Tag: Real Science

Logo from the Planet of Mystery GoFundMe

I am lucky enough to live in a small city with a planetarium – one which had an amazing astronomer named Jim Craig running its programming for over 20 years. This guy geeks science so hard he would go to writer’s conventions state-wide and be on science panel after science panel on his weekends off, because science. He has a tattoo of NASA. When he was let go from the day job, he immediately pounded feet to his computer and started making those astronomy videos he used to make for the planetarium and local school system at home. He named his new production company “Planet of Mystery” and started creating its first program “Red Planet Rising”. The aim is to have low-cost videos available to planetariums, science centers, schools, and other people and entities interested in life, the universe, and everything.

I think if you cut Mr. Craig, he would bleed starlight.

Unfortunately starlight doesn’t pay the bills, or, more specifically the computing power to crunch the videos in any meaningful time frame. If you’re interested in helping out a proven educator provide low-cost quality videos, please consider the Planet of Mystery GoFundMe campaign. Even $10 can make a difference.

The link for the GoFundMe campaign is: https://www.gofundme.com/planetofmystery

Image courtesy of zirconicusso at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Oh, no – The Dragon is Coming!!!

On Monday August 21st, a solar eclipse will be visible coast-to-coast. North Carolina will be covered from 1 pm to 4 pm with the height about 2:45

NASA has a website dedicated to Solar Eclipses – find out more about what is coming here: https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/solar.html

Fast, Faster, Fastest

Unless faster-than-light travel becomes a reality, the true reality of space will be very long voyages.

Those who ply humanity’s trade routes have pulled long transients for time immemorial. Christopher Columbus took two months on his voyage and faced mutiny. The silk road from China to Rome took two long years out of a merchant’s life. The longest regularly schedule plane flight of today takes seventeen hours as of February 2017 (from Doha, Qatar to Auckland, New Zealand). Cargo ships can take nearly 30 days to go across the Pacific, and one traveling from Europe to Australia can push 40 days.

The closest exo-planet humanity has found at this time is 4.25 light years away. Traveling at half the speed of light, without speed up or slow down taking into consideration, would take eight and a half years, one way. Just reflect on how much you have accomplished in the last eight and a half years, how far you traveled, matured, learned, and changed. Now imagine doing all that with other people in the space of a space shuttle’s crew module, 2,325 cubic feet. Allowing for a 8-foot ceiling that is 291 square feet. Putting that in perspective, RVs run about 400 square feet.

Fast – 0.0037% the speed of light

Half the speed of light is generous, when one considers the fastest humans ever traveled occurred during Nasa’s Apollo 10 mission that topped out at 24,790 mph – 0.0037% the speed of light. Plans exist for developing technology capable of reaching up to 10% the speed of light. (See “How Fast Could Humans Travel Safely Through Space?” published by BBC in 2015.) At 10% the speed of light, not counting acceleration and deceleration, Proxima Centauri’s system, including one very special rocky planet in the Goldilocks zone, is just 44 short years away.

Faster – 0.0246% the speed of light

Before humanity arranges for some of its members to take The Big Trip, unmanned space craft will be sent. At this time, Juno holds the speed record for spacecraft when she rushed to see what her husband Jupiter was doing with all his moon affairs. She pushed 165,000 mph – 0.0246% the speed of light (seven times faster than humans ever moved in a sustained manner). Plans are in the making to get an unmanned spacecraft up to nearly 3 times that, within the next two years. (See “What’s the Fastest Spacecraft Ever?” published by LiveScience.) Two years feels like tomorrow when thinking about the fifty-year plan for getting humans up to 10%.

Fastest – 0.0671% the speed of light

And that two-year plans has a countdown. See more about the Parker Solar Probe here: http://parkersolarprobe.jhuapl.edu/

 

Bibliography

“Astronomers have found the closest exoplanet to Earth” – (Last viewed 11/17/2017) – https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/astronomers-have-found-the-closest-exoplanet-to-earth/

“How fast could humans travel safely through space?” – (Last viewed 10/31/2022) – https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150809-how-fast-could-humans-travel-safely-through-space

“Space Shuttle Basics” – specifically for the crew module on the space shuttle – (Last viewed 11/17/2017) – https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/shuttle/reference/basics/orbiter/index.html

“What’s the Fastest Spacecraft Ever?” – (Last viewed 11/17/2017) – https://www.livescience.com/32655-whats-the-fastest-spacecraft-ever.html

Geeking language today – how language is developed.

Language is the first tool humans learn to use – it’s necessary to control the parents. Instead of a cry for I hurt, I bored, I hungry, and I working on my lungs – suddenly you can say “nana” to get the yellow sweet thing and “down” frees you from Aunt Kissy-Duck-Face. Such power.

But how did this technological tool develop? How difficult is it? I mean a baby can learn it.

If I was creating a language for science fiction or fantasy, what limitations should I put on the color words? Is there an order to them. Dark and light is obviously. Then I would have assumed blue or green since they are so prevalent in the world. Turns out, for humans at least, the next word is Red. Blue as water and the sky is fairly far down on the list.

All bets are off for aliens and fantasy creatures, but if my worldbuilding goes down this path – figuring how what they see, how they see it, and how they group it can help me understand the culture which the sentient beings will develop.

Language is the bomb!