Yanked The galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56 (known as the Bullet Cluster) lies 3.8 billion light-years away. It's one of hundreds that appear to be carried along by a mysterious cosmic flow. NASA/STScI/Magellan/U.Arizona/D.Clowe et al.
Here's something mind-blowing I just reported for Discovery News. It's from way, way, way beyond Earth. But it's so totally strange that I had to share it so you can comment on it. The original story with videos, etc., is posted here [ http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/09/25/universe-dark-flow.html ].
Posted by Larry O'Hanlon on September 25, 2008 at 11:54 AM
Astronomers have stumbled upon an unexplained two-million-mile-per-hour sideways shift in the universe toward a colossal, unseen, unknown gravity source beyond the horizon of the observable universe.
What's being called a dark flow appears to be pulling vast clusters of galaxies toward a 20-degree-wide patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela.
"It does fly in the face of everything we know," said astronomer Dale Kocevski of the University of California at Davis. He's one of the authors of a paper in the Sept. 24 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters which introduced the discovery. "I'm sure it's going to be controversial."
First the team of researchers led by NASA's Alexander Kashlinsky carefully located the X-ray clusters -- each containing thousands of galaxies.
Next, they looked at the same spots on a map of what's called the cosmic microwave background -- the attenuated glow from the first light that was free to travel through space just 380,000 years after the universe was born [ http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2006/05/23/bigbounce_spa.html ]. This glow was mapped in detail by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) [ http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/ ].
According to theory, when the ancient microwaves pass through galaxy clusters they should change temperature in predictable ways, depending on whether the galaxy is moving relative to the background glow. So this work started as an experiment to test that effect -- what's called the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SV) effect -- and to see if any movement could be detected.
"We were hoping to measure something there, but probably not much," said Kashlinsky. "To our great surprise what we found instead is that the velocity was quite higher than expected."
Not only were the galaxy clusters moving, but over a span of five billion light-years -- more than a third of the age of the universe -- they were all heading for the same place. It was a truly bizarre and unexpected result.
The measurements suggest far more than the distant clusters are moving, said Kashlinsky. Rather, the entire universe -- including our own galaxy -- is feeling the tug of the unseen mega-mass beyond the edge of the universe.
As for what could be exerting such a powerful, pervasive tug, it can't be anything within our universe, since there just isn't anything with remotely enough mass, said Kocevski. No way. That means it's something we can't see -- beyond the observable universe.
The sole possible explanation Kashlinsky offers is that there might be a large, very bulky neighboring part of the universe which is so far away we cannot see it. It could be, if inflationary theories are correct, a twin universe that inflated less evenly than our own did soon after the Big Bang.
The inflationary theory suggests that our universe went through a brief period of hyper expansion soon after the Big Bang. It explains how matter managed to spread out so evenly in space, rather than get stuck clumped in just one corner of space, as would happen in a more gradually expanding universe. Inflation moves everything apart faster than gravity [ http://www.howstuffworks.com/question232.htm ] could clump it.
It could be, then, that there was another, less effective inflation next door to our observable universe and that other blob from the Big Bang remained clumpier. If so it could be out there, loaded with matter, and it is exerting a powerful gravitational pull on every observable thing in our universe.
Maybe.
"We are kind of still puzzled by the result," said Kashlinsky. "We kept checking and checking (the observations and calculations) and nothing else can explain this."
With Dow Below 9,000 for First Time Since 2003, McCain Focuses on Ayers October 09, 2008 8:59 PM
On the stump and in an interview with ABC News' Charlie Gibson today, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., upped the ante in the attacks his campaign is making on the character of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., personally invoking Obama's relationship with education professor William Ayers, a former member of the violent, radical '70s group, the Weather Underground.
McCain's comments came on the seventh straight day of Wall Street losses, with the Dow plunging 679 points to trade below 9,000 points for the first time in five years.
But McCain sought to refocus attention from that to Obama's relationship with Ayers, who hosted a coffee get-together for Obama in 1995 and served on two boards with him, including one that the McCain campaign misleadingly called a "radical education foundation" in a Web video released today. The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was funded by Walter Annenberg, a former ambassador to the United Kingdom under President Nixon.
Species die. It has become a catastrophic fact of modern life. On our present course, by E.O. Wilson’s estimate, half of all plant and animal species could be extinct by 2100 — that is, within the lifetime of a child born today. Kenya stands to lose its lions within 20 years. India is finishing off its tigers. Deforestation everywhere means that thousands of species too small or obscure to be kept on life support in a zoo simply vanish each year.
So it’s startling to discover that the very idea of extinction was unthinkable, even heresy, only a few lifetimes ago. The terrible notion that a piece of God’s creation could be swept off the face of the Earth only became a reality on January 21, 1796, and it was a body blow to Western orthodoxy. It required “not only the rejection of some of the fondest beliefs of mankind,” paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson once wrote, “but also the development of fundamentally new ways of thinking.” The science of extinction was one of the great achievements of the 18th century, he thought, a necessary preamble to Darwinian evolution, and almost as disturbing.
The Great Auk, last seen in 1852. George Edwards, 1802. Courtesy of Richard Conniff
Specimens from the American colonies played a key part in this revolution. A tooth weighing almost five pounds, with a distinctive knobby biting surface, had turned up along the Hudson River in 1705, and quickly found its way to Lord Cornbury, the eccentric governor of New York. (Cornbury was either a pioneer in gubernatorial bad behavior or an early victim of dirty politics. He subsequently lost his job for alleged graft, amid rumors that he liked to dress up as his cousin Queen Anne.) Cornbury sent the tooth to London, where “natural philosophers” began a long debate over whether this “Incognitum,” or unknown creature, was a Biblical giant drowned in Noah’s flood or some kind of carnivorous monster. Decades later, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington puzzled over similar teeth when they turned up again in the Hudson and Ohio River valleys.
Whatever creature had once gnashed its food with such grinders was evidently now gone, perhaps thankfully. But this disappearance challenged widely held faith in the Great Chain of Being, the idea that the natural world was a perfect progression from the lowliest matter on up, species-by-species, jellyfish to worms, worms to insects, culminating in the Earth’s most glorious specimen, Homo sapiens. A corollary of the Great Chain held that God had created all forms that could be created. What might seem like gaps in the Chain were merely missing links that had yet to be discovered. Proposing that some forms had gone extinct, an American writer complained, was “an idea injurious to the Deity.”
Thomas Jefferson as president and scientist. Library of Congress
Jefferson also held out against extinction, though mainly because he liked the idea of big fierce animals as symbols of American greatness. “Such is the economy of Nature,” he wrote, “that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken.”
It was the French anatomist Georges Cuvier who proved otherwise. When he took the podium at the National Institute of Sciences and Arts in Paris in January 1796, he was just 26, a handsome, confident young man, with thick reddish hair and a strong chin. His new post at the National Museum of Natural History allowed him to compare a range of pachyderm specimens, including African and Asian elephants, the Siberian mammoth, and the Incognitum, which he called “the Ohio animal.” Cuvier made side by side comparisons of anatomical structures to sort specimens into separate species (incidentally inventing the science of comparative anatomy). Then he argued persuasively that animals the size of the mammoth and the Incognitum could hardly have escaped notice by “the nomadic peoples that ceaselessly move about the continent in all directions.” It’s not clear why this argument for extinction was so persuasive. Cuvier is still notorious in some circles for having later rashly declared an end to the era of “discovering new species of large quadrupeds” — only for a parade of such creatures to turn up over the rest of the 19th century. But even Jefferson seems eventually to have been persuaded, at least after Lewis and Clark returned from their expedition to the West with no evidence of a living Incognitum.
Cuvier gave the Incognitum its modern name, mastodon. (Those knobby cusps reminded him, oddly, of breasts, so he took mast from the Greek for “breast” or “nipple,” and odon from “tooth.”) He also went on, through brilliant analysis of newly discovered fossils, to create a catastrophic vision of past worlds in which “living organisms without number” had vanished forever, some “destroyed by deluges,” others “left dry when the seabed was suddenly raised … and all they leave in the world is some debris that is hardly recognizable to the naturalist.”
Georges Cuvier Library of Congress
This idea of mass extinctions thrilled and terrified the 19th-century imagination. Cuvier was “the great poet of our era,” according to the novelist Honoré de Balzac. In cultivating his own legend, Cuvier had popularized the magical idea that by carefully studying a fragment of bone he could resurrect the appearance of an entire extinct animal. Balzac now set out to do the same thing in fiction, building characters on the smallest details of gesture and dress. It was arguably the birth of literary realism. But Cuvier’s larger influence was in his apocalyptic vision of vanished worlds, which echoed down ominously through much of the 19th century. In his 1850 poem “In Memoriam,” for instance, Tennyson yearned for the comforting assurance of the older world view:
That nothing walks with aimless feet; That not one life shall be destroy’d, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete …
Instead, every cliff and quarry now reminded him that Nature does not work like that: “She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:/ I care for nothing, all shall go.” Extinction wasn’t just a threat to the natural world but to us. Tennyson wondered if mankind, Nature’s “last work, who seem’d so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes” would also end up being “blown about the desert dust,/ Or seal’d within the iron hills?”
It was a good question then, and an even better one now, when we are living through precisely the sort of mass extinction Cuvier only imagined.
Richard Conniff’s work has appeared in Smithsonian, National Geographic, Time, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and on National Public Radio. He is the author of several books, most recently, “The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth.” He blogs at strangebehaviors.com [ http://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/ ]. Twitter: @RichardConniff.
You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?
“The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World [ http://www.amazon.com/Great-Disruption-Climate-Crisis-Shopping/dp/1608192237 ].” “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.”
Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network [ http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/ ], an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding.
This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out of water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity.
“If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,” writes Gilding. “If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.”
It is also current affairs. “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” China’s environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, said recently. “The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation’s economic and social development.” What China’s minister is telling us, says Gilding, is that “the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.”
We will not change systems, though, without a crisis. But don’t worry, we’re getting there.
We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet.
But Gilding is actually an eco-optimist. As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, “our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.”
We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.”
Sounds utopian? Gilding insists he is a realist.
“We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”
A new study from researchers at Jay W. Forrester's institute at MIT says that the world could suffer from "global economic collapse" and "precipitous population decline" if people continue to consume the world's resources at the current pace.
Smithsonian Magazine writes that Australian physicist Graham Turner says "the world is on track for disaster" and that current evidence coincides with a famous, and in some quarters, infamous, academic report from 1972 entitled, "The Limits to Growth."
Now the new study here isn't the Limits to Growth study, but rather a re-examination of it that finds that we have been tracking what they called the "business-as-usual" scenario. The original work from 1972 presented a number of possibilities, not all of which ended in societal decline. However, the business-as-usual scenario, which projected what would happen if all policies remained the same, did end in decline, and as it turns out, that's the trajectory we're on. (I should note that the authors of the Limits to Growth were painfully careful not to predict or forecast anything, but rather just to model scenarios. However, as it has turned out that we've been following their business-as-usual scenario for 40 years, others have treated that model as an approximate forecast of where we're headed.)
Since the 1970s, humanity has been in ecological overshoot with annual demand on resources exceeding what Earth can regenerate each year.
How have we adapted over the past couple of decades to this scientific consensus? It has ignored the science, or taken the science piecemeal and applied it to political causes when convenient and ignored it when it was inconvenient. Our approach has tended to want to address environmental issues (say, climate change) but at the same time insist that we should still pursue growth (maybe with some euphemisms like "green growth" or "smart growth"). That's better, maybe, than the modern conservative approach of ignoring the science entirely. But not much better. In fact one of the few things you'll find agreement upon between progressives and conservatives is that growth is what we want [ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/07/09/992650/-We-have-an-Energy-ceiling,-not-a-Debt-ceiling ].
We have yet to successfully reframe the notion of progress within the limits of the Earth---the ecological limits that cannot be circumvented. Or maybe ditch the notion of progress and find something that fits better.
This last part often gets ignored: "ecological limits that cannot be circumvented." That doesn't mean "it would be nice to pay attention to the environment." Unlike many environmental causes of the past few decades (i.e. saving specific species, avoiding specific types of pollution, etc.), ecological limits have to do with the entire ecosystem we live in and depend upon. That includes our economy, which is a subset of the global ecosystem and derives 3/4 of its value from natural processes over which we have no control or input [ http://www.uvm.edu/giee/publications/Nature_Paper.pdf ] (a fact that almost nobody knows).
We're in overshoot. And any system can stay in overshoot for some amount of time---you can overspend for a little while by drawing down savings in your bank account, but it's easy to forecast that the bank account will go empty at some point and that spending can't continue. And ecologists have been forecasting that our global bank account---the resources we could extract and the wastes we could produce---would start to run dry sometime around now. And we're starting to see it all around us.
Dennis Meadows, 40 years later
Dennis Meadows, one of the lead authors of the MIT study, recently gave a 40th anniversary talk of the Limits to Growth at the Smithsonian Institution [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2oyU0RusiA (embedded)]:
I highly recommend watching this talk, even though it's a bit dry. Here we have an eminent ecologist and systems researcher reflecting on what he's seen over the last 40 years, and the responses people have had to his studies.
What's next?
So should we just throw up our hands? No. I think we need to ground ourselves in the "present conditions." In other words, what are these limits we're facing? I've been a bit vague about them, but they're actually quite concrete. As an example (a limited one), here's a figure from the Footprint studies:
Essentially we need to look at the resources we extract and the damage we do / wastes we produce. On the matter of resources, I've written a number of diaries discussing how we've basically maxed out on oil production, and soon on other fossil fuels as well. (I figure it's best to not repeat that information here.)
Anything within the green zone is "within limits". Note that two of the pieces haven't been quantified yet.
This brings us back to the limits to growth. That landmark study discussed how growth, which has been intimately tied into our notion of progress, must end. And we're seeing now that it is ending---we're at the point (plus or minus a few years) where growth as we have known it for centuries will end.
We need a new way forward, one that doesn't depend upon now defunct ideas like progress or growth or advancement or other similar ideas. Instead, as Bill McKibben put it in his excellent book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet, we need a new vocabulary, one with words like durable that convey what we really need: to weather the storm of the reversal of growth as our bills from our overshoot come due.
This is a conversation that we need to start having. The growth durability of our nation depends upon it.
We’ve Already Used Up Earth’s Resources For 2016 - And It’s Only August
Global warming, deforestation, soil erosion and depletion of water resources are just some of the impacts of accumulating “ecological debt.” Getty Images
Our ecological debt gets worse every year, Earth Overshoot Day data shows.
By Dominique Mosbergen 08/08/2016 02:01 an ET
We’ve failed again.
It’s less than eight months into 2016 and the ominous day is already nearly upon us: Earth Overshoot Day [ http://www.overshootday.org/ ], previously known as Ecological Debt Day, is a reminder of the enormous toll we take on the Earth.
The day marks the juncture when humanity’s demand for ecological resources exceeds what the planet can replenish annually. In 2016, it falls on Monday, which means people have already consumed an entire year’s worth of the world’s resources - and we still have four months to go until the year’s end.
Troublingly, this year’s Overshoot Day is happening earlier than ever before.
It’s “come around five days earlier than last year, a sign that humanity’s consumption of renewable natural resources continues to rise,” Global Footprint Network spokesman Sebastian Winkler told The Huffington Post.
Humans have gone into “ecological debt” earlier and earlier in the year since the 1970s, according to data from the California-based think tank, which hosts Earth Overshoot Day every year.
GFN calculates Overshoot Day by comparing the planet’s biocapacity (the amount of ecological resources the Earth is able to generate in a year) with humanity’s demand for these resources, which include cropland, livestock, fish stock, the use of forests for timber, space for urban infrastructure and carbon emissions.
The world’s population currently consumes the equivalent of about 1.6 Earths every year, according to GFN. If population and consumption trends continue, “by the 2030s, we will need the equivalent of two Earths [ http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/world_footprint/ ] to support us,” the group says. “And of course, we only have one.”
This, however, is not a foregone conclusion.
Concerted efforts by individuals, institutions and nations worldwide to reduce humanity’s ecological footprint could profoundly alter this dire picture. If the global community reduced carbon emissions by 30 percent before 2030, for instance, Overshoot Day could be pushed back an entire month.
“Globally, the longer we go on pretending that natural resources are unlimited, the faster we are jeopardizing the very capacity of our planet to provide us with the renewable resources that we need to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves,” Winkler said. “Balancing how much renewable natural resources we use with how much is generated is paramount if mankind is to thrive on our beautiful planet. Each of us has the opportunity to participate: the choices we make every day as consumers and as citizens actively contribute to the world that we will leave future generations.”
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