We might need to step on it for a little bit more. Who's ready for some surrounding? Our first speaker today, you heard right after the neutron star merger happened? Was anybody here for that event? Yeah. Well then, all of you get to hear for the first time Dr. Jennifer Sobeck from the University of Washington. Join me in welcoming Jennifer. All right. Hi everybody. I see tonight is a Friday night edition of Astronomy on Tap which is a little rare for us. So I hope this means that we'll have you more of a rambunctious crowd tonight. But I'd like to introduce you to a series of women astronomers. Kind of tell you why I'm going to do this. I'm going to tell you a little bit of background. There will be some derogatory kind of things they have to push through. But the important thing is that they did and they made huge contributions to science. Today, I'm going to introduce you to the Harvard computers women can map the sky. Has anybody seen a movie in Figures by Chance? Anybody watched the film in Figures by Chance? The brother book in Figures by Chance. It's a fantastic book. I definitely do recommend it if you get a chance. But as you can kind of remember from that movie, basically all the women who performed math, all the women who performed calculations were referred to as computers. So this is actually the first definition of computers. This is what people actually refer to. So not like our MAGS or our PCs or anything like that. It was actually people that we referred to for computers. So I just wanted to say I have a special thanks to Rachel Baton, Oliver Frazier, who is with our department as well. And actually some people at Harvard who helped me out with this presentation, namely Warren Smith. So there's a really great quote from Isaac Newton. It's, if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. And basically this means that science is accomplished by standing on the shoulders of people who have gone before us, people who performed experiments. There's just no way to do this. And by the way, just thinking about the Nobel Prize and stuff like that, these things are awarded to, you know, a person or 200 people. Really truly today, science is a group of people, and we're all standing on one another's shoulders. So what we need for this talk today is, I was a brand new graduate student at the University of Texas, and I had been given a book by my advisor at the time, Chris Steven, a really fantastic fellow. He encouraged me, and he really pushed me in helping me through graduate school. Anyway, I was given this book, and it said C.M. Moore. I was like, oh great, I'll take a look through it. I'm sure his work is really, really good. And he was like, no, it's not him, it's her. And my eyes just went, I was just so happy. Because I have to admit up until that time, besides Murray and Currie, I hadn't really heard of that many of the stars. I hadn't really heard of that many women businesses who really made a difference to see this and understand this. And so this is Charlotte Moore Steadily. She was a Princeton computer. She did a multitude of things, but she really just was a very precise wavelength and multiple tables. Multiple is a little bit of astrophysics. But she is the one that kind of motivated me to go further, to go deeper and see what other computers were doing. And I think it's really important for us to know that, hey, in science, we're still on the shores of many people, who were these people? And we're some people who kind of left out of history and not mentioned. And it turns out there were a few.  Basically in the 1860s and the 1870s, the Harvard Observatory was really pretty well established at this time. They were developing a bunch of facilities, both in North America and in South America, so in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere. And they were starting to really collect a lot of data. And so during the 1860s and the 1870s, really could volunteer, such as Eliza Quincy, but they were never given full status at Harvard. So they spent their time, they worked hard, and they tried to volunteer as student assistants.  We're going to lease, you know, employ women on a regular basis, and we're going to kind of set up a staffing type of program. And so some of the very first computers that we've heard of, and they weren't quite given that term just yet, but are Archie Rogers, Archie Saunders, and Anna Willack. And they were just working on, you know, a few basic projects pretty much under the supervision of the Harvard Observatory chief. In 1876, there was a change in the directorship of Harvard Observatory. And it was a man with a name of Edward Charles Pickering. He was a head of the time boy. He supported people, he supported women. And he actually said, hey, you know what, we're going to appoint women officially, we're going to need them in computers, we're going to give them a title, but at the time he said we thought it was respectable. And he remained at Harvard College Observatory for the next 40 years. There we go. And just working hard in decisions leading to how clean the room is and so forth and so on. But the funny thing is, is that they're working on lab notebooks and actually these notebooks are pretty much the same today. So they were using these to kind of catalog the various observations. So this Pickering really does continue this program and he actually built it. So he starts to hire more and more women observers. And in fact, it's his opinion that women do a better job than men. He says they're more meticulous, they're more precise, and they have tiny fingers that can do the work. So anyway, but the women observers, actually the women's computers, pardon me, were a bit of a bargain. As you can see, they are paid 25 to 30 cents per hour. Their Aboriginal colleagues were placed at least paid like 80 cents or a dollar per hour. So it was a bit of a wage gap. And they work roughly about six days a week. Just to give you an idea of these women who are working for Harvard, they're being employed as staff. They've actually probably received a few of them, decreased at this point, but this is before Radcliffe even opened. So in 1879, Radcliffe opened as a university and it was the women's section, or the women's college of Harvard. In 1882 Pickering really picks up the pace. It's really become a huge scientific endeavor from Harvard into Victoria. And he begins these photographic stellar investigations. He starts creating the plate collection. That's something we're really going to focus on today. So these plates are basically either images or spectra of astronomical objects, things that we're very, very interested in. And then finally, the last person besides Pickering to really get this program is a woman by the name of Anna Draper. Her husband, Dr. Draper, they actually had an observatory, their own personal observatory. This is still kind of in the era where you could be a quote unquote gentle woman observer, or a gentleman observer.  So her husband, unfortunately, passes away but he's doing this huge stellar catalog just starting to starve and start to starve. He's walking throughout the sky, trying to give them identifications, trying to map the sky. He passes away during this time and she issues a call. She said, hey, please help me finish this catalog this work with my husband. Nobody answers it. So she goes up to Pickering and she says, hey, can you help me do this? She gives them instrumentation. She gives them money. And from this, the actual whole observatory is her computer core is actually formed. So we're very, very thankful. By the way, just to let you know, Harvard College finally got a good one in students in 1977. All right. So what are these plates? What do they look like? And what do these computers actually have to do with? And so basically, Harvard College Observatory houses one of the largest collections if not the largest collection in the world of plates. They're like flash emulsion plates, right? So we're not quite at film, but we're basically using like a photographic emulsion to develop images or spectra of astronomical objects that we're interested in. And so you can kind of see here on the left. Here's an actual spectrum. And if you're a little familiar with your physics slash astrology, this is H beta, which is basically a spectral line of hydrogen. This is H alpha right here. And this is what they're working with star by star by star in looking at these equations. So you can see this particular plate. There's lots of spectra. And each of these actually represents a stellar spectrum of a cluster. So basically this is a collection of stars. So they're spending a lot of time getting really deep into this. And they're looking at each one of these spectrum. And this is the tool that they use to do this. It's called a fly swatter. But basically we're sitting there with the magnification, the magnification glasses. They're putting them up to their eyes and they're just more featured by the feature of what they're going for each of these stars. So it's really, really interesting. As you can tell, as I mentioned here, there's about 20 hundred telescopes. So all of these telescopes are collecting data in the West, Peru, South Africa. And then basically this program with computers can analyze 480,000 plates. Roughly 100,000 plates of spectra. So we're talking over half a million plates that we were able to accomplish over the period from 1890 to 1940. So 15 years. It's a really odd fortune. So our first woman, and I forget to tell you, I'm wearing a t-shirt. And it features the computers actually. So who's seeing the NASA Lego weapon set? I'm so proud that it has actually been released. It's something that I definitely participated in with my fellow colleagues that have been giving this release. Well, there's Legos now of all sorts of astronomers collect the series. But anyway, so I have a Lego weapon set. That's what I'm wearing a t-shirt and it's featuring some of the computers that I'll talk about now. So the first of these is Henrietta Swan-Leven. She was really one of the initial computers. So she had that full computer title in the observatory. She was very much interested in variable stars. And so what it featured here is just a really nice nearby variable star. In fact, it turns out to be a sappy and I'll talk a little bit more about that more in just a second. And here's one of her actual plates. And if you can't see it too much when you zoom in, you can actually see the identifications that she made on this particular plate. So she graduated from Radcliffe and she started volunteering. Eventually she got that computer title. Her thing was classification. So she's looking at the spectrum and she's going through and she's classifying all the lines of the spectrum. She was basically looking at these things from superposition. So you have one plate and then another plate taking in just a little time later. And she's super-employed, too. To really understand that there was variability in the stars, meaning if the positions of the lines shifted back and forth. She discovered roughly 2400 variable stars. Half of all the new variable stars at that period of time. She was prolific. So in 1908 she publishes a catalog of roughly 2000 variable stars that had been identified in the large and small Magellanic clouds. Anybody familiar with Magellanic clouds? No? But basically these are satellite galaxies on Milky Way and one of the reasons you're probably not familiar with them is because you can see them over here. So when you get a chance and you're done from Peru or Chile or Brazil, you look up into the next sky and you'll probably see people in the small and large Magellanic clouds. Anyway, these images were more sensitive than any images she had previously made and then these was really starting to be something of a pioneering discovery. So here's her plate. It was taken with a small Magellanic cloud and at this point she's actually this is something pretty, pretty special. And so she does have an issue of publication like mentioned and she starts to talk about these faint variable stars. And then what she mentions in particular a really nice finding that she arrives at is that taking within two to three days of each other, so plates taken within two to three days of each other have equally interesting results showing that the periods of many variables aren't being short. She's just now something a little bit special but she knows it. She knows that she's discovered something really, really special. And what she discovered is something called seconds. And seconds have a really well-established luminosity period relationship. So understanding their brightness of luminosity as a function of their periods, which is basically a period thinking about how fast the star is fluctuating or how fast it's varying. And so this is her original plot. Yeah. And so what you can see here on the y-axis is luminosity. And it goes from faintest to brightest. And then on the x-axis right here is the period of time, so very short period fluctuations versus very long period fluctuations. And this is actually her plot right here. And so she gives this relationship, she publishes it, she establishes it, but it's a pretty darn kind of item. And what she said is showing that there's a simple relation between the brightness of the variables and their periods. So that's actually a quote from her publication. She went on to provide the first calibration of the slope of this relationship, but as there was no known distance to the MCU and we knew it was out there, but we didn't know how to establish a distance, she wasn't actually really able to calibrate it. And just before she was able to give this information, she actually passed away. So, we have Edwin Hubble here. They both, of course, are familiar with Celsu, the next generation, which is going to be the Jane Duet, say Celsu, but Hubble was still definitely operating at this point. And Hubble pretty much stood on the shoulders of Henrietta Leavitt, but we didn't know it, right? So Hubble went in and he examined you know, various seconds, so he really well understood the varying stars, right? And examined them in a small Magellanic cloud image you can see right here. Here's an image, an actual image, from part of the observatories of the Magellanic cloud. And he was able to sit there and look at the seconds, especially in the Magellanic cloud and in drama, he was able to establish, using this period of the mass relationship, that it was a galaxy way external to the Milky Way. So first, we didn't understand, you know, if it was just something like some sort of satellite or if it was indeed its own external galaxy. He continued this idea and eventually he was able to measure the local rate and the expansion of the universe. This is a fundamental finding for all the Hubble constant. And it's something that today we can investigate and we actually try to calm down and understand because it's related to the expansion of the universe. For a hundred years, Hubble used, you know, for a hundred years, Hubble was actually credited with this idea. He was credited with this period of the mass relationship and then heaven and hell he lived in the community. So now we have Annie John Cannon. Annie John Cannon is one of my parents. She's a spectroscopist. She's a full-fledged spectroscopist studying the normal stars. She works pretty much for a long period of time. And what I've kind of shown here is just her working at a desk. She's one of these women that made the transition from being a computer to almost being like a staff photographer. I've shown here in the middle, spectra. And of course those from Woy-Gee Bibs. I'm going to know what Woy-Gee Bibs is. Okay, well, you've got enough questions for tonight. I'll ask you later. But anyway, it's the spectra of all the stars of high eddies, which is an open cluster in the disk of our galaxy. And this is an actual notebook from the period that is currently stored at Harvard. So she begins volunteering at the observatory where she's taking grad classes at Bradley. She's actually deaf. So she's doing this work. She's accomplishing this in all the time you're in here. So it's very impressive. And just impressed by our work. And he starts to promote her. And as you can see in 1911, she kind of goes to a second curator of the astronomical photographs. But at the time, the president of Harvard University did not want to allow her to be listed as staff. So you won't find her name in the staff directory at Harvard. Eventually she was beyond this and in 1938, she's finally recognized so a year, 27 years later. She's finally recognized as Harvard staff. And she becomes the official curator of astronomical photographs. She averaged three stars a minute. She averaged three stars a minute. And she was able to classify over a quarter of a million stars during her career. That's just the normal. I can't do that. So she was incredibly impressive. She basically did retire. She did retire eventually and her position was left open for anybody to actually fulfill her position with that level of just efficiency and experience. So Canon is really nice because of course she started this spectral classification and the understanding of the whole stellar sequence. So I'm looking at stars and I really said they have characteristics of properties but how do I begin to understand this? How do I begin to type these stars and try to prove them and make sense of what I'm seeing? So she was able to refine the classification systems of front and body. She reduced the number of categories and made it really straight forward to understand, hey, this star is here before we see this side. It has this temperature, so for this on. And so there's this, if you've ever taken the Astro 101 class, there is an acronym that we use to help people understand the stellar classification system. And it's O, B, A, F, G, K, M. Anybody knows what the traditional acronym stands for? O, B, a fine girl and kiss me tonight? There's that. That is not my favorite acronym. So in my own Astro classes, I've asked for people to come up with ideas substitute acronyms. I took these from a class that Stony broke but Old Bald and Fat Generals keep messages.  So she found this classification system it was a huge step forward and kind of what I've shown here in the middle plot is just a prism sector. So this is the first time that we were able to break apart light to a spectrum we used to prism. So something that, you know, I think we're kind of all familiar with. And here's the actual stellar sector's inputs. This is for main sequence stars, so basically even stars that are in the prime of their lifetimes. And you can see here there's a nice temperature down to the lowest and there's actually change what you can see with this spectrum. I'll show you more in just a second. And she had a really great applying of distinction. Anyway, she has a really nice quote. She says each spectrum is a gateway to a wonderful new world. And so here is her stellar classification system and this is of course a modern day version of this where you can see O stars at the top and M stars at the bottom. They have a disservice temperature of 44,000 Kelvin roughly. M stars are pretty cool at 32 in the 40. Our own son is a G star and our own son has a temperature of roughly 5,800 Kelvin just to give you an idea. So Canon's system was so stable, so robust that it was adopted by the IAU. And today it's known of course as the Harvard spectral classification system of the Canon, but the Harvard. So there's one other woman who I found really fascinating and her name is Sillian Payne, the author. She's Sillian Payne. Sorry, I don't have a bunch of them. But anyway, she is just phenomenal and she really, out of all these computers, she's the one to achieve the most in the greatest transition in her career. So she was around for Harvard pretty much primarily during the 20th century and she tried to initially study at Cambridge for the paper to know we don't accept women. So she went to Harvard at the time. People found her to be so fascinating, so intelligent that they actually allowed her, they created a special degree category for her and she's the first person to write a story from Rise Left to Women PhD. So she was that impressive. And it took her about 30 years though so she gets the PhD, she goes to work for Harvard with so many toys. It takes her about 30 years and finally they give her a professorship. Just to not let you guys know today she was assigned for most professors transitioning from like a postdoc so a period after her PhD to professorship is seven years. It took her 30. And eventually she became the first woman to head the department at Harvard. So she was a third department head but the first one to do so and she's just amazing. So what I've shown you here is a view of the sun because this is one of her primary research topics and I just love this view of the sun. This is from NASA which is brown-based and space-based images of our sun at different wavelengths. So each wavelength between piece of information in this picture clearly shows that and it gives you a different view of the sun. You get an idea of the s-tactivity and you get an idea as to content and this is just a really beautiful view of the sun. And these are her notes. One of the things she worked on is line streams and identifications. And so here this is her at the telescope right here. She's taking data for her doctoral work and then what she discovered at the time is that the sun is made primarily of hydrogen and foam and only 2% of the sun is heavy elements. So it's basically hydrogen and heavy elements and this shows people because people thought, hey, the sun and the earth they should be the same. They should have the same composition but she was the one to prove it. She saw a connection also between atomic physics and the understanding of these lines that we see in the absorption spectrum and she was really able to make that connection. And she was understanding to understand this as a function of the layers of the sun and her single exploring law on atomic physics was the layers of the sun. She was able to show that the many differences of lines in the spectrum were due to different atomic ionization states. Sorry, that's all we are with physics. Let me get you guys. We haven't added up here without much physics, I don't believe. And that basically different temperatures it was related to different temperatures and different elements of the elements. So here is an actual spectrum of our sun and I want you to be impressed because each of these dark spaces right here so basically the black body spectrum wanted to be the rainbow and so there's a background of the rainbow that comes from our sun. And essentially each of these dark places right here is where some sort of element has taken out light from that background of the rainbow. And each of these dark spaces corresponds to a different element. So that's how we're able to understand what's in our sun. Not just what's in our sun but what's in stars all throughout our galaxy. So her work was solely pioneering. And of course I've given this nice little periodic table of elements something I referred to in my last talk but basically shown that all these things in this periodic table of elements are actually kind of representing this one segment of the solar spectrum. So her finding was so revolutionary that Henry Norris Russell said no I don't believe you. No, I'm a rabbit. And so he went down, he was actually Princeton too so I won't lie a little bit of the Harvard Princeton dynamic came in there. He took his own observations he said, ah because this finding is true he published it and actually he was credited with finding your simple, simple decade afterwards. So... Exactly. So I want to point you to two references tonight and I really want to highlight that these women succeeded through kind of adverse and tough times but they really did persevere and the thing is, is that even though history did forget them at times but their work still came through and I'm so grateful to know that because they're an inspiration to me. And so what Harvard has done is actually started to invest in these computers these women that gave 50 years of time to figure out the astronomical science and really truly the work in before. So one of these is called Project FEDRA which is preserving Harvard's early data and research astronomy and one of the reasons I'm pointing out to you is I know everybody has a time of a London time but I really believe in citizen science and this is one of the ways that you can contribute. So you can go to Project FEDRA's web page and what you can do is perform transcription of the album, you're going to know what's in your air just so you're actually helping science and archiving to move forward for these women. So as you can see right here, here's the Project FEDRA FEDRA results where Anna Jump Cannon Cecilia Payne and then Henrietta Swann Newman and so by the way, Henrietta you need some help here. But if you do get a chance, even just taking a look at their notes is absolutely fascinating and realizing what they understood over 100 years ago. It's just amazing. And so I gave a few just links down here and by the way, these women were so prolific that all computers behind generated 2,400 notes. The other really cool thing and this I think people relate to too is big data. So the funny thing is for a long time we had these photographic plates and roughly in about the 80s 90s we transitioned to CCDs. So basically like your iPhone, all these cameras they work off the CCDs. So we had these plates and they were in storage for forever, collecting dust and hey, there might be some information on them. And the way that we really understood that these plates were valuable is they actually found an old photographic plate from about 70 years ago where the first exoplanet was actually damaged. So it was really quite fascinating. So what they did is they built a device and said hey, we're going to upload all these devices into a scanner. We're going to collect the information from the scanner as you can see here and then we're going to make all this available to scientists. We're going to make all this available to scientists. And so essentially all of this data it was taken roughly 80 to 90 years ago it was being used now in current research so it's really, really fascinating. And I just want to point out too that I've talked tonight about 30 minutes. There were so many more computers and by the way there were so many more computers throughout various institutions and various laboratories. And so right here this is the rocket with it. So again kind of thinking about that these are also women who worked on various programs that NASA had established. Here's an image of them right here. There's one whole book that goes with the rocket women and I highly suggest you take it out and probably be a good movie too at some point. So I just want to end this really quickly. I think I've been really great but I doubt it. Anyway, but the quote from Jenna Dyer is learned she's a fantastic astrophysicist and she's a whoops whoop. She's a great advocate for stuff. And one of the things that she says is so if we want to get to know our best possible discoveries, we want to get to these best possible discoveries then everyone has to have a seat at the table. So my presentation tonight is just to the iceberg and I hope I can encourage you to look into this and kind of see who are the people that really made our scientific discoveries. Thank you very much. And there's a question. Like where did I get this awesome shirt? It doesn't come in men's sizes. You see women. Good question. So basically she asked whether or not we see when you see a lot of publications when you see a lot of mentions of these women you see initials as opposed to their names. And so I will tell you that we do I refer to myself as Jay Stowek but I will tell you that's a little bit of a dodge. You're right. It's really interesting to maybe pursue just those first stages. Yeah, they definitely refer to themselves by their initials. I also have to tell you guys I hope it's not too negative. I hope you can help me out here to feel positive about this stuff. But looking for images for these guys and it was just fascinating and I'm so thankful because by the way this presentation stands on the shoulders of so many people. But this particular image is known as the paper doll image. Every a lot of images that I found are figurines.  What is the recognized definition of an exoplanet? Nice try. So you ask what is the definition of an exoplanet? I know the answer. But no one comes to my phone. It's actually going to come in a few minutes because there's a break between me and the next speaker who's by the way absolutely fabulous. She's written a book. I highly encourage you to say I highly encourage you to have another beer. But are there any other questions? This is a really good question. So basically do the plates decorate over time? And the answer is yes for some of them. They try to hold a variety of different emotions so basically different chemistry to get the plates. Also they try chemistry which is really kind of interesting to see which emotions were more sensitive to red light versus which emotions were more sensitive to human life. So basically you move the piece of information when you're looking at a star and when you're looking at an other one. And so yeah, unfortunately some of them because of the differences of emotion they didn't agree and actually some of them were trashed.  It's important. Short time. Anything else? Yeah. Good question. So basically I had mentioned that I also planned to actually do the scene in a photographic plate. So yeah, there's a study on it. And especially thankfully to this dash project the one that I mentioned the digitizing of all these Harvard images. Yeah, there's that dash to see it again just based on current specter if we go back and see hey was this perhaps seen maybe six years ago maybe eight years ago. See if there are different kinds of all that up. All right. The question is really high school to give these talks. Not yet. I think I'd like to very much I'm involved in the mentorship program because I had somebody mentor me actually so I want to kind of repay that and so I'm involved in one mentorship program right now. I'd like to be involved in more so maybe this is an opportunity and I'll make this talk really hopefully and really find out. All right. Hey guys, I hope you have a wonderful Friday night.  Thank you. Thank you. We're going to have to take a 10 minute break. Everyone can use the restroom and get more beer. And then we're going to give you trivia results. So come on back next 10 minutes. To tell us whether or not we have discovered the second dirt or not. Yes or no. Please join me in welcoming Elizabeth. I'm Brett Scott. Because I too have a women in astronomy legged t-shirt which I almost wore but then I was like it's cold. So I guess my regrets are 50-50 because I was worried about that second part. So how have we found Earth 2.0? I'm going to start our story with what I hope is a relatively familiar system of planets. This one. So on the far left we have our nearest star the sun and then moving outwards we have our rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars and just in case anyone has had a few too many beers you're here. Beyond that we have our gas giants which are predominantly atmosphere and kind of masses. So Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and then some of you might be saying Pluto. And what we say to you is that we don't talk about Pluto. Our sun is not the only star with planets around it. Now our story begins in the early 1990s or we found the first planet around a pulsar which you all know from doing your quiz earlier. So these were two planets initially discovered around a pulsar in the early 1990s and everyone ignored them. A pulsar is a freaky dead star and people were like yeah, too weird. Since then we have discovered over three and a half thousand exoplanets I believe the count was this morning 3,605 and roughly one third of those are approximately Earth sized by which I mean that physical radius is less than twice as. So this has led to an obvious question could any of these Earth sized worlds actually be Earth like? Well let's do the obvious thing and check the news. So we have headlines like Earth 2.0 NASA says scientists have found the closest to it outside the solar system or we have NASA's discovery of a solar system with seven Earth-like planets will change how we hunt for alien life. Or we have Earth-like planets around Proxima Centauri that's our nearest star. It must be just like us, right? So, oh yes and then spotted are alien neighbors. NASA found a group of Earth-like planets that could host alien life using Kepler. So based on this, I would say well, I mean this is just Earth everywhere. I have to tell you we're about to do a bit of ice bucketing. So let's wait a minute and do something more controversial and ask what we know about these planets. So 96% of planets so basically all of them are found using one of two techniques. The first technique we call the radial velocity or sometimes the doctor wobble because it sounds cooler. So this involves the star making a bit of a wobble because of the planet's gravity. So we normally think of the planet going around the star and that fortunately is true but the star also responds to the planet's gravitational pull which is a titty bit of all. And as it does it wobbles towards the Earth and further away and that causes its light waves to get stretched and compressed so we see a red and blue shift in the light and that indicates the planet. The second one is a little bit more intuitive. The planet simply passes between us and the star and blocks out a bit of the star light. Now we call this the transit technique. So what do these methods tell us? Well the doctor wobble tells us the planet's minimum mass. The reason it's the minimum is we do not know the orientation of that orbit. If it is exactly edge on, then we get the mass. If however that orbit is tilted we underestimate the mass because only part of the star's wobble is in our direction. And we have no way of knowing from this technique alone what it is. Transits gives us the planet radius. Not the minimum radius, it does give us the legit radius. And there's no small print to that one. So this means that typically for any exoplanet discovery we know a sum total of two things. We know either something about the planet's extent so either it's radius or it's minimum mass. And we know something about how far from the star so we know how much radiation, how much star light that planet is receiving. And the problem is neither of those actually directly relate to what's going on on the surface. So why then do we get the following news announcements? In 2014 a planet with a very catchy moniker, GJ832C, was discovered. And this has a minimum mass because it was found through that radial velocity technique of five times that of the Earth. So it was a super-Earth. However, when the research paper came out, see how professional that looks, the abstract says the following. No, no, I'm not even going to bother reading the paper. I am looking at that top abstract section, the introduction, the bit that really everyone reads. And it says the following. Given the large mass of the planet, it likely would possess a massive atmosphere. And therefore, GJ832C is more likely to be a super Venus, because Venus has colossal absences. Surface temperature of Venus, anyone? Yeah, it is 460 Celsius, and I don't even need to translate that into Fahrenheit because it's really irrelevant to this stage. Longest is spacecraft has ever survived on the Venetian surface. Any bets? Well, it's a bit better than your guesses, but really it makes very little difference. It's about two hours. So this is vanilla 13, and that temperature is hot enough to melt and melt, so that spacecraft didn't survive all that long. So, likely to be Earth 2.0, we're going to go with another one. So we got Newfound Alien Planet, GJ832C may be able to support life. GJ832C is the best candidate for supporting life. I'm guessing whoever wrote that was in Arizona in the summer. GJ832C potentially habitable super-Earth discovered a mere 16 light years away. Or maybe this potentially habitable super-Earth is just 16 light years away. So, you know, really we should be packing our bags right now. It's clearly around the corner and it's a big holiday.  I mean, I didn't even read the paper here. I just read the abstract. So how do we go from... Are you going to read any part of the paper? It's going to be the abstract. So how did we go so horribly wrong? And the answer, at least part of the answer, is something called metrics. I think the most people have heard of. This first metric I'm going to introduce is the so-called habitable zone. So the habitable zone, the official definition, is where an earth-like planet can maintain liquid water on its surface. So the edges are, if you take our planet and you shove it outwards, there comes a point where all our water freezes and we become a snowball that is the outer edge of the habitable zone. Conversely, if you grab the earth and give it a really big shove inwards, there's a point where all our water evaporates and that is the inner edge of the habitable zone. However, like all real-estate contracts, there is small print. And the small print in this one... Oh, sorry, it's a binary. You're either in or out. Small print in this one is earth-like.  Indeed, of all the planets we found in the habitable zone around their stars, there are five times as many planets that are very likely to be gas giants like Jupiter that have any kind of solid surface. So a different planet may or may not be able to maintain water in the same location. So for our Glossier 832C, it sits just on the inner edge of the habitable zone. So the question is, is it earth-like enough like is it an earth clone so we can use this habitable zone contract? Well, I mean, we just said it five times on that subject, you know? Like, it's obviously not identical to us. Therefore, we can't apply the habitable zone. Therefore, we're not really talking about liquid water. And I mentioned it's supervenous. I... No. So the second problem we had was with the second metric that is massively falling out of use. I like to think because I keep giving this talk. And that was called something called the Earth Similarity Index. And it looks like this. It looks very professional. However, we can break it down and say all this equation is saying is you take the planet's property and you subtract from it the same property of the earth and you throw into the arbitrary waiting and you multiply these all together. And the properties we consider are density, radius, escape velocity and surface temperature. Problem number one. None of these four conditions actually measure surface conditions at all. And we're missing loads of important factors that are going to control what it's like on the surface. For example, the fact that we have plate tectonics is kind of a big deal. Our volcanoes actually produced our atmosphere if you care about that. The fact that we have a nice circular bit without extreme seasons, I mean again, that might be nice. Our magnetic fields prevents our atmosphere from being stripped by the sun. Our rock type helps the amount of greenhouse gases in our air. And the fact that we actually have water does help us in supporting it. So, you know, it's all points, but none of those are at all mentioned in these four promises. So it becomes a little bit like this Facebook game. Which of your friends do you most look like? So this is the same basic idea. They take properties of your photo. They take the same properties of your friend's photo. They subtract them and they look for the smallest difference. So, this is me. Which of my friends do you think I most look like? Let's have a drum roll for that. So the answer turned out to be this bag of chips. This bag of chips. My buddy Will decided to replace his profile picture with a bag of frasils. Which you are the good chips, I have to say. And this Facebook game was like hally out your twins. Phones, but either we haven't got enough comparison points between me and this bag of frasils. Or possibly we're using the wrong ones. Which brings me to this four list again. The second problem is that we can only observe two things and none of them are actually these. So we can observe either radius or minimum mass. Or we can observe the amount of radiation the planet is getting. Aha! You might think you lied because look surface temperature that must be correlated with the amount of radiation the planet is getting. And yet, it's not. So we've got four quantities based on two measurements and either of them are these four quantities. So, for example, the equilibrium temperature here is what you get from the amount of radiation. It is the temperature at the top of the atmosphere. So the equilibrium temperature for our planet is a rather chilly minus 18 Celsius. Whereas our actual global average is 15 Celsius. So minus 18, the point is everything's frozen. 15, I think we're talking about what is that at Fahrenheit? 60, to me. And as I mentioned Venus is hot, but its equilibrium temperature is about late 80s.  But again, its surface temperature is something that that's left, so no, not really. So the atmosphere has a very strong effect in what happens to that radiation when it reaches us. And it's not like a linear effect. You can't just add 33 and call it a done deal. Yeah, I think it goes suddenly doesn't work for Venus. So we have these two measurements and oh yeah, right, sorry. So yes, this planet that we're looking at here. This has only two, so it has the minimum mass and it has the amount of radiation. And what happened was these two were used to make a guess at these four and then the result was a value 0.81 out of 1. And the claim was, well, if you're above 0.8, you know what it's like. So we took two properties, none of which measure surface conditions. We used them to derive four other properties that we can't measure, and we ended up with a value that claimed to be identical to Earth and everyone believed it. So just in case you weren't convinced, what do we think the ESI of Venus would be? If we observe Venus as an exoplanet, as a clue, Venus is very similar in size to the Earth. So I have one who thinks it's 0.5 or above. Who thinks it's 0.8 or above? Who thinks it's 0.9 or above? Yeah, the last group is perfect, it's 0.9. So yeah, Venus, super habitable, identical to the Earth and any volunteers who goes there next week? So yeah, HCs, we hate them. What can we do? Well, we can't yet measure what it's like on these planet's surfaces. So we can't yet tell if we really have found Earth 2.0. All we can do is say something is Earth-sized. We can't yet say whether it's at all Earth-like. But how patience, my young padawans, because their help is a hand. So currently we do know of Earth-sized planets, but we don't know about Earth-like. The next generation of telescopes is going to change that. These guys are going to be looking at the planet atmosphere. And when they do, if they manage to decipher the composition of the atmosphere, we will get our first glimpse of something that is on the surface. So JWST flies in 2019. Aerial is the European Space Agency's mission flying in 2026, I think. And Twinkly is a little UK mission that they're hoping to get up sooner rather than later. But all of these are aimed at looking at atmospheres and these may be able to tell us what is going on on surface and may even give us the first sniff of life on another planet. And maybe, maybe then we'll be able to talk seriously about Earth 2.0.  I wrote an exoplanet book and if I haven't demonstrated how many wonderful ways there are to die horrifically on these planets in this talk, I mean, I have a lot more options for you guys. So there are hot Jupiters, which are planets the size of our largest gas giant on all bits of last four Earth days. We have Tatooine worlds with two suns, road planets with no star at all, planets with secrets of lava or tar. All of them are horrifying. And they're all in this book. So I have today with me four copies, which I will happily part with for $25 each. However, I also have a bajillion little cards that you can take as a memorabilia to this talk. Because they only come in perhaps a six million, so please do come out with that. And also these bookies at most bookshops on Amazon is also specifically stopped to aid as a cabinet of Hill because I'm giving a top letter tomorrow night and they promise I'll get the book in. So thank you very much. So the question is, our atmosphere didn't exactly come instantly. So could we tell if a planet was going to be Earth-like but wasn't yet? And that actually is a very active area of study where we talk about the Earth as an exoplanet. And what people do is they sort of rewind the clock and say based on what we knew about Earth's development of life what would an early Earth look like if you could see its atmosphere? So often when we talk about the Earth you hear the term pale blue dot but we might have like a pale orange dot because they're hazes or from an early atmosphere. And that definitely is being considered so we hope we could recognise early Earth as well as current Earth. I mean I'd recommend my book. I would recommend talking about early Earth atmosphere as a particular unit or just generally.  There's a girl called Jada Ani who does a lot of work on this but I would check out conference presenters would be one of them I would get. So for instance last November there was a conference called Habitable Worlds in Wyoming and they have a few things online they were actually live streaming I'm not sure whether talks are still available but they definitely have some panel discussions that are available and the scientists on that panel would be a great place to start looking up their papers because they're all studying Habitable Worlds. So what if there's multiple planets? Oh yes, so if we use Doppler effect to find planets what if there's more than one planet in the system actually you can distinguish that so you fit the wobble to a periodic motion of a planet and you can actually unpick multiple orbits in that so you want the wobble to appear periodically every time the planet laps so you can tell if that is changing slightly you've more likely got more and more planets in the system and by matching the wobble to that you can pick out different planets. What are some methods that might be able to detect those various components of actual planets? So for some of them we're a bit mystified we don't know yet how to detect a magnetic field for instance but the presence of an atmosphere detecting that composition is going to be really key and the reason is that the planet's atmosphere is the result of pretty much everything that's going on in the planet like if it didn't have a magnetic field we would expect that atmosphere to be stripped for example the geology, the volcano is going to be adding to that atmosphere life is going to be adding to that atmosphere really the whole planet system the products of which we're going to be seeing in the gases in the air so the challenge is not whether we will see what's going on it's whether we will understand the fingerprints that we're going to get as a result of that Would you be able to determine if there was an atmosphere being produced in the surface but escaping fast enough where the magnetic field wasn't present? So the question is could we tell if the atmosphere was strategically produced but being simultaneously stripped it all comes down to time scales like how fast is stripping compared to the atmospheric production generally speaking the atmosphere is outgassed from the planet fairly early on in this history so you would expect the atmosphere to be there and be about to be stripped or be already lost so you shouldn't get the situation where you miss it because it's actively stripped I think Telescopes, you said you might actually be able to see the surface if these telescopes you could actually find what's the astronomy community doing here is that the huge announcement what would the astronomy formulate that message or based on the media we seem to be announcing it prematurely 10 years earlier I think there will be a lot of steps before we get to that stage so one of the things we're going to see is this complex signature a hope of gases now the big question will be is that definitely biological or can we do it a biologically so for example our atmosphere contains a lot of oxygen does that mean definitely life absolutely oxygen is definitely produced by life but if you look at the atmosphere of some of the Jupiter's moons like Europa they have oxygen atmospheres but they don't have life so it is possible to be able to produce a lot of these would be biosignatures by a biotic means so I don't think there will be nothing nothing nothing shabam we found aliens I think it will be this is the stage we're seeing some interesting signatures what could this mean what are the possibilities so I hope we give everyone a very gentle build up thank you very much our next event is March 28th back on our website I hope to see you there thanks for coming out


Greetings. I'm Ron Clement and this is in the studio. I've been an avid reader of science fiction since I was a kid. One of the things I love about Davis is that I've always been able to go to a locally owned independent bookstore where I can browse and buy from an excellent inventory of science fiction books. In this town I can always find someone who shares my passion for the genre. And if I happen to be riding my bicycle through village homes I can advance upon one of science fiction's most honored writers. That man, Kim Stanley Robinson, is our guest today. Stan is the author of numerous novels, novellas, and short stories. Among his works are New York Times bestsellers, and he has won the Locusts, World Fantasy, Hugo, Campbell, and Nebula Awards. Stan? Pleasure having you here. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Ron. My pleasure. Good to be on. I understand you've lived in Davis for a long time. What first brought you to the community? Well, I came here with a girlfriend in 1978. And then I stayed until 1980 or so and went back to San Diego, came back to get together with my wife, Lisa. And we've been married now 30 years. And we were in Davis while she finished her degree. We left in 1985 for two years in Zurich and four years in Washington. And then came back to Davis to bring up our kids and spend the time here since, I guess it's now been 22 years that we've been back. We came back in 1991. So, three stints in Davis for me. You see yourself staying here indefinitely? It's home. I've lived here so long that although I grew up in Southern California, I think of it as home. And I like it. So, it's our home. Well, I love Davis. I've been here since 1967. Of all the places I've been, this is one I always want to come back to. Very nice place to live. Great place to raise a family as well. That's right. And also, it's a small town. You know people. It has a small town feel. It has small town efficiencies. You can get a little work done. You don't get caught in traffic jams. There's a lot of things about Davis that I forget through the years because I've been here so long. I forget how much I like them because I take them for granted. But then when I go other places and I come back, I realize that these are real advantages for living a sane and productive life. That's always good to hear. Were you committed to being a full-time writer when you came to Davis or did that develop after you got here? That is really just a manifestation of the last 20 years. I was a teacher at UC Davis. I taught freshman composition so I was a visiting lecturer. And then when our kids were born, I was the home parent. I took care of the boys. My wife has been a full-time scientist the whole time. So, it was only really with the success of Red Mars and the fact that we had two kids to take care of that I stopped doing teaching and started writing really part-time but they call it full-time because I didn't do anything else except bring up the boys. Were you trying to be a writer or were you sort of, when you say part-time developing full-time, is that fairly typical for an author? I think it has to be. Really, writing is a strange game and there's a lot of what you might call unrewarded excellence out in the world of the arts so that you have to think of it as a part-time job I think the whole time until circumstances change and that is a little bit out of your control. It has to do with audiences and publishers and essentially no matter what you write you can't really control its fate in the world so it's best to scaffold that artistic existence with a real pain job which is what I say to all beginning writers, all students everybody interested. Do it for the love of it, do it part-time have something that pays the bills and that also teaches you things about the world that you can then put into your writing so a job is not just paying the bills but also giving you raw material for your writing. It has a dual purpose and both of them are crucial. With your family, did you decide to give it a try for a while or to just really dig in? I mean after Red Mars is an example. Well after Red Mars then at that point someone had to be the parent at home at least if that was possible and it was because I could essentially write during nap time, I could write when my wife was home. The great thing about writing is that you can do it in the time that you have for it and not have to have structured hours. Well would you say that's your discipline or could you generalize for professional writers? Well it's a good question. I can't generalize because I think every professional writer has a different pattern and a different history that they came to it but I think most of them would talk about this surprising moment when they were actually selling enough copies and getting big enough advances that they could call that their main job. Typically they would be doing something else and then realize that they would make more money for any given hour of work writing than doing anything else. Well that's unusual and surprising. The writer's epiphany. Yeah and it's kind of wonderful because at that point you can really throw yourself into it and not be distracted and not lose time doing other things. So if you're interested to write novels, novels are very time intensive very labor intensive. I reckon I work maybe I don't know five hours of page on these books and so when you think about how many pages there are the hours stack up.  Once you get to go full time then you can just do them faster. Did you choose science fiction or did it choose you? In a way I think it chose me. What I think about science fiction is that it is the realism of California and really of the world now and this has been developing over my career and when I said it 30 years ago or even 40 years ago it sounded a little bit strange but when I say it now I think people understand our world is completely formed by science. That we live within a scientific culture and our actually built infrastructure, our lives, our medical lives, our social lives in the internet and everything, they're all scientifically created. So now when you write science fiction you're describing the society that we live in right now so you're doing realism. So I was always interested in writing about the real lives that we live the real world that we're in but I chose science fiction because it struck me that was the most accurate way to do it. That was the way that had the most charge to it specifically. Do you have a working definition that you use for science fiction? Yes, it's very simple. I'd say science fiction is any story that is set in the future and then there are some little corollaries that have to be tucked in there. Like if you postulate that something different happened in the past like say the Axis I World War II or the South One, the Civil War or something like that. Those are alternative histories and they get counted as science fiction because they're a different future for a past moment. So alternative histories are a little complicated but by and large what you can say is that if a story is set tomorrow in the story, that's a science fiction story. If it's set 100 years in the future it's still science fiction and that's a very simple sort of Damocles type definition. If it's in the future it's science fiction. So I would agree, I think of Harry Turtleduff as an example is more like Jules Verne's sense of feeling historical at this point in alternate history. Well Turtleduff is the great alternative history writer. He's specialized in it. He's made it his career. Well he'll take various moments in the past and he'll postulate a change where something different happened like Napoleon conquered Europe. I'm giving only military examples but my alternative history was if everybody in Europe had died in the Black Death what would have happened in world history after that and that's the Years of Rice and Salt novel that actually ends up in Davis, California but of course because of my change Davis, California is the farm university for a Chinese-Japanese culture because North America has been colonized from west to east and the diseases that would have been brought to North America no matter who brought them have devastated the Native Americans as they did in our timeline. So alternative histories play that game but science fiction plays the same game starting with this moment and going off into the future. What if we postulate this happened, we'll get to that kind of future, maybe it's dystopian, maybe it's utopian and you postulate other changes and you get to different kind of futures and it makes you think about what we're doing right now in terms of what will come next. So I think it's a powerful way to talk about our society right now and it's also a lot of fun.  It's been my intellectual home. Like Davis has been my physical home, I would say that I live in the small town of science fiction as my intellectual home. Anymore, the weather's nice here. I can still feel the cold of Antarctica from your writing. That was quite an experience. Stan, if I could, maybe we could explore your creative process. We've got several of your books here. If you wanted to choose one, we could kind of go through what happened. I'll take the latest one because I can remember what happened in it or how it came about. 2312, I just published last year and so this paperback edition is brand new. Well, I had it. So where'd you get the idea? The idea for the story was very simple. I wanted to make a kind of a joke. I wanted a love story. It started with the idea for a romance between a mercurial person and a Saturnine person. These are astrological signs and personalities. They're kind of antiquated and nobody really truly believes them anymore. You still find those people out? There are Saturnine people, exactly. I thought my mercurial person would be from Mercury and my Saturnine person would be from Saturn. Then it was a kind of a joke. But it all followed from that because if you have human beings living on Mercury, well, you need it to be about the year 2312. You have to be 300 years out before it becomes plausible. Same with Saturn. So I decided to go out 300 years, which for my science fiction is going way out there. I think it's the furthest in the future of any science fiction novel I've ever written, at least of my major work. You're kind of a near future. I'm a near future guy. And yet, having had this idea early in my career, I had novels like Ice Hinge and the Memory of Whiteness that were solar system novels, a couple of hundred years in the future. So I stole from myself. I went back to my work of my 20s and I took things like a rolling city on Mercury because Mercury rotates so slowly that you could have a city on train tracks and it would only have to go about 5 miles an hour to stay in the shade because it cannot be in the sun or it'd be cooked. What kind of temperature difference? Well, I think it's 700 degrees Fahrenheit on the sunny side and very cold on the night side, like say I'm not sure about this, maybe 250 or 300 degrees below zero. So it's a massive change but in the zone between light and shade you've got about a 30 or 40 mile wide zone that is essentially the dawn terminator and I have my city being pushed by sunlight, by the power of sunlight always into the darkness and so just one tiny fraction of the city, the highest point is in sun and that solar power is the whole rest of the city to move on these tracks. Well, this is a crazy idea from my 20s and I just recycled it because it's very definitely true that the only person you can justifiably steal from is yourself. So I took from my previous work and I concocted this and I had a wonderful writer at Orbit Books. It was the first time we'd worked together and he kept encouraging me. He said, make it big, show us everything else in the solar system. What's going on on Earth? What's going on on Mars? And how far out are they? And so he forced me to develop the idea and make it bigger than I might have otherwise. So this is the process. Reviewers often put you in the hard science category from what I've read because you're looking into chemistry and physics and biology in some very significant ways. But I was looking back at your background in Bachelors in Literature, Masters in Ph.D. in English. Yet you seem to write very deftly about science. So how do you get from literature to being an adept scientist? I mean we look at David Bren. He's a scientist. It's mostly an English major's trick. It's a matter of rhetoric and looking plausible. It's a kind of a stage magic. If you can imitate the way scientists talk, then you can make things look very plausible. And science I find is extremely public. They're trying to be accessible. They're trying to be comprehensible. It's just that the world itself is complicated and that's why science looks complicated because the world is complicated. But science is not like legal language where they're trying to be esoteric using a jargon deliberately to obfuscate the situation. Science is trying to explain things as clearly as it can. And once you understand that and take it on that level, then you just read science news, you read the internet articles about the situations, and then you talk to scientists themselves about their work. And it turns out to be a matter of imitating their style and paying attention to what they say to you. And then you can do anything. I would say though that I'm not a hard science fiction writer and I don't like any of these sub labels. There's hard science fiction, there's soft science fiction, whatever that would be, sociology or anthropology. There's feminist science fiction, there's literary science fiction, there's military science fiction, there's techno thrillers. Well all of these are way too confining and restraining. Science fiction itself is already a genre very limited and specific. Well you have low brow, high brow in a sense. Yes, but this is what science fiction helps to break down. There's no low brow and high brow. You've got the silliest movies ever made or science fiction movies. Some of the greatest novels of the 20th century are science fiction novels. And so it's a very tall genre vertically between high brow and low brow. And what it's trying to say is there's no such thing as high brow and low brow. There's just art that it entertains. And if it works, it works at one level or another. So I've never, I don't like any of these distinctions. I have accepted the label science fiction writer because I think science fiction is interesting and important. But all the finer distinctions I think are cutting it too fine and trying to make pigeonholes so small that people don't want to go in there. Well we live in a world where we want to put everything in silos, don't we? Yes, that's right. And parse everything. Now as you're working on your book, are there people you rely on insiders for feedback, to review your drafts? I've noticed as I read that it seems in recent years, maybe with the advent of the internet, that the acknowledgement sections of books seem to be growing. I've always put an acknowledgement section in the back of my books because I get a lot of help. But I don't want people reading my drafts. So I ask them questions and I do a lot of research ahead of time that involves interviewing people. So that is a planetary scientist down at NASA Ames, Chris McKay. Well ever since Red Mars he's been there to answer oddball questions about the solar system for me. Did you find him? I think I read about him in the literature on Mars and then I just called him up and most scientists, if you call them up, they'll be happy to talk. In fact the real problem is getting them to stop talking about their area of specialty. But I've learned to be good at that too. Well you live in Davis which is full of the US and the university.  So there's no problem with getting expert help and most experts are happy to help. And I'm happy to acknowledge that a novel is not one person making up things out of their head that is somehow an individual act of creativity. I think novels are more like being the telephone central exchange operator that is plugging in a lot of voices into one story and you plug in enough voices and you get a kind of a group message that's bigger than you. And it's not just your imagination, it's you speaking a community's worth of information. Well with 2312, from initial idea Yeah. Saturday Night in Mercurial to turning the final draft into your publisher, I would think that would be about four years. Four years. But the initial idea often precedes by a good long time the actual starting of the writing. And the writing I can say took more like one year of intense work. Do you start with treatments or outlines or do you try to get the whole thing done? Oh just the barest of suggestions as to the idea. Almost love story Mercurial, Saturday Night in person, need the solar system, that's all I know. And then what I need is for an editor to say yes I like that idea, go with it, that can take some time. And the research can take a little time although usually I'm researching while I'm writing so the two go together.  How did you find these people or did they find you? My agent died a couple years ago and so this has been a great disaster in my professional life, a beautiful guy. But essentially I was connected to him in the late 1980s. And after that I had a kind of a manager or an agent that was more like an older brother that basically knew so much more about the industry that I just stayed in Davis and wrote my books. And he did the strategic thinking very well and I felt like I was taken care of in a way that allowed me to just focus on the art and then the commerce side of it was his job, which he did beautifully. So one of the reasons I've had such a great career was Ralph Vichinanza. Now I'm working with one of Ralph's assistants and I presume it'll be okay but I'm at the tail end of my career anyway and in a way the ghost of Ralph's Isn't that presumptuous? You're at the tail end of your career? I'm at the tail end chronologically. I hope for a late Picasso like burst of ancient energy but novels are time intensive. You could bring on a second. We've seen quite a bit of that now and some of the so-called grandmasters certainly did that. No, I would never do that. One of the great joys of writing novels is you don't have to collaborate, you do your own thing and I can't believe these guys do that. So we won't see one with you in spider robins? No, no, it's a terrible idea. Callahan's Cross-type Planet or something. Spider's a great writer and everything but no, I love the idea that I write the books on my own and in fact I don't have much in the way of advice. I don't really like my books being edited. I just want to write them in the way I want to write them. I put them out there. They are strange books. They don't resemble other novels. People tell me that in no uncertain terms. And I like them. So I just do my own thing. Well, I enjoy reading your books. Well, thank you. Well, some more than others but they're always stimulating. They're experiments and they have a high positive and they have a high negative and I take it that that's because they're different and a little weird. Speaking of negative, I mean it's a different context but it seems over the last, I don't know, maybe 15 years science fiction has become somewhat darker, fatalistic, pessimistic if you will and one of your peers, the writer Neil Stevenson, a couple of years ago was asked about the state of science fiction and he said something to the effect of you notice it's dystopian. Yeah. And what's your take on that? I mean the dark versus the light dystopian versus hopeful. Well, I think it's happened. I think that perception is correct that science fiction has gotten kind of dystopian between people like Paolo Bacigalupi and also the Hunger Games, a very important science fiction and what I think is that people's sense of the future has gotten darker and science fiction is very responsive to the way the current society thinks about the future. So science fiction was very positive in the 40s because a bunch of engineers and a bunch of kids in the rural America reading it were saying, hey, the future is going to be great. We'll have nuclear power. We'll be living on Mars.  So you have this positive science fiction back then in the 30s and 40s of so-called golden age and it makes perfect sense. Well now we had 9-11, big trauma where we suddenly realize that history isn't over and this planet is not arranged coherently in terms of everybody's society and you have climate change which is surely happening and is sure to come. And so young people reading are thinking well, the future. Are we even going to be able to live as well as our parents and grandparents? It isn't an obvious yes. So science fiction is very sensitive. It's like a canary in a coal mine and it responds to these emotions. It's a very emotional literature despite the techy, spock-like aspect. But remember spock has got this violently emotional human side to it. It lives in another alternate universe as well. Exactly. So science fiction has been saying lately the future could be dark and it's a kind of a 1984 warning sign. It's trying to say to the world, let's not go down this path because it would be horrible. It would be like the Hunger Games or like Bacchia Gallupi's Wind-Up Girl. Shipbreaker. Well maybe we're just being more realistic too. Science fiction is based on scientific knowledge grows. We now know that it's highly unlikely that we'll go into space, kill the bugs, and take our place in the galaxy. Although those space operas were wonderful stories, maybe the last big one was Orson Scott Card. Right. But that turned into a real philosophical treatise. Well I think that's right and a space opera will always exist as a kind of fantasy space where you can tell great stories and it's fun to read and what you can say is maybe in 5,000 or 500,000 years humans will be doing this stuff around the galaxy. It's not perhaps impossible and so let's tell those stories and that's a lot of fun. Because science fiction in the end is always about having fun. Even the darkest stuff, the dystopias you're thinking, ah but it would be so interesting to survive, to make do, to make a fire in the dark and manage to feed your family and it's always exciting. Let's put it that way. And I don't think it's being more realistic now to say that our future is going to be dark because we don't know what our future is going to be like. And science because it keeps on advancing and because one of the sciences is justice and other science is social systems. In other words the software of society is also getting better. We're globalized, everybody in the world has got their cell phone, everybody in the world knows what's going on. There's no more ignorance and the potential for good out of that situation is as big as the potential for bad out of climate change and the various problems we have. So there's a realistic possibility of utopia as well as a realistic possibility of dystopia and that's the strangeness of our time that both these very different futures are both quite possible. So then we get to choose, we get to work towards the good one and this science fiction outlines them both. Most of my science fiction has been utopian and positive, trying to describe worlds where things are going well or else like in these science and the capital books 40, 50, 60 dealing with problems in a rational manner to try to make things better. The idea of the Gulf Stream stopping still scares people to death. Yes, although less likely now that they've done the numbers on the amount of fresh water necessary in the North Atlantic which is really what causes the Gulf Stream to stall is not likely to happen in the way that I described it but I was working on information from the year 2000 rather than the year 2013. Well, we still have Governor Christie of New Jersey standing out there on the sand saying we're going to rebuild and save these disappearing barrier islands. Well, this is okay. I mean we are going to have to be adapting and mitigating and adapting to climate change and I think it's good to make statements that whatever, say it's 50 years from now or 100 years from now, those people are not going to be sitting down going oh, they blew it 50 years ago and so now we're going to sit on the beach and weep. They're actually going to be working, dealing, making do and making the best of things no matter what situation they're in. Well, and Stan, now that 2312 is doing so well, have you taken a break or are you working on something new? No, I don't take breaks. I like writing and that's my job and so I've got a book coming out next month called Shaman which is about the people of 32,000 years ago that painted the Chauvet Cave in Southern France. So that recent movie by Werner Herzog called The Cave of Forgotten Dreams is about this cave that was just discovered in 1995 and it's one of the most beautiful of the painted caves of Southern France equal to Lascaux and Altamira and yet it's twice as old as those caves. We seem to be pushing back the time that humankind arrived in Europe. Yes, that's right. The archaeologists keep pushing back that time and the Americas as well so as we learn more. That gets all very complicated, this whole problem of when the Americas were peopled but yes, it keeps getting pushed back. So when are we going to see Shaman? That is September 3rd and books have birthdays these days. Oh, they've wrapped it. Oh yes, everything is ready to go. They have birthdays because of the e-book downloads. You have to pick a moment during which people can then hit the button and download it. So that will be September 3rd. Okay. Well Stan, we're just about at the end of the show and I would like to do one thing. Your son Tim is an intern here at Davis Media Access and I want to thank him for talking into coming on the show and Tim's behind camera one. I don't know if we can get a shot of Tim on there and maybe you'd like to wave. Yeah, he can do his cameraman thing. It's like in the baseball stadiums that cameraman always just keep doing their work as you know. Great, thank you. I have many things to thank Tim for and this is one of them. So Stan, thank you very much for being on the show. I wish you the best of luck with Shaman and every other book that comes out and I'll look forward to reading them. Stan's books, of course, are generally available. If you're looking for a good read, please check them out if you haven't already. Until next time, this is Ron Clement. Thank you for watching in the studio. And thank you Davis.


what is going on everybody it stops here and in this video I'm going to be showing you all my M1 finance portfolio breaking down the performance of the portfolio and showing you all my individual holdings both stocks and ETFs so you can get a better understanding on what I see value in right now in the stock market and how I invest my money in the stock market for the long term and keep it in mind guys that this is a long term dividend growth portfolio I'm not looking to sell these stocks in the next couple of months in the next couple of years I'm looking to hold these long term and get cash flow from them reinvest those dividends so ultimately I get even more cash flow right and as you read in the title as well I'm also briefly going to be giving you all my opinion on whether or not I think the end of Robinhood is here Robinhood I'm sure a lot of you guys know and honestly M1 finance as well they've been under a lot of pressure recently because a lot of the traditional brokers have now converted to commission free trading the fidelities of the world TD Ameritrade Charles Schwab just to name a few these are going to bring a lot more competition to Robinhood and honestly M1 finance as well and I want to give you guys my opinion on M1 finances competitive edge here and why Robinhood doesn't really have too much of a competitive edge except for one thing in my opinion right now so with that further ado let's get into it if you guys enjoyed this video hit that like button consider subscribing leave a comment let me know what your thoughts are and let's get into it guys so this is my portfolio right now and I haven't done an update I feel like it's been at least a month at this point let me hit it with with a refresh to show you guys what we're working with right now so the portfolio is worth 546 dollars and 13 cents or that's the cash invested I have some cash here on the sidelines waiting to be invested of around 72 bucks and if we look at the performance very quickly since July 2nd which is when I created the portfolio it's up 4.08 percent and it's up nine dollars and 32 cents and if we hit this little drop arrow we can see earned dividends are three dollars and 19 cents so out of the nine bucks three bucks came from dividends roughly and six bucks came from capital appreciation also known as market gains right so if we just sift through let's see the performance in the past week about 3.8 percent the past month it should be up let's see what it says if it loads 3.36 percent so overall about three four percent gain in terms of this portfolio and if we zoom down to show you all my holdings we can see here I hold eight different investments stocks and ETFs the first one being Johnson and Johnson with a value right now of 123 dollars and it's worth 22.5 percent of my portfolio with a target of around 20 percent you guys can see the return is almost six percent right now in Johnson and Johnson it's up about three dollars and 22 cents since I've bought it around three bucks being market gains 33 cents being dividends the average share price here is 130 bucks and 50 cents roughly dividend yield right now is 2.91 percent and this is looking to be I'm looking to have this be a long term investment dividend growth investment where I'm reinvesting the dividends hoping for a massive cash flow in the next really couple of decades when I'm looking to use this as income you know in my retiring years that's kind of what I'm focusing on right now for this portfolio right and this is a dividend king by the way which means it's grown its dividend 50 plus years consecutively which is absolutely amazing and why I honestly have it as my number one holding in this portfolio I just have a ton of faith in Johnson and Johnson although they've been facing some heat at the end of the day all these big companies these massive Goliath companies they they face heat from time to time so they're handling it well in my opinion and I'm sure they'll be fine here in the next couple of years the second biggest position is Altria ticker symbol MO gain of around 0.91 actually a loss of around 0.91 loss of about 43 cents here market gains of minus one dollar and 33 cents earned dividends of around 90 cents and why am I holding Altria guys this stock has been in the heat just like Johnson and Johnson and typically I like buying when stocks are under pressure when they're seeing a lot of selling pressure right this is when value in my opinion is really coming and that is a good opportunity to hop into a stock when you do see that type of value so Johnson and Johnson is one of those stocks and again Altria here we can see this dividend is 8% guys this is insane it's been seeing a lot of pressure about jewel everything that's been going on with e-cigarettes right now that's been just shooting the stock down and if you believe in the longevity of jewel in the cronos investment and in all the other investments that they have in some other companies here that I'm sure a lot of you guys know but I don't want to get too deep into in this video this is a this is definitely a great time to buy this stock at an 8% starting yield 12 PE I think the forward PE is even lower than that this is a pretty good value and I do feel comfortable although it is risky of an investment I do feel comfortable right now at this valuation to have it be around 15% of my portfolio right the third one is Abbey here my third largest holding gain of around 2.91% $1.29 cent market gain or rather gain in general 71 cents from market gains and 58 cents from earned dividends here average share price about 74 bucks you guys can see right now it's trading at about 75 bucks and the dividend yield is at about 5.8 percent this is another stock that took a beating when it merged with allergen right it had a 60 billion dollar merger with allergen the stock fell initially right that opened up the long-term value in my opinion I started buying into Abbey recently actually if we go to the activity here you guys can see I ended up buying Abbey I believe it was on the 26th here is when I started buying $40 worth and I bought even more I believe last week 30 bucks worth so you can see some moves I've been making you know I put 100 bucks on the 26th of September in terms of stock buying 120 bucks yesterday and another 85 bucks today so I'm looking to build out this portfolio guys and show you all how I invest right and 3m is my fourth largest holding here 12.6 percent of my portfolio 10% is the target so it's a bit overweight here nonetheless the average share price 166 bucks I'm down on this position right now a little bit of around 1.56 percent my total gain is negative 75 cents I've made 42 cents from dividends but the market gains have been less than that or rather yeah less than that at about $1.17 in the red the dividend yield right now is 3.6 percent and this is another one of those dividend kings which again this means they've raised their dividend for 50 plus consecutive years which is incredible so 3m I like this company it's actually getting hit a lot recently so I do see value in this one on the dip AT&T is another one that I hold this is the fifth one this is actually the one that I've been doing the best in terms of individual performance here of nearly 16% in the gains here 16% gains up $5.25 for 42 being for market gains 83 cents being from earned dividends we can see the dividend yield is 5.5% nearly so this is another high dividend play and honestly guys I just like this one for the long term 5g streaming service they're coming out with this is looking good in my personal opinion and honestly I just see a lot of potential in it long term that's why I'm holding it and I'm going to be reinvesting the dividends in AT&T so this is another new one that I've added since the previous update just like Abbie and I actually just bought this one today it's ticker symbol SPHD Invesco S&P 500 high dividend low volatility ETF so I'm up about 0.2% today on this average cost $42 here dividend yield 4.2% expense ratio is 0.3% although it's not one of the lowest expense ratios that I've seen it's justified because it is a high dividend yielding ETF right at the end of the day and we can see here if we zoom in a bit actually let's go and see the details this holds 51 holdings right now inception date on the 17th of October in 2012 so 51 holdings guys that means this is dispersed you know the holdings are dispersed in this fund of each having about 1 to 3% total weight of the fund and you can see a holding that they do hold is Ford I also know they own Altria and a bunch of other ones as well so I see potential in this one long term and oh by the way I forgot to mention this is a monthly dividend play which is also why I wanted to get it in this portfolio to get some monthly dividend income action rolling through and I'll just buy more and more of the shares to compound my wealth that way so the last two holdings here nothing crazy Alibaba this is not a dividend stock it's actually a growth play up about 2.4% and this is honestly a way to dip my toes into China although I do already have funds that do have some exposure to China I just wanted to hold some Alibaba here because I do think it is the strongest company out of China and if you guys see here you know it's about 7.4% of my portfolio and I do plan on keeping it from that 5 to 10% range and the last one I have here is VEA just to get some developed markets in my portfolio that exclude the United States the beauty of this fund is it does not have any United States companies in it right it holds a lot of other developed market stocks in the fund so this way I'm getting exposure to those markets right so assets under management a lot 72 billion expense ratio 0.05 which is less than SPHD but you can see the dividend yields 2% which is also less than SPHD right but nonetheless it pays a dividend which is really really good in my personal opinion so I can then really just buy more shares and compound my wealth that way so overall guys that is what the portfolio is looking like right now and I do plan on adding a lot more money a couple hundred dollars per month into this portfolio to build it out and show you guys how I personally build it because mind you this is not my main portfolio I'm strictly making this for you guys right I want to bring value to you so you can understand what I'm personally seeing value in why I'm buying this stock why I'm buying this ETF because I think it can help you out in your investing so let's talk about the competitive advantage that M1 finance has and also whether or not I think this is the end for Robinhoods so M1 makes it very simple and really autonomous for you to invest in the stock market this is the competitive advantage right you can just put money into this account on repeat without even going into this account and it's going to be investing it for you based on how you've split it up in terms of your pie right when you open up M1 when you sign up you create a pie based on individual stocks and ETFs and obviously the percentages have to equal 100 obviously right and you put however many slices you want into the pie then you click save right and if you want to have it be autonomous for you to invest without even going into the platform all you have to do is do auto invest on right turn on auto invest and you don't even have to go into the platform which is one huge competitive advantage that I personally love about M1 that I think a lot of beginners would also love about it and off the top of my head now you can also buy partial shares which you cannot do on Robinhood so I think that is huge for M1 finance that really Robinhood doesn't have at this point all Robinhood has is options options I personally use Robinhood for my options trading and I think it's a pretty pretty good platform for that but other than that guys I think Robinhood is facing a lot of heat right now because before these huge you know you know Charles Schwab Fidelity TD before they got to zero commissions a lot of people were going to Robinhood to trade stocks and by trade stocks I mean day trade swing trade and stuff like that but one thing about Robinhood is that they had terrible charting software so these traders were using think or swim which is made by TD for their charting right they were using Fidelity's product which is called Fidelity Active Trader Pro or something like that for the charting software and that was kind of what people were doing they were trading on Robinhood in terms of executing trades and looking at think or swim or some other charting software to break down stocks because when you're short-term trading you obviously have to break down stocks on a charting software so now that a Robinhood has a crap charting software and that TD and Fidelity have zero commissions there's literally no reason for a trader like myself or a beginner trader out there to not go with TD because if you don't go with TD and you go with Robinhood sure you have zero commissions with Robinhood but you have a crappy charting software if you go with TD you have zero commissions but you have an amazing charting software that you can actually trade within the charting software so this is something very negative in my opinion for Robinhood that I do think could potentially bring Robinhood to an end here in the next couple of years I'm not going to say it's going to end guys because for all we know Robinhood can end up thriving for the rest of this decade the next couple of decades who knows right but all you have to realize is they are facing a lot of heat right now because they're demographic a lot of it are traders beginners out there that like trading in and out using charts but now that TD has a great chart and zero commissions that's going to be dragging people off of Robinhood so let me know down below what you guys thought about that what you guys thought about my portfolio and if you guys do want to use M1 finance sign up for it there is a referral link down below that if you sign up through that link you get 10 bucks I also get 10 bucks once you put in $100 once you deposit $100 and start investing in the market so I'll catch you all in the next video don't forget to leave that like subscribe if you want to see further content all the discord chats all that stuff is linked down below in the description I'll catch you all in the next video thanks again for watching peace out