Ewan's Corner

Posts Tagged ‘science’

South Africa’s second satellite – Sumbandila (“lead the way” in Tshivenda) – has produced its first official images from orbit (see left).

Launched on 17th September 2009 from Kazakhstan on a Russian Soyuz rocket, Sumbandila is a small 81kg low orbit (500 km) solar-powered satellite with a Butane propulsion system successfully fired in January. It carries a 6 spectral band imager (6,25 m × 6,25 m resolution) for ground photography and video (agriculture, mapping of infrastructure and land use, population measurement and the monitoring of dam levels etc), as well as an amateur radio transponder (SA-AMSAT) among other experiments.

See the Sumbandila mission blog for details, as well as the Wikipedia article – there is also a Facebook group.

A video taken of Earth from orbit (13th October 2009, moving over Namibia).

From Ionian Enchantment – the latest version of the African science and skepticism blog-roll, or a list of “those dedicated to science and reason on the African continent”. I am proud to be included. Definitely something thought-provoking for everyone – and quite a few reasons to get vocal and involved, no matter what your viewpoint is on science, pseudo-science, skepticism, religion, homeopathy, maths, vaccines, general woo-woo etc.

The latest Carnival of Africans – the Phoenix Edition – is well worth a read.

• 01 and the universe
• Acinonyx Scepticus
• Amanuensis
• Ambient Normality
• ASSAf Blog
• Botswana Skeptic
• Bomoko and other nonsense words
• Communicating Science, the African Way **new**
• Defollyant’s AntiBlog
• Effortless Incitement
• Ewan’s Corner
• Geekery
• Grumpy Old Man
• Hello Universe, This is Nessie
• Ionian Enchantment
• Limbic Nutrition
• Lenny Says
• McBrolloks **new**
  
• Nathan Bond’s TART Remarks
  
• Orion Spur
  
• Other Things Amanzi
• Pickled Bushman
• Psychohistorian
  
• Reason Check
• Retroid Raving
• Scorched
• Shadows Hide
  
• Stop Danie Krügel
• Subtle Shift in Emphasis
• Synapses
• Tauriq Moosa
  
• The Science Of Sport
• The Skeptic Black Sheep
• The Skeptic Detective
• Turn 2 Reason
• Word of the Blog

I don’t think I’ve ever had the occasion to congratulate a newspaper – usually exactly the opposite. But for this I think the Guardian (and Ben Goldacre) deserve serious congratulations both for courage under fire and responsible journalism:

Matthias Rath drops his million pound legal case against me and the Guardian.

Seth Shostak (space.com) asks “SETI: Is It Worth It?“. It’s a great read – he busts some common myths, and provides some reasons why SETI should and does continue even without government funding.

Personally, I am all for SETI continuing – the concept fascinates me (on both a scientific and religious level), the money spent on SETI is a drop in the ocean, and I really do believe it is our responsibility to search and look outwards. Success would change the world – there is no arguing that – and I believe overall for the good (it could give us the focus we need as a species, and put a few things into proper perspective – local xenophobia may vanish for example. We can hope).

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence seems a lot like a religious belief to me – both require faith from supporters, neither can be proved to be pointless by science, and the payoff for “success” in either case is huge no matter how you look at it :-)

I don’t follow the shallow “religion will collapse if we find intelligent life elsewhere” idea that so many people seem to subscribe to – as a Christian myself I can’t believe God created this wonderful universe just for us (in the same way God didn’t give us a huge curiosity and fascination with “out there” and the desire to explore, learn and understand).

As a fan of science fiction (“Contact” is one of my all-time favourite novels and films) I have thought and dreamt about all kinds of first contact scenarios, from beneficial through benign and on to disastrous – and plenty of reasons contact / proof hasn’t happened yet. Personally I sway towards beneficial. I definitely don’t believe we should “hide” from nasty aliens – I don’t believe anything we could do would help us hide from anything that could directly affect us anyway.

Slashdot coverage of the article includes all sorts of different viewpoints as always, including:

“How interesting it would be if we finally make contact with an alien race and the first thing they ask us is whether or not The Creator has sent a “Messiah” to us yet.”

SETI’s success may very well be an Outside Context Problem for our species (and an OCP could obviously still happen even without SETI), so it deserves to be discussed and explored. I love this quote from Excession, a scifi novel by the brilliant Iain M Banks:

“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop. The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbours were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.” —-Iain M Banks, Excession.

Links:

• Space.com SETI FAQ
• Review: Contact with Alien Civilizations
• Meet the neighbours: Is the search for aliens such a good idea? (which includes a literary and Hollywood guide to “First Contact”)
• The other side of the Fermi paradox

From Reuters comes a story which is both scary and funny at the same time – Radioactive snails lead to Spain-U.S. atomic probe.

Spanish authorities say the appearance of higher than normal levels of radiation in snails and other creatures shows there may be dangerous levels of plutonium and uranium below ground, and a further clean up could be necessary.

“We have to study the dirt, we have to look underground,” said Juan Antonio Rubio, director general of Spain’s energy research agency CIEMAT, which is carrying out an investigation with the U.S. Department of Energy.

“We don’t know what’s down there.”

That lead me to the story of Palomares (a fishing village in Spain near where the hydrogen bombs fell in 1966) and the story of humble but greedy fisherman Simó Orts.

After the bomb had been located, Simó Orts turned up at the First District Federal Court building in New York City with his lawyer, Herbert Brownell, formerly Attorney General of the United States under President Dwight Eisenhower, claiming salvage rights on the recovered hydrogen bomb. According to Craven:

“It is customary maritime law that the person who identifies the location of a ship to be salvaged has the right to a salvage award if that identification leads to a successful recovery. The amount is nominal, usually 1 or 2 percent, sometimes a bit more, of the intrinsic value to the owner of the thing salvaged. But the thing salvaged off Palomares was a hydrogen bomb, the same bomb valued by no less an authority than the Secretary of Defense at $2 billion — each percent of which is, of course, $20 million.”

The Air Force settled out of court.

Welcome to planet Earth. Escarglow, anyone?

[via Slashdot - Radioactive Snails Crawl Up From Beneath]