M Thomas Apple Author Page

Science fiction, actual science, history, and personal ranting about life, the universe, and everything

Well, *that* was interesting!

February 1, 2024
MThomas

OK, so my post about a big ole spider got the most likes of any post in ten years of blogging about science.

I have so not got the zeitgeist of the 2024 blogosphere lol – anyway, thanks, all, for the “likes”! Although one person used AI to write a very meaningless comment about arachnophobia. What’s the point, man?

By the way, back to science and space stuff. I forgot to post about the Europa Clipper project back in October.

So here you go. (It’s too late to add a message, but the project obviously is going to take some time arriving there, and you can supposedly hear US Poet Laureate Ada Limón read her poem online, although I’ve had trouble with the audio lately:

“Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book 
of the universe, expert and evident.

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom, 
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

And it is not darkness that unites us, 
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made 
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, 
of a need to call out through the dark.”

SLIM pickings! Back to work…

January 31, 2024
MThomas

The craft is at a very awkward angle. A picture, captured by the small baseball-sized robot called Sora-Q – which was ejected from Slim moments before touchdown – showed the lander face-down on the lunar surface. 

That left its solar panels facing away from the sunlight and unable to generate power. The decision was taken to put the lander into sleep mode – and conserve what power remained – less than three hours after it landed. 

That tactic appears to have worked. A change in the direction of the sunlight has now “awoken” the craft.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68131105

As previously reported, JAXA did achieve its goal of a “precision landing” — as some put it, a “pinpoint” touchdown within 100 meters of the intended target — within 55 meters, although if all had gone as planned, it would have been within 10 meters.

That’s far, far closer than previous Moon landings.

Too bad SLIM is essentially standing on its nose. But at least this is a beginning. Japan has now become the fifth country (US, USSR, China, India) to successfully “soft land” an object on the Moon.

And the robots it brought with it are pretty amazing. And tiny.

NASA — send in the cats!

December 20, 2023
MThomas

Taters the cat chases a laser pointer in a video sent to Earth from Psyche

Aiming the laser at the spacecraft so the transceiver knows where to point back is the most difficult part, Wright said. And because Earth and the spacecraft are both moving, the lasers must point to where the destination will be in a few minutes.
“The beam’s so narrow, it can’t just point to Earth. It needs to know exactly where on Earth,” Wright said. “Trying to hit a dime from a mile away while you’re moving at 17,000 miles an hour — that’s the challenge.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/12/19/nasa-laser-video-streaming-space-mars-cat/

So NASA has been working on this idea for a while now. The invisible laser beam that carried this video file came from the Psyche probe, on its way to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Psyche is 19 million miles away right now. The laser beam took 108 seconds to reach Earth.

Mars and Earth are on average 140 million miles apart and can be up to 250 million miles apart depending on the timing of their respective orbits.

I don’t think lasers are the answer here. A good start, maybe, but you can do the math. Having to wait between 10 to 20 minutes, or more, for a one-way transmission (double that for an exchange of messages) would not be ideal for a human settlement in an emergency.

Star Trek style instant interstellar communication is still just scifi. Unless there’s still something out there we haven’t found yet, even quantum communication will take time…

But at least NASA has finally realized that non-science people like cat videos.

🐈 🐈‍⬛

Webb reveals rocky planets can form in extreme environments

December 3, 2023
MThomas

This is an artist’s impression of a young star surrounded by a protoplanetary disc in which planets are forming. An international team of astronomers have used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to provide the first observation of water and other molecules in the inner, rocky-planet-forming regions of a disc in one of the most extreme environments in our galaxy. These results suggest that the conditions for rocky-planet  formation, typically found in the discs of low-mass star-forming regions, can also occur in massive-star-forming regions and possibly a broader range of environments.

Because of its location near several massive stars in NGC6357, scientists expect XUE 1 to have been constantly exposed to a high ultraviolet radiation field throughout its life. However, in this extreme environment the team still detected a range of molecules that are the building blocks of rocky planets.

https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Webb/Webb_study_reveals_rocky_planets_can_form_in_extreme_environments

In essence, this expands the possibility of finding many more rocky planets than were previous thought to be exist.

Lots of “gas giants” and a few “super Earths” have been found so far. But Webb is just getting started…

Mars missions are paused immediately…as of 11/11?

November 24, 2023
MThomas

No more selfies for now, Curiosity…

“NASA will hold off sending commands to its Mars fleet for two weeks, from Nov. 11 to 25, while Earth and the Red Planet are on opposite sides of the sun. Called Mars solar conjunction, this phenomenon happens every two years,” NASA said in a statement

https://www.livescience.com/space/mars/nasa-is-pausing-all-mars-missions-effective-immediately-heres-why

It’s funny that Live Science just announced this three days…given that the time period in which Mars is directly behind the Sun opposite the Earth only lasts from November 11th through November 25th.

Which is, ah, tomorrow.

Thanks for the heads up, guys. Honestly…

I would meet…

November 23, 2023
MThomas

If you could meet a historical figure, who would it be and why?

If I could meet an historical figure, I’d like to meet Plato.

Of course, I wouldn’t be able to understand anything he would say, since it’s all Greek to me.

So maybe it’d be better to meet Nikola Tesla.

Preferably before he went a little cuckoo and ended his days feeding pigeons in Central Park.

(Yet) another apology for a brief absence

November 19, 2023
MThomas

Dear readers,

Sorry to have been absent for a couple of weeks.

Things just got busy at work and at home. And influenza really is strong this year, as predicted (I found out long ago that teenagers – especially guys – completely ignore suggestions regarding ways of avoiding illness due to an unwavering belief in their invulnerability).

I’ll try to make it up to you over the next couple of days.

In the meantime, here’s an Apple IIe showing the matrix (“all I see is blond…brunette…”).

O Isis OSIRIS-REx!

September 16, 2023
MThomas

Currently, OSIRIS-REx is located at a distance of 7 million km from our planet. On September 24, OSIRIS-REx will drop a capsule with samples of asteroid matter, after which it will enter the earth’s atmosphere and land on the territory of the Utah Test and Training Range.

https://universemagazine.com/en/osiris-rex-is-on-a-course-for-earth/

The tiny spacecraft launched back in 2016 and reached the asteroid Bennu in 2021.

One main reason for this mission is to find out what Bennu is made of. After the asteroid spewed out tiny “micromoons,” OSIRIS-REx successfully collected a tiny soil sample. By “tiny,” I mean less than 50 to 60 grams. And it couldn’t actually land, since the asteroid is too small to have enough gravity to support the spacecraft.

Now we have less than two weeks to find out what’s in the soil — assuming the capsule is retrieved without incident. And then OSIRIS-REx will head back out to visit yet another asteroid (Apophis) in 2029.

Yes, that famous “planet-killer” the media screamed about a few years ago as “the most dangerous asteroid in the world.” (uh. “in the world”?) It will “only” approach within 38,000 km in April 2029, but could possibly collide in 2036.

No problem.

Quantum Consciousness: Incredulous or Real?

September 12, 2023
MThomas

It’s easy to see why fractals have been used to explain the complexity of human consciousness. Because they’re infinitely intricate, allowing complexity to emerge from simple repeated patterns, they could be the structures that support the mysterious depths of our minds.

But if this is the case, it could only be happening on the quantum level, with tiny particles moving in fractal patterns within the brain’s neurons. That’s why Penrose and Hameroff’s proposal is called a theory of “quantum consciousness”.

https://www.inverse.com/science/consciousness-and-quantum-physics

Quantum computers can only operate at extreme low temperatures (-272C, or -460F, which is basically colder than even the average temperature of outer space, so cold that we made up a new temperature scale called Kelvin to measure it — and no, the “Kelvin timeline” of Star Trek was not named after the temperature but after J J Abram’s grandfather).

So anyway, how is it possible that human consciousness can be considered “quantum” if we need (quite obviously) a much higher temperature to survive? (Making us controlled by classical physics and not quantum physics.)

Our brains are composed of cells called neurons, and their combined activity is believed to generate consciousness. Each neuron contains microtubules, which transport substances to different parts of the cell. The Penrose-Hameroff theory of quantum consciousness argues that microtubules are structured in a fractal pattern which would enable quantum processes to occur.

Scientists have measured electron wave functions (their quantum state) by injecting photons into two types of fractal structures, one triangular and one square-shaped (like the Sierpinski carpet pictured above). The next step would be to take quantum measurements from the brain’s microtubules.

Hmm. I think I’ve seen a shape similar to the Sierinski carpet somewhere before…

“Female” robots and other bias

September 6, 2023
MThomas

When we give AI a humanoid form, we typically choose the robot to have feminine characteristics. Are we playing on stereotypes?

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230804-is-there-a-sinister-side-to-the-rise-of-female-robots

Isn’t it blindingly obvious?

All artificial intelligence, all robots and Chatbots and everything else electronically-programmed by a human being, will inevitably have human bias.

Even women prefer women’s voices to men’s when it comes to customer service.

On the other hand, women are also historically relegated to work with lower pay, lower status, kept out of positions of power — subject to the “male gaze.”

Now, we have AI that can be treated as sex objects. Even “married.”

So it is all “sinister,” as BBC asks?

Creepy, maybe. Sad, perhaps. Entirely predictable, definitely.

As we continue to lead more and more isolated individual lives, cut off from human contact and left unable to socialize, the rise of the “AI companion” seems inevitable…

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