As we are progressing towards the end 2021, let’s summarize what we did and where we are for Space Renaissance International. It was a quite intense and fruitful year.
A first Key Performance Indicator is membership: we have grown more than 110% in membership since November 2020, but we need more registrations, and partnerships! We have a goal for 2021, we are not far from it, and we hope to exceed it within December 20!
**A special invitation for the last event of 2021, December 20th: the Xmas Special meeting with our president Prof. Bernard Foing!** That will be a very special event, where we hope we can celebrate the achievement of our membership goal for 2021! The Zoom meeting will be open to all the SRI Members and invited friends — just registered or going to register during the meeting. During the meeting all the participants will have the possibility to make questions to the SRI President, the Founder and the Board of Directors, about the 2022 program: criticisms and proposals will be welcome.
We are asking each of the SRI members and supporters to assume this priority for the next month: to bring onboard many new members, to celebrate together during the Xmas Special event and exchange season greeting and wishes for a vibrant year 2022 for Space Renaissance International!
Read a summary of the things we made in 2021, and what we’ll make in 2022:
Everything we do as living organisms is dependent, in some capacity, on time. The concept is so complex that scientists still argue whether it exists or if it is an illusion. In this video, astrophysicist Michelle Thaller, science educator Bill Nye, author James Gleick, and neuroscientist Dean Buonomano discuss how the human brain perceives of the passage of time, the idea in theoretical physics of time as a fourth dimension, and the theory that space and time are interwoven. Thaller illustrates Einstein’s theory of relativity, Buonomano outlines eternalism, and all the experts touch on issues of perception, definition, and experience. Check Dean Buonomano’s latest book Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time at https://amzn.to/2GY1n1z.
TRANSCRIPT: MICHELLE THALLER: Is time real or is it an illusion? Well, time is certainly real but the question is what do we mean by the word time? And it may surprise you that physicists don’t have a simple answer for that. JAMES GLEICK: Physicists argue about and physicists actually have symposia on the subject of is there such a thing as time. And it’s also something that has a traditional in philosophy going back about a century. But, I think it’s fair to say that in one sense it’s a ridiculous idea. How can you say time doesn’t exist when we have such a profound experience of it first of all. And second of all we’re talking about it constantly. I mean we couldn’t get, I can’t get through this sentence with out referring to time. I was going to say we couldn’t get through the day without discussing time. So, obviously when a physicist questions the existence of time they are trying to say something specialized, something technical. BILL NYE: Notice that in English we don’t have any other word for time except time. It’s unique. It’s this wild fourth dimension in nature. This is one dimension, this is one dimension, this is one dimension and time is the fourth dimension. And we call it the fourth dimension not just in theoretical physics but in engineering. I worked on four dimensional autopilots so you tell where you want to go and what altitude it is above sea level and then when you want to get there. Like you can’t get there at any time. GLEICK: Einstein or maybe I should say more properly Minkowski, his teacher and contemporary, offers a vision of space-time as a single thing, as a four dimensional block in which the past and the future are just like spatial dimensions. They’re just like north and south in the equations of physics. And so you can construct a view of the world in which the future is already there and you can say, and physicists do say something very much like this, that in the fundamental laws of physics there is no distinction between the past and the future. And so if you’re playing that game you’re essentially saying time as an independent thing doesn’t exist. Time is just another dimension like space. Again, that is in obvious conflict with our intuitions about the world. We go through the day acting as though the past is over and the future has not yet happened and it might happen this way or it might happen that way. We could flip a coin and see. We tend to believe in our gut that the future is not fully determined and therefore is different from the past. DEAN BUONOMANO: If the flow if time, if our subjective sense of the flow of time is an illusion we have this clash between physics and neuroscience because the dominant theory in physics is that we live in the block universe. And I should be clear. There’s no consensus. There’s no 100 percent agreement. But the standard view in physics is that, and this comes in large part from relativity, that we live in an eternalist universe, in a block universe in which the past, present and future is equally real. So, this raises the question of whether we can trust our brain to tell us that time is flowing. NYE: In my opinion time is both subjective and objective. What we do in science and engineering and in life, astronomy, is measure time as carefully as we can because it’s so important to our everyday world. You go to plant crops you want to know when to plant them. You want to know when to harvest them. If you want to have a global positioning system that enables you to determine which side of the street you’re on, from your phone you need to take into account both the traditional passage of time that you might be familiar with watching a clock here on the Earth’s surface, and the passage of time as it’s affected by the… Read the full transcript at https://bigthink.com/videos/does-time-exist
It’s almost Time to use our AI Brothers to search for and Welcome our Space Brothers. Welcome AI and Space friends.
The best public policy is shaped by scientific evidence. Although obvious in retrospect, scientists often fail to follow this dictum. The refusal to admit anomalies as evidence that our knowledge base may have missed something important about reality stems from our ego. However, what will happen when artificial intelligence plays a starring role in the analysis of data? Will these future ‘AI-scientists’ alter the way information is processed and understood, all without human bias?
The mainstream of physics routinely embarks on speculations. For example, we invested 7.5 billion Euros in the Large Hadron Collider with the hope of finding Supersymmetry 0, without success. We invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the search for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) as dark matter 0, and four decades later, we have been unsuccessful. In retrospect, these were searches in the dark. But one wonders why they were endorsed by the mainstream scientific community while less speculative searches are not?
Consider, for example, the search for equipment in space from extraterrestrial civilizations. Our own civilization launched five interstellar probes. Moreover, the Kepler satellite data revealed that a substantial fraction of all Sun-like stars have an Earth-sized planet at the same separation. Given that most stars formed billions of years before the Sun, imagining numerous extraterrestrial probes floating in interstellar space should not be regarded as more speculative than the notions of Supersymmetry or WIMPs.
Finding evidence of life on another planet would be a game-changer. Right now, we cannot predict how common life is in the Universe because we don’t understand what causes that initial spark of life. We only have one data point — our planet. Finding life on another planet within our solar system would illustrate one of two things. Either, life can begin easily enough that it formed twice within the same solar system, or whatever mechanism started life on Earth also somehow started life on Mars (for example, cross-contamination via meteorite). That’s why, in the search for life on Mars, we must make sure we get it right. Recent research published in the Journal of the Geological Society examines how to know if a structure is a fossil or simply a formation that resulted from a physical, non-biological process. Life on Ancient Mars Mars was a very different place four billion years ago. Under a thick atmosphere, a large ocean formed. During this time, Mars may have been temporarily habitable. Eventually, this water was lost to space or locked up in global ice caps. The search for life on Mars, then, is through ancient fossils — microbial evidence that the surface of Mars was inhabitable by microscopic life. Full Story:
“These discoveries are essential for mankind to progress into the space age,” said lead research author Professor Sayaka Wakayama, a scientist at Japan’s University of Yamanashi.
There’s no need to discover life on Mars — not when we could possibly make our own.
Scientists have discovered that sperm can potentially survive on Mars for hundreds of years, meaning that humans could possibly reproduce on the Red Planet in the future.
“These discoveries are essential for mankind to progress into the space age,” lead research author Professor Sayaka Wakayama, a scientist at Japan’s University of Yamanashi, told the Daily Mail of the study.
For as long as there have been humans on Earth, it seems that there has also been war. But, what if that changed? In this video, Unveiled takes a closer look at a world without war. How would it work? Could it ever happen? And what would the future of humanity look like if it did?
This is Unveiled, giving you incredible answers to extraordinary questions!
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Arguments for fine tuning: Physics has many constants like the charge of the electron, the gravitational constant, Planck’s constant. If any of their values were different, our universe, as we know it, would not be the same, and life would probably not exist. 0:00 — Defining fine tuning. 2:20 — Gravitational constant. 3:59 — Electromagnetic Force. 5:02 — Strong force. 6:13 — Weak force. 7:51 — Philosophical Arguments against fine tuning. 9:36 — Scientific arguments against fine tuning. 11:59 — Sentient puddle. 13:29 — Does fine tuning need an agent. 15:14 — Louse on the tail a lion. Some say that it could not have occurred by chance, that there must be some agent, like a god that set up the constants to enable life.
Let’s just look at the constants associated with the different forces. Gravity: If the gravitational constant was too small, gravity would be too weak, and planets wouldn’t form. If it was too large, then stars like the sun would burn up too fast.
Electromagnetism: The electromagnetic force is responsible for the distance at which electrons orbits in atoms. If the force was weaker, the atomic size would increase because electrons would be further away from the nucleus. This could impact chemistry, as it would change the strength of chemical bonds.
A higher constant would lead to cooler stars and a lower constant would lead to hotter stars. If the constant was bigger, atoms larger than hydrogen atoms could not form and stars may never ignite, because protons may not have been able to overcome the coulomb barrier to fuse in the first place.
Strong force: If the strong coupling constant were lower, then you wouldn’t have stable heavy atoms as it would not be enough to overcome proton-proton repulsion. If the strong nuclear force was only 1% weaker for example, atoms crucial for life like oxygen, carbon and nitrogen may not form in sufficient quantities.
Signup for your FREE TRIAL to The GREAT COURSES PLUS here: http://ow.ly/5KMw30qK17T. Until 350 years ago, there was a distinction between what people saw on earth and what they saw in the sky. There did not seem to be any connection.
Then Isaac Newton in 1,687 showed that planets move due to the same forces we experience here on earth. If things could be explained with mathematics, to many people this called into question the need for a God.
But in the late 20th century, arguments for God were resurrected. The standard model of particle physics and general relativity is accurate. But there are constants in these equations that do not have an explanation. They have to be measured. Many of them seem to be very fine tuned.
Scientists point out for example, the mass of a neutrino is 2X10^-37kg. It has been shown that if this mass was off by just one decimal point, life would not exist because if the mass was too high, the additional gravity would cause the universe to collapse. If the mass was too low, galaxies could not form because the universe would have expanded too fast.
On closer examination, it has some problems. The argument exaggerates the idea of fine tuning by using misleading units of measurement, to make fine tuning seem much more unlikely than it may be. The mass of neutrinos is expressed in Kg. Using kilograms to measure something this small is the equivalent of measuring a person’s height in light years. A better measurement for the neutrino would be electron volts or picograms.
Another point is that most of the constants could not really be any arbitrary number. They are going to hover around some value close to what they actually are. The value of the mass of a neutrino could not be the mass of a bowling ball. Such massive particles with the property of a neutrino could not have been created during the Big Bang.
We’re just weeks away from the next generation of astronomy.
When the James Webb Space Telescope launches in December, it will signal the beginning of a new day for the study of the universe, and officials at NASA and elsewhere think it could discover signs of atmospheres capable of supporting life on alien worlds beyond our solar system. But what will the process of evaluating these planets look like, and how long will it take?… See more.
The era of space exploration brings with it a new risk: invasion. The peril comes not from little green men arriving on flying saucers but, rather, from microbiological contamination of Earth from extraterrestrial environments and vice versa. Writing in BioScience, Anthony Ricciardi, of McGill University, and colleagues describe the dangers posed by such organisms and outline an approach to address the threat.
The authors caution that biological contamination endangers both ecosystems and human well-being. “Owing to their massive costs to resource sectors and human health, biological invasions are a global biosecurity issue requiring rigorous transboundary solutions,” say Ricciardi and colleagues. And that threat may be more immediate than previously anticipated. Despite considerable microbial caution among space agencies, say the authors, “bacterial strains exhibiting extreme resistance to ionizing radiation, desiccation, and disinfectants have been isolated in NASA
Established in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. It’s vision is To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity.
