Featured Articles – Page 19

Why Is SETI Not An Interstellar Switchboard?

Monolith by highdarktemplar on DeviantArt.

On reading an article in The Daily Galaxy today, I was interested by what the author had to say. In a nutshell, the article pointed out that it is a big mistake to believe we are the only intelligent life in the Milky Way.

Why is that?

The only reason given was that there are billions of stars, it is therefore foolish to think we are the only example of an advanced species. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to suggest that we aren’t the only intelligent life form in our galaxy. Just because there are hundreds of billions of stars possibly with billions of habitable planets does not constitute evidence that we’re not alone. That’s what science is all about, formulating a theory and then gathering the evidence. Simply saying, “There’s lots of stars, therefore there must be an intelligent species out there,” doesn’t cut it.

Dr Frank Drake toiled with this idea to eventually arrive at the famous Drake Equation, a concept I have never felt at ease with:

At first glance, we could say that the Drake equation really is nonsense (after all, how can any equation predict more than one intelligent civilization in our galaxy, when we only have experience of one: us), and that we are the only kids on the Milky Way block. — from If There’s an Alien Race Living on our Doorstep, Why Can’t We Hear Them?

How can you arrive at the conclusion that we are not the only intelligent life in the galaxy simply because there are a lot of stars?

Familiarity

It is true that the Milky Way contains billions of stars, of which a high percentage probably have exoplanets not dissimilar to Earth orbiting them. There’s every chance that a smaller percentage of those Earth-like terrestrial exoplanets have some kind of basic life form slivering around (or indeed swimming, flying, walking or ‘talking’). Also, there’s the chance that some of these exoplanets have nurtured something that we’d consider to be ‘intelligent.’

Now this is where things start to get a bit tricky.

There are massive international efforts under way to find any kind of extraterrestrial life. We’re toasting soil samples on Mars in the hope of finding the biological signature, and we’re using full-blown antennae scouring the skies for any organized signal from an intelligent alien species. However, whether we are looking for microbial life in the Solar System or something a little more sophisticated beyond, our search for extraterrestrial life is based on only one model: Earth.

It’s all very well saying that we should be looking for other possible forms of life, but if we have no experience of it, how do we know what to look for?

It’s a similar question to, “What is beyond a black hole’s event horizon?” We have no idea, because we cannot experience it, the physics of our Universe simply do not apply beyond an event horizon.

There are a lot of ideas, theories and conjecture but at the end of the day, we have to assume ET will have some trait we are familiar with.

When looking for intelligent extraterrestrials we make the assumption that these civilizations have progressed in a similar way to us, eventually transmitting radio signals (perhaps even laser beacons) to communicate on their home world, between planets with their own kind, or even reaching out into the cosmos, signalling their presence to other life forms capable of receiving interstellar signals.

We’ve been leaking radio signals into space for the last century and we are constantly communicating with our planetary probes. There’s every chance that if there’s an intelligent alien (with a radio receiver) within 100 light years, we may have already been detected. We are also being a bit more proactive these days, using programs such as Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) to make our presence known. (But what should we be saying?)

SETI, METI, SETA… SETT?

Unfortunately, apart from one isolated case, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has drawn up blanks, we don’t think we’ve heard anything in the cosmos that’s originated from an alien.

On this single null result, we could jump to the conclusion that there is no other form of ‘intelligent’ life in our galaxy. Say if the ‘Rare Earth‘ theory is correct, and we are indeed the only form of intelligent life in our galaxy? But there are other explanations. What if ET is signalling via another method? What if there is some interstellar mechanism that is hindering (or even blocking) the transmission of electromagnetic communications? All these questions are valid as there is no scientific evidence to support otherwise. It’s very quiet out there, a fact that is bugging scientists quite a bit, and this problem been dubbed the Fermi Paradox.

The Milky Way is very old, in fact, the oldest star in our galaxy has been burning for 13.2 billion years (compare that with the age of the Universe at 13.74 billion years); you’d logically think that something resembling an intelligent civilization would have popped into existence in that time. If they did, surely we’d have detected them by now, wouldn’t we?

Actually, this spawns yet another debate: Have ancient interstellar alien civilizations come and gone? Was there a frenzy of intelligent life popping up all over the galaxy in the billions of years that our Sun was a proto-star surrounded by a proto-planetary disk? If old alien intelligence has since become extinct, our few thousand years as an evolving civilization is a mere spark in universal time scales. Could it be that we’ll have to wait until we can actually visit interstellar destinations first-hand to do the SETI equivalent of an archaeological dig, looking for alien artefacts? Perhaps SETI should be changed to the Search for Extraterrestrial Artefacts (SETA), where we’d have to look for evidence of alien civilizations past.

Dyson Microcosm by justravelin on DeviantArt

There’s another factor to consider. What if an advanced extraterrestrial civilization simply isn’t transmitting? If this is the case, perhaps we should consider a Search for Extraterrestrial Technology (SETT). In this case we could look for alien megastructures, searching for the stuff of science fiction. These structures could include examples of Dyson Spheres, huge alien-made hollow spheres containing a star; a means to harvest all the stellar energy for a vastly advanced civilization.

These are all options, and we shouldn’t close any possibility, no matter how extreme they may be.

Conclusion

There’s a reason why we haven’t received a signal via SETI, but we have no idea about what it could be. We really could be alone in the Milky Way. But then again, there’s a huge number of reasons why we might not be receiving a message from an intelligent species.

SETI may not be an interstellar switchboard, but the reasons for this are far from obvious. The theory that we are alone is just as valid as the theory that we are actually a part of a vast interstellar ecosystem. Until we have scientific evidence, we can’t say either way.

Venus is Lonely. Very, Very Lonely

Venus is a hellish world. Although the planet is nearly the same size of Earth, that’s where the similarities end. Having said that, it does have an atmosphere, but it’s not the kind of atmosphere you would ever want to spend time breathing in. Composed of a dense carbon dioxide/nitrogen mix where clouds are made from sulphuric acid, you can forget about Venus as a tropical holiday destination. Even if you found a way to ‘breathe’ on Venus, you’d need to prepare yourself for the scorching 470°C surface temperatures and bone crushing pressures 100 times the pressure we are used to on Earth.

Doesn’t sound like a very nice place does it? Certainly an interesting world, providing us with invaluable science (after all, the reason for the extreme temperatures on Venus is due to a run-away greenhouse effect, it could help us understand the growing problems we are facing with our comparatively mild global warming woes), but an unlikely candidate for human colonization (unless we lived in the clouds).

Venus might not be a popular world for mankind to live on, but it doesn’t seem to be a popular world for natural satellites to orbit around either. It doesn’t have any moons, and astronomers are a little confused as to why this is the case. The only other planet without moons is the innermost terrestrial planet, Mercury. Every other planet in the Solar System has at least one natural satellite.

For hundreds of years, astronomers have been on the lookout for anything orbiting Venus but they’ve had little luck. However, some of the earliest observations of Venus appeared to indicate the presence satellites (in 1645, F. Fontana mentioned the possibility of a satellite discovery, followed by further observations in the late 1600’s and 1700’s). Since 1768, there have been no further reports of any satellite sightings. 1956 was the last published survey for Venusian satellites, using photographic plates, and that survey (published by Gerard Kuiper in 1961) drew up blanks for any satellites measuring over 2.5 km wide.

The lack of Venusian moons is puzzling, as a Venus-moon interacting mechanism has often been invoked as the reason why Venus has a retrograde spin (i.e. viewed from the ‘top’ of the Solar System plane, Venus has a clockwise rotation, whereas the rest of the planets, apart from Uranus — that spins on its side, bizarrely — have an anti-clockwise, or prograde, spin). Perhaps Venus once had a moon, but it has since been lost due to gravitational interactions with other Solar System bodies, or due to tidal instabilities, the innermost terrestrial planets collided with their large satellites a long time ago.

This is where Scott Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Chadwick Trujillo from the Gemini Observatory (Hawaii) step in. In a recent publication titled, “A Survey for Satellites of Venus,” Sheppard and Trujillo pick up where Kuiper left off, and carry out a systematic survey searching for any natural satellites around Venus. Only this time, by using the cutting-edge 6.5 meter telescope and IMACS wide-field CCD imager at Las Campanas observatory in Chile, they looked for objects only a few hundred meters in diameter.

The researchers scanned the interior of the Venusian ‘Hill Sphere’ to see if any undiscovered tiny moons were lurking. The Hill sphere is the volume of space surrounding a planetary body where natural satellites can orbit without being destabilized by the gravitational effects of the Sun. If there are any unforeseen moons, they should be found in stable orbits within the Hill sphere.

Sheppard and Trujillo have drawn blanks. Although a few errant asteroids were detected, no natural satellites down to a diameter of 600 meters were discovered. They surveyed 90% of the Venusian Hill sphere, and 99% of the inner Hill sphere (0.7r_H) — the volume of space predicted to contain the stable orbits of natural satellites.

This new survey improves the non-detection of satellites down to a factor of 50 on previous studies, thereby proving Venus either, a) never possessed any satellites over 1km in diameter, or b) the orbits of past large satellites have become unstable and crashed into Venus or flung into space.

Either way, Venus remains alone, with only the ESA Venus Express for company…

Source: A Survey for Satellites of Venus, Sheppard & Trujillo, 2009. arXiv:0906.2781v1 [astro-ph.EP]

John Cusack? Airlifted Giraffes? Please Tell Me It’s Doomsday

Firstly, let’s set the record straight: I love disaster movies.

I don’t care if the Earth is being invaded by aliens, getting hit by comets, being saved by oil drillers or poisoned by angry trees (yes, my brain even shrank through The Happening). It’s fiction, it’s fun and, let’s face it, who doesn’t enjoy a bit of global calamity interwoven with a silly plot.

So, today the extended trailer for the November film 2012 has been released (below), and I do admit, I was mildly excited to see what this budding blockbuster had to offer — although I changed my mind when seeing the horridly Hollywooded ‘science’ and the USS John F. Kennedy flatten the White House after surfing a mega-tsunami at the end. That was no cigarette they were smoking in the Sony Pictures cutting room.

The whole 2012 hype has kept my blogging gene active for the best part of a year, so I know for a fact that 2012 director Roland Emmerich has a lot of material to play with.

According to the CGI-fest of a trailer, have some ancient intrigue with “mankind’s earliest civilization” (the Mayans… a.k.a. not mankind’s earliest civilization) predicting the “end of the world” (are you sure?) with their pesky calendar. We also have something astronomical (yep, Planet X is back) careering toward Earth. We get tsunamis flattening cities, flying giraffe, Noah’s Ark, minivans getting hit by Big Flaming Balls Of Fire™, crying children, earthquakes, fire, more crying children, famine, angry politicians and John Cusack. (What?)

This is going to be oodles of fun if you want to see our planet disintegrate into a tortured dust bowl via computer-generated fury, but could this also be the end of the quintessential disaster movie?

This has been my complaint all along about the insane doomsday scenarios being dreamed up by crackpots and greedy authors: You’re trying too hard! What ever happened to the subtle art of doomsday prophesy?

EXAMPLE: Nostradamus says the world will end some hazy time in the hazy future (get that man a Nobel Prize!); a computer expert says, “Hmm, these microchips might reset when the calendar switches from 1999 to 2000,” followed by the aforementioned crackpots and greedy authors telling the scared populous that we’ll be driven back into the Stone Age… all because of a small, overlooked flaw in computer programming.

I miss those doomsday scenarios. They were simpler times.

Now we have 2012 conspiracy theorists compounding doomsayer dogma, bending science to suit their hopelessly flawed doomsday scenarios. 2012 seems to be a hothouse for every impossible planet killer we could possibly imagine. How the hell Emmerich is going to work Nibiru, Planet X, killer solar flares, polar reversal, galactic alignment and geomagnetic hoopla into the plot I’ll never know.

Impossibly jumbled plot to one side, I will still want to be one of the first to see this movie. I’ve examined the real science behind the proposed end of the world in 2012 since May 2008, and I can assure you, I have yet to come across one single ounce of Planet X matter. No planet-wide calamity is expected on December 21st, 2012, and there isn’t a single shred of scientific or archaeological evidence that suggests otherwise. It will be interesting to see if Emmerich hired a science advisor, to actually add any credibility to doomsday, but if recent examples are anything to go by, I suspect it’s going to be science-lite.

Unfortunately, I am still saddened by Sony Pictures marketing ploy. The Institute for Human Continuity (IHC) viral campaign was very a successful yet short-sighted idea, marketing the movie like a multi-million dollar advertising campaign, but pandering to the anti-science sentiment that flows through the heart of doomsday hoaxers.

All in all, yes, I’ll watch 2012, but I can guarentee I’ll be shaking my head for the most part. The choice of cast is a warning sign. John Cusack as the flawed dad who’ll save the day? Danny Glover as President?? Woody Harrelson? Woody Harrelson?

There’s a 2012 Doomsday Turkey in my Crop Circle

Wow, look at that title for some keyword stuffing! Stuffing… get it?

Phoenix? Turkey? They're both birds, so it's close enough (M & Y PORTSMOUTH)

The Telegraph: bedrock of traditional journalism, pinnacle of UK news reporting– I’m sorry, I can’t finish that sentence, I’m too busy crying with laughter.

Seriously. I mean, seriously. Sure, everyone needs to remain competitive in this ultra-fast world of social media and transient online traffic, but there’s a lot to be said for keeping your integrity too. In this master stroke of continued patchy reporting from the UK’s Telegraph we have a serious ‘news’ report about a crop circle, that depicts the Phoenix flying from the ashes. Or is it a turkey?

What could this possibly mean? Oh yes, I might have guessed. Obviously it means the world is going to end on December 21st 2012. What a coincidence, those Mayan fellas have been saying the same thing all along. Now we have crop circles? And crop circle enthusiasts telling us it’s the end of the world? Holy crapcakes, doomsday really is coming. I’ve been such a fool.

The saving grace about this article is that it hasn’t been filed under ‘science’, unlike the “Mars Skull” hilarity a few weeks ago. But that’s the article’s only saving grace.

I’d understand if there was a little scepticism in the tone of the report, or perhaps a little light-hearted banter about aliens and their fetish for bending corn, but unfortunately this is an article that jumps to one huge conclusion:

Crop circles = Doomsday

It really is that simple. Reading signs in bent corn has been the fodder for doomsday theorists for as long as there have been doomsday theories and this report does nothing to challenge that. Is it really that hard to find a skeptic/scientist/logical thinker in Wiltshire these days?

I might be missing something here, but where’s the link between these crop circles and doomsday in 2012? That’s right, there isn’t one.

And I’m now certain that crop circle depicts a turkey…

Source: Telegraph.co.uk ^{(YES, I know! The sodding TELEGRAPH!)}

Are Wormholes Quantum Vacuum Cleaners?

The wormhole could form shortcuts in space-time (www.designboom.com)

General relativity and quantum dynamics don’t get along too well.

If you had to compare the two it would be like evaluating the differences between a Mac and a PC; both are well-honed examples of modern computing, but both are hopelessly incompatible. In computing, this isn’t too much of a problem, you either use a PC or a Mac, or you buy both for their individual strengths (and then complain about Microsoft regardless). But in physics, when you’re trying to find a unified theory, the fact that gravity has been outcast from the Standard Model club, tough questions need to be asked. Although there is some hope being generated by superstring theory, quantum gravity has a long way to go before it can be proven (although high energy particle accelerators such as the LHC will be able to help out in that department).

As pointed out by KFC at the Physics ArXiv Blog, “physicists have spent little time bothering to find out” how quantum mechanics operates in a curved space-time as predicted by Einstein’s general relativity. But now, a physicist has done the legwork and imagined what a quantum particle would do when faced with one of the most famous loopholes in space-time; the mouth of a wormhole. And what popped out of the equations? Another curious force called the “quantum anticentrifugal force.”

So, what’s that all about?

Rossen Dandolo from the Universite de Cergy-Pontoise, France, decided to focus on the wormhole as this is the most extreme example of curved space-time there is. Wormholes are used over and over in sci-fi storylines because they are theorized to link two locations in space-time (thereby forming a shortcut), or even two different universes. As this is space-time we’re talking about, there’s also some possibility of using wormholes as passages through time. Although wormholes sound like a whole lot of fun, in practical terms, they won’t be of much use without some exotic energy to hold the throat of the wormhole open.

Dandolo, however, isn’t too interested in traversing these holes in space-time, he is interested in finding out how a particle acts when in the locality of the mouth of a wormhole.

Beginning with some bedrock quantum theory, Dandolo uses the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal that stipulates that you cannot know a particle’s momentum and location at the same time. So far, so good. Now, looking at a prediction of general relativity, the wormhole will warp space-time to the extreme, stretching the space around the hole. This space-time stretching causes an increase in uncertainty in the location of the particle. As uncertainty in location increases, the uncertainty in momentum decreases. Therefore, the closer you get to the mouth of the wormhole, the momentum, and therefore particle energy, will decrease.

This interaction between the stretching of space-time and quantum properties of the particle has some amazing ramifications. If the particle’s energy deceases the closer it gets to falling into the wormhole, the wormhole is acting as a potential well; particles will move to a location with less energy. Therefore, a new force — combining both quantum dynamics and general relativity — is acting on particles that stray close to the wormhole: an anticentrifugal force.

This makes wormholes particle vacuum cleaners, exerting a space-time curvature effect on the quantum qualities of matter.

General relativity and quantum dynamics might have some stronger ties than we think…

Source: Wormholes Generate New Kind of Quantum Anticentrifugal Force, by KFC on the ArXiv Blog.

Warp Drives and… Black Holes?

black-hole-aurora

Why do all roads seem to lead to black holes? Man made black holes are supposedly going to be produced by the Large Hadron Collider, swallowing Earth (or, at least, a large fraction of Europe), so it seems only logical that something like a warp drive — a technology of the uber-future requiring uber-energies — would also generate a black hole, right?

Yes, we are talking about a vastly theoretical technology, but according to Italian researchers, the spaceship propulsion device popularized by Star Trek could have grave consequences for Planet Earth.

Over the past week, I’ve been deep inside the science behind faster-than-light-speed propulsion and time travel as a part of the Discovery Space Wide Angle: Surfing Spacetime, and I feel well versed in the astounding physics that could make warp speed a possibility in the future. All this started when interviewing one of the leading authorities on warp drive propulsion, Dr Richard Obousy, who is not only upbeat about the possibilities of the futuristic warpship, he’s done the math to prove that a sufficiently advanced civilization could “surf” on a spacetime wave.

However, there’s a catch. Well, two.

Firstly, we need to develop an understanding for dark energy. And second, we need a gargantuan energy source.

Dark energy is a cosmological theory that explains the continued expansion of the universe. This energy pervades all of the cosmos, explaining everything from the grouping of galactic clusters to the faster-than-light-speed inflationary period immediately after the Big Bang. There’s a lot of indirect observation of dark energy and its effects on spacetime. It’s out there, but it’s a tough proposition to think we might be able to harness it someday. But then again, we said that about electricity once, who knows what technological revolutions await us in the decades and centuries ahead.

Assuming we find a way of harnessing dark energy, how can we use it? This is where visionary physicists like Dr Obousy come in. Skipping over the superstring small-print of extra-dimensional theory, we basically need a huge amount of energy to manipulate the universal dark energy, thereby shrinking and expanding vanishingly small dimensions beyond our three dimensional universe.

So how much energy is needed warp spacetime, allowing a futuristic spaceship to zip through space? “Some back of the envelope calculations I performed last year indicated approximately the mass energy contained within the planet Jupiter,” Richard told me.

This sounds like a lot of energy! However, there’s a trend, the rest mass energy of Jupiter is actually an improvement on previous warp drive calculations. “The very early warp drive calculations indicated that one would need more mass energy than was available within the entire universe… that’s TRILLIONS of Jupiters!”

This improvement is down to recent developments in superstring theory and quantum dynamics. It would appear that the energy requirements for a warp drive improves with developments in physics. If this trend continues, we may find other energy saving ways to make a warpship a reality.

However, there are some practical issues putting the breaks on travelling at warp speed. Only recently, I reported on a study focusing on quantum fluctuations as the warp “bubble” (containing our warpship) blasts through the light speed barrier: the occupants could get roasted by Hawking Radiation.

Today, another problem has surfaced from the extreme warp equations: black holes (who would have guessed?). Italian physicist Stefano Finazzi of Italy’s International School for Advanced Studies has crunched the numbers and wondered about what would happen when the energy runs out. It’s all very well generating a Jupiter’s rest mass-worth of energy, but how will it be sustained by the warp drive? What will happen when all the energy is depleted?

Eventually the energy would run out. The [warp] bubble would rupture, with catastrophic effects. Inside the bubble the temperature would rise to about 10³² degrees Kelvin, destroying almost anything on the bubble. —Eric Bland, Discovery News

It gets better, Finazzi also predicts a fair amount of doom outside the warp bubble, too. “We know that the warp drive will be destabilized,” he added. “But we do not know if it will in the end explode or collapse to a black hole.”

Don’t go running out of gas any where near Earth is all I say…

Although these implications of doom and gloom should have given Jean Luc Picard a panic attack whenever he said “engage!” or “make it so Number One…”, we have to remind ourselves warp drive propulsion isn’t even close to being a reality. Dr Obousy and warp scientists before him are only just beginning to assemble a theoretical framework around the sci-fi notion of warping spacetime, so to already be predicting warp speed fail seems a little premature in my opinion.

In response to the Hawking Radiation problem, Dr Obousy pointed out that if we get to the point of generating vast quantities of energy, harnessing the spacetime warping power of dark energy, we should be able to at least have a stab at finding solutions to these potential warp drive problems.

“Objections are good, but usually we find smart ways of circumventing problems. Humans are good at that,” he said.

I agree.

Discovery Space Quiz: Dalek Mothership?

space_quiz

For my first Discovery Space Quiz, I was sent a selection of images from the Lowell Observatory StarTales Archive. On looking through the selection this week, one image grabbed my attention and I decided to use it in the monthly “What Is That?” quiz.

So what is it? The insides of a Dalek spaceship? A new hi-tech observatory? A washing machine drum?

Check out my space photo quiz on Discovery Space… you might be surprised by the answer…

A Lightning Bolt Hits Water, So Close You Can See Its Streamers

A bolt of lightning, 40 metres away (©Francis Schaefers and Daniel Burger)

It’s pictures like these that make me a) want to do more photography, b) feel more in awe of nature than I already am, and c) wonder how the photographer didn’t pack up his gear and run away screaming. But thank goodness the talented storm chasers didn’t run away, they actually witnessed a very rare event, up close.

This astounding image was shot by photographers Francis Schaefers and Daniel Burger when they were chasing a thunderstorm along a beach in Vlissingen, the Netherlands. Chasing a storm along a beach. The best bit of the SpaceWeather.com article comes right at the end, where it says that Schaefers and Burger took a series of shots from “underneath a balcony where they figured the lightning wouldn’t reach.”

Let me emphasise that last bit: underneath a balcony.

Balls of steel comes to mind. For me, nothing less than a reinforced bunker surrounded by lightning rods will do.

Related Lightning Articles:

Anyway, back to why this image is so fantastic. When lightning strikes the ground, if you are able to get the timing perfect, you might be able to capture ‘upward streamers’ rising from the ground to meet the leading edge of the bolt, as NASA lightning expert Richard Blakeslee explains:

Streamers reach upward from the water.

“In a typical cloud-to-ground lightning strike, as the leader approaches the ground, the large electric field at the leader tip induces these upward propagating streamers. The first one that connects to the downward propagating leader initiates the bright return stroke that we see with our eye. Upward streamers are often observed on photographs of lightning hitting the ground.”

It’s hard to imagine if this streamer phenomenon has been observed to reach out from water before, but this Dutch example must be very rare. It’s hard enough to photograph lightning streamers on solid ground, let alone on the surface of a body of water.

In case you weren’t already amazed, check out this shot. It’s called The Cruise You Don’t Want to Take for very obvious reasons:

The storm, plus cruise, ship off the coast of Vlissingen, the Netherlands (©Francis Schaefers and Daniel Burger)

Source: SpaceWeather.com

New NASA Funding Proposal: Blow Up Mars

mars_boom

Here’s an idea to get more funding for NASA: destroy Mars before the China gets there first. What an epic feat of human ingenuity!

If you think about it, the proposal makes perfect sense. Build a vast militarized space agency network throughout the US; get the government to heavily invest in R&D; task scientists with a decade-long Mars Manhattan Project to come up with a plan of how to dissect the Red Planet gram-by-gram and then build the most awesome weapon the worl– the Universe has ever seen! Forget the playful Death Star, this thing will eat planets for breakfast!

I’m thinking either a massive laser or a huge burrowing fusion bomb… or trillions of regolith-munching nanobots. (I like the idea of nanobots.) Once this planet killer is built, it will be sent to Mars by 2020. This time, the deadline will be met, if NASA has infinite funds available for this audacious plan, they will build the Mars Marauder in a decade. This is how it works; flood the project with stupid amounts of cash and we will succeed. NASA will stimulate an entire industry, the US will be industrialized once more! Everyone will have a job, private contractors will be in a frenzy and Elon Musk won’t be able to sign SpaceX-NASA contracts fast enough!

Best of all, that worrisome Chinese space agency will give up their plans for space domination, we can relish in the joy that we’d won Space Race 2.0 before it even started! Why the hell haven’t we thought of this before?!

*STOP*

It’s OK, I haven’t gone all megalomaniac on you, I was just inspired by a comic on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. The premise is that NASA science proposals bore congressmen. However, throw in a bit of pizazz and they start to listen, hence my mini rampage just now. Actually, reading the Mars Marauder proposal, it kinda makes sense. Just swap out the planet-killing bit, and we’ll have a means to actually land scientists on Mars… the reason behind this excellent comic:

Inspiration: Bad Astronomy

Solar Cycle Prediction: “None of Our Models Were Totally Correct”

nov4flare

Predicting space weather is not for the faint-hearted. Although the Sun appears to have a predictable and regular cycle of activity, the details are a lot more complex. So complex in fact, that the world’s greatest research institutions have to use the most powerful supercomputers on the planet to simulate the most basic of solar dynamics. Once we have a handle on how the Sun’s interior is driven, we can start making predictions about how the solar surface may look and act in the future. Space weather prediction requires a sophisticated understanding of the Sun, but even the best models are flawed.

Today, another solar cycle prediction has been released by the guys that brought us the “$2 trillion-worth of global damage if a solar storm hits us” valuation earlier this month. According to NOAA scientists sponsored by NASA, Solar Cycle 24 will peak in May 2013 with a below-average number of sunspots.

“If our prediction is correct, Solar Cycle 24 will have a peak sunspot number of 90, the lowest of any cycle since 1928 when Solar Cycle 16 peaked at 78,” says Doug Biesecker of the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.

Although this may be considered to be a “weak” solar maximum, the Sun still has the potential to generate some impressive flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Although I doubt we’ll see the record-breaking flares we saw in 2003 (pictured top), we might be hit by some impressive solar storms and auroral activity will certainly increase in Polar Regions. But just because the Sun will be more active, it doesn’t mean we will be struck by any big CMEs; space is a big place, we’d be (un)lucky to be staring directly down the solar flare barrel.

So, we have a new prediction and the solar models have been modified accordingly, but it is hard to understand why such tight constraints are being put on the time of solar maximum peak (one month in 2013) and the number of sunspots expected (90, or thereabouts). Yes, sunspot activity is increasing, but we are still seeing high-latitude sunspots from the previous cycle (Solar Cycle 23) pop up every now and again. This is normal, an overlap in cycles do occur, yet it surprises me that any definitive figures are being placed on a solar maximum that may or may not peak four years from now.

Ah, I see, it's obvious Solar Cycle 24 will look like that... is it really? (NOAA/NASA) — Tenuous link: Are you really happy with that prediction? (NOAA/NASA)

We are able to look at the history of sunspot number and we can see the cycles wax and wane, and we can pick out a cycle that most resembles the one we are going through now, but that doesn’t mean that particular cycle will happen this time around. Statistically-speaking, there’s a higher chance of a similar-looking cycle from the past happening in this 24th cycle, but predictions based on this premise are iffy to say the least.

Also, solar models are far from being complete, and many aspects of the physics behind the Sun’s internal dynamics are a mystery. The Sun really is acting strange, which is fascinating for solar physicists.

“It turns out that none of our models were totally correct,” says Dean Pesnell of the Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA’s lead representative on the panel. “The sun is behaving in an unexpected and very interesting way.”

Personally, I think we should concentrate less on predicting when or how the next solar maximum presents itself. Solar models are not going to suddenly predict the nature of the solar cycle any more than we can predict terrestrial weather systems more than a few days in advance.

Using the atmospheric weather analogy, we know the seasons cycle as the year goes on, but there is no way we can say with any degree of certainty when the hottest day of the year is going to be, or which week will yield the most rain.

The same goes for our Sun. It is vastly complex and chaotic, a system we are only just beginning to understand. We need more observatories and more solar missions with advanced optics and spectrometers (and therefore a huge injection of funding, something solar physicists have always struggled without). Even then, I strongly doubt we’ll be able to predict exactly when the peak of the solar cycle is going to occur.

That said, space weather prediction is a very important science, but long-term forecasts don’t seem to be working, why keep on releasing new forecasts when the old one was based on the same physics anyway? Predicting an inactive, active or mediocre solar maximum only seems to cause alarm (although it is a great means to keep solar physics in the headlines, which is no bad thing in my books).

I suppose if you make enough predictions, eventually one will be correct in four years time. Perhaps there will be a peak of 90 sunspots by May 2013, who knows?

If you’re blindfolded, spun around and armed with an infinite supply of darts, you’ll eventually hit the board. Hell, you’ll probably even hit the bullseye…

Source: NASA, special thanks to Jamie Rich for bringing this subject to my attention!