At this blog site, I write about where we are going scientifically, technologically, and intellectually in the 21st century. It’s hardly more than the addition of my current lifetime before we get to the century end. And yet when we look back 70 years you would be able to count the number of computers on the planet on the fingers of one hand. Today in our digital world there are as many computing devices as there are humans on the planet. It is but one aspect of the dimensional leap humanity continues to demonstrate in less than a blink of cosmological time. And it makes you wonder just how far we can go in thirty more of my lifetimes, and how unrecognizable humanity and society will be when that time comes.
On the day before Christmas, I’ve been reading Stephen Hawking and his description of time and how the Universe began from nothing. According to Hawking, you cannot describe the Big Bang in terms of time because until it happened time didn’t exist. In fact there was nothing. Our Universe arose from it in what some call a singularity, an event that marked the beginning of time. That Universe as we know it has dimensions of breadth, mass, and energy, and also can be measured in time.
Hawking describes the yin and yang of the existence of the Universe in which the mass containing galaxies, dust, and gas reflect the yin, and empty space the yang. Space is the negative counterweight to the positive energy and matter that balances the equation. The two negate each other bringing us back to the nothing from which the Big Bang occurred. In Hawking’s description of the Universe, it is clear there can be no supreme divinity. A Universe that began from nothing in which the equation of its construct still calculates to zero doesn’t require a divinity to build it.
Which bring us to the religious aspect of the annual ritual of Christmas celebrated at the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere (Down Under it’s the beginning of summer) each year. Christmas always sees me contemplative about such big questions like, how the Universe came into being, how life began, and is there a god or gods, and are they our creators.
When I was studying in university to be a teacher of world history, I focused on researching the origins of religion. I was particularly interested in the commonalities found in many faiths, a study called religious syncretism, the borrowing by religions of the culture and practices of other faiths. The period of my study focused on the rise of Christianity during the Roman Empire, a world dominated by Hellenistic paganism.
Our idea of Hellenistic paganism is a world of many deities, Zeus or Jupiter, Hera or Juno, Helios or Apollo, and such. Could the rituals, rites, mysteries, and practices associated with these gods have been equivalent to those practiced by monotheistic faiths?
Yes they could.
Just look at evidence in our daily lives. Hellenistic paganism defined our months, weeks, and days. Our seven day week is based on pagan observation of the Moon’s phases. The names of our weeks and months come from pagan gods and not just Hellenistic ones. And our divisions of time, the 24-hour day and 60-minute hour come from Babylonian rituals and practices based on the number “six,” the common denominator defining Babylonian religious observance as well as mathematics.
The concept of divine birth, salvation, the soul, and a cosmic, morally perfect deity, all were conceived within Hellenistic philosophy. They are not divine in origin. Pythagoras, the Greek was the one whose mathematical constructs attempted to explain the metaphysical world as described by his predecessor, the philosopher, Plato. Number forms and number theory were expressions of the order of existence from we humans on Earth, to transcendental intermediaries (Catholics call them saints), to an ultimate supreme divinity. The saints of Catholicism, who were the intermediaries and intercessors between the supreme divinity and humanity, is a borrowing from Plato who placed intercessors between the physical world and the ideal one.
It is this same Hellenistic pagan world that observed cult practices that we recognize as rituals in today’s Christian faith. Baptism is one. Immersion in blood or water goes back to pre-Christian religious practices, freeing believers from their sinful bodies.
Christianity borrowed baptism from Mithraism, a faith predominant in Roman imperial armies. The cult of Mithra also included a rich history of stories, tales about a divine presence appearing on Earth in human form, acting as saviour, and suffering and dying in sacrifice to save humanity. Mithra was the saviour who was then resurrected and ascended to the divine.
The rival to Mithraism in the Roman army was the cult of Sol Invictus, the divine sun. It too had a saviour. And in both faiths there is the tale of the nativity scene repeated each Christmas and depicted in the image below. The story of the Magi, the appearance of a divine star, and the divine birth that Christianity celebrates to this day are borrowed, as is the holy day of Sunday, the day of Sol Invictus. Even the rite of the Eucharist comes Mithraism and the cult of Sol Invictus. Talk about syncretism.
So Christmas as practiced today represents a syncretic merging of practices and beliefs from two of Christianity’s predominant competitors during the time of the Roman Empire. One can easily see how those who proselytized the faith might have found it expedient to adopt the cult stories, rites, and practices of the competition to win over converts.
In my musing I have wondered if at the time of Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who consolidated power and united the empire in the early fourth century, and who fought his way to victory under the banner of the cross, if he had instead chosen symbology from Mithra or Sol Invictus, would the Europe that followed have been called “Mithradom” or “Soldom,” and not “Christendom?”
And if Christianity, had borrowed less from the cult practices of Mithra and Sol Invictus, and instead adopted the mathematical constructs of Pythagorean forms in conformity with Plato’s philosophical teachings, would it have evolved a religion based on scientific observation mixed with philosophy? In this alternative world would we be making saints of Stephen Hawking and worshipping the Big Bang? Some food for thought on Christmas Eve.
To all my readers I wish you all the best of the season whatever faith or non-faith you follow. This is my last posting for the year as I take a sabbatical to work on other tasks. I will return in the New Year and hope you will come back often to read the postings here.
A Happy Julian Calendar New Year to you all.
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In the last couple of years of his life, Hawking warned humanity that we were on a path to extinction; that if we didn’t start planning a getaway to other worlds, we would soon consume Earth in its entirety leaving us with no home. He also feared the rise of unfettered artificial intelligence stating that thinking machines in the near future would hasten our extinction.
For Hawking whose body began failing him in his twenties, one could say he was continually in search of an out-of-world, out-of-body experience. It’s just too bad we hadn’t yet come up with the technology and science to upload all that incredible Hawking knowledge into a computer to continue his work.
In the past, I have written about entrepreneurs putting money into, and researchers pursuing the science and technology needed to upload a human brain. A project called the 2045 Initiative with a membership club of over 20,000 and the backing of billionaires, has been working on the development of both neural interfaces and robotics to create a human-machine, all the knowledge contained within our brains, our consciousness, but hosted in a non-biological carrier.
When the 2045 Initiative met in New York City in July of 2013 they set future milestones:
I’m not so sure Hawking would have wanted to be the first to try out the brain-computer interface and experience the world through an avatar. His death today came up two years short of the timetable described above.
We will miss the mind and the courage of this man.
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Douglas Vakoch, President of METI describes the message as a “prototype” for future targeted messages aimed at other nearby stars with exoplanets. Based on the latest count these number in the thousands. Saying “Hello” and getting back a reply from one would be a moment in time humanity could live to regret or see our childhood’s end as an isolated intelligent species.
Unlike those in METI, Stephen Hawking believes contact with extraterrestrial intelligence could lead to disaster for our species. He uses the analogy of our own human history when more technically advanced societies made first contact with others on the planet. Europe’s discovery of America is a good example. The wave of destruction unleashed in the Americas decimated the indigenous peoples of both continents. States Hawking, “A civilization reading one of our messages could be billions of years ahead of us….and may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria.”
Luyten’s Star is 12.36 light years from our Solar System. So the message METI just sent will arrive there in more than 12 years, and any reply will take the same amount of time to get back to us. If in 25 years we hear back let’s hope Hawking is wrong.
After Luyten’s Star, METI plans to send similar messages to as many as one million targeted stars in coming years. All these messages will be sent using radio waves. Can we assume that an intelligent species will be using radio waves as a means of communicating? Quite frankly, with all the background radiowave interference coming from space, intelligent species may have long abandoned this medium for communication. They may be using ghostly neutrinos, or gravitational waves, or other communication technologies we have yet to think of? It is our anthropocentric assumptions that has us thinking that any intelligence will be doing exactly what we do, using the same technologies we do.
That’s poor science based on a sample of one, life here on Earth. We have no idea about the evolution of life elsewhere. Today we are excited about finding evidence of oceans beneath the icy crusts of moons and dwarf planets in the outer Solar System. Why? Because we have in our one sample where life emerged, evidence that without water, it likely wouldn’t have happened on Earth. So finding water elsewhere gets exobiologists excited about potential life? Meanwhile, we have in Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, a world that looks so much like ours with a thick atmosphere, oceans, rivers, erosion features, and other similarities, not based on water but rather liquid methane. Would we recognize living things from a world like Titan considering our built-in search bias?
A leading cosmologist in the United Kingdom, Sir Martin Rees, has pointed out that our anthropocentric view may make any exoplanet life almost invisible to us. He is quoted in an October 2013 article stating, “They could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognize them.”
And why is that? Because we have made assumptions that an advanced civilization will have been built in the same way as ours with mathematics and technology.
Today our earliest detectable radio waves have reached more than 100 light-years away from Earth. Our television broadcasts are a mere 30 light-years behind. This is Earth’s technological communication bubble and so far no alien intelligence has bothered to tell us we know you are there. Maybe METI is wasting its time considering what’s already pulsing through interstellar space. But imagine an alien intelligence trying to understand episodes of “I Love Lucy” or “The Beverly Hillbillies.” I’m not sure they would deem us an intelligent species worth knowing.
When Carl Sagan conceived of the two records that accompanied the American spacecraft named Voyager 1 and 2, the messages contained within these gold discs provided greetings from Earth in many languages, pictures of life on our planet and of our human civilization, and a roadmap to find our Sun and its third planet. The Voyagers launched in 1977 represent humanity’s most significant technology export having both departed from the Solar System. Neither has yet to travel a light-year from our home planet and it is estimated it will be 40,000 years from now when it encounters a star designated AC +79 3888, and lying 17.6 light-years from our planet. A reply from an alien civilization finding this human-created artifact would arrive back here on Earth 40,017 years from today, give or take a few years. Would humanity be around to receive it?
Exobiologists seeking intelligent alien life have theorized why we may not be receiving signals from space. Here are a few of their hypotheses:
So if I were METI, I wouldn’t hold my breath that 25 years from now someone at the other end of our sent message will have prepared and sent a reply.
Lucky for us astronomers in Chile have discovered a new exoplanet designated GJ 1132b that we may have to call home. The planet is 39 light years away and appears to have an atmosphere.
States Dr. John Southworth, of Keele University, team leader of the discovery, “While this is not the detection of life on another planet, it’s an important step in the right direction: the detection of an atmosphere around the super-Earth GJ 1132b marks the first time that an atmosphere has been detected around an Earth-like planet other than Earth itself.”
Atmospheres around exoplanets do not guarantee suitability for human life. After all in our own Solar System we have two rocky planets other than Earth that have atmospheres. Venus is an inferno, and Mars is a dry freezer. And gas giants like the outer planets appear to be more atmosphere than solid.
GJ 1132b has 1.6 times the mass of Earth. Its radius is estimated to be 1.375 that of Earth, plus or minus 0.16. Researchers indicate the presence of silicates and iron in the planet’s rocky crust. Spectral examination of the light passing through the planet’s atmosphere indicates strong opacity probably from the presence of water or methane. The planet is also hotter than Earth and if a water world is probably hot enough for steam to erupt in the atmosphere.
Its star is smaller than the Sun, described as low mass. The discoverers don’t describe the star as a brown dwarf although they are among the most prevalent stars in the Milky Way and are defined as low-mass. And based on exoplanet discoveries to date, low-mass stars are proving to be great places to find lots of small rocky planets.
So Mr. Hawking may be able to let out a sigh of relief that we humans with a little geoengineering to cool the place down could have a new place to call home. A century is a long time in technological evolution. Who knows we may have warp drives and interstellar travel by then. Or maybe we will have the tools to fix our own home planet and won’t have to find an exoplanet safe haven for our species.
On a more serious note, when the James Webb telescope is launched next year, GK 1132b should be high on the viewing priority list.
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The latest news is about a bevy of planets circling K2-72, a red dwarf star some 181 light-years from Earth. There are four exoplanets circling this small and dim star. All of them are 20 to 50% wider than Earth. Two appear in what we would define as the star’s “habitable zone.” Because K2-72 is a red dwarf the “habitable zone” is much closer to the star than ours here in the Solar System. All four exoplanets if in our Solar System would circle inside Mercury’s orbit.
K2-72c is a planet that completes a single orbit in the equivalent of 15 Earth days. Scientists calculate it is 10% warmer than Earth.
K2-72e orbits its sun in 24 Earth days and is 6% cooler than Earth.
The four new exoplanets are among 104 newly announced discoveries made by Kepler. That brings the total to more than 2,300 exoplanets discovered since the spacecraft’s launch in 2009. But that’s the confirmed list only. There are at least 2,000 more exoplanet discoveries awaiting verification through further observations.
But K2-72 isn’t the only solar system in the news that is getting a closer look from scientists. Two researchers at NASA are giving the twin-star system Alpha Centauri, our second nearest neighbour in the Milky Way, a good look. Alpha Centauri consists of an A and B that are both sunlike stars. A mere 4.4 light years away, the planets circling the two stars are candidates for what scientists hope will soon be possible, the direct imaging of these worlds providing details about their atmospheres and surfaces.
To date we have yet to detect planets circling these stars. But we know a bit about them as neighbours of ours. The two move together orbiting around a common centre point in what amounts to an 80-Earth year circuit. Their closest approach to each other is 11 Angstrom Units (AU). An AU is the orbital distance between the Earth and Sun. The two stars are also closely accompanied by another neighbour, a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri. It is in fact the star closest to us other than the Sun and resembles K2-72, the star system we described above. And considering that Kepler has found a bevy of planets around K2-72 then it shouldn’t be too much of a stretch to believe that we will find exoplanets at Proxima Centauri and probably its two neighbours. The illustration below shows the comparative sizes of our three closest neighbours to our Sun.
Some astronomers argue that binary systems are not suitable for planets because they would lead to unstable orbits. But that is not proving to be the case as we, through Kepler, discover planets around binary and even triple star systems. So a search at Alpha Centauri may be well warranted. If we find planets the scientists have calculated that stable planetary orbits would be possible up to 2.5 AUs from either of the twin stars. In 2012 a detected wobble in Alpha Centauri B suggested the existence of an Earth-sized planet circling the star every three days. It has yet to be confirmed.
To get to Alpha Centauri Ruslan Belikov and Eduardo Bendek, of NASA Ames Research Center, have proposed to send laser-propelled nano spacecraft to the binary system. Their original proposal to NASA back in 2014 was nixed because of budgetary limitations. But a privately-funded initiative known as Breakthrough Starshot, backed by Stephen Hawking and a Russian entrepreneur with $100 million US burning a hole in his pocket, can make the two NASA scientists’ dream a reality.
What would be involved? More than 1,000 nano-sized laser-propelled spacecraft, each incorporating a sail, would be propelled into by laser pulses sent from an Earth-based generator placed somewhere at a high-latitude in the southern hemisphere. Why there? Because Alpha Centauri is only visible to those living south of the Equator.
The laser pulses would be fired daily at each nano spacecraft acting like wind bouncing off the sail. This would accelerate them to 20% the speed of light, approximately 60,000 kilometers (37,000 miles) per second. To capture the maximum energy from a laser pulse each nano spacecraft would incorporate adaptive optics and deformable mirrors. A single laser pulse would generate power equal to the energy needed in the launching of each American space shuttle. When the nano spacecraft arrive at Alpha Centauri they would be traveling much faster than a speeding bullet with no way to decelerate. They would, therefore, have a very short window of opportunity to capture what they observe and send images and data beaming back to Earth.
Breakthrough Starshot could happen by mid-century but it isn’t the only project in the works being thought up to learn more about the Alpha Centauri system. Mission Centaur is a privately fund initiative to build a space telescope dedicated to the Alpha Centauri system. It could be built and launched much sooner than Breakthrough Starshot. Mission Centaur would be a first of its kind since no space telescope to date is designed to just look at a single star system.
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In previous entries to this blog site I have written a number of articles describing our efforts to unlock the secrets of Mars. The Viking missions of the 1970s left scientists with a quandary. Were the experimental results evidence of life or of a unique Martian chemistry? When Phoenix reached Mars and uncovered water ice and witnessed snow falling in the Martian atmosphere we were once more astounded by what seemed to be such an Earth-like world. And yet Mars is far from Earth and very much unlike our world.
Through Curiosity and its on board science laboratory we will gain a more comprehensive understanding of the chemistry, soil and atmosphere of Mars, and in its wake will set the stage for future missions including those by humans.
What Curiosity Has Taught Us Already – Radiation in Deep Space is a Problem
One of Curiosity’s tasks involved measuring radiation in transit on the way to Mars. Designed with a radiation protection shell capable of reducing exposure by 99%, over the eight months en route the amount of radiation penetrating the spacecraft recorded by the Radiation Assessment Detector or RAD was significant. Considering a human mission to Mars involving a two-way trip plus a significant period of time on the planet’s surface, the kind of radiation exposure any human crew would receive could prove lethal.
Curiosity’s RAD was switched off just before landing but will be turned on again as it begins its mission on the planet’s surface. We will know a lot more about the risk to human missions on the surface after studying the data we receive. But what we know now in terms of the cosmic rays and solar particle storms is that the existing designs of spacecraft for any human Deep Space exploration need to be altered radically to address the risk.
The Technology to Send Human Crews to Mars
Missions to Mars, inhabiting Mars, for many here on Earth this seems a pipe dream. The cost measured in hundreds of billions of dollars by NASA. The scientific and technological advancement marginal, say the critics, when compared to what we could do with artificial intelligence and robotics. Some even argue that we can have a virtual presence on Mars through intelligent robots. And some believe uploading our minds to robotic brains may give us the means to experience Mars without dealing with the frailties of our human bodies when confronted with the harsh realities of Deep Space and the Martian surface. You can read Mike Wall’s article about reasons for not going to Mars and begin to draw your own conclusions.
Or you can read about those who dream about exploring and settling on Mars fostered by groups like The Mars Society, a non-profit international organization, and Mars One, a Dutch private venture, the latter intending to begin colonizing Mars in 2023. Getting there, however, is as much a challenge as surviving once we arrive. What will it take?
1. Lots of fuel. Today’s chemical-based rockets expend enormous amounts of fuel to escape the gravity well that is Earth. A spacecraft using chemical rockets on a mission to Mars would also have to carry propellant on board for trans-Mars navigation adjustments and for slowing down once in the vicinity of Mars to achieve orbit. Then there would be the need for fuel for a Martian lander and fuel for launching from the surface to rendezvous in orbit for the return home – even more fuel. We could use celestial sleight of hand to plot a course that reduces the amount of time to get to Mars and, therefore, the amount of fuel, or we could use aerobraking techniques to limit fuel requirements in our approach to Mars. We can even manufacture the fuel we will need for the return trip from Mars once we arrive on the planet’s surface. But what we cannot do is ignore the reality of the amount of fuel we will need.
2. A new propulsion system that is not chemical based. There are a number of choices. VASIMIR, which you can read about in a previous article on this site, is one. Nuclear Thermal Engine technology such as NERVA is another. Antimatter-based propulsion may be a third.
3. A new type of spaceship that is more than a crew capsule. Any long-duration space mission needs to provide better cosmic ray and solar radiation shielding than anything currently on the shelf from any space agency or commercial space operator. It also needs to address the issue of long-term human exposure to micro-gravity. Nautilus-X MMEV is an acronym with cachet. It reminds us of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus but actually stands for Non-Atmospheric Universal Transport Intended for Lengthy United States X-ploration Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle. The Nautilus-X features a toroidal ring that produces artificial gravity, hydroponic farming on board, docking ports, radiation shielding, manipulator arms, solar panels and landing craft. Designed to be built in low-Earth orbit and then moved to a way-point between Earth and the Moon, it would be mated to an advanced propulsion system such as VASIMIR or NERVA and sent on its way.
The Why and When of Mars
Viking landers in the 1970s provided us with a dilemma. One experiment showed a chemical reaction consistent with biological existence. The other did not. We have never gone back to repeat the experiment. Instead we have in subsequent missions to the Red Planet, looked for telltale signs of water, an essential medium in which life exists on Earth. And what we have discovered is that Mars has lots of water, not oceans, but subsurface water that occasionally surfaces and evaporates. We saw this evidence with the Phoenix lander and we are seeing it in photographs taken by Mars orbiters.
We want to go to Mars because finding life there, either in existence today, or in the geological record, tells us that in our Solar System two planets out of eight, not one, gave birth to life. Knowing the meaning of that statistical coincidence alone will change our perspective about life elsewhere.
Creating human settlements on Mars and the technology necessary for these settlements to thrive is a good bet according to Stephen Hawking. “The human race shouldn’t have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet,” he recently stated.
Of course in inhabiting Mars we will be married to the technology that supports our existence in a very different way than here on Earth. Will we get there by 2023? More than likely not. But humans will be not just exploring by living on Mars by mid-century.
Will we terraform the planet? To some degree in the same way we have altered Earth through our human activity.
What will Mars be like in 2100. When we turn our Earth telescopes to focus on Mars we will see the lights of human settlement. And the people of Mars, born in a low-gravity environment, in many ways very different and in many ways the same as us, will be looking outward further to the next step in our human space journey.
Mars will change us forever.
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