Personal Blogs

I'm sitting here right now contemplating never seeing another manned NASA mission. Its quite a sobering thought. Since the early days of Mercury through Gemini, Apollo and Shuttle the manned missions have been with us for 50 years, longer than I have been alive (just). With no replacement currently in sight and even the best of the commercial carriers not yet ready to step up to the plate, America has lost the capability to put humans into space.

The shuttle programme had a troubled birth. Teetering on the edge of cancellation since its inception. It finally made it only because it underwent a major redesign, enlarging it to make it capable of carrying spy satellites into orbit meaning it could get funding from the defence budget.

And yet this craft built the International Space Station. It launched and then repaired the Hubble space telescope as well as launching countless other satellites and conducting many experiments. It was ageing and needed replacing. it was never the perfect spacecraft but, then again, it was built by the lowest bidder. To cancel it with no replacement in sight is crazy.

Its not just shuttle and its not just America. Today we are told that gas and electricity bills are set to rise again due to having to buy gas on the world market. Last year Professor Brian Cox presented an Horizon programme called Can we make a star on Earth. In this programme we found out clean, safe fusion energy is less than a few decades away and yet he stated in his programme that more money gets spent on ringtones every year than has been invested in fusion. Am I the only one that sees something wrong with this picture?

Why can we find money to bomb yet another middle eastern country, to bail out another self serving irresponsible banking group but we cannot find the money to invest in the technologies that will make a difference. The Apollo programme alone pulled in far more Dollars than was ever spent on it and yet it was forced to scrape by on hand out after hand out.

There is something fundamentally wrong in our society when it prides the financial gains of a few greedy capitalists over the scientific advances that have been made by people who have to beg for grants just to survive.

In conclusion I wish the crew of Atlantis well and hope this final mission is the success it deserves to be. To the politicians and policy makers I say with out science and scientific advancement we are heading for a new dark age and you are the instigators of the fall.

Thank you for your time

I started studying with the OU in March of 2009. Now, just two and a bit years later and with my current courses drawing to a close I thought I would reflect back on the person I was back then and the person I am now.

The DouglasAdams quote, spoken in The Hitchhickers Guide to the Galaxy by Marvin the paranoid android, is rather apt. Paranoid is pretty much how I felt. Always A-typical of my peer group, not really interested in the latest soap plot or last nights match, preferring to spend my time watching the Discovery channel or listening to Radio 4. Always the one concerned about climate change and the issues of the day without really doing anything about it dispite a brief flirtation with anti-vivisectionists in the mid 80's. Always atheistic and failing to see why anyone these days needs to believe in a god I never made my views known feeling that, maybe, it was me that was wrong. Maybe it wasn't how people were supposed to feel.

Then I enrolled with the OU. Here I found like minded people who, whilst not always agreeing with me, allowed discussion of subjects that I felt strongly about. This lead me to realise that there is a whole sub-culture out there who feel as I do and share my interests. This made me want to explore more and make new friends. I have now joined a political party (Though at least one friend is sure its the wrong one) and actively will post petitions and stories that I feel strongly about. It has lead me to new Radio programmes where people who think like me air their views (www.littleatoms.com is highly recommended) and just last week I was at the uncaged monkeys gig, a show based around science and reason and found organisations like Skeptics in the pub that I probably would never have known about if I had never got involved with the OU.

In the brief time I have been at the OU I have changed emensely. I just regret not doing it 20 years ago.

I know I haven't blogged for a long, long time but I have some ideas I need to get down and, well lets face it, no one is going to publish a paper by a 41 year old, 2nd year Under grad!

This has been prompted by a discussion I had with a friend who is a firm believer in God. it got me thinking about one of the points that usually come up in these situations, where is evolution today? why is nothing changing? Of course the standard answer is because it happens over huge timescales but what if? what of evolution has indeed stopped? how could this happen and why did it start in the first place?

At this point I must make some assumptions about the reader. The first is that you are prepared to read this through to the end with out dozing off, another is you are versed in current theories involving planet formation and geological processes.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection gives us the processes. The why it happens. A creature developers a variation which makes them more suited to a particular problem. They do better because of it and, as a result, their genes get passed on to the next generation. So far so good. The question that is raised next is how do these variations occur? Thanks to advances in gene research we now know that it is how the genes are encoded in our D.N.A. that make us what we are. It is changes in these codes that allow variation. So again where is this variation. One way we know for sure to affect the gene sequence is with radiation. The blasts of Hiroshima and Nagaski are proof of this. Here we see genetic mutations that deform their victims. but what if genetic mutation is the tool that allows the variation in evolution? Obviously I am not saying that a tumour is an advantage in the survival of the fittest but we know radiation can and does rewrite gene sequences. could long term, lower level radiation exposure drive evolution.

So now we must travel back in time, before life began, to the formation of the planet itself.

Current theory is that the Earth, its moon, the sun and all the objects in the solar system were created from the decaying remains of a dead star. These atoms slowly drew together under gravity to build every thing we are, see and can touch. Our sun was still young and cool but the Earth was warm. How can this be? (and doesn't it make a joke of the term Solar Constant?) The answer lies within the Earth itself. From my studies of geology I know that the Earth creates its own warmth through radiogenic heating. As radioactive elements decay they lose energy as heat and they decay because nature dictates that they have to be in a steady state. We can now accurately date the Earth thanks to knowing how long certain isotopes take to decay into a more stable form. Once in that form it no longer gives off energy so is no longer radioactive. Knowing this we can state now that the reason our Earth was warmer was because it was more radioactive then than it is today.

And so to my hypothesis. I believe that once the back ground radiation had dropped enough and other conditions allowed life to form, radiation was capable of mutating D.N.A. and these mutations formed the toolkit of life. As single celled and then multicelled creatures started to appear, radiation allowed for mutations to occur. Some proved worthless and the creature would have perished but small adaptations were able to mutate and where they gained an advantage the mutation was passed on. Could this be how evolution started? radioactive mutation caused by the environment?

As the eons passed radiation has reached a much lower background level. Is it possible that it can no longer affect the changes to D.N.A. that it did and we have reached a point where we are now frozen in these forms?

If this is so it may answer the question would evolution ever happen again? If radiation is indeed the driving force then no.

Thank you for your time