"The new observations we obtained with the Subaru telescope earlier this year were good enough to reveal the Yarkovsky acceleration of Apophis," astronomer Dave Tholen said in a press release.
"They show that the asteroid is drifting away from a purely gravitational orbit by about 170 metres per year, which is enough to keep the 2068 impact scenario in play."
Read more at:
'God of chaos' asteroid is speeding up as it heads towards Earth
Showing posts with label Destruction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Destruction. Show all posts
11/12/20
10/12/19
Global Warming ?: Japan hit by biggest Typhoon in decades
Typhoon Hagibis: Biggest Japan storm in decades makes landfall
Read more at:
9/8/19
Asteroid Versus Earth NASA confirms new Asteroid heading towards Earth that could destroy it
NASA confirms new asteroid heading towards earth; Will it just pass by or destroy the
planet?.
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5/20/19
EU - Germany: Merkel calls for Europe to stand up against far-right parties - by Andreas Rinke
German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on Saturday for Europe to push
back against far-right parties, saying populist movements wanted to
destroy core European values such as fighting corruption and protecting
minorities.
Merkel made the remarks when asked about a scandal engulfing Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, whose leader Heinz-Christian Strache quit on Saturday as government vice-chancellor after he was videoed offering state contracts in exchange for political support.
Read more at: Merkel calls for Europe to stand up against far-right parties - Reuters
Merkel made the remarks when asked about a scandal engulfing Austria’s far-right Freedom Party, whose leader Heinz-Christian Strache quit on Saturday as government vice-chancellor after he was videoed offering state contracts in exchange for political support.
Read more at: Merkel calls for Europe to stand up against far-right parties - Reuters
3/3/19
USA: What does it take to destroy a world order? - Alfred W. McCoy
Once upon a time in America, we could all argue about whether or not
U.S. global power was declining. Now, most observers have little doubt
that the end is just a matter of timing and circumstance. Ten years ago,
I predictedthat,
by 2025, it would be all over for American power, a then-controversial
comment that’s commonplace today. Under President Donald Trump, the once “indispensable nation” that won World War II and built a new world order has become dispensable indeed.
The decline and fall of American global power is, of course, nothing special in the great sweep of history. After all, in the 4,000 years since humanity’s first empire formed in the Fertile Crescent, at least 200 empires have risen, collided with other imperial powers, and in time collapsed. In the past century alone, two dozen modern imperial states have fallen and the world has managed just fine in the wake of their demise.
The global order didn’t blink when the sprawling Soviet empire imploded in 1991, freeing its 15 “republics” and seven “satellites” to become 22 newly capitalist nations. Washington took that epochal event largely in stride. There were no triumphal demonstrations, in the tradition of ancient Rome, with manacled Russian captives and their plundered treasures paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead, a Manhattan real-estate developer bought a 20-foot chunk of the Berlin Wall for display near Madison Avenue, a sight barely noticed by busy shoppers.
For those trying to track global trends for the next decade or two, the real question is not the fate of American global hegemony, but the future of the world order it began building at the peak of its power, not in 1991, but right after World War II. For the past 75 years, Washington’s global dominion has rested on a “delicate duality.” The raw realpolitik of U.S. military bases, multinational corporations, CIA coups, and foreign military interventions has been balanced, even softened, by a surprisingly liberal world order -- with sovereign states meeting as equals at the United Nations, an international rule of law that muted armed conflict, a World Health Organization that actually eradicated epidemic diseases which had plagued humanity for generations, and a developmental effort led by the World Bank that lifted 40% of humanity out of poverty.
Some observers remain supremely confident that Washington’s world order can survive the inexorable erosion of its global power. Princeton political scientist G. John Ikenberry, for example, has essentially staked his reputation on that debatable proposition. As U.S. decline first became apparent in 2011, he argued that Washington’s ability to shape world politics would diminish, but “the liberal international order will survive and thrive,” preserving its core elements of multilateral governance, free trade, and human rights. Seven years later, amid a rise of anti-global nationalists across significant parts of the planet, he remains optimistic that the American-made world order will endure because international issues such as climate change make its “protean vision of interdependence and cooperation... more important as the century unfolds.”
This sense of guarded optimism is widely shared among foreign-policy elites in the New York-Washington corridor of power. The president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, has typically arguedthat the “post-Cold War order cannot be restored, but the world is not yet on the edge of a systemic crisis.” Through deft diplomacy, Washington could still save the planet from “deeper disarray” or even “trends that spell catastrophe.”
But is it true that the decline of the planet’s “sole superpower” (as it was once known) will no more shake the present world order than the Soviet collapse once did? To explore what it takes to produce just such an implosion of a world order, it’s necessary to turn to history -- to the history, in fact, of collapsing imperial orders and a changing planet.
Admittedly, such analogies are always imperfect, yet what other guide to the future do we have but the past? Among its many lessons: that world orders are far more fundamental than we might imagine and that their uprooting requires a perfect storm of history’s most powerful forces. Indeed, the question of the moment should be: Is climate change now gathering sufficient destructive force to cripple Washington’s liberal world order and create an opening for Beijing’s decidedly illiberal one or possibly even a new world in which such orders will be unrecognizable?
Read more: What does it take to destroy a world order? | Salon.com
The decline and fall of American global power is, of course, nothing special in the great sweep of history. After all, in the 4,000 years since humanity’s first empire formed in the Fertile Crescent, at least 200 empires have risen, collided with other imperial powers, and in time collapsed. In the past century alone, two dozen modern imperial states have fallen and the world has managed just fine in the wake of their demise.
The global order didn’t blink when the sprawling Soviet empire imploded in 1991, freeing its 15 “republics” and seven “satellites” to become 22 newly capitalist nations. Washington took that epochal event largely in stride. There were no triumphal demonstrations, in the tradition of ancient Rome, with manacled Russian captives and their plundered treasures paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue. Instead, a Manhattan real-estate developer bought a 20-foot chunk of the Berlin Wall for display near Madison Avenue, a sight barely noticed by busy shoppers.
For those trying to track global trends for the next decade or two, the real question is not the fate of American global hegemony, but the future of the world order it began building at the peak of its power, not in 1991, but right after World War II. For the past 75 years, Washington’s global dominion has rested on a “delicate duality.” The raw realpolitik of U.S. military bases, multinational corporations, CIA coups, and foreign military interventions has been balanced, even softened, by a surprisingly liberal world order -- with sovereign states meeting as equals at the United Nations, an international rule of law that muted armed conflict, a World Health Organization that actually eradicated epidemic diseases which had plagued humanity for generations, and a developmental effort led by the World Bank that lifted 40% of humanity out of poverty.
Some observers remain supremely confident that Washington’s world order can survive the inexorable erosion of its global power. Princeton political scientist G. John Ikenberry, for example, has essentially staked his reputation on that debatable proposition. As U.S. decline first became apparent in 2011, he argued that Washington’s ability to shape world politics would diminish, but “the liberal international order will survive and thrive,” preserving its core elements of multilateral governance, free trade, and human rights. Seven years later, amid a rise of anti-global nationalists across significant parts of the planet, he remains optimistic that the American-made world order will endure because international issues such as climate change make its “protean vision of interdependence and cooperation... more important as the century unfolds.”
This sense of guarded optimism is widely shared among foreign-policy elites in the New York-Washington corridor of power. The president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, has typically arguedthat the “post-Cold War order cannot be restored, but the world is not yet on the edge of a systemic crisis.” Through deft diplomacy, Washington could still save the planet from “deeper disarray” or even “trends that spell catastrophe.”
But is it true that the decline of the planet’s “sole superpower” (as it was once known) will no more shake the present world order than the Soviet collapse once did? To explore what it takes to produce just such an implosion of a world order, it’s necessary to turn to history -- to the history, in fact, of collapsing imperial orders and a changing planet.
Admittedly, such analogies are always imperfect, yet what other guide to the future do we have but the past? Among its many lessons: that world orders are far more fundamental than we might imagine and that their uprooting requires a perfect storm of history’s most powerful forces. Indeed, the question of the moment should be: Is climate change now gathering sufficient destructive force to cripple Washington’s liberal world order and create an opening for Beijing’s decidedly illiberal one or possibly even a new world in which such orders will be unrecognizable?
Read more: What does it take to destroy a world order? | Salon.com
5/22/18
USA: Donald Trump's "Mein Kampf" : the startegy of a mad man ? - Destroy the International Community in Order to Save It.
The new president’s cabinet nominees are a similarly worldly
lot, being either generals or multimillionaires (or both), or simply,
like their president, straight-out billionaires. Rich people jet off to
exotic places for vacations or to make deals; generals are dispatched to
all points of the compass to kill people. With an estimated net wealth
of more than $13 billion,
Trump’s cabinet could be its own small island nation. Make that a very aggressive island nation: The military men in his proposed cabinet—former generals Mike Flynn (national security adviser), James Mattis (defense secretary), and John Kelly (head of Homeland Security), as well as former Navy Seal Ryan Zinke (interior secretary)—have fought in nearly as many countries as Trump has done business.
As worldly as they might be, Trump’s nominees don’t look much like the world. Mostly rich white men, they look more like the American electorate… circa 1817. Still, the media have bent over backward to find as much diversity as they could in this panorama of homogeneity. They have, for instance, identified the nominees according to their different ideological milieus: Wall Street, the Pentagon, the Republican Party, the lunatic fringe.
In this taxonomy of Trumpism, the media continue to miss the obvious. The incoming administration is, in fact, united around one key mission: It’s about to declare war on the world.
Don’t be fooled by the surface cosmopolitanism of the new president and his appointees. For all their international experience, these people care about the planet the way pornographers care about sex. Their interactions are purely transactional, just the means to an end. There couldn’t be less empathy for the people out there involved in the drama. It’s all about the money and that piercing sense of conquest.
The Trump team’s approach, a globalism of the 1 percent, benefits themselves even as it reinforces American exceptionalism. Their worldview is a galaxy distant from the sort of democratic internationalism that values diplomacy, human rights, and multilateral cooperation to address planetary problems like climate change and economic inequality. Such a foreign policy of mutual engagement is, in fact, exactly what’s under immediate threat.
As with Obamacare, the incoming administration wants to shred an inclusive project and substitute an exclusive one for it. In so doing, it will replace a collection of liberal internationalists with something worse: a confederacy of oligarchs.
For such an undertaking that so radically privileges the few over the many, the next administration needs a compelling rationale that goes beyond assertions that the status quo is broken, international institutions are inefficient, and the United States is the indispensable power on the planet. America isn’t facing just any old crisis like failing banks or nuclear wannabe nations. For someone like Donald Trump, the threat has to be huge, the biggest ever.
So brace yourself for a coming clash of civilizations. The new president is circling the wagons in defense of nothing less than the Western way of life. As if it were a town in South Vietnam in 1968, Trump aims to destroy the international community in order to save it.
Read more: Donald Trump’s Strategy? Destroy the International Community in Order to Save It. | The Nation
Trump’s cabinet could be its own small island nation. Make that a very aggressive island nation: The military men in his proposed cabinet—former generals Mike Flynn (national security adviser), James Mattis (defense secretary), and John Kelly (head of Homeland Security), as well as former Navy Seal Ryan Zinke (interior secretary)—have fought in nearly as many countries as Trump has done business.
As worldly as they might be, Trump’s nominees don’t look much like the world. Mostly rich white men, they look more like the American electorate… circa 1817. Still, the media have bent over backward to find as much diversity as they could in this panorama of homogeneity. They have, for instance, identified the nominees according to their different ideological milieus: Wall Street, the Pentagon, the Republican Party, the lunatic fringe.
In this taxonomy of Trumpism, the media continue to miss the obvious. The incoming administration is, in fact, united around one key mission: It’s about to declare war on the world.
Don’t be fooled by the surface cosmopolitanism of the new president and his appointees. For all their international experience, these people care about the planet the way pornographers care about sex. Their interactions are purely transactional, just the means to an end. There couldn’t be less empathy for the people out there involved in the drama. It’s all about the money and that piercing sense of conquest.
The Trump team’s approach, a globalism of the 1 percent, benefits themselves even as it reinforces American exceptionalism. Their worldview is a galaxy distant from the sort of democratic internationalism that values diplomacy, human rights, and multilateral cooperation to address planetary problems like climate change and economic inequality. Such a foreign policy of mutual engagement is, in fact, exactly what’s under immediate threat.
As with Obamacare, the incoming administration wants to shred an inclusive project and substitute an exclusive one for it. In so doing, it will replace a collection of liberal internationalists with something worse: a confederacy of oligarchs.
For such an undertaking that so radically privileges the few over the many, the next administration needs a compelling rationale that goes beyond assertions that the status quo is broken, international institutions are inefficient, and the United States is the indispensable power on the planet. America isn’t facing just any old crisis like failing banks or nuclear wannabe nations. For someone like Donald Trump, the threat has to be huge, the biggest ever.
So brace yourself for a coming clash of civilizations. The new president is circling the wagons in defense of nothing less than the Western way of life. As if it were a town in South Vietnam in 1968, Trump aims to destroy the international community in order to save it.
Read more: Donald Trump’s Strategy? Destroy the International Community in Order to Save It. | The Nation
10/30/17
Outer Space: A Nearby Neutron Star Collision Could Cause Calamity on Earth - by John Wenz
A long time ago in a galaxy far away—NGC 4993, to be exact—two neutron stars collided and created a spectacular light show.
After billions of years spent slowly circling each other, in their last moments the two degenerate stars spiraled around each other thousands of times before finally smashing together at a significant fraction of light-speed, likely creating a black hole. The merger was so violent it shook the universe, emitting some 200 million suns' worth of energy as perturbations in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves. Those waves propagated out from the merger like ripples on a pond, eventually washing over Earth—and into our planet's premiere gravitational-wave detectors, the U.S.-built LIGO and European-built Virgo observatories.
Yet gravitational waves were not the merger's only products. The event also emitted electromagnetic radiation—that is, light—marking the first time astronomers have managed to capture both gravitational waves and light from a single source. The first light from the merger was a brief, brilliant burst of gamma rays, a probable birth cry of the black hole picked up by NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope.
Hours later astronomers using ground-based telescopes detected more light from the merger—a so-called "kilonova"—produced as debris from the merger expanded and cooled. For weeks much of the world's astronomical community watched the kilonova as it slowly faded from view.
According to a 2016 study, supernovae occurring as close as 50 light-years from Earth could pose an imminent danger to Earth's biosphere—humans included. The event would likely shower us in so much high-energy cosmic radiation that it could spark a planetary mass extinction. Researchers have tentatively linked past instances of spiking extinction rates and plummeting biodiversity to postulated astrophysical events, and in at least one case have even found definitive evidence for a nearby supernova as the culprit. Twenty million years ago, a star 325 light-years from Earth exploded, showering the planet in radioactive iron particles that eventually settled in deep-sea sediments on the ocean floor.That event, researchers speculate, may have triggered ice ages and altered the course of evolution and human history.
The exact details of past (and future) astrophysical cataclysms' impact on Earth's biosphere depend not only on their distance, but also their orientation. A supernova, for instance, can sometimes expel its energy in all directions—meaning it is not always a very targeted phenomenon. Merging black holes are expected to emit scarcely any radiation at all, making them surprisingly benign for any nearby biosphere. A kilonova, however, has different physics at play. Neutron stars are a few dozen kilometers in radius rather than a few million like a typical stars. When these dense objects merge, they tend to produce jets that blast out gamma rays from their poles.
"[W]hat it looks like to us, and the effect it has on us, would depend a lot on whether or not one of the jets was pointed directly at us," Frank says. Based on its distance and orientation to Earth, a kilonova's jets would walk the fine line between a spectacular light show and a catastrophic stripping away of the planet's upper atmosphere. If a jet is pointed directly at us, drastic changes could be in store. And we probably wouldn't see them coming. A kilonova begins with a burst of gamma rays—incredibly energetic photons that, by definition, move at light-speed, the fastest anything can travel through the universe. Because nothing else can move faster, those photons would strike first, and without warning.
Don't let all this keep you up at night. Kilonovae are relatively rare cosmic phenomena, estimated to occur just once every 10,000 years in a galaxy like the Milky Way. That's because neutron stars, which are produced by supernovae, hardly ever form as pairs. Usually, a neutron star will receive a hefty "kick" from its formative supernova; sometimes these kicks are strong enough to eject a neutron star entirely from its galaxy to hurtle at high speeds indefinitely through the cosmos. "When neutron stars are born, they're often high-velocity. For them to survive in a binary is nontrivial," Fruchter says. And the chances of two finding each other and merging after forming independently are, for lack of a better term, astronomically low.
For the unabridged report click here: : A Nearby Neutron Star Collision Could Cause Calamity on Earth
8/22/16
Middle East: Syria ‘US, Russia reaching end of Syria talks’
US Secretary of State John Kerry has said that he would “likely” meet his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov to talk about Syria, noting they might reach the end of the ongoing discussions on the war-torn country.
Kerry made the remarks in Nairobi, Kenya on Monday more than one month after he and Lavrov met in Moscow and discussed steps to restore peace in Syria.
"We are indeed engaged currently in ongoing conversations that have been going on now for several weeks and it is my hope that we are reaching the end of those discussions one way or the other," Kerry told reporters.
"In the next days, our teams will meet, this week, and depending on where those discussions go, it is very possible, even likely, that Foreign Minister Lavrov and I would meet," he said.
Read more: PressTV-‘US, Russia reaching end of Syria talks’
Kerry made the remarks in Nairobi, Kenya on Monday more than one month after he and Lavrov met in Moscow and discussed steps to restore peace in Syria.
"We are indeed engaged currently in ongoing conversations that have been going on now for several weeks and it is my hope that we are reaching the end of those discussions one way or the other," Kerry told reporters.
"In the next days, our teams will meet, this week, and depending on where those discussions go, it is very possible, even likely, that Foreign Minister Lavrov and I would meet," he said.
Read more: PressTV-‘US, Russia reaching end of Syria talks’
7/28/15
Artificial Intelligence: genuine concern, or fearmongering?
Dozens of prominent scientists have put their names to an open letter
warning the public about the danger of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
They are, specifically, worried about potential developments in
autonomous weapons, made possible by the progress of robotics and AI.
Among those endorsing the letter are Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky and Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X fame.
In the letter, the signatories claim “the deployment of such systems is – practically if not legally – feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”They highlight a large list of possible drawbacks to consider, should such weapons become reality.
For example, the signatories argue that they are relatively cheap to mass-produce, which could lower the boundaries for going to war, since fewer (if any) human lives would be lost.
The ‘human factor’ is also listed as one of few advantages of autonomous weapons, however, it is followed by:
“There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.”
Mass-production could mean the weapons would easily end up on the black market or in the hands of terrorists wishing to destabilise nations, or war lords “wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc.”
They write: “the key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting.”
Their response: “A military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity.”
Read more: Artificial Intelligence: genuine concern, or fearmongering? | euronews, world news
Among those endorsing the letter are Stephen Hawking, Noam Chomsky and Elon Musk of Tesla and Space X fame.
In the letter, the signatories claim “the deployment of such systems is – practically if not legally – feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”They highlight a large list of possible drawbacks to consider, should such weapons become reality.
For example, the signatories argue that they are relatively cheap to mass-produce, which could lower the boundaries for going to war, since fewer (if any) human lives would be lost.
The ‘human factor’ is also listed as one of few advantages of autonomous weapons, however, it is followed by:
“There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.”
Mass-production could mean the weapons would easily end up on the black market or in the hands of terrorists wishing to destabilise nations, or war lords “wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc.”
They write: “the key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting.”
Their response: “A military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity.”
Read more: Artificial Intelligence: genuine concern, or fearmongering? | euronews, world news
2/4/14
Animal World: Gone, But Not Forgotten: Species We've Lost in the Last 10 Years
Mankind has the honor of quite possibly being the most destructive force to ever hit Mother Nature. With 150 to 200 species of life ceasing to exist every 24 hours, a mass extinction is looming, and biodiversity is in crisis.
Periods of extinction are nothing new in the planet’s history, but species extinction in the past 10 years is far greater than anything the world has experienced in the past 65 million years. Humankind’s unsustainable production and consumption are without a doubt the major contributing factor.
For the first time since the disappearance of the dinosaurs, humans are driving both animal and plant species to extinction faster than new ones can evolve.
Although we can’t honor them all, here’s a glimpse at just some of the beautiful creatures that we’ve lost forever in the last decade:
Read more: Gone, But Not Forgotten: Species We've Lost in the Last 10 Years | Care2 Causes
Periods of extinction are nothing new in the planet’s history, but species extinction in the past 10 years is far greater than anything the world has experienced in the past 65 million years. Humankind’s unsustainable production and consumption are without a doubt the major contributing factor.
For the first time since the disappearance of the dinosaurs, humans are driving both animal and plant species to extinction faster than new ones can evolve.
Although we can’t honor them all, here’s a glimpse at just some of the beautiful creatures that we’ve lost forever in the last decade:
Read more: Gone, But Not Forgotten: Species We've Lost in the Last 10 Years | Care2 Causes
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