Face It - We Are Alone

We are stuck with our universe, and powerless to alter its fundamental constants. So long as this is the case, the anthropic principal will be immune to experimental falsification  - a sure sign that it is not a scientific principle. 
Heinz R. Pagels, A Cozy Cosmology, The Sciences, Vol. 25 No. 2 March/April 1985 p. 35-38

As one gets a certain age, one must take stock. One must admit that some long held beliefs were a bust. As a youngster growing up in the 1960's I was all but convinced in my heart and soul that by the year 2015, we would have made contact with certain higher life forms that surely populated the universe.

Pioneer Plaque - Relax, no one will ever see it...

And in hand with that there would most certainly be proof that could be visited in a museum. The Lunar Rosetta stone for instance. After all there was Carl Sagan and the Drake Equation, how could one go wrong with authority such as that? Here we are in the early 21st century and not one artifact, not one message, and not even anymore sightings of possible alien spacecraft.

Relax! The aliens threw their record players parsecs ago...

For many years the Oracle of Ottawa was convinced of the mainstream urban myth that our governments had secretly cut a deal with the aliens and all findings were forever stored and suppressed. But the only people that could believe that are the ones that have never worked for government! Governments can't keep secrets. And the only thing that a government can cover up, given enough time and money, is it's self! And as time goes on it is getting harder and harder for them to even attempt to do so.

My favorite counter argument today for the space cadets is this; if the worlds largest governments really had the ear of a Type III civilization, do you think that they would have allowed 9/11 to happen? That argument just kills, feel free to use it. The smarter ones then start on about all the exo-planets discovered by the Kepler Observatory of late. How there are thousands of possible earth like planets in the sweet spot around a star with water. The reply here is, how many of those sweet spot planets have a counter rotating molten core like Earth that will generate the defenses from the full electromagnetic interstellar space spectrum like the Earth does? The answer is about zero.

Then there is the question is why did the Americans stop going to the Moon? Answer: the TV ratings went to hell and there was way more money and profit margin per item, for the defense contractors to make Agent Orange and Napalm then heavy detail cost plus contracts for small amounts of very closely supervised space vehicles! Yes Sir! The Humans of Earth are one serious bottom line life form...

The Spanstrom - A Cosmological Dimension

Now let us move helter-skelter to a dramatic conclusion.
Sir Fred Hoyle, Frontiers Of Astronomy, p. 339

The species of Man, if it is to realize its full potential in the Universe, must get over it's self.  We must start to face up to our limitations and realize that being a really smart ape with a big stick  (dick?) is just not going to cut it for much longer. In all the astronomy and cosmology texts that I have read so far has no dimension for man in context to his place in the Universe.

NGC 6302 - The Butterfly

The Oracle of Ottawa, as a public service to his world wide readership, has decided to remedy the situation. We have all heard of the angstrom that is a unit of length equal to 10⁻¹⁰ m  or one ten-billionth of a metre, it is used to measure very small things. My unit is called the spanstrom, that is a non dimensional unit of time and space, compared to the average mans life. For the calculations in this post, our "unit life" will be equal to 83 human years, or 83 trips around the sun of our solar system.

The highest score you can achieve is 1.00. This is scored to the man who seriously believes that that the universe started when he was born and will end when he expires.  i.e. 83/83 = 1.00

Now assume that the man was a very big fan of Bishop Usher, whose date of the creation was October 23, 4004BC. Now add 2015 years and you get 6,019 years. The fundamentalist creationist will have a spanstrom value 83/6,019 = 0.0137 

Now let us continue with some values that would pretain to a thinking man. Let us first try the earliest value for the Hubble length. The figure 1.2 Billion light years comes to mind. This would gave a spanstrom value of 6.1967 x 10^-8.

Of course as time went on the Hubble Length tended to get longer. For a Hubble Length of about 5.0 billion light years the spanstrom value is now 1.66 x 10^-8.

For todays Hubble Length of 13.8 billion years, the spanstom value is 6.0145 x 10^-9.

Then there is that circumference figure that I believe is 93 billion years. This will give a spanstrom value of 8.9247 x 10^-10.

If you look up the number of stars in a galaxy in Wikipedia, the number at the time of this writing is 
100 billion, The value of the spanstrom of the number of stars in just one galaxy compared to an ordinary mans lifetime you will get a spanstrom value of  8.30 x 10^-10.

At the time of this writing the suspected number of galaxies in the observable universe is 400 billion, this gives a spanstrom value of 2.075 x 10^-10.

So now we can come to our conclusion. And that is that as man finds out more about his universe and it's unimaginable vastness the value of his significance tends to zero.... Sorry about that.

The Universe - An Excellent Introduction

We who write and read these chapters are setting forth as explorers who rarely touch solid ground or come abreast of contemporary events.
Harlow Shapely, Galaxies, Third Edition, (opening line), p.1

The universe is a violent, dangerous, random place. And that is just starting out in our own solar system! Out in interstellar space it all gets even more dangerous, contrary to the pap that is fed to us through the large corporate ho media, it is best not thought of as a theme park.

WR142 - The Universe is a dangerous place...

 After viewing many documentaries on the University of You Tube the Oracle of Ottawa has picked out a real winner. I have watched it myself a number of times. And I can find no fault. So as a public service to my Dear Readers around the world I have come to realize that it is my duty to share it with you.

 The documentary is titled; Journey To The Edge Of The Universe. It is breathtakingly awesome in its visual quality and it's factual correctness. And best of all it is narrated by Alec Baldwin, who must have a very keen interest in such matters because his passion is utterly infectious. It is also in HD and the visuals throughout are simply breathtaking. And again, after watching it through more than once, the Oracle of Ottawa can find not a single factual error.

As a matter of fact at some points the Oracle of Ottawa was so moved that when Alec asked if we should bother to continue, the Oracle of Ottawa must be perfectly honest and admit that the door to the transporter room would not have slapped my ass on the way into it! Going were no man has gone before is most certainly for youngsters. And as the feature comes to its end the Oracle of Ottawa is always comforted by the fact that living at the bottom of a deep gravity well that orbits a naked nuclear furnace way out in the boondocks of an average galaxy certainly has its advantages...

First Light

All science is cosmology, I believe, and for me the interest of philosophy, no less than of science, lies solely in the contributions which it has made to it.
Karl Popper, The Logic of  Scientific Discovery, p. 15

It was sometime in 1970, just after Christmas, that the Oracle of Ottawa, set up his first observatory on the trunk lid of a 1967 Chevy Belair, in Pembroke Ontario, after I convinced my Mom that the legs of the tripod would not damage the paint. I can't remember if I got the telescope for Christmas or if I "sourced" it myself with the Christmas tips from my paper route. I was twelve years old at the time.

This was all started from watching the Apollo 11 Moon Landing on July 20th 1969. It is one of those events, that even at the time of this writing, I can remember with total clarity. The whole family watched the whole thing, my Mom declared a special event dispensation as regards to the usual rules of bedtime. I remember thinking, hell, if I am only twelve years old and we are walking on the Moon, the future is surely unlimited. Why in 2015, which seemed eons away, the Oracle of Ottawa  should be surely getting regularly smashed at some bar at the end of some galaxy.
 

Dominion Observatory, Ottawa Ontario

 I remember how well prepared I was for the big night. I read all I could get my hands on, I had my model of the command module, with matching lunar module that I carefully constructed from a kit that I ordered in the mail. And even though I was just a kid, I knew how risky this was, and if successful, what triumph it would be for all time...

With my crappy little refracter telescope set up, I picked the brightest object in the sky, and put my eye to the scope, and was pretty bummed that the image in the eyepiece was the same as looking with the naked eye, just bigger and somewhat brighter. And it was damn hard to focus a draw tube telescope, (twist and draw..), but I never even conceived that you could get one with a rack and pinion focus. Spirits lifted in later observation sessions when the moon was out. All my brothers and sisters lined up for a look, even my Mom came out and was truly amazed. My Dad of course took a pass. He assured me that he would always take my word for it that the Moon was still there... Oh, and did I mention how cold it could get in Pembroke Ontario in the middle of winter? A very early conclusion was that astronomy was very hard work.   
 

 
Later on in the early 1970's, our family had moved to Arnprior Ontario, Consolidated Paper refugees, as my Dad took a job at the Gillies Mill in Braeside Ontario. It was a happening little town back then, and a mere half hour from Ottawa, the Oracle of Ottawa's horizons sort of widened, to say the very least. One example of that was when our boy scout troop went to the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa for a tour, and if the weather was favorable, a moment for everybody at the eyepiece of a real professional telescope! But as luck would have it rained cats and dogs for the whole evening and it all looked pretty hopeless until the clouds unexpectedly parted just long enough for everyone to get a peek at Venus, which was just like I saw it with my telescope but bigger and brighter.

Then came the teenage years, first jobs, first rock concerts in Ottawa, that just happened to be a golden time, for concert goers. And yes the Oracle of Ottawa saw Queen in their first appearance  in the western hemisphere, you can check that... It was a trial run before the official tour started in the US. Interest in astronomy and all that hard work took a bit of a back seat. But as to the origins of it all, the Oracle of Ottawa was always interested. And my favorite cosmologist was Sir Fred Hoyle. I  have always believed he was right. The most admirable thing of the man was that he went his own way and stuck with it no matter what the world thought.

Lately the comments about the stupidity of the Steady State universe are not so confident as they once were. And even though Sir Fred is long gone from us, the Universe just seems to be getting older and bigger... We will talk about that in postings to come...