COLORED MOONS

But first, I begin with the the U.S./Israel vs Iran War.

• Israel has attacked Lebanon recently. Despite ongoing ceasefire talks and fragile truces mediated by the United States, Israeli drone and air strikes have continued to target multiple areas across southern Lebanon, including Nabatieh, Tyre, and the Bint Jbeil district.
• Israel continues to occupy between 220 and 234 square miles of Lebanon.
• 

  Israel and Lebanon just signed a ceasefire agreement.
• The Strait of Hormuz is not totally closed.
• A trickle of marine traffic continues.
• Many ships take the extreme southern route away from Iran.
• Insurance costs are very high.
• A container ship was struck by an Iranian drone yesterday,
• Technical talks in Switzerland about that MOU are occurring daily, but there has been no announcement when any high level discussion will next be held.
• The U.S. House this month passed a resolution directing the President to end hostilities, while the U.S. Senate also passed the same measure on a 50-48 vote.  But a concurrent resolution is only a symbolic rebuke, and need not be followed by President Trump.

• 
  What do Americans think of the U.S.-Iran deal?
  • 23% of respondents, including 50% of Republicans, believe the U.S. is now in a stronger position with regard to Iran than before the war.    
  • Half from the poll said the conflict was not worth it.  63% think it is unlikely that the MOU will lead to lasting peace.  
  • Only 18% think the deal will deliver lasting peace.
  • Trump's 47% approval rating of January 2025 has slipped to 34%, a second term low.
• 
  In a CBS/YouGov poll a week ago, 57% of Americans believed the war led to more problems than it solved.  
• Further, 69% said they do not think the U.S. has permanently stopped Iran's nuclear program.  
• 74% do not believe the U.S. has made Iran's people safe and free.  
• 78% believe that the U.S. should end the war now.
• Trump's approval has fallen from 53% in February to 38% now.

The latest death toll from those two Venezuela earthquakes passed 900 and up to at least 920.  3,000 were injured.  The country's a mess with the government in turmoil, and the U.S. is trying to get in to help.  Want to personally help?  Here is a CNN site.

The next Strawberry Moon (the first full moon of summer) will peak on Monday, June 29, 2026, at 7:57 PM Eastern Time (or 2:57 PM in your local time in Honolulu). [1, 2]  Of course, the Moon won't be colored red.  The nickname is for the first summer full moon, for this is about when wild strawberries ripen.

Same for Blue Moon, which is the second full moon in a single calendar month.  Under normal circumstances, the moon is not blue.  Mind you there are occasions when volcanic ash or smoke from large forest fires can scatter red light, allowing blue light to pass through, creating a blue-tinted moon.

And, by the way, do you really know the color of our Moon?  And Sun?

• The sun emits all colors of the visible spectrum towards Earth.  
• However, as sunlight passed through our atmosphere, shorter blue and violet wavelengths are scattered away, leaving the longer wavelengths that make the sun look YELLOW.  
• At sunrise and sunset, sunlight has to pass through more of the atmosphere, scattering yellow light, leaving only orange and red.
• 
  Our Moon only reflects sunlight towards Earth.  Thus, what reaches your eyes is a pale, muted gray or white, and maybe even brownish-gray.  Why?
• The lunar surface is made of dust and rocks containing titanium, iron and magnesium.
• When sunlight hits them, they create a faint combination of blue from titanium and redish to orange tint from iron.
• However, while scientific instruments can see them, our eyes can't distinguish these colors, and when the moonlight comes to Earth, we see this color as a neutral gray on the Moon.
• When moonlight reaches Earth, the atmosphere scatters light, and while mostly colored white up above, begins to also turn yellow, orange or red when sitting low on the horizon.

Mind you, the Moon can be all kinds of hues.  I asked Google AI about this:

The Moon's true surface color is an off-white, brownish-gray. However, depending on atmospheric conditions and minerals, it can appear in dozens of hues—ranging from deep reds and oranges to blues and purples.[1, 2, 3, 4]

The varying colors seen from Earth are primarily caused by how light scatters through Earth’s atmosphere. Here is what causes the different lunar colors: [1, 2]

• Gray/White: The Moon's natural, unaltered color, reflecting sunlight. [1, 2]
• Yellow/Orange/Red: Commonly seen when the Moon is low on the horizon. Earth's atmosphere scatters short-wavelength colors (like blue), allowing longer-wavelength colors (reds and yellows) to pass through. [1, 2]
• Blood Red (Lunar Eclipse): Occurs during a total lunar eclipse when sunlight passes through the edges of Earth's atmosphere, casting a red hue on the Moon. [1, 2]
• Blue: A rare phenomenon caused by larger dust or ash particles in the Earth's atmosphere (e.g., from volcanic eruptions or major forest fires). [1, 2]

Here are full moons of 48 different colors.

• Taken by Marcella Giulia Pace.

What color is the Moon? It depends on the night. Outside of the Earth's atmosphere, the dark Moon, which shines by reflected sunlight, appears a magnificently brown-tinged gray. Viewed from inside the Earth's atmosphere, though, the moon can appear quite different. The featured image highlights a collection of apparent colors of the full moon documented by one astrophotographer over 10 years from different locations across Italy. A red or yellow colored moon usually indicates a moon seen near the horizon. There, some of the blue light has been scattered away by a long path through the Earth's atmosphere, sometimes laden with fine dust. A blue-colored moon is more rare and can indicate a moon seen through an atmosphere carrying larger dust particles. What created the purple moon is unclear -- it may be a combination of several effects. The last image captures the total lunar eclipse of 2018 July -- where the moon, in Earth's shadow, appeared a faint red -- due to light refracted through air around the Earth. The next full moon will occur at the end of this month (moon-th) and is known in some cultures as the Beaver Moon.

• 
  Who is she?
• Is a primary school teacher from Sicily.
• Here is another photo she took in 2022 of a Moon greenflash.  Fascinating!

The recent Artemis 2 flyby of the Moon resulted in some amazing photos.  

Single photos just showed mostly gray.  However:

"You can do it with a single photo, but it's really, really low resolution from a noise standpoint," McCarthy said. "What's different about those different photos is the noise, because noise, by definition, is random. So, when I'm stacking those photos together, I'm able to average out that noise, and then that noise vanishes … That's why you hear astrophotographers talk about the signal-to-noise ratio, because when you stack, the signal stays the same, but the noise diminishes."

And wow, what about the above?  Read the article to better understand what happened.

Purple Moon from Samsung.  Purple is possible when a reddish hue Moon near the horizon mixes with the blue tint of the night sky, combined with the presence of wildfire smoke or volcanic ash.

Brilliant Red Moon has been photographed during the 2023 Canadian wildfires, caused by Rayleigh scattering.

A Blood Moon is created during total lunar eclipse.

I can go on and on, but I end is an entertaining video on colors of the Moon.  Final moon shot.

FIFA World Cup matches today.

Group I

• France 4, Norway 1:  Erling Haakand of Norway rested today.
• Senegal 5, Iraq 0 [1]

Group H

• Spain 1, Uruguay 0
• Cape Verde 0. Saudi Arabia 0

Group G 

• New Zealand vs. Belgium (11:00 p.m. ET kickoff)
• Egypt vs. Iran (11:00 p.m. ET kickoff) [1]

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THE SCIENCE TO STOP AND REVERSE AGING: Part 2--History of Eternal Life

To start, though, from the New York Times this morning:

Details about these grand public undertakings have dribbled out rather un-grandly. The government’s finance wizards have revised and re-revised, and in some cases re-re-revised, their cost estimates. It’s all about as clear as the algae-clouded water in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

NYT also reported:

After weeks of speculation over Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s wedding plans, clues suggest that it might be at Madison Square Garden over the July 4 weekend.

Back-to-back earthquakes of 7.2 and 7.5 magnitude rocked the region of Morlon, Venezuela last night, killing nearly 200 people and injuring more than 1500.

• The first quake of 7.2 hit west of Moron, about 105 miles west of Caracas.
• A minute later, a larger one, 7.5, struck a region southwest of Moron.

• 
  Buildings as far as Brazil's Amazon, more than a thousand miles away from Caracas, were damaged.
• Venezuela is the country from where former President Nicola Maduro was kidnapped by the U.S. early this year, and has become a puppet American nation.
• Yesterday there were  other smaller size earthquakes around the Pacific.

• 
  That graphic above shows a 6.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan, but some reports indicated maybe as high as 7.2.
• Read my experience in a 7.1 magnitude aftershock when I was in Japan during that terrible March 2011 period when the country was crippled by the Great Tohoku Earthquake, Tsunami and Nuclear Cataclysm.

So on to Part 2 of my series about stopping, if not reversing aging.  The notion of eternal life has been, well, eternal.  This promise is the foundational cornerstone of Christianity, Islam Hindusim and Judaism.  Buddhism has a form of eternal life through rebirth.

I asked Google AI about this.

The concept of eternal life dates back over 4,500 years to the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. It first appears in recorded history as a desperate desire to conquer death and achieve god-like immortality. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

The earliest known literary exploration of eternal life is the Mesopotamian The Epic of Gilgamesh, which dates to roughly 2100 BCE. After the death of his close companion Enkidu, King Gilgamesh goes on a perilous quest to find immortality, ultimately learning from the gods that death is the inevitable fate of humankind. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Even in Greco-Roman times:

....the concept of "eternal life" took three main forms: the personal immortality of the soul, the cyclical rebirth of the universe, and living an ethically divine, "god-like" life on earth. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Major thinkers who shaped these concepts include:

• 
  Plato (c. 428–348 BCE): The most influential architect of the immortal soul. In works like the Phaedo, he argued that because the soul is the seat of reason and grasps eternal, unchanging truths (the Theory of Forms), it must also be eternal and imperishable. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• 
  Pythagoras (c. 570–495 BCE): Pioneered the idea of metempsychosis (the transmigration or reincarnation of the soul). He viewed the body as a temporary tomb for an eternal soul, which passes through multiple lives until it achieves ultimate purification. [1, 2]

• 
  Zeno of Citium (c. 334–262 BCE) and the Stoics: Instead of individual personal survival, Stoic philosophers, including later Roman thinkers like Marcus Aurelius, believed in eternal return. They posited that the universe operates in vast cycles, periodically destroyed by fire and reborn to replay exactly the same events forever. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• 
  Plotinus (c. 204–270 CE): Founder of Neoplatonism. He taught that the ultimate reality is "the One," and that the human soul is an eternal fragment striving to purify itself from the material world in order to return to the divine. [1, 2, 3, 4]

• 
  Epicurus (341–270 BCE): Offered a stark counter-perspective. He argued that the soul is made of atoms and dissolves at death. For Epicurus, the fear of eternal punishment was the root of human anxiety, and he argued that achieving peace of mind depends on embracing our utter mortality. [1, 2, 3, 4]

From 0 AD to today, the human quest for eternal life has shifted from a spiritual focus on the soul's resurrection and divine realms to modern technological pursuits like transhumanism, AI mind-uploading, and the creation of conversational "digital ghosts". [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

0 AD – 1500: The Spiritual Age

Early Christianity reshaped ancient Jewish thought, shifting the concept of an afterlife from the shadowy underworld of Sheol to the promise of physical resurrection and a kingdom of God. Instead of viewing eternal life strictly as a future event at the end of time, early thinkers debated how salvation and divine knowledge intersected with human mortality in the present. [1, 2, 3, 4]

1500 – 1900: Scientific Awakening and Mysticism

As the Enlightenment took hold, the definition of immortality began to branch outward. Philosophers like Baruch Spinoza redefined eternity as living in the present "sub specie aeternitatis" (under the aspect of eternity). Simultaneously, popular culture and spiritualism sought communication with the dead, paving the way for the exploration of the afterlife through different philosophical and theological lenses. [1, 2, 3, 4]

1900 – 2020: Transhumanism and Radical Life Extension

The digital revolution gave birth to transhumanism—a movement utilizing advanced technology, AI, and biotechnology to radically extend human life. This era marked a radical shift from divine salvation to materialist immortality, where scientists and technologists explored ways to defeat biological aging and eventually preserve consciousness on digital substrates. [1, 2, 3]

Today: The Digital Afterlife and AI

In 2026, artificial intelligence brings the pursuit of eternal life into the hands of grieving families and tech startups. Through conversational avatars, large language models, and deepfakes (sometimes called "griefbots"), companies offer users the ability to interact with the simulated personalities of deceased loved ones. [1, 2]

However, online sentiment reveals mixed opinions on these advancements. [1]

• The "Digital Ghost" Divide: On platforms like Reddit, discussions highlight a divide between finding comfort in the digital preservation of legacy, and the feeling that such AI-generated "immortality" is an artificial simulation rather than true consciousness. [1, 2, 3]
• 
  Theology vs. Technology: Many religious scholars and philosophers argue that the transhumanist and AI pursuit of digital immortality actively bypasses natural human limitations and divine design, asserting that true eternity remains a spiritual concept rather than a technological one. [1, 2]

Scholars and historians continuously map these changing ideas, exploring the psychological and existential meaning of humanity's constant longing to overcome death. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

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