This is just too cool. Jump straight to the 34 second mark.
That’s right. That’s what you saw. Romulans de-cloaking next to Mercury!
NASA has the usual cover-up, this time’s it’s some crazy far-fetched fantasy like an echo ( ghost ) image on the camera. That takes a lot to buy in order to believe. It’s just so much more obviously Romulans.
UPDATE:
Actually, upon closer examination:
It’s obviously the Enterprise.
A fantastic article on one of my all time favorite NASA missions:
Launched two weeks after its sister spacecraft, Voyager 1 lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s SLC-41 at 08:56.00 EDT on 5 September 1977 on a Titan III-E Centaur rocket.
Three months and five days later, on December 10, 1977, Voyager 1 entered the Asteroid belt beyond the orbit of Mars.
And lasting till:
However, in an effort to gain more information on this phenomenon, Voyager 1 conducted a test roll on March 8, 2011 to change its orientation in order to better detect the current direction of the solar wind.
For this maneuver, Voyager 1 rotated 70 degrees counterclockwise with respect to Earth. This was the first maneuver of the spacecraft since it took the family portrait in 1990.
What most people don’t think about is the fact that Voyager 1 is STILL a mission, thirty-four years after its launch. It’s mission, to boldly go where no man has gone before, is expected to last until sometime between 2025 to 2030, or whenever its power runs out.
And, according to one source, 2030 might not even be the end.
OK, I’ve waited as long as I can stand. Warning, Star Trek spoiler, sorta, is the heart of this post. If you haven’t seen it yet, go see it and come back. Otherwise, this post makes less sense. If you don’t plan on seeing it, this post isn’t as much fun. OK. Spoiler space has been covered, proceed at your own risk.
The heart of the movie involves two instances of time travel. By the time it’s done, none of the Star Trek shows or movies matter. They have all been rendered meaningless. Now, besides being a ton of celluloid, the most ardent fans are still those that adore and practically worship the original series. That would be me. By the time this movie is done, Vulcan is gone, Romulus is gone, the entire future that is all of the Star Trek series’s and movies is gone. The entire slate has been wiped clean as far as Star Trek goes. There are no enemies, there are no allies, and everything that made Kirk and Spock what they are is gone. That wouldn’t be such a big deal other than it’s kind of a sucker punch to the gut kind of feeling when the movie ends and you realize that they’ve done.
And secondly, what they’ve done relies on movie magic and not real science. This bothers me a lot too. The thing that made the original series great was it relied heavily on assumed science that was barely known and hardly understood by the general public. Warp drives, phasers, transporters, and even communicators. It was so realistically done that some of those elements became staples of modern society. The cell phone for example, was inspired by the Star Trek communicator. The microwave I’m sure, was inspired by the food thingy in the original series. All you have to do is push a button that drops the food in the microwave and then zaps it accordingly and you have the Star Trek food processor.
This movies jumps as far from accepted science as you can get. First of all, I don’t believe in time travel. I think you can slow it down, but you can’t go backwards. If you could bend the constant that is time, and make it negative, think slow motion video, it would speed up real time. In other words, you would jump into the future. You would appear to be in a perpetual state while the world moved at its regular pace. If you speed up time, it would make your time move more slowly. In other words, you’d move at the speed of light while everything else appeared still. But under neither cicumstance would you actually reverse time. To me time is the only constant. Time is not matter, it’s not energy, it’s not anything. It is simply the measurement we use to distinguish the difference between events. So, going backward in time is impossible. That pretty much scratches the entire assumption of the entire movie. It also scratches a few episodes as well. I can live with that.
Secondly, the “saviour” of the movie is Spock the old. Spock the young, due to the screwed up new time, is put in charge of the Enterprise instead of Kirk. For some reason, Spock the old thinks that this is not as history intended even though he’s quick to point out on more than one occasion that history no longer exists. At the end of the movie, Spock the old meets Spock the young and they have a conversation about re-establishing the Vulcan culture. Spock the old thinks he can do that just fine without the help of Spock the young. But, here’s the rub for me. How can the same matter exist in two places at the same time? Now, some people will toss the caveat at me that Spock the old is not the same matter as Spock the young since Spock the old was re-created on Genesis. However, Spock the old’s matter still exists on Genesis if it’s not the same matter he was given when he was regenerated. In either case, Spock the old’s matter is somewhere at the same time as Spock the young’s. It would be exactly the same matter. Now, it’s a little convoluted coming to this point. Matter itself is not necessarily fixed. However, the density of this universe supposedly is. If you somehow change the amount of matter, then for the density to remain constant something has to be removed to balance it out. Using modern logic, that could be dark matter, subatomic matter, matter, or something else based on who you ask. But, something has to give. In the movie, besides Spock, one incredibly huge spaceship and a crew jumps time as well.
And lastly, a black hole is what supposedly sends them back in time. Now, what makes a black hole black is the fact that its gravitational force is so intense that light itself can not escape. The telling sign that they are upon a black hole is a “lightning storm”. That’s never been anyone’s idea of what’s on the other end. When they are going IN a black hole, it’s not slightly bigger than the ship. Black holes typically, in order to sustain the energy they need, suck in entire galaxies. And, when they do, they reduce them to atomic level matter and spew them at the speed of light out the “lightning” side. And, the lightning side is not in some other time. We can see the “lightning” side. It looks something like this:
See that jet stream looking thingy? That thing is so powerful it’s sucking stars millions of miles away, crushing them, and projecting them billions of miles. None of it’s outside of our time. We see it. If Spock the old and the Romulans went into a black hole, even if it’s small, they’d be reduced to subatomic matter and that would have been the end of the movie. But, it wasn’t. Not only did they use black holes to travel through time apparently at will, they used “red matter” to create black holes on demand that apparently sucked planets inside out and that was that. Only the one that was aimed for a star became a permanent, kinda real one. Vulcan gets smashed while Spock sits on a nearby planet, or really what would have to be a moon, and watches unaided by any type of telescope while a very-large-in-the-sky Vulcan is destroyed. Any black hole, or any force for that matter, capable of crushing a planet would have crushed, or done great harm, to the nearby moon as well. Or, at the very worst, thrown it wildly out of orbit rendering it completely uninhabitable.
With most movies I try to ignore the things that go bang in space. However, Star Trek is a little different for me. I don’t expect the realism of Space Odyssey, but I expect the science to be grounded by at least some level of accepted speculation.
And, more importantly, I want the old series and movies back. You can’t just wipe all that away with one silly movie. Next episode I fully expect old Spock to go back to his future, and the history of Spock and Kirk returned as it was. Anything else and I may not even bother to watch.
A while back I did a post on why inter-stellar travel may never be realistic. It’s basically grounded in basic laws of physics. Well, some people think it is possible. Now, their concept is not that you thrust yourself faster and faster, but rather you simply move the space-time you’re in to another spot. Simple, huh? This doesn’t remind me so much of warp drives as using something like the transporter. They had all kinds of issues with the transporters tho. The warp drives broke down, the ship just stopped. The transporter malfunctioned, you were most often a lifeless blob. Now, I’m not going to belittle the idea of picking up and moving a block of space-time. But, I’m certainly not going to volunteer for any test rides.
Via my buds at Independent Sources:
For a start, they say that the inside of the bubble would be filled with Hawking radiation, making life rather uncomfortable for any spacecraft within it……..
That strongly implies that such a bubble would be unstable. So it looks increasingly likely that, after a brief few years of excitement, Alcubierre’s warp drive is impossible.
Now, per my training in quantum mechanics, I’ll have to just pass on Hawking radiation and anything to do with whether warp drives could exist, I have never taken a quantum mechanics class. I liked beer too much in college. But, from a lay perspective, I think we need to spend our time figuring out how to even get TO a space bubble, or even how to find a space bubble, before we come to the conclusion one way or another that warp drives can or can not exist. Our understanding of quantum mechanics will have to change before we can reach out to the stars. So far, they pretty much slam the door on anything superluminal, which means it would take thousands of years to get anywhere outside of our solar system. And, that may be the case. But, it will most definitely be the case if we allow our current understanding of quantum mechanics to shut all the doors. Rather releasing headlines that such and such can not exist, I think we need to look more into what would have to happen for it to exist.
Then, once we figure out how to generate the energy required to travel fast enough to actually ponder how safe a space bubble might be, then we’ll figure out whether or not we can use them.
Dang, that long title is guaranteed to screw up some formatting. But, it addresses a whole bunch of my posts very well. What got this post going was a recently released article written by Ian O’Neill for Universe Today. In it, he cites scientists who conclude:
Now, I have breeched that topic here before. Namely, the technology involved to travel with ease to other planets is profound by our standards today. These scientists put it in even simpler context by basically saying it’s not there. That no matter how powerful we make our thrust, it will still take hundreds, if not thousands of years to get there. That’s been my point regarding UFO’s. Why would they sacrifice the resources necessary, and the lives, to travel thousands of years to gut cows and taunt people in small towns? There’s just not been a logical argument to date made for UFO’s.
However, the assumption has always been made that the technology we need, as well as the aliens piloting UFO’s effortlessly throught the universe, is just not here yet. We have the concepts down, we jsut haven’t mastered the technology. One guy on the Universe Today post even puts the math there to assert it is feasible:
Essel Says:
August 20th, 2008 at 4:22 amVery poorly researched article.
“According to Brice N. Cassenti, an associate professor with the Department of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, at least 100 times the total energy output of the entire world would be required for the voyage”
Assuming a cruising speed of c/10, the enregy required to reach that speed would be 1/2 mv^2, a payload of 10 tonnes would need an energy of 1/2 X (10,000) x (3 X 10^8/10)^2 = 4.5 X 10^18 Joules. Earth consumes more than 6 X 10^20 Joules every year. That is 1/133 rd of energy consumption p.a.
Considering a total roundtrip of 85 years and two accelration and deaccelration phases. The eneregy required would be 4 X 4.5 X 10^18 joules over 85 years that would be 1/2833 times the consumption of earth energy during comparable time.
If we send a compact probe of 100 Kgs the requirement would come down by 100 times……
Simple huh? I don’t have a clue about math at that level, so I’ll just take his word for it. All he’s proving is the energy required is actually available, maybe. Problem is, we have never figured a way to generate that much energy in a concentrated situation. When, and if, we do, all our energy issues will have been solved. Then, once we’ve solved all our energy issues, the issue of time has to be addressed. The most popular theory is some type of warp drive
And nothing else. We’ve been pointing our telescopes at Proxima for a long time. If that trip proves fruitless, then the trip starts getting a lot longer real quick:
| Proxima Centauri | 4.2 |
| Rigil Kentaurus | 4.3 |
| Barnard’s Star | 6 |
| Wolf 359 | 7.7 |
| Luyten 726-8A | 8.4 |
| Luyten 726-8B | 8.4 |
| Sirius A | 8.6 |
| Sirius B | 8.6 |
| Ross 154 | 9.4 |
| Ross 248 | 10.4 |
| Ross 128 | 10.9 |
| Luyten 789-6 | 11.2 |
| Procyon A | 11.4 |
| Procyon B | 11.4 |
Once you get past the closest 15, it starts jumping pretty dang quick. Within a very brief span, you’ll easily be past 100 light years. In a not too lengthy list, you’re past 1,000. So even if you’re travelling at warp 10, you’re still talking, as I understand warping, decades, if not centuries at the speed of light. My main issue with warping tho is what do you do with all the stuff between point A and point B? Dodging comets and asteroids at fifty times the speed of light just sounds real dicey to me.
OK, so now you’ve figured how to get more energy than mankind has ever generated, you’ve figured out how to bend matter, you’ve figured out how to travel faster than mass is known to exist, and you’ve figured out how to dodge stuff while traveling billions of miles an hour. The question then becomes, why would you even want to? The plausible explanations have always been that Earth was dying and man would be looking for new places to live. That seems plausible enough other than if Earth were truly in that dire a situation, I doubt the technology would be available to do it. In simpler terms, that technology would be used to fix the problems here on Earth. If you can do all that, you can fix the planet. Or, man’s curiosity just keeps expanding and the desire to explore strange new worlds kicks in. That would be about the only one I would buy off-hand, but the technology would have to be there and ready to use before man could put the concept to practice. In other words, why would a person be interested, and willing to finance the development of the technology involved in inter-stellar travel other than to do inter-stellar travel? We developed rockets not for space travel, but to bomb other countries. Once the tchnology was developed to destroy ourselves, we put men on them and went to the moon. Even after fifty years, most rockets are still intended to do others harm. If someone developed the technology necessary to generate the energy necessary to travel at warp speed, who’s to say it wouldn’t be used for destructive purposes initially? And, if it is, man won’t have the resources to use it for much else. So, to say the least, man, with the mindset man has right now, isn’t mature enough to deal with the power necessary for inter-stellar travel. When man does develop that maturity, we won’t be the same animal we are now.
A lot of sci-fi movies have pondered alternative means of transportation. I think my personal favorite has to be from the movie Contact
You got this huge magnetosphere and you drop someone into it while the turbines are spinning incredibly rapidly. At that point, the pod is magically transported exactly where it was intended to go. You never really know where it is she is, but she’s there. Since it apparently distorts time as well, no one ever knows she was even gone. Pretty cool huh? All problems solved. Distance becomes a non-issue entirely. However, we’re not certain what exactly she goes to. Even though she travels great distances, when she’s there she has no pod. So, I’m too sure this concept is too well thought out. I’m not sure I want to get somewhere and have nothing when I get there. So, as neat as this concept is, it’s not terribly useful. Other than Concept, most sci-fi just ignores all the issues of physics and just gives us inter-stellar travel with ease
Bottom line, I tend to agree with the scientists who are skeptical of inter-stellar travel in man’s distant fufure. Sure, technology has exploded in the last century, but it’s still bound by the very simple laws of physics. None of those laws have been broken in any way. They haven’t even changed. The “next level” for science will be changing and breaking the current understanding of physics. And, given man’s current fear, nay paranioa, over things he doesn’t understand, I don’t expect those laws of physics to be changed any time soon.
Alpha Centauri has long been speculated as having all kinds of different life forms. Wiki gives a good run-down. Starting in 1944…. Well, here’s a brief list:
(1953), the inhabitants of the Alpha Centauri system possess a vast but decaying empire that encircles humankind and prevents further exploration of the galaxy. Dick also wrote the novel Clans of the Alphane Moon
(1964), which dealt with an independent former Terran Colony on Alphane III M2, an inhabitable satellite orbiting a gas giant within Alpha Centauri’s planetary system. Alphane II is inhabited by sentient insectoids, who had previously fought an interstellar war with Earth, but are now engaged in an arms trade with Alphane III M2.
(1955) was Robert Silverberg’s first novel.
(1963), the overly regulated government on Mars has become so stifling that a small group of men secretly restore an old spaceship and go with their families to a habitable planet of Alpha Centauri, where they can govern themselves.
(1964 onward), Wunderland is an inhabitable planet circling Alpha Centauri, and was the earliest extra-solar colony in human history. Later it is occupied for a long time by the Kzinti, an intelligent catlike species, after their first contact with humans, which resulted in several interstellar wars.
(1975) by M. John Harrison the native Centaurians (humanoid aliens able to interbreed with humans) have been wiped out in a genocidal attack by expanding Earth colonisation of the galaxy. The novel’s main character, whose mother was Centauran, is one of the few people in the cosmos able to operate the ’device’ of the book’s title; a weapon of enormous power.
setting (1978–1980), Alpha Centauri is the home system of the Alphans, the first alien race Terrans made contact with and allies in the war with Proxima Centauri. In Thomas J. Hubschman’s novel Alpha II (1979) a failed colony at Alpha Centauri is the subject of an explorer’s investigations and troubles.
(1985), the invading elephant-like creatures are revealed to have come from Alpha Centauri. In a discussion within the novel among science-fiction writers about the presumed origin of the so-called “snouts,” one writer dislikes the idea of Alpha Centauri because it is “trite,” but admits it got that way because it was used so often, and it was used so often because it was one of the best options.
(1986), Foundation councillor Golan Trevize and his traveling companions find the last survivors of a radioactive Earth on a largely marine planet, Alpha, which is in orbit around the largest star of the Alpha Centauri system. The name of the settlement is New Earth. 
(1972) and The Monster of Peladon (1974). Alpha Centauri is depicted as a large egg shaped green blob wrapped in a cloak with a singular slit eye and a high pitched voice.
(1996), and episodes of the TV series Enterprise (2001). conclusively establishes he is an Earth native, as he is found by the Enterprise-E crew on Earth in the late twenty-first century. It is established that Alpha Centauri is a colony founded by humans from Earth and that Cochrane lived on Alpha Centauri for a time before his mysterious disappearance. In Encounter With Tiber (1996), former astronaut Buzz Aldrin and science fiction writer John Barnes write about intelligent aliens who visited the Earth long ago. They had come from the Earth-like moon Tiber of a hypothetical giant planet round Alpha Centauri A.I know this list is incomplete, it doesn’t list Lost In Space. That’s what got me thinking in the first place. Anyways, fiction people have speculated about a lot of life on an Earth-like planet circling Alpha Centauri. Probably more than any other star. That’s quite a feat considering how many stars are out there. So, wanna guess what the headline is in 2008, sixty-four years after Van Vogt told us?
Remember that scene from Star Trek II – The Wrath of Khan
Until today. Check THIS headline out:
Arizona Teen Becomes Sixth Victim This Year of Brain-Eating Amoeba
Here’s some bits of interest:
….an amoeba, a microscopic organism called Naegleria fowleri that attacks the body through the nasal cavity, quickly eating its way to the brain…..
People who are infected tend to complain of a stiff neck, headaches and fevers, Beach said. In the later stages, they’ll show signs of brain damage such as hallucinations and behavioral changes.
Although not nearly as big as the bug in Star Trek, it seems to be quite more lethal. This is a pretty nasty little animal that I can not believe I’ve never heard of before. And, although I’m sure most people who read this blog of higher intellect are not familiar with a lot of what goes on at Lake Havasu, I can not believe more people have not been exposed to this nasty critter. And, living where I do, I am just thankful it’s never popped up here. ( Most likely won’t either, water tends to move around in hilly areas. )
According to that article, the best thing you can do when swimming in warm standing water is pinch your nose. Apparently those pesky brain eating amoeba can’t function too well anywhere else in your body.
Pretty
Damn
Amazing
August 20, 1977 Voyager II blasted off and left the Earth’s atmosphere. Four years later it completed its mission. However, due to a fairly rare planetary alignment, they extended its life to map the outer planets. Then, something kind of strange happened. They both kept functioning. In late 2004, Voyager I left our solar system. About the same time, Voyager II did as well. Now, they weren’t supposed to do that till a year or so later. That redefined how we saw our solar system ( it’s oval, not circular ). Three years later, at 30 years old, it’s still going, and apparently still working.
NASA normally does a very minimal write-up on their greatest acheivements. However, they have a GREAT Voyager page. Voyager has changed the way man looks at a lot of things. I think it’s going to change the way we look at some other things before it’s done. Assuming of course, it ever IS done
I found this article very intriguing:
Habitable Planet Possible Around Nearby Star System
The 55 Cancri system involves three gas giant planets and another world that could be icy or rocky and is about the size of Neptune. The setup is 41 light-years from Earth and about 4.7 billion years old, comparable to our Sun.
Only 41 light years away? No big deal ya think? Well, I’ll put it a little differently. Off the top of my head, I think the average speed of a craft traveling at modern speeds tops out at around 50,000 miles per hour. That means it would only take a little less than 550,000 years to get there at the current speed. It also means, that IF there was intelligent life there, and they decided to send us a cryptic message telling us that they were indeed intelligent ( “We are your friends” ), it would take about 45 years or so to let us know. And, if we replied, it would be a hundred years after they sent the message that they got an answer.
Pretty daunting challenges to overcome before Star Trek become feasible.
It’s obviously the Enterprise.