We Need Three Planets to Keep the Human Race Alive, NASA Scientist Says.

It’s no secret that uncurbed climate change and population growth are going to (and already have) put stress on the planet. But the situation is getting so bad that one prominent NASA scientist says we have to start thinking about terraforming Mars and that, in order for the human race to survive at current levels, we will eventually “need at least three planets.”

“The entire ecosystem is crashing,” Dennis Bushnell, chief scientist of NASA’s Langley Research Center said Thursday. “Essentially, there’s too many of us. We’ve been far too successful as the human animal. People allege we’re short 40-50 percent of a planet now. As the Asians and their billions come up to our living systems, we’re going to need three more planets.”

Bushnell was discussing the release of The Millennium Project’s “State of the Future,” an annual report that looks at global challenges and how they might be solved. He said that Mars is a good start, but we’d soon need even more space to live.

“If NASA terraforms Mars, that’ll take about 120 years, and that’s only one planet,” he said. “We’d need more shortly.”

It’s not the first time someone has floated the need for humans to colonize other planets, but usually such ideas are proposed as a way for the human race to survive in the event of a cataclysmic asteroid collision or nuclear war. In 2012, the World Wildlife Fund also suggested the three-planet idea, stating that we're using about 50 percent more resources than the Earth can support, and that by 2050 we’d need three planets to sustain that rate.

Bushnell didn’t say when he thought we might need three planets or what planets those might be—Mars is a good start, but beyond that, the Solar System is looking pretty barren as far as terraform-able planets go. 

"The point isn’t to be alarmist or cynical, says Jerome Glenn, CEO of the Millennium Project. It’s about identifying the challenges Earth faces and finding a way to rise above them. “We have no right to be pessimistic. We have to find out what’s intelligent to do to make this species survive,” he told me. “If you think the problems aren’t going to get better, then why try. And if you think there aren’t problems, then why change anything?”

In any case, Bushnell wasn’t suggesting that we absolutely need to leave the Earth—he was saying that we need to stop consuming like we are. He’s got one solution in mind: Salt water farming.

Halophytes, a class of plant that grows well in salt water, could potentially be used to create biofuel by growing plants in the middle of the oceans (or at least using salt water to irrigate plants we do have in agriculturally-unproductive parts of the world). Scientists are working on the possibility, and an MIT project suggested that some pilot programs started in India, Pakistan, Laos, Algeria, and other poor countries should be started sometime this year, but so far, not much progress has been made. Bushnell says it’d solve most of our problems.

“If you grew halophytes on wastelands using seawater, in 10-15 years you’d have fuel that cost $50 a barrel. That’s half of what petroleum costs today,” he said. “With that, you could solve land, food, water, energy, and climate. All of that comes together.”

If we can’t do that, it just may be time to start buying land on Mars.

Source: MOTHERBOARD

A Massive Solar Superstorm Nearly Blasted The Earth In 2012.

Back on July 23, 2012 a furious solar magnetic storm just grazed our planet. Had it erupted just nine days earlier, it would have hit us, causing extensive damage to our technological infrastructure. It would have been a geomagnetic catastrophe the likes of which we've never seen. Scientists say the close shave should serve as an important wake-up call.

We actually have a precedent for such an event, but it happened back in the mid 19th Century. It was called the Carrington Event of 1859, and it damaged the few electronic devices that existed at the time, namely telegraph systems. The solar blast managed to shock some telegraph operators and set fire to their offices. It even caused the Northern Lights to shine so bright and so far south that people could read newspapers by its red and green glow as far as Mexico.

More recently, a severe magnetic storm in 1989 wreaked havoc on Canada's Hydro-Quebec power grid, resulting in a power-out that kept six-million people without electricity for nine hours.

Back To The Dark Ages

Several years ago, the National Academy of Sciences estimated that, if a Carrington-like event occurred today, it could cause $1- to $2-trillion in damages to our civilization's high-tech infrastructure and require four to ten years for complete recovery. Last year, Lloyds put out a study showing that geomagnetic storms could cause upwards of $2.6 trillion in damages across the globe.

And what a headache it would be. An event like this would damage everything from satellites, emergency services' systems, hospital equipment, banking systems, and air traffic control devices, through to everyday items such as home computers, iPods and GPSs. Because of our heavy reliance on electronic devices, which are sensitive to magnetic energy, the storm could leave a multi-billion dollar damage bill and cataclysmic-scale problems for governments.

Worse than this, however, would be the potential length of blackouts. According to a Metatech Corporation study, an event like the 1921 geomagnetic storm would result in large-scale blackouts affecting more than 130 million people and would expose more than 350 transformers to the risk of permanent damage. It could take months—if not years—to put everybody back on the grid.

And as a new analysis from UC Berkeley's Ying D. Liu and Janet Luhmann show, it almost happened two years ago.

A Perfect Solar Storm

Using data detected by NASA's STEREO A spacecraft, the researchers concluded that a huge outburst on the sun on July 22, 2012 propelled a magnetic cloud through the solar wind at a speed of more than 2,000 kilometers per second — nearly four times the typical speed of a magnetic storm. It violated our orbit, but Earth and all the other planets were on the other side of the sun at the time.

When the storm hit STEREO A it was about 120 degrees ahead of the Earth (west of the Earth). Had it occurred nine days earlier — one third of the rotation period of the Sun (which takes 27 days to complete one rotation) — it would have propagated directly towards the Earth.

Here's what it looked like from STEREO's perspective:

The outburst was generated by two nearly simultaneous coronal mass ejections (separated by about 10 to 15 minutes), releasing energies equal to about a billion hydrogen bombs. But that alone wasn't enough to create the intensity observed. According to the analysis, the incredible speed of the magnetic cloud was possible because of another mass ejection four days earlier which had cleared the path of material that would have slowed it down.

The storm also produced a long-duration, southward-oriented magnetic field, which made it all the more dangerous. This is a nasty orientation owing to Earth's northward field. This causes a process called reconnection, resulting in a violent merger.

"These gnarly, twisty ropes of magnetic field from coronal mass ejections come blasting from the sun through the ambient solar system, piling up material in front of them, and when this double whammy hits Earth, it skews the Earth's magnetic field to odd directions, dumping energy all around the planet," explained Luhmann in a statement.

Predicting the Weather

According to the researchers, this event is not as rare as it might seem. It could have easily been missed if STEREO A (the spacecraft ahead of us in Earth's orbit) had not been there to record it.

"People keep saying that these are rare natural hazards, but they are happening in the solar system even though we don't always see them," noted Luhmann. "It's like with earthquakes — it is hard to impress upon people the importance of preparing unless you suffer a magnitude 9 earthquake."

Indeed, preparation is possible. Further study of solar superstorms and the sun's 11 year cycle should help our predictive abilities. But we also need to create more robust technologies to protect ourselves for this eventuality. NASA, for example, has proposed a solar shield to protect power grids from geomagnetic storms. We certainly need to start thinking along these lines to prevent a world-changing catastrophe.

Source: io9

World's Most Advanced Computers Unravel the Universe's Most Primitive Processes (Op-Ed)

The visualiztion, Magnetic Fields in Core-Collapse Supernovae depicts the magnetic field inside the shock surface of a supernova, and was created using the GenASIS code on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facilitypetascale computer, Jaguar, work that continues on Titan. Credit: Eirik Endeve, Christian Cardall, Reuben Budiardja, Anthony Mezzacappa, Dave Pugmire.

Gregory Scott Jones, a writer who covers supercomputing. He contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

There is an idea, popular in New Age circles, that humans represent the universe's primary self-awareness.

In other words, our consciousness is actually the Cosmos realizing it exists; is mankind the only creature to ever look up at the sky and know the vast distances to the stars, or the fact that we are physically the product of their demise? This is, I imagine, the sort of thing Carl Sagan had in mind when he said "humans are the stuff of the cosmos examining itself." Far out for sure.

But this self-awareness, if it's indeed real, presents many questions. Big ones. And we're getting answers thanks to those primitively simulated brains we call computers. Big ones. The Universe, it seems, has begun to write its autobiography.

The irony is hard to ignore. The idea that some of the most advanced machines in the modern world will piece together the most basic processes in all of time is rapidly becoming a reality.

Today's supercomputers are necessary for solving an entire range of complex scientific challenges, from the complexities of climate change to the properties of new materials to the ideal aerodynamics of vehicle design. But few problems require such massive computing power as do those born in the heavens.

Unfortunately, recreating the Big Bang and watching the universe unfold in a laboratory is out of the question for obvious reasons. But with empirical data from satellites, probes and seriously powerful telescopes, and the simulation potential of computers pushing 30 petaflops — or 30 thousand trillion (quadrillion) calculations per second — scientists are getting a much clearer picture of how this whole universe thing unraveled, and how we came to be.

Observation reveals what was created in the early moments of the universe: The cosmic microwave background, or CMB, represents the dawn of time just after (well, about 378,000 years after) the Big Bang. Its current geography is the result of roughly 14 billion years of formation, plenty of time for researchers to play with piecing the puzzle together.

But we're getting there, one step at a time. For example, thanks to decades of observation and extremely sophisticated applications running across many thousands of processors, a team of researchers led by Salman Habib is using Argonne National Laboratory's Mira and Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Titan supercomputers to see how tiny variations in the Big Bang can grow to form enormous clumps that now host stars and galaxies.

The simulations take place across billions of light years of space in thousands of time steps with the potential to squash or validate theories and confirm or disprove much of what we thought we knew about how the universe behaves, including the elusive "dark energy," the reigning champion in our quest to explain how the universe expands, and why the expansion rate is currently accelerating.

Supercomputers are necessary for such complex simulations, principal investigator Salman Habib has said, due to their sheer speed, massive amounts of memory and their communication-oriented architectures. Habib's application achieved a sustained performance in excess of ten petaflops, completely out of reach just years ago, allowing the team to witness the evolution of the universe from the largest scales down to those characteristic of galaxies.

"In a way supercomputers compress the enormous reaches of space and time that are characteristic of the cosmos, and allow us to interact with them on the — by comparison — incredibly short scales of human perception," said Habib.

If the Universe is self-aware, simulating its creation is akin to forcing it to watch embarrassing home movies of its childhood.

But what about us? After all, if we are in fact the latest and greatest universal incarnation, where is our birth story? Consider core-collapse supernovas (CCSNs), or stars greater than eight times the size of our sun, but no greater than around 40 times.

These massive elemental factories self-implode, a violent act that leaves in its place all the elements up to iron, i.e., all of the necessary ingredients for life. When Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang "we are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon," they had CCSNs in mind, whether they knew it or not.

Researchers can now simulate in three dimensions many of the implosions that created us, a feat impossible just a couple of years ago. We now know that neutrinos play a significant, if not the dominant, role in these massive elemental creation events, as a team of researchers using the Titan supercomputer located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is achieving neutrino-driven explosions across a range of stellar masses in two dimensions, giving credibility to their model.

The same team used Jaguar, Titan's predecessor, to explain how a neutron star could become the more rapidly rotating pulsar, a problem featured on the cover of the June 1, 2012, issue of Science, which explored the top unsolved problems in astrophysics. Known as the standing accretion shock instability, or SASI, researchers now have a relevant description of how a rotating neutron star picks up steam, work that was recently validated by observation in the February 20, 2014, issue of Nature.

Forget about home movies. This is the universe staring at its reflection in the mirror.

These monumental developments are occurring across a wide range of astrophysics and cosmology, from black hole accretion to the formation of individual planets and stars, fields with concepts so vast that it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a computer powerful enough to ever resolve them completely. Nevertheless, the potential for the world's latest and greatest calculators to solve the biggest questions, both metaphorically and literally, is potentially limitless, as are the questions. The universe is, after all, a very old and very large place.

Our best estimate of the structure of the universe as we know it, the standard model, accounts for roughly 5 percent of its total mass; the rest we embarrassingly refer to as "dark matter." We can't see it, can't feel it, can only infer it. The resolution and definition of dark matter and "dark energy" would be among the most significant scientific achievements of all time, and simulations on the world's most powerful computers will doubtless play a large role.

But problems of this magnitude will no doubt require technologies more powerful than today's leading systems. Luckily for us, the next era is unfolding before our very eyes. The world's fastest computers may soon approach the exascale, capable of crunching quintillions of calculations per second, or nearly an entire order of magnitude faster than current systems. And once again the most advanced machines on the planet will be called upon to answer the most fundamental questions: Who are we? And where do we come from?

Our earliest history is intimately connected with our near future. The universe must think it's pretty smart.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This article was originally published on Live Science.