Okay, you could be easily forgiven for wondering what the heck you are looking at.
Early this morning, as in 0300 early, we were en route from Paris to Helsinki, just south of Stockholm at 39,000 feet. At exactly the same time as I was mentally formulating the question, my First Officer asked "Do you know what you are looking at?"
"Yeah, Noctilucent clouds."
Noctilucent clouds, or night shining clouds, are tenuous cloud-like phenomena in the upper atmosphere of Earth. They consist of ice crystals and are only visible during astronomical twilight. Noctilucent roughly means "night shining" in Latin. They are most often observed during the summer months from latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the Equator. They are visible only during local summer months and when the Sun is below the observer's horizon, but while the clouds are still in sunlight. Recent studies suggests that increased atmospheric methane emissions produce additional water vapor once the methane molecules reach the mesosphere - creating, or reinforcing existing noctilucent clouds.
They are the highest clouds in Earth's atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85 km (47 to 53 mi). They are too faint to be seen in daylight, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in Earth's shadow
In an absolute sense they are rare, and the very restricted observation conditions make seeing them far rarer still; this was a first for me. (As an aside, it doesn't hurt my Captain credibility when the FO asks a question he expects to be a stumper, and I just happened to have the correct answer right there. The big question is how it is that I was able to, within three-quarters of a second, use tenuous visual information to retrieve a term I had read at least a half dozen years prior. Humans do this all the time; it is extremely difficult to imagine AI ever managing it.)
Unfortunately, the camera in my now ancient iPhone 5S doesn't really do the scene justice -- there were patterns and structure that disappear in the noise.
Also worth noting is that this picture clearly shows a very sharp boundary between between the Troposphere and the Stratosphere, and, in so doing, also reveals the Earth's curvature.
More of the noctilucent clouds, with Stockholm in the foreground.
You have no idea how much I had to pay that damn seagull to bomb my photo.
3 comments:
LOL on the seagull.
With a little help from wikipedia I can see the difference between run-of-the-mill clouds that are illuminated after sunset and these very high ones. From your photos, less so.
Oh, and perhaps AI's would have trouble with this, but I'm pretty sure if I run into such clouds in the distant future, I won't remember this either.
With a little help from wikipedia I can see the difference between run-of-the-mill clouds that are illuminated after sunset and these very high ones. From your photos, less so.
Which should serve as a reminder that cell phone cameras, like Swiss army knives, can do a great many things, few of them well.
In reality, the clouds had as much structure as the wikipedia images. The other part of reality that pictures, no matter how good the camera, is how perspective warping those things are.
Our altitude happened to be right at the top of the troposphere (which is why the demarcation appears so clearly). Broadly speaking, the troposphere is where weather happens. So, again broadly speaking, clouds go no higher than the top of the troposphere.
The perspective warping part comes in the eye being used to clouds and lighting at certain altitudes and angles. Adding a layer of clouds some 40 miles above where they "should" be kept making my brain want to turn the world on its side in order to pivot the noctilucent clouds down to where the were "supposed" to be, only to suddenly reverse because ground orientation was suddenly all wrong. Very strange.
Oh, and perhaps AI's would have trouble with this, but I'm pretty sure if I run into such clouds in the distant future, I won't remember this either.
I'd be happy to bet that, in the unlikely event you see a similar scene, you will instantly see it for what it is.
More importantly, though, isn't the specific situation, but rather that human intelligence can very quickly abstract across a wide range of stimuli and retrieve relevant information. Happens to all of us all the time, yet none of us has even the tiniest idea how it happened, and therefore equally little notion of how to create it.
Yet it is probably the fundamental element of what we consider "intelligence".
Which is why I think claims for AI are largely overblown, not only in the short term, but perhaps forever.
In a reflective mood, I ponder just how far above my pay scale the posts above are.
A man-make "system" that is able to do something/anything 30 trillion times a second - faster than I can type those few words is impossible for me to wrap my mind around. How on earth do you calculate that. Amazing.
And our amazing Skipper while merely aiming a very heavy object through the air from Paris to Helsinki can simultaneously pull out of his memory an arcane cloud formation in, I'm spozin, about the same time it takes Bret's gadget to process multi-trillion of whatever it does.
It's great fun for me to stop by here and get dazzled by your genius. Thanks.
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