There are many reasons to be disappointed by the Trump presidency, but here's one you may not have thought of: We now know definitively that there are no aliens. I mean, aliens may exist, but no one on this planet knows about them. The reasoning is simple: if the U.S. government was sitting on secret evidence of aliens - say, from Roswell - then they would have had to tell Donald Trump about it when he took office. And there's no way he could sit on a secret like that.
You know that would be on Twitter within the first month. At the very least, there'd be some hint of it. Say, he responds to a "small hands" joke with "hey, I've seen gray dudes and they have some really small hands."
Okay, maybe he'd leak it, but only to the Russians. But even then we'd see some evidence of it. You know, Putin annexes New Mexico, or announces a new fighter plane that's suspiciously saucer-shaped.
Just to be clear, I never thought that there was secret knowledge of aliens. But a part of me sort of hoped that there was something to it. But now I know it's nothing, it's disappointing. That's sort of emblematic of this administration, to reveal unpleasant realities. Losing faith in humanity was worse, but now I've even lost faith in aliens.
Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label astronomy. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
Thursday, February 25, 2016
That's No Moon
Some people have started a drive to come up with a name for The Moon. See, Earth's moon is a moon, but it doesn't have a name; we just call it "The Moon," just like how people in Los Angeles call the San Fernando Valley "The Valley," as if it's the only valley in the world. But there are lots of other valleys on Earth, and lots of other moons in the solar system.
You might assume that this campaign is something a few physics students came up with while high, and in the age of Kickstarter, you end up kind of committed to crazy ideas like that. Well, that might well be how it started, but it's actually pretty elaborate - they even have their own animation with adorable anthropomorphized moons of the solar system. I never would have thought the Moon would sound so much like Linus from Peanuts.
Anyway, the reasoning is that calling it "The Moon" made sense when we only knew about the one Moon, but then we found that there were similar things for other planets, and called them "moons" too. Apparently it's all Galileo's fault, since he was the first to study moons of other planets (Jupiter, to be precise.) I guess we're lucky he didn't decide to call these things "Galileos," with ours being a Galileo called "Moon."
Of course, there are a few things that could use names. The Sun, God, etc. Really, this is a kind of retronym. In the same way that we had to create the term "acoustic guitar" only after we invented electric guitars, we needed a name for the Moon only after realizing we had to deal with other moons.
As for the Sun, we at least have the sun/star distinction. And we sometimes fall back on the name "Sol" when astronomers or science-fiction writers need to call it something specific. Yeah, they also sometimes call the moon "Luna," and I suspect that would be the most likely name.
I like the idea of naming the Moon, and it's great that these people want to do it consciously, so we don't end up naming it after dirt (The Earth) or giving it a silly name without realizing what we were actually talking about (The Milky Way.) But I don't think it's too likely that this effort is going to work. For one thing, look at the fuss over reclassifying Pluto. And that's for something no one can see with the naked eye. But more to the point, we'll probably only give our moon a name when more of us are conscious of the existence of the rest of the solar system. That will only happen when we've moved on to realize our place in the universe. Damn - The Universe: another thing that needs a name.
You might assume that this campaign is something a few physics students came up with while high, and in the age of Kickstarter, you end up kind of committed to crazy ideas like that. Well, that might well be how it started, but it's actually pretty elaborate - they even have their own animation with adorable anthropomorphized moons of the solar system. I never would have thought the Moon would sound so much like Linus from Peanuts.
Anyway, the reasoning is that calling it "The Moon" made sense when we only knew about the one Moon, but then we found that there were similar things for other planets, and called them "moons" too. Apparently it's all Galileo's fault, since he was the first to study moons of other planets (Jupiter, to be precise.) I guess we're lucky he didn't decide to call these things "Galileos," with ours being a Galileo called "Moon."
Of course, there are a few things that could use names. The Sun, God, etc. Really, this is a kind of retronym. In the same way that we had to create the term "acoustic guitar" only after we invented electric guitars, we needed a name for the Moon only after realizing we had to deal with other moons.
As for the Sun, we at least have the sun/star distinction. And we sometimes fall back on the name "Sol" when astronomers or science-fiction writers need to call it something specific. Yeah, they also sometimes call the moon "Luna," and I suspect that would be the most likely name.
I like the idea of naming the Moon, and it's great that these people want to do it consciously, so we don't end up naming it after dirt (The Earth) or giving it a silly name without realizing what we were actually talking about (The Milky Way.) But I don't think it's too likely that this effort is going to work. For one thing, look at the fuss over reclassifying Pluto. And that's for something no one can see with the naked eye. But more to the point, we'll probably only give our moon a name when more of us are conscious of the existence of the rest of the solar system. That will only happen when we've moved on to realize our place in the universe. Damn - The Universe: another thing that needs a name.
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
The Wishful Thinking Is Out There
The question of whether or not aliens exist is an awkward one. On the one hand, some people will answer that question with any number of bizarre answers:
Because of this, many people who are sensible (but not particularly knowledgeable) will answer the question with an emphatic no, congratulating themselves on their sensibility. It seems to make sense: You haven’t seen aliens, and their existence seems to be far beyond anything we’ve actually experienced.
But then you’ll get a different answer from someone who is sensible and more knowledgeable. If we take someone like myself - who saw Cosmos and now thinks he’s an astronomy expert - and ask them if aliens exist, they’ll tell you that they most certainly do. After all, space is really big. So yes, even though life is surely unlikely to arise on any particular planet, there are so many possibilities, that life must exist somewhere out there. And if you ask the follow-up question, where are they (smartass)? They will refer you back to the “space is really big” principle.
But there’s a problem with that space-is-big, many-possibilities argument. See, space is not only big, it’s also old. It’s about four times older than life on earth, or 70,000 times older than modern humans. On the one hand, that fact adds to the lots-of-chances argument: not only are there lots of planets on which life could have arisen, but there’s been plenty of time for life to arise on them too.
The problem is when it begs that follow-up: Where are they? If the universe is so old, then not only must there be lots of alien races out there, but some of them must have been around for a long time. So even though space is big, they’ve had plenty of time to spread out, explore, and build lots of things. Even if we’re assuming that there’s no way to travel faster than the speed of light, and it will take years just to get to the nearest stars, a race could spread throughout our galaxy in, say, a million years. When you look at it that way, it doesn’t make sense that we haven’t seen any evidence of alien civilizations.
That’s called Fermi’s Paradox. We can’t explain why we can’t find any evidence of aliens, but we also can’t explain how there could not be aliens. There's a long list of interesting explanations for the paradox.
Why rehash this? The Kepler Space Telescope has found a star that appears to have thousands of objects orbiting it. That’s not unusual: a newly created star would have that. Over time, the matter surrounding it would accumulate into bigger and bigger chunks which would turn into planets. Anyone observing our sun five billion years ago would have seen the same thing. But this isn’t a new star, it’s “mature,” like ours. So it should only have a few planets orbiting it. No one has seen anything like this, and we aren’t sure what we’re looking at.
So if science can’t explain it, why not try some wild speculation? People have speculated that a really advanced civilization, with tremendous technology and voracious energy requirements, might build a Dyson Sphere. (Named for physicist Freeman Dyson, not the vacuum cleaner guy.) Essentially the idea is to build a shell around the star to collect all its energy, rather than just settle for the tiny little amount that falls on one planet.
In science fiction, this is often depicted as, literally, a big shell, where your people would live on the inside surface of the shell, with the star essentially above them. Yes, that’s right, there was one on a Star Trek episode once. But there’s a bunch of reasons why that probably wouldn’t work. So if an advanced civilization really wanted to make maximum use of their star’s energy, they’d more likely build something closer to what Dyson actually specified: a “swarm” of small structures of planetlets. They would all orbit the star, absorbing as much of its energy as possible.
So even though there’s probably some rational, boring explanation for this unusual star system, it does seem to resemble what we imagine a Dyson Sphere would look like. And it would provide an answer to Fermi’s Paradox, since this is the sort of thing we would expect to see, given how many really old, presumably advanced civilizations should be out there.
So please allow me to have my moment believing that this really is the sign of intelligent life we’ve always been looking for. Lots of people believe in things just because they want them to be true, and unlike them, at least I’m not voting based on it. And we could all use some good news: just when I was researching this, I found that most astrophysicists on social media were instead complaining about an astronomer given a slap on the wrist for serial sexual harassment. So let’s believe the aliens are there, and we have something better to aspire to.
“Yes, I sure hope they exist.”
“Yes, and the Loch Ness Monster too.”
“Of course. Why, my uncle Kenny’s been abducted twice in the last year alone.”
Because of this, many people who are sensible (but not particularly knowledgeable) will answer the question with an emphatic no, congratulating themselves on their sensibility. It seems to make sense: You haven’t seen aliens, and their existence seems to be far beyond anything we’ve actually experienced.
But then you’ll get a different answer from someone who is sensible and more knowledgeable. If we take someone like myself - who saw Cosmos and now thinks he’s an astronomy expert - and ask them if aliens exist, they’ll tell you that they most certainly do. After all, space is really big. So yes, even though life is surely unlikely to arise on any particular planet, there are so many possibilities, that life must exist somewhere out there. And if you ask the follow-up question, where are they (smartass)? They will refer you back to the “space is really big” principle.
But there’s a problem with that space-is-big, many-possibilities argument. See, space is not only big, it’s also old. It’s about four times older than life on earth, or 70,000 times older than modern humans. On the one hand, that fact adds to the lots-of-chances argument: not only are there lots of planets on which life could have arisen, but there’s been plenty of time for life to arise on them too.
The problem is when it begs that follow-up: Where are they? If the universe is so old, then not only must there be lots of alien races out there, but some of them must have been around for a long time. So even though space is big, they’ve had plenty of time to spread out, explore, and build lots of things. Even if we’re assuming that there’s no way to travel faster than the speed of light, and it will take years just to get to the nearest stars, a race could spread throughout our galaxy in, say, a million years. When you look at it that way, it doesn’t make sense that we haven’t seen any evidence of alien civilizations.
That’s called Fermi’s Paradox. We can’t explain why we can’t find any evidence of aliens, but we also can’t explain how there could not be aliens. There's a long list of interesting explanations for the paradox.
Why rehash this? The Kepler Space Telescope has found a star that appears to have thousands of objects orbiting it. That’s not unusual: a newly created star would have that. Over time, the matter surrounding it would accumulate into bigger and bigger chunks which would turn into planets. Anyone observing our sun five billion years ago would have seen the same thing. But this isn’t a new star, it’s “mature,” like ours. So it should only have a few planets orbiting it. No one has seen anything like this, and we aren’t sure what we’re looking at.
So if science can’t explain it, why not try some wild speculation? People have speculated that a really advanced civilization, with tremendous technology and voracious energy requirements, might build a Dyson Sphere. (Named for physicist Freeman Dyson, not the vacuum cleaner guy.) Essentially the idea is to build a shell around the star to collect all its energy, rather than just settle for the tiny little amount that falls on one planet.
In science fiction, this is often depicted as, literally, a big shell, where your people would live on the inside surface of the shell, with the star essentially above them. Yes, that’s right, there was one on a Star Trek episode once. But there’s a bunch of reasons why that probably wouldn’t work. So if an advanced civilization really wanted to make maximum use of their star’s energy, they’d more likely build something closer to what Dyson actually specified: a “swarm” of small structures of planetlets. They would all orbit the star, absorbing as much of its energy as possible.
So even though there’s probably some rational, boring explanation for this unusual star system, it does seem to resemble what we imagine a Dyson Sphere would look like. And it would provide an answer to Fermi’s Paradox, since this is the sort of thing we would expect to see, given how many really old, presumably advanced civilizations should be out there.
So please allow me to have my moment believing that this really is the sign of intelligent life we’ve always been looking for. Lots of people believe in things just because they want them to be true, and unlike them, at least I’m not voting based on it. And we could all use some good news: just when I was researching this, I found that most astrophysicists on social media were instead complaining about an astronomer given a slap on the wrist for serial sexual harassment. So let’s believe the aliens are there, and we have something better to aspire to.
Wednesday, July 29, 2015
Plutocracy
A bunch of the names of surface features of Pluto and its moon Charon have been released. There are some surprises, given their decision to name a number of things after either fictional places and people, or inanimate objects. Yes, I realize this is the second time this year alone that I've had a post about naming astronomic stuff. And I'm aware my last one cautioned against taking the task too lightly and naming after the less deserving. But hey, in the grand scheme of things, it's only a couple of rocks. Sorry to rub it in, but not even official planets.
The big prize is the "heart" that has become Pluto's trademark. Fittingly, it was named after Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto. Too bad it will inevitably become the home to the 22nd-century's sleaziest motels. There were also shoutouts to scientists who worked on the outer solar system (e.g. Oort.) Some of the names were surprisingly dark, such as the huge Cthulhu Regio, named after H.P. Lovecraft's demonic character, even though most sci-fi/fantasy names were relegated to Charon. But you have to remember that Pluto - for all it's modern association with cute dogs - was the Roman god of the underworld, and Charon the operator of the ferry that takes the dead to the underworld.
My thoughts on the names:
The big prize is the "heart" that has become Pluto's trademark. Fittingly, it was named after Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto. Too bad it will inevitably become the home to the 22nd-century's sleaziest motels. There were also shoutouts to scientists who worked on the outer solar system (e.g. Oort.) Some of the names were surprisingly dark, such as the huge Cthulhu Regio, named after H.P. Lovecraft's demonic character, even though most sci-fi/fantasy names were relegated to Charon. But you have to remember that Pluto - for all it's modern association with cute dogs - was the Roman god of the underworld, and Charon the operator of the ferry that takes the dead to the underworld.
My thoughts on the names:
- There were several large areas named after robot spacecraft (such as Voyager and Viking) which seems odd, but I guess it makes sense since this whole mission is made possible by such a craft. I was glad to see Pioneer get some love. It's always been the Rodney Dangerfield of deep-space probes.
- Not surprisingly, there weren't any obvious references to Pluto, the Disney character. Any attempts to name things after their characters would cause the company's lawyers to craft an armada to send after New Horizons. But apparently they're thinking of using Laika as a name for something, which would be nice.
- Maybe it just went over my head but I couldn't find any snide reference to Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
- Since Charon has lots of science-fiction names on it, and the mythological Charon was a boatman on the river Styx, you'd think they could have fit in a Roboto crater.
- Although the usual suspects dominated the science fiction area of Charon, it was nice to see Macross Chasma.
- Speaking of the usual suspects, there was also a big chasm named "Serentity," after the ship from the short-lived-much-loved show Firefly. I never cease to be amazed by the love for that show. Future generations will wonder how it got right up there with Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, and Doctor Who.
- Also predictably, Stargate got shafted. Surely an "O'Neill mountain" wouldn't be out of place.
- If you're going to name a bunch of things on Charon after Star Wars stuff, why not have a feature named, "This Is No Moon." That would look hilarious on maps.
- In the Mass Effect series of video games, Charon turns out to be an ancient alien transportation device. You'd think they could have worked in a reference to that to make up for the fans' disappointment that it's just a regular moon.
- In the unlikely event they run out of names for things on Charon, how about naming a bunch of mountains after all the pronunciations of "Charon." You could have Chahron, Kahron, Kairon, Chai-Ron, Shy Ron, Sharon, Karen etc.
Friday, June 19, 2015
Soccer Stars
You may have seen this week that a new galaxy has been named after Cristiano Ronaldo. Well, it’s technically named “CR7” which is his nickname/brandname, combining his initials and number. As you may know, he’s one of the sports megastars with his own symbol, which is a stylized CR7.
It's bad enough that we confuse him with Ronaldo, now we have a galaxy in his honour too. And there are so many galaxies out there that Ronaldo will eventually get his own, and that will surely lead to a massive war centuries from now.
And that's what's weird about this. For a while now they've been naming asteroids after people, and that seems reasonable. You're a good person; here, have a big rock. But galaxies? It may seem like a little smudge on the lens from our perspective, but it is a collection of billions of stars and planets. The billion-year-old collective experience of entire civilizations, and we named it after the second-best soccer player of his generation.
(Speaking of which, there's a list of major galaxies and other astronomical phenomena called the Messier objects. I tried to make a "Messi-eh" joke, couldn't make it work.)
Now really, this is unlikely to be a problem. If humanity survives and advances to the point where we could ever get to the Ronaldo galaxy, it will surely be so far into the future that our current names for things will be long forgotten. But who knows. In the same way we still use the name America long after we’ve forgotten what was so great about Amerigo Vespucci, these names could survive.
Sure, it may seem like there are lots of things out there to name after people. It’s estimated that there are far more galaxies out there than people on Earth, so we could afford to hand out galaxy names just for remembering to do a shoulder-check changing lanes. But if we were to expand through the cosmos, we’d run out of galaxies to name after ourselves, and then we’d regret wasting a bunch of them on athletes. "Well, Zartog, we appreciate your single-handedly saving the Stellar Alliance from the Jarfan raiders of the Beckham Galaxy, but we ran out of unnamed galaxies a few years ago. Here, have a rock."
It's bad enough that we confuse him with Ronaldo, now we have a galaxy in his honour too. And there are so many galaxies out there that Ronaldo will eventually get his own, and that will surely lead to a massive war centuries from now.
And that's what's weird about this. For a while now they've been naming asteroids after people, and that seems reasonable. You're a good person; here, have a big rock. But galaxies? It may seem like a little smudge on the lens from our perspective, but it is a collection of billions of stars and planets. The billion-year-old collective experience of entire civilizations, and we named it after the second-best soccer player of his generation.
(Speaking of which, there's a list of major galaxies and other astronomical phenomena called the Messier objects. I tried to make a "Messi-eh" joke, couldn't make it work.)
Now really, this is unlikely to be a problem. If humanity survives and advances to the point where we could ever get to the Ronaldo galaxy, it will surely be so far into the future that our current names for things will be long forgotten. But who knows. In the same way we still use the name America long after we’ve forgotten what was so great about Amerigo Vespucci, these names could survive.
Sure, it may seem like there are lots of things out there to name after people. It’s estimated that there are far more galaxies out there than people on Earth, so we could afford to hand out galaxy names just for remembering to do a shoulder-check changing lanes. But if we were to expand through the cosmos, we’d run out of galaxies to name after ourselves, and then we’d regret wasting a bunch of them on athletes. "Well, Zartog, we appreciate your single-handedly saving the Stellar Alliance from the Jarfan raiders of the Beckham Galaxy, but we ran out of unnamed galaxies a few years ago. Here, have a rock."
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