Category Archives: science

moon

Worm Moon reigns over tonight’s sky

Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the blue corn moon? And what the hell is a blue corn moon?

Today is a good day to think about the moon. At 1:11 p.m. EDT, the sun and moon reached opposite points in the sky — what we call the full moon. Of course, you couldn’t tell that because, at 1 in the afternoon, the sun was up and the moon was not. But you may notice the full moon rising in this evening’s eastern sky, just after the sun sets in the west.

We think of that as the normal order of things: each evening, the sun sets and the moon rises. But in truth, that only comes close to occurring for three or four nights in a row per lunar cycle (that is, per month or so). The reality is that the moon rises somewhere around 40 to 60 minutes later each day. After two weeks or so, the moonrise catches up with the sunrise and we experience a new moon, the next due on March 30.

If you think a bit deeper about this, it makes perfect sense. Tonight, the moon will appear full because the sun is able to shine on the full surface of the moon facing the Earth. That can only happen when the moon is opposite the sun in the sky — or, more scientifically, when the Earth is positioned between the sun and the moon. And even though we think of the full moon as a nightlong event, there is only one brief moment — 1:11 p.m. EDT this time — when the moon is 100 percent full; by tonight, it will already be less than full.

As the moon rises later each day, the sun, moon, and Earth move out of alignment, causing earthlings to see more and more of the unilluminated side of the moon, leading to the progressively smaller-appearing, or waning, crescent moon. About one week after full, you won’t see the moon in the evening because it won’t rise until the middle of the night, as the half-illuminated last quarter moon.

A week later, the moon will seem to disappear from the sky altogether. It will rise in the morning and be completely in shadow because it is between the Earth and sun — the new moon.

In the days that follow that, you’ll start to see the waxing crescent setting just after the sun in the western sky. By week three, the first quarter moon will rise mid-afternoon, be half-illuminated overhead at sunset, and fall below the horizon in the middle of the night. Finally, the cycle repeats with the next full moon.

In the days before hunky firefighters gracing the pages of commercially produced calendars, people looked to the moon cycles, in tandem with the length of the day, to plan their migrations, hunts, and farming. Many cultures named each full moon to reflect seasonal associations. Without trespassing too much into Lingwizardy territory, I’ll give one example: the full moon closest the spring equinox — the full moon we in the Northern Hemisphere are experiencing today — has been called the Worm Moon by some peoples because it is around the time when earthworms begin to reemerge from the thawing ground. The full list of moon names is interesting; check it out here.

The lunar cycle is 29.53 days long, as compared to most of our calendar months being 30 or 31 days. As a result, there are sometimes 13 full moons in a year; by necessity, at least one month in those years will have two full moons. Many folks understand this quirk is called a blue moon. (So “once in a blue moon” isn’t all that uncommon; it happens seven times every 19 years!) The traditional definition of a blue moon is actually a bit different: it refers to the third of four full moons in a single season (as opposed to the standard one-per-month, three-per-season).

Now we can answer the great question of Pocahontas. Native Americans named the full moon nearest the autumnal equinox the Corn Moon because it is when the corn was ready to be picked; this is what we still today call the Harvest Moon. So, it stands to reason that the “blue corn moon” would be when the Corn Moon also happened to be a blue moon, right?

Unfortunately, no. For one thing, the Corn Moon, being the one closest to the autumnal equinox, could never be the third of four in the season. For another, songwriter Stephen Schwartz explained that he made up the phrase because he liked the sound of it:

In preparation for doing the lyrics to Pocahontas, I read a lot of Native American poetry. One of the phrases I came across, in a love poem, was: “I will come to you in the moon of green corn.” The phrase stuck in my head, but I didn’t think the lyric: “Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the green corn moon” really worked, because of the association of the moon and green cheese, plus the “ee” sound in it, etc. So I changed it to blue corn moon, which I thought had a nice resonance to it because of the phrase “blue moon”…

In other words, Walt Disney misled us. Next thing you know, we’ll discover not all girls can be princesses and animals don’t speak English. But thanks to this primer on lunar cycles, you’ll still be able to impress all your friends at parties.

elevator

Colonizing space … the inevitable frontier

In recognition of tonight’s premiere of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, Curiata.com presents this look at the potential for — and possible necessity of — space colonization.

Space colonization has long been a dream for scientists and fiction writers alike. Despite this dream, space colonization seems no closer to realization today than it was in 1969. With population and pollution rising across the globe, the time has come to seriously consider development of space colonization programs. Although some of the technology is still a few years away, with proper funding, space colonization can be achieved during our lives.

Humanity is developing at an ever accelerating pace. Only 100 years ago, radio was a completely novel innovation with unknown potential. Just 20 years ago, cell phones were an extreme luxury, and the World Wide Web was just beginning to enter into public consciousness. Yet today, most of us have cell phones which can access the Internet at blindingly fast speeds.

Our quick expansion and development has undoubtedly caused growing pains, some of which, particularly climate change, could stop our development cold, even causing our own extinction. While we certainly need to address these problems on our own planet immediately, we should also look to space for some answers. Uninterrupted solar energy, population diffusion, and resources attainable from near-Earth objects, are just some of the benefits we would gain from expanding into space.

Population projections by the United Nations expect humanity to increase by 50 percent in the next 60 years. The assumption after 2075 is that population growth will level off. This, however, ignores some unexpected developments in the world of science.

Many scientists are beginning to see death as not necessarily inevitable. Google recently announced the creation of a new company, Calico, whose goal is to defeat death, or at least slow it down. Calico and scientists across the globe will continue looking into lab-grown organs and reverse-aging techniques by studying the so-called immortal jellyfish.

These studies offer great hope to those of us who don’t want to die, but they raise an important question about the Earth’s capacity. If natural death is no longer a factor, adverse population trends are virtually impossible. That potential reality shatters all prior population trends and can put us in danger of overpopulation much sooner than expected.

If Google is able to defeat degenerative diseases, and if scientists master laboratory organ growth, the human population will explode, exacerbating pollution, climate change, scarcity, and all the other problems associated with overpopulation. But if humanity has the capacity to conquer death, then surely it cannot be too difficult to make substantial progress in our space programs. This is not science fiction anymore. Advanced space programs of exploration and colonization are an evolutionary necessity.

Then the question must be raised: where should humanity begin this endeavor? The first step is already being planned by a company in Japan, which hopes to have a space elevator running by 2050. A space elevator would provide cheap cargo shipment into space for building projects, while beginning the early steps of moving humans into orbit in a cost-effective manner. Space elevators, however, require a material both strong and light. While carbon nanotubes and boron nitride nanotubes are thought to have potential, they are not yet financially viable.

The International Space Elevator Consortium is asking the public to discover the ideal material for a space elevator. Designers of materials meeting certain strength requirements will receive cash payouts upwards of $1 million. Once discovered, the tether material will be attached to a conventional rocket and lifted into space. From there, the counterweight and tether will be assembled. The counterweight will enter geosynchronous orbit, where the tether will be released to lower itself to the ground station on Earth. The tether can then be upgraded as necessary to carry increasingly larger loads.

Following the elevator’s completion, carts carrying the cargo can be added and fitted with solar panels to allow them to run continuously and cleanly for days at a time. The counterweight and other parts of the elevator may also be fitted with solar panels to provide the Earth and all its nations with clean, nearly infinite, power for generations. The lowered cost of space shipment would even allow industries to expand into space and begin looking into orbital colonization and beyond.

Orbital space stations are a strong next step in the expansion of the human race, but the goal should undoubtedly be to settle on a new planet. Interestingly, several private companies are already looking ahead with plans for permanently colonizing Mars within the next two decades.

Assuming the success of these ventures, their societies are expected to start small, with only a handful of people landing on the Red Planet every few years. Eventually, a next step should be made in creating a large, self-sustaining colony. A biodome, consisting of many layers of transparent materials to block solar radiation and fend off the Martian sandstorms, would create an environment habitable for plants and animals. As these settlements become stronger, the next step should be undertaken, one which will be even more daring and seemingly impossible.

The final step in this cosmic Manifest Destiny imposed by human ingenuity is to pass the vast distance between star systems and create permanent settlements on extrasolar planets. The distances between star systems are incredibly great, some measuring in the hundreds of thousands of light-years from the Earth.

Overcoming this daunting matter is possible according to the theory of relativity. In this theory, Albert Einstein stated that as an object travels close to the speed of light, it will appear to travel through time more slowly than any stationary or slower moving object. This means that interstellar travel is possible within a typical human lifetime.

A matter-antimatter engine may be the ticket to achieving this seemingly impossible accomplishment. When matter and antimatter collide, they annihilate each other completely and produce nearly pure energy output. With almost 100 percent efficiency, the speed of light is within reach.

There is no doubt that space colonization will one day be a necessity. The technology is only a few research grants and hypotheses away. With the right funding, where we go is only limited by the daring of scientists to push the envelope and expand our horizons.

One day, there may be colonies throughout the galaxy, and even the universe, built by human pioneers, keeping the human race alive beyond our mother Earth.

Kevin Hillman contributed to this story.

pale-blue-dot1

Our Pale Blue Dot, floating in the Cosmos

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

The year was 1990. Nelson Mandela was released from prison. East and West Germany reunified. The Hubble Space Telescope was launched. The Human Genome Project began. The United States engaged in Operation Desert Shield, in what would become the opening moves of the first Gulf War. Tim Berners-Lee created the first web server, which would become the foundation for the Internet when it was released to the public in 1991. Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister of England after serving in that capacity for 11 years. The Warsaw Pact began to collapse as Poland became the first of its member states to withdraw from that treaty and abolish its state socialist economy. The Channel Tunnel was completed. The Cold War ground to a halt.

And nearly four billion miles away from Earth, the Voyager 1 space probe turned its eye back toward home for the last time to take a series of pictures that would be known as the Family Portrait. It captured a shot of Earth, caught in a shaft of light — a single blue pixel hanging in the great vast blackness of eternity.

Voyager 1 was launched September 5, 1977. It completed its primary mission in November 1980, having taken detailed pictures of Jupiter and Saturn and their respective moons. It will continue operations until sometime in the year 2025, at which point the probe’s generators will no longer be able to power its sensors and transmitters, and it will continue eternally onward, a lonely traveler far from home. At the time of this writing, Voyager 1 has been in operation for 36 years, 6 months, and 3 days.

Voyager 1 and its sister probe, Voyager 2, each carries a golden record in the hope it encounters an advanced civilization. The record, an audio-visual disc, contains, among other things, images of the Solar System, human DNA, and the music of Beethoven, Mozart, and Chuck Berry. The golden record is more a time capsule than a serious attempt to communicate with another civilization.

Carl Sagan, the cosmologist and author who pushed for the inclusion of the golden record on the Voyager probes, said, “The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

Sagan was involved with assembling the contents of the golden record. He had been a researcher and a science advocate for many years, working on the cutting edge of the science of space exploration. Sagan had been instrumental in the discovery of Venus’ high surface temperatures. He hypothesized about the oceans of liquid gases on Saturn’s moon Titan. He was a member of the SETI Institute board of trustees, guiding its mission to search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Sagan’s most well-known contribution to science is the television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which premiered on PBS in 1980 and remained the most highly watched series on public television until the broadcast of Ken Burns’ documentary The Civil War in 1990, the same year Voyager would take its famous photograph. Sagan released a book, also titled Cosmos, at the same time as the television series, and it became the best selling science book ever published in the English language.

The Cosmos television series will be rebooted this Sunday. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey will be presented by today’s most popular astronomer, Neil deGrasse Tyson; the executive producers are Seth MacFarlane and Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan.

As the Voyager 1 probe reached the edge of the Solar System in 1990, Sagan managed to convince NASA to turn the probe’s cameras back toward the Earth. The narrow-angle camera that Voyager carried was far better suited to this sort of distance photography than the wide-angle camera’s the Mariner probes had carried. The photographs of the first six planets in the Solar System would be the last pictures Voyager 1 would take.

In his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Sagan would eloquently describe this picture of Earth, distant and alone. He would speak from his perspective as an early activist about the dangers of climate change, as a man who spent a sizable portion of his career struggling against anthropocentrism, and as a survivor of the Cold War, a time when the possibility of mutually assured destruction in a hail of nuclear fire was no further away than a single moment of irrational international saber-rattling.

Sagan’s words are powerful. (Read Sagan’s full reflection; listen to Sagan read it in full; view the image in full) He speaks of the reality that there is as yet no other world that we know of that can harbor human life. He reminds us that we have been engaged in our many internecine struggles over possession of a section of a tiny mote of dust.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Sagan speaks to the ties within humanity. We are alone in this universe, and yet we throw ourselves at each other in bloody conflict over minutiae of ideology and nearly indistinguishable differences in genetics. Sagan reminds us there is no help coming from elsewhere: if we are to survive as a people, as a species, we must look to each other for the answers.

Today, the world is a very different place than it was in 1990. With the end of the Cold War, the specter of nuclear apocalypse has largely disappeared. The Internet has created a world that is more interconnected than we had imagined possible. We have created an International Space Station that might become the staging area for future explorations of the Solar System and beyond. Computer technology has become far more compact and powerful than once thought possible. The world we live in today is, in many ways, the future predicted in the dreams of science fiction.

Despite the progress we as a species have made, we must regretfully acknowledge that Sagan’s words still ring true.

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

In the United States, political acrimony and partisanship have deadlocked the government. Africa and the Middle East remain hotbeds of ethnic and religious tensions, where being a member of the wrong tribe or worshipping the wrong god can lead to death at the hands of one’s neighbors. Venezuela and Ukraine are wracked by violent protests, and the ghost of the Soviet Union and Cold War imperialism stalk Crimea. The reality that we live in a post-9/11 world hits us every time we go to an airport, apply for a loan, or open a bank account.

We face the challenges of global climate change and its potentially devastating effects on our ability to produce food and have access to clean drinking water. Increasing denialism about the validity of scientific research has created a society ever more ignorant of the way the world around them works, leaving questions about how to handle genetically modified crops, vaccinations, and medical ethics in the hands of people willing to consider unrefuted scientific evidence as nothing more than an opinion.

While we may have made many amazing advancements, our future as a species is inexorably tied to the same realization that Sagan had when he spoke of the Pale Blue Dot. We feel that we are important, enthroned among our achievements. We need to be reminded on occasion of how big the universe is, and of how small a piece of it we have managed to master. When we look at the last picture Voyager 1 took of its home before turning its electronic eyes outward, toward the vast and unknowable distances between the stars, we should remember the words of Carl Sagan:

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

giordano

Turn! Turn! Turn! Seasons and mourning goddesses

Winter has officially worn out its welcome. Yes, yes, I know that this winter has so far been warmer than the average recorded, and climate change, and it’s just my perception based on recent experience here in south-central Pennsylvania, but still. I don’t like being cold.

Of course, almost as soon as the cold goes away, we get the heat. It feels like the mild seasons, spring and fall, are only shadows of the more extreme seasons, wistful and fleeting. In fact, not all cultures have four seasons like we do in North America. Tropical climates have two: the hot season and the wet season. So why do we even use four? Where does that come from?

There are, of course, two solstices (Latin: “still sun”), so named because those are the dates when the sun reaches its visible apex in the sky during summer and its nadir in the sky during winter as the Earth rotates on its tilted axis. The two equinoxes (Latin: “equal night”), so named because those are the days when the night and day are the same length (though that’s not quite scientifically true), occur in between the solstices on either side; they are the vernal (which is just a Latin and Norse term for the season of spring) and the autumnal (Latin and Old French term that potentially shares a root, auq, with the word August, meaning “drying up season”).

The seasons don’t actually begin on the solstices and equinoxes, though, because it takes a few months before the actual weather begins to change in relation to the prolonged/shortened exposure to the sun. Sort of like how outdoor pools don’t warm up at noon, but in the afternoon after the sun has been shining on it for a few hours. The atmosphere works somewhat similarly, but on a much greater scale.

“Spring” comes from an Old English word (springen) meaning to leap, burst forth, or fly up. It began to be used in relation to the seasonal change in the 16th century, in a descriptive sense, as in “spring of the year.” Before that, the word “lent” was used to indicate the season, from Old English/Middle Dutch, meaning “length,” as in lengthening of the days, along with printemps, French for “first time.” Spring is the season when plants spring up, and the sun springs above the horizon earlier and earlier. Representing change and birth and optimism, it’s usually considered the “first” season of the cycle.

“Summer” seems to come from an ancient Sanskrit form (sama), meaning “half year” or “season.” Far enough back, people would have used two seasons, the warm and the cold, and summer was one half of the year. The other season was — well, we’ll get to that.

“Fall” comes from Old English as well (feallan), meaning to fail, decay, and die. It also found usage in relation to the season in the 16th century, both as an antonym to spring and because it’s the season when things fail, decay, and die.

“Winter” means, roughly, “white year” from Proto-Indo-European and Celtic words (wind/vindo). So summer was “half year” and winter was “white year.” I’m not sure if there was originally a subtle distinction in the language, like “regular half year” versus “white half year,” but it seems likely, to the extent that the words share a root language. Summer and winter originated well before spring and fall — as seasons, at least.

Now that we know something about where the idea of seasons and their names came from, let’s figure out who these ancient people blamed for the cold. And before you start to think these myths are silly, ask yourself how much stock you, or people you know, put in the predictions of a groundhog on these matters.

 

Demeter and Persephone

These two Greek harvest and nature goddesses, mother and daughter, whose worship predates that of Zeus and his cohort (though Zeus is also supposed to be Persephone’s father), kept everything bountiful and sunny, year-round. One day, Hades, god of the underworld (and Persephone’s uncle), kidnapped Persephone ‘cuz she was pretty. Creeeeeper. Demeter flipped out and went into mourning, causing the land to turn bitter cold and dry up. Naturally, Zeus intervenes.

“Hades,” he says. “What in tarnation is you doin’ wit’ mah youngun.” (I like to imagine the Olympians as inbred mountain folk, for obvious reasons.)

“She et six seeds from a pomegranate. She’s mah wife now.”

“Dag nabbit. If’n it’s only six seeds, you only get ‘er fer six months.”

So Demeter makes “summer” happen half the year, when she has her daughter around, and “winter” when Persephone’s in Hades.

Inanna and Dumuzi

The Sumerian goddess of the sun decided she wanted to check out the underworld, where her sister Ereshkigal, keeper of the dead, lived. They weren’t close, and Inanna was probably just going there to brag about how great things were on the surface. She got told by gatekeeper after gatekeeper that she had to give up her items of power, like her wand and her headdress and necklace, to pass, so she did (for some reason). When she finally got to her sister, Erishkigal killed her immediately. Once again, no more sun meant no more summer, so Enki, leader of the pantheon, sent some servants in to go fish her out and bring her back to life.

Erishkigal said, “No fair, send someone to replace you.”

Inanna looked around and found her husband, Dumuzi, lounging about, not in mourning but living it up bachelor style, so she said, “Yeah, he’ll do.”

Dumuzi’s sister offered to take his place in the underworld for half the year, and Inanna, conflicted about her feelings, still mourned for him for the half of the year when he was down there, causing winter.

Amaterasu

The sun goddess (kami) of Japan, Amaterasu, got ticked off at her brother, Susanoo, flaying ponies and throwing them at her loom, so she hid in the cave, Amano-Iwato, leaving the world in darkness. The other gods showed up and begged her to come out, to no avail. Finally, Uzume danced around naked, which caused the male gods present to laugh (for some reason?), and that drew Amaterasu out of the cave.

Uzume had put a mirror at the mouth, which stunned Amaterasu long enough for some other gods to block the way back in. They made her shine her light again and, eventually, she and Susanoo made amends, sort of. While this myth doesn’t directly mention the seasons, it’s easy to see that the sun has some volatility in how she behaves.

 

So, while the ancient myths have more death (and pony-flaying) in them compared to our Groundhog Day, I’m sure there’s more than a few people who’d like to take a hunting rifle out to Punxsutawney and change that score. Gotta blame winter weather on somebody, after all.