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FQXi BLOGS
CATEGORY: Blog
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TOPIC: Vita Nuova
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The days' big news, of course, was the second Earth. This was the discovery of the first "Earth-like" planet outside our solar system.
 | | image: Joseph.Stueffer |
The inglamorously named "581 c" is circling the red dwarf Gliese 581, and has awakened immediate astronomic interest in the plethora of other local red dwarfs. Based on the rough data gleaned by the European Southern Observatory's telescope in Chile, it's thought to be 1 ¬? times Earth's size. It may be rocky, may have liquid water, and may have an atmosphere. It may also, just conceivably, be the home of our remote descendants.
More immediately, it provides us here and now with confirmation of what has been generally believed to be the case but has, until this generation, been imposssible to demonstrate: that the Solar System is no aberration in the Milky Way, that gas giants are not the only regularly occurring form of accretion around stars, and that rocky, water-bearing, reasonably temperate inner planets may form just as frequently out there as they do here. 581 c also makes it that much more likely that, as Earth is not alone in the Milky Way, neither are we.
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This discovery is headline news today, forgotten tomorrow. But that makes it none the less significant. With the introduction of 581 c we open the door on a new era -- only by the slightest crack, but one can see the light -- in what might be called our cosmic potential. The plausibility of extraterrestrial organic life is a little greater today (intelligent life is another issue); the prospect of human colonization beyond our homeworld a little less like fantasy. Gradually, life is expanding.
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It's one of the more charming aspects of Jules Verne's speculative-science classic "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (which doesn't mean straight down, by the way: that would be through the planet and about a quarter of the way to the moon)--the character of Conseil, "a devoted Flemish boy‚" who acts as an amanuensis to our hero. Conseil is "quiet by nature, regular from principle, zealous from habit, evincing little disturbance at the different surprises of life, very quick with his hands, and apt at any service required of him‚"-- all those orderly things prized by naturalists of the day.
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He is also a fanatical list-maker. As Arronoax adventures his way across the Atlantic, Conseil tags along, going "wherever science leads," and cataloguing every living thing they see:
"Various kinds of isis, clusters of pure tuft-coral, prickly fungi, and anemones formed a brilliant garden of flowers, decked with their collarettes of blue tentacles, sea-stars studding the sandy bottom ( . . . ) specimens of molluscs which strewed the ground by thousands, of hammerheads, donaciae (veritable bounding shells), of staircases, and red helmet-shells, angel-wings ( . . . ) medusae whose umbrellas of opal or rose-pink, escalloped with a band of blue, sheltered us from the rays of the sun and fiery pelagiae ( . . . )"
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And so on. The Disney version most folks know eschews this 19th century fascination with all things encyclopedic and cuts right to the giant squid.
"Twenty Thousand Leagues" remains terrific, though, as a snapshot of the scientific turn of mind at a certain period. If only all the information about living things could be set down, once and for all, in proper Linnaean form! If only all of nature could be fitted into one . . . big . . . book . . . !
So, congratulations, M. Arronax. Headlines this week include the virtual "Encyclopedia of Life", a mash-up of data from multiple sources that will classify all the swimming, slithering mess . . . and put it out there for public use.
Here's John Roach at National Geographic News:
"Scientists announced plans today to put descriptions, pictures, video, and sounds of the world's estimated 1.8 million named species on the Internet for free.
The effort, called the Encyclopedia of Life, will standardize the presentation of 'information about the plants and animals and microorganisms that share this planet with us,' said James Edwards, the project's executive director."
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This is a Foundational Question of a biological sort (isn't it?): exactly what is life on Earth? How much of it is there? How do all the species relate to each other--genetically, historically, evolutionarily? Can we understand the whole?
Friends I've spoken to about this idea point out that there's plenty living on Earth about which we know nothing, and, perhaps ironically, most of it is in the sea. Still, it's nice to see that a hundred and forty years after Captain Nemo, the super-Encyclopedia may be surfacing.
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Staying on the foundational biology thread for one more post:
Sagan used to comment on the paucity of our imaginations when it came to alien species. After all, the Earth itself--a single biosphere, examined at a single point during a single epoch--gives rise to such incredible diversity as to include underground aspen grove rhizomes, whale sharks, and the H. Pylori microbe. Is it really likely that aliens, evolved under radically different conditions, will resemble little gray people?
Even the more outlandish "designs" for aliens we see in popular culture, which tend to resemble insects and reptiles, are almost certainly going to seem decidedly conventional, if and when we get a specimen of the real thing.
 | | image: JLplusAL |
Just as a reminder of how fecund, and downright weird, nature is when it comes to evolving lifeforms to fill different ecological niches, hundreds of previously undiscovered deep-sea species have just been recorded by the Antarctic Benthic Deep-Sea Biodiversity Project.
From National Geographic News:
"Researchers aboard the German research vessel Polarstern in the Weddell Sea also brought up heart-shaped sea urchins, carnivorous sponges, and giant sea spiders the size of dinner plates.
'We were astonished by the enormous biodiversity we found in many groups of species,' said Angelika Brandt, a marine biologist at the University of Hamburg in Germany."
To stimulate your mind into imagining what exobiology will appear like, take a gander at the unreal glass sponge, the crustacean related to wood lice, or the munna--an organism so peculiar its difficult to tell whether its one living thing or several fused together. (These images are not they. In fact, this bizarre-enough looking creature is the fairly standard angler fish.)
This work is are all part of another foundational biology project--the international Census of Marine Life program, aiming to create a database of all marine life by 2010. My only beef: Why didn't they call the project Arronax?
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And speaking of exobiology . . .
The big news of the day is the best evidence so far of past liquid water on Mars. Spirit, the current Mars rover, examined soil in Gusev crater and found loads of silica, which only forms in such amounts when liquid H2O is around.
There's a nice image of one of Spirit's malfunctioning wheels uncovering a silica-rich soil layer as it is dragged along the surface here. When was the last time a flat tire actually made your job easier?
From Wired News:
"This is a remarkable discovery," principal investigator Steve Squyres of Cornell University said in a statement. "It makes you wonder what else is still out there."
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There's a good interview with two major cosmologists today at WBUR: Neil Turok, professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge University, and Alan Guth, professor of physics at the MIT (and estemmed member of the FQX scientific advisory panel). They debate, among other things, the question of whether the SCM needs to be replaced by a brane-collision model.
For folks new to the question: branes (membranes, p-branes) come out of string theory and M-theory, where they are a natural consequence of the math. A point particle is technically a 0-brane, or a brane with zero dimensions, while 1-branes are strings and 2-branes are sheets. Forgive the analogy, but it helps to think of 2-branes and higher as those enormous bubble-walls that people make every summer in parks using wire and soapy water.
Branes are just a mathematical concept--anybody dive in here if you want to take issue with that claim--but they are speculated to underlie physical phenomena and have active world-lines, or world-volumes, of their own. They can, for example, collide, causing a locally inflationary state such as the one now believed to have initiated the emergence of our universe.
 | | image: Jay Khemani |
The big point is that brane collisions, other than being intrinsically cool, in no way imply a Foundational beginning. The elemental stuff of the cosmos exists before the branes meet as well as after. If the Bang was an event like this, it may have been the local beginning without being *the Beginning*. Indeed, there may have been no beginning.
Here's a quotation from Turok in the broadcast to whet the appetite:
"I think the challenge we're raising is that the usual picture of the Big Bang is based on an assumption which is that time, space, matter, energy, everything began at the Big Bang. And that assumption was made in the 60s when people got the first strong observational evidence that the Big Bang happened. But it's really just an assumption and our point of view has come out of new development in physics which are enabling us to describe the behavior of matter in very extreme conditions such as were present around the Bang. And what we're seeing is that the Big Bang doesn't have to be the beginning of time. It's perfectly possible that the Big Bang was just a violent event in a pre-existing universe."
I would be very interested in hearing any opinions on whether brane cosmology is poised to supplant the SCM . . .
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