Sometimes you just need to look up. This is one of those days for me. So here is some amazing slow-motion footage of a shuttle launch. It really gets going about the 2:30 mark.
Enjoy.
Jim Downey
Filed under: Apollo program, Arthur C. Clarke, Astronomy, Humor, movies, Neil Armstrong, NPR, Science, Science Fiction, Space, Writing stuff
What topic could possibly warrant being the subject of post #1,000?
None.
I have no big announcements to share, no news, not even a scrap of intelligent musing on something obscure. Things are pretty much just what passes for routine here currently: getting conservation work done, waiting to hear from the publishers/agents, going through the day-to-day of life.
So, I’ll just break the tension (well, *I’ve* been feeling tension over it) and share this amusing item:
Neil Armstrong Talks About The First Moon Walk
Well, this doesn’t happen every day.
In yesterday’s post, I talked about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s walk across the lunar surface back in 1969 and wondered, how come they walked such a modest distance? Less than a hundred yards from their lander?
Today Neil Armstrong wrote in to say, here are the reasons:
He also posts the entirety of Armstrong’s email. It’s not often that you get to read history from one of the men who actually made it – it’s worth a look.
So, on to 1,001: A Blog Odyssey.
Jim Downey
So, last night I was in the mood for a little classic science fiction, and decided to watch Alien.
It’s a movie which has aged remarkably well, and as a friend mentioned to me this morning doesn’t seem just silly or cartoonish. The design elements are still widely emulated in science fiction film and television. The special effects are solid and hold up to our modern standards. The cinematographics are perfect for the horror storyline, except for some 70’s lens-flare which seems a bit dated. The anti-corporation subtext is still relevant. And the saga of survival timeless. It’s a great movie.
But one thing about it bugged me while I watched it last night. And thinking more about it this morning, it still bugs me.
It’s the “self destruct” mechanism.
Yeah, I know, this isn’t the first film which had something like that in it. And it certainly wasn’t the last – seems like there isn’t a SF movie or TV show out there which manages to completely avoid using this trope (or at least playing with it).
But think about it: why would you actually build that kind of mechanism into a commercial vehicle? We don’t do that today. The Nostromo was a space tug, hauling an ore-processing facility and some 20,000,000 tons of minerals. You’re talking a huge capital investment – no corporation would want to destroy such an asset, I don’t care how many people were killed on the thing or what sort of horrors happened there. They’d want to be able to salvage as much of the ship, facility, and cargo as possible, no matter what.
And designing the mechanism to act the way it does in the movie doesn’t make sense, either – shutting off the coolant for the nuclear reactor which powers the ship? That’s building a weakness into a system which you would rather want to make as safe and redundant as possible. That’s just asking for trouble.
OK, yeah, I’m being picky. But it really is this sort of thing which I try to pay attention to in my own writing – looking at what makes sense in terms of human motivation and practical engineering, whatever the story or tech that you’re playing with.
But it is still a great movie. I’d hope that Communion of Dreams ages half as well in say, 30 years.
Jim Downey
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
This would be so very cool:
Did NASA Discover Life on One of Saturn’s Moons?
NASA is holding a press conference on Thursday “to discuss an astrobiology finding.” Are they going to announce that they’ve found evidence of extraterrestrial life?Blogger Jason Kottke took a look at NASA’s press release, which touts “an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life” (astrobiology, besides being a cool word, is “the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe”), and decided to investigate further by looking at the participants’ resumes. So who are the participants?
- A geobiologist who’s written about “geology and life on Mars”;
- an oceanographer who’s done extensive work on arsenic-based photosynthesis;
- a biologist examining Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, and its similarities to early Earth;
- and an ecologist investigating the “chemistry of environments where life evolves.”
Keep your fingers crossed.
Jim Downey
Hat tip to Jacob for the link! Thanks!
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
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
Communion Of Dreams 