Photo, above: Located slightly more than four lights-years away, the low-mass red dwarf Proxima Centauri is the nearest star other than our own Sun to Earth. Despite its proximity, it is still too dim to be viewed with the unaided eye. It is probably bound gravitationally to the Alpha Centauri binary system, located 0.23 light years from Proxima Centauri.

The nearest star system to our solar system is Alpha Centauri, a triple star consisting of two bright sun-like stars and a much dimmer red dwarf star called Proxima Centauri. The main Alpha Centauri system is 4.37 light-years away, while Proxima Centauri is slightly closer at 4.24 light-years. From a hypothetical planet in this star system, our Sun would appear as one of the brightest stars in the sky (just as Alpha Centauri is one of the brightest from Earth). The apparent magnitude of the Sun as viewed from Alpha Centauri would be around magnitude 0.2, or about the same brightness as the star Rigel in Orion appears from Earth.

One of the most interesting aspects of the view of our Sun from Alpha Centauri is that the Sun appears to be located amongst vast clouds of nebulosity in the constellation Cassiopeia. In actuality, these nebulas (known as the Heart and Soul) lie 7500 light-years beyond the Sun. The Sun and Alpha Centauri are part of the "Orion Spur", an offshoot of the Sagittarius spiral arm of the Milky Way, while the Heart and Soul nebulas are located in the Perseus arm, the next spiral arm outward from the center of the galaxy.

This image--a two-frame mosaic of the Heart and Soul taken in 2010--simulates the photographic view one would get looking toward the Sun from Alpha Centauri. While the Sun would be a bright naked-eye star, the nebulas would be visible only on long-exposure photographs because of their faintness. If hypothetical Centauran astronomers invented celetial photography, they might naturally associate the nebulosity with the Sun; at least until they invented more advanced astronomical methods such as spectroscopy that would prove the star and the gas clouds were not related.

This field of view spans about 6 degrees of sky, or about 780 light-years at the distance of the Heart and Soul nebulas (and just under half a light-year at the distance of the Sun from Alpha Centauri).

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW

Co-hosts:  Gordon Chang, Forbes.com. David M. Livingston, The Space Show.

Hour One

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 1, Block A: Anne Stevenson Yang, J Capital Research (Beijing) and author, China Alone, in re: Washington sees three inches of snow en route, scrambles and skedaddles.  "Prepare for the hard time and act frugally." A  little snow falling in Beijing – oops, could be asbestos flakes. Yesterday, news of another trust default, people being laid off across mining sector in the middle of the country.  In Guangdong, Shenzen, a lot of export.  Use export invoices to transfer cash. Govt is complicit in the process. Trade surplus – amt of money that came out of the banks - amt was same as last  May. China needs $40billion a month to keep the system running. Feed the machine: China relies on investing t have growth; otherwise, recession, Bank lends you$1millin; if you don't repay, it has to obtain new – imported – money. Therefore, authorities are complicit in fake invoices.  Ponzi.  Recall Madoff.  China  has invented  new investment concept: doesn’t matter if it's bogus as long as you can sell a dream of the future – same as US with tech bubble. 

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 1, Block B: Todd Stein, Director of Government Relations at International Campaign for Tibet, in re:   Tibetan new year is worse today than last year – Chinese paramilitary troops anticipate the Tibetan New Year.  HH the Dalai Lama on a tour speaking of hope and reconciliation with China, which is truculent. Also, he's privy to information fro Chinese scholars and popular interest in Vajrayana Buddhism.  May take decades to achieve. Lithuanians waited for decades to be liberated from the Soviet Union.  Chinese soldiers walk around with fire extinguishers on their hip in case a monk or nun is found self-immolating in protest against Chinese brutality.  The system that the Chinese say they're giving to Tibetans to "improve" their lives is not acceptable to Tibetans, who se their culture being crushed and exterminated.  The Chinese Communist Part is about 70 years old, Vajrayana Buddhism is 1,400 years old.  Span has  law, Universal Jurisdiction, anywhere my be brought in Spain. A case charged China with human rights violations and won. Arrest warrants for Chinese leadership. Chinese soft power and bullying are pushing the law back.  Need Spanish people to object loudly to outside interference in their internal judiciary. Losar on 2 March this year. A thousand years ago, Tibet was powerful, China was fractured. Tibet chose the peaceful way and now China is the brute.

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 1, Block C: Darrell Preston, Bloomberg News, in re: democrats and Republican working together to bring SpaceX to southern Texas, which sure needs the jobs.  Billionaire Musk Gets States to Compete to Help Finance SpaceX – Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk told Texas officials he was interested in building the world’s first commercial rocket launchpad in their state -- if the state could compete. In the months after the 2011 meeting, state and local officials gave Musk, a billionaire, what he and his lobbyists sought: about $20 million of financial incentives, laws changed to close a public beach during launches and legal protection from noise complaints. 

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 1, Block D: Henry R. Nau, George Washington University and author, Conservative Internationalism,  in re: bellicosity of PLA Navy and Xi Jinping in the last months:  going in the wrong direction and as China extends its range and expands  its zone of activity the US is retreating. Most evident in deteriorating relations between Japan and South Korea – our two principal allies there. At loggerheads; the Western alliance is lying in ruins as China expands. Not a good situation. Our allies demanded we do something, causing the "pivot"; neither Japan nor India can take the led, no NATO in Asia, so this president's tendency to lead from behind is [not working]. Pres has done naught to prepare the ground for he Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in Congress. Historically, Congress will give the resident authority as long as he consults with Congress during the negotiations – not one person has been consulted, now he'll try to get Congress to vote in his favor – despite his abysmal relati0nships there. These negotiations thereby become kabuki – unrealistic to think the TPP will be approved.

 Obama’s instincts put U.S. policy at risk. A question about President Obama that has not been answered among international relations scholars is whether he is a “realist” who believes in maintaining a leadership role for the United States in balancing military power around the world, especially in Asia; a liberal internationalist who promotes trade and diplomacy in the hope that international institutions may one day replace military power in world affairs; or a liberal “nationalist” who is interested in reducing America’s role in the world and concentrating on domestic problems.

Obama claims to be a realist, but he has shown remarkably little interest in America’s military power, a trademark of realists. He has not laid out a future-oriented defense strategy and, as the memoirs of former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates suggest, has not had particularly close relations with his military advisers. He was late in recognizing the challenge of Chinese naval aggression in the Pacific Island chains, which upset U.S. allies and many other countries in Asia. And his pivot to Asia was designed primarily by his advisers, such as Kurt Campbell, the assistant secretary of state at the time, who made it clear to Obama that the United States had to do something to respond to China’s assertiveness or it risked losing all support and . . .

Hour Two

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 2, Block A: Stephen Yates, Chief Executive Officer of D.C. International Advisory and former advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, in re: Pres Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan is deeply unpopular: 80% of Taiwanese people do not want to integrate with Mainland China, which Ma  wants.  Political war: Beijing cleaves to its political objective; political show: will allow the external appearance of things to shift if needed.  Abe of Japan has made friends with Putin; Shinzo Abe fancies himself a main intl figure; wants to alter Japan's strategic relations with neighbors.  Met Kim Jong-il last decade; aims for strategic dialogue with all the major powers.    Putin met with Xi and Abe at the Sochi Olympics.    The northern border of the Amur River is lightly populated, where oil and gas are – and China wants that land.  Russia needs either a friend or a [collaborator].  Putin thinks he's the leader of the intl Right?  Tokyo is being pressed by China right now.  Some coercion from China on Japan.  Chinese sneer, hope that Japan and Russia can’t collaborate very well.

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 2, Block B: Nitin Gokhale, anchor at New Delhi Television, in re: Chinese aggression on the Indian border.  Intrusion in Arunachal Pradesh and elsewhere: a pattern.   Upcoming understandings between India and Japan: defense cooperation increasing; India has invited Japan to participate in Malabar Exercise in Indian Ocean (with US); also buying an amphibious place from Japan; Emperor and his wife visited two months ago.  On Monday and Tuesday the Indian Natl Security Advisor conferred with a Chinese rep in New Delhi? Hope to be briefed soon. More than 50% of young Indians see China as the main threat, not Pakistan.  China has failed to notice how widespread is the public perception of Beijing as a danger.    This is no longer the India of 1952 – military is much stronger, so I doubt an all-out war or even a serious skirmish.  Short-term worry is $30 billion Indian trade deficit with China (out of $100 billion in bilateral trade).

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 2, Block C:  Martin Fackler, NYT, in re: Japanese LibDems won election for Tokyo mayoralty by a large margin. He got the central bank to be much more active, has improved the economy.  The winner, a LibDem, bested a former PM who ran on an antinuclear platform, which didn't work. (Another antinuke candidate was from Communist Party.)  Abenomics benefits haven’t spread to the average citizen yet.   Foreign relations:  deep anxiety about China that motivates support for a strong leader such as Abe, although it's pocketbook issues that most motivate voters. 

Former Premiers Try to Use Tokyo Election to Rally Public Against Nuclear Power  Former Prime Ministers Morihiro Hosokawa and Junichiro Koizumi are trying to turn the election for Tokyo governor on Sunday into a referendum on the future of nuclear power in Japan . . .

How tweets helped predict the Tokyo mayoral election The frequency of tweets regarding nuclear plants in the run up to the 2014 Tokyo mayor elections helps explain the election result. Fear about economy, so wanting to be safe with nuclear power, also fear bout nukes.  Totally green economy not seen as necessarily viable. All reactors in Japan are currently turned off; the newest, safest ones are to be revived – with the understanding that as soon as possible better sources will be used (more than 18 months?).  

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 2, Block D:  Gordon Chang, Forbes.com, in re:  Willing too criticize China in Washington: an important rhetorical shift that may lead to a policy change. Adm Locklear said that the Chinese navy is behaving professionally and that the main threat to the US in the Pacific is global warming . . .  Gordon gave a talk today with several Chinese dips in the audience.  China doesn’t seem to grasp some critical facts: shift I thinking toward China in many capitals; Beijing cannot adjust, which itself is chilling. India and Japan: working relations; Russia and Japan, same. Philippines have already lost territory to China so they get it.  China's weakening economy make the Communist Party more aggressive, so have to fall back on nationalism.  This way, the military gets larger budgets; has taken over Scarborough Shoals, feel good. See: Japan in the Thirties: one success leads to another aggression. Rumor of PLA navy extending an ADIZ across the entire South China Sea: US State Dept publicly warned the Chinese not to do this – it will happen in the future.  May also have one over the Yellow Sea – the South Koreans are really ticked off about this.  

Hour Three

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 3, Block A:  John Fund, National Review Online, in re: Dems poured millions of union money in and look at what happened in a) a non-presidential election and b) a race where public employee unions became the issue Obama won 63% of San Diego CITY vote in 2012   Last November in the open primary for mayor, Dem candidates total won 54% of vote.  But yesterday, they  crashed and turnout machine sputtered....Dem candidate (an Hispanic no less) won only 45.5%...they lost ground from the November primary.  GOP won Asian vote and took well over a third of Hispanic vote in San Diego (against an Hispanic candidate).  [more]

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 3, Block B:  Ken Croswell, Scientific American, in re: Proxima’s Unprecedented Passage: When Stars Align.   Of the hundreds of billions of stars that throng the Milky Way, only one is closest to the sun: a little red dwarf named Proxima Centauri, a star so dim it was unknown a century ago. Now this stellar neighbor is about to betray some of its secrets, because in October it will pass in front of another star. As the light from the distant star skirts past Proxima, the red star's gravity will bend the beam, divulging our neighbor's mass and perhaps even its planets.

A gravitational deflection by a star "has never ever been seen outside of the solar system," says astronomer Kailash Sahu of the Space Telescope Science Institute, who discovered the remarkable upcoming alignment. In 1919, during a solar eclipse, observers watched the sun's gravity alter the apparent positions of stars in a way that confirmed Albert Einstein's new general theory of relativity. Isaac Newton's theory of gravity also predicted a deflection, but by only half the amount seen. Since then astronomers have discovered cases in which a galaxy's gravity splits the light of a distant quasar into multiple images, and . . .  [more]

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 3, Block C: Katrin Bennhold, NYT, in re:  Accustomed to Floods, but ‘Nothing Like This,’ in Southern England  In parts of England, the wettest January on record has left whole villages flooded and residents cut off from vital services. And it is still raining.

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 3, Block D:   John Nicolson, journalist in Glasgow, in re: Scottish elections. If Scotland goes independent, it'll own a huge store of undersea oil; the resulting income can perhaps best be utilized by following the lead of Norway. If Scotland leaves, the loss of oil revenues would be disastrous to the rest of the UK – what would the remaining assemblage be called?   

Hour Four

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 4, Block A: A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War by Thomas Fleming (1 of 4)

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 4, Block B: A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War by Thomas Fleming (2 of 4)

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 4, Block C: A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War by Thomas Fleming (3 of 4)

Wednesday  12  February 2014 / Hour 4, Block D: A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War by Thomas Fleming (4 of 4)

..  ..  ..  ..  ..  ..

Music

Hour 1:  Games of Thrones. The Kingdom. Elysium. Dark Knight Rises. 

Hour 2:  Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. India & the Tiger. Shaolin. 

Hour 3:  CSI. Breaking Bad. Braveheart. 

Hour 4:  Gears of War 2.