And here I thought that I'd finally be able to hide out in the womens' changing room at the gym.
That there are scientists out there that are proclaiming they are on the cusp of creating a cloak that doesn't reflect visible light is astounding.
Is this a late april fools joke?
Maybe you have to wear the cloak in order to get through the wormholes.

My driver's liscense need never again be in jeopardy.

Very interesting. I had heard about a shifting axis, but not very much about shifting polarity. A shifting axis seems like it would be a cataclysmic event.


I don't even know what effect a polarity shift would have on your average person. We sure don't want to end up like Mars.

They could spell it out, but they'd be guessing.

Shift in polarity only plays havoc with devices that use magnetic field, mostly for finding magnetic north which will sometime be magnetic south.

I recall something about iron in the human nose making us a bit of a human compass. Don't know if it's true. One of those nature shows or something. The closest thing I could Google.

Going back a ways but I think even inertial units align to magnetic field so be careful flying during the polarity fluctuations... Cannot remember if GPS has some dependence, I think not...

GPS does not in and of itself use magnetic reference but uses coded time signal delays to provide a refernce to the receiver for spatial positioning, headings are then calculated by the recieving unit as it moves through the time delay field. The more GPS satellites "in view" the better the accuarcy. GPS based navigation units use presets for starting referents. At least that was my experience with INS and my understanding of how the more modern navigational system work.

Depends on the INS used. A simple one (such as the LORAL system in my beloved F-4) will use the compass heading and magnetic deviation presets (or a manual input if known for the parking spot) when started as an initial reference, along with dialed in coordinates for "home plate" while its gyroscopes spin fully up to speed and stabilize their precession. After that the INS itself uses its own gyroscopic precession to determine heading and reference in space. More modern, and complex systems, also incorporate other reference cues for heading and positional determination (slaved to GPS, radio aids to navigation such as TACAN, VORTAC, LORAN, etc., even celestial (using a star tracker system)) when available. Most INSes are now back-up systems to the primary GPS based systems. This is one of the areas where automation has indeed eliminated or severely reduced the need for human navigators.

GPS does not in and of itself use magnetic reference but uses coded time signal delays to provide a refernce to the receiver for spatial positioning, headings are then calculated by the recieving unit as it moves through the time delay field. The more GPS satellites "in view" the better the accuarcy. GPS based navigation units use presets for starting referents. At least that was my experience with INS and my understanding of how the more modern navigational system work.

Thats kind of what I remember as well. Some modern military aircraft can do NAV fixes if their radars have ground mapping modes as well.

Yeah the 15E can do that IF you know in advance the accurate coordinates of a gven point readily identifiable on the radar. This is made much easier by the Strike Eagle's system than in previous fighters. You can actually take a radar "picture", freeze it, refine the cursor/cross-hairs and hit update (the system saves all the relevant dat for when the picture was taken, up to the point of update to redefine your current position at update time). Wish I could find on line the ad I saw (confirmed by some SE GIBS (Guys In Back)) when the 15E was being proposed. It showed a picture of a port facility (overhead imagery), the same facility on something like my old F-4's radar in ground mapping mode - what we called "blob-ology" - and a picture of the same facility from the SE radar. The difference between the actual photo and the SE radar was about 1 F-stop on a camera. Forget the F-4 picture.

Makes the old VOR and compass look like doing navigation with a stick in the dirt.

Rise of the boutique carmaker

By Clayton Collins | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
SAN CARLOS, CALIF.

The slope-nosed supercar sits ready to awaken, latent power in deep red. It should be nearly time to savor the harmonics of an engine well built, to smile at an exhaust pipe's burbling notes.

But today in San Carlos, Calif., in a region better known for silicon chips than superchargers, the Tesla Roadster comes to life with the auditory drama of a golf cart.

An engineer at the wheel, the Tesla - a preproduction sports car that's a heavier electric cousin to the wasplike Lotus Elise - engages and rolls away in a hush, tires humming on the concrete floor of a hangar-size garage.

The car, headed off for more tests in advance of its release next year, has the capacity to leave this building and run 250 miles before its 900-lb. lithium-ion battery pack needs a charge. At a stoplight it could - tapping the low-end torque inherent in electric drive - joust confidently with a similarly priced Ferrari. All without burning any gas.

It's one vision, at least, of the automotive future. Twenty-five years after John DeLorean rolled out his gull-winged gas-burner, small, private-label carmakers are decidedly in drive.

Several - including some whose creative juice flows back to General Motors' famously "killed" electric car, the EV1 - now bank on batteries, tuning out critics' static about battery longevity and questions about how electric utilities might generate enough power to handle a widespread shift.

Experts debate what role such boutique firms will play in an industry dominated by a dozen alliance-clad global juggernauts. The smalls still lack economies of scale, and must eye narrow niches in hopes of winning public attention (if you want a $100,000 Tesla, get in line behind George Clooney).

But they might be well suited to a coming shift: By 2015, parts suppliers - not carmakers - will represent nearly 80 percent of the industry's "total value creation," according to a 2004 report by Mercer Management Consulting.

"Smaller companies may really benefit from these developments," says Christian Kleinhans, a Mercer principal based in Munich, and a coauthor of the report. They will gain access to technology in such vital areas as electronics, he says, that they did not fund.

Nimble little firms can also adapt quickly to evolving consumer desires. Tesla, for one, plans another car, probably more mass-market friendly, as soon as 2009, says Martin Eberhard, cofounder and CEO. He built the Roadster to "convince consumers that an electric car can be something more than an in-town runabout."

Tesla sells direct to customers; its first wave of 100 Roadsters was snapped up in August. Orders for 2007 models are in the hundreds, says Mike Harrigan, Tesla's vice president of marketing.

"You don't have to make a million cars a year to be in the car business," says Peter Morici, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Business and former chief economist at the US International Trade Commission. "If [small carmakers] get out there in front, then they will develop expertise the big guys don't have.... I think there's an opening here."

Pointing to another business realm, Professor Morici cites the example of Dell creeping up on a complacent IBM, a firm he says "did not initially grasp the consequences of the PC and didn't fully exploit it," lingering instead in mainframes.

Others say carmaking entrepreneurs stand little chance against highly motivated giants, even as several of the titans struggle financially.

"Every generation has its creative geniuses who think that they can beat the odds, but the reality is that the car business is more than just the challenges of engineering the car itself," says Maryann Keller, an industry analyst, in an e-mail. "Getting the attention of the buying public with advertising and then setting up a dealer network - no, you can't sell them online - parts and repair investments, etc., are usually way beyond the capability of most individuals."

Ms. Keller also doubts consumers will align with brands whose futures seem uncertain. "Remember," she says, "the DeLorean was a failure, except in the movies."

But industry upheaval has generated all kinds of action. Some mavericks are focusing on collaborative engineering and low-cost manufacturing in making their runs. Visionary Vehicles founder Malcolm Bricklin, best known for bringing the Yugo to the US, aims to import a vehicle from China-based Chery next year, for example.

All-electrics, too, have picked up some buzz. Beside Tesla, there is Commuter Car Corp. in Seattle, building the two-passenger Tango. AC Propulsion, the San Dimas, Calif., firm whose founder engineered GM's EV1, has an electric based on the Toyota Scion.

And if hydrogen fuel cells remain a holy grail for most majors, with gas-electric hybrids as a stepping stone, some of the big firms also are dabbling in all-electrics.

A DaimlerChrysler unit, Global Electric Motorcars, is building a small, fleet-type car. Toyota is weighing a plug-in version of its hybrid Prius. (Some impatient owners had been making the change themselves.) Mitsubishi introduced the third generation of its electric "i" car this week, though it's not planned for the US market.

Tesla's Mr. Eberhard acknowledges the complexity of creating an automobile in what amounts to a small high-tech shop, with clusters of engineers poking at wire harnesses and whiteboards covered with scrawl about actuators. High-voltage signs are everywhere.

On one table a battery case lies open. Inside, a blue tube for liquid coolant snakes around the 621 cells on each of 11 stacked sheets. It's one of a few tables that can't be photographed. ("There," jokes an engineer, covering it with paper after its display. "Now it's secret again.")

"There's a lot more to a car than there is to a typical Silicon Valley project," Eberhard says. "And remember that in our case, we're not just building a new product, we're also building a new company and a new kind of company, and that takes a fair amount of effort and energy and money and time."

Money came from a group of investors that included billionaire PayPal founder Elon Musk as well as Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. That has helped Tesla compress time.

"In order to get the Roadster on the market fairly quickly, all the choices we made were not the most cost-effective choices," says Eberhard.

The manufacturing is done in England. Some parts - windshield-wiper motors and the like - are bought from other automakers in a milder form of the sourcing done by companies like Georgia-based performance carmaker Panoz, a leader in "scavenger" engineering.

"We're developing a car for $60 million," says Mr. Harrigan. "GM would probably spend that on marketing [alone] for its new Chevy Cadaver or whatever."

Eberhard says he understands the importance of support and sales infrastructures. (Regional "depots" are planned.) As for a nationwide system that will help drivers get around from day to day, he points to the 250-mile range and a portable recharger pack. "You charge at your house and that's enough," he says. "I mean, how much cellphone-charging infrastructure do you depend on?"

He brushes off concerns about battery technology, citing steady increases in capacity and declining costs. Eberhard seems quietly self-assured, almost missionary. As one Boston headline writer put it last summer: "Who's reviving the electric car?"

But even if Tesla and others can push the innovation curve and generate broader interest, says Ryan Brinkman, senior analyst at the PricewaterhouseCoopers Automotive Institute, that's the full extent of their impact.

"I don't think that a small manufacturer is going to come in and revolutionize this industry," Mr. Brinkman says. "I would place the probability of that as close to zero." Domestic and foreign manufacturers, he says, have too many billions invested in technologies even beyond electric vehicles.

Eberhard is used to hearing firms like his sold short. "Excellent," he says with a laugh, "I love it. That way maybe the big guys won't see me as a threat for a long time."

To the extent that a certain distribution of social power is rooted in the given technological rationality, which in turn forms the unquestioned horizon of discussion, no amount of debate can make much difference.

Depending upon the extent that a certain distribution of social power is rooted in the given technological rationality is often translated as "ya can't get there from here".

To the extent that "a certain distribution of social power" has as one of its necessary conditions of existence a "given technological rationality", and vice-versa, any attempt at altering either alone will come up against serious obstacles.

It's an argument about the 'lack of innocence' in the relationship between technological rationality and social power.

As you're interested in enhancing MORAL control or oversight in the development and USE of technologies (e.g. stem-cell, human cloning, abortifacients, etc.) I would think you'd want to sink your teeth into the argument.

Snapshots taken by Hubble reveal five supernovae, or exploding stars, and their host galaxies. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Riess/Space Telescope Science Institute
The History of Dark Energy Goes Way, Way Back
By Sara Goudarzi
Staff Writer
posted: 16 November 2006
01:10 pm ET
http://space.com/scienceastronomy/061116_d...ntuniverse.html

Scientists now have evidence that dark energy has been around for most of the universe's history.

Using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, researchers measured the expansion of the universe 9 billion years ago based on 23 of the most distant supernovae ever detected.

As theoretically expected, they found that the mysterious antigravity force, apparently pushing galaxies outward at an accelerating pace, was acting on the ancient universe much like the present.

All supernovas of a certain variety, called Type-1a, burn with the same brightness, so scientists can calculate relative distances in the universe based on how dim or bright these exploding stars get. In the late 1990’s it was realized that these standard candles were dimmer than expected and that the expansion of the universe was accelerating.

Scientists blamed the acceleration on an inexplicable repulsive force, dark energy.

"Although dark energy accounts for more than 70 percent of the energy of the universe, we know very little about it, so each clue is precious," said Adam Riess, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who was involved in the initial discoveries back in the '90s. "Our latest clue is that the stuff we call dark energy was present as long as 9 billion years ago, when it was starting to make its presence felt."

The universe is about 13.7 billion years old.

The researchers believe that although this new observation is a significant clue in the quest to understand what is probably, in Riess's words “one of the most, if not the most, pressing question in physics,” it’s far from the proof to what dark energy actually is.

Mario Livio from the Space Telescope Science Institute put the situation in perspective at a media teleconference at NASA headquarters today. “Water covers 70 percent of the surface of the Earth,” Livio said, yet it took humans many centuries to first discover the properties of water. With dark energy, he said, researchers are still in the phase of determining its properties.

Previous observations revealed that the early universe was comprised of matter whose gravity was trying to pull it all inward and slow down its expansion. But the spreading out of the cosmos started speeding up around 5 billion to 6 billion years ago. That’s when scientists believe dark energy started to win the cosmic tug of war.

"After we subtract the gravity from the known matter in the universe, we can see the dark energy pushing to get out," said Lou Strolger from the University of Western Kentucky.

Another important finding, the researchers said, is that they can now compare the properties of ancient stellar explosions to today's explosions.

“This is important because we use these tools to measure the universe [and] we need to make sure that our understanding of their nature themselves have not changed,” Riess said. The chemical composition in these 9-billion-year-old supernovas look remarkably similar to those that occur in the modern universe. So this finding continues to validate the use of supernovas as cosmic probes for understanding the nature of dark energy.

This latest finding is consistent with Einstein’s explanation for what dark energy is, the researchers noted. Einstein’s “cosmological constant” idea, which he called his biggest blunder and later rejected, turned out to be the same thing that scientist now see as the repulsive form of gravity called dark energy.

The findings will be published in the Feb. 10 issue of Astrophysical Journal.

The Ekpyrotic Universe: Colliding Branes and the Origin of the Hot Big Bang

Authors: Justin Khoury, Burt A. Ovrut, Paul J. Steinhardt, Neil Turok
Comments: 67 pages, 4 figures. v2,v3: minor corrections, references added
Journal-ref: Phys.Rev. D64 (2001) 123522

We propose a cosmological scenario in which the hot big bang universe is produced by the collision of a brane in the bulk space with a bounding orbifold plane, beginning from an otherwise cold, vacuous, static universe. The model addresses the cosmological horizon, flatness and monopole problems and generates a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of density perturbations without invoking superluminal expansion (inflation). The scenario relies, instead, on physical phenomena that arise naturally in theories based on extra dimensions and branes. As an example, we present our scenario predominantly within the context of heterotic M-theory. A prediction that distinguishes this scenario from standard inflationary cosmology is a strongly blue gravitational wave spectrum, which has consequences for microwave background polarization experiments and gravitational wave detectors.

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0103239

Catch a meteor show this weekend

Leonids reach their peak, and some observers may see an extra burst

By Joe Rao
Skywatching columnist

Updated: 2:51 p.m. ET Nov 17, 2006


Mid-November brings us the return of the famous Leonid meteor shower, which has a storied history of producing some of the most sensational meteor displays ever recorded.

These meteors travel along the orbit of periodic Comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle, and whenever that comet is passing through the inner solar system, the Leonids have a chance to provide us with a dramatic show. But the most recent passage of the comet around the sun came back in 1998, and we are now well past the favored time frame when, for several years running, observers in various parts of the world were witnessing very strong, even storm-level Leonid activity.

The most recent Leonid storms occurred in 2001 and 2002.




Most forecasters are indicating that a sharp peak of perhaps 100 to 150 (mostly faint) Leonids per hour might be seen this year. Those regions of the Earth that are in prime position to see another potential Leonid outburst are western Africa and western and central Europe, where the constellation Leo will ride high in the southeast sky as the peak of the shower arrives. Morning twilight will begin shortly thereafter.

In North America, for the Maritime Provinces of Canada, New England, eastern New York and Bermuda, the Sickle of Leo (from where the Leonids appear to emanate) will be above the east-northeast horizon just as the shower is due to reach its peak. But because Leo will be at a much lower altitude compared with Europe, meteor rates correspondingly may be much lower as well. However, this very special circumstance could lead to the appearance of a few long-trailed Earth-grazing meteors, due to meteoroids that skim along a path nearly parallel to Earth's surface. Seeing even just one of these meteors tracing a long, majestic path across the sky could make a chilly night under the stars worthwhile.

Keep in mind that for New England and U.S. East Coast, the peak is due locally on the previous day: Saturday at 11:45 p.m. ET. (For the Canadian Maritimes and Bermuda, the corresponding time is 12:45 a.m. Sunday. For Newfoundland it is also on Sunday, but at 1:15 a.m.).

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15717478/

I'm going to watch.

Better than politics, even.

Open Source at 90 MPH
Inspired by Linux, the OScar project aims to build a car by tapping the knowledge of a volunteer team. It won’t be an easy ride, but their journey is important

by Bruno Giussani
Innovation & Design

The computer operating system Linux and the Web browser Firefox are generally considered the two biggest successes of the movement to develop open-source programs—software anyone can modify, transform, and redistribute back into the community. While there are thousands of other examples, Linux and Firefox have managed to mount serious competition to established commercial products, and have therefore come to represent this specific, collective mode of creation.

But Linux and Firefox are made of bits. They are immaterial. Bits can be shared and sent around easily, so that distant people can work on them concurrently; bugs can be corrected almost instantly; new versions containing updates, improvements, or fixes can be released virtually for free.

So here's a question: Can open-source practices and approaches be applied to make hardware, to create tangible and physical objects, including complex ones? Say, to build a car?
From Farm to Plant

Markus Merz believes they can. The young German is the founder and "maintainer" (that's the title on his business card) of the OScar project, whose goal is to develop and build a car according to open-source (OS) principles. Merz and his team aren't going for a super-accessorized SUV—they're aiming at designing a simple and functionally smart car. And, possibly, along the way, reinvent transportation. After all, "Form follows function", says Merz.

It's a conspiracy I tell ya!

Geminid storm - last show of the year - and for the fifth time in a row - overcast.

Here I live in a place with beautiful clear air, relatively dim light pollution, and an unobstructed view of the sky (except to the west - got Rockies there) - and the last few events have been weathered out.

Arrrggghhhh!!!!!

Remembering Carl Sagan (1934-1996)

Carl Sagan, co-founder of The Planetary Society and an inspiration to millions the world over, passsed away ten years ago on December 20, 1996. To the memory of Carl, to his dreams, and to his unfinished mission, we dedicate these pages.

From the November/December 2006 issue of The Planetary Report

From the Editor

A few days ago, I took from the shelf a book I hadn't read in 10 years. Glancing though its pages, I was startled again by the power of its words to move me, emotionally and intellectually. I also was saddened that the man who presented this Cosmos to the world, who profoundly shared his spiritual and scientific wonder of the universe, has been gone for so long.

This December marks the 10th year since Carl Sagan's death. With his passing, science -- particularly its planetary and astronomic branches -- lost its most effective spokesman and defender. The Planetary Society lost not only a founder and figurehead but, more vitally, an involved and energetic leader. His fingerprints are on every aspect of our program, from our research projects to our political advocacy.

Most of all, his influence is felt in the pages of our magazine. The Planetary Report is, in many ways, his creation. Carl took special responsibility for it, and, until a few weeks before his death, he read every word before we published it.

We continue The Planetary Society's work in his long shadow. When we hear of discoveries on other worlds, encounter new policies that advance or impede our explorations, struggle with disappointments, or celebrate our successes, we often ask, "What would Carl have said?" There is no answer to that question.

--Charlene M. Anderson

Where Would We Be With Carl?

by Ann Druyan

From the November/December 2006 issue of The Planetary Report

Weather permitting, Carl preferred to think and write outdoors amidst the natural beauty that surrounds our home in Ithaca, New York. As I write this, I look out on the clearing down by the waterfall where he would work, sitting at a table, all but motionless for hours at a time. He said the music of the rushing water provided the perfect background white noise for concentrating. When Carl and I were writing Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, I once looked up from the computer in my office to find him deep in thought, his attention so highly focused on our manuscript that he was completely unaware of the rather large deer peering over his shoulder, as if trying to read what he was writing. The waterfall, the gorge with its record of the aeons inscribed in its strata, and the still-wild animals remain for now. The chair is empty.

We have traveled ten times around the Sun since Carl’s death, and our little world is much changed. With his dazzling mind and vast knowledge, what would he have thought of the direction we, as a civilization, have taken in the years since? How might he have campaigned against the forces of darkness and brutality? How many minds might he have opened? During the last ten years, I have longed for the personal Carl of our love, family, and work together, but I have also keenly missed the man who was a global voice for science, exploration, reason, and democracy. Carl’s ecological niche has remained tragically untenanted for all this time—and in my opinion, the consequences have been profound. My respect for his greatness keeps me from speaking for him with any degree of certainty. I can only offer my conjectures based on our 20 years of intense communication. Some of my speculations are more confident than others, flowing logically from the deeds and words of his life.

For instance, I feel sure that he would have been gratified by the achievements of The Planetary Society and especially thrilled by our boldness in actually launching our own spacecraft, Cosmos 1, the first solar sail. (Only ten years ago, this would have been so prohibitively expensive that even Carl never dared to dream that we could attempt such a feat.) I can see him tipping an imaginary hat in Lou Friedman’s direction for his leadership of the mission. I know Carl would now be knocking on every conceivable door to raise the money necessary to see the project through to its fulfillment as a major milestone in the history of exploration. Given his powers of persuasion, I think we would be well into the countdown to our next launch.

Carl would have been inspired by the discoveries of the Mars missions and very proud that they were led by his students. The revelations of Cassini and Huygens would have taken him to new heights. How I wish he could see the new data from Mars and the outer solar system. If it were possible to share one new image of the planets and moons with him, I would pick a shot of Titan, the object of a lifetime of his scientific imagining. It would be the one taken by the Huygens descent probe of the Titan coast, showing icy highlands with dry rivers and what appears to be the shoreline of a vanished sea. Here the Titan coast looks more like Biarritz than any other place that comes to mind. From his boyhood in Brooklyn in the 1930s, he envisioned a time when the planets and their moons would become real places to us. No matter how inhospitable to humans Titan’s atmosphere may be, that vision of the Titan coast beckons.



Years before the launch of the first space shuttle, Carl criticized it as an unsafe “capability without a mission,” a program that he prophesied would siphon off support from the grudgingly funded space science treasury. I have no doubt that he would have led the fight to protect and enhance federal support for space science. He would have continued to campaign for science and critical thinking against the many different cultural and political assaults of the last several years. It’s not that I think he alone could have turned the tide, but he would have provided critically needed leadership for those of us who have felt unrepresented.

To know what Carl would have thought of the current state of our nation, you need only remember that his pride in being an American stemmed from the integrity of our elections, our system of checks and balances, our respect for the rule of law both domestically and internationally, our high standards of evidence and truthfulness, our long historical recognition of the critical importance of the separation of church and state, our ability to take care of each other in times of disaster, what we stand for on the planet, our commitment to science and public education, and, perhaps most of all, the Bill of Rights guaranteed to us in the Constitution.

Carl died five years before the attacks on September 11, 2001, but he saw growing religious fundamentalism—whether it was in Mecca or the Bible Belt—as a looming threat, from without and within, to everything we value. He knew but one antidote for the magical thinking that lies at its root: the ability to weigh contending hypotheses and evaluate them by using the scientific method. So, despite the fact that he was battling a fatal disease and undergoing the “medieval torture” we call bone marrow transplants, he found the strength to write The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. It would be one of two books that he would write during his last illness. His doctor told me that he had never had a patient who was able to read two books during the months it takes for a bone marrow transplant, let alone to write them.

I hope that, believing as he did in the profound relationship between science education and effective citizenship in a democratic society based on science and high technology, Carl would have shared my excitement in the current project we at the Carl Sagan Foundation have chosen to support: the Carl Sagan Academy, the nation’s first humanist public charter school. CSA serves middle schoolers in the Tampa area of Hillsborough County, Florida who otherwise might never have any experience of the wonders of nature as revealed by science. It is the result of a remarkable collaboration of the American Humanist Association of Florida and the local Baptist churches, the kind of cooperation between people with radically different ideologies that exemplifies the world of which we dream. CSA is now in its second year, with a student body consisting of 78 of some of the most underserved children in America. I hope Planetary Society members who share Carl’s dream of a scientifically literate and critically thoughtful public will contact us at the Carl Sagan Foundation.

This past summer, as I watched former Vice President Al Gore’s film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, I thought how proud Carl would have been of his former student at Harvard and longtime friend. More than once in the film, Al acknowledges Carl’s influence on his thinking, and his evocation of Carl’s “Pale Blue Dot” meditation provides the film with its final spiritual impact. I was reminded of how long it has been since we had a tireless, rigorously scientific, eloquent advocate for the planetary perspective to connect with people everywhere and to awaken us from our stupor; to move us to act in defense of our life-support system.



The briefcase Carl carried with him on that last trip to the hospital remained locked, exactly as he left it in December of 1996. It’s a kind of time capsule of what he was working on and thinking about during those last days of his life. I had carried it home on that last trip from Seattle, but something kept me from exploring its contents. When I sat down to write this article, it occurred to me that it was probably time to open it and look inside. I tried a couple of likely combinations. When I got to my own birthday, bingo, the golden hasps flew open. The case contained photos of our family; a Saturn-shaped birthday card from our then-14-year-old daughter, Sasha; a clutch of NASA security badges; an issue of Science with a false-color Galileo image of Europa on the cover; slides of various planetary surfaces; a note from Chris Chyba about a visit that was never to be; Carl’s reply to Neil Tyson, whom he had known and admired since Neil first wrote to him as a Bronx high school student contemplating a career in science; Charlene Anderson’s request that Carl respond to a Planetary Report reader’s question (“How can simple gases turn to organic residues when exposed to UV rays?”), to which, of course, his answer was “yes”; a message to artist Don Davis regarding the astronomical imaging for the motion picture Contact; another from scientist/artist Bill Hartmann about cratering on Mars; and letters of thanks for his agreement to give the keynote addresses to NASA’s 1997 Early Mars Workshop and to the December White House Conference on the Future of Space Exploration.

In the last week of his life, Carl wanted desperately to somehow get to that conference. He knew he was about to die, and he wanted to leave us with a vision of how to build on the epochal achievements of the first 40 years of the space age. He was worried that we were losing our way and our resolve to continue on the long road to the stars. As he lay dying, he managed, with an effort I found heart-wrenching, to dictate the speech.



A few days later, Vice President Gore opened the meeting by reading Carl’s words aloud. It was one of the last things I was able to tell him and be certain that he understood. He smiled at the news. What I saw in those hazel eyes was a mixture of affection for Al Gore, a sense of relief that he had been able to communicate with the space science decision makers, and a flicker of concern about the future, one that proved to be, in the short term at least, all too well-placed.

Well, maybe two steps forward, one step backward is how we as a species wend our way through history. Perhaps these little detours have some selective advantage as a means of processing change along our pathway to the stars. In the meantime, a global community of people coalesces around Carl’s legacy. The chair may be empty, but the ideas, the values, and even the dreams of the man are here now.

Ann Druyan’s latest collaboration with Carl Sagan is her edit of his 1985 Gifford Lectures into the new book titled The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, published by The Penguin Press. She is working on three feature films. Anyone wishing to contact The Carl Sagan Foundation is urged to write to Cornell Business and Technology Park, 95 Brown Road, Suite #1027, Ithaca, NY 14850.

Mr. X
By Carl Sagan

This account was written in 1969 for publication in Marihuana Reconsidered (1971). Sagan was in his mid-thirties at that time. He continued to use cannabis for the rest of his life.

It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life - a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend's living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my eyelids. Flash . . . a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. . . Flash . . . same scene, orange house, brown sky, red clouds, yellow path, violet fields . . . Flash . . . Flash . . . Flash. The flashes came about once a heartbeat. Each flash brought the same simple scene into view, but each time with a different set of colors . . . exquisitely deep hues, and astonishingly harmonious in their juxtaposition. Since then I have smoked occasionally and enjoyed it thoroughly. It amplifies torpid sensibilities and produces what to me are even more interesting effects, as I will explain shortly.

I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience.

I want to explain that at no time did I think these things 'really' were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don't feel any contradiction in these experiences. There's a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there's another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the creator-part. I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror that accompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it's my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any time I want to.

While my early perceptions were all visual, and curiously lacking in images of human beings, both of these items have changed over the intervening years. I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high. I test whether I'm high by closing my eyes and looking for the flashes. They come long before there are any alterations in my visual or other perceptions. I would guess this is a signal-to-noise problem, the visual noise level being very low with my eyes closed. Another interesting information-theoretical aspects is the prevalence - at least in my flashed images - of cartoons: just the outlines of figures, caricatures, not photographs. I think this is simply a matter of information compression; it would be impossible to grasp the total content of an image with the information content of an ordinary photograph, say 108 bits, in the fraction of a second which a flash occupies. And the flash experience is designed, if I may use that word, for instant appreciation. The artist and viewer are one. This is not to say that the images are not marvelously detailed and complex. I recently had an image in which two people were talking, and the words they were saying would form and disappear in yellow above their heads, at about a sentence per heartbeat. In this way it was possible to follow the conversation. At the same time an occasional word would appear in red letters among the yellows above their heads, perfectly in context with the conversation; but if one remembered these red words, they would enunciate a quite different set of statements, penetratingly critical of the conversation. The entire image set which I've outlined here, with I would say at least 100 yellow words and something like 10 red words, occurred in something under a minute.

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I'm down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights - I don't know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate. For example, I have spent some time high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some years later, I emerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral reef. In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which made up the beach, I saw before me a vast Tanguey painting. Perhaps Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood.

A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning experience when high has at least to some extent carried over when I'm down. The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we ordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation. A potato will have a texture, a body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so. Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex - on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I've had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word 'crazy' to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: 'did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.' When high on cannabis I discovered that there's somebody inside in those people we call mad.

When I'm high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won't attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day. Some of the hardest work I've ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it's a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I've made the effort - successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.

I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can't go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.

But let me try to at least give the flavor of such an insight and its accompaniments. One night, high on cannabis, I was delving into my childhood, a little self-analysis, and making what seemed to me to be very good progress. I then paused and thought how extraordinary it was that Sigmund Freud, with no assistance from drugs, had been able to achieve his own remarkable self-analysis. But then it hit me like a thunderclap that this was wrong, that Freud had spent the decade before his self-analysis as an experimenter with and a proselytizer for cocaine; and it seemed to me very apparent that the genuine psychological insights that Freud brought to the world were at least in part derived from his drug experience. I have no idea whether this is in fact true, or whether the historians of Freud would agree with this interpretation, or even if such an idea has been published in the past, but it is an interesting hypothesis and one which passes first scrutiny in the world of the downs.

I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I'm high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say 'Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!' I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds.

Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? While I find a curious disinclination to think of my professional concerns when high - the attractive intellectual adventures always seem to be in every other area - I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent. So far, so good. At least the recall works. Then in trying to conceive of a way of reconciling the disparate facts, I was able to come up with a very bizarre possibility, one that I'm sure I would never have thought of down. I've written a paper which mentions this idea in passing. I think it's very unlikely to be true, but it has consequences which are experimentally testable, which is the hallmark of an acceptable theory.

I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of your mind that remains a dispassionate observer, who is able to take you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced to drive in heavy traffic when high. I've negotiated it with no difficult at all, though I did have some thoughts about the marvelous cherry-red color of traffic lights. I find that after the drive I'm not high at all. There are no flashes on the insides of my eyelids. If you're high and your child is calling, you can respond about as capably as you usually do. I don't advocate driving when high on cannabis, but I can tell you from personal experience that it certainly can be done. My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover. Through the years I find that slightly smaller amounts of cannabis suffice to produce the same degree of high, and in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater.

There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I've never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn't too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

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