I’ve been so dazzled by Venus – that is, occupied with maneuvers connected to the publication of my Venus book – that the Perseids slipped past me. These meteors were probably most abundant during the night of August 11/12. Never mind, they taper off till about August 24, and you may still see several per hour, especially later in the night, if the thunder storms consequent on the heat wave hold off!
See the end note about enlarging illustrations.
The meteors’ radiant, the point from which they seem to fan out over the whole above-horizon hemisphere of the sky, will have shifted slightly east (as the arrow through the radiant indicates) past the head of the warrior constellation Perseus. This happens with meteor streams in general, as Earth continues along the curve of its orbit.
The stream consists of particles that separated, some long ago, from Comet Swift-Tuttle. Our line in the space diagram represents merely one particle that happens to hit Earth. The particles take their own slightly diverging orbits, forming an enormous sparse tube in space, through which it takes Earth (at its speed of about 67,000 miles an hour) more than a month to travel. So during that time the angle at which the particles enter and burn up in our atmosphere slightly changes.
The Perseid particles, in this inner part of their orbits, are traveling more than twice as fast (relative to the Sun) as Earth is. The meteor you missed seeing on August 12 is now more than 3 million miles down past Earth in our space diagram. – What’s wrong with that statement?
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Home Planet Department
We have mixed feelings about world government. To me, the United Nations functions to promote peace among nations without altering their individual essences, and the European Union does the same on a regional level; but some are suspicious of anything that might impose the will of other countries on, say, Venezuela, or the U.S.A.
Here is a test of what you think about world government. Would there be any substitute for it in this case? A country has control of the rivers that run into another country. It dams them, to create reservoirs for irrigation and electric power, releasing an agreed amount of water to continue downstream to the other countries that need it. But the upstream country has a quarrel with the ethnic group living just over the border, and shuts off some of the water so as to – what’s the liquid equivalent of “starve”? “Parch” them? The men, women, and children of that region will die of thirst. Nobody can prevent it.
This is not an imaginary example.
(Search down the article for “weaponise”.)
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ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format. You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor. One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge. Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it. On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers). Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.
Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after positing it. If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.
This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.
Good riddle. What is wrong with the statement is that the meteor would have burned up in the atmosphere so it would not be 3,000,000 miles below the earth. Good teaching tactic – I double checked the math first which burned the numbers into my brain.
The U.S. does this too, using most of the Colorado River water before it reaches Mexico.
A world government might be the answer, but I think it should follow the pattern of the U.S. Constitution, which limits the down side of human nature (passion, or desire for power / oppression) and elevates the good side of human nature (reason, which benefits the common good).
The U. S. constitution provides an ingenious way of organizing government to protect freedom by implementing the following checks and balances: The population has the ability to check the government through the right to vote. The states retain the right to pass laws for social organization that allows experimentation at the state level that other states can copy. The U.S. is a republic rather than a democracy; this enables the Congress to pass thoughtful legislation that protects minorities from mob rule. The Judicial branch ensures we follow the constitution. The Executive branch enforces the laws.
This is a historically inopportune moment to present the United States as an ideal model for world governance. A demented narcissistic maniac won the presidency with a minority of the popular vote. The minority party he hijacked controls one house of the legislature and stonewalls every effort to address global warming, poverty, racial injustice, a broken health care system, and the looming prospect of tens of millions of people losing their homes. We live in the only developed country which has completely failed to control the corona virus pandemic. Our postal service is being deliberately sabotaged by the politically appointed postmaster general with the stated aim of preventing us from holding an election by mail, because the President knows he would lose a fair election.
I don’t know anything about the constitution of Belarus, but I doubt it would be much worse as a template for a world government.
We already have the United Nations as a deliberative and administrative organization through which the nations of the world can cooperate to prevent war, address shared problems, and create a better world for future generations. I think it makes more sense to work through the UN and to improve how the UN functions, rather than try to create something new. It took a devastating world war and the invention of atomic weapons to get world leaders to agree to create the UN. I’m afraid that if we wait for an equally horrific tragedy to start over, it will be too late.
A perfect constitution is not to be expected from fallible human beings, but so far it has prevented tyranny.
Last night and this morning were clear here in San Francisco, the first fully clear night in a couple of weeks. I saw a few Perseids last night and before dawn this morning, including one moderately bright meteor. I was more excited this morning to get my first confident view of Uranus during his current apparition. Mars is getting really bright! And big!
Arianne Shahvisi’s elegy for Hasankeyf, and her broader indictment of how the Turkish government is either flooding Kurdish villages or cutting off their water supply, are sad and moving. Indeed, the Kurds have no friends but the mountains. Thanks for the link.
The objections of Egypt and Sudan to the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Nile River also demonstrate how a large dam can wreak devastation on people living downstream. At least Egypt and Sudan are sovereign nations and able to negotiate with Ethiopia on a formally equal footing.
Early Perseid results on the International Meteor Organization’s website suggest the peak may have been a little under-strength this year. The predicted Zenithal Hourly Rate was around 110 between about 13h to 16h UT on August 12, but the limited data from that period available so far suggests computed ZHRs were only in the 80-90 range (and that that was as good as they were at any point). Early days still, and this is all liable to change as more data comes through, however. From sites that weren’t completely clouded-out, anyway (as was I…).
The water-control issue takes me right back to high school Geography lessons in the mid-’70s. Studying West Africa, one of our pre-exam assessment projects centred around just this topic back then, so it’s certainly not a new problem (and it gives landlocked states some bargaining power for sea-route access with their coastal neighbours). Even further back, in the 3rd millennium BC and later, wars were fought in ancient Mesopotamia over control of the water supply channels diverted from the River Euphrates to the numerous city-states along them.