Bag's Rants

Soon. In cosmic terms.

Too hot to do anything so I have just been pottering about reading or browsing the web. The servers in the house are shut down because they were getting too hot and I had a disk failure. So I'm on a laptop at the moment.

I come across this article about a glimpse of a soon to be supernova. Read more here. Now I've always been impressed with scientists calculating out everything from the big bang to using suns gravity to examine planets. Really is brilliant the way they work it out. Theory out for review and back for refinement until they have a theory that holds water. Then they only have to wait a billion years to test it but it still amazes me how right they are even those from the 1600s using the equipment they had then. Human ingenuity is impressive.

It seems all our information on supernova comes from observing long exploded stars and theorising. So I was quite interested in reading that they are watching a star which seems on the verge of coming a supernova. Any minute now. In cosmic terms any time from now to 100,000 years it's going to blow. Apparently,they are so rare that the last one seen by humans was in 1572. It seems this will be an opportunity to check out some of the theory. Hope we are still here if it is at the latter end of the timescale. Although, if we are, we will hopefully be observing a little closer.

I think I have been watching too much science fiction. You see, I think we should be at the stage where we are working on interstellar travel. Warp engines and the like. Let's get out there and start expanding. Bush's plans for going to Mars do not seem to be progressing. All the money going on Iraq and homeland security.

Makes you think though. In cosmic terms our wars and advances have taken place in a blink of an eye. Because space is so vast and we won't get a return for many years we won't invest in anything. Got to get a quick return you see. The sooner we start the better. Or it will be too late for us as a species.

posted by Bag @ 11:54 am