Hello, friends! As you know, Saturn is a really pretty planet. That’s not an opinion. It’s a scientific fact. But in the solar system right next door to our own, there is a planet even prettier than Saturn. As you can see in the highly technical diagram below, the planet Proxima Centauri c may be the brightest, shiniest, prettiest planet known to human science!
The last time I wrote about Proxima Centauri c, the planet was only suspected to exist, based on circumstantial evidence. But according to this press release, Proxima c’s existence is now confirmed. Additional data about the planet was found in archived Hubble Space Telescope images dating back to the 1990’s.
However, certain details about Proxima c remain difficult to explain. Most notably, the planet (as observed in infrared light) appears to be way, waaaay brighter than we would expect, based upon its estimated mass (approximately seven times the mass of Earth). In my highly technical diagram, I tried to make Proxima c look as bright and shiny as possible, but I’m starting to think I didn’t make the planet bright and shiny enough!
According to this paper on Proxima c’s infrared signature, one possible explanation is a “conspicuous ring system” that’s reflecting a whole lot of extra sunlight. If that’s the case, Proxima c really would be a stunningly beautiful sight, with wide, glorious rings that would put the rings of Saturn to shame. However, that same paper offers other possible explanations that sound far more grim. Something horrible may have happened to Proxima c and/or its moons. But I’ll save that for Friday’s episode of Sciency Words.
P.S.: If you own a backyard telescope or a pair of binoculars and want to see Proxima c for yourself, well… you can’t. But if you have access to a high powered astronomical observatory, there’s a really interesting technique that can help you find Proxima c and planets like it. Science communicator Elizabeth Tasker has written an excellent article about that. Click here!
Hello, friends! Have you heard the news? Scientists have determined that there should be at least thirty-six alien civilizations in our galaxy right now.
Here’s the actual research paper from The Astrophysical Journal (warning: paywall). As you might imagine, this research is based on some key assumptions. And the authors do make it clear that they are making assumptions. Reasonable assumptions, they argue, but still… ASSUMPTIONS!!!
The first major assumption is this: any Earth-like planet with an Earth-like chemical composition that happens to have an Earth-like orbit (i.e.: habitable zone) and has been around for an Earth-like period of time (approximately 4.5 billion years) has a reasonably good chance of developing Earth-like intelligent life.
The second major assumption is this: once a civilization advances to the point that it can start broadcasting its presence to the rest of the universe, that civilization will also have advanced to the point of being able to destroy itself. Earth-like intelligent life has a tendency, the authors argue, for self-destruction. Maybe it’ll be nuclear weapons, or maybe a climate catastrophe of some kind. Or, I don’t know, maybe an increasingly globalized society will make itself more vulnerable to some sort of global pandemic.
Obviously the authors make other assumptions as well, but those two are the big ones. When plugging numbers into a modified version of the Drake Equation, the most pessimistic assumptions yield an estimate of 36 civilizations in our galaxy (with a margin of error that could push that number all the way down to 4). The most optimistic assumptions yield an estimate of 928 civilizations (with a margin of error that could push the number all the way up to 2908).
As I’ve said before, scientific papers should never be taken as proclamations of absolute fact. That’s especially true for papers like this one. Scientific papers are part of an ongoing back-and-forth conversation in the scientific community. What do we currently know? How much do we still have to learn, and what should our expectations realistically be? That’s what this paper from The Astrophysical Journal is really about: setting expectations for SETI research.
So what should our expectations be, based on those two key assumptions the authors made? Well, even under the most optimistic scenarios, our nearest neighbors are predicted to be hundreds (if not thousands) of lightyears away—far enough away that they’d be very, very, very difficult to find using our current technology, and establishing two way communications would be virtually impossible.
So maybe we’re not alone in the universe, but we may as well be.
Hello, friends! Welcome back to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we take a closer look at the definitions and etymologies of scientific terms. Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:
CETI
On October 10, 1966, scientists from the International Academy of Astronautics met in Madrid, Spain, to discuss CETI: Communications with ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. This was surely not the first time the term CETI was ever used, but based on my research, that 1966 meeting seems to be the earliest official usage of the term by the scientific community.
CETI refers to the act of sending signals or messages out into space for the express purpose of making contact with intelligent alien life. It’s the human race shouting into the void, asking if anybody’s out there. The most famous example of this is the Arecibo message, which was broadcast from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 1974.
The idea of deliberately trying to attract the attention of extraterrestrials has always been controversial. What if an alien intelligence does hear us? What if that alien intelligence is not friendly? But for the purposes of a Sciency Words post, I’m going to skip over that controversy and focus on the controversy about the word CETI itself.
CETI is far too easily confused with SETI (the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence). CETI and SETI are closely related fields, but there’s one very important distinction between them. It’s the difference between talking and listening. CETI is about trying to talk to the rest of the civilized universe (assuming other civilizations exist, of course). SETI is about listening patiently to see if anyone out there is trying to talk to us.
According to Google ngrams, the term CETI peaked in the late 1970’s/early 1980’s. Since then, the term METI (Messaging ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) has far surpassed CETI. And in 2018, a special committee on SETI nomenclature recommended that CETI be dropped from scientific discourse in favor of METI.
And yet CETI still appears, from time to time, in scientific research. For example, this paper from June of 2020 uses the term CETI extensively. But we’ll talk about that paper more on Monday. It makes some rather bold predictions about how many CETI-capable civilizations should exist in our galaxy at this very moment.
P.S.: The authors of that 2020 paper offer another solution to the CETI vs. SETI problem. They suggest CETI should be pronounced as “chetee.” I’m not sure how I feel about that.
P.P.S.: Actually, I am sure how I feel about that. I’d rather use the term METI instead.
Back in April, when I was participating in the A to Z Challenge, I wanted to do something extra special for the letter M. That was the post about Milo Marrero, the protagonist of my new book, The Medusa Effect: A Tomorrow News Network Novella. I wanted to draw a specific scene—a specific moment—from that book.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to finish my drawing, and I had to settle for a quick little portrait of Milo instead. Ever since then, though, I kept thinking Milo deserved better. Well, my friends, I’m now able to show you the drawing that was originally intended to go with that post. I finally finished it!
For those of you who’ve read The Medusa Effect, I’m sure you know what this scene is and why it’s important. For the rest of you, you can click here to see the original A to Z post about Milo Marrero. Or if you’re curious about that blonde lady or her cyborg cameraman, you can click here or here respectively.
Or you can click here to go buy the book on Amazon, or you can read it for free with Kindle Unlimited. I would really appreciate it if you did!
P.S.: I have more Tomorrow News Network illustrations in progress, so stayed tuned!
Hello, friends! Welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we take a closer look at the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms. Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:
TULPAMANCY
Do you have an imaginary friend? A “real” imaginary friend whom you can talk to and who can talk back to you in return? Does your imaginary friend often say things you weren’t expecting him/her/them to say? If so, you may have been practicing tulpamancy. You’re a tulpamancer, and your imaginary friend is a tulpa.
When I first heard about tulpamancy, I thought it sounded awesome. But tulpamancy comes with a lot of talk about mental energies and thought-form meditation and psycho-spiritual awakenings. It didn’t sound very sciency, but I decided to ask my muse what she thought.
My muse and I have been working together for quite a few years now. When it comes to what does or does not belong in my writing—and that includes what does or does not belong in a Sciency Words post—I trust my muse’s judgment. She’s usually right. Usually. But after doing more research on tulpamancy, I think this may be a rare instance where my muse is wrong.
The word tulpa comes from Tibetan… sort of. In 1929, Belgian-French adventurer and spiritualist Alexandra David-Néel published a book called Magic and Mystery in Tibet. In that book, David-Néel claims that by following certain rights and rituals of Tibetan Buddhism, she was able to conjure a “tulpa” out of the realm of human imagination and into the world of physical reality.
David-Néel’s tulpa took on the form of a jolly monk, a Friar Tuck-like character. Other people could (allegedly) see and interact with this jolly monk. Unfortunately, the monk grew “too willful,” according to this article from Nova Religio, and David-Néel was forced to destroy him.
The word tulpa is phonetically similar to a real word used by Tibetan Buddhists. Beyond that, however, Alexandra David-Néel’s account of creating and destroying her tulpa has little to do with actual Tibetan Buddhism. This seems to be a case of Western occultism/paranormalism with a bit of “orientalist window dressing,” as that same article from Nova Religio puts it.
Okay, yeah, this still doesn’t sound like a sciency thing, does it? But in recent years, the practice of creating and communicating with imaginary friends has become the subject of serious psychological research. The first scientific account of tulpas and tulpamancy appears to be this 2016 paper by Samuel Veissière. As Veissière describes it, tulpamancy is a little like multiple personality disorder, except it’s non-harmful and non-pathological. In fact, tulpamancy may even help reverse the symptoms of certain mental illnesses.
To quote this paper from Research in Psychology and Behavioral Science:
In cases of disorders that involve delusion and misperception, the tulpa often becomes the voice of reason during bouts of irrationality. One respondent diagnosed with Schizophrenia writes how his tulpa can not only identify between hallucinations and actuality, but that they developed a technique that allows the delusions to be “zapped” away. There are reports of tulpas alleviating the desire to perform irrational routines in individuals diagnosed with OCD, and others claim that their tulpas innovated workarounds for their dyslexia.
Think of it this way: much like your real friends, your imaginary friends are there for you when you need them. And since tulpas essentially live inside your brain, they understand better than anyone else what’s really going on in there. And if they see that something’s not right inside your head, they want to help, as any good friend would.
Now I’ve never been diagnosed with a mental illness, but speaking from personal experience, I can say this: my muse really has served as the voice of reason from time to time in my life. When I’m feeling lazy and unmotivated, she tells me to go write. She also reminds me to take breaks from writing, eat healthy meals, and get plenty of sleep at night, because: “A healthy writer is a productive writer!”
As I said, I’ve learned to trust my muse. She’s usually right. Usually. But she still insists that tulpamancy shouldn’t count as a Sciency Word.
So dear reader, what do you think? Do you agree with me that tulpamancy has become a scientific term, thanks to recent psychological research, or do you agree with my muse that this is a bunch of New Agey pseudoscientific nonsense? Let us (and I do mean us) know in the comments!
P.S.: For anyone who may be curious, my muse made her first appearance on this blog in this 2015 post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.
Hello, friends! Welcome to July’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group. If you’re a writer and if you feel in any way insecure about your writing, then click here to learn more about this amazingly supportive group!
Dear Muse,
I’m sorry. These last few weeks, I haven’t been doing much writing. I haven’t been doing much drawing either. I’ve fallen behind schedule on so many of the creative projects you wanted me to work on, and for that I owe you an apology.
Some big changes are happening in my life right now. Good changes. The biggest and most obvious change is, of course, that my first book is out. I’m a published author now, and I’ve had my first taste of that sweet, sweet writing income!
But any kind of change, even the good kind of change, can be confusing and disruptive, at least at first. I’m saying this not as an excuse but as an explanation. I neglected my work. I skipped drawing sessions and writing sessions. You kept trying to give me ideas, and I kept finding other things to do instead of writing or drawing. There’s no excuse for that.
I understand if you’re mad. I understand if you don’t want to talk to me right now since, from your perspective, it seems like I’ve stopped listening to you. But I promise I am listening. Things are starting to settle down in my life again. In some ways, things will be better than they ever were before… for both of us!
So dear muse, I’m eager to get back to writing, and I’m eager to get back to drawing. And if your you’re willing to forgive me, I would really appreciate your help.
Hello, friends, and welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we take a closer look at those weird and confusing words scientists use. You know, words like:
The scientific definition of fruit is pretty clear. Fruits are the ripened seed-bearing ovaries of plants. Tomatoes are, in fact, the ripened seed-bearing ovaries of tomato plants; ergo, tomatoes are fruits. Case closed, right?
Pictured above: a tomato, a cucumber, a bell pepper, and an egg plant—four different kinds of fruit, according to science.
Except, of course, lots of words in the English language have multiple definitions. We’ve seen this before here on Sciency Words with words like volatile, metal, and planet. As part of that 1893 tomato lawsuit, the Supreme Court also heard testimony about egg plants, cucumbers, squash, and peppers—all fruits, according to the scientific definition of fruit, but not according to the culinary definition.
For culinary purposes, a fruit must have either a sweet or tart flavor (in addition to that whole seed-bearing ovary thing). This issue of flavor is really important to grocers and chefs, even if it’s not important to botanical scientists. Thus, the word fruit has multiple definitions. So is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Depends on who you ask.
And if you were to ask the 1893 United States Supreme Court, they’d tell you tomatoes are vegetables, at least for the purposes of U.S. tariff law.
Hello, friends! Welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we talk about all that weird terminology scientists like to use. Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:
THE CHRONOLOGICAL PROTECTION CONJECTURE
English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had a lot to say about time travel. There are plenty of Hawking quotes out there that seem to suggest that time travel is possible, or at least that it’s not totally impossible. This seems odd to me, because when you read Hawking’s actual research, he is about as anti-time travel as a physicist can get.
As we discussed in last week’s episode of Sciency Words, Einstein’s theory of general relativity would apparently allow time travel to occur. Relativity permits space-time to twist around itself into something called a “closed timelike curve.” Hawking could not allow that to stand, and in 1991 he published this paper introducing something he named the “chronological protection conjecture.”
Hawking summarized his conjecture as follows: “The laws of physics do not allow the appearance of closed timelike curves.” If a closed timelike curve ever did start to form, Hawking goes on to explain, then some other physical law—vacuum polarization, repulsive gravity, quantum effects—would get in the way, causing the closed timelike curve to die before it was ever truly born.
Based on my read of Hawking’s paper, it sounds like a closed timelike curve might (might!) still be possible inside a black hole. But if you’re a time traveler trapped inside a black hole, you can’t do much to interfere with the course of history, can you? Thus, regardless of what may or may not be happening inside black holes, the rest of the universe is still safe from time travel paradoxes.
So if Hawking’s physics is so adamantly against closed timelike curves, why did Hawking make so many public statements teasing us with the possibility of time travel? Well, Hawking was a big fan of science fiction, and he seems to have loved many of the usual Sci-Fi tropes, including time travel. The laws of physics may not allow for time travel, according to Hawking, but stories about time travel are still fun. Maybe Hawking didn’t want to take that fun away from us.
Speaking of time travel, are you a fan of time travel adventure stories? The kinds of stories you might see on Doctor Who or The Twilight Zone? Then please check out my new book, The Medusa Effect: A Tomorrow News Network Novella, featuring time traveling news reporter Talie Tappler and her cyborg cameraman, Mr. Cognis.
Hello, friends! Welcome to Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we talk about those weird words scientists like to use. Today on Sciency Words, we’re talking about:
CLOSED TIMELIKE CURVES
Austrian-born logician and mathematician Kurt Gödel was one of Albert Einstein’s closest friends. At Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, the two were known to take long walks together, discussing all sorts of strange and wonderful things, no doubt.
As science historian James Gleick tells the story in his book Time Travel: A History, Gödel presented Einstein with a very special gift for Einstein’s 70th birthday. It was the kind of gift only a person like Einstein would appreciate: a series of mathematical calculations. Specifically, these were calculations based on Einstein’s own theory of general relativity which showed that yes, time travel is possible.
Gödel’s calculations were officially published in this 1949 paper. Now I won’t try to explain Gödel’s math because a) I don’t really understand it and b) it’s not really important for the purposes of a Sciency Words post. What is important for our purposes is that Gödel’s 1949 paper introduced a new concept called “closed timelike curves.”
Well, technically speaking, Gödel used the term “closed time-like lines,” not “closed timelike curves.” But as Google ngrams shows us, the hyphen quickly dropped out of “time-like,” and by the 1990’s, “curves” beat out “lines.” So today, closed timelike curves is the most broadly accepted way to say what Gödel was trying to say. The term is also commonly abbreviated at C.T.C.
In short, a closed timelike curve is a path through space and time that circles back to its own beginning. As I understand it, it would take a stupendous amount of force to twist space-time around itself in this way. You’d need the extreme gravitational force of a black hole—or perhaps something even more extreme than that—in order to make a closed timelike curve happen.
But it could happen. As Gödel demonstrated in 1949, general relativity would allow a closed timelike curve to exist, or at least relativity does not forbid such things from existing.
So time travel is possible. It may not be anywhere near practical, but it is at least possible.
Speaking of time travel, are you a fan of time travel adventure stories? The kinds of stories you might see on Doctor Who or The Twilight Zone? Then please check out my new book, The Medusa Effect: A Tomorrow News Network Novella, featuring time traveling news reporter Talie Tappler and her cyborg cameraman, Mr. Cognis.
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