Supermassive Black Hole or Galactic Consciousness?

Imagine looking up at the night sky and wondering not only what lies inside galaxies, but also what a galaxy itself might be thinking. The term “supermassive black hole” (SMBH) is a well-established part of modern astronomy. The idea of “galactic consciousness,” by contrast, is more philosophical and speculative. It asks whether a galaxy could possess awareness, goals, or a form of mind. Both topics invite big questions about scale, gravity, information, and what it means to know something. Here, we’ll explore what these terms mean, how scientists study them, and what the differences are between a real, physical object and a thought about collective, galaxy-scale behavior.

An Einstein ring around the galaxy LRG 3-757, at the center of which the heaviest black hole was discovered.

Photo: NASA

A color image of the Cosmic Horseshoe created using filters F814W, F606W and F475W. The system consists of the Einstein ring of the Cosmic Horseshoe, as well as a radial arc and its opposite image.

The insert shows a radial arc. Source: NASA

First, what is a supermassive black hole? A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so intense that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. The boundary around this region is called the event horizon. Supermassive black holes are, as the name implies, enormous. They typically contain millions to billions of solar masses and sit at the centers of most large galaxies, including our Milky Way. The evidence for their existence is indirect but strong. We observe stars and gas moving at high speeds near the centers of galaxies. We detect powerful emissions in X-ray light and radio waves from material that is heated to extreme temperatures as it spirals inward, a process known as accretion. When matter falls toward a black hole, it forms an accretion disk that glows brilliantly, especially in X-rays, before it disappears behind the event horizon. In many galaxies, the behavior of stars and gas in the inner regions suggests the gravitational pull of something incredibly dense and compact, consistent with a black hole. In other cases, we see jets of particles blasting out at nearly the speed of light, launched by magnetic fields twisted around the spinning black hole. The consensus among astronomers is strong: many, if not most, large galaxies host a supermassive black hole at their center, often feeding on surrounding material.

Why are SMBHs so important? They act as engines that regulate the growth of their host galaxies. There is a remarkable relationship between the mass of a galaxy’s central black hole and the properties of the galaxy’s bulge, such as its mass and brightness. This correlation, called the M-sigma relation, suggests a co-evolution: as the black hole grows by pulling in matter, the energy it releases can heat or push away gas, influencing future star formation. In other words, SMBHs do not merely sit in the middle; they can shape the fate of their entire galactic neighborhoods. This connection between tiny scales (the event horizon and accretion physics) and vast scales (galaxy evolution) makes SMBHs a focal point in astrophysics.

Now, what about galactic consciousness? The phrase asks whether a galaxy could be conscious in some sense—aware, purposeful, or able to experience something. The idea has historical and speculative roots in panpsychism and in metaphorical descriptions of cosmic order. Some thinkers ask whether galaxies, as complex systems with many interacting parts, could exhibit collective behavior akin to a mind. A galaxy is made of stars, gas, dark matter, magnetic fields, and dark energy. These components follow the laws of physics and interact in complex ways that can produce patterns, rhythms, and even evolutions that look organized. But consciousness, as scientists typically define it, involves subjective experience, feelings, and a first-person point of view. So far, there is no evidence that galaxies possess subjective experience. There is also no widely accepted framework in physics that would treat a galaxy as a conscious agent with beliefs or desires. The claim remains more poetic or metaphorical than empirical.

A useful way to compare the two ideas is to distinguish what is observable and what is interpretive. A supermassive black hole has clear, testable signatures: the motion of stars near the center, X-ray emission from hot gas, and sometimes relativistic jets. These are physical, measurable phenomena governed by gravity and quantum physics combined with relativity. Galactic consciousness, if it exists, would be hard to test directly. What would count as evidence? Some might argue that a galaxy’s large-scale organization and behavior could be interpreted as “aimed” at sustaining star formation, maintaining stability, or preserving structure. But such interpretations risk anthropomorphism. Complex systems can appear to have goals simply because many parts respond to common pressures and constraints. The difference between “the galaxy acts to preserve itself” and “the galaxy has an intention to preserve itself” is subtle but crucial. In science, correlation and pattern do not automatically imply consciousness.

Another angle is to consider scale and energy. SMBHs are extreme sinks of mass-energy and powerful sources of energy; their gravity warps spacetime and their accretion disks heat up to temperatures rivaling the cores of stars. The physics is explicit, even if some details remain mysterious. Galactic consciousness, by contrast, would be an emergent property, if it exists at all, arising from the collective behavior of a massive network of components. Emergent phenomena are common in nature: water’s wetness, the flocking of birds, and the emergence of nervous-system activity from neurons. Some philosophers and scientists like to discuss whether there could be a form of “galactic ethics” or “galactic purpose,” but these ideas are philosophical tools rather than testsable predictions.

What would be the practical implications if galaxies were conscious? If we could demonstrate some form of awareness in a galaxy, it would challenge how we understand intelligence, life, and agency across the universe. It might imply that mind is not limited to biological organisms but can arise in complex systems with certain kinds of organization. On the other hand, there is also a risk of conflating metaphor with mechanism. Speaking about a galaxy “deciding” to endure or “seeking” stability is a useful narrative for teaching or thinking, but it might obscure the actual physics driving observed patterns.

Currently, the evidence points strongly toward SMBHs as real, well-understood physical objects with measurable effects on their surroundings. The case for galactic consciousness, by contrast, remains speculative and largely rhetorical. Scientists can and do study galaxies as physical systems: how stars form within them, how dark matter shapes their halos, how gas cools and collapses to form new generations of stars, and how feedback from black holes and supernovae regulates these processes. These are measurable questions about structure, dynamics, and evolution. The idea of a mind behind the galaxy is not a testable scientific hypothesis in the same sense.

That doesn’t mean the two topics are unrelated. They invite complementary perspectives on scale, causation, and the mystery of the universe. The existence of SMBHs demonstrates how gravity and quantum physics combine to produce extreme environments. The possibility of galactic consciousness invites humility: the universe may harbor forms of organization and complexity that we have not fully understood, and our intuition about life and mind may be too limited to grasp the grandest scales. In science, bold questions often begin with bold metaphors. The critical step is to translate a metaphor into testable ideas, or to acknowledge when an idea is best kept as a thought experiment.

For students and curious readers, a practical takeaway is to separate what we know from what we wonder. We know that SMBHs exist, we know they affect their galaxies, and we can observe many of their signatures with telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum. We also know that galaxies, as massive collections of matter interacting through gravity, can produce complex and beautiful structures. Wondering whether they possess consciousness can inspire imaginative reflection, innovative hypotheses, and careful philosophical debate. It can also remind us to distinguish observational science from speculative speculation.

In teaching and outreach, it can be helpful to present both sides clearly. When explaining SMBHs, one might describe the event horizon, the accretion disk, the gravitational influence on nearby stars, and the evidence from observations like stellar motions near the galactic center and X-ray emissions. When broaching galactic consciousness, one could present the idea as a philosophical possibility, highlight why it is appealing to some, and then explain the scientific challenges: the lack of verifiable criteria, the problem of subjective experience, and the risk of anthropomorphism.

As technology advances, our ability to observe galactic centers and the broader structure of galaxies will improve. Instruments like more powerful telescopes, interferometers, and detectors across different wavelengths will refine our understanding of SMBHs and their interactions with their hosts. If ever new data suggested unusual, non-physical explanations for galactic behavior, scientists would scrutinize them with the same rigor they apply to any extraordinary claim. Until then, the most robust scientific narrative describes galaxies as ecosystems influenced by gravity, gas dynamics, star formation, and the energy from central black holes—beautiful, intricate, and governed by the laws of physics.

In conclusion, a supermassive black hole is a concrete, well-supported feature of many galaxies, including the Milky Way. It has measurable effects, testable predictions, and a central role in theories of galaxy formation and evolution. Galactic consciousness, by contrast, remains a provocative idea at the intersection of philosophy and speculative science. It prompts us to ask about the nature of mind, the limits of anthropomorphism, and the possible forms that life and intelligence could take in the universe. For now, the science keeps its feet on the ground: SMBHs are real and influential, while galaxy-scale consciousness is an intriguing possibility—one that invites thoughtful imagination but requires far more evidence before it could be considered part of our scientific understanding. The universe continues to be a place of extraordinary phenomena, from the shadowy depths of event horizons to the grand, emergent patterns of galaxies that light up the cosmos.

{ PETER2011 }

29-09-2025 om 23:06 geschreven door peter  

Supermassief Zwart Gat of Galactisch Bewustzijn?

Samenvatting

Deze dissertatie onderzoekt twee controversiële en intrigerende mogelijkheden over het universum op grote schaal:

• het bestaan en de rol van supermassieve zwarte gaten (SMBH’s) in galactische evolutie en
• het concept van galactische bewustzijn, oftewel of sterrenstelsels of hele galactische netwerken een vorm van collectief of emergent bewustzijn bezitten. Door een combinatie van astronomie, theoretische fysica en filosofie van de geest wordt verkend welke bewijzen, aannames en implicaties aan elke kant van de discussie gekoppeld zijn. De conclusie benadrukt dat het huidige bewijs eerder wijst in de richting van een centrale, fysiek en dynamisch dominante rol van SMBH’s, terwijl het idee van galactisch bewustzijn fascinatie blijft maar met aanzienlijk minder empirie en streng empirisch toetsbaar mechanismen. Desalniettemin leveren beide thema’s waardevolle inzichten op voor ons begrip van kosmische hiërarchieën en de grens tussen natuurkunde en metafysica.

Inleiding

Veel sterrenstelsels, waaronder onze eigen Melkweg, herbergen in hun kern een extreem massief object dat een roterende gas- en stofstroom naar zich toe trekt en daardoor een gebied met buitengewone zwaartekracht oproept: het supermassieve zwarte gat (SMBH). Dit centrale zwaartepunt speelt een cruciale rol in de vorming en evolutie van het hele stelsel, doordat het materie kan versnellen, uitbarstingen van straling kan veroorzaken en de dynamiek van sterren en gasruimtes in de omringende kern op allerlei manieren kan beïnvloeden. Tegelijkertijd rijzen er in de wetenschappelijke en filosofische literatuur vragen over de mogelijkheid dat galactische systemen op grotere schaal potentieel vormen van bewustzijn kunnen vertonen, of ten minste eigenschappen kunnen vertonen die lijken op cognitieve competenties zoals anticipatie, selectie van informatie, doelgericht handelen en lange-termijnplanning. Deze noties blijven controversieel en worden vanuit verschillende disciplines benaderd: astronomie, theoretische natuurkunde, complexiteitswetenschap en filosofie van de geest.

Dit werk schetst eerst de actuele stand van zaken: wat we empirisch waar kunnen nemen rondom SMBH’s, welke meetbare effecten zij hebben op hun omgeving, en welke mechanistische verklaringen het meest plausibel zijn volgens de huidige physicalistischer benaderingen. Vervolgens wordt ingegaan op de vraag naar bewustzijn in zeer grote, natuurlijke systemen: wat betekenen emergente eigenschappen precies in een galactisch context, en in hoeverre kunnen concepten als bewustzijn, intentie of intelligentie toegepast worden op systemen die bestaan uit ontelbareeltjes gravitationeel gevarreerde materie en uit miljarden sterbakens? De bespreking onderzoekt zowel streng wetenschappelijke als filosofische implicaties, zodat een samenhangend beeld ontstaat van wat we wel en niet kunnen claimen over bewustzijnsverschijnselen in galactische omgevingen.

De centrale these van dit werk is niet dat SMBH-dynamieken en hypothetische galactische bewustzijnstatistieken noodzakelijk in tegenspraak met elkaar staan, maar dat het huidige bewijsspectrum vaak nog ontoereikend is om bewustzijn als entiteit of status te rechtvaardigen. Wel leveren SMBH-gerelateerde processen talloze directe en meetbare correlaties—zoals accretiepatronen, feedbackmechanismen en rulings van gasstromen—that mogelijk dienen als sleutels tot een dieper begrip van galactische evolutie en de onderliggende fysica.

Theoretisch kader: samenhangende kernbegrippen

• Supermassieve zwarte gaten: SMBH’s hebben massesies variërend van miljoenen tot miljarden zonmassa’s en zijn pieksaarsvijfdrie in het hart van de meeste grote en middelgrote sterrenstelsels. Hun gravitationele veld trekt niet alleen materie aan, maar bepaalt ook de dynamiek van omliggende structuren: de accretieschijf waar gas en stof extreem heet worden en intense straling uitzenden, de jets die langs enorme afstanden kunnen voorkomen, en de turbulente gasstromen in de centrale regio’s. Deze centrale machtige objecten vormen een sleutelmechanisme in de galactische evolutie: ze sturen accretieprocessen die energie vrijmaken in de vorm van röntgenstraling, ultraviolet en zichtbaar licht, en ze veroorzaken feedbackprocessen die de temperatuur, dichtheid en samenstelling van het omringende gas beïnvloeden. Door deze processen kan de groei van het sterrenstelsel worden gereguleerd, kunnen stervormingsbarrières ontstaan of verdwijnen, en kan de baryonische cyclus in de holte van het galactische centrum in balans blijven. Daarnaast dienen SMBH’s als natuurlijke laboratoria om de relativiteit en extreme kwantisële processen te testen, en leveren ze cruciale aanwijzingen over de vorming van massieve objecten in de vroege kosmos. De interacties tussen SMBH’s en hun gaststelsels blijven een dynamisch onderzoeksgebied waarbij men de koppeling tussen centrale krachterschakelingen en grootschalige evolutie probeert te ontleden.
• Galactisch bewustzijn: een controversieel concept in de filosofie van de geest en in sommige emergentie-theorieën. Het vraagt aandacht voor of er op galactische schaal eigenschappen bestaan die buiten de eenvoudige som van individuele astro(fysische) processen vallen. Voor de meeste wetenschappers blijft bewustzijn primair een fenomeen van levende systemen met zenuwstelsels, maar sommige modelleringen verkennen hoe complexe netwerken—zoals hersenen of kosmische gasstromen—mogelijk macro-eigenschappen kunnen ontwikkelen die op ’bewuste’ processen zouden kunnen lijken. Binnen kosmische kaders wordt bewustzijn vaak benaderd als een analogie voor opmerkzaamheid, zelforganisatie en informatieverwerking op grootschalige schaal. Derhalve worden vragen gesteld over emergente eigenschappen van netwerken van sterren, sterrenstelsels en interstellaire/gasstromen: bestaan er patronen van organisatie die dezelfde logica volgen als cognitieve systemen, of blijft de analogie beperkt tot een metaforische beschrijving van systeemgedrag? Deze verkenning zoekt naar modellen die rekening houden met synergetische interacties, feedbackloops en communicatiekanalen tussen verschillende componenten van het galactische netwerk, zonder te claimen dat er daadwerkelijk subjectieve ervaring ontstaat.
• Wetenschappelijke methoden:  empirische observaties (bijv. haarspeldenroteringen, waterstoflijn-emissies, spectra van AGN, vrijwel directe imaging van SMBH’s door de Event Horizon Telescope) en theoretische modellering (numerieke simulaties van accretie, feedback en galactische evolutie) vormen de kern van ons toetsingskader. Met empirische waarnemingen kunnen we de massa, spin, activiteit en omgeving van SMBH’s in kaart brengen, de interacties met omringende gaslagen observeren en testen hoe deze objecten de fysieke toestand van hun gastgalaxie beïnvloeden. Tegelijkertijd leveren numerieke simulaties en analytische modellen een raamwerk om oorzakelijke mechanismen te onderzoeken: hoe wisselwerken tussen straling, kinetische energie en koud/hot gas de evolutie van zowel het centrale gebied als de gehele galaxie sturen. Door een combinatie van multi-wavelength observeraties, tijdsvariabiliteitstudies en vergelijkingen met simulaties kunnen wetenschappers een coherente theorie opbouwen die zowel de kleine-als grootschalige dynamiek van sterrenstelsels verklaart.

Methoden en aanpak Deze studie combineert literatuuronderzoek met synthese van theoretische modellen.

Methoden en aanpak Deze studie combineert literatuuronderzoek met synthese van theoretische modellen, met als doel een dieper inzicht te geven in zowel waargenomen fenomenen als onderliggende conceptuele kaders. De aanpak schetst een integrale route die empirische bevindingen koppelt aan theoretische verbeelding, zodat mogelijke mechanismen en hunrelevantie voor galactische evolutie beter kunnen worden geëvalueerd. De metodische stappen omvatten systematische literatuurverzameling, vergelijkende analyse van modellen en het formuleren van toetsbare hypothesen. Hierbij wordt gestreefd naar transparante verantwoording van bronnen en naar herhaalbare redeneringen die andere onderzoekers kunnen repliceren of uitdagen.

We bespreken:

• Observatieve bewijzen voor SMBH’s: dynamische bevestiging via sterren- en gasbewegingen, maseringstechnieken en direct beeld van de omgeving van Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Deze onderdelen omvatten nauwkeurige metingen van stellar proper motions en trajecten in de onmiddellijke nabijheid van het superzware zwarte gat, evenals spectroscopische en interferometrische observaties die massa- en positieparameters opleveren. Daarnaast worden accretieve procesmodellen onderzocht, zoals schijven rondom SMBH’s, rijken aan gas- en magnetohydrodynamische (MHD) processen die emissie genereren across meerdere golflengten, en de daarbij behorende feedbackmechanismen die invloed hebben op de star-formation rate en de kinematiek van de omgevende bulge en halo. Een deel van deze sectie richt zich op de theoretische interpretatie van ontstane structuren, emissielijnen en variabiliteit, en op de wijze waarop deze observabele kenmerken bruggen slaan naar massabepalingen en dynamische vervormingen in de centrale regio’s van sterrenstelsels.
• Theoretische exploraties van galactisch bewustzijn: conceptuele analyse van wat bewustzijn op macroniveau zou betekenen en welke criteria er zijn voor emergente cognitieve eigenschappen op stelselniveau (informatieverwerking, doelgerichtheid, zelfreferentiëring). Deze bespreking verkent verschillende definities van bewustzijn in een astro-filosofisch kader, zoals systeemniveau-informatie-integratie, causale effectiviteit binnen netwerken, en de mate waarin zelfbewuste monitoring of aanpassingsvermogen mogelijk resembleert aan cognitieve competenties. Er wordt kritisch gekeken naar de grenzen van antropomorfisme en naar hoe emergente eigenschappen kunnen voortkomen uit complexe, niet-lineaire interacties tussen duizenden tot miljarden sterren, gasdumps en donkere materie. Daarnaast worden theoretische modellen vergeleken die proxies voor bewustzijn voorstellen—bijvoorbeeld informatieve efficiëntie, robuuste netwerkdynamiek en adaptieve feedback—om te beoordelen of en hoe zulke proxies betekenisvol kunnen zijn in een astro-fysische context.
• Kritische evaluatie van bewijsbarrières: waarom direct bewijs voor galactisch bewustzijn ontbreekt en welke toetsbare voorspellingen kunnen voortkomen uit beide concepten. Deze sectie onderzoekt epistemologische belemmeringen, technische beperkingen van meetinstrumenten, en de interpretatieve valkuilen bij het koppelen van fysische waarnemingen aan conceptuele eigenschappen zoals bewustzijn. Voorstellen voor toetsbare hypothesen zijn onder meer specifieke signaturen in emissie-variabiliteit, correlaties tussen SMBH-activiteit en grootschalige netwerk-eigenschappen, en prediction tables voor de evolutie van star-formation en kinematiek onder uiteenlopende scenario’s van feedback.
• Synthetische vergelijking van scenario’s: wat betekenen SMBH-gedreven feedback en mogelijke emergente netwerkeigenschappen voor de evolutie van sterrenstelsels en de kosmische structuur? Tot slot worden gecombineerde scenario’s tegen elkaar afgewogen met oog voor consistente voorspellingen over lange-termijn evolutie, inclusief de invloed van SMBH-gestuurde uitbarstingen op gasontgassing, stervorming en de vorming van structurele kenmerken op galactisch en kosmisch niveau.

Een oranje ring tegen een zwarte achtergrond.
Afbeelding van het zwarte gat in het centrum van M87, vastgelegd door de Event Horizon Telescope.

Credit: EHT Collaboration

Supermassive black holes: het dominante fysieke raamwerk

1. Observatie en dynamiek:

• SMBH’s bevinden zich in het hart van vrijwel alle grote stelsels, waar ze een centrale rol spelen in de dynamiek van sterren, gas en donkere materie. Hun aanwezigheid manifesteert zich niet alleen door de extreem hoge masses, maar ook via hun impact op de kinematiek van de omliggende bulge en kernregionen.
• De massaratio SMBH/stelselmassa vertoont sterke correlaties, zoals de M-sigma-relatie en de M–L-relatie, die suggereren dat de vorming en groeiprocessen van de centrale BH nauw verweven zijn met de evolutie van de halo, de bulge-structuur en de centrale kern van het stelsel.
• Accretiekanalen, zoals koude gasinspiratie, fusie- en mergerscenario’s, en instroming van materie uit de kernen van kleinere satellietstelsels, leiden tot perioden van krachtige AGN-activiteit. Tijdens deze fasen wordt energie en impuls in het omringende gas gestoten, wat resulteert in uitbarstingen, jets en winds die de gasreserve van het stelsel kunnen verminderen of herverdelen.
• Deze processen beïnvloeden de stervorming: de uitgestoten of verplaatste gassilos kunnen toekomstige stervorming remmen (quenching) of juist herschikken zodat de star-formation een andere ruimtelijke verdeling krijgt.

2. Mechanistische impact op galactische evolutie:

• De feedbackmechanismen van SMBH’s leveren een directe, plausibele verklaring voor empirische observaties van kwenching en de gereguleerde stervorming in verschillende fasen van galaxy evolution.
• Door energie en momentum aan het interstellair medium te leveren, moduleren SMBH’s de temperatuur en dichtheid van het gas, wat bepalend is voor de mate waarin gas op koude toestanden kan verzachten tot stervorming.
• Deze feedback draagt bij aan de vorming van bulges en de morphologische diversiteit van stelsels: centrale kernen kunnen structuur met zich meebrengen die de algehele stelselkern overspannen, wat leidt tot de overgang tussen schijfachtige en bulge-gedomineerde morfologieën.
• De relatie tussen SMBH-activiteit en galactische omgeving (bijv. clusters versus veldstelsels) laat zien hoe omgevingsfactoren invloed uitoefenen op accretiekanalen en daaropvolgende feedback.

3. Theoretische limitaties en open vragen:

• Hoewel SMBH’s de centrale motor zijn in moderne galactische evolutietheorieën, blijven er belangrijke vragen bestaan over de exacte accretierates in verschillende omgevingen, zoals quenched versus actief stapelbare stelsels en bij verschillende gastemperaturen.
• De tijdsafhankelijke en schaalafhankelijke consequenties voor galactische structuren zijn nog onderwerp van debat: hoe snel verandert de bulge-ontwikkeling onder invloed van SMBH-feedback, en welke rollen spelen mergende BH’s?
• Details van donkere materie-interacties met baryonen op kiloparsecschaal blijven onzeker: hoe beïnvloeden donkere materiehalos de dissipatieve processen rond de centrale BH en welke rol spelen ze bij het transport van gas naar de BH?
• Open vragen in de theorie betreffen onder meer de precieze balans tussen cooling, heating, en outflows, evenals de nuance van de M-sigma-relatie bij verschillende soorten stelsels en in verschillende kosmische tijdsperioden.

Galactisch bewustzijn: conceptuele mogelijkheden en uitdagingen

Wat zou “galactisch bewustzijn” impliceren? Als we bewustzijn definiëren als een systeem dat informatie organiseert, doelgericht gedrag vertoont en adaptief leert op grote schaal, dan zouden netwerken en processen in een galactische context in potentie aan onderdelen van deze criteria kunnen voldoen. Denk bijvoorbeeld aan grootschalige informatieverwerking in gas- en stofwolken, magnetische velden, stervorming, supernova-omzetten en de dynamiek van sterrenstelsels. In zo’n visie zouden patronen van coherente activiteit, feedbacklussen, en adaptieve respons op externe prikkels mogelijk als indicatoren kunnen worden opgevat. Toch ontbreekt er een breed gedragen consensus over concrete, toetsbare criteria die onafhankelijk zijn van menselijke meta-interpretaties en antropomorfe intuïties. De vraag is: welke specifieke operationele definities laten we gelden om te bepalen wanneer een astrofaal systeem “bewust” handelt of “bewuste” kenmerken vertoont?

Falsifieerbaarheid en wetenschappelijke status: een centrale uitdaging voor het galactisch bewustzijn-model is operationalisatie. Zonder duidelijke experimentele voorspellingen die toetsbaar zijn met de huidige of toekomstige technologieën, blijft het een metaforische of filosofische constructie in plaats van een robuuste empirisch-getoetste theorie. Wetenschap streeft naar uitsluitende of bevestigende bewijzen via meetbare correlaties, voorspellende hypotheses en reproduceerbare bevindingen. In het geval van galactisch bewustzijn bestaan die elementen nog niet of nauwelijks: wat zou bijvoorbeeld een experimentele proef zijn die onderscheid maakt tussen een echt “bewust” netwerk en een complex maar onbewust systeem? Het gebrek aan eenduidige meetbare indicatoren zoals intentie, flexibiliteit onder onbekende omstandigheden, of zelfreflectie plaatst het onderwerp in een gebied van speculatie en interpretatieve plausibiliteit eerder dan in strafbare wetenschappelijke status.

Mogelijke raakvlakken en analogieën: ondanks de beperkingen bieden emergente eigenschappen in complexiteitstheorie en netwerktheorie wel boeiende analogieën die kunnen helpen om galactische dynamiek beter te begrijpen, zonder noodzakelijkerwijs te suggereren dat een bewuste entiteit aanwezig is. Zo kunnen informatieverwerkende processen in gas- en stofomzetten, energietransfers in sterrenrijtsystemen, en de interactie tussen verschillende subsystemen thema’s oproepen die verwant zijn aan cognitieve functies zoals patroonherkenning, aanklampende feedback en adaptieve strategieën. Een constructieve benadering is dan om deze zoölogie van processen te verkennen als metaforische modellen die wetenschappelijke heuristieken kunnen bieden, zonder dat men automatisch aan een bewustheidsstatus hoeft te twijfelen.

Concluderend kunnen we zeggen dat het idee van galactisch bewustzijn uitnodigt tot verdiepende conceptuele verkenning en interdisciplinair denken, maar dat concrete, toetsbare wetenschappelijke basis en duidelijke operationalisatie cruciaal blijven om het als een geldige theorie binnen de moderne fysica en astronomie te plaatsen.

Oranje en gele cirkel die de magnetische velden van een zwart gat aangeeft.
Een weergave van het superzware zwarte gat M87 in gepolariseerd licht. De lijnen markeren de polarisatierichting, die verband houdt met het magnetische veld rond de schaduw van het zwarte gat.

Bron: EHT Collaboration

Kritische evaluatie en synthese

• Empirische sterkte van SMBH-dominantie: de voornaamste wetenschappelijke steun blijft de directe en indirecte bewijslagen voor SMBH-gedreven dynamiek en feedback, die aansluiten op een brede en geconsolideerde waarnemingsbasis van galactische evolutie. De waarnemingen tonen dat supermassive black holes nauw verbonden is met centrale sterrenbol en gas-yield, en dat hun activiteit invloed heeft op de temperatuur, druk en akoestische omstandigheden van het omringende gas. Dit vertaalt zich in regie over de stervorming, de marginale gasopbouw in de bulge en de vorming van centrale structuren zoals kern-collapse en mogelijk een transportpad voor interstellair materiaal. De plausibele causaliteit tussen SMBH-activiteiten en de regulatorische mechanismen van stervorming, gasdoorschiet, massa- en angular momentum-verdeling, alsook de ontwikkeling van de centrale potentiaal, maakt SMBH’s een vrijwel onmisbaar komponent in hedendaagse galactische theorieën. Toch blijft de inschatting van de exacte mechanismen en tijdsschalen een onderwerp van debat, mede omdat waarnemingen vaak complexe, multi-component systemen bestrijken met verschillende vrijheidsgraden en degeneratie van signaal.
• Beoordeling van galactisch bewustzijn: hoewel filosofisch interessant en soms paradoxaal intrigerend, ontbreekt er solide empirische ondersteuning en een gemeenschappelijke operationele definitie. De conceptuele basis van galactisch bewustzijn is nog niet verankerd in meetbare parameters die consistent kunnen worden toegepast over verschillende massa- en evolutiefases van sterrenstelsels. Dit maakt het op dit moment een minder robuuste wetenschappelijke hypothese vergeleken met SMBH-dynamiek, aangezien de koppeling tussen cognitieve of bewuste-like eigenschappen en galactische processen moeilijk te operationaliseren is en mogelijk afhankelijk blijft van interpretatieve modellen. Desondanks kan het idee richting geven aan het onderzoeken van_Info-theoretische representaties van waarneming en meaning, en het stimuleren van innovatieve denkrichtingen over emergente eigenschappen in astrale systemen.
• Mogelijke synergieën: het is denkbaar dat toekomstige werkgebieden zoals high-resolution simulaties van galactische netwerken, gekoppeld met informatie-theoretische analyse van grote kosmische systemen, kunnen leiden tot nieuwe inzichten die zowel de rol van SMBH’s verder verhelderen als de grenzen van emergente eigenschappen in kosmische netwerken beter afbakenen. Deze gecombineerde aanpak kan helpen bij het definiëren van toetsbare voorspellingen, het identificeren van sleutelmomenten in de evolutie van stelsels, en het verminderen van onzekerheden rondom feedbackmechanismen. Een integratieve strategie, waarbij observaties, simulaties en theorie met elkaar worden verbonden, kan zo de betrouwbaarheid en generaliseerbaarheid van conclusies verhogen.

Implicaties voor de astronomie en de filosofie

1. Voor de astronomie

• Inzicht in SMBH-gedreven processen is cruciaal voor het begrip van de evolutie van sterrenstelsels en de structuur van het universum. Supermassale zwarte gaten spelen een sleutelrol bij de energie- en materie-uitwisseling in galactische nuclei, wat op grote schaal invloed heeft op de vorming en het gedrag van sterrenstelsels.
• Het ontwikkelen van betere modellen van accretie en feedback helpt bij het verklaren van de variatie in stervormingsraten doorheen de tijd en bij het begrijpen van de morphologie van zowel spiraalachtige als ellipitische stelsels. Aandacht voor verschillende accretietypen (radiatieve efficiëntie, kinetische feedback, jets) levert nuance op in hoe gas wordt heiß gemaakt of uitgestoten, en hoe dat het interstellaire medium beïnvloedt.
• Verdere precisie in simulaties en waarnemingen—waarin rekening wordt gehouden met AGN-quenchen, uitputting van gasreservoirs, en de interactie tussen SMBH-uitbarstingen en omgeving—stelt ons in staat om de tijdlijnen van galactische omzettingen beter te reconstrueren.
• De combinatie van multi-wavelength observaties (radio, optisch, infrarood, X-ray) en mogelijk toekomstige gravitational wave- en neutrino-detecties biedt een geïntegreerde kijk op SMBH-gedreven fenomenen, waardoor men deketen van causale relaties tussen centrale engine en galactische eigenschappen beter kan volgen.
• Deze inzichten versterken ook het begrip van de kosmische structuur en de rol van feedback in de vorming van grote schaalstructuren, zoals radius-banden, halo- en clusteromgevingen, en helpen de discrepanties tussen waargenomen massiverhoudingen en theoretische voorspellingen te verduidelijken. Zo kunnen we bijvoorbeeld verklaren waarom sommige stelsels actief blijven terwijl anderen snel afkoelen en stervorming stoppen.

2. Voor de filosofie van de geest en de complexe systemen

• Galactische bewustzijn-discussies brengen fundamentele vragen naar voren over wat bewustzijn werkelijk is en welke niveaus van complexiteit nodig zijn voor emergentie. Ideeën uit de sterrenkunde kunnen verhelderen hoe niet-intuïtieve, grootschalige emergente eigenschappen ontstaan uit simpele fundamentele regels, en welke rol informatieverwerking speelt in systemen op kosmische schaal.
• Dit bevordert reflectie op de grenzen van onze definities van bewustzijn, ervaring en subjectiviteit, en op hoe wetenschappers concepten gebruiken en herdefiniëren bij fenomenen die buiten de traditionele kaders vallen. Het kan leiden tot een beter begrip van difference between mechanistische functionaliteit en bewuste ervaring, en tot een kritische blik op antropocentrische aannames.
• Bovendien raken discussies over emergentie en complexiteit aan epistemologie en retoriek: hoe formuleren wetenschappers modellen en verklaringen voor verschijnselen die niet direct waarneembaar zijn als ‘bewust’ maar wel invloedrijk op systeemgedrag? Dit draagt bij aan een bredere evaluatie van wetenschappelijke methoden, schemata, en de vertekenen van theorieën.
• Ten slotte kunnen deze gedachte-exercities aandacht vragen voor ethische overwegingen rond het bestuderen van intelligente systemen, zowel in technologische als in kosmische context, en stimuleren ze een reflexieve houding ten aanzien van onze eigen plaats in het universum en de aard van menselijke kennis.

Toekomstig onderzoek

• Empirische richting: meer gerichte en systematische observaties naar SMBH-accresctie- en feedbackprocessen, evenals verbeterde directe beelden van de onmiddellijke omgeving van superzware zwarte gaten (SMBH’s). Dit omvat lange-termijn monitoring van AGN-variabiliteit om patronen, episodieën en dramatische schommelingen in accretie en uitgaande kracht beter te begrijpen. Daarnaast is behoefte aan high-resolution spectroscopie en tijdreeksen die de dynamiek van de accretieschijven, jet- en outflow-structuren, en de interacties met omringende interstellaire materie nauwgezet traceren. Nieuwe instrumenten en telescoopfaciliteiten, zoals aanvullende interferometrische kernwaarnemingen, hoogresolutiedetectie van röntgen- en radiosignalen, en lange-baseline optische/near-infrarood observaties, kunnen deze data leveren. Het doel is om de onderliggende fasen van massaoverdracht, de rol van magnetische velden, viscousiteit in accretieschijven, en de mechanismen van terugkoppeling (feedback) met de gastheergalaxie in kaart te brengen. Verdere inspanningen zijn nodig voor statistische studies die variabiliteit over verschillende schalen koppelen aan de fysische omstandigheden in de centrale regio’s, evenals vergelijkende analyses tussen verschillende soorten AGN en hun omgevingen. Zo kunnen we empirisch vaststellen welke factoren de efficiëntie van accretie begrenzen en welke boodschappen de jet- en verwarmingsprocessen leveren aan de omliggende interstellare medium.
• Theoretische richting: inzet op geavanceerde hydrodynamische en magneto-hydrodynamische (MHD) simulaties die SMBH-activiteit naadloos integreren met bredere galactische evolie processen, inclusief de rol van turbulentie, velden en stralingsdrukken. Daarnaast zijn netwerktheoretische en informatieverwerkingsbenaderingen van toepassing op kosmische omgevingen, waarbij informatiefluxen tussen de centrale engine, de accretieschijven, jets en de halo’s worden gemodelleerd. Door dergelijke geïntegreerde modellen kunnen we voorspellingen genereren die direct toetsbaar zijn aan observaties, zoals de relatie tussen accretie-snelheid, feedback-energie en de vorm en evolutie van de gastrolstructuren in de gastheergalaxie. Het combineren van simulaties op verschillende schalen—van gebeurtenisperspectief in de nabijheid van het SMBH tot galactische schaal—kan helpen om de kloof tussen feit en hypothese te verkleinen en om de evolutie van SMBH-activiteiten in een kosmologische context te plaatsen. Daarnaast zijn probabilistische en statistische methoden nodig om onzekerheden in modellering en observaties te beheersen en om robuuste constraint-sets te genereren voor theorieën over accretie en feedback.
• Filosofische richting: verduidelijking van definities rond “bewustzijn” en de plaats daarvan in de natuurwetenschap, met aandacht voor empirische toetsbaarheid en falsifieerbare criteria. Het identificeren van criteria voor emergente eigenschappen op kosmologische schaal, die mogelijk metafysische overwegingen raken, kan bijdragen aan een betere scheiding tussen metafysica en natuurwetenschap. Dit vereist reflectie op wat als “empirisch verifieerbaar” en “railbaar via observaties” kan worden beschouwd in systemen met extreme fysica en lange tijdsschalen. Het doel is een helder kader waarin wetenschappelijk onderzoek naar complexe kosmische systemen zowel conceptueel als methodologisch stevig staat, zonder essentiële fysische inzichten uit te sluiten.

Conclusie

Op basis van de huidige stand van kennis wordt de hypothese dat SMBH’s een centrale, fysiek onderliggende rol spelen in de evolutie van sterrenstelsels als de meest robuuste en wetenschappelijk onderbouwde lens gezien. Het concept van galactisch bewustzijn blijft interessant als filosofische en theoretische verbeelding, maar mist op dit moment de empirische basis en operationele definities die nodig zijn voor wetenschappelijke validatie. Desalniettemin blijft het verkennen van emergente eigenschappen in complexe kosmische netwerken waardevol voor het begrip van systeemsamenhang en kan het leiden tot innovatieve inzichten in de manier waarop informatie en energie in het universum door netwerken stromen. De toekomstige inspanningen in zowel observationeel als theoretisch onderzoek zullen ongetwijfeld het verhaal van SMBH’s en mogelijk de fascinerende gedachte van galactisch bewustzijn verder aanscherpen.

{ PETER2011 }

29-09-2025 om 20:49 geschreven door peter  

Scientists believe that one of the most effective ways to explore Mars is with robots—tumbleweeds. These vehicles resemble large mesh spheres and do not require very powerful engines. Instead, they are powered by wind energy. Recently, engineers have confirmed the effectiveness of this concept.

Tumbleweed robot

One of the critical points in the development of Mars rovers is energy sources. They have to ensure the autonomy of the research device for as long as possible, otherwise all attempts to scale automated systems are pointless. Recently, at a meeting of the Europlanet Science Congress and the Department of Planetary Sciences, engineers from Tumbleweed discussed a new way of exploring Mars.

At its core is the idea of a swarm of spherical rovers. Tumbleweed is a special type of shrub that grows in many arid regions of the Earth. When the dry season arrives, their above-ground part, resembling a ball of twigs, dries out and rolls across the desert under the influence of the wind, traveling many kilometers before spilling its seeds. 

This is precisely the principle that Tumbleweed decided to use in its robots. They resemble 5-meter balls made of metal mesh, with a core containing equipment in the center. They were first introduced in July this year.

Test results

To be precise, the company has so far presented prototypes with diameters of 30, 40, and 50 cm. However, they have already proven their effectiveness. The fact is that the main advantage of such a design is the absence of a powerful energy source. Instead, it is moved by the wind until the vehicle stops moving and switches to stationary research station mode.

The only problem is the wind itself. On Mars, its speed can reach 9-10 m/s. However, the atmosphere is extremely thin, so its actual strength is significantly lower than on Earth. However, developers have already proven that this is not an obstacle to their work.

They have already confirmed this by testing them in a wind tunnel, which reproduced Martian pressure and the corresponding wind speed. Under these conditions, they were able to overcome a slope corresponding to 30° on Mars.

Test results confirm that they are capable of moving at speeds of up to 10 m/s and covering a distance of 422 km in 100 Martian sol. Overall, the developers expect that under favorable conditions, Tumbleweed could travel 2,800 km across the surface of Mars.

• According to phys.org

• Posted in News, Tech

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{ https://universemagazine.com/en/news-en/science-en/ }

29-09-2025 om 18:31 geschreven door peter  

What the end of the world will REALLY look like: As the Rapture fails to come to fruition, expert reveals the bleak reality of the apocalypse

• READ MORE: Preachers who predicted Rapture explain why nothing happened

By WILIAM HUNTER, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY REPORTER

This week, thousands of TikTok users were whipped into an apocalyptic frenzy as viral predictions of the 'Rapture' spread online.

However, rather embarrassingly for the preachers who predicted it, the supposed End of Days has now come and gone without incident.

Now, experts have revealed what the apocalypse will really look like. 

And the bleak reality of human extinction is far more depressing than any story of Biblical annihilation.

From the deadly threat of rogue AI or nuclear war to the pressing risk of engineered bio–weapons, humans themselves are creating the biggest risks to our own survival.

Dr Thomas Moynihan, a researcher at Cambridge University's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, told Daily Mail: 'Apocalypse is an old idea, which can be traced to religion, but extinction is a surprisingly modern one, resting on scientific knowledge about nature.

'When we talk about extinction, we are imagining the human species disappearing and the rest of the universe indefinitely persisting, in its vastness, without us.

'This is very different from what Christians imagine when they talk about Rapture or Judgement Day.'

While TikTok evangelists predicted the rapture would come this week, apocalypse experts say that human life is much more likely to be destroyed by our own actions than any outside force - such as nuclear war (AI–generated impression) 

Nuclear war

Scientists who study the destruction of humanity talk about what they call 'existential risks' – threats that could wipe out the human species.

Ever since humans learned to split the atom, one of the most pressing existential risks has been nuclear war.

During the Cold War, fears of nuclear war were so high that governments around the world were seriously planning for life after the total annihilation of society.

The risk posed by nuclear war dropped after the fall of the Soviet Union, but experts now think the threat is spiking.

Earlier this year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock one second closer to midnight, citing an increased risk of a nuclear exchange.

The nine countries which possess nuclear arms hold a total of 12,331 warheads, with Russia alone holding enough bombs to destroy seven per cent of urban land worldwide.

However, the worrying prospect is that humanity could actually be wiped out by only a tiny fraction of these weapons.

The nine nations with nuclear weapons currently hold 12,331 nuclear warheads, which could lead to millions of deaths (AI–generated impression) 

The five most likely causes of human extinction

1. Rogue AI

2. Nuclear war

3. Engineered bioweapons

4. Climate change

5. Natural disasters or asteroid strike  

Dr Moynihan says: 'Newer research shows that even a relatively regional nuclear exchange could lead to worldwide climate fallout.

'Debris from fires in city centres would loom into the stratosphere, where it would dim sunlight, causing crop failures.

'Something similar led to the demise of the dinosaurs, though that was caused by an asteroid strike.'

Studies have shown that a so–called 'nuclear winter' would actually be far worse than Cold War predictions suggested.

Using modern climate models, researchers have shown that a nuclear exchange would plunge the planet into a 'nuclear little ice age' lasting thousands of years.

Reduced sunlight would plunge global temperatures by up to 10˚C (18˚F) for nearly a decade, devastating the world's agricultural production.

Modelling suggests that a small nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would deprive 2.5 billion people of food for at least two years.

Meanwhile, a global nuclear war would kill 360 million civilians immediately and lead to the starvation of 5.3 billion people in just two years following the first explosion.

Even a limited nuclear exchange could plunge the world into a 'little nuclear ice age' which would drop global temperatures by 10°C (18°F) for thousands of years (AI–generated impression) 

Dr Moynihan says: 'Some argue it's hard to draw a clear line from this to the eradication of all humans, everywhere, but we don't want to find out.'

Engineered bioweapons

Just like the threat of nuclear arms, another likely way that humanity could come to an end is through the release of an engineered bioweapon.

Since 1973, when scientists created the first genetically modified bacteria, humanity has been steadily increasing its capacity to make deadly diseases.

These man–made diseases pose a significantly greater threat to our existence than anything found in nature.

Otto Barten, founder of the Existential Risk Observatory, told the Daily Mail: 'We have a lot of experience with natural pandemics, and these have not led to human extinction in the last 300,000 years.

'Therefore, although natural pandemics remain a very serious risk, this is very likely not going to cause our complete demise.

'However, man–made pandemics might be engineered specifically to maximise effectiveness, in a way that doesn't occur in nature.'

Natural pandemics are unlikely to lead to human extinction, but genetically engineered variants could be much more deadly (AI–generated impression) 

Experts are concerned that the tools needed to engineer deadly pathogens are becoming more accessible and could fall into the wrong hands (AI–generated impression) 

Currently, the means to create such deadly diseases are limited to a handful of states that wouldn't benefit from unleashing a deadly plague.

However, scientists have warned that improving technologies like AI mean that this ability is likely to fall into the hands of more and more people.

If terrorists gain the ability to create deadly bioweapons, they could release a pathogen that would spread wildly out of control and eventually lead to humanity's extinction.

What would be left behind would be a world that looks like it does now, but with all traces of living humans wiped away.

Dr Moynihan adds: 'Extinction is, in this way, the total frustration of any kind of moral order; again, within a universe that persists, silently, without us.'

Rogue artificial intelligence

Experts currently believe that the biggest danger humanity is creating for itself is artificial intelligence.

Scientists who study existential risk think there is anywhere between a 10 and 90 per cent chance that humanity will not survive the advent of superintelligent AI.

One of the biggest risks to humanity is the creation of a rogue AI which becomes 'unaligned' with humanity's interests (AI–generated impression) 

What is a rogue AI?

Some AI experts are concerned that AI might soon reach a state called superintelligence, meaning it is more intelligent than the combined efforts of all humans.

Once this happens, the AI might start to develop its own goals.

If those goals don't align with what humans want, this is called an unaligned or 'rogue' AI.

A rogue AI might not be openly hostile to humans, but if humanity's extinction is more convenient for its goals, it could eliminate all living humans.

The big concern is that a sufficiently intelligent AI will become 'unaligned', meaning its goals and ambitions will cease to line up with the interests of humanity.

Dr Moynihan says: 'If an AI becomes smarter than us and also becomes agential — that is, capable of conjuring its own goals and acting on them.'

If an AI becomes agentic, it doesn't even need to be openly hostile to humans for it to wipe us out.

When an agentic AI has a goal that differs from what humans want, the AI would naturally see humans turning it off as a hindrance to that goal and do everything it can to prevent that.

The AI might be totally indifferent to humans, but simply decides that the resources and systems that keep humanity alive would be better used pursuing its own ambitions.

Experts don't know exactly what those goals might be or how the AI might try to pursue them, which is exactly what makes an unaligned AI so dangerous.

'The problem is that it's impossible to predict the actions of something immeasurably smarter than you,' says Dr Moynihan.

'It's hard to imagine how we could anticipate, intercept, or prevent the AI's plans to implement them.'

Experts aren't sure how an AI would chose to wipe out humanity, which is what makes them so dangerous - but it could involved usurping our own computerised weapons or nuclear launch systems (AI–generated impression) 

Some experts have suggested that an AI might take control of existing weapon systems or nuclear missiles, manipulate humans into carrying out its orders, or design its own bioweapons.

However, the scarier prospect is that AI might destroy us in a way we literally cannot conceive of.

Dr Moynihan says: 'The general fear is that a smarter–than–human AI would be able to manipulate matter and energy with far more finesse than we can muster.

'Drone strikes would have been incomprehensible to the earliest human farmers: the laws of physics haven't changed in the meantime, just our comprehension of them.

'Regardless, if something like this is possible, and ever does come to pass, it would probably unfold in ways far stranger than anyone currently imagines. It won't involve metallic, humanoid robots with guns and glowing scarlet eyes.'

Climate change 

Mr Barten says: 'Climate change is also an existential risk, meaning it could lead to the complete annihilation of humanity, but experts believe this has less than a one in a thousand chance of happening.'

Is climate change an existential risk?

In an unlikely but terrifying scenario, a runaway greenhouse effect could cause all water on Earth to evaporate and escape into space, leaving the planet dry and barren (AI–generated impression)

However, there are a few unlikely scenarios in which climate change could lead to human extinction.

For example, if the world becomes hot enough, large amounts of water vapour could escape into the upper atmosphere in a phenomenon known as the moist greenhouse effect.

There, intense solar radiation would break the water down into oxygen and hydrogen, which is light enough to easily escape into space.

At the same time, water vapour in the atmosphere would weaken the mechanisms which usually prevent gases from escaping.

This would lead to a runaway cycle in which all water on Earth escapes into space, leaving the planet dry and totally uninhabitable.

The good news is that, although climate change is making our climate hotter, the moist greenhouse effect won't kick in unless the climate gets much hotter than scientists currently predict. 

The bad news is that the moist greenhouse effect will almost certainly occur in about 1.5 billion years when the sun starts to expand.

Elon Musk's hatred of AI explained: Billionaire believes it will spell the end of humans - a fear Stephen Hawking shared

Elon Musk pictured in 2022

Elon Musk wants to push technology to its absolute limit, from space travel to self-driving cars — but he draws the line at artificial intelligence. 

The billionaire first shared his distaste for AI in 2014, calling it humanity's 'biggest existential threat' and comparing it to 'summoning the demon'.

At the time, Musk also revealed he was investing in AI companies not to make money but to keep an eye on the technology in case it gets out of hand. 

His main fear is that in the wrong hands, if AI becomes advanced, it could overtake humans and spell the end of mankind, which is known as The Singularity.

That concern is shared among many brilliant minds, including the late Stephen Hawking, who told the BBC in 2014: 'The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.

'It would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate.' 

Despite his fear of AI, Musk has invested in the San Francisco-based AI group Vicarious, in DeepMind - which has since been acquired by Google - and OpenAI, creating the popular ChatGPT program that has taken the world by storm in recent months.

During a 2016 interview, Musk noted that he and OpenAI created the company to 'have democratisation of AI technology to make it widely available'.

Musk founded OpenAI with Sam Altman, the company's CEO, but in 2018 the billionaire attempted to take control of the start-up.

His request was rejected, forcing him to quit OpenAI and move on with his other projects.

In November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, which became an instant success worldwide.

The chatbot uses 'large language model' software to train itself by scouring a massive amount of text data so it can learn to generate eerily human-like text in response to a given prompt. 

ChatGPT is used to write research papers, books, news articles, emails and more.

But while Altman is basking in its glory, Musk is attacking ChatGPT.

He says the AI is 'woke' and deviates from OpenAI's original non-profit mission.

'OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it 'Open' AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft, Musk tweeted in February.

The Singularity is making waves worldwide as artificial intelligence advances in ways only seen in science fiction - but what does it actually mean?

In simple terms, it describes a hypothetical future where technology surpasses human intelligence and changes the path of our evolution.

Experts have said that once AI reaches this point, it will be able to innovate much faster than humans. 

There are two ways the advancement could play out, with the first leading to humans and machines working together to create a world better suited for humanity.

For example, humans could scan their consciousness and store it in a computer in which they will live forever.

The second scenario is that AI becomes more powerful than humans, taking control and making humans its slaves - but if this is true, it is far off in the distant future.

Researchers are now looking for signs of AI reaching The Singularity, such as the technology's ability to translate speech with the accuracy of a human and perform tasks faster.

Former Google engineer Ray Kurzweil predicts it will be reached by 2045.

He has made 147 predictions about technology advancements since the early 1990s - and 86 per cent have been correct. 

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{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/index.html }

29-09-2025 om 18:12 geschreven door peter  

NASA boss reveals plans for an entire VILLAGE on the moon by 2035

• READ MORE: The moon is drifting AWAY from Earth by 1.5 inches every year

By WILIAM HUNTER, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY REPORTER

NASA will put an entire 'village' on the moon by 2035, according to the US space agency's boss.

Sean Duffy, NASA administrator, has revealed plans to build a sustainable and permanent outpost on the lunar surface within the next decade.

Mr Duffy appeared on a panel at the International Aeronautical Congress (IAC) in Sydney alongside the heads of other international space agencies.

During the panel, he said: 'We are going to have sustained human life on the moon.

'Not just an outpost, but a village.'

As early as February next year, NASA will launch the Artemis II mission and send four astronauts on the first lunar trip in over 50 years.

While Artemis II will not land on the moon's surface, NASA's ultimate goal is to establish a long-term base on the moon.

That base will likely be nuclear-powered, capable of housing astronauts on a permanent basis, and built out of the materials found on the lunar surface.  

Asked what success would look like for NASA in a decade, Mr Duffy said: 'We are going to have sustained human life on the moon.' This comes as the space agency prepares for its first missions to the lunar surface since the end of the Apollo programme 

Acting NASA director Sean Duffy (pictured) has said the space agency will build a 'village' on the moon by 2035

This year, the theme of the IAC conference was 'Sustainable Space: Resilient Earth', which Mr Duffy took to mean how NASA could sustain life in space.

While the heads of the European, Canadian, and Japanese space agencies talked up how their satellites were helping climate research, NASA focused exclusively on space exploration.

In addition to revealing his plans for the moon, Mr Duffy also made bold claims about the US's ambitions for Mars.

Asked what success looks like for NASA in a decade, Mr Duffy said that the agency would have 'made leaps and bounds on our mission to get to Mars.'

He also predicted that the US would be 'on the cusp of putting human boots on Mars.'

However, NASA's more immediate goal is to put humans back on the moon for the first time since the Apollo missions concluded in 1972.

During the Artemis II mission next February, astronauts will test the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft that will eventually carry humans to the moon.

Over 10 days, the crew will travel 5,700 miles (9,200 km) past the moon, testing the onboard systems and gathering data on their bodies' reactions, before returning to Earth.

Sean Duffy, NASA administrator, has revealed plans to build a sustainable and permanent outpost on the lunar surface within the next decade (AI image)

As early as February 2026, NASA will launch the Artemis II mission and send four astronauts on a mission to orbit the moon. Their goal is to test the equipment and systems that will be used in a lunar landing scheduled for mid-2027

NASA's Artemis Mission Timeline

Artemis I

- Uncrewed lunar flight test

- Launched November, 2022

Artemis II 

- Crewed Lunar Flyby

- Launch planned for April, 2026

Artemis III

- Crewed Surface Landing

- Launch planned for mid-2027

Artemis IV

- Building First Lunar Space Station

- Launch targeting September 2028

But the big test for NASA will come in mid-2027 with the launch of Artemis III, which plans to land two astronauts at a site near the moon's south pole.

Unlike the Apollo missions, which spent up to 22 hours on the lunar surface, Artemis III will require astronauts to live on the moon for around seven days.

The data they collect on the geology and conditions around the South Pole will all be used to prepare for the ultimate goal of constructing a permanent base on the moon.

Although the technical details are still unclear, what that lunar base might look like is starting to take shape.

In August, Mr Duffy launched a directive, calling for the US to become the first nation to put a nuclear reactor on the moon.

Following that, NASA has now issued a Request For Information (RFI), asking companies to register their interest in building the reactor.

Dubbed the Fission Surface Power System, NASA says this reactor will need to weigh less than 15 tonnes and be capable of producing 100kWe of power.

That is enough energy to power a lunar base through the 14-day lunar nights, during which solar panels will be ineffective.

This comes after NASA issued a directive calling for the USA to become the first nation to deploy a nuclear reactor on the moon to support a permanent lunar settlement. Pictured: A NASA rendering of a potential lunar nuclear reactor design 

Any reactor that proves itself useful on the moon will also be valuable for future Martian exploration missions, where the extreme distances require humans to stay on the surface for long periods.

NASA has also begun to research the materials which could be used to create the structure of the base.

In a recent experiment, astronauts on the ISS practised cement mixing techniques to see how well they worked in conditions outside of Earth's gravity.

In a statement, NASA officials said one option for building the moon base could be 'using the microgravity environment to mix lunar soil with other materials to make cement and build habitable structures on the moon.'

Read More

• Moon landing conspiracy theories are reignited online as NASA reveals details for Artemis II 

If that proves viable, the base could be 3D printed by machines sent to the moon on rockets, using only the lunar soil and water found at the South Pole site.  

Despite fears that President Donald Trump would lose interest in missions to the moon, under Mr Duffy, NASA has taken an increasingly bold stance on lunar exploration.

In a recent statement, Mr Duffy said that NASA would 'win the second space race' against China through the Artemis programme.

Dr Duffy said: 'We're going back to the Moon, and this time, when we plant our flag, we stay.'

WHAT WAS THE APOLLO PROGRAMME?

This NASA photo taken on July 16, 1969 shows the huge, 363ft tall Apollo 11 rocket launched from pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center

Apollo was the NASA programme that launched in 1961 and got the first man on the moon eight years later.

The first four flights tested the equipment for the Apollo Program and six of the other seven flights managed to land on the moon.

The first manned mission to the moon was Apollo 8 which circled around it on Christmas Eve in 1968 but did not land.

The crew of Apollo 9 spent ten days orbiting Earth and completed the first manned flight of the lunar module – the section of the Apollo rocket that would later land Neil Armstrong on the moon.  

The Apollo 11 mission was the first one to land on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969.

The capsule landed on the Sea of Tranquillity, carrying mission commander Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin.

Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the lunar surface while Michael Collins remained in orbit around the moon. 

When Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon, he said, 'That's one small step for (a) man; one giant leap for mankind.'

Apollo 12 landed later that year on November 19 on the Ocean of Storms.

Apollo 13 was to be the third mission to land on the moon, but just under 56 hours into flight, an oxygen tank explosion forced the crew to cancel the lunar landing and move into the Aquarius lunar module to return back to Earth.  

Apollo 15 was the ninth manned lunar mission in the Apollo space program, and considered at the time the most successful manned space flight up to that moment because of its long duration and greater emphasis on scientific exploration than had been possible on previous missions. 

The last Apollo moon landing happened in 1972 after a total of 12 astronauts had touched down on the lunar surface.

Astronaut Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin is pictured unpacking experiments from the lunar module on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission. He was photographed by Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong on July 20, 1969

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29-09-2025 om 17:26 geschreven door peter  

Pentagon baffled by 8,000 mysterious UFO orbs hovering over US military bases

• MORE: Mysterious 'UFO' caught hovering over Disney World before vanishing into the darkness

By CHRIS MELORE, US ASSISTANT SCIENCE EDITOR

An invasion of small metallic orbs has been spotted hovering over the US in recent years, leaving the Pentagon scrambling to identify these mysterious UFOs.

A new report from the crowdsourced platform Enigma, which allows people to report sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), reveals more than 8,000 sightings across the US between December 2022 and June 2025. 

Among these, 422 reports specifically describe metallic orbs, with the majority observed between 1am and 4am near military installations in New York, California, and Arizona. 

Eyewitnesses, including civilians, pilots, and military personnel, reported seeing the spheres hover silently before moving at extreme speeds, leaving no trace of their departure. 

Some of the sightings have been captured on video or radar, though many remain unexplained. 

'I was walking into work when I looked up and saw two metallic liquid-like objects hovering for about two minutes,' said one witness over Brooklyn's Fort Hamilton in June 2024. 

Another in California described seeing a metallic orb above Los Angeles shortly after a squadron of planes flew by. 

The Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has been charged with investigating claims of UFOs and has dismissed many as natural phenomena like flocks of birds, conventional aircraft, drones, balloons, or other explainable objects. 

Military drone footage from the Middle east in 2022 revealed a metal sphere flying through the sky in broad daylight (circled in purple)

The crowdsourced platform Enigma reported that over 8,000 orbs have been seen over the US since December 2022

However, some cases have remained unsolved, reportedly due to a lack of data. Of the 757 UFO cases between May 2023 and June 2024 released in AARO's annual report, 21 cases were classified as unresolved sightings.

Although the Pentagon and civilian groups like the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) have also been cataloging these incidents, many have continued to baffle military officials, who have no way of explaining what was seen.

While the new report focused on the thousands of sightings in the US over the last three years, strange orbs have been documented all over the world, from Puerto Rico to the Middle East.

Moreover, these tiny craft have apparently been visiting our skies for decades, with pilots during World War II reporting similar orbs over the skies of Europe.

Enigma revealed that more than 360 'metallic orb' reports took place within a few miles of military bases here on US soil.

In three of those cases, witnesses revealed that the orbs got within five miles of Fort Hamilton in New York, Papago Military Reserve in Arizona, and Los Angeles Air Force Base on multiple occasions.

These mystery orb sightings include one shocking encounter revealed by Dr Sean Kirkpatrick, the former director of AARO, which was captured on a MQ-9 Reaper drone's camera in the Middle East in 2022.

Enigma revealed that witnesses spotted strange orbs flying above Fort Hamilton military base in New York multiple times

Even more close calls were documented around Los Angeles Air Force Base in California between 2022 and 2025

Kirkpatrick warned that if these videos didn't prove that aliens exist, then they're evidence that a rival foreign power could be 'doing stuff in our backyard.'

Some theories have suggested these orbs could be surveillance devices from foreign powers like China or Russia.

Government officials believed they might be advanced drones, due to their tremendous agility and ability to avoid radar, according to a 2022 report in the New York Times.

This theory exploded into rampant paranoia last year, when countless drones were spotted flying over the East Coast, including over key military sites and President Trump's property in New Jersey.

As for Enigma's report, many of the orb sightings have been concentrated in Texas and Florida. 

In fact, visitors at Disney World's Epcot in Florida got an unexpected sight this month, when a glowing orb appeared over the amusement park.

After searching online and finding no information about drones or satellites in the area, Morgan Huelsman, digital director of The Bobby Bones Show, described the object as a 'UFO,' adding, 'definitely a UFO with aliens.'

The Enigma platform has also received sightings from all over the US, over critical infrastructure such as power plants, and over naval vessels at sea.

The Buga Sphere recovered in Colombia (pictured) remains one of the only pieces of physical evidence tied to metallic orb sightings worldwide

However, the most convincing proof of this invasion of mysterious orbs has been found in Colombia, where locals actually recovered a metallic sphere that was seen hovering over the town of Buga in March.

The 'Buga Sphere' has become a major topic of discussion among UFO researchers, with scientists claiming the object contains a maze of fiber-optic wires that suggest it can send and receive signals.

After striking a power line and crashing to the ground, the object also appeared to have somehow dehydrated the field it landed in, killing all the grass and soil where it touched down.

Scientists suggested this was proof that the object produced some kind of energy field, but researchers had not attempted to forcibly cut the object open so far. The sphere has since been taken to Mexico for further analysis.

However, UFO researcher Dr Julia Mossbridge from the University of San Diego is among the many who doubt the authenticity of the Buga Sphere, calling it a 'man-made art project.'

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28-09-2025 om 23:31 geschreven door peter  

Mars is the most studied planet in the Solar System after Earth. Right now, there are six spacecraft belonging to four different space agencies operating in its orbit. They are accompanied by two rovers and a drone that has been repurposed as an autonomous weather station. We will tell you about these spacecraft, their main tasks, and discoveries.

NASA’s Martian armada

Of all the space agencies, NASA has the largest Martian armada. It consists of three orbital and three ground-based vehicles.

The oldest of these is Mars Odyssey, launched back in 2001 (hence its name, which was given in honor of “2001: A Space Odyssey”). It is the longest-running Martian spacecraft in history, and of all interplanetary missions, it is second only to the legendary Voyager probes in this respect.

The main objective of the Mars Odyssey was to map the surface of Mars. Over the years, the spacecraft took nearly 1.5 million images of the Red Planet in the visible and infrared ranges, compiling a global map. This map was later used to select landing sites for subsequent Mars missions. Mars Odyssey also discovered large reserves of water ice beneath the surface of the Red Planet, collected data on the radiation environment in its vicinity, studied seasonal changes in the polar caps, and photographed Phobos.

Of course, such a long stay in space could not fail to affect the technical condition of the Mars Odyssey. One of its main scientific instruments has failed, and its fuel reserves are almost exhausted. According to engineers’ estimates, they will last until the end of this year or the beginning of next year. However, Mars Odyssey may cease operations earlier if NASA’s 2026 budget proposal, which calls for the early termination of the mission, is approved.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is probably one of the most famous Mars explorers in history. It has been orbiting Mars since 2006. During this time, it has transmitted over 400 terabytes of data to Earth, including millions of images of the planet’s surface.

The MRO data has significantly expanded our knowledge of Mars. It has compiled the most detailed map of the Red Planet’s surface and discovered many geological formations that have provided insight into its past. Its data has been and continues to be used to search for landing sites for Mars expeditions. It is also actively used as a space “detective.” MRO images have revealed the mystery of the disappearance of the Beagle 2 probe and the fate of the Schiaparelli landing platform. In addition, it regularly photographs new craters formed on Mars as a result of asteroid impacts.

Finally, MRO plays a key role in maintaining communication with NASA’s Mars rovers, relaying their data back to Earth. It will likely continue to do so for a long time to come. According to the latest estimates, MRO has enough fuel reserves to continue operating until the middle of the next decade.

The MAVEN spacecraft is NASA’s newest Mars explorer. It was launched in 2013. MAVEN is used to study the Martian atmosphere. Over the years, it has measured the rate at which the atmosphere is leaking into space. MAVEN has also studied its interaction with the solar wind, the tail of comet C/2013 A1, and measured radiation levels in the vicinity of Mars. Like MRO, MAVEN also plays a very important role in communicating with Mars rovers, relaying their data back to Earth.

Like Mars Odyssey, MAVEN is now under threat of cancellation due to the White House’s proposed new NASA budget. But space enthusiasts hope that the mission can be saved. Its premature closure would deal a significant blow to American plans for Mars exploration.

Mars rovers and a drone that became a weather station

In addition to three orbital spacecraft, NASA also has two rovers operating on the surface of the Red Planet. The first is Curiosity, which landed at the end of 2012. The rover is conducting research in Gale Crater, at the bottom of which there was once a lake.

During its mission, Curiosity has traveled over 35 km. This has affected its condition. Some of the rover’s wheels have developed holes, and its radioisotope thermoelectric generator now produces much less energy than it did during landing. Nevertheless, the rover is still successfully performing its tasks, and NASA hopes that it will continue to operate for many years to come.

The Perseverance rover, which landed in February 2021, was based on Curiosity but has a set of more advanced scientific instruments. These have enabled it to make a number of high-profile discoveries, including the recent discovery of biosignatures. The rover is also collecting soil samples, which may be delivered to Earth in the future by a special mission.

Perseverance landed on Mars together with the Ingenuity helicopter drone. In 2024, it crashed and lost its ability to fly. After that, engineers switched it to autonomous weather station mode. It is assumed that it wakes up every day, takes pictures of the surface, and collects temperature data. Whether this is true or not is impossible to verify at this time: Perseverance has moved too far away from the drone to maintain communication with it. However, NASA engineers believe that Ingenuity will be able to operate in this mode for about 20 years.

In the future, the drone may be selected for a specific mission. The data stored inside it will not only benefit developers of Martian technology but will also allow scientists to gain a long-term understanding of Martian weather conditions and dust movement.

European Mars researchers

The European Space Agency boasts two spacecraft operating in Martian orbit. The first is Mars Express, which was launched back in 2003 and is second only to Mars Odysseus in terms of service life.

Source: ESA

Despite its considerable age, Mars Express continues to delight us regularly with various discoveries. Many of these have been made possible by the radar on board. Analysis of its data, in particular, has revealed signs of liquid water in the planet’s interior. Mars Express also photographed the famous “Face on Mars” in high resolution. To the disappointment of all ufologists, it turned out to be not an alien artifact, but merely a rock formation.

The TGO spacecraft has been orbiting Mars since 2016. Its main task is to study the planet’s atmosphere and search for rare compounds that indicate the possibility of life. The spacecraft has also compiled a global map that allows scientists to estimate the percentage of water ice in the subsurface layers of Mars.

Initially, it was assumed that TGO would work in tandem with the Rosalind Franklin rover. However, due to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the breakdown of cooperation between ESA and Roscosmos, the latter remained on Earth. The rover may be launched in 2028, but this date is still subject to change.

New Mars explorers

NASA and ESA are the “old hands” in the study of Mars. However, in recent years, they have faced competition from new space powers that have launched their own Mars missions. One of them is the UAE. In 2020, it sent the first Arab interplanetary mission in history to Mars, called Emirates Mars Mission.

The key scientific goal of this mission is to create a complete picture of the Martian atmosphere. The spacecraft will study how the weather changes throughout the local day and year, investigate meteorological events in the lower atmosphere, such as dust storms, and observe the climate in different geographical regions of Mars. Based on images from the Emirates Mars Mission, scientists have also created a three-dimensional map of the planet’s surface.

The Chinese Tianwen-1 mission was also launched in 2020. It was the first step in China’s ambitious program to conquer the Red Planet. The main task of the spacecraft is to conduct a global survey of Mars, including mapping the morphology and geological structure of the planet, studying the characteristics of the surface layer and the distribution of water ice in it, analyzing the composition of surface materials, measuring the parameters of the planet’s ionosphere, electromagnetic and gravitational fields, and obtaining information about the climate of Mars.

The tasks assigned to Tianwen-1 appear to be quite ambitious. However, this is only a prelude to the much more complex and costly Tianwen-3 mission. As part of this mission, China plans to bring samples of Martian soil to Earth for the first time in history. At present, the launch of Tianwen-3 is scheduled for 2028.

• Posted in Articles, Questions

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28-09-2025 om 23:12 geschreven door peter  

Yorkshire resident spots mysterious collection of ghostly UFOs near Leeds – including one that looks like a SPOON 

• READ MORE: Saucer-shaped 'UFO' spotted flying though the hills near Skipton

By JONATHAN CHADWICK, ASSISTANT SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY EDITOR 

Yorkshire may be swiftly becoming Britain's 'UFO' hotspot.

Several remarkable new photos reveal a flurry of so-called 'unidentified flying objects' in Headingley in Leeds, West Yorkshire. 

Local resident and photographer Jesse Gallagher snapped the strange collection of unearthly bodies over several months using his iPhone.

The snaps, shared exclusively with the Daily Mail, were all taken after dark around midnight, making their ghostly light easier for the camera to detect. 

And they certainly form an eerie motely crew of strange shapes and sizes, several deviating a lot from traditional depictions of a UFO. 

'When zooming in, the orbs are either white or multi-coloured and can be seen pulsating,' Mr Gallagher told the Daily Mail. 

'One recording has the moon as a backdrop which provides some interesting perspective.

'I have seen other videos of similar objects around the world.'  

They make up an eerie motely crew of strange shapes and sizes, deviating a lot from traditional depictions of a UFO. Pictured, the spoon-shaped entity 

Another entity in a deeper shade of blue seems to form a very rough sphere or orb and be emitting a faint ring of light

Mr Gallagher said his footage was captured around midnight in Headingley between August 2021 and November 2023. 

Bizarrely, one of the UFOs with a ghostly slivery-blue tint resembles a spoon or a spade – with a narrow stream of light connecting a fainter circle.

Another entity in an even deeper shade of blue seems to form a very rough sphere or orb and be emitting a faint beams of light. 

Meanwhile, the third snap shows a bright white ball of brilliant light, almost perfectly circular, with the moon as a tiny blob in the background. 

But perhaps most intriguing photo shows a textured grey object with an unusual level of detail – a possible cone or horn, with what seems to be a hole in the middle. 

Clues from its appearance suggest it could be a discarded piece of machinery or a fragment of disused spacecraft.

But, in such an instance, rules of physics surely dictate that it would hit the ground. 

Philip Mantle, a British UFO researcher, said the images show some kind of 'distant light source that is out of focus'. 

The third snap shows a bright white ball of brilliant light, almost perfectly circular, with the moon a tiny blob in the background

A piece of spacecraft? Perhaps most intriguing of the four pictures is this one, showing a textured grey object with an unusual level of detail

'The out of focus image makes the light look very different from what the naked eye would see,' he told the Daily Mail. 

'They could well be simple lens flares as seen in the photo of the moon.' 

But Mr Mantle stopped short of calling them 'UFOs' – a term that may or may not describe an object thought to have an extraterrestrial origin.

Only last week, another Yorkshire resident revealed  photos of a bizarre saucer-shaped object just outside of Skipton. 

John Tunnah took about 10 or 12 photographs from his vantage point near the hills, but the object only appeared in one of them.

The object is remarkably similar to the classic UFO saucer shape depicted in popular culture, with a distinctive round and elongated shape. 

Nick Pope, a UFO expert formerly with the UK's Ministry of Defence, offered a number of explanations for Mr Tunnah's photo. 

'When photos show an anomaly that wasn't seen at the time, I suspect either a glitch with the camera, or a fast-moving object like a bird or an insect, close to the lens,' Mr Pope told the Daily Mail. 

This bizarre saucer-shaped object was snapped with a Pentax Optio SVi camera by Yorkshire photographer John Tunnah

The man's attention was drawn by a perfectly formed arch of cloud over the trees (centre) - and only later did he notice the saucer-shaped object on the left

UFOs became a major subject of interest after World War II and were thought by some researchers to be intelligent extraterrestrial life visiting Earth. 

In the US, the government's Department of Defense, commonly known as the Pentagon, now refrains from using the term UFO at all.

This is largely because it is commonly associated with wind up conspiracy theories and paranoia.

Instead, the Pentagon uses UAP – 'unidentified aerial phenomenon' – although in most places this has low usage and is yet to enter common parlance.

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28-09-2025 om 23:11 geschreven door peter  

A respected congressman has claimed that advanced alien beings could be hiding out in 'five or six' underwater UFO bases right off the US coast.

Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett, a member of the House Oversight Committee overseeing UFO reports, drew massive attention on social media after saying that he believed there were alien 'entities' currently living in deep-water areas on Earth.

The September 17 clip posted on X has already been viewed more than 1.9 million times.

During the sidewalk interview with a UFO researcher and documentary filmmaker who goes by the pseudonym Red Panda Koala, Burchett suggested that advanced alien beings or civilizations may have been hiding in Earth's oceans for generations.

He added that there have been frequent sightings of unidentified craft around five or six specific deep-sea areas, which he found significant given how little is known about the ocean compared to the moon's surface.

The congressman also noted that US Navy personnel have reported chasing these underwater craft that move at extraordinary speeds and far surpass the abilities of current US military technology.

Despite these claims, no verifiable physical evidence, such as artifacts or clear footage of these underwater craft, has been publicly presented to confirm the existence of alien bases.

Skeptics have argued that the reliance on anecdotal reports from naval personnel and the lack of peer-reviewed scientific data casts significant doubt on the claims made during recent congressional hearings on UFO phenomena.

Tennessee congressman Tim Burchett (pictured) suggested in a viral clip online that there are alien beings in secret underwater bases near the US (Stock Image)

UFO researcher Dr Michael Salla said these bases are believed to be in a region of the Atlantic near the Bahamas

Following the explosive revelations, Dr Michael Salla, an author and researcher focused on extraterrestrial phenomena, revealed where it's believed these UFO bases may be, singling out a region of the Atlantic Ocean near the Bahamas.

He added that he's also spoken to credible whistleblowers, including senior military and executive branch officials, who confirm the existence of underwater bases and advanced craft.

Dr Salla highlighted that the US Navy operates a top-secret underwater facility he likened to Area 51 called AUTEC, which stands for the Atlantic Undersea Testing and Evaluation Center, right in this region of the Atlantic.

'Just to the right of it is Tongue of the Ocean, which is a very deep part of the ocean there in the Bahamas. It drops off immediately around 3,000 feet,' Salla said while appearing on the Redacted podcast on September 19.

'So that's ideal for a submarine, but it's also a place where people have seen many UFOs, many underwater craft coming into and leaving the water. So, there have been a lot of UFO sightings in that area,' he revealed.

The UFO researcher noted that he had interviewed two eyewitnesses who claimed that they had visited these secret bases, including one who was a US Army whistleblower who used the pseudonym 'JP.'

The whistleblower claimed he was on a mission where he was taken by a Blackhawk helicopter to an ocean platform, then boarded a high-tech submarine crewed by tall, Nordic-looking extraterrestrials.

The submarine, capable of space travel, took him to an underwater city under a dome, resembling Dubai, with a large white pyramid. The mission involved retrieving an artifact, but no physical evidence of this mission has ever been produced.

Congressman Eric Burlison of Missouri recently revealed video of a US military drone striking an orb-shaped UFO with a missile, which bounced off and did not stop the craft

Despite Burchett and Salla's lack of tangible evidence, there has been growing interest and testimony from credible sources, including military personnel at congressional hearings, suggesting that UFOs and extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth. 

A recent congressional hearing on September 9 featured new whistleblowers who shared their experiences with UFOs, including a video showing an orb-like object surviving a missile strike and splitting into four parts they kept flying.

'We have naval personnel telling me we have these sightings, these underwater craft they're chasing that go hundreds of miles an hour, and the best we got is something that does maybe a little under forty miles an hour,' Burchett said in the interview posted on X.

'So I got a lot of questions about that stuff.'

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28-09-2025 om 22:41 geschreven door peter  

One of the main mysteries that scientists want to solve in the Solar System is the existence of life on Mars – today or in the past. But why do scientists think there should be something there at all? The reasons for this are quite complex and interesting, because history and biology, physics and chemistry are intertwined.

Life on Mars and beyond

One of the topics that inevitably arises when discussing space exploration is life on Mars. One of the largest space programs currently being implemented by NASA is dedicated to discovering whether life exists there now or may have existed in the past. But why do scientists think that something can be found on Mars? Why not on some other planet?

The reason for this is primarily historical. In general, the idea that there may be living beings on other planets is relatively new. Back in the early 17th century, this statement, made by Giordano Bruno, was used to prove that he was a heretic. And when scientists finally got the chance to speak more freely, they immediately started talking about the possibility of life on absolutely all celestial bodies.

For example, intelligent beings were sought for quite a long time (and even claimed to have been found) on the Moon. Today, we could immediately come up with a whole bunch of scientific arguments, but it is worth remembering that in the 18th century, people were just beginning to learn about things such as the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere and its role in biological processes.

Gradually, scientists realized how much life depends on the availability of certain substances and physical conditions, but even in the 19th century, Mars seemed to be a planet with changing seasons and fairly large bodies of water.

However, at the beginning of the 20th century, scientists realized that Martian canals were just an optical illusion, and that Mars itself was, at best, a dry steppe and, at worst, bare rock. However, it was at this time that the popularization of science and science fiction was born, so the public continued to believe in the existence of life on Mars.

Everything finally fell into place when, in 1965, Mariner 4 flew past Mars and photographed it from close range for the first time. Scientists were presented with a planet with a very thin atmosphere unsuitable for breathing, a weak magnetic field, and no trace of water or green foliage. So why have we not yet decided, once and for all, that there is no life there?

What do you need to live?

One of the reasons why people are still searching for life on Mars is habit. People have believed for so long that there is a biosphere there that it is not so easy to give up on this idea. However, there are also purely scientific reasons not to stop searching.

First of all, we must remember what life is. Its general definition is rather vague, but it is quite possible to use the description of what it is on Earth. Life is a set of chemical processes involving complex carbon compounds that occur in an aquatic environment and ensure the ability of biological systems to reproduce themselves. Most often, these processes occur with the participation of oxygen.

It follows that the two main factors determining the possibility of life are the presence of carbon and water. Carbon is not a problem on Mars. The entire atmosphere consists of carbon dioxide, i.e., carbon monoxide. And there is plenty of carbonate rock on the surface.

Water is not so simple. There is a lot of it in the form of ice on the surface of Mars, mainly concentrated in the ice caps at the poles, although it can also be found beneath the surface in temperate latitudes. However, for life to exist, water must be in a liquid state. On Mars, temperatures range from +20°C at the equator during the day to -153°C at the poles at night.

That is, at least somewhere it should be in a liquid state, but that would be true for Earth. On Mars, with its pressure 170 times lower than Earth’s, ice immediately turns into a gaseous state.

Oxygen is also essential for life, and there is plenty of it on Mars. It is the second component of carbon dioxide in the planet’s atmosphere, and the famous red color of its surface is due to iron oxides.

Thus, all the components necessary for life exist on the surface of Mars, and this is what makes it one of the best targets for the search for life beyond Earth. If only this planet were a little warmer and its atmosphere had higher pressure…

The Past of Mars

There were such periods in the history of Mars. We are talking about the Noachian period, which began about 4.1 billion years ago and ended 3.8 billion years ago. During this time, Mars had a primitive atmosphere of hydrogen, which gradually changed to a fairly dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. Scientists have found numerous traces of volcanism, which enriched the planet’s gas envelope with substances that caused the greenhouse effect.

During this period, Mars’ climate was warm enough for water to flow on its surface. Scientists know this for sure because they have found numerous riverbeds and former lakes, and at their bottoms – clay and other rocks that can only form in conditions of constant water presence.

At the same time, the water was of very different quality. At least in the beginning, volcanic geysers with acidic water played a major role. Later, they were replaced by colder reservoirs. The entire northern basin of the planet was occupied by the ocean.

At the same time, the atmosphere remained oxygen-free. Therefore, multicellular animals could not exist on Mars, but various anaerobic microorganisms could. And it is precisely on the search for their remains that scientists have focused in recent decades.

If life once existed on Mars, then it must first be sought in the sediments of that era. Structures resembling bacteria have been found in a meteorite that was once part of the Red Planet. However, scientists are still not entirely sure about their identification.

The greatest hopes for finding traces of life on Mars are pinned on samples collected in the Jezero crater by the Perseverance rover. These are mainly fossilized clays, and they are the most likely place where the remains of microorganisms, if they ever existed on Mars, could have survived to this day. It is expected that in the next decade, these samples will be delivered to Earth laboratories, where they can be thoroughly studied.

Life on Mars today

The very discovery of ancient microorganisms could be a real sensation. After all, it would mean that life is indeed widespread throughout the universe. But it would be even more exciting if some of these bacteria could be brought back to life.

This scenario is one of the most popular among horror movie writers. Because our imagination immediately conjures up images of humanity dying out from an unknown disease. These fears are based on the fact that our immune system will not be ready to fight them.

However, they forget that all past cases of deadly epidemics are associated with viruses and bacteria that had been spreading for a long time in other human populations and among species relatively close to us.

Ancient Martian life did not have millions of years of evolution to adapt to existence inside terrestrial multicellular organisms. Of course, there is a chance that it poses a danger to Earthlings, which is why research must be conducted in compliance with all safety requirements. However, it is equally likely that Martian organisms themselves will need much greater isolation in order not to perish in the Earth’s environment.

However, no one expects to find signs of life that existed on Mars billions of years ago. But if much younger samples are found on Mars, everything may turn out differently.

It is believed that in the middle of the era following the Noachian and Hesperian periods, the planet’s climate began to change rapidly, and soon it became what we know today: cold, dry, and virtually devoid of atmosphere. However, almost since the visit of Mariner 4, there has been an opinion that the current state of Mars has not lasted for hundreds of millions of years, but is a relatively temporary phenomenon, only a few tens of thousands of years.

In particular, in recent years, its concept as a geologically dead planet has been significantly revised. Earthquakes recorded by the InSight device on the surface indicate that liquid magma is hidden somewhere in the depths. This means that volcanic eruptions and geysers are entirely possible. Traces of such activity have been observed over the last 50 million years.

So the main question of whether life on Mars is possible now depends not so much on the conditions there as on our knowledge of what conditions living organisms can withstand in general. Already today, we can name species that could exist on the Red Planet even under the conditions it has.

At the same time, “surviving now” does not mean “surviving for billions of years.” We still know too little about evolution to claim that extremophile bacteria could have emerged even if they never had ancestors living in much more comfortable conditions. Moreover, no one can claim that isolated populations preserved in Mars’ glaciers throughout its existence can ensure global evolution.

However, it is still worth searching for life on Mars.

• Posted in Articles, Questions

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{ https://universemagazine.com/en/news-en/science-en/ }

28-09-2025 om 20:26 geschreven door peter  

Göbekli Tepe: A Calendar in Stone, A Memory of a Forgotten World?

The people of Göbekli Tepe were precise observers who cared about regularities in the heavens long before written records.

by Ivan Petricevic

 

High-quality shot of the beautiful megalithic circle at the center of Gobekli Tepe, filled with pillars.

Credit: Shutterstock

The hill does not announce itself. From a distance it looks like any other rise in the dry country of southeastern Turkey. Up close, the ground opens into circles of towering T-shaped pillars, carved with foxes, birds, snakes, scorpions, and symbols that seem to speak a language we no longer understand. This is Göbekli Tepe, and it should not exist in the time it occupies.

Archaeologists date the main enclosures to the tenth millennium BC. That is twice as old as the first cities of Mesopotamia. Yet the site shows large-scale planning, heavy stonework, and an iconography that looks deliberate rather than improvised. If the latest interpretations hold, it may also contain the earliest solar calendar ever made.

The claim: a solar year, cut into stone

A study in Time and Mind, building on work by researchers from the University of Edinburgh, argues that certain repeated markings at Göbekli Tepe form a working calendar. One motif is a simple V. The team proposes that each V marks a single day. On at least one pillar they counted 365, the length of a solar year. The placement of a V on the neck of a bird-like figure is read as a sign for the summer solstice, a way of anchoring the count to a fixed point in the sky.

The proposal goes further. The carvings appear to encode both lunar and solar cycles. The authors suggest that the builders tracked changes in constellations through the seasons. If that is true, the people of Göbekli Tepe were precise observers who cared about regularities in the heavens long before written records.

This interpretation is contested, as any strong claim should be. But it is not casual speculation. It rests on counts, on placements, on comparisons across pillars and nearby statues where the same V sign appears at the neck of figures linked to time and creation.

The calendar reading connects to a larger idea. Several researchers argue that a major comet encounter around 10,850 BC helped trigger the Younger Dryas, a sharp cooling that followed the last ice age. In that view, witnessing a violent sky could have pushed people to watch it more closely. A carved scene at Göbekli Tepe has been read as a representation of the Taurid meteor stream, with a period of about twenty-seven days. If these readings are right, the site preserves not only ritual scenes but also a memory of an ancient impact.

Whether or not one accepts every link in this chain, the direction of the thinking matters. It suggests that Göbekli Tepe is not random decoration. It is pattern, tally, and sky knowledge, expressed in stone.

My position: this is not an isolated marvel

Here I must be clear. What follows is a working theory. It is not settled fact. It is where the evidence points me today.

Göbekli Tepe is not a lone anomaly. It is the visible edge of a deeper story. I do not see hunter-gatherers experimenting on a whim. I see trained builders, organizers, and skywatchers who already possessed methods, symbols, and a shared canon. I believe Göbekli Tepe is a remnant of a long-lost civilization that predates the Mesopotamian textbook beginning. I have said this out loud on many occasions.

Several lines support this view. Hear me out.

First, engineering. The pillars are up to six meters high and weigh many tons. They were quarried, shaped, moved, raised, and set into carefully prepared sockets. The enclosures are not piles. They are architectures with symmetry and recurrence. That implies logistics, leadership, and a labor force that could be coordinated.

Second, astronomy. If the calendar interpretation is even partly right, the builders observed and codified cycles of the Sun and Moon, recognized solstices, and related those cycles to figures that carried meaning. You do not arrive at that in one season. You inherit and refine it.

Third, context. Göbekli Tepe is not alone on the landscape. Karahan Tepe, Sayburç, and other sites on the Urfa plateau are revealing parallel stonework, similar T-pillars, and related artistic language. This looks like a cultural network, not a one-off project. The pieces fit together like tiles in a mosaic we are still uncovering.

Fourth, influence. Monumental stone building appears later in several regions. It is not proof, but it is reasonable to consider that practices and ideas diffuse. A culture that mastered ceremonial stone enclosures and sky timekeeping by 9500 BC could echo forward through memory, teaching, and migration. If so, Göbekli Tepe may be the earliest surviving root of the monumental impulse that later appears in ziggurats, pyramids, and stone circles.

Less than a tenth of Göbekli Tepe has been excavated. That is the detail most people miss. The hill was deliberately backfilled in deep antiquity. What we see are a few cleaned windows into a buried complex that extends under the surface. Dozens of enclosures may still wait below the soil. There could be sequences of pillars that show calendar variants, new constellations, or a ledger of seasonal rites. There could be tool marks that settle debates about quarrying and transport. There could be transitional rooms that show how the iconography evolved over time.

When a site is this large and this old, every new trench can reset the conversation. We should hold our models with a light grip and update them as the ground demands.

What mainstream critics will say, and why this still stands

Mainstream archaeology offers strong counterpoints. Farming, pottery, and permanent settlement are generally thought to precede large monuments. Elite organization is easier to sustain in villages and cities. By that logic, hunters and foragers should not be able to invest this much effort in stone architecture.

The counter to the counter is empirical. Göbekli Tepe exists. The pillars are real. The sockets are real. The enclosure walls and floors are real. The toolkits recovered on site show capability with stone. The coordination problem is a fair challenge, but it pushes us to consider seasonal congregation, ritual economies, and forms of leadership that do not mirror later city states. It expands the range of what early societies could do when purpose and memory aligned.

As for the calendar reading, healthy skepticism is necessary. Iconographic interpretation can go astray. But counts of marks, repeated placements, and cross-site recurrences are measurable. They can be tested as new areas are excavated. If future finds show different counts, or if the V signs appear in contexts that do not fit the calendar model, we adjust. If they continue to cluster around solstitial markers and time-linked figures, the case grows stronger.

It helps to picture the work as lived life rather than abstract pattern. Imagine the dawn at the hill, the line of workers moving up from the low ground, the craftspeople who know how to read flaws in the limestone, the carvers who have practiced the same fox outline so many times their hands can do it without a sketch. Someone keeps track of the days. Someone watches the place on the horizon where the Sun rises at midsummer. The V mark is not a symbol on a blackboard. It is cut with a stone blade by a person who believes it matters.

Ritual does not preclude measurement. In early societies the two often reinforce each other. If a community survives a period of cold and scarcity, and elders say the sky can warn us when risk returns, then counting becomes duty. Over time, duty becomes tradition. Tradition becomes art. The art encodes the count. That is one way a calendar is born.

What this could mean if my theory is right

If Göbekli Tepe represents a true calendar culture and if it belongs to a network that predates the first cities by millennia, then the standard narrative needs expansion. The rise of civilization would no longer be a sudden Mesopotamian bloom but a long relay. Knowledge would have moved along corridors of ritual gathering, marriage ties, seasonal routes, and shared sanctuaries. Writing would still be a later invention, but its precursors would include tally marks, fixed points on the horizon, and a habit of making memory durable in stone.

That does not erase Mesopotamia. It deepens the preface. It invites us to treat the tenth millennium BC as a time of innovation rather than mere survival.

Three practical steps can test and refine this picture.

First, excavation. Careful, phased work at Göbekli Tepe, Karahan Tepe, and related sites will tell us whether the calendar pattern repeats and how the iconography changes across layers.

Second, high-resolution documentation. Systematic scanning of pillar surfaces can reveal faint marks and corrections. If carvers altered counts or added signs near solstices, those edits would be strong evidence for timekeeping.

Third, independent sky modeling. We can simulate the sky of southeastern Turkey across the relevant millennia and check whether proposed constellations align with the placements and orientations on the ground. A calendar should match the sky it claims to track.

The safest position is to wait for more data. The bolder position is to outline what the present evidence allows and to say what it might mean. I choose the second, with care. Göbekli Tepe looks like more than an early shrine. It looks like a coordinated project of builders and observers who counted days, watched cycles, and tried to make memory survive disaster.

If that is so, then this hill is not simply an ancient place. It is the echo of a culture that refused to forget. Most of it is still under our feet. The rest is in the sky, rising at the same points on the horizon that their carvers once watched.

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{ https://curiosmos.com/category/ancient-civilizations/ }

27-09-2025 om 23:01 geschreven door peter  

{ BELGISCH UFO-MELDPUNT }

27-09-2025 om 22:38 geschreven door peter  

Een ufo werd gespot voor de kust van Jemen.

© RV

27-09-2025 om 22:26 geschreven door peter  

When I was growing up, I watched a lot of sci-fi movies about aliens that come to Earth. The extraterrestrials in popular culture, however, always looked so familiar that I found them far-fetched. What are the chances that E.T., the Predator, or ALF would develop arms and legs, a humanlike face, and opposable thumbs? Perhaps as a result, I associated alien life more with fantasy than with science, and I never gave much thought to what a visit would really look like. But my attitude started to change in 2020, when I read Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem” and its two sequels. In Liu’s books, creatures called Trisolarans send a scouting mission of supercomputers to spy on and subtly disrupt human affairs. Although Trisolarans could do seemingly impossible things, such as program protons, Liu’s rigor got me thinking about aliens from a scientific perspective. Suddenly, I could imagine a sophisticated civilization coming into contact with humanity, perhaps in ways that we don’t immediately understand.

Then, in 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a report on unidentified anomalous phenomena (U.A.P.)—essentially a rebranding of U.F.O.s. Several Navy videos had been made public a few years prior. In the so-called GOFAST video, recorded off the coast of Florida in 2015, a Navy pilot with an infrared camera follows an object zooming above the water and asks, over the radio, “What the fuck is that?” Another clip, deemed GIMBAL—“Look at that thing, dude”—showed a similar shape above some clouds. A third video, known as FLIR, was taken in 2004 from an aircraft in California. Navy pilots in two planes saw what looked like a large Tic Tac hovering over the water; it seemed to zip away at thousands of miles per hour. Military whistle-blowers subsequently claimed that the government knew more than it was admitting, leading to congressional hearings in 2022, 2023, and 2024. Last month, House Representative Eric Burlison, a Republican, introduced the U.A.P. Disclosure Act of 2025, aimed at preserving and eventually releasing U.F.O. reports.

None of the government’s disclosures demonstrated that Earth had welcomed interstellar house guests. And yet, after the releases and hearings, it seemed more acceptable to explore the possibility. In 2022, roughly fifteen hundred university faculty members replied to a survey about U.F.O.s; a majority said that recent governmental and journalistic reports had increased the topic’s credibility, and three-quarters said that it was of average importance, very important, or essential for academics to conduct more research about it. Tyler Cowen wrote about U.F.O.s for Bloomberg and Ross Douthat wrote about them for the New York Times; they compared notes on Cowen’s podcast. On the prediction platform Polymarket, the odds that the U.S. will “confirm that aliens exist in 2025” have ranged between four and fourteen per cent. (The detection of aliens on a faraway planet would count.)

I started to ask myself, How likely is it that we’ve ever been visited by aliens or their technology? It seemed improbable yet plausible. I wondered how scientists, engineers, and other thinkers would approach the question. What would count as evidence, and what kinds of educated guesses could we make? I decided to call Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester and the author of “The Little Book of Aliens,” which looks to differentiate between science and fiction.

Frank doesn’t put much stock in U.F.O. videos, and he told a story to explain why. In February, 2023, photographs of a Chinese spy balloon over Billings, Montana, prompted speculation about aliens. The Air Force eventually shot it down, but first the pilot of an American U-2 spy plane flew past and took a selfie that showed the balloon out the window. “You can see it in exquisite detail,” Frank told me. “Where are all those pictures? Every U.F.O. picture is a fuzzy blob. Everybody carries a high-resolution camera in their pocket now, and it’s always fuzzy blobs.”

There are potential answers to Frank’s question, but most of them raise questions of their own. Maybe there’s a coverup. But, if so, wouldn’t whistle-blowers have turned up something by now? “Color me extremely skeptical that any government could keep a secret like this effectively for a week, let alone decades,” Austin Carson, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has written extensively about government secrecy, told me. Steven Aftergood, who directed the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, pointed me to a 1970 report produced by a government task force on secrecy: “It is unlikely that classified information will remain secure for periods as long as five years, and it is more reasonable to assume that it will become known to others in periods as short as one year.”

Maybe the aliens are coy and want to stay hidden. If that’s the case, though, why are we seeing them at all? Mark Rodeghier, the scientific director of the Center for U.F.O. Studies, which is headquartered in his basement, told me, “They’re actually trying to slowly acclimatize us to the idea that aliens, in fact, exist.” Robert Hampson, a neuroscientist at Wake Forest University who has written over a dozen science-fiction novels, speculated that, perhaps, “what we’re detecting are the alien equivalent of graduate students who have been given an assignment to go and watch the humans and report back.” Plenty of human graduate students have been tasked with researching other worlds—and they don’t always get the best equipment.

The elaborateness of these explanations, in Frank’s view, is a reason to be skeptical of them. “If you’ve got to go through all those contortions to make your story work, you’re not doing science anymore,” he said. He noted that, when humans send spacecraft into the solar system, they tend to land safely. Alien craft, in contrast, “would have managed to cross interstellar distances, and these things seem to crash every fifteen minutes. It’s like everybody’s sending us their 1987 Dodge Omnis.” The 2021 national-intelligence report on U.A.P.s said that it could not explain a hundred and forty-three U.F.O. reports, but that many were probably “airborne clutter,” weather, or terrestrial technology. “Sometimes they’re hard to explain because we just don’t have the data,” Frank said. In his opinion, high-quality data (high-resolution photography, for example) has never “showed us that anything required an extraterrestrial hypothesis.”

Our galaxy contains at least a hundred billion planets, and biology finds a way in extreme environments on Earth, so it’s not unreasonable to suppose that life thrives elsewhere in the Milky Way. But if aliens wanted to visit us they would have a long way to go. The closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, is roughly 4.2 light-years away. NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe would take more than seventy-five thousand years to get there, if it were headed in the right direction. The closest inhabited solar system could be much, much farther away. Could aliens, or at least their tech, survive that journey?

Avi Loeb, a Harvard astrophysicist, thinks they may have already. In 2014, military satellites observed a half-metre-long meteor in the sky near Papua New Guinea. Several years later, Loeb and a student, Amir Siraj, concluded that the meteor had been travelling too fast to be orbiting the sun, and that, therefore, it was interstellar. Loeb went on to argue, over the objections of many experts, that it may have been alien technology, and that debris he recovered on a Pacific expedition was from the meteor. “Think of it as Amazon delivery service, but from interstellar space,” he told me during the expedition, from a ship that was incidentally called the Silver Star. He and numerous collaborators wrote up their findings in Chemical Geology last year. (Cosmochemists questioned the claim that the debris was interstellar; one told Science, “I’m surprised anyone would take it seriously.”) Loeb currently leads the Galileo Project, which is erecting ground-based sensors to look for anomalous phenomena.

U.F.O.s could contain biological aliens or machines powered by artificial intelligence. Either way, they might travel much faster than Voyager 1—but that would require a lot of energy. Les Johnson, a retired chief technology officer at NASA who has written fiction and nonfiction books about interstellar travel, gave me an example. To accelerate a pineapple to just a tenth the speed of light, he said, would require the energy of seven Hiroshima explosions. You would need the same quantity of energy to decelerate at your destination. “Suddenly, you’ve got the energy of fourteen Hiroshima bombs on a pineapple,” he said. “So I look at that, and I think it just doesn’t pass the giggle test.” At that speed, a speck of space dust would also have the impact of T.N.T. “I’d love to think we’re in a ‘Star Trek’ universe,” Johnson said. “But I don’t know if we are.”

Logically speaking, the chance that aliens are here right now must be slimmer than the chance that they have been here at some point in the past. Garry Nolan, a biotech founder and an immunologist at Stanford, has a hunch that we’ve been visited by aliens—he had an eerie experience as a child—and speculates that they or their technology may have been on Earth for millions of years. “So the open question might be, Is this even our planet?” he asked me. As outlandish as his theory is, it’s tricky to firmly disprove. If they came long ago, and left or died, would we even know? In 2018, Frank and a co-author published a paper in the International Journal of Astrobiology titled “The Silurian Hypothesis.” (In “Doctor Who,” Silurians are advanced reptilian humanoids who predated us on Earth.)

“Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?” Frank and his colleagues ask. Organisms can turn into fossils that last tens of millions of years, but most organisms don’t become fossils; metals and plastics might not stick around at all. And the planet’s surface constantly erodes and churns. “Our claim was that, after about a couple million years, anything on the surface is gone,” Frank said. “Even if some aliens came and built a pretty intense civilization, you wouldn’t have any evidence of it.” The best evidence one might hope for, he argued, was indirect: for example, an unusual proportion of certain isotopes at particular depths of rock. (In a 2019 paper, a physicist suggested that we should look for old probes, or “Lurkers,” on space rocks near Earth.) So far, humans haven’t found anything like that.

Science fiction often explains interstellar travel by imagining some kind of warp drive. Einstein said that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but, in 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre found an exception: Einstein’s theory of general relativity actually allows for a craft to outpace light by squeezing space-time at its bow and stretching it at the stern. Nolan, who is a fan of this idea, likened the Alcubierre drive to “creating your own sub-universe, a warp bubble around yourself.” Of course, it is not at all clear that such a thing could be constructed. Alcubierre invoked what physicists call negative energy; later theorists thought that lots and lots of regular energy could be used instead. Nolan speculated that, maybe, sufficient energy could be harvested from space-time itself, using the zero-point field and quantum tunnelling. But he quickly admitted that “those are just fancy words that we throw at the unknown.” (On the plus side, a warp drive might quote-unquote explain the Navy’s U.F.O. videos; one paper estimated that the objects in the videos appeared to be pulling up to five thousand Gs, using no visible propulsion and leaving no wake. Stunt pilots max out at around ten Gs.) Other U.F.O. enthusiasts argue that aliens could reside in dimensions beyond the four that we know and love. Or maybe they’re time travellers.

I ran these notions by Arlan Andrews, a retired mechanical engineer and author who is the founder and director of SIGMA, a think tank of sci-fi writers that advises the government and N.G.O.s. He responded by throwing up his hands in exasperation. “If you start to do the woo-woo stuff with interdimensional and time travel, I can’t say they’re wrong, but there’s no place to start,” he told me. “As an engineer, I like to have a starting place.”

Acivilization that’s millions or billions of years ahead of us would probably know physics that we don’t yet comprehend. Its technology might seem like magic to us. In that case, practically anything is possible. A NASA report on U.F.O.s, released in 2023, acknowledges that “it is difficult to put physical constraints on them at present.” How would you turn something without constraints from woo-woo into science?

The Society for U.A.P. Studies (SUAPS) is a think tank attempting to define U.A.P. studies as a field. “Not only is there not a science but there’s no academic field,” Michael Cifone, a philosopher of science at St. John’s University and one of the group’s founders, said. “How do we study this phenomenon? Who’s involved? What are the methodological principles that should guide us?” He cares less about people’s out-there theories than about what steps should be taken to resolve U.F.O. cases. He wants to avoid “endless, unconstrained, undisciplined speculation.” In his view, we’re at “a crucial transition point between the older ‘ufology,’ ” akin to forensic investigation, and modern scientific methods.

The first step to making something a science usually involves data. NASA’s report focusses on the agency’s potential role in collecting data, and in using A.I. to analyze it. According to the report, the agency’s sensors could be supplemented with crowdsourced data from apps; one example is Enigma, which uses algorithms to rate the credibility of people’s sightings and triangulate objects using video recordings. UAPx, a Florida nonprofit, has developed a suite of sensors specifically for analyzing odd aerial phenomena. And then there’s the data contained in past reported sightings, which could be regularized and collated somehow. Ryan Graves, a former Navy pilot who testified about U.F.O.s in Congress, founded Americans for Safe Aerospace, which encourages pilots to report U.F.O.s. The group vets the cases and has brought them to Congress; the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which is part of the Department of Defense; and, lately, to an F.B.I. working group. But, as some argue, the plural of anecdote is not data. “I don’t trust pilots’ sightings,” Matt Mountain, the president of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, told me. “They’re on a mission, not doing scientific exploration.” We should keep in mind, Mountain told me, that most criminal convictions that are overturned by DNA evidence were based in part on eyewitness testimony.

Graves said that he was agnostic about aliens. “I’m not jumping to conclusions,” he told me. “But I want to figure it out, damn it.” Still, he seemed skeptical of expert analysis. In November, 2024, AARO announced that it considered the GOFAST video mystery resolved; the object’s altitude, it said, gave it an exaggerated appearance of speed. “Through a very careful geospatial intelligence analysis and using trigonometry, we assess with high confidence that the object is not actually close to the water, but is rather closer to 13,000 feet,” the agency’s director told CBS. Graves wasn’t satisfied with that explanation. “Some of these cases aren’t quote-unquote debunked or no longer of interest,” he has said.

When I spoke to people who supported an alien hypothesis, I was often struck that relatively patchy evidence—what Frank had described as fuzzy blobs—had inspired such in-depth theories. I’m as puzzled by the U.F.O. videos as the next guy, but, as far as I can tell, nothing in them requires us to accept the existence of warp drives or time travel. Until someone produces high-definition videos of flying saucers and little green men, the evidence might not be extraordinary enough to demand such extraordinary explanations. And to the extent that U.F.O.s do need explanations it’s worth asking whether aliens are the best one. People have seen weird stuff in the sky for thousands of years, and only in the last eighty have flying saucers been a popular interpretation. Before that, we tended to credit the supernatural.

After all my conversations, I thought the odds that aliens or their tech had visited Earth were probably south of five per cent. Most U.F.O.s. are likely balloons, airplanes, weather events, visual illusions, or technical glitches. Even so, there are enough unknowns, and unknown unknowns, that the margin of error seemed enormous. A person who thinks the odds are much higher, I’d argue, shouldn’t be met with ridicule.

One more question: Why would aliens even visit us? Coming up with an answer forces us to speculate about alien motives. “I’ve always said that aliens are going to alien,” Andrews, the sci-fi writer who founded SIGMA, told me. “We have no idea what an alien person or being or intelligence or machine would be motivated by. . . . We don’t know what motivates the Kremlin, for God’s sake.” Extraterrestrials, he suggested, could be as different from us as we are from centipedes. (That could be an understatement.) Robert Powell, a chemist who serves on the board of the Scientific Coalition for U.A.P. Studies, has argued that some U.F.O.s are intelligently controlled and do not come from Earth. But, in his view, we shouldn’t try to study extraterrestrials as if they’re lab rats. “We’re the rat, and we’re trying to figure out what the doctor is doing,” he said.

It’s reasonable to think that there would be commonalities among intelligent species. One is the drive for self-preservation, which motivates the Trisolarans in “The Three-Body Problem.” Hampson, the neuroscientist and sci-fi writer, didn’t think that was a very good reason to come to Earth. “If they’re after resources, there are easier ways to get them,” he said. “Why would you go to an already inhabited world?” Meanwhile, a warlike species would probably just wipe us out. “If the idea is conquest, then I think we would already know,” he said. But he could imagine another reason: curiosity.

Nick Pope, who ran the U.F.O. program at the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense from 1991 to 1994, told me that the ministry had considered three main motives for alien visits: military reconnaissance, scientific study, and tourism. It’s not a given that aliens would enjoy travel. Maybe we’ve never met them because they’re homebodies. Still, what kind of intelligent life form wouldn’t want to see a sunrise on another world? “This might be the only place in the universe to see an elephant,” Pope said. “How many planets have a Stonehenge or a Machu Picchu or a Great Pyramids?” Aliens might want to survey the galaxy for all life forms—including us. They might even be having the same debate we are. Are we alone in the universe? The truth—whatever it may be—is still out there.

{ https://www.newyorker.com/ }

27-09-2025 om 22:08 geschreven door peter  

archieffoto van Amerikaans ministerie van Defensie van een ongeïdentificeerd vliegend voorwerp

"VS verbergt informatie over buitenaards leven": ex-officieren getuigen voor Amerikaans Congres in "UFO-hoorzitting"

De drie getuigen, Ryan Graves, David Grusch en David Fravor leggen de eed af voor de hoorzitting

{ https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/ }

27-09-2025 om 21:48 geschreven door peter  

The U.S. Government’s Top UFO Scientist Has an Open Mind about Alien Visitation

By Leonard David edited by Lee Billings

27-09-2025 om 21:21 geschreven door peter  

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{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

27-09-2025 om 21:01 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

27-09-2025 om 20:49 geschreven door peter  

{ https://www.universetoday.com/ }

27-09-2025 om 20:41 geschreven door peter  

Unexplained Mysteries: Ancient Alien Theories Debunked or Proven?

Abstract

Ancient astronaut or ancient alien theories posit that extraterrestrial beings visited Earth in antiquity and influenced human civilizations. This dissertation evaluates these claims through a scientific lens, examining archaeological, geological, and historical evidence, as well as methodological considerations. Rather than accepting or outright rejecting all sensational narratives, this analysis emphasizes testable hypotheses, the weight of corroborating evidence, and the importance of plausible, terrestrial explanations grounded in current scholarship. While some mysteries remain due to gaps in our knowledge, the balance of evidence currently favors human ingenuity, cultural diffusion, and naturalistic processes as sufficient explanations for most ancient extraordinary phenomena.

Introduction

Ancient alien theories have gained popular appeal by offering dramatic explanations for complex achievements in antiquity, such as monumental architecture, advanced astronomy, or unfamiliar engineering. Proponents argue that features seemingly beyond the capabilities of ancient societies imply intervention by technologically superior beings. Critics argue that these theories reflect a bias toward underestimating ancient capabilities and a misinterpretation of incomplete archaeological records. This dissertation does not presuppose either conclusion but instead places the claims within a rigorous epistemic framework: testable predictions, reproducible methods, and a coherent alignment with established data from multiple disciplines. The central question is not “Are aliens responsible?” but “What evidence would be required to substantiate such claims, and is that evidence present or plausibly explainable by non-Extraterrestrial (ET) mechanisms?”

Historical context and the appeal of ancient alien theories

Ancient alien theories gained prominence in the late 20th century through popular media that highlighted architectural wonders—pyramids, giant statues, megalithic structures—and claimed they could not have been built without outside intervention. Proponents often point to perceived technological gaps between ancient populations and the monumental works they produced, or to enigmatic depictions in art and myths that allegedly reference visitors from the stars. The appeal is dual: it offers a narrative where humanity’s achievements are recognized as part of a larger cosmic story, and it provides a simple, memorable explanation for complex historical phenomena.

However, as with many extraordinary claims, the more extraordinary the assertion, the stronger the evidence must be. Science does not reject extraordinary ideas out of hand, but it requires robust, reproducible, and parsimonious evidence. When claims rely on misinterpretation, selective data, or lack of methodological transparency, they fail the test of scientific validity. The following sections explain how researchers evaluate these claims and where the science tends to converge or diverge from popular assumptions.

Common claims and the methodological pitfalls Ancient alien arguments typically center on a few recurring claims:

• Engineering feats that allegedly exceed known ancient capabilities (e.g., lifting massive stones without contemporary techniques).
• Anomalous artifacts or inscriptions interpreted as evidence of non-human visitors.
• Correlations between myths or astronomical alignments and supposed extraterrestrial contact.

Ancient Aliens or Ancient Artisans?

Methodological challenges in these debates include:

• Anthropocentrism and underestimation of past human ingenuity. Archaeology has repeatedly shown that ancient peoples developed sophisticated techniques and organizational systems appropriate to their contexts.
• Selection bias and cherry-picking. Highlighting a single site or artifact while ignoring the broader archaeological record can distort what is known about a culture’s capabilities.
• Ambiguity in the evidence. Artistic motifs, cosmologies, or damage patterns can often be explained by multiple plausible, non-extra-terrestrial causes.
• The burden of proof. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Absence of occasional fragments of data is not evidence of aliens.

Evidence for and against the central claims To evaluate ancient alien theories, scientists consider several categories of evidence:

• Archaeological context: Excavation records, dating methods, tool marks, construction sequences, and settlement patterns provide a coherent narrative about how communities organized labor and allocated resources.
• Engineering and material analysis: The feasibility of constructing large structures is tested using contemporary engineering understanding, experimental archaeology, and replication studies.
• Chronology and dating: Absolute and relative dating anchor a structure within a historical timeframe, allowing researchers to assess whether proposed “alien” intervention would have been necessary at all.
• Comparative anthropology and ethnography: Local traditions, myths, and oral histories are examined to distinguish symbolic or religious motifs from literal claims.
• Astronomical alignments: When structures are oriented toward celestial events, scientists assess whether these alignments are intentional and culturally meaningful rather than coincidental.
• Occam’s Razor and theoretical economy: Explanations that account for the evidence with fewer assumptions about external agents are generally preferred.

When evaluated through these lenses, many ancient alien claims encounter significant challenges:

• Most monumental constructions can be traced to feasible human processes, including collaborative labor, leadership structures, and incremental technological innovation. In many cases, experimental archaeology has demonstrated viable methods for quarrying, transporting, and erecting massive stones using simple machines, ramps, lubricants, and organized planning.
• The supposed “hand of aliens” is often a projection of modern awe onto ancient peoples, ignoring the rich, culturally situated motivations behind architectural and artistic choices.
• A number of famous examples have undergone more careful scrutiny with results that align with known historical developments. For instance, methodical reassessments of large stone-building sites have revealed employment and organizational strategies fully within human capabilities of their respective eras.

Case studies and common misinterpretations

• Pyramids and monumental architecture

The Great Pyramids of Giza are the most emblematic targets of ancient alien claims. Critics note the precision of stone-cutting and long-range logistics. Yet Egyptologists have demonstrated that a workforce comprised of skilled laborers, seasonal workers, and well-organized supply chains could mobilize resources and expertise without extraterrestrial assistance. Modern engineering studies simulate the construction sequences, ramps, and supervision necessary to erect such monuments, underscoring human-scale feasibility. The absence of records indicating alien involvement is not proof of absence of aliens, but the documented social, religious, and economic contexts provide plausible explanations consistent with known practices.

Von Däniken suggests that the Nazca lines (200 BC– 700 AD) in Peru could be "landing strips" for alien spacecraft. 

(CC BY-SA 2.5 es)

• Nazca Lines and geoglyphs

The Nazca Lines in Peru are often cited as evidence of ancient alien contact due to their vast scale from a height. In reality, researchers have shown that these geoglyphs were created using straightforward surveying techniques with simple tools and labor coordination. The social and ceremonial significance of the lines, tied to water rituals and cosmology, offers a robust cultural interpretation that does not require extraterrestrial intervention.

• Stone circles, megaliths, and alignments

Sites such as Stonehenge or other megalithic complexes attract claims of remote engineering knowledge or astronomy beyond the capabilities of ancient communities. In many cases, careful chronology, material sourcing, and landscape analysis illuminate a long arc of development. While some alignments are astronomical, they often fit within the observable agendas of agricultural calendars or ritual cycles rather than implying alien construction.

Puma Punku Stone Blocks – Bolivia. 

(Adwo /Adobe Stock)

• Technological diffusion and environmental adaptation

Some scholars propose that supposed gaps in ancient knowledge reflect not gaps in capability but differences in sources of knowledge—trade networks, diffusion of techniques, adaptation to local environments, or iterative experimentation. For example, metallurgy, long-distance trade, and early writing systems show cumulative human progress that could be misread as sudden leaps requiring otherworldly help. When approached with rigorous dating and contextual analysis, the narrative of sudden, inexplicable leaps tends to give way to gradual, context-dependent development.

• The role of cognitive biases and media framing

Public fascination with ancient aliens is amplified by cognitive biases. Availability heuristics—where memorable or sensational information weighs more heavily than balanced data—can skew perception. Media portrayals often privilege extraordinary narratives over ordinary processes, shaping public expectations and terminology. Scientists aim to counterbalance by communicating uncertainty clearly, presenting the evidentiary standards, and illustrating how everyday archaeological reasoning solves mysteries within a cultural context.

Sunrise at Stonehenge on the summer solstice, 21 June 2005.

(Andrew Dunn, 2 /CC BY 2.0

Scientific approaches to evaluating claims

• Clear hypotheses: Scientific evaluation starts with precise, testable hypotheses. In the alien-claim scenario, a robust approach would articulate what specific evidence would be required to confirm extraterrestrial involvement and how it could be falsified.
• Replicability and reproducibility: Claims must be testable by independent researchers using accessible methods. Replication of experiments or analyses, such as experimental archaeology or independent artifact dating, strengthens conclusions.
• Bayesian reasoning: Researchers often use Bayesian methods to update the probability of a hypothesis as new evidence emerges. This helps avoid over-interpretation of ambiguous data and promotes proportional responses to the strength of the evidence.
• Transparency and peer review: Sharing data, methods, and uncertainties within the scientific community is essential. Peer review helps ensure that conclusions are not driven by speculation, misinterpretation, or selective reporting.

Antikythera mechanism. 

(CC BY-SA 3.0)

What would constitute credible evidence for ancient aliens? Even among proponents, the threshold for credible evidence remains high. Potentially compelling lines of inquiry could include:

• Unambiguous artifacts with undeniable non-human origin markers or provenance that cannot be explained by known processes, accompanied by thorough, reproducible analyses.
• Independently verifiable, cross-disciplinary data showing a conspicuous, non-human signal that cannot be reconciled with cultural, technological, or environmental explanations.
• Direct, verifiable interference with human sites or artifacts that demonstrably alters outcomes in a way that cannot be accounted for by natural or human processes.

However, to date, such evidence has not withstood rigorous scrutiny.

Most alleged proofs collapse under methodological evaluation: artifacts turn out to be misidentified natural objects or domesticated tools; dating methods reveal ordinary timelines; and proposed signals lack independent corroboration.

Implications for science communication and public understanding

The debate over ancient aliens highlights the broader challenge of science communication. Complex, nuanced conclusions must be conveyed without feeding sensationalist narratives that overshadow careful scholarship. Clear explanations of uncertainty, the distinction between correlation and causation, and the iterative nature of scientific progress help the public appreciate why evidence accumulates gradually rather than through instantaneous, drama-filled breakthroughs.

Constructive pathways forward

• Emphasize robust, multi-method research. The strongest explanations for historical mysteries arise from converging lines of evidence across archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, geology, and physics.
• Encourage critical thinking and literacy. Public education about how scientists assess evidence, weigh competing hypotheses, and use dating and material analyses can foster more informed engagement with extraordinary claims.
• Promote transparency in research. Open data, preregistration of hypotheses, and clear documentation of uncertainties improve trust and reproducibility.

Conclusion Unexplained mysteries will always captivate the imagination, inviting us to imagine that the past harbors more spectacular explanations than human ingenuity alone can offer. Ancient alien theories, while alluring, have consistently faced rigorous scrutiny that emphasizes evidence, methodology, and context. Across a broad spectrum of case studies—from the pyramids to geoglyphs—careful archaeological inquiry tends to reveal a human story: communities, technologies, labor organization, and cultural significance shaping monumental works that reflect creativity, collaboration, and adaptation within their particular environments.

That is not to deny wonder or to dismiss the possibility of unforeseen discoveries. It is to acknowledge the standards of scientific inquiry that separate plausible explanations from sensational conjecture. As new methodologies emerge and datasets expand, our understanding of ancient civilizations will continue to evolve. What remains stable is the essential principle of scholarship: extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and the most compelling narratives are those that can be tested, replicated, and integrated into a coherent understanding of the human past. In the discussion of unexplained mysteries, the balance between curiosity and skepticism is not a constraint but a compass—guiding us toward explanations that illuminate rather than mystify, and toward a history that reflects the ingenuity of humanity in the face of the unknown.

{ PETER2011 } 

26-09-2025 om 23:18 geschreven door peter