Cordial Deconstruction

Observations from our shared single objective reality in a materialistic, naturalistic, & effectively macro-deterministic universe.

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Deconstruction of the Drake Equation

Posted by Karl Withakay on August 18, 2010

I’ve been scooped by PZ Meyers, but I’m still writing this post anyway.  It fits in well with my recent posts on space;

Cordial Deconstruction of Stephen Hawking? (Am I So Bold?)

Follow-Up: Energy Requirements of Interstellar Travel

Final Follow-Up on the Probability of an Alien Invasion

Where Does Stephen Hawking Think We Can Go?

On Monday  I read this article: Proof of Aliens Could Come Within 25 Years, Scientist Says on Space.com.  The scientist, Seth Shostak, cites the Drake equation when attempting to support his prediction.

The Drake equation, in case you’re not aware, is an equation that is supposed to be used to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way, and it’s utter garbage.

Form Wikipedia, the equation is:

N = R^{\ast} \times f_p \times n_e \times f_{\ell} \times f_i \times f_c \times L \!

where:

N = the number of civilizations in our galaxy with which communication might be possible;

and

R* = the average rate of star formation per year in our galaxy

fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets

ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets

fℓ = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point

fi = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop intelligent life

fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space

L = the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume the equation itself is basically sound, tough that’s debatable.  In that case, the accuracy of the number we can get from this equation depends on how accurate the values we plug into the individual terms are, so let’s look at  the terms and see how well we can estimate those numbers.

The first term, R*, we have an OK, better than order of magnitude estimate for, so we’re off to not too bad a start, understanding that we’re not looking for a terribly precise value here.

For the second term, fp, we really don’t have a good number for right now.  PZ says we have “growing evidence of values” for this number, and that’s not an inaccurate statement, as long as you understand that the evidence is not quite ripe for picking yet.  While we have been making a lot of progress in detecting extra solar planets,  we’re still only good at detecting larger giant type planets like Jupiter orbiting stars similar to the sun (the Kepler mission may change that).  Because the best way we have to detect planets right now is to detect the wobble the planets induce in their parent star while they orbit, it’s easier to detect planets with a large mass relative to its parent star.  Because of this, we haven’t yet been able to detected any planets of less than several Earth masses, which means what we currently have for this number is really a lower limit for this value, but we really don’t have a good estimate for an upper limit because we don’t know how many stars have only relatively low mass planets and no planets large enough to induce a noticeable wobble.  We’re only on the second term, and we already have a little problem, but as long as we use the lower estimate for this values, we should be OK.

For the third term, ne, we really have nothing but projections using our solar system as a model.  We don’t know how many rocky planets or moons are out there, we don’t know how many of them lie in the habitable zone of their parent stars, we don’t know how many of them have the right elemental composition, we don’t know how many have relatively circular orbits (to avoid extreme temperature variances), etc, etc.  Even if we get better at detecting terrestrial planets, there are so many factors that contribute to the suitability of a planet for supporting life, many of which will be very difficult to detect, that it will be problematic to ever come up with a good value for this number.

As little as we have to go on for the third value, we have basically jack nothing to go on for the all the remaining terms.  We have absolutely no clue about any of those numbers and any attempt to make an estimate for any of them is just wishful thinking or anthropically derived values by people wanting to find an answer.

What fraction of the unknown number of habitable worlds actually develop life?  How does one even make up a number for this and keep a straight face?  Without knowing how life arose here on Earth, how can we begin to  say how probable it is anywhere else?

What fraction of the planets from the previous term develop intelligent life?  Again, who knows?  Our sample of 1 doesn’t give us much to go on.  If the dinosaurs hadn’t died out, would we have intelligent dinosaurs now?  Who knows?  We assume we are the natural, logical conclusion of the evolutionary process because we’re here, but we could be an aberration, an exception to the norm.

What fraction of civilizations develop technology that releases detectable signals?  It might seem reasonable to suggest that if they survive, that this is an inevitable outcome, but we shouldn’t be overly anthropic and assume we are the norm.  We really don’t know.  We do know that when Europeans ventured forth and explored the word, they ran into a lot of pre-industrial and stone age civilizations several millennia behind them technologically.  We can’t even say if the native Americans would have ever developed technology in America under very similar conditions to what the Europeans had let alone say what would be likely on a planets of different conditions and abundances of resources.

How long do such technological civilizations release detectable signals into space?  We haven’t stopped yet, so we don’t even have an anthropic reference number to go on here.

Frankly the best evidence we have for estimating a number for N is the lack of evidence so far.  This is basically the Fermi Paradox.  The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations.  I would say that this is not so much a paradox as an indicator that the estimates for N are probably unreasonably exaggerated.  N must be low enough that we’re not currently detecting signals from alien civilizations.  If they’re out there, we can at least say they’re probably not close by or we’d have detected them by now, which means alien civilizations probably aren’t as widely dispersed as the optimists project.

Honestly I’m amazed that anyone tries to invoke the Drake equation, given that we can only reasonably speculate the value for N is between 0 (if you don’t count us) and millions or even billions.  I automatically loose a little respect for any scientist who seriously invokes the Drake equation; the equation is junk science and probably always will be.

Posted in Criticism, Science, Space | Tagged: , , | 1 Comment »

Where Does Stephen Hawking Think We Can Go?

Posted by Karl Withakay on August 11, 2010

Stephen Hawking thinks we need to start looking for another home– not necessarily a replacement, but a summer home, perhaps.  He says our existence is fragile enough that we shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket and that we need to hedge our bets by spreading humanity to other worlds, just in case something happens here.

I admit that we face all sorts of threats, both from ourselves flirting with disaster and from the universe potentially trying to kill us as well.  Hawking cites climate change, and nuclear or biologic war as man made threats to humanity.  We also face threats we have little power to influence, such as an asteroid impact or a gamma ray burst aimed right at us.

Hawking says “It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million”.  So what are our options, really?  I’ve already covered the relative implausibility and impracticality of interstellar space travel in a previous series of posts (here, here, and here), and we’re not talking about a little exploration scout ship here, we’re talking about an big, massive ark.  It’s arguably questionable whether we would ever have the resources to reseed ourselves on a planet orbiting a distant star if we somehow managed to find one suitable enough to relocate to.  Certainly in the 200 year time frame, we have to think more locally.  We’re talking Mars or one the large moons of the solar system.  Saturn and its moons are a long way out, and the amount of sunlight that reaches Saturn is about 1% of what reaches Earth; that’s not exactly a good setup for a self sustained civilization with no support from the potentially destroyed Earth.  Jupiter is a little closer, but the Jovian system still gets only 4% the solar energy Earth does and 3 of the 4 large moons are bathed in high levels of radiation due to Jupiter’s magnetic field to boot.  As Mercury is too close to the sun, and Venus is pretty much worse than we could hope to make Earth by ourselves, this leaves the Moon or Mars as the most likely candidates.  Mars gets about 44% the solar energy Earth does, and that’s likely enough to use to provide energy and grow crops, plus it has water and a (very) thin atmosphere.  It has no magnetic field to protect against cosmic rays , but we’ve got to work with what we have.

But, how practical is creating a reservoir of humanity on mars or the moon?  We’re not talking about a base or an outpost, we’re talking about a fully self sustained, independent colony here that has to be able to survive on its own.  It has to support a large enough population to provide sufficient genetic diversity to allow our species to survive, at least 1000 people, and it probably needs to be able to grow.  Sure Mars has water and solar energy, and with those two things, you can also have oxygen, but how independently habitable can you make it within 200 years?  How bad would the devastation to the Earth have to be before Mars was more survivable than Earth?  You either have to terraform Mars to make it earthlike enough to support an agrarian civilization , or build an entire self contained infrastructure capable of supporting itself without any support or resources from Earth.  Frankly, if an extinction level asteroid hits the Earth in the next 200 years, my money is on the people who stay behind on Earth; they’ve got a lot more to work with.  A devastated Earth is probably a safer bet than Mars.  If we had the resources and technology to terraform Mars enough to make it habitable independent of technology (technology requires infrastructure over the long term to keep it going), we’d probably be able to neutralize global warming and clean up all the pollution to boot here at home.

Any refuge inside the solar system only works for Earth specific disasters anyway.  Everything in Phil Plait’s Death From the Skies after chapter one would be just as bad for any other location in the Solar System as it would be for the earth, and I’ve previously covered that I don’t consider interstellar travel particularly likely or practical.

If we want humanity to survive really long term, we better hope we do find a way to get humanity to the stars.  Even if we get lucky and dodge all the bullets we and the universe have aimed at us, the sun’s out to get us.  In a billion years, the Earth will definitely be uninhabitable, and nine or so billion years after that, the sun will be a burned out white dwarf providing very little energy to whatever is left orbiting it at that time.  However, even if we manage practical interstellar travel, we’d only be delaying our inevitable doom.  One way or another, there will be an end to the universe as we know it.  Whether it’s a heat death where all stars are burned out and everything in the universe is in thermal equilibrium making work or energy transfer impossible, a big rip, a big crunch, or the decay of ever proton in the universe, eventually there won’t be any place in the universe for humanity to survive.  Sure, we should do what we can to stay alive, but maybe what’s really important is how we live while we are around.  After all, that’s all we really can control.  In the words of Phil Plait at TAM8, “Don’t be a dick.”

EDIT 8-12-10:  Stephen Hawking also has expressed the thought that the possibility that we might be invaded and killed by extraterrestrials is another reason why our existence here on Earth is tenuous, but I’ve already addressed why we shouldn’t worry about being invaded by ET in the posts I cited above. (here, here, and here)

EDIT II 8-12-10:  Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks colonizing other world is prohibitively impracticable.  PZ Meyers has an interesting post this morning where he discusses a post by Charlie Stross that discuses the same idea of how it is  just so absurdly impracticable that it is essentially impossible.

Posted in Criticism, Science, Space, Stephen Hawking | Tagged: , , | 4 Comments »

Sci-Fi Science and Skepticism Fail on Syfy

Posted by Karl Withakay on June 10, 2010

A couple of months ago, I was flipping through channels on my POOP TV* and caught a few minutes of one of those really bad, direct to cable movies they run all the time on the Syfy channel.  The movie was Savage Planet and before I changed the channel, I chanced to hear the following lines of dialog spoken by one of the characters in the movie:

“I always believed there had to be a scientific explanation for everything.  Science was the only answer.  Since I’ve been here, I’m rapidly becoming a skeptic.”

I hit the record button on my DVR remote so I could preserve that line of dialog for a potential future blog post.  However, I didn’t continue watching the program, and I stopped the recording after the dialog, so I only have a few minutes recorded.

I don’t really know what the character was specifically talking about, but I imagine it had something to do with the killer space bears the reviews say the movie contains.  Regardless, this quote is an epic fail on the part of the writers of the movie.  They apparently buy into the philosophy that “science doesn’t know everything”, which is really a misunderstanding of science, since science is a process, and not a body of knowledge or answers.

To quote the Wikipedia article on science,

“Science is a systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the world and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories.”

Science is not the answer, it is the means to an answer; it is they way to provide the explanation.  If it is beyond  your ability to explain scientifically, that is not a failure of science; that is a failure of your ability and knowledge base.  Lacking a scientific explanation for a phenomenon does not make that phenomenon supernatural or paranormal, it simply means you haven’t found the scientific explanation yet.  It can be very frustrating to not have the answer for something.  It can be even more frustrating to know that the answer to that question may never be discovered during your lifetime, but that is no reason to engage in a god of the gaps fallacy and invent some supernatural explanation just so you can have an answer.

The dialog is also a profound misunderstanding of skepticism and the skeptical community.  While the word skepticism can technically mean any questioning attitude, skepticism is about challenging claims lacking empirical evidence.  It is also about challenging and examining the evidence that is used to support a claim.  Skepticism is a crucible for inquiry in which claims are subjected to the fires of scientific scrutiny to burn away the extraneous fluff, leaving only scientific knowledge and/or more questions to be answered.

I don’t really expect any better for a low budget sci-fi movie that likely went straight to Syfy, but I wanted to blog about it because I’ve heard the “Science doesn’t have all the answers” gambit many times before, and I wanted to give my take on why that concept is so wrong.

*POOP TV:  Picture Out Of Picture.  I have a 40” HDTV sitting next to my 60” HDTV.  When I was researching buying a new 60” HDTV, I wanted to get a model with PIP (Picture In Picture) because my then current TV had it, and it was pretty nifty for watching one football game while keeping track of another.  I discovered that it would cost a lot more extra to get any of the current models with PIP, more than the cost of buying a second, smaller HDTV.  So I bought a budget model 32” LCD TV to go next to my new 60” model.  I found that I liked the setup not just for watching two football games at the same time, but also for watching TV while playing video games, especially when I am just performing some boring, repetitive action to level up a character, exploit a flaw in the game to generate endless amounts of money, or get some achievement.  I liked the POOP TV setup so much that a couple years later, I sold my 32” TV to a friend and upgraded the POOP TV to a 40” model.

I have no wife or kids, I have to spend my money on something, right?

Posted in Critical Thinking, Criticism, Quotes, Sci-Fi, Science, Skepticism, Space, Syfy, Television, Thoughtful/Random Observation | Leave a Comment »

Final Follow-Up on the Probability of an Alien Invasion

Posted by Karl Withakay on June 3, 2010

This post is part 3 of my Deconstruction of Stephen Hawking’s comments about contact with alien intelligences being risky.  Part one was a general overview of why alien visitation/invasion is highly unlikely.  Part two involved some rough numbers regarding the energy requirements for interstellar space travel at the near light speed velocities required to get anywhere in a remotely reasonable time frame.

In this post I will address the hypothetical “what if” scenario where some advanced alien intelligence has made a fundamental advance/ breakthrough in physics and engineering that allows interstellar or even intergalactic travel at effective speeds far in excess of the speed of light at a relatively low energy cost.

So, what if it is possible?  What if the laws of physics as we know them need to be rewritten or at least get greatly expanded, and it turns out it is possible to travel interstellar distances in practical time frames instead of decades, centuries, or longer?  Further, what if it is possible to do so with a relatively low energy cost instead of needing energy equivalent to tens of thousands of thermonuclear weapons or the yearly outputs of thousands of nuclear reactors?

Well, in short, in that case we’re probably screwed, and there’s still no reason to worry about it because there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.

Any alien civilization that advanced would probably be so far beyond us technologically that we probably couldn’t hope to resist their invasion or even evade detection by them.  We’ve been making radio transmissions for well over 100 years, and during that time, our transmissions have been leaking into space to worlds more than 100 light years distant.  I think it’s reasonable to speculate that any civilization capable of effectively superluminal travel is likely to have an equally advanced ability to detect and locate other intelligent civilizations or suitable worlds.  If such a super advanced civilization is out there, and they are bent on conquest, they probably already have thousands or even millions of probes scattered throughout the galaxy looking for worlds to plunder in addition to their super advanced observation/ search techniques they will be using from their home world.  Basically, if they are reasonably capable of getting here, they are probably capable of finding us whether we want them to or not.

Certainly, if they are capable of getting here, there can be little question of their ability to conquer us with little difficulty, as long as they’re not to worried about our welfare.  Some might point to US and Soviet difficulties in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq as reasons to think we could have some hope of resisting a technologically superior invader, but I would disagree.  First of all, the difference in technology would be closer to trying to fend off A-10’s with paper airplanes, the Ethiopians fighting off the Italian Army in 1935, or the Aboriginal Americans fighting off European invaders, settlers, or colonists.  The Soviets did pretty well in Afghanistan until we started supplying the other side with modern military equipment.  Our problems in Vietnam have been well documented and much debated, but I think it’s at least safe to say we weren’t engaged in an unrestricted attempt to eliminate North Vietnam’s military capability, and they had some help from the Soviets to boot.  Likewise, we’re not attempting to eliminate the populations of either Afghanistan or Iraq.  I’m pretty sure we could do that if we wanted to and we didn’t care about preserving the infrastructure.  Independence Day may have been a fun movie, but it was delusional in regards to our ability to fight off an alien invasion.  We very probably have little chance against a super advanced alien invasion force unless we can find some equally advanced alien allies or a fifth column to help us.

Additionally, Stephen Hawking seems to be implying that if we just stay silent, ET may not find us.  This super advanced ET probably doesn’t need our help to find us.  Irrespective of all the radio transmissions we’ve been leaking into space for over a hundred years, ET would probably be able to detect our rich blue and green world on their own without our help.  We are already are able to detect planets only a few times more massive than the Earth orbiting other stars and detect elemental composition of stars with what would be extremely primitive techniques and technologies compare to what any superluminal civilization would have at its disposal.  It seems likely that ET would be able to find our rich, garden world whether we were here to transmit to them or not.

In summary:  If extraterrestrial aliens have the ability to get here in a reasonably short period of time without bankrupting their planetary economy, then they can probably find us, come here, and kick our butts if they want to.

Frankly, the fact that we haven’t yet been conquered by ET is a hint that maybe either ET isn’t interested in or capable of coming here and conquering us.

Posted in Critical Thinking, Criticism, Followup, Science, Skepticism, Space, Stephen Hawking | 3 Comments »

Deconstruction Review of Fringe, Episode 21, Season 2, Over There, Part 2

Posted by Karl Withakay on May 20, 2010

As usual, an episode synopsis can be found over at Scott’s Polite Dissent.

Kind of a Short Deconstruction Tonight

Maybe there wasn’t as much to Deconstruct again, but I know I’m burned out from work this week.

Quaternary Park

It’s nice to know that millions of years from now when some other life form rules the Earth, they will be able to extract DNA from humans encased in quarantine amber, clone them, and build a Quaternary Park.

The Name Walternate is Now Show Canon

It’s now the show’s official designation for the alternate universe Walter, thanks to Walter.

Quote of the Show

“The laws of physics were changed into mere suggestions”

Apparently Peter Prefers Brunettes As Well

“…but you hair’s different.  I think I like yours better.”

Do They Know Scott Watches the Show?

The comic books on the wall were a nice touch, especially the Red Lantern/ Red Arrow cross-over comic.

Motivation Explained

The motivation for the original espionage against the alternate universe was to obtain their advanced technology for our universe.

Prop Convenience Theater

Did the show explain why the device is keyed to Peter’s genome?  Did Walternate obtain it from some third-party source, and is the design therefore out of his control?

You Lost Me at Stars In The Sky

“I’ve traveled between universes so many times, my atoms are ready to split apart at the slightest provocation.  You taught me there are as many atoms in the human body as there are stars in the sky.  That’s how many atom bombs I am.  That should be enough power to get you home.”

There are an estimated 2X10^22 stars in the observable universe, which is an order of magnitude less than one mole of atoms.  Let’s take a 70kg human (154lb) for an example.  The human body is mostly water (Hydrogen and oxygen) and various carbon compounds.  Lets assume every atom in a human body is oxygen (the “heaviest” of those three elements) just to get a ball park number of the approximate number of atoms in the human body.  That would make a human body consist of roughly 4000 moles of atoms, or ~2.5X10^27 atoms, many orders of magnitude more than the number of stars in the sky.

Also, I suppose that traveling between universes could increase the internal energy in atomic nuclei, making them unstable, buy not so unstable that EACH atom was as powerful as an atomic bomb.  If that were the case, Bell’s body would contain more energy than 9X10^23 kg of antimatter annihilating with the same amount of matter (if we assume a very modest Hiroshima type atom bomb).  That is on the order of an antimatter Mars and a regular matter Mars mutually annihilating.

Was William Bell In On The Plan the Whole Time?

For that matter, is that really our William Bell, or was he lying about Willaimternate dying?  By the way, hands up anyone who didn’t figure out half way through the show which Olivia was coming back to our universe.  I hope there aren’t a lot of raised hands out there.

A Little Out of Character, Don’t You Think?

I would have expected Olivia to be a little more defiant and angry, rather than behave like a frightened little girl at the end

All Math is Approximate In This Post

The numbers are ballpark figures for illustrative purposes.  The results of all calculations were imprecisely rounded to give simplified, rough estimate figures.  If my figures are off, I’m blaming it on lingering  exhaustion form working 32 hours without sleep on Montuesday this week.

Any spelling, grammatical, or typo errors will also be attributed to the same cause.

Posted in Fringe, Prop Convenience Theater, Quotes, Science, Space, Television | 6 Comments »

Deconstruction Review of Fringe, Episode 21, Season 2, Over There, Part 1

Posted by Karl Withakay on May 13, 2010

As usual, an episode synopsis can be found over at Scott’s Polite Dissent.

Kind of a Short Deconstruction Tonight

Maybe there wasn’t as much to Deconstruct, or maybe I’m just too burned out from work today, but I’m hoping for more material from the second part of this episode next week.

Maybe I Just Have a Thing For Brunettes…

But Oliviaternate is way hotter than our Olivia.  Between the brunette hair, the leather jacket, and the ballsier attitude and manner of Oliviaternate, I’ll take her over our Olivia any day.  She’s probably smarted too.  (She can’t be any less bright, can she?)

1983 Silver Clad Nixon Dollar

The reverse of the Nixon Dollar shown in the episode was same as the 1975-76 Bicentennial Dollar from out universe.  The slightly two toned silver color edge of the dollar indicates it is of (or similar to) the silver clad composition, used only for collector issue dollars in our universe, and last made in 1976.  (Half Dollars in silver clad composition were issued for circulation from 1965-1970)  The traditional size dollar coin was last minted for circulation in 1978, though commemorative, traditional size 90% silver dollars were brought back beginning in 1983 for the ‘84 Olympics Coins.  Also, in our universe, no living person may be featured on an American coin, so either the alternate universe does not have that law, or Richard Nixon was already dead in 1983 over there.

Non-Product Placement?

That touch-screen surface table in Colonel Broyle’s office isn’t science fiction, it’s reality.  I’m flabbergasted that they didn’t hit us over the head with a Microsoft logo.  What a missed opportunity for a blatant product placement!

You Didn’t Think We’d Never Hear Form Them Again, Did You?

It seemed likely we’d see the surviving cortexiphan children again; the show made too much of a point of showing them being delivered to Massive Dynamic at the end of their featuring episodes.

Why Not Just Throw in a Mention of Aliens While We’re at It?

Walter:

“You know Belle and I always agreed that that primal part of the brain which allows us to cross universes is also responsible for a host of paranormal activities-  Pyrokinesis,  telepathy, thought control- and that we all had these abilities until, ‘till there was a moment in history when something was done to us and, and it was shut down.  I suspect aliens.”

What, no mention of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, or ghosts?  🙂

Let’s Not Overuse Our Super Powers Right Before We Need to Really Use Them, OK?

“You’ve got to know something.  What the hell is wrong with us?”

“Oh, I suspect that something that somehow the human circuit is flawed.  Did any of you engage in extreme use of your abilities last night- far more than normal?”

Close, But No Cigar

Secretary of Defense was my second guess, after Homeland Security.

Posted in Coins, Flash Forward, Science, Television | 3 Comments »

Deconstruction Review of Fringe, Episode 20, Season 2, Northwest Passage

Posted by Karl Withakay on May 6, 2010

As usual, an episode synopsis can be found over at Scott’s Polite Dissent.

With Street Smarts Like That, No Wonder She’s Dead

Did the waitress just hook up at the local motel with every charming stranger that bought pie and coffee in the diner?

Gratuitous Product Placement Du Jour

Another gratuitous Ford product placement, this time for the Ford Taurus and its Sync based navigation system.

Ford’s Navigation Must Have a Very Good Location Database

It couldn’t find any city in the entire United States called Mars.  Wikipedia found two US cities currently named Mars, one in Pennsylvania, and one in Texas.

Quote of the Show #1

Peter talking to the Sheriff:

“I know how it sounds, but believe me, if you can imagine it, it’s possible.”

At least in Fringe land that’s true.

A Pen for Many Different Customers

“Find the Crack”  Do they also have those pens at the DEA?  Maybe they have them in the current season of Doctor Who as well.

WTF Was Peter Doing to Those Bullets?

Are hollow point bullets restricted in the state of Washington?  Why was Peter filing on the handgun bullets?  Soft point bullets don’t expand very well at handgun velocities, especially ones made in a hotel room with a file.  Was Peter perhaps carving crosses on them in case he had to shoot a vampire?

Do You Have Any Delicious Strawberry Flavored Death?  Yes, Aisle Five.

Apparently Potassium Bromate (KBrO3) may not be the best thing to improve flour with, though it’s still legal to use in the US.

Maybe She Had a Clue When They Posted Mid Term Grades

Walter speaking to Astrid:

“You’re a federal agent.  I doubt during your years of training that you had dreams of baby sitting a helpless old man.”

I’m No Doctor, But My BS Meter Was Registering Off The Scale

I’m not even going to bother Deconstructing that BS with the adrenaline & the time of death.

Are You Allowed to Work in the Fringe Unit if You Know Proper Firearms Safety?

Firing a handguns indoors without hearing protection is a good way to suffer some permanent hearing damage.  Based on the location of the windows in the room, it looked like they were in the basement or lower level, which brings up two other safety issues.  If the building had concrete floors, the bullet could had ricocheted, or if the floors weren’t concrete, the bullet could have penetrated to the upper floor and injured someone.  Hey Peter, why not just try shouting “BOO!’ when the sheriff’s back is turned if you want to scare her?

Quote of the Show #2

Sheriff to Peter:

“I think you’re looking for meaning in things that have no meaning.”

That’s what we humans tend to do; we are pattern seeking creatures.  Even when none exist, we tend to find them if we look hard enough.

Confirmed Sooner Than I Expected

Ladies and Gentlemen: Secretary Walternate Bishop.  Anybody want to guess what he’s secretary of?  My vote is for Homeland Security.

Posted in Fringe, Product Placement, Quotes, Science, Television | 4 Comments »

Follow-Up: Energy Requirements of Interstellar Travel

Posted by Karl Withakay on May 2, 2010

This is a follow-up to my recent post, Cordial Deconstruction of Stephen Hawking? (Am I So Bold?) where I discussed the likelihood that an alien intelligence would bother crossing the universe or galaxy to plunder the resources of the planter Earth.

In this post, I will discuss the energy requirements of interstellar travel.  Before I begin, I want to explain that I’m not going to show the math involved in the numbers, both because many people won’t be interested in the equations, and because this post is going to be long enough without showing all the calculations and equations involved.  I’ve also ignored the time dilation factor which would reduce the relative travel time of the journey for the passengers of a spacecraft traveling close to the speed of light, but it only makes a significant difference at speeds that are energetically prohibitive anyway.

First, a discussion of the distances involved when discussing interstellar travel.  To quote Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe,

“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

A typical galaxy is about 30,000 light years in diameter, the Milky Way being about 100,000 light years across.  The distances between galaxies is even more mind bogglingly huge; the typical distance between galaxies is about 3 million light years.  The visible universe is about 93 billion light years in diameter.  (This is the current, commoving distance, not the distance at the time the light from the furthest visible stars was emitted.)  So, to start, lets rule out intergalactic travel and focus on interstellar travel from within the Milky Way galaxy to see how practical that would be.

The nearest star to the sun is Proxima Centauri at a distance of about 4.2 light years, but Proxima Centauri is not a great candidate for habitual planets, for several reason.  It’s a red dwarf, and that could pose numerous problems.  It’s also variable, which almost closes the door on Proxima Centauri as a candidate for our hostile ET to come from.  Moving on, there are 64 known stars within about 16 light years of the Earth, so let’s just say ET is coming from our back yard, say 10 light years away, though the aliens probably wouldn’t be so local unless life is very common in the universe.

So let’s look at how much energy it would take ET to get here from an unspecified plant 10 light years away.  If we assume ET doesn’t want to spend 200 or more years making a round trip to Earth, they’re going to need to travel fast, really fast.  Even 10% of the speed of light isn’t going to cut it.  Let’s shoot for 90% of the speed of light (c).  At .90 c, it’s going to take about 11 years to make the trip from ET world to earth, if ET can accelerate and decelerate nearly instantaneously.

So now we have our target speed, but we need to know the mass of ET’s vehicle.  An object the size of the space shuttle (~110,000 kg for the orbiter by itself or around 2,000,000 kg for the whole system with boosters and fuel) seems a little physically small for an 11 year journey, so let’s try something a little bigger.  A Virginia class submarine is about 8,000,000 kg and is a craft designed for long term endurance travel; let’s assume ET’s craft is the same mass.

The amount of energy needed to accelerate an object of a mass of 8,000,000kg to.90 c is 7.45 9.32 * 10^23 Joules, which is about 180 million megatons of energy.  This is the equivalent of 3.6 ~4.5 million Tsar Bombas, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated.  It would take more than four five million kg of antimatter annihilating with the same amount of matter to produce this much energy.  It’s worse than it looks, because the ETs need to slow down to a relative stop when  they get here, which will take the same amount of energy as the acceleration, so we’re talking about 360 ~450 million megatons of energy just  for a one way trip.  But it’s even worse than that.  We are ignoring the mass of the energy source and any propellant used in for ET’s spacecraft, and we are assuming 100% efficiency in the conversion of the energy source into vehicle velocity, which isn’t going to happen in the real universe.  All things considered, without going into the increasingly complicated math (which would require us to start using calculus since the mass of the vehicle now decreases as we consume reactant & propellant), we probably need to increase our estimate of the energy requirements by an order of magnitude or so.

So, bottom line, at the end of our rudimentary estimate of the energy requirements to travel at .90 c, we’re talking about an energy requirement in the order of a billion megatons or so.

OK, what if ET is a little more patient and is willing to endure a 200 year round trip at .10 c?  The energy requirements drop to ~17,000 ~870,000 Megatons of energy (or 17,000 Tsar Bombas) for a one way trip. (It’s not a linear decrease because we’re talking relativistic mechanics here.)

(For reference, doing a little math, I calculate the Callaway Nuclear Generating Station in Missouri generates about 8 megatons of energy a year.)

So, in summary, the energy requirements are massive for velocities even 10% of the speed of light, and absurdly huge for speeds 90% of c, and even at those speeds, we are limited to about 10 light years of distance for any reasonable length journey.  Why would any ET, no matter how conquest driven they were, bother expending such energy resources to plunder the resources of another world, assuming they could even find a suitable planet to plunder in their local stellar neighborhood?

I think we can sleep soundly at night, never having to worry about Stephen Hawking’s ETs ever attacking the Earth ID4 style.

In regards to the energy requirements of some mythological faster than light propulsion system, who can really say what those would be?  I can speculate that they would be much greater than those of traveling at velocities at “significant” percentages of the speed of light, and someone else can say that as long as we are speculating about faster than light travel, why can’t we speculate about some relatively low energy process to achieve those speeds?  It’s all wild speculation if not outright fantasy at that point, so there’s really no numbers to talk about.

Posted in Critical Thinking, Criticism, Followup, Science, Skepticism, Space, Stephen Hawking | 12 Comments »

Deconstruction Review of Fringe, Episode 19, Season 2, Brown Betty

Posted by Karl Withakay on April 29, 2010

As usual, an episode synopsis can be found over at Scott’s Polite Dissent.

A Doubly So-So Episode

This was a pretty meh episode from a Deconstruction viewpoint due to the nature of the episode.  Regardless of whether you liked the episode itself or not, it was also kind of a throw away episode that didn’t do much of anything for the show’s story arc/plot either.

Rachel Dunham, Mother of the Year

OK, let’s assume that Rachel had a really good reason for needing to go to Chicago for the weekend.  Was it really a good idea to leave her daughter in the care of her single, FBI field agent sister who wasn’t on vacation?  How was this any better than just taking Ella with her to Chicago?  Did she know that Olivia could just pawn Ella off to Astrid for daycare, or did she think Olivia was just going to bring Ella along on cases?

Did Astrid run over the FBI director’s dog at some point in her past?

How badly do you have to screw up in the FBI to not just be assigned to the Fringe division, but to be assigned as the lab assistant/ gofer/ baby sitter for the rest of the Fringe unit?  If Olivia’s not usually the sharpest tack in the junk drawer (the previous two episodes notwithstanding), what does that say for Astrid as Olivia’s lackey?

Story Walter’s Lab is Cooler than Real Walter’s

Story Walter has cooler toys in his lab than real Walter.  Real Walter needs to go to Think Geek and Edmund’s Scientific more often like story Walter apparently does.

Continuity Lapse

I know it was just a story being told to a child, but Fringe has usually done a commendable job on continuity in the past, in that scars and bruises persist from one episode to another.  It was a little disappointing to see story Olivia’s chest scar disappear in the next scene after Esther treated it.

Get Your Sci-Fi Straight

I know I’ve made this mistake in the past myself, but I’m not one of the show’s writers.  A bald guy in a dark suit and hat in Fringe is called an Observer, not a Watcher.

I Always Carry a Nice, Warm Blanket in My Zodiac

You know, just in case I happen to find a woman trapped in a leaky wooden coffin out at sea.  I wouldn’t want her to suffer from hypothermia or anything.

Posted in Fringe, Science, Television | 4 Comments »

Cordial Deconstruction of Stephen Hawking? (Am I So Bold?)

Posted by Karl Withakay on April 26, 2010

Would you drive to Alaska to buy gasoline?  Stephen Hawking seems to think you might if your local gas station ran out.

Here’s my take on the ID4/ hostile aliens thing:

(And here is where I dare to Cordially Deconstruct the position of someone who is much, much, much smarter than I am)

There’s something on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the known universe, and there’s something on the order of 100 billion stars in each of those galaxies.  We’re just beginning to scratch the surface of figuring out how many of those stars might contain planets and how many of those planets or their moons might be remotely habitable by life as we know it.  I think it would be wise to assume that some forms of extremophiles could survive on worlds more hostile than what we conservatively call habitable.  And although we don’t really have any reasonable clue for estimating the probability of life arising on a suitable world, let alone the odds of intelligent life developing, 10,000 billion, billion stars is a lot of stars (10^20), and that’s a lot of spins on the roulette wheel of life to hit the jackpot only once.  In the absence of actual data, it seems reasonable to speculate that there’s life elsewhere in the universe, and some of it is probably more advanced than we are.

That being said, it also seems likely to me that inter-galactic space travel isn’t particularly likely, and we don’t have to worry about whether ET is friendly or not.

You may think this is modern arrogance, but despite mysteries like dark energy and dark matter, we have a pretty good idea of how the universe works, and it looks like the universal speed limit (can not obtain) for things with mass is the speed of light.  The practical effect of this limit is that inter-galactic travel would take an incredibly long time to get anywhere not in you own star system.  Intergalactic travel would also take an impractically large amount of energy if you wanted to travel at any velocity approaching a significant percentage of the speed of light.  Even if we speculate the discovery of some way to travel faster than the speed of light, it seems reasonable to also speculate it would extremely (prohibitively) energy intensive.

So what might we have here in an ultra-advanced, space faring, alien species?  We have ETs that have no motivation to travel to other stars for anything other than esoteric knowledge gathering that probably won’t be of any use to the folks back home anyway, since they’ll likely all be long dead by the time the explorers got back.  Listen, if you have the energy resources to travel across the galaxy (either at sub-light or superluminal velocity), you don’t need to plunder the resources of other worlds; you’ve got resources coming out of your ying tang, and you’ve got the technology to do whatever you need  with those resources.  You’d be better off just terraforming some reletively nearby world rather than traveling across the galaxy to plunder a distant Earth-like planet.

Traveling across the galaxy to plunder the Earth’s resources would be like me driving to Alaska from Missouri to buy gas if my local filling station ran out.  Why bother if I already have the resources to get there?

5-2-10:  See the followup post here:  Followup: Energy Requirements of Interstellar Travel

Posted in Critical Thinking, Criticism, Science, Skepticism, Space, Stephen Hawking | 7 Comments »

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