More Space News March 19, 2020 Scientists are getting very excited over a mysterious signal of fast radio bursts which came from another galaxy. The signals went on for some time and then they suddenly stopped. I have to say before we get too excited about this the signals were from so many light years away; they could be from many hundreds of thousands of light years away or even millions of light years. This has implications. If they came from an intelligent civilization, they could be long gone by now. These signals are called fast radio bursts and it doesn’t seem like they are anything other than natural since they have been detected before, but we still don’t know why they are created or how. If a civilization wanted to let other unknown civilizations know they were there, the most inefficient way would be by radio waves since they only travel at the speed of light. Lately it has become very obvious how tenacious life is and how it can form in the least likely of places. Scientists believed microbes were everywhere on earth until recently they found the place on earth that has absolutely no life which really surprised them. European researchers confirmed the fact there is no life in the hot saline hyper acid ponds in the Dallol geothermal field in Ethiopia. The water is boiling and completely saturated with salt and other toxic gases and is subject to all sorts of hydrothermal activity. This has led scientists to think maybe Mars may have had a similar situation. Will we find places on other planets which are impossible for life to exist in? There is a problem with the theories on what space time really is. It is kind of confusing, at least to us regular people when we see what scientists are planning. They want to launch a mission to find out if space time is a continuous fabric as was described in the theory of general relativity or it is a chunky, pixilated jumble of discrete objects described by quantum mechanics. I am not sure exactly what they’re talking about, and to tell you the truth much of quantum mechanics is beyond me. This business where if you watch an experiment it changes the result has always made me wonder what is really going on. I say this because to the average person this seems so incredible, it becomes hard to believe. It makes one wonder if there is a fault with the experiments. The scientists are getting prepared to launch something called GrailQuest, but it doesn’t seem like they are in a big hurry since it is scheduled sometime between 2035 and 2050. Even the way they plan to find the answer seems confusing to me. They want to see if the speed of light rays has changed and they say this would prove spacetime is guided by the quantum theory, otherwise general relativity will be proven. In all honesty I don’t get it I guess I am just not as smart as those scientists are, or could it be whatever the results are won’t really prove anything? There are so many theories about what space really is we could find one on almost anything. There are still a lot of scientists who think we are living in a computer-generated universe and if we get far enough out, we will find there are only holograms there. There are just so many theories about space and what it is that they range from the obvious of what we think it is which is a bunch of planets, solar systems and galaxies to a more matrix like existence where there is nothing and we are all just dreaming space exists. A recent discovery has found that there is a barrier on the edge of our solar system and it is made up of super-hot plasma. Scientists are saying this barrier defines the edge of interstellar space. Scientists found that when Voyager 2 reached interstellar space in 2018 the temperatures went up as high as 49,427 degrees Celsius which is the same as 89,000° Fahrenheit. It didn’t seem to do any damage to the space probe, which seems to be a big mystery to me. One question is why is this barrier there and what makes it so hot if it on the edge of our solar system? A lot more has to be studied about this barrier. I think one of the obvious things we have to find out is if it is natural. Scientists are blaming the solar wind for this phenomenon but can they be 100% sure? I think most of us are familiar with one of the themes of sci-fi movies which is putting the crew of long duration flight spaceships into suspended animation. This has also been a goal of NASA which would love to be able to do this. For the first time humans have been put into suspended animation and a procedure has been used for surgery. There is a name for this procedure and it is called “emergency preservation and resuscitation” or EPR. Severely wounded patients can take advantage of this procedure where they cool rapidly until their hearts stop beating and brain activity almost completely stops. The extreme cold stops the chemical reaction in cells and they need less oxygen to survive. The suspended animation has a limit of two hours but who knows how long it will last as improvements are made over the years and perhaps finally we will see suspended animation used on spaceflights. Engineers have been struggling with the problem of space junk. There is so much of it orbiting the earth now which includes defunct satellites and pieces of satellites which are making launches more problematic. Even a tiny screw whirling around the earth near 25,000 miles an hour hitting something, could destroy it and kill the occupants if it was a spaceship. Engineers believe they can solve this problem in the future by equipping new satellites with thin tethers which can pick up magnetic fields and allow the satellites to be steered back to earth without needing any more fuel. While this may be fine for the future there are a couple of floors with the plan. The first obvious one is what about the tiny pieces of junk, how are they going to be gathered up? The second is what about the thousands of satellites that are whirling around now which will don’t have tethers? A system is going to be needed which takes care of these other problems. I’m surprised no solution has worked yet, but I’m also sure it will not be much longer until these other problems are solved.
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