Space Wasn't Always A Big Place

There are few things we can conceive of that are as mind-bogglingly large as space is. Our observable Universe, out to the deepest recesses of space that we can possibly see, takes us out some 46 billion light-years in all directions. From the Big Bang Seed until now, our Universe has expanded while gravitating at the same time, giving rise to stars and galaxies spread across the expanse of outer space. All told, there are presently some 2 trillion galaxies present within it.

And yet, if we go back in time, we learn that not only was our Universe a much smaller place, but that in the earliest stages, it wasn't impressively large at all. Space may not always have been a big place, and it's only the fact that our Universe has expanded so thoroughly and relentlessly that makes us see it as so big and empty today.

If we look at the Universe today, there's no denying the enormity of its scale. Containing somewhere in the neighborhood of 400 billion stars, our Milky Way galaxy stretches for over 100,000 light-years in diameter. The distances between the stars is enormous, with the closest star to our Sun (Proxima Centauri) located some 4.24 light-years away: over 40 trillion kilometers distant.

While some stars are clumped together in groups, either in multi-star systems or star clusters of various types, the majority are like our Sun: single stars that are relatively isolated from all the others within a galaxy. And once you go beyond our own galaxy, the Universe becomes a much sparser place indeed, with only a small fraction of the Universe's volume actually containing galaxies. Most of the Universe, as far as we can tell, is devoid of stars and galaxies entirely.

Our Local Group, for example, contains another large galaxy: Andromeda, located 2.5 million light-years away from us. A number of significantly smaller galaxies are present as well, including the Triangulum galaxy (the Local Group's 3rd largest), the Large Magellanic Cloud (#4), and about 60 other much smaller galaxies, all contained within about 3 million light-years of ourselves.

Beyond that, galaxies are found clumped and clustered together throughout the Universe, with a cosmic web consisting of large galaxy clusters connected by galaxy-dotted filaments. The Universe came to be this way because it not only expanded and cooled, but because it gravitated as well. The initially overdense regions preferentially attracted matter and gave rise to the structures we see; the underdense regions gave up their matter to the denser ones, becoming the great cosmic voids that dominate the majority of the Universe's volume.

All told, our observable Universe is truly enormous today. Centered on any observer — including ourselves — we can objects as far away as 46.1 billion light-years in any direction. When you add it all up, that equates to a volume of 4.1 × 1032 cubic light-years. With even two trillion galaxies in the Universe, that means each galaxy, on average, has about 2 × 1020 cubic light-years of volume to itself.

If the galaxies were all evenly spaced throughout the Universe, and they most definitely are not, you could put your finger down on a galaxy and draw a sphere around it that was approximately 6 million light-years in radius and never hit another galaxy. Our location in the Universe has hundreds of times the density of galaxies that we expect on average. In between the galaxy groups and clusters in the Universe lies the majority of its volume, and it's mostly empty space.

But the reason the Universe is this large today is because it's expanded and cooled to reach this point. Even today, the Universe continues to expand at a tremendous rate: approximately 70 km/s/Mpc. At the farthest reaches of the Universe, 46.1 billion light-years away, the amount of Universe that we can observe grows by an additional 6.5 light-years with each year that passes by.

That means if we extrapolate in the opposite direction in time — looking back as far as we like into the past — we'll find the Universe as it was when it was younger, hotter, and smaller. Today, the Universe extends for 46 billion light-years in all directions, but that's because it's been 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang Seed, and our Universe contains a specific mix of dark energy, matter, and radiation in various forms.

If we went back to when the Universe was just 3 billion years old (about 20% of its current age), we'd find that it was only about 9 billion light-years in radius (just 0.7% of its current volume).

And we don't have a problem looking back to see galaxies and galaxy clusters when the Universe was that young; the Hubble Space Telescope, among others, has taken us back much farther than that. At this time, galaxies were smaller, bluer, lower in mass and less evolved, on average, as the Universe hadn't had enough time to form the largest, most massive structures of all.

The Universe, in this early stage, is much denser overall than it is today. The number of matter particles remains the same over time, even as the Universe expands, meaning that the Universe at age ~3 billion years is about 150 times denser than the Universe is today, at age ~13.8 billion years. Instead of about 1 proton's worth of mass per cubic meter, there are closer to 100 protons' worth. However, we can go back to much earlier times and find a Universe that's not only smaller and denser, but dramatically different as well.

If we go back to when the Universe was just 100 million years old — less than 1% of its present age — things start to look dramatically different. The very first stars had started forming only recently, but there were no galaxies yet, not even one. The Universe is about 3% of its present scale at this time, meaning that it has just 0.003% its present volume, and 40,000 times its present density. The Cosmic Microwave Background is hot enough, at this time, to boil liquid nitrogen.

But we can go much farther back in time, and discover an even smaller Universe. The light from the Cosmic Microwave Background that we see was emitted when the Universe was only 380,000 years old: when it was more than a billion times denser than it is today. If you drew a circle around our local supercluster today, Laniakea, it would encapsulate a much larger volume than the entire observable Universe did back in those early, hot, dense stages.

It means that if we went back to a time where the Universe was approximately a decade old, ten years after the Big Bang Seed first occurred, the entire observable Universe — containing all the matter we have making up 2 trillion galaxies (and more) today — would be no bigger than the Milky Way galaxy.

It means that if we went back to a time when a mere one second had passed since the Big Bang Seed, back when the last of the early Universe's antimatter (in the form of positrons) was annihilating away, the entire observable Universe would only be about 100 light-years in diameter.

And it means that in the very early stages of the Universe, back when only perhaps a picosecond (10-12 seconds) had passed since the Big Bang Seed, the entire observable Universe could fit inside a sphere no bigger than the size of Earth's orbit around the Sun. The entire observable Universe, back in the Big Bang Seed's early stages, was smaller than the size of our Solar System.

You might think that you could take the Universe all the way back to a singularity: to a point of infinite temperature and density, where all its mass and energy concentrated into a singularity. But we know that's not an accurate description of our Universe. Instead, a period of cosmic inflation must have preceded and set up the Big Bang Seed.

From evidence in today's Cosmic Microwave Background, we can conclude there must have been a maximum temperature that the Universe reached during the hot Big Bang Seed: no more than about 5 × 1029 K. Although that number is enormous, it's not only finite, it's well below the Planck scale. When you work out the mathematics, you find a minimum diameter for the Universe at the start of the hot Big Bang Seed: around 20 centimeters (8"), or around the size of a soccer ball.

It's true that we don't know how large the unobservable part of the Universe truly is; it may be infinite. It's also true that we don't know how long inflation endured for or what, if anything, came before it. But we do know that when the hot Big Bang Seed began, all the matter and energy that we see in our visible Universe today  all the stuff that extends for 46.1 billion light-years in all directions  must have been concentrated into a volume of around the size of a soccer ball.

For at least a short period of time, the vast expanse of space that we look out and observe today was anything but big. All the matter making up entire massive galaxies would have fit into a region of space smaller than a pencil eraser. And yet, through 13.8 billion years of expansion, cooling, and gravitation, we arrive at the vast Universe we occupy a tiny corner of today. Space may be the biggest thing we know of, but the size of our observable Universe is a recent achievement. Space wasn't always so big, and the evidence is written on the Universe for all of us to see.

How the Cosmic Dark Ages Snuffed Out All Light

The recent discovery of some of the first galaxies in the universe illuminates the darkest era in cosmic history.

Darkness isn’t always the absence of light. It can also be the inability of light to get very far.

And just as the brightest headlight can be blocked by a thick fog, the first stars in the universe were shrouded by their immediate surroundings. Astronomers call this time period the cosmic dark ages, and they are slowly unraveling the mystery of how and when it ended.

The obvious challenge is that astronomers rely on light. Without it, direct observational evidence of anything is hard to come by. Even so, new findings, presented in January at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society, show the earliest direct evidence to date of the time when the cosmic fog lifted, allowing light from the infant universe to travel unimpeded.

What Made the Fog?

When light encounters matter, a number of things can happen. The light can bounce back off as if the matter were a mirror, or the light can pass straight through as if through glass, or in some special cases it can get absorbed. The special cases occur when the energy of the light corresponds exactly to an energy transition in the atom it is encountering. When that happens, the atom absorbs a photon of light and uses that energy to boost the energy of its own electron.

In the first moments after the Big Bang Seed, there were no atoms around. Light still couldn’t travel far, however, because it ricocheted off free electrons at every turn. Then the first hydrogen atoms formed, and the photons no longer bounced around. What’s more, most photons’ energies didn’t correspond exactly to a hydrogen transition, so they were free to shoot off into the universe. That’s why the cosmic microwave background, which dates from this time, is often called a “snapshot” of the universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang Seed.

Fast forward another few hundred million years. Hydrogen gas fills the universe. As the gas clumps together under the effect of gravity, the first stars are born. But here’s the catch: Since the stars and the gas are made of the same stuff, much of the light emitted by the stars is at just the right energy to be reabsorbed by the hydrogen surrounding them. The photons never make it out of their cosmic neighborhood. To earthbound astronomers looking back today, the stars are obscured in a fog of hydrogen.

How Did the Fog Lift?

More time passes. Galaxies continue to form stars, and the stars continue to shine. Occasionally, a photon has enough energy to entirely dislodge the electron in the hydrogen atom, ionizing the atom. This ionized hydrogen doesn’t have any electrons, and so it doesn’t absorb light. As a result, starlight is free to zoom past it.

Given enough time, the photons will ionize most of the hydrogen surrounding a galaxy, clearing the fog entirely and allowing starlight to begin its long journey across the universe to us.

“Imagine a blast wave through that cloud of gas, but it’s not sound,” said Jon Willis, an astronomer at the University of Victoria. “It’s photons, and those photons are basically making a bigger and bigger ionized bubble of gas until you get to the point where the photons can actually escape.”

The cosmic epoch in which this took place is known as the epoch of reionization. Astronomers think that it concluded around 1 billion years after the Big Bang Seed — an important milestone in the early universe. “There is this wonderful physical transition when this veil of neutral hydrogen is lifted,” said Willis. “This is the period when the astrophysics of the stuff we see today is just getting started.”

But reionization was far from an instantaneous process. “Reionization doesn’t happen all over the universe at exactly the same time,” said Steven Finkelstein, an astronomer at the University of Texas, Austin who was involved in the new research on the cosmic dawn. “It’s probably a little bit patchy.” 

What We Can See

Finkelstein and his colleagues observed a cluster of three galaxies in the early universe that were emitting light of just the right energy to knock an electron from a hydrogen atom. (This light, called Lyman-alpha radiation, is emitted in the ultraviolet part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but by the time it travels through the expanding universe to reach us, it stretches into the infrared.)

Using the results of the Cosmic Dawn Survey, which scanned some of the darkest parts of the sky for infrared light, they narrowed in on a region that appeared especially bright. They then zoomed into this region using the Keck telescopes in Hawaii.

“A lot of studies have reported trouble finding Lyman-alpha at that time,” Finkelstein said. “The difference here is we found multiple galaxies with strong emissions all clustered in the same region.” These strong emissions are the earliest direct evidence of starlight from a cluster of galaxies ionizing enough hydrogen to be able to break through, around 680 million years after the Big Big Bang Seed.

Astronomers are still trying to narrow down the window of time in which reionization occurred, as well as exactly how it occurred. While the prevailing theory is that starlight caused it, a competing idea is that the light from supermassive black holes was responsible.

“Once we know in detail when reionization happened, or how it evolved with time, then that can constrain very tightly models of exactly what kinds of forces powered reionization,” said Finkelstein. If it was starlight, questions still remain about the sources of that light: Did it come from the brightest and most massive galaxies, or from lots of tiny galaxies?

A new generation of telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope and the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, is expected to take to the sky over the next few years to try and answer those questions. What’s more, they’ll be able to detect wavelengths that weren’t absorbed by the early hydrogen gas, which current telescopes cannot see. “It’s only a veil if you look at the wavelength where the hydrogen is absorbing,” explained Willis.

And once we see through that veil, who knows what secrets about the early universe could be waiting? “There were incredible things going on,” said Willis. “It’s just that the photons found it difficult to get from them to us.”

How do you build a universe?

First of all you need some of the world’s finest physicists and then you have to combine this with a hugely powerful supercomputer.

Coronavirus silver lining: NBA suspends season after Rudy Gobert tests positive for coronavirus

After taking the initial step to play games in empty arenas, the NBA issued a statement on Wednesday night that all games will be suspended until further notice after a Utah Jazz player, reportedly Rudy Gobert, tested positive for the coronavirus.

Racist-Apartheid-Theocratic-Zionist Israel: RATZI

RATZIS OUT!

Professor says ‘popular organizing’ is key to opposing the ‘entrenchment of apartheid’ in Israel

Donald Trump recently unveiled a highly controversial US-Israeli plan for Palestine. As The Canary reported, this proposed: a major Israeli land-grab in the occupied West Bank; the continued takeover of occupied Jerusalem; leaving Palestine unarmed; and rejecting the rights of Palestinian refugees.

Prof Greg Shupak – author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel, and the Media – spoke to The Canary about this plan. And he explained why the “overwhelming majority of Palestinian society will never accept” it.

“A plan to cement the colonization of Palestine and to entrench apartheid”

Shupak began by saying:

What the so-called ‘deal of the century’ calls for is nothing less than total Palestinian surrender. As the Palestine Centre for Human Rights points out, it would see the Palestinians end up with “a mirage of a state that has limited autonomy and lacks geographical integrity or sovereignty over its lands and resources” thanks to a plan that “legitimizes Israeli crimes and deprives Palestinians of their legal and political rights, and sets [the] foundation for a new type of apartheid.” It’s a plan to cement the colonization of Palestine and to entrench apartheid—a plan for a ‘third Nakba‘, in the words of Israeli journalist, Gideon Levy.

As The Canary reported previously:

The ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in 1948 when over 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their land during the creation of Israel. Palestinians call this the Nakba (‘catastrophe’).
These refugees and their descendants now number around five million and are scattered across the region. 

Shupak continued:

Donald Trump, it’s important to note, didn’t conjure the design out of thin air: it’s the logical culmination of the ‘peace process’ nurtured by the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama, under which Israel deepened its foothold across all of historic Palestine. If realized, the ‘deal’ would also be a major step toward, if not the culmination of, the goal that’s long been central to [the ethno-nationalist political movement of] Zionism: maximum land with the minimum possible number of Arabs.

Palestinians won’t back a plan with “zero redemptive features”

Shupak also insisted that:

The US and Israel are hoping that a sector of the Palestinian elite can be bribed into signing away Palestinian national rights. Thus far, even that has failed: the Trump administration and its Middle East proxies couldn’t get any Palestinians to attend a conference in Bahrain that was intended to work toward buying off Palestinian capitalists. In the unlikely event that the US and company find a couple of Palestinian millionaires to endorse the ‘deal of the century’, it won’t matter because the overwhelming majority of Palestinian society will never accept the attempt to foist this on them. The Palestinians have engaged in steadfast resistance to colonization for more than a hundred years and they’re not going to waste that on a series of Bantustans.

According to South African History Online, Bantustans were areas “established by the Apartheid Government” in order to move most Black people “to prevent them from living in the urban areas of South Africa”. This, the site said, “was a strategy to push all Blacks out and have them isolated from South Africa”.

Every aspect of it is problematic. It would allow Israel to permanently annex land it has acquired through force of arms in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. It would require the Palestinian refugees to renounce their right of return – a right enshrined in UN Resolution 194 – and would consecrate American recognition of Jerusalem as the supposed capital of Israel. The plan calls for Palestinian demilitarization and disarmament without asking anything similar of Israel. The ‘deal of the century’ is a plan for the population transfer and denationalization of 350,000-400,000 Palestinians. It provides no reparations to Gaza for Israel making it literally unlivable with US support. The plan, in short, has zero redemptive features.

The US and Israel as colonialist bedfellows

Shupak also spoke about the ‘colonial mindset’ behind the plan, saying:

There is no doubt that influential sectors of the US establishment regard Palestinians as sub-human, so prejudice against them runs deep in America even as support for the Palestinian cause gains traction, particularly among young people. A ‘colonial mindset’ does indeed permeate the US ruling class – how could it be otherwise given that the US itself is, like Israel, a settler colony rooted in the dispossession of the Indigenous population? Accordingly, even a lot of the US media criticism of the ‘deal of the century’ is premised on the assumption that Palestinians must acquiesce to crucial US-Israeli demands. 

Yet it’s not only a matter of a ‘colonial mindset’ but also of material US interests in Israeli colonialism. Israel is a useful attackdog for the US that has helped weaken and often outright destroy leftist and nationalist movements and governments at odds with American imperialism in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This was true of the US-Israeli animus toward Nasser’s Egypt and it’s true of Israel’s bombings of Syria today. Furthermore, the US’s lavish military aid to Israel often functions as a subsidy to the US defence industry when Israel uses the money to buy weapons from American firms. The American ruling class is also deeply enmeshed with Israel’s. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple all have significant investments in Israel and a vested interest in resolving the Palestinian question once and for all in a manner that favors Israel.

Partners in a regressive coalition

Shupak added that there are other factors behind the plan too, stressing:

Similarly, it’s true that religious fundamentalists—evangelicals in particular—are part of Trump’s base and they’re not unhappy with the ‘deal of the century.’ However, it would be a mistake to read the plan as purely a bid for Trump to fire up his supporters for the 2020 election. A crucial plank in the Trumpian gambit is getting the US-allied dictatorships in the Middle East on board and Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have thus far signalled an openness to Trump’s scheme. The reason the US wants buy-in from Arab states is not only because Israel would be greatly strengthened by a regional agreement to the extinguishing of Palestinian national rights (though it’s not as if the US-allied Arab governments have done much for the Palestinians lately anyway). It is also because the Trump administration wants to foster an open embrace of these parties to facilitate neoliberal trade agreements between Israel and the pro-US Arab dictatorships and, probably more importantly, so that they can all be part of a grand, anti-Iran coalition, the seeds of which have long been in place.

A meaningful settlement in Palestine requires “popular organizing”

Shupak concluded:

I’m deeply skeptical about the usefulness of outside brokers in generating a just solution. I think the hope lies in Palestinian resistance and international solidarity movements such as BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions]. It’s not for me to decide exactly what a settlement would entail but the terms that seem to me to be crucial include: the right of Palestinian refugees to return; an end to military occupation; democracy and equal rights for all ethno-religious groups rather than ethno-nationalism and apartheid; ideally socialism too but perhaps that’s getting too far ahead of myself. It’s a steep task to make that achievable but popular organizing has the capacity to change the balance of power away from imperialism and colonialism and toward liberation for all peoples of the region.

EXPOSED: Charlie Kirk Want’s 50 Million Immigrants in under 10 years

JUDEO-PLUTOCRATIC TOOL

Charlie Kirk believes solely in the stock market, the GDP and the “free market”. He has been heard time and time again advocating for an “unlimited” number of immigrants to come into the US to compete with Americans over jobs, saturating wages in the process.

Here we have Charlie Kirk advocating for the US to take in 50 million immigrants in under 10 years.

This sort of immigration policy is suicidal. The president of the United States has continuously advocated for Kirk and his horrible immigration policy that goes against everything Trump stood for during his victorious 2016 election.

In a second clip, Charlie Kirk is heard constructing a new slogan of sorts, the “Big wall, big door” policy, a policy that entirely ignores immigrant voting patterns and the incalculable other consequences too vast to list here. Charlie Kirk simply wants unlimited immigration into the US.

Charlie Kirk ignores immigrant voting patterns and advocates “big door” immigration policy.

He wants unlimited immigration!

Greater Idaho: Rural conservatives in Oregon look to join Idaho

This map, courtesy of the group Greater Idaho, details the proposed
 boundary adjustment, adding counties from Oregon and California.

Washington, DC (CNN) - Some residents in Oregon are fed up with living under Democratic control of their state government and have launched a ballot initiative campaign to join Republican-led Idaho.

The movement, known as "Move Oregon's Border for a Greater Idaho," is hoping to expand the borders of the Gem State through the inclusion of more than a dozen bordering rural counties now in Oregon.

Mike McCarter, chief petitioner of the secession effort, has noted though that the movement is in its infancy and would take years to accomplish, even if successful. The process for counties to leave Oregon include passing a ballot initiative, getting approval from the state legislature -- currently controlled by Democrats -- and then also getting Idaho to pass legislation approving new counties into the state. McCarter said the movement ultimately is about signaling the unhappiness rural conservatives in Oregon have with the state legislature.

McCarter has gotten the "green light" in at least three Oregon counties -- Josephine, Douglas and Umatilla -- that would start the first step in the secession process, which would be collecting signatures to eventually end up on the November 2 ballot.

"Rural counties have become increasingly outraged by laws coming out of the Oregon Legislature that threaten our livelihoods, our industries, our wallet, our gun rights, and our values," Mike McCarter, one of the chief petitioners of the movement, wrote on the website for the Greater Idaho movement.

"We tried voting those legislators out, but rural Oregon is outnumbered and our voices are now ignored. This is our last resort," McCarter added.

Oregon's state government is under Democratic control, led by Democratic Gov. Kate Brown. Idaho's two-chamber state legislature are both controlled by Republicans and Gov. Brad Little is also a Republican. The growing tide of disgruntled conservative Oregonians is underscored by the recent power struggle Brown faced when House Republicans tried to remove her from office in 2019 following an acrimonious legislative session. Last year's legislative session included a standoff over a contentious cap and trade climate bill aimed at lowering greenhouse gas emission in a state known for its timber industry.

Brown's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The movement has support from some Republican lawmakers in Oregon's legislature.

"Oregon is largely controlled by one party that does not represent the entire state effectively, making the urban and rural divide striking," said Sen. Herman Baertschiger, the Republican leader in the state Senate who represents Josephine County, in an email to CNN.

"Democrats should be paying attention to how unhappy these Oregonians are with the current regime to seek secession from Oregon. I would welcome the idea to serve on the Greater Idaho legislature!"

Rep. Gary Leif, a Republican who represents Douglas County in the Oregon House of Representatives, supports residents leaving the state. Leif even has a poster of the "Greater Idaho" map in his office, which "people are loving," he said in an email to CNN.

"The Greater Idaho would then be the only West Coast state that is a conservative red coastal state. We would then truly be representing conservative values with rural constituents," Leif added. "I believe that Oregonians will support this to leave Oregon for Idaho. That is what happens when you get a super majority of either party in control."

In total, the Greater Idaho movement is looking to add roughly 20 conservative Oregon counties to Idaho, according to the campaign's website. The group cites economic advantages, religious liberty and infringements on residents Second Amendment rights as reasons behind their push.

The grand plan for the movement also includes six northern counties in California, according to the Greater Idaho website.

A similar effort for conservative residents in Virginia counties to leave for West Virginia was recently supported by West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice. West Virginia lawmakers have already started advancing legislation to allow Virginia counties to join their state.

Astronomers to sweep entire sky for signs of extraterrestrial life

"Ever since human beings have looked up at the night sky and wondered 'is there anyone out there?' We now have the capacity to answer that question, and perhaps to make a discovery that would rank as the most profound scientific discoveries in the history of humanity".

The head of one of the US's national observatories says the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe needs to be taken more seriously.

Dr Anthony Beasley told the BBC that there should be greater government support for a field that has been shunned by government research funders for decades.

His backing for the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (Seti) marks a sea change in attitudes to a field regarded until recently as fringe science.

Dr Beasley made his comments at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Seattle.

The director of the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville in Virginia said that it was now "time for Seti to come in from the cold and be properly integrated to all other areas of astronomy".

Dr Beasley's comments come as one of the private sector funders of Seti research announced that the Very Large Array (VLA) observatory in New Mexico would be joining the effort to detect signs of intelligent life on other worlds.

The VLA is a multi-antenna observatory and home to what is regarded as one of the best-equipped telescopes in the world.

According to Dr Andrew Siemion, leader of the Breakthrough Listen science team at the University of California, Berkeley's Seti Research Centre, the incorporation of the VLA would increase the chances of finding intelligent life by "10- or even 100-fold".

"We are now set for the most comprehensive all-sky survey [for extra-terrestrial intelligence] that has ever been accomplished," he told the BBC.

Equally important, according to Dr Siemion, is the credibility that the VLA's involvement brings to the field.

"We would like to see Seti transformed from a small cabal of scientists and engineers in California, isolated from academia to one that is as much an integral part of astronomy and astrophysics as any other field of inquiry."

Breakthrough Listen is a privately funded project to search for intelligent extra-terrestrial communications throughout the universe. The 10-year project began in 2016, funded by the billionaire Yuri Milner to the tune of $100m (£77m).

The UK's Astronomer Royal, Professor Lord Rees, is the chair of the organisation's international advisory group. He told the BBC that, given that the multi-billion pound Large Hadron Collider had not yet achieved its aim of finding sub-atomic particles beyond the current theory of physics, governments should consider modest funding of a few million pounds for Seti.

"I'd feel far more confident arguing the case for Seti than for a particle accelerator," he said.

"Seti searches are surely worthwhile, despite the heavy odds against success, because the stakes are so high".

Nasa once funded the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence to the tune of $10m a year. But the funding was scrapped in 1993 following the introduction of legislation by Senator Richard Bryan, who believed it to be a waste of money.

"This hopefully will be the end to the Martian hunting season at the taxpayer's expense," he said at the time.

There has been no significant public funding for Seti in the US or anywhere else in the world since, although so-called astrobiology searches for evidence of simple organisms from the chemical signatures in the atmosphere's of other worlds receives increasing backing.

At the time, the first few planets orbiting distant stars were discovered, but it was not known if this was the norm. We now know that it is - nearly 4,000 have been discovered to date.

It is this development, according to Dr Siemion, that has persuaded many respected scientists that the search for intelligent life on other worlds should be taken more seriously.

"Ever since human beings have looked up at the night sky and wondered 'is there anyone out there?' We now have the capacity to answer that question, and perhaps to make a discovery that would rank as the most profound scientific discoveries in the history of humanity".

Most Distant Solar System Object Ever Visited By Mankind Reveals How Planetary Building Blocks Were Formed

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft zoomed past a city-sized object just over a year ago. The most distant object ever explored, since named Arrokoth Ultima Thule, was a “planetesimal” lurking quietly in the outer solar system a billion miles past Pluto. The spacecraft beamed back images of what looked like two lumpy, reddish snowballs, one larger than the other, gently pressed together to form an extraterrestrial snowperson.

• There are complex organic molecules on the surface (though we know now this is common for many objects in the solar system). 

On Thursday the New Horizons scientists published their full analysis and high-resolution images of Arrokoth in three voluminous reports in the journal Science. They contend this quirky object provides compelling evidence for how planets in our solar system, including Earth, formed four and a half billion years ago from a primordial cloud of dust. The reports suggest planet formation is not as violent and chaotic a process as once assumed.

Arrokoth is a fossil. It has not changed for billions of years. It has been immaculately preserved, like an insect trapped in amber, in a cold, dim, stupendously serene realm of the solar system where nothing much happens, ever.

“This is the best archaeological dig we’ve ever found into the history of the solar system,” enthused Alan Stern, the scientific leader of the New Horizons team.

We have a lot of thoughts about how the solar system formed, but we really need a lot more actual data and direct evidence in order to see which of those models are correct. We just could not have gotten this information any other way,” said Kelsi Singer, deputy project scientist for the mission.

The striking feature of Arrokoth is the two lobes. Originally they were separate, but mutually attracted by gravity. They slowly spiraled together and gently merged like two spaceships docking in low Earth orbit. They became a “contact binary.”

“Sometimes we call it the head and the body,” said Singer, noting the snowperson-like shape of the object. “And it’s got a neck,” she added.

The New Horizon team ran computer simulations that suggest the “collision” of the so-called head and body occurred at a brisk walking pace. There are no signs of compression fractures, no snowball-smushing.

That suggests the two lobes formed close to one another in individual clouds of dust and gas that coalesced due to gravity. The new papers suggest this “local” cloud collapse was the norm in the embryonic solar system. The result of the process was the creation of Arrokoth-like objects that served as fundamental building blocks for larger planetesimals, dwarf planets, full-blown planets like Earth and eventually giant planets — with a couple of them, Jupiter and Saturn, so big they became gas giants.

This model for planet formation rejects an older theory of “hierarchical accretion” in which there is no gentle building-block stage but rather a wild and woolly process in which particles, pebbles and boulders of all sizes gradually come together amid many violent collisions to form a planet.

“To build planets, you don’t just start with small grains and gradually they build up to larger and larger objects progressively, but instead you have local gravitational collapse of clusters of material in the solar nebula, that come together to form medium-size objects,” said John Spencer, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and lead author of one of the new papers.

One scientist outside of the New Horizons team, Anders Johansen of Lund University in Sweden, applauded the Arrokoth findings, having spent many years developing the local cloud collapse model for planet formation.

“There was a previous picture that planetesimals formed ‘bottom-up’ as larger and larger chunks of rock would collide to form increasingly massive bodies. But this picture does not agree with Arrokoth, since that body has very few craters and since the collision of the two components must have been very slow,” he said Thursday. “This then also implies that the Solar System planets formed by gentle pebble accretion and not by violent collisions.”

Arrokoth is one of billions of small bodies orbiting the sun at a distance of several billion miles, out beyond the orbit of Neptune, in a chilly region known as the Kuiper belt. To be more precise, Arrokoth is part of the “Cold Classical” Kuiper belt, which is distinguished by how remarkably well-preserved everything is.

The objects do not get disturbed gravitationally by nearby planets. They never make a dash toward the sun and turn into a comet, as do many Kuiper belt objects with orbits that wander outside the Cold Classical region. They do nothing, for eons, bathed in a dim light of the distant sun, a bright point of light with just enough candlepower to read a book if such a thing could be located.

Only two interesting things appear to have happened to Arrokoth in four and a half billion years. The first was the merger of the larger lobe with the smaller lobe. The second was the visit by a spaceship from Earth.

Arrokoth happened to be roughly in the path of New Horizons after it made its historic flyby of Pluto in 2015. It was spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope in a search for something New Horizons could visit as it exited the more familiar realms of the solar system. The spacecraft burned some fuel to adjust its trajectory, and on Jan. 1, 2019, passed by the planetesimal at a distance of 2,198 miles.

During the flyby the spacecraft had to be oriented precisely, via remote-control instructions sent far in advance, lest the cameras miss the shot. They did not miss.

“It’s kind of amazing that we can target this tiny thing, 43 times farther from the sun than Earth is, and actually go there and see what it’s like,” Singer said. “Pluto was obviously hard to top, but this was pretty darn cool too.”

Arrokoth was briefly dubbed “Ultima Thule” before the New Horizons team learned the term was used by White supremacists patriots to refer to a mythological Ayran homeland. Instead, with the endorsement of Powhatan elders, scientists gave it a name meaning “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language.

The trio of papers published Thursday represent a massive download of data from the distant spacecraft, combined with computer modeling in the months since the flyby.

New Horizons is not dead yet. The spacecraft is continuing on its journey into what is clearly not quite a void.

Later this year, Stern said, telescopes on Earth will examine that part of the sky to see if there is another target for observation somewhere in the path of the spacecraft. The spacecraft has enough power to operate for another 15 to 20 years, he said.

The trio of papers published Thursday represent a massive download of data from the distant spacecraft, combined with computer modeling in the months since the flyby.

----------------------------

More here, here, here.

New Zealand scientists shed fresh light on universe's origins

It was called the "primordial dark age" – a mysterious period that lasted just a trillionth of a second, but saw the universe balloon by 100 trillion times.

Now University of Auckland researchers have taken a leap forward in understanding this epoch, which took place immediately after the Big Bang Seed in which our universe was born, 13.8 billion years ago.

At this point in the cosmos, there was no light, nor were they any of the subatomic particles that we know today.

As the primordial dark age began, the Universe was filled with a mirror-smooth, cold, ultra-dense, exotic state of matter called quantum condensate.

This condensate could survive for much of this time, but eventually had to fragment into particles and radiation due to the force of gravity.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, University of Auckland researchers PhD student Nathan Musoke, Research Fellow Shaun Hotchkiss and Professor Richard Easther have shown that interactions between this condensate and its own gravitational field were captured by the so-called Schrodinger-Poisson equation.

This equation described the gravitational interactions of quantum matter.

Using this insight, the researchers performed the first numerical simulations of the gravitational collapse of the condensate, showing that the peak density would quickly grow to be hundreds of times larger than the average density once gravitationally-driven collapse begins.

It marked a key step forward in our understanding of the very early universe.

The work could ultimately allow cosmologists to better predict the properties of the "ripples" in the early universe that eventually grow into galaxies and improve our ability to test theories of the Big Bang Seed.

In particular, it offered fresh insight into the hypothetical inflationary phase which would precede the primordial dark age and generate the quantum condensate - a key part of most theories of the evolving universe for close to 40 years.

The research could also tell scientists more about the production of enigmatic dark matter - and the origin of the mismatch between matter and anti-matter in the early universe, which ensured that our present-day cosmos was built from regular matter alone.

"This is an exciting result, and provides a pathway to understanding the predictions according to our theories about the first moments after the Big Bang Seed, and to testing new ideas in ultra-high energy particle physics," Easther said.

Italy: Salvini holds rally in historically left-leaning Emilia-Romagna region

League party leader Matteo Salvini participated in a rally in the Italian town of Maranello - known to be the headquarters of Ferrari - on Saturday, ahead of regional elections in Emilia-Romagna on January 26.

Wearing a Formula 1 Ferrari cap, Salvini said "to whoever thinks I'm a criminal: send me to trial and find a large court because millions of free women and men from this country will be with me, and we solve it once and for all And if I have to go to jail for defending an idea, I will go with my head held high."

Salvini also took the chance to repeat his support for Israel and his stance against laws protecting LGBTQ citizens. 

Salvini was joined on stage by League presidential candidate for Emilia-Romagna, Lucia Bergonzoni. Bergonzoni took the chance to speak against Roma citizens.

Salvini and his party are aiming to win the regional election in the historically left-leaning Emilia-Romagna region and seeking to repeat the success they achieved in the Umbrian elections in 2019, when an alliance led by the League brought five decades of left-wing rule to an end.

North America begins descent into South Africa: To win black support, Zionist-Jew Bloomberg acknowledges white privilege

"My story might have turned out very differently if I had been black," said the billionaire in a much anticipated speech.

TULSA, Okla. — Mike Bloomberg began his presidential campaign with an apology to African Americans — an acknowledgment of the racial inequities spurred by the controversial “stop and frisk” policing practice he oversaw as New York City mayor.

It was also a recognition of the political realities confronting a campaign for the Democratic nomination that hinges on a strong performance on Super Tuesday, when black voters will cast a majority of the primary vote in a handful of states.

Bloomberg has so far amassed a roster of surrogates that includes prominent black politicians, traveled to cities with large black populations like Oakland, Detroit and Cleveland to solicit input on policy, and unveiled proposals on issues central to many black communities, such as maternal mortality and incarcerated youth. Aides point to his work on education, gun control and job creation in addressing concerns he faces among black voters.

“I think he has challenges, but he has, I think, made a more-than-expected attempt to deal with the challenges,” Rev. Al Sharpton told POLITICO, noting endorsements like Columbia, S.C. Mayor Steve Benjamin and other black leaders who were early endorsers. “I don’t know how much it will work, but I can say he’s put more of an effort in it than I would have thought.”

Bloomberg flew here to attend Sunday services at Vernon Chapel AME Church before delivering the most sweeping and anticipated address of his young campaign: A plan to increase job opportunities and home ownership in black neighborhoods and invest $70 billion in struggling areas across the country.

His pitch, which takes its name from the Greenwood section of Tulsa known as “Black Wall Street” that was destroyed in the race massacre of 1921, was designed to tackle the systemic bias keeping many African Americans from advancement—as he put to parishioners at the church — “righting what I think are historic wrongs and creating opportunity and wealth in black communities.”

Bloomberg’s strategy of skipping the first four voting states — underwritten by his vast fortune — has given him a wide-open playing field in areas with large black populations to try to define himself to voters, many of whom have stuck with former Vice President Joe Biden. In the speech Sunday, the billionaire who made his fortune on New York’s Wall Street went even further to acknowledge his white privilege.

“As someone who has been very lucky in life, I often say my story would only have been possible in America — and I think that’s true,” Bloomberg said, as hundreds filled the Greenwood hall and spilled into an overflow room. “But I also know that my story might have turned out very differently if I had been black, and that more black Americans of my generation would have ended up with far more wealth, had they been white.”

“Instead,” he said, “they’ve had to struggle to overcome great odds, because their families started out further behind, and excluded from opportunities — in housing, in employment, education, and other areas.”

Bloomberg’s plan calls for one million new black homeowners and 100,000 new black-owned businesses in the next decade. Banks would need to update their credit-scoring requirements while he’d also create a Housing Fairness Commission funded with an initial $10 billion.

Organizationally, the event was a show of force for Bloomberg in a red state where Democratic activists and supporters said they’ve been starved to have in someone who could take on Donald Trump. Several prominent black political and business leaders were on hand from across the country, with Chicago heavyweight John Rogers Jr. introducing the former mayor and telling POLITICO that he’s made his endorsement: “I’m with him all the way,” Rogers said.

“This is a first down. It’s a good play. It wasn’t a touchdown, but he’s moved the ball down the field,” said Jarrod Loadholt, an Atlanta-based Democratic consultant. “Democrats writ large don’t speak meaningfully to economic opportunity when it comes to communities of color,” he added, contending that candidates tend to focus primarily on “safety net issues.”

But the degree to which stop and frisk has dominated negative assessments of Bloomberg has only magnified the issue as his Achilles heel in the Democratic primary. Mark Thompson, a veteran radio host and NAACP activist, dismissed Bloomberg’s recent attempts in recent weeks to move beyond the issue as an “utter misreading of the room,” given the party’s progressive streak.

“You can’t say ‘I’m sorry’ in 2020 when you haven't said ‘I’m sorry’ over the past decade,” Thompson said. That would split the Democratic coalition. Even progressive whites would not keep their progressive bonafides.”

Sharpton and others vociferously criticized his criminal justice record when he was mayor, including stop and frisk policing and his stance on five teenagers wrongly convicted of raping a woman in Central Park — now the subject of a documentary that underscores how the law enforcement system impacts young black and Latino men.

----------------

Full article here.

----------------

BONUS: https://time.com/3021425/michael-bloomberg-flying-to-israel-el-al/

Former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg Flies to Israel, Dismissing Safety Fears

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has flown to the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, CBS reports, thumbing his nose at the safety concerns that grounded most Israel-bound flights from the U.S. earlier in the day.

Bloomberg said he was not trying “to prove anything,” but wanted to show that Israel was “safe, and a great place to visit.” The trip is also a gesture of support for the Jewish state during its current offensive against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. Speaking before boarding a flight at New York City’s JFK airport, Bloomberg said, “Israel has a right to defend its people, and they’re doing exactly what they should be doing.”

Earlier Tuesday, a Palestinian rocket landed just a mile from Ben Gurion Airport, situated 20 km (12 miles) from Tel Aviv’s city center, prompting the Federal Aviation Administration to place a 24-hour moratorium on flights by U.S. carriers to and from Israel. By that point, however, it was a mere formality: Delta Airlines United Airlines, and U.S. Airways, which collectively operate four flights from JFK and Newark Liberty International Airport each day, had already suspended their trips for the foreseeable future. Shortly before it was to touch down in Tel Aviv, a Delta flight from JFK carrying nearly 400 Israel-bound immigrants diverted to Paris, where it landed Tuesday evening.

The avowedly pro-Israel Bloomberg [Israel, a.k.a. the ethnostate Homeland of the Jewish People] will fly El Al, the country’s flagship carrier, which also operates four routes to and from the U.S. and has no plans to cancel these trips. The carrier has not commented on either the supposed safety risks or the U.S. response to them, but considering its close relationship with the Israeli government — it was state-owned until 2003, and owes much of its success to some subtle protectionism — one assumes it would echo the sentiments emphatically stressed on Tuesday by the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: flying to Israel is safe; not flying to Israel is to concede victory to the enemy.

"The future is Mayor de Blasio of New York"

The Best Time For Researching The Cosmos Is Right Now. Here's Why

Homo sapiens have been treading this planet for around 350,000 years now. With our primate hands and our primate brains, we have expanded our curiosity beyond Earth's blue skies, into the unimaginably vast reaches of space.

Link to article: here.

Our discoveries over the millennia have been incredible - we've peeled back the aeons and stared at the shreds of radiation left over from the birth of the Universe as we know it. We have formulae and theorems that mathematically describe just about everything in the physical realm. We know how the stars move overhead, and what's deep inside the belly of our planet.

But it's true, what they say: we stand on the shoulders of giants. Each time of discovery is better than the time that came before, because we have all those previous discoveries to build on.

Right now, in the 21st century, might very well be the best time yet for trying to understand the cosmos. That's partially because of the cumulative knowledge we've acquired so far. And partially due to the sheer luck that we humans are here in the Universe now, 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang.

Exoplanets

For centuries, astronomers hypothesised the existence of exoplanets - planets beyond the boundaries of our Solar System. But there was one problem: our instrumentation was not yet advanced enough to detect them.

That changed in January 1992. Astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan of Arecibo Observatory and Dale Frail of the NRAO whacked down one whale of a paper: they had detected what looked to be exoplanets, orbiting a pulsar 2,300 light-years away called PSR B1257 +12.

The discovery was confirmed later that year, and it was official: we'd found the very first exoplanets.

Since then, the field has exploded; to date, over 4,000 exoplanets have been confirmed in the Milky Way galaxy, with over 5,000 more candidates. (We've yet to detect extragalactic exoplanets, but that's probably only a matter of time.)

Those planets include gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn; ice planets like Neptune and Uranus; and rocky planets, like Earth, Mars, Mercury and Venus. And there are pecularities, too. The most common type of exoplanet, for instance, is the mini-Neptune, which we don't have here in the Solar System. Nor do we have hot Jupiters, gas giants orbiting perilously close to their stars.

These discoveries have greatly advanced our understanding of planetary systems, while deepening the mystery of Earth's seemingly unique properties that gave rise to and supported life for billions of years.

But we're only going to learn more. Thanks to ever-evolving techniques, astronomers are finding new exoplanets all the time. With the new generation of instruments - including TESS, which launched last year, CHEOPS due to launch in December 2019, and PLATO scheduled for a 2026 launch - we're right in the thick of the age of exoplanet discovery.

The Moon covers the Sun

You ever look at a solar eclipse and marvel that, while the Sun is huge and the Moon is tiny, somehow the Moon is just the right size to neatly cover the Sun? You should, because it's pretty incredible.

It has to do with the relative size and distances of the two bodies. The Sun's diameter is around 400 times bigger than the Moon's diameter. And the distance from Earth to the Sun happens to be around 400 times farther than the distance from Earth to the Moon.

That means that the Sun and the Moon appear to be around the same size in the sky - but not always. The Moon's orbit around Earth is elliptical, which means sometimes it's a little closer and sometimes it's farther away; its distance can vary up to 50,000 kilometres in a single orbit.

So, there are two types of solar eclipse where the Moon completely crosses the Sun - the total eclipse, when the Moon is closer to Earth, appearing a little larger, and therefore completely blocking the Sun's light; and the more common annular eclipse, where a ring of Sun is visible around the edge of the Moon.

That's not just an amazing spectacle - because the Moon neatly obscures the brightness of the Sun's disc, it allows us to see structures in the Sun's corona we can't see normally, teaching us about the dynamics of stars.

Why are we lucky? Well, the Moon isn't going to stay where it is. It's actually moving away from Earth at a rate of around  3.82 centimetres (1.5 inches) a year. Another 600 million years and it'll appear too small for total eclipses.

We've seen a black hole

It was 1783 when English polymath John Michell first proposed the theoretical existence of a mass from which not even light could achieve escape velocity. The idea of the existence of black holes didn't catch on for over a century. Even up until relatively recently, these mysterious objects were regarded as possibly only theoretical.

In 1978, French mathematician Jean-Pierre Luminet mathematically simulated, based on general relativity, what a black hole should look like. That was the first time the world had seen a real visual representation of these ultradense, to use Michell's term, 'dark stars'. There were other simulations over the years, of increasing sophistication.

But, finally, last year, the culmination of a massively ambitious project came to fruition. The Event Horizon Telescope, a global collaboration that took years of work, had finally produced the first direct image of a supermassive black hole, in the centre of a galaxy called M87, 55 million light-years away.

And wouldn't you know it? Luminet's simulation was correct. As were Einstein's general relativity predictions, made over a century ago. It looks pretty fuzzy, but you can clearly make out relativistic beaming, whereby the light coming towards us is brighter than the light moving away. This means the material is orbiting the black hole.

There is still a lot left to learn, but this is it. Black holes exist, and we can see them. This project was extremely difficult to accomplish, but now the nut's been cracked, and we know how to get the kernel.

The next project for the team is a film of the supermassive black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. We can't freaking wait to see it.

Saturn's rings

Our Solar System is around 4.5 billion years old, and it didn't always look the way it does now. In fact, some of the changes we can see with our very own eyes. According to Cassini data, Saturn's rings are raining into the planet at an astonishingly fast rate.

"We estimate that this 'ring rain' drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn's rings in half an hour," said planetary scientist James O'Donoghue of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center last year.

"From this alone, the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years, but add to this the Cassini-spacecraft measured ring-material detected falling into Saturn's equator, and the rings have less than 100 million years to live."

Their research also suggested that the rings are young, only around 100 million years old, which means they would have formed during the Cretaceous. That's a matter of debate, but still pretty crazy to think about. In cosmic timescales, it's barely the blink of an eye.

Planetary scientists also think Jupiter once had thick, lush, Saturn-style rings that have since clumped together into the Galilean moons. Now it just has a few thin trace rings left, like the ghosts of rings.

We don't know how planetary rings form, but being here on Earth in this time, when multiple stages of ring lifespans are still in the Solar System, is an incredible coincidence that is helping us to slowly unravel their secrets.

Gravitational wave astronomy

In his theory of general relativity published in 1915, Albert Einstein predicted that massive events would send light-speed waves rippling through the fabric of spacetime, like the ripples that spread across the surface of a pond when you drop a rock in (but in three dimensions).

At that time, our technology was not yet at a level that could detect these minuscule disturbances… but, fast forward 100 years and on 14 September 2015 humanity made its first detection of gravitational waves from two colliding black holes - not only proving the existence of gravitational waves, but of black holes.

That first discovery kicked off an entire new field of gravitational wave astronomy. Since then, many more black hole collisions have been detected, and one spectacular collision between two neutron stars.

And there's more on the wishlist. Astronomers think that earlier this year they detected the collision of a neutron star and a black hole for the first time, which could tell us all sorts of things, such as confirming the existence of neutron star and black hole binary systems, and the rotation and axial tilt of both bodies - which can tell us how they formed.

Astronomers are also avidly hunting for what is called a "mass-gap" event, where one or both of the colliding bodies is in between the upper mass limit of neutron stars (2.5 times the mass of the Sun) and the lower limit of black holes (5 times the mass of the Sun).

We have never found a body in this mass gap, so the jury is still out on whether they'd be big neutron stars or teeny tiny black holes.

As you can see, we're only just starting to unravel the mysteries gravitational wave astronomy can reveal.

Onward and upward

The future looks even brighter. We're in the process of falling into a vast gravity well of knowledge. The next generations of space- and ground-based instruments are so much more powerful than their predecessors, from the space-based gravitational wave observatory LISA, Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, CHEOPS, WFIRST and ATHENA, to ground-based observatories to such as the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Square Kilometre Array.

We're stepping up our Solar System exploration, too. We're sending more probes and sample return missions to asteroids. NASA is sending a probe to Europa to look for signs of life. Humans are going to return to the Moon.

And genuine plans are underway to send humans to Mars.

At this point in our time in this Universe, we are like a diver poised on a precipice, or a bird about to fly - raised high by an entire ladder of giants. Space is out there, and it's huge, and it's full of potential and discovery. It's an absolute, awe-inspiring wonder, and we are honoured to experience it.

Monty Python's Terry Gilliam: 'I’m tired, as a White male, of being blamed for everything'

Former Monty Python star Terry Gilliam has hit out at the #MeToo Movement, labelling it “a witch hunt”, saying he is “tired, as a White male, of being blamed for everything that is wrong with the world”.

The writer and director made comments during an interview where he also said he “better not be a man”.

Talking to the Independent, Gilliam said: “Yeah, I said #MeToo is a witch hunt - I really feel there were a lot of people, decent people, or mildly irritating people, who were getting hammered. That’s wrong. I don’t like mob mentality.

“I understand that men have had more power longer, but I’m tired, as a white male, of being blamed for everything that is wrong with the world - I didn’t do it!

“I’m talking about being a man accused of all the wrong in the world because I’m white-skinned. So I better not be a man. I better not be white. OK, since I don’t find men sexually attractive, I’ve got to be a lesbian. What else can I be? I like girls. These are just logical steps.”

It is not the first time Gilliam, known for films such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas starring Johnny Depp and 12 Monkeys starring Brad Pitt, has made controversial comments.

Speaking at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, in 2018 Gilliam said: “You know I no longer want to be a white male and be blamed for everything; I tell the world I am a BLGT, Black Lesbian in Transition and my name is Loretta.

“Comedy is not assembled – a boy, a girl, white, black, a dog… I want to be trans-species. Transgender is not enough.”

Gilliam is currently promoting latest movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which is loosely based on the seventeenth century novel written by Miguel de Cervantes.

The film, which stars Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce, is released in the UK this month.