Review: Earthlight

What happens when humans expand to the planets, but then the planets try to assert their independence? It’s a common science fiction storyline, and the central focus of Earthlight.

Earthlight is one of Arthur C Clarke’s earlier novels, originating as a short story in 1941 and published as a novel in 1955. It is set at an astronomical observatory on the moon. There is war brewing between Earth and the other planets and Earth’s moon is both the front line and the cause for the conflict. Huge amounts of valuable metals are discovered on the moon, and the “Federation” of planets want these resources, while the Earth doesn’t want to share.

This is a pretty simple story, which was written primarily as an excuse for Clarke to describe in loving detail what it would be like to live on the surface of the moon, and what weapons and war in the future would be like. The characters are not particularly interesting and are mostly interchangeable. There are no female characters, and although there are some women described as working at the observatory, for the most part women are present only as distant lovers for the main characters to visit at the lunar colony or send patronizing letters to back on Earth.

Earthlight makes up for its lack of compelling characters with some great descriptions of science as it was known in 1955. There are lakes of dust on the moon, hardy moon-dwelling plants, and galaxies that are still called “island universes”. The largest telescope ever created is the “giant” three hundred inch telescope on the moon, and nobody knows what causes a supernova. The computers are fed punch-card tape, and morse code is used to communicate. It was also fascinating to hear Clarke describe the futuristic weapons used in the climactic battle. A modern reader would think nothing of monochromatic beams of light narrowly focused and used to cause damage. Lasers are nothing new to us, but they weren’t invented when Clarke tried to describe them here! Some of the other weapons described are still out of our reach, though somewhat similar technologies are being developed by DARPA. (Warning: spoilers at that link!)

Bottom line, Earthlight is a fun, short novel with uninteresting characters but great, though dated, science. Much of the fun in reading it, for me, was in seeing how much has changed in science and technology and also how much Clarke got right. If you don’t know much about science, this book is probably even cooler, but will give you some old-fashioned ideas about the moon and astronomy. There is also, in true Clarke fashion, a good deal of semi-optimistic pondering about the future of mankind, as well as a scene involving an emergency suit-less spacewalk that anyone who has watched/read 2001: A Space Odyssey will find familiar.

[PS - Remember to keep voting for my article about the striking similarities between the Mars Science Laboratory and James Bond!]

Be a Martian!

Fact #1: As a Mars scientist, I am incredibly spoiled. There are so many missions to Mars right now sending back so much data, that even if they all went silent tomorrow, it would be decades before we managed to look at all the data and figure out what it’s telling us.

Fact #2: There are lots of people out there (I’m looking at you, loyal readers!) who would love to be able to actively participate in exploring Mars. I mean, have you seen the stuff that the folks at UnmannedSpaceflight have managed to put together? They do more with the data from Mars than a lot of scientists!

So, given those two facts, you can see why I think the new “Be a Martian” collaboration between NASA and Microsoft is a great idea. Check out this excerpt from the press release:

Drawing on observations from NASA’s Mars missions, the “Be a Martian” Web site will enable the public to participate as citizen scientists to improve Martian maps, take part in research tasks, and assist Mars science teams studying data about the Red Planet.

“We’re at a point in history where everyone can be an explorer,” said Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “With so much data coming back from Mars missions that are accessible by all, exploring Mars has become a shared human endeavor. People worldwide can expand the specialized efforts of a few hundred Mars mission team members and make authentic contributions of their own.”

How cool is that? It’s a really brilliant idea, and I hope it goes well. A similar project was pioneered by galactic astronomers who had way too many pictures of galaxies to deal with, so they opened up the database to the public in the form of GalaxyZoo. It was a tremendous success, with thousands of people helping to classify millions of galaxies.

I just created my account and played around a bit, and it looks like a very user-friendly introduction to Mars science. You can contribute in two main ways: aligning images to contribute to a global map, and also counting craters. Both of these tasks can sort of be done by computers, but humans will always be better.

There’s more to the Be a Martian site than just work though, there are also lots of goodies like videos and Mars wallpapers, and great information about Mars. There is even a “movie theater” where you can watch the first few episodes of a series of videos called “The Martians”, that focus on people from all over the country who are involved with Mars, ranging from members of the rover teams to enthusiastic amateurs to actors putting on a play about Mars! There are more episodes on the way, and I encourage you to keep watching… you might see someone you recognize. ;)

Bottom line, it looks like a great site, and a great way to get involved in Mars exploration and learn about everyone’s favorite Red Planet and the people who are fascinated by it. What are you waiting for? Head on over and sign up! I’ll see you on Mars!

 

Crescent Earth, Water on the Moon, and Free Spirit!

Just a quick post to update you on the latest space news and remind you to keep voting for my article about how MSL is like James Bond.

First of all, the Rosetta spacecraft, on its way to a rendezvous with a comet in 2014, swung by Earth the other day, and took some beautiful pictures:

Crescent earth as seen by the Rosetta probe.

Second, NASA held a press conference on friday announcing that the LCROSS mission to “bomb the moon” was successful and that they found evidence for hundreds of kilograms of water in the impact plume. This means that the south pole of the moon just got a lot more appealing, both because of the potential as a resource and because the water trapped in permanently shadowed craters could be billions of years old, preserving the history of the solar system much like the ice cores of Antarctica do for the Earth’s past. Check out the Planetary Society article on the discovery for more information.

Third, the rover drivers are finally preparing to extract Spirit from the sand trap where she has spent most of the summer! Once again, the Planetary Society blog has a good summary of the recent NASA press conference.

That’s all for now. I’m off to frantically write bad sci-fi so I can keep up with NaNoWriMo!

 

Sunjammer

In case you were wondering, the title of this post is the name of a short story by Arthur C Clarke in which solar sail-powered spaceships race each other around the moon.

Ok, that’s cool, but why do I bring this up? Because the Planetary Society is going to be launching a solar sail spacecraft in about a year! An anonymous donor contributed enough money to jump-start the program. The Society had a previous solar sail spacecraft attempt, but the Russian rocket it rode to space malfunctioned and instead of sailing through space, Cosmos 1 ended up in the Bering sea.

Solar sails are a very cool idea, but they have never been tested before, even by NASA. They work because sunlight is capable of transferring momentum, particularly to shiny surfaces, so a solar sail spacecraft just extends it giant silvered wings and hitches a ride on sunlight. It’s a “free” form of propulsion that could be used to accelerate probes without the need to launch heavy rockets and fuel tanks.

Needless to say, people at the Planetary Society are pretty excited about this opportunity to make space exploration history. To read more about the mission, check out this New York Times science article.

(PS – did you remember to vote for my article about MSL over at scientificblogging.com? You can vote daily until the 23rd!)

Big Picture HiRISE Gallery!

Speaking of Mars art, the Big Picture blog (which all of you should be following by now) has a feature on images of Mars taken by HiRISE. Head on over and take a look. Mars is a really pretty and often bizarre-looking place.

[PS - Have you voted today?]

Mars Art: Mind-blowing Swiss Cheese

First of all, a reminder to go vote on my article about MSL, which is a finalist in the scientificblogging.com science writing competition.

Ok, done? Good. I wanted you to do that before I showed you this image because it may very well break your brain. This is a HiRISE image of the so-called “swiss cheese” terrain at the south pole of mars. The terrain is formed by the sublimation of CO2 ice, which forms weird rounded pits. Yes, the round things in this picture are pits.The smooth parts are mesas and the illumination is from the lower right. Pictures like this always make my brain hurt because for some reason I want to see the round depressions as bulges! And if you think this is bad, try watching a scientific presentation with dozens of pictures like this, with varying orientations and illumination angles. I rarely get anything out of Mars south pole talks because my brain is so busy struggling to see the images properly.

Believe it or not, illumination is from the lower right in this image. Click the image to go to the HiRISE page and check out the full sized versions.

LCROSS preliminary results

Hey remember when we bombed the moon? Here’s an interesting article about some preliminary results from LCROSS. I was especially surprised when they said that there may be mercury at the impact site. They say they’re seeing spectral lines that could be produced by iron, magnesium or mercury, but then the article goes on as if mercury is the likeliest candidate! I’m skeptical. Fe and Mg are common in lunar rocks. Mercury: not so much. Oh well, it’s an interesting update anyway, and it sounds like the real juicy results are still in the works.

PS – Have you voted today for my MSL: Mars Action Hero article over at the scientificblogging.com science writing competition? Remember, you can vote daily!

How Habitable is the Earth?

Charlie Stross has an interesting post on his blog that asks the question “How habitable is the Earth?” He goes on to conclude, through a great discussion of the evolution of our planet, that the fraction of time that the earth has been habitable to humans is a tiny sliver of the time the Earth has been around, and that furthermore, much of the earth is not habitable for humans because it is water or ice or mountains. If much of our planet, even now, is not habitable, he argues, what hope is there of finding other habitable worlds out there in space?

It’s an interesting discussion, but I find it somewhat misleading. It makes the rather large assumption that for a world to be considered habitable, a human would have to be able to survive for 24 hours, naked, on the surface. Ok, that’s one definition of habitable. But if you are postulating that these humans are capable of interstellar travel, it seems like you might make allowances for the use of clothing and the ability to build shelter. After all, we’ve known about those ones for a while. You could go even further and suggest that these humans might be able to alter the air they breathe, either through individual gas masks, or on a planetary scale. We used CO2 scrubbers on the Apollo missions to make the air breathable, maybe that would work on a planet with otherwise unbreathable air?

I think he’s fundamentally right in terms of human habitability: the likelihood of a planet being perfectly attuned to humans is extremely low. We evolved to live on Earth and nowhere else. We are going to have to make some adjustments to ourselves or our environment to live anywhere else.

The problem is that he then extrapolates and suggests that this might explain the Fermi paradox (aka. if there are so many stars and planets out there, why haven’t we heard from any little green men?). But that is completely off-base! He is essentially saying that, because humans evolved to live on Earth and nowhere else, it is unlikely for anything else to be living out there because there are likely few earth-like places. That does not follow. There could be aliens out there that are completely happy on their planets that would be instantly lethal to us. And it’s entirely possible that if they set foot on Earth they would find it a very hostile and uninhabitable environment (and not just because of the terrified earthlings).

Anyway, it’s an interesting article. Go take a look.

And speaking of interesting articles, have you gone and voted for my MSL: Mars Action Hero article over at scientificblogging? I’m one of the finalists for their science writing competition, so take a look and vote for me if you like it. To see the other entries, click here. Feel free to vote for as many as you like, and remember you can vote daily until the 23rd!

 

Voting is fixed!

There were some issues with the voting widget on the University Science Writing competition, but they have been resolved, and it turns out it was counting the votes all along! So go vote for my post if you haven’t done so yet today! Don’t worry if you don’t see a number in the grey voting widget box. They decided to hide the number of votes from everyone except the authors.

Ans while you’re there, go ahead and check out and vote for other finalists too. There are some great other posts!

Edit: Can anyone else see the voting widget on my post? I just edited the voting instructions in the text to reflect the fact that they got rid of the visible number of votes, and when I saved, the widget disappeared.

Vote Early and Often!

Remember when I mentioned a few weeks ago that I submitted a blog post about MSL as an action-adventure hero  to ScientificBlogging’s  science writing competition? Well they have announced the finalists and I’m one of them! From now until November 22, all the finalist posts are open for voting. You can vote for as many entries as you want each day, every day! So that means that you can vote for my post 22 times! To vote, go to my post and click on the little gray counter to the right of the title.

The winner of the competition gets $2500 and a 3 month writing internship at ScientificBlogging.com, and the runners up get $1000 and $500. So please, vote early and vote often! Thanks!