www.RogerWendell.com
Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic Evolution^SM

NGC 4535

Cosmology My page on astronomy, SETI, and the study of the Universe in its totality... (See also my Science page)

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

Very Long Base Line Array	On top	On the way up	Tami at 9,000 feet	Headquarters at sea level!

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

Green Bank Formula

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?'"

Carnarvon Shire, Australia

SETI 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

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."

Click Here for my page on antennas...

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...

Miscellaneous Definitions:

• Angular Velocity - "...is the correct measure of rotation."  "The higher the angular velocity, the faster the body is turning."

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)].

• A slice of Phi - 1.61803398874989484820458683436563811772030917980... (The Divine Proportion)
• A slice of Pi - 3.14159265358979323846264...
• Birefringence - the separation of a ray of light into two unequally refracted, plane-polarized rays of orthogonal polarizations, occurring in crystals in which the velocity of light rays is not the same in all directions.
• Cerenkov Radiation - Highly radioactive objects, when observed under water, become bathed in an intest blue light. In the water used in nuclear reactors, including the storage of spent fuel pieces, this light is easily seen and photographed. This "Cerenkov Radiation," as it is called, is caused by particles entering the water at speeds greater than what light is capable of traveling through that same medium. As these particles slow down, to that of light through water, they produce a cone of light that's analogous to the bow wave of a boat. Such a bow wave, in the case of a boat, is caused when the boat is moving through the water at a speed greater than the wave speed on the water's surface. This bow wave effect of Cerenkov Radiation is also similar, in ways, to the sonice boom of high speed (greater than the speed of sound) aircraft.
• Jiffy - 1/100th of a second.
• Laccolith - a volcano that never erupted.
• Mole - a basic chemistry measurement using Avogadro's Number 6.023 X 10²³ (National Mole Day takes place every October 23rd...) [Also defined as the amount of pure substance containing the same number of chemical units as there are atoms in exactly 12 grams of carbon-12 (i.e., 6.02 x 10^23)].
• Planck Length: - a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a centimerter (Actually, it's 1.6 times 10 to the negative 35th centimeters, or about 10 to the negative 20th times the size of a proton).  For a sense of scale, imagine an atom being magnified to the size of the known universe, the Plank legnth would be the height of the average tree...
• Planck Time: - is the time it would take a photon, travelling at the speed of light, to cross a distance equal to the Planck length.  This is "Quantum Time," (Not to be confused with "Miller Time") the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10 to the negative 43rd seconds.
• Precautionary Principle - In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation. [Article 15 of the Rio declaration of 1992]
• Precession of the perihelion of Mercury - A long-time problem between Newtonian physics and General Relativity concerning the orbit of Mercury. As Mercury, or any other planet, orbits the Sun the path it takes follows, approximately, an ellipse. The point of closest approach of Mercury, to the sun, does not always occur at the same place but that point of closest approach slowly moves around the sun. This rotation of the orbit is called a precession.
• Vacuum Energy - underlying background energy that exists in space even when devoid of matter.

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

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