Obama's Bush-Style Surge: Revoke Nobel Peace Prize

The U.K.'s Telegraph is anticipating that the newly-announced winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is planning a surge of up to 45,000 more troops in Afghanistan, bringing the U.S. total force there to 110,000 service persons:

The US is expected to announce a significant surge of up to 45,000 extra troops for Afghanistan after Gordon Brown said that 500 more British troops would be sent to the country...

President Barack Obama's administration is understood to have told the British government that it could announce, as early as next week, the substantial increase to its 65,000 troops already serving there.

This will be a terrible disaster. The Soviets could not subdue Afghanistan, and the wasted resources in their attempt is often cited as a reason for their final fall. It could be America's end too. The body-counts of our kids are likely to pile-up dreadfully, and we will probably be at much greater risk for a new round of domestic terror like the 2001 attacks. It is always right to turn the other cheek, but it is usually human nature to fight back.

I was congratulatory and glad that President Obama won the Nobel Prize, but I'm sure this should absolutely disqualify him from such an honor.

CO2 Still Rising Fast - Arctic Ice Cap Imminently Threatened

Despite the worst global recession since WW2, carbon dioxide atmospheric concentrations are continuing to rise rapidly. NOAA has just reported their measurement for September 2009 at 384.78 PPM, with a seasonally adjusted figure of 388.00 PPM. This reflects a robust year-on-year increase of 1.71 PPM, comparable or higher than many years which had strong economic growth.

UCLA scientists recently noted that CO2 levels have not been so high since the Miocene epoch 15 million years ago, with global temperatures 7 or 8 degrees higher than present.

Wikipedia says:

Oceans cooled partly due the formation of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, and about 15 million years ago the ice cap in the southern hemisphere started to grow to its present form. The Greenland ice cap developed later, in the Middle Pliocene time, about 3 million years ago.

We are witnessing the live disintegration of the Arctic ice cap, and with CO2 levels continuing to grow swiftly, it's time is likely short. Without the Arctic ice, the darker (water vs snow) surface will absorb even more heat, accelerating the Greenland ice melt.

Global warming is much worse than the press are reporting, and it's happening very fast.

Kepler Mission Online - Space Alien Signal Soon?

Scientists' best estimates about astronomy and biology (astrobiology) suggest many reasons it is likely we will soon find proof-positive that there are extra-terrestrial intelligent civilizations sharing our galaxy.

I doubt very much that extraterrestrials visit our planet often, if ever. Interstellar (beyond a solar system) travel is generally prohibitively expensive as far as our physics can project. But signals or emissions patterns leak out of possibly billions of advanced civilizations into the universe. From us, through T.V. signals, Hitler's unfortunate 1936 Olympics Games speech, "I Love Lucy," and "Howdy Doody" have already broadcasted their electromagnetic patterns many light years beyond Earth, possibly within detection-range of a listening civilization in orbit around another star. So, if they do visit us, don't be too surprised by an enthusiastic, "Lucy!! I'm home!" as their greeting. E.T. might presume it customary.

In 1960, long before we dreamed of the Hubble Telescope or the Kepler Mission, a scientist named Frank Drake created a mathematical model to determine the most likely number of "technologically advanced" civilizations in our galaxy. His theory is centered on the eponymous "Drake Equation" which would provide a mathematically definite answer, if only we knew the required pieces of information. Some of this information is how many stars there are, how many stars have planets, and how many of those planets are suitable for life to evolve. For most of five decades, the calculations and solutions to Drake's "probability of aliens" have been mostly speculative without much data. Estimates based on rational probability have suggested "optimism" that the sky is a-twitter with noisy who-knows-how-little-and-why-green-men transmissions. (See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation )

SETI (the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) is a project to detect those "alien" signals. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI ). You might not know this, but it is true, that we are actually dedicating some of our most powerful supercomputing grids to looking for unnatural patterns in the radio telescope data from beyond our galaxy. We could "hear" them any day.

Now, 49 years after Drake asked the question, NASA's Kepler Mission is poised to provide some answers. For the first time ever, we will be able to look out into a distance into the Milky Way Galaxy and find planets that look a lot like our own Earth. A recent NASA press release states:

"This early result shows the Kepler detection system is performing right on the mark," said David Koch, deputy principal investigator of NASA's Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. "It bodes well for Kepler's prospects to be able to detect Earth-size planets."

SETI and astrobiology expect at least two areas of important results from this exciting project.

"Optimists" who anticipate many galactic civilizations have successfully argued from a probability standpoint that they are correct. Kepler will make the guessers obsolete with hard, cold data. Watch for "Loads of Earth-like Planets" headlines quite soon, unless we "optimists" are wrong.

And secondly, scientists have been forced to listen at the sky for E.T. signals at more or less random directions because they didn't really know where to look. When Kepler zooms it's "sharp eye" on several relatively near Earth-like planets, we'll know right where to listen.

My gut wager: headlines of "Scientists Detect Definitive Intelligent Extra-Terrestrial Signal" will be confirmed before the kids get much older.

Hat tip to Carl Sagan. He has shaped my thinking on our place in the Cosmos with his brilliance. He shined so brightly among we Star-Stuff.