Marvels of the Universe

I just returned from Cape Canaveral for a meeting of NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts group, where I am on the Council of External Advisors.  NIAC is the small team within NASA charged with taking big risks (with little money) on highly speculative and "far-out" potential technologies. Small seed grants are handed over for clever (and a few almost-crackpot) endeavors that might bear fruit some distance down the road.

Past grants have included ventures in quantum entanglement communication, "torpor" suspension of human metabolic activity, haptic-reactive space suits, submarines for Titan and Europa, prodigious space telescopes, extrusion-construction of girders in space, and a supersonic jet that swivels 90 degrees in order to land!  Some prove to be... well... blue sky. Others have won major followup investment from agencies and even industry, such as a way to "print" concrete buildings on Earth, or do the same with sintered regolith on the moon. Be proud to be a member of a civilization that invests (modestly) in notions on the borderline with science fiction!

 Tune in to watch some of this year's presentations -- including glimpses of Buzz Aldrin, Frank Drake, Penny Boston and me (et al) asking questions.

== More excitement from space! ==

Despite major efforts to diss science and to turn us against each other and pump up cynicism (admit it: many of you wallow in that drug), our civilization is actually doing great things! Here's just one of many cures for that vile high of cynicism.

Everybody watch these 90 seconds: Space Suite -- using stunning images from NASA and ESA -- with 3D image processing by visual artist Lucas Green.  A lovely reminder of our ambitions to explore... and seek out strange new worlds...

You get to be a member of a civilization that does stuff like this. I cannot reiterate that too often. Your civilization did this.  Yours. And your neighbors are not sheep. (Well, a lot of em aren't.)

Also, zoom in on the gorgeous super-high-resolution panoramic view of the Andromeda Galaxy: Gigapixels of Andromeda, the largest image ever compiled of our neighboring galaxy. Awe-inspiring!

Cynical despair is just plain dumb.

== Making the universe show herself! ==

Going to the Ends of the Earth to Discover the Beginning of Time: Watch this wonderful TEDx talk by my pal Brian Keating, professor of astrophysics at UCSD, whose membership in both teams that probed the first trillionth  of a trillionth of a second of the universe, already has him under discussion in the preliminary, penumbral zones of Nobel-dom! 

Okay, it's a wild ride and maybe the results were premature.  Certainly, science is doing its proper job -- applying competitive reciprocal criticism to test and double test bold assertions! (Exactly as it has been doing re Climate Change.) So, I guess we'll just find out!  No movie plot could be more exciting.

Still... Brian does a wonderful job explaining new developments in cosmology... culminating in a way-cool/fun stunt at the end!  You will have fun! That's not just a prediction, but a command!

  
== Cosmetology! How about them cosmets! ==

Here's a stunning look at the cliffs of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, imaged by ESA's recent Rosetta mission.  They shock even this comet expert. See the full collection of images on the ESA website. 

And yes, I would have been hip deep in the Rosetta-Philae data analysis right now... had you folks not dragged me (kicking and screaming) away from being a cometologist into doing storytelling and speechifying and industrial consulting and all that other blather, instead.  Ah, parallel worlds and might have beens. Sigh

== And plasmets! ==

After five years of searching, researchers using data from NASA's exoplanet-hunting Kepler spacecraft have discovered what look to be two of the most Earth-like worlds yet. Dubbed Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b, both planets appear to be rocky, and orbit in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold habitable zones of their stars, where liquid water can exist in abundance. Orbiting smaller-dimmer suns... Kepler-438b is only about 12 percent larger than the Earth, and basks in 40 percent more starlight. Kepler-442b is 30 percent larger than Earth and receives about 30 percent less starlight. (Note such suns sometimes have cycles of intense flare activity.)

A monster ring system just discovered around exoplanet J1407 is 200 times larger than the rings of Saturn!

Ultrascope is an automated robotic observatory (ARO) that you can laser-cut and 3D print at home. Future versions will be able to contribute to the Asteroid Grand Challenge.  See this and other cool NASA-related STEM projects at the Space Gambit Site!  Some of the projects are way, way cool!

Now to get them interested in the best of all — the EXORARIUM!

== Looking out into the cosmos == 

Here’s an interesting rumination on whether the galaxy may fill with advanced artificial intelligences - which can occupy deep space and use its resources - rather than the bio-entities that spawned them, after evolving on muddy worlds. The notion of self-replicating machines filling the stars goes back to Jones and Finney's classic paper around 1983, about how Von Neumann probes may replicate and fill the galaxy in just 30 million years.

In fact this concept has long been grist of scientific science fictional speculation.  Gregory Benford's Galactic Center series, for example, posits that that realm - lethal to bio life - might be the natural abode of advanced machine civilizations.  

My novel Existence explores this notion in detail, including whether such machines might be "lurking" in the asteroid belt.  And the Brightness Reef trilogy explores possible relationships between bio and machine civilizations on a galactic scale.

== ... and more space, more! ==

Kewl.  We proposed this in the 1980s.  Now President Obama wants it… using a railgun to launch scramjets to near orbit. 

Support the Sentinel Mission. Join a citizen-funded deep space mission to detect Near-Earth Asteroids! (I will be speaking to donors for this mission and the B612 Foundation, in San Jose, in February.)

Stay Tuned for a Group Message from Humanity: With NASA's New Horizons space probe arriving at Pluto, space artist Jon Lomberg is heading One Earth -- an effort to upload messages from Planet Earth. Sign here to add your voice.

Do manatees need spacesuits? The lead image in this article about the  may remind some of you of the first chapter of SUNDIVER.  But these fellows have more than enough delightful craziness of their own. The "Nonhuman Autonomous Space Agency" is a whimsical futurist speculation built on top of a serious thought experiment.

== SETI and the question of God ==

There's a truly stunning piece of drivel in the fast-sinking shipwreck that Rupert Murdoch has made of the former Wall Street Journal. One Eric Metaxas argues that the Fermi Paradox – the absence of any evidence (so far) of extraterrestrial civilizations – means there “must be a God.”  Quoth he: “As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, then 200, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.”

Given that Metaxas offers no citations, it is hard to trace what he means by “parameters” for life to develop. But as someone  who has been immersed in this field for 35 years, I have to say that he must have pulled such a number out of thin air… or somewhere else.  

In fact, every year the conditions for life in the universe seem more prevalent. Today scientists no longer believe you even need an Earth-like world in a “Goldilocks Zone” (and those zones are now much wider than we previously thought). Indeed, there may be a hundred “roofed worlds” or icy moons with sub-surface oceans, like Europa, for every Earth with its waters exposed to the sky.

But I’m not making the mistake of fact-debating silly people who lie about science in order to sway the gullible. We've seen that trick used to devastating effect, in ways that endanger all our children. Yes, even (especially) the children of carbon moguls.

 No, what puzzles me is a matter of basic logic. Like why Mr. Metaxas clearly wants Earth to be alone in the cosmos. Somehow, he has convinced himself that a vast universe of quadrillions of stars and planets is somehow better and more reflective of a great and creative deity if… if it is entirely sterile, except for one teensy dust ball, floating in one obscure corner, that somehow was chosen to receive a spark granted to no other place in all of that immensity.

Let’s leave out that it took the light from some of those stars billions of years to get here… I won’t cram into Mr. Metaxas’s mouth any claim that the Earth, nevertheless, is just six thousand years old. Though we know that is the formal dogma of his brand of fanaticism.

In the end, what depresses me is how immensely insulting to God their proposal is – that we should act all impressed with such a measly, small-minded, un-ambitious and teensy-parochial “creation!” When in fact the heavens are replete with glories suggesting that – well – if He is out there (and I ain't sayin'), then He/She/It is surely a whole lot bigger, more curious and more ambitious than the philosophy clung to by claustrophilic, narrow-minded Kindergarteners, terrified of the vastness of actual Creation.

== And from the celestrially ridiculous to the terrestrially... ==

Ah… Texas Sen. Ted Cruz now heads the Senate committee overseeing NASA. He is making a show of supporting "exploration" but he is part of the cult that all-too recently ordered NASA to drop the word "Earth" from all mission statements and to many Earth-sensing, environment and resource programs.  His "emphasis on exploration" has one goal, to renew that Bush era scheme, diverting all NASA eyes toward the Moon's useless desert and away from the only oasis of life that we know.

Finally, though... swerving to a magnificent "failure" that advanced us all tremendously... catch this amazing video footage of the "almost!" attempt of Elon's SpaceX first stage to land on a barge.  Clearly there are faults, but correctable ones, which makes this a case of "Hell yes, you get a cigar!"