Tag Archives: space

Ancient Wisdom

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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 that 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

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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.

Insignificantly small

I’ve been following updates from the James Webb Telescope and its fascinating to see how its expanding our knowledge of our universe. Recent news includes an “active supermassive black hole 10 million times the mass of the Sun”. (MSN)

To give this a different perspective on the physical size of this black hole. Our entire galaxy would fill less than 1% of this black hole. It’s hard to comprehend just how big this is. It boggles the mind to think of the scale of the universe. 500 years ago the work of Copernicus and Galileo helped change modern physics by defying the church and arguing that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, with our sun circling the earth. Now we can see the insignificance of our planet on the scale of the universe.

We are so insignificantly small. Furthermore, we know so little about our universe… and it’s exciting to know that new discoveries and theories are still being developed thanks to this telescope. We may not inhabit a significant part of the universe, but our knowledge of what’s beyond our galaxy is expanding. I find this exciting!

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Another fascinating point that boggles the mind with respect to the size of things in our universe: the radius of the star, UY Scuti is 1,700 times bigger than our sun. It would engulf Jupiter if it replaced our sun! (Source)

Cold, dark universe

Take a half hour and watch TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time

The current theories about the future of the universe is that it will expand into vast, empty, cold darkness. Even before all this happens the universe will be a very lonely place with stars moving away so fast that our telescopes would not be able to see them. Of course the timeline for this happening is so unfathomably long it simply isn’t conceivable. How inconceivable?

Life will only be possible for this percentage of time of the universe’s existence:

This would be utterly depressing if the scale of time wasn’t so enormous. But on this scale, if I looked forward 1,000 generations, that too would be a blip in time, with almost no change in the universe described in this film happening yet. We have a lot more immediate concerns about humanity’s survival than the expansion and aging of the universe.

I wonder if our universe isn’t like a lonely atom in empty space… a simple speck in a multiverse of distant universes that are oblivious to the existence of other atom-like universes also floating in empty space. Maybe some universes are aware of each other, quantum entangled with each other, playing out inverse existences. And maybe they are all entangled, universe-particles in a cosmic wave, vibrating in every possible direction. Grab your surfboards, it’s time to surf the cosmos.

Playing with geometry

The image below is a blue cube octahedron with each triangular face forming a tetra-octa-tetra pattern coming out from the center.

This is a tetra-octa-tetra, with two yellow tetrahedrons on opposite sides of an octahedron:

I’m fascinated by these shapes thanks to my uncle, Joseph Truss, who has been playing with these shapes for decades, and who believes the fundamental building blocks of our universe is the tetrahedron. We live in a ‘Tetraverse’.

But the geometry he describes goes far beyond this. He intuitively understands the underlying structure of the universe through geometry in a way that mathematical physicists understand it through math.

Watch this 28 minute movie, Hacking Reality. It gets to some of the topics Joe and I discuss. I really think he’s on to something some of the smartest physicists in the world are still trying to figure out… but he’s done it purely by playing with geometry, and visually/intuitively making sense of how shapes are formed and come together.

To the moon

I was hoping to see the launch of Artemis 1 to the moon this morning, originally scheduled for a few minutes ago (5:33am), but it seems there are delays due to issues with one of the engines. I’m fascinated by the idea of humans going back to the moon. 12 people have stood on this celestial body before… 12 people have left the earth and have stood on the moon looking back at planet earth. In the next few years that number will change. In the next hundred years there could be people living on the moon. There could even be a child born on the moon.

We aren’t going to see space travel beyond our galaxy any time soon. Voyager 1 was launched almost 45 years ago. At a distance of 156.61 AU (23.429 billion km; 14.558 billion mi) from Earth as of July 31, 2022, it is the most distant humanmade object from Earth… and it is less than one light day away, while the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years away. There needs to be a quantum leap in technology before a human leaves our solar system.

So in the meantime, we have our own galaxy to explore and it only makes sense that the place we explore first is our moon. We may not be able to travel to the stars, but our moon is within our reach.