An eye-opening exposé just went up on Mars One, the private company that wants to send you to Mars: All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go. Journalist Elmo Keep spent the better part of a year on this story, and it shows in her breezy prose, slick artwork and diverse cast of contributing voices. Solicited for comment were the Mars One founders, SpaceX, cosmonaut Chris Hadfield, and a wide-eyed hopeful from Australia named Josh. It’s a lengthy but enlightening article, and the illustration is top-notch.

Mars One is a not-for-profit headquartered in the Netherlands. The current timeline, which founder Bas Lansdorp says is “highly flexible”, has a manned Mars-bound craft lifting off in the year 2024. There are just a few details to square away before then, and one of them is funding. The company believes the project will cost no more than $6 billion. Total donations so far have barely reached $600,000, or 0.01% of their target.

Spokesmen for Mars One remain optimistic, citing dozens of sponsors and a number of contracts in the works, though they are tight-lipped as to the substance of these contracts and the dollar-values of the sponsorships. SpaceX is listed on its website as one of its suppliers, but when Keep reached out to SpaceX, she discovered that they have no current contracts with Mars One.

Ultimately Lansdorp and his few associates hope to fund the initial mission with a reality TV series, which will involve filming the final candidates night and day during their ten years of training here on earth. Whether the revenue flows from this “Big Brother In Space” will translate into the capital they need for the most daunting mission in human history remains to be seen.

Apart from bringing to light the true status of Mars One’s ambitious programs, Keep is also interested in the reasons an earthling might wish to volunteer for a permanent relocation to a hellish landscape, or what she calls “being sentenced to death row”. To leave everything you’ve ever known and loved to sign up for an uncertain, but certainly hazardous, future seems to leak sanity.

Mars’ non-breathable atmosphere ensures any future visitors will be confined to self-contained, subterranean structures, which affords greater protection from harmful radiation swirling around the surface. David Willson of NASA puts it bluntly: “They’re going to be living like moles. I don’t think that the people who volunteered really appreciate that they’re going to spend the rest of their lives living in a submarine.”

Moreover, even with high-bandwidth transponders, latency problems promise against ever having real-time communication with life back home. For all intents and purposes, those applying to Mars One’s space opera are signing off from everything they once knew. In some ways, the dangers of planetary travel and existence on Mars seem overshadowed by the twinship of loneliness and loss. And the centerpiece of Keep’s story, the passionate aspirant from Australia, appears to have made peace with all of it.

The challenges involved with a manned flight to Mars are many and varied. Among them is a reliable way of regulating the atmosphere in the life support habitat. Colonizers would depend on plants for food by growing them in a pressurized, nitrogen-rich environment. Plants release oxygen, and eventually the O2 levels would build up and need to be filtered out. But no existing technology can selectively vent molecular nitrogen and oxygen. Too little nitrogen, and the pressurized environment is lost; the crew will asphyxiate. Too much of both poses serious fire hazards and risk of hyperoxia.

In fact, a team of graduate students at MIT assessed this very threat and presented their findings at this year’s International Astronautical Congress in Toronto. According to their report, it would only take 68 days for this risk to become fatal to the crew. There are ways around this, such as siloing the food production and crew quarters, but mainly at the expense of significant mission creep.

There are also several scientific questions that still need to be answered before we should even consider green-lighting a one-way trip with human cargo: whether a “Base First” approach (where the underground base is built before the crew arrives) is preferable or even feasible, how to grow food in perpetuity, how to cleanly recycle water and a breathable atmosphere, how to repair faulty equipment with limited materials, how to balance the psychological profiles of a crew, how to resolve interpersonal hiccups on a barren rock hundreds of millions of miles away. All of these are absolutely critical to mission success and must be worked out before Mars One is ready for primetime.

But does any of this matter if the endeavor is destined to abort before it gets off the ground? To date there are no specifications for the craft, the space suits or the base that will need to be established promptly after the crew’s arrival. Any existential yearnings to sate human curiosity should be balanced by realistic expectations. While Mars One may not be blatantly phoning it in (Keep stops short of calling it an outright scam), it’s clear that its three-employee contingent is grossly underqualified and underprepared for the most harrowing off-world mission in the history of spaceflight. The oft-reported 200,000 applicants is likely exaggerated, as is their preparedness, both technologically and financially. Theoretical futures are fine, but a line is crossed when utter fantasies are repackaged as something more.

 
External Link:  All Dressed Up for Mars and Nowhere to Go

 
 
Make sure you don’t miss the historic comet landing ten years in the making. Your options for live-streaming tomorrow:

• ESA will have live coverage beginning tonight and all day tomorrow.

• NASA Television will be covering the event starting at 9 am tomorrow.

• Livestream will have a mirrored feed of ESA’s live coverage.

• The Telegraph will have up-to-the-minute updates and other miscellaneous coverage.

The clock ticks closer to an encounter of the first kind. Tomorrow the ESA’s unmanned Rosetta will drop a robotic lander onto the surface of a 22 trillion-pound comet barreling through space at 30,000 mph. The target, known as 67P/C-G (short for 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko), circles the sun every six and a half years and is expected to yield new insights into comet geology, the origins of our solar system, and of life on Earth.

Rosetta was launched back in 2004 as a follow-up mission to the ESA’s own Giotto spacecraft, which pulled data from Halley’s Comet. While primarily an ESA brainchild, NASA did contribute three of Rosetta’s onboard instruments. Its time spent in space prior to the pending comet approach has been resoundingly successful, with a sweep of flybys of local asteroids and planets, and even an up-close look at the aftermath of NASA’s Deep Impact mission, famous for shooting an impactor at comet Tempel 1 in 2005. In total, Rosetta has journeyed 4 billion miles (6.4 billion km) through the solar system on course to its eventual destination of Comet 67p/C-G. The full timeline is visualized here.

A rendezvous between comet and machine is easily one of the most daunting technological and logistical feats of spaceflight ever attempted. To cruise around in the vacuum of space, Rosetta must rely strictly on energy from the sun for power. The farther it drifts from the sun, the less power returns the craft’s solar panel array has to work with. Traveling around the inner loop of the solar system and spying on nearby objects allowed enough juice to power the craft indefinitely. But the comet’s enormous distance from the sun meant that a hibernation-like state was required to bridge the gap with enough reserve power for the mission’s climax. For two and a half years ESA powered down Rosetta’s onboard electronics while it stalked its prey in deep space. That extended slumber was interrupted this past January as it readied for the most harrowing stage of the mission.

Right now mission control is preparing for the separation phase of the Philae lander from Rosetta, which is scheduled to occur at 4 am EST. By 11 am tomorrow, if all goes as planned, the human species will have landed a probe onto a far-flung comet moving at vertiginous speed. Signals sent from Earth will require tens of minutes to reach Rosetta orbiting 317 million miles (510 million km) away. After separation, the lander will fire two harpoons into the comet proper to secure a safe landing. Once aboard it will unleash its full armamentarium of survey gear, including an industrial drill and a suite of spectrometers and magnetometers for measuring chemical composition and magnetic field strength, respectively.

Moments like these don’t come often. We should never take for granted what we can achieve when we guide our intelligence in scientific directions. Be proud that you’re a member of a civilization that accomplishes things like this.

Update 11.12.2014: LANDING COMPLETE, reports ESA. At 11:03 EST (16:03 GMT), Philae has successfully docked on the comet and is relaying data back to Earth every few minutes. Now it’s time for it to do what it does best: science! These are not the ending credits for a job well done, but an exciting start to the second phase of the mission.
 

Update 11.15.2014: Due to its bouncy landing, Philae’s photovoltaics did not achieve line of sight with the sun. Bankrupted of power, the lander is nonfunctional for the time being, ESA reports. “With its batteries depleted and not enough sunlight available to recharge, Philae has fallen into ‘idle mode’ for a potentially long silence. In this mode, all instruments and most systems on board are shut down…From now on, no contact would be possible unless sufficient sunlight falls on the solar panels to generate enough power to wake it up.” But fret not; Philae has already gotten what it came for—geological samples, temperature readings and hordes of photos—and ESA considers the mission complete. Anything else, such as power being restored next August when its orbit is nearest the sun, will be a bonus to an already lucrative project.

 
 
In 1959, the chemist-cum-novelist C. P. Snow opined on what he saw as a cultural partition between the sciences and the humanities. Regardless of whether this divide was self-imposed or the product of institutional myopia, he encouraged more interplay between the two camps. Art and science, for example, have a lot to offer one another. Like a translator between foreign speakers, art makes it possible to convey the sophistication of science to a wider audience. And science is itself a profound source of art, as anyone who’s basked in the radiant images of Cosmos or been transported by the poetic prose of Carl Sagan can attest.

This alliance between the aesthetic and the descriptive can be traced back to a common heritage. Both are, at bottom, vehicles for human expression—windows into the human condition that reach across cultures and generations. What makes productions like Cosmos and the BBC’s Human Universe so extraordinary is that they appropriate our natural sense of wonder and connect it to a scientific vision of reality.

Today Dr. Snow might revel in what was for him an underexplored medium. Collaboration among artists and science communicators has blossomed in recent years, enabling us to disseminate scientific knowledge in fresh and innovative ways. Armed with an array of digital tools and a passion for science, several talented entrepreneurs have created some truly magnificent content and put it here on the web for all to enjoy. I’ve hand-picked this catacomb of treasures based on scientific merit, aesthetic quality and their ability to lend a sense of perspective.

1.  Scale of the Universe

What better place to start than with a visualization that captures the entire observable universe—from the large and distant to the small and invisible? This incredible Flash animation was created by 14 year-old Cary Huang and his twin brother Michael. Spanning a massive 62 orders of magnitude, you’ll move from the quarks and neutrinos lurking beyond where our senses can take us and out to the cosmic reaches of the Crab Nebula and Barnard’s Loop. Best of all, you can click on each and every object for a pithy description or interesting factoid. Go ahead and spend a few minutes. I’ll even provide the soundtrack (click the music icon to disable the audio first).1
 

2. Cell Size and Scale

Humans are primates adapted to seeing mid-sized objects. Anything shorter than ~0.1 mm in length is hidden from the naked eye, leaving us oblivious for most of our history to the tiny machinery powering life on earth. An animation created by the University of Utah’s Health Sciences department brings this subvisual world of cells, chromosomes and amino acids into sharper focus.

In many ways, life is more interesting on this scale. Delve into the bustling environment of a cell and you will see millions of protein factories called ribosomes assembling amino acids spelled out in DNA; antibodies and enzymes scrambling to identify virus intruders and refortify cell walls; lysosomes flushing out unwanted bacterial toxins from nomadic strains like E. coli and Salmonella; hemoglobin proteins shuttling oxygen through the blood stream. Your cells are keeping you alive in a myriad of ways at any given moment, each unit working together like a well-trained platoon.

Also notice the middling stature of a sperm cell in comparison to an egg cell, not unlike a small comet in low orbit around an earth-sized planet. The rest of the content by the Genetic Science Learning Center is equally educational and worth checking out.
 

3. 100,000 Stars

Among the first submissions to the Chrome Experiments channel, 100,000 Stars remains to this day one of the most impressive examples of art interfacing with science. This interactive lets you leave our crazy world behind and embark on a tour of the nearest 119,617 stars, including 87 labeled stars like Arcturus and Gliese 570. Clicking on the name of each star will bring up a description paired with a magnified view, from which you can continue to the Wiki page or snap back to your previous zoom point. The amount of work that went into this—hacking together multiple data sets, the subtle use of rendering tools like like color shaders and lens flare—makes for one spectacular visualization. And to top it off, the music you hear is a previously unreleased track for the Mass Effect series titled “In A Strange Land,” scored by Sam Hulick and Jack Wall. Epic.
 

4. How Big Is Space?

Here we are in this dark corner of the cosmos, aglow under a sun eight light minutes away, removed by some 25,000 light years from the center of our home galaxy. What we are seeing on the sun actually happened eight minutes ago. Our galaxy could be ripping apart at the seams and we wouldn’t know it for another 25,000 years. And light travels faster than anything in the known universe. How could we possibly grasp so much sky?

Even with scale-sensitive visualization, the Universe can overwhelm us with its imponderable size and scope. Thankfully, the BBC have put together a graphic that helps illustrate its vast spread in a way humans can more readily comprehend.

Catch up with Felix Baumgartner, who was dropped from the stratosphere at a height of 24 miles in 2012, clinching the world skydiving record.2 Venture out 134 million miles and meet up with Juno, NASA’S New Frontiers probe en route to Jupiter and slated to arrive in July 2016. Then fly out to Ceres, the largest asteroid we’ve yet glimpsed and the destination of Dawn, soon to be the first spacecraft to study a dwarf planet up close. Next zip over to the New Horizons spacecraft which has an appointment with Pluto in less than a year’s time.

Finally, at a distance of 12 billion miles, reunite with Voyager 1, the farthest object we’ve ever sent out into the Universe. After 37 years and counting, Voyager 1 is still transmitting, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is still receiving.
 

5. The Tree of Life

Common ancestry is a concept that lends itself especially well to illustration. An interactive created by the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science allows you to explore the evolutionary connections of life on earth. It relies primarily on sequence data, where available, and physical fossil evidence where it’s not.

The hierarchical structure is instantly recognizable, arrayed in a three-domain system with the many interconnected branches subjacent. The pool of universal common ancestors towards the bottom of the graphic denotes the uncertainty surrounding the first life forms to emerge on earth. At this early stage, the branching concept breaks down due to rampant genetic swapping among nascent organisms. Over time, evolution stabilized to the point where different forms of life developed along more independent tracks. All in all, it’s a bird’s eye view that could use more detail, but every metaphor has its limits.
 

6. Kepler’s Tally of Planets

With every potentially habitable planet espied, Fermi’s paradox looms ever larger. It plays torture with our curiosity and claws at the deepest questions of existence. With each turn of the telescope we are tantalized by the unresolved quandaries and stygian enigmas that have haunted us for so long. We have climbed to the cosmic surface, and can feel our answers drawing near. Might, on just one of those faraway worlds, there be beings gazing back at us?

NASA’s Kepler observatory, first cast into space in 2009, has been a colossal success. The 2,300-pound planet hunter is tasked with identifying Earth-sized planets outside our solar system by detecting telltale dips in brightness from planet-like bodies passing in front of their home stars. As of October 2014, we’ve confirmed a total of 1,763 exoplanets, 992 of which were spotted by Kepler, with another 3,218 unconfirmed candidates.3 Many of these are expected to be within their star’s habitable zone, where water could exist in liquid form. Since Kepler samples only a sliver of the night sky, a few teams have spun the numbers and extrapolated that there may be billions of Earth-like worlds in the Milky Way alone. That’s quite a far cry from the nine planets we knew of by the time I entered grade school.

The Milky Way

The NY Times have compiled a fantastic feature which tracks Kepler’s running tally. The catalog is organized by size of solar system and star temperature, and you can mouse over each star system to display the number of planets in orbit and any accompanying images or news stories.

In May of last year, a second of Kepler’s four reaction wheels failed, crippling its onboard precision and navigation gear. Never one to quit prematurely, NASA spent a year testing the functional equipment and declared the mission salvageable. They green-lighted the K2 campaign this past May, in which the spacecraft will continue its prime directive while expanding its scope to include study of star formation and supernova explosions. With more than 150,000 stars now surveyed by Kepler, the enormous backlog of data is sure to keep astronomers busy for the next several years.
 

7. Mars Curiosity Rover Tracker

For such a desolate planet, there’s a lot happening on Mars right now. Two rovers plod its surface and a fleet of five research satellites ring its perimeter, though it’s fair to say that none have garnered the acclaim of Curiosity. In June the Curiosity rover celebrated its first Martian lap around the sun at 687 Earth days. And in August we celebrated its two-year anniversary on the vermilion planet since touching down in Gale Crater. For the last 780 days and counting, the robot that could has been beaming data and images back to Earth at an average distance of 140 million miles.

Thanks to another outstanding feature by the NY Times courtesy of NASA, you can take in every vista snapped by the rover. Each high-resolution image is an actual photograph from Curiosity‘s onboard optics. Beginning at Sol 0, relive its slow (it boasts a maximum speed of 300 ft per hour) and measured traversal of the barren wasteland as it chases signs of life and biopsies its geology. What thrilling secrets might be unearthed as it inches its way up the ridge of Mount Sharp?
 

8. Rosetta Space Mission

The clock ticks closer to an encounter of the first kind. Next month the ESA’s unmanned Rosetta will drop a robotic lander onto the surface of a 22 trillion-pound comet. The target, known as 67P/C-G (short for 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko), circles the sun every six and a half years and is expected to yield new insights into comet geology, the origins of our solar system, and of life on Earth.

A rendezvous between comet and machine is easily one of the most daring technological and logistical feats of spaceflight ever attempted. For two and a half years of its ten-year voyage, ESA powered down Rosetta’s onboard electronics so as not to deplete its solar energy reserves while it stalked its prey in deep space. That extended slumber was interrupted in January to prepare for the most harrowing stage of the mission, set to commence on November 12. Signals sent from Earth will require tens of minutes to reach the probe orbiting several hundred million miles away. After separation, the lander will fire two harpoons into the comet proper to secure a safe landing. Once aboard it will unleash its full armamentarium of survey gear, including an industrial drill and a suite of spectrometers and magnetometers for measuring chemical composition and magnetic field strength, respectively.

A team called INOVE have written a 3D model representing the Rosetta timeline. For Android owners, this was also released as an app. Finally, a short film featuring the sleek Rosetta in CGI form recently aired at the British Film Institute: Ambition.

Honorable Mention

Two Years On Mars: This might be the coolest piece of science content The Verge has put out there. It’s a before-and-after diorama of the Curiosity rover after its two-year stint on Mars. As durable and well-engineered as the rover might be, it still took a beating from Mars’ rough-and-tumble landscape. Save for a memory glitch in one of its onboard computers in 2013, and generous amounts of dust, none of the wear and tear has proved mission-critical, however. This “Hack Week” feature by The Verge is an excellent use of technology to which more multimedia should aspire.

What creative presentations of science have you come across? Leave them in the comments below!

1. As this graphic was created in 2012, two minor updates are in order (there may be others):

   – The genus Megavirus is no longer the record-holder in terms of either genome size or capsid diameter. The Pandoravirus, discovered in July 2013, is now the largest known genus as a measure of DNA, while Pithovirus, first described in 2014, is now the largest by measure of capsid diameter.

   – Thanks to the discovery of the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall (Her–CrB GW) in November 2013, the Sloan Great Wall is now the sixth largest known object in the observable universe.

2. That record has since been eclipsed by Alan Eustace, senior vice president of Google, whose 25.7 mi (135,890 ft) plunge on October 24, 2014 is now the highest free fall jump on record.

3. You can export the full database to Excel here.

 
 
I have a bit of a lover’s quarrel with this one. The plot (lone crew member gets stranded on Mars), setting (Mars) and scientific integrity (there’s a lot of good science here) would seem to be the perfect blend for a target audience that is me. But then there’s Mark Watney, or as I like to call him: the teenager in an EVA suit. Crafted of equal parts cocky and corny, The Martian‘s main character makes the male cohort on The Big Bang Theory seem downright intoxicating. Each time you’re about to settle into the sci-fi goodness unfolding on the blood-red planet, Watney’s juvenility and hackeneyed attempts at humor rear up to depressurize the drama and poison the narrative atmosphere. I did not connect with this character, at all.

Here’s an exchange between Watney and NASA Mission Control in which Watney can’t help but lay on the prepubescent charm:
 

[11:49] JPL: What we can see of your planned cut looks good. We’re assuming the other side is identical. You’re cleared to start drilling.

[12:07] Watney: That’s what she said.

…..

[12:04] JPL: We’ll get botanists in to ask detailed questions and double-check your work. Your life is at stake, so we want to be sure. Also, please watch your language. Everything you type is being broadcast live all over the world.

[12:15] Watney: Look! A pair of boobs! -> (.Y.)

 
…What am I reading? Is this sci-fi or middle school? I’m all for bucking stereotypes — like the urbane, straight-laced NASA astronaut Weir apparently had in mind — but Watney is a stride too far in the opposite direction. On occasion the dullish teen-speak gives way to genuine wit, but such instances are too few and far between that the bad taste in my mouth never left. That said, I do expect reader mileage to vary on this score.

I could probably look the other way if the supporting cast were infused with greater dimensionality, but it’s hardly the case. The crew deliver dialogue every bit as stilted and cliched, their interactions adding nothing of substance to the narrative. Here’s one crew member chatting with his wife back home:
 

Martinez: “So, you’re pissed.”

Marissa: “I have to wait another 533 days to get laid!”

Martinez: “So do I,” he said defensively.

A World Away

But not even Watney’s itchy tongue and forgettable dialogue are enough to dash an epic quest on a foreign world. This is Mars after all, our second closest neighbor and perennial sci-fi favorite. In this outing a crew of six travel to Mars for NASA’s third manned mission, known as Ares 3. While out on expedition, a nasty storm sweeps up and amid the chaos one crew member is struck by a wayward antenna carried by the high-powered surface winds. With his comms no longer transmitting, the crew is unable to locate the downed engineer. Fearing the destruction of their return vehicle, the crew abandon the search and conclude that Mars has claimed its first human casualty.

Except Ares 3 leaves behind more than an unforgivable environment. They leave one of their own, bruised and battered, but not exactly dead. It’s now Watney vs. the Red Planet, a match less lopsided than one might think. Mars’ razor thin atmosphere, brutal cold, active weather, and craggy terrain all serve as redoubtable antagonists Watney must overcome to secure a return trip home. Imagine being all alone on a planet climatically hostile to your kind of life with dwindling resources, no return vessel and no contact with the only people who can bring you one. Even the best odds of survival would be Planck length-low.

Fortunately, our deserted soul is no slouch. What Watney lacks in charisma he more than makes up for in sheer intelligence and technical brilliance. Mars’ first “colonizer” wears the hats of botanist and mechanical engineer, and is a person for whom “asleep at the wheel” would be a most inapt descriptor. If MacGyver, Rube Goldberg and Robinson Crusoe were to have some kind of hybrid child, Watney would be it. The man’s a dynamo, as pragmatically minded, resourceful and resilient as they come. It’s probably why he was chosen for a NASA mission.

He’s also utterly determined to make it back to Earth. As Watney awakes groggy-eyed and the true extent of his plight comes into focus, his indomitable survivalism takes over and doesn’t let up. He quickly realizes it will require every ounce of his scientific acumen to hold out until the next scheduled NASA mission, at which time an aghast Ares 4 crew would set eyes on one weary astronaut. His botany training is put to immediate use by creating a renewable source of food from little more than potato seeds and “homegrown” fertilizer. He employs some fancy chemistry in order to maintain a breathable atmosphere and reliable (though radiatively unstable) heat source. And every whit of Watney’s engineering know-how is spent on preparing the rover for a transplanetary jaunt over Mars’ surly, rough-and-tumble terrain.

Watney’s time on Mars is relayed through daily first-person logs that record his progress in addition to a few clunky transitions to third-person omniscient. Provided you don’t mind being submerged in technical detail, these logs may just win you over as they did me. This is science at its most raw and ad hoc. The meticulous cataloging succeeds in connecting you to the action as Watney slaps together one near-suicidal scheme after another.

Just as we might expect of someone marooned 140 million miles (annual average) from all of civilization, our hero is never allowed too much comfort. Part of the allure is seeing what hellish scenario presents itself next and how Watney’s ingenuity and moxie will combine to solve it away. Better yet, all of the science here is kosher, otherwise known as “hard” sci-fi. Watney won’t run into any boogeymen or Martian monsters in this one, but the trials he does chance upon are every bit as deadly. With each setback and triumph, no specifics are spared the reader, as complex concepts are unspooled with ease and clarity.

Andy Weir, something of a prodigy himself, started out as a computer programmer at age 15. For him, science can be both a hobby and a narrative device. But Weir’s goal was not just to use sciencey tropes to drive the story forward, but to make Watney’s exploits as scientifically plausible as possible. He released some early chapters online as a free serial novel, which quickly garnered interest from fans and scientists alike. Weir incorporated their technical feedback for the final print edition, making The Martian a kind of collective effort by science enthusiasts.

What results is a unique blend of survivalist sci-fi and problem-solving escapades told through excruciatingly detailed science. Could one human really survive on Mars with standard NASA equipage? The answer is surely yes, if Watney has anything to say about it. All of his interdisciplinary expertise is on display for the reader to either absorb, deconstruct and debunk, or skim over until the next existential disaster strikes.

Technical readers will fall head over heels working through the minutia, while the less initiated may find their eyes glazing over, but both audiences will come away having learned something new. The thoroughness of it all is really what pulled me in and lent the story its strong scent of credibility. There’s no deus ex machina here. If Watney didn’t die in the previous chapter, it’s because he used science to decatastrophize the latest curveball Mars threw his way. It’s satisfying in a way that “softer” sci-fi tropes aren’t.
 

As beautiful as it is inhospitable

Don’t Leave Home Without Them

Before wrapping up the review, I thought I’d briefly walk through a few pieces of equipment that recur throughout the story. These are absolutely vital to Watney’s survival, and given how often they’re mentioned it might be helpful to have a quick reference here for those looking to embark on Weir’s planetary safari. The “Big Three” are:

• Oxygenator. A machine that strips apart the carbon atoms from the CO₂ that Watney exhales and retains the oxygen atoms. Relies on the atmospheric regulator for the CO₂; worthless without it.

• Atmospheric regulator. A machine that monitors the molecular gas concentrations in the air, removing and resupplying CO₂ and O₂ as necessary. Too much oxygen (oxygen toxicity) is just as dangerous as too much carbon dioxide (hypercapnia).

• Water reclaimer. A machine that salvages and purifies water from virtually anything that gives off moisture, including humidity from the air when Watney exhales or sweats in the pressurized environments, waste waters from the Hab’s fuel cells, and even Watney’s urine. If this sounds disgusting, it’s worth noting that the reclaimers NASA employs on their manned missions use three-step purification.

Closing Thoughts

In The Martian, science is front and center, assuming the roles of protagonist and antagonist and is the driving mechanism that allows forward progress for the hero. If chemistry, biology, and physics aren’t your speed, you won’t last long on this cerebral joyride. Much of the narrative hovers just on the edge of possible, and Weir’s technical accuracy and attention to detail were more than enough to keep me glued, even if Watney’s unsavory personality and the stilted character interactions frequently left me out in the cold.

Were the grade-school script and throwaway dialogue intentional juxtapositions to compensate for the technical nature of much of the rest of the book — a lighthearted, expletive-suffused respite to allow your brain a cooldown period from the stress and heavy lifting? Perhaps, but I think they could have been handled much better, as I found the contrast jarring, often piercing the tension at several inopportune moments. I also simply found the attempts at humor largely nonfunctional, though I acknowledge the subjectivity on this account. Quibbles aside, The Martian is well researched space fiction that manages to capture mankind’s relentless will to survive, an orchestra of science in which limited resources and unlimited creativity battle to the last breath.

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

 
 
In a world without context, the recent discovery at the South Pole might seem rather mundane and uneventful. The soon to be iconic map of a lattice-shaped grid with faint, interlacing patterns might be forgivably mistaken for an undergrad art deco project gone wrong. But in reality it is a trip through time — far, far back in time, to the earliest moments of our universe. Like the discovery of the Higgs particle and the microwave background radiation before it, this week’s announcement is another extraordinary confirmation of our ability to comprehend the cosmos, right down to its very origins. The supposed limits of science have once again been cast off, deep time made ever more accessible, as we grapple with scales that subdue the mind into equal shades of awe and humility.

There were rumors over the past few months that a huge discovery had been made at the Amundsen-Scott research station at the South Pole. Beginning in 2006, the station has employed a pair of ultrasensitive radio telescopes to scan the skies in an attempt to learn more about the early universe. Measuring 32.8 feet (10 meters) high and outfitted with 512 detectors, BICEP2 was trained specifically to pick up the polarization properties of the cosmic microwave background (residual radiation from the Big Bang).1 Sure enough, a team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics released the map below and supporting observational data this week after nearly three years of onerous cross-checking and analysis. Led by Dr. John Kovac, the team claims they are registering signals from gravitational waves, the elusive ripples first predicted by Einstein in 1916 as part of his general theory of relativity.
 

B-mode polarization detected at the South Pole. Photo by BICEP2 Collaboration

Until now, the inflation model was little more than an exotic idea that accounted for a broad range of cosmological data. It was put forward as an explanation for the curious macroscale isotropy of the observable universe. Non-uniformities in the density of space as well as temperature fluctuations in the CMB radiation amount to just one part in 100,000, representing a level of homogeneity that cannot simply be waved away. Michael Hanlon has a superb explanation at The Telegraph:
 

“And why do we need inflation?…to explain some problems with the original Big Bang idea. The main one is that deep space looks much the same in every direction. There are no gigantic “gaps” — no galaxies in some places and agglomerations in others — which is what you would expect if you had a simple explosion of matter and energy. Instead, the idea behind inflation is that right at the start of the “Bang”, a period of unimaginable, hyper-fast expansion, billions of times faster than light-speed would smooth out the unevenness, much in the way that pulling on a crumpled sheet will make it flat and even.”

 
Like any good hypothesis, inflation makes a number of predictions. Finding gravitational wave patterns in the cosmic microwave background would be powerful ratification, in the same way the CMB lent observational credence to the Big Bang.2 If our universe indeed rose from the ashes in a violent fury of primordial energy, we should see gravitational distortions in the CMB. This delicate imprint in the “B-mode” power spectrum — the designation given to polarization with a curling or twisting component — is what Kovac and team allege to have found. BICEP2’s wave signatures, if sustained by corroborative surveillance, are nothing less than the smoking gun evidence of inflation: relic ripples from 10^-35 seconds after the Big Bang.

It is important to note that these findings have not yet passed peer review. Of considerable concern is that the CMB signals generated by gravitation, by far the weakest of the four constituent forces, are expected to be so faint that even cosmic dust could produce false positives. Quite confident in his team’s findings, however, Kovac estimated the chance the results were a fluke is only one in 10 million. The team has spent the last couple of years holding the news close to their chest, diligently ruling out any and all alternative possibilities. Thankfully, we won’t have to wait too long for independent confirmation (or disconfirmation), as a number of other observatories are set up to detect B-modes, including ESA’s Planck satellite as well as BICEP2’s successor, BICEP3, which ups the total onboard sensors to 2,560 and is set to deploy later this year.3

Should the findings at the South Pole hold up, the physical markers for the earliest known cosmological event will have been secured, marking one of the greatest scientific discoveries of modern time. Some are ranking this higher than the Higgs boson detection in 2012 and on par with the revelation of the accelerating expansion of the universe in 1998. It’s also a thrilling example of one scientist’s bold prediction vindicated by observation some three decades later — in the case of Einstein a century later — and the euphoric bliss such a moment occasions in the hearts and minds of those so involved. Best positioned for a Nobel Prize here is Andrei Linde, a Russian-American physicist whose 1983 chaotic inflation model expanded on the ideas set down in Guth’s eternal inflation model. Linde’s reaction to the discovery, captured on camera by his colleague, is worth watching twice.

Why Should We Care?

Whenever a discovery in cosmology or particle physics is announced, particularly one as esoteric to the nonspecialist as this one, before long someone will come along and ask, ‘Why does this matter and what impact will it have on humanity?’ After all, what’s paradigm-shifting to those in the field may seem utterly anodyne to someone zipping up and down their news feed. So why should we care?

We might first point out that this question conceals an underlying assumption: that only knowledge with practical benefit bears importance. But should utility be the sole motivator for scientific exploration, a prerequisite for our investigation of the cosmos? Or is our seemingly innate desire to better understand the workings of the universe enough? The notion that knowledge ever has to be justified certainly strikes me as a strange one. Indeed, the acquisition of knowledge for knowledge’s sake is among science’s most treasured and foundational values. The 19th century polymath C.S. Peirce handled this flavor of critique best when he wrote:
 

“True science is distinctively the study of useless things. For the useful things will get studied without the aid of scientific men. To employ these rare minds on such work is like running a steam engine by burning diamonds.”

 
Granted, donors and grantors deserve the benefit of understanding short-term, purpose-driven objectives, but this should never come at the expense of broader theoretical pursuits. For it is those nondescript pursuits that often yield the highest rewards. In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan extols the virtues of “curiosity-driven science,”4 reminding us of the 1900s when popular sentiment in the UK insisted that funding James Clerk Maxwell for his mathematical minutia was absurd. Of course, neither the populace nor Maxwell were imagining radio, radar, and television when he scribbled out those now legendary equations. But within them lay the key to some of the most magnificent breakthroughs in human technological advance.

More to the point, the applied sciences would not exist but for the theoretical (pure) sciences that underlie them. When we began fiddling with silicon and its conductive properties, who could have supposed that our tamperings would one day be worth billions and change the world? Einstein’s equations on relativity issued into dozens of technologies, including mobile phones, GPS, and nuclear power. Number theory gave way to cryptography. Jennifer Doudna’s research focused on how bacteria get the flu and culminated in programmable enzymes, ushering in a whole new era of biotech and gene therapy. Our desire to reach the moon began as a pissing contest with the Soviets but left us with computers that fit a handbag instead of a building. Or take a page from taxonomy. Many may wonder what possible utility there could be for attaching Latin binomials to the life we observe around us. Unbeknownst to its original devisers, however, the benefits proved to be far-reaching and economically invaluable.

When we equate science with technology, and progress with utility, we risk overlooking the very thing that underwrites our strides as a civilization and allows new technologies to exist in the first place. As observed from the standpoint of history, powerful applications often emerge out of pure curiosity. Let us not give in to the narrow-minded assumption which says that scientists should only study things they know in advance will benefit humanity. All knowledge is important, even knowledge pursued on its own merits, but we may not know precisely how or in which way until we have a lot of it.

If our interest is tied strictly to practical applications, we might pause to consider that we are barely waist deep in cosmological understanding, much as Maxwell and his contemporaries were in the embryonic stages of electrodynamics. Right now we have dozens of mutually inconsistent models and ideas about the early universe. What this week’s discovery — if confirmed by outside teams — will have done is empirically establish something previously considered hypothetical. And in doing so, we’ll have winnowed the plausible models down from many to some.5 This represents a vital leap forward on our journey toward a comprehensive understanding of the origin and evolution of our world. I can scarcely imagine such an understanding not being both epistemologically and practically important in obvious, non-obvious, and as yet unforeseen ways.
 

 
With the BICEP2 detection of cosmic ripples in the CMB, we’ve scored a win for humanity. Not only have we found evidence for inflation and opened up manifold channels for further inquiry, we’ve also turned virtue into triumph as we continue to irradiate the universe’s deepest mysteries. Should we forget, the universe does not come with an operating manual, nor a treasure map. There are no hints, no shortcuts, no head starts — nothing but our wits and the efforts of those before us. Our collective innovation has allowed us to peer back further than ever before, to the beginnings of time itself, to a point when our world was but a few heartbeats old. Some of our unknowns have been set free, and our known unknowns have increased: epistemological wins both.

Think of it, as Feynman did, as a peeling away of one level of onion skin. Sure, you may still have something left to peel, but peel away you did, and in doing so, discovered more and glimpsed further.

Update: See this piece for a couple of breakthroughs that have already happened as a direct result of hunting for gravitational waves.

Update 6.19.2014: The BICEP2 data is now available for peer review. And now we wait.

Update 1.30.2015: BICEP2’s original signal has now been attributed almost entirely to foreground dust, not gravitational wave imprints from the inflationary epoch as previously claimed. A joint analysis by the Planck and BICEP2 teams, described in an ESA press release, has concluded that the polarized light picked up by the BICEP2 telescope originated from our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Effectively, the claim of detection has been withdrawn.

It’s important to note that a Type I error (false positive) here does not rule out the existence of gravitational waves or collapse cosmic inflation theory. Rather, we are more or less where we were before the announcement: it may either be the case that gravitational waves, a key prediction of Einstein’s theory, are out there and we simply haven’t detected them yet, or that they have not been found because they do not exist. If the former, we can expect conclusive evidence once our measurement hardware reaches threshold levels of precision. And if the latter, existing theories will need to be rewritten to account for a universe that doesn’t contain gravitationally impressed ripples in spacetime, either of the primordial variety hunted by BICEP2 and Planck or the more generic kind sought by wave-detectors like LIGO.

Either way, a non-result at the South Pole represents valuable information on the road to progress, as it clues us in to improvements in detection protocols or needed revisions to standing theory. Echoing this, Jules Verne wrote in the 19th century, “Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.”

Further reading:

• Preprint at ArXiv (removed following disconfirmation of signal)
• First Direct Evidence of Cosmic Inflation
• Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun
• A Scientific Breakthrough Lets Us See to the Beginning of Time (Lawrence Krauss)
• Major Discovery: ‘Smoking Gun’ for Universe’s Incredible Big Bang Expansion Found
• Proof of the Big Bang
• Good Morning, Inflation! Hello, Multiverse! (Max Tegmark)
• Gravitational Waves in the Cosmic Microwave Background (Sean Carroll)
• Listening to the Big Bang (Brian Greene)

Feature image: Photo by NSF/Harvard CMB group

1. See here for the most accurate map of the CMB as revealed by ESA’s Planck: “The CMB is a snapshot of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when the Universe was just 380,000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today.”
   We call this cosmic ‘microwave’ background, or CMB for short, because the glow from the photons still streaming across space from the Big Bang are strongest in the microwave region of the EM spectrum.

2. The roots of the Big Bang theory reach back to 20th century observations of the redshift-distance relation. Known as Hubble’s law, named after astronomer Edwin Hubble, it states that galaxies (up to ~1 billion light years away) are receding from Earth at velocities proportional to their distance. Otherwise put, the farther a galaxy, the faster it is receding from Earth. This linear relationship holds for any universe operating in accordance with Einstein’s relativity equations. That includes our own. When distant objects recede, their wavelengths are stretched by the expansion of space, shifting the light toward the red end of the spectrum. The more distant the galaxy, the more pronounced the redshift.

   Expansion implies contraction, as Georges Lemaître adduced in 1927. Were we to rewind the tape of expansion, we would see galaxies approaching one another and eventually converging to a point of minuscule geometrical size and extreme density and temperature, often referred to as a singularity. It was on the back of these initial observations of redshift that the Big Bang theory came to fruition.

3. Other opportunities for B-mode detection include Spider, EBEX, ABS, ACT, CLASS, and POLARBEAR.

4. See the chapter titled “Maxwell and the Nerds”.

5. Specifically, we can now eliminate perhaps all of the non-inflationary models extant, like the ekpyrotic and cyclic models, as well as some of our more profligate inflationary models, such as slow-roll inflation, hybrid inflation, supersymmetric inflation, and natural inflation, thereby freeing up resources to home in on those more consistent with this latest discovery.

“Do you see the pattern? First the Earth was the center of everything-hurrah! Then, well, ahem. Maybe the Sun still is-yay! But then, yikes, actually we’re way out in the suburbs of the [Milky Way] Galaxy. Well, this was getting downright insulting.”

 
 
A casual spin of the Google directory returns over 600,000 results for “moon landing hoax.” Naturally, some portion of these hits are by the debunkers, those war-torn heroes who continue to throw logic and sense at the convinced conspiracy cults. Yet even discounting the lights of reason embedded in these results, the fact remains that far too many still believe that America’s voyage to the moon was no voyage at all: 6% of Americans, to be precise.

At first brush, and consumed without much in the way of science literacy, some of the doubts offered by hoaxers can sound marginally compelling. But first glances can be deceiving. And be warned: If you do wade into this cesspool of credulity, you may find yourself in contact with ideas that would make Roswell truthers blush. ‘The whole moon itself is faked and is projected onto the sky using the same technology used to project the Bat Signal’. Or something just as otherwordly. Conspiracy wonks are nothing if not creative, but you may find such departures from Reality unfit for public consumption. Don’t venture too long.

To be sure, collapsing the arguments of moon landing deniers requires little more than a healthy dose of common sense infused with trace amounts of scientific acumen. They might try the following on for size:

1. Experts spanning the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, and photography all say we’ve been to the moon, and it’s usually a good idea to defer to experts on matters in which you are, in fact, not one.

2. Global conspiracy theories on the scale necessary to fake a moon landing are probably infeasible given how many people would need to stay silent, from the hundreds of thousands of NASA engineers who worked on the Apollo project for nearly 10 years, the staging crews who fabricated and processed the footage for six different manned landings, the 12 men who claimed to have walked on the moon and the other astronauts who flew with them, and finally to the chain of command terminating with the Oval Office.

3. If the Soviet Union had the slightest inkling of imposture, they would have trumpeted it from the rooftops to the stars. We were, after all, waging an international space race at the time.

4. Photographic chicanery of the type required to spoof a moon landing did not exist.

5. Along with much third-party evidence, in recent years orbiting spacecraft have captured photos of the landing sites, the tracks left by the Apollo astronauts, and various remnants of the lunar surface experiments they conducted.

If exercising logic and countering similarly pseudoscientific moonshine is something you work into regular rotation, you’ll find Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing “Hoax” crowded with thrills and long on ammunition. In a way, this is the book Phil Plait, award-winning blogger and skeptic superstar, was always meant to write. The topics covered are the very ones he’s written vibrantly about for more than a decade on his blog of the same name (now appearing on Slate). Fans of his work will be accustomed to the serviceable combination of wit, humor, and academic rigor directed at popular misinformation. His easily digestible tome is in this sense perfectly continuous with his veteran crusade to debunk all manner of ‘bunk’.

Astronomy is Plait’s specialty, and his breadth of the stars is staggering. Sure, much of the information on offer here is a Google search away, but the comedic, accessible format and the assortment of diverse but neatly divisioned topics prove to be the book’s redeeming qualities. And along with a pulverizing exposé on moon landing conspiracy theories, about a quarter of the way into the book you’re treated with one of the best, if not the best, layman explanations of how tides work. Given all of the half-explanations and untruths swirling around online on this topic (Plait notes that even many textbooks have it wrong), it’s refreshing to read a comprehensive breakdown of tidal physics that even an amateur can regurgitate. His deconstructions really are that good.
 

“The essence of science is that it makes its own improvements: A theory is only as good as  its next prediction.” (p. 20)

As it turns out, the seasons are not caused by the sun’s intensity or by its distance from the earth. The moon is not larger near the horizon than when it’s high overhead. Lunar phases are not the result of the earth’s shadow dynamics. The sky is not blue because it reflects the color of the oceans. And, far from proving that no man has stepped foot on the surface of the moon, the fact that there are no stars in the Apollo 11 photographs simply shows that NASA knew how to work a camera. Plait’s treatments are precise, no-nonsense and layered with enthusiasm.

Some chapters are less memorable than others: why you can balance an egg on its end any day of the year; why you can’t glimpse stars in daylight; and why astrology carries as much science cred as Harry Potter struck me as less than revelatory. However, the sections on the Hubble Space Telescope, the “Velikovsky affair,” the Big Bang — perhaps the most frequently misconceived of scientific theories — and his entertaining finale on bad astronomy in film all earn high marks.

Closing Thoughts

If you find science synonymous with entertainment, then Bad Astronomy is for you, especially if you’re already familiar with Phil Plait’s online persona. Not merely the arch-critic of pseudoscience, Plait is one of the few educators I know of who can graft humor onto science without falling victim to oversimplification or pulling from the standard bag of clichés. You won’t just learn that the sky is blue because the earth’s atmosphere scatters blue light more than other wavelengths, or that 2001: A Space Odyssey is the most scientifically authentic space movie ever. You’ll also obtain a wonderful introduction to the underlying principles of astronomy and appreciate the admixture of humor throughout. Plait’s book, his first, is an exercise in clear thinking fused with good science, necessities surely foreign to the moon landing deniers. Highly recommended.

Note: This review is mirrored over at Goodreads and at Amazon.

Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy column

Supplement with: Neil deGrasse Tyson and Joe Rogan Debate Moon Landings

 
 
An exoplanet about double the size of Earth was discovered back in 2004. Further analysis showed 55 Cancri e’s chemistry to be quite unique from anything we’ve seen before, its rocky layers composed largely of pure diamond. SPACE reports on the new paper appearing in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

From the article:
 

“55 Cancri e is what’s known as a super-Earth, with a radius twice as wide as that of our own planet, and a mass eight times greater. It speeds around its host star, making a full orbit in just 18 hours (Earth takes 365 days). It is so close in to the star that its surface temperature reaches a scorching 3,900 degrees Fahrenheit (2,100 degrees Celsius), making it probably way too hot for life.

The revelation of the planet’s diamond nature means that it could have very different thermal evolution and plate tectonics processes than Earth, which could create bizarre types of volcanism, seismic activity, and mountain formation.”

External link: Super-Earth Planet Likely Made of Diamond

Feature image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC)