Stephen Hawking on Aliens and Resource Depletion

Don’t talk to aliens, warns Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking…suggested that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist — but that instead of seeking them out, humanity should be doing all it that can to avoid any contact.

…Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Hawking’s logic on aliens is, for him, unusually simple. The universe, he points out, has 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. In such a big place, Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

“To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational,” he said.

…The answer, he suggests, is that most of it will be the equivalent of microbes or simple animals — the sort of life that has dominated Earth for most of its history.

…a few life forms could be intelligent and pose a threat. Hawking believes that contact with such a species could be devastating for humanity.

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: “We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they can reach.”

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is “a little too risky”. He said: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

…Similarly, Lord Rees, the astronomer royal, warned in a lecture earlier this year that aliens might prove to be beyond human understanding.

“I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can’t conceive,” he said. “Just as a chimpanzee can’t understand quantum theory, it could be there are aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains.”

The Sunday Times

On Snow Storms and the Jet Stream

"...In the past two decades, snow cover has expanded across the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Siberia, just north of a series of exceptionally high mountain ranges, including the Himalayas, the Tien Shan and the Altai.

The high topography of Asia influences the atmosphere in profound ways.

The jet stream, a river of fast-flowing air five to seven miles above sea level, bends around Asia’s mountains in a wavelike pattern, much as water in a stream flows around a rock or boulder.

The energy from these atmospheric waves, like the energy from a sound wave, propagates both horizontally and vertically.

As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.

The sun’s energy reflects off the bright white snow and escapes back out to space.

As a result, the temperature cools.

When snow cover is more abundant in Siberia, it creates an unusually large dome of cold air next to the mountains, and this amplifies the standing waves in the atmosphere, just as a bigger rock in a stream increases the size of the waves of water flowing by.

The increased wave energy in the air spreads both horizontally, around the Northern Hemisphere, and vertically, up into the stratosphere and down toward the earth’s surface.

In response, the jet stream, instead of flowing predominantly west to east as usual, meanders more north and south.

In winter, this change in flow sends warm air north from the subtropical oceans into Alaska and Greenland, but it also pushes cold air south from the Arctic on the east side of the Rockies.

Meanwhile, across Eurasia, cold air from Siberia spills south into East Asia and even southwestward into Europe.

That is why the Eastern United States, Northern Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinarily snowy and cold winters since the turn of this century. Most forecasts have failed to predict these colder winters, however, because the primary drivers in their models are the oceans, which have been warming even as winters have grown chillier.

They have ignored the snow in Siberia..."

Judah Cohen

 

Why isn't the the government testing for Mercury etc..., from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?

FDA Not Testing Gulf Seafood for Mercury, Arsenic or Other Heavy Metals Because "We Do Not Expect to See an Increase Based on this Spill"

Congressman Markey's subcomittee...got the Food and Drug Administration to admit that fish are not being tested from oiled areas...

The FDA also admitted that it is not testing for mercury, arsenic or other toxic heavy metals, because - wait for it - the FDA doesn't expect to see an increase of these toxins from the oil spill...

The FDA's statement is similar to NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco's recent assertion that oil doesn't bioaccumulate in fish, and that fish naturally "degrade and process" the oil.

The FDA also admitted that it is not testing for the most toxic bioaccumulating metabolites of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

George Washington
via Tyler

"What would happen if a tropical storm hit the oil floating in the Gulf?"

Hurricane vs. Oil Slick

...the annual hurricane season begins on June 1, and some scientists are predicting an above-average year with 15 named storms and eight hurricanes. It sounds like a deadly combination—but what would actually happen if a storm like Katrina tracked across the spill in the Gulf?

It could make things even worse. At least one forecast team puts the chance of a strong hurricane hammering some part of the Gulf Coast this year at 44 percent...

...In the Northern Hemisphere, hurricanes rotate counterclockwise, with the largest storm surge occurring where the winds blow in the direction the storm as a whole is traveling—that's in front of the eye and off to the right. 

...So if a powerful storm approached the slick from the southwest, say, its most potent winds would push the oil forward, instead of sweeping it off to the side and out of the storm's path. If the storm then plowed into the Gulf Coast, you'd expect an oily landfall.

...It's even possible that an oil slick could make a powerful hurricane a little stronger. Oil is darker than water, and so it absorbs more sunlight while also blocking evaporation from the sea surface. That means the spill could be trapping heat in one part of the ocean. If a storm passed over and churned up the surface of the water, that potential hurricane energy might then be released.

Chris Mooney
Slate, May 21, 2010

More Volcanic Ash for Europe

Iceland's volcano sends more ash towards Europe

Iceland's Eyjafjoell volcano threatened European skies with a new ash cloud Friday raising the risk of more flight cancellations, officials said.

"Renewed and more intensive ash eruptions took place overnight and as a result, the area of potential higher ash contamination is forecast to extend from Iceland as far south as the western edge of the Iberian Peninsula during the day," Eurocontrol, the European intergovernmental air traffic control coordinator, said.

"Lava has stopped running from the crater and the eruption is now again an explosive eruption," Icelandic geologist Bjoern Oddson said.

...According to the Brussels-based Eurocontrol, the areas where the volcanic ash concentration were likely to exceed engine tolerance levels were to the west of north-west Europe.

"Transatlantic flights are being re-routed south of the affected area which could cause delays to these flights."

The ash cloud was predicted to reach up to 35,000 feet (some 10,500 metres), far higher than in recent days and thus affecting more overflying planes.

...Last month the Icelandic volcanic caused travel chaos, with airspaces closed over several European nations.

It was the biggest aerial shutdown in Europe since World War II, with more than 100,000 flights cancelled and eight million passengers affected. The airline industry said it lost some 2.5 billion euros.

The Economic Times

Life

1.      Beginning with none of the oxygen that we breath, it is estimated that life on Earth has been around for about 3.9 billion years.  

 

Somewhere in the first billion years or so, some life forms started excreting oxygen, which poisoned and killed all of the other life forms on the planet at the time.

 

It took about 2 billion years to get to the level of oxygen we have now.

 

 

2.      Out of the estimated 100 million asteroids that that intersect with the Earth’s orbit around the sun, there are about 2,000 big enough to cause a major extinction.  Mass extinctions of life on Earth occurred 440,  251 (asteroid),  210 and 65 (asteroid)  million years ago.  About 74,000 years ago, a volcano caused the last widespread extinction.

 

If the average species on Earth lasted about four million years, chances are that 99.99% of the approximately thirty billion species of everything that has ever lived on Earth is extinct.

 

The more complex life was, the faster it may have disappeared.

 

 

3.      If life on Earth were one day, a big meteor would have hit it about every 3 minutes.  Plants on land showed up around 10 P. M., or about 450 million years ago.  Insects showed up around 10:30 P.M. and dinosaurs about 11 P.M. 

 

No one knew about dinosaurs until 1855.

 

Some scientists figure Homo Sapiens have been around somewhere between 150,000 to 1,800,000 years, or about 20 seconds before midnight, or .04% or less of the approximate age of the planet.  Modern human beings have existed for about 10,000 years, or 0.0001% of Earth’s age.

.

Don’t worry, be happy

 

-Bobby Mcferrin

Earth

1.      Earth revolves around and receives light and energy from the Sun, whose core is estimated to be 27,000,000° F.  The Sun’s interior could hold 1.3 million Earths.

 

The Sun appears to have been active for 4.6 billion years and may have enough fuel to go on for another five billion years or so. 

 

Earth is about 4.55 billion years old.

 

About 50,000,000 years after Earth was formed, an asteroid and/or another planet about the size of Mars crashed into it, creating the moon.

 

 

3.      Earth is one of nine known planets in our solar system.

 

Earth orbits the sun at 66,000 miles per hour and is spinning at 1,041 miles per hour at the equator.

 

 

3.      The surface of Earth is made up of big slowly moving plates, the center is about 3,959 miles away, and is probably hot in the middle.

 

 

4.      When comparing Earth to the rest of the universe, it is very, very, very small. 

 

So is the Sun, the solar system and the Milky Way.

The Speed of Light

1.      Earth’s view of the universe is a reflection of light from what distant objects looked like when light bounced off them in the past.

 

If you were at the center of the galaxy looking at Earth, you would be seeing what it looked like 30,000 years ago. 

 

If light from the middle of our the Milky Way takes 30,000 years to get to Earth, than a spaceship would have to travel at the speed of light for about 30,000 years to get to the center of the galaxy.

 

 

2.      The speed of light is 5,880,000,000,000 or 5.88 trillion miles per year, meaning that light goes 186,282.4 miles per second, 11,176,944 miles per minute, and 670,616,640 miles per hour.

 

A bolt of lightning travels at about 270,000 miles per hour, or about .0004% as fast as the speed of light.

 

So far the fastest man made object has been a Voyager spacecraft, which has traveled at about 35,000 miles per hour or about 13% as fast as a bolt of lightning.

 

 

3.      If a spaceship could travel 250,000 miles per hour without stopping or hitting anything, it would take at least 11,276 years to get to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, where there may be at least a 99.99% chance that there won’t be a habitable planet orbiting around it. 

 

At 250,000 miles per hour, it would take 80,547,945 years to get to the center of the Milky Way.

The Universe

1.      The universe is somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years old.  The last best consensus is about 13.7 billion years.

 

There might be other universes and/or other dimensions.

 

 

2.      Not including planets, the Sun is one of 100 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way.  There may be about 140 billion galaxies. 

 

Before 1923, no one knew there were any other galaxies.

 

 

3.      Carl Sagan calculated there could be 10 billion trillion planets in the universe of which we have found a few thousand.

 

If each star in the Milky Way has an average of one planet each, and one tenth of one percent of them has an environment that could support life (meaning 99.99% do not), there could be at least 200,000 planets in our galaxy that could be inhabited by human beings.

 

The problem is traveling to one.

 

 

4.      Everything in the universe is made of atoms, which are not visible to the human eye.

 

When something living dies or when an inanimate object disintegrates, the atoms that it was comprised of become part of something else.

 

Chances are that today’s atoms have been in existence since the beginning of the universe and possibly beforehand.

 

There is a possibility that today’s atoms may continue to exist after the currently known universe doesn’t exist anymore.

Monty python - universe song

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SY[/youtube]

If water was money and grass was credit, and Cheetahs and Gazelles were people, who would be who?

Current world population    6.8 billion

 

Net growth per day      218,030

 

2040 Forecast    9 billion

 

Census Bureau

 

There are probably already too many people on the planet.

 

We need to continue to decrease the growth rate

 of the global population.

 

The planet can't support many more people.

 

Dr Nina Fedoroff

National Medal of Science Laureate

Professor of Molecular Biology

Science and Technology Advisor

 to the US Secretary of State since 2007

 

If Gazelles need water and grass

and Cheetahs need water and Gazelles

and an abundance of sustenance leads to more Gazelles,

should more Gazelles and water lead to more Cheetahs?

 

If too many Gazelles relative to water and grass lead to fewer Gazelles,

do fewer Gazelles  =  fewer Cheetahs?

 

Population, when unchecked,

increases in a geometrical ratio.

 

Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio.

 

Thomas Robert Malthus

Suggested populations could increase faster than food supplies

Do some interest groups exaggeratewhile business interests belittlethe threat of climate change?

¶

Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic

how to recognize the real conclusions of science

and how to distinguish them

from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?

 

Partisans of this issue often wield vastly different facts

and sometimes seem to even live in different realities

 

Perhaps the only hope involves taking a stand

for a breed of journalism and commentary

that is not permitted to simply say anything

that is constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility

that are similar to the canons of modern science itself

 

Chris Mooney

Climate Change Myths and Facts

Washington Post, March 21, 2009

 

Does thinking you understand what another says

mean you hear what they mean?

 

Is an untruth disseminated as true a lie

if the truth remains unfound through incuriosity?

 

The partisan

when engaged in a dispute

cares nothing about the rights of the question

but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions

 

Plato

Why would some mainstream media personalities

criticize policy positions of some

while receiving undisclosed, indirect compensation from others

interested in non-attributed dissention?

Do some interest groups exaggeratewhile business interests belittlethe threat of climate change?

¶

Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic

how to recognize the real conclusions of science

and how to distinguish them

from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?

 

Partisans of this issue often wield vastly different facts

and sometimes seem to even live in different realities

 

Perhaps the only hope involves taking a stand

for a breed of journalism and commentary

that is not permitted to simply say anything

that is constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility

that are similar to the canons of modern science itself

 

Chris Mooney

Climate Change Myths and Facts

Washington Post, March 21, 2009

 

Does thinking you understand what another says

mean you hear what they mean?

 

Is an untruth disseminated as true a lie

if the truth remains unfound through incuriosity?

 

The partisan

when engaged in a dispute

cares nothing about the rights of the question

but is anxious only to convince his hearers of his own assertions

 

Plato

Why would some mainstream media personalities

criticize policy positions of some

while receiving undisclosed, indirect compensation from others

interested in non-attributed dissention?