Major Milestone for NASA’s Revolutionary Roman Space Telescope

The Space Telescope Science Institute Will Host Roman’s Science Operations Center and Data Archive

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has just successfully completed the critical design review of the mission’s ground systems, which are spread over multiple institutions including the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; and Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California. STScI will host the Science Operations Center while Goddard will provide the Mission Operations Center and Caltech/IPAC will house the Science Support Center. The passing of the critical design review means the plan for science operations has met all of the design, schedule, and budget requirements. The mission will now proceed to the next phase: building and testing the newly designed systems that will enable planning and scheduling of Roman observations and managing the resulting data, which will amount to over 20 petabytes (20,000,000 GB) within the first five years of operations.

When it launches in the mid-2020s, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will revolutionize astronomy by building on the science discoveries and technological leaps of the Hubble, Spitzer, and Webb space telescopes. The mission’s wide field of view and superb resolution will enable scientists to conduct sweeping cosmic surveys, yielding a wealth of information about celestial realms from our solar system to the edge of the observable universe.

On July 23rd, the Roman Space Telescope successfully completed the critical design review of the mission’s ground systems, which are spread over multiple institutions including the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland; NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; and Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California. STScI will host the Science Operations Center (SOC) while Goddard will provide the Mission Operations Center and Caltech/IPAC will house the Science Support Center. The passing of the critical design review means the plan for science operations provides all the necessary data processing and archiving capabilities. The mission will now proceed to the next phase: building and testing the newly designed systems that will enable planning and scheduling of Roman observations and managing the resulting data, anticipated to be over 20 petabytes (20,000,000 GB) within the first five years of operations.

“At STScI, we are really excited about the opportunities for discovery that Roman will bring. All areas of astrophysics will benefit,” said STScI deputy director Nancy Levenson. “We are developing novel tools and new ways of working so the global research community can make best use of the advanced capabilities of this survey-oriented, ‘big data’ space mission.”

“A lot of work is required to reach this stage in any space mission, and our team faced the added challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic. The successful completion of the critical design review is a testament to all of their efforts,” said Cristina Oliveira, SOC deputy head at STScI.

In its role as Science Operations Center, STScI will plan, schedule, and carry out observations, process and archive mission datasets, and engage and inform the astronomical community and the public. STScI will collaborate closely with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which manages the mission and will host the Mission Operations Center (MOC). The MOC is responsible for overall spacecraft operations and overseeing the data transmitted between the spacecraft and the ground. The collaboration also includes Caltech/IPAC, home of the Roman Science Support Center (SSC), which works with the other ground system elements to achieve the scientific and operational goals of Roman.  

The Science Support Center at Caltech/IPAC is tasked with issuing calls for Roman proposals to the general science community and managing the proposal process. It will also lead the Coronagraph Instrument observation planning and data products, and provide a data analysis environment for the instrument and community team. In addition, it is responsible for community outreach for both exoplanet science and science enabled by spectroscopic observations. The SSC is also developing and operating science data pipelines to process data from the Wide Field Instrument spectroscopic modes and for exoplanet microlensing science.

Goddard is developing the Wide Field Instrument to perform the major science surveys, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is developing the Coronagraph Instrument to perform exoplanet direct imaging observations.

Expanding Our View

Roman will be able to capture an area over 100 times larger than Hubble in a single snapshot. This will give it the unique ability to do wide-field surveys at space-based resolution, which will be the observatory’s primary operating mode.

“Unlike Hubble and Webb, Roman is a survey mission first and foremost,” explained acting SOC mission scientist John MacKenty of STScI. “Our role is to help gather input from the astronomical community, make those surveys ready for the community to do science, and give the community the tools they need to do their research.”

Roman’s surveys will generate mountains of data, creating new challenges for scientists seeking to analyze those data. As a result, STScI is spearheading the use of cloud-based computing for Roman data processing.

“Instead of sending the data to the astronomer, we’re bringing the astronomer to the data,” said SOC mission systems engineer Chris Hanley of STScI.

All of the data collected by the Roman Space Telescope will be accessible via the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) at STScI. Those data will be publicly available within days of the observations – a first for a NASA astrophysics flagship mission. Since scientists everywhere will have rapid access to the data, they will be able to quickly discover and follow up on short-lived phenomena, such as supernova explosions.

The Science of the Roman Space Telescope

Roman will enable new science in all areas of astrophysics. It can search for dwarf planets, comets, and asteroids in our solar system. It will image stars throughout our own galaxy to measure its structure and investigate its formation history. It will also survey the birthplaces of stars, giant nurseries of gas and dust which Roman’s large field of view will be able to fully image at high resolution for the first time.

By staring deeply at wide swaths of apparently blank sections of sky, Roman will image an unprecedented number of galaxies with high resolution. Roman will map the distribution of dark matter within large clusters of galaxies and discover thousands of galaxies at very high redshifts, which will provide the tools to study how galaxies change over cosmic time.

Roman’s surveys will deliver new insights into the history and structure of the universe, including the mysterious “dark energy” that is making space itself expand faster and faster. This powerful new observatory will also build on the broad foundation of work begun with Hubble and other observatories like Kepler/K2 and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) on planets outside our solar system. It will discover thousands of exoplanets using its wide-field camera. Its Coronagraph Instrument will conduct a technology demonstration and, depending on its performance, may provide studies of the atmospheres of giant gaseous planets orbiting other stars.

The Space Telescope Science Institute is expanding the frontiers of space astronomy by hosting the science operations center of the Hubble Space Telescope, the science and mission operations centers for the James Webb Space Telescope, and the science operations center for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. STScI also houses the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) which is a NASA-funded project to support and provide to the astronomical community a variety of astronomical data archives, and is the data repository for the Hubble, Webb, Roman, Kepler, K2, TESS missions, and more. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Melbourne, Florida; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.

{ https://scitechdaily.com/ }

13-08-2021 om 00:11 geschreven door peter  

Are You Ready for Benevolent Artificial Intelligence

Picture yourself driving on a narrow road in the near future when suddenly another car emerges from a bend ahead. It is a self-driving car with no passengers inside. Will you push forth and assert your right of way, or give way to let it pass? At present, most of us behave kindly in such situations involving other humans. Will we show that same kindness towards autonomous vehicles?

Using methods from behavioural game theory, an international team of researchers at LMU Munich and the University of London have conducted large-scale online studies to see whether people would behave as cooperatively with artificial intelligence (AI) systems as they do with fellow humans.

Cooperation holds a society together. It often requires us to compromise with others and to accept the risk that they let us down. Traffic is a good example. We lose a bit of time when we let other people pass in front of us and are outraged when others fail to reciprocate our kindness. Will we do the same with machines?

The study which is published in the journal iScience found that, upon first encounter, people have the same level of trust toward AI as for human: most expect to meet someone who is ready to cooperate.The difference comes afterwards. People are much less ready to reciprocate with AI, and instead exploit its benevolence to their own benefit. Going back to the traffic example, a human driver would give way to another human but not to a self-driving car.The study identifies this unwillingness to compromise with machines as a new challenge to the future of human-AI interactions.

Credit: Pixabay

“We put people in the shoes of someone who interacts with an artificial agent for the first time, as it could happen on the road,” explains Jurgis Karpus, Ph.D., a behavioural game theorist and a philosopher at LMU Munich and the first author of the study. “We modelled different types of social encounters and found a consistent pattern. People expected artificial agents to be as cooperative as fellow humans. However, they did not return their benevolence as much and exploited the AI more than humans.”

With perspectives from game theory, cognitive science, and philosophy, the researchers found that ‘algorithm exploitation’ is a robust phenomenon. They replicated their findings across nine experiments with nearly 2,000 human participants. Each experiment examines different kinds of social interactions and allows the human to decide whether to compromise and cooperate or act selfishly. Expectations of the other players were also measured. In a well-known game, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, people must trust that the other characters will not let them down. They embraced risk with humans and AI alike, but betrayed the trust of the AI much more often, to gain more money.

“Cooperation is sustained by a mutual bet: I trust you will be kind to me, and you trust I will be kind to you. The biggest worry in our field is that people will not trust machines. But we show that they do!” notes Dr. Bahador Bahrami, a social neuroscientist at the LMU, and one of the senior researchers in the study. “They are fine with letting the machine down, though, and that is the big difference. People even do not report much guilt when they do,” he adds.

Biased and unethical AI has made many headline — from the 2020 exams fiasco in the United Kingdom to justice systems — but this new research brings up a novel caution. The industry and legislators strive to ensure that artificial intelligence is benevolent. But benevolence may backfire. If people think that AI is programmed to be benevolent towards them, they will be less tempted to cooperate. Some of the accidents involving self-driving cars may already show real-life examples: drivers recognize an autonomous vehicle on the road, and expect it to give way. The self-driving vehicle meanwhile expects for normal compromises between drivers to hold.“

Algorithm exploitation has further consequences down the line. “If humans are reluctant to let a polite self-driving car join from a side road, should the self-driving car be less polite and more aggressive in order to be useful?” asks Jurgis Karpus.

“Benevolent and trustworthy AI is a buzzword that everyone is excited about. But fixing the AI is not the whole story. If we realize that the robot in front of us will be cooperative no matter what, we will use it to our selfish interest,” says Professor Ophelia Deroy, a philosopher and senior author on the study, who also works with Norway’s Peace Research Institute Oslo on the ethical implications of integrating autonomous robot soldiers along with human soldiers.

“Compromises are the oil that make society work. For each of us, it looks only like a small act of self-interest. For society as a whole, it could have much bigger repercussions. If no one lets autonomous cars join the traffic, they will create their own traffic jams on the side, and not make transport easier”.

Contacts and sources:

• Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Publication:

• Algorithm exploitation: humans are keen to exploit benevolent AI.
  Jurgis Karpus, Adrian Krüger, Julia Tovar Verba, Bahador Bahrami, Ophelia Deroy. iScience, 2021; 102679 DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.102679

Source: 

• https://www.ineffableisland.com/2021/06/are-you-ready-for-benevolent-artificial.html

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12-08-2021 om 23:59 geschreven door peter  

12 Mysterious Events That Left Scientists Scratching Their Heads

People are accustomed to routine events. However, something strange occurring anywhere in the world evokes interest across the globe. You might be familiar with certain mysteries. So, let us introduce you to a few mysterious events that are bound to pique your interest. From the true story of a young boy going into coma and waking up to speak a language completely foreign to him to actual rivers on fire, we got it all. Some would be terrified to know that a star in the galaxy disappeared suddenly for which astronomers could not find any reason. These jaw dropping events will make you feel like a very small and helpless part of a divine plan.

Here are the twelve most mind boggling, mysterious events that astonished everyone who found out about them.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/ }

12-08-2021 om 23:45 geschreven door peter  

August 10 612 BC: Nineveh, the Largest City in the World, Fell

On this day, 2,632 years ago, the ancient metropolis of Nineveh fell. “ ABC 3 ” is a historiographical text from ancient Babylonia which records August 10th 612 BC as the date of this dramatic occurrence. At that time, Nineveh was the largest city in the world and the capital of Assyria. This all came to an abrupt end when Nabopolassar, the Chaldean king of Babylonia and a central figure in the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, siezed Nineveh. This marked what historians know as one of the most shocking events in ancient history: The “First” Fall of Nineveh. The “second” Fall of Nineveh occurred in 2015 with more destruction by ISIS.

The Discovery of Nineveh: A Unparalleled Archaeological Find

Ancient Mesopotamia was a cradle of civilization in the northern part of western Asia’s Fertile Crescent, corresponding to modern Iraq, Kuwait, eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and areas along the Turkish–Syrian and Iran–Iraq borders. In 1839, Paul-Émile Botta of France excavated a series of mounds in the Iraqi desert that led to the incredible discovery of Nineveh, the vast ancient Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia located on the outskirts of modern-day Mosul in northern Iraq.

This discovery in mid-19th-century Europe was truly amazing, because it meant that at least one of the ancient cities and cultures mentioned in the Bible actually existed. This gave the Holy Bible a breath of newfound esteem at a time when scientists were demanding the empirical testing of supernatural claims, replacing time worn myths with logic and reason. The discovery of ancient Nineveh changed everything.

Ancient Nineveh: A Royal City Envied Far And Wide 

The Assyrian Empire started to become unstable after the death of King Aššurbanipal in 631 BC when the Babylonians ended their independence. Around 627 AD the Babylonian general Nabopolassar defeated the Assyrians in a battle near Babylon and became king, marking the beginning of the Babylonian Empire which lasted until Nineveh was captured by the Persian Cyrus the Great in October 539 AD.

Assyrian military campaign in southern Mesopotamia, 640-620 BC, from an alabaster bas-relief located in the South-West Palace at Nineveh.

(Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin / CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Although he had liberated Babylonia, Nabopolassar also wanted destroy its capital cities including the religious center at Aššur, the first Assyrian city, and the administrative center at Nineveh. To prevent this, which would have caused a major shift of power in the Near East, the Egyptians offered military support to Assyria. The Fall of Nineveh Chronicle says that on 25 July 616 AD Nabopolassar defeated an Assyrian force on the banks of the Euphrates to the south of Harran. However, soon after he retreated when an Egyptian army closed on his forces. By at the end of the following year, the Medes, a tribal federation living in modern Iran, seized the moment, amidst all the unrest, and had took control of Nineveh.

This image, taken in April 2017 during a UNESCO mission to Nineveh, which was heavily destroyed and excavated by ISIS in the "second" Fall of Nineveh in 2015.

(UNESCO / CC BY-SA 3.0 )

Nabopolassar tactfully signed a treaty with the Medes king Umakištar (Cyaxares). The Babylonian crown prince Nabû-kudurru-usur (Nebuchadnezzar) is said to have married Amytis, who many historians hold to have been the daughter of Cyaxares' son Astyages. The joint Medes-Babylonian army invaded Nineveh in May 612 AD the city finally fell in July. According to an article on Livius after the suicide of King Sin-šar-iškun, “the looting of Nineveh continued until 10 August, when the Medes finally went home,” and that the fall of Nineveh “shocked the ancient world.” From distant Greece, the poet Phocylides of Miletus reported of the destruction of this ancient city.

ISIS soldiers in the Museum of Mosul destroying ancient Nineveh artifacts with sledgehammers in 2015.

(Aljazeera / Screenshot)

2015: The “Second” Fall of Nineveh By ISIS Destruction

While Nineveh fell for the first time over 2500 years ago, destruction of the ancient city continued in 2015 when a priceless Assyrian winged bull was demolished at the Nineveh site. An article in The Guardian discussing the destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) described the destruction as a “war crime.” At the same time, the terrorist organization attempted to attract a sympathetic audience to gain new recruits in their homeland, while provoking reactions in the West.

• Tragedy as militants bomb 2,700-year-old Nineveh Wall in Iraq
• 3000-Year-Old Assyrian Reliefs Unearthed in ISIS Stomping Ground
• Three ancient cities to rival London, Paris and New York

A 2015 Aljazeera video shows the destruction of several 7th century artifacts from Nineveh on February 26 2015, when ISIS publicly destroyed the Mosul Museum. Many other artifacts were stolen and put up for sale in foreign markets. However in 2019, the BBC announced that since Iraqi troops recaptured Mosul in 2017, part of the Mosul Museum has been restored and reopened to exhibit contemporary art, while the rest of the museum remains closed “to protect what is left,” said the museum director. If the first Fall of Nineveh was incredible, the second fall of Nineveh was both tragic and disturbing.

• Top image: Assyrian soldiers carry beheaded heads of their prisoners as depicted on a wall in the South-West Palace at Nineveh, during the “First” Fall of Neneveh.         
• Source: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin / CC BY-SA 4.0

By Ashley Cowie

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

12-08-2021 om 23:34 geschreven door peter  

A July 30 report describes a “bright green flying object” that “flew into a cloud, then disappeared.”

By Daniel Otis

A CANADIAN MILITARY TRANSPORT PLANE REPORTED SEEING A UFO OVER THE GULF OF SAINT LAWRENCE ON JULY 30.

FILE PHOTO BY LARS HAGBERG/THE CANADIAN PRESS

On the night of July 30, a Canadian military and a KLM Royal Dutch Airlines flight reported a UFO over the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.

According to an aviation incident report posted on the night of Aug. 11, both flights “reported seeing a bright green flying object” that “flew into a cloud, then disappeared” in a stretch of open water between Quebec and Newfoundland. 

The KLM passenger flight (KLM618) was travelling from Boston to Amsterdam while the Canadian military transport aircraft (CFC4003) was flying between CFB Trenton, a base in Ontario, and Cologne, Germany. 

• The Canadian Military Has Been Encountering UFOs for Decades, Documents Show

DANIEL OTIS

06.01.21

Few other details were made available in the report, which appeared in CADORS, the Canadian government’s flight incident archive. In a previous story, VICE World News showed how this digital database contains dozens of UFO reports from airlines such as Air Canada, Porter, and WestJet. In a June investigation, VICE World News revealed how Canadian military personnel have been reporting UFOs for decades.

Whatever they are, these kinds of enigmatic objects and lights have caught the attention of the U.S. government, which has openly investigated UFOs for years and recently released a report on 143 U.S. military sightings, including objects that appeared to “maneuver abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion.” 

Canada, by contrast, appears far less interested. In a recent statement to VICE World News, a spokesperson from the Department of National Defence said, “We do not track reports or collect information about sightings” of UFOs.

The Canadian military plane was travelling to Europe as part of a mission to bring at-risk Afghan personnel to Canada. 

Data posted to Twitter by aviation and shipping researcher Steffan Watkins suggests the Canadian flight even changed course and altitude at the time of the sighting, which might actually have occurred on July 31. 

KLM airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the July 30 UFO report in CADORS.

In a statement to VICE World News, a Canadian military spokesperson said Canada’s air force has “no intent or need to investigate this further.”

“In this particular incident, there is nothing to indicate that what the crew saw posed any kind of safety risk to the aircraft,” they added. “We believe that they saw something—they would not have filed a report otherwise.”

A spokesperson from Nav Canada, the private company that operates Canada’s air traffic control system and whose employees would have received the initial reports, told VICE World News that “there is no additional Nav Canada information available for these events.”

In all statements relating to its aviation reporting system, Transport Canada cautions the “reports contain preliminary, unconfirmed data, which can be subject to change.”

• Follow Daniel Otis on Twitter.

{ https://www.vice.com/en }

12-08-2021 om 22:58 geschreven door peter  

Suspected UFO Sighting by Civilian, Military Aircraft Reported on Canadian Government Website

by Andrei Dergalin

{ https://sputniknews.com/ }

12-08-2021 om 22:48 geschreven door peter  

Nieuwe berekening van NASA: asteroïde Bennu in 2182 het gevaarlijkst

De aardappelvorminge ruimterots Bennu vormt op 24 september 2182 een mogelijke bedreiging voor de aarde. Het kan zijn dat de asteroïde dan op onze planeet botst. De waarschijnlijkheid is ongeveer 1 op 2700 (0,037 procent). In het algemeen geldt voor de periode tot 2300 een mogelijkheid van 1 op 1750 (0,057 procent).

  Bron: ANP, de Volkskrant

Hoewel de kans dat Bennu de aarde raakt erg klein is, blijft het een van de twee gevaarlijkste bekende asteroïden in ons zonnestelsel, samen met een andere, genaamd 1950 DA, aldus de Amerikaanse ruimtevaartorganisatie NASA. NASA-onderzoekers gebruikten bij hun berekeningen gegevens van de ruimtesonde OSIRIS-REx.

Lees ook

• 

  PREMIUM

  Nasa-sonde Osiris-Rex verliest deeltjes van planetoïde in de ruimte

De kans op een botsing doet zich pas ná 2135 voor, wanneer de planetoïde zeer dicht langs de aarde raast. De zwaartekracht van de aarde past Bennu’s baan dan zodanig aan dat een botsing bij een volgende passage mogelijk wordt.

De kans dat de ruimterots tussen 2135 en 2300 inslaat bleek na de nieuwe analyse zo’n 1 op 1.750. In september 2182 is dus de kans op botsing het grootst.

Aardappelvormige rots

De Amerikaanse ruimtesonde OSIRIS-REx heeft de afgelopen jaren onderzoek gedaan bij Bennu. Dat is een aardappelvormige rots van ongeveer een halve kilometer doorsnee. Hij draait in een baan rond de zon, momenteel op 306 miljoen kilometer afstand van de aarde. De asteroïde kan wetenschappers iets vertellen over het ontstaan van ons zonnestelsel en over het ontstaan van leven op aarde.

De metingen van OSIRIS-REx helpen de bewegingen van de mogelijk gevaarlijke asteroïde de komende eeuwen beter te begrijpen, aldus NASA. Het vermindert de onzekerheden over de toekomstige baan aanzienlijk. Ook verbetert het het vermogen van wetenschappers om de waarschijnlijkheid van een inslag te bepalen en banen van andere asteroïden te voorspellen.

NASA deelt "belangrijke ontdekking" bij asteroïde Bennu

Een van de doelen van NASA is het vinden en in de gaten houden van asteroïden en kometen die in de buurt van de aarde kunnen komen en gevaarlijk kunnen zijn voor onze planeet. “De OSIRIS-REx-missie bood een buitengewone kans om deze modellen te verfijnen en te testen, waardoor we beter kunnen voorspellen waar Bennu zal zijn wanneer hij over ruim een eeuw dicht bij de aarde komt”, aldus de de organisatie.

De missie van de OSIRIS-REx kost 1 miljard euro. In 2016 werd de sonde gelanceerd en in 2018 kwam hij in een baan rond Bennu. Vanuit alle hoeken werd de rots gemeten en gefotografeerd. Die gegevens werden naar de aarde gestuurd om te bestuderen.

Een ander onderdeel van het onderzoek volgt nog. In oktober vorig jaar daalde de OSIRIS-REx af naar het oppervlak van Bennu om daar ongeveer 60 gram steentjes en stof op te zuigen. Die zijn verzameld in een bakje aan boord van de sonde. Een paar maanden geleden begon de OSIRIS-REx aan de miljoenen kilometers lange terugreis naar de aarde. Het is de bedoeling dat hij in september 2023 op aarde landt, waarna wetenschappers het opgehaalde gruis onder de microscoop kunnen leggen.

GERELATEERDE VIDEO'S, uitgekozen en gepost door peter2011

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12-08-2021 om 22:36 geschreven door peter  

The UFO Phenomenon | Full Documentary

It is now beyond doubt that strange, anomalous objects filling our skies and caught on camera are the real deal. Even the Pentagon admits it’s true. These seemingly intelligently controlled craft are operating above the clouds, in our oceans and in our orbit – travelling at hypersonic speeds far beyond any known human technology and completing manoeuvres unknown to science. The subject of conspiracy and derision for years, UFOs are now the hottest topic in Washington and the world. Five-time Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist Ross Coulthart – who has been investigating the phenomena for the past two years – led the 7NEWS Spotlight team across the US, amassing never-before-seen compelling evidence and speaking to the key players behind an event that will change the course of history.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

12-08-2021 om 17:52 geschreven door peter  

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - MUFON CASES - - 12 - 8 - 2021

MUFON CASE : 117235 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ( August 11, 2021 )

Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : strange object closeup
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117235

Witnessed by 4 audio removed b/c of yelling & cussing words It is not a balloon or drone

Date Submitted : 2021-08-11
Date of Event : 2021-08-11
MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : blackobject.mp4

VIDEO 2 : MUFON CASE : 117231 Palos Heights, Illinois
Glowing UFO Spotted in Illinois
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117231

I was outside and I was sitting there on a chair in the middle of our yard, I look up to my right and see a normal plane flying at regular distance from the ground heading to midway airport like they usually do. I then look out far east and in the atmosphere I see this cylindrical glowing object, it did NOT look like a normal plan and was flying on a steady path at a normal not fast or slow speed, but was FAR OUT in the atmosphere. This video was cropped so I don't disclose personal information about where I live. However, this video is completely untampered with and I have the time and date stamp mark on the original video I recorded to prove it. This was recorded from an I-phone 11 Pro, the footage I am going to show you is a slowed down recording I made frame by frame from the original video I took.

Date Submitted : 2021-08-11
Date of Event : 2021-08-08
MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : evidence.mp4

VIDEO 3 : MUFON CASE : 117236 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
creature security cam footage
Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117236

A ufo was sighted around the neighbourhood last night.

Date Submitted : 2021-08-11
Date of Event : 2021-08-11
MUFON SUBMITTER FILE : Aug112021.mp4

RELATED VIDEO

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

12-08-2021 om 17:35 geschreven door peter  

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - MUFON CASES - - 11- 8 - 2021

MUFON CASE : 117221 Brooklyn, New York ( August 10, 2021 )

Mutual UFO Network : MUFON SUBMISSIONS : Giant blue ufo ejecting ufos : Long Description of Sighting Report - Case 117221 : Recorded from cellphone which turned off for no reason

Date Submitted : 2021-08-10
Date of Event : 2021-08-09

• note : file has been looped 

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

12-08-2021 om 17:34 geschreven door peter  

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 12 - 08 - 2021

UFO Sighted Releasing Probes Over Mooca, São Paulo, Brazil ( August 8, 2021 )

Extraordinary sighting of another UFOs releasing probes in the Mooca neighborhood, São Paulo, Brazil on August 8, 2021

Here I present the originals and an approximate analysis.

Closer and more evident every day

• credit : Diego Santos

UFO Ejects Craft Over Japan ( August 10, 2021 )

Video of a Bright Unidentified Object or UFO Ejecting a smaller object or UFO from itself. Filmed In Japan on August 10, 2021.

Here i present the original : Closer every day

• credit : Yuki Serpo
• note : no audio

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

12-08-2021 om 17:12 geschreven door peter  

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 11 - 08 - 2021

Flashing UFO Sighted Over Colombia ( August 9, 2021 )

Intense extream flashing UFO was sighted over the skies of Colombia on August 9, 2021 : UFO has intense extream flashing light

what is this mysterious bright flashing light above Colombia.

They are everywhere

• credit : U.S.F

Transparent UFO Sighted Over Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Japan ( August 10, 2021 )

Transparent Cloaked UFO was sighted over Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Airport, Japan : 富士山静岡空港 on August 10, 2021 : What is this mysterious transparent spherical UFO / UAP/ ORB doing over Mt. Fuji Shizuoka Airport : Here i present the original

Closer every day and more evident

• credit : アルマ・ウリベ

What Is Above Us?(UFO SIGHTINGS)

Several unexplained sightings. Come and join in on the discussions?
All Lunar and Planetarium videos made by Terry's Theories.
Source of first video MUFON case # 117112
Source of second video MUFON case # 117024

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

12-08-2021 om 17:08 geschreven door peter  

N.S. expert says American UFO report could be about something else entirely

Recent examples could be governments experimenting with hypersonics, says Paul Kimball

Carsten Knox · CBC News 

In this 2015 video declassified by the U.S. Department of Defence, U.S. navy pilots track an unidentified flying object off the coast of Jacksonville, Fla. 0:35

"The U.S. navy has come out and said, 'Yes, these are real videos. Our guys took them and we're not exactly sure what they represent,'" said Kimball. "And that's kind of it. You know, I hate to be the skunk at the garden party, but at the moment that's as far as it goes. Then there's the UFO media machine, as I like to call it, that latches on to that and drums up interest in the subject and says, 'Well, OK, space aliens.' And it's a very long leap to get from these videos to space aliens.

"We have some anomalies. We can't necessarily explain them. No evidence to say that they're space aliens, but no evidence to say that they're not, you know, so leaving the door open."

As far as what else the U.S. government might be up to with the release of this current report, Kimball tells a story his close friend, Karl T. Pflock, told him.

The late Pflock was deputy assistant secretary of defence in the Ronald Reagan administration, a strategic planner, a CIA officer, UFO researcher, and author of Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. 

"Karl actually believed that space aliens had visited Earth," said Kimball. "So we weren't talking about somebody who said there were never any space aliens. But, he said, 'Look, most of these cases can be explained by testing advanced weapon systems. The government is working on technology that is 10 or 15 years in advance of what they'll admit to.' 

"You're sort of seeing in many of these cases, like the Belgian triangle flap that occurred in the 1980s, that was probably delta-wing aircraft being tested by the United States military. Well, you would mistake that potentially for a UFO."

Kimball suggests governments have been experimenting with hypersonics, the kind of technology that, theoretically, could be what these navy pilots may be seeing but not actually know anything about. If it represents tech being developed by the United States, these videos are a way to let America's enemies know what's coming soon without being overt about it. But if it's the tech of another superpower, that would be a problem. 

"That would be very concerning from a national security point of view, which is, I think, why members of Congress are really interested in it," said Kimball. 

For the record, Canada's Department of National Defence doesn't have a dog in this fight. Spokesperson Jessica Lamirande sent a statement to CBC News on the subject of the American report. 

"The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) do not typically investigate sightings of unknown or unexplained phenomena outside the context of investigating credible threats, potential threats, or potential distress in the case of search and rescue," the statement said.

"Although we collaborate closely with the U.S. for aerospace control, we are not aware of any Canadian nexus or participation in the U.S. Department of Defence's UFO studies at this time, nor does the CAF have a unit dedicated to investigating UFOs." 

Kimball remains an agnostic about extraterrestrial visitors to Earth, but he also thinks the subject is worth serious consideration. 

"I'm very open to the idea of the paranormal or the supernatural or things beyond our understanding, however you want to frame it," he said.

"The odds are there are extraterrestrials in our galaxy. So could they be coming here? Yeah. Have I seen anything yet that absolutely convinces me that they have been coming here? No. But I've seen enough to make me think this isn't a subject that you should laugh at." 

{ https://www.cbc.ca/ }

11-08-2021 om 22:43 geschreven door peter  

On August 8, 2021 a drone owner in the city of Vera Cruz, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil captured a high speed object at the moment the object passes close to the drone in straight path.

The drone owner wonders whether the object was a small airplane, another drone, a bird or eventually something else. 

After analyzing the object with other similar objects moving through the sky at very high speed, it looks like it is a so-called UFO "fastwalker".

 “Fastwalker” is a term used by NORAD and branches of armed forces to describe unidentified aerial phenomena moving and/or changing directions at high speed far beyond what current aerospace technology is capable of.

  

{https://ufosightingshotspot.blogspot.com/ }

11-08-2021 om 21:56 geschreven door peter  

UFO deploying two small objects over São Paulo, Brazil 8-Aug-2021

This video was filmed in the Mooca District in São Paulo, Brazil on August 8th 2021. It shows a bright UFO deploying two small objects.

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

11-08-2021 om 21:35 geschreven door peter  

UFO report ‘vindication’ for man who tracked 1994 sightings on radar

It was the night of March 8, 1994. Working at the National Weather Service, Bushong’s radar was lighting up with stuff he’d never seen before.

{ https://www.latest-ufo-sightings.net/ }

11-08-2021 om 18:27 geschreven door peter  

LATEST UFO SIGHTINGS AND VIDEOS - 10 - 08 - 2021

UFO Sighted Over Middleburgh, New York ( August 8, 2021 )

Impressive UFO was sighted over the skies of Middleburgh, Schoharie County, New York on August 8, 2021

STATEMENT : UFOs in our airspace.

They are everywhere

• credit : A Esemplare 

New Crop Circle, Kitt's Lane, Nr West Meon, Hampshire.( August 8, 2021 )

This Stunning crop circle was discovered on August 8, 2021 North West of Meon in Hampshire, England . Crop circle show a unique six pointed star design aligning with what seekers call the 'Lion's Gate 8/8.'

• credit : Stonehenge Dronescapes

RELATED VIDEO

What's Happening? Glitch in the Matrix ? ( August 8, 2021 )

What's happening? Glitch in the matrix ? August 8, 2021 : What if we are living in a simulation, and the world as we know it.
This is the simulation theory -- the idea that our entire universe could be running inside of some sort of extra-dimensional computer ..

STATEMENT : What's happening?!?! Glitch in the matrix.....?

Is this a glitch in the matrix an account for a missing period of time or a lapse in the space-time continium.

• credit : .W Wijk

UFO Sighted Over Spain ( August 8, 2021 )

UFO Mothership or Portal Entrance ? This was sighted over Spain on August 8, 2021

STATEMENT : Strange cloud appears in Spain, what is it?

ORIGINAL : Aparece una nube extraña en España, ¿qué es esto? Closer every day

• credit : H Motti

RELATED VIDEOS

Huge UFO Sighted Over Mexico City ( August 8, 2021 )

A Huge UFO was sighted over a Mexican Federal Highway in Mexico City 

STATEMENT : They send me this video in private message of a UFO sighting in Mexico City
ORIGINAL : Me mandan, este video por privado, de un avistamiento O.V.N.I en Ciudad de Mexico

• credit : U.S.F

UFO Filmed Deploying Two Objects & Fast-walker UFO Filmed By Drone Over Brazil. August 8, 2021

Guys, thanks for all the kind words and support. It meant alot to me....

Clip one was filmed on the 8th of August 2021 from the Mooca District of São Paulo, Brazil. In the clip we can see this brightly lit object fly over the sky of Mooca, the quick thinking witness pulled over his car and managed to filmed the UFO moments before it deployed two smaller objects. The Main craft seem to be Plasma in origin, as it doesn't seem solid.
Thanks to Diego Santos for allowing me the use of his footage and to view the original: https://youtu.be/K5A1b2ar-nk

Second clip was also filmed on the 8th of August 2021 from Vera Cruz in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The Fast-walker was filmed by the camera on-board this drone. The object passes close to drone in straight path but what could this object be???
Thanks to Fabricio Bullerjahn for allowing me the use of his footage and to view the original: https://youtu.be/_v20x74tBOs

{ https://www.youtube.com/ }

11-08-2021 om 01:12 geschreven door peter  

Anunnaki Revealed: Who Were These Beings of Ancient Astronaut Theory? – Part I

The modern era has witnessed an incredible surge in the popularity of all forms of media concerning the mythology of the ancient Mesopotamians. Fueling this ever-growing trend are the writings of a number of researchers who propose connections between several Sumerian myth cycles and the theory that the human race was engineered or created by a group of extraterrestrial beings. Known as Ancient Astronaut Theory , this field is largely reliant upon the translations of cuneiform tablets supposedly made by Zecharia Sitchin, whose series of Earth Chronicles books form the foundation upon which the modern church of the alien gods has been built.

Central to Sitchin’s narrative is a group of mythic beings known as the Anunnaki, whom he claimed crossed their own DNA with that of Homo erectus in order to create mankind—for the purpose of using humans as slaves to mine gold and other minerals. Today these Anunnaki are often portrayed as the equivalent of the Old Testament creator God.

Anunnaki created mankind?

( Public Domain )

But what does the cuneiform corpus actually say about the Anunnaki and other mythic beings? How does the version of these beings and their activities presented in Ancient Astronaut media compare with how they were truly represented in the ancient world?

• Ancient Mesopotamia and the Rise of Civilization
• Ancient Angels: Heavenly Messengers or Myths? The Origins of Cherubim – Part I
• The Disc of Life in Ancient Texts

Princely Blood

To begin with, Anunnaki translates to “princely blood” or “seed of Anu”, not “those who came down” or “those who came from heaven to earth”, as many modern sources have claimed. The Anunnaki are “the Sumerian deities of the old primordial time;” a pantheon of gods who were the children of the sky god Anu and his sister, Ki. Significantly, some scholars have come to realize that the Anunnaki should more appropriately be considered demi-gods or semi-divine beings. Apparently, Anu’s sister Ki was not originally considered a deity and was only ascribed the status of a goddess much later in the history of the myth cycle.

Akkadian cylinder seal dating to circa 2300 BC depicting the deities Inanna, Utu, and Enki, three members of the Anunnaki.

( Public Domain )

As explained by William Klauser:

“Some authorities question whether Ki was regarded as a deity since there is no evidence of a cult and the name appears only in a limited number of Sumerian creation texts. Samuel Noah Kramer identifies Ki with the Sumerian mother goddess Ninhursag and claims that they were originally the same figure. She later developed into the Babylonian and Akkadian goddess Antu, consort of the god Anu (from Sumerian An).”

Essentially, this would mean that the Anunnaki were born of a union between a sky god and a mortal female, who was later deified in mythic traditions.

Four copper-alloy statuettes dating to c. 2130 BC, depicting four ancient Mesopotamian gods, wearing characteristic horned crowns.

(Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin/ CC BY-SA 3.0 )

From Dust to Dust

Furthermore, “Ki” is the Sumerian sign for “earth”, and Anu’s consort is sometimes considered the personification of the earth itself. This is similar to Biblical tradition, where mortals were created out of the dust of the earth (Genesis 2:7). The concept of a group of half-divine beings born of mortal women is very similar to the Biblical and extra-Biblical tradition of the Nephilim.

One of the most heavily referenced ancient texts which describes the Nephilim is the Extra-Biblical Book of 1 Enoch attributed to the patriarch Enoch, son of Jared and father of Methuselah. 1 Enoch is considered an apocryphal text today, and is rejected by most mainstream theological establishments, but this was not always the case. Many of the early Church Fathers, such as Athenagoras, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, and Tertullian accepted the book as scripture, and fragments of 10 copies of 1 Enoch in Aramaic have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. 1 Enoch is also quoted in the Biblical Book of Jude , and it has been estimated that there are as many as several hundred more references throughout the New Testament itself.

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

11-08-2021 om 00:34 geschreven door peter  

Anunnaki Revealed: Finding the Nephilim in Myth, Giants Among Men– Part II

• READ PART I

Central to Ancient Astronaut Theory and author Zecharia Sitchin’s narrative, is a group of mythic beings known as the Anunnaki, whom he claimed crossed their own DNA with that of Homo erectus in order to create mankind—for the purpose of using humans as slaves to mine gold and other minerals. Today these Anunnaki are often portrayed as the equivalent of the Old Testament creator God.

But what does the cuneiform corpus actually say about the Anunnaki and other mythic beings? How does the version of these beings and their activities presented in Ancient Astronaut media compare with how they were truly represented in the ancient world?

Babylonian representation of the national god Marduk, who was envisioned as a prominent member of the Anunnaki

( Public Domain )

[Don’t Miss Part 1 Here]

Mount Hermon is located at the southern end of the Anti-Lebanon mountain range, straddling the borders of Syria and Lebanon. Hermon’s highest peak reaches 9,232 feet (2814 meters). Gilgamesh was renowned in the ancient world for obtaining knowledge from the pre-flood (or “antediluvian”) world, as stated by the Ugarit Epic of Gilgamesh (lines 5-9):

“He explored everywhere the seats of power, he knew the totality of wisdom about all things. He who traveled the distant road to Utter-napisti, who crossed the ocean, the wide sea, as far as the sunrise: he brought back tidings from the antediluvian age.”

These passages bring us full circle with Lipinski’s interpretation of the Old Babylonian version of the Gilgamesh epic, where the ancient king journeyed to Mount Hermon—abode of the Anunnaki.

• The Mythical Dilmun and The Island of the Dead
• Ancient Angels: Heavenly Messengers or Myths? The Origins of Cherubim – Part I
• The Ascension of Gilgamesh: Did the Epic Hero Actually Exist?

Gilgamesh, the Giant

The concept of ancient knowledge from the pre-flood world is actually inherent in many Eastern traditions. For example, there is a similar story in the apocryphal Book of Jubilees about Kainam, a son of the Biblical Arphaxad:

“And the son grew, and his father taught him writing, and he went to seek for himself a place where he might seize for himself a city. And he found a writing which former generations had carved on the rock, and he read what was thereon, and he transcribed it and sinned owing to it; for it contained the teaching of the Watchers in accordance with which they used to observe the omens of the sun and moon and stars in all the signs of heaven. And he wrote it down and said nothing regarding it; for he was afraid to speak to Noah about it lest he should be angry with him on account of it.” (Jubilees 8:1-5)

Interestingly, there are several ancient sources, which suggest that Gilgamesh himself was a half-god or semi-divine being of gigantic stature. According to the Sumerian Kings List, Gilgamesh was the 5th king of Uruk, who reigned sometime between 2800 and 2600 BC. While there are traditions considering the father of Gilgamesh to be king Lugalbanda, the Sumerian Kings List states that his true father was a “lillu-spirit, a high priest of Kulaba”, and he is described in the epic as “two-thirds god”.

Gilgamesh Statue

(Gwil5083/ CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Gilgamesh is believed to have attained victory over the kings of Kish, centralizing Uruk’s power, and tradition has him expanding the city of Uruk, including its temple precinct and walls. In several fragments of a twelfth-century-BC copy of the Gilgamesh Epic discovered at ancient Ugarit, Gilgamesh is described as “Surpassing all (other) kings (!), renowned for bodily stature” (line 16) and again as “Gilgames, renowned for bodily stature, hero born in Uruk, butting wild bull!” (lines 18-19). Lines 34-36 of the Ugarit Gilgamesh offer specific details on Gilgamesh’s size: “Eleven cubits was his height, four cubits the width of his chest. A triple cubit was his foot and a reed-length his legs”. According to these measurements, Gilgamesh would have stood between 16 and 18 feet tall (4.8 to 5.4 meters tall). In connection to Gilgamesh being a giant, the fragmentary Book of Giants from the Dead Sea Scrolls names several Nephilim giants as Ohya, Mahway, Hahya, and Gilgamesh.

Gilgamesh, the king-hero from the city of Uruk, battling the 'bull of heavens'

(0045269/ CC BY-SA 4.0 )

Giants Reigning on Mount Hermon

Returning to the subject of Mount Hermon, Gilgamesh is not the only ancient giant directly associated with this prominent locale. Several Old Testament books ( The Book of Numbers , Deuteronomy, and The Book of Joshua ) record the battle of Moses and the Israelites against Og, an Amorite king of Bashan. In Deuteronomy 3:11 (KJV), Og is described as “of the remnant of giants”, and his bed (or sarcophagus) is measured as nine cubits long and four cubits wide, meaning that Og himself may have been 12 or 13 feet in height (approx. four meters tall).

In Joshua 4:5 (KJV), it is revealed that Og “reigned in mount Hermon, and in Seclah, and in all Bashan”, a region which would include the slopes of Mount Hermon and the Golan Heights.

Entities of the Underworld

Still another factor connecting the Anunnaki with the story of the Watchers and their offspring is their status as underworld beings. In Mesopotamian cycles, the Anunnaki are frequently depicted as “fates” or judges of the dead who occupy the subterranean realm or function as “spirits of the earth”. In tablets discovered at Nippur from around 2000 BC, the Anunnaki are “the seven judges”, underworld entities that accompany Ereshkigal, queen of the subterranean realm. When Ishtar descends and is brought before the assembly, they fasten their “eyes of death” upon her, causing her to perish.

An early nineteenth-century drawing of a statuette of Hecate, with whom Ereshkigal was syncretized.

( Public Domain )

Cast Down into Hell

The mountain abode of the Canaanite god, El is also frequently associated with secret or hidden natural springs and underground rivers. Lipinski associates these connotations with the sources of the Jordan River, one of which is the spring of Banias, originating at the foot of Mount Hermon. He furthermore elaborates that the mountain was considered in ancient times to cover “one of the outlets of the Deep or Ocean from which came the waters of the Flood…an eruption of the subterranean ocean on which the earth was believed to rest.”

In 1 Enoch, God commands the archangel Michael to “Go, bind Semjaza and his associates who have united themselves with women…bind them fast for seventy generations in valleys of the earth…”(1 Enoch 10:11-12), while Raphael is commanded, “Bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: make an opening in the desert, which is in Dudael, and cast him therein.”(1 Enoch 10:4)

Ancient Hittite relief carving from Yazılıkaya, a sanctuary at Hattusa, depicting twelve gods of the underworld, whom the Hittites identified as the Mesopotamian Anunnaki.

(Klaus-Peter Simon/ CC BY 3.0 )

There are also references to the fate of the Watchers in New Testament books, including Second Peter , which states, “…God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness…” (2nd Peter, 2:4, KJV). The word translated as “hell” in this verse is actually the Greek Tartarus, referencing the deepest underworld of Greek mythology—the prison of the Titans.

Not only were the Titans giants, but like the Anunnaki, they were the offspring of an earth goddess (Gaia) and a sky deity (Uranus). Some scholars consider it likely that the Greek mythos was largely based on the older Eastern Mythologies. The same concept is repeated again in the Book of Jude, verse 6, which mentions, “the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness”.

One of the giant Titans, Atlas, who was punished to bear the heavens on his shoulders for all time.

( Public Domain )

The True Identity of the Anunnaki

It is widely known that the archetypal myth cycles of the Mesopotamian and Near Eastern traditions share a common origin, and that the subjects of these cycles also appear in the Biblical, extra-Biblical, and even Quranic texts. The purpose of this article is to identify the specific mythic concept behind the Anunnaki in the ancient world.

• Are The Nephilim Really The Offspring Of Sons of God And The Daughters Of Man?
• The Nurturing Goddess Ninsun: Worshipped by Ancient Mesopotamians and the Mother of Gilgamesh
• Legends of Mount Shasta: “The Abode of the Devil” Part I – The Legend of J.C. Brown

Contrary to much of the popular literature and other media of today, the evidence recorded by the academic research of scholars and a comparative study of the actual cuneiform and other ancient texts indicates that the true identity of the Anunnaki is to be found in the Eastern tradition of a group of half-gods, spawned by cross-breeding between divine beings and mortal females at Mount Hermon in the Anti-Lebanon mountain range. These beings are often associated with knowledge from the world before a great deluge and were later assigned roles in the underworld. This would suggest that rather than making the Anunnaki the equivalent of the “Elohim” who created man in the Book of Genesis; they should more properly be compared to the Nephilim and the fallen angels described in Genesis Chapter 6, 1 Enoch, and other extra-biblical texts.

Jason Jarrell and Sarah Farmer  are investigative historians and avocational archaeologists. They study many subjects including depth psychology, Biblical mysteries, political science, and comparative mythology.  They’re also authors of Ages of the Giants: A Cultural History of the Tall Ones in Prehistoric America (2017). Learn more at their website:  ParadigmCollision.com

• Top Image: Ordered universe and cuneiform (Public Domain) and statue of Gilgamesh. ( CC BY 2.0 );Deriv.

By Jason Jarrell and Sarah Farmer

{ https://www.ancient-origins.net/ }

11-08-2021 om 00:30 geschreven door peter  

ANCIENT ALIENS: THE MILLENNIA-LONG HISTORY OF OBSESSING ABOUT EXTRATERRESTRIALS

The idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings has been part of our thought for as long as we have been looking skyward.

TO FEEL SMALL, all we have to do is look up.

The Sun, the Moon, the stars, the planets, and the Milky Way are evidence enough that Earth is not all that is.

And for as long as humans have had words, we have been sharing stories about the presumed builders and occupiers of those vaulted heavens: the gods, spirits, angels, and demons who were, in a sense, the first extraterrestrials.

According to a Cherokee story, for example, the Milky Way is a great web spun across the sky by Grandmother Spider, who used it to reach the other side of the world and bring back the sun.

In one grisly Aztec myth, the war god Huitzilopochtli sprang from his mother Coatlicue’s womb fully grown and fully armored. He beheaded his sister, Coyolxauhqui, who had been plotting to kill Coatlicue, and cast her head into the sky, creating the Moon.

Materialist interpretations of the cosmos eventually began to take the place of mythological ones. But the idea that there might be other beings in the sky has stayed with us, and it found its first proto-scientific roots in Greece in the sixth century BCE.

Anaximander, a philosopher who lived in Miletus in modern-day Turkey, contributed one key idea. He was the first to propose that Earth is a body floating in an infinite void, held up by nothing. For someone who lived 2,200 years before Isaac Newton, this was a stunning insight. The philosopher Karl Popper called it “one of the boldest, most revolutionary, and most portentous ideas in the whole history of human thought.”

Anaximander also thought Earth was a cylinder with the continents arrayed on one flat end, so he wasn’t right about everything. But he did invent the idea of space, a place with no absolute up or down.

And just as important, Anaximander’s system was the first to leave open the possibility that there are other worlds like ours. (Though, to be clear, he may not have believed that these worlds existed elsewhere in space. He may have thought they preceded or would succeed Earth in time or perhaps coexisted in some parallel universe.)

Anaximander’s successors were more definite about the idea that came to be known as “the plurality of worlds” and more willing to explore its implications.

In the fifth century BCE, the Thracian philosopher Leucippus and his pupil Democritus invented atomism: the belief that the visible universe consists of tiny, indivisible, indestructible atoms, churning in the void without purpose or cause.

In this picture, worlds aren’t divinely created; they simply form when enough atoms collide and stick together. Democritus thought that there was an infinite supply of atoms, so he reasoned that there must be an infinite number of worlds. His pupil Metrodorus of Chios put it this way: “It seems absurd, that in a large field only one stalk should grow, and that in an infinite space only one world exists.”

And then there’s Epicurus. He lived about a century after Democritus and is most notorious for his philosophy that pleasure — best obtained through modest, self-sufficient living — is the greatest good.

But Epicurus read Democritus and thoroughly absorbed his empiricist, atomist worldview, including the idea that there must be many worlds. “There is an unlimited number of cosmoi [worlds], and some are similar to this one and some are dissimilar,” Epicurus wrote in a letter to the historian Herodotus.

Epicurus’s ideas are important not just because they were prescient but because they became a long-lasting irritant for future philosophers and theologians. Unfortunately, most of his writings are lost. What we know about his thought comes mainly from De rerum natura, or On the Nature of Things, a book-length poem by his Roman disciple Lucretius.

You can think of this book, written around 50 BCE, as the first volume of popular science. Here’s what Lucretius said about the Epicurean view of other worlds:

If store of seeds there is

So great that not whole life-times of the living

Can count the tale …

And if their force and nature abide the same,

Able to throw the seeds of things together

Into their places, even as here are thrown

The seeds together in this world of ours,

’Tmust be confessed in other realms there are

Still other worlds, still other breeds of men,

And other generations of the wild.

The passage is a milestone in discussions of extraterrestrials. It goes beyond the basic idea that infinity must contain many worlds to offer what is probably the first straightforward assertion in Western literature that aliens must exist. The first and sadly the last for a very long time.

The truth is that the mechanistic, nonsupernatural picture of the world offered by Anaximander, Democritus, and Epicurus was radical for its day. It failed to gain a large following in ancient Greece.

In Athens in 450 BCE, the philosopher Anaxagoras posited that the sun is a fiery rock and that the Moon is an Earthlike body that glows in the sun’s reflected light. He was promptly arrested on charges of impiety and sentenced to death. After his friend and former pupil Pericles came to his defense, he was released but banished.

Both Plato (428–348 BCE) and Aristotle (384–322 BCE) lambasted Democritus’s idea of a plurality of worlds on theological grounds. Plato, a monotheist, argued that there is only one creator and that therefore there can be only one world, “if the created copy is to accord with the original.”

Aristotle similarly thought that a plurality of worlds would require a plurality of Prime Movers to keep them in motion — a plainly heretical idea. The idea of infinite worlds also conflicted with his view of physics, in which the five basic elements — earth, air, fire, water, and divine aether — tend to move up or down toward their “natural places” at the center or the edges of the universe.

Because things made of earth always sink to the center, Aristotle believed, Earth must be the only world, and there can be no solid bodies in the heavens.

Though Aristotle was a pagan, his anthropocentric picture of the universe was a gift to early Christian theologians. The Book of Genesis, which says God purposefully created the heavens and the earth, left no room for other worlds or other sentient beings (unless you count angels and demons).

The New Testament then introduced the idea that God was incarnated as Christ to rescue the faithful from sin and damnation — a flattering story implying that humans are uniquely worthy of Christ’s sacrifice. As the scientist and Christian apologist William Whewell would later put it, the Incarnation made Earth into “the Stage of the Great Drama of God’s Mercy and Man’s Salvation.”

By contrast, Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius offered a picture of a purely mechanical universe where everything arises from the purposeless collisions of atoms and where humans might be just one of an infinite number of intelligent races. “Small wonder the early Christians tossed the Epicurean package, extraterrestrials and all, into the abyss of doctrinal errors,” writes the Catholic ethicist Benjamin Wiker.

As Christianity swept across the decaying Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries CE, the Church Fathers ridiculed and suppressed the Epicureans and their ideas and allowed their writings to burn or crumble. Atomism, the pursuit of pleasure, the plurality-of-worlds idea — all of it slipped into darkness, where, as Wiker observes, “it stayed for nearly a thousand years.”

KEPLER, COPERNICUS, GIORDANO BRUNO, AND MANY WORLDS

Somehow, though, Lucretius’s poem On the Nature of Things managed to cross the abyss into the 15^th century.

The Swerve, a delightful book about “how the world became modern” by the Harvard literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt, tells the story of the Florentine book collector Poggio Bracciolini, who recovered a copy of the poem in the library of a monastery in southern Germany in 1417.

Within 60 years, hundreds of manuscripts and print editions were in circulation, reigniting interest in Epicureanism. Greenblatt argues that the poem’s atheistic and materialist ideas helped usher in Renaissance humanism — an inquisitive philosophy that, despite its name, began to question humanity’s privileged station in the cosmos.

Whether the credit is due to Bracciolini or not, the Renaissance saw steadily growing interest in the idea of the plurality of worlds and its corollary, the possibility that other worlds might be populated by other beings. Mikołaj Kopernik, better known as Nicolaus Copernicus, provided one key stepping stone.

The Polish mathematician and astronomer were born in 1473 — coincidentally, the same year the first print edition of On the Nature of Things appeared. (Note the date here: Copernicus lived at the same time as Christopher Columbus, who was 22 years his senior; Leonardo da Vinci, who was 21 years older; Niccolò Machiavelli, four years older; and Martin Luther, 10 years younger.)

Copernicus is central to the story of extraterrestrials not because he believed in them — the question didn’t seem to interest him — but because he was the first person to propose, based on observation and calculation, that Earth was not the center of the visible universe.

Around 1510, Copernicus began writing the commentaries and manuscripts that would become De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres). Finally published in 1543, the year Copernicus died, the book upended the old Aristotelian system.

It argued that Earth rotates around its pole, that the Moon orbits Earth, and that Mercury, Venus, the Earth-Moon system, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all travel around the Sun at their own rates.

Finally, it asserted that the firmament — the outermost celestial sphere, containing the stars — must be incomprehensibly far away, at least compared to the distances between the sun and the planets.

Copernicus’s heliocentric model accounted for important oddities that the old Aristotelian system couldn’t adequately explain, such as the occasional “retrograde” or backward motion of the other planets against the background stars.

But, of course, heliocentrism wasn’t immediately accepted, not least because it amounted to a huge demotion for Earth. It left us with only a single heavenly attendant, the Moon, and it forced Copernicus’s readers to reckon with the idea that we live on a planet that is just like any other.

This premise — that there’s nothing particularly special about Earth and that we aren’t in a privileged, central position to observe the universe — would come to be known as the Copernican principle, and it’s at the core of the modern-day case for doing research related to the search for extraterrestrial life (SETI).

Copernicus knew his theory would provoke religious objections, which may be why he declined to publish it during his lifetime. His follower Giordano Bruno was not so cautious. Bruno was a Sicilian subject who entered the Dominican order in Naples and then became a religious vagabond. He read Lucretius and Copernicus, took their ideas deeply to heart, and made some startling leaps of his own.

In three sets of dialogues published between 1584 and 1591 — La cena de le ceneri (The Ash Wednesday Supper), De l’infinito universo et modi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), and De immenso (Of vastness) — Bruno argued that at least some of the stars are suns with their own planets and that some of these planets must have their own residents.

On this and many other subjects, Bruno’s daring views conflicted with long-standing doctrines of the Catholic Church: For starters, that the universe was created for humanity alone and that there can be no people on other worlds without another Christ to redeem them.

Bruno was arrested in Venice in 1592 on charges of blasphemy and heresy and sent to Rome, where his trial lasted seven years. On February 17, 1600, he was hanged naked upside down and burned at the stake.

Bruno’s persecution was widely followed by people living outside Rome, but it couldn’t prevent the emergence of a new understanding of the heavens. In 1609, Johannes Kepler, the German mathematician and astronomer, published Astronomia nova (New Astronomy), which extended Copernicanism in crucial ways.

Understandably, Kepler was elated to receive a copy of Galileo Galilei’s Siderius nuncius (Starry Messenger) soon after it was published the following year. The book announced Galileo’s discovery of mountains on the Moon and four satellites orbiting Jupiter: we call them Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

These Jovian moons formed what was, in essence, a miniature solar system obeying the same rules as the planets. This discovery provided spectacular evidence for Copernicanism and in Kepler’s mind confirmed his own theories about planetary motion.

But here’s the interesting part for our purposes: Even though Kepler (a Protestant) knew of Bruno’s travails and the Catholic Church’s attitude toward the plurality-of-worlds idea, he sent Galileo (a Catholic) a congratulatory letter that included speculation about extraterrestrials. Any planet important enough to have moons, Kepler supposed, must also have people.

“These four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us,” he wrote. “Each planet in turn, together with its occupants, is served by its own satellites. From this line of reasoning, we deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited.”

Galileo cannily declined to endorse that idea. “The view of those who would put inhabitants on Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, and the Moon, meaning by ‘inhabitants’ animals like ours, and men in particular” was “false and damnable,” he wrote in his pamphlet Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie Solari (Letters on Sunspots) in 1613.

But while Galileo may have sidestepped Bruno’s error in this case, he eventually ran afoul of the church for different reasons. His volume Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems), a rousing defense of Copernicus, angered Pope Urban VIII and his inquisitors. In 1633, the church sentenced Galileo to a house arrest that lasted until his death in 1642.

OF THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS

From Democritus to Galileo, thinkers treated the idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings — the word alien comes from the Latin term alius, “other” — with great seriousness. After all, believing in aliens could get you banished or burned at the stake.

But in 1686 a Frenchman named Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle became the first writer to exploit the subject’s humorous possibilities. His book Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds) was another early example of science popularization.

Fontenelle made a rigorous case for Copernicanism, but to keep things entertaining he also used whimsical proto-science-fiction notions about the cultures of the other planets. The people of Venus, Fontenelle mused, are “sunburnt, full of verve and fire, always amorous, loving verses, loving music, inventing celebrations, dances, and tournaments every day.”

The inhabitants of Saturn, by contrast, are “quite phlegmatic. … These are people who don’t know what it is to laugh, who always take a day to answer the slightest question asked them.”

These ideas didn’t contradict the doctrine of Christ’s unique incarnation on Earth, Fontenelle reassured his readers because people on other planets would not be descended from Adam and wouldn’t need saving. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the church from putting Conversations on its Index of Forbidden Books.

Christian Huygens, the Dutch astronomer who explained the rings of Saturn and discovered its moon Titan, took a more serious tack in Cosmotheoros, published posthumously in 1698 and translated into English as Celestial Worlds Discover’d; or, Conjectures Concerning the Inhabitants, Plants, and Productions of the Worlds in the Planets.

He noted that Venus and Jupiter have atmospheres, one requirement for life. He expanded on Bruno’s assertion that other stars must have their own planetary systems and reasoned that where there are planets, there must be people.

By Huygens’s time, the plurality-of-worlds concept was beginning to seem ordinary. Eighteenth-century thinkers such as Edmond Halley, Gottfried Leibniz, Alexander Pope, Immanuel Kant, William Herschel, Pierre Laplace, and Thomas Paine accepted it as part of a scientific-realist worldview.

This view was, however, still incompatible with strict Christianity. That’s what motivated a leading 19th-century scientist and one-time believer in other inhabited worlds, William Whewell, to abandon pluralism and publish one of the strongest catalogs of scientific arguments against the idea.

A brilliant polymath, Whewell was a professor of mineralogy at the University of Cambridge, then a professor of moral philosophy, and finally the head of Trinity College, where Sir Isaac Newton had studied and taught.

In the 1830s, Whewell published essays that left room for the idea of extraterrestrials. But he later grew increasingly disturbed by the question of whether God had provided “a like scheme of salvation” for every other world.

If both pluralism and the Incarnation could not be true, Whewell decided he would stick with the Incarnation. So he assembled a scientific and philosophical broadside against the idea of other worlds, which he published in 1853 under the title Of the Plurality of Worlds: An Essay.

Whewell pointed out that humans, according to the geological record then being unearthed, had been present on this planet for only an “atom of time.” If Earth had been, in effect, uninhabited through most of its history, then it wouldn’t be surprising if other distant planets were also empty.

In any case, he pointed out, no planets around other stars had yet been observed, and many nebulae, star clusters, and multiple-star systems would be unsuitable places for them. Here in the local neighborhood, Whewell noted, the Moon has no atmosphere or water; Jupiter features crushing gravity and may lack a solid surface; Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are probably too far from the sun and therefore too cold to support life; and Mercury and Venus are probably too close to the sun and therefore too hot.

He wasn’t sure about Mars, but he theorized that only Earth is in what he called “the Temperate Zone of the Solar System.”

In short, though Whewell’s ultimate goal was to defend Christian theology, he was the first to marshal empirical evidence to point out the real weaknesses in the plurality-of-worlds idea.

This challenge was, in a sense, long overdue. Copernicus was correct to revoke Earth’s privileges as the pivot point of the universe, but that insight by itself says nothing about what else might exist in the universe.

We know today that Democritus and Epicurus were on the right track when they theorized about atoms and other worlds, but they didn’t have any hard data, and neither did Bruno, Kepler, Huygens, or Fontenelle. Whewell concluded: “The belief that other planets, as well as our own, are the seats of habitation of living things, has been entertained, in general, not in consequence of physical reasons, but in spite of physical reasons.”

Coming from the master of Trinity, this attack caused a ruckus in the scientific world. Defenders of pluralism were forced to go back to their laboratories and telescopes (which is evidence, if you’re in an optimistic mood, that materialists and religious believers aren’t engaged in a winner-take-all war, but rather in a healthy competition of ideas). Even today, the essential aim of astrobiologists and exoplanet hunters is to provide what Whewell called the missing “physical reasons.”

PERCIVAL LOWELL AND THE CANALS OF MARS

One of the researchers who poured new energy into the pursuit of extraterrestrials in the late 19th century was Percival Lowell. An amateur astronomer, Lowell used his wealth and his connections as a member of an old Boston Brahmin family to establish his own observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1894.

The year before that, the distinguished Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli had published La vita sul pianeta Marte (Life on Mars), laying out his observations of “seas,” “continents,” and waterways on Mars. After reading Schiaparelli’s book and another on Mars by the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, Lowell became convinced that the alleged waterways were artificial canals, and he built the observatory in order to observe, document, and publicize them.

One piece of lore, endlessly repeated in books, magazine articles, and web posts about Mars, says that Lowell’s imagination was fired by one of history’s most comic mistranslations. Schiaparelli, so the story goes, described the lines he saw on the surface of Mars using the word canali, “channels.”

English translators, however, rendered it as “canals.” A channel isn’t necessarily artificial; a canal is. The misleading word choice was what supposedly sent Lowell on his wild quest.

This is one of those stories journalists call “too good to fact-check.” In reality, Schiaparelli had begun talking about canali as early as 1878, the year after a close Mars–Earth approach. He was well aware that his work had inspired others to speculate that the canali were artificial, and perhaps used for irrigation. He did nothing to tamp down this speculation.

“Their singular appearance and the fact that they are designed with absolute geometrical precision as if they were drawn with a ruler or a compass, has led some to see in these features the work of intelligent beings, inhabitants of the planet,” Schiaparelli wrote in La vita sul pianeti Marte. “I will be careful not to combat this assumption, which includes nothing impossible.”

Regardless of who inspired his canal obsession, Lowell set out to confirm Schiaparelli’s discovery, making nearly nightly observations of Mars starting in mid-1894. He duly discovered 184 canals, putting Schiaparelli’s 79 to shame.

Lowell published these findings in a popular volume, Mars (1895), followed by “Mars and Its Canals” (1906) and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908). Like Schiaparelli before him, Lowell was struck by the “uniformity,” the “precision,” and the “supernaturally regular” appearance of the alleged canals. He wrote in the first volume, “Too great regularity is in itself the most suspicious of circumstances that some finite intelligence has been at work.”

Such a great collection of works would need builders, of course, and Lowell would go on to deduce — based on Mars’s lower gravity — that Martians must be far larger and stronger than humans. And older and wiser, too.

“A mind of no mean order would seem to have presided over the system we see — a mind certainly of considerably more comprehensiveness than that which presides over the various departments of our own public works,” he wrote. “Certainly what we see hints at the existence of beings who are in advance of, not behind us, in the journey of life.”

The public greeted Lowell’s work rapturously, scientists more coolly. Alfred Russell Wallace, the co-discoverer with Charles Darwin of evolution by natural selection, was still alive when Lowell’s books appeared. He eviscerated the idea of intelligent, canal-building Martians.

Wallace pointed out, correctly, that there is little liquid water on Mars to transport in canals. And he anticipated later critiques of SETI by highlighting the fantastic odds against the appearance of even one technological species in a given star system, let alone two on neighboring planets.

Given the series of evolutionary accidents that opened the way for the emergence of primates, each accident dependent on the previous one, “the total chances against the evolution of man, or an equivalent moral and intellectual being … will be represented by a hundred million of millions to one,” Wallace wrote.

Wallace was right that there are no men on Mars. But there was an intelligence at work in the story: Lowell’s. We know from decades of telescopic, orbital, and robotic exploration of the red planet that there are no canals or even features such as sand dunes or dust storms that could create the illusion of canals. What Lowell saw had to have been what astronomer Simon Newcomb would call, in 1907, unconscious “visual inferences” — projections of Lowell’s desire to see what he already believed was there.

I’m reminded of the snide acronym sometimes used by tech-support workers to describe questions from naive computer users: PIBKAC, Problem Is between Keyboard and Chair. In Lowell’s case, the problem was between the telescope eyepiece and the drawing pad.

But even before Wallace published his critique in 1904, it was too late to defuse Lowell’s idea. Martians had escaped into popular culture. H. G. Wells took Lowell’s concept of an ancient, advanced race of Mars dwellers and added a layer of imperial malice in The War of the Worlds, which was published in serial form in 1897 and as a print novel in 1898.

Edgar Rice Burroughs used Mars, a.k.a. “Barsoom,” as the setting for a series of pulpy stories and novels published between 1912 and 1948. Orson Welles adapted H. G. Wells’s story as a live radio drama broadcast on Halloween Eve in 1938, and its simulated news format scared at least a few listeners into believing invaders from Mars had really arrived.

The hostile-Martian cliché spread so quickly that by 1948 it would be satirized in the form of every nerd’s favorite Looney Tunes villain, Marvin the Martian, followed in 1950 by Ray Bradbury’s groundbreaking short-story collection The Martian Chronicles, about the conflicts between telepathic Martians and settlers from Earth.

Today we know that Mars is cold and dry and that if there are real Martians, they’re probably microbes, buried below the surface. But Mars has been extremely fertile as a garden for our own evolving theories, fears, and longings about extraterrestrials.

We don’t know yet whether the sky is full of “still other worlds with other breeds of men,” as Lucretius poetically put it. Yet there remains one stubborn and absorbing fact: on the very next planet, life is not out of the question — even if that life winds up being us.

• This article was originally published in The MIT Reader by Wade Roush. Read the original article here.

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10-08-2021 om 23:51 geschreven door peter