Climate research is not a political act

I know Donald Trump won’t read this, but I feel it still needs to be said, on the day we hear that NASA’s Earth Observation funding is in jeopardy, that no matter how political a subject is, the gathering of information itself is never a political act.

Climate change is regrettably, a very hot political potato, the science is very clear cut, the physics describing how molecules interact with different wavelengths of photon is highly detailed, and people who state global warming is fake because it’s snowing have failed to grasp the obvious difference between the words climate and weather.

The accusation in question is that by studying the effect of climate change on the planet, NASA is shutting down conversation on the causes, and forcing policy makers to enact unnecessary regulation and prohibitions; that the act of studying the Earth’s climatic systems is a politically motivated act.

Amongst the hundreds of ongoing projects that form the highly respected and world renown Earth Observation program, NASA has been flying radar equipped planes over Antarctica for decades, and they have constructed a highly detailed 4D map of the ice cap; its shape and structure, and how it moves and flows over time.  They have found geological features buried under millions of years of ice, and lakes and rivers hidden forever from view.  They have found an entire sub-Antarctic hydrological cycle.  This is data, it’s not policy; it doesn’t say you can’t have a car with a large V8 engine, it just tells us something about the world we didn’t know beforehand.

Discovering how energy enters and exits our atmosphere and oceans is not policy.  Measuring the changes in gas and particle levels across the Earth’s surface, seeing how they move and rise and fall and mix is not policy.  Establishing climatic norms across large time spans and geographical areas, and then identifying deviations from the norm is not policy.

Political decisions have to be made in the light of this and all other relevant data, but they are made by political institutions.  Just because research produces data that forces political institutions to make decisions they would rather avoid does not mean that the research is flawed.

There is a device at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque called the Z machine.  It was built in order to verify that America’s thermonuclear arsenal would remain effective years after the warheads were manufactured, now that test detonations had been outlawed by treaty.  To do this it can produce, for an instant, the temperatures and pressures that initiate thermonuclear detonation in the deuterium tritium fuel.  There is possibly no greater political act that working on potentially world ending super weapons, and yet even here the actual data been gathered is not political.

The Z machine produces the Z effect, in which a target is surrounded by a nest of thin wires that are then explosively vaporised by a massive electrical pulse.  The wires transform in to a cloud of intensely magnetic plasma, which then collapses and generates an immense x-ray pulse, this hits the target from all directions, and blasts the surface outwards at relativistic velocities.  In obedience to Newton’s second law, this outward force must be countered by an inward force, and the target is crushed.  The energies involved are pure hyperbola, billions of atmospheres and billions of kelvin.

The periodic table as we know it is a grouping of elements by the characteristic which they possess in environments that humans would be comfortable with.  Crank the pressure up to one million atmospheres and the table would bear no resemblance to the one we all saw in class, or shower curtain in my case.  At high temperatures or pressures, the unique properties of the elements change.  Our physics was built on the surface of the Earth, but in reality most atoms in the universe exist in a very different environment.  They are crushed within planets and stars, or drift in giant intergalactic clouds, which surprisingly are enormously hot, so hot in fact we didn’t spot them for decades as we were looking in the wrong part of the spectrum.  Most of the universe inhabits a region our physics in only beginning to understand.

Our particle accelerators and massive lasers, and z-pinches allow us to establish fundamental physics at high energies, where most of the universe’s physics actually happens.  True, as a consequence it does teach us how to blow up one very small part of the universe very effectively, but that is not the fault of knowledge.

I am a massive fan of space exploration.  The fact that we may soon inhabit a world where no living person has been anywhere except the Earth is a failure of our civilisation.  We should be doing much much more, we should be on the surface of Mars, we should be drilling through the icy moons to the oceans beneath, we should be using nuclear propulsion to get round our system in a reasonable time frame.  Yes, it would take massive resources, and trillions of dollars, but we spent trillions on weapon systems that prevented their own use, so perhaps an opportunity has already been missed.

But if we could only do one thing in space, learn about our world, or learn about the others, then it would have to be this home of ours every time.  We cling to our small rock with only the slightest sliver of atmosphere to cosset us, and to deliberately fail to understand the workings of that, the effects of that, the consequences of that, seems incomprehensible. 

There is no such thing as political and apolitical science.  It is an artificial delineation that is only created by politicians at times for expediency.  We don’t mind what you say on the news, and how you pander to the crowd on the hustings, just leave the very clever men and women to get on and find real answers.

Let me throw another 2 cents in the Donald Trump pot

So, it would seem that the pollsters were wrong again, and people are somehow surprised.  Like the General Election, or Brexit, Trump is a major failing by the insiders to be right, but by now we should expect them to be wrong.  We are in an era where democratic populations are rejecting the more of the same, the business as usual, the safe option.  The concept of a cosy political elite that treats us with disdain is causing real frustration and a willingness to take risks, and weather this class exists or not, the concept it real.

Make America great again.  That phrase will come to dominate how we remember this campaign, because it is genius.  If you are even moderately well educated, with a more international perspective, and a desire for politics to be more then empty posturing, then this phrase is nonsense; an orange man in a baseball cap with a two bit sentiment on it.

America is great.  It is the richest and most powerful country in the world.  Its military is untouchable, its corporations comprise virtually the entire list of global mega brands, its currency is the most used in the world, and its ideals, morals, and democracy is feared by its enemies and aspired to by millions.

America is great already.

But you can’t sell anything with that.  If someone disagrees with you, they will never connect with that sentiment; your bit of America might be great, but mine is rubbish.  And even if they do agree, if you’re already on top, where do you go; where is the idealism, the inspiration for better?

Make America great again.  It’s negative, it says America has fallen, it’s failed.  If you are negative about your nation, then this can speak to you, can connect to you, and can offer you hope.

Great again.

Trump never mentioned any policy, never said how it would be great, never defined what great meant.  Just great again.  It’s hollow, but it never needed factual content, only emotional resonance.

This is marketing made god.  Sell images, not facts, sell ideals, not reality.  Hillary was the most experienced and well qualified candidate America has ever had.  Her work in the highest levels of government for thirty years has given her knowledge, insights, and international credibility that can be obtained in no other way.  Trump never attacked her experience, or her service, he didn’t need to because as an outside he played this the only way an outside can, he attacked the system itself, and he could have done that against any opponent.  By making people question the very system of government they are partaking in, he automatically tarnishes anyone with a long standing connection to that system.

He never mentioned policy, told lies, contradicted himself, and seemed only to say what the crowd in front of him at that very moment wanted to hear, no matter what he had said only hours before.

The irony of a technology that allows everybody access to almost unlimited information at a moment’s notice is that more and more people choose less and less engagement with fewer and fewer sources of knowledge.  This election has been described as post fact politics, where anyone can spout any opinion, or make any claim, and all of them are equal.

Trump has embodied this idea to own every single channel and outlet for almost a year now.  His language and manner were outspoken, or aggressive, or just offensive, and every online, broadcast, or printed form talked about him over and over and over again.  He attacked the so called main stream media, who dutifully wrote about the attack, and then wrote about it some more in their own defence, and then wrote about it some even more in analysis of others defences.

Billions of video clips where he tried to short cut democracy by calling for rivals to be imprisoned or murdered, or where group by racial group he managed to insult almost everyone, flooded social media.  Thousands of posts and hashtags every seconds for months.  Industrialised self-aggrandisement.

It is well understood in sales that you buy with your heart, not your head.  It’s why you’ll spend five times more on a brand over an own brand, even though the difference may be negligible.

Today we are seeing what happens when you turn yourself in to a brand and market it perfectly.  Let’s just hope the Americans haven’t bought the last turkey in the shop.

The loss of Schiaparelli shows what a glorious age we live in

We know that we have lost Schiaparelli; the second attempt by the European Space Agency to land on the surface of Mars, and the second to fail.  On Christmas Day 2003 Beagle 2 landed successfully, but failed to unfold all four of its solar panels, and so was never able to radio Earth.

In December 2015 the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged the landing site, and showed us how close it had come to working.

Beagle 2 model at Liverpool Spaceport. Mike Peel

Mars is hard.  It’s a long way to send a fragile box of sensitive electronics, and America, Russia, and Europe have all lost spacecraft trying to enter orbit around the planet, or survive the high speed plunge through its atmosphere.

While at first it seems there is little of happiness to take from the failure of a probe that hundreds of hard working scientists and engineers have poured years of effort in to, that is not the case at all.  There is a very positive take home from this whole enterprise.

Schiaparelli was a test bed designed to try out Europe's new landing system, and while the landing became a crash, so much engineering data was uplinked to the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, that ESA is still waiting to recover it all.  The next time a larger version of this system will be used is in 2020 to deliver a combined Russian and European rover to look for traces of life on Mars.  Believe me, the data recovered from a failure will allow the platform to be made significantly more reliable.  Nothing teaches more about possible failure modes than actually having one.

The main part of this mission is the Trace Gas Orbiter, which successfully inserted in its initial elliptical orbit, and is now aerobraking to adjust its speed and orbit in to a 400 km high circular orbit.  In seven months time it will start mapping the Martian atmosphere, in part to tell us if the Methane we have found before has a geological, or possible, biological origin.

But for me the best thing to happen is the pictures that are coming out, for these really show what we are capable of.

It’s only been three days, but already we have some very exciting images, with the prospect of more to come.

NASA / JPL / MSSS / ESA / Emily Lakdawalla

This GIF is from the fantastic blog of planetary geologist and science writer, Emily Lakdawalla, and shows a before and after of an area within Schiaparelli's landing zone.  These images were taken with the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's context camera, and have a six meter resolution, meaning each pixel is about six meters across.  In a few days time MRO should be in the right place for the HiRISE camera to image the area.  It has a resolution of one meter, or better.

It can take pictures like this one of the Opportunity rover.  It was 300 miles above it at the time!

Have a look at a much larger version here.

Schiaparelli came down on the Meridiani Planum, the same plain that Opportunity is currently on, and indeed an attempt was made to image the landing using the mast-cam on Opportunity.

This picture came out earlier.

We can now be sure that this is just cosmic radiation hitting the electronics in the mast-cam, and that at a distance of 54km, Schiaparelli was too far away, and too low on the horizon for Opportunity to have any chance of spotting it.

Mars has no magnetic field, and so there is a lot more cosmic ray activity at the surface than on Earth. All cameras on Mars take numerous images of high energy particles.  This is a better example, also seen while waiting for Schiaparelli.

The most hopeful and positive aspect of all of this, is that you and I live in a time when humanity can gather this data, take these images, and share them between thousands of fascinated individuals.  The technology that we have on Mars, combined with the technology we have on Earth make this a golden age of discovery and investigation.  An age that all of us are invited to partake in.

Stars, station, and finding purpose

Events of recent days have got me thinking.  Just things running round my head, but they ran till they gained momentum, gained shape and substance, and now they need to come out.  I am the first up in my house, at least on a school day, and this week the International Space Station has been passing over Britain just before sun rise.  Out of my bedroom window shines Venus, the morning star, and on the opposite side of the house, Jupiter, the king of planets.  One morning I was even able to get my telescope in to my daughter’s bedroom, and let us see Jupiter and its four moons, just before the approaching day swamped the opportunity.

The ISS has been the scene for another triumph, albeit more regional, with the first British citizen in space completing our nation’s first spacewalk, an event that was very well covered I must say.  It got me thinking about the big picture, a picture so big it’s not really possible to see it, but I’m trying, I’m always trying.  Some people can’t see it, or won’t see it, and I don’t understand that; it leaves me bewildered.

Astronomy is the father of science, at least as we understand it.  It is the father of the scientific method.  Those four moons I saw in a line, with Jupiter in the centre, marked the death of the religiously driven geo-centric model.  If four small moon clearly orbited the much larger Jupiter, then why would the very large sun orbit the tiny Earth?  By watching Venus we were able to measure our whole solar system.  By timing the transit of Venus across the surface of the sun, as seen from widely spread, but known locations on the Earth, the diameter of Venus’s orbit, and thus all other orbits, could be calculated.  We were able to turn ideas, scientific ideas, in to predictions, and turn predictions in to mathematical models, and add observations to let those models provide answers to questions that had been mere philosophy for millennia.

With the sky accessible to everyone, the huge amount of data that the early astronomers quickly gathered allowed the other newer sciences to flourish.  Cartographers could make better maps as location could be more accurately determined.  Geologists, who were beginning to suspect the biblical age of the Earth was very wide of the mark, had their view reinforced by structures in the heavens that could not be young.  The laws of movement, conservation of momentum, conservation of angular momentum, and gravity could be tested to a degree impossible in the rudimentary laboratories of the time.

As our instruments improve, as the distance we can see grows, as the context we reveal expands, we see ourselves as less and less the centre of a myth, and instead part of an enormous and beautiful story.  A story larger and more glorious and more encompassing that any mere human made fable could ever be.

I know someone, a friend, who is very much in to personal development.  Now, I had long assumed that self-development is automatic; the result of been a person, and moving forward through time, but self-stagnation seems to be the more common result.  When asked ‘what are you, what do you represent, what is your own purpose?’ most are apparently left dumbfounded.

So what am I?  What do I represent?  Do I have a purpose?

I represent reason over ignorance, fact over myth, knowledge over superstition, wisdom over dogma.  My purpose is to be part of a future brighter than our past, where learning and understanding banishes the fairy stories of the old world to the archive of cultural history.  Where blind acceptance is replaced with curiosity and enquiry.  We live on a tiny world, a pale blue dot, a speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam.  We have grown here, but we cannot remain here.  As our knowledge has grown, our power has grown.  Now our power cannot be sustained on this small world.  We are changing it completely, and no matter the good intentions of some of us, no matter if we all took the environmental cause to heart, universal access to our current technology is not possible, in the long term, on so small a world.  We must spread out, we must find new homes, new resources, new horizons to venture over.

Our galaxy contains approximately four hundred billion stars, most of which are main sequence stars.  Planets out number stars, we know that, we just don’t know by what factor, but a conservative number would be a trillion planets.  Rocky worlds seems to be a minority, although this may be a limitation of the technology we use to find them.  Rocky worlds with a stable habitat at the temperature water remains a liquid will be rarer still, but they will be out there; hundreds of millions of new homes, hiding in the darkness.

When the first humans leave the Earth with no intention of returning, the technology they take with them, the way they survive in their ship or habitat for long periods, how they are fed and watered and breath, how the crew selection works, how the craft are designed, and how the tasks and workloads are managed is all been learnt now, aboard the International Space Station.

Yesterday two men opened the airlock and stepped outside to repair a piece of power infrastructure, fit a valve, and lay a data cable.  How many times in the millennia to come will humans step in to vacuum to fix the very thing keeping them alive?  How many kilometres might they be from the Earth, how many light years?  When I watch the live stream on the internet I am watching what we can achieve when people from a hundred nations work together for a common purpose; I am watching mankind bettering itself.

This century will see us change from a single planet species, bickering over our limited resource, to a multi world species with resource we can barely count.

Science has gotten us here, the scientific method; the only reliable way to separate fact from fiction.

That is what I think of when I see the heavens revolve above me.  That is what I think when I see man made points of brilliant light race over head.

This is where I find my purpose.