Geologists beware

Coal Cares

This is the most fantastically over-the-top pro-coal website I have ever seen.  Pure genius.  I have no idea who is actually behind coalcares.org, but I hereby declare them a legend of the internet.

Alien beyond comprehension

When an astronomer says a far-off planetary system is like ours, what he means is that it is completely different.  For example, see the recent press releases about the seven planet system KOI-135 (aka Kepler 90). 

This system has a planet the size of Jupiter in an orbit almost the same as our Earth’s.  Since the star is a little bigger (and hotter) than the sun, the orbit takes less time, but the orbital radius is just like ours.

Inside of that, in an orbit about the size of Venus’s orbit, is a Saturn sized gas giant planet.

Inboard of the Saturn-sized planet are three mini-Neptunes.  Our solar system doesn’t have any planets of this type, but they seem to be fairly common in the rest of the galaxy.  These are gas rich planets smaller than Neptune and Uranus, but still much larger than Earth. One of them has an orbit substantially larger than that of Mercury, one substantially smaller, and one about the same radius, but much more circular (Mercury has quite an elliptical orbit).

Finally, inside of that, are two earth-sized planets that orbit screamingly close to the planet.  The inner planet is more than five times closer to its star than Mercury is to the Sun, and its orbit (e.g. its year) is only a week long.  The other planet is only slightly farther out, in a 9 day orbit.

It is not known if there are more planets farther out- Kepler’s detection method would not pick them up.

So you gotta wonder, if that is Earthlike, then what are the strange ones like?

In fact, the whole framing of exoplanetary research as “counting up the Galaxy’s Earths” is a bit disingenuous.  By presenting a scientific study as having a foregone conclusion (e.g. there are Earths everywhere), NASA takes a lot of the suspense and excitement out of the search.  Furthermore, it makes trying to fit otherwise interesting discoveries into the Earthcount box awkward, and it diminishes the wonder and diversity of just what is out there.

In fact, the NASA exo-Earth search program is a lot like going to China to find a person just like your mother.  After all, China has billions of people, and they were all born more or less the same way as your mother, so odds are, the place must be crawling with women just like mom.

Imagine how tedious a travel documentary of China would be when viewed in this way. “Our way south to Beijing to look for mom-analogs was blocked by some kind of wall- fortunately we managed to avoid it).” You would have progress press releases, “Some people in China confirmed to be women.”  “New mission shows some Chinese women to be mothers.”  Newly discovered Chinese woman likes fried rice, just like your mom.”

This narcissistic approach misses the whole point of travel and exploration.  We investigate far-off places because they are foreign, because they expose the assumptions on which our beliefs are based, and because the let us discover new and wondrous things that were beyond the scope of our imaginations.

This is what exoplanetary research does.  Everything we have discovered in planetary science, from the first Moon probes to the discovery of planets 2500 light years away, has been wonderful and new and different to expectations and awe-inspiring.  But the current framing of the science does not allow this amazement to be conveyed to the public who fund the research.  And this is a terrible shame.

The planets xkcd forgot

 A recent cartoon/poster on xkcd tries to estimate what the population of habitable zone planets in our stellar neighborhood looks like. Unfortunately, despite labeling the poster as “all habitable zone planets”, there are a couple of very important omissions.  The center of the picture should look like this:

When discussing the habitable zone, and how it applies to exoplanets, one needs to remember that the definition of habitable zone is sufficiently wide that it covers both Mars and Venus, the closest planets to Earth.  In fact, despite discovering thousands of exoplanets and exoplanet candidates, we still do not have any planets as earthlike as Venus. It is hard to say much about exo-Mars equivalents, as exoplanet detection technology has trouble finding a planet that small and far from its host star.

Most of the planets shown in the chart have not been discovered yet.  Even among those which have, very little data about the planets is available.  It will be years, perhaps even decades, before we have the technology to pick an exo-Earth from an exo-Venus. But framing the exo-planet debate as an Earth versus Venus relative distribution would be a mistake.  Chances are, the vast majority of these planets are completely unlike either planet.

Our solar system is strange.  It is missing the most abundant type of planet in our galaxy- those which are larger than Earth, but smaller than Uranus.  These worlds are often, albeit deceptively, referred to as “super-earths”.  But as Systemic has shown, those which we have data for are not only completely different to anything in our solar system, they are often quite different from each other. 

The omission of Venus and Mars is therefore important, because it gives the false impression that planets in the habitable zone are going to be Earthlike.  Neither of the habitable zone planets in our solar system are particularly Earthlike, and everything we know about exoplanets so far suggests that they will be far stranger still.

At the risk of igniting a spelling war in the middle east...

I give you this:

Note that I don't have a horse in this race; I just wanted to arm all sides of the conflict with silly graphics.

2 years of solar

Note the decreased sampling rate in year two due to decreasing novelty and increased travel. Here they are stacked:

After 2 years: 6700 kwh produced, 5230 kwh used.

Twenty years...

Twenty years ago, in the early afternoon, I stomped up a small mountain in the cool Georgia autumn, and stopped walking.  It had been a long walk, a bit over five months, and the trail I was walking on ended there.  As I was twenty years old at the time, this was almost half a lifetime ago.  When I started the Appalachian Trail, the main question in my mind was, “Can I get to the other end.”  When I got there, my main concerns, judging from the notes in my Journal, seemed involve food.  I guess I’m not really the philosophical sort. 

I started walking because it was the only thing I really wanted to do.  I didn’t like college, the alternatives weren’t very appealing, and ever since my uncle pointed out that the trail in the Virginia mountains was the same trail as the one my folks took me to in New Jersey, I wanted t osee for myself if these familiar paths in the disconnected lands of home and summer holiday land could really be connected ,simply by walking a lot.

 I stopped walking because my feet hurt.  The end of the trail helped too, of course, but there are people who simply turn around and walk back the way they came.  There are people who walk because they have nothing else left in life.  I called them trail zombies, and they terrified be because I could see myself becoming one of them. It would be so easy, to lose touch with everyone, sell anything that didn’t fit in my pack, and walk until the end of my days. Instead, I stopped walking.  I went home, looked up people who I’d lost touch with in college, went back to school in ’94.  It wasn’t easy, as I’ve always been a bit of an introvert and a misfit, but somehow, 20 years later, here I am with a house, a wife, a job and a couple of kids. I still love bushwalking, and get out whenever my commitments to the above listed allow, but these days, every walk has an end, and a return to civilization. Hopefully the next 20 years will go as nicely.

Carbonado, the diamond that looks like pizza.

I like to horrify current and recent students by telling them that I spent a month of my PhD figuring out what sort of film to use for best capturing the colors produced by the cathodoluminescence centres in carbonado diamond.  Of course, by the time it came to submit my thesis, I then had to spend days scanning all those slides.  Although, I still have a poster somewhere that is made from big glossy 8x10 prints, all glued to cardboard backing.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to chase some kids off my psilphytopsid lawn...