My Two UFOs
Part of the fun of being an astronomical artist is that you get asked engaging questions. A surprising percentage of people are eager to buttonhole anyone who might have some inside info on things celestial. Often, folks want some follow-up on a news story, like the man who read about an impending collision between two galaxies and was curious how it had turned out. Some people just want reassurance that the moon landing wasn’t faked. Nearly everyone is fascinated by the possibility of extraterrestrial life. This sometimes leads to a discussion about UFOs, which makes me squirm a little, because, doggone it, I’ve seen ‘em. Two, in fact. But I don’t really “believe” in them. It’s a subject that causes some personal cognitive dissonance.
My creepiest UFO sighting occurred in 1969. In those halcyon days I often loaded a homebuilt telescope into my mom’s Falcon and drove into the Mojave desert in search of clear, dark skies. I would invariably get the car stuck in a sandpit on some abandoned road and spend hours extricating it. Eventually, in a suitably god-forsaken place, I’d set up the ‘scope, toss my sleeping bag on the ground, heedlessly bed down with the scorpions and sidewinders, and gaze at the heavens. On one occasion I was adopted by a pack of coyotes, but that’s another story.
On the night in question, I was setting up the telescope an hour after sunset. The clear sky would allow a nice view of Saturn when it rose in the wee hours. I had just finished aligning the polar axis of the telescope when something caught my eye: in the southeast, just above a ridge of hills near the horizon, was a perfectly straight, luminous line. It was about half the apparent size of a full moon, absolutely horizontal, and moving slowly west. It was clearly too thin and too straight to be anything natural. Cue X Files theme.
There was a weird scintillation to the object and, in my mind’s eye, I could see the sequentially rippling running lights on the edge of a saucer cruising over the desert, its hull cooling from the plunge into earth’s atmosphere as its pilots searched for a suitable landing spot after their journey of who knew how many light years. That line from War of the Worlds about “minds vast, cool, and unsympathetic” came to mind and I could feel goosebumps sprouting. I half-expected green death rays to blast me where I stood.
Then I noticed that the object seemed to be slightly larger. It was headed my way! Mingled terror and awe. First contact. Take us to your leader, who, God help us, happened to be Nixon. I also noticed a creamy glow developing in the east, but I knew what that was: the moon, getting ready to rise. Then I noticed something else: I had a telescope! Homer Simpson wasn’t even a twinkle in Matt Groening’s eye, but this was an early “Doh!” moment. I deftly aimed the instrument toward the object, peered through the finder telescope, and was even more mystified.
The scintillation was real. There was indeed a line of lights flashing on and off, but they were not turning on sequentially. Nor were they spaced with the geometric precision one would expect. Each light was, however, flashing with a regular pulse, and the period seemed to be pretty consistent for all the lights: about three flashes a second. I centered the spacecraft (now firmly convinced that’s what it was) in the finder’s field of view and looked at it through the 60 power eyepiece of the main telescope.
The strange green sheen of the hull betrayed the alien nature of the craft. Auroral curtains shimmering at the base of the ship hinted at the power of its advanced magnetic drive. They had come. The world was about to change forever.
Well, maybe not. What I actually saw was even stranger until my brain made the right connections. I was indeed looking at alien life forms: geese, on their way to some avian resort. The underside of their wings was reflecting the light of the moon, which was still hidden by hills at my location. Distance and perspective had blended the flock into a single line. Eventually the geese got close enough that I could see their characteristic “v” formation and hear their faint, evocative honks.
Without a telescope it would have been impossible to determine the nature of this UFO, which makes me think that most of the twenty-percent as-yet unexplained UFO sightings by sane, sober, honest people could have become explicable given a bit of optical aid or a different point of view. Under the right conditions even the most prosaic things can look extraordinary: Venus; weather balloons; swamp gas — all the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me official explanations. If investigators at Project Bluebook had suggested that I had seen a flock of geese I’d be looking over my shoulder for black helicopters even today. No way that was a flock of geese! But the telescope revealed that it was.
Item Number 2 in my UFO casebook isn’t quite so easy to explain. The desert encounter occurred when I was 18, arguably well above the age of reason (which I actually didn’t reach until 35, like most of my generation, but that, too, is another story). At least I was old enough and knew enough to eventually figure out what I was seeing. My first UFO sighting, however, happened when I was a mere lad of seven, and I thought nothing of it at the time.
The sighting lasted maybe three seconds. I was sitting directly behind the driver of our school bus as it cruised through a New Jersey forest ablaze with the colors of autumn. I was looking out the window, studiously ignoring Sharon Blake, the cute little red-haired girl across the aisle. The sky was blue and early morning sun dappled the treetops. Just ahead of the bus there was a flash of light. It was the sun gleaming off a shiny metallic disk flying over the road from right to left at maybe a thirty degree angle. I watched it for a couple of seconds until it went behind the trees. I thought it was kind of cool. Some new type of airplane, maybe, but no big deal.
I’m blessed — sometimes plagued — by the ability to retain vivid images. I remember looking out through the bars of a crib and can recall the shiny varnish that coated the top of a bannister at my grandmother’s house, viewed from the perspective of a babe in arms. This is not a particularly useful talent, but it allows me to recall details about that flying saucer that suggest the sighting was not a synthetic memory based on a dream or a misapprehended conventional aircraft such as a helicopter.
The UFO was lustrous silver and perfectly circular, sufficiently oblate that it looked basically flat, but there might have been a slight convex bulge to the bottom. As it glided across the road, a dazzling sub-solar glint slid along its edge, properly obeying the laws of optics. The most amazing thing about it was that its silvery underside reflected the orange and red treetops. I was able to see the trees as if in a mirror. This brief, bird’s-eye view is what enchanted my seven-year-old mind and it is the primary detail that convinces me I saw a real, physical object that morning.
If I were filling out a UFO report I would guess the thing was about 50 feet in diameter and 200 feet up. If it were much higher or bigger the tree reflections wouldn’t have been so distinct. It was likely moving at about the same speed as the bus, maybe 30-40 miles per hour. Given the location of the sun glint and the time of day, the bus was headed west and the UFO was traveling southwest. That should be enough to pin down the location of the saucer nest, don’t you think?
Did I see an alien spacecraft? Probably not. The least-bad explanation is that it was a test device from the nearby Picatinny Arsenal, covered with the same kind of aluminized Mylar envelope used on the Echo satellite two years later. This observation happened in 1958, post Sputnik, at the dawn of the Space Age, when America was frantically trying to catch up with the Russians. We could hear test firings of the Redstone rocket every few days, so they were doing bleeding-edge work at Picatinny. Perhaps it was an exotic balloon, like the one that supposedly went down at Roswell. Aeronautical engineers were trying all sorts of weird designs then. I’ve seen footage of a wacky flying saucer-like test craft from that time, but I don’t think it ever got more than a few feet off the ground; the computers required to stabilize such a thing weren’t around yet. The object I saw flew very gracefully.
Anybody know what it might have been?
Trampling the First Amendment
Not content with having their views promoted uncritically by CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, NPR and the entire professariate, Democrats are lobbying for legislation that would require conservative talk radio programs to provide equal time to leftist advocates. The proposed “Fairness Doctrine” is a cynical attempt to undermine the most effective alternative voice besides the Internet. You can sign a petition against this effort to restrict free speech here.
It isn’t as if liberals can’t broadcast their own programs. Air America, after all, has hundreds of listeners. The fact is, few prominent liberals have the audacity to accept invitations to debate in the talk radio venue; it is uncontrolled, unscripted, and generally attracts a better-informed audience than they are used to addressing. They have little to gain and much to lose. The only effect of the proposed legislation will be to force talk radio shows to provide air time to dull, minor league, leftist spokesbeings, who will drive listeners away.
Which is, of course, the point.
Global Warming: A Human Perspective
According to most climate experts, anthropogenic greenhouse gases add about 2 watts per square-meter of radiative forcing to earth’s environment. This is roughly the power used by a small Christmas tree lamp. In more personal terms, the human body generates approximately 100 watts of power and has a surface area of around 2 square-meters. Assuming that the sole of the average foot has an area of about 200 square-centimeters, it would emit 1 watt of power. Both feet, applied to a surface, would add 2 watts to that surface. Applied to a square-meter, that would be equivalent to the anthropogenic greenhouse effect.
If we could cover every square meter of the Greenland ice cap with a barefoot human — a magical, never frostbitten human willing to stand, day after day, pumping his 2 watts into the ice — would we expect the ice to melt?
The answer is “eventually.” A back-of-the-envelope calculation* suggests that it would take about 10,000 years, assuming an average ice depth of 2 kilometers. In light of this, Al Gore’s threat to invoke the wrath of Gaia to bring about a complete meltdown in 60 years seems off by a couple of orders of magnitude — unless, of course, he is willing to acknowledge the possibility that the warming we observe is due to a so-far unmeasurable anthropogenic effect superimposed on a poorly understood natural warming process that began when Abraham Lincoln was a baby, long before carbon dioxide levels changed.
Such an admission, however, might be inconvenient.
*2 Watts = 172800 Joules/day
333700 Joules melts 1 kg of ice
Therefore 2 watts melts 172800/333700=0.52 kg/day
1 kg = 1000 cubic centimeters of ice (yes, I know its really a bit more because of expansion)
Distributed over 1 square meter, this equals a depth of 0.1 cm
But our feet can melt only 0.52 kg/day, so a hotfooted human would melt a depth of (0.52)X 0.1 cm / day = 0.05 cm/day (half a millimeter)
THUS, the heat from a person’s feet would melt (distributed over a square meter), a depth of:
0.05 cm/day
1 meter/2000 days (call it 5 years)
2000 meters in 10,000 years (This surprised even me, so I’d appreciate a check of this reasoning by more arithmetically adept readers).
NB: Junk Science has a detailed discussion of how to evaluate anthropogenic radiative forcing .
Quest for a New Earth
If our civilization survives for another decade or two, we may get our first glimpse of a planet remarkably like Earth. The red dwarf star Gliese 581 is about 20.5 light years away, practically next door. Last year, two planets were discovered orbiting it. Both are giant worlds like Jupiter, detected by the subtle wobble they produced in their “sun” as they tug it slightly to and fro with their gravitational fields. Last month, astronomers announced the discovery of a third planet, dubbed GL 581 c. Two things about it are intriguing: Its mass is only about 5 times greater than Earth’s (as opposed to Jupiter’s 300 times greater heft), making it one of the smallest extrasolar planets yet detected. If it is made of rocky material like earth, it would be only about 75 percent larger than our world. The second interesting thing is its orbit, which places it squarely in its parent star’s “Goldilocks Zone,” where it is neither too hot nor too cold to sustain liquid water. This is the first planet we’ve found that could conceivably look something like Earth, with white swirling clouds and vast oceans.
We should be reluctant to draw a graph using two data points, however, and all we know about this world is its mass and orbit. Be cautioned that all that follows is speculation. Gliese 581 shines with only 1.3 percent of the Sun’s luminosity, so a planet would have to orbit 14 times closer than Earth orbits the Sun in order to receive the same amount of heat. GL 581 c does this, in fact, giving it a “year” that is only 13 earth-days long. In such a close orbit Gliese 851c has probably become tidally locked, so that its rotation period matches its orbital period. This means that the same hemisphere would always be turned toward its star. Our own moon does this, so that we see only one side of it.
Such a situation could make for an interesting climate. Any ocean in the subsolar region of GL 581 c might simmer under a perpetual hood of steam. If the atmosphere is dense enough, convection might carry heat away to the dark side, possibly preventing it from freezing in its eternal night. The most habitable place might be the “Twilight Zone” near the boundary between night and day. Any creatures living in this temperate band would see their sun as a bloated orange orb — a dozen times larger than our sun looks to us — poised always on the horizon. Plants, questing for light, would tumble over themselves, trying to grow ever-sunward. I imagined a situation like this back in 1980, and have updated my painting of this “Marching Forest” to suit the GL 581 c scenario.
So far, no telescope has been able to photograph a planet orbiting another star, but with any luck, sophisticated satellites planned for the next decade may obtain spectrographic data that could tell us something about the compositions of the atmospheres of these distant worlds. GL 581 c is close enough that, should its atmosphere contain oxygen — almost certainly proof of life because it is so unlikely to remain unbound for long — we would have the first evidence that earthlike worlds abound.
Whether that realisation does anything to improve behavior on this planet is anyone’s guess. A sense that there is still wonder and mystery in the universe might kindle hope in those parts of the world where there currently doesn’t seem to be much, this side of Paradise.
Mayor Declares War Against Gangs
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has declared war against the local gangs. Bully for him! Being a Democrat, his strategy should be obvious: re-deploy the police out of gang-infested areas and let the gangs settle their own problems. We have no business trying to force our cultural values on people living in those neighborhoods, and the gangs are obviously no threat to us. Let’s bring our brave boys and girls in blue back home where they belong. This whole police patrol thing is a distraction from the real war on…whatever.
Sorry. Sometimes a reductio ad absurdum can be pushed a bit too far, I suppose.
Theological Implications of Time Travel
The usual plaintive queries regarding God’s whereabouts have followed the Virginia Tech massacre. How could a loving God permit such horror and injustice? The standard answers are offered: God has a plan, the victims are in heaven now, and we need better gun control. Such bromides provide little comfort and less illumination. Far greater intellects than those given voice in the mainstream media have confronted the problem of evil, or theodicy, for centuries, and the best answer they’ve come up with is this: God has granted us free will. Interference by God would restrict our freedom to choose between right and wrong. For whatever reason, this is how the universe is designed.
This answer may not be comforting, but it is logical. The argument that God should intervene to prevent evil begs a multitude of questions. Should God prevent all violence? How about suicide? How about bungee jumping and mountain climbing — activities that can harm not only voluntary practitioners but their innocent friends and families as well? Should we be guaranteed a peaceful death in our sleep on our 75th birthday? The notion of God as a cosmic crossing guard seems a bit ridiculous.
To be sure, many religious folks are willing to give God credit for an occasional intervention: the vest pocket Bible that stops a bullet; the serendipitous ledge that stops the climber’s fall; the spontaneous remission of illness. Folks even pray for such interventions. They are called miracles, and perhaps they happen, but such events occur so inconsistently that they are indistinguishable from dumb luck. The fact remains that the Virginia Tech killer was permitted to accomplish exactly what he set out to do. His guns didn’t jam and he did not keel over suddenly from a brain embolism. Innocents died.
So what does this have to do with time travel?
The recent movie Deja Vu, starring Denzel Washington, explores the issue of free will in an action/adventure format. (Warning: mild plot spoilers follow). Washington plays an ATF agent named Doug Carlin who is dispatched to investigate a terrorist bombing of a ferry in New Orleans. Carlin is teamed with other government agents who are ostensibly using a plethora of remote sensing satellite data streams to reconstruct events that transpired four days in the past (that being the fastest the data can be integrated). Inconsistencies in the information lead Carlin to discover that they are actually looking into the past via an Einstein-Rosen bridge, or wormhole, and that there may be a possibility of influencing past events to prevent the disaster. He has himself sent back in time.
The usual time-travel paradoxes are dealt with in an amusing fashion; Carlin receives messages from an alternate version of himself and battles against the forces of destiny with apparent futility. One of the scientists says that Carlin’s efforts to change the past are analogous to changing the course of the Mississippi, and the protagonist’s struggles seem exactly that hopeless. It’s an exciting story, once you buy the premise.
After watching the video, my wife and kids tried to untangle the plot and explain apparent holes in it. I pointed out that time travel will probably never be invented because of the apparent dearth of time traveling tourists. Dramatic historical events, such as the JFK assassination or 911, should have attracted huge, popcorn-crunching crowds, including folks from the far future with large, bald heads and six fingers. One of my kids suggested that perhaps time-travel is carefully regulated to restrict tourism. Another pointed out the impracticality of such regulation being consistently enforced for millions of years. My wife, ever logical, pointed out another possibility: time travel may not have time to be invented. Our civilization — and perhaps our species — may not survive long enough. Even if another intelligent species were to arise 100 million years down the line, they would be unlikely to either know or care about our historical turning points.
This cast a pall over the conversation, and we went to bed. It got me to thinking, though. The absence of time travel is perfectly consistent with consensus theodicy. Just as intervention by God would restrict free will, so would time travel.
Does the absence of time travelers suggest that God exists, or that the future doesn’t?
NOTE (posted July 9, 2007) — I just stumbled on an interesting debate between Philip E. Graves of the Department of Economics at the University of Colorado and a devout atheist named Vexen Crabtree in the U.K. that touches on many of these points.
The Coming Dark Age
Orson Scott Card says it better than I could ever hope to…
Here’s how it happens: America stupidly and immorally withdraws from the War on Terror, withdrawing prematurely from Iraq and leaving it in chaos. Emboldened, either Muslims unite against the West (unlikely) or collapse in a huge war between Shiites and Sunnis (already beginning). It almost doesn’t matter, because in the process the oil will stop flowing.
And when the oil stops flowing, Europe and Japan and Taiwan and Singapore and South Korea all crash economically; Europe then has to face the demands of its West-hating Muslim “minority” without money and without the ruthlessness or will to survive that would allow them to counter the threat. The result is accommodation or surrender to Islam. The numbers don’t lie — it is not just possible, it is likely. (more)
A New Blueprint for Peace
Even the Democrats appear to be distancing themselves from the report issued by James Baker’s geriatric coffee klatsch, which recommends enlisting Iran and Syria to help stabilize Iraq. This approach had mixed results in 1939, when Germany and Russia cooperated to stabilize Poland.
