Archives For space exploration

astronaut on mars

Astrobiologist Jacob Haqq-Misra likes to ask questions about our future in space. If you’ve been following this blog for a long time and the name seems familiar, it’s because you’ve read a take on a paper regarding the Fermi Paradox he co-authored. But this time, instead of looking at the dynamics of an alien civilization in the near future, he turned his eye towards ours by asking if it would be beneficial for astronauts we will one day send to Mars to create their own government and legally become extraterrestrial citizens from the start. At its heart, it’s not a really outlandish notion at all, and in fact, I’ve previously argued that it’s inevitable that deep space exploration is going to splinter humanity into independent, autonomous territories. Even further, unless we’ve been able to build warp drives to travel faster than light and abuse some quantum shenanigans to break the laws of physics and communicate instantaneously, colonists on far off worlds would eventually become not just different cultures and nations, but different species altogether.

However, the time scales for that are thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, while plans for an independent Mars advanced by Haqq-Misra are on the order of decades. And that’s very problematic because the first Martian colonies are not going to be self-sustaining. While they’re claiming their independence, they’re being bankrolled and logistically supported by Earth until a time when they can become fully self-sufficient. Obviously that’s the goal, to travel light and live off the land once you get there, but laying the basic infrastructure for making that happen in an alien wilderness where no terrestrial life can exist on its own requires a lot of initial buildup. And under three out of the five main provisions of what I’m calling the Haqq-Misra Mars Charter, the relationship between the colonists and Earth will be parasitic at best, violating international laws on similar matters, and ultimately restricting the colony’s growth and future prospects.

For example, under the charter, every piece of technology sent to Mars is now Martian property in perpetuity and cannot be taken back. What if this technology is software updated by a steady internet connection used for communication between the two worlds as NASA is planning? Will some Martian patent trolls start suing Earthly companies for not handing over the rights to their digital assets? Not only that, but if a Martian pays for this software, he or she is in violation of a trade prohibition between the planets. That’s right, no commerce would be allowed, and neither would input on scientific research that the Martians feel infringes on their right to run their world as they see fit. In other words, Earth is expected to shell out cash, send free technology, write a lot of free software stuck in legal limbo, and keep its opinions to itself. This does not sound like setting up a new civilization as much as it sounds like enabling a freeloader. Any even remotely plausible Martian colony will have to pay its own way in technology and research that should be traded with Earth on an open market. That’s the only way they’ll be independent quickly.

And of course there’s the provision that no human may lay claim on Martian territory. However, should the colonies lack a sufficiently strong armed forces, their ability to enforce this provision would be pretty much nonexistent. Sovereign territory takes force projection to stay that way so what this provision would be doing is creating an incentive for military buildup in space as soon as we set foot on Mars. Considering that the top three space powers which will be capable of a human landing on another world in the foreseeable future currently have strained relations, it is not something to take lightly. Runaway military buildup gave us space travel in the first place. It can change the world again just as quickly. And I can assure you that no nation in the world will be just fine with heavily armed extraterrestrial freeloaders with whom they can’t engage using a lot of resources these countries have to provide on a regular basis to keep them going. There’s not going to be a war for Martian independence that Haqq-Misra wants to avoid, but there may be one of Martian annexation. And probably a fairly short war at that when the troops land.

Now, all that said, after a century of colonies, terraforming attempts, and several generations of colonists who know Mars as their home, I can definitely see the planet turning independent. It’s going to have the self-sufficiency, economy, and culture to do so, and that culture isn’t going to be created ex nihlo, as Haqq-Misra is hoping to force by declaring astronauts Martians with the first step on alien soil. They will be speaking with Earth daily, many will identify with their nations of origin and their cultures, and it’s all going to take a long time to gel together into something a future researcher can call uniquely Martian. And what it will ultimately mean to be a Martian will be shaped by two-way interactions with those on Earth, not by forced isolation which could give megalomaniacs a chance to create a nation they could subjugate, or utopians a chance to build an alien commune with the consequences that would entail, while people who could help give a group of critics a means to be heard, are legally required to stay out of the way. But the bottom line is that we need to learn to thrive on Mars and spend a great deal of time there before even thinking of making it its own autonomous territory. It will happen, just not anytime soon.

self-steeping tea







pluto on flyby



pop culture aliens

If you don’t remember Chandra Wickramasinghe, here’s a quick refresher. Back in the day, the scientist worked with Fred Hoyle, the brilliant astronomer whose really poorly supported notions about the origins of life inspired many a creationist, and led him and a few of his colleagues on a hunt for evidence of panspermia, the idea that life originated somewhere in deep space and as our planet was finally settling down after its turbulent infancy, it settled here and evolved into all the species we know, and numerous ones we don’t. On the face of it, it’s not an inherently bad, or even wrong idea. It has actually been around since Darwin started wondering about the very same questions, and despite being occasionally criticized, it’s still popular in astrobiology. There does appear to be plenty of interesting evidence in favor of at least some building blocks of life coming form space, especially from asteroids and comets. This is why finding complex organic structures in the carbon layer of 67P wasn’t a surprise at all. In fact it was widely expected.

Yet according to Wickramasinghe, it’s proof that comet 67P is actually teeming with life and the scientific community at large needs to step up and announce that we found aliens. Despite how generously he’s treated by The Guardian’s staff writer however, he’s not a top scientist and his claim to expertise in astrobiology comes from declaring pretty much every newsworthy event in any way related to viral and microbial life as undeniable proof of aliens. He’s done this with mad cow, polio outbreaks, SARS, AIDS, and one of his fans recently declared that Ebola could have come from outer space. His proof of all this? Pretty much none. What papers he published to at least clear up how he thought life actually got its start and how it can travel across billions upon billions of light years so easily were in a vanity journal which was basically mocked into shutting down after failing to include a single entry of real scientific merit, and are absolutely inane. Hey, personally, I’m a huge fan of the panspermia hypothesis myself, but even in my very generous approach to reviewing astrobiology papers, what Wickramasinghe produced was absurd.

But of course, as all cranks eventually do, Wickramasinghe cried conspiracy after his work was battered by other scientists, declaring that astrobiology was a discipline under assault from the conservative geocentric cabal made up of old scientists hell bent on shutting down research on possible alien life forms in the wild. This came as a surprise to the flourishing researchers who had been studying extremophiles, theoretical alien biochemistry, and discovering more proof of organic molecules and water floating in space. You see, astrobiology is doing great and keeps advancing every day. Wickramasinghe, on the other hand, is not doing well because he doesn’t actually conduct any rigorous scientific experiments while desperately aspiring to be the person who goes into the history books as the scientist who discovered alien life. His constant attempts to stay in the media spotlight with his out-of-left-field proclamations and conspiracy theories are the typical self-serving machinations of a vain elder past his prime jealous that someone else is going to do what he aspired to accomplish. Honestly, it’s a sad way to end one’s career, to just chase after those doing the real work with outlandish soundbites and wallowing in self-pity.

pluto approach




porn starlet




[ illustration: porn starlet Ariana Marie ]

pluto render

New Horizons is just weeks away from finally flying by the most controversial object in our solar system and giving us a true picture of what it looks like. We suspect that Pluto is Triton’s twin, since both are large trans-Neptunian objects, icy would-be planets that never quite got enough mass to dominate their orbits, and since they both come from a similar blend of raw materials, it makes sense they would be very similar. There’s already evidence of Triton-like cryovolcanism taking place on Pluto and some proposals even argue that they were sojourners until Neptune managed to capture one of them and trap it in its orbit until in a few billion years, its new moon will fall and burn up in its vast atmosphere. But Pluto is more than a flash point for debates for what constitutes a planet. Since it was predicted to exist and successfully discovered, it was an incredibly fertile ground for conspiracy theorists and sci-fi authors, giving us the legends of the mysterious Anunaki, who supposedly built eldritch temples on the Cydonian Plains of Mars and colonized the Earth millennia ago, and the sci-fi horror genre as we know it.

Out there, in deep space, yet close enough to reach without world-ships or warp drives was an unknown planet that could be home to anything. It was Nibiru, the now desolate home of once thriving, hyper-intelligent aliens who fled to look for a more suitable home closer to the Sun and settled on Mars until it too died, forcing them to finally relocate to Earth and build Atlantis. Until we realized that it was a world much too small and far too cold to sustain any complex life we’d imagine could survive without requiring exotic chemistry by inner solar system standards, it was also Yuggoth, home of the twisted and bizarre Mi-go, and in future iterations of the mythos, all sorts of other nefarious creatures that cared little for humanity. Not knowing what Pluto really was and what it looked like gave conspiracy theorists inspiration, and writers the cover of eerie plausibility. But now we know that if anything is living on Pluto, it’s colonies of a still hypothetical bacterium that breathes hydrogen and needs liquid methane or ethane the same way life as we know it needs water, and the stories no longer work, not for planets in our solar system.

But just because Pluto is an icy desert doesn’t mean it’s any less interesting. If it’s a geologically active ice world like Triton, its eruptions provide a glimpse into planetary chemistry which helps describe a vast swath of worlds across the universe. There are bound to be countless dwarfs a lot like it since we have two of them just in one solar system. Likewise, if it has water ice in any significant quantity, it could be an extremely useful world for future explorers about to depart on a trip to interstellar space. It could become the last chance to fix up and refuel your spaceships when you venture out, and the first stop for maintenance when you return many years later, as well as a critical node in an interstellar communications network. No matter how soon the New Horizons flyby will be over, we’re not going to be done with Pluto. Now that it’s about to give up some of its secrets, this is only the beginning of our new relationship with it, this time not as the potential origin of malevolence and darkness, but as a destination for science and exploration, and a potential gateway to the rest of the galaxy. Don’t worry Pluto, we’ll see you soon…





cape verde





[ illustration from Erik Wernquist’s Wanderers ]

roving on mars




