It's almost time to name Gliese 581d.  

Two billion years or so before our own solar system coalesced, this planet was formed around a dim red star that's now about 20 light years from Earth.  Gliese 581 d is therefore an ancient world, orbiting around a cold star.  But it may be habitable.

That's the conclusion of the latest study, by R. D. Wordsworth, F. Forget1, F. Selsis, J.-B. Madeleine, E. Millour, and V. Eymet (the paper is Is Gliese 581d habitable? Some constraints from radiative-convective climate modeling; you can find it on archiv.org).  They ran simulations based on what we know about the planet and its star, and conclude that if d has a sufficiently thick atmosphere of CO2, it could have liquid water at its surface.  Other studies of so-called "super-earths" like d hint that many or most of them will be water planets, global oceans.  And, when you factor in a recent study of habitable zones that indicates they could be much broader than first assumed, it seems that if this world has any sort of an atmosphere at all, then it's likely habitable.  So, here's what we know about d:

• It's between 7 and 13 times the mass of the Earth, but its radius is unknown (however, likely around 1.15 times Earth's radius).  If it's as dense as the Earth, then its surface gravity is about 2 times Earth's; but Earth is the densest of the solar system's rocky planets.  If d is an ocean world, it's likely a lot less dense and its surface gravity may be the same as Earth's.  In that case, though, it is almost certainly an ocean world, with no accessible land at all.
• It's may be tidally locked to its star, meaning that the sun stays fixed in one spot in the sky, and one whole hemisphere is in permanent darkness.  This is a condition usually taken to mean that the planet in question would be lifeless because the atmosphere would all condense on the cold side; but numerous studies have now shown that tidally-locked planets can retain their atmospheres quite well.  They do, however, tend to be windy.
• It may well have a thick CO2 atmosphere (researchers suspect these are common) in which case, provided minerals are able to leach up from the depths of the planetary ocean, it may have been capable of hosting life for six billion years now.

There's a really good chance that d could support life--though you and I wouldn't want to live there, since we'd weigh twice what we do on Earth and the atmosphere would be toxic.  But it could still be a lush world, overflowing with life.

What does it look like on this world?  The sunlight of its permanent day isn't red, though we call Gliese 581 a "red dwarf."  To us, it would appear to have about the same spectrum as a 60 watt bulb, which is to say, yellowish-white; and daylight is a bit dimmer than it is on Mars, so with the naked eye, it's visually like wearing a good pair of sunglasses.  The human eye adapts to a wide range of light conditions, so you wouldn't really notice the difference.  But, if d has an atmosphere, the sky is blue.  Old as it is, d may no longer have active plate tectonics, so, like Mars, it probably doesn't have mountains or volcanoes.  But it won't be a cratered environment, either, if the atmosphere is thick enough for water to be stable.  --And speaking of water, the weathering effects of high wind and water over billions of years suggest that it's become a very flat world lately, with either a global ocean, many shallow seas and low islands, or vast dry plains.

But this is amazing--because we're talking about a real planet here, not some speculative possible world; and not some science-fictional dream.  d does exist; we'll soon know whether it really is habitable, and within a few years, may be able to detect signatures of actual life in its atmosphere.  Already, we've learned enough to know that there are billions of other planets sailing through the galaxy with ours.  If we learn that Gliese 581 d really could sustain life, we'll be able to begin estimating (roughly, at first) how many habitable planets the Milky Way contains.  Considering how close Gliese 581 is to us, that number could be huge.

So what do we name this new world?  It is ancient, far older than our own worlds; so it would be fitting to name it after one of the Titans, who are older than the Greco-Roman gods we've named our planets after.  If it's a sterile ocean, I vote for Oceanus; if it could host life, then my favoured name would be that of Oceanus's wife, the goddess of rivers and lakes: Tethys.

Welcome, Tethys, and may you divide history into two parts:  the long age in which we wondered whether we were alone in the universe--and a new epoch in which we know we are not.

Here's the panel that Vernor Vinge, Charlie Stross, Aleister Reynolds, and I did at Boskone 47 on "The Technological Singularity:  an Assessment."  We critiqued the idea itself, its effect on science fiction writing, and its influence on our own works. You can watch it below; enjoy!

The Singularity: An Appraisal from Michael Johnson on Vimeo.

Just when I thought life couldn't get any stranger, MacMillan starts releasing my books as iPhone apps!  This is very cool.  Since they apparently don't have the licensing rights to sell the app into Canada, I can't confirm its presence in the iTunes Store; however, you can find my latest Virga novel, The Sunless Countries, at appshopper.com.

Not only that, but The Year's Best Science Fiction: 26th Annual Collection is also available; it contains my popular Virga story, The Hero.  

And here's what they'll look like in your iPod or iPhone:

Few ideas have been so thoroughly misused as Garrett Hardin's notion of the tragedy of the commons.  Hardin's idea was that "multiple individuals acting independently and solely and rationally consulting their own self-interest will ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone's long term interest for this to happen" (to quote Wikipedia).  There are some historical cases of this happening (i.e. the Boston commons).  There are, however, many more cases where it did not; and the idea is often used to try to justify the privatization of public goods.

I've found when I travel to the United States that the tragedy of the commons is a popular idea there, despite the fact that the historical evidence for it is equivocal, at best.  Commons were a widespread feature of European life for centuries, and mismanagement of them was extremely rare.  Now, New Scientist reports on a new study that shows that forests that are managed locally (i.e. as a commons) sequester more carbon than institutionally, governmentally or privately managed forests. 

One significant comment in the article was the following:

They argue that their findings contradict a long-standing environmental idea, called the "tragedy of the commons", which says that natural resources left to communal control get trashed. In fact, says Agrawal, "communities are perfectly capable of managing their resources sustainably".

This really comes as no surprise.  But it needs to be reinforced, particularly for people who've drunk the koolaid of the notion that public goods either can't exist or can't be managed efficiently.

From worldchanging.com comes an interesting posting about Sourcemap, an open tool for visualizing the supply chains that contribute to the products you buy.  It's a great idea:  name a product, and you can see where its pieces were sourced, who built what and where--in short, who's involved in making your life happen.

This is great, but it's the step after Sourcemap that really interests me:  when the app can fully trace the corporate ownership of the entities involved, as well as their publicly-available information things like campaign contributions.  Because the stuff you buy isn't just made by people and corporations; it's made by political movements and their supporters.  For good or ill, in the near-term future we're looking at being able to instantly, seamlessly, and completely boycott entire polities by simply filtering your buying options. Imagine an iPhone app where you aim the iPhone's camera at a product on the shelf in the store, and the iPhone tells you how in-line with your own political stripe (how green, or how Republican) the aggregate entity that built it is.  Instead of deciding which of sixteen varieties of spaghetti to buy based on the colour of the box or (God forbid) the price, you can do so based on whether the companies owners support progressive family planning programs in Africa.

The prospect is both terrifying and exhilarating.  Terrifying because products can no longer succeed or fail entirely on their own merits.  Politics will enter buying in a big way.  --Exhilarating because of the prospect of laying bare the world as it really is--a world where purchasing decisions have never been innocent, but we have previously never had the ability to follow through on that knowledge.

While our attention was elsewhere, a truly earth-shattering change has been in the wind--a development most experts have dismissed as impossible, but which now increasingly looks like it is going to happen.

According to Lyle Dennis over at the AllCarsElectric blog, EEStor has applied for certification from the Underwriter's Laboratories for its ultracapacitor technology. If this is true, then the secretive company may really have succeeded in creating the ultimate in electricity-storage technology:  a device capable of running your car for hundreds of miles on one charge, and of recharging in under five minutes.  A device that is not a battery, and hence never wears out.  A technology that would make intermittent power generation sources such as windmills directly competitive with baseload generation sources such as coal.

Canadian electric car company Zenn Motors has licensed EEStor's technology for a soon-to-be-built fully electric sedan.  Zenn is betting the farm on EEStor, and they seem remarkably confident.  Naturally, we hear outrageous claims about new technologies nearly every day; and many industry watchers have been skeptically tracking EEStor for years.  The expectation has been that any day now, the company would disappear, and its executives would later be found living high off the land in Ecuador or somewhere.  That hasn't happened, and now the company appears poised to release an actual product--according to Zenn, by the end of the year.

If it happens, this will be a truly disruptive change.  It would be nothing less than the first nail in the coffin of the fossil fuel age.

And here's more on the developing story, from Zenn's point of view.

Cory alerted me to an interesting upcoming event:  The Science Fiction Message Board is hosting Author August, a month of discussions about particular science fiction writers--one per day.  Apparently I'm Mister August 26th (no, there will be no centerfold, unless you make one up yourself).  

The introductory description of the event is here, and the threads themselves will, I gather, be unraveling from the Author Central forum.  

This is pretty cool, although I'd be an idiot if I expected to necessarily be flattered by what (if anything) gets said about me on the day.  The sensible thing for me, in fact, would probably be to steer clear of reading it altogether--but you may want to drop by. 

And, if you do, be kind. :-)

Wolfram's Alpha is not a competitor to Google.  I've been playing with it since it went live the other night, and its limitations are glaring and clear.  It has trouble answering even the simplest and most intuitive query, which makes it seem like it's a spectacularly stupid system.  But what's impressive is that it is able to answer any questions at all.

If I understand Stephen Wolfram's description of the system (and others') correctly, Alpha is an attempt to create a knowledge engine out of a very large library of fairly small algorithms.  Its database is vast; but the code that operates on it is not necessarily complex.  In other words, Alpha's not a monolithic "thought engine" but a collection of heterogenous mini-engines that Wolfram hopes will interact in unpredictable but creative ways.  As Stephen Wolfram puts it in a recent blog entry on the subject:

There is an immensely complex web of systematizable knowledge out there in the world. And before NKS [Wolfram's book A New Kind of Science --K], I would have assumed that to handle something of this complexity would have required building a system that is somehow correspondingly complex—and in practice completely out of reach.

But from NKS we have learned that even highly complex things can have their origins in simple rules and simple programs.

This last statement is the important one--it speaks to what I've been saying for a while now, that the vision of a 'technological singularity' that comes as a result of increasing complexity of information processing systems, is mistaken.  (It is, in fact, an example of the erroneous theory of Intelligent Design.)  Creativity is not correlated to complexity; and as well as being a potentially useful tool, Alpha is an attempt to prove this very non-intuitive idea.

As Wolfram goes on to say in his blog post:

Today, Wolfram|Alpha uses existing models from science and other areas, then does computations based on these models.

But what if it could find new models? What if it could invent on the fly? Do science on the fly?

That is precisely what NKS suggests should be possible. Exploring the computational universe on request, and finding things out there that are useful for some particular specified purpose.

Stephen Wolfram expects Alpha to be more than a data regurgitator or formatter.  He expects it to be creative.  And, he expects this creativity to emerge, not from complexity, but from simplicity. 

These are very interesting ideas.  The next year of Alpha's growth should be interesting to watch.

Solaren corporation has signed a deal with Pacific Gas & Electric to orbit a 200 megawatt solar power satellite by 2016.  I mention this not because the news is amazing (it was inevitable, really) but because their plan gives me some nice numbers to plug into my Verne gun calculations. 

You might remember my enthusiasm over Next Big Future's recent discussion of Project Orion and the spinoff notion of using nuclear bombs to loft very large payloads into space (wheeee!).  I called this idea the Verne gun in a feeble public relations attempt.  Anyway, Brian Wang's calculations over at NBF gave a figure of 280,000 tons as the lift-capacity of a single 10-megaton bomb.  At the time, I suggested using ten or so of these suckers to lift an entire continental powersat infrastructure into space.  But I didn't have hard numbers about how much mass equaled how much power.

Solaren have conveniently stated that their 200 megawatt, self-assembling power transmitter could go up in five launches of 25 tons each.  Solar power satellites are far more efficient per-solar-cell than ground-based plants, so they have a much smaller industrial footprint and almost no environmental footprint at all.  They run 24 hours a day.  So that means that the engineers at Solaren can do 200 megawatts of baseline power with 125 tons orbited.  To put it another way:

1 gigawatt baseline power = 625 orbited tons

Launching this much mass using conventional rockets is expensive, but obviously not entirely out of line, or they wouldn't be doing it.  But, here's a question:  how much baseline power (97% uptime) could be orbited using a 10 megaton Verne shot?  The answer: 448 gigawatts.  

The United States currently uses 4 terawatts of power per year.  About half of that is coal.  So four firings of the Verne gun could orbit enough power to obsolete the entire American coal-power system.

The big problem wouldn't be radiation from the launches (which would be effectively zero) but the astronomical insurance costs attendant on putting so many eggs in one launch basket.  Maybe a few dozen 100 kiloton shots would be better...

With the addition of its final set of solar panels, the international space station is slated to become the second brightest object in the night sky--brighter than Venus.  Now, admittedly the ISS is the size of a football field, but it's also three hundred kilometers away from the Earth directly above the plane of its orbit--but much further away for most of the people who see it.  Thousands of kilometers, for most of us.

Consider this:  on any given night, you can look up (if you're not in a city that already drowns the stars) and see satellites.  They're hundreds of kilometers away, and the biggest are no larger than a compact car--yet you can see them.  Most are the size of a barrel, but perfectly visible.

Consider Bradley Edwards' ribbon design for the space elevator cable.  This would be a meter or two wide and curved, so that it is effectively visible from all angles.  So it's about the width of a barrel, but infinitely longer.  Its reflective surface over one kilometer's distance would be at least as great as the ISS; but please multiply that light output by 35,000 because that's how many kilometers long it would have to be.  A Hoytether (open meshwork) design would presumably reflect less, but how much less?

You could paint the ribbon black.  Then again, how much would a coating weigh that had to cover 1 meter x 35 million meters of area?  The black coating would heat the cable because the sun is so intense in orbit, so you wouldn't want it to be totally absorptive.  But here's the thing:

The moon is black.

Actually, overall the moon's surface is about the shade of an asphalt highway. It absorbs almost all the light that hits it.  The moon appears pearly white to us only because of the tiny fraction of light that's reflected off the lunar blacktop.  So even a mostly-black ribbon would look brilliantly white to us on the ground.

As if all this were not enough, the only practical means of powering the climber cars (which would be visible too) appears to be multi-megawatt lasers, aimed at solar cell arrays on the climbers.  As Wikipedia puts it:

The proposed method is laser power beaming, using megawatt powered free electron or solid state lasers in combination with adaptive mirrors approximately 10 m wide and a photovoltaic array on the climber tuned to the laser frequency for efficiency.

So, the climbers are in the cross-hairs of, essentially, a set of a huge spotlights.  Maybe you could use infrared or ultraviolet lasers, but if not, then even for the most efficient solar cells (40% or thereabouts) 60% of the laser light will be absorbed or reflected.  Add to that light from the sun reflecting off the (presumably large) collectors, and you get something fiercely bright climbing the already bright cable.

This issue doesn't just affect the space elevator, by the way.  It's also relevant to any substantial effort to place solar power satellites at geosynchronous orbit.  Their immense surface area would pretty much guarantee that they'd shed a vast amount of light on the Earth.

But why should we care?  Here again we can refer to Wikipedia, in its entry on light pollution:

Life exists with natural patterns of light and dark, so disruption of those patterns influences many aspects of animal behavior.  Light pollution can confuse animal navigation, alter competitive interactions, change predator-prey relations, and influence animal physiology.

...Studies suggest that light pollution around lakes prevents zooplankton, such as Daphnia, from eating surface algae, helping cause algal blooms that can kill off the lakes' plants and lower water quality.

Lots of other life forms are affect--everything from birds to frogs.  It doesn't take very much light to have a big effect. So, in the absence of any direct physical effects, the space elevator would still have a large, if not catastrophic, ecological impact.

I wish this weren't true.  I'm a big fan of the elevator, and an even bigger fan of solar power satellites.  But the devil, as they say, is in the details.  If these structures cause the amount of light pollution I'm suggesting, then they are very far from being green options for energy and transport--regardless of how much carbon they may offset.

Further to the discussion about Brian Wang's treatment of Orion and its offshoot, the Verne gun, if you look at the comments to my previous post, Adam Crowl suggests that peak acceleration for Brian's gun would be about 3700 gravities.  He also suggests ways of reducing that, primarily by using a nuclear charge to energize hydrogen gas and have that push the ship.  (I'm not sure that's the most efficient way to go, though, because the Orion design depends on the efficiency of energy transfer to the pusher plate and requires close proximity to the charge.)

In any case, this figure of 3700 g's suggests something: some things would be able to take it (like hardened electronics, tight rolls of thin-film solar cells, and liquids like water or rocket fuel) but others (like people and furniture) would not.  In one of Brian's latest posts, he talks about the Mercury laser, which might make practical laser-initiated fusion happen.  This piece makes me wonder what the total mass of the system minus the supporting building structure would be (because that bears on how practical it would be for fusion powered spacecraft) but also reminds me that laser launch systems have only been waiting for this one development to become practical. 

So here's the plan:  launch a few hundred thousand tonnes of rugged stuff using the Verne gun, and send up the rest a tonne at a time using a laser launch system.  You can even run the laser launch system off renewables if you want to be green; and after the first few launches, you end up running it off beamed power from the first solar power sat you put up.  True bootstrapping through hybrid launch technology.

I have to admit I got a bit ahead of myself in the post below, in which I renamed the nuclear cannon the Verne gun and described some of what you could do with it.  As it stands, the idea would only work for cargoes that could withstand tens of thousands of g's of acceleration---which in practice would amount to fuel, raw iron and a few other simple items like that.  Still valuable to orbit, but a bit limiting.

So, here's a proposal to refine the idea a bit:  the sabot.  In this variation of the Verne gun, you don't try to reach escape velocity.  The blast that sends up the ship only needs to loft it about 100 kilometers---above the atmosphere, but not into orbit.  The bulk of the ship's mass is in fact acceleration padding--a sabot or shell around a more conventional rocket-powered craft.  After an initial acceleration (still on the order of hundreds of g's at least) the sabot separates from the cargo at 100 kilometers, lightening the load and permitting the contained rockets to fire.  This lighter craft then enters orbit under rocket power.

An alternative to rockets would be to catch the ship at the top of its trajectory using an orbiting tether (a huge one, if we're catching tens or hundreds of thousands of tonnes!).  In either case, the acceleration shielding for the initial launch falls back into the ocean and what enters space is pure cargo.

Using a sabot might allow us to launch more fragile cargoes than the straight shot version.  I now doubt that you could launch, for instance, solar power sats without a sabot, though sending up a space elevator would probably still work.

Toby Buckell informs me, by the way, that Niven and Pournelle used the idea of the nuclear cannon in their alien-invasion novel Footfall.  Let's get precedent straight here---as far as I know, they did it first in science fiction.

Recently I talked about one of my favourite blogs, Brian Wang's Next Big Future.  He and his team are a veritable fountain of ideas, and this week they've outdone themselves with a series of pieces on Project Orion and its offshoots.  Now, I freely admit that they've done all the heavy lifting here (so to speak) but I'm going to take one of their ideas and run with it anyway.

A couple of the salient posts on Project Orion are The Nuclear Orion Home Run Shot, and Pieces of a True Nuclear Cannon.  Now, Orion was the 1950s-era American project to build a nuclear-bomb powered spacecraft.  Three facts stand out about the project:

1. It could have worked, and would have put unlimited amounts of mass into space for less than $1 a kilo.
2. The biggest vessel contemplated by the Orion team would have weighed 8 million tonnes, and would have been bigger than the Great Pyramid.
3. The sucker wouldn't have incinerated, flattened, and irradiated nearly as much real estate as you might think.

Still, for some reason the project was canceled around 1964.

In contemplating the glory that almost was, it's tempting to imagine what could have been accomplished with Orion.  One thought I had was that, well, maybe you could just use it once:  do the full-out 8-million tonne monster and use it to launch, in one shot, enough solar satellite infrastructure to obsolete every North American coal plant overnight.  According to a rational moral calculus, if Orion works it should be used in such a way, because the number of people who would die worldwide from the beast's fallout would be trivial compared to the number saved by reductions in air pollution from coal.  (Three million people die from air pollution each year; what they point out over at Next Big Future is that Orion could be calibrated to limit its fallout deaths to no more than a few dozen per launch, even for the biggest ship).

Still, there would be some place on Earth that would suffer from such a launch, and one thing we've learned is there is no truly "empty" land.  Even if our moral calculus could be extended to other species that would be saved by greening our power, it would be better if there were some way to launch such huge masses without exposing the biosphere to nuclear explosions and fallout at all.

There is.  I call it the Verne gun because frankly, a name like THE ATOMIC CANNON would just not go over well in certain circles.  In any case, the principle is the same as Verne's original idea, but using modern technology:  you set off a nuclear charge underground where the blast, heat, radiation and fallout can all be contained, and use Orion-type technology to direct its energy into orbiting a very big, very heavy spacecraft.  This vessel would experience hundreds to thousands of g's of acceleration--you couldn't put humans in it.  But Wang calculates that a 10 megaton bomb could put 280,000 tons into orbit with zero radiation escape into the biosphere.  Since dozens of bombs were exploded in exactly this way from the 50's to the 70's, we know this can be done.  And Orion's researchers proved nearly every one of their theories about Orion.  What they couldn't test at the time can now be simulated accurately by today's supercomputers, without the need for a test program.

Such an orbital gun could be used multiple times.  Here's what you could do if you could put 280,000 tons into orbit in one shot:

• Put 1.5 terawatts of clean solar power into orbit with less than ten launches.  Obsolete coal and petroleum power production with green baseline power, using less than a 10th the number of solar cells as you'd have to install on Earth to capture the same amount of sunlight.
• Orbit an entire space elevator with one launch.  Set it up, retire the gun, and get on with a clean space age.
• Do the same thing with an orbiting greenhouse infrastructure.  Drop solar-powered mass drivers on the moon to feed a continual stream of building material to the building sites.
  
• Orbit fuel depots to drop the price of conventional rocketry to orbit through the floor.  One shot and access to space for NASA becomes 10 times cheaper.
• Send up a telescope so big that it can image the continents of planets circling other stars.
  
• Put up one or more of those cool gigantic orbiting space station wheels that are showcased so dramatically in the movie 2001:  A Space Odyssey.
• Send an entire colony's worth of material to the moon or Mars.  With a second shot, put up an interplanetary cycler ring, tether launch system or other permanent mechanism for shuttling people to and from the colonies.
• Toss a couple hundred thousand tons of nuclear waste into the sun, where it won't bother us anymore.  (Trust me, the sun won't notice.)
• Launch an empty Orion ship, send its fuel up the safer space elevator, and send an expedition to Saturn, or a probe to the next star.
  

I'm not going to suggest orbiting a sunshade to head off global warming, because that's no solution for problems like ocean acidification.  --In any case, you can certainly think up other cool stuff we could do; and notice that some of these options, like orbiting fuel depots or a space elevator, can easily bootstrap us out of having to use the gun more than once or twice.

Oh, and of course, there's one more thing you could do with it, but since you'd need to get signoff from all the members of the nuclear club to use it at all, this one's a bit less likely:

• Orbit a huge frikkin death star platform with ATOMIC LASERS and MISSILE RACKS and RAIL GUNS and aim them at anybody you don't like.
  

Keeping up with the pace of scientific discovery is getting harder and harder; either we really are approaching the Singularity, or I'm just getting old.  In any case, I would fall woefully behind if it weren't for two excellent websites:  Centauri dreams by Paul Gilster, and Brian Wang's Next Big Future.  Both sites are firehoses of content, even more so (for my interests) than, say, slashdot.  This week in particular they've presented a smorgasbord of cool ideas.  

First, Paul talks about a recent paper studying the Drake equation (which attempts to deduce how many civilizations there are in the galaxy).  People have speculated about this for decades; what the authors of this paper do is show using statistical analysis that even if the galaxy contains hundreds of communicating civilizations (CC's) they may never be able to find one another. 

This could explain some things.

Next Big Future posts lots of really interesting pieces on technology; I have a particular interest in one endeavour, Robert Bussard's polywell fusion reactor.  This week NBF has a great summary of where the US navy's stealth program to develop such a reactor is at.  The science is encouraging; the levels of funding are not.  Luckily Barack Obama's new technology czar seems to be aware of the work, so maybe things there will take off. 

Even more intriguing are recent attempts to harness zero-point energy.  I'd been playing with designs for a zero-point generator in my head for quite some time, and the patents talked about in this article are, physically, close to what I'd imagined.  The mechanism by which it operates is very different, though. 

A working zero-point generator would be more than revolutionary, partly because these devices could be made arbitrarily small.  They could do far more than transform our civilization:  I was thinking last night that you could build them into the mitochondria of a cell, making such pesky activities as eating and breathing unnecessary for maintaining positive energy flow. Even more than nanotechnology, this kind of zero-point energy makes anything possible.

Except... there's a problem here which is similar to the Fermi paradox.  Life has evolved ways to play nanotechnological and quantum-mechanical tricks many times--chlorophyl's mode of action is a great example, as it depends on quantum-mechanical tricks to shift energy with maximum efficiency.  So, if the tiny Casimir-effect devices being talked about now are possible, why didn't life stumble across the design sometime in the past 3.5 billion years?  As with alien civilizations, one can validly ask, if they can exist, where are they?

Bookmark Centauri Dreams and Next Big Future.  If the world is going to change overnight, they'll give you the heads-up the evening before.

For me, the thing that decisively signals a split between old-style politics and something new, is President Obama's reluctance to give up his blackberry.  In retrospect, it's astounding that someone in such a position should not have personal access to instant messaging of this kind.  It suggests that there are always filters around the president--i.e. that someone else is filtering his view of reality--and limiting his ability to act.  The presence of 21st century tools in the White House would be highly significant; as I wrote in Lady of Mazes, "technology is legislation."  Technologies like instant messaging are likely to have a profound impact on process that, at least in the near term, is almost certainly going to be attributed to other causes.

The fact is that you haven't just elected a president.  If he gets to keep it, then you've also elected a blackberry; and nobody yet knows what that is going to mean.

The most recent Scientific American contains a paper on the possible ocean under Saturn's moon Enceladus.  This is really cool news and well worth investigating further.  Europa, however, is still where the action is.  I've resurrected a year-and-a-half old blog entry from my old site that tells of some particularly spectacular possibilities:

A recent paper suggests if that Jupiter's moon Europa does have a subsurface ocean, then that ocean is probably highly oxygenated--i.e., breathable by terrestrial fish.

To quote the article's tantalizing abstract:

...Europa's ocean could reach O2 concentrations comparable to those found in terrestrial surface waters, even if 109 moles yr1 of hydrothermally delivered reductants consume most of the oxidant flux. Such an ocean would be energetically hospitable for terrestrial marine macrofauna. The availability of reductants could be the limiting factor for biologically useful chemical energy on Europa.

To translate: macrofauna=fish, and reductants=food. Current theory suggests that Europa's internal heat comes from the flexing of the planet due to its gravitational interactions with Jupiter and the other moons. This flexing may create enough heat in the moon's core to drive volcanic processes, creating the equivalent to the "black smokers" that pepper the mid-Atlantic ridge on Earth. Scientists have speculated that these vents might support some sort of life, but while they constitute a potential nutrient source, an energy source has been lacking. This paper suggests that energy, in the form of oxygen, might be common.

The mechanism for creating that oxygen appears to be radiation from Jupiter's radiation belts. When substances such as sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide land on Europa, they sit there and get fried for very long periods. The broken molecules produce Europa's atmosphere, which is pure oxygen. Eventually, the surface ice subducts like a terrestrial continent, pulling the now-split oxygen and carbon et. down and into the ocean. According to the article, at currently projected infall rates, even if a huge amount of that oxygen is immediately bound up with non-biological molecules coming up from below, the total amount available should be comparable to the surface of Earth's oceans.

If this is right, and there really is an ocean, and there really are venting processes at work in the deep, then Europa is habitable now--but not necessarily for us. Consider these mitigating factors:

• It's a salty ocean--but it's Epsom salts (magnesium sulfate) rather than our kind of salt. It may also be really salty (think thick soup), in which case only the most extreme halophile bacteria could survive there.
• There could well be other substances, common to the outer planets, saturating the ocean--such as ammonia. Imagine a sea of Windex.
• Pressure. I've seen no calculations of how much pressure should be crushing down on this sea. But even on a small moon, an ocean under 30 kilometers of ice should have mighty powerful forces compressing it. The ice could be as thin as 800 meters, but we just don't know.

Still--none of these factors makes large, native Europan life forms impossible. And even if the ocean is sterile, in the best case, we might be able to engineer terrestrial fish to withstand a lifelong Epsom salt bath, and populate it ourselves. If the pressure allows, we could dig domes into the ice ceiling and pump them full of nitrogen, and let the oxygen percolate up from below. I used all these ideas in my 2002 novel Permanence, to show what habitable worlds around brown dwarf stars might look like.

All of this makes a Europan mission increasingly important. After all, it may be small, but it's a whole world, and potentially a shirt-sleeve environment for humans. Stocked with fish and other organisms to provide a full food chain, Europa may, shockingly, prove to be a world we can terraform and live on indefinitely (unlike Earth, Europa might even survive the death of the sun). It's definitely worth finding out whether all of that is possible.

Aviation Week has created a shitstorm on the web by publishing this article.  They claim that the White House has been briefed about a forthcoming announcement from the Phoenix Mars lander team--something significant, apparently, that will blow the doors off the recent confirmation of water and even the revelation that Martian soil would be capable of growing Earth plant life.

On sites like Slashdot, people are lining up to speculate about what the news is.  Is it life?  Ideas range from the possibility that Phoenix's microscopes have spotted fossils, to actual confirmation of life.  NASA, however, was careful in its statement to state that no direct sign of life, past or present, has been found.

Many others are jumping in with sober reminders that Phoenix isn't even equipped to find life--just water and maybe organic substances.  The most likely scenario is, in fact, that Phoenix has discovered organics in the Martian soil.

This would be a big discovery, true; it would make an unequivocal statement that Mars is a habitable planet, only the second one in the universe known.  If our very next-door-neighbour is hospitable to life, then how much more likely is it that many other worlds also are?

...Of course, such a discovery isn't as world-shaking as it sounds.  After all, for a very long time now, we've known that there's no known reason why other planets wouldn't be habitable--Mars included.  This would just be confirming what we've already deduced from the available evidence:  that safe havens for life are abundant in the universe.

From this point of view, the Phoenix team briefing the White House is really just a piece of grandstanding--a last-ditch attempt to squeeze money from a science-hostile administration before the expected recession/depression gets the space program killed.

But there is one other possibility.

The recent discovery that the soil at the Phoenix lander site could support some earthly plants would appear to contradict the findings of the Viking landers from the 1970s.  Those craft deployed sophisticated experiments to determine whether life is present on Mars, yet the instruments returned ambiguous results.  There was a strong signal indicating life from some of the instruments, yet no evidence of biological material in the soil.  The official interpretation that has become orthodoxy as a result, is that the Martian soil is highly oxidizing, ie. that it contains compounds such as hydrogen peroxide that destroy biological materials.

But if Phoenix has found that you could grow earthly plants in the soil at its site, doesn't this cast serious doubt on that interpretation?

Here's the logic in its most direct form:

1. The Viking experiments indicated the presence of metabolism, but did not find biological materials.  The failure to find organics was puzzling, and meant either that the instrument failed or there were no organics.  But the metabolism tests did indicate life.
   
2. A strongly-oxydizing soil was the only consistent interpretation other than life+instrument failure to account for the test results.
   
3. Phoenix has found water and soil that can apparently support plant growth.  This would appear to contradict the hypothesis of strongly oxydizing soil.  If Phoenix has found organics, or has at least found that there is little likelihood of a strongly oxydizing soil existing anywhere on Mars, we are then left with:
   
4. The Viking landers detected life in 1976.  One of their instruments failed to do its job and did not correctly characterize the chemical makeup of the soil, leading to thirty years of muddied waters in the quest for life on Mars.

By this hypothesis, NASA is being coy by saying that Phoenix has not detected life.  It hasn't; what it's done is confirm that the Vikings already found it!

Now, NASA's not actually going to say this.  Scientists are (rightly) conservative with their pronouncements, and even vindication of the Viking experiments doesn't actually prove anything.  A Mars sample-return mission would have to be undertaken to do that.  But maybe that's the funding that NASA is looking to get here.

Because the fact remains that if you can grown vegetables in Martian soil, it can't be the kind of hostile chemical bleach that would be necessary to invalidate the Viking experiments.  Even without any data beyond what's already been released, the evidence now points to life on Mars, and fairly cries out for a follow-up investigation.  And that, I suspect, is what NASA is going to call for.

This one's from the unbelievably cool department:  reprap has built its first child machine! 

Reprap is the world's first self-reproducing machine.  Mind-boggling as this sounds, the proof is in the picture; and, if you take some time to explore the site, in the project's extensive documentation.

Not that reprap is yet able to sit in a corner by itself and knock off copies of itself without human aid--it still needs people to screw the bits together and as yet not all of its electronics can be made by itself.  Think of the human beings and electronics as being like environmentally-available resources, free-floating enzymes, say, that facilitate the work of the reprap.  It needs them, like we need air; but that doesn't mean it's not reproducing by itself. 

The idea is that the irreproducible parts should be commodities you can find in any electronics supply store; what reprap makes is its unique pieces. 

Reprap is now alive, by some definitions.  It's is a stunning milestone and happened a lot faster than I expected it would.  Thanks to Michael Nielsen for alerting me to this!

My favourite planet-hunting site is Centauri Dreams.  From there comes a discussion of the smallest conventional planet yet discovered outside our solar system--a super-Earth or mini-Neptune only three times Earth's mass.  It's not in a conventional location, however:  this planet circles a brown dwarf, a "failed" star that doesn't shine.

What's even more amazing (to me) is that there's speculation that this planet could be habitable.  There's a couple of reasons for this:  its size could mean that it retains enough radioactives in its core to heat it; its atmosphere might retain enough hydrogen (which is a greenhouse gas) to keep the surface temperature above the freezing point of water.  Also, although it's three Earth masses, that doesn't necessarily translate to three gravities of weight; it depends on its radius (you'd weigh almost the same on Saturn as you do on Earth, despite the fact that Saturn masses 95 times more than the Earth).

I never considered super-earths when I was inventing livable planets for my novel Permanence.  In this case, two interesting possibilities would be an oceanic planet with a hydrogen atmosphere; or a mini-Neptune with a radius large enough that its local gravity is Earth-normal, and an atmosphere that, like Venus, hosts a layer where the air pressure and temperature are also Earth-normal.  Just for interest, you could also imagine that the brown dwarf's radiation field dissociates water molecules at the top of this atmosphere; the hydrogen escapes and the oxygen falls back (this happens on Europa, which is now thought to have a breathable [by fish] ocean).  Then, you could have an air-world with Earth-levels of gravity, air pressure, temperature, and oxygen content in the air.  The only downsides:  no ground to walk on and no sunlight--ever.  But that lets us imagine all sorts of air-pirate scenarios in gloomy, lightning-lit skies.

Isn't that just too cool?  And brown dwarfs are everywhere.  As I said in Permanence, with this discovery the number of potentially habitable planetary systems in the galaxy has multiplied, by as much as a factor of ten.  There could easily be one within a light year of Earth.

Scientists like to low-ball their estimates.  The now-famous IPCC scenarios for the effects of climate change are already known to be woefully, unrealistically conservative (Freeman Dyson's recent opinions notwithstanding). Arctic changes expected 20 years from now are happening now, and in North America the beginning of spring has already been pushed back by two weeks, which is enough to play havoc with the fertility cycle of many migratory birds (among other consequences).  The worst-case scenarios used in public debate ignore some extremely worrisome factors, such as the possible release of oceanic methane from clathrates. If we're going to deal with this problem, we have to do it now, as in, within the term of your next government.

Science fiction writers, on the other hand, are generally optimistic--if not about the fate of humanity, then at least about the progress of technology.  The ultimate in technological optimism is the idea of the technological singularity, which posits that technological advance is exponential and, driven by progress in artificial intelligence, will soon hit the vertical slope of the curve.

Maybe.  In fact, let's assume that this mythology is true and, within about 25 years, computers will exceed human intelligence and rapidly bootstrap themselves to godlike status.  At that point, they will aid us (or run roughshod over us) to transform the Earth into a paradise. 

Here's the problem:  25 years is too late.  The newest business-as-usual climate scenarios look increasingly dire.  If we haven't solved our problems within the next decade, even these theoretical godlike AIs aren't going to be able to help us.  Thermodynamics is thermodynamics, and no amount of godlike thinking can reverse the irreversible. 

If there's to be a miraculous transformation of human civilization, it has to be accomplished by us, right now, and without the aid of any miracle technologies.  (That said, technology is a large part of the answer--and game-changing breakthroughs are possible--but until proven otherwise it's existing systems such as wind power that we have to assume we'll be using.)  The technological singularity may be real, but who cares?  By the time it happens, we'll have won or lost our grand battle with fate.

Therefore, here's a rare piece of advice for my fellow science fiction writers:  forget the singularity.  Even if it's real, it's irrelevant.  The decisive moment in history is now, before it occurs.  Seize that, write about that. 

All else is distraction.