MAX 2019: A Space Festival

Heading out to California in just a few days for MAX 2019: A Space Festival from Media Art Exploration. The festival will take place at the California Academy of the Sciences, The Exploratorium, and the Z Space theater in San Francisco from the 16th through 18th. There will be live performances, displays of artwork, panels of scientists and artists, booths from various groups sharing their art and their science, and more!

We'll be running a booth for SAGANet.org at the California Academy of Sciences on Friday, the 17th. Come find our booth and we can chat about astrobiology, space exploration, and more. We'll also have stickers and comic books to give out, scifi books and our book of astrobiology classic literature for sale, and I'll also have some of my meteorites there to show off (including a little piece of the Moon!). Hoping to see you there!

Co-Hosting Ask an Astrobiologist!

I’ve recently agreed to become a co-host of the show Ask an Astrobiologist! 

Ask an Astrobiologist, brought to you from the community of SAGANet, is a NASA Astrobiology-sponsored show that airs online once each month. In each episode, either myself or Sanjoy Som will interview a guest astrobiologist to ask about their career paths, their scientific research, and the things that drive them to wonder about the nature of life in the universe. Every episode also features a photo contest with the potential to win some NASA swag!

Ask an Astrobiologist airs live on SAGANet and on the NASA Astrobiology Facebook page. People watching the show live can ask questions of our interviewees on either streaming platform or on Twitter using #AskAstrobio. 

I’m definitely excited for becoming more involved with the show! Look for more here in the future, including episodes and my personal comments about what it's like to host a show like this!

Holy Planets, Batman

The Google Doodle celebrating the TRAPPIST-1 system announcement on 22 February 2017

Hopefully you've already heard about today's announcement during a NASA press conference about the confirmation of discovery of 7 Earth-sized planets around the star TRAPPIST-1, three of which are in that star system's Goldilocks Zone for liquid water. This star system is only 39 lightyears away from Earth (coincidentally, that's 12 parsecs, so just within one good Kessel Run if you have the right ship). 39 lightyears is practically down the street in the context of our galaxy (which spans over 100,000 lightyears from one end to the other). This announcement isn't only exciting, but it also comes with a lot of implications for astrobiology. We have the capabilities right now to start observing these planets closely to look for signs of biosignatures in their atmosphere and that will only get better in the coming years (especially when the James Webb Space Telescope goes into operation). I'm still in the process of crunching out my Ph.D. dissertation, so I can't write up all of my thoughts about this incredible announcement right now, but definitely stay tuned to the exoplanet and planetary science community to see what more we can learn in the coming years about these world so close to our own. 

Credit: JPL/NASA

AbGradCon 2016

This cosmobiologist won't be writing a lot here in the coming week. I'm one of the organizers for the 2016 Astrobiology Graduate Conference (AbGradCon), to be held at the University of Colorado Boulder. This conference is going to be lots of fun. I'll review everything once (if?) I survive all of the logistics of bringing this thing together.

The Immunity Syndrome

My friend recently completed watching all of the episodes and films of Star Trek made thus far. Inspired by her, I've decided to go back and re-watch all of them myself. I'm now on the second season of The Original Series of Star Trek. I just watched the episode called "The Immunity Syndrome". In this episode, the crew of the Enterprise finds their ship and their bodies losing energy due to a gigantic, single-celled space creature. The single-celled organism looks very much like an amoeba, but one that is 11,000 miles long by 3,000 miles wide (that'd be one very large cell!). 

I love sci-fi stories that consider what other types of life could exist. A single-celled organism that is larger than North America may seem far fetched, but could it be possible that life at some point could evolve to form organisms so large? Even though this episode treats this organism as a giant cell (Spock even announces that it's composed mostly of protoplasm), maybe there could be organisms that are gigantic, contiguous structures as large or even larger than planets. Perhaps they have their own biomes composed of multitudes of other organisms inside of them, or perhaps they could be composed of various connected biological organs and tissues. Would such organisms need to eat worlds to live? Would they be able to develop some way to propel themselves through space? I guess we really wouldn't know if this is possible, until we ourselves step out amongst the stars and take a look to see if there are other forms of life out there.

Answering the Question "Are We Alone?"

 A TEDx Talk by Shawn Domagal-Goldman

Shawn Domagal-Goldman may be one of the hippest of our current generation of astrobiologists. I've heard him speak several times and have found his manner of speaking profound and enjoyable. Domagal-Goldman's work has focused on global geochemistry of terrestrial worlds, including the Earth, as well as on how we can characterize extrasolar planets from afar to learn more about their surface conditions and possibilities for supporting biology. Here's a video of Domagal-Goldman's talk from TEDxMidAtlantic 2015 where he considers how NASA is currently going about answering the all-important question "Are We Alone?":

Kepler-452b: One of the newest discovered kids on the block may be similar to our Earth

An artist's concept of what Kepler-452b might look like from orbit (NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle)

We've now confirmed the existence of nearly 2,000 exoplanets in our neighborhood of the galaxy. There are still another three thousand or so possible finds that are awaiting confirmation, but there's a good chance many of them will turn out to be real planets as well. We still estimate maybe 160 billion (or more) planets exist in our galaxy alone (averaging 1.6 planets per star). These numbers are incredible, especially for those of us who remember a time when we had not yet confirmed the existence of planets around other stars. 

Most of the worlds we have confirmed were first detected by the Kepler space telescope. Kepler was launched and entered service in 2009, immediately getting to the work of hunting for alien worlds. The mission had a highly successful lifetime of 3.5 years and was even granted a mission extension, but then, in 2013, a second of four of the reaction wheels within the spacecraft had broken (the reaction wheels are what allow such spacecraft to orient themselves in space without the need for fuel). Since that time, an ingenious repurposing of the spacecraft for a new planet-hunting mission called "Second Light" (a.k.a. K2) has been undertaken. Second Light has been operating since early 2014 and has been slowly building upon the list of potential exoplanets out there.

From all of the worlds discovered through Kepler's original mission and the Second Light mission, none has been as exciting for the general public as one that was just announced this past week. On July 23rd, researchers announced 521 more planet candidates, including 11 worlds that are close in their size and orbital distances from their stars as is our own Earth. One of those eleven is a world currently known as Kepler-452b. This exoplanet orbits a G2 star (one that is in the same spectral class as our Sun), it has an orbit that is similar in size to the Earth's (Kepler-452b's year is only 20 days longer), and this alien world is only about 1.6 times larger than the Earth. The following infographic from Space.com gives some fantastic details on what we've recently discovered about this exoworld:

The discovery of another world very similar to our own Earth is very suggestive that we are on the right path to discovering extraterrestrial life. Since my birth, we've now determined that there are billions of planets in our galaxy and we now know that some of them, like Kepler-452b, are very similar to our homeworld in their size and orbit (and some even orbit similar stars!). With current improvements in telescope technology and the development of exoplanet atmosphere research, it seems more and more like it really is only a matter of time before we start seeing abundant evidence for worlds that are habitable. Following that, how long might it be before the first detections of biosignature gases on exoplanets? If life is abundant in our universe, then it seems like we are only around the corner from finally determining whether we are alone in the vast cosmos.

Kepler-452b excites many people because of how similar it is to our world. Might there be a geophysical processes occurring on that world that are similar to ours? Might there be plate tectonics, continents, oceans...

We have a tendency to think that we need to find worlds like our own to find life (though this may not truly be the case), and that's why Kepler-452b is so exciting. I'm glad to know that so many people in the general public have been excited by this new finding. It might be that Kepler-452b is another Venus (a hothouse world devastated by a runaway greenhouse), or maybe the surface of Kepler-452b is simply a barren wasteland. Yet it's fun to imagine some of the more intriguing possibilities. 

Maybe Kepler-452b has a surface covered in microbial mats that generate large amounts of gases that are far from equilibrium with the atmosphere. Maybe that world has gigantic creatures like walking trees, dinosaurs, or giant floating blobs. Maybe there are intelligent beings on that world that have also discovered math and science and who have orbiting space telescopes that are peering out into their galactic neighborhood. Maybe, if that's the case, then just maybe they're also holding exciting press conferences to share their findings of new exoplanets around other stars. Maybe they've even had a meeting to discuss this new planet that is just like theirs in it's orbit around a similar star. Maybe that planet is just a bit smaller. Does it also have life?

An artist's illustration of a possible surface of newfound planet Kepler-452b (SETI Institute/Danielle Futselaar)

No, there was not a major discovery of life on comet 67P by the Philae lander

...but a lot of journalists have once again shown that they love to fall for quackery

This image of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko was taken by the Rosetta spacecraft on 15 June 2015 (ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM)

Earlier this month, The Guardian posted an article which started a brief but infuriating internet fire of gossip about the possibilities for life on comets. Specifically, the article announced that Max Wallis and Chandra Wickramasinghe had claimed during a talk at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting that the organic-rich crust of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is best explained by the presence of microorganisms. Indeed, Wickramasinghe (whom the author of the article titled as a "maverick astronomer and astrobiologist") was quoted as saying that their finding of life on the comet was "unequivocal".

As an astrobiologist and a fan of ideas about the possibilities for alien life out there, I like to wonder about whether there could be living organisms on cometary material. Based on that, you might think I would have been excited about this "news", but a quick read into the announcement and where it came from (more importantly, who it came from) quickly suggests that these findings are a bunch of bunk. 

Chandra Wickramasinghe has become known in the astrobiology community as someone who has a conclusion that alien microbes are everywhere and who will stop at nothing to try to prove his belief. This makes him less of a "maverick astronomer and astrobiologist" and far more of a pseudoscientist and a threat to real science. 

Taken from a page of Skeptical Raptor's blog, where it's shown that
debunking quackery can be fun as well as rewarding 

In this announcement of "finding" alien life, Wickramasinghe and Wallis take the findings of organic-rich materials on the surface of comet 67P by the Rosetta mission and make the claim that such materials are "not easily explained in terms of prebiotic chemistry". They went further and told their audience at the National Astronomy Meeting that they have conducted simulations which suggest that microorganisms with antifreeze proteins could explain dark, organic-rich features as well as certain icy structures on the comet. Wickramasinghe was quoted as saying "...data coming from the comet seems to unequivocally, in my opinion, point to micro-organisms being involved in the formation of the icy structures, the preponderance of aromatic hydrocarbons, and the very dark surface."

You should always be cautious in trusting someone who uses statements like "unequivocally" and "in my opinion" in the same sentence. As Chris Lee pointed out recently in an Ars Technica article titled "Magic carbon layer not a sign of extraterrestrial life", the finding of organic carbon on the surface of a comet is by no means surprising from the stance of modern surface chemistry. In fact, we now know that organic compounds are abundant in the universe. We've discovered organics in meteorites, on comets, on other worlds, and in interstellar space. It's no surprise that the Philae lander discovered organic material on comet 67P, but just because there is organic material there in no way implies that there is also life. Decades ago, it might have seemed that organic material automatically implies life, but we now know that the conclusion of life does not follow simply from the presence of organic material in a sample. Such thoughtful approaches to science, however, are not in Wickramasinghe's realm of thought. It seems that Wallis and Wickramasinghe have taken the approach of dressing up their hopeful belief as a scientific certainty.

This isn't the first time that Wickramasinghe has been involved in unjustified claims that alien has been discovered. Wickramasinghe has previously claimed that viruses like SARS, the bird flu, and the 1918 flu epidemic were extraterrestrial in origin. This pseudoscientist has also been involved in "publishing" claims of finding alien microbes in meteorites and in the atmosphere through the fake science source called the Journal of Cosmology. Phil Plait, author of the Bad Astronomy book and blog, has written several articles pointing out Wickramasinghe's fallacious claims. Phil even tackled this recent claim of life on 67P with his article "Life on a Comet? I’m Gonna Go With “No.”" Dan Evon also briefly covered this non-discovery of life in an article on Snopes.

It gets tiring sometimes battling against the fraudulent and the quacks, and some people might even ask why we then do it. The answer is simple: in our age of abundant information, where disinformation and misinformation run rampant and many people are illiterate in science and technology, the frauds and the quacks pose a serious danger to the future of our civilization. If we lose the scientific method, if we allow ourselves to dwell in unjustified claims, and if we forego evidence for satisfaction, then it's only a matter of time before a new dark ages befalls us and we have to start all over again.

It's not always easy to determine the differences between science and pseudoscience (indeed, philosophers of science have been trying to figure out how to do that for quite some time). Claims like those made by Wickramasinghe and his fellow pseudoscientists seem legitimate to many people, especially when news sources claim these people are "experts", "maverick astronomers", or "top astrobiologists". Yet people like Max Wallis and Chandra Wickramasinghe are a threat to modern science and to the public. Their approach of accepting their preformed conclusions without significant evidence or even rational skepticism is a bane to modern science. I sincerely hope that, moving forward, we will see more scientists taking to social media and more reporters seeking input from real scientists to fight the bunk of people like Wallis and Wickramasinghe when they start to peddle their snake oil.

We may one day, perhaps very soon, discover evidence for extraterrestrial life. I've dreamt of that moment since I was a child. Many of us have. Yet jumping the gun with false assertions of alien life does nothing to improve our pursuits in astrobiology. Certainly, if and when we do find actual evidence for life outside of our biosphere, you will hear the news coming from far more reliable sources than Wallis and Wickramasinghe.

NASA and University Researchers Discuss the Search for Life in the Solar System & Beyond at AbSciCon 2015

Image taken from the NASA Astrobiology Roadmap

Last week, at the Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon) in Chicago, NASA convened a press briefing to feature some of the lead figures within the realm of astrobiology and to promote discussion of what we're doing right now in astrobiology as well as what will be coming next. You can find the video of that briefing at the bottom of this post!

The panel for the briefing consisted of the following four people:

-John Grunsfeld, former astronaut and now Associate Administrator for Science at NASA Headquarters

-Alexis Templeton, Principal Investigator for the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Rock-Powered Life team

-Britney Schmidt, Principal Investigator for the NASA-funded project Sub-Ice Marine and Planetary Analog Ecosystems (SIM

-Vikki Meadows, Principal Investigator at the University of Washington's Virtual Planetary Laboratory

Left to right: Vikki Meeadows, Britney Scmidt, and Alexis Templeton. Image posted to Twitter by NASA NExSS

I've never met John Grunsfeld in person, but I love the energy and enthusiasm he presents when he talks. I have met Vikki Meadows, Britney Schmidt, and Alexis Templeton. They are impressive researchers and wonderful people. 

Britney and Alexis are especially kick-ass women. Britney has quickly climbed to fame within the sciences as a lead expert on the icy worlds of our solar system. She's travelled to Antarctica to study icy analog environments and a paper that she authored in the journal Nature in 2011 rocked icy-worlds research with the conclusion that the chaos regions on Europa may be caused by shallow subsurface fluids. 

I was abundantly overjoyed to see Alexis Templeton on the panel. She's one of the most renowned researchers in the realm of geobiology, she knows more about the connections between microorganisms and the variety of environments present on the Earth than anyone else I've ever met, and she is my graduate research advisor! Here's a picture of Alexis and I taken by John Spear while we were working at our field site, Borup Fiord Pass, in the Canadian High Arctic during the summer of 2014:

Alexis has been involved in many research projects that seek to characterize the myriad ways that microorganisms interrelate with their environments. Research that has been conducted in her lab over the years has included looking at the microbial alteration of basalt on the seafloor, characterizing metal oxidation by microbes in the depths of the Earth, and working on our NASA-funded project to understand microbial sulfur cycling and the formation of sulfur biosignatures at an Arctic analog to icy extraterrestrial environments. 

Most recently, Alexis has become the Principle Investigator of a team that goes by the handle Rock-Powered Life (RPL). This team, funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute, seeks to characterize the pathways through which water and rock can react to form the simplest ingredients for living processes on Earth. They're also considering what these reactions mean for the habitability of extraterrestrial environments, such as those in the subsurface oceans of Europa and Enceladus. 

The NASA press briefing last week went very well. All of the members of the panel gave fantastic introductions to what we're doing right now in astrobiology to better understand life on Earth and the potential for life in our solar system and beyond! I highly recommend checking out the briefing video below:

My research talk for AbSciCon 2015

I'm traveling off to Chicago tomorrow morning to attend the 2015 Astrobiology Science Conference (AbSciCon). AbSciCon is a scientific meeting for researchers, educators, and science communicators who work in the diverse realm of astrobiology, the scientific pursuit to understand the origins, evolution, and radiation of life in the universe. This is my first big science conference, so I'm pretty excited. I'll be giving a research talk this coming Tuesday, the 16th of June, to share a little bit of my graduate research. My talk will be part of a conference session titled "Habitability of Extraterrestrial Analog Environments" and it will allow me to talk about my current work on samples that I collected last summer at Borup Fiord Pass in the Canadian High Arctic. If you're interested, here's a little introduction to what I'll be talking about on Tuesday:

My field site, Borup Fiord Pass, is a valley in the Canadian High Arctic where there resides a very special glacier. Near the toe of this glacier (the glacier's edge) you can find large accumulations of yellow elemental sulfur on top of the ice. These deposits of sulfur form from sulfide-rich springs that emerge on the glacier or just at its edge. The sulfide carried by the springs is derived from the reduction (electronation) of sulfate by microorganisms that thrive in the subsurface. The yellow sulfur that appears at the surface may be partly formed through the activity of microbial life and also may feed microorganisms that are capable of oxidizing (de-electronating) elemental sulfur. This unique sulfur-dominated system may serve as an ideal analogue for icy environments in our solar system and beyond, especially those where subsurface fluids may emerge at the surface of an icy system (like maybe on Jupiter's moon Europa!).

I had the wonderful opportunity to visit this remarkable site for two weeks during the summer of 2014. Here is an image taken by John Spear, of the Colorado School of Mines, while flying over the glacier in a helicopter:

The image shows the region at the toe of the glacier where yellow sulfur staining was visible. The large sulfur covered area in this shot is about 100x100 square meters (about the size of a couple of American football fields). Interestingly, during our time at the site, we did not observe an active spring. Instead, what we found was that a very thick structure of ice had formed at the edge of the glacier. This icing is not only covered in sulfur, but is loaded with sulfur in various states (sulfide, elemental sulfur, and sulfate). We took samples from various regions on the sulfur icing, on the glacier, and in the melt water streams that ran down the valley. Below is a ternary diagram showing some of the data I've now analyzed for major cations in the samples as compared to some samples from previous years:

What this figure is showing is that there is a range of cation chemistry that can be observed in samples collected at the site. There are data here for active springs from previous years, sulfur deposits from 2009 and 2014, as well as melt water and stream water from around the site from 2000 and 2014. Most importantly, these data show that the sulfur icing is really similar to the sulfide-rich springs, which is part of why we reason that the spring was flowing and then that fluid was frozen in place to make the sulfur icing.

Sulfur bubbles on a melt pool on a sulfur icing

One of the coolest things about the sulfur icing during our time at Borup Fiord Pass was the active thawing and refreezing of the ice each day within melt pools on top of the icing. Hydrogen sulfide gas that had been locked within the sulfur icing would gurgle its way up through these melt pools, forming bubbles on the surface of the fluid. In several places these bubbles became encrusted in yellow sulfur and formed sulfur bubbles, like those shown to the left here.

I was so intrigued by these sulfur bubbles that I had to know more about them. I took some of the material and ran x-ray diffraction (XRD) on it. XRD allows us to determine what minerals or other crystallized material is present within a sample. The XRD data revealed something very interesting. The data show elemental sulfur present in three different forms, known as allotropes. Usually, in nature, sulfur is most stable as eight-membered rings of sulfur atoms that are packed in a certain arrangement that is known as α-S₈. (a.k.a. alpha-cyclooctasulfur). However, there are two other mineral forms of cyclooctasulfur that can also form in nature. These are known as the beta and gamma forms. β-S₈ is a form of cyclooctasulfur that
forms when α-S₈ is heated above ~96 C. It's extremely bizarre to find this form of sulfur in a sample from Borup Fiord Pass, where the fluid forming the sulfur icing likely never reached a temperature that high. Likewise, the gamma form of cyclooctasulfur, γ-S₈ (which is also known as the mineral Rosickyite), usually only forms in high temperature environments. That said, Susanne Douglas and Heixong Yang published an article in the journal Geology in 2002 where they reported finding Rosickyite within an endoevaporitic microbial film. They hypothesized that processes of microbial sulfur metabolism that formed elemental sulfur favored the formation of γ-S₈ over α-S₈. If that's not exciting enough, Damnhait Gleeson, who was once a member of our lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, also previously reported finding rosickyite in a microbial sample, this time it was within a sample of sulfur collected at Borup Fiord Pass in 2009 by Katherine Wright (also a former member of our lab). Since rosickyite was previously detected at our site, it wasn't a huge surprise, but it's definitely exciting. 

During my talk at AbSciCon, I'll be showing some images of the sulfur bubble material that I recently collected using an electron microscope. There's some really interesting structures to be found within these samples. I'm now hot on the trail of figuring out if I'm seeing the representation of gamma and beta cyclooctasulfur or perhaps something else all together. I don't know yet if these unique forms of sulfur and strange things that I'm seeing under the electron microscope are indicative of the biological processing of sulfur or if they've formed through an abiotic process at Borup Fiord Pass (which would also be very interesting), but it's nice to find new and exciting things when doing research.

There's a bit more that I'll be presenting at my talk at AbSciCon, however the talk is only supposed to be 10 minutes in length (which is a very short time for a talk). Fortunately, for the stuff that I don't get to cover in my talk, my colleague Chris Trivedi of the Colorado School of Mines will be presenting a poster with information about his work on our samples from Borup Fiord Pass. Hopefully, if people find our work interesting and want to know more following my talk, they'll then have a chance to check out Chris' poster as well.

This is me saluting the sulfur stained glacier and the valley that holds it

I'm definitely looking forward to the experiences I'll be having in the coming week at AbSciCon 2015. There's going to be a lot of great science to hear about and to talk about. I'm going to serve as a judge for student posters at the conference and I'll also be serving as a Meeting Mentor, spending half of one conference day with a high school student shadowing me at the conference. On top of all of this great stuff, on Monday evening there will be the final preliminary heat of the 3rd season of the NASA Famelab science communication competition. In case you don't know, I won the first preliminary heat of the competition in August of 2014, when I shared a story about my first day in the field at Borup Fiord Pass. I'm looking forward to watching a new line-up of scientists and science communicators as they compete in this final heat for Famelab. I have a feeling there are going to be some awesome talks and a lot of great stories.

I'll be adding more posts in the coming weeks that detail my experiences at AbSciCon, so look forward to those. I think I'll wrap this post up right now by sharing the video of the talk I gave when I competed in NASA Famelab in 2014. Here's looking forward to great science and good times at AbSciCon 2015!

The Blue Marble: The importance of seeing our world in its entirety

This image of the Earth was taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on their trip to the Moon on the 7th of December, 1972. It is one of the most famous images in recorded history and has come to be known as The Blue Marble. 

Not only is the image significant as it was taken by the last human beings to travel to the Moon (something that will hopefully soon change), but The Blue Marble is one of the first images that captured our world as a whole, without any of the borders we've been told to imagine between nations and cultures. The image shows the place of birth of every human being who has ever lived. The Blue Marble shows land, sea, clouds, vegetation, and ice. Just like the Earthrise and Pale Blue Dot images, The Blue Marble gives us pause to reflect upon our connections to one another and to the rest of our biosphere. Seeing our world as a whole set amongst the background black of space should remind us that we're all in this crazy thing called life together and that our world is only one amongst what we now know to be a very great many.

Seeing the World We've Made

All is Fair in Love and War, by Bugspray609

Any thoughtful person who takes the time to regard the known history of our species must assuredly, at least sometimes, take some pause when considering the dichotomy of how well and how bad we have treated each other. For all of the beauty we have created in our music and art and literature and architecture, we have have created just as much destruction and pain through our acts of selfishness and fear. I think any person who seeks a better life in this world for everyone has to admit to and understand the atrocities that have occurred in human history while working to stop such atrocities from occurring again (whether through direct or indirect means).

In the 1937 preface to his science-fiction story, "Star Maker", Olaf Stapledon wrote of the direct and indirect approaches to overcoming the crises of human suffering while commenting on the foreseen terror of the rise of fascism in Europe. He pointed out the importance developing the "self-critical self-consciousness of the human species" (something I see as the capability for us to review our actions and work to improve the world for future generations by improving our actions). Although written over three decades before The Blue Marble image was produced, Stapledon had the foresight to point out the potential importance of seeing our world as a whole:

"...Perhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human crisis. It may also strengthen our charity to one another."

Stapledon even attempted a guess in Star Maker at what the Earth may look like from space:

"...The sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony. It was nacrous, it was an opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. Its patterned colouring was more subtle, more ethereal. It displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony of a live thing. Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake."

Olaf Stapledon couldn't have known it at the time of that writing, but the first official image taken of the Earth from space would be collected from a weapon of war, a V-2 rocket, less than a decade after the writing of Star Maker.

Earth from Space 

Taken from a V-2 Rocket in 1946, this is the first picture of Earth from space

Since the atmosphere of the Earth doesn't actually have a perfectly defined edge or separation that can tell you when you're still on Earth or when you're in space, a border called the Kármán Line was agreed upon for this purpose at 100 km above the surface of the planet. Theodore von Kármán, the namesake for the Kármán Line, was the first person to realize that it is around this altitude that the gases of the atmosphere become too rarified for aeronautical flight. As such, it's also this altitude that separates the study of aeronautics from the study of astronautics.

The first image of Earth taken by a camera that had passed the Kármán Line was taken on the 24th of October in 1946. This camera was riding along with a V-2 rocket, a weapon of war that was the progenitor of the rockets that took the first American astronauts into space and which took the first people to the Moon. It's somewhat ironic that one of the arguably most important pictures in history, one which has the power to captivate our wonder and to show us that we really are all in this together, was captured from an implement of death and destruction.

You can find more information about the first picture of Earth from space in this article from Air & Space Magazine.

Capturing the Blue Marble

There have been lots of pictures taken of the entirety of the Earth from spacecraft since that first one in 1946, but The Blue Marble remains as the first full shot of our world fully lit by the sun. 

Still, there are a lot of other great images from spacecraft of the Earth that have been released. Here, for example, are satellite composite images of Earth released by NASA in 2001 and 2002:

Composite images of the Earth from space, developed by NASA

Another fantastic image of our world is one known as The Blue Marble 2012. In the first week after its release, the Flickr page for the image garnered over 3 million views and now stands at almost 6 million views total. It's a fantastic composite image of our world that was taken from the Suomi NPP satellite:

The Blue Marble and similar images are testaments to our technological and scientific progress as a species. I think everyone should take a moment, at least once in their goings about in their daily lives, to consider the importance of seeing our world as a whole. 

Capturing images and videos of our Earth gives us a chance to look at our entire biosphere as though it is one living entity. Just as all humans are composed of human cells and cells of microorganisms that work together in one large system, our world can be viewed as one entity with one biosphere composed of many trillions of trillions of organisms that all function together as one whole (think: Gaia Hypothesis). It's especially intriguing to watch video, like the ISS Ustream Live Feed, that shows some of the dynamic processes on Earth that can be seen from space.

There's no knowing yet if biology is itself a cosmological imperative or if maybe life as we know it on our little Blue Marble is just the happenstance of chemistry and physics in one place and in one time. Many of us think the former is more likely, especially given the vastness of our universe and the myriad worlds we now know to exist outside of our own, yet we won't know more without further exploration. 

When I see The Blue Marble, it reminds me that all of our technological and cultural advancement over the last two hundred thousand years may just be the beginning of our advancement as a cosmologically conscious species. The Blue Marble, as an image, couldn't have been taken without our first taking those minuscule steps into space. If we continue working together to advance ourselves, technologically and philosophically, then maybe one day The Blue Marble will be an icon for how we first took to the heavens to know more about our world and its place in the cosmos.

Update (10 June 2015):

For more information about the importance of seeing our world from space, check out this article published in Space Policy in 2010 by my friend, Sanjoy Som. He discusses the importance of The Blue Marble and has proposed that we create a world flag with The Blue Marble at its center to support future exploration for all of our species and all of our biosphere. If you're interested in getting involved in spreading the word about The Blue Marble, check out One Flag in Space as well.

Book Review: The Science of Avatar

I just finished reading The Science of Avatar by British scientist and science-fiction author Stephen Baxter. It was a most excellent read and definitely a book worth talking about.

Avatar

The film Avatar blew the socks off audiences worldwide back in 2009. Some people were even noted to have become depressed over not being able to personally experience the world that the film created. You've probably seen Avatar. If not, go watch it. You'll be happy you did, but here's a brief overview anyway:

Quick Summary: Avatar is a story about an ex-marine who travels to a world called Pandora to take control of an avatar, a genetically engineered organism that can be linked to a human "driver's" mind, so that he can interface with the indigenous, intelligent alien species (on whom the avatar is mostly based; though there are human components as well). This indigenous species are a humanoid group who call themselves the Na'vi (they are very reminiscent of various ancient Native American tribes). The ex-marine, Jake Sully, not only interfaces the Na'vi, but befriends (and eventually falls in love) with one of them. The conflict of the story is developed through the exploitation of Pandora's resources and disregard for the Na'vi and other wildlife by a company called RDA (Resources Development Administration) and their militarized force of employees (similar to our modern Private Military Contractors). The story develops as Jake Sully sides with the Na'vi in a battle against RDA and their "offense" forces. This is just a brief review of the story. If you haven't seen the film, go watch it. If you haven't seen it in a while, go watch it. I'll be here.

Seen it? Awesome!

I remember the first time I saw Avatar in the theater and thought to myself, "What a fantastical alien environment they've created here for the audience." I was stunned by the visual beauty and depth of the alien world, Pandora, and its similar-yet-alien biosphere (let's face it, most viewers would have a hard time watching the film if Pandora were truly alien - and so there are creatures that are very similar to life as we know it, and that's okay). I also really liked the story. 

It's a fairly typical story of the technologically-advanced bully wreaking destruction upon the indigenous ecology; we've seen this time and again. Many people made associations between the story of Avatar and that of stories such as Ferngully and Dances with Wolves. The blog Madatoms went as far as to create a rather humorous diagram showing some of the basic comparisons between Avatar with Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, Dune, and Ferngully:

"Avatar Dances in Ferngully's Dune" from Madatoms

Sure, the story of Avatar was not exactly new, but I think James Cameron and the other creators of the film did an excellent job telling the story within the world they created. They gave us a thrilling look at a possible dystopian future for Earth (briefly), interstellar travel, a new biosphere on an alien world, genetically engineered surrogate organisms that we can literally control with our minds, a possible role of mercenaries in future warfare, and, probably coolest of all, a biosphere where organisms can neurologically link together (thus giving the entire biosphere a "brain/mind" of its own). 

Stephen Baxter did a fantastic job reviewing some of these key points in his book on the science of Avatar. I thought I'd share a few of his ideas as well as mine for each of the major sections of the book. 

Science fiction is often inspired by scientific discovery (and vice versa); The background is a painting by willroberts04 on Deviant Art

The Science of Avatar

Stephen Baxter is a fantastic author of hard sci-fi stories. He has a background in mathematics and engineering, but has made a name for himself by writing science fiction stories with alternate history and future history slants. His approach to The Science of Avatar comes from someone who understands sci-fi but who also has a great bearing on modern science. 

The primary sections of Baxter's book are "Earth", "RDA", "Venture Star", "Pandora", "Hell's Gate", "Living World", "Na'vi", and "Avatar"; these sections discuss the possible future of Earth, the resources extracted from Pandora, interstellar travel, the planetary science related to Pandora, the potential future of human colonization of other worlds, the biology developed for Pandora, the tribe of the Na'vi, and finally the nature of the avatars.

By breaking down the film into some key points, Baxter made it easier to tackle some of the more intriguing ideas that were developed by the film's creators. The book considers everything from the ecology of Pandora to the nature of the fictional resource "unobtainium" (which appears in various science fiction stories and in various forms; in Avatar, unobtainium appears to be a mineral that serves as a superconductor at room-temperature).

Credit: Dylan Glynn

We're only given a brief glimpse of the dystopian future of Earth in Avatar, although Jake Sully gives us an idea of what it might be like: "See, the world we come from, there's no green there. They've killed their mother..." Yes, that's a little vague, but it leads us to imagine a future Earth that has succumbed to global pollution, climate change, and sprawl such that ecosystems have been destroyed globally. 

An early draft of Cameron's Avatar screenplay had intended a bit more detail of future Earth: "Jake stares upward at the levels of the city. Maglev trains whoosh overhead on elevated tracks, against a sky of garish advertising... Most of the people wear filter masks to protect them from the toxic air... It is a marching torrent of anonymous, isolated souls." This sounds like a sad future for Earth, but it is by no means unheard of with regard to science fiction. There have been plenty of sci-fi stories that have considered dystopian futures for Earth (including the films Automata, Mad Max, Blade Runner, 12 Monkeys, Cloud Atlas, Elysium, Looper, and WALL-E). 

The future of Earth in Avatar appears to be one where industrial pollution and overpopulation have finally driven the Earth to the verge of global collapse. However, the real industrial trouble we see in the film is the extraction of resources (namely unobtainium) from Pandora without any regard for the ecosystems or intelligent species who live on that world. 

We currently extract an exceedingly large amount of raw material from the Earth each year to support our industrial, technological, and commercial infrastructure and to provide for the lives that many of us enjoy. It's hard to find good estimates of the actual amount of material we mine, but most numbers I've seen range in the billions to hundreds of billions of metric tons (around 60 billion metric tons of raw material each year sounds like a reasonable estimate). Although some nations have implemented various forms of regulation on mining operations to avoid industrial pollution or the devastation of ecosystems, mining across the globe still causes deforestation, acid mine drainage, and a range of other environmental impacts.

This is the Bagger 288. Like the other Bagger mining vehicles, this sucker is one of the largest land vehicles on the planet.

The Resources Development Administration (RDA) plays the "bad guy" in Avatar. They're developed to fit with the stereotypical image of a mining company or tech company that develops their product with little to no interest for the wellbeing of the ecosystem from which they take their goods. In The Science of Avatar, Stephen Baxter does a fantastic job of considering whether or not this is a potential future for resource development. Baxter mentions some of the current plans for resource development in our solar system, especially from asteroids. Given the potential for resource development organizations to act humanely and with vested interest in more than just profits, it's sad to admit that many times in the history of our species we have pushed forward for our own gain without regard for the rest of the natural world. Maybe our future of exploring new worlds will involve companies like RDA, though I hope by that point we'd learn to act better, especially when encountering new worlds.

The Hallelujah Mountains from Avatar

One of the cooler story points in Avatar is the nature of the Hallelujah Mountains. Much like the the floating island of Laputa in Jonathan Swift's Gullivers Travels, the Hallelujah Mountains fit with a common fantasy of islands floating in the sky, but in Avatar they give these floating mountains a scientific basis. The Hallelujah Mountains are composed mostly of the mineral unobtainium. The creators of Avatar built a backstory for the origination of unobtainium along with the formation of the moon Pandora and the planet it orbits (Polyphemus, in the Alpha Centauri system) - an object (either a planetary body or maybe a neutron star) impacted Pandora early in its formation causing an enrichment in the moon with the mineral unobtainium. As Stephen Baxter points out in the book, though, with a back-of-the-envelope calculation one could see that the magnetic field required to raise the Hallelujah Mountains into the air is thousands of times greater than the magnetic field here on Earth (not only that, but it would be far stronger than the magnetic fields produced by our Sun). Although the film's creators have built a Polyphemus and Pandora system with intense gravitational fields, it's still not likely to be enough to raise the Halleljuah Mountains. However, sometimes the fun of merging science fact with science fiction is having the creative license to push the boundaries of truth a bit. Which might be what the film does with the idea of the avatars.

Jake Sully checks out his avatar in its amino tank

The avatars are pretty sweet. It's not unthinkable that we may be able to port ourselves into created bodies in the future. We're already pushing into more immersive media with improved 3D films, steps towards better virtual reality with tech like the Oculus Rift, and developing CAVE systems (I had the chance to try one of these immersive systems at the Desert Research Institute some years ago). With increasing interest in virtual worlds (like Second Life), I can definitely see people in the future looking to find ways to take on new personae, possibly through the control of another body in the real world. In fact, a pretty fun movie came out not too long ago looking into just that: Surrogates is a 2009 film featuring Bruce Willis which portrays a future where nearly everyone interacts in the real world through surrogate robots. But will we get to the point where we can take control of a biological form like that of an avatar?

Baxter points out in The Science of Avatar that the basic biological structure of the organisms of Pandora does not utilize DNA/RNA and proteins the way that Terran life does. This means that to make an avatar requires an understanding of Pandoran biology to the point of genetically engineering organisms, but, moreso, it requires that the scientists who create the avatars are capable of appropriately decoding human and na'vi heritable traits (not so hard for the human side these days) but then that they be able to logically code these two forms of life together to make a third form that becomes the avatar. It doesn't seem too outlandish, but it definitely would be a huge marvel of science to attain that level of biological engineering. It seems to me that if we were to get to that point then we could easily have fixed Jake Sully's paralysis or even may finally develop gene therapy to the point where we could make it so that human colonists could live naturally on the Pandoran surface.

Avatar ends with Jake Sully having his conscious self fully transitioned from his human body into his avatar body. It's an interesting idea, for sure. Although there really isn't a good reason to believe in dualism (the idea that our physical minds and our conscious selves are different), a lot of people have been wondering lately if we may be able to upload our brains to computers in the near future (neuroscientist Randal Koene wants to see this happen, though there are other who doubt it's even possible). The 2014 film Transcendence, starring Johnny Depp, is one of the more interesting takes on this idea in recent media. Not only does Avatar force us to question whether we could create a newly biological form like an avatar but also whether it would be possible to code everything from the structure of our brains into the brains of one of these organisms. A very intriguing consideration.

The Science of Avatar considers all of these points and more. For instance, Baxter goes into what we currently know about the possibilities for life beyond Earth, the relativistic effects of near speed-of-light travel, the history of rocketry, what we currently know about exoplanets, the potential for terraforming, and more. The Science of Avatar was definitely a fantastic read. It's inspired me to watch the film again (but this time paying a little bit closer attention to the world of the film). I think Baxter could have filled the book with so much material as to make it a tome of information, but he wrote it so that it's accessible to just about anyone and can be read in as little as one sitting. Now that I'm finished writing about the book, I think it's time to watch Avatar again. 

In case reading this hasn't inspired you to watch Avatar again yourself, maybe having a listen to the film's soundtrack will help: