The Origins of Language Predates Humans

Language is a tricky and fascinating thing. On the one hand, it could be said to be one of the defining features of our species. We talk, therefore we are intelligent. And it's something we all do, wherever you find a group of humans you will find a language. But language is not unique to us, our cousin species the Neanderthals had a hyoid bone almost identical to our own thus they probably also had complex speech. But there are also plenty of indicators that whales, dolphins and even elephants may have their own forms of language as well, some of them apparently quite complex.

How we actually developed language is a huge mystery, one that will probably remain largely lost to the mists of time. But it's worth noting that language is distinct from communication, which is a much more broad term. Most animals can be said to communicate, even if just through chemical signals or body language. But a new study on baboons seems to suggest that the origins of human language actually predates us, at least physically.

A joint French-American team led by Dr. Louis-Jean Boe studied the vocalizations and mouth and throat anatomy of over 1300 Guinea baboons. And while the sounds these animals make may seem very different than human speech, the scientists found that present in the baboon's alarm or breeding calls were vowel sounds similar to those of humans coinciding with another earlier study on monkeys that identified 5 separate vowel sounds in their vocalizations. By extension, this would suggest that the origins of human speech could go back further than 25 million years.

This calls into question a group of long-standing theories regarding the development of language. The general idea was that language wasn't possible until the appearance of modern humans with our low or descended larynx. That means that the appearance of language coincided with our appearance. This in itself has been called into question before in that it's not actually a unique feature to us, it's known for example that certain species of deer also have a similar low larynx. It may actually be that the descended larynx of homo sapiens is not as important as once thought in the development of complex language.

Instead, it may be more about the structure of the tongue and that our vocal system actually developed from structures already present in more primitive primate species such as the baboons in the study, at least as far as forming vowel sounds are concerned which is a key component of speech. But vowels are only one component, how consonants evolved is still not well understood.
But I suppose none of this should be surprising. One only has to spend an hour with a talking bird to be blown away by their powers of speech. It gets even stranger when you contemplate that the talking parrot you're looking at is a descendent of the dinosaurs and has a vocal system entirely different from our own. Or go on YouTube and you'll find a myriad of videos of various animals seemingly trying to vocalize something.

And while most of this activity would simply be imitation, sometimes it may be more. There are old videos of dolphins apparently being taught to count using their blow hole and also videos of chimpanzees dynamically using another form of human language, sign language, in a way that's far more than imitation. I've included some links to some of these videos in the description below, it really is quite extraordinary and shows that rudimentary vocalization is not solely the domain of humans.

But being me, I have to go off the rails and take it a step further and wonder about aliens. I can't help but to ask if language, as in verbal speech, is something we're going to find in alien species. They would have to have some sort of method of communicating with each other to create a technological civilization, but does it need to be vocal? No, it can work like sign language does and be visual. Aliens do not necessarily need powers of speech for complex communications. It could even have evolved to be chemical. Or it could even be accomplished through bioluminescence like a kind of biological Morse code. Or it could be digital.

To go even further off the rails and into the world of futurism, I'll suggest that some day humans may stop speaking at all and simply communicate wirelessly - I won't use the word telepathically - between chips implanted in our heads. Entire thought conversations could be held without saying a word. Or we may choose not to pursue that technology because the idea is just too creepy. It remains to be seen.


But the one thing we will share with aliens however are things that are the same across the universe like mathematics, physics, chemistry and so on. Science is the built-in language of the universe and through it establishing communications with alien races is possible. We can announce our presence, and so can they. Conversation, however, is a different matter and any kind of conversation would be maddeningly slow.

Life on Venus? Venera D Update of 01/14/2017

You could say that Venus is the forgotten world of the inner solar system. Outshined, figuratively, by her superficially more interesting brother Mars, Venus holds both the potential for microbial life and the eventual potential of terraforming and human colonization. And, as I pointed out in my video "Colonizing and Terraforming Venus" it has advantages that Mars does not. But that forgotten status may soon change if a new space probe targeting the planet is approved.

Its name is Venera D after the venerable soviet-era Russian probes and landers of the 1970's and 80's that brought us the first pictures from the surface of Venus. And while Venus has not been a high priority for NASA, they have their eyes on Mars, RosCosmos has never lost interest in Venus and hopefully will collaborate with NASA on this mission and once again visit earth's sister world launching in 2025.

The mission, as planned right now, would include an orbiter designed to study both the atmosphere and surface in detail from orbit using powerful radar, but also to deploy a robust lander on the surface. And it would need to be robust, the rough conditions of the surface have only allowed for previous probes to survive for less than a few hours.

Possible additions to the mission include a drone designed to cruise the clouds of Venus, a second micro orbiter for studying Venus' magnetosphere, such as it is given that it basically borrows one from the sun, and even a high altitude balloon.

There are many reasons to study Venus' atmosphere directly. One reason is that for some unknown reason the atmosphere rotates significantly faster than the planet does. This super-rotation was discovered by studying an even stranger phenomenon. Within Venus' atmosphere there are dark streaks that display some strange properties. After knowing about the streaks since the 1960's to this day we have no idea what they are or why they are there.

The streaks are odd. They should have long ago mixed in with the atmosphere and disappeared. They have not. And, even stranger, they absorb ultraviolet light which somewhat restricts what they could be made of. We know nothing about their composition, but one possibility is that they are made up of iron chloride. Think of it as a kind of atmospheric ice, sort of like ice crystals in earth's atmosphere but in the much hotter conditions of Venus.

The problem with that theory is that the iron chloride would need to be coming from the surface. The trouble is there doesn't appear to be a way for that to happen, Venus' winds in the lower dense atmosphere are too weak. It could also be some other chemical dissolved or partially dissolved in Venus' atmosphere, but again, how it hasn't mixed in with the rest of the atmosphere is unknown. Given that the explanations thus far aren't very good, it's worth considering another possibility. Microbial life.

Microbes living in an atmosphere is nothing new. We find tons of them in earth's atmosphere. More, while Venus is extraordinarily hot, one area of it isn't. There is a region about 30 to 40 miles above the surface of Venus where the temperature and atmospheric pressure is earth-like. This also seems to be the location of the dark streaks. Intriguing indeed. And, oddly enough earlier Venera missions did detect some kind of elongated particles in the atmosphere that were about the right size for a bacterium.

But there's a huge hurdle. Venus' atmosphere is loaded with sulfuric acid. This is nasty stuff that life would have a hard time with. That is, unarmored life. Within Venus' atmosphere interesting molecules have been found that are called S8 molecules. Made up of a ring of sulfur atoms, these molecules are immune to the effects of sulfuric acid. If Venera's particles are indeed bacteria, they could have incorporated S8 during their evolution and essentially armored themselves.

Even more interesting is the fact that S8 does absorb ultraviolet light, meaning that it could be the culprit for the streaks. It's even been suggested that the presence of the S8 could be a direct result of microbial life. Because of all of this, an investigation of the potential for life in Venus' atmosphere is being looked at as one of the Venera D mission objectives.

Key to this however would be the drone. Balloons are hard to maneuver, so to get to the layer where the bacteria might be you would need a controllable aircraft. This is not so far fetched as you might think, it should be easily possible to build a solar powered UAV filled with hydrogen as a sort of hybrid balloon/airplane, something like a blimp.

Northrop Grumman has a concept for just such a vehicle. Known as VAMP or the Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform, it would be  huge with a 180 foot wingspan and a mission length of an entire year without ever landing. It would deploy from the orbiter and fall like a leaf through Venus' atmosphere until reaching the optimum altitude for the mission and then essentially fly anywhere in the atmosphere we need to go with a 100 lb capacity for scientific instruments.

A final plan for the mission will be submitted at the end of this month. An answer whether NASA and Roscosmos wish to accept the mission and collaborate will come at the end of 2017 or sometime in 2018. 

Check out this awesome photo taken by a satellite above Antarctica. The tiny line you see is a convoy of supply trucks moving across the ice.

http://www.space.com/35305-antarctic-lifeline-seen-from-space.html

A New Star in the Night Sky? Update 01/07/2017 and an announcement!

You could say that I have a love affair with the night sky. Since I was a little kid, I have looked to the stars with wonder. One of my earliest memories, in fact, was seeing the night sky burning brightly in a remote Colorado sky unencumbered by any city lights. As I got older, that love affair extended to telescopes and amateur astronomy and continues to this day. But the one thing that's remained constant across my life is the generally unchanging nature of the night sky, other than the movements of the planets and the occasional comet.

That's about to change. A new star is  about to appear in our sky in the northern hemisphere, and it could be among the brightest, at least for a while. But first some history. When new stars suddenly appear in the sky humans take notice. In the year 1054 a star in the constellation Taurus went supernova and lit up the night sky in a big way, to the point that it was visible in daylight.

Numerous cultures took note of this star and recorded the event and it is now enshrined in the oral traditions of several cultures along with written accounts from Europe and the middle east. There's even a Native American pictograph thought to depict it. But the most detailed preserved accounts come from Chinese astronomers of the period who poetically called it a "guest star". 

The guest star faded over time, but you can still see the remnant of this supernova in a telescope or a pair of binoculars. It's called the crab nebula and represents the shell of gas thrown out by the supernova explosion. More recently, the southern hemisphere was treated to a similar supernova in 1987 located on the outskirts of the tarantula nebula. At the time I was 12 years old and was very sad because it wasn't visible in the northern hemisphere where I live. But that's now okay as something similar to this event seems set to happen again. And it's going to happen soon.

Researchers at Calvin College in Michigan have predicted that a star, currently being called the "Boom Star", in the constellation of Cygnus will dramatically brighten in the year 2022. If the prediction holds, it will become one of the brightest objects in the sky for about six months before calming back down and returning to its normal brightness after about 2 years.

The real name of the star is KIC 9832227 and it's located at a distance of about 1800 light-years. The system is made up of two suns that orbit very closely, so much so that their "year" is only eleven hours. That orbital speed has been shown to be slowing down. This means that these two stars are on a collision course.

We've seen stars collide before, it's a fairly predictable event. But what's rare is for it to happen so close. In the cosmic scheme of things, 1800 light-years isn't far at all. When the collision happened, for example, the Roman Empire was in full swing. But when they do collide to form a new, larger star, lots of light is emitted as the two suns coalesce.

That's good news for us. While the collision poses no danger to us, it will treat us to a spectacular display of a new star shining brightly in the sky that we can watch dim in real time. It's a new guest star and I for one welcome it. I just hope there's no civilizations closer to it that might not be so lucky.

Lastly, and completely unrelated, I would like to announce something special I have planned for 2017 for this channel. While I'm not yet sure if I'll stream it live or just take a bunch of footage and make a video, something extraordinary is happening in my area this year and I'm going to bring you along to enjoy it with me.

On Monday, August 21st, 2017 I will be within the path of a total solar eclipse and I will be setting up cameras and covering it on YouTube. I've been waiting for this eclipse for decades so I'll probably be beside myself with excitement, which isn't really saying much given that I'm sort of mellow, but I'll record that too. So there's much to look forward to on this channel for 2017 and I wish all of you a positive, prosperous and happy new year as together we boldly march into the future.

Study Crashes Main Moon Formation Theory

It seems there is a rethink regarding the formation of the moon going on.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/study-crashes-main-moon-formation-theory-162207822.html

An Amazing Picture of Earth

This article has one of the neatest images I've seen in a while. It was taken by a spacecraft in orbit of Mars!

http://www.space.com/35252-earth-and-moon-from-mars-photo.html 

Are Aliens Trying to Say Hello? Fast Radio Bursts Update 01/05/17

One of the strangest mysteries of the universe that continues to baffle astronomers are the phenomena of fast radio bursts or FRBs. Lasting only a few milliseconds, these highly energetic bursts have only been known since about 2001. And while we don't yet know much about them, we can infer from their behavior that the sources of the bursts seem to be very small. So small in fact that the sources must be less than a few hundred miles across. This eliminates a lot of possibilities as potential sources of the activity, including most normal stars, sending us into another tier of explanations, none of them particularly good so far. One of those potential explanations are the activities of alien civilizations.

Unexplained radio signals from space are nothing new, the universe is teeming with natural radio emitting objects. But in the case of FRBs, they behave very strangely and one research team suggested in 2015 that they seem to conform to a mathematical pattern, at least as far as the bursts known at the time were concerned. If present, that pattern doesn't really make much sense as far as our understanding of cosmology goes. And to add icing to the cake, they appear to originate invariably, again so far, from only outside our galaxy. A head-scratcher indeed.

They seem to be distant because of a metric known as the dispersion measure. The FRB's emit the same thing at many frequencies at once. Think of it as a radio station that beams out the same radio show on all frequencies on the dial. But those frequencies do not all travel at the same speed, some of the waves get delayed by floating electrons in space. This has the effect of higher frequencies crossing space faster than lower ones. The bigger the difference in time between the two, the further away the origin of the burst is.

As it turns out, the origins for the FRBs seems very distant. And new research suggests they are very common, with thousands happening each day. The reason we don't see them is because they happen so fast that we can only catch them by chance. More, just a few days ago research came out that found one that repeats. This eliminates one of the main natural explanations, that of colliding neutron stars.

But even stranger, there is another kind of reported pattern to these bursts. In 2015, researchers Michael Hippke and John Learned determined that of the 10 or so FRB's known at the time, the delay between the arrival of the first and last parts of the signals are always multiples of the number 187.5. No known natural process can do that. But, the pattern may not actually be real, more on that in a minute.

If that pattern is present, it might imply that the sources of the bursts line up at regularly spaced distances from earth. This is very difficult to explain with a natural explanation if we take the data at face value, so much so that alien activity is the easy explanation in much the same way that finding distance marker signs on a road would indicate human activity. The odds are in the alien's favor in this case and are estimated to be 5 in 10,000 that this pattern would just be due to chance.

But don't get excited yet, we could be misinterpreting the data. And subsequent observations of FRB's since 2015 do not line up with the pattern, calling the whole thing into question. Why the first ten did and the subsequent bursts did not is a complete mystery but the current consensus is that the pattern wasn't really there and that the effect was a statistical flaw from having too small of a sampling to go on.  

It could also be that the sources for the FRBs are in reality much closer to home. They could have galactic origins and merely present the appearance of being billions of light-years away by emitting long frequency waves before emitting short ones on a delay. Or they could be even closer, it has been suggested that the FRBs are emissions from our own spy satellites that we're accidentally picking up. This is particularly interesting because a group of FRB-like signals that had been detected by a single radio telescope were thought to be originating from space. It turns out, they weren't. They were coming from the microwave oven in the lunch room.  

Another possibility is that superdense stellar remnants could be the sources, though this explanation is somewhat weak because it's based on the fact that we really don't know very much about the physics of how those produce radio waves. Other potential explanations include oddly behaving solar flares, activity around black holes, and many others. So it's best not to run to the alien explanation just yet.

There's a good reason for this other than skepticism. While sending out engineered signals that contain mathematical patterns would be a logical way to announce your presence to the universe, there are a lot cheaper ways to do it. FRBs, if they originate outside the Milky Way, would take a huge amount of energy to produce, about the same amount our sun produces in a month or more.

In addition to that the signals are pretty ambiguous, they don't really look like something aliens would intentionally send. If your aim was to wow other civilizations with your math skills, you'd probably do something less ambiguous, such as base a message on Pi or simply count out numbers like they did in the movie "Contact". And you would do it on selected frequencies as opposed to eating up energy by blasting the signal out on a wide spectrum of frequencies as is the case with FRBs.

No two frequencies are the same where interstellar communications are concerned. Certain ones, such as the hydrogen line that SETI places a high value on are better at tagging your signal as a dead ringer for being artificial than other frequencies. What you wouldn't do is intentionally make your communication questionable as in the case of FRBs. You'd want your signal to be loud and clear and easily understood as artificial. This is not so with the FRBs.

But that's all based on the assumption that alien signals would come in the form of communications. But, if we are any indicator, that would not be true in most cases. The fact is we've only sent out a few intentional signals and we have a nasty habit of not repeating them, which is one of the criteria SETI requires to call an alien signal an alien signal, it must repeat and be independently verifiable by other scientists. In reality most of our radio signals that aliens might pick up would be random things like radar. So that begs a question, if artificial, what if the FRBs are not designed for communications at all?

Enter in a paper released on January 5th of 2017 by Manasvi Lingham and Abraham Loeb that lays out just such an alien scenario that seems consistent with the data where a specific type of alien activity would fit. Their idea is that the FRBs might be extremely powerful for a reason: they are pushing sails.

They have determined that the frequencies where we see the FRBs just happen to be those perfect for pushing spacecraft connected to huge sails. They suggest that the beams powering them sweep by very rapidly explaining the short duration of the bursts and that if they are indeed pushing spacecraft we should see that in the light curves of the bursts. They also note that not all FRBs need to be of alien origin, some may be natural or they may all be natural. Only time and more research will tell. 

Lingham and Loeb's Paper of 01/05/2017

https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.01109

Hippke and Learned's Paper from 2015

https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.05245