Special Snowflakes Melt - The Mediocrity Principle

For those who ponder whether we are alone in the universe, some bright sparks have combined the Fermi Paradox and the Mediocrity Principle , deducing that we are still some 1500 years from our first contact with aliens.
Not only that, but the fact is we're not special. 
'The Mediocrity Principle', basically means that we are not alone in the universe, and there are probably so many versions of humanity that we really are quite banal.
Bit of a blow for the schools of thought that say we are all special snowflakes.
So, perhaps we should get over it, and embrace our galactic banality.
Only then will we make contact with other, equally banal but possibly more technically advanced, aliens.
Personally, I find it oddly discomforting that a think - tank exists to remind us of our ordinariness...
...but 1500 years before we meet another (supposedly dull) race of beings?
The mind boggles...are we watching the galactic equivalent of  paint - drying ?
Mediocrity, indeed.
So, how will we know when we finally encounter these aliens ?
After all, if, like us , they are not special or unique, surely it's possible that we might totally miss them ?
Or will we identify them by their shapeless grey clothing with no distinguishing features ?
Will they look alike ?
Shall they all be named Derek ?
Apologies to any readers named Derek.
How can a technologically advanced race seem dull ?
Are they beyond the world of strong emotions ?

Provenance unknown

Some time ago I mentioned the discovery of a star with the mysterious property of intermittent flickering.
A kickstarter to pay for precious telescope time observing ' Tabbys star ' has just been successfully funded - so we are much closer to the truth of the mysterious star thanks to public crowdfunding - I think this is a great idea, even though it will almost certainly prove to be anti - climactic, with no evidence of sci - fi / aliens whatsoever.
Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

A highly improbable  ' Dyson sphere'

Interesting trivia regarding LIGO - which is tasked with registering gravitational waves generated by the merging of black holes and suchlike - apparently, the equipment is so sensitive it can be affected by passing clouds.
To avoid too much ' background noise' , some people have mooted that perhaps it should be set up on the far side of the moon - but won't that signal be messed up by the secret alien moon-bases ?

Just kidding.
Or...

In Which I Rant

In a complete change around, here are some thoughts on the burgeoning , vapid world of the vlogger.
Call it sour grapes, if you must - after all, I am too old for such japes, and have a resigned, world-weary face best suited to radio or other non-visual media.
Take a deep breath -
In this new 21st Century technology - driven world, it seems that everyone can grasp their fifteen minutes of alloted fame -
but I see a flaw.
Something is missing.

Where is the content ?
Many vlogs, like plain old blogs , are about daily life, and the authors personal experience of the wider world.
Some vlogs are literally about opening packages, and are hugely successful.

In other vlogs, the author wanders around, accidentally - on - purpose promoting a range of cosmetics / clothing / foodstuffs / whatever.
Remove the framing device of  ' wandering ' , and there's really nothing there.
It's bland.
We have these ' perfectly decent ' types, moving through their vlogging world.
Scratch the surface, though, and what do you find ?
Nothing.
That's it.
No big life lessons.
No high dramas - after all, edgy tension doesn't equate to selling product.
Or more probably, being hungover and unshaven doesn't look good for a brand ambassador.
Unless you're Keef Richards promoting Jack Daniels, maybe...
I'm feeling increasingly aware of the aimlessness here.
I don't really mind, it's a cultural thing, and I'm obviously not the demographic, so why care ?
I care because I am sad that the new ' level playing field ' of the internet / You Tube world is already awash with this stuff, and not genuine creativity.

Perhaps it's just age - I am bitter and twisted, after all.
I used to write mean (snarky ?) media reviews for an indie magazine long ago, but nowadays, I would find it hard to maintain that level of vitriol for long periods of time.
It's odd, but maybe I chilled out.
These days, I avoid things that annoy me.
Except when they get in my face.
Hence this rant about vloggers / marketing devices - and make no mistake, whilst being seemingly innocuous, most vlogs are aggressively about marketing.
Okay - deep breath.
Perhaps my finger lingered too long on the button marked  ' buy happiness '.


ASMR is another burgeoning area of  videos with the smallest of sounds designed to comfort and replace the unwanted noisy chaos of the everyday world - given my own myoclonus that took hold a few years ago, I can see the need for such, and so we have niche stars of the ASMR world who post videos of themselves quietly brushing things, or whispering about things, which are viewed by millions.
It's all strange - and, oddly, comforting.


I have no real comparison here - in my dim and distant teenage years, VHS was a new thing, and most people didn't even have a camera.
They were bulky and expensive for a long time.
Disposable culture came in the form of Polaroids - which were a sort of analog Snapchat, I suppose - depending on who you asked...
Some people proudly owned Super - 8 cameras, which took cassettes of film .
When developed, they'd yield three minutes of action.
This meant that you'd have to think about every shot.
Make it count...

Super 8

There was no social media
There were no computers in the home.
If you asked someone for their wi-fi password they'd look at you strangely, then probably have you sectioned.

It wasn't even very long ago.
Twenty years.
Okay, twenty - five .

We've advanced at an incredible rate, really - oh, no - wait -
Technology has advanced at an incredible rate.
We are trying to adapt to new rules, netiquette and such.
The finer points of social media; lol does not mean ' lots of love', that sort of thing.
My daughter explained to me the use of emojis in place of nuance - no italics or bold type in social media, so intention and meaning are often depicted visually.
It's a minefield - the winking face ?
Thank goodness for millenials to guide us through...

The strange thing is, there's no rebellion.
Well, not in the old way.

" -Whatcha got ?"  - The Wild One 1953

The music used to carry the message.
Rock Around The Clock
Summertime Blues
My Generation
Pretty Vacant
Bored Teenagers

Perhaps no-one is vacant or bored anymore.

Infact, are there such a thing as teenagers anymore ?
Or is Young Adult the preferred title ?
Which leads me to another rant - who devised the YA category of  books ?
Surely a school somewhere?
In my experience, books are just books.
Okay, there are books which are specifically aimed at children, but they're fairly obvious due to big illustrations and odd fonts.

So how do we reclassify older books from the era pre-YA ?

Is The Lord Of The Rings YA ?
I don't even suppose Harry Potter is YA, technically.
So why marginalise a section of readers?
When do they officially become Adults ?
And who decides this arbitary nonsense ?

My initial research shows that YA appears to be an American scholastic thing , although the age group is fairly loosely defined.
I still have personal issues in that it implies that it's undesirable to expose ' Young Adults' to certain 'Older Adult' themes - presumably issues of mortality or 'perversions' or other life - stuff.
If so, this ties in with  the whole avoiding ' triggers ' thing which is really censorship of the worst kind, because it encourages self-censorship.
The ultimate result would surely be a society of molly-coddled, ill - prepared people standing at the door marked ' Real World '.

Not that the real world is entered through a door.

Our Expanding Universe, ♥ and the Zombie Pandemic...

Apologies for the delay in missives, the author was overwhelmed by illness at a time when antibiotics are becoming redundant - that global zombie pandemic begins to look almost plausible - even moreso if we look at political trends.
Ahem
However, we shall rise above such concerns which lead to fisticuffs at the watercooler - apparently a new reason for not 'getting things done' in the workplace is the recent discovery that the universe is expanding faster than we thought, by some 5 - 9 %.
As a percentage, that may sound insignificant, but of course the universe is expanding at the speed of light, so a conservative estimate is approximately 34 million miles an hour - which is one of those frightening, unwieldy numbers that keeps me awake at night.
The sheer thought of the emptiness...*

There's more space than we thought...

...to counteract the coldness of deep space, I think of the intense warmth generated by fusion, which may eventually provide an almost limitless supply of energy .
Although it seems like an eternal carrot being dangled just out of reach , the immense technical challenges (how do you generate millions of degrees of heat, and how do you keep it safe ?) are being addressed by facilties such as PPPL, in the USA.

 

Fusion Image courtesy PPPL

Meanwhile, on the event horizon ...

It has also recently been deduced that black holes were mostly created in the first seconds of the existence of the universe, and may be used to explain the absence of ' dark matter' .
As we hurtle through an increasingly large space on our little rocky world, we are also adapting to our new technologies, the smartphones and screens which alter the way our brains work - with shorthand language that replaces expressions with emojis ♥ and acronyms instead of words.
An extreme extrapolation of this is that we are preparing for the next level of communication - a language of symbols  which would be quite universal (certainly for carbon - based lifeforms)...

Meanwhile, on Mars...

There is evidence of an ice age in the records of the Martian polar ice cap, and also records of two huge tsunamis exist in the shorelines around Mars.
All that remains is to establish whether Marsquakes were triggered, and there is the proof of a mass extinction event.
Of course, this leads to the question - what became extinct ?
Again, it has been put forward that a fossil record would be preserved in rock near the tsunami shorelines.
If you ask me, the pieces of jigsaw are falling into place for the evidence of a mass migration.
Wouldn't it be funny if we, in our shiny new spaceships, boldly conquered the barren Mars, only to find that our ancestors had abandoned it millenia ago ?
Especially if our collective reason for the Conquest of Mars was our own poor environmental management here on Earth , triggering extreme weather cycles and natural disasters...♥


* ...okay, so how can anything exceed the speed of light ?
Theoretical particles for one, and - oh, yes - the Theory Of Relativity may be wrong.
Or at least, incomplete...hey, I'm only the messenger, put those virtual pitchforks down !

Are We Here Yet ?

Solar system to scale...

Do you know that feeling of insignificance ?

Yeah, that one.
Good for keeping the ego in check...

In other trivia...

There is a Starbucks in the CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia , where no-one asks the names of customers.
Apparently this causes slow service.
Did no-one think to, oh, I don't know - make a fake name?
Isn't deception part of the stock- in - trade ?
And why so many questions ?

 Facebook admit to manipulating news, and Google write their own history.
Once written by the victors, history is now generated by algorithms.
With a left-wing bias.
The danger here is similar to any social media site - people tend to surround themselves with like minds, so alternative opinions tend to be quashed, which equates to surpression of free speech.
Hmmm
Discuss...

Meanwhile, up in the Mesosphere... 
 

Like a stellar jellyfish...

Above the atmosphere, way up high, (about 60 miles / 100 km) is the Mesosphere, which is where we find  trolls , elves and sprites lurking.
Recently discovered, red sprites are immense bolts of red lightning that seem to power storms down below - their origins are unknown, and until one was caught on film , they were considered as mythical as unicorns.
All the phenomena illustrated above are known as TLEs - Transient Luminous Events.


NASA have been making serious waves with a huge web presence, detailing almost every mission and all images from explorer craft and landers throughout our solar system (and beyond, if you count the distant Voyager craft) .
Looking for a balance, I discovered that there is a site called Russian Spaceweb.com, on which I watched this launch footage.

In other news, there is a dwarf planet without a name - 2007 OR10 is the largest unnamed planet in our solar system .
It should perhaps be the subject of an international quiz to name it.

New Horizons continues , having furnished us with the first closeup flyby of Pluto, adding immeasurably to our knowledge of that distant denizen of the solar system.
New Horizons is now sending updates and images as it heads even further out (currently some few hundred million miles beyond Pluto) to a projected rendezvous with a KBO- (Kuiper Belt Object) in 2019.
Latest images show another little KBO ( 1994 JR1) with a five hour rotation period, so pretty fast.

It's tiny because it's far away...1994 JR1

The excitement with the KBOs is that they are almost certainly unchanged since the birth of our solar system.
Let's keep our fingers crossed that funding is approved for this next stage of NASAs exploration of the outer reaches of our solar system.


Meanwhile, 30 million light years away... 

A distant ' blue galaxy' known as ' Little Lion' may provide scientists with an insight into the Big Bang. At a distance of 30 million light years, it's far away, yet close enough to gauge from its spectrum that it contains very few precious metals - apparently an indicator of no stellar activity , which makes it extremely primitive.

Exoplanets, Extremophiles and Earth2

NASA have announced the discovery of 1,284 Earth-like planets by their Kepler mission.
This news was almost an anti-climax, as there had been quite a buzz in the online world , with many predicting an imminent announcement confirming the existence of - gasp - aliens ; which is becoming almost a cliché itself, when any NASA announcement is expected.
I've also noticed the change in the tone.

Artist depiction of possible Earth2   NASA

This revelation seems to reinforce the idea that there is a second Earth out there, so moving away from the 'discovery' of alien life in whatever form it takes, we are now, apparently, seeking a mirror image or close match to our own world.
Surely this belittles the excitement of the potential for aquatic life in one of the many hidden seas in our own solar system - Enceladus, Europa, Ganymede, Ceres, all of which are candidates .
Did we decide that alien squid - jellyfish types were not good enough ?
Are we intent on refining the search to define extraterrestrial life as EXACTLY how we want it ?
In which case, what are we looking for in an alternative Earth ?
A planet which conveys the idyllic rural bliss of a painting by Turner ?

Tivoli     William Turner                          collection of the Tate

A world unsullied by the Industrial Revolution, where man, beast and nature work in harmony ?
Or a world where society has developed to an extent, with trade routes enabling the use of fine spices and foods, yet slave labour has not been introduced ?
In other words, do we seek a utopia where we never 'fell from grace' ?

I worry that the imposed view of an idyllic Earth2 can only ever fall short of our inflated hopes.
The phrase 'barking up the wrong tree' comes to mind
Also ' ...be careful what you wish for '.

I think that I am reading too much into the announcement itself - after all, the search for Earth - like worlds is the remit of Kepler, searching for Exoplanets in the ' Goldilocks' zone of other stars, and applying the chemical criteria which we know to be fruitful for life.
The discovery of 1,284 such candidates does not mean that we won't continue to examine our own solar system for signs of life - it just seems that we have almost resigned ourselves to knowing that, beyond the possibility of extremophiles or alien jellyfish, and long dead civilisations on Mars, there isn't really much potential here.
The grim ' reality' we face is the Terraforming of Mars, with all the unglamourous work that entails.
 

Oxygen has been detected on Mars

Speaking of Mars -
There was a smaller announcement of the discovery of oxygen in the upper atmosphere of Mars, but that was quickly cast aside - after all, oxygen on Mars may be beneficial for the imminent colonising and Terraforming, but it is hardly 'news' - we learned some time ago that there was once fresh water on Mars, and oxygen is a common factor in the structure of water.

Meanwhile back on Earth...
Apparently the molten interior of our world is far livelier than previously thought.
This leads to an ever-changing yo-yo of a surface.
Personally, I don't see any difference  thanks to this new revelation, but then - hey, I only live here, and my experience is not on a geological timescale.
In other news, here is a link to a global map in real-time of wind direction !
You're Welcome !

Until next time !

Power drains, Blue Mars and Boiling Rivers

 
Hello, everyone. My apologies for delay in this post, but my Google has been playing up.
Terrible thing, I know, but such is modern life.
If I didn't know better, I'd say that dark forces were at work ; after all, my microblog with its puny readership of two people and a bored translator in the Steppes must surely be inching closer to world domination .
The blog itself has been ' playing up ' , as I received a comment on the last post, and my attempts to respond were deleted mid-air, it seems.
So, in lieu of a response, this post shall be my reply to the comment.

A damaged magnet in LHC 2008

Even the Large Hadron Collider, the worlds largest and most expensive physics experiment is vulnerable.
The Large Hadron Collider uses a lot of electricity - 13 trillion electrovolts, following its recent upgrade.
This puts it on a par with the nearby city of Geneva.
Part of the immense power load is drawn from France , as well as Switzerland.
The French side of things is overseen by EDF, who impose strict conditions (including the fact that the LHC cannot function for certain days of the year ).
A lot of the power is used to maintain a constant temperature inside the collider, that is equal to deep space  (-271.25°c ).
this ensures that there is no danger of meltdown.
Well, that's the theory.
My last post told of animal intervention, where weasels, birds and raccoons had scuppered the world of science.
Even a multi-billion dollar enterprise like the LHC is vulnerable to 'Acts Of God' - or at least the Natural World.

I try not to be too topical on this blog, as it could be weeks, months or even years after the event that people read of it, but a rare occurence is due tomorrow, May 9th 2016 , with the transit of Mercury across the sun.
Like the passing of a comet, the transit of a planet across the sun is considered symbolic.
The transit of Mercury is apparently good for catching up with correspondence, communications, etc.

In other news from Mars, we hear that the water flows we see may be boiling - and parts of the planet are blue, as opposed to red !

Nilae Fossae is a blue area of Mars  

Also, staying with the martian thing, NASA have announced the discovery of oxygen in small amounts on Mars.
Haven't we been here before ?
Personally, I can't get very excited - the problem is that most of the atmosphere on Mars has gone, evaporated into the ether, millenia ago - so how does this find affect the present situation ?
I suppose it lends weight to any proposed Terraforming initiative, so the recent Space X landings and proposed 'Red Dragon' mission , would seem to contribute to this ever-increasing excitement as Earth2 becomes an almost tangible prospect.
.

Animal Saboteurs from the Future, Red Dragon on Mars, and Storms in Space

Weasel

Marten

The humbling effect of nature reaches us through this weeks news that the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider was recently taken down and rendered inoperable .
Terrorist action ?
No, apparently a weasel chewed through an electrical cable.
I say apparently , as it is yet to be determined whether the culprit is indeed a weasel, or a marten.
Either way, given the frazzled nature of the poor interlopers remains, it may never be conclusively proven.
It seems that incursions by wildlife are an occupational hazard for particle accelerators like the LHC.
In 2009, a bird dropped a 'piece of baguette' onto an electrical substation above ground, causing a dangerous heat surge in sector 81.

Also, a report dating from way back in 2006 tells of a ' co-ordinated attack' (May 30th entry) by raccoons on the Fermilab accelerator in the USA .

Fermilab, Illinois

It could be argued that the animal kingdom is determined to undermine these experiments - two physicists have actually proposed a theory that the animals are time travelling saboteurs, I kid you not - read this link to TIME magazine !
It's odd how something so bizarre as the ongoing search for theoretical particles renders the most outlandish ideas as somehow - normal .
Anyway, my attempts to further research the unusual animal interventions at Particle Accelerators led to a world of conspiracy, with wayward physicists and exploding magnets.
Then I took a deep breath and stepped back from the abyss...

Footnote
It appears that the creature involved was a beech marten , although whether it was a time- travelling saboteur determined to prevent the Earth from certain apocalypse by misguided physicists remains unknown .
As of 29/04/16 it will be a week until the LHC is back in action.


MEANWHILE, UP IN SPACE...

Space X have announced their intention to land a ' Red Dragon' craft on Mars in 2018, a feat which, if accomplished , will provide a major boost to the idea of colonising space.
Their recent successful launches and recovery of first stage Falcon rockets prove that where there is a will, there is a way - and NASA will be watching closely  (and no doubt with a tinge of jealousy) at the progress of the mission.


FURTHER OUT...

Neptune - roughly the size of Hat-P-11B

A previously unexplained radio signal from space now has an explanation - using complex algorithms, scientists have discovered that the signals from a large, icy exoplanet some 122 light years away were infact triggered by an immense storm estimated to be five hundred times bigger than anything on Earth.
So they now have an answer for strange signals from space - " Oh, that's nothing special -  it's raining on Hat - P - 11B "
So even in deep space, we can talk about the weather...