With the USA midterm elections safely behind us, let's turn our attention to an election of an entirely different nature, probably less important but still worth getting informed about.
A few months ago, the International Astronomical Union announced its intention to begin a campaign to involve the public in naming extrasolar planets. And I'm not talking about the existing names like HD 40307 d.
My first reaction is, "About time." The IAU probably is best known to the general public for demoting Pluto to the status of "dwarf planet", so one could interpret this as an attempt to win back the crowd.
Now, of the hundreds of planets discovered so far, only 305 are being named by this campaign. (They are listed at http://nameexoworlds.org/). What's going to happen is, ideas will be submitted to registered astronomy clubs and non-profits worldwide, and in January these organizations will each select the top 20-30 planets they want to name, followed by the proposed names. We, the general public, will get to vote on the final ballot in April, and the results will be announced in mid-August 2015.
Now, I like that planets are getting human-readable names, even if they're only a fraction of all the planets we've found so far (makes sense; they probably don't want to waste names on unconfirmed planets that later turn out to be false positives). However, one of the conditions of the proposed names bothers me. Most of the conditions are what you would expect: maximum length of 16 characters, preferably one word, no intellectual property names, etc. I wonder, however, if a severe mistake is not being made by requiring names be "not too similar to an existing name of an astronomical object".
That's a problem.
It's common in fiction to name extrasolar planets after figures from classical mythology. I'm sure a lot of people hope to make that concept reality with the discovery of new worlds. Unfortunately, take a brief wiki walk here. Look at the names of the minor planets in our solar system; notice that a lot of the mythological names are taken. By glorified rocks. I know I've said before that the distinction between "planet" and "asteroid" is largely a matter of semantics, but only "largely". You can't deny that a world like Mars or Earth and an asteroid like Vesta or Juno are not the same thing. So we have a wide array of evocative names that we may not be able to use like Romulus, Remus, Hestia, Pandora, Janus, the list goes on and on and on and on!
We shouldn't be afraid to have more than one astronomical object with the same name. We aren't afraid to have countless Washingtons, Franklins, Springfields, or Greenvilles. Look at Georgia: is it a state, or a country? If we're going to force ourselves to be bound by decisions made by astronomers decades or centuries ago, then science is broken somehow. The organization that said Pluto is no longer a planet shouldn't be getting cold feet about reusing the name of a flying rock. If 51 Pegasi b can't have its unofficial name "Bellerophon" made official because it's already taken by an asteroid so obscure its size isn't listed on Wikipedia, something. is. wrong.
Maybe I'm overreacting. Look at that list of minor planets and you will see some duplicate names, like Dione, which is also the name of a moon of Saturn. So there is a chance the IAU will be happy to reuse these names. I sincerely hope so. This campaign has the potential to bring extrasolar planets into the public eye, and isn't that in the IAU's job description somewhere? It should be.
Monday, November 24, 2014
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Interstellar and the Worlds Therein (Spoiler-Saturated)
So guess what movie I saw last weekend. Go on, guess.
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is our generation's 2001: A Space Odyssey, for better *and* worse. A science-fiction film with highly realistic depictions of astronauts and space travel, with entertaining robots and a confusing and highly implausible ending. Only this film is much less "arty" than Kubrick's 1968 work, and in my mind, that makes it better.
For starters, though, it's misnamed. They should have called it Intergalactic, because the (absolutely gorgeous) wormhole leads to...somewhere in another galaxy. But the title they went with sounds more cerebral, and I'm ok with that, because it's that kind of movie. I also can't remember the last time a movie soundtrack relied heavily on a church organ, and that's a shame, because it is truly something to behold, making the exploration of space into something like a religious experience, beholding creation untouched by man.
The trailers were all tantalizing, promising memorable alien worlds. In the end, we get to see three, plus a black hole for good measure.
That's right, this movie tours a solar system where the primary is a black hole. The matter spinning around and falling into it seems to be what generates light and heat for the orbiting planets, but...that's either really creative or really stupid; I still can't figure out if it's done with enough class and the appearance of realism to pull off creative. From what I remember, black holes are small. As small as the Earth if not more so.
In the plot exposition we find out that astronauts have been dispatched through a new wormhole near Saturn to a dozen potentially habitable worlds in a quest to find a new home for the human race. It's not clear whether these are all in a single star system; a neutron star is also mentioned briefly. The wormhole is humanity's only means of traveling faster than light, from which you can infer that there is only one star system to explore. However, the mission of the Endurance only seems to be interested in three. Maybe I need to rewatch this movie; it'd certainly be good on Blu-ray.
So in order of appearance:
Miller's Planet
Mainly this will be remembered as the planet with ludicrous time dilation (1 hour Miller's Planet time = 7 years Earth time), serving to set up character drama when the protagonist leaves the planet after a few hours to find his kids are now adults and he has a grandson. I can empathize; I've occasionally sat down to play FTL: Faster Than Light for "just one game", and emerged to find the global political landscape completely unrecognizable.
Now I think these time-stretching shenanigans should be accompanied by lethal gravitational forces, although I've heard conflicting interpretations. Due to poor life choices, I am not a theoretical physicist, so I will not enter that debate. I guess what matters is, it makes a good story.
What confuses me more, however, is the terrain. All we get to see is an ocean that's about two feet deep, which is in and of itself bizarre (I'm going to assume the whole ocean isn't like that). More confusingly, somehow waves are generated about two orders of magnitude higher than that. We see two 200-foot mega-tsunamis within about 5 minutes local time. Are these waves triggered by the massive tidal forces from Gargantua, which has already been established as too close for comfort? Or do the waves start in deeper water and then gain height as the depth decreases? (If you've ever been in a wave pool, you may have noticed that the waves seem more intense in the shallows.)
Mann's Planet
Um...
Frozen clouds.
This planet is definitely the most creative of the three we see, and also the most insane. Most of the action seems to take place on glaciers that look like clouds, resulting in some bizarre topography. As I said before, I don't know if this could ever happen in reality. Most would call it "absurd" unless you're from Minnesota, like me, in which case you'd be more likely to call it "January." If it could happen, Christopher Nolan is the greatest. If not, well, he wouldn't be the first to pull a stunt like that. But even James Cameron's Avatar had superconducting unobtanium to justify Pandora's floating mountains.
We're also told there's a surface below, but given that the guy describing the surface clearly couldn't be trusted, there's no hard evidence.
Edmunds's Planet
Only glimpsed at the very end, this looks like a desert planet (or, a planet with at least one desert). It's implied that this planet could indeed sustain a human colony.
I was hoping for more screentime spent exploring alien worlds, but I'm not exactly surprised; not many sci-fi movies give front-and-center focus to their settings. This movie's just crying out for a companion book that describes the setting in more detail though; maybe it could tell us about the other planets that astronauts were sent to before the mission depicted in the movie.
But nitpicking aside, Interstellar is a good movie. Flawed both technically and philosophically, but worth seeing.
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is our generation's 2001: A Space Odyssey, for better *and* worse. A science-fiction film with highly realistic depictions of astronauts and space travel, with entertaining robots and a confusing and highly implausible ending. Only this film is much less "arty" than Kubrick's 1968 work, and in my mind, that makes it better.
For starters, though, it's misnamed. They should have called it Intergalactic, because the (absolutely gorgeous) wormhole leads to...somewhere in another galaxy. But the title they went with sounds more cerebral, and I'm ok with that, because it's that kind of movie. I also can't remember the last time a movie soundtrack relied heavily on a church organ, and that's a shame, because it is truly something to behold, making the exploration of space into something like a religious experience, beholding creation untouched by man.
The trailers were all tantalizing, promising memorable alien worlds. In the end, we get to see three, plus a black hole for good measure.
That's right, this movie tours a solar system where the primary is a black hole. The matter spinning around and falling into it seems to be what generates light and heat for the orbiting planets, but...that's either really creative or really stupid; I still can't figure out if it's done with enough class and the appearance of realism to pull off creative. From what I remember, black holes are small. As small as the Earth if not more so.
In the plot exposition we find out that astronauts have been dispatched through a new wormhole near Saturn to a dozen potentially habitable worlds in a quest to find a new home for the human race. It's not clear whether these are all in a single star system; a neutron star is also mentioned briefly. The wormhole is humanity's only means of traveling faster than light, from which you can infer that there is only one star system to explore. However, the mission of the Endurance only seems to be interested in three. Maybe I need to rewatch this movie; it'd certainly be good on Blu-ray.
So in order of appearance:
Miller's Planet
Mainly this will be remembered as the planet with ludicrous time dilation (1 hour Miller's Planet time = 7 years Earth time), serving to set up character drama when the protagonist leaves the planet after a few hours to find his kids are now adults and he has a grandson. I can empathize; I've occasionally sat down to play FTL: Faster Than Light for "just one game", and emerged to find the global political landscape completely unrecognizable.
Now I think these time-stretching shenanigans should be accompanied by lethal gravitational forces, although I've heard conflicting interpretations. Due to poor life choices, I am not a theoretical physicist, so I will not enter that debate. I guess what matters is, it makes a good story.
What confuses me more, however, is the terrain. All we get to see is an ocean that's about two feet deep, which is in and of itself bizarre (I'm going to assume the whole ocean isn't like that). More confusingly, somehow waves are generated about two orders of magnitude higher than that. We see two 200-foot mega-tsunamis within about 5 minutes local time. Are these waves triggered by the massive tidal forces from Gargantua, which has already been established as too close for comfort? Or do the waves start in deeper water and then gain height as the depth decreases? (If you've ever been in a wave pool, you may have noticed that the waves seem more intense in the shallows.)
Mann's Planet
Um...
Frozen clouds.
This planet is definitely the most creative of the three we see, and also the most insane. Most of the action seems to take place on glaciers that look like clouds, resulting in some bizarre topography. As I said before, I don't know if this could ever happen in reality. Most would call it "absurd" unless you're from Minnesota, like me, in which case you'd be more likely to call it "January." If it could happen, Christopher Nolan is the greatest. If not, well, he wouldn't be the first to pull a stunt like that. But even James Cameron's Avatar had superconducting unobtanium to justify Pandora's floating mountains.
We're also told there's a surface below, but given that the guy describing the surface clearly couldn't be trusted, there's no hard evidence.
Edmunds's Planet
Only glimpsed at the very end, this looks like a desert planet (or, a planet with at least one desert). It's implied that this planet could indeed sustain a human colony.
I was hoping for more screentime spent exploring alien worlds, but I'm not exactly surprised; not many sci-fi movies give front-and-center focus to their settings. This movie's just crying out for a companion book that describes the setting in more detail though; maybe it could tell us about the other planets that astronauts were sent to before the mission depicted in the movie.
But nitpicking aside, Interstellar is a good movie. Flawed both technically and philosophically, but worth seeing.
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