Uncategorized – Page 51 – Scienceandsf -A Blog Published by Robert A. Lawler

TV Movie Review: Fahrenheit 451.

Fahrenheit 451 (Credit: Ballantine Books)

Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which books burn and of course it is also the title of the classic novel by Ray Bradbury about a future society where books are burned as a way to keep the populace happy, and dumb, and controlled. Now HBO productions has released an new, updated version of Bradbury’s tale for our divided and angry age.

For the most part the HBO version sticks to the original. Guy Montag is a fireman who doesn’t put out fires, he starts them in order to burn books but in keeping with our modern age he also burns VHS tapes, DVDs and even computers with literature on them. Legally allowed entertainment in this age consists of lame, interactive videos and games, a lot like what we do have.

One mistake HBO makes right from the start is eliminating Montag’s wife who Bradbury used to good purpose in illustrating the vapid, lifeless. anti-intellectual life in the society of Fahrenheit 451. Indeed the only characters we meet in the new version are either book burning firemen or book reading criminals. We never get any feel for the vast majority of the people in this society.

The HBO version also tries to make itself more exciting by adding a healthy dose of violence. Right at the beginning we see a boxing match between Montag and his fire chief, a couple minutes of action that has nothing to do with the plot. Cutting out a few scenes of firemen hitting book readers could have freed up some time to show how censorship is used to control people.

Montag, with flame thrower, and his Chief (Credit: HBO)

Going by the sets and visuals either the producer or director, probably both, are big fans of Blade Runner because there are a lot of shots of tall skyscrapers with videos being shown on their sides. Also everything is very poorly lighted and has a high-tech but still grimy feel to it.

A couple of the most memorable scenes from the novel are shown pretty much as Bradbury wrote them. Probably the best known scene is when the fireman burst into a house with huge library of books, maybe even more than in my house. After the firemen have doused all of the books with kerosene the little old lady whose books they are refuses to leave. Instead she sets the books, and herself alight with a match.

Scenes like that are powerful, they are the reason why Fahrenheit 451 is still such a good read after 65 years. However instead of just sticking to their source material the script writers decided to ‘improve’ Fahrenheit 451 by adding Omnis. What’s Omnis you ask? Well I don’t like to give away too much so let’s just say that Omnis has something to do with the recent discovery that you can store data, even a book, on DNA.

With the addition of Omnis the writers are then able to drop Bradbury’s quiet, yet very profound ending and replace it with five minutes of pyrotechnics. It’s an ending that disappoints at best.

While HBO’s version of Fahrenheit 451 isn’t great, it isn’t bad either. The cast and crew obviously realize that Bradbury had something important to say not just for the McCarthy era when he wrote the novel, but something that applies to today’s world as well.

Astronomers declare Asteroid near Jupiter to be an Interstellar Immigrant.

It was only last October that astronomers discovered the first known interstellar visitor to our Solar System. (See my post of 4Nov17) The asteroid, which was discovered by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System or Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii, was moving much too fast for the Sun’s gravity to keep it in a permanent orbit so it must have come from interstellar space and only spent a short period of time going around our Sun.

Astronomers named the asteroid Oumuamua, Hawaiian for scout, and we learned quite a lot about it in the few months Oumuamua was close enough to study. Astronomers found the composition of Oumuamua was like that of an iron-nickel meteorite than a dirty snowball like a comet. They also discovered that Oumuamua possessed a very unusual cigar shape being at least ten times longer than it was wide. The image below is an artist’s impression of Oumuamua.

The Interstellar Visitor Oumuamua (Credit: Space.com)

Now the astronomers at Pan-STARRS have discovered another asteroid that, while it is a permanent member of our Solar System, its orbit is so strange that it may not be an original member. Orbital simulations suggest that it could be an interstellar immigrant.

The new find hasn’t been given a name yet so I’ll be using its astronomical designation, which is 2015 BZ509. Now 2015 BZ509 orbits the Sun with a semi-major axis (Average distance) only slightly less than that of Jupiter. The most unusual thing about its orbit however is that 2015 BZ509 orbits in the opposite direction of nearly every other object in the Solar System. It has what is called retrograde motion. The image below shows a telescopic view of 2015 BZ509, it’s in the yellow circle.

Two pictures of the Asteroid 2015 BZ509, in yellow circle (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

To understand what retrograde means let’s imagine ourselves looking down on the Solar System from the Sun’s north pole (which happens to correspond to Earth’s north pole). Looking at the image below of the inner Solar System ( the whole thing is too big to really illustrate my point), the orbits of the planets, the spin of the Sun and the spins of all of the planets, even the motions of the major moons all go counterclockwise. The reason for this is simple; the original gas and dust cloud that formed our Solar System must have had a counterclockwise spin and so the Sun, the planets and all of the moons shared that counterclockwise motion.

The Inner Solar System (Credit: University of Rochester)

Objects that orbit in a clockwise motion are very rare, but not completely unknown. There is an entire class of objects known as Centaurs who orbit the Sun between the orbits of the gas giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). This small number of asteroids are of great interest to astronomers simply because of their unusual orbits and astronomers have done an enormous amount of computer modeling trying to understand how those asteroids got those orbits. What they found was that the powerful gravity of the gas giants could capture an object out of the Ort cloud and an object so captured could on occasion wind up going the wrong way. Astronomers also found that such orbits are unstable, lasting less than 100 million years. The image below shows a few of the crazy orbits of the Centaur asteroids.

Centaur asteroid Orbits (Credit: Nick Fiorenza, Lunar Planner.com)

2015 BZ509 isn’t a Centaur however, it’s not between two gas giants its in an orbit very similar to Jupiter’s only backward. And when researchers F. Namouni of the Universite Cote d’Azur in Nice France and M. H. M. Morais of the Universidade Estadual Paulista in Sao Paulo Brazil carried out one million simulations of the orbit of 2015 BZ509 they found that its orbit was stable going back to the very beginning of our Solar System four and a half billion years ago.

So if 2015 BZ509 has been sitting around Jupiter pretty much since the formation of Jupiter and the other planets how did it get its backwards orbit. Doctors Namouni and Morais theorize that, back when the Solar System was very young and we were a part of a star cluster like the Pleiades or the Orion nebula 2015 BZ509 could have been grabbed from another star system that was also in the process of formation.

Personally I think that claiming that 2015 BZ509 is interstellar in origin just because it has a very unusual, but nevertheless stable orbit is a bit of a stretch. I want to see some more evidence, and I expect I’ll get my wish as astronomers continue to study this fascinating object.

P.S. Orbital dynamics isn’t my forte but I do know how to calculate the difference between the specific energy of an object (that’s the energy per kilogram of mass) between being free of the Sun’s gravity and being captured at Jupiter’s orbit. I calculate that 2015 BZ509 would have to have somehow lost 85 million Joules of energy for every kilogram of its mass if it is an interstellar immigrant. That’s lot so you can see why I’m more than a little doubtful!

Movie Review: Avengers, Infinity War.

Poster: Avengers Infinity War (Marvel / Disney)

How many superheroes can you cram into a single movie before it becomes an unwieldy mess? That was my fear before I went to see the new Avengers movie from Marvel / Disney Productions.

I’m happy to report that my worries were groundless. Even with by my count twenty-one superheroes, Avengers Infinity War is both a very exciting and actually very well constructed story. Not only did the writers and production crew manage to give all the big named stars at least a few scenes where they get to say some important lines. They also succeeded in keeping the story flowing along without making it look like they were giving all the big named stars etc. etc.

Part of the secret is just following the old formula KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). The plot is really simple. The bad guy Thanos is on a mission to acquire (i.e. steal) the six Infinity Stones that will give him infinite power. Can’t get much simpler than that.

Thanos The Bad Gut (Credit: Marvel / Disney)

Another trick is to break your twenty-one superheroes into separate groups. Thor meets up with The Guardians of the Galaxy, the God of Thunder and Rocket the raccoon actually work really well together. Then Iron Man, Doctor Strange and Spiderman are on a spaceship toward the Bad Guy’s home planet while Captain America is back on Earth getting everybody else organized for the big battle at the end. It’s important that the writer’s keep the scenes moving back and forth seamlessly between these groups but if they can do so it can actually keep the audience from getting confused, or bored.

Thor with Rocket and Groot (Credit: Marvel / Disney)

Iron Man with Spiderman and Doctor Strange (Credit: Marvel Disney)

Captain America Takes Command (Credit: Marvel / Disney)

One thing you can’t make simple is the characterizations and that’s one of the advantages of a series of movies like the Marvel Universe. With one exception all of these actors have already played their character several times and hence knows how to play the character and how the public expects their character to behave.

The one exception is the bad guy Thanos; he may have made a couple of brief appearances in earlier Marvel Movies but this is the first time he’s a major character so it’s important that Thanos doesn’t become just a cardboard villain. Once again the writers have done their job by making Thanos crazy, psychopathic and absolutely certain that he’s the good guy!

Now I’m not going to give away too much of what happens in Avengers Infinity War but I will say that the ending was quite unexpected. I will give away one little secret however. Marvel movies often have a short scene either during or at the very end of the credits. This scene gives a clue to what’s to what’s going to happen in a future movie. Well in Avengers Infinity War you have to wait until the very end of the credits if you want to see it!

Avengers Infinity War was undoubtedly a difficult movie to make, there really is just a lot going on. However, it is definitely a success both as a story and as a spectacle. If the writer’s, producers and production teams at Marvel / Disney keep up the quality it seems to me as if the Marvel Universe will be turning out the blockbusters for quite a few more years to come.

The Coriolis “Force”, it’s what makes Hurricanes, Tornadoes and the water in your Toilet spin.

Did you ever take a ride on a Merry-Go-Round with a friend and while the ride was spinning you tried to toss something, let’s say a piece of candy to them? Well I bet the candy took off in a sharp turn and you missed by a mile! You’re left with a surprised look on your face as the candy flies off as if it had a mind of its own!

Think about it, because of the motion of the Merry-Go-Round both you and your friend are moving in a circle! That means that by the time the candy gets to where your friend was when you threw it, they’re not there anymore! And because of the circular motion of the Carousel your candy appears to you to take a sharp turn in the opposite direction of the spin of the Merry-Go-Round! Click on the link below to be taken to a youtube video of a very nice demonstration of what I’m describing from a freshman physics course at MIT.

This effect is commonly known as the Coriolis “Force” although any physicist will point out that there’s really no force acting on the candy. Technically what’s happening is that you are in a rotating frame of reference, the Carousel, but once you let go of the candy it no longer is. This makes the candy’s straight line motion look to you as if it’s curved. That’s right the candy is moving in a straight line, you’re on the Merry-Go-Round, you’re the one going in a circle!

Now we all live our lives on a great big Merry-Go-Round, better known as the spinning globe of the Earth, so the coriolis effect has a major influence on many of the phenomena we see every day. (That’s right you flat Earth loonies, the Earth is a spinning globe and the phenomena I’m about to talk about are demonstrations of that fact!!!). Since the Earth’s equator is 40,000 km in circumference and the planet rotates once every 24 hours that means that a person standing on the equator is actually moving at 1666.6 kilometers per hour (40,000km / 24 hours=1666.6 kph). On the other hand someone standing at the north or south pole isn’t moving at all (relative to the center of the Earth at least) but simply turning around once every 24 hours. In between you can calculate your speed if you know your latitude using the formula:

v=1666.6 x sin(Latitude)

For example I live in Philadelphia at a latitude of 40º N so I’m moving at a speed of 1071 kph. The image below illustrates this.

Your speed due to the Earth’s spin depends on your latitude.

This difference in velocities has a major effect on our weather and to see how let’s look at how a LOW pressure system behaves. Now I hope you remember that a low pressure system is also a storm system because it pulls in and condenses moisture laden air leading to rain and strong winds.

Looking at the image below we see that a super strong Low Pressure system is sitting right over me in Philadelphia. This low is so strong it’s pulling in air all the way from the equator and the north pole. Now as I said above Philadelphia is moving at 1071 kph and so is the air above it. The air at the equator is moving much faster however, 1666 kph so when it get pulled toward the low it misses, going in front of the low, to the east. The air at the pole however is moving much slower so it misses the low to the rear, the west. The result is a counter-clockwise flow of air around the low pressure system giving hurricanes and tornados their familiar spiral shape, see image of a hurricane below. That is why you often hear your local meteorologist, in the northern hemisphere, talk about storms having a counterclockwise motion while a fair weather system has a clockwise spin.

Hurricane Irma Spinning Counter-Clockwise (Credit: National Geographic)

The mirror image of this happens in the southern hemisphere. The air from the equator still misses to the front of the low and the air from the pole misses to the rear but because the equator and pole have flipped positions, see image below, the low now has a clockwise flow. The very movements of the weather systems on Earth are due to our planet being a spinning globe.

Before I go I’ll mention one more example of the coriolis effect that you probably see several times a day, whenever you flush your toilet in fact. Think about it, isn’t all that water flowing out causing a low pressure system, and doesn’t the water spin counter-clockwise north of the equator and clockwise south of it. That’s the coriolis effect right inside your own home.

And you don’t have to be very far north or south of the equator to see the spinning. Click on the link below to be taken to a youtube video shot at the equator in Uganda. The presenter demonstrates the coriolis effect just a few feet north of, right on and a few feet south of the equator.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xqtXBnuXiA

So remember, the next time some you arguing with a flat Earth idiot just flush the toilet and tell them the spinning globe of the Earth is causing the spin in the water. Then you can flush their nonsense down the toilet as well.

The SuperCDMS Experiment and the Search for Dark Matter.

It was back in my undergraduate days (early 1980s) that the topic of Dark Matter first began to be seriously considered by astro-physicists and cosmologists. The idea that there was some kind of matter in the Universe that was for some reason invisible to our telescopes was considered as a solution to two of the biggest problems in our study of the Universe.

The first problem concerned the stability of all of the rotating spiral galaxies we were studying. The idea that the stars in the outer reaches of a galaxy, like our own sun, would orbit around the center of the galaxy made perfect sense. After all, it was just Newton’s laws of gravity at work we thought. However, when we estimated the mass a galaxy, basically counting the numbers of stars, and measured the speed at which the stars were orbiting we found that there wasn’t enough mass, the galaxies should fly apart! There had to be some mass that we weren’t seeing, some invisible matter whose gravitational attraction was holding galaxies together. See image below.

At the same time other astronomers were studying the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the leftover radiation from the original big bang, and used that data to calculate how the Universe should look today. Problem was that the calculations didn’t match the reality, not based on the amount of mass we could see. In order to make the calculations work the Universe had to have about four times as much invisible matter as the matter we could see.

O’k so the Universe had a lot of matter that didn’t emit light the way normal matter did in the stars, some sort of Dark Matter. The search was on to discover just what this Dark Matter was. The astro-physicists, with some help from the high-energy physicists, came up with a lot of ideas: Cold Dark Matter, Hot Dark Matter, MACHOS (Mass Concentrations) and WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles).

That was almost forty years ago now, and we’re still waiting for direct experimental evidence of any kind of dark matter. Oh, we’ve made some progress, everybody pretty much agrees on WIMPs as Dark matter but that doesn’t mean everybody’s right. We need good hard evidence.

Hopefully soon we’ll get some from the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search now under construction by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) at Stanford University and which will be set up over 2000 meters underground at SNOLAB at the Vale Inco Mine in Sudbury, Canada.

Setting up sophisticated, delicate physics experiments deep down in an old mine because all of the rock above the instruments helps insulate them from the interference of cosmic ray particles. And the SuperCDMS needs to eliminate all of the interference it can, it’s trying to measure the tiny amount of energy produced when a WIMP bounces against a normal atom. The image below shows the Sudbury neutrino telescope already in operation at Sudbury.

Neutrino Telescope in Sudbury Mine (Credit: Pinterest)

Physicists calculate that such collisions are very rare, you may have to wait many trillions of trillions of years for a particular atom to experience such a collision. Rather than waiting so long physicists will use trillion of trillions of atoms and then ‘listen’, that’s right listen for the sound of any collisions. Technically the intent is to detect the minute phonon signals of the collisions with germanium crystal detectors. The image below shows one of SuperCDMS’s detectors.

But in order to ‘hear’ the sound of a WIMP hitting an atom the physicists have to eliminate as much as possible the racket caused by all of the atoms hitting each other caused by thermal vibrations and the only way to do that is to reduce the detector’s temperature down to a small fraction of a degree above absolute zero, hence Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search.

The experimental setup is shown in the image below. The cyrostat and detector section is modular in design allowing more detectors to be installed in the future. Around the detectors is a lining of lead (Pb) shielding with water shielding around that. The entire apparatus is then mounted on seismic isolators because even the slightest outside movement could be picked up as an erroneous signal. It’s often true that in today’s physics experiments, eliminating the unwanted signals can be a bigger job than detecting the minuscule signal you’re looking for!

SuperCDMS Experimental Layout (Credit: SuperCDMS)

SuperCDMS is scheduled to be up and running by the year 2020 but it will take four or five years of data collection before any results can be announced but I’ll let you in on my opinion. Now I’ll be very happy to be proven wrong but I’ve always been skeptical of WIMPs, we’ve been looking for them for forty years and have no evidence so far. Personally I was a MACHO supporter, basically the idea here was that for every star we can see there would be dozens of smaller brown dwarfs, objects just too small to start nuclear fusion and so don’t glow, and on top of that there would be literally thousands of planetary sized objects in interstellar space. I still think we need to consider MACHOS as a possible solution to the Dark Matter problem.

Fossil Reveals First Steps in the Evolution of the Beaks of Birds.

In today’s world the taxonomic group we call birds have two unique anatomic characteristics that no other animals possess, feathers and beaks. Trying to understand how these distinct features evolved has been a goal of paleontologists since Darwin’s days.

Considerable progress has been made in the study of feathers with the discovery not only of early birds with feathers like Archaeopteryx but also of new evidence that some species of dinosaurs sported primitive feathers for insulation. The images below show archaeopteryx and a feathered T-rex (yes some paleontologists think the mighty T-rex might have been partially covered by feathers).

Archaeopteryx: Feathers and Teeth! (Credit: Independent)

T-rex with Feathers? (Credit: American Museum of Natural History)

Evidence for the evolution of the bird’s beak however is much sparser; and the development of the beak is mostly unknown. Beaks by the way are composed of bony upper and lower mandibles (jaws) that are covered by a thin later of keratin (the protein in your hair and fingernails) and which lack teeth composed of dentine. Although similar in some ways to the mouths of other vertebrates the avian beak is a structure unique to birds.

The big problem in studying the development of the beak is that usually the delicate bones making up the skull of an early bird are so squashed that little can be learned from them. One thing we were certain of however was that feathers came first; there are many fossil specimens, again like Archaeopteryx, of early birds covered with feathers but sporting a mouthful of teeth.

Now a new study, combining both recent fossil finds and a reexamination of older specimens with the latest instruments, is changing that. It started in 2014 when Kristopher Super, then an undergraduate student at Fort Hays State University in Kansas, found an almost complete fossil of the well know early bird Ichthyornis dispar encased in limestone. A transitional species between the dinosaurs and birds I. dispar was a seagull sized creature that lived between 66 and 100 million years ago.

When the find was shown to Yale Professor of Paleontology Bhart-Anjan Bhullar he suggested that instead of trying to remove the specimen from the limestone it should be scanned by computerized tomography (CT scanning). What they found led them to perform CT scans on three other fossils for conformation. There, right at the very end of a long bony jaw filled with very sharp teeth sat a tip covered in keratin, a beak. Professor Bhullar suggests that even a tiny tip of a beak may have given I. dispar a greater ability to manipulate its food and preen its feathers. Exactly the behavioral activities that modern birds use their beaks for. The image below shows a composite of the CT scans of I. dispar.

Ichthyornis CT Scan (Keratin Beak is at tip) (Credit: Science Magazine)

The scientists also found that the skull of I. dispar shared a mixture of dinosaur and bird like features, a large brain case like that of a bird along with the powerful jaw muscles of a velociraptor like dinosaur. The evidence provided by I. dispar pushes back by millions of years the development of the bird’s beak while at the same time indicating that birds may have existed for millions of years with both a partial beak and a mouthful of teeth. The image below shows an artists rendering of the head of Ichthyornis dispar.

Ichthyornis Head (Artist’s Rendering) (Credit: Science Magazine)

The first fossils of Ichthyornis were discovered in the 1870s by the US paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh, famous for his ‘Dinosaur Wars’ with Edward D. Cope. Even after almost 150 years we’re still leaning more about these amazing dino-birds.

Space News for May2018.

Several stories of interest have been happening in space exploration over the past month so let’s get to it!

Once again Space X is rewriting the rules on how to get into orbit cheaply and efficiently. Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket has now been successfully launched more than fifty times with Space X recovering more than twenty of the first stages. For the last two years the Falcon 9 has flown more often than any other rocket making Space X the leader in the drive to commercialize space travel.

The latest Falcon 9 rockets have been considerably improved and updated from the first vehicle that was launched in 2010. Lighter, more powerful engines combined with larger fuel tanks have nearly doubled the Falcon 9’s payload to orbit.

Now Space X is rolling out a new version of the Falcon 9, referred to as Block 5 by Space X. The Block 5 version has been optimized for recovery and reuse. The intention is to reuse the Falcon 9 first stages at least ten times each in order to maximize the cost savings. The first launch of the new, improved Falcon 9 is scheduled for next week but since this is a new design there may be delays as Space X wants to be certain that everything is a go for launch. The image below shows the new, optimized Falcon 9 Block 5.

Falcon 9 Block 5 Rollout (Credit: Space X)

Perhaps the success of Space X is making their competitors a little nervous because just this past week Boeing saw fit to publicly remind everyone that their Space Launch System (SLS), which hasn’t flown yet, is bigger than Space X’s Falcon heavy, which has. I think that ‘my rocket is gonna be bigger than your rocket’ doesn’t quite match the success Space X has had recently. The image below shows what the SLS will look like when it is finally tested, hopefully next year.

Illustration of the Space Launch System (Credit: NASA)

My second story is actually an update of a story I blogged about back on 27Jan2018. In that post I described the small nuclear power plant that was developed by NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland Ohio. Called the Kilopower Reactor Using Stirling Technology (KRUSTY) the prototype has been undergoing testing to the Department of Energy’s Nevada National Security Site. The image below shows the prototype KRUSTY.

NASA’s kilowatt Nuclear Reactor KRUSTY (Credit: Youtube)

The first two tests to be carried out were simple environment checkouts without the reactor being powered up in any way. During the third test the reactor’s core was slowly powered up in order to heat the core. The final test consisted of a full power test of 28-hour duration intended to simulate an actual mission.

The prototype KRUSTY reactor is designed to output one kilowatt of electrical power but the concept is intended to be scalable up to ten kilowatts. NASA scientists are of the opinion that four such ten-kilowatt units would be sufficient to power a manned outpost on either the Moon or Mars. The image below shows what a KRUSTY unit could look like deployed on the Moon.

KRUSTY on the Moon (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

Over the last forty years NASA has initiated several programs for the design and testing of a small nuclear reactor for use in outer space. However all of those programs were canceled before testing had even begun primarily because of public aversion to nuclear power. Hopefully the day will soon come where KRUSTY is providing the electrical needs of NASA astronauts on another world.

My final story concerns a brand new NASA program for an initial design of the space telescope of the future. What scientists at Cornell are proposing is a modular concept of a telescope that will build itself piece by piece in orbit until it is about thirty meters across. The image below shows both a single module and a partially assembled telescope.

Modular Active Self Assembling Space Telescope design concept (Credit: NASA, Cornell University)

Professor of mechanical engineering Dmitry Savransky leads a team of fifteen scientists and engineers who have been awarded a Phase I NASA Innovative Advanced Concept grant of $125,000 for an initial feasibility study.

The basic idea is for the Telescope to be constructed from one thousand or more identical pieces that can be placed into orbit one at a time. Since the larger a telescope is the more light it can gather to study we want to put the largest possible into orbit but also the larger a telescope is the more difficult it is to get into space.

This certainly makes the idea of putting the telescope into orbit in pieces and assembling them there is a logical way to go. However the final configuration of the optics of any telescope has to be so precise that the concept of a prefabricated space telescope may simply be unworkable. Only time and study will tell if a modular space telescope is the way to go or not. This is a Phase I study after all.

Book Review: The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu.

Cover Art for ‘The dark Forest’ (Credit: China Underground)

‘The Dark Forest’ is the second novel in the science fiction trilogy by China’s best-known SF writer, the Hugo aware winning Cixin Liu. Starting with ‘The Three Body Problem’, which I reviewed in my post of 30Aug17, the series will conclude with ‘Death’s End’. For the sake of those who haven’t read ‘The Three Body Problem’ let me give a brief summary of it before I go on to ‘The Dark Forest’. (Although you could just read my review, hint, hint). The image below shows Cixin Liu.

Author Cixin Liu (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

In the ‘Three Body Problem’ a Chinese astrophysicist named Ye Zhetai has seen her father murdered and was herself tortured during her country’s cultural revolution of the 1960s. Forced to work for a super secret military program Madam Ye makes contact with an alien civilization called the Trisolarians, living on a planet orbiting the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system. Hating her own species for the things that were done to her Madam Ye gives the Trisolarians the information they need to launch an invasion fleet against Earth. The Trisolarian fleet is traveling at one percent of the speed of light so it will take more than 400 years for the aliens to arrive in our solar system. ‘The Three Body Problem’ ends with the governments of the world becoming aware of the alien threat.

Cover Art for ‘The Three Body Problem’ (Credit: Goodreads)

In ‘The Dark Forest’ humanity is now faced with the task of trying to work together to develop a defense against the technologically superior Trisolarian invasion fleet, even if it’s not going to reach Earth for 400 years. To make matters worse the Trisolarians have succeeded in sending sub-atomic probes called sophons to Earth that are not only keeping mankind under constant surveillance but are even able to interfere with the results of experiments probing the fundamental laws of the Universe, CERN, LIGO, etc. Because of the sophons humanity cannot advance in new knowledge but only improve the technology we have that is based on already established physics, which leaves us in a perpetual technical disadvantage relative to the Trisolarians.

Faced with this continuous surveillance and the blocking of our scientific advance the UN Security Council responds with the Wallfacer program. Four men are selected to develop strategies to defeat the Trisolarians, strategies that they will keep entirely to themselves, telling no one at all in an effort to keep the sophons from figuring it out.

The Wallfacers are given total control over the entire resources of mankind; they get whatever they need to carry out their plans. Three of the Wallfacers are men of achievement and renown, men with military, political and scientific credentials. The fourth is Luo Ji, an irresponsible, self-centered, perpetual student but he’s also the only man that the Trisolarians want dead.

Luo Ji’s importance stems from a conversation he had with Ye Zhetai that is in fact the first scene of the novel so pay attention as you read it. Much of ‘The Dark Forest’ is concerned with Luo Ji’s trying to figure out why the Trisolarians are so afraid of what he and Madam Ye talked about.

While Luo Ji is the main focus of the novel there are subplots and complications galore. With the other three Wallfacers along with people who feel that humanity’s only hope is to escape into intergalactic space before the Trisolarians get here, the story has more than enough twists and turns to keep you guessing as to what’s gonna happen next!

I don’t want to give away too much but I do want to admit to having made an incorrect guess in the first novel. In the ‘The Three Body Problem’ Madam’s Ye’s daughter Yang Dong has committed suicide before the story even starts and I predicted that she wasn’t really dead yet. Well as it turned out she didn’t show up in ‘The Dark Forrest’ so I suppose I was wrong. Of course there is still ‘Death’s End’, which I plan on reading quite soon.

Cover Art for ‘Death’s End’ (Credit :Amazon)

TESS: NASA’s new Exoplanet Hunting Satellite.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched on the 18th of April from the Kennedy Space Center aboard a Space X falcon 9 rocket. Another space success for Space X, which not only delivered TESS to its proper orbit but once again recovered the Falcon 9’s first stage so that can be reused for further missions. The image below shows TESS riding into space aboard a Falcon 9.

Launch of TESS Space Telescope (Credit: Deutsch Welle)

TESS is a replacement for, and an improvement upon NASA’s highly successful Kepler exoplanet hunting space telescope. Kepler’s mission began in 2009 with the spacecraft continuously observing the light output from approximately 150,000 main sequence stars looking for tiny yet periodic dips in the stars light output. Such dips could be caused by one or more planets passing, technically transiting across the face of the star. The image below shows the Kepler Space Telescope and the area of the sky it observes.

As of April 2018 the Kepler Space Telescope had identified 2,650 exoplanets that have been confirmed by closer study with ground-based telescopes. Of the confirmed exoplanets 550 are believed to be rocky Earth type planets with nine of those planets orbiting within their star’s habitable zone.

The years have taken their toll on Kepler however. System failures have greatly reduced the telescopes ability to perform and it will run out of the fuel it needs to keep itself in position within a few months. At the same time a new space telescope, with improved performance that could survey a greater number of stars would lead to even more discoveries of exoplanets. Enter TESS, NASA’s new exoplanet hunting space telescope. The image below shows TESS.

TESS Space Telescope (Credit: Many Worlds)

TESS’s mission is different from Kepler’s in several ways however. For one, whereas Kepler stared continually at a very small patch of the sky, about 0.2% of the entire sky, TESS will be able to observe as much as 85% of the celestial globe. On the other hand, while Kepler studied stars as far away as a thousand light years or a little more, TESS is going to concentrate on the stars closest to our own.

The idea here is for TESS to find a large number of exoplanets that are also close enough to us that we can use other telescopes to not only confirm their existence but to actually learn more about them. In particular it is hoped that the soon to be launched James Webb Space Telescope will even be able to discover something about the chemical composition of the atmosphere of some of the planets that are found by TESS.

TESS will be doing other research as well. The satellite’s instruments will also be able to obtain observations of unexpected, transient events such as the optical components of gamma ray bursts. It is also hoped that the observations made by TESS will advance the study of astroseismology, that is the study of the interior of stars through measuring their surface vibrations.

The projected mission time line for TESS is estimated at 15 years but of course that will depend on the fuel usage. If you’d like to learn more about the TESS Space Telescope and its mission the link below will take you to NASA’s official website for the spacecraft.

https://www.nasa.gov/tess-transiting-exoplanet-survey-satellite

Before I go I’d like to quickly mention another piece of NASA news, the cancellation of the planned Lunar Resource Prospector rover. This mission was intended to land a rover vehicle on the Moon to excavate and study materials on the Lunar surface. The primary material of interest was water ice, which has been observed by orbiting spacecraft in the Moon’s polar regions and which it is hoped could to used to provide fresh water and perhaps even rocket fuel in the near future for any long term settlements on our satellite.

NASA’s decision to cancel the Lunar Prospector makes little sense therefore when you consider President Trump’s recent directive for the Space Agency to return manned missions to the Moon before going on to Mars. The knowledge that the rover could have gained could have been very useful to future lunar explorers. Once again we have a situation where the space agency doesn’t seem to have a firm understanding of exactly what it’s long term goals are, let alone how to achieve them. The image below shows a prototype of the Lunar Prospector rover undergoing test.

Lunar Resource Prospector Prototype (Credit: NASA)

New study details how Human Beings have been causing the extinction of other Large Mammals for thousands of years.

Last Sunday was Earth day, the one day a year when we human beings try to think about how we’re treating our home planet and consider whether we could perhaps do a little better. According to a new study of the damage that has been caused by human activity over the last 200,000 years, that’s basically our entire existence, we have a lot of work to do.

The article by the University of New Mexico’s Felisa Smith and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Kate Lyons follows the decline and extinction of species of large mammals on a continent by continent basis. Starting first in Africa more than 125,000 years ago and moving on to Europe, Asia, Australia around 35,000 years ago and finally the Americas 12,000 years ago every continent saw mass extinctions of large mammals starting from the time our ancestors first arrived.

The list of species that were hunted to extinction before the dawn of history includes well known creatures like the Wholly Mammoth and the Irish Elk along with lesser known, but just as large and impressive beasts like the Megatherium, a huge ground dwelling sloth and the Glyptodon, an armadillo the size of a small car. In addition to the herbivores many species of predators also disappeared once humans arrived on the scene . These included the saber toothed tiger and the monstrous cave bear. (See images throughout this post).

A Mammoth in Trouble (credit: Business Insider)

It’s easy to understand why early humans should preferentially hunt larger prey, as Doctor Lyons says “If you kill a rabbit you’re going to feed your family for a night. If you can kill a large mammal, you’re going to feed your village.” Add to that the facts that large animals are simply easier to find and that there are fewer of them and the path to extinction becomes clear.

Megatherium and Glyptodont (Credit: Pinterest)

So it seems that human beings have had a deadly impact on our fellow creatures as long as we’ve existed, and that impact has only grown more lethal as our technology has advanced. There is scarcely a large mammal species left on Earth today that isn’t endangered. Elephants, Rhinos, Tigers are all on the verge of extinction, along with many other species.

Saber Toothed Tiger (Credit: Vertebres Fossils)

In fact Smith and Lyons estimate that in as little as 200 years the largest surviving land mammal may be the domestic cow, and that’s only because we raise them for food. Are we heading towards the day when the only life left on Earth will be our pets, our parasites and ourselves? Let’s hope humanity finds the wisdom to use our technology to find some way for our fellow creatures to survive. A world without Elephants, Giraffes, Buffalo etc, doesn’t sound like much of a world to me.

Now it may have just been a coincidence but the very day I first read about the paper by Doctors Smith and Lyons there also came the news that the only surviving male Northern White Rhino had died at a wildlife reserve in Kenya. At the age of 45 Sudan as he was known had contracted an infection in his right hind leg and back. Due to his age treatments for the infection had little success and as Sudan’s health declined it was decided to put him to sleep.

Sudan the last Male Northern White Rhino under guard (Credit: Face to Face Africa)

The Northern White Rhinos once dominated the grasslands of east Africa but by 1960 only 2,000 remained, by 2009 only seven and now there are just two old females. Another species that is now gone because of nothing more than human greed.