Tag: Interstellar Visitor

Book Review: ‘The Object’ by Joshua T. Calvert. 

‘The Object’ by Author Joshua T. Calvert advertises itself as a ‘Hard Science Fiction’ novel, meaning that all of the technology in the story is based on well-established science. In stories of this kind spaceships are propelled by rockets not by warp drive or anti-gravity, there are no transporter beams and time travel is simply impossible. The problem with such stories is that they can become dated pretty quickly.

Cover Art for the Novel ‘The Object’ by Joshue T. Calvert. (Credit: Amazon)

For example Arthur C. Clarke’s first novel, ‘The Space Dreamers’ was written in 1947 and describes the development of a rocket designed to take men to the Moon using technology that was at least possible in the late 1940s. Needless to say the story soon became ‘quaint’ to put it nicely.

Quaint and old-fashioned can be a lot of fun on occasion but most of the time we prefer to live in the modern world. Science Fiction deals with possible futures, not comfortable pasts! (Credit: TouristBee)

Author Joshua T. Calvert goes even further, placing his story in the present day world of NASA, the International Space Station and even Space X gets a lot of mention. Today’s politics are also a part of the plot with tense relations between the US-EU bloc and the China-Russia bloc. The story even begins in the year 2023. The risk in this strategy is that things could change a lot in the next few years so that ‘The Object’ also rapidly becomes dated.

Much of the action, at least in the first half of ‘The Object’ actually takes place at the Johnson Manned Space Center in Houston. That makes it easy to add local colour to the story but if NASA ever changes the name or moves the facility the whole novel becomes simply wrong. (Credit: Texas State Historical Society)

As the novel begins Melody ‘Mel’ Adams is a scientist working for NASA keeping a watch out for asteroids and comets. Mel was in line for an astronaut post but she just missed the cut, her current position at least keeps her a part of the space agency. During an observing run Mel discovers a comet with a developed tail out beyond the orbit of Pluto. The problem with identifying the thing as a comet is that comets don’t develop their tails until they get close enough to the Sun to warm up and begin outgassing.

Author Joshua T. Calvert. (Credit: Podium Entertainment)

The object’s orbit is soon calculated and indicates that, whatever it is it comes from outside the solar system. When the object, which is given the name Serenity, then makes at stop at the planet Saturn and then changes course heading toward the inner planets the possibility that it is an alien spaceship is taken seriously.

As you read ‘The Object’ you get a strong feeling that the story was inspired by the recent discovery of the interstellar object called Oumuamua and the speculation that it could be an interstellar probe build to study our solar system. (Credit: King 5 News)

Serenity’s new trajectory doesn’t have it headed toward Earth however. In fact the closest it will come to our planet is the orbit of Mars so a special mission, using a modified Space X Starship is set up to take a crew of six, two Americans, two Europeans and two Chinese, to rendezvous with the object as it intersects Mar’s orbit. The training and preparation for this mission take up a large part of the novel and it is during training that an injury to the assigned mission commander causes Mel Adams to become the ship’s commander.

As the largest rocket ever build it’s Space X’s ‘Starship’ that author Calvert uses as the vehicle that travels to rendezvous with ‘The Object’. (Credit: Aerospace American AIAA)

I won’t give away the secret of just what Serenity turns out to be but it certainly is different from just a spaceship with an alien crew aboard. That’s the best part of ‘The Object’, Serenity itself. It’s here that the author finally let’s his imagination go, the problem is it takes so long to get there.

In some ways ‘The Object’ itself resembles ‘The Black Cloud’ from the novel by Fred Hoyle. Hoyle’s novel, written in the 1950s is pretty dated now, but still worth reading!!! (Credit: Amazon)

I’m not saying that the first three quarters of “The Object’ are bad, it’s just that they are so filled with minutia that I often lost track of the story, a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. Author Calvert has obviously spent years learning all of the details of how NASA handles a space mission, of what working for NASA is like and wants to include every one of them.

In engineering the smallest detail can have immense importance. In a novel not so much! (Credit: Love Changes Everything)

So I am giving ‘The Object’ a thumb’s up, especially if you are interested in how NASA organizes a space mission, how the space agency selects and trains its astronauts. For me however I would have preferred to have the first two-thirds of the novel cut in half and the last third doubled in size.

Have Scientists taken a critical step in understanding the Chemistry of how life began and an update on our Interstellar Visitor.

Ever since Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’ had demonstrated that all of the multiform types of living creatures here on Earth had evolved over millions of years from a single primitive type of life scientists have sought to understand how that first living thing came into being. Much has been learned in the last 150 years but many of the details of the chemistry involved in the development of a complex, self-replicating molecular system, i.e. a simple living cell, are still unknown.

Now researchers at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have published a paper in which they claim to have found a chemical compound that played a key role in assembling short nucleotide chains (early genetic material) with peptide chains (short version of proteins) encapsulated in a lipid vesicles (early cell walls). Finding a catalyst that could combine these three distinct types of chemicals, and which could have existed on the primitive Earth has been a goal of ‘Origins of Life’ researchers for the past several decades.

The scientists at Scripps have given their compound the name diamidophosphate or DAP for short and have published their results in the journal ‘Nature Chemistry’. The figure below shows the chemical diagram and the structure of DAP.

Chemical Formula for DAP (Credit: Ramanarayanan Kirshnamurthy)

Structure of DAP (Credit: Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy)

According to lead researcher Doctor Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy DAP “would have allowed other chemistries that were not possible before, potentially leading to the first simple, cell based living entities.” “With DAP and water and these mild conditions, you can get these three important classes of pre-biological molecules to come together and be transformed, creating the opportunity for them to interact together, ” Krishnamurthy said. The image below shows DAP and the three classes of chemicals needed to build a simple cell.

DAP linking three classes of pre-biological complex compounds (Credit: Ramanarayanan Krishnamurthy)

Whether or not DAP was THE chemical catalyst that enabled the formation of the first living cell will be difficult to prove four billion years after the fact but Dr. Krishnamurthy and his co-authors intend to continue their study of DAP and other phosphorylating compounds. If you’d like to read the press release put out by the Scripps Institute click on the link below.

https://www.scripps.edu/news/press/2017/20171106krishnamurthy.html

Before I go I’d like to take a moment to update one of my posts of just last week (4Nov17) about the interstellar visitor that entered our solar system and is now on its way back into the void between the stars. Well A/2017 U1 has been given the new name of 1I Oumuamua. The 1I indicates that it is the first interstellar object ever discovered while Oumuamua is a Hawaiian word meaning scout or Messenger. 1I Oumuamua was discovered by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii after all. The image below shows Oumuamua’s path through our solar system.

Path of 1I Oumuamua through our Solar System (Credit: NASA-JPL-Caltech)

 

More importantly a group of Astronomers are preparing a paper in which they give their estimate as to the place of origin of Oumuamua along with how long it took to reach our solar system. Working backward along the trajectory of Oumuamua Eric Gaidos and Jonathan P. Williams of the University of Hawaii along with Adam Kraus of the University of Texas are of the opinion that Oumuamua originated in the Carina and Columba Associations, clusters of young stars at a distance of 215 to 365 light years. (Carina and Columba are constellations in the southern sky).

Current research estimates that the Carina and Columba Associations were an active star-forming region about 45 million years ago. If Oumuamua had been thrown out of a newly forming solar system in the direction of our Sun at a velocity of 1-2 kilometers per second it could just now be arriving in our solar system!

Even though Oumuamua was only near enough for us to study it for about a month we have already learned a great deal from it. This is only the start, in the years to come I have no doubt that we’ll be learning a great deal more.