Ministers responsible for space exploration from the 18 European Space Agency (ESA) countries plus Canada met last week. They agreed to fund 9.9 billion euros (US$12.7 billion) of the requested 10.4 billion euro ($13.34 billion) budget. The ESA Council meets once every three years to decide funding on a list of proposed projects. The meeting took place in The Hague on 25-26 Nov.

ISS showing Jules Verne ATV (NASA)

Afterwards French education minister Valerie Pecresse said, “Investing money in long-term space projects is an appropriate answer to the economic crisis.” ESA director general Jean-Jacques Dordain said, “These are investments that can help the economy. This is the right time invest in the future.”

Two projects in particular were competing for funds. The ExoMars mission and ESA’s continued commitment to the International Space Station (ISS). ExoMars is championed by Italy and aims to land a rover on Mars and drill beneath the surface to a depth of two meters. Unfortunately ExoMars’s costs had doubled from those originally projected. Germany, a great supporter of the ISS with a heavy industrial commitment to the station, fought hard to protect the 1.4 billion euro ($1.8 billion) ISS budget.

Compromise Reached

After two days of haggling a compromise was reached. ESA contributions to ExoMars are capped at 1 billion euros ($1.28 billion), leaving another 200 million euros ($257 million) to be funded through co-operation with other national agencies. The mission will now blast off in 2016, three years behind schedule. Germany received pledges that the ESA can seek another 400 million euros ($513 million) for the ISS if necessary.

Germany’s junior minister for economics and technology Peter Hintze said, “The ISS is our biggest technological project and tremendous efforts have been made. Now is the time to reap the benefits of our work.” Supporters of the ISS want to get the most out of the station before 2010 when NASA stops flying shuttle missions. An ESA delegate told Reuters, “The real question is the future of the ISS after 2015 when the United States has said it will stop using it.”

New Climate Satellite – Tropomi

The Netherlands is to build a new climate satellite to be launched in 2014. The Tropospheric Ozone- Monitoring Instrument (Tropomi) will measure ozone in the troposphere. This is the lowest part of the Earth’s atmosphere containing 80 percent of our air. The Dutch government will provide 78 million euros ($100 million) for the project. The balance of 37–52 million euros ($47.5–66.7 million) will be provided by the ESA. “The data provided by the Tropomi will enable the Dutch Royal Meteorological Institute to provide accurate data about smog,” Dutch Economics Minister Maria van der Hoeven said.

Tropomi is part of ESA’s Earth monitoring project which has a total funding of 857 million euros ($1.1 billion). ESA’s new budget also includes money for ESA’s contribution to the Hubble Space Telescope, further development a new version of the Ariane launcher and funding of telecommunications projects.

The European Commission is behind Europeana and provides the annual budget of 2.5 million euros (US$3.15 million). At its launch commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said, “Europeana is much more than a library; it is a veritable dynamo to inspire 21st century Europeans to emulate the creativity of innovative forbears like the drivers of the Renaissance.”

The site was designed to handle up to five-million users per hour. It was receiving 10-million hits an hour when it crashed on its first morning. Despite increasing the number of servers from three to six, the site crashed again early that evening. It is now offline and displays the message, “We are doing our utmost to reopen Europeana in a more robust version as soon as possible.” It hopes to be back online by mid-December 2008.

Giving visibility to hidden treasures
Started 2005, the European Digital Library Foundation runs the project. Its staff of 14 coordinates the digitizing activities of the national libraries, museums and archives of the EU member states. Some 1,000 organizations including the Louvre in Paris, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and the British Library have provided material.

The EU Commissioner responsible for new technologies is Viviane Reding. She said Europeana will, “give greater visibility to all the treasures hidden deep in our libraries, museums and archives.” Enabling, “a Czech student to browse the British library without going to London, or an Irish art lover to get close to the Mona Lisa without queuing at the Louvre.”

Only a fraction of content online
Europeana currently holds some two-million paintings, photographs, sound recordings, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and documents. The number of documents provided varies considerably between states. France has provided 52 percent of the present content, with the UK and the Netherlands providing ten-percent each. Finland and Sweden have so far added a sizeable contribution with eight and seven percent respectively. Other countries have contributed less than two-percent each, with nine countries contributing less than 0.1 percent of the content each.

There are an estimated 2.5 billion works in Europe’s public libraries. The aim is to have 10 million works available by 2010. “I now call on Europe’s cultural institutions, publishing houses and technology companies to fill Europeana with further content in digital form,” said Reding.

The Europeana site is available in almost all official EU languages with Maltese and Bulgarian to be added soon. For now, searches return only documents tagged in the language of the keywords. Searching for “treaty” will only yield material tagged with the word “treaty.” However, it is intended to developed technology to perform cross-language searches, allowing search on the word “treaty” to return documents tagged with “trattato” etc.

Europeana is not the only digitizing project launched this decade. Microsoft launched an online library project at the end of 2006, but abandoned it 18-months later, having digitalized only 750,000 books. Google launched its Book Search at the end of 2004 and now claims some seven million books online. In fact, Europeana was a response to Google Book Search.

In one amazing incident from 1984, air-traffic controllers describe a, “brilliant solid ball of light, bright silvery in colour,” land on a runway in front of them, then takeoff in a near vertical climb. These stories appearing in both the national press and on TV caused quite a stir.

What happened next depends on your point of view. In one narrative, worried by their pubic exposure, the UFOs decided to step up their invasion plans, with the UK the center of the attack.

Another point of view has it that once UFOs became newsworthy, UFO stories multiplied. When people saw these reports, things they once dismissed as mundane they now perceived as UFOs. With more sightings publicized, people become more likely to report their own experiences, as they were no longer are worried about being labelled as “weird.” It was a self-reinforcing process.

Whatever the reason, by mid-summer, UFO sightings had rocketed (excuse the pun). Malcolm Robinson, the founder member of Strange Phenomena Investigations, told the normally staid Daily Telegraph, “Something very bizarre is happening in the skies over the UK.”

The national press ran stories on a “glowing” disc spotted above the M5 motorway, on fleets of objects hanging in the sky above an army barracks and of a police helicopter chasing a UFO.

In one famous story, a man calls the police to report a mysterious light hovering above his house, only to have the Police identify it as the moon when they arrived at the scene.

Stevenage, has not been immune. A sighting in August was the first UFO sighting in the town in 32 years. The Comet reported multiple-sightings of between two and seven orange spheres, travelling silently in a parallel course to the local airport’s flight path. One group of 10 people at a barbecue took photos, which also appeared in the paper.

A week later, the paper provided the explanation. Someone had been letting off Chinese lanterns in the town. Chinese lanterns are baby hot air balloons about the size of a dustbin liner. The local airport was not amused. Pointing out that anyone releasing such objects needs to get clearance from the Civil Aviation Authority first.

Not everyone I know accepts this explanation, conspiracy and cover-up are suspected. “I believe,” and, “the truth is out there,” they mutter.

Now September has arrived, the new soccer season has started and UFO reports have died down. With a new cold war looming and the UK facing its worse recession in 60 years, we may be looking back with fondness to the summer of 08. When all we had to worry about was ET stopping by for some barbecue chicken.

Recent research suggests that human evolution is speeding up. A team led by John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, suggested in 2007, that an acceleration in human evolution started around 40,000 years ago. The human population explosion and rapidly changing lifestyles due to the adaption of settled agriculture are likely to be behind this acceleration. Five thousand ago, we were evolving 30 to 40 times faster than before, and are likely to be evolving at the same rate today.

Devolution or degeneration is a social-philosophical concept. It was influential from 1850′s to 1950′s and is now largely discredited.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was the first to define “degeneration” as a theory of nature. He argued that entire species became sterile, weaker or smaller due to harsh climates. This is incorrect. Any species will adapt slowly over time to its climate, possibly producing a new species in the process.

In the 1850′s, Benedict Morel argued that certain groups of people were degenerating, such that each generation became progressively weaker. Again, this flies in the face of accepted Darwinian evolutionary theory. In the 1880′s, criminologist Cesare Lombros believed he had found evidence of degeneration by studying the corpses of criminals. After completing an autopsy on a murderer, he found the indentation where the spine meets the neck to be a signal of degeneration and responsible for the criminality.

In 1890, Europe’s elite were gripped by fear that widespread degeneration was leading to poverty, crime, alcoholism, moral perversion and political violence. This hysteria had echoes in Europe and the US in the 20th century, giving rise to eugenic programs. Despite this, there is no scientific evidence to support degeneration.