Living in the Universe

The Space Race

Fifth Week of November 2007

I’d like to talk about the race for space, and I want to use that word in two ways. This week saw ambitious plans in space announced by the Chinese government.
When we think about the race for space, perhaps our perceptions are set by science fiction. We all know the bridge of the Starship Enterprise was very multicultural. There was the Russian Chekov. There was Scotty, who as actually Canadian but pretended to be a Scotsman, and it was fairly international. But Captain James T. Kirk was all-American, American to the core, and throughout that series there was a clear sense of the American projection of power into space.

America has led the space effort almost from the beginning, except for a decade or so when we were eclipsed by the Russians, and when most people think of the distant future of humans in space, it’s inevitable that they conflate human presence in space with the aspirations of the world’s greatest superpower. But what if things change? What if the distant future of space actually involves a different race, with perhaps the Chinese race taking over from us? Anyone who is paying attention to economics will know that China is gaining on us fast, and is poised to overtake us. In 2008, the GNP of China will eclipse Germany to become the third largest in the world. China’s GNP has been doubling essentially every three years since the early 1980s. Extrapolating past GDP rates into the future is risky, but under any of these extrapolations the size of the Chinese economy will surpass that of the U.S. in purchasing power terms somewhere between 2012 and 2015.

By 2025, China is likely to be the world’s largest economic power by almost any measure. This extrapolation is supported by different considerations, even taking into account the change of its economic nature in the political considerations. One of the projections of a major economic power is their military aspiration. Another is that of exploration. China now has put together a significant space program.

Their history was not that auspicious. It wasn’t until 1971 that they launched their first telecommunications satellite. In 1984, Ronald Regan offered to fly a Chinese astronaut aboard the space shuttle. China pridefully declined the offer. In 1995, their space program suffered a very public setback with the January 25 destruction of a Long March rocket that exploded fifty seconds after launch killing at least six people at the launch site and injuring dozens of others with falling debris. Also in that year, China and Russia signed an agreement to transfer space technology, and Russia agreed to help train China’s astronauts.

But that’s the past. In this current decade, China has been going it alone, and they’ve been surging in their capability. It was a shock and a surprise to some people when October 2003 China became the third country to send an astronaut into space aboard Shenzhou 5. Their current plans are strikingly ambitious. China has plans for a space station orbiting the Earth, a Chinese Moon colony, and a joint China-Russia explorer to Mars. If all goes well, the spacecraft that was launched last week will spend the next year orbiting the Moon mapping the surface and looking for resources. Next, the Chinese hope to send an unmanned rover to the Moon by 2012 with a robotic mission to bring back samples by 2017.

Officials have recently backpedaled from goals of putting a taikonaut, which is the Chinese version of an astronaut or cosmonaut, on the Moon by 2020, but analysts believe that it is still a pressing ambition. Dean Cheng, a Chinese military analyst for the CNA, a private research corporation, says, “If China can go to the Moon, eventually with a manned program, it will represent the ultimate achievement for China in making it essentially the second most important space power, behind us and accomplishing what even the Soviets could not.” According to Cheng, the Chinese are embarking on a systematic space program the world has not seen since the 1960s, and for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. is facing real competition. That may explain why the head of NASA Michael Griffin recently warned, quote, “China will be back on the Moon before we are. I think that when that happens, Americans will not like it.”

There could be more at stake than just lunar boasting rights. It’s very unlikely the Chinese will land at Tranquility base and pull down the Stars and Stripes, but the goal could be mining resources. One potential fuel source is helium 3. Helium 3 originates in the Sun and is deposited in the Moon’s soil by the solar wind. It’s estimated that there are up to two million tons on the Moon but virtually none on the Earth. If we can ever get helium 3 and helium 3 to fuse together, it’s nuclear power without waste. There is no radioactivity associated with that reactor. The key, however, will be to develop a fusion reactor, which might be able to be done within fifteen to twenty years in tandem with a program to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon. Four tons of helium 3 would be enough to supply all the power needs for the United States for a year. That’s just two shuttle payloads. This is a potent resource, and it’s probably one of the reasons China is exploring space and heading so strongly to the Moon.

Chinese State media reported last month details of a new rocket with enough thrust to put a space station into orbit. When it’s developed, the Long March 5 will have almost three times the power of existing rockets. China had always wanted to be part of the International Space Station, but was always denied, partly, it’s believed, because of U.S. concerns. So China once again is going to go it on their own and develop their own space mission.

At a recent news conference from Chinese Space Administration, the quote was made, “China has always adhered to the principle of peaceful use of space,” but the spokesman made no mention of China’s satellite-killer missile which was tested earlier this year destroying an aging Chinese weather satellite in a low-Earth orbit. That plus the fact that Chinese Space Administration is controlled entirely by the military has many in Washington worried about where the Chinese are headed. Technologically, the Chinese are still behind the United States, but analysts warn that will not last much longer. It appears that early in the twenty-first century we are heading for a new space race, one where we may be in the unfamiliar role of being second fiddle.

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Follow the Water

Fourth Week of November 2007

The theme this week is water, which is considered to be one of the fundamental and essential ingredients for life in the universe. In a story based on an Ohio State University news release, scientists for the first time have directly observed how water lubricates the motions of protein molecules to enable their different functions to occur. Scientists are one step closer to understanding how proteins move when they perform essential life functions. This finding was based on using ultra-fast light pulses to reveal how the water molecules link up with proteins and enable them to move around.

The research has practical benefits. Researchers hope to find new treatment for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cataracts, cystic fibrosis, and diabetes. In addition, understanding the role of proteins in living cells can help scientists decipher how the first cells on our planet began to function. The work also sheds light on the role liquid water plays in living organisms. Scientists were able to map the motions of water molecules at different locations on a very much larger protein molecule. The team took laser snapshots of a single myoglobin molecule, which is the protein that carries oxygen inside muscle tissue, while it was immersed in water in the laboratory. They were able to observe how fast the water molecules were moving around the protein and see how those rapid motions related to the characteristics of the protein at that moment, the electrical charge at a particular site for example, or changes in the protein shape.

Proteins can execute motions in as little as a few billionths of a second. Water normally moves a thousand times faster on a scale of a trillionth of a second. In previous work, researchers showed that water molecules slow down substantially as they get close to a protein. This new study shows that water molecules slow even more once they reach the protein. The water forms a very thin layer only three molecules thick around the protein, and this layer is the key to maintaining the protein structure and flexibility and lubricating its movements. These findings challenge the conventional wisdom of theorists trying to envisage what occurs on these tiny scales. They usually use computer simulations to fill the gap, but now the observations are direct.

We move from this story of how water works within the context of life to a more distant location: Europa. Europa is perhaps Jupiter’s most exciting moon, the water moon. Its icy shell is scarred with a crazy quilt pattern of cracks and grooves, and beneath that outer layer of ice hides a global ocean. Astronomers would love to know if there is life swimming in that ocean. The answer partly depends on the flavor of the water. Earth’s oceans are full of minerals that have shed into the water from the erosion of rocks or from volcanic eruptions. Chlorine and sodium are the primary elements in the solution, and they give our ocean its distinctive salty taste. Europa’s ocean too is believed to be salty, but is it just like the Earth’s ocean? Or does it have its own unique recipe based on different ingredients, and how would those different ingredients affect the likelihood of life in the Europan ocean?

Kevin Hand, who’s a planetary scientist with NASA’s JPL says, “The conventional wisdom is that Europa’s ocean is dominated by magnesium sulfate. The reason for that,” he says, “if you take a bunch of chondrite, space rocks, and crunch them all together to form a planet or a moon as we think occurred around the Jovian system, the dominant cation and anion that come out of that leached material is magnesium and sulfate.” He says that while scientists have seen evidence for the sulfate, the anion or the negatively charged ion, in spectroscopic measurements of Europa’s icy surface, they’ve not been able to discern what the dominant positively charged cation is. There’s active debate over whether that cation is really magnesium or if it could instead be sodium as it is on Earth. A third possibility is that it might even be hydrogen. There is a lot of hydrogen in the Jovian system because the planet that it belongs to is ninety percent hydrogen, and hydrogen is available on the surface of Europa. If that’s the case, then Europa’s ocean could be a searing cauldron rather than a placid sea because hydrogen combined with sulfate creates sulfuric acid.

Europa’s ice chemistry is further complicated by its neighboring moon, Io. This volcanic moon is constantly spewing particles out into space, and those particles become trapped in Jupiter’s rapidly rotating magnetosphere. Europa is continually bathed in this charged ionic stew. Another researcher in the team chips in, “Io contributes sodium, sulfur, chlorine, and other ions to Europa’s surface. These charged particles, along with electrons and protons from the hydrogen ions, stimulate chemistry in the surface material and have probably altered its chemical makeup.” Another complication is that Europa’s oceans still could be adding its own salts to the surface ice because scientists have shown that the ice has more salt than can be explained by simple radiolytic processing from Io’s contribution. To determine the ocean’s chemistry from remote spectral data, scientists would need to tease out that native source of salt from the other salts present in the surface.

However, yet another complication is that over long timescales the ocean and the surface may exchange material thanks to the cracking and shifting of the ice shelf. By now you’ve probably got the sense that this is a difficult problem to solve. To summarize, Hand says, “Right now, many people think that the spectra on Europa may be best matched by a one-third mixture of magnesium, sodium, and hydrogen as cations.” It’s going to be awhile before we know exactly what Europa’s ocean water is like. In fact, to really know we’ll have to send a mission there designed to pierce through the ice. Scientists don’t even agree on how thick that ice shell is, but it likely varies a great deal from one place to another. The best Galileo data suggest an average thickness of four kilometers or two and a half miles. Hand says, “That’s comparable to the Antarctic ice sheet, and we’re boring down through that now on our way to Lake Vostok. It may be comparable to what we need to do on Europa.” Around the year 2015, hopefully NASA will launch the Europa explorer mission, which could include a lander that will melt through the ice pack, allowing us to answer these questions directly for the first time.

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Voyager Turns Thirty

Third Week of November 2007

This week I’d like to celebrate an anniversary that occurred this fall, an important milestone in the history of space exploration. A mission that was supposed to last only five years is celebrating its thirtieth anniversary. Scientists continue to receive data from Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft as they approach interstellar space. These twin craft have become a fixture of the pop culture, inspiring novels, and playing a central role in TV shows, music videos, songs, and movies from the 80s and 90s.

Many of these fictional works focus on what would happen if an alien race were able to locate the Earth via Voyager’s famous Golden Record, which includes a selection of sounds and images of the Earth. The selections portray people young and old, male and female, not to mention examples of other species. They include information about every continent on the planet, as well as our exact location in space. The images are also designed to show the human spirit of adventure when exploring our own planet.

Earlier NASA missions included plaques with information about the Earth too. This spurred John Casani, Voyager’s first project scientist, to appoint astronomer and author Carl Sagan to head a committee to come up with a message for Voyager. In his book Murmurs of Earth, Sagan described how the committee created the record and selected its contents. Physicist Frank Drake suggested the idea of a record that would have pictures on one side and sounds on the other. The group had less than six weeks to come up with a record to represent the entire population of Earth. A long-playing record may not make aliens think we were very advanced so it’s more of a statement of optimism than a serious attempt to communicate. It will take thousands of years to reach even the nearest stellar system; the chances of extraterrestrials finding the message are extremely slim. However, the Voyager Golden Record has become an icon.

Ann Druyan, who was creative director of the project and later married Sagan, says, “It’s a classic message in a bottle. The likelihood of finding it is small, but the payoff is so huge if it’s found.” Ed Stone, the project scientist of Voyager and a former JPL director, explained that although there’s no chance of it being found realistically, the record is really a message to ourselves. “In a sense,” he says, “it’s a unifying message from the Earth. It contains greetings in many languages, music from many cultures, and images that portray our home planet. It’s our attempt to say what is the Earth, and it’s a record of who we think we are.”

Druyan says, “The record represented the idea that science and technology could come together with art. It’s one of the few totally great stories that we have about humans. It cost the taxpayer virtually nothing. Nobody got killed. It was a way to celebrate the glory of being alive on this tiny blue dot in 1977. It was the most romantic and beautiful project ever attempted by NASA. It had the sounds of a kiss, a mother saying hello to her newborn baby for the first time, all that glorious music.” She said, “Remember, this was during the Cold War. Everyone was living with the knowledge that fifty thousand nuclear weapons could go off at any time, and there was a lot of angst about the future. This was something positive, a way to represent the Earth and put our best foot forward. That was irresistible.”

Along the way the Voyager Record and other messages sent into space have had their share of criticism. Some people have questioned the musical taste of the selections. Done as it was mostly by slightly older people, it didn’t represent all musical genres, although it was fairly international. Other people criticized the choice of a record which after all represents an obsolete technology even on the Earth. However, the record had a gold cover which inside contained instructions on how to play it. We presume an alien would dumb down their technology to be able to play a long playing record. The record was a nice bringing together of different people and different cultures.

One of the back stories of this was Carl Sagan’s son Nick who was six years old in 1977 when the Voyager Record was assembled. The record features a recording of him as a child saying, “Hello from the children of planet Earth.” This is what the younger Sagan has to say now, “I had no sense of the magnitude of it at the time.” Sagan actually partly followed in his father’s footsteps by pursuing a career as a science fiction writer. He says, “Literally, it was my parents putting me in front of a microphone and saying, ‘What would you say to extraterrestrials?’” Sagan said he began to realize what the record meant as he got older, and as a teen he started to realize what a strange and wonderful honor it was. “It has been a challenge for the rest of my life to live up to that honor. It’s always there in my subconscious,” he said. “My dad inspired so many people to do so many great things, to not take things at face value and look at evidence, and to search for the truth. It’s something I look to as a beacon.”

Sagan said that he and his father discussed the Voyager discoveries in the context of their search for life. They got excited when the spacecraft photographed Titan and Europa, and Sagan noted a change in his father as the years went by. “One of the things that surprised him was that we didn’t find life during his lifetime,” says Sagan. “He started to realize that if there’s no other life out there and life is so rare, we need to protect ours. I saw a shift in him. That’s when he became more socially and politically conscious.”

In the end, Sagan’s son believes that Voyager and other extraterrestrial missions are important because of their process rather than their discoveries. He says, “The question is, what’s it all about? If we do find life, it will change us, but it will not change things also. The act of looking will tell us much, and we will learn more about ourselves.” So this mission celebrating its thirtieth anniversary is a way of looking out and looking in at the same time. It’s one of the best things happening in the space program.

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Teleportation

Second Week of November 2007

Space travel is so easy in science fiction and in TV and movies; but the reality is less inspiring. Our best rocket technology is only capable of accelerating a payload to a small fraction of the speed of light. At such a speed, the distance to even close stars would take more than a human lifetime to travel, and any significant voyage would require us to go into hibernation. Multigenerational space arks are required for the voyage. How much better if we could do it the way they do on TV? What episode of Star Trek would be complete without Captain Kirk and his colleagues beaming off the enterprise onto the surface of some distant planet?

Well, teleportation, long a staple of science fiction, is finally being talked about as a serious scientific possibility. More than just talked about. Over the past couple of years, physicists working independently in Australia, Austria, and Denmark have all achieved a rudimentary form of teleportation, albeit at the quantum level of atoms and photons rather than the macroscopic level of objects and actual people. Chuck Bennett at the IBM Research Center says, “Exact teleportation was thought to be impossible. However, it is now shown to be possible.”

The term teleportation was first coined by the writer and paranormal investigator Charles Fort in his 1931 book Lo!, It’s defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as the instantaneous transportation of persons or objects across space by advanced technological means. The idea of transporting an object or person in the blink of an eye has been in science fiction of course for ages, and it even crops up in Islamic mystical tradition in the concept of Tay-al-Ard, or the folding up of the Earth. In this concept a person is, without actually moving, miraculously transported to a far off destination by the world spinning very rapidly beneath their feet.

Sadly for the science fiction enthusiasts, the work being carried out is not quite producing the type of teleportation that we love from science fiction. Instead, physicists have been focusing on what is known as quantum teleportation. The whole idea is surrounded by a mystique and a mathematical complexity that makes it difficult to understand, but basically it’s the idea that the information of atoms can be teleported but not the atoms themselves. Chuck Bennett says, “In effect you’re disembodying the complete quantum state of an atom and reincarnating it in another atom of the same sort at a distant location.” Teleportation like this is not as we tend think of it, an object appearing in one place having disappeared in another. Rather it is the transfer of information and, in particular, the quantum property of spin from one location to another at the speed of light.

One way of imagining this is to think of a snooker table with balls on it. In the traditional view of teleportation, a spinning ball would dematerialize at one end of the table, and exactly the same ball will rematerialize at the other end. In quantum teleportation the spinning ball stays where it is, but its spin is transferred to another ball elsewhere on the table, creating what the Germans call a doppelganger. It is this aspect or property of the original ball that’s transmitted rather than the ball itself. Although, to complicate matters, the process of transmission would destroy the original ball.

How is this quantum teleportation actually achieved? It involves two separate particles acting as if they were one and the same even though they are separated by a great distance. Changes to one particle are mirrored in the other. This isn’t quite as dramatic, involving as it does, subatomic particles, as the teleportation of an actual person, but it’s a proof of concept that shows that the laws of physics do not prohibit information, and in principle extremely complex information, from being transmitted instantaneously over large distances. Another professor involved in this work, Neil Johnson at the University of Miami’s Physics Department, says, “Although we are still way off from building a quantum computer, which is the main application of this technology, the possibilities are extraordinary. In theory it could contain an infinite amount of information and move that information around at almost the speed of light.”

Chuck Bennett believes in principle at least that it’s feasible to teleport humans without violating any of the laws of physics. However, it could only be done to a certain degree, not literally. “Teleporting a person,” he said, “would not require reproducing the quantum state of everything exactly. Everything we know about biology and how molecules fit together to produce a living being, including the brain, indicates that creating some level of approximation would give you a real person who is a serviceable replica of the original in terms of looking the same and thinking the same thoughts without necessarily being a perfect quantum replica. The teleported person would end up slightly different, but not in a biologically important way.” The implication of this is you could scan a person using some advanced form of the technology used to perform MRI scans and transmit that scanned information somewhere else using electrical or sound signals where it would then be reassembled into an approximation of the original.

Chuck Bennett says, “It’s the same principle as a fax machine. When you fax something, what comes out the other end obviously looks like the original and contains the same information, but it’s not the same paper, however, or the same type of ink. It’s the same but not the same. We already have three dimensional fax machines,” he points out, so the basic theory is in place. “What happens to the original person when their bio-molecular details are faxed somewhere else, and whether the average person on the street would be happy to be assembled as a similar but not the same or identical person,” thinks Bennett, “are moot points.”

With each person being made of trillions and trillions of atoms, ten to the power twenty-eight to be precise, the technology will never exist to make an absolutely accurate scan and reproduce every quantum property of a human over a large distance. So this approximation teleportation will probably be what we develop maybe tens, maybe hundreds of years in the future. However, the story is exciting because it means that teleportation may be a part of our future.

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A Familiar Solar System

First Week of November 2007

There’s no place like home, but we’re finally beginning to find places beyond the Solar System that resemble home. Astronomers reported this week that there are at least five planets circling a star known as 55 Cancri in the constellation of Cancer, whereas only four had been known before, making this system the most extensive set of planets yet found outside our own.

This is very exciting. Over two hundred and fifty extrasolar planets have been discovered, but most of them are single planets, Jupiter-sized or larger. The set of planets around 55 Cancri really resembles something like our solar system where one planet that we’re quite partial to is in the so-called habitable zone, just warm enough for liquid water but not so hot that it evaporates. The planet that’s in the habitable zone in 55 Cancri, however, is forty-five times the mass of the Earth, so this planet is more like Neptune or Saturn than the Earth and would probably be a deadly environment for any kind of life that we know.

Debra Fischer from San Francisco State University led the team that discovered this fifth planet around this one system. She says, “It’s a system that appears to be packed with planets.” Another of the team members, Geoff Marcy, isn’t jaded by his part in discovering dozens of extrasolar planets; he said he was jumping out of his socks. “We now know the Sun and its family of planets is not unusual,” said Geoff. The discovery of this signal and this extrasolar planet is a good sign that astronomers will continue to find new planets in the systems already discovered, adding numbers and adding lower mass objects much closer to the Earth in size. Jonathan Lunine, who is a colleague of mine at the University of Arizona, said that astronomers were on the verge of answering a question posed by Albertus Magnus, a medieval German philosopher and priest, who wondered whether there was but one world or many worlds. “As we now know,” Dr. Lunine said, “the universe is lonely; how far we live from the distant stars.”

In this past decade, having found all these extrasolar planets, the technology and techniques have improved, and planet hunters have been moving down the scale from Jupiter-mass planets to some that are just a few times the mass of the Earth. Detecting Earth clones is beyond the limits of the Doppler method and will await future space-based missions. 55 Cancri was one of the first exoplanets discovered in 1996. Debra Fischer and her colleagues have been observing the system now for eighteen years, adding more planets to the list as they make their presence known. The outermost and heaviest planet in that system is four times as massive as Jupiter and circles at a distance of five hundred million miles which is only slightly farther than Jupiter in our own system. It takes fourteen years to complete an orbit. The star’s three innermost planets all circle more tightly than our Mercury at distances from twenty to three and a half million miles. The closest of the three is also the smallest, only eighteen times as massive as the Earth; it’s surely a scorched and nasty place to live.

The new planet, which Dr. Fischer calls one of the more annoying planets because it resisted being folded into their mathematical models for such a long time, basks in the lukewarm light of its star at a distance of about seventy million miles, and it takes two hundred and sixty days to complete one orbit. Although the planet itself is likely to be too massive for life, Dr. Marcy thinks that the planet could harbor rocky moons just as Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune in our solar system do, and these moons will be warmed to the same lukewarm temperature as the Earth. The moons would have to be as massive as Mars, however, in order to keep their water from escaping into empty space.

The discovery of this new planet highlights the difficulty and the sophistication of the techniques that are now used to find yet more planets in existing systems. You can think of these lower mass planets in a system that already has a massive planet as overtones, like musical notes that are found on the Doppler curve. Essentially, astronomers use a harmonic analysis that’s very musical in nature to find smaller mass planets in systems already known to have large mass planets.

We like to think that some of these planets that are being discovered could host life, but of course we don’t really know. It would take spectroscopy of the feeble reflected light from the planets to look for trace gases that might indicate biology; these indicators are called biomarkers and such observations are very difficult. The discovery of true Earth clones is probably five to ten years away, but a system with five planets is so strikingly similar to our own solar system that it tells us that the discovery and study of extrasolar planets is moving into a new and exciting phase.

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