Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans?

A look at the available evidence

ADAM FRANK

It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me.

Schmidt is the director of nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (a.k.a. GISS) a world-class climate-science facility. One day last year, I came to GISS with a far-out proposal. In my work as an astrophysicist, I’d begun researching global warming from an “astrobiological perspective.” That meant asking whether any industrial civilization that rises on any planet will, through their own activity, trigger their own version of a climate shift. I was visiting GISS that day hoping to gain some climate science insights and, perhaps, collaborators. That’s how I ended up in Gavin’s office.

Just as I was revving up my pitch, Gavin stopped me in my tracks.

“Wait a second,” he said. “How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?”

It took me a few seconds to pick my jaw off the floor. I had certainly come into Gavin’s office prepared for eye rolls at the mention of “exo-civilizations.” But the civilizations he was asking about would have existed many millions of years ago. Sitting there, seeing Earth’s vast evolutionary past telescope before my mind’s eye, I felt a kind of temporal vertigo. “Yeah,” I stammered, “Could we tell if there’d been an industrial civilization that deep in time?”

We never got back to aliens. Instead, that first conversation launched a new study we’ve recently published in the International Journal of Astrobiology. Though neither of us could see it at that moment, Gavin’s penetrating question opened a window not just onto Earth’s past, but also onto our own future.

We’re used to imagining extinct civilizations in terms of the sunken statues and subterranean ruins. These kinds of artifacts of previous societies are fine if you’re only interested in timescales of a few thousands of years. But once you roll the clock back to tens of millions or hundreds of millions of years, things get more complicated.

When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization—things like cities, factories, and roads—the geologic record doesn’t go back past what’s called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago. For example, the oldest large-scale stretch of ancient surface lies in the Negev Desert. It’s “just” 1.8 million years old—older surfaces are mostly visible in cross section via something like a cliff face or rock cuts. Go back much farther than the Quaternary and everything has been turned over and crushed to dust.

And, if we’re going back this far, we’re not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn’t make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. That means the question shifts to other species, which is why Gavin called the idea the Silurian hypothesis, after an old Dr. Who episode with intelligent reptiles.

So, could researchers find clear evidence that an ancient species built a relatively short-lived industrial civilization long before our own? Perhaps, for example, some early mammal rose briefly to civilization building during the Paleocene epoch about 60 million years ago. There are fossils, of course. But the fraction of life that gets fossilized is always minuscule and varies a lot depending on time and habitat. It would be easy, therefore, to miss an industrial civilization that only lasted 100,000 years—which would be 500 times longer than our industrial civilization has made it so far.

Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we’d leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development.

Now that our industrial civilization has truly gone global, humanity’s collective activity is laying down a variety of traces that will be detectable by scientists 100 million years in the future. The extensive use of fertilizer, for example, keeps 7 billion people fed, but it also means we’re redirecting the planet’s flows of nitrogen into food production. Future researchers should see this in characteristics of nitrogen showing up in sediments from our era. Likewise our relentless hunger for the rare-Earth elements used in electronic gizmos. Far more of these atoms are now wandering around the planet’s surface because of us than would otherwise be the case. They might also show up in future sediments, too. Even our creation, and use, of synthetic steroids has now become so pervasive that it too may be detectable in geologic strata 10 million years from now.

And then there’s all that plastic. Studies have shown increasing amounts of plastic “marine litter” are being deposited on the seafloor everywhere from coastal areas to deep basins and even in the Arctic. Wind, sun, and waves grind down large-scale plastic artifacts, leaving the seas full of microscopic plastic particles that will eventually rain down on the ocean floor, creating a layer that could persist for geological timescales.

The big question is how long any of these traces of our civilization will last. In our study, we found each had the possibility of making it into future sediments. Ironically, however, the most promising marker of humanity’s presence as an advanced civilization is a by-product of one activity that may threaten it most.

When we burn fossil fuels, we’re releasing carbon back into the atmosphere that was once part of living tissues. This ancient carbon is depleted in one of that element’s three naturally occurring varieties, or isotopes. The more fossil fuels we burn, the more the balance of these carbon isotopes shifts. Atmospheric scientists call this shift the Suess effect, and the change in isotopic ratios of carbon due to fossil-fuel use is easy to see over the last century. Increases in temperature also leave isotopic signals. These shifts should be apparent to any future scientist who chemically analyzes exposed layers of rock from our era. Along with these spikes, this Anthropocene layer might also hold brief peaks in nitrogen, plastic nanoparticles, and even synthetic steroids. So if these are traces our civilization is bound to leave to the future, might the same “signals” exist right now in rocks just waiting to tell us of civilizations long gone?

Fifty-six million years ago, Earth passed through the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, the planet’s average temperature climbed as high as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above what we experience today. It was a world almost without ice, as typical summer temperatures at the poles reached close to a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Looking at the isotopic record from the PETM, scientists see both carbon and oxygen isotope ratios spiking in exactly the way we expect to see in the Anthropocene record. There are also other events like the PETM in the Earth’s history that show traces like our hypothetical Anthropocene signal. These include an event a few million years after the PETM dubbed the Eocene Layers of Mysterious Origin, and massive events in the Cretaceous that left the ocean without oxygen for many millennia (or even longer).

Are these events indications of previous nonhuman industrial civilizations? Almost certainly not. While there is evidence that the PETM may have been driven by a massive release of buried fossil carbon into the air, it’s the timescale of these changes that matter. The PETM’s isotope spikes rise and fall over a few hundred thousand years. But what makes the Anthropocene so remarkable in terms of Earth’s history is the speed at which we’re dumping fossil carbon into the atmosphere. There have been geological periods where Earth’s CO₂ has been as high or higher than today, but never before in the planet’s multibillion-year history has so much buried carbon been dumped back into the atmosphere so quickly. So the isotopic spikes we do see in the geologic record may not be spiky enough to fit the Silurian hypothesis’s bill.

But there is a conundrum here. If an earlier species’s industrial activity is short-lived, we might not be able to easily see it. The PETM’s spikes mostly show us the Earth’s timescales for responding to whatever caused it, not necessarily the timescale of the cause. So it might take both dedicated and novel detection methods to find evidence of a truly short-lived event in ancient sediments. In other words, if you’re not explicitly looking for it, you might not see it. That recognition was, perhaps, the most concrete conclusion of our study.

It’s not often that you write a paper proposing a hypothesis that you don’t support. Gavin and I don’t believe the Earth once hosted a 50-million-year-old Paleocene civilization. But by asking if we could “see” truly ancient industrial civilizations, we were forced to ask about the generic kinds of impacts any civilization might have on a planet. That’s exactly what the astrobiological perspective on climate change is all about. Civilization building means harvesting energy from the planet to do work (i.e., the work of civilization building). Once the civilization reaches truly planetary scales, there has to be some feedback on the coupled planetary systems that gave it birth (air, water, rock). This will be particularly true for young civilizations like ours still climbing up the ladder of technological capacity. There is, in other words, no free lunch. While some energy sources will have lower impact—say solar vs. fossil fuels—you can’t power a global civilization without some degree of impact on the planet.

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Once you realize, through climate change, the need to find lower-impact energy sources, the less impact you will leave. So the more sustainable your civilization becomes, the smaller the signal you’ll leave for future generations.

In addition, our work also opened up the speculative possibility that some planets might have fossil-fuel-driven cycles of civilization building and collapse. If a civilization uses fossil fuels, the climate change they trigger can lead to a large decrease in ocean oxygen levels. These low oxygen levels (called ocean anoxia) help trigger the conditions needed for making fossil fuels like oil and coal in the first place. In this way, a civilization and its demise might sow the seed for new civilizations in the future.

By asking about civilizations lost in deep time, we’re also asking about the possibility for universal rules guiding the evolution of all biospheres in all their creative potential, including the emergence of civilizations. Even without pickup-driving Paleocenians, we’re only now learning to see how rich that potential might be.

{ https://www.theatlantic.com/  }

If we don’t hurry, the life we find on Mars might be from Earth

BY MIHAI ANDREI

" There is a ticking clock now,” Princeton astrobiologist Chris Chyba said at last week’s Breakthrough Discuss conference, conducted at Stanford University. The race isn’t to find life on Mars — it’s to find it in time before we contaminate the Red Planet with our Earthly microbial fauna.

Is there life on Mars? Even if there is, is it from Mars?

Image credits: NASA / JPL.

We don’t know if there is life on Mars or not. The Red Planet seems like a good candidate, and we’ve found significant evidence that it might have held vast quantities of liquid wateron its surface at once point in its geological past — a prerequisite for life as we know it. There’s also a good case to be made against this, with its lack of active tectonics and atmosphere. If Martian life exists, it’s bound to live beneath the surface where it’s shielded from the devastating radiation, and almost certainly microbial. Either way, it’s an exciting area of active research, but we might be on a clock.

With every mission we send to Mars, every lander, and especially with the planned manned missions to Mars, we risk contamination with microbial creatures from Earth. These alien microorganisms (technically, they’re Earth microorganisms, but to Mars, they’d be aliens) could overpower and destroy potentially existing native fauna.

For instance, Elon Musk’s highly anticipated mission to Mars aims to bring people to Mars within the decade, and Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg has announced similar plans. For the Martian life, the effects would be unforeseeable — hence Chyba’s remarks. But people weren’t necessarily fond of his idea. Longtime space entrepreneur Jeff Greason, who serves as chairman of the board for the Tau Zero Foundation, poked fun at Chyba:

“If all you want to do with the solar system is look at it, the rest of us would like to borrow it for a while. … There are things to do with these bodies other than science.”

Others have claimed that there’s no reason to believe Earth’s microbes would take over the Martian natives.

“You could terraform Mars, and the microbes on Mars would survive,” said Robert Zubrin, founder and president of the nonprofit Mars Society.

But Chyba makes a very valid point. If we don’t really know what could happen, isn’t it better to take extra precautions? He advocates a precautionary approach, what he calls the Smokey the Bear argument: “Until we know more, let’s be careful.”

To me, this sounds like a sound idea. There are many unknowns when it comes to Mars and its habitability, but we can take measures to limit the potential damage, for instance by ensuring that no microorganisms escape through astronauts’ space suits. If we send people to Mars, microbes are bound to come along for the ride, and the effects can truly be unforeseeable. We shouldn’t just concede that we’re gonna contaminate Mars no matter what.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

Mass extinction event 232 million years ago paved the way for the dinosaurs

 BY TIBI PUIU

A life-scene from 232 million years ago, during the Carnian Pluvial Episode after which dinosaurs took over. A large rauisuchian lurks in the background, while two dinosaurs species stand in the foreground. Based on data from the Ischigualasto Formation in Argentina.

Credit: Davide Bonadonna.

Much has been said about the famous asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago and ushered in the age of mammals, eventually clearing the path for our species to achieve total domination. However, in turn, the dinosaurs were also privileged by a different mass extinction event, which is far less studied than the asteroid impact. This was the conclusion of a new study which found that dinosaurs became far more prevalent across the world after a mass extinction called the Carnian Pluvial Episode.

Starting and ending with a bang

The Carnian Pluvial Episode occurred roughly 232 million years ago. During this time, a series of cataclysms, triggered by volcanic eruptions in western Canada, shifted the climate from wet to dry and from dry to wet again. The hostile periods of global warming and acid rain had taken their toll on countless species that eventually went extinct.

Researchers at the MUSE-Museum of Science Trento, Italy, the Universities of Ferrara and Padova, and the University of Bristol investigated ancient rock deposits in Northern Italy’s Dolomites mountain range which still had dinosaur tracks trapped inside them. This allowed them to build a timeline for dinosaur expansion; the more and diverse the tracks, the more successful the dinosaur must have become. For instance, in the early Triassic, some 245 million years ago, dinosaurs were very rare and stayed that way for at least 13 million years. After the Carnian extinction, however, dinosaur footprints became ubiquitous.

“We were excited to see that the footprints and skeletons told the same story,” Massimo Bernardi, a researcher at the University of Bristol, said in a news release. “We had been studying the footprints in the Dolomites for some time, and it’s amazing how clear cut the change from ‘no dinosaurs’ to ‘all dinosaurs’ was.”

When the researchers calculated the peak of this expansion, they found that it coincided with the end of the Carnian Pluvial Episode. What’s more, the Dolomite samples also contained evidence of climate change. Namely, the researchers detected four pulses of warming and climate disruptions within a million year span, which must have led torepeated extinctions.

“The discovery of the existence of a link between the first diversification of dinosaurs and a global mass extinction is important,” said Mike Benton, co-author of the new study and a professor at the University of Bristol.

“The extinction didn’t just clear the way for the age of the dinosaurs, but also for the origins of many modern groups, including lizards, crocodiles, turtles, and mammals — key land animals today.”

• Scientific reference: Massimo Bernardi, Piero Gianolla, Fabio Massimo Petti, Paolo Mietto, Michael J. Benton. Dinosaur diversification linked with the Carnian Pluvial Episode. Nature Communications, 2018; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03996-1.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

We’re Getting Closer to Cloning Humans. Here’s What’s Stopping Us.

 

Bryan Fernandez/Victor Tangermann

{ https://futurism.com/ }

Look at that “Water and Roll Cloud” Onlookers "freaked out" as Lake Michigan has rare moment

A very rare event happened when a quick rise in water level known as a seiche or a Great Lake meteotsunami caused the Lake Michigan to rise 13.9 inches in just 42 minutes around 12:30 p.m. on Friday, April 13.

The water was as high as had seen since Nov. 10, 1975, the day the freighter Edmond Fitzgerald sank on Lake Superior. Water was also flooding the beach and the end of Ludington Avenue but returning to nearly the same spot less than 10 minutes later.

But something strange happened before the quick rise of the water in Lake Michigan.

A massive roll cloud that touched the water surface of Lake Michigan has been filmed just before the meteotsunami and even though it is a natural phenomenon it would be possible that this rare roll cloud and the quick rise in water level is the effect of weather manipulation?

{ http://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.be/ }

Several recent archaeological discoveries made in the Baltic and North seas suggest that there could be an entirely unknown Stone Age civilization which once inhabited the areas which now make up Scandinavia. This “Swedish Atlantis” could reveal a whole new chapter of human history we’ve yet to discover. What exactly lies under the icy, black waters of the northern seas?

A lot of stone tools, it turns out. Over the last several years, hydrocarbon exploration and fishing operations have been discovering prehistoric animal bones and primitive stone tools in North Sea sediment, attracting the attention of British and Belgian scientists. A team of geologists, archaeologists, and anthropologists aboard the Belgian ship RV Belgica is now excavating a sand back on the North Sea floor measuring about 30 kilometers (19 miles) long. Vince Gaffney, an archaeologist at the University of Bradford who is leading this expedition, says that this area of the seafloor was likely once a highly habitable piece of seashore property:

Areas under the North Sea now would have been the best to live in during the Mesolithic [period] – prime real estate, because the coastlines then had fish, birds, fresh water. But it is terra incognita. The area is so large that complete cultures could be out there.

Gaffney leads a project known as Lost Frontiers which aims to uncover these hidden ancient civilizations under what is now the North Sea and Baltic Sea. According to the project’s website, “these lost lands hold a unique and largely unexplored record of settlement and colonization linked to climate change over millennia.” It turns out that glaciers once linked this area with Europe and the British Isles, but rising global temperatures caused the seas to rise, flooding what could have been home to an unknown civilization.

As with all these stories, it makes me wonder what future archaeologists will make of the flooded ruins of New Orleans, Venice, or Shanghai which may someday (perhaps soon) lie at the bottom of vast oceans. Will the few scattered remnants of our brief lives be enough for them to piece together what life was like for early transhumans? If there’s enough radioactive dust left of us, maybe.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

I was seven years old in the summer of 1988; a little kid with a big imagination in a quaint English village called Little Haywood. My house looked out over an expansive forest called Cannock Chase. I didn’t know until many years later that this was, and remains, one of the UK’s top hotspots for UFO and paranormal reports; but there was always a magic about the place, and I loved spending time there.

On the morning of August 5, 1988, a classmate of mine, a kid called Mark, was speaking excitedly and insistently in the school playground that, last night, a flying saucer had landed on his car. His father and stepmother were driving him and his older brother home from something called a Gingerbread meeting. These meetings provide a space for single parent families to get together and meet new people, and to offer support. Mark’s mother had died of cancer a year or so earlier—a powerful memory from my childhood. I hadn’t known her, and Mark was hardly a close friend of mine, but the news of his mother’s untimely death affected me deeply—the notion of mortality is a scary thing for a seven-year-old, and, being a particularly empathetic child, I felt Mark’s loss like a sickness in my belly. In any case, this was a family in a liminal state, seeking to recover from a profound tragedy.

Cannock Chase forest, Staffordshire

When Mark recounted his flying saucer story to his enraptured classmates, our responses were much as they would be for adults being told the same story by another adult—some “oohs” and “ahhs,” some giggles and some quietly exchanged glances of bemusement and mockery. I didn’t know what to think about Mark’s story, but, like a pre-pubescent Fox Mulder, I wanted to believe it. And it stayed with me, buried in the back of my mind for all the years to follow. Mark’s story implanted the mystery of the UFO deep into my psyche.

Eleven years later, in 1999, at the age of eighteen and now rather obsessed with UFOs, I revisited Mark, and his parents, to see if there really was any truth to the story I remembered so clearly from my childhood. Sitting in Mark’s living room with his father, Ron, a worker at the local power station, and his stepmother, Gina, I listened and took notes as the couple, now both in their fifties, recounted what happened on the night of August 4, 1988. It turned out that Mark and his older brother had been fast asleep at the time of the incident (unsurprising given that it occurred around midnight); Mark had simply based his embellished story on what he’d heard his parents discussing over some strong coffees the following morning.

The site of the encounter: Weetmans Bridge, on the outskirts of Cannock Chase in Staffordshire.

The story as told to me by Ron and Gina in 1999 is as follows…

The family was just minutes from home as they travelled along the edge of Cannock Chase forest. They were approaching Weetmans Bridge, a small cobbled structure built in 1888 across the River Trent. Gina, behind the wheel, had been chatting away to Ron when, in mid-sentence, she fell silent, her gaze drawn off to her right… and up. As she began to turn onto the bridge, she saw what she described to me as a large, circular metallic object, “the size of a double-decker bus,” hanging silently, halfway over the bridge and halfway over the river below. She estimated its altitude to be roughly 30 feet above the bridge. Its circumference was bejewelled with multicoloured lights, pulsing slowly, on and off. The object was partially enshrouded in a circular pool of mist, which she felt in hindsight may have been generated by the object. Gina noted a total absence of noise, not only from the UFO, but also from their car. No engine sound, no ambient noise. Nothing. This effect is characteristic of what is known in UFOlogy as “The Oz Factor,” which UFOlogist Jenney Randles has described as a “sensation of being isolated, or transported from the real world into a different environmental framework” when in close proximity to a UFO.

Meanwhile, Ron, in the passenger seat, was similarly dumbstruck. He too was seeing the UFO, but, intriguingly, not quite as Gina was seeing it. As they turned onto the bridge, Ron saw what he described to me as a pool of mist hanging above the cobbles, within which was a circular object visible only by a thin rim of red light about its circumference. No multi-coloured lights for Ron, no pulsing on and off; only a steady circular red light. Again, though, what Ron saw was approximately thirty feet above the bridge and around 30 feet in diameter (roughly the length of a bus).

Weetmans Bridge. As seen from this perspective, the UFO would have appeared toward the far end of the bridge on the right-hand side of the frame, hanging halfway over the wall and halfway over the river below. Its reported altitude above the bridge was approx. 30 feet. The witnesses entered the bridge at the far end with a right-hand turn from the left of the frame.

Ron and Gina shared an immediate feeling of panic as they felt they might hit the low-hanging object in their path. However, as their car turned onto the bridge, according to Ron, the object made a short and swift ascent, lifting vertically to perhaps twice its original altitude, before stopping dead and departing horizontally and silently towards the neighbouring village… quite literally in the blink of an eye.

It was gone, whatever it was. The whole encounter had lasted perhaps no more than sixty seconds, but its impact was deep, and lasting. Gina has been in mid-turn when the object had made it’s lightning-fast departure. She continued to drive for a few hundred feet, clearing the narrow bridge before pulling over and stopping at the side of the road. It was a quiet country lane in the dead of night. No other witnesses. The couple were in a state of shock and needed a few minutes to regain their composure. “What the fucking hell was that??” exclaimed Ron. A few minutes later, the couple had arrived home. Still deeply troubled by what they had witnessed, and with no interest in UFOlogy or knowledge of UFO reporting systems, Ron decided to phone the police.

Weetman’s Bridge.

By the following morning, somehow, the story had leaked to the local press, and a journalist and a photographer paid a visit to Ron and Gina, requesting that the couple take them to the scene of their otherworldly encounter. The couple were surprised to see the press at their door, but, wanting to make sense of their experience, they obliged their visitors and drove with them back to the site of their experience the previous night, explaining as best they could what had happened. When they arrived at Weetmans Bridge a few minutes later, they were disquieted to see that they had company. According to Ron and Gina, across the road from the bridge, perhaps fifty feet away, was an unmarked white van, close to which were two men inspecting the hedges, apparently taking samples. When the men saw that they were being observed, they left.

As Ron and Gina showed the press the site of their encounter, they noticed that sections of the otherwise-green hedges adjoining the bridge were now brown and dying, and the foliage had been “pushed back” from the road, as if by something large and heavy. Additionally, a young tree in the field next to the bridge in the object’s line of departure had apparently been “swept over” and was now almost flat to the ground (I can personally attest that the tree in question remains in its bizarre “swept-over” position to this day, and has grown considerably, almost parallel to the ground, in the thirty years since the encounter).

The power station where Ron worked, as viewed from Cannock Chase forest.

A few days later, the story appeared in the local newspaper with a picture of Ron and Gina, stood stony-faced near the bridge. The article was light-hearted and dismissive. Naturally, the couple was now the talk of the village, and the talk wasn’t pretty. They had nothing to gain by spinning a UFO yarn. They received no money for sharing their story, only ridicule. After that, Ron and Gina kept themselves to themselves. Even their son, Mark, went quiet. They had learned a hard and fast lesson about what it means to speak out as UFO witnesses.

The eighteen-year-old me sat in silence as Ron and Gina finished telling their story. It was obvious that they hadn’t spoken of it with anyone for quite some time, and, clearly, they were still in awe at what they had experienced. In the eleven years that had passed, the couple had not pursued the UFO mystery at all. They wanted to move on with their lives.

I should note at this point that my interview with Ron and Gina was part of a broader retrospective investigation I was conducting into what was known to local UFO researchers as “The Staffordshire UFO wave.” This spate of several dozen independent UFO sightings across the county of Staffordshire had occurred during the summer of 1988, peaking in July and August. Witnesses had consistently been reporting sightings of anomalous orange balls of light; more interesting, though, were the numerous accounts of large black triangles sailing silently and at low altitude through the Staffordshire skies. Many of these sightings were logged by the UK ministry of Defence (MoD)—a fact unknown publicly until the new millennium when the MoD began releasing large batches of its previously-classified UFO files. Interestingly, despite it being registered with the Staffordshire police and being featured in the local press, there is no mention of Ron and Gina’s UFO sighting in the MoD’s declassified files pertaining to the Staffordshire UFO wave of 1988. If indeed the couple’s mystery white van men had been taking samples for some government agency (and this remains pure conjecture), we can only assume that any data that may have been gathered relating to Ron and Gina’s dramatic sighting remains under lock and key to this day.

Ron and Gina’s UFO sighting was just one among dozens being reported across the Staffordshire region during the summer of 1988. Most common were large black triangles and orange orbs.

I would later learn that the couple’s sighting had been investigated a few weeks after its original reporting by representatives of BUFORA—the British UFO Research Association. I obtained their original case report, and it made for frustrating reading. Key parts of the couple’s testimonies had been overlooked or ignored by BUFORA, such as Gina’s strong insistence that the UFO appeared “metallic,” (she described it to me as “like brass”), and that that it displayed multi-colored lights around its circumference that flashed slowly and steadily on-and-off. The BUFORA report also neglected to note Ron’s description of the object’s departure, which appeared intelligent, controlled, and impossibly fast. Instead, BUFORA focused on the pool of mist the couple had described as partially enshrouding the UFO—this, they theorized, was indicative of a natural phenomenon, possibly relating to so-called “Earthlights” or something similar, thought to be generated by seismic activity or through the coalescence of other mundane phenomena in certain environments.

Whatever it was that so startled Ron and Gina on August 4, 1988 remains a mystery. The couple tried as best they could to forget it, but, for me, hearing their story (or a version of it) from their young son at the age of seven was enough to set me on a lifelong pursuit of the UFO enigma. And so, you are reading this now, a memory of a memory, for what little it may be worth, because of something I never saw on an August night in 1988, but which sparked in me the flame of cosmic wonder—such is the lure of the UFO; succumb to it at your own psychological, emotional, and financial cost. I know I did.

NOTE: All witness names in this article are pseudonyms.

{ http://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

PHOENIX LIGTHS NU BOVEN MEXICO (VIDEO)

Op 31 maart 1997 zagen duizenden mensen een vreemde formatie UFO's boven de Amerikaanse stad Phoenix in Arizona, een mysterie dat nooit is opgehelderd. 

Enkele dagen geleden heeft een dame in Mexico een livestream op Facebook wanneer daar opeens identieke lichten verschijnen zoals men die zag in Phoenix. 

Even terug in de tijd en wel naar Phoenix in 1997 toen er het volgende gebeurde:

De Phoenix Lights (de lichten boven Phoenix) waren een serie van massaal gemelde ufo's die werden gezien in het luchtruim boven Arizona, vooral Phoenix, en Nevada in de Verenigde Staten en Sonora, Mexico op 13 maart 1997. Het incident is een van de best gedocumenteerde ufomeldingen. Er werden foto's en video's van genomen, en CNN bracht er een verslag van uit. Meer dan 700 ooggetuigen beweerden dat ze driehoekige ufo's hadden gezien met vijf bolvormige lampen of eventueel lichtgevende motoren. Fife Symington, de toenmalige gouverneur van Arizona, was een van de ooggetuigen; later zou hij het object beschrijven als "niet van deze wereld" (otherworldly). 

Beelden van hoe het er toen uitzag:

 
En dan naar 12 april 2018, de dag waarop een aantal mensen objecten in de lucht zagen die heel veel lijken op de beroemde Phoenix Lights uit 1997.

Een dame, Sarah Adams, zit die avond met enkele vrienden net ten zuiden van de Amerikaanse grens in Mexico, niet ver van plaatsen zoals San Diego en Tijuana, waar heel regelmatig UFO's worden waargenomen.

Ze heeft een livestream op Facebook en daarin verschijnt er eerst één licht, dan nog één en zo door totdat er op een gegeven moment negen lichten te zien zijn.

Sarah geeft een soort commentaar op de achtergrond waarbij ze laat weten er heilig van overtuigd te zijn dat Disclosure nu gaat beginnen, dat de buitenaardsen hier zijn om ons te helpen en dat ze echt niet zullen toestaan dat er met bommen zal worden gegooid die de planeet zullen vernietigen.

Dan, dezelfde avond en iets verder naar het noorden gebeurt er iets in Carlsbad dat even ten Noorden ligt van San Diego in Californië.

Net voor negen uur 's avonds loopt Haley Higgins daar en ziet vreemde lichten boven de oceaan. Ze heeft een opname gemaakt door een verrekijker en met een iPhone. Door de korte afstand en omdat het op dezelfde avond gebeurde, is het waarschijnlijk dat dit dezelfde lichten zijn als die die ze werden gezien door Sarah.


En mocht er nog enige twijfel bestaan, dan maakt de volgende video daaraan een einde. Het is een opname gemaakt op wederom 12 april en dit keer in Rosarito, Mexico, net ten zuiden van Tijuana.

Wederom hetzelfde soort lichten en wederom geldt ook hier dat gezien de afstand en het tijdstip deze lichten dezelfde zijn als die van de twee bovenstaande waarnemingen.

Heeft Sarah gelijk en is dit een boodschap van de buitenaardsen aan ons of is het een geheime menselijke constructie die deze fascinerende lichten veroorzaakt?

4 things you need to know about NASA’s new planet-hunting satellite

by Colm Gorey

Inside NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as the SpaceX payload fairing containing TESS is moved by crane to a transporter. Image: NASA/Kim Shiflett

NASA is set to launch its latest satellite, called TESS, aboard a SpaceX rocket with one mission: locate distant worlds that could harbour alien life.

NASA has been told it has to wait until 18 April for the launch of its latest satellite – the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) – after ground crew identified that further guidance, navigation and control analysis had to be done.

Aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, the Monday (16 April) launch of TESS was aborted in the final hours as the company looked to make absolutely sure it avoids any costly catastrophe.

Coverage of the launch has garnered particular attention, but what exactly is TESS and what does it hope to achieve?

Here are four things you need to know about what could be an important scientific mission.

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1. What it aims to do

The TESS satellite aims to take on board what has been achieved by the exoplanet-hunting spacecraft Kepler and improve it exponentially by directly searching for alien worlds in greater detail.

After all, Kepler was limited by the hardware on board, meaning it could only observe a small fraction of what was out there, with many of the stars too faint to detect the surrounding planets with great accuracy.

The spacecraft will spend the next two years observing 200,000 of the brightest points in the night’s sky, with the NASA team hopeful that by the time the mission is over, it will have found 20,000 exoplanets, of which 500 might be Earth-sized.

2. NASA hitches ride aboard SpaceX in major first

SpaceX will feel vindicated following a recent investigation finding it devoid of blame in the loss of the secret Zuma satellite in January, but NASA scientists will still be feeling slightly anxious with the launch of TESS.

In a major landmark for the space agency, this is the first of its missions to be launched by a SpaceX rocket.

The $200m piece of hardware was given the go-ahead to launch aboard the Falcon 9 rocket by NASA’s administrators only as recently as February.

Adding to the anxiety will be the fact that TESS will be put into an orbit never attempted before, out as far as the moon and back to Earth, lasting 14 days at a time.

NASA’s newest planet hunter, TESS, will look around the brightest stars closest to our solar system for new worlds. Image: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

3. Astronomers dying to get their hands on the data

Once the planets are identified, the world’s astronomers can adjust all of their equipment – including the long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope – and analyse the planets in great detail to determine whether they could harbour life.

When active, TESS will collect 27GB of scientific data every day before being put through NASA’s specialist algorithms, which are designed to clean up the signal to remove any background interference.

Stephen Rinehart, TESS’s project scientist, said of the mission: “There are some people on the mission who are very, very, very keen to find Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of their host stars, and that would be absolutely fabulous.

“But the data on all these planets is interesting, because they help us form a picture of how planetary systems form and evolve. It’s going to be a game-changer in our ability to study planets.”

4. A one-two punch of satellite discovery

The launch of TESS will be immediately beneficial to scientists down here on Earth, but the satellite will also lay the groundwork for future missions, most notably the European Space Agency’s Atmospheric Remote-sensing Infrared Exoplanet Large-survey (ARIEL) spacecraft.

Set for launch in 2028, ARIEL – with the location of thousands of exoplanets discovered by TESS – will be able to ‘sniff’ their atmospheres to determine their chemical composition and answer the question: how do planetary systems form and evolve?

During its four-year mission, ARIEL will observe 1,000 planets, ranging from Jupiter and Neptune down to super-Earth size, in the visible and the infrared with its metre-class telescope.

All of these factors should lead to a bounty of information returned to Earth, dependent on whether SpaceX can get the craft to its intended orbit.

{ https://www.siliconrepublic.com/ }

{ https://sputniknews.com/ }

Have The Ancient Ruins Of Atlantis Been Found In Antarctica?

I mean who doesn’t want to find Atlantis, right?

According to satellite images on Google Earth, there is a strange area in Antarctica which supposedly reveals a structure that, according to some theorists, could belong to lost ancient civilization, and not just any lost civilization, but Plato’s Atlantis.

As expected, the video detailing the possible ‘discovery’ was posted by the Conspiracy Depot channel, and it shows a series of lines that according to the video’s narrator, appear to have an artificial origin and have been exposed due to the melting of the ice in the region.

“The three parts of this structure are separated by equal distances and all are approximately seven meters long,” says Graham Maple, owner of the YouTube channel.

“It looks ancient, almost as if it had been carved into the rock itself. I think this was what was left of a building or structure. I think there were great civilizations in the ancient Antarctic continent and maybe Antarctica was even home to the mythical Atlantis, “he said.

2There is much-forgotten knowledge of our ancient history. We are beginning to scratch the surface with this new discovery,” concluded Maple.

According to Mapple, Atlantis, or the ruins of another ancient empire, are buried somewhere beneath the Antarctic ice.

Image Credit: Google Earth.

Coordinates: 64 ° 2’40.87 “S 59 ° 46’13.97” W (the discovery was made in the north of the Antarctic Peninsula).

So are these the Atlantean ruins that have eluded discovery for centuries?

If we read what Plato wrote about the mythical city/continent than no.

The Story of Atlantis

In Timaeus and Critias, written around 360 BC Plato described—through the voice of Critias—how Solon, a highly respected and well known Greek Statement traveled to Sais and met with priests from the goddess Neith.

It is there where an extremely old priest tells Solon about an empire that existed 9,000 years before him, which was at war with Athens.

Eventually, this empire identified as ‘Atlantis’ was destroyed by a great catastrophe.

Sonchis explained that Atlantis’ capital city was elaborately constructed, where great temples and palaces were erected, adorned by exotic gardens made of silver, gold and, ivory. Sonchis further described the capital of the Atlantean empire as being made of massive walls, which in turn were surrounded by circular islands protecting the inner citadel of the metropolis.

And according to Plato, Atlantis was located “beyond the Pillars of Hercules“. While Antarctica is beyond the pillars, it isn’t anywhere near where Plato said the mighty Atlantean empire disappeared.

However, as noted by experts, Antarctica wasn’t always the frozen continent and was certainly not always located where it today (geographically).

While this may not be Atlantis, it certainly is interesting to see what future explorations of the frozen continent will yield, and whether or not it’s possible that in the distant past, perhaps even before written history, great civilizations ruled the earth.

Featured image credit by Julian-Faylona Posted with Permission

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The Stone Circles Of Senegambia, The Largest Group Of Megalithic Complexes On Earth

If the largest concentration of dolmens on the planet is found on the Korean peninsula, the largest group of megalithic complexes corresponds to the central area of Senegal bordering the north of Gambia.

Surprised?

So was I!

But this just shows off the huge number of ancient sites that exist on Earth, which most people have no idea of.

In an area of 30,000 square kilometers between the two countries north of Janjanbureh (former Georgetown) we find the megalithic structures of a lost civilization.

These massive monuments are sometimes divided into the Wassu (Gambian) and Sine-Saloum (Senegalese) circles, but this is purely a national division from modern times.

Wassu Stone Circles.

Image Credit: CC BY-SA 2.0

The megalithic structures found in Senegal and Gambia are usually divided into four large sites: Sine Ngayene and Wanar in Senegal, and Wassu and Kerbatch in the Central River Region in Gambia.

The monuments itself are a mystery.

So far, experts have not been able to date them, but it is mostly accepted that the megalithic structures were erected between the third century B.C. and the sixteenth century AD.

The megalithic stone circles of Senegambia are home to around 29,000 stones, 17,000 monuments, and 2,000 individual sites.

Archaeologists Todd and Ozanne first studied the monuments in 1903.

Wassu stone circles.

Image Credit: CC BY-SA 2.0 Wikimedia Commons.

The structures were declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2006.

Todd, together with Wolbach, carried out excavations on the monuments in 1911 and determined that their construction could not be attributed to the cultures that occupied the territories at that time.

Experts note that the construction of the Senegambian stone monuments is evidence of a prosperous and well-organized culture.

This conclusion was reached after experts calculated the amount of labor which was required to build such structures.

Wassu Stone Circles.

Image Credit: CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikimedia Commons.

The stones are believed to have been extracted from laterite quarries with the help of iron tools, although archaeologists have identified few of the quarries which are directly linked to particular sites.

How the ancient builders transported the massive blocks of stones from their quarry to their construction site remains an enigma.

Who these ancient people were is also a mystery.

Some archaeologists believe that the Serer people are the builders of the massive structures.

This theory comes from the fact that the Serer still use funerary houses like those found at Wanar.

Stone Circles of Senegambia.

Image Credit: CC BY 2.0 Wikimedia Commons.

The Serer people are the third largest ethnic group in Senegal making up 15% of the Senegalese population.

Burial mounds with human remains, ceramics, and other objects have been found around the monuments, although the relationship of these tombs with the stone circles is not very clear.

Some theories suggest that the builders of the structures were farmers, since most the circles are located close to rivers, but experts have discovered spears in some of the tombs, which seems to indicate that they were also hunters.

Most experts seem to agree that it is not known exactly if the tombs are prior to the circles, whether they are contemporary to the structures or if they were built later.

According to local legends, the circles would have been built around the tombs of the kings of the ancient empire of Ghana.

Circles of stone Wassu Gambia.

Image Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0 Wikimedia Commons.

The largest monolith is located in Wassu, Gambia, and it has a height of 2.59 meters and is part of a circle that includes another 10 stones.

However, the area that hosts the largest number of circles is Sine Ngayene, in Senegal, with 52 circles, one of them featuring double stone circles, and has a total of1102 stones.

Archaeological excavations carried out in 2002 concluded that some tombs clearly predate the megaliths.

So, in all the mystery that engulfs these megalithic structures, we do know one thing: the area hosts the largest group of megalithic complexes in the world, as we haven’t found so many megaliths in any other part of the world.

Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons.

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Inner Earth Civilizations? Unraveling The Mystery Behind Our Planet’s Massive Inner Ocean

One of my all-time favorite books is without a doubt Journey to the Center of the Earth, written by world-famous Author Jules Verne.

The story written by Verne involves a German professor called Otto Lidenbrock who was convinced that there are volcanic tubes that lead toward the center of our planet.

Lidenbrock, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans descend into the Icelandic volcano Snæfellsjökull and encounter many adventures along the way, including prehistoric animals and dangers. Eventually, they resurface in southern Italy, at the Stromboli volcano.

In the book, Verne describes a MASSIVE ocean that exists inside our planet.

He explains how: a vast expanse of water, the beginning of a lake or an ocean, extended beyond the limits of sight.

Further, the view followed its mass outlined on the misty background of the horizon. It was a true ocean, capriciously contoured by the terrestrial shores, but deserted and with a terribly wild aspect.

The book was a science fiction bestseller, and despite many people believing that something like this may be possible, the idea remained firmly a science fictional idea.

Now, what if what was once thought to be a mere fantasy of the writer, was, in fact, closer to reality?

Image Credit: Shutterstock.

Is it even possible that there really is an underground ocean beneath or feet?

An article published in the journal Nature points in that direction.

As it turns out, scientists discovered a while ago, a diamond-rich in water with traces of a mineral called ringwoodite (in honor of its discoverer, the geochemist Alfred Ringwood).

The diamond originally came from an area that separates the upper terrestrial mantle from the lower one, that is, between four and six hundred kilometers beneath our feet.

So, what does that has to do with Verne, Inner Earth, and an ocean beneath our feet?

The fact is that the diamond found was associated with water molecules in a significant proportion (1.5%), which leads experts to propose the theory that this zone of transition of the mantle is very rich in water.

In fact, scientists have proposed that there is so much water beneath the surface of our planet, that we can cover the surface of our planet entirely in water. The existence of this ‘underground ocean’ would explain the great volcanic and tectonic dynamism of the planet.

Graham Pearson, a researcher from the University of Alberta (Canada) says that the ringwoodite found “provides confirmation that there really are pockets of water in the depths of the Earth.”

That, however, is a theoretical confirmation, of course, since due to lack of equipment and technology it would be impossible to obtain physical evidence from the mantle directly.

That kinda’ sucks since, despite the fact that humans have made it to space, landed on the moon and explored distant alien worlds, we’ve still not explored what exactly lies beneath our ocean, and what mysteries may be hidden beneath the surface of our planet.

Alfred Ringwood proposed that the mineral that bears his name could be found in the transition zone of the mantle, originated by the high pressures and temperatures that are found beneath deep beneath the surface.

But if we can’t go down there, how did scientists find the diamond?

Experts believe that the diamond surfaced in a volcanic eruption in a kimberlite wash (an igneous rock formed from magma and that is the deepest).

It was only three millimeters wide and lacked commercial value, but it was sold to scientists who were looking for other types of rocks, and who came up with something that was priceless: inside the diamond, there was a microscopic trail of ringwoodite.

But not everyone is convinced that a massive underground ocean exists and not all scientists believe that the result of the diamond analysis should be extrapolated to the theory of a massive underwater ocean based on such a small sample of ringwoodite.

Moreover, some scientists even admit that even if there is an ocean beneath our feet, it would not be in liquid form but under a molecular variant called hydroxyl, with only one atom of oxygen and another of hydrogen instead of the two.

David Wilcock and Earth’s Inner Civilizations

In 2015, an article appeared on Coast To Coast AM, where author and researcher David Wilcock discusses Earth’s Inner Civilizations.

Wilcock told C2C that an alliance of ancient civilizationscurrently resides inside the Earth, and they may soon reveal themselves to the ‘outer’ world.

During the formation of all watery planets in the universe, he explained, hollow cavities form below the surface of the crust and have their own biome that features bacteria which gives off natural light.

“What this means is that you can actually live inside caverns in the Earth that have visible light,” he marveled.

Based on his research, Wilcock said, “it appears that these cavities are used so that more advanced civilizations have a place they can live while they’re managing what takes place on the surface.”

Over the span of the planet’s history, he explained, various advanced societies, such as the Atlanteans, took refuge underground in order to survive tumultuous times and ultimately settled in their new subterranean location.

While the presence of these civilizations has been a part of UFO lore for decades, he contended that the government has direct knowledge of their presence due to accidentally discovering them via clandestine projects aimed at building secret underground bases.

“They’ll have these tunnel boring machines and sometimes they break through into someplace they’re not supposed to go,” Wilcock claimed, “and there’s already people there.”

For the full interview with David Wilcock click here.

Featured image by Leon Tukker. Image Posted with permission.

{ https://www.ancient-code.com/ }

Lasers squeezed iron to mimic the conditions of exoplanet cores

The experiment offers a hint of how the material behaves deep inside faraway worlds

BY LISA GROSSMAN 

UNDER PRESSURE  Using lasers, scientists compressed iron to high pressures that are likely found in large, rocky exoplanets’ cores. Here, an image of inside the laser chamber is shown with an artist’s rendering of an exoplanet. 

MARK MEAMBER/NIF

Physicists have simulated the cores of some large rocky exoplanets by pummeling iron with lasers. The resulting measurements give the first clue to how iron might behave inside planets outside the solar system that are several times the mass of Earth, researchers report April 16 in Nature Astronomy.

“Until now, there’s been no data available on the state of these materials at the center of large exoplanets,” says Ray Smith, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Working at the National Ignition Facility, Smith and his colleagues aimed 176 lasers at a pellet of iron a few micrometers thick wrapped in a gold cylinder. The lasers delivered enough energy over 30 billionths of a second to compress the iron to pressures up to 14 million times Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level. The researchers measured how the iron’s density changed at different pressures.

These high pressures are thought to be found in the iron cores of rocky exoplanets that are between three and four times Earth’s mass, Smith says. Although our solar system doesn’t have any planets of this size, they are the most common type of exoplanet in the galaxy. Previous simulations suggest that some of these rocky worlds may have interior compositions similar to Earth’s.

That similarity raises hopes that the exoplanets may have features that make the worlds hospitable to life, such as a magnetic field or plate tectonics (SN: 4/30/16, p. 36). NASA’s latest exoplanet-hunting telescope called TESS, scheduled to launch the evening of April 16, is expected to find hundreds of planets in this size range (SN Online: 4/12/18).

But the details of exoplanet interiors are hard to tease out. Until now, researchers had to extrapolate iron’s behavior at high pressures from measurements made at low pressures, which introduced uncertainties. With the new measurements, scientists can be more confident that their simulations reflect actual planets.

Previously, Smith and colleagues had made some headway by compressing diamond to even greater pressures (SN: 8/9/14, p. 20). Diamond is easy to compress but is not likely found deep inside rocky exoplanets.

“This is one of the first mineral physics experiments that is going to be much more applicable to every planet,” says exogeologist Cayman Unterborn of Arizona State University in Tempe. “That’s going to be really important once we start characterizing exoplanets with all of these new missions.”

Citations

• R.F. Smith. Equation of state of iron under core conditions of large rocky exoplanets. Nature Astronomy. Published online April 16, 2018. doi:10.1038/s41550-018-0437-9.

Further Reading

• L. Grossman. With the launch of TESS, NASA will boost its search for exoplanets. Science News Online, April 12, 2018.
• L. Hamers. Some TRAPPIST-1 planets may be water worlds. Science News Online, March 19, 2018.
• T. Sumner. How alien can a planet be and still support life? Science News. Vol. 189, April 30, 2016, p. 36.
• T. Sumner. Exoplanets need right stuff to be habitable. Science News. Vol. 189, January 23, 2016, p. 8.
• T. Sumner. Diamonds under pressure impersonate exoplanet cores. Science News. Vol. 186, August 9, 2014, p. 20.

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

Disques protoplanétaires : une étonnante diversité dans le cosmos

Laurent Sacco

Journaliste

L'instrument Sphere du VLT permet aux astronomes de former des images directes d'exoplanètes et de disques protoplanétaires, similaires à celui où sont nées les planètes du Système solaire. Ces disques apparaissent maintenant avec un zoo de formes et de tailles, plus diverses que l'on ne l'imaginait.

André Brahic aimait souligner que l'exploration du Système solaire à laquelle il avait participé avec les missions Voyager puis avec celle de Cassini avaient montré sa grande diversité. Les surprises étaient au rendez-vous et cela n'a pas changé quand ce fut le tour de la rencontre entre Pluton, son satellite Charon et la sonde de la mission New Horizons.

Les astrophysiciens du XXI^e siècle sont devenus plus ambitieux puisqu'ils explorent désormais le monde des exoplanètes et qu'ils multiplient les observations des disques protoplanétaires autour des jeunes étoiles. Ils espèrent mieux comprendre encore la cosmogonie des planètes du Système solaire et mieux contraindre les théories modernes, héritières de celle proposée par Kant et Laplace, pour expliquer la naissance de ces astres avec la formation de ce type de disque de matière.

Ils ont développé l'instrument Sphere (Spectro Polarimetric High contrast Exoplanet REsearch) qui équipe le Very Large Telescope (VLT) de l'ESO au Chili depuis 2014. Il permet de faire de l'imagerie directe des exoplanètes mais aussi des disques protoplanétaires, malgré le rayonnement bien plus intense de leurs étoiles hôtes, dans une certaine mesure tout au moins.

Sphere a permis aux chercheurs de mener une campagne d'observation baptisée DARTTS-S (Disques Autour des Etoiles T-Tauri avec Sphere) concernant des étoiles de type T-Tauri à des distances de 230 à 550 années-lumière du Soleil. Ces étoiles, moins de trois fois plus massives que le Soleil, ne sont pourtant pas encore sur la séquence principale, car ce sont en fait de jeunes protoétoiles dont les âges sont inférieurs à 10 millions d'années.

Les étoiles T-Tauri, un laboratoire d'étude de la naissance des planètes

Elles sont entourées d'un disque protoplanétaire et sont particulièrement lumineuses car même pour une masse équivalente à celle du Soleil, elles ont un rayon plus grand et donc une surface d'émission de la lumière plus importante. Elles sont encore en contraction gravitationnelle de sorte qu'elles ne tirent pas leur énergie de la fusion thermonucléaire de l'hydrogène (bien que peut-être, parfois, en partie de celle du lithium), mais bien du mécanisme de Kelvin-Helmoltz.

On considère que les étoiles T-Tauri sont de bons laboratoires pour observer en direct l'équivalent de la naissance du Système solaire et ses étapes, alors que les planètes se formaient dans son disque protoplanétaire.

L’instrument Sphere installé sur le Very Large Telescope de l’ESO révèle les disques de poussière autour de jeunes étoiles proches. Tous arborent des formes, des dimensions ainsi que des structures différentes, et témoignent des probables effets des processus de formation planétaire.

© ESO/H. Avenhaus et al./E. Sissa et al./DARTT-S and SHINE collaborations 

DARTTS-S vient de faire l'objet de deux publications sur arXiv et de nouveau les astronomes sont surpris par la diversité découverte, comme le montre en images, un véritable zoo de disques qui diffèrent nettement les uns des autres en termes de dimensions et de formes. Certains sont composés d'anneaux brillants alors que d'autres exhibent des anneaux sombres.

Les astrophysiciens sont particulièrement intéressés par le cas de l'étoile GSC 07396-00759, une naine rouge de type M qui fait partie d'un système triple car elle orbite autour d'une étoile double formée de deux astres de type T-Tauri : V4046 Sagittarii. Ces deux étoiles sont nées ensemble et curieusement, elles ne sont pas entourées d'un même disque protoplanétaire, alors qu'ils devraient avoir évolué en parallèle et avec un matériau similaire. Là encore, il y a une diversité à comprendre pour progresser dans notre quête des origines, du Big Bang au vivant, et de notre place dans l'univers observable avec peut-être de la vie ailleurs.

• Le cosmos est un laboratoire naturel faisant varier les conditions de multiples « expériences », comme celle menant à la naissance des planètes dans des disques protoplanétaires autour d'étoiles de type T-Tauri.
• Plusieurs de ces disques ont été imagés directement par l'instrument Sphere du VLT de l'ESO. Ils sont apparus d'une surprenante diversité, ce qui va alimenter la théorie de la formation planétaire, y compris quand elle est appliquée pour comprendre la formation du Système solaire.

{ https://www.futura-sciences.com/sciences/ }

Project 1794 And The Flying Saucers They Were Supposed NOT To Be Working On?

The US was working on Flying Saucers regards of what they said publicly and it looks like they were taking it very, very seriously! So yeah when the US government says one thing we should take it with a pinch of salt especially with regards to UFOs and the existence of Aliens? If your caught lying about it once then how do we know they're not pulling the same stunt again? Well we don't and all we have to go off is past behaviours and they've lied once so...

I mean just look at this image marked " SECRET" and you tell me if they took it seriously or not?

Officially, aliens have never existed but flying saucers very nearly did. The National Archives has recently published never-before-seen schematics and details of a 1950s military venture, called Project 1794, which aimed to build a supersonic flying saucer.

The newly declassified materials show the U.S. Air Force had a contract with a now-defunct Canadian company to build an aircraft unlike anything seen before. Project 1794 got as far as the initial rounds of product development and into prototype design. In a memo dating from 1956 the results from pre-prototype testing are summarised and reveal exactly what the developers had hoped to create. The saucer was supposed to reach a top speed of “between Mach 3 and Mach 4, a ceiling of over 100,000 ft. and a maximum range with allowances of about 1,000 nautical miles,” according to the document. If the plans had followed through to completion they would have created a saucer, which could spin through the Earth’s stratosphere at an average top speed of about 2,600 miles per hour.

Wow. It was also designed to take off and land vertically (VTOL), using propulsion jets to control and stabilise the aircraft. Admittedly the range of 1,000 nautical miles seems limited in comparison to the other specifications but if you’d hopped on the disk in New York it could’ve had you in Miami within about 24 minutes. The document also hints that the product development seemed to be going better than planned; “the present design will provide a much superior performance to that estimated at the start of contract negotiations.”

It begs the question – why was the project dropped? Why aren’t wars being fought with flying saucers? The cost of continuing to prototype was estimated at $3,168,000, which roughly translates to about $26.6 million in today’s money and wouldn’t have been an insane price for such advanced technology. The problem with the other flying saucers developed under the same program (see video) is pretty clear. They didn’t get anywhere near 100,000 feet in altitude, more like five or six if you were lucky – so the military finally pulled the plug in 1960.

That's the introduction and there's loads more to come, we suggest you check all this out guys?

{ https://www.ufosightingsfootage.uk/ }

Did Another Civilization Exist On Earth Before Humans? Scientists Investigate

These civilizations would have existed many millions of years ago on Earth, to be precise nearly 60 million years ago. Now, scientists ask whether there’d be evidence of such civilizations existing on Earth. 

If you take a look at the long history of our planet, you’ll see that nearly sixty million years ago, our planet experienced temperatures far warmer than today, and the planet’s poles melted.

This historical fact has led some scientists to venture out into the unknown and ponder whether it is possible that this event—the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)—is the result of global warming caused by a now existing civilization which existed on Earth before mankind.

And while this may sound as something that scientists wouldn’t really investigate, since, as Rob Waugh, Metro’s writer puts it: “It sounds like the kind of crackpot conspiracy to be found on ‘ancient alien’ UFO sites,” scientists have in fact ventured out of their ‘comfort zone’ and asked a question they’ve refrained from asking for decades.

In an article by the Atlantic, Adam Frank, a scientist from the University of Rochester asked what many other experts have refrained from asking.

Professor Frank writes: “There is a conundrum here. If an earlier species’ industrial activity is short-lived, we might not be able to easily see it. The PETM’s spikes mostly show us the Earth’s timescales for responding to whatever caused it, not necessarily the timescale of the cause.”

“So, it might take both dedicated and novel detection methods to find evidence of a truly short-lived event in ancient sediments. In other words, if you’re not explicitly looking for it, you might not see it.”

This isn’t just another conspiracy theory cooked up by a scientist.

Professor Frank wondered about what our civilization could leave behind if it perishes one day, and what other potential civilizations may find on Earth. Will they identify our civilization by the plastics we’ve dumped in the ocean? Will they find us because of the chemicals we’ve been using? Or will they find evidence of an ancient civilization on Earth prior to them because we’ve been using fossil fuels?

Professor Frank clarifies that while there is no evidence of an ancient advanced civilization existing on Earth before us, the idea brings up a number of possibilities regarding the cycle of life and how it may operate on other, distant alien worlds.

Professor Frank explains in the article that civilizations may inadvertently—through their collapse—create the necessary conditions to produce more fossil fuels, for future, distant civilization to use.

“Our work also opened up the speculative possibility that some planets might have fossil-fuel-driven cycles of civilization building and collapse. If a civilization uses fossil fuels, the climate change they trigger can lead to a large decrease in ocean oxygen levels.”

“These low oxygen levels (called ocean anoxia) help trigger the conditions needed for making fossil fuels like oil and coal in the first place. In this way, a civilization and its demise might sow the seed for new civilizations in the future.

By asking about civilizations lost in deep time, we’re also asking about the possibility for universal rules guiding the evolution of all biospheres in all their creative potential, including the emergence of civilizations. Even without pickup-driving Paleocenians, we’re only now learning to see how rich that potential might be.”

And as Waugh writes for Metro, here’s a crackpot conspiracy video for you to enjoy: (I wonder why Waugh writes so many conspiracy-related articles? Maybe he likes the crackpot conspiracy to be found on ‘ancient alien’ UFO sites, or maybe he just loves writing for popular sites like Metro, who not only post ridiculous articles but are apparently happy making revenue off of ‘Conspiracy’.

Source: Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans? A look at the available evidence

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Comment la France s’apprête à imposer le pistage des drones de plus de 800 grammes

Crédits : VictorBernard/iStock/ThinkStock

    

Par Xavier Berne 

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