Every year representatives from nearly 200 countries come together at a chosen location to discuss efforts toward fighting global warming and the harmful changes in our planet’s climate caused by it. The first such conference was held in 1995 and given the title COP 1.
The slogan for COP27, the international conference on Climate Change was a ‘New Era of Implementation’, but not much got implemented. (Credit: IFLR)
Each succeeding forum has added one to the number with COP 20 back in 2015 generating the famous ‘Paris Accord’ where a target figure of a rise in global temperature of no more than 1.5º C above pre-industrial levels was pledged by every nation in attendance. However no concrete plan to eliminate greenhouse gasses such as CO2 and Methane was agreed upon in Paris and every conference since then has basically failed to stop the ever increasing rise in fossil fuel emissions.
The difference in the damage done to our environment but 1.5 degree and 2 degree rise in temperature. We’re basically already at 1.5 degrees and doing little if anything to stop getting to 2 degrees. (Credit: CBC)
Last year’s COP 26 in Scotland could not even reach an agreement on how or when to eliminate the use of coal, the worst emitter of CO2. Plans to issue a strong final statement on ‘Phasing Out’ coal were scuttled by India, the world’s forth largest emitter of CO2 but a nation still considered to be ‘developing’ and which in fact has plans to greatly increase its fossil fuel emissions. The wording that was finally agreed to was to ‘Phase Down’ coal use instead of ‘Phase Out’.
The use of coal to generate energy is the worst polluter but at COP26 in Scotland the nation of India refused to accept the wording of ‘Phase out’ the use of coal instead forcing the term “Phase Down’ on the conference. (Credit: The Wire Science)
With so much contention making it impossible to develop any realistic plan to fight global warming it not surprising that the negotiators at COP 27, held in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh on the Red Sea, spent more of their time tackling a different part of the climate problem. The negotiators concentrated their efforts on the question of how to help those of the poorer countries of the world who are already suffering from climate change. Over the last year the flooding in Pakistan and Niger coupled with severe droughts in east and south Africa have brought attention to the fact that many of the countries that produce the smallest amounts of greenhouse gasses are enduring some of the worst consequences of global warming.
It’s estimated that one third of the nation of Pakistan saw flooding this year, millions suffered and the chances of more of this happening just keeps growing. (Credit: The Diplomat)
For the past thirty years these poorer countries have been pushing the richer countries, who just happen to be the biggest polluters, to establish a reparations fund that will help pay the costs of disaster relief. And for the past thirty years the richer countries have resisted signing a blank cheque that could keep them paying into this fund for decades. Another complication was the status of China, which back in 1995 was still a small economy producing only a small amount of greenhouse gasses but which since then has become the world’s second biggest economy and the biggest emitter of both CO2 and methane. So should China contribute to this fund or should it, and this would be a real farce, actually benefit from such a fund?
China has swiftly become the world’s worst polluter (top), but it’s still considered to be a ‘Developing Country’. The harm the Chinese are doing to their own country is easily seen (bottom). (Credit: Financial Times / New York Times)
Right at the start of COP27 the European Union signaled that they were now ready to support the reparations proposal but the United States was still reluctant. When the US’s chief negotiator, former US Senator John Kerry tested positive for Covid-19 it appeared that the entire conference might end without any real progress.
Former Senator John Kerry is America’s special representative for climate change. He’s pushing hard but there’s only so much one man can do. (Credit: The American University in Cairo)
Only a willingness to extend the negotiations through the weekend allowed the conference to come to an agreement. The world now has an established fund, endowed by most of the world’s richer nations, to help poorer countries pay for the damage done to them by climate change. Before you start thinking that a tremendous achievement was made however bear in mind that the richer nations have yet to announce how they will contribute and for how long and the status of China has yet to be decided.
The poorer nations of the world, who have contributed little to the huge amounts of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere are nevertheless suffering the most. They want those nations that profited from fossil fuels to pay for the damage. (Credit: WNYC)
The worst part however is that by appearing to make progress on who will pay for the damage caused by climate change absolutely nothing was achieved toward reducing, let alone eliminating the use of fossil fuels for energy production. So the release of greenhouse gasses is going to continue, in fact increase, increasing both the severity and length of the whole problem.
They just keep rising. Greenhouse gasses are being released in ever growing quantities and we’re simply not doing enough to stop the trend. (Credit: Institute for European Environmental Policy)
The final report from COP27 did restate the goal of preventing global temperature rise from exceeding 1.5ºC over pre-industrial levels but it also restates that coal use is to be ‘phased down’ not ‘phased out’. The world still has no agreement on or plan for how to stop making the problem of climate change worse.
The whole world is in this position! (Credit: Shutterstock)
And while the politicians dither more greenhouse gasses are being dumped into the atmosphere every day causing the world’s temperature to continue to rise bringing with it ever more severe climate crisis.
It was Aristotle who first described what we now call the ‘Five Senses’, that is Sight, Hearing, Smell, Touch and Taste. Now for we humans sight dominates, we are very visual creatures with our other senses taking a secondary roll. Even our language is sight oriented, we ‘see what someone else is talking about’ or a smart person can be referred to as ‘bright’.
We often imagine a good idea as a light bulb in a person’s head. Would an animal that’s relies more on its sense of smell or hearing think the same way? (Credit: Getty)
Aristotle thought that animals shared the same five senses as we did but today we know that the animal kingdom has members for whom senses other than sight predominate, like dogs whose view of the world is based more on smell than sight or an owl who hunts its prey by sound rather than sight. What Aristotle never imagined was that some animals could possess senses that we humans have no awareness of, the echolocation of dolphins and bats or the electrical senses of many species of fish.
Bats and Dolphins ‘see’ with sound. Echolocation is an ability we humans simply do not possess. (Credit: Frio Bat Flight)
‘An Immense World’ by author Ed Yong is all about the variety of senses animals possess and the way those senses effect the animal’s view of the world. Early on in ‘An Immense World’ Young introduces the term ‘Umwelt’ coined by the German biologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909 to describe the perceptual world that each species would have based upon those senses it possesses and how it uses them to survive. This concept serves as a focal point for Yong’s broad survey of animals and their senses.
Cover art for ‘An Immense World’ by Ed Yong. (Credit: Penguin Random House)
Now throughout my life I have read about or watched TV documentaries about different animals and how they use their different senses so I already had a good understanding of how bees can see in the ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectra or how rattlesnakes can see in the infrared. So I was already familiar with a good bit of the things ‘An Immense World’ describes. Nevertheless in ‘An Immense World’ Ed Yong is so thorough and detailed that I still learned a great deal.
Author Ed Yong with one of the animals he discusses in ‘An Immense World’. (Credit: Ed Yong)
In ‘An Immense World’ Ed Yong proceeds from the most familiar of the senses, like vision and first talks about how that sense differs in other animals, like colour blindness in dogs and most other mammals. As each kind of animal is mentioned we get a little further from human senses, like the compound eyes of insects or the way clams simply have a series of photosensitive cells along the rim of their shells. For each species the way they use their sight is discussed, whether it be to find prey, escape predators or even find a mate. Yong then proceeds to each human sense in turn, hearing, smell, touch and taste and starting with how we use that sense he describes how that sense can differ in other creatures and how they use it.
We all learned about our Five Senses back in grade school. As limited as they are they are the only way we humans have of understanding the world around us. (Credit: Learning Junction)
It’s after spending several chapters concerning the senses we possess that ‘An Immense World’ goes on the describe those senses that were unknown to Aristotle, echolocation or sonar, and electrical senses like those of the electric eel, although many other fish also possess it as a sense. The ability of some species to actually detect magnetic fields, usually the Earth’s magnetic field to use in migration, is given a whole chapter to itself because it is still the one we know the least about. The penultimate chapter is about how every species, even we humans, use all the senses they possess together in order to understand the world around them and survive in it.
The Electric Eel is the animal best known for its ability to use electricity as a sense, and a weapon. It is certainly not the only animal to do so however. If you want to find out about the others ‘An Immense World’ is the book for you. (Credit: Encyclopedia Britannica)
Finally Young uses the last chapter to describe how we humans, in altering the world to suit ourselves, are attacking the senses that other species use to live. Light pollution is disrupting the lives of nocturnal animals while noise pollution and chemical pollution are hurting those species that ‘see’ the world through sound or smell.
Just a few of the thousands of birds who die by flying into the windows of skyscrapers that leave their lights on. Our converting the world to suit our senses is wrecking havoc on the senses of other animals. (Credit: BBC)
I do have a couple of small criticisms of ‘An Immense World’. As someone who spent most of his career as an electrical engineer I found a couple of tiny factual errors in the chapters on the electrical and magnetic senses. During one of his interviews with an ichthyologist Yong places his hand in a tank with an electric eel and gets a 90V shock that he describes as being electrocuted. Well, technically you’re only electrocuted by a shock if you die, not when you just get hurt. Then, in the sections on the electric and magnetic senses Yong mentions how the senses of sound and smell have a built in delay because they travel at a certain speed while the electromagnetic senses are ‘instantaneous’. Well no, electromagnetism may be a lot faster than sound or scents but it’s not instantaneous, it travels at the speed of light. I know I’m being a bit pedantic but still those are still errors.
Nothing is instantaneous, even light has a finite speed. (Credit: web.physics.utah.edu)
One other thing I would have liked to see was a chapter on the senses possessed by plants, which is actually a growing field of research. We know very little about how plants sense the world but we’re finding out more every day. Many, possibly most plants are light sensitive but every day researchers discover more and more evidence of the sense of touch in plants, think of how a Venus Fly Trap knows when an insect has landed in one of its traps. A quick review of plant senses would have been a great addition to the book.
See those little hairs inside the Venus Fly Trap. Those are the plant’s sense organs. Yes plants have senses too and ‘An Immense World’ could have had a chapter on them as well! (Credit: EurekAlert)
Nevertheless ‘An Immense World’ is a wonderful book, full of details about the endless variety of life here on Earth. Whether you’re familiar with the way animals senses work or this is an entirely new subject you’ll learn a lot, and do so in an enjoyable way, if you read ‘An Immense World’ by Ed Yong.
Back when I was in college the standard model of Cosmology consisted of a Big Bang that happened between 10-15 billion years ago. That detonation led to an expansion of the matter in the Universe that could be seen in the red shift of light coming from distant galaxies, the rate of that expansion was given the name ‘Hubble’s Constant’.
No, not that ‘Big Bang’. (Credit: Rotten Tomatoes)This ‘Big Bang’. The evidence for this basic model of how our Universe evolved is now overwhelming. However there are still some discrepancies in the details that could be clues to new Physics. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Even as the Universe as a whole expanded locally matter clumped together due to gravity to form the galaxies and stars we see today. The model also predicted that the force of gravity between the galaxies would slow down the rate of expansion so that today Hubble’s ‘Constant’ would be smaller than it was billions of years ago.
Carl Hubble’s graph from his original 1929 paper where he announced the expansion of the Universe. The general trend of greater velocity with greater distance is easy to see but determining the exact slope of the line is very difficult. We still are having problems with that. (Credit: Universe Today)
The big Question, back when I was in college, was whether or not the force of gravity was strong enough, was there enough matter in the universe to eventually bring the expansion of the Universe to a stop billions or even trillions of years from now. If that happened the Universe would begin to contract until there was a ‘Big Crunch’. Or if there wasn’t enough matter in the Universe then it would just expand forever with all of the stars dying out as they ran out of fuel. A cold, empty Universe that was paradoxically called ‘Heat Death’ because the entire Universe would be at thermal equilibrium so that no work could be done.
Will the expansion of the Universe someday come to a stop and reverse itself into a ‘Big Crunch’ or will the expansion go on forever, maybe even accelerate. That’s the big question right now. (Credit: Astronomy Magazine)
Oh, and then there was something wrong with the way the galaxies behaved, their dynamics. They acted as if they contained more matter than we could see, so astronomers called the problem ‘Dark Matter’. The astrophysicists had a few ideas what Dark Matter could be but really had no evidence to back up their hypothesizes.
Using Newton’s law of gravity and what matter we can see in other galaxies we can calculate what their rotation curves should be. Our measurements don’t match the calculations so something is wrong. ‘Dark Matter’ is the leading theory to explain the discrepancy but it also has problems. (Credit: Universe Today)
Things began to change in the late 1990s as two groups of astronomers led by Adam Riess and Saul Perlmutter tried to answer the question of whether the expansion of the Universe was slowing fast enough to come to a stop. What they found was that the expansion wasn’t slowing at all, it was accelerating.
Along with Brian Schmidt, Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess recieved the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the acceleration of the Universe’s expansion. (Credit: Wired)
Riess and Perlmutter used observations of Type 1 supernovas to make their measurements, see my post of 18 January 2020. Type 1 supernova occur when a white dwarf star steals matter from a nearby companion star. Eventually the white dwarf steals too much matter and explodes as a Type 1. Since all Type 1 supernova happen at the same mass our theories predict that the supernova explosions should all have the same total amount of energy and can be used to measure the distances to other galaxies. That is, if all Type 1’s are the same absolute brightness then if one Type 1 supernova looks brighter it must be closer, if another looks dimmer it must be further away. Whatever it was that was that was pushing the galaxies apart was given the name ‘Dark Energy’ in correspondence with Dark Matter although it is really more of a pressure than an energy.
Type 1 and Type 2 Supernova are very different animals. The interesting thing about Type 1’s are that they all release about the same amount of energy so they can be used as ‘Standard Candles’ to measure distance. (Credit: Lifeng.lamost.org)
Another, more technical problem also came out of the work of Riess and Perlmutter, the value for Hubble’s Constant that they measured over the last few billion years differed slightly from the value obtained by the astrophysicists who studied the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the leftover radiation from the era of the Big Bang itself.
The Cosmic Microwave Background as measured by the Planck satellite. This is our Universe’s baby picture and as such it tells us a lot about what our ‘adult’ Universe should look like. (Credit: European Space Agency)
Now a group of astronomers led by two former students of Riess, Dillion Brout of Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics along with Dan Scolnic of the Department of Physics at Duke University have published a greatly expanded data set of over 1500 Type 1 supernova observations, ten times as many as Riess and Perlmutter gathered. This study has been given the name Pantheon+ and has produced a value for Hubble’s constant over the last 10 billion years of 73.4 kilometers per second per megaparsec with an uncertainly of only 1.3%. This value is significantly larger than the value obtained from the CMB for the early Universe 13 billion years ago.
Compare this graph of the Pantheon+ supernovas with Hubble’s graph above. We’ve learned a lot in the last 90 years but there are still details to be worked out. (Credit: ResearchGate)
These measurements give us the most precise account yet of the effect that Dark Energy has had on the evolution of the Universe. It also solidifies the discrepancy between the measurements of Hubble’s constant using Type 1 supernova and those made using the CMB to a better than one in one million chance of being caused by statistical error.
In physics having enough data to declare 3 Sigma confidence, 99.7%, is considered to be ‘Evidence’ while 5 Sigma, 99.9767% is needed to declare a ‘Discovery’. (Credit: Medium)
So what is going on here? What is causing our models and measurements to differ? Well the simplest answer would be that ‘Dark Energy’ has not been a constant effect throughout the history of the Universe, it’s dynamic, it changes and the results of Pantheon+ can give us some clues as to how it changes with time.
Dynamic simply means changing. For Cosmologists the question of whether ‘Dark Energy’ is dynamic, and if so how it changes, is the Big Question. (Credit: Adam the Automator)
The other possibility is that we’re seeing the first evidence of some completely unknown factor effecting Dark Energy. As you can imagine cosmologists are hoping to avoid that possibility. After all, currently they have no idea what Dark Energy is or if it changes. To assume there’s a yet completely unknown factor effecting Dark Energy would just square the problems we have now.
And then there’s the Dark Matter that astrophysicists first proposed before Dark Energy but which they still have no clear idea of what it is. Dark Matter was supposed to account for why galaxies, like our own Milky Way, are observed to spin faster than they should based on the matter we can see and Newton’s laws of gravity.
As you can see we’ve got a lot of ideas about what Dark Matter could be, and little evidence as to just what it is! (Credit: Physics-APS.org)
Dark Matter therefore was predicted to be some sort of heavy sub-atomic particle that did not react with the electromagnetic field, that is light, and that therefore we could not see. Physicists have been searching for that exotic particle, called a Weakly Interacting Massive Particle or WIMP, since the 1980s and have so far completely failed.
Many experiments, such as Xenon 1T shown here, have tried to discover the elusive Dark Matter particle, none have succeeded so far. (Credit: CERN)
In fact a growing minority of physicists are ready to give up on the whole idea of Dark matter and instead propose that there is something wrong with Newton’s laws of gravity. There are currently many ideas floating around as to how Newton might be wrong and these theories have been given the generic name of MOdified Newtonian Dynamics or MOND.
Modified Newtonian Dynamics or MOND seems to work theoretically but there’s no physical justification for the modifications. It’s all just math that seems to fit the data with no reason as to why! (Credit: Slide Player)
Now a new study of Open Star Clusters in our Milky Way has provided evidence backing some of those MOND theories. The paper comes from researchers at the Helmholtz Institute of Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn in Switzerland.
The Pleiades is an open star cluster that’s easy to see with the naked eye. Known as the seven sisters there are actually hundreds of stars in a family that were born together just a few million years ago. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Open star clusters are the maternity wards of galaxies where gas clouds contract under gravity to give birth to stars. The best-known example of these open clusters are the Pleiades but many are known throughout the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies. After the stellar nursery has given birth to all the stars it can the grouping stays together for a few tens of millions of years as it orbits around the center of the galaxy. Eventually however tidal forces from the billions of other stars in the galaxy cause the stars in an open cluster to drift away, spreading across the galaxy. In fact our own Sun must have once been a member of such a cluster only to have drifted away billions of years ago.
Our Sun follows its own orbit around the center of the Milky Way but once it must have been a part of an open cluster. (Credit: NBC News)
And just as here on earth we have two tides, one rising as the Moon is high in the sky and the other 12 hours later, the tides of the galaxy will pull the stars in an open cluster in a forward direction, relative to its motion around the galactic center, and in a backward direction.
We all know that the tides are caused by the gravity of the Moon and a bit by the Sun but actually every object in the Universe has a gravity that causes a tidal force. (Credit: Time and Date)
Now Newton’s laws predict that the two tides will be of equal strength, with an equal number of stars leaving in each direction. Certain versions of MOND however predict that the forward tide should be just about twice as strong as the backward so that twice as many stars should drift away in that direction.
Newton would predict that the stars leaving an open cluster would do so equally from the front and back but the astrophysicists at the University of Bonn are seeing twice as many leave by the front. Could Newton be wrong? (Credit: Phys.org)
Needless to say trying to determine just which stars that are near an open cluster were actually once members of that cluster is no easy chore but the team from the University of Bonn succeeded with five open clusters and their results, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society strongly indicate that some variety of MOND is at work here.
So astronomy and astrophysics today have a couple of really big problems to be solved. Wouldn’t it be interesting if the solution to one problem is also the solution to the other? I mean, what if MOND is that extra factor effecting Dark Energy? We’ll just have to wait and see.
In was during the 1970s that the science of geology was revolutionized by the theory of Plate Tectonics, the idea that the surface of the Earth was cut up into a number of plates that moved relative to each other. As those plates slide past, or butt up against each other mountains rise, volcanoes erupt and earthquakes are generated. There are even places where one plate slides over another causing a ‘subduction zone’ where the deepest parts of the oceans occur. The theory of plate tectonics explains so much of what we see in the rocks around us that it is central to the entire study of geology.
The surface of the Earth is very much like a jigsaw puzzle except that some pieces are getting bigger while others are getting smaller and they’re all pushing and shoving against each other. (Credit: Google Play)
Central perhaps but like most theories plate tectonics is incomplete, there are still some details to be worked out and geologists around the world have been kept busy trying to understand exactly how plate tectonics works. This week’s post is about two such studies.
The major pieces of Earth’s puzzle, the tectonic plates on which the continents ride. (Credit: Earth How)
The first study deals with those subduction zones and how they are generated. The study comes from the Instituto Dom Luiz at the University of Lisbon Portugal along with the supercomputer at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany. And, like many scientific studies nowadays, this one uses a computer model to analyze more data than any human being could ever manage to do. In fact the study would not have been possible even with the supercomputer had it not been for the recent development of a much more efficient computational code by the programmers at Johannes Gutenberg.
Modern supercomputers are revolutionizing the way that large scale studies of natural processes are carried out. (Credit: IEEE Spectrum)
Combining the geological expertise of the University of Lisbon with the computing power of Johannes Gutenberg the program was applied to the problem of the development and evolution of subduction zones. For the first time all of the various forces at play at the interface of two plates were taken into account in order to calculate a 3D model of a of how one plate pushes another beneath it down into the Earth’s mantel.
Subduction zones, where one plate is forcing another down into the Earth’s mantel, are regions of great geological activity with earthquakes and volcanoes. (Credit: www.columbia.edu)
Beginning with the many trenches that make up part of the Pacific’s ‘Ring of Fire’ the researchers found that subduction zones follow a rhythmic ebb and flow, with existing trenches slowing in their growth and then being followed by new ones near the same locations. Having used their new model to study the trenches in the Pacific the geologists now hope to apply it to other areas of the Earth like the Caribbean, the Antarctic and even the Atlantic Ocean off of Lisbon. In fact there is evidence that a new subduction zone has started in the waters just off of Portugal, one that may be the beginning of a new ‘Ring of Fire’ that could someday encircle the entire Atlantic Ocean!
The ‘Ring of Fire’ surrounding the Pacific Ocean is formed by all of the plates around the Pacific squeezing in on it! (Credit: National Geographic Society)
Even as one group of geologists learns more about one facet of tectonic activity another, led by scientists at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland is investigating how plate tectonics contributed to one of the most destructive volcanic events in the history of Earth. Known as the Toarcian period the event happened about 183 million years ago during the Jurassic period. At that time massive volcanic eruptions poured enormous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and we all know what that means, global warming and environmental destruction leading to a mass extinction event.
Millions of years after the breakup of the single continent Pangaea, the Toarcian period was marked by a huge increase in volcanic activity releasing enormous amounts of harmful gasses into the atmosphere. (Credit: Nature)
Performing a chemical analysis of samples of mudstone obtained from a 1.5 km deep borehole in Whales researchers were surprised to find that the massive upwelling of magma that triggered the Toarcian event occurred at a time when the movement of the tectonic plates had slowed almost to a stop. That evidence seemed to run counter to common sense, wouldn’t magma pushing up from the Earth’s interior lead to increased tectonic activity?
The recent eruption of the Mauna Loa volcano on Hawaii’s big island is a reminder of the power of molten rock forcing its way up to the Earth’s surface. (Credit: BBC)
But perhaps this is one of those occasions where common sense is simply wrong. Perhaps significant tectonic activity acts as a pressure relief valve releasing energy from beneath so that the magma remains deep below the surface. If that were the case then it would be when the movement of the tectonic plates slows that the magma underneath can build up the pressure to upwell and cause destructive geological events like the Toarcian.
By opening up when the pressure at their intake becomes to high Pressure Relief Valves prevent greater damage from occurring. (Credit: North Ridge Pumps)
The study itself will have to be considered by other geologists but one thing is certain, our planet is a complex, very dynamic place and we still have a great deal to learn from it.
On November 16th, after more than six years of problems, delays and cost overruns, to say nothing of two last minute hurricanes, NASA’s massive Space Launch System (SLS) with it’s Orion man capable capsule was finally launched from Cape Kennedy’s pad 39B. The Artemis 1 mission as the combination is officially designated is an unmanned test of the equipment that will in just a few years take human beings back to the Moon after a more than 50 year absence. In many ways Artemis 1, and its manned successor Artemis 2, are a reboot of the Apollo 8 mission that first took humans to orbit the Moon.
On the Apollo 8 mission Borman (l), Lovell (r) and Anders (c) became the first humans to go to, although they did not land upon, another celestial body as they orbited the Moon. (Credit: National Air and space Museum)
All of this was supposed to happen back in 2016, the huge SLS rocket that serves as the lunch vehicle was going to be easy to design and build. After all the main engines were the same RS25 engines that powered the space shuttle and the solid fuel boosters on each side of the rocket’s core stage were just longer versions of the shuttle’s solid fuel boosters. The problems just kept multiplying however and the delays, and cost overruns caused the program to take twice as long and cost nearly three times what was originally allocated.
The Artemis Program is a scaled back version of the Constellation Program the NASA developed backs in the early 2000s. (Credit: SlidePlayer)
Even once the SLS got to Cape Kennedy the problems continued to pile up with hydrogen fuel leaks alternating with the threat of hurricane winds to cause a series of small delays. Even on the day of launch itself a small hydrogen leak was detected after the SLS had been fueled that required a team of engineers to go out to the pad and tighten some valves on the rocket before liftoff.
As if the engineering problems weren’t enough even the weather caused problems for Artemis 1 as two hurricanes delayed the launch. (Credit: Space Channel)
Still when the countdown went to zero and the engines ignited the SLS, the most powerful rocket ever built, that’s in terms of initial thrust, performed flawlessly, lifting the Orion capsule, its European Service Module (ESM) along with an Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage into Earth orbit. So powerful was the takeoff that the mobile launch pad, which had carried Artemis back and forth to the Vehicle Assembly Building several times, was damaged.
Some of the damage sustained by the mobile launch pad used by Artemis 1. (Credit: Florida Today)
Once Orion was in orbit the SLS had completed its task, ten years of costly development for a mere eight minutes of performance. Now the engineers will have to go over the data thoroughly but the big rocket certainly proved that it could do the job it was designed for. Approximately forty minutes after achieving orbit the Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Sage fired its engine for an eight minute burn that sent the Orion capsule and the ESM on an Earth escape trajectory to the Moon.
Years behind schedule and billions over budget at least the Space Launch System (SLS) worked perfectly when it finally did launch. (Credit: Geek Wire)
The rest of the mission is up to the Orion capsule and it’s service module, which was designed and built by the European Space Agency (ESA) as their contribution to the Artemis program. According to the mission plan the spacecraft was to pass behind the Moon and there perform a four minute burn of the ESM’s engine to place Orion in a lopsided retrograde orbit around the Moon that would bring the spacecraft closer than 100 kilometers to the Lunar surface and take it further than 60,000 kilometers. This burn was successfully carried out on the 21st of November.
Currently (3 December) the Orion Spacecraft is in a distant retrograde orbit around the Moon. This orbit was chosen in order to more fully test the capabilities of the Orion capsule and its European built Service Module. (Credit: The Coalition for Deep Space Exploration)
O’k, so what’s a retrograde orbit and why it that important for Artemis? Well if you take your right hand, point your thump up while wrapping your fingers around, see image, and imagine that your thumb is the Sun’s north pole then virtually everything in our Solar System orbits, rotates, spins around the Sun in the direction your fingers point, their angular momentum is counter-clockwise.
Spin can occur in two directions, like your right hand, seen above, or left hand. Because most people are right handed that direction has been defined as positive while left handed is negative. It just so happens that our Solar System as a whole is righted handed. (Credit: Rolling Motion)
Only a few objects, like the spin of Venus on its axis and several of Jupiter’s smallest, and farthest moons rotate in the opposite direction, clockwise and are said to have a retrograde motion. Now the engineers at NASA wanted Orion to be put into this unusual orbit in order to push it a bit, to see if the spacecraft and the ground systems tracking it, could handle the extra strain. This mission is intended to test the equipment after all.
At the farthest point in its orbit from Earth the Orion capsule takes a selfie with the Earth and Moon in the background. (Credit: Friends of NASA)
So the plan was for Orion, with its ESM to orbit the Moon until the 1st of December when a final burn of the ESM’s engine set the spacecraft on a return path back to Earth. Reentry and splashdown are scheduled for December eleventh off the California coast in the Pacific Ocean.
The splashdown of Apollo 11. It’s been a long time since a man capable capsule has returned from the Moon but hopefully that’s about to change. (Credit: DesignNews.com)
If the mission ends as successfully as its gone so far then the Artemis 2 mission is scheduled for sometime in 2024. That mission will be manned and for the first time in fifty humans will return to Lunar Orbit although not actually land on the Lunar surface. That event is going to have to wait for Artemis 3 and the development of a landing module.
While changes could still be made it is expected that the Artemis lander will look something like this. How long its development will take is the big question. (Credit: Space.com)
It’s been along time since humans last walked on the Moon but the Apollo program that put men on the Moon had no plan for a follow up, no intention of staying on the Moon. Artemis may be slower but it is designed as a step-by-step program leading to a permanent base on the Moon. This time we plan on staying.
Fame and power have always gone hand and hand. As far back as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar men vying for authority often sought celebrity status as a means toward that goal. Think about, doesn’t the very name ‘Alexander the Great’ sound like something a public relations consultant would think up.
Back in the days of Alexander the Great men achieved fame by winning battles. Today many achieve fame by pretending, i.e. acting as superheros or other strong men. (Credit: Greece Is)
In our modern era we have become familiar with entertainers, actors, musicians and athletes, turning their notoriety into political office. Here in America we have now elected two such men, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, to the highest office in our country, the Presidency of the United States, often referred to as the most powerful position in the world.
In the last 50 years America has elected two celebrities to be President. Hopefully we’ve learned our lesson and won’t do that again!!! (Credit: Wikipedia)
Why do we do it? Why do we choose inexperienced amateurs as our political leaders instead of seasoned politicians? And why do people who have had success in the entertainment world even think that they are qualified to hold public office?
Oprah Winfrey is another celebrity who has been mentioned as a possible choice for President. Fortunately it seems that she has sense enough to know that she’s not qualified. (Credit: Forbes)
Those are some of the questions that Dr. Lauren Wright, a lecturer in Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University seeks to answer in her book ‘Star Power, (American Democracy in the Age of the Celebrity Candidate)’. In her book Dr. Wright surveys the latest studies and polls related to the whole issue of celebrities running for public office, examining the advantages that celebrities have over traditional politicians as well as the justifications that celebrities give for entering the political arena.
Doctor Lauren A. Wright, a lecturer at Princeton University and author of “Starpower”. (Credit: Center for the Study of Democratic Politics)
Dr. Wright separates her study into four subsections, each of which is a chapter in ‘Star Power’. The first chapter is a brief review of the interplay between celebrity status and political power through history starting with Alexander and Caesar but concentrating on celebrities in American history. Dr. Wright even takes a bit of time to describe the race for California governor by the author Upton Sinclair in 1934 pointing out numerous resemblances between that campaign and Donald Trump’s race for President.
Front Cover of “Star Power, American Democracy in the age of the Celebrity Candidate” by Lauren A. Wright. (Credit: Amazon)
In chapter two the question of why celebrities run for office is considered. Why does someone who has seen success in film or the concert hall or ball field think that their skill as an entertainer will translate into success as a member of government? Starting with the actual reasons that celebrities give for running Dr. Wright then goes into the psychology of famous people, their need for acclaim along with their conceit that they can do anything because the flatterers around them tell them they can.
Wht is it about humans psychologically that we have such a desire to be adored by thousands of people we’ll never meet and never get to know? (Credit: Billboard)
Chapter three considers the way that the public treats celebrities differently from normal folk, even normal folk like politicians. In fact Dr. Wright lists seven qualities that celebrities possess that the average politician would love to have. These qualities are Name Recognition, Favourability, Relatability, Outsider Status, Large and Passionate Following, Fundraising and Media Attention. I’ll just discuss one of these in passing because I have never understood why people think that an ‘outsider’ without any experience in government, is in any way preferable to a politician who actually knows how to do the job.
As children we all want the attention of those around us. Many people never seem to grow up. (Credit: Icon Agency)
Here in Pennsylvania we recently had a celebrity TV doctor, Memhet Oz who ran for the US Senate against the former mayor of the city of Braddock who is currently our state’s Lieutenant Governor, John Fetterman. As a part his campaign Oz has on many occasions criticized Fetterman as ‘A Career Politician’, in other words someone with training and experience, while he as an outsider is better suited for the post. Why do we even consider such an illogical argument when we would never think of hiring someone like a cab driver to fix our plumbing? (P.S. Fetterman won thankfully!)
John Fetterman (l) has been a popular Mayor of a small Pennsylvania town and hard working Lieutenant Governor. Mehmet Oz (r) has been a cardiologist and talk show host. The question is, why do some people think that political / governmental experience should actually count against a candidate? (Credit: Los Angeles Times)
Chapter four then considers the question of ‘Do voters actually prefer Celebrity Candidates over more Traditional Politicians’. Here’s where things get kinda scary because although in poll after poll people claim that they do not prefer celebrities in fact such absolute amateurs as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sonny Bono and Jesse Ventura, to say nothing of Donald Trump, have all been elected to high office. People it seems do not want a polltaker to think they would vote for a celebrity, but in fact they often do.
Despite absolutely no experience in either politics or government Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of the most populace start in the US. Why did anybody think he’d do a good job? (Credit: YouTube)
Psychologists often use a technique known as a ‘Paired Choice Experiments’ in order to gage the true reactions of people when we’d rather not have our true reactions known. As an example when given a choice between the extremely well known celebrity Oprah Winfrey or the much less known US Senator Cory Booker the TV star wins easily, the seven advantages mentioned above that celebrities have now become more relevant.
One big Advantage Celebrities have over more traditional politicians is in fundraising. Their legions of fans can usually be counted on to big in the cash needed in today’s elections. (Credit: Wild Apricot)
Finally Dr. Wright considers the effect that celebrity candidates are having on the very fabric of our democracy. Several times she uses quotations from ‘The Federalist Papers’ to show how our founding fathers feared the rise of a popular demagogue and how that fear seems to be coming true today. Celebrity candidates are with us for good or ill, and we are just going to have to adjust to them.
One type of political figure that our founding fathers feared was the demagogue, a person with so much fame that they can seize too much power and by using the mob, make themselves a dictator. (Credit: Simon and Schuster)
I do have several criticisms of ‘Star Power’ however. For one thing while the book does show some charts displaying data it could use a lot more. Dr. Wright often talks her way through a lot of data rather than showing it. As a firm supporter of ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ I like charts and ‘Star Power’ needed more charts. Another similar problem is that of paragraphs, over and over again there are pages with only two or three paragraphs, and my copy of ‘Star Power’ had small print so there were a lot of sentences running together in each paragraph. These two defects combine to make ‘Star Power’ a bit difficult to read, I found myself growing blurry eyed at times.
Which is exactly what almost happened on January 6th of 2021. Clearly the celebrity candidate is a something that has to be considered in a democratic society. (Credit: The Washington Post)
Which is a shame because ‘Star Power’ is a very important book, about a subject that needs a comprehensive but still accessible book to help the public understand the issues at play. For all its faults I recommend ‘Star Power (American democracy in the Age of Celebrity Candidates) as one small thing we can do to help preserve our democracy.
Paleontology is the science that’s all about origins. Whether it be the origin of life itself or the beginnings of a certain aspect of some living creatures, let’s say warm bloodiness, paleontology seeks to understand when and how the different characteristics that living creatures possess came to be. In this post I’ll be discussing three such important characteristics and as usual I’ll begin in the distant past and work my way forward in time.
O’k ‘The Cambrian Explosion’ is really just a metaphor but the sudden appearance of so many different life forms at the same time was a unique event in the history of life. (Credit: Think Big)
I have mentioned the Cambrian period several times in these posts, see posts of 16 June 2018 and 2 December 2020. The Cambrian is unique in the history of life because that is the time when a large diversity of living creatures first appears in the fossil record, a phenomenon known as the Cambrian explosion. In the fossils from the Cambrian however we can already recognize animals that are clearly molluscs, or echinoderms, or worms, or arthropods. In other words the major groups of animals known as phyla are already distinct, which means a lot of evolution has already happened. If we want to study the relationships between those major groups, say that between the segmented worms and arthropods, we need fossils that are either from before the Cambrian or from a creature in the Cambrian that contains features unique to two or more distinct phyla.
In order to understand how the various phyla of animals are related to each other we either need evidence from before the Cambrian or ‘missing links’ that share characteristics of two or more phyla. (Credit: ResearchGate)
A recent fossil from China falls into that latter category. The creature is a one centimeter long worm like animal covered with both armoured plates and hair like bristles that has been given the name Wufengella. This creature packs a lot of anatomy into its tiny frame linking three different phyla, the brachiopods (bivalved animals that are not related to clams), bryozoans (known as moss animals) and phoronids (horseshoe worms).
Wufengella, from the late Cambrian, appears to be one of those Missing Links, having features of several very different types of creatures. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Brachiopods (l) may superficially look like clams (r) but the animal inside the bivalve shell is completely different, from a different phyla. (Credit: Wikipedia)
The fossil has been dated to 518 million years ago, near the end of the Cambrian period and so therefore it is not a ‘missing link’ ancestor to those three phyla but rather a now extinct cousin of the brachiopods, bryozoans and phoronids who possessed features of them all. The paper describing Wufengella was published in the journal Current Biology and was written by a large group of paleontologists from a number of universities in both China and the United Kingdom illustrating once again the value to science of cooperation between nations no matter what the quarrels created by their governments.
The original fossil of Wufengella (l) and an artists rendering (r). (Credit: Sci.ners)
One anatomical structure that is of critical importance to many animals is the one with which they eat, their jaw. Different types of animals built their jaws in different ways, arthropods for example built their jaws from modified legs, that’s why close ups of insects eating look so creepy to us. Humans and other vertebrates however developed our jaws from bones that originally held our gills in place, that’s why human fetuses still develop gills about five weeks after fertilization, if we didn’t we wouldn’t have either a jaw or an inner ear.
Human Embryos do in fact develop gills and gill slits. That’s where our jawbones came from and where they first appear. (Credit: Vedantu)
In a previous post I discussed how the early jaws of vertebrates evolved and diversified in the Devonian period, some 400 million years ago, see my post of 30 April 2022, but how the very first vertebrate jaw evolved is still a subject of debate among paleontologists. The one thing that was agreed upon was that, since there were so many different vertebrates with so many different sizes and shapes of jaws during the Devonian, the first jaw must have developed before that time, perhaps during the preceding Silurian period, around 440 million years ago.
By the Devonian period many species of fish possessed jaws. This guy’s are quite impressive. In order to find the first fish with a jaw paleontologists have had to go further back, into the Silurian period. (Credit: The applied Ecologist)
Now a series of four papers in the journal Nature have described a series of early species of jawed fish from the Silurian that are so diverse that they may force paleontologists to look even further back for the first jaw, perhaps as far as the Ordovician period some 480 million years ago. The Silurian fossils were unearthed in a pair of fossil beds outside of Chongqing in southern China and contain both cartilaginous fish, like modern sharks and rays, along with bony fish.
The species discovered represent not only a variety of different types of jaws but different body types, from the wide flat bottom dwelling shape of Xiushanosteus mirabilis and Tujiaspis vividus to the sleek, fast swimming shark like shape of Shenacanthus vermiformis and Fanjingshania renovata. With so much diversity it is obvious that the fish unearthed in China have a lot of evolution behind them, meaning that paleontologists will have to look even further back in time, to the Ordovician period in order to understand how the earliest members of our own phyla came into being.
With a life style that probably resembled a founder’s Xiushanosteus mirabilis already had a well developed jaw when it lived during the Silurian. (Credit: The New York Times) Shenacanthus vermiformis was a very different kind of fish but, like X mirabilis it too had a well developed jaw. So the common ancestor of this two species, the first jawed vertebrate, must have lived even earlier. In the Ordovician perhaps? (Credit: The New York Times)
Moving forward in time another important innovation in vertebrate animals is the wing, which has allowed thousands of different species to fly. Nowadays when we think of wings we think of birds or bats but they weren’t the first vertebrates to fly, that honour belongs to the family of lizard-like contemporaries of the dinosaurs known as the Pterosaurs.
The Pterosaurs were a large and diverse group of flying reptiles during the age of the dinosaurs but they were not themselves dinosaurs. (Credit:Wikipedia)
Now a reexamination of fossils discovered a hundred years ago in Scotland may have identified the pre-flying ancestors of the pterosaurs. Known as Scleromochlus taylori the small reptile went unappreciated in part because of the incredibly hard 237 million year old limestone blocks in which it was encased.
Not a very impressive creature the small 237 million year old reptile Scleromochlus may have been the common ancestor of the pterosaurs. (Credit: The Indian Express)
The question of how the pterosaurs evolved to fly has been debated as long as how the birds first flew and with pretty much the same arguments. Most paleontologists thought that tree climbing reptiles who began gliding from branch to branch eventually developed leathery wings which they starting flapping for powered flight. The fossils of S taylori however tell the story of a small, fast running ground runner.
Fossils in Limestone can be almost perfectly preserved, but are a bitch to get out of the rock. No wonder it took a long time to discover just exactly what S taylori was. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
The researchers at Edinburgh University discovered the connection between S taylori and pterosaurs only when they performed CT scans of the limestone encased fossils revealing for the first time some of more delicate details of the animal’s anatomy. Details like a head too large for its body and a femur with a hook to it that fits into a slot in the hip so that the animal’s legs go straight downward instead of sidewards like a lizard’s or crocodile’s.
Nowadays paleontologists use advanced technology in order to learn everything they can about their fossils. (Credit: Rapid City Journal)
S taylori was a runner, catching insects near the ground and maybe it started using flaps on its forearms to help it catch its prey. Flaps that got larger and larger until the creature took off like…well, like a pterosaur!
The pterosaurs were the largest animals to ever fly. The sight of one of these babies soaring overhead would have put an eagle to shame! (Credit: Biosphere Magazine)
By studying the anatomy of ancient life paleontologists not only learn about the lives of creatures of the past but of how different species relate, the family tree of life on Earth.
Nowadays we’re all used to seeing beautiful images of astronomical objects, whether from Hubble or now James Webb or from some other observatory. To my mind however, nothing beats seeing the planet Saturn with your own eyes through even a small telescope. Somehow looking through a telescope is different; maybe it’s the movement of the air causing a little shimmer that makes it seem different from an image.
A beautiful image of the planet Saturn even showing a ring of Aurora around the south pole. (Credit: Hubble Space Telescope)
Of course it’s the rings that make Saturn the most beautiful planet to see. They just seem so unreal, fairy like in a sense. And in a telescope they seem to be as solid as the planet they circle, even though in your mind you know that they are actually made up of trillions, hey millions of trillions of small snowballs. Each snowball a separate moon with its own orbit around Saturn.
From here on Earth it looks like Saturn only has a few rings but up close it’s easy to see hundreds if not thousands of small ringlets in this enhanced image taken by Voyager 2. (Credit: NASA Space Place)
Back before the space age it was thought that only Saturn had rings, you couldn’t see any around any other planet using the telescopes of the 1950s or earlier. Some astronomers claimed to see faint rings around Uranus but it wasn’t until 1977 that observations by James Elliot, Jessica Mink and Edward Dunham convinced the astronomical community that Uranus did indeed have rings. Then in 1979 as the Voyager 1 space probe was flying by Jupiter a couple of its images of the giant planet showed a faint ring system, a discovery that Voyager 2 would confirm a few months later. Finally in 1989 Voyager 2 found that the last of the solar systems gas giants, Neptune also had a set of rings. Since all of the solar systems giant planets are now known to have rings astronomers have begun to wonder if there is some connection, do all gas planets, even those in other solar systems, have rings.
After Saturn the planet Uranus has the best set of rings as seen in this Hubble image. (Credit: Universe Today)
Which of course begs the questions, why do any planets have rings? How do rings form, and how long do they last. Since we’ve never actually seen a ring system forming we really only have theories and educated guesses and astronomers have argued for decades over the details.
One thing we do know about planetary rings is that they are not solid but made up of billions and billions of small moonlets. (Credit: Shutterstock)
For a big ring system like Saturn’s the leading theory has always been that one of the planet’s moons got too close and was disintegrated by tidal forces generating the trillions of particles making up the rings. As I said that theory has been around for nearly a hundred years but now a new analysis by a team of astrophysicists at MIT is using data collected by the Cassini spacecraft that studied the Saturn system between 200 and 2017.
Two major models for how Saturn’s rings formed. Either a moon got to close to Saturn and was pulled apart by tidal forces or an object from the Kuiper belt got to close. (Credit: Science)
As you may remember, NASA ended the Cassini mission by taking the space probe closer and closer to the giant planet until it finally burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere. By tracking Cassini’s path as it got closer and closer the researchers were able to actually measure the distribution of Saturn’s mass within its body, in other words how much of Saturn’s mass was deep in the planet’s core, how much near the surface etc.
The Cassini spacecraft studied Saturn and its moons for thirteen before plunging itself into the giant planet’s atmosphere and burning up! (Credit: Jet Propulsion Labouratory)
That distribution, technically known as the ‘moment of inertia’ was the missing piece of the puzzle to carry out hundreds of computer simulations of an ancient moon of Saturn, which has been given the name of ‘Chrysalis’ being torn apart by the planet’s gravity to form the rings. According to the simulations Chrysalis was about the size and mass of Saturn’s remaining moon Iapetus, about 700 km in diameter. What happened to Chrysalis is that roughly 160 million years ago the gravity of Saturn’s big moon Titan sent Chrysalis too close to the planet where it broke up. So our best estimate now is that Saturn’s big, beautiful ring system probably formed during the age of the dinosaurs!
The beginning of the end for Chrysalis? That’s the leading model for where Saturn’s rings came from. (Credit: PBS Learning Media)
The same thing may happen before too long, cosmically speaking with another moon around planet in our solar system. Phobos, the larger, closer moon of Mars is getting ever closer because of tidal forces drawing it towards the planet. It has been estimated that in about 50 million years Phobos will start to break apart giving Mars a ring system of its own.
Phobos, the bigger, and closer moon of Mars. Are those lines stretched across the moon’s surface signs that Phobos is being pulled apart? Astronomers think that may be so! (Credit: NASA)
Before I go I would like to mention several news stories that have been circulating about the eventual fate of our own planet Earth. According to the stories, based on a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, as the Sun uses up its hydrogen fuel its core will shrink and grow hotter until it begins to burn helium as a fuel. As the core gets hotter the outer surface of the Sun will expand turning the Sun into a red giant star like Betelgeuse or Antares. As the Sun’s atmosphere expands it will engulf the planets Mercury and Venus and perhaps even our Earth. the news stories hasten to assure their readers that these events will not occur for another 4-5 billion years.
When a star runs out of its hydrogen fuel it begins to burn helium. That causes the star to puff up and become a red giant star. The familiar stars Betelgeuse and Antares are both red giants. (Credit: Forbes)
Well actually that’s all been known since about the 1950s when astrophysicists combined the data from the Hertzprung-Russell diagram with nuclear research to determine the life cycle of stars. That was when the idea that our Sun was a ‘main sequence’ star with a life span of about 10 billion years and was about half way through that span was developed. After the main sequence our Sun will have just about one billion years as a red giant. The question of whether or not the Sun will expand enough to devour the Earth has been debated now for more than 60 years.
The Hertzprung-Russell diagram of star absolute brightness versus surface temperature. This diagram was instrumental in understanding the life cycle of stars. (Credit: Center for Astrophysics and Supercomputing)
What the new study was actually about was what would happen to those planets, Mercury and Venus and maybe Earth, that are engulfed by the Sun as it grows. Once again computer simulations were carried out giving a range of possible fates for those planets but anyway you look at it the planets will certainly be destroyed.
Astronomers think that about 5 billion years from now, as the Sun becomes a red giant, there’s about a 50-50 chance that our Earth will be devoured. In either case our planet won’t be a pleasant place to live anymore! (Credit: Forbes)
The first season of HBO’s new series ‘House of the Dragon’ has finished and so I’ll take this opportunity to give my two cents worth. As I’m sure everyone reading this post knows ‘House of the Dragon’ (HOD) is a prequel to HBO’s massively successful series ‘Game of Thrones’ (GOT) and the network hopes to capitalize on the popularity of its biggest ever hit.
HBO’s House of the Dragon (HOD) is the prequel to the network’s hugely successful Game of Thrones (GOT) with much of the same production staff and even input from the creator of GOT George R. R. Martin. (Credit: IGN Nordic)
As a prequel HOD is more constrained in what new ideas can be portrayed than could be done in a sequel. For example, since in the final season of GOT the supernatural creatures the ‘White Walkers’ were totally defeated and destroyed a sequel could replace them by introducing a completely new supernatural foe, maybe some sort of amphibious creature or bat like people. A prequel on the other hand cannot introduce anything too important that’s completely new without explaining why that new thing never got mentioned in the original show.
As a prequel HOD cannot introduce any new ideas or important characters that would cause anachronisms (literally out of time) in the already broadcast GOT. (Credit: IMDB)
HOD definitely succeeds in not going outside the bounds of a prequel. In fact it may succeed too well because whereas GOT is a sprawling tapestry of many stories woven into one, HOD is much more narrow in theme, too narrow in my opinion.
HOD is really just a family squabble played out across the background of seven kingdoms. Nevertheless by concentrating on a single family it loses much of the complexity and variety that made GOT so interesting. (Credit: IMDB)
Season one of HOD concerns itself with the political intrigue between two branches of the Targaryen dynasty that rules the ‘Seven Kingdoms of Westeros’. In HOD the Targaryen family rules Westeros because they control the dragon’s that are by far the most fearsome weapon in the whole GOT Universe.
Since their power comes from their dragons the Targaryen family has taken to revering, almost deifying the creatures. By the way many people have begun to criticize the cinematography of HOD as simply being so dark it’s hard to see what’s happening! (Credit: NPR)
King Viserys Targaryen is the fifth king of that line and when his wife dies in childbirth Viserys names his daughter Rhaenyra as his heir rather than his hot-tempered brother Daemon. Things get even more complicated when Viserys marries a second time to the lady Alicent Hightower who bears the king two sons. The marriage between the old king and the young noblewoman was the contrivance of Alicent’s father Ser Otto Hightower, the king’s first minister, known as ‘the Hand’. Ser Otto seeks to increase his own power by putting his grandson on the iron throne as king. It’s in episode 9, when King Viserys dies that the peace of Westeros unravels as the various claimants grab for power.
As HOD begins the young noblewomen Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower are the best of friends. That doesn’t last long however, not when there’s the throne to be taken. (Credit: Vanity Fair)
And so we have a tale of political intrigue worthy of GOT, but GOT was about a lot more than just than just political intrigue. In GOT in addition to the fight over the iron throne after the death of King Robert Baratheon between House Stark and House Lannister there were the adventures of Daenerys Targaryen across the narrow sea in Pentos, there were the adventures of Jon Snow beyond the Wall in the north, and there were the adventures of Arya Stark with the Assassins, plus a lot more.
George R. R. Martin freely admits that much of his inspiration for GOT came from England’s ‘War of the Roses, a war for the English throne between two branches of the same family. GOT however also went beyond that simple conflict to explore a unique and interesting world while HOD is just a family quarrel. (Credit: Ancient Origins)
There was also a lot more magic, whether it be Bran Stark with the Raven’s eye, or the witch Melisandre along with the religious fanaticism of the High Sparrow, and I’ve already mentioned the demonic White Walkers. In other words there were a lot of things going on at once, I haven’t mentioned a tenth of everything that happened in GOT and trying to keep it all straight was part of the fun. If one story ever got a little boring there were a half dozen other stories to keep your interest.
In GOT the gift of clairvoyance was represented by the three eyed raven (r). Bran Start (l) had it. Aside from dragons there’s a lot less magic in HOD. (Credit: Diply)
HOD isn’t that complicated, and therefore it just isn’t that fascinating. It also isn’t as surprising as GOT was, remember the Red Wedding! A lot of things happened in GOT that were totally unexpected, but that certainly isn’t true of HOD where everything is pretty much predictable. In fact we’re told about Ser Otto Hightower’s plans to put his grandson on the throne at least a dozen times over five episodes before the king dies.
GOT’s ‘Red Wedding’ just before the blood starts to flow. GOT made a point of killing off major characters suddenly and sometimes almost pointlessly, in a sense almost like real life. HOD hasn’t shown that same spontaneity however. Everything that happens is is pretty much telegraphed well ahead of time. (Credit: Herald Sun)
I’ll add one more criticism, at the beginning of GOT we’re told that the Night’s Watch who guard the northern wall are just a shadow of their former glory and at the same time GOT starts with no dragons still alive. Well, when I heard that they were doing a prequel I was hoping to see the Night’s Watch at full strength and learn a little about what happened to the dragons. So far I’ve been disappointed on both counts.
Winter is Coming. In GOT the Night’s Watch were tasked with guarding ‘The Wall’ that kept the wild peoples and supernatural creatures of the north out of the ‘Seven Kingdoms of Westeros’. (Credit: winteriscoming.net)
Now this is only the first season of HOD, and to be honest GOT got a lot better in season 2. Still HOD seems to be much more committed to its main story and when that story sags the whole show becomes uninteresting. And that’s one thing Game of Thrones never was.
In several previous posts I have argued that the United States became the world’s richest and most powerful country not because of our many freedoms, nor thanks to our heroic military. No, in my opinion the US owes it’s status as the world’s superpower because of its educational system, because of our nation’s determination that all of its citizens should have free access to primary and secondary schools while at the same time taking an active role in helping its brightest young people to attend college, whatever their families financial situation. For over a hundred years, from about the 1880s into the 2000s the US graduated more high school students and more college and university students than any nation on Earth. See my posts of 23 June 2021 and 12 July 2017.
Dozens of Colleges and Universities here in the US were initially funded by land grants from the Federal Government. This active promotion of education at all levels of government is the primary reason we now enjoy our status as the world’s richest nation. (Credit: Urban to Ag – WordPress.com)
The benefits of having the world’s largest and best public educational system should be obvious but because so many people nowadays are blind to the obvious I’ll take a moment to mention just a few. By educating its large population the US possessed the trained workforce needed to build the wealthiest economy in history. With the largest number of scientists and engineers that economy grew ever more productive as new inventions were developed and old problems were solved. To put it simply the United States of America had the well-educated, well-trained people it needed to get things done and that, more than any other reason, is why the 20th century was the American century. America’s dominance in science and industry was only made possible by America’s dominance in education.
We used to honor education and our educators in this country. Maybe we’d better get back to doing that. (Credit: ebay)
All that began to change about forty years ago during the Reagan administration. Reagan’s emphasis on lower taxes and smaller government did not immediately effect education, at least it wasn’t supposed to. As time went on however and lowering taxes became the only “proper” way to boost the economy shrinking government budgets meant less money for education leading to lower teacher salaries, larger classroom size and poorly maintained, crumbling schools and school facilities.
Reaganomics does not work. All it has done is caused ever growing deficits and debt while causing an enormous decline in education and infrastructure. (Credit: Mar Martinez Blog)
Public schools faced another threat as well as the “private sector” of the economy came to be preferred over the “public sector”. Private, charter schools grew in number as some parents sought to insulate their children from the growing problems at public schools. Charter schools possessed several advantages over taxpayer funded schools. For one thing since they were not legally obliged to accept all students so that any child who became a disciplinary problem was simply expelled and sent back to the public schools. Because of this, over time discipline in many public schools, especially inner city public schools grew worse and worse when compared to their private school rivals. And because of that those parents who cared about their children’s education more and more sent their kids to charter schools, a vicious feedback mechanism that continues to increase the gap between private and public schools even today.
Charter Schools are ‘For Profit’ institutions. Hence they exist to make money not educate students. When a charter school fails it simply closes its doors leaving its students without a school to attend. (Credit: Weapons of Mass Deception)
Recently even higher education has begun to feel the strain. College enrollment, which reached a peak of 70% of recent high school graduates in 2016, had dropped a full 7% to 63% by just 2020. The causes for this are many but the increasing cost of a college degree along with stories of the crushing debt of student loans on people with bachelor’s degrees has made a growing number of young people question the value of higher education, whether or not a four year degree is really worth the time and money. In fact the state of higher education has declined so much that while back in 2000 the US was second in the world for the proportion of its population between the ages of 25 and 34 with a college degree by 2020 it had fallen to 16th.
The growth in numbers of high school graduates going on to college that occurred during the last half of the 20th century has ended in the 21st, and may even be going down! And that was before Covid! (Credit: Admissionly.com)
So all in all the state of education in this country was pretty bad and getting worse BEFORE the pandemic set in. For the past two years students have been in and out of classrooms, either trying to learn remotely at home on a computer, or at school while social distancing and wearing a mask. The confusion and uncertainty must have surely combined to make learning all that much more difficult.
I don’t know about you but I’m tired of talking about Covid. Unfortunately it’s still out there effected nearly every part of our lives, even education. (Credit: CDC)
Now the results of standardized testing for 9 year olds has shown the effect that Covid-19 has had on education in this country. The National Assessment of Educational Progress tests have been conducted since the 1970s as a means of quantifying the basic ability in math and reading of third graders throughout the country. This year the tests were given to 14,900 nine year old third graders and the results compared to those taken in 2020 immediately before the pandemic.
The worst part of the decline in students test scores is that the students that needed the most help saw the biggest decline. (Credit: John Locke Foundation)
The comparison showed a dramatic difference. For the first time ever math scores declined while reading scores saw their largest drop in over thirty years. Worse, the declines were not evenly spread across all ability levels. In math the top 10% of students saw a decline of only 3 points while the lowest 10% saw a 12 point drop, four times as great. And the decrease had a racial component to it as well. Black and Hispanic students on average saw a full 13 point drop compared to only a 5 point drop for the White counterparts. The declines in reading were similar and together they indicate that two decades of progress in education had been wiped out a little over a year.
Minority students had been making considerable progress, catching up to their white counterparts between the years 1970 and 2017. At least some of that progress has been lost due to the pandemic. (Credit: Education Next)
And for children falling behind in first, second or third grade can lead to continuing problems throughout their school careers. So it is that our nation’s educational system, which has been suffering from neglect for decades, has now been further damaged by the pandemic.
Students who fall behind in elementary school rarely catch up. All to often a human brain is already wasted before they are 10 years old! (Credit: Vox)
I’d like to end this post on a somewhat more hopeful note. On the 24 of August President Biden issued an executive order eliminating $10,000 dollars in student loans for millions of Americans and up to $20,000 dollars for Pell grant recipients. Only time will tell if this is the beginning of renewed emphasis on education in this country, but at least it’s something.
P.S. Just a few days after publishing this post another report was released that details the math and reading abilities of 4th and 8th graders here in the US. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the nation’s report card, has been tracking the advancement of our country’s children since the 1990s and this year’s report showed the biggest decline in math and reading scores ever measured.
According to the report math scores for eighth graders fell in every state, every state, with only 26 percent of students showing proficiency in math, down from 2019’s 34 percent. Fourth graders did little better with 36 percent showing proficiency, down from 41 percent, while there were declines in 41 states. The results for reading were little better with 33 percent of fourth graders and only 31 percent of eighth graders being proficient. Once again the scores for the most vulnerable students saw the biggest drops clearly showing that we are in danger of producing an entire generation of the uneducated at just the time when our nation needs all the brains it can get.
