Category: Science

Space News for April 2023: Analyzing the results from NASA’s DART mission and how the discovery of a new asteroid may mean that we have to use those results sooner than we thought!

You may recall back last September when NASA’s DART spacecraft slammed into an asteroid as a first test of a planetary defense system, see my post of 8 October 2022. The DART mission, which stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test, was designed to see if it was possible to alter the trajectory of an asteroid that was on a collision course with Earth as a way of preventing that impact.

The Dart spacecraft was intentionally send to crash into the small asteroid Dimorphos, which orbits around the larger asteroid Didymos. By carefully measuring the orbital period of Dimorphos astronomers can calculate the change in the asteroid’s velocity that the collision caused. (Credit: DART – NASA)

The target for the DART spacecraft was the asteroid Dimorphos, a 160m wide space rock that orbits around a larger, 750m asteroid named Didymos. By slamming into Dimorphos at 6km per second it was hoped that the 600kg DART spacecraft would change the time it takes the smaller asteroid to orbit around the bigger one. In astronomy it’s just easier to measure the time it takes something to happen rather than positions or distances.

Long before we could measure the distance to the Moon astronomers knew how long it took the Moon to orbit the Earth simply by keeping track of the Moon’s Phases. In astronomy it’s just easier to measure time than distance. (Credit: MoonConnection.com)

Dimorphos’ orbital period around Didymos before the collision with DART had been measured at approximately 11 hours and 55 minutes. After the collision astronomers back here on Earth took their time to accurately measure the new period. Once the new orbital period had been determined the laws of orbital dynamics could be used to calculate how much the asteroid’s velocity had been changed.

Once astronomers have measured the orbital period P, they can then use orbital mechanics, this is Kepler’s third law, to calculate other quantities like the average distance r between the two bodies. (Credit: burro.astr.cwru.edu)

It wouldn’t have to be by much either for the test to be successful because if you can change an asteroid’s trajectory by only one meter per second a year before it hits the Earth then that asteroid would miss our planet by more than 25,000 km. That’s why NASA’s plan for protecting Earth is to locate any potentially dangerous asteroids and if any are headed our way to gently alter their trajectory years before they get here. That’s considered to be a safer and less costly way to protect the Earth than Hollywood’s usual technique of blowing them up with nuclear weapons.

In the movie ‘Meteor’ the US and USSR send a bunch of H-bombs to blow up an asteroid that’s headed for Earth. NASA hopes to develop a bit more gentle technique. (Credit: Amazon.com)

So the DART spacecraft slammed into Dimorphos and the collision was so brilliant that several telescopes back here on Earth were able to photograph it. Not only was the impact itself impressive but the force of the collision ejected a large amount of material from the surface of Dimorphos generating a tail behind the asteroid similar in appearance to a comet’s. Since then astronomers have been observing Dimorphos in order to learn just how successful the DART mission was.

Image of the actual DART collision. The big asteroid Didymos is lower left while Dimorphos is upper right and obviously erupting in some fashion. (Credit: New York Times)

Now the results are in and it is clear that DART did better than anyone had expected. In a series of five papers in the journal Nature astronomers and aerospace engineers presented a detailed account how the DART collision changed the Didymos-Dimorphos system. NASA had hoped that the collision would reduce Dimorphos’ orbital period by seven minutes, from 11 hours 55 minutes down to 11 hours 48 minutes but instead the orbital period dropped by 33 minutes, more than four times what was predicted. The scientists are convinced that it was the large amount of ejected material knocked off the asteroid that generated the larger than anticipated result. Based on ground observations it is estimated that as much as 0.5% of Dimorphos’ entire mass may have been exploded into space, and remember for every action there is an equal an opposite reaction.

The trail of ejected material from Dimorphos. The amount of material ejected by the DART collision is estimated to be as much as half a percent of Dimorphos’ total mass. (Credit: El Pais in English)

So the DART mission clearly showed that the idea of protecting Earth from an asteroid impact by nudging it slightly years before the asteroid reaches us is a good one. More than that however DART gave scientists and engineers a good baseline for determining exactly how to go about giving an asteroid that nudge.

Possible future mission to visit an Asteroid, or perhaps push one out of our way? (Credit: Forbes)

And we may have to make use of that knowledge before long because NASA has recently announced that the space agency has discovered a small asteroid that might, emphasis on might, collide with Earth on Saint Valentine’s day in the year 2046, 23 years from now. The new asteroid has been given the name 2023 DW and is about 47m in size so it’s considerably smaller that Dimorphos. Still if an asteroid that size were to strike a heavily populated area it could cause a lot of damage. Right now the Jet Propulsion Labouratory (JPL) estimates that 2023 DW has about a 1 in 560 chance of striking our planet while the European Space Agency puts the odds at 1 in 625. You can be certain that astronomers are keeping a close eye on 2023 DW and so over the next year or so those estimates are likely to change.  If asteroid 2023 DW continues to be a threat who knows, it may very well become the first target of a real attempt to use the lessons from DART to protect our planet from an asteroid impact.

New Studies indicate that Sea Level Rise due to Climate Change over the next 100 years could be far worse than previously expected. Meanwhile the big Oil companies continue to make record profits.

Over the last several years various aspects of Climate Change have been getting a bit more attention in the news than previously. Both the continuing drought in the Western North America, East Africa and Europe as well as the abnormally severe storms, hurricanes, tornadoes along with massive floods throughout the world have been making so many headlines that global warming can no longer be completely ignored.

So far this year has been unprecedented in the number and destruction of Tornadoes here in the US. How anyone can continue to doubt the reality of Climate Change is beyond my understanding. (Credit: American Museum of Natural History)

Now all of that news coverage is a good thing but all of those stories about changing weather patterns have obscured another piece of the climate change problem, sea level rise. Sea level rise may not get the headlines, basically because we haven’t begun to see the worst effects of it yet, but millimeter by millimeter it just keeps it just keeps on building, a measured 20cm rise worldwide over the last 100 years. Already some of its effects have been noticed in low laying parts of the world like the Mississippi delta or islands like the Seychelles. At the same time the entire US gulf and Atlantic coasts have been subjected to an ever growing number of ‘King Tides’, periodic flooding of land areas even when there has been no rain for days. In the city of Miami seawater has been known to come bursting out of sewers while the Sun is shining brightly.

While Hurricanes, Tornadoes and Droughts get the most press coverage, King Tides caused by the slow but constant rise in sea level are becoming a regular nuisance in many coastal cities. (Credit: Science / How Stuff Works)

Now two news studies, each looking at the long term consequences of sea level rise from opposite directions have concluded that the problem will become much worse, much quicker than expected. The first study, published in the journal Nature Communications by an international team of scientists details the results of a series of model based computer simulations.

The ice in Greenland is melting faster than ever and now there is evidence that the ice is melting from the bottom up indicating that the whole ice cap could become unstable! (Credit: CNN)

Those results predict that not only will the melting of the ice caps on both Greenland and Antarctica continue, but that the melting will accelerate, causing a much greater rise in sea level by the end of the century. In fact the models show that, if global temperature rise should exceed 1.8ºC above pre-industrial levels the melting of the ice caps would reach irreversible, catastrophic amounts with a sea level rise by the year 2100 estimated at one meter above today’s level.

It was all smiles as the nations of the world agree to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees back in 2015. It seems however that nobody realized that meant that had to do something other than just smile! (Credit: State of the Planet – Columbia University)

Now remember, ever since the Paris climate accords of 2015 both scientists and politicians have been pushing for a limit of 1.5ºC rise in global temperature, and pretty much failing to do anything substantial to actually stop the world from going past that goal. Indeed, the latest estimates have the global temperature rise going above 1.5ºC sometime in the next five years. And once we’re past 1.5ºC can 1.8ºC be far behind. So the amount of water being dumped into the oceans by melting ice caps is going to increase rapidly, threatening the low laying areas of every nation on Earth.

Worst case scenario for sea level rise here in the US. Even without this extreme case many of our largest cities will become unlivable due to constant floodings and storm damage. (Credit: Forbes)

The second paper concerns those low laying areas and concludes that we have been greatly underestimating the amount of global land area that will be lost due to sea level rise. The study, published in the American Geophysical Union’s journal Earth’s Future, utilizes data from NASA’s ICESat-2 LiDAR satellite, which was launched back in 2018, to determine the elevation above sea level of land areas throughout the globe.

Well they finally did it, NASA put a LASER in space. Don’t worry this one is intended to measure land elevations not blast cities to rubble. (Credit: ICESat-2 -NASA)

Previous measurements of land elevations were carried out by airplanes using radar, but those measurements were inaccurate, primarily because radar cannot penetrate beneath vegetation to the true ground surface. The ICESat-2 satellite uses the much more precise Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) that is better able to determine the true elevation of land areas.

Elevation maps showing the hight above sea level of land areas are a common tool in geography but if sea level continues to rise we are going to need to redo all of them! (Credit: SERC)

What the researchers found was the elevation of much of the world’s low laying land areas was being overestimated. Not by much, only a meter or two for the most part, but when coupled with a one meter rise in sea level it means that just about twice as much of the world is going to sink beneath the ocean by the year 2100 than was previously thought.

Salt Marshes are among the richest and most important ecological environments in the world. A 1 meter rise in sea level would result in most of the world’s salt marshes simply disappearing. (Credit: The Pew Charitable Trusts)

That means that millions more people will see their homes swept away by floods. Whole nations like Bangladesh may simply cease to exist while seacoasts around the world will be inundated. Rich cities like Miami and Boston may be able to afford to build dikes to preserve them, but what about poorer cities like Mumbai and Bangkok? What about the numerous small coastal towns in New Jersey, North Carolina, Florida and Texas?

One of the most densely populated counties in the world Bangladesh is also probably the most threatened by sea level rise. (Credit: UCAR Center for Science Education)

So it may not be long before you start hearing more and more stories on the news about widespread flooding across the globe. It’ll happen slowly, millimeter by millimeter as the sea rises, but it’s going to happen.

By building a large interconnected system of dykes the people of the Netherlands succeeded in building a country that is mostly below sea level. However that task took centuries to complete and Holland isn’t that big a country. Imagine the cost of doing that for the whole world! (Credit: Quora)

Now, if you find the latest estimates on sea level rise and the flooding of the world’s coastlines associated with it to be a bit depressing then here’s some news that I’m certain will cheer you up. The major oil companies have recently all announced that they made record profits during last year 2022. So even as the planet burns up you can still have a safe investment for your 401K that will be paying dividends in the post-apocalyptic hellscape to come.

Is this what the future holds for New York and other coastal cities? (Credit: Rolling Stone)

For the record, Exxon-Mobile posted a profit in 2022 of $55.7 Billion, that’s profit, not sales, while Shell announced $39.9 Billion in profit. The other oil giants saw similar levels of profit, Chevron $35.5 Billion, BP $27.7 while France’s Total Energies announced $36.6 Billion. All of these numbers were records for each company and came while the world was recovering from the Covid-19 pandemic and tittering on the brink of a recession.

Even as people all over the world complained about the sharp rise in the price of gas the oil companies were quite happy. (Credit: Bloomberg.com)

Of course the oil giants insist that they did nothing wrong, it was the pandemic’s fault really. You see during all of the Covid lockdowns the demand for oil and natural gas dropped so they all had to cut way back on production. Then last year, as life throughout the world began to return to normal the demand for oil and natural gas shot up. Add to that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia is the world’s third largest oil producer and second largest producer of natural gas, and the price for a barrel of oil went through the roof. There was nothing the oil companies could do; the law of supply and demand literally forced them to make ungodly amounts of money.

How much is Russian oil paying for Russia’s war in Ukraine? How many wars so far this millennia have been fueled by oil? (Credit: Fair Observer)

All of which is just more evidence of how hard it is going to be to get the human race to stop polluting the world with fossil fuels. There are simply too many people making too much money from oil and natural gas, I won’t even mention coal, for them to be simply outlawed. The question therefore becomes how much of the world’s land mass has to be flooded, how severe do storms have to become, how many people have to suffer in droughts or wildfires before we finally do something? And will it be too late by then?

Space News for March 2023: The International Space Station is becoming a busy place as three manned missions make news and NASA is planning the development and testing of a Nuclear Rocket Engine.

When the International Space Station (ISS) was first assembled in Earth orbit more than twenty years ago now the astronauts that made up its crew traveled there using either the American Space Shuttle of the Russian Soyuz manned spacecraft. After the Shuttle was retired there was a time when the only way to get to the ISS was aboard a Russian Soyuz. During that period NASA was busy working on its Commercial Crew Program where two private corporations, Space X and Boeing, would develop their own man capable spacecraft and NASA would pay them to take astronauts to and from the ISS.

The International Space Station (ISS) under construction with the space shuttle Endeavor docked on the left. (Credit: NASA)

One of these corporations, Space X has succeeded admirably. The first ever manned launch of a private space capsule took place on the 30th of May in 2020 and took two astronauts to the ISS for a three month stay; see my post of 3 June 2020. Since then Space X has carried out another six manned space missions. Five of those missions were a part of NASA’s commercial crew program but one was the first ever completely private space mission, see my post of 2 October 2021.

A night time launch is always spectacular! The launch of the Crew 6 mission on its way to the ISS. (Credit: Spectrum News 13)

Now Space X has launched its eighth manned mission, the sixth commercial crew mission to the ISS for a regular crew transfer. Liftoff took place on the 2nd of March with arrival at the ISS the next day. The astronauts aboard the Crew 6 mission are Stephen Bowen and Warren Hoburg of NASA along with Sultan Al Neyadi of Dubai and a Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaer.

Crew 6 Dragon capsule docking at the ISS. (Credit: Space Launch Now)

As with all of the ISS crew missions the four astronauts who took off aboard a Space X Dragon capsule are scheduled for a six month stay on the space station. Just a week after the crew 6 astronauts arrived at the ISS the crew five team, who have served aboard the ISS since October of 2022, returned to Earth aboard their Dragon capsule, splashing down in the waters off of Florida. The engineers at Space X have performed their tasks so well that another Space X mission to the ISS has now become rather routine.

Crew 5’s splashdown was also at night. (Credit: NASA)

Not so for Boeing and its Starliner man capable capsule. After years of delays the capsule finally launched on its first, unmanned test flight back on the 20th of December in 2019 only to have so many software problems that the capsule could not complete its mission to rendezvous with the ISS. After more than a year of corrections a second, successful unmanned test flight was conducted in May of 2022, see my post of 11 June 2022.

On its second unmanned test flight the Starliner capsule did succeed in reaching the ISS and docked with the station. (Credit: Mashable)

Now Boeing is preparing for the final, manned test flight of Starliner. Currently scheduled for mid to late April the final test flight will carry astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the ISS for a six day stay. Total mission length will be eight days. If successful NASA could finally have two completely different space launch systems for taking its astronauts to and from the ISS.

Scheduled for a launch in April, the Crew of the first manned launch of the Starliner capsule are (L-R) astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Eugene Wilmore. (Credit: Wikipedia)

Meanwhile the Russians have been having a series of problems with their venerated Soyuz space capsule. First flown back in 1967 the initial flight of the Soyuz capsule was a disaster as the cabin lost pressure during re-entry killing Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. After those early problems however the Soyuz spacecraft has become a reliable, if not exactly comfortable means for getting into Earth orbit.

Gas leaking out of the Soyuz capsule can be seen in the photograph. The current Russian crew at the ISS was supposed to use this craft to return to Earth. Obviously an alternate means of getting home is necessary. (Credit: Fox 9)

Until now, because the Soyuz capsule that took the current Russian crew to the ISS has sprung an air leak and is now incapable of returning those cosmonauts to Earth. Not only that but a recent Soyuz derived Progress cargo ship also developed a pressure leak soon after arriving at the ISS.

Based on their Soyuz manned capsule the Russians developed an unmanned cargo ship Progress to supply the ISS. The most recent Progress send to the ISS developed a leak similar to the one in the Soyuz capsule. Is there a connection? (Credit: Wikipedia)

This puts Russia in something of a quandary, how do they get their astronauts back down to Earth without a usable spacecraft, Russia’s space agency Roscosmos has decided that the leaking Soyuz module could be used in an emergency but would rather not use it at all if possible.

The Soyuz Rescue capsule arriving at the ISS. The current schedule is for this capsule to return the current Russian crew to Earth in September. Assuming this capsule doesn’t spring a leak! (Credit: NASA Spaceflight)

In the end what the Russians did was to launch another Soyuz spacecraft to the ISS to bring the cosmonauts home. That unmanned capsule was launched on the 23rd of February and reached the ISS on the 25th. The Russian crew, with their American colleague, are now scheduled to return to Earth in September.

However, should this third Soyuz type craft also experience problems the only viable backup plan would be for the Russians to pay Space X to send one of their Dragon capsules to the ISS as a rescue vessel. With all of the tension between Russia and the US happening now such a last resort would be a very costly embarrassment to the Russians, so I think Roscosmos will leave their cosmonauts stranded in space for a while if it becomes necessary.

Being stranded in Space is no fun as Mark Watney in ‘The Martian’ can tell you! (Credit: Outside Magazine)

One last little item before I leave. Back in the early days of the space age NASA carried out a very serious program to study the possibility of using nuclear rockets as a propulsion system for spacecraft. The program was called Project NERVA and did in fact develop several nuclear rocket engines that were successfully static tested on the ground. However, because of the danger posed by both the radioactive exhaust as well as the possibility of an explosion during launch spreading radioactive material over a wide area the program was canceled in 1972.

Basic design of a Nuclear Thermal Rocket. (Credit: NASA)

The idea behind a nuclear rocket engine is simple. Instead of using chemical combustion to heat the rocket’s exhaust the heat of a nuclear fission pile can be used to heat almost anything, even something as simple as water. Calculations, backed up by the tests carried out in project NERVA, have shown that such a nuclear rocket can provide 3 or more times as much ‘push’ as even the best chemical rockets. Which is why NASA was so interested in the concept.

Actual test of a Nuclear Thermal Rocket back in the early 1970s. (Credit: AutoEvolution)

Now NASA is teaming with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to revive the nuclear rocket engine. DARPA carries out research for the Department of Defense and as such is a natural partner for the development of a nuclear rocket. The initial schedule is for a test flight of a nuclear rocket is 2027.

Yea, I know, it’s the Pentagon but they have supported some really important technology over the years! (Credit: Internet of Business)

There will be some changes to NASA’s original idea for project NERVA however. For one thing we have a lot fewer explosions happening during the launch of a rocket so the danger of nuclear material being spread over half of Florida is much less. At the same time the nuclear rocket itself will not be used to lift a payload into orbit. Rather the nuclear rocket will only be used for deep space exploration outside of Earth orbit. That way no radioactive exhaust will be dumped into the atmosphere.

Proposed design for a Mars spacecraft. Two Nuclear Thermal Rockets are to the left while an Orion space capsule is docked with the crew habitat module to the right. (Credit: IEEE Spectrum)

The plan is of course to use a nuclear rocket to power the first manned missions to Mars, the space agency’s long desired goal. So hopefully, in about ten years or so, a spaceship assembled in orbit will ignite its nuclear rocket engine and begin a long journey to the red planet, mankind’s first trip to another planet. 

With all the stars in the Universe there should be at least a few Civilizations out there whose radio emissions we could have detected by now but we haven’t. Why? Is there a Great Filter that eliminates all but a very few alien Intelligences and are we approaching it?

For as long as people have looked up at the sky and wondered, we’ve thought about whether there is anybody living up there? A thousand years ago or more we thought that the gods lived in the heavens but today we look, and listen with our radio telescopes to see if we can find any sign of alien intelligences out there.

Is anybody there? With hundreds of billions of stars, anyone of which could have an Earth type planet, how can there not be other intelligences in the Milky Way? So where are they? (Credit: Unsplash)

After all there are simply so many stars in just our own galaxy the Milk Way, the latest estimate by astronomers is about 200 Billion! So even if only a very, very, VERY few stars have planets with civilizations on them there should be at least a hand full of other intelligent, technological species out there.

In the movies Alien Intelligences are always coming to Earth. Not so in reality. (Credit: Walmart)

In 1961 the astronomer Frank Drake even thought up an equation to ‘estimate’ the number of civilizations ‘N’ there should be in the Milky Way. The equation starts with the number of stars in the galaxy, 200 billion and then multiplies that by a number of different factors:

Astronomer Frank Drake and his equation. (Credit: Wikipedia)

P=The fraction of stars that have planets. Recent observations by the Kepler space telescope and other planet finding searches put this at least at 10% and perhaps as high as 50%.

During its life the Kepler Space Telescope showed us that there are at least thousands, more likely millions or billions of planets orbiting stars in the Milky Way. (Credit: NASA)

G=The fraction of planets that are in the so-called ‘Goldilocks Zone’ where liquid water can exist. Here on Earth wherever there is liquid water there is life so biologists think that liquid water is essential to life. At present we have very little data about the value of G but based on our own solar system it’s around 20%.

The ‘Goldilocks Zone’ is where a planet is just the right distance from its star for liquid water to exist. Not to close and hot, not too far and cold, just right! (Credit: NASA)

L=The fraction of planets with liquid water where some form of primitive life does arise. Biologists have no idea what the value of this could be; some say it is probably as small as a few percent while others argue it could be as large as 90%.

At what point does complex chemistry become life? We’re still trying to figure that one out. So how hard is it for simple life to form on other planets? (Credit: CK-12 Foundation)

I=The fraction of planets with some form of life where an intelligent, technically advanced species eventually evolves. The value of this fraction, your guess is as good as anybody’s.

What would a city built by alien intelligence look like? (Credit: Newsweek)

So the Drake equation looks like this:

N=200Billion * P * G * L * I

And again, even if F, G, P, and I are all quite small when multiplied by 200 billion there should still be a dozen or so intelligent species in the Milky Way. Which again begs the question, why haven’t we found any yet?

Oh, my mistake, I forgot one last factor. You see when Drake thought up his equation he also considered the average lifetime of an intelligent, technological species, the factor ‘T’. After all, even if we don’t like to think about it species do go extinct. The trilobites all went extinct, the dinosaurs went extinct, so did the wholly mammoths. If an intelligent species lived on another planet 100 million years ago but has since gone extinct then we certainly wouldn’t be receiving radio signals from them today!

In the movie ‘Forbidden Planet’ the alien Krell destroyed themselves a million years ago, but their machines still existed. (Credit: YouTube)

Recently a diverse group of thinkers, including space engineers, political scientists and just some smart people have taken a good look at that last factor and wondered, what if T is really small? What if being an intelligent, technological species is actually a short road to extinction? Remember out of the 4.5 billion years that Earth has existed our civilization has only been here for 10,000 years, a mere flicker of time. We have no real evidence that intelligent species survive any longer than non-intelligent ones do. Maybe they actually don’t survive very long at all.

Every species has its own particular niche, its own way of making a living in its environment. We have yet to see if Intelligence is actually a good long term niche or not! (Credit: Eco-Intelligence)

Evolutionary biologists talk about ‘survival strategies’, having a bony, internal skeleton would be one example. That certainly is a good survival strategy, there are thousands of vertebrate species on Earth and they’ve been around for at least 450 million years. What about flying as a survival strategy, again there are tens of thousands of flying insects, birds, bats and there used to be flying reptiles as well.

So is intelligence a good survival strategy? You would think so at first sight. After all we now dominate this planet as no other single species ever has. We are so dominate that we’re even killing off thousands of other species, destroying whole ecosystems while we covert the planet to suit our pleasures of today and pay no attention to what the world is going to be like tomorrow.

Just a few of the thousands of species we humans have driven to extinction. And will we be the cause of our own extinction? (Credit: Encyclopedia Britannica)

By now I guess you see where I’m going with this. Do intelligent species actually destroy themselves by developing technologies they haven’t got the wisdom to properly use? The researchers, led by Jet Propulsion Labouratory engineer Jonathan H. Jiang, have christened this idea ‘The Great Filter’ that filters out, eliminates those species that allow their own technology to destroy them.  

Notice for a seminar by Jonathan Jiang at JPL. Sounds like fun to me! (Credit: YouTube)

This idea isn’t completely new; back in the 1960s a lot of people were afraid that a nuclear war would destroy humanity. In the original Star Trek series Captain Kirk several times described the threat of nuclear war in the 20th century as “Our weapons outgrew our wisdom”. That line would be an early version of the Great Filter concept.

Will this be humanity’s final, most enduring symbol? (Credit: Fair Observer)

And the researchers do include a nuclear war as one of the possible ways that an intelligent species could destroy itself. The paper, which has been published on Cornell University’s Arxiv pre-print site, see link below, https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2210/2210.10582.pdf, goes further however, including other man-made threats to ourselves like climate change and pollutants such as plastics and cancer causing forever chemicals.

Or will we simply poison ourselves. (Credit: Greenpeace)

Now the researchers also included one possible extinction cause that I’m going to have to argue against. In science fiction the idea of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that supplants humanity is familiar from such movie series as The Terminator and The Matrix, and with the continuing development of cybernetics it is a definite possibility. However any such scenario would only represent one intelligence being replaced by another, perhaps better adapted intelligence. Such an event, whether here on Earth or on another planet would not cause the extinction of intelligence on that planet. Therefore I don’t think that AI should be included in the Great Filter.

If artificial intelligence does supplant us does that actually count as the extinction of intelligence? (Credit: Quora)

With that one exception I find the paper’s analysis to be depressingly logical. The threats we are causing by our own selfishness and stupidity are real and growing. That’s why the Doomsday Clock maintained by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently been reset to a mere 100 seconds before midnight. There simply isn’t much time left for us to acquire the good judgment we need to solve all the problems we have created for ourselves. The wisdom we need to safely pass through the Great Filter.

So the big question is, does humanity have the wisdom it needs to survive? (Credit: Quora)

That dilemma could, indeed probably is true for all intelligent species anywhere in the cosmos. As we sit warm and comfortable here on Earth it’s easy to ignore the fact that the Universe is actually a very hostile place for life. And maybe it is even more hostile to intelligence.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing its Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) space probe for an April launch. By the time it arrives at the Sun’s largest planet it will have been joined by NASA’s Europa Clipper and together they will survey the mini-solar system that are the moons of Jupiter.

At a factory in France belonging to the aerospace corporation Airbus a 6,200 kg spacecraft has completed its assembly and testing and is now being packed up for shipment to its launch facility. The space probe is the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer or JUICE, which is scheduled to liftoff aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from the ESA’s Kourou launch complex in French Guiana this April.

The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft and the worlds it will explore. (Credit: NASA)

The JUICE spaceprobe is Europe’s first robotic mission to the outer solar system. Indeed it will be the first non-NASA spacecraft to go beyond the orbit of Mars. Because of the immense distances and energy needed to reach the Sun’s outer worlds JUICE’s journey to Jupiter will take eight years and require several gravity boosting flybys of both Venus and the Earth.

The Pioneer 10 space probe was the first man made object to reach the outer Solar System, and it then continued on the leave the Solar System. So far only the United States has succeeded in reaching as far as Jupiter. (Credit: NASA)

The mission of JUICE is to make multiple flybys of three of Jupiter’s big moons, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, all of which are known to be covered by enormous sheets of ice beneath which it is thought there could be oceans of liquid water. Water that could be the habitat of living creatures.

Of Jupiter’s four big ‘Galilean’ moons the three on the right are covered with ice and are the targets of the JUICE space probe. Io, on the left, is the exact opposite being very hot and covered with volcanoes! (Credit: BIRA-IASB)

To carry out its mission JUICE carries 10 instruments including a Laser altimeter for making a 3D maps of the surfaces of the moons and an ice penetrating radar to discover if there really are oceans beneath those icy surfaces. And as the space probe travels back and forth between Jupiter’s moons it will use magnetometers and radiation detectors to study the complex magnet fields generated by the largest planet in the solar system and how that field effects, and is effected by its moons. Power for all these instruments is provided by a huge 100 square meter solar panel. Such a large array is needed because Jupiter is so far from the Sun that the sunlight out there only 1/25th as powerful as it is here on Earth.

The JUICE space probe undergoing testing at Airbus. (Credit: The Guardian)

After a period of three and a half years studying the three moons JUICE will enter into orbit around Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, for further study. Eventually the spacecraft’s orbit will decay and JUICE will crash onto the surface of Ganymede.

Bigger than the Planet Mercury Ganymede is the largest moon in the Solar System. Beneath that icy coating astronomers think there is a liquid ocean containing more water than there is here on Earth. And could there be life as well? (Credit: Earth Sky)

As it carries out it’s mission of discovery JUICE will not be alone. Scheduled for launch in October of 2024 NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft will actually reach its target of the moon Europa a month or two before JUICE arrives at Jupiter. Since the Europa Clipper is still undergoing its final testing and isn’t scheduled for launch until late next year I’ll hold off on a lengthily description of that space probe.

NASA’s Europa Clipper space probe will leave Earth after the ESA’s JUICE but will arrive at its destination of Europa first! (Credit: NASA)

What I will do however is take a few minutes to discuss why both the ESA and NASA are so interested in Jupiter’s icy moons and it all has to do with the search for liquid water elsewhere in the solar system. You see, here on Earth wherever you can find liquid water there you will find life and perhaps the simplest definition for life is complex chemicals dissolved in packets of water. The space agencies therefore feel that their best chance for finding life elsewhere in our solar system is to find liquid water.

As seen in this image from Hubble, Europa is completely covered in ice but scientists are certain that there is an ocean beneath that ice. In the past few decades NASA has followed a plan of ‘Follow the Water’ in its search for life off the Earth. (Credit: Hubble Space Telescope)

Now Jupiter’s icy moons certainly have water in the form of ice, we can see that in pictures taken as far back as the Voyager probes. At that distance from the Sun however the question is, where’s the heat coming from that’s needed to create the theorized oceans beneath the ice.

The same forces that cause the Volcanoes on Io should be generating hot ‘thermal vents’ on Europa. Given both water and energy the possibility of life is very good! (Credit: MarineBio.net)

The answer lies in the tidal forces generated by massive Jupiter and it’s four big moons. As each moon orbits around Jupiter it’s pulled and squeezed not only by Jupiter’s strong gravity but by the three other moons as well. That pulling and squeezing causes friction deep inside each moon and fiction generates heat, lots of it.

Here on Earth the Tides cause the oceans to rise and fall twice every day. This actually does generate a tiny amount of heat. The Tidal forces, and so the heat, generated by enormous Jupiter and its four big moons are much larger. (Credit: Lumen Learning)

We know that is true from our observations of Jupiter’s innermost moon Io, which is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The heat generated by tidal forces inside Io must be tremendous and so we estimate that the heat inside Europa and maybe Ganymede should be enough to have melted some of their ice, producing oceans that could easily contain more water than all the oceans here on Earth. And once again, where there’s water, there’s a good chance for life.

The moon closest to Jupiter, Io feels the full force of Jupiter’s tides making it the most volcanic body in the Solar System. (Credit: NASA)

We now know that Mars once had oceans, and if JUICE and Europa Clipper do find oceans on Jupiter’s moons how long will it be before we do finally find life out there?

Archaeology News for February 2023: Two recently discovered sites remind us of the exquisite beauty of Roman art and how even the ‘Barbarians’ who destroyed the empire still tried to emulate it.

There can be no question that the rise and subsequent fall of the Roman Empire is one of the most important stories in all of history. For a little village in the middle of the Italian peninsula to gain control of the entire Mediterranean and all the lands around it is a testament to the military technology and organization of the Roman people.

Edward Gibbon’s ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ is considered one of the most influential books of all time. (Credit: Easton Press)

There’s no doubt that the Romans were brutal, conquering other nations one by one then collaborating with some of the conquered upper class while enslaving pretty much everyone else. Rome’s willingness to rule through local leaders, backed up by the iron fist of the legions whenever the lower classes got out of hand led to an empire that lasted more than 600 years.

After defeating the rebel slave army of Spartacus the Romans Crucified every prisoner they took in a line the stretched from Mount Vesuvius to the gates of Rome itself ! (Credit: Zainab’s Lounge)

But the Romans were more than just soldiers and politicians, they also possessed the accumulated artistic and engineering skills of the civilizations that came before them all the way back to Babylon. With those skills they built beautiful cities throughout their empire and decorated them with monuments and statues, frescos and jewelry the like of which the world had never seen. In this post I shall be discussing two recently discovered archaeological sites that remind us not only of how skilled the ancient Roman artists were but of how hard the barbarians who finally defeated Rome sought to emulate and preserve Roman art.

With all of their skill Roman art could be quite beautiful, yet at the same time still a bit brutal! This is their idealized version of the first emperor Augustus. (Credit: Smarthistory)

The first story comes from the small Italian town of San Casiano dei Bagni just a short drive of 160km north of Rome and dates to a time around 200 BCE. Researchers had been involved in the excavation of an ancient Roman bath, itself an important find when they began to unearth a series of twenty-three beautiful and exquisitely preserved bronze statues from the mud beneath the bath.

One of the statues from San Casiano dei Bagni after being cleaned, the quality of the workmanship is obvious. This must have been a very valuable piece even back in Roman times, so why was it deliberately buried in the mud around a Roman bath? (Credit: WWNY)

The statues are believed to be of some of the Greco-Roman gods like Apollo and Hygieia, yes the ancient Roman goddess of Hygiene. The archaeologists from the University for Foreigners in Siena who are carrying out the excavations think that the statues represent votive offerings to the gods in the hopes of receiving good fortune in return. The statues were deliberately sunk in the waters near the bath in much the same way, and for the same reason we still throw pennies in a wishing well. In fact along with the statues the archaeologists have uncovered over 6,000 bronze, sliver and gold coins dating to between the second century BCE and the first century CE so the site must have remained a ritual center for centuries. As for the statues themselves they are now undergoing a thorough cleaning in a labouratory at nearby Grosseto before they are to be put on displayed in a new museum dedicated to Roman artifacts in San Casciano.

Another staute (a Roman God?) as it was found in the mud. The mud actually turned out to be a excellent method for preserving the statues. (Credit: The Guardian)
In addition to the Statues the archaeologists have unearthed thousands of Roman Coins. It seems the Romans used San Casiano dei Bagni in the same way that we use ‘Wishing Wells’. Only they were a lot more serious about paying to get their wishes! (Credit: Reddit)

Such was the power and prestige of Rome that even the barbarians who finally conquered the western half of the empire continued to value Roman art and artifacts, even to the extent of incorporating Roman art into their own whenever they could. An example of this reuse of Roman art long after the fall of Rome was discovered recently at a dig in Northamptonshire.

Archaeologists at the Northamptonshire site doing what Archaeologists love to do, dig. (Credit: North

The site is an undisturbed burial of a high class Anglo-Saxon woman that has been dated to about 1,300 years ago. The grave contained a number of interesting objects including two decorated pots and a copper plate but the most spectacular find was a chain necklace composed of thirty pendants, all very rare and valuable.

Artists reconstruction of the woman’s burial in Northamptonshire. With all of the grave goods that were unearthed this woman must have been an important member of her community. (Credit: The Conversation)

The objects on the necklace varied considerably, some were made of gold, others of semi-precious stones while some were made from Roman coins, some 300 years after the Romans abandoned Britain. The use of Roman coins as pieces in an Anglo-Saxon necklace speaks to how powerful an influence Rome was, even centuries after its fall.

Some of the Jewelry discovered at the Northhamptonshire burial site. The coins are actual Roman coins and the whole collection has the feel of an attempt to copy ancient Roman style. (Credit: CNN)

The most beautiful pendant, and almost certainly the centerpiece of the necklace is a large square piece made of red garnets set in gold that has a basic cross shape. The inclusion of a very valuable necklace with a cross motif centerpiece in the grave has led researchers to speculate that the deceased was a high born lady, and perhaps an early Anglo-Saxon convert to Christianity. Unfortunately the only organic remains were a few fragments of tooth enamel so any details of the person buried have probably been lost forever. As with the Roman statues the finds from Northhamptonshire are currently undergoing cleaning and conservation efforts at the Museum of London Archaeology (Mola) and will go on display sometime in the future.

A human face cast in silver is one of the more intriguing finds from the Northamptonshire burial. Archaeologists have found evidence that the woman buried was a Christian so could this have been meant to be the face of Jesus? (Credit:The Past)

Studying the art of an ancient people is one of the most powerful tools archaeologists have in trying to understand those people. The art of ancient Rome left its mark on many of the cultures that came after it.

Paleontology News for February 2023: Two new Fossil sites tell us exciting stories about the world of millions of years ago while a large scale study takes on the question of why the Dinosaurs died when the asteroid hit while mammals, birds, crocodiles and turtles all survived.

There are two kinds of paleontologists in the world, field explorers who discover sites where new and exciting fossils are found, and labouratory analysts who use the fossils that are unearthed to understand the big picture of life in the past. Today’s post is about two sites where new discoveries are being made along with a new study, based on evidence from fossil sites around the world, that tackles the question of why some creatures, such as our mammalian ancestors, survived the asteroid strike 66 million years ago killed all the dinosaurs. As usual I’ll begin with the oldest story in geological time and go forward from there.

At fossil sites around the world paleontologists unearth the data, the fossils that is, they need to study past life on Earth. But at the same time a lot of work is needed to understand what that data is telling us. (Credit: Phys.org)

Paleontologists have categorized the history of life here on Earth into a large number of ‘periods’ some of which are better known that the others. The Cambrian period is known for being the first period with large numbers of species who possessed ‘hard parts ‘ that can fossilize. The Devonian period is known as the ‘age of fishes’ where vertebrate animals with bony skeletons began to dominate the oceans, and by the end of the period the land. The Jurassic and Cretaceous periods are both known for the many familiar dinosaur species that lived during them.

The time that multi-cellular life has existed is known as the Phanerozoic Eon, which is then subdivided into eras and periods. (Credit: Digital Atlas of Ancient Life)

The Ordovician period isn’t that well known. Coming right after the Cambrian the animals that lived about 470 million years ago (mya) aren’t really that much different from their Cambrian ancestors. I have quite a few Ordovician specimens in my collection and they are mostly bivalved brachiopods along with a few trilobites and some other invertebrates like corals.

The animals of the Ordovician period seem strange and primitive to us because the story of life was just getting started. (Credit: Natural History Museum)

Now a newly discovered fossil site in Morocco may help to increase interest in the Ordovician period by highlighting the diversity of large arthropods that existed 470 mya. The site is a part of the Fezouata shale that outcrops from the Atlas Mountains and which has recently been designated as one of the 100 most important geological sites in the world.

Some of the fossils discovered in the Fezouata shale. Several of these creatures seem to be related to the earlier creatures discovered in the famous Burgess shale from the Cambrian period. (Credit: Nature)

The Fezouata shale as a whole is well known for the exquisite condition of its specimens, with the soft parts of the animals often as well preserved as their hard shells. However most of the specimens in the Fezouata consist of creatures that lived and crawled on the shallow sea floor. Until recently very few specimens of free swimming or nektonic animals had been found. The new site, which is being excavated by paleontologists from the University of Lausanne and the University of Lyon, does precisely that, providing specimens of dozens of new species of arthropod that swam freely, some of which are as much as 2m in size.

The Fezouata shale location with the Atlas mountains in the distance. Ever notice how the most inhospitable regions always seem to be fossil hot spots. (Credit: Lyell Collection)

   It is thought that the new site may be different from the already known Fezouata sites because the carcasses of larger animals where transported to deeper water by underwater landslides. Regardless the new site opens yet another window into a relatively unknown time in the history of life on Earth.

The Fezouata fossils are helping to fill in a gap in our knowledge of the earliest multi-cellular species of life. (Credit: Center for Geosphere Dynamics)

Another such window is the Berlin Ichthyosaur State Park in the state of Nevada. Unlike the Fezouata site in Morocco, which contains specimens of dozens of different species, the Berlin site is very much dominated by specimens of the bus sized ichthyosaur species Shonisaurus popularis.

Berlin Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada is open to the public and is certainly a fun place for the whole family! (Credit: Travel Nevada)

Living during the age of dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs were aquatic reptiles that seem to have filled the same ecological niche as dolphins, porpoises and whales do in the oceans today. In a recent issue of Current Biology a team of researchers from the University of Utah, the Smithsonian Institute, Vanderbilt University, The University of Nevada at Reno, the University of Texas at Austin, along with Vrije Universiteit in Brussels and Oxford University in the UK, have published a new paper that suggests that Shonisaurus popularis may have resembled whales in more ways than just size and shape.

As large as many of today’s whales, Shonisaurus popularis was the giant of the oceans during the age of the dinosaurs. (Credit: Prehistoric Wildlife)

In our modern seas several species of whales are known to migrate thousands of miles in order to give birth in relatively predator free, protected areas of the oceans. The researchers think that the Berlin site may have served the same function for the ichthyosaurs who ruled the seas back when dinosaurs ruled the land.

Many species of Whale migrate over thousands of kilometers in the oceans following their food sources as well as seeking safe areas in which to give birth to their young. (Credit: Daily Mail)

As I said above the fossils at the Berlin Ichthyosaur park are almost exclusively Shonisaurus popularis, there’s little sign of anything that the ichthyosaurs could feed upon, or feed upon them. The fossils also consist primarily of fully grown adults and newborns, no juveniles.

Baby’s first picture. A newborn Sperm Whale cafe. Like humans whales seem to prefer to keep older children outside of the nursery, and out of the way when a delivery is happening. (Credit: Youtube)

 For a long time it was thought that the Berlin site may represent an ancient beaching, where a group of Shonisaurus popularis got confused and swam up onto a beach that they could not escape from, much as dolphins and porpoises do today. However a chemical study of the rock around the fossils shows no sign of any toxin that could have led to such a beaching. And a 3D analysis of the positions of the fossils indicates that the animals did not all die at the same time but rather over hundreds, if not thousands of years. In other words, occasional deaths happening at a place where large numbers of the animals gathered on a yearly basis.

A mass beaching of Whales in Tasmania. Recent evidence indicate that this is not what happened to the Ichthyosaurs at Berlin State Park. (Credit: BBC)

So did ichthyosaurs, the whales of the age of dinosaurs also migrate across the oceans of their day to aquatic nurseries where they could give birth in relative safety? The Berlin site certainly suggests that they did and if so that would show that, when living creatures face the same problem they often evolve the same solution, even when separated by millions of years.

Finally another large scale study by paleontologists at the University of Oulu in Finland, the Universities of Leon and Vigo in Spain along with the University of Edinburgh in Scotland have tackled the question of why it was that the dinosaurs went extinct while some species of mammals, birds along with crocodiles and turtles managed to survive. The team of paleontologists carried out their investigation using the data obtained from hundred of different papers on environmental conditions at the end of the cretaceous period published over the last decades.

The day the Dinosaurs died. One of the most catastrophic events in the history of life. But where the dinosaurs already on the road to extinction or were they doing quite well just before the asteroid struck? That’s a question paleontologists have been wondered for decades. (Credit: Tech Explorist)

According to the study the answer may be, paradoxically that the dinosaurs were too dominate, too well fitted to the environment as it existed just before the asteroid struck. By adapting so completely to their world the dinosaurs had pushed the other creatures to the margins where they had to do whatever they could to survive.

Sometimes a species can be too well adapted to its environment, like these polar bears. With global warming melting the polar ice these bears are facing extinction. (Credit: Encyclopedia Britannica)

That may have served the dinosaurs well before the asteroid struck, but in the environmental upheaval that followed they couldn’t adapt in time, while the small little rat like mammals managed to get by on whatever they could find. In other words the dinosaurs were so good at what they did that they couldn’t learn to do anything else while the mammals and birds had already learned to do many things making them better able to adapt to the new conditions.

Other species are generalists, doing whatever is needed to survive. Did the Dinosaurs die out while mammals lived because they were so well adapted to the world before the asteroid while mammals knew how to get by on whatever scraps the dinosaurs left them? (Credit: Snapshot Wisconsin)

A lesson perhaps for today with our, human induced, rapidly changing environment?

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.