30 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Your Birth Star
Name any event in history and you will find a star out there whose light
gives you a glimpse of something happening during the year of that event.
Provided you are not a very young child, somewhere up in the night sky
you can find your personal birth star. Its light is a thermonuclear glow
that heralds the year of your birth. Indeed, you can find quite a few such
stars (about 40 if you are 40; about 70 if you are 50; about 175 if you are
80 years old). When you look at one of your birth year ... 1 
notes
notes07 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Type 0 and Type III Civilizations
It's humbling to realise that the developmental gulf between a miniscule ant colony and our modern human civilisation is only a tiny fraction of the distance between a Type 0 and a Type III civilisation – a factor of 100 billion billion, in fact. Yet we have such a highly regarded view of ourselves, we believe a Type III civilisation would find us irresistible and would rush to make contact with us. The truth is, however, they may be as interested in communicating with humans as we are keen t...Folksonomies: perspective
Folksonomies: perspective
1 notes
notesWe are closer to ants than the more advanced civilizations, so why would they show anymore interest in us than we the ants?
23 APR 2012 by ideonexus
The Lifetime of DNA
The messages that DNA molecules contain are all but eternal when seen against the time scale of individual lifetimes. The lifetimes of DNA messages (give or take a few mutations) are measured in units ranging from millions of years to hundreds of millions of years; or, in other words, ranging from 10,000 individual lifetimes to a trillion individual lifetimes. Each individual organism should be seen as a temporary vehicle, in which DNA messages spend a tiny fraction of their geological lifeti... 1 notes
notesIt exists in living messengers for brief periods of their lifetimes, but communicates across millions of years throughout all life.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
How Radiometric Dating Works
Briefly, a radioactive isotope is a kind of atom which decays into a different kind of atom: for example. one called uranium-238 turns into one called lead-206. Because we know how long this takes to happen, we can think of the isotope as a radioactive clock. Radioactive clocks are rather like the water clocks and candle clocks that people used in the days before pendulum clocks were invented. A tank of water with a hole in the bottom will drain at a measurable rate. If the tank was filled at... 1 notes
notesA great summary of how we date fossils using Uranium and Carbon atoms and their decay rates.
08 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Everything Comes from Stars
What gravity is and why it is, no one knows. Albert Einstein spent most of his life trying to figure it out, but the secret eluded him. it is simply a fact that everything in the universe with mass pulls on everything else. If it weren't for the initial outward impetus of the Big Bang, gravity would have caused the entire universe to collapse into a heap. (Indeed, someday the cosmic collapse may happen, if and when the initial impetus is expended, although the best evidence suggests that the ... 1 notes
notesThe Big Bang to the formation of stars, which formed the elements crucial to life. It takes 1,000 calories of sunlight to evaporate one thimbleful of water.
11 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Atoms Within Our Bodies Still Release the Energy of an An...
Explosions are seldom one hundred per cent efficient. When a star ends as a supernova, the nuclear explosive material, which includes uranium and plutonium together with large amounts of iron and other burnt-out elements, is distributed around and scattered in space just as is the dust cloud from a hydrogen bomb test. Perhaps the strangest fact of all about our planet is that it consists largely of lumps of fall-out from a star-sized hydrogen bomb. Even today, aeons later, there is still enou...
1 High amounts of uranium in the Earth's core suggest our sun was in the vicinity of a supernova event, and the atoms within our bodies, if measured with a Geiger counter, can be found to still be releasing the energy from that event.
03 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Number of Bits for a Set of Encyclopedias are Minuscule C...
I have estimaged how many letters there are in a the Enclyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are (10^15). For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredths of an inch wide--which is the barest piece of dust t... 1 notes
notesFeynman estimates the number of atoms neccessary for storing a set of encyclopedias, and then compares that to the amount of data included in a DNA string.
