Aditya

Part One

We all heard about Global warming, climate change, carbon emission and ozone zoon.  And several individual activists and scientists warn us to do something to save the planet earth from extinction sooner than it is doomed to face one time in future.

But as a lay person I never understood the seriousness of this crisis as I don’t  know what exactly is happening and going to happen.  As I have no scientific knowledge, particularly to understand various technical terms, like many, I also never paid much attention that it needs.  Though I cannot do anything as an INDIVIDUAL, still I can do a lot if I sincerely and seriously do my part—however insignificant it might be.  This I realized after reading the following account about Adita as our Kalam Baba (our president AJP Abdul Kalam) explained in simple terms for even a lay person to understand such a complicated topic. 

As India successfully launched Mission Adita, though many might be wondering what this mission is going to achieve and even cynical about the waste of precious recourse that needs to be spent on the more urgent and pressing need of our country now.  But if we read carefully the following point by Baba Kalam, then we can realize the need for such studies.  At the same time simply reading one time that too superficially without paying attention to the seriousness with which Baba Kalam wrote this might not help anyone.  So, I request you to read it again and again till you grasp the seriousness of climate change and do your part of—not using plastic bags (when going for purchase), separate plastic wastes and send them for recycling.  Never burn them.  I strictly practise in my ashram.  It really surprised me to know that when in other parts of India every local authorities from village panchayat to Corporation plead everyone to co-operate with them in separating plastic waste for recycling spending money for that purpose, in Kelar to dispose plastic waste from your home you have to pay for them to come and collect it. You cannot simply throw away or burn as you wish.  So in this area, Kerala is showing some example for every other Indians to follow.  And we salute them.

Part Two

The sun is a relatively small star, yet it can hold around 1.3 million earths. Betelgeuse, a red giant star about 640 light years from earth, could accommodate about 1,000 suns across its diameter. For the purpose of understanding, if the sun is the size of an orange, on that scale, the earth is a grain of sand circling in an orbit around it at a distance of about 10 metres. And on the same scale, the nearest star to the sun, a star called Alpha Centauri, is 2,000 kilometres away. And again in the same scale, a galaxy can be visualized as a cluster of oranges, (which is actually thirty million kilometres in diameter), where an average distance of 3,000 kilometres separates each orange.

… The sun’s core consists of plasma-gas so hot that it has become completely ionized, and its atoms stripped of their electrons. At these temperatures, the protons of hydrogen nuclei are moving so rapidly that they overcome their mutual repulsion and collide to form helium nuclei. This type of reaction is called nuclear fusion. In the sun, in every second, 600 million tonnes of hydrogen atoms are converted into helium, generating 4 X energy emitted as light. 1022 megawatts of energy emitted as light.

Extrapolating into the future, in 1.1 billion years from now, the sun will be 10 per cent brighter than it is today. The extra energy will cause a moist greenhouse effect. Eventually, the earth’s atmosphere will dry out, as the water vapour is lost to space and would never return. In

(p.165) 3.5 billion years from now, the sun will be 40 per cent  brighter than it is today. It will be so hot that the oceans would boil and the resulting water vapour would be lost to space as well. The ice caps have permanently melted, and snow would be ancient history; life would be unsustainable anywhere on the surface of the earth. The earth will resemble dry, hot Venus. (http://www.universetody.om/18847/life-of-the-sun/).

In about six billion years, the sun’s core will run out of hydrogen. The inert helium ash built up in the core will become unstable and collapse under its own weight. This will cause the core to heat up and ger denser. The sun will grow in size and enter the red giant phase its evolution. The expanding sun will consume the orbits of Mercury and Venus, and probably gulp up the earth as well. Even if the earth survives, the intense heat from the red giant sun will scorch our planet and make it absolutely impossible for any semblance of life to exist.

The burning helium of the sun will then form carbon. This phase will last for about 100 million years until this source of fuel is exhausted. Finally, the shell of helium will become unstable, causing the sun to pulse violently. It will blow off a large fraction of its atmosphere into space over the course of several pulses. When the sun has blasted off its outer layers, all that will remain will be the central core of carbon. In fact, it will be an earth-sized diamond with the mass of a star, slowly cooling down for trillions of years.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar estimates the maximum size of a stable white dwarf to be approximately 3 x 1030 kilograms, which is about 1.4 times the mass of the sun. Stars with mass higher than the Chandrasekhar limit ultimately collapse under their own weight and become neutron stars or black holes. Stars with a mass below this limit are prevented from collapsing by the pressure of degeneracy of their electrons.—‘God Is the Source of the Universe’, pp. 162-168, in A.P.J Abdul Kalam with Arun Tiwari,  Transcendence: My Spiritual Experiences with Pramukh Swamiji, Noida, Harper Element, 2015, pp. 165-166