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RIP, Leonard Nimoy. Perhaps George Takei said it best: “Rest in peace with the stars, my dear friend.” Here’s a bit of what the internet had to say: Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Recommend on Facebook Share on Linkedin … Continue reading
I’m not sure if “Space Station Earth” looks more like the Death Star (as Gizmodo‘s Darren Orf thinks) or like the Earth a few centuries after the Borg take over. Here’s its take on downtown Austin:
(I took a screen capture in case the map doesn’t embed.)
Regardless, Mapbox Studio seems like a pretty awesome website.
Rob Bricken at io9 answered a question last week about the seeming dearth of optimism in science fiction these days, and he initially responds that “[s]tories need conflict, and having optimistic futures where humanity got their shit together narrows the possibilities of what your protagonist has to struggle against.”
This certainly explains movies like Elysium, Avatar, and the Hunger Games series, but Bricken notes that even the paragon of future optimism, Gene Rodenberry’s Star Trek, has gotten the cynical treatment in the reboots:
The original Trek series — and the movies — and to an extent the series following it — were optimistic, that showed us a better future, that gave us hope that humanity might not fuck it all up. And then the new Trek movies completely ditch all that for the same old shit we’ve seen in everything else — violence, disaster porn, and war. I’m not such a Trek fan that this is such a betrayal of Gene Roddenberry’s vision that it keeps me up at night, but I do miss what made Star Trek so unique and charming.
This got me thinking about my personal favorite Trek series, Deep Space Nine. I liked it for the fact that it was darker and grittier than the other Trek series, but I think I realize now that part of what made DS9 so good was that it existed in this broader universe of optimism. To put it in cheesy terms, DS9 was good because it allowed its protagonists to be bad in a universe that was mostly good. If you look at it that way, DS9 may have been the most optimistic Trek show of them all. Continue reading
I’m about halfway through watching Star Trek: Into Darkness (spoiler alert, sort of). My first observation is that Benedict Cumberbatch is no Ricardo Montalbán. (I am decidedly of the opinion that Montalbán es más macho.)
At no point during The Wrath of Khan are Khan and Kirk face to face; they speak to each other only over communication links such as view screens. This was due in part to the fact that the set of the Reliant was a redress of the Enterprise bridge, and the two actors’ scenes were filmed four months apart. Montalbán recited his lines with a script girl instead of to William Shatner.
In dozens, if not hundreds of viewing over the past 31 years, I never really appreciated the fact that the two characters never met face-to-face. While the “Khaaaaaaaaan” scream will live on forever in movie history, the world would undeniably be a better place had the film included a 40-something on 60-something fight scene…….in space.
Artist's conception of the Gliese 581 system by Lynette Cook, via NASA
Digital Journal ran a slightly hyperbolic headline this morning, “Habitable planets like Earth ‘now in the billions'”:
An international team of astronomers have discovered “billions of planets” not much bigger than Earth and have the potential to sustain life, BBC News reports.
Planets like Earth are circling the faint stars in the Milky Way according to the new research. The estimate for the number of so called “Super-Earths” are based on detections of the number of red-dwarf stars in the Galaxy.Harps employs an indirect method of detection that infers the existence of orbiting planets from the way their gravity makes a parent star appear to twitch in its motion across the sky.
The team’s leader Xavier Bonfils from the Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble, France said:
“Our new observations with Harps mean that about 40% of all red dwarf stars have a super-Earth orbiting in the habitable zone where liquid water can exist on the surface of the planet.
“Because red dwarfs are so common – there are about 160 billion of them in the Milky Way – this leads us to the astonishing result that there are tens of billions of these planets in our galaxy alone.”
The only reason this isn’t quite as exciting as it sounded to my un-scientifically-trained ear at first is because “discovered” doesn’t necessarily mean “directly identified.” I think most people know that, but the way it’s phrased makes it sound much more earth-shattering (pun sort of intended) than it is. Based on the findings made so far, it seems safe to extrapolate, but it’s not like the researchers will be publishing a billion-entry guidebook to the planets of the Milky Way. It almost seems like the headline and lead-in to this story were specifically designed to disappoint laypeople.
The team investigated a total of 102 of carefully chosen red dwarfs, which are stars that are dimmer and cooler than our sun.
The team found nine super-earths, which are planets with mass one to ten times the size of Earth, with two of these planets being inside the habitable zone of their stars.
So we’ve gone from “billions” to nine, with two in the “Goldilocks zone.” And about that whole “habitable” thing…
Liquid water is deemed a necessity for life to develop on potentially habitable planets.
“The habitable zone around a red dwarf, where the temperature is suitable for liquid water to exist on the surface, is much closer to the star than the Earth is to the Sun,” commented co-researcher Stephane Udry from the Geneva Observatory.
“But red dwarfs are known to be subject to stellar eruptions or flares, which may bathe the planet in X-rays or ultraviolet radiation, and which may make life there less likely.”
![Rachel Nichols as Gaila in "Star Trek," from Historyguy.com [Fair use]](http://www.historyguy.com/celebrity_history/kirk_rachel_nicholss_star_trek.jpg "Rachel Nichols as Gaila in \"Star Trek,\" from Historyguy.com [Fair use]")
We know there is life on earth that can exist without liquid water, or even oxygen. It’s kind of a leap to assume that all life needs liquid water, although every mechanism of evolution that we know of required liquid water at some point. It also doesn’t help that no one has ever come up with a clear, concise definition of “life” in a biological sense (cf. viruses). Alien life is highly unlikely to be anywhere near our level of technological advancement, and is most likely to be microbial. Aliens certainly won’t look anything like Rachel Nichols. Won’t that be a disappointment?
Getting back to the number of planets, keep in mind that this is only about the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of at least a hundred billion galaxies in the known universe. That’s potentially (I think this is the scientific term) a shitload of planets. Unless we come up with some kind of wormhole or super-warp technology, though, we’ll never know very much about planets in other galaxies.
So this is exciting news. Just don’t get too carried away with it.
On the other hand, we could just send James Cameron to look for other planets. That guy goes everywhere.
Photo credits: Artist’s conception of the Gliese 581 system by Lynette Cook, via NASA; Rachel Nichols as Gaila in “Star Trek,” from Historyguy.com [Fair use]
