Sunday, April 27, 2014

Chapters Nineteen and Twenty

Chapter Nineteen: Nineteen discusses the topic of settling other planets and in particular, making asteroids suitable for human life. The problem with asteroids are that they have very little gravity compared to planets. If we were able to make an atmosphere for this asteroid, it would not be held by its small gravity and be lost in space. An idea by a writer named Jack Williamson seemed very interesting. He suggested a type of paragravity, or an artificial gravity constructed by humans. So far, this is impossible to us, but maybe not in the future. Another more attainable idea is to live inside an asteroid. If we found the right type of asteroid, there would be many different kinds of materials inside it to use for building stone and metal, as well as a source of water in the asteroid. This idea can't be executed today, but this is a project surely possible in the near future, unlike paragravity. A source of power would be needed for this asteroid home to propel it. In this case, Williamson suggested anti-matter. Anti-matter can be explained using a hydrogen atom. In a normal one, there is a positive proton and negative electron. In a anti-hydrogen, the electron is positive and the proton is negative. In fact, we can already make anti-matter. It is formed from the reactions in nuclear accelerators. The problem with anti-matter is that, when contacted with our normal matter, both are annihilated. The reason we have matter and not anti-matter is that when this enormous reaction occurred, some matter was left over or as Albert Einstein said "Matter won".
Chapter Twenty: When you think about it, we actually do live in darkness. Its not what you're thinking though. You can look around at this moment and easily find a source of light. But the Universe is dark, and we are surrounded by it. Alien life could be out there, and it probably is, but we don't know yet. However, a underrated technology by you is actually very useful to science. Radio. This technology could be used all across the Galaxy. If anything is out there, we could possibly communicate with it, if it was as advanced as us or ever more so. The program that is searching for life is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Their first exploration for life was when Frank Drake of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory listened to two stars at a time length of two weeks that were about 12 light years away from us (around 70 trillion miles).  Later on project META was begun. It stands for "Megachannel ExtraTerrestrial Assay". It consisted of 8.4 million frequencies devoted to a single purpose: Alien life. It was designed to distinguish any Earth interfering radio waves from actual waves coming from space. If we are going to search for life, this META project is a good addition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al7sFP4C2TY



















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