Cuba, OZNA-UDBA (Yugoslav Security Service)
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John Maher of DELANCEY STREET
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A Short History of Nearly Everything
By Bill Bryson
Lost in the Cosmos: How to Build a Universe
For a long time the Big Bang theory had one gaping hole that troubled a lot of people – namely, that it couldn’t begin to explain how we got here. Although 98 percent of all the matter that exists was created with the Big Bang, that matter consisted exclusively of light gases: the helium, hydrogen and lithium that we mentioned earlier. Not one particle of the heavy stuff so vital to our own being – carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and all the rest – emerged from the gaseous brew of creation. But – and here’s the troubling point – to forge these heavy elements, you need the kind of heat and energy thrown off by a Big Bang. Yet there has been only one Big Bang and it didn’t produce them. So where did they come from? Interestingly, the man who found the answer to that question was a cosmologist who heartily despised the Big Bang as a theory and coined the term Big Bang sarcastically, as a way of mocking it.
We’ll get to him shortly, but before we turn to the question of how we got here, it might be worth taking a few minutes to consider just where exactly ‘here’ is.
Welcome to the Solar System
Astronomers these days can do the most amazing things. If someone struck a match on the Moon, they could spot the flare. From the tiniest throbs and wobbles of distant stars they can infer the size and character and even potential habitability of planets much too remote to be seen – planets so distant that it would take us half a million years in a spaceship to get there. With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so presposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is ‘less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground’, in the words of Carl Sagan.
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In short, there isn’t a great deal that goes on in the universe that astronomers can’t find when they have a mind to. Which is why it is all the more remarkable to reflect that until 1978 no-one had ever noticed that Pluto has a moon. In the summer of that year, a young astronomer named James Christy at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, was making a routine examination of photographic images of Pluto when he saw that there was something there – something blurry and uncertain but definitely other than Pluto. Consulting a colleague named Robert Harrington, he concluded that what he was looking at was a moon. And it wasn’t just any moon. Relative to the planet, it was the biggest moon in the solar system.
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This was actually something of a blow to Pluto’s status as a planet, which had never been terribly robust anyway. Since previously the space occupied by the moon and the space occupied by Pluto were thought to be one and the same, it meant that Pluto was much smaller than anyone had supposed – smaller even than Mercury. Indeed, seven moons in the solar syste, including our own, are larger.
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Now, a natural question is why it took so long for anyone to find a moon in our own solar system. The answer is that it is partly a matter of where astronomers point their instruments and partly a matter of what their instruments are designed to detect and partly it’s just Pluto. Mostly it’s where they point their instruments. In the words of the astronomer Clark Chapman: ‘Most people think that astronomers get out at night in observatories and scan the skies. That’s not true. Almost all the telescopes we have in the world are designed to pper at very tine little pieces of the sky way off in the distance to see a quasar or hunt for black holes or look at a distant galaxy. The only real network of telescopes that scans the skies has been designed and built by the military.’
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We have been spoiled by artists renderings into imagining a clarity of resoliution that doesn’t exist in actual astronomy. Pluto in Christy’s photograph is faint and fuzzy – a piece of cosmic lint – and its moon is not the romantic backlit, crisply delineated companion orb you would get in a National Geographic painting, but rather just a tiny and extremely indistinct hint of additional fuzziness. Such was the fuzziness, in fact, that it took seven years for anyone to spot the moon again and thus independently confirm its existence.
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One nice touch about Christy’s discovery was that it happened in Flagstaff, for it was there in 1930 that Pluto had been found in the first place. That seminal event in astronomy was largely to the credit of the astronomer Percival Lowell. Lowell, who came from one of the oldest and wealthiest Boston families (the one in the famous ditty about Boston being the home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells spoke only to Cabots, while Cabots spoke only to God), endowed the famous observatory that bears his name, but is most indelibly remembered for his belief that Mars was covered with canals built by industrious Martians for purposes of conveying water from polar regions to the dry but productive lands nearer the equator.
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Lowells other abiding conviction was that there existed, somewhere out beyond Neptune, an undiscovered ninth planet, dubbed Planet X. Lowell based this belief on irregularities he detected in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, and devoted the last years of his life to trying to find the gassy giant he was certain was out there. Unfortunately, he died suddenly in 1916, at least partly exhausted by his quest, and the search fell into abeyance while Lowell’s heirs squabbled over his estate. However, in 1929, partly as a way of deflecting attention away from the Mars canal saga (which by now had become a serious embarrassment) the Lowell Observatory directors decided to resume the search and to that end hired a young man from Kansas named Clyde Tombaugh.
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Tombaugh had no formal training as an astronomer, but he was diligent and he was astute, and after a years patient searching he somehow spotted Pluto, a faint point of light in a glittery firmament. It was a miraculous find, and what made it all the more striking was that the observations on which Lowell had predicted the existence of a planet beyond Neptune proved to be comprehensively erroneous. Tombaugh could see at once that the new planet was nothing like the massive gasball Lowell had postulated – but any reservations he or anyone else had about the character of the new planet were soon swept aside in the derlirium that attended almost any big news story in that easily excited age. This was the first American-discovered planet, and no-one was going to be distracted by the thought that it was really just a distant icy dot. It was named Pluto, at least partly because the first two letters made a monogram from Lowells initials. Lowell was posthumously hailed everywhere as a genius of the first order and Tombaugh was largely forgotten, except among planetary astronomers, who tend to revere him.
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It is certainly true that Pluto doesn’t act much like the other planets. Not only is it rusty and obscure, it is so variable in its motions that no-one can tell you exactly where Pluto will be a century hence. Whereas the other planets orbit on more or less the same plane, Pluto’s orbital path is tipped (as it were) out of alignment at an angle of 17 degrees, like the brim of a hat titled rakishly on someone’s head. Its orbit is so irregular that for substantial periods on each of its lonely circuits around the Sun it is closer to us than Neptune is. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, Neptune was in fact the solar systems most far-flung planet. Only on 11 February 1999 did Pluto return to the outside lane, there to remain for the next 228 years.
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So if Pluto really is a planet, it is certainly an odd one. It is very tiny: just one quarter of 1 percent as massive as Earth. If you set it down on top of the United States, it would cover not quite half the lower forety-eight states. This alone makes it extremely anamolous; it means that our planetary system consists of four rocky inner planets, four gassy outer giants, and a tiny, solitary iceball. Moreover, there is every reason to suppose that we may soon begin to find other, even larger icy spheres in the same portion of space. Then we will have problems. After Christy spotted Pluto’s moon, astronomers began to regard that section of the cosmos more attentively, and as of early December 2002 had found over six hundred additional Trans-Neptunian Objects or Plutinos as they are alternatively called. One, dubbed Varuna, is nearly as big as Pluto’s moon. Astronomers now think there may be billions of these objects. The difficulty is that many of them are awfully dark. Typically they have an albedo, or reflectiveness, of just 4 percent, about the same as a lump of charcoal – and of course these lumps of charcoal are over six billion kilometres away.
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And how far is that, exactly? It’s almost beyond imagining. Space, you see, is just enormous – just enormous. Let’s imagine for purposes of edification and entertainment, that we are about to go on a journey by rocketship. We won’t go terribly far – just to the edge of our own solar system – but we need to get a fix on how big a place space is and what a small part of it we occupy.
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Now the bad news, I’m afraid, is that we won’t be home for supper. Even at the speed of light (300,000 km’s per second) it would take seven hours to get to Pluto. But of course we can’t travel at anything like that speed. We’ll have to go at the speed of a spaceship, and these are rather more lumbering. The best speeds yet achieved by any human object are those of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecrafts, which are now flying away from us at about 56,000 kilometres an hour.
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The reason the Voyager craft were launched when they were (in August and September 1977) was that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were aligned in a way that happens only once every 175 years. This enabled the two Voyagers to use a ‘gravity assist’ technique in which the craft were successfully flung from one gassy giant to the next in a kind of cosmic version of crack the whip. Even so it took them nine years to reach Uranus and a dozen to cross the orbit of Pluto.
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Based on what we know now and can reasonably imagine, there is absolutely no prospect that any human being will ever visit the edge of our own solar system – ever. It is just too far. As it is, even with the Hubble telescope we can’t see even into the Oort cloud, so we don’t actually know that it is there. Its existence is probable but entirely hypothetical.
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About all that can be said with confidence about the Oort cloud is that it starts somewhere beyond Pluto and stretches some two light years out into the cosmos. The basic unit of measure in the solar system is the Astronomical Unit, or AU, representing the distance from the Sun to the Earth. Pluto is about 40 AU’s from us, the heart of the Oort cloud about fifty thousand. In a word, it is remote.
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But lets pretend again that we have made it to the Oort cloud. The first thing you might notice is how very peaceful it is out here. We’re a long way from anywhere now – so far from our own Sun that it’s not even the brightest star in the sky. It is a remarkable thought that that distant tiny twinkle has enough gravity to hold all these comets in orbit. It’s not a very strong bond, so the comets drift in a stately manner, moving at only about 220 miles an hour. From time to time one of these lonely comets is nudged out of its normal orbit by some slight gravitational perturbation – a passing star, perhaps. Sometimes they are ejected into the emptiness of space, never to be seen again, but sometimes they fall into a long orbit around the Sun. About three or four of these a year, known as long-period comets, pass through the inner solar system. Just occasionally these stray visitors smack into something solid, like Earth. That’s why we’ve come out here now – because the comet we have come to see has just begun a long fall towards the centre of the solar system. It is headed for, of all places, Manson, Iowa.
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General Ralph Eberhardt
In the short term, nothing. The most perfect vacuum ever created by humans is not as empty as the emptiness of interstellar space. And there is a great deal of this nothingness until you get to the next bit of something. Our nearest neighbour in the cosmos, Proxima Centauri, is 4.3 light years away, a sissy skip in galactic terms, but still a hundred million times further than a trip to the Moon. To reach it by spaceship would take at least twenty-five thousand years, and even if you made the trip you still wouldn’t be anywhere except at a lonely clutch of stars in the middle of a vast somewhere. To reach the next landmark of consequence, Sirius, would involve another 4.6 light years of travel. And so it would go if you tried to star-hop your way across the cosmos. Just reaching the center of our own galaxy would take far longer than we have existed as human beings.
Space, let me repeat, is enourmous. The average distance between stars out there is over 30 million million kilometres. Even at speeds approaching those oflight, these are fantastically challenging distances for any travelling individual. Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in Arizona, but it does seem unlikely.
Still, statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way – estimates range from a hundred billion or so to perhaps four hundred billion – and the Milky Way is just one of a hundred and forty billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours. In the 1960s, a professor at Cornell named Frank Drake, excited by such whopping numbers, worked out a famous equation designed to calculate the chances of advanced life existing in the cosmos, based on a series of diminishing probabilities.
Under Drake’s equation you divide the number of stars in a selected portion of the universe by the number of stars that are likely to have planetary systems; divide that by the number of planetary systems that could theoretically support life; divide that by the number on which life, having arisen, advances to a state of intelligence; and so on. At each such division, the number shrinks colossally – yet even with themost conservative inputs the number of advanced civilisations just in the Milky Way always works out to be somewhere in the millions.
What an interesting and exciting thought. We may be only one of millions of advanced civilisations. Unfortunately, space being spacious, the average distance between any two of these civilisations is reckoned to be at least two hundred light years, which is a great deal more than merely saying it makes it sound. It means, for a start, that even if these beings know we are here and are somehow able to see us in their telescopes, they’re watching light that left Earth two hundred years ago. So they’re not seeing you and me. They’re watching the French Revolution and Thomas Jefferson and people in silk stockings and powdered wigs – people who don’t know what an atom is, or a gene, and who make their electricity by rubbing a rod of amber with a piece of fur and think that’s quite a trick. Any message we receive from these observers is likely to begin “Dear Sire”, and congratulate us on the handsomeness of our horses and our mastery of whale oil. Two hundred light years is a distance so far beyond us as to be, well, just beyond us.
So even if we are not really alone, in all practical terms we are. Carl Sagan calculated the number of probable planets in the universe at as many as ten billion trillion – a number vastly beyond imagining. But what is equally beyond imagining is the amount of space through which they are lightly scattered. ‘If we were randomely inserted into the universe,’ Sagan wrote, ‘the chances that you would be on or near a planet would be less than one in a billion trillion trillion’ (That’s 10 33, or 1 followed by 33 zeroes.) ‘Worlds are precious’.
Which is why perhaps it is good news that in February 1999 the International Astronomical Union ruled officially that Pluto is a planet. The universe is a big and lonely place. We can do with all the neighbours we can get.
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