At birth we humans are perhaps the most helpless of creatures. Unable to move let alone find food or take care of ourselves in any way we are utterly dependent on other humans for our survival. For that reason the very first thing our brains are designed to do is recognize another person, especially another human face.
Most living creatures have to be able to take care of themselves from the moment they are born. We however are probably the most helpless of creatures, utterly dependent on other humans to provide for us. (Credit: The Washington Post)
This instinct is true of virtually all mammals and birds, even some reptiles. Since the first thing we see after birth is usually our mother we imprint on her. And since humans have always lived in groups we quickly imprint on the other members of the group, our father, siblings, and other relatives.
Most vertebrate babies imprint on their mother and follow her wherever she goes, learning how to live from her. So its very important that the babies are able to recognize her immediately. (Credit: DOGO News)
It also very important that we be able to recognize the mood other people are in. Crying for food when your mother is angry, or perhaps frightened because a predator is near is more likely to get you a slap than a meal. The shape of a smile, or a frown, and what they mean also appears to be built into our brains even before we are born. And as we grow older we become attuned to the more subtle facial expressions the different members of our group have, this ability aids in our communications with those around us.
We humans use our faces to let the world know how we’re feeling. It’s important that babies learn to interpret these expressions as fast as possible. (Credit: MDPI)
So important is our ability to detect and analyze another human face that we are unconsciously looking for human faces all the time, and all to often finding them in objects that are completely non-human. We’re all familiar with this psychological phenomenon; we’ve all at one time or another seen a human face in almost anything that vaguely resembles two eyes, a nose and mouth. Artists sometimes even toy with our mind by generating face like shapes out of things that are completely non-human.
Literally anything can appear to us to have a face. Human faces are just something we are designed to see. (Credit: KickVick)
Psychologically this phenomenon is called pareidolia and studies have shown that our minds will even attribute emotions to non-living objects if we see a face in them. Perhaps even stranger is the fact that the feeling of seeing a face, and emotions in that face will persist even after we realize our mistake and recognize that the thing we are anthropomorphizing isn’t even alive.
It’s not just humans who see faces everywhere. Here’s a dog seeing a dog’s face in a knothole. (Credit: Bored Panda)
Now a new study by neuroscientists at the University of Sydney in Australia and the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda in Maryland has examined both how a pareidolia face is detected and how the ‘expression’ on that face is analyzed. In the experiment a group of 17 student volunteers were shown a sequence of images of both actual human faces and illusionary faces on non-living objects. Forty images of each type were used with the human faces expressing emotions ranging from happy to neutral to angry.
Alternating between real human faces and pareidolia the psychologists at University of Sydney and the National Institute of Mental Health studied the reactions of their volunteer subjects. (Credit: Alais, Xu et al, Proceedings of the Royal Society)
The students were shown the images alternating between human and non-living with each image being shown eight times for a total of 320 trials. Although each image was shown eight times the order of the images was randomized so that a non-living image would follow different human faces. The students were asked to rate the emotion of the faces on both the human and illusionary faces as they saw them.
And the face doesn’t have to be head on from us to ‘see’ it. Here are a couple of facial profiles in a vase! (Credit: Etsy)
What the researchers found was that the emotional rating of the non-human faces was profoundly influenced by the emotion on the face of the human image immediately preceding it. This result indicates that our brain detects and then analyzes false faces in exactly the same manner as it does an actual human face rather than discarding the detection as a mistake. In addition, by controlling the time that the volunteers saw each image the researchers were able to estimate that our brains require only a few hundred milli-seconds to analyze even a pareidolia face.
It actually takes us only a small fraction of a second to analyze the expression on another person’s face. (Credit: ProProfs)
According to Professor David Alais of the University of Sydney’s school of Psychology and lead author of the study, “From an evolutionary perspective, it seems that the benefit of never missing a face outweighs the errors where inanimate objects are seen as faces.”
We even recognize expression in non-human objects. Does this tree trunk look thoughtful to you? (Credit: Imgur)
Which goes to show that our brains are already programmed with a variety of instincts and behaviors before we are even born, instincts and behaviors that may have served our pre-human ancestors well but some of which may actually be harmful in our modern world. We need to better understand the way our brains work if we are ever going to control the prejudices and impulses acquired by our ancestors millions of years ago.
So if we realize that we are instinctively born to see human faces in everything why do we insist that faces on other planets have to be the work of aliens? (Credit: NASA)
In the late 18th century, as astronomers first got some accurate distances to the various planets in the Solar System they noticed a wide gap in the space between Mars and Jupiter. Then during the first half of the 19th century a large number of smaller bodies, now called asteroids were discovered and the idea of an asteroid ‘belt’ between Mars and Jupiter where the chunks of a failed planet orbited the Sun was developed.
The asteroid belt sits between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. There are also two smaller groups of asteroids held by massive Jupiter in its orbit known as Trojan asteroids because astronomers started giving them names from Homer’s poems. (Credit: ZME Science)
Basically the idea was that the gravity of nearby Jupiter, the most massive of all the planets caused so many perturbations in the orbits of the asteroids that they never succeeded in merging into a single body. Today we know of the existence of hundreds of bodies in the asteroid belt.
Are the asteroids a ‘failed planet’ that never succeeded in coming together because of Jupiter’s strong gravitational field? (Credit: Jet Propulsion Labouratory NASA)
The sixteenth of those asteroids to be discovered was named 16 Psyche and yes the 16 refers to it being the sixteenth asteroid discovered. Psyche has recently garnered a considerable amount of attention because the latest estimate of the asteroid’s density, released in 2019, put it at a rather high value of 3.99+0.26 g.cm3. Because of its high density planetary physicists have suggested that 16 Psyche may in fact be the remains of the core of that failed planet that Jupiter prevented from coming together.
Computer enhancements of the best images of 16 Psyche taken by the Hubble space telescope. (Credit: Extreme Tech)
Now that density is far too high for the asteroid to be composed primarily of silicates like the Earth’s crust is. Psyche must be mainly, an estimated 95%, composed of metals like iron, nickel and cobalt, with perhaps even some gold, silver and copper mixed in. With all of those valuable minerals in a ball about 200km across, giving the asteroid a mass of 2.4×1019 kg, the potential value of 16 Psyche could be as high as $10,000 Quadrillion USD using current commodities prices. Before you go grab your pick ax and shovel and try to stake a claim however remember 16 Psyche never comes closer to Earth than 225 million kilometers so getting there, and getting you and your ore back to Earth, might make the whole enterprise a loosing proposition.
There’s been a lot of hype about 16 Psyche because it is possible that it contains ENORMOUS amounts of valuable metals. Right now nobody knows for certain so it really is all just hype. (Credit: The Sun)
By the way, all this talk about valuable metals on 16 Psyche reminds me of a short story by the British astronomer Fred Hoyle from back in the 60’s called ‘Element 79’. Now back when the story was written the UK was still suffering from the debt it had accrued fighting the Nazis in world war two when it gets struck by a fairly large meteorite. The impact occurs in the Scottish Highlands, which helps to minimize the loss of life. And the damage done by the impact is soon forgotten because the meteor is mainly composed of element 79, that’s gold to any of you who don’t have access to a periodic table of the elements. The mass of the meteor was about 300 billion kilograms, more than all the gold in all the world’s bank vaults and quickly made the UK the world’s richest nation.
If you can find it ‘Element 79’ by Fred Hoyle is a very interesting collection of short stories by the late British Astronomer. (Credit:
Interesting story if you can find it but getting back to 16 Psyche a recent paper by undergraduate student David Cantillo at the University of Arizona concludes that the asteroid is actually only about 85% metal, the rest carbonaceous chondrite type material. Cantillo also concludes that structurally the asteroid is not a solid object but little more than a pile of rubble held together by gravity. Still an asteroid that is 85% valuable metals would be very interesting, from a business point of view.
Currently under construction at the Jet Propulsion Labouratory (JPL), the Psyche space probe will study the asteroid in detail. (Credit: JPL)
Which view of 16 Psyche is correct we may know in just a few years because NASA is currently building a robotic space probe to visit and survey the asteroid. The probe is being funded as a part of NASA’s Discovery Program and is scheduled to be launched aboard a Space X Falcon Heavy Rocket in July of 2022, just a year from now. After getting a gravity boost from Mars the probe will reach 16 Psyche in 2026 and will orbit and survey the asteroid for at least 20 months.
The planned mission of the Psyche probe. Launch will take place in 2022 with arrival in 2026. (Credit: Earth Observer Portal)
Let’s imagine just for a minute that the probe reaches 16 Psyche and discovers that the asteroid is absolutely teeming with valuable metals, even deposits of gold are observed right on the surface. And if the asteroid is just a pile of rubble as Mister Cantillo thinks that would actually make it easier to mine. Just grab a shovel and start hefting gold into your spaceship’s cargo bay. And since the gravity of an asteroid like 16 Psyche is so low you won’t have to worry much about landing and taking off on the asteroid, just get to the asteroid belt!
Which will be easier, to mine the valuable materials from an asteroid and ship them to Earth… (Credit: Explainingthefuture.com)…or to literally drag the entire asteroid to Earth where its riches can be mined a leisure? (Credit: Sputnik News)
Think of it, commercial space ventures are just now starting to really get going, in 6-10 years they may be ready to try something beyond Low Earth Orbit (LOE), way beyond. Now of course since 16 Psyche is so far away the first miners to the asteroid will all be robots but still it just might happen that 10 years from now asteroid mining becomes a real possibility.
The small Canadian town of Lytton sits about 100 kilometers to the northeast of the city of Vancouver in British Columbia. Situated at a latitude of 50º North of the equator Lytton is hardly the place that you would expect to be competing for the honour of being one of the world’s hottest places. In fact the daily high temperature in Lytton during the hottest times of the year rarely reached above 30ºC. Or at least it did before global warming.
The little town of Lytton, red marker, sits to the NE of Vancouver in an area more commonly asso9ciated with winter sports than heat waves! (Credit: Google Maps)
(Before I go any further I just want to state again that in my opinion the green house gasses we are dumping into the atmosphere are causing Earth’s average temperature to rise, that’s global warming. But that rise in temperature can cause many different localized changes to the environment, that’s climate change. Nevertheless, I don’t care about whether you call it global warming or climate change I just want something done about it!)
Who are we trying to kid. We are putting our planet in the oven and consequences be damned! (Credit: Wikipedia)
Over the past week however Lytton has suffered under a once rare weather phenomenon called a heat dome. Simply put a heat dome is a very strong high pressure system that gets cut off from the high altitude jet stream and therefore can remain in the same location for several days or more. Now remember that in the northern hemisphere the wind blows clockwise around a high pressure system so where I live in Philadelphia the hottest days occur when there is a Bermuda high off the Atlantic coast. The clockwise flow around the Bermuda high brings warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico over the southern states, where it warms even further, right into the Mid-Atlantic region. Bermuda highs are generated by the warming of the waters in the western Atlantic during the summer and thanks to global warming they have been getting stronger over the last decade.
Heat domes are actually a fairly common phenomenon but like hurricanes they have been growing in numbers and strength. (Credit: The Sun)
On the west coast the high pressure systems that generate heat domes are caused by a difference in temperature, technically known as a gradient in the Pacific Ocean with the temperature rising as you go from west to east. In other words the ocean waters near Japan are relatively cool but get progressively warmer as you go east towards the North American west coast. Recalling that the air above warm water rises means that the northern Pacific can become a kind of wind tunnel pointing towards North America. These prevailing winds bring warm air onto land and sometimes during the winter those winds can become trapped against a jet stream pushing down from the Artic forming a massive high pressure system, which as the summer begins forms a heat dome.
The heat dome was generated by a blob of warm water in the waters of the northeastern Pacific. (Credit: The weather Channel)
These heat domes have appeared several times in the past few years over the US pacific northwest states leading to record high temperatures in cities like Portland Oregon and Seattle Washington. This year’s heat dome has been the largest and strongest ever seen reaching all the way from Portland, which set it’s all time record high of 46º on June28th, to the Canadian Yukon and Northwest Territories.
The heat dome diverted the jet stream around it which then actually held the dome in the same place for days baking the land beneath the dome! (Credit: CBS News)
Little Lytton sat right in the middle of the high pressure system which meant that for several days there was virtually no wind or clouds in the town. Nothing but Sunlight lasting for nearly twenty hours a day. Remember Lytton is at 50º north latitude so the days there in summer are very long. After days of baking in the Sun on June 27th Lytton broke Canada’s all time high temperature record of 45ºC with a temperature of 46.7ºC. That record was only the start however for on June 28th the high temperature in Lytton reached 47.8ºC before finally on June 29th reaching an astounding 49.4ºC, hotter than it’s even been recorded in the city of Las Vegas, Nevada. That temperature is in fact the hottest ever recorded at any latitude above 45º, north or south on the entire planet!
Temperature records aren’t just being broken they’re being shattered across the Pacific northwest. (Credit: Yahoo News)
Of course it wasn’t just Lytton that sweltered in oppressive heat, almost the entire western part of Canada and the United States have been subjected to an unprecedented heat wave in regions where it rarely gets hot, regions where air conditioning is virtually unknown. While the consequences to public health will take some time to fully determine an initial heat related death toll of 380 has been announced for Canada and at least several hundred for the US states of Washington and Oregon.
It isn’t just North America that has seen deadly heat domes. In June of 2019 a heat dome over France killed hundreds in a region not used to such prolonged high temperatures. (Credit: CNN)
So is this the new normal, it certainly does seem as if we’ve reached a tipping point where massive changes to large areas of the globe are happening right before our eyes. And the evidence has become so overwhelming that it seems as if even the worst climate change deniers have become silent. Still there’s so much we have to do if we’re to prevent even worse climate disasters, and so little time left.
Maybe Climate Change isn’t a ‘New Normal’ we want to embrace. If we don’t act soon however we may have no choice! (Credit: GraceMed Health Clinic)
Post Script: As I was writing this post the BBC broadcast a story about a wildfire that was ravaging the Canadian province of British Columbia. Caused by the excessive heat and drought conditions generated inside the heat dome the wildfire had virtually wiped out the small town of Lytton!
Only days after suffering through the highest temperatures ever in Canada the town of Lytton was burned to the ground in a massive wildfire. (Credit: Castanet)
In the earlier sections of the olde testament there are a number of groups of people mentioned who did not survive into later, better historically recorded times and who are therefore something of a historical mystery. The Moabites, Jebusites, Edomites and Ammonites were small tribes who unlike the great empires of Egypt, Assyria and Babylon left little evidence behind of their existence for later historians to study.
The Olde Testament mentions a number of the Bronze Age neighbors of the two Hebrew Kingdoms. All of whom got swallowed up by the great empires of the Iron Age. (Credit: Pinterest)
For many centuries it was thought that the Hittites were like that, a small nation of people who got swallowed up by the great empires, as the Hebrews almost did, and who disappeared from history. The early 19th century historian Francis William Newman even proclaimed that “…no Hittite king could have compared in power to the king of Judah”. Boy did he get it wrong, in fact the rediscovery of the Hittite kingdom as one of the great powers of the Bronze Age Mediterranean is among the greatest achievements of the science of archaeology.
For centuries much of what was known of the Hittites was that Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba, was a Hittite mercenary in the service of King David whom David had killed in battle so he could have Bathsheba. (Credit: Wayfarer)
The first evidence indicating that the Hittites were more important than the bible seemed to indicate was unearthed in Egypt where archaeologists came across numerous inscriptions mentioning the Hittites as an important people. In fact they discovered far more mentions of the Hittites than they did of the Hebrews. The true status of the Hittites really became clear however with the first excavations of the ruins of their capital Hattusa in north central Anatolia, that’s modern Turkey.
The Hittite Empire, in red, is centered upon their capital of Hattusa during the late Bronze Age. Wilusa in the upper left is the Bronze Age name for Troy. (Credit: World History Encyclopedia)
Although the ruins were first discovered in 1884, large-scale excavations of Hattusa only began in 1906 by the archaeologist Hugo Winckler. In addition to determining the full scale of Hattusa, which ranked in size with other great Bronze Age cities like Luxor, Nineveh or Babylon, Winckler also found the royal archives of the Hittite kings, 10,000 clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform but in an unknown language.
The famed lion gate at Hattusa. (Credit: Kathmandu and Beyond)A recreation of what Hattusa may have looked like at its peak around the year 1250 BCE. (Credit: Amusing Planet)
In the century since then much has been learned about the Hittite empire, which extended over the central and eastern portions of modern Turkey along with down the coast of modern Syria as far south as Lebanon. It is even thought by some that the city of Troy in what is now western Turkey may have been loosely associated with the Hittite empire.
In the time of the Pharaoh Rameses II, 1274 BCE, the Egyptians and the Hitties, under their king Hattusili III fought what may have been the greatest battle of the Bronze Age at Kadesh. The battle was pretty much a draw and five years later the two empires concluded a treaty that lasted more than a hundred years until the collapse of the Hittite empire.
In a Bas-relief at Luxor the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II declared that he won the battle of Kedesh against the Hittites pretty much single handed. In reality the battle was a draw with the two empires making a treaty and never fighting again. (Credit: Discovering Ancient Egypt)
When the language of the Hittites was deciphered from the cuneiform tables it was found to be Indo-European in nature, more closely related to Greek or Latin than Aramaic or Hebrew. Historians are of the opinion that the people who became the Hittites entered Anatolia from either the Balkans or Ukraine around 2000 BCE and either conquered of intermingled with a non-Indo-European people known as the Hattians from who the name Hattusa seems to have come.
Although they used cuneiform symbols to write the Hitties spoke an Indo-European language. Some of their tables even tell of the last days of Hattusa as the ‘Sea Peoples’ advanced on the city. (Credit: Biblical Archaeological Society)
The Hittite empire came to an end around 1200 BCE as the eastern Mediterranean world was rocked by a series of invasions by ‘Sea Peoples’ who spread destruction from Greece through Mesopotamia down to Egypt. While Assyria and Egypt both endured the barbarian assaults it was the Hittite empire that suffered the most, the capital Hattusa being burned to the ground around 1180 BCE. For a hundred or so years after that there were several smaller, less powerful nations who called themselves Hittites. Those later Hittite kingdoms did not last long however as they were all swallowed up by either the growing Assyrian empire or by the Phrygian people who settled in western and central Anatolia, and who may have been one of the ‘sea peoples’.
The Egyptians fought two great battles against the ‘Sea Peoples’. They saved Egypt but the Sea Peoples settled along the eastern Mediterranean coast to become the Philistines. (Credit: Simple Wikipedia)
Even after 100 years of archaeological research there is still much that we don’t know, or don’t understand about the Hittite people. One place that has epitomized that mystery is the sanctuary of Yazilikaya, a religious shrine with numerous rock carvings just a short distance from the walls of Hattusa. While the site of Yazilikaya, and its many bas-reliefs have been studied for a century now their meaning had eluded archaeologists.
Chamber A of the Yazilikaya shrine as it is today. (Credit: The Vintage News)
Now a new paper by a diverse group of scientists claims to have solved the riddle of Yazilikaya. The team includes Serkan Demirel of the department of archaeology at Karadeniz Technical University in Trabzon, Turkey, Eberhard Zangger, President of Luwian Studies in Zurich, Switzerland, Rita Gautschy of the department of ancient civilizations at the University of Basel in Switzerland along with E. C. Krupp, the Director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, California. By the inclusion of an astronomer in a paper about an ancient temple you can probably guess that the researchers maintain that Yazilikaya, in common with many ancient religious sites, was part temple and part astronomical observatory.
Bas-Relief on the north wall of Yazilikaya depicts the chief gods of the Hittite pantheon. (Credit: Todayunews)
In fact the rock art displayed at Yazilikaya represents both the Hittite view of the structure of the cosmos while at the same time functioning as a calendar. Like many cultures the Hittites believed the Universe to be divided into three parts, the heavens, the Earth and the underworld. Well the shrine at Yazilikaya is divided into two chambers, referred to as A and B. On the north wall of chamber A is a rock carving that portrays the northern constellations that never set below the horizon, like the Big and Little dipper along with Cassiopeia. These constellations are accompanied by carvings of the major gods of the Hittite pantheon, the storm god Teššub, his wife Ḫebat and their son Šarruma and together they represent heaven. On the two side walls of chamber A are carvings of fertility and other more Earthly types of god marching in procession toward the greater gods at to the north. They represent the Earth.
Hittite gods of the underworld carrying scythes to gather up the dead from chamber B. (Credit: Artnews.Com)
The entrance to chamber B is guarded by lion headed daemons and also contains a three-meter tall statue of Nergal, the god of the underworld. Along the wall of chamber B is a carving of twelve gods of the underworld carrying sickles, a common representation for the gathering of the dead.
The three bas-reliefs may be used as a calendar. (Credit: Zangger, Krupp, Demirel and Gautschy)
According to the study the sets of carvings, except the northern one, could be used as a calendar keeping track of both the phases of the Moon as well as the days of the year. Such archaeoastronomical alignments and religious observatories in the ancient world are coming to be accepted and studied more and more by archaeologists since the idea was first suggested for Stonehenge back in the 1960s. Many religious ideas and concepts really began as attempts by ancient man to understand the nature and movements of the sky above our heads.
The Hittites were once a powerful, wealthy people whose empire played a leading role in the beginnings of civilization during the Bronze Age. Understanding their culture and religion is necessary if we are to understand how we got to where we are.
When I was growing up I was very interested in space. Not just the space race to get to the Moon either. I knew all about the planets and their moons, the stars, galaxies etc. Back then outer space meant empty space, a vacuum, once you were out of Earth’s atmosphere there was really nothing of any interest until you got to the Moon or some other planet.
This is the way we though of the Solar System back in the 60s. Just a few planets and moons with a lot of empty space in between. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Even back then things were starting to change however. The Physicist Eugene Parker first proposed the existence of the solar wind in the mid-1950s, a prediction that was confirmed by the first interplanetary space probes in the early 1960s. Now in some ways the solar wind may seem pretty much like a vacuum, it only averages around five protons per cubic centimeter but those few particles are moving at a nominal 500 kilometers per sec generating both a large electric current and a strong magnetic field.
Astrophysicist Eugene Parker back when he predicted the existence of the Solar Wind! (Credit: University of Chicago)
As everyone knows those currents and magnetic fields can interact with the Earth’s own magnetic field to generate both the aurora and occasionally, when a particularly strong solar storm strikes, radio and TV interference and even electrical blackouts. And since the solar wind has been blowing now for four billion years it can have a large effect over time. In fact planetary astronomers now think it was the solar wind that slowly, over millions of years ripped away the atmosphere of Mars.
In our modern tech dependent world space weather is now a big deal, one that requires constant monitoring. (Credit: SpaceWeather.com)
As the solar wind spreads outward from the Sun it disperses slowly, losing strength as it reaches the outer solar system. At a distance about twice as far from the Sun as Neptune’s orbit the solar wind collides with the Interstellar Medium (ISM), the tenuous gas and ionized matter between the stars.
At the edge of our Solar System the solar wind collides with the interstellar medium forming the Termination Shock and the Heliopause. (Credit: Sci-News.com)
In many way the solar wind and the ISM are very similar. They are both near vacuums by Earthly standards and they are both composed mainly of hydrogen atoms or hydrogen ionized into protons and electrons. The big difference is in the forces pushing on those particles. The solar wind is exploded out from the Sun and carries the Sun’s magnetic field out with it while the ISM moves in response to the magnetic field of the galaxy.
The Solar Wind is not constant by any means, solar flares like this one often occur to increase the outward flow of particles while the Sun can also be almost quite at times. (Credit: CNET)
When these two electromagnetic clouds collide with each other they generate a kind of electromagnetic wall that’s millions of kilometers thick known as the Termination Shock. Here the particles of the solar wind lose most of their velocity, they just collided with a wall after all. The particles now drift slowly through what is called the heliosheath, a region of space where the solar wind and the ISM mix. Finally, beyond the heliopause is the ISM proper.
Even the space between the stars is not truly empty. There is dust and gas, some of which is ionized and gets pushed around by the magnetic field of the Galaxy. (Credit: Science at your Doorstep)
Now the bubble around our solar system formed by the termination shock and the heliosheath is not perfectly spherical. You see our Sun orbits around the center of the galaxy and as it moves both it, and the bubble produced by the solar wind push their way through the ISM. Because of this the bubble is compressed in front of the Sun’s direction of motion and elongated in the rear.
Pushing against the Interstellar wind the Heliosheath gets compressed up front but elongated to the rear. (Credit: Researchgate)
Now you may have noticed that, aside from once saying “At a distance about twice as far from the Sun as Neptune’s orbit” I haven’t been too precise about the distances from the Sun where the termination shock and heliosheath begin and end. Well, that’s because until recently we didn’t have very accurate information on those distances.
The two Voyager space probes have both passed beyond the Termination Shock and left our Solar System. Both are still working, sending back data telling us about conditions in the Interstellar Medium. (Credit: Britannica)
The first accurate measurement came from the Voyager 1 space probe, which is still continuing to send back data on conditions in the space around it 44 years after it’s launch back in 1977. In August of 2012 Voyager 1’s magnetometer saw a rapid shift in the direction of the magnetic field around it. At the same time the number of low energy particles associated with the solar wind dropped while the number of high energy particles considered to be part of the ISM began to increase. Voyager 1 had passed the termination shock and became the first man made object to enter interstellar space.
Voyager 2 followed its sister in November of 2018 giving scientists two data points about the exact size of the bubble formed by the Sun’s solar wind. But with an object that large two data points still leaves a lot unknowns. The scientists wanted more; they wanted a space probe that could measure the distance to the heliopause in many different directions from back here in Earth orbit. The wanted the Interstellar Boundary Explorer or IBEX satellite.
The Interstellar Boundary Explorer or IBEX satellite. IBEX measures the echo of the solar wind colliding with the ISM to measure the distance to the Termination Shock and Heliopause. (Credit: Pinterest)
The launch of the IBEX probe was on October 19th of 2008 by a method that is more than a bit unusual for those of us who have been watching rocket launches since we were young. The spacecraft was first placed atop its Pegasus XL rocket, which was then suspended beneath NASA’s Stargazer L-1011 aircraft. The stargazer then flew to the island of Kwajalein in the Pacific near the equator. On the 19th the Stargazer took off from Kwajalein and the Pegasus rocket was launched from the aircraft in the same fashion as the old X-15 was launched from a B-52. The IBEX probe was placed into an extremely elliptical orbit of 86,000 kilometers perigee by 260,000 kilometers apogee. In this orbit the satellite is Sun oriented, in other words always able to keep the Sun in view.
NASA’s Stargazer L-1011 aircraft ready to launch a rocket, underneath the aircraft, into orbit. (Credit: Aerotech News and Review)
IBEX makes its measurements by collecting Energetic Neutral Particles (ENPs) that are generated by the collisions between the solar wind and the ISM. On a average day IBEX detects about 600 particles but the greater the intensity of the solar wind the greater the number of ENPs.
Analysis of the data collected by the IBEX space probe. (Credit: Interstellar Boundary Explorer)
In this way IBEX can measure the size and shape of the Sun’s bubble in the same way that a dolphin uses sonar to ‘see’ what’s around it in the ocean. You see the intensity of the solar wind emitted by the Sun varies with time; IBEX then sees that same variation later in the ENPs it detects. The delay being two to six years depending on the energy of the particles and the direction IBEX is looking.
Now scientists working with IBEX at the Los Alamos National Labouratory have used that data to generate a three dimensional map of the heliosheath. At the same time the data also allowed them to calculate the speed with which the Sun’s bubble is moving through the local ISM to be 23.2 kilometers per second. The space probe has succeeded in making detailed measurements at immense distances about objects so faint that no human sense could even tell they existed.
Empty space is not really empty, there’s a lot more going on there than our human senses can perceive. (Credit: TYKMA Electrox)
All of which just shows that what we used to think of as ’empty space’ is a lot more dynamic, and a lot more interesting than we ever imagined it was back in the 1950s and 60s.
In 1859 Charles Darwin changed the world with the publication of his most famous work “On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection” commonly referred to simply as The Origin of Species. In that book Darwin provided an enormous amount of evidence for the existence of evolution as a phenomenon, that is he presented a wide variety of examples of how populations of living creatures do change with time, even on occasion splitting into different species. (Darwin by the way never liked the term evolution preferring the simpler, and more accurate “Descent with Modification”.)
A first edition of Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” can be your for a mere $400,000 USD!!! (Credit: Raptis Rare Books)
In Origin of Species Darwin also proposed natural selection as a mechanism that drove evolution. According to natural selection on occasion an individual is born with a new trait caused by a mutation. How these mutations occur Darwin had no idea, biology at that time had no knowledge of genes or DNA, but he had plenty of evidence that they did in fact occur. If the new trait was advantageous to the individual in their environment then that individual would live longer than the other members of its species and more importantly, have more offspring who would inherit the advantageous trait. Again Darwin had no knowledge of how traits were inherited he just knew that they were. Before long the population with the advantageous trait would have out bred those without it and over time, advantageous trait by advantageous trait the species would adapt better to living in its environment. It would evolve.
How to evolve from a dog-like land animal to a whale! All by natural selection. (Credit: Live science)Darwin had no knowledge of DNA or how inherited traits were passed on from parent to offspring, he just knew they were. (Credit: Medical News Today)
But even as he argued the case for natural selection Darwin realized that there were some traits, like the long ornate feathers on a peacock or the large antlers on deer, which did not provide any obvious advantage to individuals of the species that possessed them. Darwin noticed that these traits that natural selection could not explain always seemed to be related to a difference between the male and female of the species, peahens do not have long ornate feathers nor do female deer have antlers for example. Such traits are technically called sexual dimorphisms, which Darwin realized arise because males, who produce a large number of sperm cells, benefit by having sex with as many females as possible while females, who produce a smaller number of egg cells, benefit by reproducing with the best possible males.
The gorgeous feathers of the male peacock are the classic example of ‘Sexual Selection’ since the ornate feathers do not aid the bird in any way except attracting a female. (Credit: How Stuff Works)
In Origin of Species Darwin suggested that these traits might have evolved so that an individual might gain an advantage, not in living longer but in having sex more often and called this driver of evolution Sexual Selection. In his later book “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex” Darwin expanded on the workings of sexual selection to describe the fighting of male elephant seals, the displays of male birds of paradise and even the calls of male songbirds.
The sometimes deadly fight between male elephant are also all about females. In order to win access to females the males have grown to more than twice the mass of their mates. Another example of sexual selection. (Credit: Scientific American)
As an example of how sexual selection works I’ll use a species of fish that I used to keep in my aquarium as a kid, the swordtail. A native species of Central America only the male swordtail has the elongation at the bottom of the tail that gives the species its name. It is a sexual dimorphism. Anyone who has kept these fish as pets knows that female swordtails prefer to mate with those males who have the longest tail and so those males have more offspring and over time the species gets longer tailed males.
A popular fish for aquariums only the swordtail male has the extension that the species is named for. Like the male peacock’s feathers the sword tail is for display not for fighting. (Credit: YouTube)
But it works on the females also. Those females who have the stronger preference for long tailed males will not only mate with those males first, but more often producing more female offspring who prefer longer tails. Sexual selection drives both sexes toward greater enhancement of the sexual trait. And in the years since Darwin’s time many examples of sexual selection have been studied largely confirming his views.
Male Red Deer fighting for the chance to mate. Another classic example of sexual selection. (Credit: Discover Wildlife)
Darwin also theorized that since it was the males who competed for the females sexual selection would become more important in species where males outnumbered females, making the competition that much more important. In other words with few females around a male would have to work harder in order to be able to mate. Recent studies however have indicated that in this one instance Darwin may have gotten things exactly backwards.
Evolutionary biologist Tamas Szekely of the University of Bath in the UK working in the field. (Credit: University of Bath)
A new paper with lead author Tamas Szekely, Professor of Biodiversity at the Milner Center for Evolution at the University of Bath presents evidence from 462 species of mammals, reptiles and birds. The study measured the strength of sexual selection on a species by the ratio of male weight to female weight. As an example consider elephant seals where the males can weight more than twice what a female weights and where the males fight tremendous battles between themselves in order to maintain a harem of females. In the species studied what the researchers found that competition amongst males was actually strongest in those species where females outnumbered males.
A lion pride usually consists of 6-12 related females with only one or two unrelated males. A recent study has found evidence that the force of sexual selection actually is strongest in species where the females outnumber the males. (Credit: Quora)
The researchers also examined some of the ways that one sex can outnumber the other in a species, since most species of vertebrate start with a 1:1 ratio at birth. Sometimes predation can be the cause of the imbalance as in the way African lions kill about six times as many male buffalo as females because males tend to graze alone while females are more likely to stay in large herds where they’re more protected. And of course the violent competition between males for females, such as in elephant seals and lions, will also lead to an shortage of males increasing the strength of sexual selection still further. Sexual selection is a powerful force in nature generating many of the odd and unusual features we see in the animals around us. Even if Darwin did get one facet of it wrong his discovery of and description of sexual selection is another one of the great achievements of that great scientist.
Ever since the last of the Apollo missions to the Moon back in December of 1972, manned space exploration has been completely trapped in Low Earth Orbit (LOE). Over the last almost 50 years our robotic probes have gone on to explore every large body in the Solar System and a lot of smaller bodies. However no human being has gone further than 1000 kilometers from the surface of the Earth.
The Crew of Apollo 17, Eugene Cernan (seated), Ronald Evans (r) and Harrison Schmitt (l) were the last human beings to go further into space than Low Earth Orbit (LOE) way back in 1972. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
There have been a lot of proposals from NASA engineers, with plans pretty much alternating between returning to the Moon to establish a permanent base or else heading straight on to Mars. The most elaborate plan was developed during the George W. Bush administration with the ‘Constellation Program’ a scaled up version of the first Moon landings sometimes called Apollo on steroids. Constellation however was projected to be so expensive, and remember we were fighting a war on terror at that time, that it was quickly cast aside when the Obama administration took office.
Referred to as ‘Apollo on Steroids’ the Constellation Program during the George W. Bush Administration would have had a budget on steroids as well! It got canceled as soon as Obama took office! (Credit: YouTube)
Faced with the cancellation of their main human spaceflight program NASA regrouped and decided to just try and coax enough money out of congress to develop a heavy lift vehicle that could take humans back into deep space. A rocket so powerful that it would rival the Apollo Saturn V and once that was built, tested and flying it could be used for a Moon return or Mars program, whichever they could talk the politicians into. This new ‘Space Launch System’ (SLS) would be cheap to develop, the engineers assured congress, because it would be based on designs from, and actually use hardware from the now cancelled Space Shuttle program.
Much of the engineering for the Space Launch System (SLS), Block 1 (l) and Block 2 (c) is derived from the space shuttle (r). That was supposed to keep development costs low. Didn’t work out that way! (Credit: How Stuff Works)
The new mega-rocket would be designed like this. A core section consisting of tanks for liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen would be an elongated version of the big orange fuel tank used on the space shuttle. At the bottom of the core stage would be four RS-25 shuttle engines to provide 980 thousand kilograms of thrust for eight minutes. NASA actually had 16 of these engines left over at the end of the shuttle program so the first four SLSs will not even be required to have engines built for them. Then, attached to each side of the core section will be two, five section solid fuel boosters based upon the four section solid fuel boosters used for the space shuttle. With so much reuse of equipment and technology it was expected that the SLS would take very little time to develop and could be done at a reasonable cost.
Artists Impression of the SLS as it will appear on pad 39A at Kennedy before its launch. (Credit: Wikipedia)
Congress approved the SLS in 2011 with a planned first launch to occur in 2017 at a total price tag of $18 billion dollars, of which $6 billion would go to the development of a manned capsule named Orion and $2 billion for upgrades to the launch pad. In other words the SLS itself was only supposed to cost $10 billion to develop.
Developed in tandem with the SLS the Orion manned capsule had also had its share of technical problems. (Credit: Ars Techica)
It didn’t work out that way. Because of both engineering difficulties as well as dithering by congress with the appropriations the SLS has been subjected to an ongoing series of delays and cost overruns. Currently the program is four years behind schedule and will end up costing more than $18 billion dollars and we still haven’t had a single flight.
Even worse, thanks to the amazing success of Space X with their reusable Falcon 9 launch vehicle, the entire rational for a super heavy, and very costly SLS has been called into question. The SLS program has so far been saved from the budget ax however thanks to strong support from the senators and congresspersons in whose states the majority of the work is being accomplished.
The first stage of the Space X Falcon 9 launch system has now been successfully landed 81 times with 63 reuses considerably lowering the cost of getting into orbit! (Credit: Space Flight Now)
And we are now at least coming close to seeing the results of all that effort. In January of 2020 the first core stage of an SLS was completed and delivered to NASA’s test range. Again a series of minor problems caused delays so that the whole test program took nearly twice what was scheduled. The final ‘Hot Fire Test’ of the core stage of the SLS was only completed on March 18 of 2021.
The vehicle has since been sent to Kennedy Space Center to begin full assembly with first the side boosters and then an Orion capsule and service module. That first assembly step has now been completed and the most powerful rocket since the Saturn V is presently taking shape in the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Kennedy. The first launch of an SLS, officially designated as the ‘Artemis 1’ mission, is scheduled to take place no earlier than (NET) the 4th of November this year. That initial launch will be unmanned but it will send the man capable Orion capsule on a trans-Lunar trajectory.
The massive core stage of the SLS being lifted inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Kennedy for insertion between its two solid fuel boosters. (Credit: Space Flight Now)Assemble completed on the core stage and boosters of the SLS. (Credit: Space Flight Insider)
The first manned launch of the SLS, designated as ‘Artemis 2’ is scheduled to take place NET September 2023. Artemis 2 will carry astronauts back to the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years on a mission that will resemble Apollo 8, orbiting but not landing on the Lunar surface. The actual first landing of the Artemis program is scheduled for NET October 2024 with the Artemis 3 mission but considering construction of the Artemis Lunar landing module has not even begun that date can best be described as tentative.
The Artemis 1 mission scheduled for later this year will be unmanned but will return a manned capable spacecraft to Lunar orbit for the first time in 49 years. (Credit: SciTech daily)
And over the next several years there is the potential for more changes, more deviations from NASA’s planned path for the SLS. The space agency still wants to build the Lunar Gateway space station in orbit around the Moon but it is quite possible that most of the modules for Gateway may be launched on commercial rockets rather than the SLS.
NASA still hopes to build its Lunar Gateway Space Station as a part of its Artemis program. (Credit: YouTub)
And Mars? Well that’s so far down the road that the SLS could be totally obsolete by then. In fact, if you want my opinion the odds are that in the end the thirteen launches of the Saturn V will outnumber those of the SLS.
The 13 launches of the Saturn 5 rocket. Will the SLS succeed in eclipsing that number? (Credit: Space Exploration Stack Exchange)
Still, come this fall, cross your fingers, we will get to see a sight that hasn’t been seen for nearly 50 years, the launch of a really big, Moon capable rocket!
In his book ‘On the Origin of Species’ Charles Darwin coined the phase ‘Artificial Selection’ to describe the way we human beings breed those of our domesticated animals who possess those traits that we find desirable and wish to propagate. By selectively breeding our pets and livestock we have succeeded in generating an enormous number of different breeds of dogs, cats, cattle, sheep etc, etc. Botanists have used the same techniques to develop more productive and hardier stains of the plants we eat or the flowers we admire.
Darwin himself made a particular study of pigeon breeding, which is popular in England. He observed how breeders were able to take small variations in body and feather shape and size and by selectively breeding over several generations develop a new variety of pigeon. (Credit: www.mun.ca)
Several times Darwin contrasted this Artificial Selection with his ‘Natural Selection’. Both depend on the random mutation of genes to produce those changes in living creatures that produce new and different traits. But whereas we humans will directly favour those mutations with traits we desire, making certain they live longer and propagate more, in the natural world beneficial mutations give only a slight advantage. For example a Zebra colt with a mutation that enables it to run faster, a huge advantage for a zebra, could die in a drought or flood before it ever gets the chance to mature and pass on that beneficial mutation. This makes natural selection a much slower, more haphazard process than artificial selection.
In the wild a Sea Turtle hatchling that has a mutation allowing it to swim faster and farther than other members of its species could get eaten before it ever reaches the ocean! That’s one reason why natural selection is such a slow process. (Credit: Kirsten Hines)
Right now this planet is going though a large number of very rapid changes caused by the growth of our human population. Climate change, industrial pollution and the loss of habitat are just the three biggest problems that the other living creatures on Earth are having to adapt to. Problem is that they simply can’t adapt fast enough, natural selection is a slow process remember so instead of adapting what’s actually happening is that many species are going extinct. Every year more and more kinds of animals and plants just disappear because they aren’t able to evolve fast enough to keep up with the changes we are causing to the planet.
Once again global warming is a major driver in the changes our planet is facing. Many species may not be able to adapt to these changes quickly enough to survive. (Credit: BBC)
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was some way to use the faster speed of human directed artificial selection to enable species to change fast enough that they could adapt to all the changes around them. That’s the basic idea behind the new program of ‘Assisted Evolution’, to use our knowledge of genetics and selective breeding in order to help species that are in trouble to adapt more quickly to a changing world.
Currently a major effort is underway in both the United States and Australia to use assisted evolution to save each nation’s coral reefs. Over the last 20 years or so nearly half of the Great Barrier Reef and the Reefs around the Florida Keys have seen massive episodes of coral die offs due to increased ocean water temperatures and pollution.
Higher ocean temperatures cause coral to become bleached, a condition they cannot survive for long. Nearly half of the world’s coral reefs have suffered an episode of this condition over the last five years and the trend is likely to continue. (Credit: NBC News)
Scientists in both nations have been studying the various species and varieties of coral, subjecting samples in a labouratory to excessive temperature and pollutant levels in order to discover which can better withstand the higher than normal levels of stress. Those varieties that showed greater adaptability are now being grown in nurseries before being transplanted back onto injured coral reefs in the hopes that they will grow and help repair the damage.
Oceanographers have been studying the varieties of coral to learn which can best handle higher temperatures. Those that can are now being breed in nurseries for later planting in damaged reefs. (Credit: Fast Company)
This type of assisted evolution is known as ‘Stress Conditioning’, forcing individual specimens to endure high, but non-lethal levels of the environmental stress. Those individuals that survive best are then breed in large numbers to be returned to the wild to hopefully increase their species chance of surviving.
Sometimes stress is a good thing, such as when you’re testing a new invention to see how well your design can handle vibration! (Credit: Delserro Engineering Solutions)
Australia is also the site of another effort using stress conditioning. In the centuries since Europeans first settled the land down under the native wildlife has suffered greatly from invasive European predators, feral cats in particular. Several species of marsupials, such as the lesser bilby and the crescent tailed wallaby have gone extinct primarily because of cats.
A bilby may look like a cross between a rabbit and a mouse but they are actually marsupials. The lesser bilby is now extinct and the greater bilby, seen here, is endangered. (Credit: Pinterest)
Because there are now simply too many cats to even try to eradicate them, researchers are attempting a different strategy to save other threatened species, exposing them to cats in controlled settings. Two large paddocks in the Australian Outback have been set up with a few hundred greater bilbies, a relative of the lesser bilby in one and a few hundred burrowing bettongs in the other. Five cats were then introduced into each paddock and allowed to prey on the native marsupials.
The cat proof fence used in Australia to protect bilbies and other endangered animals. In a recent experiment a few cats were introduced into the preserve in order to train the bilbies on how to avoid cats! (Credit: Greensborough Vet)
After several generations of the marsupials, during which time the number of cats was kept controlled; the offspring were placed in another paddock with members of their species that had not had the stress conditioning. Again a few cats were introduced and the ratio of kills for conditioned and naïve prey was measured. The naive marsupials suffered much more than their conditioned kin indicating that the conditioned bilbies and bettongs had become cat savvy a sign of hope that perhaps their species can learn to survive the harm done by invasive cats.
Nietzsche’s saying is very true in the natural world but the killing part happens a lot more often than the strengthening! (Credit: Brainyquote)
Another type of assisted evolution that is being tested in labouratories but not yet used in the wild is known as Assisted Gene Flow (AGF). In AGF the actual DNA of a threatened species is altered by a gene editor like CRISPR in order to change their anatomy to help them adapt to changing conditions. For example an animal whose environment is undergoing increasing drought conditions could be have genetic material from another species inserted into their DNA that enables it to better survive long periods of time with little water.
With CRISPR and other gene editing techniques we may soon have the ability to change species dramatically. If we use such techniques however will we just be turning the natural world into another product of out technology! (Credit: YouTube)
The technique of AGF is more controversial than stress conditioning however, as is the entire science of gene editing in general. The question of how many genes can be altered before you’re no longer saving the original species but a labouratory version of it comes into play. Indeed the whole question of trying to save threatened species by changing them is problematic.
Problem with assisted evolution is that we may end up with the entire world being domesticated and no longer wild! (Credit: How Stuff Works)
Still, every year as more and more species become extinct the possibility of saving some species by helping them adapt to the changes we are causing is at least trying to mitigate the harm we’re doing.
In 1790, as the new United States of America was busy setting up its constitutional form of government, it was by European standards a rather poor, backward, rural based country. The new country did possess a small number of degree granting Colleges / Universities such as Harvard, Yale and William and Mary which like their European models Oxford and Cambridge catered only to the very wealthy and concentrated on a liberal arts education.
Not too long ago you had to be born into a rich family in order to have a chance at getting into a college or university. (Credit: brainstudy.info)
However, because the United States was built out of a number of different, and competitive states it wasn’t long before each state had its own College or University such as the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia in New York, Princeton in New Jersey, and the Universities of North Carolina and Georgia. And as new states joined the union they too established a school of higher education. Ohio University was the first of these new Universities. Many of these new schools were funded by their state legislatures through the act of taking and selling tracks of publicly owned land to raise the money needed. The University of Georgia and North Carolina were the first of these ‘Land-Grant’ public Universities.
One advantage of being a union of separate states is that each state competed with the others in educating their citizens. So each state had to have its own university. Ben Franklin founded the University of Pennsylvania. (Credit: AmericaiconsTemple)
Meanwhile by the 1850s the US federal government had acquired huge amounts of undeveloped land. Thanks to the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War the government in Washington owned several times as much land as all of its citizens put together. The idea began to circulate that the best way for the federal government to use some of that land for the benefit of the American people would be to establish land-grant colleges in every state and territory. This movement was led by a professor at Illinois College named Jonathan Baldwin Turner. Spurred on by Turner the Illinois delegation in congress began work on a land-grant bill but because of one of those flukes of politics the final bill was officially sponsored by a congressman from Vermont named Justin Smith Morrill.
With the Louisiana purchase the federal government bought nearly as much land as the original US! More territory was later taken from Mexico so by 1850 the federal government owned a huge amount of land. (Credit: History)
The initial Morrill Land-Grant act passed both houses of congress in 1857 but bowing to pressure from southern states President James Buchanan vetoed the legislation. When Abraham Lincoln became President in 1861 Morrill resubmitted the bill and President Lincoln signed the bill into law on the 2nd of July in 1862.
Vermont congressman Justin Smith Morrill gets credit for the Morrill Land Grant Act. (Credit: Senate.gov)
But it was educator Jonathan Baldwin Turner who originally came up with the idea! (Credit: Wikipedia)
One critical feature of Morrill Land Grant bill was that the Colleges and Universities founded would be intended to teach agriculture and mechanical arts rather than concentrating on a classical, liberal education. In other words practical knowledge would dominate the curriculum, what today we would call engineering. Another critical feature would be that tuition at these publicly funded schools would be subsidized making a college degree available to a much wider section of the American society.
The Morrill act explicitly stated that the colleges and universities founded by it would teach practical subjects like agriculture and engineering rather than the Latin and Greek studies taught at European universities. Iowa State University, seal above, was the first school to take advantage of the Morrill act. (Credit: Iowa State University)
Iowa became the first state to take advantage of the Morrill Act by designating Iowa Agricultural College as Iowa State University. The first school to be created as a Morrill Land Grant school however was Kansas State University, which was officially founded on February 16, 1863 barely 6 months after the bill was signed. Since then every US state, territory and many Native American Tribes have created their own state university system that every year graduates tens of thousands of young Americans preparing them for their future careers.
Land Grant Colleges and Universities soon crisscrossed the US providing a practical education to thousands of young Americans, and yes at that time mainly white boys. Nevertheless the enormous number of trained engineers and scientists played a great role in building American industry and making the US the world’s richest and most powerful nation. (Credit: Slideplayer)
The Morrill Act came at just the right time to act as a spur to the growing American economy. In 1866 the total number of degreed engineers in the US was only around 300, that’s not the number who graduated in 1866 it’s the total number of engineers in the entire country. By 1870 however there were now 21 colleges offering degree programs in engineering and the number of degreed engineers had tripled. By 1911 the US was graduating 3,000 engineers each year, as many as the next two countries Germany and the UK combined.
An engineering class at MIT in 1900. This is more engineers than the US had just fifty years earlier! (Credit: MIT Black History)
So during the last four decades of the 19th century, as the US population grew thanks to immigration and the untapped resources of a continent became available the Land-Grant Universities supplied a steady source of trained engineers to turn those resources into wealth. According to economists the US overtook the UK to become the world’s richest country in 1872, just ten years after the Morrill Act became law, while in terms of per capita income the US overtook the UK in 1902. In less than 50 years the US had become the world’s leader in technology and the result of that leadership was the world’s richest and fastest growing economy.
The US overtook the UK as the world’s richest nation around 1870, just 20 years after the Morrill Land Grant Act. Coincidence, I think not! (Credit: City-Data.com)
There’s a name for this economic / social policy, it’s called ‘Investing in Human Capital’. From 1860 to 1900 the US Federal government ‘gave away’ some 70,000 square kilometers of land for the purpose of educating its citizenry. Instead of investing in ships or guns to make war or acquire colonies the US invested in its most valuable commodity, its people.
The idea of nations investing in their citizens, their most valuable resources, what a concept! (Credit: Slideplayer)
Now the Morrill Act wasn’t without its flaws, for one thing the land given by the federal government was first taken from the Native Americans through a long string of treaty violations. And many of the original Land-Grant schools simply refused admission to any black student. This second problem was somewhat alleviated by a second Morrill Act in 1890 that provided for the establishment of many of the historically black colleges and universities.
The Morrill Land Grant Act even provided funds that helped to found historically black colleges like Howard University. A vain attempt to make the phrase ‘Separate but Equal’ true that nevertheless did educate many blacks who later fought to put and end to ‘Separate but Equal’. (Credit: KPBS)
So what about today? Can a new, modern version of the Morrill Act help to get our country out of its current malaise? Right now we are all so concerned about China overtaking the US that we seem to be unable to do anything to keep ahead.
Currently China is founding a new University of Technical Institute every week! (Credit: daydaynews.cc)
And how is it that China, that was so backward and poor when I was growing up, is soon to become the world’s richest nation? Could it possibly be because China now claims some eight times as many Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) graduates as the US? Over the last 50 years China has invested in its own version of a Morrill Act and is currently building a new University every week! And the result of China’s ‘Investing in Human Capital’ has been the same as it was back in the 1870s, a new economic superpower.
If this trend continues the US could become a third world nation with super-rich, very poor and a shrinking middle class! (Credit: Twitter)
If America is to compete it must have a new Morrill Act of its own. We must guarantee two years of higher, that is college or trade school education to all of our children and we must make the necessary investment so that a four-year degree becomes once again affordable for the children of the middle class.
A good slogan not just for blacks but for all peoples! (Credit: Quote / Counterquote)
The United Negro College Fund has long had a slogan that I’ve always found to be extremely profound. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” It is time for the US to commit to the principle that it will invest in all of its citizens so that no mind goes to waste.
Year after year the evidence that fossil fuel emissions are causing the Earth’s temperature to rise and causing all sorts of environmental problems just continues to accumulate. (And again I don’t care whether you call it global warming or climate change I just want something done about it!) By this time only someone who is either making a great deal of money off of petroleum and natural gas or else is a total fool can doubt that we have to end our reliance on fossil fuels and invest heavily in more sustainable energy sources.
CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere act as a blanket, warming our planet. But all of the fossil fuels we burn are increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses causing the Earth to grow hotter and hotter! (Credit: Medium)
Slowly, bit by bit the tide is turning, more and more people are becoming aware of the grave threat posed by the continued use of fossil fuels. At the same time the alternatives to fossil fuels are becoming more realistic, even attractive from a business point of view.
Young people all over the world are becoming aware of the threat to their future posed by climate change! (Credit: Fox 29 News Philadelphia)
The cost of solar and wind generated electrical power is dropping dramatically. Electric cars have gone from being mere curiosities to a major part of the automobile market with every car manufacturer now boasting about their EVs, see my post of 3 March 2021. And power saving electric products, such as LED lights are gaining favour as consumers are now deliberately trying to reduce their carbon footprint, and save money.
Everyday we’re seeing more and more Electric Vehicles (EVs), and more places to charge them. (Credit: Deseret News)
At the same time political and legal pressure is building to make fighting climate change a major policy in many countries. Climate conscious Joe Biden’s defeat of global warming denier Donald Trump is just the most notable of a number of setbacks for politicians linked to the fossil fuel industry.
And Thank God is all I have to say! (Credit: New York Times)
And lately courtrooms in several nations have proven to be even less friendly to oil companies. Recently a Dutch court at The Hague ordered Shell Oil Company to cut by 45% the emissions of greenhouse gases caused by its products before the year 2030. In years past oil and gas companies had argued in court that they were not responsible for the emissions their customers produced with their products. This argument, know in legal circles as ‘Scope 3’ is now being overturned in case after case because, as the Dutch court put it, climate change due to greenhouse gasses “has serious and irreversible consequences” which threaten the “right to life” of human beings.
Headquartered in the Netherlands, Shell Oil company has been ordered by the Dutch court at the Hague to reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses IT’S CUSTOMERS produce!! A landmark decision placing responsibility for global warming on the producers of fossil fuels. (Credit: Friends of the Earth Europe)
Surely however the most unexpected change has come in the boardrooms of the gas and oil companies themselves. A recent resolution that was circulated amongst shareholders in Chevron Corporation calling for the company to drastically cut its own ‘scope 3’ managed to gain 61% support. While the resolution was not binding, and did not specify any definite amount of the cuts no company’s management can ignore 61% of their stockholders.
Perhaps the biggest shock of all however came in the recent board elections at Exxon-Mobile Corporation, the one company that has before now fought hardest against any environment regulation of the oil and gas industry. In the election an environmentally activist hedge fund called ‘Engine No.1’ won at least two, perhaps threes seats on the twelve member board.
Of all the oil companies Exxon-Mobile has fought hardest against any regulations to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels. Now they are being attacked from within as climate conscious investors worry about the long term business prospects of global warming. (Credit: CNBC)
Now don’t get the idea that the stockholder’s in Chevron and Exxon-Mobile have suddenly become tree-hugging environmentalists. The truth is that they can see that big oil’s days are numbered and if those companies are to remain profitable they are going to have to stop pumping oil out of the ground and invest in more sustainable energy sources. If you think about it this is a change that should have happened twenty or more years ago since the major petroleum producers were in the best position to develop alternative energy sources like solar and wind.
Why didn’t the oil and gas companies start investing in green energy decades ago? They had the money and they knew what was coming. They could have avoided much of the problems we now face while actually improving their long-term financial prospects. I guess it was just the old “I want money and I want it now!” attitude. (Credit: Vox)
Alright, so let’s assume for the moment that the tide has turned, does that mean that we’ve won, that the burning of fossil fuel’s is going to stop and the problem of global warming will soon be solved. Well the battle certainly isn’t over yet. First of all there are still many in the oil industry who are determined to just keep making money whatever the consequences. And even if publicly traded corporations like Shell and Exxon-Mobile are finally convinced, or compelled to do the right thing what about Russia, which is heavily dependent on oil as a export to keep its economy running. And what about China, which is still dependent on coal burning for much of its energy.
Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil company is perhaps the largest oil company in the world now. Virtually owned by the Saudi Royal family there is little legal pressure that can be put upon it to make it environmentally conscious. (Credit: The Washington Institute)
And even if environmentalists have gained the advantage it may already be too late! After all everyone isn’t going to buy an electric car tomorrow. And even with a commitment from the oil companies to reduce their scope 3 emissions oil and even coal burning power plants are still going to be generating electricity for years to come.
Even if we act quickly and decisively to reduce green house emissions there is already so much CO2 in the atmosphere that this is probably a sign of things to come. (Credit: The Guardian)
But we may not have many years before the worst consequences of climate change come to pass. Back in 2015 in the Paris Climate Agreement the nations of the world promised to take action to prevent the Earth’s temperature from rising more than 1.5º Celsius above pre-industrial levels, that’s the year 1850. Since that time there has been little accomplished and in fact greenhouse gas emissions have continued to steadily climb.
Not a pretty picture! The global rise is temperature since the beginning of the industrial age is unmistakable. And let’s be honest, it’s gonna get worse before it starts to get better! (Credit: NASA Earth Observatory)
Meanwhile scientists had calculated that the world was on course to reach and surpass that 1.5ºC level by the year 2030. Well, last year in 2020 the average temperature on this planet was 1.2º C above that in 1850 and the latest set of calculations has now given a 40% chance that we will reach that 1.5º C by 2025, just four years from now! So, is the news good or bad? I suppose it depends on how you look at it. Every day more and more people are getting involved in trying to protect our planet from our own worst impulses, but there is so much left to do with so little time left.
