We are not alone in universe

Genesis 1-2: 
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."


Our planet Earth is a tiny speck in one in the very peripheral in one of the spiral arms of the galaxy 'The Milky Way". If the center of our galaxy is "down town", then we live far out on the country side. Will we ever be able to go there or find out what's going on?


According to ESO the chances are that we are not alone in universe. A new result from ESO’s HARPS planet finder shows that rocky planets not much bigger than Earth are very common in the habitable zones around faint red stars. The international team estimates that there are tens of billions of such planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and probably about one hundred in the Sun’s immediate neighborhood.

Rocky planets not much bigger than Earth are very common in the habitable zones around faint red stars

Now, when ESO talks about  the 'immediate neighborhood' they mean within a distance of 10 Parsec, which is equal to 32.6 light years, i.e. the distance light itself travels in that time. Read the whole article "Many Billions of Rocky Planets in the Habitable Zones around Red Dwarfs in the Milky Way".

In order to escape Earth's gravitation at 9,000 km altitude in "space" an interplanetary rocket needs a speed of slightly less than 7.1 km/s, which is about 6 times the muzzle velocity of a rifle bullet. The moon rockets sent to the moon during the Apollo program all had a speed slightly less than the Earth's escape velocity. This speed put them into an elongated elliptical Earth orbit, to a point where the Moon's gravity would capture them. It took three days to reach the moon. Unless somebody comes up with a new type of rocket drive that allows people to travel faster in space and keep accelerating even after escaping the gravitional force we will not even be close to reach our nearest known star, Proxima Centauri which is 1.29 parsecs away. A mere speed of 10 km/s would require 126 years of travel time. So, it seems we are pretty much stuck here.

Planets with a mass between one and ten times that of the Earth (aka super-Earths) appear to be very common around other stars in the Milky Way. Discoveries of such planets in the habitable zones around stars are very exciting because — if the planet were rocky and had water, like Earth — they could potentially be an abode of life.
 “Our new observations with HARPS mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet,” says Xavier Bonfils (IPAG, Observatoire des Sciences de l'Univers de Grenoble, France), the leader of the HARPS team at ESO. “Because red dwarfs are so common — there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way — this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone.”

Let's say that only one super-Earth in a million carries some kind of advanced life forms. Let's be careful and put the number of super-Earths to only 16 billion, i.e. reduce the 40% probability to only 10%. This still means that there are around 16 million super-Earths only in our galaxy that are abodes of advanced life forms! And why not? After all we can conclude that we have life on Earth, so why wouldn't it be possible that there should be life on other planets in the universe?

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

How can we imagine an alien life form that's really different than anything you'll find on Earth, rather than just a slightly tweaked version of a human or other Earth creature? If you can imagine a planet with a very different environment — different gravity, different atmosphere, different food sources — then we'll naturally come up with a strange and beautiful creature, such as could never have come into existence on Earth. The only thing that's absolutely not plausible is that creatures from other worlds would look just exactly like us. These and other things you will be able to read in the article "How to Create a Scientifically Plausible Alien Life Form".

We have come a far way from the old times when Earth was considered the center of the universe with the sun orbiting around us. Copernicus changed that, even if he just replaced Earth with the Sun to be the center of the universe in his heliocentric model. Copernicus started the astronomical revolution that later turned out discoveries that our sun was only one star out of many in a galaxy. Even later on we found out that our galaxy was only one out of many galaxies. What will be the next? Will we find other life forms, or will the mere distance kill such initiatives.
The distance from us to the center of the Milky Way is 8,000 Parsec, approx.  26,000 light years. Unless there are "worm holes" in the space-fabric there is no way we will ever get there. Even when we study the night sky and turn our binoculars towards the center of the Milky Way we will only see what happened there 26,000 years ago. The same applies to radio signals. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is the collective name for a number of activities people undertake to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, but whatever signs of advanced life forms with the capability of sending out strong radio signals the time and distance will never allow us to connect to each other.

Chances are, however, that if we still hang around here in a distant future from now, we will get closer to a whole set of new potential life carrying planets! The nearest galaxy to the Milky Way is the Andromeda Galaxy. It has long been known that these two galaxies have been heading in the general direction of each other. They are separated by about 800,000 Parsec (2.5 million light-years), but are converging at something like 400,000 km/h, or 111 km/s. The new Hubble data provides fresh insight on when and how a union is likely to unfold, as you can read more about in the article "Hubble times Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy pile-up". The two galaxies are being pulled together by their mutual gravity and the scientists expect them to begin to merge in about four billion years' time. A further two billion years on and they will appear as a single entity. So what will happen to us? Well, the good news is that our Sun's position will be disturbed, but the star and its planets are in little danger of being destroyed.

Above I have only mentioned the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy. Today we know there are probably more than 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Most of these are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter (the Milky Way is approx 30,000 parsec wide) and usually separated by distances on the order of millions of parsecs.

Now, consider the number of potential super-Earths if you multiply the conservative assumption of 16 million super-Earths per galaxy with the total number of 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe...

The universe is bigger and more complicated than we ever could imagine.

Upon talking about stars; perhaps of all the Church Fathers, none shone so brightly as St. Augustine (351-430).
St. Augustine problably hit the nail when he coined the expression 'Deus semper major', that contains the insight that God always transcends our notions and ideas of what God is, e.g. similar to the multiplication of super-Earths in the universe.
Scribes in the old days often wrote DSM in the margin whenever they wanted to point out this fact in a scripture. We should take note of that...
Why should God limit himself to just one single Earth when he took the trouble to create a whole universe? My personal conclusion is that there are, there has been, and there will be, millions and millions of intelligent and advanced life forms out there on different planets.
Just like ESO concludes - the chances are that we are not alone in universe.

The question is; will we ever meet with one of those other civilizations?

Problably not.



Genesis 3-4:

"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness."

You've never seen data presented like this before

It's fun, it's educational, and it's highly thought-provoking.

Thanks to an old friend Mohamad Ferej, I had the pleasure to get acquainted with  Hans Rosling and his work.

With the drama and urgency of a sportscaster, statistics guru Hans Rosling explains how the world population will grow, global warming, child mortality vs number of childrens per woman born, the rise of the east vs the west - and why it all matters for the decisions and planning for the future!

Below you will find some of the presentations that I like best. These are all between 10 to 20 minutes long, You will definitely enjoy them all and get hooked just like I was when I saw them the first time.
It's amazing how Hans Rosling in such a short time frame can get his message through and deliver a solid statement.




Recommended videos: 
- Hans Rosling on global population growth
- Hans Rosling and the magic washing machine
- Hans Rosling: Religions and babies
- Hans Rosling: Asia's rise -- how and when


... and there are plenty more. You just have to find out yourself.

Good luck and enjoy the shows!

What Greece and Argentina have in common

The scary part is that if you replace the name Argentina with Greece and people's names and currencies; you will find this to be a rather similar account of what is going on now in Greece and Europe, more than 10 years after the events in Argentina. The big difference is that Argentina had its own currency, which makes the case of Greece so much more complicated.

Argentina

Greece

Below is my summary of the Argentine economic crisis (1999-2002)  from Wikipedia:

"The Argentine economic crisis (1999-2002) was a dire financial downturn that affected Argentina's economy during the late 1990s and the early years of the 2000s. In macro-economical terms, the critical period started with the decrease of real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1999 and ended in 2002 with a return to GDP growth. However, the origins of the collapse, as well as the effects upon the country's residents, can be traced back to earlier economic and political decisions that were reportedly of a questionable nature.

In a 2001 interview, journalist Peter Katel identified three very serious crises that converged at "the worst possible time" in his explanation for why the Argentinian economy unraveled in the manner that it did, at the time that it did:

• The Argentine peso was bound to the US dollar at the start of the 1990s by the Economy Minister at the time, Domingo Cavallo.
• The large amounts of borrowing by former Argentine president, Carlos Menem.
• An increase in debt due to the considerable shrinkage in the size of tax revenue that the government was receiving.

By late December, 2001, riots had reached the capital, Buenos Aires. Confrontations between the police and citizens became a common sight, and fires were also set on Buenos Aires avenues

The crisis intensified when, on 5 December 2001, the IMF refused to release a US$1.3 billion tranche of its loan, citing the failure of the Argentinean government to reach previously agreed-upon budget deficit targets and demanded further budget cuts, amounting 10% of the federal budget. On 4 December, Argentinean bond yields stood at 34% over U.S. treasury bonds, and, by 11 December, the spread jumped to 42%. By the end of November 2001, people fearing the worst began withdrawing large sums of money from their bank accounts, turning pesos into dollars and sending them abroad, causing a run on the banks. On 2 December 2001 the government enacted a set of measures, informally known as the corralito ,that effectively froze all bank accounts for twelve months, allowing for only minor sums of cash to be withdrawn, initially announced to be of just $250 a week.

During the last week of 2001, the interim government led by Rodríguez Saá, facing the impossibility of meeting debt payments, defaulted on the larger part of the public debt, totalling no less than US$132 billion, what approximately represented the seventh portion of all the money borrowed by the Third World.

Rodríguez Saá, utterly incapable of dealing with the crisis and unsupported by his own party, resigned before the end of the year. The Legislative Assembly convened again, appointing Peronist Eduardo Duhalde—then a Senator for the Buenos Aires province—to take his place. After much deliberation, Duhalde abandoned in January 2002 the fixed 1-to-1 peso–dollar parity that had been in place for ten years. In a matter of days, the peso lost a large part of its value in the unregulated market. In addition to the corralito, the Ministry of Economy dictated the pesificación, by which all bank accounts denominated in dollars would be converted to pesos at official rate. This measure angered most savings holders and appeals were made by many citizens to declare it unconstitutional. After a few months, the exchange rate was left to float more or less freely. The peso suffered a 80% depreciation, which in turn prompted inflation since Argentina depended heavily on imports, and had no means to replace them locally at the time."

- - -

I ledaren 20 maj i DN så gör Peter Wolodarski följande sammanfattning att  "historien på väg att upprepas, med större efterdyningar" där han synar händelserna Argentina och hur dessa speglas i dagens händelser i Europa och Grekland och hur aktörerna runt agerar kontra-produktivt. Detta trots att facit redan finns att hämta från tidigare kriser, såsom som den i Argentina.

I ledaren 3 juni i DN så fortsätter Peter Woldodarski att diskutera vilka vägskäl och beslut som kommer att krävas inom EU för att Euro-samarbetet inte skall spricka. Wolodarski sammanfatta på ett bra sätt bakgrunden "Orsaken är att ekonomierna under lång tid, precis som Sverige på 1980-­talet, eldats på av billiga krediter och omfattande spekulation i bostäder. Medlemskapet i euron pressade ned räntan till en alldeles för låg nivå. När så krisen kom spräcktes prisbubblan och fastighetsmarknaden kraschade. Som en direkt konsekvens backade BNP, skatteintäkterna rasade och budgetunderskottet exploderade".

och....den 17 juni är det nyval i Grekland. Nu gäller det att ingenting händer under de fyra veckorna som är kvar fram tills dess.

I ett tidigare blogginlägg kan du läsa om hur du kan positionera ekonomiskt inför Greklands högst troliga utträde ur euro-samarbetet. Vi får hoppas att det inskränker sig till Grekland, för annars blir det, som Peter Wolodarski skriver "potentiellt katastrofala politiska och ekonomiska konsekvenser".

Det är lätt att glömma bort hur vackert det är i Grekland

när man bara läser om de ekonomiska problemen

The surprising truth about what motivates us

It's really interesting to understand what drives people to do wonderful stuff. Take a look at this animated video adapted from Dan Pink's talk at the RSA 1).

The conclusion by Dan Pink is that as long as you pay people enough salary to keep the topic of money off the table, there are 3 things that REALLY drive people to innovate and come up with new ideas;
- Autonomy - give people a frame and a goal to work towards - don't micro-manage
- Mastery - people wants to get better at stuff and master new disciplines
- Purpose - people wants to make the world a little better place to live in
Unless those 3 things are in place, it doesn't matter how much bonus you throw at people...

So, what can you do after listening to this talk?

Well, make a new start at your own  company today.
Present the concept for your group or department. Make sure you have your clear goals of what you want to achieve. Target the broken down goals for your specific department. What is your group supposed to aim at in order to support the overall top company goals?. If you're in R&D it could be to lower the cost of goods sold, improve the performance of the product, or to reduce the manufacturing time or lead time etc.. If you're in an economy function it can be about how you can improve your most important financial KPIs. Everybody can do this.
Start with a 1-day workshop, and repeat that every 3rd month. Increase it to a 2-day workshop if that workds better for your kind of work. Let people work on and present new ideas and concepts on whatever they think is interesting during 24-48 hours. Then invite sales and management when the group is presenting all their new ideas; each group has 15 minutes and a 5 minute session for questions. Make it a party! Celebrate! Afterwards, go through and analyze all new ideas and put the best ones into the plan or road map. It's amazing what people can come up with. I tried this concept.Not only does it works, it's big fun too!

Here are some suggestions when discussing with your group what could be good to keep in mind when coming up with new ideas or trying to improve on already existing methods;
- Consider with new (unprecedented) connections between cause and effect - ask stupid questions!
- Simplify!
- Experiment and do simple prototypes; there's nothing like trying out things in practice.
- Re-use or re-visit earlier failures; sometimes a new approach under new conditions can change things.
- Have patience!

Here is the book by Dan Pink: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Drive-Surprising-Truth-About-Motivates/dp/184767769X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337465566&sr=1-1

 

And, here is the link to the full presentation by Dan Pink at RSA. Enjoy!

1) The RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) is an enlightenment organisation committed to finding innovative practical solutions to today’s social challenges.

Positionera dig inför Greklands utträde ur euro-samarbetet

Alla verkar nu mer eller mindre överens om att det bara är en tidsfråga innan Grekland lämnar euro-samarbetet. Frågan är vad som händer med övriga Europa och hur marknaden reagerar?

http://www.economist.com/node/21555572 "The Greek run"

"It is not a good idea for Greece to leave the euro. But it is time to prepare for its departure..."

Är det bara att "sitta still i båten", eller kan man göra något?
Enligt ett extra nyhetsbrev som kom 16 maj från SEB så är det dags att lägga om sina tillgångar inför "sommarens härdsmälta" (min formulering). Ni som kommer ihåg kanske minns förra sommaren? Nu skall man särskilt hålla sig borta särskilt från aktier som är cykliska, obligationslån/fonder (investment grade och high yield), samt alla små valutor. Köp istället USD, japanska yen, schweiziska CH, och fyll på med Guld....
Se bilden nedan.

SEBs förslag på positionering, för den som vill skydda sig vid grekiskt utträde ur eurosamarbetet, är:
1) 25% Valutacertifikat Long JPY F S
2) 25% Råvarucertifikat Long Guld D S
3) 50% SEB Penningsmarknad USD - Lux ack


En annan intressant detalj är att folk har börjat göra sig av med Euro-sedlar som har bokstaven Y framför det elva-siffriga löpnumret (se t ex sedeln i bilden högst upp). Dessa är Euro-sedlar tryckta av Grekland. Läs den här artikeln för mer om hur löpnummren och landskoder fungerar.

Selling cars online... also in Sweden?

Så här har det sett ut i bilhallarna sedan 2:a världskriget...

http://www.economist.com/node/21542456

I USA har det kommit nya tjänster på nätet som låter konsumenter att välja och begära offerter från bilhandlare på nätet. Bilbranschen står inför vad som redan har skett i andra branscher med internets intåg, nytt kundbeteende och smart phones.

Här i Sverige så har nu den nya oberoende sajten FACIT  dragit igång. Där man kan jämföra samtliga bilmodeller och bilversioner som finns att köpa. Testa själv!

www.facit.com

Varför blir det så här då?

Jo, enligt en undersökning baserad på svar från 8 000 globala nybilsköpare så är 1/3 av alla nybilsköpare osugna på att handla av en bilhandlare. Mest för de vill slippa att förhandla om priset eller ha med bilsäljare att göra. Varför skulle man inte kunna sitta och jämföra bilar av olika märken med varandra på nätet hemma i lugn och rooch sedan åka till rätt ställe på en gång som har en kampanj på den bil man söker eller som redan gett en offert?
Enligt samma undersökning så har 71 procent svarat att de också skulle kunna tänka sig att ändra sitt bilval efter att de har läst positiva omdömen från andra om en bilmodell i sociala medier. 51 procent skulle kunna ändra sig efter att ha läst negativaomdömen.

En annan undersökning från Moderna visar också att vi i Sverige är de som har lägst märkeslojalitet när det kommer till bilar i hela Norden. Endast 28 procent av oss skulle kunna tänka sig att köpa en bil av samma märke som man haft tidigare när det är dags att köpa nytt.

Annat var det på farfars tid då man höll sig till ett bilmärke och gick till sin lokala bilhandlare!

Paper Money Collapse & Tulip Mania

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Paper-Money-Collapse-Monetary-Breakdown/dp/1118095758/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1337285221&sr=8-1

Just finished reading this book while the news all around are screaming "Greek exit" and "Euro collapse"...
It's a bit repetitious but still drives home the point and the fact that there has never been one single stable system of paper currency or similar without a fixed value base during the last 5000 years...
If finance had been a science, the elastic paper would not be around due to all failed experiments so far in China, North America, Europe etc.

Otherwise, do you remember the painting Tulip Mania and the tragic story behind it?

A Satire of Tulip Mania by Brueghel the Younger (ca. 1640) depicts speculators as brainless monkeys in contemporary upper-class dress. In a commentary on the economic folly, one monkey urinates on the previously valuable plants, others appear in debtor's court and one is carried to the grave.

Sydney Wignall, explorer, spy and marine archaeologist, died on April6th, aged 89

Obituary worth reading

http://www.economist.com/node/21554174