Donald Rumsfeld, architect of the Iraqi war, has been removed from the planet:https://www.rt.com/usa/528041-defense-secretary-donald-rumsfeld-dead/ The Light Forces are asking everybody who feels so guided to participate in the meditat...
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Dr. Mercola, GuestIn the video below, Funny or Die pokes fun at Monsanto’s “feeding the world” message by highlighting some of the most obvious features of genetically engineered (GE) foods, such as the unnatural crossing of genetic material between plant and animal kingdoms, the use of toxic chemicals and Monsanto’s ever-expanding monopoly.“I own everything!” Mama Monsanto exclaims, and that’s pretty close to the truth. Monsanto [...]
By Carey Wedler for The Anti-Media(ANTIMEDIA) According to Defense One, the Pentagon is rushing to build a space war center to sustain its global power. Within six months, the space apparatus will be fully functional, as announced by Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work at the 2015 GEOINT conference. Work openly admitted the move is an attempt by the Pentagon to maintain global dominance and combat alleged attacks from China and Russia. Most prominently, the [...]
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| The Proton-M carrier rocket blasted off with the MexSat-1 communications satellite from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan |
Excerpt from nytimes.com
MOSCOW — A Russian-made rocket ferrying a Mexican telecommunications satellite crashed in eastern Siberia minutes after its launching on Saturday, Russian news agencies reported, citing officials at the country’s space agency.
The Proton-M rocket was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 11:47 a.m. and crashed in the Chita region of Siberia about eight minutes later, the reports said.
The failure appeared to have occurred with the rocket’s third stage, which was intended to bring the satellite to an altitude of about 110 miles. At that point, it was supposed to be propelled by engines into geostationary orbit.
Instead, there was a catastrophic failure. The stream of telemetry data sent back by the rocket failed about a minute before the satellite was to enter orbit, the news agencies reported.
The Interfax agency quoted an unidentified official at Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, as saying there had been an “emergency engine shutdown of the third stage.”
The Proton rocket is the mainstay transporter for International Launch Services, a joint Russian-American satellite carrier business. The satellite, called Centenario, was being sent into orbit on behalf of Mexico’s Ministry of Communications and Transportation and had been manufactured by Boeing Satellite Systems.
According to a statement issued by International Launch Services before the launching, it was intended to provide “mobile satellite services to support national security, civil and humanitarian efforts and will provide disaster relief, emergency services, telemedicine, rural education and government agency operations.”
The Proton-M is regarded as a workhorse but has encountered numerous problems in its decades of service. In 2013, a leadership shake-up at Roscosmos was prompted in part by the fourth failed launch of a Proton-M rocket within three years.
Officials said further launchings would be suspended until the cause of Saturday’s crash was determined.
The Mexican ministry said International Launch Services would create a commission to investigate the accident.
It said the satellite loss was “100 percent” covered by insurance, a point that seemed aimed at a domestic population often skeptical of the government’s spending on big projects.
The ministry said it still planned to launch another communications satellite from Cape Canaveral, Fla., aboard a Lockheed Martin rocket in October.
Gerardo Ruiz Esparza, the transportation and communications secretary, said that the lost satellite and its launching were valued at $390 million.
“I regret the mission was not a success,” Mr. Esparza said. “If Mexico is joining in these high technologies, we are going to have to learn to live with the risks that are not uncommon in this industry. The benefit is not so much being in the space era so much as the service it could provide to Mexicans.”
Randal C. Archibold contributed reporting from Mexico City.
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bbc.com
Artist Carrie Paterson has long dreamed of beaming messages far out to the emptiness of space. Except her messages would have an extra dimension – smell.
By broadcasting formulae of aromatic chemicals, she says, aliens could reconstruct all sorts of whiffs that help to define life on Earth: animal blood and faeces, sweet floral and citrus scents or benzene to show our global dependence on the car. This way intelligent life forms on distant planets who may not see or hear as we do, says Paterson, could explore us through smell, one of the most primitive and ubiquitous senses of all.
It is nearly 40 years since the Arecibo facility sent messages out into space (Wikipedia)
Her idea is only the latest in a list of attempts to hail intelligent life outside of the Solar System. Forty years ago this month, the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico sent an iconic picture message into space – and we’ve arguably been broadcasting to aliens ever since we invented TV and radio.
However in recent years, astronomers, artists, linguists and anthropologists have been converging on the idea that creating comprehensible messages for aliens is much harder than it seems. This week, Paterson and others discussed the difficulties of talking to our cosmic neighbours at a conference called Communicating Across the Cosmos, held by Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). It seems our traditional ways of communicating through pictures and language may well be unintelligible – or worse, be catastrophically misconstrued. So how should we be talking to ET?
Lost in translation?
We have always wanted to send messages about humanity beyond the planet. According to Albert Harrison, a space psychologist and author of Starstruck: Cosmic Visions in Science, Religion and Folklore, the first serious designs for contacting alien life appeared two centuries ago, though they never got off the ground.
In the 1800s, mathematician Carl Gauss proposed cutting down lines of trees in a densely forested area and replanting the strips with wheat or rye, Harrison wrote in his book. “The contrasting colours would form a giant triangle and three squares known as a Pythagoras figure which could be seen from the Moon or even Mars.” Not long after, the astronomer Joseph von Littrow proposed creating huge water-filled channels topped with kerosene. “Igniting them at night showed geometric patterns such as triangles that Martians would interpret as a sign of intelligence, not nature.”
But in the 20th Century, we began to broadcast in earnest. The message sent by Arecibo hoped to make first contact on its 21,000 year journey to the edge of the Milky Way. The sketches it contained, made from just 1,679 digital bits, look cute to us today, very much of the ‘Pong’ video game generation. Just before then, Nasa’s Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes each carried a metal calling card bolted onto their frame with symbols and drawings on the plaque, showing a naked man and woman.
Yet it’s possible that these kinds of message may turn out to be incomprehensible to aliens; they might find it as cryptic as we find Stone Age etchings.
Antique tech
“Linear drawings of a male and a female homo sapiens are legible to contemporary humans,” says Marek Kultys, a London-based science communications designer. ”But the interceptors of Pioneer 10 could well assume we are made of several separate body parts (i.e. faces, hair and the man’s chest drawn as a separate closed shapes) and our body surface is home for long worm-like beings (the single lines defining knees, abdomens or collarbones.).”
Man-made tech may also be an issue. The most basic requirement for understanding Voyager’s Golden Record, launched 35 years ago and now way out beyond Pluto, is a record player. Aliens able to play it at 16 and 2/3 revolutions a minute will hear audio greetings in 55 world languages, including a message of ‘Peace and Friendship’ from former United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. But how many Earthlings today have record players, let alone extraterrestrials?
Our sights and sounds of Earth might be unintelligible to an alien audience (Nasa)
Time capsule
Inevitably such messages become outdated too, like time capsules. Consider the case of the Oglethorpe Atlanta Crypt of Civilization – a time capsule sealed on Earth in 1940, complete with a dry martini and a poster of Gone With the Wind. It was intended as a snapshot of 20th Century life for future humans, not aliens, but like an intergalactic message, may only give a limited picture to future generations. When, in 61,000 years, the Oglethorpe time capsule is opened, would Gone With The Wind have stood the test of time?
This message was taken into the stars by Pioneer - but we have no idea if aliens would be able to understand it (Nasa)
Kultys argues that all these factors should be taken into account when we calculate the likelihood of communicating with intelligent life. The astronomer Frank Drake’s famous equation allows anyone to calculate how many alien species are, based on likely values of seven different factors. At a UK Royal Society meeting in 2010 Drake estimated there are roughly 10,000 detectable civilisations in the galaxy. Yet Kultys points out that we should also factor in how many aliens are using the same channel of communications as us, are as willing to contact us as we are them, whose language we hope to learn, and who are physically similar to us.
Another barrier we might consider is the long distance nature of trans-cosmos communication. It means that many years ‒ even a thousand ‒ could pass between sending a message and receiving a reply. Paterson sees romance in that. “Our hope for communication with another intelligent civilisation has a melancholic aspect to it.
We are on an island in a vast, dark space. Imagine if communication… became like an exchange of perfumed love letters with the quiet agony of expectation... Will we meet? Will we be as the other imagined? Will the other be able to understand us?”
Ready for an answer?
Anthropologist John Traphagan of the University of Texas in Austin has been asking the same question, though his view is more cautious. "When it comes to ET, you'll get a signal of some kind; not much information and very long periods between ‘Hi, how are you?’ and whatever comes back. We may just shrug our shoulders and say 'This is boring’, and soon forget about it or, if the time lag wasn't too long, we might use the minimal information we get from our slow-speed conversation to invent what we think they're like and invent a kind concept of what they're after.”
The aliens in Independence Day (1996) did not come in peace (20th Century Fox)
Consider how easy it is to mess up human-to-human communications; I got Traphagan’s first name wrong when I e-mailed him for this article. An apology within minutes cleared up the confusion, yet if he had been an alien anthropologist on some distant planet it would have taken much longer to fix. He later confessed: "I could have thought this is a snooty English journalist and our conversation might never have happened."
Even if Earth’s interstellar messaging committees weeded out the typos, cultural gaffes are always a possibility. These can only be avoided by understanding the alien’s culture – something that’s not easy to do, especially when you’ve never met those you’re communicating with.
Rosy picture
So, what is the best way to communicate? This is still up for grabs – perhaps it’s via smell, or some other technique we haven’t discovered yet. Clearly, creating a message that is timeless, free of cultural bias and universally comprehensible would be no mean feat.
But for starters, being honest about who we are is important if we want to have an extra-terrestrial dialogue lasting centuries, says Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at Seti. (Otherwise, intelligent civilisations who’ve decoded our radio and TV signals might smell a rat.)
The golden discs aboard the Voyager spacecraft require aliens to understand how to play a record (Nasa)
“Let's not try to hide our shortcomings,” says Vakoch. “The message we should send to another world is straightforward: We are a young civilisation, in the throes of our technological adolescence. We're facing a lot of problems here on Earth, and we're not even sure that we'll be around as a species when their reply comes in. But in spite of all of these challenges, we humans also have hope – especially hope in ourselves."
Yet ultimately what matters, says Paterson, is that they stop and consider the beings who sent them a message; the people who wanted to say: “Here are some important things. Here’s our DNA, here is some maths and universal physics. And here is our longing and desire to say “I’m like you, but I’m different.”
India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C25), carrying the Mars orbiter, blasts off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, about 100 km (62 miles) north of the southern Indian city of Chennai November 5, 2013. REUTERS/B...
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September 25, 2011
Hello again. I am FEELING it's about time to connect up with you once again and my little heart is a' pounding as I tune in to make the connection. Anyone home?
We are always home ... for that, deare...
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The date for Chinese New Year 2011 - February 3rd. This is also known as Spring Festival or CNY 2011.
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U.S. Creates Largest Protected Area in the World ~ 3X Larger than California
"We thought [the monument decision] was a good way to balance what the science was telling us was important to protect and the needs of those who use the area," Boots said.
The area being protected by the administration will expand the protected areas from 50 miles offshore to 200 miles offshore around three areas—Wake Island, Johnston Atoll, and Jarvis Island—the maximum reach of the United States’ exclusive economic zone. The current 50-mile offshore protections around the Howland and Baker islands, and Kingman Reef and Palmyra Atoll, will not change.
Kerry said one measure that could help deter illegal fishing in the region, as well as around the world, would be to implement the Port State Measures Agreement, an international treaty that requires member nations to prevent illegally caught fish from entering the market. Eleven nations or parties have ratified the agreement, but a total of 25 must sign before the treaty will take effect.
"Our goal is to get this done this year," Kerry said.