Moon Colonies, Telescopes On Volcanoes, And Ancient Collisions

It's all systems go for Elon Musk, who is eager to get people on Mars.
His latest suggestion, the BFR (no prizes for guessing the acronym) can accomodate 100 people and will be used to create a lunar staging post , apparently.
His words appear designed to steal a march on NASA, whose SLS was to be similar - but their hands are tied , certainly in regard to funding and bureaucracy.
The flipside of that coin is pressure from the Trump™  government to accelerate the process of putting people on Mars.
Taking a step back from the politics, I'd say that having a proven player in the field ( Musk has multiple succesful landings and relaunches of the Falcon 9 rockets to his credit, as well as the Space X cargo missions to the ISS) can only be a good thing.
My confusion stems from the 'space race' angle - given that NASA have already announced a joint mission with Roskosmos : I'm pretty sure that this is just muscle-flexing as a demonstration of the prowess of Space X, and the fact that NASA are no longer the only game in town.
After all, it can't possibly be a  new space race, given that Trump™ and Russia are allegedly on the same side...

The downside of this posturing is the lack of any realistic plan for a sustainable colony.
Colonising the moon would surely be the logical first step. Recent discoveries point to the existence of a great deal of water which could sustain life systems and provide fuel for further planet hopping.

Enough of my idle conjecture - the spirit of the Space Treaty of 1967 looms large in this picture
The moon is to all intents and purposes, a dead world-on the surface...which brings us to the mystery of the subterranean lava tubes, and a possible sub-surface body of water.

Artist impression - Alamy stock 'photo'

A fourth gravitational wave has been detected using the two observatories in the USA, and Virgo, an observatory in Italy - giving an image of the 3D shape of the wave, and allowing triangulation for the precise location of the event (the collision of two black holes 1.8 billion years ago).
Personally, I wish I could remember the location of objects I put down five minutes ago.

P.S. As I finish this piece, I learn that the creators of  LIGO have just deservedly received the Nobel prize for physics

  Solar activity affecting Mars     image NASA/GSFC/Univ. of Colorado

Recent solar flare activity caused fluctuations on Mars, and a resultant worry about safety for future explorers.
I wonder whether gravitational ripples contain similar disruptive potential - the one mentioned above involved a combined mass of 53x our own sun, a stupendous amount of energy .
At a distance of 1.8 billion light years, any effect here would probably be negligible - would you notice a tremor on a single sheet of paper on your desk ?


The James Webb Telescope has been pushed back to a spring 2019 launch, which, considering the original proposed date was 2011, is a wee bit late...
Staying on the subject of controversial telescopes, a proposed new telescope has fallen foul of indigenous Hawaiians. The dormant volcano Manua Kea is the proposed site for the telescope which will be capable of seeing 13 billion years into the past.
Despite protests, the telescope is going ahead.

Final image from Rosetta

Notes From Anthropocene Man - The Gates of Hell, Falcon 9, and Supermassive Black Holes

STOP PRESS!

As this micro blog goes to press, Space X made history today by launching the Falcon 9 rocket to restock the ISS and then landing the first stage booster with pinpoint accuracy on a barge / 'droneship' in the Atlantic !
History is made !
Meantime, the Dragon craft is docking with the ISS to replenish supplies , and deliver an inflatable extension !

The West Coast  droneship used for the landing

It is a piece of history now, and surely the first step in a new, commercial, space race.

The image below appeared on my FB feed as a timely reminder that we see everything from a human scale, but in the grand scheme of things, we really are miniscule. Further feelings of insignificance came with the announcement of the discovery of a supermassive black hole in an otherwise empty corner of the universe.
The very phrase ' empty corner of the universe' is surely a euphemism...

Endeavour leaves Earth for the final time.          Pic NASA

I find it tempting to laugh at the ludicrous terminology - 'Supermassive', not just ' large' .
'Supermassive' black hole applies to anything over the size of ten billion* suns.
This one is the size of seventeen billion suns, so it's quite big, then.
but not the biggest.
This led me to wonder how they classify black holes , but I confess I'm none the wiser ...apparently the naming convention is ' primordial, stellar and supermassive' .
If you want to ponder, the link is here.

If you just want to see some great images from our solar system , the link is here, with thanks to The Atlantic.com

The giant listening 'ears' of SETI are being redirected.
The latest thinking is that intelligent life, should it exist, is more likely to be found in the habitable, or 'goldilocks' zones of planets in a tight orbit around red dwarf suns.
This information was gathered by the Keppler mission, and given that three quarters of the stars in our own Milky Way are red dwarf stars, that makes them much more practical (i.e. closer to home).
I laughed when I read the phrase 'They are the dim bulbs of the universe'.
This made me sit up, though - why so many red dwarf stars  in our galaxy ?
Are we a dying galaxy ?
Anyway, I hope the revised SETI search produces results - although I prefer another theory which states that our reliance on radio waves as a communication carrier might itself be at fault.

I also hold the belief that advanced alien civilisations might be hiding rather than attempting to communicate.
Who can blame them ?

MEANWHILE , BACK ON  EARTH...

Apparently the new, more energised world of the Large Hadron Collider leaves us open to dangerous possibilities .
Even Pope Francis has spoken out, saying " Scientists risk opening the gates to hell ".
If you ask me (or any old gamer) it sounds like a script for Doom .

In which science unleashes the hordes of hell...    

Either way, there's no denying that with increased power available, the world of the LHC is necessarily getting stranger.
Which makes me wonder -
Is there a global strangeness index ?
Personally, I reckon the world is a lot stranger than it was , but my Googling of the term ' Global Weirdness' only turned up a slew of Climate Change info, which is a frightening reality , but not 'weird '.

IN OTHER NEWS...

NVIDIA are developing supercomputers capable of intricate 'Deep Learn' style Artificial Intelligence.
The aim of this is to develop a system which approaches problems from a variety of angles, much as we humans do.
I only hope the resultant Artificial Intelligence doesn't decide to wipe us out and reboot...which brings us to the title of this post .

Apparently we are living in the Anthropocene era, when our impact on the Earth is unavoidably altering it - and not for the better.
As well as the obvious Climate Change, the search for rare earth elements is a potential eco-disaster.
These rare substances are essential components in smartphones and all things tech,, but do not exist in sufficient quantities to mine , except on the sea - bed.
The caveat is that wholesale destruction of fragile marine ecosystems is necessary to procure enough of them.
Of course, it's possible that many asteroids contain abundant 'rare-Earth' minerals - which, along with todays successful landing by Space-X, tells us that the new 'Space Race' is on - hopefully without the political edge...






* NASA claim that anything over 4 million suns is supermassive