Recently in outer space life Category
Earlier this year, I attended a "Star Party" at the MacDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, a venerable institution perched on a hill in the far west Texas desert. The skies out there are, understandably, crushingly big and so teeming with stars that the astronomers guiding the public stargazing events need to aim high-powered laser pointers at the sky in order for anyone to tell one star from another. On the evening of my attendance, our guide was giddy with the news that the International Space Station, formerly an invisible blip in the night sky, had recently been expanded to the point that it might now be visible from Earth. His calculations showed it scheduled for a fly-by that evening, so he ushered a group of us outside to the parking lot and commanded us to look at the horizon. Suddenly, a point of light slightly larger than a star emerged from the night.
There it was.
It shot across the sky in a graceful arc, growing larger as it flew directly above us. No one said a word. It seemed incomprehensible that men and women were up there, in that tiny point of light, swallowing beads of floating water and conducting esoteric experiments. I felt inexplicably proud of this achievement, glad to be implicated in it by virtue of my membership in the human race. Despite the thrill, however, it was humbling: here was a minute dot of light, speeding across the sky as it encircled the Earth. From their vantage point, the astronauts aboard the ISS saw dozens of sunsets a day, saw the world in all its complexity as a blur of browns and blues, felt safe and massive in their technological warren; but from Earth we could see them as they really were, one blip among millions, a hunk of metal shining among massively powerful stars and the vastness of space.
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On an unrelated note, now would perhaps be an appropriate time to announce the soft launch of a new project, Space Canon. I will be reading every important science fiction book ever written and blogging about the process, and it might take years. Any other heads are welcome to follow along in my journey, provide suggestions, and make comments like "After reading Neuromancer, I too think the Wachowski brothers should be sued for plagiarism!"
More data as I gather it.
The search for a Theory of Everything, which is kind of the unofficial M.O. of the scientific establishment, has always been closely guarded. The elements of profound uncertainty involved with such a quest have always primly clipped, safe from the grubby hands of untrained speculation. Relatively sane, brilliant physicists who err too far in the direction of the fabulous are practically shunned, or at least relegated to different class; those who posit that any variant of string theory might bridge the gap are nominally demoted from "physicists" to "string theorists," a nomenclature that smacks of thinly-veiled condescension.
In recent years, however, the tides have changed, at least to the untrained eye of this untoward layperson.
In November, a non-affiliated renegade physicist with a penchant for year-round surfing and Burning Man baffled the scientific community with a surprisingly cogent theory of everything: a testable hypothesis, which, refreshingly, does not require either highly complex mathematics, or any more than one dimension of time and three of space. It's based on the E8, a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points, generally considered to be the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics. Quoth the surfer in question, Garrett Lisi, "I think our universe is this beautiful shape." A radically simple Theory Of Everything that could shelve once and for all the quivering postulations of String theorists? Strike one.
Furthermore, this month, one of the most prestigious astronomical publications in the world, The Astrophysical Journal, will publish the research of Gerrit Verschuur, who claims that the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite images -- which, since 1992, have served as unfuckwithable empirical evidence of the Big Bang -- depict nearby hydrogen gas clouds in our own galaxy, rather than the structures of the early Universe they are thought to be. A massive paradigm shift that brings us back to square one as far as the origin of the Universe is concerned? Strike two.
There's plenty of contenders vying for strike three. A recent, and much-misunderstood, paper by Laurence Krauss (author, incidentally, of The Physics of Star Trek) of Case Western Reserve University argued that since the Universe originated from a quantum state -- and hence is part of a highly illogical quantum system -- then it's possible that a "probability wave" of reality could be conked out by something as innocuous as an observation. Remember Schroedinger's unfortunate cat? In any case, Krauss' paper ever-so-lightly suggested that a 1998 observation of a supernova, through which scientists deduced the existence of dark matter, could have collapsed a web of probabilities stretching all the way back to the Big Bang, potentially shortening the lifespan of our very universe.
But wait, isn't the Big Bang potentially bunk? Or maybe there's no quantum universe at all; maybe the universe is this glamorous, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern resounding with beautiful and complex symmetries. It's a mess: the quest for a unified front has only led to more and more chaos, illogical syllogisms, and mutually-exclusive theory sets. Meanwhile, astronomers are knee-deep in dark matter, dark energy, new planets, holes in the universe, and ancient textures in the sky.
It seems as though string Theory era has opened the vibrating, 11-dimensional doors to a period of open speculation. We seem to be in the midst of a theoretical free-for-all, a mêlée of ideas, both hackneyed and abstract. Is the scientific establishment really evolving into a multifaceted, fractured, and wildly theoretical community? Are open-source electronic journals and the democratization of information in this self-navigating digital era rending the staid entitlement of science into shreds? Or is it simply the fault of the mainstream press, being more clued in to the hype potential of science than it once was, perhaps enticed by the exoticism of String Theory, the media-savvy of Brian Greene, or the throbbing pulse of the upcoming Mayan apocalypse?
In his 2006 book, "Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Particle Physics," mathematical physicist Peter Woit explains that "particle theory has a long history of being successfully pursued in a somewhat faddish manner...new ideas get a lot of attention, leading in a short period either to significant progress, or, more commonly, to abandonment as the community moves on to the next thing."
Are these recent jabs at the gilded throne of particle physics, as Woit puts it, simply "faddish?" Perhaps string theory's wildly untestable nature has broken this pattern dramatically, thrusting us headlong into an age of uncertainty, an era of radically open scientific discourse, careening along the mandala-like vortices of cosmic shapes or emanating from an uncertain, perhaps quantum, past. Here's hoping, right?
On March 26th, 1997, 39 people in matching black sweatsuits and Nike sneakers were found dead in a rented mansion in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. They were members of a marginal religious group called Heaven's Gate -- a "cult," in the frenzied media parlance of the 90's -- and they had committed suicide, cleanly and methodically, by ingesting large doses of phenobarbital and vodka. Their motive, profoundly misunderstood by pretty much everyone not directly involved with the group, was to hitch a ride to the "Next Level" on a heavenly spacecraft positioned behind the rapidly-approaching Hale-Bopp comet. In a very real sense, they did not believe themselves to be committing suicide; they merely saw themselves as abandoning their fallible physical "vehicles:" a radical extension of a commitment they had spent years developing while living in isolated compounds in Salt Lake City, Denver, and the Dallas Forth-Worth area, before moving to their final resting place in Southern California.
Heaven's Gate is a fascinating group, a religious sect that defies our perceptions of cult-dom in strange and interesting ways. What intrigues me the most about them, however, aside from the controversy and mystique of the suicide, is their complicated relationship to technology. While we all remember the Nike sneakers, what most people don't know about these 38 devotees and their leader, Marshall Applewhite (known to them as "Bo" or "Do"), is that they sustained themselves, financially and socially, by making websites.
From the early 1990s until their deaths, they ran a reasonably profitable web design company called Higher Source, churning out innocuous sites for organizations like the San Diego Polo Club. The Higher Source site (now-defunct, but available on Archive.org if you're feeling industrious) proclaimed -- and this should maybe have been a red "crazies" flag for potential clients -- that "individually and collectively, we have focused on outgrowing the artificial limitations this society has programmed all of us to accept in personal conduct and task efficiency...we can produce at a level of efficiency and quality unequalled in the computer industry." Even more interesting is that although the business was characterized by Heaven's Gate as state of the art, it was, by all accounts, far from cutting-edge.
A technical communications specialist quoted in a 1997 CNN story on the subject put it this way: "They weren't very good Web designers. I don't know what kind of money they were making. They have white outlines on the edges of the text that kind of mooshes it against the background."
When exactly they first became mixed up with computers is unknown, but it must have dated back some years, probably catalyzed by their fascination between emerging communication technologies and space travel. Furthermore, their love of computers became totally absorbed into their idiom and ideology, as well as the way they conceptualized their beliefs. Patricia Goerman's awesome MA thesis, "Heaven's Gate: A Sociological Perspective," delves into this issue in some detail. Goerman points out that in their writings, Heaven's Gate members "discuss their use of 'N.L. (Next Level) Base computer language,' as a way to express their 'higher level' of understanding of Biblical and other ideas as compared with the average human...they say that those who have the same 'computer program' or 'software' will interpret...statement[s] differently than the average human."
It's not surprising that the burgeoning Internet technologies of the mid-1990s could have been so easily adaptable to this kind of cultic mysticism. After all, all great paradigm shifts usually engender some kind of religious sentiment or fervency, either in reactionary fear or evangelical embrace. The web explosion must have seemed like a great harbinger of change, as well as a perfectly suitable -- or alarming -- metaphor for New Age notions of connectivity, to anyone thinking of the big picture.
It seems bitingly ironic that, while the media in the 1990's scoffed at Heaven's Gate's loony dreams of space travel and the Internet, their ideas aren't that far from the truth anymore.
10 years ago, extrapolating the web into the realm of space travel was the rhetoric of purple-shrouded cult members. Now, there is sheer muscle (and brains) behind the development of an interplanetary Internet -- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSCS), which includes all the world's space agencies as well as 100 industrial heavy-hitters, and even Vinton Cerf, who invented the Earthbound Internet's TCP/IP protocols.
Of course, there are some huge differences between the 1.0 Internet as Heaven's Gate knew it and the interplanetary Internet -- namely, in terms of its difficulties. On Earth, two computers connected to the Internet can only physically be a few thousand miles apart, tops. So, packets of data shooting along fiber-optic cables at 186,000 miles a second only take a paltry few fractions of a second to get from one computer to another. The delay is so infinitesimally small as to be negligible, no matter how much we complain about the download speed of our Office bittorrents.
But when you factor in distances such as, say, the 38 million miles from Earth to Mars, that same little delay doesn't look so negligible anymore. At this point, we're talking several minutes or even hours for a radio signal to reach a receiving station, assuming the line-of-sight isn't blocked by another satellite, an errant meteor, or some floating space junk. In the foreseeable future, an Interplanetary 'net rigged from NASA's Deep Space Network of antennas to all kinds of microsatellites floating in constellations around the planets just won't be able to duplicate the real-time immediacy of the one we have on Earth.
You may rebut, quite reasonably, "Why in the hell do we need the Internet on Mars? That is still a totally insane notion." That is as fundamental a question, however, as "Why do we need a space program?" and the answers are probably wildly relative to your stance on the issue. Still, one look at the Mars Pathfinder mission (which, coincidentally, was big news only a few months after the Rancho Santa Fe suicides) elucidates the technical need. When NASA sent the first rovers to Mars, they gave us a highly-anticipated, detailed look at a long-mysterious planet. However, data from the Pathfinder trickled back at an excruciating rate of about 300 bits per second -- about 200 times slower than even an average computer with decent Internet on Earth can transfer data.
With the advent of interplanetary Internet protocols, however, researchers at JPL's Mars Network think the transfer rate could eventually get up to about 1 Megabyte (8,288,608 bits) per second, allowing us Earthbound lugs to take virtual trips to Mars and other salient spots in outer space.
If only Applewhite and his crew had waited a few years, they might have been able to visit Hale Bopp without ditching their Earthly vehicles.
To aid in the gestation of a new project, I've been watching a whole lot of Carl Sagan programs.
Namely, the 13-part epic of Cosmos, which remains, to me, the most comprehensive survey of the Universe and our place within it ever presented to the lay public. Sagan's devastating empathy, his respect of the viewer's intelligence, as well as his often outrageously optimistic sense of human community, have never been replicated in television. He shifts deftly from dallies in human history to well-diagrammed explanations of evolution, stressing the clarity and self-evidence of science and framing its longstanding opposition -- organized religion, unenlightened government policy, etc -- as natural and understandable human foibles that we must overcome together.
Modern science programs are usually hosted either by flashy, serious-voiced British actors or anonymous narrators; Sagan, however, takes it all on himself. He never conceals the fact that he's a total nerd, a courduroy-jacketed cosmologist from Brooklyn who gets stoked about watching live Voyager feeds from the JPL labs in Pasadena. Rather, he embraces it, presents himself as a helpful authority, someone genuinely invested in the well-being of the human race, happily taking on the enormous responsibility of educating us.
For an example of the moral themes put forth by Sagan (as well as his close collaborators, Ann Druyan and Steven Soter), witness this, an excerpt from his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. I found this while errantly clicking on Google Video (incidentally, Google Moon?!), and came pretty close to losing it.
Few things get me as riled up as the human being's lack of perspective: about our place in the "grand scheme of things," about our longevity, or about the kinds of impact -- damaging and otherwise -- that we have on our planet. We seem terrified of massive perspectival shifts, threatened by our own galactic history or the dark matters that astronomers so often bandy about. There is one trope, I've found, however, that can lead laypeople to safely revel in the sheer minisculity of our race: the Condensed History of the Universe. "Imagine that all of time were to take place in one day," the Condensed History posits, before thrusting the lofty events of cosmic time into moderately-paced succession, relegating all of human history -- all of life on Earth, in fact -- into one fleeting second book-ending the last hour of the hypothetical 24. We've all encountered this metaphor, in high-school science textbooks, gallantly curated natural history museums, educational films, or the conversations of our stoner neighbors.
In any case, I've been dabbling with history. Here is a short film of my authorship where not a lot happens until 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang:
The History of the Universe from universe and Vimeo
"Not only are we not at the centre of the cosmos, but we are alien to it: we are a singularity. The Universe is strange for us, we are strange for the Universe."
PRIMO LEVI, "News From the Sky," from Other People's Trades
Of course, you've already heard.
A team of European astronomers have discovered a planet five times as massive as the Earth orbiting a distant, dim red star known as Gliese 581. I've already started lamenting the proto-future, the first contact with extraterrestrial life, that I imagine my generation -- already so media savvy, so keen to negotiate alternative spaces with their own sets of digital constraints -- will probably just miss out on. I could cry, just weep, thinking about it.
Although most scientific developments of this magnitude -- including the recent discovery of another new planet within our the confines of our own solar system -- leave only blips on the cultural radar, this latest one is being bandied around like it was season 3 of LOST. We know very little about it, of course, considering it was detected like all extrasolar planets initially are: by measuring the infinitesimal gravitational wobble it causes in its home star, in this case, a red dwarf, a star a fraction as bright as our "sun." Our picture of it is not exactly in HD, to say the least.
What has everyone buzzing, however, is that Gliese 581 exists just within the slim parameters necessary for biological life. Not too close, nor too far, from its neighboring star, the planet's surface temperature vacillates inside of a tepid margin conducive to liquid water. The SETI people, chuffed, happy to be quoted about something people are interested in, tell us they've already checked Gliese 581 for signs of a radio signal, twice, to no avail. "We'll try again," they offer, eternally hopeful.
But this is as much as we know, at least until the planet's orbit crosses beams, so to speak, with the light emitted from its home star, in which case the fluctuations in wavelength and light-intensity will give us a few clues about its composition. Despite this profound intangibility, the headlines are all the same; the phrases "new Earth," and "super-Earth" are ubiquitous, while the selling point of the story is the potentially rocky, potentially water-friendly nature of the planet. Rocky, the articles specify, like Earth.
This attitude of immediately referring to the Gliese 581 object as being a "Super Earth" already adheres a first-generation science fiction mythology to something that is, pragmatically, only a faintly-detectable stirring in the gravitational balance of a distant star system. Why are we so eager to symbolically bequeath to Gliese 581 the nominal future of our own planet? Is it because we have no other conception of planetary "life" that we so quickly equate potential life with being inherently Earth-like? Can we not conceive of other modes of existence?
It says a great deal about our lack of imagination that we would throw such a loaded term around outer space; on a cosmic level, we are still conquistadors, feebly imaging ourselves 20 light years away, at home.
James Gardner is part of a new breed of complexity theorists: an armchair philosopher that goes beyond the epistemological, who posits broad, celebratory theories about the nature of the future of the universe. His first book, Biocosm, proposed the "Selfish Biocosm" hypothesis, which suggests that intelligence doesn't emerge in a series of Darwinian accidents, but is hard-wired into the cycle of cosmic creation; it's a really beautiful idea, putting us right at the center of a living, breathing, intelligent universe, which, incidentally, is the title of his newest book.
Dude also rolled with J.P. Sartre in 1967, edited the Yale Law Journal, counts Ray Kurzweil among his colleagues, and was a six-year Oregon State Senator. I also went to elementary school with his son.
Thanks to the good people over at the Willamette Week, I had the opportunity to pursue some really metaphysical, extended e-mail conversations with Jim Gardner, the most interesting of which is featured below. Get deep with me: it's worth it.
Universe: I'm interested in the process of explaining complex scientific ideas to a lay audience. There are moments of great elegance in your book, in terms of how compactly you manage to lay out huge ideas. Is this something you find difficult -- or, as a self-avowed "scientific generalist," does this sort of synthesis come naturally?
Gardner: The composition of both Biocosm and The Intelligent Universe was excruciatingly difficult for me. The two books presented the most daunting set of intellectual challenges I have ever confronted, both in terms of coming to grips with the implications of some very unusual ideas and then communicating those ideas and implications to a lay audience. That being said, there were extraordinary “Aha!” moments I experienced throughout the process of writing both books that were truly exhilarating—moments that more than compensated for all the pain.
If we're going to make it in this future of ours, we've got to stop thinking that our planet hangs in some kind of splendid isolation in the dead vapor of empty space. We're part and parcel of a dynamic system, a vast cosmos of activity and, probably, intelligence; though our home planet's life span is limited, the Universe is not going anywhere.
That said, meet the Space Elevator, probably the most revolutionary idea in the history of aeronautics. Why? Because it's exactly what it sounds like. An elevator. To space.
What's so elegant about the space elevator, to me, is that it draws a clean line of connection between our centuries-old conception of "down here" and the newly approachable "up there," or, as Bucky would have it, "in" and "out," respectively. While space shuttles, rockets, and satellites retain a certain abstract quality -- off they blast, in a florid burst of flame and noise, the mechanics of the whole thing still pretty mystical -- the space elevator is concrete, as though humankind were reaching its own tentative arm into the great beyond, an unknown which will, of course, quickly normalize.
Despite its seemingly implausible nature, the space elevator is totally pragmatic, ultimately much cheaper and more economical than the high-energy rigamarole we're currently faced with every time we need to wrest something from the grips of our planet's escape gravity. The method is simple, like most good ideas are: a tether held taut by the inertia of the planet's rotation, spanning from the surface of the Earth to a point beyond geosynchronous orbit, serving as a sort of cosmic freeway, shuttling "lifters" out of the planet's gravity and into orbit. It would be built somewhere near the equator or on a man-made island, capable of shifting coordinates if necessary.
Think about it. No thunderous rocketry. No risky landings. Rockets are so expensive -- and launching them so damn burdensome -- that they will probably always keep the democratization of space travel at bay. So what are we waiting for?
Arthur C. Clarke, perhaps the most ardent and famous promoter of the space elevator, was often asked when he thought the first one might be built. A little flippantly, he noted, "my answer has always been: about 50 years after everyone has stopped laughing. Maybe I should now revise it to 25 years."
Of course, not everyone is laughing. Some companies, such as Liftport Group, based in Bremerton, Washington, are already on it. Confident of the elevator's viability, they're already hard at work developing the ancillary technologies (the robotics, for example, which will form the heart of the lifter) that this paradigm-shattering device will need. Which is what is so stunning about the elevator: we have all the technology to implement it. The only thing missing is a strong enough material to build the tether out of; burgeoning carbon nanotube technology seems to fit the bill. Once we find a way to put the nanotubes, which have a theoretical tensile strength far and above any other man-made material, into practice, we'll have all our ducks in a row.
Brian Dunbar, systems administrator at Liftport, optimistically concedes that space elevator groups are "a little like Goddard in his cabbage patch, knowing that Nell should work - but there is more engineering and study needed before we light that fuse."
Of course, we have the technology to do a lot of things: stem cell research, cloning, a $100 computer...but that doesn't mean that we always do them. In order for a legitimate space elevator project to take shape, a friendly political climate is perhaps even more necessary than carbon nanotubes are. After all, it can be difficult to instill in an administration -- let alone the greater public -- the importance of these kinds of projects. Politicians (and most people) think in the short term, generally unconcerned with what happens 10, 20, or 1,000 years from now. If they didn't, my generation would certainly not be left with the blunder of global warming, nor would we have to agonize so much about the provenance of our food. Galvanizing people into action for something like the space elevator, which, off the bat, does not seem immediately worthwhile, is improbable. Look at what NASA is replacing the Shuttle with, for crying out loud: little rockets that look like the Apollo modules. Are we going forward or what?
As James Gardner, complexity theorist and author of The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos, more elegantly put it, "framing the political debate in a way that will lead to a sustainable political consensus will be as important a determinant of success as the capacity to overcome the formidable technical challenges that confront would-be space elevator builder."
Three incredible, little-known things about the Apollo 11 mission:
1. Although everyone knows what Neil Armstrong said as he hopped out of the landing module, I've always preferred Buzz Aldrin's elegiac phrase, "Beautiful. Beautiful. Magnificent desolation." This leads me to the next point.
2. Aldrin, always the most conceptually approachable of the Apollo 11 astronauts, claims in this interview that he (as well as Collins and Armstrong) observed an unidentified ship traveling alongside theirs, but never said anything about it for fear of being sent back to Earth. The sighting, which was repeated on later Apollo missions, has never been formally acknowledged by NASA, although video of it exists.
3. In the event that the moon-walkers might become stranded on the moon and, by consequence, die there, president Nixon had a funerary speech prepared, entitled "In Event of Moon Disaster." Reading it offers a devastating glimpse at an alternate past. Imagine this as part of our cultural vocabulary: "For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind."
