The End of the World.

There's been a lot of chatter this past week about the end of the world, the end of life as we know it, Armageddon, judgement day, whatever term or phrase you want to use for it. It all started from a prediction made by Harold Camping, a Christian radio broadcaster from Oakland CA (right up in my neck of the woods), that the world would end on May 21st at 6pm. Harold had made a similar prediction back in the 90's when he claimed the world would end in September 1994. Of course he was wrong on both occasions
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He based his claims on so called 'careful study' of the bible, that he somehow calculated when judgement day  would occur up to the the exact day and hour . Did he fail to read the several passages in the bible which make it clear that nobody can know when the end will come? (Matthew 24:36 "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."  Mark 13:32 "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."  Acts 1:7 He said to them: "It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.")

Camping is not alone in his search to try to figure out when the end of the world will come; these sorts investigations and claims have been made throughout history by many people and in many religions. For example, all of the the three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) have deep seeded religious views that promote and amplify prophecies that the end of the world is either imminent or coming soon within a few centuries. For Christians in particular, the belief that Jesus will return to usher in the end of the world is a dominating factor in these sorts of prophecies. Christians have thought that the end of the world has been imminent essentially since the religion was founded nearly 2000 years ago. Even in the bible it shows the apostles and disciples of Jesus making claims that the end was near at hand. But it seems that all cultures and religions have some notion of the end of the world, the Mayan calender for example is used to argue that the end of the world will come in 2012 which is, of course, another claim which will be dis proven very soon.

The truth is that the world will not be ending this millennia or even the next. We as human beings can never know what will happen to the human race or what the future will hold for us, but one thing is certain though, humans will go extinct, just as surely as any other animal will go extinct. We may have descendants of humanity living on for many millions of years into the future, but humanity as we know it does have an end. What sort of end it will be is for anyone to guess. My prediction is that; unless we annihilate ourselves and life on earth with a nuclear war, humanity will go on living for several hundreds of thousands of years, after which there will be certain branches of humanity that go extinct and new forms of humanity that will be living on for perhaps several millions of years. It will likely be an ambiguous 'end' to our race of humanity that will branch off into some other race of humanity into the future, just as it has been for all other lifeforms on earth since life began.

Looking beyond the end of humanity and our ultimate extinction we can make much more precise and accurate statements as to how the earth as a whole will end in a few billion years. With the knowledge we have on the life cycle of stars and what we know about the age of the sun, scientists can give a fairly specific timeline and sequence of events that will bring about the end of the earth. The Sun is middle aged, being roughly 4.5 billion years old.



So in about 4 billion years the sun will have increased in temperature and will start to expand more rapidly to where all the oceans will be evaporated. Eventually the sun will likely engulf the earth and obliterate it around 5 billion years from now.

As far as the universe itself, it is expected to continue expanding in size to were eventually all matter will be so spread out that there will be no light or heat remaining, this is called the 'Heat Death of the Universe'.

With all of this in mind we can be assured that the world will not be ending for many many many millions of years. Weather or not we as humans will survive longer than a few hundred thousand years is unknown but it really only makes sense to think of our short term survival and prosperity as opposed to being fixated on how things will eventually end. With this larger perspective we should try to make a world that will continue to give space, life, and opportunities to the many, many, many, generations that will follow in our wake.

Attack on the Middle Class

Alot is going on in the news that is alarming to say the least. Many of the newly elected Tea Partiers have made it very clear which side of the economic divide they stand on; they stand with the rich and the big corporations.

The latest onslaught on the middle class is taking place in Wisconsin where the newly elected Governor Walker is attempting to push a bill through the state legislature that would in essence destroy the right for workers to take part in unions and collective bargaining (Walker's union fight latest in a long history). The reasons that Walker gives are weak at best. He claims that this needs to be done in order to deal with the state budget deficit of 112 million dollars. But wait a minute...just last month he pushed for a bill that was passed that gave tax cuts to the corporations in his state. The amount of those tax cuts is equivalent in size to the budget shortfall. So basically, he just gave money to the corporations while trying to take that same amount of money from middle class workers. There are now several other states in which the republicans are proposing similar measures to cut away workers rights to collectively bargain for working conditions and benefits. A great overview of this can be seen here: GOP seizes on crisis to shift power to corporations.

This is all to common for Republicans these days. They constantly want to pass measures which take from the poor and give to the rich. Like in January, when the U.S. house republicans refused to give out jobless benefits unless president Obama agreed to extend the tax cuts for the wealthiest among us.

What is going on here? Why would people support such measures and policy? I can understand why lobbyists and politicians might support this sort of thing...after all many of them are earning their living by taking the side of the powerful and and well to do, but why would regular everyday people support all of these causes to strip money and influence from the middles class and the poor and give it all to the wealthy and the powerful? The only reason I can think if is that they are ideologically and dogmatically brainwashed by the arguments and propaganda of the corporations and the wealthy. In essence, most of the people supporting the Tea Party and the Republicans on this particular issue are unknowingly supporting their own economic demise and the demise of the middle class as we know it.

So the conservative far right continue to try to take from the poor and give to the rich, much like we would expect of Robin Hood's evil twin brother. It is important to remember that in the past Republicans have stood up for the poor and the middle class. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, was a great advocate for workers rights and worked hard to bust large monopolies and established the Department of Commerce and Labor. I bring this up to make it clear that I have no ill will towards Republicans in general, but when they knowingly or unknowingly side with the powerful and the wealthy at the expense of everyone else, well then I take great issue with that.

We must do all we can to see that the Tea Partiers are not successful in their efforts to undermine the middles class and continue to prop up the powerful and the wealthy. We must fight for the rights of workers, for a sense of fairness in our economy, and for reasonable reforms to deal with the budget issues that states and the federal government are now facing.

Caving in: Obama's blunder

I have supported president Obama for the most part since he was nominated for president back in 2008. He was not my first choice for the job, but far superior to McCain in my estimation. When the whole health care debate was in full swing I was quite aggravated to see how the administration buckled under GOP pressure and didn't even try to include a public option in the bill, he didn't fight for it. He gave away what was his "ideal" plan from the beginning. Why?

Sadly, since that time this has happened again and again. For example with the financial reform deal, the administration and many of the Democrats gave up on much of the tougher regulations that were most effective in getting rid of many of the root causes to the financial melt down in 2008 before Obama took office. In the end we got a very watered down and not very effective law as with the health care bill. The banks found loopholes in the bill which enabled them to go right back to business as usual (http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/wall-street-loophole-financial-reform) and are setting us up for yet another financial melt down in the future.

I keep seeing these guys fold and give up the more progressive elements of his campaign. Did he have this planned all along? Is he being bought out by the special interests who want to see all these things fail so that they can keep their profits and economic strong hold? Who knows. All I know is that enough is enough.

With the new tax cut debate and the pending legislation that would follow, you would hope that the man and his possy would start off with a strong negotiating position. How about this; since nearly 75% of Americans supported either a partial repeal of the Bush tax cuts (taking only those making under $250K a year for tax break extensions),  or a full repeal, how about leverage the republicans using that fact. If nearly 75% of the country is with you you have a very strong bargaining tool and you should damn well use it! Why not rally the people to put pressure on those senators that might oppose this? Again I am at a loss for words as to why he would just give up the fight before the fight even began. This I believe will be the downfall of this presidency and putting us in worse shape then we could have been if he had fought to get more of what he supposedly wanted

I have heard at least 3 people say to me that because of this they will not be voting for Obama again in 2012. I can't say I blame them. Hopefully he can turn this around and start pushing for what most people want and stop being so flimsy.

Now the Left is riled up and not backing the president on this deal he made with the republicans. If he is not careful there may be a rival democrat running for president in 2012 that is more progressive, or at least more willing to stand and fight for the progressive cause. This could make for an interesting and historic presidential race in 2012 with the possibility of there being 4 presidential candidates on the ballot, one from the "Tea Party" on from the Republican establishment, Obama, and a progressive democratic candidate. Now that I would like to see.

Can radioactive decay rates change & Does it really matter?

Some out there may have heard that there has been a recent discovery that indicates that the decay rate of some radioactive elements may change very slightly in relation to the amount of solar radiation they are exposed to. Nobody knows if this might be due to nutrino particles or some other undiscovered particle that has yet to be discovered by science. Some (namely the creationists anti-evolutionists) are using this new discovery to throw out the validity of radioactive dating methods all-together saying somehow this proves radioactive dating is unreliable. Not so fast!

First of all, it has only been tested and verified by a couple labs, so until more information and testing is available I will not take these finding too seriously yet. But even if this phenomena is true, then what exactly would that mean for radioactive dating and it's reliability and consistency?

Well if you look at the actual findings; some of which are described here: http://dinosaurc14ages.com/changedecay.htm, you will see that the actual variation detected is quite small, around 0.3% for both chlorine-36 and silicon-32. So what are the implications of this variation? Well if you look at chlorine-36 as an example, it is used to date rock and fossils that are relatively old, since the half life of chlorine-36 is around 300,000 years. So if we take the seasonal variation found by the new findings at 0.3 % we see that some measurements could be off by an additional 900 years...well that doesn't seem so bad. If you say you found a fossil that is dated to 300, 000 years ago by a chlorine-36 sample then you would just adjust your accuracy by an additional  plus or minus 900 years. This doesn't change much of anything in the way of accuracy or reliability. Moreover, if you simply average across a calender yea,r the radioactive decay would still be extremely stable and these new findings fail to show anything that is significant to effect dating methods that we already use in the scientific community.

The study also has yet to verify or show the degree to which this phenomenon effects particular radioactive elements aside from chlorine-36, manganese-5, silicon-32,  radium-226 of which it was observed that these have only "seasonal variations of a few tenths of a percent in the decay rates of the respective isotopes" (Castelvecchi). So what about other radioactive elements like carbon, plutonium, uranium, or potassium? Well one study by Peter Cooper on plutonium-238 from the Cassini spacecraft indicates that it is not effected by solar radiation fluctuations at all. Since Cassini traveled very near to the sun going to Venus, and very far from the sun out near Saturn; you would expect that if this hypothesis of solar effect on radiation were true that the plutonium contained in the spacecraft would show larger fluctuations in decay. Well guess what? It didn't show any variation in decay rate (Cooper; arxiv.org/abs/0809.4248). This is evidence that the initial findings may very well be incorrect and that radioactive materials are not effected by variation in solar radiation, and at the very least perhaps only a few elements are effected to a very small degree.

So to all those out there who would use this new finding to debunk the long standing methods for radioactive dating, think again! There is no evidence here to show that any dating method is not valid, reliable and accurate. The very most that they could argue is that some dates that have been given may be off by a couple tenths of a percent at most. This would not change the vast majority of findings and conclusions made in the scientific community. So we can rest assured that the Earth is still roughly 4.5 billion years old, give or take a few million, and dinosaurs still lived over 65 million years ago give or take a few hundred thousand years, and mankind still has Africa as it's cradle around 250, 000 years ago give or take a couple thousand years.

What is interesting and possibly ground breaking with this apparent finding is that this may indicate that a brand new particle exists that had never been detected before. This could start a new debate within the physics community but surely after more testing has been done. But to all non-physicists, this is not a game changer.