Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic EvolutionSM
 NGC 4535 |
Cosmology
My page on astronomy, SETI, and the (See also my Science page) |
"We say pronounce, sentence, and declare that you Galileo . . . have rendered yourself in the judgment of this Holy Office vehemently suspect of heresy, namely . . . that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world . . . Consequently we order that the book Dialogue of Galileo Galilei be prohibited by public edict. We condemn you to formal imprisonment in the Holy Office."
How Much is Nothing?
Consider that a thimbleful of air would contain trillions upon trillions of atoms. In a commercial vacuum tube, the same thimble would hold only a few billion. In the best vacuum scientists make today, the number would be reduced to about 500. A thimble on the surface of the moon would have perhaps 50 inside, and if that thimble were put in the empty regions of the galaxy, it would hold, on average, a single atom.
Mauna Kea, Hawaii
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 Very Long Base Line Array |
 On top |
 On the way up |
 Tami at 9,000 feet |
 Headquarters at sea level! |
| In February 2007 Tami and I took another fantastic trip back to Hawai'i where we were able to visit the observatoris on Mauna Kea's 13,796 foot peak twice - once during the day and again at night where we watched the stars with the roof of our convertible folded down... |
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Click Here for a video I took of Keck 1 being rotated... |
WASHINGTON (Reuters)
Memorial Day Weekend, 2007
"The giant Keck telescope he is using, on the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano, is sending images straight to a digital camera, to be analyzed by a computer.""'There are no eyepieces anywhere. In fact, we don't have an eyepiece for the Keck telescope,' [Geoff] Marcy, an astronomy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in a telephone interview as he finished up a night of planet-hunting."
"'We've done about 85 stars tonight,' Marcy said. 'We started at about 6 p.m. and it is 4:30 a.m. now. We never stop and we never take any breaks. The world's largest telescope is so precious that you don't want to waste a second.'
"Marcy is in fact not even sitting at the telescope. The eight-story telescope is a 45-minute drive away, in the thin air above 13,000 feet (4,000 meters)." "He is connected by audio and video link to a telescope operator who points and clicks at his command." "The $100 million telescope collects the light from stars and sends them straight to a spectrometer that, like a prism, separates light into its colored wavelengths." "'It goes to a digital camera, the spectrum is recorded, and I take it back to the University of California Berkeley to get all the data,'" said Marcy. "Using this method, Marcy's team has discovered 28 new planets orbiting other stars in the past year. They are responsible for two-thirds of the 236 known exoplanets."
"Most of the planets seen so far are gas giants like Jupiter, unlikely to host life. But astronomers hope to refine their methods so they can spot small, rocky planets covered with liquid water, like our own."
"'The real question that is on everybody's minds, whether you are 6 years old or 96, is whether there is intelligent life in the universe,' Marcy said. 'We will point our telescopes at those Earths hoping to pick up transmissions from any intelligent species that might happen to be living there.'"
"There are so many billions of stars (maybe an infinity of them) that even if life is an incredibly rare accident it is clear that it will occur eventually in odd parts of the universe."- Paul Davies, Other Worlds p. 144
Also known as the Drake or Sagan Equation, it was first devised by Dr Frank Drake in the early 1960s. According to the formula, throughout our galaxy there could be millions of different civilizations interested in, or capable of, technilogical communications with other civilizations.When working with the formula, Scientists usually allow two values for each term. One is a normal value based on our present state of knowlege and the other is an absolute minimum value. The final value, N, is then the number of technilogical civilizations capable of communicatios with others:
Whereas:
R* = the average annual number of new stars that are like our sun;
Fp = the number of stars with possible living beings;
Ne = the average number of planets which orbit the ecosphere of their sun and so have adequate conditions for the development of life by human standards;
Fl = the number of planets favored in this way on which life has actually developed;
Fi = the number of planets which are populated by intelligences with thier own ability to act during the lifetime of thier sun;
Fe = the number of planets inhabited by intelligences that have already developed technical civilization;
L = the lifespan of a civilization (Only very long lasting civilizations could encounter each other, given the vast distances in the universe);
If we take the lowest possible figures for all terms in this formula we get: N = 40.
However, if we take the admissable maximum value, we get N = 50,000,000.
Sky & Telescope, in there November '92 "SETI at a Crossroads" article (by Robert Naeye) included a sidebar called "Is anybody out There?" A small portion of it, on page 512, had this to say; "...astronomer James Sweitzer (university of Chicago) criticizes the broad use of this equation in popular books and articles. He points out that, except for the term R*, scientists have no idea as to the true values of the remaining terms. Moreover, they do not have even the knowledge needed to calculate these probabilities. Sweitzer says that assigning values gives the false impression that N can in fact be quatified."Optimists maintain that with 400 billion stars in our galaxy alone and an abundance of organic molecules in interstellar space, life must be commonplace. And since intelligence conveyed considerable survival advantages to Homo sapiens, given enough time intelligent species should arise on many worlds. As John Billingham, who heads the SETI office at NASA's Ames Research Center, points out, 'There's a countless number of possiblew life sites out in the galaxy. And if it happened here, why shouldn't it happen somewhere else?'"
SETI
 Carnarvon Shire, Australia |
Note: Tami and I stopped by the 33.5 metre Carnarvon Shire "dish" while in Western Australia. At about the time of our visit some amateurs were asking to convert part of its use to SETI work. We're hoping they're succesful! The antenna is described as a fully steerable precision unit that's of Casegrain design with the focal point situated in the control room beneath the dish. It seemed huge as we parked beneath it that day!! |
SETI, an acronym for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, is a project based on organized efforts to detect intelligent life throughout our galaxy and even beyond. There have been a number of organized projects engaged in this effort including some funded by the United States Government. The general approach is to survey the sky to detect electromagnetic emissions (usually in the form of high frequency radio waves) from civilizations on distant planets.So far, at the time I created this page in January 2007, there were no verified reception reports of such signals and emmissions. However, because both our galaxy, and the universe itself, is so broad and vast the scientific search for these signals has been relatively narrow - there's certainly room for a lot more searching and listening - a whole lot more!
There are huge challenges in searching across the sky to detect intelligent transmissions from other worlds. The signal(s)' direction, spectrum, strength, bandwidth, and other factors are all challenges that can only be guessed at and anticipated by scientists. Also, there are problems with weak signal strengths as the radio waves travel over such great distances (this is illustrated by the Inverse Square Law - where the intensity of light observed from a source of constant intrinsic luminosity falls off as the square of the distance from the object).
There are also issues related to the absorbtion of signals by interstellar dust and debris - even though most of the universe is nearly a perfect vacuum, one or two stray atoms per cubic metre, over millions of miles, can attenuate signals. And, of course, there's the problem of human generated interference - evertyhing from malfunctioning automobile ignitions to over-active microwave ovens and satellite TV broadcasts have the potential of interfering with sensitive SETI receivers .
Nevertheless, despite the huge challenges (and expense!) SETI remains one of the most important scientific and philosophical endeavors of human existance. I believe this effort deserves the full support of our people and government!
- Roger J. Wendell, January 2007
Golden, Colorado
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Click Here for the SETI@Home program. SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. |
"...SETI@Home has done more to raise public consciousness about SETI than any other project, and SETI League members are eager and active participants. The project has demonstrated how a large-scale task can be broken downinto manageable chunks, and parsed out to a cadre of participants. What remains now is to marry the distributed processing aspects of SWTI@home to the distributed observing network of The SETI League's Project Argus all-sky survey. The result will be the most powerful SETI project ever, a net stretched wide to capture that elusive fish in the comsic pond."
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| Click Here for my page on antennas... |
More on SETI:
"Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later."
Steward Observatory
While on business in Tucson, in June of '07, I took
a drive up Mt. Lemmon and got a pretty close look at
the observatory. The University of Arizona actually
let me through their gate, by accident (I believe they
thought I was with some other students or something),
but I decide to "play fair" left the facility to take
my photos from outside the fence and perimeter...
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Miscellaneous Definitions:
Relativity and Common Sense by Herman Bondi) Mathematicians say it's the time a body takes to turn through an angle of just over 57 degrees [180°/Π to be precise (Your browser may not be displaying 180 Degrees divided by Mathematical Pi)].
Miscellaneous Photographs:
 Comet 17P/Holmes |
This photo was taken by my brother, Randy Wendell, at about 9PM EST on November 04, 2007. He was using a Canon 20D with a 300mm zoom lens with about a 50 second exposure at F9.1 |
Ancient Astronomy:
"By measuring the days and years and by studying the seasons and movement of celestial bodies, the ancient Americans hoped to understand and to influence, if not totally control, the most important events of their world. The study of the planets and stars, believed to be manifestations of the gods, led to the development of calendars for guiding people through the agricultural and ritual cycles of their lives."Naked eye astronomy was aided by building alignments and window slats. Sometimes entire complexes were constructed for observatories, such as the Caracol at the Yucatec city of Chichén Itsá. Mesoamerican skywatchers plotted the movements of the stars in the night skies so skillfully they could predict the positions of Venus for over 500 years with only a two-hour margin of error. Entire cities could be aligned with an astronomical event, such as the heliacal set of Pleiades - known as the 'rattlesnake' by the Mesoamericans - that divided the year into rainy and dry seasons. Or a sacred building, such as a great ruler's tomb, might be designed to glow in the setting sun at solstice, a symbolic moment when the sun was believed to enter the Underworld, the realm of the dead."
Pale Blue Dot:
A Vision of the Human Future in Space
by Carl Sagan (Random House, 1994)
 Earth as seen from 3.7 billion miles away by Voyager 1 in 1990. |
...Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. |
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
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