Contrabang! #34 How We'd All Die Instantly

Is Betelgeuse About To Explode? (link)

One of the brightest stars in the sky, Betelgeuse has recently dimmed by a surprising amount. This has prompted scientists to surmise that the orb may be about to go supernova. It is the kind of upside-down logic that only an academic could love. The theory goes that supernova is caused when the star hits a critical mass of fissionable material, just as happens in a nuclear bomb. In bombs, the collapse is caused by carefully placed and precisely time explosives. In stars, they reckon, it occurs when they run out of fissionable material. The lower thermal output reduces "radiative pressure" and the star collapses under its own gravity, and eventually goes boom. So stars explode when they run out of fuel, is the short description.

However, they say that even if the star is going supernova, it could be hundreds of thousands of years until the event happens. Thus, they can't be disproven in any case. However, I would offer a more general prediction: if a known star goes supernova, it will brighten, not dim, prior to the event.

Antimatter Mystery Likely Due To Pulsars, Not Dark Matter (link)

This article contains a lot of words of a highly technical nature. The only ones that really matter are in the last sentence.

Right now, it appears that pulsars may be responsible for 100% of the observed excess, requiring scientists to go back to the drawing board for a direct signal that reveals our Universe’s elusive dark matter.

Another theory of dark matter has been shot down. They must be running thin on them at this point.

This Is How We’d All Die Instantly If The Sun Suddenly Went Supernova (link) 

A favorite past time of Ethan and his ilk is to fantasize about the cataclysmic destruction of all humanity. This one does not disappoint.

While our Sun isn’t massive enough to experience [a supernova], it’s a fun and macabre thought experiment to imagine what would happen if it did. Yes, we’d all die in short order, but not from either the blast wave or from radiation. Instead, the neutrinos would get us first.

Gosh, that is fun.

That energy goes into a mix of radiation (photons), the kinetic energy of the material in the now-exploding stellar material, and neutrinos. All three of these are more than capable of ending any life that’s managed to survive on an orbiting planet up to that point, but the big question of how we’d all die if the Sun went supernova depends on the answer to one question: who gets there first?

I bet $100 it's photon radiation. I hope I'm right!

But any living creature would surely die even before the light or the blast wave from the supernova arrived; they’d never see their demise coming. Instead, the neutrinos — which interact with matter so rarely that an entire star, to them, functions like a pane of glass does to visible light — simply speed away omnidirectionally, from the moment of their creation, at speeds indistinguishable from the speed of light.

Ah! I was wrong, but that's a way cooler way for humans to go extinct.

It’s horrifying to think that an event as fascinating and destructive as a supernova, despite all the spectacular effects it produces, would kill anything nearby before a single perceptible signal arrived, but that’s absolutely the case with neutrinos. 

The only reason he finds it horrifying that humans would not be subjected to awaiting their disastrous fate is that he wouldn't have the opportunity to gloat about being right about physics before everyone gets blasted to smithereens. These people fantasize about hearing everyone remark "you were right the whole time, Ethan; we should have listened" just before being internally incinerated by an elusive form of stellar radiation.

Ask Ethan: Did God Create The Universe? (link)

An interesting question to take on, since the ultimate point of the moderns is to remove God and appoint themselves as deity.

Science cannot prove the existence of God, but it cannot disprove God either; it can only disprove the notion of a specific, poorly conceived God. If you claim that your God lives in the clouds, you can disprove that God by simply observing the clouds. If you claim that God lives in our Universe, you can disprove that God by observing the entire Universe. But if your God exists in an extra dimension, before cosmic inflation, or outside of space and time altogether, neither proof nor disproof is possible.

A reasonable scientific stance on God. But he's not done yet.

In a fundamental way, it is purely a matter of what your faith is. All we can control, at the end of the day, is how we treat one another. Do we welcome those who believe different things than we do into our hearts, communities, and lives? Or do we shun, exclude, and “other” them?

Ethan, a guy I know is moving to Portland. He's a neo-Nazi who believes the Holocaust was a hoax, but he's really tidy and nice. Can he stay with you for a bit while he gets himself established in your community?

Regardless of what you believe, I have the same advice for you: choose kindness. It costs nothing, while benefitting the giver, the recipient, and those who simply witness it. Whether you say that God made us or not, I would say the same thing: the wonders and joys of science and the Universe are for you, exactly as you are, too.

And there is the materialist's prayer. Whether God exists or not doesn't matter, because you the individual can choose what you believe and that is all that is important. It doesn't matter if there is God because man is God.

The problems with the materialistic approach, of course, have been detailed endlessly on this blog. Not only that, but the major tenets of that belief system - that the cosmos evolved by random processes, and lifeforms by random genetic mutations - are not supported by evidence. Thus, his own "neutral" viewpoint is actually a religious position in itself. It is every bit as religious to say that life evolved as a quirk of nature as to say that it was created by a higher intelligence.