Exoplanets

So far, there are 5,656 potential discoveries of exoplanets, that is, planets outside of our solar system. 1,955 have been confirmed discoveries. Possibly the closest habitable planet is located 14 light years away around a star called Wolf  1061 (see wolf).  Most exoplanets are gas giants like Jupiter or Neptune, much larger than Earth, but this is biased caused by our techniques and instruments. It’s just way easier to discover bigger planets either by watching the wobble of a star due to the planetary gravity tugging or the dimming of a star by planets’ transit as it passes in front of its host star. Instruments that are currently in construction or in the planning phase such as the James Webb Telescope (JWST), Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) will take planet hunting to a whole new level and replace the still functioning but basically defunct Kepler Telescope (Kepler). The combination of these state of the art instruments will no doubt find our true Earth twin and possibly the first exo habited planet!

Exoplanets so far, have been quite varied, from Earth like to super-earths, to gas giants of various sizes and distances to their host stars. Science fiction has also been vary imaginative in creating all different types of interesting planets. One of the more famous planets, Tatooine, home world to our beloved Luke Skywalker, resides in a binary star system. It’s reminiscent of an actual planet, Kepler-16b, which actually resides in a binary star system!

Another is Vulcan, the planet where the venerable Spock is from. It is believed that Vulcan is larger than Earth therefore the gravity stronger and its atmosphere thinner, resulting in Vulcans being much stronger and with greater endurance than humans. There have been several super-earth discoveries. It is interesting to note that Spock’s blood is green due to the copper which is used to transport oxygen. On Earth, certain species of lizard also have green blood and some marine species have blue blood due to the copper based hemocyanin, while others have clear blood. Humans have red blood due to the iron rich hemoglobin (see Blood).

For a planet to be habitable it must be in the ‘goldilocks zone’ around a star. This is a zone where liquid water can exist and is thought to be most potentially habitable by life as we know it. However, many planets reside outside this goldilocks zone. Could the Hoth planet of Star Wars be one of these? It appears Hoth must reside just outside of the liquid water zone of its star and might reside in the ‘snow zone’ or beyond the ‘snow line’ (snowline). This is where a planet doesn’t receive enough energy from its host star to melt water to liquid form, therefore the water remains frozen, like Hoth, a complete ice ball. Hoth could also be in a snowball condition brought on by cataclysmic global climate change. We know Earth underwent at least 3 of these events called ‘Snowball Earth’ where the entire Earth was covered in glaciers.

The first Snowball Earth took place 2.3 to 1.8 billion years ago in association with the Great Oxygenation Event, the second, 730 to 670 million years ago and the third between 640 to 580 million years ago finishing just before the Cambrian explosion, for which it may have been a trigger. (Our world was ruled by microorganism for the first 3.5 billion years!) Reduction in greenhouse gas content in the atmosphere seems to trigger these snowball events, which leads to a runaway condition since the increase in snow reflects solar radiation back into space, thus cooling the Earth even more. Its plausible that massive volcanic activity is responsible for reversing these snowball events.

Glaciation and ice ages on Earth seem to advance and retreat every 40,000 to 100,000 years caused by the wobble or precession of the Earth’s axis and the variability in the eccentricity of Earth’s orbit around Sol. The most recent retreat of the last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago. Snowball Earth events and ice ages have brought about major changes in the evolution of life, probably mass extinctions. As much as 99.9 per cent of all species that have ever lived are now extinct (see extinct). “We may find, if and when we meet humanoid extraterrestrial aliens, that we both have the same interest in the weather as a subject of small talk, before getting on to the serious conversations about interstellar propulsion systems and fostering world peace” John Murdin.

Speaking of weather, the famous planet of Arrakis in the Dune novels is entirely desert. Very unlike Earth, water is a scarce commodity if not sacred to the native Fremen. They wear special suits to keep cool and to capture perspiration and recycle bodily fluid waste. No water is ever wasted, when a Fremen dies, their body and blood is ‘recycled’ and returned to the camp’s water reserves. It’s unsure whether the planet wide desertification of Arrakis is due to some global cataclysm or its position in its solar system prevents Arrakis from blossoming. Either way, in the novel Dune, a global wide terraforming project is underway to create a green paradise from the desert, led by Liet-Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist turned revered Fremen and father in law to Paul Atreides aka Muad’dib the protagonist.

Although there is much ecology on Arrakis it seems to me that a planet lacking in much flora would ever have a breathable atmosphere, since on Earth plants produce the oxygen necessary for life. However, 25% of our oxygen is produced by cyanobacteria so maybe there are single celled organisms on Arrakis that produce their oxygen.

Since most stars in the universe (about 70%) are red dwarfs, which are cooler and smaller than our sun, photosynthesis on planets around red dwarfs would evolve to be much different. Photosynthesizing life would adapt to absorb the red light from their host stars, unlike chlorophyll A on Earth, not only able to absorb red-orange light but violet-blue as well, and reflecting green light. Planets orbiting Gliese 581 and Kepler-186f could host plants that blossom black.

Terraforming is a popular subject in science fiction. Usually associated with Mars, such as the Red Mars, Blue Mars and Green Mars novels of Kim Stanley Robinson and the Mars colonies in the Expanse Series by James S. A. Corey, and of course, the mentioned Dune series, but with the planet of Arrakis. Even Venus was undergoing terraforming in 2312 also by Kim. And in Star Wars, the planet Coruscant is one giant city. I assume massive ecological and geological projects must of have been undertaken to keep Coruscant habitable.

Real exoplanets can be checked out at Planet Quest website (planetquest). Also check out their interactives they're really cool. We see that the universe is just as creative as science fiction authors in creating various planets. But most of us are interested in finding a true Earth analog. Kepler-452b so far is the most Earth like, having a year similar to ours, orbiting a star similar to the sun and only being 60% larger than Earth. The search continues, in the meantime our imagination and knowledge about exoplanets will continue to expand.  

2312

Kim is one of the greatest sci-fi writers of our time. I loved this book. I thought it was great. If you want a view what the world will be like in 300 years from now read this book! Kim is a master, not sure why he does not hold the mantle of hard sci-fi such as Arthur C. Clarke, anyway Kim is what I call a description maximalist. Which I'm more of a plot guy, but I find his descriptions so intriguing I literally could not put the book down. Excellent storytelling.

The only critical thing I can say is the overall plot or arc was lacking especially the ending. The ending was anticlimactic. Which now that I think about it, it may be part of Kim's genius. Because this book came out in an era where normal plot lines and character bounds were being broken, a good example would be G.R.R. Martin's SoIF series (Game of Thrones). So the fact that Kim went with a conventional, bland and happy ending is dumb or is it?

I don't want to give all the details, but it's loaded with the future, climate change, quantum computers, space travel, space colonies, spaceships, environmental restoration, androgynous humans, genetics, artificial intelligence, and of course, murder, sex and drugs!

Aliens, Who or What is Out There?

Sci-fi authors and have been inventive in creating all kinds of various aliens. From the alien in Alien with acid for blood that uses humans to gestate past the larva stage, to silicon based lifeforms in Star Trek such as the Tholians, to the giant bird like slash dinosaur creatures of Shipstar, to the Wookies of Star Wars. We can see that imagination knows no bounds, but what is the actuality that any of these aliens could in theory be real? Are they potentially realistic?

We now know that space is full of the key ingredients of life as we know it. First is water, think comets and Europa. Europa is a frozen water world moon of Jupiter and its speculated that Ganymede contains more water than the entire Earth! (see underground ocean on ganymede).  It’s also theorized that comets and asteroids delivered Earth’s water over the course of millions of years (see oceans arrived early on earth). Second is sugar. Sugar has been discovered out in space as well as other prebiotic molecular species such as amino acids (see prebiotic molecules and building blocks of life).

It’s no wonder our bodies are ~70% water, our DNA contains sugar, deoxyribose, and proteins are chains of amino acids; and proteins are produced by the genes embedded in out DNA. In fact, there have been meteorites found that contained off world amino acids, such as the Murchison meteorite and several others since then. Roughly 500 amino acids are thought to exit and Earthly biology uses 20 of them, 9 have to be ingested since they are not produced by our bodies.

Certainly DNA has been a successful molecule for storing and spreading information, it has dominated life on Earth, but is there another way for biology to spread information and ultimately for life to thrive? I am reminded of a Voyager episode where the crew discover a species known as 8472. It turns out species 8472’s DNA has a triple helix instead of the Earthly double helix of our own DNA. Is a triple helix DNA molecule possible? We know that DNA came from RNA, but where did RNA come from? When and where did it begin? These questions are outside the realm of Evolution and are concerned in the study of Abiogenesis (see Genesis by Robert Hazen).

It appears life exists in every niche on Earth, even in the most extreme environments. These Extremophiles are thought to be the first life on Earth, the Archaea if you will, and the reasoning goes if they can exist in such extreme places on earth then certainly they can be found in the various extreme conditions that space provides. Especially if space is pervasive in prebiotic molecules. Let us conduct a thought experiment using the proverbial Drake Equation to guesstimate the chances of intelligent life in our galaxy. It is as follows:

# of stars: 100 to 400 billion, so we’ll go with a conservative number at 200 billion

% of stars with planets: 0.6 to 0.9, it appears that star formation goes hand in hand with planet formation, but we’ll go with the conservative estimate at 0.6

% of planets in the habitable zone: around 1/100 according to the latest surveys

% of habitable planets with life: 0.5 is a good number because either a planet has life or doesn’t, but again we’ll go conservative here and guess at 1/100, we enter uncharted area here

% with intelligent life: totally unknown here so go conservative at 1/1000

200e9 * 0.6 * 1/100 * 1/100 * 1/1000 = 12,000

Wow that’s potentially 12 thousands planets in our galaxy with intelligent life on them!! We can adjust the values to develop a range with N being the number of planets with intelligent life. It comes out to be:

1e6 >= N >= 3000

So, we can have anywhere from 1 million to only 3 thousand, personally I think the 12 thousand is a pretty good number. So far, we only know of one planet with (supposedly) intelligent life on it.  Here on Earth we have several smart animals that can demonstrate a relatively higher intelligence. Namely, certain bird species such as magpies, crows and ravens, elephants, whales, dolphins, and certain species of dog. The smartest animals of course are our cousins, the great apes specifically chimpanzees and bonobos (we share ~95% of our DNA with them).

Star Trek has been criticized for having aliens humanoid and too human like, but I’m convinced that if intelligent life exists outside of our solar system, it would be humanoid in form (see aliens-will-look-a-lot-like-us). This argument was put forth by several scientists, one of them [University of Cambridge paleontologist] Simon Conway Morris even argued aliens would be as specific as being bipedal primates! Also, [Harvard University biologist] Ed Wilson argues for humanoid form. However, a number of scientists disagree such as, Josh Timonen of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. See will-e-t-look-like-us for the ongoing discussion. Also, is-there-any-plausible-reason

In general, I think the common thread that makes an animal smart is having a big brain, stereo vision, bilateral (but not necessarily bipedal), and dexterous appendages such as hands, etc. for tool use. These, I feel are the necessary characteristics for intelligent life, hence the humanoid form.  If these conclusions aren’t so far off base then maybe the aliens portrayed in sci-fi namely Star Trek and Star Wars give us a slight glimpse of what’s really out there!

Dune

I took it upon myself to write the next great sci-fi epic, but being unfamiliar with the sci-fi literature I decided to investigate. Science fiction has had, and still does impact pop culture and our society at large. As an aspiring writer I wanted to familiarize myself with some of the sci-fi classics. So, I started reading some of the classic sci-fi novels, first up was Dune.

Dune was amazing. The fact this book was written in the 1960's is impressive. Still a fantastic story today. Its use of ecology and religion to solidify plot is original and exceptional. The hallucinogenic drug, called the Spice, is inventive for a deus ex machina, but I imagine it was part of the zeitgeist of the 60's.

There is not much to criticize about the book. Herbert, a UW grad and native Washingtonian, does a fine job to provide enough detail to plant the reader right in the story, but to move the plot along almost entirely by dialog. In fact, the second book Dune Messiah is almost all dialog, also a very good book. I notice Arthur C. Clark is also a master at this technique as well. Both authors have very good pace, yet enough description to put you into the story. It seems Brian, Frank's son, is not as skilled in this category, but to be in Frank's constant shadow and always compared to him must be daunting.

The feminists have critiqued Dune citing females play no major roles and assume traditional roles, side stepped by male dominance. However, the Jedi like order, Bene Gesserit is all female. This female Jedi like order, have special powers, much like Jedi in Star Wars; and are major players in the empire, via their breeding programs or acting as advisers to Dukes and even the Emperor himself. Paul's mother, a Bene Gesserit member, trained with all the powers, even though a concubine, is a protagonist in the book.

A classic! And a real page turner, Frank has the amazing ability to take an epic galactic space opera and turn it into a heart felt and entertaining story. Well done and a wonderful intro into the world of sci-fi literature!

Welcome

Hi All,
Welcome.  I finally got the blog up and running! You may not know it, but this has been an idea of mine for quite some time. Anyway, it kind of coincides with the release of Star Wars episode 7 (Finally a descent SW movie, even if it is New Hope The Next Generation) so I posted a little Star Wars Collection I made for a shindig, check it out!  I'm looking forward to having many discussions with you all about all things sci-fi.  Expanding our minds through time and space!!!