WHAT WAS THE SHAPE OF NOAH'S ARK?

Forget for now that some don't believe there ever was a Noah's Ark.  One report provides evidence that there was no worldwide flood, ever.  If all the water in our atmosphere rained down all at once, it would cover Planet Earth about an inch.  This article admits that a miracle (such as this fluid coming from the bowels of the earth, which is mentioned in The Bible) could have happened, but 40 straight days of rain could not have supplied so much water that Mount Ararat would be covered.  Said the author, "...it is time for people to stop looking for Noah's Ark...it's not there."  Here are 101 reasons why Noah's story does not float.

This painting of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat is by Heironymous Bosch, so he probably believed.  Interesting that in an ABC poll, while 64% of Americans believed the story about Moses parting the Red Sea, a lower percentage, 60%, supported the fete of Noah.  A bit bewildering to me, but 61% believed the story in which the world was created in six days.  

But if there ever was such a flood and previously built ark, conflicting stories abound.  The best date of The Flood I could determine was 2304 BC.  However, time is a variable in The Bible, as for example, Noah being 480 years old when first contacted by God, and that it took 120 years to build the boat.  The biblical passage says 300 (450 feet--although the Egyptian cubit makes this length around 521 feet) cubits long by 50 (75 feet) cubits wide and 30 (45 feet) cubits high. The largest Christopher Columbus ship, the Santa Maria, was 62 feet, but all the major ships of the day are longer than 1000 feet.

Authorities estimate that 36,000 species, or as many as 75,000 animals, boarded.  How did Noah and his family feed this lot?  The best surmisal is that God willed these beasts to come and had the power to minimize their metabolism for minimal food and sanitation care.  There are variations to this tale, In any case, they all lived on the boat for about a year, the exact number of days is another debatable subject for scholars.  But it is partially for these temporal illogicalities in this paragraph that I don't take The Bible too literally.  That painting is by Judy Collins.

John Hulbers has actually built two Noah-type arks, which you can visit in Dordrecht, Netherlands.  I forgot his name, but a rather wealthy gentleman from Japan a couple of decades came by Hawaii and wanted to know about koa wood.  Koa is a type of acacia, and the wood purportedly used in Noah's Ark was a type of acacia called gopher wood, which is grown in Turkey.  He wanted to build this ark of koa on the Big Island .  He never returned.

Four years ago, a Chinese/Turkish expedition claimed with 99.9% certainty that the wooden structure they found at an elevation of 12,000 feet on Mount Ararat (16,854 feet tall--scene from Armenia) in eastern Turkey.was dated to be 4,800 years old, and this, no doubt, was from Noah's Ark. Some of the wooden planks were nearly up to 200 feet long.  This from the Christian Science Monitor.  However, Randall Price, director of the Center for Judaic Studies, said this was a hoax, as local Kurdish men had recently trucked up all that wood.  Ron Stewart has a book with many answers.  His analysis adheres to the ship's hull model.

I just saw a trailer of the new Noah film, and this is their ark being built on the left.  But will Russell Crowe and Ron Aronofsky be pissed if true, as the British Museum just announced that a 4,000 year old tablet found in Mesopotamia (now known as Iraq) suggests that instructions were deciphered mentioning building a boat to save Man and animals, two by two, of woven rope reinforced with wooden ribs and coated with bitumen.  The area interpreted was two thirds the size of a soccer field and...ROUND, in the shape of a coracle:

Round makes sense, as the Pacific International Ocean Station which I originally envisioned a quarter century ago was round, but not anything like a coracle.  The shape was like a donut or torus:

If I find the close-up I'll later add it.  Somewhere in my files are detailed drawings of this grazing OTEC plantship to support an industrial park.  But you can see the passageway to the inside, which would be like a calm harbor.  Much of the toroid would be covered by a translucent material.  Only one deepwater pipe is shown, but there could be four for a 10 MW system to improve the stability.  Hmmm...Pat's Ark, or, more probably, Guy's Ark.

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2014 GRAMMY AWARDS

The Gramophone Award (now known as the Grammy Award) for songs almost totally foreign to me, was tonight on CBS at 7PM.  Why I do this I'm not sure, but you can gaze at my effort last year and in 2012, which had some appearances by my kind of entertainers:  Beach Boys and Glen Campbell (mind you, he already had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's when he showed up).

The highlights this year were this truly eclectic mix of performers:

• Madonna, and no one yet knows what she will do, but scroll down to find out

• Metallica with Ling Ling, yes the pianist

• Two of the Beatles:  Paul McCartney and Ringo Star, together...and did you realize they broke up almost 44 years ago...44 years.  Above, John and George, who are no longer with us.

• I'll look forward to Kendrick Lamar and Imagine Dragons (you surely must be familiar with their Radioactive...I'm not), also together, because I haven't the faintest idea who they are, but many say Lamar has staying power, and I love dragons.

• Robin Thicke (of Blurred Lines and Miley Cyrus fame, but she won't be there) with Chicago.

• Also performing will be Willie Nelson, Carole King, Kris Kristofferson, Blake Shelton and more.

Wait a minute, I know all of them.

I honestly never ever heard of Daft Punk until just now, but they have an Album of the Year nominee with Random Access Memories (one hour nineteen minute recording), and they first formed in 1992, with their first group named Darling, after one of the songs of their idols, the Beach Boys.  Here is their One More Time, and worth a 5+ minute journey with just a click.  I thought Taylor Swift's Red came out in 2012, but here she is again as best album:

Let me finally add New Zealander of Croatian and Irish ancestry Ella Maria Lani Yelich-O'Conner (her father is a civil engineer), who simplified her name to Lorde, and has a Record of the Year nomination for Royals:

She was the first from her country to top the Billboard 100 and might well be the favorite to win best song...and she is all of 17 years old.  I should add that I never heard of her until I did some research five minutes ago.  

Okay, I should also mention Bruno Mars, who also has a Record of Year nomination for Locked Out of Heaven, as he is from Hawaii, will be the featured entertainer at the Super Bowl half time in a week and is giving a two-night performance here in April.

That's Bruno when young as Elvis.  Make your day...click on it.  That was from the movie, "Honeymoon in Las Vegas," one of my favorite films, with Kauai and 34 flying Elvis impersonators.

There were more, but here are the highlights.  The show was opened by Beyonce...then came Jay Z...well they're supposed to be married...but:

Although they looked lovey-dovey sitting next to each other in the front row.  I still can't believe Lorde is 17, but she won two awards:

Macklemore and Lewis got four  Grammys:

French pop duo Daft Punk prevailed on five awards.  They're in the middle with Pharrel Williams and Nile Rogers for Get Lucky.

They wear Star Wars helmets when they entertain:  Robin Thicke sang with Chicago:

Kendrick Lamar and Imagine Dragons:

Paul (71) and Ringo (73) performed McCartney's new song:

Bruno got an award for something:

Merle Haggard (76}, Kris Kristoferson (77) and Willie Nelson (almost 80) joined Blake Shelton (37):

Stevie Wonder (63) and Daft Punk:

Carole King (72) and Sarah Bareilles :

Metallica and Lang Lang:

Madonna showed up with Queen Latifah, Macklemore & Lewis and more to serenade 33 marriages of all kinds, even conventional:

A tribute to the Everly Brothers (Phil passed away last year)  by Miranda Lambert and  Billy Joe Armstrong:

Finale with Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac, Nine Inch Nails, and Queens of the Stone Age:

The show went overtime and finished at 10:45PM or so.  Of final interest:

• There were 82 winning categories, but only a few were actually presented on the TV show, for this was almost pure entertainment.
• Herb Alpert (yes, that's  77-year old Herb Alpert to the right, famous for A Taste of Honey and Whipped Cream) won Best Pop Instrumental Album with "Stepping Out."
• If you want the complete story, click on The Guardian.

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SATURDAY BONBONS

For reasons I cannot appreciate, my Bonbons postings draw an increased volume of readership.  These have nothing to do with candy, as to the right (this cannabis is merely 0% THC hemp).  Here are a few more:

• More Sunday Bonbons
• More Bonbons
• Scientific Bonbons
• Monday Bonbons
• Tuesday Bonbons
• Wednesday Bonbons

So why not a Saturday Bonbons?

• In a WIN/Gallup International survey conducted last month, can you believe that the countries named as the greatest threat to world peace were:
• 4%   Iran
• 4%   Israel
• 5%   Afghanistan
• 6%   China
• 8%   Pakistan
• 24% USA

Shocking?  Not really, for the world doesn't really like us.  Let me say, though, that a personal poll I took when visiting Southeast Asia (primarily Vietnam and Cambodia, but also Thailand) two years ago was somewhat surprising.  I asked, how would you would rate the U.S., Japan, China and Russia on trust and like.  The results:

• #1  USA
• #2 Japan:  although the citizens still mostly hate Japan because of World War II
• #3  Russia:  they are just not liked
• #4  China:  there is a fear of being taken over

Here is the latest Pew Research Center poll comparing the U.S. and China:

• Airline fatalities reached an all-time low last year.  Mind you, 265 died, but there were 31 million flights.  During the past decade, there were an average of 720 fatalities/year.  Safest airline?  Quantas hasn't had a death since 1951.  However, flying per mile is almost 10 times safer than driving.  Each year around 1.3 million are killed in traffic.  The white countries are the worst:

• I saw a headline in the morning paper this morning;

          Justices help nuns skirt law's contraception requirements

          So I thought, why are nuns using contraception.  What it was was that the Supreme Court yesterday allowed the Little Sisters of the Poor to avoid filling Obamacare contraception requests with a written request.

• Did you know that the Vietnamese New Year, or Tet (Remember the War and the Tet Offensive?), is always celebrated on the same day as the Chinese New Year (although it is called the Spring Festival in China), which will be on January 31 (the year of the Horse--next year will be a Sheep, on February 19)?  Yes, this is also the Year of the Horse in Vietnam.  Everything is based on the Moon, and the new year celebration can actually last up to 15 days, with China this year officially having a holiday until February 6.  Some details:
• People go home, so trains and planes and highways can be a mess.  Many establishments here and there actually close, like small restaurants.  The "tourist" ones are taken up by advanced reservations from those who live there.  
• Thus be careful when you travel to China, Vietnam, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, North Korea and Singapore during these days.  Here is a traveler's survival guide for these holidays, but note that this article was for 2012.  
• South Korea is a little different.  They celebrate both January 1 and have the equivalent of a three day weekend during this period.  
• If you must travel by train, try going the opposite way:  trains are filled, and tickets are very expensive, going out of big cities at the beginning, and then returning home at the end.  Don't buy a standing ticket if you are joining the masses.  Oh, yes, smoking is allowed.  
• Unlike Hawaii now, fireworks are part of the local culture.

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WHAT ARE THE PROSPECTS FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE?

It was 40 years ago when I first got professionally involved with the notion of extraterrestrial intelligence.  Click on:

     THE NEXT BILLION YEARS

for this background.

In the mid-70's the key question facing astrophysicists and their ilk was:  Are we the only solar system in the Universe?  I was in the first group of faculty members convened by NASA in 1976 at the Ames Research Center to develop an instrument to find the first extrasolar planet.  Till today, NASA, with good reason, has felt that the answer would not be found in the optical spectrum (what we can see), but in the microwave region.  

Yet, with the encouragement of Nobel Laureate Charles Townes, I drew up the Planetary Abstracting Trinterferometer (PAT, of course), which theoretically would be able to detect and track discrete wavelengths of coherent light (Townes' idea was that if a planet has an atmosphere, chances are that the emission would be the equivalent of a laser) that would stand out despite the overwhelming density of the star light.  Plus, knowing the wavelength, you could determine the composition of the atmosphere.  Click HERE to appreciate the difference between the traditional extrasolar detection techniques and mine.  (For the record, I since have passed on this concept to a series of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence specialists at the Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, and I'm disappointed that no one found time to respond.)

In any case, NASA went down the microwave pathway and my proposal was ignored.  However, it was not until 1988 that the first extrasolar planet was found...which was finally confirmed in 2003.  The Kepeler Space Telescope (2009-2013, but it is now not functioning) detected 2700 alien planets using the transit method, and when the costs are finally added up, the sum just for this project will approach $1 billion.  There are several replacements being considered by NASA, and one, the James Webb Space Telescope slated for launch in 2018, will cost $8.8 billion.  Yes, sour grapes, but for "only" $100 million in the '70's I could have done all that and found real Earth-like exoplanets in the 1980's.

Anyway, talk about overkill.  Science has now proven that there are extrasolar planets.  In fact, there could be up to 10 trillion planets just in our Milky Way Galaxy.  One estimate has 1, followed by 24 zeroes, as the number in our universe.  Why spend ten billion dollars to find more?  We now know they are there.  

Certainly, don't waste my tax money sending humans back to the Moon or, especially, Mars.  These types of adventures are a millennium away.  Do make an effort to detect signals, as Jodie Foster did in CONTACT.  There is that Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, California.  However, this is a low-level $30 million attempt.  If NASA needs to spend a billion dollars on anything, this is where those funds should be placed.

So, is there alien life out there somewhere?  Almost surely, with those numbers.  However, bacteria cannot communicate with us.  Oh, forgot intergalactic space travel for now, and perhaps forever.  It takes light 100,000 years just to travel from one end of our galaxy to the other.  Homo sapiens haven't been around that long yet.  

Is life on Earth unique?  First, some form of micro-life will need to evolve.  Then, some higher life with the equivalent of a brain.  Yet, a chimpanzee cannot design a spacecraft, except in Planet of the Apes (Can you believe that was in 1968?  And by the way, Dawn of Planet of the Apes will be released in May), a movie.  How much will it take to develop intelligent life?  And will this intelligence want to send signals?  

The matter of time becomes a factor, for we have been able to possibly detect and interpret alien signals for maybe half a century, since Frank Drake.  The Universe has been around for 13.8 billion years.  The odds for an advanced exo-civilization in a nearby galaxy to mesh in time with us are iffy.  Finally, the distances are disheartening, when you consider that this signal from a planet in our neighboring Andromeda Galaxy would take 2.2 million years to reach us.  Thus, while the prospects for intelligent life on one of those septillion planets in our Universe must be high, the prospects for actually detecting an extraterrestrial signal  before I pass away are probably low.