Chile miners rescue

The capsule : will become object of veneration

29 miners rescued now.  4 more of the original 33 to come up, plus several rescuers.  Been watching BBC News on and off throughout the day.

You can be sure that capsule will be erected in a museum and will become an object of national veneration. It’s striking how the operation has been the focus of huge national pride, flags and chanting “Chi – le”.  Some scenes have brought a tear to the eye.  Great dignity of the miners. The occupation of miner, toiling in the bowels of the earth to enrich the already rich, has forever been a powerful icon of capitalism.

The president of Chile has just been interviewed and said “I hope that from now, when people hear the word Chile, they will remember not the coup or the dictatorship but this rescue”. 

From The Guardian website “several commentators – including international trade unions – have pointed to Chile's failure to ratify International Labour Organisation (ILO) conventions on safety and health in mines, and drawn attention to the consequences of inadequate workplace safety standards across the country.”

The behaviour of the mining company San Esteban seems to have been disgraceful. Partly explained perhaps by the fact that they look like being forced into well deserved bankruptcy. After the August 5 cave-in that trapped the workers, the company sacked more than 200 other miners, refusing to pay their wages and entitlements.  The miners union in Chile, is still, even now, pursuing demands that the government pay the workers’ wages if the company won’t.  The Chilean president in the interview I've just seen deflected a question put to him on this.

A comment on the website of the US trade union federation AFL-CIO draws a disparaging contrast with how the Bush administration handled the New Orleans hurricane: “The entire country turned out for the miners. There are celebrations throughout Chile. The President is at a 24 hour watch at the site, greeting the miners as they come out. The operation cost 9 million dollars and the mine owner is being fined 10 million. The miners will get constant medical attention for 6 months. Then there was Katrina ...”

An Earthlike planet?

Gliese & Gliese 581g

Gave my extra terrestrial life lecture again in Cork on the 11th.  I became aware of two developments after the Galway lecture, but in time to include them in Cork.  I can't hazard an estimate of their importance because I haven't yet come across any commentary in Nature or New Scientist, which is where I normally take my cue for what's significant in the world of science.

One was the announcement of a planet that was in the news on 29th September.  That was Gliese 581g.  Gliese 581 is the name of a star, and several planets have been detected called a, b, c etc. The illustration is an artist’s impression showing the star in the background. The planet in the foreground, has, apparently, been named “Zarmina's World”.  It’s worth stressing that any illustration you see of extrasolar planets will always be an artist’s impression. Their existence and their properties turn up as data on a computer, not as photographs.  Notice how in this illustration the artist has added seas. So far there is no warrant for those seas.      

The Guardian reported the story like this: “Astronomers have discovered a potentially habitable planet of similar size to Earth in orbit around a nearby star. A team of planet hunters spotted the alien world circling a red dwarf star called Gliese 581, 20 light years away. The planet is in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ of space around a star where surface temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold for liquid water to form.” 

Early indications seem to be that this is the most Earthlike extrasolar planet discovered so far. This however will need to be confirmed. I don’t know how long the confirmation process will take.  Dr Lewis Dartnell of UCL is quoted in The Daily Telegraph as saying it’s undeniably very exciting, but we don’t know if there's any water there.

The other story broke in the Irish Times last Friday, October 8. It was a report of work done at NUI Maynooth by a Dr James McInerney.

Simply put, there are two types of cell. Cells with a nucleus and cells without a nucleus.  All complex life – animals, plants - consists of cells that do have a nucleus.  But the first cells didn’t have one, and the question is, how did the first cell with a nucleus come about?  There is a view that unlocking this puzzle will answer the question of how life on Earth became complex and eventually intelligent.

The work at Maynooth seems to provide such an explanation.  Justifying the relevance of this in a lecture about extra terrestrial life,  I said that we’re hunting for freakish, chance events in the story of life.  But we’re hunting for them in the same way that you may hunt at home for unpaid bills.  We’re hunting for them and hoping not to find them. Because if there are no freakish, chance events in the story of life, then our hopes rise that life will have emerged elsewhere, given the right environment.

I'll say more when I’ve seen what Nature and New Scientist think.

Subsequent info here
 

Extra-terrestrial life – the next 10 years

5 years ago if you had told me I would be travelling to astronomy clubs to give lectures I would have laughed at you. But last Monday I was in Galway to talk to the astronomy club there about whether the universe is a machine for creating life.

Though when I give the talk again, which I may do next week in Cork, the title ought to be “Extra-terrestrial life – the next 10 years”. I started by saying that I didn’t intend to talk about extra-terrestrial intelligence, despite knowing from audience questions on previous occasions that this is what tends to arouse most interest. I quoted Paul Davies as saying that he wouldn't be surprised if there is no life of any description in the universe except here on Earth. Despite holding that view, Davies is head of the SETI post-detection committee (*). He will be the first to be informed if (despite his doubts) ET does actually call.

Interrogating the Martian microbe
Are you related to LUCA?

I strongly recommended his book The Eerie Silence.

I used a tree of life diagramme to show that all Earth life is related, and ultimately descended from a single-cell organism which lived 3.8 billion years ago. The cell rejoices in the name LUCA – the last universal common ancestor. I then suggested that number 1 on the list of developments to look out for, is this: if a microbe should be discovered on Mars, will it turn out to be related to LUCA? I  showed the interrogation room where an answer to this question will be demanded of the Martian microbe.

If the answer is yes, Paul Davies may be right. Life may consist of just us and a few stray cousin microbes in the solar system. If not (something which Paul Davies admits he secretly hopes for) then we can conclude that life will be abundant in the universe.

Other forthcoming developments that I suggested the audience keep en eye on were

1 – Mars exploration : NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission which should arrive 2012, and a decision on whether to fund a Mars sample return mission.

2 - Synthetic biology – will it provide insights on life: what life is, where to look for it?

3 – Lake Vostok (Antarctica) – scientists are drilling through 4km of ice to test the cold dark waters beneath. Next year may see the success of this project – will Lake Vostok provide insights into possibilities for life on icy moons such as Europa?

4 – Decisions on solar system moon missions, eg a Jupiter Europa orbiter.

5 - Cambrian Explosion – this was the event 543 million years ago where evolution invented the idea of body parts – heads, guts etc. A fluke occurrence, or inevitable? This ongoing debate has something to say about the prospects for complex life elsewhere (always supposing that there’s any life at all elsewhere).

* He is chair of the Post-Detection Science and Technology Taskgroup of the International Academy of Astronautics.

Just discovered SourceWatch

Just discovered SourceWatch which bills itself as a “collaborative, specialized encyclopedia of the people, organizations, and issues shaping the public agenda. SourceWatch profiles the activities of front groups, PR spinners, industry-friendly experts, industry-funded organizations, and think tanks trying to influence public opinion on behalf of corporations or government.”

US based I think.  It seems right on to me but I should welcome an independent endorsement. Can't be too careful with internet information.

Is the Tea Party a form of fascism?

Just got round to reading The Guardian of 10th September, where it reports that the Taxpayers Alliance in Britain, a lobby group for low taxes and small government, is taking advice from Freedom Works, one of the well-funded organisations behind the Tea Party.  Taxpayers Alliance founder Matthew Elliott wants to organise mass anti-union demonstrations next time there’s a tube strike in London.

A working definition of fascism is a mass movement mobilised in the interests of big business.  Fascist movements take steps to hide their pro-business aims from supporters by adopting anti-business slogans.  Think of the anti-Wall Street rhetoric of the Tea Party.

There's a video of an hour-long Noam Chomsky lecture on this, on, off all places, the Veterans Today website (Military Veterans and Foreign Affairs Journal). He says “Ridiculing the tea party shenanigans is a serious error,” and “I’m just old enough to have heard a number of Hitler’s speeches on the radio, and I have a memory of the texture and the tone of the cheering mobs, and I have the dread sense of the dark clouds of fascism gathering here at home.”  He talks about the bitter the class war relentlessly waged by the US business community, a business community which, he says, is unusual amongst industrial societies for being intensely class conscious. The date is April this year.

Amongst the aims of Freedom Works are to "Fight The Left ...[and to create] a grassroots juggernaut capable of going toe-to-toe with the unions, extreme enviros, and the MoveOn.org's of the world." 

According to the The Guardian, Freedom Works has received funding from the tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris. The Guardian also reports that local branches of Freedom Works' sister organization, Americans for Prosperity have also received tobacco money and oppose smoke-free workplace laws and cigarette taxes. 

Information in the two preceding paragraphs from SourceWatch. See my comment on this.

 

First World War to end on Sunday with final payment

Startling story in the Irish Examiner on Wednesday.  Germany has until this week still been paying off First World War reparations.

The First World War “finally draws to a close”, the Examiner says, on Sunday 3rd October, with Germany’s final payment of wartime reparations to the Allies. 

After 92 years, a final payment of €69.1 million payment will discharge the onerous debt, which the paper correctly describes as “the price for one world war and a cause of another”.  For campaigning against the reparations was one of Hitler’s main themes, and it struck a chord with some Germans who wouldn't otherwise have given him the time of day.  See my recent post What was it like at the time?

The reparations were set at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, as both compensation to France, Britain, and America, and as punishment for the war.  Article 231 of the Treaty (the so-called 'war guilt' clause) declared Germany and its allies responsible for all 'loss and damage' suffered by the Allies during the war and provided the basis for reparations.

John Maynard Keynes was the principal representative of the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference. In June 1919 he resigned in protest at the extent of the reparations, and subsequently protested publicly in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919).

What follows is quoted from the Irish Examiner story. “The initial sum agreed for war damages in 1919 was 226 billion Reichsmarks, a sum later reduced to 132bn. At the time this was the equivalent of around €28bn – the then equivalent of 100 million kilograms of gold.

“However, interest on that sum was added to considerably when Hitler rose to power and refused to foot the bill any longer. The Treaty of Versailles settlement is also credited with accelerating the Nazis’ rise to power as it was a substantial roadblock to getting the country back on a sound economic footing as money poured out of the country to finance the debt.

“France, which was on its last legs after the war, pushed hardest for the maximum fiscal punishment for Germany. 

“The Wall Street Crash in 1929 sounded the death knell of the already feeble Weimar Republic and the country sank further and further into debt. Just four years later, Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany and by the end of the decade, the country was at war again in Europe.

“The reparation debt came back at the end of World War II, and was quickly frozen again when the nation was split into West and East Germany. Following the 1990 reunification, the debt was renewed. 

“Most of the money goes to private individuals, pension funds and corporations holding debenture bonds.”

The shore of our ignorance

John Archibald Wheeler (1911 – 2008) is someone I must find out about.  He said: "As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance."  He was an American theoretical physicist, and one of the later collaborators of Albert Einstein.  He is also known for having coined the term black hole.  But if he never did anything except coin that phrase about the island of our knowledge and the shore of our ignorance, he would have justified his existence.   

Even though he probably borrowed the thought from TH Huxley who said "The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.  Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land." (Huxley was "Darwin's Bulldog" 1825 – 1895)