Month: January 2023

The very Science of Astronomy itself could be in big trouble as more and more Low Earth Orbiting (LOE) Satellites are interfering with our observations of the Heavens.

Even a casual reader of this blog will know that I’m one of those people who likes to look up at the night sky. Seriously, given the choice between watching some banal sitcom or gazing at the Moon, the stars and the planets you’ll find me outside every night surveying the heavens. In fact right now Venus, Jupiter and Mars are all easily visible in the early evening.

Better than any TV show. The heavens above are endlessly entertaining. (Credit: Scholastic Watch and Learn Library)

At the same time I also enjoy finding Low Earth Orbiting (LOE) satellites as they pass overhead here in Philadelphia in the early evening or just before dawn. The easiest to spot is the International Space Station (ISS) which I’ve seen now hundreds of times but I’ve also seen China’s Space Station (CSS) a couple of dozen times, the space shuttle back when it was flying, Space X’s Dragon capsule along with the Air Force’s secret shuttle the X37B, some communications satellites and Earth observation satellites. Those last are really cool because unlike the others they are in polar orbits. I even remember one time as a kid when I was on a Boy Scout camping trip and the Echo 2 satellite passed overhead as we were sitting around the campfire.

Just a big balloon coated with aluminum foil to reflect radio waves the Echo 2 satellite was the first attempt at a communications satellite and very easy to spot from Earth’s surface. (Credit: Space.com)

If you’d like to try to observe some of these satellites as they fly overhead here are a couple of web sites that will get you started: https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/

https://www.n2yo.com/passes/

Now for each of those satellites that are big enough and bright enough for me to see with my naked eye, and despite the light pollution of living in a big city, there are probably a hundred smaller satellites that are also orbiting the Earth along with a lot of space junk. In fact NASA keeps track of 8,000 objects that are orbiting the Earth.

75 Years ago the Earth had only one moon but today it has more than any other planet. Most of these objects are junk but there are some 2,000 active satellites and more all the time. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)

To me those satellites are just more interesting objects to look at in the sky but to professional astronomers they are a real nuisance, and becoming more and more of a problem with time. Just imagine, you’ve been given a precious few hours of observing time on a big telescope that cost millions of dollars, you go though all the steps of pointing the ‘scope at the object you wish to study, spend hours gathering the light of the object, only to have your observation ruined by a streak of light from some passing satellite.

The observatory atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. Time at big instruments like these is precious and to have an important observation ruined by the light of a satellite passing in front is becoming a more and more common problem. (Credit: Institute for Astronomy)

And that problem is growing as more and more satellites are being launched. In fact Space X has over the past (two) years has begun placing and entire fleet of its Starlink satellites into orbit to provide Internet service anywhere in the world. Each time a Falcon 9 rocket is launched for Starlink another 50 satellites are placed in orbit, 50 more objects that could impact astronomical observations.

Dozens of starlink satellites being packed into a nose cone ready for launch. As miniaturization has made satellites cheaper and reusable rockets has done the same for putting them into orbit the number of satellites is increasing at an ever growing rate. (Credit: Spaceflight Now)

Meanwhile Blue Origin plans on establishing its own fleet of 3,200 Internet satellites while AST Spacemobile intends to launch 100 or more Bluebird satellites. The first of the Bluebird satellites, a prototype designated as Bluewalker3 already has astronomers worried about what is to come. You see, once in orbit Bluewalker3 unfolded into a 64 meter square communications array that is almost as bright as the ISS. A hundred such satellites could be devastating to science.

When unfolded in orbit the Bluewalker series of Internet satellites will have almost as much reflective surface as the International Space Station. Blue Origin plans on putting hundreds of these satellites into orbit. (Credit: Universe Today)

Worse yet the problem doesn’t only affect visual light telescopes, the radio signals emitted by all of those satellites also interfere with the observations being made by Radio Telescopes. As companies like Space X continue to make putting a satellite into orbit cheaper and engineers find more and more uses for satellites in LOE the problem of interference can only grow worse.

Radio Telescopes are affected as well because of the the signals being put out by satellites in orbit that is just noise to instruments like these. (Credit: SETI Institute)

In the long term the only real solution is the one that Science Fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke suggested all the way back in the 1950s, astronomical instruments themselves need to go into space. In fact with space telescopes like Hubble, the Chandra X-ray telescope and now James Webb the most important discoveries are already being made by space telescopes. Getting telescopes out of the fog caused by Earth’s atmosphere has been a dream of astronomers for over a hundred years.

Hubble is still the best known space telescope but it has a lot of company. Being well above most other satellites Hubble has an almost unobstructed view of the Universe. (Credit: BBC Sky at Night Magazine)

Starting a few decades from now we will probably see the first actual observatories being constructed on the Moon not far from the first manned bases. Observatories on the Moon, particularity the far side, will not only escape the interference from LOE satellites but also city light pollution and, for radio telescopes electromagnetic interference from TV and radio stations as well. And having telescopes on the Moon, where they can be serviced and repaired from nearby Lunar bases, would be a big advantage over having them orbiting in space, remember the problems Hubble had at first and the dramatic shuttle mission to fix it.

Someday, not too far in the future, astronomy will be conducted from observatories on the Moon or even beyond, to get away from the glare of the Sun. (Credit: Astronomy Magazine)

So observatories on the Moon is almost certainly the long term solution but the transition period will be a long and hard one as numerous important observations are ruined by the streaks of light caused by Earth orbiting satellites, space pollution if you like. 

Two Stories from Nature about the creatures that really run this planet, insects, ants to be specific.

We humans like to flatter ourselves that we rule the Earth. After all there are eight billion of us spread across the globe and our cities, highways and other structures dominate the surface of the planet. Deep down inside however we know that’s not true, we know that scurrying beneath our feet, or hiding just out of sight, or even buzzing in the air around us are untold trillions of little creatures, insects. They were here hundreds of millions of years before us and they’ll be here hundreds of millions of years after we’re gone.

The Number and diversity of the Insects is simply mindboggling. Here is just a small sample of how insects can differ. (Credit: Encyclopedia Britannica)

O’k so insects outnumber us, just take a walk outside and look around and you can see that, insects are pretty much everywhere you look. But just how many insects there are would be enormously difficult thing to calculate. Just think of all of the different kinds of insects there are, all the different environments in which they live, the different ways in which they live.

Our world contains a great many different environments and insects have evolved to fill many ecological niches in all of them. (Credit: Meltano)

That amount of work would take more than the life span of any single naturalist or small group of naturalists. Recently however a team of entomologists, that’s the formal name for scientists who study insects, from the University of Hong Kong did just that for at least one very important family of insects, the ants and the answer is simply mind blowing. 

With all of the different kinds of insects in the world, many as beautiful as these moths, the work of entomologists can be endlessly fascinating. (Credit: Bohart Museum of Entomology)

Now to be honest the entomologists did not actually do any field research themselves. Instead what they did was to compile the results of 489 papers written about ants by scientists from all over the world and over the last hundred years dealing with hundreds of different species of ants. The entomologists who carried out those 489 studies may have had to get down on the ground and estimate the number of ants in each square meter of ground from hundreds of locals spread around the world but the researchers in Hong Kong simply used that data to get an estimate for the total number of ants living here on Earth. 20 Quadrillion, that’s 20,000 trillion.

A map showing the distribution of ants around the world. They do concentrate in the tropics, but then so do living things in general. But basically they are everywhere. (Credit: Science)

To put it another way, that’s about 2.5 million ants for every person alive today, and although ants may be small, that means that when put together they would outweigh all of us. So try to remember that the next time you’re walking down the sidewalk and you see an ant’s nest sticking out of a crack in the cement with a lot of ants around the entrance. If you’re tempted to step on the ants just because you’re big and strong and they’re not, don’t forget they have a lot of friends and in the long run they’re going to outlast you and all of us.

In many ways they really do run the world, and they’ll continue to do so long after we’re gone! (Credit: Active Wild)

As we all know ants are social insects, with many thousands living together in a nest that’s ruled by a single queen who produces all of the eggs from which the many worker ants develop. And in some species the nests have been discovered to carry out some rather amazing, and intelligent construction projects.

Like a beehive an ant nest is centered around a queen ant who lays all of the eggs that turn into worker ants. (Credit: Wagner Pest Solutions)

Leaf cutter ants for example are known to grow, tend and harvest a form of fungi in their nest underground that they use for their main source of food. Several species that don’t like the sunshine use leafs and other ground litter to build covered highways to their sources of food. And the fire ants of the American southeast can avoid being killed during heavy, flooding rains by literally building rafts out of their own bodies.

If their nest is flooded Fire Ants will literally use their own bodies to build a raft to survive until they find solid ground. (Credit: Animals – How Stuff Works)

Fire ants may be a considerable pest in the states along the Gulf Coast of the United States but they are also one of the most highly organized of all the social insects. So synchronized are their movements that in large numbers they seem to flow more like a liquid than as a collection of individual creatures. So coordinated are the ants that their behavior has even been given the name ‘active matter’.

There are even considerable signs of intelligence in the building of a Fire Ant raft. Here it can be seen how the nest’s eggs are kept on top to protect them. (Credit:BugGuide.net)

Now in a series of two articles, one in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics while the second has been accepted at the Physical Review – Fluids (There’s a combination for you) Dr. Hungtang Ko, who recently moved to Princeton University after several years as a graduate student at Georgia Tech, has described some of the details of how fire ants not only build their rafts, but actually control them.

Sounds like a fun seminar to sit in on! (Credit: Twitter)

Right from the start the ant’s actions show a considerable degree of intelligence, at the first sign of rising water levels they begin to gather up the nest’s eggs in order to preserve the next generation. Once the nest is flooded the individual ants don’t swim toward each other but rather just allow the ‘cheerios effect’ to bring them together. The cheerios effect is the name given to the way that surface tension causes small objects floating in water to clump together, like the last few cheerios in a bowl of milk. The skin of each individual ant is water repellant to a small degree but this property increases as more ants join the raft, grabbing a hold of each other with their mandibles and claws. Every ant seems to know what it is supposed to do so the raft can be assembled in about 100 seconds, even storing the precious eggs onboard.

We’ve all seen the ‘Cheerios Effect’ where a small number of floating objects will tend to come together and stick together. (Credit: Ars Technica)

If the floodwaters are quiet, with little or no movement or turbulence, the ants maintain their raft in a flat circular shape but if the water is flowing the ants can actually streamline the shape of their raft to make it more stable. The ants can do this because the raft is actually constructed in two layers with the bottom layer providing stability so that the ants in the upper layer can change their positions to alter the raft’s shape.

Because it is literally built of living material a Fire Ant raft can reconfigure itself even while it’s being used. (Credit: Science News)

The brainpower of each individual ant may be tiny, but studies like Dr. Ko’s provide strong evidence that collectively they are one of the most intelligent animals on this planet.

Archaeological news for November 2022: We owe so much to the Bronze Age Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations of ancient Greece but much of who they were and where they came from are still a mystery.

Here in America our founding fathers were both admirers and students of the Iron Age Greek civilization that was considered by some in the 18th century to be the founding fathers of the European civilization of their day. Many of the ideals of classical Greece, like personal liberty, democracy and a liberal as opposed to religious education became part of American culture because our founding fathers respected the ancient Greeks so much.

The western ideal of ancient Greece. A bunch of guys talking to each other. By the way all those arches were actually invented by the Romans, Greek architecture didn’t use arches! (Credit: Khan Academy)

So then who did the Iron Age Greeks regard as their founding fathers? Who did Socrates, Pericles, Herodotus and Euripides admire and look back to for inspiration? Well, that would be the still more ancient Bronze Age cultures that archaeologists have named Mycenaean on the Greek mainland and the earlier Minoan on the Island of Crete. These two peoples built the first civilizations in Europe and therefore are therefore the founding fathers of so much of human history.

The lands of Bronze Age Greece. The Minoans were centered on Crete and the islands of the Aegean while the Mycenaeans lived on the Greek mainland. (Credit: AllatRa Canada)

For thousands of years most of what we knew about these Bronze Age peoples came from the myths and stories told by the Iron Age Greeks like Homer and later authors. Starting from the late 19th century however archaeologists have learned a great deal about the Minoans and Mycenaeans, sometimes confirming, sometimes contradicting the ancient tales.

Theseus slaying the Minotaur as shown on a jar from the classical Greece period. This is the best known story concerning the Minoan civilization. (Credit: Quatr.us)

Let’s get one thing straight from the start. The Mycenaeans and Minoans did not call themselves by those names. Those terms are strictly archaeological labels for a large number of excavated sites that have been dated to the time of Bronze Age in Greece and Crete. Even Homer didn’t call the heroes of his epics Mycenaeans or Minoans, he called them Achaeans to differentiate them from his own people the Dorians. Recent analysis of the diplomatic archives of the Hittites and Egyptians have indicated that the Mycenaean people may have called themselves something like the Ahhiywans, similar to Homer’s Achaeans, but we have no idea what the ancient Minoans may have called themselves.

According to Homer the warriors who attacked Troy called themselves ‘Achaeans’ and Homer did not considered them to be the same race as his people. (Credit: Reddit)

Whatever they called themselves Homer considered the Mycenaeans to be a completely different people and culture from his own Doric people. And judging by the myths the Mycenaeans considered themselves to be different from the Minoans.

The palace of Knossos as it would have been during the height of the Minoan civilization. (Credit: Hercynian Forrest)

The name Mycenaean comes from the ruins of Mycenae, the largest and wealthiest of the Bronze Age palatial centers that have been excavated in mainland Greece. According to myth Mycenae was the palace of Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks during the Trojan War. The Minoans, on the other hand were named for King Minos the most powerful king of Crete in the ancient myths.

The citadel of Mycenae as seen from the air as it exists today. Obviously the Bronze Age people were very concerned with defense. (Credit: Mycenae Archeology Department)

Both the Minoans and Mycenaeans possessed a form of written language that have been given the names Linear A, for the Minoans, and Linear B for the Mycenaeans. A major advance in understanding these Bronze Age cultures came in the 1950s when Micheal Vintris succeeded in deciphering the Linear B of the Mycenaeans and it was discovered that their language was Greek, not too different from the Greek of Homer. Linear A however has resisted all attempts at translation and we have only guesses as to what kind of language the ancient people of Crete spoke.

Linear B is known to have used symbols to both represent syllables the way our modern letters do…
…and also ideas the way Egyptian hieroglyphs do. (Credit: Mathweb.ucsd.edu)

Now archaeologists and historians have a new tool with which to try to understand who the Minoans and Mycenaeans were, where they came from and what relations they have to the people of modern Greece, DNA analysis. A study has just been published in the Journal Nature that details the genetic makeup of nineteen individuals whose remains were unearthed from Bronze Age sites across mainland Greece and Crete. The study also compared that ancient DNA to that of 334 living people from around the world including 30 individuals from modern Greece.

As ancient people migrated around the world their DNA went with them. By studying the DNA of people around the world today scientists can learn something about those prehistoric migrations. (Credit: Wikipedia)

What the researchers found was continuity; some 60-80 percent of the Bronze Age DNA was shared with the modern Greeks. What’s more, when the ancient DNA was compared to DNA samples from sites dated to the Neolithic period, some 7000 BCE, they again found a great deal of overlap. So it seems that Homer was incorrect when he asserted that the Achaeans were a completely different people than his own Dorians.

The Spartan King Leonidas, leader of the 300 Spartans and played by Richard Egan in the center, claimed to be descended from Heracles. He may have been right. Modern studies show that a lot of Mycenaean DNA lived on to the Dorian people of classical Greece and still lives on today. (Credit: Obscure Hollywood)

So genetically the people of Greece today pretty much come from people who lived in that part of the world nearly 10,000 years ago! Oh, the study did show some foreign influence; about 10% of the Minoan and Mycenaean DNA appears to have come from the region around modern Iran. Also the Myceaeans, but not the Minoans had genetic similarities to people from the steppes of Eastern Europe and central Asia, the land of the people who the classical Greeks would call the Scythians.

During the Classical Greek period the steppes of southern Russia and Ukraine belonged to the nomadic Scythians who the Greeks considered the prototype of a barbarian. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Still, for the most part, the Greeks have been Greek for longer than recorded history, a testament to the Greek spirit and the impact it has had on the Human spirit around the globe.

Book Review: Cosmic Roots (The Conflict Between Science and Religion and How it Led to the Secular Age) by Ira Mark Egdall

Without question Science and Religion are two of the most influential forces in human history dating all the way back to the very beginnings of civilization if not earlier. Without science we’d still be living in caves, or even back in the trees while without the unifying effect of religion we probably would never have built any of the cities that mark the beginnings of civilization. Instead our largest social unit might still be an extended family / clan.

The interplay between cultural forces is what provides the energy for human progress, but sometimes that ‘energy’ can be more destructive than constructive. (Credit: Medium)

Today it seems as if science and religion are polar opposites, and not friendly opposites either. Whenever we hear about a news story that concerns both science and religion it’s inevitably a story of conflict, as if these two social forces are competing for dominance and simply cannot exist in peace.

Trust Feynman to give a succinct quote that really sums up the whole subject. (Credit: Thomas P. Seager PhD)

It wasn’t always that way. In fact the first scientists, the first people who had the leisure time to study the world around them were priest / astronomers who observed the heavens above us in order to try to understand God / the Gods by understanding his / their works. In ancient times, indeed up until just around 500 years ago, science and religion were pretty much the same thing with many of the best known thinkers and philosophers making contributions to both fields.

The first scientists were also priests, trying to understand the gods by studying the heavens where they lived. (Credit: Astronomy Trek)

So how did religion and science break apart, and why are they today in such opposition to each other. That’s the story that ‘Cosmic Roots: The conflict between Science and Religion and how it led to the Secular Age’ by Ira Mark Egdall seeks to tell.

Cover Art for ‘Cosmic Roots’ by Ira Mark Egdall. (Credit: Ebay)

In order to tell that story ‘Cosmic Roots’ begins at the very beginning of civilization, the first cities of Ur, Uruk and Eridu in ancient Sumer and how the need to regulate life by the seasons, when the annual floods would come, when to till, plant and harvest crops led to the development of a class of priests who used the cosmic clock in the sky above us to make those decisions. And even as they were inventing astronomy and mathematics the Sumerians also invented many of the devices that made civilization possible, irrigation, the plow, glass and even the wheel. In Sumer religion and science were one and the same thing, both working together to make civilization possible.

The ancient city of Ur as it exists today. Much of our ideas about civilization come from the people who built Ur and its sister cites nearly 6,000 years ago. (Credit: World History Encyclopedia)

From Sumer ‘Cosmic Roots’ goes on to discuss the Hebrew Old Testament, the classical Greek philosophers and the beginnings of Christianity. The story then continues with the links between Islam, Judaism and Christianity and how the Moslem world saved the achievements of the ancient world while Europe suffered through its ‘Dark Ages’. Through all of this time Mister Egdall points out the ‘disagreements’ between the best thinkers and the established, usually religious order of the time, the trial of Socrates for, among other things being an atheist is one example.

The three religions who all claim to worship the same god yet somehow argue more over just how to worship than all the other religions combined. (Credit: Slideplayer)

‘Cosmic Roots’ then proceeds to describe how the conflict between science becomes a little more open during the late renaissance and the works of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo and finally Isaac Newton. With Newton’s work the Earth was permanently displaced as the center of the Universe with all of the consequences to religion. The big break however had to wait another 150 years and the publication of Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’. Since that time science and religion have taken two very different paths, with science going on to make ever more astounding discoveries while religion struggles to try to find a new role in a world where humanity is not the chief concern of a cosmic creator.

‘If I have seen further it is because I stood on the shoulder of Giants’, claimed Newton. (Credit: Church and State)

Now ‘Cosmic Roots’ purports to be about ‘The Conflict Between Science and Religion and How it Led to the Secular Age’ but actually it is more like a survey of the history of both science and religion, admittedly mostly western science and religion, with an emphasis of the conflicts that have grown between them. In that respect it succeeds admirably, covering a great many of the important moments where science and religion played pivotal roles in history.

Galileo defends himself, and science, against the inquisition. One of the pivotal moments in history it is also a central moment in ‘Cosmic Roots’. (Credit: www.history.com)

However ‘Cosmic Roots’ is not a discussion of why we humans feel a need for something to believe in as truth despite science’s proven ability to discover real truths that we can use to make our lives better. This isn’t Joseph Campbell’s studies of Mythology or James Frazier’s evolutionary scheme of Superstition > Magic > Religion > Science. ‘Cosmic Roots’ is really a history book, not psychology or sociology and as such it is filled with many, many details of who did what and when they did it. Despite having learned much of the story of ‘Cosmic Roots’ years ago Mister Egdall still brought out quite a few details that I’d never heard of.

Author Ira Mark Egdall. (Credit: Facebook)

Nevertheless at the same time all those details was my biggest problem with ‘Cosmic Roots’. That’s because sometimes Mister Egdall got caught up in the minutiae of an event and would veer off into a discussion that really didn’t pertain to his science / religion thesis. One event in particular was the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 CE. Now the rebellion of the Jews against Rome in itself was only of minor importance to the science / religion theme, but it takes up the whole of chapter 12 in ‘Cosmic Roots’ while the final siege is eight whole pages. It was just too much that had little or nothing to do with science / religion. Although interesting and well written, the section simply wasn’t germane to the book’s subject. On the science side Mister Egdall also spends a good bit of time discussing the personal conflicts Newton had with other scientists of his day. Again while interesting, it doesn’t have much to do with religion!

The destruction of the second temple by the Romans was certainly a major moment in history but it had little to do with science. (Credit: The Temple Institute Store)

Still, ‘Cosmic Roots’ tells an important story and tells it well. Many of the issues we face today have their roots in the events ‘Cosmic Roots’ relates. Everyone who wishes to be considered an educated individual needs to known the basics of this story and ‘Cosmic Roots’ is a good way of learning it.