In 10 Years, a Probe Will Search for Life in Jupiter’s Moons

No wonder why people are not interested in space anymore.

A few days ago, I read the headline that titles this post. JUICE (Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer) is Europe’s attempt to prospect the biggest galilean moons for signs of life and landing sites for future missions (maybe in the year 2150).

JUICE is expected to reach Jupiter in 2030 and spend at least three years studying the gas giant’s major moons. The mission’s cost will be around $1.1 billion, barring any unforeseen (but common) setbacks.

JUICE is arguably one of the most promising and exciting missions of the past few decades, but nobody -within the general public- gives a damn thing about it.

Unfortunately, JUICE is not alone. Joining it are dozens of similar missions.

I first heard of New Horizons (a Mission to Pluto) in 2002. The probe launched in 2006 and is still cruising. NH will make it to Pluto’s system in 2015. In these ADHD ridden times, how would you expect me to keep my attention and interest for more than a decade?

In 1962, JFK compelled NASA to go to the Moon and back by the end of the decade. The space race peaked, and space was the center of attention in the media. It’s no coincidence that the US entered a Golden Age.

Today, we live in a real-time world. Things happen now, tomorrow, next moth or maybe in a year… but if it hasn’t happened by then, forget it; there are too many things to pay attention to and tangible ROI is always around the corner.

Why would I care about something that is going to be launched in 10 years and make it to its destination in 16. That’s in another life!

Two pitfalls

One is kind of unavoidable: we simply don’t have the technology to make it faster. Maybe tomorrow. But not today.

The second one is the most worry-some. Let me illustrate:

  • NASA’s FY 2012 budget:  $18.7 billion.
  • US FY2010 Defense budget: $1.030–$1.415 trillion

Can you spot the difference?

The potential for game changing advancements in technology, medicine, physics and cultural paradigm shifts ( link to video of Neil deGrasseTyson -who proposes doubling -yes, just doubling, NASA’s budget- linking culture and space) get delayed by decades at a time.

Imagine what  could be accomplished if governments inverted those figures above.

This is Why I Don’t Need a God to Feel Whole

I’ve been often asked, as an atheist, how I cope with the absence of that oceanic feeling that believers possess -to fill the void within-.

People are sometimes intrigued about how I see a world without the notion of a superior being(s). A world devoid of faith and the embracing warmth that it provides.

I’ve been often told how lonely I must be, knowing that there’s no one watching over me and that there’s nothing waiting for me after I die.

Well, I see no better and simpler way to answer these questions and illustrate the way I see existence than showing you the following piece of art. But before, a few introductions are due.

Have you heard about Neil deGrasse-Tyson? If you haven’t, Tyson is the astrophysicist  who is quickly becoming the Carl Sagan of this generation. If you are not familiar with him, I strongly urge you to check out the speech he gave when asked about the most astounding fact he knew and this one discussing the link between space and culture.

Gavin Aung Than, is the artist behind Zen Pencils. He takes famous quotations and creates comics around them. In this case, he took Neil Tyson’s speech and turned it into this amazing piece of visual art (click to enlarge):

En la Argentina del año 2397 no habrá más días laborables

Todavía falta un poco pero está bueno saber que hay good news en el horizonte.

Estaba contando la cantidad de feriados y días no laborables en el 2012 (121) y pensé: si nos llevó 195 años acumular 121 feriados en el calendario, a éste paso, cuánto vamos a tardar para que feriado sea todos los días del año? Respuesta: 385 años más.

Lo que me lleva a pensar que éste es el país más eventful del planeta o somos el país más prolífico en sucesos históricos. Si en 195 años de historia hay 121 fechas para recordar, eso nos da un promedio de 0.62 sucesos históricos por día. Lo cual implica que casi día por medio, pasa algo digno de recordar para la posteridad.

La otra opción es que somos vagos y nos encantan los fines de semana largo; y si lo del Día Osvaldo no pegó, no calienta. En éste país venimos haciendo un trabajo de hormiga desde los años de la colonia para lograr que en un par de años, no queden días para trabajar.

SOPA-PIPA-SINDE-SIBIOS

(versión en español debajo)

Familiar with these acronyms? It’s legislation, about to get passed around the world to censor the internet.

This is gonna sound like one of those despicable chains but, this is not a hoax. It’s real like you and I and it will affect the internet as you know it. To put it in perspective, if the internet was a country and all of us its population, then the approval of this legislation would be like going from a democracy to a -futuristic- dystopian dictatorship where control is delegated to governments and corporations. In this case, the censorship will affect freedom of speech, what gets published and what’s considered inconvenient so it gets shot down. Best part, no trial needed.

This is something real and it’s happening at a Congress, Senate or House of Representatives near you.

To stay up to date, you can head over to Techmeme for USA and Europe or ALT1040 for Iberoamerica.

Video explaining SOPA/PIPA in a nutshell below the Spanish version:

 

Les suenan familiares esas siglas? Es legislación que se está por pasar alrededor del mundo: SOPA/PIPA en EEUU, SINDE en España o SIBIOS en Argentina.

Esto va a sonar como una de esas cadenas de emails que tantos odiamos pero esto no es joda. Is real y está por afectar internet tal y como la conocemos. Para ponerlo en perspectiva, si internet fuera un país y nosotros los habitantes, el aprobar ésta legislación significaría como pasar de un gobierno democrático  a una dictadura distópica donde el control es delegado exclusivamente al gobierno y grandes corporaciones.

Si estas leyes son aprobadas, significaría un golpe purísimo a la libertad de expresión, mayor vigilancia y pérdida de confidencialidad.

Querés subir a YouTube el video del cumple de tu hijo de 5 cuando bailaba con Barneuy? Pensalo dos veces porque vos y tu familia pueden ir a juicio por usar música de fondo con copyright.

Esto está pasando hoy. Si quieren mantenerse informados, ALT1040 cubre frecuentemente el tema y Techmeme en inglés.

Acá el video explicando como funcionan éstos proyectos de ley similares en todo el mundo:

Posts from the other blog that fit this one

Cheers!

Catch me if you can

I’ve been an information junkie for as far back as I can recall.  At age 6, I was quasi-savant in paleontology. The problem back then, was getting information -specially in a field such as paleontology-. I had to rely on the few books I was able to get my paws on and once I was done, my parents and I would take entire days to search at specialized/college book stores hoping to find something.

What if I had today’s internet back then? How much faster would I have learnt? And… what kind of a monster would I have become? (JK here). Remember my previous post? It took me 3 seconds to come up with a search query and get all the information I needed to know.

Times have changed faster than ever and we’ve been adapting pretty gracefully… well, actually, most of us have.

Where’s your internet, son?

Imagine the shock of your grandpas when they first saw a TV. Well, that’s the kind of shock that some of those in their 50s had when they met computers in the 80s and then survived an aftershock in the 90s when the internet was born. I bet our ancestors never thought that TV would be able to show them live video transmissions from the Moon, live Football or Dancing with the Stars.

Along the same lines, we did not see Youtube, Facebook or Wikipedia coming (the phenomenon they sparked, not the sites per se)… we could only infer some of them but the idea never had a clear shape; it was still in the science fiction realm.

It took me  a little bit to get the hang of the internet, but I was one of the first generations that grew up with computers so the internet was not an entirely radical concept. My parents didn’t have it so easy when I introduced them in 2007. And it gets worse as you move up on the Age axis.

Wanna try giving your PC to grandma and see how she fairs? Mine wanted to throw bleach at my x286 back in ’93 when I told her it had the virus Michaelangelo and, while working on tech support in ’04, an elderly customer asked me why waste money on coffee trays for the computer (obviously referring to the CD drive). Another client, in a highly confused state of mind, couldn’t figure how to fit a newspaper inside a computer to send it to her grandson in Japan.

I know kung fu

Kids born with the internet have the same relationship with it as we did with TVs and VCRs twenty five years ago. Give them an iPad, Android Tab, or Windows 98; they won’t need tutorials or user guides. Their malleable brains get wired to naturally interact with gadgets and applications… and I think… why would I want to remember anything if I can instantly google it. Why learn Geography if I can locate or “be” anywhere with Google Earth. History about that country? Wikipedia must have that. Wanna know the ultimate fate of the Universe, how it ALL ends? Wikipedia’s got your back too, buddy. Instant wisdom for the masses.

We are culturally and technologically steering our biological evolution into a path where Memory has no longer a predominant role on us. Even hard drives, technological analogies of our memory are giving  way to storage in the cloud. A place where you can’t see, touch or pinpoint on the map. But your data, your memory, is up there in the ether.

A visible symptom of this trend towards de-memorification is the exponential increase of attentional disorder diagnoses. Are all of these really psychological/psychiatric disorders or is it that, the way some kids learn at school, is not compatible with what they learn outside the classroom?

So, wouldn’t we need to start thinking about how we are going to educate our children in a world where we are not native speakers anymore?

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How Much is 1 Billion?

My grandfather taught me that 1 billion is a million millionth (1.000.000.000.000) and that calling a thousand million (1.000.000.000) a billion was wrong -take a second to digest those numbers-.

As I grew up I realized that people in foreign movies referred to billions as a thousand millions. I thought it would be odd if 1 billion people were so confused about something so basic. It was obviously a social convention, then.

Today, I wanted to learn where this “confusion” comes from.

Turns out, that there’s no confusion. There are two coexisting scales (called long and short) for different large-number naming systems used throughout the world for integer powers of ten.

From the 115 countries that use these scales, 67 use the short scale (1 billion=1.000.000.000) and 48 use the long scale (the one my grandpa taught me). Here’s Wikipedia’s entry.

It’s amazing how we’ve changed the way we are able to see the world today. We’ve made a big leap in information availability since the time of my grandpa. Our world has gotten so much bigger that concepts in our minds can now exist in this quantum state of rightwrongness. A certain truth here may mean something different elsewhere.

A concept learnt during childhood and crystalized for 75 years. For my grandfather, the lesson learned 75 years ago is still vivid in his memory. It’s as if information was so scarce, that you treasured every word of knowledge that was imparted to you.

Today we’ve become a sort of obese society where we snack information every few minutes during the time we are awake. We have trouble prioritizing what to keep or discard and we live in such over abundance that information is just a snack; as opposed to almost a century ago, when every bit of information was a feast to cherish and enjoy for the rest of your life.

Contrary to that, we’ve got the ability to type or dictate a question on our phones (I wonder why we still call them like this) or laptops and the accumulated knowledge (and stupidity) of mankind instantly pops before your eyes, updated to the second.

When compared to yesterday… is this better, are we worse? It may probably be both right and wrong, just like a billion.

 

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