Sorry... You are Listening on a wrong line!!!

A question always haunted mankind... And me since I have become a man :P... "Are we Alone in the Universe?".

A question has been asked a million times, probed into a million times and abandoned in dissapointment a million times. But yet , we have not found any valid, concrete and tangible answer for this.

Since the advent of radio communication, Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (S.E.T.I.) has pointed its radio telescopes to the heavens and has been listening to every minute regular signals, that may be from an intelligent source. But none has yet arrived. Many signals from natural sources like Cephids, pulsars and quasars were misinterpreted. Many were straighaway scrapped to be noise.

But I think is that we are missing a huge link. Picture a scenario when we are blind ants living in a world full of ants :) . We are quite advanced for ants an we think that we are smart enough to search for life on worlds other than this Ant-o-lia the ant planet :). But we are blind as I said. The most advanced mode of communication we have is scent trails and sound. "We" think that this is the highest level of advancement any life on the universce can have. So we set out on a search of ET life.

We put scent sensors and sound sensors in space (which obviously wont work) and we wait for an intelligent detection.

But any human can say that this is a useless attempt. Humans, which are ET life for ants try to communicate to them using light and radio waves and optical signals. But no use, they are not capable to interprete us and neither are we because we have evolved beyond the stage where smell was a mode of communication. They are simply waiting for our call on the wrong line. This is what I think is exactly happening to us.

We are like ants in this universe, proud of our technology and capabilities to think beyond our planet. But we forget one thing, that cultures both above and below our advancement benchmark, may miss our call. The cultures below our technology threshold may not be in a condition to listen to us, and those above us may have entirely scrapped our present technology. For them the mode of communication may be far advanced than what we have right now.

All we can do is that hope that we are on the same line as them.

Some Clarifications of ASTRONOMICAL scale

Hello friends,

I have been replying some queries and some "updates" from my friends, about particularly 2 "once in a lifetime" kind of astronomical phenomenons which would be sighted by our "Lucky" generation.

Yes I am talking about the two hoax mails that talk about

• Mars being closest to earth and being the size of the moon in sky,
• Some stupid asteroid coming 35.5 million miles close to earth and being as bright as SUN

So my reply to every question was with an exclamation and then a 15-20 min casual lecture describing our solar system, and the facts about why planets seem to be the size and brightness in the sky.

So lets go step by step in reasoning this.

• When it comes to Mars, the average distance from earth varies between 0.6A.U. to 2.6 AU. 1 AU is the mean distance between earth and sun standardised to be approximately 150 million kilometers. Now this fluctuation of distances is due to differences in time taken by each planet to complete one revolution around sun. This asynchronous movement creates two specific cases called as opposition and conjunction. (see Diagram).

• Opposition is the state when the planet and the sun are on the opposite sides of earth. This is the point when the planet can be the closest and brightest. Now in case of Mars this happens roughly every 1.8 years.. Reason : Earth is 1.8 times quicker around the sun than Mars.Now this shows that Mars being close to earth is not at all an uncommon fact. But the distance when Mars is in opposition really varies.

• Now comes the question of how close can it really come. The answer is that the closest ever recorded distance is roughly 56 Million Kilometers or roughly 0.35 AU. Now why is this discrepancy? Reason is simple: Earth and Mars orbits are eccentric. Hence even the distance between the orbits vary. For a better understanding of earth and mars dance around sun go to this link.
• The closest possible position would be seen on date near to 31st Aug 2003. This was when mars was closest ever. Now this is what is really once in a lifetime kind of situation. But again... even if this is a rare event , it is not as spectacular as the mail says. I have seen it, mars does look bright but not as big as the moon. Again lets reason it out.
• Moon is roughly 300 thousand kilometres away and its size is roughly half a degree or 0.5 degrees. Now if I give you distance of moon from earth and diameter in kilometers, you can easily find its angular size using simple trigonometry. Using the same logic if I give you distance of Mars as 56000000 km (closest ever) and size as 6800 km (diameter of mars) what you get is 0.007 degrees which is 70 times smaller than moon. You can try it out yourself by using this link. Evaluate for Angle. Put distance as 56 million and size as 6800 see wat you get. Then put distance as 300 thousand and size 3500 km (moon dia) and compare what you get :).

So now that the Mars hoax is solved... we can use the above procedure to calculate the size of an asteroid that comes 35 million km close (hardly possible number as it breaches danger levels and we would know about it atleast a decade before). Largest asteroid known till now is CERES which is about 1000 km on its biggest axis. Put this size and distance as 35 million in above link and see what you get. Sun's angular size is also around 0.6 degrees {thats why moon can eclipse Sun :) } and Ceres is now way close to it.

I hope my blog was simple to understand. Do give me a feedback. Lets be aware of our universe and stop such hoaxes from spreading. I will post some fun facts about universe shortly. Keep reading :) .

Sagar

Genes Learn Physics

Ever wondered about how did the Laws of physics got encoded in the very genetics of life on earth? We have chameleons who change color according to background... How does he know what wavelength exactly to reflect so that he actually blends into the background.


We have eggs whose shape allows efficient distribution of pressure along its major axis so that during hatching the weight of the bird wont crush it. Also its shape is mechanically designed such that, given the weight and density distribution on the embryo inside, if the egg starts rolling on a surface, it will automatically decelerate and come to a stop.

The explanation of all these creations in nature needs a deep understanding of the theory of evolution. Plainly saying that evolution is a phenomenon of chance will not suffice. In that case we can extrapolate life on a planet with g of 10 instead of 9.8 and we see shape of eggs flat instead of ellipsoid, and bones made up of a heavier element than Ca and average size of life decreased by fourfold. Physics has governed and regulated the evolution on earth and has deep presence in the very DNA of life.

Riddles of Mother Nature

Well this was a weird question I had when I was on a trek in konkan. A butterfly which falls into the buck-eye species are found in plenty there. Please see pic

So this is how these butterflies look like, an the reason behind these eye-like designs on their wings is that they tend to confuse their predators. Now this is one of the many creations of evolution. And such tricks do still work in nature and hence the genome of these species perpetuate and we are seeing these species thriving. So this triggered a question in my mind.

There are several protocols followed in nature which convey specific messages to their predators, e.g.
1) bright colors: I am poisonous... Don't you dare eat me.
2) eye-like, head-like designs: I am trying to fool you by misplacing my eyes/head

Besides these common signals, there may be many more tactics of self defense. Naturally these tactics didn't suddenly come out of the blue. It took several generations of species and several mutations and sub mutations to come to a exactly working combination. So we can assume that the poison arrow frog (see the image) had several mutations tried out before settling down to a bright colored skin which was recognized amongst the group of his predators that its not safe to eat.

Now here goes my confusion/question/anomaly whatever you may call it.
How does the frog informs his habitat that bright colored skin means "Dont eat me, you will die", because even if the predator eats him both of them die and invariably the frogs bright color did not help him and neither did it helped his mutated genes pass over to the next generation, so that his decendents may wear the same skin. If we think the other way round, How did his predators come to know that this new design is what we should not eat. Cos any way post eating, they are dying, forbidding their learnt lesson to be passed on to their descendents in form of mutations.

So in a broader meaning, my question is : How does a mutation in a specie attain equilibrium with its habitat and what is the process of the same to avoid failure of the mutation?