Tycho

Posted 21:55 by Tycho

Cead mile failte!

So...today...woke up far too early (11:20 or so). I had been planning on going running, but was asked if I wanted to go to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. Answer: HELL FUCKING YEAH I do!

It is the bestest museum in the whole damn world! Unfortunately was only able to spend a couple hours there before having to take the metro back. Oh, the metro down here is FUCKING AMAZING. I don't know why the hell we put up with the MBTA, the piece of shit that it is.

Anyways, I've got lots of pictures from the museum, but I need to get PhotoBucket to work first before I can post them.

I feel slightly cheated. I'll never have the chance to go to the stars, to explore the reaches of the universe. No, instead I get stuck in a period where space travel is only used for political means, goals, and expediency. No serious effort is being made to project mankind into space.

It is our destiny. We belong out there. We have nothing here--space is our only hope. Our race is going to die, one way or another, if we do not all realize this and make a concerted effort towards the creation of a sustainable space program. Instead of listening to von Braun, presidents have ignored his suggestions for a permanent infrastructure.

For one, in five billion years, if we don't somehow leave Earth and permanently colonize other planets or star systems, the sun will go red giant, and will expand out to engulf Earth's orbit. For two, and you're going to think me a crazy nutter, at some point, contact with alien life WILL be made--and what are the odds that it will be friendly? Odds that it will be hostile?

We need to assert ourselves, and our project a base of power. I hate to say it, but this probably won't happen until some sort of world government is formed, and I feel we're about a thousand years away from one in our current state. Cooperation between the different space agencies (NASA, ESA, NASDA, ISA, etc.) may quicken this projection appreciably, but not significantly.

But instead of doing this, we use space travel and exploration as a pawn to be sacrificed for political goals. Did you know that most of the discoveries and comforts we know of come from research that was done for the space program during the space race?

Speaking of research, at the museum, I came across and exhibit about Dark Matter. Not much is known about it, other than it exists, comprises 90% of the mass in the universe, and doesn't radiate energy, or at least energy we can't detect (yet). This is extremely disturbing to me. For one, in order to do this, the matter has to be the exact opposite of a perfect blackbody (a perfect transmitter). As we've all learned, nothing is perfect or ideal. There has to be some absorbtion of energy, but there is no evidence of this. One idea did cross my mind concerning this, that maybe dark matter acts as a clear piece of glass. The clear piece of glass will transmit light through it almost perfectly, with little or no loss (some scattering occurs, but this can be minimized to be negligible); there is only one side effect: the light slows down as it travels through the glass (moving at < 186 000 mps), and so it exits at an angle that is different than the angle it entered at. Maybe dark matter works the same way with all energy--transmits almost all of it through (with very little "scattering"), but the energy is "refracted" and so comes out in a different "angle" (wavefunction now out of phase?) than when it entered the dark matter. Quotations are used because I am not sure how to describe the reaction--so far as I know, no one does. It's just an idea.

Or maybe it is a new phase of matter (much like we determined there were 4 states of matter [plasma], and not 3, a while ago), and reacts in a characteristic manner for this phase.

Another thought: maybe dark matter isn't actually matter at all, but is a particle. This particle's reaction with being in space is to curve it (cause gravity), but without having appreciable mass. Therefore we get the gravity attributed to dark matter, and also can explain why it is undetectable. All particles are detectable, but under different circumstances, and we just don't have the particular method to detect this particle just yet. Maybe they act like electrons the two slit experiment, where an electron's position is described by a wavefunction, which collapses into a point mass when detected, excepting for the dark matter particle, the wavefunction collapses into nothing (self-annihilation), or into point mass (extremely low mass, less than that of a photon).

I don't know. Not knowing bothers me. There is so much to learn about in this world, and so little time.

Ok, enough out of me. I actually have nothing to report about that would be interesting to anyone that reads this. Sorry I continually expose you to the crap that I write.

I'll get to work on seeing if I can get those pictures up.

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