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The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, “we are as gods, we might as well get good at it”. Photographs of earth from space had that god-like perspective.

What I’m saying now is we are as gods and have to get good at it. Necessity comes from climate change, potentially disastrous for civilization. The planet will be okay, life will be okay. We will lose vast quantities of species, probably lose the rain forests if the climate keeps heating up. So it’s a global issue, a global phenomenon. It doesn’t happen in just one area. The planetary perspective now is not just aesthetic. It’s not just perspective. It’s actually a world-sized problem that will take world sized solutions that involves forms of governance we don’t have yet. It involves technologies we are just glimpsing. It involves what ecologists call ecosystem engineering. Beavers do it, earthworms do it. They don’t usually do it at a planetary scale. We have to do it at a planetary scale. A lot of sentiments and aesthetics of the environmental movement stand in the way of that.

Continue reading “We are as Gods…” and watch the video interview

The New York Time reported Space Exploration Technologies of Hawthorne, Calif. — SpaceX, for short — launched its Falcon 9 rocket on schedule at 8:35 p.m. Eastern time from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

The Wall Street Journal reported, “trouble-free countdown followed by liftoff at 8:35 p.m. ET, precisely as scheduled.”

Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the NASA administrator said, “It actually marks the beginning of true commercial spaceflight to take cargo to the International Space Station for us.”

This is a milestone in the relationship between public and private enterprise. The handoff of what public enterprise, NACA/NASA, pioneered, developed and brought to maturity, to private enterprises capable of lowering the costs of space travel with ambitions to do more than stay in low earth orbit.

Congratulations, to Elon Musk, who believed it was possible, and went ahead and proved all the nay sayers wrong. This is an example of how one man’s vision and tenacity has changed the way we perceive the world. Congratulations!

At the halfway point to a climate gamble, 50 contributor ideas give just a taste of the creativity and innovation available to us

“One or other of us will have to go,” Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said on his deathbed to the hated wallpaper in his room. The perilous acceleration of Arctic ice loss, and the imminent threat of irreversible climate change poses a similar ultimatum to the economic system that is pushing us over the brink. For society’s sake I hope this time we redecorate.

Fortunately, many people are queuing up to propose better designs, rather than just cursing the interiors, as you can read about here.

Monday 1 October marks the halfway point in a 100-month countdown to a game of climate roulette.

On a very conservative estimate, 50 months from now, the dice become loaded against us in terms of keeping under a 2C temperature rise. This level matters because beyond it an environmental “domino effect” is likely to operate. In a volatile and unpredictable dynamic, things like melting ice, and the release of carbon from the planet’s surface are set to feed off each other, accelerating and reinforcing the warming effect.

The time frame follows an estimate of risk of rising greenhouse gas concentrations from the world’s leading authority on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that passed a certain point, it will no longer be “likely” that we stay the right side of the line. Some consider even a 2C rise too much, but it is the limit that the EU and others have signed up to.

Extraordinarily, however, in spite of the stakes, the issue has receded from the political frontline like a wave shrinking down a beach. This could, though, merely be a prelude to it returning with a vengeance. Politicians may have turned their backs, others have not.

Continue reading “50 months to avoid climate disaster”

Previous posting in this Debunking Series.

In this post we will look at the last three types of engines. Can these engine technologies be debunked?

Start with the boring stuff. Nuclear/plasma engines. For more information look up Franklin Chang-Diaz’s Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR). Real. Cannot be debunked.

Now for the more interesting stuff. The second is Pulse Detonation Engines (PDE). This type of engine uses detonation waves to combust fuel and oxidizer mixture. “The engine is pulsed because the mixture must be renewed in the combustion chamber between each detonation wave initiated by an ignition source.” Theoretically this type of engine is capable of speeds from subsonic to Mach 5.

Here is an UT Arlington Feb 2008 YouTube video that shows how elegantly simple, a workable engineering concept is. According to the posting this engine was built and tested in 2005.

Here is a link to Mojave Skies blog posting which shows photographs of an Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) subsonic pulsed detonation engine trials (about May 2008), made from off-the-shelf automotive parts. Impressive!

Some history regarding the Mojave Skies blog posting. Scaled Composites is led by Burt Rutan, whose team won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004. Scaled Composites is now owned by Northrup Grumman a defense contractor. What a small world. Everyone is interconnected to everyone else.

What about supersonic trials?

Here is a link to Military, Aviation & Space forum where the jet plumes appeared to be pulsed. The date of this posting is Feb 2008, while the AFRL’s press release is dated May 2008. Here is the AboveTopSecret’s link to a Jun 2008 discussion about what appears to be PDE aircrafts in action. The writers appear to be experienced and leaning toward the PDE aircrafts in the video being real.

My guess is that conventional fuel pulse detonation engines are a reality in experimental supersonic aircrafts, and that the May 2008 AFRL’s press release is about making PDEs cheaper. These engines are real and cannot be debunked.

Now for the third type of engine technology, atomic bomb or nuclear pulse engines. It is quite obvious from the Medusa design that the nuclear energy released by such a device that is used to propel this starship is only 1/6th of the useful energy. Note, useful energy is less than total energy released. Therefore this is an inefficient design.

Further, as the Wikipedia article on nuclear pulse engines points out, there is the Partial Test Ban Treaty that makes such engines illegal. Debunked.

Therefore, nuclear or atomic bomb pulsed engines are debunked, and people who support such ideas are out of touch with reality. Let me quote Billy Currington “God is great, beer is good, people are crazy”.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

On January 28 2011, three days into the fierce protests that would eventually oust the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, a Twitter user called Farrah posted a link to a picture that supposedly showed an armed man as he ran on a “rooftop during clashes between police and protesters in Suez”. I say supposedly, because both the tweet and the picture it linked to no longer exist. Instead they have been replaced with error messages that claim the message – and its contents – “doesn’t exist”.

Few things are more explicitly ephemeral than a Tweet. Yet it’s precisely this kind of ephemeral communication – a comment, a status update, sharing or disseminating a piece of media – that lies at the heart of much of modern history as it unfolds. It’s also a vital contemporary historical record that, unless we’re careful, we risk losing almost before we’ve been able to gauge its importance.

Consider a study published this September by Hany SalahEldeen and Michael L Nelson, two computer scientists at Old Dominion University. Snappily titled “Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost?”, the paper took six seminal news events from the last few years – the H1N1 virus outbreak, Michael Jackson’s death, the Iranian elections and protests, Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Egyptian revolution, and the Syrian uprising – and established a representative sample of tweets from Twitter’s entire corpus discussing each event specifically.

It then analysed the resources being linked to by these tweets, and whether these resources were still accessible, had been preserved in a digital archive, or had ceased to exist. The findings were striking: one year after an event, on average, about 11% of the online content referenced by social media had been lost and just 20% archived. What’s equally striking, moreover, is the steady continuation of this trend over time. After two and a half years, 27% had been lost and 41% archived.

Continue reading “The decaying web and our disappearing history”

I have been meaning to read a book coming out soon called Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. It’s written by Harvard biologist George Church and science writer Ed Regis. Church is doing stunning work on a number of fronts, from creating synthetic microbes to sequencing human genomes, so I definitely am interested in what he has to say. I don’t know how many other people will be, so I have no idea how well the book will do. But in a tour de force of biochemical publishing, he has created 70 billion copies. Instead of paper and ink, or pdf’s and pixels, he’s used DNA.

Much as pdf’s are built on a digital system of 1s and 0s, DNA is a string of nucleotides, which can be one of four different types. Church and his colleagues turned his whole book–including illustrations–into a 5.27 MB file–which they then translated into a sequence of DNA. They stored the DNA on a chip and then sequenced it to read the text. The book is broken up into little chunks of DNA, each of which has a portion of the book itself as well as an address to indicate where it should go. They recovered the book with only 10 wrong bits out of 5.27 million. Using standard DNA-copying methods, they duplicated the DNA into 70 billion copies.

Scientists have stored little pieces of information in DNA before, but Church’s book is about 1,000 times bigger. I doubt anyone would buy a DNA edition of Regenesis on Amazon, since they’d need some expensive equipment and a lot of time to translate it into a format our brains can comprehend. But the costs are crashing, and DNA is a far more stable medium than that hard drive on your desk that you’re waiting to die. In fact, Regenesis could endure for centuries in its genetic form. Perhaps librarians of the future will need to get a degree in biology…

Link to Church’s paper

Source

Previous post in this Debunking Series.

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This video was broadcast on G4TV, September 19th 2012.

http://www.g4tv.com/videos/60838/dr-eric-w-davis-on-new-light-speed-breaking-science/

Major Notes from the Video are:

a. Dr. Eric Davis, Senior Research Physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Austin TX.

b. Use exotic energy, quantum energy from vacuum energy, to generate warp drive by surfing space.

c. Surfing on space at faster than the velocity of light.

d. Theory requires stupendous amount of vacuum energy.

e. Sonny White (correct name?) suggests that it could be done with much less energy.

f. Disruptive innovations can happen at any time.

g. Richard Obousy of Icarus Interstellar Inc, using string quantum theory shows that the limit of velocity is 10E32 x c (velocity of light) using quantum string theories.

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Need to bear in mind that for interstellar travel to become a reality three factors must be realized.

1) Costs:

From the video this group has not been able to quantify their costs.

2) Technological Feasibility:

As Dr Eric Davis states it might take anywhere from a 100 year to 200 years for this technology to become a reality, but you never know that some disruptive innovation might change all that.

There is another problem with this. Dr. Robert Nemiroff’s Three Photon Observation, which suggests that quantum foam may not exists, therefore falsifying the ability to do interstellar travel in this manner.

Actually come to think about Dr. Eric Davis was describing Dr. Miguel Alcubierre work but substituting Alcubierre’s General Relativity tensors solutions with ‘string quantum’ theory.

3) Safety: Don’t know how to navigate or how to protect crew.

That is a fail on all three counts.

Finally, if I remember correctly, the string theories sits on top of quantum theory and therefore all the discoveries in quantum theory have been translated into string theories. But the string theories by themselves have not been able to predict any new physical behavior, in an ‘a priori’ manner.

For a simple description of quantum foam and vacuum energy see, here.

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I put forward a test for these type of proposals, in the comments section of an earlier posting,

https://lifeboat.com/blog/2012/10/debunking-antimatter-rockets-for-interstellar-travel

And here it is, if you had a few millions dollars can you demonstrate experimental feasibility as a propulsion device?

If the answer is ‘no’ then it is debunked if it is ‘yes’ then let’s get the funding. From Dr Eric Davis comments it is clear that the answer is ‘no’.

Appreciate your comments & feedback.

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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.

Solomon is inviting all serious participants to his LinkedIn Group Interstellar Travel & Gravity Modification.

One question that fascinated me in the last two years is, can we ever use data to control systems? Could we go as far as, not only describe and quantify and mathematically formulate and perhaps predict the behavior of a system, but could you use this knowledge to be able to control a complex system, to control a social system, to control an economic system?

We always lived in a connected world, except we were not so much aware of it. We were aware of it down the line, that we’re not independent from our environment, that we’re not independent of the people around us. We are not independent of the many economic and other forces. But for decades we never perceived connectedness as being quantifiable, as being something that we can describe, that we can measure, that we have ways of quantifying the process. That has changed drastically in the last decade, at many, many different levels.

Continue reading “Thinking in Network Terms” and watch the hour long video interview

Earth is a hostile place — and that’s even before one starts attending school. Even when life first sparked into being, it had to evolve defenses to deal with a number of toxins, such as damaging ultraviolet light, then there were toxic elements ranging from iron to oxygen to overcome, later, there was DDT and other toxic chemicals and of course, there are all those dreaded cancers.

In Evolution In A Toxic World: How Life Responds To Chemical Threats [Island Press; 2012: Guardian Bookshop; Amazon UK;Amazon US], environmental toxicologist Emily Monosson outlines three billion years of evolution designed to withstand the hardships of living on this deadly planet, giving rise to processes ranging from excretion, transformation or stowing harmful substances. The subtitle erroneously suggests these toxins are only chemical in nature, but the author actually discusses more than this one subclass of toxins.

The method that arose to deal with these toxins is a plethora of specialised, targeted proteins — enzymes that capture toxins and repair their damages. By following the origin and progression of these shared enzymes that evolved to deal with specific toxins, the author traces their history from the first bacteria-like organisms to modern humans. Comparing the new field evolutionary toxicology to biomedical research, Dr Monosson notes: “In light of evolution, biomedical researchers are now asking questions that might seem antithetical to medicine”.

Continue reading “Evolution in a Toxic World”

The Ontological Einstein – One to Four

Otto E. Rossler and Dieter Fröhlich, Faculty of Science, University of Tübingen, Auf der Morgenstelle 8, 72076 Tubingen, Germany

One: Ontological clock slow-down downstairs in gravity

Two: Ontological rest-mass decrease downstairs in gravity

Three: Ontological size increase downstairs in gravity

Four: Ontological charge decrease downstairs in gravity

(1): Assume an upstairs and a downstairs floor to be equally strongly accelerating in gravity for simplicity. Then the situation can be transposed to a constant-acceleration rocketship of equal height in outer space that by definition is governed by the rules of special relativity alone. Here one finds that whenever a light ray from the rear end arrives upstairs at the tip, the point of arrival has, during the flight time of the photon, picked up additional speed. Hence the emitted light arrives upstairs redshifted. The normal-ticking CLOCKS and atoms present downstairs therefore appear slowed down from the point of view of upstairs owing to a receding motion of constant speed (without falling back) performed by them. This 1907 result can be called “ontological” because an upper-level clock that is brought down and then back up again predictably presents an ontological (undeniably present) deficit in the number of ticks performed in the meantime, on its being re-united with its waiting twin. Einstein always called the “equivalence principle” between gravity and ordinary acceleration (that allowed him to solve everything from within the fold of special relativity and hence intuitively) “the happiest thought of my life.” It is indeed miraculous because it derives an asymmetry from the symmetry of special relativity. (So many perspective changes were never made before in a single mind according to anthropologist George Herbert Mead.) Three corollaries are implicit: points 2–4.

(2): Since the red-shifted photons arriving from below are non-redshifted on emission, they are inter-transformable into material particles and vice versa (as in positronium creation and annihilation) down there. Hence all locally-at-rest MASSES downstairs are ontologically reduced by the redshift factor relative to upstairs.

(3): Since the wavelengths of all locally emitted photons are increased downstairs by point (1), and simultaneously all masses locally at rest downstairs are reduced by point (2), it follows logically as well as independently from quantum mechanics that all the locally normal-appearing LENGTHS downstairs are ontologically increased by the redshift factor compared to upstairs.

(4): Since all masses that are locally at rest are reduced downstairs via (2), and the charge/mass ratio is locally conserved via Einstein’s principle of general covariance, the CHARGES of all local electrons and positrons (etc.) are ontologically reduced downstairs by the redshift factor compared to upstairs. (Q.e.d.)

Remark: Ulysses’ son Telemach helps one to remember all 4 ontological changes (Time, Length, Mass and Charge). Let us add that the “Einstein dilation” (3) does not show up in the transverse direction from above in spite the locally maintained isotropy – just as the Lorentz contraction does not show up in the transverse direction despite the likewise locally maintained isotropy.

Historical note: Points number 2 and 3 have been found many times individually (and several times in combination) by specialists and aficionados. Number 4 first appeared in a conference paper in mid-2008 (and under the name “Telemach theorem” on the Internet in early 2011 and in a refereed journal in early 2012, see http://www.academicjournals.org/ajmcsr/PDF/pdf2012/Feb/9%20Feb/Rossler.pdf ).

Acknowledgments: O.E.R. thanks Burton Voorhees and Ali Sanayei for a discussion. For J.O.R.