Transit of Venus

It gives me great comfort to think that no matter how grossly the revolting barbarian war-mongers like Barack Obama or Angela Merkel or Hu Jintao mess things up here on Earth, the planets orbit, stars shine, life thrives (despite all human efforts to annihilate the living planet).

Here, then, is my thrill today, Tuesday, 5 June 2012. The Transit of Venus, taken at about 7:30 pm, Eastern time.

You can see Venus in the upper right quadrant of the sun. Through the clouds and roughly about the middle of the Sun, you can see some sunspots.

Our Place in the Universe

Great visualization of our place in the universe developed by the Hayden Planetarium and The American Museum of Natural History.

NASA's Messenger Spacecraft Flies by Mercury

Today, September 29th, the Messenger spacecraft will approach to within 142 miles (about 229 km) of the surface of Mercury. That's damn close — closer than many satellites are to Earth's surface.

Using the freeware Celestia, I created this image of what Mercury and the Sun would look like at a distance of 3000 kilometers, much further away than Messenger will be. The Sun looks a lot bigger there. Mercury is just 58 million km from the Sun, as opposed to Earth's 150 million km.
Further down, check out the comparison of how the Sun looks here on Earth with how it looks on Mercury (courtesy of messenger-education.org or here too). Click on the images to see full-size.

A Heap of Humans

This courtesy of entomologist and great biodiversity E. O. Wilson:

Take all humans on earth — all 6.5 billion of us — and log-stack us, we humans would fill a cube just 1 mile on a side. One cubic mile of humans on the whole earth. So few humans in many senses, yet each of us, on average, now requires roughly 24 acres of Earth's surface to support our consumption (much more than 24 acres for those of us in the US and much much less for those in the poorest nations).

That entire cube could fit into the Grand Canyon.

This little mass of humanity is annhilating life at a rate greater than any natural disaster in the history of the planet.

Better Living . . . Through Science! (or How to Save the Earth Without Solving the Problem)

Scientists around the world, some begrungingly, recognize the problem of global warming. Granted, "intelligent design" scientists (1, 2) affiliated with Republicons and the Bush administration are still trying to prove that the Earth is just 6,000 years old. The vast majority of the scientific community, however, has moved from trying to convince the Palinites (aka, idiots or blockheads) to working on what to do.

Now, some might think that if you have a problem like, say, smoking that has bad consequences, one obvious course is to stop doing the thing that causes trouble . . . stop smoking. In the case of the global environment, stop pumping millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

But this is the age of The Modern Human or, as discussed some time ago, Homo funestus — Dead Man or Fatal Human. Why solve a problem when you can balance it out with a new problem?

Thus many scientists are now knocking heads to come up with geo-engineering schemes that might reduce the impact of global warming. Here are some of the brilliant ideas:

• Mirrors in space, to deflect sunlight away from the earth, previously tried in The Simpsons. Whether Fox or Matt Groening will seek patent protection remains to be seen.
• More pollution or global sunblock. Seed the atmosphere with still more particles to block light from reaching the Earth's surface. Previously tried in Jimmy Neutron, a 3D animation show for kids.
• Iron the ocean. Salt the ocean with iron filings to promote growth of plankton that absorb CO2. How this works I have no idea.

Once upon a time, science took great ideas from great science fiction, as in geosynchronous satellites from Arthur C. Clarke. Times have changed.

Nevertheless, scientists are brimming with novel novelties. Still, missing from this impressive list is a brilliant idea recently proposed by yours truly — Earth 2. This is far and away the the most absurd, most implausible and, most importantly, most expensive and therefore most best idea for Saving the Earth Without Actually Solving the Problem. I urge all to contact Congress, especially our most right-wing and dimmest Senators and Representatives, to promote this option.

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NOTES
1. Behe, Michael. 'Professor' of Biochemistry at Lehigh 'University' and Senior CSC Fellow at the 'Discovery' 'Institute'.
2. Discovery Institute.
3. Center for Science and Culture.
4. "Climate damage science studied" in The Guardian, Thursday, 30 October 2008.

Homo funestus — The End of Life on Earth

One quarter of all mammalian species on Earth face extinction. One quarter.

So it's an overstatement to say humans are destroying all life on Earth — so far. Still, the narcissistic Homo sapiens may be interested to learn that it is on the endangered list. The BBC has the story on endangered mammals.

My own view for some time has been that Homo sapiens would be better named Homo funestus or Homo fatalis.

We are a modern equivalent of the sabre tooth cat. Our massive brains are the product of competing and incompatible selective pressures. On one hand, a brain well-suited to problem solving, tool creation, etc., serves well to advance the survival of an organism — us — that is otherwise quite ill-adapted — weak, slow, poor vision, poor hearing, poor olfaction, easily hunted. . . .

But, as the history of the past two or three thousand years makes clear, this large brain has also enabled a war-like self-destructiveness. No other species so rapidly annihilates not just one habitat but all of them.

See also

• the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
• CNN story
• New York Times
• Scientific American