Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

Back in April a nine meters basking shark was caught in a fishing net four kilometres off Hitachi, Ibaraki. Weighing in at 4,6 tonnes, it’s the largest basking shark specimen ever found in Japan.

To the cryptozoology enthusiasts, like me, one image of the news item immediately reminded the famous carcass of a supposed plesiosaur caught in 1977 by the Zuiyo Maru:

The similarity is no coincidence, as it’s suggested the carcass was actually a pseudoplesiosaur, which is, it was indeed a basking shark carcass. Glen Kuban has a nice reference about it on Sea-monster or Shark? An Analysis of a Supposed Plesiosaur Carcass Netted in 1977. 

Via The Anomalist, a nice essay by Mike Baron: Peak Oil and the Fermi Paradox.

The hydrocarbon energy available to a planetary civilization is analogous to the yolk of an egg: just as the yolk offers a newly emerged creature needed energy to break out of the egg and get established in the wider world, so too does a planet’s hydrocarbon energy deposits provide an emergent technological civilization the boost it needs to leave its birthworld and establish itself in its solar system. It offers a very brief window of opportunity to allow a species to develop the technologies and techniques to bootstrap itself off of its planet of origin. Once out into space, a civilization can take advantage of the thousandfold greater material and energy resources found across the solar system. Meanwhile the birthworld can rest and regenerate from its difficult birthing.

This adds to Drake’s equation and the Rare Earth hypothesis to solve the Fermi Paradox. It’s very interesting to emphasize the concept of a small window of opportunity for a civilization to leave the gravity well of its home-planet, but there are some problems for this to be a simple answer to the Italian physicist’s paradox.

The Peak Oil Apocalipse scenario is greatly exaggerated. It may put some stress on our economical and political systems, but the risk we may blow up the planet because of that is still lower than it was during the whole Cold War, when for most of the time oil was extremely cheap.

If a civilization manages to survive the age of a cheap and easily accessible hydrocabon energy source, even if did not manage to colonize space, it will be able to do that if it wants. And the lack of cheap oil may even be a strong incentive to colonize space, as cheap energy sources may lie outside the home-planet. A specially beautiful idea mentioned by Carl Sagan was to use nuclear warheads as fuel for nuclear pulse rockets.

The point is, as long as a technological civilization with a sufficiently developed science exists, it will be able to colonize space if it really wants to do that. Besides the energy stored in nuclear fuels, the energy required to put something into orbit is lower than the solar energy it may collect and direct back to the Earth, for instance. It may all be more expensive than cheap oil, and the total energy available to us my decrease substantially, but as long as science and technology exists, the colonization of space and the possible discovery and access to new sources of cheap energy are always a possibility.

Another interesting point, though, is also advanced by John Micheal Greer on Solving Fermi’s Paradox.

Greer too emphasizes the limited amount of cheap non-renewable energy and the implications of that to the Fermi paradox. But he also notes that besides the gravity well of the home-planet, there’s also the huge vacuum between the planetary systems.

So, even if a civilization manages to colonize some of the planets in its own solar system, that’s still a small step compared to the huge jump ahead. Difficult as interplanetary colonization my look, it’s close to nothing compared to interstellar colonization.

That’s very true, but again, I don’t think energy would be a fundamental problem making interstellar colonization impossible — at least not for an interplanetary civilization. As long as the civilization continues to develop science and technology and doesn’t annihilate itself, its main star will be providing plenty of energy that could be collected, stored and used for interstellar travel. But as for leaving the home-planet, it would take the will and possibly the need to do that.

Overall, all those concepts may indeed solve Fermi’s Paradox, though none of them are absolute.

The Rare Earth hypothesis may not mean we are alone, but it may mean civilizations are indeed extremely rare.

The small window of opportunity to use cheap energy sources (if they are available in the first place!) may not stop a civilization from leaving its home-planet, but it may make things much more difficult. And cheap energy on the home-planet may also induce the species to enjoy all it can on its home-planet with silly things like storing countless nuclear weapons, SUVs and private jets. Also, chemical rockets. It may boost civilization, but it may also blow up the planet.

And then, what is very likely, the huge distances between the stars may mean that there could be absolutely no reward on expanding to such distances. It may only be possible with automated probes that could take too much time to reach their destination and provide no benefit to the builders for millions of years.

There’s just one problem, though. The Fermi Paradox only takes one single civilization to dedicate itself, for whatever reason, to colonize the Galaxy for a few million years. There are also many other different concepts for interstellar colonization. A Von Neumann probe could do it.

Observation suggests not one single civilization did that in the whole history of our Galaxy, and as far was we know, the entire Universe (there are no visibly engineered galaxies). The Paradox is still there. My obvious guess is that’s something to do with some fundamental thing about the Universe we still don’t have any idea about.

The Fermi Paradox may be the single most fundamental question of 20th century science. We now know how puzzling it really is — before that, we didn’t know how large and how old the Universe is, we also didn’t really know much about the other planets and the fact there is no sign of intelligent life out there.

After looking at a picture of it, I had some trouble believing an animal like this was real. Only a video and some Googling convinced me.

Now, that was obviously the inspiration for the Nasobema, a fictitious creation.

[via PD, Neatorama]

“The Future: the Superbrain
The region of the brain responsible for the memory, consciousness and complex thought will develop itself, enlarging the forehead. On schools, telepathy and telekinesis skills will be trained. Brain tissue transplants will be performed in case of sickness and accidents. Anesthetics will be applied with electrodes.”

I found this on a science magazine published in Brazil in the beggining of the 1990s, titled “Descobrir” (Discovery), though I’m not certain if it was a translation of Discovery magazine (I guess not). I couldn’t help, I had to share it.

As you can see, the illustrator is one Joe Lawrence, but I couldn’t find any reference to him on the internet. There are a lot of other illustrations by him about the future, very paleo-future like, and the magazine wasn’t that much for wild paranormal claims, which only makes this gem much more priceless.

“O brave new world! That has such people in’t!”

Location: Pirinopolis, Goias, Brazil
Date: February 2005

Regina Sylvia sent us this series of three amazing photos that she described as “UFOs disguised as clouds“. We suggested to her that they could have been just clouds, and she told us that:
“This ‘cloud’ was something strange… If it was just a cloud… I don’t know, but on this day we were going to the Pirineus (in Pirinopolis, Goias), and as we stopped at the city we saw this first cloud. Huge, amazing. Afterwards on our house, around two hours later, we saw the same cloud, huge, but it wasn’t just one, as there was another, smaller, a little to the left. The night came and… another cloud appeared in the same place, lit as if the Moon was behind it.”

At first sight, we thought these were just common lenticular clouds, as we told Regina. These clouds are formed with strong, vertical winds on irregular terrain. They also resemble “mountain cap” clouds, formed over the top of mountains.

But the images are not like the common lenticular clouds — as noted by Andreia Tschiedel, who remarked that these clouds are joined closely by other types of clouds. The first image shows a cumulus clouds along with the intriguing semi-spherical, translucent cloud. Were they UFOs disguising as clouds? Well, we Googled some more, and found a possible prosaic explanation.

They are Pileus clouds. “Pileus caps are made of ice crystals high in the troposphere. They form as a slab of air is shoved upward, in the shape of a dome or cap, just above a rapidly rising convective tower. Moisture in the dome condenses directly into an ice fog as the air rises and cools, forming the pileus. Next, the convection shoots right through the pileus layer. The lifted layer above the convective tower can’t be too dry (must have high humidity), or the pileus cap won’t develop.”

As images may be worth more than words, we present the image of the month for May 2005 of the Cloud Appreciation Society, taken by Justin Moore:

(source: CAS Cloud of the Month, May 2005)

With thanks to Regina Sylvia for the beautiful images.