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anonymous

Climate Change Is Making the Whole Planet Tip - 0 views

  • The Earth is a ball that floats in space, and the Earth’s surface—the tectonic plates that make up the land—are like a shell that floats on the mantle below. Just like the hard chocolate coating can slip and slide on your soft serve ice cream, the crust of the Earth can slide over the mantle. This is different than continental drift. This is the whole surface of the planet moving as one. The rotation axis of the Earth stays steady, the land masses shift around it. The idea is known as “true polar wander,” and its occurrence is a part of the planet’s history.
  • The Earth is not a perfect sphere—it’s kind of fat at the middle—and changing how the mass on the surface is distributed changes how the tectonic plates sit in relation to the planet’s rotation axis.
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    "Climate change is changing the planet. Yes, it's doing it in all those ways that you already know about: rising seas, rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, more extreme weather. But climate change is changing the planet in another dramatic way, too: It's actually causing the entire crust of the Earth to shift. According to new research by Jianli Chen and colleagues, climate change-induced glacier melt and sea level rise have thrown the whole planet off-kilter."
anonymous

If the Earth Stood Still - What Would Happen if the Earth Stopped Spinning? - 0 views

shared by anonymous on 25 Sep 12 - Cached
  • Typically, we do not pay much attention to the delineation of the sea because it seems so obvious and constant that we do not realize it is a foundation of geography and the basis for our perception of the physical world.
  • Why is the sea level where we currently observe it? What controls the sea level? How stable are the forces that determine the sea level? This article does not refer to the climate change and the potential increase of the water level in the global ocean but rather to the geometry of the globe and the powerful geophysical energies that determine where oceans lie.
  • Sea level is—and has always been—in equilibrium with the planet's gravity, which pulls the water toward the earth's center of mass, and the outward centrifugal force, which results from the earth's rotation. After a few billion years of spinning, the earth has taken on the shape of an ellipsoid (which can be thought of as a flattened sphere). Consequently, the distance to the earth's center of mass is the longest around the equator and shortest beyond the polar circles.
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  • What would happen if the earth's rotation slowed down and finally stopped spinning over a period of a few decades? ArcGIS lets us model the effects of this scenario, performing calculations and estimations and creating a series of maps showing the effects the absence of centrifugal force would have on sea level.
  • The lack of the centrifugal effect would result in the gravity of the earth being the only significant force controlling the extent of the oceans. Prominent celestial bodies such as the moon and sun would also play a role, but because of their distance from the earth, their impact on the extent of global oceans would be negligible.
  • If the earth's gravity alone was responsible for creating a new geography, the huge bulge of oceanic water—which is now about 8 km high at the equator—would migrate to where a stationary earth's gravity would be the strongest.
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    "The following is not a futuristic scenario. It is not science fiction. It is a demonstration of the capabilities of GIS to model the results of an extremely unlikely, yet intellectually fascinating query: What would happen if the earth stopped spinning? ArcGIS was used to perform complex raster analysis and volumetric computations and generate maps that visualize these results."
anonymous

Greater India Before the Himalayas; Dinosaur Eating Snakes - 0 views

  • Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula.
  • Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula.
  • Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula.
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  • Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula.
  • Throughout most of the 545 million years during which there has been visible life on Earth (the Phanerozoic Eon), Greater India was not part of Asia, and it was not a peninsula.
  • Dinosaurs are one of the best groups for studying the potential effects of paleogeographic changes on evolution because dinosaurs were large animals that were capable of traversing continent scale-distances. For example, early in the Mesozoic Era, when the Earth's continental landmasses were connected, dinosaur faunas worldwide are generally similar. Carnivorous dinosaurs from North America, for example, bear striking resemblance to those from southern Africa, and herbivorous dinosaurs from China resemble those from South America. Later in the Mesozoic Era, however, this is not the case. Dinosaur faunas worldwide became more distinctive from one another due to evolutionary changes and extinction associated with increased isolation.
  • Snakes first appear in the fossil record 100 million years ago, but most Mesozoic snake fossils consist of isolated vertebrae—complete skeletons are extraordinarily rare and limited to a handful of specimens collected from Patagonia, the Levant, and southern Europe.
anonymous

How to destroy the Earth - 0 views

  • The Earth is built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily. So my first piece of advice to you, dear would-be Earth-destroyer, is: do NOT think this will be easy.
  • I will define our goal thus: by any means necessary, to change the Earth into something other than a planet or a dwarf planet.
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    An internet classic. For all of you who want the earth "to not be there anymore" - it's much harder than you've been led to believe (S.D. Hughes, August 24 2006).
anonymous

Five Billion Years of Solitude: Lee Billings on the Science of Reaching the Stars - 0 views

  • The question of habitability is a second-order consideration when it comes to Gliese 581g, and that fact in itself reveals where so much of this uncertainty comes from. As of right now, the most interesting thing about the "discovery" of Gliese 581g is that not everyone is convinced the planet actually exists. That's basically because this particular detection is very much indirect - the planet's existence is being inferred from periodic meter-per-second shifts in the position of its host star.
  • So it's very difficult to just detect these things, and actually determining whether they are much like Earth is a task orders of magnitude more difficult still. Notice how I'm being anthropocentric here: "much like Earth." Astrobiology has been derisively called a science without a subject. But, of course, it does have at least one subject: our own living planet and its containing solar system.
  • This is really a chicken-and-egg problem: To know the limits of life in planetary systems, we need to find life beyond the Earth. To find life beyond Earth, it would be very helpful to know the limits of life in planetary systems. Several independent groups are trying to circumvent this problem by studying abiogenesis in the lab - trying to in effect create life, alien or otherwise, in a test tube.
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  • I do think humans are motivated to daydream about extraterrestrial intelligence, and, to put a finer point on it, extraterrestrial "people." They are motivated to dream about beings very much like them, things tantalizingly exotic but not so alien as to be totally incomprehensible and discomforting. Maybe those imagined beings have more appendages or sense organs, different body plans and surface coverings, but they typically possess qualities we recognize within ourselves: They are sentient, they have language, they use tools, they are curious explorers, they are biological, they are mortal - just like humans. Perhaps that's a collective failure of imagination, because it's certainly not very easy to envision intelligent aliens that are entirely divergent from our own anthropocentric preconceptions. Or perhaps it's more diagnostic of the human need for context, affirmation, and familiarity. Why are people fascinated by their distorted reflections in funhouse mirrors? Maybe it's because when they recognize their warped image, at a subconscious level that recognition reinforces their actual true appearance and identity.
  • More broadly, speculating about extraterrestrial intelligence is an extension of three timeless existential questions: What are we, where do we come from, and where are we going?
  • The first pessimistic take is that the differences between independently emerging and evolving biospheres would be so great as to prevent much meaningful communication occurring between them if any intelligent beings they generated somehow came into contact.
  • The second pessimistic take is that intelligent aliens, far from being incomprehensible and ineffable, would be in fact very much like us, due to trends of convergent evolution, the tendency of biology to shape species to fit into established environmental niches.
  • It stands to reason that any alien species that managed to embark on interstellar voyages to explore and colonize other planetary systems could, like us, be a product of competitive evolution that had effectively conquered its native biosphere. Their intentions would not necessarily be benevolent if they ever chose to visit our solar system.
  • The third pessimistic scenario is an extension of the second, and postulates that if we did encounter a vastly superior alien civilization, even if they were benevolent they could still do us harm through the simple stifling of human tendencies toward curiosity, ingenuity, and exploration.
  • Right now reaching low-Earth orbit generally comes at a cost somewhere between $5,000 to $10,000 per kilogram, depending on which launch vehicle is used. This creates an enormous barrier to making profitable ventures in space or building major space-based infrastructure. It also engenders further high costs in the design, fabrication, and testing of most spaceflight hardware, which due to the high cost to orbit must be made as lightweight and reliable as possible.
  • If launch costs fall well below $1,000 per kilogram, a host of economic activities that were previously prohibitively expensive should at a stroke become cheap enough to be readily profitable.
  • I'm an American citizen, so I will focus my comments on the American space program and the American political system. I'm sad to say that in this country, the most powerful nation presently on the planet, space science, exploration, and development are treated as fringe issues at best. Too many politicians, if they consider these issues at all, treat them in one of two ways: Dismissively, as things to be joked about, or cynically, as little more than pork-barrel job programs for their districts, things to be defended purely for the status quo and only given token lip-service when absolutely necessary.
  • And who can blame them? Look at what happens to politicians when they try to talk seriously and ambitiously about space today. They are lampooned and ridiculed by the media and by their political opponents as starry-eyed idealists who are disconnected from everyday realities.
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    "One of the best briefings on the state of the art of interstellar exploration is Lee Billings' essay "Incredible Journey," recently reprinted in a wonderful new anthology called The Best Science Writing Online 2012, edited by Scientific American's Bora Zivkovic and Jennifer Ouellette. I'm very honored to have a piece in the anthology myself: my NeuroTribes interview with John Elder Robison, author of the bestselling memoir of growing up with autism, Look Me in The Eye, and other books. When SciAm's editors suggested that each author in the book interview one of the other authors, I jumped at the chance to interview Billings about his gracefully written and informative article about the practical challenges of space flight. Billings is a freelance journalist who has written for Nature, New Scientist, Popular Mechanics, and Seed. He lives outside New York City with his wife, Melissa."
anonymous

Science: Why is the flight journey from Dubai to Los Angeles always over Europe, Greenl... - 0 views

  • Going across the Atlantic would be out of the way and make the trip longer. Here is the shortest path from Dubai to Los Angeles:
  • This "Mercator projection" is extremely stretched out near the poles, so a path that goes through very high latitudes is stretched out quite a lot on the map. It looks much longer than it really is. Thus, although the path straight across the Atlantic looks shorter, it is actually longer.
  • Mathematically, this impossibility of a perfect map projection means the metric for the Earth is different from that of a map. It results from the Earth being curved in a technical sense.
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  • The outside edge of a cylinder, by contrast, is actually flat in this sense of the word, not curved. It is curved in three-dimensional space, but it is itself two-dimensional, and within two dimensions it has no curvature. This is because it can be cut and set down flat without any stretching, so if the Earth were like the edge of a cylinder we could make nice flat maps and draw straight lines on them to find the shortest distances. Since the Earth is roughly a sphere, which is truly curved, we can't do this, and to find the shortest path between points we need to use a globe or use mathematical techniques; we can't rely on what maps seem to tell us.
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    Also how does the rotation of Earth and movement of the atmosphere figure in? If say a flight takes 12 hours, would you not be back in Dubai due to the Earth's rotation?
anonymous

Why did nearly all life on Earth die 250 million years ago? - 0 views

  • Among paleontologists, it's sometimes called the "Great Dying." Roughly a quarter of a billion years ago, 90-95 percent of all life on Earth died out. It took 30 million years for the planet to recover. What happened?
  • The era before the Great Dying - also known as the Permo-Triassic Extinction - is called the Permian, and it was a time of rapid animal evolution, including mammal-reptile hybrids called synapsids that looked sort of like giant lizards - some even had big sails on their backs.
  • there were actually three die-offs during the Permian, but the one at the end of the Permian and the beginning of the Triassic, 250 million years ago, was extreme.
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  • Put another way: It's likely that 9 out of 10 marine species and 7 out of 10 land species went extinct.
  • So you've got massive volcanic eruptions, spewing tons of sulfur and greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Billowing clouds cut plants off from life-giving light, and acid rain pours from the skies. The ozone layer is shredded. Then you've got this major asteroid impact, whose heat is so intense that it ignites forests. The burning trees release carbon dioxide and other toxins. The end result? A long-term transformation in the Earth's climate, similar to what environmentalists predict in a worst-case scenario for our near future if we continue to burn fossil fuels and release other toxins. Carbon dioxide levels rise, oxygen levels fall, and animals and plants die off by the millions.
  • Not all scientists agree that the asteroid impact caused the volcanic eruptions. Whether the volcanoes or the asteroid came first, it's certain that the Great Dying was caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide both in the sea and on land.
  • What does the Great Dying tell us about our place in Earth's current ecosystem? Most importantly it reminds us that our existence is short, contingent, and precarious.
  • More specifically, the Permo-Triassic extinction event proves that climate change caused by greenhouse gasses can kill nearly every creature on the planet.
anonymous

How did life begin on Earth? - 0 views

  • Recent findings—such as that life seems to be everywhere on Earth—have encouraged scientific inquiries into the nature of life’s beginnings, said Szostak.
  • Two critical needs for life are to create a membrane, which defines a boundary that can contain genetic material, and to replicate. Szostak said it is relatively easy to create a membrane from fatty acids that could have arisen in conditions that mimic early Earth; fatty acids, mixed in water with a little salt, readily create closed structures called vesicles.
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    By Mariette DiChristina at Scientific American Observations on June 29, 2010.
anonymous

New study clinches it: the Earth is warming up | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine - 0 views

  • The 2009 State of the Climate report released today draws on data for 10 key climate indicators that all point to the same finding: the scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable. More than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries contributed to the report, which confirms that the past decade was the warmest on record and that the Earth has been growing warmer over the last 50 years.
  • That’s not correct. Of course this report is deniable. That’s what deniers do: deny. And we’ll be hearing from them in the comments below, have no doubts.
  • Mind you, I am distinguishing, as I always do, between deniers and skeptics. Those are two very different things. I am, quite literally, a skeptic of global warming. I do think it’s happening, but that’s because that’s what the evidence is telling me.
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  • If good, solid evidence came along that contradicted that, I would a) look at it, and b) assess it, and c) if it’s incontrovertible then I would change my mind.
  • But to deny means to ignore the evidence, or twist it, spin it, cherry-pick it, distort it.
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    "For quite some time now, the evidence that the Earth is warming up has been piling up. Study after study has shown this, and that's why the vast majority of scientists agree on it. And now, to pile on even more, a large NOAA study has been released." By Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy (Discover Magazine) on August 3, 2010.
anonymous

Embracing the Anthropocene - 0 views

  • The Earth has entered a new geological period in which human influence dominates the state of the planet, compounding uncertainty about the future.
  • Crutzen and Stoermer made the case that the Holocene, the geological epoch that had held sway on Earth for the past 12,000 years, was at an end. In its place, with a start date pegged to the late 18th century commercialization of James Watt’s steam engine, was the Anthropocene, an epoch defined by the influence of humanity’s collective actions.
  • For humans, adjustments to a warming world can be divided into three categories: mitigation, adaptation, and remediation.
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  • Now, a study in this week’s PNAS reinforces that even those geoengineering schemes that have a history of scientific testing can still have surprising consequences.
  • If some consensus is reached by the individuals at Asilomar, then the early spring of 2010 may be seen in hindsight as the time when, for better or worse, humanity decided to truly embrace or reject the Anthropocene—and all its chilling, sublime implications. Amid the inevitable theatrics next week, both sides would do well to pause and remember that.
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    Tagline: "The Earth has entered a new geological period in which human influence dominates the state of the planet, compounding uncertainty about the future." By Lee Billings, Seed Magazine, March 19, 2010.
anonymous

We Are Not Alone - 0 views

  • according to a new book by astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch and science writer David Darling, we’ve had good evidence of microbial life on Mars since NASA’s Viking missions in the late 1970s.
  • The Viking researchers thought life on Mars would be heterotrophic, feeding off abundant organic compounds distributed everywhere all over the Martian surface. That picture was wrong, and studies of extremophiles on Earth have made us think differently about Mars.
  • There were three life-detection experiments: the Labeled Release Experiment that yielded a positive result, the Gas Exchange Experiment that gave a negative result, and the Pyrolytic Release Experiment, which was gave ambiguous, inconclusive results.
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  • We now have much better technologies, and a much better understanding of the Martian environment, but we still haven’t had a life-detection experiment since Viking!
  • all our biological molecules have a certain “handedness,” a left- or right-handed orientation to their structures. So if the molecules in the organisms from Mars have a different handedness than the molecules from Earth life, that would be pretty good proof.
  • The biggest thing is that we don’t yet understand the origin of life on Earth. Rather, we understand the persistence of life in habitable environments on this planet. There are tons of potential habitable environments elsewhere in our own solar system, and we know that life originated on Earth and spread nearly everywhere.
  • It’s hard to see other possibilities, other forms life can have, what other options, avenues, and paths, life could take elsewhere. I think as we discover more and more strange planets and moons, in our solar system and beyond, most scientists will realize that it’s very important to look at these other possibilities, so that we’re somewhat prepared for what else might be out there.
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    "In his new book, astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch says that extraterrestrial life has already been found." By Lee Billings in Seed on April 20, 2010.
anonymous

Leap Seconds May Hit a Speed Bump - 1 views

  • In order to keep the time determined by Earth's motion in line with the seconds measured by atomic clocks, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service inserts "leap seconds" into the calendar. But leap seconds may fall out of favor after next year's World Radiocommunication Conference
  • the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) uses the resonant frequency of cesium-133 atoms in the NIST-F1 Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock to keep time so accurately that even if it ran for 60 million years, NIST-F1 wouldn't drop or add a single second.
  • atomic clocks are actually more stable than Earth's orbit—to keep clocks here synched up with the motion of celestial bodies, timekeepers have to add leap seconds.
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  • Getting rid of leap seconds would certainly make it easier to calculate UTC, but this measure would also decouple astronomical time from civil time: The time measured by atomic clocks would gradually diverge from the time counted out by the movement of Earth through space.
  • After hundreds of years of letting planetary and lunar motion define time, we will shrink our scale, and let atoms determine it instead.
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    "For most of human history, we have defined time through the movements of planets and stars. One day is the time it takes the Earth to rotate about its axis, one year the duration of a single orbit about the sun. But in January 2012, the way we think of time may change."
anonymous

Super Mario Earth - 1 views

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    "Earth as various maps from Super Mario? Genius. If only we really had warp pipes. Worlds identified include the U.S. as Donut Plains (ouch) and Eastern Europe as the Forest of Illusion. Can you spot any other interesting choices?"
anonymous

The Technium: The Average Place on Earth - 1 views

  • I describe this global system of technology deployed around the planet as an emerging superorganism. It consists of roads, electric lines, telephone cables, buildings, water systems, dams, satellites, ocean buoys and ships, all our computers and data centers, and all 6 billion humans. But while this superorganism of new and old technology operates at the planetary scale, and reaches all continents, and spans the oceans, and reaches into orbital space, it is a thin and uneven layer on the globe. In fact most of the planet, on average, is in a very primitive state.
  • Let's draw a grid around the globe with lines that form a square approximately every 100 km (at the equator). At every intersection of these grid lines we'll take a picture for inspection. There are about 10,000 intersections over the land part of this planet. They will give us a very good statistical portrait of what this planet looks like on land. Shown are 6,000 images of a possible 10,000 degree intersections on land.
  • The imaginary grid is the longitude and latitude grid, and somewhat remarkably, over 6,000 of the 10,000 intersections have already been photographed. Intrepid volunteers sign up at a web site called the Degree Confluence that is half art-project, and half adventure storytelling in order to select an intersection somewhere on the globe to visit --no matter how wild -- and record their success with photographs including a legible snapshot of their gps proving a bonafide "even" lat-long reading with lots of zeros.
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  • The resultant grid of photos is very revealing (below). Here is a portion of southern China, one of the most densely settled regions on the planet. Each image is one degree intersection. There is hardly a building in site. And for a place that has been intensely farmed for centuries if not millennia, there is a surprising lot of wildness. What it does to show is urbanization.
  • Projections for the year 2050 predict that most of the 8 billion people on the planet will live in megacities, with populations over 30 million. And these megacity clusters will form a network made up of smaller cities over 1 million in population. But these incredibly dense clusters will weave through a countryside that is emptying. It is already common to find entire villages in China, India, and South America abandoned by its inhabitants who fled to the swelling cities, leaving behind a few old folks, or often, no one at all. This is the pattern on Earth. Extremely dense and vast populations in a network of megacities connected to each other with nerves of roads and wires, woven over an empty landscape of wild land, marginal pastures, and lightly populated farms. By 2050 and beyond, Earth will be a urban planet, while the average place on the planet will be nearly wild.
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    "Technology and human activity are so global that they operate together as if they were a geological force. Civilization is altering the climate in the same way that volcanoes do and have done; our agriculture alters the biosphere the way climate has in the past; and now megacities are altering the planetary balances of heat and sea level. The technium is a planetary event."
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    That opening paragraph is a keeper.
anonymous

Geopolitical Journey: Europe, the Glorious and the Banal - 1 views

  • How prosaic business opportunities generate the most risky and grandiose undertakings has come to interest me. This school arose with the specific goal of training sailors to go farther and farther south along the African coast in search of a sea route to India.
  • The Portuguese sought this route to cut out the middleman in the spice trade. Spices were wealth in Europe; they preserved and seasoned food, and were considered medicinal and even aphrodisiacs. But they were fiendishly expensive
  • The more I learn more about Henry, the more his program reminds me of NASA and of Tom Wolfe's classic, The Right Stuff, about America's space program. Like NASA, each mission built on the last, trying out new methods in an incremental fashion. Henry didn't try to shoot to the moon, as they say. He was no Columbus, risking everything for glory, but rather a methodical engineer, pushing the limits a little at a time and collecting data.
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  • Europe wasn't kind to the world it discovered. But over time it did force each culture to become aware of all the others; after centuries, a Mongol student might learn about the Aztecs. Instead of a number of isolated worlds, each believing itself to be the center of the Earth, each new discovery fed the concept of a single world.
  • On this cape, early in the 15th century, well before Columbus sailed, Henry planned Europe's assault on the world. In the process, he laid the foundation of the modern world and modern Europe.
  • If Henry created his school solely for knowledge, then perhaps sending messages in a bottle and waiting for a reply would have done that. But Henry, the prince who became a monk, also acted for wealth, God's glory and to claim his place in history.
  • Today, we have entered a phase of history where the buccaneering spirit has left us. The desire for knowledge has separated itself from the hunger we have for wealth and glory. Glory is not big today, cool is. Cool does not challenge the gates of heaven, it accepts what is and conforms to it.
  • This is a passing phase, however. Humans will return to space to own it, discover unknown wealth and bring glory.
  • Out in West Texas and other desolate places, private companies -- privateers -- are reinventing the space program. They are searching for what Henry sought -- namely, wealth and glory.
  • Certainly, European imperialism brought misery to the world. But the world was making itself miserable before, and has since: One group of people has always been stealing land from other groups in a constant flow of history. What culture did not live on land stolen from another culture, either annihilated or absorbed? Ours has always been a brutal world. And the Europe Henry founded did not merely oppress and exploit, although it surely did those things. It also left as its legacy something extraordinary: a world that knew itself and all of its parts.
  • Only the dead leave legacies, and Europe is not dead. Yet something in it has died. The swagger and confidence of a great civilization is simply not there, at least not on the European peninsula.
  • Instead, there is caution and fear. You get the sense in Europe -- and here I think of conversations I had on previous trips in the last year or so -- of a fear that any decisive action will tear the place apart.
  • The European search for comfort and safety is not trivial, not after the horrors of the 20th century. The British and French have given up empires, Russia has given up communism, Germany and Italy have given up fascism and racism. The world is better off without these things. But what follows, what is left?
  • I am not talking here of the economic crisis that is gripping Europe, leaving Portugal with 17 percent unemployment and Spain with 26 percent. These are agonizing realities for those living through them. But Europeans have lived through more and worse.
  • Instead, I am speaking of a crisis in the European soul, the death of hubris and of risk-taking. Yes, these resulted in the Europeans trying to convert the world to Christianity and commerce, in Russia trying to create a new man and in Germany becoming willing to annihilate what it thought of as inferior men.
  • The Europeans are content to put all that behind them. Their great search for the holy grail is now reduced to finding a way to resume the comforts of the unexceptional. There is something to be said for the unexceptional life. But it cannot be all there is. 
  • We humans are caught between the hunger for glory and the price you pay and the crimes you commit in pursuing it. To me, the tension between the hunger for ordinary comforts and the need for transcendence seems to lie at the heart of the human condition. Europe has chosen comfort, and now has lost it. It sought transcendence and tore itself apart. The latter might have been Henry's legacy, but ah, to have gone to his school with da Gama and Magellan.
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    "We flew into Lisbon and immediately rented a car to drive to the edge of the Earth and the beginning of the world. This edge has a name: Cabo de Sao Vicente. A small cape jutting into the Atlantic Ocean, it is the bitter end of Europe. Beyond this point, the world was once unknown to Europeans, becoming a realm inhabited by legends of sea monsters and fantastic civilizations. Cabo de Sao Vicente still makes you feel these fantasies are more than realistic. Even on a bright sunny day, the sea is forbidding and the wind howls at you, while on a gloomy day you peer into the abyss. Just 3 miles east of Cabo de Sao Vicente at the bas"
anonymous

Moore's Law and the Origin of Life | MIT Technology Review - 0 views

  • These guys argue that it’s possible to measure the complexity of life and the rate at which it has increased from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to more complex creatures such as worms, fish and finally mammals. That produces a clear exponential increase identical to that behind Moore’s Law although in this case the doubling time is 376 million years rather than two years.That raises an interesting question. What happens if you extrapolate backwards to the point of no complexity–the origin of life?Sharov and Gordon say that the evidence by this measure is clear. “Linear regression of genetic complexity (on a log scale) extrapolated back to just one base pair suggests the time of the origin of life = 9.7 ± 2.5 billion years ago,” they say. And since the Earth is only 4.5 billion years old, that raises a whole series of other questions. Not least of these is how and where did life begin.
  • Of course, there are many points to debate in this analysis. The nature of evolution is filled with subtleties that most biologists would agree we do not yet fully understand.
  • For example, is it reasonable to think that the complexity of life has increased at the same rate throughout Earth’s history?
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  • They also point out that astronomers believe that the Sun formed from the remnants of an earlier star, so it would be no surprise that life from this period might be preserved in the gas, dust and ice clouds that remained. By this way of thinking, life on Earth is a continuation of a process that began many billions of years earlier around our star’s forerunner.
  • However, if life takes 10 billion years to evolve to the level of complexity associated with humans, then we may be among the first, if not the first, intelligent civilisation in our galaxy. And this is the reason why when we gaze into space, we do not yet see signs of other intelligent species.
  • There’s no question that this is a controversial idea that will ruffle more than a few feathers amongst evolutionary theorists.But it is also provocative, interesting and exciting. All the more reason to debate it in detail.
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    "As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore's law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself."
anonymous

Penn and Teller interview - 0 views

  • Illusionists Penn and Teller barely communicate outside work – but after 35 years together they still create the most beautiful shows on earth. Ahead of their first British performances for 16 years, Benjamin Secher went to Las Vegas to ask them how they do it .
  • Penn dominates the stage, pointing, spouting like an evangelist, encouraging us to see the big ideas behind the wizardry, plucking at his double bass, doing dangerous looking things with a nailgun, cracking jokes at the expense of Homeland Security or dispensing a running commentary on Teller’s sleights of hand. He also has a habit of giving away the tricks – before Teller’s red ball act, he declares “this is done with a thread!” – something he describes as “a kind of peace offering” to the audience but which some of the other magicians in Vegas see as a professional blasphemy. He couldn’t care less what they think. “I have always hated magic,” he says. “I have always hated the basic undercurrent of magic which Jerry Seinfeld put best when he said: 'All magic is “Here’s a quarter, now it’s gone. You’re a jerk. Now it’s back. You’re an idiot. Show’s over”.’ I never wanted to grow up to be a magician. It was never my goal.” He would rather have been a rock star, he says, but the business seemed already saturated with extraordinarily talented people. “So my thinking was, and I will say this outright, music is full of people I absolutely love. I don’t have a chance. They are all better than me. Magic has, ooh, nobody in it that I like.” He rocks back in his chair, cackling. “This is the field for me!”
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    "Illusionists Penn and Teller barely communicate outside work - but after 35 years together they still create the most beautiful shows on earth. Ahead of their first British performances for 16 years, Benjamin Secher went to Las Vegas to ask them how they do it ." By Benjamin Secher at The Telegraph on July 9, 2010.
anonymous

Germany's Geopolitical Opening - 0 views

  • Germany is, of course, not like any other country. It was the primary culprit behind the deadliest conflict to ever befall mankind — World War II — and of the greatest state-organized massacre of a single group of people — the Jewish Holocaust. As such, it essentially was forced to give up much of its sovereignty for the next 40 years and to serve as the board for the geopolitical chess match between Washington and Moscow throughout the Cold War.
  • Germany is forcefully defending its interests and national economic strategy ahead of the G-20 summit. The stage is therefore set for a serious disagreement between Washington and the chief trade surplus countries, specifically Germany and China, at the summit. Germany is also beginning to take shots at China, especially for its decision to limit exports of rare earth elements crucial for German industry. These economic disagreements come as Berlin becomes comfortable with its own geopolitical assertiveness. As far as Germany is concerned, it is no longer anybody’s chessboard. It is beginning to see itself as one of the world powers again — with grand strategies, pawns to sacrifice and everything else that goes along with the title of a chess grand master.
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    "German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said on Tuesday that Germans as a nation "must really do something to articulate the relationship between regional security and economic interests without coming to deadlock." Guttenberg cited China's decision to limit rare earth element exports as an example of how competition for resources with the emerging powers could negatively affect Germany's economic well-being. In other words, Guttenberg made a direct link between Berlin's economic and security policies. In any other country such a link is obvious and often reiterated by policymakers, but when German President Horst Koehler expressed similar sentiments in May, he was forced to resign a week later due to criticism that he was overstepping his constitutional bounds (the presidency in Germany is a ceremonial position and one of Europe's constitutionally weakest head-of-state institutions). "
anonymous

Living On a New Earth - 0 views

  • Forget banking and the automotive industry. Earth is the one system that is truly “too big to fail.”
  • Those fixes could slow environmental degradation but might not solve the underlying cause. That culprit, according to Middlebury College scholar in residence Bill McKibben, is the very driver of modern society: a relentless quest for economic growth. In an exclusive excerpt from his upcoming book, McKibben argues that we must give up growth and reorganize based on smart maintenance of resources. Critics say the idea is unrealistic; staff editor Mark Fischetti challenges him to respond. 
anonymous

Geoengineering (Wikipedia definition) - 0 views

  • The modern concept of Geoengineering (or Climate Engineering) is usually taken to mean proposals to deliberately manipulate the Earth's climate to counteract the effects of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions.
    • anonymous
       
      I was brought to this page after reading a Wired Magazine excerpt of "Hack the Planet" on March 24, 2010. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2010/03/24/wired-excerpts-hack-the-planet/
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