Filed under: Astronomy, Fermi's Paradox, General Musings, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Space, Survival | Tags: astronomy, blogging, Drake Equation, exoplanets, Fermi's Paradox, gamma ray bursts, Harvard, Hebrew University, jim downey, life, physics, Raul Jimenez, science, Science Fiction, SETI, space, survival, Tsvi Piran
It really does seem to be a pretty universal law:
On the role of GRBs on life extinction in the Universe
As a copious source of gamma-rays, a nearby Galactic Gamma-Ray Burst (GRB) can be a threat to life. Using recent determinations of the rate of GRBs, their luminosity function and properties of their host galaxies, we estimate the probability that a life-threatening (lethal) GRB would take place. Amongst the different kinds of GRBs, long ones are most dangerous. There is a very good chance (but no certainty) that at least one lethal GRB took place during the past 5 Gyr close enough to Earth as to significantly damage life. There is a 50% chance that such a lethal GRB took place during the last 500 Myr causing one of the major mass extinction events. Assuming that a similar level of radiation would be lethal to life on other exoplanets hosting life, we explore the potential effects of GRBs to life elsewhere in the Galaxy and the Universe.
What that means is summed up in this article. Here’s the conclusion:
Astronomers have long known that the Earth occupies a unique position in the solar system that allows life to flourish. This idea of a habitable zone now allows them to focus search for exoplanets that might also have conditions that are right for life. Now they can take this further by excluding inhospitable regions of the galaxy, and searching only those stars and galaxies that exist in the universe’s habitable zones.
Of course, that’s just for life as we know it …
Jim Downey
Filed under: Argentina, Augmented Reality, Connections, Discover, General Musings, Humor, movies, Science, Science Fiction, Space | Tags: Argentina, augmented reality, blogging, dinosaur, Dreadnoughtus schrani, humor, jim downey, paleontology, Patagonia, Predator, science, Science Fiction, space
No doubt by now you’ve heard of the discovery of Dreadnoughtus schrani, the massive dinosaur found in the Patagonia region of Argentina (been there!), which in addition to being notable for its size is also notable for how much of it was found:
Lacovara says those other estimates are based on a mere smattering of bones, or on analyses that haven’t yet been subjected to peer review. In contrast, the estimate of Dreadnoughtus’ size and weight was based on measurements of more than 100 separate elements, including most of the tail vertebrae, a yard-long (meter-long) neck vertebra, numerous ribs and nearly all the bones from the forelimbs and hindlimbs.
Researchers unearthed about 45 percent of the skeleton’s full complement of bones, representing 70 percent of the bone types found below the skull (for example, a left rib without the mirror-image right rib).
Very impressive to find so much of it. Too bad they didn’t find the skull, as well.
Wait, no skull?
Hmm …
Yeah, I’m sure that it’s just a coincidence …
Jim Downey
Filed under: Brave New World, Connections, General Musings, Science Fiction, Society, Writing stuff | Tags: blogging, Communion of Dreams, jim downey, Kameron Hurley, Lady Business, Science Fiction, society, writing
This piece by Kameron Hurley is quite good. It’s about using fiction to shape expectations and open imaginations. Here’s a good excerpt:
Even our nonfiction perpetuates this idea that the way we are today is the way we’ve always been, or will ever be. I saw my first few episodes of Cosmos this week, a show I probably would have interrogated less before I started untangling the stories we tell ourselves are history. As with every other depiction of “early humans” this one showed a recognizable, to us, family group: women holding children, a couple men out hunting, maybe grandma off to one side. They looked like the limited family groups we knew from popular media, instead of the likely far more complicated ones that they moved in during their time: four women and two men stripping a carcass, two men out gathering, an old man watching after the children, two old women tending the fire. The truth is that every archaeologist and historian is limited by their own present in interpreting the future. So when Americans and Europeans talk about early humans, they don’t talk so much about early humans in Africa, even if that’s where we all came from. When we talk about early humans, they’re always hairy, pelt-wearing pale folks hacking out a living on some ice sheet. The men are always out hunting (like good 1950’s office workers!) while women stay in camp to dawdle babies on their knees. In fact, small family groups like these could not afford truly specialized roles until the advent of agriculture. Before that, folks needed to work together even more closely to survive — every member pulled their weight, whether that was looking after young children, gathering food, or herding some big mammal off a cliff and stripping it for meat.
Couldn’t agree more. In fact, here’s a passage from Chapter 2 of Communion of Dreams, and this element was built into that book for precisely the reasons she discusses:
Down at the end of a cul-de-sac was his family’s residence. A couple of the large, old homes which were built in the ‘90’s served as the bookends of the compound, with additional structures between and behind them forming an open triangle. Group families of various configurations had become the norm in the few decades since the flu. Almost everyone who survived the flu was left infertile, even the very young, and the children who were born were themselves likely to be infertile. Children had become critically important, treasured above all else. Group families formed naturally as a way of raising more children in a secure environment, with shared responsibility. Those adults who were fertile came to be cherished and protected by the others. Couples still tended to pair-bond, as in Jon’s family, but formed a small collective, or extended family structure. In some ways it was an older form of the family, a survival strategy from deep in mankind’s racial memory.
And, unsurprisingly, even this fairly tame variation on what a ‘family’ is has gotten criticism from some reviewers.
Anyway, Hurley’s piece isn’t very long, and is well worth the read.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, Emergency, General Musings, Health, NPR, Pandemic, Predictions, Preparedness, Psychic abilities, Science Fiction, tech, Writing stuff | Tags: bats, blogging, Ebola, health, jim downey, NPR, pandemic, predictions, science, Science Fiction, technology, White Nose Syndrome, writing
News item on NPR this afternoon:
Ebola In The Skies? How The Virus Made It To West Africa
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the most explosive in history. One reason the virus spread so fast is that West Africa was blindsided. Ebola had never erupted in people anywhere close to West Africa before.
The type of Ebola causing the outbreak — called Zaire — is the deadliest strain. Until this year, it had been seen only in Central Africa, about 2,500 miles away. That’s about the distance between Boston and San Francisco.
How did it get there?
Disease ecologist says scientists don’t know for sure. But they have a top theory: The virus spread through bats.
Many signs point to bats as the main source of Ebola. Scientists have found Ebola antibodies in bat species that are widespread throughout Africa. The virus infects and replicates inside bats, but it doesn’t kill the animals. So bats can easily spread Ebola.
And bats get around. Some can migrate hundreds, even thousands of miles.
Combine that with the item I posted about earlier … and my mind went in a very odd direction as I was doing some routine work in the bindery this afternoon: what if …
… what if a few years ago someone with some limited precognitive ability (either technological or psychic) was able to foresee an Ebola epidemic which made it to the US and then was spread by our native bat population?
And then what if they decided to do something to stop that epidemic before it ever happened … by decimating the bat population?
Yeah, sometimes the ideas I get kinda scare even me.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Connections, Emergency, Failure, Flu, General Musings, Government, Health, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Preparedness, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Violence | Tags: blogging, Ebola, Elliot Hannon, fire-flu, Foreign Policy, health, influenza, jim downey, Laurie Garrett, pandemic, predictions, science, Science Fiction, Slate, society, St. Cybi's Well, writing
Sorry for my absence here — I’ve been very busy with a another big project, one which I can’t discuss publicly just yet. But soon.
Without wanting to buy-into the complete panic in some corners about Ebola, here are a couple of very sober articles to consider, which are less about the actual disease and more about what such a pandemic does to the society it hits:
Looters Attack Liberia Ebola Quarantine Center, Patients Under Observation Return Home
Battling the deadly outbreak of Ebola in Liberia has been a mammoth task for the country’s government and international aid agencies. Over the weekend combating the virus’ spread got even harder when a quarantine center in Monrovia was attacked, and 17 patients being monitored for possible infection fled the medical facility. The Liberian government initially said all of the patients had been relocated to another facility after the West Point health center was looted on Saturday, but later admitted that 17 patients had gone “back into their communities,” the BBC reports.
And this one from last week:
You Are Not Nearly Scared Enough About Ebola
Attention, World: You just don’t get it.
You think there are magic bullets in some rich country’s freezers that will instantly stop the relentless spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa? You think airport security guards in Los Angeles can look a traveler in the eyes and see infection, blocking that jet passenger’s entry into La-la-land? You believe novelist Dan Brown’s utterly absurd description of a World Health Organization that has a private C5-A military transport jet and disease SWAT team that can swoop into outbreaks, saving the world from contagion?
Wake up, fools. What’s going on in West Africa now isn’t Brown’s silly Inferno scenario — it’s Steven Soderbergh’s movie Contagion, though without a modicum of its high-tech capacity.
And from that second article, more to my point:
I myself have received emails from physicians in these countries, describing the complete collapse of all non-Ebola care, from unassisted deliveries to untended auto accident injuries. People aren’t just dying of the virus, but from every imaginable medical issue a system of care usually faces.
That’s the thing — a pandemic is bad enough in its own right, when a disease such as Ebola has a mortality of more than 50% under the best conditions. Consider how much worse the impact will be once the overall public health system collapses due to the death of doctors and nurses, when deliveries can’t be made to restock supplies, when whole cities are quarantined, when people begin to really panic.
That is the horror of a true global pandemic. Like the one in St Cybi’s Well.
Cheery thought, eh?
Jim Downey
PS: Two other unrelated things I want to mention. The first is thanks to all who participated in Helping Cassandra – you made a real difference. And the second is just to link to a blog post about some black powder shooting I did this past weekend with some very fun historical guns.
Filed under: Astronomy, Brave New World, Connections, General Musings, NPR, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Space, tech, Titan | Tags: Arecibo, astronomy, blogging, Communion of Dreams, Duncan Lorimer, jim downey, Joe Palca, NPR, Parkes Observatory, predictions, radio astronomy, Robert Gish, Science Fiction, SETI, space, Titan
Interesting news item on NPR this morning:
Close Encounters Of The Radio Kind? Mystery Bursts Baffle Astronomers
Astronomers have a mystery on their hands. Two large radio telescopes, on opposite sides of the planet, have detected very brief, very powerful bursts of radio waves.
Right now, astronomers have no idea what’s causing these bursts or where they’re coming from. And nothing has been ruled out at the moment — not even the kind of outrageous claims you’d expect to see in tabloid headlines.
* * *
As you would imagine, there’s been lots of speculation about what’s behind these mysterious bursts. Some astronomers think they’re caused by blitzars, pulses of energy from a supermassive star collapsing into a black hole. Others think they may be caused by power solar flares coming from stars nearer by.
And Lorimer says he has to mention it: “There’s even been discussions in the literature about signatures from extraterrestrial civilizations.”
From Chapter 1 of Communion of Dreams when news of the discovery of an evidently alien artifact on Titan is being discussed:
The man sitting next to him got up, stepped up to the holo of the artifact still rotating there in the center. Robert Gish was a little unkempt, his beard untrimmed, his dark hair matted. He was out of shape, almost flabby in appearance. His scientific reputation was as unconventional as his looks. More so. He had been responsible for the radical change in long-range sensing which led to the development of the Advanced Survey Array. Nobel Prize stuff. A true genius, not just brilliant but able and willing to make leaps that took others years to understand. Which was why Bradsen had him here: Gish had been saying for decades that there was other intelligent life among the stars. Saying it so loud and so often that he was considered a crank, since he had no proof and couldn’t even really explain why he believed it to be so, at least in a way that others could accept.
Reaching out as though he was going to touch the object, he said quietly “We know what it is. It is a crack in our shell.”
Interesting news, indeed.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Brave New World, Emergency, Fireworks, General Musings, Humor, NASA, Predictions, Preparedness, SCA, Science, Science Fiction, Society, Space, Steampunk, Survival, tech | Tags: blogging, Daniel Baker, humor, jim downey, NASA, predictions, preppers, SCA, science, Science Fiction, solar storm, space, Steampunk, Sun, survival, technology
Just think — all the folks who are prepping to deal with some global emergency almost got a chance to see how well their theories work in practice. My friends who are into Steampunk and the SCA would have reigned supreme!
Earth survived near-miss from 2012 solar storm: NASA
Back in 2012, the Sun erupted with a powerful solar storm that just missed the Earth but was big enough to “knock modern civilization back to the 18th century,” NASA said.
The extreme space weather that tore through Earth’s orbit on July 23, 2012, was the most powerful in 150 years, according to a statement posted on the US space agency website Wednesday.
* * *
“If the eruption had occurred only one week earlier, Earth would have been in the line of fire,” said Daniel Baker, professor of atmospheric and space physics at the University of Colorado.
Ah well. Better luck next time!
Jim
Filed under: Alzheimer's, Argentina, Ballistics, Bipolar, Book Conservation, Connections, Depression, Failure, Gardening, General Musings, Guns, Health, Italy, New Zealand, Patagonia, Science Fiction, Society, Survival, Travel, Wales, Writing stuff | Tags: Alwyn, Alzheimer's, Argentina, bipolar, blogging, book conservation, bookbinding, care-giving, Communion of Dreams, depression, direct publishing, feedback, gardening, guns, Habaneros, health, Her Final Year, hospice, Italy, jim downey, John Bourke, Legacy Bookbindery, literature, New Zealand, Patagonia, Science Fiction, St. Cybi's Well, travel, Wales, writing
This will probably come across as a little brag-y. Sorry about that. Not my intention.
The other day I got a phone call. For Legacy Art. The gallery we closed May 31, 2004. Yeah, more than ten years ago.
And after I got through abusing the telemarketer over this point, I got to thinking about the many changes in the last decade.
First thing I should say up front: I’m at a low point in my bipolar cycle, as I’ve noted recently. That means that my self-image isn’t all that great. This isn’t a debilitating depressive episode or anything — I’ve managed to continue to work steadily, as well as enjoy the usual aspects of life. So not horrid. But it is sometimes difficult to not focus on the things which haven’t gone well, and my own failings which are often a component of that. And one of those failings is a sense of not accomplishing much, of being lazy, of wasting my time and the time of others.
Anyway. I got to thinking about the changes in the last decade. And surprisingly, more positive things came to mind than negative ones. That fed on itself, and I found myself making a mental list of the accomplishments.
In no particular order or ranking: wrote two books (one of them as co-author). Most of the way done with another. Visited Wales. And Argentina. And New Zealand. And Italy. Wrote several thousand blog posts. Became something of an authority on small caliber ballistics. Wrote several hundred articles and columns for publication. Was the full-time caregiver for someone with Alzheimer’s. Have done conservation work on something more than a thousand (that’s just a guess … may be closer to two thousand) books and documents. Made some great hot sauces. Raised, loved, and then said farewell to a great dog. Tried to be a good friend, and husband. Tried to help others when I could.
We all fail. We all have things we’ve done that haunt us in one way or another. Sometimes, those fears and demons overwhelm. Me, at least.
I may or may not be at a turning point in my bipolar cycle. But I’m glad that at least I can think of things I have accomplished. That helps.
Back to work on St. Cybi’s Well.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Amazon, Connections, Emergency, Feedback, Flu, General Musings, Health, Kindle, Marketing, NPR, Pandemic, Plague, Predictions, Preparedness, Promotion, Science, Science Fiction | Tags: Amazon, anthrax, blogging, CDC, CNN, Communion of Dreams, Ebola, FDA, feedback, free, health, jim downey, Kindle, medicine, NIH, NPR, predictions, promotion, reviews, Sarin, science, Science Fiction, serendipity, Smallpox, St. Cybi's Well, WHO, writing
First, thanks again to one and all for helping to make my recent promotion a success! We did finish the weekend with just under 500 total downloads worldwide. Yay!
In addition, there’s a new review up over on Amazon. Here’s how it starts:
A good story, and an excellent first novel.
This kept me interested until it was finally done.
For a first novel it was very good.
There were a couple of awkward sentences I had to re-read, but most books have that.
The plot was good, and different.
I am a bit amused that some people focus in on the “first novel” thing, and sometimes it seems that they feel like they can’t give a 5-star rating just on that basis. But perhaps they’re just trying to be nice in comments. If you have a chance, and haven’t yet done so, please consider posting your own review on Amazon (or elsewhere). Thanks!
There have been a couple of fairly scary pandemic stories in the news lately. One which has gotten a lot of attention is the Ebola outbreak, and how it has spread more than previous outbreaks. One which is even more frightening (to me) is word of an accidental anthrax exposure which went undetected for upwards of a week at a major supposedly secure research lab, the CDC bioterrorism facility in Atlanta. From one article:
Unfortunately, such scenarios are very real threats to not just lab workers but to the general population should a deadly contagion escape undetected the same way the CDC anthrax exposure remained undetected for possibly an entire week. That much time lapse for a deadly viral infection could prove devastating to the world population.
As it turns out, I am right at the point in St Cybi’s Well when first reports of the fireflu outbreak has hit the news. At first it is thought to be a Sarin gas attack at Hartsfield–Jackson International Airport in Atlanta. From the book:
“Jay, I’m here at the Georgia International Convention Center, just west of the airport. Authorities have turned this into something of a command center for the developing crisis, since they have put the entire airport terminal on lock-down.” She was reporting from a large, open room. In the background there was a stage and podium, where a small knot of government officials were standing and taking turns addressing the crowd of reporters and film crews down on the floor in front of them. “As you can imagine, the situation here is very confused at present, with conflicting reports coming from the airport itself about how many people have been injured in the attack, when it likely happened, how it was detected, and what steps are being taken to protect the public. What is certain is that while this airport – one of the busiest in the world – always has a number of arriving and departing flights, that the attack came sometime late at night has meant that the number of victims is much smaller than it could have been. We’re due to receive an update on the situation at 3:00 AM local time, which is in about an hour and fifteen minutes. Back to you.”
Serendipity. Scary, scary serendipity.
Edited to add this tasty tidbit of news which broke just in the last hour:
Smallpox Virus Found in Unsecured NIH Lab
Scientists cleaning out an old laboratory on the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Md., last week came across a startling discovery: Vials labeled “variola” – in other words, smallpox.
* * *
In a statement Tuesday, the agency said scientists did indeed find smallpox DNA in the vials. Scientists are now testing the sample to see whether any of the is still capable of causing disease. That testing will take two weeks.
The laboratory on the NIH campus had been transferred to the Food and Drug Administration in 1972. It was being cleaned out as the FDA was preparing to move that lab to its main campus.
Yeah baby!
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 