Wednesday 28 March 2012

Post 23: Wherein I Blatantly Break The Rules To Talk About PLANETS

Samuel here, but I am not writing a blog post today.

"Then what am I reading?"

Okay, I guess I am writing a blog post today. But I'm breaking all the rules.

See, this morning I found an editorial cartoon that I wanted to write about because when I saw it I thought up a really great joke about Rick Santorum and condoms. But after a few deep breaths and a lot of coffee, I still couldn't bring myself to crack wise about Rick Santorum's penis. It's great to have an outlet, but after a couple weeks of writing as though everything I see on Facebook is personally offensive to me, I have to take a break. I already basically did when I wrote that one about things being awesome, and this morning I was reading the news when I discovered, to my surprise, that things are still awesome.

This is the second most important news article that I have ever read. The most important was on September 29, 2010, when Steven Vogt and Paul Butler discovered Gliese 581 g. It was immediately apparent that it would more profoundly change the human legacy than any discovery in our lifetimes thus far. It was the first Earthlike planet ever discovered; it had a substantial atmosphere, remarkably Earth-like temperature and chemical composition, and astrophysicists worldwide deemed it likely habitable by humankind. Immediately Gliese 581 g caused our estimate of the distribution of nearby habitable planets to skyrocket; it unrecognizably changed our estimation of the number of future homes for us or even present homes for others. Having Earthlike planets nearby means two crucial things: that in order to branch out into space we don't have to spend millions of years terraforming uncooperative worlds like Mars (not only don't we have to terraform, but I am literally talking about wandering around on a planet 20 light years away without any kind of spacesuit at all), and that perhaps the evolution of organisms like us isn't so unlikely after all. All the life we know is based on liquid water, so in space we look for life where there is liquid water. The more liquid water we know about, the more likely we are to find life. The discovery that there is anywhere near 10 billion Earthlike planets in our galaxy alone is the biggest step towards finding aliens since the invention of the telescope.

And the individual discoveries aren't even the important thing. The important thing is the trend. Ever since we started looking for planets outside of our solar system in 1995, we have found them in droves. I mean, really, in unbelievable numbers. No one could have predicted that when I was born. But within my lifetime, the likelihood of humans ever living on another world has increased by orders of magnitude. If we can find sufficiently Earthlike planets sufficiently close by, all the remaining obstacles to far-reaching human colonization of space are cosmetic. The infrastructure is there. We don't have to fundamentally alter the nature of worlds; the building is done for us, all that's left is engineering and politics. It's like the universe has handed us a state-of-the-art computer, and all we have to do is write the software.

So why does it take me to tell people about this? When Pluto was accurately reclassified as a trans-Neptunian dwarf planet, newspapers worldwide were loud and indignant for days. Where are they now? This story didn't even make the Android news app's Top News section for the day. We have just witnessed a radical overnight transformation of humankind’s understanding of the universe and you're probably hearing about it from a blog. I mean, this article has further-reaching consequences than almost anything you will ever read or see or hear; if our descendants exist in a billion years, they will be spacefaring, and if they are spacefaring then this very discovery will be the cornerstone of their longevity. The name of the researchers, and of Gliese 581 g and Steven Vogt and Paul Butler, should be taught to every child in every school on Earth. And yet they will be casually mentioned and quickly forgotten.

I cannot imagine a human future without space colonization. I can't even imagine another generation without space colonization. I like humans and I want to see us survive, and I have limited patience where the extinction of my species is concerned. To know that worlds exist that are perfectly prepared for our arrival is comforting on a cosmological scale. It is viscerally exciting. When I stand at my window and look into the sky I have always seen the unfathomable blackness of space. I have always known the tiny shimmering glints of those massive furnaces that pepper our cosmos. But now, for the first time ever, I see home. Earth is no more safe, no more nurturing or lovely, than tens of billions of distant alien rocks. This is not my home. I am shackled here, temporarily, by the technical immaturity and social irresponsibility of my species. But I learned today that that can't last. There's no reason any longer to keep us here, for today we learned the Earth is nothing special. The Earth is not our home. Our homes are everywhere. So let's go.

14 comments:

  1. This is a good point. I'll add this to the list of stories that I tend to tell when people give me an opportunity to get excited about space in public.

    Do you know of any papers/websites that give today's best estimates on the parameters in the Drake equation?

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    1. I can't say that I know of any papers (can you imagine getting a publication under your belt for just making numbers up? Wouldn't that be great...), but this section of the Wikipedia article is about as satisfactory as it gets imho http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#Current_estimates

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    2. The tl;dr version: over the last couple decades the result of drake equation has been rapidly rising. When Carl Sagan was doing it ~20 years ago, he usually stayed within a couple orders of magnitude of 0. Now most people who do it come out with somewhere over a million sentient species

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    3. Stefan De Young28 March 2012 at 20:18

      United Federation of Planets, here we come! :P

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    4. I so envy our great-grandchildren

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  2. Point. This changes a lot. I do wish I were better at finding stuff like this. What's your strategy?

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    1. Instead of paying attention in lectures, I read the news on my phone.

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  3. I think you overestimate the importance of space stuff.

    See, most people don't have your semi-religious enthusiasm for space travel. Your visceral excitement is not normal.

    And that's not because the population at large is dumb. It's because these discoveries have very little immediate effect on the lives of most people.

    Sure, we'll probably leave the planet sometime. But it won't be tomorrow. It'll be at some point in the unknowable future. So this sort of thing get filed beside the latest from the Large Hadron Collider and all the other important discoveries that most people don't need to care about.

    Hmm...that might be an interesting idea for a blog. "This Will Be Important Later", a collection of obscure-but-important scientific discoveries.

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    1. That it will be important later and consequently people don't think about it, and that it will be important only later and consequently people don't need to think about it, challenges nothing in my argument.

      I am absolutely certain that I have more experimental evidence on the propensity of humans to find space cool, having spoken about it at length to dozens and dozens of people, than you do. I think you are talking out your ass.

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    2. "So this sort of thing get filed beside the latest from the Large Hadron Collider"

      You mean that thing whose supposed controversy was all over the news for months?

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    3. Excellent counterattack!

      But this is important to your argument. You were surprised/annoyed that this wasn't major news. I think that you should expect this sort of thing to be ignored, because it's not immediately meaningful to most people's lives.

      The LHC is a good example of how this works, in my opinion. Like Simon says, it sometimes makes the news. But not because it does important research. Because a) some lunatics thought it would blow up the world and b) there was a possibility that it was going to disprove the lightspeed limit, which is actually meaningful to most people. (Why it's meaningful, I don't know. It probably has to do with the celebrity status of Einstein...but for some reason people actually care about that particular subset of physics.)

      Point is, whatever substantive research the LHC is mainly used for is completely ignored by the media.

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    4. Sure, I was annoyed that this wasn't major news. I firmly believe that it should be major news. That it isn't relevant to their lives is entirely irrelevant to whether they should care about it or not. I contend that it is morally incorrect to impede space colonization, and that it is morally correct to learn about it and work to bring it to fruition. That "these discoveries have very little immediate effect on the lives of most people" should not register in considering whether they should know and think about it or not. It has no impact whatsoever on my life if I, without getting caught, regularly mow down pedestrians with my car. It's still wrong.

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    5. I don't really understand why you consider this to be a moral issue. Please explain.

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    6. It mitigates several obvious mechanisms for the destruction of my species. The perpetuation of my species is a moral issue.

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