Category: Sciency Words

Sciency Words A to Z: The Drake Equation

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

Welcome to a special A to Z Challenge edition of Sciency Words!  Sciency Words is an ongoing series here on Planet Pailly about the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms.  In today’s post, D is for:

THE DRAKE EQUATION

In 1961, American astronomer Frank Drake proved that alien life exists.  He didn’t do this with a telescope or by analyzing a Martian meteorite. No, Frank Drake proved it with math, pure and simple.  Or at least that’s the impression some people seem to get when they first hear about the Drake equation.

The Drake equation was first presented in 1961 at a conference held at the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. Only ten people were in the audience when Drake gave his presentation (one of those ten people, by the way, was a young Carl Sagan).  And the topic to be discussed at this conference: a new and highly controversial idea called SETI.

In this article from Universe Today, Drake is quoted explaining what inspired his equation:

As I planned the meeting, I realized a few day[s] ahead of time we needed an agenda. And so I wrote down all the things you needed to know to predict how hard it’s going to be to detect extraterrestrial life.  And looking at them it became pretty evident that if you multiplied all these together, you got a number, N, which is the number of detectable civilizations in our galaxy.

After reading All These Worlds Are Yours by Jon Willis, I’ve come to think of the Drake equation as a to-do list for astrobiologists.

N = R* · fp · ne · fl · fi · fc · L
  • Figure out how many stars are born in our galaxy per year (R*).
  • Figure out how many of those stars have planets (fp).
  • Figure out how many of those planets could support life (ne).
  • Figure out how many planets that could support life actually do (fl).
  • Figure out how often life evolves into intelligent life (fi).
  • Figure out how often intelligent life develops radio communications that we could detect (fc).
  • Figure out how long the average intelligent civilization keeps its radio equipment working (L).

Like I said, it’s a to-do list.  It’s presented in the form of an equation because… well, you know… scientists.

At this point, we have a pretty good feel for the first two variables in the Drake equation.  As stated in this article from Astronomy Magazine, 1.5 to 3 new stars are born per year in our galaxy, and each star has at least one planet, on average.  Current and upcoming missions should start to pin down real numbers for the number of planets that could potentially support life.

Beyond that, those questions do get progressively harder, but astrobiologists are steadily working their way down their to-do list—or rather, they’re working their way through the equation, starting from the left and heading to the right.  Answers are coming, slowly but surely.

Next time on Sciency Words A to Z, when astrobiologists talk about Earth-like planets, what exactly does that mean?

Sciency Words A to Z: Carbon Chauvinism

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 15 Comments

Welcome to a special A to Z Challenge edition of Sciency Words!  Sciency Words is an ongoing series here on Planet Pailly about the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms.  In today’s post, C is for:

CARBON CHAUVINISM

According to legend, Nicolas Chauvin was a French soldier during the Napoleonic Wars.  He’s described as being boastfully patriotic and doggedly loyal to Napoleon even long after Napoleon was defeated.  He was basically a joke, a caricature of a Napoleon supporter in a post-Napoleonic Europe.  And it is from Nicolas Chauvin’s name that we get the word chauvinism.

Carbon chauvinism is a term coined by Carl Sagan.  It refers to a common attitude among scientists that carbon-based life is the only kind of life that’s possible in our universe.  There are other kinds of chauvinism that the science of astrobiology has to contend with (just you wait until we get to the letter R), but carbon chauvinism is the big one, followed closely by water chauvinism.

In this 1973 interview with Rolling Stone, Sagan had this to say:

There’s carbon chauvinism, water chauvinism—you know, people who say that life elsewhere can only be based on the same chemical assumptions as we are.  Well, maybe that’s right.  But because the guys making that statement are based on carbon and water, I’m a little suspicious.

And yet despite Sagan’s little suspicions, he goes on to say in that same interview that he is a carbon chauvinist himself. And I have to admit, so am I. Carbon chauvinism is the one and only chauvinism I know of that seems to be justified.  As Sagan says:

Having gone through the alternative possibilities, I find that carbon is much better suited for making complex molecules, and much more abundant than the other things that you might think of.

Silicon is often suggested as a possible alternative to carbon, and silicon-based life forms are everywhere in science fiction. Carbon and silicon do have a great deal in common, chemically speaking.  But where carbon-based molecules are nice and wiggly—perfectly suited for all the wiggly activities of life—silicon-based molecules tend to be inflexible and kind of brittle.

So if you want to be a rock, silicon’s great! But if you want to be a life form, it’s hard to imagine why you would choose to base your biochemistry on silicon rather than carbon—carbon’s just objectively better in every way!

But then again, I am one of those people Sagan was talking about: one of those guys based on carbon.  Maybe you should be a little bit suspicious of my biases.

Next time on Sciency Words A to Z, let’s count our aliens before they’ve hatched, so to speak.  Exactly how many alien civilizations do we expect to find out there?

#IWSG: Can You Trust Me?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 11 Comments

Welcome to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group!  If you’re a writer, and if you feel in any way insecure about your writing life, click here to learn more about this awesome group!

So what am I feeling insecure about this month?  Well, I’m doing the A to Z Challenge.  To be honest, I’m not too worried about finishing it.  I’ve done A to Z before, and this year I feel like I’m well prepared for what’s coming.

But I do feel insecure about the theme I picked: astrobiology, one of the newest and awesome-est branches of science.  But here’s the thing: I’m no astrobiologist. I’m no scientist.  What authority do I have to talk about this stuff?

You see there’s a lot of misinformation out there about the search for alien life.  A lot of the actual science gets misreported in the popular press or coopted as “proof” by U.F.O. conspiracy theorists.  So I really, really, really do not want to spread any of that misinformation around.

Recently, I saw something that kind of surprised me: a bunch of well respected educational channels on YouTube have posted videos admitting their mistakes and promising to do better in the future. This one from Adam Ruins Everything is my favorite.

I don’t have the kind of research team behind me that Adam Ruins Everything has, or that Kurzgesagt has, or that SciShow has.  It’s just me.  I do a lot of reading, and I fact check myself as best I can; but even so, you probably shouldn’t trust everything you read on this blog.

But you can trust this: I love space, and I love science. I think the reality of our universe, as revealed to us by science, is way more interesting than anything our human imaginations might dream up.  And I’m really excited to share all the cool science stuff I’ve learned with you.

At the same time, I’m also eager to keep learning.  So if I make a mistake, or if there’s some important point you think I’ve missed, or some perspective you feel I’m overlooking, I absolutely do want to talk about that in the comments.

And now, I have more A to Z Challenge stuff to work on. In today’s A to Z post, C is for carbon chauvinism.

Sciency Words A to Z: B.S.O.

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 11 Comments

Welcome to a special A to Z Challenge edition of Sciency Words!  Sciency Words is an ongoing series here on Planet Pailly about the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms.  In today’s post, B is for:

B.S.O.

When you study the planets, when you really get to know them well, you soon start to feel like they each have their own unique personalities.  Jupiter is kind of a bully, pushing all the little asteroids around with its gravity.  Venus hates you, and if you try to land on her she will kill you a dozen different ways before you touch the ground. And Mars… I can’t help but feel like Mars is kind of jealous of Earth.

I get the sense that Mars wishes it could be just like Earth, and that Mars is trying its best to prove that it has all the same stuff Earth has.

In 1996, Mars almost had us convinced. A team of NASA scientists led by astrobiologist David McKay announced that they’d found evidence of Martian life.

As reported in this paper, McKay and his colleagues found microscopic structures (among other things) within a Martian meteorite known as ALH84001.  They interpreted those structures to be the fossilized remains of Martian microorganisms.

This was a truly extraordinary claim, but as Carl Sagan famously warned: “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Or to put that another way, when it comes to the discovery of alien life, astrobiologists must hold themselves and each other to the same standards as a court of law: proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

In follow-up research, those supposed Martian fossils came to be known as bacteria shaped objects, or B.S.O.s for short.  I kind of wonder if somebody was being a bit cheeky with that term. I wonder if someone was trying to say, in a subtle but clever way, that the whole Martian microbe hypothesis was just B.S.  As this rebuttal paper explains:

Subsequent work has not validated [McKay et al’s] hypothesis; each suggested biomarker has been found to be ambiguous or immaterial.  Nor has their hypothesis been disproved.  Rather, it is now one of several competing hypotheses about the post-magmatic and alteration history of ALH84001.

In other words, those B.S.O.s might very well be fossilized Martian microorganisms.  Yes, they might be.  It is possible.  But no one has been able to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, and therefore no one can say with any certainty that we’ve found evidence of life on Mars. At least not yet.

Still, the ALH84001 meteorite and its B.S.O.s are an important part of the history of astrobiology.  As that same rebuttal paper says:

[…] it will be remembered for (if nothing else) its galvanizing effect on planetary science.  McKay et al. revitalized study of the martian meteorites and the long-ignored ideas of indigenous life on Mars.  It has brought immediacy to the problem of recognizing extraterrestrial life, and thus materially affected preparations for spacecraft missions to return rock and soil samples from Mars.

Next time on Sciency Words A to Z, are we prejudiced against non-carbon-based life?

Sciency Words A to Z: Astrobiology

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 22 Comments

Welcome to a special A to Z Challenge edition of Sciency Words!  Sciency Words is an ongoing series here on Planet Pailly about the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms.  In today’s post, A is for:

ASTROBIOLOGY

If you’ve ever looked up at the night sky and asked yourself if someone or something might be out there gazing back at you, you’re not alone.  Lot’s of people wonder about that.  Some of those people are scientists—a very special kind of scientist called an astrobiologist.  And those astrobiologists are busily working to find an answer.

In my previous A to Z Challenge, we looked at a lot of scientific terms that don’t quite make sense, like this one or this one. Scientists aren’t always the best at naming things.  Astrobiology is yet another term that people sometimes complain about, because based on a strict translation of the Greek root words, astrobiology should mean the study of life on stars.

And that’s absurd.  Nobody expects to find life on or inside of a star.  Rather, astrobiologists are looking for life on planets and moons, and perhaps also asteroids and comets.  And maybe interstellar dust particles.  But not stars.  Definitely not stars!

To quote from All There Worlds are Yours by Canadian astronomer Jon Willis:

The science of astrobiology has three main goals: to understand the conditions necessary for life on Earth (and perhaps the conditions required by life in general), to look for locations in the universe which supply these conditions, and, finally, to detect life in these locations.

The word astrobiology was coined in 1953 by Russian astronomer Gavriil Adrianovich Tikhov, who’s described in this paper from Interdisciplinary Science Reviews as “an unusual beacon of scientific individualism in a sea of Soviet imposed conformity.”

According to that same paper, the term didn’t really catch on in the West until the 1990’s.  The establishment of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute in 1998 seems to have been a key turning point in the history of this word (prior to that, the scientific search for alien life was generally known as exobiology).

Next time on Sciency Words A to Z, we’ll find out what happened in the 1990’s that made NASA so keen to set up its own Astrobiology Institute.  Until then, keep looking up, and keep wondering!

Sciency Words: Sciency Words

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 6 Comments

Sciency Words: (proper noun) a special series here on Planet Pailly focusing on the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms.  Today’s Sciency Word is:

SCIENCY WORDS

Yeah, that’s right.  I’m declaring that Sciency Words is itself a Sciency Word.  It is a science-related term, after all!

Seeing as we’re about to embark on a full twenty-six episodes of Sciency Words for this year’s A to Z Challenge, I figured this is a good time to talk about why this series exists and why I think it matters.  You see, I’m a science fiction writer, and I started writing this blog as a way of teaching myself about science.  And the #1 problem I had right from the start was learning the vocabulary.

And it seems I’m not the only one who struggles with that. In fact, according to this paper from the Journal of Research in Science Teaching, understanding the “discursive practices of science” is the biggest obstacle high school science students have to overcome.  One student is quoted in that paper saying, “Science has its own little slang to it.”  And as another student said, “[Scientists] communicate with their own different words and it’s, well to me, it’s hard to like to use their words cause they’re big.”

So why do scientists insist on using such big, confusing words?  Why can’t they use plain English so that everybody can understand what they’re saying?  It is not because scientists want to make themselves sound smart or to make other people feel stupid (at least that’s not always the case).  The problem with plain English (or plain whatever language you prefer) is that it can be a little ambiguous.

Couldn’t you just say random instead of stochastic? Couldn’t you say wobble instead of libration?  Couldn’t you say forward and backward instead of prograde and retrograde?  Well, no, in some contexts those words really aren’t synonymous.  Those Sciency Words mean something a little more precise than their plain language “equivalents,” and that linguistic precision is really important if you’re trying to explain complex scientific concepts.

So for me, in my ongoing research journey, there’s really no way around it.  I have to learn the vocabulary, and thus the vocabulary has become a big part of this blog.  Because using simple words can lead to oversimplified—and woefully inaccurate—science, as I often see in the popular press.  There’s a quote that’s often attributed to Albert Einstein which I think applies here: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”  Or as one of the students interviewed for that Research in Science Teaching paper said, “It isn’t no slang that can be said about this stuff.”

Sciency Words: The Sagan Effect

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 10 Comments

Sciency Words: (proper noun) a special series here on Planet Pailly focusing on the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms.  Today’s Sciency Word is:

THE SAGAN EFFECT

This year’s A to Z Challenge is fast approaching. I’ve already revealed my theme: Sciency Words, specifically scientific terms related to the search for alien life.  And with that theme in mind, there’s one person whom I expect we’ll be talking about a lot: Carl Sagan.

Sagan deserves a lot of credit for making astrobiology a respected branch of modern science, and he invented some of the scientific terms we’ll be talking about next month.  But Sagan himself was not as well respected by his peers as he should have been.

Why not?  Because he wrote too many books.  Because he was on television all the time, giving interviews, hosting his own T.V. show, and waxing poetic about our place in the universe.

Apparently that led to a perception among the scientific community that Sagan must not be spending much time doing actual scientific research.  As a direct consequence of that perception, Sagan was denied membership to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and it’s widely believed that this is also why he was denied tenure at Harvard.

And Sagan is not the only working scientist to suffer from what is now known as the Sagan Effect.  As described in this article from the Journal of Neuroscience, quite a few researchers have lost grant money or been reprimanded by their supervisors or faced other career-derailing consequences simply for giving a TED Talk or having too many followers on Twitter or writing a few articles for popular science magazines.

This despite the fact that there is a growing awareness in the scientific community that scientists do need to engage with the public. To quote from that same article from Neuroscience:

Most scientists agree that science communication is important, and some even say that it is a scientist’s duty to interact with the media and the tax-paying public.  Yet, the concern remains that science dissemination may be incompatible with a successful academic career, particularly if the scientist is a junior or pretenture investigator.

So it would seem that if you’re a scientist and you want to engage with the public, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

The frustrating thing is that Carl Sagan was no slacker when it came to science.  The oft cited statistic is that he produced, on average, one peer-reviewed paper per month.  All that work he did to popularize science was on top of his regular workload as a scientist, not instead of it.

And the same could be said of many “popularizers” today, according to this paper titled “Scientists who engage with society perform better academically.”  Yes, the scientific community has been researching itself, and the evidence shows that scientists who engage with the public do not slack off with their regular work.  Quite the opposite: they outperform their less publically engaged colleagues!

Even so, the Sagan Effect remains in play. Scientists seem to have embraced certain stereotypes about themselves, and, quoting again from this Neuroscience article, “deviating too much from the idealized image of the single-minded, focused academic is still considered problematic.”  But I think it’s time we all let that stereotype go, because if you’re a working scientist today you can do your research AND help inspire the next generation of scientists (and give people like me ideas for cool Sci-Fi stories)—just like Carl Sagan did!

Sciency Words: A to Z Theme Reveal

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 14 Comments

Hello, Internet friends, and a very special hello to those of you who will, I hope, become new Internet friends!  Today I’m revealing my theme for this year’s A to Z Challenge, and that theme will be Sciency Words.  Specifically, I want to talk about scientific terms related to the search for and study of alien life.

Now before we go any further, I want to make one thing clear: when I talk about the search for alien life, I am not talking about this guy:

No, I’m talking about legitimate scientists doing legitimate scientific research.  No conspiracy theories, no pseudoscience.  The search for alien life is part of a relatively young branch of science that was originally called exobiology and was later renamed astrobiology.

Now some of you may be thinking there’s a problem.  As American biologist and paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson said in 1966, “[…] this ‘science’ has yet to demonstrate that its subject matter exists!”  That’s not an unfair criticism.  We have yet to discover a single alien organism for astrobiologists to study.  Not one.  And as of yet, we have no credible evidence that there are any alien organisms out there to study at all.

Yet astrobiologists already have a lot of work to do trying to answer what might be called preliminary questions.  Questions like:

  • Where might alien life be hiding?
  • What should we be doing to find it?
  • How will we know we’ve found it, assuming we ever do?

That last question may be the toughest of all. At the moment, we only know about life here on Earth.  Aliens might turn out to be so biochemically dissimilar from us that we might not even recognize them as alive!

So starting on April 1st, I hope you’ll join me on this adventure into space.  Hopefully we’ll all learn something about the universe, and about the kinds of life that might be living in it. Or at least I hope we can all expand our scientific vocabularies together!

P.S.: I did a lot of writing for this ahead of time, so fingers crossed that astrobiologists do not announce the discovery of alien life before the end of April.  If they do, it’s going to be a nightmare for me to rewrite all this stuff!

Sciency Words: Exotheology

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 8 Comments

Sciency Words: (proper noun) a special series here on Planet Pailly focusing on the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms.  Today’s Sciency Word is:

EXOTHEOLOGY

I was raised Catholic.  I went to Catholic school, and when I was very young I remember a religious instructor telling a group of us Catholic boys about how God made “all life on the earth.”  Naturally, I raised my hand and asked about life on other planets.  The instructor assured me (rather impatiently, as I recall) that there is no such thing.

This was not a satisfying answer for little me. It’s even more annoying to adult me.  So it was with great delight that I recently became acquainted with a new term: exotheology.

Appropriately, my first encounter with this word was in a book called Exoplanets, by Michael Summers and James Trefil. The “exo-” prefix in both “exoplanet” and “exotheology” means pretty much the same thing: something external to Earth or to our Solar System.  To quote from Exoplanets:

If there are living beings on other planets, questions—debated today in the relatively new field called exotheology—must be asked.  For example, did the Fall occur on every planet and for every race?  If it didn’t, was the Redemption needed for beings who had never experienced the Fall?  If the Fall is universal, did Jesus have to go to every world to die and be resurrected, or were the events on Earth enough to cover everyone?  If so, why is Earth so central?  Are there other paths to redemption on other worlds?  It’s not hard to see how this sort of theological questioning could go on forever.

Indeed it could.  No wonder that religion teacher didn’t want to get into this discussion with me when I was little!

Based on my subsequent research, it seems the term exotheology isn’t that new.  And lest you think this is a Christian only thing, it’s actually a Jewish rabbi who gets credit for the first usage of the term (or at least the first usage in print).

In 1965, Rabbi Norman Lamm wrote this essay entitled “The Religious Implications of Extraterrestrial Life: A Jewish Exotheology.”  Based on what I could read of Lamm’s essay, it sounds like the term “exotheology” was formed by analogy with “exobiology,” the scientific search for and study of alien life.  The word exobiology has since been changed to astrobiology, but it doesn’t seem like exotheology has been updated to astrotheology yet.

As for the big questions raised by exotheologists, I guess we’ll have to wait and see.  If we ever do encounter an alien civilization, what sort of religious beliefs might they have?  Would those beliefs match up at all with a Judeo-Christian worldview, or with any of the many other religious worldviews we have here on Earth?  I don’t know (but that won’t stop me from writing a Sci-Fi story about it!).

Sciency Words: Yehudi Lights (The First Cloaking Device)

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 3 Comments

Sciency Words: (proper noun) a special series here on Planet Pailly focusing on the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms.  Today’s Sciency Word is:

YEHUDI LIGHTS

Last week, we talked about cloaking devices, a term and a concept that were invented by the writers of Star Trek.  But in fact, during World War II the U.S. military conducted experiments that rendered aircraft virtually invisible.  The technology came to be known as the Yehudi lights.

Yehudi Menuhin was a well-known Jewish violinist at the time.  There ended up being a running joke about him on Bob Hope’s radio show, spawning popular (and very annoying) songs like this one:

Basically, Yehudi became the name for some mysterious person whom no one could seem to find.  In this declassified military document, he’s referred to as “the little man who wasn’t there.”  This is offered as an explanation for why the Yehudi lights got their name.

Essentially, the Yehudi lights were an optical illusion. To quote from that same declassified document:

It is known from data on the visual acuity of the human eye that, at a distance of two miles, individual lights are indistinguishable as such, if their spacing is less than about four feet.

So by mounting lights on the wings and forward fuselage of an aircraft, and matching the color temperature of those lights to the surrounding sky, and flying the aircraft in just the right way relative to an observer, you could create the illusion of invisibility.  At least from a distance.  But by the time you got close enough to an enemy target that the enemy could see you, it was probably too late for the enemy to do much about it.

Getting back to the Star Trek  universe, there is a constant “arms race” going on over cloaking technology.  The Federation keeps figuring out new ways to detect cloaked ships; the Romulans and Klingons keep figuring out ways to make their cloaked ships undetectable again.  No one ever seems to hold the advantage for long.

As Mr. Spock says about the latest Romulan cloaking device: “Military secrets are the most fleeting of all.”  The same could be said about the Yehudi lights. They worked well enough, but only for a brief while.  Then RADAR came along, and the Yehudi lights became basically useless.