Assuming the Earth is not consumed by the Sun during its Red Giant stage...
By 100 trillion years in the future, the Sun will have burned out long ago, and the Earth will have been ejected from the Solar system to wander as a rogue planet, alone in space. Due to the accelerating expansion of the universe, nearly all the galaxies recede from the Earth faster than the speed of light, and these galaxies are therefore no longer visible because their light cannot travel fast enough. At few of the nearest galaxies are still visible in the night sky in the illustration above, but they too will accelerate away, and the sky will become a black void for eternity.
Eventually, all of the matter making up the Earth will convert back to the energy from which it came, and all that will be left will be the void.
This is really great... and kinda creepy... you really need earphones.... and make sure the left earphone is in the left ear, and the right earphone is in the right ear.
Don't listen to this late at night... it is really creepy...
This spectacular article the February 2008 Discover pulls all the pieces together, and after years of reading about all the bits and pieces, this smells right.
As I mentioned before, I think it is quite likely that we are not native to this planet. Life was probably seeded on Earth from Mars, or even from the ice moons of Jupiter or Saturn, because they were smaller and cooled more quickly than the Earth did. Asteroid and comet impacts then spewed huge amounts of material into space, and the archea cells were protected by the material and low temperatures in space. Life coming to Earth from another planet is called exogenesis.
As I mentioned before, I think it is also likely that we are not native to this star system. Life probably first arose on a planet billions of years ago in another star system, and material encasing archea cells was spewed throughout the entire galaxy long before the Earth formed. One or a few planets seeding the entirety of the galaxy is called panspermia.
So we can now sketch out the overall sequence. After the Big Bang, the universe was mostly hydrogen and a little helium. Stars formed and went supernova, producing the heavier elements. This process was repeated, and the amounts of heavier elements progressively increased. Supernovas were more common toward the center of the galaxy, so there were more heavy elements toward the center of the galaxy. On the other hand, if a supernova goes off nearby, it can easily sterilize the entire surface of a planet to a substantial depth, so being too near the center, while it would mean a lot of heavy elements would be present, would also mean that the surface would be sterilized fairly often. (However, now that we know how many archea live at great depths in the Earth, these sterilizations might actually present no problem at all.) The Solar system is 4.5 billion years old, but we could easily imagine parts of the galaxy to have been rich in heavy elements 10 billion years ago. So it is easy to imagine that on an ice planet in another star system 10 billion years ago, the processes described above in the Discover article took place, and the first archea cells formed and colonized the planet quickly. Some cells were then blasted into space by impacts, encased in material that quickly cooled and protected the cells. The materials spread across the galaxy relatively quickly, and some of it eventually landed on the ice moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and later, on a Mars covered by oceans, while the Earth was still molten. The cells completely populated the moons and Mars. Impacts on the ice moons and Mars ejected huge amounts of material into space, and some of it landed on Earth. If the Earth was still too hot, the cells would have died, but as soon as the Earth cooled so that there could be liquid water, the seeding would take place, and the cells then completely populated the Earth as it cooled. So the processes described in the Discover article may actually have happened on another planet long before the Solar system formed. (And since our galaxy is made up of many smaller galaxies that have been incorporated into it, the origin of life may even have occurred in another galaxy.) We may have good evidence for life on Mars in just a few months. In later missions, when samples are eventually returned from Mars and the DNA of the organisms is examined, if the DNA seems to be similar to that of the archea found on Earth, we could reasonably suppose that these cells had a common ancestor long before the Earth formed. That would be the greatest discovery of all time (so far) and would suggest that there are many planets in the galaxy with at least simple lifeforms... and that those lifeforms are all related... and that they are related to us. We are on the verge of being able to detect Earthlike planets in other star systems. Within the next few decades, we will have scanned a substantial part of the galaxy for other technical civilizations, so in our lifetimes, we will have either found another civilization, or we will begin to suspect that we are rare.
Here is part one of a program showing how life could be carried from planet to planet by impact debris.
Yellowstone is the caldera of a supervolcano. The last time it erupted 640,000 years ago, it was a good thing we weren't around... the US was uninhabitable and the rest of the planet was not good either.
When a major disaster, such as an earthquake occurs, NTT East may automatically block most calls in order to keep lines clear for responder services. When this happens, it is very likely that no one will be able to call you on your landline, and you may not be able to call other landlines in certain areas. Mobile phone calls may also be blocked in certain areas, although text messaging should always be possible.
So that you may let others know how you are, during such an emergency, voice mail can be created, and others can hear the voice mail by dialing your number.
"Jamais vu" (French for "never [before] seen") means that a known object or situation (or even a person!) seems strangely unfamiliar or odd. "Jamais vu" is sort of the opposite of deja vu ("already seen").
When the object that seems strange is a word, this is called "word alienation". Most people can induce word alienation by, for example, simply staring at the word "and" for several minutes. Another way is to write, for example, the word "door", very quickly 30 times per minute for a minute or two. Most people will experience the word seeming to become progressively odd, and the more you stare, the stranger it looks.
In the usual course of reading, a word has a form, a meaning, and a function in a sentence, and they are experienced briefly; when the word is instead viewed repeatedly, only the form of the word is experienced, and the form becomes progressively dissociated from the meaning. It seems that being tired or having worked many hours often increases the probability of word alienation occurring.
YouTube usually limits videos to 10 minutes, but Google does not. Go to Google, choose Video (under "more") and search. http://video.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wv Try BBC Horizon.
The lead story at The Independent says that pigs are being shipped live from Canada to Hawaii so that the pigs can be sold as "island pork".
"Many live exports are undertaken to make the fraudulent claim that the animals are [locally] reared... Canadian pigs are condemned to a 4,500-mile journey by land and sea to Hawaii, so that, when slaughtered, their carcasses can be sold as "Island Produced Pork". For nine days, hundreds of pigs are crammed together in the dark, standing in their own excrement."
Click on the second video clip, entitled "Canada to Hawaii: Pigs transported for nine days".
Next year will be Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.
Over the next year, there will be many documentaries and special exhibits about Darwin and evolution.
Polaroid has announced that it is getting out of the film making business, so there has been a run on film.
Although I never had a Polaroid camera, someone was taking polaroids at a party on January 1, 2001, and I must admit, they were magical. Watching a picture appear over a few minutes is something that you simply cannot get from taking a picture with a digital camera. The suspense, the fun of watching how it turns out... and the usually very warm tones in the picture.
I knew a world with fewer printed books, printed magazines, and printed newspapers, a world without analog TV transmission, and a world without TV, was coming, but a world without polaroids would also be missing something, and that hadn't occurred to me until I saw this. At least click on the Polaroid Swinger commercial (if you are old enough, you will be humming it... and look who is in the commercial!) and the one with James Garner and Mariette Hartley below.
Coming soon: GOD (Googlelike Omniscient Databases)
In a very short while, you will basically be able to pose any question, and either someone will have already fully formulated the answer, or you will be able to get a general idea by looking through the databases yourself.
Although it is shut down now, last week, a company announced that it had gleaned the cell phone numbers of 90 million people in the US. If you wanted the private cell phone number of even a governor, just pay 15 bucks and they would give it to you. The numbers were obtained by searching through public documents.
Is a company doing a bad job? You will soon be able to ask questions about its problems, very specific questions. Considering reroofing? Why not look at a ranking of companies, they types of jobs they do, customer satisfaction, law suits, etc.?
So, there really will be someone watching everything. That "someone" will be other humans who will soon be able to summon highly tailored information for free.
Two of the biggest under-the-radar stories of all time, especially if you live in the reality-free zone that is the US: the dollar collapse and peak oil.
For years, the US has been printing dollars, buying oil, and selling treasury bonds for those dollars, in effect buying oil with promissory notes. We also ran up huge fiscal and trade deficits.
For nearly 30 years, due to overproduction of oil, there was little conservation, little investment in alternative energy, and the construction of an urban landscape that cannot function without cheap oil. The problem is not that oil has become too expensive; the problem is that for far too long, oil was too cheap. All that did was cause the oil industry to go bust and hollow out, greatly reduce the number of drilling rigs and people who knew how to operate them, discourage generations of engineering students from entering the field, and teach everyone to treat energy and food with utter contempt.
These two basic problems are about to grab each other by the tail in a vicious circle.
In the short term, the price of oil will go up, and it will go down. The dollar will go up, and it will go down. Do not avert your gaze from the brick wall we are approaching.
The price of oil and the supply of oil follow supply and demand... sort of. The problem is the supply and demand of oil are always in disequilibrium, because it can take significant amounts of time for price to catch up with supply and for supply to catch up with price. Texas used to be the "swing producer" (the one that could ramp up supply or ramp down supply quickly in response to price swings). For the last 30 years, Saudi Arabia has been the swing producer. Now, there is no swing producer. So what is different this time is that no one has excess oil production capacity, and since all the easy-to-pump oil is gone, new drilling projects now take 10 years or more to implement. Over the last three years, although the price of oil has substantially increased in all major currencies, the amount of oil pumped has remained at about 85 million barrels per day. So supply is clearly not responding to demand.
On the other hand, because the rest of the world is developing so rapidly, demand is not, and will not, respond to the limited supply until there is a global recession... and that would be only a temporary respite.
We are about to get a front seat view of what happens when supply and demand cannot respond rapidly.
The Cantarell oil field off the coast of Mexico is the second largest oil field ever discovered. It provides the US with about 7% of the oil the US uses. Even if Mexico started drilling in deep water today, because of the complexity of the drilling, the new oil would not flow for 10 years. In order to continue to export oil to the US the way Mexico has been, the Cantarell field therefore has to produce oil at the rate it has been for the next 10 years in order to continue to export oil to the US the way it has been. There is only 1 year of oil left in the Cantarell field. So, Mexico has two choices: continue pumping at the present rate and then have nothing to export for 9 years, or drop pumping immediately by 90% and export at the rate of 10% for 10 years. Either way, Mexico is about to rapidly decrease the amount of oil it exports to the US. I suppose in the next few months to a year, Mexico will have an enormous fiscal crisis because their oil exports provide the Mexican government with half of its revenue. (This is an extreme oversimplification for brevity.)
It is not like there were no warnings.
Prince Abdullah, now King of Saudi Arabia, said to the Gulf Cooperation Council in 1998: "The oil boom is over and will not return. All of us must get used to a different lifestyle."
The King said in April 2008 that he had "ordered some new oil discoveries left untapped to preserve oil wealth ... for future generations".
In April 2008, the vice president of one of Russia's biggest oil companies said that Russian oil output is in longterm decline.
So whether they can't pump or they won't pump makes no difference. They aren't.
The dollar has dropped by nearly half against the euro, and could drop further against the euro and other major currencies. This is part of the reason that the price of oil has risen to about 5 times in price in dollars; it has risen to about 4 times in yen, and about 3 times in euros.
There is wholesale buying of oil futures using all the dollars lying around because who knows how much a dollar will be worth in 5 years, but a barrel of oil will still be a barrel of oil in 2013.
Iran no longer accepts dollars for oil and only accepts euros and yen. Even some Japanese are starting to sell US treasury bonds because they lost 7% in value in two months, and they think the dollar will fall even further against the yen.
Ultimately, the oil exporters are doing us a favor. It is better to hit the brakes before we hit the brick wall rather than run into it at full speed.
Everything President Carter said is coming true.
ISBN-13: 978-0295985350
みなしご元禄津波 The Orphan Tsunami of 1700
One winter's night in the year 1700, a mysterious tsunami flooded fields and washed away houses in Japan. It arrived without the warning that a nearby earthquake usually provides. Samurai, merchants, and villagers recorded the event, but nearly three centuries would pass before discoveries in North America revealed the tsunami's source.
The Orphan Tsunami of 1700 tells this scientific detective story through clues from both sides of the Pacific. The evidence uncovered tells of a [magnitude 9 earthquake off the coast of the Pacific Northwest] a century before Lewis and Clark...
You have probably heard of the Law of Diminishing Returns: more effort gets you only marginal increase in reward (for example, if you exercise for half an hour a day, you get most of the health benefits; if you exercise for an hour a day, you get almost all of the health benefits; and exercising for two, three, or four hours a day will give very little added health benefits).
However, there are situations in which reward does not diminish (at least for a long while) and actually speeds up over time. People tend to see progress in technology as proceeding in a linear fashion, so they expect the 21st century (barring something truly unfortunate) to progress something like the way the 20th century did. But according to Ray Kurzweil, the technical progress in the 21st century will be more like 1,000 times that of the 20th century.
Here is an example. Cost to read the DNA of one person in 1990: 3 billion dollars in 2005: 2 million dollars in 2006: 200,000 dollars target for 2010-2015: 1,000 dollars
Being able to read your DNA will allow medical treatments to be tailored specifically for you, vastly improving outcomes.
This BBC Horizon program is, granted, sensational infotainment, but it is probably the most efficient introduction to this topic.
The article below is very long, and there may be parts that are difficult to follow, but look over the entire article because it is a map of the world we are already living in, and it shows what looms up the road. http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
Step 1: Slow the ageing process
Something that humans have seen only once is about to happen again: functional lifespan will vastly increase.
This happened the first time in the 20th century with improvements in public health, sanitation, nutrition, vaccination, and pharmaceuticals. Someone from the 19th century would not believe how low our risk of death is, how free of disability and pain we are, and how long we live now. Things are hardly perfect, but to all humans who lived before the early 1900s, the world we live in now would be an unbelievable paradise.
In the next leap, we will not only live even longer, but disease and disability will often be delayed by years if not decades. If we can just make it through the next 15 years or so, the interventions will be unbelievable. It is quite possible that many of us, even those in middle age, will live to see the dawn of the 22nd century, looking and feeling like 40. I am not joking.
So, how do we improve our chances of getting there? Doing basic things to take care of your health is obvious, but there are other things that can be done.
We have known for 70 years how to slow the ageing process and delay the onset of the diseases of old age: eat less. Or more exactly, reduce the number of calories while maintaining adequate amounts of protein, fats, vitamins, and other nutrients. The difference is shocking, and it has been shown in animals from ameba to monkeys without exception. Basically, when calories are low, cells turn on genes that fix damage, so you age more slowly. Fasting at least once a month seems to produce most of the desired effect.
The monkeys are both about 25 years old. The one on the right ate a normal diet and is old, frail, gray, scruffy, and has the shrunken skull of an old monkey (like a 90 year old human). The one on the left ate a diet with the same nutrients, but with about 30 percent fewer calories. The contrast is shocking. The monkey that ate fewer calories still looks young and healthy (like a 60 year old human).
So, step one is avoid excess calories, especially from sugar, white bread, white rice, and white potatoes.
But the amount by which you have to reduce calories is quite difficult for most people to maintain. Is there another way we can turn on the damage repair genes? The answer seems to be yes.
Throughout human evolution, we have always eaten plants that were far from perfect. They were drought stressed, attacked by fungi, and attacked by insects. Ironically, this seems to have been good for us. When plants are attacked or do not receive enough water, they produce huge numbers of chemicals to defend themselves. In seasons when there were a lot of these chemicals in plants, animals eating the plants used that as a signal that hard times may be coming, so their cells turned on the damage control genes to protect what the cells already had. We also did not have steady supplies of food, so whenever we didn't eat for a day, again the damage control genes turned on. Specifically, unnecessary molecular tags are removed from the DNA, returning gene expression to the way it was when we were younger. In modern life, all the plants we eat are completely protected from fungi and insects and are watered carefully. All the stress response chemicals that they would normally produce are not there. We never go for a day without eating. Therefore, our damage control genes are never turned on, so the molecular tags on our DNA become more and more different from the way they were when we were young, our gene expression becomes more abnormal, and we age at a high rate.
If we consume chemicals that plants make in response to stress, it turns on the damage control genes, and voila, the effect is the same as caloric restriction, although it is unclear what dose is necessary. One chemical that has been shown to turn on damage control genes is resveratrol, which is found in the skin of grapes, especially when the grape plants are stressed by drought or fungus infection, and is found in many other plants as well. Since people who drink red wine made from grapes harvested and processed in the French way seemed to have extremely low levels of heart disease, researchers tried screening red wines from France to find out if there were compounds which produced the effect. Resveratrol is the most potent found so far. When given to laboratory animals, it slows ageing by 20% and even much more, and it decreases risk of cancer by up to 70%. Further evidence comes from numerous studies showing that consumption of 3 glasses of red wine per week is associated with 70% reduction in colon cancer, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and other cancers.
I have been taking resveratrol for two years now, and I think the effects are apparent. When I stopped for 6 months because I ran out, the skin started to look old and wrinkled. Resveratrol is easily destroyed by exposure to air, heat, and light. I take the one from Longevinex at http://www.longevinex.com because it seems to be the most biologically active. It costs about a dollar a day, which is much cheaper than a glass of wine, though much less fun, so I do both.
These results are not obscure, but you may not have heard about them. Do a Google search for any of these topics and you will find thousands of hits.
So, step 1, let's at least do simple basic things to slow the ageing process and delay the onset of serious diseases of old age. You may be rewarded beyond your wildest dreams. 万歳！
