Scientists are using the giant Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) to prospect in Sagittarius B2(N), a giant molecular cloud near the center of our Galaxy, some 25,000 light-years from Earth for new, complex molecules in interstellar space that…
Here’s the first satellite images from the ISS of the earthquake off the coast of Chile taken by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who is currently aboard the International Space Station. It’s not high-res, but they’re still quite stunning. In the…
“The idea that we are the only intelligent creatures in a cosmos of a hundred billion galaxies is so preposterous that there are very few astronomers today who would take it seriously. It is safest to assume therefore, that they…
When scientists send their spacecraft across the universe, they save fuel by performing "slingshot fly-bys". This is where, rather than firing up the thrusters, the craft changes its trajectory by harnessing the enormous gravitational pull of a planet. However, this…
“Our human window on the Universe is terribly small within a stunningly small range of wavelengths. With our eyes we see wavelengths between 0.00004
and 0.00008 of a centimeter (where, not so oddly, the Sun and stars
emit most of their energy). The human visual spectrum from violet to
red is but one octave on an imaginary electromagnetic piano with a
keyboard hundreds of kilometers long.”
James
Kaler, astronomer and author of “Heavens Gate: From Killer Stars to the
Seeds of Life, How We are Connected to the Universe.”
The
image below is an infrared photo of M82 is a remarkable galaxy of
peculiar type in constellation Ursa Major. It is usually classified as
irregular, though probably a distorted disk galaxy, and famous for its
heavy star-forming activity, thus a prototype member of the class of
starbursting galaxies. In the infrared light, M82 is the brightest
galaxy in the sky; it exhibits a so-called infrared excess, being much
brighter at infrared wavelengths than in the visible part of the
spectrum. Over 100 young globular clusters have been discovered in M82
with the Hubble Space Telescope. Their formation is probably another
effect triggered by a tidal encounter with M81 between 50 and several
100 million years ago.
Modern cosmology theory holds that our universe may be just one in a vast collection of universes known as the multiverse. MIT physicist Alan Guth has suggested that new universes (known as "pocket universes") are constantly being created, but they cannot be seen from our universe.
In this view, "nature gets a lot of tries — the universe is an experiment that's repeated over and over again, each time with slightly different physical laws, or even vastly different physical laws," says Jaffe.
Some of these universes would collapse instants after forming; in others, the forces between particles would be so weak they could not give rise to atoms or molecules. However, if conditions were suitable, matter would coalesce into galaxies and planets, and if the right elements were present in those worlds, intelligent life could evolve.
Some physicists have theorized that only universes in which the laws of physics are "just so" could support life, and that if things were even a little bit different from our world, intelligent life would be impossible. In that case, our physical laws might be explained "anthropically," meaning that they are as they are because if they were otherwise, no one would be around to notice them.
MIT physics professor Robert Jaffe and his collaborators felt that this proposed anthropic explanation should be subjected to more careful scrutiny, and decided to explore whether universes with different physical laws could support life.
The MIT physicists have showed that universes quite different from ours still have elements similar to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and could therefore evolve life forms quite similar to us, even when the masses of elementary particles called quarks are dramatically altered.
Jaffe and his collaborators felt that this proposed anthropic explanation should be subjected to more careful scrutiny, so they decided to explore whether universes with different physical laws could support life. Unlike most other studies, in which varying only one constant usually produces an inhospitable universe, they examined more than one constant.
Whether life exists elsewhere in our universe is a longstanding mystery. But for some scientists, there's another interesting question: could there be life in a universe significantly different from our own?
In work recently featured in a cover story in Scientific American, Jaffe, former MIT postdoc, Alejandro Jenkins, and recent MIT graduate Itamar Kimchi showed that universes quite different from ours still have elements similar to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and could therefore evolve life forms quite similar to us. Even when the masses of the elementary particles are dramatically altered, life may find a way.
"You could change them by significant amounts without eliminating the possibility of organic chemistry in the universe," says Jenkins.
Although bizarre life forms might exist in universes different from ours, Jaffe and his collaborators decided to focus on life based on carbon chemistry. They defined as "congenial to life" those universes in which stable forms of hydrogen, carbon and oxygen would exist.
"If you don't have a stable entity with the chemistry of hydrogen, you're not going to have hydrocarbons, or complex carbohydrates, and you're not going to have life," says Jaffe. "The same goes for carbon and oxygen. Beyond those three we felt the rest is detail.”
They set out to see what might happen to those elements if they altered the masses of elementary particles called quarks. There are six types of quarks, which are the building blocks of protons, neutrons and electrons. The MIT team focused on "up", "down" and "strange" quarks, the most common and lightest quarks, which join together to form protons and neutrons and closely related particles called "hyperons."
In our universe, the down quark is about twice as heavy as the up quark, resulting in neutrons that are 0.1 percent heavier than protons. Jaffe and his colleagues modeled one family of universes in which the down quark was lighter than the up quark, and protons were up to a percent heavier than neutrons. In this scenario, hydrogen would no longer be stable, but its slightly heavier isotopes deuterium or tritium could be. An isotope of carbon known as carbon-14 would also be stable, as would a form of oxygen, so the organic reactions necessary for life would be possible.
The team found a few other congenial universes, including a family where the up and strange quarks have roughly the same mass (in our universe, strange quarks are much heavier and can only be produced in high-energy collisions), while the down quark would be much lighter. In such a universe, atomic nuclei would be made of neutrons and a hyperon called the "sigma minus," which would replace protons. They published their findings in the journal Physical Review D last year.
Jaffe and his collaborators focused on quarks because they know enough about quark interactions to predict what will happen when their masses change. However, "any attempt to address the problem in a broader context is going to be very difficult," says Jaffe, because physicists are limited in their ability to predict the consequences of changing most other physical laws and constants.
A group of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has done related studies examining whether congenial universes could arise even while lacking one of the four fundamental forces of our universe — the weak nuclear force, which enables the reactions that turn neutrons into protons, and vice versa. The researchers showed that tweaking the other three fundamental forces could compensate for the missing weak nuclear force and still allow stable elements to be formed.
That study and the MIT work are different from most other studies in this area in that they examined more than one constant. "Usually people vary one constant and look at the results, which is different than if you vary multiple constants," says Mark Wise, professor of physics at Caltech, who was not involved in the research. Varying only one constant usually produces an inhospitable universe, which can lead to the erroneous conclusion that any other congenial universes are impossible.
One physical parameter that does appear to be extremely finely tuned is the cosmological constant — a measure of the pressure exerted by empty space, which causes the universe to expand or contract. When the constant is positive, space expands, when negative, the universe collapses on itself. In our universe, the cosmological constant is positive but very small — any larger value would cause the universe to expand too rapidly for galaxies to form. However, Wise and his colleagues have shown that it is theoretically possible that changes in primordial cosmological density perturbations could compensate at least for small changes to the value of the cosmological constant.
In the end, there is no way to know for sure what other universes are out there, or what life they may hold. But that will likely not stop physicists from exploring the possibilities, and in the process learning more about our own universe.
Casey Kazan via MIT News Office
Before the year 2020, scientists are expected to launch intelligent space robots that will venture out to explore the universe for us.
“Robotic exploration probably will always be the trail blazer for human exploration of far space,” says Wolfgang Fink, physicist and researcher at Caltech. “We haven’t yet landed a human being on Mars but we have a robot there now. In that sense, it’s much easier to send a robotic explorer. When you can take the human out of the loop, that is becoming very exciting.”
While Fink is encouraged by the progress made by missions such as the Mars Phoenix and its robotic arm, he emphasizes that the link between human and robot needs to be eliminated, allowing robots to make their own decisions on what science needs to be carried out. In reference to the Phoenix’s robotic arm he said, “The arms are the tools, but it’s about the intent to move the arms. That’s what we’re after. To have the robot know that something there is interesting and that’s where it needs to go and then to go get a sample from it. That’s what we’ve after. You want to get rid of the joystick, in other words. You want the system to take control of itself and then basically use its own tools to explore.”
The physicist said he envisions a time when humans send out intelligent probes to explore the far reaches of the universe and send information back to Earth - without having to send people on excruciatingly long and dangerous space missions.
“In the old Star Wars movies, especially in the Empire Strikes Back, the empire was sending out probes or floating robots,” said Fink. “Those were ideal robotic explorers because they floated over planets and had sensors and communication capabilities. Once you venture out to other planets, you need something that can operate on its own. You can’t monitor and supervise every single step. You want to deploy something that, on its own, can start a reconnaissance of the area and report back.”
The key attribute robots need to possess is the ability to recognize something of interest, such as a rock or crater, something that a human mind would see as a scientific opportunity. At Caltech, Fink and others are working on programs that use images for robots to distinguish colors, textures, shapes and obstacles. Once artificial intelligence has the ability to do this, if the programming is complex enough, the robot can notice something that is out of place, or a region worth investigating (such as a strangely coloured patch of Mars regolith that a Mars robot will decide to dig into).
The researchers also are working on a wish list of sorts for the spacecraft. The list would include things that NASA and university scientists would like the robot to investigate. “It’s very difficult to teach a spacecraft,” said Fink. “When a geologist goes into the field, they can tell you if they see something that sparks their interest. Based on that interest, it triggers more refined research. But the problem is if you encounter something that scientists had not foreseen, then you run the risk of not detecting it We’ll equip it with a database and a wish list, along with the ability to flag an anomaly.”
Fink said NASA has shown some interest in their work. And that makes sense since NASA is planning an unmanned mission to Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, around 2017. The CalTech physicist explained that an orbiter would most likely release a balloon-type vehicle that would float above the surface of the moon and send its findings back to Earth.
“It takes more than hour to send communications back and forth to a space probe at Saturn or Titan,” said Fink. “It is not a problem so much if you are dealing with a Lander, which is immobile, or when you’re dealing with a rover which is not moving too fast. It becomes a significant problem if you deploy a balloon or air ship on Titan, let’s say. They are floating so you need a much quicker reaction time. If there’s a mountain or hill coming up, you need to make a decision right there and then.
The main question is will robotic missions trump our basic human desire to explore space via manned missions?
Posted by Casey Kazan.
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/07/28/by-2020-droids-will-explore-space-for-us/
The intriguing remark was made by Lord Martin Rees, a leading cosmologist and astrophysicist who is the president of Britain's Royal Society and astronomer to the Queen of England. Rees, who last month hosted the National Science Academy's first conference on the possibility of alien life, said he believes the existence of extra terrestrial life may be beyond human understanding.
"They could be staring us in the face and we just don't recognize them. The problem is that we're looking for something very much like us, assuming that they at least have something like the same mathematics and technology.”
"I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms we can't conceive. Just as a chimpanzee can't understand quantum theory, it could be there as aspects of reality that are beyond the capacity of our brains."
During the conference entitled 'The Detection of Extra-terrestrial Life and the Consequences for Science and Society', Rees asked whether the discovery of aliens would cause terror or delight on earth, the Telegraph reported.
However, Frank Drake, the founder of SETI and Drake’s Equation, told the conference that satellite TV and the "digital revolution" was making humanity invisible to aliens by cutting the transmission of TV and radio signals into space. The earth is currently surrounded by a 50 light year-wide "shell" of radiation from analogue TV, radio and radar transmissions. According to Drake, digital TV signals would look like white noise to a race of observing aliens.
Although the signals have spread far enough to reach many nearby star systems, they are rapidly vanishing in the wake of digital technology, said Drake. In the 1960s, Drake spearheaded the conversion of the Arecibo Observatory to a radio astronomy center. As a researcher, Drake was involved in the early work on pulsars. Drake also designed the Pioneer plaque with Carl Sagan in 1972, the first physical message sent into space. The plaque was designed to be understandable by extraterrestrials should they encounter it.
Casey Kazan via The Telegraph
The smartest person in the world could well be behind a plow in China or India. Providing universal access to information will allow such people to realize their full potential, providing benefits to the entire world.”
Hal Varian, Google, chief economist
Respondents to the fourth “Future of the Internet” survey , conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project were asked to consider the future of the internet-connected world between now and 2020 and the likely innovations that will occur.
Among the issues addressed in the survey was the provocative question raised by eminent tech scholar Nicholas Carr in a cover story for the Atlantic Monthly magazine in the summer of 2009: “Is Google Making us Stupid?”
Carr argued that the ease of online searching and distractions of browsing through the web were possibly limiting his capacity to concentrate.
“I’m not thinking the way I used to,” he wrote, in part because he is becoming a skimming, browsing reader, rather than a deep and engaged reader. “The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas…. If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with 'content,’ we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.”
Jamais Cascio, an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and senior fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, challenged Carr in a subsequent article in the Atlantic Monthly. Cascio made the case that the array of problems facing humanity - the end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, among others - will force us to get smarter if we are to survive.
“Most people don’t realize that this process is already under way,” he wrote. “In fact, it’s happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It’s visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity.”
Cascio argued that while the proliferation of technology and media can challenge humans’ capacity to concentrate there were signs that we are developing “fluid intelligence-the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge.” He also expressed hope that geeks will develop tools to help people find and assess information smartly.
With that as backdrop, respondents were asked to indicate which of two statements best reflected their view on Google’s effect on intelligence. As shown, 76% of the experts agreed with the statement, “By 2020, people’s use of the internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid.”
Respondents were also asked to “share your view of the internet’s influence on the future of human intelligence in 2020 — what is likely to stay the same and what will be different in the way human intellect evolves?” What follows is a selection of the hundreds of written elaborations and some of the recurring themes in those answers:
Nicholas Carr and Google staffers have their say:
• “I feel compelled to agree with myself. But I would add that the Net’s effect on our intellectual lives will not be measured simply by average IQ scores. What the Net does is shift the emphasis of our intelligence, away from what might be called a meditative or contemplative intelligence and more toward what might be called a utilitarian intelligence. The price of zipping among lots of bits of information is a loss of depth in our thinking.”– Nicholas Carr
• ”My conclusion is that when the only information on a topic is a handful of essays or books, the best strategy is to read these works with total concentration. But when you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should coexist. I would also like to say that Carr has it mostly backwards when he says that Google is built on the principles of Taylorism [the institution of time-management and worker-activity standards in industrial settings]. Taylorism shifts responsibility from worker to management, institutes a standard method for each job, and selects workers with skills unique for a specific job. Google does the opposite, shifting responsibility from management to the worker, encouraging creativity in each job, and encouraging workers to shift among many different roles in their career….Carr is of course right that Google thrives on understanding data. But making sense of data (both for Google internally and for its users) is not like building the same artifact over and over on an assembly line; rather it requires creativity, a mix of broad and deep knowledge, and a host of connections to other people. That is what Google is trying to facilitate.” — Peter Norvig, Google Research Director
• ”Google will make us more informed. The smartest person in the world could well be behind a plow in China or India. Providing universal access to information will allow such people to realize their full potential, providing benefits to the entire world.” - Hal Varian, Google, chief economist
The resources of the internet and search engines will shift cognitive capacities. We won’t have to remember as much, but we’ll have to think harder and have better critical thinking and analytical skills. Less time devoted to memorization gives people more time to master those new skills.
• ”Google allows us to be more creative in approaching problems and more integrative in our thinking. We spend less time trying to recall and more time generating solutions.” — Paul Jones, ibiblio, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill
• “Google will make us stupid and intelligent at the same time. In the future, we will live in a transparent 3D mobile media cloud that surrounds us everywhere. In this cloud, we will use intelligent machines, to whom we delegate both simple and complex tasks. Therefore, we will lose the skills we needed in the old days (e.g., reading paper maps while driving a car). But we will gain the skill to make better choices (e.g., knowing to choose the mortgage that is best for you instead of best for the bank). All in all, I think the gains outweigh the losses.” — Marcel Bullinga, Dutch Futurist at futurecheck.com
• ”I think that certain tasks will be ‘offloaded’ to Google or other Internet services rather than performed in the mind, especially remembering minor details. But really, that is a role that paper has taken over many centuries: did Gutenberg make us stupid? On the other hand, the Internet is likely to be front-and-centre in any developments related to improvements in neuroscience and human cognition research.” — Dean Bubley, wireless industry consultant
• “What the internet (here subsumed tongue-in-cheek under “Google”) does is to support SOME parts of human intelligence, such as analysis, by REPLACING other parts such as memory. Thus, people will be more intelligent about, say, the logistics of moving around a geography because “Google” will remember the facts and relationships of various locations on their behalf. People will be better able to compare the revolutions of 1848 and 1789 because “Google” will remind them of all the details as needed. This is the continuation ad infinitum of the process launched by abacuses and calculators: we have become more “stupid” by losing our arithmetic skills but more intelligent at evaluating numbers.” — Andreas Kluth, writer, Economist magazine
• “It’s a mistake to treat intelligence as an undifferentiated whole. No doubt we will become worse at doing some things (’more stupid’) requiring rote memory of information that is now available though Google. But with this capacity freed, we may (and probably will) be capable of more advanced integration and evaluation of information (’more intelligent’).” — Stephen Downes, National Research Council, Canada
• “The new learning system, more informal perhaps than formal, will eventually win since we must use technology to cause everyone to learn more, more economically and faster if everyone is to be economically productive and prosperous. Maintaining the status quo will only continue the existing win/lose society that we have with those who can learn in present school structure doing ok, while more and more students drop out, learn less, and fail to find a productive niche in the future.” — Ed Lyell, former member of the Colorado State Board of Education and Telecommunication Advisory Commission
• “The question is flawed: Google will make intelligence different. As Carr himself suggests, Plato argued that reading and writing would make us stupid, and from the perspective of a preliterate, he was correct. Holding in your head information that is easily discoverable on Google will no longer be a mark of intelligence, but a side-show act. Being able to quickly and effectively discover information and solve problems, rather than do it “in your head,” will be the metric we use.” — Alex Halavais, vice president, Association of Internet Researchers
• ”What Google does do is simply to enable us to shift certain tasks to the network — we no longer need to rote-learn certain seldomly-used facts (the periodic table, the post code of Ballarat) if they’re only a search away, for example. That’s problematic, of course — we put an awful amount of trust in places such as Wikipedia where such information is stored, and in search engines like Google through which we retrieve it — but it doesn’t make us stupid, any more than having access to a library (or in fact, access to writing) makes us stupid. That said, I don’t know that the reverse is true, either: Google and the Net also don’t automatically make us smarter. By 2020, we will have even more access to even more information, using even more sophisticated search and retrieval tools — but how smartly we can make use of this potential depends on whether our media literacies and capacities have caught up, too.” — Axel Bruns, Associate Professor, Queensland University of Technology
• “My ability to do mental arithmetic is worse than my grandfather’s because I grew up in an era with pervasive personal calculators…. I am not stupid compared to my grandfather, but I believe the development of my brain has been changed by the availability of technology. The same will happen (or is happening) as a result of the Googleization of knowledge. People are becoming used to bite sized chunks of information that are compiled and sorted by an algorithm. This must be having an impact on our brains, but it is too simplistic to say that we are becoming stupid as a result of Google.” — Robert Acklund, Australian National University
• “We become adept at using useful tools, and hence perfect new skills. Other skills may diminish. I agree with Carr that we may on the average become less patient, less willing to read through a long, linear text, but we may also become more adept at dealing with multiple factors…. Note that I said 'less patient,’ which is not the same as 'lower IQ.’ I suspect that emotional and personality changes will probably more marked than 'intelligence’ changes.” — Larry Press, California State University, Dominguz Hills
Technology isn’t the problem here. It is people’s inherent character traits. The internet and search engines just enable people to be more of what they already are. If they are motivated to learn and shrewd, they will use new tools to explore in exciting new ways. If they are lazy or incapable of concentrating, they will find new ways to be distracted and goof off.
• “The question is all about people’s choices. If we value introspection as a road to insight, if we believe that long experience with issues contributes to good judgment on those issues, if we (in short) want knowledge that search engines don’t give us, we’ll maintain our depth of thinking and Google will only enhance it. There is a trend, of course, toward instant analysis and knee-jerk responses to events that degrades a lot of writing and discussion. We can’t blame search engines for that…. What search engines do is provide more information, which we can use either to become dilettantes (Carr’s worry) or to bolster our knowledge around the edges and do fact-checking while we rely mostly on information we’ve gained in more robust ways for our core analyses. Google frees the time we used to spend pulling together the last 10% of facts we need to complete our research. I read Carr’s article when The Atlantic first published it, but I used a web search to pull it back up and review it before writing this response. Google is my friend.” — Andy Oram, editor and blogger, O’Reilly Media
• ”Google isn’t making us stupid — but it is making many of us intellectually lazy. This has already become a big problem in university classrooms. For my undergrad majors in Communication Studies, Google may take over the hard work involved in finding good source material for written assignments. Unless pushed in the right direction, students will opt for the top 10 or 15 hits as their research strategy. And it’s the students most in need of research training who are the least likely to avail themselves of more sophisticated tools like Google Scholar. Like other major technologies, Google’s search functionality won’t push the human intellect in one predetermined direction. It will reinforce certain dispositions in the end-user: stronger intellects will use Google as a creative tool, while others will let Google do the thinking for them.” — David Ellis, York University, Toronto
• ”For people who are readers and who are willing to explore new sources and new arguments, we can only be made better by the kinds of searches we will be able to do. Of course, the kind of Googled future that I am concerned about is the one in which my every desire is anticipated, and my every fear avoided by my guardian Google. Even then, I might not be stupid, just not terribly interesting.” — Oscar Gandy, emeritus professor, University of Pennsylvania
• “I don’t think having access to information can ever make anyone stupider. I don’t think an adult’s IQ can be influenced much either way by reading anything and I would guess that smart people will use the Internet for smart things and stupid people will use it for stupid things in the same way that smart people read literature and stupid people read crap fiction. On the whole, having easy access to more information will make society as a group smarter though.” — Sandra Kelly, market researcher, 3M Corporation
• ”The story of humankind is that of work substitution and human enhancement. The Neolithic revolution brought the substitution of some human physical work by animal work. The Industrial revolution brought more substitution of human physical work by machine work. The Digital revolution is implying a significant substitution of human brain work by computers and ICTs in general. Whenever a substitution has taken place, men have been able to focus on more qualitative tasks, entering a virtuous cycle: the more qualitative the tasks, the more his intelligence develops; and the more intelligent he gets, more qualitative tasks he can perform…. As obesity might be the side-effect of physical work substitution by machines, mental laziness can become the watermark of mental work substitution by computers, thus having a negative effect instead of a positive one.” — Ismael Peña-Lopez, lecturer at the Open University of Catalonia, School of Law and Political Science
• “Well, of course, it depends on what one means by 'stupid’ — I imagine that Google, and its as yet unimaginable new features and capabilities will both improve and decrease some of our human capabilities. Certainly it’s much easier to find out stuff, including historical, accurate, and true stuff, as well as entertaining, ironic, and creative stuff. It’s also making some folks lazier, less concerned about investing in the time and energy to arrive at conclusions, etc.” — Ron Rice, University of California, Santa Barbara
• ”Nick [Carr] says, 'Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.’ Besides finding that a little hard to believe (I know Nick to be a deep diver, still), there is nothing about Google, or the Net, to keep anyone from diving — and to depths that were not reachable before the Net came along.”– Doc Searls, co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto”
It’s not Google’s fault if users create stupid queries.
• ”To be more precise, unthinking use of the Internet, and in particular untutored use of Google, has the ability to make us stupid, but that is not a foregone conclusion. More and more of us experience attention deficit, like Bruce Friedman in the Nicholas Carr article, but that alone does not stop us making good choices provided that the ‘factoids’ of information are sound that we use to make out decisions. The potential for stupidity comes where we rely on Google (or Yahoo, or Bing, or any engine) to provide relevant information in response to poorly constructed queries, frequently one-word queries, and then base decisions or conclusions on those returned items.” — Peter Griffiths, former Head of Information at the Home Office within the Office of the Chief Information Officer, United Kingdom
• “The problem isn’t Google; it’s what Google helps us find. For some, Google will let them find useless content that does not challenge their minds. But for others, Google will lead them to expect answers to questions, to explore the world, to see and think for themselves.” — Esther Dyson, longtime internet expert and investor
• ”People are already using Google as an adjunct to their own memory. For example, I have a hunch about something, need facts to support, and Google comes through for me. Sometimes, I see I’m wrong, and I appreciate finding that out before I open my mouth.” — Craig Newmark, founder Craig’s List
• “Google is a data access tool. Not all of that data is useful or correct. I suspect the amount of misleading data is increasing faster than the amount of correct data. There should also be a distinction made between data and information. Data is meaningless in the absence of an organizing context. That means that different people looking at the same data are likely to come to different conclusions. There is a big difference with what a world class artist can do with a paint brush as opposed to a monkey. In other words, the value of Google will depend on what the user brings to the game. The value of data is highly dependent on the quality of the question being asked.” — Robert Lunn, consultant, FocalPoint Analytics
The big struggle is over what kind of information Google and other search engines kick back to users. In the age of social media where users can be their own content creators it might get harder and harder to separate high-quality material from junk.
• “Access to more information isn’t enough — the information needs to be correct, timely, and presented in a manner that enables the reader to learn from it. The current network is full of inaccurate, misleading, and biased information that often crowds out the valid information. People have not learned that 'popular’ or 'available’ information is not necessarily valid.”– Gene Spafford, Purdue University CERIAS, Association for Computing Machinery U.S. Public Policy Council
• ”If we take ‘Google’ to mean the complex social, economic and cultural phenomenon that is a massively interactive search and retrieval information system used by people and yet also using them to generate its data, I think Google will, at the very least, not make us smarter and probably will make us more stupid in the sense of being reliant on crude, generalised approximations of truth and information finding. Where the questions are easy, Google will therefore help; where the questions are complex, we will flounder.” — Matt Allen, former president of the Association of Internet Researchers and associate professor of internet studies at Curtin University in Australia
• ”The challenge is in separating that wheat from the chaff, as it always has been with any other source of mass information, which has been the case all the way back to ancient institutions like libraries. Those users (of Google, cable TV, or libraries) who can do so efficiently will beat the odds, becoming 'smarter’ and making better choices. However, the unfortunately majority will continue to remain, as Carr says, stupid.” — Christopher Saunders, managing editor, internetnews.com
• “The problem with Google that is lurking just under the clean design home page is the “tragedy of the commons”: the link quality seems to go down every year. The link quality may actually not be going down but the signal to noise is getting worse as commercial schemes lead to more and more junk links.” — Glen Edens, former senior vice president and director at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, chief scientist Hewlett Packard
Literary intelligence is very much under threat.
• ”If one defines — or partially defines — IQ as literary intelligence, the ability to sit with a piece of textual material and analyze it for complex meaning and retain derived knowledge, then we are indeed in trouble. Literary culture is in trouble…. We are spending less time reading books, but the amount of pure information that we produce as a civilization continues to expand exponentially. That these trends are linked, that the rise of the latter is causing the decline of the former, is not impossible…. One could draw reassurance from today’s vibrant Web culture if the general surfing public, which is becoming more at home in this new medium, displayed a growing propensity for literate, critical thought. But take a careful look at the many blogs, post comments, Facebook pages, and online conversations that characterize today’s Web 2.0 environment…. This type of content generation, this method of 'writing,’ is not only sub-literate, it may actually undermine the literary impulse…. Hours spent texting and e-mailing, according to this view, do not translate into improved writing or reading skills.” — Patrick Tucker, senior editor, The Futurist magazine
New literacies will be required to function in this world. In fact, the internet might change the very notion of what it means to be smart. Retrieval of good information will be prized. Maybe a race of “extreme Googlers” will come into being.
• ”The critical uncertainty here is whether people will learn and be taught the essential literacies necessary for thriving in the current infosphere: attention, participation, collaboration, crap detection, and network awareness are the ones I’m concentrating on. I have no reason to believe that people will be any less credulous, gullible, lazy, or prejudiced in ten years, and am not optimistic about the rate of change in our education systems, but it is clear to me that people are not going to be smarter without learning the ropes.” — Howard Rheingold, author of several prominent books on technology, teacher at Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley
• ”Google makes us simultaneously smarter and stupider. Got a question? With instant access to practically every piece of information ever known to humankind, we take for granted we’re only a quick web search away from the answer. Of course, that doesn’t mean we understand it. In the coming years we will have to continue to teach people to think critically so they can better understand the wealth of information available to them.” — Jeska Dzwigalski, Linden Lab
• ”We might imagine that in ten years, our definition of intelligence will look very different. By then, we might agree on ’smart’ as something like a ‘networked’ or ‘distributed’ intelligence where knowledge is our ability to piece together various and disparate bits of information into coherent and novel forms.” — Christine Greenhow, educational researcher, University of Minnesota and Yale Information and Society Project
• ”Human intellect will shift from the ability to retain knowledge towards the skills to discover the information i.e. a race of extreme Googlers (or whatever discovery tools come next). The world of information technology will be dominated by the algorithm designers and their librarian cohorts. Of course, the information they’re searching has to be right in the first place. And who decides that?” — Sam Michel, founder Chinwag, community for digital media practitioners in the United Kingdom
One new “literacy” that might help is the capacity to build and use social networks to help people solve problems.
• “There’s no doubt that the internet is an extension of human intelligence, both individual and collective. But the extent to which it’s able to augment intelligence depends on how much people are able to make it conform to their needs. Being able to look up who starred in the 2nd season of the Tracey Ullman show on Wikipedia is the lowest form of intelligence augmentation; being able to build social networks and interactive software that helps you answer specific questions or enrich your intellectual life is much more powerful. This will matter even more as the internet becomes more pervasive. Already my iPhone functions as the external, silicon lobe of my brain. For it to help me become even smarter, it will need to be even more effective and flexible than it already is. What worries me is that device manufacturers and internet developers are more concerned with lock-in than they are with making people smarter. That means it will be a constant struggle for individuals to reclaim their intelligence from the networks they increasingly depend upon.” — Dylan Tweney, senior editor, Wired magazine
Nothing can be bad that delivers more information to people, more efficiently. It might be that some people lose their way in this world, but overall, societies will be substantially smarter.
• ”The Internet has facilitated orders of magnitude improvements in access to information. People now answer questions in a few moments that a couple of decades back they would not have bothered to ask, since getting the answer would have been impossibly difficult.” — John Pike, Director, globalsecurity.org
• “Google is simply one step, albeit a major one, in the continuing continuum of how technology changes our generation and use of data, information, and knowledge that has been evolving for decades. As the data and information goes digital and new information is created, which is at an ever increasing rate, the resultant ability to evaluate, distill, coordinate, collaborate, problem solve only increases along a similar line. Where it may appear a 'dumbing down’ has occurred on one hand, it is offset (I believe in multiples) by how we learn in new ways to learn, generate new knowledge, problem solve, and innovate.” — Mario Morino, Chairman, Venture Philanthropy Partners
Google itself and other search technologies will get better over time and that will help solve problems created by too-much-information and too-much-distraction.
• “I’m optimistic that Google will get smarter by 2020 or will be replaced by a utility that is far better than Google. That tool will allow queries to trigger chains of high-quality information — much closer to knowledge than flood. Humans who are able to access these chains in high-speed, immersive ways will have more patters available to them that will aid decision-making. All of this optimism will only work out if the battle for the soul of the Internet is won by the right people — the people who believe that open, fast, networks are good for all of us.” — Susan Crawford, former member of President Obama’s National Economic Council, now on the law faculty at the University of Michigan
• ”If I am using Google to find an answer, it is very likely the answer I find will be on a message board in which other humans are collaboratively debating answers to questions. I will have to choose between the answer I like the best. Or it will force me to do more research to find more information. Google never breeds passivity or stupidity in me: It catalyzes me to explore further. And along the way I bump into more humans, more ideas and more answers.” — Joshua Fouts, Senior Fellow for Digital Media & Public Policy at the Center for the Study of the Presidency
The more we use the internet and search, the more dependent on it we will become.
• ”As the Internet gets more sophisticated it will enable a greater sense of empowerment among users. We will not be more stupid, but we will probably be more dependent upon it.” — Bernie Hogan, Oxford Internet Institute
Even in little ways, including in dinner table chitchat, Google can make people smarter.
• “[Family dinner conversations] have changed markedly because we can now look things up at will. That’s just one small piece of evidence I see that having Google at hand is great for civilization.” — Jerry Michalski, president, Sociate
'We know more than ever, and this makes us crazy.’
• “The answer is really: both. Google has already made us smarter, able to make faster choices from more information. Children, to say nothing of adults, scientists and professionals in virtually every field, can seek and discover knowledge in ways and with scope and scale that was unfathomable before Google. Google has undoubtedly expanded our access to knowledge that can be experienced on a screen, or even processed through algorithms, or mapped. Yet Google has also made us careless too, or stupid when, for instance, Google driving directions don’t get us to the right place. It has confused and overwhelmed us with choices, and with sources that are not easily differentiated or verified. Perhaps it’s even alienated us from the physical world itself — from knowledge and intelligence that comes from seeing, touching, hearing, breathing and tasting life. From looking into someone’s eyes and having them look back into ours. Perhaps it’s made us impatient, or shortened our attention spans, or diminished our ability to understand long thoughts. It’s enlightened anxiety. We know more than ever, and this makes us crazy.” — Andrew Nachison, co-founder, We Media
A final thought: Maybe Google won’t make us more stupid, but it should make us more modest.
• ”There is and will be lots more to think about, and a lot more are thinking. No, not more stupid. Maybe more humble.” — Sheizaf Rafaeli, Center for the Study of the Information Society, University of Haifa
Read more about responses to other “tension pairs” tested in the survey as well as a more complete description of the survey methodology and respondents at pewinternet.org.
"If
you look at the fossil record, it is just littered with dead bodies
from past catastrophes," observes University of Washington
paleontologist Peter Ward. Ward says that only one extinction in
Earth's past was caused by an asteroid impact – the event 65 million
years ago that ended the age of the dinosaurs. All the rest, he claims,
were caused by global warming.
Ward’s Under a Green Sky explores extinctions in Earth's past and predicts extinctions to come in the future.
Ward
demonstrates that the ancient past is not just of academic concern.
Everyone has heard about how an asteroid did in the dinosaurs, and NASA
and other agencies now track Near Earth objects. Unfortunately, we may
not be protecting ourselves against the likeliest cause of our species’
demise. Ward explains how those extinctions happened, and then applies
those chilling lessons to the modern day: expect drought, superstorms,
poison–belching oceans, mass extinction of much life, and sickly green
skies.
The significant points Ward stresses are geologically
rapid climate change has been the underlying cause of most great
“extinction” events. Those events have been, observed Harvard
evolutionary biologist Stephen Gould, major drivers of evolution.
Drastic climate change has not always been gradual; there is solid
empirical evidence of catastrophic warming events taking place in
centuries, perhaps even decades. The impact of atmospheric warming is
most potent in its modification of ocean chemistry and of circulating
currents; warming inevitably leads to non-mixing anoxic dead seas. We
are already in the middle, not the beginning, of an anthropogenic
global warming, caused by agriculture and deforestation, which began
some 10,000 years ago but which is now accelerating exponentially;
though the earliest wave of anthropogenic warming has been stabilizing
and beneficial to human development, it appears to have the potential
for catastrophic effects within a lifetime or two.
Looking
at the ancient evidence, Ward notes that ice caps began to shrink.
“Melting all the ice caps causes a 75-meter increase in sea level will
remove every coastal city on our planet.” It will also cover earth’s
most productive farmland, the author warns, adding, “It will happen if
we do not somehow control CO2 rise in the atmosphere.”
A new analysis of the geological record of
the Earth’s sea level, carried out by scientists at Princeton and
Harvard universities supports Ward using a novel statistical approach that reveals the
planet’s polar ice sheets are vulnerable to large-scale melting even
under moderate global warming scenarios. Such melting would lead to a
large and relatively rapid rise in global sea level.
According to the analysis, an additional 2 degrees of global warming
could commit the planet to 6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) of long-term
sea level rise. This rise would inundate low-lying coastal areas where
hundreds of millions of people now reside. It would permanently
submerge New Orleans and other parts of southern Louisiana, much of
southern Florida and other parts of the U.S. East Coast, much of
Bangladesh, and most of the Netherlands, unless unprecedented and
expensive coastal protection were undertaken. And while the
researchers’ findings indicate that such a rise would likely take
centuries to complete, if emissions of greenhouse gases are not abated,
the planet could be committed during this century to a level of warming
sufficient to trigger this outcome.
The last interglacial stage
provides a historical analog for futures with a fairly moderate amount
of warming; the high sea levels during the stage suggest that
significant chunks of major ice sheets could disappear over a period of
centuries in such futures.
Previous geological studies of sea
level benchmarks such as coral reefs and beaches had shown that, at
many localities, local sea levels during the last interglacial stage
were higher than today. But local sea levels differ from those in this
earlier stage; one major contributing factor is that the changing
masses of the ice sheets alter the planet’s gravitational field and
deform the solid Earth. As a consequence, inferring global sea level
from local geological sea level markers requires a geographically broad
data set, a model of the physics of sea level, and a means to integrate
the two. The study’s authors provide all three, integrating the data
and the physics with a statistical approach that allows them to assess
the probability distribution of past global sea level and its rate of
change.
The findings indicate that sea level during the last
interglacial stage rose for centuries at least two to three times
faster than the recent rate, and that both the Greenland and West
Antarctic ice sheet likely shrank significantly and made important
contributions to sea level rise. However, the relative timing of
temperature change and sea level change during the last interglacial
stage is fairly uncertain, so it is not possible to infer from the
analysis how long an exposure to peak temperatures during this stage
was needed to commit the planet to peak sea levels.
A similar
study by a team of scientists from Bristol, Cardiff and Texas A&M
universities braved the lions and hyenas of a small East African
village to extract microfossils from rocks which have revealed the
level of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere at the time of the formation of
the ice-cap. New carbon dioxide data confirm that formation of the
Antarctic ice-cap some 33.5 million years ago was due to declining
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Professor Paul Pearson from
Cardiff University's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, who led the
mission to the remote East Africa village of Stakishari said: "About 34
million years ago the Earth experienced a mysterious cooling trend.
Glaciers and small ice sheets developed in Antarctica, sea levels fell
and temperate forests began to displace tropical-type vegetation in
many areas.
"The period culminated in the rapid development of a
continental-scale ice sheet on Antarctica, which has been there ever
since. We therefore set out to establish whether there was a
substantial decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels as the
Antarctic ice sheet began to grow."
Co-author Dr Bridget Wade
from Texas A&M University Department of Geology and Geophysics
added: "This was the biggest climate switch since the extinction of the
dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Our study is the first to provide a
direct link between the establishment of an ice sheet on Antarctica and
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and therefore confirms the
relationship between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and global
climate."
Geologists have long speculated that the formation of
the Antarctic ice-cap was caused by a gradually diminishing natural
greenhouse effect. The study's findings, published in Nature online,
confirm that atmospheric CO2 started to decline about 34 million years
ago, during the period known to geologists as the Eocene - Oligocene
climate transition, and that the ice sheet began to form about 33.5
million years ago when CO2 in the atmosphere reached a tipping point of
around 760 parts per million.
The team mapped large expanses of
bush and wilderness and pieced together the underlying local rock
formations using occasional outcrops of rocks and stream beds.
Eventually they discovered sediments of the right age near a
traditional African village called Stakishari. By assembling a drilling
rig and extracting hundreds of meters of samples from under the ground
they were able to obtain exactly the piece of Earth’s history they had
been searching for.
Ward is encouraged that we are
beginning to make changes in their daily lives and demanding action
from their leaders -”that we are on a planet that has violent
convulsions, and that we humans are playing with nature in such a way
that we could recreate what were some really awful times in earth’s
history, that we really tinker with the earth’s atmosphere at our
peril.”
Posted by Casey Kazan from material provided by Princeton University and Bristol University
http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2009/6546.html
The Quelccaya Ice Cap in the heart of the Peruvian Andres, is the
largest
tropical body of ice in the world. The ice cap is at an average
altitude of 5,470 meters (18,600 ft) and spans an area of 44 square
kilometers (17 miles). As the ice cap is retreating, it is exposing
almost perfectly preserved plant specimens dating back 5,200 year,
indicating that it has been more than 50 centuries since the ice cap
was smaller than it is today.
According to recent research, one of the glaciers in this ice cap, the
Peruvian Qori Kalis, like the snowfields of Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro,
is rapidly melting and could soon vanish completely (comparisons with
previous mapping showed 33% of Mount Kilimanjaro’s ice had disappeared in
the last two decades - 82% since 1912).
The icecap has lost approximately 20% of its area since 1978, and
the current rate of retreat is increasing. Ice cores taken from Upper
Fremont Glacier in Wyoming show an oxygen isotope profile similar to
that of the Quelccaya ice cores at the end of the Little Ice Age, a
period of cooler global temperatures between the years 1550 and 1850.
The sudden alterations in the oxygen isotope ratio found in ice core
samples from these two remotely located glaciers, provide evidence of a
sudden global climate change in the mid-latitude regions of the planet.
“I would not be surprised to see half of it disappear in this coming
year,” said climatologist Lonnie Thompson, from Ohio State University.
Thompson has been studying the Qori Kalis glacier since 1978.
“In the first 10 years [that] we observed the glacier, it was
retreating 6 meters (19.7 feet) every year,” Thompson said. “In the
last few years, it has started retreating 60 meters (197 feet) every
year - a 10-fold increase. On top of that you will have natural
phenomena like El Nino, which release heat into the lower atmosphere,”
he predicted.
“The combination of those two things will have a big impact on glaciers
throughout the tropics,” said Thompson. “No matter what we do, we are
going to lose the glaciers on Kilimanjaro and the lower elevation
glaciers in the Andes.”
“Kilimanjaro could be gone by 2020,” he suggested. “In the Andes, some
of the glaciers are bigger, but I think we are talking 30 to 50 years.”
This will cause many problems for some of the poorest people on earth
since they depend upon annual glacial melt to sustain their crops. Loss
of these glaciers will cause a huge drought and crop failure.
“These changes are going to take place and these people will be impacted,” observed Thompson. “They have to find ways to adapt.”
Posted by Jason McManus.
Related Galaxy posts:
Monitoring Climate Change -Expert Says We Need Lunar Observatories
In his new blockbuster Avatar, director James Cameron places his bet squarely on the “life as carbon-based DNA” camp. With NASA’s Kepler mission showing the potential to detect Earth-sized objects, habitable moons may soon become science fact. If we find them nearby, a new paper by Smithsonian astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger shows that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) will be able to study their atmospheres and detect key gases like carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor.
“If Pandora existed, we potentially could detect it and study its atmosphere in the next decade,” said Kaltenegger of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
So far, planet searches have spotted hundreds of Jupiter-sized objects in a range of orbits. Gas giants, while easier to detect, could not serve as homes for life as we know it. However, scientists have speculated whether a rocky moon orbiting a gas giant could be life-friendly, if that planet
orbited within the star’s habitable zone (the region warm enough for liquid
water to exist).
“All of the gas giant planets in our solar system have rocky and icy moons,” said Kaltenegger. “That raises the possibility that alien Jupiters will also have moons. Some of those may be Earth-sized and able to hold onto an atmosphere.”
Kepler looks for planets that cross in front of their host stars, which creates a mini-eclipse and dims the star by a small but detectable amount. Such a transit lasts only hours and requires exact alignment of star and planet along our line of sight. Kepler will examine thousands of stars to
find a few with transiting worlds.
Once they have found an alien Jupiter, astronomers can look for orbiting moons, or exomoons. A moon’s gravity would tug on the planet and either speed or slow its transit, depending on whether the moon leads or trails the planet. The resulting transit duration variations would indicate the moon’s existence.
Once a moon is found, the next obvious question would be: Does it have an atmosphere? If it does, those gases will absorb a fraction of the star’s light during the transit, leaving a tiny, telltale fingerprint to the atmosphere’s composition.
The signal is strongest for large worlds with hot, puffy atmospheres, but an Earth-sized moon could be studied if conditions are just right. For example, the separation of moon and planet needs to be large enough that we could catch just the moon in transit, while its planet is off to one side of the star.
Kaltenegger calculated what conditions are best for examining the atmospheres of alien moons. She found that alpha Centauri A, the system featured in Avatar, would be an excellent target.
“Alpha Centauri A is a bright, nearby star very similar to our Sun, so it gives us a strong signal” Kaltenegger explained. “You would only need a handful of transits to find water, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and methane on an Earth-like moon such as Pandora.”
“If the Avatar movie is right in its vision, we could characterize that moon with the James Webb Space Telescope in the near future,” she added.
While Alpha Centauri A offers tantalizing possibilities, small, dim, red dwarf stars are better targets in the hunt for habitable planets or moons. The habitable zone for a red dwarf is closer to the star, which increases the probability of a transit.
Astronomers have debated whether tidal locking could be a problem for red dwarfs. A planet close enough to be in the habitable zone would also be close enough for the star’s gravity to slow it until one side always faces the star. (The same process keeps one side of the Moon always facing Earth.) One side of the planet then would be baked in constant sunlight, while the
other side would freeze in constant darkness.
An exomoon in the habitable zone wouldn’t face this dilemma. The moon would be tidally locked to its planet, not to the star, and therefore would have regular day-night cycles just like Earth. Its atmosphere would moderate temperatures, and plant life would have a source of energy moon-wide.
“Alien moons orbiting gas giant planets may be more likely to be habitable than tidally locked Earth-sized planets or super-Earths,” said Kaltenegger. “We should certainly keep them in mind as we work toward the ultimate goal of finding alien life.”
So what about Cameron’s Na’vi? Will our first discovery of life beyond Earth be DNA and carbon-based? At once humanoid and tantalizingly exotic, the 10-foot, blue-skinned Na'vi come with supermodel dimensions; long articulated digits, the better to grip with; and the slanted eyes and ears of a cat.
In his famous lecture, “Life in the Universe,” Stephen Hawking observed that what we normally think of as ‘life’ is based on chains of carbon atoms, with a few other atoms, such as nitrogen or phosphorous. We can imagine that one might have life with some other chemical basis, such as silicon, “but carbon seems the most favorable case, because it has the richest chemistry.”
Several eminent scientists think otherwise, that life in the universe could have a myriad of possible biochemical foundations ranging from life in ammonia to life in hydrocarbons and silicon. Silicates have a rich chemistry with a propensity for forming chains, rings, and sheets.
One of the founders on modern genetics, Cairn-Smith, argued that layers of crystalline silicates functioned as a primitive form of life on early Earth, before they evolved into carbon-based life forms.
The Earth (and we’re assuming, Pandora) was formed largely out of the heavier elements, including carbon and oxygen.
Somehow, Hawking observes, “some of these atoms came to be arranged in the form of molecules of DNA. One possibility is that the formation of something like DNA, which could reproduce itself, is extremely unlikely. However, in a universe with a very large, or infinite, number of stars, one would expect it to occur in a few stellar systems, but they would be very widely separated.”
Other prominent scientists have warned that we humans may be blinded by our familiarity with carbon and Earth-like conditions. In other words, what we're looking for may not even lie in our version of a "sweet spot" in the Galactic Habitable Zone. After all, even here on Earth, one species "sweet spot" is another species worst nightmare.
In any case, it is not beyond the realm of feasibility that our first encounter with extraterrestrial life will not be a solely carbon-based fete.
Alternative biochemists speculate that there are several atoms and solvents that could potentially spawn life. Because carbon has worked for the conditions on Earth, we speculate that the same must be true throughout the universe. In reality, there are many elements that could potentially do the trick. Even counter-intuitive elements such as arsenic may be capable of supporting life under the right conditions.
Even on Earth some marine algae incorporate arsenic into complex organic molecules such as arsenosugars and arsenobetaines.
Several other small life forms use arsenic to generate energy and facilitate growth. Chlorine and sulfur are also possible elemental replacements for carbon. Sulfur is capably of forming long-chain molecules like carbon. Some terrestrial bacteria have already been discovered to survive on sulfur rather than oxygen, by reducing sulfur to hydrogen sulfide.
Nitrogen and phosphorus could also potentially form biochemical molecules. Phosphorus is similar to carbon in that it can form long chain molecules on its own, which would conceivably allow for formation of complex macromolecules. When combined with nitrogen, it can create quite a wide range of molecules, including rings.
So what about water? Isn't at least water essential to life?
Not necessarily. Ammonia, for example, as we mentioned above has many of the same properties as water. An ammonia or ammonia-water mixture stays liquid at much colder temperatures than plain water. Such biochemistries may exist outside the conventional water-based “habitability zone”.
One example of such a location would be right here in our own solar system on Saturn’s largest moon Titan.
Hydrogen fluoride methanol, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen chloride, and formamide have all been suggested as suitable solvents that could theoretically support alternative biochemistry. All of these "water replacements" have pros and cons when considered in our terrestrial environment. What needs to be considered is that with a radically different environment, comes radically different reactions. Water and carbon might be the very last things capable of supporting life in some extreme planetary conditions.
While some of these scenarios may seem the stuff of science finction, it’s important to keep in mind that the foundations of life on Earth, the association of a protein with a nucleic acid when view abstractly, does little to convey the endgame wonders such as blue whales and Mozart’s operas.
A billion years from now our descendants may have discovered other systems of physical life such as plasma within stars which would be based on the reciprocal influence of patterns of magnetic force and the ordered motion of charged particles. In fact, such life may well exists within our Sun.
Another form would be based on radiation emitted by isolated atoms and molecules in a dense interstellar cloud similar to the one physicist Fred Hoyle described in his scifi thriller, The Black Cloud. Such clouds can have a long lifetime lasting millions of years before they collapse.
Our personal favorite at The Daily Galaxy is the possibility of life in Neutron stars which would be based on the properties of polymeric atoms which which could form chains that could store and transmit information in a way that bears an uncanny similarity to the functions of nucleic acids -the molecules that carry genetic information or form structures within cells.
In the meantime, you can be sure I’ll be dreaming of the exotic and very sexy carbon-based Neytiri, the slinky Na’vi heroine -tail and all.
Casey Kazan - sourced from materials provided by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
Astrophysics (CfA) and New York Times article by Manhola Dargis
Scientists may have glimpsed a particle that is a leading candidate for mysterious dark matter but say conclusive evidence remains elusive. A nine-year search from a unique observatory in an old iron mine 2,000 feet underground has yielded two possible detections of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. But physicists, who include two University of Florida researchers, say there is about a one in four chance that the detections were merely background noise — meaning that a worldwide hunt involving at least two dozen different observatories and hundreds of scientists will continue.
“With one or two events, it’s tough. The numbers are too small,” said Tarek Saab, a UF assistant professor and one of dozens of physicists participating in the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search II, or CDMS II, experiment based in the Soudan mine in Northern Minnesota.
A scientific system buried deep below the Earth, constructed of ultrapure materials held hovering over absolute zero, has finally stirred. This isn’t an attack by misbegotten monsters but an encouraging clue to the main mystery of the universe: dark matter.
The kind of matter with which we are familiar — atoms and molecules, and indeed every particle we have ever created in a laboratory known as baryonic– only makes up about 5% of the universe. Another 25% is dark matter, a kind of particle that is massive and weakly interacting. The remaining 70% is dark energy, which is not even a particle — it’s a smoothly-distributed energy field that remains persistent in density even as the universe expands. The ongoing effort to understand dark matter and dark energy is the most important task of twenty-first century cosmology.
The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search II (CDMS II) does exactly what it says - it’s cryogenically cooled, it’s searching for dark matter, and this is the second time they’ve done it. High purity low temperature crystals of germanium and silicon vibrate are disturbed by anything impacting on them, and they’re buried under seven hundred meters of iron mine to make sure most of “anything” can’t make it. One thing that could conceivably come down and stir things up is a WIMP, a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle - one of the options for dark matter.
The system is so shielded that over an entire year users only expect 0.8 events, and in 2008 they saw two. This is a tantalising taste of data: analysis indicates that the event energy matches the model for dark matter WIMPs, but even after screening out as much noise as possible it simply isn’t enough signal to be sure. Scientists, you see, double-check and confirm things before shouting about them (unlike others who - for example - might hack unprocessed e-mails, strip random sentences out of context, then start screaming about all kinds of nonsense.
This excitement is motivating instead of mob-making: the research team are upgrading the equipment with Super-CDMS stacks of crystal which will triple its efficiency. Space satellites, subterranean sensors, and that little LHC thing: we want this dark matter stuff.
The bulk of the dark matter that makes up 75% of the universe is believed to be nonbaryonic, which means that it contains no atoms and that it does not interact with ordinary matter via electromagnetic forces and includes neutrinos, and possibly hypothetical entities such as axions, or supersymmetric particles. Unlike baryonic dark matter, nonbaryonic dark matter did not contribute to the formation of the elements in the early universe, so its presence is detected only by its gravitational attraction.
Scientists recognized decades ago that the rotational speed of galaxies and the behavior of galaxy clusters could not be explained by the traditional forces of gravity due to the mass of visible stars alone. Something else — something invisible, undetectable yet extremely powerful — had to exert the force required to cause the galaxies’ more-rapid-than-expected rotational speed and similar anomalous observations.
What came to be known as “dark matter” – dark because it neither reflects nor absorbs light in any form, visible or other – is now estimated to comprise as much as 23 percent of the universe. But despite abundant evidence for its influence, no one has ever observed dark matter directly.
There are several possibilities for the composition of this mysterious, omnipresent matter. Particle physics theory points toward WIMPs as one of the most likely candidates.
WIMPs are “weakly interacting” because, although their masses are thought to be comparable to the masses of standard atomic nuclei, they have little or no effect on ordinary matter, and among other things, that makes them extremely difficult to detect. However, scientists believe WIMPs should occasionally “kick” or bounce off standard atomic nuclei, leaving behind a small amount of energy that should be possible to detect.
The CDMS II observatory is located a half-mile underground beneath rock that blocks most particles, such as those accompanying cosmic rays. At the observatory’s heart are 30 hockey-puck-sized germanium and silicon detectors cryogenically frozen to negative 459.58 Fahrenheit, just shy of absolute zero. In theory, WIMPs would be among the few particles that make it all the way through the earth and rock. They would then occasionally kick the atoms on these detectors, generating a tiny amount of heat, a signal that would be observed and recorded on the experiment’s computers.
Observers recorded the two possible WIMP events in 2007, one on Aug. 8 and the second on Oct. 27. Scientists had estimated that five detections would be sufficient to confirm WIMPs — meaning that the two fell short, according to the CDMS. But while the two detections may not be conclusive, they do help to set more stringent values on the WIMPs’ interaction with subatomic particles.
At the very least, the finding helps to eliminate some theories about dark matter — raising the profile of the WIMP and potentially accelerating the race to detect it.
Most experts agree that in the next five years or so, someone will see a clear signal.
Casey Kazan with Luke McKinney via University of Florida
Image at top: Dark Matter ring in Galaxy Cluster CI 0024+17 Hubble Space Telescope
This image gives the first clear view of the faint boundary of the Crab Nebula’s X-ray-emitting pulsar wind nebula. The nebula is powered by a rapidly rotating, highly magnetized neutron star, or pulsar (white dot near the center). The combination of rapid rotating and strong magnetic field generates an intense electromagnetic field that creates jets of matter and anti-matter moving away from the north and south poles of the pulsar, and an intense wind flowing out in the equatorial direction.
The inner X-ray ring is thought to be a shock wave that marks the boundary between the surrounding nebula and the flow of matter and antimatter particles from the pulsar. Energetic electrons and positrons (antielectrons) move outward from this ring to brighten the outer ring and produce an extended X-ray glow.
The fingers, loops, and bays in the image all indicate that the magnetic field of the nebula and filaments of cooler matter are controlling the motion of the electrons and positrons. The particles can move rapidly along the magnetic field and travel several light years before radiating away their energy. In contrast, they move much more slowly perpendicular to the magnetic field, and travel only a short distance before losing their energy.
The Daily Galaxy via Chandra Space Telescope
New observations using ESO's Very Large Telescope have been used to solve an important astrophysical puzzle concerning the oldest stars in our galactic neighborhood hidden until recently in dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way. In comparison to the Milky Way, most dwarf galaxies are blob-like, 85% smaller (around 6700 vs 100,000 light-years across), containing around 30 billion stars.
When the Universe was just a fraction of its current age, and galaxies
such as the one we inhabit were nowhere to be seen, stars formed inside odd structures, that have long since disappeared. These
structures are called dwarf irregulars, and the scientist believes that
the peculiar type of stellar formation processes they display may
resemble the original one and may provide clues as to how stars
appeared shortly after the Big Bang.
Unlike massive galaxies,
such as the Milky Way, with highly-defined central regions, spiral arms
and so on, dwarf irregulars are very small and diffuse groups of stars,
which are the last thing to spring to mind when thinking of the word
"galaxy". Star formation in dwarfs today is similar to star formation
right after the Big Bang.
"We have, in effect, found a flaw in the forensic methods used until now," says Else Starkenburg, lead author of the paper reporting the study. "Our improved approach allows us to uncover the primitive stars hidden among all the other, more common stars."
Primitive stars are thought to have formed from material forged shortly after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago. They typically have less than one thousandth the amount of chemical elements heavier than hydrogen and helium found in the Sun and are called "extremely metal-poor stars.” They belong to one of the first generations of stars in the nearby Universe. Such stars are extremely rare and mainly observed in the Milky Way.
Cosmologists think that larger galaxies like the Milky Way formed from the merger of smaller galaxies. Our Milky Way's population of extremely metal-poor or "primitive" stars should already have been present in the dwarf galaxies from which it formed, and similar populations should be present in other dwarf galaxies. Metals" are all the elements other than hydrogen and helium. Such
metals, except for a very few minor light chemical elements, have all
been created by the various generations of stars.
"So far, evidence for them has been scarce," says co-author Giuseppina Battaglia. "Large surveys conducted in the last few years kept showing that the most ancient populations of stars in the Milky Way and dwarf galaxies did not match, which was not at all expected from cosmological models."
Element abundances are measured from spectra, which provide the chemical fingerprints of stars . Since the dwarf galaxies are typically 300 000 light years away — which is about three times the size of our Milky Way — only strong features in the spectrum could be measured, like a vague, smeared fingerprint. The team found that none of their large collection of spectral fingerprints actually seemed to belong to the class of stars they were after, the rare, extremely metal-poor stars found in the Milky Way.
The team of astronomers around Starkenburg has now shed new light on the problem through careful comparison of spectra to computer-based models. They found that only subtle differences distinguish the chemical fingerprint of a normal metal-poor star from that of an extremely metal-poor star, explaining why previous methods did not succeed in making the identification.
The astronomers also confirmed the almost pristine status of several extremely metal-poor stars thanks to much more detailed spectra obtained with the UVES instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope. "Compared to the vague fingerprints we had before, this would be as if we looked at the fingerprint through a microscope," explains team member Vanessa Hill. "Unfortunately, just a small number of stars can be observed this way because it is very time consuming."
"Among the new extremely metal-poor stars discovered in these dwarf galaxies, three have a relative amount of heavy chemical elements between only 1/3000 and 1/10 000 of what is observed in our Sun, including the current record holder of the most primitive star found outside the Milky Way," says team member Martin Tafelmeyer.
"Not only has our work revealed some of the very interesting, first stars in these galaxies, but it also provides a new, powerful technique to uncover more such stars," concludes Starkenburg. "From now on there is no place left to hide!"
Casey Kazan via ESO
As the oldest, largest and deepest lake on planet Earth, ancient Lake
Baikal is known as the "grand dame" of all lakes. UNESCO declared it a
World Heritage due to its stunning bio-diversity. Most of its 2500 some
odd plant and animal species, including the freshwater seal, evolved in
pristine isolation and are found nowhere else on the planet.
In late January, Russian police raided the offices of the Baikal Environmental Wave group after it criticized a plan to reopen a paper mill next to Lake Baikal in Siberia that had been closed since 2008 due to pollution fears. Russian PM Vladimir Putin decreed that the mill could reopen. The Baikalsk Paper and Pulp Mill is the biggest employer in Baikalsk, a town of 17,000. The mill is owned by Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska.
Environmentalists have fought for years to keep the mill shut, arguing that it threatens the lake’s fragile ecosystem.
The
Siberian lake contains 20 percent of the entire world’s
freshwater, and is large enough to hold all the water in the Great
Lakes combined and then some. The lake has yielded many exciting
aquatic wonders and likely holds many more undiscovered marvels in its
incredibly deep waters. The 25 million year old lake predates the
emergence of humans, but its splendor may not outlive us.
Stephanie Hampton, the Deputy Director of the National Center for
Ecological Analysis & Synthesis (NCEAS) who has been studying the
lake shared with The Daily Galaxy what makes Baikal so exquisite.
"Lake Baikal probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever been - I’m
thinking especially right now of the day I spent on Olkhon Island when
the wildflowers were spectacular and the serenity was awe-inspiring. It
is the world’s most ancient lake with a proliferation of biodiversity
that is breathtaking," describes Hampton affectionately.
"Where I would usually see 2 species of a particular type of crustacean
(amphipods, in this case), instead, I see 344 species in all shapes and
colors and sizes. Many of the unique fish in Baikal resemble deep-sea
fishes rather than other freshwater fish that are more closely related
to them - with big eyes and spindly bodies. Also, sponge forests are
common. If you are surprised that I’m mentioning a sponge forest in a
lake, it’s for a good reason: they are not that common in lakes!"
Hampton notes with enthusiasm, "So here you are in this incredibly cold
lake at fairly high latitude, and underwater, this sponge forest looks
more like the Caribbean than the subarctic! It is really like a
freshwater Galapagos in the midst of Siberia."
It doesn't take much prodding to get information out of Hampton when it
comes to the lake! Her abounding awe and reverence for one of Mother
Nature's most unique wonders is completely apparent. Unfortunately,
according to Hampton and other experts, all this is about to change
forever. Global warming has had a strong impact on the lake, and is
threatening its incredibly unique life forms that evolved to live only
in extreme cold. A multi-generational study involving careful and
repeated sampling over six decades was recently reported in the journal
Global Change Biology showing that the lake's temperatures is rising
dangerously fast. Hampton, who participated in the study, notes that
the lake was expected to be among those most resistant to climate
change, due to its tremendous volume and unique water circulation. But
unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case.
"So many organisms in and around Lake Baikal have evolved only in Lake
Baikal, and they are very well-adapted to an extremely cold environment
that is covered by ice for much of the year. More than half of the
animals in Baikal are not found anywhere else! Lake Baikal has been
around for 25 million years, so there has been plenty of time for
organisms to evolve to its special environment - the warming associated
with climate change is very abrupt, and it’s not clear whether or how
these special organisms can adapt to a rapidly warming lake," Hampton
explains.
Already there has been a rise in more common water organisms in the
lake—a sight that does not bode well for the lakes original inhabitants.
"We know that Siberia is one of the most rapidly warming regions of the
world - the air temperature in Siberia has warmed at a rate that is
about twice that of the average global rate of temperature increase. So
when we approached this work with the Lake Baikal temperature data, we
knew that the lake would have been exposed to a greater ambient
temperature increase than lakes in other regions, but I certainly will
admit to being surprised that the lake had warmed so rapidly since
1946. Why is it warming so much faster than the air? The answer
probably involves ice," Hampton explains.
"Ice is a very prominent feature of life on Lake Baikal. Ice normally
starts taking over the lake in January and it doesn’t leave until May
or June - so, life goes on in Lake Baikal under ice for nearly half the
year! The top predator in the lake, the Baikal seal, raises its pups
on ice in the winter in snow caves, fishing for food in the lake water
by using holes in the ice. Under the ice, algae (the microscopic
plants at the base of the food web) that are found only in Lake Baikal,
are well-adapted to achieve their greatest productivity while there is
still thick, but clear, spring ice on the lake. So, both the top and
the bottom of the food web in Baikal are very well adapted to long icy
winters - this dependence on ice by the top and bottom of the food web
is not common in lakes."
She continues, "We know from previous work, published by other
researchers, that the ice is staying on the lake for a shorter time
period now than it used to. When ice lasted longer in the past, it kept
the lake insulated from air temperature changes for a longer portion of
the year. Now that there is less ice, the water is warming faster. This
is what other researchers also found on Lake Superior just last year.
So, we can expect the lake to get warmer and warmer, as the ice lasts
for a shorter time each year."
But what about the humans in the region? Even if the aquatic resident's
of Lake Baikal can't thrive in the warmer weather, aren't the nearby
human settlements looking forward to a respite from the bitter cold
that global warming may offer? Again, Hampton explains that the issue
is a lot more complicated than most of us realize.
"Some of the harshest winters of the century occurred within living
memory for many Siberians, and it is easy to understand why Russians
might welcome a longer growing season in Siberia. However, one big
concern, as the air temperature increases, will be the deterioration of
infrastructure as permafrost melts and the ground shifts under
buildings and around pipes or other structures laid in the ground," she
explains, "Also, there are villages around Lake Baikal that can only be
reached by water during the summer and by travel over the ice in winter
- when ice is too thin for travel, but too thick for a boat, those
villages are cut off from each other and from the main roads, so there
will be societal impacts for some of these isolated villages where
winter is already a pretty tough time of year."
In other words, climate change will likely have a negative impact on
the human population as well. As far as the lake itself goes, Hampton
points out that she's not alone in her concern.
"Russia, and many people are concerned for its welfare. A conservation
organization called the Baikal Environmental Wave received a
prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize this year, and there has been
good community involvement in environmental issues surrounding the lake
in recent years."
But awareness alone can't save the grand dame's biodiversity, nor other
fragile habitats around the globe. It will take action too. But what
can we ordinary people do to make any kind of real difference? Climate
change expert Thomas Reichler, who was not involved in the study, told
The Daily Galaxy that combating global warming starts with simple daily
choices that everyone makes. You don't have to change the world all by
yourself, just change your own actions and let your example inspire
other to do the same, he says. Things as simple as choosing to "drive
smaller cars, drive less, and insulate your house well. Things like
this can make a difference."
Posted by Rebecca Sato.
If you liked this article, please give it a quick review on Digg, Reddit, or StumbleUpon.Thanks!
Related Galaxy posts:
The Crisis is Coming: How Peak Water Could Reshape Civilization
The "Little Ice Age" Argument Makes a Comeback: Abrupt Climate Change Goes Both Ways, Warns Scientist
Ancient Antarctic Lake Exploration
Reports Warn that Climate Change & Eco-migration Could Lead to Increased Warfare
Are Global Warming Models Accurately Predicting Our Future? New Study Reveals the Answer—A Galaxy Interview
World’s Oldest Living Microbes May Cast Light on Aging & Life on Mars
Ancient Antarctic Microbes Revived in Lab
“Hunt for the Red October” Revives -Russia Challenges West Under Arctic Ice
National Science Foundation Link:
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=111511&org=olpa&from=news
