SCIENCE CATCHES UP TO SF--AGAIN!

And now, a few items to prove that real science is overtaking science fiction at an astounding rate.

Remember that scene in the episode of Star Trek, The Original Series, when Captain Kirk steps to a bank of receptacles in the wall and orders a chicken sandwich and coffee from the replicator (only to be served a plateful of fluffy Tribbles)? Well, a similar food reproduction system may be coming to an automat near you (without the furry interlopers, of course).

So close to replicator tech--just leave out the tribbles.

Catherine Lamb reports in TheSpoon.tech that the Israeli company Redefine Meat has developed a 3D printer that can produce a beef-like meat substance from plant-based materials. The company can build the printer for the relatively low cost of $100k. The idea would be to sell the machine, then supply the buyer (food distributors or producers, for example) with plant-based material packs to make the meat products. Currently Redefine Meat is focused on beef, but is researching how to create tuna, pork and other “flavors” as well.

Why stop there? “Replicated” vegetables and grains would be just as desirable in space, or even in isolated environments on earth where storage and/or refrigeration space is at a premium—the research stations at Antarctica, for example, or on remote islands. And imagine the advantages on the International Space Station, or if we establish an outpost on the moon or on Mars.

Of course, we Trekkers are not surprised that the writers who envisioned the cellphone, the iPad and the MRI would inspire yet another tech marvel. But, hey, I never really thought I would be clairvoyant when it came to the science in my books.

My Interstellar Rescue series characters use a system of stable wormholes to get around the galaxy. The entrances/exits to these tunnels in space/time are called Jump Nodes in the books and act on surrounding space like mini-black holes. In the series, one of these Jump Nodes exists on the very edge of our own solar system, hidden from our technology, but making Earth an easy target for the slave-trading bad-guy aliens. 

 

A stable wormhole--the jump node method of interstellar travel.

Well, guess what? Scientists have found a mysterious object they have tagged “Planet 9” in the outer reaches of our solar system. Some scientists believe the object may be what is known as a “primordial black hole,” that is, one formed in the aftermath of the Big Bang. The hole, if it exists, may be no bigger than a bowling ball and would not be detectable by visible-light or infrared telescopes. Scientists arguing for the existence of the object base their hypothesis on anomalies in the orbits of asteroids, comets and other bodies beyond Neptune, according to the report in NBCNews.com. The only problem is, no primordial black holes have ever been seen before, though they theoretically might exist.

An alternate explanation would be that a huge, undetected planet is causing the gravitational variations. Says a coauthor of the study, James Unwin of the University of Illinois at Chicago, “The discovery of a giant planet in the outer solar system would be an extraordinary discovery. But the discovery of a primordial black hole would be immense and even more spectacular.”

Yes. But a Jump Node leading to another, inhabited, sector of the galaxy? Well, that discovery would really blow our minds, now wouldn’t it? 

 HAPPY BOOK BIRTHDAYS TO MY CO-BLOGGERS 

Congratulations to both Sharon Lynn Fisher for the debut this week of The Absinthe Earl (The Faery Rehistory Series Book 1) and to Laurie Green and her co-authors for the fabulous success of Pets in Space® 4. If you haven’t gotten your copies of these great books (one a fantasy/alternate history romance, the other a continuation of the SFR series), better get in line.

Cheers, Donna

 Information for this post drawn from: "Redefine Meat Raises $6M for 3D Printed Meat   Alternatives." by Catherine Lamb, TheSpoon.tech, September 11, 2019.

"Our solar system's mysterious 'Planet 9' may actually be a tiny, ancient black hole," by Denise Chow, NBCNews.com, October 2, 2019.

How the planets formed

I confess I'm a fan of Masterchef. This years' contestants have been great and I've enjoyed the episodes. Except… I channel-surf when the ads are on, quite often flicking to old episodes of Spicks and Specs (a music trivia show) or the food network.

Then, while I was channel-surfing three weeks ago on a Sunday night, I came across The Planets, hosted by Britain's rock star astrophysicist, Professor Brian Cox. From then on, Sunday nights became watching The Planets, with a quick flick now and then to see how Masterchef was getting along.

If you haven't seen this series – do. It's chock full of the all the new things scientists have learned from unmanned missions to all the planets in the last decade or so. Water on Mercury and on asteroids, why Mars lost its atmosphere, what turned Venus into a death trap. And last Sunday, it was Jupiter's turn. What was particularly interesting about this episode is that Prof Cox ventured into cosmology and discussed the formation of the solar system.

When I was at school the conventional wisdom (at least for kids) was that the planets formed from a cloud of material surrounding the new-born Sun. The four rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) were formed first from the heavier material closest to the sun. The lighter gases escaped further out and formed the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune). Back then Pluto was still a planet but even then it was something of an anomaly.

Public interest in space exploration waned quickly after the first Moon landing. Not too many people tuned into the pictures from the last manned mission in 1972. Funding or space exploration collapsed. For many years the best information we had came from the Voyager flights, launched in 1977. But more recently we have data from planetary explorers like Cassini-Huygens, Galileo, Juno, Dawn, and others. So we know more about the outer planets and – most importantly – because of Kepler's search for exo-planets, we know a lot more about what solar systems look like.

And they don't look much like ours.

Kepler has found a whole bunch of 'super earths', rocky planets much larger than our home. Scientists have also found lots of gas giants as big as Jupiter whipping around their stars in close orbits, nothing like the configuration of our system, with rocky planets innermost.

So why does our solar system look the way it does?

Professor Cox explained that Jupiter formed at about the same time as the Sun. In some other universe it probably went on to become another star, forming a binary system. There are heaps of them out there. But while Jupiter has two-and-a-half times more mass than every other object in the solar system combined – planets, moons, asteroids - [1] it's not enough to start nuclear fusion. However, Jupiter's presence dictated how the rest of the planets formed the way they did. At one time in its history Jupiter moved toward the sun, coming closer than the asteroid belt and into Mars's orbit. As it did so, it sort of vacuumed up matter in its orbit, leaving less material to be amalgamated into a planet. That's why Mars is so much smaller than Earth and Venus. What dragged Jupiter out again to its present orbit was the development of Saturn, which set up a resonance with Jupiter. The larger planet orbits the sun twice in the time it takes Saturn to orbit once.

These days Jupiter's vast gravitational field protects the inner planets from debris coming in from the Oort cloud or outside the solar system, but millions of years ago, the planet's close encounter with a large asteroid deflected its path, sending the giant rock hurtling through the inner solar system where it collided with a young planet Earth. In fact, that probably happened many times with smaller asteroids – but the big one wiped out the dinosaurs.

I love this stuff. It proves that science is never static. As they learn more about the universe scientists need to revise their hypotheses so they fit the new facts. So much has changed, even in my lifetime.

Maybe sometime, somewhere, we'll find that elusive hint of life on another planet. Won't that be wonderful?

Here's a bit more about the wonderful BBC series The Planets. Catch it if you can.

We live in a very strange neighbourhood

When I was a youngster we learned a bit of basic stuff about our solar system at school and, because I was a voracious reader, in encyclopedias. They used to be the hard-cover equivalent of Google back then. 😊

The solar system and how the planets formed was all very logical. The sun started as a spinning accretion of gas clouds that condensed until it kind of 'turned on' and started to produce light and energy as a fusion reactor. During this process it spat out concentric rings of material which in turn started their own cycle of condensation. The first planets, those closest to the sun, were comprised of the heavier materials. Thus we had Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. We skipped over the asteroid belt. I don't remember the explanation back then. Not enough material to coalesce into a new planet? Disrupted by Jupiter's massive gravity field? Then it was on to the gas giants – Saturn, mighty Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. Then, as an afterthought of left-overs, Pluto. They all danced around the sun in a pretty much flat plane and some of them had moons of their own. Back then the moonless planets were Mercury, Venus, and Pluto.

All this was a simplified view of the solar system, suitable for kids and people not interested in science and astronomy, which was just about everybody. That superficial veneer of uniformity drops off fairly quickly when start to look more closely. Venus and Uranus rotate in the opposite direction to all the other planets (ie the sun rises in the west). Venus's day is longer than its year. Uranus rotates on its side (ie the axis of the poles points at the sun). Pluto turned out to be a binary system with its large moon, Charon, and was demoted to a dwarf planet. Oh – and Pluto does not orbit in the same plane as its erstwhile siblings. Its orbit is at a 17° angle from the plane. It's also more circular, so sometimes Pluto is closer to the sun than Neptune. However, there's no chance of a collision between Pluto and Neptune because "for every two orbits that Pluto makes around the Sun, Neptune makes three, which prevents close encounters between them that would otherwise destabilize their orbits." [1]

We knew there were thick clouds blanketing Venus's atmosphere – but it wasn't until space craft visited that we learned that Venus isn't covered with lush jungles as depicted in many SF stories of the '50s and '60s. 

Another popularly supported myth, originating from Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, who observed Mars in 1877, was the network of canals on the planet's surface. We now know that's not true. Mars might have supported water and life eons ago but not anymore. But that myth inspired writers like HG Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs to write his books.

We knew very little about the outer planets until the seventies when the Voyager missions visited. Astronomers found many, many more moons, marvelled at the rings of Saturn and the moonlets that acted as shepherds of the rings. We found out there are volcanoes on at least one of Jupiter's moons and that moons might have oceans. We learned that ALL of the gas giants – Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune – have rings. In the recent New Horizons visit to Pluto astronomers were astonished to find evidence of lava flows on the planet, since it's so cold out there.

Now we know Jupiter's famous Red Spot, a massive cyclonic storm larger than the diameter of the Earth, is shrinking. Over time Saturn's iconic rings will disappear. And an object (named Kiku) has been spotted in the solar system beyond Neptune's orbit that orbits in the opposite direction to all the other satellites of the sun. Scientists, as they say, are baffled.

There is so much more to learn.

I was delighted to hear Mike Pence say that the US wants humans to return to the Moon by 2024. [2] It's regrettable that the reason is very likely much the same as the reasons for the space race in the 'sixties – rivalry with Russia and I suspect more importantly today, with China. But it hardly matters. Space exploration has languished for too long. It has been forty-seven years since a man stood on the lunar surface and that probably has to happen before we even think about landing anyone on Mars. I'm glad I have a chance of being around when that happens again.