Starship Asterisk*

The Code wrote:Is the sun getting bigger right now?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37705466/ns ... nce-space/

Who knows?

What does that have to do with the size of the Sun???

That post deals with the relative inactivity of the Sun (copied from Space.com article). That topic is covered here and here. You posted the same article here. I think once, in an appropriate location, is enough. Don't you?

Is the sun getting bigger right now?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37705466/ns ... nce-space/

Who knows?

tc

Ann wrote:And that's what we are reduced to when it comes to pondering the question of extraterrestrial life - believing, thinking, guessing.

Proving the existence of extraterrestrial life might well be hard, if that life doesn't look like we expect life to look, and if it exists in places where we have a hard time finding it, such as underground.

But as hard as it might be to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life, that's nothing compared with how hard - no, make that how utterly impossible - it is going to be to prove the non-existence of such life.

Bear with me for a moment and consider the possibility that we are alone. (You may conclude that if we are alone, then that is because we were created by a God and this God chose not to create life elsewhere. But you may just as well conclude that if we are alone, then that is because life is really so improbable that it took an entire universe to come up with life on just one planet.)

Okay. So play this mind-game with me and accept, for the moment, the idea that we are alone. How do we go about proving that? How do we ever prove that there is nobody else out there? The way I see it, we would literally have to search every nook and cranny of every terrestrial planet out there, plus the innards of all said planets, plus, I'm sure, a few places that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial planets such as comets and perhaps the atmospheres of many gas giants, before we could know that there is no life there. And let's not forget that we would have to travel in time, too, and conduct our search again and carefully examine all the possible cosmic habitats of life at every possible time period.

So are we ever going to prove the non-existence of extraterrestrial life, if we are indeed alone?

Of course we aren't. I thought you'd see my point.

With me being so negative, do I believe that we are alone?

Well, let me put it like this - if a person strongly believes that we are alone in the universe, then that person has a religious belief in that concept, because a conviction should be termed a religious belief if it is forever beyond the reach of our knowledge. And I'm not particularly religious.

Then again, a person who believes that the universe is teeming with life is also a bit religious in his or her belief, as long as we have no proof whatsoever to back the concept up. But the person who believes in life elsewhere at least has a chance to be vindicated by science in the future.

Somebody put it like this: We are either alone or we aren't. Either way, it's a staggering thought.

I like that.

Ann

One word, NO to all the above.

How to find a habitable exoplanet: Don't look for one
Scientific American | Guest Blog | 14 June 2010

Caleb Scharf wrote:
Most planetary scientists will tell you that the objects they study are more complex and harder to categorize than almost anything else out there in the universe. That assertion is surprising and interesting, and it's a point that is gradually sinking in for astronomers. Much of the past 400 years of telescopic exploration has been about stellar taxonomy, pinning objects into their respective display cases. Despite the glorious wealth of 200 billion stars in our galaxy, the physics underlying their fundamental properties is remarkably uniform, and most can be readily described with only a few parameters – mass, age, elemental abundance. Individuals may be having particularly bad millennia, covered in spots, twisting their magnetic fields into knots, and throwing off flares, but their overall place in the cosmic zoo can be well defined.

Not true for planets, especially the smaller ones that just might be suitable for harboring life in a recognizable form. Mass, age and composition are just the start of a lengthy list of important characteristics. How far does it orbit from its parent star? What type of star does it orbit? Is the orbit elliptical? Does the planet have an atmosphere, and if so what is the composition? Is there an axial tilt? Are there other planets in the system, exerting their gravitational might and forcing the orbit to shift over time? Are there gravitational tides at work, flexing and molding the planet? Is there volcanism or tectonic activity? How is the interior of a world layered? Is there a global magnetic field, cocooning the world? How did the planet assemble, does it have surface water? Did the planet get washed by rich organic chemistry in its youth? Does it have moons, and if so, what are the conditions on those? How often are they pelted by asteroids and comets?

Continue Reading >

And that's what we are reduced to when it comes to pondering the question of extraterrestrial life - believing, thinking, guessing.

Proving the existence of extraterrestrial life might well be hard, if that life doesn't look like we expect life to look, and if it exists in places where we have a hard time finding it, such as underground.

But as hard as it might be to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life, that's nothing compared with how hard - no, make that how utterly impossible - it is going to be to prove the non-existence of such life.

Bear with me for a moment and consider the possibility that we are alone. (You may conclude that if we are alone, then that is because we were created by a God and this God chose not to create life elsewhere. But you may just as well conclude that if we are alone, then that is because life is really so improbable that it took an entire universe to come up with life on just one planet.)

Okay. So play this mind-game with me and accept, for the moment, the idea that we are alone. How do we go about proving that? How do we ever prove that there is nobody else out there? The way I see it, we would literally have to search every nook and cranny of every terrestrial planet out there, plus the innards of all said planets, plus, I'm sure, a few places that have nothing to do with extraterrestrial planets such as comets and perhaps the atmospheres of many gas giants, before we could know that there is no life there. And let's not forget that we would have to travel in time, too, and conduct our search again and carefully examine all the possible cosmic habitats of life at every possible time period.

So are we ever going to prove the non-existence of extraterrestrial life, if we are indeed alone?

Of course we aren't. I thought you'd see my point.

With me being so negative, do I believe that we are alone?

Well, let me put it like this - if a person strongly believes that we are alone in the universe, then that person has a religious belief in that concept, because a conviction should be termed a religious belief if it is forever beyond the reach of our knowledge. And I'm not particularly religious.

Then again, a person who believes that the universe is teeming with life is also a bit religious in his or her belief, as long as we have no proof whatsoever to back the concept up. But the person who believes in life elsewhere at least has a chance to be vindicated by science in the future.

Somebody put it like this: We are either alone or we aren't. Either way, it's a staggering thought.

I like that.

Ann

Chris Peterson wrote:

rstevenson wrote:As we learn more about our sun and others, it becomes clear that the Drake Equation needs some refinement in its terms to account for different kinds of stellar environments.

I don't think so. The Drake Equation is already chock full of huge unknowns. What is the purpose of extending the precision of one term out a few decimal places when the other multiplicative terms are only estimated to orders of magnitude?

I see your point. I was thinking of adding in a factor for type of sun. But of course we have only one data point for all of the factors, so I don't suppose one more will help.

Chris Peterson wrote:I think there is probably life all over, around all sorts of stars. Intelligence is probably not all that unusual.

I agree there is likely life all over. I'm not too sure about how much of that life evolved to intelligence coincident in time with our own. I think that "type of sun" factor may help with estimating that -- if only we knew enough to enter a figure for it.

Chris Peterson wrote:But species don't last very long, and civilizations probably much less than that. ...

Now there my estimate would be quite different from yours. True, species "in the wild" come and go, but I think an intelligent species would last almost forever if it possibly could arrange to do so -- always assuming they get beyond the smart enough to kill themselves, but not smart enough not to stage. Aye, there's the rub.

Rob

beyond wrote:[Bumblebees'] wing size does not give them enough lift to fly (especially the really big ones), but they do not know that and fly around anyway.

This is a myth. Even if it were true that bumblebees could not fly according to our theories of aerodynamics, that would simply mean that our theories were wrong (though maybe still good enough for designing machines that work). The real story is obscure, but it seems that in the early 20th century, European scientists noticed that according to the rules they had worked out for flight with rigid wings that don't oscillate very far, bumblebees should not be able to fly; they concluded that there is something about the flexibility and flapping of the bumblebee's wings that makes a big difference, and that they did not know everything about aerodynamics. This pretty story somehow became an an anti-science meme, like the we-can't-really-know-anything interpretations of relativity and quantum mechanics, with all the associated imagery of lab-coated scientists standing in a meadow waving their dissertations and insisting that those bumblebees can't really be flying around. The fact that we now know more about insect flight than we did in 1920 isn't mentioned, because it doesn't improve the story.

rstevenson wrote:As we learn more about our sun and others, it becomes clear that the Drake Equation needs some refinement in its terms to account for different kinds of stellar environments.

I don't think so. The Drake Equation is already chock full of huge unknowns. What is the purpose of extending the precision of one term out a few decimal places when the other multiplicative terms are only estimated to orders of magnitude?

I think there is probably life all over, around all sorts of stars. Intelligence is probably not all that unusual. But species don't last very long, and civilizations probably much less than that. Given the immense cost and difficulty involved in populating a galaxy, I find it unsurprising that we see nobody else- even if there are millions of civilizations active at any time in a galaxy.

Ann wrote:... Or it could be that life is finicky, that it won't form easily, and that it certainly won't evolve into complex life forms easily. It could be that our star, untypical and unusual as it is, was one of the few in our galaxy which was good enough for life.

I'd vote for that sort of conclusion, though we have too little data to say for sure one way or the other. For example, it may be that life begins and evolves faster on a panet near our type of star than it does around those multitudinous cool red stars, and that we're therefore early inhabitants of our galaxy. Or a more common form of life may have evolved and died out millions of times already around those common stars, and we're late to the party. No way to know -- yet. And maybe not ever, unless we can figure a way around the light "barrier."

As we learn more about our sun and others, it becomes clear that the Drake Equation needs some refinement in its terms to account for different kinds of stellar environments.

Which might be a good thread here. Post your Drake Equation solutions, and the reasoning behind them. Shall I?

Rob

OR, as i have suggested before, pehaps the sun in not native to this section of space? To me its kinda like bumble bees. Their wing size does not give them enough lift to fly (especially the really big ones), but they do not know that and fly around anyway.
OR, how about water? Water must be really smart. Its the only thing that expands when it freezes. Good thing too, or we all would be frozen solid in ice that started forming from the bottom up, instead of floating on top of the water and freezing downward. There are many things in the heavens and on Earth that do not "fit" into man's way of thinking. The Sun just happens to be a BIG and very important one - for now. And who knows what surprises it still has instore for us, who benefit from what it produces? Space is still full of "unknown" strange things, many of which are most likely not detectable by our current scientific equipment and are just waiting to surprise us in the future. So lets just admire the pictures of space that we have and enjoy what we know about them and realize that there is room for improvement in all things.

I just bought the June issue of Astronomy magazine. On the cover there is a deeply red-orange picture of the Sun,, with the following caption: Is the SUN an oddball star? The article in the magazine says that while it is easy to find analogs of the Sun in our cosmic vicinity (that is, it is easy to find main sequence stars of spectral class G around here), it has proved very hard to find solar twins. A solar twin should have the same age, chemical composition, magnetic properties etc. as the Sun.

The magazine says that an astronomer named Mark Giampapa has studied 15 solar analogs in M67, a cluster with the same age as the Sun, but the stars studied all have shorter sunspot cycles than the Sun. All of them had cycles shorter than six years, compared with eleven years for the Sun. "I'm seeing some brightness variability data that suggests that the Sun might be more quiescent than most stars," says Mark Giampapa to Astronomy magazine. A possible reason for the solar quiescence, if I understood the magazine correctly, is that the Sun might be slightly less magnetic than most stars. "Strong magnetic fields pose more danger than no magnetic fields" says an astronomer named Ulrich according to the magazine.

The Sun is also chemically different from most solar analogs. An astronomer named Jorge Meléndez has studied 75% of all solar analogs in the Hipparcos million-star catalog, and it turns out that one difference between the Sun and most solar analogs is that the Sun is depleted in "refractory elements", which are elements that vaporize at high temperatures. Meléndez says that these elements probably formed dust and then accreted into planetesimals and ultimately into terrestrial planets in our solar system. About 15% of all solar analogs studied have a chemical composition similar to the Sun.

Personally I think it is interesting to think that the Sun may not be so typical after all. It may be less magnetic than most solar analogs, and it has a chemical composition which is unlike most solar analogs, too.

Also, let's not forget that stars of spectral class G are neither "typcial" nor "average" in the Milky Way. The typical, average star here is much smaller and cooler than the Sun. In fact, about 95% of all stars in the Milky Way are fainter than the Sun! The true "average sun" here is a cool, faint red dwarf. So why do we find ourselves orbiting a star which is so "untypical" in our galaxy? I think there are two possible answers to that. One is that life (and complex life-forms and intelligence) is so common in the Milky Way that you will find it even on planets orbiting "untypical stars" like the Sun. (If that is the case, then it follows, of course, that there will be life on billions and billions of planets orbiting the "typical stars" of our galaxy, the red dwarfs.)

Or it could be that life is finicky, that it won't form easily, and that it certainly won't evolve into complex life forms easily. It could be that our star, untypical and unusual as it is, was one of the few in our galaxy which was good enough for life.

Ann

mark swain wrote:How can there be a time, that was hotter than now. with no power stations or petrol engines or methane from billions of animals. In the past, the hottest periods were a duel between a hotter sun and volcanic activity.

That is an inaccurate assessment. Periods of hotter temperature have not been related to a hotter Sun- there is little evidence of that.

How can there be a time, that was hotter than now. with no power stations or petrol engines or methane from billions of animals. In the past, the hottest periods were a duel between a hotter sun and volcanic activity. So its going to get very hot again. but how hot is it going to be, when you put human activity into the mix? If we have a big volcano around NOW! That means we are going to fry?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:0Mast ... 150dpi.png But on the other hand. What mechanism puts 2 miles (deep) of ice over my house?

http://www.datacenter53.com/the-data-sa ... heory.html

What is a Dalton Type Solar Minimum? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Minimum

They say its not well understood.

Why should we not take notice of past records, does not our world depend on knowing whats going to happen? After all, we do know, it is going to happen don't we? And as a lot of past records (Graphs) show, it usually happens very fast.

Mark

This thread seems to have evolved away from the sun and into a global flood.
In the discussion of flooding on a biblical scale being inferred by localized civilization altering events
This could be the cause of the "Biblical" flood.
http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_re ... BiotID=422

mark swain wrote:Well you learn something every day, I did think that 10,000 years ago the globalize flood was sort of set in stone.

Nope. Just the opposite- evidence very strongly shows that there was no global flooding at any time in history. The first two websites you reference are junk- just your typical religious sites picking and choosing a few studies, and misinterpreting them to try and support bible stories. The Wikipedia articles about ice ages are just fine, but don't suggest any global flooding. Of course, at the end of ice ages the ocean levels rise, but that would not cause cataclysmic flooding. And melt waters certainly increased the incidence of local and regional flooding. But there is nothing relating to ice ages that can cause global flooding.

In the middle of the last ice age, where i live in England would have been 2 miles under the ice cap. There are several reasons for the ice as you read. and one of those does state the sun is a variable star. I do not see, how an ice age can be sustained for thousands of years without help from a dimming sun.

Did you read the Wikipedia article on ice ages? It points out that the variability of the Sun is far too small to explain these climate cycles, and that we need to look at the interaction between multiple effects to get some idea how they occur. If you are interested in times when modern humans have been on Earth, there have been no ice ages. Or more properly, there has been one ice age, and we are still in it. That ice age has been punctuated by glacial and interglacial periods, which are almost entirely explained by Milankovitch cycles and associated shifts in feedback effects.

I can not write off what that person wrote on the wall of his burial chamber, in hieroglyphs. ''The Sun Went Out''

I write it off as easily as I do the guy in the New Testament who said somebody walked on water. Nonsense is nonsense, and somebody writing it down a few thousand years ago doesn't make it less so.

Ann wrote:I liked the monthly average sunspot curve that was posted by Art. I guess the proper conclusion is that all stars are more or less variable, and the Sun is a star, so it is variable, too. Although I think the Sun is fairly constant as variable stars go!

In visible light the sun IS remarkably constant; however, the sunspot cycle manifests itself as a 10% variation in ultraviolet light making for up to a 10º C variation in upper stratospheric temperatures. As a consequence, the wintertime stratospheric polar vortex is noticeably less stable during sunspot maxima. It is an open question whether or not this stratospheric (sudden stratospheric warming) instability variation has any noticeable effect on our tropospheric weather but it would really be nice to know if one should be looking at a 10.66 year cycle or an 11.02 year cycle.

I liked the monthly average sunspot curve that was posted by Art. I guess the proper conclusion is that all stars are more or less variable, and the Sun is a star, so it is variable, too. Although I think the Sun is fairly constant as variable stars go!

Ann

Chris Peterson wrote:There is almost no recorded history from that long ago. Floods are normal and happen all the time. Likewise for droughts. And there are loads of mythological tales that almost certainly have little or no connection with reality. An anecdotal ancient reference to the Sun going out could be an eclipse, it could be a hallucination, or it could be simple fiction. None of this is any more credible than Joshua making the Sun stand still or any of hundreds of other tales.

There is no geological evidence of any sort of worldwide flood. Such a thing did not happen. There were, of course, many regional floods, and in an era of tiny, regional cultures it is to be expected that some of these would be seen as much greater.

Well you learn something every day, I did think that 10,000 years ago the globalize flood was sort of set in stone. And it was hard to prove other wise, looking through the internet. I did however manage to find some interesting articles that do state that something did happen. And here they are:

http://www.ucgstp.org/lit/gn/gn047/worldwideflood.htm
http://www.earthage.org/EarthOldorYoung ... _flood.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Va ... rgy_output

In the middle of the last ice age, where i live in England would have been 2 miles under the ice cap. There are several reasons for the ice as you read. and one of those does state the sun is a variable star. I do not see, how an ice age can be sustained for thousands of years without help from a dimming sun. A cooling due to volcano's ? would that of killed 99% of life? And then as suddenly as it appeared, the ice age was gone. How variable is our sun? I can not write off what that person wrote on the wall of his burial chamber, in hieroglyphs. ''The Sun Went Out''

Mark

mark swain wrote:I don't understand. Which source?

You quoted holoscience.com quoting NewScientist.com. The former is junk at its worst. The latter is a reputable site. It would have been better if you had simply quoted The New Scientist directly.

Witnesses from 3500 BC, have written in some form or another Of a great Flood. Of a great drought, Of a time when the Sun "Went Out". Unless they were in 24 hour darkness, how could they describe The Sun ''went out'' ?

There is almost no recorded history from that long ago. Floods are normal and happen all the time. Likewise for droughts. And there are loads of mythological tales that almost certainly have little or no connection with reality. An anecdotal ancient reference to the Sun going out could be an eclipse, it could be a hallucination, or it could be simple fiction. None of this is any more credible than Joshua making the Sun stand still or any of hundreds of other tales.

There is no geological evidence of any sort of worldwide flood. Such a thing did not happen. There were, of course, many regional floods, and in an era of tiny, regional cultures it is to be expected that some of these would be seen as much greater.

Chris Peterson wrote:But the secondhand quote about the Sun was from a reputable source (which is really the source that should have been used, not the pseudoscience site).

I don't understand. Which source? The information is so hard to find with so little time. I suppose its best from my own memory. Witnesses from 3500 BC, have written in some form or another Of a great Flood. Of a great drought, Of a time when the Sun "Went Out". Unless they were in 24 hour darkness, how could they describe The Sun ''went out'' ? They did not say The sky was Black. They understood the clouds blocks out sunlight, they did not say big black sooty clouds covered the sun. they said the sun went out period. So what was they saying, with archaeological evidence that proves that something really drastic did happen?

I will have another look for better source info tomorrow.

Mark

bystander wrote:I would question anything I found on a page that displays The Electric Universe in its header, especially something from 6 1/2 years ago (09 November 2003).

Yes, the site is certainly of negative intellectual value. Total garbage. But the secondhand quote about the Sun was from a reputable source (which is really the source that should have been used, not the pseudoscience site).

mark swain wrote:http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=by2r22xg

I would question anything I found on a page that displays The Electric Universe in its header, especially something from 6 1/2 years ago (09 November 2003).

mark swain wrote:The fact they are talking about, is this: Quote

Adjusting Dr. Schoch's recent weathering measurements from the base
structure inside the Pyramid--by adding at least another 1500 years to
its age--we obtain a total date range of 8500-6500 BC for the original
construction and LOCATING of the Great Pyramid.

Utter, unfounded rubbish. The Great Pyramid is very reliably dated to between 2500 and 2600 BCE. There is no doubt and no controversy about this.

...Plato's discussion of
Atlantis, where Egypt is "re-founded" 1000 years after the sinking of
Atlantis in 9600 BC.

Atlantis = mythology. No such place actually existed. Plato's idea may have had some basis in the destruction of some ancient minor society by a natural disaster, but that's all. Plato certainly was not working with historical information, or anything that could be dated.

Quote:

A news item by Jenny Hogan on NewScientist.com of 2 November says, 'The Sun is more active now than it has been for a millennium.

That was in 2002, during the solar maximum. And the comment is speculative at best, as reconstructing sunspot cycles is far from an exact science. Right now, we're in a particularly low solar minimum. The simple fact is that the Sun's activity is cyclical, probably on multiple time scales, and may contain a chaotic component as well. There is no evidence that the Sun's activity in historical times has deviated so far from the norm as to result in anything more radical than a slight increase or decrease in global temperature averages. Certainly, nothing cataclysmic.

mark swain wrote:
A news item by Jenny Hogan on NewScientist.com of 2 November says, 'The Sun is more active now than it has been for a millennium. The realisation, which comes from a reconstruction of sunspots stretching back 1150 years, comes just as the Sun has thrown a tantrum. Over the last week, giant plumes of material have burst out from our star's surface and streamed into space, causing geomagnetic storms on Earth.'

mark swain wrote:
<<The history of solar activity was estimated from sunspot counts stretching back to the seventeenth century. Beyond that, the sunspot numbers were deduced from levels of radioactive beryllium-10 trapped in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. When Mike Lockwood, from the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, saw the results he said, "It makes the conclusion very stark. We are living with a very unusual Sun at the moment." >> So just how far can the Sun change its Mood?

bystander wrote:Not only are you dealing with Egyptian mythology, if the date on the paper can be believed, the material is over 100 years old.

The fact they are talking about, is this: Quote

Adjusting Dr. Schoch's recent weathering measurements from the base
structure inside the Pyramid--by adding at least another 1500 years to
its age--we obtain a total date range of 8500-6500 BC for the original
construction and LOCATING of the Great Pyramid. So it was apparently
sited by the Egyptian civilization mentioned in Plato's discussion of
Atlantis, where Egypt is "re-founded" 1000 years after the sinking of
Atlantis in 9600 BC. We now can tie Plato's history to solid rock in
Egypt, with a major part of his story being confirmed: There truly was
an advanced Egyptian civilization founded around 8500 BC. Climatologist
Dr. Cesare Emiliani confirmed in 1973 that Plato's flood date was sound.
Emiliani discovered evidence in sea-core sediments for a sudden global
sea-level rise of c.325 feet around 9600 BC(+/-70yrs)--Plato's date for
the sinking of Atlantis. Emiliani's data proves that, if Atlantis were
real, then it would indeed have been flooded by the ocean at the very
time Plato stated. Plato either relied on genuine history or he made
an astonishingly lucky guess: Within a century of the exact date over
a period of nearly 10,000 years: 99% perfect.

Credit to: http://petragrail.tripod.com/newhistory.html

There are many papers as you say are well over a hundred years old. But also many times I have heard of great floods, droughts, written in hieroglyphics etc etc. and geology stands by this with evidence of ice cores, lake cores etc etc. We all know about ice ages, on a regular basis. Why would not the Suns invariable Mood Never change to a much harsher one? Here's another paper.

http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=by2r22xg

Quote:

A news item by Jenny Hogan on NewScientist.com of 2 November says, 'The Sun is more active now than it has been for a millennium. The realisation, which comes from a reconstruction of sunspots stretching back 1150 years, comes just as the Sun has thrown a tantrum. Over the last week, giant plumes of material have burst out from our star's surface and streamed into space, causing geomagnetic storms on Earth.' The history of solar activity was estimated from sunspot counts stretching back to the seventeenth century. Beyond that, the sunspot numbers were deduced from levels of radioactive beryllium-10 trapped in ice cores taken from Greenland and Antarctica. When Mike Lockwood, from the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, saw the results he said, "It makes the conclusion very stark. We are living with a very unusual Sun at the moment."

So just how far can the Sun change its Mood?

Mark