On Sept. 22, 2017, a ghostly particle ejected from a far distant supermassive black hole zipped down from the sky and through the ice of Antarctica at just below the speed of light, with an energy of some 300 trillion electron volts, nearly 50 times the energy delivered by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest particle accelerator on Earth. The cosmic invader set off a cacophony of code-red detectors in the The IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole, solving one of the enduring mysteries of physics and the cosmos.
“Space has been expanding since the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago,” said Harold “Sunny” White, head of NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories: Advanced Propulsion. “And we know that when you look at some of the cosmology models, there were early periods of the universe where there was explosive inflation, where two points would’ve went receding away from each other at very rapid speeds. Nature can do it. So the question is, can we do it?”
NASA’s Kepler Mission K2 team announced the discovery of another new world today, two months after the Kepler spacecraft ran out of fuel on Oct. 30th, and ended its mission after nine years, during which it discovered 2,600 confirmed planets around other stars – the bulk of those now known – along with thousands of additional candidates astronomers are working to confirm.
“Once such superhumans appear, there are going to be significant political problems with the unimproved humans, who won’t be able to compete,” suggests the late physicist and author Stephen Hawking in The Sunday Times. “Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant. Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings who are improving themselves at an ever-increasing rate. If the human race manages to redesign itself, it will probably spread out and colonize other planets and stars.”