I found this lovely video of the setting for much of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun on Caleb Scharf's Life, Unbounded blog. It was made by Sander van der Berg, using images taken by the Voyager spacecraft and the Cassini orbiter. The miracle isn't only that we find such austere and inhuman vistas beautiful, but that we are also able to understand the interactions between mass, gravity and time that created them.
Saturday 28 April 2012
Moon Dance
Posted on 01:44 by Unknown
I found this lovely video of the setting for much of The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun on Caleb Scharf's Life, Unbounded blog. It was made by Sander van der Berg, using images taken by the Voyager spacecraft and the Cassini orbiter. The miracle isn't only that we find such austere and inhuman vistas beautiful, but that we are also able to understand the interactions between mass, gravity and time that created them.
Friday 27 April 2012
Worldbuilding Made Easy
Posted on 12:30 by Unknown
I was in Lillehammer, Norway, a few years back. It's probably most famous for being the site of the Winter Olympics in 1994, but it also possesses a very big and very fine open-air museum, Maihaugen, which contains a huge selection of vernacular Norwegian buildings. The collection was started by a dentist, Anders Sandvig, in the late nineteenth century. When it outgrew his garden, the city of Lillehammer gifted him with a permanent site. Most are traditional rural structures, but there are several short streets of urban buildings, and a scattering of twentieth century houses.
The setting is lovely; the attention to detail comprehensive. Everything is neatly labelled; everything is explained. The traditional turf roofs provided good insulation and their weight stabilised the wooden buildings. Most guttering and most tools were wooden because worked metal was expensive, and so on, and so forth. It's a great museum, an idyllic simulacrum of a vanished way of life. It is, in short, an object lesson in worldbuilding. A ready-made stage set for a fantasy trilogy.
But like all museums, you wouldn't mistake it for the real thing. When you step inside one of the farmhouses, there's no sense of trespassing on someone's home, someone's life. Everything is an exemplar: authentic, but without the individuality of human context. Worldbuilding is, let's face it, isn't that difficult. A few basic principles, a few rules, consistency, coherence . . . Making it come alive, that's the hard part. That's where the work really begins.
Sunday 22 April 2012
Friday 20 April 2012
News From Elsewhere
Posted on 09:15 by Unknown
In December this year it will be forty years since human beings escaped low Earth orbit; forty years since the end of Apollo. But although there are no cities on the Moon, or expeditions to Mars, the asteroids, and the moons of Jupiter, it's a golden age for space science. Just about every day I'm excited by a new piece of research, a new discovery, a new image of some sublime extraterrestrial landscape.
A couple of days ago, for instance, there was advance publicity for an astrophysics paper describing the computer simulation of trajectories of free-floating planets in star clusters. The investigators discovered that if the number of planets equalled the number of stars in the cluster, then over time some 6 - 8 per cent of the planets were captured by stars. Given that ejection of planets appears to pretty common during formation of planetary systems, not only is the Galaxy teeming with rogue planets, but many star systems may contain captured planets, distinguished by distant and eccentric orbits. Far-fetched? We have an example of a similar mechanism right here in the Solar System.The outermost moons of Saturn are almost certainly captured bodies that were ejected from the Kuiper belt, out beyond Pluto's orbit, and were captured by Saturn as they migrated inwards. These little moons possess distant, inclined and often irregular orbits. They cluster in three groups - Inuit, Gallic and Norse - and the members of each group may well be fragments of a parent body that broke up. The best known and largest irregular moon is Phoebe, a couple of hundred kilometres in diameter, orbiting in the opposite direction to the inner moons, and the source of dark material that forms Saturn's largest ring (which was unknown until a few years ago) and darkens the leading hemisphere of the ying-yang moon, Iapetus.
That dark ring was discovered by examination of data and images collected by the Cassini spacecraft, still in orbit around Saturn, and still working hard after entering orbit around Saturn some eight years ago. One of the Cassini team's latest discoveries is that one of the hydrocarbon lakes in the south polar region of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, appears to behave like a salt pan in Namibia; both are depressions that drain in the dry season and refill from below, fed by groundwater (or ground hydrocarbons, in the case of Titan's lake). Titan and Earth are the only bodies in the Solar System known to possess hydrological cycles. Although Earth's cycle is based on water, and Titan's on methane, ethane and propane, there amazing similarities. Cassini's extended missions have allowed it to observe seasonal changes in Titan's rain patterns and the size of its lakes, something a human-crewed mission would be hard-pressed to do, given that Saturn takes 29.7 years to complete an orbit, and seasons on the gas giant and Titan are correspondingly longer than seasons on Earth. But maybe somewhere on Titan there are dry salt pans, old, large, and very flat, like the Bonneville salt pans in Nevada, but composed of something like asphalt. Imagine the drag-racing possibilities...
A couple of days ago, for instance, there was advance publicity for an astrophysics paper describing the computer simulation of trajectories of free-floating planets in star clusters. The investigators discovered that if the number of planets equalled the number of stars in the cluster, then over time some 6 - 8 per cent of the planets were captured by stars. Given that ejection of planets appears to pretty common during formation of planetary systems, not only is the Galaxy teeming with rogue planets, but many star systems may contain captured planets, distinguished by distant and eccentric orbits. Far-fetched? We have an example of a similar mechanism right here in the Solar System.The outermost moons of Saturn are almost certainly captured bodies that were ejected from the Kuiper belt, out beyond Pluto's orbit, and were captured by Saturn as they migrated inwards. These little moons possess distant, inclined and often irregular orbits. They cluster in three groups - Inuit, Gallic and Norse - and the members of each group may well be fragments of a parent body that broke up. The best known and largest irregular moon is Phoebe, a couple of hundred kilometres in diameter, orbiting in the opposite direction to the inner moons, and the source of dark material that forms Saturn's largest ring (which was unknown until a few years ago) and darkens the leading hemisphere of the ying-yang moon, Iapetus.
That dark ring was discovered by examination of data and images collected by the Cassini spacecraft, still in orbit around Saturn, and still working hard after entering orbit around Saturn some eight years ago. One of the Cassini team's latest discoveries is that one of the hydrocarbon lakes in the south polar region of Saturn's largest moon, Titan, appears to behave like a salt pan in Namibia; both are depressions that drain in the dry season and refill from below, fed by groundwater (or ground hydrocarbons, in the case of Titan's lake). Titan and Earth are the only bodies in the Solar System known to possess hydrological cycles. Although Earth's cycle is based on water, and Titan's on methane, ethane and propane, there amazing similarities. Cassini's extended missions have allowed it to observe seasonal changes in Titan's rain patterns and the size of its lakes, something a human-crewed mission would be hard-pressed to do, given that Saturn takes 29.7 years to complete an orbit, and seasons on the gas giant and Titan are correspondingly longer than seasons on Earth. But maybe somewhere on Titan there are dry salt pans, old, large, and very flat, like the Bonneville salt pans in Nevada, but composed of something like asphalt. Imagine the drag-racing possibilities...
Monday 16 April 2012
Life On The Drift
Posted on 10:25 by Unknown
The New Scientist reports that Japanese scientists have calculated that microbes riding rocks knocked off Earth could not only have seeded bodies in the solar system which may be able to support life, but could have seeded Earth-like exoplanets like Gliese 581d, too. At first glance, it's a perfect example of science-journalism catnip: DINOSAUR-KILLING ASTEROIDS! EXOPLANETS! ALIEN LIFE!. But the paper it cites, by Tesuya Hara and colleagues, is a serious examination of the probability that life on one planet could seed other hospitable planets and moons; an attempt to pin down some of the factors that make the old idea of panspermia possible.
Hard panspermia theory suggests that life originated in just one stellar system in the Galaxy about ten billion years ago, and spread out to planets around other stars, including Earth. It assumes that life is unlikely to arise more than once, that big whacks like the dinosaur-killing Chixulub impact could knock debris off Earth's surface and into interplanetary space, and that microbes could survive inside rocks for the million-odd years it would take to drift to another star system. Hara et al's paper suggests that more than one fragment of debris could reach stellar systems within twenty light years of the sun, and microbes might survive if those fragments were embedded in icy material like comets, which would shelter it from cosmic radiation.
It's a neat idea. Doughtly little microbes minding their own business when they're suddenly knocked off Earth by a fiery cataclysm, snoozing away a million years inside a centimetre-long spaceship of solid rock, plunging into an alien ocean and getting busy with the business of evolution. But like all ideas associated with panspermia, it is based on the very big assumption that abiogenesis, the spontaneous generation of life, is a highly unlikely event; an assumption that tends to degrade into an argument about First Cause that is as yet is impossible to answer because we have only one example of a life-bearing planet. (And it's possible that life on Earth arose more than once, but other forms were wiped out by catastrophic impacts, or were out-competed by our very early ancestors, leaving only fossils or refuge populations surviving in niche habitats. In that context, discovery of microbes with characteristics radically different from all other known species would be as important as discovery of life on another world. That's why NASA made a big noise about the possible (and now largely discredited) discovery of a microbe that appeared to substitute arsenic for phosphorous in its metabolism.)
If we found life on Mars, and that life closely resembled life on Earth, then we'd certainly have to take the idea of panspermia (or at least its weaker cousin, exogenesis) within the solar system seriously. But given that one estimate puts the number of Earth-like planets in the Galaxy at around ten billion, abiogenesis would have to be an extremely rare event for it to have occurred only once. Martians may be from Earth (or we may be Martians), but despite the calculations of Hara et al about the probability of the chain of steps required to transfer life from one stellar system to another, it still seems most likely that if ever do meet any aliens, they'll be genuinely alien, products of a creation utterly separate from our own.
(Thanks to James Bradley for pointing me towards the article.)
Hard panspermia theory suggests that life originated in just one stellar system in the Galaxy about ten billion years ago, and spread out to planets around other stars, including Earth. It assumes that life is unlikely to arise more than once, that big whacks like the dinosaur-killing Chixulub impact could knock debris off Earth's surface and into interplanetary space, and that microbes could survive inside rocks for the million-odd years it would take to drift to another star system. Hara et al's paper suggests that more than one fragment of debris could reach stellar systems within twenty light years of the sun, and microbes might survive if those fragments were embedded in icy material like comets, which would shelter it from cosmic radiation.
It's a neat idea. Doughtly little microbes minding their own business when they're suddenly knocked off Earth by a fiery cataclysm, snoozing away a million years inside a centimetre-long spaceship of solid rock, plunging into an alien ocean and getting busy with the business of evolution. But like all ideas associated with panspermia, it is based on the very big assumption that abiogenesis, the spontaneous generation of life, is a highly unlikely event; an assumption that tends to degrade into an argument about First Cause that is as yet is impossible to answer because we have only one example of a life-bearing planet. (And it's possible that life on Earth arose more than once, but other forms were wiped out by catastrophic impacts, or were out-competed by our very early ancestors, leaving only fossils or refuge populations surviving in niche habitats. In that context, discovery of microbes with characteristics radically different from all other known species would be as important as discovery of life on another world. That's why NASA made a big noise about the possible (and now largely discredited) discovery of a microbe that appeared to substitute arsenic for phosphorous in its metabolism.)
If we found life on Mars, and that life closely resembled life on Earth, then we'd certainly have to take the idea of panspermia (or at least its weaker cousin, exogenesis) within the solar system seriously. But given that one estimate puts the number of Earth-like planets in the Galaxy at around ten billion, abiogenesis would have to be an extremely rare event for it to have occurred only once. Martians may be from Earth (or we may be Martians), but despite the calculations of Hara et al about the probability of the chain of steps required to transfer life from one stellar system to another, it still seems most likely that if ever do meet any aliens, they'll be genuinely alien, products of a creation utterly separate from our own.
(Thanks to James Bradley for pointing me towards the article.)
Wednesday 11 April 2012
I Am Stepney, I Am Peru
Posted on 06:56 by Unknown
Jah Wobble reminds us that there's no need to use faux exoticism to evoke 'transcendence' or 'the sublime'.
Monday 9 April 2012
The Human Absence
Posted on 08:44 by Unknown
Maybe it's different now, but when I was learning to be a scientist I wasn't given any formal instruction in the art of writing a scientific paper - in how to write like a scientist. The basic structure of a paper is easy enough to understand. A summary, or abstract, describing in a few sentences the nature of the investigation and the results obtained. An introduction, giving the background of the investigation, and the questions being investigated. A section on methods and materials, or, How I Did It. Results, or, What I Found (here be graphs and tables). A Discussion of the significance of the results - do they answer the questions posed in the introduction, and what further questions to they pose? And finally, References: a list of papers quoted in the text. So far, so good. But more mysterious was the language of the paper. Words you could use and words you couldn't, the detached tone, the dry precision, and most of all, the passive tense that removed all sense that anything had been thought or done by a human being. You never say 'I' in a scientific paper. You never say 'I boiled the frog.' You say instead 'The frog was boiled'. It was not so much what you should do, but what you shouldn't. You learned by making mistakes which your supervisor and the referees of the paper corrected.
Adam Ruben gives a wonderful deconstruction of the process:
Adam Ruben gives a wonderful deconstruction of the process:
I asked for an example, and [my advisor] pointed to a sentence on the first page. “See that word?” he said. “Right there. That is not science.”Never mind fiddling around with second-person narratives and unreliable narrators. Imagine writing a short story - a novel - shorn of anything that shows the slightest quiver of emotion. A properly post-modern hard science-fiction construction in which the author becomes a committee of ghostly puppeteers, and his characters objects acted upon: 'It has been proposed that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. This was investigated by introducing the subject into a location populated by family groups which each possessed unmarried daughters...'
The word was “lone,” as in “PvPlm is the lone plasmepsin in the food vacuole of Plasmodium vivax.” It was a filthy word. A non-scientific word. A flowery word, a lyrical word, a word worthy of -- ugh -- an MFA student.
I hadn’t meant the word to be poetic. I had just used the word “only” five or six times, and I didn’t want to use it again. But in his mind, “lone” must have conjured images of PvPlm perched on a cliff’s edge, staring into the empty chasm, weeping gently for its aspartic protease companions. Oh, the good times they shared. Afternoons spent cleaving scissile bonds. Lazy mornings decomposing foreign proteins into their constituent amino acids at a nice, acidic pH. Alas, lone plasmepsin, those days are gone.
So I changed the word to “only.” And it hurt. Not because “lone” was some beautiful turn of phrase but because of the lesson I had learned: Any word beyond the expected set -- even a word as tame and innocuous as “lone” -- apparently doesn’t belong in science.
Monday 2 April 2012
Found Poetry
Posted on 07:54 by Unknown
'Dead Stars' to guide spacecraft.
Of course, it's only a matter of time before it's incorporated into a GPS app to point you towards that hot new restaurant, and it will have become as invisibly prosaic as satellite technology.
Of course, it's only a matter of time before it's incorporated into a GPS app to point you towards that hot new restaurant, and it will have become as invisibly prosaic as satellite technology.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)