NASA Forecasts a Space Storm by 2013

NASA has warned that a space storm could arrive in 2013 and could cause a super storm that would disrupt electronic devices. From the article:

National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the Sun reaches its maximum power in a few years.

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes “from a deep slumber” sometime around 2013, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.

“It will disrupt communication devices such as satellites and car navigations, air travel, the banking system, our computers, everything that is electronic. It will cause major problems for the world.

“Large areas will be without electricity power and to repair that damage will be hard as that takes time.”

That would be horrible to be without electricity for any length of time because of the food in the fridge and freezer. I think I could do without a cellular phone or I-pad and even the computer, but electricity in general, that is very necessary. Getting yourself as self- sufficient as possible is a good idea in these economic times despite an oncoming storm because governments have less money to repair important infrastructure anyway. The electricity could go out for any number of reasons and food could be unavailable because markets could also be without power.

The link to the article in full is below.

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• Nasa solar flare space storm warning: a British scientist writes (telegraph.co.uk)
• NASA Warns of Potential "Huge Space Storm" In 2013 (science.slashdot.org)

Scientists Study Saturn´s Moon Named Titan

Scientists from NASA have been studying the moon Titan that circles Saturn and they are coming to the conclusion that life could exist in its atmosphere, from the article:

Researchers at the space agency believe they have discovered vital clues that appeared to indicate that primitive aliens could be living on the moon.

Data from Nasa's Cassini probe has analysed the complex chemistry on the surface of Titan, which experts say is the only moon around the planet to have a dense atmosphere.

They suggest that life forms may have been breathing in the planet’s atmosphere and also feeding on its surface’s fuel.

Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at Nasa Ames Research Centre, at Moffett Field, California who led the research, said: “We suggested hydrogen consumption because it's the obvious gas for life to consume on Titan, similar to the way we consume oxygen on Earth.

"If these signs do turn out to be a sign of life, it would be doubly exciting because it would represent a second form of life independent from water-based life on Earth.”

This reminds me of the different aliens portrayed in many different science fiction shows and movies all capable of living in different types of atmospheres, or sentient being living in the oceans of a world, or even living on rogue planets and survivng from thermal vents within the planet.

This study is interesting and the artist interpretation of what the surface would look like is fascinating as well.

I have always though that sentient life would be found outside our solar system, but who knows.

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• Titan: Nasa scientists discover evidence 'that alien life exists on Saturn's moon' (telegraph.co.uk)

V (1983 Miniseries) and V (2009 TV series)

I watched the miniseries V in 1983 and enjoyed the story very much, but I was not 100% into it, however I did like the idea and execution of the story, but I have never been a big fan of aliens that come to conquer the Earth unless there are good aliens to help us poor humans defend against them, ha!
I do like the new television series or as they say, re-imaged version of V, because I like the main actors, the story is still good, and the special effects very interesting. I am glad they are making a second season of the show because so often science fiction gets axed very quickly without giving the story and actors time to get into a rhythm. I suggest giving the show a try, it is good and here is a cool clip from the show.

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• Which "V" reigns supreme? (salon.com)

Artificial Gravity on the International Space Station

NASA is working on artificial gravity for the International Space Station and possibly for space craft as well. Now this feels like it is right out of science fiction! I have been watching some episodes from Star Trek:Deep Space Nine and I always have in the back of my mind that the station is in space while everyone walks around as if they had the gravity of a planet holding them down because everytime I see pictures from the ISS, they are floating around as the astronauts try to complete their daily tasks. The astronauts also need to exercise regularly and take medication to curb bone loss, from the article:

New plans for artificial gravity tests in space using centrifuges may hold the key to helping future astronauts ward off the debilitating loss of muscle and bone due to weightlessness on long missions to asteroids or the moon under NASA's revised space exploration plan.
Space station residents currently rely upon different exercises to keep themselves fit for the eventual return to Earth. But a spinning centrifuge device could create artificial gravity, which simulates the gravitational tug a planet, like Earth, has. The giant spinning device will give astronauts a healthy break from the weightlessness of space.
"You can try to treat each of the effects of weightlessness system by system, with certain pills for bone loss and certain exercise regimens for the muscles," said Laurence Young, an aeronautics and astronautics engineer at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. "Or you can treat the root cause of weightlessness by restoring gravity."

Artificial gravity sets the stage for long term visits to the ISS but if implemented into a craft that could travel long distances in space, could imply longer trips into the solar system as long as fresh air, food supply, and water, can be available for that same amount of time.

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• New Artificial Gravity Tests in Space Could Help Astronauts (space.com)

Space Weapon Being Tested

As reported on Space.com, the U.S. Air Force is testing a space glider and I imagine the little money left for NASA was diverted to this kind of project. It is one thing in a science fiction show to have space craft and weapons to DEFEND yourself from other sentient aliens who have similar technology and there are no provocations, and it is another thing to build space craft to attack right here on planet Earth to provoke hostility one county against another. WOW!

A U.S. Air Force space plane and a failed hypersonic glider tested by the Pentagon represent the latest space missions to raise concerns about weapons in space. But while their exact purpose remains murky, they join a host of new space technology tests that could eventually bring the battlefield into space.
Some space technology demonstrations are more obviously space weapons, such as the anti-satellite missile capabilities tested by the U.S. and China in recent years. India has also begun developing its own anti-satellite program which would combine lasers and an exo-atmospheric kill vehicle, as announced at the beginning of 2010.
The U.S. military could even be using the cloak of mystery to deliberately bamboozle and confuse rival militaries, according to John Pike, a military and security analyst who runs GlobalSecurity.org. He suggested that the X-37B and HTV-2 projects could represent the tip of a space weapons program hidden within the Pentagon's secret "black budget," or they might be nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

You can read the entire article here.
I wish people in their personal lives, cities, states, and countries could live in peace and find peaceful solutions to problems, but I guess that is too much to ask. I have always enjoyed Star Trek: The Next Generation because solutions were sought through talk, treaties, meetings, peace, and fighting was usually the last resort. The entire concept of the Federation of Planets was to invite other worlds who desired a peaceful union working together. Of course there were conquering races such as the Klingons and Romulans, but there will always be a force to face that has interests opposed to your own, thus the ability to negotiate peacefully is vital.

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The Eerie Silence by Paul Davies

Physicist Paul Davies has written a book that is exactly the kind of topic I like to read. The basic question he asks is:

If aliens exist, where are they?The physicist Enrico Fermi asked this question 60 years ago, and it has since come to be known as the “Fermi Paradox”. Given how vast the universe is, and the billions of years that life has had to spread across the cosmos, why have we not found any evidence of alien life?Paul Davies takes a fresh look at this question in his engaging and thoughtful new book, The Eerie Silence.

He goes on to discuss if life on Earth is a simple fluke or there is a possibility that life does exist somewhere out there in the vast Universe.

He also explains that communication may take time:

Even if complex life can be found elsewhere, does that mean it will be intelligent? By “intelligent,” we often mean a species that will use science to investigate the universe. Davies again throws cold water on our assumptions, saying the scientific method is a specific outcome of Greek philosophy and medieval European monotheism. Despite this, Davies gamely uses the Drake Equation to estimate there could be 10,000 civilizations in the galaxy capable at this time of communicating by radio waves.

“At this time” is an important element of his estimate, since a barrier to interstellar communications is not only distance but time. Consider aliens living one thousand light years away. Davies points out that if they were able to see Earth in their telescopes, they would not see us as we are today, but as we were in the year 1010 A.D. - long before we invented radio dishes. And because human radio technology is only about 100 years old, it will take another 900 years for our first signals to reach them.

His writing would suggest he feels we are alone in the Universe but in true scientific form he states:

Still, the fact that we don’t know and may never have the answer about alien life is reason enough to keep searching, says Davies. By stretching our minds to try to envision all the possibilities in our search for aliens, not only may we one day find what we seek, but in the process we also will learn about many other deep and enduring mysteries of the cosmos.

I would like to think that life does exist in the Universe, but then again that is why I love science fiction, and I am not being unrealistic, in my opinion, because nothing has been proven to exclude the fact that life does not exist beyond our galaxy. It is a book that gets you thinking about all the possibilities in life.

LINK.

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Universe Video

I found this very interesting video over at the website by Mike Brotherton that takes us on a journey beginning on the surface of the Earth, then depicts the satellites that orbit the Earth, and then shows us our our place in the Universe. It puts into perspective our small place in the Universe and how much we have to explore and learn about this vast place we live in.

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• Small asteroid flies safely by Earth (cbc.ca)

2010 Baja California Earthquake

I am still recovering from the earthquake that struck the 4th of April, a nice peaceful Sunday afternoon that was disrupted by the intense shaking of the 2010 Baja California earthquake as it is being named! Even though I live about 150km from the epicenter, it was an intense shaking that had myself and my family headed for the back door in panic! I was reading this article on Live Science, well here is what they said:

Yesterday's magnitude-7.2 earthquake that rocked northern Mexico and parts of Southern California was barely worth noting compared to the ongoing, major forces that shape planet Earth. In a geologic sense, there are greater forces at work, from the coming and going of ice ages to an ongoing imbalance in the planet's rotation that make it wobble like a spinning top that's winding down.

Ummm, I agree on a global scale, but in my daily life, when the ground is shaking so hard I can barely stand, it is worthy of note, on my part at least.

"These large earthquakes are rare, catastrophic events," Gross explained. "What's normally causing the Earth's rotation to change is the surface mass movement of the oceans and atmosphere."

I am glad they are rare because it is no fun going through the main event and the aftershocks, and waiting for a larger aftershock, it really rattles the nerves!
I am just having a little fun with the article because it has been so stressful the last couple of days I feel like poking some fun at something, I do enjoy studying about earthquakes and learning new things about them, just not going through the experience first hand, at least this was in the afternoon and not in the middle of the night which is much worse.
Anyway, here is the article.

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Check out Mars in the Sky tonight!

If you have a clear sky tonight and the next few nights try to get a good look at Mars, from Space.com:

On Thursday night, March 25, many people may look up at the sky and ask the question, "What's that bright star next to the moon?"The answer for Thursday night is Mars, but that answer changes night by night as the moon travels along the ecliptic, the path the sun, moon and planets follow across the sky. If you ask the question again on Monday night, March 29, the answer will be the ringed planet Saturn.Such conjunctions of the moon and planets are regular reminders of how rapidly the moon moves across the sky.

Mars was in opposition to the Sun on Jan. 29, when it appeared 14 arcseconds in diameter, 1/120 of the diameter of the moon. Two months later, it is much farther away, and has shrunk to only 10 arcseconds in diameter.This will be your last chance to get a good look at Mars until it approaches the Earth again in 2012 [see more Mars photos].

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Martian Moon Pics

Wired.com has an awesome pic of the Martian Moon, from the article:



The sharpest images yet taken by the Mars Express spacecraft of Mars’ tiny moon Phobos reveal features as small as 14.5 feet across, the European Space Agency announced March 15.

The Mars Express flybys, which happen every five months, may also determine if Phobos is a fragile pile of rocky fragments stuck together — what planetary scientists refer to as a rubble pile — or solid through and through, says Mars Express scientist Gerhard Neukum of the Free University of Berlin.

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/03/mars-phobos-flyby/#ixzz0iMxw7Qdg

Science fiction movies and television make it look so easy to travel about in space when in reality it is very difficult and impressive the strides we have made. I just wish as much money were spent on space studies vs. war and weapons. Maybe one day......

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• Closest Ever Look at Martian Moon (wired.com)

Alien First Contact

First contact with alien creatures is the core of science fiction literature, movies, and television; and the kind of aliens we encounter range from benevolent beings to acid for blood reptilian-like monsters. While we love to read or watch science fiction aliens, scientists actually theorize what an alien life-form could look like and how we would react to an actual face to face meeting.

Scientists feel that there are two possibilities, one being we will visit aliens from the "neighborhood" or we will be in verbal contact with a more distant alien civilization.

The article explains that if we contact alien life in our solar system:

If first contact turns out to be within our solar system, then at least we have some prior knowledge about the available habitats. Several spots might be suitable for Earth-like life based on carbon biochemistry and using water as a solvent. The subsoil of Mars may be warm enough to host microbes akin to Earth's bacteria, for example, and there could be larger beasts swimming in the watery oceans of some outer moons of the solar system - especially Jupiter's moon Europa. There's every chance that a deep aquatic ocean lies beneath Europa's ice, stretching right down to the moon's rock core, where volcanic vents pump out hot, nutrient-rich water.

Then the article goes on to explain how the aliens we talk to may exist:

And then there is the fact that in order to contact us, ET must be able to send and receive radio waves or laser beams, or use some other medium to reach across the light years. So either they are vast creatures that have evolved natural radio-wave organs to talk and listen to each other, or they have developed technology. For that, intelligence alone is not enough. "The thing that advances us as a species is that we are social," says Schulze-Makuch. "One of us alone is not very smart - I'm so dumb I can't even build a radio. It is by working together that we got on the moon."
So message-sending aliens will probably have some form of society. It need not be anything like human societies, however. "There are meta-intelligences in the societies of bees and termites. I can imagine something like a termite or ant colony that gets really intelligent," says Schulze-Makuch. This does not tell us, however, whether they will be furry, scaly or slimy. Even on Earth, clever brains come in a wide variety of packages: dolphins and primates, parrots and crows, sea otters, honey badgers, octopuses and squid.

If you love science fiction or just the idea of making contact with an alien species, I suggest reading the entire article, it is well worth the time, it will change your perception of what an alien is and how we might contact each other.

Here is a link to the full article.