Author Archives: Phil Bowermaster

Just Where We Weren’t Looking for Them

Last week we had the exciting discovery of a a solar system very similar to our own:

Two planets much like Saturn and Jupiter are orbiting a star roughly half the size of our sun in a solar system some 5,000 light years away, astronomers say.

The newly discovered complex seems like a parallel star system to the one that includes Earth, researchers say. Both planets are composed largely of gas and each is a bit smaller than its counterpart in our solar system. The smaller planet is about twice the distance from its star as the larger one, just as Saturn is roughly twice as far from the sun as Jupiter.

That’s cool, but what we want to find is not so much a solar system like ours as a planet like ours. For that, it turns out that we might have to look as far as we once thought:

A Second Earth in Our Solar System

Traveling to another Earth-like world just got a lot easier. It turns out that there may be many other dirt-and-water planets lurking at the edges of our solar system in places like the Oort Cloud. These planets, which could be roughly the size of our own, would contain all the elements we need for life. They’re just sitting in a cold, dimly-lit part of the solar system, waiting to be defrosted and colonized. Yesterday, NASA scientists announced that this changes the prognosis for nearby livable planets.

NASA’s Alan Stern said these planets are so far away from the sun that we haven’t seen them yet:

Stern says:

Our old view, that the Solar System had nine planets will be supplanted by a view that there are hundreds if not thousands of planets in our Solar System. It could be that there are objects of Earth-mass in the Oort cloud (a band of debris surrounding our planetary system) but they would be frozen at these distances. They would look like a frozen Earth.

Still, it might be something of a stretch to describe these planets as “livable.” They’re going to be darn cold. However, we ought to be able to think of ways to warm and brighten them up — maybe by moving them closer to the sun?

FastForward Radio

Blog Talk Radio seems to be experiencing technical difficulties, and so far no archive of our interview last night with Philippe Van Nedervelde of the Lifeboat Foundation has been published. Stephen is in touch with BTR and working on the problem. Stay tuned. We hope to have the recorded show up soon.

Safeguarding Humanity

I was born into a world in which no individual or group claimed to own the mission embodied in the Lifeboat Foundation’s two-word motto. Government agencies, charitable organizations, universities, hospitals, religious institutions — all might have laid claim to some peace of the puzzle. But safeguarding humanity? That was out of everyone’s scope. It would have been a plausible motto only for comic-book organizations such as the Justice League or the Guardians of the Universe.

Take the United Nations, conceived in the midst of the Second World War and brought into its own after the war’s conclusion. The UN Charter states that United Nations exists:

  • to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and
  • to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and
  • to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and
  • to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom

All of these are noble, and incredibly important, aims. But even the United Nations manages to name only one existential risk, warfare, which it is pledged to help prevent. Anyone reading this can probably cite a half dozen more.

It is both exciting and daunting to live in an age in which a group like the Lifeboat Foundation can exist outside of the realm of fantasy. It’s exciting because our awareness of possibility is so much greater than it was even a generation or two ago. And it is daunting for exactly the same reason. We can envision plausible triumphs for humanity that really do transcend our wildest dreams, or at least our most glorious fantasies as articulated a few decades ago. Likewise, that worst of all possible outcomes — the sudden and utter disappearance of our civilization, or of our species, or of life itself — now presents itself as the end result of not just one possible calamity, but of many.

I’ve spent the last few years writing about many of those plausible triumphs, while paying less attention to the possible calamities. But I’m not sure that this is a clear-cut dichotomy. Pursuing the former may ultimately provide us with the tools and resources we will need to contend with the latter. So my own personal motto becomes something of a double-edged sword. I encourage everyone to strive to “live to see it.” But maybe we also need to figure out how we can see it…to live.

With that in mind, perhaps “safeguarding humanity” takes on a double meaning, too. We must find a way for humanity to survive in the face of these very real threats. Moreover, we must find a way for humanity — the values, the accomplishments, the sense of purpose which has defined the entire human experience — to survive. And that may be the most audacious mission statement of all.

Stephen and I will be interviewing the Lifeboat Foundation’s International Spokesperson Philippe Van Nedervelde on the next FastForward Radio.

(Cross-posted to the Lifeboat Foundation blog.)

CERN, the Russians, and Time Travel

Here’s a bit of a potential mind-blower:

The world’s first time machine? Tunnel to the past could open door to future within three months, say Russians

Time travel could be a reality within just three months, Russian mathematicians have claimed.

They believe an experiment nuclear scientists plan to carry out in underground tunnels in Geneva in May could create a rift in the fabric of the universe.

The European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) hopes its “atom-smashing” tests – which aim to recreate the conditions in the first billionth of a second after the “Big Bang’” created everything – will shed invaluable light on the origins of the universe.

But Irina Aref’eva and Igor Volovich, of Moscow’s Steklov Mathematical Institute, say the energy produced by forcing tiny particles to collide at close to the speed of light could open the door to visitors from the future.

Interestingly, Aref’eva and Volovich claim that the wormhole they believe the CERN experiment will open up will not provide us with the means to travel through time, or at least not back through time. Our end of the rift in time would be the day that the experiment is conducted — and that is the farthest back anyone could travel using the wormhole. They talk about visitors from the future potentially coming through the wormhole to our era, but the linked article doesn’t say whether we would have the ability to use the wormhole to move rapidly forward in time and then back again to this era.

Presumably, even with the wormhole, it would take some sophisticated technology to travel through time. People in the future might have that technology, and thus be able to use the CERN-created rift in time to travel back to our era. So our first time machine is really of more use to people in the future than it is to us. Still, if they use it to come back here and pay us a visit, that will be pretty darned interesting.

The CERN scientists are understandably skeptical:

But Dr Brian Cox, a member of CERN and one of Britain’s leading experts in particle physics, is highly sceptical about the Russian claims, calling them “nothing more than a good science fiction story”.

“Stephen Hawking has suggested that any future theory of quantum gravity will probably close this possibility off, not least because the universe usually proceeds in a sane way, and time travel into the past isn’t sane.”

Not to take issue with Brian Cox (much less Stephen Hawking), but I can’t help but note that this argument is predicated on the idea that the universe usually proceeds in a sane way. Well, hey — close only counts in hand grenades and horseshoes. What Cox and Hawking are saying is that they find the idea of travel back through time intellectually unpalatable, even though it can’t be ruled out altogether.

Of course, the fact that something can’t be ruled out altogether is no reason to think it might be true. But then again…

In any case, what the Russians are saying about time travel seems to sync up pretty well with the ideas about time travel espoused by University of Connecticut professor Ron Mallett — at least the part about not being able to travel further back in time than the day the time machine was built. Mallett is one of the few serious academics currently studying time travel; he says it will be achieved within this century.

In fact, as I feel duty-bound to point out — time travel is going on all the time. We’re all doing it right now. We just don’t think anything of it, because we’re all doing it all the time. Nobody cares about that model of time travel because there’s nothing out of the ordinary about it. When people talk about time travel they mean:

1. Traveling back in time

or

2. Traveling into the future faster than everyone else

But even by those criteria, time travel has already occurred. At least item number 2 has. As Mallett points out:

“To physicists, time is what’s measured by clocks. Using this definition, we can manipulate time by changing the rate of clocks, which changes the rate at which events occur. Einstein showed that time is affected by motion, and his theories have been demonstrated experimentally by comparing time on an atomic clock that has traveled around the earth on a jet. It’s slower than a clock on earth.”

That clock effectively traveled into the future. When the jet landed, the clock showed an earlier time than the clocks which had stayed behind. The clock –and the pilot of the jet — had effectively leaped forward a few milliseconds into the future.

So if the second kind of time travel is demonstrably possible, why not the first? We shall see.

All in good time.

NowTell Me the Sace Program Isn't Worth the Money

Zero-g Alka-Seltzer:

Via GeekPess.

UPDATE: Michael Darling seems to want to turn every posting on this blog into an episode of Tales of the Paranormal (see comments). I think what he’s missing out on, here, is that we don’t buy in to every crackpot theory that shows up in the blog comments section. We need compelling evidence before we are moved to take a stand on any paranormal phenomenon.

So with that in mind, here is the “face” that shows up at 4:35 on the Youtube video, above:

alka@435.jpg

I’ll grant Michael one thing — it doesn’t look much like my dog!

NowTell Me the Sace Program Isn’t Worth the Money

Zero-g Alka-Seltzer:

Via GeekPess.

UPDATE: Michael Darling seems to want to turn every posting on this blog into an episode of Tales of the Paranormal (see comments). I think what he’s missing out on, here, is that we don’t buy in to every crackpot theory that shows up in the blog comments section. We need compelling evidence before we are moved to take a stand on any paranormal phenomenon.

So with that in mind, here is the “face” that shows up at 4:35 on the Youtube video, above:

alka@435.jpg

I’ll grant Michael one thing — it doesn’t look much like my dog!

Unintended Consequences

We talked a little about the risks associated with genetic modification of crops on the most recent FastForward Radio. Where the danger exists, it is not so much a matter of crops being deliberately modified to do some kind of harm — Stephen pointed out that there are probably easier, more direct, and harder to detect ways of causing destruction than modifying crops — but rather due to unintended consequences of modifications that are aimed at achieving some good outcome.

Here’s an interesting case in point:

First documented case of pest resistance to biotech cotton

A pest insect known as bollworm is the first to evolve resistance in the field to plants modified to produce an insecticide called Bt, according to a new research report.

Bt-resistant populations of bollworm, Helicoverpa zea, were found in more than a dozen crop fields in Mississippi and Arkansas between 2003 and 2006.

“What we’re seeing is evolution in action,” said lead researcher Bruce Tabashnik. “This is the first documented case of field-evolved resistance to a Bt crop.

“Resistance is a decrease in pest susceptibility that can be measured over human experience,” said Tabashnik, professor and head of UA’s entomology department and an expert in insect resistance to insecticides. “When you use an insecticide to control a pest, some populations eventually evolves resistance.”

So the bollworms are now immune to the insecticide the cotton produces, meaning either that

1.The entire exercise was pointless?

or

2. We need to move on to the next round of genetic modification to find a way to wipe out these super-bugs?

bollworm.jpg

Well, not so fast:

Even so, the researchers found that most caterpillar pests of cotton and corn remained susceptible to Bt crops.

“The resistance occurred in one particular pest in one part of the U.S.,” Tabashnik said. “The other major pests attacking Bt crops have not evolved resistance. And even most bollworm populations have not evolved resistance.”
Bollworm, Helicoverpa zea, moths have a wingspan of 1. 5 to 2 inches. Their caterpillars, known as bollworms, are serious pests of cotton in the southeastern US and Texas….
Click here for more information.

The field outcomes refute some experts’ worst-case scenarios that predicted pests would become resistant to Bt crops in as few as three years, he said.

So let’s wait and see what other species do before we modify cotton any further. Meanwhile — if the Bt-resistant strain spreads beyond the small area they currently occupy — what about genetically modifying the bollworms? Right now it is probably well beyond our capacity to introduce a strain of bollworm into the wild that has some distinct reproductive advantage over the standard bollworms, but if we could do that, and if the modified bollworms were wired to re-develop the susceptibility to Bt, we might bring the situation into stasis.

Every few generations, the bollworms would evolve resistance to Bt, and every few generations, the susceptibility to it would be forcefully reintroduced. Rather than upping the amount of change to the cotton, just change the bollworms enough to keep them at bay.

One way to control unintended consequences is to control the number of variables in play. So we have a plant producing a natural insecticide and a pest developing a resistance to that insecticide. Rather than introducing new variables, the smart approach would be to find a way to work just with those

While not “natural” in the strictest sense, this approach would follow a more natural model of equilibrium than, say, allowing a strain of super-bugs to evolve through injecting multiple kinds of insecticide into the plant’s genetic makeup or through doing something really wonky like modifying bollworms such that they want to feed on other bollworms.

This won’t eliminate all risks, of course, but this kind of approach (if it ever becomes feasible) would help to keep the risks manageable.

Now He's Slumming

First Aubrey de Grey was on 60 Minutes.

Then he was on FastForward Radio.

I guess all glory is fleeting. Poor Aubrey is reduced to doing Stephen Colbert. Well, what the hey — let’s tune in anyhow.

UPDATE: Aubrey did great. I figured Colbert would tear him to shreds, but not at all. He held his own and then some — recommended that McCain should get serious about funding the Methuselah Foundation before being elected president seeing as “he doesn’t have much time.”

Good stuff.

UPDATE II: Here’s the clip…


Now He’s Slumming

First Aubrey de Grey was on 60 Minutes.

Then he was on FastForward Radio.

I guess all glory is fleeting. Poor Aubrey is reduced to doing Stephen Colbert. Well, what the hey — let’s tune in anyhow.

UPDATE: Aubrey did great. I figured Colbert would tear him to shreds, but not at all. He held his own and then some — recommended that McCain should get serious about funding the Methuselah Foundation before being elected president seeing as “he doesn’t have much time.”

Good stuff.

UPDATE II: Here’s the clip…


A Triumph for Irrationality and Superstition

Try this one one for size:

France halts genetically modified corn

The French government on Saturday suspended the use of genetically modified corn crops in France while it awaits EU approval for a full ban.

The order formalized France’s announcement Jan. 11 that it would suspend cultivation of Monsanto’s MON810, the seed for the only type of genetically modified corn now allowed in the country.

I’m not a huge proponent of genetically modified corn, nor do I have anything in particular against it, but I can’t help but think that an outright ban seems a bit harsh. Can’t it be labeled genetically modified? Can’t meat from livestock that were fed genetically modified corn also be labeled appropriately?

But maybe it all begins to make sense when you read this:

The European Food Safety Authority says genetically modified products do not constitute a risk to human health or the environment, but some EU governments — including Austria, France, Greece and Hungary — are wary of biotechnology.

Right. The people who ought to know whether it’s safe say it is, and the government bans it anyway. Compare this with the cloned meat controversy in the US. In this instance, we have the government body saying that the suspect produce is okay, and some consumers are saying the won’t have anything to do with it.

No outright ban. Yet.

Are there risks associated with genetically modifying the plants we eat? Of course there very well could be, but the scientific consensus so far is that nothing particularly risky is being done with corn and other foods that are being modified. But cloned meat and milk? This goes back to something I’ve been pointing out for some time now: a lot of people have no idea what cloning is, but that doesn’t stop them from being scared of it.

The real downside here is that GM and cloning technologies that we have today can serve as the foundation for technologies that will one day provide us with food that is abundant and nutritious beyond anything we can even imagine today. I am confident that eventually we’ll have nanotech-based replication machines that will allow a user to scoop dirt into one end and get a cheeseburger (or Caesar salad) out the other. Today’s GM corn and cloned beef are very humble stepping stones in that direction. Well before we have the replicator, we are likely to see plants modified to yield significantly more food, of a better quality, and causing less damage to the environment. And we will see milk and meat grown in vats, much healthier than what we currently take from animals, and without the environmental damage or the ethical concerns of surrounding mistreating animals.

But we won’t see any of these developments, or they will at least be much slower in arriving, if they are legislated out of existence before they can even happen.