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News Briefs 04-09-2009

By G. Calofon

What if Joan Osborne was right and God was one of us? Gauntlet, thrown 😉

Quote of the Day:

“It isn’t that the world of appearances is wrong; it it isn’t that there aren’t objects out there, at one level of reality. It’s that if you penetrate through and look at the universe with a holographic system, you arrive at a different view, a different reality…”

Karl Pribram

G. Calof
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9 Comments

  1. What if Joan Osborne had it completely backward?
    What if, instead of “What if God was one of us?”, the correct point of view is “What if we are actually one with God?”

    That may seem like the same thing (one=1, 1=one), but the discontinuity occurred because when we started thinking we were different than God, a completely false reality sprung up around us to support the idea, and we lost our way back to the truth of what we are (One with God). So in our current “dream state” we SEEM to be different from God and the equation (One = 1 ) no longer makes sense. But hidden away deep inside is what was forgotten eons ago, and can still be recognized, although it does take discipline and effort on our part.

    But hey, Joan’s getting the idea completely backward is no great screw-up: Everything here is backward relative to our original home. In the completely-awakened world of spirit, things are eternal. Here everything ends – even mountain chains eventually are worn down to sand and washed into the ocean. In our original home, perfection, love, and peace are eternal and all-pervasive. Here the common person’s experience of these qualities is fleeting at best.

    But Edgar Cayce, the late, great seer had it right when he said that every soul eventually begins to seek its true home, and that in time we all make it back!

  2. Comment on UK designed “Gravity Tractor”
    “UK designed gravity tractor may alleviate NASA’s lack of vision”?

    All right! Sock it to NASA’s myopic leadership skills! Good old limey scientists have found a way to harness gravitational forces and are using them for the benefit of mankind!

    But then the article is read. What is this source of gravitational force that the tractor uses? It doesn’t actually say what source of gravity is being utilized. Have these intrepid UK scientists found a way to measure and generate gravitational forces that can then be focused on a subject so that work can be done?

    It is never specified anywhere in the article. Is it just a poorly written article? Did the author forget to mention that vital detail?

    Surely, the scientists are not suggesting that the almost too-small-to-measure force of gravitation between masses is what is supposed to move this asteroid off course? The itty-bitty gravitational force exerted by a ten ton, 100 ft long spacecraft ghosting alongside the asteroid would probably not be measureable relative to other factors affecting the course of the asteroid such as solar wind, gravitational pull from the sun/other planets, and impacts from other asteroids.

    Of course the source of the “small gravitational force” is not specified. It would have been easy to just specify that this “small gravitational force” was a consequence of the attraction between the masses of objects, if that’s what is being referred to.

    But that presents another problem: IF the source of gravitational attraction is that attractive force between masses, and the idea is to “ghost” alongside the asteroid with this 100 m spaceship and “pull” the asteroid out of its current orbit using that mass attraction, the effective thrust of the “four ion thrusters” are THE source of “work” actually changing the direction of force in the inertial system.

    Changing the system’s inertial vector would require the ion thrusters to have some component of thrust at right angles to the inertial vector of the spaceship and towards the asteroid mass. (If the ion thrusters on the spaceship are positioned away from the asteroid, the spaceship will be inexorably DRIVEN INTO the asteroid. Gravitational ATTRACTION is the only game we can play using the currently stated physical rules.)

    The force vector that is generated by the displacement of the ion thruster is negated by the resulting impact of the ion mass on one or both of the members of the inertial system. Net gain zero.

    Either some very important factors to understand this basic idea have been left out of the article, or these UK scientists need to mix up a Gin and Tonic and re-watch a few Monty Python episodes to re-establish their bearings.

    1. Voting for Nukes
      A megaton warhead detonating on impact should handily vaporize an asteroid this size. We already made the stupid H-bombs, so we might as well get some value out of them instead of using them on people.

      Besides, it would be really cool in a fireworks kind of way!

    2. weighty issue
      Probably they will just make their device real heavy. But to be more specific:
      [quote]
      The itty-bitty gravitational force exerted by a ten ton, 100 ft long spacecraft ghosting alongside the asteroid would probably not be measureable relative to other factors affecting the course of the asteroid…
      [/quote]

      how small is the force? Should be easy to calculate, go ahead and improve on the article, give us a number.

      1. NEWTON’s FIGuring
        [quote=earthling]Probably they will just make their device real heavy. But to be more specific:
        [quote]
        The itty-bitty gravitational force exerted by a ten ton, 100 ft long spacecraft ghosting alongside the asteroid would probably not be measureable relative to other factors affecting the course of the asteroid…
        [/quote]

        how small is the force? Should be easy to calculate, go ahead and improve on the article, give us a number.[/quote]

        How would you like your numerical eggs cooked?

        The spaceship specified here has a mass of 10 tons.
        The Earth’s mass is 6,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons (that’s 6.6 followed by 20 numerical eggs).
        Earth’s gravity, a factor of its mass, is called 1 g (one gee; “little g” is a local gravitational field derivative of “Big G” below).
        The amount of gravity exerted by the ship is then in terms of Earth gravity, 10/6600000000000000000000 or
        1.5 x 10^-21 G.

        There you have it. What are you going to do with it? You could calculate the gravitational acceleration of a freely falling body but that number too would be so small as to be so close to zero that it would make no practical sense. To get something practical (both ‘within the realm of familiarity’ and ‘capable of being applied to a task to aid in its completion’) one should consider the actual situation in which it will be used: two bodies in space. Flying parallel in microgravity or sitting motionless in an otherwise empty universe, it makes no difference. And since the job at hand is changing an orbit of one using the other, we can ignore the rest of the universe. Oh sure, it exists and has an effect that can be calculated, but the result would be as vanishingly useless as the H calculation above.

        For a simple two body system, the formula for calculating the mutual gravitational attraction based on their masses and distance is:

        F = G(m1*m2/r^2) where m1 and m2 are the masses of the bodies, r is the distance between them and G (“Big G”) is the gravitational constant (how much gravity is produced by mass). The resulting force is in Newtons. Although the most relevant calculation, it is not in itself the most basic form. That distinction belongs to “Big G”.

        G is itself a numerical constant. Cavendish discovered its existence in 1798. Its value is, in cgs notation, 6.674 x 10^-8 cm^3 g^-1 s^-2, the volume, mass and time dimensions included because these factors are necessary to work out applications of the formula, such as the two body solution above.

        So there you have it, or rather them, the essential constant and the relevant application. What are you going to do with them?

        1. wrong body
          I was referring to the asteroid, not earth.

          The asteroid would be no more than 430 yards in diameter for the UK people. Maybe 400 meters is ok too.

          So given a density of about 3 kg per cm^3, that would be about 1×10^11 kg. Compared to the 1×10^4 kg of the spacecraft.

          I don’t know what the mass of the earth has to do with the question. Unless you were thinking about the proposal to move the earth’s orbit outward, for the time when the sub gets really big.

          1. Asteroidy-toidy
            [quote=earthling]I was referring to the asteroid, not earth.

            The asteroid would be no more than 430 yards in diameter for the UK people. Maybe 400 meters is ok too.

            So given a density of about 3 kg per cm^3, that would be about 1×10^11 kg. Compared to the 1×10^4 kg of the spacecraft.

            I don’t know what the mass of the earth has to do with the question. Unless you were thinking about the proposal to move the earth’s orbit outward, for the time when the sub gets really big.[/quote]

            I was aware you were speaking of the asteroid, as was I. You requested the numbers, and I gave them a few different ways. I used Earth only as a standard of measurement, as there were several ways to approach your question, one G being one of those, and that being directly related to the mass of Earth.

            Your comment here approaches it from the F=G(m1*m2/r^2) direction, by comparing the masses of the objects at your not unreasonable ratio of a million to one. The previous would also, but the ratio in the sextillions would make the proportion of movement of the Earth compared to the ship or asteroid so small as to be irrelevant, so a strict comparison with G is easier, and requires less arithmetic.

            To approach it in even more practical terms: Using ship-to-asteroid comparison, to move the asteroid one mile the ship would have to move one million miles. But to keep it effective (ie. close to the asteroid) it would for instance have to ‘tug’ it a mile one million times. Theoretically it works, but figure the odds on someone building a ship that can cycle one million firings with the thrust necessary to move itself and a heavy load also, much less there being enough time to send the tug out, rendezvous, prepare, and fire then repeat these three a million times. If we sent it to Apophis now to deflect its 2039 arrival (and it had the mass ratio above, which it doesn’t, but let’s just play with the numbers), the tug would have to cycle every 15 minutes to do the job hypothesized by the designers using the numbers here. A closely orbiting pair of regular bodies far from any other orbits could be made to do this. A ship and an irregular, rotating asteroid in at Earth’s distance from the sun and approaching the Earth/moon system more than once in the interim would require constant course corrections as well as the thrusting, so no way. BTW, I’m assuming the tug to be a thrusting type for this reason, since the article was scant on details.

          2. real problem
            Timing is the real problem, in the sense that you would have to generate the political will to do something that will take effect 30 years into the future.

            I have seen this kind of proposal before. They intend to basically do a whole bunch of flybys. This will work given enough time, for a small enough asteroid.

            The advantage is that if you know that it will hit earth at a certain time, you don’t have to be all that precise about diverting it.

            My favourite idea is to paint the dangerous asteroid, so that the solar radiation pressure diverts it.

            PS.
            A small practical problem now, for the 10 ton spacecraft, is that we probably don’t have a launcher to get it out there. And by “we” I mean all the earthly space programs.

    3. Filling In The Spaces
      What’s left out are several facts, and a few that they get flat wrong.

      NASA isn’t running out or going to run out of money. What they don’t have, and what’s continually misreported, is no more funding in 10 years for the NEO projects than they have now. At that level they can either search, or store the data, but not both. Either way they won’t be able to have detected 90% of NEOs by 2020. Since NASA has rarely had an ongoing project go without budget increases for 10 years, it’s safe to assume they’ll get what they need.

      Also not said is that if NASA doesn’t come across, one of the other 6 (that’s SIX) NEO projects probably will. This is also a point often misrepresented. NASA is not the only people running such a project, nor the source of funding for all. Two of them aren’t even in the US. The NASA/JPL NEO project does happen to be the largest and best funded, but that’s all.

      Now keep in mind that the NASA NEO program has been running successfully for years with adequate funding. To assume that it’ll suddenly collapse only makes sense if you don’t know the facts (no fault there, many don’t) AND if you read a news story that implies it.

      Why would they do such a thing? Because they needed a mechanism to make what they wanted to talk about seem better than poor old NASA. Well, it would be successful. How about, it’s a good idea? Maybe. Possibly?

      Fact is, they did it because without knocking down NASA they might have to admit that the “study” was done independently, unbidden and unwanted; that some of the ESA people were asked questions by the “researcher” and that’s about it; that the “project” amounts to an idea and a a few drawings, and they don’t show the drawings so we can’t tell if they, at least, are original. The article goes as far as to state that national or international funding would be necessary to build it. It doesn’t say that no existing lift vehicle could get it into orbit, or that lifting the components and building it in space (which makes sense) would take as much effort, money and time as the space station. It doesn’t reference the November 9, 2005 National Geographic article (source of the Wikipedia article) on using a gravity tractor to change asteroids’ orbits.

      You can tell that they knew the story couldn’t fly on its own and required the use of a straw man because they tried to make it sound like this UK “project” would succeed where the NASA/JPL project failed, despite the fact that the former was about building a craft to alter orbits, whereas the latter only exists to detect and track such bodies rather than build anything to try to stop them from hitting Earth. Had they actually intended to compare two things, one would hope they would choose two things with similar goals.

      Try their rhetorical device on some more mundane material:

      1. ESPN doesn’t have enough sportscasters to cover football (“soccer” to us Yanks).

      B. Arsenal midfielder Denilson has just signed a long term contract with the team.

      Finally, Arsenal Could Go All The Way This Year. I can say this because I looked up the stuff about Denilson on Arsenal.com, and they are experts on Arsenal.

      Does anyone else get the feeling that this space “project” is being run by The Underpants Gnomes?
      1. Take underpants.
      2. …
      3. Profit!

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