Life’s a Tough Cookie

It Survives Bombardments

The early Earth, moon, and bombardment. Artwork by D. Aguilar.

Our planet is young, in cosmic time. And life on our planet is just about as young.

The universe is some 13.7 billion years old. A lot of time had to pass — say, nine of so billion years — before the Earth began forming, some 4.5 billion years ago.  The place was nothing like the planet we know today. It had just accreted from “stuff” in the proto-solar nebula. The baby Earth was hot, but cooling down. It had some kind of atmosphere, although nothing we could breathe.  And, it was being hammered by leftover debris from the rest of the solar nebula. The period it was experiencing is called the Late Heavy Bombardment, and it was long thought that the bombardment would have sterilized the surface of the planet (if any life had managed to arise there).

It turns out that the picture of a spanking clean new planet with NO life on the surface during and after the bombardment may need to be rejiggered a bit. A study funded by NASA indicates that the Late Heavy Bombardment may not have sterilized the early Earth as completely as scientists thought, and that some of the incoming asteroids (some the size of Kansas) might have actually boosted the chances for life.

The story of life on this planet is a tough one to tell. For one thing, it’s not easy to say exactly when life arose.  Scientists are getting closer to pinpointing its time, but we may never know exactly where it got the first “oomph” that transformed some randomly mixing chemicals into a living thing.

The sort of “canonical” start date that we toss around is usually 3.8 or 3.9 billion years ago, but it could well have been earlier. These findings are significant because they indicate that if life had begun before the LHB or even earlier than 4 billion years ago, it could have survived in those hidden places protected by the surface from the bombardment.  Certainly all the elements for life were in place by the time the planet finished forming — carried in by asteroids and comets, and in place from the elements from which the planet formed.

Astrobiologists are examining each step in the ladder of life minutely — from the elements that formed this planet to the processes taking place on and near Earth during the crucial time when life arose. What they learn may well translate to the stars, especially when we start looking at other planets where life may have arisen.

Science Marches On

Missions and Experiments, Galore

With the end of the final servicing mission to HST coming up, it’s comforting to know that HST will serve our astronomy needs for years to come.  It’s a grand machine and we will get lots of good science from it. Makes me glad! It was a stunning mission to watch from the comfort of my desktop computer.

But, life (and science) marches on, and there’s always another mission coming up for launch, another set of science experiments to perform, and not just in astronomy and space science, but in every corner of the science community. But, for right now, let’s look at a roundup of the news that crossed my desk since early this week.

The Kepler mission to find Earth-like exoplanets, for example, is in calibration and testing now that it’s in space and returning its early data. The Spitzer Space Telescope is beginning a new “warm” phase of its operations, largely because its liquid helium coolant has run out and the detectors it was keeping cool have been warming up. They can still do good science, just not the science that requires coolant to keep the detectors chilled enough to see some of the infrared wavelengths seen before.

The Herschel and Planck missions to study the birth and evolution of the universe were launched last week, and seem to be running nicely, so far.  Moon missions are in planning, and at Mars, the handlers for the Spirit rover are working on ways to get it moving again from its dust pit location.  SETI institute is celebrating 10 years of SETI@Home – the massive distributed computing project that is searching for signals from elsewhere that might indicate intelligent life elsewhere.  The National Radio Astronomy Observatory announced the discovery of a double star system that seems to be birthing one of the fastest-spinning pulsars yet seen. University of Chicago scientists have a new gravity-wave probe that will begin taking data in June, and astronomers in California and France are developing new ways to use the intrinsic brightness of certain types of supernovae to determine cosmic distances more accurately. Finally, the NSF is using the popularity of the movie Angels and Demons to talk about the science of the Large Hadron Collider at the particle physics laboratory at CERN.

Science is ongoing; it’s part of our lives, and we’re part of it. Fascinating, as Spock would say.

To Boldly Go

United Federation of Planets (Courtesy Wikipedia and Sallico)

It was tough to tear myself away from watching the amazing spacewalks yesterday to go see the new Star Trek movie yesterday at the IMAX theater, but I’m glad I did. To say it was a good movie experience is an understatement!  The movie is “wow!” on several levels: dramatically, special-effects, and acting.

Now, I wasn’t sure what to expect, so went with pretty much an open mind, especially after reading conflicting viewpoints on the Trek boards and discussion groups I sometimes frequent.  Of course, there are always Trekkies who will not like anything that isn’t just like the series they most like — whether it’s the Original Series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), Deep Space 9 (DS9), Voyager (VOY), or Enterprise (ENT).  Or the movie series.  Or the cartoons. Or the books.  But,  many more are ready for more of the trekiverse… and this one delivers more.

I have pretty much watched them all, read many of the books, and haven’t really paid attention to the comics or animations, yet. But, I have to say that I am thoughtfully happy and surprised that the “franchise” continues so well.  There’s something about the Star Trek story that continues to touch people many decades after the first series premiered. It certainly does touch me and I’ve been watching since I was a teenage girl wondering if I could have a career in space somehow.

It’s not just the action sequences on the bridge and in space that are well done (although I still would prefer to see less punch-em-up in the shows — that we still have a bunch of guys baring their fists in space for lengthy periods of the movie tells me that producers still think that we are all 15-year-old boys who think with our fists).  The visuals are beautiful, the story is reasonably well plotted and it’s told well. The actors pretty much nail their characters — a tough thing to live up to for any actor. In particular, Zachary Quinto absolutely rocks as Spock.  So does Leonard Nimoy.

I had a few issues and questions with some of the plot — but I’m still thinking about those and may need to go see it again to resolve those before I talk about them. Besides, it never hurts to see a good movie twice.

Of course as a science geek, I constantly have to close my eyes to the many violations of science precepts that take place in these kinds of movies. There are a few in Star Trek, but remarkably few beyond the usual “flying through the black hole and surviving” and “traveling at warp speed” that we’ve all come to accept as staples of the genre.

But, as this is drama, and I know how difficult it is to do some of these scenes (we create our own animations for astronomy at Loch Ness Productions, so I’m aware some of the technical and dramatic issues involved), so I do let some things slide.  I won’t go into the science issues here — rather, I’ll point you to Phil Plait’s excellent discussion over at Bad Astronomy (warning: there are a few spoilers there). He pretty much covers the same bases I would.  But, the science issues are not movie-killers and as long as you go knowing you’re not there to learn science, but see the Trek universe, it’s a great movie!  Boldly go and see it!