Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Artificial Intelligence

(From my science essay collection How Do we know? )

Kenny A. Chaffin

The first Alien Intelligence we meet may not be from another planet, but from our own computer labs. Many of us walk around with a computer in our pocket capable of listening, parsing, and responding – sometimes even correctly – to our voice. We Google for information by typing in phrases, sentences or disconnected words and the artificial intelligence in Google’s search engine almost always comes back with what we are looking for. These dedicated applications are on the verge of intelligent behavior and could certainly in their domain be called intelligent. Other systems are even more so and in some cases demonstrate more generic intelligence such as the Watson system from IBM that recently defeated the all-time Jeopardy! champions. So how soon until we get to meet these Alien Intelligences of our own creation? We could see them perhaps within the century and almost certainly (provided we don’t kill ourselves off or get whacked with an asteroid) by next century. A Watson-like system is being rolled out by IBM to assist in medical diagnosis. Google, Google Voice, and Siri will continue to improve. New research into machine learning, user interfaces and the human brain are being brought from the lab into practice. It’s been a long and bumpy road, at least by technological progress measurement since that first Dartmouth conference on machine learning in 1956 when Marvin Minsky boldly predicted that "within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved." Other bold predictions followed every few years, then every decade until with little actual success the predictions stopped. In some ways that was when the work really began. And that work as often happens emerged not from the expected avenues, but from the back allies and offshoots of other research.

Artificial intelligence is defined as a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers. John McCarthy, one of the Dartmouth conference organizers who coined the term defines it as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." The founding idea was that the central feature of humanity – intelligence – could be analyzed, described and simulated by a machine. The core issues of accomplishing this have to do with perception, communication, analysis of sensory input, reasoning, learning, planning and responding to real-world events. The ability to perform these functions in a general manner (like a human) is known as Strong AI though much of the work and research is done as subsets of the larger goal. There are a number of associated areas as well such as neuron simulation, learning theory and knowledge representation.

The key of course is understanding intelligence, what it is, what it does, and perhaps even why it does what it does. But it is a bit like art or pornography – “I may not be able to define it for you, but I can certainly tell you what it is when I see it.” There are many often disparate definitions of intelligence, but what seems to be the core is problem solving. It involves identifying a problem or obstacle, seeking or creating a solution, applying that solution and then evaluating the result. The evaluation provides a feedback process to inform future decisions.

The artificial intelligence field got its start at the Dartmouth conference with four key figures – Alan Newell, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, and Herbert Simon all of whom were computer scientists with exception of Simon who was more of a psychologist/sociologist as well as being knowledgeable in other disciplines. All of them were in fact somewhat cross-disciplinary. This idea of building a machine capable of human intelligence came not long after the advent of the first practical computers. Given the broad capabilities exhibited by computer programming as a result of the Von-Neumann architecture based on Alan Turing’s mathematical concepts it seemed quite possible to program a computer to emulate human intelligence and decision making. But oh what a tangled web was to be weaved from this.

Throughout history there have been numerous attempts, desires, stories and examples of building or bringing inanimate objects to life. There are clockwork robotic devices, statues and puppets and trees that came to life (Pygmalion, Pinocchio), the mechanical devices built to simulate/emulate/recreate human behavior sometimes even with dwarves or children inside to huckster the crowd, and back beyond even that to the oracle at Delphi. Given all the literature, myths, stories and actual devices there must be something very deep in the human psyche that longs to re-create itself. Perhaps it is even down to the genetic drive of reproducing, recreating, perpetuating ourselves, perhaps a kind of genetic imperative drives our attempts, our need to explore artificial intelligence.

Nevertheless the work seriously got underway following the Dartmouth conference and there was serious money behind it, primarily funded by the departments of defense in the United States and in Britain as well as Russia and other world powers of the mid-20^th century.

The perceived promise led Darpa to invest approximately $3 million a year from 1963 to the mid 1970’s. Similar investments took place in Britain. Darpa of course was looking for potential military applications during this cold war time of tension around the world. The promise and the culture of the time though led to a devastating situation. The funds flowed with little oversight and the field went in many directions that resulted in little applicable output. This was the early days of computers and the algorithms and programs designed to emulate things like human logic and reasoning were quite complex and resource demanding. They did not work well on the hardware available at the time. Either the programs had to be scaled back and limited in their scope or very long time-frames had to be allowed in order to get results. Neither came close to approaching the abilities of a human brain on any level. Sensing capabilities such as vision and audio which were being worked on as a subset of the AI problem required massive programming just to acquire and manipulate the data into a form that could be used by the AI components.

By the mid 70’s the faltering field was stripped of funding and mostly dropped. This in now known as the first AI Winter and would last almost a decade until the early 80’s. Some work continued, but without the freely flowing funds it was much more focused and more a labor of love rather than more random experimentation. During this time as well much criticism was leveled at the computer scientists by other academic departments. Philosophy, psychology, biology and mathematics all took shots, but by the same token they were all interested in the field that they had been shut out of in this early phase and as a result many research institutes began bringing together diverse cross-disciplinary groups to work on the research as well as providing means for them to work better together. As a result we get learning specialists helping to design computer learning applications. We get knowledge management experts helping to devise search and storage hardware and software. And we find neurological experts working with programmers to simulate neural networks.

This ‘background’ research led to the next step in AI - Expert systems, which were the rage in the 80’s. An expert system was intended to be a subject matter expert in a specific or limited domain. It incorporated a knowledge base and a means of searching and retrieving (as well as updating) information. This lead to a boom in database research and development. Computers were rushing along following Moore’s Law of doubling capabilities every two years. This allowed for more complex search algorithms which were ever faster as were the database search and retrieval. The programming language of choice for these systems was Lisp a symbolic manipulation language thought to better model thought processes, symbolic manipulation and such. Certainly there was some success for these expert systems but again the result failed to match the expectations and once more the field floundered.

In the meantime Japan initiated the Fifth Generation Computer Project which was intended to create computers and programs that could communicate using natural language, do visual processing and recognition as well as emulate human reasoning. They dropped Lisp and chose a newer language Prolog as the core programming language perhaps to leave the old ways behind and start anew. Other countries responded in kind to this ‘threat’ of computer dominance. During this time much work was beginning to focus on neural networks and emulating the brain in hopes of breaking free of the step-by-step von-Neumann style of programming. This took place (and continues to this day) in both hardware and software. Emulating the workings of individual brain neurons as well as connecting them in the manner of a biological brain. But again the lack of substantial applicable results to business or military uses brought on another ice-age. The second AI Winter lasted from the late 80’s to the mid 90’s.

By this time the field of robotics was rising particularly due to the use of robotics in assembly factories such as car manufacturers and electronic assembly plants. There was money to be had for robotics research and a new slant on the AI field emerged. By providing the means to these factory robots to handle ambiguity, recognize defective parts, to align and assemble them properly without supervision or through extremely precise programming and logistics provided a new venue to AI. It wasn’t just emulating human intelligence and reasoning, but performing the tasks a human would do in a real-world assembly factory.

A separate but similar revolution was taking place in space exploration. Our robotic probes to Mars, Venus, Saturn and the outer planets were being designed with increasingly autonomous and error-correcting capabilities. These robots – rovers and probes of various styles had to operate autonomously in much more demanding and dangerous situations than the factory floor. NASA and the military funded some of the best minds, universities and corporations to build these mechanical emissaries to the cosmos.

There was a completely different revolution taking place during these years as well. From the mid/late 80’s the business demands for data storage and retrieval have exploded like a sun going nova. This fueled much database research and even special purpose hardware research such as Teradata and Britton Lee database machines. The advent of the internet brought search engines to the fore and the star of course that emerged was Google now a household name/word and verb equivalent to internet search. The massive data problem is far from solved, it continues to grow. Everything has gone digital. Businesses store all their corporate data digitally, our space telescopes produce massive amounts of data as do research projects such as the Human Genome Project and other DNA and biological analysis research as well as the recently announced Human Brain Mapping initiative. This issue is known today as the Big Data problem and significant amounts of cash from government and private industry are pouring into managing the problem. The results of this are applicable as well to AI research because one of the obstacles is providing and managing the amazing amount of information storage required to emulate a human brain.

A human brain has about the same number of neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy – about 100 million. And each of these neurons may be connected to thousands of other neurons. This creates an amazingly complex multi-processing system that is not only difficult to emulate but requires computing capabilities that are currently beyond present-day systems. We may see it in the next half-century though.

All of these areas of research and application are at the fore-front of today’s computer, information and cognitive science. Google is increasingly capable of parsing and analyzing natural language inputs and providing (in extreme short time-frames) relevant results. We have cell phones that are capable of processing speech input and providing similar search results or actions based on the spoken words. Our robots are exploring Mars, Voyager (launched 35 years ago) is still functional and approaching the edge of interstellar space. It requires 20 minutes for radio messages to travel to or from it. The autonomous land vehicle trials by Darpa and Google continue. Google’s vehicle has already been given approval for commercial operation of these vehicles in several states.

It seems we are now approaching real AI – the capabilities of humans from several oblique angles following failures of direct methods of programming rational decision making, expert systems, and embedded logic. It seems that real AI is coming not from the research labs, but from the factory floor, our autonomous space probes and vehicles, and from our information management needs. We continue to attempt to emulate the physical structure and workings of the human brain but some of our best results are in our pockets -- our cell phones with voice-actuated access to the world’s knowledge at the tip of our tongues.

References/Resources/Links

Artificial Intelligence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

History of Artificial Intelligence:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_artificial_intelligence

Watson:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watson_(computer)

Human Brain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_brain

Human Brain Mapping:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2013/06/21/what-does-human-brain-mapping-actually-tell-us/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_mapping

Blue Brain Project:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Brain_Project

http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/index.html

Neural Network Software:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_software

Expert Systems:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_system

Strong AI:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI

Big Data:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data

About the Author

Kenny A. Chaffin writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction and has published poems and fiction in Vision Magazine, The Bay Review, Caney River Reader, WritersHood, Star*Line, MiPo, Melange and Ad Astra and has published nonfiction in The Writer, The Electron, Writers Journal and Today’s Family. He grew up in southern Oklahoma and now lives in Denver, CO where he works hard to make enough of a living to support two cats, numerous wild birds and a bevy of squirrels. His poetry collections No Longer Dressed in Black, The Poet of Utah Park, The Joy of Science, A Fleeting Existence, a collection of science essays How do we Know, and a memoir of growing up on an Oklahoma farm - Growing Up Stories are all available at Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B007S3SMY8. He may be contacted through his website at http://www.kacweb.com.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

The Elephants in the Room - Problems with Physics

The Elephants in the Room

Kenny A. Chaffin

Maybe I’m getting crabby or frustrated or impatient but it seems that physics has forgotten its basics. Let’s start with gravity. We become aware of gravity even before we are born and even more when we begin to make our way in the world, rolling, crawling and walking. We are constantly aware of the ‘pull’ of gravity. Examination of gravity rationally and scientifically began with Galileo (though certainly many had thought about it before). He was the first we know of to conduct and record experiments to determine the force of gravity and he supposedly tested dropping balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa though the majority of his experiments were done using inclined planes and rolling balls. He was able to determine that the acceleration of gravity was constant.

Now let’s jump to Newton. He took our knowledge a step further, to actually mathematically determine the pull of gravity and to show that its action was the same on Earth as in space by describing mathematically how planets and stars interacted. Still he was at a loss as to what the force actually was and how it worked.

Einstein took another giant leap by equating gravity and acceleration and ultimately describing gravity as not a force, but as a curvature of space due to mass. This theory predicted that light would be ‘bent’ when passing near a massive object. We’ve actually seen and measured this as well as observing the effects of gravitational lensing wherein galaxies bend the light of stars around themselves.

Quantum mechanics has another approach. According to the Standard Model there should be a particle – a gravitron – that mediates the gravitational force (note that gravity is a force here not curved space) which appears to be a direct contradiction with Einstein’s General Relativity and its description of curved space.

String theory attempts to take a slightly different angle in an attempt to move beyond quantum mechanics by adding dimensions to space and ultimately trying to define quantum loop gravity (in an attempt to unify relativity and quantum mechanics) as something like a ‘hidden’ dimension of reality. String theory has become extremely mathematically intensive and has yet to meet the true standards of prediction and testability required by science.

Now maybe this gravity issue is just an ‘unanswered’ question of physics. Certainly that is what it seems to be given the contradictory explanations between Relativity and Quantum. But hold this in mind for a bit.

In Special Relativity Einstein ‘set’ the speed of light as constant and invariant due to various properties that physicists had observed – primarily the Michelson-Morley experiment. He pushed this idea further than anyone and developed his Special Theory of Relativity (prior to the General Theory) with its unique results and predictions about light, its behavior and ultimately about time changing depending on the observers position and movement due to the fact that the speed of light must always be invariant regardless of the motion of the observer. This results in some very non-intuitive results, including the ability to (in a manner of speaking) travel into the future. It all seems to be true based on tests conducted with clocks of various types moving at various speeds. The question for me though is why is the speed of light constant and why if photons are massless do they have a finite speed? This is the elephant in the room as is the curvature of space.

Now maybe as opposed to Marvin the Android my tiny brain just can’t comprehend these concepts, but it seems something is missing. It seems that perhaps we need to slow down, back up and rethink. That is a bit what the bad boy of physics Lee Smolin is attempting to do in his approach. He worked for decades in researching and developing String Theory before declaring it the wrong approach. This is detailed in his book “The Trouble with Physics” and continues in his latest release “Time Reborn.” In it he revisits the fundamentals of physics including light, space and time. He has taken the radical approach of declaring Time the fundamental component of reality. In essence he is setting time as real and invariant similarly to what Einstein did with the speed of light. At one point in the book he states that this approach is really just another way of looking at Relativity.

After reading about Special and General Relativity myself for decades (but without any of the mathematical abilities to examine it in detail) I’ve often wondered myself about whether one could simply choose a component of reality as we know it – like the speed of light, time, or space – set it as invariant and work the math required to develop an alternative view of reality just as Einstein did. Now Smolin’s book and view on time is written for the popular reader and he admits that he has not followed through with the mathematics but is putting the idea forward as an alternative possibility in the hopes of someone taking it and running with it.

Along these same lines now comes Dark Matter and Dark Energy to explain a couple of anomalies we seem to observe in the cosmos. Dark Matter is the proposed solution for the aberrant movement of galaxies and stars which appear to be acting as though there were more mass in the universe than is evident from the stars and reflected light we see. It certainly seems possible there is ‘unseen’ matter that might cause this gravitational effect. Another possibility could be that our observation is somehow affected by space or time or other laws of the universe we simply don’t understand yet.

This brings us to Dark Energy, the proposed solution to the recently discovered accelerated expansion of the universe. We’ve known (or assumed we have) that the universe is expanding since Hubble measured and proposed it in 1929. We can measure the red-shift of distant stars with spectrographic instruments and have determined that not only are they all moving away from us (thus implying expansion) but that that expansion is accelerating. This has been confirmed by recent cosmic microwave background measurements. We don’t know why this is happening yet Dark Energy has been anointed as the reason by creating a kind of anti-gravity force ‘pushing’ space apart while at the same time being a force that is undetectable, unmeasurable, and invisible other than through the observation of the foresaid acceleration of universal expansion.

I don’t know about you gentle reader, but this is all a bit unsettling for me. There are many unknowns here and of course as Feynman says that’s okay, it is much better for science to say I don’t know than to create unsupportable, unsubstantiated solutions. I ‘believe’ in science, I trust it to eventually find the answers to the reality of the universe around us but at times I wonder if perhaps we haven’t gotten off the path, I wonder if perhaps we are not seeing the elephants in the room and if perhaps we should not stop, regroup, and reexamine some of our basic assumptions about the world around us.

About the Author

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

A Visitor from the Oort Cloud

Kenny A. Chaffin

(Note this post was written before the feeble appearance and flyby of Comet ISON, nevertheless it contains some relevant information about comets, the Oort Cloud etc.)

This November you may see the most spectacular celestial event of your life. Comet ISON (officially known as C/2012 S1) is due to make its closest approach to the Sun on November 28, 2013 and if indications are correct it will be as bright as the full moon and may even be visible in daylight with a magnitude of -11.6.

Comet ISON is named after the Russian observatory - the International Scientific Optical Network (ISON) near Kislovodsk where it was discovered by Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok on September 21, 2012. At that time it was still 625 million miles from Earth.

This event may very well be one they are talking about 1000 years from now long after you and I are gone. But as with all comets though there is much guesswork involved. If it should breakup before it gets close to the Sun there may be no sky-show at all. The spectacularation is also dependent on the comet’s composition which of course varies from comet to comet. Comet hunter David Levy says, “Comets are like cats, they have tails, and they do precisely what they want.” We’ll simply have to wait and see what happens but given the indicators (such as the photographs by the NASA probe Deep Impact on January 17 and 18) it will be truly awesome. I’m betting it will outshine my experience of Halley’s Comet which I saw put on a show in 1986.

Comet ISON on April 10, 2013 taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

Image courtesy of NASA.

Comets are things of imagination, fascination and lore. With their long luminous tails sweeping across the sky, their unusual movement against the fixed stars of the night sky and their unpredictable appearances they were clearly of a fantastical and dream-like nature and have long been thought of as bad omens. Still the biblical star of Bethlehem may have been a comet and the 1066 comet over the Battle of Hastings was no less than the well-known Halley’s Comet itself, perhaps the most famous of all comets and one that was key in establishing the nature and science of comets. Halley’s is a short period comet and that was helpful in identifying it as a recurrent visitor to our inner solar system. By tracking its path and calculating its orbit Halley in 1705 was able to predict that it would reappear every 76 years and also confirm many historical observations. It has been reliably recorded since 240 BCE and will next appear in mid-2061. Odds are not in my favor for being around barring significant medical breakthroughs in age extension, but hopefully you will be there to see it.

Long period comets like Comet ISON are somewhat more difficult to predict as small variations in their paths and changes in their mass as they approach the sun can result in significant variations in their predicted return. These long period comets may not return for hundreds or thousands of years. The difference in short and long period comets is in their origin and the path they follow around the sun. They each come from different regions of our solar system. The short period comets originate and travel from an area known as the Kuiper Belt which is just past Neptune within the outer reaches of our planetary space. The long period comets like ISON originate in the Oort Cloud which is vastly further away.

Artists rendering of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. Courtesy NASA.

No one has seen the Oort cloud; not Hubble, not Sagan, not Voyager, not even Halley though the comet named for him was a large impetus for its conception. There have been ancient and historical accounts of comets appearing in the skies, the Chinese observed Comet Halley in August and September of 12 BC. Because comets are so unusual and different with their movement and huge glowing and streaming tails they were terrifying to the ancients. People would hide or perform sacrifices or other bizarre behaviors when a comet appeared in the sky; though that may not be much different than today given the strange cult behavior during recent comet appearances. Eventually though more scientific oriented minds began to ask what are they? Where do they come from? These thoughts led Ernst Opik in 1932 to postulate the existence of a vast cloud of material surrounding our solar system and for Jan Hendrik Oort to come to the same conclusion in 1950. The behavior of comets – the ‘boiling away’ of their mass as they approach the sun and its warmth creates their spectacular tails and this thought to preclude them being formed near the sun. The hypothesis was then that they were from some far domain, some cometary cloud that had existed since the formation of our solar system and only some gravitational perturbation would cause a comet to begin a journey to the gravity well of our sun. Many of those journeys would end up with collisions of the comet with planets or a final plunge into the sun itself. Others on slightly different trajectories would enter the solar system swing around the gravity well of the sun and be returned one again to the far reaches of the solar system -- only to return again. Oort used the trajectories of the comets along with his knowledge of the solar system and of the cosmology knowledge of the day to describe and determine the distance, extent and makeup of the speculative cloud that came to bear his name.

The Oort cloud itself is a spherical cloud of material surrounding our solar system centered on the Sun. Its outer edge lies approximately one light year or 50,000 Astronomical Units (1 A.U. = 93 million miles) from the sun. An additional reason the Oort Cloud is of note is that its outer edge marks the furthest extent of gravitational influence from the Sun and planets. In attempting to comprehend this vast distance we might think about the current furthest man-made objects from the Earth -- the Voyager spacecraft -- currently 123 AU from the sun well beyond the Kuiper belt and are just entering (as of December 2012) ‘interstellar’ space yet still far from the Oort Cloud. Voyager’s trip so far has taken 35 years and will require another 10,000 years to reach the Oort Cloud – far longer than humanities recorded history on Earth.

Since no one has ever seen the Oort cloud our information about it is based on secondary observations such as those long-period comets like ISON, simulations and logical inferences about the formation of the Solar system and we speculate that other solar systems have Oort clouds as well, but given the density and the difficulty we have with even detecting planets around other stars detecting an extra-solar Oort cloud is pretty much out of the question given our current capabilities. We believe the Oort Cloud consists of two parts, a spherical outer shell some 20,000- 50,000 AU and an inner doughnut-shaped cloud of 2000- 20,000 AU from the Sun. This inner portion is called the Hills Cloud for J.G. Hills who proposed its existence in 1981.

Based on the comets we have observed it is believed that the cloud is comprised of trillions of icy objects larger than 1 km. The ices are thought to be water, methane, ethane, carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide though some may be rocky asteroid-type objects. All together it is thought the mass of the Oort cloud is about 5 times the Earth’s mass – virtually nothing given the volume of space it covers. It is no wonder we can’t see it! Still a few objects have been detected and are thought to be part of the Oort Cloud, the most well know and biggest is Sedna discovered in 2003 and thought to be some 1500 km in diameter.

One reason comets are of interest – other than making disaster movies and creating end-of-life-as-we-know-it scenarios and speculation is the possibility that comets were the bearers of water to our planet and possible even the bearers of life itself or the components thereof. This idea of course has been questioned and continues to be questioned. Since we have established that comets do contain a significant amount of water as well as other ices this seems a reasonable possibility. But it is also just as possible is that the Earth and comets formed from the same protoplanetary substances and thus both contain water. This second scenario however does not explain is why we don’t see water on the other solar system planets and moons – though there may be other explanations for that. This cometary delivery of water has also been questioned because of the make-up of the water ice in the comets which we’ve been able to determine using spectral analysis. Earth’s oceans contain a significant percentage of ‘heavy’ water - deuterium. Our analysis of comet Halley and comet Hyakutake, both originating in the Oort cloud give ratios of deuterium to normal hydrogen that is twice that of Earth’s oceans. Conversely analysis of Comet Hartley2 and Comet LINEAR (originating in the Kuiper belt) show it has the proper ratio. It is thought the origin of these comets from different parts of our solar system accounts for their difference in composition. So there appear to be at least two measurable differences in the types of comets we see, their composition and their orbital period – either short or long period comets. This seems to make sense in that comets from vastly different parts of the solar system (Kuiper belt or Oort cloud) would have different compositions based on the way the initial protoplanetary disk originated and formed the objects in our solar system.

Interestingly then based on composition it would appear Halley’s Comet actually originated in the Oort cloud but has through gravitational perturbations become a short period comet now traveling from the Kuiper belt around the sun while Comet ISON remains a long period comet and will only be visiting us for a short time later this year and then beginning its long climb out of the solar well to the far reaches of the Oort cloud.

As far as ISON, it is still 475 million miles away as of January 18, 2013 but already has a tail more than 40,000 miles long. It is going to be spectacular! Plan your comet watching party now while there is still time. I’m very much looking forward to it and as it may be the last really spectacular celestial light show I’ll see and I’d love for it to outshine my memories of those 60’s and 70’s concert light-shows! I've got a feeling it just might. Take care and enjoy the show!

References/Links:

Oort Cloud:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud

http://www.universetoday.com/32522/oort-cloud/

Oort Cloud Image:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kuiper_oort.jpg

Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud:

http://nineplanets.org/kboc.html

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=KBOs&Display=OverviewLong

Comets:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halley%27s_Comet

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/deepimpact/media/f_ancient.html

Where did Earth get its water:

http://earthsky.org/space/did-comets-bring-water-to-earth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_water_on_Earth

Comet ISON:

http://earthsky.org/space/big-sun-diving-comet-ison-might-be-spectacular-in-2013

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2012_S1

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/news/asteroid20130205.html

http://astrobob.areavoices.com/2013/02/06/tadpole-comet-swims-under-deep-impacts-gaze/

Comet ISON Image:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ISON_Comet_captured_by_HST,_April_10-11,_2013.jpg

About the Author

He may be contacted through his website at http://www.kacweb.com.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Hotspots Calderas and All That (Excerpt from: How do we know? )

Hotspots Calderas and All That

(Excerpt from: How do we know? Available on Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/know-things-learned-science-ebook/dp/B00DTIEZYW)

Kenny A. Chaffin

Yellowstone is well past due for a massive eruption. The magma chamber 6 miles beneath it is growing larger and faster than at any time in human history. We know that Yellowstone erupts every 600,000 years or so and the last eruption was 642,000 years ago. Now while past performance does not guarantee future events, we are past due for this one. Past eruptions occurred 2 mya (million years ago) and 1.3 mya as well. These were massive eruptions 1000-2000 times that of the Mt St. Helens eruption of 1980.

This image shows the basic geology of the Yellowstone area and caldera. This area and others like it around the world are caused by mantle plumes.

By examining and mapping the terrain of the area each of a few recent eruptions can be seen in the separate calderas they left. These are indicated in this image from the U.S. National Park Service.

The three most recent eruptions (2.1, 1.6, and .6 mya) are all in the current Yellowstone area as shown in the previous caldera image. The following image shows the movement of the hotspot back some 16 million years into Oregon and Nevada. It is a bit deceiving but it’s not the hotspot that is moving, it is the crust of the Earth moving above and across it. The hotspot rises up from the magma layer below and the North American continental plate moves from North/East to South/West above the hotspot as the continent makes its way steadily and irrepressibly towards the Pacific subduction zone under California. This makes it appear as though the hotspot is moving to the east/northeast but it is actually the continent moving over the hotspot.

Each past eruption has been unique with varying impacts on the geography, fauna and flora. We can see this by examining the geological evidence in the ash it expelled in amount and extent as well as the evidence of pyroclastic and lava flows. The smaller eruptions seem to have devastated life in the four surrounding states – Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska. The larger eruptions devastated the entire western half of the United States from Canada to Mexico and from the Pacific Ocean to the Mississippi River.

Scientists are constantly watching, measuring and monitoring any movement, tremors, geological or volcanic activity in the area. From 2004 – 2007 the floor of the Yellowstone caldera rose about 3 inches each year. This is three times more than in prior years. The rise is attributed to the growing magma bubble under the region which is slowly pushing the crust upwards. It has slowed slightly since 2007 but continues.

Yellowstone and other areas like it, past and present are due to these so-called hotspots on the Earth’s crust. If look at the interior of the Earth we know there is an inner core of solid iron that is under extreme pressure and is extremely hot. The temperature is well beyond the temperature of liquid iron but remains solid due to the pressure at that depth. A brief aside on this, scientists recently discovered that the Earth’s inner core is actually 1000 degrees hotter than had been previously thought which solves a long standing problem involving the Earth’s magnetic field. The lower temperature would seem to make the magnetic field impossible so there has been much consternation over it. How did they determine this? You can refer to the article in the reference section, but basically by using x-rays, particle accelerators, lasers, diamonds, and iron for measuring and simulating the conditions. It is now thought that the inner core is 6000 degrees Celsius -- hotter than the Sun.

This solid inner core is surrounded by a liquid iron which is in turn surrounded by molten magma that swirls and circulates in an extremely slow rolling boil like candy or fudge on your kitchen stove. All this heat and pent-up energy sits beneath the thin egg-shell-like crust on which we live. That energy sometimes escapes through areas such as Yellowstone, volcanos like Mount Saint Helens, Etna, or those with the unpronounceable names in Iceland. The rolling boil of the magma is what drives continental drift, pushing up new crust at the mid-ocean ridges and pulling old crust down into subduction zones over the millennia.

Hotspots such as Yellowstone are areas where the crust is thinner than average due to the molten mantle pushing upwards warming it and creating volcanism, hot springs, sulfuric and other volcanic gas emissions. In addition to Yellowstone, it is a hotspot that is responsible for the Hawaiian Islands as well as some forty other areas around the world. Throughout history these hotspots have resulted in some of the most deadly events imaginable.

The Deccan Traps in west central India began erupting approximately 65 million years ago contemporaneously with the extinction of the dinosaurs and was likely at least partially responsible for their demise. As with Yellowstone and other past ‘trap’ events it was due to a deep mantle magma plume erupting onto the surface of the Earth. The word ‘trap’ comes from the Dutch word for stairs because these types of lava flows result in a stair-stepped appearance as repeated flows build up atop one another. The Deccan Trap event may have caused cooling of the Earth by two degrees Centigrade due to release of sulfur dioxide and other volcanic gasses but it is not thought to have been the primary death dealer to the dinosaurs. That title goes to the Chicxulub impact event in Central America. An asteroid 10 km in diameter struck the northern Yucatan Peninsula area which blanked the Earth in a deadly dust cloud cutting off the sunlight, killing most plant life and ultimately the dinosaurs as well. The Deccan eruptions lasted 30,000 years and certainly contributed to that deadly atmospheric blanket. They exuded enough molten magma to cover 1.5 million kilometers about half of the modern India.

Deccan Traps area (Photo of Rajgad Fort taken from Pabe Ghat.)

A still bigger event was the Siberian Traps event of 251 mya. It is thought to have been responsible for The Great Dying which killed 96% of all marine species and 70% of all land species including insects.Some 57% of all families and 83% of all genera became extinct. This is also called the P-T Permian–Triassic extinction event and while we can’t say for sure the Siberian Traps event was responsible, it was certainly the largest part of it. There may have been asteroid impacts (Wilkes Crater in Antarctica) or other triggers. In any case it took 30 million years for land-based life to recover. This was a mantle plume event like the Deccan event but lasted a full million years from 251 – 250 mya. It covered an area of 2 million square kilometers and released from 1 – 4 million cubic kilometers of lava. This is an incredible volume of molten rock! Even at the minimum of 1 million cubic kilometers this amount of material – assuming it were possible, could be used to build a 22 lane interstate ‘highway’ 266 feet wide (as well as deep) between the Earth and the Sun.

Siberian Traps Area - Physical map of Siberia with extent of Siberian traps according to http://www.mantleplumes.org/Siberia.html (links provided in lieu of copyright-restricted image)

The fact that humanity has not seen an event such as these just goes to emphasize once more the fleeting amount of experience and time we have existed on this small planet with our miniscule collection of recorded history. We are so much less than important, a minor species on a minor planet of a minor sun in an unconcerned unrelenting uncaring universe. We may be headed towards a sixth great extinction of our own making but even if we as a species avoid, live through, or prevent it, we have no control whatsoever over massive eruptions such as these and depending on the size and extent there would be little we could do to survive. This is perhaps one more reason to be pushing for development of space capabilities sooner rather than later. There is little to be gained from worrying though, we can only hope to survive and we certainly are survivors we survived the much smaller Toba event some 6000 years ago even if it was a few thousand of us, we may survive again. There may be some warning, we are monitoring closely…or there may not, humanity has yet to experience a true massive eruption, asteroid or other extinction event. Let’s hope we never do, or that we are long gone from the planet should it happen.

References/Resources/Links

Yellowstone Caldera Image:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yellowstone_Caldera.svg

Yellowstone Hotspot Movement Image:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HotspotsSRP.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Yellowstone_Caldera_map2.JPG

Yellowstone Hotspot:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_hotspot

Increasing Magma Inflation under Yellowstone:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071108141612.htm

http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/09/researchers-ponder-whats-next-in-volcanic-yellowstone/

Siberian Traps and P-T Extinction Event:

http://palaeo.gly.bris.ac.uk/palaeofiles/permian/siberiantraps.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Traps

http://www.rochester.edu/pr/releases/ear/basu2.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Extent_of_Siberian_traps_german.png

http://www.mantleplumes.org/Siberia.html

Deccan Traps:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deccan_Traps

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kille_Rajgad_from_Pabe_Ghat.jpg

Emeishan Traps:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emeishan_Traps

Hotspot Geology:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotspot_%28geology%29

The Great Dying, P-T extinction event:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian%E2%80%93Triassic_extinction_event

Mantle Plumes Organization:

http://www.mantleplumes.org/index.html

Earth’s Core Hotter than previously thought:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/154357-earths-core-is-much-hotter-than-previously-thought-hotter-than-the-surface-of-the-sun

Rescue Party – Arthur C. Clarke (fiction):

http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0743498747/0743498747___1.htm

About the Author

Friday, April 19, 2013

Evolution, Then?

Kenny A. Chaffin

Life on Earth fills the seas, the land and the air; driven by evolution, it has pushed into each and every environmental nook and cranny using mutation and natural selection. One might wonder as you read this if there are not bacteria, viruses or spoors in the Earth’s upper atmosphere that are mutating and evolving to move into and step across space to other planets, other habitable environments -- assuming of course they have not already done so. This may sound implausible, even impossible, but so was the possibility of creatures stepping from salt seas onto dry land, breathing directly from the nebulous atmosphere and going on to plant their footsteps on the Moon.

While the theory of evolution makes no claim as to the origin of life, it clearly delineates the means by which life has diversified and filled our planet. There are a number of origin of life theories but none that is definitive. Life may have drifted in from space after evolving elsewhere, it could have arrived via comet or asteroid or may have actually originated right here on Earth from natural chemical and physical processes. We really don’t know at this point. Should we discover other life, alien life on Mars or elsewhere in the solar system it may give us a clue. If that alien life is our cousin, in other words if it shares our biological and/or genetic processes there is a very good chance life on Earth came from elsewhere – still no guarantee though because Earth life might still have originated here and spread to other places in the solar system. And it’s going to be a very very very long time before (if ever) we can reach out to other star systems and determine if life exists there. In fact we ourselves may have evolved ‘beyond human’ by the time we answer that question.

It seems that the rise of intelligence is an inevitable outcome of evolution so it would not surprise me nor others if we were to someday discover intelligent life in the cosmos – most likely via radio signals – but certainly not necessarily. The universe is a very big place! We seem to be discovering more potentially habitable planets in our galaxy almost daily though so it’s very possible we will be able to determine if those planets harbor life in some reasonable time-frame (e.g. thousands of years). But let’s step back and consider again the mechanism of evolution by natural selection – adaptation and survival in new or changing environments. The random nature of mutations and modifications that become survival mechanisms in certain environments predispose any such system that evolves to create all manner of adaptations. These adaptations provide a basis for individual organisms to survive against competition or in the new or changing environmental conditions. Many of the mutations will fail of course and the individuals or species will die. If we look way back at simple early life forms, some will by mutation evolve pseudopods to reach out and surround food rather than simply waiting for it to drift in or to drift to the food. These pseudopods will over millions of years become fins and flippers used to move though water to escape predation or to capture prey. At some point in our own evolution the ability to breathe air directly became a survival trait and allowed its possessor to slip across dry land to another pond or body of water when its own pond becomes unlivable. This temporary air breathing ability because it allowed the creatures to survive eventually became permanent allowing us to slip the surly bonds of the sea forever.

Even now there may be high-altitude bacteria, viruses or spores poised to in some manner temporarily survive in order to take that step across the barren and deadly environment of space to reach another world, another pond where life can continue. That certainly could be one branch of the evolution of life on Earth but remember evolution is constantly, irrepressibly and simultaneously pursuing all possibilities, even in humans. It may seem that mankind has changed little since the rise of intelligence, but that is not exactly true. We have used our clever minds to provide technological solutions to the environmental changes and challenges around us. We learned to first exploit natural shelters like caves and trees and geological features of the environment to provide a survival mechanism which our biology did not afford us. We went on to find ways of building our own shelters – first clothing such as animal skins and woven plants to shelter us from cold and then to structures – yurts, tee-pees etcetera that could be transported while pursuing the game animals on which we depended for survival. Of course we’ve gone on to build massive skyscrapers and cities. In many ways we have ‘evolved’ to a point where many members of our species would never be able to survive a rough night in the wild, no matter how tame that wild environment might be. (total aside: this is probably a large part of the fascination with survival reality shows).

Let’s push that line of thought a bit further. We have been able to create technology which allowed us to physically step on the moon. This is an incredibly adaptive mutation. Mutation you might ask? Yes, but you have to consider this in a slightly different way than you may normally think of biological evolution. Just as biological mutations such as number and length of fingers, ear shape and hair color are an extension of our biology our technological creations (mutations) are extensions of ourselves as well; ourselves being both our biological and our intellectual abilities. The technological capabilities we create are survival mechanisms just as much so as biologically developed pseudopods, bipedalism or breathing air. The difference is that these adaptations are not physically part of our biological bodies. Yet we are more and more tied and dependent upon the technology we create. You may think of this as good or bad, but really it is neither any more than random biological mutations such as red hair, long fingers or breathing air. Our technology is increasingly an extension of ourselves and we are becoming one with it. We are Borg and increasingly so. Expect it to continue as we become ever more dependent on cars, transportation, cities, food production, technological services, computers, iThings, and Google.

Now then, what does that mean you might ask; what’s the point? That brings us to the “Then?” part of this essays title. Evolution, Then? We have nothing to compare and contrast with at this juncture in our experience as we have not even discovered other life forms or examples of evolution, but assuming this is the natural progression, to move via evolution from inert chemicals to simple living organisms capable of evolving through natural selection to fill an entire planetary ecosystem and then to begin to push even beyond that environment by randomly selecting survival mechanisms within its species such as intelligence and then to assimilate the fruits of that intelligence (i.e. technology) as part of its own plethora of life, what then?

What is next? Maybe we move beyond the physical, perhaps we can transfer our intelligence, our minds into our machines. Is that the next step? Does that fit with the process of evolution? Perhaps, but who’s to say? Evolution necessarily explores any and all options in an effort to reach out, to expand, and to provide a means of survival for life. Even if we could ‘become’ pure information, even that needs some sort of container to sustain it, to provide it energy with which to operate such as our brains or perhaps our future computers. That is not to say there may not be some other means of physically representing life in a more pure informational form such as energy patterns or some such thing, but that step may move completely beyond what we think of as evolution.

How then would it mutate and adapt? Evolution currently requires death in order to do its work. Would death be part of a being that existed as informational patterns of energy? Certainly the simple solution is to provide for the death of individual organisms but allow them to propagate their environmental lessons in survival to their progeny. Perhaps this could be done simply though changes to the information, but again who’s to say? Evolution will likely pursue all these avenues including those spores in the upper atmosphere whom we may meet up with again within a few billion years and when we do I think the biggest question might be will we recognize one another?