Happy Valentine's Day!
Feb. 14th, 2005 10:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
plutherusI'm sitting here eating leftover stir-fry and watching Stargate on TV. Just another fabulous night in the exciting life of the swinging bachelor.
And, since it's Valentine's Day, I will share my love with you. (because, you know, I'm into that sort of thing).
Yes, now it's time for:
First up, it's a new type of solar sail! ("There was an old type? Yes, there was, pay attention. :) Dr. Gregory Benford (author of Sailing Bright Eternity and a whole bunch of other books and stuff) and his brother were playing with an ultra-thin carbon mesh and a microwave beam (cuz, you know, physicists get the coolest toys) and discovered that the microwave caused carbon monoxide to outgas from the material, pushing it much faster than previously expected. Now all we need is about 30,000 square meters of carbon mesh and a 60-megawatt laser cannon with an advanced tracking system, and we could send a craft to Mars in about a month. Since the acceleration is constant, the same thing would be a great way to get a craft to Alpha Centauri (or Bernard's Star if you're one of those). Need a bigger laser, and the best collimator that's ever been invented, and really, the intelligent place to put it would be the farside of the moon where it wouldn't have all those problems with atmospheric interference (not to mention all the money you could save with a room-temperature superconductor such as the type you could build in a nice shadow in a lunar crater).
Elsewhere in space, for all you Virgos out there, you've got your very own pulsar planetar system. Remember all those SF geeks in the late 70's who were ripping on Star Wars because they "knew" that planets couldn't form in a binary star system? Not only do they, but they also have now been found around a pulsar. And the inner planets are small, Earth-sized, with an even tinier one (about a fifth of the mass of Pluto) at the outer edge. Leaving aside for a moment the obligatory reveling about how just damn cool it is that we can now find planets that small, or that if there are Earth-sized planets around a pulsar, they're probably just about everywhere, think of interesting it must be to grow up on that planet! On this planet, we get a constant stream of energy from our sun, growing and fading in intensity daily as out planet turns around to face it for about 12 hours at a time (more or less in winter, summer, and depending on which side and how close to the equator you are). Life has evolved to take advantage of this cycle, but even when you're on a side of the planet facing away from the sun, energy is still hitting it on the other side, thus keeping the atmosphere from freezing every night. I couldn't find any data on the frequency of pulsar PSR B1257+12, in pulsars range in frequency from several hundred times per second (The record is PSR 1937+21 at 641 times per second), to once every 30 minutes or so. So, it may be slow enough to detect without instruments. If it's in the hundreds (or even the dozens), our friends there may have never noticed it througout most of their history. The pulsar would be too small to see, so they'd live in perpetual star-lit darkness. Lots and lots of stars, though, without a sun. And probably never have light pollution, since without sunlight they wouldn't be adapted to needing light to live and work by. They'd know that it got warmer then colder every day, but until they invented the radio they'd never have any idea why. It would be a while before they figured out that all those points of light they see are stars which may have their own planets around them, since they wouldn't make the connection between stars and planets, lacking our own example. And they wouldn't even be able to see any of the planets in their own system, lacking a sun reflecting light off of them. (Though, once they learned to read radio waves, they'd detect the frequency of energy hitting their own planet being reflected faintly from specific points in the sky and likely figure it out quickly enough.) They would likely take much longer to come up with their own speculations about what, if anything, is "out there". I wonder if they'd eventually look up at our sun, discover planets there, and wonder if life could form around such a low-energy star?
And, speaking of alien astronomers (and science fiction writers), how would things go with these guys? A relatively normal, visible-light type star, but it used to be part of a binary system, and just completed a slingshot around the black hole at the center of our galaxy, losing its companion in the process, and speeding away from the galaxy at 670km/sec, a whopping .22% of the speed of light. They'd make the connection between stars, planets, and life at about the same rate as we did (assuming of course that they're pretty much just like us and have a similar history :), but they'd be awfully confused for a long time about, for instance, why their northern hemisphere has only a small amount of scattered stars in it (which they'd probably eventually figure out are galaxies), and their southern hemisphere is full of them. Imagine the journals of early explorers from their southern hemisphere trying to explain to those back at home that those heathens up north don't even have stars. (Obviously a sign that the gods favor the southern half of the planet). But later, once they figure out the difference between a star and a galaxy, they'd get even more confused at the apparent expansion of the universe. Most of our recent advances (relativity, quantum physics, that sort of thing) come from measurements of other stars which, for those relatively close to us, seem to be moving at about the same rate we are. Would these guys ever figure out about the speed of light? With everything in their southern hemisphere (stars) slightly red-shifted, and everything up north (galaxies) slightly blue-shifted, it would take them quite a while until some poor schmuck is laughed out of the scientific community for claiming that the stars are actually part of a galaxy which they have recently (relatively speaking) left. And what would they learn about planetary formation? If they've got lots of planets, all of which have weird, irregular orbits, and some have elements not found on their own, would they ever figure out that there was once another star accompanying them, but it disappeared a few million years ago, long after the system was formed? Or would the physics just be so complicated that their equivalent of Newton eventually just gave up and devoted his life to alchemical experiments instead?
Kinda makes you wonder what's weird and unique about our own planetary system and which completely erroneous assumptions we're making based on it, or what obvious connections we're overlooking in our attempts to understand the universe, huh?
And, since it's Valentine's Day, I will share my love with you. (because, you know, I'm into that sort of thing).
Yes, now it's time for:
First up, it's a new type of solar sail! ("There was an old type? Yes, there was, pay attention. :) Dr. Gregory Benford (author of Sailing Bright Eternity and a whole bunch of other books and stuff) and his brother were playing with an ultra-thin carbon mesh and a microwave beam (cuz, you know, physicists get the coolest toys) and discovered that the microwave caused carbon monoxide to outgas from the material, pushing it much faster than previously expected. Now all we need is about 30,000 square meters of carbon mesh and a 60-megawatt laser cannon with an advanced tracking system, and we could send a craft to Mars in about a month. Since the acceleration is constant, the same thing would be a great way to get a craft to Alpha Centauri (or Bernard's Star if you're one of those). Need a bigger laser, and the best collimator that's ever been invented, and really, the intelligent place to put it would be the farside of the moon where it wouldn't have all those problems with atmospheric interference (not to mention all the money you could save with a room-temperature superconductor such as the type you could build in a nice shadow in a lunar crater).
Elsewhere in space, for all you Virgos out there, you've got your very own pulsar planetar system. Remember all those SF geeks in the late 70's who were ripping on Star Wars because they "knew" that planets couldn't form in a binary star system? Not only do they, but they also have now been found around a pulsar. And the inner planets are small, Earth-sized, with an even tinier one (about a fifth of the mass of Pluto) at the outer edge. Leaving aside for a moment the obligatory reveling about how just damn cool it is that we can now find planets that small, or that if there are Earth-sized planets around a pulsar, they're probably just about everywhere, think of interesting it must be to grow up on that planet! On this planet, we get a constant stream of energy from our sun, growing and fading in intensity daily as out planet turns around to face it for about 12 hours at a time (more or less in winter, summer, and depending on which side and how close to the equator you are). Life has evolved to take advantage of this cycle, but even when you're on a side of the planet facing away from the sun, energy is still hitting it on the other side, thus keeping the atmosphere from freezing every night. I couldn't find any data on the frequency of pulsar PSR B1257+12, in pulsars range in frequency from several hundred times per second (The record is PSR 1937+21 at 641 times per second), to once every 30 minutes or so. So, it may be slow enough to detect without instruments. If it's in the hundreds (or even the dozens), our friends there may have never noticed it througout most of their history. The pulsar would be too small to see, so they'd live in perpetual star-lit darkness. Lots and lots of stars, though, without a sun. And probably never have light pollution, since without sunlight they wouldn't be adapted to needing light to live and work by. They'd know that it got warmer then colder every day, but until they invented the radio they'd never have any idea why. It would be a while before they figured out that all those points of light they see are stars which may have their own planets around them, since they wouldn't make the connection between stars and planets, lacking our own example. And they wouldn't even be able to see any of the planets in their own system, lacking a sun reflecting light off of them. (Though, once they learned to read radio waves, they'd detect the frequency of energy hitting their own planet being reflected faintly from specific points in the sky and likely figure it out quickly enough.) They would likely take much longer to come up with their own speculations about what, if anything, is "out there". I wonder if they'd eventually look up at our sun, discover planets there, and wonder if life could form around such a low-energy star?
And, speaking of alien astronomers (and science fiction writers), how would things go with these guys? A relatively normal, visible-light type star, but it used to be part of a binary system, and just completed a slingshot around the black hole at the center of our galaxy, losing its companion in the process, and speeding away from the galaxy at 670km/sec, a whopping .22% of the speed of light. They'd make the connection between stars, planets, and life at about the same rate as we did (assuming of course that they're pretty much just like us and have a similar history :), but they'd be awfully confused for a long time about, for instance, why their northern hemisphere has only a small amount of scattered stars in it (which they'd probably eventually figure out are galaxies), and their southern hemisphere is full of them. Imagine the journals of early explorers from their southern hemisphere trying to explain to those back at home that those heathens up north don't even have stars. (Obviously a sign that the gods favor the southern half of the planet). But later, once they figure out the difference between a star and a galaxy, they'd get even more confused at the apparent expansion of the universe. Most of our recent advances (relativity, quantum physics, that sort of thing) come from measurements of other stars which, for those relatively close to us, seem to be moving at about the same rate we are. Would these guys ever figure out about the speed of light? With everything in their southern hemisphere (stars) slightly red-shifted, and everything up north (galaxies) slightly blue-shifted, it would take them quite a while until some poor schmuck is laughed out of the scientific community for claiming that the stars are actually part of a galaxy which they have recently (relatively speaking) left. And what would they learn about planetary formation? If they've got lots of planets, all of which have weird, irregular orbits, and some have elements not found on their own, would they ever figure out that there was once another star accompanying them, but it disappeared a few million years ago, long after the system was formed? Or would the physics just be so complicated that their equivalent of Newton eventually just gave up and devoted his life to alchemical experiments instead?
Kinda makes you wonder what's weird and unique about our own planetary system and which completely erroneous assumptions we're making based on it, or what obvious connections we're overlooking in our attempts to understand the universe, huh?
