Exploring and Extracting Resources from Space

The planet we live in can suffice our necessities. There are enough animals to hunt and plants to cultivate. There’s enough room to fill everybody’s space. We even find rocks to collect for luxurious desires.

But there’s not enough abundance of resources in Earth for us. And we know that there’s more out in the space.

There is a plan to mine precious metals from asteroids. Scientists believe that these entreating minerals, including platinum, iron and gold, came from asteroids showering earth millions of years back. Now they wanted to contact directly the source. According to Astronomer John S. Lewis, “a relatively small metallic asteroid with a diameter of one mile contained more than $20 trillion worth of industrial and precious metals”.

Planetary Resources Inc. headed the project with high-profile investors and supporters from director James Cameron, Google executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and the former US Presidential Candidate Ross Perot.

Fossil fuels are expensive economically and environmentally. There’s no major movement to deviate from it and our electricity demands are even more insistent. One proposal is to extract helium-3 from the moon’s soil to power our lights. It is more efficient that hydrocarbons and nuclear plants.

The pioneer of space exploration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration or NASA also hopes to extract lunar water. The search continues for other resources discovery from the US government agency.

The question is, who owns the space?

China is set to launch a lunar rover this 2013. The robot explores the surface and extracts nuclear fuel along the way. Russia hopes to revive its Russian robotic space program. They are landing robots to the Moon, Venus and Mercury as early as 2014. The European Space Agency awaits approval to send a robotic space plane that will soar in the orbit. Japan launches a cargo craft to space station. India celebrates the 101^st mission to space.

Now everybody’s into it.

Is it a race to space?

Climate Change is Proved, Disapproved, Harmful and Beneficial

Scientists hustle to prove or disapprove climate change. They cite benefits and others add to the list of harmful effects to our planet. It does not only affect humans, but every species on Earth will show how the warming affects their living. It’s such a controversy that lay people and notorious researchers won’t agree collectively.

Proved

Statistical data proves that climate change is happening. Since the late 19^th century, the global temperature increased by 0.6° C. Glaciers thaw and 10% of the snow cover decreased since 1966. The sea-ice’s thickness is narrowing in a rate of 1.57 inches annually. Since the ice is losing its mass, the sea-level is rising in a rate of 0.06 inches yearly.

This peremptory consensus already used up $106.7 billion of US taxes trying to amend the problem of global warming.

Disapproved

16 scientists tagged their names in a Wall Street Journal article discrediting global warming. While records in the past 50 years or so indicates increasing temperature on earth, it is not consistent. There has been no warming in the last 15 years.

Global Warming is natural in Earth’s climatic cycle. It happens before humans are born and even before the debate started. The glaciers in Asia’s Karakoram Mountains are getting bulkier. 2008 has been the coldest since 2000, averaging on 14.3° C. Dr Mojib Latif predicts that it’ll be colder in the next two decades while other scientists claim that Earth a century from now will be 4° C colder.

Harmful

Climate change exalted the catastrophes – fiercer storms, more prominent wildfires and longer heat waves. Flash floods are counted in Europe. Freshwater ran out in Asia and Africa. Forests disappear in Latin America. These issues keep on breaking previous records.

There is an estimated six million species on earth and 20% of them are endangered due to global warming. In 2012, newly found species include gorgeous primates, smallest known frog and 24 different skinks in the Carribean. With the rate of extinction, their disappearance will run faster than discovery.

What does species’ demise meant for humans? Russell Mittermeier answers: “without species diversity, we wouldn’t have the healthy ecosystems that supply our food, cleanse our air and water, provide sources of life-saving medicines and help stabilize our climate.”

Beneficial

The typical news reported how humans suffer from climate change, but not all organisms are contested. Plants from drylands can adapt to warming of climate. It is logical that extended and intensified draught will lead to demise of these plants, but these species are used to the hot climate. Ecologist Roberto Salguero-Gómez, who investigated the plants during the research, claims that they also benefit from the climate change. Higher temperature at night will induce the growth of plants.

Increased temperature in the North Sea boosted its food web, according to Dr. Richard Kirby of Plymouth University. Since the 1° C rise, swimming crabs actually swam longer in the sea. Adult crabs will then increase in the next year. It makes it easier for lesser black-backed gulls to hunt them, which will also increase their numbers in the next three to four years.

Killer whales, wandering albatrosses, mosquitoes, jellyfish, and trumpeter swans are thriving in the warming condition. Even polar bears, according to researchers from Umea University in Sweden, benefit from climate change as species migrate towards the north promoting biodiversity and arctic ecosystem.

Economically, climate change will increase production in agriculture. Olivier Deschênes and Michael Greenstone’s study in 2007 believed that the “changes in temperatures and precipitation” will modestly enhance the yields and profits of American agriculture.

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Any side you take on climate change, there will be a community supporting it. Which do you believe in?

What’s Up with Scientific Nomenclature?

If the doctor says you are infected with orthomyxoviridae virus, would you freak out? If the doctor walks out after giving you prescription, you would probably rummage for your phone and search for it. You would then learn that orthomyxoviridae is a family of influenza virus. It meant you have flu.

The scientific community has their own language. It is complicated, hard to pronounce and often threatening.

Scientific nomenclature is continually expanding its dictionary. In the latest update of DSMV-5, a bible of psychological disorders, Gender Identity Disorder was renamed as Gender Dysphoria. Although the purpose was to update the book to the latest information and to stray away from confusing transgender people as disordered, it seems like they’re itching to convert simple nomenclature to sophisticated terms.

Scientific nomenclature is for standardization of names. One breed of dog may look similar to another but a feature could render them different species. An owl may be called a different name in Russia. Organisms have varying common names per region. Scientific naming ensures that species are properly classified and international scientists can relate to each other.

Scientific names use Latin. It is a dead language; and unlike the languages we still speak today, it will not change. It is the world’s language when scientific discoveries exploded. And it is the root of many languages in the world, making the scientific names descriptive.

Like Latin terminologies are not confusing enough for normal people, the scientific language can be updated and have synonyms. The bobcats we know is once known as Felis rufus, and then changed to Lynx rufus. All bats whose generic name is Nycteris may also be named Lasiurus; thus Lasiurus borealis is a synonym of Nycteris borealis.

Maybe scientists feel good on sounding smart.

Do you bother to pronounce the scientific names right?

Country Doctors – A Fading Memory

At eighty-seven, Dr. Russell Dohner still sees patients who come by his office off the town square in Rushville, Illinois, just like he has done for the past sixty years. But time marches on, and Dr. Dohner has been forced to more than double his fee for a first-come-first-served office visit. On their way out, each patient now pays Edith Moore, the eighty-five-year-old secretary, a five dollar fee.

Dr. Dohner doesn’t accept medical insurance–he says it’s not worth the bother. “I always just wanted to be a doctor to help people with their medical problems and that’s all it’s for. It was never intended to make a lot of money.” You can read more of Dr. Dohner’s story here, in the LaCross Tribune.

From the late 1950s, I grew up in a small, rural town in northeast Ohio. There was a little white house across the street from us, where Dr. List had his office. With wisps of gray hair, black-rimmed glasses, and a white coat, Doc List stitched me up when I fell partway through a glass storm door, prescribed medicine whenever I got sick, and he even fitted me with my first pair of glasses. My parents always paid him in cash. Back then, Doc List either didn’t take medical insurance, or we didn’t have that kind of insurance. I’m not sure which was the case, but whenever we needed medical care, we just walked across the street.

Fortunately for me, Doc List’s son followed in his father’s footsteps. When I was about thirteen, and too sick to even walk across the street, the young Dr. List made the last house call I can remember. He ended up sending me straight to the hospital with a 105 degree temperature, and a bad case of viral pneumonia.

In the story, An Irish Miracle, Doc McGowan makes a house call to look after Alastar Connolly, after he took a nasty fall and split his head open. Dr. Dohner, both Dr. Lists, and Doc McGowan are caring, dedicated country doctors. The only difference is that Doc McGowan was a large animal veterinarian, affectionately, a horse doctor. Since his patients usually weighed well over 1000 pounds, it wasn’t really his fault that he might have been a little heavy-handed with the local anesthetics he administered to Alastar.

Would you trust an old country doctor, like the ones in this story, with your medical care today? Their training and methods might have been from a bygone era, but they each cared deeply for their patients, many of whom were also friends and neighbors. Going to a doctor’s office these days seems to begin with “Has your insurance changed?” instead of “It’s nice to see you, how are you feeling?”, and end with a string of cryptic billing statements and frustrating telephone calls that can stretch out for months afterward.

Something in between might be nice.

10% Brain Usage: is it True?

The 10% brain usage is definitely a myth for the scientific community. Every region of the brain is performing, whether it is from the back’s occipital lobe that controls our vision or the frontal lobe that’s responsible for our cognitive functioning. Every region of the brain is almost working constantly to accommodate our activities. Even those that we don’t have to think of doing, like breathing, are under the brain’s supervision.

100% of our brain is working hard; that’s why it demands so much energy to operate. Our brain “represents three percent of the body’s weight and uses 20 percent of the body’s energy”, said Johns Hopkins’ neurologist Barry Gordon.

Where did the myth came from?

It may have started from William James’ words in The Energies of Men (1908), “we are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources”. Later on, Karl Lashley studied the brains of rats where he removed portions of cerebral cortex and the rats can perform specific tasks like nothing happened. So people would be thinking, we won’t need most of it.

The more interesting claim is human’s potential psychic abilities. It is indulging to believe that there’s even more we could do, perhaps have a super memory or heroic capabilities.

The more appropriate claim is we only know 10% of our brain. That 10% are neurons, and the rest of the brain is supporting glial cells. There is still a broad spread of exploration to know what glial cells are for.

But the science community is not backing off to know more. In a way, you could buy Einstein’s brain via an iPad app. $9.99 gives anyone access to images of the genius’ brain cut into 350 slides, hoping to spark another knowledge to his brain apart from knowing that his parietal lobe (processing of mathematics, language, and spatial understanding) is wider than normal.

Is this too much to take from the man who already contributed so much to our comprehension? The man who wished for his body to be cremated?

As long as the person is dead, it seems, his voice will not matter. Jacopo Annese of the University of California “predicts that there will be another Einstein, and when that individual dies, we’ll be prepared (we’re hanging on for that 3D-mapped interactive specimen)”.

Do you believe that nothing should hamper the search for knowledge?

Genetically Modified Humans Are Created

There is a “drug” that will cure a rare fat production disrupting disease by modifying a damaged gene; and 1 or 2 people in a million will get the treatment. You may think that it’s not that bad, at most there could be two people per million to be modified. That’s not the only story.

30 genetically modified babies are already created in the US. The cover reason behind this is parents having problems conceiving. 2 of those babies have gene combinations from 3 different parents. Now these parents will have a more favorable life, as the geneticists state, “this genetic modification method may one day be used to create genetically modified babies ‘with extra, desired characteristics such as strength or high intelligence’”.

There are no policies guiding genetic modifications of humans, and powerhouse countries are taking advantage of it. Human stem cells are implanted on goats in China; human brain cells are embedded on mice in the US; 150 human-animal hybrids are grown in the labs of UK. It may be that the government funds scientists and biotech companies to achieve “a much larger feat – genetically modified humans in the form of ‘super soldiers’”.

Rats that ate genetically modified corn either became ill or died. Let’s say we take away ethics, GMO’s safety is still not guaranteed. But the bigger issue here is invasion of GMOs. When you put a genetically modified plant in a field, it could potentially affect the other plants by sucking all the nutrients from the land. Via survival of the fittest, the GMO plant will persist and reproduce until the rest of the field is full of GMOs.

Now that we have genetically modified humans, are we breeding a new class in the society, a group called the “superior race”? How long can we, the normal race, will last? At the time the GMO babies reproduce, the spread will start.

Scientists are now claiming that they could trace the “criminal gene”. It may not be too long to produce another drug to isolate that gene; and thus, controlling humanity. People started thinking that we could correct the disordered genes. When will they stop? Until they produced the perfect human? Perfect is not characteristic of human at all.

Are you scared of the genetically modified people living with us?

Alien Life: We Come In Peace?

Those are the wise words of Stephen Hawking commenting on how an alien discovery could bring more danger than good. And let’s face it, he has a point – after all, if we were to find an alien species with higher level of intelligence and understanding than us, how would parties on both sides react?

It seems like every other day there is another rover being sent to some distant planet on the edge of our solar system, looking for signs of life. More telescopes pointing towards the skies and everything from written messages to radio waves all in a desperate attempt to find life.

Add to that, more people looking to the skies with little more than the naked eye – claiming to have seen alien spaceships and UFO’s.

People today are obsessed with such a possibility and how it will change our understanding of science and the universe. More films are being released with various different scenarios revolving around the idea of discovering alien life and how us and them would react.

Ideas of invasion, death on a large scale and manipulation may all sound completely ludicrous and similar to that we may expect from a feature film. But nobody knows exactly what kind of danger lies within our universe and what we could potentially be dealing with.

On a more positive note we would come together as a race, as Ronald Reagan once stated: “I occasionally think how quickly we would set aside our difference if we faced some alien threat from the other side.”

Nick Pope, a former British Ministry of Defence UFO expert claims aliens have been around us for some time and can come in all shapes and sizes.

Possibly one of the most significant recorded alien sightings was in Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk, United Kingdom – not far from where I am currently based – where an alien space craft apparently landed between two defence bases.

Many people tried to cover up this case as much as they could, but what the people working at the defense base claimed to see is frightening to hear – especially when it seems Britain’s latest fighter craft – the Taranis – looks similar to that of the UFO claimed to have been seen near Rendlesham Forest.

It is also worth noting what some would call excessive defense systems in place during the London 2012 Olympic Games, where missiles were placed on top of a number of blocks of flats across the city.

Is or was Britain preparing for an alien invasion? And if so, are they aware of certain alien activity across the planet that the rest of us are unaware of? Or is the Taranis just the latest unique addition to modern warfare?

As Nick Pope said in a recent interview regarding skeptics of the idea of alien contact: “The believers only have to be right once.”

Let’s just hope no one ever has to report on an alien takeover of planet earth.

Should we be taking a step back?

Space Tourism: Out of this World

The adventure that history may think as fictional or delusional is now taking off with us. Space tourism is welcoming wealthy adventurers to go somewhere where not many has been and seen. Like what Virgin Galactic said, “space is a virgin territory”.

After a brief tease of the thrilling tour, people jumped aboard. From 520 listed customers, £64M ($103M) is already in deposits. The first batch of flight will happen next year. Among the early birds to space were known personalities – Hollywood’s Paris Hilton, Ashton Kutcher, Tom Hanks, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt; scientists James Lovelock and Stephen Hawking; and royal Princess Beatrice. See Virgin Galactic passenger list.

A spaceplane can accommodate eight people. Two are pilots and six are passengers. Perhaps, among the six passengers was a photographer to keep track of the adventure. Virgin Galactic is excited to bring in the first batch of space tourists photos. With this mission of resolute publicity and marketing, it won’t be for long until they earned back their £162M ($261M) investment for the fleet of spaceplanes. In fact, the space industry has the potential to reach $1.6B in the next decade.

This growing industry also has growing competition. Orbital Technologies, a Russian company, plans to construct a “Hotel in the Heavens”. No gravity is the gimmick of the hotel. The price to get there was £500,000 ($806,000) and £100,000 ($161,000) to stay for five nights. Space Adventures in Virginia will bring you to the International Space Station for $50M. Other companies offering the adventure are emerging in California and Texas while a European conference was held in London in the talks of space tourism.

How will it go? Everything will seem like a flash. 90 seconds to ascend with a speed of 4,000km/h. After six to seven minutes of gliding to the space engineless and gravityless, they’ll start descending. Tourists will appreciate a view similar to this:

We don’t know where it’s going from here. I guess there will be more men – ridiculously wealthy men – to step on the moon in the near future.

Would you travel in space?

Are We Heading Towards A Big Brother World?

Everywhere you go, you seem to be watched at some point or another – in fact in the U.K you can be watched up to 300 times a day.

Is the Big Brother fantasy from the book “Nineteen Eighty Four” becoming a reality? Slowly but surely is probably the answer.

Especially so in the United Kingdom, which is the most watched nation on earth – with a reported one camera to every 14 people as of 2008 (a total of 4,2 million). Other nations around the world are extending their use of CCTV.

On the one hand – if anything does ever happen to you in the street, it will all be caught on camera and thus creates the idea of safety through a sense of security.

The argument is why do we need so many cameras in our cities and towns?

Just imagine, for one moment, we lived in a Big Brother world – where every action was watched and monitored. Would you be happy with this lifestyle?

Surely it’s an invasion of privacy to have so much CCTV surveillance following us wherever we go, as well as a violation of data protection.

It creates the feeling that we are being watched for no real reason other than so people higher up can keep an eye on us.

According to a YouGov poll, the majority of people are in full support of CCTV cameras – thinking they will keep us secure and safe. But would you trade an ounce of liberty for a lifetime of high level security?

The worrying factor is that more CCTV cameras will appear, as if there aren’t enough already. More so worrying is that the next step is for these cameras to feature high-powered microphones to monitor your conversations.

Whilst I cannot deny that crime solving could be made a lot easier, I am in the majority when I say I have never broken the law and had no intention of doing so. I feel like my privacy is being severely invaded.

Do you think CCTV is a good thing or do you feel your privacy is being severely invaded?

Walk Away from Traffic

It isn’t the density of people, but the density of cars. As shown in the photo above, a bunch of people occupied the whole street when they rode with their personal cars. Head-striking traffic is eradicated when people use economical mediums such as a bus or environmental such as bicycle.

December of last year sold 1,145,079 vehicles in United States. With roughly a million cars sold each month, no wonder why our roads are intersected with traffic.

People blame different factors to traffic. Main in the list was the disturbances, like accident or construction constricting the road. And of course, rush hour, the most used excuse.

Japan Airlines CEO Haruka Nishimatsu rides the public bus to work; while every person is prided with his or her own vehicle in the United States.

If you’ll just go to the book store a block away, walking won’t be bad. Cycling is a nice time to think and feel the rush of air while all those time burning hundreds of calories. Technology can help us live better, but not to the point of laziness. There’s no technology for clearing away traffic magically or technology to permanently keep an inactive body healthy.

If people use their feet to pace a proximity, or be smart to ride with other people than seclude themselves on their personal cars all the time, there will be less traffic.

So, will you walk?

Category Archives: Science & Technology