CHAPTER 1: Prologue – Creation
Factoid: The inflation theory in cosmology is a well-accepted explanation of several puzzles of the Big Bang. But the inflation concepts present another perplexing probability: they predict that we live in a multiverse. In 2009, Andrei-Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin of Stanford University calculated that, based on quantum fluctuations, our universe could be just one of possibly 10^10^10^7 universes. Scientists also estimate that the human brain can only absorb 10^16 bits of information in a lifetime.
In essence, there could be more universes than the human brain could possibly fathom.
Zyga, Lisa (2009, October 16). Physicists Calculate Number of Parallel Universes. Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2009-10-physicists-parallel-universes.html
CHAPTER 2: Leverage
Factoid: It was September 12, 1933, when Leo Szilard first conceived the idea to use a chain reaction of neutron collisions with atomic nuclei to release energy. This was more than six years before the discovery of nuclear fission. Due to fears that German scientists were working on a weapon using nuclear technology, the Manhattan Project focused US nuclear research on making a bomb. Twelve years after Szilard’s idea, on July 16, 1945, the world’s first nuclear explosion was tested at a site located 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico. It was another six years before the technology was used for peace—not until December 20, 1951, when the first electricity from nuclear energy was generated by Experimental Breeder Reactor 1 at a site in Idaho.
Chodos, Alan. (2003, July). This Month in Physics History, July 16,1945: First Nuclear Bomb Exploded. APS.org. https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200307/history.cfm
CHAPTER 3: Launch
Factoid: Astronauts sometimes relate that launching into space is like sitting on a bomb. There’s considerable justification for this. A standard car is about four percent fuel by weight. Some tank munitions are about thirty percent fuel. Rockets, on the other hand, are typically eighty-five percent fuel and fifteen percent structure and payload.
Pettit, Don. (2012, May 1). The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html
CHAPTER 4: The Belt
Factoid: In 2020, it was estimated that there are about two hundred thousand pieces of space debris in orbit around Earth, with a size between one and ten centimeters (0.4 and 4 inches) across. The United States Space Surveillance Network tracks more than fifteen thousand pieces of space junk larger than ten centimeters. In addition, there could be millions of pieces smaller than one centimeter.
Gregersen, E. (2022, January 31). Space debris. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/technology/space-debris
CHAPTER 5: Experiments
Factoid: For years, some scientists were concerned that experiments in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, could result in the formation of black holes that might destroy the earth. In 2010, Matthew Choptuik of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and Frans Pretorius of Princeton University built a computer simulation that calculated the gravitational interactions between the colliding particles, and they found that a black hole does form if two particles collide with a total energy of about one-third of the Planck energy. Although powerful, the LHC’s maximum is well below this energy level. But maybe the next-generation collider could make a black hole?
Cho, Adrian. (2010, January 22). Colliding Particles Can Make Black Holes, Simulations do not prove that Large Hadron Collider will produce them, however. Science.org. https://www.science.org/content/article/colliding-particles-can-make-black-holes
CHAPTER 6: Feelings
Factoid: Extrasensory perception (ESP) has long been a controversial subject in scientific communities. Yet most of the population tends to believe it is real. One study has even shown that more people will believe in ESP if they are told the scientific community thinks it is bogus.
Rao, Smriti. (2010, April 22). How to Make People Believe in ESP: Tell Them Scientists Think It’s Bogus. Discovermagazine.com. https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/how-to-make-people-believe-in-esp-tell-them-scientists-think-its-bogus
CHAPTER 7: Engage
Factoid: Various premonitions have been recorded throughout history. An often-quoted example is one by President Lincoln about his assassination.
“According to the recollection of one of his friends, Ward Hill Lamon, President Abraham Lincoln dreams on this night in 1865 of ‘the subdued sobs of mourners’ and a corpse lying on a catafalque in the White House East Room. In the dream, Lincoln asked a soldier standing guard, ‘Who is dead in the White House?’ to which the soldier replied, ‘The president. He was killed by an assassin.’ Lincoln woke up at that point. On April 11, he told Lamon that the dream had ‘strangely annoyed’ him ever since. Ten days after having the dream, Lincoln was shot dead by an assassin while attending the theater.”
Direct quote from This Day in History, April 4, 1865, President Lincoln dreams about his assassination. (April 1, 2020). History.com. https://www.history.com/this-day–history/lincoln-dreams-about-a-presidential-assassination
CHAPTER 8: Spy
Factoid: The growth of satellites circling the Earth is exploding. In 2019, there were about two thousand satellites in orbit. By January 2022, that number had jumped to more than twelve thousand. Some predict that by 2030, there will be fifty thousand. The largest growth is in communication satellites, with more than sixty percent of active satellites being used for communication services, including internet services.
Mohanta, Nibedita. (2022, November 11). How Many Satellites are Orbiting Around Earth in 2022? Geospatialworld.net. https://www.geospatialworld.net/prime/business-and-industry-trends/how-many-satellites-orbiting-earth/#:~:text=According%20to%20UNOOSA%20records%2C%20there,record%20of%20the%20operational%20satellites
CHAPTER 9: Matter and Energy
Factoid: Our universe contains billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars and almost countless planets, moons, and clouds of dust and gas. The stars emit tremendous amounts of energy in a spectrum of radio waves to X-rays. But all the matter and energy we can observe with conventional measurements only make up about five percent of the total mass and energy of the universe. Through gravitational lensing, the bending of light due to gravity, we know there is far more mass and energy in our universe. Gravitational lensing tells us that the domain of dark matter (twenty-seven percent) and dark energy (sixty-eight percent) must be added to the content of our universe.
Dark Matter. (2023, January 21). CERN. https://home.cern/science/physics/dark-matter#:~:text=Dark%20energy%20makes%20up%20approximately,diluted%20as%20the%20universe%20expands
CHAPTER 10: Misjudgments
Factoid: For hundreds of years, embassies and diplomatic missions have been used to spy on adversaries’ lands. But they do not need to be assigned to an embassy; they could be living among us. A retired counterintelligence supervisor for the US Defense Intelligence Agency said that an estimated one hundred thousand foreign agents living in the USA, working for at least sixty to eighty nations, was a “good guess.”
Patterson, Thom. (2017, July 18). Spies among us: Get a peek at their playbook. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/20/us/declassified-spycraft-espionage-gear-techniques/index.html#:~:text=Spies%20are%20living%20among%20us,nations%20%E2%80%93%20all%20spying%20on%20America
CHAPTER 11: Superposition
Factoid: In 2015, European Space Agency researcher Rang-Ram Chary took a map of the cosmic microwave background and removed everything scientists knew about. He was left with a map that should have been empty, but instead had patches 4,500 times brighter than they should be. His explanation: the patches are imprints from a collision between our universe and a parallel one.
Rice, Roy. (2015, November 3). Study may have found evidence of alternate, parallel universes. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2015/11/03/alternate-universes-discovered/75102502/
CHAPTER 12: Schrödinger’s Cat
Factoid: In addition to his famous thought experiment using a cat to describe superposition, Erwin Schrödinger wrote What is Life (1944). In it, he tried to show how quantum physics can be used to explain the stability of the genetic structure. The book is still considered one of the most profound and useful introductions to the study.
Ball, Philip. (2018, August 29). Schrödinger’s cat among biology’s pigeons: 75 years of What Is Life? Nature. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06034-8
CHAPTER 13: Huntsville, We Have a Problem
Factoid: The often-repeated Apollo 13 phrase, “Houston, we have a problem” would not be how the astronauts aboard the ISS would report a similar dire event. Since most activities on the ISS are related to the space-bound payloads (the research facilities and experiments), the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, would likely get the call. The Payload Communication controller, or PACOM, would be responsible. So, they would more likely say, “PACOM, Station. Huntsville, we have a problem.”
Garcia, Mark (2020, October 15). Ground Facilities. NASA.com. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/behindscenes/index.html
CHAPTER 14: Universes, Plural
Factoid: In 2021, the Parker Solar Probe reached a top speed of 101 miles (163 kilometers) per second during its tenth close solar flyby. That translates to an amazing 364,621 miles per hour (586,000 kilometers per hour). In December of 2024, the probe will make another approach to the solar surface, with an expected speed of over 430,000 miles per hour (690,000 kilometers per hour). The probe is the fastest-moving object ever built by man. Yet at its 2024 speed, the probe was still only traveling at 0.00064 times the speed of light.
Howell, Elizabeth. (2021, November 23). NASA’s superfast Parker Solar Probe just broke its own speed record at the sun. Space.com. https://www.space.com/parker-solar-probe-sun-speed-record-november-2021
CHAPTER 15: Prison
Factoid: Every spacecraft carries survival gear for crash landings, and the Russian Soyuz capsule attached to the ISS has a kit that includes a gun. But although the gun has been there for as long as the space station has been in orbit, its existence is kept quiet. NASA and Russia won’t talk publicly about it.
Macias, Amanda. (2015, January 29). This Is a Triple-Barreled Soviet Space Gun with an Attached Machete. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-a-triple-barreled-soviet-space-gun-with-an-attached-machete-2015-1
CHAPTER 16: Plans
Factoid: The International Space Station always has a Soyuz-TMA spacecraft attached to it in standby mode to serve as an emergency CRV, “crew return vehicle.” The number of seats on the CRV limits the number of people aboard the ISS at any single time, unless it is being visited by another spacecraft. Typically, a new Soyuz-TMA return vehicle is delivered to the ISS every six months.
Soyuz TMA. (2022, November 9). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_TMA
CHAPTER 17: Gravity Bomb
Factoid: The simplest and oldest explanation for dark energy is that it is an energy density inherent to empty space, or a “vacuum energy.” Mathematically, vacuum energy is equivalent to Einstein’s cosmological constant. Despite the rejection of the cosmological constant by Einstein and others, the modern understanding of the vacuum, based on quantum field theory, is that vacuum energy arises naturally from the totality of quantum fluctuations (i.e., virtual particle-antiparticle pairs that come into existence and then annihilate each other shortly thereafter) in empty space.
Riess, Adam. (2021, December 15). Dark energy. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/dark-energy
CHAPTER 18: You Have Mail
Factoid: In the Western world, coffee consumption is around one-third that of tap water. After petroleum, coffee is the second-most traded commodity in the world. Over seven million metric tons are produced annually. By the end of 2015, Great Britain had more than twenty thousand coffee shops across the country, and even after fifteen years of rapid expansion, Britain’s coffee shop sector still continues to grow. Despite the fact that a pope once called it “the devil’s drink,” there is coffee in every kitchen, and it is a fact of life that drinking coffee is here to stay.
From the description of the book, Coffee: A Drink for the Devil, Paul Chrystal found at Coffee. (n.d.). Amberley Publishing. https://www.amberley-books.com/coffee.html
CHAPTER 19: Best-Made Plans
Factoid The first records of the legal application of torture to prove guilt or innocence were found in the Sumerian Code of Ur-Nammu (circa the twenty-first century BC) and the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (circa the eighteenth century BC), which in the evidentiary procedure employed the so-called “divine judgment” of the water ordeal.
History of Torture. (2015). Tortureum. https://tortureum.com/history-of-torture/
CHAPTER 20: Limited Time
Factoid: France launched the first and only cat into space. Félicette, a stray Parisian cat, went to space in 1963, experienced weightlessness, and was successfully recovered. She has been commemorated on postage stamps around the world, and a statue of her is on display at the International Space University.
Félicette. (2023, January 1).Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9licette
CHAPTER 21: Change of Plan
Factoid: While the International Space Station hasn’t experienced a fire, a significant blaze did take place in 1997 on the Russian space station Mir. The fire came from an oxygen generator, where the oxygen supplied a ready source of fuel. Tests showed that the generator had to run out of oxygen for the fire to burn out. If a fire were to occur on the ISS, the astronauts would become firemen and follow a three-step response system. First, they would turn off the ventilation system to slow the spread of fire. Next, they would shut off power to the affected unit. Finally, astronauts would use fire extinguishers to put out the flames.
Uri, John. (2022, February 23). 25 Years Ago: Fire Aboard Space Station Mir. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/25-years-ago-fire-aboard-space-station-mir
CHAPTER 22: Less Carrot, More Stick
Factoid: The ISS is the single most expensive object ever built. The cost of the ISS has been estimated at over 150 billion US dollars. In April of 2021, NASA updated their prices for private missions flying to the ISS. The updated prices reflect the true costs of supporting current missions. The costs include cargo, station resources, crew time, and mission planning services. Under the new pricing, a hypothetical four-person, one-week stay at the ISS would cost at least 12.5 million dollars. The price assumes that the four astronauts would provide their own transportation, i.e., a rocket. The cost is more than twenty times the price of the most expensive hotel in the world (according to Guinness World Records).
The charge for room service (food on the ISS) is two thousand dollars per person, per day.
Johnson, Michael. (2021, April 29). Commercial and Marketing Pricing Policy. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/leo-economy/commercial-use/pricing-policy
CHAPTER 23: Return
Factoid: The Soyuz return vehicle has a landing zone accuracy of twenty-eight kilometers relative to the center target using a parachute descent and may be up to six hundred kilometers short of the target in a ballistic return. That makes the landing zone longer than the width of the state of Pennsylvania. For safety, landing areas need to be flat and open without structures, rivers, or trees. There are no sites in Russia that meet these criteria, and only thirteen sites in Kazakhstan that do.
Zak, Anatoly. (2023, January 20). Here is how Soyuz returns to Earth. RussianSpaceWeb.com. https://www.russianspaceweb.com/soyuz-landing.html
CHAPTER 24: Dot, Dot, Dash
Factoid: The first message sent via Morse code’s dots and dashes across a long distance was sent from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. With today’s ability to hold global conversations with a ubiquitous handheld device, that accomplishment in human communications might seem trivial. But consider this in respect to all human history: it took until Friday, May 24, 1844, before complex thoughts could be communicated almost instantaneously at long distances.
Today in History – May 24, What Hath God Wrought? (n.d.). Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/may-24/
CHAPTER 25: The Bunker
Factoid: During the tense years of the Cold War, from 1953 to 1979, the United States built and operated close to three hundred Nike missile sites across the country. Named after the Greek goddess of victory, the air defense system was equipped with both conventional (NIKE-Ajax) and nuclear (NIKE-Hercules) missiles. The last battery of Hercules missiles, at Fort Bliss, Texas, were decommissioned in 1983.
Historic Context of the Nike Missile Site. (n.d.). Fairfax County Gov. – Laurelhill – History. https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/planning-development/sites/planning-development/files/assets/documents/laurelhill/history/nikemissilesite.pdf
CHAPTER 26: Station-to-Station Call
Factoid: “On October 9, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson talked by telephone to each other over a two-mile (3 km) wire stretched between Cambridge and Boston. It was the first wire conversation ever held. Yesterday afternoon the same two men talked by telephone to each other over a 3,400-mile (5,500 km) wire between New York and San Francisco. Dr. Bell, the veteran inventor of the telephone, was in New York, and Mr. Watson, his former associate, was on the other side of the continent. They heard each other much more distinctly than they did in their first talk thirty-eight years ago.”
The advance from “long distance” (Washington, D.C., to Baltimore ) Morse code in 1844 to cross-country verbal conversations took just seventy-one years.
Direct quote fromPhone to Pacific from the Atlantic. (1915, January 26). The New York Times. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1915/01/26/100134789.html?pageNumber=1
CHAPTER 27: Displeasure
Factoid: Although often referenced in Hollywood movies, it was not until May 2016 that the first and only documented case of “cement shoes” was reported. The body of Brooklyn gang member Peter Martinez, age 28, better known on the streets as Petey Crack, washed up near Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn. His body floated to the shore due to air in the concrete, because it was not given enough time to dry before being thrown into the ocean.
Cement shoes. (2022, December 15). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement_shoes#:~:text=In%20May%202016%2C%20the%20first,immediate%20cause%20of%20his%20death
CHAPTER 28: A Bold Plan
Factoid: The 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion, nicknamed the Geronimos, were also known as “gingerbread men” for the figure on the unit patch they wore. Lieutenant Colonel Edson Raff, the first combat commander of the Geronimos, believed that in military operations, “the boldest plan is the best.” That philosophy was demonstrated repeatedly by the 509th PIB on the battlefields of World War II. They were the first American paratroopers to jump into combat during the invasion of North Africa, then behind enemy lines in Italy, at Anzio, into southern France, and finally the Battle of the Bulge, where only fifty-five men walked away.
Directly from Broumley, Jim Travis. (2011). The Boldest Plan is the Best: The Combat History of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion during WWII. Rocky Marsh Publishing.
CHAPTER 29: Friends
Factoid: “2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence. I have set the date 2045 for the ‘Singularity’ which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion-fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.” — Raymond Kurzweil, computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist
Reedy, Christianna. (2017, October 5). Kurzweil Claims that the Singularity Will Happen by 2045, Get ready for humanity 2.0. Futurism. https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2045
CHAPTER 30: Tipping Point
Factoid: A 2020 study (Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050, Ilona M. Otto, et al.) proposed six social tipping points that could help stabilize Earth’s climate: removing fossil fuel subsidies and incentivizing decentralized energy generation, building carbon-neutral cities, divesting from assets linked to fossil fuels, clarifying the moral implications of fossil fuels, expanding climate education and engagement, and making greenhouse gas emissions transparent.
Cho, Renee. (2021, November 11). How Close Are We to Climate Tipping Points? Columbia Climate School. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/11/11/how-close-are-we-to-climate-tipping-points/
CHAPTER 31: Playing with Fire
Factoid: Flipping a coin repeatedly rarely works out to even odds, heads or tails. In one hundred tosses of a coin, there is less than an eight percent probability that you will have fifty heads and fifty tails.
Kowalski, Maciej. (2023, January 5). Coin Flip Probability Calculator. Omni Calculator. https://www.omnicalculator.com/statistics/coin-flip-probability
CHAPTER 32: New Cargo
Factoid: The US Coast Guard has sweeping authority to board any vessel subject to the jurisdiction of the United States at any time, at any place. It does not require a warrant nor probable cause.
Bland, Will, III. (2012, November 12). The Fourth Amendment Rights vs. Boarding Power of the United States Coast Guard. Mouledoux, Bland, Legrand & Brackett. https://mblb.com/admiralty-maritime/the-fourth-amendment-rights-vs-boarding-power-of-the-united-states-coast-guard/
CHAPTER 33: A Message
Factoid: Spies can be found even in the most secure houses. In 2005, Leandro Aragoncillo used his position as staff assigned to then Vice President Dick Chaney and his top-secret clearance to steal classified intelligence documents from White House computers.
Ross, Brian, and Esposito, Richard. (2005, October 5). Espionage Case Breaches the White House. ABC News. https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=1187030&page=1
CHAPTER 34: Shell Game
Factoid: The fake silicone faces of Mission Impossible are closer to reality than you might think. Officials suspect a con artist of using a custom-made silicone mask to impersonate the French defense minister Jean-Yves Le Drian in a scam that netted an estimated ninety million dollars from wealthy victims. In Skype video meetings, the fake Le Drian wore a silicone mask and sat behind a desk with props to appear to callers that they were indeed talking to the actual minister. The ruse worked for two years.
Schofield, Hugh. (2019, June 20). The fake French minister in a silicone mask who stole millions. BBC.com. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48510027
CHAPTER 35: Capture
Factoid: Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec (1781–1826) was a French physician who invented the stethoscope in 1816. Laënnec is considered to be the father of clinical auscultation and wrote the first descriptions of bronchiectasis and cirrhosis. He also classified pulmonary conditions such as pneumonia, pleurisy, emphysema, pneumothorax, phthisis, and other lung diseases from the sounds he heard with his invention. Laënnec perfected the art of physical examination of the chest and introduced many clinical terms still used today.
Roguin, Ariel, MD, PhD. (2006, September). Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laënnec (1781–1826): The Man Behind the Stethoscope. National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1570491/
CHAPTER 36: Goodbye
Factoid: When Apollo 11 landed on the moon, there was concern that some failure might mean they could never return. Richard Nixon’s speechwriter, William Safire, prepared a contingency speech, “IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER,” with the statement, “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.”
Safire, Bill. (1969, July 18). IN EVENT OF MOON DISASTER. National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/files/presidential-libraries/events/centennials/nixon/images/exhibit/rn100-6-1-2.pdf
CHAPTER 37: Reunion
Factoid: On March 16, 1926, Dr. Robert H. Goddard successfully launched the first liquid-fueled rocket. The launch took place at Auburn, Massachusetts, and is regarded by flight historians to be as significant as the Wright Brothers’ flight at Kitty Hawk.
Uri, John. (2021, March 17). 95 Years Ago: Goddard’s First Liquid-Fueled Rocket. NASA. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/95-years-ago-goddard-s-first-liquid-fueled-rocket
EPILOGUE: Always Watching…
Factoid: The observable universe is a ball-shaped region of the universe encompassing all matter that can be detected from Earth or its space-based telescopes and exploratory probes at the present time, because the electromagnetic radiation from these objects has had time to reach the solar system and Earth since the beginning of the cosmological expansion. The word “observable” in this sense does not refer to the capability of modern technology to detect light or other information from an object, or whether there is anything to be detected. It refers to the physical limit created by the speed of light itself. No signal (that we know of) can travel faster than light, hence, there is a maximum distance (called the particle horizon) beyond which nothing can be detected, as the signals could not have reached us yet. The radius of the observable universe is therefore estimated to be about 46.5 billion light-years.
Observable Universe. (2023, January 15). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe
DARK MOON, Chapter 1: Prologue – Vanished
Factoid: The force of earth’s gravity on your body is proportional to the distance you are from the earth’s center of mass. This means that the force at your feet is greater than the force at your head. We don’t notice this because the force is relatively small and the difference miniscule. But the gravitational force in the vicinity of a black hole is immense. If you were to stand near one, the difference in the forces would be so large that it would stretch your feet away from your head. Physicists call this “spaghettification,” as you would be drawn into the black hole like a long, thin noodle with your feet stretched miles from your head. It would be rather uncomfortable!
Spaghettification. (2022, July 10). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification