Author: Adam

Rydberg Matter… Invisible Hazard?

Rydberg Matter in Space.

Rydberg atoms are atoms orbitted by electrons in an excited state which leaves them barely attached to their nucleii, often for surprisingly long time periods. Rydberg Matter is basically clusters of Rydberg atoms attracted to each other and forming stable small n clusters. These small clusters typically form “atomic snowflakes”, but these in turn link up in long chains. Collected together in space Rydberg matter composed of interstellar hydrogen is largely transparent to radio, visible and IR light, thus it’s almost impossible to see… and possibly a billion times denser than the 106 protons per m3 that makes up most of the ISM. That’s bad news for interstellar travel as running into the stuff at high-speed (~0.1 c or more) would cause incredible meteoric levels of heating ~25,000 K.

An explanation for Fermi’s Paradox? Unsure. The chief researcher on Rydberg Matter seems kind of solitary in his research, perhaps indicating it’s dubious nature. More data from other researchers would be helpful.

Dense Deuterium for Nuclear Fusion

News detail – University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

A Swedish physical chemist, Leif Homlid, is producing ultra-dense deuterium, though the news-bite is a bit vague on how much and how stable it is. However it’s 130,000 times denser than water and would make a fantastic fusion fuel in an ICR fusion system. Might even make deuterium rockets a whole lot easier than Friedwardt Winterberg has imagined. Sure would be a less bulky way of storing the stuff if it could be made in bulk.

Proterozoic Metazoans?

Complex life pushed back in time (ABC News in Science).

The Vindyan sedimentary basins in central India have been contentious for quite some time, with claims of animal body and trace fossils going back into the Meso-Proterozoic (1.6-1.0 Gya.) That claim has been given a shot-in-the-arm by new work reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which describes fossils found in the Vindyan from 1.65 Gya (late Paleoproterozoic) akin to those usually found in the Cambrian and Ediacaran.

So what’s going on? Is complex life really so old? Did it experience a global setback and took a billion years to recover?

There’s merit to that idea. A current puzzle of astrobiology, that I’ve blogged on time and time again, is the Fermi Paradox – in sum, if Life is similar in age to the Galaxy then why isn’t the Galaxy full of obvious signs of Life? As in alien space-junk in our Solar System, or stars shrouded in Dyson Swarms or whatever…

But what if there’s a faulty assumption? What if Life only gets so old, then gets knocked back to microbes? Perhaps we’re now in an epoch of recently removed restrictions on Life – like frequent gamma-ray bursts – and soon, in cosmic terms, the Galaxy will be colonized. Or perhaps what we’re seeing in the fossils is a reminder that the Galaxy may still be a dangerous place.

Giant trilobites had (complex?) social lives

Giant trilobites had complex social lives (ABC News in Science).

Trilobites ganged together to molt, just like modern day horseshoe crabs – themselves relicts of a bygone age. Such “social” behaviour is surprisingly old, as molting groups have been found dating back 520 million years, making me wonder why Arthropods never did develop intelligence as we know it in larger animals. Possibly it’s because they usually don’t reach huge sizes, though multi-metre long Eurypterids (“Sea Scorpions”) are known. On land they seem to be limited by their circulatory systems and the weakness of their chitin-based exoskeletons. Perhaps on a different world that might not be the liability it is here on Earth… imagine a low-gee moon with a dense atmosphere.

Maybe we will know one day.

New Nanocrystals Show Potential for Cheap Lasers, New Lighting : University of Rochester News

New Nanocrystals Show Potential for Cheap Lasers, New Lighting : University of Rochester News.

Lasers are one of the backbones of interstellar travel via large reflective sails. If they can be made sufficiently powerful and sufficiently efficient that is… and sufficiently cheap. This research might address the latter point.

As the saying goes: “No Bucks, No Buck Rogers”

Messinian Eden?

When the Mediterranean Dried Up.

The Messinian Salinity Crisis doesn’t sound like much, but for 400,000 years it meant that the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic and the WHOLE SEA evaporated, leaving huge salt deposits, that are still on the deep sea-floor of the Med. Such a place, several kilometres below “sea level”, would’ve have been sweltering and rather nasty, aside from the occasional oasis.

A geophysicist Web-friend of mine, Glenn Morton, believes that human origins began in one such oasis, a haven amidst the salt-flats, watered via a river spilling over the edge and splitting into four tributaries that met at the oasis… if that sounds familiar it’s because it’s from Genesis 2 & 3 of the Hebrew Bible. Glenn believes that God had formed Eden – which was a Garden, remember – and placed our first parents there. But Glenn isn’t an evolution denier. His geophysics work led him to accept Darwin and long-ages over a decade ago, but geology also gave him the only known example of an entire “land” (ha-aretz in Hebrew) being drowned beneath the waves just like in the tale of Noah’s Flood. To reconcile the Flood and the evidence of geology, Glenn suggests that Noah’s boat was the sole survivor of the refilling of the Mediterranean.

But when was it? The Messinian Salinity Crisis ended with the Miocene, some 5.33 million years ago, which implies Noah was a lot like Australopithecus, Orrorin and Sahelanthropus. Is that reasonable? Until 2003 I didn’t really think it was possible, but towards the end of that year a dimunitive hominid, much like those billennia ago, was uncovered in sediments on the Indonesian Island of Flores… Homo floresiensis. The more we learn about the Hobbits, as they’ve been dubbed, the more – to my eyes – they seem a relic of a far distant time in our evolution.

Perhaps Glenn is right?

Warp Drive 6.0

[0712.1649v6] Warp Drive: A New Approach.

A New Approach to Warp-Drive

December 2007 should be remembered as the date that a viable warp-drive burst forth from multi-dimensional obscurity… well no, but the blogosphere did notice the paper by Richard Obousy and Gerald Cleaver which tackled the warp-drive concept via LEDs (Large Extra-Dimensions) and gave an estimate of how much energy it would take – a 1000 m3 volume needs 1045 joules of cosmological constant energy. But that’s for that whole volume to be filled by a sufficiently strong cosmological constant for the vehicle to be propelled at lightspeed. If it was confined to a thinner shell the energy requirement would be much less. Say it was as thick as the postulated LED (10-6 metres) then the volume is reduced by ~3.2 million fold to ~3×1038 joules… still pretty “yipes!” but now only Ceres mass in size, not half a Jupiter.

Alternatively there’s the “Pocket Universe” design suggested by van de Broek, which had the ship in a mini-space connected to our own by the warp-bubble itself. In this case the minimum volume is probably ~(10-6)3 metres3 and the energy required is just ~1024 joules. That’s just 10,000 tons of mass-energy converted into the cosmological constant of the warp-bubble… if we can figure out just how do the trick of converting energy into cosmological constant, of course. I think the LED size-limit is probably as small as a tamed bit of space-time can get, so we’ve quite a task in mass-energy manipulation to fling ships around in warp-bubbles. Eventually experiment will tell us more about the LEDs – if they exist, for starters – and perhaps give us a big hint on how to make a “pocket Universe” wrapped in a cosmological constant…

Uranium Forever

There’s 3.3 micrograms of Uranium in every litre of seawater and since there’s 1.35 exalitres (1.35E+18 litres) of seawater, thus there’s about 4.5 trillion kilograms of Uranium for anyone who wants it bad enough.

As Uranium, when fissioned, produces about 90 trillion joules per kilogram, that means there’s 405 million exajoules of energy potential in the ocean. One terawatt expended over a year is 31.5576 exajoules, thus the ocean’s energy store is 12.8 million terawatt-years. Humanity is presently using 15 terawatt-years per year so if all our energy came from Uranium it’d last 856,000 years at present energy levels.

But what’s in the sea must come from somewhere – about 64,000 tons of dissolved Uranium flows into the sea every year, eventually being removed by chemical reactions in the seabed after floating around for ~70,000 years on average. If we could remove 50% of the annual flow – in energy terms 90 terawatt-years – we would have an ever-renewing resource, naturally.

An affluent Westerner in the USA or Australia, uses about 10 kilojoules of energy per second. Thus 90 TW-years would supply 9 billion people with a Western energy-rich lifestyle and that much energy supply is essentially available for billions of years.

Could humanity last so long essentially static in population? That’s a question no one can yet answer, but at least we know they’d still be able to live well a billion years from now if we get the social equations right.

Cold Dark Matter or MOND? Or… ?

Study plunges standard theory of cosmology into crisis.

A study has shown the Milky Way’s satellite galaxies are arranged in a common plane around the Milky Way – something at odds with the Cold Dark Matter paradigm, but perfectly predicted by Modification Of Newtonian Dynamics (MOND.) But there’s another option which might make it all clear… Relational Quantum Gravity…

LiFePO4 batteries a breakthrough…

Battery-powered vehicles to be revolutionized by Universite de Montreal technology.

Well, sort of a breakthrough. The iron and phosphorus components are a lot more abundant than lithium and thus cheaper and easier to produce. Thus electric cars will just keep getting cheaper.

Notice the funny typo that makes them “LifePO4” batteries not LiFePO4. I initially thought it was some bizarre marketing name, but it’s actually the chemical formula.