Exploration: Part One

A spotlight illuminates a spare, unadorned stage, empty except for a guitar and its case, a microphone, and a black-draped table with a bottle of water and a glass.  Then an exuberant Chris Hadfield makes his entrance, greeted with an enthusiastic standing ovation from the audience.

He responds with equal enthusiasm: "I'm excited too! We've got so much to talk about," and proceeds to deliver a passionate, dynamic and inspirational three hour talk* on his topic of choice: exploration.

He starts with the analogy of the single step that is at the beginning of all exploration, comparing it to the first uncertain steps of a baby, then progressing to learning to ride a bicycle, the first machine that we use to increase our speed and distance, culminating in the Eagle Moon Lander, "one of the best bicycles we have ever built."

"Michael Collins took this picture of the Eagle in 1969.  Every human being that has ever lived in in that picture - except for Mike."

Looking at the background of the Apollo program that produced the Eagle, Hadfield quotes the famous 1962 speech by John F. Kennedy in which he announced, "We choose to go to the Moon" commenting that “JFK was challenging us to do something we had never done before, to use this new technology and have it take us somewhere we'd never been before. Seven years later, we took our first step onto the Moon."

"Our imprint, our visible exploration of someplace other than our own planet."

He goes on to speak about the effect that watching the first moon landing had on him, on how it changed the course of his entire life: "The moon landing did something for me - it gave me permission to imagine myself as someone completely different. What might I be able to do? What are the limits in my world? Where can we go in a lifetime?"

Some people would ask why would you explore?  For the Commander, exploration puts the world in perspective - "It's so tiny by the standards of the universe. The better our machines get the better we can understand the perspective of where we are."

"That bright dot at the lower right is Earth from 1.5 billion kilometers, shot by the Cassini probe in 2013."

"The best exploration machine we've come up with is Voyager, which left in 1977.  There's actually two of them, Voyager I and II.  They went beyond Pluto and now out beyond the influence of our sun, the Voyager probes are 22 billion kilometers away.

”Through Voyager, we have left our solar system. If you stuck your hand out the window of Voyager - which would be a bad idea - you would no longer be able to feel the solar wind from our sun.

"How did we do that? How did we explore that far away?"

To look at how we’ve reached so far, the Commander first takes a look at where we started, detailing the history of exploration and technology here on Earth. To Hadfield, it's all about speed, starting with the six kilometer per hour walking speed of homo sapiens that spread humanity around the planet, and working up through the domestication of the camel and the horse, the invention of the wheel in the Ukraine, then the development of boats and sailing and early exploratory trips by the Vikings around the year 1000.

500 years after that, humanity needed “a better spaceship”, leading to the development of the caravel in Portugal, “the great exploration vehicle of its time”, capable of 15 kilometers an hour.  The Cape of Good Hope was transitioned in 1487, and Columbus travels across the Atlantic to North America five years later. These voyages needed more than just improved ships, they required improved mathematical and navigational tools, technology like the sextant and astrolabe: “…the computers of the time for navigation, a tremendous technical achievement.“

The steam engine catapults humanity into the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s, followed fast by the airplane, the jet, the Saturn V rocket, which reaches a speed of 9,920 kilometers per hour, the 60,000 kilometer an hour speed of the Voyager I and II probes as they passed Pluto on their way out of our solar system, and the planned Solar Probe, which will need to reach a speed of 700,000 km per hour to successfully pass within 6 million kilometers of the Sun.

He also looks at some of the people who helped to explore our world and increase our understanding of it, early explorers like Jeanne Baret, the first woman to circumnavigate the world in the 1760s – “tough and self-reliant”, and the Montgolfier brothers and the first manned balloon flight by Étienne Montgolfier in 1783.  He also notes Charles Darwin’s voyage of exploration, circumnavigating the world in the Beagle in the 1830s, visiting the Galapagos Islands, and eventually publishing The Origin of the Species in 1859, his groundbreaking work about the fundamental nature of life.

1911 sees the first real exploration of Antarctica by Roald Amundsen, American test pilot Chuck Yeager breaks the sound barrier in 1947, and 14 years later, five foot two Yuri Gargarin is the first man in space, “opening the door”. Eight years later, Apollo 11 puts the first man on the Moon.

Hadfield then speaks to the immensity of space, and the challenges of finding a way to cross the vast distances involved in the exploration of space, illustrating the point by comparing our solar system to the recently discovered M87 black hole.

From XKCD

"Our galaxy is vast. Our best telescopes show us that the Milky Way*** is 200,000 light years across - it's huge. If you start counting stars, there are about 400 billion stars just in our galaxy, and we've discovered in the last ten years that each of those stars has, on average, has one planet, and one in ten is like Earth.  So about 40 billion potential earthlike worlds in our galaxy."

He pauses for a moment then makes a deadpan observation: "That's pretty intriguing..."

"Then there are other galaxies, the scale is incredible, the number of stars, the number of things that exist - all the possibilities that exist, the unimagineably huge number of possibilities!

"How can we understand it?"

He takes a moment to look at the work of Vera Rubin, the first woman astronomer to work at the famous Palomar Observatory in California, who looked at the Andromeda Galaxy and realized that there were too many stars.

"There isn't enough gravity to hold all those stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, and from that she theorized the existence of dark matter - she could have called it Ralph - everything we know about only accounts for six percent of the universe.  The other 94 percent is unknown."

"Can we even explore these places - what is the fastest ship we can imagine?  There's the Enterprise - Kirk was always calling on Scotty for more speed, faster, Scotty."

Using Star Trek's USS Enterprise and its faster than light warp drive as an example, he first explains that the warp drive system is based on the cube of the warp number****, which makes Warp 9 equal to 729 times the speed of light.

At that speed, he calculates that it would take Starfleet's proudest ship 274 years to cross the Milky Way Galaxy, adding, "They were only on a five year mission!! They didn't go anywhere! They were just driving around the neighbourhood!!"

More seriously, he looks at the practicalities of how we are going to explore the universe.

"Maybe we're going to have to get into the very essence of not huge but small, maybe that's the only way that we'll be able to do it - to accelerate very small particles to speeds that will push us to unimaginable velocities."

As an example, he cites Costa Rican ex-astronaut Franklin Chang Díaz, a PhD in applied plasma physics who visited space seven times.  After leaving NASA in 2005, Chang Díaz started the Ad Astra rocket company, which is researching plasma-based propulsion systems for space exploration.

But propulsion is not the only issue - Hadfield contends that new sources of power will also be a crucial aspect of future exploration.

"We need the power of the atom to make it work. We need not just fission, but fusion, to understand how the atom works In order to break the bounds of our own solar system let alone our galaxy."   He points out that many people are working on fusion reactor research, with General Fusion, one of the key players, located nearby in the Fraser Valley.

“They hope to create enough pressure inside this device to fuse two light atoms into one heavier atom which would release an enormous amount of energy - maybe that's the right idea. That's how the sun does it."

Other crucial research is underway at CERN, the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire.   "The underground CERN particle accelerator accelerates individual bits of matter and slams them into each other not only to understand what an atom is, but what makes up neutrons:  subatomic particles, quarks, muons, bosons, trying to understand the very nature of matter itself.  

"If we truly want to explore, we can't just rely on horse power or cannon power or steam power. Being relentless inventors is the only way to travel even further and to understand even more.  We need a better power source, better than burning oil and coal and wood, and maybe the answer will come from deep underground."

At this point, the Commander took a break - and, based on the length of this post, we're going to do the same thing. In the second half of his talk, Hadfield looks at the crucial role played by water in exploration, and where we may go next.

- Sid

* I have to give the Commander** full points - unless there's a really well concealed teleprompter somewhere in the theatre, he speaks unaided for the entire three hours.

** I know that he's actually a Colonel, but really, I think he'll always be Commander Hadfield to the general population. And it's also his Twitter hashtag - @Cmdr_Hadfield - although it's colchrishadfield on Instagram.

*** I'm never sure about things like this - does everyone know that our solar system is in the Milky Way Galaxy? I've known for as long as I can remember, but not everyone has the advantage of being a science fiction fan.

**** Again, you all knew that already, right?

Reading Week: Keeping Score.

Installation, East Jesus Art Garden, Slab City

And so, in the fullness of time Palm Springs Reading Week came to an end.  The final list of books read was as follows:

The Brain Stealers, by Murray Leinster;
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury;
Ringworld, by Larry Niven;
Cowl, by Neil Asher;
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy;

And last but not least, Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, not to mention the purchase of $150 CAD worth of used books.

All that and the Cheesecake Factory, too - what more could you want from a vacation?

- Sid

Reading Week: "Them! THEM!"

Robert Graham: And I thought today was the end of them.
Dr. Harold Medford: No. We haven't seen the end of them. We've only had a close view of the beginning of what may be the end of us.

Them!

Following our book store visits (and a quick lunch break in a crowded biker bar) Karli and I do a driving tour through the northern half of Joshua Tree National Park.

Looking out at the arid landscape, it takes me a minute to realize why it feels unexpectedly familiar:  it's the same desert backdrop featured in the classic 1954 science fiction film Them!  The movie is set near Almogordo, New Mexico, site of the first atomic bomb test in 1945, but was actually shot near Palmdale, about 120 miles from where we are.

Them! isn't the first atomic radiation monster movie - the preceding year's Monster from 20000 Fathoms takes first place - but it's certainly the first to introduce the possibility of giant radioactive mutant insects.  Released in the same year that Japanese movie makers first unleashed Godzilla on the world, Them!, like Godzilla, is a cautionary tale about the dangers released from the new Pandora's Box of atomic energy, and sets the standard for these films, in which science is both the villain and the hero.

Considering its subject matter, Them! is oddly plausible in its slow build from two police officers finding a traumatized little girl wandering alone in the New Mexico desert, through to the final battle with a nest of giant ants in the storm drains beneath Los Angeles.  The movie creates an air of suspenseful menace by delaying the reveal of the giant ants themselves, relying instead on the shrill keening noise made by the gigantic insects to suggest their presence.

The giant ants themselves are a bit of a weak point, at least by modern special effects standards - I can only guess how the original audience reacted to the giant ant models. The practical effects look somewhat clumsy and obvious now, but the scene where we first see the giant head and mandibles of an enormous ant appearing out of a sandstorm behind an unsuspecting victim is still an effective piece of filmmaking.  Later there's an equally effective moment where the scientists, having found the ants' nest, see one of the giant creatures carelessly tossing away a human ribcage.

The cast features a grim James Whitmore as police sergeant Ben Peterson, and James Arness as the FBI agent assigned to the mystery, with Edmund Gwenn as Formicidae expert Dr. Harold Medford and Joan Weldon as his daughter, Dr. Patricia Medford, originating in this movie the part of the female scientist who also occupies the role of chief screamer when necessary.*

 

The movie also showcases Fess Parker as a bewildered small plane pilot who thinks that he has seen UFOs shaped like huge flying insects**, and a startlingly young Leonard Nimoy makes an uncredited appearance as an air force sergeant.

One of the great strengths of this movie is the absolute seriousness with which the premise is handled, with the exception of a few quips in the dialogue that actually feel a bit misplaced due to the earnest nature of the rest of the script. Them! is actually plotted more as a mystery than a horror movie, with the first half aimed at solving the enigma of missing and murdered people and stolen sugar, and the second half dedicated to discovering the whereabouts of two queen ants who have left the original nest before it was destroyed. 

In spite of the numerous films dealing with the horrifying possibilities of the atomic bomb, none of these monstrous nightmares appeared in the real world over the succeeding 74 years.  In some ways, it's a shame - the appearance of a few giant insects or a giant lizard breathing radioactive fire might have had a salutary effect on early arms limitation treaties.

- Sid

* Monsters Versus Aliens does an excellent little sendup of this particular trope.

** It says a great deal about the mindset of 1950s America that he doesn't think he's seen huge flying insects, but rather UFOs that look like insects.