Tag Archive for Earth

Brandon Christen | December 19, 2011
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And now, if you will, a Metaphor….

Imagine a massive ship filled with many sailors…

At some time, a rumor began spreading amongst all the people that the boat was heading towards an island that was unbelievably amazing; an island where all the normal laws of reality were suspended and ultimate, endless bliss would enrapture them forever. Many of the sailors took so much joy from this thought that they began ignoring their duties on the ship, doing little more than staring out on the horizon and waiting for the island to appear. Many others did indeed continue their day-to-day tasks on the ship, helping to keep it clean and such, but they constantly talked about the island. It was their obsession, their passion, and their pride. Groups and sub-groups formed around different ideas of what the island would be like. Some thought it would be tropical, others temperate, and still others thought it would have every climate imaginable for all people to enjoy. Arguments sprang up over what sorts of foods would be present on the island!

At various times, different sailors would hold out their spyglasses and shout aloud “I see it! I see the island there!” and many would swell with enthusiasm…that is, until it was revealed that the crier had seen wrong (or, on occasion, even outright lied). Despite all these false alarms and misplaced swells of hope, the vast majority of the sailors kept believing, to the point of certainty, that the island was just over the next wave.

Eventually, almost all of the sailors took to ignoring the present duties of ship-board life and chose to stare out on the horizon with their own spyglasses, each on certain that they could see the island in the distance (despite some of them looking in utterly opposite directions). Indeed, there were many heated arguments, but one thing every one of them could agree on was this: regardless of exactly where it was or what it was like, that perfect island was definitely out there, somewhere. It just had to be.

One day, one of the sailors climbed up to the top of the mast and found two other sailors there, arguing.

“I think the island will be temperate!” said the first. “It will be temperate, I tell you!”

“Ah, but you’re mistaken, friend. It will be tropical!” said the second. “I guarantee you, for I can see it!” he continued, holding his spyglass aloft.

“Fool!” shouted the first. “I can see it, and it is, in fact, quite temperate!”

At that point, the third sailor (who had just climbed up) yanked the spyglasses from both others and told them this:

“Actually, friends, you’re both mistaken. If you’ll just look right here,” he said, gesturing to the ends of their spyglasses, “you’ll see that you each just drew what you wanted the island to be like on the glass. You were never actually seeing the island; you just painted what you wanted to see and thus saw it in your own imagination. Now if you’ll just look without these faulty spyglasses, you’ll quickly see that there is no island; in fact, there never was an island. However, what we do have is an amazing ship with everything you could ever really want already on it. There are lots of other people onboard, too. You can get to know them, make friends, find lovers, and have wonderful conversations. You can learn, eat, relax, work, and overall have a merry life aboard this ship if you’ll only just stop obsessing over this island you came up with.”

“But the island is supposed to be perfect!” cried the first sailor.

“Indeed! Perfect!” shouted the second, both of them clearly distraught at this news.

“Ah, but that is exactly why it doesn’t exist, friends,” said the third sailor. He reached out and put his hands on their shoulders: “Nothing perfect is out there. I’ll admit it, this ship is sometimes leaky and some of the other people aboard aren’t too terribly pleasant. But I think you’ll find that once you stop daydreaming about perfection and start happily working with what you do have, you’ll find yourselves much happier.”

Behold, our ship

Now, guess which sailor was the Atheist…

Category: Creative, General, Opinion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Ellen Lundgren | November 14, 2011
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Time Lapse of Earth from Space

This is such a gorgeous video, I just thought I’d share it here. Be sure to give your props on their page as well! My favorite are the night time auroras and the thunderstorms you can see.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Time lapse sequences of photographs taken by Ron Garan

http://fragileoasis.org/bloggernauts/Astro_Ron and the crew of expedition 28 & 29 onboard the International Space Station from August to October, 2011, who to my knowledge shot these pictures at an altitude of around 350 km with a high ISO HD Camera developed by NHK Japan, nicknamed the SS-HDTV camera. All credit goes to them.  I intend to upload a FullHD-version presently. HD, refurbished, smoothed, retimed, denoised, deflickered, cut, etc. All in all I tried to keep the looks of the material as original as possible, avoided adjusting the colors and the like, since in my opinion the original footage itself already has an almost surreal and aestethical visual nature.

Music: Jan Jelinek | Do Dekor, faitiche back2001

w+p by Jan Jelinek, published by Betke Edition

http://www.janjelinek.com | http://www.faitiche.de

Image Courtesy of the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory,

NASA Johnson Space Center, The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth

http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov

Editing: Michael König | http://www.koenigm.com

Shooting locations in order of appearance:
1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United States at Night
2. Aurora Borealis and eastern United States at Night
3. Aurora Australis from Madagascar to southwest of Australia
4. Aurora Australis south of Australia
5. Northwest coast of United States to Central South America at Night
6. Aurora Australis from the Southern to the Northern Pacific Ocean
7. Halfway around the World
8. Night Pass over Central Africa and the Middle East
9. Evening Pass over the Sahara Desert and the Middle East
10. Pass over Canada and Central United States at Night
11. Pass over Southern California to Hudson Bay
12. Islands in the Philippine Sea at Night
13. Pass over Eastern Asia to Philippine Sea and Guam
14. Views of the Mideast at Night
15. Night Pass over Mediterranean Sea
16. Aurora Borealis and the United States at Night
17. Aurora Australis over Indian Ocean
18. Eastern Europe to Southeastern Asia at Night

Category: Creative | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Nicholas Smedes | August 9, 2011
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Epitaph to a Rusting Memory

NASA to strip down its remaining once glorious fleet.

To be cataloged and entered into the archives that will rest as the bone yards of NASA

A sign of once pride of this great nation.

Timelessly embedded in our hearts, on flags, in the dreams dreamed by our children of exploration and progress

Something that is in every heart of the great peoples of these United States,

whether new or old, no matter what creed, race, or sex

Still the uncharted final frontier awaits

The same spirit once ignited in our ancestor’s hearts as they set forth towards the West ages ago knowing the dangers and risks

Now only embers ceasing to reignite our spirit

The flame that we thought would never be extinguished

Kennedy’s “We choose to go to the moon” echoes of a dying cry

As the hulls of great space ferries to other worlds will collect a new type of dust

The still dust of idle and sloth

Another Dark Age descends upon us

To be taught in history classes as relics of ‘the once was’

Stunted will be our growth

Hope for a better tomorrow reverberates through empty halls and falls onto deaf ears

The continued lie is our only guide

As we wade back onto the shore from the once cosmic ocean no longer as inviting.

The demise of our spirit never thought possible comes welcomed by the pens of mighty men

How long will mighty men remain mighty when there is nowhere to go but down?

Fade into memory and all that will be asked is “Where were you the day the Space Shuttle died?” 

Category: Creative | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Brett Helzer | July 24, 2011
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The Future of NASA: Where to Go From Here?

AtlantisLanding

With the Shuttle program officially over, and budget negotiations still on-going in Congress, the future of NASA is looking grim. As it is currently, some 1500 employees are being let go, and even current projects like the James Webb Telescope are in danger of being defunded and put on hold indefinitely. So one must ask, what will NASA look like in the future?

The Final Launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis

I sometimes have trouble defending my love of space and putting human kind into the farthest reaches of our solar system. After all, there are millions of people on this planet that don’t even have clean water to drink, or good food to eat. Wouldn’t that money be better off spent on the poor, the homeless, all those less fortunate?

From a pure money perspective we, as tax payers, spend very little on space: less than 1% of the federal budget goes to NASA, and it’s been like that for the last 35 years. From that relatively small amount of money, we as a society have gained things like advancements in medical practices (vital sensors, improvements to heart disease and cancer detection), wireless communication and GPS satellites, and advancements in food cleanliness (frozen foods, vacuum packaging, food longevity) to name a few. We as a country get one of the best returns on investment from NASA, not to mention all of the psychological benefits that our society gains from probing new frontiers in space.

NASA technology helps to predict hurricanes and other weather events

So I think it’s safe to say that one could make a very compelling case for keeping NASA around, and to even have it still be tax payer funded. However, with the current political climate and the recent economic recession, the future federal funding of NASA is in jeopardy. In order to send astronauts into space in the near future, the US will either have catch a ride with the Russians, or rely on private companies to do it for them.

In my opinion, the privatization of NASA is a negative thing. The one thing that makes NASA so successful is that profit is not a main motivator; it is rather a drive to discover something new, to extend human kind into the stars. I fear that, as NASA becomes more and more privatized, making money will become the main focus, and only the projects that will make the most money will be fully actualized. If NASA were a private company, things like the International Space Station and the Hubble telescope would have never been built.

I really think that keeping NASA in its current form is the best course to take. There are still many exciting projects on the horizon, like the James Webb telescope and there are still plans to send humans to Mars, even though the Constellation program was defunded last year. To help keep NASA intact, please write your congressman (if you don’t know who that is, use this website: https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml ). Tell him/her that NASA must stay federally funded; that it is in the interest of human kind, as well as the interest of the US, to keep exploring new frontiers. NASA has provided us with numerous advancements to society, and who knows what the future could hold.

As Socrates once said,

“Man must rise above the Earth-to the top of the atmosphere and beyond-for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives.”

"Planet earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do..."

Category: Current Events, Science, Science Sunday | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Nicholas Smedes | July 22, 2011
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Hark! Vanity Be Thy Name: God’s Influence ‘Hand of a Dictator’ Part 1


“Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:3-5)

Declarations from the Bible were Moses was used as a conduit atop Mount Sinai preaching to the recently freed people of Israel. Now if I was going to create a religion that had some profitable promises I think I would make a few commandments along these lines. By making such commandments it keeps my followers loyal by putting my God ahead of the rest and lessening any competition from other Gods. I come to my next conundrum. Are these Holy Texts influenced by God or Humans anthropomorphizing another deity?

First I will approach this inquiry as if God is the influencing factor. Here we have this omnipotent, benevolent God. Christians place this God upon a pedestal as being the Creator of us and everything we see and do not see. God is endowed with all this power as being the self proclaimed “…Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End.” (Revelations 22:13). One thing I do not understand is why he needs humans to worship him? Then out of the close to seven billion humans on the planet only a bit over a billion people believe in the actual Christian God. If it is the Christian God that exists as the one true God, these odds mean that 6/7 people don’t know God exist or refuse/choose not to believe in him. These are horrible odds if one is playing a game of Russian roulette (if you can find a seven shooter).

Allow me to back this up a bit. If the holy texts are indeed influenced by the Christian God here is the scenario I see. God creates the Universe then waits roughly nine billion years and creates Earth [1]. He continues to wait four and a half billion more years and watches ancestral human little by little emerge from the sea to land, from the trees to the ground and begin to walk around [2].  The divergence of the Homo sapiens species from other primate ancestors is estimated at 250,000 years [3]. God reveals himself at 248,000 years into human’s evolution. After many God(s) have fallen and risen and still remain. It is the Christian God that comes in human form in a man named Jesus Christ and proclaims that he is God “…God was manifest in the flesh.” (1 Timothy 3:16). I guess if one calls God omnipresent this is a quick fix to explain away all this time that God was just sitting around rolling his thumbs for thirteen billion years or so. But to us this is a large amount of time to waste to create a lonely species that the majority will reject you for another god that is supposedly better or for no God at all. Why wait so long to reveal Himself? And then to reveal Himself to a primitive man in the Middle East rather than the learned people in, now modern day, China.

The next process is to insight a punishment to keep the followers scared of leaving while striking fear into those who reject God to believe in him and not to offend. The aggressor will be punished by being sent to hell. “The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity; And shall cast them into a furnace of fire: there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 13:41-42). If not a punishment there is the candy bar dangling in front of the follower with promises of eternal bliss in the afterlife. All one has to do is believe in Christ “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house” (Acts 16:31). God makes it rather easy to believe in him easier then filling out a Cosco membership.

The vanity of God is then maintained with the measurement system of sin. When it comes to sin pretty much anything can be forgiven which is good because humans would get too disgruntled with this forced guilt of always doing something wrong or being hypersensitive/attune to sin would make daily living unbearable. In Romans 3:23 “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” so this is the fine print, no matter what, no one is good compared to God. Even before the sin is committed or a good act performed God is still better. But the twist here is God is not subjected to his own laws he demands upon his subjects. No matter what God has already deemed himself as Good. So God is good when he kills the majority of mankind with a flood (Genesis 6:7) or allows slavery (Joshua 9:23), rape, and murder (Judges 10-24). Going back to sin, on the biblical standard humans sin a lot, but can easily be forgiven to allow for excused daily living, however blasphemy against the Spirit is the one unforgivable sin (Matthew 12:31-32).  The Christian God shows strong evidence of being a narcissist. Like a dictator one should not criticize God for fear of being struck down and sent to a tormented afterlife in hell for all eternity. Blasphemy against the Spirit being the unforgivable sin brings up similar instances of what happens in North Korea or China. Criticizing leadership gets one jailed or shot. Supposedly, God creates man with free will, but God condemns mankind if they refuse to follow Him. This vanity continues when God accepts/demands forced adulation or sacrifices displaying a dictatorship like appearance (Passages of worship: Genesis 22:1-2, Exodus 7:16, 23:25-26, John 4:23, Romans 12:1-2, Psalms 29:2, Jonah 2:8, 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10, 2 Timothy 1:3, Hebrews 10:2, just a few of the many examples of prostration). From demanding a sacrifice of one’s favorite son or a plethora of goats and sheep the thirst for laud is unquenchable. Which for a deity that can allegedly make something from nothing why does he demand this obedience in His name? Albert Einstein has an exquisite quote on this idea of a God ruling through a system built on punishments and rewards: 

“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death”

I ask again how does one explain such vanity in a deity? Is it God that is vain and we are made in his image and thus we are vain? Or do we ascribe our human behavior of vanity onto God? With God showing so many human emotions how can we trust a supreme being to help and guide us thru our own lives? If God is just as unstable as depicted in the Old and New Testaments does it really matter if He declares Himself ‘Good’ or ‘Alpha and Omega?’ Who is at fault with the Holy Text the writer and human error or God for not being more influencing or clear when speaking? By these faults alone is it not feasible to just treat the Holy Book as a work of fiction?

In my next essay I will look at the other half of my beginning inference. That the God of Christianity is human’s way of continued anthropomorphism and that Christianity is based on religions prior to the birth of Christianity. I will also critique some of the ways that man has helped with the evolution of Christianity to solidify Christianity in the history books rather an opposing religion.

 

References used:

[1] Age of the Universe

space.com

[2] Age of the Earth

United States Geological Society

[3] Age of Homo sapiens divergence as a species

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History

Bible passages from:

The Bible 

Category: Religion | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Shawn Witham | July 10, 2011
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Science Sunday!: STS-135…The End of an Era

Atlantis STS-135

An amazing view of NASA's last shuttle launch via screenshot.

Within minutes after NASA’s last shuttle launch, Atlantis STS-135 (an extraordinary piece of machinery) is moving at nearly 5 miles per second. From the time it takes you to start and finish your cigarette, or brew a pot of coffee, a handful of human beings have left the comfort of Earth’s atmosphere and entered into a place like no other, traveling at speeds no one can fathom. For the record, this isn’t going to be a piece on the intersection of science and religion, or how irrationality ruins scientific drive, but rather, this is a tribute to one of the greatest endeavors humans have ever undergone. A tribute to the shear awesomeness of intellectual ability, scientific progress, and communal effort that is the NASA Space Shuttle Program.

As I sat in my office Friday morning, July 7th, watching Live NASA TV on my 13″ laptop with crummy headphones and internet bufferings, I teared up. Not really because this was the final launch or because politics has come to take yet another great thing from humanity (although when I let myself think too much about it, I do get rather emotional), but really because I’ve come to the complete admiration for what these hundreds/thousands of scientists, engineers, janitors, secretaries, and machinists have accomplished. Take a minute to yourself and think how unbelievably ridiculous it is for so many people from so many backgrounds to come together and produce something that can carry a living being to a place that is so far away, so harsh to life, and return them safely…all while continuing to perform sound, meaningful, scientific research. You’d have to be a heartless, ignorant, selfish person to shrug this off as a waste of taxpayer money.

Good Luck STS-135

So, what’s next? What’s next for NASA, space flight, and space research? Well, all hope is not lost. And, to be honest, I’m a little bit excited for the future. Let me push my own political and economic opinions aside for a moment (I’m referring to the privatization that is occurring within NASA) and focus on the science. NASA has so much awesome research happening that deals with propulsion technology, off-Earth habitat development, fundamental cosmology and astrophysics, and so much more…the list is long. Along with so many other publicly funded and run research institutions, NASA will continue to be one of the best.

With that being said, I’d like to finish with this: I don’t think anyone can breed or teach this sense of curiosity and awe when it comes to such immense, intricate science. Inherently, within all of us, we yearn for moments like these. Throughout centuries, through all of the modern technological advances that make our lives what they are today, we have evolved into a species that needs moments like these. We’re humans. We are natural scientists. Cooking new recipes, using your GPS to navigate unfamiliar cities, starting life over in an unfamiliar place with no friends…these are all experiments that coincide with our innate ability to do science, along with the exploration of the harsh environments of space and other worlds. For those of you who are reading this, and don’t have a genuine appreciation for the way science is done, look again. Take another look at your life and take note of every daily occurrence like the ones I previously mentioned. This is why we are natural scientists. Trile nd rror. Trial nad rerro. Trial and Error.

Category: Science, Science Sunday | Tags: , , , , , , , ,