http://www.dbskeptic.com Skepticism. Critical thinking. Podcast. Community. Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:54:54 +0000 en-us hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Digital Bits Skeptic brings skepticism and critical thinking to a world of new age, religion and credulous pop culture. Andy Kaiser clean Andy Kaiser skeptic@dbskeptic.com skeptic@dbskeptic.com (Andy Kaiser) 2009 Skepticism and critical thinking in a world of new age, religion and credulous pop culture skeptic, skepticism, critical thinking, new age, religion, pop culture, skeptical articles, critical thinking articles, philosophy http://www.dbskeptic.com/images/dbskeptic-logo-144.jpg http://www.dbskeptic.com/category/astronomy/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/12/13/water-on-the-moon/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/12/13/water-on-the-moon/#comments Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:19:29 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=1701 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/12/13/water-on-the-moon/feed/ 4 Andy Kaiser By Andy Kaiser Article ID: 1348 - On October 9, 2009, NASA's LCROSS mission (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) slammed a "Centaur" rocket into the moon, into a dark, ancient crater named "Cabeus". After a silent explosion of moon guts, By Andy Kaiser Article ID: 1348 On October 9, 2009, NASA's LCROSS mission (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) slammed a "Centaur" rocket into the moon, into a dark, ancient crater named "Cabeus". After a silent explosion of moon guts, the rocket was destroyed. The resulting ejecta was huge, measuring six miles across. NASA then surveyed that moon plume, and found water. Even in the tiny section of the plume that the instruments could survey, they found about 27 gallons of water! H2O! Translucent gold! By Earth standards, the moon is still extremely dry, about as dry as a desert. But, even a desert can still hold enough water to support life. NASA's LCROSS mission is the first indicator of significant amounts of water in Earth's neighborhood. A critical person might say, "so what?" This is not the first discovery of water in outer space, or even on the moon. Other planets and moons contain ice, and perhaps liquid water, though we don't yet know how much of what states there are. The discovery of water on the moon is still very significant. Here's why: 1) Knowledge: We add to the current store of scientific knowledge. It puts another piece in the puzzle of how the Universe works, how the moon formed, and ultimately helps us to improve the human condition. 2) Alien life: It provides additional evidence to the notion that life could exist outside of Earth. For those who believe life originated on Earth through a natural process, having a higher abundance of life-making ingredients increases the chances of there being alien life. What do we need for life? From our current understanding, we need water, carbon, and an energy source. Carbon is everywhere. We know that water is remarkably abundant. Energy sources abound (we're not just talking about the sun). Get the right catalyst in place, and so-called miracles can happen. 3) Moon bases: When we get to the moon, we could "live off the land". There are two significant aspects: Humans who live there could drink the local water. They could also move around the moon with vehicles powered by a hydrogen/oxygen fuel source, all extracted from available water. And, there's another use for the oxygen: breathing! Fuel, water and life support are very expensive items to transport from the Earth to the moon. Having them already in place will make a moon base far easier to create and maintain. 4) Human life in off-world colonies: You don't think a moon base is important? Well, it is. Right now, we Earthlings are horribly susceptible to complete extinction. Our entire species could easily be wiped out. Take your pick of any horrible natural disaster. Just ask the dinosaurs why they didn't do anything about the fire from the sky, the killer rock that, so many millions of years ago, destroyed them all. There are also more embarrassing (but just as effective) ways to die, by killing off our own kind, something which we humans are perversely good at. In order to survive, we must spread the human species from off this planet. Here's a video, courtesy NASA, of the LCROSS mission and resulting lunar impact by the "Centaur" rocket. You can't actually see the rocket hit the moon, but it's still interesting to see the process to get the rocket to the moon itself: The discovery of water on the moon is powerful, no doubt. Don't just shuffle it aside as needless fact-gathering. This advance is just as important for scientific cheerleading as it is for powering future technology and off-planet living. This discovery doesn't just tell us more about our celestial neighborhood. It also gives us the ability to not only know our place in the Universe, but to change it. I can think of no better way to end this article than with this quote by Carl Sagan: "The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars." For those who really like the audio version of that quote, here's the full video: Andy Kaiser clean 7:00 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/06/28/was-life-on-earth-an-alien-creation-a-critical-look-at-directed-panspermia/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/06/28/was-life-on-earth-an-alien-creation-a-critical-look-at-directed-panspermia/#comments Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:28:22 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=1158 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/06/28/was-life-on-earth-an-alien-creation-a-critical-look-at-directed-panspermia/feed/ 0 Nicholas Covington By Nicholas Covington Article ID: 1328 - Life may have been the result of intelligent aliens sending bacterium to Earth. This theory is called "directed panspermia". It was proposed thirty-five years ago by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, By Nicholas Covington Article ID: 1328 Life may have been the result of intelligent aliens sending bacterium to Earth. This theory is called "directed panspermia". It was proposed thirty-five years ago by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, and Leslie Orgel, a highly respected British chemist. I found the original paper they published. Here I examine it and provide some comments[1]. A common objection to the theory that aliens brought life to Earth is the problem of infinite regress: If life on Earth was created by aliens, who created the aliens? And who created those creators? And so on. Crick and Orgel get around this problem by speculating that some planets may have chemical properties that make the origin of life much more probable than it is on Earth. Although it's not mentioned, I think it's possible that there are forms of life more likely to originate from non-living matter (and without the guidance of an intelligent designer). Citing the work of astronomer Carl Sagan, they conclude that life traveling on a meteor would probably be destroyed by radiation long before it would arrive at Earth. But what if an alien civilization designed a special radiation-proof microorganism-carrying ship? Then the "life-from-space" proposal would once again be plausible. In the paper, Crick and Orgel say, "[I]t is quite probable that planets not unlike the Earth existed as much as [6.5 billion years] before the formation of our own solar system." This allows life to originate, evolve and spread before Earth even existed. They go on with arguments supporting their theory: "Infective theories of the origins of terrestrial life could be taken more seriously if they explained aspects of biochemistry or biology that are otherwise difficult to understand. We do not have any strong arguments of this kind, but here are two weak facts that could be relevant. The chemical composition of living organisms must reflect to some extent the composition of the environment in which they evolved. Thus the presence in living organisms of elements that are extremely rare on the Earth might indicate that life is extraterrestrial in origin. Molybdenum is an essential trace element that plays an important role in many enzymatic reactions, while chromium and nickel are relatively unimportant in biochemistry. The abundance of chromium, nickel, and molybdenum on the Earth are 0.20%, 3.16%, and 0.02%, respectively. We cannot conclude anything from this single example, since molybdenum may be irreplaceable in some essential reaction - nitrogen fixation, for example. However, if it could be shown that the elements represented in terrestrial living organisms correlate closely with those that are abundant in some class of star - molybdenum stars, for example - we might look more sympathetically at 'infective' theories." Crick and Orgel's second argument for their theory is the genetic code. As you may know, the genetic code is universal[2]. It is the same in plants, animals, and bacteria. Crick and Orgel believed this means all life on Earth shares a common ancestor with a complete and fully developed genetic code[3]. They reasoned that if an alien civilization sent life to Earth, then it would have developed an organism with that same genetic code. On the other hand, if life originated naturally, the common ancestor of all living things may have simply had a primitive genetic code which coded for only a handful of amino acids (later on, this species would have split into several different lineages which had genetic codes that coded for more types of amino acids using the codons which originally did not code for anything). In this scenario, all life would have genetic similarities, but would also have significant differences. The moral of the story is that directed panspermia would show a universally shared genetic code. A non-panspermia origin could produce a single, universal genetic code, or many codes with significant similarities). Andy Kaiser clean 9:32 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/04/19/the-drake-equation/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/04/19/the-drake-equation/#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 04:06:03 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=955 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/04/19/the-drake-equation/feed/ 15 Andy Kaiser By Andy Kaiser Article ID: 1317 - I'm about to prove to you that aliens exist. I'm talking space aliens. Whether they're the traditional Little Green Men, bug-eyed monsters, or something incomprehensible to the human mind, they exist, By Andy Kaiser Article ID: 1317 I'm about to prove to you that aliens exist. I'm talking space aliens. Whether they're the traditional Little Green Men, bug-eyed monsters, or something incomprehensible to the human mind, they exist, they're intelligent, and they're trying to find us. I'm going to prove this to you by using the most powerful tool on Earth: mathematics. Ready? Here we go: The number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy Our planet Earth resides comfortably in the Milky Way galaxy, a pinwheel-shaped collection of at least 200 billion stars. You know how our sun is just ONE star? Give it 200 billion friends. That's 200,000,000,000. At the time of this writing, this is roughly thirty times the number of humans living right now on this planet. Personally, I can't even visualize a number that high. Again, that's why we're using math - even if we can't see it or fathom it, we can represent it and come up with meaningful answers. So, we have 200 billion stars. We know this number fluctuates - new stars form and die. Astronomers think that the birth rate of stars in the Milky Way galaxy is roughly one star per year. The percentage of stars that have planets Next, let's look at all those stars. How many have planets around them? They're hard to see, but we're sniffing them out. NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory tell us we've so far found hundreds of "extrasolar planets".  As of April 2009, the count was at 344. Some astronomers think at least fifty percent of all stars have planets! We'll be more conservative. Let's cut the ratio in half, and estimate twenty-five percent of all stars have a planet. The number of "Goldilocks planets" per star Now look at the planets spinning around all those stars. Of those planets, how many (per star) are capable of sustaining life? Such habitable places are sometimes humorously called "Goldilocks planets", meaning that conditions for life (as we know it) are not too cold, not too hot, but just right. In our own solar system, we have an idea of this number. Earth is such a planet. As we explore further, we may find that other places in our solar system are also "just right". Or say you have a solar system with a Venus-like planet, where the greenhouse effect has escalated beyond control and turned the planet into an acidic-raining wasteland which is hot enough to melt lead. Take that hellish planet and move it away from the sun. Get it out far enough and you'll find a sweet spot, where the planet is warm enough (thanks to the greenhouse effect), but not so hot it kills everything on the surface. There are endless possibilities and plenty of conjecture as to the number of habitable planets per star. For now, let's use the number as dictated by our only example, ourselves: let's assume that of the stars which have planets, one planet is capable of supporting life in some form. The fraction of planets where life evolves This leads us to a conversation about life itself: on planets capable of sustaining life, what are the chances that life exists? Some biologists think that if life can exist somewhere, it will. Their opinion is bolstered by so-called "extremophiles" - Earth-based life that has adapted to some truly nasty conditions. Extremophiles can exist without sunlight, or under massive pressure, or bombarded by amounts of radiation that would make The Incredible Hulk blush. With evidence here on our planet, this is why many suggest that if life can exist somewhere, it will. Others say that getting to that point - the point where life begins - is very difficult. We know it's possible, of course, because I'm writing this and you, my fellow human, are reading it. But let's err on the side of caution. Let's say that on life-capable planets, only one percent of those will harbor living beings. The fraction of life evolving into intelligent life So we've got a lot of stars. They have a lot of planets. Andy Kaiser clean 13:50 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/01/05/a-fire-officers-guide-to-disaster-control-an-expert-works-outside-his-expertise-and-is-attacked-by-ufos/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/01/05/a-fire-officers-guide-to-disaster-control-an-expert-works-outside-his-expertise-and-is-attacked-by-ufos/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:27:12 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=593 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/01/05/a-fire-officers-guide-to-disaster-control-an-expert-works-outside-his-expertise-and-is-attacked-by-ufos/feed/ 9 Andy Kaiser By Andy Kaiser Article ID: 131 - The Fire Officer's Guide to Disaster Control is a massive, 600-plus page book detailing various emergency scenarios and how to respond to them. As the Fire Department is the first service to arrive at many emergency sit... By Andy Kaiser Article ID: 131 The Fire Officer's Guide to Disaster Control is a massive, 600-plus page book detailing various emergency scenarios and how to respond to them. As the Fire Department is the first service to arrive at many emergency situations, the book is a quality guide for crisis response and management. It's co-authored by William Kramer and Charles Bahme. Both authors have a short bio, and each is the resume of a superhero. Each man has dedicated his life to fire and disaster management, both in training others and by direct field experience, which, I assume, involved lots of physically dangerous situations. Between the two authors, we have active duties in World War II and the Korean War, college and professional-level instruction, and appearances for national and international audiences. They've worked with high-level United States agencies like the U.S. Supreme Court and the Department of Defense. In essence, they've done more to help people and have saved more lives than many of us could ever hope to achieve. These men are true real-world heroes. There's something strange, however, about the book's second edition, published in 1992. As you browse through it, you'll be impressed with the scope and detail, with chapter headings like "Organizational Structure and Incident Command", "Communications and Information Management", "Catastrophic Fires", "Civil Disorders and Riots", "Weather-Related Natural Disasters", "Transportation Disasters", "Mass Casualties and Mass Evacuation" and "Aftermath and Recovery". And then you come to Chapter 13. It's titled "Enemy Attack and UFO Potential". I'm going to guess that UFOs are generally not associated with nationally-used emergency training materials. Maybe the Fire Officer's Guide just chose poorly for the chapter heading. That's the way it looks at first: the chapter begins with a brief analysis of warfare, and mentions the United States' entry into World War II, with the attack on Pearl Harbor. There are logical definitions of war, mentions of Grenada, Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, and the United States' "cold war" with the Soviet Union. Next we have causes of war with plenty of sobering examples. These include chemical warfare, biological warfare, bombs both conventional and nuclear, and detail of perceived and probable effects of a nuclear attack. Then, almost twenty pages through the chapter, we get to the good stuff with a heading that reads, "The UFO Threat - A Fact". You might say this chapter is meant to teach proper response to human behaviors, and is not about alien attack remediation. Or you may say it's meant to react to Earthly UFOs, like stealth technologies from another nation visiting our airspace. Nope. The authors are talking about aliens: green-skinned, big-headed, silver-jumpsuit-wearing aliens. Or at least that's what I assume. And my assumption of the alien's appearance is as valid as the book's claim we need to watch out for an alien attack. That is, there is no evidence to justify either statement. Why did the authors pick aliens and UFO attacks? Why stop there? Why didn't they have another section for Biblical Armageddon and the final battle between good and evil? You know, something like "In the event of the heavens raining from the sky and most everyone being killed, the most important thing is to first establish a sense of calm and order." You don't think Armageddon is appropriate? I should keep things realistic? Then what about other Earth-changing disasters, like the Large Hadron Collider creating deadly black holes? Or what if the Sun decides to vomit out a planet-destroying solar flare? Why not plan for these? They're just as applicable as a UFO attack. Granted, the LHC is an unfair example, having been created years after this edition of the Fire Officer's Guide. But you get my point. The results of an actual UFO attack - wake up and smell the humans Now consider logistics. Andy Kaiser clean 11:58 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2008/07/15/tunguska-mystery-almost-solved/ http://www.dbskeptic.com/2008/07/15/tunguska-mystery-almost-solved/#comments Tue, 15 Jul 2008 05:30:14 +0000 Andy Kaiser http://www.dbskeptic.com/?p=101 http://www.dbskeptic.com/2008/07/15/tunguska-mystery-almost-solved/feed/ 2 Andy Kaiser By Andy Kaiser Article ID: 1240 - It was a quiet morning on June 30, 1908. The event occurred in a remote location of heavily-forested Siberia, in the Russian Federation. - Instead of leaping ahead to the finale and just saying "kaboom", By Andy Kaiser Article ID: 1240 It was a quiet morning on June 30, 1908. The event occurred in a remote location of heavily-forested Siberia, in the Russian Federation. Instead of leaping ahead to the finale and just saying "kaboom", we'll make this a little more dramatic. So get ready. A rustling is heard as a brown bear lumbers forward and stops. It drops its head and sniffs, poking its thick snout through green leafy undergrowth. It smells an appetizer. The bear stops, and lifts its massive head. It again sniffs the air, confused. The bear has good eyesight, but trusts its nose over any other sense. It smells nothing out of the ordinary, though, yet knows something is wrong. What is it? The bear shuffles, and swings its head to scan around. It catches a glimmer of something, something bright and shining far above the trees. Massive muscles flex, and the bear hoists itself up a tree for a better view. A blue light shines far above, like a second sun. The bear snorts, and drops heavily to earth. It doesn't care about what's up in the air. It's more concerned with stuff on the ground, and what part of that stuff is edible. Then the world explodes. A roaring wall of noise slams into the bear. All surrounding trees lean away, as if flinching in unison against a terrifying power. In the next moment, everything bursts into flames. The bear spends his last living moments roaring at this new enemy, this massive invader from the sky. It takes only a few more seconds to raze 80 million trees over 800 square miles. Everything is destroyed. Everything burns. This overly-dramatic-yet-plausible story is about the Tunguska explosion. No one positively knows what happened that day, and what caused such devastation. The Tunguska event was so destructive and so complete, it made later analysis difficult. Here are some known facts about the Tunguska explosion: The blast analysis tells us the explosion occurred a few miles above the earth - perhaps between three and six miles. The blast force was ten to fifteen megatons - that's roughly a thousand times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb. To put this in a better perspective, some scientists think that a similar meteor impact 66 million years ago was the cosmic sledgehammer that wiped out the dinosaurs. What happened here? Many theories have been raised over the years. These include an antimatter explosion, a miniature black hole tearing through the Earth, a natural gas explosion, and the accidental crash of an alien spacecraft. According to RIA Novosti, a Russian-language news site, researchers have found evidence of acid rain in the epicenter of the explosion. This acid was presumably formed by the ill-fated meteorite screaming through the Earth's atmosphere. Atmospheric oxygen combined with nitrogen. Mix in some incredibly high temperatures, and you get nitrogen oxides. These oxides are found where the explosion is thought to have occurred. Diamond-graphite rock formations have been found at the scene. These tiny, super-hard granules are created by taking a bunch of carbon, and subjecting it to massive pressure, like, for example, what you might get from the detonation of a thousand atomic bombs. Almost twenty years after the Tunguska explosion, witnesses were interviewed (note that the time delay was due to arguably more important things, like an impending World War I and the Russian Revolution). Their testimonies include descriptions of what you would expect from a huge explosion, like violent earthquakes, massive heat and blinding light. One interviewee seems to have seen the meteor itself, saying: "...the peasants saw to the North-West, rather high above the horizon, some strangely bright (impossible to look at) bluish-white heavenly body, which for 10 minutes moved downwards. The body appeared as a "pipe", i.e. a cylinder. The sky was cloudless, only a small dark cloud was observed in the general direction of the bright body. Andy Kaiser clean