It may not seem like it to such short lived creatures as we humans but the Earth is really a very dynamic place. Yes, it’s true that we do notice the occasional outburst like an earthquake or volcanic eruption but we are hardly aware of the constant and steady but slow, emphasis on slow, movements of the ground beneath our feet. That movement is called Plate Tectonics and as an example the entire North American continent is moving westward at a rate of about five centimeters per year. Now that may not sound like a lot but for an entire continent, and remember the Earth has a lot of time for little movements to add up to big changes.
An erupting Volcano is the most obvious evidence of a dynamic planet, but the ground beneath your feet is constantly moving with the tectonic plates that carry entire continents. (Credit: AZ Animals)
Today the surface of the globe consists of about fifteen different sections or plates, some big, some smaller, that push and squeeze against each other. Sometimes the plates grow, as when seafloor spreading is forcing North American and Europe apart. Sometimes they shrink as when subduction around the edge of the Pacific eats away at the largest plate.
The surface of the Earth is broken up into a number of tectonic plates that push and jostle against each other. That interaction is the cause of most earthquakes and volcanoes. (Credit: ThoughtCo)
Geologists studying plate tectonics of course ask themselves just when in Earth’s history did the process of plate tectonics begin. They know for example that about 250 million years plate tectonics caused all of the land masses to come together to form one giant super-continent that’s been named ‘Pangaea’. However four and a half billion years ago the Earth’s surface was still molten so there certainly weren’t any tectonic plates back then.
As our planet was forming it was under constant bombardment by asteroids and other pieces of space rock. The heat of that energy kept Earth’s surface molten for millions of years. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)
Did plate tectonics begin as soon as Earth had a solid surface? Or were there other processes at work on the early Earth before plate tectonics started? Just when did plate tectonics begin to reshape Earth’s surface?
So did the tectonic plates form as the Earth’s surface cooled and became solid or did they form sometime later? (Credit: Universe Today)
Recent evidence has been found in the Pilbara Craton region of western Australia which sheds light on that question. The rocks of the Craton are among the oldest on Earth’s surface, some are dated back to about 3.2 billion years ago. Using instruments and techniques of their own invention a team of geologists from Harvard University in the US led by Alec Brenner and Roger Fu showed that 3.2 billion years ago the entire Pilbara Craton region was moving at a speed of 6.1 centimeters per year, a rate very similar to that which our modern tectonic plates are moving.
The Pilbara Craton region of western Australia contains some of the oldest rocks on the surface of the Earth. (Credit: Wikipedia)Just by looking at some of the rocks of the Pilbara Craton even an amateur can tell that they are old, that a lot of geology has happened here! (Credit: Reddit)
Doctors Brenner and Fu also found evidence for another of our planet’s dynamic processes, the flipping of Earth’s magnetic poles, north becoming south and south, north, see my posts of 8 February 2017 and 16 January 2017. While there is still a great deal that we don’t understand about how the magnetic poles flip, or why our planet even has magnetic poles for that matter, there is overwhelming evidence that they have flipped 183 times in the last 83 million years. Now the evidence that Brenner and Fu have uncovered shows that the poles have been switching for at least over three billion years.
Geological evidence tells us that our planet’s magnetic poles have ‘flipped’ many times, north becoming south and vice versa. (Credit: NASA Climate Change)
Speaking of their discoveries Doctor Brenner remarked. “It paints this picture of an early Earth that was already really geodynamically mature. It had a lot of the same sorts of dynamic processes that result in an Earth that has essentially more stable environmental and surface conditions, making it more feasible for life to evolve and develop.”
Geologist Alec Brenner having fun. That’s the best part of being a scientists, we actually love our work! (Credit: Research Gate)
So plate tectonics has been causing Earth’s land masses to push and collide and bounce off of each other for over 3 billion years now. And as I mentioned above 250 million years ago all of the planet’s land masses were jammed together in a single super-continent. What about the future? Is another super-continent going to happen some day?
About 250 million years ago the movement of the tectonic plates brought all of Earth’s continents together into a single supercontinent called Pangea. Will that happen again? (Credit: Live Science)
Yes, according to a new study conducted by researchers led by Australia’s Curtin University. In fact according to the model super-continents occur on Earth about every 600 million years so the next one should form about 280 million years from now around the North Pole.
The future supercontinent ‘Amasia’ predicted by the geophysicists at Curtin University. We only have about 280 million years to wait! (Credit: Science)
The researchers have already given the coming super-continent a name ‘Amasia’ because, according to led author Dr. Chuan Huang, it will form when North America and Asia collide causing the Pacific Ocean to vanish. Of course that’s not going to happen for a long time. A long time that is to such short lived mayflies as we humans.
Why does it seem that, whenever we humans can’t make any progress in solving a problem we just change the name of it in order to make it appear that we’re getting somewhere? Take abortion as an example, it’s been a contentious issue now for over fifty years which is why nobody refers to themselves as either pro-abortion or anti-abortion anymore. No, you’re either pro-choice or pro-life, public relations wise it’s always best to be pro-something rather than anti-anything.
Why do we humans always seem to try to hide our meanings? The issue is abortion but we have to use terms like pro-choice or pro-life. In the same way we hide the issue of flying saucers by first calling them UFOs and now UAPs. (Credit: The Survey center on American Life)
Now we’re doing the same thing with Unidentified Flying Objects or UFOs that over the last seventy-five years have been the biggest and longest lasting conspiracy theory, see my post of 30 June 2022. Decade after decade has gone by with no better evidence for the existence of flying saucers than we had back in the 1950s. Still people insist that there has to be something going on so Congress decided to get involved and back on May 17th held meetings to discuss the latest sightings, including two films taken by Naval Aviators. Both the Pentagon and the Intelligence services were called upon to testify and just to let everybody know that they weren’t just sitting on their butts it was decided to change the name of UFOs to Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon or UAP.
Some of the best new evidence for UFOs comes from naval aviators flying off the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. This video is referred ton in the media as the ‘Go Fast’ video because the object in the video appears to be moving at impossible speeds Notice the numbers on both sides of the object in the center. They’ll become important later. (Credit: The Guardian)
Despite all of the ‘new evidence’, which once again is no better than the evidence we had in the 1950s, the military had to admit that it couldn’t explain all of the sightings but that there was no evidence that UFOs were either advanced aircraft built by our enemies, Russia or China, or Extra-Terrestrial in origin. The only decision made at the hearings was to have NASA get involved and see what the space agency thought about the whole matter. Which if you think about it is something the government probably should have done sixty years ago.
Filmed in Great Falls Montana in 1950 the Marianna UFO film, which you can check out on YouTube, is still completely unexplained and still as good of evidence for the existence of UFOs as anything presented since. (Credit: Journalnews)
So NASA gathered a panel of scientists, academicians and other technical experts, including an astronaut to form an ‘Independent Study Team’ to look into the matter. As a group the team is highly qualified, several are professors from major universities like George mason University, Boston University and UC San Diego. There are also several scientists from both private corporations and the US government including the FAA. The team chair is Dr. David Spergel of the Simons Foundation think tank and finally the team included former astronaut Scott Kelly, who spent a year living on the International Space Station and whose brother, another former astronaut is now a Senator from Arizona.
NASA’s ‘Independent Study Group’ for the investigation into UFOs. There’s a lot of talent here but really this is something that should have been tried 60 years ago. (Credit: NASA Science)
On the 14th of September NASA released a report from the Independent Study Team that included analysis of some of the best known recent sightings but that also served to inform Congress of the expertise and scientific assets that NASA could bring to the study of UFOs. Indeed, much of the report, which you can read for yourself at the web address: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/uap_independent_study_team_-_final_report_0.pdf
reads something like a sales brochure for NASA. Throughout the report phrases like “NASA – with its extensive expertise in these domains and global reputation for scientific openness” or “NASA’s assets can play a vital role” show that the space agency would be happy to undertake a long term study of UFOs, with adequate funding of course.
It’s true, in order to do science somebody has to pay for it! NASA has always known that funding is key to space exploration. (Credit: SlidePlayer)
To show what NASA can do the report does include analysis of several well known recent sightings especially the ‘Go Fast’ video taken by a Naval Aviator flying off of the USS Theodore Roosevelt aircraft carrier, a video that was shown at the congressional hearing back in May. From the measured data shown on the video itself and using a little simple mathematics the team was able to demonstrate that is was the Navy plane that was going fast, not the object it filmed. In fact the object was traveling no faster than 40 mph, and with the wind. The report confidently states that in all likelihood the UFO was drifting with the wind, in other words it was nothing more than a misidentified balloon.
The NASA teams explanation of the ‘Go Fast’ video shown in the figure above. Many UFO sightings happen when the observer is moving but thinks it’s the strange object they’re looking at is what’s moving. (Credit: NASA)At the same time as it’s studying UFOs NASA could use the money to study actual Phenomenon like the Red Sprites shown here. (Credit: NASA)
So, should the federal government fund NASA to conduct a long term examination of UFOs in the hope that when the final report is published everyone will accept it. As I said above this is something that might have made sense sixty years ago but today the ‘true believers’ on either side will never accept any answer but the one they want. My fear is that NASA will explain the great majority of the UFO sightings while at the same time there will always be a small percentage of ‘Unknowns’. This is the same situation that Project Blue Book wound up in sixty years ago and which only served to generate rumors that the federal Government was ‘hiding the truth’ about flying saucers, an accusation that NASA may very soon find itself to be the target of.
With all of the times that the government has kept the truth from us can you really blame people for thinking the same thing about UFOs? (Credit: Nixon Library)
If space aliens were actually visiting Earth, in such great numbers as UFO believers insist wouldn’t they have contacted us by now, or conquered us by now or at least have DONE SOMETHING BY NOW!
Back in the 1950s aliens flying around our skies kinda made sense. But after 75 years you’d think our visitors would have done something by now! (Credit: iMDB)
Whenever we think of the objects that archaeologists discover at ancient sites what usually comes to mind are items made of precious metals or jewels. Artifacts like king Tutankhamun’s death mask or the jewels of Helen found at Troy are certainly among the most famous of archaeological finds. These are the sorts of archaeological treasure than we commonly find displayed in museums.
Finding artifacts like King Tut’s death mask is what we usually think of as the work of archaeologists, but sometimes the things archaeologists study are far less material. (Credit: Joy of Museum’s Virtual Tour)
However there is another class of ancient ‘find’ that is far more valuable to archaeologists in their study of past cultures, language. Written records, whether on papyrus or vellum or even inscribed in stone can tell us much more about ancient peoples than gold or jeweled trinkets, if we can read them. Additionally there are the remains of bygone languages in the very words we use today, the study of which has it own special class of scholars, Philologists.
Ancient texts like this papyrus scroll can tell us much more about the lives of ancient people’s than any jewelry or weapons because it carries their thoughts on it. (Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Today’s post is about two examples of how archaeologists study long forgotten languages, and how, using the most modern of techniques they are learning more about ancient peoples by better understanding their languages.
While a conversation disappears once it’s finished the words that people use last longer and contain traces of the words people used thousands of years ago. (Credit: National Institute od Health)
One of the earliest forms of writing is cuneiform, a technique that was developed to record the language of the ancient people of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians and Babylonians. Basically a scribe would take a soft clay tablet and, using a reed cut to a special wedge shape, make triangular marks in the clay that could be read by another scribe. The clay tablets were then fired just like a piece of pottery, producing a written record that can last for millennia.
Perhaps the oldest form of writing is Sumerian Cuneiform as show here. Such tablets are more valuable than any golden jewelry to archaeologists. (Credit: Britannica)
The Mesopotamians recorded everything, inventories of livestock or grain, tax revenues, speeches by their kings and of course stories like the saga of Gilgamesh. Hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets have been excavated from scores of different sites along the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, writings that could contain a wealth of knowledge of the peoples of Mesopotamia.
Over the thousands of years it was used, 3500 BCE to 500 BCE, cuneiform changed quite a lot. Scholars studying ancient Mesopotamia have to learn all of the variations if they want to really understand the history of that early civilization. (Credit: Getty)
The problem is that so very few modern scholars can read Mesopotamian cuneiform, and because of damage to the tablet, often large sections are simply gone, it can take even an expert weeks to decipher a single record. Because of this only a small percentage of cuneiform tablets have ever been read. No one knows what priceless piece of history remains unknown simply because the tablet on which it is written lies unread in the basement of some museum.
All museums have storage rooms where objects not on display are kept. Many of these treasures have only had a cursory examination, their true importance is unrecognized until some researcher comes along and realizes how valuable they are. (Credit: Pinterest)
Enter a computer, an Artificial Intelligence algorithm to be exact. An interdisciplinary team of computer scientists and language historians, led by a Google software engineer and an Assyriologist from Arial University has trained an AI to perform translations of Mesopotamian cuneiform. After its development the AI was given a test of its abilities known as the Best Bilingual Evaluation Understudy 4, the same test that a human student of cuneiform would take as a evaluation. The AI’s score was better that the team had expected and good enough to be considered ‘High Quality Translations’.
Thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) computers today can even learn ancient languages and translate ancient texts thousands of times faster than any human. (Credit: Live Science)
The AI model did show difficulty in understanding some of the nuances of translations, idioms that have no exact counterpart in English for example. Even with the occasional error however the fact that the AI could produce translations in seconds has led the researchers to suggest that it be used to translate inventories and other mundane writings. If the AI’s translation indicates that the tablet is something more interesting, a peace treaty between two warring cities for example, then a human translator can quickly check the work, just to be certain. With more experience the translation AI will be progressively better so that, in perhaps just a few years the massive backlog of cuneiform tablets will finally be read.
Cuneiform tablet containing part of the epic of Gilgamesh. How many ancient stories, both real and imagined, wait to be read in all of the cuneiform tablets that haven’t been translated yet! (Credit: No sweat Shakespear)
Clay tablets containing cuneiform markings are actual physical objects whose survival after thousands of years allows modern scholars to recreate the dead languages of ancient Mesopotamia, but how can anyone reconstruct a dead language for which there are no written records. That is the problem facing scholars who try to understand the origins of the large group of modern languages known as Indo-European.
Family chart of the modern Indo-European languages. All these languages, and many now forgotten, stem from one original ‘Proto-Indo-European’ language. (Credit: University of Ottawa)
So how do philologists know that certain languages, say English and Persian for example, are actually related, that they evolved from a common language, proto-Indo-European that was spoken in prehistoric times. The historic records give us a start. We know that in the 5th century CE Germanic tribes called the Angles and the Saxons invaded Roman Britain and the language they spoke became modern English, so English is a dialect of German. Or we can look at the number of similar words, like how the English Water = German Wasser, or Mother = Mütter, or Morning = Morgen and etc. In the same way we know that modern Italian, Spanish and French all descend from Latin.
Here the English word ‘Two’ and all of its Indo-European counterparts are traced back to an ancestral Proto-Indo-European word ‘dwoh’. (Credit: Starkey Comics)
Then, in the late 19th century British Officers serving in India came upon a number of ancient scrolls in Sanskrit, the ancient ancestor to modern Hindi. Those officers, educated at either Oxford or Cambridge, were shocked to realize that Sanskrit was an awful lot like Greek, so Sanskrit and therefore Hindi are a part of the Indo-European languages.
Ancient Sanskrit compared to several modern languages, including Hindi. (Credit: Quora)
Today there are over 160 languages that are recognized as being a part of the Indo-European group, including more than 50 that are officially dead, that is, no one alive today speaks them as their primary tongue. Nearly half the people in the world speak an Indo-European language.
Today most of the world speaks an Indo-European language. (Credit: Reddit)
So the questions of where and when was the original proto-Indo-European language spoken is one of the most important in all of anthropology. Many theories have been proposed, often without much evidence and much blood has been spilled in the arguments.
With so many different peoples speaking Indo-European languages the question becomes, who were the original Proto-Indo-Europeans? (Credit: Pinterest)
I’m not kidding about the blood, before World War 2 the Nazi maintained that Germany was the site of the original proto-Indo-Europeans, whom they called the ‘Aryans’ and that they were the pure descendants of the Aryans, everyone else being of ‘inferior’ blood. Such was the basis for their racial cleansing and the holocaust.
Hitler and the Nazi used a bastardy version of real archaeology and anthropology to justify their murder of millions of people they didn’t consider real ‘Aryans’. (Credit: CEU Press)
Most modern scholarship however considers that the steppes of Russia-Ukraine directly north of the Black Sea or the area of the Caucus Mountains where Turkey, Iran and Armenia come together are the likeliest places for the proto-Indo-Europeans with a time frame between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago. Now an international team of linguists and geneticists led by the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have established the largest ever dataset of both language and genetic correlations of Indo-European words and people.
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig Germany is a leading center for the true study of how the human species evolved and how civilization developed. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Using a computer algorithm the team performed a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of all of their data. What the analysis concluded was that the original home of the Indo-European languages was in the Caucus mountains of eastern Anatolia about 8,100 years ago but that by 7,000 years ago there was already a split into five main branches with many going to the steppe region north of the Black Sea. In other words the answer appears to be a mixture of the two leading theories.
First appearing in the region around Modern eastern Turkey and Armenia about 8,000 years ago the Indo-European people spread to both the east and west. (Credit: Phys.org)
Language is very much a part of the foundation of civilization; as such it is one of the primary concerns of anthropology and archaeology. Studying the language of ancient peoples is essential in order to understand their lives.
When it comes to getting your money’s worth NASA certainly can’t complain about the two Voyager space probes that were launched way back in 1977. After having accomplished all of their mission objectives by visiting the gas giant planets of, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune the spacecraft are still operating, sending back priceless data after 45 years in space. Now the two probes have left our solar system and are in interstellar space giving scientists their first in situ measurements of conditions in the void between the stars.
Like a classic car that, with careful maintenance just keeps getting better with age, the two Voyager space probes have proven their value a dozen times over. (Credit: BBC)
So when a problem occurs with such a venerable spacecraft it gets a lot of attention from the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratories (JPL) who built and have managed the Voyager missions from the beginning. Especially when they caused the problem. You see the trouble happened on the 21st of July when a series or routine orders meant to align Voyager 2’s antenna so that it was correctly aimed at Earth contained a typo that instead caused the antenna to point in the wrong direction, a full 2º away from our planet. As a result Voyager 2 was unable to either send or receive any signal from Earth.
Like a telescope a dish antenna aims its signals at a very precise point in the sky. If that aiming is just slightly off, communications failure! (Credit: Wikipedia)
Thankfully Voyager 1 was unaffected and the good news was that Voyager 2 is programmed to automatically realign back to Earth several times a year so whatever else happened the spacecraft would try to reconnect on October 15th. Nevertheless NASA was determined to reestablish communication with Voyager 2 before then.
The Voyager probes were built by, and are still managed by the engineers at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory in Pasadena, California. If those guys can’t fix a problem, nobody can! (Credit: Jet Propulsion Labouratory – NASA)
The first thing for NASA to try was to see if they could pick up Voyager 2’s signal using the biggest antenna they had, the giant dish antenna outside Australia’s capitol Canberra. That large dish is a part of NASA’s Deep Space Network that keeps in contact with our most distant probes. On the 2nd of August the Canberra receivers succeeded in picking up what JPL termed Voyager 2’s “heartbeat”. It was therefore decided to try to send the correct signal to the probe in the hopes of restoring full communications. Adding to the complications is the fact that the spacecraft is so far away from Earth that it takes 18 hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager 2, and another 18 hours for any reply to come back.
NASA’s Deep Space Network handles the communications for all of NASA’s interplanetary probes and is highlighted by the big 34 meter dish antenna outside Canberra, Australia. (Credit: YouTube)
Despite all the difficulties on the 7th of August NASA succeeded in regaining full communications with Voyager 2, a marvel considering how old, and how far away Voyager 2 is. So we are still getting priceless data about interstellar space from humanity’s oldest still active spacecraft, Voyager 2 was actually launched before Voyager 1.
The launch of Voyager 2 back on 20 August 1977. How many of our TVs or Radios or other electronics from back then are still working? (Credit: Universe Today)
Two other unmanned space probes have also been making some news this past month as both Russia and India attempted to land spacecraft on the Moon. For Russian this was the first time in 47 years that they had tried to land on our nearest neighbor while for India it is their growing space program’s first attempt at a landing on any other world.
Hoping to be the first nation to successfully land near the Moon’s south pole Russia also hoped that Luna 25 would revive their once mighty deep space exploration program. (Credit: AP News)
Although Indian’s Chandrayaan-3 probe was launched first, back on July 14th, it was Russia’s Luna 25 that first attempted a landing on the 19th of August with a result that was a complete disaster for the Russian space program. As the lander was starting its descent an engine misfire caused a crash landing with the complete loss of the spacecraft.
The crash of LUNA 25 caused the crater in the center of this image and was another in a long series of disappointments for the Russian space program. (Credit: BBC)
Chandrayaan-3’s attempt four days later was more successful making India only the forth nation to soft land a spacecraft on the Moon. The landing also marked the first time any spacecraft had landed near the Moon’s south pole, a region that may become very important in the coming years as it is thought that deposits of water ice could be hidden there, water that could help sustain a future Lunar base or colony. In addition to an array of instruments to study the surface Chandrayaan-3 also carries a small rover that will operate for at least one Lunar day, which lasts 14 Earth days.
Image of the Chandrayaan-3 lander on the Lunar surface taken by its small rover. Both spacecraft represent a big success for India’s growing space program. (Credit: The Times of India)Image of the Chabdrayaan 3 Rover taken by the main lander. (Credit: Hindustan Times)
The results of the two Moon landings may be a sign of what is to come for both countries with India on the way up while Russia is on its way down. As the Soviet Union, Russia was once the clear leader in space exploration but the country’s last major achievement by itself in space was the MIR space station back in the 1990s. Since then Russia has been in a downward spiral with Vladimir Putin robbing its treasury to keep his oligarchs happy while starting fruitless wars against his neighbors.
Vladimir Putin is more interested in grabbing pieces of his neighbors territory than he is in making the lives of his people better let alone in the exploration of space. (Credit: U. S. Naval Institute)
India, on the other hand has been steadily growing both in terms of its economy and its access to technology. India’s space program is a sign of that growth and a source of national pride. With the landing of Chandrayaan-3 India becomes part of an elite group space faring nations with even more ambitious plans for the future.
Now India has even succeeded in sending another probe to study the Sun! With plans to launch a manned mission in 3-4 years India is set to become a space powerhouse. (Credit: Space.com)
There is also some news about manned spaceflight and again it’s all about Space X and Boeing. On August 25th the Crew Seven mission was successfully launched to the International Space Station (ISS) with one of Space X’s Dragon capsules atop one of their Falcon 9 rockets. This mission is Space X’s 11th manned spaceflight and the seventh to send a full crew to the ISS under NASA’s commercial crew program.
A night time launch started NASA’s crew 7 crew on their way to the ISS. They successfully docked less than 24 hours later. (Credit: Austin County News)
The four astronauts aboard Dragon come from four different nations, all a part of the ISS consortium. Commander Jasmin Moghbeli is a former US Marine pilot now with NASA while the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Andreas Morgensen is from Denmark. Rounding out the crew are mission specialist Satoshi Furukawa from Japan and Russia’s Konstantin Borisov. All four will remain aboard the ISS for six months in what has become standard operating procedure thanks to Space X.
Five days after the arrival of the Crew 7 astronauts the Crew 6 team returned to Earth in what is becoming a routine operation. (Credit: Space News)
Meanwhile Boeing, which was expected to compete with Space X for missions to and from the ISS, has had a seemingly endless series of problems with its Starliner space capsule. Last April Boeing finally succeeded in sending an unmanned Starliner capsule to the ISS as a test flight and it was hoped that a final, crewed test flight would take place by the end of the year.
NASA planned on Boeing’s Starliner (l) competing with Space X’s Dragon capsule (r). It hasn’t worked out that way. The score to date is eleven manned missions for Space X to zero for Boeing! (Credit: Florida Today)
Complications arose with the capsule’s parachute system however along with some adhesive that could pose a fire risk under certain circumstances. The work of satisfying NASA’s rigid safety protocols grew and grew until now it seems as if that final manned test flight of Starliner will not take place until March of 2023 at the earliest.
In May of 2022 the parachutes worked well on Starliner’s unmanned test flight. Nevertheless Boeing has had problems with the system and parachutes are one system you want to be certain are going to work perfectly. (Credit: EarthSky)
Despite all of their difficulties with Starliner Boeing insists they are committed to the program, having secured enough parts to build a further six capsules. If Starliner does succeed in taking astronauts to the ISS early next year it is hoped that the first crew mission could take place just about a year from now. Going forward then Space X and Boeing would alternate crew staffing missions until the end of the ISS program that is expected to be in 2030.
Now scheduled to continue in operation until 2030, the International Space Station is humanity’s first real home away from Earth. (Credit: Scientific American)
Even with all of the problems, space exploration is expanding with more countries like India becoming involved, with private companies like Space X reducing costs and with new missions to explore our solar system and the infinite beyond.
The legend of the Loch Ness Monster dates back at least to the year 565 CE when a Christian missionary named Saint Columba traveling near the loch used the power of God to drive a colossal beast back into the water. For the next 1400 years there were occasional local stories about the beastie but to the world at large the Loch Ness monster remained little known.
Loch Ness in Scotland as seen from the air. It’s really not that big and for a ‘monster’ to hide there all these centuries? (Credit: Wikivoyage)
That all changed in the 1930s when first there was a sighting by the manageress of the Drumnadrochit Hotel that was reported in the press as a ‘water beast’ in the loch. But the Loch Ness monster really came to the attention of the world in 1934 when a photo of the ‘monster’ was purportedly taken a London gynecologist named Robert Kenneth Wilson and published in the Daily Mail.
First published in The Daily Mail in April of 1934 this image from Loch Ness made the monster a household word. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)
That photo, see above, showed a long necked, large bodied creature reminiscent of something from the age of the dinosaurs. Based on Doctor Wilson’s photo the idea that ‘Nessie’ was a plesiosaur that somehow escaped the extinction of the dinosaurs took hold and since then many attempts have been undertaken to obtain concrete evidence of the monster’s existence.
An aquatic reptile from the age of the dinosaurs the plesiosaur has become the ‘de facto’ Loch Ness Monster. (Credit: Dinosaur Database)
As the years went by those searches became ever more technically advanced with motion picture cameras and even sonar being used to find Nessie. All to no avail as expedition after expedition failed to find anything more than grainy images of something causing ripples in the still waters of the loch. The last big search for the monster was back in 1972 when over a hundred observers spent days keeping watch on every stretch of the 40-kilometer long loch. Nothing was found. Nessie remained a mystery.
In 1969 a miniature submarine was even launched in the loch to try to find ‘Nessie’. It found nothing! (Credit: The Independent)
Which is hardly surprising because, in addition to no solid evidence, there are many good arguments against any group of really large animals living in the loch, especially leftovers from the age of the dinosaurs. First off, the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago but Loch Ness is a glacial lake formed during the ice ages and is less that 100,000 year old! So how did a group of plesiosaurs survive for 66 million years while waiting for Loch Ness to form?
Loch Ness formed back during the ice age as a glacier gouged a deep canyon in the Earth. When the glacier melted it left a lake that we now call Loch Ness. Therefore Loch Ness is less than 100,000 years old and could not have protected any plesiosaurs from the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Even more troubling, Loch Ness is not a very fertile body of water, there’s very little vegetation to serve as the basis of a food chain. It’s been estimated that the supply of food in the loch could not support more than a dozen large Nessie sized animals, far to small for a breeding population. And last of all, that very famous picture of the monster taken in 1934 was finally revealed to be a hoax. The last survivor of the original group that made the photograph confessed in a 1999 book that the monster was in fact a toy submarine they’d bought at Woolworth’s and to which they added a plastic head and neck. The toy was then floated in the loch and several photos taken, Doctor Wilson didn’t even take the pictures but he was in on the hoax, passing the images along to the Daily Mail. Ever since the image had first been published experts had pointed out that there was nothing in the picture but the creature making it impossible to judge how big the thing was.
The reality of that famous picture of Nessie. (Credit: PBS)
Still none of that has stopped people from trying to find the beastie. And now the biggest hunt since 1972 is ready to try again and again with the latest in technology. The Loch Ness Investigation Bureau (LNIB) has joined forces with Loch Ness Exploration (LNE) to again cover the loch with more than a hundred pairs of eyes but this time they will also have drones surveying the loch from above, some with infrared cameras to help spot Nessie by body heat. (By the way, if Nessie is a reptile then it’d be cold-blooded and invisible in the infrared!)
So here we go again. Another search that will undoubtedly find a few ‘tantalizing hints’ but no real evidence. (Credit: CNN)
Thanks to the Internet even people around the world can join in. Volunteers sitting at home can observe the loch through one of the many cameras that are being set up. If anything unusual is spotted the volunteer can then raise an alarum so that more people and instruments are concentrated to the site of the possible sighting. The ‘researchers’ running this expedition, which has been dubbed ‘the quest’ have even promised that all of the findings will be collated and analyzed for publishing.
The only good thing to say about Nessie is that the monster does bring tourists to Scotland! (Credit: Time)
Why? I’m sorry but I have to ask that question. If there were a group of large animals living in what is actually a small body of water they would surely have been discovered by now. A million people a year visit Loch Ness and every one of them, even the doubters at least look for Nessie. And by this time wouldn’t a dead carcass of one of them washed ashore. Let’s not forget that plesiosaurs are air breathing reptiles, so like dolphins they have to raise their heads above the surface of the water on a regular basis.
Just this year a dozen dead whales have floated onto east coast beaches. If there was some large animal living in Loch Ness, after all these centuries wouldn’t the dead body of one of them been washed ashore??? (Credit: NPR)
So by now it’s really time to give up on Nessie. We’ve looked in every corner of Loch Ness and the creature simply isn’t there. In fact we humans now so dominate this planet that there is little chance, very little chance of there being any animal larger than ourselves existing that isn’t known to science.
A still from the famous movie of Bigfoot. A man in a gorilla suit, what do you want to bet? Like all mythical creatures it’s difficult to separate the hoaxes from honest sightings and in the end no real evidence of anything! (Credit: MendoFever)
And the money that is being spent on searches of Loch Ness, or searches for Bigfoot or other mythical creatures, could be better spent on expeditions in the Amazon or other under-explored areas of the world. If carried out by actual naturalists such expeditions could easily find a hundred totally new species of insect with another hundred of other kinds of invertebrate and maybe a few vertebrate species as well.
Biologists estimate the half of the world’s insects are still waiting to be discovered. What if the money being wasted on Nessie and Bigfoot and all the other mythical creatures was used to look for creatures we know exist. (Credit: Etsy)
That money would then actually serve to increase our knowledge of the natural world, instead of just being wasted looking for something that was never there to begin with.
