The Zen of Technology & Scientific Discovery! (& Robots)

[Jundo]

More wonders from space announced today ...

Oumuamua, the mysterious celestial object that caught astronomers by surprise when it was seen speeding by the sun last year, just became a bit less mysterious.

Using new observational data from a European spacecraft, an international team of astronomers has identified four dwarf stars as possible "homes" of the cigar-shaped object — the first interstellar visitor ever observed within our solar system.

"Somehow it must have escaped from that system to get to us," Coryn Bailer-Jones, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany, and the leader of the team, told NBC News MACH in an email. "At what point in the life of the system we do not know."

The astronomers may not know for sure, but evidence suggests that gravitational forces from a giant planet in orbit around the home star ejected Oumuamua into interstellar space more than a million years ago.

https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science...ect-ncna913001

Oumuamua is you too, as are all the little mosquitoes and the malaria viruses.

However, don't get a swelled head, because all is me too and everyone, and the mosquitoes are oumuamua too.

Has everyone seen my sometime post, part of the book I am (slowly!!) writing with my physicist friend, on how the universe actually has no center (or, better said, every point has just as much claim to being the center as any other point like the surface of an expanding ball), is not really big or small (because nothing outside to compare it too, and it is exactly the same singularity as when it started ... just spread out), and is all interconnected like the all-reflecting jewels of Indra's Net? It is true. Even the physicist says so.

https://www.treeleaf.org/forums/showthread.php?16436-Emptiness-is-form-and-form-is-emptiness&p=228963&viewfull=1#post228963

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

One more discovery announced today. You are Ledumahadi mafube, and Ledumahadi mafube is just you.

New 26,000-pound dinosaur discovery was Earth's largest land animal

The recently discovered fossil of a new dinosaur species in South Africa revealed a relative of the brontosaurus that weighed 26,000 pounds, about double the size of a large African elephant.
The researchers have named it Ledumahadi mafube, which is Sesotho for "a giant thunderclap at dawn." Sesotho is an official South African language indigenous to the part of the country where the dinosaur was found. ...

The newly discovered dinosaur is a close relative of gigantic dinosaurs that lived during the same time in Argentina, which supports the idea that all of the continents were still assembled as Pangea, a supercontinent made up of most of the world's land mass during the Early Jurassic. "It shows how easily dinosaurs could have walked from Johannesburg to Buenos Aires at that time," Choiniere said.

https://us.cnn.com/2018/09/27/world/new-giant-dinosaur-brontosaurus-relative/index.html

This discussions reminds me of this song, especially the punch line ...

And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWVshkVF0SY

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.


The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

Gassho, J

SatToday, Ledumahadi mafube

[Amelia]

*Monty Python appreciation moment*

Always look on the bright side of life.

Sat today, lah

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

[Jundo]

And sometimes scientists get it wrong ... but we learn from that too ...

WASHINGTON (AP) — What were billed as the oldest fossils on Earth may just be some rocks, according to a new study.

Two years ago, a team of Australian scientists found odd structures in Greenland that they said were partly leftovers from microbes that lived on an ancient seafloor. They were said to be 3.7 billion years old, which suggests life formed quicker and easier than thought after Earth formed.

But on Wednesday, the journal Nature, which published the 2016 study, released new research using NASA technology that concludes the structures found on rocks were likely not fossils but more rock. The Australian scientists, however, still maintain they are.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/nation-now/2018/10/18/oldest-fossils-stromatolite-research-finds-rocks-nature-study/1680545002/?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzRss&utm_campaign=usatoday-newstopstories

Gassho, J

SatTodayLAH

[Kyonin]

Hi Jundo,

I really like Monty Python and thanks to Netflix I can finally watch it here in Mexico. I wasn't aware of this son, but it is amazing! One of my new favorites now

Gassho,

Kyonin
Sat/LAH

[Cooperix]

Hello,

The one regret I have about being old is that I may not live long enough to wonder at what fantastic astronomical discoveries await us. SO much happening in astronomy and astrophysics right now with new technologies, new space telescopes. We seem on the verge of vast fresh knowledge about our universe. It's hard to keep up with it.

If I were a young person today I would study astronomy with a focus on exoplanets! And make that my life's work. Now it is a fascinating past time.

Gassho
Anne

~st~

[Jundo]

An international team of astronomers has announced the discovery of an enormous and surprising structure, formed fairly early in the lifetime of the universe. This structure is a "supercluster" of galaxies, created when many galaxies are bound together by the force of gravity. Conceptually, you can imagine it as looking similar to a swarm of bees, albeit on a cosmic scale, and each bee being replaced with an entire galaxy full of hundreds of billions of stars.

...

Hyperion is not only large in terms of its mass, it's also physically very large. Roughly speaking, you can imagine it as a cylinder about 200 million light years across the circular ends, and about 500 million light years long. To give a basis of comparison, our own Milky Way galaxy, which comprises about 200 billion stars, is only about 100,000 light years across.

Superclusters are not all that unusual; astronomers know of many of them. What sets the Hyperion apart from others is that it is old. The universe is about 14 billion years old -- just two billion years older than Hyperion, which, in cosmic time, is the blink of an eye.

...

emember that we are not seeing Hyperion as it exists now. We're seeing it as it existed 12 billion years ago. If we were able to see it as it exists now, it would presumably look more like more modern superclusters, located closer to Earth. By extension, it's probably true that Hyperion gives us a glimpse of what nearby superclusters looked like in the distant past.

https://us.cnn.com/2018/10/21/opinions/hyperion-supercluster-opinion-lincoln/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Frank Murray]

Thank you all! I just stumbled across this thread and was also surprised with Jundo’s knowledge and flair for space related wonder. [emoji23]

In my uni days I studied Applied Physics and Japanese. I was not so big on the mathematical theoretical physics, but was completely inspired by hands on laboratory work. To witness and investigate phenomena first hand gave me a real buzz and filled me with a sense of profound awe.

Regarding other life in the universe, to me it is hard to believe we are the only ones around. The odds of technologically advanced, travelling species, interested in interacting with us, who also happen to be around at the time we are here... presents a lot of conditions making it seem reasonably slim they would be dropping by for dinner and a chat in the immediate future. Therefore asking for proof, right now, is a very narrow window of opportunity to make a conclusion within. ‘They’ may well be busy enough with everyday life just as we are, inhibiting their ability to make a an appearance anytime soon.

But remember, we are just as ‘alien’ as any other ‘life form’ out there. [emoji6]

Gassho,

Frank

Sat today, lent a hand


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Jundo]

Thank You, Kepler!

Maybe we should dedicate our Zazenkai this week as a memorial service for the Kepler Space Telescope. After all, Master Dogen said that mountains and tiles are sentient beings, thus so are space probes ...

NASA's Kepler spacecraft, which discovered more than 2,680 exoplanets orbiting distant stars and allowed scientists to statistically show billions more must exist across the Milky Way, has finally run out of fuel, bringing one of NASA's most scientifically productive projects to an end after an extended nine-and-a-half year mission, mission managers said Tuesday.

...

"We have shown there are more planets than stars in our galaxy, that many of these planets are roughly the size of the Earth and some, like the Earth, are at the right distance from their star that there could be liquid water on the surface, a situation conducive to the existence of life," Borucki said.

Kepler also found planets "completely unlike those in our solar system," he told reporters. "Some of those, in fact, might be actual water worlds. We've also found planets that were formed at the beginning of the formation of our galaxy six-and-a-half billion years before the formation of our own star and before the formation of the Earth. Imagine what life might be like on such planets."

"Before we launched Kepler, we didn't know if planets were common or rare in our galaxy," he said. "But now we know ... that planets are more common than stars in our galaxy. Now we know there are billions of planets that are rocky like the Earth and are orbiting their stars in the habitable zone, or the Goldilocks zone, where their temperatures might be conducive to water on the surface."

We are not alone. Let's hope that the aliens on other worlds are non-violent Buddhists.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nasas-kepler-spacecraft-dead-after-discovering-thousands-of-planets-2018-10-30/

Gassho, J

STLah

[Amelia]

Metta to all, and telescopes. _/\_

Sat today, lah

[Jundo]

And for the "ridiculous, but who knows?" science story of the week ...

... Maybe they took a look at what is going on here, and decided to just keep moving on ...

A mysterious cigar-shaped object spotted tumbling through our solar system last year may have been an alien spacecraft sent to investigate Earth, astronomers from Harvard University have suggested.

...

A new paper by researchers at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics raises the possibility that the elongated dark-red object, which is 10 times as long as it is wide and traveling at speeds of 196,000 mph, might have an "artificial origin."

"'Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization," they wrote in the paper, which has been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

...

The theory is based on the object's "excess acceleration," or its unexpected boost in speed as it traveled through and ultimately out of our solar system in January.
"Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that 'Oumuamua is a light sail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment," wrote the paper's authors, suggesting that the object could be propelled by solar radiation.

The paper was written by Abraham Loeb, professor and chair of astronomy, and Shmuel Bialy, a postdoctoral scholar, at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Loeb has published four books and more than 700 papers on topics like black holes, the future of the universe, the search for extraterrestrial life and the first stars.

...

"I am distinctly unconvinced and honestly think the study is rather flawed," Alan Jackson, fellow at the Centre for Planetary Sciences at the University of Toronto Scarborough, wrote in an email. "Carl Sagan once said, 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' and this paper is distinctly lacking in evidence nevermind extraordinary evidence." ... "The thing you have to understand is: scientists are perfectly happy to publish an outlandish idea if it has even the tiniest 'sliver' of a chance of not being wrong," astrophysicist and cosmologist Katherine Mack tweeted. "But until every other possibility has been exhausted dozen times over, even the authors probably don't believe it."

https://us.cnn.com/2018/11/06/health...ntl/index.html

Gassho, J

STLah

[Amelia]

Whether or not Oumuamua is a probe, I find it to be endlessly fascinating. The physics of how fast it moves blows my mind. It was only here a few months ago and they can't even see it through telescopes anymore.

Sat today, lah

[Jundo]

A greeting from an old family member ...

'Oldest animal painting' discovered in Borneo

The earliest known painting of an animal has been identified in a cave on the island of Borneo.

The artwork, which is at least 40,000 years old, is thought to be the oldest example of figurative painting - where real objects are depicted rather than abstract shapes.

The researchers aren't certain what animal it represents, but their hunch is that it's a banteng, a type of wild cow that lives in the area today.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-env...8Ke3x5XpO3JtjU

Always interesting to me ...

... has striking similarities to ancient rock art found in other parts of the world ...

The dating of this ancient southeast Asian cave art pens a new chapter in the evolving story of where and when our ancestors started painting their impressions of the outside world. A painted rhino in France’s Chauvet Cave had until recently been the oldest-known example of figurative cave art, dated to roughly 35,000 to 39,000 years old. Chauvet and a few other sites led scientists to believe that the birth of such advanced painting had occurred in Europe. But in 2014, Aubert and colleagues announced that cave art depicting stenciled handprints and a large pig-like animal from the same time period had been found on the other side of the world on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.

Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...qhlvZ4iE3Wj.99

Gassho, J

STLah

[Jundo]

And here is the current state of our human ability to represent our animal cousins ...

German company Festo hopes to learn from the natural world to improve the future of automated machines.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6wvqh1

https://us.cnn.com/videos/business/2018/11/08/festo-animal-robots-orig.cnn-business/video/playlists/business-gadgets/

Gassho, J

STLah

[Shinshou]

This reminded me of the Walt Whitman poem When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer:

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

I love science, especially astronomy and astrophysics, but looking at the sky with only the mind is incomplete, we must also look with the heart.

Shinshou (Dan)
Sat Today