"We
will hire the most qualified people based upon their skills and mutual
interests. I've had two people say that was the kiss of death. I thought
I was trying to be nice saying that if you were interested and able I'd
hire you and that's all that mattered. I don't care about the colour of
your skin. I'm interested in hiring someone who wants to work on the
project and is good at it."
"I believe this is an important stand to make. I will not be silenced any more."
"I
think what's happened is the woke and the social justice warriors have
made a moralistic argument the way the religious right used to make
moralistic arguments. And now people are afraid to challenge them. But I
think it's okay to say I believe that equality is a morally valid
position. I believe that meritocracy is a morally valid position."
"People
do different things. They have different abilities. They have different
interests. To me, the whole point is to treat people as individuals, so
that's what I do in my life. My way of dealing with racism, or sexism,
or any other 'ism' is to treat people as individuals.
"[As
scientists] we don't believe in EDI [equality, diversity, inclusion].
We believe in merit, fairness and equality. You should be fair in your
procedures and treat people as equals."
Patanjali Kambhampati, professor of chemistry, McGill University, Montreal
Patanjali
Kambhampati, a scientist at Montreal's McGill University turned down
twice for government grants related to inclusive, equity and diversity
provision 'hoops;. John Kenney, National Post
As
an award winning Canadian scientist Professor Kambhampati has decided
to speak out after his request for funding of two projects a year apart
were refused one after another, two years running. As a man of great
integrity and an expert in his field of scientific research accustomed
in the past to receiving federal government research grants, he was
being punished for his lack of commitment to "diversity"; doublespeak
for giving breaks to unqualified people simply on the basis of their
colour or ethnicity.
It
doesn't seem to matter to the funding authorities who decided to set
his requests aside as not worth evaluating when he emphasized that it
was expertise as a qualification that moved him to make his hiring
choices, not the colour of an applicant's skin. As himself a man of
colour, born in India, living in a 'white' society with ample
experiences of his own in the past as a recipient of overt racist
discrimination. It is the scientist in him, not the man of Indian
origins who responded to pointed questions on his funding application
that displeased the funding arbiters.
He
committed himself to hiring on merit, nothing more, nothing less. Merit
as in scientific qualifications, not the merit based on diversity and
considerations of 'inclusiveness'. When his first research funding
request was turned down on patently obvious rejection linked to the
critical hiring questions, he put it down to new criteria he had no
interest in and set it aside. When it happened for a second time, he
decided to make it a public issue.
His
field of scientific expertise explores super-fast laser science at its
cutting edge, a field spanning every issue from telecom to medicine. He
applied for a $450,000 grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council of Canada [NSERC]. NSERC responded that "the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion considerations in the application were deemed insufficient",
and they rejected his application. His previous application went to the
federally funded National Frontiers in Research Fund a year earlier "to
support world-leading interdisciplinary, international, high-risk,
high-reward, transformative and rapid-response Canadian research"; turned down on similar grounds.
This
is the same government that refuses to give summer-student employment
grants to any employee-applicant that refuses to sign a commitment to
never support groups or are themselves involved in denying abortion
rights to women. The result of which was that critical hiring in many
areas of social services for summer student jobs for the past several
years stumbled and failed when church groups, for example, could not
affirm the demand.
It
was at the first-stage bureaucratic level that both Professor
Kambhampati's applications were stalled. Neither proceeded to the next
step where other scientists would review the proposals for their
scientific merit and immediacy. Then it came to light that at roughly
the same time another arm of government, the Canadian Institutes of
Health Research, approved a grant to Dr.Lana Ray, professor at Lakehead
University, Thunder Bay, of $1.2 million to study cancer prevention with
the use of traditional Indigenous healing practices.
Professor Ray commented when the award was announced: "We need to stop framing prevalent risk factors of cancer as such and start thinking about them as symptoms of colonialism."
Professor
Kambhampati took up his position in Montreal in 2003 at McGill. Born in
India, the now-50-year-old had lived in the United States since age
four, working in Minnesota, Texas and California before taking up his
Canadian professorship. "In
childhood I used to get constant beatings and name calling. Two years
ago, I had eight police officers break into my house because I was
sitting on my porch while brown. That happened on Canada Day", he said in an interview.
He
treats everyone equally and fairly, led by his own experiences. He now
believes that woke ideology prevalent on campus has leached into
government, creating two major problems: self-censorship and a
resistance to asking meaningful questions.
"There's a lot of self-censoring. And certainly you see it among young
people in the university. So young people in the university self-censor a
lot. Now they are afraid to talk. That's no way to advance our
understanding of the world."
As a child, he said, his mentors were "old, white World War II vets" who taught him all about radio-controlled airplanes. "And that's what led me to build lasers 30 years later". As a mentor now, the Professor explained he has been of assistance to both men and women of different cultures and religions.
"I've mentored minorities, I've mentored women. I myself am a Third
World minority. And I have mentored people who have catastrophic
illnesses. And I have mentored people who are LGBTQ, and not for any
reason other than to treat people as equal."
Woke ideology, in his experience, has accelerated in the last several years.
"And now it's the prevailing culture. It's 90 percent of the normal
people against 10 percent of the vocal minority that has shamed everyone
into self-censorship", he said.
"As
a scientist our job is to think about how nature works, ask questions,
and find answers without prejudice. We cannot do that anymore. We cannot
ask how humans work, and how science and nature work, because the woke
are interfering with us and saying, 'You can't ask those questions.
You're a racist. You're a sexist. You're a homophobe. You're a
colonialist. You're a something'. There's some way in which the woke are
trying to get people [so they're' no longer asking meaningful
questions]."
"What we do must be done carefully with guidance from the best scientific minds. Our window of opportunity is closing." "If we fail to improve our response now, based on science, I fear the pandemic will get worse and be prolonged." "He [U.S. supplier of medical-grade face masks] said 'we are in deep s**t. The world is. We need to act'." "From that moment, I knew that we were going to have a crisis for health
care workers because we were not taking action.We were
already behind the ball." "And I pushed that forward to the highest level that I could of HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] and got no response." "My concern is if we rush too quickly [to reopen the economy and push for an untested vaccine], and consider cutting out critical
steps, we may not have a full assessment of the safety of that
vaccine. So, it's still going to take some time." Rick Bright, former director, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA)
He is now considered to be a contemptible 'whistleblower' by the Trump administration, a man who claims he was removed from his post with government for having raised concerns related to the preparedness for the coronavirs. He stood before a congressional hearing and warned that the United States could face "the darkest winter" should it not take steps immediately to increase its response to the global pandemic.
As he testified before a U.S. House of Representatives panel about the American preparedness for the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak, President Donald Trump's Twittered assaults against his reputation and trustworthiness were still fresh. Removed in April as director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services responsible for developing drugs in the battle against coronavirus, he struggled to persuade the lawmakers of the urgency of the situation.
Close to one and a quarter million Americans have contracted the novel coronavirus. The country went into lockdown, with the result being that the economy collapsed, millions of Americans lost their employment, thousands of businesses were shuttered for good, large corporations cried foul, with many going into bankruptcy, the stock market crashed, and worst of all, more than 82,000 Americans lost their lives to COVID-19.
He would "never forget", the man testified to the subcommittee, an email he received in January alerting him to a dire shortage of vital personal protection equipment for health workers to enable them to do their work in relative safety from infection. Mr. Bright had been dismissed by President Trump who described him as a "disgruntled employee" on Twitter, prior to the onset of the hearing. His message runs absolutely counter to that of the president who insists the U.S. economy must be re-started swiftly to rescue the country's future.
Mr. Bright stated his intention was to warn about the virus back in January only to be faced with a hostile attitude emanating from HHS executive authorities. In response, he was re=assigned to a new position with government last month. According to Mr. Bright, he was dismissed from BARDA when he went counter to the intention to push the drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as cures for COVID-19.
In his whistleblower complaint filed with a government watchdog last week, he stated his belief that the U.S. government has promoted the drugs as a "panacea" despite that they "clearly lack scientific merit". Caitlin Oakley, spokeswoman for HHS disputed this accounting, noting that Mr.Bright had been transferred to a job which entrusted to him the expenditure of $1-billion to develop diagnostic testing.
"Success in creating effective AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst." "We just don't know." "So, we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it." Stephen Hawking, 2017
Russia’s T-14 Armata tank is being worked on to make it completely unmanned and autonomous.
Photograph: Grigory Dukor/Reuters
How humanity adores its new, newer and newest technological toys...! And looks forward to the genius that provokes inventors and technical nerds to keep on creating newer technology, cutting-edge and beyond expectation, creating new excitement on an ongoing basis. Science is built upon human curiosity, the urge to find new discoveries, new devices, new techniques, spurred on by the increasing rewards that fall into human hands, through human ingenuity.
So, what happens when human ingenuity succeeds in building systems that will ultimately be more clever than the human mind can conceive? When the grasp of control over human destiny is lost to a superior technology itself capable of emulating and superseding human thought and invention? It's on the horizon, after all, and human invention is enabling it.
One of our future robot overlords? Quartz
Artificial intelligence capable of matching human capability is now envisioned by 2029. It will have its immediate benefits in science, medicine and technological innovations. When General AI, machines fully capable of designing machines begin their work, who will audit what they do, and who will be capable -- a human agency -- of controlling what results? The devil, as always, is in the details.
Salon Eurosatory 2018
Christophe Morin/IP3Getty Images
Genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and androids or AIs with personalities, do they all presage a brave new world, or a world of unforeseen horrors for humankind? When will we know? When we can no longer put on the brakes? Think nuclear weapons, as an uncomfortable example. Now mostly in the possession of responsible states, but increasingly threatening to be possessed by rogue states and those with malevolent ambitions.
Humanity has attempted in the past to use its authority to impose ethical restrains on science, technology and engineering, with divided results. A grouping of responsible states may issue their declarations, high-minded and global-protection uppermost, but how to exert control to the extent that those with less concern for the welfare of humanity will not come into possession of destructive weapons they will have little compunction in using?
In the era of the Internet, knowledge and research capabilities have been disseminated as never before, leaving governments helpless to exert control when the most powerful among them fail to agree on standards and opt instead to practice their own levels of control, most frequently not in synchronization with those they view as seeking to impede their progress.
In 2015, over a thousand luminaries, representing governments and founders of high-tech, finance, business leaders, signed an open letter focusing on the convergence of AI with nuclear weapons, calling for a ban on AI warfare and autonomous weapons. This led in time to a United Nations initiative. To the present time the UN secretary general continues to urge all member nations to agree to the ban. Of the 193 member nations, 125 had signed.
Tomorrow’s wars will be faster, more high-tech, and less human than ever before. Welcome to a new era of machine-driven warfare The Atlantic
"They were using cutting-edge technology one hundred years ago developing chemical weapons." "That was high technology at that time, and here we are one hundred years later using high technology again to remediate the material left behind." Alex Zahl, project manager, United States Army Corps of Engineers
"They're still fascinating reminders of a remarkably little-known but important chapter in American history." "A secret archaeological site in the forest." Elliot Gerson, 66, Period home-owner, Dalecarlia Reservoir
Searching for WWI Munitions Buried in D.C.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers scours the Spring Valley area in search of WWI munitions and fragments.
The Dalecarlia Reservoir represented one of the main water sources for the city of Washington, D.C. There, under a canopy of trees, a team of geophysicists survey the forest floor for relics from the First World War with an electromagnetic scanner looking to harvest data relating to objects lying deep in the soil. It is a place where one hundred years ago mortars and artillery shells hit, launched from American University where scientists developed chemical weapons, explosives and gas masks for use during the conflict.
Remnants of experiments are also being unearthed. World War I, also called the Great War, one that inspired those who experienced its horrors to name it the war to end all wars, infamous for its horrible battlefield conditions, was responsible for the death of 8.5 million soldiers, the agonized wounding of another 21 million -- though assuredly it was not among the military alone that the Grim Reaper found enough corpses to keep his great mortuary busy for years to come.
On the scientific side of things a kind of inventive progress was made with optics, radio and sonar while German submarines prowled the seas and aviation came to maturity at the conflict's conclusion. The U.S. Navy hosted the scientific knowledge of Thomas A. Edison. The National Academy of Sciences anticipated a need for collaboration among scientists, universities, industry and the military even before America entered the war after it had raged for two years.
The National Research Council was established in 1916 by then-President Woodrow Wilson. Once he signed the war declaration in 1917, the National Academy's foreign secretary sent a telegram to counterparts in Britain, France, Italy and Russia reading: "The entrance of the United States into the war unites our men of science with yours in a common cause". And in that common cause top physicists, chemists and engineers volunteered to work in scientific solidarity.
American University surrounded by army tents Library of Congress [public domain]
Germany had launched a surprise chlorine gas attack in Flanders, Belgium at a time that the U.S. Army had no protective gear, and no capability to produce, much less deploy chemical weapons, and nor did doctors have any experience with gassed or chemically afflicted soldiers. Which led the War Department to set up a laboratory they named the American University Experiment Station and by the end of the war close to two thousand soldiers, scientists and civilians worked at the campus and at its outposts throughout the country.
By the time the war ended in 1918, scientists at the campus revealed their development of a new weapon they called lewisite, a blister agent based on arsenic reportedly to be dropped on the Germans in 1919 should the war not have ended by then. Post-war, the experiment station reverted to American University and over the succeeding decades developers turned the surrounding land into an affluent residential neighbourhood.
In 1993 developers dug up a cache of mortars, leading to a commitment to finally clean up the area. Mr. Gerson and his wife Jessica Herzstein bought a home where her parents had once lived on the property, where the Corps investigated and cleaned up the area to ensure no health concerns remained. On the wooded slope above their driveway, weeds cover a concrete platform that was once a launch pad for the experimental mortar range.
Two ivy-draped bunkers are to be found behind the house, which Mr. Gerson calls evidence of century old scientific endeavours, pointing to holes in the walls where scientists likely pumped gas into the chamber, a memento of the dread weapons once tested there.
"They occurred in small hollows two to three metres deep in the surface of the ice, on the southern side of high ridges on the plateau." Antarctic frigid temperature study
"There's a limit to how long the conditions persist to allow it to cool to these ultra-low temperatures, and a limit to how much heat you can actually get through the atmosphere, because water vapour has to be almost nonexistent in order to emit heat from the surface of these temperatures." "Going forward in time, I think we could see that the lower limit might slowly start to rise, as we put more carbon dioxide in the air, and water vapour in the stratosphere starts to increase." Ted Scambos, scientist, National Snow and Ice Data Center
Handout photo taken on January 8, 2018 and
received on June 12, 2018 via the Nature website shows unusual iceberg
at Rothera Research Station, Antarctic Peninsula. ANDREW SHEPHERD/AFP/Getty Images
Roald Amundson and Robert Scott and their crews each separately racing to be the first at the South Pole experienced life-threatening hardships negotiating the icy terrain and the frigid temperatures of the Antarctic, along with miserably inclement weather and long-lasting storms that kept them in their tents hoping to survive for weeks at a time in the hostile-to-life frozen environment. Even they, suffering through difficult months of surmounting -40C and -50C weather days, with high, brutal winds and sight-impairing snow conditions, however, would never have imagined a penetrating cold of -88C to -144 C.
The presence of such minus temperatures as -93 degrees Celsius was left to the present century and intrepid research scientists who have discovered the planet's coldest areas. It is unimaginable to think of cold that can descend to minus-100 degrees at night through the Antarctic winter. No living thing could conceivably survive. On the other hand, there are scarce living things to survive in that geographic location, in that prevailing atmosphere, and in the face of the most alien-to-life weather systems, that plague the South Pole.
Persistent winds shape the surface of East Antarctica’s snow into small dune forms called ‘sastrugi’. Credit: Ted Scambos, NSIDC/University of Colorado-Boulder
A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters found, with the help of weather satellites, "approximately 100" sites in the Antarctic where low temperatures of around minus-144C were found during the winters of 2004 to 2015, These are temperature lows that outrival the average temperature on Mars with its minus76C average. The locales were observed to be in dips and hollows close to the top of East Antarctica's Ice Sheet, occurring at elevations of around 3,8700 to 4,000 metres, during July and August.
Russia's Vostok Station was the locus for the previous coldest temperature ever measured on Earth at minus 89C in 1983. Satellite data analysis dating to 2013 took in 32 years of data to conclude colder temperatures to be present closer to minus 135C. It seems that minus 144 represents the theoretical minimum for the coldest temperatures could plunge, according to the research; possible only under conditions where the sky is clear and winds calm, to allow residual heat to radiate away from Earth's surface back into space.
If the atmosphere is as dry as it can possibly become, water vapour which retains heat in the atmosphere cannot interfere. With extremely dry air on a prolonged basis, temperature can be reduced beyond 144, but marginally. Measured, needless to say, from a safely existential distance thanks to the kind of modern technology that Amundson, the first to discover the South Pole, might never have imagined.
The East Antarctic Plateau. (Ted Scambos/NSIDC/CU Boulder)
"We know from past volcanic eruptions -- the last big one was Mount Pinatubo in 1991 -- that it will create a cloud of sulphuric acid droplets in the stratosphere, where there's no rain to wash it out. It will last for a couple of years and it will reflect sunlight." "We know that this can cause climate change, so the idea is to emulate that." Alan Robock, meteorologist, distinguished professor of climate science, Rutgers University
"[To date the geoengineering proposal risks to biodiversity have been] almost completely unexplored." "Interstate conflict could cause geoengineering to fail, and unintended negative consequences or regionally severe climate events such as extreme droughts could force rapid termination, even if direct attribution of these events to geoengineering could not be demonstrated." "Extreme climate velocities from geoengineering termination thus represent a potentially acute threat to species survival in the most biodiverse region on Earth." New scientific paper
“People become more concerned about doing
something about global warming when they find out that scientists are
considering doing this.” Stuart Broce/NASA
Climate change mitigation is on the minds of environmentalists to the extent that a strategy has been hypothetically developed that would block the warming effects of the sun, serving to cool down the temperature of the Earth to a purportedly controlled degree, turning back the threatened effects of global warming. One of the leading strategies to challenge impending climate change is to spray gases high into the atmosphere to have them reflect sunlight back toward space; a method known as geoengineering, described in a new scientific paper.
Solar geoengineering would have the effect of countering rising temperatures when reflective aerosols serve to impede sunlight reaching the Earth. What this new paper points out is the proposal's effectiveness can cause surface temperatures on the planet to drop to a dramatic degree and precipitously, as though global warming was occurring in reverse. Should such a scenario arise, it would conceivably come with dire existential effects on the planet's plants and animals.
Custom designed high-altitude jets would be used to spray sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, above most clouds, to mimic the meteorological effects of a major volcanic eruption, some of which have been so violently catastrophic they have through history been followed by long periods of global cooling. After the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, for example, Canada was seen to be roughly three degrees colder than would be normal in the summer and it was found that ice remained in Hudson Bay for an additional month or so.
Professor Robock's and colleagues' paper published in Nature Ecology & Evolution pointed out risks and benefits of geoengineering, qualified as large scale projects whose purpose is designed to halt, slow or reverse climate change. The model of a major project spraying sulphur dioxide for 50 years and abruptly putting a halt to the program gave researchers cause to highlight the most unpredictable and possibly harmful element in such plans for ameliorating climate change: geopolitical leaders' propensity to change their minds.
A fairly major point is that spraying sulphur dioxide has the effect of producing acid rain and acid snow adding to what humans already place into the lower atmosphere by burning coal and oil. "Locally it can be quite polluting but globally it's not that much", added Professor Robock. The real problem, the paper emphasized, is with political leaders where the paper speculated a geoengineering scheme might disintegrate for a mass of reasons, from drought to war.
A controlled experiment on Earth's climate could, in effect, become shuttered abruptly leaving an increase in what is known as climate velocities; the speeds at which an animal or plant would be forced to migrate to enable it to remain in their optimum climatic comfort zone. And while some animals would simply trek, fly or swim as climate becomes altered, to ensure they reach a geography where the same average temperatures prevail through moving up in either altitude or latitude, other affected animals are unable to.
The paper points out that inhabitants of tundra, boreal forests and temperate grasslands would be the species most likely to be seriously adversely affected.
Sulfurous
emissions from volcano eruptions, like Calbuco in Chile, temporarily
cool the climate, and were the inspiration for some geoengineering
techniques. Getty Images
"2016 was a year in the Arctic like we've never seen before." "A clear and more pronounced signal of warming than in any other year on record." Jeremy Mathis, Arctic research chief, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
"The Larsen C rift [from Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf] and iceberg 'calving' is not a warning of imminent sea level rise, and any link to climate change is far from straightforward." Adrian Luckman, glaciologist, Swansea University
"Climate change may not be responsible for the recent skyrocketing cost of natural disasters, but it is very likely that it will impact future catastrophes." NASA Earth Observatory
"Some storm types such as hurricanes, tornadoes and winter storms are also exhibiting changes that have been linked to climate change, although the current state of the science does not permit detailed understanding." U.S. federal agencies report
Nasa handout photo dated 10 November 2016 showing the rift in the Larsen C Ice shelf in Antarctica.
Photograph: Nasa/John Sonntag/PA
Scientists from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released their annual study of Earth's climate indices to focus on 2016 having been identified as the hottest year on record, on sea levels being at the highest level on record, and sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctica registering as the lowest on record, in the 209-page report published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
All of which point to a clear affirmation of declared human-caused climate change. Just incidentally, an El Nino warming of the central Pacific which alters weather worldwide, was also a large factor in the wild weather experienced throughout the Globe. The El Nino, though not part of identified climate change, a regular natural feature, was described as also being the largest on record.
Key findings included:
Almost 1/8 of the world's land mass was in severe drought; higher than normal, making it "one of the worst years for drought", according to report co-author Robert Dunn from the United Kingdom Meteorological Office.
Extreme was the byword for giant downpours, heat waves, and a huge wildfire in Canada.
For the sixth straight year of record high sea levels, the global sea level rose another quarter of an inch.
With a total of 93 tropical cyclones including Hurricane Matthew that struck Haiti, killing a thousand people, 13 percent more cyclones struck last year than usual.
For the 37th year in a row, the world's glaciers shrank by an average of about one metre.
Since 2002, Greenland's ice sheet has lost 4,000 billion tonnes of ice; last year's loss measured 30 billion tonnes.
The droughts that are impacting North America haven't matched the 930s Dust Bowl phenomenon, the worst of the last thousand years. The ferocious wildfires in British Columbia are dreadful but in 1950 wildfires in Alberta were so widespread Toronto's atmosphere was darkened. The heat wave Phoenix recently experienced began to melt city infrastructure, but on June 25, 1990 it registered its highest temperature ever, at 50 C.
Balance that with sixteen of the world's 17 warmest record years having occurred since 2001. Concurrently, global sea ice is diminishing. All these changes are being tracked through networks of satellites, weather observatories and weather experts. And the scientific picture being delineated is that on average the planet is going to experience more powerful droughts,intensified conflicts linked to same, and coastal cities being threatened by rising seas.
Crack in Larsen C ice shelf. Photograph: Ted Scambos, NSIDC
"We must ... continue to go into space for the future of humanity. I don't think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet." "[Despite which it is a] glorious time to be alive and doing research into theoretical physics." "Our picture of the universe has changed a great deal in the last fifty years, and I am happy if I have made a small contribution." "Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten-thousand years. By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race." "I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it will take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate." "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete and would be superseded." Stephen Hawking, 74, professor, theoretical physics, Cambridge University, U.K.
Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking speaking at a press conference
where “Breakthrough Starshot” space exploration initiative was
announced. Hawking recently said mankind is running short of time and in
1000 years they have to find another planet to colonize as life on
Earth is turning risky. (Bryan Bedder | Getty Images )
The theory-mesmerizing professor whose mind is capable of leaping the boundaries of unknown science and nature while his earthbound body has been in slow deterioration for most of his life was given the news that he was destined for an early death when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease as a graduate student. His mind-bending theories have been widely regarded as indisputable forecasting from the mind of a genius. Indeed he may be, even while there appears, at times that his pronouncements have more than a whiff of science fiction about them.
Which is not to say that the minds of science fiction writers have not been uniquely fine in imagining a cosmology and human invention, science and nature intersecting with sometimes amazing results, since many of those predictions decades before mechanical science produced working models reflecting the literarily-imagined technological marvels have become reality.
Leonardo da Vinci whose mind reflected that of a polymath genius in science, humanities and art, politics and warfare has never been replicated. The world has never seen his equal, and possibly never will. His was an instance of a mind outdistancing all others and predicting the future far in advance of reality.
Dr. Hawking is not beating a new drum, warning the world that humanity's time on Earth is limited, and similarly forecasting incredible understated 'difficulties' in producing human-intelligence grade computers whose speed in outdistancing human thinking and invention and capabilities will leave humanity in a fix of redundancy for he has been stating for years what to him is the obvious conclusion to our steady, current trajectory into the future.
Do we have just 1000 years left on Earth? Photo / 123rf
He has given us a thousand years to come up with a remedy to what he recognizes as the inevitable; a destroyed Earth, no longer able to sustain human life which has managed to drain away all the resources that make life sustainable on the planet. That is, if malevolent natural events, or alternately evil designs of humankind itself do not destroy human life and all other animal life on our lonely planet. Dr. Hawking predicts mass extinction. Which is to say, no more life on Earth, the planet succumbing to becoming a vast, empty desolation.
According to Dr. Hawking, humankind must strive without surcease to engineer a way to say farewell to the only planet we have ever known as our home and comfort. The century looming before us, he states, will be a precarious one. However, has it ever been otherwise on this restive planet where human beings view one another with suspicion, jealousy, blame and conflict? NASA, the good doctor points out, has been on a relentless search to discover planets with Earthlike properties that could conceivably offer themselves as a haven to be colonized by humans.
Thus far, over 4,600 "candidate" planets have been recognized, with an additional 2,300 confirmed to be planets, and thus potentials for further investigation as platforms for human habitation should mankind venture toward them at some unknowable time in the future through modes of travel and time management whereby human beings could transfer technology through another dimension to settle far from their original home, to learn to live in a different atmosphere and to tame it and to exploit whatever resources may be found there.
As for artificial intelligence. Stop. Allow inventive scientific curiosity to go so far and no further. Else we are doomed.
Or maybe not.
WARNING: Stephen Hawking has warned a mass extinction is coming -- Getty
"We know that Canadians want a government that they can trust to protect the environment and grow the economy." "The Government of Canada will work hand-in-hand with provinces, territories and like-minded countries to combat climate change, adapt to its impacts, and create the clean jobs of tomorrow." "We are disappointed by the decision [Obama's rejection of Keystone XL pipeline] but respect the right of the United States to make the decision." Canada's new Prime Minister Justin Trudeau
"While he expressed his disappointment, given Canada's position on this issue, we both agreed that our close friendship [Canada-US] on a whole range of issues -- including energy and climate change -- should provide the basis for even closer co-ordination between our countries going forward." "This pipeline would neither be a silver bullet for the economy, as was promised by some, nor the express lane to climate disaster proclaimed by others." U.S. President Barack Obama
CREDIT: Katie Valentine
Protesters gather outside of the White House to deliver anti-Keystone XL petitions on Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Coal fired plants, leading to plenty of black particulate matter circulating in the atmosphere? America has lots of them; dirty energy galore. Oil pipelines buried in the earth proliferate all across the United States bringing U.S. dirty crude to refineries and keeping production chugging along in the U.S. The method of extracting gas and oil through 'fracking', pumping water and chemicals deep into bedrock with concerns of polluting watersheds and wasting precious water resources continues apace.
Oil deriving from Canadian sources will continue to be shipped into the United States, despite Mr. Obama's choice to burnish his environmental credentials and in the process sour relations with his closest neighbour and trade partner. Over 11,600 miles
of oil pipelines have been laid in states all over America. Some of
these pipelines are located just a few miles away from proposed
stretches of the Keystone XL.
With current conditions prevailing, oil Canada shipments by rail and truck (far more dangerous than pipeline) will be sold to the U.S. at bargain-basement prices; nice for the U.S., not so nice in reducing Canada's revenues. The 'dirty' oil Obama turned down will come instead from Venezuela. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are always ready and willing to ship their fossil fuels; profits that fund the extremism of Islamist jihad.
At November's conclusion, 40,000 politicians, officials, green activists, lobbyists and journalists representing 195 nations of the world will gather outside Paris for a climate-change conference that they anticipate will change much about how the world does its business. A treaty is expected to come out of this conference, committing each nation to massive cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases, to prevent the Earth from resulting rising temperatures.
Kyoto's 1997 agreement presented a few little inconveniences to iron out. That was supposed to have taken place in Kyoto in 2009. So, once again it was agreed as it will likely be in Paris that "developing" nations must be given the opportunity to catch up to the advances that the developed, wealthy countries of the world have achieved, which made them responsible for human-caused global warming through made-made, industrial C02.
Dramatic cuts in energy usage are the pledges awaiting the conclusion of this conference. The developing nations are willing to make their cuts as well, as long as they're given the proper incentives to do so. And that's where a $100-billion yearly fund enters the C02 picture. This is a "Green Climate Fund", fittingly financed by the wealthy malefactors who produced greenhouse warming to begin with.
China, at the present time, contributes a whopping 24 percent of the global C02 emissions and it plans to double those emissions by 2030 by building 363 more coal-fired power stations. How that will impact on an immense population struggling with the effects of health-impacting smog hiding the sun and irritating lungs is evidently not up for discussion.
India presents currently as the third-largest C02 emitter, plans to triple its emissions, while Russia which closed down the bulk of its decrepit Soviet industrial plants now proposes to increase its emissions from 2012 levels by up to 39 percent. The fifth-largest emitter, Japan, lays claim to plans to cut emissions by15 percent, though planning to build more coal-fired power plants; the country has reason to have suspicions of the nuclear safety record.
South Korea, standing as the seventh-largest C02 emitter, plans to cut emissions by 23 percent, and this is where "carbon credits" are most useful, allowing it to "offset" its production of C02 for cash. Saudi Arabia and Iran (eighth and ninth-largest emitters) have no proposals as yet, while the United Arab Emirates which doubled their emissions since 2002, evinces little sign of slowing, though it is interested in "carbon-free" solar and nuclear power.
Brazil, swiftly increasing dependence on fossil fuels, plans to diminish the felling and burning of the C02 sink, the Amazon rainforest. And, so, the position of the United States, fully concerned with the degradation of the environment thanks to Climate Change, with a president committed to helping other countries make their needed sacrifices, stands offside itself any global treaties on the environment.
As for the Green Climate Fund meant to hand out $100 billion yearly to aid developing countries in their efforts to "adapt to climate change", pledges haven't quite met expectations, with $700 million in pledges so far having been received.
"[Orbital] has a contract to resupply the International Space Station, and their rocket honestly sounds like the punchline to a joke." "It uses Russian rocket engines that were made in the '60s. I don't mean their design is from the '60s, I mean they start with engines that were literally made in the '60s and, like, packed away in Siberia somewhere." Elon Musk, chief executive, SpaceX "We need to go through this investigation and be very thorough before we determine whether that's a factor [use of Soviet-era engines] in this or not." "I do want to caution the public, this is an accident site and it's a rocket and it had a lot of hazardous materials on board that people should not be looking for or wanting to collect souvenirs over. If you find anything that washes ashore in the local area or came down in your farm or in your yard, please make sure that you call local authorities." Frank Culbertson, vice-president, Orbital Sciences Corp.
An unmanned
Orbital Sciences Corp Antares rocket headed for the International Space
Station lifts off from the Wallops flight facility shortly before
exploding.Photograph: Jay Diem/AP
"Due to certain specifics, it’s not possible to talk about the
construction details of the rocket itself and the interaction of its
systems during launch, since this is the field of American specialists. However, it's important to note that
during yesterday’s launch, the AJ-26 first-stage engines, which are a
modification of the NK-33, were functioning normally." Kuznetsov company, Samara, Russia
Orbital executives with their contract to run cargo for NASA to the International Space Station were using 40-year-old Soviet-designed-and-manufactured rocket engines for which Orbital executives claim no modern alternatives to that technology exist. Now that's a wonder. Nothing equal to those particular engines exist? Then why not design and produce them? Isn't that their business after all? And if they have no other alternatives, what on Earth is SpaceX using as another NASA contractor?
In May, during tests at NASA's Stennis Space Centre in Mississippi, the very same type of AJ-26 engine, similar model to the two propelling the Antares rocket that exploded on Tuesday seconds after launch from Wallops Island Virginia, exploded. Mightn't that explosion have triggered a concern, enough so to point a stern figure of suspicion at the reliability and utility of those engines?
Thank heavens the rocket was unmanned; the resulting fireball and shredding of the rocket and its contents as a supply vessel carrying food, equipment and experiments for the astronauts on the ISS rained down potentially toxic material all over marshlands and farms in Virginia. That isn't manna from the heavens, that's possibly dangerous material to endanger whatever comes in contact with it, whether humans or wildlife, cattle or birds, let alone crops.
Police cars
drive past an antique rocket at Nasa’s Wallops Flight Facility. The
incident sent ripples though the space industry on Wednesday.Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
If private companies set up to compete as an alternative to government cutbacks requiring NASA to look for cheaper methods of contributing to the International Space Station and scientific exploration of the stratosphere cannot be relied upon to safely and efficiently fill the gap, perhaps it's time for the U.S. government to decide whether it is interested in continuing its missions to space, and to allocate sufficient funds to enable them to continue.
The contract privatization of space science may sound sensible to some degree, but not from the perspective of cost-saving, when low-end devices are used to produce high-end results. The AJ-26 engines bought and refurbished by a U.S. company, subsequently used in several rocket launches likely need to be permanently mothballed.
The $200-million Antares loss will be difficult to justify; saving funding by wasting funds doesn't appear like very good economics.
"It's still a significant technological challenge to land on another world. Especially somewhere like the moon, which doesn't have an atmosphere so you can't use parachutes or anything like that. You have to use rocket motors for the descent and you have to make sure you go down at the right angle and the right rate of descent and you don't end up in a crater on top of a large rock." "They are taking their time with getting to know about how to fly humans into space, how to build space stations ... how to explore the solar system, especially the moon and Mars." "They are making good strides, and I think over the next ten to twenty years they'll certainly be rivalling Russia and America in this area and maybe overtaking them in some areas." Peter Bond, consultant editor, Jane's Space Systems and Industry
China, making world history again. Quite remarkable an advance to have achieved in somewhat of a relatively brief period of time. The Cultural Revolution is not all that distant in the historical past. Beijing did an amazing U-turn in its trajectory. The Communist Party of China abandoned its horrendously dysfunctional drive to convert human nature into an army of mechanical quasi-human, self-abnegating, self-sacrificing robots dedicated to the common weal of social uniformity.
The Chinese mentality is a sharp one of hugely intelligent people. The Chinese Politburo was forced to recognize that people cannot forever be pounded into square holes when their conformation is round. And they were forced as well to recognize that just as they themselves reacted to the allure of gaining whether it be recognition or wealth, so too do all other people react positively to whatever advantages them.
The great equalizer is the opportunity to amass wealth. And the most reliable and advantageous route to achieving wealth is the capitalist system. The experiment that Communist China embarked upon when it took possession of Hong Kong from Great Britain was that that intensely successful experiment in channeling human greed and the drive to acquire, could be harnessed to communism.
That harnessing has enabled China to become the world's manufacturing centre.
It has enabled China, despite the sacrifices (in environmental degradation and population health) made to gain and to retain that position of rare influence and power, to become immensely wealthy as well. With that wealth China has been enabled to let loose its scientists so the country could achieve within its own immense borders and for its own gigantic population advances in medical science and pure science itself.
The traditional export of Chinese intellectual brilliance to other countries of the world where science has benefited universally demonstrates the extraordinarily compelling competitive drive and cerebral functioning of an ethnic group.
The national ambition to achieve great heights and world recognition has motivated Beijing to embark on many directions new to them but to which they have felt entitled to achieve. Chinese creativity amazed the world looking in on the introductory ceremonies of Beijing's Summer Olympic Games, with the breathtaking creative wizardry of a country determined to fete the world. And they did.
And now another venture of huge significance both to China and to the world of science and exploration. China's first moon-rover is now wandering the surface of the moon. The landing vehicle and the rover will each separately take photographs of their environment and themselves at work on the lunar surface. The rover is engineered to survey the moon's geology and surface and hunt for the presence of natural resources.
China Central Television image -- Moon rover, Jade Rabbit
The lander itself will continue to carry out scientific exploration around the landing site for a one-year period. The Chang'e 3's solar panels are used to absorb sunlight for the generation of power. China sent its first astronaut into space in 2003 and sent its first probe to the moon in 2006. Around the year 2020 China plans to have a functioning space station in operation, and soon afterward, to send a Chinese astronaut to the moon.
Whatever other new horizons beckon as a challenge to China we will soon enough be apprised of.
Esa's Cryosat sees Arctic sea-ice volume bounce back
By Jonathan AmosScience correspondent, BBC News, San Francisco
The bounce back in the extent of sea ice in the Arctic this summer was reflected also in the volume of ice.
Data from Europe's Cryosat spacecraft suggests there were almost 9,000 cu km of ice at the end of this year's melt season.
This is close to 50% more than in the corresponding period in 2012.
It is a rare piece of good news for a region that has
witnessed a rapid decline in both area cover and thickness in recent
years.
But scientists caution against reading too much into one year's "recovery".
"Although the recovery of Arctic sea ice is certainly welcome
news, it has to be considered against the backdrop of changes that have
occurred over the last few decades," said Prof Andy Shepherd of
University College London, UK.
"It's estimated that there were around 20,000 cu km of Arctic
sea ice each October in the early 1980s, and so today's minimum still
ranks among the lowest of the past 30 years," he told BBC News.
Cryosat is the European Space Agency's (Esa) dedicated polar monitoring platform.
It has a sophisticated radar system that allows scientists to work out the thickness of the ice floes covering the Arctic Ocean.
In the three years following its launch, the spacecraft saw a
steady decline in autumn ice volume, with a record low of 6,000 cubic
km being recorded in late October 2012.
But after a sharply colder summer this year, the autumn volume number has gone up.
Measurements taken in the same three weeks in October found the floes to contain just shy of 9,000 cu km.
Thicker ice has been retained in the Arctic
Part of this stronger performance can be put down to the greater retention of older ice.
This is evident particularly around the Canadian archipelago
and North Greenland, where there is much more two-year-old and
three-year-old ice than in previous years.
"One of the things we'd noticed in our data was that the
volume of ice year-to-year was not varying anything like as much as the
ice extent - at least for the years 2010, 2011 and 2012," explained
Rachel Tilling from the UK's Nerc Centre for Polar Observation and
Modelling (CPOM).
"This is why we're really quite surprised by what we've seen in 2013.
"We didn't expect the greater ice extent left at the end of the summer melt to be reflected in the volume.
"But it has been. And the reason is related to the amount of multi-year ice in the Arctic."
Dr Don Perovich is a sea-ice expert at Dartmouth College, US.
He said Cryosat's data tallied with observations made by other spacecraft.
"In previous summers, some of the [multi-year ice] migrated
over to the Alaska and Siberia areas where it melted. But this past
summer, it stayed in place because of a change in wind patterns. And so
there'll likely be more multi-year ice next year than there was this
year," he told BBC News.
Satellite altimetry: How to measure sea-ice volume
Cryosat's radar has the resolution to see the Arctic's floes and leads
Some 7/8 of the ice tends to sit below the waterline - the draft
The aim is to measure the freeboard - the ice part above the waterline
Knowing this 1/8th figure allows Cryosat to work out sea-ice thickness
The thickness multiplied by the area of ice cover produces a volume
The minimum ice extent in the
Arctic this summer was recorded as 5.10 million sq km. Again, this was a
figure almost 50% larger than the all-time satellite-low mark achieved
12 months previously - when floes were reduced to just 3.41 million sq
km by mid-September.
Area/extent is easier to measure, but scientists regard
thickness/volume to be the best metric with which to judge the health of
the ice pack, which is why Cryosat's unique data-set is so important.
For a while, it was uncertain whether the European satellite would get any autumn measurements this year.
The spacecraft suffered a major fault in its onboard power
system at the beginning of October, and all science activity was halted.
But engineers managed to switch the satellite over to a back-up system and normal operations were resumed on 11 October.
"We lost the side 'A' of the power subsystem we believe for
good, although we still have hope to be able to use part of it in the
future in case we experience another issue," said Esa Cryosat mission
manager Dr Tommaso Parrinello.
"Since 2 October, we have been operating on the redundant
chain, but all other subsystems are still being operated on their prime
chain 'A'. Therefore, the science instruments and the quality of data
have not been affected."
Harvard Smithsonian Center for AstrophysicsAn
artist concept provided by Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
shows the newly discovered planets named Kepler-62e and -f. Scientists
using NASA's Kepler telescope have found two distant planets that are in
the right place and are the right size for potential life.
WASHINGTON
— Space is vast, but it may not be so lonely after all: A study finds
the Milky Way is teeming with billions of planets that are about the
size of Earth, orbit stars just like our sun, and exist in the
Goldilocks zone — not too hot and not too cold for life.
Astronomers using NASA data have calculated for the first time that
in our galaxy alone, there are at least 8.8 billion stars with
Earth-size planets in the habitable temperature zone.
The study was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
For perspective, that’s more Earth-like planets than there are people on Earth.
As for what it says about the odds that there is life somewhere out
there, it means “just in our Milky Way galaxy alone, that’s 8.8 billion
throws of the biological dice,” said study co-author Geoff Marcy, a
longtime planet hunter from the University of California at Berkeley.
The next step, scientists say, is to look for atmospheres on these
planets with powerful space telescopes that have yet to be launched.
That would yield further clues to whether any of these planets do, in
fact, harbor life.
The findings also raise a blaring question, Marcy said: If we aren’t
alone, why is “there a deafening silence in our Milky Way galaxy from
advanced civilizations?”
AP Photo/NASA/Ames/JPL-CaltechThis
artist's rendition provided by NASA shows
Kepler-69c, a
super-Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of a star like our sun,
located about 2,700 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.
In the Milky Way, about 1 in 5 stars that are like our sun in size,
color and age have planets that are roughly Earth’s size and are in the
habitable zone where life-crucial water can be liquid, according to
intricate calculations based on four years of observations from NASA’s
now-crippled Kepler telescope.
If people on Earth could only travel in deep space, “you’d probably
see a lot of traffic jams,” Bill Borucki, NASA’s chief Kepler scientist,
joked Monday.
The Kepler telescope peered at 42,000 stars, examining just a tiny
slice of our galaxy to see how many planets like Earth are out there.
Scientists then extrapolated that figure to the rest of the galaxy,
which has hundreds of billions of stars.
Just in our Milky Way galaxy alone, that’s 8.8 billion throws of the biological dice
For the first time, scientists calculated – not estimated – what
percent of stars that are just like our sun have planets similar to
Earth: 22 percent, with a margin of error of plus or minus 8 percentage
points.
Kepler scientist Natalie Batalha said there is still more data to pore over before this can be considered a final figure.
There are about 200 billion stars in our galaxy, with 40 billion of
them like our sun, Marcy said. One of his co-authors put the number of
sun-like stars closer to 50 billion, meaning there would be at least 11
billion planets like ours.
Based on the 1-in-5 estimate, the closest Earth-size planet that is
in the habitable temperature zone and circles a sun-like star is
probably within 70 trillion miles of Earth, Marcy said.
And the 8.8 billion Earth-size planets figure is only a start. That’s
because scientists were looking only at sun-like stars, which are not
the most common stars.
An earlier study found that 15 percent of the more common red dwarf
stars have Earth-size planets that are close-in enough to be in the
not-too-hot, not-too-cold Goldilocks Zone.
Put those together and that’s probably 40 billion right-size, right-place planets, Marcy said.
And that’s just our galaxy. There are billions of other galaxies.
Everything they’ve done looks legitimate
Scientists at a Kepler science conference Monday said they have found
833 new candidate planets with the space telescope, bringing the total
of planets they’ve spotted to 3,538, but most aren’t candidates for
life.
Kepler has identified only 10 planets that are about Earth’s size
circling sun-like stars and are in the habitable zone, including one
called Kepler 69-c.
Because there are probably hundreds of planets missed for every one
found, the study did intricate extrapolations to come up with the 22
percent figure – a calculation that outside scientists say is fair.
“Everything they’ve done looks legitimate,” said MIT astronomer Sara Seager.
The International Lung Cancer Consortium studied results from six "case-control" studies comparing over two thousand cancer patients and three thousand healthy controls. Their finding was that there was no significant link detected between marijuana and malignancy. The involved scientists delivered their findings at an April conference.
Marijuana smoke is known to contain cancer-causing chemicals. However, according to Hal Morgenstern, a University of Michigan epidemiologist, and a member of the International Lung Cancer Consortium, the majority of marijuana users don't consume enough of the product to become ill.
"When you think about people smoking 20 - 40 cigarettes a day for forty years, they're smoking hundreds of thousands of cigarettes. The exposure [to harmful smoke] that marijuana users get ... is more than a magnitude of difference less", insists Dr. Morgenstern.
On the other hand, smoking pot leading to cancer is a reasonable enough conclusion. Marijuana contains some of the same carcinogens as does tobacco. Users tend to inhale far more deeply. And marijuana is smoked without a filter. On the marijuana-plus side, medical marijuana use is increasing in popularity.
Evidence suggests smoking marijuana not only helps control the pain of arthritis and cancer sufferers, it can help alleviate chemotherapy-related nausea, as well as some forms of pain and it can also relieve loss of appetite in cancer patients. Those are big pluses.
A medical professor at the University of California at Los Angeles discovered no association between low-to-moderate marijuana use and cancer. And the evidence on heavy-long-term use was anything but conclusive.
Bur now comes a new, Canadian-led study adding to the debate over medical marijuana and legalization. This is a study which contradicts recent research studies that conclude with no connection to marijuana use and cancer. A large group of Swedish men who had been surveyed in 1969-70 relating to their lifestyles and tracked over the following 40 years represented their subject trials.
The finding was that those who were classified as "heavy" pot users when they were young became over twice as likely to have lung cancer by 2009. Russ Callaghan, a psychiatry professor at the University of Northern British Columbia and his colleagues in Russia and Sweden were involved in the research, the results of which they had published in the journal Cancer Causes and Control.
It wasn't his intention to "demonize" marijuana, said Dr. Callaghan. Pointing out that two legal drugs, tobacco and alcohol cause "dramatically" more harm in their use. He felt it to be of importance to identify possible negative effects of marijuana use, as well as acknowledging its potential benefits, a logical enough goal for a scientist.
"It is seen as organic and natural", said the researcher. "[The study] does add one piece of evidence to suggest a caution around that."
This represents a general opinion site for its author. It also offers a space for the author to record her experiences and perceptions,both personal and public. This is rendered obvious by the content contained in the blog, but the space is here inviting me to write. And so I do.
