Snowden

It’s not aliens... but...

Not a Drill:  SETI is Investigating a Possible Extraterrestrial Signal From Deep Space

   some of my related posts

Kardashev Scale (tumblr post)

Fermi (weebly page)

other old, related tumblr posts

http://krillion.tumblr.com/post/140353978285/aliens

http://krillion.tumblr.com/post/137384284965/update-aliens-maybe

http://krillion.tumblr.com/post/131250260930/aliens

The Starfish Story

I heard this story the first year I taught and have never forgotten it... I just shared it with a teacher friend of mine who needed some encouragement- thought I would share it on my blog as well.....  Once upon a time there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work. One day he was walking along the shore. As he looked down the beach, he saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself to think of someone who would dance to the day. So he began to walk faster to catch up.

As he got closer, he saw that it was a young man and the young man wasn't dancing, but instead he was reaching down to the shore, picking up something and very gently throwing it into the ocean.

As he got closer he called out, "Good morning! What are you doing?"

The young man paused, looked up and replied, "Throwing starfish in the ocean."

"I guess I should have asked, why are you throwing starfish in the ocean?"

"The sun is up and the tide is going out. And if I don't throw them in they'll die."

"But, young man, don't you realize that there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it. You can't possibly make a difference!"

The young man listened politely. Then bent down, picked up another starfish and threw it into the sea, past the breaking waves and said- "It made a difference for that one."

How many "starfish" do you come across in a day?

This Sleek Spiderman Spacesuit Could Take Astronauts To Mars

When humans go to live on Mars those 300-pound space suits are going to get old fast. The Biosuit with its tight-fitting Spiderman look could make...

Peace or Violence?

Is World History Becoming More Peaceful or More Violent?

Updates:  

Ray Kurzweil: The world isn’t getting worse — our information is getting better

Why the World Is Better Than You Think in 10 Powerful Charts

Questions no one knows the answers to - Chris Anderson

In the first of a new TED-Ed series designed to catalyze curiosity, TED Curator Chris Anderson shares his boyhood obsession with quirky questions that seem to have no answers.

Creativity, Technology/Robots/Jobs, Futurism

Links discussed/related to a couple of conversations this week about the purpose of education and what is your purpose in life....

Creativity....

Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking and Arthur C. Clarke - God, The Universe and Everything Else (1988) [52:10]

A couple of clips from this excellent video, an hour well spent…   Big questions and Curiosity Science, Politics, and Skepticism Creativity

Is Stifling Creativity in the Classroom Preventing Future Problem Solvers?

Excerpts:                        "Dr. Mae C. Jemison, an American physician and NASA astronaut, correctly noted that the “majority of scientists say they developed their passion for science by age 11. That means that the educational experience children have in grade school profoundly impacts our nation’s ability to graduate a prepared STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] work force.”"

                 "Look at any truly stunning innovation and you’ll find creativity at play. Inspiring our students to think creatively while being trained in a specific discipline is vital for our country’s growth and development. But here is the sobering reality: according to researchers, scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (the standard test used to measure creativity, akin to IQ tests for measuring intelligence) have been declining in the U.S. during the past two decades, with the most significant decline among kindergartners through sixth graders. This leads to a fundamental question: Is our education system stifling creativity in today’s children, preventing them from becoming the world’s future creative problem solvers?

  Some argue that the decline in creativity may be caused by excess media consumption, because students are spending countless hours interacting with smart phones, video games and television. Others may argue standardized testing or other root causes. However, a fundamental fact remains: most children spend the majority of their day in a highly structure, perhaps overly ridged learning environment. How are we supporting teachers and equipping classrooms in the battle to preserve the child’s inherent and natural curiosity?" MORE LINKS 18 Things Highly Creative People Do Differently TED Playlist: Where do ideas come from IN THE AIR New Yorker (Gladwell)

Technology, robots, and jobs...

10 Rad Jobs of the Future Infographic

Will Technology Make Work Better for Everyone? Slate

Here Comes The Future Of Education. Are We Ready?  Mitch Joel  Robots Are Already Replacing Us Wired (I like page 11) Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs Kevin Kelly, Wired              Excerpts:               "Robots create jobs that we did not even know we wanted done."                 "When robots and automation do our most basic work, making it relatively easy for us to be fed, clothed, and sheltered, then we are free to ask, “What are humans for?” Industrialization did more than just extend the average human lifespan. It led a greater percentage of the population to decide that humans were meant to be ballerinas, full-time musicians, mathematicians, athletes, fashion designers, yoga masters, fan-fiction authors, and folks with one-of-a kind titles on their business cards. With the help of our machines, we could take up these roles; but of course, over time, the machines will do these as well. We’ll then be empowered to dream up yet more answers to the question “What should we do?” It will be many generations before a robot can answer that." (also see Kevin Kelly's TED talk:  The next 5,000 days of the web?)

  The long view... 

Have you seen Jason Silva's latest 'Shots of Awe' video?  JASON SILVA’S LATEST: TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE TRANSHUMAN

The next species of human Juan Enriquez TED Talk I'm planning to give a talk on transhumanism  (more than just Kurzweil's ideas on the singularity) next semester....   

May the 4th Be With You

My Star Wars Flipboard

Our Galaxy is Caught Up in a Giant Cosmic Cobweb! 🕸️

If we could zoom waaaay out, we would see that galaxies and galaxy clusters make up large, fuzzy threads, like the strands of a giant cobweb. But we'll work our way out to that. First let's start at home and look at our planet's different cosmic communities.

Our home star system

Earth is one of eight planets — Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — that orbit the Sun. But our solar system is more than just planets; it also has a lot of smaller objects.

An asteroid belt circles the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. Beyond Neptune is a doughnut-shaped region of icy objects called the Kuiper Belt. This is where dwarf planets like Pluto and Makemake are found and is likely the source of short-period comets (like Haley’s comet), which orbit the Sun in less than 200 years.

Scientists think that even farther out lies the Oort Cloud, also a likely source of comets. This most distant region of our solar system is a giant spherical shell storing additional icy space debris the size of mountains, or larger! The outer edge of the Oort Cloud extends to about 1.5 light-years from the Sun — that’s the distance light travels in a year and a half (over 9 trillion miles).

Sometimes asteroids or comets get ejected from these regions and end up sharing an orbit with planets like Jupiter or even crossing Earth’s orbit. There are even interstellar objects that have entered the inner solar system from even farther than the Oort Cloud, perhaps coming all the way from another star!

Our home galaxy

Let's zoom out to look at the whole Milky Way galaxy, which contains more than 100 billion stars. Many are found in the galaxy’s disk — the pancake-shaped part of a spiral galaxy where the spiral arms lie. The brightest and most massive stars are found in the spiral arms, close to their birth places. Dimmer, less massive stars can be found sprinkled throughout the disk. Also found throughout the spiral arms are dense clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. The Sun lies in a small spiral arm called the Orion Spur.

The Milky Way’s disk is embedded in a spherical “halo” about 120,000 light-years across. The halo is dotted with globular clusters of old stars and filled with dark matter. Dark matter doesn’t emit enough light for us to directly detect it, but we know it’s there because without its mass our galaxy doesn’t have enough gravity to hold together!

Our galaxy also has several orbiting companion galaxies ranging from about 25,000 to 1.4 million light-years away. The best known of these are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, which are visible to the unaided eye from Earth’s Southern Hemisphere.

Our galactic neighborhood

The Milky Way and Andromeda, our nearest neighboring spiral galaxy, are just two members of a small group of galaxies called the Local Group. They and the other members of the group, 50 to 80 smaller galaxies, spread across about 10 million light-years.

The Local Group lies at the outskirts of an even larger structure. It is just one of at least 100 groups and clusters of galaxies that make up the Virgo Supercluster. This cluster of clusters spans about 110 million light-years!

Galaxies aren’t the only thing found in a galaxy cluster, though. We also find hot gas, as shown above in the bright X-ray light (in pink) that surrounds the galaxies (in optical light) of cluster Abell 1413, which is a picturesque member of a different supercluster. Plus, there is dark matter throughout the cluster that is only detectable through its gravitational interactions with other objects.

The Cosmic Web

The Virgo Supercluster is just one of many, many other groups of galaxies. But the universe’s structure is more than just galaxies, clusters, and the stuff contained within them.

For more than two decades, astronomers have been mapping out the locations of galaxies, revealing a filamentary, web-like structure. This large-scale backbone of the cosmos consists of dark matter laced with gas. Galaxies and clusters form along this structure, and there are large voids in between.

The scientific visualizations of this “cosmic web” look a little like a spider web, but that would be one colossal spider! <shudder>

And there you have the different communities that define Earth’s place in the universe. Our tiny planet is a small speck on a crumb of that giant cosmic web!

Want to learn even more about the structures in the universe? Check out our Cosmic Distance Scale!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space.