I Don't Have a Title

     So last week I promised to talk about something called Transcendance. Yup, don't know why I did that, forced myself to write about something in particular. Here we go.
     So last week I talked about the Fermi Paradox, where is everybody and all that. Check it out if you want to, just scroll down further. You'll love it, I promise. So where there is a problem in science there are also hypothesis, possible solutions. With a question like the Fermi Paradox, you have to account for why we don't see any big glowing signs. Some people like the idea that civilizations simply stop talking so loudly when they get smart, others think they close themselves off in giant bubbles called Dyson Spheres. One of the most interesting ideas is something a little more odd.

     What would be the ultimate freedom in a Universe like ours? Without getting all wishy-washy and philosophical its a pretty easy question; not being a "thing". How do you not be a thing? Well, a thing is something in this universe, something solid and with weight. If I ask: "which is a thing, a gluon or an elephant?" The answer seems obvious, a gluon is a tiny tiny tiny little thing, practically nothing at all, and elephant is big and solid. Humans are things, we have a mass, a size, a density, a specific energy output, ect...
      But if you lose your "thingyness", then you lose all the things that being a thing means. No more mass means you can zip around the universe at the speed of light without relativistic effects, and not having a solid body means you could go for a dip in a star if you felt like it. Sounds like science fiction right? Well it is.
     Basically transcendce is an idea, nobodies sure how to do it, but we have inklings, and we know what the end result should be. Its like knowing what type of cake you want to make but not knowing what you need to bake it. Transferring a human consciousness into an stable energetic matrix isn't exactly baking a cake, but you get the idea.
     Why bother with it? Well a lot of reasons. It's basically immortality, and the number one reason as always is just because its worth a shot. Thats how science works, if you can do it, awesome, congratulations  if not, you probably still learned plenty along the way.

Planet Earth Calling the Universe, is Anyone Home?

     Silentium universi, literally Silence of the Universe, and another name for one of the most puzzling questions ever to face the astronomical society of the world: The Fermi Paradox. The math has always said the Universe should be teeming with life in varying stages of development, so the question is, where is everybody?
     The Paradox was so named after an informal discussion in 1950 where physicist Enrico Fermi brought up the subject. His conjecture was based on a mathematical probability model called the Drake Equation, which, when feed the proper data, will produce a rough estimate of the number of space-faring civilizations in our galaxy at this point in time. The exact values of certain points of data in the equation are constantly changing, such as the estimate of the average number of planets a star system might have or the type of star system, as certain types of binary systems are much less capable of sustaining planets in a stable orbit. The Drake Equation's results can come out to anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000,000 depending on the exact data used, but even using the smaller part of this range, a thousand space-faring civilizations should make noise, lots of it.

     Look at humans. We've been space-capable for just the last half-century, and yet even before that we were blasting radio and TV signals into space for the entire universe to hear. Hitler's opening speech at the 1936 Olympics, the first broadcast strong enough to leak into space, has already travelled outwards 76 lightyears. That's right, Hitler will be the first human any alien who's watching gets to see. The thought is, we're a young people, imagine what a far older civilization would send out, especially if they covered a few stars. An empire of that size should look like a bright "Right Here" neon sign, and yet our radio telescopes pick up nada.
     There are possible solutions though. What if the aliens didn't want to be found? Think Columbus and the Indians, hostile takeover of a less advanced people. If an advanced race were to show up in orbit they could easily wipe us out in one of many ways, then have our planet for themselves. So a species might be wise to stop broadcasting and keep all future communications on tight channels, make sure nobody could hear them. If that's the dominant mentality in this area of the Galaxy, we shouldn't expect to hear much.
     And then there's the Zoo Hypothesis, that a race of Superintelligent Galactic Police make sure nobody stops in and says "Hello" to us while we're still developing; like the Prime Directive from Star Trek. It might seem cruel to do such a thing, just leave us here to bomb ourselves into extinction, but maybe that's the point. If a species isn't capable of maintaining and prospering itself, or chooses the path of violence and conquer, what use would it be to a galactic community? Better to let the good ones fight there way up the ladder and sit back as the bad ones blow themselves to pieces.
     That's another idea to, they're all gone because they've manage to destroy themselves. Any species that develops nuclear power could destroy itself with relative ease, never to be heard again. Hell, we almost did it a few times. Wouldn't that be a nightmare, we finally get to space to find out we're the only ones who've managed to get that far, humans as the smartest beings in the Universe. Pray to whatever god you have that never happens, imagine the size of our egos.
     A final, less dismal idea is that we've simply come to our prime in a "Dead Zone", meaning we've just missed everybody. Empires might have risen and fallen while we drew pictures in caves, but we missed their phone calls, and now everybody's either dead, in a Dyson Sphere, or transcended. Next week I'll actually try to talk about what transcend means, it's not what you might think.
    All in all, that's a lot of text, if you got this far, congrats.

From the Desk of the Xenobiolgist

     Most people easily know what a biologist does for a living. But ask them what a Xenobiologist does and you'll probably get quite a few "huh?" and "what did you say?" responses. Someone who knows their root words might know that xeno means roughly "stranger". A Xenobiologist studies the biology of strangers, i.e. non-Terran species. Terran means things on Earth, in case I haven't covered that.
     So what might a Xenobiologist do? Well, one of their jobs would be to map out possible evolutionary lines that could emerge on foreign planets. I'll walk you through an example, something a bit more familiar than say Kepler 22b, we'll use good old Jupiter.
     Lifeforms residing on Jupiter would be called Jovians. Now as you may know, Jupiter doesn't have a surface. Then how could something live there you ask? Balloons. Really, big, balloons. Balloons stay aloft by using differences in pressure, you fill it with Helium, a gas lighter than air, it will float. You can do the same thing with living things to, it turns out. A Jovian might process compounds in the atmosphere for nutrients and break it down to lighter gases, using those to float. These things, call them Scoopers, would be big, absolutely huge. Imagine whale shaped creatures, floating around Jupiter's atmosphere, scopping up organic compounds as it lumbers around. It would spend its entire life at the mercy of the air currents, and probably never develop any level of Sapience because it would likely evolve in a low-intelligence herd line.
     Another theoretical creature, we'll call this one an Aeroraptor (it's not real, so we can have cool names), might be capable of powered flight. Technically speaking, Jupiter's atmosphere is filled with combustibles. It sounds silly, but in an environment like this it would be completely possible for a creature to evolve an organic type of jet engine. Like the Scoopers it would collect compounds as it moves, but it would use them to zip quickly around. This type of adaption would likely only evolve on carnivorous creatures, who need speed to ambush their prey in the big open skys. If an Aeroraptor evolved to be big, it would hunt by itself, and if it was small, it would likely hunt in packs.
     Of course these are only a few possible creatures, an environment as big as Jupiter with so many varying layers would have a very complex biosphere. It's fun to think of all the different creatures that could evolve in these environments, and thats a draw most Xenobiologists understand. There are billions of other planets, billions of other systems where unique and interesting species could evolve.

Cheap Rockets

     Anyone paying much notice to the news lately has likely heard about a little company called SpaceX. In May of this year SpaceX launched one of its Falcon 9 rockets to deliver its Dragon Capsule to the ISS. That flight was a test run, to make sure it could be done without any serious problems. The mission was a complete success, streamed live on NasaTV the entire day, thought with not nearly the press coverage our friend Curiosity got.
     SpaceX is a small private space company started in 2002 by Elon Musk, the creator of PayPal. Its goal is to act as a cheaper method of orbital payload delivery, particularly to the ISS, though Musk is interested in extending the company's reach farther into the solar system. They operate using three rocket designs, the Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy, and use the Dragon capsule with all three designs.
     Today (October 8th) was the first commercial payload mission for NASA, meaning they are shipping supplies up to the ISS. I've had a hard time finding the exact numbers, but as I've heard it the SpaceX system is nearly 1/10th as expensive as the system NASA has used for resupplies for the longest time, especially with the retirement of the Shuttle program.
     With the advent of these new private companies who are more than eager to do simple tasks like resupplying, it frees up NASA's hands for more ambitious projects, like Mars or a replacement for the Shuttle, something we desperately need.

The Sneaky Comeback of Mr. Frederik Pohl

     The year is 2022, you've got plenty of money to spare (maybe you sold that metric tonne of antimatter to the Swiss), and you feel like going on a space-vacation. You could take a suborbital flight, but that's only a few minutes of 0-gee at most, you're looking for something a bit more fun. What about those space habitat hotels Bigelow Aerospace has been launching? To confined? Well aren't we a picky space tourist. All I've got left is a trip to Gateway.
     Pack your space-luggage and take a shuttle up to a relay station in orbit. Grab a ticket on the first tug headed to interplanetary space and rendezvous with a small asteroid on an extremely eccentric orbit between Earth and Venus, then wait for your number to come up and board a cramped mysterious spacecraft headed to the stars! Sound like fun?
     Okay, that last bit probably sounded like science fiction right? Well that's because it was, straight out of Frederik Pohl's 1977 award winning book Gateway. But fear not, there is another Gateway that will really exist in 2022, and has a function similar to Pohl's idea. But first, a quick lesson in physics.
     In a planetary system like ours, with one planet and one moon, there exists five points in space with very interesting properties, called Lagrange Points. At one of these points, a spacecraft maintains is position in relation to the rest of the system. For instance, a craft placed in the L3 position would always be opposite the Moon, while something at the L1 position would always be between the Earth and the Moon. Our main interest is L1 and L2, because that's where they'll build Gateway.
     NASA recently announced its plans for constructing a large space station in the L2 position, or L1 position should funded fall shorter then expected. This spacecraft would act as an intermediary for manned craft headed to the Moon or even other planets. Here's the idea: Gateway helps to establish permanent colonies on the Moon, which can mine materials and farm solar energy to send back up to Gateway, which can use it to fuel or even build spacecraft to send out to interplanetary space, and maybe in the future even farther. Gateway would be permanent, meaning it has no "expiration date" like most spacecraft, when it gets abandoned or deorbited.
     So you could take a shuttle out to Gateway and become a citizen of the new Lunar or Martian colonies. Or maybe rent one of those newfangled Alcubierre ships and make a supply run to your buddies living under the Europan ice shelves. Heck at 10c that trip would only take five minutes each way, you could be there and back before dinner! See thats the neat thing about science fiction, as we get better at space travel, the reality begins to sound even cooler than the fiction.