Internet Debris
A collection by Neal McKenna
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A collection by Neal McKenna
McKenna Ink Thesis Editing Service
To add your comments,
click here.
NOTHING posted here is mine!
Internet Debris does not claim rights
to any of the photos or media content posted to the site.
No copyright infringement is intended.
WHAT'S TAKING E.T. SO LONG TO FIND US?
By Irene Klotz
E.T. would have had plenty of time to reach us by now. ...Or are we just being ignored?
WHAT'S TAKING E.T. SO LONG TO FIND US?
By Irene Klotz
E.T. would have had plenty of time to reach us by now. ...Or are we just being ignored?
Mathematically speaking, ET would have found us by now - if he exists - so we’re being consciously avoided for some reason, a new study concludes.
“We’re either alone, or they’re out there and are leaving us alone,” mathematician Thomas Hair, with Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, told Discovery News.
Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second.
“We’re either alone, or they’re out there and are leaving us alone,” mathematician Thomas Hair, with Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers, told Discovery News.
PHOTOS: Top Ten Places
to Find Alien Life
Hair, who presented his research at the Mathematical Association of America in Boston earlier this month, based his approximation of what he considered to be extremely conservative estimates for how long it would take a society to muster up the resources and technological know-how to leave its home world and travel to another star. Even at the relatively sedate pace of 1 percent of light-speed, the aliens would arrive at their nearest neighbor star in about 500 years.Light travels at about 186,000 miles per second.
"They've either passed us by, or they stay around their home star systems and contemplate their navels," Hair said.
There could be several reasons why we’re not listed in intergalactic Yelp. Perhaps most important is that we don't have anything aliens need.
“Any ancient civilization is probably not biological. They don’t need a place like Earth. They don’t need to come here and steal our water. There’s plenty of it out in the outer solar system where the gravity is not so great and they can just take all they want,” Hair said.
Or perhaps modern-day extraterrestrials are following routes laid out long ago, all of which bypass Earth, he added.
Whatever the reason we're being ignored, there is no chance ET, if he exists, does not know we are here, Hair said, pointing to telescopes, such as NASA's Kepler observatory, which can detect planets around other stars.
If humans living on a planet that is roughly 5 billion years old have technology like Kepler, an alien civilization with another 10 million years of experience under its belt would have advanced much further, Hair maintains.
“I’m sure they’d be able to detect if this planet had life on it. Just the CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) in our atmosphere would give us away,” he said.
NEWS: NASA Refutes Alien Discovery Claim
CFCs are compounds typically found in refrigerants and aerosol products that release chlorine atoms when exposed to ultraviolet light and erode Earth's ozone layer.University of Minnesota physicist Woods Halley, who just published a book about the prospects of extraterrestrial life, says we don’t know enough about how life got started on Earth to be able to recognize alien life, even if it were staring us in the face.
"I think there are three options," Halley told Discovery News. "Life is rare, which I think has a reasonable probability of being correct. Life is weird - every time you run into it, it's extremely different from the last time you saw it. Life is dull, meaning you will find something that looks a lot like life on Earth and our problems (in detecting life) are technical.
"I've come to the view that they’re all possible, but the preponderance of evidence most likely fits the first - we are rare,” Halley said.
Text and images via Discovery News
Be sure to look at the readers' comments!
Spoooky Reading
Photo via NASA
NASA scientists have found the crash site, pictured above, of a spacecraft set into orbit during the early 60s. This one–thankfully–is not crawling with Decepticons. They believe it is the missing Lunar Orbiter 2 which disappeared back in 1967 during a passage over the far side of the moon, when the craft went out of telescope and radio range.
Lunar Orbit 2′s primary function was documenting areas of the moon that would be most hospitable to the Apollo and Surveyor missions. During its run, it returned a total of 609 high resolution images and 208 medium-sized frames. This includes the Copernicus crater (pictured below) which is considered by many to be the Picture of the Century.
The wreckage is thought to have been located by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) which is currently mapping the lunar surface in unprecedented detail. During its mission so far, the spacecraft has gathered more than 192 terabytes of data; that’s nearly 41,000 DVDs worth of data, images and maps! One of its key findings is our solar system’s coldest spot: a crater near the moon’s north pole was recorded at minus 415 degrees Fahrenheit. Brrr!
Some of the images LRO has captured can be seen below, but you can also find more here.
The ancient Mesopotamians predicted Nibiru? Don't bet on it.
NASA
Lunar Orbit 2′s primary function was documenting areas of the moon that would be most hospitable to the Apollo and Surveyor missions. During its run, it returned a total of 609 high resolution images and 208 medium-sized frames. This includes the Copernicus crater (pictured below) which is considered by many to be the Picture of the Century.
Photo via NASA
While the spacecraft was intentionally downed on October 11, 1967, scientists had yet to find the crash site until now.The wreckage is thought to have been located by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) which is currently mapping the lunar surface in unprecedented detail. During its mission so far, the spacecraft has gathered more than 192 terabytes of data; that’s nearly 41,000 DVDs worth of data, images and maps! One of its key findings is our solar system’s coldest spot: a crater near the moon’s north pole was recorded at minus 415 degrees Fahrenheit. Brrr!
Some of the images LRO has captured can be seen below, but you can also find more here.
Photo via NASA
Photo via NASA Follow Stone @jerryjamesstone or friend him on Facebook.
Text and images via Curiosity.com
NIBIRU - Armageddon planet - or aStronomical baloney?
NASA astronomer David Morrison gives his take.
Conspiracy theorists are convinced a rogue planet is bound to doom Earth in 2012.
The ancient Mesopotamians predicted Nibiru? Don't bet on it. NASA
The scoop:
Conspiracy theorists are convinced a rogue planet will destroy the Earth in 2012, and just as we are about to see the release of a Hollywood movie on the topic, the hype is set to increase. David Morrison, a NASA astrobiologist and expert scientist for NASA's Ask an Astrobiologist website, calls for a reality check and in 2008 he contributed this article to Discovery News.
Unbeknownst to most of us, a small but vocal group of conspiracy theorists is convinced that a rogue planet is about to enter the inner solar system and doom the Earth.
They say this threatening planet on a 3600-year orbit was discovered by the ancient Mesopotamians, who named it Nibiru, and it was known also to the Mayans, who associated it with the end of their calendar "long count" in December 2012. In Web sites, blogs, and radio talk shows, they insist that NASA is tracking Nibiru - but that this information is being kept from the public as part of a worldwide conspiracy.
They say the official silence can't be maintained for much longer, however, because by 2009 Nibiru will be visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere. They also say Earth's axis is already tilting and the length of the day is changing under its influence. As one believer recently wrote to me, "Why are you lying. It's coming, and everyone knows it."
I began to receive questions about this bizarre story in December 2007 through NASA's "Ask an Astrobiologist" site. Normally I receive up to a dozen questions per week from the public, dealing mostly with life in the universe -- but in the past 6 months the Nibiru traffic alone has grown to 20-25 messages a week, ranging from the anguished "I can't sleep," "I am really scared" or "I don't want to die" to the abusive "you are putting my family at risk" and "if NASA denies it then it must be true."
As a scientist, I'm both fascinated and astonished by the deluge of questions from people who are genuinely frightened and, apparently, unable to distinguish astronomical fact from fiction. They're watching YouTube videosand visiting slick Web sites with nothing in their skeptical toolkit, or to quote Carl Sagan no "baloney detector." Now a blockbuster disaster film called "2012" is set for release in the summer of 2009, and the commercial enterprise is clearly trying to cash in on people's concern (perhaps contributing to their fear as well).
My guess is that only a tiny fraction of people truly believe Armageddon is coming in December 2012. But their uncritical acceptance of this story worries me as a warning of the dangers of our current scientific illiteracy.
We're facing monumental problems with global warming and loss of habitat, yet a substantial minority of Americans thinks the world was formed less than 10,000 years ago and deny that evolution is possible. Many Americans seem to prefer coal-fired generators to nuclear power plants without realizing the toll in public health that coal imposes. Billions are spent, including tax-payer dollars, for so-called alternative medicine with no scientific evidence for its efficacy. And legislators often resist efforts to collect the data that could actually demonstrate which government programs are effective and which ones don't work as intended.
In spite of my frustrations, I can always hope that Nibiru will turn into a teaching moment. Its proponents are convinced that it will be visible to the unaided eye this coming spring, and its effects on the rotation and orbit of the Earth will be obvious by summer (just in time for the release of the film "2012"). When none of this happens, I hope they'll realize that they need better tools to distinguish fact from fiction.
They say this threatening planet on a 3600-year orbit was discovered by the ancient Mesopotamians, who named it Nibiru, and it was known also to the Mayans, who associated it with the end of their calendar "long count" in December 2012. In Web sites, blogs, and radio talk shows, they insist that NASA is tracking Nibiru - but that this information is being kept from the public as part of a worldwide conspiracy.
They say the official silence can't be maintained for much longer, however, because by 2009 Nibiru will be visible to the naked eye from the southern hemisphere. They also say Earth's axis is already tilting and the length of the day is changing under its influence. As one believer recently wrote to me, "Why are you lying. It's coming, and everyone knows it."
I began to receive questions about this bizarre story in December 2007 through NASA's "Ask an Astrobiologist" site. Normally I receive up to a dozen questions per week from the public, dealing mostly with life in the universe -- but in the past 6 months the Nibiru traffic alone has grown to 20-25 messages a week, ranging from the anguished "I can't sleep," "I am really scared" or "I don't want to die" to the abusive "you are putting my family at risk" and "if NASA denies it then it must be true."
As a scientist, I'm both fascinated and astonished by the deluge of questions from people who are genuinely frightened and, apparently, unable to distinguish astronomical fact from fiction. They're watching YouTube videosand visiting slick Web sites with nothing in their skeptical toolkit, or to quote Carl Sagan no "baloney detector." Now a blockbuster disaster film called "2012" is set for release in the summer of 2009, and the commercial enterprise is clearly trying to cash in on people's concern (perhaps contributing to their fear as well).
My guess is that only a tiny fraction of people truly believe Armageddon is coming in December 2012. But their uncritical acceptance of this story worries me as a warning of the dangers of our current scientific illiteracy.
We're facing monumental problems with global warming and loss of habitat, yet a substantial minority of Americans thinks the world was formed less than 10,000 years ago and deny that evolution is possible. Many Americans seem to prefer coal-fired generators to nuclear power plants without realizing the toll in public health that coal imposes. Billions are spent, including tax-payer dollars, for so-called alternative medicine with no scientific evidence for its efficacy. And legislators often resist efforts to collect the data that could actually demonstrate which government programs are effective and which ones don't work as intended.
In spite of my frustrations, I can always hope that Nibiru will turn into a teaching moment. Its proponents are convinced that it will be visible to the unaided eye this coming spring, and its effects on the rotation and orbit of the Earth will be obvious by summer (just in time for the release of the film "2012"). When none of this happens, I hope they'll realize that they need better tools to distinguish fact from fiction.
Text and image via Discovery.com
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