Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Zach Urbina, solar science, SDO

After nearly six months of relative quiet, our parent star, the sun, awoke. Recent predictions from leading solar scientists ranged from “cycle 24 will be our weakest yet” to “cycle 24 is quiet now, because it will be double peaked.” It appears that the latter is emerging as the clearer truth.

Over the course of a week, between October 24th and 31st, more than 28 substantial flares fired off from the sun. Several of the more recent flares sent massive clouds of ionized particulate matter, called coronal mass ejections, toward Earth.

Four of the recent flares were X-class solar flares, the strongest on the scale, erupting from the photosphere of the sun, causing minor radio blackouts, and sending coronal mass ejections in many different directions, including toward Earth.

Unfortunately, due to the recent US government shutdown, the suite of tools generally available to the public for space weather prediction were offline. As of November 2nd, there remains a backlog of missing data for several sets of publically available apps and internet resources for space weather prediction and observation.

This period of excited solar activity comes of the heals of recently published science that revealed no discernable connection between the planetary rotation period of Jupiter (11.87 years) and the length of solar cycles (variable between 9 and 12 years). This may sound intuitively obvious, but holdouts from several corners of the scientific world have sought to ascribe significance to the similarities between both cycles. Some claimed that the much less massive Jupiter somehow caused solar dynamic activity.

Published analyses of radioactive isotopes of beryllium and carbon in 10,000 year-old ice core samples recently dismissed the similarities between both periods as being consistent with chance and statistically insignificant. This leaves open the possibility that the solar dynamo is indeed self-excited, in a process whose predictive models are still being tested and perfected, called the meridional flow.

Meridional flow moves solar material just beneath the apparent subsurface of the sun (called the photosphere). Models for the meridional flow have proven difficult to hammer down with predictive certainty, but NASA’s Dr. David Hathaway and a number of other leading solar scientists are moving closer to understanding the dynamic forces that drive the activity of our parent star.

Radar imagery from SDO, taken every 45 seconds over the past two years, was recently analyzed as well. The results of that analysis revealed that the current models, which predict the rate of meridional flow are off by at least half. In short, the conveyor belt-like process of plasma that returns material to the photosphere of the sun moves more quickly than originally theorized. This misunderstanding might have contributed to the lower than normal forecast for solar cycle 24. Time will tell if the sun is truly tapering off its maximum output for this cycle, or if more activity is coming Earth’s way.

The NASA/ESA heliophysics fleet currently observing the sun is comprised of nearly twenty spacecraft in various orbits measuring not only our star, but the interstellar space between it and Earth as well as the intricate space weather system that interacts constantly with our planet.

One of the most exciting moments in solar sciences comes when an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection collides with the Earth’s magnetic field to the degree of causing a geomagnetic storm. The Earth’s magnetic field is fully capable of protecting our planet from the occasional glancing blow from the sun; however, strong clouds of magnetized plasma can often find their way into Earth’s atmosphere, causing minor interference with electrical grids as well as the constellation of GPS satellites.

The Carrington Event of 1859 and the Manitoba Blackout of 1989, revealed that the Earth is indeed vulnerable to space weather events. There have been calls, falling largely upon the deaf ears of US legislators, that want the electrical grid of the United States to be fully retrofitted with radiation hardened components that could handle the surges associated with geomagnetic storms. The problem will not go away and unlike global warming and other self-destructive, human propagated phenomena, there is little we can due to curtail such activity, other than being aware and prepared.

As the number of active regions on the apparent surface of the sun increase, we are likely to experience more geo-effective activity in the coming weeks and months. The phase of the solar cycle remains high and will gently curtail overall activity as solar maximum wanes into the lull of solar minimum.

For solar science enthusiasts, including this writer, this period of solar activity is an ideal time to better understand the dynamic interactions that the sun has with Earth. It is only in the last 10 to 15 years that we’ve understood our parent star to be a dynamic system, not as predictable as we’d assumed it to be in the nearly 400 years of solar science observations.

Deepening the scientific understanding about our parent star is as much about protecting Earth, as it is about examining the interconnected nature of the Earth-Sun space weather system. It behooves all of humanity to keep apprised of this connection as we establish new laws and more accurately understand our extended natural environment.

Before being interested in applied futurism, I was college trained in “…General Insurance Management…” (U.S.) I also took university classes on engineering and technology (Canada, Venezuela). Working with the second largest oil group in the world (PDVSA, with 54,000 active employees. PDVSA is Citgo’s parent company), that group wanted me to only institute beyond-insurance risk management. You see, when they were to incur in a loss (potential disruption), it did not suffice to them to have the indemnity payment from the insurance and reinsurance pool.

Please read the entire document at http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

Regards,

Mr. Andres Agostini

www.linkedin.com/in/AndresAgostini

“…Transformative and Integrative Risk Management (TAIRM) is also implemented in order to prevent technological surprises to the savvy organization seeking this advice and service by TAIRM, but also to create disruptively technological surprise (managerial ‘Sputnik Moments’) for the enterprise’s competitors…” This notion is better understood when the axiom “… strategy is a function of a grander beyond-insurance risk management program and not the other way around…” is fully accepted and practiced.

Please read the entire document at http://lnkd.in/bYP2nDC

Regards,

Mr. Andres Agostini

www.linkedin.com/in/AndresAgostini

In our on-going ambitions to colonise space — and our search for exo-planets in goldilocks zones, it is often overlooked that the most Earth-like area known to us is in our own Solar System, and very nearby — the upper reaches of the Venusian troposphere.

Whilst the surface of Venus invokes classical images of Hell — a dark sea of fire and brimstone, where temperatures raise to an incredible 450°C — hot enough to melt lead, tin and zinc, and pressurised to such an extent (92 bar) that in these conditions the atmosphere ghosts in and out of an ocean of supercritical carbon dioxide — sulphur dioxide tints the air, and sulphuric acid rains down on volcanic plains. One just needs to look to the skies…

At about 50 km to 60 km above the surface, the upper reaches of the Venusian troposphere, the environment is quite different. At these high altitudes the temperature is in our comfort zone of 0°C to 50°C, and the air pressure similar as habitable regions of Earth.
Havens over Hell - Ecosystems of the Venetian Tropopause

An atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide (96.5%) and abundant solar radiation, the conditions are ideal for photosynthesis. One could imagine solar energy powered crafts could easily sustain ecosystems where the ideal conditions for photosynthesis ensure an abundant source of food and oxygen for inhabitants. The solar energy here is abundant and in all directions — the high reflectivity of clouds below causes the amount of light reflected upward to be nearly the same as that coming in from above, with an upward solar intensity of 90% — so aircraft would not need to concern about electricity or energy consumption. Indeed, that energy would not even be needed to keep the craft airborne — as the oxygen store would also double up as a natural lifting agent for such aircrafts, as in the Venusian atmosphere of carbon dioxide, oxygen is a lifting gas — in the same way helium is a lifting gas on Earth. With temperature, pressure, gravity, and a constant source of food and oxygen via plant growth all accounted for, not to mention close proximity to Earth, waste & water recycling would be the main challenge for the permanence of such Venusian aircraft — where the initial establishment of a balanced ecosystem is key. The engineering challenge would be far less than that of establishing a colony or base on Mars. Just don’t look down!

I am very pleased to say that the 2013 100YSS conference held in Houston, TX, was a success. I met a lot of like minded people — people who want to make interstellar travel a reality — though we differ in our opinions of when.

I was especially pleased to be able to visit with Mae Jemison, Jill Tarter and Pamela Contag. These three are amazing, shepherding us along. Shepherding us? Yes, are a loose collection of visionaries going every which way.

Mae Jemison
Jill Tarter
Pamela Contag

http://www.ardmediathek.de/wdr-fernsehen/quarks-und-co/quarks-und-co-auf-teilchenjagd-ranga-yogeshwar-am-cern?documentId=17482362

I learned from it about the unfathomable degree of social coherence among the many thousand scientists and engineers whose synergy makes this largest constructive effort of humankind since the pyramids possible. And it also revealed the wonderful spirit of Peter Higgs who is a loving mind in the old sense of a devout scientist.

Ranga Yogeshwar here made it clear to me for the first time WHY this brave community could not respond to a novelty that would have destroyed their cohesion. The effort was too big to be disturbed even for a few days of “second thoughts.” For that it was too late from the beginning.

So CERN’s public refusal to update its “safety report” for more than 5 years is part and parcel of the beauty of the new pyramid (the word means “immortality”). Imagine the pyramids’ construction having been disturbed by a news that interfered with its political and divine purpose: This would have meant the end of the whole effort and the civilization behind it.

So I apologize to CERN: “Dear admired colleagues, please, forgive me that I tried to disturb your super-human effort by insisting on a safety update!”

Ordinary mortals have no right to interfere with a divine project. If the devotion behind it implies accepting a harsh fate for the community at large, the Egyptian/Aztec rationality of a large number of dedicated individuals cannot possibly be tampered with. It is not religion: it is collective dynamics – chaos theory – or as my colleague Hermann Haken calls it, Synergetics. “When the flag is flying the brain is in the trumpet.” The rules of rationality are suspended in this case according to the Bible.

Poor Einstein, poor dear Peter Higgs, poor humankind. Hopefully, someone jumps upon the 5 years.
.

Meta-materials — materials that have been engineered to have properties that absolutely do not exist in nature — such as negative refraction — are unraveling interesting possibilities in future engineering. The discovery of negative refraction has led to the creation of invisibility cloaks, for example, which seamlessly bend light and other electromagnetic radiation around an object, though such are normally restricted to cumbersome laboratory experiments with split-ring resonators and/or restricted to an insufficient slice of spectrum.

A recent article in ExtremeTech drew attention to the world’s first quantum meta-material, created recently by a team of German material scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. It is believed such quantum meta-material can overcome the main problem with traditional meta-materials based on split-ring resonators, which can only be tuned to a small range of frequencies and not conducive to operate across a useful slice of spectrum. While fanciful applications such as quantum birefringence and super-radiant phase transitions are cited it is perhaps invisibility cloaks that until very recently seemed a forte of science fiction.

From Fiction - The Invisible Man

Breakthroughs at the National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan have also made great strides in building quantum invisibility cloaks, and as the arXiv blog on TechnologyReview recently commented ‘invisibility cloaks are all the rage these days’. With such breakthroughs, these technologies may soon find mass take-up in future consumer products & security, and also have abundant military uses — where it may find the financial stimulus to advance the technology to its true capabilities. Indeed researchers in China have been looking into how to mass-produce invisibility cloaks from materials such as Teflon. We’ll all be invisible soon.

—

[1] The first quantum meta-material raises more questions than it answers
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/168060-the-first-quantum-metamaterial-raises-more-questions-than-it-answers

[2] Quantum Invisibility Cloak Hides Objects from Reality
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/516006/quantum-invisibility-cloak-hides-objects-from-reality/

[3] Hide the interior region of core-shell nano-particles with quantum invisible cloaks
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/1306.2120

[4] Chinese Researchers Make An Invisibility Cloak For Mass Production
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519166/chinese-researchers-make-an-invisibility-cloak-in-15-minutes/

Science is based on dialog. Not a single colleague including Hawking and his crew contradicts my safety-relevant finding for 5 years. This fact can only have one of two reasons:
(1) The finding is so embarrassingly stupid that to take it up would suffice to soil the respondent.
(2) The finding harks back so deeply to the young Einstein that it causes fear to tread upon.

One country – my own – singlehandedly left CERN in response (only to surreptitiously return under non-publicized pressure).

Obviously the offered result (“gothic-R theorem”) has historical dimensions. Everyone’s survival is affected by it probability-wise if it is valid. We “live in an interesting time” as the Chinese proverb goes.

800 newspapers reported on the theorem in 2008. Only Aljazeera remained four years later. There is a “curfew of silence” obeyed by my colleagues. Not a single counterargument is in the literature against my result published in 2008 and its many sequels.

Why is CERN’s official “Safety Report” allowed to go un-updated for 5 years? And why is the friendly admonition by a court given to CERN standing before it to, please, admit a “safety conference” a planet-wide taboo topic even after almost three years? Refusing dialog and discussion is one thing, refusing updating on safety is another. In the one case but a single person is the victim, in the other it is you and you and you.

The most recent prime-time movie “Heroes – the Fate of the World in their Hands,” aired last Thursday by RTL ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2324130/plotsummary?ref_=tt_stry_pl ), struck me by total surprise. Everyone can spot the movie’s weaknesses (rating 1.7), but: Imagine the loving courage that stands behind it!

CERN cannot remain silent any longer.

P.S.: I cordially congratulate Peter Higgs to his Nobel prize which he fully deserves along with his colleague. And I ask him for the great honor of replying to this blog post which congratulates him first.