I have been reading and researching more intensely about peak oil and the intricacies and intrigues of U.S. energy policy. I found an excellent resource in the comprehensive blog The Oil Drum, as well as Peak Oil, and the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas. It was at The Oil Drum that I came across this video of Bill Moyers from June of this year. Moyers ties a few things together, and makes some assertions that are worth serious consideration:
Luis de Sousa put together a really interesting piece for The Oil Drum that captures a number of perspectives on the value of human labor power as compared to the power generated by a barrel of oil, and goes some distance in explaining why oil is such an efficient energy source, and why we are addicted to it. The post is fascinating, especially as the conversation gets increasingly complex, so definitely read it. Here’s a quick overview of some of the calculations that inform the comparison:
One barrel of oil is equivalent to about 25,000 hours of human labor, which is about 12.5 years at 40 hours of labor per week.
The average American uses about 60 barrels of oil or oil equivalent (coal and gas) per year. This is about 360 billion joules of energy.
For a human to generate labor equivalent to the energy created by a barrel of oil would take an average of 10,000 hours would cost about $200,000 at $20/hour.
A barrel of oil generates 1,700 kwh. A human averages 150 kwh per year.
I suppose a subtext of this discussion is the hard reality that we are still very challenged to offer serious, viable alternatives to oil as an energy source. This reality, coupled with a history that has seen industry, and by extension our economy, establish and refine an oil based energy infrastructure over most of the last century, perhaps explains why we still struggle with energy policy and change. Oil has become an integral, integrated part of not only our economy, but also our culture and society. Creating change in this situation is analogous to turning the proverbial freight train.
Definitely a highlight of my rather long day today was seeing these images taken by the ESA’s Mars Express robotic probe. The images depict the Echus Chasma series of canyons mentioned in the title, and I find them absolutely stunning. Planetary geologists believe that these chasms were formed by flowing ground water, and that they were carved over thousands of years. More images:
I absolutely geek out seeing the surface of Mars in such incredible detail. Our base of knowledge for Mars is growing rapidly, and it seems that with the Phoenix Mars Explorer, Mars Surveyor, and ESA’s Mars Express we have a trifecta of data and images streaming to us from the red planet.
Catching up on the deluge that is my RSS reader lately, I came across this image from APOD of the Caloris basin (also called Caloris Planitia) on Mercury recently snapped by the Mercury Messenger robotic explorer. It’s huge, and one of the largest impact basins from an asteroid-sized object in our solar system. The basin measures over 1,500 km across. The image above is a false color image in order to enhance details not visible in a true color image. The yellowish object dominating the image is obviously the impact crater of the Caloris basin, but the orange spots above denote volcanic activity on Mercury, which is new evidence provided by Messenger that the smooth plains of Mercury are actually lava flows.
I had previously written about Mercury and NASA’s Messenger mission here and here.
How many lost opportunities have there been from research projects that seem to have gone wrong, and were subsequently thrown out? Countless. Not so for Swedish chemist Saeid Esmaeilzadeh, who came to Sweden over twenty years ago as an eight year old with his family fleeing from Iran. Esmaeilzadeh’s work is focused on developing new types of glass and ceramics. During this work he accidentally discovered a new kind of ceramic, one that has strength superior to steel, when he inadvertently cooled ceramics he was working with too quickly. It would normally be thought that this compromised the ceramics, and they would be discarded. But Esmaeilzadeh decided to look more closely at his mistake, and in the process he discovered he had created a “Super Glass”. He has started a company to work with Super Glass, called Diamorph, and they are hard at work looking at various commercial applications for this material.
More support for the value in failing forward, taking risks, and looking at accidents. That is where innovation happens. Clearly, you can miss these opportunities if you’re not curious enough to look more closely.
It’s true. The ice of the North Pole is melting at an exaggerated rate, so much so that we may see the North Pole lose all of its ice in the near future, like this year. While this has been making the rounds in most of the major news outlets as a story, I am somewhat surprised that it is not being reported as a much more serious situation than it seems to be. We are distracted.
Here’s the deal. If this happens, and all Arctic ice is lost, this will be the first time this has occurred in all recorded human history. To be fair, scientists give this a 50/50 chance of happening, but even 50/50 seems to be dangerous odds for something that has not happened in a very, very long time and with as yet unknown implications. If this does happen, it means that you could sail completely across the Arctic and cross the North Pole on the ocean surface, as opposed to having to travel underneath the Arctic ice inside a nuclear powered submarine. This is bad news for the already threatened species of the Arctic. It also means that the nations that border the Arctic will have ready access to exploit the natural resources (oil, minerals, natural gas) that were previously unreachable, and would probably race to do so.
The shrinking Arctic ice is not a new phenomenon, as the sea ice loss has been increasing each year. The thick ice that makes up the Arctic had been built up over many, many years. This ice has been melting, with last year’s melt being especially dramatic, and this year’s already on pace. The problem is that the melted old, thick sea ice is replaced by very thin ice that is built up in only a year. This ice is totally vulnerable, and without the ability to replace the thicker sea ice means that the ice footprint of the Arctic is very precarious. This is attributed to rising ocean temperatures and changing climate patterns.
While reading more about this I came across an EU sponsored program named Damocles that measures the environmental impact on the Arctic. Their site is packed with information and I highly suggest checking it out.
The Phoenix Mars mission team released some incredible news on June 20th. The Phoenix Mars explorer, since landing on Mars on May 25th, had definitively established that the white material exposed with its digging tool earlier is in fact frozen water. Phoenix had found water ice just below the Martian regolith. That was a significant part of the mission, and to accomplish it so quickly and efficiently is a big win for NASA, JPL, and the whole mission team. The proof is represented in the image above. If you watch the image you see the white material begin to shrink and disappear. That is called sublimination, which is the transition of an element or compound from solid to gas without the intermediary liquid step. Given the atmospheric conditions on Mars, you are seeing evidence above of the frozen water on mars subliming.
Identifying water ice was the first important step in the mission team’s “follow-the-water” mission framework. Knowing that they are working with water ice now triggers a series of analyses that will help identify the mineral components and chemicals in that water ice, and also look for any organic materials. This investigation will help determine if the conditions just below the Martian surface are conducive to microbial life, and if that life exists or has existed on Mars.
Fun for me on this Father’s Day where I was told to do whatever I wanted this afternoon. I did the right thing and began using the Impact Calculator from Edward Gomez and Jon Yardley to create simulated asteroid impacts and measure the resulting destruction. The image above is the crater created by an asteroid made of iron and measuring 15,000 meters wide which impacted at 27 degrees in excess of 60km/second. That crater is over 1700 meters deep (that is the Empire State Building sitting in the center to provide some perspective).
I came across the Impact Calculator at OrbitingFrog.
The Cassini robot explorer, written about here before, will hit the four year mark on June 30th in the relentless pursuit of its prime mission to explore Saturn and its many moons. After June 30th Cassini is operating in bonus territory, as it was not expected that the probe would last this long or work this well. They call this additional time the “extended mission”. Obviously, everyone is ecstatic as the Cassini mission has been profoundly successful in sending us back invaluable information and images of Saturn (like the one above of Saturn’s rings), as well as the moons Titan, Enceladus, Dione, Tethys, Phoebe and Iapetus. In many ways the discoveries regarding Saturn’s moons has largely overshadowed the many, many findings with regards to Saturn itself.
Following the work of Cassini has been like following your favorite band on tour. Nearly every month the mission team has reported more incredible findings or provided another series of stunning images. This page from the mission website catalogs dozens of events and accomplishments. This year alone Cassini has scheduled over a dozen different flybys to allow the use of the craft’s Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS), Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UIS), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer (INMS), and Radio Science Subsystem. Cassini is packed with gear, and it is not only amazing that it all is still working as planned, but that it made it there in the first place. Congratulations to the Cassini-Huygens mission team on the four year anniversary.
Over the past two years astronomers at NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office have observed over one hundred explosions on the moon’s surface. These explosions are the results of impacts by meteoroids and have measured as powerful as a few hundred pounds of TNT. It is no surprise that the moon suffers impacts, look at the image of the moon’s surface above. What is interesting is the observable frequency of these impacts in the last 24 months, which is quite a bit more intense than astronomers were expecting. This is an important phenomena for NASA to observe and understand as we get closer to the reality of a new effort to send astronauts to the moon and eventually set up a permanent lunar base. Essentially, there is no place on the moon that is impact free, nor is there a time that is less intense for impacts than others. The image below depicts the locations of the recorded impacts since initiation of the program:
The frequency and explosive power of these impacts pose a number of challenges to lunar astronauts, not so much from the risk of a direct hit but more from the risk of a secondary hit by one of the millions of particles that the explosions create and that shoot out from the impact area like bullets. A piece of debris 1 millimeter in diameter could penetrate an astronauts suit and damage equipment.
The first impact was recorded very shortly after the initiation of the moon impact observation program and recorded the strike of a meteoroid about the size of a baseball. Most of these impacts are the result of small meteoroids, some little bigger than a small rock or pebble, but they are traveling in excess of 30,000mph and hit the moon with incredibly violent force. A meteoroid the size of a pebble can create a crater several feet across.
This image is the result of the Mars Phoenix mission team instructing the robotic arm camera to look under the vehicle. What you are looking at is the surface of Mars, and it shows that the Martian soil has been displaced by the landing thrusters on Phoenix to expose what is most probably ice. The simple action of Phoenix landing on Mars has potentially exposed polar ice directly under the vehicle, ice that was covered by a very loose and thin layer of soil.
There is a rumor that when the mission leaders saw this image the first words uttered were “Holy cow!”
Posts lately have been all things solar system, and that is because there is so much going on right now with regards to robotic exploration of Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and the their various moons. It is an exciting time to be a space exploration geek. I just came across the above image taken by the ESA’s Venus Express explorer of a vortex occurring in the southern polar region of the planet. This image was captured by Express back in 2006. I also found an excellent image montage of Express approaching Venus that shows some detail in the cloud covering that surrounds Venus.
Venus Express is essentially a reconfiguration of the ESA’s Mars Express explorer technology and left for Venus back in 2005. The goals for Venus Express are to explore the atmospheric composition and circulation on Earth’s closest neighbor, as well as how the atmosphere interacts with the planet’s surface. Venus is definitely inhospitable, with an atmosphere mostly comprised of noxious gasses and an incredibly hot surface temperature. Surprisingly, given the close proximity of Venus, we still know very, very little about the planet. Venus Express is helping to change this.
The Phoenix robotic explorer has been on Mars now for about 27 hours after an incredibly successful entry, descent and landing. It has been very busy. Incredible images are already streaming to Earth, and those of us geeked out by things of this nature are absolutely riveted. I was excited to discover how many people I know were following @MarsPhoenix on Twitter.
Many images are coming back, and most right now are of the explorer itself and the immediate vicinity as the mission managers check systems and get their bearings. The above image of one of the craft’s landing pads is one of my favorites because that image is of the pad of a man-made robotic explorer sitting on the surface of Mars millions of miles away from Earth, and it was taken in the last 24 hours. Astounding. Even more astounding is this video composite of the Martian surface, terrain and horizon taken by Phoenix today.
We are at just under four hours before Phoenix lands on the surface of Mars. I am checking periodically at the Phoenix mission control website in anticipation of this event. Martian weather is clear and the landing later today is green for go. I suspect there are a lot of very excited and anxious people at JPL right now.
The above animation is of weather on Mars around its north pole from 5/16 through 5/22. The small cigar shaped outline in the upper left quadrant is the planned landing zone.
It’s not just a big day for race fans, its a big day for science and space enthusiasts. In August of last year the Mars Phoenix Explorer left Earth to start its journey to Mars. Its mission is to arrive safely, land on the Martian North Pole, and dig into the soil there begin looking for the building blocks of life. It arrives today at around 4:45PM PDT. Arriving is the hardest part, as now the explorer has to successfully enter the Martian atmosphere (at 12,000mph) using parachutes to slow the rapid descent from 900mph to 250mph, and then fire landing rockets to prevent it from slamming into the Martian surface (see the video above). Its a complex landing, and the mission control team probably hasn’t been sleeping much these last few days, as the last five years of their work culminates today in about seven minutes of anxiety. That’s okay, though, as they have a number of ways they can distract themselves while keeping us updated on the the mission’s progress. For instance, you can follow the Phoenix mission on Twitter and get frequent updates and mission facts. The mission team also has a blog that is full of information and that will be used to post what the mission team is thinking and what Phoenix sees and discovers, as well as an information rich mission website.
So, the entire Phoenix mission is going to be captured for us via an array of online tools. This is incredibly exciting, and it serves to connect us to the exploration and science that NASA leads in a way that is not only meaningful, but also basically real time.
I came across the graphic below this morning and found it really interesting, and startlingly revealing of the fragility of freshwater on the planet. It was put together by UNESCO’s World Water Assessment Program, a program that monitors freshwater issues to properly inform decision making and ensure a comprehensive understanding of the status of our planet’s most valuable natural resource. WWAP puts out a report, the World Wide Development Report, that comprehensively reviews the state of freshwater on the planet. This relates to an earlier post here, What is Important, to Scale, that used a compelling image to represent the proportion of air and water to our planet. The graphic below supports the tenuous nature of freshwater on our planet:
Let’s summarize:
Of the total water on the planet, only 2.5% is freshwater
Of that 2.5%, almost 69% is in glaciers
About 30% is groundwater
Only 0.4% is surface and atmospheric freshwater
Of that 0.4%, 67.4% is freshwater lakes
12.2% is made up of soil moisture
9.5% is in the atmosphere
And just over 10% is in wetlands, rivers and plants and animals
It is interesting to realize how overwhelmingly abundant freshwater is in certain areas of the world, so much so as to be taken for granted, while in contrast how overwhelmingly scarce it is in others. The net is that there is just not that much freshwater on the planet.
The image above is via the Galileo explorer and depicts the volcanic moon Io previously discussed, with its neighboring moon Amalthea. Amalthea is small, and has been misshapen by the incredible volatility of existing in close proximity to Io and Jupiter. It’s a tough neighborhood. As Io is swept by Jupiter’s electromagnetic field huge amounts of material are scoured off of Io and spiraled towards Jupiter. At times Amalthea orbit takes it directly into the path of this material, and the total intensity of the power generated, and it is thought that this has created its intense reddish color and elongated shape.
I came across this composite image last evening and it stopped me in my tracks. Click on it to view larger, it’s worth it. Here is an enormous, active chain of volcanic calderas, named Tvashtar Catena, on Jupiter’s moon Io and we get to see it in amazing detail and color. This is a color intensified composite made up of images taken by Galileo back in 2000 and composited by Ricardo Nunes.
Back in 1999 the Galileo Orbiter snapped some pictures of an active fissure eruption in this caldera. The eruption let loose lava flows that were 30km long and 1.5km high. Here’s a composited image from those pictures:
Io is the most volcanic body in our solar system with its surface literally covered in lava lakes, giant calderas, and active lava flows. The color of Io is mostly due to the huge amounts of sulfur that blanket its surface from all of this activity, which has remained continuous as long as we have been able to observe this moon. We have measured volcanic eruptions on this moon that have created sulfurous plumes 500km high. Because Io orbits closely to Jupiter it is subject to intense electromagnetic radiation. As Jupiter’s magnetosphere rotates it sweeps Io and strips away nearly 1 ton per second of volcanic gases and other materials. Io actually acts as an enormous electrical generator as it moves through Jupiter’s magnetic field developing 400,000 volts across its diameter and generating 3 million amperes that flow across the magnetic field and into Jupiter’s ionosphere.
Incredible images recently of Volcano Chaitén in Chile. This volcano is awake after 9000 years of dormancy, erupting with a fierceness this past week that has sent a plume of volcanic ash 12 miles into the atmosphere and stretching from Chile to the Atlantic ocean. The photo above is of the intense lightning that has erupted in and around the enormous plume, the result of static electricity released in incredible intensity by the density of the ash and the multitude of particles hitting each other and becoming charged. Between the earthquake in China, the cyclone in Myanmar, and the volcano in Chile it is hard to not remember how very much active our planet really is.
Last Monday Stephen Hawking gave a speech at an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of NASA. Hawking has long been a proponent of the value of humans exploring space, and again called for a determined effort by humans to colonize the moon and Mars. He put special emphasis on putting humans into space, and not relying solely on robotic explorers, which is largely driven by the survival of humans, longer term, and is an insurance policy against war, catastrophe, and disaster here on Earth. A great quote from the speech:
“Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don’t catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don’t spread the human race into space, which I’m arguing should be our long-term strategy. If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before.”
With regards to life on other planets, Hawking offered three possibilities: that life in the universe, of any type, is rare; that simple forms of life may be common, but intelligent forms of life rare; or that intelligent life typically destroys itself. He went on to say:
“Personally, I favor the second possibility – that primitive life is relatively common, but that intelligent life is very rare. Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth.”
I cannot help but be riveted by the concept of network science, actually an emerging scientific discipline that combines interacting physical, informational, biological, cognitive, and social networks… and in a way that scares me a little bit. It seems that the Department of Defense shares my fascination, but not my hesitations. The Pentagon is devoting resources (now up to $7.5 million in research grants) to what it deems a priority area of investigation and research in the effort to understand complex and variable networks. This is directly related to how the Pentagon and related constituents can then work on an understanding of the structure of the diffuse networks employed by our nation’s enemies. An underlying goal of this research is the ability to anticipate who might join such a network, which takes threat assessment to an entirely different level. So, network science would seem to be a holy grail, of sorts, for the abstract goal of developing predictive modeling. Again, very interesting and very scary, and surprising that it only garners $7.5 million currently. I suspect that will be increasing once efficacy is established. How does the military view network science:
“Initiation of a field of network science would be appropriate to provide a body of rigorous results that would improve the predictability of the engineering design of complex networks and also speed up basic research in a variety of applications areas.”
That’s from a 2005 report by the United States Army, which I have excerpted from a post at DangerRoom, Wired’s national security blog that pretty much gets my attention every day, and where I first came across this story.
Last month the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiement (HiRISE) took some incredibly detailed images of the Martian moon Phobos, as pictured above. It is incredible to me to see something so far away in such crisp detail. The simple reality that there is so much to learn and see is probably the biggest reason I continue to be fascinated by our solar system and by cosmology.
Mars has two small moons, the other being Deimos. Phobos is the bigger of the two, and is about 13 miles across. HiRISE captured a lot of amazing images of this tiny moon, but perhaps the most interesting was a focused shot on the large crater feature named Stickney and shown in the image above. It is the enormous dent on the right side of the moon. If the object that had struck Phobos had been fractionally larger it would very well have blown the moon apart and we would now only know Phobos as a dispersed ring of dust and rock orbiting Mars. Here is an image of the crater in detail:
Those lines emanating from the crater are enormous stress fractures caused by the impact and that run outward across the surface. Surviving this impact was an enormous event, but that pales when compared to the realty that the orbit of Phobos is in slow decay (at 1.8 meters per century) and will eventually bring the moon to crash into the Martian surface. Eventually being about 50 million years from now.
You’ve no doubt already heard of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) due to the recent resurgence in mainstream media. This is partly because it is a really big deal, connecting us to the earliest moments of the formation of the universe, and partly because some people are worried that when scientists, physicists, and researchers fire it up that it will end reality… and as a result these people are pretty active. That’s not going to happen, the world will not be consumed by tiny black holes. Rest easy.
So, what is the LHC for? It has been constructed to recreate the conditions that occurred just after the Big Bang. In recreating these early moments of the universe we may be able to understand how the first particles were conceived, and thus help us better understand how the universe actually works. The LHC will do this in a very controlled environment, and be heavily measured, recorded and monitored. It will allow us to repeat this experiment with frequency, greatly increasing our ability to study and understand. In short, this is an enormous step towards enlightenment, understanding the nature of reality, and will fill in many of the theoretical blanks that physicists and cosmologists have struggled with for a long, long time. In the name of epistemology, this is a very, very good thing.
LHC Facts:
It is made up of 2000 super conducting magnets
It will utilize the most complex cameras ever made
These cameras will be able to capture impossibly small time horizons
The LHC is the culmination of over two decades of work
Construction involved 7,000 physicists from 80 nations
It is located 175 meters underground and is 27+ kilometers in diameter
Once operational, protons will be accelerated close to the speed of light
Every second there will be 800 million proton collisions
Only a fraction of these matter, and will captured by cameras mentioned above
Particles created will exist for a thousandth, of a thousandth, of a billionth of a second
These collisions will generate heat 1 million times hotter than the core of the sun
To achieve this, the LHC team has had to build an incredibly complex machine of enormous scale. Just one of the superconducting solenoids contains more iron than the Eiffel Tower. There are many of these making up the LHC particle accelerator. The receptors and detectors are housed in giant rooms that are as big as cathedrals. The cost of this project was of such a magnitude (estimates range in the $6 billion and up range) that the United States halted its own Superconducting Super Collider back in 1993.
Excellent video of the LHC and the planned experiments (part 1 of 3):
Earlier this month the European Space Agency posted some high resolution images taken by the ESA Mars Express Orbiter of the ice covered oddity that is Promethei Planum. The images are striking and gorgeous, and depict the seasonal ice coverage of this cratered area that measures as deep as 3,500 meters in places. In the image below on the right is an impact crater, partially covered in ice, that measures roughly 100 km wide and 800 meters deep.
Catching up on my feeds just now I was saddened to see that Arthur C. Clarke, physicist, author, innovator, futurist, and ardent believer in the potential of humanity, has died. He was 90, so the man had a very decent run. Perhaps his most recognized work was 2001: A Space Odyssey, the movie for which just celebrated its 40th anniversary. He leaves behind an enormous legacy of invention, creativity, art, and inspiration having written over 100 books. Enormous. Few have been so profoundly influential to so many, and managed to do it with such consistent style, usually sporting a satin Nehru jacket and tanned from the beaches of his home in Sri Lanka. For me, Arthur C. Clarke is the Yin to Philip K. Dick’s Yang. A couple great quotes from Clarke in honor of his passing…
Reflecting on his life:
“Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered. I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer.”
A terrific quote on the value of the space program, from 1970:
“The inspirational value of the space program is probably of far greater importance to education than any input of dollars… A whole generation is growing up which has been attracted to the hard disciplines of science and engineering by the romance of space.”
Absolutely stunning imagery of the recent fly-by of Saturn’s moon Enceladus by Cassini presented in a photo animation. You will find little mention of this in the news, and that is mostly because the news does not care. Lost opportunity for the news. We’ve investigated the robotic Cassini probe here before, and it continues to be very, very busy. On March 12th Cassini flew within 30 miles of Enceladus, approaching from above Enceladus’ north pole and thus seeing the moon as a crescent. Some facts on this beautiful moon:
Enceladus is very bright, reflecting nearly 100% of the light that strikes it
This is because we believe it is almost entirely covered in water ice
It’s surface is considered to be geologically young at less than 100 million years old
There is evidence indicating that the interior of the moon may still be liquid
It is about 500 km wide, or roughly the width of the state of Arizona
Enceladus is known as the “geyser moon” because of enormous eruptions
These are created by the release of energy caused by frictional geothermal heating
More on Enceladus and Cassini’s observations here, here, and here.
A fascinating image. On the left is all of the water on Earth, roughly 1.41 billion cubic kilometers (including oceans, ice, lakes, rivers, ground water, clouds… etc) proportionally represented by the blue marble sitting over Italy. On the right, all of the air in the atmosphere, roughly 5,140 trillion metric tonnes, proportionally represented by the pinkish marble. I would have thought both to be somewhat larger, the reality being that we only have a tenuously thin skin of both water and air.
I found this to be quite surprising, a bit startling, and a little scary.
Image and story via Dan Phiffer, who tests the mathematical veracity of these proportional representations.
From MIT’s Technology Review (an excellent online tech resource) comes this interesting list of technologies to watch for over the coming months… the “emerging technologies” of this year. You’ve no doubt heard of some of these, and others can’t be too surprising, but taken together this list should give at least a little techno-infused optimism for the balance of 2008 (I’m feeling better already):
The practical neatnik in me is perhaps the most enthused about the potentiality of my environment without the tangle of power cords everywhere. The futurist in me is getting pretty excited about the potential of graphene transistors. There is concern in Silicon Valley about the probable termination of Moore’s Law as we approach the performance envelop of silicon based chips. Having something that is so theoretically expansive in contrast, and from PENCIL LEAD, is quite comforting.
This video, via Winding Road, is utterly amazing. The organic, chaotic, nature with which this traffic flows, melds together, and merges at an intersection in Hyderabad, India is incredible to see. That it seems to work, despite a number of close calls, is a testament to the focus and mettle of the drivers and pedestrians transiting this intersection. The way the traffic fluidly comes together and then separates reminds me of how the blood mixes in the ventricles of the heart.
It would seem that reality does map nicely to the various themes of science fiction:
“I’ve made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029.”
That is both fascinating and definitely something to ponder. I had imagined it taking us longer to reach human level AI as 2029 is only just over twenty years away. In the article Kurzweil goes on to say that humans and machines will eventually merge and become indistinguishable from one another. He does not say whether or not this will be by choice.
The universe is inconceivably vast and empty and we are incredibly isolated here on our little blue speck of dust. This cold, hard reality is an abstraction to most of us because as far as we’re concerned, we’ve got it pretty good. This video is along the lines of the one I posted earlier in the week that contrasts Earth against some impossibly large celestial bodies elsewhere in the universe. More fuel for universal irrelevancy.
Video found via Western Paradigm, a smart and superbly generalist blog I recently discovered.
The International Space Station has been underway for so long that I think it is often just forgotten about. Work commenced in 1998, so its been under construction for nearly a full decade. But it’s up there and manned 24/7/365. We should collectively pay more attention to the development of the ISS as that is where the future of humanity is slowly (very, very slowly) being shaped. That, and we’re freaking building this thing in space. Most are at least familiar with the station if only because of the problems that have plagued its construction, including the problems with the NASA space shuttle that have caused major construction delays. There have been some close calls for the astronauts and scientists manning the ISS, and some difficult learning experiences for the international team tasked with building Earth’s first large scale “permanent” space platform. But that is the whole point, really, to learn along the way. Building this station is an incredible undertaking.
Some quick ISS facts:
- It is the largest and most complex international science project in history
- 27 nations are actively involved in its construction, most not having a space program
- When completed it will weigh over 1 million pounds
- It will ultimately be 356 feet across and 290 feet long
- The solar panels on the ISS would cover an acre
- It is in orbit approximately 250 statute miles from Earth
- It completes 15.77 orbits of the Earth each day
- The station has been continuously inhabited since November, 2002
- It will eventually have 15,000 cubic feet of living space
- The costs to create the ISS will exceed $130 billion, far beyond the original budget
- Five space tourists have visited, paying $25 million each for the opportunity
- The microgravity environment on the station is 88% of Earth’s gravity
- As of today it has been in orbit 3,362 days, and has been inhabited for 2,651 days
- For this pinnacle of human technological achievement, it looks rickety
There is a tremendous amount of valuable research already underway on the station, including experiments in biology, medicine, physics, biotechnology, materials research, cosmology and meteorology. Obviously, much more is planned and as more research modules come online the opportunities will increase. 2010 is tentatively planned to be the year of completion. But that will certainly be subject to change. Oddly, the year that the station is completed is the year that NASA decommissions the space shuttle with its replacement, the Orion/Constellation program, not coming online until 2015.
Some images I grabbed of the ISS for review:
This image, from 2001/2002, shows the initial operational solar arrays.
This is the station configuration as of November, 2007.
Very cool image of an astronaut capturing a reflection of the ISS and the Earth below in his face mask.
A detail shot of the connection between one of the solar arrays and a module. Note the astronaut working on the station in the upper center of the image.
Another detail. The exterior is incredibly complex. There is an astronaut in the image towards the center middle providing the scale of this module. The arm in the image was manufactured by Canada.
A space shuttle preparing to dock with the station. The shuttle has been the primary large payload delivery vehicle for the ISS. The Russians provide supplies and take away refuse via manned and unmanned Soyuz capsules.
A chart showing the breakdown of components and with nation’s of origin.
More from NASA. Check out the interactive informational tour.
2007 was a terrifically important year in the field of robotics. It was a year of new accomplishments in mobility, application, and the continuation of exponential increases in functional robotic populations. Take note, we are riding a technological wave that will dramatically impact our collective futures for the better, and in some ways for the worse, I surmise. The forces behind the continuous improvement and innovation within robotics are gaining tremendous momentum, and the associated tremendous budgets. This is not just about the military, either. Advances in robotics are happening globally and are sponsored by both public and private enterprise. It will be interesting to see what 2008 brings.
There was an excellent article late last month at Scientific American that summarizes well some of the incredible accomplishments and developments in robotics from the past year.
It has taken me too long to write about this. I say that because this is an effort that should be an absolute top priority for all of us, at least those of us who value rational, reasonable thought and the support of science as an issue demanding attention from the presidential candidates.
Sciencedebate 2008 has been underway for several weeks, and it is an effort to get the candidates to engage in a substantive debate on science and technology. This is effectively an effort to inject intelligence back into the election process as a barometer of how a presidential prospect will move our society forward. I encourage you to check this out by clicking on the link and if you are so inclined, sign the petition. You’ll be in good company as some of the more notable supporters of this effort are 23 Nobel and Crafoord laureates, 21 government leaders of both parties, 25 University and college presidents, and several thousand concerned citizens, including yours truly.
I have posted previously about the planet Mercury, so I was excited to learn that the robotic Mercury research spacecraft Messenger had sent back it’s first image of the planet, the first since Mariner 10 visited Mercury 30 years ago. Messenger stands for the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemsitry, and Ranging mission.The image above was was taken on January 11 as Messenger approached Mercury (at just over 1 million miles from the planet). Scheduled for Monday is a pass at about 125 miles over Mercury’s surface. The plan is for Messenger to make two more close passes (in October 2008 and September 2009) before settling into orbit in March of 2011 and initiating its mission of mapping the surface of Mercury in detail. And in color.
Mercury is the fastest planet in our solar system, and the maneuvering that Messenger will have to do (see graphic below from the Messenger website) to comfortably settle into an observational orbit is complex. It involves the three flybys mentioned to help the craft build up enough speed to match Mercury as it settles into orbit, called “Mercury Orbit Insertion,” or MOI. Messenger will also use a series of trajectory corrections and deep space maneuvers achieved by the controlled firing of its thrusters.
Over the course of his life, Stephen Hawking has made a number of sharp and pointed comments with regards to humanity. One of the most memorable for me would be:
“It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.”
Stephen Hawking
Today he celebrates his 66th birthday. The man is beyond remarkable, and ranks up there with Carl Sagan as an inspiring astrophysicist who has made his life’s work making cosmology understandable and of value to the rest of us. From his limited physical state, the man has tirelessly worked to broaden our understanding of the universe we live in, and the physics of that reality, in ways that are beautiful and poetic while eschewing complex technical descriptions. He also has a terrificly dry sense of humor which he wields at every opportunity. His approach to life is probably as simple as stated in this statement, one we could take the time to consider:
“When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything one does have”
Stephen Hawking
More about my favorite living cosmologist here, here, and from YouTube, Stephen Hawking lectures on the origins of the universe.
This post was initiated by one of my xmas presents. My good brother Mattisimo gave me a subscription to a newish arts and culture magazine called Cabinet. On page 13, as part of a really terrific article on the history of giant spheres, was the above image with a paragraph explanation. According to Cabinet, in 1960 NASA launched Echo 1 (the balloon pictured above) which qualified as America’s first communications satellite. This was not enough information.
The image above depicts a giant aluminumized satellite balloon, the same balloons that most likely account for +90% of all UFO sightings during the 1950’s and 1960’s. This is because from 1956 until 1964, engineers and scientists at the Langley Research Center developed a series of these spherical satellite balloons called “satelloons.” They were part of a much larger project, named Project Echo, that was the United States’ initial foray into orbital communications. Project Echo served as our proof of concept for orbital communications satellites, and anticipated the looming space satellite race between the United States and the Soviet Union (who kicked it off with Sputnik in 1957). These satelloons, like the mo
