Tag: Real Science

Image courtesy of namakuki at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

We are bags of mostly water, about 60%, with the brains pushing 75% and lungs over 80%. When humans go into space, the second consideration after air (and air pressure) is water. With air, we face a volume transport problem – but air does compact nicely; though runs toward the explosive during the unpacking. Water, though, is a weight problem and nearly all the hard-to-impossible-to-solve problems with space travel so far have been weight problems.

How does one get off the planet? Fight the weight of gravity. How does one travel through space? Fight the weight of inertia. Every pound in space requires a force to get it off the planet and moving where we will want it to go. Places like the Moon for training and exploration, Mars for first stage colonization testing, and other stars for immigration.

All the best situations for long-term habitation in space are to have water already be there at the end. Yes, we can (and are) studying every manner recycling of water during the journeys. Controlling a dozen gallons per person recycled in a closed system has been challenging. Forward osmosis is just one of the many processes being studied.

But for colonization, where the need for water will be hundreds of gallons per person – not a few dozen – between the requirements for crops and manufacturing and washing and population growth, water must be at the other end. 

We are beginning to find it among the exo-planets. Our tech isn’t *quite* there yet – new cameras and satellites are coming on line to double-check initial findings. But we have some suspects. Each step, each discovery, brings us that much closer to the stars.

 

Bibliography

Astrobio.net. “Recycling water in space”. phys.org. 2011 June 20.https://phys.org/news/2011-06-recycling-space.html – last viewed 1 November 2019.

Damadeo, Kristyn. “NASA and Partner Announce Finalists in the 2019 Mars Ice Challenge”. nasa.gov. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/nasa-and-partner-announce-finalists-in-the-2019-mars-ice-challenge – last viewed 1 November 2019.

Ghosh, Pallab. “Water found for the first time on ‘potentially habitable’ planet”. BBC News Science & Environment. 2019 September 12. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49648746?SThisFB – last viewed 1 November 2019.

Siegel, Ethan. “Does water freeze or boil in space?” medium.com. 2016 Dec 10. https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/does-water-freeze-or-boil-in-space-7889856d7f36 – last viewed 1 November 2019.

 

Astrogarden/Farming Game Image

I call them Inventory Games. You know those games with lots of steps to gather this and that, then build an item, to build another item. The object is not to beat the bad guy but get all the stuff. They appeal to our natural hunt and gather instinct, to have enough to get through the winter. I swear we are hard programmed to play these games, at least I am. Astrogarden takes up far too much of my time, as my 130 level “character” indicates.

Why are these games so addictive? It’s like the manufacturers are tapping directly into our dopamine receptors and drugging us senseless. 

After all, the only thing humans really own is time, and to waste it cutting down virtual trees for hours on end makes no sense.

Originally games were aimed at fulling about 20 to 40 hours, maybe 100 hours of time, complete with a story. Unless it was just mindless Tetris, but even that had natural stop points to sleep and eat and go to work. These Inventory Games NEVER end. They are Grinds. Yet, still, we play.

Sometimes, part of the grind can be short-cut through purchase of items with real-world money. Like you have time to hold down a job while playing these games. This is how the companies make their money. I’ve limited myself to a certain amount per month, treating the “free” Astrogarden as a subscription service. But, really, you can easily drop hundreds of dollars on virtual nothingness. It is worse than Kindle and buying books you never will touch and if your device goes away (or Amazon does, don’t laugh, it has happened for other book and music dealers), everything goes away. I spent weeks getting a new kindle and fixing it just the way I like it when my old one got the black-lines-of-death during the 2019 tax season.

Why, why do I Grind through Inventory Games which provide no meals on my real-world table? One, it is therapeutic. Like doing embroidery and sewing. I notice the more I videogame, the less I sew. They provide the same need, to take a brain break. And the game, with its colored lights, happy music, and noticeable, achievable goals is much more fun, without being really fun, than sewing for 10 hours. Plus I can click my mouse for 10 hours in a single day, and I can’t stab cloth that long without my eyes crossing.

And tons more fun than putting words on a screen. Not reading them after the words successfully fought their way out of my head, but the process of words on screen makes grinding through the trees and rock appealing.

You want to kill the productivity of a nation – get the more active, the more intelligent, the go-getters, and the children – addicted to something that feels like it produces something but actually produces nothing. Kind-of like a paper-pusher job, only with fun lights every five minutes instead of a coffee break every two hours.

I need to figure out how to funnel my “time wasting” habits, the brain breaks, where I am not thinking, back into productive actions like sewing and cleaning house.

In the meantime, I’m off – my Tiger-Cows need milking and my hybrid-crops need harvesting.

Bibliography

Wong, David. The Secret Reason So Many Video Games are a Tedious Grind. Cracked.com. https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-secret-reason-so-many-video-games-are-tedious-grind/ . Last viewed 9/17/2019.

From the Planetary Society Kickstarter site

It’s been a long journey to start this long journey, and I have been on it from the moment the Planetary Society Board presented the idea to its members, through its Kickstarter, through LightSail 1’s fiery death on the Russian Launch Pad, and finally the deployment of LightSail 2.

You may remember the Bajoran lightship on Deep Space Nine, the one Captian Sisko and Jake created reminiscent to the real-world Kon-Tiki expedition to prove a raft could cross the Pacific from South America to the Polynesian Island, in the fictional story’s case to prove the Bajorian traveled to Cardassian territory in their early space travel.

The cool thing is lightsail ships were a real scientific thought at that time, just hadn’t been proven viable. The ability to travel through space riding on just photons from the sun. It would be much slower than a rocket booster, but not everything needs to be done immediately. Station keeping weather stations, slow fly-bys of planets sending millions instead of hundreds of photos, communication arrays throughout the system. The possibilities are endless. And cheap – as the weight of the sails are negligible when compared to rocket fuel or nuclear power … and tons less dangerous.

The long journey? Oh, that will be LightSail 2 in orbit right now with its sail due to be deployed on July 23, 2019 and going for about a year. That is a lot of orbits around the Earth, a very long journey.

You can follow its journey around the earth through the LightSail 2 Mission Control link.

Breakthrough Initiatives plan to use lightsails to send their fleet of small ships to Alpha Centauri.

This is now. This is our future. We can reach the stars.

Red Saxifrage in Sardinia (look at the other rocks round the flowers for lichen)
Image courtesy of Phil_Bird at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Toby Spribille asked a question and went down a rabbit hole. “How closely related are two lichen growing in the same area that look like they have the same structure, but one is yellow and acidy-poison and the other a benign brown?” Obviously different species, since color and acid difference, but when did they split off of each other?

Except he found out he asked the wrong question. The question should have been “How do three separate DNA species create a symbolic relationship and within that relationship, sometimes they create acid?”

Because lichen were involved, everything got turned on its head.

Lichen has been doing that for a while.

In 1868, Simon Schwendener discovered lichen were composite organisms – fungus who had co-opted and shared life with some alga. (Fond, How a Guy…) Not a happy idea in a time where Darwin’s On the Origin of Species – only the strong survive – ruled. Why would two creatures need each other to survive? That’s just nonsense.

Other scientists tested Schwendener’s findings under the microscope. “You know, he isn’t wrong.” More testing and the concept of symbiosis was born in biology.

Humanity has since gone on and discovered nearly everything on this planet has some internal helpful flora and fauna hanging out. For example, the human microbiome in the digestive system from the stomach through both the small and large intestines is helpful, and gets really upset when antibiotics take out the good bacteria. (There is some debate about whether eating yogurt helps – the two major bacteria in yogurt get killed in the stomach acid long before arriving in the large intestines to help replace what modern medicine erased.)

Symbiosis has became the name of the game. And raises lots of questions for science fiction authors about if humanity goes to the stars, how long will them remain human when other planets start affecting the colonists microbiomes. 

Now lichen are rewriting things again. Instead of the clear structure of the fungus protecting the alga, there is a third party involved – at least proven by DNA testing in 2016 and reverified in 2019 through a second scientist for the same basic community of lichen.

Other scientists are looking into other lichen, and discovering similar things there. Previously the other fungus were ignored, because lichen were defined as a partnership of two – now, polyamory seems to be the rule for lichen.

That is another thing writers and editors should bring to the table when writing, and we often forget. Science isn’t about doing something wild and crazy in a one-off. It’s about a running tests over and over, building up knowledge. Testing already known information with new equipment. And, most important, peer review.

In genres with laser focus on a character or group of characters – like urban fantasy and science fiction, the network community of science is often downplayed.

But, like lichen, it takes more than one scientist to thrive.

Read more about the lichen discoveries below in the Bibliography.

Bibliography

Grens, Kerry. Not One, Not Two, But Three Fungi Present in Lichen. The Scientist. 2019 January 17. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/not-one–not-two–but-three-fungi-present-in-lichen-65333 – last viewed 11/12/2019.

Yong, Ed. How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology. The Atlantic. 2016 July 21. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/07/how-a-guy-from-a-montana-trailer-park-upturned-150-years-of-biology/491702/ – last viewed 11/12/2019.

Yong, Ed. The Overlooked Organisms The Keep Challenging Our Assumptions About Life. The Atlantic. 2019 January 17. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/01/how-lichens-explain-and-re-explain-world/580681/ – Last viewed 11/12/2019.