Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Brave New World, Buzz Aldrin, Carl Zimmer, Comics, Government, io9, movies, NASA, Neil Armstrong, Phil Plait, PZ Myers, Science, Science Fiction, SETI, Space
Today’s xkcd sums things up pretty well, I think: the actual discovery was cool, but the hype made it feel anticlimatic.
Above and beyond what this says about our press being driven by ASTOUNDING!! news and the failure to get even basic science stories right (with some very obvious and excellent exceptions), consider just what was behind the hype: excitement at the prospect of non-terrestrial life of any sort being discovered.
The initial speculation that NASA had proof of life on Titan swept like electronic fire around the world. It wasn’t just science fiction geeks. Or actual biologists. Or space buffs. It was pretty much the whole world, though some had more fun with it than others.
Why did this capture the imaginations of so many people? Easy: we’re hungry for this news, and have been for decades. It’s not just the countless science fiction books and movies which have fed this hunger (mine included) – it is also the very real science behind the search for extra-terrestrial life (or intelligence). Proof of the existence of life beyond our planet would likely be considered one of the most important discoveries in the history of mankind, and the announcement of such a discovery would be a turning point bigger than even the first time that humans walked on the Moon.
It is easy in a time of recession, when money is tight for most people and the government is trying to figure out ways to cut expenditures, to under-value NASA or basic science research. And I am not arguing for this or that ‘big science’ program, per se. But all you have to do is look at what happened this week, to note the wonder and excitement which was launched by the merest possibility of the discovery of life elsewhere, to realize that this kind of knowledge is something that people around the world are waiting for with eager, almost palpable, anticipation. I think it is one of the very best things about humans that this is the case, and it should be encouraged and used.
Jim Downey
Via Phil Plait, this may do the trick:
TimeScapes: Rapture from Tom Lowe @ Timescapes.
Sorry for just the link – I still haven’t figured out to get WordPress to let me post vimeo content. But it’s two minutes of loveliness. Phil’s description:
Rapture is a paean to the American Southwest, one of my favorite regions on the planet. But the video’s loaded with gorgeous, sensuous astronomical skyscapes as well. Tom takes time exposures long enough to register faint night sky objects, but at the same time uses slow tracking to move the camera. The superposition of the ground and sky motion is simply mesmerizing. The music by Nigel “John” Stanford is incredibly compelling, too.
Enjoy!
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, Fermi's Paradox, Phil Plait, Predictions, Publishing, Science, Science Fiction, Seth Shostak, SETI, Space
The Fermi paradox is at the heart of Communion of Dreams – given what we know, where are the extra-terrestrials?
What do I mean “given what we know”? Well, the Drake equation has been a staple of science fiction (and at least part of the justification for SETI) for decades. Filling in the factors in the equation has always necessitated a lot of guesswork – the Wiki entry goes into that fairly well – but now we have more solid information on at least one of the more important components of the equation: how many terrestrial (Earth-like) planets are there in our galaxy?
Phil Plait has a good rundown on this, coming at the number from two directions, using the latest astronomical observations:
How many habitable planets are there in the galaxy?
By now you may have heard the report that as many as 1/4 of all the sun-like stars in the Milky Way may have Earth-like worlds. Briefly, astronomers studied 166 stars within 80 light years of Earth, and did a survey of the planets they found orbiting them. What they found is that about 1.5% of the stars have Jupiter-mass planets, 6% have Neptune-mass ones, and about 12% have planets from 3 – 10 times the Earth’s mass. This sample isn’t complete, and they cannot detect planets smaller than 3 times the Earth’s mass. But using some statistics, they can estimate from the trend that as many as 25% of sun-like stars have earth-mass planets orbiting them!
And what does that mean? Here’s the closing calculation from Plait:
2 x 1013 / 8000 = 2,500,000,000 planets
Oh my. Yeah, let that sink in for a second. That’s 2.5 billion planets that are potentially habitable!
How many of them would host indigenous life? How many of *those* would develop intelligent, technological civilization? There’s a nice interactive on the PBS site which allows you to play with this. Using that 2.5 billion number, but assuming that only half the planets which could support life will actually develop it, and that only 1% of those will develop intelligent life, and that only 10% of those intelligent lifeforms will develop technological civilizations capable of interstellar communication . . . you wind up with 125,000 such civilizations. You then have to make some assumptions about how long such a civilization would last, and what the likelihood would be that they would be around now (at the same time we are), but still . . .
I’ve complained previously that I worry that solid evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence will be discovered before Communion of Dreams makes it into print. That window is now closing. But you know, I really wouldn’t complain too much now if such evidence beat me to press.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Bad Astronomy, NASA, Phil Plait, Predictions, Science, Science Fiction, Space, tech
One of the main technological features of the setting of Communion of Dreams is the Advanced Survey Array – an artificial satellite in orbit around Titan, which is searching for likely planets to colonize in nearby star systems – planets which would be able to sustain Terran life. When I started writing CoD, finding such planets was still very much beyond our current tech – exoplanets of any sort were still just being inferred from other data.
But we’ve come a long way in the last decade. From Phil Plait’s latest blog post on Exoplanets:
Direct imaging of exoplanets is perhaps the newest field in all of astronomy. Ten years ago it didn’t exist, and was something of a dream. Now we have images of seven tiny dots, seven blips of light indicating the presence of mighty planets.
And with the advent of spectroscopy, we’ll learn even more: how hot they are, and what they have in their atmospheres. Eventually, with new technology, new telescopes on space, we’ll be able to split their light ever finer, and who knows? Maybe, one day not too long from now, we’ll see the tell-tale sign of molecular oxygen… the only way we know of to have molecular oxygen in an atmosphere over long periods of time is through biological activity. If we ever see it… that, my friends, will be quite a day indeed.
As I have noted previously, this is one of the dangers in writing near-term SF: that actual technological developments can outstrip what the writer envisions all too easily. We’re still not to the tech of my novel, but we’re further along than I would have guessed. Good thing that the book will soon be in print . . .
Jim Downey
OK, I made it through one-sixth of the Sixty Symbols. And I’ve enjoyed them. I’ll probably make it through the rest of them. But I don’t think I’ll do any more reviews of the videos. They’re good, but there really isn’t much for me to say beyond what I have already, since while the content changes, there isn’t much more to add other than that.
So, today’s symbol 
will be the last, unless one of the other videos I look at prompts me to write something.
Dark Matter is like a chocolate pie. No, seriously. Except it doesn’t really interact with the matter of most of the rest of the universe, so it’s like a chocolate pie that you could eat but wouldn’t taste. Oh, it would make you fat if you ate it, since it does have some effect on gravity. Or something like that.
OK, snark aside, this is a good recap of why scientists think that some 23% of all the matter in the universe seems to have gone missing, but has to be there somewhere. It’s worth watching this video in order to understand the issues involved, even though the science to date is very uncertain, as are the models suggested to provide an explanation. And don’t even get me started on theories concerning the 73% of the dark energy which is also missing. Because the vid sets that aside as a whole ‘nuther problem.
So, farewell, Sixty Symbols, at least for now. But thanks at least for giving me a craving for chocolate this morning.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Astronomy, Music, Science, Science Fiction, Sixty Symbols, YouTube
“Now it’s complete because it’s ended here.”
That’s from Dune, of course. The context is that it sums up the practical attitude of the Fremen – no dithering, no misgivings, just figuratively take a knife and cut the thing off, so you have a conclusion.
But that is also the attitude of scientists, when it comes to 
, at least according to the Sixty Symbols video about infinity.
It’s a good vid, and I recommend it. No, nothing terribly impressive about the images or production values. But it has a clarity that conveys how scientists think: they may be theoretical, but they’re also practical. They don’t like the concept of infinity, at least not when it is applied to understanding the physical universe. They’d rather leave that to the mathematicians. As a number of the scientists say, when infinity shows up in one of their equations/models, then there’s something wrong with the equation/model.
Jim Downey
A hand mirror? I think I had forgotten that. Which is interesting, because I know full well what the symbol 
means, both in astronomical terms and otherwise.
Anyway, the bit about the mirror is about the only new thing I got out of this well done but very pedestrian video. But part of that may simply be due to the fact that I’m a space exploration geek from way back, and remember following the different probe missions sent to Venus when I was a kid. And the thing is short – less than five minutes – so if you need a refresher course about what we know about Venus, take a look.
Jim Downey
That’s an exchange in today’s Sixty Symbols video, on the subject of asteroids: 
But the point is made clearer as the scientist explains that the threat is unlikely – yet, if we had a major impact, the results would be catastrophic.
However, the bulk of the relatively short (6:36) vid is just talking about the asteroid belt, and how it is now thought to be a planetary body which failed to form, due to the gravitational effects of the other planets. One good item was discussion of how even though this is the case, the vastness of space is such that the chances of encountering an asteroid while traversing the belt is very remote.
It would have been nice if they talked about project WISE, which was used to detect some 25,000 new asteroids recently. But I suppose it was important that they talked about the 1970s video game “Asteroids”, instead.
Jim Downey
Sorry, in a bit of a mood.
But seriously, I came across this site last night and thought that I would share: Sixty Symbols. From their ‘Project’ page:
Ever been confused by all the letters and squiggles used by scientists?
Hopefully this site will unravel some of those mysteries.
Sixty Symbols is a collection of videos about physics and astronomy presented by experts from The University of Nottingham.
They aren’t lessons or lectures – and this site has never tried to be an online reference book.
The films are just fun chats with men and women who love their subject and know a lot about it!
Chances are, you already know something about many if not most of the different symbols featured. (Hey, if you read my blog you’re clearly above average in terms of intelligence and education, right?) But this is still a fun way to get a little deeper into some of those concepts.
I’m planning on going through each of the videos, about one a day, and posting about it. Not exactly a review of each one, more of a brief synopsis, perhaps with some additional background info thrown in.
The first one on their site is “Eclipse.” Approached through travel to Ningbo, China to observe the total solar eclipse of July 2009. There’s not a lot of explanation of the astronomy involved, but there probably doesn’t need to be. What you do get is the sense of delight of experiencing a total eclipse, even for someone who is a professional in the field. It is such an impressive moment that even understanding the science behind it, the astronomer is almost giddy. I only remember having been through partial eclipses, and that was magical enough – I can easily see how experiencing totality would be a real blast.
So, take the 9 minutes or so, and enjoy “Eclipse”.
Jim Downey
Communion Of Dreams 