Episode 12 Encyclopaedia Galactica

Some topics seem like they haven't changed much over the last 33 years. Whether we have been visited by extraterrestials is one of those topics. I agree with Carl that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So far, there doesn't seem to be any credible evidence that contact has been made.

The Drake equation that estimates the number of civilizations within the Milky Way galaxy has also stood the test of time.The fact that we have found over 1000 exoplanets has increased the validity of the estimates for the leftmost factors in the equation. I've seen estimates that there are 33 billion Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones of their stars. Carl calculated that there were 100 billion planets with life.

The moon systems of Jupiter and Saturn have also proved that planets are not necessarily the only places to look for life. The chance that Mars had or has simple life has increased with the rovers discovering rocks that could have formed only in liquid water. The moons Europa, Enceladus and Titan all have their proponents for current life because they have liquid lakes and oceans.

The more uncertain factors are on the right side of the equation. The most uncertain one is "how long do civilizations last?" and that is a political question rather than scientific one. Carl calculated that there has been 1 billion planets with civilizations with radio communication. But when you use the fact that mankind has had radio communication capability for only a few decades of the Earth's 4.5 billion years, you have to multiply those 1 billion civilizations by (45 years / 4.5 billion years) 1/100,000,000 with a result of 10 civilizations currently in existence.

The observation that there should be aliens all over the place but we haven't seen them yet, is called the Fermi paradox. Carl proposes a couple of reasons for their absence. Possibly were the first ones on the block and the others are still in development. Another possibility are that they are here already. Observing us discretely without letting their presence be known. A third possibility is that civilizations become complacent and lose their drive to explore. Sometimes with the reduced support for science in the US, I'm worried that could be the direction we are headed in. A future with people so preoccupied texting what they had for breakfast with their smart phones they don't have any interest in looking at the stars in the sky anymore.

One of the recent topics up for debate is whether we should attempt to communicate by sending signals from Earth. Stephen Hawking thinks it is a bad idea. The odds are that any civilization we contact would be far more advanced than we are. Historically things haven't gone well when a backward civilization meets a much more advanced one, Aztecs vs the Spanish for example. I still remember the Twilight episode entitled "To Serve Man". The Earth thought it was a book on how the aliens would teach Mankind about all their great scientific discoveries but it turned out to be a cookbook. Maybe we can intercept that signal we sent to the globular cluster M13.

Episode 11 The Persistence of Memory

Life is complex and Carl assumes with the vastness of the cosmos, other instances of intelligent life must exist. And yet we have the Fermi paradox that we have not seen or heard any other civilizations. My feeling is that the civilizations are so far apart in the cosmos, we are effectively all in separate cages in a cosmic zoo. Everyone is effectively trapped through space and time from contacting one another.

It is an interesting concept to connect the information in genes with the information content of the brain and finally the information stored within our books. Each step exponentially increases the amount of storage capability.

I've heard one theory that man is not the top of the pyramid of life. We are merely the means that DNA uses to keep its message replicating through time. DNA has been at it for several billion years. We may come and go as a life form. DNA will find another host to keep its immortal chain letter continuously being replicated through time.

Episode 10 The Edge of Forever

There are some great galaxy pictures in this episode especially considering that the corrected Hubble Telescope was more than a decade away.

I thought the flatland segment was way overdone and I never heard of the tesseract which is a 4-dimensional cube. I guess a lot of this discussion was the precursor to string theory and its additional dimensions.

The current theory on the universe is that it has just the necessary amount of mass to be flat with only a .4% margin of error. If the universe had more matter it would have curvature of a sphere and less matter would create a saddle shape.

Carl has really done his analysis of various cultures. I find it amazing that the Hindu religion has Brahma cycles that last 8.6 billion years.

Another amazing fact is that all the energy intercepted by all radio telescopes from non solar system objects would not equal the energy of a single snowflake hitting the ground.

The last fact is hard to visualize. When you think of the arms of a spiral galaxy rotating, it is not a constant group of stars comprising the arm. The arm is actually defined by a density wave that creates new stars at the leading edges of the arms. The sun as it rotates around the Milky Way actually goes in and out of the spiral arms. The sun is traveling at 486,000 mph so that it can make one galactic revolution in 240 million years.

Carl did a great job of bringing his own perspective to this cosmology episode. I'm really looking forward to Neil De Grasse Tyson's handling of this material in the 2014 version of Cosmos.

Episode 9 The Lives of the Stars

That was a cool statistic at the beginning. If you cut an apple pie in half, 90 times you'll be down to the size of an atom.

Atoms are mainly empty space. In fact the nucleus of the atom is 1/100,000 the size of the full atom with its electron cloud. Now you know why neutron stars that have a mass several times the Sun and have been crushed down to the size of a city, have such a high density. One of Dan Joyce's favorite quotes is that, "if you drop a marshmallow from eye height, it will hit the surface of a neutron star with the energy of an atomic bomb."

I wonder how many people know the origin of the name of the search engine, Google. It isn't spelled the same but the Googol (10 raised to the power of 100) was the source. I never knew that the name came from a mathematician's 9 year old nephew. For future reference, remember a Googolplex is 10 raised to the googol power.

Speaking of big numbers, I recently seen the the number of stars in the universe has been estimated to be 300 sextillion (3 x 10 to the 23rd power). Carl throws out a couple more with, number of atoms in the human body being 10 to the 28th power), number of elementary particles (protons, neutrons & electrons) in the universe being 10 to the 80th power, and the entire universe packed with neutrons would be 10 to the 128th power.

I thought the observation of the neutrino flux from the 1987 supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy was one of the great scientific accomplishments. It was mentioned that astronomers were only finding 1/3 the theoretical flux of neutrinos from the Sun. Subsequently, scientists found that neutrinos can change between 3 flavors, electron, muon and tau. The detectors scientists were using could only detect 1 of the 3 flavors. That's why they were only seeing 1/3 of the neutrinos. I didn't realize that it took until 2001 for scientists to confirm this.

Episode 8 Travels in Space and Time

The Cosmos series was pulled from Hulu just when I was really hooked on it. Even Hulu+ didn't help. Fortunately my library came through with the series on DVD. So it looks like I'll be able to finish but I've got to get through 4 more episodes in 2 weeks.

Carl brings out the concept of chaos where small changes can make a big difference in the outcome of systems especially if enough time has elapsed.

He makes a point to show that the star patterns in the sky change through time and space. They also change due to the aging of stars.It is also fun to realize that when you look up at the sky, you're looking back in time. All the stars in the sky are members of the Milky Way galaxy so rarely are we looking at anything farther than a few thousand light years away. The Andromeda galaxy is the farthest object that can typically be seen with the naked eye and it is 2.5 million light years away. With my 8" telescope, I've seen the 13th magnitude quasar 3C273. It is really neat to contemplate that the photos hitting your eye from that object have been traveling for 2 billion years.

The designs of the star traveling spaceships haven't changed much over the years. I remember when the Orion design came out with propulsion provided by exploding nuclear bombs behind it. I never was too confident that way a good way to travel.

It was quite a coincidence that Carl was sitting in the time machine from the 1960 movie with Rod Taylor. I had just recorded the movie on my DVR and am trying to convince the grand kids that they want to watch so they can see the Eloi fight the Morlocs.

Episode 7 The Backbone of Night

When Carl romances about what the ancients knew, it is humbling to recognize that people 2500 years ago were pretty smart. The Ionians believed things were made from atoms, humans sprang from simpler forms of life, diseases were not caused by demons, Earth was a planet going around the sun and stars were far away. I wasn't sure where Ionia was but a map in the "Cosmos" book showed that it was the western side of modern day Turkey and just across the Aegean Sea from Greece. He attributes their forward thinking to the lack of a strong civil government and no controlling religion.

Eventually more mystical thought and oppressive governments overtook the Ionian way of thinking. It took the Enlightenment of the 1600's to rediscover many of these early truths. Imagine how much more science might have advanced if we didn't take the 2000 year detour.

There was no 1995 update by Carl on this episode. Probably because he had the exoplanet search and size of the universe pretty up-to-date. He mentions that the Milky Way contains a few hundred billion stars and that there are about 100 billion galaxies. These numbers are what scientists today think are accurate. I've seen within the last year that they estimate that there are 300 sextillion stars in the universe (3 followed by 23 zeros). There are more stars than grains of sand on all the beaches of Earth!

The exoplanet count is now up to 755. The vast majority where discovered by spectroscopic studies where they follow how the stars move toward us and then away from us as the planets revolve around them (blue-shifting and red-shifting of spectral lines). The Kepler satellite used the method of  rhythmic star dimming due to planets passing in front of the star, to find planet candidates.The number of Kepler unconfirmed candidate planets is 3470. I've seen a recent estimate of 33 billion habitable-zone earth-like planets in the Milky Way. I'm sure that statistic would have brought a smile to Carl's face.

Let us support space and science endeavours so that we can fulfill his final comment that, "Man is ready to set sail for the stars." I think he'd frown a bit to see how little we have advanced since 1980 in some areas.

Episode 6 Traveler's Tales

I'm writing this post on Thanksgiving night. It was a great convention today for the Mueller's and I'm fighting off the tryptophan sleep-inducing effects as I type this. My job at Courts+ will be calling me at 3:30AM tomorrow morning to help people work off the excesses of today.
 
Things didn't go so well for the two space items that occurred today. First the comet ISON swung around the Sun and achieved a top speed of 844,632 mph. Not bad for something that weighs 2 billion tons. Unfortunately, the gravity of the Sun ripped it apart and it evaporated before it came out from behind El Sol. Here it was going to be "the greatest comet of all recorded time" during December, drat! I'm glad Carol and I tried to see it last Sunday morning. We spotted the planets Saturn and Mercury but no luck for comet ISON even with binoculars. Fifteen minutes of searching in 10 degree temperatures in a field a couple of miles away from my house was a noble effort. I had hoped that it would be a naked-eye object after swinging past the Sun.

Second, SpaceX made its second attempt to launch its first geosynchronous satellite for Luxembourg. The countdown got down to 2 seconds and then the engines sensed something wrong and shut down. I haven't seen a new launch date published yet. This will be the first commercial satellite launch for a US company since 2009. The US has lost the satellite-launching market to Europe, Russia, and China. SpaceX is only charging $60 million for this launch. Europe's Ariane 5 rocket costs at least $200 million. It will be a great day for the cost of putting stuff into orbit if SpaceX can be successful at its current pricing.

Now for Carl Sagan's Traveler's Tales. Carl compares the 1977 launched Voyager space probes to the sailing ship exploration voyages of the 1600's. When he spoke about the space probes they had only gotten as far as Jupiter. Both would continue on to Saturn and Voyager 2 would also visit Neptune and Uranus. I fondly remember going to the Field Museum to listen to a NASA person relate the discoveries at each planet. This was before the Internet, so information was much harder to come by.

Because Voyager 1 only traveled past two planets, it was slingshotted sooner and faster out of the solar system. As of tonight, its distance from the Sun is 11.7 billion miles or 126.1 AU (AU being the distance between the Sun and the Earth). A round trip radio signal to Voyager 1 takes 35 minutes and 12 seconds. Scientists have finally agreed that Voyager 1 has left the heliopause that surrounds the Sun. It is now impacted by interstellar particles rather than solar ones. It has a long way to go to reach the distance of the nearest star. At 126 AU it is over 4 times farther from the Sun than Pluto but the nearest star is 4.3 light years or 272,500 AU away. Space is big!

Carl also contrasts how different cultures can influence their scientists. He mentioned how the tightly Catholic Church controlled Italians did not receive new ideas with open arms. Galileo was condemned for professing that the Earth revolved around the Sun and spent the last 8 years of his life under house arrest. Another Italian,Giordano Bruno, was burned at the stake for speculating about beings on other planets. Whereas the Dutch who were very open to new ideas and treated Christiaan Huygens as a celebrity even though he had the same views as both of these Italian scientists. The Dutch went on to established the largest world trading organization while the Italians seemed to slip into a much more stale society and soon weren't a world power. I'd like to see us get more science savvy representatives in the US government. I don't think congressmen that profess the Earth was made in 4004 BC, help us make informed decisions on many topics critical to the US.

I have just one nit-picking complaint with Carl on his pronunciation of Jupiter's moon, Io. I've always pronounced it eye-oh. I even have a running joke with my oldest grandson, Jack, about how do you spell, Io. The joke doesn't work if you use Carl's pronunciation of ee-oh. The controversy evens gets a footnote on page 156 of his book, "Cosmos".  During the episode one of the young female astronomers uses eye-oh but Carl insists on the Eastern Mediterranean origin of the word and uses the non-British pronunciation.

My final point is that I feel pretty dated with all the main-frame computers shots at JPL. I remember computers with blinking lights, card punches, line printer output on fan-folded green stripped paper and 80 megabyte hard drives that were the diameter of a large pizza and 6 inches tall. I still remember when I carried one of the disks on a plane. Under its blue plastic case was printed 80MB. I was worried that it looked too similar to BOMB.

Remember MASS members that we will be getting together on Friday, December 6. Part of the program will be Episode 1 of Cosmos with Dean's study guide as an accompaniment. I'm still keeping up with the Planetary Society schedule for viewing the programs. I hope you don't mind hearing about the episodes a little early in the blog.

Episode 5 Blues for a Red Planet

Carl is right that Mars has a lot of features that make it seem to be a planet with life. Earth-like features such as: polar caps, a 24-hour day, clouds, dust storms, seasons, to name a few.

It surprised me that the H.G. Wells story, "War of the Worlds" was written so long ago, 1897. The episode also dramatized part of the story and mentioned the 1938 Orson Welles version that was a Halloween prank that panicked much of the country. That production just celebrated its 75th anniversary earlier this month. By coincidence, a week after this Halloween, I convinced two of my grandkids, Cara age 10 and Jimmy age 7, to listen to the broadcast. It seemed a contrast in technology to play off the Internet on my smartphone a 1938 radio recording. It took a while for the kids to realize that there was no picture to watch. You merely listen and use your imagination. I think they enjoyed it and now have a better sense of what life was like before TV, cell phones and computers.

This pictures from the July, 1976 Viking landers seem a little washed out and lacking detail compared to the snapshots we've been getting from later rovers and landers, especially the most recent, Curiosity Rover. Curiosity with its nuclear power source is immune to the seasonal limitations of solar panel power. I hope it keeps rolling up Mt. Sharp for quite a few years. The fact that it can zap rocks with its laser from 20 feet or more reminds me of a reverse "War of the Worlds" with the Martians being attacked this time.

NASA in a few days plans to launch the MAVEN spacecraft that will orbit Mars and try to determine how it lost its atmosphere. MAVEN will also be the communication relay for the current and future assets on the surface of Mars. There is another rover planned in 2020 and after that probably a "sample return" series of missions. The long term goal is to send people in the 2030's. I'd believe that goal more if it wasn't for the fact that every administration since Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the early 1970's has said we should go to Mars in the next 20 years.

Scientists have quite a concern about bringing samples of Mars back to Earth because of possible contamination issues. I've heard that they are only confident in bringing the samples back to the International Space Station. I wonder whether they would ever bring the samples down to the Earth's surface.

There also is a Mars contamination concern if we ever send people to explore Mars. Remember that the human body has bacteria and other foreign cells that outnumber the human body cells by a factor of 10. I don't know how we could ever explore with our breathing and other bodily functions and not spread a little of us around the place.

As a final topic, Carl discusses terraforming Mars into a more habitable place if we find that there is no Mars life. Some people probably would consider that effort as the ultimate pollution scenario. But I feel objects like Mars and asteroids are resources meant to help the human race become a multi-planet species. One does wonder what authority here on Earth will have jurisdiction over making those climate changing decisions.

Hope you watch the episode. Comments are much appreciated. Jim

Episode 4 Heaven and Hell

The episode begins with the Tunguska Event in 1908 Russia. I'm always amazed that it took 20 years for Russia to explore the event. But when I see the extreme environment of a bug-infested swamp, I get a better comprehension for the difficulty.

He lists the size of incoming object as a football field (~100 meters). More recently I've heard the size estimate as 40 meters or 130 feet. I think additional research into the damage caused by air burst simulations has reduced the size required to cause the damage.

I'm amazed he listed the possibilities of it being an anti-matter object or an alien spaceship. In fairness, part of the episode was about not rejecting unlikely hypotheses just because they are weird. Hopefully, the recent Chelyabinsk event which occured uncannily close to Tunguska with a similar air burst will demonstate that a comet or stony asteroid can cause a lot of damage without leaving much debris or any crater.

Comets were always believed to be the harbingers of evil. Carl didn't call the sphere of comets around the Sun its current name of the Oort Cloud. I've read that the Oort Cloud might hold up to 2 trillion comets and begins about 2000 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun and ends just short of half way to the nearest star (~100,000 AU).  The AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun or about 93 million miles. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, is 4.3 light years away. There are 63, 115 AU in a light-year. Half the distance to Alpha Centauri is 135, 700 AU. For comparison, the Voyager 1 spacecraft that has been traveling since 1977 is only 126 AU away from the Sun about three times Pluto's  40 AU distance. Space is big!!

Venus is definitely a rough environment with a crushing atmosphere of 90 times that of Earth's and sulphuric acid clouds. The 900+ degree Farenheit temperature doesn't help the hostile environment either. Those conditions are definitely making Mars the exploration planet of choice. There hasn't been many recent launches to Venus. Europe's last launch was the Venus Express in 2005 and the US's last one was Magellan in 1989. Russia's last launches were in 1984 when a couple of Venus landers piggy-backed on Halley's comet missions.

He dwells a little about the relatively new science of Ecology and in the 10 year follow-up spends most of his time warning us that we must be should become better shepherds of the Earth's environment. Get more fuel-efficient cars, increase renewable energies and control our population explosion. 

Hope you enjoyed the episode. Let me know what you thought about it. 

Jim

Episode 3 "The Harmony of the World"

Carl spends a large part of the episode discounting the belief in astrology.I'm amazed that one of his quotes has stuck with me all these years and I used it in conversation just a couple of days before re-watching the episode. The quote is "that the obstetrician at your birth has a greater gravitational influence on you than any planet does." I'm always amazed that people that I consider critical thinkers can put any predictive stock in astrology. When Sagan shows that the patterns of the stars have been assigned different configurations by every culture that looked to the sky, it is obvious that the only significance to the star patterns is the mirroring of each culture's beliefs and fears.

Kepler comes through as one of the great thinkers of science. The fact that he could discard his life-long idea of using the perfect solids and circles to explain the planetary motions and embrace the vile and irregular ellipse as the solution is extraordinary.

From another perspective if I ever was able to go back in time, I think I'd rather hang with Tycho Brahe and his entourage for a night than the strait-laced Kepler. It makes me wonder when Tycho was able to make all those highly accurate astronomical sightings if he was always wining and dining every night.

It also hits home how hard life was back in those times. All the personal tragedy that occured to Kepler in his later life. Much of it caused by war caused by competing religions. That brings to mind a gentleman named Richard Dawkins who was on the Bill Maher show last week. He brought out a t-shirt with the logo, in large letters, "Religion", and in small letters below, "together we can find the cure".

Remember you can watch the updated 1980 Cosmos series on www.hulu.com/#!watch/63327 with commercials included but the price is right. It's free.

The blog by Casey Dreier of the Planetary Society's  called "Cosmos with Cosmos" can be found at, http://www.planetary.org/blogs/casey-dreier/ . His comments on each episode are very insightful and thorough.

Also check out Dean's suggested site www.learnerstv.com for some great science & astronomy videos. I was impressed with the video that showed how to compute a star's parallax, why a telescope mirror has to be shaped like a parabola to reflect all the light to a point and an explanation why a star like the sun swells up into a red giant star when it ages.

Episode 2 One Voice in the Cosmic Fugue

This episode was more about biology and evolution than astronomy. Carl is definitely an evolution proponent. I'm a little more flexible in letting people use their "Faith" to decide how much of the evolution story they wish to buy into. On the other hand, I don't think topics like "Intelligent Design" should be portrayed as science.
In regards to the chance of extraterrestial life, it is heartening to know that Earth's life uses the most common chemical element building blocks of the Cosmos. He also implies that the leap from simple microbial life to inteligent civilizations might be as great as the leap from inert chemical to simple life. I hope that we can soon search locations like Mars, Titan, Enceledus and Europa to see if the Solar System has another sample of simple life. Computing chances of life within the Milky Way or the Cosmos is so hard when you only have one occurance to work with.
With his 10 year followup comments, it's interesting that the asteroid explosion 65 million years ago was new information. It shows how scientific thinking modifies over time.

Episode 1 "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean"

A few comments where the info might be a little old.
The Local Group of galaxies is thought to include about 40 not 20. The Milky Way is thought to be a barred spiral not just a spiral. Pluto is mentioned as a planet not as a "dwarf" planet.
It's always amazing how advanced many of the astronomers of antiquity were. Eratosthenes, for example, who computed the size of the Earth from the different shadow lengths in 2 Egyptian cities.
It always makes me a little melancholy when he tells about the burning of the Library of Alexandria and all the information lost. It took mankind almost 2000 years to recover some of knowledge. What a waste because it was caused by rioting people, not a natural disaster.
Carl Sagan's use of a year's calendar to represent time since the Big Bang, humbles us as by representing "recorded history" as only a small slice of a few seconds at the end of the Cosmic Year. Now we're humbled in time as well as place (the Earth is only a dot in the vast universe).
There's a great moral at the end of the episode, don't swander our opportunity to acheive greatness by arguing amonst ourselves.

Old Cosmos Series

Planetary Society suggest people watch old 1980 Cosmos Series before new series comes out in 2014. Sounds like like a fun idea. Watch Episode 1 on Oct 13, Episode 2 on Oct 22, etc. Videos watchable at hulu.com but you have to listen to the commercials too.