Kids probably get it, even if we don’t. Honey, I Shrunk the (Kids, Whoops) Universe! This is a previous post that I introduce just to show how a (my) warped sense of cosmological history works, the better to understand the very complicated tale I weave below. Telescopes such as the James Webb, the European Euclid scope and even more forthcoming Rub...
As you will see below, my formative years were spent dissipating while reading tomes like The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Europa Will Be Bulldozed to Make Way for the Next Cosmic Superhighway! We’re just sending the Europa Clipper to Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. Clipper is an apt name coz there’s apparently a huge underwater ocean on t...
Space is big right? What if all those books, movies and stories are just so much bunkum anyway? At best epics that could never be. Surely not??? No Thrust? No Trust! I guess you could have missed seeing the latest failure of the NASA/Boeing launch to the ISS. This time it was the thrusters, but it could have been anything else, given the sad and ev...
Would Saudi Arabia’s new city of Neom be more admired on Earth if it could be seen from Proxima Centauri? The Line in the Sand No doubt you have read about the new city of Neom being built by Saudi Arabia as its new-world city. It will be 170 kilometers long and incorporate skyscrapers and architectural monuments. Neom’s vision is the flowering of ...
We humans made a huge mistake in our design for exploring the universe – we are looking through the wrong end of the telescopes! Eye in the Sky I’m sure you have heard heaps about the James Webb Telescope – definitely a technological breakthrough and a gigantic step towards understanding the known universe a bit better. Now we’ve got another additi...
Where’s the Universe headed? Downhill, according to “The 3 Body Problem”. Not a Warm Body So maybe you are aware of the hot sci-fi movie on Netflix “The 3 Body Problem” (T3BP)? The first Chinese sci-fi film to win a famous global prize for sci-fi stories. Yep, it’s pretty good, probably one of the best sci-fi books and movies I have ever encountere...
Gravity is not a constant. What icon falls next? Weighty Matters Whadya know? New cutting-edge research seems to show conclusively that gravity doesn’t work like it’s supposed to. To wit, it is stronger at lower-than-average accelerations. Wow! That changes everything! For the skinny see this account. I can’t imagine a deeper revolution in physics,...
The JWT, no matter how technologically sophisticated and amazing it is, is showing only a tiny fraction of what it could. Shouldn’t it show us GPS-like maps and graphic pictures of travel directions? Here is my vision of the new super-duper images from, the (AI?) enhanced super-telescope. Dazzle Without the Frazzle! The JWT (James Webb Telescope) i...
Has the James Webb Telescope (JWT) just revealed a totally new universe which we can now physically see? Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall? The JWT was always going to be interesting because it can see so much that we’ve never seen. One of the things we wanted to see was the edges of our universe. Current theory says that limit happens to be around 13.5 ...
When/if we see aliens, they would have evolved from where they were when we first saw them. But could they have evolved backwards? There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills The James Webb telescope is getting into its stride. Now its discovered active atmospheres on exoplanets. The telescope has actually made an inventory of the chemicals in the atmosphere o...
Can Pandorans Speak Whale? It might be that the only way we can ever understand an alien language is by figuring out how to understand what terrestrial animals are actually saying. On a Planet, Far, Far Away You might have noticed that the movie “Avatar” is about to get a sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water”. Avatar is one of my old-time favorite movi...
Data from the James Webb Telescope suggest that there might not have been a Big Bang. What about countless tiny pops? The Big Bang is Dead, Long Live the Tiny Pops If you want to look truly up with the latest, just tell your credulous colleagues that the James Webb Telescope (JWT) shows us that the Big Bang didn’t happen. Instant street cred for su...
There’s RNA in space. What happens when black holes pull it in?
Did you see that astronomers have spotted a huge cloud containing RNA in the Milky Way? What’s that all about. Isn’t RNA supposed to be tucked away on terra firma comfortably in our warm cuddly bodies?
As we know RNA is a precursor of DNA and serves to manufacture proteins for our bodies. Could there possibly be embryos being formed in the cold vastness of space. Kind of unlikely one would think.
Oh yes and bye the way did you also know that there are giant molecules of alcohol (actually methyl alcohol) in space too? For someone to drink perhaps on those interminable voyages between star clusters (although this form of alcohol sends you blind)?
RNA is a relatively large molecule. We used to think that large molecules could not exist in space as they would be broken up by the many errant radiations out in the sticks. But now we know otherwise. We already knew that amino acid molecules are also out there. So, what else could be lurking?
How about DNA? Why not? And if there are DNA out there as well as RNA, could there also be free-floating life out there? Might it not be easier for these molecules to join up and self-assemble since they already do it on Earth and there are less pesky things to get in the way in space like viruses and bacteria.
But if you could get DNA floating around, why not even larger molecules? Ones that cannot exist on Earth, so we haven’t seen them. Could there be macro-molecules similar in concept to DNA that could form life forms orders of magnitude more complex than we have right now, as exemplified by that primitive multi-cellular organism called homo sapiens?
Could these massive molecules portend new life forms that are so complex they are unrecognizable by us humans? Ones that could be as large as a complete solar system with planets?
So, there are macro-molecules out there. What could it all mean?
It’s becoming increasingly clear that black holes are a critical part of the grand design. They have their own lifecycle, being born and then dying somehow although exactly how we don’t know. But it seems to be that there’s at least on mega-black hole at the center of each galaxy and they are part of galactic evolution. Without them you probably don’t get galaxies and by extension, us. So, they are part of the human story too, at least in our own galaxy.
Which brings me to the point. If a black hole is part of the human, if not at least the biological, story, is all that RNA and alcohol part of the deal too. If so, how?
Well one thing we’ve got to take into account is the sheer size of black holes. So far the biggest one we know of is 66 BILLION times the mass of the Sun. That’s a lot of Big Macs.
What does all that stuff do inside the black hole? (See my post “What’s really inside black holes?” 24 March 2018) We don’t know, but it must be interesting for sure. And since we haven’t seen many black holes, relatively speaking, maybe there are black holes that are still way larger!
But here’s where I’m going. These black holes are omnivorous as far as we know and pull in everything and anything around them. That would undoubtedly include clouds of RNA and alcohol. What happens to this stuff inside the hole. Does it form life for instance?
If there’s life inside the black hole that raises a whole range of scenarios. More humans perhaps? Dinosaurs? Trees 10,000 fee high/ God? The list goes on. In fact, those black holes might not be 66 billion tons of inert mass. It could be 66 billion tons of life! And since there’s a lot of big black holes around the various infinitude of galaxies, that means there could be a lot of life in the universe. That is, not just restricted to the odd, lonely exoplanet.
Of course, when said RNA is pulled into a black hole, maybe it is stripped down to its constituent electronic particles never to be seen again. Or maybe it remembers the form of the RNA and reconstructs it from epigenetic spatial memory. Or maybe by some mechanism of which we are yet, in our primeval ignorance, not aware, it protects itself and survives to become the Blob, just very, very large. And, just maybe, very, very intelligent.
So maybe we’re thinking the wrong way when we talk about life being found, on Mars, the occasional exoplanet, on under the oceans of watery moons. Perhaps the real answer is that we have to look inside black holes as being the most likely location of life, including intelligent life.
Now I am aware of course that thesekill-joy astronomers tell us that you can’t get inside black hole otherwise you’ll be stretched into spaghetti millions of miles long, and maybe they’re right. But could AI, computers and math look for it for us in weird and wonderful ways to tell us what forms of life could exist there? If we’re into discovering new stuff, shouldn’t we be doing that also? Especially if there could be Gods there, or ultrasmart beings that could solve all our problems including climate change and free food?
Could it be that most of the universe, not just black holes, is mainly made of living things and the rocky stuff is actually a minority? Could that mean that most of the universe is conscious, and likely sentient at the same time?
The James Webb telescope and astronomy are revolutionizing the way we think. Even if the meanderings here are totally idiotic, it’s clear that these sorts of questions are going to come up in an amplified sense.
Makes the woke stuff look trivial right?
My Point: If we do indeed meet them, this is something you want to know. Full Disclosure: My last post was about the James Webb Telescope and ETs (“Is the JWT (James Webb Space Telescope) a Sitting Duck for ETs?”). My friend, #Tony Barr, best known as the creator of the SAS language and the lead founder of the SAS Institute, asked me this question....
Is There Life Inside a Nuclear Reactor? Every day now we get articles in the press about the possibility of life on Mars, albeit invisible or defunct or both. There’s numerous people globally involved in SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And the universe is so incomprehensively massive that, I’ve always though it’s impossible ...
UFOs are Officially Official So now UFOs are hitting the big time with a report from the US government on the topic. The report is now out but actually we’re none the wiser as to what these UFOs actually are. So, here’s my ha’penny’s worth. You know all those pesky drones out there buzzing overhead and invading your privacy? It’s probably them. But...
Just for Trekkies If you loved Star Trek the bad news is that it looks like Star Trek 4 will never see the light of day. The good news is that a practical warp drive might be on the way, well kind of. So, you won’t need to watch a movie to see the planet Vulcan in the star system 40 Eridani in the flesh. You will be able to go there and see it for ...
Why We Need Harvard I’m sure you’ve heard all the news about asteroid Oumuamua (rhymes with onomatopoeia, kind of) that paid our inconsequential little solar system a visit in 2017. At the time it just looked peculiar, like nothing we’ve ever seen. That’s because it was cigar-shaped, not spherical. Since when were asteroids not spherical? Since th...
I guess you’ve heard the US contention that Huawei chips have a back door that allows the Chinese government to sniff any and all communications through them. Maybe yes, maybe no. But no doubt its possible. I wonder if we are doing it too with the chips that American companies sell to companies overseas? Hmmm, interesting. Getting Deep into the Sub...
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” Arthur C. Clarke Thought I’d change pace for a post or two, so much bad news around, pandemic, fake news, elections. So, when I saw the article I’m going to tear apart (NOT), it looked like a welcome diversion. The article is about a spinning neutron star 4500 light-years from E...
