Alien Earths, by Lisa Kaltenegger, is an excellent book and was immensely enjoyed. The author is a female, which would have pleased Mother, who railed against the natural order ‘back in the day’, which was to keep women, “Barefoot and in the kitchen.” During my life women have certainly come a long way, baby, and it has been good to see. An example would be the fact that this is not the first science type book I have read that was written by a female. Another book, Warped Passages, by Lisa Randall, was devoured several years ago. Our country is better now that all the brain power is being utilized.
Ms. Kaltenegger begins the book with a question: So where is everyone? She writes, “Let’s assume, for a moment, that the universe is teeming with life. In that case, the obvious question is: Where is everyone?
After cogitatin’ for a moment I wondered if maybe we Earthlings were not fortunate that other entities had either not found us or had found us but wanted nothing to do with us, for obvious reasons.
She writes about where she began the path through life: My world began as a small town,
but it grew to encompass the whole globe, then reached into the cosmos, with new planets to explore in whatever way possible. The mysterious twinkling dots of light of my childhood have transformed into scorching ball of gas and the heavens into a celestial history book of the cosmos, but when I look at the night sky I still feel the wonder and excitement I felt as a child to uncover what is out there.
At home or on vacation, my mom was always there to listen to my stories. She also nurtured my growing love for books. When I was ten, the library gave up trying to put limits on the number of books I could borrow, and I happily carried increasingly larger piles home, sinking into worlds I could only imagine in those pages. Who could have dreamed that one day I would be the one filling a spot on the library shelf?
Here Be Bananas, Aliens, and Dragons
I once began a lecture in my introductory class by holding up a banana and asking my students, “Could this banana be an alien?” Let me be clear: I don’t think a banana is an alien-or at least I think it is extremely, extremely unlikely.
To find life in the cosmos, we need to stretch our minds and search at the limits of technology. Not only do we need to work at the edge of knowledge, but we must ask the right questions and overcome our own biases. The human brain has evolved to spot patterns-a great evolutionary trait for people who were once hunted as prey. If your ancestors spied hungry lions in tall grass before the lions sneaked up on them, they survived. If there were a few false alarms and a bit of energy wasted in fleeing unnecessarily, that was not as bad as being surprised by lions on the prowl.
The Golden Record: A Message in a Bottle
When Voyager 1 and voyager 2 were launched in 1977 to explore the outerplanets in our solar system, NASA included a message from humankind on each spacecraft: the Golden Record. Inscribed with the words “To the makers of music-all worlds, all times,” it is a time capsule of life on Earth.
The Golden Record tells the story of our planet: a story captured in images, sound, and science: 115 images of life on Earth and 90 minutes of musical selections from different cultures and eras…
One song on the record always touches me deeply: “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” recorded in 1927 by Blind Willie Johnson, a Texas blues musician. In 1945, Willie Johnson’s home was destroyed by a fire, but he lived in the ruins because he had nowhere else to go. He contracted malaria but hospitals refused to treat him, either because he was Black or because he was blind-the accounts differ. We don’t even know where he is buried-but his song is aboard two spacecraft en route to the stars.
A Pale Blue Dot
Before Voyager 1 got the final push to leave our solar system, (Carl) Sagan convinced NASA to turn the spacecraft around and take a last image of Earth, its home planet.This spectacular photograph captured on Valentine’s Day in 1990, more than three decades ago, shows Earth as a tiny point of light suspended in a sunbeam on the dark canvas of space. The vast oceans and a medley of clouds combine to paint it pale blue. That picture changed how I think about our planet.
Our Sun circles the black hole, Sagittarius A*, in the center of our Milky Way. We are about 25,000 light-years away from Sagittarius A*, but like all stars in the Milky Way, our Sun and its planets are caught in its gravitational embrace. Monty Python’s “Galaxy Song” provides a fun and pretty accurate summary of our movement in the universe-and asks hopefully, in satiric Monty Python style, whether there could be intelligent life in the cosmos because, they lament, “there’s bugger all down here on Earth.”
Except for hydrogen, helium, and small amounts of lithium and beryllium, all the elements that make you were produced in the inferno found in the cores of stars or during their violent death throes in spectacular supernova explosions. Elements heavier than iron, like silver, and gold, are forged in the immense supernova explosion at the end of a massive star’s life. You can hold the leftover fragments forged in a star’s death throes in you hand. The calcium in your bones, the iron in your blood, and the oxygen you breathe are all ancient stardust. In the vast expanse of the universe, you are part of the cosmos. You are made of ancient stardust.
Unfortunately, no one has managed to journey to the center of the Earth yet…
Say what? I watched the movie!
The movie contains one of my all-time favorite quotes: (at around 1h 35 mins) Count Saknussemm says: “I don’t sleep. I hate those little slices of death.” (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052948/trivia/?ref_=tt_ql_3)
Under a Purple Sky
What colors can a sky be? It turns out it depends on what the air is made of and if there are particles like dust in it. Air on other planets could have a very different chemical makeup than ours, so the pinball effect of scattering would be different too. Pick a color to paint an alien sky. Imagine a pink sky or a purple sunset. It might exist on one of these new worlds. I would love to see that, but first, I’d make sure I was in a safe place on a spaceship or an enclosed base, because a sky painted in eerie colors means that breathing the air would probably kill you. So beware, future astronauts, of different-colored skies!
Worlds That Shook Science
A Winding Road
Since the start of my career, I have been propelled by my fascination with the question of whether we could ever find life on other planets-and how I might be able to play a role in that exciting research. But the road to scientific discovery is not without its potholes, especially for women.
Sometimes they are big enough to block your path completely, requiring creative maneuvering to find a new way to follow your dream. (I can recall numerous incidents where I was challenged or ignored, experiences that will resonate with many others, no matter what gender, and might provide a little help when facing these obstacles.)
“This is just crazy,” my Ph,D. student Sarah declared, outraged, upon bursting into my office. She was upset on my behalf because she overheard two men on the bus stating with conviction that I had been given my position as the leader of one of the highly competitive Emmy Noether research teams here at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, only “because I was a woman.” The fact that the program, funded by the German Research Foundation to the tune of about half a million euros, is named after the famous German female mathematician Emmy Noether was probably lost on these men too.
There are thousands of empty seats-about 5,960 of them-around me. They will be filled tonight, but no one is allowed at sound check except for he musicians and a few scientists who are here for their own sound check later. The Starmus International Festival was found by the Armenian-Spanish astronomer Garik Israelian and the British musician Brian May, who holds a Ph.D. in astronomy, and the festival celebrates music, exploration, science, and art. It bring musicians, Nobel Prize winners, artists, writers, and scientists together to share their passions with everyone. In 2022 it was held in Yerevan, Armenia.
The night before, I had drinks and pizza on the rooftop of our hotel on the central square on the central square with the musicians of Sons of Apollo; we discussed life in the cosmos, the universe, and how scientists figured out that it is ever expanding, then we seamlessly switched from the mysteries of the cosmos to the mysteries of the music that connects us all. I wonder how many more kids would pay attention in math and science class if they knew that even rock stars are fascinated by the cosmos.
Exploring space allows us to gather the knowledge to save ourselves from asteroids, from pollution, and from using up the limited resources on Earth, our beautiful, incredibly complex yet fragile “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” as Carl Sagan so eloquently described it.
Armchair Warrior 