Democracy and governance

One of the subthemes in the futuristic novels I am writing is, how should we be governed? Most readers of this blog will think the answer is obvious: democracy. Think about this for a minute, and ask, is this true, and how do you know? My answer is that democracy is too cumbersome. Trying to get everybody to even consider an issue is hopeless in our modern life, and even if you can get them to think about it, the thoughts tend to be very superficial. So, what we tend to do is to give everybody a vote, but they have to spend it on a politician. We do not have democracy; we have a republic, and the United States constitution in particular is based on the Roman republic. What happened then was that the eligible citizens were all given a “stone” and they went to a selected spot and cast it. The United States President is elected in a similar way to the Roman Consul, the electoral college representing the role of the great families. Most other “democracies” work in a similar way. This is more efficient at decision-making, but it has its problems.

Recently, the death of Margaret Thatcher illustrated what I consider to be much of what is wrong with our political system. You may not agree with her policies, but why not disagree while she was alive? Perhaps because there was nothing the public could do to change them? In an election you get one vote, so one issue predominates. It is not democratic to have no means of deciding separable issues, but merely more efficient.

I think it is a fair assessment that when she came to power, Britain was sick. The manufacturing industries were simply non-competitive. There were several reasons for this. One was the overall debt incurred by Britain in fighting Hitler. This debt totally wrecked Britain’s economy, and Britain would have been better to have stayed out of the war, or to have made peace after Dunkirk. The world, of course, would have been a much worse place, but the fact remains, Britain never really recovered from that war. The second problem was that British industry did not reinvest, but rather it ran its factories into the ground, and did not value what it had. A long time ago, I owned a Datsun 1600, which was quite an advanced car for its time, and one day, while driving in the Australian country, I had trouble with a hose. I limped into this small country town with one garage, which nominally was an Austin/Morris agency, so I stopped. Could he do something to get me to …  No problem, he had the part. Austin had sold its designs to Datsun, and persisted with a much inferior design, but the Austin hoses exactly fitted the Datsun. So Japan has a car industry and Britain does not. The final piece of bad news for Britain prior to Thatcher was the Union movement. Nobody would do anything that was not on their formal job description, which meant that industries were hopelessly overstaffed. Margaret Thatcher excised the cancer. The trouble was, she excised far too much. She closed the coal industry, almost overnight, and industry simply collapsed, unable to compete with German and Japanese industry. I consider this was a triumph of political dogma over logic

Thatcher became extremely unpopular, until the Falklands. Whether she was completely rational there is a matter of opinion, but she decided to retake them. In my opinion, all other things being equal, Britain should have failed. What happened is that Thatcher risked many lives as she staked her reputation, and the question is, was what she did a rational assessment of the situation, a moral stand, or was it a throw of the dice to rescue an otherwise impossible political position? Whatever it was, it worked, and her reputation reached unparalleled heights.

So what we saw was that prior to Thatcher, Britain was sliding into a depressed inefficient state, thanks to politicians who refused to take hard decisions. Thatcher went to the opposite extreme: there was no shortage of hard decisions, but how many of them were right? What we need is a government that makes the right decisions. The problem is, how to get such a government?

 

The compact city

One of the discussions going on now in New Zealand is what a future city should look like. One of the major reasons for this is that planners have decided that they should restrict urban sprawl, and to do this they have withheld planning permission to open up new land. That is all very well, but they have not facilitated any alternative, and hence all that has happened is that house prices have actually soared, especially in Auckland where, for some reason, immigrants come and do not proceed further. The problem with the compact city is that even if you decide you need it, you need land to build whatever the extra people are going to live in. The inner city tends to be already built on. 

Why does it matter what our cities evolve into? While it is possible, and necessary, to have biofuels, it is most likely that they cannot produce enough to replace oil. I have sent quite a lot of my professional working time involved with this issue, and with one possible exception, it is physically impossible to find enough biomass to power future usage assuming we continue with present trends. People talk about hydrogen to replace oil. In my opinion, that would be a mistake. Hydrogen is one of the hardest gases to store, since it leaks given the slightest plausible excuse. Once it has leaked, it has a very large range of mixtures with air that are explosive. It is reasonably easy to ignite, and as was part of my ebook Puppeteer, a terrorist could do serious damage. The gas is just too dangerous. There have been proposals to store the hydrogen chemically and slowly release it. An example would be compounds based on ammonia/borane, but the problem then is, where to find the energy to make the compounds, and how to teach the general public how to handle the chemicals safely.

The other alternative is to cut down drastically the amount of fuel consumed. In my most recent futuristic novel Dreams Defiled, one of the major protagonists must deal with this problem and comes up with the scheme: arrange it so that wherever possible, everyone walks or cycles to work. How can that be arranged? Simply by dispersing work into small island communities, and have everyone who works at a site live nearby. The argument to sell this scheme was, why spend two hours going each way to and fro work? If everyone lived close to work and had the ability to purchase groceries close by, fuel consumption would drop dramatically, and now I think biofuels could make up the rest. The problem then is, how to persuade people to move, and how to provide something suitably attractive for them so they are happy to move. One of my thoughts is that when planners set out to redesign a city and ask people to live in a different type of house/apartment, the planners should be the first to move. That way, at least the housing is far more likely to be livable.

Radiation: a space travel hazard?

Space travel is, not unnaturally a key part of much science fiction, but a recent article in the journal Science raised an important issue: radiation. Based on data from Curiosity, travelling to and from Mars employing the same type of trajectory as Curiosity (a standard orbital transfer trajectory) a person going there and back would receive approximately 660 millisieverts of radiation. For comparison the average person gets just under 4 millisieverts per annum, although a CT scan can give you 8. Space agencies limit astronauts to 1000 millisieverts during their entire career. There appear to be two views to this. The first is radiation is probably still the least of an astronaut’s worries. The second it, radiation could get worse than this.

There are two sorts of radiation that are relevant: protons expelled from the sun, which may be in great blobs of plasma, and cosmic rays, from the rest of the universe (and probably originating in supernovae). On earth, we are protected from the sun’s emissions by the earth’s magnetic field, which diverts charged particles, but on an average space ship, there will be no such protection, nor will there be such protection on the surface of Mars. There is less you can do about cosmic rays because they have so much energy. So what can be done to protect the intrepid space traveller?

The first step is obvious: get there faster. Think of crossing the Atlantic. Curiosity was about the slowest you could travel and still get there, and could be compared with crossing the Atlantic in a Viking longboat. Jet planes make what was then a highly risky and very prolonged trip rather ordinary now. Curiosity took so long because chemical propulsion does not provide enough power, so the first step is to devise better propulsion systems. The second step is to provide the astronauts with protection against such radiation, which should include shielding at a minimum. Once at Mars, the atmosphere will provide some shielding, because while the pressure is low, there is still a fairly thick layer, and of course, while inside a building, or even in a suit, there is protection. A massive solar flare would go through a simple wall or a suit, but such flares are detectable and the astronaut should get a couple of days warning. On Mars, getting underground provides any amount of shielding.

Several science fiction books have a lead-shielded zone in their space ship to protect themselves. Actually, plenty of water would do a fairly good job, and of course you have to take plenty of water anyway. Design features help, and do we want to take a huge mass of lead for no other purpose? In my novel, Red Gold, the setting of which involved the colonization of Mars, I proposed two fusion-powered ships, the fusion units to provide electricity and energy for materials production once there. The ships were each about twenty million tonne mass fully laden so they were not small, but they had to be about that big to carry enough stuff required to make a settlement work and give two hundred settlers a reasonable lifestyle. The mass provided some shielding, but the large disks also had large magnetic fields. How much good that would do is debatable. However, I also proposed a massive space station at the Mars sun L1 position, which is the nul gravitational point between Mars and the sun, and that was intended to generate a massive magnetic field powered by solar energy and superconductors. The concept was if charged particles were even given a small nudge, from that distance they would miss Mars. Finally, I had my key settlement underground. I suppose one can debate the effectiveness of these schemes, but I think that if we are going to colonize Mars we have to consider radiation, and I think part of the point of fiction is to alert readers to some of the relevant issues. Meanwhile, I gather there is a Dutch reality TV program intending to send a very limited number of people on a one-way trip to Mars. Read what I think is a dead minimum that should be taken, and see if you would want to be part of that TV show.

Rocky planets, atmospheres and aliens

This week, the second ebook, Dreams Defiled, in my trilogy, First Contact, was published on Amazon. The trilogy is nominally about contact with aliens (at least an alien hologram in A Face on Cydonia) and its consequences. It is also about how civilization might deal with (or perhaps fail to deal with) certain crises that appear to be inevitable. One solution to a crisis that you may or may not like is the proposed solution to the fuels/transport crisis, for no matter what, it is unlikely the whole planet can continue burning energy at the rate some western countries do so now. Check out my solution, and see what you think.

In the meantime, back to the issue of how many planets could have alien life. In previous posts I made an estimate of the likely number of stars that have rocky planets suitable for life. While most stars are not suitable, there are still billions of stars that are, even in this galaxy. The rocky planet then has to be within the right size range. It would have to be somewhat bigger than Mars to ensure it held a significant atmosphere, and there will also be a maximum size, but we do not know what that is. According to my theory, to keep within the right size range, the star has to clear out the accretion disk early, but up to half the stars do this. So, the next question is, will they have water and atmospheric gases? Where do the gases come from?

The usual argument is that the rocky planets get their water and atmospheres through later being bombarded by small asteroids. I don’t believe this either, since, as I show in more detail in Planetary Formation and Biogenesis, since Venus, Earth and Mars have totally different atmospheres, they have to be bombarded selectively by totally different types of asteroids that, as far as we can tell, no longer exist. Thus Venus has about four times as much nitrogen as Earth, but negligible water. Mars has a reasonable amount of water, but almost no nitrogen. How does that come about?

My answer is that the rocky planets form by cement-like dust joining rocks together, and that is where the water comes from. The available cement depends on how hot the solids get during primary stellar accretion, and at what temperature they set during the late cooler accretion disk. Earth happened to set at the optimum temperature – the first stage had been hot enough to get the best cement made, while the second stage was cool enough to let the cement set with the most water. Venus had the same cements, but it was hotter, so it did not set with much water, while Mars had only a limited cement, so while it was cooler, it did not have the means of setting much water. Subsequently, the water reacted with solid sources of carbon and nitrogen and made the atmosphere, and Venus, because it was hotter, had more carbon and nitrogen, so it used up most of its limited water making its very dense atmosphere. If that is true, then most stars that can form rocky planets will have one like Earth in the habitable zone.

That means there are billions of planets in this galaxy capable of forming life. That does not mean that the galaxy is teaming with civilizations. For example, the nearest suitable single star, Epsilon Eridani, is only about 900 million years old. At that age, Earth may or may not have got around to having primitive single-cell life. Of course, in Dreams Defiled I give hints there is a civilization there. How could that be? There is an obvious possibility, but to add to the mystery, I provide evidence that in this fictional story, the food on the rocky planet around Epsilon Eridani and on Earth is each compatible with both life forms, and in general, life forms that evolve separately find that they can only tolerate food that evolved with them.  Now can you guess where this plot is going? As you might guess, I am trying to write stories that also try to impart some scientific knowledge, and which I hope readers will find interesting.

Planets for alien life (3)

We have a suitable star, but will it have planets? Let me confess at once – I would generally be regarded as being a heretic on this subject, so be warned. The standard theory argues that they form through the gravitational attraction of planetesimals during the second stage of stellar accretion, but it has no mechanism by which planetesimals form, so there isn’t much more to be said about that. In my view, the planets formed in a completely different way, which involves the chemistry that should take place in the accretion disk and the material gradually heats up as it approaches the star.

In my proposal (more details in my ebook, Planetary formation and biogenesis) the four outer planets form the same way snow-balls form: the pressure induced merging of particles that melt-welds the ices into a larger body when collisions occur a little below the melting point of the ice. There are four major ices, with increasing melting points: nitrogen/carbon monoxide; methane/argon; ammonia/methanol/water; water. Bodies will contain the ices that have yet to melt, so all have water as the major component, and the water should hold the more volatile ices in pores. We then have four giants, in order Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter. The satellites form the same way, and the internal chemistry of Saturn converts methanol and ammonia into some methane and nitrogen, which is why Titan (a Saturnian satellite) has an atmosphere, and the somewhat larger Jovian satellites do not. In the ebook I show that the planets are at positions that roughly correspond to the expected temperature profile in the disk when they are formed.

You may be skeptical at this point – where are such exoplanets? The reason why hardly any have been found is that they are difficult to find. Remember how long it took to find Neptune? However, one such system has been found: HR 8799. These planets are at 68 A.U. (1 A.U. is the earth-sun distance), 38 A.U, 24 A.U. and 14.5 A.U. and these distances are proportionately similar to those in our solar system, only more spaced out. The greater distances will arise from more energy being converted to heat, through a larger star (more gravitational energy produced per unit mass) or faster accretion (more mass per unit time). So, why is there only one such system discovered? One reason why these planets were detected is that the inner three are about 9 times bigger than Jupiter, and they have only just formed. Their temperature is about 1100 degrees, so they shine, and we can see them! This is rather exceptional. The two main means of finding planets are the Doppler effect, where the planet pulls on the star as it orbits, and its motion has a “wobble” that can be detected, or, with the Kepler telescope, the planet passes in front of the star, giving a transit effect. Both of these favour finding planets close to the star. The Doppler effect is bigger the larger and closer the planet because that gives it a bigger pull, while to observe a transit, the planet has to be on a line between the observer and the star. Close up, there is more angular tolerance because the star is so big, and there may be, say, 2-3 degrees tolerance. If the planet is as far away as Neptune, there is essentially no tolerance, and there is a further problem: a transit cannot happen more often than once the planet’s “year”. For Neptune, that is about once in 165 years. Kepler has been going only a few years and will soon stop.

The giants are hardly likely to have life as we know it, however giants are important because if the giants grow too big and are too close together, their gravitational interactions start to disrupt their orbits, which at first should become more elliptical, and then start moving each other around. The larger the giants, and the closer they are together, the more disruptive they are. Given sufficient time, they may throw one or more of the giants out of the system, while the Jupiter equivalent moves closer to the star, often becoming a star-grazing planet. If it did that, it would most likely totally disrupt rocky planets. So, the number of suitable stars must be reduced by the probability that the giants stay where they are. Since we cannot, in general, see giants in their proposed original positions, it is hard to estimate that probability, but as noted in the last post, the factor will be something less than a half.

There is still one further problem. If, around the Jupiter position, more than one planet started to grow, subsequent gravitational; interactions could lead to one of the bodies being flung inwards, where, if it is big enough, it may continue to grow. This could produce anything from a water world to a small giant. It is rather difficult to guess the probability of that happening. However, if I am correct, all of those with giants in the right position and which only formed one significant Jupiter-type precursor will be likely to have rocky planets in the habitable zone, and of course, a water world does not prohibit life (although there will be no technology – it is hard to invent fire under water!) There are still plenty of stars! 

Planets for alien life (2)

My last post gave an estimate of how many stars were suitable for having planets with life, if they had rocky planets in the right place. The answer comes out very roughly as one per every five hundred cubic light years. At first sight, not very common, but galaxies are very big, and we end up with about a hundred billion in this galaxy. The next question is, are there further restrictions? Extrasolar planets are reasonably common, according to recent surveys, however most of these found are giants that are very close to the star, and totally unsuited for life. On the other hand, there is a severe bias: the two methods that have yielded the most discoveries favour the finding of large planets close to the star.

To form stars, a large volume of gas begins to collapse, and as it collapses to form a star, it also forms a spinning disk. Three stages then follow. The first stage involves gas falling into the star from an accretion disk at a rate of a major asteroid’s mass each second. The second involves a much quieter stage, where the star has essentially formed, but it still has a disk, which it is accreting at a much slower rate, about a thousandth as fast. Finally, the star has “indigestion” and in a massive burp, clears out what is left of the disk (technically called a T Tauri event). The standard theory has the planets forming in the second stage or, for rocky planets, even following the T Tauri cleanout.

There are two important issues. As the gas falls into the star, both energy and angular momentum must be conserved. The fate of energy is simple: as the gas falls inwards, it gets hotter, and it is simple gravitation that heats the star initially, until it reaches about 80 million degrees, at which point deuterium starts to fuse and this ignites stellar fusion. However, the issue with angular momentum is more difficult. This is like an ice skater – as she brings her arms closer to herself, she starts spinning faster; put out her arms and the spin slows. As the gas heads into the star, the star should spin faster. The problem is, almost all the mass of the solar system is in the star, but almost all the angular momentum is in the planets. How did this happen?

Either all the mass retained its original angular momentum or it did not. If it did, then the sun should be spinning at a ferocious rate. While it could have lost angular momentum by throwing an immense amount of gas back into space, nobody has ever seen this phenomenon. If the stellar mass did not retain its angular momentum, it had to exchange it with something else. In my opinion, what actually happened is that the forming planets took up the angular momentum from gas that then fell into the star. If that is true, every star with enough heavy elements will form planets of some description because it helps stellar accretion. If so, the number of planet-bearing stars is very close to the number of stars.

There is, however, another problem. In my theory (Planetary Formation and Biogenesis for more details) planets simply keep growing until the stage 3 disk clear-out. If they get big enough, mutual gravitational interactions disrupt their orbits and something like billiards occurs. The planets do not collide, but if they come close enough one will be thrown out of the system (astronomers have already detected planets floating around in space, unattached to any star) and the other will end up as a giant very close to the star. A considerable number of such systems have been found. This would totally disrupt Earth-like planets, so stars with planets suitable for life must have had a shorter stage 2.

How short? Stage 2 can last up to 30 million years, although that is probably an exception, while the shortest stage 2 is less than a million years. The answer is, probably no more than a million years, i.e. our planetary system was formed around a star that had a relatively short secondary accretion. The reason I say that is as follows. The rate of accretion of a gas giant should be proportional to how much gas there is around it, and for how long. The amount of gas decreases as the distance from the star increases, and if you double the distance from the star, the gas density decreases somewhere between a half and a quarter. Now the three million year old star LkCa 15 is slightly smaller than our sun but it still has a second stage gas disk. This star has a planet nearly five times as big as Jupiter about three times further away from the star. This almost certainly means that Jupiter must have stopped growing well within three million years. (As an aside, standard theory requires at least 15 million years to start a gas giant.) Fortunately, it appears that about half the stars have such a short secondary stage. If we then say that about half the stars will be in the wrong part of the galaxy, then the estimate of stars that could be suitable for life reduces to about 25 billion. If we further reduce the total by those that are simply too young, or do not have sufficient metallicity, we could reduce the total to about 10 billion. These numbers are very rough, but the message remains: there are plenty of stars suitable to sustain life-bearing planets in the galaxy. The next question is, how many stars will have rocky planets?

Planets for alien life

In my novel, “A Face on Cydonia”, an alien message was finally intercepted. That raises the question, what is the probability of alien life? Frank Drake answered that question with the Drake equation, which involved the product of the number of potentially suitable stars, the probability such a star has a suitable planet, the probability that life will evolve on such a planet, and the probability that it will develop to a civilization. (There is a little more to it, relating to communications, but we leave that.)

In my ebook, “Planetary Formation and Biogenesis” I tried to put some numbers on these, or at least the conditions that have to be met. I should add that what I put forward is NOT in accord with most astronomical thinking. Most astronomers and physicists believe that planets form through gravitational attraction of planetesimals (Bodies of the 100 km size) into embryos (bodies about Mars size) then these accrete into planets by gravitational collisions. While this theory has been around for 60 years, nobody has any real idea how planetesimals form. My concept is that the initial bodies accrete through chemistry that differs at different temperatures, and that means you do not get a uniform distribution of planetesimals. Unfortunately, if I am correct, there are a number of different types of solar system that can evolve.

For life to evolve, it is usually considered the planet must be in what is called the “habitable zone”, which is usually defined by a zone in which planets have liquid water. Venus is usually considered to be too hot, and Mars too cold. The distance from the star for the habitable zone depends on the luminosity of the star, which in turn depends on the stellar mass to a power of approximately four. Thus if we require the planet to be in the habitable zone, for very small stars the planet has to be very close to the star. The smaller the star, the more common it is. If the star is very big, it burns so much faster and does not last. For these reasons, it is usually thought that stars have to be roughly the same size as the sun, i.e. G-type stars (our sun is a G-type, but one of the smaller ones) or K-type (the next size range down). The next problem for a planet is whether the star is a single star, and if so, do they come close enough to gravitationally throw the planets away. Double stars are more common than single stars. Further, stars have to have sufficient elements heavier than helium. You cannot have rocky planets without silicon! Finally, for life to evolve very far, the star has to be old enough.

None of the closest stars to Earth seem particularly promising. The most promising is Alpha Centauri, which also happens to be the closest, at a little over 4 light years, and has two stars that approach about as close as the Sun-Saturn distance. One star is slightly bigger than Sol, and the other is a smaller star. Neither star could hold a gas giant, but rocky planets might be possible, and the smaller star appears to have a small planet. A star like Sirius or Procyon is simply too big and will not last long enough to let animal-type life evolve. The two closest single stars that seem big enough have their problems. Epsilon Eridani is known to have a Jupiter-type planet, but is only 900 million years old, so any planets will not have had time to evolve advanced life. Tau ceti is probably old enough, but it has a low fraction of heavy elements, and may not be able to form rocky planets.

There are only 2 G-type stars (our sun is a G-type star) within ten light years, and about 18 within thirty light years, however K-type stars might also be adequate, and there are about 38 of them within 30 light years. Unfortunately, the heavier G-type and the lighter K-type are probably not suitable, so we may have a lot of space to ourselves. On the other hand, our galaxy is huge, and by my count it probably contains something like a hundred billion suitably sized stars. Those near the centre of the galaxy probably have to be discounted (the region is too violent) and we may have to eliminate about half of the rest for various reasons, nevertheless, it is almost certain that there are plenty of suitable stars. It is just that they are rather far away both from us and from each other. How many will have planets? That is for a later post.