Peter Cawdron's Blog, page 19

Horrorscopes

Recently, I was having a beer with some friends and the topic of birthdays arose. Somewhat inevitably, the subject of “birth signs” came up. I was born in October, so (apparently) I was born “in” Libra, and (apparently) that says something profound about me. I beg to differ, but (apparently) that’s a Libran trait as well, so I’ll lay out my case here for your consideration.

Our conversation was very much in jest, and light hearted, but it got me thinking about horrorscopes – hmmm, I’m sure I’ve spelt that correctly, but spellcheck doesn’t seem to agree

Like most good counterfeits, there’s a grain of truth in the base concept behind horrorscopes, and that is that the heavens can be used to track important events. Before the advent of calendars, knowing when to sow seed or when to conduct the harvest was important, and the position of certain stars at at certain times of year became a helpful guide in this regard. But horrorscopes are no more credible than chinese fortune cookies.

For something that has no basis in reality, the whole topic of horoscopes (sp) is hideously complex and convoluted. For the purpose of this blog post, I’m going to go with the simplest version most people are familiar with culturally, that of horoscopes being based loosely on when someone was born.

Zodiac symbols making up constellations outline the earth and create the Zodiac. As they revolve around the earth, the signs become event markers – Daily Horoscopes

The Zodiac does not “revolve around the earth,” rather Earth spins on its axis each day as it revolves around the Sun each year. This statement is five hundred years out of date.

One of the many technical problems with astrology is the notion of constellations of the Zodiac being important around sunrise. Somewhat ironically, this means these stars are furtherest away.

If the constellations of the Zodiac held any influence over our lives, their influence would be less at that time of year, not greater. If anything, they should exert their greatest influence when they appear directly overhead at midnight, as that’s when they’re closest.

But the distances involved are so extreme compared to Earth’s orbit of the sun that our orbit never equates to more than a fraction of the overall distance. Alpha Centauri, as an example, is the closest star outside our solar system. At 25 trillion miles, our orbit around the sun equates to 0.000006% of the distance to Alpha Centauri. If there was any celestial influence over our earthly lives from these stars it would be static and unchanging regardless of where the constellation appeared.

Astrologers use the Zodiac to learn about people’s futures and how they react to life. For them, the Zodiac is the roadmap of people’s lives - Daily Horoscopes

Such a modest claim for a concept that is as thin as tissue paper. It will come as no surprise to learn there’s no scientific basis to astrology.

The scientific method is simple. There’s nothing mysterious or mystical about science. Does an idea live up to its claim when scrutinized in detail? In essence, that’s all science is.

The premise that celestial events influence earthly events has been shown to be false.

Astrology fails to recognize that the stars we see appear as though they are all the same distance from us, but this is a line of sight illusion.

Stand on a street and look at the telephone poles stretching into the distance. Those further away appear much closer that those you see next to you even though they’re all evenly spaced. In the same way, two stars may appear close together in a particular constellation but can be separated by a greater depth of distance than two stars that appear to be spread apart in different constellations.

In this image, stars from several Zodiac constellations are clustered relatively close to our sun, while the vast majority of the hundreds of stars making up these constellations (as seen from our perspective on Earth) are thousands of light years away.

A solar-centric perspective destroys the illusion of the Zodiac.

Ah… but it gets worse… You’re probably familiar with these dates

Zodiac Sign
Dates


Aries
The Ram
March 21 to April 20.


Taurus
The Bull
April 21 to May 20.


Gemini
The Twins
May 21 to June 20.


Cancer
The Crab
June 21 to July 21.


Leo
The Lion
July 22 to August 22.


Virgo
The Virgin
August 23 to September 22.


Libra
The Scales
September 23 to October 22.


Scorpio
The Scorpion
October 23 to November 21.


Sagittarius
The Archer
November 22 to December 21.


Capricorn
The Fish-Tailed Goat
December 22 to January 20.


Aquarius
The Water Bearer
January 21 to February 19.


Pisces
The Fish
February 20 to March 20.

The problem is… they’re all wrong.

The Zodiac was drawn up around two thousand years ago, when these dates coincided with the correct location of these constellations in the sky. Since then, the precession of Earth, its slow “wobble” through space, has caused these dates to shift.

If you’ve never heard of precession it might seem a little obscure, but Earth slowly precesses like a child’s spinning top. Although the top is spinning rapidly, its axis slowly points in a different direction over time.

Over a period of almost 26,000 years, Earth slowly points at a different point in outer space. Polaris hasn’t always been the pole star and won’t remain the pole star. The celestial north pole will drift as far as Vega due to precession.

Over the past two millennia, the slow precession of the equinoxes has caused the dates assigned to horoscopes to shift by roughly half a month.

Constellation
Original Date
Actual Date


Aries
March 21 – April 20
April 15 – May 15


Taurus
April 21 – May 20
May 16 – June 15


Gemini
May 21 – June 20
June 16 – July 15


Cancer
June 21 – July 21
July 16 – August 15


Leo
July 22 – August 22
August 16 – September 15


Virgo
August 23 – September 22
September 16 – October 15


Libra
September 23 – October 22
October 16 – November 15


Scorpius
October 23 – November 21
November 16 – December 15


Sagittarius
November 22 – December 21
December 16 – January 14


Capricorn
December 22 – January 20
January 15 – February 14


Aquarius
January 21 – February 19
February 15 – March 14


Pisces
February 20 – March 20
March 15 – April 14

And that’s a rather long-winded way of pointing out that rather than being born “in Libra” I was actually born in Virgo… so what does that tell you about me? Hah!

In the middle of nowhere

We are in the middle of nowhere, in every sense of the phrase. See that fullstop at the end of the previous sentence? There’s roughly 500,000,000,000 protons in that dot, and this one. As astonishing as that realization is, our little planet orbits one of anywhere up to 400,000,000,000 stars within the Milky Way, and the Milky Way is just one among anywhere from 200,000,000,000 galaxies to potentially a trillion galaxies. And that’s just from what we can see in the observable universe. We’re awash in a vast galactic sea.

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose - J.B.S. Haldane

Let’s put the size of just our solar system in perspective for a moment.

Scale model
Size
Distance


Sun
Basketball
At your feet


Mercury
Stud/sleeper earring
100 feet away


Venus
Chickpea
200 feet away


Earth
Chickpea
270 feet away


Mars
Diamond from an engagement ring
400 feet away


Ceres (asteroid)
Full stop (like this one.)
750 feet away


Jupiter
Baseball
Quarter mile mark


Saturn
Tennis ball
Almost half a mile


Uranus
US Quarter (25c coin)
Just shy of a mile


Neptune
US Quarter (25c coin)
One and a half miles


Pluto
A minus sign (-)
Two miles away

I’m not sure where you are as you read this blog post, but pick a point roughly opposite your current location, somewhere on the far side of the planet, and that’s roughly where you’ll find the nearest star in our basketball scale model.

It’s fair to say, if you were standing behind that basketball you’d struggle to see anything at all. There’s a whole lot of nothing out there. I don’t know how good your eyesight is, but I’d struggle to spot an earring at anything over about 5-10 feet, but certainly not a hundred feet. And as for spotting another basketball 10,000 miles away, well, that gives you some idea of how incredibly radiant stars are.

Looking up at the stars, the universe looks like tiny pinpricks of light, but those bright dots are phenomenally large, and the distances between them are unimaginably vast. On the darkest of nights, you might see 2,500 stars, a mere 0.000000006% of the stars within just the Milky Way.

It’s difficult to grasp the immensity of space and the size of a single galaxy, let alone all the galaxies in the universe. And yet Google has set out to plot the location of 100,000 stars within the Milky Way. Google has launched its star explorer, mapping the 100,000 stars closest to Earth. Even this, though, still only represents 0.00000025% of the stars within our galaxy. To Google’s credit, they’ve depicted the rest of the galaxy graphically, while still allowing you to fly through the 100,000 stars closest to us.

Book One of my novel Galactic Exploration describes the journey of the Serengeti out above the galactic plane, and Google have captured precisely that view.

The specs of light you can see here are not stars, they’re clusters and groupings of stars, each one containing tens of thousands of stars. At this scale, individual stars are not readily apparent and this gives you some idea of the immensity of the challenge faced by SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. There’s an awful lot of stars to scan.

If you go to the Google 100,000 stars project be sure to hit the play button and take the tour, it’s well worth your time.

Science needs you

Recently, I was excited to announce I’d received a postcard from Mars, a photograph of the Martian terrain taken by NASA’s HiRise satellite. It’s not every day you get to influence the targets of a satellite in orbit around another planet, so it was quite a thrill to see NASA take up my suggestion, and I’d like to think I’ve contributed to the body of knowledge documenting the evidence for a watery past on Mars.

I mentioned this to a friend and they said something to the effect of, “Oh, but you’d know where to look.” Implicit in that was (a) that I somehow know something unique about Mars and (b) that they don’t, or that they couldn’t come up with some interesting geological feature for investigation. Both of these assumptions are wrong. I explained that I was armed with nothing more than amateur curiosity, and that they could find interesting features if they looked, but they weren’t convinced, and that got me thinking about how sometimes we sell ourselves short, especially when it comes to understanding science.

Science needs you. 

Seriously, science needs you as much as you and I need science. NASA made the HiRise satellite available publicly through HiWish so we could assist them in the exploration of Mars. I understand that the interface may be a little intimidating at first, but take a look at the areas of interest on Mars. Sign in, create a new suggestion, switch the background to elevation, zoom in, and look at what others have suggested and photographed, and before you know it, you’ll find some small corner of the red planet that no one else has considered.

Citizen science is an exciting way to participate in science projects and gain an appreciation of what science is and how science works. And there’s lots of fun things you can do:

Planet hunters – this is a leisurely way to spend a quiet Sunday morning
Study explosive outbursts from the sun – how cool is that?
Examine the moon’s surface – you’ll be surprised at how much variation there is
Review breast cancer cells for drug efficacy - and help find patterns that reveal potential new treatments and possible cures for cancer. Each slide you look at is someone’s life under the microscope, which is quite humbling.
Consider how ship logs reveal our changing climate – take a first-hand glimpse at how climate records are gathered from the logs of ships from World War II
Help categorize 30 years of cyclones – climate change need not be some aloof, mystical concept if you jump in and help scientists understand the severity of storms over several decades
Listen to whales talk – OK, you’re probably thinking this one is like listening to old Sting records, but by categorizing these calls we can understand what whales are saying to each other. And, no, they’re not saying, “Watch out for the guy eavesdropping with the microphone.”

And there’s more at the zooniverse. Citizen science is all about supporting scientific research by providing a helping hand, helping categorize important information so scientists have hard evidence with which to construct their theories. These theories then help explain the world in which we live and help us improve our quality of life moving forward.

The breast cancer research is a particularly good example of why citizen science is important, as it is a double-blind review of drug efficacy tests. In an age of quacks and snake-oil salesmen, where everything from coffee enemas to crystals to baking soda have been proposed as “cures,” there is a need for the public to understand that only evidence-based medicine has any value. And as a citizen scientist, you can help gather that evidence.

The phrase “alternative medicine” is a misleading. Panadol is an alternative to Nurofen, Duragesic is an alternative to morphine, but these are medicines to start with, carefully screened and tested, well-understood, with known efficacy.

Baking powder is not an alternative to anything other than yeast in baking.

One site even goes so far as to claim there are “hundreds” of “cures” for cancer but that the “politics of the Cancer industry keeps many of these hidden and forbidden.” Such alarmist, conspiratorial claims mislead thousands of innocent people desperately seeking genuine help.

If there is a conspiracy, it is a conspiracy to eliminate baseless, unproven, irrational and ultimately harmful practices that exploit vulnerable people in an unethical manner.

By participating in the review of double-blind clinical results you are contributing to understanding whether a particular approach to treating cancer is effective or not.

And it’s “double-blind” because the researchers collecting the samples have ensured they’re anonymous so there’s no bias. You too have no idea which patient or which drug results you’re examining. In this way, you can be confident that there’s no bias, no subtle weighting in the outcome. In effect, you are eliminating the possibility of any conspiracy, ensuring a particular therapy is judged on its merits and its merits alone.

If crushed unicorn horns, dissolved pixie wings or whatever other exotic “alternative” concoction passes a double-blind clinical test, wonderful. If not, junk it.

Scientists are not the high priests of some new mystery religion. There’s no cordoned-off area behind the altar that is the sole domain of the most sacred, holy scientists. Science is for everyone. Participating in a citizen science project can help demystify science for you personally.

What is science other than your inner two-year old asking, “Why?“

Science is a carefully measured, transparent, testable description of reality. Ever since we were children, we asked questions like, “Why is the sky blue?” At some point, some exasperated adult may have replied, “Just because.” And with those two words, thinking and reasoning were stifled. Science rekindles that interest. Science awakens within us our base sense of awe and discovery about this magnificent universe in which we live. We need to renew that childlike enthusiasm to learn and explore.

Science needs you, but not just to help, to understand.

Next

Transylvanian psychological-thriller science fiction writer Veronica Sicoe nominated me to continue The Next Big Thing, where authors talk about their WIP (work-in-progress). I’ve shortened the title to Next, as Big seemed overly ambitious and Thing is already a brilliant science fiction story in its own right.

What is the working title of your book?

Having just launched Monsters a couple of days ago, I’m between projects at the moment, pondering several interesting lines of inquiry for my next book, so I’ll talk about Monsters.

Where did the idea for the book come from?

2012 is the National Year of Reading here in Australia. The slogan love2read captures the essence of the campaign with adroit brevity. Reading is something we take for granted. Public literacy is a relatively modern phenomena and is somewhat understated in society. I’m convinced reading leads to a quiet revolution, but it’s contingent on love, not soppy romance, but a hungry desire for mental callisthenics. As frivolous as Twilight or Harry Potter may be, there’s a very real benefit socially and individually for those that love to read, as their minds are exercised, their imagination inspired, and their sense of pathos is recharged.

Ours is the age of distraction, the age of dilution. Short attention spans are the bane of reading, but for those that love to read, there’s no more exciting time to be alive. In Monsters, I wanted to capture the unique age in which we live by contrasting it to a broken society in which reading was akin to witchcraft.

What genre does your book fall under?

Primarily, it is an action/adventure novel, with a sprinkle of science thrown in for good measure.

Which actors would you chose to play characters in a movie rendition?

I’m rather frugal with character descriptions, describing what a character looks like only if it directly contributes to the mood of a section. I don’t think there’s any description of what either Bruce or his son James actually look like other than that they have beards. The rest is left entirely to the discretion of the reader. In light of that, I’d have to say no-name actors rather than Hollywood stars. I just can’t see Brad Pit or Angelina Jolie fitting the brief.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Like most writers, I suffer from prolixity. One sentence? Are you kidding me? What is this? Twitter? OK, here we go…

After the collapse of civilization, reading is lost, readers are persecuted, but one family seeks to restore knowledge, only monsters stand in their way.

Phew…

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Once, self-publishing was the kiss of death for a professional author, but times have changed as writers like Hugh Howey and Matthew Mather have shown. I’d love to be represented by an agency, but I suspect it’s not as glamourous as it seems and, besides, I’ve done well out of self-publishing, having met people from all over the world through my books, from university biology professors to scientists running coffee shops (damn, that’s got to be a great cup of joe). Writing is holistic, very much about the journey rather than the destination, so I’m OK with being an indie (independent writer/publisher).

How long did it take to write the first draft of your manuscript?

About four months, then another two months revising and editing.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Wool, Hunger Games and Fahrenheit 451, although I don’t know that I’m doing those novels justice in making such a comparison.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My wife and kids. My wife and I read Hunger Games aloud with our girls before seeing it as a movie, tapping into the girls’ excitement for the story. Funny thing was, I’m not a big fan of the first person narrative used in Hunger Games, so I was the one that had to be dragged along.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Well, there’s monsters, lots and lots of monsters, and they never attack the same way twice. With each attack you learn more about this fictional future world and how people deal with the stress of no longer being at the apex of the food chain.

Who will you nominate for the next big thing?

I’m going to mix things up and pick writers that are at different stages in their careers as well as in different genres, but they’re all writers I’d like to hear from.

Cristian Mihai
Brian Wells
Matthew Mather
Hugh Howey

Monsters love2read

2012 is the National Year of Reading here in Australia, a campaign by the libraries of Australia to promote literacy under the banner of love2read .

I was shocked to learn that 46% of Australians struggle to read a newspaper or to follow a recipe. Although 99% of the population qualify as literate according to the strict definition of being able to read and write to a basic level by the age of 15, almost half the population struggles to read effectively. And so the love2read campaign got me thinking about the role reading has played in forming modern society. Of the various catalysts for change over the past five hundred years, from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution, from the Reformation to the Age of Enlightenment, reading has been central to them all.

It’s easy to dismiss reading fiction as a frivolous exercise, irrelevant to modern life, but that fails to appreciate the impact of pathos on the mind of the reader. Like dreams, reading fiction exercises the imagination, which is important for a healthy mind.

Reading seems passive, but it’s not. Reading actively engages the mind, stimulating and provoking thoughts and emotions. Whether it’s science fiction, fantasy, romance, an adventure or a tragedy, books provide us with a place of refuge, somewhere from which we can recharge and engage further with life.

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons
`

The central premise in my latest book, Monsters, is that we should not take public literacy for granted because it is a relatively modern development in history, and one that could easily be lost.

At the time I started writing Monsters, I thought, “Perhaps I’m stretching things too far in this book, beyond the realms of credibility. We could never lose the scientific knowledge upon which our civilization is built, could we?“

Since then, I’ve been appauled to hear about the attack on Malala Yousufzai, a 14 year old Pakistani girl who was shot in a cowardly ambush by the Taliban. Her “crime?” Malala wanted other girls to have access to education.

It’s tempting to say, “Oh, how horrible, but that’s in the Third World.” And yet we are not immune from such idiocy in the West. Recently, US Congressman Paul Broun announced that evolution and the Big Bang Theory are “lies” from “the pit of hell.” Although this seems like a comment spoken out of ignorance, Congressman Broun is a doctor of medicine and serves on the state of Georgia’s House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

In Italy, we have seen scientists convicted as criminals and sentenced to six years in jail for failing to predict an earthquake in L’Aquila. Claudio Eva described the ruling, quite appropriately, as “medieval.”

The appalling reality of the Taliban, political leaders like Paul Broun and the judicial process around the tragedy at L’Aquila make the concept of burning people at the stake suddenly seem not quite so unthinkable. Our hold on scientific and rational thinking is anything but assured. Monsters makes the case that we should consider reading as one of the pillars of modern society.

Monsters
Monsters is a dystopian novel set against the backdrop of the collapse of civilization.
`
The fallout from a passing comet contains a biological pathogen, not a virus or a living organism, just a collection of amino acids, but these cause animals to revert to the age of the mega-fauna, when monsters roamed Earth.
`
Bruce Dobson is a reader. With the fall of civilization, reading has become outlawed. Superstitions prevail, and readers are persecuted like the witches and wizards of old. Bruce and his son James seek to overturn the prejudices of their day and restore the scientific knowledge central to their survival, but monsters lurk in the dark.
`

On a lighter note, a friend’s young daughter overheard I was about to release a new book around my birthday and made me a birthday card in the style of a book cover. I thought you’d enjoy seeing her art work.

Monsters is available on Amazon and Smashwords.

I hope you love2read

Science Friction

Contrary to the common misconception perpetuated on Amazon, science fiction is not in any way related to fantasy.

True science fiction is the hypothetical conjecture of how science could, in one form or another, shape the world of the future, and in that regard it is forward thinking.

Science fiction looks to preempt and predict how mankind will adapt to the challenges of the future.

Science fiction classics could loosely be termed science friction in that they agitate and challenge preconceptions. Throughout its brief history, the best loved science fiction stories have been those that dared to challenge the status quo.

George Orwell’s 1984 is, arguably, the greatest science fiction novel ever written.

Half a century before Skype video chats and Google hangouts, George Orwell saw the danger of our seemingly innocuous video screens with their built-in cameras.

Thought-police, newspeak and Big Brother became the clarion called that allowed the West to avoid the Stalinist-style abuse of technology portrayed in 1984.

If you’ve read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago you’ll understand this was no idle, misplaced phobia on Orwell’s part. Had Stalin, Hitler or Mao had access to such instruments of surveillance, their repressive, murderous regimes might still be with us.

And yet, a book review in 1949 noted “This may mean that [1984's] greatness is only immediate, its power for us alone, now, in this generation, this decade, this year, that [1984] is doomed to be the pawn of time. Nevertheless it is probable that no other work of this generation has made us desire freedom more earnestly or loathe tyranny with such fulness.” Far from being limited to its day, 1984 stands as a dire warning about the dangers of authoritarian rule for countless generations to come.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a reactionary tale, written by Kurt Vonnegut, capturing the trauma and senseless waste of war as he experienced it during the Allied fire bombing of Dresden.

The book is fictional, but it is also allegorical and biographical, capturing the heartrending futility of death and violence as epitomized by destruction of Dresden. It’s hard to do the history of Dresden justice, needless to say, it was an Allied war crime. This excerpt from a survivor of the bombing conveys the horror Vonnegut witnessed.

Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. It became more and more difficult to breathe. It was dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled upon…
~
We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub.
~
We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers… and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm [sucked] people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.
~

As a writer, Vonnegut could not ignore the devastation he’d witness in World War II. His protagonist is propelled around in time, chaotically flashing back and forth, capturing the emotional trauma of survivors in an allegorical fashion.

In Slaughterhouse-Five he wrote, “It is, in the imagination of combat’s fans, the divinely listless loveplay that follows the orgasm of victory. It is called ‘mopping up.’” In this way, Vonnegut sought to arrest our attention, to ensure the past was not buried and forgotten, to make sure that the lessons were learned, not ignored.

In the words of George Santayana, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Vonnegut was determined we should not forget.

Science friction is fiction that wakes us from our lethargy, stirring us to action.

Robert Heinlein wrote several stories in this category. But his classic, Starship Troopers, became a cautionary tale in a way Heinlein never intended.

In Starship Troopers, Heinlein sets out his arguments against communism, the Cold War, and the need for duty to reinforce responsibility, all set against the backdrop of an interstellar conflict with alien bugs.

Somewhat ironically, the extremist right-wing views he promoted as future social values backfired. Throughout the book his characters debate the weakness of democracy and the need for military service, but the book was published just a few years before the Vietnam war escalated out of control. Starship Troopers became a parody of reality.

The book’s description of society happily accepting life on a war footing became a stark contrast to the socially traumatic events of the 60s. If anything, Heinlein’s vision highlights a fascist extreme the US narrowly avoided.

In 1962, Heinlein wrote Stranger in a Strange Land. With its focus on the formation of a new religion comprised of celebrities, one wonders if he intended his “all worlds religion” as a mockery of scientology.

In stark contrast to Starship Troopers, Heinlein unveils a world of free love, drugs and promiscuity. With themes such as homosexuality, hippies and a fascination with psychic powers, the book preempted the radical movements of the 60s and 70s.

The US Congressional Library named Stranger in a Strange Land as one of a hundred books that helped shape modern America. The stark contrast between Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land captures the contradiction that was America in the 1960s.

Perhaps the most radical work of science fiction friction is Planet of the Apes.

Although the motivation for the book was originally to highlight cruelty to animals and to challenge the presumption of man’s position at the head of creation, the movie version became a social statement on US racial tensions.

The racial overtones are overt, and clearly not intended just as an analogy for animal cruelty. African-American slavery, segregation and discrimination are subject to a role reversal within the movie, with Charlton Heston appearing very much as a white European slave held in chains. This switch was intended to shock audiences into the realization that racism is unjust.

White supremacists didn’t miss the point. In supremacist rallies in the late 60s, bigots displayed racist placards decrying what they saw as “Planet of the Apes” resulting from the dissolution of segregation.

In much the same manner, during some of the later movies in the series, black audiences cheered for Caesar, drowning out the movie’s dialogue as they cheered for his rebellion against oppression.

The point of all this is simple: We need mirrors.

We need to see ourselves in a mirror, to see who we are and where we are going in life, and science fiction does that, but not with flashy light-sabres and green muppets. Science fiction shows like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica are legendary not because they fire photon torpedoes or travel faster than light, they preempted social change. It’s no surprise the first interracial kiss on TV occurred in Star Trek.

Science fiction can easily address topics we would not otherwise talk about. Often, these are the topics we needed to be talking about.

In the words of Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, “I knew I could get away with Martians saying things Republicans and Democrats couldn’t.“

Science fiction should cause friction, but not to be obnoxious or sensational, to provoke critical thinking.

Extremophilephile: loving the unlovable

Extremophile describes organisms that “love” extremes, thriving in environments that would kill most cellular life. Extremophiles are so varied it’s hard to do this category of life justice in a blog post, so here’s just a sprinkling of some of those that catch my eye.

Life is… well, what adjective could accurately describe the versatility and diversity of life on Earth? Remarkable? Astounding? Incredible? Each of these superlatives pales in comparison to the wonder that is biology.

Life never ceases to surprise.

The discovery of Halicephalobus mephisto, a nematode ‘worm from hell,’ which thrives over two miles beneath the ground, has rewritten the textbooks on the bands within which live can evolve, raising hopes that such a subterranean migration could occur elsewhere on places like Mars or Enceladus.

As [insert superlative here] as mephisto is, the bacteria on which this worm feeds are even more [insert an even stronger superlative here].

Recognized as a species of Firmicutes, this bacteria thrives on molecules produced as a byproduct of the radiation given off by naturally decaying Uranium breaking up water into peroxide. This means that like the bacteria around deep sea thermal vents, these Firmicutes exist independent of the rest of the biosphere.

These Firmicutes have carved out their own ecological niche entirely separate from photosynthesis-driven surface life. If life on Earth was wiped out by radiation from a nearby supernova or a massive asteroid impact, these little critters probably wouldn’t notice.

Nematodes tend to rate highly on any list of extremophiles because they have adapted to living anywhere from the Antarctic to the deserts of North Africa. When winter closes in on Antartica, these guys do what guys do everywhere when the winter snows start looming, they put some antifreeze in the radiator. Only these guys incorporate antifreeze (glycerol) in their blood.

And this party trick isn’t reserved for microscopic creatures, the Antarctic ice fish does the same thing.

Tardigrades, or water bears, are a personal favorite, as these guys are complex creatures capable of being revived after spending a week in outer space, exposed to the harsh vacuum and solar radiation in a low Earth orbit.

Not only that, but tardigrades can be found in the Himalayas, at 20,000 ft above sea level, as well as down to 13,000 ft below the ocean. Tardigrades are exceptional in that they thrive in all extremes, not just in one niche area. They’ve been revived from temperatures as low as almost absolute zero, and can survive at upwards of 300F or 150C.

Like all extremophiles, tardigrades raise the prospect of life potentially existing elsewhere within the extremes of the solar system.

Deinococcus radiodurans is a bacterium that can survive a thousand times the radiation levels that would kill a human. Scale that up to three thousand times a lethal dose for us, and the survival rate is still over 37% for a given culture of radiodurans. Given how quickly bacteria multiply, this would barely phase the organism.

The surprising thing about radiodurans is that there’s nowhere on Earth that’s naturally exposed to these kind of radiation levels. These are the kinds of radiation levels we see around Jupiter, and that bacteria from the relatively benign third-planet out from the sun could thrive on a Jovian moon bathed in harsh radiation is astounding. In this regard, Io, Ganymede or Europa are suddenly looking quite promising in the hunt for extraterrestrial life.

Speaking of harsh environments, there are bacteria that can survive in hydrochloric acid (ph 1.5-3.5) in the human gut.

There’s even been bacteria revived from ice cores dated at over a hundred thousand years in age, highlighting how hardy microscopic life is in contrast to macroscopic life.

The dry valleys of Antartica, the driest place on Earth, offer a glimpse of the kind of life that could be possible on Mars. There’s little or no ice present in these frozen deserts, while what minuscule rainfall occurs on an annual basis freezes or evaporates within a day.

With mean temperatures around -35C (-90F), the only significant difference between Antartica and the highlands of Mars is the atmospheric composition and pressure. Fungi and bacteria exist within a few centimeters of the surface. With no appreciable water, they form a thin, dry crust, defying all expectations as to what is required for life to thrive.

Even apparent “dead zones” on Earth, ocean and lakes starved of oxygen, have evolved anaerobic bacteria.

The more we look, the more we find life carving out an existence in the harshest environments on Earth.

Given the mechanisms by which Natural Selection drives evolution, and the advantages of specialization in dominating an environmental niche, all this shouldn’t be surprising, but it is carried to an extreme beyond anything we could have imagined, and that bodes well in the search for extraterrestrial life. As nice as it would be to find intelligent aliens, I’d settle for microscopic extraterrestrial life in the first instance, as we would learn so much from such a discovery.

It’s impossible to predict how successful SETI will be in searching for intelligent alien life, and the search for extraterrestrial life within the solar system might not find anything, and yet it may be that given the success of bacteria on Earth, both in terms of longevity, diversity and their tolerance of extremes, that we could find alien microbial life before we hear from ET.

Instead of looking completely implausible, our knowledge of extremophiles on Earth helps us to understand that life elsewhere within our solar system is plausible. I guess that makes NASA scientists extremophilephiles, as they love those organisms that love extremes.

Book Cover

MONSTERS is due for release on October 31 of this year, but I haven’t been able to settle on a cover yet and thought you might like to help choose one. Here’s the blurb for the novel.

The fallout from a passing comet carries a biological pathogen, not a virus or a living organism, just a collection of amino acids forming a simple helical structure, but one that causes animals to revert to the age of the mega-fauna, when monsters roamed Earth.

With the collapse of civilization, reading is lost. Superstitions prevail. Readers are persecuted like the witches and wizards of old. Bruce and his son James seek to overturn the prejudices of their day and restore the scientific knowledge central to their survival while teaching others the joy of reading, but monsters lurk in the dark.

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Postcards from Mars

Last year, I wrote a blog post called Dr Evil Hijacks Martian Satellite in which I talked about NASA’s HiRise project for budding citizen scientists. In association with the University of Arizona, NASA has crowd-sourced suggestions for targets of interest for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

I am astonished and humbled that NASA would make this publicly available to anyone with an interest in Mars. It is a privilege to be part of the exploration of Mars in this manner.

Mars is as dry as a bone. One of the key questions on the path to determining whether life has ever existed on Mars is understanding the role of water on the planet. So in selecting a target for HiRise, I wanted to explore a region that might reveal something of the planet’s possible watery past.

With pressures and temperatures below or just at the triple point of water, Mars cannot sustain liquid water on its surface for any length of time. If you’ve ever been to Colorado and boiled water for a cup of tea, you’ll know that water boils in the Rockies at a lower temperature than you’d expect, somewhere below 90c/200F depending on elevation. This is because of the lower air pressure at these heights. On Mars, the atmospheric pressure is so low water either “boils” at near freezing or just sublimes from ice into vapour without ever becoming a liquid (just as dry ice does on Earth). With enough salts, liquid water can exist on the surface of Mars, but it will evaporate rapidly.

If the concept of water boiling without being hot sounds a bit too bizarre to be real, you can try cold boiling water in your own home with a syringe.

In light of all this, I submitted a candidate on the edge of the Hellas basin that looks particularly interesting as it appears to be a dried-up lake bed. The western wall of the lake appears to have collapsed at some point in the past, and the runoff has scoured the land. To my delight, NASA took my suggestion and snapped some holiday pics, so here they are, with my rather amateur observations.

The false colour in this image indicates elevation, so the yellow peaks are the highlands, the green isn’t a grassy field, it’s simply the midlands, while the blue descends into the Hellas Basin. The target I proposed looks at what appears to be an ancient lake wall several hundred meters high that has collapsed and run off into the basin before drying up completely.

Most of the depressions you see on Mars are the result of meteor impacts or fractures in the crust. In this case, though, the deep blue depression is too irregular to be the result of an impact, and too broad for a fracture. It may have started out as a string of craters, but its irregular shape suggests alluvial influences, the presence of a large body of water that has triggered sedimentary behavoir.

Look at the “seam” running horizontally in the middle of the “lake bed” between the two cliffs to the north and south. This crease is roughly parallel with the northern cliff and is reminiscent of the run-off deltas we see on Earth, with channels eroded at the deepest point as sediment accumulates. Also, look at the roughly uniform depth of the “lake bed,” and how smooth sections of the bed are.

When lakes dry up, water slowly recedes from the walls, gathering in the depths. Any inflow will run in channels, forming deltas, curling around accumulated sediment. This image, from Lake Mills near Seattle, shows these characteristics in beautiful detail, along with clearly defined lake walls with a steady, smooth gradient. This is precisely what we see in the HiRise photographs, minus only the water.

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Our target region straddles the depth of the “lake bed,” the “lake wall” and a region where the lake burst its banks and the run off eroded vast channels that lead down into the Hellas basin.

Here are the results from HiRise. This image spans about roughly 15-18 miles. I’ve rotated the image counter-clockwise so it fits easily in this post, but you can find the original image here.

The assumed lake wall shows up in dark shadows, running from bottom-left and stretching across to top-right. You can see a clear distinction between the smooth, previously submerged regions, with their eroded, softened shapes, and the more coarse, high ground to the right.

Remember, when looking at Mars, we’re seeing overlapping geological features that span hundreds of millions to billions of years.

The “tiger strips” on the proposed lake wall are more recent erosion, where gullies roughly a mile long have been worn away by aluvial erosion. NASA suspects this is typical for subterranean salt brines thawing in the Martian spring. The false-colour images of this section on the HiRise site show the accumulation of clays at the base of these gullies, showing how heavy materials have been carried away by liquids.

Note the three wavy channels at the base of the lake wall, sprawling across the dried-up lake bed. These channels are reminiscent of the channels we see forming in Lake Mills here on Earth, and represent water still flowing into the lake while it is drying up and shrinking in size.

The following image, from inside the lake bed, shows large, previously submerged knolls (at least, that’s my proposition). Look at how smooth the sides of the hills are, and the steady gradient down to the lake bed. You can also see well-defined channels between the knolls, with creases matching the flow of water.

This next shot shows the outer wall of the lake and the highlands beyond (bottom left). Notice the distinct boundary between the two regions.

In this final picture, you can see the highlands on the left edge of the image, and the more recent erosion caused by subterranean water melting in the spring. But it’s the smooth knoll on the lake bed that is most telling. I was sceptical about water existing in huge quantities for an extended period of time on Mars because of its low gravity, lack of a planetary magnetic field and thin atmosphere, but for this knoll to have been eroded within a lake bed implies it was submerged and subject to currents for a considerable period of time.

Hey, I’m an amateur, so I may be well wide of the mark on this, but these relatively smooth regions within a depressed irregular basin on Mars look distinctly like a dried-up lake bed to me. Could life have flourished in such a region as this? Well, Mars Curiosity is wandering through Gale Crater looking to answer exactly that question.

Thank you, NASA

Alien Landscapes

What would we see if we stood on an alien world?

As the word ‘alien‘ originally meant ‘foreigner, stranger, one who is not a naturalized citizen of the country in which they are living,‘ we naturally expect everything alien to be different, and perhaps it will be, but the laws of physics are universal so we should expect some similarities. The classic sci-fi interpretation is often as though a blue/purple/black filter (or blood red filter) had been placed over the lens of a camera just for the sake of it. And although there is some scientific basis to this assumption, as different stars will emit different intensities of radiation, it is an overly simplistic way of coming up with something ‘different‘ for the sake of being different. We have black plants here on Earth, though, making them not-quite-as-alien as we thought.

The danger is that science fiction may be trying too hard to come up with something radically different just so it seems alien, with alien being synonymous for jaw-dropping and unexpected. Reality may be stranger than fiction in that the laws of physics and chemistry are what determine biology, and as the laws of physics and chemistry are universal, astrobiology too may be much more similar than we’d expect.

Theoretically, life could arise in a multitude of places we wouldn’t anticipate, using chemistry we haven’t seen exploited on Earth (like silicon-based lifeforms), but as a university professor recently pointed out to me, the odds on favorite has to be carbon from a purely chemical perspective. Carbon is the most versatile atom for forming complex molecules.

So what would alien landscapes look like? Well, they’re going to be bound by the same laws of physics and chemistry we have on Earth, although probably in different proportions, as it’s unlikely there will be the same gravitational strength, or atmospheric mix, etc.

I’d venture to say with the astounding diversity of environments we see on Earth, there’s enough versatility to give us a good idea about alien landscapes.

These are snow covered trees in lapland, with temperatures dropping as low as -40c in winter, these hardy trees survive encased in ice.

Just a couple of hours from where I was born you can find boiling mud in the thermal wonderland of Rotorua. As a kid, I’d marvel when we’d stop by the side of the road to watch mud bubbling away in the forest.

If you ever get to Sydney, Australia, you should take a trip to the Blue Mountains to the Jenolan Caves. It takes several hours to walk through these caves, but the stalactites and stalagmites are magnificent.

Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone is an example of how “alien” life on Earth can be.  The deep blue color is the natural result of water clarity and depth, but the greens, yellows and ocre-reds are all the result of bacterial life. In particular, this spring hosts chemotrophs, microbes that use chemicals rather than photosynthesis as their energy source, but its the cyanobacteria, photosynthesizing bacteria, that give off the green, yellow and ruddy colours. Chemotrophs and cyanobacteria are among the oldest forms of life on Earth.

Any alien world will undoubtedly have volcanoes, but, as we have seen within our own solar system, not necessarily volcanoes seething with boiling magma. The moons of Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune have all displayed cryovolcanoes, erupting with cold/frozen gases and liquids such as water, methane and ammonia. Volcanoes like these may well be the chemical mixing pot for life on other worlds.

Here on Earth we see a variety of life arising around volcanic hydrothermal vents where sunlight can never penetrate.

Although it might look like something from the Alien franchise of movies, this microscopic worm was discovered around a deep sea thermal vent.

With nematodes being discovered up to a mile beneath the Earth’s surface, the extreme boundaries at which live can thrive continues to be redefined. Life is far more remarkable and surprising, resilient and prolific than we dared to imagine even just a decade ago, raising hopes of life being able to etch out an existence in the far-flung corners of our own solar system on planets and moons like Mars, Enceladus and Europa.