TRAVEL TUESDAY 541 - SATURN, SOLAR SYSTEM

“Geez, all that money we waste on space exploration; just think how many bombs that would buy!” - Craig Bruce

Welcome to the Travel Tuesday meme! Join me every Tuesday and showcase your creativity in photography, painting and drawing, music, poetry, creative writing or a plain old natter about Travel.

There is only one simple rule: Link your own creative work about some aspect of travel and then share it with the rest of us.
Please use this meme for your creative endeavours only. Do not use this meme to advertise your products or services as any links or comments by advertisers will be removed immediately.

The ultimate travel destination this week, is an extraterrestrial extravaganza: Imagine yourself on one of the moons of Saturn (it has 285 confirmed moons, the most of any planet in the Solar System!) This location would give you a ringside view (yes, pun intended!) of the most photogenic planet of our solar system… If it were possible to travel there, that is…

Travelling to Saturn is a massive undertaking, with robotic probes like Cassini taking over 7 years to reach the planet (roughly 1.2 billion kilometres away). Human missions are projected to be possible in over 100 years, with travel times likely exceeding a dozen years, relying on advanced propulsion.

Saturn is a gas giant with no solid surface for landing. A spaceship would sink through its thick atmosphere, encountering crushing pressures and extreme temperatures. Future human exploration is more likely to focus on Saturn's moons, such as Titan, which offers possibilities for studying methane lakes and unique, frozen environments.

If you are interested in space, astronomy, astrobiology, possibility of extraterrestrial life, science fiction and science fiction art, please look at my Instagram account @nicvard

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TRAVEL TUESDAY 465 - CERES, DWARF PLANET

"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying." -  Arthur C. Clarke

Welcome to the Travel Tuesday meme! Join me every Tuesday and showcase your creativity in photography, painting and drawing, music, poetry, creative writing or a plain old natter about Travel.There is only one simple rule: Link your own creative work about some aspect of travel and share it with the rest of us.Please use this meme for your creative endeavours only. Do not use this meme to advertise your products or services as any links or comments by advertisers will be removed immediately.

Let’s travel beyond Earth this week. Just a little jaunt of 423,273,606 kilometers, to be precise. Let’s go to Ceres, which is the largest asteroid, situated between Mars and Jupiter.

Ceres is a dwarf planet in the middle main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It was the first known asteroid, discovered on 1 January 1801 by Giuseppe Piazzi at Palermo Astronomical Observatory in Sicily, and announced as a new planet. Ceres was later classified as an asteroid and then a dwarf planet, the only one not beyond Neptune's orbit. Ceres's small size means that even at its brightest it is too dim to be seen by the naked eye, except under extremely dark skies. Its apparent magnitude ranges from 6.7 to 9.3, peaking at opposition (when it is closest to Earth) once every 15- to 16-month synodic period. As a result, its surface features are barely visible even with the most powerful telescopes.

Little was known about this dwarf planet until the robotic NASA spacecraft Dawn approached Ceres for its orbital mission in 2015. Dawn found Ceres's surface to be a mixture of water ice and hydrated minerals such as carbonates and clay. Gravity data suggest Ceres to be partially differentiated into a muddy (ice-rock) mantle/core and a less dense but stronger crust that is at most thirty per cent ice by volume. Although Ceres likely lacks an internal ocean of liquid water, brines still flow through the outer mantle and reach the surface, allowing cryovolcanoes such as Ahuna Mons to form roughly every fifty million years. This makes Ceres the closest known cryovolcanically active body to the Sun. Additionally, Ceres hosts an extremely tenuous and transient atmosphere of water vapour, vented from localised sources on its surface.

Ceres follows an orbit between Mars and Jupiter, near the middle of the asteroid belt, with an orbital period (year) of 4.6 Earth years. Compared to other planets and dwarf planets, Ceres's orbit is moderately tilted relative to that of Earth; its inclination (i) is 10.6°, compared to 7° for Mercury and 17° for Pluto.

Although Ceres is not as actively discussed as a potential home for microbial extraterrestrial life as Mars, Europa, Enceladus, or Titan are, it has the most water of any body in the inner Solar System after Earth, and the likely brine pockets under its surface could provide habitats for life. Unlike Europa or Enceladus, it does not experience tidal heating, but it is close enough to the Sun, and contains enough long-lived radioactive isotopes, to preserve liquid water in its subsurface for extended periods. The remote detection of organic compounds and the presence of water mixed with 20% carbon by mass in its near surface could provide conditions favourable to organic chemistry.

If you are interested in things extraterrestrial, science fiction and science fact, aliens, astrophysics, astronomy, exoplanets and SETI, you can follow me on my Instagram account, where I consider such things mainly in pictorial form: @nicvard 

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POETS UNITED - METEOR SHOWERS

“Look at the sky; remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity in order to see the smallness of yourself.” - Matt Haig 

In the Midweek Motif of Poets United this week, the theme is “Meteor Showers”. My contribution below: 

Meteor Showers 

Billions upon billions of suns
Strewn through the endless emptiness
Of cosmic infinitudes –
I look at them and yet remain indifferent
To the immensity that stares at me,
Being able to contain it all
Within the low walls and ceiling
Holding my brain.

I love.
I love you, and that is:
More important than the speed of light
Within a vacuum;
More rare than comets that careen past
And are glimpsed once in a lifetime;
More precious than the meteor showers,
Which fall around us like golden rain…

What should it matter if now a million suns
Should suddenly decide to supernova?
What if I am but a mite on a speck of dust?
It is enough that I have loved,
Nothing can take that from me.

I love, I feel, I understand:
I am small, insignificant, an atom only
In the endlessness of eternity,
And yet I love and I can pinpoint my existence
In unfaltering co-ordinates.

What if the earth should suddenly expire?
What if the universe decides to crunch?
What if Death around each corner lies in wait?
My only fear now is that we two are on a parallel course
And that the threads of our two lives will never cross...

That which I feel
Is infinitely more important
Than all the vastness looming above, below,
Around all sides of me.
Without you by my side,
The boundless space within me
Annuls the space without.

THE WINTER SOLSTICE

“I believe in process. I believe in four seasons. I believe that winter's tough, but spring's coming. I believe that there's a growing season. And I think that you realize that in life, you grow. You get better.” - Steve Southerland

We have just had the Winter solstice in Australia on June 21, and it was also made special by a full moon during its occurrence. This last happened 70 years ago. The word solstice came into Middle English from Old French, from the Latin solstitium. This is a compound of sol- (sun) and -stitium (a stoppage), so the word means “the sun stands still”, reflecting the time when the Sun apparently stops moving north or south and then begins moving in the opposite direction.

In every year, there are two solstices. In the northern hemisphere, the June solstice happens when the Earth’s north pole is tilted its maximum amount towards the Sun. The December solstice happens when the north pole is most tilted away from the Sun. Thus, the June solstice is the day with the most sunshine, and the December solstice has the longest night. The opposite is true in southern hemisphere, with the Winter and Summer solstices in June and December respectively.

In each year, there is also an equinox in March and another in September. These days are the times when the night is as long as the day. This is reflected in the word's Latin root, aequinoctium, from aequi- (equal) and nox (night). In the northern hemisphere, the vernal (Spring) equinox is in March and the Autumnal (fall) equinox is in September, with seasons reversed once again in the southern hemisphere.

The time when the Sun is brightest and the days are longest is the Summer solstice, near June 21^st in the northern hemisphere. Yet the hottest days of Summer usually come in July or August, when the days are shorter and the Sun is lower in the sky.  Winter’s coldest days also lag the solstice by about two months.  Why? When the sunshine maximum comes in June, the landscape and atmosphere are still warming from the winter's chill.  Although the Sun begins to lose strength after the solstice, there is still enough heat to continue warming the landscape until the balance shifts about two months later.

In the days after the Winter solstice, although the Sun’s heat is returning, it is still not warm enough to keep the landscape from cooling further, especially during the night.  It is not until early March that the balance of solar heat and night-time cooling shifts into a warming trend.

The Winter solstice is also known as Yule, and this is a major Wiccan holiday. Many religions have placed the birth of their solar hero gods and saviours on this day: Jesus, Horus, Helios, Dionysus, and Mithras all claim Yule as their birthday. Since this day also represents the point at which the sun begins to wax, it represents rebirth and regeneration in the Wiccan tradition. It is interesting to see Wiccans in Australia celebrating Yule in June.

MOVIE MONDAY - INTERSTELLAR

“Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.” - Isaac Asimov

I was wary about Christopher Nolan’s 2014 movie “Interstellar” before watching it, as his 2010 film “Inception” had disappointed me greatly (see my review here). However, after watching this 169 minute epic at the weekend I was pleasantly surprised. The screenplay was by the two Nolan brothers, Christopher and Jonathan, and the film starred Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Michael Caine, Matt Damon and David Gyasi.

'Interstellar' is the story of a future earth dystopia, where climate change and a plant blight does not allow crops other than corn to grow. Worsening conditions and disease amongst the population mean that humanity’s extinction is almost certain. The hero of the movie is an ex-NASA test pilot named Cooper (McConaughey), who is a widower, and a dedicated family man (now corn farmer as all scientific jobs have been scrapped). He has two children, and is especially partial towards his bright daughter Murphy (named after Murphy’s Law). Cooper is invited by the now covert and top secret NASA to become humanity’s last hope in finding a new home, as a wormhole has appeared near Saturn. This provides a portal that will warp a spaceship to another galaxy in quest of a habitable planet. Heading the project is Professor Brand (Caine), a brilliant physicist, whose daughter (Hathaway) is also an astronaut that accompanies Copper on his mission.

This is an intelligent science fiction movie, not one based on pyrotechnics and arcade-style shoot-‘em-up chases in space. Although one has to suspend scientific belief now and then, most of the science is valid and to their credit, the Nolans did consult with astrophysicists when writing the script and making the movie. Relativity and the way that time becomes elastic for those who travel very fast through space is significant in the storyline. Alternate universes where more than three dimensions exist are also explored in the film. However, more importantly, the film’s main focus is that of love. How important is love to human beings and what are we capable of doing to ensure the safety of those we love. There are other themes, including the gregariousness of humans and the scourge of loneliness, the concept of heroism and altruism, especially as they relate to the good of society and humanity as opposed to the good of any one individual, and how honest are we as individuals, as organisations as a species…

The acting in the movie is excellent, with McConaughey pulling out all stops and delivering a suitably heroic performance, although his first allegiance script-wise is to the concept of fatherhood. Hathaway looks prematurely aged in the film and is quite a far cry from the ingénue roles of her early career. She plays her role convincingly and has good chemistry with McConaughey, although their relationship is not one of lovers. Caine in his old age has mellowed and as one would expect delivers his lines well and looks the part of a brilliant if flawed scientist. The musical score is brilliant and composer Hans Zimmer, adds considerably to the action, but even more importantly underlines the emotional motivation of the characters. The cinematography and special effects were of the standard one expects nowadays of Hollywood and were suitably unobtrusive so that they did not detract from the meat of the movie.

Nolan has made some very interesting and in some cases extremely good films. Some say “Inception” would be his masterpiece, but I beg to differ. Other people would say it’s “The Dark Knight”, or “Memento”. His remake of the Norwegian thriller, “Insomnia”, was excellent, not something that one can always say about remakes. His vision of the “Batman” sagas, starting with “Batman Begins”, is a gem of the super hero genre. There are many others, with a favourite of mine “The Prestige”, adapted from the novel of the same name, which is dark and disturbing, although quite entertaining.

We thoroughly enjoyed the movie and even if there are some inconsistencies and flaws in it, one can overlook them, as in totality this is an emotionally satisfying film and one that gets the viewer to think a little, going beyond simple entertainment and eye-candy value of many of the standard science fiction films.

MOVIE MONDAY - THE LAST DAYS ON MARS

“Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.” - Ray Bradbury

I like watching science fiction movies. No, let me qualify that. I like watching science fiction movies, provided they are intelligent, mind-challenging, do not contravene blatantly laws of nature and they are capable of making you think that what is impossible today may well be possible tomorrow (thank you, Mr Bradbury). “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury is an excellent science fiction novel that was made into an excellent film. That is the sort of Science Fiction I like.

Unfortunately, the film we watched last weekend was a science fiction film that we did no particularly like. It was more of a horror film dressed in astronaut costumes. As such it pandered to the teen market and was not a satisfying movie for a thinking, critical viewer. It was Ruairi Robinson’s 2013 film “The Last Days on Mars” based on a short story by Sydney J. Bounds and a screenplay by Clive Dawson. It starred Liev Schreiber, Elias Koteas, Romola Garai and Olivia Williams.

The plot is set on Mars, where the first human Mars base has been established in the non so distant future. On the last day of that first manned mission to Mars, a crew member of Tantalus Base believes he has made an astounding discovery: Fossilised evidence of bacterial life discovered in a rock sample he has collected. Unwilling to let the relief crew claim all the glory, he disobeys orders to pack up and goes out on an unauthorised expedition to collect further samples. But a routine excavation turns to disaster when the porous ground collapses and he falls into a deep crevice and near certain death. His devastated colleagues attempt to recover his body. However, when another vanishes, they start to suspect that the life-form they have discovered is not without danger…

And so starts a misadventure, which in typical horror movie fashion pulls all the right strings for thrills and spills. Mars is a bit of a furphy, as the story could have as easily been set in deep underground cavern, or the South Pole, or the Jungle of the Amazon (hmmm, I think similar films have in fact been made in all of those locations!). The film is quite unoriginal and it’s a bit of a mystery as to how it got made, given that it trod such familiar ground.

The beginning of the film had some good potential. The acting was OK, the sets and costumes fine, the cinematography captivating, some good characters that began to develop well. However, it soon slips and slides downhill where the inconceivable becomes impossible and ludicrous. OK, I won’t spoil it for you if you want to watch it, except to say that it is more in the fantasy/horror genre rather than the science fiction genre. Watch at your peril. It’s B-grade matinée material…

PERSEUS & THE PERSEIDS

“Necessity is the mother of invention.” - Plato

The Perseid meteor shower appears every year at around this time in the skies of the northern hemisphere. The phenomenon has been observed since at least 830 AD and has delighted night sky observers year after year. Gazing up at the cloudless skies, near the constellation of Perseus up to 60 meteors appear per hour, lighting up the sky with falling stars.

A meteoroid is any interplanetary body of relatively small size that enters the Earth's atmosphere. In colliding with atmospheric atoms and molecules at high velocity, the object begins to burn up and heats the air around it. The resultant luminous phenomenon is called a meteor. If the object survives its plunge through the atmosphere and lands on the ground, it is termed a meteorite. Meteoroids vary in size from small rocks to large boulders weighing a ton or more.

Perseus, in Greek mythology, was the son of Zeus and Danaë, the daughter of Acrisius of Argos. As an infant he was cast into the sea in a chest with his mother by Acrisius, who knew of a prophecy that said he would be killed by his grandson. The chest grounded on the island of Seriphus where Perseus grew up. King Polydectes of Seriphus, who desired Danaë, tricked Perseus into promising to obtain the head of Medusa, the only mortal among the Gorgons (winged female creatures of a terrible beauty, whose hair consisted of snakes).

Helped by the gods Hermes and Athena, Perseus pressed the Graiae, sisters of the Gorgons, into helping him by seizing the one eye and one tooth that the sisters shared and not returning them until they provided him with winged sandals (with which he could fly), the helmet of Hades (which made him invisible), a curved sword, or sickle, to decapitate Medusa, and a bag in which to conceal the head. Because the gaze of Medusa turned all who looked at her to stone, Perseus guided himself by her reflection in a shield given him by Athena and beheaded Medusa as she slept. He then returned to Seriphus and rescued his mother by turning Polydectes and his supporters to stone at the sight of Medusa’s head.

On his way to Seriphus, Perseus rescued the Ethiopian princess, Andromeda. Andromeda’s mother, Cassiopeia, had claimed to be more beautiful than the Nereids (sea nymphs), so Poseidon had punished Ethiopia by flooding it and plaguing it with a sea monster. An oracle informed Andromeda’s father, King Cepheus, that the ills would cease if he offered Andromeda to the monster as a sacrificial victim, which he did. Perseus, passing by, saw the princess and fell in love with her. He turned the sea monster to stone by showing it Medusa’s head and afterward married Andromeda.

Later Perseus gave the Gorgon’s head to Athena, who placed it on her shield, and gave his other accoutrements to Hermes. He accompanied his mother back to her native Argos, where he accidentally struck her father, Acrisius, dead when throwing the discus, thus fulfilling the prophecy that he would kill his grandfather. He consequently left Argos and founded Mycenae as his capital, becoming the ancestor of the Perseids, including Heracles. The Perseus legend was a favourite subject in painting and sculpture, both ancient and Renaissance. The chief characters in the Perseus legend, Perseus, Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, and the sea monster (Cetus), all figure in the night sky as constellations.

HELLO PLUTO

“O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world That has such people in’t!” - William Shakespeare (The Tempest Act 5, scene 1, 181–184)

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is about to reveal to us earthlings a new alien world for the first time. At 7:49 am ET today, the probe became the first spacecraft to fly by Pluto, our solar system’s outermost dwarf planet. This is a historic day for astronomy and science, but also for all people who are curious about our universe, life and everything…

New Horizons has been en route for the last nine years, travelling more than 3 billion miles. The flyby was over in a matter of minutes, as the probe frantically took hundreds of photos and collected data on Pluto’s atmosphere, geology, and moons. All this data will be enormously valuable to scientists as they seek to understand our solar system and how it formed billions of years ago.

New Horizons embodies a fundamental characteristic of our curious, rational species: Our urge for exploration, our desire to see a new world simply because it’s there. It represents the best of humanity, the heights of what we can accomplish through ingenuity, focus, and cooperation. More than anything, this mission is about broadening our horizons — taking in just a little bit more of the impossibly vast universe we live in.

It’s hard to really comprehend how far away Pluto truly is from us. If we think of Earth as a basketball, comparatively speaking, Pluto would be just a little larger than a golf ball. To keep to the planetary scale in our analogy, we’d have to put that golf ball incredibly far away: 80 to 130 km (depending on its location in orbit)! This goes to show how vast even our own little corner of the universe is…

Pluto was discovered by Clyde W. Tombaugh in 1930 and was originally considered the ninth planet from the Sun. After 1992, its status as a planet fell into question following the discovery of the Kuiper belt, a ring of objects beyond Neptune that includes Pluto among other large bodies. In 2005, Eris, which is 27% more massive than Pluto, was discovered, which led the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to define the term “planet” formally for the first time the following year. This definition excluded Pluto and reclassified it as a member of the new ‘dwarf planet” category (and specifically as a plutoid). Some astronomers believe Pluto should still be considered a planet.

Pluto has five known moons: Charon (the largest, with a diameter just over half that of Pluto), Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. Pluto and Charon are sometimes considered a binary system because the barycenter of their orbits does not lie within either body. The IAU has not formalised a definition for binary dwarf planets, and Charon is officially classified as a moon of Pluto.

As the new high resolution images of Pluto trickle in in a few hours, watch and learn, wonder and ponder, speculate and surmise! A rare glimpse into the bottomless pit of creation, a taste of eternity, a wild beauty, and an awe-inspiring view of primordial mysteries. Pluto is part of our solar system, a neighbouring world, an alien planet that nevertheless is built of the same cosmic dust that we are built of.

POETRY JAM - LOOKING BACK

“Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.” - William Shakespeare

This week Poetry Jam sets as a challenge the following theme: “This week go back to a year in the past and write a poem about your life or life in general at that time.”

Halley’s Comet is a short-period comet visible from Earth every 75–76 years. Halley is the only short-period comet that is clearly visible to the naked eye from Earth, and the only naked-eye comet that might appear twice in a human lifetime. Halley last appeared in the inner Solar System in 1986 and will next appear in mid-2061. Halley’s returns to the inner Solar System have been observed and recorded by astronomers since at least 240 BC. Clear records of the comet’s appearances were made by Chinese, Babylonian, and medieval European chroniclers, but were not recognised as reappearances of the same object at the time.

Here is my poem duet:

1986: Night of the Comet, I

And then tonight
Was the night of the comet.
Clear sky spattered with stars
And in the midst of astral dust
Of star-strewn chaotic order,
A faint, fuzzy, ill-defined light
Lost in all the others.

“Search and ye shall find!”
The night crisp, cold, pungent
And beside me...
“Ask and ye shall receive...”

Have I found you?
Faint, pale and ill-defined
A light amidst a billion others,
Yet only that one mattering;
Like that once in a lifetime glimpsed at,
Faint, pale and ill-defined,
Comet-light...

1986: Night of the Comet, II

Billions upon billions of suns
Strewn through the endless emptiness
Of the cosmos,
I look at them and yet remain indifferent
To the immensity that stares at me,
Being able to contain it all
Within the low walls and ceiling
Holding my brain.

I love...
I love you and that is more important
Than the speed of light within a vacuum.
What should it matter if now a million suns
Should suddenly decide to supernova?
What if I am but a mite on a speck of dust?
It is enough that I have loved,
Nothing can take that from me.

I feel, I love, I understand,
I am small, insignificant, an atom only
In the endlessness of eternity
And yet I love and I can pinpoint my existence
In unfaltering co-ordinates.

What if the earth should suddenly expire?
What if Death around each corner lies in wait?
My only fear now is that we two are on a parallel course
And that the threads of our two lives will never cross...

That which I feel
Is infinitely more important
Than all the vastness looming above,
Below, on all sides of me.
The space within me
Annuls the space without.

MOVIE MONDAY - GRAVITY

“Good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract.” - Nicolas Cage

We watched Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 movie “Gravity” at the weekend. It starred Sandra Bullock, George Clooney and Ed Harris (voice only). I had been looking forward to seeing this film after hearing all the hype about it and also seeing it received a rating of 7.9/10 in IMDB. Well, unfortunately it proved to be a case of “when you hear there are lots of cherries for the picking at some place, be prepared by taking with you only a small basket…”, as my grandfather used to say. This was a woeful movie, full of clichés and almost no plot, no character development, overlong (even at 91 minutes!), and frankly, boring.

In a nutshell this is what happens: Veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (Clooney) is in charge of the Shuttle Explorer mission to repair the Hubble Telescope by the rookie specialist Ryan Stone (Bullock). Suddenly Houston control advises them to abort the mission with a warning that a Russian missile hit a satellite, causing a chain reaction of destruction, with large clusters of debris coming upon them. Soon the astronauts lose communication with Mission Control in Houston. The debris strikes the Explorer and Ryan is cut loose from the shuttle while Kowalski is forced to bring her back. However, the Explorer is completely damaged and now their only chance to return to Earth is to reach a space station. But being short of oxygen and fuel is the least of their problems...

I love good science fiction and I am prepared to allow Sci-Fi to bend the rules of physics, for a good reason, and also I put up with a director using some clichés, provided he/she is packing some punch with plot, good characters or being innovative in dealing with some social, political or interpersonal issues, as all good science fiction does. “Gravity” fails in this respect. From start to finish there were blatant factual errors in everything from the laws of physics, engineering and orbital mechanics, right down to the unidentifiable views of the earth from space (yes, I saw the Nile and Arabia, as well as Florida, but nothing else recognisable). There is no intelligent plot, no world-shaking challenges, no engagement of the viewer.

Ryan Stone who was meant to be an astronaut behaved like a small child when trying to fly spacecraft, even resorting to “eenie-meenie-miney-moe” when trying to find the right button to press for some critical and essential function. Matt Kowalski was a pain to listen to and came across as complete idiot bordering on dementia, repeating trite stories about his life to Mission Control while offering motherhood statements and inane advice to Ryan.

The film is a special effects extravaganza, with CGI and special attention to 3D gimmicky. It’s meant to “wow” people with its depiction of how it would be to float up in space with the earth above/below/beside you as you spin all around. Yes, that’s OK for 5 minutes… What happens if there is no story and no good characters to make your film a memorable, engaging experience? Viewers lose interest and become bored.

I must say that I am becoming very wary of George Clooney films. They have disappointed me in the past (I shudder when I remember the bathos of “The Men Who Stare at Goats” or the muddled and pretentious “Syriana” or the disappointing “The American” – ugh!). It’ll have to be on the recommendation of someone I trust very much that I will now go and watch another Clooney film…

“Gravity” was a waste of my time. I’d rather watch a good old-fashioned sci-fi movie like one of the “Star Trek” series or one of the “Star Wars” ones! Better stories, better actors, great humour and special effects galore as well. If it’s drama, character development and tension you want instead, then watch a standard earthbound film, no need to go out in space or watch pretend science fiction!

SETI

"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery." – Anaïs Nin

SETI is an acronym that stands for “Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence”, the designation of a series of projects based mainly on attempts to detect artificial radio transmissions from outer space. Here is the web page of the SETI organisation: http://www.seti.org/

I was reminded of this word by a report in the news that yet another batch of new Earth-like planet was discovered close to us, in our backyard, so to speak (in cosmic terms!). Astrophysicists from around the world, including a team from the University of Sydney, have found a Sun-like star with five orbiting planets, which dates back to the dawn of the galaxy. The scientists have determined that the star is 11.2 billion years old, making it the oldest system with Earth-sized planets ever discovered.

The certainty of finding other intelligent life forms in the universe was established by the Drake Equation, which was developed by Frank Drake in 1961 as a way to focus on the factors which determine how many intelligent, communicating civilizations there are in our galaxy. The Drake Equation is:

N = N* fp ne fl fi fc fL

The equation can really be looked at as a number of questions:
N* represents the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy

Question: How many stars are in the Milky Way Galaxy?

Answer: Current estimates are 100 billion.

fp is the fraction of stars that have planets around them

Question: What percentage of stars have planetary systems?

Answer: Current estimates range from 20% to 50%.

ne is the number of planets per star that are capable of sustaining life

Question: For each star that does have a planetary system, how many planets are capable of sustaining life?

Answer: Current estimates range from 1 to 5.

fl is the fraction of planets in ne where life evolves

Question: On what percentage of the planets that are capable of sustaining life does life actually evolve?

Answer: Current estimates range from 100% (where life can evolve it will) down to close to 0%.

fi is the fraction of fl where intelligent life evolves

Question: On the planets where life does evolve, what percentage evolves intelligent life?

Answer: Estimates range from 100% (intelligence is such a survival advantage that it will certainly evolve) down to near 0%.

fc is the fraction of fi that communicate

Question: What percentage of intelligent races have the means and the desire to communicate?

Answer: 10% to 20%

fL is fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilisations live

Question: For each civilization that does communicate, for what fraction of the planet's life does the civilisation survive?

Answer: This is the toughest of the questions. If we take Earth as an example, the expected lifetime of our Sun and the Earth is roughly 10 billion years. So far we've been communicating with radio waves for less than 100 years. How long will our civilization survive? Will we destroy ourselves in a few years like some predict or will we overcome our problems and survive for millennia? If we were destroyed tomorrow the answer to this question would be 1/100,000,000th. If we survive for 10,000 years the answer will be 1/1,000,000th.

When all of these variables are multiplied together we come up with: N, the number of communicating civilisations in the galaxy.

Considerable disagreement on the values of most of these parameters exists, but the values used by Drake and his colleagues in 1961 were: 

    * R* = 10/year (10 stars formed per year)

    * fp = 0.5 (half of all stars formed will have planets)

    * ne = 2 (2 planets per star will be able to develop life)

    * fl = 1 (100% of the planets will develop life)

    * fi = 0.01 (1% of which will be intelligent life)

    * fc = 0.01 (1% of which will be able to communicate)

    * L = 10,000 years (which will last 10,000 years)

Drake's values give N = 10 × 0.5 × 2 × 1 × 0.01 × 0.01 × 10,000 = 10 communicating civilisations in the galaxy.

Some people may shrug off the whole SETI project as a pointless exercise and a waste of time, money, people power. Many more say that it takes up valuable resources that could be used better elsewhere, improving the lot of the underprivileged in this world, for example. Fundamentalists may say that the earth is the only place created by God and hence the only one populated by sentient beings with a soul. Others may object to the search on the grounds that even if many civilizations are there in the stars, they are so far form us that it does not make any difference to us one way or another, as we may never contact them.

As for myself, I am a rational, sentient, logical being who has been trained in the sciences. I possess an inordinate amount of curiosity and my imagination is boundless. I support SETI as I think it utilises only a small fraction of resources compared to the enormous amounts that are spent on other less necessary endeavours - say, military spending. I would like us to find evidence of life elsewhere in the Universe, as the Drake Equation predicts that this is a distinct possibility. Even if we never contact other sentient beings in the universe directly, I think that knowing certainly that they exist will change us as a species…

What do you think? Do you think there is extraterrestrial life? Do you support SETI?

CALENDRICAL VAGARIES

“I don’t wait for the calendar to figure out when I should live life.” - Gene Simmons
 
Time has always fascinated human beings. The intangible and yet inexorable passage of the hours, the endless procession of the seasons, the death and regenerative cycles of crops and vegetation have necessitated the use of a calendar.  The farmer has to know when to sow his plants, the priest when to glorify his gods, the king when to lead his army to battle.  And so were born calendars, to keep time and to reckon the passage of the seasons and the years.  Each culture tried to solve the problem of time keeping and calendar construction in its own way and vestiges of these multiple calendars are still to be found around the world.  Currently, there are about 40 different calendrical systems in use worldwide, with about six widely used.  The Gregorian calendar is the most widespread, and by convention, used in most (if not all) secular activities around the world. This calendar is solar one and it is based on the ancient Roman calendar as modified by Pope Gregory XIII (7 January 1502 – 10 April 1585).
 
The solar year depends on the revolution of the Earth around the sun, each revolution taking 365.2422 days.  The tilt of the Earth’s axis is responsible for the seasons. At the same time, the moon has influenced the development of a calendar with each lunar cycle lasting for approximately 1/12 of the solar year. This has given rise to subdivision of the year into 12, sometimes 13 months.  The word month itself shows its close association with the word moon.  The ancient Greeks had a similar association: mén = “month”, méne = “moon”.
 
The Western calendar developed from the ancient Greek and Roman calendars.  The term calendar itself is derived from the Latin calenda meaning the first day of the month.  The ancient Roman calendar is the one that corresponds most closely to our own and was called the Julian Calendar as it was standardised by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. His Greek astronomer Sosigenes devised a 12-month calendar of 365 days, with a leap year of 366 days every four years. Each month had 30 or 31 days except for February, which was considered unlucky and hence had 29 days except every leap year when it had 30.  This was until Augustus Caesar renamed the old Roman month Sextilus after himself, in the process robbing February of a day in order to increase August’s 30 days to 31.
 
The Julian calendar assumed that the year lasted for exactly 365.24 days.  The real year was about 11 minutes and 14 seconds shorter than the Julian year and over the decades, the seconds and minutes added up to hours and days, making the real seasons drift away from the calendrical seasons.  After a few centuries, the Church began to find it difficult to set the moveable Church feasts such as Easter, which depend on the Vernal equinox.
 
Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 decided to remedy the situation, which by that time had led to a calendrical discrepancy a few days ahead of the seasonal calendar.  The Pope decreed that February would have 29 days in century years that could be divided evenly by 400 (e.g. 1600, 2000), but only 28 days in century years that could not be divided evenly by 400 (e.g. 1700, 1800, 1900).  Commencing in October 1582, ten days were dropped from the calendar in order to correct the discrepancy. The resulting calendar is the Western Gregorian Calendar in use throughout most countries around the world today.
 
Most Catholic countries adopted the Gregorian calendrical reformations immediately after Pope Gregory’s modifications, and other Western nations followed suit soon after (e.g. France, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg 1582).  As the Pope had no authority over the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Julian calendar persisted in its use in the countries where the Orthodox faith was the official state religion (e.g. Russia [adopting the Gregorian calendar in 1918], Rumania [1919], Bulgaria [1915], Greece [1923]).
 
Even when for practical reasons the Gregorian calendar was adopted by the laity, the religious feast days continued to be calculated according to the Julian Calendar.  This situation persists in some countries to this day.  Some of the Eastern Churches calculate all of their feast days according to the Julian Calendar (which is now 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar!).  For example, the Ukrainian Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on the 7th of January.
 
Some other Orthodox Churches have adopted a more illogical practice.  They have embraced the Gregorian calendar for all “fixed festivals” (e.g. Christmas and the commemorative Feast Days of Saints) that recur on the same date every year.  However, when it comes to calculating the “moveable festivals” (e.g. Easter and all of the associated feasts such as Ash Wednesday, Ascension, Pentecost, etc), such Orthodox Churches use the Julian Calendar.  This leads to the curious situation of the Greek Orthodox and Catholic devotees celebrating Christmas together on the same date and Easter at different times.
 
Easter is an interesting example as the Paschal dates are calculated on the seasonal calendar, re-enforcing the fact that Easter is an old Spring fertility festival (Eostra was the name of the Celtic Spring goddess).  Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox on the 21st of March.  The dates of all other moveable feasts are calculated in connection with the date set for Easter in that year.  If there is no full moon between the Spring equinox calculated according to the Gregorian calendar and the Spring Equinox according to the Julian calendar, then Catholic and Orthodox Easter occur at the same time.  This happened in 1977, 1987, 1991, and will periodically recur until reason prevails and the Gregorian calendar is adopted universally.  An even more logical approach would be to specify Easter as always being celebrated on the third Sunday in April, for example. What a boon for time-tablers, schedulers and forward planners that would be!