Mapping what you can't see

SUBHEAD: Looking at this, I'm reminded that we have been imagining spaces we cannot see for thousands of years.

By Robert Krulwich on 7 September 2014 for NPR -
(http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2014/09/05/346125416/mapping-what-you-cannot-see-cannot-know-cannot-visit)


Image above: Still frame of our own Laniakea Supercluster from video in original article. For video see below.

When I was a boy I had a globe. I could take it in my hands, rest it on my lap, give it a spin and look down on Africa, Europe, North America and Asia spinning by.

In 1961 (I was 13), cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin left the planet and got high enough to look down on the real Earth spinning beneath him. He was the first (followed by Alan Shepard and later John Glenn) to gaze with his own eyes on what we had over the centuries so carefully mapped, drawn and imagined.

From 160 miles up, you can take in the whole boot of Italy, the Red Sea narrowing to Suez, North America tapering down to the isthmus at Panama, and the amazing thing — amazing to me, anyway — is that what we'd spent 2,000 years drawing in our heads was actually there. We'd gotten it pretty much right!

Of course, you say. Cartography is a science. What it describes should be there. And yet, I find myself a little surprised by our ability to measure, to extrapolate, to conjoin, to build a true whole from a gazillion little parts. It's an enormous intellectual feat. And now, I'm happy to report, it's been done again — on a scale that boggles my mind.


Video above: Laniakea Supercluster that includes the Milky Way. From (http://youtu.be/rENyyRwxpHo).

R. Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, and his team have mapped a hunk of the universe that is 500 million light-years across. It contains 100 million billion suns — including our own little star. Their new map, like our early Earth maps, is built from detailed observations, intense data crunching and, when assembled, it pictures a galactic neighborhood he calls "Laniakea" — that's a Hawaiian name that the video below translates as (oddly) "immeasurable heaven."



Image above: Laniakea Supercluster and its closest neighbor Perseus-Pisces Supercluster that touch on another. Another still from video above. From (http://youtu.be/rENyyRwxpHo).

But they measured it. What you will see in this video is the first coherent map, not of our Milky Way but of the Milky Way's larger neighborhood, a branching "supercluster" of galaxies, being pulled, pushed and splayed over what I thought would be an unimaginable, unmappable distance — but here it is. As the video will show you, we are at the far, far edge of a long branch of swirling stars, an impossibly small seed dangling from an immense tree of light.

A Postscript: We Have Done This Before
Looking at this, I'm reminded that we have been imagining spaces we cannot see for thousands of years.

Back in 240 B.C., in ancient Alexandria, an astronomer named Eratosthenes got a letter from southern Egypt. The letter writer commented that where he lived there's a day — the longest day of the year (what we would call the summer solstice) — when a person casts no shadow. None at all. At exactly noon where I live, the southerner wrote, the sun is directly over my head, not a single degree north, south, east or west. For that moment, I am shadowless.

Me And My Shadow
Hmm, thought Eratosthenes, that doesn't happen where I live. Here in Alexandria on the longest day of the year at noon, the sun still casts a slight shadow. That got him thinking: What if the Earth is curved? Maybe sunshine is falling straight to Earth, but the shadow I see in Alexandria is telling me that I'm at a different angle to the sun than my friend down south? Maybe these shadow differences are telling us we are living on a giant sphere.

He measured the distance between Alexandria and Syene, Egypt, where his friend lived. Then, on the next solstice, he put a stick in the Alexandrian ground, measured the shadow at noon and was able to calculate (using trigonometry, based on the different lengths of shadow) how big the Earth might be.

What's amazing is he got very close. He imagined an Earth bigger than the one we live on, but since we don't know how Eratosthenes measured distances exactly, his calculations were either 16 percent too big or just 2 percent too big.

Either way, he was conjuring up an immense ball, hundreds of millions of times bigger than he was, and when Yuri Gagarin got to see what Eratosthenes had imagined, it turns out, Eratosthenes was pretty much right. Go figure.

(Come to think of it, that's what Eratosthenes did. Using a stick, a shadow and his head, he figured out what he was standing on. On our good days, we humans are very, very good.)

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Black Hole Weather Report

SUBHEAD: Stephen Hawking shakes up physics theory (again) saying black holes are actually gray.

By Alan Boyle on 27 January 2014 for NBCNews -
(http://www.nbcnews.com/science/stephen-hawking-shakes-theory-again-black-holes-are-actually-gray-2D12001605)


Image above: Photo of Stephen Hawking by David Parry. From original article.


British physicist Stephen Hawking earned worldwide attention for his surprising claims about black holes, and he's doing it again with a new paper claiming that "there are no black holes."

Actually, Hawking isn't denying the existence of the massive gravitational singularities that lurk at the center of many galaxies, including our own Milky Way. He's just saying the classical view of a black hole as an eternal trap for everything that's inside, even light, is wrong. In his revised view, black holes are ever so slightly gray, with a chaotic and shifting edge rather than a sharply defined event horizon.

"The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity," Hawking writes in a brief paper submitted to the ArXiv.org preprint database. "There are, however, apparent horizons which persist for a period of time."

Hawking's paper, titled "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes," has kicked off a new round in the long-running debate over black holes and what happens to the stuff that falls into them. Theoretical physicists, including Hawking, have gone back and forth on this issue, known as the information paradox.

Back and forth over black holes
For decades, Hawking contended that the information that disappeared inside a black hole was lost forever. Then, in 2004, he reversed course and said the information would slowly be released as a mangled form of energy. That switch led him to pay off a bet he had made with another physicist about the fate of information in a black hole.

More recently, other physicists have suggested that there was a cosmic firewall dividing the inner region of a black hole's event horizon from the outside, and that anything falling through the event horizon would be burnt to less than a crisp. But that runs counter to the relativistic view of black holes, which holds that there should be no big difference in the laws of physics at the event horizon.

To resolve the seeming paradox, Hawking says that black holes would have "apparent horizons" — chaotic, turbulent regions where matter and energy are turned into a confusing mess. "There would be no event horizons and no firewalls," he says. Everything in a black hole would still be there, but the information would be effectively lost because it gets so scrambled up.

"It will be like weather forecasting on Earth. ... One can't predict the weather more than a few days in advance," Hawking writes.

Protests and jests
Hawking's paper wasn't peer-reviewed, but his peers are already weighing in on the accuracy of the black hole weather report.

"It is not clear what he expects the infalling observer to see," Joseph Polchinski, a pro-firewall physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, told New Scientist. "It almost sounds like he is replacing the firewall with a chaos-wall, which could be the same thing."

"The idea that there are no points from which you cannot escape a black hole is in some ways an even more radical and problematic suggestion than the existence of firewalls," Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California at Berkeley, said in Nature's online report on Hawking's paper. "But the fact that we’re still discussing such questions 40 years after Hawking’s first papers on black holes and information is testament to their enormous significance."

If the "no black holes" quote is taken out of context, it makes Hawking's claim sound kind of ridiculous — and Andy Borowitz, a humorist at The New Yorker, has turned that take into an Onion-like jab at members of Congress. "If black holes don't exist, then other things you scientists have been trying to foist on us probably don't either, like climate change and evolution," Borowitz writes in one faux quote.

Fortunately, we're getting to the point where we won't have to take any theorist's word for the existence of black (or gray) holes. Astronomers are preparing to watch a huge cloud of gas fall into the black hole at the center of our galaxy — and over the next decade, they're planning to follow through on the Event Horizon Telescope, a campaign aimed at direct observation of the galactic black hole's edge.

As for Hawking, it just so happens that this is a big month: He turned 72 years old a couple of weeks ago, and he appears to be keeping active despite his decades-long struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

And this week marks the television premiere of "Hawking," a PBS documentary about the good doctor's life and work. For still more about the world's best-known physicist, check out his recently published memoir, "My Brief History."



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The next ten billion years

SUBHEAD: The shortest-lived civilization lasted for less than 100 years while the longest endured for 8 millennia.

By John Michael Greer on 5 September 2013 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-next-ten-billion-years.html)


Image above: Screen shot of my computer after entering the Time Machine program. From Juan Wilson's desktop.

Earlier this week, I was trying to think of ways to talk about the gap between notions about the future we’ve all absorbed from the last three hundred years of fossil-fueled progress, on the one hand, and the ways of thinking about what’s ahead that might actually help us make sense of our predicament and the postpetroleum, post-progress world ahead, on the other.

While I was in the middle of these reflections, a correspondent reminded me of a post from last year by peak oil blogger Ugo Bardi, which set out to place the crises of our time in the context of the next ten billion years.

It’s an ambitious project, and by no means badly carried out. The only criticism that comes to mind is that it only makes sense if you happen to be a true believer in the civil religion of progress, the faith whose rise and impending fall has been a central theme here in recent months. As a sermon delivered to the faithful of that religion, it’s hard to beat; it’s even got the classic structure of evangelical rhetoric—the awful fate that will soon fall upon those who won’t change their wicked ways, the glorious salvation awaiting those who get right with Progress, and all the rest of it.

Of course the implied comparison with Christianity can only be taken so far. Christians are generally expected to humble themselves before their God, while believers in progress like to imagine that humanity will become God or, as in this case, be able to pat God fondly on the head and say, “That’s my kid.”

More broadly, those of my readers who were paying attention last week will notice that the horrible fate that awaits the sinful is simply that nature will be allowed to go her own way, while the salvation awaiting the righteous is more or less the ability to browbeat nature into doing what they think she ought to do—or rather, what Bardi’s hypothesized New Intelligence, whose interests are assumed to be compatible with those of humanity, thinks she ought to do.

There’s plenty that could be said about the biophobia—the stark shivering dread of life’s normal and healthy ripening toward death—that pervades this kind of thinking, but that’s a subject for another post. Here I’d like to take another path.

Once the notions of perpetual progress and imminent apocalypse are seen as industrial society’s traditional folk mythologies, rather than meaningful resources for making predictions about the future, and known details about ecology, evolution, and astrophysics are used in their place to fill out the story, the next ten billion years looks very different from either of Bardi’s scenarios. Here’s my version or, if you will, my vision.

Ten years from now:

Business as usual continues; the human population peaks at 8.5 billion, liquid fuels production remains more or less level by the simple expedient of consuming an ever larger fraction of the world’s total energy output, and the annual cost of weather-related disasters continues to rise. Politicians and the media insist loudly that better times are just around the corner, as times get steadily worse.

Among those who recognize that something’s wrong, one widely accepted viewpoint holds that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will shortly solve all our problems, and therefore we don’t have to change the way we live.

Another, equally popular, insists that total human extinction is scarcely a decade away, and therefore we don’t have to change the way we live. Most people who worry about the future accept one or the other claim, while the last chance for meaningful systemic change slips silently away.

A hundred years from now:

It has been a difficult century. After more than a dozen major wars, three bad pandemics, widespread famines, and steep worldwide declines in public health and civil order, human population is down to 3 billion and falling.

Sea level is up ten meters and rising fast as the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps disintegrate; fossil fuel production ground to a halt decades earlier as the last economically producible reserves were exhausted, and most proposed alternatives turned out to be unaffordable in the absence of the sort of cheap, abundant, highly concentrated energy only fossil fuels can provide.

Cornucopians still insist that fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration will save us any day now, and their opponents still insist that human extinction is imminent, but most people are too busy trying to survive to listen to either group.

A thousand years from now:

The Earth is without ice caps and glaciers for the first time in twenty million years or so, and sea level has gone up more than a hundred meters worldwide; much of the world has a tropical climate, as it did 50 million years earlier. Human population is 100 million, up from half that figure at the bottom of the bitter dark age now passing into memory.

Only a few scholars have any idea what the words “fusion power,” “artificial intelligence,” and “interstellar migration” once meant, and though there are still people insisting that the end of the world will arrive any day now, their arguments now generally rely more overtly on theology than before.

New civilizations are rising in various corners of the world, combining legacy technologies with their own unique cultural forms. The one thing they all have in common is that the technological society of a millennium before is their idea of evil incarnate. 

Ten thousand years from now:
The rise in global temperature has shut down the thermohaline circulation and launched an oceanic anoxic event, the planet’s normal negative feedback process when carbon dioxide levels get out of hand.

Today’s industrial civilization is a dim memory from the mostly forgotten past, as far removed from this time as the Neolithic Revolution is from ours; believers in most traditional religions declare piously that the climate changes of the last ten millennia are the results of human misbehavior, while rationalists insist that this is all superstition and the climate changes have perfectly natural causes.

As the anoxic oceans draw carbon out of the biosphere and entomb it in sediments on the sea floor, the climate begins a gradual cooling—a process which helps push humanity’s sixth global civilization into its terminal decline.

A hundred thousand years from now: 

Carbon dioxide levels drop below preindustrial levels as the oceanic anoxic event finishes its work, and the complex feedback loops that govern Earth’s climate shift again: the thermohaline circulation restarts, triggering another round of climatic changes.

Humanity’s seventy-ninth global civilization flourishes and begins its slow decline as the disruptions set in motion by a long-forgotten industrial age are drowned out by an older climatic cycle.

The scholars of that civilization are thrilled by the notions of fusion power, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration; they have no idea that we dreamed the same dreams before them, being further in our future than the Neanderthals are in our past, but they will have no more luck achieving those dreams than we did. 

A million years from now:

The Earth is in an ice age; great ice sheets cover much of the northern hemisphere and spread from mountain ranges all over the world, and sea level is 150 meters lower than today. To the people living at this time, who have never known anything else, this seems perfectly normal.

Metals have become rare geological specimens—for millennia now, most human societies have used renewable ceramic-bioplastic composites instead—and the very existence of fossil fuels has long since been forgotten. The 664th global human civilization is at its peak, lofting aerostat towns into the skies and building great floating cities on the seas; its long afternoon will eventually draw to an end after scores of generations, and when it falls, other civilizations will rise in its place.

Ten million years from now:  
The long glacial epoch that began in the Pleistocene has finally ended, and the Earth is returning to its more usual status as a steamy jungle planet. This latest set of changes proves to be just that little bit too much for humanity.

No fewer than 8,639 global civilizations have risen and fallen over the last ten million years, each with its own unique sciences, technologies, arts, literatures, philosophies, and ways of thinking about the cosmos; the shortest-lived lasted for less than a century before blowing itself to smithereens, while the longest-lasting endured for eight millennia before finally winding down.

All that is over now. There are still relict populations of human beings in Antarctica and a few island chains, and another million years will pass before cascading climatic and ecological changes finally push the last of them over the brink into extinction.

Meanwhile, in the tropical forests of what is now southern Siberia, the descendants of raccoons who crossed the Bering land bridge during the last great ice age are proliferating rapidly, expanding into empty ecological niches once filled by the larger primates. In another thirty million years or so, their descendants will come down from the trees.

One hundred million years from now:
Retro-rockets fire and fall silent as the ungainly craft settles down on the surface of the Moon. After feverish final checks, the hatch is opened, and two figures descend onto the lunar surface. They are bipeds, but not even remotely human; instead, they belong to Earth’s third intelligent species.

They are distantly descended from the crows of our time, though they look no more like crows than you look like the tree shrews of the middle Cretaceous. Since you have a larynx rather than a syrinx, you can’t even begin to pronounce what they call themselves, so we’ll call them corvins.

Earth’s second intelligent species, whom we’ll call cyons after their raccoon ancestors, are long gone. They lasted a little more than eight million years before the changes of an unstable planet sent them down the long road to extinction; they never got that deeply into technology, though their political institutions made the most sophisticated human equivalents look embarrassingly crude.

The corvins are another matter. Some twist of inherited psychology left them with a passion for heights and upward movement; they worked out the basic principles of the hot air balloon before they got around to inventing the wheel, and balloons, gliders, and corvin-carrying kites play much the same roles in their earliest epic literature that horses and chariots play in ours.

As corvin societies evolved more complex technologies, eyes gazed upwards from soaring tower-cities at the moon, the perch of perches set high above the world. All that was needed to make those dreams a reality was petroleum, and a hundred million years is more than enough time for the Earth to restock her petroleum reserves—especially if that period starts off with an oceanic anoxic event that stashes gigatons of carbon in marine sediments. Thus it was inevitable that, sooner or later, the strongest of the great corvin kith-assemblies would devote its talents and wealth to the task of reaching the moon.

The universe has a surprise in store for the corvins, though. Their first moon landing included among its goals the investigation of some odd surface features, too small to be seen clearly by Earth-based equipment. That first lander thus set down on a flat lunar plain that, a very long time ago, was called the Sea of Tranquillity, and so it was that the stunned corvin astronauts found themselves facing the unmistakable remains of a spacecraft that arrived on the moon in the unimaginably distant past.

A few equivocal traces buried in terrestrial sediments had suggested already to corvin loremasters that another intelligent species might have lived on the Earth before them, though the theory was dismissed by most as wild speculation.

The scattered remnants on the Moon confirmed them, and made it hard for even the most optimistic corvins to embrace the notion that some providence guaranteed the survival of intelligent species. The curious markings on some of the remains, which some loremasters suggested might be a mode of visual communication, resisted all attempts at decipherment, and very little was ever learnt for certain about the enigmatic ancient species that left its mark on the Moon.

Even so, it will be suggested long afterwards that the stark warning embodied in those long-abandoned spacecraft played an important role in convincing corvin societies to rein in the extravagant use of petroleum and other nonrenewable resources, though it also inspired hugely expensive and ultimately futile attempts to achieve interstellar migration—for some reason the corvins never got into the quest for fusion power or artificial intelligence.

One way or another, though, the corvins turned out to be the most enduring of Earth’s intelligent species, and more than 28 million years passed before their day finally ended.

One billion years from now:

The Earth is old and mostly desert, and a significant fraction of its total crust is made up of the remains of bygone civilizations. The increasing heat of the Sun as it proceeds through its own life cycle, and the ongoing loss of volatile molecules from the upper atmosphere into space, have reduced the seas to scattered, salty basins amid great sandy wastes.

Only near the north and south poles does vegetation flourish, and with it the corbicules, Earth’s eleventh and last intelligent species. Their ancestors in our time are an invasive species of freshwater clam. (Don’t laugh; a billion years ago your ancestors were still trying to work out the details of multicellularity.)

The corbicules have the same highly practical limb structure as the rest of their subphylum: six stumpy podicles for walking, two muscular dorsal tentacles for gross manipulations and two slender buccal tentacles by the mouth for fine manipulations. They spend most of their time in sprawling underground city-complexes, venturing to the surface to harvest vegetation to feed the subterranean metafungal gardens that provide them with nourishment.

By some combination of luck and a broad general tendency toward cephalization common to many evolutionary lineages, Earth’s last intelligent species is also its most intellectually gifted; hatchlings barely out of creche are given fun little logic problems such as Fermat’s last theorem for their amusement, and a large majority of adult corbicules are involved in one or another field of intellectual endeavor. Being patient, long-lived, and not greatly addicted to collective stupidities, they have gone very far indeed.

Some eight thousand years back, a circle of radical young corbicule thinkers proposed the project of working out all the physical laws of the cosmos, starting from first principles. So unprecedented a suggestion sparked countless debates, publications, ceremonial dances, and professional duels in which elderly scholars killed themselves in order to cast unbearable opprobrium on their rivals.

Still, it was far too delectable an intellectual challenge to be left unanswered, and the work has proceeded ever since. In the course of their researches, without placing any great importance on the fact, the best minds among the corbicules have proved conclusively that nuclear fusion, artificial intelligence, and interstellar migration were never practical options in the first place.

Being patient, long-lived, and not greatly addicted to collective stupidities, the corbicules have long since understood and accepted their eventual fate. In another six million years, as the Sun expands and the Earth’s surface temperature rises, the last surface vegetation will perish and the corbicules will go extinct; in another ninety million years, the last multicellular life forms will die out; in another two hundred million years, the last seas will boil, and Earth’s biosphere, nearing the end of its long, long life, will nestle down into the deepest crevices of its ancient, rocky world and drift into a final sleep.

Ten billion years from now

Earth is gone. It had a splendid funeral; its body plunged into stellar fire as the Sun reached its red giant stage and expanded out to the orbit of Mars, and its ashes were flung outwards into interstellar space with the first great helium flash that marked the beginning of the Sun’s descent toward its destiny. Two billion years later, the gas- and dust-rich shockwave from that flash plowed into a mass of interstellar dust dozens of light-years away from the Sun’s pale corpse, and kickstarted one of the great transformative processes of the cosmos.

Billions more years have passed since that collision. A yellow-orange K-2 star burns cheerily in the midst of six planets and two asteroid belts. The second planet has a surface temperature between the freezing and boiling points of water, and a sufficiently rich assortment of elements to set another of the great transformative processes of the cosmos into motion.

Now, in one spot on the surface of this world, rising up past bulbous purplish things that don’t look anything like trees but fill the same broad ecological function, there is a crag of black rock. On top of that crag, a creature sits looking at the stars, fanning its lunules with its sagittal crest and waving its pedipalps meditatively back and forth. It is one of the first members of its world’s first intelligent species, and it is—for the first time ever on that world—considering the stars and wondering if other beings might live out there among them.

The creature’s biochemistry, structure, and life cycle have nothing in common with yours, dear reader. Its world, its sensory organs, its mind and its feelings would be utterly alien to you, even if ten billion years didn’t separate you. Nonetheless, it so happens that a few atoms that are currently part of your brain, as you read these words, will also be part of the brain-analogue of the creature on the crag on that distant, not-yet-existing world. Does that fact horrify you, intrigue you, console you, leave you cold? We’ll discuss the implications of that choice next week.

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Baby Universe Lumpy

SUBHEAD: First detailed map of the infant universe after Big Bang shows asymmetry and dark matter.

By Makiko Kitamura on 21 March 3013 for Bloomberg News -
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-22/first-map-of-infant-universe-shows-asymmetry-dark-matter.html)


Image above: From (http://planetivy.com/news/30248/big-bang-theory-confirmed-ish-new-questions-raised/).

The first map of the universe in its infancy showed the seeds of the stars and galaxies of today and previously unobserved anomalies, astronomers said.

The all-sky map is based on the first 15.5 months of observations with the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, capturing the oldest light in the universe, emitted when it was only 380,000 years old, the agency and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics said in a statement.

The data generated from the map generally confirm the established view of the universe and imply that it is 13.82 billion years old. They also show some new features, such as a greater proportion of dark matter than previously thought, with normal matter, consisting of galaxies, stars and Earth, contributing only about 5 percent to the total mass and energy density, the scientists said.

Another surprise was an asymmetry in the average temperatures on opposite hemispheres of the sky, they said.

“The extraordinary quality of Planck’s portrait of the infant universe allows us to peel back its layers to the very foundations, revealing that our blueprint of the cosmos is far from complete,” said Jean-Jacques Dordain, director general of the European Space Agency, in the statement.

The data also revealed that the universe is expanding at a rate that is signifantly less than previously estimated, and a cold spot extending over a patch of sky is much larger than expected. A possible explanation is that the universe is in fact not the same in all directions, they said.

“We see an almost perfect fit to the standard model of cosmology, but with intriguing features that force us to rethink some of our basic assumptions,” said Jan Tauber, ESA’s Planck project scientist. “This is the beginning of a new journey and we expect that our continued analysis of Planck data will help shed light on this conundrum.”

---

Most Detailed Picture of Big Bang

By Staff on 22 March 2013 for AFP -
(http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/entertainment/22-Mar-2013/most-detailed-map-of-big-bang-radiation-unveiled)

The European Space Agency (ESA) on Thursday unveiled the most detailed map yet of relic radiation from the Big Bang, revealing new data it hopes will shed light on the creation and expansion of our Universe.

The 50-million pixel, all-sky image of the oldest light adds an edge of precision to some existing cosmological theories, defining more precisely the composition of the Universe and its age - about 80 million years older than previously thought.

“This is a giant leap in the understanding of the origins of the universe,” the agency’s director general Jean-Jacques Dordain told a press conference in Paris.“This image is the closest one yet of the Big Bang.

You are looking 13.8 billion years ago.”The map is composed of data gathered by ESA’s Planck satellite, launched in May 2009 to study Cosmic Microwave Background - the remains of ancient radiation emitted as the Universe started cooling after the Big Bang.

“What we are seeing is a picture of the microwave sky, a picture of the Universe as it was 380,000 after the Big Bang,” George Efstathiou, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, told journalists.
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The Known Universe

SUBHEAD: A video animation tour from Earth through the known universe to its time horizon.  

Directed by Carter Emmart 15 December 2009 for Museum of Natural History- (http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/universe/)
   
Image above: The Milky Way. White dot near center left is location of our solar system. From video below.

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum, is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010. Data: Digital Universe, American Museum of Natural History
http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/universe/

  
Video above: A tour through the known universe. From (http://youtu.be/17jymDn0W6U).
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Hydrocarbons on Titan

SUBHEAD: Concerns over Peak Oil fade with confirmation of Cheney's homeworld.

By Carolina Martinez on 13 February 2008 For NASA -  
(http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080213.html)
 

 
Image above: Artist's computer rendering of the surface of Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. From article.

[IB Editor's note: lets face it, when you discover a 'planet' so distant and cold in orbit around the ancient greek god of time who ate his children - that is obviously a good candidate for the homeworld of the former head of the US neo-con regime, Dick Cheney. When it is further discovered to have a massive amount of methane and ethane, more than are presently known to exist on earth - this stuff literally rains down out of it's smog hazy sky - it seems like a clincher. The only remaining question: when will the US invade?]  

Saturn's orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.

The new findings from the study led by Ralph Lorenz, Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Md., are reported in the Jan. 29 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters. "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material -- it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Lorenz. "This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan."

At a balmy minus 179 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit), Titan is a far cry from Earth. Instead of water, liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane are present on the moon's surface, and tholins probably make up its dunes.

The term "tholins"was coined by Carl Sagan in 1979 to describe the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry. Cassini has mapped about 20 percent of Titan's surface with radar. Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed, with each of several dozen estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth's oil and gas reserves.

The dark dunes that run along the equator contain a volume of organics several hundred times larger than Earth's coal reserves. Proven reserves of natural gas on Earth total 130 billion tons, enough to provide 300 times the amount of energy the entire United States uses annually for residential heating, cooling and lighting. Dozens of Titan's lakes individually have the equivalent of at least this much energy in the form of methane and ethane.

"This global estimate is based mostly on views of the lakes in the northern polar regions. We have assumed the south might be similar, but we really don't yet know how much liquid is there," said Lorenz. Cassini's radar has observed the south polar region only once, and only two small lakes were visible. Future observations of that area are planned during Cassini's proposed extended mission. Scientists estimated Titan's lake depth by making some general assumptions based on lakes on Earth.

They took the average area and depth of lakes on Earth, taking into account the nearby surroundings, like mountains. On Earth, the lake depth is often 10 times less than the height of nearby terrain. "We also know that some lakes are more than 10 meters or so deep because they appear literally pitch-black to the radar. If they were shallow we'd see the bottom, and we don't," said Lorenz.

 The question of how much liquid is on the surface is an important one because methane is a strong greenhouse gas on Titan as well as on Earth, but there is much more of it on Titan. If all the observed liquid on Titan is methane, it would only last a few million years, because as methane escapes into Titan's atmosphere, it breaks down and escapes into space. If the methane were to run out, Titan could become much colder. Scientists believe that methane might be supplied to the atmosphere by venting from the interior in cryovolcanic eruptions. If so, the amount of methane, and the temperature on Titan, may have fluctuated dramatically in Titan's past.

"We are carbon-based life, and understanding how far along the chain of complexity towards life that chemistry can go in an environment like Titan will be important in understanding the origins of life throughout the universe," added Lorenz. Cassini's next radar flyby of Titan is on Feb. 22, when the radar instrument will observe the Huygens probe landing site. For images and more information visit: http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov .

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Cassini-Huygens mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The radar instrument was built by JPL and the Italian Space Agency, working with team members from the United States and several European countries.

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A Way of Seeing

SUBHEAD: Seeing and loving the mutual interdependence of all the elements of the universe.

 By Namaste Bodhisantra on 4 June 2009 for Paul Chefurka -  
(http://paulchefurka.ca/Worldview.html)

 
Image above: Detail of oil painting by Alex Grey titled "Oversoul", 1997. From www.alexgrey.com

All form is a manifestation of the formless, arising from it and returning to it. Everything is interconnected. This recognition is fundamental to understanding our universe, and to the right action that springs from understanding. Consciousness is independent of physical form, and is somehow imbued into it. Consciousness is not simply an emergent property of the brain. The consciousness of humans and other life forms is reality's way of experiencing itself.

We are the eyes of the universe, and the more conscious we become the more clearly the universe "sees" itself. This consensual reality we inhabit here is "Earth School". If there is a purpose to life, it is to learn the lessons we need to become fully human. The most important lessons are love, liberation and the sacredness of interconnection.

The sense of separation that we feel (mind/body, matter/spirit, self/other, humans/resources) gives rise to the grasping or attachment that is the source of all of our misery, and by extension also the misery we humans inflict on the non-human world.

This is why healing our sense of separation is of crucial importance. If there is such a thing as "Evil", at its core is the feeling of separation. If there is such a thing as "Good", its foundation is the awareness of interconnection. Love and compassion are the inevitable outcome of realizing the sacredness of interconnection, which is an aspect of awakening. Each of us who has awakened has a deep responsibility to help others awaken in turn. We are all bodhisattvas now.