Tag Archives: space

Observing time

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Yesterday’s post, ‘Let’s Do the Time Warp Again’ is still messing with my head a bit. The idea of the Andromeda paradox suggests that if we are in motion compared to another bystander, our view of very distant events can be days apart.

I understood relativity with respect to travel, a twin in a spaceship travelling close to the speed of light goes to a distant galaxy. When he comes back to earth a few years later he would be younger than the twin left behind… demonstrating the relativity of time. But the idea that distant events can ‘happen’ at different times for people witnessing it from almost the same spot, simply because of their relative motion to each other is perplexing.

So then I suggested that we could re-witness an event by changing our motion such that we are moving quickly away from a very, very distant event, so that from that relative perspective the event hadn’t happened yet. I’m no physicist, the distances would have to be huge, and I don’t know what speeds would need to be achieved, but it seems pretty conceivable to me.

What’s messing with my head is that if this is possible, what does ‘now’ mean?

We have to wait 8 minutes for the sun’s light to reach us. When it reaches us, the sun is already 8 minutes older. We don’t see the sun now, we see its history. Our concept of now has a perpetual lag.

This then got me thinking about animals and their reaction times. Have you ever seen a video of a cat toying with a snake? A cat can avoid the bite of a snake, always reacting faster than we would be able to. How does a cat perceive ‘now’ differently than us?

How do birds fly in a murmuration? The flock changes direction in waves, so quickly that they can stay in formation despite hundreds of them having to coordinate with each other. How does a bird in a murmur perceive ‘now’ differently than us?

To a ten year old, 5 years is half a lifetime, to me it’s less than 1/11th of my life. Is it any wonder that as we get older, time seems to go by faster?

Like I said, these ideas are messing a bit with my head. They make me wonder what ‘now’ means and if in reality we share a ‘now’ with anyone? Is the mere act of observing ‘now’ just a relative glance of varying histories? And yet the only thing any of us ever experience beyond our memories and imagination… is now.

Let’s Do the Time Warp Again

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“It’s just a jump to the left… it’s a jump to the ri-ight🎵”

…And that’s all it takes to witness two completely different views of what ‘right now’ means:

“The Andromeda paradox, proposed by physicist Roger Penrose, is a thought experiment in relativity that highlights how simultaneity depends on an observer’s motion. It imagines two people walking past each other on Earth: one toward the Andromeda galaxy and one away. Because of special relativity, the plane of simultaneity for each observer tilts slightly, meaning that the events they consider “happening right now” in Andromeda could differ by entire days. This illustrates that what is considered the present in distant regions of space is relative to an observer’s motion.” (ChatGPT)

Here is my thought experiment based on the Andromeda paradox:

If we were to witness a supernova of a star hundreds of light years away, could we send a rocket hurling at a high speed away from that event and capture the event happening again? Could we re-witness the supernova, a past event that happened many years ago, but from farther away? Would it be possible that from that perspective the event has not been witnessed yet, and so we can ‘get ahead of it’ focus our cameras on it, and wait for it to happen again, just for the first time from that relative perspective?

My head hurts a bit trying to make sense of this, but my hunch is that it would be possible. So instead of the Andromeda paradox, it’s more like the Andromeda mirror, bouncing back the same light but at a slightly later time than the present… which already is what a mirror does. 

Spaceship Earth

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First: Two perspectives from a trip to the moon, shared by Victor Glover and Christina Koch.

“I don’t have anything prepared. I think these observances are important, and as we are so far from Earth and looking back at the beauty of creation, I think for me, one of the really important personal perspectives that I have up here is I can really see Earth as one thing.

You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth. But you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe.

Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special, but we’re the same distance from you. And I’m trying to tell you — just trust me — you are special.

In all of this emptiness — this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.

This is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing, and that we’ve got to get through this together.” 

~ Victor Glover

And;

“So when we saw tiny Earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had. And honestly, what struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth. It was all the blackness around it.

Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe.

I may have not learned — I know I haven’t learned — everything that this journey has yet to teach me. But there’s one new thing I know, and that is:

Planet Earth, you are a crew.”

~ Christina Koch (See the full speech where she is talking about what it means to be a crew.)

Next: This insightful perspective from physicist Brian Cox.

“There’s only one interesting question in philosophy. The interesting question is, what does it mean to live a finite, fragile life in an infinite, eternal universe? I think the answer is, paradoxically, whilst we are definitely physically insignificant, I’ve just said that the Earth is one planet, around one star, amongst 400 billion stars, in one galaxy amongst two trillion galaxies, in a small patch of the universe, right?

So we’re definitely small, you can’t argue with that, we’re just specks of dust. But if you think about what we are, we’re just collections of atoms. Our bodies were made in stars, right? So it’s all cooked over billions of years. And we’re in this pattern that can think, you have a means by which the universe understands and explores itself, which is us. And that sounds unlikely when you put it like that, that you can have a few things that were cooked in the hearts of stars, you stick them together in a pattern and suddenly it has some ideas and starts writing music.

There aren’t any other worlds where this happened, certainly in our galaxy. So it could be that this planet, notwithstanding its physical insignificance, is the only place where anything thinks.”

~ Brian Cox

We don’t often think of the significance of this tiny blue marble we live on. We don’t often ponder the idea that we are a single species cohabiting with other living organisms on an oasis in a sea of emptiness beyond our atmosphere. We don’t recognize that we are all connected, all crew, on a spaceship that is bigger than our political and cultural differences, bigger than the borders of our countries.

We are all crew on spaceship earth, our mother ship that supports us, and in turn we need to nurture and support her.

Mental gymnastics

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I know it’s a very small percentage of people in the world that think the world is flat, but this group fascinates me. You’ve got to be a special kind of stupid to live in 2026 and think that every scientist and millions of others are all conspiring to fool you. The mental gymnastics needed to ignore blatant evidence and then double down on thinly veiled lies and poorly contrived talking points has to far exceed the effort to actually look at the obvious evidence. How much must it hurt to admit you are wrong to continually have to fight logic, facts, and data that contradict your beliefs?

Meanwhile, the rest of the world can marvel at Artemis II, travelling to the moon and back , and sharing incredible photos of this pale blue marble that we all live on. There is so much we still don’t know about the universe we live in, mysteries still to be solved… and here is a group of people who not only fight science with oblivious imagination, they hide from the enjoyment of seeing our globe from angles we have not enjoyed in decades, at resolutions we could not have previously imagined.

Maybe Artemis II will be the thing that has flat eathers ‘come around’ to the global reality… but stupidity defies logic, and I’m afraid the mental gymnastics will continue to work against people dedicated to sharing their ignorance in a loud, proud, uninformed, and uneducated way.


Ancient Wisdom

Watch this video about tomorrow’s solar eclipse.

@welchlabs

How rare is the April 2024 #eclipse?

♬ original sound – Welch Labs

Predicting the next total eclipse is not a simple math problem, having several independent factors. Yet as the video mentions, an ancient Babylonian tablet tracked all the solar eclipses from 347 to 258 BCE.

It makes me wonder about the wisdom of some ancient civilizations. What did they know, that has been lost to us? From medicines to space to science, what intelligence was previously discovered and has since needed to be rediscovered, relearned.

And what did the ancients know that we still don’t know?

Blind spot

I saw a Neil deGrasse Tyson video where he described our galaxy as thinner than a pancake. He said it is more like a crepe. Our galaxy is more than 100 times long as it is wide. One result of this is that it limits our ability to see the universe.

We can’t look beyond our galaxy along its length. There are so many stars in our own galaxy that they prevent us from seeing anything beyond it along this thin plane. Essentially our galaxy creates a blind spot for our visible universe.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to see along this axis. We can look at our closest neighbouring solar systems and explore our own galaxy, we just can’t see beyond our galaxy nearly as well and as clearly as when we view the universe from an angle other than along the plane of our flat crepe galaxy.

It’s interesting because while this flat shape creates a bit of a blind spot for us, it also makes a lot of the universe easier to see, because our galaxy does not get in the way of a lot of the sky. If our universe was more spherical, it would be a greater impairment to the universe beyond. Our blind spot creates an advantage elsewhere.

There is a metaphor there for our own personal blind spots. Blind spots might limit what we see in some areas, but how do they allow us to see more in others? We observe our world from eye level. We can learn more about our surroundings by seeing a bird’s eye view, but it wouldn’t be an advantage for us if that was the only view we had.

We all have blind spots, I just wonder what insightful perspectives they give us compared to if we didn’t have them?

Trips to the moon

India just soft landed a spacecraft on the moon. It’s the first craft to successfully land in the South Pole region, where craters that never see sunlight might be hiding frozen water. Reading this article made me realize that, while landing a human on the moon hasn’t been done in decades, the ‘race to the moon’ has been alive and well since then.

I searched for ‘missions to the moon’ and found this massive list on Wikipedia. It was shocking to see how many there have been, and how many of those have been failures. I’m not sure what rock I’ve been living under but I had no idea that so many countries were part of this space race.

I hope this craft finds frozen water. It would be an amazing discovery. And with a human return to the moon planned by NASA in the next few years, I’ll be watching news about moon landings a lot more now. We certainly are living in fascinating times and I’m excited to learn more about our universe beyond the earth’s atmosphere from flights like this and from telescopes like the James Webb telescope. There is still so much we have to learn.

Not a question of first or rare or distant

When thinking about whether we are alone in the universe or not, it seems to me that it isn’t a question of whether we (intelligent life) are rare? Or are we first/early compared to other intelligent life? Or are we simply too far away? But rather a question of enduring. Are intelligent civilizations enduring enough to travel beyond their solar system or galaxy?

The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence. Scientists today are looking for life in our very own solar system. It’s possible, in our vast universe, that our quest for life beyond earth may be as close as Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It would probably b\e microbes, too small to see without a microscope, but that would still suggest that life is way more abundant than even most scientists would have imagined just a few years ago.

But I’m more a believer that the reason we don’t see alien life is for two reasons, the first being distance. Quite simply, even the nearest galaxy to our Milky way is astronomically far away.  “The closest known galaxy to us is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, at 236,000,000,000,000,000 km (25,000 light years) from the Sun. The Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy is the next closest , at 662,000,000,000,000,000 km (70,000 light years) from the Sun.” If intelligent life started sending messages to us from the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy 10,000 years ago, it would still take 15,000 years to reach us if they could do the unlikely task of sending that message at the speed of light… and the crazy thing is, why would they send a message our way? 10,000 years ago there was no evidence coming from earth that we are a worthy planet to send a message to!

And the second reason we don’t see any intelligent life ‘out there’ in the universe is The Great Filter. Either it is extremely rare and difficult to get beyond simple, unintelligent multicellular life, or civilizations themselves getting to multi solar system travel capabilities are extremely rare. This second point is my belief. Civilizations are not enduring enough. It took Homo sapiens 300,000 years to become a scientifically intelligent life form that attempted to leave our planet and explore our solar system. During this time, we’ve been brutal to each other. We’ve created weapons of mass destruction and quite literally drawn lines in the sand to keep us separate from our brothers and sisters.

We’ve created religions that don’t like each other and think all other Gods are unworthy of following. We’ve created borders that keep ‘others’ out. We’ve created governments that are more interested in power than in caring for fellow humans. We’ve created corporations that worry more about profit than about caring for our planet. All the while we also create technologies that threaten the longevity of humanity. As technological innovations occur, it becomes easier for individuals and small groups to terrorize larger groups. It becomes easier for a single unstable person to threaten larger and larger populations around our planet.

What happens 50 years from now when a kid can create a devastating bomb or virus in their basement with readily available resources? Is that a world where we continue to advance technologically? Albert Einstein is often quoted as having said: “I don’t know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones“. In other words, we will destroy ourselves and become far more primitive, much less advanced. Imagine our world with no power grid, and no internet. How long would it take to get back to where we are now? What if the next pandemic is far more deadly and has us living like subsistence farmers, keeping ourselves in tiny communities, afraid of outsiders. How many hundreds of years would we be set back, and would we be trying to explore the cosmos when survival is our greatest concern?

I tend to be an optimist, and I’m excited about the future ahead of us. I think my kids have the potential to live healthy, productive, and cognitively sound lives past 100 years of age. I think there will be universal basic income for every human alive, and that things like childhood starvation and extreme poverty could come to an end. Technological advances could make us live healthier, longer, more fulfilling and creative lives. But I also fear that greed, power, and beliefs in bad ideas could corrupt us, and undermine our potential. Are we 50, 100, or 1,000 years away from ravaging our planet or at least the human race? Or are we a species that will populate other parts of our galaxy?

If I was an alien who came to explore earth today, I’m not sure I’d report back to my planet the the inhabitants are intelligent? I’m not sure I’d consider humans technologically advanced enough to seek contact? I’d be conveying that earthlings are as likely to destroy themselves as they are to send someone out of their own solar system. I’d send a message home and say, ‘Let’s leave them alone for now and see what they can do in another couple hundred of their earth years?‘

‘Let’s see if this race of humans will endure?‘

Science and stupidity

If you haven’t been paying attention to the discoveries of the James Webb telescope, you are missing out on an opportunity to really understand what Science is all about. Scientists start with a hypothesis then they look for reasons for that hypothesis to be wrong. That’s happening right now.

“…results from the James Webb Space Telescope have hinted at galaxies so early and so massive that they are in tension with our understanding of the formation of structure in the universe. Various explanations have been proposed that may alleviate this tension. But now a new study from the Cosmic Dawn Center suggests an effect which has never before been studied at such early epochs, indicating that the galaxies may be even more massive.” (Source)

These ‘too massive’ galaxies do not jive with current hypothesis, and they challenge what scientists think they know about the origins of the universe. These discoveries are forcing our greatest scientific minds to question their own research and beliefs.

Meanwhile, we still have people believing that the world is flat and that for some unknown reason NASA is nothing more than an instrument of the government used to keep us in the dark about our flat world… As if there is some mastermind ploy to keep us ‘in the dark’ because [input ridiculous theory here].

Oh, and as for these ‘look at the horizon, it’s flat just like the earth’ believers? Any time a scientist course corrects and changes their hypothesis, or admits that they have new insights and information, is proof that they don’t know what they are talking about. This process of learning more and changing trajectories isn’t seen as an incredibly brilliant approach to new discoveries. Instead it’s seen as a weakness in thinking. But they don’t see the weaknesses of their own ideas, and the inadequacies of their ‘evidence’.

But this isn’t just about flat-earthers. It’s about unscientific and conspiracy thinking that seems to be growing. Scepticism in science is being confused with scepticism of scientific thinking. Terms like ‘sheeple’ are used to describe people who believe in science, in NASA, and in things like research at CERN. With CERN there is even a conspiracy theory that it is the cause of the Mandela Effect. The basis for this? Nothing.

It’s sad that there is such an anti-intellectual movement happening right now. It seems that people have access to as much misinformation as they do information, and for a small but every growing number of people the misinformation, the un-scientific ‘evidence’ is more compelling than what our best and brightest scientists think… And somehow a guy making videos based on conjecture and stupidity in his basement gets to have equal or more airtime than the brightest minds on our globe, who are making amazing new discoveries about the universe.

The secret sauce of iHub – Time and Space, and Pace

Inquiry Hub (iHub) is a small school that runs more like a specialty program than a school. The backbone of the program (besides some awesome and innovative educators) is two courses we wrote: Foundations of Inquiry 10 – BAA Course 2018 &  & Foundations of Inquiry 11 – BAA Course 2018. Large high schools have a multitude of elective offerings that students can take, and we can’t offer them with our small teaching staff. Instead, Grades 9 & 10 take these two courses and then in Grades 11 & 12 students do IDS, Independent Directed Studies, where they develop their own year-long course.

Here  is a student, Thia, describing her inquiries, her ‘electives’, at our school:

You can see other unique projects on our student page.

I’ve been doing some reflection and our inquiry courses are necessary, but they not the secret sauce of our school. The secret sauce has two main ingredients: ‘Time and Space’ and ‘Pace’.

  1. We create the time and space for students to work on projects that they want to work on. Student are not ‘in front’ of a teacher who is ‘in front’ of the room all day. They have time and space to work independently and in groups. We create multidisciplinary projects and use an adapted version of scrum project management to get required content out of the way so that students have more time to work on projects they want to work on. They get the time and space to follow their passions and interests while at school.
  2. We provide support for students to help them maintain a good pace. The most important trait a student needs to be successful at our school is that they are self-directed learners… they know how to use their time well. However, most Grade 8 students don’t come fully pre-loaded with these skills, (in fact many adults lack these skills). So, teachers work as a team and our student services teacher connects with any students that are behind on work. She works with students to help them build in strategies that help them keep up and stay on top of work. This is essential in a school where students can have up to 50% of their school day without a teacher in front of them, directing their work/tasks.

Yes, the inquiry process is important. Yes, we can talk about their mindset and look at how we examine failure, but when I really think about what makes Inquiry Hub tick (again, besides the hard work of great teachers) I think that giving students the time and space to explore their interests while supporting them in keeping up a good pace, is what the school is really all about.