Alpha Centauri. What Does the Closest Stellar System Conceal?

Largest human family tree ever created

Provided by https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/24/world/unified-human-genome-scli-intl-scn-gbr/index.html

DNA REVEALS BIGGEST-EVER HUMAN FAMILY TREE

  
DNA reveals biggest-ever human family tree, dating back 100,000 years
An excerpt taken from the CNN article by Jack Guy, dated February 24, 2022

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/24/world/unified-human-genome-scli-intl-scn-gbr/index.html

“Researchers have used genetics to create the largest human family tree ever made, allowing individuals to find out who their distant ancestors were and where they lived, as well as exactly how they are related to everyone alive today… anyone with access to their own genetic information can work out when their ancestors moved to a particular place, and why they have certain genes. "Simply put, what we did was we created the largest human family tree ever," Wohns said. Anthony Wilder Wohns, is a lead author and postdoctoral researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "We have a single genealogy that traces the ancestry of all of humanity, and shows how we're all related to each other today… It's basically understanding the entire story of human history that's written in our genes."”

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CNsvQk4GoWMYCN7NzaVwdYuZVm73K5GB/view?usp=sharing

Largest human family tree ever created

EVOLUTION OF EXPLORATION

EVOLUTION OF EXPLORATION -The first human explorers walked out of Africa, spreading to neighboring continents. Populations eventually reached Asia, and crossed a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska. We know this because there is a single woman, a common ancestor of all living humans. Everyone alive today carries a little piece of her in our mitochondria. 

In Asia, humans living on the steppes tamed wild horses, eventually domesticating them sufficiently to ride on horseback. This took a considerable amount of nurturing, across multiple generations. Meanwhile, American migrations spread on foot, to Peru and beyond. Where the Inca used their vast road system for runners and llama caravans. To the north, Puebloan networks stretched from Teotihuacan to the Pacific. While the Mississippians lived in vast population centered around the river. Vikings from Europe first arrived on North America, by crossing the Atlantic in a rowboat. Much can be said about the devastation to native populations unleashed by later European migrations, a topic that will be deferred to a later article. 

Regardless of the hemisphere humans inhabited, animal husbandry was integral to developing farms, and later, residential settlements. New frontiers meant new modes travel. Use of the horse drawn wagon made traveling overland, for greater distances, possible for the first time, more so than was feasible, compared to walking alone. Travel by water took many forms: from the first canoe, to rowboats, and sailboats. Greater scientific advancements brought an ability to travel further, often using astronomical charts to navigate the open oceans. 

Engineers of the Industrial Revolution followed this feat with the steam powered engine - running ocean liners and locomotives all over the globe. The first automobile wasn’t far off, when most working class folks could still afford to buy a car. The time span between the first airplane flight and landing on the moon comes in at a mere 65 years. My "Evolution of Flight" article describes the period from the first hot air balloon to present. 

The space race begins when the Soviets send out Sputnik 1, the first space probe. A slew of increasingly advanced probes since, have traveled as far as 486958 Arrokoth, a Kuiper belt object. It is the most distant object ever explored in our solar system at the time of this writing. The Hubble Space Telescope has been imaging galaxies as distant as 13 billion years away since 1990. The Space Shuttle program ran it’s course, and the International Space Station is aging. It will be re-orbited at some point in the future, to avoid an uncontrolled crash and burn. The Mars Ingenuity Helicopter made the first controlled flight on another world last year, in 2021. 

Today, the James Webb Space Telescope orbits at Lagrange point 2, about 1 million miles away, on the dark side of the moon. It's first published image, a mosaic created over 25 hours, was taken in the early stages of aligning the telescope's 18 mirrors. There is a tangible possibility Webb can detect the signature of life on distant planets far afield in the Milky Way. With discoveries of water ice on both Mars and the Moon, there will certainly be more surface missions, and most likely, new settlements. A new age of exploration in human history has begin, all over again. 

https://www.chadschimke.com/2022/02/evolution-of-exploration.html
https://www.chadschimke.com/2017/02/evolution-of-sound.html
https://www.chadschimke.com/2018/09/the-evolution-of-text.html
https://www.chadschimke.com/2017/09/evolution-of-images.html
https://www.chadschimke.com/2017/08/the-evolution-of-flight.html
https://www.chadschimke.com/2017/04/evolution-of-computing.html

JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE

 

JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE - The James Webb Space Telescope pictured, as it propels away from Earth’s upper atmosphere - headed into deep space. The image was captured on 12-24-21 by cameras on board the discarded upper stage. En route, a terrifying number of complicated deployment procedures will be performed, by the most advanced telescope every built, traveling to a preprogrammed Lagrange point. All this will be done autonomously by onboard AI, since the telescope will be too far away from Earth for instantaneous communication. Hopefully amazing photos taken of our planetary neighbors will soon be forthcoming. 

SPACE TELESCOPE

 

EVOLUTION OF TEXT

EVOLUTION OF TEXT – Prior to printing, scribes copied books by hand, in laborious fashion. Drawings became pictographs, Egyptians used reed brushes to write on papyrus pages quickly and cleanly. Phoenicians developed a phonetically-based alphabet before the Romans. The Celts wrote runes on tiles with thick tight set angled ascenders and descenders, a precursor of upper/ lowercase. Christianity pushed Bibles, often by force, but led to the development of the illustrated manuscript.  A jumble of bones that became Old English ended up on the shores of the island. Oddly enough, it became a world language. Very few early written fragments survived, mostly as short inscriptions. A Chinese inventor makes movable type of earthenware around 1100 but there are no surviving examples. Gutenberg created his movable type press, around 1400, imitating a writing style used by scribes of his day. The penmanship craze, tied to social status, pushes the use of easily carved copperplates featuring script-like letters influenced by elegant handwriting. Single sheets known as incurables, a pamphlet recognized as the origin of the publication business, were created in 1501 using wood block stamps. Editor Edward Cave coined the term ‘magazine’ as a word for periodicals in 1731, with Gentleman's Magazine. Penguin paperbacks are a new idea, cheaper than hardbacks, ushering in the dawn of the modern paperback in the 30s. American children still learn both cursive and printed handwriting styles in the 70s. As early as the 80s, online newspapers like The Columbus Dispatch were being read on CompuServe computers. Grocery store aisles across the country stock cheap plentiful tabloids and women’s print magazines, peaking in the 80s and 90s. Print books/ newspapers/ magazines first became available on stationary desk top computers, and later downloaded to increasingly portable devices. Every version of e-books are formatted exactly like paperback novels. Desktop to laptop to e-reader to kindle to smartphone to audiobook. Listening to audiobooks on long commutes becomes a new user experience for an old concept.  In the future, people will wear smart glasses and smart watches to take audio/ books everywhere. Might it become too much of a good thing? We will see what happens next, in the evolution of text.

https://www.chadschimke.com/2022/02/evolution-of-exploration.html
https://www.chadschimke.com/2017/02/evolution-of-sound.html
https://www.chadschimke.com/2018/09/the-evolution-of-text.html
https://www.chadschimke.com/2017/09/evolution-of-images.html
https://www.chadschimke.com/2017/08/the-evolution-of-flight.html
https://www.chadschimke.com/2017/04/evolution-of-computing.html

DIFFUSE GALAXIES

DIFFUSE GALAXIES - Astronomers discovered another new galaxy that contains almost zero dark matter. But diffuse galaxies aren’t new, since Dragonfly 44 was in the news a few years ago. Here’s the difference.

DRAGONFLY 44 - Astronomers reported In August 2016 its composition was made almost entirely of dark matter. A dark ultra-diffuse galaxy with similar mass to our own, but strangely, showed no evidence of rotation. With 1% the light we’re used to, its 99% darker than the Milky Way.

NGC 1052-DF2 - This clear ultra diffuse galaxy contains only 1/200 the number of stars and also has roughly the size as our own galaxy. Here’s where things get weird. It doesn’t look like a spiral or elliptical  galaxy but appears malformed. It contains at least 400 times less dark matter than normal and possibly none at all. This large fuzzy diffuse galaxy is so clear, distant galaxies can be seen behind it.

What’s so unusual about this? - Typically galaxies coalesce from dark matter forming dark matter halos, gas blobs turning into stars beginning to build, organized in typical galaxies such as the Milky Way with orderly rotation and shape.

The discovery demonstrates dark matter is separable from galaxies since NGC 1052-DF2 has none. Dark matter is conventionally believed to be integral structurally to all galaxies. NGC 1052-DF2 challenges notions of how galaxies form. Interesting stuff, indeed.

TRAPPIST-1e UPDATE

TRAPPIST-1e UPDATE - Precise data from NASA's Spitzer and Kepler space telescopes reveals more interesting possible features of Trappist-1’s remarkably stable planetary system. Data has been gleaned from observing minute variations of the planetary interactions in their orbits. The TRAPPIST-1e planet is rumored to be the most Earth-like, the system’s rockiest planet with an iron core nearly identical to our own, and the potential to host some liquid water with maybe an atmosphere. TRAPPIST-1 has the most rocky planets orbiting the sun, the greatest number of potentially habitable worlds and more is known about this system besides our own precious Planet Earth. 

EUROPA CLIPPER

Europa Clipper - Europa is an icy moon that orbits Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. The Galileo space probe confirmed the moon has a thin atmosphere, is covered by thick ice and flexes tidally. The surface is covered with reddish-brown hatch marks, possibly left behind by irradiated salt water deposits. The Hubble telescope found water vapor shooting sixty miles in height, prompting the theory of a subsurface ocean on this strange world. The USA has planned a new mission of discovery, the Europa Clipper, named for high seas ship voyages in the not so distant past. For the first time, a space probe might discover life outside Earth. Still in the planning stages, the radiation-tolerant spacecraft will use Jupiter’s gravity to slingshot by the moon, 45 revolutions within 16 miles of the surface. Passing through the water above the surface will allow analysis of the chemical makeup but avoids the need to drill through ice layers. NASA is sending instruments aboard including cameras, spectrometers, radar, magnetometer, thermometer and instruments to detect atmospheric water and particles. Every great story starts the same way. What if? Could unimaginable creatures inhabit this familiar yet so alien underwater world? Truly, this is a new age of exploration.