Monday 12 May 2014

Pints in the sky...

Hi Everyone,

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth...he also made the stars" (Genesis 1, 1 &16)

"Thus the heavens and the earth were completed in all their vast array " (Genesis 2, 1)

Nothing could be more true of the above verses in Torah,  that what we are discovering about our universe; many 'fixed' suppositions about what can and cannot exist in space and what should and should not be there are all being turned on its head, which is why I can never get why atheists claim  'science' as their religion, but then I never really get why, on the other extreme,  some  so -called Haredi  Orthodox dislike science so much either, given that we are studying the work of  He Who made heaven and earth (Psalm 134).

Carina Nebula, a star forming region in the Sagittarius Carina arm of the Milky Way
But that's a story for another day. Over the years,  scientists have discovered planets made of diamonds, planets called 'hot Jupiters' orbiting so close to the sun, they are like massive steel factories and in our own solar system, Titan is a moon of natural gas lakes  liquid hydrocarbons and frozen methane, with more barrel of oil equivalents that the whole earth. Neptune, it is believed contains diamonds that are as big as icebergs and float in a liquid ocean of hydrogen.

But nothing could be more cool than the fact that, in what are called molecular clouds, there are billions and billions of pints of alcohol. True most of it is undrinkable, being methanol, Ethylene glycol (uses include anti-freeze),Vinyl alcohol (used in the chemical industries), but there is a fraction which is ethanol ,that is drinking and 'fuel' alcohol.  But a fraction in a gas cloud, some of which are 300 billion miles across, still means that there are about 400 billions of drinkable, but probably frozen, booze as a conservative estimate, from one cloud, which  overall contains ten billion, billion pints of alcohol (!). I look forward to the day when we go to the stars and touch this for ourselves, which, one day I am confident that  we will.

4 comments:

  1. Eh, how many pints again?? I thought you'd made this up, but checked the links out. Bloody heck, isn't the universe amazing. And what fool could suggest this wasn't created by God?

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    Replies
    1. Hi David

      I'll never buy the argument that we are here due to 'random chance'...

      Delete
  2. Wow, I like this idea sis- billions of pints. Re the ethanol, from my memories of my first degree, I think that you'd still have to distill the alcohol before it could be drunk. You couldn't drink it straight from the cloud... hey if I got there I could call it "Shmuel's cloud Malt Whisky" or something !!

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  3. Shoom,

    Now that'd be worth buying, even if I'm not really a spirit drinker.

    ReplyDelete

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