Science education’s next frontier

It has been interesting to see the nucleation, aggregation, and subsequent metamorphism of the science blogosphere over the past 7 years. In general, I suspect that it has been good for science education, and there has been a concerted effort by many to reach out to women, atheists, and minorities who generally have more trouble leading successful scientific careers in the white English speaking world.  This is good, although the fact that this outreach has intensified after the deprofessionalization of science makes it a less effective tool for lifting people out of poverty.

There is one group, however, that has by-and-large been excluded from the recent wave of on-line science educators, commentators, and promoters.  The are conservatives.  There are very few outreach programs aimed at making science interesting and accessible to conservatives in English speaking countries. 

Back in the good old days of the cold war, this was not a problem.  The great mass of conservative scientists and engineers who designed and built the weapons of the cold war know that science and technology were crucial to beating the Soviets, so there was no need to reach out to them.  But times have changed.  Military engineers no longer keep California a reliably Republican state, the cold war is long over, and the prominent, respectable suburban private research parks of the 20^th century have mostly closed their doors.

Why does this matter?  Because conservatives are numerous and influential.  In the white English speaking world, they control the House of Representatives in the USA, and the Canadian, British, Australian, and New Zealand governments.  The flight of scientific research out of the suburbs and into universities has had the effect of alienating scientists from conservatives, and vice versa.  This is not good for either group.

Conservative who don’t have access to sound scientific advice are likely to make policy mistakes.  At the same time, Scientists who engage conservative in an adversarial manner are less likely to be funded by these governments.  So it is in everyone’s interest to stop taking cheap shots at each other and find a way of effectively communicating.

Mapping while black

Happy Martin Luther King Day.  Dr. King, of course, was a pivotal leader of the civil rights movement, and was crucial in organizing African Americans to claim their rightful places in American society.   And while the civil rights struggle has continued in the decades after his untimely death at age 39, the progress of integration in geological sciences has been slower than in other areas.  So it seems that today is as good a day as any to discuss some of the potential barriers to racial integration in geology.

One little known problem is the issue of Mapping While Black.  Most people know what driving while black is, but a Google search for “Mapping while Black” reveals a bit less information.  However, in many parts of the world, including the US and Australia, rural land owners often have a tendency to be whiter, more racist and better armed than the urban population.  And this can put black field geologists into uncomfortable positions which their white colleagues never even conceive of. 

While I am not black, and did not experience any such events as an undergrad in the USA, my PhD research brought me to Brazil, where I collaborated with predominately African-Brazilian colleagues.    And while the most memorable event we had was not actually mapping, it does serve to illustrate the hairy end of what can happen if one tries to do geology with (or in the company of those with) low albedo skin.

My PhD research focused on an obscure type of diamond called carbonado.  Carbonado is found primarily in East-central Brazil and the Central African Republic, but a month after my PhD started the fall of Robert Mugabe in neighboring Zaire destabilized the CAR, making it off limits to my project.  So Brazil it was, chiefly the poor, black eastern part of Bahia state known as the “Chapada diamantina” (diamond plateau).

One of the elder statesmen of the (small) field of carbonado research suggested to me, at beers in a conference, to drop in on a man called “Oswaldo”, who owned a saloon in the town of Lençios. Oswaldo was a mid-level diamond trader; someone who bought raw stones off of garimpeiros, and then up sold the better material into exporters for cutting, while retaining the weird stuff in his collection.  I was interested in the weird stuff.

So, after three days of field work with and dealing directly with the local garimpeiros, in we went to Oswaldo’s.  Me, the very white foreign guy, a black Brazilian geologist, and our black Brazilian driver.  We sit down at a table.  A waiter comes over.  We say we would like to talk to Oswaldo about diamonds. No Oswaldo appears. Our driver starts looking nervous. “blah blah something something vamos,” says the driver. (I only had about 5 months Portuguese lessons before the field work, and they didn’t include the Bahian dialect or accent). 

My geologist colleague say to me, “we have to go now.” And gesture towards the rest of the room as he gets up.  Three of the four exits to the room are now blocked by tough looking Brazilian roughnecks.  My memory is blurry, but I think one of them has a gun.  The people at the table next to us start to move away.  And then everything was a blur, until I was in the cab of our truck and we were gunning the engine to get the fuck outta there. As we do, there is a yelp.  A dog (Oswaldo’s  we were never properly introduced, so I can’t say) had crawled under the ute to get out of the harsh November sun, and we had clipped its leg tearing up the street.  I feel bad about the dog, but we lived with that, and didn’t stop.  In fact, we didn’t stop until we were over the mountains, and then we hid the truck at a roadhouse where my colleague knew the patrons, and watched for pursuit for 20 minutes, before turning north and heading for Morro do Chapeu, 200 km away.

Years later, I related this story to the guy who recommended Oswaldo to me. He, a gruff, no-nonsense senior professor, was shocked, and appalled. He and his (white) Brazilian colleagues had been treated very generously by Oswaldo.  And it never even occurred to him that anything different would happen to us.

And therein lies the problem.  There isn’t much on the internet about this phenomena.  Many white geologists simply have no idea that you can get a gun pulled on you in the pursuit of knowledge simply by having the wrong skin tint.  If the field of geology wants to integrate at the speed of the rest of our society, we need to think of tactful and effective ways of identifying, discussing, and solving the extra hurdles raised by mapping while black.

Isotope guru starts blogging.

Hope Jahren, the stable isotope guru who studies everything from Paleogene ecosystems to french fries, now has a blog. This is, as far as I know, the first time a scientist who I know from the literature (and have cited) has started blogging.  I'm still busy building mass spectrometers and juggling kids, so don't expect too much here.

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.