Ideal human population is 100 billion. Off-planet.

My off planet assumptions are for 200-300 years; that the Moon, asteroids, and free-floating colonies have been settled with lots of people; that Martian life discovery protects Mars from colonization; and that Venus hasn't yet been terraformed. And that there's no Singularity - otherwise all bets are off.* There's lots of room out there in space, and changing some of these assumptions make mine a low-end figure.

I think this is the good way to approach it if you're a space nerd who's deeply concerned about population growth and how little any side of the political spectrum has done to address it. We're not anti-human. Live long and prosper! Just as long as it's mostly out there, where you can't take the sky from me.

On planet Earth, we're messing up big time. What the global ideal population would be depends on trading off numbers against resource constraints. If we don't want resource constraints, want everyone to live like kings, and want minimal harm to the environment, then I think we're looking at 100 million people. If you settle for the median American quality of life with some reasonable technological upgrades to reduce environmental impacts, then we're looking at a billion people, one-tenth of what we'll see in 89 years. For larger numbers with modest environmental impacts, the only way I can imagine an ideal life is if people get most of the high quality of life experiences through virtual reality.

It's a rotten shame that the left in the US has mostly forgotten about the population problem due to some overstatements decades ago, and a fear of doing anything that tar them with espousing a policy that's also espoused for racist reasons by racists. The right is even worse, either ignoring the problem for ideological reasons or dog-whistling racist or fear-inducing reasons to control population. All the above gets magnified tenfold when discussing immigration to the US, where we convert the usually-young immigrants into highly impacting Americans, with descendants.

Maybe we can take the latest milestone of 7,000,000,000 people to do something about population, and even about immigration, without playing into the hands of racists.

*I think we'll pass the Singularity point in less than 50 years.

Our permanent robotic presence in space

Nothing insightful in this post, just something in the "space is cool" category that I hadn't seen written elsewhere.

I remember when the International Space Station's Expedition I crew arrived in November 2000 that news media said it could mark humanity's permanent occupation of space. That may still hold true, although it happened a generation before it probably should have. When I read that, I remember thinking that we missed marking one milestone for our permanent robotic presence in space, three years earlier.

On September 11, 1997, the Mars Global Surveyor probe reached Martian orbit. Since then, humanity has had at least one satellite in Martian orbit. Three are operating right now and more are planned, from multiple nations and not just the US. We'll never leave.

Somewhat surprisingly, we may also have achieved permanent presence on the Martian surface. In early 2004, two rovers landed on the surface, one of them is still working and making important discoveries, and an even more powerful one is set to land there next year. If it doesn't crash, I think it could last long enough to be there when more landers arrive.

So where else? The moon's had lots of visitors, but most of them were short-lived. From Japan'sSelene mission in 2007 onward though, there's lots of overlap that shouldn't end.

I thought figuring out the start of permanent earth orbit would be hard, but not so (and I'm not counting dead probes, btw, a permanent presence requires operational satellites). Looks like the prize goes all the way back to 1958 with the fourth-ever satellite, Vanguard I, which lasted until 1964. The 1962 probe Alouette operated for 10 years, with countless overlaps since its launch.

My guess is that's it, so far. We have operating satellites at Mercury, Venus, the asteroid belt, and Saturn, but none of them will live long enough to be working when replacements arrive. A probe just launched to Jupiter, but radiation makes that a hard place, and it'll be many decades before we get a permanent presence.

As for future milestones, I think Venus will be the first. A Japanese mission got screwed up going there and is mostly crippled, but the first really operational orbiter that gets there will make things permanent, and I'm sure it'll happen within 10 years. The lunar surface won't be that hard either, maybe 15 years.

A proposed lake explorer on Saturn's moon Titan could get there in the 2020s and last long enough to see a Saturn orbiter years later, so 2020s or 2030s for Saturn. The 2040s for Jupiter, arrival for either a distant weather satellite or a communications satellite to relay info from short-lived probes messing around near its major moons.

I've been foolish enough to speculate this far, but now I'll stop, with no guesses about dates for permanent balloon platforms on Venus, permanent anything near Mercury, the asteroid belts, or elsewhere outside of Saturn and Jupiter. This all assumes no near term fiscal collapse or long term Singularity.

Pretty impressive stuff, overall. The human space program may have stalled out in the last 40 years, but what we've done to get our presence beyond earth has not.

Enceladus rains water vapor on Saturn - how about microbes?

Badly answered question: 1. Is there life (as we know it) on gas giant planets?

Better answered questions: 2. Can life originate on gas giants? and 3. Can life survive on gas giants?

What I've seen of pop science, and my impression of Planetary Protection standards for spacecraft, is the assumption that because the answer to #2 seems to be "difficult", then the answer to #1 is "unlikely". But what if you drop living microbes through space and into the gas giant atmospheres?

That could be happening on a regular basis with Enceladus shown to drop water vapor from its geysers on to Saturn's atmosphere (blog post at link, pdf of article in the blog post). Enceladus probably has a near surface ocean feeding geysers through cracks in the ice. If it has life, then microbes are also being shot out as the geyser jets freeze.

The water vapor connection to Saturn doesn't necessarily establish that water ice particles will get there, or get there in the same short time frame (<2.5 months) as the vapor, but it makes it more plausible. And there's always the impact delivery of ice chunks from Enceladus to Saturn as a mechanism.

While microbes couldn't survive the deep level heat (which is what would stop life from originating on gas giants), if they can survive long enough to reproduce and randomly spread, then some descendant microbes can escape destruction. All they could need is some weather patterns keeping them out of the deep layers for weeks, unlike the millenia that would be needed for life to originate there.

Besides being interesting and a potential target for astrobiology, there are some policy implications to this. Crashing the Galileo orbiter into Jupiter may have been a mistake - better to have crashed it into Io, Callisto, or Almathea. The plan to eventually deorbit the Cassini mission into Saturn is also mistaken, when the dead-surface moon Mimas makes a better target.

Harm minimization, the space program, and carbon caps

Same Facts has a nice post tying drug addiction and political demagoguery - sometimes you can only aim for health improvements instead of fully quitting the drug, and it's similarly an issue in politics:

Thus, in some cases, the right policy is to give injection drug users access to sterile needles. In others, the right policy is to give grandstanding congressmen some way to pander to ignorant voters without crashing the economy. We all wish that heroin users would stop using. We all wish that Congressmen would not demagogue the debt ceiling. Neither wish will be granted soon.

I invite reflection among those who have low opinions of politicians and simultaneously advocate for perfect solutions at the expense of solutions that are politically feasible. Those two positions work well together if you're primarily interested in expressing contempt, but not if you're trying to make progress.

With the end of the disastrously expensive space shuttle program, the perfect solution is to let the private sector carry on manned "exploration" of areas that robots explored decades ago, and switch the federal government funding to something beneficial. I see little point in talking about that solution.

Harm minimization, or successful harm mitigation, means alternatives that keep most of the federal money in the same states that it's spent in now, even in some of the same institutions in the same states. Obama's plan for partial privatization of the manned space program might be the best feasible option. I've thought about replacing it with something entirely different, an advanced technology rescue service, but that might be a bridge too far. Maybe we can gradually reduce the scale of the program (an aside - Republicans are fighting for the big-government, socialist style old program instead - how typical).

So, carbon cap and trade. Any number of people have pointed out how a simple, universal carbon tax would avoid all the problems of the compromised cap and trade programs in various parts of the world. Australia's example suggests it is possible to get a modest carbon tax through - but one with many exceptions and that transitions into a cap-and-trade scheme.

Taking a harm minimization/benefit maximization approach, rather than a rigid rationality or nothing approach, will get a better result. I'm all for a carbon tax, but won't let that stop me support capntrade as well.

Carnival of Space #155: Short, Medium, and Haiku-long

Hi everyone, Backseat Driving is hosting this week's Carnival of Space, a round-up of space-related posts across the blogosphere.  Format is the host's choice, so I'll go with short (blog name and post name); followed by a combined medium length (same plus a sentence summary or excerpt) and haiku-long (a lousy haiku I'm adding at no extra charge for each post).  Check out the main Carnival of Space page for past Carnivals and for info on how to participate.

Short:

Backseat Driving: Not your typical SETI conspiracy
Weird Sciences:  Extreme Tech:  Genetic Engineering and Genetic Programmer [Part-I]
Weird Sciences:  Could There Be Life on Every Planets
Arts Nova:  The 2010 NASA Moon Art Contest
Cheap Astronomy: Cheap Astronomy in Transit podcast
Centauri Dreams:  Burying the Digital Genome
Alice's Astro Info: Ikaros - Japan's Solar Sail
Robot Guy:  administering space
Out of the Cradle:  2010 Metroplex Moonday Machinations
21st Century Waves:  Obama's New Space Policy: an Encore!
Spread Science:  Why Does One Bit Matter to Voyager?
Planetary Blog:  The Most Amazing Image of Enceladus Cassini Has Captured Yet
Astroblog:  Using the Gimp for Astrophotography (Part 2)
Chandra's Blog:  Innovative Exhibit Connects Art and Science Through X-Ray Light
Discovery News:  Can a Black Hole Have an 'Aurora'?
Urban Astronomer:  What is the Face on Mars?
The Spacewriter's Ramblings:  Soaring to the Stars
Next Big Future:  Combining MHD Airbreathing and IEC Fusion Rocket Propulsion for Earth-to-Orbit Flight
Next Big Future:  Mach Effect Propulsion Experiment May Generate 50 Milli-Newtons in 2010

CollectSpace:  STS 132 Atlantis Flight Day Journal

Cosmic Log:  Two faces of a grand galaxy
Cosmic Log:  Spaceships get day in the sun
Cumbrian Sky:  Gazing across the Gulf of Time...


Medium and bad-haiku long, combined together:

Backseat Driving: Not your typical SETI conspiracy Argues that SETI pros Paul Davies and Seth Shostak are contradicting each other on how to handle an alien signal, and that Shostak is right.

No, Davies.  Shestak.

It's beyond what we should stop.

People must know.

Weird Sciences:   Extreme Tech:  Genetic Engineering and Genetic Programmer [Part-I] Other elements besides carbon and other solvents besides water can form the basis of alien life, with examples.

Hey why the long face?

Carbon life spurned you, but then

Fish a solvent sea

Weird Sciences:  Could There Be Life on Every Planets Runs through theories of biogenesis, argues that some experimentation shows it's not so unlikely, but that a discovery of life elsewhere in our solar system could help settle the issue.

Everyone's a winner!

Okay, chance's role's unclear

Mars may tell us soon.

Arts Nova:  The 2010 NASA Moon Art Contest  The experience of judging NASA's moon art contest, and how judging criteria was applied.

In space no one can

Hear you ooh and ahh over

Good art or bad poems.  (Host's note:  please don't judge my haiku!)

Cheap Astronomy: Cheap Astronomy in Transit podcast Snippets on lunar spacecraft explosions being different from scifi, and speculating on how to research problems on a strangely earthlike, planetary civilization. 

On the road again,

Thinking lunar boom's a bust.

Hey, sounds familiar....

Centauri Dreams:  Burying the Digital Genome  An article about the need to preserve not just digital documents and multimedia but the formatting used to display them, describing project in Switzerland is now creating a long-term database of these materials in hopes of preserving knowledge that might otherwise be lost.
Ah, the Rosetta Stone!

Copied it on floppy disk.

Oops.  Help, Genome!

Alice's Astro Info: Ikaros - Japan's Solar Sail How the (now launched) Japanese solar sail works, with video.

Japan's Solar Sail.

Alice's Astro Info?

She wrote the haiku!

Robot Guy:  administering space Detailed ideas for NASA's management in "administering space," with specific comparisons to the Federal Aviation Administration.

Developing space:  fine.

Take it to the next level.

Commercial space, it's time.

Out of the Cradle:  2010 Metroplex Moonday Machinations Summarizing events happening at the very busy Moon Day celebration in Dallas this July 18th.

Zone 1:  glamor show

Zone 2:  time for real learnin'

Zone 3-8: wow.

21st Century Waves:  Obama's New Space Policy: an Encore!  A dialog about NASA's future, Maslow Windows, and potential near term opportunities

History doesn't 

Repeat itself.  But it does

Rhyme ever better.

Spread Science:  Why Does One Bit Matter to Voyager?  How a recent problem with the Voyager probe was traceable to single flipped memory bit.

Now where did I put

My memory? It was here.

Problems, getting old.

Planetary Blog:  The Most Amazing Image of Enceladus Cassini Has Captured Yet  Enceladus geysers, Enceladus, Titan, and Saturn's rings all imaged and composed together.

What Cassini sees

What's never before been seen

What's ours to dream of.

Astroblog:  Using the Gimp for Astrophotography (Part 2) Using software to put your astrophotography together and make animations.

GIMP layers it on

Not so hard after a bit

You're now Walt Disney.

Chandra's Blog:  Innovative Exhibit Connects Art and Science Through X-Ray Light  X-rays as the theme connecting an understanding of art and of science together

Art shows the inside

X rays get inside the art

Chandra shows it all.

Discovery News:  Can a Black Hole Have an 'Aurora'? An accretion disk in a black hole could generate a magnetosphere and aurora.

Spinning your way in

Shocking where you're going now

A flash, then goodbye.

Urban Astronomer:  What is the Face on Mars?  Synopsis of history of the famous "face" on Mars.

Beauty's in the eye

of the beholder.  It's now

a beautiful hill.

The Spacewriter's Ramblings:  Soaring to the Stars  How an interest in space can inspire kids and adults, with the example of space events in Los Angeles.

Captain Adama,

inspired by the stars when young.

Actor inspires us.

Next Big Future:  Combining MHD Airbreathing and IEC Fusion Rocket Propulsion for Earth-to-Orbit Flight

The post title says it all, and the post provides technical information that outlines how it could be done.

Got to be a way

A way that can really work

This might be the one.

Next Big Future:  Mach Effect Propulsion Experiment May Generate 50 Milli-Newtons in 2010 If mass fluctuations are real, then propellantless space drive may be possible.

They tell us, no way

You can't get to there from here.

Mach Effect?  Make it so.

CollectSpace:  STS 132 Atlantis Flight Day Journal  Summary of the shuttle Atlantis' return home.

The final time back.

The shuttle of the future,

Now a memory.

Cosmic Log:  Two faces of a grand galaxy  Very different light wavelengths give very different portraits of the beautiful Pinwheel Galaxy

Shall I compare thee

To a summer's day? Got it.

Warmer is diff'rent.

Cosmic Log:  Spaceships get day in the sun  Amazing photos of the Shuttle and space station, including ones where they transit in front of the sun.

The shuttle's huge

ISS even moreso

Then you see the sun.

Cumbrian Sky:  Gazing across the Gulf of Time... Rock-art images of people 7,000 years ago and images from Cassini today show how far we've come

Someday, a visit

To Enceladus geysers

Will carve memories.

All your astrophotography are belong to us

Here begins my career as an astrophotographer - I took this picture of Saturn by awkwardly jamming my cell phone alongside my telescope eyepiece. I'm sure I'll be beating out the Hubble in picture quality in no time.

Not your typical SETI conspiracy

Nature has a recent "Podcast Extra," an extended interview with physicist Paul Davies that I listened to while injuring my foot on a trail run.  He's got an interesting book, The Eerie Silence, about the failure so far of SETI to detect alien intelligence and what the next steps might be.

Davies talked about his position as chair of the SETI post-detection task group, which is where the not-very-secret conspiracy issue arises and where he said some things that contradicted statements I've heard from SETI guy, Seth Shostak.  He said that if they receive a signal demonstrating alien intelligence that has no policy implications beyond the demonstration of its existence, then the world should be told.  If, however, the communication has implications like instructions for how to transform our technology, the potential disruptive impact means we shouldn't immediately disclose the news.  He also said we should be very careful and controlling of what information humanity should send in response.

I'm just going off of memory, but I think Shostak has said the exact opposite - that all information should be disclosed, and that a cacophony of signals sent to the aliens might actually give them a better idea about us than careful control would.  I think Shostak's right.

As a practical matter, I don't think SETI scientists are capable of keeping secret something this important, and I'm not sure they and anyone they recruit in the decision-making has the right to keep the information secret.  And as I'm certain I heard Shostak say, it's not possible from stopping anyone with a two-bit radio antennae from making their own broadcasts in response.

Otherwise, Davies had some interesting stuff to say, and his book might be worth picking up.

Obama re-reverses on space policy, and I'm glad

In February 2008, Obama was expressing doubt about the Bush plan for manned spaceflight that would replace the Space Shuttle, the Constellation/Ares/Orion program, and suggested delaying it in order to pay for increased funding for science and education.  Some months after that, competing with Hillary Clinton and then John McCain for Florida voters, he reversed and supported the Bush plan, with all the money it entailed in Florida expenditures (and Alabama and Texas, but they weren't in play).

Now Obama has re-reversed and even gone beyond where he was before, cancelling the over-budget and delayed Constellation program entirely.  He didn't kill the manned space program (although that would've been fine with me), but instead will contract out the "space taxi" business to get astronauts to the space station, extend the station's life from 2016 to 2020, and redirect money to research on more advanced heavy lift vehicles that could ultimately get humans out of low-Earth orbit, although not in this decade.

To get the best details currently available, read the pdf (especially page 4).  None of this is guaranteed, by the way, because existing programs will use their pet congressional reps to fight back.  Killing Constellation is good.  Extending the space station lifespan is bad but probably necessary politically and diplomatically.  The slight increase in space station budget to do some actual science is good but only if we're keeping the station.  Switching parts of the manned program to advanced research creates some real-world utility.  There's also $3b of that funding for robotic exploration as precursors of manned flight, which could be a good way to sneak actual science into otherwise wasted money.

Science does well, with earth climate observation getting funding it needs, as does research on green aviation.  Rightwingers who deny climate change are attacking the funding for climate science, without noticing the contradiction in their attempt to shut down science that they claim will ultimately vindicate them.

They say they're fully funding the Hubble replacement, Juno robotic mission to Jupiter, and already-planned future missions to Mars and Europa.  Nothing too surprising - robotic scientific missions have done well (at least in comparison to the manned program).

Then there's my hobbyhorse, the Terrestrial Planet Finder space telescope whose budget was zeroed out by the Bushies in order to fund the manned space program.  Because this mission could detect atmospheric spectra on habitable planets on other starts that could provide pretty-conclusive evidence of life elsewhere.  So just a potential, partial answer to life, the universe, and everything.

Unfortunately, no answer as to whether TPF is coming back.  Page 16 of that pdf I linked to says a new decadal survey will determine astrophysics priorities, which will apparently be released in mid-2010.

We'll see what happens.  Meanwhile, I plan to revolutionize everything with a Facebook group I just established called "Launch the Terrestrial Planet Finder Space Telescope!"  I'm sure this will make it a lock in the future budget.

The Europa science conspiracy is no climate science conspiracy

It seems doubtful that a scientific conspiracy to oppress alternative scientific viewpoints is even possible at the level denialists claim, a level so successful that "Since 2007, no scientific body of national or international standing has maintained a dissenting opinion" against human-caused warming.

There are some of my fellow space nuts who think they've proven that it's at least possible for a massive scientific conspiracy to exist, and they point to research about Jupiter's moon Europa as their example. Astronomer Richard Greenberg, member the Galileo space probe team, alleges repression of the view of his team that Europa has a thin ice sheet and not a thick one that separates its oceans from the surface. He's got a book out that I've read, Unmasking Europa, that makes exactly this case.

At first read, it gives some support to an argument that parallels denialists, saying

It seems bizarre that political clout would be used to promote a scientifically weak position...[but] the situation is both familiar and disturbing....Deviation from [the scientific "party line"] is risky business....less secure [researchers] may feel pressure to toe the party line or move on to other fields.

(page 7).

Things go downhill from this point on though, if you're trying to use Europa as a metaphor for the alleged climate conspiracy. It starts with Greenberg's next paragraph:

The political aspects of the story of Europan science play out largely within the scientific community. In this way they are different from the even more ominous attempts at political control of science from the outside, such as the recent efforts to discredit the scientific consensus on climate change.

(emphasis added).

Yup, Greenberg might agree that there's a conspiracy related to climate science, except that it's about powerful interests trying to obscure the understanding that we are changing the climate.

On a broader level, Greenberg and other thin-ice supporters think science can work through the peer-review process, saying "even the hard-line isolated ocean are starting to hedge their bets" (page 34). He's doing exactly what the reality-based faction are suggesting to climate skeptics, that they prove their case in and through the scientific process.

Greenberg also argues that political power in Europa research was highly centralized in a small team that controlled access to Galileo imagery (current NASA missions allow easier and quicker access to data), and one government agency, NASA, indirectly controls their future careers. Climate change involves thousands of scientists in a broad range of fields - climatology, physics, oceanography, geology - where a small shadowy cabal can't run everything.

Another major distinction between Europa and climate is that Greenberg isn't arguing that his view has been completely excluded from the scientific process. He has even been included on the design team for the next mission to the Jupiter system that will definitively resolve the issue, although not until 2026.

So denialists will have to look elsewhere to show that it's even possible to find an example of a scientific conspiracy at the level they're describing.

Setting this all aside, Greenberg's book is well-written, persuasive, and has gorgeous photographs. He's also quite willing to name names about who's unfairly working against his viewpoint.

I have no idea who's right, and my opinion would be worthless anyway. Reading the wiki article on Europa is a good balance to Greenberg's point of view (the article acknowledges the lack of consensus, of course). I can say, however, that Greenberg's contrarian inclinations are obvious. For example, he claims it's good that the probe's main communication antenna failed, because this kept the researchers from being overwhelmed with data and could concentrate on a small set of images instead. That is simply ridiculous. Being a contrarian isn't ridiculous -they can sometimes make the big leaps - but it's something to keep in mind.

Greenberg and his book will either be considered a visionary or a footnote when the next probe finally gets to Europa. It'll be interesting to find out which.

A WISE result could bring extrasolar exploration in this century

2010 looks to be a boring year in space, at least for space buffs like me who want eye candy.Cassini will continue to do its amazing thing, but that's been going on for a while. Same with theMars Rovers. We'll find out in a few weeks if Phoenix will have survived the Martian Arctic winter, which would be cool, but a stationary lander doesn't bring much in the way of new images.

Mars Science Laboratory was to be the big thing in 2010, but they blew the deadline along with the budget, and now it's delayed to 2012.

On the bright side, the Kepler space telescope should finally put out some results on its search for extrasolar planets. It's not eye candy, and it won't be until later that it finds how many Earth-sized planets are in Earth-sized orbits around stars, but next year we'll finally get some statistically-valid information on the percentage of stars with planets in short-period orbits.

And then there's WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, a space telescope that launched yesterday. Other telescopes are more sensitive for detecting cold objects in space, but they can view only tiny parts of the sky, while WISE will survey the entire sky. That means it could find brown dwarfs (massive planets/failed stars) or stray gas giant planets that are closer to our solar system than the Centauri star system, the closest known stars that are four light years away.

If WISE finds a brown dwarf within .5 light years or less, I think it's conceivable that a robotic mission to explore it could be launched and arrive there in this century. If aerocapturetechnology gets sufficiently developed, it might even go into orbit instead of being a flyby.

Not exactly a mission to another star, but pretty close.

UPDATE: Cool Cassini pic of sunlight on a lake on Titan. No one has ever seen sunlight on a lake anyplace besides Earth, until this picture was taken. I guess we will have some eye candy in 2010.

Mars Opportunity Rover on its way to clay-bearing rocks

This announcement got very little attention: the Mars Observer satellite found clays in the rim of the Endeavour Crater, which is the distant destination of the Opportunity Rover. While the rover has already analyzed water-deposited rock, the rock was from highly acidic water that is less hospitable to life than the earlier, phyllosillicate-clay rock found elsewhere. A major reason for the delayed Mars Science Lander mission is to examine clay rocks, and this discovery could give a preview.

The sequence of events as I understand it is that scientists believe that clay rock layers were deposited first. Then a large impact created the Endeavour crater, with crater rims sticking up above the surrounding rock. Then acidic waters left acidic rock deposits that covered the entire area except the crater rim. If Opportunity can get to it - it's still a long way away - it can find a type of surface more life-friendly than anything we've seen before.

I've wondered if the $20m annual cost of extending the rover missions has been worth it, but this would make it worthwhile if the rover successfully gets there.

Space politics - the scientists are learning

I've been intrigued by the political aspects of two space science missions: the Mars Exploration Rovers trundling around the Red Planet, and the Cassini mission to Saturn. Both missions arrived around early 2004, long ago completed their initial mission timelines, and have been granted funding for multiple mission extensions.

Several months ago, the Mars Opportunity rover controllers announced they were sending it to a massive crater 12 kilometers from its current position. That travel distance is equal to the total distance it's traveled in five years, and they expect moving quickly it will still take two years. After it arrives, many more months or years would be needed to analyze the crater's geology.

More recently, the Cassini mission announced plans for an extended mission all the way to 2017, with all the exciting things they plan to do in that time.

The trick in both cases though is that Congress hasn't authorized the budgets that would allow the missions to achieve their self-appointed goals, and Congress authorizes extensions only for significantly shorter periods. The mission managers acknowledge they need approval, but they leave unsaid how they've also put Congress in a bind.

If Congress cuts off the funding in the near future, they finish in the middle of a mission instead of at a logical conclusion of a mission extension. The Opportunity rover in particular would be seen as the equivalent of being commanded to cross half-way through a river, and then abandoned. Why send it all then?

I'm not criticizing. This will result in good science. But it's even better politics, and noone's paid much attention to it.

Happy Face Sky, tonight only!

Look west in the evening sky tonight just after sunset - Jupiter will be almost directly above Venus, and the crescent moon off to the left making a pretty good, sideways, Happy Face Sky. I declare this conjunction to be of enormous astrological significance.

Don't wait too long after sunset or the moon will set and you'll miss it.

Once again, I strive to bring only the highest quality, useful news here at Backseat Driving.

A one-species ecosystem

Interesting Astrobiology Magazine article: at the deepest level beneath the earth's surface, the only living thing is a single bacteria species. What interests me is that a stable environment that's existed for millions of years hasn't created a diverse ecosystem.

I think it's likely that life is common in other solar systems (I'm less certain about other parts of our own solar system). I also think intelligent life is likely, based on the idea that as biological systems become more diverse, one of those branches of diversity that will be explored in many places would be through species becoming more intelligent.

I don't really expect intelligent life to arise anywhere like miles beneath the surface where multicellular organisms can't exist, but I had expected something like a rule that biological systems tend towards diversity, or at least a certain level of diversity. This example says the rule isn't always true.

Beaten to the Easterbrook Idiot party

The party's here (via Deltoid). Easterbrook calls for more action to prevent asteroid strikes on Earth, based on a cherry-picked expert's ten-percent worst case scenario. Apply the same standard to the climate crisis and I can tell a pretty scary story too.

I actually don't want to pick on Easterbrook too much. However unfortunate it is that major publications think he has something to say about science, he did eventually give in to reality about climate change - in 2006. The people I really want to pick on are the right wingers, because they eat this stuff up about space risk, but don't want to do squat about climate risk. They need to get their risk assessments in order.

Finally, don't throw the baby out even though Easterbrook blinds us. There is a risk from asteroid impact, although that risk is reducing as NASA continues to search and eliminate near-future risks from larger asteroids. Just because Easterbrook says we should do more, that doesn't mean in this case that we should do the opposite. Doing what we're doing is fine.

Short stuff

Yesterday I switched back and forth between watching news of the Phoenix lander arrival on Mars and listening to an NPR program about detainees tortured at Gitmo.

In 1997 I was in Chile when the Pathfinder mission arrived at Mars. I'm not all that given to patriotic expressions, but the widespread fascination that the Chilean news media had with the Mars mission gave me a sense of pride as an American, something my country did that was admired globally. What a strange perspective yesterday, then, seeing the best and the worst of America being expressed.

I feel like focusing on the best instead of the worst. We might know within a week whether the polygonal cracks in Mars' polar surfaces have filled in part with ice, which could only happen if pre-existing ice melted and flowed into the cracks - in other words, proof of liquid water at the Martian surface in geologically recent time periods, and therefore a potential habitat for life.

We need more of the best and an end to the worst.

Counting down to the Mars Science Laboratory liftoff next year....

My NASA space conspiracy theory

No, it's not that the Apollo moon landings were fake - everyone knows that.*

My conspiracy theory is that many or most of the space scientists who say they support NASA's manned space exploration are lying through their teeth. I don't think anyone can adeptly play the game of getting NASA money for an unmanned project you're working on, while simultaneously dissing the stupid and politically powerful manned program. I think the scientists are playing politics.

The moon landings did good science, although that wasn't the main reason for them. Since then, the manned program has been a huge disaster, and Obama to his credit has started pushing away at it. I say leave it to private industry.

Meanwhile, not much has surfaced about the mysterious resignation of the NASA's science chief, although it likely had something to do with political infighting over Mars funding. A great comment here seems to indicate some inside knowledge.

And we're less than two weeks from when Phoenix lands on Mars. Here's hoping it doesn't crater....


*Mom will kill me when she reads that - she wrote software for the Mercury and Gemini missions.

Obama winning the space race

I've got no idea who will win the primary race today in Wisconsin, but I definitely agree with Matt Yglesias and disagree with Chris Bowers that Obama is winning the space race against Clinton by de-emphasizing the human spaceflight program.

Specifically, Obama has called for delaying the over-budget Constellation mission to return to the moon (with a vague pretense of eventually going to Mars), in order to fund math and science education. As Yglesias correctly points out, Bowers' counter-argument points to the science benefits of the useful, unmanned space program to argue for human spaceflight which has almost no science value (doing it an additional time here, too). In fact the budget overruns from manned spaceflight meant "we took a couple of billion out of [unmanned space] science" in the words of NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. So if you like the science results that Bowers points to, you should support Obama.

Bowers tries to come up with non-science reasons for human spaceflight, and it's just the same vague nothings that I see all the time on the space websites. Yglesias tries to give developing countries reasons to put people in space, but I think resource-constrained societies have much better things to do with money than throw it away. If they want to spend money on high-tech, do clean energy. Or, get involved in aviation. China could have built a competitor to Boeing with the money they burned to put a couple guys into orbit. Was that a good expense?

Meanwhile, Obama has taken a lot heat from the space nuts who like our useless human spaceflight program. Not the hugest possible difference in the world, but it does take some guts to take on the political patronage involved in NASA.

Some SETI vindication

A while back, I wrote about an "interview" I had with E.T. the Extraterrestrial, disputing the idea that alien intelligence is unlikely:

ET: Well look, [P.Z Myer's] guilty of the same anthropocentrism he accuses Sagan of having when he says technological capability has only evolved once on earth. So what? It always evolves only once per planet, from the perspective of the first species to get it on that planet. That doesn't make it unique.

And this is in a recent interview with Frank Drake of the SETI Institute, who knows what he's talking about:

[Astrobiology Magazine]: Although we have no evidence for intelligent life in our own solar system other than Earth.

[Frank Drake]: But that’s meaningless. Probably every planet can produce more than one intelligent species eventually. But they do it at different rates. So on every suitable planet in very many planetary systems, there may be many intelligent species about to appear, but one is always first. And the first one looks around and says, “We’re the only smart ones!” It is the only way it can be, and this is greatly misunderstood. This inevitable situation does not say that a planet can produce only one intelligent species. This fact says nothing about the probability of intelligent life or the possible eventual number of intelligent civilizations.

Nice to see that agreement.

Cooling on Uranus

While the "warming solar system is proof the Earth is heating naturally" claim is completely bogus, that hasn't stopped the support of idiots.

So I thought the report that the unfortunately-named planet is getting cooler should receive some more attention than it did. Now in the land of science as opposed to the land of science denialists, the fact that a study found Uranus to be cooling wouldn't do much to disprove "sun did it!" claim. For one thing, it's just one study and could be wrong, and for another, Uranus could be cooling for climatic reasons that have nothing to do solar dynamics.

Doesn't matter though - the claims that planets (other than Mars) are warming are also just based on little more than a single study each, and acknowledgment that Uranus' internal climate can override short-term solar influence pretty much shoots down the stupid, if-Earth-is-warming-only-the-sun-can-cause-it claim. Anyway, the claim is just wrong.

In other solar system events, some friends and I went outside last night to watch the meteor shower and play with a 12" Meade LightBridge telescope that I half-own. Now is a nice time to see Jupiter and its moons in the evening sky. What I really need to find is a good place between San Jose and San Francisco to use the scope though; the place we chose wasn't so great.