And now for the biggest event in science today: the Rosetta comet landing!
Latest reports suggest landing confirmation from ESA will come at 17:02 CET / 16:02 GMT.
Stay tuned and watch the live stream at the above link!
UPDATE: LANDED! Pretty tense right up until the end there. Unbelievably impressive stuff.
I was as blown away as anyone by the speed of Amtrak’s response in creating its writer residency program. The quick turn of events, from a quick retweet to a full-blown shot in the arm for the image and relevance of the ailing service, was yet another example of how powerful the internet and social media truly is.
However, that story is well-told and, frankly, boring.
What is interesting about the Amtrak story is that it has allowed the company to take what has typically been seen as a drawback to its service (namely the time required to travel from one place to the next) and turn it into a benefit. It has enabled writers to drop out, plug in, enjoy the scenery – and go to work. And that, for the right person, can be a powerful thing.
Being a sci-fi enthusiast, I immediately thought of the next step – the possible implications for space travel. Space is vast, as has often been said as well, and we are typically used to regarding this as a massive drawback. And, truth be told, it very likely is an obstacle that we may never learn to overcome.
But, just for a second, imagine a universe in which we do travel between the stars. In this world, science fiction has typically employed one of two conceits to overcome the time gap: the first, faster-than-light travel, decreases the time between two points though wormholes, warp drives, or other bending of space. The second, cryostasis, requires freezing the human body in time to offset the aging process as the vessel travels within the constraints of current ability and physics.
But perhaps, inspired by Amtrak, there is a third option: maybe it is possible that, instead of avoiding or attempting to overcome the time barrier of the journey, humanity instead embraces and celebrates it? In the aftermath of digital age, where artistic, scientific, or any other works might not require massive storage, or heavy materials for their creation, might not the long voyages in space offer potential to think, to collaborate, to produce and to refine? Might we not achieve our greatest masterworks while in limbo, waiting to begin our future on a foreign world?
Maybe, as Amtrak is currently suggesting, a little extra time between points isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Statistics are tricky things, in particular statistics based on survey interpretations, and without meaning to jump too hard onto this bandwagon, I have to admit I was floored and embarrassed by the recent finding that suggests 25% of Americans think the Sun revolves around the Earth.
This is pathetic, not just because it suggests that a quarter of the country is scientifically stuck in the time of Galileo (or before it), but also because of the sheer, willful ignorance that is required to support this view. You would literally have to be blind to avoid the various depictions of our solar system with the sun at its center these days. You would have to studiously avoid all manner of educational websites, textbooks, science texts, or even cartoon illustrations to believe otherwise.
On the one hand, I want to believe this was confusion, a rigged survey, a wording issue, but even that is hard to defend, because this isn’t a tricky question (not something like ‘How many moons does Saturn have?’ or ‘Why is Pluto not considered a planet?’). This is a basic, fundamental concept, a logical extension of gravity, and a building block for vital, larger ideas such as galaxies, space exploration, and the potential for life on other planets. It is perhaps the fundamental relationship that dictates how we view the universe and our place in it. And 25% of Americans, a country that likes to consider itself at the forefront of research and development (although we have, for essentially our entire existence, imported science and tech advancement instead of growing it at home), have this basic, critical concept embarrassingly wrong. In other words, as far as space is concerned, they don’t even make it past page 1.
Even worse, despite the checkered history of scientific concepts in media (from Journey to the Center of the Earth to Armageddon to The Core to 2012, with dozens of issues in between), this is not a question it has gotten wrong. Anyone who has watched Danny Boyle’s 2/3 brilliant movie Sunshine will not be in any doubt as to where the sun belongs in our system. Nor do any of the planets in Halo, or Star Wars, or Star Trek (as far as I know) have suns revolving around them. Even Doctor Who, a show often noted for its fantastical elements or departures from scientific accuracy, does not violate this principle.
I suspect this phenomenon is a growing one, in America in particular, and is a function of a whole generation of students who have managed to pick up only a modicum of science, perhaps even actively avoiding it in their university studies, and have then coasted on into the warm embrace of sitcoms and Sportscenter (not that there is anything particularly wrong with either, but you’re not going to hear about gravity or space in a meaningful way on them).
And yet, this is exactly why science fiction matters: because it allows people who would never otherwise consider scientific principles to encounter, absorb, and digest them. And willingly, at that! Granted, scifi is not always accurate (Sunshine has a whole host of problems, as do all of the above-mentioned films), but in general, the more extravagant the departure from reality, the more likely the audience leaves the theater googling ‘Can the sun really go out?’ (or if phasers are technologically possible, or lightsabers, or sonic screwdrivers). And that, in itself, is no bad thing.
In short: science matters, basic scientific facts matter, and scientific advancement matters – for us, for how we see ourselves, for how we approach our world, and yes, for our long-term survival potential. However, the rise (or persistence) of willful, apathetic ignorance creates a real barrier to social advancement. Science fiction offers a very powerful tool for smashing through that barrier, and we should embrace it as such.
Not long ago now, there was great excitement when we began to discover signs of potentially Earth-like planets in the theoretically habitable zones around their stars. A number of first followed each other in quick succession, each both more impressive and more fanciful than the last, each revising our estimation on the likelihood of life elsewhere in the Universe.
The trend is only continuing: recent discoveries suggest not only that potentially habitable planets exist in a number of places, but that they may in fact be “plentiful.” Thus, little by little, the odds are improving for the potential of life out there, which, to a degree, is an exciting thing (as long as you ignore the corollary implications for threats, either via other life or in terms of extinction barriers, as has been discussed at length elsewhere).
But perhaps most interesting of all of this is that it’s now very clear that we have been, at best, a curious bystander shining a narrow beam around a very large and dark room: we have barely begun to understand the limits of what surrounds us, or the things which we may encounter there. With each improvement in technology, we discover more, see farther, deeper, or measure better, and so it seems only inevitable that, in the very near future, the odds of life will improve again.
Meanwhile, in the realm of real science, NASA has taken advantage of 3D Printing (not the prosumer/hobbyist kind, mind you!) to develop and test new rocket parts. This is exciting for the acceleration it brings to the innovation cycle and the promise it has to lower the costs of rocket-building in future. It’s true that this is still an early-stage application, but it represents a sea change in the cost model and a potential further democratization of the spaceflight process. In other words, NASA’s 3D printing initiative has the promise to make rocket-building cheaper, technological development faster, and production more readily scalable than would be possible otherwise.
Additionally, of course, it brings AutoCAD that much closer to cool, which is actually pretty important. Hell, if this had been happening while I was in high school I might have become an engineer.
Courtesy of NASA (and the Atlantic), here’s a list of free space-related e-books to check out for your weekend. I know I, for one, will be checking out the Rockets and People: Hot Days of the Cold War series.
Early in Apollo 13, when a reporter asks Jim Lovell (i.e. Tom Hanks) why the Apollo program should continue on after ‘One small step…’, Tom’s answer is (loosely paraphrased) ‘Imagine if Christopher Columbus discovered the New World, and no one followed in his footsteps.’ At the time, it seems a strong response, and the reporter at least acts as if his question has been answered.
This line struck me immediately and instantly as oddly flippant and insufficient, partially due to the fact that we now know that someone (i.e. the Vikings) actually reached America nearly 500 years before Columbus and that for those five centuries, no one did follow, and partially because it reflects the degree to which Hanks’ character in the film (not necessarily Jim Lovell in real life) has become removed from the real world realities that govern his world.
The first issue is of course one of hindsight. Lovell likely did not know at the time that the Vikings had reached North America, or at the very least would not have considered it a confirmed fact. However, to someone in our present situation, this knowledge is significant as it provides both a precedent and a cautionary tale. The precedent is that of outliers, of concerted efforts and overachievement that extend past the boundaries sustainable by societal structures. The cautionary tale is the flipside of that equation, and concerns what happens when we overextend: failure, suffering, and – in the case of the Greenland settlers – starvation and ultimately extinction.
This dovetails nicely with my second issue with the response – namely, that it reflected the idealistic fervor of a true believer. To Hanks/’Lovell’, it is inconceivable that we would not continue to fly to the moon, to mine its secrets and perhaps the moon itself, whether that made economic sense or not. But of course, in the 1970s, it made absolutely no economic sense to colonize the moon – reaching it had been a primarily political achievement, a proof that the strongest nation in the free world, through a combination of concerted efforts and supported by the free market, could achieve more, and more quickly, than a totalitarian state. Once this political end was achieved, there was little left on the moon that was of interest to society as a whole.
Nor has this absence of interplanetary purpose been overcome since. The probes to Mars and Venus, and across the rest of the solar system, only served to reinforce this: outside of the spectacular announcement of life on another planet, there has been little of interest off-world to a society that has developed none of the cultural or technological structures to support an extraplanetary presence. Even now, the ISS is little more than an ultra-high-altitude observation balloon, conducting scientific experiments whose primary cultural function is to exist and occasionally upload cool zero-gravity (or more precisely, low-gravity) clips on YouTube.
More broadly, the question of whether space exploration has reached a near-term apex is one that bears serious thought. Despite plans to launch to Mars by 2030, despite various plans (including the aforementioned Mars One reality TV concept) to extend the reach of human space exploration, and despite the work that the various Mars rovers are doing, the merit/relevance of space exploration is not yet proven in the cultural psyche. For better or for worse, and James Cameron’s half-baked idea of mining asteroids notwithstanding, space exploration is a big ‘so what?’ at present, one that is somewhat hard to answer. Let’s not forget that, while the Viking expeditions to North America were the result of petty individual one-upsmanship and fortune-making, the Columbian expedition was one fueled by a global arms race for riches and dominance. In other words, despite some evidence that the Americas existed prior to Columbus’ expedition, there was no need to follow up on this information before the factors that launched Columbus in the first place made the new lands relevant. We may, unfortunately, need significantly higher pressures on Earth to overcome a similar hump in our space exploration.
Finally, there is a third, nagging question regarding the above question: “What if no one had followed in Columbus’ footsteps?” Why then, millions of Native Americans might have survived and thrived, the Incan culture might have reached new heights, and the eventual global confluence might have had a very different power dynamic. That the outcome was what it was is partially due to the factors that created the demand for exploration in the first place: an exploration born out of a thirst for power and riches is not likely to be a benign one. If our space exploration is likewise fueled by greed for wealth and power, as it inevitably will be if we wait for the large-scale cultural factors supporting permanent settlements off-world to be in place, then it can be expected we will meet similar disasters. This, then, to me, is a healthy portion of my reason for writing near-Earth science fiction: to make real the potential, to consider the present possibilities, and to light a fire under our cultural backside and make it happen – before the economic and political imperatives kick in.
We make a lot of noise about fair competition and the unfairness of doping, hormonal treatments or other chemical advantages, but let’s consider the issue from another perspective:
If tomorrow the world were threatened by a significant event, such as an asteroid impact, supervolcano eruption, or – dare I say it – confrontation with extraterrestrials, what version of human would we want to confront that danger with? The fully optimized, chemically altered superman a la Lance Armstrong, or the ‘fair play’ human with whatever natural balance of fast-twitch muscle or endorphins evolution has gifted him or her with?
This is a serious question, because it gets at the heart of the whole doping conflict. If you think you’d prefer mankind’s chances with the unaltered version, you’re either delusional or (at best) suggesting there’s something in our natural imperfection that would better qualify us for survival.
I’ll get back to the latter point later. First, a word on natural selection, our planet, and our universe: the forces that created us are also trying to kill us. More precisely, the apparent statistical anomaly of intelligent life in the Universe suggests strongly that a) the odds against our coming into existence in the first place are astronomical and b) that the odds of our continued existence are hardly better. So before there is talk of ‘mother nature/natural selection knows best’, consider that mother nature could care less about intelligent life, here or anywhere. In other words, when considering our survival, we need all the help we can get, natural or chemical.
Now, to get back to the idea of the inherent advantages of not tampering with our genetics or conditioning – this is an argument born out of the imperfections of the current state of doping / steroid treatments. It is indubitably true that looking like Barry Bonds or Arnold Schwarzenegger is not a unilateral advantage, and that anabolic steroids in particular have a number of unfortunate and unhappy side effects. But at the same time – as the cycling circuit is now proving – it is possible to look quite small, in fact, and still possess extraordinary aerobic and/or anaerobic fitness. Further, it should be pointed out that ‘natural’ weight training and dietary improvements, which have succeeded in pushing human development far beyond even the farthest bounds of previous standards of size, weight, and strength – these are scientific improvements just as much as the ‘illegal’ chemical treatments, and they also have significant physiological drawbacks (overtraining, resulting in muscle tears / shin splints / premature aging of joints etc.). And yet few people decry them as dead ends in the evolution of human development. As a result, while current chemical methods may be flawed, these are flaws that must be worked out in further development and not in avoiding the topic completely.
Further, the hazards and challenges that space travel presents – in terms of muscle atrophication and the difficulty of maintaining basic fitness – suggest that extraordinary solutions must be created and deployed in order to allow the exploration of our system (and perhaps eventually beyond). Fundamentally, it seems at present unlikely that we, in our current form, could make it far off this planet, and as numerous philosophers and astronomers have pointed out, this more than likely means extinction, perhaps sooner rather than later.
Finally, while I am a huge sports fan and completely understand the impetus to deride artificial performance enhancement as ‘cheating’ (which it is, under current rules, and which creates inequalities between richer and poorer athletes), it is worth noting that, at some point in the future when we are all eternally young, good-looking, and well-muscled, we just might owe a significant debt of gratitude to the Lance Armstrong and Barry Bonds of the 2000s; after all, they were willing – albeit for significant financial gain – to be guinea pigs when the technologies in question were far from proven, and far from safe. This is not to say that these technologies should not be carefully watched and controlled (a major cause of the conflict in Hard Drop, after all, is caused by irresponsible experimentation in this area), but it is to say that we should not – perhaps even must not – shelve the conversation.
Rise of the machines. Well. Or just the self-assembling nanoparticles.
A relief to anyone perhaps overworried about Yellowstone (not that it’s not still a big deal): Supervolcanoes just got downgraded as an extinction threat.
And a potential huge boon for transportation of furniture or ‘soft’ implements required off-world (not to mention, threat to Ikea): the chair that unpacks itself.
It’s been a good month in science!
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