Asteroids, Super space drives, and Io volcanoes!

Here goes one of our occasional space and astronomy roundups!

First some personal science news. I will be speaking about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) twice, early in 2015. (1) at the conference of the AAPT - the American Association of Physics Teachers, January 4 - 6, 2015, in San Diego...

... then (2) I'll be the "con" arguer in a debate over "messaging to aliens" at the American Association for the Advancement of Science - AAAS Annual Meeting - the greatest scientific conclave on the planet, from 12 - 16 February 2015, in San Jose, CA.

And now... cool stuff!

== Are we a target? ==

... or rather... really hot stuff! Did you hear that a solar storm spewed forth a major spray of energetic, charged particles that passed very close to the Earth, a while back? Read up on the 1859 Carrington Event that fried telegraph systems -- if it struck today, our electronics-dependent civilization could suffer real damage. Contemplate that... then consider this. There may have been a truly monumental coronal mass ejection around the year 775 that hit the Earth with a strength that was about 20 times the 1859 Carrington Event.

And yes, the solution is to get out there!  Members of Congress introduced a bill to protect property rights for commercial exploitation of asteroids. The bipartisan legislation, introduced by Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) and Rep. Derek Kilmer (D-WA), is called the American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities in Deep Space (ASTEROIDS) Act. Alas, during our current civil war, there is no chance of an actual political process in the USA.  But when this phase ends, as it must, the bill will be ready for action by a restored, scientific and forward-looking nation.

Have you heard stories about this supposed reactionless drive, “unveiled” at a NASA conference in Ohio? I've put in a query to Geoff Landis - NASA scientist and renowned SciFi author, who promised to watch developments and give us the straight dope... or poop.   To be clear, there are some places where we already can do a version of this -- turn solar energy directly into motion, without using reaction mass or rocketry -- e.g. by applying electrodynamic tethers to leverage against the Earth's magnetic field...

…but only where there is an electron rich zone like the Van Allen belts to close the circuit loop. Interestingly, electomagnetic tethers work in exactly the realm you must climb through before deploying a solar sail. (See this process illustrated in both my short story “Tank Farm Dyamo” and in the first chapter of EXISTENCE, which I read aloud for you, here.)

Meanwhile. NASA released high-quality footage of their experiment in near-space in June, deploying the agency’s Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) and experimental parachute systems that will be helpful in maneuvers and landings near planets, like Mars. Way cool footage!

Oh but we really need to get out there! Dig this — “Within a two-week period in August 2013, astronomers observed three massive volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon Io. The grand finale was an eruption they say was one of the brightest volcanic eruptions ever observed in our solar system. These astronomers are speculating that these eruptions on Io – which can send material hundreds of miles above the little moon’s surface – might be much more common than they previously thought."

We should have a satellite observatory in-residence above Jupiter, permanently.

Meanwhile, researchers have found a microbial menagerie that thrives in tiny water worlds floating in oily tar pits ... perhaps a model for life on Titan?

== And yet more from space! ==

From beyond the solar system: Cosmic grains returned by the Stardust mission predate the solar system -- and may be our first samples of interstellar dust. This is amazing.  And crowd-sourced amateur science played a role!

Are many asteroids “rubble piles” held together by molecular forces, in addition to very weak gravity?  It seems that is the case for near Earth crosser 1950 DA… and the implications — for resource-mining as well as countering potentially dangerous ones — are very complicated.  It is a good thing we are forging forward to find out.  Alas, the Space.com reporter might need to get straight the meanings of “centripetal” vs “centrifugal.”

Under ideal conditions, the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) should be able to detect two kinds of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the atmospheres of alien worlds, if atmospheric levels were 10 times those on Earth. In other words, if aliens are self-destructive fools, we might catch them during the brief window of time. But only if it is orbiting a very dim star.

Is the Universe a Bubble? If two pocket “universes” make physical contact, there are several possibilities. M-brane theorists think the collision would release so much energy that the resulting bang would wipe out any galaxy-style realms that existed before. 

On the other hand, researchers at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, think the interaction could be mild and show up in the maps we are now making of the microwave background. “We start with a multiverse that has two bubbles in it, we collide the bubbles on a computer to figure out what happens, and then we stick a virtual observer in various places and ask what that observer would see from there."

Want more about the multiverse? See Exploring the Multiverse -- a talk given by astrophysicists Brian Keating (UCSD) and Andrew Friedman (MIT)... and me....  We covered the ELEVEN different ways (that we have thought-of, so far) that this cosmos we observe may be just one of many! The event took place at the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at UCSD on July 29. 

Here's a photo from our panel discussion: Brian Keating on the left, Andrew Friedman in the middle, me on the right:

== Space is also for dreams ==

Finally... do you miss the "final frontier"? The notion of a hopeful future of unbounded possibilities? Do you like well done sci fi and drama and neat effects... in a terrific Kickstarter-level production? Have a look at the 20 minute "Prelude to Axanar."  All of it aimed at a high quality, semi-pro indie Star Trek film.

You have to hand it to Paramount Pictures.  They figured out that you don't have to be jerks about policing a copyrighted franchise. Start Trek has always had a close and friendly relationship with its fans and Paramount has kept a very loose and tolerant attitude toward "unofficial" productions, many of which have been well-written and entertaining... and which ultimately kept Paramount's valued core healthy.  A true win-win.

But Axanar looks likely to be something special. This is Star Trek at its best. The danger and tension and action... mixed with joy and optimism that you get nowhere else, these days. This is worth your support.

Strangeness and Multi-Worlds

"The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual.The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community."--William James

Fifty years ago this month Hugh Everett III published his paper proposing a "relative-state formulation of quantum mechanics" - the idea subsequently described as the 'many worlds' or 'multiverse' interpretation. Its impact on science and culture continues. In celebration, a science fiction special edition of Nature on 5 July 2007 explores the symbiosis of science and sf, as exemplified by Everett's hypothesis, its birth, evolution, champions and opponents, in biology, physics, literature and beyond.

Though I always found it weird that in this one case a sci fi idea pronounced by a grad student was so thoroughly embraced by the physics community, making his rep for life.

And while we’re discussing weird ideas from physics... Richard Gott’s infuriating, thought-provoking, “Copernican” approach to predicting that humanity has 5,000 more years. (I’ve seen the same kind of analysis give us just twenty years, or less. huh.)

Speaking of many worlds, I highly recommend the latest book to ponder the topic of “where is everybody out there?” Contact with Alien Civilizations: Our Hopes and Fears about Encountering Extraterrestrials was written by former senior U.S. diplomat Michael A.G. Michaud, who chaired the committees that developed the well-regarded “SETI Protocols.” I served with Micahaerl on those committees...

...until they unraveled, just this last year, under the strain of the increasingly tense METI imbroglio, or the debate over whether humanity (or rather, a few peremptory individuals) should start shouting into a strange and dauntingly silent universe. An excellent book, covering these issues from many angles!

See also my collected articles on SETI vs METI.

==Changing Times==

The Arlington Institute issued this warning: The era of cheap food is over. The price of corn (maize) hasdoubled in a year, and wheat futures are at their highest in a decade. Thefood price index in India has risen 11 percent in one year, and in Mexicoin January there were riots after the price of corn flour (used in makingthe staple food of the poor, tortillas) went up fourfold. Even in thedeveloped countries food prices are going up, and they are not going tocome down again.

Cheap food lasted for only fifty years. Before the Second World Warmost families in the developed countries spent a third or more of theirincome on food (as the poor majority in developing countries still do). Butafter the war a series of radical changes, from mechanisation to the GreenRevolution, raised agricultural productivity hugely and caused a long,steep fall in the real price of food. For the global middle class, it wasthe Good Old Days, with food taking only a tenth of their income. It will probably be back up to a quarter within a decade, and itmay go much higher than that, because we are entering a period when threeseparate factors are converging to drive food prices up. The first issimply demand. Not only is the global population continuing to grow (aboutan extra Turkey or Vietnam every year), but as Asian economies race aheadmore and more people in those populous countries are starting to eatsignificant amounts of meat.

An experiment in viral hit measurement! A bright young SF author, Jeff Carlson, is about to see his first novel published. We are also writing a book together! He has just posted his very first author web site at www.jverse.com. Now for the experiment. Let’s see how many hits we can generate on Jeff’s site and show how thumping big and influential the Contrary Brin community really is!

President Bush has signed a directive granting extraordinary powers to the office of the president in the event of a declared national emergency, apparently without congressional approval or oversight. The directive establishes under the office of the president a new national continuity coordinator whose job is to make plans for "National Essential Functions" of all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments, as well as private sector organizations to continue functioning under the president's directives

New Scientist reports a single hydrogen atom has been snipped off a molecule and then added back on again, marking the first time a single chemical bond has been broken and reforged in a controlled, reversible way. The team first used their STM to locate a methylaminocarbyne (CNHCH3) molecule that was fixed to a platinum surface. Then they turned up the voltage, increasing the flow of electrons. That was enough to break one bond – between the molecule's nitrogen and hydrogen atom – but not to disturb any of the other bonds, leaving a molecule of methylisocyanide (CNCH3).

To reverse the process, the group simply bathed the sample in hydrogen gas. The platinum surface catalysed the splitting of the hydrogen molecules into their hydrogen atoms, which reacted with nitrogen in the methylisocyanide molecule to re-form methylaminocarbyne.

Okay, the last part was more classic chemistry, manipulating the surroundings rather than a single site. Still. Wowzer.

DID YOU KNOW THAT...newly discovered fossils show that penguins as tall as 5 feet roamed what is now Peru more than 40 million years ago

There is a growing body of evidence that the Earth's magnetic field is about to disappear, at least for a while. One of those signs is that the strength of the field has been falling by 5% per century recently. Other evidence comes from old navigation records showing that patches of abnormal magnetism have been growing off south-east Africa and in the South Atlantic.

Researchers studying Neanderthal DNA say it should be possible to construct a complete genome of the ancient hominid despite the degradation of the DNA over time. There is also hope for reconstructing the genome of the mammoth and cave bear, according to a research team from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

NASA is joining a Japanese team in a space experiment that uses a “reverse origami” tether to keep satellites in their proper orbits, or to return spent rocket stages quickly to Earth. This tether will have to be strong considering its gossamer construction. Looking like a strip of aluminum foil, almost like a tape measure, the tether is 1 km (3280 feet) long, but only 0.05 mm thick and 50 mm (close to 2 inches) wide.

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report confirms that Bush's use of presidential signing statements are, in fact, utterly without precedent. Though they've been used by American presidents for about 200 years, signing statements - edicts issued by the president to declare his intent to construe a provision within a law differently than Congress does - are constitutionally questionable.

Scientists can now sugars ubiquitous in nature to a replacement source for those products that make oil so valuable, with very little of the residual impurities that have made the quest so daunting. The process converts glucose directly in high yields to a primary building block for fuel and polyesters. That building block, called HMF, is a chemical derived from carbohydrates such as glucose and fructose and is viewed as a promising surrogate for petroleum-based chemicals.

A US company is taking plastics recycling to another level – turning them back into the oil they were made from, and gas. All that is needed, claims Global Resource Corporation (GRC), is a finely tuned microwave and – hey presto! – a mix of materials that were made from oil can be reduced back to oil and combustible gas (and a few leftovers). Key to GRC’s process is a machine that uses 1200 different frequencies within the microwave range, which act on specific hydrocarbon materials.

(I thought of this 25 years ago, only with a twist that could take uses FAR beyond the range of just converting hydrocarbons! Anyone know these people or more about them?)

Pathetic "broadband." The median U.S. download speed now is 1.97 megabits per second — a fraction of the 61 megabits per second enjoyed by consumers in Japan. Other speedy countries include South Korea (median 45 megabits), France (17 megabits) and Canada (7 megabits).

Eschatology & Cosmic Evolution - (bet you can't make THIS political!)

The poilitcal lamp is definitely OUT for this one!

Some physicists have argued that the universe is doomed to be ripped apart by runaway dark energy, while others think it is bouncing through an endless series of big bangs and big crunches. Now these two ideas are being combined to create another option, in which our universe ultimately shatters into billions of pieces, with each shard growing into a whole new universe. The model could solve the mystery of why our early universe was surprisingly well ordered. 

(Um... did any of you read Heaven’s Reach? Does any of this sound familiar? )

In the new model, dark energy becomes very dense and sets the universe expanding at such a rate that it approaches the big rip. The universe tears into small patches that rush away from each other faster than the speed of light. But the destruction is then halted, as the density of dark energy becomes equal to the density of the universe. At this point, each patch crunches in on itself. "All the patches, of which there are a huge number, will separately contract into disparate universes," says Frampton. Each patch will then bounce outwards again, creating a new universe. This has got to be the third or fourth or eighth variation on universal reproduction and/or birth that I have seen from astrophysicists in the last decade or so, an era of profound imagination and speculation! It is starting to look pretty wild out there, in the wonderful realm of eschatology. So, let’s try to put it all in a bit of perspective.

Everyone who is not still in Kindergarten -- either literally or theologically -- knows that overwhelming evidence has proved that a Big Bang started it all - everything we see - about thirteen billion years ago. Some of our neo-cosmologies do poke about earlier, speculating about vast realms of “context” within which the Big Bang took place. See my novella “What Continues and What Fails...”

Where there is even more confusion is about the future. All right, so there was a bang. Where is it all heading?

Take the Big Bounce... under which notion the universal expansion slows down due to gravity, decelerates and stops, then reverses into a Crunch... that thereupon rebounds outward in a fresh Big Bang! This concept was in the 60s brilliantly dramatized by Poul Anderson’s epochal novel TAU ZERO. (Get it, read it!)

The Crunch view was later pursued with fantastic quasi-theological passion by Frank Tipler is his amazing THE PHYSICS OF IMMORTALITY: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, in which he brought forward probably the most flamboyant and unabashed eschatology of all time... that the infrared radiation emitted by your own body, whenever you step outside, will someday all be collected by godlike descendants during the LAST WEEK of the universe and used to learn all about you! (And every other ancestor.) In order to resurrect you in effective (if totally subjective) immortality during the last few (objective) days of the cosmos, when computer-simulation power will supposedly be utterly limitless. Yipes!

Tipler thus vied with Freeman Dyson for the encomium of “greatest theologian of the 20th Century”... an honor that Freeman appeared to have won, when it was shown that HIS eschatology is probably more relevant, because our metagalaxy’s expansion appears to be accelerating rather than slowing, implying the existence of more than sufficient Dark Energy to keep the expansion going forever. Dyson’s quasi-theology describes how life might cope with and eventually resign itself to the final dissipation into absolute-zero nothingness. The big chill.

Only, meanwhile, Stephen Hawking and others had fixated on black holes, those marvelous, one way tunnels that may... possibly... emerge in a completely new cosmic “context” -- possibly even triggering new episodes of creation and universal inflation. And, if so, according to Lee Smolin, there may be vast cycles of “evolution” as mother universes use black holes as the eggs to parent new daughter universes whose genetic code it, in effect, the detailed set of physical parameters and laws and “gosh numbers” that get passed down the line, mutating slightly and experiencing “selection” in favor of maximum reproductive success, in probably the most mind-boggling concept of our age.

Meanwhile, OTHERS have been speculating that all of this is way, way premature. I was shocked, shocked, to learn recently that the SHAPE of the cosmos is still considered debatable, despite signs of endless expansion, and that some astronomers have re-discovered and legitimized the old notion that the “actual universe” is flat and infinite! In other words, the “Universe:” that we see may have come from a bang 13 billion years ago. but that happened in one small patch of a vastly wider expanse of already-existing spacetime that could contain vast numbers of such firecracker creations at the same time, outside of our light-cone of perception.

In other words, some are now saying that the Big Bang was really an explosion!”

An actual, honest-to-God explosion, taking place INSIDE a much vaster context, a truly immense “macro-universe” that is made of real distance, and boggling amounts of real space. Really? But... but... but didn’t you cosmologists yatter at us for generations about how naive that view was? How the bang was a sudden and impressive expansion of “metric” but did not explode “into” anything because it contained everything, period?

This new/old/rediscovered notion, which actually is easier to envision than the standard model of the last 50 years (a Big Bang that consists of expansion without any pre-existing setting to expand into) now seems completely boggling, simply because I thought all the big-domes had already declared it completely excluded. With many a snort of disdain.

Only now guys are talking seriously about a “meta” universe in flat space that is as much bigger than our measly teeny 13 billion light year “universe” as than universe is bigger than the solar system!

Confused yet?

Okay, NOW go back to the top and re-read the news article. That dark energy might drive accelerating expansion until it the metagalaxy breaks apart, then dark energy diffusion allows many long-delayed collapses, which trigger new black holes... new “bounce” creations...

Um, is this in the context-free standard Big Bang? The dimensionally separated “new universe” variation of the standard model preached by Hawking and Smolin? Or in the new/old/restored notion of a vast-flat mega context cosmos? I guess this dissipate-breakup-collapse-bounce idea could happen in any of the three!

Oh, wow, the Big Guy is really laughing now, I betcha. Smartass modernist humans.

Still, we are apprentices. Sniffing. Trying. Gotta make Him proud.

(See also: Is Theology Compatible with Science...Sci Fi and Progress?)