Daisy and the Trillion Trees

In 1983 James Lovelock and Andrew Watson created a computer simulation called "Daisyworld". The premise was an ultra-simplified ecosystem, a world inhabited by only two species, white daisies and black daisies. Affecting this world's climate was the single factor of its sun's heat. The high-albedo white daisies reflect sunlight and the low-albedo black daisies absorb sunlight. The "monkey wrench" in the system is that the sun is actually slowly becoming hotter.

So, as the simulation begins, the sun's radiation is too small to germinate either the white or black daisies, but the surface of the planet is covered with evenly distributed seeds of both black and white daisies. As the sun becomes hotter and the world heats up, eventually the world becomes warm enough for the black daisies to germinate and bloom. The black flowers absorb the sun's heat, causing the world to warm even more rapidly, until it is warm enough for the white daisies to also germinate and bloom. The white flowers reflect the sunlight and begin to lower the world's temperature. As the sun continues to heat up to a level which is uncomfortable for the daisies, the white flowers, which are better able to cool themselves, out-compete the black flowers. The greater the surface-area of the world that is covered by white daisies, the greater the cooling effect of the white flowers. In this way, the white and black flowers work in tandem to regulate the temperature to a level which is comfortable for all daisies. Eventually the sun heats up beyond the ability of the white daisies to regulate it, and all of the daisies die. If, however, the sun's heat remains more or less constant, the populations of white and black daisies will equilibrate in such a way as to maintain an optimum climate for the daisies. In this way, rather than naturally selecting to adapt to the environment, the daisies modify their environment to fit their own needs.

Later generations of the Daisyworld program added many more layers of complexity (atmosphere, herbivorous and carnivorous animals, etc), but each iteration of complexity actually increases the world's ability to self-regulate.

Here is a diagram of this first Daisyworld test, in 1983:

It is serendipitous, only, that this model happens to address global warming. Lovelock and Watson could have chosen any number of variables, and the problem of anthropogenic climate change was only vaguely understood at the time. Nonetheless, it serves admirably to illustrate a possible solution to the current global warming crisis.

There are four things we know for certain about the current global warming situation.

1) It is happening, and it is the largest and fastest increase in global temperatures since eukaryotic life has existed on earth.

2) It is happening mostly as the result of human activity, especially the combination of the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

3) If left unmitigated, it is the single most likely cause of the extinction of the human species. If current trends continue, earth will be uninhabitable by human life by the end of this century. More importantly, there is a very real possibility that anthropogenic global warming will (if it has not done so already) trigger a runaway climatological feedback-loop which will continue to increase global temperatures long after humans are extinct. The worst-case scenario, which is unfortunately quite plausible, would result in earth becoming a hellishly hot Venus-like world devoid of all liquid water and all life, within about 600 years.

4) There are three foreseeable outcomes for the human population from this; mitigation, outmigration or extinction.

This blog has spent a lot of time exploring the possibility of outmigration, and I do believe that this is a critical step to ensure the survival of our species, and other terrestrial species. However, in the very short amount of time we have before this planet is no longer habitable, we would only be able to successfully evacuate a tiny fraction of our population. In order for the majority of humans to survive, we must directly and immediately mitigate the increase in global temperatures.

The good news is, we can. And we don't have to wait for governments or corporations to take the lead; we can do it ourselves, right now, easily and inexpensively.

As a very quick summary, the problem is this. Short-wave radiation from the sun (insolation, with an "o") enters the atmosphere, heating both the atmosphere and the earth's surface. Some of this is reflected directly back into space, both by the earth's surface or by clouds. Some of it is re-radiated as long-wave radiation from the earth and air back into space as well. Some of it, however, is trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gasses ("insulation", with a "u") such as carbon dioxide, water vapor and methane. For a very long time, this insolation/insulation cycle was in a state of equilibrium. Now, however, the combination of an extraordinary amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial revolution by the burning of fossil fuels, and the diminished ability of trees to scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere due to deforestation, has created an overabundance of CO2 in our atmosphere. This increases the greenhouse effect, which raises temperatures, which evaporates water which increases the greenhouse effect even more which further raises temperatures, which kills off trees which reduces the ability of forests to scrub CO2 out of the system which increases greenhouse CO2 which increases temperatures, etc.

Freeman Dyson, the same brilliant mind who invented a starship to reach Alpha Centauri in 88 years time back in 1957 (the Orion nuclear-pulse starship, I've written quite a bit about it in this blog) has proposed a simple and elegant solution to this problem.

In order to stop catastrophic global warming, we simply need to plant one trillion trees.

Right now.

Really.

Yes, it sounds like a lot. But we have over seven billion people on the planet. That works out to just under 143 trees per person. If every man, woman and child on planet earth were to plant just two trees every five days for one year, even with no reduction in our usage of fossil fuels we would actually be in some danger of shocking the climate into a mini ice-age.

Our planet has a remarkable ability to self-regulate its ecosystems. But it only works if all the "daisies" are there to do their part of the regulating.

Yes, it would actually be more helpful to plant all 143 trees at an optimal time for planting them. You can start them from seeds, just pick up a couple handfuls of seeds of some kind of tree which is indigenous to your area, and plant them in an place that they are likely to grow. If you are ridiculously slow about it, it might take you a couple of hours to do so. Then, walk away and forget about them. This isn't difficult. Entire forests have been successfully planted by a single individual.

Of course, the very best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. Barring that, "today" is an awfully good second best.

Happy Arbor Day, whenever that happens to be where you are.

Tax Day

Okay, since the last post touched on politics, here's one more for Tax Day. And then I'll stop.

I am not an economist. I did not major or minor in economics in school. Economics isn't even especially interesting to me. I have absolutely no qualifications whatsoever to talk about economics.

Which is to say, I'm at least as qualified to develop a federal budget as most of our elected representatives and senators are.

So, on this belated tax day, here is my recommendation to balance the federal budget.

Discretionary Spending Cuts

Yes, eliminate such waste, fraud and abuse as can be reasonably agreed upon by both parties and both chambers.

Income Tax

Repeal the Bush-era tax cuts. All of them. For every tax bracket, including mine. Actually require all tax brackets to pay all of the taxes they owe, without loopholes and exemptions.

Corporate Taxes

Ditto.

Also, tax every US corporation $100,000 each year for every single job which is created and sustained outside of the United States.

In order to prevent "reflagging" of US corporations, increase tariffs on all imported goods to 25% of the total retail value of the goods.

Petroleum

Eliminate all corporate welfare for the petroleum industry.

Eliminate all corporate warfare for the petroleum industry. Immediately cease and desist from any military operation which in any way benefits the importation of petroleum products to the US.

Immediately stop all new drilling. And any old drilling which cannot reasonably prevent an oil spill. Remediation costs from the Deepwater Horizon accident will ultimately total in the trillions, if they actually happen to remediate it. I'm not holding my breath, just holding my nose.

Add 25% retail tax to all refined petroleum products in addition to the aforementioned tariffs on imported oil.

After all of that, gasoline still probably won't cost as much in the US as it does in the real world. But with any luck, Americans will take the hint anyway and stop using gasoline.

Cold War Spending

The Cold War ended 20 years ago. China won. Get over it. We no longer need to support a Cold War arsenal. Mutually Assured Destruction was a stupid idea anyway.

==================

Alright, there's my budget proposal. Which has even less chance of being passed than any of the other budget proposals which will be debated.

And now back to things more interesting and less political which might actually make a positive difference in this world. Or some other.

Oh, and the "death" thing? No idea how to fix that one.

An Eye for an Eye

Dear Afghanistan,

Some drooling imbecile in Gainesville Florida burned a copy of the Quran.

I'm genuinely sorry for that. That was evil, inappropriate, insensitive and frankly utterly un-Christ-like. But the person who did this was, as previously mentioned, a drooling imbecile.

I understand that you're upset about this. I would like to personally, on behalf of my mentally deficient countryman, make amends.

I, Captain Robert Reeder of Seattle Washington, will personally burn one King James Bible for you. I will post photos of the Bible burning here at SoM; if you'd like I can try to hook up a live video feed, but no promises. Once I have burned one King James Bible for your one burned Quran, we're done, even-Steven. And then perhaps you can stop killing people over it.

Pakistan, if you'd like, I'll be happy throw in a copy of the Bhagavad Gita, pre-emptively in case some Hindu might decide to burn a Quran as well. Palestine, if you'd like, I'll add in a copy of the Tanakh as a freebee. I'll even see if I have an extra copy of Darwin's Origin of Species lying around in case some atheist should decide to include a copy of the Quran in their recycling program.

Okay, we're cool now? No more killing?

I'm dead serious about this. I'm leaving my "comments" box open on this post. One single response from any individual anywhere saying anything to the effect of "yes Captain Robert, the burning of one Christian Bible would sufficiently avenge the burning of one Quran, so that I will not feel compelled to kill anyone else over it", and it will happen, and I will post it here.

----------------------------------

Dear drooling imbecile in Gainesville Florida,

So many things I could say here, but they would fall upon deaf ears. Let me try this:

I have a young daughter. She happens to enjoy pinatas. For whatever reason, beating a large paper bag with a stick, while blindfolded, to see what might come out of it, is great fun for her. Her friends seem to enjoy it as well, so, at least for special occasions, we try to provide her with the opportunity to play pinata.

Where we live, we happen to have a species of insect called bald-faced hornets. They aren't really true hornets, more like very large and very aggressive yellow-jacket wasps. But they build a nest which strongly resembles the nest of a true hornet, which is to say, it is about the size, shape, consistency and elevation of a pinata. Even when my daughter was very young, she was quite capable of taking a broom-handle and whacking any of the hornets' nests which frequent our yard in the late summer.

But, she didn't.

Because, by the time she was old enough to heft and swing a broom-handle, she had figured out that beating a hornets' nest with a stick was a Very Bad Idea.

As of the last time I looked at CNN some 20 people are dead and another hundred or more seriously wounded, all because you thought it was a Very Good Idea to smack at a hornets' nest with a broom stick.

I won't have a King James Bible anymore after I burn the one I have, so please, if you could be so kind, remind me of where in the Bible exactly Jesus recommends burning the holy books of other Abrahamic faiths, specifically with the intent of inciting the followers of those faiths to violence? Because, Pastor, I thought I was pretty familiar with your Bible, but I seem to have somehow missed that passage.

Nuclear Power: it's not rocket science

I teach celestial navigation for a living. Some people are intimidated by celestial navigation, but celestial navigation isn't actually especially difficult. The math, which is what intimidates most people, is nothing more than simple arithmetic. Very simple, just adding and subtracting. But you have to do the arithmetic correctly, or you will have a mess on your hands.

I am not a nuclear physicist or a nuclear engineer, but I've worked on nuclear powered ships carrying nuclear weapons for about ten years, and my father worked at the Atomic Energy Commission back when it was still called that. And I teach for a school run by a PhD in nuclear physics. A lot of my friends are nuclear physicists and nuclear engineers. Also, if I may say so, I'm reasonably bright. Over the past 30 years or so I've gleaned a reasonable understanding of how a nuclear reactor works.

It isn't especially sophisticated technology. At the end of the day, it's just a steam engine. The mathematics involved in designing, building and operating a nuclear reactor are not much more than simple arithmetic.

But you have to do the arithmetic correctly, or you will have a mess on your hands.

A couple of days ago I posted about the possibility of earthquake-proofing buildings. If you haven't done so already, please re-read that post. Everything in it applies to nuclear reactors.

Over the past several days I keep reading people stating that the Fukushima reactors were designed to withstand a serious earthquake, but the Sendai earthquake was five times stronger than the designers anticipated. This is true. Here's a hint.

If the actual earthquake that actually hits your reactor is five times stronger than what you built the reactor to withstand, YOU BUILT YOUR REACTOR FIVE TIMES TOO WEAK.

There is no excuse for this. None. You built the reactor in a known earthquake zone. 9-point earthquakes happen. Therefore, build your reactor to withstand a 10-point earthquake. Not seven. That's stupid.

The US Navy has been running nuclear reactors on seagoing vessels for more than half a century without serious incident. Seagoing vessels which on a daily basis withstand far more serious motion than any earthquake will ever create.

"Oh, but after the earthquake the reactors were hit by a Really Big Wave!"

Newsflash. Ships get hit by really big waves all the friggin' time. It's what they're designed for. It's what their reactors are designed for.

Newsflash number two. Tsunamis accompany earthquakes. If you build your reactor close enough to seawater that you are able to use the seawater as your secondary coolant, you need to account for tsunamis.

If you can design a nuclear reactor to withstand the daily rigors of a ship of war at sea, you can damned well design a land-based reactor to withstand a once-in-a-lifetime seismic event.

Oh, but you would have to spend money on that. That might cut into your shareholder's profits.

Congratulations, TEPCO. You did the arithmetic wrong. And now, you have a mess on your hands.

Earthquake-proofing buildings

First off, I want to commend Japan for having done an exemplary job of building their skyscrapers as earthquake-durable as probably any in the world. I also want to commend Japan on their earthquake early warning system. One minute doesn't seem like much of a head start, but it probably meant the survival of many more people than otherwise would have. http://www.jma.go.jp/jma/en/Activities/eew.html

However, I would like to posit that it is entirely possible to create buildings which are, for all intents and purposes, entirely earthquake proof.

Imagine, if you will, a luxury hotel with a capacity for 6000+ guests, park-courtyards, playgrounds, swimming pools, restaurants, day-spas and gymnasiums, movie theaters, performance arenas, casinos, shops, and many other recreation facilities.

Now, imagine an earthquake so severe that the ground directly beneath this hotel was violently lifted to a 30° angle. Now imagine that the hotel is lifted violently in the opposite direction an equal or greater amount. And then again from another direction. And another. And another. Imagine that instead of lasting for a few seconds or a few minutes, this violent shifting of the ground beneath the hotel lasts for days, or weeks. Sometimes the entire hotel heaves up suddenly by 10 meters or more, sometimes it falls into a similar sized hole made by the shifting earth, sometimes it slides up or down hills forming and unforming beneath its foundation.

And as this happens, the hotel staff and guests go about their business, mostly unperturbed. The walls do not break, the windows do not break, the floors and ceilings do not crumple. Poorly stowed objects may fall to the floor, unsecured furniture may move about, an elderly patron may stumble and injure a wrist. But that is all.

Such buildings already exist. They are called SHIPS.

There is no reason that a building on land cannot be built with the same techniques that shipbuilders have used for centuries. It is no more expensive than building a ship of the same size, and a land-based hotel has the added advantage of no fuels costs for propulsion. Really, we can do this. And in areas which are prone to serious earthquakes, we need to seriously consider it.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

Typically, in astronomy, "The Great Silence" refers to the (not actually surprising) lack of intelligent radio transmissions emanating from the nearby stars.

Today it apparently refers to the lack of intelligent or otherwise radio transmissions emanating from the commercial media regarding the NASA announcement of a high energy heat source on Saturn's moon Enceladus.

By "commercial media" I mean CNN, BBC, Fox and even Weekly World News. I gave up the search after WWN, although I was pleased to learn there that space aliens have been ditching the bodies of human abductees onto the surface of the moon, minus their bones. How DO they keep scooping larger news agencies like the BBC?

Anyway, none of the news outlets I checked had picked up the NASA story (the real one). Given the incredible opportunity this story presents for each of the media outlets to royally eff it up in their own special way, I was inclined to give NASA credit for cleverly hiding the story in plain sight and wording it so blandly that the media didn't notice it. But that would imply that the NASA press corp was "clever", and so far the available data does not fit that hypothesis very well.

My next hypothesis was that the news outlets did read the story and understand its implications, but were taking the responsible path of allowing the information to trickle into the public's consciousness in its own time. Then I remembered that I had included Fox News in my list.

The only conclusion I was left with was that the science editors of the various media really genuinely didn't understand the importance or the implications of the press release. So, allow me to break it down into itty bitty words for the journalists.

Saturn has a tiny moon called Enceladus. "Tiny" as in about 500 kilometers, or about 300 miles, in diameter. For comparison, if Enceladus happened to be sitting on Ellensburg WA, the sphere of the moon would reach to Aberdeen WA to the west, Pullman WA to the east, Warm Springs OR to the south and nearly to Chilliwack BC to the north. So, "tiny" as far as moons go, but you wouldn't want to have to store it in your basement.

Enceladus has an ice mantle which is about 5km thick, which is much thinner than the ice mantles of the Jovian moons. Beneath that is a salt water ocean, which happens to be rich in simple organic chemicals.

Now, here's the rub. Enceladus should be frozen solid. There really isn't a logical reason why the interior of Enceladus is warm enough to melt the ice. There are two standard candidates for this, the first being tidal expansion and contraction from the gravitational relationship with Saturn and Dione (another of Saturn's moons), and the second being radioactive decay of superheavy metals within the rocky interior of Enceladus. Neither of these explanations hold much water.

Mimas, yet another of Saturn's moons, is closer still to Saturn but frozen stone cold solid. And you wouldn't really expect a world with a gravity 0.01 times that of earth to have made very much uranium.

Furthermore, Enceladus' heat does not seem to be evenly distributed around the globe, but concentrated in one single very small area. A tidally induced underwater volcano might account for this, but we would expect that to be situated near the equator, either facing or opposing Saturn (like our own moon, Enceladus is tidally locked with Saturn, with the same side always facing the planet). However, it turns out that our lone hot-spot is precisely at the south pole.

Still, knowing that there was in fact a hot-spot, scientists computed the absolute maximum heat output which could be generated by a combination of tidal dynamics and radioactive decay. The very generous number they arrived at was 1.4 gigawatts.

The hot-spot is called the "tiger stripes", because it is a region of four nearly parallel and evenly spaced trenches, each about 80 miles long by 1 mile wide. Cassini recently measured the heat from the tiger stripes as 15.8 gigawatts. More than ten times the maximum which could be generated by any known natural phenomenon.

So, what are we looking at here?

The official SWAG (stupid wild-assed guess) from NASA and JPL is that it is a somehow anomalous flareup that Cassini just happened to capture. The problem with this is that the original 1.4 gigawatt number was the anomalous flareup. So we can probably throw that one out. That leaves us with two possibilities. Either we're seeing a previously unknown natural phenomenon, or we're seeing a previously unknown artificial phenomenon. Either way we're going to need a lot more data and a lot more research. And suddenly Saturn's moon system looks a lot more interesting.

On Intelligence, part three

Signs of Life

Electromagnetic radiation is of limited utility for interstellar communication, precisely because it is limited to the speed of light. It is not terribly difficult to imagine a scenario in which a civilization on a star was in EM communication with a colony of its own on another star one parsec away. Of necessity, this would be in the form of reciprocal one-way communications, perhaps the interstellar equivalent of three-year-old newsreels. But it seems unlikely that this sort of communication would be uninterrupted and continuous.

Over distances much larger than a parsec, any semblance of two-way communications
breaks down to the point of utter futility. The only place in our galaxy where EM has any conceivable utility for two-way communications over interstellar distances is near the galactic center, where “interstellar distances” are in fact quite short. However, with as much radiotelescope time as has been devoted to this region of the sky generally, we have not yet detected artificial signals there. For the rest of the galaxy, any species attempting two way communication across interstellar space using EM may, almost by definition, not be considered “intelligent”.

Unfortunately, we are still limited to searching in this spectrum, even with the
understanding that no species in their right mind would be broadcasting on it, at least in terms of two-way interstellar communication. So we must look for reasonable purposes for transmitting high-output, uniformly pulsed signals which are not intended to be responded to. As we have only earth-bound human culture as an analogue from which to anticipate alien technologies, we must look at human civilization and technologies which have, by design and intent, broadcast proportionally large-output transmissions which were deliberately and readily identifiable as artificial.

Perhaps the best candidates which come to mind are “aids to navigation” such as buoys and lighthouses. On earth, these tend to be self-powered, self-repairing, and capable of broadcasting light, sound and/or radio signals easily discernible from the background, in an easily recognizable and repeating pattern. An analogous structure in deep space might well remain “on station”, transmitting for eons after the civilization which constructed it had become extinct. Antiquity would be no great barrier to utility, as the age of the phased light or radio transmissions would be of little relevance for determining the object’s relative location. A “buoy” placed on-station ten thousand years ago by a species long extinct would still have utility for space-faring civilizations today, and would provide earthbound SETI researchers with proof of extra-terrestrial intelligence.

Buoys, by definition, are undeniably artifacts; they must be designed in such a way as to not be possibly mistaken for a naturally occurring phenomenon. They tend not, however, to be scintillating conversationalists. If in fact such artifacts do exist throughout the galaxy, and are in fact transmitting on frequencies which humans are capable of receiving, the first “intelligent” communication we receive from an alien civilization may be something like “dit dah dah dit”, repeated over, and over, and over, and over…tantalizing, as it would tell us absolutely nothing about the species which created it other than the fact that they had need of navigation aids at some point in their history. However, given their potential longevity, message redundancy, signal strength and likely ubiquity (if in fact other species in the galaxy are spacefaring, by whatever means), deep-space aids to navigation, if
such exist, seem very likely candidates for our first unmistakable and undeniable contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence.

The argument against navigational buoys being our first contact is that we haven’t heard any yet. There are four possible reasons for this. 1) they are too far away, or for whatever other reason the signal-to-noise-ratio is too low for us to detect with our existing telescopes, 2) they are not transmitting in the spectra we are looking, or even in a spectrum that we are aware of, 3) we are receiving transmissions from them already and have simply not recognized then as such, or 4) they don’t exist.

SETI today

Presently, SETI predominantly uses very large earth-based radiotelescopes such as
Arecibo Radio Observatory in Puerto Rico to “look” at the sky at that latitude as the earth rotates under it. Because this is a “fixed” antenna located on a rotating body, SETI first looks for signals which increase and then decrease at a rate consistent with planetary rotation and the passive field-lobe of the array; this signal-strength bell-curve is called a “Gaussian”. Any EM source which is not originating on earth will exhibit this, whether it is a star, an earth-orbiting satellite or an Aldebaranian disc-jockey. Strong narrowband EM pulses of smaller pulse-length than the duration of the Gaussian are also looked at, and “triplets” (evenly spaced short pulse-length EM pulses which conform in signal strength to a Gaussian) are especially interesting.

Once a signal of interest has been detected, verified by multiple computers and isolated from terrestrial (or near-extraterrestrial, such as satellite) radio frequency interference, it is then examined for persistency. A “persistent” signal is one which is observed on more than one occasion with the same frequency and same location, by one or more radiotelescopes. One current data set of 80,704 Gaussians contained 2,868 candidates which matched once (2 occurrences), 111 candidates which matched twice (3 occurrences), and 4 candidates which matched three times (4 occurrences). Within this particular data set there were no candidates which matched more than three times. As this particular search construed “persistency” as being within 2.5 arc minutes and 50 Hz frequency, the persistent signals in this sample must be presumed to be only randomly and incidentally so.

Much of the search to date has focused on the 1000 to 10,000 MHz “waterhole”, with the presumption that anyone willfully transmitting EM over interstellar distances would do so in frequencies least impeded by background noise. Again, the likelihood of any species technologically intelligent enough to do so actually attempting two-way communication across interstellar distances with EM is, one hopes, rather small; aids to navigation or similar beacons, however, would by necessity utilize the water hole if they were transmitting EM at all. All other things being equal, then, as EM is the only means we have of searching for extraterrestrial intelligence at this point in our history, if we are serious about locating proof of extraterrestrial intelligence we need to consider the virtue of searching for radio- or light-transmitting artifacts rather than actual coherent communication, and optimize our search toward finding those things which are most likely to be transmitting on the frequencies we’re searching.

The disadvantage of searching for buoys, obviously, is that once the initial excitement of discovery wears off, they really aren’t very interesting. The advantage is that what buoys lack in eloquence they make up for in tenacity, so there’s no worry about “missing the signal”. Any systematic search of the sky on the right frequency and sensitivity will find it eventually, and once it is located it is easy to verify independently with other antennas, and could be easily monitored continuously as the earth rotates by a series of antennae at different longitudes around the globe. For a search such as this, then, one large array is
infinitely preferable to a large number of smaller arrays.

However, for detecting more “interesting” and potentially more ephemeral signals, a
much larger number of smaller antennae would seem to be optimal. A 3-meter dish
antenna is the minimum needed to “see” in the water hole. Already, SETI-inclined
amateur radio enthusiasts have been building very small radio telescopes from old
satellite television antennas; the SETI League has established Project Argus to integrate the searches of these amateur radio-astronomers via e-mail and newsletters.

Concurrent with but independent from this “SETI at home” amateur radio astronomy is
“SETI@home”, which utilizes millions of personal computers around the world to
analyze SETI data obtained from Arecibo or other giant radio arrays. Essentially
SETI@home is using unused processing time on individual personal computers as a giant supercomputer. The individual user is given a screensaver-like program which processes units of parsed-out data from Arecibo. Because SETI@home has over 2,000,000 participants, extraordinary amounts of data are able to be processed in a very small amount of time.

“Combining the forces” of the SETI League and SETI@home, it would be possible to
create an array of perhaps millions of small antennae scattered around the world,
interfaced via personal computers. If an individual antenna picked up an interesting
candidate, the personal computer it was attached to could perform a preliminary data
analysis, and then automatically prompt all of the antennae in its hemisphere to train on the same Right Ascension and Declination. All data collected would then be transmitted to a central supercomputer for further analysis. In this way, a truly global antenna array (if only 1% of current SETI@home participants participated in this, that would commit 20,000 new antennae to the search) could be built for well under $500 per participant, and almost no hardware or software overhead whatsoever for the university organizing it.

The existing single massive antenna approach, used in tandem with the sort of
Shoestring Budget Global Array (SBGA) proposed here, could significantly accelerate
our search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

And, really, what could be cooler than turning your old satellite dish into a personal radiotelescope to hunt for aliens with?

On Intelligence, part two

Inter-species communication on earth has met, to date, with only limited success. The most successful instances of inter-species communication have all involved a wide spectrum of visual, auditory, tactile and other sensory cues, such as the Fouts' work with chimpanzees. Crafting a communication which can be broadcast on radio frequencies and which will be comprehensible to an intelligence other than ourselves is not a small task. Any communication which is deliberately transmitted to other stars should, at the very least, be readily comprehensible to all humans from all cultures on this planet, and it should also be readily comprehensible to all other species on this planet which are estimated to have intelligence in any way analogous to humans. More, it should be such that all such species comprehending it would be able to convey their comprehension of it to the humans transmitting it in such a way that the humans would understand conclusively that
comprehension was being conveyed. This problem of “comprehensibly conveyed
comprehension” is crucial to SETI.

For example, if we were to attempt to convey our intelligence to a spiny anteater (which has a much higher neocortex-to-body-weight ratio than humans, and is therefore, by some definitions of intelligence, significantly and demonstrably more intelligent than we are) by means of tapping out “x, xx, xxx, xxxxx, xxxxxxx”, then a response from the anteater which indicated its comprehension that it was being communicated with might be tapping out “x, xx, xxx, xxxxx, xxxxxxx”, whereas a response which indicated its comprehension of the meaning of the communication might be tapping out “xxxxxxxxxxx, xxxxxxxxxxxxx, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”, in this case simply continuing the string of prime numbers for the same consecutive interval as the transmission. However, responses such as 15 taps or 120 taps (the units of the original message added or multiplied together, respectively) might also convey comprehension of part of the meaning of the message, if not the actual intent. However, it is not impossible that the spiny anteater, with its relatively massive neocortex, is possessed of a mathematics so far advanced of our own that the “obvious” relationship of these numbers to it would be utterly incomprehensible to us or even unrecognizable as an intelligent response.

To date, our attempts at deliberate communication with extraterrestrials have been mostly undecipherable even to the majority of humans living in the same culture as the scientists creating the messages. Obviously, this cannot work; language is by definition symbolic, and without a universal (even if rudimentary) symbol set, communication will not occur.

We may presume, for example, that hydrogen occurs in any place that life exists.
However, humans have only been aware of the existence of hydrogen since Paracelsus, and it was not until Cavendish that it was isolated as a unique gas, and it is very unlikely that Neils Bohr would have recognized the Schrodinger/Heisenburg model of a hydrogen atom as anything related to chemistry. So it is probably unreasonable to assume that a non-human intelligence would have any ability to decipher a human’s symbolic representation of a hydrogen atom, from any given point in human history.
Dolphins and other cetaceans, for example, are believed by many humans to be likely terrestrial candidates for non-human intelligence. It is unlikely, however, that most dolphins would understand a human’s symbolic representation of a hydrogen atom, or binary notation of numerals, or consecutive strings of prime numbers. At least, as of this writing, no dolphin has clicked a consecutive string of prime numbers to any human capable of comprehending the significance of prime numbers; it may simply be that dolphins consider humans mathematically inept.

Symbolic representations of hydrogen atoms, binary notation, and prime numbers
each, at one time or another, have been deliberately transmitted into space, in hopes that some other species somewhere might recognize us as intelligent. Perhaps the most eloquent, although probably equally incomprehensible, messages sent
deliberately into deep space to date were not a radio or light transmission at all, but rather two identical drawings etched in 6” by 9” gold-anodized aluminum plates, attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft.

Punch magazine was quick to point out some possible misinterpretations of the etchings. Among the quotes of the hypothetical alien scientists attempting to decipher the etchings--

“A suggestion that it could be a map of some metropolitan railway has been made to us, but we feel that this fails to take into account the arrowed position of a capsized yacht…”

“The illustrated talent for the creature on the right to be capable of firing arrows from the shoulder is a particularly sinister turn…”

Indeed.

On Intelligence, part one

The following is part of an essay I wrote back in 2000 or something, as part of a 600-level course in astronomy and exobiology. I'm not big on recycling old material, but I'm even less big on re-inventing the wheel, and there's material here I want to present before delving deeper into the topic of extra-terrestrial intelligence. I've edited it here to read a bit less like a post-grad paper, but I'm leaving the original content more or less intact. I'm going to present this here in installments, because the original essay is rather long. I probably won't disclaimer all of the later installments, or excerpts from other essays from that time, so let this disclaimer stand for all of them.

=========================================

The first obstacle in the path of finding extraterrestrial intelligence is to define
“intelligence”. Even when discussing terrestrial animals, the concept of “intelligence” is at best an abstraction. Some criteria for intelligence have been such things as total brain mass, brain-to-body-weight ratio, neocortex-to-bodyweight ratio, communications and behavior. Using these criteria, reasonable arguments may be made for the intellectual superiority of such creatures as humans and other apes, crows, cetaceans, mice, dogs, cats, bees and spiny anteaters. It is questionable whether humans possess the intellectual capacity to recognize intelligence in other species, or to meaningfully define intelligence
generally. From a purely evolutionary standpoint, every species which currently exists would be, by definition, equally “intelligent” for its evolutionary niche or it would have been out-competed by a more “intelligent” species.

However, for the purposes of the current search for extraterrestrial life, we can eliminate a great many of the abstract considerations of what constitutes actual intelligence, and simply focus on the specific types of intelligence which might produce EM transmissions. As EM energy is the first (and currently only) possible means for humans to communicate beyond this planet and beyond the solar system, we are limited to this spectrum, and any species communicating by other than EM means are self-eliminated from the search. Within the EM spectrum, we can narrow our definition of “intelligence” to mean the type of intelligence which can produce narrowband EM transmissions which are pulsed into a pattern which is readily identifiable as non-random. This effectively limits the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to such intelligences as humans, which are now able to produce such EM transmissions artificially, and fireflies, which are capable of producing such transmissions biologically. There is no reason to postulate the greater
likelihood of biological or artificial ability to transmit in the EM spectrum, nor is there any reason to assume that either would necessarily be more likely to possess a type of intelligence similar to our own. However, it is
possible that a species which developed artificial means of transmitting and receiving EM energy would have undergone a greater number of analogous steps in their intellectual evolution to our own, than a species which had evolved a biological means of transmitting and receiving in this spectrum. For this reason, we will focus our search on those species which have developed EM technology independent of any biological mechanism for producing this, whether or not we would be able to discern the difference from Earth-based telescopes.

We have not yet discovered another world within our own solar system which
conclusively harbors life, although Europa is a prime candidate. As we have observed no evolutionary models other than our own, we can, at this point, only extrapolate from our own evolution what course the evolution of intelligence might take on another world. The steps in our own evolution which might reasonably be expected to have extraterrestrial analogues leading to the development of EM technology are as follows:

Impeti 1: Organic chemicals to prokaryotic life
Evolutionary Impeti 2: Prokaryotic life to eukaryotic life
Evolutionary Impeti 3: Cambrian explosion (2011 note: I was unaware of the Ediacaran Biota when I wrote this, which fundamentally changes this part of the equation)
Evolutionary Impeti 4: Prehensility
Evolutionary Impeti 5: Technology
Evolutionary Impeti 6: Intelligence (development of EM technology)

By this definition, homo sapiens became an intelligent species in September of 1895 ev, when Guglielmo Marconi became the first intelligent mammal on earth. Now, a little more than a century since this achievement, humans are able to demonstrate their intelligence every time they place a call on a cellular telephone.
Prehensility is of course critical, as species which might otherwise be construed as
“intelligent” which have no physical means of creating technology (such as some
cetaceans) tend not to build artifacts capable of transmitting in the EM spectrum. It is over-simplifying the situation, however, to assume that an orderly progression from the digging-stick to the cellular telephone (or radio telescope) is inevitable for any prehensile and technologically inclined species.
Even species which happen to develop EM technology may not utilize it for
communications, either because they have methods of communication which are superior
to EM, or simply because it does not occur to them to do so. For example, many human
cultures have, independently of one another, developed both cups and strings; however the number of human cultures who have adapted these technologies to create crude telephones out of them is significantly small. The analogy is not a bad one; SETI itself is rather like standing on an island with a cup-and-string telephone and sticking one cup to our ear and holding the other cup out to the sea, and hoping to hear people talking on some other island. And then shouting into one cup while holding the other cup out to the sea, hoping someone out there will hear us.

Means vs Ends

Rarely am I as conflicted as I am about the report that the Japanese whaling fleet has apparently been stopped largely due to the efforts of Sea Shepherd.

Ending whaling is superb, and long overdue. My conflict is with the methods used to accomplish this. To Sea Shepherd's credit, no human lives were lost on either side, and they were apparently successful where all other means have failed. And also, as one who has been a fairly constant critic of Sea Shepherd, at the end of they day they've done much more to protect the whales than I have. I recognize that, and grudgingly respect it. Sea Shepherd has however displayed excreble seamanship at times, and their tactics are often no more than terrorism.

I say this with no strong bias; I spent ten years as a nuclear terrorist myself, on behalf of the US Navy. It's an ugly way to fight a war, but sometimes it's an effective one. At the end of the day neither the US or Soviet Union were willing to nuke the other, out of fear of retaliation against civilian population centers. The Cold War is now over, the Chinese won, and most of all of the player's cities and citizens were still standing. The end result was a positive one, mostly. But it was still terrorism, and at the end of the day we were all basically willing to commit genocide against complete strangers, who had done us no more wrong than being born in a place which had different ideas about how to share property. Did the end justify the means in that case? Maybe.

Did Sea Shepherd's ends justify their means? Again, maybe. Perhaps the road to heaven is sometimes paved with evil intentions. For the moment, the whales are not being hunted. Maybe it really is as simple as that, ethics and seamanship be damned.

Will post more on this in a few days, will be on the water this weekend. Here's the story in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/world/asia/19japan.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Lowering the Bar: NASA 2012 Budget Request

NASA has just released its 2012 budget request. We knew it wasn't going to be pretty.

From a very quick perusal, here's what it looks like. The centerpiece of the 2012 budget is the International Space Station. I could almost end this post with that, and you'd get the idea. But, there are some other points of interest.

Maintaining the ISS is the biggest single item on the list. They spent an awful lot of ink justifying that one. It's a good program, and relatively inexpensive to maintain at this point. But at this moment it's the sexiest thing NASA has to offer the general public, and that's not great. Once the Space Shuttles are retired later this year, to get to the ISS we'll either hitch a ride with the Russians, or make our astronauts fly coach on Virgin Galactic. At least if they fly with Sir Richard they'll have funky purple lighting, techno music, cool safety videos, personal entertainment systems and pretty decent food while they rack up those frequent-flier miles to use on lower altitude Virgin flights.

Continued exploration of the Moon and Mars, with the long-term goal of colonizing both of them, are also a high priority in this new budget. I think that the possibility that we'll have a colony in the moon's Peary Crater within my lifetime is now pretty good. I don't expect to see a colony on Mars within my lifetime, but my daughters may see it within theirs. If outmigration is the main goal (and it's not an unreasonable one) a larger low-orbital space station might have been cheaper. But it would have been harder to justify, given that we already have the ISS. 

Continued focus on earth sciences, such as global warming, and on solar weather. All of these are necessary and good.

The James Webb Space Telescope, even though it's already well over budget, survived the cuts. I think Hubble made a believer out of people. I'm really glad JWST survived, I had serious doubts.

There's still funding for Near Earth Object tracking and research. I figured that one was safe. Almost everyone can figure out the cost-benefit analysis of knowing if a large asteroid is on its way.

Other than Mars, most of the planetary exploration has been cut. JUNO will still fly to Jupiter, simply because they've already spent so much on it. But the proposed missions to Europa and the other Galilean moons, and to Titan and Enceladus, have all been de-funded. This isn't surprising. Taxpayers generally fall into two categories; those who have never heard of Europa, and those who are terrified that we'll find life there which wasn't mentioned in some bronze-age religious text or another. Either way, most Americans aren't that interested in going there. Maybe Europe, India or China will get there in the next decade or so. NASA won't.

Low-budget heavy lift, using cannibalized parts from the space shuttles and the Constellation project, was authorized to be fully operational by 2016. See the recent post here on big dumb booster technology. I'm happy about this: I've been a fan of BDB for years, and the US is long overdue to start exploring space on-the-cheap. I'm a little surprised that they didn't also grant more funding for solar sail technology for the same reason, but they didn't, so far as I could tell.

Not surprisingly, exploratory funding for  Project Orion was cut, again. I'm a huge proponent of Orion, but I'm not too sad that it was cut from NASA's budget this year. I think that particular djinni is out of the bottle now, and if NASA doesn't build it, somebody else will (c'mon Mr Branson, you know you want to do it before Bezos does!). But for the moment, for better or worse, it looks like the moon and Mars, slow and cheap but with the intention of staying, are NASA's new goals.

Here's the whole budget.

Big Dumb Booster

There is a story which has been floating around (sorry) for some time now, about NASA astronauts during the first Apollo/Soyuz mission showing off their multimillion dollar space-pen to the Soviet astronauts, who in turn showed the NASA astronauts that they had solved the problem of writing in a zero gravity environment by using a pencil. The story is technically true but mostly apocryphal; NASA had tried to develop pencils which could be used safely in space but found them exorbitantly expensive, and the Russians have been using the US (commercially researched and designed by Fisher, not the US government or its contractors) space pens ever since. The combination of the fact that broken pencil leads floating around in a spaceship are dangerous for both the crew and the ship itself, and the fact that flammable materials (like wood) on board a spaceship are a really bad idea, mean that the Fisher Space Pen really is the best solution to the problem of being able to write in a zero-G (and otherwise extreme) environment. And, incidentally, you can purchase one yourself now for as little as $22, although if anyone reading this blog was thinking "hey, what a great Valentine's gift for Captain Robert" the Kubotan/Key Chain/Space Pen version is way cooler and only $8 more. Because in space, no-one can hear you kiai.

But I digress.

The point is that the story, though mostly apocryphal, is still around because it illustrated a fundamental truth about the difference between the US and Soviet space programs during the Cold War, and incidentally also the US and Soviet militaries during the Cold War. The US built things to much narrower tolerances with much tighter margins for error, and were generally more elegant and sophisticated. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, excelled at low-tech solutions to high-tech problems. Early on, it was assumed (at least by Americans) that this meant that the US space programs were better and safer. History has shown otherwise. With the Russian space program launching many more crewed missions than the US during the same time period, both nations have suffered two fatal in-flight accidents; Soyuz 1 and 11 in 1967 and 1971 (the latter of which being the only crewed mission to technically fail in "space"), and the space shuttles Challenger and Columbia in 1986 and 2003.

So, what did the Russians do to create a perfectly functional space program on-the-cheap, and why can't the United States do the same thing? The answer to the first question is that instead of building an incredibly sophisticated bleeding-edge system like Apollo, they basically just stuck a primitive life-support capsule on top of a giant fuel tank, lit the fuse and ran. Yes, that's an oversimplification, but not much of one. And, proof being as it is "in the pudding", the damned thing worked. Over and over and over again. The method is called "Big Dumb Booster" or BDB. It's not pretty, and it's not especially efficient, but it does get the job done at a fraction of the cost of the way Apollo did.

So, if the Soviets could figure that out, why couldn't the US? The NASA space programs weren't always high-tech; the Mercury Redstone Freedom Seven rocket which launched Alan Shepard into space for fifteen and a half minutes in 1961 could not possibly have been more crudely designed. Next time you happen to be in the Cape Canaveral area go look at the Mercury Redstone that is on display there, touch it, and remember that a man went into space in it once and lived to tell about it.

The answer is that NASA did in fact figure this out, quite independently of the Vostok program. In 1962 Robert Truax designed the Sea Dragon rocket, which would have been the largest rocket ever built. It would have been capable of lifting 550 metric ton payloads into orbit for the insanely low cost of about $300 per kilogram, using materials and technologies available off-the-shelf in 1962. Even allowing for 50 years of inflation, with modern materials replacing steel and cheaper, smaller computers controlling the flight than were even imaginable in 1962 the costs would be substantially the same. And both stages and the capsule of the 150 meter tall rocket are reusable. Sea Dragon presumed being launched at sea with nothing but its own buoyancy to keep it vertical during the launch phase, but there is no reason that the traditional launch gantries already existing at Canaveral could not be used.

Sea Dragon tended by USS Enterprise. Now that's irony.

So, I'm discussing the BDB technology for a reason. The space shuttle program is ending this year, we have only two or possibly three missions left. This is not a bad thing. The shuttles are 30 years old now, I wouldn't recommend driving to Spokane in a Buick that old, let alone going into space. Especially if 1/3 of the Buicks ever built had already failed catastrophically. The space shuttles were supposed to be replaced with the Constellation/Orion project, which was basically "Apollo was fun, let's do it again!". I was sad when the US government pulled the plug on Constellation/Orion (not to be confused with Project Orion, the so-called 100-year starship), but it was the right decision. Funding was instead given to companies like Virgin Galactic, SpaceX and Blue Origin to produce light-lift Low Earth Orbit vehicles, which they're doing. However, none of these companies are ready yet to start producing genuine heavy-lift vehicles, so Congress, after canceling Constellation/Orion went back and ordered NASA to build a heavy-lift crewed vehicle, on a very limited budget.

My first reaction to this was that Congress needed to get out of the spaceflight business and leave it to the professionals. But, actually, I think they may have gotten it right. What they really said, or meant to say, was "build us a heavy lift rocket, use whatever parts you can from Constellation, build it big, sloppy and cheap, and build it now". In so many words, Congress told NASA to build Sea Dragon, or something very much like it. Good on them. It's not a decision NASA would have likely come to on its own.

For the record, toward the end of the Cold War the Soviets started trying to build things like space shuttles the way the US did. The grass is always greener, but ultimately Russia went back to building BDBs. We can, too. Big Dumb Boosters aren't sexy. They aren't "the way of the future". But they may well be the best option we have to keep our space programs rolling forward in the present. And maybe, once they've built a successful BDB program, they'll have a little money left over to buy a couple of pens.

UPDATE: Here is another page on Sea Dragon, link sent to me by Winchell Chung at the Atomic Rockets website: More Sea Dragon Info

The Sentinel

In 1950 physicist Enrico Fermi, while considering the presumed ubiquity of technological civilizations around the Milky Way, over lunch one day asked the simple question, "Where are they?". By which he meant, even if advanced alien civilizations were exceedingly rare, if they existed at all some of them, even traveling at speeds of 5% of the speed of light (which may in fact prove to be about the maximum speed possible for space travel, which will be the subject of another post in the near future) or even slower, should eventually have colonized or at least visited all of the galaxy and already contacted us, either in person or by means of a probe of some sort. Meaning, the question of whether or not there are other technological civilizations in the Milky Way should be nonsensical; either there are none, or they're already here and downtown Seattle should look like Mos Eisley Spaceport. I mean, even more than it already does.

 The fact that earth is not already crawling with aliens (no disrespect intended to the Aldebaranian's mode of locomotion, its just an expression), combined with the lack of an unambiguous signal received by any of the SETI telescopes, is sometimes referred to as the Great Silence, or the Fermi Paradox.

I think this is from the brilliant comic XKCD, if you know otherwise please let me know!

There are a couple of possible explanations for this. The first is that there simply aren't any other technologically advanced civilizations in the Milky Way. As a generation which has grown up on a daily diet of science fiction, this seems ironically uncomfortable. But it may well be the case. Of the billions of species which have ever lived on earth we are the only one which has proven capable of space travel or radio broadcasts. Or any other technology more sophisticated than a digging stick or a broken rock. Life, even intelligent life, may well be ubiquitous, but technologically advanced civilizations may be vanishingly rare.

Another possibility is that interstellar space travel, either for reasons we do understand or for reasons we do not, may simply not be feasible. This is also uncomfortable for us, but it may be true. It is almost certainly true that crewed space travel will never exceed about 10% of the speed of light, for a variety of reasons (not the least of which being that by 12% of the speed of light, a grain of sand hitting the vessel would react with the force of a hydrogen bomb). But at 10% (or even 5%, which we have the technology to achieve right now) of the speed of light we could get to the nearest stars within a human lifetime. But there may be barriers to traveling through interstellar space which we haven't even considered.

Another possibility, one championed by UFO enthusiasts, is that our skies and streets ARE crawling with aliens, we just need to pull our heads out of our recta and realize it. This isn't quite as far-fetched as it sounds; some have posited that the natives in Hispaniola could not see Columbus's ships until their shamans or whatever they're called there did. This may be apocryphal, but it is true and demonstrable that the human mind filters out data it isn't prepared to process. If this sounds like BS to you, take this simple test here, and then come back to this post. My personal feeling is that this possibility is pretty unlikely, but I wanted to include it specifically because so many discussions of the Fermi Paradox willfully exclude it, which is simply bad science. 

Yet another possibility is that alien civilizations have visited here in the past, and then (tinkered with chimpanzi genes to invent us/used their antigravity technology to move around a bunch of rocks/put on funny hats and modeled for neolithic artists/figured we were beyond hope and left never to return/fill in the blank). This is also possible; there is an entire field of research called SETA, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Artifacts. SETA to date has not proven any more fruitful than SETI, with one possible exception which I'll talk about in a moment. In order for an artifact to be unambiguously "alien" it needs to be something truly beyond the abilities of human artificers to construct. For example, the pyramids at Cheops are amazing, but well within the capability of bronze-age builders if you happen to have many of them. If the pyramids had been made out of titanium, for example, THAT would be a pretty good indication that it was not built by bronze-age humans.

One type of artifact especially interesting to SETA researchers is something called a Bracewell Probe, first proposed by Ronald Bracewell in 1960. It is an autonomous robot probe used essentially as a message in a bottle to another star, which has crammed into its memory banks all of the information from and about the originating species that it's creators deemed worthy to put in it. If the probe happens to have the ability to utilize resources in other star systems to self-replicate, it is called a von Neumann probe and then has the ability to cover a lot more interstellar territory. Arthur Clarke, in his novel and then movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, imagined that an advanced alien civilization might send out millions of such probes to monitor promising worlds around the galaxy. Rather than try to analyze the development of each of the billions of species the probes were monitoring, the aliens set up a simple test. They placed a Bracewell probe on the moon. Any species on earth which advanced to the point of landing on the moon would find the probe, and trigger it to give the previously earthbound species further instructions.  

If you watched 2001 but didn't quite understand what was happening in that scene, or in any part of the movie, that's okay. Clarke was brilliant, and director Stanley Kubrick was brilliant, but the combination of the two of them was just effing weird.

So, we've been to the moon, and haven't found a Bracewell probe there. But oddly enough, we may actually have found one even closer than the moon.

On 6 November 1991 astronomer Jim Scotti discovered what he thought was a small near-earth object (asteroid), which was prosaically named 1991vg. NEO expert Duncan Steel at the University of Adelaide, Australia, analyzed 1991vg and made a truly startling discovery.  Based on the orbit of 1991vg, which trails the earth in its own orbit but sometimes closes range with earth for brief periods and then resumes its "station" behind it, and based also on the fact that light reflected from it indicates that the object is of a faceted nature (more like a shoebox than a basketball), there are three possible explanations for it. The first is that it is a naturally occurring asteroid. The second is that it is a piece of human-made space debris, left over most likely from the early Apollo missions. The third is that it is a self-propelled artifact of non-human origin. Through careful analysis and process of elimination, the third possibility has emerged as by far the most likely candidate. Really.

It is important to understand that Duncan Steel is probably the world's foremost expert of NEOs. He has written dozens of papers on various aspects of NEO research, and Steel and Scotti together have discovered and catalogued more NEOs than maybe all of the other researchers in the field combined. When Duncan Steel says "that's definitely not an asteroid and probably not human-made space junk", it's worthy of further investigation.

Here is his paper on the subject, in its entirety: SETA and 1991vg    

More research, obviously, must be done to determine the true nature of 1991vg. But if you happen to look up in the sky some night and see a giant baby swatting at satellites, don't say I didn't warn you.

The Future is Ours to See

This is a blog about science. Sometimes it focuses on practical applications of science, particularly in the maritime industry. Sometimes it focuses directly on new (or old but interesting) discoveries in astronomy, physics or meteorology, and sometimes I'll even branch out from these if I see something I find interesting. For the most part I try to stay away from the "soft sciences" (usually defined as any discipline other than your own, but with no judgment implied I specifically mean things like psychology and sociology which don't lend themselves as well to the methodological rigor of the physics lab).

And unequivocally I avoid discussion of pseudosciences, except occasionally in the negative. With one singular exception I have avoided anything even remotely metaphysical here. If someone reports seeing something unusual in the sky I may report that, but without much more solid evidence than I've seen to date I'm not going to report that as space aliens.

It isn't that I'm not occasionally interested in such things. It's not even that I refuse to accept the possibility of such things; Bigfoot may prove to be the 21st century's coelacanth (possible; there's no reason to assume that humans are the only primate species in North America), and UFOs may turn out to be alien space ships (rather less likely, I think). The Royal Society once dismissed reports of meteorites based on the understanding that "there are no rocks in the sky, therefore rocks do not fall out of the sky". I get that. But I don't blog here about things currently considered pseudoscience, first because this is a science blog, and second because there are quite enough really cool things within the realm of the hard sciences to fill a blog.

I have and will continue to discuss SETL,  SETI, and things like the Drake Equation, the Great Silence and the Fermi Paradox, because they are topical to my blog and relevant to most fields of astronomy. My next "series" will probably be about SETI. SETI is weird, but SETI is science. It belongs here.

What follows is also science. It belongs here, too.

Dr Daryl Bem, Professor Emeritus at Cornell University, has done something for the realm of ESP research which is going to revolutionize nearly everything we thought we understood about the way the world works. Dr Bem is a psychologist, not a physicist, so he is perhaps to be forgiven for not immediately recognizing some of the more unsettling implications of his work. I had planned to wait and see how the mainstream media was covering his research before posting about it, but they don't seem to be covering it at all. So, maybe you're hearing about his research here first.    

Dr. Daryl Bem

So, here's what Dr Bem did. He recognized the fact that in the field of Psi research, even extraordinary evidence would not suffice to support an extraordinary claim. No amount of evidence for telepathy would matter, it is already established that information can be transmitted invisibly from one mind to another. Part of this very post was written and transmitted to my computer on an Android phone (thanks, Santa!). Similarly, for a mind to influence matter invisibly at a distance has no special merit, we use remote controls all the time. Similarly with remote viewing. All of the "talents" ascribed to Psi could be accomplished with simple radio waves.

Except for one. The one thing radio waves cannot do is relay information from the future to the present. To prove that one could receive information "psychically" from the future would prove that something extraordinary was indeed happening. To do so, in and of itself, would fundamentally change the way we understood the world around us, forever.

But Bem didn't stop there. He realized that for the new knowledge to become widely accepted, the experiments to prove the new knowledge had to be simple enough to be reproducible not just by a major research facility, but by any undergrad at any community college with access to no more resources than a laptop computer. It would not suffice for the knowledge to be demonstrable by scientists cloistered in a laboratory. It needed to be demonstrable by anyone who had a few minutes to demonstrate it.

And, the demonstration could not be ambiguous. Some hundredths of a percent deviation over statistical norms when performed by some rare talent would not do; the numbers had to be big and unambiguous and reproducible no matter who was being tested. Bem did this. In each of his experiments his subjects scored consistently 3% above random chance. This is not a statistical anomaly. This is solid evidence.

Bem's methods are going to be controversial. His main field of study is human sexuality, and he realized that humans would react much more strongly to sexual imagery than to deliberately neutral imagery such as the Zener cards pioneered at the Rhine Institute and other parapsychological research facilities.

Zener cards at the Rhine Institute

But his results are striking, and some of the implications of his results are mind-bending. Not only did he establish that the human mind can receive information from the future as well as from the past, but that the human mind can actually learn new information in the future and apply that information in the present. Meaning, you can study for a test after taking the test and still improve your test score.

Chew on that one for a bit.


Daryl Bem's research has been thoroughly peer reviewed and is already demonstrating its reproducibility. By any standard, this is huge. Much of the scientific community is pooping its collective diaper over it at the moment, up to and including attempting to dismiss all of statistical analysis for all fields of science rather than accept that Bem's research could be correct. Otherwise reputable scientists are actually going on record and stating that "Bem's analysis is wrong because it proves precognition and precognition isn't real". Which gets us back to the Royal Society. Rocks do occasionally fall out of the sky. And apparently we do occasionally get information from the future.

Here is Dr Bem's paper, in its entirety.
Feeling the Future

God, Science, the Universe and Everything

How's that for a modest title?
As promised, a short talk on the nature of God and the universe we live in.

First, let me state up front that I am not going to weigh in on the subject of whether or not God actually exists, because 1) I don't know and 2) it really doesn't matter to me one way or the other. Either God exists and that's the way the universe is, or God doesn't exists and that's the way the universe is. Either way, I have no great stake in the matter and no ability to do anything about it. What I am going to weigh in on is the question of, if God does exist, what must that be, and what must that mean for human (and other) life on earth and elsewhere?

I'm going to look at "God" in three distinct contexts; that which created and maintains the universe, that which is the creator and destroyer of all life on Earth, and that which guides our own moral compass with which we navigate our lives. Whether these three contexts have any relationship to each other or in any way are describing the same thing is a matter for the philosophers and theologians; perhaps the simple act of naming these things "God" makes it so. I do not know, and again I have no stake in the matter.

Oh God, thou art so big, we're all really impressed down here

So, let's start with God as the Supreme Architect of the Universe, that force which created all that is. Arguably, anything less than that cannot really be considered to be God. If the "universe" turns out to be much bigger than our observable universe, as Gurzadyan and Penrose seem to have proven, then God would have to be the creator and maintainer of the entire multiverse as well. However vast the universe ultimately turns out to be, God, in order to be God, would need to be bigger/older/whatever than that.

For perspective, our earth is about 8000 miles in diameter. It orbits the sun at about 93,000,000 miles, give or take 3,000,000 miles. The sun's diameter is about 865,000 miles, or about 110 times that of the earth. The distance from the sun to the earth is one astronomical unit (AU). The outermost planet of our solar system, Neptune, orbits 30 AU from our sun. The nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri, is 27,1000 AU from the sun, or 4.2 light years away. Our Milky Way galaxy contains some 400,000,000,000 stars many if not most with planets orbiting them, and it is some 100,000 light years across. There are more than 80,000,000,000 galaxies in the observable universe which is some 92,000,000,000 light years across; the whole universe is many times greater than this, even if it turns out to be only a single universe. It is more likely that there are as many universes in the multiverse as there are stars in the Milky Way. And there may be structures of an even greater magnitude which we cannot yet conceive.

For God to be God, God must be God of all of this.
This God, which happens to be the God of Einstein and Spinoza and Hawking and all of the other Pantheists, does not give a tinker's damn about the petty sectarian squabbles of some primate species crawling on a rock spinning around a tiny yellow star in a backwater neighborhood of some modestly sized barred-spiral galaxy in the middle of mother effing nowhere. The petty foibles and aspirations of one individual of one species living on one world orbiting one of some 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the observable universe really cannot be that big of a concern to any entity or intelligence worthy of the name God. By this definition, any God that gives a sliver of a damn about you, or your species, or your world, or your galaxy, is not really God.

And, that's okay. I'm happy to get along in my life without direct assistance from the Grand Architect of the Universe, whatever that might be. It's a big universe, and I don't want to be a bother.

There is only one God, and He is a Sun God, Ra, Ra, Ra!

No that's not me, but it's a great pic!

For so long as humans have existed as a species, and probably long before then, we have recognized or intuited that all life on earth depends directly on our sun. Our sun lives and we live, our sun dies and we die; the sun as the ultimate giver and taker of all life on earth is easily demonstrable and incontrovertible. It is no accident, then, that as organisms living upon the earth we have come to venerate the sun as God. How the sun is portrayed in a spiritual context varies from culture to culture, sometimes male, sometimes female, gentle and benign in colder climates and sometimes vengeful and wrathful in hotter climates. God as the sun has many names throughout the world; Ra, Shakuru, Osiris, Amaterasu, Apollo, Quetzalcoatl, Jesus Christ, Surya, Lugh, Tai Yang Gong, Mithras, Sunna and many others. It's hard to think of a rational argument against venerating the source of all life on earth, by whatever name or image one likes to think of that.

And yes, the Moon also played a critical role in the origin of life on earth, and continues to play a critical role in sustaining it. So long as our species lives on earth, we will hopefully always venerate these lights as Gods, by any other name.

Your Own Personal Flying Spaghetti Monster

From astronomy to neuroscience...God also is that "entity", for want of something better to call it, which guides our daily lives. The fact that so many people from so many different cultures and religions have experienced this God in so many different guises, and also the fact that so many people from so many cultures and religions have not experienced it, leads me to believe that whatever this God is, it is simply a natural part of the human condition.

For sake of disclosure, I myself have had a near-death experience, when I was a teenager, and during that experience I encountered that which I consider to be God, in the sense of that presence which both guides me and by which I attempt steer my life. Subjectively, for me, God in this sense is very profoundly real, at least to the extent that the sun and the moon and the earth are real, and that the universe is real. My own consciousness is the only window I have with which to perceive the world. Through that window, I have glimpsed God. Whether what I glimpsed was actually an entity outside of my existence, or my own "higher power", or simply a natural result of brain chemistry under extreme stress, I neither know nor care. If God as I experience that steers me to make the world a better place I tend to try to follow that, and if God as I experience that tried to goad me into bombing a building with a Ryder truck full of fertilizer I would politely decline, and seek psychiatric attention.

Religion which soothes a child during the loss of their pet goldfish is good, religion which inspires people to burn other people at the stake is bad. It really isn't more complicated than that.

Many Mansions

There is only one universe, or perhaps there is only one multiverse, but regardless the universe for one is the universe for all. The same is true for the sun and moon; the sun I see is relatively (and relativistically) the same sun you see. Whatever name I choose to call that, whatever myths I choose to ascribe to that, my sun is no more or less "true" than anyone else's sun. My own personal Deity is true for me, it may resemble someone else's Deity, or it may not.

All of the world's religions are based on one or more of these three basic concepts of God. As such, they are equally true and equally untrue. If God is infinite, and we are finite, and all finite things are equally distant from any infinite thing, then no one is "closer to God" than anyone else, or anything else. I am no more or less Godly than Mother Teresa or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or a jelly-fish or a carrot. Neither are you.

I tend to think of God as a single jewel with many thousands of facets. Which facet you see most clearly depends entirely upon where you are standing as you look at the jewel. The fact that one facet does not look exactly like another facet is of no relevance, no single facet is superior or inferior to any other. Each of the world's religions is simply viewing a single facet of God. 

Mythology and Science

Nuit at the Beginning of the World

Myths are powerful and beautiful things. To impart wisdom through storytelling and fable lies at the very core of the human experience. It does not matter if the story was created by stone-age hunters or bronze-age herdsmen or space-age film-makers, the power of myth is the thread which sustains and inspires the human spirit and lifts it above the daily drudgery of gutting a sheep or driving a passenger ferry. Even when a myth was created to explain an unexplainable which has since been explained, myth continues to hold power as metaphor. I do not need my metaphors to be literally true in order for them to be useful. I also do not expect a bronze-age philosopher to have had a space-age understanding of the history or cosmology of the universe, nor do I need their understanding of the universe to be synoptic with my own in order to grasp the meaning of their stories.

As we develop better methods of observing the world around us, inevitably some of our myths will be found to be factually erroneous. The earth does not rest on the shoulders of a giant standing on a turtle, the human species was not created by mixing sand and mucus in a seashell, and the universe was not created in six solar days. That's okay, myths are not science textbooks.

Strait of Magellan, however, is a science blog. And so now I depart from the topic of religion on this blog. Really, it has no place here.

Brightest blessings, to all and sundry.

Before the Big Bang, and Beyond the Universe

Not very many years ago the title of this post would have been oxymoronic. There was no "before" the Big Bang, and no "beyond" the universe; the Big Bang defined the beginning of Time and the universe defined the limits of Space.


This month, for the first time, astronomers studying patterns in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) have discovered artifacts both from before the Big Bang and beyond this universe. At least four other universes have "bumped" into our own. The images below are of "bruises" in the CMB of our own universe. 

By rights this announcement should be as big, or bigger than the Copernican Revolution, which first proved that Earth was not the center of the Universe. But only 90 years ago it was still scientifically accepted that the sun was at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which was the only galaxy and therefore the entire universe (the other observable galaxies being mistaken for small nebulae within the Milky Way). The Shapley-Curtis debate in 1920 marked the beginning of our present understanding of the cosmos. Heber Curtis correctly surmised that the Andromeda "nebula" and others were in fact "island universes"; separate galaxies unto themselves. Harlow Shapley, for his part, correctly surmised that rather than inhabiting the exalted real estate of the center of the galaxy, the Sun actually exists far away from the center of the galaxy. We now know that the sun is in the Orion-Cygnus spur, not even one of the major galactic Spiral Arms.    


So, within a human lifetime, we have been relocated within the collective conscious from the center of the universe to a speck in some galactic backwater in only one of countless billions of galaxies. So perhaps the further relocation from a single universe with a unique beginning to just one of countless universes just doesn't seem that important to anyone other than astronomers and physicists. That's okay. I still think it's pretty damned cool.


Here's the story from the Daily Mail:  Cosmic Bruises

Here's the original paper, and a response to another group of researchers who were able to reproduce the data but didn't agree with the original team's conclusions.

40 Acres and a Vacuum-Packed Mule

When thinking about colonization of other worlds and places within our solar system, I am reminded of how very unhappy many earthbound colonists have been with their new homes. When the Denny Party landed on Alki Beach in what was to become Seattle, the women and children wept at the realization that they had left civilization to be stranded upon some of the most temperate and arable land on the planet. They wept because they were far away from home, and because it was raining. Seattle rain. Not deluge, just steady drizzle. Plenty of water, plenty of food, November temperatures in the mid 50s, and the natives were friendly and helpful. But the settlers were heartbroken because it wasn't New York City, yet.

A closer (albeit fictional) analog to our potential planetary expats are the intrepid penguins from the movie Madagascar, who, having commandeered a merchant ship to Antarctica, set foot on the Antarctic ice and solemnly pronounce, "well, this sucks". 

Seattle, on the worst of days, is a hell of a lot more clement than Mars. Antarctica, on the worst of days, is a hell of a lot more clement than Mars.

So what would motivate thousands of people to relocate off-world to a place less hospitable than the least hospitable places on earth? To create, not just a scientific outpost like McMurdo Station in Antarctica, or a mining facility like Prudhoe Bay, but an actual frontier settlement?

What has caused people to create such colonies in the past? Here are a few possibilities.

Mineral or other wealth has always been a strong motivator, but there's no reason to imagine that we'll experience a Lunar or Martian Gold-Rush anytime soon. Mars has plenty of iron, but so does earth, and earth's iron deposits are a lot closer.

What Mars does have, however, is an awful lot of cheap real estate. Assuming that the cost of transporting a large number of families could be kept low per family, some people would likely be enticed by the possibility of owning a plot of land the size of, say, Japan. The land isn't arable, so they would be under no obligation to cultivate it. First generation homesteaders could congregate in a central community on Mars, and "tend" their lands from a distance. Once the central community was well-established, some settlers might well chose to actually homestead on their property. The central "city" would continue to grow, and smaller communities would crystallize around the outlying homesteads. In this way, large expanses of Mars could be colonized quickly, albeit sparsely.

One of the easiest ways to relocate large numbers of people from more desirable land to less desirable land is, um, against their will. Penal colonies, for example, have a long history of thriving in the most adverse conditions, and emerging within a few generations as a stable society. I'm actually a fan of penal colonies. But my ancestors were among the first European colonists of Australia, so I'm a direct result of one. The Botany Bay and Port Moresby colonies were unequivocally successful. A large penal colony on Mars or Callisto might, another century hence, be a sprawling metropolis like Sydney or Brisbane.

A slightly more benign corollary to the penal colony is the refugee camp. A population dislocated from their homeland by famine, war or persecution might well find impetus to settle on an alien world. It is not difficult to imagine a latter day Plymouth, or Salt Lake City, or Tel Aviv rising from the deserts of Mare Frigoris. 

It is also possible that utopianists would build a sanctuary from worldly ills on another world. Robert Heinlein envisioned a lunar libertarian utopia in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but I am inclined to imagine that it would be utopianists, if anyone, who would first settle Enceladus. Nestled within Saturn's rings, spinning like a top delicately perched on the ice, a rotating colony on the surface of Enceladus would be far removed from terrestrial worries and law enforcement, but habitable and comfortable for those willing to leave earth behind forever. And the views would be unequalled in the solar system.

These are a small number of possibilities, there are thousands more.

Whether I have created here a reasonable template for future out-migration, or simply the backdrop for a science fiction novel, only time will tell. But it has been an interesting thought-experiment.