Neil DeGrasse Tyson - On Intelligent Design

Neil DeGrasse Tyson can explain just about everything in easy-to-grasp terms. He's a natural communicator, as well as a brilliant scientist, and unlike plenty of other scientists, his astounding intelligence doesn't come off as smarmy or arrogant, which is a plus, in my book.

Here, Tyson discusses how the Universe is not here for our benefit. Indeed, it's about as hostile to humans as any place could be, give or take. I'm not sure if he goes into talking about the Earth - he talks plenty about the Universe as a whole - but the Earth's lack of habitable space is worth mentioning here.

People always talk about what an amazing fit humans and the Earth are, but they don't think of how little of the planet we are able to inhabit. It's a very small percentage, when discussed on the whole. It's not that being here at all isn't amazing. It is. It truly is, but that's just the point.

Plus, we live on an environmental knife-edge, where it is very likely for the balance to teeter in one direction or the other and cause the extinction of the entire human race, so our collective happiness should rest on the fact that we are here at all and not on just how much we mean to the rest of the Universe. Think about it like this: if the Earth was struck by a meteor the size of, say, Mt. Kilimanjaro, then we'd all be gone and the rest of the Universe would just keep plugging along.

Mini-Galaxies Orbiting Milky Way

One of the misconceptions about astronomers is that they're merely stargazers, peering into telescopes at night, scanning the skies for new information. That's not entirely true. The telescopes that have been built for scientific purposes generally scan very specific places in space. That's perhaps why we occasionally find objects "near" us, if you count the outer edges of our galaxy anywhere near us.

That includes a potential hidden mini-galaxy orbiting our own. It may take more research to define it as such, but early indications tell us that it may indeed be a galaxy orbiting the Milky Way.

The satellite's immense invisibility could be because of it's location in the plane of the galaxy: instead of conveniently swinging far "above" or "below" the galactic discs as the other satellites are considerate enough to do, the missing mass is predicted to be on the other side of the Milky Way. Meaning we have the entirety of almost every local star in the sky between us and it, and if it's made up of old or burned-out stars it won't emit enough light for detection until it orbits round to our side again. Which'll be a job for our great-great-great-greatest-to-the-nth-degree descendants to detect.

Hidden Galaxy Discovered Orbiting the Milky Way

'Dark Flow'; Science Stuff, Not a Horror Movie

The Daily Galaxy is reporting that scientists have witnessed something as-yet unexplainable called 'Dark Flow'. Apparently, at the outer reaches of the galaxy, where matter is supposed to be heading out in all directions simultaneously, millions of stars are heading toward a single point, a cosmological "hot spot" (Luke McKinney).

It sounds pretty compellingly scary. In fact, so far it has baffled and flummoxed the scientists who discovered it:

The unexplained motion has hundreds of millions of stars dashing towards a certain part of the sky at over eight hundred kilometers per second. Not much speed in cosmic terms, but the preferred direction certainly is: most cosmological models have things moving in all directions equally at the extreme edges of the universe. Something that could make things aim for a specific spot on such a massive scale hasn't been imagined before. The scientists are keeping to the proven astrophysical strategy of calling anything they don't understand "dark", terming the odd motion a "dark flow".

Though we've sort of adopted a (sort of) unifying theory that is an amalgamation of string and supergravity theories, I wonder how this discovery complicates things. The article doesn't go into much depth as to what the Dark Flow might be (just about everything that is not explained is called Dark this or that, these days), nor does the article explain what I've mentioned, which is how it might complicate (and negate some of) the earlier theory.

Perhaps, and I have no idea what I'm talking about, it could be a P-Brane hovering so close to our universe that it is pulling matter toward it. Hmm. I'm no scientist, but it is an interesting concept. I'll try to keep an eye on this to see if there is anything new that comes out of it. Anyone have any thoughts?