Megafauna Find

Scary Pre-historic Monsters

There are lots of those that fit that moniker, but for the moment consider this: the most frightening, land mammalian carnivore may not have been the lion, but the marsupial lion.

The largest creatures to fall into the caves were giant wombats weighing about 200 kilograms and similar-sized giant kangaroos. This may have been the maximum size of creature that could fit down the small chimney holes.

From the pristine condition of the remains it is thought the holes must have been sealed for hundreds of thousands of years.

Nonetheless, the bones the scientists found were extremely fragile and had to be hardened using a chemical process before being wrapped and removed from the site in hard plastic cases.

All but one of the species of lizards that fell into the caves still scurry around the plain today.

Most of the small mammals - which included possums, dunnarts, antechinuses, bandicoots and bilbies - are also still alive, but do not all live on the now-denuded Nullarbor.

Two species of parrots were also found. This "suggests the presence of hollow-forming trees useful for nesting", Prideaux says.

Altogether, the remains of 11 marsupial lions, Thylacoleo carnifex, were found in the caves, which have been named the Thylacoleo Caves in their honour.

These 100-kilogram creatures were Australia's fiercest predators, with the most powerful bite of any known animal, including the sabre-toothed tiger, hyena and Tasmanian devil.

Interesting find. Let'ds call it a' landshark' instead... only kidding! :)

Fall Out

Here's the latest on the Chinese satellite-missile test.

Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill raised the issue with Chinese Foreign Ministry officials during a weekend visit to Beijing, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters in Washington.

Hill was told the Jan. 11 test was ``not meant as a threat against anybody and it's not meant to spark a race to militarize space,'' said McCormack, who urged China to be more ``transparent'' about its space program.

The U.S., U.K. and Australia raised concerns with China following the test and said debris from the destroyed satellite could be dangerous to other space installations. Japan called on the government in Beijing to explain its actions.

``We would encourage greater transparency as to exactly the specifics of this test, the intent behind it,'' said McCormack yesterday, according to a transcript. ``It has been a continuing topic for us as well as others in the region to encourage the Chinese to become more transparent in terms of their military spending and their military programs.''

U.S. officials have expressed concern that other countries may be acquiring capabilities to attack civilian and military space systems.

Well, presumably, they would. After all, who likes knowing that America is peeping in on them 24/7? It's th kind of capability that one would expect to be developed by somebody out there.

ISRO Space Capsule

Strange But True

Indian scientists are working on a return capsule.

Indian scientists for the first time have safely guided a space capsule back to Earth.
Indian space agency ISRO said the capsule splashed down in the Bay of Bengal. It added, efforts are underway to locate it and bring it ashore.

Scientists will see if all experiments have gone as planned and most importantly if the ceramic tiles served their purpose.

Only three other countries, Russia, America and China have mastered this complex technology.

It is seen as India's first steps towards undertaking a manned mission.
The 550 kg capsule was planned to land 140 km east off the coast of Sriharikota.

On splashdown, a giant balloon keeps it afloat, while a green dye and a homing beacon will help Coast Guard ships and scientists from ISRO locate the capsule.

The capsule re-orients and four tiny rockets on it will help de-boost it. Upon re-entry the capsule faces temperatures as high as 1200 degrees.

Three parachutes were planned to slow down its speed five km above sea level. Finally, when the capsule splashes down it travels at 36 km per hour.

The spindle shaped space capsule that was launched on top of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle or the PSLV is India's first attempt to see if orbiting objects can be safely brought back to earth.

The space capsule has been orbiting the earth at a height of 625 km.
When it re-enters the earth's atmosphere it will be traveling at over 28,000 km per hour.

There you go. It has in fact splashed down safely.

The Space Recovery Experiment-1 (SRE-1) splashed down in the waters of the Bay of Bengal at 9.45 a.m., about 140 km from where it had taken off into space at the Sriharikota launch station in Andhra Pradesh.

'Its speed at the time was about 40 km per hour, the speed of a car,' said an official of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), adding that it was located by a Coast Guard helicopter and recovery efforts were in full swing.
The satellite will be towed first to an area off the Ennore harbour, north of Chennai. The Coast Guard vessel will then slowly navigate northward to Sriharikota and reach the station by night.

The space industry just keeps on changing.

Chinese Star Wars

Blowing Up Satellites
China managed to destroy a satellite with a medium ballistic missile. The immediate ramifications of that are obvious: they can knock out the aerospace intelligence capability of her enemies.

The satellite was some 500 miles (800km) above the earth.

At the very least, it represents the first significant escalation in the space weapons race in 20 years.

Only the United States and the former Soviet Union have previously destroyed targets in space and that was back in the 1980s.

Although this time China used a relatively old-fashioned ballistic missile to target the satellite, it is also thought to be working on far more sophisticated laser technology to do the job.

US officials have been alarmed by the test itself and the failure of China to announce what it was doing either publicly or privately.

A White House spokesman said the "development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of co-operation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area".

He said both the US and other countries were concerned.

Talk about setting cats amongst the pigeons.

Space Elevator Rationale

Some Reasons Why We Should
Here's a link.

I think the argument that continuing our civilization's current carbon based energy regime cannot meet the environmental restrictions even if (and it is a big if) we can wring another few decades or a century out of it by using forms such as oil shale, tar sand etc (see Bjorn Lomborg on how that can be done). It is equally clear that while the dire predictions of the Club of Rome have not come true as predicted, we must sooner or later face sever shortages of minerals - raising the price of some of them beyond what our societies energy regime can afford - eventually threatening even out globalised society with collapse (as laid out by Jarred Diamond in his seminal work 'Collapse: How Societies choose to succeed or fail').

If our society did collapse, we would have to expect this to occur globally as our now world spanning economy and political structures fight it out for the resources they need to sustain themselves just the same way the chiefs did on Easter Island or the Aztec Nobles and Kings did in Central America. The trouble would be that with this occurring globally we could expect the collapse to be world wide as well and our heirs to be unable to rebuild a society like ours for many centuries (if ever) because we had already exploited all the easily recovered mineral resources and they would lack the technology or global organisation or both, to go after the scraps we leave them. The scraps we are increasingly turning to now ourselves (as recommended by Lomborg). We therefore should equate such a potential collapse with near extinction of our species (& many others) for planning purposes. I believe we must plan to avoid it at all costs.

So we have a knotty problem, or at least a major crisis of how our society works and collapse within 100 years is a very real possibility, however high on the hog we may seem to be riding as the West sees it. Part of the solution will surely be utilizing every 'alternative' clean energy source we can. Part or it will be new technologies to replace minerals we lack with alternatives and better extraction to go after reserves no-one would have touched previously but this only buys us time as we tighten our belts and still consume more of the geological legacy the Earths past has left us - and which can never be replenished (except over Millions of years) and which we therefore CANNOT use *sustainably*.

This of course leads us back to my original assertion that we need resources beyond those of the Earth in order not to face near extinction. We also need energy to be sufficiently environmentally clean (including greenhouse neutral) plentiful and affordable to run our ongoing civilization on it. This will be hard enough if we keep the high standard of living for the current developed West only but China and India are determined that that will not be how it goes.

I do recommend you read on.

5 Minutes To Midnight

The End Is Closer

Thanks to the efforts of Iran and North Korea, the world is closer to nuclear holocaust.

We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.

As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilization. We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.

This deteriorating state of global affairs leads the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — in consultation with a Board of Sponsors that includes 18 Nobel laureates — to move the minute hand of the “Doomsday Clock” from seven to five minutes to midnight.

Thank you Kim Jong-Il and Ahmedinejad.