by me, Kerry Burgess, 04/25/2024 06:04 AM
Still, there must be some explanation
I have speculated that people in the distant future are so bored with the overall paradise of their existence that their only real source of entertainment is to time-travel scary stories - clandestinely - back to this present time
They know I know they know I know they know I know they know I know they know I know they know I know they know
by me, Kerry Burgess, 04/25/2024 03:49 AM
Only because of a vision and associated dialog in a sleeping-dream just now
Awoke from dream, looked at time projected on ceiling: 03:44 AM
Got out of bed, sat down at this desk, opened text file
The reference in this post to the 1979 item is from my research last night before going to bed for the night
There was nothing about it that could have caused me to have the sleeping-dream I write about now
The vision was simple
In my sleeping-dream, as happens, I saw myself working on my original-work code-pattern, the variations today described here now
My examination returned the calendar-day 12/19/1984
The significance was not immediately obvious to me.
In my vision, I pursued the line of research from a Wikipedia article that mentioned something about a mine that yield the ore gold. Only because an unseen person asked me about that result did I realize that 12/19/1984 was a detail significant to me personally
The cognitive process of this note progresses from the observation by me, as referenced here, about the detail from 1979, which also caused me to think of the detail from year 1991, which I have not yet checked. Then the sleeping-dream caused me to think about 09/26/1962, of which I made observations and describe here now. Then that all caused me to think of other stuff to check
This extends from my note yesterday about the orange-juice
Need more sleep. Debating whether to brew a pot of strong, black, mediocre coffee or to try to fall back to sleep, of which sleep again right now seems doubtful, miserable as it was these past few hours tonight
Just had a glass of pleasantly 36F-chilled orange-juice
The Ballad of Jed Clampett (The Beverly Hillbillies)
Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,
Then one day he was shootin at some food,
And up through the ground came a bubblin crude.
Oil that is, black gold, Texas tea.
Well the first thing you know ol Jed's a millionaire,
Kinfolk said "Jed move away from there"
Said "Californy is the place you ought to be"
So they loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly.
Hills, that is. Swimmin pools, movie stars.
Well now its time to say good by to Jed and all his kin.
And they would like to thank you folks fer kindly droppin in.
You're all invited back a gain to this locality
To have a heapin helpin of their hospitality.
Beverly Hillbillies, that's what they call 'em now
Nice folks, Y'all come back now, hear?
From 9/26/1962 ( premiere USA TV series "The Beverly Hillbillies"::series premiere episode "The Clampetts Strike Oil" ) To 3/18/2021 ( ) is 21358 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 4/24/2024 ( Wednesday ) is 21358 days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zack_Snyder%27s_Justice_League
Zack Snyder's Justice League
From Wikipedia
Release date March 18, 2021 (United States)
From 2/8/1968 ( premiere USA film "Planet of the Apes" ) To 4/24/2024 ( ) is 20530 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 1/17/2022 ( ) is 20530 days
https://twitter.com/SpaceEngineersG/status/1483158016224469006
excerpts,
From: Kerry
To: House
Sent: Sunday, August 12, 2007
Then I was thinking about a time in 1985.
There were two teams of two men, including me, that worked on the helo deck during landing operations
The cable. That blasted cable with the funky connector. I was the first one on the Taylor that had to run out underneath the hovering Seahawk and perform the first exercise of the RAST system.
We didn't have the other end of the cable from the helo that our cable connected to so on my first test, I only had the advice of my Chief Boatswains Mate. Standing there under that helo, I nailed it perfectly
https://youtube.com/embed/PRNkf99_3L0
YouTube
Helicopter Operations on a Navy Frigate (FFG-60)
From 1/20/1986 ( ) To 4/24/2024 ( ) is 13974 days
13974 = 6987 + 6987
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/19/1984 ( from my official enlisted US Navy documents: as Kerry Wayne Burgess the undesignated E-3 Seaman US Navy I reported to my first fleet assignment for permanent duty aboard USS Taylor FFG-50, US Navy, departing 02/11/1986 as FC3 Kerry Wayne Burgess, US Navy ) is 6987 days
https://papersofprinceton.princeton.edu/princetonperiodicals/?a=d&d=Princetonian19860120-01.2.6&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN-------
From 6/15/2011 ( "Leviathan Wakes" by James Corey, book 1 "The Expanse" ) To 4/24/2024 ( ) is 4697 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 9/12/1978 ( premiere USA TV series "Taxi" ) is 4697 days
From 1/2/1965 ( ) To 4/24/2024 ( ) is 21662 days
21662 = 10831 + 10831
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 6/29/1995 ( the Mir space station docking of the United States space shuttle Atlantis orbiter vehicle mission STS-71 includes me Kerry Wayne Burgess the United States Marine Corps commissioned-officer and United States STS-71 pilot astronaut and my 3rd official United States of America National Aeronautics Space Administration orbital flight of 4 overall ) is 10831 days
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_of_Colonel_Barham
From 2/3/2006 ( premiere USA TV series episode "Battlestar Galactica"::"Scar" ) To 4/24/2024 ( ) is 6655 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 1/22/1984 ( premiere USA TV series "Airwolf" ) is 6655 days
BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
2X15 - "SCAR"
Original Airdate (SciFi): 03/FEB/2006
(from internet transcript)
BB: Who's Scar?
Duck: Not who. What. Toaster's top gun. Deadliest raider in the cylon fleet.
Jo Jo: Gimme break. Come on they're machines. one's the same as the next.
Yeah, that's what we thought till Captain thrace cut the brain out of one.
Hotdog: Scar's the best they got.
From 11/24/1973 ( premiere USA TV series episode "Star Trek"::"The Time Trap" ) To 4/24/2024 ( ) is 18414 days
18414 = 9207 + 9207
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 1/17/1991 ( from the thoughts in my conscious mind, coinciding with United States of America Veterans Affairs hospital psychiatric doctor medical drugs: the date of record of my US Navy Medal of Honor as Kerry Wayne Burgess chief warrant officer United States Marine Corps circa 1991 officially the United States Apache attack helicopter pilot ) is 9207 days
From 12/25/1991 ( from the thoughts in my conscious mind, coinciding with United States of America Veterans Affairs hospital psychiatric doctor medical drugs: in non-aviator related duties boots on the ground as United States Marine Corps chief warrant officer Kerry Wayne Burgess I was prisoner of war in Croatia ) To 4/24/2024 ( ) is 11809 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 3/3/1998 ( {puppet-in-chief} Bill Clinton, 42 President of USA: Statement of Administration Policy: H.R. 2369 - Wireless Privacy Enhancement Act ) is 11809 days
from my private journal, as me, Kerry Burgess, typed after being released from the USA Veterans Affairs psychiatric hospital enduring many months sitting in a grungy two-computer room in a homeless shelter on the waterfront in downtown Seattle:
From: Kerry Burgess {me}
Sent: Sunday, May 21, 2006 11:04 AM
To: Kerry Burgess {me}
Subject: Re: Journal May 21, 2006
Kerry Burgess wrote:
I think it was my first thought after waking up this morning that I used to date Julia Roberts a long time ago.
I also have these unexplained thoughts that I was a fighter pilot in the U.S. military, although I'm not sure which service, but I may have been in two different branches over time. I am also confused about thoughts that I may have been a helicopter pilot. What's next? A space shuttle pilot? Seems like a lot for someone that is only 40. And, while I am not sure when this divergence happened, I am reasonably certain it was before I turned 33. So I must have been a pretty busy guy. Especially because I have thoughts that I was some kind of mathmetician too. I have these thoughts too that I was captured by enemy forces at some point and tortured while in captivity.
by me, Kerry Burgess, excerpts from my private journal: 9/26/2006 3:06 PM
As I was trying to go to sleep last night, I had a thought that I have a doctorate in computer science from Princeton.
and I had thoughts that I studied music as well at Princeton.
from my private journal, as me, Kerry Burgess, typed after being released from the USA Veterans Affairs psychiatric hospital enduring many months sitting in a grungy two-computer room in a homeless shelter on the waterfront in downtown Seattle:
by me, Kerry Burgess, excerpts from my private journals: 9/28/2006 7:13 PM
This sounds very interesting. In my memory of taking Physics my Senior year at Ashdown, I remember being very interested in the class, but we didn’t cover such an interesting topic.
http://www.princeton.edu/main/about/present/
Ayan Chatterjee (left) and Mark Daly measure piano strings as part of a lab project for professor Pierre Piroué's freshman seminar on "Sound, Music and ... Physics."
9/28/2006 7:37 PM
I think I even have memories of the graduate degree process. I am not sure of the terms to describe the process.
9/28/2006 7:47 PM
I actually do remember... something... I can’t explain it. It feels that I am holding an unmarked, undistinguishable book that I don’t know the name of or the contents but I know I have read it already.
9/28/2006 8:34 PM
A few minutes ago I started thinking that maybe I started at Princeton University in 1972. I would have been 13 at the time as Thomas Ray. I remember that Kerry Burgess started first grade in 1972. But then I decided that I probably started Princeton earlier than 1972 and maybe 1972 was the year I completed my first major degree. Or 1972 doesn’t really mean anything in particular to Thomas Ray; rather it is there for continuity sake for the life of Kerry Burgess.
by me, Kerry Burgess, posted by me: H.V.O.M at 3:06 AM Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Salesman
Also, "Salesman." I saw that in a dream while sleeping recently. I saw myself going through an induction process in the United States Marine Corps and I woke up understanding that I was dreaming of my actual experience in 1990. I saw a document that indicated I was being inducted to the United States Marine Corps with the officer grade of Chief Warrant Officer 2. I saw in the dream another document associated with my induction and that document indicated I had been assigned the informal name "Salesman."
From 10/31/2010 ( premiere USA TV series "The Walking Dead"::series premiere episode "Days Gone Bye" ) To 4/24/2024 ( Wednesday ) is 4924 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 4/27/1979 ( Jimmy Carter, 39th President of USA: United States-Soviet Union Exchange of Prisoners - White House Statement ) is 4924 days
read the full text at:
https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2014-featured-story-archive/a-look-back-25-years-since-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall.html
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
A Look Back: 25 Years Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall
On December 25, 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the Soviet Union ceased to exist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_(electric)
Rotor (electric)
From Wikipedia
The rotor is a moving component of an electromagnetic system in the electric motor, electric generator, or alternator. Its rotation is due to the interaction between the windings and magnetic fields which produces a torque around the rotor's axis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brushed_DC_electric_motor
Brushed DC electric motor
From Wikipedia
A problem with the motor shown above is that when the plane of the coil is parallel to the magnetic field - i.e. when the rotor poles are 90 degrees from the stator poles - the torque is zero. In the pictures above, this occurs when the core of the coil is horizontal - the position it is just about to reach in the second-to-last picture on the right. The motor would not be able to start in this position. However, once it was started, it would continue to rotate through this position by momentum.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/earth-got-hammered-cosmic-rays-120050555.html
Yahoo! News
Earth got hammered by cosmic rays 41,000 years ago due to a weak magnetic field
Robert Lea
Wed, April 24, 2024
From 3/20/2009 ( premiere USA film "Knowing" AND premiere USA TV series episode "Battlestar Galactica"::series finale episode "Daybreak" ) To 4/24/2024 ( ) is 5514 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 12/7/1980 ( premiere USA TV series episode "Cosmos"::"The Persistence of Memory" ) is 5514 days
From 2/16/2020 ( premiere USA streaming video-serial Epix MGM+ "War of the Worlds" ) To 4/24/2024 ( ) is 1529 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 1/9/1970 ( premiere USA TV series episode "The High Chaparral"::"The Journal of Death" ) is 1529 days
From 2/16/2020 ( premiere USA streaming video-serial Epix MGM+ "War of the Worlds" ) To 4/24/2024 ( ) is 1529 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 1/9/1970 ( premiere USA film "...tick... tick... tick..." ) is 1529 days
IMDb
Knowing (2009)
Quotes
[last lines]
Rev. Koestler: [hugging John] This isn't the end, son.
John Koestler: I know.
by me, Kerry Burgess, posted by me: February 11, 2019
Nope. That is most definitely The End for you, fictional bible-thumping coward of mortality. The chemical molecules that made you think you were the most special, self-centered animal in the Universe - THAT YOU ARE COMPLETELY IGNORANT OF - is just so much meaningless vapor now
https://www.yahoo.com/news/earth-got-hammered-cosmic-rays-120050555.html
Yahoo! News
Earth got hammered by cosmic rays 41,000 years ago due to a weak magnetic field
Robert Lea
Wed, April 24, 2024 at 5:00 AM PDT
Earth is under constant bombardment by high-energy charged particles called cosmic rays. We're normally shielded from this barrage by Earth's magnetic bubble, the magnetosphere. But what happens when this shield weakens?
Cosmic rays are primarily hydrogen nuclei blasted into space by powerful celestial events such as the supernova deaths of massive stars. These incredibly energetic particles are normally intercepted by the magnetosphere, which also protects us from harsh solar radiation from the sun.
The magnetosphere is not a monolithic, unchanging entity, however. Not only does magnetic north "wobble" slightly away from geographic "true north," but the entire magnetosphere occasionally "flips." This results in the field's north pole becoming south and vice versa, with the intensity of the field waning in the process.
In addition to this, there are other brief periods during which the two magnetic poles of the magnetosphere "disappear," to be replaced by a multitude of magnetic poles. During these periods, called "magnetic field excursions," the strength of magnetic poles also weakens, implying that our planet is less well-protected from cosmic rays at these times.
Related: Where do cosmic rays come from?
The question is, Do periods of low magnetosphere intensity also correlate with major upheavals in Earth's biosphere, the complete zone of our planet over which life exists, ranging from mountaintops to the deepest ocean trenches?
"Understanding these extreme events is important for their occurrence in the future, space climate predictions, and assessing the effects on the environment and on the Earth system," Sanja Panovska, a scientist at GFZ Potsdam in Germany, said in a statement.
To determine the periods during which Earth has experienced a heavier than usual bombardment of cosmic rays, scientists can measure the abundances of different isotopes. These are variants of an element that have different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei.
When cosmic rays strike particles in Earth's atmosphere, they create showers of isotopes called "cosmogenic radionuclides" that rain down to our planet's surface. These build up over time in sediments, which scientists can study after recovering them from the sea bed and in ice cores drilled from regions like Antarctica and Greenland.
One well-studied example of a magnetic field excursion is the Laschamps excursion, which occurred around 41,000 years ago. Panovska has been studying the relationship between the intensity of Earth's magnetosphere and the concentration of cosmogenic radionuclides such as beryllium-10 during this event.
She found that the average production rate of beryllium-10 doubled compared to the rate at which this cosmogenic radionuclide is generated by cosmic ray bombardment today. This indicates a very low magnetosphere intensity during the Laschamps excursion, leading to vastly more cosmic rays reaching Earth's atmosphere and creating showers of secondary particles.
Panovska used these measurements to reconstruct Earth's magnetosphere, finding that it shrank during this event when its strength decreased. She is hoping this reconstruction will help her and fellow scientists get more information from cosmogenic radionuclide and cosmic ray bombardments.
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/announcement-ve-found-alien-life-113105311.html
Yahoo! News
‘The announcement we’ve found alien life could be just a couple of years away’
Chris Harvey
Thu, April 25, 2024 at 4:31 AM PDT
“Generally, when I’m on a plane, if I tell somebody that I search for life on planets around other stars, I don’t get to sleep,” says Lisa Kaltenegger, with a laugh. “It’s always a careful, curated answer depending on if I need to do something next morning when I arrive or not. People are like, ‘Oh, I read about this,’ you know, ‘Have we been visited? Is this true?’”
Outside of her need for sleep, Kaltenegger loves those questions. The 47-year-old professor of astrophysics is a pioneer and world expert on the search for extraterrestrial life. As the author of Alien Earths: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos (Allen Lane), Radio 4’s Book of the Week next week, she is well aware that her chosen field of study taps into a deep and abiding human fascination – are we alone in the universe or is there life elsewhere?
And as the director of the Carl Sagan Institute at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, which brings together scientists from many separate disciplines to collaborate on the search for life among the stars, she’s better placed right now to answer those questions than almost anyone on Earth.
When I catch up with her over Zoom at her home in Ithaca, she’s just got back from a three-week lecture tour in New Zealand, and a trip up to Burlington, Vermont, “where we had an incredible eclipse. It was beautiful.”
She’s upbeat, passionate, physically expressive. Evidence of alien life, she believes, is tantalisingly close. Kaltenegger is looking for “biosignatures” – telltale signs of life in the atmospheres of distant planets, the sort of gases that organic processes create on Earth, oxygen, methane and others. “We actually have a tool [for finding them],” she says. “And a lot of people don’t realise we do. We have the James Webb Space Telescope, which has been up in space for about a year. We live in this era of golden exploration, with thousands of other worlds on our doorstep, that we now can actually explore.”
Alien Earths is in the best tradition of pop science – bringing water worlds, planets of lava, and the possibility of blue dots like our own before our eyes in a way that is never dry or impenetrable. Kaltenegger is a natural communicator; one of the classes she teaches at Cornell is the introduction to astronomy for non-science majors – “I love being able to change their view of the cosmos,” she says. She took her nine-year-old daughter out of school to go to New Zealand; it was the perfect way to show her the world is a sphere, she says, “to set those physics concepts” on the planet on which we live.
No one should run away with the idea that Kaltenegger is a wide-eyed believer in UFOs, alien visitors, abductions and the rest. In fact, she begins her book by sweeping from the table all the “evidence” put forward so far. She recognises that UFO hunters are responding to “the excitement of trying to find life in the universe”, but “a lot of times with UFO sightings, the data is just not good enough”, she says. “If you have a smudge on a photo, it is interesting, but…”
This turns out to be a big “but”. One has to understand all the variable factors of a sighting, Kaltenegger explains, light reflection, weather patterns, how far away something is if it appears to be moving really fast. In her book, she notes, “I’ve basically said, this data is not good enough for us to make any conclusions.”
What then, of the former US Air Force officer David Grusch, who testified at an American House of Representatives sub-committee last year that, in his time on the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, he had seen documents that showed the existence of a secretive UFO-retrieval programme; that America possesses multiple spacecraft of alien origin and that “non-human biologics” were found at an alien crash site?
Kaltenegger wrote her book “a little bit with that in mind”, she says. “Because I think people are very, very smart, and actually do start to doubt these things when it’s just a little too convenient. But there’s not much out there that’s easily accessible that tells you, be careful if somebody wants to sell you this and what are the questions you should ask.
“When I see that [testimony], honestly what I think is, ‘Oh God, I wish this were true.’ That would be so much easier if we had aliens coming here. Because the search for chemical make-up, and gas as a biosignature, it’s hard, even with the biggest telescopes we have.”
The idea that we are constantly being visited by interstellar entities, she suggests, begs the question, why? – given the technological gulf between us and any intelligent life-form capable of interstellar travel. “We are in the infancy of space exploration. We have boots on the moon, but we don’t even have boots on Mars,” she says. “We are not the place that you would go to.”
All this plays in her head when she sees pronouncements like Grusch’s, she says. “This is where the scientific method is so important. This snake oil is probably not going to help you.” If it was their health, people would ask for a second opinion, she stresses. “It’s funny that some people suspend that thinking when it comes to somebody trying to sell them evidence of alien life.” At the very least, she says, people should not give it credence without a “second independent team for us to confirm it. That’s the least thing.” Her own methodology, she says, “is a much stronger evidence-based search tool”.
Even for scientists prepared to put their evidence for extra-terrestrial life into the public domain, she suggests, the bar remains high. Harvard science professor Avi Loeb caused a stir with his 2021 bestseller, Extraterrestrial, which suggested that an unusually thin stellar object spotted moving away from the sun millions of miles from Earth in 2017 was an alien light sail, propelled by solar radiation instead of wind.
“I think Avi really wants to be the person who finds life in the universe,” Kaltenegger says, with an expression that could perhaps be interpreted as a groan, “[when] people looked at it and said, it couldn’t be [what Loeb claimed] because of the way it moves, at that point, I think as a scientist, you are trained to accept the death of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact, and you move on to the next thing… I think at some point, as scientists, we know better. Chances are, it’s not a light sail.”
In Kaltenegger’s world, though, there is excitement about four potentially life-supporting planets found orbiting the red dwarf star Trappist-1, a mere 40 light years from Earth, in 2017. “The James Webb Space Telescope is observing these planets right now,” she says. “We have a chance to find the gases on these worlds. And to figure out if there’s biosignatures on them within the next, let’s say, five to 10 years.” The time frame, even with the wonders of a space telescope, is necessary because of the difficulties of building a clear picture of an exoplanet with so much light interference from the star itself. It takes time.
But, Kaltenegger says: “If life is everywhere, it can be in that system. It may be that we need to observe 100 systems before we find life, or 1,000. But it could also be that we just need to observe one system.” If that’s the case, she says, then the announcement that we’re not alone, “could be just a couple of years from now”.
When Kaltenegger was a girl growing up in the small Austrian town of Kuchl, in a quiet river valley beneath the Berchtesgaden Alps, the idea that her horizons would one day expand to the furthest visible planets beyond our own solar system was unimaginable.
Her father was a civil engineer and her mother a secretary; her elder sister is an architect. Kaltenegger was “always really curious” about the world around her, she tells me. “I was one of these kids with all the questions.” By the age of 10, the local library had given up trying to put limits on the number of books she could borrow. Yet it would be another five years before the first exoplanet – a planet outside our own solar system – was even found. And it wasn’t until her first year at university in Graz, where she studied astrophysics, that the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star was discovered, in 1995, in the constellation of Pegasus.
The Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy had identified the constellation as far back as the second century, yet the discovery of this planet, 51 Pegasi b, was a game-changing revelation. Still, Kaltenegger felt, “this was something that Nasa did, that the big countries did, I was studying in Graz, which is a pretty tiny town”.
A year later, she travelled to a conference on “Planets Outside the Solar System” in Corsica, by package flight and bus, and met “this really small community of people who were asking all these questions for the first time, you know, what does it mean? Could there be more planets out there? What are the things we should do? It was a very flat hierarchy – the professors would ask the students what they thought, what I thought. I was an undergrad in my second year… The discussion was so fascinating.”
She soon realised, “to understand a planet, you have to understand the star, you have to understand the geology, you have to understand the biology that’s going on… I was basically thinking, this will never get boring.”
Within a few years, she had gained a doctorate in astrophysics, and at 27, moved to Harvard University; in 2010, she took over the leadership of a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, in Germany, before taking up the post of associate professor of astronomy at Cornell.
Along the way, Kaltenegger has encountered sexism many times. “It got a lot better. It’s still not that great sometimes.” She describes how in her first week working for the European Space Agency, her boss had forgotten to copy slides for a meeting with aerospace engineers, but insisted that she not go off to copy them for him, telling her that if she was seen to be doing the copying, whatever she did subsequently, they would always see her as the secretary. It’s essential to challenge sexist attitudes whenever they are expressed, she says, because “if nobody speaks up, they interpret it as everybody agrees with them and that’s not the case”.
“I would say that 80 or maybe even 90 per cent of people think that women in science are capable. And they do understand that it’s historically coloured, that you don’t have as many women with big breakthroughs, because they had such a hard time getting into the field. And if they were in that field, most of the time, they didn’t get the acclaim for whatever they did discover, somebody else did.”
It was her sense of a need for an interdisciplinary approach that became the seed for the Carl Sagan Institute, which she set up in 2015, becoming its founding director: “No one person can know all of science any more,” she says, “so I built this institute with about 15 different departments ranging from astronomy, geology and biology to music and performing arts to interlink that information.”
There are now more than 5,000 confirmed exoplanets, which can be studied in ever greater detail, as more powerful telescopes become available. And the search for evidence of life on these planets has narrowed to ones in the “habitable zone” of a star system – often referred to as the “Goldilocks” zone, because it’s “not too hot, not too close to the star; not too cold, not too far away”, Kaltenegger explains. In fact, the conditions are just right.
“What we know is that around every fifth star, there’s a planet that’s in the habitable zone and small enough to be a rock,” she says. “And our galaxy alone has 200 billion stars. So one out of five gives you billions and billions of opportunities.” She’s clear about what that means about the search for alien life. “I think the biggest surprise would be if we found nothing.”
She knows, though, that there are scientists who have cast doubt on the validity of “biosignatures” as definitive proof of life, who suggest that the possibility of chemical processes that produce the same composition of gases cannot be ruled out. Kaltenegger embraces scientific scepticism: “I think the brutality of the scientific method is really important, especially if you wish to find something. Scrutiny is science’s biggest strength, because it cuts off the wrong answers. However, I think we do, currently, have some combination of biosignatures, the combination of oxygen and methane, that under specific circumstances, if the planet is within this habitable zone, we have no other explanation than there being life.”
The certainty may not be 100 per cent, she says, but if the likelihood reaches 95-99 per cent, then it will cross the threshold for scientific confidence, because any other explanation would rely on “a really exotic geochemistry that we don’t understand and have never encountered… It will depend very much how many of these planets we find. If we find lots of planets with signs of life, to have an exotic geochemistry that works just so for each of those is going to be super unlikely.”
I want to ask Kaltenegger about the scenario in the 1996 film Independence Day and so many others: are we making a mistake searching for alien life, given our own violent, rapacious qualities as a species – is there any reason to think intelligent alien life would be benign? In 2011, the physicist Stephen Hawking said that “the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational” but suggested, “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
Kaltenegger enjoys science fiction and says that if aliens do visit earth, the military helicopters and quarantine zones of Contact (1997) and Arrival (2016) are “definitely something that I think would happen”, but she’s not buying the Independence Day scenario.
As for trepidation about making contact, she notes, “the cat’s already out the bag”. She explains that a technological civilisation could easily have used “biosignature” techniques to observe Earth and see that it supported life a very long time ago.
“In my first real scientific paper from 2007,” she says, “we figured out that for about two billion years in Earth’s history you could find the combination of oxygen and gases that are the golden fingerprint of life. If there’s somebody out there, I don’t think announcing our presence would make any big difference. Because if they just had our level of technology, they’d know we’re here. It’s been two billion years, and nobody has come to eat us yet.”
I wonder what she makes of Elon Musk’s Space X project and his plan to build a sustainable colony on Mars. “I don’t want to live on Mars,” Kaltenegger says. “I think it will be incredibly hard because you can’t breathe, so that’s a completely different step in exploration than we’ve ever had before – even at the North Pole, you can breathe. But I think if somebody wants to do it, it’d be quite interesting. I think space exploration actually has great benefits.”
One might perhaps expect this response – Kaltenegger’s husband (Filipe Pereira) is a spacecraft systems engineer – but she says one of the benefits is an ecological one. “When you go to space, you have to be able to perfectly recycle.” It’s possible to see the Earth itself as “a gigantic spacecraft”, she adds. “And its life support system is the biosphere.”
What would finding life on other planets do to our concepts of God, I wonder. “For me personally, science and religion are not in conflict. Religion to me is where you cannot do any measurements, where you do not have any data, where you have to believe. And science is the other realm, where you have data… I think the trouble starts when people misunderstand where things are valid. If you tell me that you have to believe everything that’s written in the Bible, then you get into trouble really fast, because I can tell you that the Earth is not 7,000 years old.
“I think there is space for whatever religion you hold, while taking the science, and looking at the beauty that it actually reveals about the cosmos. I can’t tell you what that concept of God could be like, it’s everybody’s personal opinion. But there’s space for it. And if you want, you can put it before the Big Bang – what was before the Big Bang? We don’t know, we have no data.”
Kaltenegger “absolutely” hopes that she’ll find what she’s looking for in her lifetime. The introduction of AI, she says, is a step forward to compare with the invention of the computer. “AI is incredibly good at deciphering, ‘Oh, this is like 20 per cent of green vegetation, 40 per cent of water and 30 per cent of ice.’ Now we have something that can pattern recognise.”
Designs have been drawn up, too, for a next-generation space telescope – the Habitable Worlds Observatory.
But, she insists, “I think that science is a beautiful web of ideas that spreads through time. Even if we can’t find it in my lifetime, the ideas we put together, the things we put into place are the stepping stones that will allow the next generations to do it.”
- by me, Kerry Wayne Burgess, posted by me: 02:58 AM Pacific-time USA Friday 04/26/2024
