It Takes You There… and Then

I’m a science fiction reader, one with hundreds of back issues of Analog and Asimov’s magazines and a library full of science fiction dating back to Hugo Gernsback. Back when I was in Catholic school, the nuns made it pretty clear that SF wasn’t for girls (heck, they weren’t wild about it for boys either, but they allowed guys to read it). When I’d try to take SF books out of the school library, there’d be this little raised eyebrow and a gentle shake of the head. So, I learned early on that I’d have to read it in my brother’s Boy’s Life magazines or get them out of the public library. Which I did.

What worlds they opened up to me! Over the years I’ve sailed to distant lands, faraway planets, sampled alien cultures, and learned science along the way. Oh, and read about different ways of thinking about things. It has opened my eyes to things the way travel does, only in this case, the traveling is across space and throughout time.

So, what are my favorites? Where to start? I began with Edgar Rice Burroughs and some of his Barsoom adventures. Then, I moved on to Robert A. Heinlein’s juveniles. I think the first one was Red Planet, about a couple of boys growing up on Mars. I quickly worked my way through Heinlein’s easier books. By the time I was in high school, I’d graduated to some more mature ones (with politics and everything in ‘em). In college I started reading his Stranger in a Strange Land. That led me to read Isaac Asimov’s works, and then I was off to the races. Today I’m reading a lot of Bujold’s work in the Vorkosigan universe, and not too long ago, I spent several months on Dune, reading the books and watching the Sci-Fi channel miniseries (Dune and Children of Dune) on DVD.

Lately I’ve been trying my hand at writing some of my own SF, but so far haven’t sent anything out for publication. I will sometime, but for now, I’m still having fun exploring. and, not for the first time have I noticed (and appreciated) that good storytelling is essential to SF. It’s not just scientists in white lab coats rubbing their hands together in stereotypical geek fashion. As with science, SF talks about LIFE.

Giving the Gift of Exploration

I’m about to head out to a meeting of planetarium folk, a conference I’ve attended every two years since 1978. It’s always a lot of fun and there’s such a diversity of people who do the job well and love doing it. They give of themselves for the sole purpose of exciting people about astronomy and space science.

I remember my first planetarium visit; it was back in the late 1960s. I’d never heard of a planetarium, yet the moment I stepped in the door, I was taken with the space. It immersed me in the stars. More than 40 years later, I’m still playing in planetarium spaces and loving the experience.

Astronomy (and all science, really) helps us explore the cosmos and understand it. The planetarium helps that understanding, along with the many books and publications dedicated to the subjects. It’s all there, if you want to open your mind to the cosmos, and if you’re lucky enough to have a planetarium nearby, then all the better. It’s exciting science education and I love being a part of it.

Summer Gifts

Those of us in the northern half of planet Earth are celebrating the beginning of summer today. Summer and late spring are planting times, and for millennia, humans have used this time to grow food. I always think of summer as a gift that we all get in return for the winter and its cold, nasty weather (at least, the winters around where I live).

It’s also summer in the Martian northern hemisphere right now. For the folks who are minding the store for the Phoenix Mars mission, their first summer “gift” is finding out that they’ve most likely found the water ice they were looking for on Mars.

This animated image is made from a set of images acquired by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander’s Surface Stereo Imager on the 21st and 25th days of the mission, or Sols 20 and 24 (June 15 and 18, 2008). They show the sublimation of ice over the course of four days in a trench the scientists have informally named “Dodo-Goldilocks.”

The lumps that are disappearing in the lower left corner are most likely the water ice they were looking for, going away in a process that’s similar to evaporation. In the next few days, the spacecraft will be digging deeper to check out a hard surface the digging arm has found. It’s most likely ice, too.

Photo from NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University.

So, What’s the Beef?

It’s been great fun reading all the comments in various blogs and listservs about the continuing process of recategorizing the places in the solar system. I think such “sorting” is a step in the right direction, and I’ll get to why in a moment. For some folks, however, the IAU’s recent action to further clarify some dwarf planets as Plutoids, including Pluto, is a slap in the face of “tradition” (the one that says Pluto is a planet and all’s right in the universe). I guess I can see why they might want to stick with that tradition, although none of the arguments I’ve heard really convince me that Pluto’s categorization is a bad one. The IAU is doing what needs to be done when you are confronted in science with multiple things (moons, planets, animals, plants, etc.): taxonomy.

Let’s think of it this way: suppose you have a bag of marbles of five different sizes and colors. You are given the job to sort and name them. So, you make five different subcollections according to size. Just to keep it simple, all marbles of each size are the same color. So, you end up with a pile of tiny pink ones, some little red ones, some middle-sized yellow ones, some rather large clear ones, and some huge blue ones. You name them Huge Blues, Large Clears, Middling Yellows, Little Reds, and Tiny Pinks. You would be foolish to pick up and say, “Well, this Tiny Pink really looks more like a Red, so I’m going to call it a Little Red, instead.” It wouldn’t logically fit in your taxonomy, although calling it a Little Red might make YOU personally feel better…

Anyway, this is the kind of “sorting” into bins that IAU is doing with the “places” of the solar system. They do it because sorting of things (classifying them) is a way of keeping “like” things together. Good taxonomies grow as the collections of “things” they categorize grow, and they help the scientists who use them characterize and study the objects they contain.

The problem of the “wrong” sorting bin for Pluto came about because we just didn’t know enough about our solar system when Pluto was discovered, and our rather old-fashioned taxonomy was simpler than that bag of marbles. We had planets, asteroids, comets, moons, and dust. Then, as solar system exploration (and the tools we do it with) got better, we found all kinds of things in between those bins — ring particles and worlds that were either bigger or smaller than the criteria we used to lump things into the original categories. Not only that, but we used to lump the worlds of the solar system into two “made out of” categories: rock and gas. Now we know that there are worlds out there that are ice, and that some of those also have rock, and that some of the gas giants could also be thought of as ice giants.

Taxonomy is a big step toward “sorting” the solar system by a number of different criteria. It may seem rather “bookkeeperish” of the IAU, but what they’re doing is allowing scientists to group worlds together by their evolutionary paths (among other things), which helps us understand the history of solar system evolution. And what we learn can be applied to planetary systems we find around other stars to help us understand their formation and evolution.

So, I don’t have a problem with the taxonomy the IAU is slowly putting together for the solar system. It actually shows that we’re learning more about our neighborhood and that there’s still a lot left to learn.

Going There… or sending our Ads

I saw in today’s news that one of Google’s founders is buying a seat into space. Nice.  I wish we could all do that, but I suppose the first bunch of civilian flights into low-Earth orbit will be reserved for those who can plunk down the money. There’s little chance I’ll get to go, even though I grew up as an Apollo-age kid thinking I’d be living on the Moon at some point in my life. It doesn’t look too likely because (for any number of reasons) no country has had the will to get us there and so the “tourist” flights that will take people up for short flights are subject to all the usual market forces. The part of me that’s a scientist understands the science reasons why we aren’t living on (or even personally exploring) the Moon. It still doesn’t make it easy to accept that the dream of going to space is reserved for the astronaut/cosmonaut corps or the well-connected.

The consolation prize, if it can be called that, is getting to send one’s name to space or blasting one’s ad for delicious and crunchy corn chips out to space, as is happening with a fan-created Doritos ad that will be beamed out to a star called 47 Ursae Majoris as part of a promotion with the University of Leicester in England. I like Doritos in moderation (as a matter of fact, I just ate one), but the thought of targeting an ad to a specific star seems a bit weird, even for me. It’s an outreach project, so it has the added advantage of bringing more attention to astronomy and physics at the same time it sells a few more corn chips to folks on. There’s no evidence yet that the folks on any possible planets orbiting the target star are clamoring for Doritos, but since they’re 42 light-years away, any wholesale orders for the chips won’t arrive at Earth for nearly a hundred years.

So, I wonder. Does Sergey Brin’s purchase of a space ride or Doritos’s ad campaign excite interest in space and astronomy?