Holy Shit, the Speed of Light!

If you know a little bit about physics, you know that the speed of light is around 300 million meters per second. If you know a bit more, you know that the exact figure is 299,792,498 meters per second. If you know just a bit more, you know that neither of those are necessarily true.

Here's the problem: "The Speed of Light" is a bit of a misnomer, which is probably one of the reasons scientists tend to just call it c. A more accurate definition of c would be "The Speed Limit of the Universe," because 299,792,498 meters per second is the fastest that any energy, matter, or information can possibly travel. It so happens that light is the only thing we know of that can reach that speed.

There are contenders, but we haven't quite gotten there yet.

What that doesn't mean, however, is that light always travels at c. In fact, light only travels at "light speed" in a vacuum. You'll note that the entirety of Earth is not, to our great benefit and relief, a vacuum. We have a whole atmosphere that lets us breathe and stuff.

That's not to say we don't have some perfectly nice vacuums on Earth

The effect of the atmosphere on light is relatively small. It shaves off about 90,000 meters per second from light speed, which is a drop in the bucket. "So what's the big deal," you might say, "that's more or less the same. What's the difference?" To which I'd respond, "Are you inside?"

"Always."

Because if you are inside, the light you're seeing is traveling significantly slower. Even if it's natural light coming through a window. Glass alone will slow down light by almost a third. These are just natural processes that slow light down. If you put some effort into it, you can make light practically crawl. Physicists at Harvard University, led by Lene Hau, used a bizarre state of matter with densely packed, super-cold atoms to slow light to 17 meters per second. That's 38 miles per hour. That's like you're morning commute, if you don't take the highway. You could beat light to work, depending on the traffic.

A few years later, those same physicists succeeded in turning light into matter and making it just stop. They then revived it and started it moving again a short distance away. So, congratulations. Any time you move, you are travelling faster than light...given the right conditions.

Holy shit.





"Bolt200" by Jmex - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons

"Робот пылесос Roomba 780" by Nohau - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons

"Sacrumi". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikipedia - No offense intended :-)

Holy Shit, Uhura!

The woman in the above photo is Nichelle Nichols, in character as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura on the set of Star Trek. It's easy to forget (which is encouraging to me) how groundbreaking this character was for American fiction, and particularly for network television. She debuted with series opening episode, "The Man Trap," which aired in 1966.

Uhura was Chief Communications Officer aboard the Enterprise. That makes her the fourth link in the chain of command. So,..a black woman, in 1966, held a position of considerable power in a network television show. That's a mere two years after the Civil Rights Act. Deep-seated institutional racism doesn't just taper off that quickly. Uhura wouldn't have existed if Gene Roddenberry hadn't held downright shockingly progressive views for a man of his generation from Texas.

You wouldn't have known it by his face.

As a matter of fact, Roddenberry's original pilot featured a female First Officer, who was the intensely logical and level-headed presence on the bridge. The female character. In 1965. It goes beyond that, even. He stubbornly refused to allow any reference to organized religion as a going concern on the show. While working on The Next Generation, he told writer/producer Ronald D. Moore that he believed Earth's religions would taper out by the 23rd Century, to be replaced by personal spirituality.

But back to Uhura. At the end of the first season, Nichelle Nichols considered leaving to pursue a career on Broadway. One weekend, she went to a Civil Rights and met a big fan of the show who changed her mind. You may have heard of him, because he was Martin Luther King.

Junior.

Yeah. That Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. King told Nichols that Star Trek was the only show he and his wife allowed their kids to watch. He begged her not to leave, because he knew how important it was for black people in America, and in particular black women, to have a role model like Uhura. Someone who was not a servant of the heroes, but their peer. "Once that door is opened by someone," he said, "no one else can close it again.

So she stayed on for the duration of the series. It turns out, Dr. King was right on the money. Among those who called Nyota Uhura a major influence were Dr. Sally Ride, the first female astronaut, and Dr. Mae Jamison, the first black woman astronaut. Whoopi Goldberg, who played Guinan in The Next Generation, also looked up to Uhura. When she first saw Star Trek, she ran to her parents and shouted, "I just saw a black woman on television; and she ain't no maid!"

People make a big deal out of Star Trek, and we like to call those people nerds. But you can't deny the impact. It goes beyond launching a renewed interest in science fiction (and science in general). Star Trek played a crucial role in tearing down racist and sexist taboos, and it did so deliberately. Because Uhura's name? Comes from the Swahili, uhuru. Which means "freedom."

Holy shit.


"Gene roddenberry 1976" by Larry D. Moore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gene_roddenberry_1976.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Gene_roddenberry_1976.jpg

Holy Shit, Pluto!

Sit down. Look at me. Are you looking? Okay, now listen closely. I know it hurts, I know it betrays the memory of your favorite third grade acrostic, and I know you don't want to hear it, but Pluto is not a planet. It never was. The mistake was calling it a planet in the first place.

It's nothing personal. It's not like we like Pluto any less for being a dwarf planet. Some of my best friends are dwarf planets! It's just that the evidence is all there in support of Pluto's demotion, and the only compelling argument to the contrary is basically just nostalgia.

And what has nostalgia brought us?

Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, a 23-year-old astronomer from Kansas. Given his youth, he was assigned the arduous task of taking pictures of the sky every two weeks and comparing the two to see if anything had moved. Shortly after he began his work, something moved, and that something was Pluto.

Ladies love the 'scope

Initially, astronomers thought that Pluto was around the size of Earth. Since that time, estimates have been repeatedly revised downwards. The most recent evidence puts the size at about .6% of Earth. That's "zero point six percent," not "six percent." It's really damn small, is what I'm getting at. It's small enough that its satellites have a sufficient gravitational pull to make Pluto sort of revolve around itself.

Pluto...wat are you doing?

Don't worry, though, I'm not just picking on the little guy. That's not the only reason Pluto was begging for the boot. After all, if I learned anything from Star Wars it's that size matters not. Orbit does, though, and Pluto's orbit...well...

Go home, Pluto, you're drunk

Yeah. Pluto's not really being a team player in that regard. It's orbit has more in common with a comet than a planet. In fact, it even weaves its way in and out of Neptune's orbit at different times. Planets don't get all up in one another's grill like that. That's Planetary Etiquette 101. You orbit like a planet and you own the neighborhood. Pluto does neither.

KEEP YOUR HANDS TO YOURSELF, PLUTO.

What really did Pluto in was the fact that we found other objects like it in the Kuiper Belt. The final nail in the coffin was the discovery of Eris. Until that point, the tentative agreement among astronomers was that as long as all those Kuiper Belt objects were smaller than Pluto, we'll keep telling ourselves that it's a planet. Then Eris came along, and it had more mass. By 27%, too, so it's not even close.

If that's not enough to sway you, let me ask you this: Are you upset that Ceres is not a planet? How about Pallas? Juno? Vesta? Are you willing to fight for their inclusion in the planet club? Because they were demoted, too. When they were first discovered, all four of them were considered planets. Then astronomers realized that they were all on the same orbit, and they shared it with a bunch of debris. So they were demoted, and we started calling them asteroids (although some asteroids have actually been promoted to dwarf planet status now).

You can sort of see why we had to be a bit more specific with the "planet" title here.

There are basically two ways of taking this information in. The first is to rage against the astronomers. You grew up thinking Pluto was a planet, so a planet it is and that's that. There's no better way to label that reaction than to call it anti-science. The point of any scientific pursuit is to be willing to challenge previous discoveries. To deny new discoveries because they conflict with your feelings is to deny critical thinking.

The other way to look at it (while still maintaining your love for old Pluto) is to realize that Pluto wasn't the last discovered planet, but the first acknowledged dwarf planet. Being the first, Pluto gets a whole range of benefits, not least of which is the fact that a whole class of dwarf planets are now named plutoids. This isn't the story of Harry Pluto being bullied and shunned by the muggle astronomers, this is Harry Pluto finding his Hogwarts.

And yes, I did go there

Don't cry for Pluto. Give it a pat on the back and a congratulations. While you're at it, keep your eyes peeled. Next summer, for the first time, we'll have actual pictures of Pluto. The New Horizons robotic spacecraft is scheduled to get there sometime in July.

Before you dismiss this whole thing as a silly and pointless argument, give it some real thought. How we categorize the universe will inform how well we understand it. If we get it wrong just because we're used to the wrong answer, we'll never understand the way the universe works, and it'll be our own fault. Denying the recategorization of Pluto is denying critical thinking. It's the same frame of mind that gets people to think vaccines cause autism, which leads to children dying of preventable diseases.

This stuff matters.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Moon Landings!

Let me just get this out of the way right off the bat: we put human beings into a small capsule attached to several enormous machines that create aimed and sustained explosions which carried them off of the goddamn planet all the way to the goddamn moon, both of which are in constant motion. They landed and walked on the surface of the moon, then came back home and survived re-entry. We did this six times, and for some reason we haven't even really tried to do it again in over 40 years.

Look at her face. She misses us.

Holy shit.

There is no part of the concept of people walking the surface of the moon that is not profoundly incredible. Literally incredible to a lot of people. Otherwise we wouldn't have the conspiracy theories about it being a hoax. Which are just plain wrong.

Apollo 11, the first manned spacecraft to bring human beings to the moon, had less computing power than a modern graphing calculator. It traveled through 238,900 miles of pure nothing to deposit people onto the lunar surface. Imagine what we could do with the power we have today?

Astronauts could pipe in some tunes!

And have you paid attention to rockets? Do you know what they are? They're pretty much the same thing as missiles. NASA managed to point one of those things at a moving target (albeit a big and predictable one) with enough accuracy and controlled chaos that they could not only fling astronauts to the moon, but do it safely.

Don't make a fart joke, don't make a fart joke, don't make a fart joke...

Neil Armstrong stepped out of the landing module and he was, by most definitions, an alien. Then he flubbed his line (no really, it was supposed to be "one small step for a man," which makes more sense), planted a flag too close to the landing site, picked up some rocks, and went back to Earth. And they made it. Safely. After knocking over the flag during takeoff. Don't worry, even the ones that weren't knocked over have been bleached white by the untempered radiation of the sun by now.

The real kicker for me, though, is the fact that the United States, the only country to have ever put human beings onto the surface of another celestial body, did so six times within a three year period, then never did it again. The entire time we were at it, the public, half awed by the monumental accomplishment they were witnessing, were clamoring about "more important problems back home." You hear the same argument today.

How is this not worthy of attention?

To which I like to say, "Are you fucking kidding me? Look at that shit. Look at what we did, America. Jesus. The moon. We went there." Saying that we shouldn't try exploring space until we've solved all of the problems on Earth is like saying you shouldn't try to get a job until you've figured out how to stop needing to eat. It's pure bullshit.

And seriously, look at that. It's a man on the moon.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Chemosynthesis!

There are two basic elements that every ecosystem needs (sort of): water and light. Water is the obvious one because, as my high school biology teacher put it, "Life is juicy." Light is the other one, and it's the foundation of the food chain. Plants use light to sustain themselves, herbivores eat plants, carnivores eat herbivores, and humanity makes everything its bitch.

Om nom nom

But like I said: sort of.

Let's talk about the ocean floor for a second. For almost all of human history, we've had no idea whatsoever what the hell was down there (other than water). It was, we assumed, dark, flat, and utterly devoid of life. After all, light only penetrates about 3,500 feet down, and the ocean floor is around ten times deeper than that at best.

Light reaches the second line, or "almost nothing."

Then in 1977, scientists sent DSV Alvin, a deep sea diving vessel, to the bottom of the Marianas Trench to see what was up down there. Instead of finding an area devoid of life, they found a flourishing ecosystem, filled to the brim with never-before-seen creatures.

Oh hi! Make yourself at home.

To be fair, researches probably wouldn't have gotten the grant money to explore the ocean floor if they hadn't already predicted that deep sea life was possible. At that point, plate tectonics was finally thoroughly accepted by the scientific community. That means scientists were aware that the ocean floor actually had some pretty bitching terrain. Of particular interest: deep sea hydrothermal vents.

It's like the Earth let one rip and it never stopped.

Vents on the ocean floor that leak extreme heat from underneath the Earth's crust. The theory was that light is only one form of energy, so who's to say heat can't also sustain life? In its trip to the ocean floor, Alvin proved this theory of chemosynthesis (as opposed to photosynthesis) to be right on the money. Instead of plants, there were bacteria and terrifying animals that used heat to sustain themselves.

But wait, there's more! I didn't just choose this topic arbitrarily. Chemosynthesis is considered one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time. Life on Earth began in the oceans. Chemosynthesis may have actually been the original pillar of the worldwide ecosystem.

If you find the origin of life dull, then first of all, shame on you. What the hell impresses you if not the origin of life as we know it? That's some fascinating shit. But second, how about this: If life as we know it can exist without light, then it can exist anywhere with liquid water and heat. Like, say, another planet.

Or moon.

Liquid water, as it turns out, is not super rare. In fact, ever since chemosynthesis was discovered, potential xenobiologists have been giving Europa, one of Jupiter's moons, the "come hither" look. It is downright reasonable to assume that under the thick layers of ice on Europa, there are thermal vents creating a gourmet primordial bisque. If that's the case, it's downright reasonable to assume there may be extraterrestrial life in our solar system.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, The Most Astounding Fact!

I'm just going to let Neil deGrasse Tyson take this one, because I'm lazy and he puts it more eloquently than I could ever hope to.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Black Holes!

Somewhere out in the inconceivable vastness of space, there are regions that were once incredibly massive stars which have now collapsed upon themselves. The result is a chunk of mass so incredibly dense that its gravitational field lets nothing escape. Not even light, and light is pretty damn fast, as you may well know. When mass gets that compacted, space and time get warped and deformed around it, which causes what we call a black hole.

When I say compacted, I mean really, ridiculously, unbelievably compacted. To the point where a black hole the size of a marble would have more mass than the entire Earth. Despite that, there are actually micro black holes that are so imperceptibly small that they have about the same mass as a flea's egg. On the other hand, there are black holes in that same category that have approximately the same mass as the moon. Is that sinking in? The smallest category of black holes range in mass from about the same as a flea's egg to about the same as the freaking moon.

At black hole density, this would sink to the core of the Earth and cause very bad things.

The next category up contains stellar black holes, which get up to about the size of Manhattan and have about ten times the mass of the sun. After that comes intermediate-mass black holes, which is where it starts getting harder to fathom. These get up to the size of the Earth and have the mass of one thousand suns.

Then we get into the last category. The supermassive black holes. These puppies are some of the biggest things in the known universe. They can reach up to 10 Astronomical Units in size. That's 10 times the distance between the Earth and the sun, which is about 93 million miles. Times ten. At that size, their mass could be the same as one billion suns. Supermassive black holes are, therefore, rather aptly named. Scientists believe that they exist at the center of every galaxy in the universe, which means we are currently orbiting a star which is itself orbiting an incredibly enormous distortion in space and time.

The bright spot in the center is light being warped and consumed

One more thing, and I think you know what it is. It's the burning question that always creeps up from the back of your mind when you think about black holes. What happens when you go into one? The answer, mostly, is that we don't know. What we do know, however, is what it would look like to observers.

So let's say your friend is in a spaceship headed toward a black hole, toward the point of no return known as the event horizon. As the ship gets closer, it seems to slow down - time is dilated in such a way that anything close to the event horizon appears to be moving slower and slower, until finally the movement is so small that it can't be seen. Eventually, it stops. As far as you're concerned, your friend is frozen in time forever. But that's just you. Your buddy will experience whatever there is to experience in the black hole. Probably death, I'm sure, but as it happens, time around him will pass. Infinitely.

Holy shit. That might be a little too heavy, so here's a puppy:

D'aww

Holy Shit, Aliens!

A while back, I mentioned my favorite folk singer - specifically, how he opened my eyes to supervolcanoes. This same gentleman tells a story on one of his albums about a friend of his named (not making this up) Vlad the Astrophysicist. Here's the full version:

The gist of it is that he asks his astrophysicist friend if there are aliens somewhere in the universe and, if so, why haven't they contacted us? The answer is, in essence, a poetic take on the Drake Equation. The Drake Equation takes the unknowable trillions of stars in the unknowable vastness of the Universe and tells us that, given the observable portion of those stars that have planets capable of supporting life, we can assume that other civilizations must exist, and estimate how many there are.

Of course, when you're dealing with something unknowable, the best you can do to solve the equation is estimate, and estimates so far for the Drake Equation have suggested that there are between 1,000 and 100,000 civilizations somewhere out in the Universe. That's a huge variation, but something is almost definitely out there.

The problem is that the universe is big, and there's an excessively slim chance that any two cultures on such a massive stage will ever meet each other. So, as Vlad pointed out, we seem to be more or less on our own.

But then there's the Wow! Signal.

No, seriously, WOW!

The Wow! Signal was picked up by the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, and yes, that's a thing) Project in 1977. It's a 72-second radio burst that came from somewhere other than Earth, and that fact alone is a smack straight to the gob. The listener on deck agreed, and unintentionally named the signal by writing "Wow!" on the printout he made of the event.

Sadly, when the excitement wore off, the stuffy and rational types wrote off the Wow! Signal, saying that if it were aliens, we'd be able to hear it again in the same spot. Case disappointingly closed.

Or not, according to a recent theory that the Wow! signal may have been specifically targeting other civilizations. In other words, this wasn't us listening in on someone's radio chatter, it was their civilization shooting off a message with someone like us in mind. We should know, we've done the same thing. We tossed a brief message off into space where we thought there might potentially be life, and we haven't repeated it.

That's our message to aliens. Yeah. Straightforward, right?

Consider that for a second. First Contact is a concept that could potentially alter humanity's view of itself and its place in the galaxy. It could be the biggest discovery of all time. And it may have already happened.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Meteors!

My wife and I spent several hours late Saturday night/early Sunday morning watching the Perseid meteor shower in our backyard. It got me thinking, "Holy shit, we're seeing chunks of rocks from SPACE, burning up to dust in our atmosphere. I mentioned the mind-boggling vastness of space before. It's really, really, really big. And yet, once a year, because the Swift-Tuttle Comet leaves behind a huge cloud of dust where the Earth goes, we get a reliable view of stuff burning up in our atmosphere. And that's just one of several annual meteor showers.

As it turns out, given how much empty space there is in the universe, there's also a shitload of debris. You can tell by looking at the moon. All those little dents you can see in the surface are from meteor strikes. Over the past few billion years, our neighbor has gathered quite a few of them. "But wait," said the rhetorical device, "If the moon gets hit so often, why don't we?" Well, Mr. Device, there are two answers to your question.

The first answer is that there are many much bigger objects with stronger gravitational pulls in the solar system that attract meteors that may otherwise hit us. Jupiter is the main one. I think we should take time every once in a while to thank Jupiter for that, because we'd probably be pretty dead if it didn't take one for the team so often. The moon helps, too, since it's so close. So thanks, Moon. Way to have your head in the game.

The second answer, though, is that we do get hit by meteors all the time. It's just harder to tell. There are craters caused by meteorites all over the planet, some of them huge. The big ones usually happen out of sight. An unexplained explosion the size of an atomic bomb in Tunguska in 1927 is attributed to a meteor or comet strike.

The small ones, though: all the time. We usually don't notice, but sometimes we do. Sometimes they hit someone's house. If you ever see a strange looking dark rock that's much heavier than other rocks of the same size, put a magnet up to it. If it sticks, you can say to yourself, "Self, this rock came from goddamn space."

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, the universe is big!

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

I went to the local observatory this weekend, where they have what they call the Planet Walk. The yard surrounding the buildings has 9 inscribed bricks that represent the Sun and the planets of our Solar System (and Pluto). The Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are pretty close to the center of the grounds, but the rest of the planets are so far out they're tricky to find. It's impossible to make that model to scale in terms of size, because if they did, the Sun would be about the size of a light bulb and some of the planets would be smaller than a grain of sand. You can find some fully scaled models of the solar system online if you want to get a sense of the perspective they're going for.

 

Our Solar System is enormous. That's my point. So big that it's possible to lose track of the entire asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. That's the most densely packed cluster of objects in our solar system, and astronomers came close to losing track of the whole thing shortly after WWII. The trouble is, "densely packed" means something entirely different on the scale of the Solar System. Because the Solar System is huge.

 

 

 

Then we have our galaxy. The image to the left shows you roughly how big the Milky Way Galaxy is. The Sun is not even a single pixel in that image. The Sun is 1.3 million times the size of the Earth, which means the Earth is less than one millionth of one pixel in this image. If the Solar System is big, the Milky Way Galaxy is mind-numbingly massive. But it's almost literally nothing compared to the rest of the universe.

 

 

In 1995, the Hubble Deep Space Telescope took a picture of a single degree of the sky. The area it was looking at is just a tiny portion of the night sky. It's the little L shape in the picture below on the left. What you see is a fraction of a fraction of the observable sky. What it returned was this:

Those aren't stars. They're galaxies. Some of them much, much bigger than ours. There are literally billions and billions of stars in every single one of those specks of light. All of this is contained in a tiny little fleck of the sky. I don't think any other topic could make me "HOLY SHIT" with more sincerity than that image. Now, here's where it gets really crazy.

We're not entirely sure just how big the universe is, because we can't see the whole thing. It's not that we can't build a powerful enough telescope. We probably could, given time and determination. It's just that we can only see things where there is light. Because light has to travel to reach us, we see really goddamn far away things as they existed a really goddamn long time ago. When you get to a certain distance, we'd be looking so far back in time that there was nothing there yet. There is a spherical border you can draw around the Earth that shows exactly how far away we could possibly see anything with the most powerful telescope that will ever exist, because that telescope would show us what the universe looked like before the beginning of time.

I mean, seriously, holy shit.

Holy Shit, Population

Look at this graph:

Just look at it.

Remember how I was talking about how awesome it was that we could eradicate diseases, but there are some potential downsides? That right there is the potential downside. Since we started getting good at fighting disease and starvation, the world human population has uncontrollably skyrocketed. We see this kind of population growth in nature all the time when a species is introduced to an environment that has easy access to food and no natural predators. When it happens to other animals, though, they eventually burn through all their resources and start starving to death, causing a decline in population almost as precipitous as the rise, sometimes even eradicating the population altogether. That hasn't happened to us. Not yet, anyway.

We've avoided the Big Nasty Event so far because we, as a species, are really goddamn clever. We have an answer for everything nature can throw at us. We meet diseases with medicine, famine with genetically modified crops, drought with irrigation, and predators with guns. We've prevented so much death. It's amazing, and it's wonderful, but in the long run it may also be dangerous. It's not hard to see why.

Every time we remove a threat, we remove an obstacle to population growth. It's a big, fancy feedback loop. Eventually, the cycle will break. Something is going to come up that we don't have an answer for, and it's going to wreck our shit in a very alarming way. So how do we actually fix that? The short answer is, we probably don't. We could use population-controlling methods like China, but that probably won't fly in a democracy, and it would do some pretty serious harm to the economy. Sure, the economy is less important than human continuation, but it's also a more palpable and immediate concern, so good luck convincing people that they need to give up their livelihoods for the greater good. I wouldn't, and I'm the one sitting here ranting about how important it is.

The solution I like throw around when I talk about this is colonizing other planets. The most feasible solution I can think of is, "I dunno. Space?" And even that just buys more time.

I mean, seriously, look at that graph!

Holy shit.