Can You See Me Now?

I've mentioned this before, but one of the things that I find the most amazing about space is the vastness. To quote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (I often do), "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is." It's very true. The more you think about the distances and time frames involved in properly studying the Universe, the more immense and incalculable it seems.

This bothers a lot of people, in much the same way as looking down from a height does. I'm going to take advantage of this opportunity to evoke the sensation in you, readers. Thinking that it takes 25,000 miles to go once around our planet's equator seems like a fairly large distance, right? It's a little over twice as far as the average person commutes to work in a year (my own calculations, based on Census data -- see bottom of page for how I got it). Then you think that you'd have to drive 9.5 times the Earth's circumference to get to our nearest neighbor, the Moon. To drive to Mars at the same speed, you would have to cover 3000 times the distance of your annual commute, or 1440 Earth circumferences. All that, and we haven't even left the inner solar system yet, much less looked at other stars.

It just gets more staggering from there; beyond our solar system are widely-spaced stars, beyond our local stars are the far-flung arms of our galaxy, beyond our galaxy are distant other galaxies in the Local Group, beyond the Local Group are other chains of galaxies spreading out into the Universe, at distances where even the light of billions of suns are a faint smudge in our telescopes. Just outside the (suddenly tiny) confines of our atmosphere is a vast, black stretch of...almost nothing...for distances that still take our most modern propulsion systems months to travel to.

And that's just space; don't look at time scales unless you want to feel real cosmic vertigo.

I find this all oddly comforting. There's something intensely personal about the fact that, in all this vastness, there is one tiny rock around one totally average star that is just right for our form of life to develop. Then there's all the other rocks out there that could support the same type of life. And all the ones that could have other kinds of life that we wouldn't even recognize. It doesn't matter how you think this Universe started, scientific or otherwise -- anyone who can think about these things and not get totally awestruck is missing out on one of the biggest beauties we know.

So I want to share some of the things that help make the Universe a warmer, fuzzier place to think about again:

1. SETI (http://www.seti.org/): de-funded by the government after less than a year's actual operation, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence has not been idle. Looking for signals from other planets, the now-private group uses its own radio telescopes (or gets time on other telescopes pointing in likely directions) and gathers data. The head scientist, Seth Shostak, recently claimed that SETI was likely to find an alien signal within the next 25 years . You can even help them sort through it by running a SETI@home program while your computer is idling.
2. The Drake Equation: this equation applies to our galaxy, or any other galaxy with at least one civilization. It basically summarizes all of intelligent-life astrobiology. Made up of about 7 terms (depending upon which version you use), it tells you just how likely it is to find intelligent life advanced enough to be broadcasting signals into space in your galactic vicinity at the present time. The trick is that we don't have exact numbers for most of the terms, but the upshot is that all but the most conservative estimates turn up at least a few alien civilizations in our galaxy. A good introduction to the nitty-gritty of the equation can be found here (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/drake-equation.html).
3. Hubble Image Gallery (http://hubblesite.org/gallery/): This might seem counter-intuitive, but there's just something about seeing these beautiful, colorful pictures that makes the Universe look like a friendlier place.
4. Things Close to Home (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/): if you're feeling a little...a-claustrophobic still, take a gander at some of the neighborhood scenery. NASA's Cassini-Huygens and Curiosity missions are returning routinely gorgeous pictures of planets that are within our reach, our cosmic siblings. Cassini is focusing on Saturn and its moons (some of which are prime local candidates for life), and Curiosity is, of course, on Mars. Check out especially the skyline pictures from Curiosity, and think about how those things that look like low hills are mountains up to 5 miles high!

*Fun Census calculations: I used the 2011 ACS numbers for average commute time for the entire US. (while I have your ear, the American Community Survey recently had its funding axed in Congress; this seriously erodes the information we have about the state of our nation's populace. Go read about about the fight, it was all over major media sources.) This number was 25.3 minutes. I assumed 55 mph as a median driving speed, to factor in both highways and local traffic. This gives 23 miles commute, one-way. Double that for a day's trip, 46 miles. Now, multiply that by the traditional 5 day workweek and 50 weeks of work per year, and you get approximately 11,600 miles per year.

The Economic Morality of Space Exploration

Also known as, how I justify spending billions of dollars on space programs. This is a topic I've debated in my own head for a while. I'm a minimalist when it comes to governmental theory, so I've struggled with the idea of a national space agency and the huge amounts of money that get poured into it. In the end, I've come out pro-NASA (and it's not just because I want a job eventually).

The pros and cons of most government agencies get rehashed every election year, and when the economy is going down the drain this badly, a lot of people start looking to slash anything that doesn't benefit everybody in an obvious way. Here's my thinking:

1. Saving our behinds in the future. Honestly, no one knows right now what's happening with our planet, on multiple levels. Not to sound alarmist, but our climate is changing measurably within a single generation, the ice caps are melting, storms are getting larger and more violent, and our magnetic envelope is slowly but surely disintegrating. None of this is new in our planet's history, and if archeological evidence is correct, we're overdue for a lot of what's coming. But most of these changes have each been associated with the near- or utter extinction of the predominant species on the planet at the time, and we have no solid idea of the time scales upon which these events took place in the past. This is not very comforting for us (or dolphins, or mice, if you believe Douglas Adams).
   
   How does this justify our space program? Well, first there's the worst-case scenario, in which we have to evacuate the planet before it becomes the next Venus or Mars (depending on your preferred doomsday disaster). Space exploration teaches us the tricky bits of living elsewhere, so our homeworld exit isn't a strictly sink or swim situation. We could also learn how to nudge other worlds' climates into being habitable -- a la terraforming -- to make the adjustment easier for the non-astronaut population.
2. Learning how to save/preserve our own planet. Take a look around at how many things we use on Earth are from NASA. Seriously. Car seats, your cell phone camera, that crinkly foil-y blanket you keep in your trunk, even your Brita filter in your fridge all came from things developed by our national space labs (here and here are overviews of some more items). With a track record like that, the idea that they wouldn't learn and share strategies to help our planet by researching and exploring others is a little far-fetched. Terraforming Mars may take tens of thousands of years, but if we learn how to do it, we may be able to keep Earth from needing to be terraformed itself.
3. Soft power. Look, we're America. Designing and manufacturing things that go into space makes us look really good; we don't need a Cold War to justify shining up our soft power quotient. And it gives our people the opportunity to be part of something scientific in our country, which is an area that we are falling further and further behind in compared to developing nations. We need to strengthen our science base in both the public and private sectors, and show the world that we do more than just make movies featuring warp drives...we can build them (which will probably be my next blog post, since it's exciting me so much).
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Mars News...Sort of

Might as well strike while the iron's hot with this story...if you can call it that yet. I posted it on my Twitter (click here) the other day, but no one reads that.

Everyone is excited because the lovely science-y types over at MSL announced -- well, that something very interesting is about to pop, but that they're checking their data a few more times before they'll announce it (click here). Apparently the SAM instrument (click here -- sorry, if I just code the link in-text, it's not visible) has turned up a discovery of some sort.

Now I'm going to pretend for a few minutes that I'm qualified to speculate on this, because I've been following this mission like nerds follow Joss Whedon. Also, I've actually done coursework on astrobiology, so I know a teensy bit more than the average news reader.

Background info first: the rover has been collecting soil samples on Mars. They scooped and then dumped out the first few, because they want to make absolutely sure that the samples aren't contaminated by anything Earth-originating. It would be pretty embarrassing to claim to find life and later realize that someone sneezed on the shovel (just kidding, they do insane amounts of decon work before it gets launched; there's bona fide international laws about contaminating other planets -- click here). Anyway, the first sample was actually deposited in the spectroscopy machine, and now they're saying they have a discovery.

Overview of Spectroscopy: it's...just really, really cool. Basically, you beam white light into an object and pass the light that comes out the other side through a kind of prism, separating it into its constituent colors. If you're doing emission spectroscopy, what you get looks like a multicolor bar code. If you're doing absorption spectroscopy, you get the opposite -- a rainbow bar with red light at one end and purple at the other, and black vertical lines in certain areas. In both cases, the lines are the fingerprints of elements. Different atoms absorb light of certain wavelengths, always. So those wavelengths, seen together, always point to that particular element. Depending upon the patterns of the lines (and in more sophisticated readings, how much light is absorbed at each wavelength), you can tell what chemicals compose the object you're looking at, without taking it apart, using nothing but light. It's incredible.

So, what do I think they've found? I bet they've found some sort of complex organic molecule, maybe an amino acid or two. The simpler molecules that life are based on (hydrocarbons and other organics) can be found in a surprising range of places in the Universe, from asteroids to nebulae. It seems like the more we look, the more we see that carbons and hydrogens just can't wait to bond into the things our cells are made of, with a little help from cosmic radiation and/or water. However, amino acids and proteins are much harder to form, and don't seem to happen without a lot more prodding (lots of electrical current, or RNA/DNA instructions -- which are proteins themselves, you can see the problem).

It's unlikely that they've found current life, with the amount of radiation that hits the topsoil there, and the lack of water. It's also unlikely that they found dead signs of life, since that would be hard to find on the surface after billions of years, and microfossils are annoying hard to confirm as such. I also think it's improbable, as some naysayers are predicting, that they're going to announce definitively that there is no life. That would be ridiculous to do from a single soil sample.

It would be nice for them to have found something that would make a great headline -- MARS LIFE FINALLY CONFIRMED. But my guess is that they found something that only other scientists and astrobiology nuts are going to be excited about, while science-column journalists for newspapers scratch their heads about how to phrase the real discovery. PREPARE FOR...Prerequisites for Life Tentatively Confirmed on Martian Surface. Shiny.

Cosmic Face-off

It's almost December, 2012, and some people are panicking. Apparently one of the apocalyptic theories is centering around a planetary conjunction (link) happening in a few weeks. I'm going to ignore the apocalyptic part entirely (already read the news today, thanks) and focus on conjunctions, which have boggled me as astronomical "events" for years now.

In fact, there's a basic division I've noticed across amateur astronomers, that I've never really understood. Forget quibbling over 'scope type or comparing CCD camera specs, this is a base-level aesthetic difference. I'm talking about the conjunction/cluster faction vs. the objects faction.

To clarify, in the first group, I'm placing the group of astronomy buffs who go out in the middle of winter, stand on piles of newspaper with a thermos, 12 layers of clothes, and 2 sets of gloves on in order to watch a conjunction or track down an open cluster. In the second group, I'm placing the group of astronomy buffs who go out in the middle of winter, stand on piles of newspaper with a thermos, 12 layers of clothes, and 2 sets of gloves in order to take a several-minute exposure of a nebula or sketch a galaxy. It's not that people don't dabble in both, but most astronomers I've known have a preference for one or the other.

Bias alert: I'm in the second group. I just don't get the attraction of watching a planet and a star appearing to approach each other, or seeing a blob of stars that formed together hanging in space. Give me the faintly-glowing building blocks of the Universe, the bright, whirling arms of a star cradle, or the death-ring of a planetary nebula. Something to really wrap my mind around the varied nature of the dimensions in which we live.

Conjunctions just baffle me. We see shapes in the sky all the time: sometimes they're made of stars, sometimes they're made with planets, but they're just all bright dots from here. We've known for quite some time that they aren't actually close to each other, so what is the attraction? I can see sitting up all night looking at Jupiter or Saturn by itself, but they're only fascinating to me as visible objects, not "stars." Stars are fascinating to think about in comparison to our own Sun, to imagine the other lives that might be orbiting them, or as parts of a constellation telling an old (and probably creepy) myth, but not solely as bright dots in the night sky.

Somehow, I feel astronomy guilt over this, like there's something I'm missing about the philosophy of observational astronomy. I know, objectively, that a sparkling smudge of starlight from a galaxy millions of lightyears away is no more or less appealing than a conjunction, Nature's temporary installation in the cosmic art gallery. But, like most art, I just don't get it. If anyone from the other side of the fence would like to jump in and explain what I'm not seeing when I look up, feel free, I'd love to finally get it!

Science Writing

This post is born out of frustration with writing lab reports. I was sitting staring at my most recent physics lab the other day, trying to organize my analysis section in my report and mentally teasing out what elements made it different from my other sections. A professor later that day brought up the theme of science writing in a more general sense, so I decided to write this post. Here's my radical idea:

All science departments should require their students to take a short class on writing methods *for science* in their freshman year.

In science circles, the jokes about humanities being "non-scientific" and subjective never seem to get old. The grain of truth? Science writing is fundamentally different from humanities writing and the kinds of argumentative papers that kids are used to writing in school. The systems have a very basic splitting point: in history, say, you look at the causes for a war in one country, and write a paper stating that these causes could have been factors in other wars in other places. You quote other sources liberally throughout the paper, weave various themes in and out of your structure, have a position that you're defending, and write a conclusion that expands your main idea to a wider application.

In science, a paper structured like that would be considered a mess, if not downright fraudulent. Science writing is more similar to technical writing in many ways. You have specific sections for literature review, methodology, data, results, and conclusions, which -- like food on an OCD person's plate -- aren't allowed to overlap. If you extrapolate your results too far, show a bias, or use overly definitive terminology, your professional integrity goes out the window.

Granted, some students seem to pick up the format intuitively; most don't. With their future graduates' credibility on the line, you'd think that schools would include these building blocks of scientific communication formally somewhere. Almost every science textbook begins with a discussion of the scientific method; why not start classes with a discussion of what makes science writing...scientific?

I can't be the first person to think about this. Surely the devoted science schools of the world teach some sort of Science Writing 101, something to introduce the syntax and structure of scientific academia. So I ran a basic, university-specific web search of undergraduate catalogues for required classes on science writing.

All that came up were optional courses for journalism students looking to focus on science reporting.

I think this is a serious shortcoming. If I were the queen of the Universe, or at least a department head, this is how I would do it: a mandatory 1 credit, 4- or 6-week class in freshman year. Teach the students acceptable and unacceptable terminology, the basic structure of a scientific paper, the sections where you can repeat your data, the sections where you expand it, etc. I'd wrap up the class by having them read one short, well-written scientific journal article to illustrate the way it should be done. Then, turn them out into the world with a little better idea of what they're reading and writing.

Am I crazy? I'd love to know if anyone else out there has the same frustrations, or actually has such a class at their school.

Google's Interactive Star Map

First real post! I'm on fire...

I was trawling my Twitter feed before bed, and I found this link: http://workshop.chromeexperiments.com/stars/

Go drool for five or ten minutes (or half an hour, whatever) and then come back and read this.

This has to be getting more press SOMEWHERE than what it's getting on the various feeds and sites I follow. While it's not the most in-depth or scale accurate rendition of our stellar neighborhood that could be made, it's still a great tool. It helps bring the concepts of distance and size down to something more easily grasped, which is (to my mind at least) one of the major stumbling blocks people face when learning astronomy.

Numbers scare people; it's easy to become dazed when comparing millions of miles and billions of lightyears, without being able to visualize either one. I was reviewing some of the distances earlier in the year for my astrobiology class, and I sat there for...quite a while, just zooming in and out in my mind between the measures involved in the solar system, galaxy, Local Group, etc. Now, that sense of enormous distance is one of the things that makes me feel most strongly that I'm studying the "right" thing for me, but someone who's dabbling around the edges of astronomy needs something a little more hands-on and a little less terror-inducing. And (as much as I hate to pat Google on the back), I think this app does that admirably.

Which brings me to another thing I think the site does really well: it takes the emptiness out of the Universe. By focusing on i.e., stars everyone has heard of (at least every geek and sci fi fan), it shows where we are situated generally without emphasizing the immense tracts of nothing (or whatever they're calling "nothing" this week) that lie between. The comforting streak of the Milky Way that lies behind each star image reminds you of the scale while situating you firmly in something familiar, our galactic town's local landmarks.

That's enough philosophizing for the night. Til next time,

~The Clumsy Astronomer

Intro Post

So, you found my little pet project -- congratulations! Here's what I intend to do:

1. Keep track of my current crackpot theories
2. Share awesome astronomy news (I have a Twitter for that, as well, although it's not strictly astronomy-based)
3. Post some of the things I've either stumbled across or developed to help in astronomy education. I am a big proponent of sidewalk astronomy, and even intend to actually help with it again someday.

 If I actually stick with this blog, it will all be sorted into tags and categories and subfolders upon subfolders...because that's what I do. I sort things. Then I drop them when I'm carrying them.

~The Clumsy Astronomer