Tag Archives: Jupiter

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Marble & Heavenly Bodies


Michelangelo’s Grocery
List & the Finger of Galileo

What if future generations would wind up knowing famous people not for what we celebrate them for, but for something entirely unexpected? What if, in the big scheme, that’s what’s all about, or rather, how would you like to be known a century from now?
Michelangelo Buonarroti and Galileo Galilei, whose mastery of arts and sciences summarizes much of mankind’s greatness, may be safe from such a vexing fate. Nevertheless, recent news about them did make us wonder, over 400 years after their time.
In 2014, Illinois-based weapons maker ArmaLite had an awful idea: to outfit Michelangelo‘s masterpiece David with an assault rifle, committing not just an act of vandalism for profit, but also insulting four centuries of enlightenment to transcend our destructive nature.
Almost as offensive to any human who’s ever contemplated in awe the universe, let alone Galileo‘s memory, was a National Science Foundation study, that found that one in four Americans, or some 80 million of us, simply doesn’t know that the Earth orbits the Sun.

INTERTWINED LEGENDS
It’s very likely that both ArmaLite and those millions of our fellow voters remain unaware that Michelangelo died over 456 years ago, only three days after Galileo was born, both in the same region known today as Italy. Or even what greatness we’re talking about here.
After all, it’s really a coincidence that they were joined by such a happenstance of date and place. But it’s no casual fact that they both defined their age and set the standards to all others that followed it, in ways that still resonate with our world today.
And it’s a bit petty to castigate people for caring little whether Michelangelo‘s art makes us a bit more deserving of the wonders of our own time, or that Galileo‘s telescope introduced us to the stars, from which we inherited the dust that makes up our bodies.
But times, alas, are barely open to wonders, enigmas, or marvels of the physical world. While the Renaissance bred so many geniuses and they, in return, doted us with their indelible foresight and imagination, we got used to ignoring every star above us, as the song goes.
We’re content to juxtapose the sublime with the abhorrent, like David with a gun, and relish on the comfort of long-debunked beliefs, (more)
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Read Also:
* On This Day
* Renaissance Faire
* F For Fade

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Rock On

Immigrants to the Solar System
& a Stone That Predates Humans

No one knows how many of them are out there. They travel light, fast, and come from lifetimes of distance. Surveillance may catch a few, but this is too vast a place to easily spot them. Some fear them like the end of times. Others call them refugees, or vagrants, or immigrants.
They’re asteroids, meteorites, shooting stars. They may come to visit: one zipped by Earth’s orbit last year, on its way out of the Milk Way. But long ago, Jupiter captured another; it’s now a permanent resident. Like those that come crashing to die among us, they’ll keep on coming.
The fear, of course, is that they do have the potential to end our civilization. Just like that, and there’s damn little, or pretty much nothing, we can do about it. Geological data, i.e., extracted from rocks, plus statistical probability, prove that such a literally earthshaking possibility does exist.
Twice in the past an incoming high-speed ball wiped nearly all life on the planet, changing evolutionary history in the process. So we try to keep track of them, but even if we could see them all at a safe distance, we’ll probably would’t have time for anything but to go mad, and then die.
Not Oumuamua, though, the object that crossed incognito our zenith last September. When it reached the sun, we knew that it couldn’t possibly be from within our system, like all the others, race-ending or not. When it left it, it’d become the very first interstellar little world to came and say hi. Or rather, a Hello, Goodbye. I must be going.

THE THIRD ROCK FROM THE SUN
Of course, Shakespeare was right. So was Carmichael, and so was Sagan. After being given such a noble provenance, linking us straight to the most distant heavenly body we will never get to see, who wants to have anything to do with an errant piece of rock? But it’s been said, they’re inevitable.
In fact, without denying we’re shinning stars and all that, life may have been brought down to this Pale Blue Dot, which once thought of itself as the center of the universe, by a lowly slice of outwordly dust, teeming with what would blow air through our nostrils. Hey, cheer up. We’re all rock stars.
Or whatever. The hominids who act as if they own the place they know nothing about, and are just about to put it on fire, couldn’t bear thinking that they don’t count. But in reality, they don’t. (more)
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Read Also:
* The Undreamed World
* World Snatchers
* It’s Fly By Us

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Infinity & Beyond

Voyagers Leave Solar
System, Promise to Call

Talking about the little, multi-million dollar, engine that could. The Voyagers twin spacecraft, launched 35 years ago next August and September, are about to reach a place full of cliches but still vastly unknown: the interstellar space, the area beyond the imaginary trajectory of even the farthest member of the Solar System. Literally, it’s about to get to where no one has gone before.
The small crafts don’t even register on the world’s most powerful telescope screens and NASA scientists track them both by complicated astronomical calculations. But their math indicates that, yup, Voyager 1 is almost at the Heliosphere, and #2 is coming up soon after. Bye bye cruel world that mostly forgot about us, then. Except that we haven’t.
Sorry, there won’t be any cake waiting for you guys, to mark the occasion, and even our messages will get to you ever more apart from each other. They now take almost 17 hours to get to you, but fear not; Continue reading →

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Worlds Away

New Earth-Like Planet May
Have Everything But a Moon

It’s almost as warm as our planet. It may have liquid water on its surface. It orbits a twin of our own sun. Kepler-22b, the newest exoplanet found by NASA’s space hunter mission Kepler, is but one of hundreds already found that could harbor life. But it’s somewhat unique in what its size is comparable to earth’s in ways many before it aren’t.
No astrophysicist is hyper ventilating about it just yet, though. The observations are based in a lot of assumptions and, at this point, we have no idea whether the new discovery is a rocky or a gaseous body. There’s also no word yet on whether it has a moon.
The Kepler mission has accelerated a thousand-fold the hunt to find a place fit for life as we know it, and a few obscenely massive black holes to boot.
In fact, the mission’s findings will be combined with observations made by the S.E.T.I. project, one of the oldest searches for alien life that was recently revived.
It’ll now direct the eyes of its system observatories to the same area in the sky that Kepler has been pointed to.
As for us, in the meantime, all we have managed was to multiply threats to the environment and to our own survival on this planet.
BUILDING A NEW BODY
But no one is ready to pack and board the first rocket to the unknown just yet. In fact, we’re far to even being able to consider the possibility of a mass exodus from earth as a viable survival option to our species.
Never mind diminishing budgets and interest in space travel, as sad as it may be. Or the creeping malaise of conformism and settling for the Continue reading →

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Fab Four Reunion


Mars, Jupiter, Venus
& Mercury Together!

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Sun’s Hidden Sister?

Giant Planet or a
Speck of Stardust?

Just in time for another solar flares cycle, comes news that a giant gas planet may be hidden in the outskirts of our solar planet. But the possibility that there’s such a hidden heavenly body, which was quickly named Tyche, for the Greek goddess Continue reading →

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Monolith, Isle & Star

Wood on Ice, Birth of an
Island & A New Sun Coming

Religion and scientific inquiry were bred out of our compulsion to explain the world. Whereas science challenges dogma and welcomes questioning, faith thrives when reason fails. Fortunately, neither is relevant at this moment. Or necessary when you’re having a laugh.
So when an Australian reporter came upon a piece of wood laying on top of an Antarctic iceberg, miles from nowhere, someone suggested it was a take on the black monolith Stanley Kubrick used in his “2001 – A Space Odissey” to illustrate mankind’s progress.
A coffin. A door to a magical world. Debris from a shipwreck. Or a rudimentary penguin surfboard were some of the theories Continue reading →

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Heavenly Bodies

The Cardinal Grand
Cross Is Finally Here

It’s a busy time for astrologers all over and the Internet is abuzz with a rare phenomenon. Jupiter and Uranus in Aries, Pluto in Capricorn, the Moon in Cancer, and Venus, Mars and Saturn in Libra, plus the Sun in Leo, are forming a curious square at the center of the Astrological Map template.
That signals, according to informed sources, the need to “remain calm and balanced to deal with an extraordinarily intense wave of energy.” Old systems are set to “break away and new ones to form,” and “what’s in the shadow will be revealed.”
All in preparation, of course, for the “Triple Crystalline Portal” in 10/10/10. We, honestly, have no idea what this all means but humbly wish to pass along the information. No additional details will be provided.