artist: Rod Gray
This is my favourite piece from Rod Gray’s latest exhibit, Tracking Station (on show at Level 2/39 Little Collins St until Nov 21).
I stumbled upon Rod’s work when I was out for lunch at the Napier Hotel. More accurately, my wife did, and dragged myself and lizbt up to see his work.
He is inspired by his time at Mt Stromlo, Canberra collecting fire ravaged parts of the Great Melbourne Telescope.
His work, and this piece in particular, resonates strongly with me. It evokes a decayed space age.
For the same reason I am loving Ellis’s Ignition City (issue 5 came out last week, why haven’t I read it yet? Supergod starts this week; I am incredibly psyched for that!)
I spent my youth filling scapbooks with newspaper clippings of the promised space age. Torn out pieces of paper announcing that the International Space Station would be complete by 1995. Carefully clipped plans for a spaceport near Cairns.
In 1995 I would turn 20years old, so I was perfectly on track for my desired life as an astronaut. I read somewhere that you could pre-adapt the body for space by elevating the end of your bed, so of course it did just that.
Fifteen years later and space elevators are just making it into mainstream press, the US is about to retire it’s disastrous shuttle fleet, and Kazakhstan is the country from which humans are mostly regularly hurtled into the heavens. In my mind it looks just like that painting.
When I was chatting with Rod at the opening night last Wednesday he admired my Russian space dog tags. After watching this doco on British street styles, I realized I too was dressing aspirationally. To live the life of the space marine I longed for as that teenager.
I don’t think I’m the only one. We don’t want what the rich have, we want the future we were promised. It’s probably about time we stopped waiting, and started building it for ourselves.
Imagine an alternate present where the space shuttle hadn’t been such a disaster and the Cold War hadn’t been sole the driver for the space program. Where the dreams of the sixties came true, and the fears of the seventies were never realised. Where the whole Earth is powered by clean energy and humanity has a presence that extends at least as far as Jupiter.
This is the utopian world of Moon and the story of the dark secret that makes it all possible.
Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, an engineer on a small lunar base overseeing the mining production of Helium-3, the new clean energy the Earth now runs on. He’s coming up to the end of his three year contract and is beyond ready to go back home and see his wife and kids. His job mostly seems to involve supervising the operations of big, hulking mining drones that eat moon dirt, collecting their payload when they’re full.
His sole companion is a robot, GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), whose only goal is to keep Sam safe. He cuts Sam’s hair, monitors his psychological state and is the intermediary with the headquarters on Earth.
Occasionally Sam receives video messages from his wife, but for some mysterious reason direct comms with Earth are broken.
This is the set-up for the film, quickly established. What happens next is a fascinating exploration of memory and identity. A Philip K Dick level science-fiction story; corporations with questionable morality.. a man that might not be what he thinks he is, and the robot that might be his only ally (OR his most dreaded enemy.. they play up the 2001 references wonderfully).
All this in a setting that looks retro, which really reinforces the alternate-present that this could be. The lunar base is not some all-white, shiny future thing; it looks assembled out of 1970s pre-fab materials, as if after SkyLab America did keep pushing onwards, and matter-of-factly established a permanent presence on the Moon, which corporations simply took over. It’s all just business up here in space.
Mining is a dirty business, and Sam’s EVA suit looks well worn and grimy. When he journeys out in his lunar rover, with it folded down, oh my, I’ve never wanted a white flight cap so much. Give me this lunar grunge chic, I need it now!
If there was any doubt about Sam Rockwell, that’s put aside here. He is AMAZING, especially when [redacted spoiler]. He carries the whole film with ease.
Now, I never saw that Fed-Ex movie with Tom Hanks, Cast Away, but I doubt it compares to this. And robots are way cooler than volleyballs anyway, especially when they incorporate an emoticon screen; when it cried, I teared up too. GERTY is the best robot on screen since Wall-E.
Duncan Jones has made a stunning debut. I hope he is left alone to make something equally brilliant in his next piece.
5 Stars
Something Ariana said on the Whitechapel thread about Terraforming Mars has been bubbling away in the back of my head; namely that once we get there we need to breed like heck. Because it’s far cheaper to populate it by ‘ole fashioned reproduction, than to send ships back and forth. And to expand beyond anything more than the barest toehold colony, we’re going to need lots of bodies (and robot friends).
All of which has me thinking about space harems and Zero-G polygamy – because once you go down that road, you realize that it will be a far more effective use of resources to send one man to every six women and let them go on a rutting frenzy, all in the name of Science and the Future. And with a 40min lag-time back to Earth, let’s face it – what else is there going to be to do on a cold Martian night?
As the Bindychild pointed out late Saturday night, this lends itself quite nicely to the Mormons. And I find myself wondering why, apart from Battlestar Galactica, these guys aren’t yearning to get into Space? Because my cursory knowledge of the Church of LDS is that they have quite the Alien belief system and that they’re a) polygamists b) big breeders and c) AFAIK not exactly poor – so surely they’d make some ideal collaborators to get the Mars Colony off the ground.
Because I’m seriously done waiting around for this, and starting to look around to figure out exactly where my Space Future went. So let’s start forming whatever alliances are necessary to get out there. Even if, as watching John Adams hints to me, we’ll most likely end up repeating the great American experiment – as a group of people, all leaving their homeland for vastly different reasons, banding together against a common enemy to create a vastly different Future.
I must admit I’d have reservations about any Scientologists being involved. Apart from that, let’s do it already. Build a true coalition of the willing and bold.
What do we need to change to nudge this thing along? Can we co-opt “reality-tv”? Survivor: Phobos? The Amazing Race: LEO?
Can’t I put my superannuation contributions (or Social Security, as it’s called in the US), which I’m likely not going to touch for around 50 years, can’t I make them do something useful in the interim? Where’s my freaking Space-Friendly Investment Fund?!
I don’t care if it’s low-earning; just do something I care about, instead of propping up hedge funds, funding ridiculous take-overs, and what ever else Global Capital does with the forced savings of ~20million people.
Seriously, the Eco Freakz can consume ‘greenly’ for just about everything now – why can’t I spend my money in a space-friendly way?!
In conclusion: MARS!!! And my foot standing on it, shortly. Please. Let’s GO!
Now, what pieces of the puzzle am I missing People?
Do the Mormons already have a space program? Or do the Scientologists? Are there already rumors of the spaceship “L Ron. Hubbard” being assembled in some underground bunker already? Has someone other than Heinlein wrote compelling tales about free-loving space-colonists in Zero G?
from PhysOrg
Ocean Planets on the Brink of Detection
Imagine a world with no land at all, merely the impenetrable depths of a seething ocean. Models of planet formation predict the existence of such worlds, even though our own solar system has none. Indeed, their formation should actually be rather common — and new satellites may soon detect them around other stars.
Planetary embryos that form far from a star are composed mostly of water ice. Pluto and the comets are good examples of such icy bodies, as are the moons Titan and Europa. Early in our own solar system’s history, the largest of these planetary embryos acquired a dense envelope of hydrogen and helium and transformed into the gas giants we know today. But what would happen if they drifted a bit closer to the Sun before getting so big?
Planets that form far from their parent star are expected to have a composition similar to comets (50% rock, 50% water by weight). Once a planet exceeds about ten Earth masses it has enough gravity to attract any hydrogen and helium near its orbit, and will rapidly transform into a gas giant. But what happens to planets in this region that never exceed the threshold?
It becomes an “ocean planet”, a term coined by Alain Léger (Université Paris-Sud, France) when he first proposed the existence of such worlds in 2003. An ocean planet that stays in the outer disk will probably be captured by the gas giants forming there, perhaps to become a moon like Europa. Such worlds will be composed mostly of rock and ice, and depending on their environment and formation history may harbor liquid oceans below their surface.
Hydrodynamic simulations have shown that it is common for planets to migrate inwards or outwards as they plunge through the turbulent gas of the disk. It is therefore quite possible for an ocean planet to creep close enough to its star to melt the ice.
So why doesn’t our system have any ocean planets? It’s hard to say, but it’s also clear that random chance plays a large role in planet formation. “Simulations … starting from random initial conditions produce a broad diversity of planets, including small planets migrating through the ice line.” explains Franck Selsis (Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, France), one of Léger’s principle collaborators and the author of a more recent article on the detection of ocean planets. “Planets with masses less than 20 Earth-masses have been found at short periods with the instrument HARPS.”
These objects are too big to be ocean planets; rather, they are small gas giants like Neptune or Uranus. As gas giants cannot form close to a star, it appears that they must have formed in the outer planetary nebula and migrated inwards. As Selsis tells PhysOrg.com, “Their detection shows that the process that can give birth to ocean planets is common.”
Water, water every where…
The water content of the Earth is only about one part in 4400, yet water covers over two-thirds of its surface. Not only would water cover the entire surface of an ocean planet, but its average depth would on the order of 100 kilometers!
All the rocky matter would sink to the center of the planet, forming a dense core not unlike the Earth’s. Where the Earth has a thick mantle of magma, however, ocean planets would have a mantle of exotic ice. The pressure at the bottom of the ocean would be10 million atmospheres or more; under such a crushing weight, water has no choice but to solidify.
..nor any drop to drink.
Depending on its proximity to the star, an ocean planet’s surface might be icy, liquid, or some combination of the two. If it gets too close, however, the surface temperature might rise high enough for the oceans to transform into a global sauna. Such a planet wouldn’t have an ocean at all; at temperatures above the critical point of water, the distinction between liquid and gas disappears. Instead of an ocean, the ice mantle would be surrounded by a thick envelope of supercritical water: an even mix of vapor and suspended droplets at hundreds of degrees Celsius.
Right now, ocean planets exist only in the realm of theory. They might well be detected by the recently launched CoRoT satellite, however. In a recent article posted to arXiv.org, Selsis describes how CoRoT and ground-based observations can be combined to estimate the density of extrasolar planets and thus tell the difference between an ocean world and a rocky world like the Earth. In the case of CoRoT any ocean worlds it can detect will be much closer to their star than even Mercury is to the Sun. The Kepler satellite (due to launch in 2008), on the other hand, will be able to detect such planets as far out as the habitable zone of some stars.
Planet-finders have much to look forward to, and the discovery of these exotic worlds will provide a great deal of support for current theories of planet formation. Nobody knows yet whether such planets could evolve life, but they clearly have one of the essential ingredients in abundance.
Citations:
1. Alain Léger et al. 2004, “A new family of planets? ‘Ocean Planets’ “. Icarus 169, 499L. An online version of this paper is available at http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0308324.
2. Franck Selsis et al. 2007, “Could we identify hot ocean planets with CoRoT, Kepler, and Doppler velocimetry?” Icarus (submitted); an online version of this paper is available at http://xxx.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0701608 .
via
from New Scientist Space
Hints of huge water reservoirs on Mars – space
Mars is losing little water to space, according to new research, so much of its ancient abundance may still be hidden beneath the surface.
Dried up riverbeds and other evidence imply that Mars once had enough water to fill a global ocean more than 600 metres deep, together with a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide that kept the planet warm enough for the water to be liquid. But the planet is now very dry and has a thin atmosphere.
Some scientists have proposed that the Red Planet lost its water and CO2 to space as the solar wind stripped molecules from the top of the planet’s atmosphere. Measurements by Russia’s Phobos-2 probe to Mars in 1989 hinted that the loss was quite rapid.
Now the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft has revealed that the rate of loss is much lower. Stas Barabash of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna led a team that used data from Mars Express’s ASPERA-3 instrument (Analyzer of Space Plasmas and Energetic Atoms).
Its measurements suggest the whole planet loses only about 20 grams per second of oxygen and CO2 to space, only about 1% of the rate inferred from Phobos-2 data.
If this rate has held steady over Mars’s history, it would have removed just a few centimetres of water, and a thousandth of the original CO2.
Huge amounts
Either some other process removed the water and CO2 or they are still present and hidden somewhere on Mars, probably underground, Barabash says. “We are talking about huge amounts of water,” he told New Scientist. “To store it somewhere requires a really big, huge reservoir.”
Barabash is not sure what form this reservoir – or reservoirs – would take, but he points to findings from NASA’s now lost Mars Global Surveyor (MGS). This data provided evidence that water had gushed down slopes on Mars in recent years, possibly originating from beneath the surface (see Water flows on Mars before our very eyes). “So there might be some possibilities for water existing in liquid form even now,” he says.
“If water is there, I think it will put all ideas about human missions to Mars on a completely different level,” he says. “It’s not only water to support [astronauts], but also a potential fuel.” Hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel can be produced from water.
Stormy weather
However, the researchers point out that other mechanisms might have removed water and CO2 from Mars, such as asteroid and comet impacts. Or the solar wind might have sheared off of whole chunks of atmosphere rather than individual molecules.
Another possibility is suggested by Mars atmosphere expert David Brain at the University of California in Berkeley, US. He points out that magnetic storms might boost the rate at which the solar wind strips molecules from the atmosphere.
“We believe that solar storms were frequent and more intense early on in the solar system’s history,” he told New Scientist. Even so, Brain thinks that some of Mars’s ancient water and CO2 is still stored in hidden reservoirs.