More space news!

 Okay, let's have another non-political post while we prep for the World Science Fiction Convention (LACon) in Anaheim, next weekend... and the premier of my play, The Escape! Hope to see some of you there... where there will also be panels and revelations about... SPACE N' SCIENCE!

== Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse… ==

Okay I won’t say it a third time. Our nearest fast-decaying red supergiant star has been much discussed lately as likely to go supernova in the next few millennia, possibly centuries… or less.  Now a discovery that Bet… um that giant has a companion star, barely detectable. 

The smaller member of the binary actually orbits within Betelgeuse's atmosphere and won't survive for much longer (10K years or less before it crashes into the primary).  Betelgeuse's six year dimming cycle is probably the result of this companion.

== The latest fad space structure – Analemma! ==

Every decade seems to have its hallmark transcendent visions that counterpoint repeated jeremiads of doom.  In the eighties, Reagan-Era brinksmanship vs. the Kremlin’s "Evil Empire* was the backdrop for lavish dreams of space colonies – not on Mars or any planet, but human-built in orbit from melted or repurposed asteroids, leading to wondrous, rotating “O’Neil Habitats” that might offer new homes for millions.  The nineties saw a lot of talk of Space Elevators. And soon after the millennial** Y2K panic and the accompanying braying about the 2000th Christmas, we got a fresh wave of renewed interest in the Red Planet… or turning it Green.  

Along the way, in Earth I brought the entire planet to life and in Heaven's Reach I took you all to dizzying-huge 'fractal' habitats for 'retirement' civilizations orbiting in the tides of a black hole... then in Existence I added to a sub-genre about ‘alien lurker probes’ and how they might embody a wide range of both powers and motivations, for what we’d deem well or ill. (And I stand by my belief that asteroid belt Lurkers are 10,000x as likely as silly-ass UFO 'Disclosure' aliens.)

Okay, so here’s a relatively new take on an old idea… that a ‘beanstalk' space elevator version – an “analemma city” – need not be anchored in the ground, but only to an asteroid at geosynchronous orbit, with the bottom tip – a designed cloud city – dangling high in the stratosphere. That tip would then – it’s posited – travel a ‘ground track” or map path of an analem… a kind of figure eight that you still see on some globes. Planned in advance to pass over – within airplane range – some chosen cities.

Way kewl for some author to sci-fi the idea!  Even if my instincts deem it pretty implausible. For one thing, you cannot have a geosynchronous orbit "above New York."  Any geosynchronous satellite has its analem centered over the equator. It might be possible to have such an asteroid suspended bola swing in its orbit as high in latitude as New York, at its northernmost reach. But that will be brief and very hard to reach by airplane.

For another thing, it cannot just be suspended from an asteroid at geosynch. It will need a counterweight strung HIGHER, countering the effects of that suspended tower. And the swinging analemboid will incur appreciable drag, so everything is going to have to be maintained.

And... you plan to haul a huge asteroid that close to Earth and then tug/push it into geosynchronous orbit without billions below getting a little.. well... concerned?

 **(You ain’t seen nothing yet. Read here about how millennial fever will reach its horrific peak in the 2030s!)

== More stuff about spaaaaace! ==

Proba-3 is ESA’s precision formation flying mission. A pair of spacecraft form an artificial solar eclipse, casting a precisely-controlled shadow from one platform for sustained views of the Sun's faint surrounding corona.  

At NIAC we funded the first work on what became the Starshade that will vastly improve the ability of space or earth telescopes to see clearly the planets orbiting close to stars. And from this year's NIACS?  Realization that red dwarf stars - the most abundant in the cosmos - are mostly FLARE stars that will challenge the atmospheres of any nearby planets. 

But those flares do put out a lot of ultraviolet... and when that wave of UV later hits a nearby planet it should brighten as if by a strobe or flash bulb, in exactly a part of the spectrum where the star itself is dim! Possibly (in the UV) briefly outshining the star! I'd love to see a project around this.

Shocking details about a star-forming region known as Sagittarius C—a turbulent area located near the Milky Way’s center. Long, glowing filaments, energetic protostars, and powerful magnetic fields that are reshaping the way stars are born and die. So much of this was predicted in Gregory Benford's Galactic Center Series!

You might enjoy this list of 15 places on Earth that look like alien planets.

According to Miles Palmer, for $460 you can include a personal item on the Astrobotic Lunar Lander. If this works, your personal item would presumably stay on the Moon until:

-The Sun expands to vaporize the Earth and the Moon (Billions of years)

-A meteor hits the Astrobotic lander and destroys it (Maybe 100 million years?)

-A Lunar tourist or tourist’s child vandalizes it (100 years?)

JPL techies keep finding ingenious ways to keep alive the two Voyager probes, after 48 years, One of the most impressive examples of multi-generational human competence and a reminder that the scions of chippers-of-flint-arrowheads remain admirable and much-needed.

== Aaaaaand… getting really, really deep in the weeds ==

See this fascinating conversation between two physics podcast stars. Sabine Hossenfelder & Matt O’Dowd.

In the simple example that they argue over – the measurement correlations of far-separated entangled particles – ‘super-determinism’ depends upon the fact that most parts of the universe at some point touched each other and thus can trace back some degree of causal contact, going back almost to the Big Bang. 

That is the 'causal chain' Matt talks about - and that Sabine appears to believe-in. The notion is not necessarily untestable! Here is an experiment by some fellows I know, using quasars at opposite ends of the universe which (we think) never ever had any mutual influence. Unless influence extends either FTL or else back even further. Say into a previous Penrose Era...

Longtime rocker and astrophysicist Brian May collaborated in this musical tribute to the New Horizons Mission to Pluto and beyond!  

== And Revisionist cosmology ==

Highly skeptical of this one. Still, some astronomers suggest that new concepts of a dynamically variable version of Dark Energy might cancel out the last 30 years of assumptions about the universe heading toward ‘accelerating dissipation.’  Indeed they go the other way and propose that gravity will end Big Bang expansion in just 7 billion years. Using data from a number of astronomical surveys including the Dark Energy Survey and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, the researchers have developed a model that predicts our Universe will end in a "Big Crunch" in approximately 33.3 billion years.

Jeeper, let’s dust off my old copy Of Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality!

    == And finally back to the "Disclosure" nonsense ==

As it has been since I was ten - 65 years ago - every one of these spasms turns out to be a nothing burger driven by the dumbest versions of sci fi mystical wishing, plus fools shouting "I'm one of the few-ones they won't fool!" 

The 'images' get fuzzier every time even though we now have ten million times as many active cameras. Not even a whiff of logic and every single 'sighting' could have a much easier explanation, like little plasma balls zipping around at the whim of DARPA operators of a ship-born cat laser. And you are the pussycats.

What this does is harness reflexive American Suspicion of Authority to aim it away from the "Files." Not X... but Eps.

Want some physics? Because I could make these zipping little balls ('ships') without breaking a single physical law.

Oh, but sure... 

EIGHTY YEARS this has supposedly been going on, with thousands of humanity's smartest Best People hurled at a project that would be far more urgent than the atom bomb, tasked to reverse engineer alien technologies... only, oops... um do YOU see any reverse-engineered alien tech? After 80 years?

Have any of these cultists found one... even just one... top techie or scientist who spent a career on this? I know scores of the Best and not one was ever asked. IF the disclosure cultists WERE SINCERE they'd track down such folks and shine light on them, because there'd be thousands of them, by now.  Instead they shrug that off, dismissing them all as obedient henchmen.

Eighty years. The original teams would be in their 100s by now. And no deathbed revelations? Hundreds of retired guys with shotguns racked behind the seats of their pickups in Arizona... and they're afraid of f$#$!g NDAs? N..D...As? 

And meanwhile, advanced beings a million years ahead of us can't figure out how to phone JPL? OR the SETI Institute? Or the Dod?  Meddle with out genes and brains, yep. Mind control and wheat twirling and anal probes, sure. Break every law of physics? Why not. But looking up a phone number and navigating call options to suggest a friendly meeting? Beyond them.

It's not just that these UFO folks are shills using "X-Files" to distract from Eps Files. Only some of them have that purpose in mind. Others are sincere ninnies.

It's that their sci fi cult meme is BAD science fiction. Illogical and utterly evidence-free. Drawing attention away from high crimes... and also away from a real future and real universe of wonders.

See my posting: What's really up with UAPs?