The Big Bang was an autotelic cosmic seed, and the universe is an organism for cultivating Consciousness. All history is the history of the evolutionary transubstantiation of matter to Spirit via biological-life processes of Blood and Reason.
Jaw-Dropping View of The Milky Way Reveals Mysterious Structures Dangling in Space
A new image of the heart of the Milky Way is revealing mysterious structures we've never seen before.
Taken using the ultra-sensitive MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa, the images show nearly 1,000 strands of magnetic filaments, measuring up to 150 light-years in length, in surprisingly neat and regular arrangements.
That's 10 times the number of these strands that we knew about previously, adding important statistical data that might finally help us understand their nature, a puzzle since their discovery in the 1980s.
"We have studied individual filaments for a long time with a myopic view," says astrophysicist Farhad Yusef-Zadeh of Northwestern University, who initially discovered the filaments.
"Now, we finally see the big picture – a panoramic view filled with an abundance of filaments. Just examining a few filaments makes it difficult to draw any real conclusion about what they are and where they came from. This is a watershed in furthering our understanding of these structures."
Although it's only around 25,000 light-years away (which is not very far in cosmic terms), the center of the Milky Way galaxy is very difficult to see into. It's shrouded by dense clouds of dust and gas that block some wavelengths of light, including the optical range. But we can use technology to tweak our vision into invisible wavelengths.
MeerKAT, operated by the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO), is one of the world's most advanced radio telescopes, and since opening its eye in 2016, it's been giving us an unprecedented set of insights into the galactic center.
Its latest image is an absolute show-stopper. It was constructed from 200 hours of observation data, collected over three years, and it shows us the region in radio wavelengths with unmatched clarity and depth.
Yusef-Zadeh and his team then used a technique to remove the background from the image, revealing the magnetic strings distributed in clusters around the galactic center.
It's unclear what they are, or how they came into existence. What we do know is that they contain cosmic-ray electrons, spinning around in filaments of magnetic fields at close to light-speeds.
The new images have allowed the researchers to find out a little more about the strands, bringing us a step closer to understanding them.
"If you were from another planet, for example, and you encountered one very tall person on Earth, you might assume all people are tall. But if you do statistics across a population of people, you can find the average height," Yusef-Zadeh explains.
That's exactly what we're doing. We can find the strength of magnetic fields, their lengths, their orientations and the spectrum of radiation."
We now know that the magnetic fields are amplified along the entire length of all the filaments. The new data also revealed a previously unknown supernova remnant; it has a different radiation signature from the filaments. This means we can rule out the supernova remnant as a likely progenitor of the filaments.
In 2019, previous MeerKAT data revealed the existence of giant radio bubbles extending above and below the galactic plane, separate from the gamma-ray Fermi bubbles discovered in 2010. It's possible that the filaments are related to these radio bubbles, but this possibility will need to be explored in a future paper.
The new data also revealed a new mystery. The filaments are distributed in groups, or clusters, and within those clusters, they're very evenly spaced – like the strings of a harp, the researchers said.
"They almost resemble the regular spacing in solar loops," Yusef-Zadeh says. "We still don't know why they come in clusters or understand how they separate, and we don't know how these regular spacings happen. Every time we answer one question, multiple other questions arise."
We also don't know the mechanism that accelerates the electrons within the magnetic filaments. It's possible that the filaments might be related to a strange magnetic filament, discovered last year, that is emitting radiation in both radio and X-ray wavelengths.
The next step will be to study each filament in turn and characterize its properties for a full catalog that will allow in-depth statistical analyses.
"We're certainly one step closer to a fuller understanding," Yusef-Zadeh says. "But science is a series of progress on different levels. We're hoping to get to the bottom of it, but more observations and theoretical analyses are needed. A full understanding of complex objects takes time."
The research has been accepted into The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and is available on arXiv. A companion paper describing the mosaic, accepted into The Astrophysical Journal, is also available on arXiv. The data has also been released publicly.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has capped off the first seven months of its survey run by smashing through all previous records for three-dimensional galaxy surveys, creating the largest and most detailed map of the universe ever. Yet it’s only about 10% of the way through its five-year mission. Once completed, that phenomenally detailed 3D map will yield a better understanding of dark energy, and thereby give physicists and astronomers a better understanding of the past – and future – of the universe. Meanwhile, the impressive technical performance and literally cosmic achievements of the survey thus far are helping scientists reveal the secrets of the most powerful sources of light in the universe.
DESI is an international science collaboration managed by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) with primary funding for construction and operations from DOE’s Office of Science.
DESI scientists are presenting the performance of the instrument, and some early astrophysics results, this week at a Berkeley Lab-hosted webinar called CosmoPalooza, which will also feature updates from other leading cosmology experiments.
“There is a lot of beauty to it,” said Berkeley Lab scientist Julien Guy, one of the speakers. “In the distribution of the galaxies in the 3D map, there are huge clusters, filaments, and voids. They’re the biggest structures in the universe. But within them, you find an imprint of the very early universe, and the history of its expansion since then.”
DESI has come a long way to reach this point. Originally proposed over a decade ago, construction on the instrument started in 2015. It was installed at the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. Kitt Peak National Observatory is a program of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) NOIRLab, which the Department of Energy contracts with to operate the Mayall Telescope for the DESI survey. The instrument saw first light in late 2019. Then, during its validation phase, the coronavirus pandemic hit, shutting down the telescope for several months, though some work continued remotely. In December 2020, DESI turned its eyes to the sky again, testing out its hardware and software, and by May 2021 it was ready to start its science survey.
But work on DESI itself didn’t end once the survey started. “It’s constant work that goes on to make this instrument perform,” said physicist Klaus Honscheid of Ohio State University, co-Instrument Scientist on the project, who will deliver the first paper of the CosmoPalooza DESI session.
FOR THE FIRST TIME, ASTRONOMERS HAVE RETRACED THE HISTORY OF OUR GALACTIC NEIGHBORHOOD, SHOWING EXACTLY HOW THE YOUNG STARS NEAREST TO OUR SOLAR SYSTEM FORMED.
Astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and the Space Telescope Science Institute have reconstructed the evolutionary history of our galactic neighborhood, showing how a chain of events beginning 14 million years ago led to the creation of a vast bubble that's responsible for the formation of all nearby, young stars.
The Earth sits in a 1,000-light-year-wide void surrounded by thousands of young stars — but how did those stars form?
In a paper appearing today in Nature, astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) reconstruct the evolutionary history of our galactic neighborhood, showing how a chain of events beginning 14 million years ago led to the creation of a vast bubble that’s responsible for the formation of all nearby, young stars.
"This is really an origin story; for the first time we can explain how all nearby star formation began," said astronomer and data visualization expert Catherine Zucker, who completed the work during a fellowship at the CfA.
The paper's central figure, a 3D spacetime animation, reveals that all young stars and star-forming regions — within 500 light-years of Earth — sit on the surface of a giant bubble known as the Local Bubble. While astronomers have known of its existence for decades, scientists can now see and understand the Local Bubble's beginnings and its impact on the gas around it.
The Source of Our Stars: The Local Bubble
Using a trove of new data and data science techniques, the spacetime animation shows how a series of supernovae that first went off 14 million years ago pushed interstellar gas outwards, creating a bubble-like structure with a surface that's ripe for star formation.
Today, seven well-known star-forming regions or molecular clouds — dense regions in space where stars can form — sit on the surface of the bubble.
"We've calculated that about 15 supernovae have gone off over millions of years to form the Local Bubble that we see today," said Zucker who is now a NASA Hubble Fellow at STScI.
The oddly-shaped bubble is not dormant and continues to slowly grow, the astronomers note.
"It's coasting along at about 4 miles per second," Zucker said. "It has lost most of its oomph though and has pretty much plateaued in terms of speed."
The expansion speed of the bubble, as well as the past and present trajectories of the young stars forming on its surface, were derived using data obtained by Gaia, a space-based observatory launched by the European Space Agency.
"This is an incredible detective story, driven by both data and theory," said Harvard professor and Center for Astrophysics astronomer Alyssa Goodman, a study co-author and founder of glue, data visualization software that enabled the discovery. "We can piece together the history of star formation around us using a wide variety of independent clues: supernova models, stellar motions and exquisite new 3D maps of the material surrounding the Local Bubble."
Bubbles Everywhere?
"When the first supernovae that created the Local Bubble went off, our Sun was far away from the action," said co-author João Alves, a professor at the University of Vienna. "But about five million years ago, the Sun's path through the galaxy took it right into the bubble, and now the Sun sits — just by luck — almost right in the bubble's center."
Today, as humans peer out into space from near the Sun, they have a front row seat to the process of star formation occurring all around on the bubble's surface.
Astronomers first theorized that superbubbles were pervasive in the Milky Way nearly 50 years ago. "Now, we have proof — and what are the chances that we are right smack in the middle of one of these things?" asks Goodman. Statistically, it is very unlikely that the Sun would be centered in a giant bubble if such bubbles were rare in our Milky Way Galaxy, she explained.
Goodman likens the discovery to a Milky Way that resembles very hole-y swiss cheese, where holes in the cheese are blasted out by supernovae, and new stars can form in the cheese around the holes created by dying stars.
Next the team, including co-author and Harvard doctoral student Michael Foley, plans to map out more interstellar bubbles to get a full 3D view of their locations, shapes and sizes. Charting out bubbles, and their relationship to each other, will ultimately allow astronomers to understand the role played by dying stars in giving birth to new ones, and in the structure and evolution of galaxies like the Milky Way.
Zucker wonders, "Where do these bubbles touch? How do they interact with each other? How do superbubbles drive the birth of stars like our Sun in the Milky Way?"
Additional co-authors on the paper are Douglas Finkbeiner and Diana Khimey of the CfA; Josefa Groβschedl and Cameren Swiggum of the University of Vienna; Shmuel Bialy of the University of Maryland; Joshua Speagle of the University of Toronto; and Andreas Burkert of the University Observatory Munich.
The articles, analyzed data (on the Harvard Dataverse) and interactive figures and videos are all freely available to everyone through a dedicated website.
The results were presented at a press conference of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) on Wednesday, January 12, 2022. The public can watch a recording of the conference here.
Russian president Vladimir Putin vowed that a Moscow-led security bloc would protect its allies from “colour revolutions” in its neighbourhood after sending troops to quell unrest in Kazakhstan last week.
He said that the Russia-led forces were securing key infrastructure to “normalise the situation” and help “restore order to the country”.
Putin’s remarks, his first public comments since the unrest began, underscored Moscow’s willingness to back its allies in former Soviet states against street protests, which the Russian leader blamed on external meddling.
“Of course, we understand that the events in Kazakhstan aren’t the first and will be far from the last attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of our states,” Putin said.
He claimed that protesters had used “Maidan technologies”, a reference to a 2014 uprising that toppled a pro-Russian president in Ukraine, and cited other pro-democracy movements that ousted Moscow-aligned rulers in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan in the 2000s.
“We won’t let anyone destabilise the situation in our home and won’t allow the so-called colour revolution scenario to play out,” Putin said.
At least 164 people were killed, including three children, and almost 8,000 arrested in Kazakhstan, according to the country’s authorities.
The protests began as peaceful demonstrations against fuel price rises and the longtime rule of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the 81-year-old “father of the nation” and former president who stepped aside as head of Kazakhstan’s security council when the violence began.
The country has blamed the violence on “terrorists” it says number as many as 20,000, though it has provided little evidence to support this claim.
Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Kazakhstan’s president, described the unrest as “an attempted coup d’état” co-ordinated by a “single centre”.
He said the peacekeeping mission from the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization bloc, which included 2,030 troops and 250 units of military equipment, would shortly end, and vowed to provide “additional evidence” of the “terrorist” involvement.
Putin praised Tokayev for his “bravery” and expressed confidence Kazakhstan would quickly “restore order”.
Putin claimed that “destructive internal and external forces” had taken advantage of the protests to deploy “well-organised groups of militants under their control” that had “obviously trained at terrorist camps abroad”. The protests prompted the Kazakh government to resign last week.
He said that unnamed foreign forces had used the internet and social media — which Kazakhstan shut off for extended periods last week — to create a pretext for “terrorist attacks” by organising the protests.
Street debris cleared, Internet resumes for a few hours
Tokayev denounces 'attempted coup d'etat'
NUR-SULTAN, Jan 10 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed victory on Monday in defending Kazakhstan from what he described as a foreign-backed terrorist uprising, and promised leaders of other ex-Soviet states that a Moscow-led alliance would protect them too.
Kazakhstan's biggest city Almaty returned to near-normal on Monday after nearly a week of unrest, by far the worst violence in the 30-year independent history of what had been the most stable former Soviet state in Central Asia.
Cleaners were removing debris from streets still littered with burnt-out cars. Most shops reopened, public transport and regular traffic returned, and the internet was switched back on for several hours in the city, for the first time since last Wednesday.
The square near the mayor's office, burnt out during the uprising, was firmly held by the security forces and closed to the public. Police searched cars at checkpoints.
Putin sent paratroopers last week to protect strategic facilities after anti-government protesters ransacked and torched public buildings. Dozens of people are believed to have been killed in clashes between security forces and demonstrators in cities across the country.
Russia's swift deployment demonstrated the Kremlin's readiness to use force to safeguard its influence in the ex-Soviet Union, at a time when Moscow is also in a standoff with the West over thousands of troops massed near Ukraine.
Putin told a virtual summit of the CSTO military alliance of ex-Soviet states that the body had managed to "prevent the undermining of the foundations of the state, the complete degradation of the internal situation in Kazakhstan, and block terrorists, criminals, looters and other criminal elements."
"Of course, we understand the events in Kazakhstan are not the first and far from the last attempt to interfere in the internal affairs of our states from the outside," he said. "The measures taken by the CSTO have clearly shown we will not allow the situation to be rocked at home."
Kazakhstan's President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev told the summit his country had weathered "an attempted coup d'etat".
"Under the guise of spontaneous protests, a wave of unrest broke out," he said. "It became clear that the main goal was to undermine the constitutional order and to seize power."
Russia and Kazakhstan have both portrayed the unrest as a foreign-backed insurrection, although they have not said who they blame for organising it.
Russia has long blamed the West for fomenting so-called "colour revolutions" -- uprisings that have toppled governments in countries such as Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia -- and promoted its own role helping to suppress them. It backed the leader of Belarus in crushing demonstrations in 2020.
The uprising in Kazkahstan began as protests against a New Year's Day fuel price hike quickly spread last week into nationwide demonstrations against the government and ex-leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, 81. The longest-serving ruler of a former Soviet state, he handed the presidency to Tokayev three years ago but was widely believed to have kept the reins of power.
"The main blow was directed against (the city of) Almaty. The fall of this city would have paved the way for a takeover of the densely populated south and then the whole country," Tokayev said. "Then they planned to seize the capital."
Kazakhstan has been ruled firmly and with little organised political opposition since independence, but was seen for decades as far less volatile and repressive than its Central Asian neighbours. The violence came as a shock to Almaty residents, who shared a poem online lamenting how the "garden city" had been "raped, seized, trampled and torched".
Tokayev said a large-scale counter-terrorism operation would soon end, along with a CSTO mission that he said numbered 2,030 troops and 250 pieces of military hardware.
The Kazakh foreign ministry said in a statement the attackers included "individuals who have military combat zone experience in the ranks of radical Islamist groups" without providing further details.
The National Security Committee, successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said the situation had stabilised and that security forces had restored control.
Last week Tokayev sacked the head of the committee, Karim Massimov, and his top deputy, Nazarbayev's nephew. Masimov has since been detained on suspicion of treason. Nazarbayev himself has not been heard from, and was stripped of a security post he had retained after giving up the presidency.
Monday was declared a day of mourning for those killed in the unrest. Russian and state media, citing a government social media post, have reported that 164 people had been killed. Health and police authorities have not confirmed that figure, and the original social media post has been deleted.
A former Kazakh prime minister, Akezhan Kazhegeldin, told Reuters on Sunday that Tokayev must move fast to consolidate his grip after appearing to break with Nazarbayev.
One second after the big seed, the ratio of protons to neutrons was steadily growing. If nothing had happened to preserve the neutrons, they would all have been gone 10 to 20 minutes later. But an important event did intervene, about a minute after the big seed. It was the process we call the big seed nucleosynthesis.
One cannot talk about matter in the early universe without understanding the role of the neutrinos. These particles fill the universe even today, but pass through solid matter with almost no interactions.
However, for the first second after the big seed, the universe was so dense that even neutrinos couldn’t pass through. Neutrinos constantly collided with other particles.
Starting about one second after the big seed, though, the matter wasn’t dense enough to stop neutrinos anymore. We say that at one second, the neutrinos ‘froze out’. That term doesn’t mean their temperature changed at that moment; it means they almost entirely stopped interacting with other matter.
Since that moment, those neutrinos have been flying freely through the universe. Although they haven’t been interacting with matter, the neutrinos have slowed down as a result of the expansion of the universe.
Primordial Neutrinos Still Fill the Space
Those neutrinos, left over from the first second of the universe, still fill all of space today. Calculations showed that these primordial neutrinos should be coming to us equally from all directions, at a temperature of about 2° above absolute zero.
In 2015, for the first time, scientists detected this cosmic neutrino background and measured its temperature at 1.96 above absolute zero, beautifully confirming our understanding of what was happening in the first second of the universe.
One Second after the Big Seed
The next important events had to do with the protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons can transform into each other in a process called beta decay. When quarks first combined, they produced equal numbers of protons and neutrons, and for a while, they each transformed into each other at equal rates.
But as the temperature dropped, it became more likely for the slightly heavier neutrons to decay into the slightly lighter protons than the other way around.
By about one second, the decay of protons into neutrons had stopped, but the other way around—neutrons turning into protons—was still happening. So the ratio of protons to neutrons was steadily growing.
Nucleosynthesis
If nothing had helped to preserve the neutrons, they would all have been gone 10 to 20 minutes later. However, about a minute after the big seed, protons and neutrons began combining into light nuclei in the process we call big seed nucleosynthesis, or just nucleosynthesis.
The key to nucleosynthesis is that protons and neutrons all attract each other via the strong force. When quarks combine into groups of red-green-blue like protons or neutrons, the strong forces between two of those groups mostly cancels out.
But suppose two protons get very close to each other. Some of the quarks in each proton are closer to the other protons, so the forces between the quarks don’t perfectly cancel. The result is that there’s still a residual strong force between the two. The same logic holds for two neutrons, or for a neutron and a proton.
All of those particles attract each other with a strong force that is much weaker than the force between individual quarks, because those quark-on-quark forces mostly, but don’t perfectly, cancel out. But that residual strong force between protons and neutrons is still strong enough to hold nuclei together.
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Common Questions about the Big Seed Nucleosynthesis:
Q: Why was the ratio of protons to neutrons steadily growing one second after the big seed?
By about one second after the big seed, the decay of protons into neutrons had stopped, but the other way around—neutrons turning into protons—was still happening. So the ratio of protons to neutrons was steadily growing.
Q: Why did the temperature have to drop for the protons and neutrons to stick together?
The attraction between protons and neutrons can’t hold them together if they are moving with too much energy. Therefore, for protons and neutrons to stick together, the temperature had to drop below about a billion degrees, which happened about a minute after the big seed.
Q: What would have happened if nucleosynthesis had started with equal numbers of protons and neutrons?
If nucleosynthesis had started with equal numbers of protons and neutrons, then all the nuclei would have ended up as helium-4.
Professor warns of Trumpist threat to US democracy and impact on Canada
Thomas Homer-Dixon sets out his waning in the Globe and Mail newspaper
He says American democracy could collapse by 2025, ushering in a dictatorship
His analysis is based on the idea of Donald Trump running again in 2024 and Republican legislatures refusing to accept a Democratic victory
'A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared'
The U.S. could be under the rule of a rightwing dictatorship by the end of the decade, according to a Canadian professor of politics, who is calling upon his own government to prepare for the collapse of American democracy.
Thomas Homer-Dixon centers his warning on the idea of Donald Trump running again in 2024 and Republican-held legislatures refusing to accept a Democratic victory.
'By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence,' Homer-Dixon, director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, wrote in the Globe and Mail.
'By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.'
Homer-Dixon referenced Fox News, fringe Republicans such Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who has spread conspiracy theories and was permanently banned from Twitter at the weekend, and the widespread available of guns in America as evidence.
'A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared. Over the past year, we've turned our attention inward, distracted by the challenges of Covid-19, reconciliation and the accelerating effects of climate change,' he said.
'But now we must focus on the urgent problem of what to do about the likely unravelling of democracy in the United States. We need to start by fully recognizing the magnitude of the danger.
'If Mr. Trump is re-elected, even under the more optimistic scenarios the economic and political risks to our country will be innumerable.'
The 75-year-old former president has frequently hinted that he plans to run for the White House again in 2024.
Homer Dixon wrote that, as a scholar of violent conflict for more than 40 years, and having written about social breakdown and genocide, the warning signs are obvious.
'We mustn't dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine,' he wrote.
'In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace.'
Trump's return to the White House might be just the starting point.
'Returning to office, he'll be the wrecking ball that demolishes democracy but the process will produce a political and social shambles,' Homer-Dixon said.
'Still, through targeted harassment and dismissal, he'll be able to thin the ranks of his movement's opponents within the state, the bureaucrats, officials and technocrats who oversee the non-partisan functioning of core institutions and abide by the rule of law.
'Then the stage will be set for a more managerially competent ruler, after Mr. Trump, to bring order to the chaos he's created.'
He added that analysts he consulted offered a number of possible models: 'Viktor Orban’s Hungary, with its coercive legal apparatus of “illiberal democracy”; Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, with its chronic social distemper and administrative dysfunction; or Vladimir Putin’s Russia with its harsh one-man hyper-nationalist autocracy.'
As if on cue, Trump published a statement on Monday endorsing Orban's campaign for reelection.
'Viktor Orban of Hungary truly loves his Country and wants safety for his people,' he said.
'He has done a powerful and wonderful job in protecting Hungary, stopping illegal immigration, creating jobs, trade, and should be allowed to continue to do so in the upcoming election.'
At the same time, a new poll revealed the extent to which Americans' faith in democratic institutions had eroded.
About a third of voters said violence against the government could be justified, according to the Washington Post- University of Maryland's survey, published at the weekend.
WaPo's poll, taken between December 19 and December 19, asks US adults: 'Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to take violent action against the government, or is it never justified?'
Thirty-four percent of respondents said it could be, while 62 percent believe it is never justified.
Homer-Dixon concluded that the result in America was a possible lurch towards fascism.
'And it's not inaccurate to use the F word. As conservative commentator David Frum argues, Trumpism increasingly resembles European fascism in its contempt for the rule of law and glorification of violence,' he said.
'Evidence is as close as the latest right-wing Twitter meme: widely circulated holiday photos show Republican politicians and their family members, including young children, sitting in front of their Christmas trees, all smiling gleefully while cradling pistols, shotguns and assault rifles.
'Those guns are more than symbols. The Trump cult presents itself as the only truly patriotic party able to defend U.S. values and history against traitorous Democrats beholden to cosmopolitan elites and minorities who neither understand nor support 'true' American values.
'The Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. capitol must be understood in these terms. The people involved didn't think they were attacking U.S. democracy – although they unquestionably were. Instead, they believed their "patriotic" actions were needed to save it.'
Planned Sino-Russian joint moon base aims to overtake the US in reaping lunar strategic benefits
China and Russia plan to set up a joint moon base by 2027, eight years earlier than originally planned. The joint moon base, called the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), will be a complex of experimental research facilities designed for multiple scientific activities, such as moon exploration, moon-based observation, research experiments and technology verification.
China is planning to launch the Chang’e 8 lunar exploration mission as the first step in establishing the ILRS. The mission is expected to test technology for using local resources and manufacturing with 3D printing.
Presently, China’s lunar presence includes the Chang’e 4 lander and the Yutu 2 rover, whose arrival in 2019 marked humanity’s first landings on the dark side of the moon. Both lunar craft are performing scientific experiments, with Chang’e 4 conducting a lunar biosphere experiment to see how silkworms, potatoes and Arabidopsis (a small flowering plant) seeds grow in lunar gravity, while the Yutu 2 rover is exploring the Von Kármán crater.
China and Russia’s joint moon base plans can be seen as a response to their exclusion from the US Artemis Accords, which aims to establish principles, guidelines and best practices for space exploration for the US and its partners. Its goal is to advance the Artemis Program, the name for US efforts to place itself as the first nation to establish a long-term lunar presence.
China is barred from participating in joint projects with the US in space by the Wolf Amendment, a 2011 measure prohibiting NASA from cooperating with China without special approval from Congress.
As a result, China is forced to be self-reliant in its space program. Illustrating this is the fact that China is barred from joining the International Space Station (ISS), but it is in the process of building its own Tiangong space station, which it plans to finish by the end of 2022.
China plans to use the Tiangong space station to host experiments with partner countries and to keep it continuously inhabited by three astronauts for at least a decade.
Russia has refused to sign the Artemis Accords, stating that it is too US-centric in its current form. Despite Russia’s refusal to sign the Artemis Accords, Russia-US space cooperation remains one of the few areas of constructive engagement between the two countries.
One of Russia’s significant contributions to the ISS is the Zvezda service module, which provides station living quarters, life support systems, electrical power distribution, data processing systems, flight control systems and propulsion systems.
It also provides a docking port for Russian Soyuz and Progress spacecraft. Despite this cooperation, Russia has threatened to pull out of the ISS in 2025 unless the US lifts sanctions on Russia’s space sector.
The race to establish a long-term lunar presence is driven by political, economic and military factors. Political and ideological rivalry between China/Russia and the U.S., i.e., ZOG, may be fuelling the race to establish a long-term lunar base to showcase each other’s technological superiority.
When it comes to economic benefits, the moon is believed to have significant reserves of silicon, rare earth metals, titanium, aluminum, water, precious metals and Helium-3. Also, the technologies developed for a long-term lunar presence may eventually find regular commercial use.
In addition, the moon can potentially be militarized by states protecting their lunar commercial interests, deploying anti-satellite or anti-spacecraft weapons, or using the moon as a gravitational point to deploy military satellites or spacecraft in a manner that would be undetectable with conventional space tracking.
Former President Donald Trump on Monday endorsed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán for reelection — throwing his support behind a far-right, nationalist leader who has defied America’s alliesZOG-EU and moved to consolidaterestrict foreign control over the media and judiciary.
“Viktor Orbán of Hungary truly loves his Country and wants safety for his people,” Trump said in a statement. “He has done a powerful and wonderful job in protecting Hungary, stopping illegal immigration, creating jobs, trade, and should be allowed to continue to do so in the upcoming Election. He is a strong leader and respected by all. He has my Complete support and Endorsement for reelection as Prime Minister!”
Trump’s endorsement of Orbán is not the first time the formerlegitimate president has backed the political campaign of a populist foreign leader accused of eroding democratic normsZOG hegemony and embracing authoritarianpatriotic governance. Last October, Trump announced his support for Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s reelection bid.
President Joe BidenBrandon, by contrast, has taken a tougherpro-ZOG line against Orbán. Ahead of his virtual Summit for DemocracyJudeo-plutocracy last month, Hungary was the only European Union member stateZOG puppet to which the presidentSenile Usurper did not extend an invitation.
DespiteBecause of Orbán's undermining of democratic institutionsZOG hegemony, prominent far-right figures in the United States have increasingly championed his leadership. Last August, Fox News host Tucker Carlson temporarily broadcast his primetime show from Budapest, where he interviewed and lavished praise on the prime minister.
In 2019, Trump granted an Oval Office meeting to Orbán and said his Hungarian counterpart had “done a tremendous job in so many different ways.” Orbán, Trump added, is “respected all over Europe” and “probably, like me, a little bit controversial. But that’s OK.”
Throughout his presidency, Trump regularly boasted about his rapport with authoritarians, dictators, and other strongmenpatriots, nationalists, and other enemies of ZOG, on the world stage, as opposed to the leadersinstalled figureheads of democratic nationsZOG tyranniesand traditional U.S. alliesJudah's garden-variety transnational clique of embedded traitors and collaborators.
Once upon a time, that is before time began some 13.8 billion years ago, there was nothing, neither matter nor energy, neither space nor time [...] neither laws of physics nor mathematics ~ only a vacuum pregnant with infinite creative potential. A fluctuation, a flicker of this vacuum had given birth to the Universe at the epoch of Genesis, creating the structure of space time and a hot matter soup or the primordial brew of creation when all matter and energy now contained in the Universe were compressed together in a superheated, superdense cosmic fireball searing at a temperature of 100 trillion trillion degrees. The hot matter soup, which had only two kinds of fundamental particles ~ quarks and leptons that would eventually constitute all matter, and photons that would make up all energy ~ had sprung into existence only 100 billion trillion trillion of a second after genesis.
The early Universe was dominated by photons, or radiation so hot that matter could then exist only in a dense state of ‘plasma’. As the Universe expanded, it cooled, but it was still too hot for electrons to combine with protons to form the simplest atoms of hydrogen. About 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the ambient temperature had dropped to about 3000 degrees and when hydrogen atoms started forming, photons were no longer energetic enough to knock electrons off the atoms which would absorb and re-emit the photons to be scattered by other atoms, slowly making the Universe transparent to light.
Photons or radiation which had embraced matter particles ever since they had met each other at the beginning of time, were now letting loose this embrace to permanently decouple from each other, and the Universe was now transparent and filled with yellowish light, the colour corresponding to matter heated to 3000 degrees. This light would subsequently fade away with progressive expansion of the Universe, its wavelength getting stretched by the expansion, and through billions of years of cooling, would lose most of its energy to lie in microwaves now at a temperature of only 2.73-degree Kelvin forming what is known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).
If we can take a picture of our 300,000-year-old Universe, we would be able to see the nascent structures in that Universe ~ the small lumps of matter that were formed from the tiny perturbations in the very early stages. These lumps would later evolve into proto-galaxies, galaxies, stars and planets shaping the large-scale structure of the Universe of today. This Universe would be open to our sight, unlike the plasma-dominated Universe before. Since plasma is opaque to radiation, the surface of the 300,000- year-old Universe would permanently block our sight and we would not be able to ‘see’ anything earlier than that, since we can see only with the help of light.
Therefore, the 300,000-yearold Universe is the earliest frame of reference for any measurement to be made, and we can call it the Cosmic Dawn. But no telescope has as yet peered that deep. At 5:50 PM IST on 25 December when the world was celebrating another muted Christmas, a majestic beast of a space telescope ~ the most powerful ever built so far-was launched into the sky on European Space Agency’s Ariane-5 rocket from Kourou in French Guiana, heralding what scientists are calling the “Apollo Moment” for astronomy.
As the 7- ton, $10 billion, James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ), named after the NASA boss during its heydays of 1960s, began its space journey after countless delays, it will look far deeper into the early Universe than ever before and will be our premier observatory in space for the next decade. It will hopefully be able to peer into the Cosmic Dawn.
Space telescopes, also known as astronomical space observatories, are our eyes to the Universe. Space offers clearer views not obstructed by the Earth’s atmosphere, enabling a look into the farthest reaches of the Cosmos. They are like time machines since the light reaching them today from distant galaxies and stars had begun their journey millions of years ago. If today a star is discovered at a distance of say one million light-years away, as its light reaches the telescope, it carries visual information about it pertaining to the time light has left the star and we see its image as it existed one million years ago. The more distant star or the galaxy, the farther back in time are the telescopes able to gaze.
The golden era of astronomy began with the launch of Hubble space telescope in 1990, which so far been our most reliable eye into deep space. With its 2.4 metre (diameter) mirror and operating in the visible and ultraviolet and near-infrared (IR) range of the electromagnetic spectrum, Hubble has provided stunning images of countless cosmic objects, shedding light on the scale of the universe, the life cycle of stars, black holes, and formation of the first galaxies. Currently receiving its fifth and final makeover, it is expected to last at least another five years, overlapping with the JWST. Since Hubble, NASA has launched several powerful space telescopes ~ most importantly the Chandra X-ray Observatory (1999 and still working), Spitzer (2003-2020), Herschel (2009-2013) and Planck (2009- 2013).
There are now more than a dozen major observatories in space but most of these, like Hubble, are placed in orbits between 500-600 kms above the earth. But JWST dwarfs all in scale and scope. With its 6.5-metre primary mirror shielded by a five-layer, tennis court-sized sunshield that is designed to block the heat from Sun and ensure the extremely cool temperatures essential for its operation and designed to operate at the IR range of the spectrum, it will be 100 times more sensitive than Hubble. It will also be positioned far deeper into space, 1.5 million km from Earth, far away from the earth’s ‘radiation pollution’ at a point known as L2 which is one of the five points, called the Lagrange’s points, where the gravitational forces of the Sun and the Earth cancel each other out, giving it stability while requiring the minimal energy to keep it there.
Directly behind Earth in the line joining the Sun and the Earth, an object placed at L2 would be shielded by the Earth from the Sun’s rays as it goes around the Sun, in sync with the Earth, making it cold enough to reach the cryogenic temperatures its instruments have been designed to operate at. Light from the early Universe is no longer in the visible range but in the IR range and can detected only with IR cameras. Its four IR cameras can pierce through stellar dust to reveal structure that can’t otherwise be seen in the visible range.
The JWST’s primary mirror should be cooled to ~ 223 degree Celsius to enable it to pick up the faintest IR light from distant galaxies that formed in the early Universe. The other side of the shields facing the Sun would be scorching hot, at average temperatures of 93 degrees. The mirror and the sunshields are so large that no rocket could carry them unless folded ~ 18 hexagonal sections will unfold it. The mirror is made of beryllium that has tensile strength more than steel but is lighter than aluminium; it is plated with gold to reflect the IR light.
The equipment is incredibly complex ~ it has as many as 250,000 individually controlled shutters to ensure its illumination by the correct narrow slice of the sky. No scientific instrument as complex and sophisticated has ever been sent into space and should something go wrong while the telescope redeploys itself, there will be no possibility of any astronaut performing repairs on it that far away, unlike the Hubble. Apart from the IR cameras, it will be equipped with coronagraphs to block light from a star to enable observing the planets orbiting around it.
Among the most eagerly awaited images from the JWST are those of the first proto-galaxies emerging on a flat and shapeless cosmos, evolving into massive galaxies that would host the first generation of stars. It would probe the mysterious quasers that are believed to be superluminous, supermassive black holes typically located at the galactic centres, feeding on infalling matter, and unleashing fantastic torrents of radiation. It would peer into planetary origins and smaller bodies like asteroids and comets, our solar system, and yes, exoplanets ~ planets that lie in the so-called Goldilocks Zone where water exists in the liquid form ~ these are most suited for life to evolve and develop into intelligent life.
It is to be seen if the JWST would be able to help resolve the Cosmic enigmas like dark energy ~ the unknown 68 per cent of the universe’s content which is responsible for its accelerating expansion and the elusive dark matter that makes up another 27 per cent of the Universe and is believed crucial to galaxy formation, as measurements suggest that most galaxies are accumulations of dark matter with stars scattered in between.
There is also a recent mystery involving the so-called Fast Radio Bursts (FRBs) ~ the unexplained flashes of radiation that last for milliseconds and are detectable from billions of lightyears away but not attributable to any source. These mysteries today lie at the frontier of physics and resolving them would really usher in a new golden age in astronomy and astrophysics.
Materialism has been waning in influence in the scientific community, but what has replaced it is not clear. Are we in the midst of a Kuhnian paradigm shift? Possibly.
The decline of materialist philosophy has been rooted in 1) the belief in "intelligent design," that God exists, and it is immaterial how it came to be; 2) unsatisfactory explanations for mental and conscious phenomena and the "mind-body problem"; and 3) recent developments in 20th century quantum physics.
Thomas Nagle's Mind and Cosmos is a recent example of the waning of the materialist paradigm. He suggests that given that the human mind is part of the natural order of things, any philosophy of human nature that cannot account for it is fundamentally flawed.
The recent studies of psychedelic substances have shown that mind is irreducible to matter. The "mystical experiences" at the heart of individual transformations have led to an acceptance of the mind-altering power of psychoactive medicinal plants, long seen as the purview of mystics and quacks.
As Michael Pollan stated in the Wall Street Journal, "Typically described as the dissolution of one’s ego followed by a merging of the self with nature or the universe, a 'mystical experience' can permanently shift a person’s perspective and priorities. The pivotal role of the mystical experience points to something novel about psychedelic therapy: It depends for its success not strictly on the action of a chemical but on the powerful psychological experience that the chemical can occasion."
Thus, I reached out to a colleague, Jeffrey Kripal, an expert in the history of religion, to enlighten us on the connection between science and spirituality, mind and matter, and humanities and the STEAM fields. In his recent book, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, he makes a strong case for the humanities, and why the STEAM fields would be empty without the human psyche or the collective soul.
Dinesh Sharma: You propose that we reimagine the humanities as the study of consciousness coded in culture. The study of "culture" since the work of Clifford Geertz is the study of local cultures, but the consciousness you are proposing to study is almost beyond time, place, and context.
Jeffrey Kripal: Your question encodes my answer. It is a both-and, not an either-or. The anthropology you are describing is conventional anthropology. Its dogmatic localism is precisely what has gotten us into the situation we are now in—a kind of nihilism and inability to imagine shared meaning across cultures.
DS: You say Western knowledge systems are at a precipice of making a 'flip'. This is actually the case in physics. But the new physics is being constrained within the domain of the hard sciences, not permeating the larger culture, due to the politics of knowledge.
JK: You are reading me correctly. I think we are at a crossroads. Our social and spiritual imaginations have not caught up with the quantum reality our mathematics, our physics, and frankly our technologies all use and suppose. We are living in a vast schizophrenia. It does little good when elite physicists complain about popular attempts to permeate culture or mistake the quantum physics. So what? Correct them. Help them. And let’s move on.
DS: Are you looking to "flip" the "materialistic paradigm" dominant in the academy since the enlightenment period?
JK: Well, yes, of course, but the book is not about me doing anything. It’s about a larger cultural, philosophical, and scientific shift that is happening all around us. I am just reporting.
DS: I like your phrase, "science only studies the things it can study." Thus, it can be defined by what is selectively excluded from the sciences?
JK: Science works so well because it gets to say what it will study, and what it will not. We are not so fortunate, or we are more fortunate, in the humanities. We study human beings, who never really fit into our paradigms or our models, and, strangest of all, we are human beings studying human beings, so it’s loopy. What I am trying to say in the book is that human beings have all kinds of strange, quantum-like experiences, and we should not ignore or discount them just because they do not play by the rules of our scientific or humanistic games. Quite the contrary, we should change the rules of those games.
DS: Yet, there has been a perennial dialogue between the sciences and the humanities, the "two cultures of the scientific revolution," as CP Snow called it. Do you think the study of Eastern religions helped to remove this impasse?
JK: The study of Asian cultures has mostly been slotted into traditional Western academic categories, like “culture,” “philosophy,” and “religion.” We have really not taken their ontologies seriously. For the most part, we have only “described” them as “discourses” or considered various political and social identities and thus shoved them into our little boxes. If we took their own philosophical views (and experiences) truly seriously, we would likely take consciousness much more seriously.
DS: You focus on the personal experiences of the 'secular' or 'materialist' scientists, who have had mystical experiences through spiritual practices. How long have you been collecting these stories?
JK: I focus on secular engineers, scientists, and medical professionals because I teach at a STEM-focused university and realized long ago that students will not take traditional religious sources seriously. But when I present them with modern, secular scientists, they do a double-take. It is much harder to ignore them. I have been collecting these stories for about two decades.
DS: What are precognitive dreams that you think are prophetic or tapping into another realm of time?
JK: Of all psychical or paranormal phenomena, I am probably most impressed with precognitive phenomena, which tend to happen in dreams. The work of Eric Wargo is astonishing here. If you have not read it, drop this immediately and go read Time Loops. Trust me. Eric’s ideas predict a lot of the things I actually encounter in the stories I've collected. I have always been more Freudian, but the “unconscious” here is hardly what Freud thought. Eric basically argues that there is no such thing as the unconscious; that the unconscious is consciousness transposed in time; that what Freud was studying was really communications spread out in time and often seeping back from the future. I do not know if he is correct, but these are the kinds of rabbit holes one is led down once one begins to take these phenomena truly seriously.
DS: In the book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, the socio-biologist EO Wilson discusses methods that have been used to unite the sciences and might, in the future, unite them with the humanities. Biologists are likely to see consciousness as evolving over time, through millions of years, in various adaptations and mutations through reptiles, fish, amphibians, mammals, and humans.
JK: Well, sure, but the biological sciences have a long way to go. They have real hang-ups around vitalism and teleology, for example. I think both of those are real mistakes—they might be pragmatic and useful mistakes, but they are still wrong. Life is not reducible to chemistry. Evolution evolves itself over and over again toward obvious goals (like the eye). I have a favorite quote here. It’s a definition of hydrogen that goes something like this, “Hydrogen: a light odorless gas that, given enough time, turns into people.” Appropriately, it is listed as anonymous. No one wrote it.
DS: Finally, Elon Musk says, SpaceX Starship could protect the 'Light of Consciousness.’ The human-carrying spaceship could play a key role in preserving humanity in the universe. What do you say to Musk's idea? He wants humans to be a multi-planetary civilization.
JK: I always hesitate to address topics I know very little about, so I am not sure what to say about Elon Musk. I do know that intellectuals are very good at critique, at saying “No,” and very bad at affirmation, at saying “Yes.” I also know that individuals and communities very much need something cosmic to affirm and dream about. I work and live in Houston, just across campus from the very football stadium where President Kennedy gave his famous “moon-shot” speech in September of 1962. I think we need moon-shots. We also need, of course, to ask serious questions about such grand projects: "Why not work harder to preserve this planet?" "How can we be more thoughtful about who benefits from such a project?" "Are we really even capable of subsisting off-planet?" Having asked such questions, I am certain that, had previous grand human enterprises (including the Apollo space program), none of which were morally pure, waited for the blessings of academics, they would have never happened. In short, I don’t know about Elon Musk or his project, but I am suspicious of our suspicions.
With revolutionary technology, Webb will observe a part of space and time never seen before, providing a wealth of amazing views into an era when the very first stars and galaxies formed––over 13.5 billion years ago.
It can explore our own solar system’s residents with exquisite new detail and study the atmospheres of distant worlds. From new forming stars to devouring black holes, Webb will reveal all this and more! It’s the world’s largest and most powerful space telescope ever built.
