Tune in, Turn on!

Considering that quantum physics now views atoms as some kind of wave construct (a variety of static wave), it seems reasonable to use the same tools used in optics to manipulate them. In fact, viewed this way, matter, photons/light, and electromagnetic waves seem headed in the direction of being the same standing wave construct propagated in different media. It also opens the door to a myriad of unorthodox ways of handling these waves as well.

It should be just as possible to handle these waves using the tools created for other classes of waves.  For example, it would be conceivable to use what is called a comb filter, in the field of radio, and apply that to do something like filter everything out of water that is not H2O. Or filter H2O to produce hydrogen. What you could produce using a lens, I'm not all sure, but it should be an interesting experiment! And how about using a 'tuner' to release and refine gold out of gold ore? The possibilities are huge and wide open. A plant 'tuning' hydrogen, then burning it could replace coal and nuclear power plants and producing pure water for human use.

My biggest hope is that someone, somewhere will read these crazy theories of mine and attempt to find out if it's more than a dream. The number of human problems that could be solved seems to me to make such research a  higher priority than a lot of other things being studied today.

In the long run, such filters and tuners  could open the door to the universe.

Touchdown!

Against a whole lot of odds, the Rosetta mission has succeeded. The Human race now has a temporary, tiny foothold on the core of a comet.

Just getting there was a monumental task. The story started ten years ago. On top of a rocket sits the main probe and a tiny instrument lander. The lander will be like a pebble tossed down a well. Our little pebble will sit in the cometary well and hopefully tell us all kinds of things we don't know. The mission launches and one of the longest space missions in history begins.

Now we're faced with a slow motion chase. The probe can't head straight for the well. We don't have ability to fly something fast enough to make the 4 billion mile trip in any sane amount of time. A hundred year mission wouldn't be viewed as practical. So we sent it out in the wrong direction. Or at least nowhere near where the comet was. As is the case with most things involving orbits, it gets complicated. First we whip the probe around the Earth like a hula hoop in a classic slingshot maneuver. That gets things going much better than any rocket motor we could attach. Not to mention the amount of fuel needed. Still not fast enough. We send the probe to Mars, for it's help. Now we have a fast enough probe. All of 85,000 mph. Woot! Fast boat to China! NOT. I mean really. 85,000 mph. A mere 45000 years to the nearest star. Sigh. So  much for human ingenuity.

Well, our little pebble is on its way. We can sit back for the next 6 or 7 years and twiddle our thumbs.

Now it's 2014. The pebble is at the well and things get the scientific equivalent of exciting. Did we plan the orbit to the right well? Has anything interfered with the orbits of our pebble or the well? Will the pebble and the well end up in the same place at the same time? The number of things that could go wrong has probably kept our team's psychologist busy staving off anxiety attacks for most of the ten years.

But now we're up against the biggest gamble of all: tossing the pebble. The probe cosies up to our well. The pebble is tossed. A bunch of people are probably very close to breakdowns. Something goes wrong and the team finds out if stress can cause mass heart attacks in a group of people. Pure luck lends a hand. Our pebble's landing hardware and anchor has failed. Somewhere out in the dark and utter cold of space, something stopped working. Now our luck: the pebble lands anyway. Three bounces and it settles at the bottom of the well.

The relief is tremendous! Ten years work and billions of dollars have been well-spent. The pebble goes to work and we start getting back the very first pictures of a comet's core. It may be just black and white pictures of what looks like your average pile of rubble on Earth, but it's so very much more.

The pebble down, we are getting priceless data about what the solar system was like when the comet formed. The drama is not entirely over. The batteries powering all this activity have been sitting on the shelf for ten years and they don't last forever. So for the next 3 days they're being recharged by a solar panel array. Then it's back to work unlocking things hidden for eons.

We're just opening the book. There will be many chapters and it all adds up to a great treasure. I can't wait to read the next page!

Cold News From Outer Space

There's no lack of news this time around and not all of it is good. Fortunately, even some of the bad news isn't so bad.

First off we lose two spacecraft in a matter of days. This is a disaster, because in the case of the Virgin Spacecraft Two, there was a fatality. Then there was the case of the unmanned SpaceX cargo launch that had to be aborted. Spaceflight really doesn't need this kind of disastrous news.

SpaceX says that the flaw in their cargo rocket was caused by their "antique" Soviet engines that were built 40 years ago. That seems reasonable. What isn't so reasonable is that SpaceX was using those engines because they were unable to get American made engines that fit. That is very sad. The once pioneer United States lost the edge.

And the other crash. One brave test pilot lost. It's unclear what happened, though it looked like the wings or entire wing section came loose and started fluttering. Did the pilot unlock the wings too soon? Did the lock fail? It may be a year before we know. The surviving pilot is in no shape to tell us at this time.

The tiny silverish lining is that neither outfit is giving up. In Virgin's case, none of the reservations for future flights have been canceled and in fact, they had two new reservations on the day of the crash. I give those people my heartfelt thanks, as well as Richard Branson himself.

It was a tragedy, but it could have been so much worse. Maybe some company will decide that we need to get American rocket engines back in production. It's been that 40 years. Let's see if we can't do a little better in engine design!

Now on to happier things (at least in one case).

Next week there will be a BIG show! On the 12th the Rosetta probe will land ON a comet core. There was a mission that landed on an asteroid and returned, but this comet is the next best thing to an alien visitor! It was created during the same times as our solar system and gathering samples will tell us all kinds of things. Think about this - if such a comet ever decides to take a shot at Earth, we'll have a far better chance of changing the outcome.
Speaking of far, it will be between 3 and 4 billion miles out when the probe lands.

They're going to be a long way from home!

Dig It

Let's get right to work. This time we'll continue the attack on the tiny end of the spectrum. This in an attempt to get a handle of any kind on gravity. I'm slightly hindered by the lack of a lab and a research staff ☺.  A simple search reveals that there are all kinds of forces that have been quantified. That certainly doesn't help.

So what we have at a 'macro' level is gravity, magnetism, electro-magnetism, and electricity. That seems to argue that we've missed a category: magneto-gravitic, for want of an actual term. If such a thing exists, that is where we would look for an 'anti-gravity' drive.

Of course since we can't detect gravity, it may be a while before that concept does us any good. What's that you say? You can detect gravity (as he jumps up and down like a monkey)?

Sorry, but you can't detect gravity any more than Heisenberg can tell you where that phantom electron is. What you and every other thing in the solar system can detect is the effects of gravity. And darned happy about it, generally speaking. However, we're left with the same sinking feeling we got when we tried to nail down the atom. Yes, I know that there are things out there called gravity detectors, but it's the same story as before- we can see the critter's tracks, but the animal itself is invisible. We'll deal with the atom later. Maybe we can figure out where it went by then.

The trouble is, nobody can prove what gravity is or how it propagates. Since we can't detect it, we're going to have a rough time doing anything with it. It seems reasonable to consider it a force, but there are so many forces (well, at least they have been named forces... it's another case of The Cat Syndrome). And how do we know that they aren't all the same force with another name? We don't. There you are. The 'experts' really hate admitting that they have no clue. I don't. We are simply clueless about most things that happen at the atomic level. This is not to say that we can't use what we've deduced to operate these forces- atomic fission bombs still wipe out cities and all, but we're frankly jungle savages playing with an iPod. We can poke the buttons and make it run, but we have no real clue of how or why it works. We find something that goes boing when we poke it there and then we scribble down a theory that describes why.

For heaven's sake, the entire realm of physics and chemistry is loaded with enough fudge-factor numbers to sink a doughnut. Or an aircraft carrier. That alone should be screaming that there are things going on that we know nothing about! There are huge gaps in what we know about atomic and molecular forces and I seriously doubt that we'll make any progress until we do. It's really disappointing to me, but there's no choice. We have to build the foundation before the roof goes up.

The Question

I saw something on History Channel that frankly caused me to stop dead. That doesn't happen a lot. The fact that something incredibly tiny stopped me, just goes to show.

Yes, today's post is heading in the opposite direction from outer space. The subject is the Higgs-Boson particle. As we know, this is the infamous God Particle. It is supposed to provide the attribute of mass to everything else in the universe. I know I've expressed some doubt about this in the past and this new info just makes things more confusing.

It's said that an atom is both a particle AND a wave. That still sounds like something you spread in the garden to promote plant growth. However, when scientists tried to get close enough to see what's going on, they failed. Why? Because the darn atom disappeared ! Plain and simple disappeared. Much like the slightly less famous Snark, the place where the atom under study was supposed to be was empty. And yet, when they tried firing an electron at the spot, it showed something. I would love to integrate what happened into some kind of picture of the basic structure of matter. It resisted. In fact, what showed up was a diffraction pattern on the target behind the atom. That argues for some kind solid structure inside the atom. But we can't actually see any such structure, because we can't even see the atom! AND, the fired "particle", while it obviously interacted with something in the general locus of where they thought it was, didn't hit anything on the way through. It's path was affected, yet the result wasn't that of a single particle of anything hitting anything. No, instead, it was that of a transmissive wave[1] moving past a a refraction grid.

[1] a transmissive wave is a wave that moves "matter" along with a waveform. (Like water does)

Let's summarize:

Matter is made up of atoms.
Atoms were considered solid particles.
When looked at, it becomes obvious that atoms are not matter as we thought.
Atoms aren't there, but they interact with "particles" in some manner.
Atoms create refraction patterns when "particles" pass through them.

This reads like sheer nonsense. It leaves entirely open the question of what it is that isn't there, yet interacts with things. And, if atoms aren't there, how do we manage to do things that seem like we're doing? If atoms aren't there, how do we operate a particle collider? Or set off an atom bomb? Where's the fizz in fission? How do we walk across the street???

We have accepted that matter and energy are the same (right?). We run atom bombs on that premise. Now we have to try to find out what we're doing when we do it. If the atom is some kind of energy matrix, then there is no such thing as solid matter!!!

Sorry I  had to let you have that one right between the eyes, but there isn't any honest way to soften the blow. And a huge chunk of physics and science in general just went up in a puff of non-smoke. I guess we can continue to call what we thought we had "matter". We need a tag and this one isn't attached to anything.

Something is making matter matter! If matter is real, perhaps an atom is a set of standing waveforms that is static and stable, although it can be modified via physics or chemistry. Where this leaves quarks, electrons, neutrons, and protons, I don't know. It's clear that we can't really see them either. And what about the small and large atomic forces? Where do they fit in? Do we think that a Higgs-Boson is also an energy waveform/matrix that parks itself in the matrix of the atom and somehow makes it 3-dimensional so that it can hang itself on the fabric of space? Or maybe the H-B connects the "atom" to space so that it can be moved. Then we could say that inertia is the resistance of the "atom" to being moved elsewhere away from the spot where it was hanging. Is gravity simply an electromagnetic effect that happens because the charge on the Boson wants to fill empty space in the matrix that surrounds it? Or is it something different now?

As you can tell, this discovery is a mite more impactful than any other discovery in A While. It's going to change our entire view of the universe and literally everything in it. We know a great many things work, but we now have no idea WHY. This brings up the minor question of why this news isn't being screamed from rooftops, but the main news item makes everything else inconsequential.

I hope that someone can come along to straighten things out. I don't like feeling that I could disappear at any moment. Perhaps, like Peter Pan, we can think happy thoughts and fly around the room while wait for an answer. At this point, there's no apparent reason we can't. As Waldo said, "Nothing is certain! Magic is everywhere!".

What keeps me up, nights

And no, it's not that... 😇

It's actually something I wonder about- if we sent a starship, would anyone go? And if they are willing to go, are they worth sending?

Yes, that's harsh, but I'm worried. Yes, there are actually 8000 or so people (out of 330 million) who are willing to turn their back on blue skies for the rest of their lives for whatever reasons. So out of those 8000, surely there will be 24 who have the right skillset to make it worth sending them. Right?

But my worry is this: the skillset isn't the whole story. The rest of the story goes like this. It takes a certain type of person to be a pioneer. Make no doubts about it, that's who these people are- pioneers. Pioneers are seldom people who fit in with others well or they wouldn't be good pioneers. They have to be willing to take the entire human race and kiss them goodbye. That's true for our future Martians and much more totally true for anyone willing to take that ride to the stars.

Our future Martians can have some hope that they can catch a ride back some day and that others will follow their lead to redder pastures, so to speak. The pioneers on the starship may have to give up even that much hope. No further influx of new faces, no messages from home after a half hour wait, no nothing.

So... how many hardy pioneers do we have now? When we get where we're going, we'd better dam well have more than a couple dozen in the crew! For one thing, we'd better have either enough people for a diverse gene pool or a wide selection of frozen eggs and sperm (inside heavy shielding, too). I would also think that the entire crew does a rehearsal of a few years in isolation. If someone can't get along during that period, they have no business on a starship! Maybe if the crew can stand being alone with that limited interaction, they can stand giving up the rest of us forever.

Pioneering in real life is not a walk in the park. Find in one person a good team player and someone able to stand very real isolation. Best to give the crew the opportunity to bring along whatever books, movies, or other trinkets they feel like bringing. Anything to maintain that delicate tie with the rest of humanity, even if it's mostly an illusion.

Perhaps the best thing would be enforced group activities. Our own pioneers had little (I speak of the Plymouth Colony folk) but their Sunday worship. They didn't have square dances or many group meals, unlike the pioneers 200 years later. Perhaps by then people had learned that lesson. I like to think that wagon train leaders had given that some tiny bit of consideration. And lastly, the captain has to maintain the discipline of crew structure. He's going to carry one helluva load, I assure you. I'm reminded of the hero of Robert Heinlein's book Tunnel In The Sky. He found all this out by having it smack him in the face. Sink or swim. So expect the crew selection team to experience any number of nervous breakdowns and anxiety attacks. Heaven help them if they pick the wrong people. I once went through the personality test for the theoretical crew of a theoretical starship and qualified for the captain's billet. I've never quite figured out if I was happy about that or not.

Most days I think I'm rather proud of that, so on those days I guess their testing may not have been too far off. Maybe.  I do know that I'm a lot closer to the needed type the older I get. Yes, that means that the crew really should have some 'village elders' along. There are things that we learn about ourselves and life that simply can't be learned in less time. Oh, it can be passed on, but it's really rare to find anyone younger who will not only listen, but believe and act on what he's told. Usually they're too busy making their own mistakes.

That's the value of age, you see- we've already made all the stupid mistakes.

Something's Rotten

As is said... Where might this decayed garbage be hiding? Somewhere, or we could say nearly everywhere, in the Great Lakes.

Today we're going to drag our selves back out of the infinite into the local view. That's simply because I'm interested  in the planet we live on, as well as ones our race may some day occupy.

Lets look at the corpse as it lies today. We have five lakes that comprise the largest body of fresh water on the planet. Three of the five lakes live inside a giant(!) stone bowl. This bowl is (from a suitable viewpoint) almost perfectly circular and hundreds of miles in diameter. That seems a might suspicious to me. Before we look a lot closer at that fact, let's give a glance at the rest of the crime scene.

Initially we have an immense salt bed. Immense like it contains 35 percent of the salt on Earth. We'll leave the obvious question of how salt, supposedly laid down in the world's biggest shallow bay happens to be that circular aside for a bit.
Now, over top of the salt deposits that form hundreds of feet thick we get a layer of limestone. Ok, you say, limestone is formed by marine deposits. That leaves aside the issue of why we suddenly have thousands of years of tiny marine life surviving in what might be said to be a giant salt pan. Anyway, we now have the salt bed with an overlay of soft rock of an unknown initial thickness.

Then the whole thing gets much cooler. Literally. We start suffering chills. Alternating periods of intense cold and what we would consider warmth. Maybe not 'heat', but warmth. That meant ice. Lots and lots of ice. Dirty ice, of course. Rivers of ice spreading out from the poles. The weight bearing down is numbers beyond human scales to the extent that it becomes meaningless, because we don't have a human scale that big. That weight is pushing the crust of the earth down.

Then it gets warm. Much warmer than the melting point of water. The ice sheet over a mile thick suddenly goes away in spectacular fashion. That gives plenty of fresh water to wash away those hundreds of feet of salt. 'But wait', you say, 'the salt didn't get washed away!'. True.

Here is where things stop following any sort of logical sense. Now we have even more fun. This circular patch in the middle of the limestone turns into something else- Dolostone. It's much harder than limestone, but limestone is the base material that gets "recrystalized" into Dolostone. Geologists don't say why or how it gets changed or why that change doesn't affect all of the limestone in that formation or why the Dolostone is perfectly circular.

Let's start thinking about that. If salt water (ground water in aquifers under this hard Dolostone layer) can change limestone left from marine deposition, then every ocean must have Dolostone flooring, right? ... They don't??? Hmm...

All right. Now, the shape. Perfect circle. What do we know that produces perfect circles?

Aha. Now we're getting somewhere. What's that you say? Craters? Why, yes, craters are perfect circles. And the size? Yes, we do know several craters of that scale and bigger, a couple on Earth. The dinosaur-killer made a crater 150 miles or so across. Is there any supporting evidence of the crime? Actually, yes. Notice we originally mentioned only three lakes. The other two, Superior and Ontario aren't at all like the other three. Those two were formed by the ice sheet grinding out immense valleys formed by Basalt. Yes, Basalt extruded by volcanic action. Rifts, according to geologists. These rifts radiate away from that giant stone bowl. Hmm again.

So... Giant metamorphic stone bowl, perfectly circular, with big-ass cracks in the Earth's crust radiating away from it.

Starts to add up, eh? Yes, ice is involved in trying to wipe out the evidence of the crime, but it's not involved in the original scene. So lets apply logic from the way we know the process works:

Salt gets laid down over millions of years in a very shallow salt lake, about the same time as coal beds are forming in nearby swamps. Finally the sea level rises and the limestone forms. This process uses up more eons, forming the cap over the salt.

Now comes the crime itself- an asteroid (ten mile diameter at a shallow angle? Or even a graze?) blasts a hot circular crater in the middle of a gigantic covered salt bed. There may even be a real hole hidden under things in the center. Who knows? No-one has looked. No-one believes there's anything to look for. Limestone in a wide area slumps into a puddle of melted rock, perfectly circular as craters usually are, forming a protective cap over the salt. That protects it from the ravages of the flood of meltwater that retreating glaciers release. Radiating cracks from the blow release rivers of Basalt from deep below the crust. The resulting 'nuclear winter' actually causes the glaciers to expand into ice sheets. The rest proceeds as normal: ice melts, releasing oceans of water, first digging, and then filling the lakes. The land underneath is still bouncing back from the last ice age- 1800 feet so far, according to a program I just watched. So we now can figure out where the material came from that created the continental shelf. Not to mention the water that has submerged the shelf to today's about 400 foot level.

I leave it you to decide whether or not logic upholds either of these theories. I find the accepted theory a bit shaky when you try to build a story of what happened. Just remember that their version didn't come together until mere decades ago, so it's not like something discovered by Einstein, much less Newton.

Cairn

Cairn - a pile of local rocks marking a trail intended for backtracking or for others to follow...

Sorry that I haven't posted lately, but sometimes I get tied up in other things and don't get the time to eat 3 meals a day, much less post a blog.

I've been watching one of the Science Channel's shows about the current X Prize competition. The X Prize sponsors the privatization of space flight and the current target is the moon. Not that it's the only target, but that's the one they're leaning on right now. I have to admit that the presence of Helium3 and the prospect of nearly limitless clean power for our sadly depleted planet has a lot of appeal. In fact, I like it a lot more than the chances for fusion reactors happening any time soon.

Then we get to that next target: Mars.

I know... it's stale news to you young 'uns, but us old buggers were raised at a time when just reaching the moon was a marvel and Mars was about as reachable as the Holy Grail. The one outfit, SpaceX, that seems serious about going to Mars in person has a unique qualifier for people who want a shot at becoming Martians- it's a one-way trip. That's right, they're not offering any return trip. They still got over 8000 applicants, of course. Sadly, there are only 24 initial seats. Those who go will have to suffer all the usual crap that happens in an alpha test situation, plus the burdens imposed on their bodies by living in a low-g environment: muscle and bone atrophy and likely nightmares, though the public hasn't been informed of anything like that. They'll need to grow their own food, as well and someone will be tending the saw grass (that's the most efficient plant for photosynthesis). Sadly, the current NASA timetable pegs Mars to happen around 2035. Is it soon enough?

Clearly we're going to learn a huge amount simply by having people just living there on a permanent basis. Things that will be vitally important when we develop a starship.

Speaking of which, I have begun to wonder just what's going on. I mean that. Is the government entirely run by stupid (clinically deficient in intelligence) people? Could it possibly be? I've been wondering if we're just not being filled in on any progress towards a starship or has everything so far been a total failure? That's the basis for my earlier questions. If they're not stupid and they ARE working on the engineering part of it, then surely some progress should be evident. And they should not only say so, they should shout it off the roof of the White House. It would give us poor plebes some glimmer of hope. Not all of us on the outside are stupid.

We know that we are going to need an escape hatch sooner than later and we'd better damn well have one handy. Skip military spending or put a tax on sugary soft drinks, but get it done!

Enough. I would expect that astronomers will be refining the orbit track of Apophus in the next dozen years. If things turn ugly or just unlucky, I think it will leak and we can all panic in plenty of time to kiss our butts goodbye. That's when we'll find out just how smart we are. Are you smarter than a dinosaur?

Other than this, things have been remarkably quiet. At least quiet if you don't count certain volcanoes and earth quakes. I do have my own theory about quakes. It holds up pretty well so far. It seems obvious that if one edge of the Pacific plate, let's say in Alaska, lets go, then the other edges will have to adjust. Note that the latest initial tremor was around San Francisco, the next was in Alaska. Now, give the plate a year, maybe, to catch up the slack, then either New Zealand, Indonesia, or Japan is going to catch hell. South America isn't precisely safe, but they expect it. The one sticky wicket is southern California. That part hasn't really moved in far too long. Get this: small quakes are good. They show that the plates are sliding along and stress is minimal. Now Man comes along. He sucks as much water out of the ground as he can. Suddenly, the plate doesn't have the lubrication it needs and sticks... Until BOOM, very big quake. And that is not good. Or maybe you get a lot of sudden rain. And you get mudslides. And things get slippery...

Think about that next time you're out there watering your lawn....

Light the Way

I'm not sure how to slide into this subject.

'In the beginning there was darkness upon the face of the void...'

Before I run face first into this post, I have to wonder- was this just an expression in poetiic terms or did it intimate that people knew more about the universe than we have ever given them credit for? I suppose it was the former... I guess I'll go ask the Dogon People. Considering that the phrase was written circa 410 A.D., it leaves the question open to at least a teensy bit of wonder.

Now. It's suddenly 2.5 and something million years ago. Somewhere out there, a galaxy the size of our own is just as it is when we look at it right now and it's about to hit ours.

HMMM???

Yes, I thought that might cause you to stop dead. I haven't done the math all the way through; I do have a few other things to do besides sit here and write. Consider that  our neighbor M-31 (fondly known as the Andromeda galaxy) is going to 'hit' ours. That's a fact, so I'm assured. That galaxy was 2.54+- light years away when the light we see it by left that body of stars, etc. So... it's not really  where we see it, right? It's been trotting along during all that time. It's more complicated than that. I think there's some doppler effect there (the light is blue-shifted) and that may affect when we're seeing it.

Where does that leave us? Or when? I'm not at all sure, but I have this sneaky feeling that it's quite a few miles closer than it looks through Mr. Hubble's namesake. Now, I don't think we need to duck for cover just yet. Given the space between stars, we may not have to worry even comes the day the collision happens. It is, however, at least interesting to think about that day when the leading edge comes this way. Makes me wonder if anyone has calculated where the solar system will be in relation to the wedge-point. I couldn't find an intelligible reference for how fast M-31 is going relative to us, which doesn't make it any easier.

And this little exercise can be applied to other things. I speak of local stars. I don't have any idea if any  are headed this way, but given how close they are, I'd be real interested to know. If we saw something 4 lightyears from here, headed this way at half light-speed, I might be willing to get nervous. What's giving me a headache is trying to figure out just how much closer that thing would be. And just how long until we really do need to duck or run.

Remembrer what I said about building starships?

Mixed Bag

As the title says, a mixed bag. There are things going on in the world that are of interest. 

First off, NASA is said to be working on an interstellar drive. That's encouraging. At  least someone is doing something. I shouldn't say that. I'm sure there must be other groups working on this, they're simply not letting anyone know about it. Does that sound sort of like the usual m.o. for the government? What bothers me is that the government isn't widely known for having active imaginations working there. We need it sometime this century, after all.

Speaking of space, did you notice that our planet nearly got into a fender-bender this weekend? Well, it was minor. A rock 'only' the size of a house... Remember Meteor Crater in Arizona? About that size rock. Might put a little kink in your commute. It was first noticed about a week ago and they rather sat on the news until they were more sure it wouldn't hit us. Now, there seem to be a number of organizations working on detecting rocks like this, but the one I like best is the B612 Foundation. They want to put an infra-red satellite in an orbit a little closer to the sun and look back to the space around Earth in order to see things headed our way. They need donations to get the bird up by 2017, so please consider donating.

Up, Up, and Away... (eventually)

This should be a short note. It covers something that it seems people should have figured out about 50 years ago- Scrap NASA.

Ok, maybe not everyone. Just the nitwit who decided that launching rockets at the heavens was the way to get payloads in orbit.

There are two elements to being in orbit: be far enough away from the surface to be above most of the atmosphere, and be going fast enough (minimum) to keep up with any particular spot on the Earth's surface.

I know... I know... shooting off rockets is fun! But we're talking results, not entertainment. The same RESULTS can be obtained by a two-piece system consisting of a lifter that gets altitude (that distance-away-from-surface thing) from a large balloon and the actual spaceship that only needs to go up a little further and gain that slightly faster lateral speed.

So, we're talking a simple dirigible built for a reasonably high speed (horizontally) with gas bags sized to lift a few hundred tons. Once the spaceplane part lifts off, the lifter can practically drift back down. The spaceplane takes off from the lifter and accelerates up into space at whatever angle works best for the orbit it's headed for. It can glide back down. I think the space shuttle demonstrated that.

This whole scenario gives us an orbital delivery system that puts a lot of loose hardware in orbit without using disposable boosters or other trash-generating nonsense. I really think it might cut down on the physical risk to the crews, as well. If you design well and throw in some luck, the lifter could possibly rendezvous with an incoming ship and pick up the crew, if nothing else, in case of emergency. It beats the heck out of our current system.

This important, at least until we start mining asteroids. Any starship we build is going to eat up quite a bit of material. We might as well get it up there with a little finesse. It all hinges on kicking our addiction to loud noise  and bright lights.

That kind of leads me into one other thing already mentioned- where we're headed. The practical side of that will be both picking where we want to go and then getting there. And it is a practical problem. Perhaps we should send out some telescopes in opposite directions. When you look up àt the stars, they appear kinda 2D right? So we need some paralax. That could do a bunch of useful things. You can get a more accurate idea of how far away a star is, you can maybe get an even better idea about any planets where you're headed, and we may even see things we'd otherwise miss. It seems like a good investment, to me.

Perhaps it's good that we don't have an FTL drive. The crew won't have any doubt about which way is home. Imagine that we do have a warp drive (or a 'Punch' drive?). We go interstellar and suddenly we're there instead of here. You then count on being able to pick out one dimmish yellow dwarf out of billions of stars. Maybe even worse because you won't be 100% certain that where you are is where you wanted to go. Well, we will have even better computers and image-matching software. An additional issue is that at FTL speeds, what we aim at won't be where we see it when we get there. It'll be 10 or 20 or 50 years along its orbit. We will have to mind our p's and q's on the trip.

I'm going out and buy stock in yhe company that makes Carafate. There are going to be lots of ulcers before we call this job done!

Wherefor art thou going, dude?

I don't think that simply pointing in a random direction aand pulling the trigger will work well as a mechanism for picking a destination for our first interstellar journey. Don't get me wrong, we will learn a huge amount no matter where  we go. But it would perhaps be better if we pick someplace not too like Earth.

...! Hmm??? I assure you it's true- we should not pick a place too like our planet. Oh, sure, we'll face lots of problems. On the other hand, we may not have to face a long list of others. Maybe we should  pick a place that gives us easy probllems to work with. That means, to me, that we pick someplace that will not harbor life like us. Specifically life like micro-organisms. As a race that can't even travel around our own planet and be guaranteed to survive, do we want to tempt disaster by picking up something  while on vacation? I'm sure that we'll find something interesting no matter where we go.

I think that just picking the crew will provide us endless entertainment :). Can you imagine the newest prime-time show: Dancing TO the Stars... Anyway, it's going to be some rough job. We willl have to try to gather a large group to crew the ship and every one will have  to be honest about their opinions and emotions. I'll leave you to imagine how likely that is. And once you find ONE honest person, all you need is 5 or 10 thousand more. Why? Because if you can't find out how they really feel, how can you tell if they'll fit in with the rest of the crew? I guess, though, that in this large a crew, we can afford some people who simply don't care for the others (mildly). As I said, it's not going to be easy. Maybe we'd better start now...

Split Decision

Starships. Not really 'nuff said. Yes, I covered drives, but there is so much more to say. Everything from the structure of the hull to who should comprise the crew.

Let's just mention hulls for a moment. The issue is: should we go for a low-mass shell or should we tell the drive design gang to suck it up and use a hollow asteroid. I have to admit that unless someone drops a warp drive in our laps, I lean towarrds the latter. The good-sized nickel-iron roid would give us a lot of stress-free shielding and that's not a thing to ignore. Shielding is going to cause a lot of sleepless nights for the engineers.

And crews.

I'm not going to assume that any ship is going to be generational, just that it's going to be a long trip. That depends so much on the drive that we, now, can't leave out any possibilities. The average I've heard, though runs decades and even that's only to the NEAREST stars. One way. We're not crewing with infants... or eunuchs... so it will be generational whether we like it or not, barring that warp. And the crew has to be large enough to allow for people to find acceptable love matches. About all we can do is weed out any anti-racial flakes. That homogenous attitude will have to carry over into skills, as  well. We will certainly need teachers to pass along the skills. Since this whole thing is not a backyard project, we're going to have to deal with military types supplied by the government. It's not something you want to trust robots with.

No prejudice, just that I have yet to see a robot supply compassion or friendship that I'd trust first contact  to.

Is that crazy? I don't think so. It seems to me that it's so critical that we have to assume that anyplace we plan on going, we're going to find somebody else already there.  They'll either be tourists or local residents. Being logical, it also means that yes, those interesting lights in the sky are not ALL weather balloons! Let's be grateful that the people behind those lights have been fairly peaceful, so far. And we should plan to carry on that tradition. I, myself, have seen something that is in the purest sense  a UFO. I have no idea what it was, but when you see a 10x20 or so bright white glowing rectangle floating along on a windless night doing 20 mph, silently, a hundred feet up, it does give you pause. Then you get a big laugh out of it when they try to tell people that it's an advertising banner being pulled by a plane. I would like to believe that we are mature enough not to make pulling the trigger the first thing we do.

So, maybe not all the crew is under age 22... We really can't afford any xenophobes in that group and we need a few 'older and wiser' heads in the mix.

At least we can relax about things like environmental systems and gravity. With the size of such a ship, those issues are minimal and something we could handle with today's engineering. No sweat.

Little Green Men

I feel that for all the more that UFOlogists are firmly headed for the future, they've missed a thing or two  in the present. Like computer tech. Fortunately, it's not all of them, but considering what kind of push-back they face, I'm not sure they can afford any.

Consider helicopters. Marvelous things. Not the highest tech, but effective for many things. Like hovering just above the geographic horizon outside the restricted airspace of certain hush-hush bases. Lacking a little finesse? Sure, but it looks to me like they know you're there even if you travel by atv. So, why not trade subtlety for really getting in there where you can see what's going on (if anything). It might just be enough advantage to get that proof you're after.

Also think about GIS software.  Correlating sightings on a map becomes a lot easier. There's a program coming up on tv that shows a 'phenomenon corridor' across the 37th parallel and it shows how easily mapped data reveals patterns. The more data and types of data you add, the more things may show up.

This is 2014. We've got fairly good investigative instruments. And yet we've supposedly had our hands on alien (LGM) technology for decades. If false, then we need to move on to something more productive, like building our own saucers. If true, then either our instruments suck and we can't tell how these things are made or we can tell, but we can't make the materials. That would be pretty sad. And that's just the shell. The toe-stubbing part may be the machines that make it go. That, at least, is something we could face - it's a matter of engineering rather than being so far behind that we don't know where to start. Face it, they know how to come here and we have no idea how to go there (where-ever that may be).

Any alien that shows up here is automatically superior in technology. I guess that may be our entrance exam to the galaxy- can we figure out how to get out there? I prefer not to think about how they might 'allow' us access to mocked-up pieces of junk that they know doesn't and can't work. That's job one: is any ship we may acquire really a viable piece of actual technology and not  their version of Hollywood special effects? Oh, I really hope that ships aren't fakes! That would be a heart-breaker.

Yes, there's always the wild card chance that they hand us a fake and we figure out some way to make it work, but I really don't want to hang the future of space travel on it!

Shallow Water

...runs faster? I don't know. Fridays are like that. But speaking of faster, let's chat about faster for a bit. Faster than what? How about everything? People are certainly hung up over the speed of light, as I mentioned before.

Of course there is a good reason to be concerned about the speed of light. Even if we were able to engineer something to go that fast, it would still take 4 plus years to get someplace exciting. More than a long bus ride, hmm? Still, we need to get out there and the longer it takes us, the more we need to work on the problem. If you don't believe that the space program is the most important thing in our collective lives, then you really haven't given it any thought. It's a little less important than breathing, but not by much.

Now we get to the rough stuff - speed. I'm not sure what it's going to take for us to build a starship NOW. I am fairly sure that we won't turn out a dozen a week any time soon. And even at the speed of light, our ability to communicate with our people will be limited to the speed of a ship, just like it was in the days of sailing ships and pirates.

We need to find that one good answer that lets us do it. We have to get at least close to the speed of light, if not faster than. We've got to move a significant number of people somewhere else. Let's look at options...

Rockets, chemical or rubber-band: let's not get silly. They stopped being relevant around 50 years ago.

Nuclear: there's some room for consideration there, but the window is closing for a pure reaction engine.

Plasma jet: still has some legs and if coupled with a mass-ramjet, has its good points. And if we can get a fusion reactor running for power, it could the job for now.

Solar sail: I know that people love it, but I am yet to be convinced it's practical. Especially when you're ten lightyears away from home and something traveling like a b.o.o.h. in the wrong direction vaporizes a twenty acre hole in your sail.

All those have one very important thing going for them - they're all past the theory stage. We might not do them with off-the-shelf parts, but darn close to it. The next group makes things, as I said, 'rough'. They will take some theoretical advances.

Anti-gravity drive: or is it a gravity drive? We'll find out as soon as we figure out what gravity is. It is far and away a favorite- clean, quiet, and environmentally responsible.

Anti-matter: what can I say? It's the Rolls-Royce of drives. One thing they never mention is how you apply all that raw power to propulsion. Oh, well...

Warp drive: Hmmm... it solves so many issues that it's a shame it doesn't exist (yet?). It makes FTL travel possible, which is a huge plus. Probably needs anti-matter for a power source.

And that is as far as it goes. Is anyone even working on any of this? If not, there must be an awfully large number of people out there with faith in a benificent deity who will happily protect fools and faithful alike. If someone wants to kick a plasma drive around the chat room, let me know. I have a few uninformed ideas I'd throw into the fray.

Snap Quiz

All right, we've covered a basic idea or two. Or have we?

One thing you HAVE to keep firmly in mind: Nothing is certain! Question everything!

Now I know that some really well-read person out there is going to tell me that I stole that from Bob Heinlein, but I did so fair and square. Besides, he's dead, so if he's offended, I invite him to tell me so and I'll change it.

However, it's really true and you would think that with all the evidence to support it, that they would have learned the lesson. Need I trot out the old tale of how bumblebees can't fly? I hope not.

What is it that so many scientists seem to have forgotten that (or just plain ignore it)? Simply that all these "laws" of physics and physical constants themselves are ONLY TRUE FOR THE PLACES IN WHICH WE HAVE TESTED THEM. Period! We are making an ass of u and me if we assume anything else.

Take, for this exercise, the case in which one of our long-distance space probes. One of them was following the precomputed orbit, which includes a sling-shot maneuver. And the probe didn't do it 'right'. Uh huh, it didn't follow the path that they 'knew' it would. Now, shall we accept that that's impossible because the computed orbit is constructed by using the "laws" of physics and physical constants that are "facts" OR shall we admit that we don't know everything we thought we did?

There are other examples. I just heard that CERN has studied neutrinos. They say that neutrinos travel at the speed of light or just under that. I think perhaps they need to rethink a few things.

First, if it takes infinite energy to propel objects (neutrinos) to the speed of light (via E =mc (2)  (sorry, no superscripts in this typeface). Ah, yes.... So, since there are more than one neutrino going at lightspeed, I guess that either Einstein was full of it, or neutrinos are not physical objects, or maybe... just maybe..... those who assume that the conditions here on Earth don't represent those elsewhere. And I'm sure that there are plenty of other examples

Physicists are nibbling at the edge of understanding this. Their latest effort is called quantum physics. Unfortunately,  there's a long way to go.

Come to that, it must mean that light is not made up of photons. Either light and neutrinos are waves or some "laws" of physics go into the outhouse with other waste. After all, CERN doesn't have infinite anything in the basement with their hadron collider or i woild have heard about it. And speaking of light (etc.), what about something simple, like refraction? I don't even want to touch that one. Something any schoolkid can demonstrate and we don't even know why it works. Of course that doesn't stop us from playing with matches...

I'm not sure how long it's going to take us to become as smart as we think we are.  All I can do is hope it's soon enough.

So, please at least consider doubting almost everything. When we can go places we will get the chance to find a few facts. Then we'll make up new laws or decide that the Area of Truth is larger than we thought. If I was as emotionally wedded to the current "laws" as some people seem to be, it would make me want to cry... Or it may all turn out to be true... everywhere... which I admit would surprise me. Something is very wrong with our outlook on physics.

Here is a patently crazy idea:

As I said, consider that the universe we can see is painted on a 'space' 'balloon'. What if we poked a 'hole' in that balloon and inside we found Nothing. I mean. Capitol 'N' Nothing. Imagine that inside the balloon is a Nothing that doesn't exist, because there's no space or time anywhere off the fabric of the balloon. So... if a tiny hole gets poked by  something and goes in any sort of direction that intersects the fabric anywhere else in space, then pokes another little hole (or maybe since there is such a Nothing, poking one hole creates a hole somewhere else, too?)... If that were possible, it certainly would do something about getting from here to there, hmmm? And then we'd have to rethink black holes. Again.

Of course it's a crazy idea. I mean it couldn't possibly be true, could it? It would go against everything everybody knows... Against all the 'laws' of physics, hey? :*D

And how would one prove it? Or disprove it? Or even work on it?

Homework for next time: e = mc2, is it really true? If so, then someone must have made matter from energy, right?

Recently In a Galaxy Very Very Nearby

With that out of the way, let's start digging. Like any good Hole, it helps to start at the beginning- the Monobloc.

Got that concept? Good! We're going to have to talk about Time... or really 'time'. The difference seems to be that Big T doesn't exist. At least not in the way that some physicists and cosmologists have been slinging it around. I suppose that this is going to upset a lot of people. Especially the ones whose view of the universe depends heavily on it. By Big T Time, I mean the concept of Time as almost a sacred thing. I'm definitely pointing at those who love using a Time variable in equations (you know who 'm talking about Albert E.).

Instead, let's leave it at small t time. I mean a simple measurement of interval- 'the time between New York and Boston by train is...'. This neatly takes care of any questions you may have about the nature of time. It also punches a neat hole through this "Space-Time I keep hearing about. No such thing. Sorry. It's semantics. Certainly it takes 1 (Earth) year of time for light to go 186000x60x60x24x365.25 miles. That kind of concrete measure is pretty simple.

Ok, that's settled. Now I can go back to a couple of things I glossed over in the above paragraph- the expansion off space and holes come to mind.

First Theory: Cosmology. I need to float this one out there. I can't prove it, but it seems reasonable. The universe MAY be cyclic. I don't think anyone has the proper perspective to speak authoritatively on this subject. We all have our favorite theory and I'll bet a billion dollars that mine is right :^). Anyway, in my universe, I can explain something that's clearly bugging physicists- the "fact" that every other body of stars is receding from the Milky Way- Bubbles. Or balloons, if you want to think of it that way. Consider: every body occupies a fixed position in the fabric of  space and, like a bubble or balloon, space itself is expanding. As space expands, every body will be seen to be moving away from every other body as the space between them increases. As for the rest of it, perhaps space is expanding faster and faster, which is why other galaxies seem to be accelerating.

Holes: black and white and what that means. Physicists are also hot and bothered by all the 'missing' matter in the universe. And maybe even the energy. Dark matter and dark energy. The obvious connecting points for the two halves of the universe are the holes- black holes on our side are white holes on the other side. Looked at that way, the total matter and energy are a lot closer to accounted for. I don't know if they've taken the masscon suspended in black holes into account. There isn't a lot of accessible chatter about cosmology on the internet. Perhaps their minds are elsewhere...

Ah, yes, the cyclical part. If it turns out to be true, then our universe may shrink back to a point, switch 'polarity', and pop again.

In closing, I'm sorry to say that this probably shoots down Time travel. I don't know that you could revisit events that have already occurred, but I seriously doubt you could experience things that haven't happened yet. And, yes, I've considered switching 'polarity', traveling to what would be 'the past', looking around, and then reversing the procedure. I just can't think of a good reason why it would work, even if someone can engineer it. It would assume that we are all duplicated on the other side and everything happens the same.

I think that's enough for now. Despite all the universal energy, typing has used enough of mine.

Open for Business

   Just like your local junkyard (ahem!... 'surplus'), we carry a wide range of things. Some of it may seem crazy, but I chalk that up to your restricted view of the universe.

            "The truth is always there"