50 Billion Suns! -The Biggest Single Object in the Universe -A Galaxy Insight

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Roughly 1 million Earths fit in to the sun.  So, multiply 50 billion, by 1 million (50,000.000.000 x 1,000,000 = 50,000,000,000,000,000 Earths [That's 50 Quadrillion])  I suddenly don’t feel so fat.

Based on this self-regulating maximum rate, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts, and the European Southern Observatory, Chile, have calculated an upper limit for these mega-mammoth masses.  Fifty billion suns, that’s 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 kg, otherwise known as “ridiculously stupidly big” and triple the size of the largest observed black hole, OJ 287.

50 Billion Suns! -The Biggest Single Object in the Universe -A Galaxy Insight

James Lovelock says the human race’s only hope is to adapt - fixing global warming will just make it worse

I have always felt that James Lovelock was on to something with his Gaia theory of Earth, which as The Daily Galaxy states, “the Earth is essentially a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism.

But, in this case, I hope that he is wrong.  According to his latest thoughts on global warming, it is really too late to do anything about it, and the “affluenza” that Thomas Friedman emphasizes in his book, ‘Hot, Flat, and Crowded‘ has taken over the developing world is starting to affect the planet.

Here is the kicker, not only is it too late to do anything about it, according to Lovelock, doing too much to fix it might actually make it worse.  Essentially, he says we should be more responsible for the sake of it and just learn how to adapt to what is about to happen to us as a race of people.

It also brings to mind a comedy sketch I saw by George Carlin when he said something like:

“The planet has been through a lot worse than us.
Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through
earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar
flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the
poles…hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and
asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires,
erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages…And we think some plastic
bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The
planet…the planet…the planet isn’t going anywhere. WE ARE!” Here is the whole thing, but in typical Carlin fashion, it includes a lot of profanity.

The Status of “Spaceship Earth”

It’s a horrible catch 22 situation that leaves only a very small gap for any joy at all. If we continue to do nothing (note the use of the word continue), then we will doom ourselves. If we do do something, like a massive cut back in the emission of carbon in to our atmosphere, Lovelock believes that we would further damage Earth.

“Any economic downturn or planned cutback in fossil fuel use, which lessened aerosol density, would intensify the heating,” Lovelock will say, in a lecture to the Royal Society today. “If there were a 100 per cent cut in fossil fuel combustion it might get hotter not cooler. We live in a fool’s climate. We are damned if we continue to burn fuel and damned if we stop too suddenly.”

US Defense Intelligence Agency wastes taxpayer money with “gravity weapons nonsense”

Question for the fiscally conservative reader…is government waste only government waste when it is money and resources wasted on liberal causes?

Fiscal conservatism and fiscal prudence have come to mean two different things to me.  Fiscal conservatism has evolved in to a phrase applied to any kind of spending that does not take place on what a political conservative would consider to be a liberal or progressive cause.  (Which is hogwash.)  Fiscal prudence, on the other-hand, sufficiently describes transparent and financially sound expenditures, regardless of political ideology.

I think it is necessary to differentiate between the two because of government waste like that which is listed here by New Scientist magazine.  Typically, this line-item would fall under ‘defense’ spending, which would usually satisfy a fiscally conservative (but not necessarily a libertarian) expenditure.

As the article states, the military could have asked any astrophysicist if this was possible and probably saved enormous sums of taxpayer money.  Instead, we have to chalk this one up to government waste, or fiscal imprudence.  (Because I am sure that fiscal conservatives will not want to take any of the credit for it.)

US investigation into gravity weapons ‘nonsense’ - tech - 19 December 2008 - New Scientist

If you think the idea of gravitational waves propelling interplanetary spacecraft sounds like science fiction, you’re in good company - any astrophysicist will rubbish the idea out of hand.

However, that didn’t stop the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from commissioning a report to investigate whether the elusive waves could pose a threat to US security.

The JASON Defense Advisory Group were also asked to judge whether high-frequency gravitational waves could image the centre of the Earth, or be used for telecommunications.

Gravitational waves are ripples in space-time caused by the movement of an extremely large mass, such as a very dense star.

Yet even those from huge stellar events have been too weak to trip the most sensitive detectors. The best evidence is indirect, coming from observations of how superdense, binary neutron stars lose energy.

Should life end in 100 years or 500 million years? - You pick.

Some scientists say that if we let nature take it’s course, all life on Earth will cease to exist in 500 million years, which is roughly 7.5 billion years before the Sun eats the Earth.  However, being the self-destructive, scarcity-based people that we are, we also could cause most life on Earth to vanish over the next century.  What A.C. Grayling proposes in this issue of New Scientist magazine is to not treat the “zero-based” scenerios below as simply unlikely, but to make a repository of “what-if” solutions, or ideas, and be as prepared as possible with how to deal with them as they are happening.  (And hopefully to prevent them.)

Commentary: Ideas that could save humanity - science-in-society - 17 December 2008 - New Scientist

Rees itemises, in sober terms, the risks that humankind and the planet we inhabit now face from “error and terror” and natural disaster. The latter category encompasses collisions with asteroids and catastrophic earthquakes. The former includes devastating human-made viruses and other genetically modified organisms, super-intelligent computers, self-replicating nanotechnologies, nuclear war, climate change and more.

Both types of event are sometimes called “zero-infinity” scenarios: the chance they will happen is tiny; but if they do the scale of the disaster will be immense. The “zero” part of the equation might make them seem discountable, were it not for the fact that there is a new risk in the mix: a few screwball individuals, or even just one, can make the zero inflate to infinity by, say, creating and releasing a virus against which human life is powerless.

That chilling possibility is one worth remembering. I suggest building a Repository of Good Insights which should be brought out and aired at regular intervals, lest we forget. If any of them should be needed, whether for speculative or for practical reasons, it would save time not to have to reinvent them - and in the latter kind of case it might save our skins, too.

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Consciousness revisited - interconnectedness between all things

A couple of weeks ago I asked the question, “Is consciousness nothing more than a survival mechanism for the human body’s ecosystem,’ but then I read the ‘Space Zen’ article from ‘The Daily Galaxy’ that delves even deeper in to the human conciousness farther than I was thinking about it at the time.  The question that I had asked was related to a white blood cell attacking a piece of bacterium in the human body.  I was looking at the question from a microscopic level up instead of a macroscopic level down.  I was also looking at it from the point of view of a human on Earth, as opposed to all things, living or not.

As the ‘Daily Galaxy’ points out, consciousness is defined simply as ‘the most basic level of awareness.’  From that point of view, even plants have been shown to have a particular level of awareness.  (If you happened to catch the banal [Yes!  10 points for use of the word 'banal'] movie ‘The Happening,’ you would be fully aware of this concept.)  This does not disprove the question of a possible purpose of consciousness being a survival mechanism.  However, it does illustrate the idea that the mere existence of consciousness is not solely a means to exist.  Consciousness, while highly developed in human beings, is perhaps one of the simplest building blocks of our universe - an interconnectedness between all things, both animate and inanimate.

In February, 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced the little understood phenomenon sometimes called the “Overview Effect”. He describes being completely engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness. Without warning, he says, a feeling of bliss, timelessness, and connectedness began to overwhelm him. He describes becoming instantly and profoundly aware that each of his constituent atoms were connected to the fragile planet he saw in the window and to every other atom in the Universe. He described experiencing an intense awareness that Earth, with its humans, other animal species, and systems were all one synergistic whole. He says the feeling that rushed over him was a sense of interconnected euphoria. He was not the first—nor the last—to experience this strange “cosmic connection”.

What legacy will humans leave in the rocks - Ego Alert

I am just full of attacks on your ego today at DaddyHogwash.com.  The following excerpt is from the book, ‘The Earth After Us; What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks,’ which I just added to my list of books to read or have read.  The author is Jan Zalasiewicz.

Some of you may have seen the History Channel special called ‘Life after People‘ which covers a very similar topic.  What made it interesting is that it worked on a time-line by showing what would the world be like the next day after people, 10 years after people, 100 years after people, etc.  It followed this trend all the way until after there is essentially no trace left of human existence on Earth.

It is after all traces of human existence have disappeared that this book appears to pick up.  I am looking forward to it.  (Not the end of human existence.  I mean the book.)

“The surface of the Earth is no place to preserve deep history. This is in spite of – and in large part because of – the many events that have taken place on it. The surface of the future Earth, one hundred million years now, will not have preserved evidence of contemporary human activity,” Zalasiewicz writes. “One can be quite categorical about this. Whatever arrangement of oceans and continents, or whatever state of cool or warmth will exist then, the Earth’s surface will have been wiped clean of human traces.”

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Watch for a really big moon tonight - Biggest in 15 years

Send pictures to karlfrankjr@gmail.com and we can post an album.

Tonight’s Moon is biggest in 15 years - space - 12 December 2008 - New Scientist

The full Moon will loom larger in the sky on Friday than it has since 1993, as it will be nearly as close as it ever comes to Earth in its orbit.

The Moon does not orbit Earth in a perfect circle. Instead, it follows an elliptical path that brings it 50,000 kilometres closer to our planet on one side of its orbit (called perigee) than the other (apogee).

On 12 December, the Moon will enter its full phase, when its disc appears completely illuminated by the Sun, just four hours after reaching its closest point to Earth. This will make it 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full Moons in 2008, though the difference will be hard to distinguish by eye (see the difference in the full Moon’s size in 2004).

Does water vapor on alien planet equal alien life elsewhere?

Considering there are billions of stars in our galaxy, and billions of galaxies in the universe, (more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all of the beaches of Earth) the fact that Nasa scientists have found a planet only 63 light-years from Earth with water-vapor in its atmosphere is quite amazing.  It leads me to believe that it is more likely that there is some form of life elsewhere in the universe than not.  Of course, I have felt that way for quite awhile now.

Water Vapor Confirmed on Alien Planet | Wired Science from Wired.com

The unequivocal signature of water vapor has been found on a planet beyond our solar system.

Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers detected the steamy signature of water vapor in the light coming from a large exoplanet circling around a star about 63 light-years from Earth. Though it’s not the first sign of water vapor around this planet, it’s the strongest evidence yet.

The planet, HD 189733b, is what’s called a “Hot Jupiter” — a boiling, gigantic gas planet more akin to our own Jupiter or Saturn than to a terrestrial planet like Earth. It’s not a good candidate itself for alien life, but the successful detection of water vapor here, in the location and quantities that theorists predicted, bodes well for further studies of more promising locales for extraterrestrial life.

Daddy Hogwash Remainders: December 5, 2008

Costco offering 2-for-1 LCD HDTVs as low as $1200 for Christmas

What you should do when you’ve been laid off

The new “McDouble” spotted at McDonald’s

Can the world’s most powerful flashlight light a cigarette?

Population of Earth by 2050?  What’s your guess?

How to prod the unemployment office into action

Daddy Hogwash Remainders: December 4, 2008

Testing Chuck E. Cheeses Restaurants for bacteria will likely give you nightmares

PrettySinful pledges to stop calling children’s clothes “sexy”

Will Jupiter cause Mercury to slam in to the Earth?

What you should tip

Ancient supernova explosion glimpsed anew

5 new views of the Big Bang

Daddy Hogwash Remainders: December 1, 2008

A new picture of Early Earth

Prepare for the SATs without opening a book.

The Science of Breakfast - Mom was right about Breakfast

Palin’s Star Dims as Networks barely cover her speech in Georgia

Tina Fey explains her facial scar

Monday Night: Planets Align in a Frown