Dit is ons nieuw hondje Kira, een kruising van een waterhond en een Podenko. Ze is sinds 7 februari 2024 bij ons en druk bezig ons hart te veroveren. Het is een lief, aanhankelijk hondje, dat zich op een week snel aan ons heeft aangepast. Ze is heel vinnig en nieuwsgierig, een heel ander hondje dan Noleke.
This is our new dog Kira, a cross between a water dog and a Podenko. She has been with us since February 7, 2024 and is busy winning our hearts. She is a sweet, affectionate dog who quickly adapted to us within a week. She is very quick and curious, a very different dog than Noleke.
DEAR VISITOR,
MY BLOG EXISTS NEARLY 13 YEARS AND 4 MONTH.
ON /30/09/2024 MORE THAN 2.230.520
VISITORS FROM 135 DIFFERENT NATIONS ALREADY FOUND THEIR WAY TO MY BLOG.
THAT IS AN AVERAGE OF 400GUESTS PER DAY.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING MY BLOG AND HOPE YOU ENJOY EACH TIME.
The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
Druk op onderstaande knop om te reageren in mijn forum
Zoeken in blog
Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
Een interessant adres?
UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld In België had je vooral BUFON of het Belgisch UFO-Netwerk, dat zich met UFO's bezighoudt. BEZOEK DUS ZEKER VOOR ALLE OBJECTIEVE INFORMATIE , enkel nog beschikbaar via Facebook en deze blog.
Verder heb je ook het Belgisch-Ufo-meldpunt en Caelestia, die prachtig, doch ZEER kritisch werk leveren, ja soms zelfs héél sceptisch...
Voor Nederland kan je de mooie site www.ufowijzer.nl bezoeken van Paul Harmans. Een mooie site met veel informatie en artikels.
MUFON of het Mutual UFO Network Inc is een Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in alle USA-staten en diverse landen.
MUFON's mission is the analytical and scientific investigation of the UFO- Phenomenon for the benefit of humanity...
Je kan ook hun site bekijken onder www.mufon.com.
Ze geven een maandelijks tijdschrift uit, namelijk The MUFON UFO-Journal.
Since 02/01/2020 is Pieter ex-president (=voorzitter) of BUFON, but also ex-National Director MUFON / Flanders and the Netherlands. We work together with the French MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP.
ER IS EEN NIEUWE GROEPERING DIE ZICH BUFON NOEMT, MAAR DIE HEBBEN NIETS MET ONZE GROEP TE MAKEN. DEZE COLLEGA'S GEBRUIKEN DE NAAM BUFON VOOR HUN SITE... Ik wens hen veel succes met de verdere uitbouw van hun groep. Zij kunnen de naam BUFON wel geregistreerd hebben, maar het rijke verleden van BUFON kunnen ze niet wegnemen...
21-07-2019
CHINA UNVEILS MORE PLANS FOR ITS ENORMOUS, ALIEN-HUNTING RADIO TELESCOPE
CHINA UNVEILS MORE PLANS FOR ITS ENORMOUS, ALIEN-HUNTING RADIO TELESCOPE
China has unveiled its latest plans for the world's biggest radio telescope—to look for habitable planets beyond our solar system by finding out if they have a magnetic field.
Published in the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the team behind the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) has announced its ambitions for the next decade—including the hunt for exoplanets.
FAST, as the name suggests, is a 1,600 feet wide telescope. It sits in the Dawodang depression of the Guizhou Province and it achieved its first light in September 2016.
One of the main scientific missions of FAST is to listen out for pulsars and other interstellar radio signals—including any coming from hypothetical extraterrestrials. "In theory, if there is civilization in outer space, the radio signal it sends will be similar to the signal we can receive when a pulsar (spinning neutron star) is approaching us," Qian Lei, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told CCTV in 2016.
Many scientists looking for potentially habitable planets are focused on its composition (rocky), distance from its star (so liquid water can exist) and its atmosphere (that it has one). These are the requirements for life on Earth to exist—so may also be true of other planets.
But in their latest publication, FAST researchers from China and France said they are planning to look for exoplanets within 100 light years from Earth with magnetic fields.
Our own magnetic field protects the planet from the solar wind—a stream of charged particles from the Sun that would strip away our atmosphere without the magnetic field to deflect them.
The team believes that because Earth's magnetic field provides protection to life on the planet, it is reasonable to think the same may be true on other distant worlds.
"There is a scientific bug in the sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth, that is, the Earth stops rotating. If that happens, the magnetic field would disappear," FAST chief scientist Li Di told Xinhua. "Without the protection of the magnetic field, the Earth's atmosphere would be blown off by the solar wind. As a result, humans and most living things would be exposed to the harsh cosmic environment and unable to survive."
Li said they could search for magnetic fields around exoplanets by looking for the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere—an interaction that should generate radio radiation: "All the planets with magnetic fields in our solar system can be found generating such radiation, which can be measured and studied by radio telescopes. But research on the planets' magnetic fields cannot be realized through optical and infrared astronomical observation. Do the exoplanets have magnetic fields? If they have, they should also generate radio radiation under the influence of the wind of their parent stars."
He said if they can confirm the presence of a magnetic field using FAST, they would be able to study it to find out whether it was habitable or not. "It would be a very important discovery," he said.
HiRISE Spots Curiosity Rover at Mars' 'Woodland Bay'
HiRISE Spots Curiosity Rover at Mars' 'Woodland Bay'
A dramatic Martian landscape can be seen in a new image taken from space, showing NASA's Curiosity rover examining a location called "Woodland Bay." It's just one of many stops the rover has made in an area referred to as the "clay-bearing unit" on the side of Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-tall (5-kilometer-tall) mountain inside of Gale Crater.
The image was taken on May 31, 2019, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). In the image, Curiosity appears as a bluish speck. Vera Rubin Ridge cuts across the scene north of the rover, while a dark patch of sand lies to the northeast.
Look carefully at the inset image, and you can make out what it is likely Curiosity's "head," technically known as the remote sensing mast. A bright spot appears in the upper-left corner of the rover. At the time this image was acquired, the rover was facing 65 degrees counterclockwise from north, which would put the mast in about the right location to produce this bright spot.
Mirror-like reflections off smooth surfaces show up as especially bright spots in HiRISE images. For the camera to see these reflections on the rover, the Sun and MRO need to be in just the right locations. This enhanced-color image of Curiosity shows three or four distinct bright spots that are likely such reflections.
The University of Arizona in Tucson operates HiRISE, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colorado. JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
It is possibly the most architecturally sophisticated prehistoric stone circle in the world. But while it is one of the world’s most famous monuments, the prehistoric stone circle known as Stonehenge in south west England remains shrouded in mystery.
That is, until now. Thanks to state-of-the-art research pioneered and led by Belgian academic Christophe Snoeck, we now know rather more about the mysteries of Stonehenge. He returned to work in his native Belgium after completing his PhD in archaeological science in 2015 at Oxford University. His research suggests that a number of the people that were buried at the Wessex site had moved with and likely transported the bluestones used in the early stages of the monument’s construction, sourced from the Preseli Mountains of west Wales.
While there has been much speculation as to how and why the iconic collection of stones was built, the question of who built it has received far less attention. That is where Dr Snoeck, still aged just 32 and based at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), comes in. His innovative research has made it finally possible to extract information about the geographical origin of cremated individuals. In partnership with colleagues at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle de Paris and University College London, he led the Stonehenge research, which combined radiocarbon-dating with new developments in archaeological analysis.
Dr Snoeck, who pioneered the techniques during his doctoral research, said the discovery that some biological information survives the high temperatures reached during cremation (up to 1,000 degrees Celsius), offers the “exciting possibility” to finally study the origin of those buried at Stonehenge.
In an interview with The Brussels Times, he explained how his team went about their work and the significance of their findings. The Antwerp-born researcher said, “Stonehenge is one of the most iconic archaeological sites in the world, and when I had the opportunity to carry out research on the site it was an immense privilege. Before we started our study, we knew, from previous work, that the bluestones used to build the earlier phases of the monument came from west Wales. By working directly on the human remains found at the site we hoped to gain insight, not on the origin of the stones, but on the origin of those using the site and being buried there.”
The work involved analysis of small fragments of cremated human bone from an early phase of the site’s history around 3000 BC, when it was mainly used as a cemetery. “Most research on Stonehenge focused on the stones,” he explains. “Little was known about the humans buried at the site. This is mostly due to the fact that they were cremated and only small cremated bone fragments remained. It is only very recently that new methods have been developed to study cremated human remains.”
During his doctoral research he developed a method to extract information about the geographical origin of cremated individuals. This method, he says, “was applied to 25 cremated individuals from Stonehenge and our results show that 40% (10 out of 25 analysed individuals) did not live near Stonehenge in the last decade or so prior to their deaths but came from further away. Some might actually have originated from west Wales where the bluestones came from, some 250km away,” he adds. “This shows the importance of the site in the British landscape during the Neolithic period.”
Photo of Carn Goedog in western Wales. The dolerite bluestones from these hills are thought by many geologists and archaeologists to be the source of several of the stones erected in the early stage of Stonehenge’s construction with dates of quarrying around 5,000 years ago.
His personal contribution to the study was mostly in the scientific analyses including isotope, elemental and infrared analyses. The results were then discussed and interpreted with the rest of the team. But the challenges of handling tiny fragments of burnt bone should not be overlooked. “Working on cremated bone fragments can be very tricky as they are very little and brittle. However, with proper care, we were able to carry out all the analyses planned.”
Understanding the past
So, why does all this matter? Well, according to Dr Snoeck, the results emphasise the importance of inter-regional connections involving the movement of both materials and people in the construction and use of Stonehenge. This, in turns, provides rare insight into the large scale of contacts and exchanges in the Neolithic era, as early as 5000 years ago.
Dr Snoeck
Dr Snoeck, who specializes in archaeology and chemistry, says it us crucial to understand the lives of past animal and human populations, including diet, mobility, landscape use and environmental conditions. The techniques used on the Stonehenge project could be used, he hopes, to improve our understanding of the past.
He said, “Understanding our past is, to me, of crucial importance to better understand where we are now and how we reached this stage. I think both Stonehenge and the pyramids of Egypt (and many more sites) are fascinating. They are markers of our past and unravelling the mysteries around their construction and use is definitely helping us better understand our past. The importance of archaeological sites cannot really be classified in my opinion.”
On the importance of learning more about people from the Neolithic period, he said, “By gathering more information about them, we can start to understand the place of such sites in the wider landscape and how they shaped societies and beliefs through time and space. We were very excited to see that not all individuals lived near the site and that many actually moved over quite large distances to come to Stonehenge. Clearly we are not going to cure disease with this but understanding how people and societies changed trough time and space helps us understand current societies and how they might change and interact.”
The results of his work were published in Scientific Reports in 2018 and have received global media attention with news reports in more than 100 Belgian outlets (incl. Radio 2, Het Laatste Nieuws, Het Nieuwsblad, De Morgen, EOS Wetenschap, Le Soir) and international media (BBC, Guardian, CNN, National Geographic, Current Archaeology and the Washington Post).
Following this ground-breaking study, he has been nominated as one of the three candidates for the Archaeologist of the Year 2019 Award by the British magazine Current Archaeology. For him and many others there is an enduring fascination with Stonehenge that will continue. The reason? “Well, it is still there after 5000 years! And there is still so much we don’t know. Mysteries are fascinating,” says Dr Snoeck.
His archaeological work does not end with Stonehenge, and he is now engaged on a project on the famous Belgian iguanodon collection (a genus of dinosaurs) at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Science. “The aim of this work is to better understand why so many Iguanodons were found at Bernissart in Hainaut. The research is still in progress.” Christophe Snoeck also plans to study cremated remains in other countries. “They’ve been kind of forgotten and put aside. And I thought that was quite sad, because in huge parts of the world, especially in prehistoric Europe, people were cremated.”
This week, the internet is going crazy with talk of a mass People’s Invasion of Area 51. More than one million people have signed up on Facebook to breach the gates of the most famous top secret government facility in the world. The event, which sprang to life as a joke started by social media shitposters, has now racked up an enormous amount of publicity worldwide, with media outlets taking it utterly seriously and others as the joke it always was. Unless you want to do it for real. In which case, settle in.
The event, Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us, was created by the Facebook group Shitposting cause I’m in shambles. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know. Despite its humble origins the event has taken on a life of its own, with 1.3 million people having declared they are going to the Nevada desert to participate in the September 20 raid and another one million having expressed interest in the event.
The American public has long had a fascination with Area 51 and allegations that the secret U.S. government air base is harboring flying saucers, bits of crashed saucers, and actual aliens. Public trust in government remains at historic lows. Just 17 percent of the American people “trust the government in Washington all or most of the time.” Given those factors, it’s not hard to see why “Let’s see them aliens” has become such an appealing rallying cry.
Interest in Area 51 has also been bolstered recently by New York Times articles reporting sightings U.S. Navy fighter pilots in 2004 and 2015. The U.S. government is also reportedly sitting on metallic alloys and UFO scrap allegedly recovered from “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
What are the alloys? No one can say. They are simply The Alloys.
Say you are actually willing to participate in the raid. The trip will be difficult and conditions not ideal. You will be arrested and sent to federal prison, or possibly shot, all to see things that may not actually exist. Still want to go? Okay.
The best place to start your federal incarceration is at Las Vegas, Nevada. Event organizers have designed the unofficial Area 51 Visitor’s Center,approximately 1 hour and 22 minutes west of Vegas, as the meetup point.The Visitor’s Center was owned by Nevada brothel magnate Dennis Hof and includes a mini-mart, picnic areas, and the Alien Cathouse, and an ET-themed brothel, which is pretty much everything you need before anyone goes a-raiding. Satellite views of the Visitor’s Center show parking for 200 cars at most, so arrive early or consider catching a Lyft.
The Alamo Fireworks Megastore next door could open their lot to event parking but don’t count on it.
Once you depart from the Visitor’s Center it’s an hour and 52 minute drive north to Area 51, and there are two routes to choose from, the first via Cane Spring Road, or I-95 and then the Mercury Highway. Both merge at “Sugar Bunker,” which is presumably where the government stores the alien food pellets, then proceed north through what looks like a moonscape of gigantic craters. These are the remnants of U.S. nuclear weapons tests and are closed to the public for a very good reason—and not because neither AT&T nor Verizon report cell phone coverage there.
Like we said, not ideal conditions.
At a certain point, early invasion participants will be stopped cold by base security. The main security force, known over the years as the “camo dudes,” are civilian contractors that patrol the base perimeter wearing camouflage uniforms and driving pickup trucks.
The “camo dudes” are generally known to UFO watchers as a humorless lot that take their job very seriously. They are quite well armed, and in one case in 2016 drew their firearms on a pair of motorcyclists. It has also been alleged for years that Area 51 is ringed with sensors, including seismic intrusion devices designed to detect the rumble of vehicles, and that explains how the camo dudes often respond so quickly to trespassers.
Traditionally, trespassers at Area 51 can expect to be detained by the “camo dudes” for hours on end until a Lincoln County sheriff arrives on the scene, at which time they are issued a $750 ticket for trespassing. That’s a relatively tame response: the base is also ringed with signs citing the Internal Security Act of 1950, and stating “Use of deadly force authorized,” and Section 21 of the act states that
Whoever willfully shall violate any such regulation or order...for the protection or security of military or naval aircraft, airports, airport facilities, vessels, harbors, ports, piers, water-front facilities, bases, forts, posts, laboratories, stations, vehicles, equipment, explosives, or other property or places subject to the jurisdiction, administration, or in the custody of the Department of Defense, any Department or agency of which said Department consists, or any officer or employee of said Department or agency, or of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics or any officer or employee thereof, relating to fire hazards, fire protection, lighting, machinery, guard service, disrepair, disuse or other unsatisfactory conditions thereon, or the ingress thereto or egress or removal of persons therefrom, or otherwise providing for safeguarding the same against destruction, loss, or injury by accident or by enemy action, sabotage or other subversive actions, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction thereof shall be liable to a fine of not to exceed $5,000 or to imprisonment for not more than one year, or both.
Deadly force is authorized even for a misdemeanor offense. Maybe that’s bit unusual, but then again, this is Area 51 we’re talking about. A smart defendant in federal court could argue that there is no mention of “alien hospitality suites” in the Internal Security Act, forcing the government to drop the charges-or produce the aliens.
There is also the prospect of federal conspiracy charges, as you have stated your intent on a public Facebook page to conspire to invade a federal military facility. Like any MMO boss the federal government’s legal powers stack, making it a formidable opponent indeed.
The Nevada Test and Training Range (of which Area 51 is a part) is an area where the Air Force tests and trains combat aircraft. Any attempt to illegally access military installations or military training areas is dangerous.
The statement is weirdly ominous, leaving it ambiguous what the source of the “danger” is. Rattlesnakes? Falling rocks? Accidental bombings? It doesn’t say. It’s probably best to never find out.
Once you’re inside the base there’s no telling what you might find. You might find a variety of secret test aircraft, including F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighters recently seen sporting “aggressor camouflage”, the legendary and elusive Aurora Mach 6 spyplane, or a Russian fighter jet owned and operated by the U.S. government dogfighting with American planes. And maybe aliens and their UFOs. Bigfoot, too.
The event already has produced one unexpected result from the U.S. government: indirect confirmation that the base actually exists. As late as 1995 the Feds were perfectly willing to argue that Area 51 did not exist: that abruptly changed around in 2013, but the government rarely addresses the topic. The Air Force’s warning acknowledges that Area 51 is a real facility. That’s quite a feat for a social media shitpost.
Correction: This post originally said the Area 51 Visitor Center is owned by Dennis Hof, but since he passed away in 2018, we should have said it “was” owned by Mr. Hof. The line has been corrected; apologies for the error.
The Soviets tried to beat Apollo 11. They crashed a spacecraft on the moon instead.
The Soviets tried to beat Apollo 11. They crashed a spacecraft on the moon instead.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin poses for a photograph beside the U.S. flag deployed on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969. Associated Press/July 20, 1969
By Alex Horton The Washington Post
As Neil Armstrong walked on the lunar surface and marveled at the "fine, sandy particles" that crunched under his boot, he and the rest of the Apollo 11 crew were not alone.
A Soviet spacecraft, Luna 15, had beat them to orbit days before, circumnavigating the moon in a final Cold War showdown race to land on another celestial body and return home.
The unmanned spacecraft's mission would be an epic coup: Get to the moon, scoop up rocks and jettison back toward Earth before the Americans returned with their own samples.
That did not happen. Luna 15 plummeted toward the moon on July 21, 1969, crashed into a mountain and cratered near the aptly named Sea of Crises -- before Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin even left the surface.
NASA had worried Luna 15 would interfere with radio transmissions and present a safety risk with Apollo 11, prompting high-level officials to cross the divide in an unprecedented level of cooperation.
It signified something else. The competition between Apollo 11 and Luna 15 to land on the moon and return to Earth did not exactly finish when "the Eagle" landed, as most believe.
"The race to the moon ends when Luna 15 crashes," William P. Barry, NASA's chief historian, told The Washington Post.
The Soviet exploration timeline was aggressive and, at turns, tragic. Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov melted during re-entry, along with the Soyuz 1 capsule in which he was riding, in 1967, all the while "cursing the people who had put him inside a botched spaceship."
In the next year, two Soviet tortoises became the first Earth beings to circle the moon.
Luna 15's design and launch time frame was incredible for its time, Barry said. Plans were drawn up for a robot designed to land, collect samples and scurry back to Earth.
That was complete in about six months as the Soviets raced to preempt the United States, including an unsuccessful June launch with a mission to grab moon rocks and study the lunar gravitational field. That rocket never left orbit.
On July 15, the rocket delivering Luna 15 roared toward the moon three days ahead of the Apollo 11 mission. The race had begun.
"I'm sure that the original plan was to beat Apollo 11 back to Earth with their sample," Barry said.
The launch puzzled NASA and surprised the Apollo 11 crew, who only knew about its existence en route to the moon and "did not know about Luna 15 or its goal," Armstrong said in 2009.
No one exactly knew where it was going or how it could interfere with the three Americans heading for the same place.
The moon's surface is about the size of Africa, Barry said, but orbital dynamics suggested landing spots around the moon's equator were best -- potentially limiting the distance between the Columbia command module, the Eagle landing craft and Luna 15.
There was only one unlikely solution to all of this: Get the flight details from the Soviets themselves.
During the Cold War.
In the midst of the moon race.
And yet, Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman had met Soviet space official Academician Mstislav V. Keldysh. He later called on him to provide details on Luna 15 and assure it would not interfere with Apollo 11.
What came next was unprecedented in American-Soviet space relations, Barry said. Keldysh telegraphed the orbital details for Luna 15 and said it would be a safe transit for the U.S. astronauts, though he never divulged the mission details.
Meanwhile, as the Apollo 11 rocketed toward the moon, Houston ground control kept the crew informed about the whereabouts of Luna 15. It had entered orbit on July 17, Houston told the crew, according to flight logs. Both spacecrafts made orbital adjustments as ground control in both nations nervously watched.
Soviet engineers worried over rugged terrain of the Sea of Crises landing site, NASA has said, and delayed its planned landing for hours.
That opened the window for Apollo 11 to land. As Armstrong and Aldrin took photos, collected samples and marveled at the view of Earth, Luna 15 tumbled in orbit.
The Soviets realized they were running out of time, Barry said, and a day later, on July 21, they decided to make an effort to land -- which surprised British astronomers listening to Soviet transmissions. They were unaware it was designed to do so, Discover magazine reported.
Luna 15 descended, cushioned by retro rockets. But its trajectory was off, sending the spacecraft careening into a mountain at 298 miles an hour, and finally, plummeting to the moonscape.
It crashed about 350 miles from the U.S. landing site at 15:50 UTC -- a full two hours and four minutes before the Eagle began its flight back to the Columbia module.
"I say, this has really been drama of the highest order," a British astronomer said afterward.
The Post reported the crash the next day. "Thus, by a fluke of moon geography, a space flight riddle 'wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma' ended in an irony," Howard Simons wrote. Scientists speculated it was deliberately crashed to "remove its carcass from lunar orbit," he added, which was also a method the United States practiced.
The Soviets never fully admitted Luna 15 was an effort to beat the United States to the moon and back, Barry said, though those details emerged after the Soviet Union collapsed. And its return trajectory after the delays made it unlikely it would even beat the American mission back.
Luna 15 may have failed its mission, Barry noted, but what scientists learned from the experience became clear in the next decade.
More attempts were made for a Luna mission to collect moon rocks. Five in total failed, until 1970, when Luna 16 shoveled 100 grams of dust and returned it to Earth -- the first time an unmanned spacecraft did so from any nation. Later missions yielded more payloads.
The bones from the doomed spacecraft may never be found, Barry said. "Distinguishing a crater caused by Luna 15 and a small meteorite would be pretty hard."
We meet our guide, Pear Månsken, at the Company's No. 5 airlock. Pear's only instructions: Keep them in sight at all times and let them know immediately of any concerns. Beyond that we're free to roam. Stay safe and live. Or do something stupid and die. Not their problem. We've signed the waiver. This is the frontier.
It's July 20, 2044: 75 years to the Earth-day since Apollo 11put moonboots on the ground. But that was way up, near the equator. Today, we're setting out at high lunar latitude, close to the pole. Where the cold and dark lies just steps away from the hot and bright. This is where the action is: A handful of companies and a few nations variously competing and cooperating on a mostly friendly quest, mostly for ancient ice. It's not for making margaritas. It's for rocket propellent and life support; what market futures analysts call Cosmic Consumable Commodities: "Triple C's."
Those first landings happened long ago, but it's still early days in lunar development. There's a lot of moon to go around. And a lot of businesses going to get it. Some, like Chevron, Maersk, Mitsubishi, Lockheed Martin and Siemens, have been well known for decades. A few, like Astrobotic, Moon Express, Masten, Orbit Beyond and the not-for-profit Draper Lab, have been quietly working since the moon-surge began, around 2018. Others, like Nyota ya Fedha, Lunapole and Polarvarg (for whom our chaperon, Pear, works) are well-capitalized startups. India’s Sampanna Candrudu, formerly part of the nation’s space agency, has now been reincarnated as a public corporation. Blue Origin partners with everyone whereas SpaceX and its sisters, Tesla and The Boring Company, prefer to work as a self-contained conglomerate. (Some would say: "cult.")
Co-located in a few lunar enterprise zones, most of these companies respect — and sometimes protect — one another. Way out here, 238,900 miles (384,470 kilometers) from Earth, with a very high cost of operation, it's difficult for authorities to patrol and enforce restrictions. Safety is in everyone's interests. Frontiers produce good citizens. Or dead ones. Hardly any in between.
Your suit boots up in seconds. The electronics and helmet-immersive display actually came online in much less than a second, but the gas-mixture-and-atmospheric-pressure diagnostics take one complete loop to verify. The suit and a few of your tools checked in with "Moon Mama." Every smart object on Luna (except certain police and military) knows who, where and what every other one is; all are connected through the ubiquitous 8G awareness-net.
Pear shoos us into one of Polarvarg's short-haul trans-landers. Small rocket-hoppers run like a shuttle-bus service here. The worksites are widely scattered. There's not that much risk of damage to neighbors' personnel or property, if things go south. The moon is a palace of robots; many fewer people live herethan science fiction writers and space advocates of bygone days expected. So, most nations and NGOs (non-governmental organizations) are taking a mostly hands-off, "laissez-faire" approach.
The United States Space Guard looks after the interests of American flagged vehicles and facilities. China's military-industrial monolith keeps to its indecipherable, but so far, serene, self. And the GC (Gendarmerie Cosmos) tends to the emergency needs of European Union company vessels. Outer space is proving to be the quintessentially asymmetric battlespace. The "Mutually Assured Paralysis" of cyberwarfare has, so far, proven a highly effective peacekeeper. A fully armed Deep Space Force — equipped with overwhelming firepower to intimidate bad actors by ensuring, in advance, their total destruction — has proved too costly a solution to a problem that hasn't yet developed. Of course, it someday might.
Where, exactly, Luna fits in humanity's story is still unwritten. Some on Earth worry that, without a tightly preconceived legal framework, unfair distribution of the moon's resources is inevitable. (It is.) Others counter that there's no incentive to develop resources that cannot be owned free and clear. (There isn't.) A few are concerned that moon workers could become easy targets for exploitation. But right now, it's moon-boom times and hardly anyone is complaining.
The corporations have seen that ethical behavior tends to enrich their investments. And it keeps them off the homepages of news sites. Fair treatment of labor (which is mostly robotic anyway), deference to international norms of the mining industry, respect for historical sites (e.g., Apollo and Lunokhod), and basic environmental awareness all turn out to be good corporate marketing strategies, the storyboards of slick stock prospectuses.
Because the risks are so gloomy — and the potential benefits so sunny — everyone on the moon is playing, more or less, on the same team. But there will, almost inevitably, come a time when they aren't. Then, solar system civilization will have lots of ethical dragons to slay. We have time to think about some of these issues as we drop from the hopper to continue on foot.
Digging for paydirt
Back in the Apollo days, our easy ramble around these moon rocks would have been a lot more arduous and dangerous, with just primitive paper maps and no space-based positioning system. Digging samples was all manual labor then. No robots around to help. Just simple tongs, scoops and rakes. The mightiest machine was a Black & Decker cordless electric hammer-drill. With a lot of effort, astronauts could bore up to 10 feet (3 meters) down through the compacted surface dust called regolith.
To ice-mine the moon, you need much heftier tech. The deep frozen water is rock-hard and often rock-bound. You are there to find out just how hard it'll be to free up that paydirt at a new site. Before you arrived, Polarvarg survey drones, carrying imaging spectrometers and radar, flagged the site as promising.
Then, a small army of Company rovers explored the nearby "cold traps." They found some tiny particles of ice lying on the surface, like dusty snow. More turned up, buried about half a meter down, in larger, purer crystals, like gravelly hailstones. And some appeared in much larger, deeper blocks — harder to get to but much more rewarding. By tradition and law, a human (that's you) must come to verify the find on-site, so he or she can attest to it later, should there be a territorial challenge. Despite all your high-tech gear, you are really just a simple scratch-ass prospector, looking to stake a claim on a parcel of moon.
But you're also here to do some new science. About half of it is "economic geology." That, historically, has been to understand where certain rock aggregates form in order to fast-track commercial quarrying. Aside from the 1970s Apollo data set, and some rover work on Mars, we've had only one planet to study in detail. Your work on how the moon made its minerals will help mining companies to locate ore bodies on Earth.
And, of course, here on Luna itself: Nearly everywhere you look, you can find titanium and aluminum, for building space structures. Mature companies like Made In Space and Tethers Unlimited, which started in LEO (low Earth orbit), are here on the surface drawing feedstocks for their space-based flexible fabricators. There's also plenty of silicon for circuitry — especially photovoltaic solar collectors (though small nuclear reactors provide local power to most lunar worksites).
All those craters punched into the crust conveniently reveal differentiated metals. Essential for small electronics and large power systems, local concentrations of rare-earth elements abound. The moon is a miner's paradise, and it's of vital strategic international trade importance to the nations and transnational corporations that dig and refine it.
The biggest player is China. The moon's gentle light has long signified aspiration and the promise of abundance in several Asian cultures. With a long-range view — free from the frequent course changes that buffet democratic societies — the Chinese Communist Party government has carefully, over decades, woven lunar development into its identity. China's effects on the activities of other nations and corporations working in space have been less adverse than some Western military planners had feared, but more disruptive than many internationalists had hoped.
Next year (2045), the People's Republic of China celebrates its 100th anniversary. The state-backed Chinese Academy of Space Technology Corporation is very close to completing two large solar-power satellites, fabricated from mostly lunar materials. Each will downlink a steady stream of up to 500 megawatts of electricity, harvested above Earth's atmosphere, from high orbit, clear of weather and nighttime darkness. The power comes down via low-density microwaves to large receiving antennas in China's countryside. It would have been more efficient to send energy down by laser, but China — for now — seems to respect international agreements crafted to prevent directed-energy weapons in space.
These big satellites are just the next step in a program China began 30 years ago, to beam growing quantities of energy over ever-increasing vertical distances. If "the 500s" prove out, China will immediately begin work on a pair of much larger solar-energy satellites, each 10 times more powerful. Neither will be so much a gargantuan spacecraft as a constellation of several hundred thousand very small ones. Each subunit a clone of the last, all built mostly of materials from the moon, by an army of robotic fabricators. Certain industries scale magnificently in space: the ones that don't need people.
It’s a lossy proposition: Converting sunlight to electricity, then back to electromagnetic waves for the downlink, then back to electricity is not very efficient. Chinese government economists are well aware that it will take many decades to fully recoup construction costs. But they are investing in future generations. They are not accountable to impatient shareholders. And they are focused far beyond the moon.
Roadhouse high
Some space moguls are focused squarely on Earth: In lower orbits, with grand views of the planet below, a number of high-end boutique hotels have sprung up. "Blown up" would be more accurate; most of these are very large inflated structures. But don't think lightweight "balloons" or "blimps." Their skins are actually much tougher than the metal hulls of traditional spacecraft. These expanded envelopes are built by sandwiching strong, lightweight synthetic fabrics tightly together. Layering with different densities protects against micrometeors and human-made space junk. Sewn into this hardy hide are impressively large windows. You'll get to look through them, in a few days, as you change vehicles on your way back to Earth.
Bigelow Aerospace (BA) is the dominant — but not the only — company to offer rentable "space in space." The nightly rack rates are, well, astronomical. And there's no such thing as a "walk-in." But there's a sufficient population of well-heeled leisure guests and B2B travelers to make a business. And lodging modules are not BA's only offering. You can find variously sized BA blow-ups popping up wherever pressurized volumes are needed. These elegant edifices come up from Earth tightly packed, in the large payload fairings of heavy-lift launchers. But they run on Triple C's from the moon.
Drumming up business
Back here on the lunar surface, that affable dude in the purple-striped moon suit, working a few meters to the west of us, is Seok Wolgwang Choi. An American of Korean heritage, he encourages English speakers to call him "Sammy." He talks and moonwalks with an easygoing manner. But that bright orange bag over his shoulder reading "Danger: Explosives" looks more than a little ominous.
On Earth, geophysicists employed by mining companies thump the ground, reading the resulting sound waves to map what lies beneath. Astronauts on Apollo missions 14 and 16 did a bit of that. They emplaced mortars to fire rounds into the nearby terrain. And they deployed seismometers to capture the resulting moon wiggles. On Apollo 17, Harrison "Jack" Schmitt — the only geologist to walk the lunar terrain during Apollo — went farther. Jack, and his commander Gene Cernan, placed explosive charges in the regolith a few kilometers from a geophone array at their landing site. The igniters were set for several days; the guys had long since left the surface by the time the explosions were triggered.
More than half a century later, Sammy, too, likes making the moon go boom. His hazardous but lucrative career is about blowing stuff up in the name of "Lunar Active Seismic Tomography." He revels in leaving LASTing lunar impressions, mostly because the company cuts him in for profit-sharing on the find.
But you and Sammy are also out here to do some pure, not-for-profit science. Understanding the moon's evolution reveals the grand story of the solar system's formation. As you select rock samples, with the help of a keen-eyed geology team on Earth peering through your suit-cams, you are again moonwalking in the footsteps of giants:
Before Apollo, just about everyone thought all those shady holes seen from Earth had been built by volcanoes. By the time John Young and Charlie Duke left behind Apollo 16's Lunar Module lower stage, in April of 1972, most scientists were rapidly realizing that the surface of the moon is mostly about impacts.
The moon itself appears to be the child of a gargantuan crash between a Mars-size protoplanet and the early Earth. Fathoming the implications of that event, astrophysicists realized that the planets we see today are not the first ones this solar system has had (except, perhaps, giant Jupiter). Nor do the planets now orbit where they originally formed. This revolutionary recognition arose directly from studies of the moon rocks hand-picked, packed and shipped home by 12 people between July 1969 and December 1972.
They made it look easy. It was not easy. On the downlinked slow-scan video stream, you see the Apollo moonwalkers bouncing merrily around in gravity only 16% that of Earth. But, listen closely and you'll hear them breathing pretty hard at times. Swaddled in layers of nylon, neoprene, aluminized Mylar, Dacron, Kapton, Teflon-coated fabric — and pumped with air pressure — each guy was fighting the suit with every move.
Each Apollo A7L "moon suit" — called the Extra-Vehicular Mobility Unit, or EMU — was rated for 30 trips outside. None got more than three. Apollo was a spare-no-expense program before the eyes of the world. Risks to the astronauts were minimized at astronomical costs. With President Kennedy's directive to "return him safely to the Earth" ringing in every program manager's ears, everything was expendable, except the crew.
But you and I, working our industrial jobs here on Future Moon, need a suit capable of hundreds of excursions before refurb or retirement. We need to go outside often — even if just to check, or fix, the machines that do most of the work. So, our suits have shape-memory materials on the inside for comfort and haptic feedback "pulsers" in the fingertips for touch. And self-healing polymer layers guarding against tool punctures and micrometeoroids. Look closely at your suit's outside layer. It's a patchwork of panels, each hosting a network of tiny wires. That's your electrodynamic dust armor. It periodically sparks away clingy motes of lunar soil. Or tries to. Dust is a constant headache here on the moon.
Btw. It's time for a new acronym, isn't it? EVA — "extravehicular activity" — has served for people exiting and reentering capsules, shuttles, stations and movable modules. But what shall we call a stroll outside a permanent habitat on a planetary surface? I nominate simply: "a stroll outside." People are really living in space now — on the moon, around asteroids, in growing settlements in a plethora of orbits. I say: If you have a gravity vector, it's a "walk." If you don't, it's a "float" or a "fly." If the atmosphere is thicker than Earth's, it's a "swim." See? Easy!
We climb onto a "flatbed" to save some steps. A direct descendant of Apollo's Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), our ride is basically just wheel motors and a big battery with a platform and a bit of open truss work to keep items (including humans) on board. Every other need — including navigation and video — is already built into our moon suits.
Well connected
Apollo moonwalkers could look down at their chest-mounted Remote-Control Units and easily see small square "flags" — status indicators — warning if oxygen, carbon dioxide, water, pressure or vent conditions drifted out of normal operating ranges. Comfy, here, in our 2044 lunar couture, we see mini-gauges floating before our eyes on the HUD (heads-up display).
But suit health is the least of our inputs. We find ourselves immersed in a serious expanse of augmented reality. Active mapping with locators, task checklists, action prompts, graphical instructions; these all rotate, prioritized for our sensory consumption by the AI agents our Company bosses have trained to help us live our best space lives.
Essential to that life: your psychological health. Extended stays in sterile monochromatic environments demand colorful, life-affirming cues. So, you brought the Earth with you to the moon. All those task-oriented cues share your sight and sound field with social messaging, and with a bit of art from time to time.
The claustrophobic confines of a helmet are emotionally expanded by well-designed AR, the harsh landscape outside softened by the occasional visual or auditory reminder of your lush homeworld. You find it's comforting — indeed, vital — to travel with live avatars of friends and family. They pop up from time to time, and you're always glad to interact with them, despite the 2.5-second delay time to and from Earth. On the barren, insensitive moon, you find you frequently want to phone a friend.
And you'll have local friends here too: human and robotic. The "Buddy Team" approach — pair bonding — is wired deeply within us. It's the secret sauce of humanity's success. Watching the paired Apollo crews in action, you could see it immediately. They could improvise on the fly, clear each other's cables, be one another's eyes.
You call up a video clip from 1971 — one of Apollo 15's sorties. Projected on your HUD: The sloped flank of Spur Crater. Dave Scott is using tongs to lift rock sample No. 15415 up from the lunar regolith. He's saying to Jim Irwin: "OK, babe; open the bag," which, of course, Irwin has already started doing. That chunk of anorthosite will come to be known as the Genesis Rock — a window 4.1 billion years back, a geologic time capsule from just after the moon's origin.
Tantalizing fusion
For all that long stretch since its formation, the moon has never had much of an atmosphere. Nor much of a magnetic field. So, whatever particles the sun threw at Luna tended to stick to the fine-grained surface.
Some of that residue has been helium-3 (He-3), implanted by the solar wind. A bit more helium-3 has been deposited here by cosmic rays from deep space. It's a tantalizing substance: two protons and a neutron, the only stable isotope that contains more protons than neutrons, besides simple hydrogen itself.
In the bad old Cold War days, when the nations of Earth had more than 70,000 active nuclear weapons pointed at each other's cities, helium-3 was a headache. It would build up as tritium decayed in the stored warhead, actually reducing its explosive effectiveness. Missile maintainers would siphon off the He-3 to be sold for medical imaging and other peaceful uses.
But helium-3 can be put to work in a fusion reactor, liberating high levels of energy, without throwing off radioactive byproducts. At least in theory.
Neil Armstrong inadvertently collected the first sample of lunar helium-3 in 1969 — about 25 parts per billion of the soil he scooped up to fill out one collection box. Other Apollo missions brought some back as well. But the potential for power generation by helium-3 fusion wasn't realized until researchers at the University of Wisconsin put the clues together in 1985.
Like water ice, helium-3 survives in greater abundance in the shadows. Here on Future Moon, prospectors have found concentrations up to three times greater than the Apollo samples in the deep, dark zones of polar craters, coincidentally where most water ice is mined. Getting both He-3 and H2O out requires heating the soil up. So, it makes sense to harvest both in these unique polar locations, where spots in nearly constant sunlight at 257 degrees Fahrenheit (125 degrees Celsius) lie adjacent to practically permanent shade at minus 274 F (minus 170 C).
The north pole of the moon turns out to be a slightly easier place to work, because more of the high ground is illuminated, more of the time. And it's easier to negotiate the gentler northern topography down into the mining sites.
But the economics of helium-3 fusion don't appear to be as bright as the idea. Concentrator-bots must sift through more than 100 tons of lunar soil to yield a single gram of helium-3. It takes more than 100,000 times that quantity to operate a 1-gigawatt reactor for a year. The power that comes out is worth about $175 million (mid-21st century value). So you need to run your reactor for more than 25 years to pay off its cost.
These reactors are so expensive because helium-3 doesn't really like to fuse with itself, which is the "cleanest," least radioactive process. Getting He-3/He-3 fusion to work requires immensely high plasma temperatures, achieved by smashing atoms together extremely fast. It takes a supermassive, highly precise machine. And, although helium-3 itself isn't radioactive, no one has shown that significant secondary radiation breeding will not compromise safety over time.
There are richer sources of helium-3 in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn. But that's a long way to go. Someday, fusion-driven rockets might use some of their own helium-3 payload to push the rest inward to Human-space and outward to the Deep System.
For now, helium-3 remains a provocative potential fuel in search of a practical way to burn. Still, it is poetic to imagine the fusion fire of our primal star giving its offspring (us) a means to ignite local fusion power for our own sustenance, and carrying that fire into places the sun does not reach.
We've rolled upslope to the rim of Haworth Crater. Looking through her spotting scope, Janelle Oladele, director of Ops at the rock-ice extraction site, is speaking: "Alexa, bring the west thermal group online." (A lot of lunar AI is named Alexa because, well, Blue Origin, which was started by Amazon founderJeff Bezos.) We watch her array of parabolic mirrors, set along the peaks, focus sunlight down into the shadows. As the beams converge, they dazzlingly light up a few square meters of the crater floor for the first time in three billion years.
We realize they've slewed the long way around to avoid cooking a pod of extractor-bots and a pair of human overseers stationed nearby. We the people — and they the machines — are essentially a single organism now, extending life into lifelessness. A way for intelligence to populate the universe — a mission begun on the grasslands of East Africa about 2 million years ago.
Back in 2016, United Launch Alliance (ULA) posted a standing offer of $1,360 per lb. ($3,000 per kilogram to any individual or company who could deliver hydrogen and oxygen made from the moon to LEO (low Earth orbit). It was a "cash-on-the-barrelhead" proposition for Lunar Triple C's, made by the most experienced rocket company on Earth at a time when no on-orbit propellant transfer machines existed.
ULA's bid jump-started an industry — one based on using material from space to get around and build things in space. It is much cheaper to get mass "up" off the moon than from "down" the deep gravity well of Earth.
Still, getting off the moon does require rockets or electromagnetic launchers. Civilization in the inner solar system is forming from the moon, but is not, for the most part, being built on the moon. Nor on the surfaces of Mars or Venus. Dream of terraforming all you want, but physics, economics and human needs will drive us into free orbits between Earth and moon for a very long time to come.
A self-coordinated phalanx of bots is swarming in just behind the beam as it tracks southwest. They fade beneath a growing bank of fog in front of them, and a cloud of dust behind. We thank Director Oladele for letting us watch the parade. Now it's off to a waiting hopper for the bounce back to town.
Home, home in the moon
Town, it turns out, is mostly underground. The same exposed conditions that allowed the moon to accumulate helium-3 leave humans naked to the killing, cancerous effects of solar energetic particles (SEPs) and galactic cosmic rays (GCRs). When you're out moonwalking, you're a sitting duck for the first energetic protons following a very large solar flare, which can travel at nearly the speed of light. But it takes at least 20 hours for the most dangerous bulk of acoronal mass ejection(CME) to reach the Earth-moon system. And most CMEs are not directed toward us. So, we can usually count on some warning.
A meter or so of dirt piled on top of your habitat keeps you safe. It matters most for long-contract dwellers who build up cumulative doses over time. They've taken to saying they live "in" the moon, not "on" it. Gopher-bots, built by the SpaceX-spawned Boring Company, have been worming their way between landing/launching zones, residential towns and processing plants, creating networks of transport and storage tunnels. Small "hidey holes" are dug (or mounded) at every worksite: If the solar flux suddenly jumps, humans can shelter-in-place.
Pear points out a long ridge as the hopper climbs to clear it; a lava tube lies beneath its hump. Built, in the moon's hot youth, by flowing magma, these hollow structures offer intrinsically shielded open spaces, and naturally occurring access through "skylights" where bubbles or meteoroids have popped open the surface. Apollo 15 explored Hadley Rille — probably a lava tube with a collapsed roof — whose floor was more than a kilometer wide, with walls up to 1,000 feet (300 m) high. Many large lunar lava tubes have been surveyed. Temperatures inside them are much more even than out on the surface. Someday people may live comfortably in them. But, here in 2044, we still seem a long way from a human population explosion on the moon.
You'll probably sleep well back at Company quarters tonight, once you've had a shower and a drink. Both are possible, courtesy of that ice you saw liberated today.
Looking around the bar, you realize miners haven't changed much in centuries. Smudges of soot go along with the job, no matter how disconnected and suit-protected one tries to be. Moon dust is nasty stuff. Not as toxic as Mars' dust, but dirty, abrasive and pervasive. And always that specific odor: Apollo astronauts likened it to spent gunpowder. This place even smells like a frontier town.
The dark side
The "Wild West," pioneering mentality of this moon rush can't last. Someday — perhaps soon — there will tougher questions to answer:
The first time a dead tourist's family sues the spaceship line that brought him there, which justice system will adjudicate?
If a rogue nation — or a private mercenary army — destroys a competitor's ice refinery, whose retaliatory force will respond? And who makes sure that response will be proportional?
Will children born here on Luna be afforded the citizenship rights of their parents? Would they even be physically capable of living on any higher-gravity world?
As genetic and genomic engineering grows ever more powerful, what ethics will apply to human or animal testing performed in, say, a lunar company town?
For that matter, what if a bug born in a bio-lab on Luna turns out to be virulent on Earth?
As every military planner knows, you take the high ground as soon as you can: Who's in charge of the moon-based ability to throw or purposefully divert big rocks around the sky?
When does a defense system against asteroids become an offensive weapon?
Who decides when the risk of diverting an asteroid close to Earth, in order to mine it, outweighs the benefit?
A long, long time from now — when civilization on the moon has become fully self-sustaining — residents may wish to claim sovereignty over that world's resources. If, say, a solar-power satellite serving Earth is made of lunar materials, do the daughters of the moon workers who built it get stock in the Earth-based utility company that profits from it? Old contracts and treaties may be torn up in the process. Hot, cold or social disinformation wars may be fought. Given our human history, all of those are likely.
The bright side
You're going home. For all but a very few people, "home" still means "Earth." Like the Apollo teams, 75 years ago, you caught a lift to LLO (low lunar orbit) aboard a high hopper. You transfer to an OTA (orbital transfer vehicle). Unlike Apollo, the OTA will drop you at one of those flying flophouses with the big windows in low Earth orbit. You're not waiting around on Luna for an Aldrin Cycler, the cheaper way to travel. But you're also not jumping a "starship-class" luxury direct liner, which is rated for direct travel between all worlds.
You drop from the High Hyatt Hotel in a dedicated atmospheric transfer vehicle (ATV). Some of that lunar ice is still with you: Your ATV is fully refueled with propellent mined on the moon.
Safely slowing down on powered descent, you get set to touch down on dirt that's full of life — unlike the lunar regolith. Some call our old world by its old name, "Terra," which means "land." By far the best planet for tens of kiloparsecs in any direction. Though the price declines with each launch, it still costs a bundle to get you to and from the moon. You wrestle with justifying your journey. While you were off ego-tripping through the cosmos, how were you helping Earth?
Your excursion was mostly — but not entirely — carbon-neutral. You launched on engines burning cold methane, "cryo-CH4." Once you got to low Earth orbit, however, lunar hydrogen and oxygen — and free sunlight — took you everywhere else. Had you gone deep into the solar system, you'd probably have been on nukes (nuclear electrical or nuclear thermal propulsion).
The old idea that Earth must deal with an ever-increasing population by shipping billions of us off-planet to colonize elsewhere will not, and cannot, work. But opening the resources of space can, in time, unburden Earth of much of the industrial impact of humanity. As Bezos, and Gerard O'Neill before him, (and Ehricke before him, and Tsiolkovsky before him) suggested: Move heavy tech off-planet, get better habitat on-planet.
Sadly, the only other way to ensure our species' success seems to require cultivating a cancerous body of increasingly restrictive rules, with ever more ironclad enforcement. Hardly anybody, outside of a few authoritarians with badly damaged personalities, wants that.
There is one additional emerging cause for hope: "the population plateau." Beginning in the second half of the 20th century, some nations have seen their populations peak and begin to recede. This trend correlates with the spread of certain nonmilitary technologies. As this permeates worldwide, it reverses the human population burst, which began with the rise of agriculture and the unintended terraforming of planet Earth. Machine proliferation on farms means we don't have to breed as many human farmhands. Birth rates continue to decline in Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia. The U.S., Canada and even China are tiptoeing toward population stability.
Though technology implies increased energy use, cleaner ways to get that power are emerging. Some of the most promising — solar satellites and like fusion power — correlate with space development.
Beyond tech, the empowerment of women is vitally important for maintaining a healthy civilization. Advanced education, self-determination, wage equality, child care: It is not, of course, necessary to go to space to do these. But, thanks to social networks of (mostly) female and non-binary engineers, most space industries have baked a responsibility to fulfill each of these requirements into their companies' cultures. And the mass of these exerts a beneficial gravitational pull on societies in general.
There's a grand virtuous cycle at work here: A maturing space-based infrastructure to lighten the burden on Earth's biosphere also happens to further open the solar system's resources. It looks like while offloading stress from our home planet, we get opportunities in the rest of space for very little additional investment. Starting with Triple C's from the moon, we can go anywhere.
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin walks on the surface of the moon near the leg of the lunar module Eagle during the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969. Mission commander Neil Armstrong took this photograph with a 70-millimeter lunar surface camera.
Plait — known as "The Bad Astronomer" to his many thousands of readers on Syfy — told Space.com he is frustrated that he and others like him still have to debunk the hoax theory from time to time, 50 years after the first moon landing. Then again, Plait became famous because he's so good at debunking in the first place.
Back in February 2001, Fox Broadcasting ran a documentary titled "Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?" Plait coincidentally had a pile of research ready from a book he was working on, and a friend sent him an advance copy of the show so that he had time to write up a response.
Plait's essay on his personal blog, which he published shortly after the show aired, quickly generated thousands of views years before Facebook, Twitter and today's social media even existed. Fox's TV show propelled Plait's writing to a large audience, and his 2002 book "Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax'" (Wiley) helped as well. Plait remains a popular science commentator nearly two decades later.
"I kind of wish it had never aired," Plait said about the Fox documentary, "because it opened a huge Pandora's box. On the other hand, it's exposing a wound to sunlight. That thing was there anyway, festering. Let it get out to the public, and let it heal, and let it kill the infection. But yeah, it's troubling. Just to know that if Fox hadn't aired that, who knows what my career path would have been."
Bond, Hyams and Mulder
Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. Even back then, some people were skeptical that the feat was technologically possible. The James Bond movie "Diamonds Are Forever," for example, had a joke about faked moon landings just two years later, in 1971.
But what really propelled the conspiracy theory into popular culture, Plait said, was the 1978 Peter Hyams film "Capricorn One," which portrays a faked human landing on Mars. (Also, a 1976 self-published pamphlet by Bill Kaysing, "We Never Went to the Moon," was popular among conspiracy-minded people of the day.)
That was 40 years ago, but moon-hoax enthusiasts are still with us today.
"The X-Files" brought all sorts of space conspiracies into the public consciousness in the 1990s and 2000s, and the rebooted version of the show addressed the moon landing in a 2018 episode. The conspiracy was also addressed in many other fictional TV shows, from "Futurama" to "Friends."
Meanwhile, some documentary films and reality-TV efforts — a 2008 episode of "MythBusters," for example — tried to chase away the conspiracy theory by educating people. Other filmmakers, such as the folks behind the 2002 mockumentary "Dark Side of the Moon," spoofed moon hoaxers.
Opinion polls over the years regularly show that around 5% of Americans believe the Apollo moon landings were faked, former NASA chief historian Roger Launius recently told the Associated Press. That's more than 16 million people, assuming a U.S. population of 327 million.
NASA has done a lot of debunking work over the decades, including a 2018 offer to NBA superstar Stephen Curry to view moon rocks at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston after Curry said he didn't believe in the moon landings. (A few days later, Curry said he made the comments in jest.)
Earlier this year, NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel recited a pile of evidence supporting the moon landings to The Washington Post. He mentioned the returned moon rocks, the ability to bounce laser beams off gear the astronauts left behind and images NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter took of the Apollo landing sites in 2011. Nevertheless, even former astronauts have found themselves in the fray.
Space shuttle astronaut Leland Melvin tackled the topic in the 2019 Science Channel series "Truth Behind the Moon Landing," which also features Space.com Editor-in-Chief Tariq Malik as a guest. And in 2002, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin punched moon-landing denier Bart Sibrel in the jaw during a taped confrontation. (Police later said Aldrin was provoked, and no charges were filed.)
Plait said there is a danger in talking about the moon-landing conspiracy and other clearly debunked conspiracies like it, such as vaccines causing autism or humans not being responsible for climate change. It's possible, he said, that by airing any of these debates, the media gives legitimacy to the conspiracy. Plait said he sometimes struggles about whether to address a conspiracy in his blog; he tries to discuss ones that are widely talked about already.
But it's a tough job in fast-moving social media. Plait said he recently commented on what appeared to be widespread Twitter backlash about the new version of "The Little Mermaid" starring black actress Halle Bailey, only to discover the backlash was itself likely faked. Plait took down his original tweet and wrote a correction. (The genesis of the viral tweet was from a troll account, according to a tweet by Buzzfeed's Brandon Wall.)
Plait said we should remember that conspiracy beliefs often have real-life effects. For example: "Because of the anti-vax movement, babies are dying, kids are dying, older people are dying, people with compromised immune systems are dying." Extreme weather events driven in part by climate change are killing people as well, he said.
Plait clarified that he did not blame any particular political position for this strife — not even the alt-right, as it doesn't "play into their ideology" (which he said targets people of certain religious groups). But nevertheless, he added, "All of this stuff has been corralling the imagination of the American public and forcing it in a direction to not think critically, and to react instead of sitting and thinking a moment about things, and to doubt — even when you can lay a paper trail from Point A to Point B right in front of someone. They won't believe it."
But Plait still tries. He remembers being on a radio show not too long ago, going over the usual arguments conspiracy theorists use — for example, why are there no stars in the sky in Apollo pictures of the lunar surface? (The reason is the cameras had fast exposure times and the stars were too faint to show.)
"Then somebody called in with some bizarre, trivial thing that made no sense at all," Plait recalled, "and bless him, the radio host jumped in and said, 'Listen. This guy said your 10 biggest claims are wrong. At what point do you back down?'"
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the film "Capricorn One" was directed by Stanley Kubrick. It was directed by Peter Hyams.
UFOs: Why the government will not be disclosing secret information about alien visits
UFOs: Why the government will not be disclosing secret information about alien visits
Dr. Seth Shostak, SETI Institute
Photo: Seth Shostak
Concept graphic to illustrate a supposed unidentified object above Earth, created by Seth Shostak.
Photo: Steven Peters/Getty Images
Date: Jan. 1, 2018
Location: Richmond
Details:
“I was driving back home from work. I was at a red light, when suddenly, I look over the horizon, I saw an oval metallic shape UFO floating/steady over some power lines near some train rail track and overlooking the Chevron refinery.
“When I realized what I was looking at, I decided to turn around to recorded on my phone but it was too late, it was gone/disappear. But I can assure you it wasn't a drone.”
Photo: Richard Newstead/Getty Images
Date: July 7, 2018
Location: Oakland
Details:
“I was blowing bubbles with my son around 7:45 pm tonight and looked up and saw a light that appeared too high to be an airplane. I thought perhaps it was a planet as it was glowing brightly. I could tell it was moving, but quite slowly and could make out six less bright lights glowing around it.
“They were traveling southeast all in tandem, though the six lesser lights seemed to move slightly as well, but all seemed to be traveling around the main star.”
Photo: Aaron Foster/Getty Images
Date: July 18, 2018
Location: In-flight over California
Details:
“We are on a direct Alaska Airline flight 3377 from Albuquerque to San Francisco and during the trip I like to take pictures of clouds. My wife then [told] me have you seen those lights I said no but look back and there 3 objects each one with 2 bright lights that were above ground and were all lined up...
“The objects seems to remain in the same position not moving from one other. I have recorded a 4 minutes clip until I couldn't see any longer the objects from the plane window. We didn't advertised our observation to any flight personnel to avoid creating chaos on the plane.”
Photo: U.S DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE, HO
Date: July 22, 2018
Location: Vacaville
Details:
“Went outside looked up towards the moon and moving slowly across sky were three bright lights in a triangle formation. Then all lights dimmed out simultaneously. This had to be a cloaked TR3B [black triangle UFO]! I am a believer.”
Photo: Lorenz And Avelar/Getty Images
Date: Sept. 10, 2018
Location: San Ramon
Details:
“It was as big or bigger than airliner.. no wings... no sound... clear as day... moving fast... not blimp speed... no visible means of propulsion... tried to get my phone cam out but had left inside.”
Photo: Joe McBride/Getty Images
Date: Dec. 23, 2018
Location: Kentfield
Details: “Very loud ongoing noise, similar to a hair dryer or leaf blower frequency, filled the Larkspur/Kentfield, CA, valley area near Marin General. Weather was clear with some light patches of fog. From our terrace, (400 ft. above city street level), in the distance I saw what looked like a huge drone, with a big green flashing light, bright white light with smaller red and yellow lights, but this was not a drone, pretty big aircraft.”
Is someone going to prove Fox Mulder right? Will somebody convincingly show that aliens have come to Earth?
That's the growing expectation of many members of the UFO community. For seventy years, they've been confidently insisting that some fraction of the strange objects seen flitting through the atmosphere are extraterrestrial craft, piloted by otherworldly beings on a junket to our planet. But while 100 million Americans give this claim a thumbs up – confident that our skies are peppered with interstellar intruders – few scientists agree.
It's not that they don't like the idea. After all, it's hard to think of anything that would be more interesting and important than aliens in our airspace, short of the cure for death. And scientists aren't skeptical simply because interstellar travel is stunningly expensive and time consuming, although it's both of those. They demur because the evidence for this idea is seriously iffy. None of it is unambiguous enough to sway their minds.
However, judging by the more recent remarks of UFO proponents, there seems to be a crescendo of confidence that things are about to change. Well-known fans of visitation – for example Steven Greer, Richard Dolan, and Stephen Bassett, all of whom publicly and frequently expound at the many UFO conferences held each year – are saying that "disclosure" is nigh. The federal government is finally going to come clean with solid evidence about alien UFOs.
That would change this subject from one that rolls eyeballs to an accepted fact-of-the universe.
At least some of the disclosure optimism derives from the revelation in 2017 of a secret $22 million government project, begun a decade earlier and innocuously named the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, or AATIP. The best-known results of this five-year effort were several videos taken by Navy pilots using their gun-sight infrared cameras. Some of these videos showed strange, elongated objects whose identity is uncertain. This was an encouraging sign for the disclosure enthusiasts. If the U.S. military was willing to trickle out such suggestive evidence about extraterrestrial visitors, perhaps they were on the cusp of admitting to a larger truth?
To the UFO crowd, that sounds encouraging. But it doesn't make sense.
It's sad that the UFO crowd has come to this – seemingly giving up on proving their own case and hoping that the feds will do their work for them.
To believe the government has been keeping mum about the aliens since the 1940s – surely not an easy thing to do – requires asking why. What's the motivation? It's not credible that it's because of an official fear that the public would go berserk if they were told there are saucers in the skies. One-third of them believe this already, and most have remained berserk-free.
Steven Greer, a former emergency room doctor who now takes folks on escorted tours to witness purported alien craft, has suggested a deeper reason: Extraterrestrial hardware is an existential threat to humanity's global power structure. Greer maintains that reverse engineering alien technology would lead to cheap energy for all countries, first world through third, providing a significantly higher economic standing in parts of the globe that could pose a serious challenge to western dominance.
Consequently, the powers-that-be have kept the UFO phenomenon under wraps. According to Greer, the potential disruption of alien technology is worse than the difficulty and embarrassment of keeping secrets from the public.
But does it really make sense to believe that the federal government could keep a secret of this magnitude during two generations of civil servants? Could the feds really twist the arms of all other nations to participate in such schemery?
In addition, reverse engineering alien technology is about as plausible as the tooth fairy. Imagine giving a cell phone to Ben Franklin and telling him to "reverse engineer" it so George Washington's army could better stay in touch while fighting the British. Any aliens who can rocket themselves to Earth are far more advanced than we are – indeed, the technology gap is surely greater than that separating us from Franklin.
The real problem with the idea of disclosure is not whether or not the government has had a good reason, and an uncanny ability, to keep an alien presence quiet all these years. It's the faulty premise.
If extraterrestrial craft are really strafing the stratosphere, and in numbers sufficient to cause roughly ten thousand citizen reports annually in the U.S. alone, then why must we throw up our hands and claim "only the government can prove it's true"? What about the hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers who avidly observe the sky on clear nights, but don't seem to see any mysterious flying objects? What of the many thousand commercial satellites that make high resolution photos of our planet all day long without witnessing strange intruders? Are none of these data good enough?
One might argue that the military has better equipment. Of course it does, but if this phenomenon can only be proven with "better equipment," then that's not only a suspiciously convenient argument, it also degrades any claim that the countless saucer photos offered to the public for the past seven decades should be taken seriously.
Besides, does one really need military infrared cameras to find UFOs? Several of the Navy pilots who testified about encounters along the Atlantic seaboard in 2014 and 2015 said they observed these things "nearly every day." That sounds like an opportunity for any civilian with a good camera and a telephoto lens.
It's sad that the UFO crowd has come to this – seemingly giving up on proving their own case and hoping that the feds will do their work for them. Mainstream scientists don't wait for government agencies to prove their theories. That ball's in the researcher's court. And yet UFO proponents are now saying that, deus ex machina, the government will soon book some network air time and fess up about the aliens.
That's both an unconvincing argument and a mentally lazy one.
Dr. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute
FIRST ON THE MOON There are two astronauts in this 1969 photo. Buzz Aldrin stands on the moon near the Apollo 11 lunar lander while Neil Armstrong, reflected in Aldrin’s visor, takes the picture.
“We didn’t know what kind of pictures we’d get, when we would get them, who we would get them from,” says Kendrick Frazier, who joined Science News as a writer just two months before Apollo 11 touched down on lunar soil. So the staff took pictures of their home television screens during the July 20, 1969 broadcast of the moon landing. “It didn’t work out very well,” he says.
Fortunately, images from NASA sufficed. On the cover of the July 26, 1969 issue — just 25 cents! — the words “At last the moon” ran atop a raw, black-and-white image of two blurry forms standing on desolate terrain, with the spidery outline of the lunar lander in the background. A description of the photo — Frazier’s one contribution to the coverage — captured the scene: “Ghostly they were, those two figures gliding over the surface of the moon. But, with all the world watching, it was certain. The dream of the ages had been fulfilled: Man was on the moon.”
QUICK WORK The July 26, 1969 cover of Science News showed an image — taken from a video feed about 40 minutes after the historic first step — of Neil Armstrong (right) walking toward Buzz Aldrin (left). Aldrin is inserting a solar wind collector into the ground.
SCIENCE NEWS
Throughout the Apollo program, Science News kept a watchful eye, reporting on the successes, setbacks and skepticism. From 1967 to 1973, the magazine published more than 100 stories about the United States’ quest to reach the moon, from the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that killed three astronauts (SN: 2/4/67, p. 112) to the splashdown of the final mission, Apollo 17 (SN: 12/23/72, p. 404), plus later findings of moon-based experiments.
“Apollo was an epic achievement. We all were super excited,” Frazier says. Yet the magazine never went overboard, he adds. “We managed to cover all the other things going on in science.” The July 26 issue devoted just five of its 24 pages to the Apollo 11 landing. Other stories included advances in predicting the sex of an unborn child and urban influences on precipitation.
The job of covering Apollo 11 fell to staff writer Jonathan Eberhart. He most likely traveled to Cape Kennedy (now called Cape Canaveral) in Florida for the launch and then to Houston for the rest of the mission, Frazier suspects, filing stories by phone or telegram. In describing the mission, Eberhart’s prose soared: “Now the moon is man’s. The incredible accomplishments of Apollo 11 have changed it irretrievably in the eyes of humankind.” Then he quickly got to work recounting the well-rehearsed descent, the harrowing landing, the hesitant first steps — before spending much of his time, of course, on the science.
Eberhart, who covered space exploration for Science News for three decades, painstakingly described three experiments installed by the Apollo 11 astronauts: a metal foil for snagging solar particles, a seismometer for tracking moonquakes and a mirror array for reflecting lasers back to Earth.
Some geologists, he noted, were miffed about the sample collection: The astronauts didn’t know precisely where they landed and were snatching soil from areas where they had already trod, thus collecting samples from potentially disturbed terrain (SN: 7/26/69, p. 72).
Special Report: Moonstruck
50 years after Apollo 11, lunar science still surprises and delights
But Eberhart’s coverage wasn’t just about timelines and equipment. In a sidebar tucked in the corner of a page of Apollo 11 coverage, Eberhart asked: “What has happened to awe?” He expresses the challenges of a writer conveying the enormity of the moment while pleading with readers to contemplate what humans had just accomplished.
“Try, briefly, to ignore the flashy rockets and the heroic astronauts. Try to feel the smallness of man and the vastness of what he is doing,” Eberhart wrote. “After two million years, man has stepped out of this world onto another. And, by incredible fortune, we are alive at the instant he did it.”
Eberhart can’t explain what he was thinking; he died in 2003 (SN: 3/1/03, p. 134). But Frazier says that this sidebar captured “Jonathan’s sense of wonder and awe amidst all of his professionalism.”
Early on, magazine editor Warren Kornberg pondered the value of this adventure amid the heavy challenges of the time (SN: 7/26/69, p. 71). “Nothing can mar the glory earned by the astronauts,” Kornberg wrote in a special commentary. But “[t]he verdict of history may well be that, while the world erupted, we ignored the real challenge and chased a rocket trail to the moon.” It’s a sobering note. But Apollo’s achievements overlapped with assassinations, race riots and the unpopular Vietnam War, a truth that Science News had to acknowledge.
“We felt we had a special role of reporting on the science part of the … mission as well as putting it into the broader context,” says Frazier, who became the magazine’s editor in 1971. Kornberg’s editorial, he says, reflected widespread “antipathy about spending this money to go to the moon while the whole country was falling apart socially and politically.”
Letters to the editor published that September echoed Kornberg’s concern (SN: 9/13/69, p. 194). “We are frustrated and ashamed,” wrote one reader.
Three years later, in his own — more optimistic — editorial as Apollo 17 drew near, Frazier wrote: “The misfortune of Apollo is that it was conceived in one era of American history and fulfilled in another.… [I]n a future and less buffeted age, the tarnish will have disappeared, and the Apollo landings on the moon will stand as an unambiguous and unparalleled human achievement” (SN: 10/21/72, p. 259).
MOON MANIA Science News wrote more than 100 stories on the Apollo missions. Here are three of the many covers that ran between 1969 and 1972.
SCIENCE NEWS
Despite the public misgivings, Frazier says it was an incredible time to be writing about science. At his home in Albuquerque, he keeps a memento from his tenure at Science News: the engraving plate used to print the cover of the moon landing issue. He plans to display it in his home office this summer, a nod to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. “It is, to me, the greatest souvenir of that time,” he says.
Christopher Crockett, formerly at Science News, is a freelance science writer and editor based in Arlington, Va.
This story appears in the July 6, 2019 & July 20, 2019 issue of Science News with the headline, "How Science News covered the Apollo mission: The magazine reported on every facet of this scientific feat."
‘Laten we de aliens opzoeken’ – 1,7 miljoen Facebook-gebruikers willen mogelijk testbasis VS bestormen
‘Laten we de aliens opzoeken’ – 1,7 miljoen Facebook-gebruikers willen mogelijk testbasis VS bestormen
Maar liefst 1,7 miljoen Facebook-gebruikers, onder wie enkele Nederlanders, zeggen van plan te zijn op 20 september de geheimzinnige Area 51 te bestormen. Alles wijst op een uit de hand gelopen grap, maar complotdenkers zien kansen om dan eindelijk oog in oog met buitenaardse wezens te komen.
De Nevada Test and Training Range, waar Area 51 onder valt, is sinds de jaren vijftig in gebruik als luchtmacht- en testbasis van de Amerikaanse overheid. Het raadselachtige gebied is hermetisch afgesloten en voer voor complotdenkers. Zo zouden er geheime ontmoetingen met buitenaards leven plaatsvinden en er met tijdreizen worden geëxperimenteerd. Lang wilde de overheid niets zeggen over het precieze doel, maar in juni 2013 erkende de CIA – na jarenlang aandringen – dat Area 51 een militair oefenterrein is.
‘Ze kunnen ons niet allemaal tegenhouden’, staat op de Facebookpagina van het op 27 juni gelanceerde ‘evenement’. ‘Laten we de aliens opzoeken.’ Matty Roberts, een van de bedenkers, had zich niet gerealiseerd dat er zoveel mensen bereid zijn de mysterieuze locatie te overvallen. ‘Het was bedoeld als grap om mijn pagina met memes te promoten’, zei hij tegen het Amerikaanse mediabedrijf NPR.
Roberts maakte het evenement aan, nadat hij 20 juni een interview met Bob Lazar had gezien. Lazar werkte jarenlang in de buurt van Area 51. Sinds 1989 claimt de klokkenluider dat de VS buitenaardse ruimteschepen bezitten.
Vorig jaar verscheen de Netflix-documentaire Bob Lazar & Flying Saucers, waarin hij uitlegt hoe de Amerikaanse overheid hem het zwijgen heeft proberen op te leggen.
‘Dodelijk geweld’
Nog altijd is Area 51 niet toegankelijk voor publiek. Borden in de omgeving van het gebied waarschuwen dat ‘dodelijk geweld’ kan worden gebruikt tegen mensen die zich ongeoorloofd toegang proberen te verschaffen.
Toch zijn er genoeg toeristen die het gebied willen bezichtigen. Connie West profiteert van die aanwas en runt al jaren het hotel-restaurant Little A’Le’Inn in het nabijgelegen dorpje Rachel. Tegen de lokale nieuwszender KLAS-TV vertelt West dat alles is volgeboekt voor 20 september. ‘Het is krankzinnig.’
Organisator Roberts betwijfelt of ‘een echt leger Area 51 gaat bestormen’. Tegen NPR zegt hij wel in gesprek te zijn voor een alternatief evenement. In afwachting van het mogelijke contact met buitenaardse wezens liet het biermerk Bud Light op Twitter alvast weten dat hun bier zeer geschikt is voor buitenaards leven. ‘Wij produceren een licht ruimtebier met een frisse smaak en een goede afdronk.’
A layer of ‘aerogel’ could make Mars habitable and even enable life to develop there – but here’s why we should wait
Artist concept of settlement on Mars.
NASA
A layer of ‘aerogel’ could make Mars habitable and even enable life to develop there – but here’s why we should wait
Transforming the red planet to support life has long been a dream of science fiction. Mars is now too cold to support life. Its atmosphere is also too thin to protect any living organisms from harmful radiation. But a new study suggests that local conditions could be changed using an inch of “aerogel” – a synthetic and ultralight material made by taking a gel and replacing the liquid component with a gas.
The authors behind the paper, published in Nature Astronomy, claim the technique could produce habitable regions on the red planet and potentially allow life to develop and thrive thanks to photosynthesis – the process by which plants can convert sunlight into energy. But is this really the case? And, if so, should we do it?
Some 3.8 billion years ago, when life was starting on Earth, conditions on Mars were habitable. The red planet had water on the surface, clouds in its blue sky and volcanism provided part of a water cycle. We know all this from space missions, which have spotted signs of dried up water-crafted channels on the surface. Meanwhile the Opportunity and Curiosity rovers have proved that these features were due to water, by finding tell-tale water-rich minerals.
A magnetic field also protected Mars from harmful space radiation up to 3.8 billion years ago. This was revealed by Mars Global Surveyor, which found crustal magnetic fields in the older, southern highlands. These are the only remains of an ancient global magnetic field, similar to Earth’s magnetic field now.
Cold and dry
These habitable conditions, however, changed 3.8 billion years ago. The magnetic field disappeared. We think this is because Mars lost the heat left over from its formation more quickly than Earth did – this may have been augmented by a large collision which formed the Hellas basin on Mars. Unprotected by a magnetic field for billions of years, Mars’ atmosphere has been scavenged away to space. Some of the water was lost that way, and some went underground and remains as permafrost and in subsurface “lakes”.
The surface now is inhospitable for life as we know it. The thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, less than 1% of Earth’s atmospheric pressure, means surface conditions include high fluxes of harmful radiation from the sun and the galaxy. The surface environment is also cold: 0-10°C during the day but down to below -100°C at night.
But it’s not impossible that life could have once flourished on Mars – or even exist there today, albeit unlikely. With the Rosalind Franklin (ExoMars 2020) rover, to be launched in 2020, we will drill up to two metres under the harsh Martian surface to search for signs of ancient life. This goes beyond what Opportunity and Curiosity could achieve with their 5cm drills, and gives the best chance of any planned mission to find biomarkers and evidence of life. Also, it is hoped that an international sample return mission may bring back the rocks cached by NASA’s Mars 2020 rover.
With these missions we may be able to answer the age-old question of whether humankind is alone in the universe. Mars itself, along with other prime astrobiological targets in the solar system, including the moons Europa and Enceladus around Jupiter and Saturn respectively, should be kept in their pristine state until we have answered this fundamental question.
Terraforming Mars
Ideas for changing or “terraforming” Mars, by introducing an atmospheric greenhouse effect to warm it, have been around for a long time. Recently it was shown that the carbon inventory on Mars is insufficient to do this, apparently killing off these ideas for now.
But the new study suggests a different approach – that smaller areas of Mars could be covered by a thin (2-3cm) covering of aerogel, providing a greenhouse effect by locking in heat. Using lab experiments, the researchers showed that this could increase the surface temperature by 50°C. The authors then used a climate model of Mars to confirm that the gel would be able to keep the water below it liquid up to a depth of several metres. It would also protect against harmful radiation by absorbing the radiation at UV wavelengths, while still allowing enough light for photosynthesis.
This suggests that a habitable region could be produced, enough even to grow some plants to fuel eventual human exploration. The idea is certainly interesting, and according to the experiments potentially plausible. But it ignores the other key issue affecting life on Mars – cosmic radiation. Silica aerogel, the proposed material, is sometimes called “frozen smoke” due to its low density. But because it is so low density, cosmic radiation of higher energy than ultraviolet light can pass through it almost unscathed. Without magnetic protection, this radiation threatens any life on the Martian surface, just as it does today.
Mars is the planet nearest us where life could have started. And to artificially change the environment would threaten one of nature’s “experiments” which has been billions of years in the making –with life either evolving or not since the planet’s formation. We go to great lengths to keep missions like Rosalind Franklin sterile, in line with international rules, so that we do not disturb any past or even present life. If we did go ahead with terraforming plans and find living organisms on Mars later on, it would be hard to know whether these were natural Mars microbes or just contaminants from Earth thriving under the areogel.
Large-scale experiments like this would affect the pristine environment so much that we should not do this yet. At least until after Rosalind Franklin and Mars sample return, let’s leave Mars untouched so we can discover whether we are alone in the universe. When the science is done and we are ready to go, aerogel blankets may be worth a further look
LUNAR LEFTOVERS Astronauts, like those who touched down in the Apollo 15 lunar module (shown) in July 1971, left a lot on the moon’s surface, from scientific instruments to trash.
Once on the moon, Apollo astronauts had two major goals: get themselves and the moon rocks home safe.
To make space on the cramped lunar modules for the hundreds of kilograms of moon samples, the astronauts had to go full Marie Kondo. Anything that wasn’t essential for the ride home got tossed: cameras, hammocks, boots and trash. Downsizing also meant abandoning big stuff, like moon buggies and the descent stage that served as a launchpad for a module’s lunar liftoff.
But the astronauts left more than castoffs. Starting with the Apollo 11 mission, which touched down on July 20, 1969, astronauts left six American flags and plenty of personal and political mementos. Importantly, the crews also left behind instruments for about a dozen experiments to keep tabs on lunar conditions (SN: 8/2/69, p. 95); one is still running today.
These devices “were really important parts of Apollo,” says Noah Petro, project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. Back then, the experiments didn’t get much time in the limelight, “because humans on the surface are obviously the big story,” says Petro, who is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Special Report: Moonstruck
50 years after Apollo 11, lunar science still surprises and delights
When we think of Apollo’s 50-year legacy, most of us probably aren’t picturing the scattered remnants of astronaut outposts gathering space dust. But as nations plan new ventures to the moon, preservationists are fighting to protect these historic sites so that future lunar visitors don’t erase the marks of humans’ first steps beyond Earth.
Solving old mysteries
By December 1972, six Apollo crews had collectively spent nearly 80 hours exploring the moon’s surface (SN: 12/23/72, p. 404). They gathered rocks, photographed the landscape and performed all manner of experiments — from unfurling metal foil to catch solar wind particles to setting off explosives and measuring the resulting seismic tremors.
Apollo 11 left behind solar-powered seismometers and a reflector array that could be paired with lasers on Earth to precisely measure the distance between Earth and the moon. On five later missions, Apollo 12 through 17 (Apollo 13 returned home without landing on the moon), astronauts left more elaborate setups powered by nuclear batteries that generated electricity through radioactive decay (SN: 11/8/69, p. 434). Some of those instruments collected data through 1977, when NASA decided to focus on other projects and pulled the plug on the whole operation (SN: 10/1/77, p. 213).
“There was this period of time where the data languished,” Petro says. But within the last decade or so, a new generation of scientists has taken up the torch, analyzing Apollo observations to answer questions lingering from early studies. Unfortunately, this isn’t nearly as simple as picking up where 1970s scientists left off, as geophysicist Seiichi Nagihara discovered when he set out to solve a decades-old puzzle about the moon’s underground temperature.
On Apollo 15 and 17, astronauts installed thermometers in the lunar surface, which took the moon’s temperature at various depths and sent the data back to Earth (SN: 9/11/71, p. 167). When Apollo-era scientists reviewed data collected through 1974, the results revealed something odd: The moon’s temperature just beneath the surface appeared to be slowly rising.
Images like this one of the Apollo 17 site reveal that the soil where astronauts drove and walked (horizontal lines) and did their work is darker than other terrain. These areas probably absorbed more sunlight, warming the underlying ground.
GSFC/NASA, ASU
“We’re talking about very minor warming,” just a couple degrees, says Nagihara, of Texas Tech University in Lubbock. But researchers at the time couldn’t figure out why. Nagihara decided to examine all the temperature data collected through 1977 to figure out what was going on. Unfortunately, the tapes that recorded these measurements were missing. This is a common problem, because during the Apollo era, data were housed at the individual labs of scientists working on each experiment and many measurements were never properly archived.
“A group of us decided to … try to hunt down the tapes,” Nagihara says. After scouring thousands of documents at NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston, the researchers traced 440 tapes to an archive in Suitland, Md. But even those covered only about three months of observations. At the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Nagihara and colleagues discovered more temperature measurements noted by Apollo-era scientists in weekly memos. Between the recovered tapes and the memos, Nagihara’s team pieced together a picture of the moon’s temperature from 1971 through 1977.
The slow warming under the surface continued through the end of data collection, the researchers reported in April 2018 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. In search of a source for the heat, Nagihara and colleagues turned to pictures taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been orbiting the moon since 2009 (SN: 6/11/16, p. 10). The images showed that soil stirred up by astronaut activity was slightly darker than other lunar terrain. Perhaps it was dark enough to absorb more sunlight and warm the underlying ground.
Computer simulations confirmed that the moon wasn’t heating up from internal processes. Astronauts trekking around the Apollo sites probably caused an increase in surface temperature of about 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, and the extra heat slowly spread more than a meter into the ground — causing the gradual warming detected by Apollo instruments. Turns out that astronaut footsteps left marks on the moon far deeper than those iconic boot prints.
Keeping vigil over gravity
While Nagihara and other researchers are digging up old Apollo data for new analyses, one lone project is still in full swing: the laser ranging retroreflector experiment.
This experiment uses arrays of reflectors placed on the moon by Apollo 11, 14 and 15 astronauts and anchored on two rovers left behind by the Soviets (SN: 5/20/78, p. 326). These arrays consist of special mirrors, each with three sides in the shape of a cube’s corner, which always reflect light in the exact direction from which it came. By shooting a laser beam at a corner-cube array from a telescope on Earth and clocking the time it takes for the light to return, researchers can measure the exact distance between different spots on the moon and Earth.
Still running
To measure the Earth-moon distance, arrays of “corner-cube” mirrors were set up at Apollo sites (top). Inside each circle (bottom left) is a corner cube that reflects laser light back to Earth in the exact direction it came from (illustrated, bottom right).
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: NASA; CHETVORNO/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC0); NSSDC
Laser ranging retroreflector measurements have offered several insights — like the fact that the moon is withdrawing from Earth at about 3.8 centimeters per year. Plus, slight variations in the moon’s rotation suggest that the orb has a relatively small core.
Physicist Tom Murphy of the University of California, San Diego is using the corner-cube arrays to probe a question much bigger than the moon. He’s testing whether a key part of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, called the equivalence principle, holds up.
The equivalence principle states that any two objects in the same gravitational field should fall at the same rate (SN: 1/20/18, p. 9). Just like a bowling ball and a golf ball should hit the ground simultaneously, the Earth and moon should fall around the sun (that is, orbit the sun) at exactly the same rate. “You’re sensitive to any difference in how they’re [orbiting] the sun by measuring the distance between the Earth and moon as they weave around each other,” Murphy says. If the Earth-moon distance ultimately breaks with the equivalence principle, that would reveal a shortcoming of general relativity. And that, in turn, could inform the creation of a theory of quantum gravity that resolves the tension between general relativity and quantum mechanics (SN: 10/17/15, p. 28).
So far, laser ranging retroreflector measurements with centimeter-level precision haven’t shown any difference in how quickly the Earth and moon are falling around the sun. But in 2006, Murphy started collecting data with millimeter-scale precision using improved laser technology and a larger telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
Amassing enough data will require several more years of observation and researchers will need more sophisticated computer models to analyze the observations, Murphy says. Luckily, since the reflectors on the moon don’t require any power, he can collect data into the foreseeable future. Eventually, those observations — at the millimeter level or even smaller scales — could reveal a crack in the equivalence principle.
Since general relativity is fundamentally incompatible with quantum mechanics, something eventually has to give. The equivalence principle might be one of those things, Murphy says. “We have to turn over every rock and see where the bugs are.”
One astronaut’s trash
Thermometers and reflectors were among about a dozen types of instruments installed on the moon. Other devices measured the moon’s magnetic field and sniffed out chemical components of the moon’s tenuous atmosphere. NASA’s Lunar Data Project is restoring data from these and other Apollo experiments, so that scientists can continue to pore over the observations for years to come.
“When you have this incredibly rare resource, you can’t not keep working on it,” says planetary scientist Renee Weber of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., who studies lunar seismic data. “There are always new techniques to try” and better computer processing to tease out previously missed signals.
Based on moonquakes sensed by Apollo seismometers, Weber and colleagues reported in May that the moon may still be tectonically active, as revealed by young faults on the lunar surface called lobate scarps (SN: 6/8/19, p. 7). Understanding moonquakes could help NASA and other agencies decide where to land future spacecraft or construct buildings on the moon, Weber says. If these lobate scarps truly mark sites of tectonic activity, future lunar visitors may want to avoid them, she says.
There’s also plenty to learn by testing how well the Apollo instruments, as well as the nonscientific paraphernalia strewn across the lunar surface, have held up. All of that stuff has been exposed to the lunar elements for decades. Future expeditions could sample the detritus to get a sense of how human communities might one day fare on the moon.
“Every single thing at the sites would be a completely priceless scientific investigation,” says planetary scientist Philip Metzger of the University of Central Florida in Orlando. He can imagine scrutinizing the effects of ultraviolet radiation, solar wind and other factors on everything from batteries to camera lenses to towels and earplugs.
Metzger sees value in everything left behind on the moon, including the astronauts’ discarded bags of excrement. “We have studies of microbes lasting in space over very short amounts of time on the International Space Station,” he says, but testing whether microbes in astronaut waste have survived or mutated over the last 50 years could help determine whether life is up to the challenge of hopping between planets or even solar systems. These are “really important questions about the position of life in the cosmos,” he says.
Protecting Apollo
While Metzger and other space scientists are hoping Apollo remnants can teach us more about how humans would fare on the moon, Beth O’Leary and other archaeologists are hoping to preserve these items as testaments to the human endeavor of getting there.
“Space is not a vacuum. We carry our culture into it,” says O’Leary, of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. The remnants of Apollo sites are important relics of a singular time in human history. Astronaut memorials, messages of peace and commemorative plaques on the moon are obvious pieces of heritage. But “even the scientific stuff has cultural importance,” she says. More than 400,000 space-age Americans at over 20,000 companies and universities across the country teamed up to put Apollo astronauts on the moon. That kind of mass collaboration, in itself, was “a cultural act, as well as a scientific or engineering feat,” O’Leary says.
Unfortunately, securing legal protections for the historical preservation of Apollo sites isn’t easy. Don’t expect the United States to establish an Apollo National Park on the moon any time soon. As fun as that sounds, it would violate the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which states that no nation can claim sovereignty over the moon’s surface.
NASA has published guidelines on how to avoid ruining Apollo artifacts in preparation for the many countries and companies that are vying for parking spots on the moon (SN: 11/24/18, p. 14). This rulebook includes policies such as the distance a future lunar spacecraft should land from Apollo sites so that the rocket exhaust doesn’t wipe Neil Armstrong’s first boot print off the face of the moon. These guidelines aren’t legally binding, Metzger says, but “no company is going to want to be known as the company that ruined one of the Apollo sites.”
Michelle Hanlon, who specializes in space law at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, has her sights on a much broader agreement to protect Apollo sites. Her nonprofit, For All Moonkind, is seeking United Nations protections for relics on the moon. The U.N. Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space is “the ideal place to negotiate a new treaty on heritage in space,” Hanlon says, though she suspects it may take decades to reach such an international deal.
By then, many more people than professional astronauts may be walking the moon, fueling concerns about visitors making off with Apollo artifacts. In 2015, a lunar sample bag used by Armstrong was mistakenly sold at a government auction for $995 and later resold for $1.8 million. Other space-age memorabilia has sold for similarly astronomical prices.
“If NASA can lose [Armstrong’s] bag, how can they keep track of all the artifacts” once people begin making regular round trips to the moon? Hanlon asks. “You can imagine [looters] going up and just grabbing artifacts and bringing them back to sell.”
This story appears in the July 7, 2019 issue of Science News with the headline, "Lunar Leftovers: 50 years on, the Apollo landing spots still generate fervent interest from scientists and historians."
Neuralink, Elon Musk’s ambitious project to wire up the brain to computers, stepped out of the shadows Tuesday evening.
In a detail-laden presentation at the California Academy of Sciences’ Morrison Planetarium, the tech entrepreneur explained how his foray into brain-machine interfaces could pave the way for a symbiotic relationship with artificial intelligence.
Clinical trials could start as early as next year: “We hope to have this, aspirationally, in a human patient, before the end of next year. So this is not far,” Musk said.
Pricing wasn’t announced in the presentation, the primary purpose of which was recruiting. Neuralink is hiring in the areas of robotics, materials, electrochemistry, micro-fabrication, histology, mixed-signal chip design, optics, and more. The company’s job board on its website lists eight engineering openings and a talent acquisition position.
Little was known about Neuralink prior to the presentation, bar a multi-page explainer published on WaitButWhy in April 2017. At that time, it seemed the company was exploring a variety of methods for linking up brains and machines, and it would initially focus on healthcare benefits as a way of funding further research.
“I feel like I’m in Transcendence,” Musk joked, in an otherwise science-focused event that lacked the party vibe of some Tesla events. “Actually, I was in Transcendence!”
Over two years later, and that vision has come into sharper focus. Neuralink has a product, a means of wiring to the brain, and even an iPhone app to plug into the existing world of hyper-connected technology. Company employees noted the rate of advancement versus existing solutions.
“Elon has this incredible optimism where he’ll pierce through these imagined constraints,” Max Hodak, president of Neuralink, told the audience. “You have to be very careful telling him that something’s impossible.”
Here’s what we learned:
6. Neuralink Has a Product
First, a quick primer. Scientists have developed a number of ways to interface with the brain, which reads the electrical firing of neurons in different ways. Some are non-invasive, like EEG scans that use a helmet, but they can be rather imprecise. Others are invasive like ones used in surgery, but the probes can be large and cause issues. Neuralink has opted for an invasive approach that uses a small chip to read the brain, with minuscule probes weaving their way through.
The product is called the N1. It’s a chip that sits in a hermetic package, which fits into a cylinder measuring eight millimeters in diameter by one-fourth of a millimeter tall. Each chip measures four millimeters by four and uses 1,024 electrodes. By comparison, designs used for Parkinson’s today can use just 10 electrodes.
All electrodes have read and write functionality. The probes are five microns thick, three microns thinner than a red blood cell and 95 microns thinner than a human hair. The design enables the probes to get close to neurons to detect spikes, and the team believes that the probes can rest 60 microns away from a neuron to detect the spikes.
In initial setups, Neuralink places four N1 chips in a patient, three in motor areas and one by the somatic sensory cortex. They’re then wired to an inductive coil near the ear that connects to a link that sits on the outside of the skin. The link contains the battery and Bluetooth to power the system, making it possible to remove and upgrade the firmware without actually touching the sensors again.
Neuralink went through a variety of prototype designs, including ones with a USB-C port. As the goal is to make it as safe as possible for surgery, the team had to compromise on more ambitious designs with triple the probes:
5. It Could Reach Patients Very Soon
As mentioned before, the first trials will focus on healthcare. The company aims to host the first-in-human clinical study trial before the end of next year, focusing on patients with quadriplegia due to C1-C4 spinal cord injury.
This will use the four-chip setup to enable patients to control their smartphone using their brain. Through that, they can control a mouse and keyboard on a computer through a Bluetooth connection.
Timescales will vary depending on regulatory approval. Musk previously stated in April 2017 that it may be around eight to 10 years before it’s available to people without disabilities.
And yes, as previous evidence suggested, the company has been using animals in its testing. President of Neuralink Max Hodak said that “we wish that we didn’t have to work with animals,” explaining how the firm takes careful consideration over its approach to tests. Musk noted that the team enabled a monkey to control a computer with his brain.
4. Surgery Will Be Like Lasik
These probes are incredibly fine, and far too small to insert by human hand. Neuralink has developed a robot that can stitch the probes in through an incision. It’s initially cut to two millimeters, then dilated to eight millimeters, placed in and then glued shut. The surgery can take less than an hour.
The goal is to make the insertion about as complex as Lasik eye surgery, making it easy to link up with machines.
3. It Has an App to Bring It All Together
It uses an iPhone app to interface with the neural link, using a simple interface to train people how to use the link.
“You have no wires poking out of your heard; very important. It basically bluetooths to your phone,” Musk said. “We’ll have to watch the app store updates for that one, make sure we don’t have a driver issue.”
No word on an Android version yet.
2. A Brain App Store? It’s Possible
One of the most intriguing comments came during the question-and-answer session, where an audience member asked about third-party software running on the pod. With read-and-write abilities, it’s potentially a tricky area of development.
“Conceivably there could be some kind of app store thing in the future,” Musk said.
Hodak noted that any creations couldn’t use an ad-supported model. While ads on phones are mildly annoying, ads in the brain could be a disaster waiting to happen.
1. A Symbiotic Relationship Is Still the Goal
Neuralink may be initially focused on healthcare benefits, but Musk noted his goal is still to link up humans with A.I. Musk compared it to using a smartphone, except making it a more direct link instead of telling the brain to move fingers to interact.
“This is going to sound pretty weird, but [we want to] achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence,” Musk said. “This is not a mandatory thing! This is a thing that you can choose to have if you want. I think this is going to be something really important at a civilization-scale level. I’ve said a lot about A.I. over the years, but I think even in a benign A.I. scenario we will be left behind.”
Details around the economics of the setup are still sketchy, but Musk joked that “if you want to be symbiotic with A.I., I think it’s safe to say you could repay the loan with superhuman intelligence.” Perhaps a funny suggestion, but research suggests that intelligence does not always predict financial wellbeing.
Far from wiring up and worrying about the details later, the really smart move may be to wait and see how Neuralink develops further over the coming years. Based on Tuesday’s presentation, it could be a fascinating ride.
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Na Area 51 willen mensen nu ook de Bermudadriehoek en deze andere locaties gaan bestormen
Na Area 51 willen mensen nu ook de Bermudadriehoek en deze andere locaties gaan bestormen
Area 51 willen mensen nu ook de Bermudadriehoek binnengaan. De organisator van het evenement zal boten en duikuitrustingen leveren waarmee de gasten het stuk oceaan kunnen gaan verkennen waar schepen en vliegtuigen op mysterieuze wijze verdwijnen.
In 1945 verdwenen daar bijvoorbeeld vijf Amerikaanse bommenwerpers. Van de toestellen werd nooit meer iets vernomen.
Ook een reddingsvliegtuig dat op zoek ging naar de vermiste bemanning zou er zijn verdwenen.
19.000 mensen
De Bermudadriehoek bevindt zich tussen Bermuda, Florida en Puerto Rico.
De organisator hoopt 75.000 dollar in te zamelen om livemuziek en entertainment te kunnen regelen.
Al 19.000 mensen hebben aangegeven te zullen gaan. Nog eens 25.000 zijn geïnteresseerd.
Witte Huis
Ook zijn er inmiddels evenementen georganiseerd waarbij het Witte Huis en de Federal Reserve bestormd moeten gaan worden.
Ondertussen zijn al meer dan 1,8 miljoen alienjagers van plan om op 20 september Area 51 te bestormen.
De Amerikaanse luchtmacht heeft mensen die daadwerkelijk naar de topgeheime legerbasis willen afreizen gewaarschuwd om weg te blijven.
Verklaringen
“De Amerikaanse luchtmacht staat altijd paraat om Amerika te beschermen,” zei woordvoerster Laura McAndrews.
Mensen die de Bermudadriehoek willen bestormen zullen waarschijnlijk op minder verzet stuiten.
Mogelijke verklaringen voor de raadselachtige verdwijningen zijn UFO’s, paranormale activiteit en extreme weersgebeurtenissen.
Steeds meer ‘ontkenners’: bijna een vijfde van Amerikaanse jongeren gelooft dat maanlanding nep was. En hoe zit het met Mars?
Steeds meer ‘ontkenners’: bijna een vijfde van Amerikaanse jongeren gelooft dat maanlanding nep was. En hoe zit het met Mars?
Heeft astronaut Neil Armstrong 50 jaar geleden echt op de maan gestaan? Of bevond hij zich op een filmset in Hollywood? Uit een nieuwe peiling blijkt dat bijna een vijfde (18 procent) van de Amerikaanse jongeren gelooft dat de maanlanding van Apollo 11 een hoax was.
Mensen tussen de 18 en 34 jaar zijn maar liefst zes keer meer geneigd om te geloven dat de NASA de landing in scène heeft gezet dan mensen die het allemaal nog hebben meegemaakt.
Het aantal mensen dat niet in de maanlanding gelooft blijft steeds verder stijgen.
Vlag
Nu zegt één op de 10 van alle Amerikanen dat de maanlanding nep was. In 1999 was dat nog zes procent. Er zijn nu dus bijna twee keer zoveel ‘maanlanding-ontkenners’ dan 20 jaar geleden.
De meeste ‘ontkenners’ (41 procent) zien de Amerikaanse vlag op de maan als belangrijkste bewijs dat het om een hoax gaat.
Het lijkt erop alsof de vlag wappert, terwijl er geen wind staat op de maan, zo is de gedachte.
Studiolampen
Daarnaast zeggen veel ‘ontkenners’ dat schaduwen van de studiolampen op foto’s zijn te zien, dat de astronauten de straling in de ruimte niet overleefd zouden hebben en dat er onvoldoende vocht op de maan is om een voetafdruk achter te laten.
Ruim de helft van de ‘ontkenners’ stelt dat we op een later moment op de maan zijn geland.
Bijna alle ‘ontkenners’ (98 procent) zeggen dat de overheid ons bespioneert.
Marsrover ook nep
En iets meer dan de helft van de ‘ontkenners’ (51 procent) is van mening dat de Marsrover ook nep is.
Veel mensen geloven dat we al buitenaards bezoek hebben gehad. Zo gelooft drie kwart van de ‘maanlanding-ontkenners’ dat aliens de aarde hebben bezocht.
Above: Apollo 11 – projected on the Washington Monument – to celebrate the 50th anniversary of July 20, 1969′s moon landing
July 20, 2019 is officially the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first setting foot on the moon, and it prompts me to revisit the conspiracy theory question (as I wrote in a previous article on BIN) – “…if we really did land on the moon as we are told, why have we not returned in almost 50 years? Are we supposed to believe there is no technological benefit to having a scientific base on the moon? Are we supposed to believe NASA’s excuse that “we forgot how to do it”? Or is it more likely that there is some kind of conspiracy?”
There are only a few possibilities:
1 –They really landed on the moon as the US Government described and there is nothing interesting there – just craters and dust.
2 –They really landed there, but they didn’t tell the public the interesting stuff
2A –They found evidence of previous advanced human civilization and technology on the moon because humans made it into space before the last catastrophic pole shift
2B – They found evidence of aliens observing us, using the moon as their base
3 – They never made it to the moon at all, it was just propaganda
“If we actually found evidence that aliens had observation bases on the far side of the moon, would we report it? If we found evidence that a previous, lost human civilization like Atlantis had risen and fallen and been to the Moon thousands of years ago, leaving behind evidence and technology equal to or more advanced than our own – would we re-write history, or hide and study their technology?”
If we do have alien evidence/artifacts/contact – how many decades of gradual acclimation to their existence does the public need before the government finally offers disclosure?
I went on about the theory that Stanley Kubrick confessed to faking the moon landing during his filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.
But a recent article on Motherboard also just got my attention with: “NASA confessed [in 2006] that it likely reused 45 tapes containing original footage of Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s iconic July 20, 1969 moonwalk. Even today, the specter of the Apollo 11 tape blunder still looms over the agency.”
So the original moon landing tapes – the most important, most historical, and most controversial footage NASA ever took – was accidentally taped over? On 45 different tapes? I’m supposed to believe that was an accident? Much more likely to me, they were under scrutiny, and could be proved as forgeries, so they were conveniently wiped clean like a Hillary Clinton email server.
Then in 2015, it was found out that someone had saved about 300 data reels of NASA tapes from 1969-1972 and stored them in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, the owner was secretive about them, and the person who found them turned them over to NASA, who said that none of them had anything to do with the Apollo missions. Sure they didn’t.
My best guess is that we found evidence that mankind had visited the Moon before – thousands of years ago – and that we are denying the truth so we can back-engineer ancient VIMANA technology and understand cycles of terrestrial destruction without re-writing history or alerting the masses.
I am not arguing that we never landed on the moon – just that the public has been shown meaningless edited photographs, while the truly interesting finds have been kept secret.
Watch 2 minutes of this video, from about the 26 minute mark to the 28 minute mark, showing very clear photographic editing:
Neil Armstrong should have been a sought after public speaker. The first man to walk on the Moon could have been rich beyond his wildest dreams merely speaking motivationally to graduating classes and anyone else… Instead he stayed out of the limelight. 25 years later he compared the astronauts to parrots. Which don’t fly high, but they do repeat what is said to them.
Article by David Montaigne, author of many books including:
A Washington witness at Valley reported watching a disc-shaped object inside a cloud; moreover, the object appeared to be having trouble with a cloaking device, according to testimony in Case 94350.
The witness was sitting outside on a warm, sunny day at 1:07 p.m. on February 8, 2018. “I was looking across the lake I live on towards the southwest sky and watching the clouds and was sort of gauging the wind, which was hardly any, maybe 4-5 miles an hour,” the witness stated. “The clouds that day were various sizes but all oval.” As the witness watched, the biggest cloud started to blink. “One second it was a giant, discshaped craft, then it was a cloud. I kept looking away at other clouds then looked back at this phenomenon, because I was questioning what I was seeing. It looked to me as though its cloaking was not working properly. This was enormous. I could see at least four stories of windows that were along the edge of the craft. The color was a metallic silver/chrome. After about 5-8 minutes it stopped blinking and looked like a cloud again.”
Washington MUFON Chief Investigator Daniel Nims closed this case as an Unknown Aerial Vehicle.
Witness illustration.
Credit: MUFON
“MUFON reports no similar large vehicle sightings in this vicinity,” Sims wrote in his report. “A NUFORC case on January 22, 2018, at 3:30 a.m. reported a similar, large object that seemed to be able to generate a ‘cloud’ camouflage. “The witness reports she stepped out to her west porch to have a cigarette and enjoy a pleasant early spring [sic] afternoon. She saw several strange oval-shaped clouds several miles away to the southwest high in the sky (about 45-degrees elevation). One of the clouds then changed from its cloud look and took on the appearance of a large disk-shaped object, which appeared oval looking at it from the side. The craft had a metallic surface. It also had what looked like four rows of rectangular-shaped windows that went around the craft. (See drawing.) The object was large. The object flickered back and forth from the cloud appearance to the disk-shaped object several times over a period of several (five to eight) minutes.
She says it was like it had a ‘cloaking’ device that was malfunctioning. It finally assumed the cloud appearance. The object stayed fixed relative to the other clouds as they drifted off to the southeast in a mild breeze of a few miles per hour. “No lights were noted. No sound was associated with the object, although it was quite a distance away. “An object this large is too big to be an aircraft. An Internet search was run to see if any airship (blimp) operations were occurring in the northwest. The Internet gave no evidence of that. FlightRadar24 showed no aircraft in the vicinity of Valley for that time period. “The unique characteristic of switching from cloud appearance to craft appearance would not be from any normal aircraft. The disposition of this case is: Unknown – UAV.” Valley is a census-designated place and unincorporated community in Stevens County, Washington, population 146.
The northern Ural Mountains of the former Soviet Union were a cold, unforgiving place in 1959. They remain so today, and had been for centuries prior to the first days of February in the aforementioned year, when nine hikers from the Ural Polytechnical Institute were found dead, their bodies strangely under-dressed for the bitter February cold sweeping down off the slopes of nearby Kholat Syakhl.
Known today as the Dyatlov Pass incident, the location where the group had been camping was a place of fear and superstition among the local Mansi, who called it the “Dead Mountain.” The name was tragically fitting, as a series of events which remain unexplained to this day caused the hikers to cut their way out of their tents, fleeing into the February cold and, ultimately, to their deaths.
Although a variety of theories about the ultimate cause behind the deaths of Igor Dyatlov and his companions have been offered over the years, there has yet to be one offered that can account for all of the odd factors the case presents. In equal measure, countless articles have been written on the subject over the years, and several books, documentaries, and films have also lend to the mill of rumor and speculation that surrounds the case; some of the tenuous conclusions offered by such media have done more harm than good, so far as coming to any logical determinations about what might have actually happened.
The graves of the Dyatlov party hikers, as it appears today (Public Domain).
The case, in short, continues to fascinate after the passing of many decades, and hence why I often receive emails and messages about it from others who are perplexed by it. My good friend Billy Clark, and Englishman now residing in Berlin, Germany, took time to write to me about the case, where he shared a number of frustrations with the way the incident is treated in popular writing. Namely, this involves the dismissal of the idea that some kind of aerial phenomenon might have been involved, whether it had been of a manmade, natural, or perhaps some other variety.
“Whatever happened, it’s totally baffling!” Billy wrote. “That it would claim all nine of them and that none were able to provide any kind of clue as to what happened in their final moments is hard to accept. Perhaps the investigators were not looking for something like that? A couple of words hastily carved into some wood could be easily missed. Perhaps we don’t have all the available facts.”
“The behaviour of the Russian authorities during the case is very peculiar,” Clark noted. “The strange change of manner of the lead investigator trying to hush up talk of lights in the sky and murder during the case, to later in life insisting that the lights in the sky were directly responsible in some way.”
“Then there are those zinc lined coffins…” he added.
Indeed, as Billy notes, there are a lot of bizarre aspects to the Dyatlov Pass case which strains the idea of there being any single, “simple” explanation. I have always been intrigued by the reports of “lights in the sky,” which are one element of the case that inevitably foments sensationalism in the sense that it would seem to insinuate that something akin to UFO phenomenon might have been involved.
“If something ‘out of this world’ were happening outside [the tent] as a result of some kind of interaction with that light, it might be one of the few things that would explain such a desperate scramble to escape,” Billy offered in our recent correspondence. “It seems the radiation on the bodies may not have actually been that strange in terms of level strength, but radiation effects are certainly consistent with some UFO encounters.”
Billy raises an important point here, in that many of the explanations that have been offered over the years (ranging from the tenuous idea of infrasound, to absurdities such as a “Yeti attack”) completely fail to account for minutiae like the radiation question. In other words, many would discount any and all implications that something akin to “lights seen in the sky” around the time of the incident could have had anything to do with the deaths of the Dyatlov group. Meanwhile, they completely discount certain pertinent facts about the case, as they churn out their own pet theories… theories which are incomplete, at very best.
I am not of a mind to think that this long-standing mystery has been “solved” in any sincere sense of things. Ideas that have been put forth in the past, like infrasound causing sudden disorientation which led to the hiker’s strange nighttime behavior is, while perhaps a little more tenable than certain other theories, simply not capable of accounting for all of the facts.
Same with the poor folks who want to believe it was a “Russian Wildman,” although it does allow for a peculiar little addendum to all of this: the Dyatlov group actually did joke about the “Abominable Snowman” in some of their private correspondence with each other. However, there is not a shred of evidence that the group ever encountered such a creature, as proposed in a Discovery Channel documentary a few years ago (unless, of course, Yetis are capable of emanating non-ionizing radiation from their bodies, hence explaining how some of the hikers appeared to have been exposed to an energetic source of some kind… figure that one out).
As far as reasonable speculations go, there are at least two ideas that I would not rule out in relation to what might have happened at the Dyatlov Pass in 1959. While each of these is speculative, I offer them here because I do feel that these possibilities—unproven though they are, like the rest of the “solutions” proposed about this case over the years—nonetheless may be able to more effectively account for the variety of peculiarities about the incident. They are as follows:
1) a Russian weapons test (for which there is actually a surprising amount of evidence),
2) some variety of natural phenomenon (certain aspects of the case actually ARE consistent with ball lightning and similar natural luminous phenomena, as we will see shortly).
If I had to put my money on either of these, I would say that the second possibility, involving something like ball lightning, is the most likely to have had something to do with the incident. Without any further elaboration, this may seem like an equally tenuous supposition:what, apart from alleged reports of “lights in the sky,” could the Dyatlov Pass incident have to do with ball lightning?
Investigators arrive at the scene where the hikers spent their final evening (Public Domain).
To that point, I would like to bring the reader’s attention to a very curious report I found in the British Journal of Meteorology from 1984, which tells the story of a group of Russian hikers in the Caucasses that were “attacked” by what was deemed at the time to have been “aggressive ball lightning.”
The details of that incident were related by a Mr. Victor Kavunenko, who had been one of four mountaineers that were camped in the Caucasus Mountains at an altitude of 12795 feet. The date was on or around August 17, 1978, and Kavunenko gives the following account of what transpired with his companions in their encampment one evening:
“I woke up with the strange feeling that a stranger had made his way into our tent. Thrusting my head out of the sleeping bag, I froze. A bright yellow blob was floating about one metre from the floor. It disappeared into Korovin’s sleeping bag. The man screamed in pain. The ball jumped out and proceeded to circle over the other bags now hiding in one, now in another. When it burned a hole in mine I felt an unbearable pain, as if I were being burned by a welding machine, and blacked out. Regaining consciousness after a while, I saw the same yellow ball which, methodically observing a pattern that was known to it alone, kept diving into the bags, evoking desperate, heart-rendering (sic) howls from the victims. This indescribable horror repeated itself several times. When I came back to my senses for the fifth or sixth time, the ball was gone. I could not move my arms or legs and my body was burning as if it had turned into a ball of fire itself. In the hospital, where we were flown by helicopter, seven wounds were discovered on my body. They were worse than burns. Pieces of muscle were found to be torn out to the bone. The same happened to Shigin, Kaprov and Bashkirov. Oleg Korovin had been killed by the ball — possibly because his bag had been on a rubber mattress, insulating it from the ground. The ball lightning did not touch a single metal object, injuring only people.”
This story, if true (keeping in mind that it was reported in a respected British scientific journal) bears undeniable similarities to the Dyatlov Pass incident. The primary similarities include 1) the presence of “mysterious lights” (which were not reported by the Dyatlov hikers, but which were allegedly observed in the same area around the time of the incident), 2) the presence of something inside the tent with the campers, 3) the presence of burns on the camper’s bodies, 4) damage to muscles and tissue of the survivors after their interactions with the phenomenon, 5) the death of one of the campers after his interaction with the light or object.
Note that at no time was the light observed by Kavunenko and his company referred to as anything more extraordinary than “ball lightning.”
I would argue that the “ball lightning” theory as an explanation for what the hikers encountered at Dyatlov pass in 1959 would be more no more likely than any other speculative theory, if it were not for the details provided about the separate incident above. There is little (if anything) else about this case that can be found, whether online, or in related literature, apart from its inclusion by the late William R. Corliss in his Science Frontiers publications, where he noted that “Ball lightning has often been called inquisitive, but this is one of the few reports where it deliberately (?) seemed to attack people. Some Russian English-language publications verge on the sensational, and one must always have some salt on hand.”
Salt-in-hand, therefore, the report is certainly interesting. If true, it may very well shed some light—perhaps of a natural luminous variety, and yet which remains little-understood—on this long-standing and enigmatic Cold War-era case.
A real-time interactive journey through the Apollo 11 mission. Relive every moment as it occurred in 1969.
Great audio, video and imaging from the mission.
Included real-time elements:
all mission control film footage all TV transmissions and on-board film footage 2,000 photographs 11,000 hours of Mission Control audio 248 hours of space- to ground audio all on-board recorder audio 15,000 searchable utterances post-mission commentary astromaterials sample data
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
Mijn hobby's zijn: Ufologie en andere esoterische onderwerpen.
Op deze blog vind je onder artikels, werk van mezelf. Mijn dank gaat ook naar André, Ingrid, Oliver, Paul, Vincent, Georges Filer en MUFON voor de bijdragen voor de verschillende categorieën...
Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.