Ever wondered what lies beyond nature(or in fact natural)!? The Existence of Constellations,The Galaxies, Why are we born?? Why has only Earth been blessed with life?? Will there be a Doomsday? What is Big Bang? Is there any life on other planets? Why aging cannot be prevented ? Is Time Travel possible? Are there any Parallel Universes? Do planets die? What is the cause for gravitation? How does Earthquakes and Volcanic eruptions take place? Why are finger-prints so specific? The Mysteries and the twisted queries and the unconquered realms of the Science! I guess they haunt you too...........
Were the Amityville hauntings cynical media manipulation? Is levitation possible? Has Earth been visited by UFOs from other realms? All these questions, and more, are considered in 100 Strangest Mysteries. Paranormal investigator Matt Lamy documents in detail the numerous phenomena and events which can be termed 'mysterious' and cannot be dismissed as mere hysteria or wild imaginings.
Divided into themed sections, the book includes:
The Beast of Bodmin ? whether it is an escaped exotic pet, a feral cat or something more sinister, it certainly causes concern for inhabitants of its local area
Area 51 ? conspiracy theorists believe it is a centre for the U.S. government's investigations into UFO activity, whilst others consider it to be 'only' a military air base
Ley lines and other energy fields ? are they sacred sites going back thousands of years or modern New Age notions?
The Holy Grail ? dismissed by organized religion, thought by some to have been a chalice brought to Britain by Joseph, many consider it to be nothing more than a romantic Arthurian legend
NASA has launched a probe into orbit high above the earth to study the distant edge of the solar system where hot solar winds crash into the cold outer space.
The Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) was launched at 17-45 GMT on Sunday, according to images broadcast live by the U.S. space agency.
The small probe was deployed on a Pegasus rocket which dropped from the bay doors of a Lockheed L-1011 jet flying at 12,000 metres over the southern Pacific Ocean near the Marshall Islands.
“The count went really smooth… and everything appears to be going well,” NASA assistant launch manager Omar Baez said shortly after the launch. The IBEX is on a two-year mission to take pictures and chart the mysterious confines of the solar system — including areas billions of kilometres from earth.
Remote region
The small, stop-sign-shaped probe is equipped with instruments that will allow it to take images and chart, for the first time, a remote region known as the interstellar boundary, where the solar system meets interstellar space. The area is a vast expanse of turbulent gas and twisting magnetic fields.
“The interstellar boundary regions are critical because they shield us from the vast majority of dangerous galactic cosmic rays, which otherwise would penetrate into earth’s orbit and make human spaceflight much more dangerous,” David McComas, IBEX principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in San Antonio, Texas, said.
The only information that scientists have of this distant region is from the twin Voyager 1 and 2 probes, launched in 1977 and still in service today.
The two probes have travelled past the inner solar system, where the planets are, and on their way to its farthest edge.
In December 2004 Voyager 1 reached an area that scientists describe as the “termination shock” zone, where solar winds crash into the gas of interstellar space, marking the boundary of the solar system.
Fascinating
“The Voyager spacecraft are making fascinating observations of the local conditions at two points beyond the termination shock that show totally unexpected results and challenge many of our notions about this important region,” said Mr. McComas.
In 2007 Voyager 2 reached the heliosheath — the area where the termination shock begins — and on its current path and speed, should reach the heliopause in 2010. The heliopause constitutes the boundary between solar winds and interstellar winds.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) remains in regular contact with the two probes, which return data recorded by their particle detectors.
By 2020, however, contact with Voyager probes will be lost because of the weakening of their plutonium generators.
Revealing images
IBEX, armed with two very large aperture single pixel “cameras” that measure energetic neutral atoms, is to produce images of the region that will allow scientists for the first time to better understand what happens where the solar system meets the galaxy.
The mission will also study cosmic radiation, which has a negative impact on human health and space exploration. The IBEX probe weighs about 462 kg and is shaped like an octagon. It measures a mere 52 cm high and 97 cm across.
The Pegasus put the IBEX in a low orbit some 96 km above the earth. The IBEX spacecraft’s own solid rocket motor will then carry the probe into a much higher altitude orbit of around 200,000 miles, NASA said in a statement.
Intel has rolled out its first chip with six brains, unveiling a "multi-core" microprocessor that boosts computing muscle while cutting back on electricity use. The new Xeon 7400 series microprocessor has been designed by none other than Intel engineers at Bangalore from scratch.
The Bangalore design centre is the first Intel team outside the US to complete the design of a 45-nanometer processor.
Post its inception in 2001, the Xeon 7400 series is the first chip to come out of Intel's Bangalore design centre. The centre had previously worked on another Xeon server chip called Whitefield.
But that chip never made it to market. It was cancelled in 2005, when Intel revised its product road maps to better compete with Advanced Micro Devices, and the Indian design team soon put its focus on Dunnington.
The Dunnington chip design marks a technical milestone for Intel, as it uses a monolithic die, the term engineers use to describe putting all of the cores on a single piece of silicon.
Intel's existing quad-core processor lines use two pieces of silicon, each with two cores, packaged together. That approach made the older quad-core chips easier to produce and avoided the manufacturing difficulties that hampered the release of AMD's Barcelona chip, an x86 server chip with four cores on a single piece of silicon. Those difficulties were compounded by AMD's transition to a new 65-nanometer manufacturing process.
The giant chipmaker has clarified that they have no intention to create virtual bridge between Intel and AMD by introducing the first of it’s kind 6-core x86 microprocessor Xeon 7400 from it’s India’s off-shore unit. The newly introduced Intel microprocessor is powered with six processing cores with each of it’s chip. Designed by 1.9 billion transistors, the Xeon 7400 will support shared cache memory in the tune of 16 MB.
Dell, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Unisys and Fujitsu are among the computer makers building the new Xeon 7400 chips into servers designed for business networks, according to Intel.
With the introduction of Dunnington, and the upcoming Nehalem line of quad-core processors that also uses a monolithic design, Intel waited until its 45-nanometer process was in mass production, with any technical difficulties presumably ironed out, before making this transition.
After successful launching of the new chip, India has entered in the list of exclusive countries that have high expertise and infrastructure to design and fabricate such a complex microprocessor. Entire design operation of the chip, including it’s front-end and back-end design, pre-silicon logic validation etc., has been performed by about 300 people at the Bangalore unit of Intel. “The quality of available talent, technology ecosystem and business potential are factors which make India a strategic business site for Intel,” says Intel India president Mr. Praveen Vishakantaiah.
The new Intel processor, Xeon 7400 series, is highly compatible with the Intel Xeon 7300 series and the Intel 7300 chipset.
With availability of the new Intel Xeon 7400 processors, VMware customers will now be able to move freely between two servers running on different Intel chips. Earlier, people had to use same type of Intel chips on two servers to allow vMotion to work, but now no such limitation exists.
The Xeon 7400 series is priced between $856 (Rs39,279) and $2729 (about Rs1.09 lakh), the company said
Intel executives say the Xeon 7400 is part of an "incremental migration" toward chips with limitless numbers of "cores" that seamlessly and efficiently share demanding computer processing tasks.
Intel and rival Advanced Micro Devices have two-core and four-core chips on the market. The six-core chip delivers 50 per cent more performance than its quad-core predecessor while using 10 per cent less electric power, according to Intel enterprise group vice president Tom Kilroy.
Electricity and cooling expenses can account for nearly half the cost of running company computer servers.
"It isn't just performance and energy efficiency but the use models," Kilroy said of the boon promised by increasingly powerful chips. "One of the major ones is virtualisation."
Multi-core chips are boons to computing trends including high-definition video viewing online; businesses offering services applications on the Internet; and single servers running many "virtual" machines.
Intel executive VP, Pat Gelsinger announcing world record performance results for XEON 7400-series processors. Industry first 1.2 million database tranactions per minute on 8 slot IBM server.
India has surprisingly broken into the Top Ten in a much-fancied twice-yearly list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, marking a giant leap in its push towards becoming a global IT power.
EKA (the Sanskrit name for number one) is a supercomputer ranked as the 8th fastest in the world and fastest in Asia as of June 2008, according to the Top 500 Supercomputer list built by Hewlett-Packard.
The supercomputer built at the Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) by Hewlett-Packard facility at Pune, India, marked a milestone in the Tata Group's effort to build an indigenous high-performance computing solution. CRL built the supercomputer facility using dense data centre layout and novel network routing and parallel processing library technologies developed by its scientists. It was reported to have cost $30 million dollars to build.
Ashwin Nanda, who heads the CRL, told the conference that its supercomputer had been built with HP servers using Intel chips with a total of 14,240 processor cores. The system went operational last month and achieved a performance of 117.9 teraflops.
It is the first supercomputer to have been developed totally by a corporation without any government help, now shares the rarefied heights of supercomputing with two American and one German supercomputer.
Eka is an important milestone because it almost restarts the train of supercomputing in India, which stalled after the PARAM supercomputers developed by the C-DAC. “It is a team effort rather than an individual’s effort. This has put India on the world map and brought a national sense of pride,” said S Ramadorai, chairman, CRL, and also the CEO of India’s largest software firm, TCS. TCS is a key partner in the entire supercomputer project.
The project was also important because it was done with a small work-force and with global partners like Hewlett Packard, Intel and Mellanox. But the most noteworthy achievement of the team was that it finished the project in time even after CRL lost its technical spearhead, Dr Narendra Karmarkar.
Supercomputers are typically used for highly calculation problem solving in quantum mechanical physics, molecular modeling, weather forecasting and climate research, and physical simulation including that of nuclear tests.
The term supercomputer is quite relative. It was first used in 1929 to refer to large custom-built tabulators IBM made for Columbia University. The supercomputers of the 1970s are today's desktops.
"The supercomputer system will have a direct effect on the lives of Indians, espcially in areas such as earthquake and Tsunami modelling, modellings of the economy and potential for drug design," said Mr S. Ramadorai, chairman of the Computational Research Laboratories, which is a subsidiary of Indian firm Tata.
Having developed the machine, the Tata group is busy developing a marketing strategy for it. “In another six-nine months, we would be able to build applications and a software library, following which we would take the offering to commercial use,” Raju Bhinge, chief executive, Tata Strategic Management Group — a Tata Group company involved in the development of the facility in Pune told ET. CRL’s capabilities are currently being used by another Tata Group company, Tata Elixsi for high speed animation rendering work. CRL is also looking at newer opportunities in the weather forecasting, automotive crash simulation, computational fluid dynamics in aerospace sector, gaming and animation and drug discovery among many others.
According to company officials, CRL has already been in touch with the likes of Boeing and Airbus for its aerospace applications and there is also interest from Tata Motors for its crash testing application. S Ramadorai, CEO & MD of TCS one of the partners for CRL and chairman of CRL said that the company was also in discussion with a host of government agencies as well, for the use of its new computing prowess.
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In 1996 the controversial discovery of what appeared to be Martian fossils in a meteorite from Antarctica ignited a furor in the scientific community.
The idea that a rock billions of years old was flung into space with traces of life aboard was intoxicating, fueling thoughts of panspermia -- the idea that all life on Earth could have originated on Mars or some other alien planet.
Twelve years on, scientists still debate whether the tiny structures are Martian or not, or even fossils. But now a new study has shown it's possible for traces of life to survive a punishing interplanetary journey.
Frances Westall of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France and a group of researchers attached a 2-centimeter-thick rock to the heat shield of a Foton M3 space capsule.
Nestled between the shield and rock was a layer of the hearty bacteria Chroococcidiopsis, commonly found in the harshest deserts on Earth.
When the capsule hit Earth's atmosphere, the rock was heated to at least 3,056 degrees Fahrenheit (1,680 degrees Centigrade). Most of it burned away, leaving only 8 millimeters of material behind. What was left was a gooey, melted white crust of quartz.
The rock's original structure -- along with visible microfossils -- was preserved at the core.
"This is a great positive result in searching for traces of extra-terrestrial life on meteorites," Westall said. "If ever Martians fossils land on Earth, we should be able to see them."
The desert-dwelling organisms were not so lucky, however.
Westall said the screws that held the rock to the heat shield loosened during re-entry, allowing temperatures between the shield and the rock to climb to between 570 and 930 degrees Fahrenheit (300 and 500 degrees Centigrade).
"[The bacteria] were carbonized," she said, "so it's a negative result for the idea of panspermia, but we'll have to run the experiment again."
"This certainly does not disprove the idea of panspermia," David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute said.
For life on Mars to make it to Earth, it would have to survive a perilous interplanetary crossing. Scientists have calculated that the first stage -- launching off the surface with debris created by a meteorite impact -- is survivable.
Little is known about the long journey through the vacuum of space, but microbes living inside rock could be protected enough to make the trip.
Then comes re-entry. If life were to survive the heat of rocketing through Earth's atmosphere at 12-15 kilometers per second (33,000 mph), it would still have to live through the impact. At this point, no one knows if it can.
"This is a piece in the puzzle of the origin of life, and the distribution of life in the solar system," Kring said of the team's research. "If life did originate on Earth and was transferred elsewhere in the solar system, it would be interesting to everyone to know that, and vice versa -- if life began on Mars and simply propagated better on Earth, that would be interesting, too."
The future technolgy:laser propulsions Imagine a small saucer like structure reaching speeds of rockets,its not a ufo...its our future rocket.. In few days we may be able to lauch spacecrafts with saucer like structure with reflecting surfaces... Laser beams are user to provide the initial thrust to it.... The Lightcraft propulsion research employs the Pulsed Laser Vulnerability Test System (PLVTS), a 10 kilowatt laser built by AVCO TEXTRON for the Army. PLVTS is the highest average power, pulsed carbon dioxide laser presently operating in the United States.
The laser-propelled vehicle, called "Lightcraft" because it flies on a beam of laser light, is designed to harness the energy of a laser beam and convert it into propulsive thrust. The Lightcraft receives the kilojoule pulses from the PLVTS laser at a rate of 10 times per second upon the concentrating mirror that forms its rear section. The function of this parabolic mirror is to focus the pulsed laser energy into a ring-shaped "absorption/propulsion" chamber. Here the laser beam is concentrated to extremely high intensities, sufficient to momentarily burst the inlet air into a highly luminous plasma (10-30,000 K), with instantaneous pressures reaching tens of atmospheres providing thrust. This airbreathing pulsed detonation engine concept owes its origins to the German V1 "Buzz Bomb" of WW II that ran on aviation fuel. see this video to get a good idea of the laser craft...
The laser Lightcraft concept was first proposed and developed by Prof. Leik Myrabo of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, under sponsorship of the Laser Propulsion Program of the former Strategic Defense Initiative Office (SDIO). He is now collaborating with the Air Force Research Laboratory's Propulsion Directorate at Edwards AFB CA to conduct field tests to demonstrate how the craft can be propelled using available high powered lasers. Dr Franklin Mead of the lab's advanced propulsion group studied the initial SDIO proposal, and offered Myrabo a multi-year sabbatical position at the lab and assistance in developing and validating the concept.
Myrabo's original SDIO Lightcraft concept was designed as a single-stage-to-orbit spacecraft that would become a microsatellite upon reaching orbit. The spacecraft lifts-off in a laser propelled airbreathing engine mode, and as it nears Mach 5 speed and 30 km altitude, shifts into a laser propelled rocket mode. The airbreathing engine mode would develop quasi-steady thrust by pulsing at hundreds to thousands of times a second -- depending on the mach number and altitude flown along the boost trajectory into orbit. The rocket mode would use on-board propellant, in the form of liquid hydrogen or nitrogen, to convert and expand the laser energy for propulsion once the Lightcraft had climbed above the atmosphere. Unlike Goddard’s rocket engine, no oxydizer is required. The SDIO study showed that all launch to orbital conditions for a laser propelled vehicle could be satisified by a single, high-power ground-based laser -- with, or without the aid of a low altitude laser relay mirror.
Myrabo and Mead are the project team co-directors for this laser Lightcraft research and development effort. Five different Lightcraft designs have been flight tested using the pointing and tracking system on the PLVTS laser, run by Stephen Squires and Chris Beairsto of WSMR's Directorate of Applied Technology Test and Simulation.
Laser boost capability has been demonstrated at the White Sands facility with Lightcraft reaching 14 feet vertically in 2-second gyroscopically stabilized free flights, as well as 400 foot horizontal guide-wire flights lasting 10 to 20 seconds.
The researchers plan to increase the Lightcraft's free flight altitude in November by moving the launch stand outside Test Cell #3, where the flights will no longer be limited by lab ceiling height. The near-term goal is to reach an altitude of 1 Kilometer in the next 18 months with the PLVTS laser. To climb even higher, e.g., 10 to 100 km or near the edge of space, will require re-activation of the 150-Kw pulsed "Driver" CO2 laser, now stored in Test Cell #2 at HELSTF. Preparations are underway to enlist this powerful infrared laser that was developed at the AVCO Research Laboratory (Everett, MA) in the mid '70's -- under the guidance of Dr. Arthur Kantrowitz, a long time advocate of laser propulsion.
The predominant reason for investigating this laser launch concept is its low cost, simplicity and responsiveness upon demand. Laser Lightcraft and their propulsion modes are a radical departure from the chemically fueled rockets used today. If successful, this new energy beam propulsion technology will supplement rather than replace current manned and unmanned launch systems.
The approach holds great promise for reducing the launch costs of microsatellites by several orders of magnitude less than today's chemical-fueled rocket technology. The evolution of ultra-lightweight high temperature materials, dual-mode laser propulsion engines, powerful lasers, and the opportunity to change science fiction into scientific fact are the driving forces behind this joint AFRL/ MSFC research effort, pursueing an innovative and promising method for reaching space.
The particle collider that was launched with fanfare on September 10 has been damaged to a degree than previously thought and will be out of commission for at least two months,its operators said on saturday.....A Cern spokesman said damage to the £3.6bn ($6.6bn) particle accelerator was worse than anticipated.
The LHC is built to smash protons together at huge speeds, recreating conditions moments after the Big Bang.
Scientists hope it will shed light on fundamental questions in physics.
DAMAGE : it seems to be a faulty electrical connection between two magnets that stopped super conducting, melted and led to a mechanical failure and let the helium out...
in detail..... On Friday, a failure, known as a quench, caused around 100 of the LHC's super-cooled magnets to heat up by as much as 100C.
The fire brigade were called out after a tonne of liquid helium leaked into the tunnel at Cern, near Geneva.
Cern spokesman James Gillies said on Saturday that the sector that was damaged would have to be warmed up to above its operating temperature - of near absolute zero - so that repairs could be made, and then cooled down again.
While he said there was never any danger to the public, Mr Gillies admitted that the breakdown would be costly.
He said: "A full investigation is still under way but the most likely cause seems to be a faulty electrical connection between two of the magnets which probably melted, leading to a mechanical failure.
"We're investigating and we can't really say more than that now.
"But we do know that we will have to warm the machine up, make the repair, cool it down, and that's what brings you to two months of downtime for the LHC."
SETBACK:
The first beams were fired successfully around the accelerator's 27km (16.7 miles) underground ring over a week ago.
The crucial next step is to collide those beams head on. However, the fault appears to have ruled out any chance of these experiments taking place for the next two months at least.
The quench occurred during final testing of the last of the LHC's electrical circuits to be commissioned.
At 1127 (0927 GMT) on Friday, the LHC's online logbook recorded a quench in sector 3-4 of the accelerator, which lies between the Alice and CMS detectors.
The entry stated that helium had been lost to the tunnel and that vacuum conditions had also been lost.
The superconducting magnets in the LHC must be supercooled to 1.9 kelvin above absolute zero, to allow them to steer particle beams around the circuit.
As a result of the quench, the temperature of about 100 of the magnets in the machine's final sector rose by around 100C.
The setback came just a day after the LHC's beam was restored after engineers replaced a faulty transformer that had hindered progress for much of the past week.
The collider, in design and consruction stages for more than 2 decades, is the world's largest atom smasher...
it fires beams of protons from nuclei of atoms around the tunnels at nearly the speed of light...
Whether it took the Earth 4.5 billion years to get to where it is today (or a mere seven days), destroying it might take a lot less time. Take a look at these spell-bounding new ways of destroying our Earth and how far man can reach from today's perspective.
10.Total existence failure
You will need: nothing
Method: No method. Simply sit back and twiddle your thumbs as, completely by chance, all 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms making up the planet Earth suddenly, simultaneously and spontaneously cease to exist. Note: the odds against this actually ever occurring are considerably greater than a googolplex to one. Failing this, some kind of arcane (read: scientifically laughable) probability-manipulation device may be employed.
Utter, utter rubbish.
9.Gobbled up by strangelets
You will need: a stable strangelet
Method: Hijack control of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. Use the RHIC to create and maintain a stable strangelet. Keep it stable for as long as it takes to absorb the entire Earth into a mass of strange quarks. Keeping the strangelet stable is incredibly difficult once it has absorbed the stabilizing machinery, but creative solutions may be possible.
A while back, there was some media hoo-hah about the possibility of this actually happening at the RHIC, but in actuality the chances of a stable strangelet forming are pretty much zero.
Earth's final resting place: a huge glob of strange matter.
8.Sucked into a microscopic black hole
You will need: a microscopic black hole. Note that black holes are not eternal, they evaporate due to Hawking radiation. For your average black hole this takes an unimaginable amount of time, but for really small ones it could happen almost instantaneously, as evaporation time is dependent on mass. Therefore you microscopic black hole must have greater than a certain threshold mass, roughly equal to the mass of Mount Everest. Creating a microscopic black hole is tricky, since one needs a reasonable amount of neutronium, but may possibly be achievable by jamming large numbers of atomic nuclei together until they stick. This is left as an exercise to the reader.
Method: simply place your black hole on the surface of the Earth and wait. Black holes are of such high density that they pass through ordinary matter like a stone through the air. The black hole will plummet through the ground, eating its way to the center of the Earth and all the way through to the other side: then, it'll oscillate back, over and over like a matter-absorbing pendulum. Eventually it will come to rest at the core, having absorbed enough matter to slow it down. Then you just need to wait, while it sits and consumes matter until the whole Earth is gone.
Highly, highly unlikely. But not impossible.
Earth's final resting place: a singularity of almost zero size, which will then proceed to happily orbit the Sun as normal.
Source: "The Dark Side Of The Sun," by Terry Pratchett. It is true that the microscopic black hole idea is an age-old science fiction mainstay which predates Pratchett by a long time.
7.Blown up by matter/antimatter reaction
You will need: 2,500,000,000,000 tons of antimatter
Antimatter - the most explosive substance possible - can be manufactured in small quantities using any large particle accelerator, but this will take some considerable time to produce the required amounts. If you can create the appropriate machinery, it may be possible - and much easier - simply to "flip" 2.5 trillion tons of matter through a fourth dimension, turning it all to antimatter at once.
Method: This method involves detonating a bomb so big that it blasts the Earth to pieces.
How hard is that?
The gravitational binding energy of a planet of mass M and radius R is - if you do the lengthy calculations - given by the formula E=(3/5)GM^2/R. For Earth, that works out to roughly 224,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Joules. The Sun takes nearly a WEEK to output that much energy. Think about THAT.
To liberate that much energy requires the complete annihilation of around 2,500,000,000,000 tonnes of antimatter. That's assuming zero energy loss to heat and radiation, which is unlikely to be the case in reality: You'll probably need to up the dose by at least a factor of ten. Once you've generated your antimatter, probably in space, just launch it en masse towards Earth. The resulting release of energy (obeying Einstein's famous mass-energy equation, E=mc^2) should be sufficient to split the Earth into a thousand pieces.
Earth's final resting place: A second asteroid belt around the Sun.
Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500. Of course, if it does prove possible to manufacture antimatter in the sufficiently large quantities you require - which is not necessarily the case - then smaller antimatter bombs will be around long before then.
6.Destroyed by vacuum energy detonation
You will need: a light bulb
Method: This is a fun one. Contemporary scientific theories tell us that what we may see as vacuum is only vacuum on average, and actually thriving with vast amounts of particles and antiparticles constantly appearing and then annihilating each other. It also suggests that the volume of space enclosed by a light bulb contains enough vacuum energy to boil every ocean in the world. Therefore, vacuum energy could prove to be the most abundant energy source of any kind. Which is where you come in. All you need to do is figure out how to extract this energy and harness it in some kind of power plant - this can easily be done without arousing too much suspicion - then surreptitiously allow the reaction to run out of control. The resulting release of energy would easily be enough to annihilate all of planet Earth and probably the Sun too.
Slightly possible.
Earth's final resting place: a rapidly expanding cloud of particles of varying size.
Earliest feasible completion date: 2060 or so.
Source: "3001: The Final Odyssey," by Arthur C. Clarke
5.Sucked into a giant black hole
You will need: a black hole, extremely powerful rocket engines, and, optionally, a large rocky planetary body. The nearest black hole to our planet is 1600 light years from Earth in the direction of Sagittarius, orbiting V4641. Method: after locating your black hole, you need get it and the Earth together. This is likely to be the most time-consuming part of this plan. There are two methods, moving Earth or moving the black hole, though for best results you'd most likely move both at once.
Very difficult, but definitely possible.
Earth's final resting place: part of the mass of the black hole.
Earliest feasible completion date: I do not expect the necessary technology to be available until AD 3000, and add at least 800 years for travel time. (That's in an external observer's frame of reference and assuming you move both the Earth and the black hole at the same time.)
Sources: "The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy," by Douglas Adams; SPACE.com
4.Meticulously and systematically deconstructed
You will need: a powerful mass driver, or ideally lots of them; ready access to roughly 2*10^32J
Method: Basically, what we're going to do here is dig up the Earth, a big chunk at a time, and boost the whole lot of it into orbit. Yes. All six sextillion tons of it. A mass driver is a sort of oversized electromagnetic railgun, which was once proposed as a way of getting mined materials back from the Moon to Earth - basically, you just load it into the driver and fire it upwards in roughly the right direction. We'd use a particularly powerful model - big enough to hit escape velocity of 11 kilometers per second even after atmospheric considerations - and launch it all into the Sun or randomly into space.
Alternate methods for boosting the material into space include loading the extracted material into space shuttles or taking it up via space elevator. All these methods, however, require a - let me emphasize this - titanic quantity of energy to carry out. Building a Dyson sphere ain't gonna cut it here. (Note: Actually, it would. But if you have the technology to build a Dyson sphere, why are you reading this?) See No. 6 for a possible solution.
If we wanted to and were willing to devote resources to it, we could start this process RIGHT NOW. Indeed, what with all the gunk left in orbit, on the Moon and heading out into space, we already have done.
Earth's final resting place: Many tiny pieces, some dropped into the Sun, the remainder scattered across the rest of the Solar System.
Earliest feasible completion date: Ah. Yes. At a billion tons of mass driven out of the Earth's gravity well per second: 189,000,000 years.
3.Pulverized by impact with blunt instrument
You will need: a big heavy rock, something with a bit of a swing to it... perhaps Mars
Method: Essentially, anything can be destroyed if you hit it hard enough. ANYTHING. The concept is simple: find a really, really big asteroid or planet, accelerate it up to some dazzling speed, and smash it into Earth, preferably head-on but whatever you can manage. The result: an absolutely spectacular collision, resulting hopefully in Earth (and, most likely, our "cue ball" too) being pulverized out of existence - smashed into any number of large pieces which if the collision is hard enough should have enough energy to overcome their mutual gravity and drift away forever, never to coagulate back into a planet again.
A brief analysis of the size of the object required can be found here. Falling at the minimal impact velocity of 11 kilometers per second and assuming zero energy loss to heat and other energy forms, the cue ball would have to have roughly 60% of the mass of the Earth. Mars, the next planet out, "weighs" in at about 11% of Earth's mass, while Venus, the next planet in and also the nearest to Earth, has about 81%. Assuming that we would fire our cue ball into Earth at much greater than 11km/s (I'm thinking more like 50km/s), either of these would make great possibilities.
Obviously a smaller rock would do the job, you just need to fire it faster. A 10,000,000,000,000-tonne asteroid at 90% of light speed would do just as well. See the Guide to moving Earth for useful information on maneuvering big hunks of rock across interplanetary distances.
Pretty plausible.
Earth's final resting place: a variety of roughly Moon-sized chunks of rock, scattered haphazardly across the greater Solar System.
Earliest feasible completion date: AD 2500, maybe?
2. Eaten by von Neumann machines You will need: a single von Neumann machine
Method: A von Neumann machine is any device that is capable of creating an exact copy of itself given nothing but the necessary raw materials. Create one of these that subsists almost entirely on iron, magnesium, aluminum and silicon, the major elements found in Earth's mantle and core. It doesn't matter how big it is as long as it can reproduce itself exactly in any period of time. Release it into the ground under the Earth's crust and allow it to fend for itself. Watch and wait as it creates a second von Neumann machine, then they create two more, then they create four more. As the population of machines doubles repeatedly, the planet Earth will, terrifyingly soon, be entirely eaten up and turned into a swarm of potentially sextillions of machines. Technically your objective would now be complete - no more Earth - but if you want to be thorough then you can command your VNMs to hurl themselves, along with any remaining trace elements, into the Sun. This hurling would have to be achieved using rocket propulsion of some sort, so be sure to include this in your design.
So crazy it might just work.
Earth's final resting place: the bodies of the VNMs themselves, then a small lump of iron sinking into the Sun.
Earliest feasible completion date: Potentially 2045-2050, or even earlier.
Source: "2010: Odyssey Two," by Arthur C. Clarke
1.Hurled into the Sun
You will need: Earthmoving equipment
Method: Hurl the Earth into the Sun. Sending Earth on a collision course with the Sun is not as easy as one might think; even though you don't actually have to literally hit the Sun (send the Earth near enough to the Sun (within the Roche limit), and tidal forces will tear it apart), it's surprisingly easy to end up with Earth in a loopy elliptical orbit which merely roasts it for four months in every eight. But careful planning can avoid this.
This is impossible at our current technological level, but will be possible one day, I'm certain. In the meantime, may happen by freak accident if something comes out of nowhere and randomly knocks Earth in precisely the right direction. Earth's final resting place: a small globule of vaporized iron sinking slowly into the heart of the Sun.
Earliest feasible completion date: Via act of God: 25 years' time. Any earlier and we'd have already spotted the asteroid in question. Via human intervention: given the current level of expansion of space technology, 2250 at best.
Source: "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers," by Grant Naylor.
I have written about the Extraterrestrial and the Alien Mania stuff here in my previous posts. Now this post is all about life beyond Planet Earth! Man has always been in a constant search for a hospitable place in our solar system and studies reveal that his long cherished dream of living off the earth may come true one day! Europa and Titan--The two moons may be the next destinations of mankind! This post should have come up right after the science explorations but its just that I recently ran into a documentary on History Channel called "Histories Classroom" and that is how my curiosity grew regarding this topic! And hence here I am trying to bring about yet another interesting aspect of Beyond-Nature! Lets digg deeper...
Europa
It is the sixth of Jupiter's known satellites and the fourth largest; it is the second of the Galilean moons. Europa is slightly smaller than the Earth's Moon. It has fascinated the humans for hundreds of years now ever since it was discovered by Galileo in 17th century.
It has been suggested that life may exist in Europa's under-ice ocean, perhaps subsisting in an environment similar to Earth's deep-ocean hydrothermal vents or the Antarctic Lake Vostok. Life in such an ocean could possibly be similar to microbial life on Earth in the deep ocean. So far, there is no evidence that life exists on Europa, but the likely presence of liquid water has spurred calls to send a probe there.
Until the 1970s, life, at least as the concept is generally understood, was believed to be entirely dependent on energy from the Sun. Plants on Earth's surface capture energy from sunlight to photosynthesize sugars from carbon dioxide and water, releasing oxygen in the process, and are then eaten by oxygen-respiring animals, passing their energy up the food chain. Even life in the ocean depths, where sunlight cannot reach, was believed to obtain its nourishment either from consuming organic detritus rained down from the surface waters or from eating animals that did. A world's ability to support life was thought to depend on its access to sunlight. However, in 1977, during an exploratory dive to the Galapagos Rift in the deep-sea exploration submersible Alvin, scientists discovered colonies of giant tube worms, clams, crustaceans, mussels, and other assorted creatures clustered around undersea volcanic features known as black smokers.These creatures thrive despite having no access to sunlight, and it was soon discovered that they comprise an entirely independent food chain. Instead of plants, the basis for this food chain was a form of bacterium that derived its energy from oxidization of reactive chemicals, such as hydrogen or hydrogen sulfide, that bubbled up from the Earth's interior. This chemosynthesis revolutionized the study of biology by revealing that life need not be sun-dependent; it only requires water and an energy gradient in order to exist. It opened up a new avenue in astrobiology by massively expanding the number of possible extraterrestrial habitats. Europa's unlit interior is now considered to be the most likely location for extant extraterrestrial life in the Solar System.
While the tube worms and other multicellular eukaryotic organisms around these hydrothermal vents respire oxygen and thus are indirectly dependent on photosynthesis, anaerobic chemosynthetic bacteria and archaea that inhabit these ecosystems provide a possible model for life in Europa's ocean. The energy provided by tidal flexing drives active geological processes within Europa's interior, just as they do to a far more obvious degree on its sister moon Io. While Europa, like the Earth, may possess an internal energy source from radioactive decay, the energy generated by tidal flexing would be several orders of magnitude greater than any radiological source. However, such an energy source could never support an ecosystem as large and diverse as the photosynthesis-based ecosystem on Earth's surface. Life on Europa could exist clustered around hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor, or below the ocean floor, where endoliths are known to habitate on Earth. Alternatively, it could exist clinging to the lower surface of the moon's ice layer, much like algae and bacteria in Earth's polar regions, or float freely in Europa's ocean. However, if Europa's ocean were too cold, biological processes similar to those known on Earth could not take place. Similarly, if it were too salty, only extreme halophiles could survive in its environment.
The Surface of Europa as pictured by satellite Galileo
In 2006, Robert Pappalardo, an assistant professor within the University of Colorado's space department, said, "We’ve spent quite a bit of time and effort trying to understand if Mars was once a habitable environment. Europa today, probably, is a habitable environment. We need to confirm this … but Europa, potentially, has all the ingredients for life … and not just four billion years ago … but today."
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This brownish-yellow satellite might have appealed more to the TitanWorld-The Watch Manufacturers that they named their company after this moon . Known for its earth like atmosphere , rugged mountains and climatic features this satellite has been cited as a possible host for microbial extraterrestrial life or, at least, as a prebiotic environment rich in complex organic chemistry.
Scientists believe that the atmosphere of early Earth was similar in composition to the current atmosphere on Titan. Many hypotheses have developed that attempt to bridge the step from chemical to biological evolution. The Miller-Urey experiment and several following experiments have shown that with an atmosphere similar to that of Titan and the addition of UV radiation, complex molecules and polymer substances like tholins can be generated. The reaction starts with dissociation of nitrogen and methane, forming hydrocyan and ethyne. Further reactions have been studied extensively. All of these experiments have led to the suggestion that enough organic material exists on Titan to start a chemical evolution analogous to what is thought to have started life on Earth. While the analogy assumes the presence of liquid water for longer periods than is currently observable, several theories suggest that liquid water from an impact could be preserved under a frozen isolation layer. It has also been observed that liquid ammonia oceans could exist deep below the surface; one model suggests an ammonia–water solution as much as 200 km deep beneath a water ice crust, conditions that, "while extreme by terrestrial standards, are such that life could indeed survive". Heat transfer between the interior and upper layers would be critical in sustaining any sub-surface oceanic life.
Detection of microbial life on Titan would depend on its biogenic effects. That the atmospheric methane and nitrogen are of biological origin has been examined, for example. Hydrogen has been cited as one molecule suitable to test for life on Titan: if methanogenic life is consuming atmospheric hydrogen in sufficient volume, it will have a measurable effect on the mixing ratio in the troposphere.
Despite these biological possibilities, there are formidable obstacles to life on Titan, and any analogy to Earth is inexact. At a vast distance from the Sun, Titan is frigid (a fact exacerbated by the anti-greenhouse effect of its cloud cover), and its atmosphere lacks CO2. Given these difficulties, the topic of life on Titan may be best described as an experiment for examining theories on conditions necessary prior to flourishing life on Earth. While life itself may not exist, the prebiotic conditions of the Titanian environment, and the possible presence of organic chemistry, remain of great interest in understanding the early history of the terrestrial biosphere. Using Titan as a prebiotic experiment involves not only observation through spacecraft, but laboratory experiment, and chemical and photochemical modelling on Earth.
An alternate explanation for life's hypothetical existence on Titan has been proposed: if life were to be found on Titan, it would be statistically more likely to have originated from Earth than to have appeared independently, a process known as panspermia. It is theorized that large asteroid and cometary impacts on Earth's surface have caused hundreds of millions of fragments of microbe-laden rock to escape Earth's gravity. Calculations indicate that a number of these would encounter many of the bodies in the solar system, including Titan.
Conditions on Titan could become far more habitable in future. Six billion years from now, as the Sun becomes a red giant, surface temperatures could rise to ~200K, high enough for stable oceans of water/ammonia mixture to exist on the surface. As the Sun's ultraviolet output decreases, the haze in Titan's upper atmosphere will deplete, lessening the anti-greenhouse effect on the surface and enabling the greenhouse created by atmospheric methane to play a far greater role. These conditions together could create an environment agreeable to exotic forms of life, and will subsist for several hundred million years, long enough for at least primitive life to form.
Landing on the Moon Titan
While the Cassini–Huygens mission was not equipped to provide evidence for biology or complex organics, it did support the theory of an environment on Titan that is similar, in some ways, to that of the primordial Earth.
There are a wide range of options for future missions to Titan that might address these and other questions, including orbiters, landers, balloons etc.
About seven billion years ago, the universe went into a sort of pubescent growth spurt that as far we know hasn't slowed down. Scientists call the growth stimulus dark energy, for lack of a better term or an understanding of the mechanics.
Now they've invented a tool called a laser comb that can measure expansion rates over time periods as short as 10 to 20 years.
Ronald Walsworth, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, offers this as an example: Say you want to figure out if something big, like your house, has moved a millimeter. If you counted on a measuring stick that chalked off miles, you'd never know. But if you had a ruler nicely hashed out by the millimeter, it'd be a cinch.
Laser combs refine the technique of spectroscopy, a process that picks apart a photon's journey from its source to our telescopes by identifying what chemicals it has passed through.
The fingerprints emerge by splitting the light into component wavelengths and comparing absorption lines in its spectrum with the wavelengths of laboratory sources.
The laser combs take a target's light signature one step further. If you've ever sat at a railroad stop and heard the train whistle, you know how it changes pitch as it comes closer or as it recedes down the tracks. The same shift takes place not only in sound waves, but in all wavelengths, including visible and ultraviolet light.
Click on the image n see a enlarged one to have a broader perspective
As the universe expands, distant galaxies, which are used to chart the universe's motion, move further away from Earth, with a corresponding shift in their spectra. Current tools to measure the shift would be like using the mile-marker to tag your house's re-location
Scientists know the universe has expanded over billions of years. The laser comb can refine that measurement to well within a human lifetime.
"We have to measure the movement of these distant galaxies to a few centimeters per second and follow this over decades. These speeds are barely faster than a snail's pace," said Antonio Manescau, with the European Southern Observatory.
The ESO says that feat would be like measuring the circumference of Earth to a millimeter (.062 inches).
"Never before have we had the chance to see the shape of the universe change before our eyes. We have inferred it from the cosmic background radiation, but it takes billions of years to see," said Walsworth. "With sensitive tools, in a human time scale we can see change."
To make the measurements, scientists use ultra-short pulses of laser light at many frequencies, each separated by a precise and constant interval. By comparing shifts in the spectra -- which may be a small as a molecule -- researchers expect to be able to determine, for example, how much a distant galaxy has moved over a 10- or 20-year period. The measurements, however, will have to wait until new, extremely large telescopes, currently under development, begin operations.
The technique also can be used to look for Earth-sized planets in other star systems.
The world's fastest supercomputer will probably never be known as the world's fastest supercomputer. RIKEN's MDGrape-3 is the first machine to break the petaflop barrier -- that's 1 quadrillion calculations (floating-point operations, to be specific) per second -- and it's three times faster than the currently ranked fastest computer in the world, IBM's BlueGene/L. But MDGrape-3 is so specialized that it can't run the software used to officially rank computing speed. What it can do is determine the effect of any chemical compound on one of the most intricate systems in the human body in a couple of seconds.
MDGrape-3 is designed for pharmaceutical research, specifically molecular dynamics simulation. In developing drugs, pharmaceutical companies have to analyze thousands on thousands of chemical compounds to find out how they'll affect the protein-bonding structures in the human body. Protein structures called enzymes are the building blocks that do all of the work within a cell, and the way these proteins bond with any drug compound introduced into the human body determines the body's response to that drug.
MDGrape-3 produces simulations of these molecular interactions. What takes most computers hours or days to analyze takes MDGrape-3 a few seconds. This functionality is invaluable in drug research, and it could drastically cut the research time involved in the development of new cures. A subsidiary of pharmaceutical giant Merck has already booked time on the machine.
Structurally speaking, MDGrape-3 is a parallel computing system consisting of two main sections: a primary server unit and a specialized-engines unit. The latter component is a cluster of 201 engines running proprietary chips developed by Riken specifically for MDGrape-3. It's this huge set of engines, running 24 MDGrape-3 chips each, that does the heavy protein-analysis lifting. Each chip has a maximum processing speed of 230 gigaflops (one billion operations per second).
The primary server unit manages the engine cluster. This parallel server setup runs two different types of processors: 65 servers run dual-core Intel 5000-series Xeon processors, 256 per server; and 37 servers run 3.3-GHz Intel Xeon processors, each with 2 MB of level 1 cache, at 74 processors per server. This hardware structure enables the 1-petaflop speed, which is the machine's theoretical maximum for certain processes.
MDGrape-3 took $9 million and about four years to build. And it's actually very efficient -- a total cost of $9 million breaks down to about $15 per gigaflop. The slower BlueGene/L cost about $140 per gigaflop to build.
BlueGene/L, which tops out at a theoretical 360 teraflops (trillion calculations per second), is also a biotechnology-specific machine. The advances in speed marked by these two supercomputers is indicative of a general trend in technology toward biologically-slanted systems. Some say the trend really started with the successful mapping of the human genome in 2000.
Regardless of what spurred the current biotechnology race, most experts agree that the logical end of the surge is a state of DNA-based medicine. In several decades, we could make an appointment with our doctor for a quick DNA analysis to find out what diseases we're at risk for and pop a single, gene-targeting pill that eliminates all of those foreseeable risks.
The riddle of Atlantis is among the greatest of the world's unsolved mysteries. Where, for a start, was the exact site of this huge island civilization? did it really, as early historians reported, vanish from the earth in a day and a night? Small wonder that since the earliest times scholars, archaeologists, historians, and occultists have kept up an almost ceaseless search for its precise whereabouts. Beginning with the Greek philosopher Plato's first description of the lost land that was apparently "the nearest thing to paradise on Earth," this chapter examines in detail the basic evidence for the existence and cataclysmic destruction of Atlantis.
(Note: Plato was not the first one to know about Atlantis. He was the first to describe it in detail. Pythagoras taught Plato what he knew)
Of all the world's unsolved mysteries, Atlantis is probably the biggest. Said to have been a huge island continent with an extraordinary civilization, situated in the Atlantic Ocean, it is reported to have vanished from the face of the earth in a day and a night. So complete was this devastation that Atlantis sank beneath the sea, taking with it every trace of its existence. Despite this colossal vanishing trick, the lost continent of Atlantis has exerted a mysterious influence over the human race for thousands of years. It is almost as though a primitive memory of the glorious days of Atlantis lingers on in the deepest recesses of the human mind. The passage of time has not diminished interest in the fabled continent, nor have centuries of skepticism by scientists succeeded in banishing Atlantis to obscurity in its watery grave. Thousands of books and articles have been written about the lost continent.
It has inspired the authors of novels, short stories, poems, and movies. Its name has been used for ships, restaurants, magazines, and even a region of the planet Mars. Atlantean societies have been formed to theorize and speculate about a great lost land. Atlantis has come to symbolize our dream of a once golden past. It appeals to our nostalgic longing for a better, happier world; it feeds out hunger for knowledge of mankind's true origins; and above all it offers the challenge of a genuinely sensational detective story.
Today the search for evidence of the existence of Atlantis continues with renewed vigor, using 20th century man's most sophisticated tools in the hope of discovering the continent that is said to have disappeared around 11,600 years ago. did Atlantis exist, or is it just a myth? Ours may be the generation that finally solves this tantalizing and ancient enigma.
~Atlantis~
" is said to have been the nearest thing to paradise that the earth has seen. It was a consortium of Concentric Islands as shown in fig. Fruits and vegetables grew in abundance in its rich soil. Fragrant flowers and herbs bloomed n the wooded slopes of its many beautiful mountains. All kinds of tame and wild animals roamed its meadows and magnificent forests, and drank from its rivers and lakes. Underground streams of wonderfully sweet water were used to irrigate the soil, to provide hot and cold fountains and baths for all the inhabitants. - There were even baths for the horses.
The earth was rich in precious metals, and the Atlanteans were wealthier than any people before or after with gold, silver, brass, tin, and ivory, and their principal royal palace was a marvel of size and beauty. Besides being skilled metallurgists, the Atlanteans were accomplished engineers. A huge and complex system of canals and bridges linked their capital city with the sea and the surrounding countryside, and there were magnificent docks and harbors for the fleets of vessels that carried on a flourishing trade with overseas countries.
Whether they lived in the city or the country, the people of Atlantis had everything they could possibly want for their comfort and happiness. They were a gentle, wise, and loving people, unaffected by their great wealth and prizing virtue above all things. In time, however, their noble nature became debased. No longer satisfied with ruling their own great land of plenty, they set about waging war on others. Their vast armies swept through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean region, conquering large areas of North Africa and Europe.
The Atlanteans were poised to strike against Athens and Egypt when the Athenian army rose up, drove them back to Gibraltar, and defeated them. Hardly had the Athenians tasted victory when a terrible cataclysm wiped out their entire army in a single day and night, and caused Atlantis to sink forever beneath the waves. Perhaps a few survivors were left to tell what happened. At all events, the story is said to have been passed down through many generations until, more than 9200 years later, it was made known to the world for the first time."
~Plato's Hypothesis~
The man who first committed the legend to paper was the Greek philosopher Plato, who in about 355 B.C. wrote about Atlantis in two of his famous dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias. Although Plato claimed that the story of the lost continent was derived from ancient Egyptian records, no such records have ever come to light, nor has any direct mention of Atlantis been found in any surviving records made before Plato's time. Every book and article on Atlantis that has ever been published has been based on Plato's account; subsequent authors have merely interpreted or added to it.
~Questions Raised~
Why, ask the scholars, are there so many remarkable similarities between the ancient cultures of the Old and New Worlds? Why do we find the same plants and animals on continents thousands of miles apart when there is no known way for them to have been transported there?
How did the primitive peoples of many lands construct technological marvels, such as Stonehenge in Britain, the huge statues of Easter Island in the Pacific and the strange sacred cities of the Andes? Were they helped by a technically sophisticated race that has since disappeared?
Above all, why do the legends of people the world over tell the same story of an overwhelming natural disaster and the arrival or godlike beings who brought with them a new culture from a far? could the catastrophe that sank Atlantis have sent tidal waves throughout the glove, causing terrible havoc and destruction?
And were the 'gods' the remnants of the Atlantean race - the few survivors who were not on or near the island continent when it was engulfed?
Map of Atlantis by the 17th-century German scholar Athanasius Kircher. Kircher based his map on Plato's description of Atlantis as an island west of the Pillars of Hercules - the Strait of Gibraltar - and situated Atlantis in the ocean that has since been named after the legendary land. Unlike modern cartographers, he placed south at the top of the map, which puts America at the right.
Even without Plato's account, the quest for answers to these mysteries might have led to the belief by some in a 'missing link' between the continents - a land-bridge populated by a highly evolved people in the distant past. Nevertheless, it is the Greek philosopher's story that lies at the heart of all arguments for or against the existence of such a lost continent.
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