Want some real news from space? Got some for you. But hold on. First: a moment distinguishing art from reality.
I eagerly anticipate any Steven Spielberg film. His AI was - I believe- prophetic in ways that most folks don't yet realize, that I discuss in AIlien Minds. Still, I expect to have mixed feelings about Disclosure. As happened in ET, there will likely be distractions from the audience ever realizing the story's true villains.*
Anyway, after living through close to seven decades of UFO fetish-crazes, each one sillier than the last and each one promising to blow the lid off the Big Coverup, I can be forgiven taking this latest one with a jaundiced eye?
You'll not find another human on this planet who has approached concepts of 'the alien' from more angles than I have, from astrophysics to SETI to sci fi and fantasy to artificial intelligence... and I do posit (in Existence) a strong possibility we'll find either dead or 'living' ancient interstellar probes in the asteroid belt! (Want a great concept and plot, Steven?)
But that is way, way different than these illogical conspiracy theories about an impossible 'coverup' - without any plausible justification - that would keep thousands of irrascibly independent researchers both frantically busy and silent across 80 years! Investigating a vital phenom... without a single plausible discovery or advance ever coming from it all.
Only now? With ten million (!!) times as many active cameras on Earth, the 'images' somehow keep getting fuzzier? And always the least-plausible theories to 'explain' the easily explainable? As for the latest crop of blurry plasma balls zipping about 'violating every known law'? Well, Mick West takes care of most of them, and here's my answer to the rest. Give me $3million and 6 months and a nice boat to set up shop upon and I'll harrass Navy pilots the same sort of cat laser dots! While violating no laws at all. Well... no laws of nature.
Feh. learn to recognize a deliberate distraction... X-Files to divert from Eps Files? I go into this elsewhere.
And enough. Let's get down to actual science.
== The Ultimate Fate of Life and the Universe… ==
Here’s an Astrum video explaining the quandaries of dark matter and dark energy. Recent DESI maps of the universe suggest that Lambda – the dark energy coefficient – may not be constant, but slowly declining with time. Which could mean that in a distant future acceleration turns into deceleration and then… an inward fall of the cosmos toward a Big Crunch?
This revives the greatest theological debate of all time, between my late friend Freeman Dyson – who posited how some form of ‘life’ might endure long into the dark leptonic era – and Tulane Prof. Frank Tipler, whose magnificently ornate book The Physics of Immortality should have won a Hugo Award in scifi, taking the Big Crunch into incredible speculative territory. (And I do mean incredible.) If the DESI results hold, then maybe both were right! Life must endure through a very, very long darkness… that eventually turns around and becomes something like Tipler’s god-making crunch. I won’t explain in detail here…
…nor a third scenario proposed by Roger Penrose. (Not a close friend but we’ve had friendly discussions.) That the great Expansive Dissipation might turn into a new Big Bang, but NOT by falling back into a big crunch-and-bounce. Instead through a scale-renormalization bookkeeping trick(!), in a boson-dominated cosmos that doesn’t care anymore about the ‘what-evs’ difference between densities of totality divided by ten-to-the-plus-or-else-minus 26. Fifty-two orders of magnitude difference? Bosons shrug and don’t care. And someday we'll all be bosons on this bust.
Somewhere an alien or AI or god is giggling at my lame efforts to understand. Enjoy, kids. My whole new book AIlien Minds is dedicated to you uber brainiacs.
Meanwhile… we may have seen ‘frame-dragging’! As a star is being ripped apart by a black hole, its debris settles into a rapidly rotating accretion disk. At the same time, powerful jets of material get launched outward at close to the speed of light. By studying repeating patterns in X-ray and radio signals from this event, scientists found that both the disk and the jet were wobbling together. This coordinated motion repeated every 20 days, providing a clear signature of the spacetime twisting effect.
== Asteroid insights ==
Discovery of the sugars glucose and Ribose in samples returned from asteroid Bennu offer two important insights. (1) That many of the complex stages toward life were relatively easy to generate in conditions of the early solar system and likely pervaded the solar system, including the sugar used in cell-energetics and the one that back-bones RNA…
...and (2) that asteroid missions inexpensively push the frontiers of both science and our advanced capabilities out there; accomplishments only achievable by USA+Japan+ESA.
Of course this adds one more bit of evidence that the insanely dumb “Artemis” fetish to plant symbolic footprints on a useless plain of poison lunar dust is at-best a distraction and at-worst deliberate sabotage. Sure, keep western robots exploring the Moon, so we keep our hand in. Maybe a robotically-built radio scope on the far side! Surely we should assay lava tubes and finally verify if there's any of the mythical Heeeelium Threeee!
But this is just plain blatant. When he was NASA Acting Administrator, Sean Duffy voiced frustration over Starship’s pace: “I love SpaceX.. but they pushed their timelines out, and we’re in a race against China. The president and I want to get to the Moon in this president’s term.""
Artemis might - maybe, if hugely modified - be ready in the early '30s. Ready to accomplish nothing of palpable (instead of symbolic) value. In fact, funding the rapid improvement of SpaceX ships is the only likely positive outcome.
== More goodies out there? ==
Meanwhile... California-based TransAstra has "developed and tested a device called Capture Bag, an inflatable bag that comes in different sizes, intended to catch anything from small rocks to house-sized boulders. Project head Joel Sercel says the bag could also be used for cleaning up human-made space junk, a problem that is increasingly a source of worry for governments and scientists." All of it based upon grants that we awarded his company at NASA’s Innovative & Advanced Concepts program – (NIAC).
== Deeeeep Space marvels! ==
Astronomers have confirmed the first known triple galactic system in which all three colliding galaxies host actively feeding radio-bright supermassive black holes.
IF anyone is still living there… what a trip!
Korean astronomers claim to have found that all type 1a supernovae are not the same, depending on the ages of the original star when it blew. And hence the ‘standard candle ‘ of cosmology needed correction. And lo, it seems the Hubble Tension disappears and the universe, which had been accelerating its expansion rate, has entered an era of deceleration. Gosh wow piled on gosh wow!
A very interesting episode of COOL WORLDS about the Gosh Parameters that made our universe (perhaps just barely) habitable. Good series. As is PBS SPACETIME! Still I wonder about the host’s surmises. For example: I'd love to see how Lee Smolin's evolution of evolvability of whole universes would interact with this. (1) it would mean that the basic general laws long ago coalesced into the ones we see and (2) the 26 (or 42 etc) parameters would be non-random but 'genetic' variations around already winnowed basic values.
== China’s next bold move ==
An ambitious mission from China covers a number of my forecasts and concerns. Its first goal is a small quasi-moon of Earth - a very near asteroid, fast-spinning and therefore likely rocky and not a rubble pile – with plans to return a sample. Showing that China understands that asteroids are at least as important – over the longer term – or more so, than that lunar plain of poison dust. Sure, it’s a far easier target than the Japanese and U.S. asteroidal sample-returns. But there’s one more reason to go to these quasi-moons…
…that they would seem (logically) to be ideal sites for ‘lurker probes’ (alien of course!) to skulk and keep an eye on us Earthlings. As pointed out by me (in EXISTENCE) and separately by James Benford. On the very small chance that the PRC mission finds something, they’d take a Godzilla-level leap ahead, in fame, if nothing else. And THAT is where someone may actually study something akin to a 'UFO'.
Finally, the same mission will flip past Earth to visit a long period comet, incidentally testing my doctoral dissertation.
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