A Spherical Earth

​As early as the 6th century BCE, ancient Greek logicians documented evidence that Earth was a circle. They noted that the night sky looked distinctive when seen from different areas on Earth, indicating at our planet's curved surface. They too watched the circular shadow of Earth on the Moon amid lunar eclipses. These logicians were even able to calculate the circumference of Earth very accurately. They did this by measuring the length of the shadow cast by an object at precisely the same time, in two distinctive areas. Taking into consideration the distance between those two locations and the distinction within the lengths of the shadows, they calculated that Earth's circumference was around 46,250 kilometers. That's exceptionally near to the real value of 40,075 kilometers!

Bright supernovae

Within the year 185, Chinese astronomers got to be the first to document a supernova. A few supernova blasts have been observed since at that point, counting a particularly bright one within the year 1054, which (at its crest) was four times brighter than the planet Venus, one of the brightest objects within the night sky. A few supernovae are indeed bright enough to be obvious amid the day!

Cloudy galaxies

The idea that our own universe – the Milky Way – is but one of the trillions of other worlds within the universe only dates back around a century. Before at that point, nearby worlds were thought to be cloudy districts of the Milky Way. The primary documented observation of the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy was within the year 964 by a Persian astronomer who portrayed it as a "nebulous smear." For centuries, it was essentially known in star charts as the "Little Cloud." The astrolabe, such as this one created in 1553 by French clockmaker Jean Naze, could be a navigational instrument that can decide local time and area in scope based on the position of ethereal objects. In spite of the fact that the Sun is most commonly used, a total of 58 recognized "navigational stars" can help calculate the user's location. One strategy of astronavigation indeed uses the point of the Moon to calculate time, a key piece of data for pre-modern sailors traveling on unfamiliar oceans.

The Copernican revolution

Before the 16th century, Earth was commonly thought to be at the center of the solar framework, with all other ethereal objects spinning around it. Typically known as the geocentric model. This hypothesis, in any case, did not match a few confusing perceptions made by astronomers, such as the way of planets that appeared to move backward on their orbits. When we observe, from Earth, the planets around the Sun, they do not continuously show up to be moving in one course in our sky. Sometimes they appear to circle in reverse for brief periods of time. Usually called retrograde motion and is one of the key pieces of evidence that the Sun lies at the center of the solar framework and all the planets rotate around it.

In 1543, Clean stargazer Nicolaus Copernicus proposed a heliocentric show of the solar framework in which the planets orbit the Sun. This model explained the unordinary way of planets that astronomers had watched. The modern theory was one of the numerous progressive ideas about astronomy that emerged amid the Renaissance period. The work of stargazers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler drove to an exact description of planetary motions and laid the establishment for Isaac Newton's hypothesis of gravitation. This advance drastically improved humanity's understanding of the universe. Their perceptions and examinations were reinforced by the innovation of the telescope within the early 17th century. Italian stargazer Galileo Galilei popularized the use of telescopes to ponder and discover celestial objects, counting Jupiter's four biggest moons. In his honor, they are known as the Galilean moons.

An expanding universe of knowledge

Hubble's disclosure of the universe's progressing development moreover cleared the way for other stargazers to theorize its beginning. The big bang hypothesis, first proposed by Georges Lemaitre, was afterward reinforced by solid evidence: the revelation of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), faint "noise" leftover from the massive blast that gave rise to everything within the universe. The CMB was incidentally found by radio space experts just five years before the 1969 Apollo 11 Moon landing. Improvements in satellite launch and design allowed stargazers to collect even more data about planets inside our solar framework within the second half of the 20th century. A few robotic space probe campaigns, counting Mariner, Venera, and Voyager, wandered farther than ever before.

Astronomy today

The James Webb Space Telescope, a collaboration between NASA, the Canadian Space Agency, and the European Space Agency, is the foremost complex and capable space telescope ever built. It'll help researcher’s way better understand the universe from its area in space.  Nowadays, stargazers collect information about ethereal objects by utilizing colossal telescopes on the ground as well as in space. These advanced telescopes prepared with enormous mirrors permit stargazers to capture the light of very faint and faraway objects. Specialized methods and delicate logical instruments have been created to study not only visible light but also the whole electromagnetic spectrum of light including infrared light, radio waves, and X-rays.

Huge, complex telescopes and progressed methods have indeed empowered cosmologists to specifically observe phenomena counting dark holes, far off exoplanets, and gravitational waves. Thanks to the sheer estimate of its 6.5-meter-diametre golden mirror, the James Webb Space Telescope is the biggest space telescope ever built. Set to dispatch in 2021, Webb will utilize its precision instruments to peer into clouds of enormous dust to gather infrared light from far off stars and worlds, giving Canadian astronomers a groundbreaking see of the earliest minutes of our universe and never-before-seen planets circling other stars.

Sources: 

http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast121/lectures/lec02.html
https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/astronomy/basics/brief-history-astronomy.asp

​Imagine ranting about your daily life and sharing your pain with a robot.

​Minter Dial’s book 'Heartificial Empathy' describes artificial empathy as “the coding of empathy into machines”. Empathy doesn’t necessarily mean being nice. It’s about understanding. Businesses can imbue empathy into their operations. In nursing homes where patients are struggling with dementia alone, introduction of empathy in AI robots can help alleviate their pain and suffering. Loneliness can have lots of negative effects on our health and wellbeing, so developing a system that could provide some way to provide social health benefits would be really beneficial.

But machines cannot feel anything.

For example, Machina, computer programmer Caleb Smith becomes attracted to Ava, an artificially intelligent robot. But did Ava actually like him? Is it possible that robots develop feelings in the future? Machines are already better able to detect depression in people than human doctors are. Recently, AI researchers after focusing on identifying emotions, created robots which can teach autistic kids by identifying and recognizing their emotions. Robots are being designed to help tutor and encourage learning more generally. For example, RoboKind has created a curriculum for the Milo robot to teach coding skills.

Chatbots often give responses that are not specific to the current context- but Google’s Meena proved this wrong, Meena can conduct conversations that are more sensible than the existing chatbots. Pepper is a semi-humanoid robot manufactured by SoftBank Robotics and has the ability to read emotions. Robots probably will never develop emotions considering they are nothing but metal/plastic. But some researchers are teaching robots to recognize emotions through facial expressions. This new ability of recognizing emotions might create a new relationship between humans and machines. But things can change very rapidly, with the help of growing AI, machines can learn to express themselves and display appropriate emotions. We could soon see humanoids assisting us in our houses and offices.

Thus, we might be able to build up a WALL-E or even a HAL 9000- we never know.