The Bubble

The crew got ready to enter the craft, once the craft was closed they would not be in contact with the outside universe for over 4 years from their perspective but to the rest of the universe it would be over 80 years. The entire interior of the craft was in a field that will be generated a series of frames that reflected light around while being spun at high speeds. Most of the frames were in the what to the rest of the universe would call the back but to the occupants would call the bottom. It was discovered thru relativity that there was no difference between rather a light was moving fast around a strong gravitational field, or light spinning fast enough to generate a gravitational field, so the spinning light beams would create gravity and slow down time inside the craft so it would slow down the flow of time inside so the crew would age much slower but time flowed the same rate outside the craft. Most of the craft was storage of supplies for the eight year round journey to the nearest planet outside the solar system around Proxima Centauri. Around the outside the craft was a shell that would had a solar sail using the pressure from the Suns light to push it and then an array of lasers powered by the fusion reactors on board to keep the craft at a speed at about one tenth that of the speed of light. The lower levels were the engineering and then the aquaponics bays were the organic waste is processed by earthworms and used to grow fruit and vegetables for the crew. Then came the several decks for crew quarters and then the med bay and command decks.

The Outpost

He sat there staring at screens all alone in this outpost at the edge of the Tau Ceti system, on a small piece of rock and ice called Omega. He was there all by himself he really didn’t mind it all. In his last days at the academy he knew he wanted some time alone. He had some bad experiences with some of the other cadets. Some didn’t like the some of the food he ate because it had to much spice or had garlic in it, one dish had garlic in a sweet milk sauce he thought why do I have to listen to you whine I am not making not making you eat it. There was one roommate who on party nights would bring his friends over who one would threaten to show him a wrestling move if he complained. There was a situation where a couple of girls grabbed an item and played a game of keep away with it and when he went to to get it back one brought close to her chest and he accidentally touched her. Also she describe a certain sauce a the sexual fluid of a male dromedary, but she was one of the few that clued into the fact his grandfather was like his father to him when the grandfather died and she actually baked him a birthday cake. He thought he just had to deal with it himself because he thought he wasn’t going to be taken serious because one instructor and a grad student said he was whining and complaining, so he just worked at night when no one was around.

Right now his outpost was getting a bit old and run down because it was down on the list of updates and repairs or even parts. He did have a small shuttle to pick up items and do some side jobs but now there was a situation going on in the system. All the inhabitants had nanobots going thru their systems but some of the people were dying and the problem was linked to some new code showing up in the nanobots of the dead people. The whole system was under lockdown part of his duties now made sure no new people entered the system. He took the option of deactivating all the nanobots on the station. Half a million people were waiting for a solution of what was going with the little robots swimming around in their blood streams on the on world bases, the several space stations.

Can Life Bounce From one Planet to Another

In this paper it is attempted to figure the chances of life being transferred from one planet to another. The idea of lithopanspermia which is the idea that life can be transferred inside meteors or other minor bodies like comets or even protoplanets has been around since at least the 19th century. The life would state evolving on on planet and a minor body impact the planet and if the ejecta had enough speed to overcome the escape velocity the material would keep going into space and might impact another body in the system or maybe another system. The radius of this sphere can be give in by R=v_oτ_o,where v_o is the average velocity of the particle and τ_o τ_o the amount of time bacteria can survive inside the rock, so if the bacteria are hardy and the velocity is high enough it can travel far enough to seed life on other star systems. If R=5.3ly(σ_o/km s ^-1)(τ_o/1Myr)),where σ_o iσ_o the Maxwellian distribution of velocities and if you set R to 50-100 ly as the sphere that is being studied, σ₀=10-20 km s^-1 and τ₀ is set at 1 million years the number of stars that could life spread to 10³-10⁴ stars that could have planets around them to receive the life bearing debris. The number of of planets within the sphere is giving by N(R)=4πρ∫drr²g(r), where ρ is a number density within the Ledensphere or the sphere of life, and g(r) is a function describing how likely the life to be exchanged dependent on the distance between planets, planets in a system like TRAPPEst-1 where the planets are closer to one another it will more likely for the swapping of life and planets in different systems would be less likely. Lithopanspermia is more likely to happen where stars are closer together like in star clusters or near center of the galaxy but in other regions it is more likely that life would originate on that planet.

2105.03295.pdf (arxiv.org)

Can Planets change from One Type to Another

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Are stars making there sub-Neptune planets into super-Earths probably but not the way the presenter of this video claims they are. This is based on an article where researchers found there was a correlation between factors like the stars mass and the planets radius and that the energy the planet receives from the star. Basically the more energy the planet receives thru the light of star, the more energetic the particles in the atmosphere have and more able to reach escape velocity, this is called photoevaporation. Another mechanism there are also solar winds and flares that could speed up the stripping off the atmosphere of the planets

But why do astronomers think that these planets weren’t just formed this way This is because most of the super-earths are around older stars, how do age stars, it is not like they have photo ids. For stars more massive than the sun you can use isochrones, which are different tracks on the H-R diagram, as a star ages the concentration helium and metals increase inside the star the brightness and size of the star changes. This will change the position of the star the horizontal axis, this is compared to models of stars to find the age of the star. For less massive stars like our sun the rotation of the stars can be used to age the stars as the star consumes the material inside the radius increases and the the spin of the star slows down and this can be used to date the star, for stars less massive than the sun aging in less certain.

And now we have planets coming out the sun, Jupiter and saturn being captured brown dwarfs, umn no, we actually do see planets in different phases of forming and Jupiter and saturns composition are consistent with them forming in the solar system.

2005.14671.pdf (arxiv.org)

Angus_2019_AJ_158_173.pdf

Pale Blue Dot(preview)

This book was written by sagan in 1994 near the end of his life and before a lot of the space probes that have been launched, were being planned, being built or on their way to their target. One of the first rovers that landed on another planet had it’s base named after him and was shown on one of the last episodes of the TV show Enterprise. It was launched just over two weeks before sagan passed on December 20, 1996. When I heard of his passing I was going up smythe st in Fredericton NB going home after exams. He mentions missions like Cassini and Huygens, the what was named then the “Fire and Ice” mission to Pluto which was renamed New Horizons , and upcoming missions to Mars. There were a few exoplanets discovered at the time but nothing like the thousands that have been found by Kepler and Tess and now we are modelling the atmosphere of other planets and brown dwarfs to see if we can detect lighting on these worlds, flying small helicopters on Mars or planning on building a nuclear powered octocopter to fly around the surface of Titan.

sagan started his carrier working under Gerard Kuiper who as sagan puts it was an intellectual descendent of Huygens who discovered Titan. Sagan also worked under Urey who in the 1950’s did experiments with organic compounds, nitrogen, oxygen and water, and excited it with electricity and UV radiation, simple compounds formed. Sagan continued the experiments in the ’70’s and called the compounds which appeared to be red and hazy, they called them tholins and simple nitrogen containing compounds called nitrile . On October 15, 1997 the Cassini space probe was launched with the Huygens probe which was to land the moon that its namesake was named after. In 2004 it arrived and stay active for 13 years. While there the Huygens probe was dropped down onto Titan and on the way down they were streams and river channels mad from ice with 17% of the surface covered with organic sand. Thru measurements by Huygens and Cassini. Cassini measured the density of the moon by the affects the gravity had on the probe and the obliquity circle, this is the circle that is made as axis wobbles, this gave a density that implies a giant ocean that on top that has an ice crust layer like rocky crust of the Earth. There are no direct measurements of the crust but the layer is thought to be between 50-200 km and the ocean underneath to be 500-700 km which might contain salts or ammonia for the high density or it might even be magnesium sulfate. The moon might even have cryovolcanicism which instead of lava the volcanoes spew out water, this also would cycle some of the methane into the atmosphere to replenish it in the methane based hydrological cycle based off of methane and a few other organic compound, where there are a evaporated into the 90K atmosphere and condense in the upper atmosphere and fall to the ground and flow into streams and eventually to seas, Cassini imaged these seas in the northern regions. Titan is considered a good comparison to cold water worlds, planets without a magnet field to protect, early versions to Earth because its atmosphere is at 1.5 times that of Earth with a similar make up of the early Earth. This is why later this decade the Dragonfly a nuclear powdered drone with eight blades mission will sent to Titan to fly from site to site to explore the hazy moon.

2102.08472.pdf (arxiv.org)

Are spacebusters spacebusted Part 1

This Youtube channel for a long time tried to debunk the globe Earth wait for it space itself, amazed they didn’t try to debunk time if they did you just need to call in theDoctor. Now this channel has gone onto debunking the Corona virus. But today I will go thru some of their debunking of space.

In the first video the narrator wonders why comets loss material and why the Earth and Moon doesn’t loss stuff. He claims scientists that things don’t fly off the Earth because the Earth has an atmosphere, no they don’t. First the reason we have an atmosphere is that the gravity of the planet keeps the air molecules bond to the Earth. First let us look at how fast you need to escape from the surface of an object, you need to compare the kinetic energy of the particle versus the gravitation potential energy. Kinetic energy is given by 0.5mv^{2 and the potential energy is given by GmM/r, where G is the gravitational constant, m is the mass of the particle, M is the mass of the larger body and r is the radius and the resulting velocity needed is v=(2GM/r), so closer to the center the higher velocity and bigger the object the more velocity than a smaller one. Now let us look how much velocity a particle can have to do this you have to compare thermal energy and kinetic energy 0.5mv2 and thermal energy 3/2kT, T is the temperature and k is a constant and you get a velocity of v=(3kT/m)1/2 you notice the higher the temperature the faster the speed and also the lighter the molecule the faster it is. Now you will hopefully see the larger body is the faster and probably the lighter molecules have to be to escape the planet. moon or comet. That is way the Earth has an atmosphere and the moon which is less massive does not and why particles as large sand grains can easily fly of comets because the comets do not have mass to keep the particles on it even at low speeds. Also comets do eventually run out of material, some collide with other bodies their other bodies to replace them.}

In this second video which is the seventh in his series for Nasa fanboys, is why does the shuttle underside heat up on re-entry and not during liftoff. It is basically surface area on launch as it goes very little of the surface is plowing thru the atmosphere, any craft does heat up doing this. When it comes down it exposes the greater surface area to create greater resistance to slow the craft down while pushing the air ahead of it, there is a layer of air that forms right under the craft and this pushes against other air and creates the heat.

Has the Precursors to Life Been Found in Venus’ Atmosphere

Recently there was an announcement that PH₃ was found in our twin Venus’ leading to headlines like signs of life found in the cloud tops of Venus. This found one of the simplest amino acids glycine which is used to compose proteins and other compounds in the human body. In the 1950’s Urey showed that if you passed an electrical current thru a mixture of gases N₂, NH₃,H₂O and CO₂ in the presence of 60Kv. Compared the atmosphere Venus that is 96.5% CO₂, 3.5% N₂ and trace amount of other molecules. This molecule was detected by measuring the rotational lines of glycine, atoms in molecules move around in relation to one another, they can flop around or rotate and to do this they absorb and emit light, 11 known rotational line in Glycine were used. Glycine has been found in the comas around comets and this does not mean there is life in the clouds of Venus it could be possible because unlike the surface of Venus where the temperatures are around 740k and pressures up to 90 time that of the Earth, about 50 km it is between 300-350 K and about the same of the Earth.

2010.06211.pdf (arxiv.org)

Contact, the Movie.

Contact, the Movie.

I did say once I saw Contact again I would do a write up on it and I saw part of it this morning so here it is partially from the last hour or so this morning and from memory. Oh still the s is broken so it will lower case s all the way.

The opening credits start with a view of the Earth from orbit and you hear music form and tv programs from the late 90s and then you pull back to the various planets in the solar system and the you hear different audio. This represents how distance and time are related the further away you are from an object the longer it takes the signal to get there and thus the information will bee that far out of date. Then it pulls back to a point where the sun is just a dot with a thin shell of dust around it representing the heliopause, the heliopause is a region where the sun solar wind pushes back the particles from the galaxy at a distance of about 128 au. Then it it pulls back to a nebula probably the Eagle nebula because it contains what appears to be the pillars of creation a star forming region. Then you notice the noise from Earth drops off, the Dec.8 1941 FDR speech the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbour in Hawai’i, then the final bit was a bit of German from the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Then it pulls back through the spiral arm of the galaxy and then past the local group and then an elliptical galaxy and then the local supercluster of galaxies and then just a stream of galaxies.

Now to the main part of the story and that is the signal. The signal i first heard by Ellie with her headset plugged into the Very Large Array in New Mexico. This is really not done they normally just look at screens and most times they just have a program that keeps an eye on any signal to see if there are signals coming in. In the book and the movie they have sETI researchers being the only ones using these big arrays and hogging them from other research. It is usually completely the other way around until the Allen Array was built just for sETI by a wealthy tech executive, but usually research into from planets to nebula’s to galaxies are being studied with the sETI searches going on in the background. After the signal is detected she calls into the office of the array where to other scientists are taking car of other business and then they rush into recording the oncoming signal and measuring the signal and realizing that the signal comes in bursts of prime numbers. Prime numbers are numbers that only evenly divide when they are being divided by itself and one, like 2,3,5,7 etc. Nothing in nature creates signals that come in prime numbers, anything rotating will repeat in regular intervals, jets will produce a study that might vary but will be probably irregular, or you will get sudden bursts of signals. Also they move one of the dishes away from where the rest of them a pointing, this is to make sure the signal is not coming from a local source and actually coming form where they think the signal is coming from. Also they talk about local military bases and the shuttle to make sure they are not just picking up some errant noise from them In the signal they thought they were receiving was just a way of the ET’s of getting the humans attention with information hidden underneath, like the a copy of the first broadcast they received. Which was from the 1936 Olympics games with a speech from probably the worst human being that ever lived, the aliens probably didn’t know about his politics it took 26 years to get to Vega and back and since the book was wriiten in 88 the total trip was 52 years. And yet underneath that was another layer of information which was a design for a machine that would generate a wormhole.

There are several main differences between the book and the movie. In both Ellie’s father dies but in the book Dr. Drumlin actually married Ellie’s mother becoming Ellie’s stepfather. Also in the movie there is only one spot in the machine and in the book there was six spots but the movie needed some extra drama so they made a bit of competition. Also there was only one machine made .

The movie touches on some of the consequences of what would happen if such claims would happen. Mostly of how people would react from the people who welcome the aliens to ones that would think the aliens are demons or a hoax. Once Ellie goes through the wormhole and it appears that she was gone only 5 minutes but from her perspective she was gone for 18 hours, and the clip recording device also recorded 18 hours of static. She is put in front of Congressional hearing where the former NsA head goes on about how it was all generated by Hayden a rich business man who funded a lot research into the project. The underlying idea was Hayden made it all up for attention. This all reminds me of what happened Galileo during his trials, some the early arguments were probably how can we know you just made up the sketches, or put something in front of telescope to make it look like the moons of Jupiter were going around Jupiter or there were phases of Venus like the moon, there is a huge difference all you had to do was to make your own telescope and look, you did not have to build a wormhole machine. One thing the movie does well is the friendship between Ellie and Pastor Joss, although they are coming from different approaches on scientific and the other religious there is a romantic relationship and tolerance which is lacking nowadays. With some people you just have to mention vaccines or there is a horrible disease going around and they go into a conspiracy. Also in the clip above there a scene where Ellie had to go around to get financing before Hayden stepped in, scientists do have to a lot just to get financing, like taking a lot of time to write proposals to committees to get funding or time at a facility.

Calculus War(preview)

Calculus Wars

Before discussing the battle of who should get credit for who came up with calculus we probably should discuss what is calculus. Calculus has to main branches on is differential calculus and the other is integral. Differential calculus is used to find the rate of change in a system because it is based of finding the slope of the tangent line to a curve.

Let say that a particle changes it speed a rate of a=x²

The formula to find the derivative of an equation of the above function is given by:

f'(x)=lim(h->0)((f(x+h)-f(x))/h), h is a small increase in the distance in the x direction and f'(x) is the notation for a derivative or dx/dy is used.

Now you place the a=x² into the formula you get

f'(x)=lim(h->0)((x+h)²-x²/h

f'(x)=lim(h->0)(x²+2xh+h²-x²)/h

Now you can see the x squared terms cancel each other out and the division of h cancels the h’s in the 2xh term and of the h’s in the h squared and putting the 0 in the last h left you get 2x.

There is more general expression to find the derivative is:

f(x)=xⁿ

f'(x)=nx^n-1

It is a bit more complicated than that for some functions but it is important tool for finding how fast something is moving or growing like my favourite exam question how fast is mold growing a block of cheese(yes that was an actual question on an exam. )

Now the second type of calculus and that is integral calculus. Integral calculus is finding the area under a curve. This is done by dividing the area under the curve into smaller rectangles so the area of rectangle is really small and there is no area that is not left over. An integral generally looks like:

∫F(x)=(1/(n+1))xⁿ⁺¹+C, where F(x)=xⁿ

The ∫ is just a fancy s because you are summing a lot of thing together, also to get a definite answer you need to have an upper and lower values but if you don’t you need to add the C. Thi can be useful to find area and if you rotate around an axis you can get a volume. But also work is defined by W=Fd where d is the distance and if divide the distance into small increments and integrate you can find work done. Also there is a relation between the integral and the derivative and that is:

F(x)=d/dx∫F(x)dx

More from the Flat Earth

Preamble/Disclosure

Here is another Flat Earther MultiTomTom, I find some these topics on other debunking websites and youtube channels and find other issue that they do not cover or I go to the original source an watch a number of their videos. This is the case here unfortunately some his stuff goes into religious grounds I want to discuss a few things before I get started, like I am just trying to point out the difference between their claims and science, there are plenty of people who are religious and trust the science of evolution, their is a somewhat famous situation between a Prof. Lenski and a lawyer schafly who wanted to disprove Lenskis’ research in the study of evolution of the bacteria e.coli, Lenski was actually in church attending a wedding during a day schalfy group was attacking him. Also that flat earthers are just doing this as a creative exercise a members of the Flat Earth s society an organization which has been around for some time. But some of them are looking for attention,some are trying to prove that they are smarter than everyone else and know some hidden truth that the rest of us sheeple don’t get and there are other reason for them arguing for the flat earth. These conspiracy theories do have a cycle at one time the moon landing was being argued, then it was anti-vax, then flat earth and now covid-19, and of course all the theories of Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t shoot JFK. Why go thru debunking these claims if most people know that they are false one reason is to prevent others going down that road, and I have heard people on a call on show trying to prove the flat earth several times. There is nothing wrong in asking questions, this i why Carl sagan said children are smarter than adults because they ask questions that adults are not ask. Another warning this guy uses some curse words in hi videos.

In the first video here he trie to convince us that the sun and stars are different kind of objects and that the sun is not as hot as it is and is a lot closer then it is. First how do we know that stars and the sun are basically the same type of objects we use their spectrum. They all have a large very hot source of light and heat in their cores and as the light leaves the the gases adsorb the energy that the light has and leaves dark bands in the spectrum corresponding to the wavelength or energy that it takes to excite the electron out of its orbit, given by the equation E=hv, where h is the plancks constant and v is the frequency of the light. Now if you point this new device called a telescope it ha only been around for about four hundred years at a star and pass it thru a prism or let the light hit a diffraction grating and you will see a spectrum kind of like the suns He also goes into how temperature in the upper atmosphere is higher than lower layers, these particles have more energy and therefore a higher temperature.

In this second video he starts with a picture of a beach and he says the evidence for a non-rotating Earth because the water is not being flung int space. If you have a spinning object there will be a force called the centrifugal force which will cause this but this does not take into account gravity, one thing a lot of flat earther don’t understand is gravity and how mass effects it. Gravity id giving by the equation by F=GM₁M₂/r², for this argument it does not matter which mass is the Earth but the value does it i 5.84 exp24 kg, which easily counteracts the centrifugal force. Another argument that some flat earthers use that there is a vacuum in space and you need something to hold the atmosphere in so you can not have an atmosphere that goes into a vacuum, without a dome or similar device. Gravity actually work on every molecule and atom and keeps the atmosphere around the Earth but the distance from the center affects the strength of attraction and also the mass of the molecules, like O₂
has a stronger attraction to the Earth then H₂ which is much lighter and that is why isn’t much H₂ jut floating in the atmosphere.

Now in the last video for now, he tries to debunk the radius of the Earth by the showing a picture taken by another flat Earther of two oil rig on jut over 6 miles away and the other over 9 miles away. Not going to worry about the calculation but they don’t seem to take into account refraction, the Earths atmosphere will bend light and this changes in different conditions like humidity and temperature. I think three video is enough at one time he ha more and maybe more later.