Set To Strauss

Space Shuttle docking rendezvous maneuver.

An Idea Of Scale

It’s hard to believe how far we are from anything else created by humankind. Except for our own, now-derelict third stage, nothing made by people or from the Earth — nothing — is within more than a billion miles of New Horizons.

(Via Bad Astronomy.)

All The News We Can Fit In A Window

From the always great Shorpy site, which features high-definition images of old photographs, an example of blogging, 1940s style.

The Death Of Grass

The world's leading crop scientists issued a stark warning that a deadly airborne fungus could devastate wheat harvests in poor countries and lead to famines and civil unrest over significant regions of central Asia and Africa.

Ug99 — so called because it was first seen in Uganda in 1999 — is a new variety of an old crop disease called "stem rust", which has already spread on the wind from Africa to Iran. It is particularly alarming because it can infect crops in just a few hours and vast clouds of invisible spores can be carried by the wind for hundreds of miles.

If there ever was a problem crying out for a biotech fix, this is it. Conventional cross-breeding to produce resistant varieties takes time, and is a Red Queen's race. The best long-term fix would be to cut our reliance on a handful of monoculture crops with very little genetic variance and a consequent high susceptibility to disease, but in the short term we'll have to bite the biotech bullet. Especially if (when) ug99 reaches North America. Or else get used to eating potatoes and seaweed (or each other).

Shaping up to be a hell of a century, isn't it?

Insert Disingenuous Remark Here

The short list for the 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award:

Song of Time: Ian R. MacLeod - PS Publishing
The Quiet War: Paul McAuley – Gollancz
House of Suns: Alastair Reynolds – Gollancz
Anathem: Neal Stephenson – Atlantic
The Margarets: Sheri S. Tepper – Gollancz
Martin Martin’s on the Other Side: Mark Wernham – Jonathan Cape

The High Life

Via Universe Today, a report that Indian scientists have used a high-altitude balloon to send a sampling package into the stratosphere, and retrieved samples of live fungi and bacteria, including three previously unknown species of bacteria with higher than usual resistance to UV. Claims are being made that this is proof of the Hoyle/Wickramasinghe panspermia theory - that bacteria raining down from space seeded Earth with life. After all, these bacteria are unusual, and they were found in a region of the Earth's atmosphere that's not only next door to space, but also doesn't usually mix with lower layers where life might be expected to be found because it's sealed off by the topopause. Are these examples of Paul Davies' 'shadow life'?

Anyone who remembers claims that Martian bacteria were found in a meteorite retrieved from the Antarctic icesheet will know that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Panspermia theories have gained respectability in recent years, but there's still no hard evidence for them - and the evidence needs to be diamond-hard. This isn't. Claims like this have been made before, and are still being debated (bacteria could reach the stratosphere when volcanoes loft dust into it, for instance). But it is very interesting. What are all those species of fungi and bacteria doing, way up high, at the edge of space? Are they active and continually present, or temporary visitors? Is there an ecosystem we don't know about?

EDIT: Just remembered that Robert Heinlein wrote a short story ('Goldfish Bowl') about giant insubstantial inhabitants of the stratosphere that were far in advance of human beings. Maybe those scientists should be a bit more careful when they're poking around up there.

Strange Days

Jack Womack is currently guest-blogging at William Gibson's joint. If you're into deep esoteric weirdness and practical demonstrations on why the past really is another country, stop by and check it out.

Bring It On

'The science fiction writers are going to be challenged to imagine the diversity that we could expect to find.' Debra Fischer, San Francisco State University, commenting on the Kepler space telescope.

If Kepler turns up a swarm of ringworlds flying out of the galaxy ahead of an exploding black hole, I'd agree. And I can't wait for the catalogues to start filling up with weird new worlds. The only challenge will be working out how to make full use of their reality.

All These New Worlds Could Be Yours

The Planetary Society, wise and generous to a fault, has put up a catalogue of known exoplanets. It's stuffed full of fact-based goodness, including planet sizes and orbital data, the type of star they orbit and its distance from the Solar System, and neat animations that show their orbits. So far, they list than 330; that number should increase considerably once the Kepler Mission goes live, and starts to detect Earth-sized planets around other stars.

Now I've turned in Gardens of the Sun, I'm beginning to think about the next novel. One of my ideas is building on the exploration and colonisation of the Solar System in The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun by ramping up that future history's time-scale from decades to millennia, taking a hard look at the possibilities of interstellar colonisation and the adaptations human beings will need to make, and the consequences if human stock frays into a dozen or more species. This direction is kinda sorta implied in the two novels. If I go with it, I'll be ravaging the Planetary Society's catalogue and other places for hard data, but in any case I find this stuff intrinsically fascinating. Actual worlds, orbiting actual stars, real as the chair I'm sitting on.

Since handing over Gardens of the Sun to my editor, I've been wandering about in my usual post-parturition daze, although I did manage to somehow write a short article on my favourite science-fiction film for BSFA booklet (2001: A Space Odyssey), write a review for Foundation (which because it's for the journal of the very learned Science Fiction Foundation meant that I had to work up solid arguments for why I thought the novel in question worked or it didn't, and also involved checking up on William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland and The Night Land (some of you might be able to guess which novel I was reviewing)), and also blurt out a couple of very short stories, one of which might be good enough for publication. Do you need to know about my Grand Fun with wi-fi broadband, or the post-modern cold that deconstructed itself in my sinuses for a couple of weeks? Nah. Pretty soon, I'll get around to cleaning up the office and taking long pointless walks; then I know I'll be on the beginning of the long and roundabout process by which I begin to stalk the interstellar colonisation idea, or the thing that's been tickling my imagination for the past year or so, or something else completely. . .

Live From Space

NASA TV has a new channel which broadcasts live views from the International Space Station when the crew isn't working. Your best bet is to check it out between 6pm and 6am GMT. Follow this link and click on the Live Space Station Link tab to the right of the screen. (Via Universe Today.)

Taipei Theme Restaurants

Airplane, hospital, toilet, Hello Kitty . . . Wonder if there's a 2001 theme restaurant? You sit in a booth watched by a glowing camera eye, a solicitous voice assures you everything is fine and asks if you'd like to play chess or watch BBC 37, you eat pastel-coloured gloop on plastic trays, and the cabaret is an uplifting act by a black monolith.

Future Now

A couple of interesting links from the ever-reliable Science Daily site.

First up, a method of creating millions of functional synthetic ribosomes that can transcribe information coded in DNA and create functional proteins. A major step towards plug-and-play biology and artificial life.

Second, a way of trapping and storing and releasing photons in quantum donuts. "This has significant implications for the development of light based computing which would require an effective and reliable mechanism such as this to manipulate light." As the article says: Slow Glass!

Just to remind you that science-fiction writers don't always have to make stuff up.

Dread

Last month, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took time out from mapping the surface of Mars to take high-resolution photographs one of the red planet's two small moons, Diemos. Like Phobos, Diemos is probably a captured asteroid, and it's relatively small, with a semi-major axis of just 12 kilometres. Pictures just released show a smooth, reddish surface pockmarked with old and more recent craters. Apparently, the surface darkens and reddens when exposed to vacuum and sunlight, so the paler areas have been recently disturbed (in relative terms), either by impact or by material sliding down the slopes of ridges. Many asteroids probably look more or less like this; dusty desert mountains pitted and battered by impacts. The old science-fiction notion of hollowing them out into giant cities isn't viable - they're basically huge rubble piles cemented by gravity - but it would be easy enough to excavate cut-and cover tunnels in the dusty durface, or maybe throw up a tent over that sharp-rimmed crater in the centre. It's about two kilometres across, not a bad size for a town...

Girls Of The Golden Myth

The Good Sisters, Millie and Dolly, were a popular duo in the 1930s and 40s, singing in beautiful close harmony about the mythical American West. Their manager had them dress in cowboy outfits, claimed that they were from the little ol’ town of Muleshoe, Texas, and named them (after the Puccini opera) The Girls of the Golden West. They really were sisters, that much is true; but they were from East St. Louis, not Texas, and their real names were Mildred and Dorothy Goad. Nevertheless, accompanied by Dolly’s guitar, they sang like angels and had the rare ability to be able to yodel in harmony, became stars of the Boone County Jamboree and Midwestern Hayride, and recorded sixty-four tracks for RCA-Victor. They sang with plangent nostalgia for a West that had never quite been, already hazed by the silverlight of Hollywood.

Compare the wistful sentiment of ‘Let Me Sleep On The Edge of The Prairie’, in which the land provides a lovely grave site (albeit with the caveat ‘bury me deep, O so deep, that coyotes and wolves will not find me’), with the existential terror implicit in ‘O Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie’ (sung here by Carl T. Sprague). This ballad was one known to and sung by working cowboys, and first published by cattleman Jack Thorp, who spent some twenty years collecting cowboy songs and poems, in Songs of the Cowboys (1908). Based on a sailor’s ballad ‘The Ocean Burial’, aka ‘Bury Me Not In The Deep, Deep Sea’, a dying cowboy pleads with his companions not to abandon his body in the unpeopled wilderness, scared that the coyotes will harrow his bones, fearful that his soul will be forever trapped in that dreadful place. But his companions are practical men, and can’t spare the time or energy to heed 'his dying prayer’ and confess that they buried him where he died ‘in a narrow grave, just six by three’. It’s a stark, merciless vignette.

For the real cowboys, the prairies were as wide and boundless and as untameable as any ocean, a place they visited to work, but not to make any kind of home. For the Girls of the Golden West and others who burnished into the myth, the wilderness is analogous to Heaven; they’re content ‘to look up into those high mountains, until it’s time to arise once again’. The West of the myth is a place where ‘the deer and the antelope play, and seldom is heard a discouraging word, and the skies are not cloudy all day’; a boundless frontier blessed with abundant beauty where simple hard-working folk lived upright lives of enviable freedom and adventure. Within a generation, while men who’d worked the range yet lived, the myth supplanted reality. It would take a couple of generations more before the bones of historical reality would begin to work their way back to the surface.

The pulps of modern science fiction (H. Gernsback, prop) were coeval with the first great flowering of popular recorded music in the 1920s and 30s. But unlike the songs of the west, sf was shrouded in its own myths from the outset, and continued to add to them during the Golden Age of John W. Campbell Jr’s Astounding Stories. Those myths cling yet. The future is an homogenous place where technology works, and empowers those who comprehend it. Where scientific problems are best solved by iconoclasts who become deservedly rich and powerful because they precisely fill the hero-shaped holes in their stories. Where it’s the destiny of humanity to conquer the galaxy and lay low fearsome aliens, or prove to wise ancients that we are somehow unique - we laugh, we cry, we hiccup! Where there are a million worlds that will be all the better for a sturdy dose of Western capitalism. Where the means always justifies the ends, and death is optional. And so on, and so on.

A plethora of writers have attempted to counter the comforting fogs of myth with a bracing dash of reality, or subvert them with satire, or use their cover to smuggle in some uncomfortable truths. But even hard sf falls back on the seductive haze - how much easier it is, after all, to imagine that aliens have conveniently cached magic technology within easy reach, or that sturdy ships can flit from star to star in the blink of an eye. Small wonder, then, that we too often recoil from the inconvenient truths revealed by Actual Science, when we should rush eagerly to embrace them, and make them our own, and use them in all kinds of inventively subversive ways.

We are beginning to understand, thanks to the unblinking camera eyes of robot probes, exactly what Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn look like. We know that they can’t support a direct transposition of the old American frontier. We know that they are stranger and more exotic than we ever dreamed; that they will radically change anyone who attempts to live out there, and out old political models simply won’t do. The songs of the Golden Girls of the West are beautiful and beguiling, and the truth is as pitiless as the coyotes of the lone prairie. But I know which I prefer.

It Depends Where You're Standing

From its discovery in 1930 until 2006, Pluto was considered to be a planet; then the International Astronomical Union downgraded it to the status of minor or dwarf planet, causing an all-mighty ruckus. Now, politicians in the state of Illinois have decided enough is enough, and want to reinstate it as a planet - and have declared 13 March 'Pluto Day'. This isn't as crazy as declaring Pi to be exactly equal to 3; Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh, who was born in Illinois. Insult Pluto; you insult all of Illinois.

Cradle Ceres

A few years ago I wrote a novel (The Secret of Life) that riffed on Paul Davis's hypothesis that the early Earth could have been seeded with life from Mars via rocks knocked off the red planet by big meteorite impacts while it was still warm and wet.

Now, Joop Houtkooper from the University of Giessen has suggested that the dwarf planet Ceres may have been the incubator of the Solar System's first life. Ceres may have retained a considerable amount of primordial water because it didn't suffer any large impacts immediately after it formed, would have cooled down more quickly than either Earth or Mars during the early history of the Solar System, so life could have started there first. And because it's a relatively small body, it doesn't take much of an impact to chip off life-bearing fragments that could have seeded Mars and Earth. (It occurs to me that it might have been some other dwarf planet that subsequently was shattered by some major impact, sending bacteria-ridden rocks in all directions.)

Not only that, but there might still be life on Ceres: like Europa, Ganymede, Triton, and a bunch of other icy moons, Ceres may have an internal ocean under its icy surface. Maybe those old pulp sf stories about tentacled beasties infesting asteroids weren't so far off the mark after all . . .

Mining For Gold

'Nowadays, keyboards and mice are the new ploughs and shears.'

I wrote about making a living by accumulating gold and other valuables in MMPORGs in my crime novel Players, published less than two years ago (I called it 'click farming' rather than 'gold farming'; same difference). It's an even bigger business now, and naturally enough most of the labour has mostly migrated to China, where it's cheapest. Wonder what these keyboard cowboys are going to do with all that processing power when gamers in the West can't afford to buy virtual wealth and prestige any more.

Lunar Koan

If a space probe crashes on the Moon and no one notices, did it really happen?

New Moon

The source of Saturn's tenuous G ring has just been discovered. The G ring is at the outer edge of the ring system, with only the E ring beyond. A couple of years ago, scientists discovered a partial arc of bright, icy dusty material at the ring's inner edge, and suspected that there must be a moon or moonlet embedded in it, as is the case with all other dusty rings and ring arcs. Now, they've confirmed that observations show a tiny moonlet is indeed embedded within the partial arc - the bright spot moving through the arc in the sequence of photos above, taken within ten minutes of each other.

It's too small for Cassini's cameras to resolve, but by comparing its brightness with a similar moonlet, Pallene, scientists reckon that it's just 500 metres across. Other measurements suggest that the moonlet is accompanied by debris between 1 and 100 metres across. Impacts of meteorites with this material and the moonlet would knock off dust to replenish the arc, which is about 250 kilometres across, and extends for about 150,000 kilometres, one sixth of the circumference of the rings.

The gravitational field of Mimas, which orbits just beyond the outer edge of the G ring, tugs the moonlet to and fro, and also keeps the ring arc together. Maybe tidal effects perturb that rubble too, causing collisions that create more dust. More complexity, but as always, it follows known physical laws. It isn't physics that limits our ideas of possible worlds; it's our imaginations.

UPDATE: Emily Lakdawalla's Planetary Society blog has a very good discussion of the new moon, and suggests that 'Cassini's beginning to venture into the murky terrain that separates "moons" from "ring particles."' And the Bad Astronomy blog has a great discussion that gets into the nitty-gritty details of how a moonlet can paint dust across the sky.

(Yes, I am a Saturn wonk.)

Summer On A Dwarf Planet

Everywhere we look, the Solar System is far more complex and exotic than we expected.

Take Pluto. Back when I started reading science fiction, and getting interested in astronomy, it was believed that Pluto was a lonely, deep-frozen ball of ice where nothing much happened. Now, we know that it orbits around a common centre shared with Charon, a body about half its size, while two small dark bodies, Hydra and Nix, orbit beyond the edge of a tenuous, dusty system of ring arcs - a compact toy of a system, as orderly and self-contained as an orrery. And we also know that Pluto has a thin atmosphere. It's been growing denser as the Pluto-Charon system swings through its closest approach to the Sun and surface ices warm and sublimate; and new results show that the atmosphere is warmer than expected because it contains about 0.5% methane, enough to cause a greenhouse effect (relatively warm, of course: it's still a chilly minus 180 degrees Centigrade). It's also warmer in the higher reaches of the atmosphere than near the surface, because sublimation of ices cools the surface while sunlight warms the resulting gases from the top down. When we get the same inversion effect here in London, smog is trapped under the warmer upper layer. Is there smog on Pluto, and if so, what is it made of? Still, pretty amazing that we can tell so much about a body so far away.

I was watching The Sky at Night yesterday, which had a nice bit on the Cassini orbiter's latest findings about Enceladus and Titan; there was also a piece on the various satellites currently orbiting the Moon, including the news ( to me) that the high-resolution camera aboard the Japanese SELENE (Kaguya) satellite had taken a picture of the Apollo 15 landing site. Turns out this happened last year, but I somehow missed it.



It's the pale blotch in the centre of the photo, visible because when the LEM return stage took off, its exhaust plume blew away dust on the surface, uncovering lighter material beneath. NASA is sending a new satellite, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, to the Moon later this year, with an even more powerful camera It's main mission os to study the poles, but it would very neat if it could take photographs of the Apollo 11 landing site, forty years on.