Mars One is OK, I suppose

The pains of emigration are seared into the Irish soul, and this week I've listened on the radio to Dr Joseph Roche contemplating it in its most extreme form. He's a Trinity College Dublin astrophysicist who’s signed up for Mars One - a privately funded venture to send colonists to Mars in 2023 on a one-way only ticket. 

The first time I wrote about it, I queried whether a no-return crewed mission to Mars was acceptable.  Perhaps those who send these colonists will be colluding in their suicide?  This question of its acceptability was, I have to agree, a woolly one, as I forgot to ask acceptable to whom, and if not, who could stop it. 

Asked by the presenter if it's suicide, Joseph Roche recognises that due to radiation his life expectancy will be “drastically reduced”.  But since there can be very few people who understand the risks better than he does,  I suppose I have to abandon my pretensions to opine on the rightness of the thing. 

You can hear his two interviews here, on RTÉ radio last Thursday and Sunday. They make extraordinary listening. 

Morning Ireland, Thurs 9 January search for “The Irishman who hopes to go to Mars” (5 minutes)

Marian Finucane Show, Sunday 12 January search for “Life on Mars” (18 minutes)

Dr Roche was interviewed after reaching a longlist of 1,058 volunteers, selected from over 200,000.   He says that to be chosen for the mission would be like a dream come true.

 “I definitely wouldn't be coming back, it's not up for debate. As soon as I get there I would have to live out the rest of my days there. Because you would be exposed to conditions that no human has experienced before, and there's not enough atmosphere on Mars to protect you from radiation, even with a space suit, my life expectancy would be drastically reduced. The way I look at it, even with a shorter life on Mars, for every day I live on that planet, I would be taking a leap forward for the scientific endeavour of human kind. For me it would be a dream come true.”

That’s the Morning Ireland clip, the shorter of the two. In the longer interview with Marian Finucane, a fellow hopeful Steve Menaa joins Joe Roche and so does his sister Deirdre. She says the family would be devastated if he was selected and he had to go, but on the other hand Joe was always ambitious and he likes to see through the things he starts, and if this is what he wants we'll support him in it.   Steve says “I like my life on Earth but I like a challenge as well. We humans are explorers.”

Greenhouse for growing plants and insects on Mars. As envisioned by the Mars Society.

Asked what they will do for food, Joe says they will grow plants. And for protein, breed insects. Yummy.

When after 5 years the colony reaches full strength, there will be 20 of them, men and women. Will there be children produced? No. Joe says sterilising all the astronauts should be considered, and it's exciting that there is that ethical discussion. Sacrifice in the cause of science is mentioned, but Joe says it's easy to sign up for this if you're passionate about it, he's not sure sacrifice is the word; it could actually be called selfish, he admits. 

It would be good to work with NASA or ESA and have a return trip, but those agencies’ plans are 30 years in the future. “I'm 30, and if I go, I go now”.

Mental illness?

There will be no Skype. Radio waves will take over 3 minutes to travel in each direction.  (Up to 20 minutes in each direction, I would say, depending on the two planets’ relative positions.)

In neither of these interviews is anything said about the psychology of isolation. According to this Guardian blog, those sent to live and die on the red planet face untold risk of mental illness.

And the 24-hour Big Brother show that’s going to fund the project will heap more pressures on. 

Will it be reality TV, or a horror movie, is my question. And which will bring in the bigger bucks?

Space - maybe we can but should we?

Artist's conception of the process of terraforming Mars (Wikipedia).
The question is, should it be done?

Am now working on a lecture I have to give in March to Galway Astronomy Club. It's about the ethics of space exploration.

Is the Mars One project (a no-return mission of Mars colonists) a suicide trip, and if so does it matter? Is colonising Mars a good thing in principle, and if so, does it signify what the motives are? Is preserving the human race a good motive?  In order to hasten exploration of Mars, is it OK to cut corners thereby risking planetary protection .. risking polluting Mars with Earth microbes, which could stymie all future investigation into life on Mars?  Is it OK to terraform Mars … schemes have been devised that, within a few centuries, would turn Mars into a replica of the Earth with an Earthlike atmosphere.  But is it right?

How is the demilitarization of space to be policed? How can we preserve archaeology in space and on the Moon?  Who is allowed to mine asteroids and who should be?

Have a lot of work to do on this in the next 6 weeks, so this blog may be a bit quiet on other matters. Any comments or pointers welcome.  In particular I have to research the international law of space, I was hoping to find someone to help me on that, but I have to do it all by hand. Moreover at the end of February am off to Berlin again with my friend Vincent.

Links:

On this blog
        The Mars One mission
        Preserving the human race on Mars
        Archaeology on the Moon

Elsewhere
        The debate on the so-called over-protection of Mars
        NASA on how to terraform Mars
        Wikipedia on whether to terraform Mars

Celebrating Isaac Newton's birthday

Which world changing person’s birth have you been celebrating today? On Christmas Day 1642 Isaac Newton was born. His work laid much of the foundation for our modern understanding of the universe by uncovering the force that keeps it together, and showing it’s the same as what makes an apple fall. He formulated what are known as Newton’s three Laws of Motion. He may have been the greatest scientist ever.

To divert you from the day’s excesses may I tempt you to Deborah Byrd’s Earth Sky blog where you'll find links to the laws of motion as well as Newton’s revelations about gravity.

But the most extraordinary revelation about Newton is this: that according to some, science wasn’t the biggest thing in his life. What was even more important to him was biblical textual criticism, in which he excelled, and his unitarian belief (no trinity) which he had to keep to himself, for fear of being expelled from Cambridge University.  A couple of years ago I attend a fascinating lecture on this.

An apology the world will little note nor long remember

Something I missed recently, but I'll include it here in case you missed it too:  coinciding with the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address on 19th November, a retraction of an 1863 newspaper editorial dismissing the speech as “silly remarks”.

“We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.” With these stinging words did the Patriot & Union of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania achieve infamy in the annals of journalism, by panning the presidential speech that lives as one of the most treasured orations in the English language.

Three weeks ago, the successor paper Patriot-News revisited this unkind judgement, suggesting that their predecessors were perhaps under the influence of partisanship, or of strong drink - whilst wittily observing that “the world will little note nor long remember” the paper's apology.

This is all good fun, but ahistorical, of which more below.

Lincoln at Gettysburg (unknown date)

First, here's the full text of the Gettysburg address. [1]

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion - that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain - that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Now to the question of how the Patriot & Union came to overlook history being made that day. It's worth reading “Living on the wrong side of history? The Harrisburg Patriot & Union's notorious 'review' of the Gettysburg Address”  from Patriot-News website.

This deals with the issue historically, and discounts the playful suggestion that their 1863 predecessors were under the influence of strong drink. In the first place, the newspaper's own reporter described the President's speech in Gettysburg like this: "The President then arose and delivered the dedicatory address, which was brief and calculated to arouse deep feeling."  But the crux is that the Patriot & Union supported the Democratic party, and was hostile to Lincoln, his conduct of the war, and his war aims. Moreover, the paper’s editors had been in put in jail for sedition a year before. So there was stuff going on.

As a final thought, I've often wondered if Lincoln really believed that the world would little note, nor long remember, what he said that day.  He well knew he had crafted a masterpiece … surely he entertained the hope that the world would recognise this?

[1] This is the text most often reproduced. There are others, see Abraham Lincoln Online.

Of logarithms, fraudsters and exoplanets

Pristine log tables. Well-thumbed would be better.

Suppose you need to multiply 263.4 by 351.2 you would nowadays use a calculator, but when I was at school in the 1960’s we used logarithms.  Logs to their friends.  In a book of log tables we would look up the log of 263.4 and the log of 361.2, add the two logs together, then look up the result in an antilog table, and bobs your uncle. Not as quick as a calculator but easier than multiplying.  We each carried around a well-thumbed book of log tables, yet one thing we all failed to notice was that the pages for numbers beginning with 1 were more well-thumbed than pages for numbers beginning with 9.  Or if we noticed we never asked ourselves why. But a character called Newcomb did, in 1881. For he it was that discovered Benford’s law and in the process proved Stigler’s law (Stigler’s law being that in science, laws are always named after the second person to discover them; and in this case the second person to discover the law was Benford.) 

Benford's law states that in most lists of data, the first digits of the numbers follow a pattern of probability, where 1 is the commonest first digit, and 9 the least common.  Take for example a list giving the heights of the tallest buildings. Almost one third of the buildings in the list will have a height whose leading digit is 1. Next most frequent in the leading position is the digit 2. And so on, till you come to 9 which is likely to be found as the leading digit in only 4.6 per cent of buildings.

Or rivers. Look at Wikipedia’s list of world rivers longer than 1000 km. You'll find a table giving length in km, length in miles, drainage area in km², and average discharge in m³/s. At my rough count, it contains five hundred numbers, of which only 18 start with a 9.

Fraudsters

Benford's law also applies to financial data, a fact unknown to most fraudsters, who tend to suppose that the best way to insert phoney entries into a list of expenses or transactions, is to make up numbers at random, with as many starting with 9 as starting with 1. But Benford’s law soon finds them out. And the spooky thing is, it matters not whether the transactions are in pounds, euros or dollars.

Exoplanet with two suns and an exomoon. But is it real?

I've read the Wikipedia article on Benford’s law which purports to explain why this should be so,  and I can't follow it as it involves high level maths.  But no matter, all this is by way of working out how many exoplanets have been discovered.

I recently mentioned that the Kepler mission found over two thousand planets orbiting other stars. Now it's important to note that these haven't actually been seen in the usual sense of the word. They have been seen in strings of data, indicating very slight periodic dimmings in the brightness of a star. From this data scientists have inferred size of a planet, distance from the star, and other factors.

But inferences can be wrong. In some cases the data could perhaps result from another phenomenon entirely, and have nothing to do with a planet at all.

And according to this week’s New Scientist, that’s where Benford’s law comes in. 

Thomas Hair at Florida Gulf Coast University wondered if Benford's law would hold true even beyond the solar system, and examined data from an online catalogue that lists 755 confirmed exoplanets and nearly 3500 planet candidates. Planet masses are given in multiples of Earth's or Jupiter's mass. He found that whichever of these two units is used, the figures closely fit Benford's law, making it highly likely the supposed planets really are out there. "The close fit with Benford's law gives a confirmation to experts' belief that most of the candidates are valid," he says. 

I wish I still had my log tables so I could check that well-thumbed business for myself. I looked in vain on the web for an image of a used copy to put at the top of this post. For fun, I've spent the last half hour reminding myself how to use logs. If you too last used them in the 1960’s take a look.

Of Little Red Riding Hood and horses' hooves

Horse's rear hoof.
It evolved from the middle toe.

Evolution has supplied horses with limbs modified for running,  as well as a special feature for locking their knees allowing them to stand for long periods, and a hoof which evolved from an extruded middle toe.  These features enabled the horse to survive on open grassland by successfully fleeing from predators.   Now here's the crux. All this is equally true of a hoofed South America mammal called a litoptern, which went extinct between two and five million years ago, and is unrelated to the horse. It too, lived on open grassland and in order to successfully flee from predators evolved those very same features, even including that middle toe which evolved into a hoof. This I learnt some years ago at a lecture about convergent evolution.  The point being that evolution, when confronting similar challenges, has an uncanny knack of arriving at similar solutions, even at widely separated times and places.

Which brings me to folk tales about wolves.

“The Wolf and the Kids" is a tale popular throughout Europe and the Middle East. A nanny goat warns her kids not to open the door while she is out in the fields, but is overheard by a wolf. When she leaves, the wolf impersonates her and tricks the kids into letting it in, whereupon it devours them. Versions of this tale occur in collections of Aesop's fables, in which a goat kid avoids being eaten by heeding the mother's instruction not to open the door, or seeks further proof of the wolf's identity before turning him away.

The tale may be new to you, but you doubtless know by heart the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. She sets out for her grandmother’s house with a basket of goodies, but a big bad wolf finds out about her itinerary, gobbles up grandma and disguises itself to lure the little girl to her doom. "What big teeth you have!" Little Red Riding Hood remarks before the wolf devours her.

 Little Red Riding Hood at the
door to Grandma's house.
Late 19th century trade card.

Lets look at the parallel between the two stories.  In each we have a wolf who gets dinner by impersonation – of the nanny goat in the first story, and of the grandma in the second.  “The Wolf and the Kids" probably originated in the 1st century AD. “Little Red Riding Hood” arose about a thousand years later. Durham University anthropologist Dr Jamshid Tehrani borrows evolutionary analysis from biology to study similarities among folktales, and claims to show that “Little Red Riding Hood” is descended from “The Wolf and the Kids”. Moreover, “Little Red Riding Hood” evolved from this root once in Europe, and again, quite independently, in Africa.  So, like the horse’s hoof, Little Red Riding Hood has it seems evolved twice.  Dr Tehrani himself draws the parallel with convergent evolution: “The fact that Little Red Riding Hood 'evolved twice' from the same starting point suggests it holds a powerful appeal that attracts our imaginations” he says. 

His article appeared in the open access journal PLOS ONE. If you can follow it all, you're a better man than I am, but luckily there’s a press release, and a very readable account from NBC News.

The best-known version of Little Red Riding Hood was published by the Brothers Grimm 200 years ago, based on a 17th-century story by the Frenchman Charles Perrault who distilled it from oral retellings in France, Austria and northern Italy.  You'll find both on the University of Pittsburgh site along with six other related stories,  which folklorists group together and classify as tales of type 333 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther system.

Dr Tehrani traces the ancestry and development of Little Red Riding Hood by observing features such as: is the victim single or a group of siblings, goat or human, eaten in their own home or a relative’s.  I found out a bit about classifying folktales when I researched the story of King Midas and his asses ears, a couple of years ago.

That's all I want to say about wolves, but I should have told you more about the lecture on convergent evolution.  One of the first I ever attended in Cork, in December 2005, it was by the Cambridge Professor Simon Conway Morris and his talk explored the heretical suggestion that  evolution has a destination, or even a destiny.  He had recently published his book Life’s Solution – Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe,  and argued that in the light of what we know about convergent evolution we should expect intelligent extraterrestrial life, if we ever come across it, to be strikingly similar to ourselves.
 

Are we poised for a jaw dropping discovery?

In my bones I feel that searching for extra-terrestrial intelligence is slightly loopy. Yet many leading scientists, especially at the SETI Institute, engage in the search and sustain their hopes that a sign of intelligent life will one day manifest itself. Radio signals are the usual target, but the lights of alien cities have also been canvassed.

The foregoing is only a digression, since I really wanted to talk about the prospects of finding any sort of life in the universe. An editorial in last week’s New Scientist suggested that if life is common in the universe, we will have found signs of it by the middle of the next decade, “a truly jaw-dropping discovery”.

This prediction of finding signs of life within 12 years or so is based on the NASA Kepler spacecraft’s hunt for habitable exoplanets. These are defined as rocky planets, roughly Earth-sized, orbiting other stars in the habitable zone where water is likely to be liquid.  For three years (finishing last May when the camera malfunctioned) Kepler surveyed a tiny patch of the Milky Way. Even though using an inefficient detection method, it found over two thousand planets, a handful of which seem Earth-like. 

Optimists, extrapolating these results to the whole sky, say it looks certain that our galaxy is home to billions of Earthlike planets.  There are pessimists though. One posted a comment to the New Scientist website claiming Kepler has not found a single earth size planet in the habitable zone.

Paul Davies: life on earth
may have been a fluke

Kepler's successor, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, is due to launch in 2017. It's being designed to search for the most promising exoplanet targets for next-generation studies. Restricting its search to nearby stars, it will scour the sky for small rocky worlds, and is expected to find hundreds. Future instruments such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the proposed StarShade mission will follow up these discoveries, probing the planets' atmospheres for signs of life. For example, to an alien astronomer, the oxygen, ozone and methane in Earth’s atmosphere would be a giveaway, because these gases are unstable, so their abundance here would indicate their being continually replenished by life.  So these gases, if present in an exoplanet’s atmosphere, would be an indicator of life as we know it; whilst certain other unstable gases could, by the same logic, be evidence of weird life.

A few comments about New Scientist’s expectation of a truly jaw-dropping discovery. First, notice their caveat “if life is common in the universe”. Many argue that life is probably very rare in the universe. If so, most (perhaps all) of those billions of Earthlike planets could be completely sterile.

Paul Davies (a guru of mine) is fond of saying that fifty years ago scientists used to say life was very unlikely; and now the fashion is to say it's very likely … yet nothing has changed: we're just as ignorant now about what causes life to arise as ever we were.  Here's a review of his 2010 book The Eerie Silence.

Next, if scientists succeed in analyzing a planet’s atmosphere and conclude “wow, life!” they won't, from that data alone, be able to tell intelligent life from microbes. But no matter, to me that would be jaw dropping enough.  Of course you can be sure that the SETI radio antennae will immediately be trained on any such planet. That may be loopy but it has to be done.