The Bull Run is not Over

Buy the Dip

Every bull run in crypto has seen 5-7 declines of 30% or more. The 2021 bull cycle is no exception.

In the long term, crypto will continue to outperform other asset classes.

Bitcoin is still set to hit $100K in the next 12 to 18 months.

Crypto is bigger than any one individual and that includes the world’s richest men, such as Elon Musk.

Unsurprisingly, China banning financial institutions from offering crypto services had an adverse effect on the already dropping market.

We have seen a lot of our clients rolling out of Bitcoin and into Ethereum.

With the run-up Bitcoin had, it is now time for some of the other currencies to shine.

With crypto, you have to take the long-term view because, on the one-, five-, ten-year scale, it tends to outperform just about any asset.

Justin Sun

Justin Sun (born July 30, 1990) is a tech entrepreneur, the founder of the cryptocurrency platform TRON and current CEO of Rainberry, Inc. He is the founder and CEO of mobile social app Peiwo[

Education
Justin Sun holds an M.A. in East Asia Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in History from Peking University.

Career
When he was 26, Sun was chosen by Jack Ma to study at Hupan University, and was the only millennial among the first graduates.[citation needed] Sun became the cover figure of Yazhou Zhoukan in 2011 and Davos Global Youth Leaders in 2014. In 2015 he was named CNTV’s most noteworthy new entrepreneur, and was named in Forbes China 30 Under 30 from 2015 through 2017.

Sun placed the record-breaking $4.5 million bid to have a private lunch with Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett in June 2019, before cancelling it to widespread surprise. The lunch with Buffett eventually occurred in January 2020.

On 11 Mar 2021 Sun was, by a narrow margin, the underbidder on the historic $69M auction at Christie’s New York of the Beeple non-fungible token (NFT) collection Everydays: the First 5000 Days.

Justin Sun’s TRON

When many people hear the word TRON, they may think of the old arcade game or their minds may cast back to the 1980s cult classic film about computer programmers. However, Justin Sun’s TRON is far more sophisticated than anything from the 1982 film starring Jeff Bridges.

Sun has created a digital platform that enhances a myriad of entertainment options. Live shows, online casinos, mobile gaming and more are all enhanced through TRON. How does it work? Well, the program provides payment, development and more options for users. It is an innovative system that has led some to call Sun the ‘new Jack Ma’.

Sun’s TRON is being compared to China’s Alibaba e-commerce company, hence one of the reasons for Sun being grouped with the famous Ma. In China, TRON has already received the backing of numerous major players, and it has made Sun a popular figure in the e-commerce world. One of the reasons TRON is being so highly touted is due to its ability to accept and work with multiple virtual currencies. TRON could make global payments much easier, and companies around the world are highly interested in Sun’s brainchild.

Recently, Totalprestige Magazine spoke with Sun about TRON and its amazing capabilities.

Justin, can you please tell us what exactly is TRON, and what are its goals and objectives?

TRON protocol is the blockchain entertainment content ecosystem, in which TRX, TRON’s token, is circulated. It’s native economic system enables an unprecedented one-on-one interaction between providers of digital entertainment content and ordinary users.

Therefore, content providers will no longer need to pay high channel fees to centralized platforms like Google Play and Apple’s App Store. Also, providers of content such as texts, pictures, videos, and broadcasts, will break the curse of popularity, and hits cannot make profits. With the strengths of social network and value network, TRON is committed to ecological prosperity. In relation to any community and free market economy, an incentive system that fairly and reasonably reflects the contributions made by participants is fundamental.

TRON will attempt to accurately and transparently measure and motivate relevant participants and contributors using digital assets for the first time, thus enabling this content ecosystem with TRX.

Tron is a decentralized content protocol that aims to establish a global free content entertainment ecosystem through blockchain technology. It allows each user to freely publish, store, and own data. The content creators will be empowered through the free creation, circulation, and trading of digital assets under decentralized self-governance.

Can you let us know how TRON began and what some of the highlights have been?

In 2015, I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Master’s Degree. I previously gained a Bachelor’s Degree at Peking University. I started a project called Peiwo, an app that is now one of the largest audio-based live show platforms in China, with over 10 million registered users and around 1 million monthly active users.

The Peiwo app will become the first TRON-compatible entertainment app and the first live show software in the world to support a ‘smart contract protocol’ of virtual currency, allowing those 10 million registered users to benefit from the additional functions of virtual currency.

This is only the first move of TRON. Next, we will provide the infrastructure construction for entertainment systems around the world, including online casino and games. Additionally, API access will be provided to facilitate robust settlement services. Our first move, though, is for TRON to make the Peiwo app benefit from its blockchain network.

What TRON provides is a shared platform for the whole entertainment market to maintain user information and share it between systems, and it is breaking down information barriers between apps.

It is explained that in this way users can significantly reduce information input efforts in specific apps, while developers can realize highly effective interactions in the realm of user identification, reducing duplicate identification costs, and preventing the risk of user information being stolen and leaked by intermediate agencies.

Justin, can you please let us know about yourself and how your career began?

I am 26-years-old and come from the Haidian District of Beijing. I’m originally from Shandong Province on the coast by the Bohai Sea. I first became part of the cryptocurrency community back in 2012 with my first purchases of bitcoin.

A year later, I joined Ripple and worked as the chief representative of Greater China. I helped Ripple with the successful completion of their first-round financing which totaled $30 million, and subsequently, it helped them become one of the world’s top three virtual currency systems.

For more information on TRON, please vist www.Tron.Network/en.html.

BitTorrent (BTT)

What Is BitTorrent (BTT)?
BitTorrent is a popular peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and torrent platform which has become increasingly decentralized in recent years.

Originally released in July 2001, BitTorrent was purchased by blockchain platform TRON in July 2018.

Since its acquisition, BitTorrent has added various new tools, with a dedicated native cryptocurrency token, BTT, released in February 2019. BTT was launched on TRON’s own blockchain, using its TRC-10 standard.

According to its official literature, BitTorrent is currently the “largest decentralized P2P communications protocol” in the world.

Who Are the Founders of BitTorrent?
The original BitTorrent is the brainchild of Bram Cohen, a developer and entrepreneur who himself has since become well known in the cryptocurrency arena.

Cohen has explained that he designed BitTorrent to usurp the dated entertainment industry, which made obtaining material slow and expensive.

The platform has seen multiple legal battles, with Cohen maintaining that it does not break copyright laws in allowing users to share files such as music and movies among themselves.

In 2018, TRON completed its acquisition of BitTorrent, bringing BitTorrent under the control of Justin Sun. Sun is notorious for his plugging of both TRON as a cryptocurrency and its blockchain technology, bidding $4.5 million at a charity auction to have lunch with Warren Buffett (well-known anti-crypto figure) and discuss cryptocurrency with him.

TRON is also behind the addition of cryptocurrency to BitTorrent, as the BTT token was released on TRON’s blockchain. The move formed part of TRON’s efforts to add further decentralized features to the platform.

What Makes BitTorrent Unique?
BitTorrent’s original goal was to disrupt the legacy entertainment industry and how consumers obtain content.

Expensive and inefficient distribution networks were the main target, with original developer Bram Cohen seeing benefits in allowing internet users to distribute content among themselves directly.

In the early 2000s, BitTorrent became the go-to P2P file sharing platform, with TRON stepping in 2018.

Under TRON, BitTorrent has expanded its user appeal to those interested in decentralized solutions and cryptocurrency, as well as to its own user base.

Among the added features are BitTorrent Speed, which uses the BTT token as part of its operations.

BitTorrent has also branched out into paid services, offering several “premium” versions of its platform which include VPN capabilities and ad-free browsing.

New to crypto? Find the answers to all your questions on Alexandria, CoinMarketCap’s dedicated education resource.

How Many BitTorrent (BTT) Coins Are There in Circulation?
BTT is BitTorrent’s native cryptocurrency, issued on TRON’s blockchain as a TRC-10 standard token.

The total supply, as stated in its whitepaper, is 990,000,000,000 BTT. 6% of that total was available in a public token sale, 2% in a private token sale and 9% in a seed sale.

Another 20.1% are reserved for airdrops, which are set to occur at various points until 2025. The BitTorrent team and umbrella organization, the BitTorrent Foundation, were awarded 19% of the supply. The TRON foundation holds 20%, with 19.9% going to the BitTorrent ecosystem itself.

A final 4% of tokens are reserved for partnership activities.

BTT plays various roles in BitTorrent’s products, including allowing users to pay others for faster downloads with BitTorrent Speed.

How Is the BitTorrent Network Secured?
BitTorrent says that it employs “the highest level of security measures” in order to secure user funds, but advises that cryptocurrency involves inherent risk.

The company recommends that users protect themselves against theft, in the form of malware or similar programs, by using options such as biometric verification.

Where Can You Buy BitTorrent (BTT)?
BTT is tradable for cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and even fiat currencies on major exchanges. Binance, Huobi Global and OKEx are among the offerings

Immanuel Kant, Writer, Philosopher

Immanuel Kant is one of the central figures of modern philosophy, and set the terms by which all subsequent thinkers have had to grapple. He argued that human perception structures natural laws, and that reason is the source of morality. His thought continues to hold a major influence in contemporary thought, especially in fields such as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics.

A black hole in your pocket?


Transcript


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00:00:00,000 –> 00:00:04,264
What would happen to you if a black hole the size of a coin suddenly appeared near you?

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00:00:04,836 –> 00:00:05,887
Short answer: you’d die.

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00:00:06,351 –> 00:00:07,424
Long answer: it depends.

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Is it a black hole with
the mass of a coin,

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00:00:09,963 –> 00:00:11,017
or is it as wide as a coin?

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00:00:11,503 –> 00:00:14,549
Suppose a US nickel with
the mass of about 5 grams

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00:00:14,963 –> 00:00:16,975
magically collapsed into a black hole.

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00:00:17,083 –> 00:00:20,139
This black hole would have a radius
of about 10 to the power of −30 meters.

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00:00:20,645 –> 00:00:24,727
By comparison, a hydrogen atom is about
10 to the power of −11 meters.

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00:00:25,465 –> 00:00:27,564
So the black hole compared
to an atom is as small as

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00:00:28,455 –> 00:00:29,531
an atom compared to the Sun.

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Unimaginably small!

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00:00:31,885 –> 00:00:34,964
And a small black hole would also have
an unimaginably short lifetime

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00:00:35,675 –> 00:00:36,736
to decay by Hawking radiation.

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It would radiate away what little mass it
has in 10 to the power of −23 seconds.

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Its 5 grams of mass will be converted
to 450 terajoules of energy,

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00:00:47,225 –> 00:00:50,246
which will lead to an explosion
roughly 3 times bigger than

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the atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

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In this case, you die.

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You also lose the coin.

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If the black hole had the
diameter of a common coin,

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then it would be considerably
more massive.

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00:01:02,133 –> 00:01:05,265
In fact, a black hole with
the diameter of a nickel

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would be slightly more
massive than the Earth.

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It would have a surface gravity
a billion billion times greater

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than our planet currently does.

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Its tidal forces on you would be so strong

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that they’d rip your
individual cells apart.

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The black hole would consume you before
you even realized what’s happening.

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Although the laws of gravity
are still the same,

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the phenomenon of gravity that you’d
experience would be very different

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around such dense objects.

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The range of the gravitational attraction

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extends over the entire
observable universe,

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with gravity getting weaker the farther
away you are from something.

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On Earth right now, your head and your
toes are approximately the same distance

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from the center of our planet.

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But if you stood on
a nickel-sized black hole,

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your feet would be hundreds
of times closer to the center,

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and the gravitational force would be
tens of thousands of times as large

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as the force on your head and
rip you into a billion pieces.

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But the black hole wouldn’t
stop with just you.

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The black hole is now a
dominant gravitational piece

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of the
Earth–Moon–Black-Hole-of-Death system.

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You might think that the black hole would
sink towards the center of the planet

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00:02:07,761 –> 00:02:09,795
and consume it from the inside out.

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00:02:10,101 –> 00:02:14,154
In fact, the Earth also moves up onto the black hole and begins to bob around,

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as if it were orbiting the black hole,

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00:02:16,331 –> 00:02:18,405
all while having swathes of mass eaten with each pass,

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which is much more creepy.

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As the Earth is eaten up from the inside,

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it collapses into a
scattered disk of hot rock,

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surrounding the black hole
in a tight orbit.

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The black hole slowly doubles its mass
by the time it’s done feeding.

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The Moon’s orbit is now highly elliptical.

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The effects on the Solar system
are awesome—

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in the Biblical sense of awesome,
which means terrifying.

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Tidal forces from the black hole would
probably disrupt the near-Earth asteroids,

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maybe even parts of the asteroid belt,

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sending rocks careening
through the Solar system.

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Bombardment and impacts
may become commonplace

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for the next few million years.

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The planets are slightly perturbed, but
stay approximately in the same orbit.

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The black hole we used
to call Earth will now

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continue on orbiting
the Sun in the Earth’s place.

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In this case, you also die.

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This bonus video was made possible
by your contributions on Patreon.

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Thank you so much for your support!

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The topic is based on a question on
the AskScience subreddit

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and the glorious answer by Matt [Caplin?],
who also worked with us on this video.

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Check out his blog, Quarks and Coffee,
for more awesome stuff like this!

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If you want to discuss the video,
we have our own subreddit now.

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To learn more about black holes or equally
interesting neutron stars, click here.

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Subtitles by the Amara.org community

KIC 8462852: The most mysterious star

Tabetha Boyajian: The most mysterious star in the universe

0:11
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is my job, my responsibility, as an astronomer to remind people that alien hypotheses should always be a last resort.

0:28
Now, I want to tell you a story about that. It involves data from a NASA mission, ordinary people and one of the most extraordinary stars in our galaxy.

0:40
It began in 2009 with the launch of NASA’s Kepler mission. Kepler’s main scientific objective was to find planets outside of our solar system. It did this by staring at a single field in the sky, this one, with all the tiny boxes. And in this one field, it monitored the brightness of over 150,000 stars continuously for four years, taking a data point every 30 minutes. It was looking for what astronomers call a transit. This is when the planet’s orbit is aligned in our line of sight, just so that the planet crosses in front of a star. And when this happens, it blocks out a tiny bit of starlight, which you can see as a dip in this curve.

1:30
And so the team at NASA had developed very sophisticated computers to search for transits in all the Kepler data.

1:39
At the same time of the first data release, astronomers at Yale were wondering an interesting thing: What if computers missed something?

1:52
And so we launched the citizen science project called Planet Hunters to have people look at the same data. The human brain has an amazing ability for pattern recognition, sometimes even better than a computer. However, there was a lot of skepticism around this. My colleague, Debra Fischer, founder of the Planet Hunters project, said that people at the time were saying, “You’re crazy. There’s no way that a computer will miss a signal.” And so it was on, the classic human versus machine gamble. And if we found one planet, we would be thrilled. When I joined the team four years ago, we had already found a couple. And today, with the help of over 300,000 science enthusiasts, we have found dozens, and we’ve also found one of the most mysterious stars in our galaxy.

2:44
So to understand this, let me show you what a normal transit in Kepler data looks like. On this graph on the left-hand side you have the amount of light, and on the bottom is time. The white line is light just from the star, what astronomers call a light curve. Now, when a planet transits a star, it blocks out a little bit of this light, and the depth of this transit reflects the size of the object itself. And so, for example, let’s take Jupiter. Planets don’t get much bigger than Jupiter. Jupiter will make a one percent drop in a star’s brightness. Earth, on the other hand, is 11 times smaller than Jupiter, and the signal is barely visible in the data.

3:25
So back to our mystery. A few years ago, Planet Hunters were sifting through data looking for transits, and they spotted a mysterious signal coming from the star KIC 8462852. The observations in May of 2009 were the first they spotted, and they started talking about this in the discussion forums.

3:46
They said and object like Jupiter would make a drop like this in the star’s light, but they were also saying it was giant. You see, transits normally only last for a few hours, and this one lasted for almost a week.

4:00
They were also saying that it looks asymmetric, meaning that instead of the clean, U-shaped dip that we saw with Jupiter, it had this strange slope that you can see on the left side. This seemed to indicate that whatever was getting in the way and blocking the starlight was not circular like a planet. There are few more dips that happened, but for a couple of years, it was pretty quiet.

4:25
And then in March of 2011, we see this. The star’s light drops by a whole 15 percent, and this is huge compared to a planet, which would only make a one percent drop. We described this feature as both smooth and clean. It also is asymmetric, having a gradual dimming that lasts almost a week, and then it snaps right back up to normal in just a matter of days.

4:51
And again, after this, not much happens until February of 2013. Things start to get really crazy. There is a huge complex of dips in the light curve that appear, and they last for like a hundred days, all the way up into the Kepler mission’s end. These dips have variable shapes. Some are very sharp, and some are broad, and they also have variable durations. Some last just for a day or two, and some for more than a week. And there’s also up and down trends within some of these dips, almost like several independent events were superimposed on top of each other. And at this time, this star drops in its brightness over 20 percent. This means that whatever is blocking its light has an area of over 1,000 times the area of our planet Earth.

5:45
This is truly remarkable. And so the citizen scientists, when they saw this, they notified the science team that they found something weird enough that it might be worth following up. And so when the science team looked at it, we’re like, “Yeah, there’s probably just something wrong with the data.” But we looked really, really, really hard, and the data were good. And so what was happening had to be astrophysical, meaning that something in space was getting in the way and blocking starlight. And so at this point, we set out to learn everything we could about the star to see if we could find any clues to what was going on. And the citizen scientists who helped us in this discovery, they joined along for the ride watching science in action firsthand.

6:36
First, somebody said, you know, what if this star was very young and it still had the cloud of material it was born from surrounding it. And then somebody else said, well, what if the star had already formed planets, and two of these planets had collided, similar to the Earth-Moon forming event. Well, both of these theories could explain part of the data, but the difficulties were that the star showed no signs of being young, and there was no glow from any of the material that was heated up by the star’s light, and you would expect this if the star was young or if there was a collision and a lot of dust was produced. And so somebody else said, well, how about a huge swarm of comets that are passing by this star in a very elliptical orbit? Well, it ends up that this is actually consistent with our observations. But I agree, it does feel a little contrived. You see, it would take hundreds of comets to reproduce what we’re observing. And these are only the comets that happen to pass between us and the star. And so in reality, we’re talking thousands to tens of thousands of comets. But of all the bad ideas we had, this one was the best. And so we went ahead and published our findings.

7:59
Now, let me tell you, this was one of the hardest papers I ever wrote. Scientists are meant to publish results, and this situation was far from that. And so we decided to give it a catchy title, and we called it: “Where’s The Flux?” I will let you work out the acronym.

8:17
(Laughter)

8:21
So this isn’t the end of the story. Around the same time I was writing this paper, I met with a colleague of mine, Jason Wright, and he was also writing a paper on Kepler data. And he was saying that with Kepler’s extreme precision, it could actually detect alien megastructures around stars, but it didn’t. And then I showed him this weird data that our citizen scientists had found, and he said to me, “Aw crap, Tabby. Now I have to rewrite my paper.”

8:53
So yes, the natural explanations were weak, and we were curious now. So we had to find a way to rule out aliens. So together, we convinced a colleague of ours who works on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, that this would be an extraordinary target to pursue. We wrote a proposal to observe the star with the world’s largest radio telescope at the Green Bank Observatory.

9:20
A couple months later, news of this proposal got leaked to the press and now there are thousands of articles, over 10,000 articles, on this star alone. And if you search Google Images, this is what you’ll find.

9:38
Now, you may be wondering, OK, Tabby, well, how do aliens actually explain this light curve? OK, well, imagine a civilization that’s much more advanced than our own. In this hypothetical circumstance, this civilization would have exhausted the energy supply of their home planet, so where could they get more energy? Well, they have a host star just like we have a sun, and so if they were able to capture more energy from this star, then that would solve their energy needs. So they would go and build huge structures. These giant megastructures, like ginormous solar panels, are called Dyson spheres.

10:21
This image above are lots of artists’ impressions of Dyson spheres. It’s really hard to provide perspective on the vastness of these things, but you can think of it this way. The Earth-Moon distance is a quarter of a million miles. The simplest element on one of these structures is 100 times that size. They’re enormous. And now imagine one of these structures in motion around a star. You can see how it would produce anomalies in the data such as uneven, unnatural looking dips.

10:57
But it remains that even alien megastructures cannot defy the laws of physics. You see, anything that uses a lot of energy is going to produce heat, and we don’t observe this. But it could be something as simple as they’re just reradiating it away in another direction, just not at Earth.

11:22
Another idea that’s one of my personal favorites is that we had just witnessed an interplanetary space battle and the catastrophic destruction of a planet. Now, I admit that this would produce a lot of dust that we don’t observe. But if we’re already invoking aliens in this explanation, then who is to say they didn’t efficiently clean up all this mess for recycling purposes?

11:48
(Laughter)

11:49
You can see how this quickly captures your imagination.

11:54
Well, there you have it. We’re in a situation that could unfold to be a natural phenomenon we don’t understand or an alien technology we don’t understand. Personally, as a scientist, my money is on the natural explanation. But don’t get me wrong, I do think it would be awesome to find aliens. Either way, there is something new and really interesting to discover.

12:23
So what happens next? We need to continue to observe this star to learn more about what’s happening. But professional astronomers, like me, we have limited resources for this kind of thing, and Kepler is on to a different mission.

12:38
And I’m happy to say that once again, citizen scientists have come in and saved the day. You see, this time, amateur astronomers with their backyard telescopes stepped up immediately and started observing this star nightly at their own facilities, and I am so excited to see what they find.

13:02
What’s amazing to me is that this star would have never been found by computers because we just weren’t looking for something like this. And what’s more exciting is that there’s more data to come. There are new missions that are coming up that are observing millions more stars all over the sky.

13:25
And just think: What will it mean when we find another star like this? And what will it mean if we don’t find another star like this?

13:36
Thank you.

13:37
(Applause)

Freeman Dyson: Let’s look for life in the outer solar system

0:11
How will we be remembered in 200 years? I happen to live in a little town, Princeton, in New Jersey, which every year celebrates the great event in Princeton history: the Battle of Princeton, which was, in fact, a very important battle. It was the first battle that George Washington won, in fact, and was pretty much of a turning point in the war of independence. It happened 225 years ago. It was actually a terrible disaster for Princeton. The town was burned down; it was in the middle of winter, and it was a very, very severe winter. And about a quarter of all the people in Princeton died that winter from hunger and cold, but nobody remembers that. What they remember is, of course, the great triumph, that the Brits were beaten, and we won, and that the country was born. And so I agree very emphatically that the pain of childbirth is not remembered. It’s the child that’s remembered. And that’s what we’re going through at this time.

1:20
I wanted to just talk for one minute about the future of biotechnology, because I think I know very little about that — I’m not a biologist — so everything I know about it can be said in one minute. (Laughter) What I’m saying is that we should follow the model that has been so successful with the electronic industry, that what really turned computers into a great success, in the world as a whole, is toys. As soon as computers became toys, when kids could come home and play with them, then the industry really took off. And that has to happen with biotech.

2:02
There’s a huge — (Laughter) (Applause) — there’s a huge community of people in the world who are practical biologists, who are dog breeders, pigeon breeders, orchid breeders, rose breeders, people who handle biology with their hands, and who are dedicated to producing beautiful things, beautiful creatures, plants, animals, pets. These people will be empowered with biotech, and that will be an enormous positive step to acceptance of biotechnology. That will blow away a lot of the opposition. When people have this technology in their hands, you have a do-it-yourself biotech kit, grow your own — grow your dog, grow your own cat. (Laughter) (Applause) Just buy the software, you design it. I won’t say anymore, you can take it on from there. It’s going to happen, and I think it has to happen before the technology becomes natural, becomes part of the human condition, something that everybody’s familiar with and everybody accepts.

3:37
So, let’s leave that aside. I want to talk about something quite different, which is what I know about, and that is astronomy. And I’m interested in searching for life in the universe. And it’s open to us to introduce a new way of doing that, and that’s what I’ll talk about for 10 minutes, or whatever the time remains. The important fact is, that most of the real estate that’s accessible to us — I’m not talking about the stars, I’m talking about the solar system, the stuff that’s within reach for spacecraft and within reach of our earthbound telescopes — most of the real estate is very cold and very far from the Sun.

4:27
If you look at the solar system, as we know it today, it has a few planets close to the Sun. That’s where we live. It has a fairly substantial number of asteroids between the orbit of the Earth out through — to the orbit of Jupiter. The asteroids are a substantial amount of real estate, but not very large. And it’s not very promising for life, since most of it consists of rock and metal, mostly rock. It’s not only cold, but very dry. So the asteroids we don’t have much hope for.

5:10
There stand some interesting places a little further out: the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Particularly, there’s a place called Europa, which is — Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter, where we see a very level ice surface, which looks as if it’s floating on top of an ocean. So, we believe that on Europa there is, in fact, a deep ocean. And that makes it extraordinarily interesting as a place to explore. Ocean — probably the most likely place for life to originate, just as it originated on the Earth. So we would love to explore Europa, to go down through the ice, find out who is swimming around in the ocean, whether there are fish or seaweed or sea monsters — whatever there may be that’s exciting — or cephalopods. But that’s hard to do. Unfortunately, the ice is thick. We don’t know just how thick it is, probably miles thick, so it’s very expensive and very difficult to go down there — send down your submarine or whatever it is — and explore. That’s something we don’t yet know how to do. There are plans to do it, but it’s hard.

6:33
Go out a bit further, you’ll find that beyond the orbit of Neptune, way out, far from the Sun, that’s where the real estate really begins. You’ll find millions or trillions or billions of objects which, in what we call the Kuiper Belt or the Oort Cloud — these are clouds of small objects which appear as comets when they fall close to the Sun. Mostly, they just live out there in the cold of the outer solar system, but they are biologically very interesting indeed, because they consist primarily of ice with other minerals, which are just the right ones for developing life. So if life could be established out there, it would have all the essentials — chemistry and sunlight — everything that’s needed.

7:26
So, what I’m proposing is that there is where we should be looking for life, rather than on Mars, although Mars is, of course, also a very promising and interesting place. But we can look outside, very cheaply and in a simple fashion. And that’s what I’m going to talk about. There is a — imagine that life originated on Europa, and it was sitting in the ocean for billions of years. It’s quite likely that it would move out of the ocean onto the surface, just as it did on the Earth. Staying in the ocean and evolving in the ocean for 2 billion years, finally came out onto the land. And then of course it had great — much greater freedom, and a much greater variety of creatures developed on the land than had ever been possible in the ocean. And the step from the ocean to the land was not easy, but it happened.

8:22
Now, if life had originated on Europa in the ocean, it could also have moved out onto the surface. There wouldn’t have been any air there — it’s a vacuum. It is out in the cold, but it still could have come. You can imagine that the plants growing up like kelp through cracks in the ice, growing on the surface. What would they need in order to grow on the surface? They’d need, first of all, to have a thick skin to protect themselves from losing water through the skin. So they would have to have something like a reptilian skin. But better — what is more important is that they would have to concentrate sunlight. The sunlight in Jupiter, on the satellites of Jupiter, is 25 times fainter than it is here, since Jupiter is five times as far from the Sun. So they would have to have — these creatures, which I call sunflowers, which I imagine living on the surface of Europa, would have to have either lenses or mirrors to concentrate sunlight, so they could keep themselves warm on the surface. Otherwise, they would be at a temperature of minus 150, which is certainly not favorable for developing life, at least of the kind we know. But if they just simply could grow, like leaves, little lenses and mirrors to concentrate sunlight, then they could keep warm on the surface. They could enjoy all the benefits of the sunlight and have roots going down into the ocean; life then could flourish much more. So, why not look? Of course, it’s not very likely that there’s life on the surface of Europa. None of these things is likely, but my, my philosophy is, look for what’s detectable, not for what’s probable.

10:20
There’s a long history in astronomy of unlikely things turning out to be there. And I mean, the finest example of that was radio astronomy as a whole. This was — originally, when radio astronomy began, Mr. Jansky, at the Bell labs, detected radio waves coming from the sky. And the regular astronomers were scornful about this. They said, “It’s all right, you can detect radio waves from the Sun, but the Sun is the only object in the universe that’s close enough and bright enough actually to be detectable. You can easily calculate that radio waves from the Sun are fairly faint, and everything else in the universe is millions of times further away, so it certainly will not be detectable. So there’s no point in looking.” And that, of course, that set back the progress of radio astronomy by about 20 years. Since there was nothing there, you might as well not look. Well, of course, as soon as anybody did look, which was after about 20 years, when radio astronomy really took off. Because it turned out the universe is absolutely full of all kinds of wonderful things radiating in the radio spectrum, much brighter than the Sun. So, the same thing could be true for this kind of life, which I’m talking about, on cold objects: that it could in fact be very abundant all over the universe, and it’s not been detected just because we haven’t taken the trouble to look.

12:03
So, the last thing I want to talk about is how to detect it. There is something called pit lamping. That’s the phrase which I learned from my son George, who is there in the audience. You take — that’s a Canadian expression. If you happen to want to hunt animals at night, you take a miner’s lamp, which is a pit lamp. You strap it onto your forehead, so you can see the reflection in the eyes of the animal. So, if you go out at night, you shine a flashlight, the animals are bright. You see the red glow in their eyes, which is the reflection of the flashlight. And then, if you’re one of these unsporting characters, you shoot the animals and take them home. And of course, that spoils the game for the other hunters who hunt in the daytime, so in Canada that’s illegal. In New Zealand, it’s legal, because the New Zealand farmers use this as a way of getting rid of rabbits, because the rabbits compete with the sheep in New Zealand. So, the farmers go out at night with heavily armed jeeps, and shine the headlights, and anything that doesn’t look like a sheep, you shoot. (Laughter)

13:24
So I have proposed to apply the same trick to looking for life in the universe. That if these creatures who are living on cold surfaces — either on Europa, or further out, anywhere where you can live on a cold surface — those creatures must be provided with reflectors. In order to concentrate sunlight, they have to have lenses and mirrors — in order to keep themselves warm. And then, when you shine sunlight at them, the sunlight will be reflected back, just as it is in the eyes of an animal. So these creatures will be bright against the cold surroundings. And the further out you go in this, away from the Sun, the more powerful this reflection will be. So actually, this method of hunting for life gets stronger and stronger as you go further away, because the optical reflectors have to be more powerful so the reflected light shines out even more in contrast against the dark background. So as you go further away from the Sun, this becomes more and more powerful. So, in fact, you can look for these creatures with telescopes from the Earth. Why aren’t we doing it? Simply because nobody thought of it yet.

14:43
But I hope that we shall look, and with any — we probably won’t find anything, none of these speculations may have any basis in fact. But still, it’s a good chance. And of course, if it happens, it will transform our view of life altogether. Because it means that — the way life can live out there, it has enormous advantages as compared with living on a planet. It’s extremely hard to move from one planet to another. We’re having great difficulties at the moment and any creatures that live on a planet are pretty well stuck. Especially if you breathe air, it’s very hard to get from planet A to planet B, because there’s no air in between. But if you breathe air — (Laughter) — you’re dead — (Laughter) — as soon as you’re off the planet, unless you have a spaceship.

15:43
But if you live in a vacuum, if you live on the surface of one of these objects, say, in the Kuiper Belt, this — an object like Pluto, or one of the smaller objects in the neighborhood of Pluto, and you happened — if you’re living on the surface there, and you get knocked off the surface by a collision, then it doesn’t change anything all that much. You still are on a piece of ice, you can still have sunlight and you can still survive while you’re traveling from one place to another. And then if you run into another object, you can stay there and colonize the other object. So life will spread, then, from one object to another. So if it exists at all in the Kuiper Belt, it’s likely to be very widespread. And you will have then a great competition amongst species — Darwinian evolution — so there’ll be a huge advantage to the species which is able to jump from one place to another without having to wait for a collision. And there’ll be advantages for spreading out long, sort of kelp-like forest of vegetation. I call these creatures sunflowers. They look like, maybe like sunflowers. They have to be all the time pointing toward the Sun, and they will be able to spread out in space, because gravity on these objects is weak. So they can collect sunlight from a big area. So they will, in fact, be quite easy for us to detect.

17:11
So, I hope in the next 10 years, we’ll find these creatures, and then, of course, our whole view of life in the universe will change. If we don’t find them, then we can create them ourselves. (Laughter) That’s another wonderful opportunity that’s opening. We can — as soon as we have a little bit more understanding of genetic engineering, one of the things you can do with your take-it-home, do-it-yourself genetic engineering kit — (Laughter) — is to design a creature that can live on a cold satellite, a place like Europa, so we could colonize Europa with our own creatures. That would be a fun thing to do. (Laughter) In the long run, of course, it would also make it possible for us to move out there. What’s going to happen in the end, it’s not going to be just humans colonizing space, it’s going to be life moving out from the Earth, moving it into its kingdom. And the kingdom of life, of course, is going to be the universe. And if life is already there, it makes it much more exciting, in the short run. But in the long run, if there’s no life there, we create it ourselves. We transform the universe into something much more rich and beautiful than it is today. So again, we have a big and wonderful future to look forward. Thank you. (Applause)

Event horizon of a black hole

a supermassive black hole with millions to billions times the mass of our sun
One of the best-known examples of an event horizon derives from general relativity’s description of a black hole, a celestial object so massive that no nearby matter or radiation can escape its gravitational field. Often, this is described as the boundary within which the black hole’s escape velocity is greater than the speed of light. However, a more accurate description is that within this horizon, all lightlike paths (paths that light could take) and hence all paths in the forward light cones of particles within the horizon, are warped so as to fall farther into the hole. Once a particle is inside the horizon, moving into the hole is as inevitable as moving forward in time, and can actually be thought of as equivalent to doing so, depending on the spacetime coordinate system used.

The surface at the Schwarzschild radius acts as an event horizon in a non-rotating body that fits inside this radius (although a rotating black hole operates slightly differently). The Schwarzschild radius of an object is proportional to its mass. Theoretically, any amount of matter will become a black hole if compressed into a space that fits within its corresponding Schwarzschild radius. For the mass of the Sun this radius is approximately 3 kilometers and for the Earth, it is about 9 millimeters. In practice, however, neither the Earth nor the Sun has the necessary mass and therefore the necessary gravitational force, to overcome electron and neutron degeneracy pressure. The minimal mass required for a star to be able to collapse beyond these pressures is the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, which is approximately three solar masses.

Black hole event horizons are widely misunderstood. Common, although erroneous, is the notion that black holes “vacuum up” material in their neighborhood, where in fact they are no more capable of “seeking out” material to consume than any other gravitational attractor. As with any mass in the Universe, matter must come within its gravitational scope for the possibility to exist of capture or consolidation with any other mass. Equally common is the idea that matter can be observed “falling into” a black hole. This is not possible. Astronomers can only detect accretion disks around black holes, where material moves with such speed that friction creates high-energy radiation which can be detected (similarly, some matter from these accretion disks is forced out along the axes of spin of the black hole, creating visible jets when these streams interact with matter such as interstellar gas or when they happen to be aimed directly at Earth). Furthermore, a distant observer will never actually see something cross the horizon. Instead, while approaching the hole, the object will seem to go ever more slowly, while any light it emits will be further and further redshifted.

Asteroid Redirect Mission

A new report chartered by NASA provides input to important areas of robotic mission requirements development and explores the science benefits and potential knowledge gain from the agency’s Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM). NASA will visit an asteroid boulder during the Proving Ground phase of its journey to Mars in cislunar space – the volume of space around the moon featuring multiple stable staging orbits for future deep space missions.

 The ARV captures a boulder from the asteroid’s surface
The ARV captures a boulder from the asteroid’s surface

Read the Report:
Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) Final Report

Data from the Formulation Assessment and Support Team (FAST) report will help with the development and design of the robotic portion of the mission, spacecraft, and boulder capture. The report answers questions posed by engineers developing requirements, including the origins of the reference “parent” asteroid from which a multi-ton boulder will be collected, boulder spatial and size distributions, geotechnical properties, robotic handling of the selected boulder, and crew safety and containment considerations.

Also included in the report are investigations that could provide additional benefit from the mission, through potential partner provided sensors, subsystems, or candidate operations. The work of the FAST focused on science, planetary defense, asteroidal resources and in-situ resource utilization, and capability and technology demonstrations. The expert team’s priorities were put into categories based on their benefits and relevance to ARM and NASA goals.

“We received really comprehensive responses to all of the questions we posed to the FAST,” said Dr. Michele Gates, ARM program director. “The findings in this report have been particularly helpful as we develop requirements and system design for the robotic spacecraft. We’ve learned a lot about the asteroid’s characteristics, which will be important for the capture system that will collect the asteroid and even for handling and containment techniques that the astronauts will have to practice before sampling it.”

NASA issued a membership call to the public last year to create the FAST and draft the report. The ARM FAST consisted of primarily non-NASA participants who participated in requirement formulation efforts during the initial development phase of the Asteroid Redirect Robotic Mission (ARRM). The agency ultimately selected 18 engineers and scientists out of 100 applicants from academia and industry to work with three NASA leaders on the report.

Orbit around the moon
The ARV demonstrates planetary defense on a hazardous-size asteroid before it begins its
transit toward a stable orbit around the moon.

“We had originally planned to select approximately 12-15 members for the FAST,” said Dan Mazanek, Senior Space Systems Engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia and ARM Mission Investigator. “However, due to the large number of exceptionally qualified applicants and the diversity needed to support the ARRM Requirements Closure TIM, we decided to expand the team to a total of 18 members.”

NASA released a draft of the report in November 2015 for public comment before finalizing the report.

“The asteroid community’s response to the membership call was astounding,” said Gates. “We’ve made a conscientious effort over the past few years to encourage external participation in this mission, and this FAST is a brilliant result of those efforts. It is remarkable that the team was able to collaborate at such a rapid pace and provide us with the many valuable inputs we received.”

As the first mission to robotically capture an asteroid mass and deliver it to an orbit around the moon where astronauts can investigate it, the Asteroid Redirect Mission uniquely transcends and combines traditional robotic and human exploration mission formulation processes. This coupling has garnered significant interest from the science and human exploration communities, allowing NASA to leverage the world’s top scientific and engineering minds throughout the planning of the ARM and the journey to Mars.

Investigating the asteroid boulder
The astronauts will conduct future spacewalks to investigate the asteroid boulder before returning to Earth with samples.

The astronauts conduct spacewalks to investigate the asteroid boulder before returning to Earth with samples.

Feb. 18, 2016
Editor: Erin Mahoney