Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has released this picture of a fossil of a life form that came to Earth on a meteorite — as opposed to Sigourney Weaver’s stomach.
In the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology, Hoover says that these fossils appear in CI1 carbonaceous chondrites — a rare type of meteorite. If true, they are a life form confirmed from outside our planet.
Source: Yahoo
Excuse me. I think I walked into the wrong classroom. Can anyone tell me where the rocks for jocks class is?
Far be it from me to intrude in this conversation being that my most advanced math was trigonmetry and my knowledge of Physics from “The Tao of Physics” and PBS’ NOVA. However, this discuswsion of long distance space
travel doesn’t touch on the “multiverse” of string theory and the possibility of using the warp of space, and/or other dimensions to get from here to there.
String Theory alone, in my limited understanding, makes the entire fabric of existence known as our Universe, very weird to a species such as ours, only in the beginning stages of acquiring knowledge about our surroundings and how they work.
Hey but what really do I know, because being old enough to know Louis Nye and never taking physics, qualifies me to be the most shallow of dilletantes in discussions such as these.
“if it’s all gold streets at the End of Ends”
James,
Hows is it that the believers in heaven, or Nirvanna for that matter, don’t address the eternal boredom inherent in these concepts?
It’s not Important…
As far as I can see you’re a keeper, nice having you around.
Mespo,
Somedays I feel as old as Louie!
rafflaw:
“Only old guys like me know who Louie Nye was.”
*****************************
Proof again of the utter preposterousness of the 6000 year old universe. Louie’s gotta be at least 7000 by now.
http://il.youtube.com/watch?v=5od-XoByzIY
Mespo,
Only old guys like me know who Louie Nye was.
Enough of all of your postdiluvian formulaics. Anyone with eyes in their god-like head can see the face of Louie Nye at the superior end of that protozoan proving conclusively that it is from outer space.
[Josh]: I do understand time dilation. I get it, I really really do. Probably better than any other layman you will speak to. I am not arguing time dilation, I accept it as fact. What I do not accept as fact are those bogus numbers that were posted. Time dilation does not under any circumstance allow you to percieve faster than light travel from your own perspective. You could not therefore from your own observational standpoint travel any observable distance faster than light itself short of some other mechanism. Period. [Wrong. Your problem here is one of perception – if your perceptions are mediated by light, then they will be different than if there is no communication delay – that doesn’t alter the fact that the clocks behave exactly how I said they do…]
Josh,
I’ve spoken to laymen who understand time dilation a lot better than you do (I consider myself one of them) – just sayin’…
You don’t know me, and I haven’t claimed any credentials (they’re not important either) because I believe that my arguments should stand on their own, but don’t call bullshit on me unless you’re prepared to prove it – to paraphrase Danny Vermin, don’t ever call my numbers bogus again. You get to call my numbers bogus once. ONCE. And to paraphrase Marsellus Winston, if it happens again I’m gonna get pedantic on your ass…
In my previous post I gave you the formula for time dilation. The formula for the addition of two velocities, u and v, is given by:
rel_vel(v,u) = (v+u)/(1+vu/c^2)
I’m assuming that, while under thrust, the ship has a fixed delta_v per unit time*. I then calculated the velocity at time t+delta_t as:
v(t+delta_t) = rel_vel(v(t),delta_v)
and calculated the duration of delta_t on the ship using the time dilation formula. Solving this numerically (nothing fancy – just Euler’s method) I got the numbers that I used above. If you would like any further clarification of how I arrived with my numbers, just ask.
*I realize that while the ship does have a fixed delta_v per unit time, the time in this case is subjective time rather than objective time (like I used). Essentially, the acceleration of the ship was increasing to enormous levels (enough to crush any terrestrial life form and probably any computer) – that wont effect my argument about time dilation, although it will change the values in the examples I gave.
[James in the fucking desert]: Josh, though the crew only experience 2y9m of subjective time, both time on Earth and Alpha Centauri have since elapsed 4.37 years. One benefit of relativistic travel is the time savings on the crew, at the expense of time passing much faster in the rest of the universe. The longer you go the worse it gets. You can reach the center of the galaxy in human-friendly ship’s time, but millions of years would have elapsed in the non-relativistic universe around you.
Thanks for helping. It’s hard to wrap one’s head around this stuff – hopefully between all of us we can convince Josh…
I re-ran the numbers and a trip to Alpha Centauri at a constant 1 G (accelerating and decelerating)takes 3.54 years subjectively and 5.98 years objectively with a top velocity of 0.95 c. I’ll have the numbers for a trip at 1 G to the center of the Galaxy (~50,000 lightyears) in a couple of hours (the code is running… oops, I forgot that I’m clever sometimes – it’s almost done now (less than 500 lightyears to go…)) Okay, sorry about that. A trip to the center of the galaxy at 1 G will take approximately 26 years subjectively.
It’s Not Important, Sam Kinneson is rather a personal hero, and you honor me deeply with that video! I miss him terribly! We need him in Congress.
The thought of Representative Kinneson screaming in Speaker Bohner’s face is a pleasant one…
rafflaw,
Promises? I didn’t make no stinkin’ promises…
I was promised that there would be no math!!
JoshOnPC,
I’m delighted to continue this conversation, but I’m going to have to get a little technical…
WARNING!!!! THERE WILL BE EQUATIONS BELOW – PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK!
First let’s clarify some things. First off, not only does acceleration affect duration – gravity does as well. GPS satellites need to correct for their position in the Earth’s gravitational field due to this effect (so they know at what rate each satellite is experiencing duration)[BIL: Thanks for describing this effect and giving a reference!]. In order to discount this effect, Let’s put one observer in a space station and the other on a ship docked there. They each have a cesium decay clock and the two clocks are synchronized. The ship then leaves the station and accelerates to near c (we’ll ignore what’s going on during acceleration – that’s general relativity and my differential geometry isn’t up to explaining it (I barely understand it myself), sorry… :-()
If you went to the Wikipedia page I linked (time dilation) then you would find that the relationship between duration in two frames of reference that are moving at speed v with respect to each other is given by
dt’=dt*(1-v^2/c^2)^(-0.5)
This means that in the interval that the space ship experiences as having duration dt on it’s clock the observed difference in the space station’s clock (assume instantaneous communication – call it an ‘ansible’) is given by dt’. As you can see, as v -> c, dt’ -> infinity. From the perspective of the ship (viewed through the ansible) the clock on the station slows down as the relative speed of the ship increases. At the speed I gave {c*(1-10^(-8))}, about 2 hours elapse on the station’s clock for every second that ticks off on the ship’s clock. Likewise, from the station’s point of view it takes two hours for their ansible image of the ship’s clock to tick off a single second. In the time it takes the ship to move 100 lightyears (a little over 100 years on the space station), the ship’s clock has only registered a little over 5 days of duration.
I hope this helped to clear things up.
Josh, though the crew only experience 2y9m of subjective time, both time on Earth and Alpha Centauri have since elapsed 4.37 years. One benefit of relativistic travel is the time savings on the crew, at the expense of time passing much faster in the rest of the universe. The longer you go the worse it gets. You can reach the center of the galaxy in human-friendly ship’s time, but millions of years would have elapsed in the non-relativistic universe around you.
It’s Not Important, Sam Kinneson is rather a personal hero, and you honor me deeply with that video! I miss him terribly! We need him in Congress.
BIL,
I do understand time dilation. I get it, I really really do. Probably better than any other layman you will speak to. I am not arguing time dilation, I accept it as fact. What I do not accept as fact are those bogus numbers that were posted. Time dilation does not under any circumstance allow you to percieve faster than light travel from your own perspective. You could not therefore from your own observational standpoint travel any observable distance faster than light itself short of some other mechanism. Period.
Josh,
Sorry, buddy, but you are indeed not getting the picture in re time dilation. Time is objectively moving at a different rate as your velocity approaches c. When you are an outside of observer, your rate of time would appear to be constant and advance 4.37 years. On the ship as it approaches c, the rate of time also appears constant to the astronauts because they are in the same frame of reference as the ship. However, what they perceive is the passage of 2.7 years relative to the baseline presented by the passage of 4.37 years on Earth. That time dilation occurs in not merely theoretical physics either, but rather proven by experimentation. In 1971, Joseph C. Hafele and Richard E. Keating ran experiments where they took high precision cesium clocks and flew them in airplanes so to compare the measurements against clocks at the U.S. Naval Observatory. The measurements confirmed the time dilation effect predicted by general and special relativity. Just Google Hafele-Keating Experiment. There are a lot of sites that will discuss it.
It’s Not Important,
Let’s assume you’re thought experiment is correct (in point of fact I have no issue with it) That if you travel such a great speed away from a clock it would tick very slowly. What you are asserting however, concludes not that a ticking clock outside you’re frame of reference ticks slowly, but that a clock inside you’re own ship would tick slowly as well. It would not. Furthermore, since the clock inside the ship would record time as experienced by the crew of said ship, you proposed earlier that it would record a time of 2 years and 9 months approx. at a distance of 4.37 light years. From the crew’s perspective we know that they can not surpass the speed of light. By what mechanism do you propose that they reach their destination in time, without surpassing c?
In fact, this is not a time dilation issue. You stated, “The duration of the journey from the passengers’ point of view is only a little over 2 years and 9 months.” If I am to take that statement seriously, then there are only three things that matter and none of them is an outside observer. Percieved time from the travelers perspective (as measured by an on board clock), distance (4.37ly), and percieved speed (never to exceed c). I submit that a clock on the ship would record a time of not less than 4.37 years, no matter what speed you travel. It may very well be true that the ship passengers would observe a clock on Earth that had only ticked away 2years 9 months, but that does not speak to their experienced time.
James,
Since you are in LA, let me just remind you…
YOU LIVE IN A FUCKING DESERT!!!
And I really did know Jim and Coral Lorenzen when they lived in Sturgeon Bay, when they started APRO.
James in LA,
A solar sail would be GREAT for getting around one of the clusters you mentioned… You would still need a pretty high density of colonies to make trade profitable, though… (what would be worth waiting over 20 years to order from a planet 10 lightyears away?) I still think that information would be the only valuable trade commodity.
Your comment that we live in desert reminds me of the end of this video:
It’s Not Important, we really live in the wrong part of the galaxy for trade. Ours is a desert in space. In clusters, the space between destinations is much reduced, and this is where it seems we’re likely to find space civilizations today. Or rather, on the day the evidence-bearing light left the aforementioned cluster.
There are some MAMMOTH clusters out there…hundreds of thousands of stars packed into a few 10s of light years…the view from planetfall must be something out of Van Gogh’s beautiful mind. In the big guys, most the stars are old and small, so the radiation isn’t all that hard to accommodate.
Mike S, if it’s all gold streets at the End of Ends, I’ll take the science. I mean, everything would have to be perfectly level, or you’d slide on your arse. And can we talk about cold? Is there firewood in heaven? And do not get me started on the vestal virgins. In eternal heaven, does this not imply bedrooms floating in blood? Does no one think these things through?
I for one welcome our small, spacefaring blue-green masters.
It would also be interesting to read the peer review papers that led to the rejection of this paper by the International Journal of Astrobiology. Few if any game changing scientific thesis were met with open arms and I have no doubt that in a country (or world) that identifies itself as religious that data exposing a fundamental fact contrary to a central tenant of (Christian) religious thought would be marginalized or outright suppressed. It wouldn’t be the first time organized religion/politics worked as one to do so. I’d like to see a lot more info about this research and the peer review.
The image you show is not that of the organism; rather it is a representative organism from earth.
Mike S,
“The journey is the worthier part” than the destination, as Reverend Book would say – besides, it’s all relative… 😉
If we didn’t all have differing frames of reference, life wouldn’t be as much fun.