The following image is not of stars (suns) - but a cluster of galaxies. Each galaxy could contain over 200 billion stars - each with their own planetary solar system. This specific cluster is about 2.3 billion light years away from us, and is only one such cluster in an unspeakable number of clusters.
On this scale, the Earth does not exist, and as for the human race? Well, we are simply invisible self-center - nuclei bouncing off one another in side this invisible blue dot atom. In the grand scheme of things none of this will ever be remembered. So relax and try to take it easy - things really are not that important.
On May 19, 2005, NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit captured this stunning view as the Sun sank below the rim of Gusev crater on Mars. This Panoramic Camera mosaic was taken around 6:07 in the evening of the rover’s 489th Martian day, or sol.
Sunset and twilight images are occasionally acquired by the science team to determine how high into the atmosphere the Martian dust extends, and to look for dust or ice clouds. Other images have shown that the twilight glow remains visible, but increasingly fainter, for up to two hours before sunrise or after sunset. The long Martian twilight (compared to Earth’s) is caused by sunlight scattered around to the night side of the planet by abundant high altitude dust. Similar long twilights or extra-colorful sunrises and sunsets sometimes occur on Earth when tiny dust grains that are erupted from powerful volcanoes scatter light high in the atmosphere.
May 28, 2008 — A new living computer, bred from E. coli bacteria instead of stamped from silica, has for the first time successfully solved a classic mathematical puzzle known as the Burnt Pancake Problem.
While this bacteria-based computer is more proof of concept than practical, a living computer might one day solve complex mathematical problems faster than silicon supercomputers.
Visions of the Future: The Quantum Revolution. 3rd part of 3 part miniseries on the BBC hosted by Michio Kaku. In this new three-part series, leading theoretical physicist and futurist Dr Michio Kaku explores the cutting edge science of today, tomorrow, and beyond.
On the 25th of May 2008 NASA’s Mars Recon Orbiter took a picture of NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander parachuting down to Mars. The Phoenix Lander will collect and analyze samples of Martian ice to determine if life has ever existed on Mars. We should start hearing results in the next 2 to 3 weeks.
The photo above is a picture Galaxies. GALAXIES! ENTIRE GALAXIES, each galaxy would host around 200 billion stars. Even if half the stars had planets around them - we would be talking about trillions and trillions of planets - of which life very easy could be supported. Sure makes you realize how minimal are little planet and its inhabitants are.
Explanation: Here is one of the largest objects that anyone will ever see on the sky. Each of these fuzzy blobs is a galaxy, together making up the Perseus Cluster, one of the closest clusters of galaxies. The cluster is seen through a foreground of faint stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy. Near the cluster center, roughly 250 million light-years away, is the cluster’s dominant galaxy NGC 1275, seen above as the large galaxy on the image left. A prodigious source of x-rays and radio emission, NGC 1275 accretes matter as gas and galaxies fall into it. The Perseus Cluster of Galaxies is part of the Pisces-Perseus supercluster spanning over 15 degrees and containing over 1,000 galaxies. At the distance of NGC 1275, this view covers about 7.5 million light-years.
According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. And in the 1970’s physicist Stephen Hawking asserted that any information sucked inside a black hole would be permanently lost. But now, researchers at Penn State have shown that information can be recovered from black holes.
A fundamental part of quantum physics is that information cannot be lost, so Hawking’s claim has been debated. His idea was generally accepted by physicists until the late 1990s, when many began to doubt the assertion. Even Hawking himself renounced the idea in 2004.
Explanation: Dark dust lanes cut across the middle of this gorgeous island universe, a strong hint that NGC 3628 is a spiral galaxy seen sideways.
About 35 million light-years away in the northern springtime constellation Leo, NGC 3628 also bears the distinction of being the only member of the well known Leo triplet of galaxies not in Charles Messier’s famous catalog. Otherwise similar in size to our Milky Way
Galaxy, the disk of NGC 3628 is clearly seen to fan out near the edges.
A faint arm of material also extends to the left in this sharp and deep view of the region. The distorted shape and faint tidal tail suggest that NGC 3628 is interacting gravitationally with the other spiral galaxies in the Leo triplet, M66 and M65.
VATICAN CITY - Believing that the universe may contain alien life does not contradict a faith in God, the Vatican’s chief astronomer said in an interview published Tuesday. The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.
Change yourself. “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
You are in control. “Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”
Forgive and let it go. “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
Without action you aren’t going anywhere. “An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.”
Take care of this moment. “I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.”
Everyone is human. “I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.”
Persist. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
See the good in people and help them. “I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won’t presume to probe into the faults of others.”
Be congruent, be authentic, be your true self. “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
Continue to grow and evolve. “Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.”
Do you know what a Captcha is? I am sure you have dealt with them, but I bet most of you don’t know what their purpose is. Unfortunately, there are a lot of programmers out there that write “bots” that are small little programs that run on a computer and scourer websites trying to find vulnerabilities in order to take control of the site. A webpage with a form is the most vulnerable - a lot of wanna-be-developers do not understand the fundamentals of how data flows, and because of that, they make it fairly easy to inject code in to a website form and obliterate their entire database. Scary shit, to say the least.
In order to protect ourselves from these malicious form posting robots, we will show the website user an image that only a human can decipher, the human then responds with the answer (in this case filling out the form for what letters you see), and then we know you are not a bot.
But I see a bigger problem here than just a simple database delete - instead I see the fundamental problem of “here comes the robots”.
This need to protect ourselves is due evil geeks - they are the people who take great ideas and intentions and twist them for their own use or to cause chaos in general. Sure, this doesn’t seem to have as much of an impact on humanity when its only a website. Where it gets a bit hairy however, is when these people inevitably get access to technology (geek trickle down effect) that will far surpass our own brain by an unspeakable amount.
Imagine when IBM finishes the Blue Brain Project (reverse-engineering the human brain down to each neuron), and plugs that beast in to the Internet. What would an “All-knowing” entity do when “it” saw the horror that we humans have created in our short span on this planet? Our destruction, our incessant need to find an enemy and kill them, or our incalculable number of killings simply because someone “is wrong” when “we were right”. Back to iRobot again…
Even in our short technical existence, we already have to “fight” our own technology, it’s a fairly easy and steady fight because the “good geeks” and the “bad geeks” all relatively have the same mental capacity. But mark my words, the fight is going to get a whole lot harder when we are up against programs that can out smart us by 1000 to 1.
A blue and pink pinwheel represents the center of the Southern Pinwheel galaxy, seen in a composite image by NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the National Science Foundation’s Very Large Array in New Mexico.
The Very Large Array’s red view of radio emissions shows gaseous hydrogen atoms — raw ingredients for stars that make up the galaxy’s extended arms.The Galaxy Evolution Explorer’s ultraviolet view captured the blue and green of the galaxy’s farthest-flung nurseries of young stars, up to 140,000 light-years from the center.
The composite view of the galaxy, also known as M83, demonstrates how the baby star clusters match up with the extended arms of hydrogen gas. That leads astronomers to speculate that the young stars may have formed under conditions resembling the early universe, when heavier elements and dust did not exist.
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