[This is actually very quaint. I spotted this while investigating this scientist. I think one can perhaps refine it a bit into something almost usable. For example, according to this method, due to me being in my late 50's, I can use this method to predict how long I will live. Thus I can say with 95% scientific certainty that I will live another at least 1.4 years or as long as 3,000 years of age!!! 🙂 So this system needs a bit of refining, but I like the mathematical basis. Jan]

The New Yorker, July 12, 1999 P. 35

ANNALS OF SCIENCE about the prediction theory put forward by Princeton astrophysicist J. Richard Gott III, 52… In the seventies, he and several colleagues published an influential paper arguing that the universe is geometrically “open”–meaning that it will go on expanding forever. Then, building on research pioneered by Kip Thorne, the eminent black-hole theorist at Caltech, he identified circumstances under which time travel into the past might be possible, inside black holes. This work has held up well, and has contributed to Gott’s growing reputation as a provocateur whose ideas, although sometimes startling, are difficult to dismiss… Gott is exquisitely serious about science, and is given to long-playing discourses—he can spend forty minutes answering a question without wasting a word—but a playful irony is seldom far from the thread of his conversation…. The question that Gott has been asking lately is how long the human species is going to last. Since scientists generally make predictions at the ninety-five-per-cent confidence level, Gott begins with the assumption that you and I, having no reason to think we’ve been born in a special time, are probably living during the middle ninety-five per cent of the ultimate duration of our species. In other words, we’re probably living neither during the first two and a half per cent nor during the last two and a half per cent of all the time that human beings will have existed. “Homo sapiens has been around for two hundred thousand years,” Gott said, once we’d finished our entrees. “That’s how long our past is. Two and a half per cent is equal to one-fortieth, so the future is probably at least one-thirty-ninth as long as the past but not more than thirty-nine times the past. If we divide two hundred thousand years by thirty-nine, we get about fifty-one hundred years. If we multiply it by thirty-nine, we get 7.8 million years. So if our location in human history is not special, there’s a ninety-five-per-cent chance we’re in the middle ninety-five per cent of it. Therefore the human future is probably going to last longer than fifty-one hundred years but less than 7.8 million years. “Now, those numbers are interesting, because they give us a total longevity that’s comparable to that of other species. The predicted total lifetime of the human species is quite similar to the ranges we see for other species—species that have gone extinct. Homo erectus, our ancestor species, lasted for about 1.6 million years. The Neanderthals went extinct after about three hundred thousand years. The mean duration for all mammal species is two million years.”… Gott, after rummaging around in his attache case, produced a set of dominoes, which he set up in five stacks of doubling height, starting with one domino and ending with a stack of sixteen. “These dominoes represent the human population over time,” he said. “We’ve gone through a period of exponential growth, so I have one, two, four, eight, and then sixteen dominoes. Now, what’s going to happen in the future? One prospect is that the population will reach a peak, then go back down at a similar rate. This is something that has happened to many species: you have an exponential growth rate that reaches a peak and then something bad happens and you have an exponential decline. In that case, you would expect to be right about here, near the peak. Most people are. And that’s where we are… If the population is going to decline, then we’re living in exactly a typical place, just as one would expect.” …This is the part of Gott’s argument that most troubles me—not because I can find fault with it but because I can’t. It ranks as one of the most baleful prognostications of the human fate since Malthus. Gott went happily on, tapping his right index finger on the domino plateau. “A lot of people say, ‘Well, our species may go out of existence, but we’ll be replaced by smarter, genetically engineered human beings. We’ll have many descendant species, so we shouldn’t mourn if Homo sapiens goes extinct, because we’ll be replaced by something much better.’ But, as Mr. Darwin noted, most species do not leave any descendants. A few do, and they leave a lot: there are sixteen species of rodents. Our genus, Homo, is down to one. We’re like the horse. There used to be several, now there’s only one. There used to be several different hominid species—the Neanderthals and us, for example—and now we’re down to one.” This is not a good sign. Describes his argument for colonizing Mars… “The manned space program is thirty-eight years old, so it’s been around only a short time,” he said. “Things that haven’t been around a very long time are not likely to be around very long in the future. So there’s a real danger that we will quit it, as the Chinese did in the fifteenth century. They explored Africa, came back with a giraffe that everybody wondered at, and then they just quit. The period of great Egyptian pyramid-building lasted about a century from the first to the biggest; then there was a long, slow decline during which the Egyptians built crummy ones. So there’s a danger that we’ll end up stuck on the earth—that if we wait too long we may have a population that’s too small to respond to an emergency or to do space colonization.”… Outside, at the curb, I waved goodbye as Gott’s car headed crosstown, bound for Princeton. That car is about a year old, I thought, so it’s likely to keep running for more than a week but less than thirty-nine more years. New York City was first settled in 1626; that gives it nine and a half to 14,500 years to go. Jupiter stood high in the southern sky, warranteed for at least another hundred and fourteen million years. Science, like art, changes the way one looks at things.

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/07/12/how-to-predict-everything

[This is amazing. Yet another Western science first. I was keen to see this, and they managed to film it. It's incredible. They've done 2 flights on Mars. They have 4 planned in total before the vehicle is destroyed by the cold. Each flight will be more ambitious and longer and more complex. This is going to be astounding. The atmosphere is 1% that of the Earth's so making the helicopter fly is really tricky and the rotor blades have to spin extremely fast. It will be very awesome when vehicles on other planets can begin flying around the planets! Jan]

Humans just made history: flying an autonomous helicopter on another planet, more than 100 million miles away.

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gQDnzpy1n4

[I've never heard of anything like this before. I have never yet heard of X-rays emanating from the centre of a planet. Jan]

For the first time ever, Astronomers have detected X-rays from Uranus. It’s unusual but is it good news or bad news?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlYNGgWjoT4

An asteroid seems to have exploded over Antarctica with a tremendous power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBXxjcHk-7g

Hints of a hefty source of gravity beyond Pluto sparked the search for a possible “Planet Nine”. Now, some astronomers think it could instead be a black hole from the big bang, offering a rare glimpse into the early universe

SPACE 31 March 2021
By Stuart Clark

BEYOND the giant planets of the outer solar system lies a vast wilderness. Most astronomers think it is inhabited by a population of small, icy worlds similar to Pluto, and several groups have dedicated themselves to tracking down these dwarf planets. In the process, some have come to suspect that something bigger is lurking out there: a planet several times the mass of Earth.

They believe that this hypothetical world, known as Planet Nine, betrays its presence by the way its gravity has aligned the orbits of a group of these small, icy bodies. The problem is that no one can imagine how a planet big enough to do that could form so far from the sun. “All we know is that there’s an object of a certain mass out there,” says Jakub Scholtz, a theorist at Durham University in the UK. “The observations we have can’t tell us what that object is.”

But if not a planet, then what? Scholtz suspects it could be something even more exotic: a primordial black hole, one forged in the big bang.

If he is right, it would be a stunning discovery. Primordial black holes would give us a new window onto the early universe. They might even comprise dark matter, the mysterious substance that holds galaxies together. All of which explains why cosmologists have been scouring the universe for them. But no one had dared to dream we might find one in our own backyard.

The question now is, how can we determine what the mysterious source of gravity lurking at the fringes of our solar system really is? …

Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24933280-100-is-there-an-ancient-black-hole-at-the-edge-of-the-solar-system/?utm_source=nsnew&utm_medium=email&

A new paper proposes a fully physically realized model for warp drive.

This builds on an existing model that requires negative energy—an impossibility.

The new model is exciting, but warp speed is still probably decades or centuries away.

In a surprising new paper, scientists say they’ve nailed down a physical model for a warp drive, which flies in the face of what we’ve long thought about the crazy concept of warp speed travel: that it requires exotic, negative forces.

To best understand what the breakthrough means, you’ll need a quick crash course on the far-out idea of traveling through folded space.

The colloquial term “warp drive” comes from science fiction, most famously Star Trek. The faster-than-light warp drive of the Federation works by colliding matter and antimatter and converting the explosive energy to propulsion. Star Trek suggests that this extraordinary power alone pushes the ship at faster-than-light speeds.

Scientists have been studying and theorizing about faster-than-light space travel for decades. One major reason for our interest is pure pragmatism: without warp drive, we’re probably never making it to a neighboring star system. The closest such trip is still four years long at light speed.

Our current understanding of warp speed dates back to 1994, when a now-iconic theoretical physicist named Miguel Alcubierre first proposed what we’ve called the Alcubierre drive ever since.

The Alcubierre drive conforms to Einstein’s theory of general relativity to achieve superluminal travel. “By a purely local expansion of spacetime behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it,” Alcubierre wrote in his paper’s abstract, “motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible.”

Essentially, an Alcubierre drive would expend a tremendous amount of energy—likely more than what’s available within the universe—to contract and twist space-time in front of it and create a bubble. Inside that bubble would be an inertial reference frame where explorers would feel no proper acceleration. The rules of physics would still apply within the bubble, but the ship would be localized outside of space.

It might help to think of an Alcubierre drive like the classic “tablecloth and dishes” party trick: The spaceship sits atop the tablecloth of spacetime, the drive pulls the fabric around it, and the ship is situated in a new place relative to the fabric.

Alcubierre describes spacetime expanding on one side of the ship and contracting on the other, thanks to that enormous amount of energy and a requisite amount of exotic matter—in this case, negative energy.

Is NASA Working On a Warp Drive?

Some scientists have criticized the Alcubierre drive, however, because it requires too much mass and negative energy for humans to ever seriously construct a warp-based propulsion system. NASA has been trying to build a physical warp drive through Eagleworks Laboratories for most of the last decade, but hasn’t yet made any significant strides.

warp propulsion
This brings us to the new study, which scientists in the Advanced Propulsion Laboratory (APL) at Applied Physics just published in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity. In the report, the APL team unveils the world’s first model for a physical warp drive—one that doesn’t require negative energy.

The study is understandably pretty thick (read the whole thing here), but here’s the gist of the model: Where the existing paradigm uses negative energy—exotic matter that doesn’t exist and can’t be generated within our current understanding of the universe—this new concept uses floating bubbles of spacetime rather than floating ships in spacetime.

The EmDrive Just Won’t Die
The physical model uses almost none of the negative energy and capitalizes on the idea that spacetime bubbles can behave almost however they like. And, the APL scientists say, this isn’t even the only other way warp speed could work. Making a model that’s at least physically comprehensible is a big step.

Plus, Alcubierre himself has endorsed the new model, which is like having Albert Einstein show up to your introductory physics class.

Of course, there’s one gigantic caveat here: The concept in this paper is still in the “far future” zone of possibility, made of ideas that scientists still don’t know how to construct in any sense.

“While the mass requirements needed for such modifications are still enormous at present,” the APL scientists write, “our work suggests a method of constructing such objects based on fully understood laws of physics.”

But while a physical drive may not be a reality today, tomorrow, or even a century from now—let’s hope it’s not that long—with this exciting new model, warp speed travel is now a lot more likely in a much shorter timespan than we previously thought.

Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a35718463/scientists-say-physical-warp-drive-is-possible/?source=nl&utm_source=nl_pop&utm_medium=email&date=0

• Experts analyzed a meteorite discovered last year in the Sahara desert
• The rock weighs 70 pounds and is tan in color with green spots throughout
• It consists mostly of volcanic rock, but also silicon dioxide that is found on Earth
• Named EC 002, it is 4.6 billion years old and was once part of an early planet

An ancient, meteorite, or achondrite, was discovered in the Sahara desert last year that has now been identified as chunk from a protoplanet that formed before Earth came into existence.

The space rock, named EC 002, dates back 4.6 billion years and consists mostly of volcanic rock, leading experts to believe it came from the crust of a very early planet.

The team of French and Japanese scientists determined that the rock was once liquid lava, but cooled and solidified over 100,000 years to form the 70-pound piece that eventually made its way to our planet.

Researchers also note that no asteroids have been found with similar properties, which suggests the protoplanet it came from has since disappeared by either becoming parts of larger bodies or ‘were simply destroyed.’

Scroll down for video

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An ancient achondrite was discovered in the Sahara desert last year that has now been identified as chunk from a protoplanet that formed before Earth came into existence. The stony meteorite, named EC 002, dates back 4.6 billion years

Anchondrites originate from early planetary bodies that have reformed from molten fragments and were flung into space as a result of another collision.

These rocks also resemble those on Earth at first glance, deeming them a rare discovery in the scientific community.

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The latest anchondrite has been named after its landing site in Algeria’s Erg Chech dune sea, which consist of several meteorites that collectively weight some 70 pounds, Motherboard reports.

Only a few thousands of these have been analyzed, most of which are basaltic, but EC 002 is made mostly of volcanic rock – making it rich in sodium, iron and magnesium.

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The rock consists mostly of volcanic rock, leading experts to believe it came from the crust of a very early planet. The team describes EC 002 as ‘relatively coarse grained, tan and beige,’ noting that it was also spotted with yellow and green bits

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The latest anchondrite has been named after its landing site in Algeria’s Erg Chech dune sea, which consist of several meteorites that collectively weight some 70 pounds

With this in mind, the team says EC 002 ‘is also the oldest magnetic rock ever observed.’

Researchers determined its age by studying the rock’s magnesium and aluminum isotopes, which showed it formed about 4.566 billion years ago – while Earth is said to be 4.543 billion years old.

The team describes EC 002 as ‘relatively coarse grained, tan and beige,’ noting that it was also spotted with yellow and green bits.

They also note that when they looked at other celestial bodies, focusing on their wavelengths, they found nothing that matched the wavelength reflected by EC 002.

The meteorite is also 58 percent silicon dioxide, making it even rarer than others previously found on Earth, as this mineral is commonly found in volcanic regions on our planet.

‘Protoplanets covered by andesitic crusts were probably frequent,’ the team wrote in the study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

‘However, no asteroid shares the spectral features of EC 002, indicating that almost all of these bodies have disappeared, either because they went on to form the building blocks of larger bodies or planets or were simply destroyed.’

Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-9346939/4-6-BILLION-year-old-meteorite-discovered-Sahara-shed-light-early-solar-system.html

Scientists have peered into the heart of Mars for the first time. NASA’s InSight spacecraft, sitting on the Martian surface with the aim of seeing deep inside the planet, has revealed the size of Mars’s core by listening to seismic energy ringing through the planet’s interior.

The measurement suggests that the radius of the Martian core is 1,810 to 1,860 kilometres, roughly half that of Earth’s. That’s larger than some previous estimates, meaning the core is less dense than had been predicted. The finding suggests the core must contain lighter elements, such as oxygen, in addition to the iron and sulfur that constitute much of its make-up. InSight scientists reported their measurements in several presentations this week at the virtual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, based out of Houston, Texas.

Rocky planets such as Earth and Mars are divided into the fundamental layers of crust, mantle and core. Knowing the size of each of those layers is crucial to understanding how the planet formed and evolved. InSight’s measurements will help scientists to determine how Mars’s dense, metal-rich core separated from the overlying rocky mantle as the planet cooled. The core is probably still molten from Mars’s fiery birth, some 4.5 billion years ago.

Compare and contrast

The only other rocky planetary bodies for which scientists have measured the core are Earth and the Moon. Adding Mars will allow researchers to compare and contrast how the Solar System’s planets evolved. Similar to Earth, Mars once had a strong magnetic field generated by liquid sloshing its core; but that magnetic field dropped dramatically over time, causing Mars’s atmosphere to escape into space and the surface to become cold, barren, and much less hospitable to life than Earth’s.

Simon Stähler, a seismologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, reported the core findings in a pre-recorded 18 March presentation for the virtual conference. Stähler declined an interview request from Nature, saying the team intends to submit the work for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

First ‘marsquake’ detected on red planet

The work builds on earlier findings from InSight that detected layers in the Martian crust. “Now we start to have that deep structure down to the core,” said geophysicist Philippe Lognonné in another pre-recorded talk. Lognonné, based at the Paris Institute of Earth Physics in France, heads InSight’s seismometer team.

The spacecraft, which cost nearly US$1 billion, landed on Mars in 2018 and is the first mission to study the red planet’s interior. The stationary lander sits near the Martian equator and listens for ‘marsquakes’, the Mars equivalent of earthquakes. So far, InSight has detected around 500 quakes, meaning the planet is less seismically active than Earth but more so than the Moon. Most marsquakes are very small, Lognonné said, but nearly 50 of them have been between magnitude 2 and 4 — strong enough to provide information on the planet’s interior.

Just as seismometers do on Earth, InSight measures the size of the Martian core by studying seismic waves that have bounced off the deep boundary between the mantle and the core. With information from enough of these deep-travelling waves, InSight scientists were able to calculate the depth of the core–mantle boundary and hence the size of the core. The seismic data also suggest that the upper mantle, which extends to around 700 to 800 kilometres below the surface, contains a zone of thickened material in which seismic energy travels more slowly.

In an effort to replicate the conditions inside planetary cores, other researchers have squeezed combinations of different chemical elements at high pressures and temperatures. InSight’s estimate of the Martian core density agrees with many of those laboratory-based estimates, says Edgar Steenstra, a geochemist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC.

Orbital extreme

InSight might be running out of time to make discoveries. Dust has been piling up on its 2-metre-wide solar panels, cutting down on the amount of power the spacecraft can generate. Mars is also moving towards the farthest point from the Sun in its orbit, which will further limit the craft’s opportunity to recharge.

“This is going to cause us to reduce our instrument usage over the next few months,” says Mark Panning, InSight’s project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

In January, the team already had to give up on its German-built ‘mole’, a thermal probe that was supposed to bury itself in the soil and measure heat flow, but which encountered problems with friction and couldn’t dig deep.

Drastic temperature changes on Mars that occur when day turns to night and vice versa, create noise in the signals that Insight’s seismometer collects, as the tether connecting it to the lander lays exposed on the planet’s surface. So InSight is now trying to bury the tether by scooping dirt onto it in an attempt to insulate it.

InSight detects marsquakes mostly at night, because daytime winds cause too much shaking and interfere with seismic signals. But the windy season at its landing site recently drew to an end. Team scientists are looking forward to new-found seismic quiet to catch as many marsquakes as they can before the mission has to end.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00696-7?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=02e41775a1-briefing-dy-20210318&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-02e41775a1-46019854

I was looking for video footage of the testing of the Mars Helicopter on Earth to see how it actually performs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAQxNd3uBN0

This contains a fascinating discussion about what happens to rockets after they’ve been fired off. I never knew that they end up returning, more or less to where they started from. Also the mention of the pressure of solar radiation on the rocket also surprised me. I was unaware the pressure had such an effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLKvK_S5StE