Microbursts

of thought,  actually...

A lot of things about our little piece of creation are pretty clear at this point.  It's certain that our solar system is a lot bigger place than they lead us to believe back in school.  That's ok,  they didn't have the data that we do.  It does point up one thing,  of course - Don't refuse to change your outlook when those nasty old facts make your opinions obsolete.

That new data makes it clear that our solar system stretches a significant way towards the next nearest one. That and there are many Big Objects out in the Kuyper Belt.  Some really would be classified as planets,  based on size.  And they follow 'rude' orbits. That's one of the things that got Pluto kicked out of the Major Planet Club. The latest I heard, they've found some 4,000+ bodies in that belt. Some are bigger than Earth. They noticed that there was a peculiar empty(ish) region out where the edge of the solar system was thought to be and have got wondering why. They're looking for Planet X and I sincerely hope they find it! The alternative, to my mind, is that there is a black hole orbiting out there perturbing asteroid orbits and eating various trash to boot. So let's hope for a rogue planet.

So many things have been happening in the odd corners of science. Some good, some rather disappointing. One of the cruddy ones: waiting until 2032 before NASA launches a Mars mission, at the earliest. And have you seen the capsule? Not even a proper ship! It's designed to carry 3 people on the 3 year trip. And that in a space about twice the size of an Apollo capsule. What they have NOT mentioned is how they plan on keeping them sane. Cooped up in a small box with zero room for exercise and no mental input, they may last a few weeks. It should give Vegas bookies income, though: do they just go crazy or will one kill the others and then themselves? Maybe the design will change before then...

One bright spot, I think, is that they have found that the moon Ganymede is an onion-like thing made of layers of ice and water. Who could guess?

I've been puzzled, lately. I'm seeing a lot of airtime spent on the origin and ultimate fate of the universe. And I'm wondering why. Are people afraid it'll happen next Thursday? Are they afraid they'll miss it? I don't know. Ask me again in about 20 billion years...

I love that astronomers are now discovering so many exo-planets. They are finding that there are far weirder ones out there than anyone ever imagined. A planet that orbits its sun in less than a day? Outrageous!

Umm. We've been told that the most massive things around are black holes. Also, that there must be 'dark matter' in order for the universe to add up to the right amount of mass. Did they add in the super-massive black hole at the center of every galaxy? Who knows? And with all the new planets they're discovering every day in our galaxy alone... At least it will keep the people who love big numbers happy.

On another note, I will try to post at a reasonable rate. I know I've been slack, but typing things on a phone screen isn't fun. I've had to put the replacement computer off another year. Losing both the desktop and the laptop to catastrophic hardware failure in one year is hard to work around.

Brrrrrr

The old year is gone away.  The new one has actually brought something interesting about a subject that has had me wondering for a long time: the most recent ice age.

We all know that it was not a major ice event.  think those are reserved for ones lasting a million years or something. Still,  it must have seemed like a curse from the gods to our ancestors- glaciers, low average temps,  and the misery that accompanies that. Then it went away.

Now let me hand you a theorem based on new info coming in.  That new info is evidence of a major ELE comet strike.  It happened...  taDA!  circa 11,000bce. The evidence is strikingly similar to The Dinosaur Killer. There's the same layer of e.t. materials visible in the rocks,  but there are some BIG surprises.

For one thing,  this material layer exists ONLY on the north American continent.  They estimate the comet at 3 miles diameter, yet there is no impact crater.  None. Remember,  this was a mere 13,000 years ago.  Surely there would have been one helluva big hole and we'd all know about it. Trust me. The other thing about the deposition layer provides the answer,  and it's one we had best pay attention to- the layer (inches - thick) is dosed liberally with soot. Soot is super-fine particles of carbon produced by combustion. An inch or so of soot. Quite a few teensy particles means LOTS of combustion.  Of what? Pretty much everything burnable over an entire continent.  So we now get to the final key. They say the strike was an airburst!

We know what a small airburst did in Russia. Something tells me that a 3 mile hot fudge sundae would cause a real problem.

Now we're headed for the tall weeds. I'll list things that ocurred to me and you can see if they create the same picture to you that they do for me.

The Biblical flood
The Grand Canyon
(and several other canyons,  including Death Valley)
Yosemite valley -  before and after
The extinction of all North American megafauna
Same for the Clovis culture
Huge ice dam rupture at the end of the last ice age.

Still checking for other goodies to add...  the loss of megalithic monument builders of the past ("the Elder Gods").

Let us begin painting the picture.

Yosemite Valley
Created in the last ice age and may not last until the next.  The rock type that makes up the valley walls crumbles quickly under the climate there. So?  It's not an ancient feature. My timeline? Created 13,000 years ago.

The Biblical flood
While we don't actually know how far back the story originated,  we know that it's at least 4,500 years old.  At least that's the first written record.  We won't ever know exactly how old it really is. There is that site in southeast Turkey that's about 10,000 years old (or is 13,000 a better guess?).  We know that such a site would be buried in sand by a flood.  We've seen a mere hurricane Sandy bury things in sand... Finally,  every surviving record,  verbal and written from every civilization and culture, includes a flood story.

The Grand Canyon
Everyone knows that it exposes millions of years of geologic rock.  Then everyone's head goes off the rails and leaves them with the lasting impression that the canyon took millions of years to form. I don't think so.

Megafauna extinction
Well,  given enough heat,  anything burns...

Clovis people
Burn at least as quickly as your average giant ground sloth.

Here is how my picture looks now:

Scenario- typical ice age -  glaciers,  ice,  snow,  cold

BOOM

3 mile comet comes calling

EVERYTHING burns...  roast camel and North American elephant/mastodon and Clovis people.  Guess we know why so much evidence of paleo-humans appears in caves.

HUGE heat pulse transfers to ice, with predictable results- ice melts over a period of days or weeks

Any ice dams in existence at that point are likely to break as they are overwhelmed by trillions of gallons of hot water. This carves lots of canyons downstream in a short time, I would think.

The resulting mass of water would have no problem creating a worldwide flood, wiping out many people worldwide,  and leaving us their view of the cause of the event.  The only people who could give us the real story were dead. The soot layer is only in North America,  which localizes the direct effects of the disaster, but the flood and the megatsunami know no boundaries.

As I said,  a Really Bad day for planet Earth.

This, of course, is just a theorem.  It requires chucking out any number of currently popular ideas,  but that's science for you. The thing that suffers most is peoples' timeline.  My theorem requires things that we assume took years or centuries to have actually happened  overnight. It does I'd be happy to hear discussion on this.

The next issue of Galactic Surplus covers interesting news from the other side of our galactic backyard.

Wrapup

Well, we're near the end of another year. All good little geeks are snuggled up warm in their beds while visions of Intel unlocked cpu's dance in their heads. Thanks to the digital revolution, the week of Thanksgiving is now the new Christmas week. Presents will arrive by drone, instead of reindeer...

Let us give thanks for a wide world of Internet. It's become an entire virtual universe to many of us. It certainly has put the resources of many libraries of info in our hands and given us access to nearly every genius on the planet. That alone is worth the price. And there is a price. The Internet has magnified us. That includes the good and the bad.

Last of all, I am thankful for the ability to tell the difference. So many out there don't seem to have made that connection.

Another thing waning with the year is the meteor shower count. I can see why ancient 'wise' men hung out on mountain tops. If they had lived near me, they would still have been wondering what everyone was talking about.

I can't help wondering if Mankind will spread out from this rock in time. We will soon be one year closer to a serious mission to Mars, but it's still years away. Even then, it's years beyond that to any kind of large colony. The moon looks like a smart base, but nobody seems to care and I can't figure out why! I know that we no longer have billions to toss around, but if it makes it more likely that we will survive, well, what is the survival of the Human race worth? The moon is a week away even at the cruddy speeds we can manage. Let's start pushing for moon colonization before we all start pushing up daisies...

A Lesson in Humility

As some of you may have heard, we're about to be taught a lesson in humility. On Halloween next week a significant piece of rock will go sizzling past out planet at a distance that qualifies it as 'bullet parting yer hair' miss.

The object is 2015 TB145. It will pass outside our orbit at an approximte range of 300,000 miles. They say that this rock is the closest thing to come near us until the scary one of 2027.

Now, why is this any kind of lesson? Simply that NASA didn't know it existed until 10 days ago.

So pardon me if I regard any such statements with the skepticism they deserve. Any time I learn of a 400 meter wide bullet aimed at Earth, I get a teensy bit nervous. What else don't they know? The only sane answer is 'almost everything'. That is not meant as a criticism in any way of the state of their knowledge! Given how few resources are being directed at the issue, it's a wonder we found it at all. Instead, my scorn is aimed at pronouncements like that one about not seeing anything more until 2027. That claim makes me want to run and hide. Preferably on the moon or maybe Mars...

Here's a little guide for those at NASA and JPL: keep your eyes open and always ask yourself what else you don't know!

Enough for a shower?

Water on Mars.

Until a few weeks ago, it was the very stuff of sci-fi. Then they found liquid water on the surface of Mars. Of all the discoveries made in the last century, this is the equivalent of having your face shoved in 'it' and then rubbed vigorously. If the 'experts' don't realize that their holy writ of infallibility is null and void, then what more can the universe do? Sadly, it also punches small holes in the latest stranded astronaut movie, but movies are works of fiction anyway, right?

To make up for that, it may also make colonization easier. Yes, I am in favor of colonizing, even though the main direction of this blog is interstellar. We need a dress rehearsal. Something easy, but not too easy, where we can test even more theorems. The most critical thing I want to see is some drive better than a toy rocket, They are leaning towards an ion/plasma drive, which is efficient, but slow. This baby step will no doubt help, but we all know it won't make the interstellar cut. Let's hope we can eventually test out a fusion drive.

Speaking of propulsion, it turns out that there is a very effective launch vehicle for heavy lifting to orbit. IF we can stand the secondary effects! It consists of digging a deep cylindrical hole, placing a metal plate over it with the load on top. Then firing off a nuclear bomb at the bottom of the hole(!). It gives the payload a final velocity of 42 miles per SECOND. Somehow I doubt that it will be useful for lifting poor, squishy people, though it may be possible to engineer around that. And then there's the mess left behind... Well, we chip the stone into a circle and grind a hole in the middle...

But let's spend a moment thinking about Mars. There are still things about the planet (it still is a planet, right?) that we can't explain. Certainly it's been a solar system's punching bag, much like our moon. I assume that there are plans at a high level to terraform the place. I have no idea what we could do to liquefy a planetary core and spin it.

Now we get to some things that scientific experts don't want to deal with!

Mars rotates. Is this a leftover from times of a liquid core? Is there a liquid core, but one too cool to generate a liquid mantle? We'll want to know. A fire is a lot easier to start if some coals remain. And Mars' rotational axis is tilted!!! I haven't heard anyone mention that! Supposedly, there is life on Earth because our moon stabilized our axis at about 23 degrees. Where is the moon that did that for Mars? No-one in their right mind had better suggest that those two little captured asteroids that pass for moons did the job! Yes, there are a lot of things that needs facts and not theories.

Speaking of asteroids, let's just touch on that. What happened to Planet 6? We know by math that there sbould be a planet there. My favorite theorem is that Jupiter made things too dicey for planetary aggregation. It would like trying to build a concrete block wall with a 7.0 quake every day at noon. Every time Jupiter passes, progress resets to zero. The jury is still out on the idea of it being enough to disrupt an already formed planet. It will take a survey of the number and composition of the asteroid belt to tell. If we looked and found the different pieces of a planet, then the question will need further attention.  I mean that should we see that there are certain proportions of core material to mixed materials to silicon/iron/carbon and other light elements, then the idea of a planet ripped apart becomes a possibility. I do wonder how big a planet it would have been.

Let's see what happens next in Mars: the soap opera.

An afterthought

There is one little theorem that infuriates me the way that taxes infuriate lottery winners: Why do we accept 14.5 billion years as the age of our universe? Because that's all we can see? Apparently. That is just plain sad!

That's enough. Chew on it a while.

Randomness, or is it chaos?

I really don't know the answer to that. As so many have observed, sometimes it's the right questions and the answers will come along in time. And then there's other times when you're left with questions and answers and the whole mess makes no sense at all. I know that it's been a long while between posts. That's because whatever time is, there isn't enough to go around.

Now, back to things we know and things we don't. There seems to be some confusion between the two in the minds of a great big bunch of 'scientists'. Or that's the impression I was left with after watching months of tv programs about our universe, its history, present, and future. Considering that quite a few of those people appeared on camera with their current theorems, I would like to plead that they should consult a dictionary for the differences between theorem, theory, and fact.

The latest thing getting airtime is planetary formation and that part that works at explaining why planets are what they are. All driven by the discovery of the hundreds (so far) of other planets in this galaxy. It seems a bit presumptuous to worry about other solar systems when they can't figure out why our own is the way it is. Did you all know that there's ANOTHER planetoid(?) out there buzzing around outside of Pluto? I think that's something my teachers failed to mention simply because they didn't know. And precisely why was Pluto demoted? There are moons out there that are bigger than our Luna. Should we then demote our moon to a moonlet because of it? This must be some kind of planetary snobbery.

And the worst part is that they seem to be totally blind to other possibilities. As we have seen repeatedly in the past, the only source for fresh ideas is old science fiction. There are so many examples that I couldn't list them all. I kind of like the concept of wandering planets being captured by a star's gravity well. Even that idea is suspect. Gravity will bend light, but so will a chunk of common glass. That seems a little limp a reason to assume that it's a case of gravity bending space. And then you get into "well, if space is the absence of anything, then how can you bend it?".

It's a mess and it's not going away. We need to accept the things we don't know and try to imagine some way to prove what we do. But can we? Where do stand in order to discover what space is?

I leave you with a final thought: 'we' have decided that nothing can go faster than light. Why that is, I don't know. Yes, our God of Science Albert Einstein has proclaimed it to be true. So, let me be a heretic. I have never heard or seen any proof that this is a fact. So... Prove me wrong. Don't throw math at me. You can make math prove that apples are diamonds. Show me proof that the speed of light is a cast iron speed limit everywhere. Then I'll apologize and shut up.