Naming Exoplanets

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.

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.

Interstellar's Surprisingly Good Tie-In App

So Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is coming out in less than two weeks and I'm super-excited. Makes it easier to deal with the fact that No Man's Sky hasn't been released yet. For a little while.

In the meantime, Paramount has released the contractual tie-in game on the Google Play Store and the iTunes store. So what kind of free-to-play iOS/Android schlock game did they release solely to promote a movie?
Surprisingly enjoyable free-to-play iOS/Android schlock, that's what.

More planets than an entire season of Star Trek. Right here. (Image source: Google Play)

It's a tie-in game, but a good tie-in game. Build your own solar system, then explore other people's. Manage fuel levels and plot out a course, making and breaking orbit as you explore the universe for the good of mankind. Not too hard to learn, and the touch controls work pretty well. There aren't enough games out there that try to capture that "astronaut" feel.

Go try it out. Hey, it's free.

Classifying Planets

When I was a kid, I learned that there were two kinds of planets: rocky planets and gas giants. Rocky planets were small, and had solid surfaces and molten cores. Gas giants were big, had no solid surface, but a solid core. I learned that there were nine planets, that Earth had a moon, and that some of the other planets had moons and oh look it's time for math.

I never had much confidence in the school system's ability to get students excited about space travel. By the time I was twelve, I felt I knew more about space than any class would teach me. (In middle school, you just start to get a taste of the enlightenment every high schooler is convinced they possess. None of them actually have it.)

I think the moons of Jupiter and Saturn deserved at least a day of attention sometime in those twelve years. A volcano moon, an ice moon that may have an ocean underneath, a moon covered in yellow fog with oceans of methane! It would blow a kid's mind.

We're discovering a lot of new things, and discoveries tend to force revisions of existing classification schemes. This happened to Pluto, but that's not what I'm talking about.

Planets like Kepler-22b break the old idea of terrestrial and gas planets. Here's a planet that may have an ocean hundreds of miles deep. Do we still call it a terrestrial planet?

"Great, now we have to revise all the textbooks, and all the students will just assume we're trying to milk them for more money. Again." (Image source: NASA)

When I was in high school, I played a demo for one of those ridiculously complex "4X" space strategy games. I remember the game had not two but three categories of planet: rock, gas, and ice. With that, and water planets like Kepler-22b, and some time wasted browsing Wikipedia again, I got an idea for a new scheme:

Type I: Gas

The large planets with which most are already familiar. I'd like to see more creativity with gas planets in sci-fi, as the idea of airborne life forms in a gas planet isn't completely impossible...

Type II: Ice

Different from rocky planets, in that they are solid, but composed primarily of volatiles, like water ice, or solid methane or ammonia. They might have thin atmospheres, allowing seas of liquid nitrogen or something.
Since Pluto's not a planet, there aren't any "ice planets" in our solar system, though there are lots of minor planets that fit that description. Notably the Centaurs, which come in a surprisingly wide color palette.

"TheKuiperBelt Albedo and Color.svg" by Chesnok. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TheKuiperBelt_Albedo_and_Color.svg

Type III: Pelagic

Planets like Kepler-22b, covered entirely, completely, in oceans many miles deep (I won't attempt to set a specific threshold). These planets could look very much like Earth's oceans, or they could be supercritical, lacking a defined surface between sea and sky. The high pressures on the ocean floor could also result in exotic forms of "hot ice".
These oceans don't have to be water. They could be another volatile substance, like ammonia, for example.

Type IV: Terrestrial

The vast majority of fictional planets would be this type, as would any real planets capable of supporting life as we know it, Jim. If an ocean planet has any landmass above the surface, any at all, it is probably terrestrial rather than pelagic.

Type V: Vulcanian

This is a planet where the surface is entirely lava, not just a planet with volcanic activity. Mustafar in Star Wars would not fall under this classification, due to having a lot of solid ground. In fact, I can't think of any planets in sci-fi that fall under this classification. We don't yet know for sure if there are any real planets of this type exist, although candidates exist, such as Kepler-10b.

Good luck having a climactic lightsaber duel here. (Source: NASA)

Of course this classification scheme already breaks down with the idea of ice giants, which are considered by some to be distinct from gas giants. Maybe we can call these Type Ib.

And a final word on the concept of a "planet". The word is derived from the Ancient Greek word for "wanderer", so in a sense you could apply the word to any object orbiting a star, be it an asteroid, Earthlike planet, gas planet, or protostar. When Pluto was demoted to "dwarf planet", I was told it was not a "planet". How is a "dwarf planet" not a planet?
We've long had the term "minor planet" to denote asteroids. I suggest we refer to the major 8 planets of our solar system as "major planets", and put major, dwarf, and minor planets all under the super-category of "planet".

Of course, the more we discover, the more we'll have to revise our scientific categories. So if my systems described here turn out to be completely wrong, I'm ok with that.

Scenario: Coldstone

It's about time I put my money where my mouth is and did some worldbuilding of my own.

Despite being one of the few single-biome planet types that actually seems plausible, the desert planet concept is a bit overused. (And...a...bit...dry. ThereIsaidit.) So no desert planets right now. We'll go with the polar opposite: ice planet (I did it again.)

I tend to think that outer space, as a general rule, is cold. Punctuated by the points of light we call stars, the lone campfires in the interstellar wasteland. So a cold planet is more indicative of space than a hot one.

Probably the most prominent ice world in sci-fi is Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back. Of all the planets in the original Star Wars trilogy, it's my favorite; it's really the only one that gives the feel of a hostile environment: Luke nearly died of exposure, and the Rebels had to work to adapt their snowspeeders to function in the cold, necessitating beasts of burden (which still froze to death at night). It's clear that Hoth is someplace you don't try to live on unless you're an enemy of the state. We'd only colonize such a world in real life if we didn't have anywhere better to go (which isn't impossible, or even improbable; we'd be ecstatic to find a planet like Hoth in this day and age).

Source: "Hothplanetsurface" by Screenshot from movie The Empire Strikes Back. Licensed under Fair use of copyrighted material in the context of Hoth via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hothplanetsurface.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Hothplanetsurface.jpg

But I think we can do better. Let's try to do better.

In eighth grade I read Ender's Game, then I picked up its sequel, Speaker for the Dead, which is not a horror novel, title notwithstanding. (Protip: I definitely do not recommend Speaker for eighth graders; it's too heavy.) Early in the story, the protagonist is on a planet called Trondheim, which is mostly frozen except at the equator. The fleeting description of this planet intrigued me at age 13, as it was the first planet I had seen in fiction that couldn't be summed up in one word. It's mostly icy, but the equator is temperate. From what I hear, Star Trek's Andorian homeworld is similar.

So a planet like that, even with more extensive icecaps than Andoria,, would be appealing for colonization. But need habitation be restricted to the tropics, with endless frozen wastes covering 90% of the planet's surface?

Let's try to do even better.

The now-invalidated Star Wars Expanded Universe has a world called Belsavis. It's like Hoth, but with warts.

Contagious? We'll see. (Image source: http://www.swtor.com/holonet/planets/belsavis)

I haven't played The Old Republic so I don't know how much explanation is given for these temperate rifts. It's just as well. More fun that way. I think they're analogous to "hotspots", localized areas of activity over which the Earth's tectonic plates drift, resulting in the formation of island chains like Hawaii (at least I think that 's how they work). These rifts in the global glaciers could be the result of geothermal heating, though not so intense that these rifts are dangerously volcanic. If the plates drift on this planet, maybe the rifts are transient, moving over time as land is ceded and reclaimed by the glaciers.

I think we now have enough ideas to build a complex ice world, which I am calling Coldstone. Below is my novice attempt to provide a visual.

Please don't laugh.

To ensure that the planet stays tectonically active, let's give it 7 or 8 small moons, gravitationally pulling on the planet in complex ways.

A significant portion of the planet is subsurface ocean, home to aquatic creatures living without sunlight. These include gigantic eel-like monsters that occasionally punch through thin regions of ice to prey upon the few creatures that live on the ice above, in a variation on the much-overused "sandworm" trope.

I'm going to make the plants blue. This discussion suggests that it could happen if plants photosynthesized with phycocyanin instead of chlorophyll. I don't know if there's a good reason for plants to be blue, but life doesn't always have to take the most efficient route, and I like the idea of blue plants on my ice planet. I think they also incorporate metals into their interior structure - maybe copper or aluminum - to conduct heat out of the ground and warm themselves. They store water in large spherical fruits...that have thick fur to warm themselves. Furry fruits! Colonists are divided on whether they're tasty or gross.

Most human habitation is in the tropics, but there are settlements in some of the rifts, connected by trains that travel on railroads in tunnels through the ice. Each rift has a unique ecosystem, existing in near-total isolation from the others. Some of the rifts are just lakes though. And on the ice itself, there are isolated encampments of survivalists, hermits, criminals, or hunters.

I did mention some creatures do try to live on the ice itself. I recently played through Capcom's Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, a game whose central premise is survival on an ice planet. Gameplay is rotated between fighting human enemies on foot, fighting human enemies in small mecha, and fighting alien creatures collectively referred to as Akrid. These creatures contain in their bodies a liquid referred to in-game as "thermal energy" or "T-ENG". It glows orange and serves as a universal energy source for colonists; your supply is continuously counting down and you'll probably freeze to death if you run out (evidenced by Akrid that freeze solid when killed and can be shattered).

I can only begin to guess how T-ENG works. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the Akrid synthesize something like liquid charcoal in their bodies, which burns very, very slowly, keeping their internal body temperatures normal. The appeal of a fossil fuel synthesized by living organisms is obvious. A valuable resource is a good way to motivate stories set on an alien planet.

So: good idea, or just cliche and/or hopelessly derivative? Should I do more of this kind of post? Leave a comment if you have any ideas of starting points for new planets.

Star Wars Rebels first impressions, and forecasts for Episode VII

So the pilot episode of Star Wars Rebels broke last week, and the follow-up episode is available for free on iTunes (for how long though, I cannot say).

Image source: Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Star_Wars_Rebels_logo.png)

First impressions:

TIE FIGHTERS WITH THEIR SCREAMING ION ENGINES! STAR DESTROYERS THAT TRACTOR YOUR WHOLE SHIP INTO THEIR DOCKING BAY!

THIS is Star Wars: ragtag heroes up against an evil empire. TIE Fighters have not been seen in non-Expanded-Universe material since 1983 and they. have. been. missed. It's a little early to provide much commentary, but suffice to say I'm optimistic that this will be even better than The Clone Wars.

Now for the new worlds we're seeing.

Lothal

Image source: Star Wars Database (http://www.starwars.com/databank/lothal)

Not much to write home about. All we see is grass occasionally interrupted by boulders. I'm actually ok with that concept; it's entirely possible that habitable worlds may only have very simple ecologies, especially if they are relatively young.

Kessel

Image source: Star Wars Database (http://www.starwars.com/databank/kessel)

First mentioned in passing by both C-3PO and Han Solo in the original 1977 movie, the spice mines of Kessel are a combination Imperial penal colony and mining operation / death sentence. It bears mentioning, though, that the writers seem to be intentionally working to get under the skin of diehard Expanded Universe fans.

The original Kessel, as detailed in Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy trilogy and the formative-in-my-childhood-video-game Star Wars: Rogue Squadron, among others, was a non-spherical asteroid, with only a thin artificial atmosphere maintained by atmospheric generators, necessitating oxygen masks for anyone on the surface.

In the pilot episode, we get a split-second establishing shot of Kessel, but that's all it took for the writers to say, "It's spherical. We're in charge now." I don't exactly disagree with this decision, as the old Kessel was pretty ridiculous in hindsight, but it would've been nice to keep the oxygen masks, as it would reinforce the hostility of the planet's environment and the fact that any prisoners condemned there are essentially on their way to a death sentence. Star Wars could really use some more "hostile" planets. Even Mustafar can't be that hostile if you can walk around and breathe the air.

Now, looking a little bit forward. Fourteen months to be more precise:

Episode VII.

I've noticed that Star Wars is exhibiting a marked trend away from the generic single-environment planets I've complained about before. Recall that most of the standard environments are covered in the original trilogy: desert, jungle, ice, swamp, forest. The prequels begin to get more creative, with a termite-mound planet in Episode II, a sinkhole planet in Episode III (plus all the weird worlds in the Order 66 montage), and all the wacky worlds of The Clone Wars that I discussed at length in my earlier post.

The planets in Star Wars are getting more creative over time. Rebels may be a bit slack so far, but it still shows promise. Thus, I'm interested in what J.J. Abrams has in mind for the upcoming sequel. Recall that Abrams's previous "Star" film, Star Trek Into Darkness, opened on a planet with red trees, an ocean, and a supervolcano, all in about 5 minutes.

Image source: TrekMovie.com

I'd bet Mr. Abrams will bring similar creativity to Star Wars. And that's pretty exciting.

"Habitable Planets for Man"

One of the most difficult things about maintaining a blog and trying to stick to a regular schedule is the temptation to forgo a detailed analysis and simply link the reader to something interesting you've found on the web.

I found this book from 1964 about the possibility of human-habitable worlds elsewhere in the galaxy. Habitable Planets for Man, by Stephen H. Dole, discusses the requirements for a planet to support human colonization. Although in our current era of rapid exoplanet discovery (I'm pretty sure the word "exoplanet" didn't exist when this was written) is likely to refute at least some of this analysis, anybody interested in worldbuilding out to skim it at the least. Some of the requirements Dole lays out in his analysis:
-A mass between 0.4 and 2.35 Earths
-A surface gravity between 0.68 and 1.5 Earth-gravities.
-A mean annual temperature between 32 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit.
-A day length of less than 96 hours.
-A primary sun massing between 0.35 and 1.43 solar masses.

Dole also uses an equation reminiscent of the Drake Equation to estimate the number of habitable planets in the galaxy. After a lengthy analysis, Dole concludes that there is probably at least one habitable planet within 27.2 light-years of Earth, and 50 such planets within a 100-light-year radius(!)

In-teresting.

Pictured: A lineup of some of the best candidates for habitable worlds as of 2014. (Credit: Planetary Habitability Laboratory, University of Puerto Rico. Full-size image here.) Not pictured: explanation for why most of these planets are so pale.

That being said, I don't want to be excessively optimistic. It's true that we've been finding hundreds of planets within a small search volume relative to the size of our galaxy, and those are just the ones we can detect. Still, we don't know if our carbon-water-oxygen-based biochemistry is the norm in the universe. An alien biosphere could very easily be toxic. Even if the chemistries were identical, that could be worse. Alien bacteria could kill the first settlers in a matter of hours, a la War of the Worlds. Or consider an inversion: we land on a new world and the human microbiota in our bodies kill 95% of the native ecosystem within 20 years. Or yes, it might be inhabited already.

The fact remains that we've only found life on one planet, our own. That's not enough to plot a trendline. Once we find life somewhere else, we can start comparing and contrasting, and then our speculations will be much more fruitful.

But in the meantime, Dole's analysis provides us with an idea of what to expect, and a place to start when conceiving alien worlds in science fiction. Dole even leaves the reader with some creative ideas of alien worlds:
-Habitable moons
-Twin habitable worlds orbiting each other
-Planets in close and loose binary systems
-Planets with high axial tilt
-Planets with two habitable belts (think too hot at the tropics, too cold at the poles, but temperate at the middle latitudes in both the northern and southern hemispheres)
-Ringed planets

Whatever we find out there, it probably won't be like anything we've seen before. Maybe it'll be like something predicted in science fiction, but that's certainly no guarantee. Whatever is out there though, it'll be awesome.

Why "The Clone Wars" Was Exactly What Star Wars Needed (spoilers ahoy)

The prequels were terrible. On this the internet seems to agree. The mid-2000s weren't a spectacular time to be a Star Wars fan. When Revenge of the Sith debuted in 2005, it looked like the circle was complete and the last Star Wars movie had been made.

Then I heard that an animated series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, was in the works. It sounded interesting, but also redundant, since the micro-series Star Wars: Clone Wars (note the absence of the definite article) had already been made. Unfortunately, I didn't have cable at the time, so it didn't make much difference. I did see the feature film in the theater back in 2008, and I watched one episode a couple years after that. Neither one really sold me on this new series. The new, "kiddie" aesthetic that permeated all the merchandise, including the Lego sets, turned me off. The whole thing seemed like a shallow imitation of the Expanded Universe novels I read in high school. And when I found out Darth Maul had been resurrected...

It was easier to dismiss this series as pointless kid stuff because I was discovering other shows like Star Trek and Stargate during the years this show was on the air. More and more, I was beginning to believe I had "outgrown" Star Wars. Sure, I would always be a fan, but I had expended enough nerd-energy on this particular franchise, and it was time to move on.

But sometimes, no matter how much you scoff, no matter how many years you look down on it, deep down inside, you know that once it's out on Netflix you're going to sit down and watch all 121 episodes.

And what was it like? Better than I had been giving it credit for.  Longtime fans of the expanded universe of the novels will take satisfaction at seeing nods to established elements of the Galaxy Far, Far Away, though they may not appreciate some of the liberties taken with the source material (Ryloth, anyone?) The war feels much more like an epic galaxy-spanning conflict where "There are heroes on both sides" and "Evil is everywhere". There are a few "off" episodes (I guess the one I saw during its original airing was one of them) and some of the elements introduced into the Star Wars universe I really could have done without (particularly the Nightsisters), but it is a well-done series overall. Anakin Skywalker can't be the hot-headed apprentice he was in the movies because now he has an apprentice of his own. This has the effect of maturing the character a bit into something resembling what a viewer might imagine him to be while watching the original films, making his eventual metamorphosis into Darth Vader more of the tragedy it was meant to be.

Unlike a lot of cartoons, the writers are not afraid to mention or depict death, though neither does it seem overly violent (about level with the live-action films). It's quite mature for an animated series (and I mean the "let's act like real grown-ups" kind of mature, not the "Rated M for" mature).

The Clone Wars have been a part of Star Wars lore since the original film. The prequel trilogy was hardly able to do it justice, however, by beginning he conflict at the second film's conclusion and ending it midway through the third. By the time Order 66 was issued, the casual moviegoer would be lucky to know the names of the Jedi we saw gunned down by their own troops, let alone feel much emotional impact. The Clone Wars provides the Star Wars saga with a chance to do some real worldbuilding, as every moment of screentime need not be rationed for the sake of advancing the overarching series plot.

The sad part is, it would have been better if this series had been airing between 2002 and 2005, between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. What was needed was, oddly enough, filler. Filler is important because it gives the audience a chance to get to know characters. If we had seen some of this series before Episode III, maybe the Order 66 montage would have carried a stronger emotional impact; I don't believe that any of the Jedi shown killed in that sequence are ever named in the films themselves, and most of them didn't even have a speaking role (Plo Koon, anyone?) A TV series gives writers the chance to develop a number of minor characters and the fans a chance to pick out their favorites (who may be different from what the writers intended). The Clone Wars was exactly what Star Wars needed, but it was about six years behind schedule. Sure, there were plenty of books, comics, video games, and that Cartoon Network "micro-series", all released in that timeframe, but all that stuff didn't quite have the same level of cohesion, and didn't reach nearly the same number of people the films did. I bet if this series had begun airing shortly after Attack of the Clones was released, capitalizing on the film's publicity, it would have reached an audience comparable to the movies.

I mentioned before that Star Wars is a good example of the generic single-environment planets that occur way too often in sci-fi: the desert planet, jungle moon, ice planet, etc. The Clone Wars is very much the opposite, and it's pretty clear why. In an all-CGI series, planets don't always have to look photorealistic, and they need only appear for one episode, allowing for many more planets to be depicted, providing a little more room to be creative. And the makers of this series were creative. With the declaration that most of the pre-existing Star Wars Expanded Universe is being jettisoned to allow more creative freedom with J.J. Abrams's Episode VII and beyond, and that this TV show is one of the only works to survive that action, the strange new worlds depicted help me believe that the decision was a good one. I'm optimistic for the upcoming Star Wars Rebels series and, of course, Episode VII.

With all that in mind, presenting...

Top Ten Clone Wars Worlds

Note: all images, and some of the info in the accompanying text, are from the Star Wars Databank, found here: http://www.starwars.com/databank (remember kids, always cite sources!)

10. Malastare (Barren planet)

This planet actually got name-dropped a couple of times in the movies, and I remember it had a few podracing tracks in Star Wars Episode I Racer. That *was* a good game...wonder if it's on Steam...(EDIT: nope).
It's satisfying to see a planet that doesn't readily fit into an Earth biome, even if it is a bit generic. Malastare is probably one of the most likely planets to actually exist somewhere. No vegetation or herd animals in sight though...gotta wonder what that Zillo Beast ate every day.

9. Mon Cala (Ocean planet)

We did see an ocean planet in Episode II (Kamino), but only the stormy surface. I've occasionally heard it said that Earth's oceans are much more diverse than all its land biomes combined, so exploring an underwater world should open up a lot of possibilities. I didn't see a lot that stood out in the few episodes featuring this planet, but it still gets points in my book for the potential. I also applaud the writers' decision not to call it "Mon Calamari", as naming an aquatic planet and aquatic species after a seafood dish makes it difficult to take either one seriously. (In addition, I applaud the writers' use of a young Admiral Ackbar in three episodes without once having him declare that something is a trap.)

8. Teth (Purple planet)

This planet appeared in the feature film and stuck with me because of the epic sideways battle taking place on a cliffside, but it sticks with me because of its purple color palette, which isn't seen in nature a lot. While variation in a color palette is sometimes a good rule of thumb for visual design, there are times when a more monochromatic approach works, and this is a good example.

7. Christophsis (Crystal planet)

First impressions are important, and despite the feature film's lackluster performance, Christophsis represents a promising start. I have to wonder whether those crystals are artificial constructs (really avant-garde architecture?) or naturally occurring formations, possibly silicon-based life forms that have been hollowed out and inhabited by the natives the way trees are used by the Wookiees, or the Berenstain Bears.

6. Carlac (Snowy-blossom-tree-forest planet)

The visual designers seem to have been going for a Japanese look here; not sure if there are any real-world trees that blossom during the snowy months, but I suppose if a planet has a colder climate, there's no reason deciduous plants couldn't retain their foliage in the deep winter. Evergreens manage it on Earth, after all. Also, I shouldn't presume that just because Ahsoka Tano happened to land here when it was snowy, that the planet is always snowy; if an alien had landed in the U.S. during last winter's polar vortex in a starship with no windows, they might have decided Earth was just like Hoth.

5. Rugosa (Coral-desert planet)

Again, first impressions matter, and a desert planet full of coral is a good place to set your first episode. Not sure if this is meant to be a dried-out ancient seabed and the coral is long-dead, or if this coral actually thrives in an arid environment. Either way, it looks really cool. Interestingly, the planet appears to have been named for a real-life order of extinct coral.

4. Saleucami (Balloon-tree-desert planet)

This planet showed up during the Order 66 montage in Episode III, and it wasn't quite clear in the few seconds of screentime whether those giant bulbs were intended to be life forms or rock formations. I'm reminded of the Balloon Trees from Blue Moon in the Extraterrestrial documentary I linked to before. I do like how the TV show portrays a planet with multiple diverse types of plants, and not just the balloon trees.

3. Felucia (Fungal-jungle planet)

This place really stood out the first time I saw it in Episode III. Giant colorful fungus in place of trees! Do these photosynthesize, or is that role filled by airborne algae (explaining the slight haze in the air)? Either way, it's exactly the kind of planet I'd like to see in Episodes VII, VIII, and/or IX.

2. Umbara (Laser-tag-arena planet)

When I was in elementary school, I spent a few birthday parties at Grand Slam, and the best part was always the laser tag arena, with everything glowing fluorescently in the dark. I liked to imagine it was an alien planet (specifically, orbiting the star Vega, and inhabited by hammer-headed interstellar warmongers). The older I got, the more I realized that a laser-tag arena didn't make a very realistic planet.
Umbara is the setting for a four-part story arc focusing largely on the clone troopers duking it out with the hostile locals (who mysteriously wear space helmets, even though the non-native clones don't seem to need breathing equipment; maybe it's just part of their battle armor). It's always dark, and the plantlife and structures glow fluorescently, essentially making the entire setting one giant lasertag arena. Bioluminescence seems at risk of being overused in sci-fi, but here it's done with some level of restraint, which I think is for the better. It's really satisfying to see an idea I liked as a kid then dismissed as unrealistic as I got older be given a believable treatment as an adult.

1. Raydonia (Neon-forest planet)

This planet only got a brief treatment in the series when Darth Maul came here to draw out Obi-Wan Kenobi, but it still looks really cool. It's basically Umbara in daylight: weird plants with bioluminescence, and a salmon-colored sky for no adequately-explored reason. Maybe the plants are giant flowers, and the sky gets its color from heavy quantities of space pollen? Point is, it looks cool, and sometimes that's all that matters.

The Real World(s)

I've been following exoplanetology news for something like a decade now, and I will admit it sometimes can seem a little dry. On NASA's PlanetQuest the news can occasionally seem discouragingly dull, talking about the size of a planet, or maybe spectral data we're occasionally able to get from one. Not a lot. And so many of the planets we've discovered are too big or too hot to be habitable (at least to us).

When a scientist voices speculation, it's easy to take it as fact, because a scientist said it. But it's still speculation. Granted, that's better than nothing. And when you put those guesses together into a three-minute video, you get something that actually can get you pumped up about astronomy:



Now, before you go sharing this with anybody, bear in mind that not all the facts presented here are correct; this channel doesn't look like it's very credible, even if they do appear to be citing sources. Kepler-35, for example, is only a binary system, not a trinary. I'm also not sure how much evidence there is that it rains rocks on that other planet, or that that pulsar planet is really made of diamond.

On the other hand, in at least one case they didn't mention the best details. HD 189733b is a blue planet where it rains molten glass. I have NEVER seen anything like that in science fiction, or even referenced.

Pictured: Artist's rendering of HD 189733b - evidence that God has more creativity than any Star Trek writer. (Image source: NASA - http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/news/107)

Alien planets don't have to be habitable to be awesome.

A Brief Clarification

In my first post, I linked to NASA's PlanetQuest site. There, they have an article on the history of exoplanetology. They open with reference to a guy named Giordano Bruno, and claim 'when the Catholic monk Giordano Bruno asserted that there were "countless suns and countless earths all rotating around their suns,' he was accused of heresy" (NASA).

Even a cursory glance at the relevant Wikipedia article reveals that this is a distortion of the truth; Giordano Bruno was indeed burned at the stake, but "scholars emphasize that Bruno's astronomical views were at most a minor component of the theological and philosophical beliefs that led to his trial" and that the charges against him included "denial of several core Catholic doctrines".

I'm tired of seeing scientists who treat religion as the antithesis of everything they work for. Science itself can be an expression of religious fervor, an attempt to know more about God's creation and how it works, opening up a greater appreciation for it all.

As far as I know, the Catholic Church has not made any declaration of the possibility or impossibility of other worlds, or life therein, intelligent or not. So let us please put to rest this tired old idea that there is some timeless conflict between science and religion. NASA, if any of you are reading this, either stick to your field of study or get your facts straight.

Pikmin - Alien Wildlife on a Familiar Planet

So this past weekend I went out and bought a Wii U, and with it, Pikmin 3.

"Pikmin 3 box artwork" by May be found at the following website: NeoGAF. Backups: fuzunga, Giantbomb. Licensed under Fair use of copyrighted material in the context of Pikmin 3 via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pikmin_3_box_artwork.png#mediaviewer/File:Pikmin_3_box_artwork.png

Despite being a Nintendo fan, I never played the original game but once borrowed the second one from my college roommate. What's always struck me about these games is the ingenuity and creativity that went into the myriad fauna the player - only half an inch tall - encounters. Since this is a video game, most of it is hostile.

While the concept isn't exactly new, I like the idea of a plant-animal hybrid. Anthropomorphic carrots! Working together like an ant colony! And they come in a variety of species, much like the creatures we lump together as "beetles" or "birds". There's your fire-resistant reds (probably a defense mechanism against the Fiery Blowhog or the Pyroclasmic Slooch!) and your electric-resistant yellows (able to take on the Bearded Amprat) and your waterproof blues (because being able to swim is pretty important). The second game had heavy-hitting purples with good upper-body strength and tiny poison-resistant whites (with red eyes - could they be albinos?)
Not sure why those last two didn't come back for the third game's story mode. Instead we've got tough-skinned gray ones that look like rocks (sort of like a walking-stick's camouflage?) and pink winged Pikmin (weak on the ground but good in the air). Also, I'm told the first game's ending implied there are other species out there somewhere; I have to wonder why they only introduce two or three new species per game. Having ten to twelve types of troops instead of three or five would probably open up some different emergent gameplay tactics, improving  replay value.

The life cycle of these creatures is a bit fantastical, though. The Pikmin appear to be omnivorous; any enemy you defeat, you can take the cadaver back to base, where the Pikmin presumably eat it and more Pikmin sprouts are produced.

That's pretty rough for a cutesy game like this! But I suppose it makes sense from a nature perspective. On one hand, I like the series' leaning toward having a real-life nature feel. On the other hand, it's still packaged like a game for children. What's up with the Bulbmin? Parasitic Pikmin? *cringes* I mean I suppose macro-parasitism does happen with real-world animals, but from what I've seen in the games, it's not quite clear whether the Pikmin are meant to be alien animals or sentient, intelligent beings. (I really hope Nintendo intended them to be the former; otherwise I feel a lot worse about all the Pikmin that died over the course of my playthroughs...)

But I digress. Wasn't I talking about the life cycle? The eating is done by their nest...thing that the game calls an "Onion" due to its shape. In the 2nd game each of the 3 principal Pikmin flavors had their own Onion. In the new one, each new Onion you find fuses with the ones you've already found, by the end creating a sort of rainbow super-Onion (must get crowded in there at night when all the Pikmin come home to roost). The new style is streamlined for gameplay purposes, true, but less realistic (yes, I am calling out a Nintendo game on realism! I am also ignoring the fact that the Onions fly away - into orbit - at night to escape nocturnal predators!) Perhaps there's a queen Pikmin inside the Onion, whom we never see, eating the food brought to the nest and producing seeds as a queen ant might lay eggs?

As for the aforementioned hostile fauna, I like how they feel like actual animals and not just enemies in a video game. Highlights include the Bulborb, a spotty frog-like thing that comes in different varieties, the aforementioned Fiery Blowhog (I'd like to see more creatures in sci-fi with a valid scientific mechanism for generating fire or electicity) and the Burrowing Snagret, a long-necked heron-esque bird that pops its head out from underground in an inversion of classic ostrich behavior. There's quite the variety; too bad the third game lacks the Piklopedia, an Audubon-style log in the second game of the various creatures you encounter. One of the characters is even a scientist, but all she really seems to journal about are the different fruits you collect as the goal of the game - fruits that players will recognize, despite the game taking place on an Earth millions of years into the future, as evidenced by visible continental drift. Likewise, I kinda miss the caves from the second game; they made you feel like there was more to the world than just the surface. Plus the daily time-limit did not apply underground.

As for the tiny astronauts from the planet Koppai, they don't seem to have any problem digesting these anachronistic fruits, despite the environment itself necessitating full spacesuits. Players will note that the fruit is always turned into juice before consumption, and this represents the whole of their food supply for the duration of their expedition to Earth - or as they call it, planet PNF-404 (see what they did there?) I find that concept interesting in itself: creatures that only drink and never eat. How does that work? Does it have to do with their diminutive stature?

All in all, I thoroughly enjoy the Pikmin games. There's a feel of exploration; the Areas you visit are named in such a way as a human explorer might think up names on the fly for areas on another planet. There's just enough realism and thought put into creature design to really leave an impact. The fact that it's a Nintendo game doesn't do much to diminish this fact; we're so used to the ideas that alien life would either be humanoid or hideous, we've never really considered the possibility that alien life would be...cute.

Plus, cultivating an army of cute killer carrots is always guaranteed fun. Makes me wish I could see the world from a height of half an inch.

Maybe being Ant-Man isn't as lame as people think.

Give this Wikipedian a Cookie.

One of my Top Ten Favorite Wikipedia Articles is "Hypothetical types of biochemistry". While I do think that the fact that our ecosystem is based on carbon, water, and oxygen gas is pretty strong evidence that life elsewhere in the universe will be similar, I do not think it wise to treat this as a guarantee.

I've heard the term "silicon-based life" brought up before, and I've seen aliens that require methane and/or ammonia in sci-fi before.

On that last note...


"Ammonia World" by Ittiz - Own work. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ammonia_World.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Ammonia_World.jpg

This picture is half the reason why this is one of my favorite Wikipedia articles. LOOK AT IT. It looks like Earth, only palette-swapped. Now I'm not going to just say that when you write your sci-fi planets you should palette-swap and call it a day; if you watched NatGeo's Extraterrestrial, which I linked to in my previous post, recall that both Aurelia and Blue Moon were predominantly blue planets like our own. But this guy/gal gives a clear and concise rationale for why it looks the way it does if you scroll down to read the image description:

-Dissolved alkali metals producing rust-brown oceans
-Oxides of nitrogen producing a reddish-orange atmosphere.
-Colder climate means the plants are black to absorb more light (an idea that's had some scientific evidence for a number of years now).

This is exactly the kind of thing I've been talking about. A world where life thrives but profoundly different than our own, at least in appearance. This is a world I can believe could exist. According to the Wikipedia article, ammonia is liquid "between −78 °C (195 K) and −33 °C (240 K)". That's a pretty narrow range- but that's just at standard Earth atmospheric pressure. Increase the pressure to 60 atmospheres, and "ammonia melts at −77 °C (196 K) and boils at 98 °C (371 K)". That's a pretty wide range. Maybe then the plants wouldn't have to be black.

I'd love to don a spacesuit and visit a world like this, and see how its ecosystem has thrived in an ammonia-rich environment.

So Ittiz, whoever you are, if you're reading this, I salute you and your creativity mixed with attention to scientific detail.

(A planet like this needs a good name though. Unfortunately I can't think of one appropriate to ammonia oceans and black plants.)

Put the Science into Science Fiction.

I am a geek.

I have identified myself as a geek, a nerd, since middle school. In high school I devoured Star Wars novels. In college I loved Star Trek.

One thing I've always had a particular fascination with, is the setting of sci-fi.


Image source: http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/image/42

Alien planets.

In Star Wars I saw a desert planet, a jungle moon of a massive red gas giant, an ice planet, a forest moon. The idea of a galaxy full of planets to explore gripped me and has never let go.

But over time, something began to get my attention.

In sci-fi, I wasn't quite exploring new worlds. I was seeing the same worlds, over and over again. A desert planet. An ice planet. A water planet. An Earth-like planet. Over and over again.

I certainly understand why it's done. Special effects cost money. It's easier to film in New Mexico, or Norway, or British Columbia, than to spend months designing a weird planet, rendering it in CGI, then having the actors...act...in front of a greenscreen. All for the background, which the audience may or may not be paying attention to. Many sci-fi novels aren't much better. In a lot of those, you're lucky if the environment of a planet gets described at all, and when they do, they're often those same planets we've visited time and time again.

Now let's be clear: I love my sci-fi. But I'm not such a rabid fanboy that I will argue to the death with anybody who says anything negative at all about Star Wars. You can be passionate about something and still acknowledge its flaws, and wish those flaws could be improved upon. And I do wish.

But occasionally, I get my wish.

Sometimes writers go that extra mile and build a world the likes of which we've never seen. And it is awesome.

Why is this such a big deal?

Because we're finding these worlds in real life. We're finding hundreds of planets around other stars. Don't believe me? Hop over here and take a look. I've been visiting NASA's PlanetQuest site for about a decade, and it's been a truly unique experience watching the number of planets we know about grow over the years, thanks in large part to the Kepler mission.




Image source: http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/image/124

I'm not just interested in sci-fi planets. I'm interested in the real ones. Or, to put it another way,

If/when we find life on another planet, what will it be like?!

Probably not like British Columbia. It could be, but with all the species diversity on our own planet, I find it rather ridiculous to assume that alien life forms will resemble Earth life forms more than superficially. They could have green plants, and they could even have trees, but we shouldn't take that as a given.

This isn't some nerds-only "wouldn't it be cool if?" scenario. This is a question that may very well be answered, perhaps, God willing, even in our lifetime.

But I can't wait. I have to speculate. And sci-fi provides a lot of that. but sometimes not enough. That's why I'm here. To talk about the truly alien worlds in sci-fi.

To get into the mindset, I'm going to recommend two links.

First, watch this. I would be willing to bet National Geographic will provide you two planets that are just as fascinating (perhaps more so), than all the combined worlds in your favorite sci-fi franchise. If I'm wrong, I want to hear about this franchise!

The other is this. Pull up the Locations tab and just peruse the Star Wars Databank for a while. After bashing Star Wars in the first paragraphs (which I'm sure have gone viral by now...) I feel obligated to make it up to the movies that, along with Legos and the Nintendo Game Boy, shaped my childhood so much. I'll come back to Star Wars some other time; I've given you enough to absorb for now!

Enjoy!