Planet Pailly

After almost a full month off, I’m ready to get back to regular blogging.  I needed the time off to fix a badly broken manuscript.  It’s been dull, tedious work, and there’s still more dull and tedious work to be done.

But I’m making progress.  The revised manuscript is coming together nicely, I think. Lessons have been learned. Improvements have been made, and a lot of superfluous text has been cut.  I’m confident that, in the end, everything will turn out okay.

Also during my time off:

• It turned out there was still one last real life problem that needed to be punched in the face. That’s now taken care of.
• I spent a lot of time re-reading some old favorite novels and re-watching some old episodes of Star Trek—the kind of stuff that inspires me to keep writing.
• I also spent a lot of time having long, difficult conversations with friends about my writing. Why did I get into writing in the first place?  Do I really want to keep doing this?  These sorts of questions were a lot harder to answer than I would have expected.
• I had a paracosmic experience involving my muse, but I’ll save that for Wednesday’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

But the most important thing, at least in relation to this blog, is that I managed to catch up on some of my research. There’s a lot of cool space stuff I want to talk about.  We’ll start digging into that in Friday’s episode of Sciency Words.

Stay tuned!

I have decided, reluctantly, that I need to take some time off of regular blogging. There’s just too much work I need to do with my manuscript.  But I promise I will be back as soon as I can.  There is, after all, some exciting Mars news that just came out, and I’m eager to dig into the research behind the headlines.

Today’s post is part of a bi-weekly series here on Planet Pailly called Molecular Mondays, where we take a closer look at the atoms and molecules that make up our physical universe, both in reality and in science fiction.

Imagine you’re a traveler in space, living in a time two or three centuries hence, engaging in the trade of resources between Earth, the Moon, Mars, and the asteroid belt.  What is the rarest and most precious resource necessary for your survival out there?

You might think it’s oxygen, or perhaps water.  Those are difficult resources to find in space, but not that difficult.  A surprising number of asteroids do, in fact, have a surprising amount of frozen water on them or inside them.  And if you can get water, you can easily split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen through the magic of electrolysis.

No, of all the resources you absolutely must have to stay alive, the hardest one to find out there may actually be nitrogen.  I first read about this nitrogen problem in a book called Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy, which says:

Nitrogen presents a more significant problem [than other essential resources]. Because of the great stability and high volatility of molecular nitrogen, it is poorly retained by solid minerals and poorly represented in meteorites.

Volatility, in this context, refers to the tendency of a chemical substance to turn itself into a gas. Planets and moons and asteroids (especially asteroids) have a really tough time holding onto volatile chemicals, also referred to as “volatiles.”  And the closer a celestial body happens to be to the Sun, the more likely it is to lose its volatiles to the solar wind.

Your best bet for finding nitrogen in space would be the carbonaceous asteroids that tend to be found in the outer reaches of the asteroid belt.  They’re a little bit farther from the Sun, and therefore have held on to their volatiles a little bit better.  These carbonaceous asteroids are also one of the best places to go looking for water.

But according to Asteroid Mining 101, nitrogen has been found to make up only about 0.25% of the mass of carbonaceous meteorites, mostly in the form of organic polymers.  “The figure of 0.25% is not very impressive […],” the book goes on to say (what an understatement of the problem!), but if you manage to capture a large enough carbonaceous asteroid, you could still potentially harvest a fair amount of nitrogen from it.

Of course if we were to imagine ourselves living in the even more distant future, in an era when humanity has expanded well beyond the asteroid belt, perhaps making it all the way out to the Kuiper belt, then nitrogen might not be such a ridiculously scarce resource. Based on what we’ve learned about Pluto and other Kuiper belt objects, it seems frozen nitrogen is a whole lot more common out there.

Welcome to another episode of Molecular Mondays, a special bi-weekly series here on Planet Pailly about chemistry.  Every other Monday, we take a closer look at the atoms and molecules that—

Turns out my muse won’t let me write when I’m sick.  I’ve come down with a really bad cold, or maybe it’s the flu.  I don’t really know, but I should be well enough to write again in time for Sciency Words on Friday.

In the meantime, I’ll do my best to get better, with a little help from this chemical and this chemical and this chemical.

So the cartoon… I mean, the highly technical diagram in yesterday’s post implied that being in space wouldn’t be much of a thrill for fish. I mean, they swim up, they swim down… they swim in whatever direction they want, right?

But then I found a video showing a side-by-side comparison of the fish tank aboard the International Space Station and an identical fish tank down here on Earth, and it looks like I was very, very wrong. Fish do change their swimming behavior in microgravity. It’s really pretty, actually, watching them spin and twirl about.