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Criticisms of Berserkers: why are we still here? Could we ot "innoculate" ourselves against them?

You don't shout in the jungle- amend the declaration- how? Could everyone comply? do we shut down spaceguard or our atmospheric monitoring satellites?

Do not expect cold, vulcan rationality- emotions keep us alive and are unlikely to be selected out

Do we exist only to build our successors?

Once we develop a human capable machine, within 50 years its descendents will be as capable as all of humanity combined.

they would dwarf us intellectually They would have indefinite lifespans they would be capable of high lamarkian evolution

The first to attain this level of itelligence will dominate due to exponential development- no one will catch up

space travel is dagerous, and AIs might mitigate it by making copies.

We will not at any time in the forseeable future be i the positio of the American Indians or the Vietnamese (colonial barbarity practiced on us by a techologically more advanced civilizatio) because of the great spaces between the stars ad what I believe is the neutrality or benignness of any civilizatio that has surived long enough to make contact with it- carl sagan

The Pioeer 10 plaque was criticised because it gave away our position

they may not see us as a threat (though the Conquistadores did not consider the Native Americans a threat)

But i any case, we're too late

Lowell
Percys younger brother Abbott was president of Harvard in 1909 his younger sister Amy became a poet and won the Pulitzer in 1926

the Lowells had a city in massechusetts named after them

Lowell was the first observatory builder to choose a site to as he put it, "see not be seen". Far away from city lights, in a high, dry environment. (Lick observatory, 1888)

Schiaparelli was going blind.

1915 lowell lecture sold out, subsequent showings had to be added in, which were just as full.

collision model of solar system formation

Meteorites as the formers of the planets

"ronins of the sky owing attraction's allegiance to one lordly sun"

A committed Nipponophile, Lowell wrote several books on Shintoism and his book, "The Soul of the Far East" was described by the psychologist Janet as "a valuable contribution to the psychology of the Orient", though in truth Lowell never mastered Japanese and gained at best a superficial understanding of the culture. A friend once remarked that he "grew so enthusiastic and demonstrative on the subject of Japanese wrestling that I grew almost apprehensive".

Lowell suffered from frequent "instabilities of mood and nerve" that in one case incapacitated him for four years.

a polymath and a universalist whose career has seldom been examined in its entirety

Lowell was a member of a deeply gated and enclosed community of monied Bostonians known as "Brhamins". Patrons and students of Harvard, they saw learning as a necessity. But the old money brahmins were in decline, facing competition from new oil and industrial wealth.

Lowell founded the Lowell Observatory in 1894 as a means to tackle the most sensational issues of the day, and, he thought, achieve fame through their prompt resolution.

At a time when observatories were becoming modern, rigorous academic institutions where research would be conducted and intensely reviewed by team players armed with the latest technology, Lowell used his own personal resources to take Lowell Observatory in his own idiosyncratic directions. the still just born American astronomical community regarded Lowell with suspicion.

A great communicator, Lowell drew his support from the general public through the media, rather than the astronomical community.

For its first four years, Lowell Observatory only operated at Martian opposition, the time when Mars was closest to earth.

"all the intellect goes into science, leaving nothing for common sense"

psychical research, shinto trances

Lowell Observatory's remit was the Solar System in general and Mars in particular. Astronomy had shifted to stellar research

argue down deductively frm some genral notion, such as the supreme virute of modernity, the impersonality of Orientals etc - he has only 3 or 4- and then bend the facts to suit the preciceived idea, seasoning the whole with verbal fireworks.

work is not creditted among astronomers because he devotes his energy tohunting up a few facts in support of some speculation instead of perserveringly hunting innumerable facts and then limiting himself to publishing the unavoidable conclusions, as all scientists of good standing do. AW Douglass, Lowell assistant, obviously fired.

1894: Lowell observatory founded, a fateful opposition

obtained evidence of water in Mars's atmosphere.

controversy over markings on the surface of venus led Lowell to purchase a spectrograph. He eventually determined, through the use of "artificial planets" that the markings were false.

Lowell was unusual in that he administered his observatory, as well as funding it. Other observatories, suhc as Lick and Yerkes, were also funded by wealthy men, but they took a back seat.

optico psychic effects

Scientists saw Lowell's proclamations as a serious attack on the public's faith in science.

George E Hale and WW Campbell were eager to chellenge and refute Lowell's claims.

Hale, Keeler, Basrnard had observed Mars in detail, but saw no canals.

the grain on the plate was several times wider than any canal

an expedition to mt whitney by ww campbell shwoed rigorously that there was little to no evidence for water vapor in mars's atmosphere. Lowell blamed weather conditions.

Lowell's behaviour managed to unify the notoriously competitive astronomical community against him.

"The necessarily intelligent and non-bellicose character of the community which could thus act as a unit throughout the globe. War is a survival among us from savage times and affects now chiefly the boyish and unthinking element of the nation. The wisest realise that there are better ways for practicing heroism and other and more certain ends of ensuring survival of the fittest. It is something people outgrow."

no one could calculate deviations in the orbit of Neptune, as it moved so slowly that so little of its orbit had been completed.

Uranus, however...

William Lassell, Triton, Mass

Simon Newcomb had conducted a study of Neptune's observed motion and found that its motions for the 19 years it had been known were in accordance with theory.

Bwtween 1905 and 1907, Lowell launched a short search for the trans-Neptunian.

Uranus's residuals after Neptune did not exceed 4.5 arc seconds. Prior to Neptune they were 133 arc seconds

Neptune had not completed enough of its orbit for it to yield data regarding a possible trans-Neptunian planet

Lowell was not the first to call the object "Planet X"; Gabriel Dallet had used the term to describe a trans Neptunian planet inferred from the orbit of Uranus in 1901.

In his Memoir of a Trans Neptunian planet, lowell referred to the object as X and the unknown, as did his cousin Lawrence

Lowell died of a cerebral haemorrage after blowing up at a servant on nov 12 1916

Le Verrier had attempted a search for a trans-Neptunian, but gave it up as impracticable. "imagination" quote

Slipher succeeded Lowell as director- galactic recession velocities and the expansion of the Universe

Mars Hill, no coincidence

1905 lampland photographs- markings in places where they had drawn canals. They did not appear when the photographs were published

Most of his ideas were unfalsifiable, either in principle, or with the technology of the time.

Clyde tombaugh saw the canals when he looked at mars at lower magnifications and concluded "They were not fiments of his imagination; He was being honest with what he saw"

Lowell craved recognition, but his observatory only began to be respected when he stepped back and let his assistants do their own work

Tombaugh saw the canals in 1950 and concluded they were an optical illusion caused by irradiation, or the bleeding of darkness into light areas, creating a sense of definition and striaghtness, which would explain why other astronomers, who had larger telescopes than Lowell, couldn't see them.

Tombaugh built his own telescopes. Slipher and Lampland were both farm boys

athlete constructed his own football field and tennis court played shot putt. Couldn't see going to college- had to drop out of high school for one year because his father needed the labor.

33 cm refractor, the only telescope in history designed specifically to search for an unknown planet. Arrived after tombaugh, feb 1929

Eventually Roger Putnam, Lowell's nephew, secured $10,000 dollars from his uncle A Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, to build the necessary telescope and restart the planet search

350 feet, hairpin turns pine forests, beautiful, bear meat

Muron taught his children the value of hard work and being right first time

mechanical workshop

corn oats and wheat- shortage of labour due to WW1

Kansas

Tombaugh suggested his father build a cyclone cellar, conveniently to his telescope making specs

In 1928, a hailstorm destroyed the wheat and oat crop. Clyde decided that farming was for fatalists. He wanted more control

He sent off he drawings to the lowell observatory merely asking for suggestions. What he got back was a query about his physical health and ability to work long cold nights.

On the strength of letters alone, Tombaugh paid his way a thousand miles to flagstaff

On Jan 15 1929, tombaugh arrived at the Lowell Observatory only then told that his photographic work would involve the search for Planet X

Tombaugh saw waves at Lake Michigan

tombaughs job was initially just to take the photographs. The actual finding of the planet would be left to more important people. then,

unheated room

born in 1906. percival planet x

giving guided tours and banking the furnace

on June 18. Slipehr informed Clyde that the blinking would be his resposibility.

clearing the snow off the dome, which had to be done with precision to avoid tearing the canvas

occasionally evading mountain lions

he ignored Lowell's predictions and instead searched the entire zodiac.

Tombaugh admitted that his and the others technique in the early months was sladashhe began to despair, as lowell had

Tombaugh's initial search was haphazard and didn't involve a control plate. That, and the absence of home, began to tell on him, and he began to despair. particularly when "Young man..."

After returning from a visit home, he found his system

young man i am afraid you are wasting your time. if there were any mroe planets to be found, they would have been found long before this eastern astronomer

Tombaugh solved the problem of occasionally shattering plates himself- after slipher had told him there was nothing he could do about it

rythmic thresher

opposition point; the smaller the retrograde motion, the farther the object

Pluto was found in Gemini, six degrees from the position predicted by Lowell, who had suggested Gemini as a possible location.

1 lamp 2 sliph

"The lot of the older men here is not a happy one"- slipher

He knew not to overdo it or his concentration would lapse

variable stars sudden appearances moving objects

Constellation by constellation, month by month, until January 1930

lampland heard the clicking stop. 45 min

john keats poem filled his head

It was announced to the world on Lowell's 75th birthday.

After the death of her father and the removal of her brothers to boarding school, Venitia and her mother, a primary school teacher, moved in with her grandfather, Falcner Madan.

As well as £5, Venitia received a gramaphone to aid her singing, which she named Pluto.

During the depression, Clyde the "rich aristocrat" donated a portion of his $125 a month salary to keep the farm afloat

3.5 mm apart

AC Crommelin of Uccle observatory i Belgium was the only astronomer to specifically congratulate Tombaugh initially

Tombaugh's reward was a full scholarship to the University of Kansas- but he asked for one year's delay so he could complete his survey- at college, met his wife patsyh Like rock on earth, water ice is the material out of which geological forces on these worlds shape and sculpt their surfaces into myriad landscapes.

Prior to Voyager, astronomers were agreed on the overall ice/rock composition of outer satellites, but there remained considerable disagreement over just how evolved these worlds were. Would they be undiffrentiated lumps, or would they possess active geology akin to our own world?

Ice behaves like rock at such temperatures, so it is studied by geologists, not glaciologists

Huygens
2017

hydrogen, water, methane from enceladus plumes- 99% water

warm spot

james webb

triton tidal dissipation upon capture, far more elliptical. radiological decay

"a man that is of copernicus's opinion, that this earth of ours is a planet, carried round and enlightened by the sun ... cannot but sometimes have a fancy that it's not improbable that the rest of the planets have their dress and furniture, nay, and their inhabitants too, as well as this Earth of ours.

satellite- attendant

attendants of jupiter and saturn, champain and hilly countries on the moon which are an argument of a relation and kin between our world and them

Huygens reasoned that, since the planets and stars were out of reach of our lordship, and since God had created the universe for the use of man, it followed that other rational creatures must exist on these far worlds to make use of what they had.

By the age of 27 he had composed his first treatise, disproving Descartes's laws of collisions of elastic bodies, though it was not published in his lifetime.

1655- 6 rings of saturn and titan telescope (age 26) 50x magnification 27 feet long

telescopes were a dutch invention, but their quality was poor- galileo 20x

huygens eyepiece

1656 invented pendulum clock

The Jesuits were slow to accept the ring, due to Huygens' copernican leanings

biography of water
Even the sun has water; umbrae of sunspots are 3000 c, cool enough for water to exist.

Water's ubiquity in the outer Solar System today is not due to its abundance in the pre-solar nebula, but to its relatively high melting and freezing point, meaning that it was the first material to condense out of the nebula.

Water expands as it freezes, and thus ice floats on water

water contracts as it cools, because less energetic molecules move around less, ergo it grows more dense, and falls downwards. Thus ponds should freeze from the bottom up. this would be fatal for most forms of life.

At around 4 C, water's density decreases, which allows cold ice to form on top of warmer water, and icebergs to float on the sea

If water behaved normally, then the global system of currents wouldn't function, and the world would be far colder

Water has a large heat capacity; you must pump a large amount of heat into it to raise its temperature.

Water is not a cat but a tetrahedron; the base corners are occupied by pairs of electrons

anomolously high melting and boiling points

Oxygen has a high affinity for electrons; ergo it takes electrons from the hydrogen, making itself negative and the hydrogen positive.

Hydrogen then interacts with the positively charged oxygen in other water molecules, forming a bond that is ten times stronger than van der waals forces but ten times weaker than the weak force that holds molecules together- hydrogen bond

ammonia and hydrogen fluoride also form hydrogen bonds

For water molecules to move closer together, they must first break the hydrogen bond; as water cools, it has less energy to do that, and so forms a lattice.

amino acids, nucleic acids, hydrolysis, origin of life (water molecule produced during protein production)

early photosynthesisers split hydrogen from water, leaving oxygen, which is deadly toxic (our bodies have a number of complex mechanisms to suppress its effects, such as the formation of free radicals)

For the non-oxygen breathers though, it was a catastrophe

Protein shapes: hydrophillic amino acids gather together, hydrophopic parts cover over, creating various folding shapes (enzymes form grooves to encourage binding of molecules together- pennicillin has a razor.

number of proteins vs number of possible proteins

water attached to a protein via hbond can be regarded as part of its machinery, acting as transmitters of information from one side to another (haemoglobin)

Mccray 2005
atmosphere: x% methane, 0.l% hydrogen

voyager: photochemistry produces chemistry of hydrocarbons and nitriles

disequilibrium state- source of chemical energy

ethane: very low soluability

Polar solvents: water, ethanol, methanol glycol

non-polar solvents: ethane, hexane, benzene

C2H2, C2H6 produced by sunlight

react with hydrogen, analogous to oxygen

C2H2 +3H2 = 2CH4 334

C2H6+H2= 2CH4 57 (KJ per Mol)

Methanogens on Earth require 40 KJ per mol

H2 would drop by more than a factor of a thousand at the surface

Mccray 2016
Light levels on the surface of Titan are more than adequate for photosynthesis,

The atmosphere is dominated by N2 (95%) with CH4 (5%) and H2 (0.1%)

synchronous orbit around Saturn with a period of 16 days (the cycle of light and dark)

The lower atmosphere of Titan is too thick to respond to the 16-day light-dark cycle but does respond on the 30-year seasonal timescale.

maximum level of sunlight on the surface of Titan is about 0.1% that of the overhead sun on Earth’s surface

which process can utilize light levels as low as 10−6 of the Earth noonday solar flux

critical problem for life on Titan would be access to inorganic elements, such as Fe, Cu, Mn, Zn, Ni, S, Ca, Na, and K, etc., which life on Earth can access through their solubility in water.

This source is known to be responsible for CO, CO2, and H2O in the atmosphere [15]. Thus, a small but possibly biologically useful flux of inorganic elements is descending from the upper atmosphere with the haze and may be adequate for life forms that carefully recycle and reuse these elements.

If life on Titan does not employ photosynthesis, and does not need to fix nitrogen from N2 (N is available in organic compounds produced photochemically), then two of the major needs for metal-based catalysis used by Earth life are removed. Furthermore, it is conceivable that H2O molecules on Titan could be used in a way that metals are used in enzymes by life on Earth. Because of the low temperatures on Titan, hydrogen bonds provide enough binding strength to form useful structures.

ethane is ~20× better than methane regarding solubility of small organic molecules

nothing in the environment changes on the diurnal schedule.

GCM models predict that the southern latitudes receive less total precipitation, albeit with more intense rainstorms than northern latitudes. Cornet et al. [6] suggest this could explain why Titan’s south polar regions are devoid of well-developed lacustrine depressions, compared to the north.

Cousteis/Taylor
March 25, 1655

"As saturn devoured his children, his family could ot be assembled around him, so that the choice lay among his brothers adn sisters, the titans and titanesses. the name of Iapetus seemed indicated by the obscurity ad remoteness of the exterior satellite, Titan by the superior size of the Huyghenia, while the three female appellations (Rhea Deoe ad tethys) calss together the tree intermediate Cassiian satellites. The remote interior oens seemed appropriately characterised by a return to male appellations (eceladus and mimus) chose from a younger and inferior (though still superhuman) brood." Hershel (John?)

Kuiper, also, of course, a dutchman. 1944- identified the specral bands for methane on titan

1975: limb darkening finally observed, showig that titan's atmosphere was optically thick

1973: low albedo, thick cloudy atmosphere

methane=90 percent of atmosphere 20 mbar

ammonia dissociation = N2, 20 bars

200k greehouse effect (earthlike)

87 +- 9 k liquid methane oceas? Owe and Jaffe

1980 Voyager encounter

Pioneer 11 was sent towards the rigs, to see if any particles beyod the visible rigs could pose a dager

atmospehric brightness asymetry (25% between hemespheres, switches with seasons), as observed by HST in 1990

1.5 bar 95 k per Voyager

1983: Jonathan Lunine, U.AZ ethane sea 1 km deep with methane mixture

methane/ethane triple point 90 K

https://www.space.com/38104-saturns-icy-moons-less-mysterious-cassini-mission.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaSntOkK-Vk

https://academic.oup.com/astrogeo/article/52/1/1.39/204149/Is-there-life-on-Titan

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4810239/

https://www.astrobio.net/alien-life/the-methane-habitable-zone/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT0y0Lub2bA