Jupiter as a procrastination tool

Many of us who live in Seattle and who have somehow developed an interest in amateur observational astronomy anyway, despite the city’s persistent cloud cover, have come to see squandering a rare cloudless night as the eighth deadly sin. Personally, I think it’s worse than most of the others, except maybe wrath.

Jupiter tempts otherwise hard-working book reviewers to drag
 the telescope out of the basement for a look on rare clear nights
 in Seattle. This photo is a Cassini shot of the King of Planets.
 The black dot is the shadow of Europa. Photo: NASA.

Thus was created a major moral dilemma this evening. Earlier in the day I finished reading a book about which I’m writing a review for Arches, the alumni magazine at the University of Puget Sound. (Some of my articles for the mag have actually been about space and astronomy.) I’d finished going through my notes and sketching out an outline for the review, which I’d planned to write this evening. I emerged from my basement office around 6:30 for a walk to the grocery for provisions for tonight’s dinner. Lo and behold, the clouds had mostly cleared, it was already good and dark, and there was a lovely crescent Moon out with Jupiter shining as a beacon, high in the southeast sky.

How is a person supposed to write a book review under such adverse conditions?

I had about 40 minutes to weigh the options, about the time it takes to walk to the store, pick out a good steak, find a nice cheese for the appetizer, check out, and walk home. Stick to my guns and write the review? Or put it off until tomorrow, when Jupiter won’t be such a temptation. And maybe I should write a blog post about this deep inner conversation with myself.

This did not turn out to be a difficult choice. As I type this, the telescope is cooling down out back on the deck, an already chilled martini sits on my desk next to the computer, the potatoes are baking in the oven, and after dinner I’ll bundle up and watch the fascinating clockwork of Jupiter’s moons and see how much detail I can tease out in the belts and bands of the King of Planets.

Interestingly enough, even the slightest notion of clear nights gets the interwebs all abuzz around these parts. The promising forecast for the weekend has the Seattle Astronomical Society Google group gearing up for an event that seems more rare than an asteroid passing by Earth with the distance of the Moon’s orbit: a monthly public star party that ISN’T cancelled because of weather. The society has these scheduled into perpetuity—every Saturday nearest the first quarter moon. I would guess that only a handful each year actually happen. Club members have grown so pessimistic about star party weather that most volunteers routinely schedule normal Saturday night stuff, movies and dates, and if it’s clear outside baffled members of the public show up and the outreach isn’t reaching out.

The star parties are on the docket for this weekend, at Green Lake and Paramount Park. We’ll see if the weather holds. If it rains, maybe I’ll write some book reviews.

Battling the giggle factor in the search for extraterrestrialintelligence

Dr. Bernard Bates is fascinated by the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but acknowledges there’s a certain “giggle factor” about the endeavor even as 21st-Century observatories discover planets in orbit around faraway stars on an almost daily basis. Bates, astronomy instructor at the University of Puget Sound, gave an informative and humorous talk this week titled, “The Quiet Sky: Searching for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” The event at the Swiss Pub in Tacoma was part of the Science Café series presented by the Pacific Science Center and KCTS9 television.

SETI is listening, but is anyone talking?

Surely part of the giggle factor comes from a half century of listening for electromagnetic transmissions from ET without hearing a peep. Bates said as technology improves so does the hunt, and suggests we give it another 40 years or so.

“If Moore’s law [about rapidly doubling computer power at lower cost] continues, if we don’t stumble upon someone by 2050, we’ve done something wrong,” he said.

That something could be in the design of the experiment.

“The worst assumption we made was that somebody is out there transmitting,” Bates said. “Someone would have to come up with funding on another planet to just send out signals for no apparent reason for a long time.”

Perhaps cash-strapped governments in other systems decided it was cheaper to just listen. Earthlings, on the other hand, have been broadcasting for a little over a century, and the original transmissions of Gilligan’s Island are now crackling out near Theta Boötes. Bates said if we were out there we would figure it out.

“We are really good at what we do. With the technology we have right now, we could find ourselves a quarter of the way across the galaxy,” he said.

It has been 50 years since Frank Drake cooked up the equation which now bears his name as a device for thinking about the factors that affect the chances of intelligent, radio-beaming civilizations appearing around the galaxy. In 1961 all we had for the seven variables were wild guesses. But now we have a pretty good idea about the astronomical variables: the rate of star formation, the fraction of stars with planetary systems, and the number of planets in each system that could support life. That part of the Drake equation suggests there should be 10 civilizations in the galaxy that are emitting electromagnetic signals. Bates said we’re still a little fuzzy on the rest of the variables.

“All of those cannot be incredibly small probabilities, because we’re here,” he noted, so the final answer has to be at least one. “But we just don’t know. Each of those variables represents an area of active research in different disciplines.”

Why all the fuss about SETI? Bates said his nine-year-old daughter drove the point home when she observed recently that she never sees two of anything. There is either just one, or there are many. Bates thinks that may go for extraterrestrial life, too.

“If we find a second genesis within the solar system that means there are probably a lot of them,” he said. “It’s hard to believe that there would only be two examples of life originating in the entire galaxy.”

Bates thinks most of the people working in the field believe there is at least simple life out there.

“It’s complex life that is hard,” he said. “Intelligence might be something that is so rare or so hard to come by that it never appeared again. There might be so many little accidents that had to happen in order for intelligent life to appear that we’re just it.”

Bates thinks we should keep at it, even if we don’t have a clear signal from another civilization by 2050.

“In the end, the worst that could happen is that we just give up and say, ‘OK we’re it. There’s no one else out there to talk to.’”

You can view the entire talk by Bates on the KCTS9 website.

Sobel talks about A More Perfect Heaven

Just as the solar-system-changing work On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres by Nicolaus Copernicus took more than 30 years to get from its first writing to actual publication, Dava Sobel’s new book about Copernicus, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos has been in the works for a while.

“I’ve been dreaming of writing a play about Copernicus for a long time,” Sobel said during a talk at Town Hall Seattle Wednesday. “Actually since 1973. That was the 500th anniversary year of his birth. I remember reading an article in Sky & Telescope—I still have the issue with his picture on the cover—and it told this wonderful story about how Copernicus had come up with this idea of reordering the heavens.”

Sobel related that Copernicus had laid out the basics of his heliocentric model of the solar system, written about it to other scientists, and said that he was at work on a big book that would explain everything. Decades went by, however, and the book never appeared.

“Toward the end of his life a young genius arrived and talked him into publishing,” Sobel said. “I remember thinking, ‘That must have been some conversation.’”

The “young genius” was German mathematician Georg Joachim Rheticus, who had come to Poland to study under Copernicus, and Sobel’s imagined conversations between the two form the basis of her play around which A More Perfect Heaven is written.

Religious politics of the time made the pairing especially unlikely. Copernicus, in addition to being an astronomer, math whiz, doctor, lawyer, economist, and diplomat, was a cleric in the Catholic Church—his uncle was the local bishop. Feeling the pinch of the burgeoning Protestant Reformation, the local diocese had evicted all Lutherans from the area. Rheticus was as Lutheran as they come, a student of Philipp Melanchthon and a professor at Martin Luther’s University of Wittenberg. His study with Copernicus had to be a covert operation.

Rheticus turned up on Copernicus’s doorstep in May of 1539. On the Revolutions finally hit print in 1543. Copernicus died shortly thereafter. He never knew the praise it received or the controversy it stirred up.

“They printed that book which changed the way people thought about the structure of the universe at a time when people thought you couldn’t discover things about astronomy of that magnitude,” Sobel said. “The only way you could know those kinds of things was by divine revelation. That book got Galileo in trouble.”

Interestingly, Sobel noted that On the Revolutions was never actually banned. The church could hardly burn it after using it to make the calendar more accurate and preventing Easter from slipping into summer. The book instead was listed on the Index of Forbidden Books as “suspended until corrected.” Recent studies of still-existing copies have found that few owners wrote those corrections into their volumes.

Sobel said the play within the book has received mixed reactions from readers.

“There have been some reviews that really liked the idea,” she said. “Some people have found the play the best part of the book. Others have said, ‘The book is really good. What is that nonsense doing in the middle?’”

Wednesday’s reading featured a staged performace of parts of the play by two outstanding Seattle actors, Hans Altweis and Darragh Kennan. The reading was well received by the audience, as Sobel said it has been on the few occasions they’ve done such a performance.

“When people can experience the play as you have tonight you can see what how it might add to an appreciation for Copernicus,” she said.

It’s difficult to overstate his impact. As Sobel read from the conclusion of A More Perfect Heaven:
“Every time the Kepler spacecraft currently in orbit detects a new exoplanet around a star beyond the Sun, another ripple of the Copernican Revolution reverberates through space.”