Space: near and long-term plans

Back from travels and giving speeches about our risk-filled future world. And so, feeling a need to share some optimism, I'll post some cool space and science news...

...only first a reminder: do find a way to get involved in the Earth Day (April 22) Marches for Science, somewhere near you. This shouldn't be about left or right. It's about our children's survival in a civilization that pays attention to fact-centered professions, evidence and being vigorously knowing-engaged citizens.

Oh, and note a week later, Independent Bookstore Day marks its third year on Saturday, April 29, with literary parties around the country.  Mysterious Galaxy is my favorite nearby one!

Look around. Surrounding you are the marvels (and half our GDP) that we owe to science. (And to science fiction!) This know-nothing carnage-of-minds must stop. Now.

== Space looms before us! ==

I serve on the External Council of NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts program — our daring venture that invests small amounts in brilliant (though maybe sometimes slightly strange) notions just this side of plausibly useful. Have a look at this year’s latest Phase One grants.

Want to play while doing science? With the EVE Online multiplayer game, you can help look for new exoplanets from your computer. In a game called Project Discovery, players can search for exoplanets while receiving real-world astronomical data.  One more example of the kind of crowd-sourced smart-mobbing I described in both EARTH and EXISTENCE.

Are humans heading to Mars? Regarding D. Trump's recently proposed NASA legislation, Elon Musk comments, "This bill changes almost nothing." No substance. No funding to back it up. Though it does appear to shift many efforts away from Earth-sensing and asteroidal resources back to putting more dusty footprints on the (for now) useless Moon. Come on. Couldn't space have been the one place where we could find consensus and do what's scientifically supported? Logical?

The use of contests to spur creative solutions has really taken off, in part thanks to the XPrize Foundation, headed by Peter Diamandis. (I'm on the board of advisers.)  During the Obama Administration, every government agency was told to set up a prize contest, aiming to draw inventive proposals for each agency’s most vexing problem, and results were promising, especially since the prizes themselves amounted to little more than petty cash.

In the latest example, NASA appears quite pleased with winners of the $15,000 Space Poop Challenge prize, for ways to collect human waste emitted by astronauts wearing spacesuits.

Only now late breaking news!  Winners have been announced for the Tricorder X Prize!  "Imagine a portable, wireless device in the palm of your hand that monitors and diagnoses your health conditions. That’s the technology envisioned by this competition, and it will allow unprecedented access to personal health metrics. The end result: Radical innovation in healthcare that will give individuals far greater choices in when, where, and how they receive care."  The lead medical evaluator is Dr. Erik Viirre, co-director of UCSD's new Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, where the sciences and arts come together to explore humanity's most unique gift.  

== Our emissaries in the solar system ==

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has spotted organic molecules on Ceres, which some believe may have a subsurface ocean. This opens the possibility that primitive life could have developed on (or under) Ceres itself. Ceres shows clear signatures of pervasive hydrothermal activity and aqueous alteration. "We see compounds on the surface of Ceres like the ones detected in the plume of Enceladus," said a researcher.

Which leads us to NASA’s recently released overall plan to study Europa and then the eight other candidates for “ocean world” status. (I coined and prefer the terms “roofed ocean worlds” or “roofed worlds.)  “By this definition, bodies like Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, and Enceladus would all be viable targets for exploration. These worlds are all known to have subsurface oceans, and there has been compelling evidence in the past few decades that point towards the presence of organic molecules and prebiotic chemistry there as well. Triton, Pluto, Ceres and Dione are all mentioned as candidate ocean worlds based on what we know of them. (See the planned "Enceladus Life Finder" or ELF mission.)

"Titan also received special mention in the course of the presentation. In addition to having an interior water ocean, it has even been ventured that extremophile methanogenic lifeforms could exist on its surface….”  Wax beings lapping along methane rivers, high above "magma" made of liquid water?  Yipe!

NASA's Juno mission currently orbiting Jupiter.  And sending back amazing images.

What might a final approach to Mars feel like? Unbelievably gorgeous high-resolution images of the topography of Mars.

The Rosetta mission's closeups of Comet 67P showed shifting dunes on the comet.

== Back on Earth ==

In a new study, scientists say they have found evidence along the New Jersey coast that an extraterrestrial object hit the earth at the same time a mysterious release of carbon dioxide suddenly warmed the planet, some 55.6 million years ago. The warm period, known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), is often cited as the closest analog to today's rapid human-induced climate change. The study does not explicitly say that an impact triggered the PETM, but the implication is consistent with the authors' previous work suggesting such an abrupt trigger. By contrast, mainstream theory says that the carbon came from volcanism or some other earthly cause, over thousands of years.

Most scientists say that the carbon release at the start of the PETM took anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 years. Many suspect it came from a surge of massive volcanism. The resultant warming may have been abetted by a sudden release of frozen methane from the seafloor, due to warming from the carbon, changes in the earth's orbit or shifts in ocean circulation. Temperatures ascended 5 to 9 degrees Centigrade (about 9 to 16 Fahrenheit), during a nearly simultaneous warm period that lasted some 200,000 years. The planet was essentially ice free, and sea levels drastically higher than now. Many small, single-celled ocean-bottom creatures went extinct.

In 2013 Schaller and James Wright of Rutgers University (also a coauthor of the new paper) published a study asserting that the PETM carbon release was virtually instantaneous. Their evidence: extremely high levels of carbon isotopes that appear in a narrow band of the Marlboro clay representing just about a dozen years. This band, it turns out, is near the newly found impact ejecta layer.

Oh, but then, we're not allowed to look at the planet called Earth, anymore.

== Bold Plans ==

Image: Popular Mechanics

Might we create an artificial magnetosphere to protect Mars and its atmosphere from the solar wind? It turns out that by setting up a dipole at the Mars L1 point, it’s not as crazy-implausible as it first sounds.  

Congress told NASA to develop a Europa orbiter and lander, to dispatch on the space agency’s future rocket, the Space Launch System, sometime in the 2020s.

Footage from a Cubesat experiment shows potato plants budding in weightlessness, in Mars-like soils, suggesting that a certain movie may have been on target in its optimism about growing food on the red planet. Providing you can wash out perchlorates and all that. We’ll see. 

Okay, the latest of many informative articles about something NASA claims has never happened – sex in space. Riiiiight.

Similar to what I proposed in my novel Sundiver, a recently proposed quantum cascade laser system is powered strictly by heat, with no electrical input; it produces a cooling effect by emitting light. 

== Striking the Gaia Balance, or why humans can alter the climate ==

On Quora I was asked: Is it plausible that a true "water world" could exist (100% ocean)?

Our world skates the very inner edge of our star’s Goldilocks Zone or CHZ. Earth can only afford the barest minimum of CO2 in the atmosphere, just enough to feed plants. We have to eliminate heat, which is why even a little carbon added to the atmosphere wreaks big effects.

The CHZ extends way out past Mars! Had Mars been bigger, it would today have oceans and a very dense CO2 atmosphere as part of its Gaia Balance. That balance is struck between greenhouse gases spewed from, volcanoes and CO2 removal cause by the weathering of mountains adding calcium, silicon etc to ocean waters, which pull carbon out of the air.

Earth may be exceptionally dry for an ocean world, because we are hot (and getting hotter.) But a world without any continents to weather away would lack the ability to scrub CO2 and hence keep getting hotter as volcanoes added carbon to the air. I suppose that heat would evaporate the oceans until continents appeared that could restore the balance. Get it?

== Science is political now ==

Sorry but all this great stuff is in danger.  Have of our wealth and GDP came from science. And from the increased wisdom and fact-centered policies that science engendered.

Steep cuts to Earth science imaging: Ultimate proof of lying hypocrisy. All you denialist cultists who said "we need more data before deciding what to do about climate change!" or "The jury is still out!" At least under the Bushites, science was sabotaged less spectacularly and openly. Now the pretense is dropped.  Science is the enemy, openly declared. Your solution is that of a 3 year old: "If we don't look at it, the problem doesn't exist!"

And finally... Winston Churchill once - in 1939 as war clouds loomed -- wrote a long essay on what would later become SETI… the question of other worlds and other life in the universe. Churchill was a devoted fan of H.G. Wells and began his essay shortly after the 1938 U.S. radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds, which whipped up Mars fever in the media. He reasoned that Venus and Mars were the only places in the solar system other than Earth that could harbour life.”

March on April 22.  Get out there and let it be seen that microcephalic troglodytes will not be allowed to assassinate our civilization or our children.