Lunar Mission Proposal - The Flypaper Observer

Today we have with us, a group of students, among America's best. To you we say we have only completed a beginning. We leave you much that is undone. There are great ideas undiscovered. Breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truths protective layers.
Neil Armstrong, Speech, at The White House, 1994, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.



One can only find it wondrous weird, that at the time of this writing, early in the 21st century, that armed only with a lease back laptop, and a half decent internet connection, one can readily stir up Google Earth and check out any place upon the planet Earth, in rather breath taking resolution in the great majority of cases.  But if you want to do the same thing as regards to any place on the Earth's moon, good luck with that!
 

The Moon - Earth's Cosmological Flypaper...

 All the Oracle of Ottawa can get is those medium resolution (at best) mosiacs by the Lunar Society! You would think that all those greatly talked about high resolution Lunar Orbiter images would have been declassified decades ago, and in turn available to every one with access to the internet, in their entirety.  But that might be true, just that the Oracle of Ottawa can't seem to find them. Why do you think that is Dear Reader?

It has become clear to me recently that all higher life forms through out the Universe will have several things in common, no matter their differences in biological origin and/ or appearance. Let us go over a few of them. First is that all higher life forms fabricate stuff. The higher the life form, the bigger and more voluminous the stuff fabricated. Secondly all higher life forms litter! This may ironically be the one thing that all life forms of the Universe have in common.  Thirdly higher life forms love to build tributes to their awesomeness! And again the higher the life form the more grand the artifacts.  

The Moon is 4.5 billion years old, slightly younger than the planet Earth. We the people of the planet Earth were gifted by the Force with something very valuable. A piece of cosmological flypaper. In 4.5 billion years what do you think the chances are that something and or someone crashed, built, fought over, destroyed, rebuilt, harvested and left the wreckage behind? In 4.5 billion years what are the chances that some higher life form claimed the moon with the construction of a very grand monument to their awesomeness? The Oracle of Ottawa would have to say, greater than 50 -50 easy.  
(Google - Moon Shard)
 

 What the Oracle is saying is that if I can see the painted parking lines that are a mere 4 inches wide (really, I measured!) on Google Earth for my hood in Ottawa Ontario, why is it that we can't arrange the same coverage of the Moon? Can't something be arranged that will map the shit out of the Moon and put all the images out to crowd sourcing Earth wide? Wouldn't it be great to show your grand children where Apollo 11 landed? (It did really land on the Moon didn't it?) And I figure that there are a ton of fascinating artifacts to be found. What the hell are we afraid of ? Think of the paradigm technological leaps we could make in one fell swoop! Just by cataloging these artifacts and sending up a rover with a hand held X-ray spectrometer?

Of course the whole thing could be a bust, in that we discover some of the most interesting naturally occurring  geologic anomalies known in the Universe so far. In that case the Oracle of Ottawa will revert back to his existentialist kick, and read that first edition copy of Being and Nothingness by Sarte. (With the original dust jacket of course!) With the greatest comfort in that at least, even as an old man, I stepped into the arena...

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.

Waiting On The Webb..(Yawn...)

The intrinsic brightness of galaxies may change with time.
George Gamow, Modern Cosmology, Scientific American, 1954

It is hard to believe that as the scientific community celebrates the Hubble Space Telescopes 25th anniversary, that there is already something bigger and better in the pipe and coming to us in 2018. But the Oracle of Ottawa just can't see how NASA can ever top the bang for tax payers buck that they have received from the Hubble. And as we all know the images that have come back from the Big Hub have sure kept the bangers up late through many nights. The Hubble changed our understanding of the Universe forever. There are indeed many people who are not amused at these unintended consequences.

JWST - Ya but, will it fly?

If you read into the Webb Space telescope  in any level of detail, you are soon forced to the conclusion that the sucker is doomed to fail. Who was the brainiac that thought an L2 halo orbit would be a good idea? And how are you going to engage the hearts and minds of the taxpayers with boring infrared images? It all sounds like a sour grapes surrender of the bangers and the dark energy and dark matter crowd.

In astronomy size is not always everything...

Hopefully this time around NASA will actually assemble the optics from the contractor out back in the parking lot and actually test the optics BEFORE it is launched into space. And yes I have watched the contractor video and I see a ton of potential screw ups. You would think that as man has been in space for over fifty years now, at the time of this writing, that there would be total and banned avoidance of delicate things that that are to be unfurled in space. The failure rate of such stupidity is very high.

If you have followed along this far you should now be coming to the realization that this device is actually being set up to fail. The bangers of the dark crowd just are not going to risk inadvertantly proving Fred Hoyle and Halton C. Arp right after all! But it is all nothing to worry about... Construction is now well under way on the European Extremely Large Telescope, The United States has lost its dominance, probably forever, and if you thought the Hubble changed everything, just be patient and look both ways before you cross the street and wait for the first light of the mighty EELT.                

Eugene M. Shoemaker - What Did He Really Know?

But a philosophic issue is a philosophic issue whether it is discussed by a philosopher or by a physicist.
Ernan McMullin, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol.18, No.3, July 1981, p. 177-189

It was while the Oracle of Ottawa was on one of his very frequent book crawls that I came across a book from my distant youth entitled "Mans Conquest of Space" by William R. Shelton, published in 1974 by the National Geographic Society, The Revised Edition. It was complete with the dust jacket with a pristine interior. All the color photos as bright and glossy as I remembered them. I of course immediately scooped it up for old times sake and at a cost of a mere 99 cents I couldn't go wrong.

Back in the heady and exciting days of the Apollo Moon Program I couldn't get enough of these beautiful picture books. They were at the school library's and even the public library. The only problem of course by the time I got to read it, the cover was damn near off, and the pages were not so bright any more.

Now deep into an early retirement, my interest has turned to cosmology of all the stupid things that a grown man could possibly be interested in. Recently I was quiet surprised that you just can not find the complete very high resolution photographs that were taken by the Lunar Orbiter 5 mission of 1967. The resolution was claimed to be awesome, two meters! And there there were 683 hi res photos from the mission. I was hoping that they were declassified by now and that I could conduct my own anomaly search. The mosiacs exist but the individual hi res, I can't find them. Why do you think that is Dear Reader?

I think I found the answer while enjoying my fresh copy of Mans Conquest of Space... On page 65 there is a beauty color picture of Eugene M. Shoemaker standing at a table looking at a fresh long strip of the awesome hi res photos from the Lunar Orbiter.  And the look on his face is pure and classic WTF?? You have to see it for yourself. I tried to dig up the picture on Google images but to no avail. 

Once you see this picture you will immediately realize that perhaps those rumors of the very many weird and strange things were found on those hi res Orbiter images. Especially from Orbiter 5 which focused on the far side of the moon... are quiet possibly true after all.

E. M. Shoemaker was the first real astro geologist. He trained the astronauts what to look for, of that I found a great tribute picture of him which I have included in this post. After some intensive searching at the University of You Tube I was even lucky enough to find ancient footage of him discussing his profession. He was one of the Best and the Brightest of his time. I could go on about the very weird pictures on page 122 and 123 of the same book, I know there are linear rilles, but through the craters?

The Pull Of The Electric Universe

Possibly the single most tantalizing feature is the omnipresence of magnetic fields. Detectable fields a hundred thousand times weaker than the earth's field are found in interstellar space. At the other extreme, the feebly glowing dense cores of some defunct stars have magnetic fields twenty million times stronger than that of the earth!
Lawrence H. Aller, Atoms, Stars and Nebulae, (Third Edition), p. xii

The fans of the Electric Universe have been around for a very long time. And the Oracle of Ottawa is amazed at the utter quality of the names. And I was very surprised to see the endorsement of L. H. Aller to it in the Preface of the Third  Edition of his very popular and standard book Atoms, Stars and Nebulae, which I have just finished reading today.

Lawrence H. Aller

But not to worry about Lawrence getting in trouble over stating the truth of the future of the universe. He covered himself by making sure to mention the big bang and black holes the required number of times through out the remainder of the text and thus ensuring telescope time and office resources with out interference for the whole of his career.

Of course you have to wonder why the conception of the Electric Universe gets such a rough ride, especially if you know that the strongest force in the universe is the electromagnetic force. While gravity is in a distant place far away from the electromagnetic in weakness. Why it can be more dangerous to your academic career to state this fact than talk about intrinsic red-shift!

But the Oracle of Ottawa does not in  the least expect you to take my word for it. There are many very instructive videos on the Electric Universe on tap at the University of You Tube. And as a public service the Oracle of Ottawa has selected what I think is the most fascinating one, just to start you off on your new education. Bet you can't watch just one video on this soon to be cutting edge topic.

Homage To The Heretics

Science does not build its theories by a single line attack.
Sir Fred Hoyle, The Frontiers of Astronomy, p. 126

This blog was kicked off by watching videos late into the night at the University of You Tube. And one night I happened to come across one entitled Universe - The Cosmology Quest. Not only did it have rare and unknown footage of my childhood hero Sir Fred Hoyle, but it included all the heretics of that wild and wonderful time of my well misspent youth. And many that I have never heard of before and some more that I had no idea that they were involved with the cosmology quest.

Sir Fred Hoyle

I will never forget that part where Halton Arp was describing his theory of how a galaxy gives birth, and there was that animation of it as he talked of it. Well Dear Reader, it took the top of my head right off so to speak. Something just clicked deep inside. It one of the most important hallmarks of a valid theory in that it was self similar. Halton Arps theory of a galaxy giving birth looks exactly like a corral spitting forth a seed. There was no mention of these things in my high school  physics texts.

Halton C. Arp and Jayant Narlikar

 All the heretics were present, too many to name in this short writing. But I was amazed that they somehow got Jayant Narlikar to appear. And he was most interesting and I am sure someday soon to be proven right for all eternity. The Oracle of Ottawa was so set on fire that he dug up all his Fred Hoyle books from the stacks finally realizing that the time has come to get the reading in and done. And as providence does provide I found a mint new copy of A Different Approach To Cosmology in mint condition in hardcover, with the dust jacket, unread. It is not unread now. It was by Hoyle, Burbidge, and Narlikar, hail the gang was all together one last time.

Now the Oracle of Ottawa has been to college and why he even graduated! So A Different Approach was not that hard to get through. The end result of that was to read Ernst Mach's most famous book  'The Science of Mechanics', and would you believe that I had a fresh facsimile copy that I bought years ago and kept for that time when I had time. The time came and the book was wacked in no time, and I can understand why it is so often mentioned even today. I will riff on it in this blog in the near and probably into the distant future...

Of course the contemporary 'Big Bangers' say that all these heretics are ancient history. Sir Fred Hoyle has been gone from us since 2001. But somehow much to the chagrin of the bangers the Universe keeps getting older and bigger around. Objects that are of several million solar masses are being found where it is impossible for the Big Bang to have placed them. The Very Large Telescopes of the European Space Agency are detecting objects being ejected from galaxies near and far, like God was pitching batting practice.. And you often are starting to hear that nightmare quip that puts the fear of God, that can't possibly exist, into every bangers heart: The text books are going to have be re written...    

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...