Video up. I am really trying to break out of the mould of a typical science vlogger with this one. I try to channel my inner Brian Cox.

      Like, Comment and Subscribe but most importantly relax and enjoy the video. Cheers.

<-Video Transcript->

       Bonjour Tout le monde, c'est moi l'astronome fou SonOfTerra92 and we are here under another starry night in Malaysia for some stargazing. We are right now watching the death of a star, an event known as a Supernova in the direction of M82.


      It is the 3^rd of February 2014 and we are camped under the constellation Ursa Major translated as the Great Bear but more popularly known as the big dipper. It's the one you learn in elementary school as the giant scoop in the sky.

Yeah, that one.

      We are witnessing a very special and exciting astronomical event in the Galaxy Messier 82. A Type 1a supernova. The closest one to Earth detected in the last 150 years.

      Type 1a supernovas happen in binary star systems, when two stars orbit each other in a gravitational dance and one of the stars happens to be a White Dwarf star, the remnant of a star that has already completed its normal main sequence life cycle. The white dwarf star indulges in a bit of stellar vampirism by accreting mass from its partner and exploding at a critical point.

      What makes Type 1a supernovas of particular interest is that they always happen with a consistent brightness. This allows curious human beings on planet Earth to use them as a form of Universal Yard Stick to measure the immense distances in the Cosmos.

      Here's how it works.
 

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       By comparing the much dimmer observed brightness with the known actual brightness of the Type 1a supernova, we can gauge the distance from our position as observers on Earth to the far flung explosive event. We do this through the inverse square law for light.

      Say you had a series of candles of the same brightness placed at equal distances from each other and you held the first candle in the series. The next candle would appear one-4th the brightness of the one in your hand and the one after that would be one-9th the brightness.

We use standard candles to find the distances to other Galaxies.

      By knowing the apparent dimness of the candle we can find the distance to other candles.

      Astronomers use Type 1a supernova's as the Standard Candle for measuring very far distances in the Universe and with them we've been able to figure out our place in an ever expanding Universe.

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        Type 1a Supernovae excite astronomers because of their scientific significance. They are a rare opportunity to study the Universe in one of its most violent moments. To experience one in a single human life-time is to me a great privilege.

Great Chaos and Great Beauty at the same time.

      But the funny thing is that when I say we are right now observing a Type 1a in M82, the reality is that this rare event actually happened 12 million years ago. 

      Wow, Talk about being late to the party.

      Messier 82 sits just outside the Local Group, a group of 54 galaxies within a 10 million light year diameter in space. Messier 82 is 12 million light-years away. Cosmologically it's our next door neighbour. The light released by SN 2014J (What the astronomers are calling it for now. I call it Darlene) left M82 at a time when there were no humans on Earth. After crossing the vast intervening distance between galaxies the light that originally left 12 million years ago has finally arrived at out doorstep ending its journey in our telescopes, in your eyes and in mines. Some of it in the ground never to be observed by human eyes.

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       Tuning into these events really makes you wonder about just how big the universe is on a scale of distance and time and how like a life raft adrift at sea our planet is adrift in a Cosmic Ocean.

       Our planet in its ordinariness is lost in a Universe of the Extraordinary. What amazes me even more is that on that planet of the mundane exists living things that can put the supernova in their minds and not have it suffer from a similarly violent explosive reaction which once you think about it is what should happen.

And its getting more extraordinary with each passing day.

       How is it that can we understand these things and not go absolutely bananas?

       I think it is because in the end we have to. If not for the imaginative and romantic purpose for some human to stand under a field of stars and talk about some distant event that happend a long time ago in a galaxy far far away or if not for the simple pleasure of watching the sky at night and feeling alive while you are doing it. Some day the ongoing journey of the human race will take us outwards into that Universe of the Extraordinary. A Universe that we are now beginning to understand.

      And after that, more than any other time ever before we will truly be alive as citizens of the Cosmos.

      My name is SonOfTerra92, and this has been another Science Epic Videolog. 

  

Working on Something really special right now. Stay tuned for more on Science Epic.

My Channel: Science Epic

Some Stuff on Energy.

     Energy, it runs our lives and we're made of it.

Reproduction, Energy and Planetary Annihilation.

     The above title is a play on the pop culture phrase "Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll", the three things people commonly associate with life in the fast lane. 

     As far as article starters go what could be better?

    Our planet is currently racing headlong down a similar fast lane as a result of one of it's inhabitant species. No, I'm not referring to the smartest of the bunch that would be the dolphins (Haha, a Hitchhikers reference)

     I'm referring to us human beings and the rate that we are using the resources of currently our only home in the Cosmos. We are now in the process of reworking the environment of planet Earth towards more extreme conditions that have never been seen before on the planet in its entire 4.6 billion year history. 

    We have caused most of that change within the past 100 years resulting in more alterations to the surface our homeworld in less than 0.00000217% of the time that it has ever existed.

    Amongst all that change, human population growth from reproduction is increasing. We're addicted to energy and we still keep those pesky nuclear weapons on hair trigger alert, prepared for a war with no possible winners.

    So we really are living in the fast times of "Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll".  An exceptional time of living on the edge, except it's our planet that is going to have to deal with the massive hangover.

Sorry Earth, We are never ever ever, going to reverse this.

The Cosmic Afterparty.

     All this talk about drastically changing landscapes, planetary engineering and global catastrophes has got me thinking of the vitality of addressing these challenges for emerging spacefaring civilizations.

     Imagine how across the entire Universe similar dramas are being played out on other planets and in other civilizations.

     I've been reading a lot of Isaac Asimov recently. I find his prose to be far more gripping and imaginative than Arthur C. Clarke. Many of Asimov's stories follow the adventures of spacefaring civilizations that have already made it past the fragile single planet stage. 

Our world, our struggles and the hopes and dreams of our species may be shared by other living things on other worlds as well.

     A common thread that lines Asimov's stories is the setting of a future civilization where all the challenges of today have already been dealt with.

     Asimovs' stories commonly reference the 21st century as the "Time of Troubles" or the "Perilous Days". The idea is that sometime in the future when we finally do solve our energy problems, our population growth problems and the various differences that divide the members of humanity we will look back to today and realize how childish it all was.

    I am an optimist. I look forward to the future and I try the best I can to communicate ideas that can hasten the arrival of that "World of Abundance" that everyone has been talking about. 

     But there is a big problem with this that I find very unsettling. 

    If we do solve today's problems some time in the future wouldn't there be equally greater problems to face once we've done so.

     This is where Sci-Fi stories commonly fall short in the details and leaves me reeling back to discover reality. 

We can imagine getting there, but can we imagine actually living there?

Infinity and Beyond

     Perhaps it is because of a lack of comprehension. We simply do not know where the future may take us and are content with just seeing the good that may come out of Science and Innovation without considering the consistent side effects.

    I think that even if we do solve the problems plaguing the humans of the 21st century, the problems plaguing the humans of the 22nd century would no doubt be 10x greater. Their energy crisis would be far beyond us. The algorithms they use for population control would perplex us to no end. Their ways of solving problems would simply stupefy us.

   All it takes is a little extra wisdom for our heads to catch up with our tails and realize that we are already living in the future and that all of tomorrows stories are written from the adventures of today.

Sincerely,
SonOfTerra92,
31/1/2014

A MALAYSIAN STORY: "ALLAH" in the Bible, A really pointless argument.

So this totally happened in Malaysia.

    Hello Internetland., It's me again SonOfTerra92 that obscure science slinging, bunk bashing,  guy on Science Epic. If you have watched the above video you can tell that I am a Malaysian. In the video I hint at the kind of hijinks we experience here in Malaysia when it comes to the politicization of religion.

     What a way to start the new year. Bravo, Malaysia, bravo. We've have definitely strong this time.

    Just a recap of what happened on the 2nd day of January.  Islamic religious department JAIS (of which is the religious department of my home state, Selangor represent) raided the office of the Bible Society of Malaysia in Damansara and confiscated a couple hundred Malay language bibles that were claimed to use used the word "Allah".

     20 JAIS people and 2 police offices barged into the Bible Society of Malaysia centre making arrests under the suspicion that they were propagating Christianity among Muslims.

     I am a science communicator. As far as these kinds of things go my role in them can usually be stretched so far as to battling creationists ideas, "Young Earthers" and the occasional moon landing conspiracy. You might be wondering why I would soil my hands in the affair of two religions taking stabs at each other? Would not it be better to leave them be? There are after all more experienced people that can comment on these events.

      This issue concerns me because of how it may affect the future of the country that I currently live in and ultimately my life as a bystander in religious debate in Malaysia.

      JAIS conducted the raid (not anything like the 2011 Indonesian action Movie) under the claim of the Selangor Non-Islamic Religions (Control of Propagation Among Muslims) Enactment 1988, a state enactment that prevents the use of Arabic words like Fatwa, Alhamdulillah, Insyaallah and most importantly "Allah"  in non-Islamic religious practice.

     Muslims in Malaysia have been made to think that  think that the word "Allah" is sacred to them and they are willing to legislate laws to rightfully defend it.

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     I am not a big fan of organised religion nor am I religious to begin with but  it doesn't take an expert (Or an ex-Muslim) to realize that a raid by an Islamic religious authority on a non-Islamic organization is a clearly in violation of something. At the very least its violating common sense. When I initially heard of this story that was that came to mindrst. Regardless of whatever law written or unwritten that we have in Malaysia, JAIS clearly has no jurisdiction over the Bible Sociey of Malaysia.

     Their actions were not a not just legally inappropriate but also morally unjustifiable.

    When it comes down to the actual raid I am reminded of the scene with the cops in Project X. In more civilised cases all the Christians had to do was pull off a Costa.

That's how it's done.

     If this raiding attitude persists how much longer before JAIS starts knock knock knocking on peoples homes (parody anyone)?

     What turned this issue from bad to worse was the long running debate of the use of the word "Allah" in non-Muslim religious practice. Which brings me to my next no-brainer. In a freethinking world the words protected by the 1988 state enactment are just that, WORDS.

     The 1988 enactment was put in place to supposedly protect the Muslim majority from potentially negative external influences. It is a clear example of  how far Malaysia still has left to go in its moral and ethical development.

     What we have here is a subtle attempt at thought control via word control. Forget 1984, this is 2014. The scary thing is that people actually buy into it. Most of the Muslim majority here consist of the see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil type. Trust me I've been around enough them.

     Because of  this attitude there exists a generation of Malaysian Muslims who don't care to ask the big questions and to me this represents a challenge in communicating science. The inroads towards sceptical inquiry among Malaysian Muslims are blocked. They can go to school and score straight A's in Astrobilological Nuclear Engineering but at the end of the day the key scientific values of scepticism and scrutiny are hard to communicate.

     That worries me because we still end up with a  people can be manipulated.

Question Everything, even the actions of  elected Leaders.

     Those are just my two cents on the issue. That's all from me. SonOfTerra92 signing off.And I'll see you next time.

10/1/2014

Wisdom From A wandering mad scientist.

POSITAWESOMISM: A NEW RELIGION IS BORN.

     In the next 5 minutes after reading this post you will witness the birth of a new religion. I'm going to try to define a set of world views from scratch. 

      I am doing this because in this day and age we tend to get drowned out in the arguments between the major labels in the religion debate that we tend to overlook that it is we as conscious human beings who have to make the final decision of exactly what to believe in. 

      So here is my attempt at creating a something to believe in.

Inspired by this video

      Positawesomism is what I will call it, I know its quite a mouth full but hold on, we're just getting started. It is described by the words "positive" and "awesome" which are its central pillars. A good start, that's 3 less than Islam.

     First I need a theme. I'll do away with applying a typical "theism" concept and instead choose to build a set of philosophies like Buddhism. It is a group of fundamental principles that can be summarized in as few sentences as possible.

    10 is way too many and we know that 10 doesn't always work. So I will go with just 2. They have to be relevant now and they have to be relevant when humanity is colonizing Alpha Centauri. Those two core principles are.

1. Stay positive.

2. Keep moving forward.

      Like the name implies this new religion of mine is about staying positive. All adherents must strive to become decent human beings. Since religions often copy from each other this is inclusive of the popular Wheatonism philosophy of "Don't be a dick".

      Positive behaviour is encouraged while anything that hurts the believer, other believers and even Apositawesomists are shunned. There is no sinning in Positawesomism because of the second pillar.

    The second pillar of Positawesomism is to always keep moving forward. Positawesomists are encouraged to become better and better people on a daily basis. This is also an idea taken from other competing religions but the only difference here is that curiosity is heavily encouraged. Not just curiosity in Science but in all manner of disciplines. Say today you don'y know how to dance. You become curious about it and you go out to learn how to dance. Every new bit of new knowledge learned contributes to the overall experience of being a Positawesomist.

Every Religion needs a Good Story.

     Every religion needs a great myth that might or might not be true. This is step 2. The myth that I intend to create is called "Children of the Stars". A long time ago great celestial beings died in a cataclysmic cosmic flame. The essence of these star beings eventually became "Life" after thousands of years of being moulded by the grand spirit of Cosmic Evolution. 

      The descendants of these beings discovered that they could actually connect with their Cosmic heritage by simply staying positive and moving forward. These creatures started movements on their home planet to deepen their understanding of the ancient and vast Cosmos that they came from. They created Science, Art, Music and Language to understand one another, their world and their connection with Positawesomism.

     All Positawesomists walk "The Path" that begins at birth and ends at death. "The Path" is the believers journey of staying positive and moving forward which will ultimately connect them with the Universe. This feeling of connection itself is the reward of walking "The Path". It is similar to the Dharma in Hinduism but with more emphasis on understanding the believers position in all physical reality.

     Now that's a creation myth.

All Positawesomists walk "The Path"

 
     Step 3 which is my final step will be to chose a propagation method. Islam has birth and marriage and Christianity has the Jehovah's witnesses (much good that has done them). For my choice method of propagation I choose the Internet. The internet has become the main battleground for conventional religions and for the most part it has become a battleground that they consistently end up losing. My religion takes the internet and uses it to its advantage. Wherever there may be a Redditor sharing knowledge to help others, that is where Positawesomism flourishes. Wherever there is a YouTube video teaching skills or expanding a community that's where Positawesomist energy will be. 

     There's just no stopping it.

     So there it is. My new age religion called Positawesomism. In 5 minutes I've created something that might live forever and because of how the Internet works a part of it will live forever. Most religions have a shelf life depending on whether they are adaptable to change. Positawesomism takes the best qualities of modern religions, does away with all the BS and simply tells people to live long, prosper and keep looking up.

     Sometimes that's all the timeless wisdom we need.

Sincerely,
SonOfTerra92
First Grand Puba of the Church of Positawesomism. (It's not really a church, more of a commune really)

16/17/2013

So this video happened about a month ago.

     It was a fun video to make but it was a bit too spontaneous for its own good. I was moving out of my apartment and decided to go on a sudden night time adventure since the date of my leaving coincided with the peak of the 2013 Perseids meteor shower in my city.

    I had as much fun making the video with my friends as I did thinking of the grand ideas I wanted to present on that night by the lake as the meteor shower fell in over our heads. In the end, the video was shot well enough. I definitely tried to channel my inner Brian Cox.

Sadly not a pic from that night, but what I wouldn't give to capture something like this.

     Reverie aside, I felt a tinge of disappointment as I was splicing the video together weeks later. Because of the level of spontaneity of the video I did not have long to prepare the material that I wanted to deliver regardless of how inspired I was to deliver it on that night.


    YouTube is hard work, you would think that I would be thoroughly seasoned in this after all these years. Some things just end up getting lost between planning and execution. Its like channel interference in a communication system. But after all that I have been through I have managed to pick up a thing or two.



      The main idea that ultimately inspired me to make a video that night was this sense of interconnectedness that we all share with the universe that we live in. This connection exists whether we realize it or not. It is found in how our existence has been shaped by the Universe that we occupy and in how we are now able to greatly affect the state of our own tiny little part of that Universe that we call Earth.

More than just being a part of the Universe, we are the Universe. It is inside us.

     In ancient times the arrival of an interplanetary  traveller like a comet would normally be considered an omen heralding some sort of special event like the death of a king or the fall of an empire. Human beings have always sought to connect themselves with the world they live in. In times where we lacked the proper knowledge to build a more or less accurate connection we created stories and rituals to bridge the gap in our relationship with the world around us.

      For most of the time we didn't know any better. We didn't know how connected we truly were. We didn't know that the building blocks for life on Earth could have been seeded by a similar cometary traveller billions of years ago. We didn't know that those same building blocks were created from the nuclear hearts of massive stars that had to die just so that we could live. For most of the time it was just the big bad scary Universe and the humans. Only our made up stories gave us some hope for a connection to any of it despite the much richer reality that persisted all along.

It doesn't matter whether it makes you feel big or small. You a living part of it.

      Through Science we are now able to tap into that deeper reality to discover that we live a world of "nearly impossible possibilities" and that we have become connected to that world by our consciousness and curiosity.

      The universal nature of Science provides a way of bridging that gap in understanding more than any made up story ever could and ever will. It brings us closer than ever before to the meteor shower, to the stars we see at night, to the particles that coalesce to make us up and ultimately closer to ourselves and every other human being on planet Earth. 

      On that night as the meteor shower rained above us I wondered of all the humans that had ever seen a meteor shower and the meteor shower itself. I thought of how much more related the two really were, and in a Universe that may not be made for us ...

       It was much closer than we would normally think.

Sincerely,
SonOfTerra92

1/10/2013       

Hey there World, So this video totally happened. It was not what I had originally planned for the moment but I feel that it has its own special place.

And here is the script.

It is perhaps one of the most important questions that we are faced with since learning of our true place in the Universe:

Are we alone?

It is a question that persisted in our ancestors who could only scarcely dream of understanding the true meaning of the lights in the night sky.

And even today we still wonder…

Could the Cosmos be alive with the music of intelligent life?

The billion dollar question: Are we alone in the Universe?

Only recently, in the latter half of the past century have we developed “a means” of truly answering this grandest of questions.

And that method is called Radio.

The search for a common medium of communication: Radio.

 While our ancestors were stuck with mere speculation, modern human civilization has acquired the capacity of tuning into the surrounding noise that fills our universe in an attempt to detect the radio signature of advanced civilizations hidden among the stars.

We do this by listening for radio signals with very unique frequencies. The radio signals we’re interested in exist within a special range of the electromagnetic spectrum which makes them noticeably different from the background noise emitted by the rest of the Universe. The holy grail of this search is the detection of a “narrowband” signal, a signal with a constrained frequency bandwidth. We use similar signals to communicate on Earth and we're hoping that if extraterrestrials exist, that they would do the same.

We've only been listening for a comparatively short period of time, and within a select array of frequencies. Could we actually be in the middle of an intergalactic conversation right now, at a time when we have the chance to listen in?

IS intelligence prominent throughout the Universe ? Or is it a rarity ?

Science, Technology and The Laws of Nature can provide common ground for two very different beings to become aware of each other.  Just as it has connected and unified the billions of human souls on Earth, Radio technology may provide a way for life separated across the vastness of time and space to communicate.

No other means of communication that we can yet derive from the laws of nature is faster. No other means is cheaper and easier to implement. Even civilizations that have yet to fully master interstellar space travel can still afford an extensive radio detection program as evident in our own civilization.

It all depends on where our priorities are. So far our most dedicated program to listen for signals from outer space called SETI (The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) costs less than one predator attack drone a year.

<predator drone video>

Where do our priorities lay?

But perhaps a much more interesting notion than just listening for extraterrestrial signals is the possibility that we've made ourselves noticeable to the wider galactic community. For the past 110 years we've been leaking our own radio signals into outer space. Right now there exists a Radio Sphere 200 light-years in diameter surrounding our planet. Although at longer distances the signals would be too weak to carry any significant information, nearby civilizations with the capability of sifting through the static might still be able to learn of our presence granted they have radio technology and a shared curiosity to listen to the Stars.

Endless distances to venture off to, could one one of those horizons contain beings that ponder the same questions as us?

Just as we are now listening for evidence of the existence of extraterrestrial beings, could they also in turn be listening for us? In due time we will finally be able to answer that question and determine whether we truly are alone or whether the Cosmos is alive with signs of life.

<Outro>