All These Worlds Are Yours: A Book Review

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 3 Comments

In his book All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life, author Jon Willis gives you $4 billion. How many authors do that? Okay, it’s imaginary money, and you’re only allowed to spend it on astrobiological research. But still… $4 billion, just for reading a book!

If you’re new to the subject of astrobiology, All These Worlds is an excellent introduction. It covers all the astrobiological hotspots of the Solar System and beyond, and unlike most books on this subject, it doesn’t gloss over the issue of money.

There are so many exciting possibilities, so many opportunities to try to find alien life. But realistically, you can only afford one or maybe two missions on your $4 billion budget. So you’ll have to pick and choose. You’ll have to make some educated guesses about where to look.

Do you want to gamble everything on Mars, or would you rather spend your money on Titan or Europa? Or do you want to build a space telescope and go hunting for exoplanets? Or donate all your money to SETI? Willis lays out the pros and cons of all your best options.

My only complaint about this book is that Enceladus (a moon of Saturn) didn’t get its own chapter. Instead, there’s a chapter on Europa and Enceladus, which was really a chapter about Europa with a few pages on Enceladus at the end.

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I agree, Enceladus. On the other hand, Enceladus is sort of like Europa’s mini-me. So while I disagree with the decision to lump the two together, I do understand it.

In summary, I’d highly recommend this book to anyone interested in space exploration, and especially to those who are new or relatively knew to the subject of astrobiology. Minimal prior scientific knowledge is required, although some basic familiarity with the planets of the Solar System would help.

P.S.: How would you spend your $4 billion? I’d spend mine on a mission to Europa, paying special attention to the weird reddish-brown material found in Europa’s lineae and maculae.

Sciency Words: Conan the Bacterium

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 8 Comments

Sciency Words BIO copy

Today’s post is part of a special series here on Planet Pailly called Sciency Words. Each week, we take a closer look at an interesting science or science-related term to help us all expand our scientific vocabularies together. Today’s term is:

CONAN THE BACTERIUM

Meet Deinococus radiodurans, a species of bacteria found in truly unexpected locations all over the globe. It’s said to be the toughest bacterium in the world. It’s so tough that it’s earned the nickname Conan the Bacterium.

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Don’t panic. Conan the Bacterium is nonpathogenic and does not represent a threat to humans.

Some microorganisms are referred to as extremophiles, because they’ve adapted to survive in some specific extreme environment. Conan is a polyextremophile, because it has adapted to survive in a wide variety of extreme environments. Among other things, Conan can endure:

  • Highly acidic environments
  • Airless environments
  • Waterless environments
  • Extremely cold environments
  • Extremely radioactive environments

Frankly, it sounds like this little bugger is perfectly adapted for life on Mars, but according to my reading, its genome suggests that it did in fact evolve here on Earth.

Conan’s resistance to radiation is of particular interest to science. It seems that whenever radiation damages Conan’s DNA, even if the DNA is shredded into tiny bits, Conan can stitch its DNA back together again in as little as twelve hours.

Lots of organisms, including humans, have some ability to repair their own damaged DNA. Conan is just a whole lot better at it than the rest of us, and no one’s sure why.

I first learned about Conan the Bacterium in a book called All These Worlds Are Yours: The Scientific Search for Alien Life. I’ll be doing a book review early next week.

IWSG: When’s It Ready?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 28 Comments

Insecure Writers Support Group Badge

Each month, the Insecure Writer’s Support Group gives us a question to answer. I usually forget about the question, or I choose to ignore it because there’s something else I want to/need to talk about. But this month, the IWSG question gets to the heart of my chronic insecurities.

When do you know your story is ready?

Short Answer: As soon as I have a story that’s ready, I’d be happy to tell you.

Long Answer: My Tomorrow News Network short story series has been “ready” several times now. The first time, my stories were ready because:

  • I’d set self-imposed deadlines for each story. When a deadline came, whatever I had had to be good enough because I needed to move on to the next story.
  • The problem was that most of my stories were rush jobs. They felt amateurish to me. Even though I’d created my own world populated with my own characters, at times my stories read like bad fan fiction.

So I worked with an editor and did a lot of studying on my own. I learned a bunch of writing rules and editing techniques (remove adverbs, avoid the verb to be, cut your manuscript’s length by 15%). After all that, my stories were ready because:

  • I’d fixed the specific issues my editor had identified, I’d cut my manuscript’s length by the recommended amount, and I’d conformed my writing style to the rules I’d learned. My stories definitely felt more polished, more professional, but….
  • I realized that my stories now suffered from something that I now call generic narrator syndrome. I can’t put my finger on what defines a generic narrator, but I know it when I see it. I think it happens because when everyone follows the exact same writing rules, we all end up having the exact same narrative voice.

So my challenge now is to establish a unique J.S. Pailly narrative voice for my stories. Not sure what that means. Don’t know yet what differentiates my voice from everyone else’s. But I think I’ll know it when I see it.

At that point, my stories will be ready. I hope.

* * *

Today’s post is part of the Insecure Writer’s Support group, a blog hop where insecure writers like myself can share our worries and offer advice and encouragement. Click here to find out more about IWSG and see a list of participating blogs.

Who’s Eating Titan’s Acetylene?

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 5 Comments

The first Monday of the month is Molecular Monday, the day I write about my least favorite subject from school: chemistry.

Molecular Mondays Header

I’d planned to write something about ammonia today. Ammonia might (might!) serve as a good substitute for water in some alien biochemistry.

But then I was reminded of something. Something important. Something I’m kicking myself for not covering before. So once again, let’s turn our attention to Saturn’s largest moon: Titan.

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Making Acetylene on Titan

As we’ve discussed previously, methane gas and other chemicals break apart in Titan’s upper atmosphere. This allows carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and possibly other elements to recombine in new ways. The result is a mishmash of organic chemicals collectively refered to as tholins.

Tholins tend to be sticky, yucky, and orange. They slowly fall to Titan’s surface, covering the moon with sticky, yucky, orange sludge. One chemical in the tholin mix should be acetylene (C2H2). In fact, acetylene is a fairly simple molecule compared to the rest of the tholin gunk on Titan, so we should find lots of it.

But we don’t. We’ve detected little to no acetylene accumulation on Titan’s surface. Maybe this means there’s something wrong with our detection techniques. Or maybe some as-yet-unidentified chemical process breaks up acetylene molecules as they fall through Titan’s atmosphere.

Or maybe (maybe!) something eats the acetylene as soon as it touches the ground.

Eating Titan’s Acetylene

I first read about this a few years ago in Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction. It came up again, in greater detail, in the book I’m currently reading: All These Worlds Are Yours. The case of Titan’s missing acetylene is a hot topic for astrobiologists.

There’s a rather simple chemical reaction that might (might!) explain what’s going on.

C2H2 + 3H2 –> 2CH4 + energy

That’s one acetylene molecule reacting with three hydrogen molecules to produce two methane molecules and some energy. The kind of energy that weird Titanian microorganisms could use to survive (maybe).

In my opinion, it still seems unlikely that life could have evolved on the surface of Titan, if only because liquid methane (Titan’s “water”) is not a good solvent for amino acids. But unlikely is not the same as impossible.

It’s worth noting at this point that a few other weird things are happening on Titan. Hydrogen gas seems to mysteriously disappear near Titan’s surface, and no one has adequately explained how Titan replenishes its atmospheric methane (all the methane should have turned into tholins by now).

If Titan does have an acetylene-eating, hydrogen-breathing microbe that expels methane as a waste product, that would conveniently solve three mysteries at once. I can’t help but think, though, that this might be a little too convenient to be true.

Sciency Words: Patera

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 4 Comments

Sciency Words PHYS copy

For the last few weeks, we’ve been touring the moons of Jupiter and learning about some of the scientific terms used to describe the weird geological features we’ve found there. Today, we conclude this Jovian moons series with the term:

PATERA

Meet Io, Jupiter’s fifth moon and the inner-most of the Galilean moons. Io, say hello to the nice blog readers.

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Oh jeez. I’m sorry you had to see that. Io is sort of caught in a gravitational tug of war between Jupiter and the other Galilean moons. You’d feel queasy too if you were constantly being yanked back and forth by all that gravity.

The result is that Io is the most volcanically active object in the Solar System. Just about any time you look at Io, its sulfur volcanoes are erupting.

A Caldera by Any Other Name…

Astronomers use the word patera (plural, paterae) when discussing Io’s volcanoes. The term comes from the Latin word for flat dish, and the name is appropriate.

Paterae don’t look much like the kind of volcanoes we typically imagine. They aren’t raised, mountain-like features but rather flattened, crater-like depressions. If you know what a caldera is, a patera is basically the same thing.

How Calderas… I Mean, Paterae… Form

Picture this: somewhere on Io, we find an underground chamber full of a nasty, sulfur-rich brew. The temperature in this chamber rises, and the pressure builds up. Suddenly, an eruption occurs, and Io spews that sulfur mixture all over its surface.

As that subterranean chamber empties, the ground above it starts to sink. The resulting pit-like surface feature is a patera. Or a caldera. They really are the exact same thing. (Here’s a short video demonstrating the caldera/patera formation process).

Paterae are not unique to Io. They’ve also been observed on Mars, Venus, and Titan, among other places. They’re also found on Earth, except you’re not supposed to call it a patera if it’s on Earth.

Patera vs. Caldera: What’s the Difference?

If you really want to, you can use the word caldera when referring to Io’s volcanoes, or similar volcanoes on other worlds. That usage seems to be acceptable. But it is unlikely that you will ever see the word patera used for such features here on Earth.

I think there’s a bit of geocentrism at work here. A lot of planetary features have one name on Earth and some other name everywhere else. You’ll sometimes find Earthly terminology used off-world, because Earth terms are more familiar to the average reader; the reverse is rarely if ever true.

Which is fine. I’m not judging. A little linguistic geocentrism makes sense to me, at least at present. In some distant Sci-Fi future where humanity has spread across the Solar System and beyond… at that point, things like the caldera/patera distinction might seem a bit silly.

Taking Things Easy

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 3 Comments

Typically, I like to write three blog posts per week, but I think I’m going to be taking things easy for a while. I’m not stopping or taking a break or anything. It’s just that I’m not doing much serious research at the moment, so I don’t have a whole lot of material to blog about.

There are a few topics I’m interested in covering in the near future, such as:

  • A Trip to Pluto: Maybe something in a similar vein to my recent trip to Titan.
  • The Alien Mega-structure: I’ve been reading up on this “discovery.” If you can get past the hype, there seems to be some genuine science going on.
  • A Tour of the Exoplanets: Not all of them; that would be crazy. I just want to visit a select few.

But that stuff will have to wait, because right now I’m diving into some heavy revisions for Tomorrow News Network. I’m basically rebuilding the T.N.N. universe from the ground up: reinventing physics, religion, and the whole future of human civilization. You know, the kind of stuff every humble science fiction writer does.

I’m also making Talie a little more Talie-like, and her cyborg cameraman a smidge less cyborg-y. These revisions are taking me in some unanticipated directions. I feel like it’s the best writing of my life, and I’m excited for the day when I can put it out there for people to read.

Okay, so that’s what I’m up to right now. That’s what I mean when I say I’m “taking things easy for a while.”

Sciency Words: Facula

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Sciency Words BIO copy

When Voyager 1 trained its camera on the moons of Jupiter, scientists back on Earth had no idea what to expect. Turned out they were right. Voyager was snapping photos of geological features unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. Which meant it was time to make up some new sciency words!

FACULA

Last week, we learned about the word macula (plural, maculae): a special term for dark spots on the surface of a moon or other planetary body. Now if you’re going to invent a special term for dark spots, you really ought to have a term for bright spots too. And that term is facula (plural, faculae).

To an ancient Roman, facula meant “little torch.” To a modern planetary scientist, it refers to a surface feature that looks brighter than the surrounding terrain. The term was first used this way to describe bright, circular features seen on Ganymede.

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If you think Ganymede’s faculae look a little like craters, you’d be on the right track. Like most moons in the outer Solar System, Ganymede is composed of a mixture of rock and ice, and it may have a layer of liquid water beneath its surface.

So the craters left by asteroid impacts on Ganymede sometimes get filled in with icy slush. The slush freezes, and the crater is virtually erased. Only the crater rim remains, and you can see a color difference between old and new surface ice.

The term facula can be used to describe almost any bright spot on a planet-like surface, not just resurfaced craters. For example, there are faculae on the dwarf planet Ceres. Ceres’s faculae are still being investigated by the Dawn spacecraft, but the current best guess is that they’re salt deposits—perhaps salt left behind after very briny water boiled into space.

For next week’s edition of Sciency Words, we’ll conclude our visit to the moons of Jupiter with a quick trip to Io.

Bonus Sciency Word: An impact crater that gets filled in and smoothed over, like the craters on Ganymede, is also called a palimpsest.

SETI Hoopla

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

SETI discovered aliens! They detected a transmission from an advanced alien civilization located 94 light-years away! I saw it on T.V., so it must be true.

Okay, I actually wasn’t planning to say anything about this. It’s just another case of bad journalism and the misreporting of science. But this story seems to have developed legs—or maybe tentacles—and it just keeping popping up in my newsfeed.

When the story initially broke, I quickly checked SETI’s website. To my amusement, I found nothing: no press release, no mention of an alien signal at all. My thought at the time: where on Earth (pun intended) did the popular press get this story from?

There are others far more qualified than I to get into the nitty-gritty of what happened, or rather what didn’t happen, with this alleged SETI signal. I recommend this post from cosmicdairy.org. From what I gather from everything I’ve read, the basic summary is this:

  • In May of 2015, Russia’s RATAN-600 radio telescope detected “something.”
  • The signal was quickly determined to be a false positive. Apparently this happens a lot with all the radio noise from Earth and satellites in Earth orbit.
  • The story should have ended there.

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Weather Report from Jupiter

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 8 Comments

Juno has completed its second flyby of Jupiter, skimming close to the atmosphere and managing to get some interesting pictures of Jupiter’s polar regions.

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Apparently we’ve never gotten a good look at Jupiter’s poles before. I imagine there’s a lot of frantic technical analysis going on right now at NASA, but not a whole lot of info has been released to the public so far.

We do have a press release, which I’m taking as a small preview of the real science that’s still to come. From the press release, we’ve learned that:

  • There’s a heck of a lot of storms, sort of clustered together. It’ll be interesting to find out which way they rotate. Are we looking at cyclones or anticyclones? (The Great Red Spot is an anticyclone, by the way).
  • Apparently cast-shadows are visible, suggesting clouds of varying altitudes. I’m guessing we’ll learn something about regional temperature and pressure variations from that.
  • The clouds have a bluish tint. In my inexpert opinion, that might indicate elevated concentrations of methane (the gas that makes Uranus and Neptune look so blue). That would be a change from the ammonia clouds we’re used to seeing in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.

In short, it sounds like Jupiter’s polar regions have a whole separate ecosystem of clouds and storms. Do these storm systems function independently from the belts and zones observed at other longitudes, or could there be some complex relationship at work?

The Juno spacecraft has a little less than two years to find out. Good luck, Juno. We’re all counting on you.

Sciency Words: Macula

~ J.S. Pailly ~ 2 Comments

Sciency Words PHYS copy

When Voyager 1 trained its camera on the moons of Jupiter, scientists back on Earth had no idea what to expect. Turned out they were right. Voyager was snapping photos of geological features unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. Which meant it was time to make up some new sciency words!

MACULA

Last week, we talked about Europa’s lineae: the reddish-brown cracks and fissures crisscrossing this small moon’s surface. But those weren’t the only surprises Voyager 1 observed. Let’s zoom in for a closer look.

Sp09 Macula on Europa

Europa has these peculiar dark splotches on its surface, similar in coloration to the lineae. Scientists came up with the term macula (plural maculae) to describe them. It comes from the Latin word for “spot” or “blemish.” It’s related indirectly to the word immaculate, which literally means “without blemish.”

Although Europa’s maculae were discovered in 1979, it wasn’t until 2011 that anyone could adequately explain them. It seems that Europa’s thick ice shell has a complex relationship with the ocean of liquid water deep beneath the surface, resulting in frequent patterns of melting and refreezing.

Sometimes “lakes” of liquid water become embedded between layers of ice. This causes surface ice to sag and cave in, breaking up into chunky, tightly packed icebergs. Some sort of material (possibly organic material) seeps up with the meltwater, causing the dark discoloration.

Eventually, the lake beneath a macula will freeze. Since ice is less dense than water, this forces the now cracked and broken surface ice to rise above the surrounding landscape. In the process, the already strange-looking maculae transform into even stranger-looking chaos terrain.

The term macula can be used to describe almost any dark, spotty or splotchy feature on a planetary body. That doesn’t mean they have anything in common beyond superficial appearances. For example, while maculae on Europa seem to be caused by melting and refreezing ice, maculae on Titan may be related to some sort of volcanic activity.

For next week’s edition of Sciency Words, we’ll move on to Ganymede. Europa wasn’t the only Jovian moon showing off strange, never-before-seen geological features when Voyager arrived.