Return to the Moon

Like some huge, dusty old attic above our heads, the Moon has been unvisited by humans ever since the crew of Apollo 17 departed from the lunar surface exactly 40 years ago last Friday – 13th December 1972. You can go to see their command module (“America”) at the Lyndon B Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and if you were on the Moon now, you could also go and see their electrically-powered rover, which is still where the crew parked it at “Station 8″ in Cochise Crater four decades ago, in the spectacular Taurus-Littrow valley, which lies on the south-eastern edge of the Mare Serenitatis. Eugene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt were the last men to walk on the Moon, and no-one’s been back since.

However, all that may be about to change. Alan Stern, CEO of new company Golden Spike, announced on 6th December that he is aiming to offer a private manned Moon expedition by 2020, at a cost of $1.5 billion. It’s a tall order, and a price tag that would better suit a national government than a wealthy individual; with that sort of sum, you could build a new airport.

Will it happen, though? The Cold War is over and developed economies are strapped for cash; few nations would have the appetite and the resources to return to the Moon a mere eight years from now. So the timeline might be unrealistic. But it is encouraging that someone is thinking about going back up there. Somebody’s going to have to, sooner or later. the Moon is not just a dusty (and dangerous!) old attic above our heads. It is – or could be – a vital resource and staging post on our journey to the bigger skies of the Solar System, with all the potential wealth that it contains. The Golden Spike company is named after the symbolic spike driven in 1869 to link the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in the United States to form the First Continental Railroad; if its namesake is successful, this may mark the next step in an equally ambitious and grand venture ending – centuries hence, who knows? – in the stars.

Another news item recently was of course the death of Sir Patrick Moore, the famous amateur astronomer, on Sunday 9th December, which was a week ago today. I have some fond memories of staying up very late in the 1970s to watch his programme “The Sky at Night”, and learn of meteor showers, the occasional comet and which constellations were prominent at the time of year – it was like a news bulletin for those interested in such arcane things. Following the programme, I’d sometimes be out in the back garden after midnight trying to identify star clusters or wander – via a heavy pair of binoculars – among the mountains of the Moon. This was when my interest in space was kindled – Patrick Moore’s enthusiasm for the subject was infectious and I’m sure played a big part – along with all the science fiction I was reading at the time – in getting me started. He will be sadly missed.

Some useful links:
An article in Wired magazine about the Golden Spike announcement:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-12/07/golden-spike-plans
Sky at Night, on the BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mk7h

A Very Quick Word About Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs could apparently be 10-15 million years older than previously thought, according to a recent study in journal Biology Letters, and reported on the PopSci website. I’m a great fan of dinosaurs. Often used as a byword for something obsolete and past its time (I’m sometimes called a dinosaur myself, because of my support for fossil fuels), in my opinion they are nevertheless one of the greatest examples of both adaptability and staying power that the world has ever known. You can still find them, in the present era. Looking out of my window, it’s hard not to notice the flocks of dinosaurs that frequent this part of London. They’re rather small, these days, and have feathers rather than scales. But they’re still with us -dinosaurs are the living world’s great survivors.

Some useful links:
The study in Biology Letters: http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/9/1/20120949
The article on PopSci: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-12/new-oldest-dinosaur-may-predate-existing-oldest-dinosaur-15-million-years

Unlocking the “BBC Climate 28″ Secret

I was going to post today about some recent transcripts, but just had to mark the surprise discovery yesterday of some data that the BBC had long wished to keep under wraps. On 26th January 2006, the BBC had hosted a seminar called “Climate Change – the Challenge to Broadcasting”, and, the following year, blogger Tony Newbery wrote to them, asking to know who was there, especially as there were meant to have been “the best scientific experts” present, whose input would have been key in the forming of BBC policy towards the reporting of climate change.

It’s a long story, and best told by Tony Newbery himself, on his excellent blog Harmless Sky (link below). Suffice it to say that the BBC proved to be more than usually obstructive in releasing the list of names, and events led to Tony’s case being heard in court (Central London Civil Justice Centre) a couple of weeks ago, only to be rejected.

However, things have taken a remarkable turn, following much discussion on climate sceptic blogs such as Bishop Hill and Watts Up With That. Sceptical blogger Omnologos (Maurizio Maurabito) found the list of attendees; it had been in the public domain all along – albeit requiring some considerable patience and skill to locate – on the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive).

As suspected, the list of attendees includes (along with some genuine scientists) a considerable number of people who were not scientists and could reasonably be called climate activists. There’s probably a lot to be gleaned now from researching the backgrounds of the people who were there (including some very senior people at the BBC who have now resigned or “stepped aside” from their roles in the midst of the organisation’s current crisis.)

However, I’d agree with the Register’s Andrew Orlowski that the real story here is that the BBC went to such inordinate lengths to try and prevent the attendees’ names from being revealed. And the full story is not finished yet, I’m sure.

In the meantime, my warmest congratulations go to Maurizio for his tenacity and to Tony for his dogged perseverance.

Some useful links:
Harmless Sky: http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=109
Omnologos: http://omnologos.com/full-list-of-participants-to-the-bbc-cmep-seminar-on-26-january-2006/
Bishop Hill: http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/11/12/bbc-climate-28-revealed.html

Harry Harrison

I only found out about this last month, but science fiction author Harry Harrison died back in August, aged 87. He was one of the greats. I’ve just finished reading Make Room! Make Room! which is a rather bleak novel about overpopulation, published in 1966 and set in New York at the millennium; searching for an ebook version of this story is how I found out that he had died. More typical of Harrison were the Stainless Steel Rat books, which I enjoyed, and his stories of Bill the Galactic Hero.

What I really love, though, is his trilogy starting with West of Eden, which is based on a what-if scenario where the dinosaurs did not die out but continued to evolve into the human era. It is excellent speculative SF, in my opinion, and the paperback versions I have contain beautiful illustrations that resemble medieval woodcuts, which help to bring the stories to life. Wonderful stuff. He will be missed.

Fellow SF author Christopher Priest wrote an obituary of Harry Harrison in the Guardian, and you can read it here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/15/harry-harrison

The (very small) starship Voyager

Just a brief trip to outer space, before I post links to the next lengthy climate transcript. In the news this week, the people at NASA JPL announced (actually not – see my update!) that they believe Voyager 1 is about to leave the solar system, 35 years after its launch in 1977, and after having had thrilling close encounters with Jupiter and Saturn along the way. This being the vast wilderness of space, there is no obvious frontier which marks out the limits of the solar system, but the JPL people have picked up an increase in the amount of cosmic rays hitting the probe, which suggest it is crossing the borderland or “Heliosheath”, where the solar wind pushes up against the cosmic radiation from the rest of the universe, about 16 – 18 billion kilometres away.

What will happen to it now? And how long will we be able to keep in touch with it? The answer to the second question hinges on how much electrical power Voyager has access to, as it crosses the deep, dark gulf between worlds. The probe is powered by three RTGs (radioisotope thermoelectric generators) fuelled by plutonium-238, which of course is in limited supply and must be husbanded very carefully. And what it’s doing is gradually shutting down some of its more power-intensive activities in order to maintain others for as long as possible. That will last until about 2025, after which time the spacecraft will no longer be able to power any single instrument and Voyager will be drifting, inert and basically, dead.

I was curious to find out where it is heading. Anywhere famous, perhaps? There are actually two Voyagers, as you will know, and according to NASA Voyager 2 will pass within about 4.3 light years of Sirius, which is, of course, a very prominent and bright local star, well known to us from prehistoric times. This will take place around 296,000 years from now. Voyager 1, on the other hand, is heading towards AC+79 3888, otherwise known as Gliese 445, a very dim and unremarkable red dwarf in the unfashionable constellation of Cameleopardalis. It will pass by Gliese 445 in about 40,000 years, but what also might be surprising is that Gliese 445 itself is approaching the solar system much faster than Voyager 1 is moving in the other direction – it’s 17.6 light years away, at present, but will be only about 3.45 light years away from us, 400 centuries from now. Such is the unnervingly dynamic nature of stars, as they buzz like bees around the galactic hive.

So, what will happen to Voyagers 1 and 2, after that? Maybe they will drift forever in the dark spaces of the galaxy, until the end of time. Maybe one day humans will go out and retrieve them (or, even better, send a robot) and they will be exhibited in a museum, if they still have these in the 40th century (and I hope they will, as I think museums are a very good thing in any epoch.)

In the 1979 movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a Voyager probe has been discovered by sentient machines, who transform it into a gigantic and threatening spacecraft (renamed “V’ger”), which then starts to make its way back towards Earth and is only stopped by the brave people aboard the Enterprise, armed with their superior wits and sparkly late-1970s special effects. However, Trekkies will be aware that the probe in question was actually Voyager 6, and so the events of the movie clearly take place in an alternative timeline and dimension to this one, where I am writing this blog and where Voyagers 3, 4 5 and 6 were never built.

But maybe the basic premise of the film is correct, and someone – or something – else will find our little metal emissaries to the stars. And if they do, will it be good or bad news for Earth? I wonder.

Some interesting links:
NASA JPL’s main Voyager page: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/
Interstellar mission overview: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/interstellar.html
Spacecraft lifetime: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/spacecraftlife.html

UPDATE

After all that, I just realised that the NASA people haven’t actually made any official announcements yet. But they will, soon. Or they might do. Or something like that.

New Transcript – Prof. Richard Muller at Climate One

Richard Muller, Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley in the United States, is an interesting and controversial figure in the climate debate, and has been in the news quite a lot, in recent years. On this YouTube video, he is being interviewed by Greg Dalton of Climate One, and I’ve transcribed the entire session here.

In some sections of the activist press, such as MSNBC, Prof. Muller is framed, simplistically, as a “climate change denier” who was funded by the evil Koch Brothers to study the Earth’s surface temperature records, and as a result recently underwent a Damascene conversion when he realised that the planet has actually warmed, renouncing his earlier denierhood (is that a real word?) and joining the forces of light and reason. A triumph!

The reality – to anyone who has been following the debate closely, and has more than an ounce of native intelligence – is rather more nuanced.

In the Climate One interview and Q&A, Richard Muller has plenty to say, and not much of it sounds very encouraging for those who are calling (in effect) for the West’s economies to be sacrificed on the altar of CO2 mitigation.

On the infamous Hockey Stick Graph, Michael Mann and the Medieval Warm Period:

What was compelling about what he had done was that he had argued that the signal went back a thousand years. That was shown invalid by the National Academy study. And that it was evident in a wide range of world data. In fact, what had been discovered was that the Hockey Stick that Michael Mann did was derived almost entirely from a few tree ring datasets that were from North America. So, basically, the end of the National Academy study – although it was kind on Mr. Mann – it said that none of the new things that he had come up with his papers in 1998, 1999 – none of them proved out to be correct.

He takes a few swipes at electric cars:

A typical automobile in the United States costs 10 cents per mile to drive, mostly gasoline. The electric cars – the Volt, the Chevrolet Volt, the Nissan Leaf – they cost between 50 cents and 70 cents per mile to drive, when you include the fact that the batteries are only good for 500 recharges. So you don’t save any money.

We have to take actions that will be meaningful in China. Building Tesla automobiles is not a leadership step. They will never be adopted in China.

And at Al Gore:

Back when I first saw An Inconvenient Truth, I predicted that people would discover that most of what is in that movie is either misleading or wrong. And when they discover that, people are deeply offended, and they overreact. I mean, the fact is climate change is a serious problem, but they were oversold with distortions and exaggerations.

And at the insurance industry, who know which side their bread is buttered on (both sides, actually!), and have positioned themselves to benefit handsomely, whatever happens to the climate:

Not that climate change is good but that the perception of climate change is good. You get people to insure against climate change, and then they make more money. That’s certainly true, whether or not – if the climate actually does change, they’ll make more money anyway, because they’re more things to insure. And if it doesn’t change, they make a whole lot more money.

There’s also a statement about winning over CAGW sceptics, which I find somewhat ironic:

So let’s agree on the science, but we don’t do that by consensus, we don’t do this by vote. We do this by addressing the issues raised by other people, and when you’ve addressed those issues, I find myself remarkably capable of convincing sceptics that global warming is real. Then they say “Well okay, I always accepted that. The question is how much it’s caused by humans”.

Actually, there are huge numbers of us who have always accepted that “global warming is real” but think that the important (and unanswered) question is how much it’s caused by humans. That’s been my position from about 2006 and it hasn’t been changed by BEST and their press releases.

Professor Muller’s stance is that the only meaningful action that could halt dangerous future global warming, is if China could be persuaded to convert from coal to natural gas. And when a woman in the audience asks him what the average individual could do, to alleviate global warming, his response is, basically:

In the end – no. You can’t do anything. I’m sorry – you can’t.

To sum up, here’s a bona fide physics professor, whose position is that man-made global warming will be a future danger to us all, but who also believes that:

* The famous Hockey Stick Graph is based on flawed studies.
* The IPCC produces a “policy report, affected by science” but which “doesn’t follow the standards of peer review.”
* The scientists implicated in Climategate behaved in an underhand way.
* Al Gore and others have been guilty of distortions and exaggerations.
* Electric cars may be neat, but they do nothing to mitigate climate change.
* The only thing that would make a difference is if China was converted to natural gas (which is a development that I think most CAGW sceptics would be comfortable with – or indifferent to – anyway.)
* Nothing that ordinary individuals could do would have an impact on climate change.

My summary doesn’t really do the interview justice, and I recommend that you watch the video (and read the transcript) to get the true sense of what he is saying. Then decide whether or not he is an asset to the proponents of CO2 mitigation!

But one thing I think both sides in the climate debate can agree on, whatever their feelings about the man; Professor Richard Muller is certainly not dull.

Norwich Under Water

In a recent interview with Deutsche Welle, neuroscientist Stephen Emmott talked about his play Ten Billion (about which, I will write soon) and also mentioned some of the notable weather events of the summer, including the floods in Manila.

…60 percent of Manila is currently under water. I mean, can you imagine? It’s a capital city of a very populous country – the Philippines. Can you imagine if 60 percent of London were under water, or 60 percent of Washington, D.C.? It’s just unimaginable.

It’s not unimaginable, though. If you have access to history books or the internet, and take an interest in these matters, you will know that Paris had very widespread flooding in 1910 (which I blogged about, last year.) As for the Phillipines, according to the journal Engineering News (January-June, 1913) Baguio City had a record 46 inches of rain over 24 hours in July 1911, an event which caused colossal landslides, destroyed roads and at least one bridge and caused the city to be entirely cut off from the outside world for eight days.

The trouble is, of course, there was no television and no internet in those times. Were the same events to have happened in summer 2012, there can be no doubt that people like Professor Emmott would make quick use of them in interviews to support the case that we’re currently heading for immanent climate doom. But go back in history, and you will find similar or worse events almost wherever you look.

Exactly a hundred years ago it was the turn of Norwich in England, the city where I grew up, to experience catastrophic flooding.

In Norfolk it had rained continuously for two days (Friday 23rd and Saturday 24th August 1912) and after a break for the Sabbath, the storm resumed in earnest on Monday 26th August, 7 inches of rainfall being measured over 30 hours, and many places ending up with five times the monthly average. Powerful winds caused havoc, rivers burst their banks across East Anglia, 40 bridges were destroyed, railways were blocked and the harvest was lost.

After the storm, the river Wensum burst its banks and flood water began to surge into low-lying districts of the city, forcing residents to be evacuated by boat. Here are some newspaper accounts from the time.

DAMAGE ELSEWHERE.

London 27th August. Owing to the floods, Norwich resembles an island city. The railways and telegraphs are interrupted. The flood is the greatest for a quarter of a century. Harvest fields are submerged. Many houses in Huntingdon are flooded, and the inhabitants of parts of Leicester are living in the upper stories, the lower stories being invaded by water. There have been heavy losses of stock in the Midlands.

RAIN FALLS INCESSANTLY FOR SEVENTEEN HOURS. BUSINESS AT A STANDSTILL. CITY IN DARKNESS.

London 28th August. Telegrams dated Norwich, Monday, arrived in London (ninety-eight miles distant) last night. They conveyed the information that it had rained incessantly for seventeen hours, and there were several feet of water in many of the streets, on which boats were plying. Hundreds of people had quitted their houses and taken refuge in the schools on the higher levels, where food was being conveyed to them. Business was at a standstill in the city. The rainfall for twelve hours was 6.32 inches, and it was still raining. The rising waters yesterday stopped the majority of the dynamos on which the electric lighting system is dependent, and the city was plunged into darkness. The flood-waters have washed away a portion of the high mound on which the old Norman castle stands, near the centre of the city. King’s Lynn and the East Coast resorts, Cromer, Sheringham, and Mundesley, are still isolated. A goods train fell through a viaduct which had collapsed near Fakenham, twenty-four miles north-west of Norwich. Several county railway bridges have been destroyed. Further floods are reported in Warwickshire. In the poorer quarters of Norwich yesterday the flood waters reached a depth of thirteen feet. The city is threatened with a shortage of water for domestic purposes, the waterworks pumping station being flooded and the machinery useless. The high-level reservoir contains only sufficient water for two days’ supply.

FLOODS IN ENGLAND

London, Aug 31. The damage in the city of Norwich is estimated at £100,000. The trees are infested with rats, which are taking refuge from the flood. The waters receding have left the flood gauge again visible. It has been hidden for the first time since 1614.

As the above newspaper accounts have mentioned, the floods were not limited to Norwich – they affected many areas in East Anglia and the Midlands. However, Norwich appears to have been hardest hit; four people drowned there, including a local hero – George Brodie, a fish porter – who rescued others before losing his own life.

Not far from where I was born is Cringleford Mill, situated on the River Yare, south of Norwich. During the great flood of 1912, the water rose to what has been described as unprecedented levels, inundating both the mill itself and the mill house and requiring the owner’s daughter to be rescued by boat from a first-floor window. About a mile upstream, there is an area of land, very close to the river and also perhaps threatened by the rising waters, that was then part of the Earlham Hall Estate but which later became a golf course and after that the site for a university campus, where in the 1970s a unit was formed to study the changing climate.

That university is, of course, the University of East Anglia or UEA, and the unit is the Climatic Research Unit, or CRU.

Great Balls of Steel

I haven’t watched all of Roland Emmerich’s movie 2012, about the end of the world, but I have seen some of the scarier highlights on YouTube, and the scariest of those, in my opinion, has to be the moment when a gigantic super-tsunami threatens to engulf the very peaks of the Himalayas. How would you ever escape from something like that? You’d need, of course, some sort of ship or ark – which is indeed what the people in the movie actually have, hoping to ride out the catastrophe in a number of strongly-built vessels, each large enough to hold many thousands of refugees.

Despite the summer’s latest doom-laden news about fires, heat waves, melting icecaps and now Hurricane Isaac, there’s nothing remotely as awful as Emmerich’s world-engulfing disaster on the horizon. Which is just as well, because no-one – to my knowledge, anyway – has built the sort of huge vessel that you would need in order to survive it.

However, people are building arks. Just – on a smaller scale. The latest of these to hit the news is a giant steel ball – 13 feet in diameter and painted bright yellow – built by Chinese inventor Yang Zongfu. It contains a year’s worth of food and water, three weeks’ worth of oxygen, and has room for up to three people (Adam And Eve, plus one spare?) Here on YouTube, you can witness the moment when the giant ball was rolled down a hill and into a small lake with the inventor inside. He survived unhurt (bar a slight mishap with a safety belt), although the ball itself appears to have picked up a rather impressive dent, on its way down.

If your budget won’t stretch that far – or if you only need to survive a modest catastrophe – the Japanese company Cosmopower has designed a much smaller and more basic capsule, called Noah. It’s – again – spherical and bright yellow in colour, with a diameter of 4 feet. You won’t be able to escape with much in the way of provisions – maybe a small bottle of water and a Snickers bar, if you’re lucky – and there’s no room for loved ones, pets, livestock, etc., or really anything else than just yourself. Basically, the Noah capsule would provide a very temporary refuge for one person during the sort of tsunami that hit Japan in 2011 or South-East Asia in 2004, but after a few hours that person would still be in urgent need of rescue.

There’s evidently a lot of room for development, then, in the field of spherical personal survival capsules. By the time I become a billionaire and establish my Bond-villain style mansion on a volcanic island somewhere, no doubt Mr Yang Zongfu will have perfected his Noah’s Ark Mk.10 and I’ll be in a position to order a dozen of them for myself and my entourage. We will then be able to weather the catastrophe in style, and perhaps repopulate the Earth later, if we feel like it.

Mind you, if the world is going to end in 2012, we’ve all clearly left it a bit too late to be planning anything like that.

The Passing of a Quiet Hero

It was saddening to hear of the death of Neil Armstrong on Saturday, at 82 and following complications after heart surgery. He was a genuine hero – unassuming, quiet, never seeking the limelight – yet he was the one who piloted the Apollo 11 Lunar Module to a safe landing on the Moon on 20th July 1969, with a sensor telling the astronauts they were low on fuel and in conditions where an error could easily have led to certain death.

Later this century, when much of the Moon will have probably become a vast industrial park, I think at least one acre or so of regolith should be kept as it was when the Eagle landed there on that long-ago July day, as a memorial to Armstrong and the other Apollo astronauts. It ought to be on every serious visitor’s itinerary when they touch down on Luna, perhaps on their way to far more remote destinations.

Neil Armstrong was the first human to set foot on another world. He was thus – and will be, forever – unique. RIP.

The Spaceplane – Still Early Days

One of my childhood treasures is a slim book called Inside Information on Space Travel, which was published in 1970 and has cutaway diagrams of various spacecraft, from Sputnik 1 forward in time – via Black Arrow, communications satellites and Apollo – to the Space Shuttle (or a rather oddly-shaped Shuttle as it was envisaged in those days, before it became a reality.) The final page has a picture of a futuristic, sleek-looking spacecraft, accompanied by the following text:

WHAT OF THE FUTURE? A space liner like this will shuttle passengers between earth and orbiting space stations in the late 1970′s. It will be a combination of aircraft and space ship and will be able to take-off and return to land-based space ports.

Maybe there is an alternative dimension where space liners actually did start to operate in the late 1970s, but not in this particular universe, sadly. However, spaceplanes are on the drawing board and a technology that might power them was tested to destruction again last week. A scramjet could propel a vehicle up into Earth orbit, as an air-breathing engine of this kind is theoretically capable of providing the sheer power needed to climb up and out of the planet’s gravity well, and the U.S. military carried out its latest attempt to fly a prototype, over the sea off Southern California last Tuesday.

This trial, like the others before it, ended in failure, when the machine – the hypersonic X-51A “Waverider” – crashed into the ocean, due to a faulty control fin, before the scramjet engine could even be ignited. So it’s really still early days, and we won’t be able to ride in comfort up to space or across to a distant continent in one of those, to the music of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz (one of my favourite moments from 2001: A Space Odyssey) for some years yet.

Spaceplanes are taking shape, though – on paper and on computer screens. One promising (and British!) example is the Skylon, which is a hydrogen powered spaceplane that could take off from a conventional runway; the SABRE engine powering this vehicle would be an air-breather, technically not a scramjet but a kind of jet/rocket combination.

The Skylon remains a wonderful idea, but at the moment only the military appear to be actually building and testing anything similar, and their motivation, as you’d imagine, has to do with war and the capability of delivering some sort of explosive payload anywhere on the planet within minutes of launching.

However, military technology has a habit of trickling down to the rest of us, given time. The jet engine is an example of this, of course – swiftly developed during World War II (although the concept and early development of the jet engine pre-dates the war), but now powering civilian airliners across the globe, 24/7. And so is the internet. Eventually, something of the sort will be available for the likes of you and me – and even if there is no space station for us to rendezvous with, there’s always the promise of being able to hop from London over to Sydney, or Tokyo or Honolulu in a couple of hours. It would probably be very expensive but you might even be able to commute!