Author: ssgeneralsilva10

Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin: Harvard’s First Woman PhD in Astrophysicist and Much More

Spotlight on Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin:

 Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (born Cecilia Helena Payne; May 10, 1900 – December 7, 1979) was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist. In 1925, she became the first woman to earn a PhD in astronomy at Harvard University. In 1956, she became the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within the faculty at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Payne was the first ever recipient of the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy

 She was appointed the Phillips Professor of Astronomy in 1958. Later, with her appointment to the Chair of the Department of Astronomy, she also became the first woman to head a department at Harvard.

In her 1925 doctoral thesis, she proposed that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her thesis title was Stellar Atmospheres: A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars. 

Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected. In 1925, her theory ran counter to the prevailing idea that stars had a composition similar to that of the Earth, so her work was ignored. Four years later, Independent observations eventually proved she was correct.

In 1962, her thesis was famously described as the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in the field of astronomy. Her work on the nature of variable stars was foundational to modern astrophysics.

Cecilia Payne began school in Wendover at a private school run by Elizabeth Edwards. She was 12 when her mother moved to London for the sake of the education of Cecilia’s brother Humfry. He later became an archaeologist. Cecilia attended St Mary’s College, Paddington, where she was unable to study much mathematics or science.

In  1918 she changed schools for St Paul’s Girl School. There she was urged to pursue a career in music, but she preferred to focus on science. The following year she won a scholarship that paid all her expenses at Newnham College, Cambridge University.

Her interest in astronomy began after she attended a lecture by Arthur Eddington on his 1919 expedition to the island of Príncipe in the Gulf of Guinea off the west coast of Africa to observe and photograph the stars near a solar eclipse as a test of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. She said of the lecture:

“The result was a complete transformation of my world picture. My world had been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown.”

She completed her studies, but she was not awarded a degree because of her sex.  Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948.

Payne realized that her only career option in the U.K. was to become a teacher, so she looked for grants that would enable her to move to the United States. She was introduced to Harlow Shapley, the Director of the Harvard College Observatory. Harlow had just established a graduate program in astronomy. Payne left England in 1923. This was made possible by a fellowship to encourage women to study at the observatory. 

Adelaide Ames was the first student on the fellowship in 1922. Payne was the second the following year. She was described by renowned astrophysicist   Lawrence H. Aller as one of the “most capable go-getters” in Shapley’s group.

After her doctorate, Payne studied stars of high luminosity to understand the structure of the Milky Way. Later she surveyed stars brighter than the tenth magnitude. She then studied variable stars, making over 1,250,000 observations with her assistants. This work later was extended to the Magellanic Clouds, adding a further 2,000,000 observations of variable stars. These data were used to determine the paths of stellar evolution.

She published her conclusions in her second book, The Stars of High Luminosity (1930). Her observations and analysis of variable stars, carried out with her husband, Sergei Gaposchkin, laid the basis for all subsequent work on such objects.

Payne-Gaposchkin remained scientifically active throughout her life, spending her entire academic career at Harvard. When she began, women were barred from becoming professors at Harvard, so she spent years doing less prestigious, low-paid research jobs. Her work resulted in several published books, including The Stars of High Luminosity (1930), Variable Stars (1938), and Galactic Structure (1954).

Shapley had made efforts to improve her position, and in 1938, she was given the title of “Astronomer.” Her title was later changed, at her request, to Phillips Astronomer. This was an endowed position, which would make her an “officer of the university”.

In order to get approval for her title, Shapley assured the university that giving Payne-Gaposchkin this position would not make her equivalent to a professor, but privately pushed for the position to be later converted into an explicit professorship as the “Phillips Professor of Astronomy”. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943. Her courses were not recorded in the Harvard University catalogue until 1945.

 When Donald Menzel became Director of the Harvard College Observatory in 1954, he tried to improve her appointment, and in 1956 she became the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within the faculty at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She was appointed the Phillips Professor of Astronomy in 1958. Later, with her appointment to the Chair of the Department of Astronomy, she also became the first woman to head a department at Harvard.

Her students included Helen Sawyer Hogg, Joseph Ashbrook, Frank Drake, Harlan Smith and Paul W. Hodge, all of whom made important contributions to astronomy.  She also supervised Frank Kameny and Owen Gingerich.

Payne-Gaposchkin retired from active teaching in 1966. She was subsequently appointed Professor Emerita of Harvard. She continued her research as a member of staff at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, as well as editing the journals and books published by Harvard Observatory for ten years.

Payne’s career marked a turning point at Harvard College Observatory. The trail she blazed into the male-dominated scientific community was an inspiration to many. For example, she became a role model for astrophysicist Joan Feynman. Feynman’s mother and grandmother had dissuaded her from pursuing science, since they believed women were not physically capable of understanding scientific concepts.  Feynman was inspired by Payne-Gaposchkin when she came across her work in an astronomy textbook. Seeing Payne-Gaposchkin published research convinced Feynman that she could, in fact, follow her scientific passions.

 While accepting the Henry Norris Russell Prize from the American Astronomical Society, Payne spoke of her lifelong passion for research:

“The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience.  The reward of the old scientist is the sense of having seen a vague sketch grow into a masterly landscape.”

Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin died of lung cancer on December 7, 1979, at age 79.  She received several prestigious awards and honorary degrees throughout her career. Some posthumous recognitions include Asteroid 2039 Payne-Gaposchkin, the Payne-Gaposchkin Patera (volcano) on Venus, and the Institute of Physics Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Medal and Prize.

Her autobiography was first published in 1979, privately as The Dyer’s Hand and in 1984, publicly as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections.

We are privileged to include Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin  in our ECG Hall of Fame – Women of Science.

Sources:

Wikipedia / Britannica / Space.com

 

 

Spotlight on Johannes Kepler: Much more than just an Astronomer

Johannes Kepler was born December 27, 1571, in Weil der Stadt, Württemberg [Germany]. He died November 15, 1630, Regensburg)

Kepler was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music. He was a key person of influence in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution.

Kepler is best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae. 

His work was of great influence on Isaac Newton and many others. Kepler provided the foundational theory of universal gravitation. The variety and impact of his work made Kepler one of the founders of modern astronomy, the scientific method and natural science in general. 

Kepler’s God was a dynamic, creative being whose presence in the world was symbolized by the Sun’s as the dynamic force that continually moved the planets. The natural world was like a mirror that precisely reflected and embodied these divine ideas.

Inspired by Platonic notions of the soul, Kepler believed that the human mind was ideally created to understand the world’s structure.

“I used to measure the heavens,
now I shall measure the shadows of the earth.
Although my soul was from heaven,
the shadow of my body lies here”.

Kepler was not alone in believing that nature was a book in which the divine plan was written. He differed, however, in the original manner and personal intensity with which he believed his ideas to be embodied in nature. One of the ideas to which he was most strongly attached was the image of the

Christian Trinity as symbolized by a geometric sphere. The visible, created world, was literally a reflection of this divine mystery (God the Father: center; Christ the Son: circumference; Holy Spirit: intervening space).

One of Kepler’s favorite biblical passages came from John (1:14).

 

“And the Word became flesh and lived among us.”

For him, this signified that the divine archetypes were literally made visible as geometric forms that configured the spatial arrangement of tangible entities.

Kepler was the astronomer who discovered the three major laws of planetary motion. 

    1. Planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus.
    2. The time necessary to traverse any arc of a planetary orbit is proportional to the area of the sector between the central body and that arc (the “area law”).
    3. There is an exact relationship between the squares of the planets’ periodic times and the cubes of their mean distances from the Sun (the “harmonic law”). 

Kepler himself did not call these discoveries “laws”. It became the customary term after Isaac Newton derived them from a new and different set of general physical principles. He regarded them as celestial harmonies that reflected God’s design for the universe.

Kepler’s discoveries turned Nicolaus Copernicus’s Sun-centered system into a dynamic universe. He discovered that the Sun is actively pushing the planets around in non-circular orbits. It was Kepler’s notion of a physical astronomy that fixed a new problem for other important 17th century world-system builders, the most famous of whom was Newton.

Among Kepler’s many other achievements, he provided a new and correct account of how vision occurs. He developed a novel explanation for the behavior of light in the newly invented telescope.

The history of the telescope can be traced to before the invention of the earliest known telescope, which appeared in 1608 in the Netherlands. A patent was submitted by Hans Lippershey, an eyeglass maker. Although Lippershey did not receive his patent, news of the invention soon spread across Europe. The design of these early refracting telescopes consisted of a convex objective lens and a concave eyepiece. Galileo improved on this design the following year and applied it to astronomy.

In 1611, Kepler described how a far more useful telescope could be made with a convex objective lens and a convex eyepiece lens. By 1655, astronomers such as Christian Huygens were building powerful but unwieldy Keplerian telescopes with compound eyepieces.

Kepler discovered several new, semi-regular polyhedrons. He also offered a new theoretical foundation for astrology. The list of his discoveries, however, fails to convey the fact that they constituted for Kepler, part of a common body of knowledge. His matrix of theological, astrological, and physical ideas from which his scientific achievements emerged is unusual and fascinating in its own right.

The highly original nature of Kepler’s discoveries requires an act of intellectual empathy for modern science to understand. How could have such lasting results evolved from such an unlikely complex set of ideas. He is considered by the modern scientific community as a bit of a scientific enigma.

Although his scientific work was centered primarily on astronomy, it was classified as part of a wider subject of investigation called “the science of the stars.”

The science of the stars was regarded as a mixed science consisting of a mathematical and a physical component. It bore a kinship to other like disciplines, such as music (the study of ratios of tones) and optics (the study of light). It also was subdivided into theoretical and practical categories.

Kepler believed the theoretical principles of astrology had a corresponding practical part that dealt with the making of annual astrological forecasts about individuals, cities, the human body, and the weather. Within this framework, Kepler made astronomy an integral part of natural philosophy, but he did so in an unprecedented way.

Astronomers looking to the sky — Scanned 1870 Engraving

There was no “scientific community” as such in the late 16th century. All schooling in Germany, as elsewhere, was under the control of church institutions. This was primarily Roman Catholic or Protestant. Local rulers used the churches and the educational systems as a means to consolidate the loyalty of their populations.

One means to this end was a system of scholarships for poor boys who, once having been trained in the schools of the duchy (territory of the duke), would feel strong loyalty to the local ruler. 

Kepler came from a very modest family in a small German town called Weil der Stadt and was one of the beneficiaries of the ducal scholarship. This made possible his attendance at the Lutheran Stift, or seminary, at the University of Tübingen, in 1589. It was expected that the boys who graduated from these schools would go on to become schoolteachers, ministers, or state functionaries. Kepler had planned to become a theologian.

 People have always named things after people who have done great things. Most people with an interest in science and Astronomy have heard of the Kepler telescope (image on left) launched by NASA in 2009 but is no longer in service today. Here is a list of just some of the many other things that were named after Kepler out of respect for his contributions to Science and Astronomy:

Kepler conjecture    Kepler triangle      Kepler–Bouwkamp constant    

Kepler–Poinsot polyhedron

Kepler’s laws of planetary motion 

Kepler’s equation      Keplerian elements   Kepler problem   

  Kepler problem in general relativity

Kepler space telescope   Kepler Launch Site

Kepler photometer   Keplerian telescope   Kepler refractor   Johannes Kepler ATV

Kepler (lunar crater)   Kepler (Martian crater)   Kepler Dorsum   1134 Kepler

Kepler orbit   Kepler Object of Interest   Kepler-11   Kepler-22     Kepler-22b

Kepler’s Supernova   Kepler Follow-up Program        Kepler Input Catalog

Kepler scientific workflow system   Kepler Mire   Kepler Museum   Kepler Track

Kepler College   Johannes Kepler University Linz     

Kepler clearly made his mark on the scientific community. The ECG is proud to include Johannes Kepler in our Hall of Fame Library

Sources:

Wikipedia

The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica

Earth Magnetism & Wormholes During Equinox Events

I have authored two books on the subject of extraterrestrial (ET) communication. Extraterrestrial Communication Code was published in February of 2021. The other, Angel Communication Code, will be published before the end of 2023. Each book demonstrates that it is possible for wormholes to appear at a specific location on the earth during equinox events.

This how it is possible to close the gap in time and distance necessary to establish ET communication. It is also how ETs have been able to come and go from earth for hundreds if not thousands of years.

 

ET communication is one of the primary motivators in why we continue to experiment and explore the universe.

The problem is that the existence of wormholes in the universe remains a theoretical construct based on the equations of Einstein.

“Wormholes” are cosmic tunnels that can connect two distant regions of the universe. They have been popularized by the dissemination of theoretical physics and by works of science fiction. 

By using present-day technology, it would seemingly be impossible to create a gravitational wormhole. The field would have to be manipulated with huge amounts of gravitational energy, which no one knows how to generate. In electromagnetism, however, advances in metamaterials and invisibility have allowed researchers to put forward several designs to achieve this.

Scientists in the Department of Physics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona have designed and created, in the laboratory, the first experimental wormhole. They actually connected two regions of space magnetically. The experiment consisted of a tunnel that transferred a magnetic field from one point to the other while keeping it undetectable and invisible all the way.

Researchers used metamaterials and metasurfaces to build the tunnel experimentally, so that the magnetic field from a source, such as a magnet or an electromagnet, appears at the other end of the wormhole as an isolated magnetic monopole.

This result is strange as magnetic monopoles or magnets with only one pole do not exist in nature to the best of our current knowledge. The overall effect is that of a magnetic field which appears to travel from one point to another through a dimension that lies outside the conventional three dimensions. [1]

Science has long believed that:

  1. Magnetism and magnetic fields could somehow be involved in how space craft can traverse lightyears of distance.
  1. Wormholes are a necessary construct for (physical) intergalactic space travel.
  1. ET spacecrafts are probably constructed of materials not known to us on earth or “metamaterials”.

One of the hurdles in going universal with this wormhole creation idea is the need for huge amounts of gravitational force in conjunction with the metamaterials and huge magnetic field. Perhaps the huge magnetic field problem can be solved via the changing magnetic field of the earth during equinox events.

We have used the earth’s gravity to launch space craft since the beginning of human space travel. It is called the slingshot effect.

When a spacecraft launches on a mission to another planet it must first break free of the Earth’s gravitational field. Once it has done that, it enters interplanetary space, where the dominant force is the gravitational field of the Sun.

The spacecraft begins to follow a curving orbit, around the Sun, which is similar to the orbit of a comet. When this orbit brings it close to its target destination the spacecraft must fire a retrorocket to slow down and allow itself to be captured by the gravitational field of its target. The smaller the target, the more the spacecraft must slow down.

Sometimes passing a planet can result in the spacecraft being accelerated, even without the spacecraft firing any of its thrusters. This is known as the ‘slingshot’ effect. 

Such ‘gravity assist’ maneuvers are now a standard part of spaceflight and are used by almost all interplanetary missions. They take advantage of the fact that the gravitational attraction of the planets can be used to change the trajectory and speed of a spacecraft.

The amount by which the spacecraft speeds up or slows down is determined by whether it is passing behind or in front of the planet as the planet follows its orbit.  When the spacecraft leaves the influence of the planet, it follows an orbit on a different course than before.

For example, the Rosetta mission launched in 2004 and is using slingshot maneuvers to reach its destination, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in 2014. It has received gravitational ‘kicks’ from close flybys of Mars (2007) and Earth (2005, 2007 and 2009). Rosetta has also made close flybys of two asteroids.

Now let us put solar events here on earth into our wormhole recipe. The energy of the sun is too great to not be involved in this somehow and in some way.

An equinox is an event in which a planet’s subsolar point passes through its Equator. The equinoxes are the only time when both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres experience roughly equal amounts of daytime and nighttime.

On Earth, there are two equinoxes every year: one around March 21 and another around September 22. Sometimes, the equinoxes are nicknamed the “vernal equinox” (spring equinox) and the “autumnal equinox” (fall equinox), although these have different dates in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.[2]

The vernal equinox is a time when cracks are known to open in Earth’s magnetic field. Researchers have long known that during weeks around equinoxes fissures form in Earth’s magnetosphere. Solar wind can pour through the gaps to fuel bright displays of Arctic lights.

During these displays, streams of solar wind barely graze Earth’s magnetic field. At these times of year, that’s all it takes. Even a gentle gust of solar wind can breach our planet’s magnetic defenses.

This is called the “Russell-McPherron effect,” named after the researchers who first explained it. The cracks are opened by the solar wind itself.  South-pointing magnetic fields inside the solar wind oppose earth’s north-pointing magnetic field. The two, N vs. S, partially cancel one another, weakening our planet’s magnetic defenses.

This cancellation can happen at any time of year, but it happens with greatest effect around the equinoxes. A 75-year study shows that March is the most geomagnetically active month of the year, followed closely by September-October as direct result of “equinox cracks.”

NASA and European spacecraft have been detecting these cracks for years. Small ones are about the size of California, and many are wider than the entire planet. While the cracks are open, magnetic fields on earth are connected to those on the sun.

Theoretically, it would be possible to pick a magnetic field line on the ground and follow it all the way back to the solar surface. There is no danger to people on earth because our atmosphere protects us, intercepting the rain of particles. The afterglow of this shielding action is called the “aurora borealis.” [3]

We have all seen pictures and video of the Aroura from earth. This is what it can look like from outer space. Looks a lot like a wormhole does it not?

Click the arrow to toggle the video on / off.

Earth’s magnetic field creates a ‘bubble’ around Earth that helps protect our planet from some of the more harmful effects of energetic particles streaming out from the sun in the solar wind. Some of the earliest hints of this interaction go back to the 1850s with the work of Richard Carrington, and in the early 1900s with the work of Kristian Birkeland and Carl Stormer.

That this field might form a type of ‘bubble’ around Earth was hypothesized by Sidney Chapman and Vincent Ferraro in the 1930s. The term ‘magnetosphere’ was applied to magnetic bubble by Thomas Gold in 1959. It wasn’t until the Space Age, when we sent the first probes to other planets, that we found clear evidence of their magnetic fields (though there were hints of a magnetic field for Jupiter in the 1950s, due to observations from radio telescopes).

The Voyager program, two spacecraft launched in 1977, and successors to the Pioneer 10 and 11 missions, completed flybys of the giant outer planets. They became the implementation of the ‘Grand Tour’ of the outer planets originally proposed in the late 1960s. The Voyagers provided some of the first detailed measurements of the strength, extent and diversity of the magnetospheres of the outer planets.

The visualizations below present simplified models of these planetary magnetospheres, designed to illustrate their scale, and basic features of their structure and impacts of the magnetic axes offset from the planetary rotation axes.

For this Earth visualization, note that the north magnetic pole points out of the southern hemisphere. For these visualizations, the magnetic field structure is represented by gold/copper lines. Some additional glyphs are provided to indicate some key directions in the field model.

  • The Yellow arrow points towards the sun. The magnetotail is pointed in the opposite direction.
  • The Cyan arrow represents the magnetic axis, usually tilted relative to the rotation axis. The arrow indicates the NORTH magnetic pole (convention has field lines moving north to south as the north pole of bar magnet (and compass pointer) points to the south magnetic pole).
  • The Blue arrow represents the north rotation axis. It is part of the 3-D axis glyph (red, green, and blue arrows) included to make the planetary rotation more apparent.
  • The semi-transparent grey mesh in the distance represents the boundary of the magnetosphere.

Click the arrow to toggle the video on / off.

Earth’s magnetosphere near the time of the equinox.

Earth’s magnetosphere near the time of the summer solstice

Earth’s magnetosphere near the time of the winter solstice

NASA Scientific Visualization Studio                                    Earth’s Magnetosphere

It certainly appears that the bulk of the ingredients necessary for a wormhole to occur are all around us every day. Putting all of it together in just the right portions seems to be the issue. To find the wormhole, we must look in the right places and at the right times, in the right direction.  Knowing all this certainly strengthens the methodology presented in my books.  It is clearly possible that during equinox events, at certain locations on earth, everything comes together that makes a wormhole open.

[1] SciTechDaily. Physicists Create a Magnetic Wormhole for the First Time. By Universitat Autònoma  de    Barcelona. September 3, 2015

[2] National Geographic. Encyclopedia Entry: Equinox

[3] Spaceweatherarchive.com. “Equinox Cracks” Forming in Earth’s Magnetic Field. Dr. Tony Phillips. March 2018

 

Marie (Madam) Curie

For centuries, women have made significant contributions to science. They’ve discovered life-saving remedies, devised world-altering inventions, and produced far-reaching research. In many cases their invaluable advances are minimized or neglected.

Women have always made significant contributions specifically to the study of astronomy throughout history. Unfortunately, they have not often been recognized for their achievements with the same publicity and reward received by male scientists throughout history.

 At ECG we offer the recognition, respect, and appreciation these women deserve for their important contributions. 

Spotlight on Marie Curie:

Maria Salomea Skłodowska (November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934)

Marie (Madam) Curie was born in Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, a Russian Empire.  She died in Sallanches, France. Curie is most remembered in the scientific community for her work on radioactivity and twice a winner of the Nobel Prize. 

Curie was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics, which was the third Nobel awarded since the first in 1901. She was the sole winner of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and she is the only woman to win the award in two different fields. 

From childhood, she was remarkable for her prodigious memory. At the age of 16, she won a gold medal on completion of her secondary education at the Russian lycée. Because her father, a teacher of mathematics and physics, lost his savings through bad investment. She had to take work as a teacher as a result. At the same time, she took part clandestinely in the nationalist “free university,” reading in Polish to women workers.

 At the age of 18, she took a post as governess, where she suffered an unhappy love affair. From her earnings, she was able to finance her sister Bronisława’s medical studies in Paris. 

She was appointed as lecturer in physics, at the École Normale Supérieure for girls in Sèvres (1900).  There she introduced a method of teaching based on experimental demonstrations. In December 1904, she was appointed chief assistant in the laboratory directed by Pierre Curie, her husband.

Their marriage (July 25, 1895) marked the start of a partnership that was soon to achieve results of world significance. Most notable was the discovery of polonium (so called by Marie in honor of her native land) in 1898. A few months later they discovered radium. 

Following Henri Becquerel’s discovery (1896) of a new phenomenon called “radioactivity”, Curie decided, as a subject for a thesis, to find out if the property discovered in uranium was to be found in other matter. She discovered that this was true for thorium. 

Marie Curie received her Doctor of Science in June 1903. With Pierre, she was awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society. Also in 1903, they shared with Becquerel the Nobel Prize for Physics for the discovery of radioactivity.

The death of Pierre Curie in 1906 was a bitter blow to Marie Curie. It was also a decisive turning point in her career. She was to devote all her energy to completing alone the scientific work that they had undertaken. On May 13, 1906, she was appointed to the professorship that had been left vacant on her husband’s death. She was the first woman to teach in the Sorbonne.

In 1908, she became titular professor, and in 1910, her fundamental treatise on radioactivity was published. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1911 in Chemistry, for the isolation of pure radium. In 1914, she saw the completion of the building of the laboratories of the Radium Institute (Institute du Radium) at the University of Paris.

Accompanied by her two daughters in 1921, Curie made a triumphant journey to the United States, where President Warren G. Harding presented her with a gram of radium bought as the result of a collection among American women. She gave lectures, especially in Belgium, Brazil, Spain, and Czechoslovakia. She was made a member of the International Commission on Intellectual Co-operation by the Council of the League of Nations.

In addition, she had the satisfaction of seeing the development of the Curie Foundation in Paris. The was also there for the inauguration of her sister Bronisława as director of the Warsaw of the Radium Institute in 1932. 

Throughout World War I, Curie, with the help of her daughter Irène, devoted herself to the development of the use of X-radiography. In 1918, the Radium Institute began to operate in earnest, and it was to become a universal center for nuclear physics and chemistry.

Curie, a member of the Academy of Medicine in 1922, committed her research to the study of the chemistry of radioactive substances and the medical applications of these substances.

Marie Curie, together with Irène Joliot-Curie, wrote the entry on radium for the 13th edition (1926) of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

One of Curie’s outstanding achievements was to have understood the need to accumulate intense radioactive sources.  The stockpile was needed not only to treat illness, but also to maintain an abundant supply for research in nuclear physics.  The resultant stockpile was an unrivaled instrument until the appearance after 1930 of particle accelerators.

The Paris at the Radium Institute ultimately accumulated a stock of 1.5 grams of radium over a period of several years. The stock of radium D and polonium made a decisive contribution to the success of the experiments undertaken in the years around 1930. In particular were of those performed by Irène Curie in conjunction with Frédéric Joliot, her husband. This work prepared the way for the discovery of the neutron by Sir James Chadwick and, above all, for the discovery in 1934 by Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie of artificial radioactivity.

A few months after this discovery, Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia caused by the action of radiation. Her contribution to physics had been immense, not only in her own work, the importance of which had been demonstrated by the award to her of two Nobel Prizes, but because of her influence on subsequent generations of nuclear physicists and chemists.

In 1995, Marie Curie’s ashes were enshrined in the Panthéon in Paris. She was the first woman to receive this honor for her own achievements.

 

 

Her office and laboratory in the Curie Pavilion of the Radium Institute are preserved as the Curie Museum.

We are privileged to include her in our ECG Library & Hall of Fame – Women of Science.

 

Sources: Britannica / Wikipedia / Nobel Prize.org

ECG Hall of Fame: Spotlight on Hipparchus – Astronomer

Astronomy and Astrology are recognized in the scientific community as “the first Science” of humanity. At ECG we recognize some of these “Hall of Fame” astronomers of all time and the contributions they have made to our modern understanding of the universe. Please visit our library as we continue to develop our roster of the great ones.

Spotlight on Hipparchus: (c. 190 – 120 BC)

 
  • Fields of study: Astronomy, Mathematics, Geography
  • Accomplishments and legacy: the Founder of Trigonometry, Greatest Astronomer of Antiquity

Hipparchus of Nicaea was a very well-known Greek astronomer. He made great contributions in the fields of mathematics and geography. He is the founder of trigonometry and is considered by many the “greatest astronomer of antiquity.” He has also been called the father of astronomy (as have others).

Hipparchus was known for his astronomical observations in Rhodes where he applied mathematical techniques for accuracy. Through them, he was able to compile the first extensive star catalog.

Hipparchus was the first mathematician known to have produced a trigonometric table. He used these tabulated values to compute the eccentricity of the Moon and Sun’s orbit. By comparing the position of stars with the observations of Timocharis of Alexandria 150 years earlier, Hipparchus discovered the precession of the equinoxes. In addition, he also devised a method to predict solar eclipses.

Only very little of the works of Hipparchus has survived through time. In geography, it is said that he was the first one to have used the geographic coordinate system in determining latitude on Earth from star observations. His star catalog and works in geography, among others, became the basis of other astronomers after him, like Claudius Ptolemy.

Source – The Planets.org

Women of Science: Hypatia of Alexandria – Astronomer

For centuries, women have made critical contributions to science and to the field of Astronomy specifically.

At ECG we bring these women into the spotlight in an effort to offer the recognition, respect, and appreciation these Women of Science deserve for their important contributions. 

Spotlight on Hypatia (355 CE— March 415, Alexandria)

Hypatia was a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who lived in a very turbulent era in Alexandria’s history. She is the earliest female mathematician of whose life and work reasonably detailed knowledge exists.

Hypatia was one of the most eminent mathematicians and astronomers of late antiquity. Scholars traveled from around the classical world to learn mathematics and astronomy at her school.

She was the first known female mathematician and scholar. Hypatia is known as a symbol of feminism to date. The manner of her death marked the beginning of the end for Alexandria as a center of academics. 

Her philosophy was Neoplatonist and was therefore seen as “pagan” during a time of bitter religious conflict between Christians, Jews, and pagans. Her Neoplatonism was concerned with the approach to the One. The One was an underlying reality partially accessible via the human power of abstraction from the Platonic forms, themselves abstractions from the world of everyday reality. Her philosophy also led her to embrace a life of dedicated virginity.

One day when Hypatia was traveling through the city, a violent Christian mob attacked her and dragged her out of her carriage, brutally murdering her and dismembering her body.

Hypatia’s death was a turning point in the politics of Alexandria. In the wake of her murder, philosophers, Greek and Romans fled the city, and the city’s role as the center of learning declined. She was being called a ‘martyr of philosophy’.

Hypatia was one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria. She was one of the first women to study and teach mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Despite these achievements, she is mostly remembered more for her violent death. Her life is a fascinating lens through which we may view the plight of science in an era of religious and sectarian conflict.

“To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force.”

Hypatia

Why Do We Explore the Universe? What is it that we seek?

Why do we explore space and the universe? Perhaps the answer to this complicated both theological and scientific question can be found in the words offered by a poet. 

T.S. Elliot in his work entitled Little Gidding (1942) wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 1948 “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”. He probably did not have space exploration in mind in 1942. His sentiment, however, poetically captures one of the most important reasons we explore space.

Little Gidding is the fourth and final poem of Eliot’s “Four Quartets”. Four Quartets is series of four poems by Eliot, published individually from 1936 to 1942. The book form compilation is considered Eliot’s masterpiece. Each of the quartets has five “movements.” Each is titled by a place name as follows.

Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry, Salvages (1941), Little Gidding” (1942).

Little Gidding is a series of poems that discuss time, perspective, humanity, and salvation.  It focuses on the unity of past, present, and future.  It claims that understanding this unity is necessary for salvation.1

Little Gidding refers to a small Anglican community in Little Gidding of Huntingdonshire, England. It was first established by Nicholas Ferrar in the 17th century.

According to Elliot, humanity’s flawed understanding of life and turning away from God leads to a cycle of warfare. This, however, can be overcome by recognizing the lessons of the past.

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family.

Eliot was first educated at Harvard University. He did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne College, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford.

Eliot settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk. He eventually became the literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber. Eliot later became their director. 

Eliot founded and edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion (1922-1939). In 1927 he became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church. 

Eliot’s insights into the cyclical nature of life are expressed through themes and images creatively woven throughout the Four Quartet poems. The work addresses connections and the very nature of the human experience. It is considered Eliot’s clearest exposition of his Christian beliefs.2

NASA’s exploration of the universe reveals humanity’s place in nature in the broadest possible sense. That view of ourselves has changed dramatically over the centuries. 

The ancients thought the earth was the center of the cosmos. Everything out there revolved around our earth.  

Then we figured out that our known universe, our solar system, revolves around our sun. After that, we came to believe that our solar system is part of a galaxy (Milky Way), which we believed to revolve around our solar system. Then that understanding changed again based on new discoveries.

One hundred years ago, most astronomers considered the universe to be about 3600 light years in extent, less than a billion years old, and with our solar system near its center.

This is an incredible historic repetition of thought process with respect to our need to think it all revolves around us at some level. It is the height of arrogance. Today science now believes that this is not the case.  

Astronomers today have seen objects 13 billion light years away in a universe 13.7 billion years old containing hundreds of billions of galaxies.

Nothing has been more revolutionary than the idea that the entire universe is in a state of constant and random evolution.  This chronology of the life of the universe, and our place within it, is known as cosmic evolution.

Cosmic evolution is the study of the many varied developmental and generational changes in the universe. Changes in the assembly and composition of radiation, matter, and life throughout all space and across all time.

These changes have produced our galaxy, our sun, our earth, and us. The result is a grand evolutionary synthesis bridging a wide variety of scientific specialties. It is a genuine narrative of epic proportions extending from the very beginning of time to the present, from the Big Bang to the birth humankind. 3

The cosmic evolutionary story has evoked a wide range of responses in the Christian religious domain. Its cosmic narrative of growth and change, its apparent fine-tuning for living beings, and possibilities for abundant life. These things raise long-standing religious questions of Divine Creation.   

On the one hand, cosmic evolution has clearly presented a deep challenge for some conservative Christians.

The apparent absence of a divine creator is not consistent with the literal readings of Genesis.

This perceived conflict mobilized some creationists into political action in the arena of public education. This is a cause more recently and aggressively pursued by the Intelligent Design movement.

On the other hand, many in the religious community view cosmic evolution as compatible with belief in a God. God who created it all and still acts in the universe. They hold positions which range from the more conservative “progressive creationism” to the more liberal “theistic evolution”.

Most mainstream and liberal theologians and laypersons, fall into the latter category. Typically, they endeavor to explore common ground with science by examining traditional religious concepts of divine action. The concepts of natural theology, design, cosmic purpose and God’s relation to the world in the light of the new cosmology. [4]

The cosmic evolution idea has roots in the 19th century. It was occasionally invoked in the first half of the 20th century by astronomers such as George Ellery Hale. It really came into its own only in the modern Space Age.

In 1958, in his classic book Of Stars and Men, Harvard College Observatory Director Harlow Shapley wrote that the Earth is “on the outer fringe of one galaxy in a universe of millions of galaxies. Man becomes peripheral among the billions of stars in his own Milky Way. According to the revelations of paleontology and geochemistry he is also exposed as a recent, and perhaps an ephemeral manifestation in the unrolling of cosmic time.“

In his 1967 essays Beyond the Observatory, Shapley wrote, “Nothing seems to be more important philosophically than the revelation that the evolutionary drive, which has in recent years swept over the whole field of biology, also includes in its sweep the evolution of galaxies and stars, and comets and atoms, and indeed all things material.”

Cosmic evolution has become the guiding principle for modern astronomy. The science programs of the world’s space agencies may be seen as filling in the details in this story of the history of the universe.

The very idea was spread during the 1970s and 1980s by NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program. It was also spread by NASA’s broader Astro biological seek and find efforts.

For the last decade, NASA’s Origins program has had cosmic evolution as its focus. When the program began in 1996, it was viewed as “Following a 15-billion-year long chain of events.” A chain that begins with the Big Bang and travels through the mysterious formation of all of the elements and energy that cradles life on Earth.”

Cosmic evolution has several possible outcomes. Its endpoint may be planets, stars and galaxies. We observe these and know they exist, and the result is what we might call the “physical universe,” magnificent in and of itself.

Alternately, cosmic evolution may result in a profusion of life, either microbial or intelligent, throughout the universe. This outcome, the Holy Grail of SETI and astrobiology programs around the world, would constitute a “biological universe.”

A third possible outcome, rarely discussed, is a universe in which cultural evolution is taken into account.

If intelligent life is millions or billions of years old, then cultural evolution may have resulted in a “post-biological universe.” A universe in which flesh and blood intelligence has been superseded by artificial intelligence (IA). We can see that happening here on earth today. It is dangerous territory, and we must proceed with great wisdom and caution with IA development. 

Carnegie Mellon AI pioneer Hans Moravec has famously postulated a post-biological earth in the next few generations. Given the time scales of the universe, it seems much more likely to have already happened in outer space.

All of these outcomes have implications for our human destiny. It may be our destiny to populate the universe, or to interact with its flesh-and-blood intelligence in many forms. In the post-biological universe, we may have to interact with IA.

There are more immediate implications as well. Sir Arthur Peacocke, a British biochemist and Anglican priest, has called cosmic evolution “Genesis for the Third Millennium.” He suggested that it must be incorporated into religious doctrines.

Reverend Michael Dowd has taken that sentiment to heart in a DVD called “Evolutionary Christianity.” In it he incorporates “the entire history of the universe and the emergent complexity of matter, life, consciousness, culture and technology.”

Space programs can get bogged down in technical details, politics, theological concerns, and funding controversies. We should not lose sight of the longer-term implications. Although its practical benefits are many, space exploration has no higher calling than this search for our place in the universe. [5]

In both space and time, the study of cosmic evolution allows us to see the universe as it really is, to reflect on our place in it, and to “know the place for the first time.” At the end of the day, this is what we seek and why we explore the universe.

 

[1] Wikipedia, Little Gidding Poem.

[2] Britannica, Four Quartets

[3] Cosmic Evolution, State of the Science, Eric J. Chaisson, 2009

[4] Omnilogos, Cosmic Evolution: Christian Perspectives, Kate Grayson         Boisvert, Greenwood Press, 2008

[5] NASA, Beyond Earth, Expanding Human Presence into the Solar System, July 21, 2005, Steven J. Dick- NASA Chief Historian

Communication Codes: Can You Decode an Alien Message?

I have authored two books about extraterrestrial communication. One is published.

Extraterrestrial Communication Code: 

The second, Angel Communication Code, will be available to the public before the end of 2023.

This subject is very real and very fascinating. The theme of the books is that ETs left us a message to decode and repeat back to them. If we can demonstrate we understand their message, the lines of communication will open. That is the theory I put on the table along with the logic and evidence that built the theory.

Communicating with another species is probably not going to be easy. Consider how difficult it is already for humans from one culture and language to be understood by those from another. Now we are trying to achieve meaningful communication with ETs. Their bodies, minds and habitats are likely to be far different from humans on earth.

The scientific community recognizes the issue. An artist-led team created a mock message from the stars to test us Earthlings. On May 24, 2023, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter beamed the note from Mars toward Earth.  

Three observatories detected the transmission 16 minutes later.  The Medicina Radio Observatory in Bologna, Italy; the Allen Telescope Array in northern California; and the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia.

This is an on-going interplanetary art project, called A Sign in Space.  Nobody has deciphered the May 24 message, but many continue to try. You can actually find the message and download it from several websites. A Sign in Space

Only three people in the world know what A Sign in Space’s message means. First among them is Daniela de Paulis, the project’s founder. She is an artist in residence at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute. She also serves at the Green Bank Observatory. De Paulis and two other co-authors created the mock alien message after consulting with poets, scientists, programmers and philosophers.

Their challenge in creating the message was not just to think like an extraterrestrial but also to neutralize Earth’s regional biases. Her team immediately ruled out language-based communication. She will not however, confirm or deny whether the message contains any text. Her team even agonized over the using of mathematics. Although the fundamental concepts are universal, different societies may think about and represent math differently. “It was really very heavy work to dismantle our Western-centric thinking,” she says.

De Paulis struggled with the message for years after she conceived the project in 2019. A breakthrough came in late 2022 when she contacted artist and computer programmer Giacomo Miceli. He suggested that she draw inspiration from the short story “A Sign in Space” in Italian writer Italo Calvino’s collection Cosmicomics.

A month before the transmission deadline, astronomer Roy Smits joined the pair. He added a mathematical component to make the message “more universal, so to speak,” de Paulis says. It also made it and much harder to crack because it looks nothing like what humans use in our daily conversations.

We have been sending messages to ETs out into the stars for decades with no response to date.  In 1974, scientists shot a radio message into the universe using the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico. It was a 1,679 string of 1’s and 0’s. When translated graphically, it consists of crude representations of a human, the Arecibo Telescope’s dish and the DNA double helix, and more.

The likelihood of this “Arecibo message” ever being understood by extraterrestrials is slim at best. Its composer, the late astronomer Frank Drake, gave the Arecibo message to his colleagues to interpret for fun, and not one of them figured it out.

That project, as well as the new experiment, illustrates just what a tall order true understanding between species is. “The beauty of A Sign in Space is to make us reflect on just how it is more frustratingly difficult and ultimately a much more profound sort of contact than Hollywood would ever portray,” says Douglas Vakoch. He is the president of the organization METI (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence) International, who was not involved in the project.

One of the project’s more than 4,700 subscribers on Discord is Gonzalo José Carracedo Carballal. He is a 34-year-old Ph.D. student in astrophysics at the Complutense University of Madrid. A radio astronomy devotee, he fills his spare time working on radio wave projects. His lab in a room littered with instruments and parts. A satellite dish peeks from his balcony. Tattooed on his right triceps is an excerpt from the etchings on the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes’ plaque. These were other 1970s attempts by Earth scientists to introduce our species to ETs that might encounter the craft.

Carracedo Carballal was part of the first group of people to extract the raw message from the ExoMars orbiter’s broadcast. The message was a 40-gigabyte string of numbers describing the waveform of the telemetry data, interwoven with the alien message. Unlike a real extraterrestrial note, which would arrive unannounced, this signal came in at a precisely scheduled time. Comparing the arrival timing with previous transmissions the telescopes received, the amateur code breakers identified a data packet in the radio signal that was more active and sizable than usual.

A week’s effort of filtering the data segment, which Carracedo Carballal likens to peeling layers off an onion, eventually led to an 8.2-kilobyte bitmap image of five speckled clusters set against a blank background. (Shown below)

Soon after Carracedo Carballal and his colleagues found the raw message, speculations on its meaning erupted. Perhaps the message was hinting at the aliens’ appearance, Morse code, cellular automata or the genetic secrets of E.T.

One user enlisted ChatGPT to reverse engineer a first contact appropriate message as a starting point. Several users suggested that the image was a star map broadcasting the civilization’s location. Others proposed that the dots represented constellations of a much smaller scale: molecules, perhaps the bio signatures of the foreign home world.

The raw message looked too random to be comprehensible. Decoding was necessary to wrangle it into a more intelligible form. However, where to start was the critical question. Every attempt would be a stab in the dark. “You start to see patterns,” Carracedo Carballal says of the process. “You have to stop and think whether something is actually there, or you’re just projecting.”

Whenever Ivi Hasanaj, a 32-year-old software engineer based in Germany, starts to work on decoding A Sign in Space’s message for the day, he opens up the raw image on his computer and stares. He stares, and stares some more until an idea occurs to him, and he writes code to manipulate the image.

Hasanaj does not think aliens, or A Sign in Space’s organizers, are the sadistic sort who would make message recipients bang their head for nothing more than their amusement. Messages are meant to be understood. Although he had not thought much about the problem of extraterrestrial communication before this project, He has solved many puzzles on the gamified coding platform Codewars, and this experience comes in handy. For one, he recognizes the difference between decryption and decoding.

Decryption is the process of making sense of a concealed message for which only the intended recipient has a key, or a translation hack, to understand it. This kind of code breaking is much more difficult than decoding: the biggest hurdle is guessing the missing key.

On the other hand, a message with the key already embedded inside lends itself to decoding. When decoding, the user should not introduce new information into the message. Any operation on the raw file, such as a rotation or an overlay, should come from instructions that the reader has managed to extract from the message. Otherwise, it would be like arbitrarily rearranging the letters of a word to arrive at a new anagram.

Hasanaj is not sure of the true content of A Sign in Space’s message, but his own best guess is a numerical system that counts from one to five. He uncovered this from observing a recurring pattern among the brightest pixels in the image.

Hasanaj has not been able to account for the remaining flecks, which constitute the majority of the signal. Perhaps other kinds of information beyond math lurk in the message. He thinks no part of the already slim communication is redundant.  Aliens would probably make every pixel count. He says he will know the correct answer when he sees it.

The community is still trying to decode the message, pursuing 30-some ideas for how to do so, before even attempting to interpret its full meaning. For this process, participants can take a less technical approach to making sense of the message, as they might do for an abstract painting. For now, the signal is still too random to be interpretable.

Watching their efforts unfold, de Paulis thinks these scattershot efforts may be distracting users from exploring each idea to the full. “They can’t focus on one particular decision,” she observes. “I think that’s the main problem.” If the public remains stuck on the decoding process, she says her team will likely organize an online hackathon later in August.

Humanity’s best shot at understanding an extraterrestrial message is to throw a consortium of diverse expertise at it, Vakoch says. A Sign in Space is a shining example of what that may look like. 

In the event of a real extraterrestrial signal reaching Earth, the public is not likely to be invited to help with the decoding process. In 1989, the International Academy of Astronautics established a post detection protocol that largely emphasizes secrecy. The guidelines have had little updating since. “An international committee of scientists and other experts should be established to serve as a focal point for continuing analysis, and also to provide advice on the release of information to the public,” the protocol decrees. “Parties to this declaration should not make any public announcement of this information” until the extraterrestrial, origin is verified.

“The world has changed a lot since the 1980s,” says Franck Marchis, a senior planetary astronomer at the SETI Institute and an outreach and education coordinator for A Sign in Space. Many more radio aficionados have rigged their own telescopes and trained them toward the skies. There is also social media, which spreads news like wildfire. “The public will know no matter what,” Marchis says.

A Sign in Space is a dress rehearsal for scientific organizations to iron out the technical challenges of message sharing and telescope mobilization to confirm signal detection. More idealistically, it is an experiment for sharing an extraterrestrial signal with members of the public and getting them involved. In that sense, A Sign in Space is the ultimate citizen science project, one on a planetary scale. De Paulis calls the participants on Discord her “co-creators.”

Marchis says he would love to make extraterrestrial communication and translation a more democratic affair. “I’d make the data available right away to the entire community of the world,” Marchis says, rather than having it “on the internal network of some random scientists.” That is what drew him to A Sign in Space in the first place. “I’m hoping that this is going to be the way we’re going to move forward in the future,” he says.

In construing the meaning of an extraterrestrial dispatch, those who give it a go often try to anticipate what the message might be trying to say. The go-to answer is often science and math, given that these concepts hold up anywhere in the universe. The movie Contact posits that space aliens will hail us with numbers, throwing us a sequence of primes that look unnatural enough to make humans sit up and take notice.

It is one thing to flag a different species’ attention but another to converse meaningfully across the vast reaches of space. “I think an alien would send information that gives us an idea of who they are and the level of complexity that they have reached,” Marchis says—something that may even give recipients a glimpse of the alien society and its evolution.

This is where art comes in. Art is a creator’s self-expression and a cross-cultural conversation with its beholder. Perhaps the true meaning of an alien’s message is the composer’s original intent plus what the recipients make of it. Interpreting such a message requires not only technical skill but also an artistic, philosophical thread. Thus, communicating with aliens is both a science and an art.

A Sign in Space recognizes the near futility of extraterrestrial communication and turns it into an endeavor that is much more open-ended. “If we ever receive a message from an extraterrestrial civilization, I can imagine that there will never be an agreement over the cultural interpretation,” de Paulis says. “I think there would necessarily be some miscommunication.” [1]

[1] Scientific American. Can You Decode an Alien Message? Shi En Kim August 3, 2023

 

Our Mysterious Radio Podcast Interview has been Broadcast

Extraterrestrial Communication Group’s podcast interview by The Mysterious Radio Program was broadcast on May 19, 2023.  Mysterious Radio Interview

Our debut book, Extraterrestrial Communication Code, was the primary interview subject.  Our sequel book, “Angel Communication Code”, was also explored.  We hope to publish it by the end of the year. Other relevant extraterrestrial communication topics were discussed as well.  

The summary below (italic print) is transcribed directly from the Mysterious Radio Website:

Mysterious Radio is the place to go for mind-expanding, thought-provoking content at its finest.

We are dedicated to exploring the mysteries of this world and taking our listeners on a journey to uncover shocking revelations with top scientists, bestselling authors and renowned journalists.

Our top-rated podcast provides exceptional analysis of extraordinary events, ancient history, supernatural places, true crime, UFO contact and unexplained phenomena. This makes us one of the leading sources for uncovering never before heard information.

Our mission statement is “To inform and empower people through knowledge”. We strive everyday toward a vision that seeks mental enlightenment for all who seek it receiving millions of downloads yearly. Mysterious Radio is proudly produced by an independent podcast team.

Mysterious Radio has approximately 500,000 formal subscribers and millions of regular listeners on several continents around the globe.

This is a big step for our Extraterrestrial Communication Group project. Our Extraterrestrial Communication Group has reached the 3,600-follower mark as of the date of this post and is growing every day. 

It is our expectation that the Mysterious Radio podcast interview exposure will boost that number quite a bit and boost it quickly. Less than 12-hours after the broad cast, the ECG experienced the highest number of visitors in any single day since the website went live in 2021, and the day is not over.

Who Owns Outer Space and What are its Sovereign Boundaries?

There are 644 Active International Outer Space Agreements by signature as of December 31, 2022.

Most are project specific. In addition, United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs contains 5 treaties. They are referred to as the “five United Nations treaties on outer space” as follows:

      1. The Outer Space Treaty.

This treaty is currently undergoing an update.

      1. The Rescue Agreement.
      1. The Liability Convention.
      1. The Registration Convention.

The five declarations and legal principles of these treaties are:

      1. The Declaration of Legal Principles.
      1. The Broadcasting Principles.
        • The Principles Governing the Use by States of Artificial Earth Satellites for International Direct Television Broadcasting.
        • General Assembly resolution 37/92 of 10 December 1982
      1. The Remote Sensing Principles.
      1. The Nuclear Power Sources Principles.
      1. The Benefits Declaration.
        • The Declaration on International Cooperation in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space for the Benefit and in the Interest of All States. This takes into Particular Account, the Needs of Developing Countries.
        • General Assembly resolution 51/122 of 13 December 1996

The jurisdiction of these treaties and agreements starts at the boarder of outer space. Where the earth’s atmosphere ends, and outer space begins. It is a proposed line, and not all entities accept the line unilaterally. This proposed delineation is called the Kármán line.

The line is named for Theodore von Kármán (1881–1963). He was a Hungarian-American engineer and physicist who was active in aeronautics and astronautics. In 1957, Kármán was the first person to calculate a theoretical altitude limit for conventional aircraft flight. 

The Kármán line is the proposed boundary between earth’s atmosphere and outer space which is accepted by the international record-keeping body FAI (Fédération Aéronautique Internationale). The line is set at an altitude of 54 nautical miles = 62 miles = 328,000 feet above mean sea level.

The line lies within the Thermosphere which is between the Mesosphere below and the Exosphere above. This delineation of the edge of space, however, is not globally adopted.[1]

The Kármán line has no physical characteristics. There is no identifiable change in the atmosphere across it. The line is in place only for outer space legal and regulatory purposes. Atmospheric aircraft and outer space spacecraft are subject to different jurisdictions and legislations. International law does not define the edge of outer space. The Kármán line is well above the altitude achievable by conventional aircraft or high-altitude balloons. 

These limits have remained much the same since the beginning of the modern jet era. For example, the Boeing 747-200 which first launched in 1968, had an in-service ceiling altitude of 45,100 feet. The only notable exception is the Concorde, which is certified to fly at an altitude of 60,000 feet, which is above the ozone layer and into the stratosphere. The higher the altitude the lower the atmospheric density.

 

The Kármán line has nothing to do with aircraft engine combustion or wing lift.  The Kármán line is set at the approximate altitude where satellite orbits will decay before completing a single orbit.

Scientists often disagree on exactly where the atmosphere ends and outer space begins. Authorities having jurisdiction however, including the United Nations, accept the FAI’s Kármán line definition.  The Kármán line as defined by the FAI was established in the 1960s. Various entities within those nations of the outer space treaties define outer space’s boundary differently for variety of intents and purposes. Treaties and agreements are not laws.

The delineation between earth atmosphere and outer space is very much a-kin to the establishment of the rules for international waters. “International Waters” is not a defined term in international law. It is an informal term, which sometimes refers to waters beyond the “territorial sea” of any State or Nation. The term “International Waters” is sometimes used as a synonym for the more formal term, “High Seas”.  

International Waters (High Seas) do not belong to any State’s or Nation’s jurisdiction according to international law. The Convention on the High Seas was signed in 1958 by 63 signatories. High Seas are defined to mean “all parts of the sea that are not included in the territorial sea or in the internal waters of a State”. It also states that:  “no State may validly purport to subject any part of them to its sovereignty“.[2] 

The Convention on the High Seas was used as a foundation for the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), signed in 1982. This law recognizes exclusive economic zones which are set at 200 nautical miles (230 miles) from the baseline. The baseline is where coastal States have sovereign rights to the water column and sea floor as well as the natural resources found there. [3] The High Seas make up 50% of the surface area of the earth and cover over two-thirds of the ocean. International Maritime Law, however, is different than outer space treaties or agreements. Again, Treaties and agreements are not laws.

In the 1960’s there was a genuine need for a globally accepted boundary between our atmosphere and outer space, and for outer space treaties and agreements.  An issue arises in the 2020’s more than half a century later. We must now consider that there is no established or even proposed outer boundary beyond the first boundary as far as we know. How far past the Kármán line does the jurisdiction of earth’s outer space treaties and agreements reach? 

Looking back through history, we can expect that the day will come when local (to earth) outer space “territories” will be measured, defined and put on a spherical map of some sort.  As soon as that happens nations will make claims to the sovereignty of those outer space territories despite any treaties or agreements. It is our nature as demonstrated throughout history. 

Nations have forever gone to war over ownership of territories on earth, regardless of ratified treaties, agreements, or even laws.  We do it with terrestrial territories to this day – every day. We also do it with the delineation of the High Seas.

China for example, is now making their own independent interpretations and challenges to the delineation of the accepted High Seas line. We can only presume China is doing this for reasons of power, money, and conquest, consistent with human history.  This will inevitably lead to international conflict, as it has historically done, depending on how hard China pushes that agenda. If nothing else, the human animal is very predictable on matters of territorial ambitions. 

There is no reason to expect earth Nations won’t do the same when outer space territories are inevitably delineated as were the current political boundaries of soil and the High Seas and International Maritime Law.   It will not matter if it is an outer space territory.

If any region has a border creating a territory, humans will inevitably wage war for control of that territory. They will fight to claim any favorable area as their sovereign territory and then defend it after they have control.  It has been our historic behavior forever and that is the first problem for humans to grapple with as we prepare to migrate into outer space.

The short-sighted second problem is that the outer space agreements and treaties currently in place don’t address extraterrestrials (ETs) in our space. They do not consider where that outer perimeter line begins or even should begin. When the day comes that ET communication happens, will earth make a claim to an outer zone territory and try to defend that outer zone from those ET entities?  To do that, we must be all on the same team. 

What we have in place now does not address an interstellar line where ETs entering our self-proclaimed territory must follow our rules. For ETs to obey our rules, we first must actually have rules and then we must be able to communicate those rules to them. Assuming we can agree on where the line is and who is responsible for holding that line; ETs will either:

      1. Respect and obey our rules.
      2. Negotiate our rules to something mutually agreeable for the benefit of both parties.
      3. Disregard the rules because there is nothing, we can effectively do about it anyway.
      4. Inform us that the rules are universal already – here is your copy, welcome to the club.
    1.  

Our interactions with ETs will be a function of the ETs purpose for coming here in the first place.  It is comparable to an adult being granted permission to enter a child’s tree house. The adult complies with the child’s tree house rules out of respect for their turf.  They do this knowing full well they can take over the tree house at any time they choose either cooperatively or by force if necessary.

Defense of territory is all about establishing a perimeter. Where should we establish that outer perimeter or should we even try? There is a lot of science fiction-like talk out there about colonizing Mars but it’s technologically very far out there for us right now. We have actually never been there in person, and we certainly will not be able to defend it any time soon.

Maybe we should start by setting the perimeter at the moon-range distance. At least we have been to the moon in person and have a flag in the ground to stake our claim so to speak. At least we have an argument that it is earths sovereign territory for a variety of reasons. The argument would imply that moon-range is the distance from our earth base which is our sovereign territory because of the impact the moon has on the earth’s oceans etc.  The moon has an impact on the earth and therefore, we must protect it. At least we would have a justifiable argument even though we can’t effectively defend that territorial perimeter at this point in time.

The obvious reality of the situation is that we have no shot at claiming and effectively defending a moon-range perimeter around the earth any time soon. We are not technologically there yet.    Moon-range defense distance might be achievable someday far into the future but not for a very long time. Maybe however, the control and defense problems are the same for ETs also. Maybe they ant defend it either. In fact, maybe the need for that sort of conquest and defense is not the way we should be thinking at all.

All of this discussion about war-like defense is based on the assumption that the ETs are coming with the intent of conquest. Maybe that sort of conquest mentality does not even exist any longer beyond our own primitive human nature. If conquest was the ET mission, they surely would have completed that mission by now.  They have been coming to earth for centuries and are probably walking among us today. The evidence of their intent and activity on earth thus far has obviously not been one of violent conquest. 

We don’t know what their intent might be, but it certainly does not appear to be one of violent conquest and control of our earthly territory. Consider the possibility that the notion of territorial control and conquest is extinct within a galactic community. It makes sense because power and control inevitably change hands and the cost is very high and all for what…. wealth and power? Perhaps the universal community has a higher and more civilized purpose.

This is why establishing two-way ET communication is so critical at this point in our time and place in the universe. Once 2-way communication is established and we are introduced to the universal community, we may very well be informed by our new ET friends that the rules are already in place. They may just tell us what those rulers are, and we would be expected to comply in order to be accepted as an active part a more universal community program. Let’s face it, we won’t really have another option.

It is not unreasonable to expect that there is an entity out there similar to the United Nations here on earth, to the fictional series Star Trek’s “The United Federation of Planets”. The logic is there and perhaps one day in the not-so-distant future, earth will have a representative on the Board of such a galactic organization.

When the day comes, and it is probably coming relatively soon, when ETs open the channels of communication, people of the entire earth as a singular common entity will have either a common friend or a common adversary. This will be unprecedented in human history to the best of our current knowledge of human history.

The concept of One World Order takes on a different meaning in this context.  The concept expands into One Galactic Order. One thing seems obvious however things turn out in the future. The people of earth or of any of the sovereign nations upon it do not own outer space or even a miniscule slice of its vastness.

In the words of former President Ronal Regan: “Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world”. There is a lot of wisdom in that simple observation and statement, and it can be interpreted as not being just about ET communication. It applies to the return of a higher authority as well. 

The more research I do on the subject of extraterrestrial communication and the universe at large, the more that research circles back to faith and a creator of the universe. Science and faith are clearly linked.

All predictions, indications and current world events are telling us that something very world changing is headed our way in the very near future. The evidence is everywhere, and it has been predicted and prophesied by most, if not all cultures and faiths of the world. With conquest, wealth and power comes corruption and immorality. The very things our creator seeks to correct in his human creation. 

The world we live in today is filled to the brim with corruption and immorality like never before. Is there a government anywhere on earth that is not corrupt? What about human morality and what we are teaching and doing to very young children in school. We are also teaching them by example. Where is all of this going? 

The judgements and corrections to human corruption and immorality will be administered by the only entity that will ever own outer space and the universe. That is for that what we must prepare. The owner of outer space is the creator of it all in the first place. In the beginning God created the heavens and earth (Genesis 1:1).

[1] Wikipedia. Kármán line

[2] Text of CONVENTION ON THE HIGH SEAS Archived 22 February 2019 at the Wayback Machine (U.N.T.S. No. 6465, vol. 450, pp. 82–103)

[3]  National Ocean Service. “What is the EEZ”.  Retrieved 8 September 2019.