Your free twice-weekly fix of stories of space and science –a random journey from Planet Earth through the Cosmos– that has the capacity to provide clues to our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our Anthropocene epoch.
“Just because we happen to live in a region that is overwhelmingly dominated by matter doesn’t preclude the existence of other regions of space that are instead dominated by antimatter,” observes Dan Hooper, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and Associate Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago.
But they may be billions of years older. Scientists are making predictions about the biological make-up of advanced, complex aliens, offering a degree of insight as to what they might look like.
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.
China is building a laser that can produce 100 quadrillion watts – about 50,000 times the planet’s total power consumption — a light so intense that it would equal the amount of power our Earth receives from the Sun.
Without mind, there might as well be nothing. Colin McGinn at the University of Miami, believes that no matter how much scientists study the brain, the mind is fundamentally incapable of comprehending itself. “We’re rather like Neanderthals trying to understand astronomy or Shakespeare,” McGinn observed in Consciousness and Space. Human brains suffer from a “cognitive gap” in understanding their own consciousness.”
The Galaxy Report newsletter brings you twice-weekly news of space and science that has the capacity to provide clues to the mystery of our existence and add a much needed cosmic perspective in our current Anthropocene Epoch.
