​Our universe is evaporating ● China wants to drill 10,000 meters deep, the deepest it has ever reached ● The oldest burials are not of our species

Our universe is evaporating

The fact that our universe will one day disappear is already a known fact. There have been many hypotheses about when and how this end will come, but none of them have been universally accepted by the scientific community. At least until now. We have recently received evidence that such a scenario is not just about to happen, it is already happening.

In particular, our universe is evaporating. Evaporate may not be the happiest term, but that’s exactly what the title of a study recently published in Physical Review Letters by a group of researchers at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, suggests.

What these scientists want to say starts with a famous phenomenon that Stephen Hawking hypothesized. More precisely, it is Hawking radiation, an idea proposed by the famous British physicist back in 1974. Hawking then said that black holes eventually evaporate, losing mass in the form of radiation that bears his name.

Starting with a combination of Einstein’s theory of relativity and assumptions related to quantum mechanics, Stephen Hawking proposed that at the edge of spacetime formed around a black hole, also called the event horizon, particles and antiparticles are created spontaneously to annihilate each other. At least in theory, nothing can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole unless it exceeds the speed of the world. Which would be impossible.

Still, Hawking said, some particles are attracted to the black hole while others manage to escape, a phenomenon that will eventually cause the black hole to disappear. And these particles are called Hawking radiation. Based on this idea, such radiation should come exclusively from black holes. The fact contradicts the studies of the mentioned researchers.

Their calculations show that similar radiation also exists where extreme gravitational environments created by a black hole have not been detected. In principle, this is also the conclusion of the study. At the same time, radiation does not need black holes to appear. And this means that, like a black hole, our universe is also evaporating. Or dissipates.

The good news is that you don’t have to pack your bags to go to another, slightly younger universe. The time it will take for our universe to disappear from here is calculated by astronomical numbers, which is much longer than 13.7 billion years as it is now.

China wants to drill at a depth of 10,000 meters, the deepest it has ever reached

It will be the deepest that anyone has ever drilled in China. It’s not quite a world record, but it’s close. The record belongs to the Russians, who, thanks to the project launched on May 24, 1970, reached a record depth of 11,034 meters on the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia.

They did not find hell and did not hear the cries of the martyrs, as many fake news outlets launched by the American church later claimed. Instead, they found that the rocks at depth were much wetter than they expected. And this meant that water penetrates much deeper into the earth’s crust than the researches of that time claimed. They also found a different composition of rocks than they expected, one that proved the existence of plate tectonics. In summary, they did a good and useful thing for science.

Returning to China, the official goal of this attempt is to reach the so-called Cretaceous system, which was formed 145 million years ago. They will do this not for the sake of dinosaurs, but officially to identify mineral resources and study the potential risk of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Therefore, they go there for resources.

For those who are worried that the Chinese will reach an unknown place and destroy the planet, keep calm, the thickness of the earth’s crust is about 30 kilometers, and in mountainous areas it reaches 100 kilometers. Therefore, no one will pierce the planet from one side to the other, so that it is possible to look into it as through an eye. And they won’t even give the planet a chance to get all the magma out of there. As for hell, we’re sure there will be plenty of zealots out there who will launch future fake news on the subject.

The oldest burials do not belong to our species

This discovery, highlighted by numerous publications after the publication of the research of American-South African paleoanthropologist Lee Berger on the BioRxiv platform, is not really a discovery. We overlook the fact that the study has so many co-authors that if each of them wrote a sentence it would be a text the size of Shogun. But it is already worn, it is no longer surprising.

The idea is that burial is a practice started not by Homo sapiens, but by Neanderthals. And this has been known since the time of Pazvante. More specifically, in the Tabun cave in Israel at the beginning of the 20th century, a group of archaeologists led by the famous Dorothy Harrod (a true pioneer of prehistoric archeology in the Middle East and beyond) discovered the remains of Neanderthals, which bore certain signs of burial.

Given that we are still talking about the romantic period of archeology of this kind, today it is not clear at what level the fossils were discovered. If they were at level C, their age would be 170,000 years. If they were in B, they would be about 120,000 years old. Be that as it may, this is still the oldest burial. And at about the same time, respectively, for 120,000 years, the first burials of Homo sapiens also appear, also in Israel.

In addition, during the entire Middle Paleolithic, the only burials of Homo sapiens appear in only two Israeli caves, Shul and Qafzeh (interval approximately 90,000 – 120,000 years). In the case of Neanderthal man, the practice of burial appears in most caves in the East (especially in Israel and Syria), so that by 78,000 years ago it also appeared in Europe. So, as you said, Homo sapiens did not invent or spread the said practice.

Now, back to Lee Berger, for those who haven’t heard of him, he is quite the controversial character. Not only because his discoveries are made with a real media show, but also because every few years a person comes to questionable discoveries that apparently change history. Or backstory.

In this case, we are talking about a new human fossil discovered in South Africa, whose age ranged between 3 million years and 1 million years, so that the latest dating puts it at 200,000 – 300,000 years old. It’s surprising to say the least, given that the species looks so primitive that it has to compete with Homo habilis, the supposed first representative of the genus Homo.

What Lee Berger tells us is not even new. He also rejected this idea in 2013, then in 2018, without gaining much confidence from the scientific community. And those original individuals actually buried each other. And this would be proven by the fact that there are some cavities in the ground where five of them could be deposited. And, by the way, this happened 200 thousand years ago.

We don’t know what to make of Berger’s discovery. Maybe, maybe not. But given the controversy surrounding it, we recommend a little more restraint.

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