Pale Blue Dot Redux

Back in the 1980s, Carl Sagan realized how important it would be for society to see what our home looks like from as far away as possible. For years he worked for years trying to convince NASA to use the Voyager 1 spacecraft to turn around before it left the solar system and take a photo of Earth.

It finally did, and the photo above is the result. The very small barely blue pixel is Earth as viewed from 6 billion kilometers away was the subject of a very moving speech/book by Carl Sagan, but we'll come back to that in a second.

In 2013 July something very unique also happened. A couple of forward thinking scientists on the Cassini space probe team had a very Sagan-like moment but with a twist. They realized that with the advent of technology it would be possible to broadcast to the world ahead of time that a certain space craft would be turning around and taking a photo of you. The Day the Earth Smiled was the result of that.

On July 19, 2013, this beautiful photograph of the same "pale blue dot" was taken while thousands of people looked up at the sky:

That tiny blue beautiful dot is us. Only Carl Sagan's thoughts can do justice to this pivotal image in human history. I can only imagine how much more he would have to say if he'd been here to witness it.

Click play below and listen.

"Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light." - Carl Sagan

Peace has been a difficult to acquire commodity for Earth, and violence seems to continue to endure almost anything thrown at it form across the globe. Perhaps this is what is needed; to step out of our scope of understanding and obliterate it with a perspective so powerful and staggering, to maybe one day eradicate such short sighted hatred. Maybe.

Looking Into the Past

When I started this blog I sought to share with everyone what might be considered "weird science". Not weird because it's not true, or it was discovered in some strange fashion but because the conclusions it gives us are not easy to accept into our daily lives.

The fact that the measured speed of light tells us that we are often looking into the past is one of those.

Let's start with some easy examples:

The Moon

The Moon is approximately 400,000 km (the amount of kms most cars end up going in their lifetime!) and speed of light is about 3 m/s, so the time it takes light to travel between Earth and the Moon is: 1.26 seconds.

So..if the Moon blew up, we wouldn't see the explosion for 1.26 seconds


The Sun

The Sun is about 150,000,000 km (no car can put that much on it's engine, not even a Honda) away from Earth. 

So ..if the Sun blew up, we would still see the Sun up in the sky for about 8.3 minutes

Everything Else

Just recently I talked about a famous image from the Hubble space telescope containing thousands of galaxies. Now, if we apply the concept above to these images we get an astounding conclusion:

The stars and galaxies we are seeing in all of these images are actually in the past, not a few seconds or minutes..but years and years into the past:

As you can see from the image above the further out a telescope captures an object the further back it is in time as far as we can see (i.e almost a billion years).

Basically the light waves from that object took a billion years to reach us, so we have no idea what it's current state is and we wont know for another billion years.

Just another example of #Scale.

Always in the Past

My final thought that I want to leave you with is this. If light travels at a certain speed and is not instantaneous, does this mean we're always seeing things in the past? The simple answer is yes.

But, it's so fast that for all intents and purposes it's instant (nanoseconds). Still something to think about when you see your friend waving at you from a distance...

Space Images

Space photography gives us some of the most breathtaking and awe inspiring photos in history. I figured it would be a travesty if I didn't explore it on my own blog!

My Favorites

Space Station transit across Moon
Photo Credit: Thierry Legault (http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/)

The International Space Station doesn't get nearly enough attention. I mean in light of all the fancy space ships in sci fi movies ... not many seem to accept that we've already got one out in space! Maybe it's because how hard it is to relate to it. So that's why this picture of the ISS flying in front of the moon is incredible. For a moment it's very much within our realm of perception.

The Hubble Deep Field

This one is one of the earliest images that captured my imagination. Released in the mid 1990s, this very dense image, filled with close to 3000 galaxies doesn't look very interesting but here's the kicker; the image represents a very very..very small section of the sky. It's about the size of a grain of sand held at arm's length. Yep, there's is a lot of stuff out there.
#Scale


Nice try Hollywood...

This last piece will be about a set of images actually. All credit goes to NASA for this. They thought it'd be neat to see if they had any images that resembled the photography in the 2013 movie Gravity. What an awesome idea. You can check them out here but here are some of the most striking ones:

 

The Ruthless Red Giant

It may sound like a typical villain in an upcoming children's film this summer, but it's far from that. This is the ultimate fate of our Sun; the next stage in it's natural life cycle.

As the Sun ages it will use it will use up more and more of it's hydrogen core which will in turn increase it's size, luminosity and energy generated i.e the Sun will get hotter and larger. In fact in about 4.8 billion years the Sun will compare to its current size like this:

Yah that's a huge upgrade. And a huge problem for Earth. So big in fact that as I alluded to earlier...no life will survive.

But that's the ending of the story, how about the things that will happen along the way?

• [50,000 Years from Now] Niagara Falls will continue erode into Lake Erie will no longer bexist
• [50 Million Years From Now] Africa will be divided into two continents as Red Sea floods into the East African Rift
• [250 Million Years From Now] All the continents may fuse back together into a supercontinent
• [500-600 million Years From Now] Supercontinent breaks up 
• [1 Billion Years From Now] Surface Temperature reaches 47 degrees celcius. Most water has evaporated. Most multicellular life has died out (yes that's us)

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. 1 Billion years from now it will no longer sustain life. Therefore...the Earth has already been around more than 80% of it's expected life.

The earth post-destruction by the Sun

Takeaways

It's truly amazing that something that gave us life (The Sun) will also likely take it away from us. The Human Species has a very likely end date. Depending on what scale you look at things, things won't really stay the same...

Or..things will stay the same. 

Consider this, Humans (Homo Sapien) on Earth have only been around for about 400,000 - 250,000 years ago. That's not even a million years. The Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years. 

We've only been around for 0.003 % of Earth's existence. Therefore to us things really do stay the same.

Like I've said all along...it's all about Scale.

Collision Course

We're all headed for a gigantic collision....in a few billion years.

The view from Earth as the collision begins to happen

It's true. It's pretty much an accepted prediction that about 4 billion years from now (Earth itself formed 4.5 billion years ago) our Milky Way Galaxy is about to collide with one of our nearest neighbors; the Andromeda Galaxy. 

As horrible as it sounds and despite the fact that each galaxy containing billions of stars, the scale is so large that the stars are way too far apart to actually collide with each other. 

Expected views from Earth as the collision takes place..really really slowly (3 billion years)

But that doesn't mean there won't be drastic changes for us on Earth...(if we're actually around).

1) Our Solar system will likely get re-located some where further away from the center and this will likely change what the sky looks like

2) The collision itself will take about 3 billion years to complete

3) As the Andromeda Galaxy approaches closer and closer, about 3.75 billion years from now it will fill the sky much like the first image in the posting

4) Once the collision begins the sky will be filled with bright new star formation

It's bound to be an incredible light show that will alter human behaviour. Except here's the part I didn't tell you, 

Humans are likely not going to be around to catch it. Find our more in the upcoming Part 2 of this post.

THE SINGULARITY

I was ADD-ing furiously at work the other day when I suddenly realized that I hadn't even looked up what movies were coming out this year (the horror) and whether any of them were good thoughtful sci-fi movies and I came across this potential gem: Transcendence, directed by Wally Pfister (cinematographer who's worked with Christopher Nolan) and has Nolan himself as the executive producer. But looking past the talent on board it was the topic that interested me the most.

The technological singularity...

The above graph depicts the exponential rate that computing power has been increasing relative to computing power of various brains of animals including humans. This chart was put together by Ray Kurzweil and his work called The Singularity Is Near. As you can see the extrapolated path is on a collision course with human brain power...

The singularity is understood as a point in the not too distant future where the computing power and ability of artificial Intelligence will surpass that of the collective ability of the human mind. It's predicted to happen within the next 50-100 years. That's not that far folks.

And when it happens it will apparently cause a shift in the way we go about out our existence. Imagine, knowing that we, the human species are no longer the most intelligent and powerful thinking entity on earth. 

Transcendence is actually the second major film to focus on this concept, last year`s surprise success Her also explored this idea.

Despite the fact that this is just a theory at this point and is not without it's detractors, it is a uniquely powerful dilemma that could have huge ramifications for mankind.

We're living in very interesting times, let's just hope it continues to be a positive (sort of) influence on society!

Kilroy was here

Memes...

Everyone likes to talk about them now, but few (including me) truly understand it. What's the difference between a meme and a joke? Was "joke" too simple of a definition and had to be expanded to become memes? How do you pronounce it? Why is it such a silly looking word? 

Who knows. 

But what I did come across after reading about Richard Dawkin's book that references memes (which I talked about here) is that one of the first memes ever was the Kilroy Was Here phenomena back during World War II when the term meme didn't even exist. 

 

It's a simple graffiti that by most accounts started (published) when a worker in a US shipyard used it as part of his daily duties to confirm something, sort of like a visual marker. It was then replicated (retweeted / reshared) when countless army personnel begin to use these ships during the war and were baffled/inspired by the inadvertent graffiti and begin to use it on military equipment and war zone buildings e.t.c. (early evidence of trolling?)

Eventually it lost it's popularity after the war but it definitely left its mark. Rumors have swirled about how both Hitler and Stalin had run-ins with this graffiti character. 

I always find strange little snippets of history like this incredibly interesting; especially when they're connected to such a modern concept (memes). Street art is a recognized form of visual art but I still didn't expect it to be the medium where the first meme would have originated.

Look Up To The Sky

Inspired by a conversation with my wife, here's a post that's a bit more thoughtful than usual (not a coincidence!):

In the face of failures, disappointment, resentment, despair, and worry why is our most instinctive reaction to look up to the endless boundaries of the skies? I don’t know, but I ask why? 

From my two and a half meager decades on Earth I gather that people fear the unknown, but they are also able to find comfort in it. 

We've all had our moments, the ups and downs, unexpected loss and unexpected bliss and though we don’t always understand why things happen we collectively agree that the answers must be somewhere out there in the depths of never ending space.

As you can tell this post is more about the human emotion rather than science (yes…guys have emotions too! I mean a little prodding is usually required...)

The hues of the skies appear differently to all of us. Perhaps those who lay on a bed of prickly grass seek to find an answer or a message from those unreachable to us. We may believe that the depths of space are home to a species greater than ours, one which has all the answers. Or maybe we gaze at the skies to find our own answers, each one of us, looking through a different lens.

It is mind blowing to realize that the sky is the one and only thing the world truly shares, without partitions or borders. Just one boundless atmosphere.  

I leave you with a view from my apartment window; an example of how the sky is always there

True Detective's connection to Sci Fi

What do True Detective (2014) and Snow Crash (1992) have in common?

Spoiler Note: As a supporter of spoiler free zones (workplaces, homes, elevators e.t.c) the following blog post does not contain any such expletives.
Read without fear.

A few weeks ago one of my (very critical) friends recommended True Detective to me. I was on the go so in jest I asked him to send me a link so I could read up on it later (how self-centered of me)....and instead of laughing at me... he actually emailed it to me. 

I had no choice. I had to watch.

A week later, a convinced but skeptical wife was sitting next to me ready to absorb what truly is an amazing show. But that's not what I wanted to talk about, rather it was a very interesting quote from Rust that piqued my interest:

Detective Rustin Cohle: "Transference of fear and self-loathing to an authoritarian vessel. It's catharsis. He absorbs their dread with his narrative. Because of this, he's effective at proportion to the amount of certainty he can project. Certain linguistic anthropologists think that religion is a language virus that rewrites pathways in the brain. Dulls critical thinking."

Sounds like the usual epic dialogue that Rust submits us to but wait - did he just quote one of my favorite sci-fi / cyberpunk novels of all time? Snow Crash is a 1992 novel written by Neal Stephenson and I'll save all my gushing words of praise for the next audiobook review (I know you're all anxiously waiting for it). 

I think it's incredible that two very different genres and different mediums can intersect at a point like that and then likely never intersect again. True Detective is by all accounts a crime drama with a dark twist. Snow Crash is a major work of science fiction with a heavy dose of cyberpunk. And yet, for a moment they were suddenly talking about the exact same thing.

The concept is controversial but novel. The idea is that viruses are not only limited to the digital or biological world but can also exist in the mental world, and are transmitted by language. It's used in the literal sense in the book but in the real world it's used as an analogy, most famously by Richard Dawkins. 

So there - now you have something unique, interesting and even controversial to add to the next lunch time edition of "Co-workers who believe their favorite TV show is better"

Oh I almost forgot, you know what else Richard Dawkins is famous for? He coined the word Meme.

See what I did there?

True Detectives > Snow Crash > Linguistic Viruses > Richard Dawkins > Memes

The Moon.

Striking isn't it?

We've all seen it, the gigantic, ominous, orange orb floating near the horizon that we all crane our necks to catch as it hides behind tall buildings while we run about our busy nights. Many question how this is possible but few ever get a chance to answer that. 

In about 10 minutes or less I will try my best:


The Moon Illusion

So if you're curious about this you're in pretty good company - the first man to be puzzled by this was Aristotle way back in 400 B.C.

He figured it had something to do with the atmosphere considering you're seeing the moon through a lot more of the atmosphere when it's at the horizon:

Figure 3.14 - Artist's (my) depiction of possible atmospheric effects | NOT drawn to scale. At all.

He figured it was causing some sort of magnification but that wasn't true, although it did account for half of our illusion: the orange hue. Similar to the sun that looks like a delicious egg yolk close to the horizon the moon also looks more orange.


The Answers (maybe...)

Both objects
are exactly the
same size

There are two main explanations for the illusion.

The first is the Ponzo Illusion. Basically our brains through evolution over the years have developed several shortcuts. This one tells us that due to perspective, towards the horizon things are more far away (i.e as the lines converge).

Therefore, if two objects look exactly the same at the horizon and nearer to us, then the one near the horizon must be bigger. 



The second half of this explanation is the Ebbinghaus Illusion, more commonly known as "Wow, my car looks huge next to that smart car!". This one's pretty simple, when the moon is next to the horizon it's passing by other objects unlike when it's up in the sky, giving our brains a frame of reference and therefore enlarging the size of the Moon.


The p(i)lot twist!

Sounds pretty legitimate? I thought so too, UNTIL I read that the illusion is experienced even by airline pilots flying far enough that they don't have the same reference objects that we do.

What does this mean? Well it's just one of many unexplained scientific mysteries that continue to remind us of how complex and challenging nature can be.


Fun with Moon illusions

In closing I figured we all deserved a fun set of moon illusions rather than such difficult to understand and scary looking ones. My favorite is definitely the "moon painting".

The inaugural audiobook review

Everyone loves reviews, they're fun to read, help us decide what to spend our time on and they're a great way to form opinions. Most reviews are about movies, TV shows..and even books (yes! those heavy looking objects situated in rows on your shelves). 

But, as someone who has spent countless hours of precious time stuck on GTA highways in agonizing bumper-to-bumper traffic I would much rather review audiobooks. Yes, yes..I know what you're thinking but I tell you audiobooks saved my life. Seriously, during those difficult early morning commutes as a sleep-deprived new parent, music, talk radio, cold air, water on my face, food and prayer could not keep me awake. 

It was the wonderful voice of Jim Dale that kept my ears peeled to the car speakers. His wonderful narration of the Harry Potter series had me on the edge of my driver's seat, my clammy hands in a 9 and 3 position as Harry and his friends escaped from many dangerous situations and I bravely admit that I had my car-designated tissue box close at hand as Jim aptly narrated the more sorrowful moments of the book.

Rendezvous with Rama

So today I will briefly review the audiobook Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke and performed by Peter Ganim. First off, the book itself was surprisingly wonderful. Expertly judging the book by it's title I assumed that it would somehow tie science fiction to Hinduism - I wasn't even close. It's an amazing blend of eerie atmosphere, suspense and action within a backdrop of a largely unknown entity. I won't ruin the book for you but Clarke does an astounding job of putting you right into the story and have you want to have your questions answered as soon as possible. I would be lying if I said I never sat in my parking spot at home/work for a few extra minutes because it was just too good to hit pause.

That brings me to the audio portion of it. Because it's a book that is constantly on the move; exploring, scouting and running away, it complimented driving very well. The narrator does an excellent job of emphasizing the most important parts of the tale. As for voices he uses a colorful mix of accents and tones to portray the various characters but deliberately avoids letting the characters become the focal point simply because of the voice acting (in contrast to Jim Dale's very colorful portrayal of Harry and Co). Peter builds the suspense extremely well, something not that easy to do in this book because of the of the mostly in-animate antagonist.

All in all this is an excellent audio book and I would highly recommend it. Don't be scared off by the genre of "hard science fiction", it's completely readable and no it is not like reading a science textbook!

I give this audioboook 4.5 head phones out of 5

Scale

Back in the 1990s, movies could be pretty hit and miss. Some (including myself) would even say that genres like sci-fi, fantasy and superhero have "grown up" in the current era. But that doesn't mean that they didn't have their moments of pure genius. Men In Black was a both a box office hit and a critical success. But for me the most memorable moment was this:

Wow. How novel an idea is that? Our entire universe...could actually be just a marble in the hands of some random alien. What this scene really did for me was help me realize how important and exciting the concept of scale was. 

The difference in size between a very tiny object (atom) and a very large one (the sun) is mind boggling. But what was even more interesting was something I like to call "Infinite Scale". This is the idea that as science advances we will find smaller and smaller objects (neutrino) and on the other end of the spectrum, larger and larger ones (Sloan Great Wall). 

But hey, why listen to me drone on about it when instead you could play around with an awesome flash animation made by a couple of apparently genius teenagers:

Wicked-Awesome? Thought so. But there's an even better example of scale much closer to home:

It would take 1.3 million earths to fill 1 sun (source)

Now that..admittedly...is a little terrifying, and really puts a perspective on how far we are from the sun to be able to see it as a friendly, yellow floating smiley face (instead of that very ominous monster above).

To top off my discussion about scale I will leave you with this. Scientists now tell us that the largest scale possible is the "End of Greatness" , where the universe looks the same in all directions, and there is no longer any sense of being able to tell one part from another. You've basically zoomed out so far that it all looks like one big homogeneous structure....

Kinda looks like a marble wouldn't you say? 

What is the Milky Way?

What is the Milk way?*

To some it's an excellent chocolate bar that tastes a lot like a Mars Bar and/or 3 Musketeers...

To others, it's usually a strip of sparkling stars in the night sky:

And then finally to some others it's the iconic spiraling image of the milky way galaxy:

But what I'm asking is not simply what is the Milky Way? *But rather what and where is the milky way in the context of us? The short answer is..well we're in it.

A few years back, more recently than I'd like to admit, I asked myself a simple question - how can we see the Milky Way when we're supposed to be in it, and if we're in it why does it look nothing like the iconic images of the galaxy we've all seen?

After a little bit of research I suddenly had this profound moment of clarity - I was able to imagine exactly where we were and how/why we saw what we did when we looked up at the night sky.

Turns out, since we're inside the Milky Way, and are looking in, and what we are able to see from earth is the very bright and dense center of the galaxy but not the whole thing. It's like driving to downtown Toronto and only seeing part of the skyline but not all of it... Needless to say, the meaning of the word "scale" took on a whole new level of meaning for me. 

The Milky Way galaxy as we see it from earth is our first major "landmark" in our local area of the Universe. If we were to give someone directions on how to find us it would be sort of like this:

How awe-inspiring is that? 

Enough to make you wonder whether it's worth trying to win every argument, always make your point and do anything to get your way.
Enough to make you realize that there really aren't a lot of us and we're lonely as hell stuck out in one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms.

In fact, it's enough to warrant a Morgan Freeman narrated "zoom out". And that is the video I will leave you with tonight along with a fun inequality to ponder...

Us < Earth < Solar System < Local Interstellar Cloud < Orion–Cygnus Arm < Milky Way....

Begin.

Begin.

My obsession with the skies began during my childhood in the 1990's. I was around 7 or 8 years old and whenever I would be whisked away on family trips, it would be the drive home during the night that I would most look forward to. The world around me ceased to exist as I gazed at the awe inspiring night sky. 

I spent the majority of the drive sitting back as far as I could, legs crossed, and my head resting on the "rear deck" (don't worry, this is the first time I had the need to name that obscure part of the car).  (Thankfully I suffered no long term injuries)

What was I trying to look at?

This.

Curiosity about the world around me and my existence within it lead me to discover my passion for astronomy. I wanted  to know more about the Universe I lived in and what  my  place and scale within it truly was. 

So... I'd like to begin by asking all of you to watch a YouTube video. 

Recommended Settings: 

• Full screen (connected to your TV is even better)
• HD settings maxed out and music/speakers on

But before you do I need you to bear in mind the following:

• This is not computer generated...at all..not even a bit of it
• This is not from a Video Game, Movie or any other piece of Fiction
• This is absolutely 100% real

Here's the link in case you are on mobile: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FG0fTKAqZ5g

That...is where we all live, that not-so-real and that-must-be-from-a-movie looking wonder is our planet earth as seen from the International Space Station. 

This video is truly a prolific moment in the history of modern civilization. A time-lapse that let's anyone experience, for 2 minutes and 30 seconds, what it would be like to see earth from the outside looking in.

That was a perfect example of what this blog is hopefully going to be about. Future posts will show you both the awesome and terrifying wonders of the universe as I share my obsession with all of you.(I may meander in some different related topics at times)

To end, I will leave you with a quote from Carl Sagan, someone who dedicated much of his life trying to bring astronomy to the mainstream (and succeeded)

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.- Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

NOTE: Credit for clever title of blog goes to "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
NOTE: Credit for the not as clever URL landing page title of the blog goes to "Rendezvous with Rama" by  Arthur C. Clarke 
NOTE: Both of the above books are HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!