UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

In the future, parts of the world will become so hot and humid that healthy adults sitting in the shade will die within a matter of hours. It’s hard to imagine, and yet that’s where Earth’s climate is headed, perhaps sooner than expected.

New research, published Wednesday in Science Advances, found that 75 percent of the population of South Asia will experience extremely dangerous heat waves by 2100 if no action is taken to fight climate change. Four percent will experience unsurvivable heat — that’s 69 million people at today’s population level.

The Indus and Ganges river valleys, spanning southeast Pakistan, northern India, and Bangladesh, have a disastrous combination of a densely populated, vulnerable population and extreme, humid heat. In these parts of the world, extreme heat is already frequent and deadly. A 2015 heat wave that covered large parts of India and Pakistan killed an estimated 3,500 people.

Spatial distribution of highest daily maximum wet-bulb temperature, TWmax (°C), in modern record (1979–2015). Global distribution of TWmax is computedusing ERA-Interim 3-hourly data with 0.75° × 0.75° horizontal resolution. The enlarged domain highlights three distinguishable regions with higher TWmax: southwest Asiaaround the Persian/Arabian Gulf and Red Sea, South Asia in the Indus and Ganges river valleys, and eastern China. TWmax values below 27°C are not shown.

These are the highest recorded wet-bulb temperatures through 2015 in degrees Celsius.

While most climate change studies look only at temperature, this one uses a different measure that accounts for the impact of humidity on the ability of humans to cool themselves off through sweating. It’s called wet-bulb temperature, and it measures how hot the air would be if cooled through the evaporation of water until it reaches 100 percent humidity.

When humans sweat, that moisture evaporates into the air, which transfers heat energy away from the skin. However, when the wet-bulb temperature reaches the temperature of the skin, at about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, it becomes impossible for heat to move away from the body in this way. Even if enough sweat could be produced to bring the surrounding air to 100 percent humidity, the air would still be hotter than the skin, and no energy would leave the body. Previous research has estimated that a healthy human could survive a maximum of six hours in these conditions — which means find a cooler spot, or die.

A wet-bulb temperature of 95 degrees has never been recorded, but parts of the world have hit 89 degrees, which is already extremely dangerous to any human who is exposed to it for more than a short period of time. The hottest wet-bulb temperatures in the world are found in the Persian/Arabian Gulf, in the northern parts of South Asia, and in Eastern China.

This study focused on South Asia — defined as the countries of Pakistan, Indian, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka — because here there is a coincidence of very high wet-bulb temperatures and a dense population of relatively poor, rural people. That makes this the most vulnerable part of the world to future deadly heat waves.

The spatial distributions of bias-corrected ensemble averaged 30-year TWmax for eachGHG scenario: HIST (1976–2005) (B), RCP4.5 (2071–2100) (C), and RCP8.5 (2071–2100) (D).

Maps show wet-bulb temperature maximums in Celsius in the historical record (B); and projected to 2100 under aggressive climate change action (C); and limited climate action (D). At 35 degrees, humans can only survive a few hours.

If there’s a glimmer of hope, it’s that the researchers found a very significant difference in outcome if the world bands together to aggressively fight climate change. With concerted action to limit greenhouse gas emissions, none of South Asia would surpass the unsurvivable threshold by 2100, although 55 percent of the population would still be exposed to extreme wet-bulb temperatures of 88 degrees or higher.

In any case, humans living in very hot and humid parts of the world will be forced to adapt. That will mean air conditioners for those who can afford it and, likely, communal cool spaces for emergencies. At the most extreme, we may see mass migrations of climate change refugees away from regions of the world that have become literally unsurvivable.

Abstract

The risk associated with any climate change impact reflects intensity of natural hazard and level of human vulnerability. Previous work has shown that a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C can be considered an upper limit on human survivability. On the basis of an ensemble of high-resolution climate change simulations, we project that extremes of wet-bulb temperature in South Asia are likely to approach and, in a few locations, exceed this critical threshold by the late 21st century under the business-as-usual scenario of future greenhouse gas emissions. The most intense hazard from extreme future heat waves is concentrated around densely populated agricultural regions of the Ganges and Indus river basins. Climate change, without mitigation, presents a serious and unique risk in South Asia, a region inhabited by about one-fifth of the global human population, due to an unprecedented combination of severe natural hazard and acute vulnerability.

Photos via Science Advances

J. Allen Hynek was hired as an Air Force astronomer to debunk the myth of UFOs but later on became a UFO believer.

(Alvin Quinn/AP/AP)

By Sarah Kaplan

Sarah Kaplan is a science reporter for The Washington Post.

Back in 1950, during a lunch break at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, several scientists were trading wisecracks about a recent spate of UFO reports when Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi offered an observation that has echoed through the decades. Given the number of places where life could exist in the vast universe, and the length of time it has had to evolve, the skies ought to be teeming with beings from advanced, space-faring civilizations — but nothing incontrovertible has shown up. You have to wonder, as Fermi did, “Where is everybody?”

His colleagues chuckled, but the “Fermi paradox” perfectly frames the profound absurdity of the search for life beyond Earth. Humans have beamed beacons into space, robotically visited every world in the solar system and discovered thousands of planets circling stars far from our own. Yet all we’ve encountered is a chilly void.

Still, the possibility that something is out there calls to us.

“The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs,” by Mark O'Connell (Dey Street)

Three new books approach the mystery from distinctly different perspectives: the unlikely believer in UFOs, the visionary dedicated to rigorous investigation and the cadre of scientists who still plug away at the problem, probing the universe for an answer.

In “The Close Encounters Man: How One Man Made the World Believe in UFOs,” screenwriter Mark O’Connell recounts the gradual evolution of J. Allen Hynek, an Air Force astronomer, from UFO debunker to believer. Hynek’s tale unfolds a few years before Fermi posed his question, when aliens were much on the minds of Americans. In the summer of 1947, a Boise businessman piloting a small plane across the Cascade Mountains spotted a chain of unidentified flying objects weaving among the peaks. Shortly after, Alabamians reported that brilliant lights appeared over an airfield in Montgomery. Then a swarm of wingless machines was spotted in Maine.

Baffled by these bizarre accounts, the Air Force decided that someone had to sort through all the sightings — if only to prove that they weren’t really extraterrestrials.

So they hired Hynek, an alum of the University of Chicago and a former civilian scientist for the Navy who previously was best known for studying the evolution of stars. Methodical and undogmatic, Hynek could not have been further from the kooky, paranoid stereotype of a UFO enthusiast. He seemed to be exactly the man who could be counted on to dismiss the phenomenon.

Instead, he became its biggest advocate.

“I was somewhat like the proverbial ‘innocent bystander who got shot,’ ” Hynek would later say.

After researching thousands of UFO reports, many from apparently credible witnesses, Hynek became convinced that a significant fraction of sightings could not be explained by current science.

The Air Force, however, disagreed. In 1970 it discontinued its UFO investigations, having concluded that the phenomenon was largely a result of pranksters, psychological experiences and tricks of light.

Undeterred, Hynek established his own Center for UFO Studies and developed a system for classifying these “close encounters” that inspired the 1977 film “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Hynek died in 1986 still convinced that UFOs were something “exotic.”

It’s clear that O’Connell, who maintains a UFO blog of his own, wants readers to come away from his book agreeing with Hynek. He derides mainstream astronomers who mock UFOlogy as pseudoscience and reserves special venom for Carl Sagan, who spoke so eloquently about the potential for life in the universe but was unwilling to believe that extraterrestrials might have visited Earth.

I’m inclined to side with Sagan — the human mind is far too easily deceived for this science reporter to believe that rogue aliens offer the most persuasive explanation for strange apparitions in the skies. If there really are advanced beings out there, traversing the universe at the speed of light, it seems unlikely that scaring suburbanites and confusing livestock are the best uses of their time.

But reading “The Close Encounters Man” does engender respect for its subject. “Hynek was a rational person looking at an irrational subject,” James Oberg, a science journalist, NASA engineer and longtime UFO doubter, tells O’Connell. He approached the UFO problem as a scientist would. And although aliens didn’t actually invade America, Hynek — with a little help from Steven Spielberg — helped them invade the American psyche. He got us thinking about encounters with ET, paving the way for a more scientific approach to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI.

Shortly after the Air Force gave up on UFOs, NASA commissioned a study of the best methods for seeking out alien life. The resulting report argued for using radio telescopes to listen for the kinds of electromagnetic signals that would emanate from an advanced civilization in space. If we still haven’t seen aliens in person, the thinking went, perhaps we might be able to hear them.

That report landed in the lap of a young astronomer named Jill Tarter, who, like Hynek, had started her career observing distant stars.

In “Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” science journalist Sarah Scoles writes that the astronomer was instantly “converted.” As Tarter told Scoles, “I just knew I’d found the right place, never having thought about it before.” Whereas her work on stars had felt distant and abstruse, SETI gave Tarter a sense of purpose. She went on to direct the first targeted effort to detect extraterrestrial signals and helped found the SETI Institute — now an authority on the search for alien life.

“There was a feeling of connectedness,” Tarter said of this research. “I was doing something that could impact people’s lives profoundly in a short time.”

It’s a noble motivation, and Scoles — who narrates her story in a warm, chatty tone — clearly thinks Tarter is a hero. But the SETI pioneer’s biggest enemies are decidedly prosaic: narrow-minded, sexist male colleagues who try to tell Tarter she doesn’t belong in science; sneering politicians who deny SETI funding to make a political point; seemingly exotic radio signals that turn out to come from ordinary satellites.

Tarter is now celebrated as a pioneer and a feminist icon; she was the inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the movie “Contact.” But her story lacks a triumphant ending. She retired in 2012, never having heard the signal she spent her life listening for.

SETI research is a far cry from UFOlogy. But it’s impossible to ignore the similarities between Tarter and Hynek. Both were ordinary astronomers who happened upon the alien question and never let go, regardless of the indifference, derision and outright hostility they encountered. Both devoted their lives to the idea that, as the saying goes, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. Even though absence is all either ever found.

Which brings us back to Fermi’s paradox. More than a half century of sustained scientific research has uncovered neither hide nor hair — or whatever — of extraterrestrial life. Does that mean there’s nothing to be found?

“Aliens: The World’s Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life” lays out the case for optimism in a collection of essays. The world in which this book was published is one that Hynek and Tarter helped make. Chris French, the head of anomalistic psychology research at Goldsmiths, University of London, uses Hynek’s “close encounters” scale to discuss psychological phenomena that can explain such experiences. Two of the essays were written by scientists at Tarter’s SETI Institute.

[The weirdest star in the sky is acting up again]

The other contributors include experts from astronomy, cosmology, planetary science and genetics, as well as fields that didn’t even exist when Hynek and Tarter began their work — astrobiology and exoplanet research. Together, they provide an overview of where the search for alien life now stands.

Advances in biology on Earth have expanded our notion of where and how life can thrive. Meanwhile, exploration of space has identified places in our solar system and beyond that could be (or once were) hospitable to alien organisms. Mars used to boast an atmosphere and flowing water; the moons of Jupiter and Saturn harbor hidden subsurface oceans and liquid methane lakes. Our growing catalogue of exoplanets suggests that most stars in the galaxy host planets on which life could conceivably form. When the James Webb Space Telescope launches in 2018, scientists will be able to probe the atmospheres of those planets in pursuit of “biosignatures” — molecules that are thought to signal the presence of life.

No one has an answer to the question: “Where is everybody?” But scientists do have plenty of places to look. Perhaps, someday in the not-too-distant future, they’ll receive that long-awaited radio beacon from a distant galaxy. Or look through a microscope at a water sample from an ocean moon and find microbes swimming around. Or detect a haze of “biosignatures” in the atmosphere of an alien world.

Or, hey, maybe an unidentified flying object will appear suddenly in the sky one day when we least expect it. A crowd will gather, a hatch will open and, finally, a little green man will step out to reassure us we’re not alone.

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