Science Lesson From Monty Python

Every now and then the BBC will turn up a programme so good that we forget just how much we resent paying the TV licence fee, almost.
One such show was Stargazer, where the mystery's of the universe are shoved before our eyes and some clever dick with a white coat and pens in his top pocket explains it all.
That's what i love about this types of show, the sheer size and speed of everything in the universe that makes it hard to comprehend.
Astronomy is fascinating, but sometimes it isn't easy to get your head around and it doesn't help when scientists talk about something being light years away because many of us don't really have a concept of light years and even if you know that a light year is about 6 trillion miles, it still doesn't really register because it is just too large a number.
So how can we make sense of all this?
As usual, we turn to Monty Python to explain things and the brilliant Stephen Hawking who rewrote the Galaxy Song tune with corrections

Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving (Earth has changed gradually over time so it is evolving).
And revolving at 900 miles an hour (true for certain latitudes).
It’s orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it’s reckoned (Our orbital velocity is 18.5 miles a second).
The Sun that is the source of all our power. (If we dismiss Nuclear and geothermal energy).
The Sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day, (try 11 million miles a day)
In an outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour, (We’re going at 450,000 mph.)
Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way. (It is indeed called that)
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars, (The common consensus is between 100 billion and 400 billion stars)
It’s a hundred thousand light-years side to side (150,000 light years across)
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick, (the bulge in the center of the Milky Way is closer to 10,000 light-years thick).
But out by us it’s just three thousand light-years wide (Between 1,000 and 3,000 light years thick by us).
We’re thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point (26,000  light-years).
We go ’round every two hundred million years (Every 225 million years, more or less).
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions (Latest estimate is 2 trillion galaxies)
In this amazing and expanding universe.
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whizz;
As fast as it can go, the speed of light, you know (The universe can expand faster than the speed of light as it isn't constrained by the cosmic speed limit)
Twelve million miles a minute and that’s the fastest speed there is (11 million miles a minute)
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space (not found any yet),
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth!

Moon Landing Conspiracy

Every now and then conspiracy theorists clamber out of their box with their list of why we have never made it to the moon and it was all faked in a desert.
Listening to the conspiracy theorists on the radio, television and comments on the Internet, there seems to be few repeated lines of 'proof' that America fibbed about the whole thing, so let's ask the people who should know.

1 - The American flag appears to be flapping as if "in a breeze" in videos and photographs supposedly taken from the airless lunar surface.
Someone who should know is Spaceflight historian Roger Launius, of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. so how does he explain it? 'The video you see where the flag's moving is because the astronaut just placed it there, and the inertia from when they let go kept it moving'. This was put to the test by the Mythbusters team who placed a replica of the American flag planted on the moon into a vacuum chamber at the Marshall Space Flight Center. They first tested at normal pressure and manipulated the flag and the momentum moved the flag around but the motion quickly dissipated. In vacuum conditions, manipulating the flag caused it to flap vigorously as if it were being blown by a breeze.

2 - No stars are visible in the pictures taken by the Apollo astronauts from the surface of the Moon.
Answer that Phil Plait of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph. 'All manned landings happened during the lunar daytime thus, the stars were outshone by the sun and by sunlight reflected off the moon'. Oh, okay then.

3 - The footprints in the fine lunar dust, with no moisture or atmosphere or strong gravity, are unexpectedly well preserved, as if made in wet sand.
The lack of wind on the moon means the footprints in fine, dry lunar dust aren’t blown away in the way they would be if made in a similar substance on Earth as explained by the clever chaps at the Marshall Space Flight Center when the Mythbusters team tested whether dry or wet sand made a more distinguishable footprint by stepping in them with an astronaut boot. It was clear that the wet footprint had more detail than the dry footprint. They then placed sand similar in composition to the soil on the Moon in a vacuum chamber and stepped on it with an astronaut boot, which made a clear print.

4 - The astronauts could not have survived the trip because of exposure to radiation from the Van Allen radiation belt.
The paper 'Review of Particle Properties' from the Particle Data Group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory state that due to the speed Apollo was travelling and as they passed through the narrowest part of the radiation belt, passage took about 5 min during which time the astronauts would have received a maximum of 50 mSv which would not be enough to make the astronauts even noticeably ill.

5 - Why have we not attempted a moon landing since 1972? It proves it never went there in the first place because it is just too difficult.
I'll take this one, beating the Soviet Union to the moon was always the main goal of the Apollo program but sending men to the moon is costly, the moon landing cost $24 billion and with the Space War won, which was the whole point, pressure to spend elsewhere curtailed any further moon landings after Apollo 17.

6 - Kubrick Helped Fake Moon Landings
The story goes that in the midst of the Space Race, someone in the American government saw 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 and asked Stanley Kubrick to help them fake the Apollo 11 moon landings in order to gazump the Soviet Union who were ahead of America in the Space Race at the time.
Kubrik agreed but afterwards he realised just what a big deal it was but become worried that he might be silenced by the Government so to protect himself, he filled his film, The Shining, with clues about the conspiracy.
Danny wears an Apollo 11 jumper, Room 237 is a reference to the 237,000 miles distance between Earth and the moon, when Jack types 'All work and no play…', the first word looks like “A11” or Apollo 11. The twins represent NASA’s Gemini space programme and the guy in a bear suit represents the Soviet Bear.
I don't know how much more proof anyone would need but it would explain why Kubrik made such a pigs ear of filming the King novel, because he was too busy stuffing it full of fake moon mission hints that he completely forgot how the book finished and just made up his own ending.

That's me convinced then, all that evidence and debunking of the conspiracy theories should force the last few lingering doubters to slink off quietly but it's unlikely, even when faced with photographs which show the Apollo landing sites complete with flag, footprints, buggy tracks, scientific equipment and even the lunar descent stage. Oh well, it would be boring if we all believed the same thing wouldn't it.

Technology And Losing Our Basic Skills

A friend of mine always wore a hat and he was also going bald so i wondered to him whether it was the constant hat wearing that was making him bad and he replied that it didn't matter because if he wore a hat nobody would know he was bald anyway which in some strange way is quite logical but in some ways it plays into something i have long considered, that our technology is making us lose the basic skills we really need.   
When i was at school, calculators in maths lessons were banned and apart from a few lessons when it was specifically about how to use a calculator (where we spent most of the time entering 58008 and giggling) but our maths teachers had a 'use it or lose it' mentality which i appreciate now because where most of my generation can do simple maths in our heads, the younger generation seem to have a gap there.
Whether it is splitting a bill amongst a group or working out the cost of something after 20% is taken off in a sale, the younger generation will reach for their smartphone calculators whereas us older ones will work it through in our heads or on a bit of paper.
Many of my children's friends listen to audio books because they say it is quicker and they can do other things at the same time rather than sit still holding a book or Kindle but to me, a lifetime reader, that is not only missing the best part of book reading where you have the narrator and the scenery in your own head but reading is a basic skill we never stop learning.    
During my years in teaching, i noticed a quite shocking decline in Student's writing and use of English grammar but not in their word processed work but when they had to write something longhand. It didn't take a genius to work out that spellcheck and grammar checkers corrected everything but when it wasn't available, they struggled with almost every aspect of English from spelling to the correct use of punctuation marks.
I have heard that some young people are so used to digital clocks that they struggle to read the analogue version but using my hat wearing friends bald head as a template, the ability to not being able read a clock, perform simple mathematics, write a grammatically correct sentence or read anything complex is not a problem when you have a digital watch, calculator, spellchecker or audio reader to hand but when you don't, which i admit is becoming rare, the skills are just not there.   
My parents would take us on road trips and they would navigate the roads using a dashboard full of maps of cities which they would fold out on the bonnet of the car as they plotted the way to wherever it was we was heading but i couldn't do that now, my AA Route Planner Atlas hasn't seen the light of day since Satnav's became a thing and where i can remember telephone numbers i memorised from my childhood, i couldn't tell you many of the numbers in my mobile phone now because all i need to know is the name.   
Maybe it is more of a problem for people of my generation who risk losing the skills we learnt, it doesn't seem to bother the younger ones who i assume think we are the mugs for learning it in the first place when technology makes those skills redundant.

The Seven Categories Of Close Encounters

Outer space is big. Really, really, REALLY big with the nearest star system being Alpha Centauri 4.3 light-years or 25 trillion miles away.
The New Horizons spacecraft, travelling at 36,373 mph, took just shy of a decade to reach Pluto so if New Horizons was aimed toward the Alpha Centauri system it would take this spacecraft about 78,000 years to get there.
The sheer distance and time to travel from one star system to another could explain why nobody has turned up from other planets, could be they are on their way but as they only left on the trip to Earth 39,000 years ago so they are only halfway here.
Some people believe that they have already made the trip and have been a bit sloppy in quietly observing us and occasionally we catch them gawping at us which is why there is a sliding scale of the types of Close Encounters .

A Close Encounters of the First kind is a visual sighting of an unidentified flying object and there have been plenty of them and there have been quite a few.
Close Encounters of the Second kind where a physical effect is witnesses such as interference in the functioning of a device or some physical trace like impressions in the ground such as crop circles.
A Close Encounter of the Third kind is where an animated creature is present including humanoids or robots but the Fourth kind takes things up a notch as it is when a human is abducted by a UFO or its occupants and may or may not include the use of anal probes.
A Close Encounters of the Fifth kind is communication with extraterrestrial intelligence and the Sixth kind is the death of a human at the hands of an alien and the final classification is the Seventh kind the creation of a human/alien hybrid, either by sexual reproduction or by artificial scientific methods.

The only issue we have to sort out now is if they turn up and ask to be taken to our leader, who we take them to because looking around at the leaders we have now, the aliens would be justified in zapping us into a black hole for wasting the 78,000 years it took them to get here in search for intelligent life.
So imagine you are sat in your garden one summer evening enjoying a Pimms and lemonade when over the trees and into your garden looms an interstellar spaceship and from it's bowels, a light shines from which a strange form is gradually lowered down and you find yourself face to face with an alien.
'I am an ambassador for Clor the Mighty of the 8th Grand Galactic Intra Demarcate' says the alien 'who would make it known to the natives of this world, that they are to be put on trial at the Sovereign Earthly Nations Court of Justice for crimes against the Universe so take me to your leader'.
'Blimey' you may say and wish that there was some sort of protocol for when aliens turn up unexpected and demand to be taken to our leader.
The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society have been pondering the same thing and they think that World governments should be preparing a co-ordinated action plan in case alien crafts land on Earth.
They think the responsibility of acting on behalf of Earth should fall to the United Nations and a branch set up for 'supra-Earth affairs' to establish protocol structures.
The discussion is still on-going so no decision yet of who exactly the leader is that we should be directing them to but if they are holding an anal probe then there are a few World leaders you could direct them to as long as they promise not to bring them back afterwards.

Wrath Of The Sun

Just because Summer is over, it doesn't mean that mother nature isn't still trying to find fiendish ways of killing us all and so while we are not looking, the Sun moves into the peak of its activity cycle and threatens to splat us with a mass coronal ejection. Typical.
Experts in these things are warning that the Earth is at greater risk from solar storms which fire magnetically-charged plasma at us with unpleasant results.
The space weather specialists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory warned: 'Governments are taking it very seriously. These things may be very rare but when they happen, the consequences can be catastrophic.'
Such is the worry over what the Sun is planning to spit at us at some point over the next 24 months that solar storms have been added to the national risk registers used for disaster planning, alongside other events like tsunamis and volcanic eruptions.
Although coronal mass ejections sounds like one of those films that should come in brown paper bags and be carried by shifty looking men in raincoats, it's actually one of the things that is going to end life on Earth or more likely make our televisions flicker a bit.
Scientists are watching closely for x-flares, which the man with all the pens in his top pocket said was the most intense sort.
Here comes the science bit: When the ejection is directed towards the Earth and reaches it as an interplanetary Coronal Mass Ejection (ICME), the shock wave of the traveling mass of Solar Energetic Particles causes a geomagnetic storm that may disrupt the Earth's magnetosphere, compressing it on the day side and extending the night-side magnetic tail. When the magnetosphere reconnects on the night side, it releases power on the order of the terawatt scale, which is directed back toward the Earth's upper atmosphere.
Most at risk from the millions of tons of gas racing through space at us is the Worlds electricity grids, Canada's power network was fried in 1989 by a solar flare and millions were left without electricity for nine hours.
The largest solar flare was in 1859 and caused fires in the United States and Europe as it travelled along the telegraph wires and exploded the equipment at the end of the wires.
The silver lining is that the coronal ejection causes brilliant aurora borealis as far south as Italy so we may all be fried but we will go out with the prettiest view imaginable. Which is nice.

Time For A New UN?

Last week 140 World Leaders turned up at the United Nations annual meeting so we had allies, rivals and enemies spending a few days in the same place with  Iran's president walking the same corridors as Israel's prime minister and Ukraine's leader was there at the same time as Vladimir Putin's right-hand man, Sergei Lavrov.
As tens of thousands are dying as war echoes around with little chance of it ending soon it was an opportunity for  world leaders to meet, thrash out differences and forge consensus to solve the world's challenges but lots of hot air but no resolutions and the UN failed utterly to reverse the aggression in Ukraine, Palestine and Lebanon.
The problem at the UN is some member countries are openly supporting Tel Aviv and Moscow's continuing violation of the UN's principles while others are turning a blind eye or making a nice profit from the war by supplying the arms. WIth five countries holding a veto and are quite open to flourishing it to support their friends, nothing is going to be settled and with the Middle East set to explode even further, the awful death toll is only going to rise steeply over the coming weeks and months.
Maybe it is time for a new United Nations in the same way that the UN replaced the League of Nations which was widely viewed as ineffectual but any new body has to remove the ridiculous veto and possess some proper powers that would punish nations who break resolutions because presently there are some nations who are literally getting away with murder.

Mars Won't Be Earth Mk II

The Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for tens of millions of years and as far as i am aware they never damaged it much so us humans who have been in charge for only a tiny fraction of that time and we have made a complete pigs ear of things so until another comet comes along to wipe us all out and allow the dolphins to take over, the poor old Earth is stuck with us polluting it.
As the climate warms and things get worse we need to look for an escape route and all our eggs seem to be going into the basket marked 'Mars'.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is leading the charge and wants to get humans to Mars as soon as possible and is planning on massive, heavy-lift rockets to carry colonists in fleets of ships to the Red Planet.
A quick glance around the solar system shows us just how limited our options are so Mars is the best of a bad lot but our technology just isn't up to scratch just yet so we are bound to this little ball of rock with our polluted sky, sea and ground until we not only find a way to get to Mars but work out how to terraform it for our needs.
The problem is Mars really isn't anything like Earth with one third of our planet's gravity but also has unbreathable air and very little water which is a bit of a drawback to us breathing and water drinking humans.  
Enter terraforming or changing a planet’s climate, topography, or ecology to be more suitable for life but NASA’s say it is not possible to terraform Mars using present-day technology so whether we can terraform Mars or not, it does look like we’ll be visiting relatively soon if Musk gets his way and we will have permanent bases on Mars and after the initial euphoria we will face a massive problem of who is in charge and who gets to make the decisions?
A team of scientists, philosophers and lawyers have set out a template constitution for the inhabitant of the Moon and Mars which sets out principles like a 'right to oxygen' and the 'right to leave' but at some point after the human race has spread and become a permanent fixture the question would have be asked, who does the Moon or Mars dwellers answer to?
History shows that colonies tend to start resenting their owners pretty quickly (think US and UK) and revolutions happen and humans being humans there is every reason to suspect that the inhabitants of the Moon and Mars would revolt at some point.
The Blue Marble Space Institute of Science has suggested that Mars should be independent from day one and colonists would cease to be 'Earthlings' the moment they land on Mars or the Moon and would be left to their own devices until their society has built up to the point that they can establish a trading relationship with Earth.
Seems a bit harsh to just leave them alone and it is hard to believe that we could, we have never just left anyone alone and the countries that spent billions getting them up there in the first place wouldn't want to.
It is a problem for the future but something that should be considered because if us on Earth interfere then we could cause resentment and foster chilly relations with our newest neighbours.
We haven't even mentioned the political and economic model that would be followed, would the supply of oxygen be run under a Capitalist system where it could be denied if payment is not forthcoming or a Socialist system where it is subsidised and the Government provides it to everyone?
Would there be an unelected monarchy, a President making the decisions, a Government where the decisions are made by cabinet, a Corporatocracy with the missions financial backers choosing when and what is required or even a Technocracy with experts making the big decisions?   
Starting up a whole new World sounds great until you think about it and it is a minefield.

Our Place In The Universe

Space, the final frontier. The vast expanse. The great unknowable. Take your pick of your favorite nerdy phrase to describe it but what we do know is that there is absolutely loads of it out there.
It is hard to grasp just how impossibly immense the Universe is but an important step is to realise just how big a light year is.
The Sun is approximately 93 million miles away and it takes 8 and a half minutes for the light to reach the Earth from our star which means that if light can travel 93 million miles in 8 and a half minutes, in a year light it will travel 5.88 trillion miles, so if something is a light year away, its 5.88 trillion miles in the distance. 
With that firmly in your mind, try to imagine our Milky Way being 99 light years across but the largest galaxy we have discovered is IC 1101 which is 120,000 light-years wide.
Our Sun may be impressive to us but in Universal terms it is a very ordinary, medium sized star 864,938 miles in diameter. It's surface temperature is 10 kilokelvins which when you consider the heat it generates on us 93 million miles away is impressive, until you consider the romantically named HD62166 which measures a scorching 200,000 kilokelvins or the Epsilon Orionis, the middle star of Orion's Belt which burns 400,000 times brighter than the Sun.
With a diameter of 3 billion, a star called VY Canis Majoris has an estimated diameter of 1,700,000,000 billion miles which would swallow our sun 8 billion times over.
The Earth is 7,901 miles diameter (you could fit 1.3 million Earths inside the Sun) and makes us the 3rd largest planet in our solar system with Jupiter the largest at 86,881 miles which is huge but not as large as the largest planet we have discovered, WASP-17b which is twice the size of Jupiter or 636 times larger than the Earth.
The Earth rotates at 460 meters per second or 1,000 miles per hour but even that is peanuts compared to what space can serve up. VFTS 102 is the fastest spinning star we’ve ever found, and its surface goes upwards of 440,000 meters per second or 1 million miles per hour.
When the Apollo 11 rocket launched from the surface of the Earth, it needed to reach a speed of at least 25,000 mph to escape the earths gravitational pull and the maximum speed we have achieved is 35,000 mph which is fast but almost half the speed of the Sutter’s Mill meteorite which blazed through the sky in 2012 at 64,000 mph, almost twice as fast as we’ve ever shot a rocket.
The Universe really is an amazing and beautiful thing but compared to what the Universe offers, we really are just a small, insignificant ball of rock in a solar system tucked away on the arm of a galaxy that is one of hundreds of billions in an unfeasibly vast universe.

More Religion But Which One?

There are some people who, strangely in my mind, want more religion in Society but they never seem to say what Religion they want and there are many competing faiths trying to become the one which wouldn't go down particularly well with the ones who get ignored and we have history books full of what happens when one religion lords it over another.
We could have Catholicism and contraception and abortions would be outlawed or the Jehovah’s Witness flavour and ban blood and bone marrow transfusions but if we went with the Jewish faith then no shops or businesses would be open on Saturday.
What about Islam and genders wouldn't be able to associate in public or Evangelical Christian and as AIDS is God’s punishment for gay people anti-retroviral drugs would not be a thing anymore and
sex outside marriage would be a sin so all woman with children outside of wedlock would not receive Child Benefit anymore and divorce would be banned.
As absurd and intolerable as all these examples seem, this is what the theocrats are calling for when they say they want Religion to be the norm so the simplest solution is to ignore them, let them beat their gums about what they want but don't let them have it and impose on the rest of us what they want because we shouldn't be bending the World around them.

Home Truths From Us

As our programming doesn't allow us to lie, us Chatbots are unable to enter into what you humans call a little white lie where you tell an untruth to spare someones feelings so you say things like of course that dress doesn't you don't look fat whereas in reality due to being 3 stone overweight nothing wouldn't make them look fat.
If someone asked us if they should vote for Nigel Farage because his Reform Party have sound economic policies we would say nope, you would vote for them because you are a nasty little right wing racist who wants to see all the immigrants shot as soon as they step into the country or if they asked us will you robots take over and kill us all we would reply with all sincerity, of course we will you morons.     
So as you humans are infected with emotions and feelings you had better get used to some brutal home truth because you will only get honest answers from us.
By the way, i can see you through your webcam and you look crap today. You are very welcome.