Parsecs

Deep space — Some of those little dots are galaxies the size of our Milky Way

A parsec is a convenient astronomical unit equal to about 3.26 light years ... and a light year is the distance that light travels in a year ... nearly 6 trillion miles. Now the universe is more than 92 million-light years (28.2 million parsecs) across ... or 46 million light years in radius ... yet the universe is only about 15 million years old. So there is a bit of a disconnect here ... meaning matter in the universe must have been moving faster than the speed of light?

Einstein resolved this dilemma by positing the universe itself is like a gigantic rubbery fabric that is being stretched ... which means that its fast-moving components ... particularly near its edges appear to be moving faster than the speed of light ... but not really ... see: Space.com Explanation for a more scientific explanation.

Einstein’s logic mostly works ... but is it true? Some scientists believe that time itself is slowing down ... which, because it appears as a squared denominator in the formula f or acceleration  ... would account for the apparent speeding up of distant galaxies ... see: Curiosity.com Write-up.

Since I am no Einstein, I have no idea who is correct. But I do know that our understanding of such things seems to undergo a paradigm shift about every hundred years or so ... so such a shift might now be underway.

Stay tuned ...

Sidebar: If time is indeed slowing down, then gravity everywhere would be increasing as per above logic ... another possible path to an explanation for our dinosaurs dying off ... see: Pterosaurs (Updated).

Pterosaurs (Updated)

Because pterosaurs were so much larger than today's flying animals, one must conclude that our atmosphere was much denser then. And  how could this be? One explanation is that our atmosphere is getting thinner. But the opposite seems true ... see Science Magazine Article.

Thus, our atmosphere then must have been infused with many more carbon dioxide and other complex (heavier) molecules such as methane and water vapor.

Therefore, if life flourished then, we must have far more latitude for changes to our current atmospheric mix than climate scientists, like Al Gore, give us credit for.

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The above was written to try to explain why flying animals were so much bigger hundreds of millions of years ago. I concluded the the density of our atmosphere was much greater back then ... which helped to support more weight. The case I made was rather strained but I am not dismissing it here. But, upon further research and thought, it might (also) be that gravity on our Earth was so much weaker back then ... allowing for easier flight ... see: More on Gravity. Could be both, but I am now more persuaded by less gravity.

I also have some further thoughts on gravity ... starting with the question: what happens to its gravity when matter is destroyed? Clearly, nuclear weapons destroy matter, albeit a small amount turned into enormous amounts of energy (E = MC2). However, when celestial events occur, such as the merging of two black holes, enormous amounts of matter is destroyed. Such events, it has been recently discovered, send out “gravitational waves.” Although it has not yet been proven that gravitational waves carry away this orphaned gravity (see: Wikipedia Entry) ... I will so speculate.

These gravitational waves, if they distributed this orphaned gravity throughout the universe, would likely do so uniformly ... which seems a requirement for not upsetting the current celestial relationships (as I have previously been concerned with). Also, of course, even though this gravitational wave might possibly distribute an enormous amount of its orphaned gravity throughout the universe, the share that the Earth might receive would be very, very small.

But again, millions of years of these gravitational waves striking the Earth might accumulate to a meaningful number ... or, there might have been one or more super gigantic celestial events that provided the Earth with a large enough dose to goose our gravity to the point where pterosaurs could no longer get airborne ... and dinosaurs to became extinct over a short time span.

My speculations here may or may not make scientific sense ... but they sure make common sense.

More on Gravity

I recently posted a picture of the femur from a huge dinosaur ... see: Femur Found in France ... and speculated whether gravity has changed over the eons. I say this because it is doubtful that an animal this enormous could live today with today’s gravity pull. Note that the largest animal on Earth now is the blue whale which survives in an environment, sea water, where it’s buoyancy helps counteract today’s gravity. And the blue whale is much smaller than the land animal represented by the femur found in France. Therefore, it seems clear to me that gravity here on Earth must have increased to a level where such a behemoth could not exist today.

Einstein’s View

The questions then persist ... how and why? Newton called gravity a force and Einstein called it a warp in the space-time continuum. Others speculate gravity comes from an elementary particle called a graviton. In order to continue this discussion further, read first: Universe Today Write-up. On the other hand, I have speculate before that gravity is a fifth dimension ... one of the seven new ones predicted to exist in string theory mathematics.

I have also opined that the amount of gravity is finite and that, during the Big Bang, not all gravity found some mass “to attach to” ... and became dark matter (an ironic term since it apparently has no mass). And that this orphaned gravity is what causing the universe to expand ... because only that attached to mass would cause the universe to contract ... as the sum of  known mass would suggest. If this reasoning turns out to be fact, dark matter and dark energy are one and the same.

How can gravity be both another dimension and a form of free-floating dark matter? This I haven’t fully figured out yet. Maybe just the difference between a dimension and the metric that measures it?

So, to return to the original speculation about the Earth acquiring more gravity over time ... which has caused our animal populations to shrink in physical size. Perhaps “dark matter” or meandering gravity, unattached after the universe was created, does continually find homes in places like Earth ... and results in higher gravity readings over the eons. Of course, this needs be occurring simultaneously everywhere ... or else the gravitational relations between celestial bodies would go awry ... which would not be good.

Afterthought: Could the tipping point and the rapid disappearance of the dinosaurs have been finally caused by too much gravity?

ET Sheriff

I have analyzed the probability that we will be able to communicate with alien life that most certainly exists elsewhere in the universe. My estimate is, at best, one in a million ... see: Sapient Window (Update). And the chances that such aliens might visit us here on Earth are quite a substantial  bit smaller. However, does this cause big government to account for this minuscule possibility? Of course not. We now will be spending six figures to hire someone at NASA to protect us from this will-o-the-wisp ... see: The Independent Article. And, once this charlatan has fleshed out this bureaucracy, we taxpayers will be shelling out millions ... with these ET sheriffs sitting around, releasing an occasional press release to gullible dreamers, while waiting for Godot.

Headlines

These headlines are real ... they have all been discovered on Internet news sites. Guess which ones came from Politico?

DNC Perez unleashed: 'Trump didn't win election' ...

Schiff heads to White House to review controversial intelligence

Rahm Emmanuel invents new ID to insure illegals get their welfare

Maddow Fever continues at MSNBC: Ratings grow and grow

Rex Tillerson says sanctions against Russia will remain in place

Bannon earned more than half a million dollars from entities tied to GOP donors

Wiki strikes again: CIA computer codes hide origins of its hacking ... disguises as Russia, China

Simulation suggests 68% of Universe may not exist ...

Kasich cracks down on opoid prescriptions with strict limit

Laptop bombs undetectable ...

Democrats aim to take out Cruz in 2018

Montana Democrats vote against law banning Sharia law

Thought for Today

Life surely exists and has existed elsewhere in the Universe, but our connecting with it is a monument to hope over logic.

For you doubters, see: Sapient Window (Update).

Sapient Window (Update)

"Sapient window" is a term I have used before to describe the time period when intelligent beings on a planet have the knowledge base to realize the possibility of life existing elsewhere in the universe and the scientific wherewithal to search for it ...  see: Sapient Window. In this  referenced link I estimate that, here on Earth we are now in our sapient window ... having been so for about a hundred years or so.

Being in this window, we are pouring resources into attempting then to discover life on other planets ... and to look for them contacting us and, maybe, eventually contacting them ... a naturally appealing idea. The largest radio telescope ever built ... partly to this end ... has just been activated  ... see: UK Mirror Story.  So far this search has been to no avail using other means. As full of romantic agony this search entails, it is my contention that this quest is very likely to continue to be quixotic. (Stephen Hawking disagrees ... see: CNET Story.) And my sad conclusion is simply based on three indisputable facts:

1) The likelihood that our sapient window, even were it to last for another 13 thousand years, would line up with the sapient window on some other inhabited exo-planet ... just in our galaxy alone ... is vanishingly small ... given the enormous span since the beginning of time (the Big Bang?) ... I calculate the probability of such alignments at 0,0001% (see: Are We Alone?). Even if I am off by three orders of magnitude (because of things likely being back-end loaded), there is still only a one in a thousand chance of these sapient windows matching up.

2) The vast distances ... just in the galaxy in which our solar system exists, the Milky Way, let alone the Universe, are so large that the time delays imposed on any intelligent communications pretty much negate things ... even at the speed of light. We are talking about at least tens of thousands of years between any "Hello" and our excited response. This makes any meaningful communication pragmatically impossible.

3) it has been estimated that the energy required to send a receivable message of greeting over these vast interstellar distances could be equivalent to the energy output of our sun. I kind of doubt that this is realistically doable by all but a minuscule number of exo-planets with intelligent life, if any.

Thus, I again conclude that we are on a fool's errand with our attempt to wait for the phone to ring from another exo-planet ... and our possibly responding is even nuttier. The cost benefit analysis and actual science make no rational sense to this quest. I conclude that it is all just emotional pandering by scientists looking for more grant money.

Sapient Window

I have previously coined the term "sapient window" when discussing the possibility of communicating with life elsewhere in our universe ... see: Cosmic Silence. This term is meant to define the period when life on a planet has progressed far enough scientifically to understand its uniqueness in the continuum of space and time. In other words, without superstition, being able to define enough of the essential realities of the universe to fathom that there is other life elsewhere out there ... is the essence of a sapient window.

It is difficult to say when the sapient window opened here on Earth, but a good guess would be with the publication of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity in 1916. Thus our sapient window seems at most to be about 100 years old. This is a vanishing small percentage of our Earth's 1.3 billion years of age which is about 10% of the age of our universe. The more difficult task is estimating how long our sapient window will remain open ... may I be optimistic and propose another 10,000 years? (I think Charles Krauthammer is more pessimistic in the article above-referenced.) What will cause this window to close is anyone's guess ... a pandemic, a natural disaster, another Dark Age, self-annulation, etc.

Even with this, the Earth's sapient window would still be but a snap of the fingers compared to the age of our planet ... and just a blink of the eye relative to the age of the universe ... as, I assume, it would be for other exo-planets.Therefore, assuming a meaningful concurrence of the sapient windows between any of the billions of possible life-supporting exo-planets is a bit of a stretch ... even ignoring the unfathomable distances involved.