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What with all of the holiday excitement, we have failed to compliment the Chinese Space Program on their successful lunar landing. On January 3rd, 2019, the Chang’e IV spacecraft landed on the South Pole-Aitken Basin, on the far side of the Moon, and deployed the Yutu-2 Rover. Here is a stunning photo taken by the rover as it began its explorations of the lunar surface. The spacecraft is, of course, named after the beautiful and sad Chinese moon goddess, Chang’e.
To quote the Smithsonian magazine, “[the Chinese lander will] collect mineral and geological samples of the moon’s surface as well as investigate the impact of solar wind on the moon. The craft even has its own little farm, or lunar biosphere, aboard—the first of its kind.” This miniature ecosystem consists of some potatoes, a few Arabidopsis plants (this is a hardy and universally known laboratory plant), and some living silkworm eggs in a special 3-kilogram (6.6-pound) aluminum terrarium (or lunarium?).
I realized as I write this that I don’t even know the Chinese Space Agency’s name. It turns out it is the Chinese National Space Administration “CNSA.” Their logo, immediately above, is a flying blue chevron with, I don’t know, blue wheat, or something–it looks like somebody mimeographed the Federation logo. But who cares about their logo? [cough, Chinese space administrators, you could hire a graphic artist to make a space phoenix, a rocket tiger, or galactic dragon or something for about ¥150.00 and outshine everyone before you even leave the pad]. The CNSA are now doing things which have never been done. This is the first landing on the dark side of the moon (which is not really dark, but which goes by that conceit since the moon is tidally locked).
United States triumphalism over our amazing moon program has obscured the fact that the first moon landing happened 50 years ago. Nobody has been on the moon during my lifetime, and I am not young. NASA has responded to budget cuts and whiplash conflicting demands from different presidential administrations by concentrating on robot probes of the unknown edges of the solar system. That is smart, practical, and amazing. Yet some of the thrill and prestige that NASA had even during its silver age in the eighties and nineties is now wearing away.
Of course America doesn’t even really have a functioning government right now, so perhaps it is better that we have decided to abandon our own bright dreams of moon bases and Mars missions…but it saddens me that we are so politically deadlocked that we are not pushing harder to explore and build in space. All day, every day, billionaires tell us how scarce resources are and how much better the private sector is at allocating these precious resources (to super yachts, offshore bank accounts, and regulatory capture, apparently). Well, resources are not scarce in space. There is infinite real estate. There are whole planets worth of matter. There are wells of energy which create all of the energy humankind has ever used throughout all of our history within a picosecond. Hopefully the brand new accomplishments of CNSA will remind the American people of our true nature–as scientists, explorers, and visionaries. However if we are too fixated on the crimes and inanities of Individual Number 1 to pay attention to the universe, maybe the Chinese can build a floating colony on Venus. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing what they have planned next.
Since the year is pretty new and my bright hopes and shining dreams for 2019 are still intact, here is a Friday evening blog post! I have been worried that I have not been devoting sufficient time to blogging. In particular I have lately been especially bad about responding in a timely fashion to anybody gracious enough to post a comment. I promise I will work hard on doing a better job writing and responding this year, so keep those comments coming! In the meantime, kindly find a picture of the first sculpture which I finished in 2019: “Galactic Fluke,” which is carved out of wood and adorned with a handmade polymer galaxy and plastic stars. When I pulled that galaxy out of the oven it looked like a millipede with hairy waving legs…and it was no picnic making it adhere properly to the fluke instead of to my fat fingers.
Regular readers of this blog will recognize the flounder as the quixotic avatar of all Earth life in my recent artworks. Concerned friends and relatives have asked why the Pleuronectiformes have so completely infiltrated my ouevre–so I will answer that question in greater depth in 2019 (the emotional side of the story involves a confessional story about my life, and the intellectual side of the story involves a treatise on environmentalism and musings about the future of all of humankind).
This sculpture however transcends such concerns–this is, after all, a galactic fluke…a very great flounder indeed! It represents the apogee of my desires–life transcendent and all-present at an incomprehensibly vast scale. One of my friends said that his mother, a devout Muslim, was worried that my art is idolatrous (!) which is difficult to respond to, but I do certainly try to imbue my conception of the numinous into my flounder works. I have never found a bunch of rules from ancient near-eastern sages to be particularly supernatural…but the interlocking destinies of lifeforms living together in complex ecosystems does inspire me with feelings of transcendent awe. The great web of life on Earth is the closest thing we know to divinity–save perhaps for the celestial grandeur of outer space with all of its scope and mystery. This small sculpture is an attempt to bring these two sacred concepts together in poplar, paint, and plastic.
It’s an exciting new year in space exploration and today we are getting back images from the most distant object ever explored by a probe spacecraft. Launched in January of 2006, NASA’s amazing New Horizons mission (pictured above) has been flying through the solar system ever since. Back in 2014 it reached its primary objective, the icy dwarf world Pluto, which has been the focus of considerable interest and, arguably, of even greater controversy concerning astronomical naming conventions (“My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us….Nothing.” could arguably teach us about astronomy AND independent food preparation, I suppose). Since that time, New Horizons has continued to fly further from the Sun and deeper into the Kuiper Belt, a dark distant band of icy pseudo-worlds at the edge of the Solar System. New Horizons just flew past one of these Kuiper Belt objects…the distant ice ball 2014 MU69.
This frozen miniature planet is only 35 by 15 km (20 by 10 miles in diameter) and it orbits the sun every 298 years. The most exciting part of this body is its shape. It is literally a snowman—a smaller spherical lump of ice frozen to a larger one. Just look at it! You can practically see Charlie Brown half-building it and then giving up with a silent outer space “Good Grief”
Sadly, the mission has generated another astronomical naming controversy. Scientists were dissatisfied with the way “2014 MU69” rolled off the tongue so they crowdsourced the problem to the internet to find names for this distant iceball. The internet suggested “Ultima Thule” which was a Roman and Medieval term for the unknown icy lands beyond the periphery of the known world. That is a pretty good name and the scientists split it into two for the weird binary snowman (the larger body is “Ultima” and the smaller is “Thule”). Unfortunately, though, Nazi occultists also found the name “Thule” back in the thirties and they used it as a mythical place of origin for the mythical Aryan Race (sorry Nazis, we are all originally African).
Like all good-hearted people, I despise Nazis…but this seems like a Roman name sullied by racist morons more than a millennium after its introduction. Do you think scientists need to rename this primitive snowman world? Or should we go with Ultima Thule? Or should we just stick with 2014 MU69 (since, frankly, unless New Horizons discovers some strange artifacts, alien beings, or something we are probably never going to think about this corner of the solar system again).
To celebrate the season, here is a special Christmastime Sunday space post! Discovered in 1948 Comet 46P/Wirtanen orbits the sun every 5.4 Earth years. The comet’s apoapsis (the point of its orbit farthest from the Sun) is out in the vicinity of Jupiter’s orbit, but the closest point in its orbit brings it to Earth’s orbit. Unfortunately, because of the dance of the planets it only in relative proximity to Earth every 11 years, and even then, it is generally barely visible except to hardened astronomers. The comet is also known as the Christmas comet because its periapsis (when it is closest to the sun—and thus, sometimes to Earth) is in December and because the comet has a distinct viridian tinge!
This year, 46P/Wirtanen’s periapsis is unusually close to Earth. Tonight, the comet will be a mere 11.4 million kilometers (7.1 million miles) from Earth. That sounds like a fairly large distance but it is quite close, astronomically speaking: only 10 comets have come in such near proximity to our home planet in the past 70 years! Filled with excitement, I glanced out my window only to see that it is raining in Brooklyn and the sky is filled with clouds. But don’t worry, the comet will nearly as visible for another week. If you have an internet connection (and if you don’t, how are you reading this?) you can go to this link and find the comet in the sky from your location (that link is an amazing resource, so maybe hold onto it).
So why is this comet such a delightful color? Comet 46P/Wirtanen is mostly melted—it consists of a solid kernel approximately a kilometer in diameter trailing a cloud of gases hundreds of thousands of kilometers long. The majority of these gases reflect light in green wavelengths. Additionally, the comet is hyperactive—which, in this case, does not mean that overpaid physicians will prescribe it unnecessary medications so it can learn rote facts. In an astronomical context, hyperactive bodies are emitting more water than expected.
Unless you are avidly examining the comet with a gas spectrograph, its color is likely to be a source of awe and reflection. Does the comet’s color reflect the seasonal green of Yuletide or is it an ironic reprimand for the envy and jealously which grip all of human society? Is it the eye of a great sky panther or a kindly celestial sea turtle (hint: actually more of a ball of gas with an icy nucleus). Whatever your conclusions, I hope you enjoy this close-up view of “the Christmas Comet” before it zips back towards Jupiter’s orbit. Season’s greetings to all of my readers. I will try to find some special posts for this solstice week, before we all take a much-needed Christmas break.
We have a lot to talk about this week, but, as a Monday treat in the December darkness, there is a lot of news (and, yes, inflammatory pseudonews) from outer space. Let’s get down to it and proceed through this grab bag of tidbits.
The big headliner is something which has been in the offing since 1977. According to NASA, the Voyager 2 space probe has left the heliosphere, the protective “bubble” of radiation and charged particles which surrounds the entire solar system, and the craft is now proceeding through interstellar space. The spacecraft is only the second probe with any working instruments to accomplish this feat (the first was Voyager 1). Based on telemetry, it seems that Voyager 2 crossed the Heliopause on November 5th (2018). This occasion gives us reason to look back at the stupendous accomplishments made by the probe during the main stage of its mission. As it traveled through the Solar System, the craft visited all four gas giant planets and discovered 16 moons in addition to mysterious phenomena like Neptune’s Great Dark Spot, previously unknown rings around Neptune and Uranus, and cracks within the ice of Europa. Perhaps it will provide a few more momentous discoveries as it heads into the great darkness between stars.
A second astonishing space headline is the existence of a recording of the wind on Mars. NASA’s InSight lander (which we have been following here on this blog) captured the audio a few days ago and the space agency released the clip to the world this past weekend. This is the first recording of sound from a different planet. You can listen to it here if you want to know what another world sounds like.
OK…those were great stories, but by now you are probably asking where is the pseudonews which was promised in the opening sentence. Pseudonews is news-like material designed to evoke a strong emotional response. The stories are actually revealed to be conjecture, opinion, propaganda/public relations material, or just straight-up celebrity dreck. A cursory scan of the top media sights reveals that many—or maybe most–of the most visited and commented upon pieces are exactly this sort of fatuous puffery, so I thought I better throw some into Ferrebeekeeper to see what happens. For some reason the world can’t get enough of this folderol so let me know what you think!
The first of these newslike stories is actually pretty interesting…if it is true, and I can’t find much confirmation of that. Apparently the Southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu has plans to launch an artificial moon in 2020 to obviate the need for streetlights in the metropolis. This plan is theoretically feasible, in the 1990s the Russians launched the Znamya experiment, which showed that satellites could be used for reflected illumination. Yet the Znamya experiment didn’t produce much illumination…and the costs (bot known and unknown) of such a solution as Chengdu proposes would be outrageous. The idea is worthwhile as a fantasy concept about planetary scale engineering, but until we hear more details I am dubious.
Speaking of dubious, let’s end this article which started with such promise on a truly leaden note. Professional athletes in America are often famous dullards—these are, after all, adults who are paid astronomical sums for running around playing children’s ball games. The ignorant, misleading, and inflammatory declarations of athletes are a constant source of amazement and disgust. Which brings us to the story. Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors (a contemporary basketball team) has announced that humans never visited the moon. This conspiracy theory is common enough around the country, which is filled with people who lack the inclination or aptitude to assess whether fundamental truths are true or not, but it still makes me angry. Do big media companies print this stuff so that “Steph” Curry fans will turn their back on the great accomplishments of the space program during the 1960s or does CNN just want people to believe less in science in general?
Of course not, major news sites are reporting this “news” merely for clicks. I guess technically I am too, although I would be stunned if any Stephen Curry fans read this blog (if you do, please go elsewhere), yet I also have a more noble purpose in talking about this stupid Curry story. In our age of information saturation, it is becoming more difficult to evaluate news sources. Educational failures in public schools and political dysfunction have combined with the information revolution to cause ridiculous drivel to proliferate. The closest analogy I can think of is the era after the printing press became widespread in Europe and crazy tracts appeared everywhere causing wars, confusion, and mayhem (although this previous information breakthrough ultimately led to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment as well). Society is working through another unruly adolescent growth spurt where we try to figure out how to build society-wide consensus out of all of the new tools and discoveries we have made. The process is working out pretty unevenly so maybe we should stop publicizing the rantings of willfully ignorant and malevolent actors like Curry as “news stories”, even if they garner ratings. What’s next, a president who doesn’t believe that vaccines help people? We will revisit these dark fruits of the information era soon, but first there is enormous news from right here on Earth. Tune in tomorrow when we talk about discoveries made right under our feet.
There have been some stories bouncing around the world media lately which are highly germane to past Ferrebeekeeper posts (and to some bigger topics too). We’ll get to them one at a time this week, but let’s start with the most exciting news: today (11/26/18) NASA’s InSight lander touched down successfully on Mars at 2:47 PM Eastern Time. The craft is the eighth human-made craft to successfully touch down on the red planet. It’s unwieldy name is a trademark agonizing NASA acronym which stands for “Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport.” To put this in more comprehensible (yet less correct) terms, the lander is a geophysics probe which will examine the interior of the planet. Of course InSight isn’t really geophysics since it is not studying Earth, but saying “astrophysics” misleads one from the lander’s core mission of assessing Mars’ internal composition and structure.
The landing was a marvel of aerospace engineering since, in the span of about 6 and a half minutes, the craft was forced to slow from 17,300 kph (10,750 mph) to 8 kph (5 mph). Coincidentally, this was the first interplanetary mission to launch from California…from Vandenberg Air Force Base, where my paternal grandfather used to paint rockets back in the 1950s and 60s! Speaking of which, as always, I am taken aback by the extent to which our interplanetary probes resemble retro UFOs from 1950s science fiction.
The craft landed on Elysium Planitia an enormous featureless plain famous for its dullness. You may think “why didn’t they just send the poor thing to Kansas?” but since the craft is designed to examine the interior of Mars, its landing sight was not important (except to make sure the lander arrived in one piece).
Now that the probe has finally reached its destination, it will begin to utilize a sophisticated array of instruments including a seismic wave reader, a subterranean infrared reader to monitor heat escaping Mars, and a sophisticated radio array to monitor the planet’s core (among other tools).
It is easy to lose track of the many amazing Martian discoveries being made by robot explorers, but InSight strikes me as truly important since it offers to answer one of the most important question about Mars–how did it go from being a volcanically active world with oceans and an Earthlike atmosphere to being an inactive, desolate desert? We’ll keep you posted as discoveries (insights?) come rolling in, but, for now, congratulations NASA!
It is the first day of October, which means you need to start getting ready for Halloween horror coming to Ferrebeekeeper at the end of the month! Every year we have done a special theme week to highlight the monsters lurking in the many shadows of existence. As all of you know, there is darkness out there: it lurks just beneath our appetites, our skin, our mortal lives…Ye! there is a ghastly void beneath the pretty autumn flowers themselves! As a teaser of things to come later this month, I am doubling back to an earlier post which had one of my drawings in it.
The drawing was hard to see in that post (because WordPress seemingly no longer blows images up to true size if you click on them) however it took me an enormous amount of time and it looks very ghastly and disconcerting in the real world. It is another one of my allegorical flounder drawings, but this one concerns the hunger, carnage, and obliteration which, alas, seem to be ineluctable features of all systems involving living things…perhaps of all systems, full stop.
There is a story I imagined while drawing this: what if you were wandering through the barrowlands of Europe when you found an ancient flatfish made of hammered gold? You would grab the treasure and begin to carry it off, however closer examination might give you pause, for, graven into the solid gold, are vile butchers, sorcerers, monsters, and dark gods. Assembled on the surface of the piece are a monster andrewsarchus, an underworld goddess leaping out of a well with entrails in her hand, cannibals, and a parasitic tapeworm thing. All of these frightful entities are gathered around an evil sentient tree with hanged men it its boughs, and the entire tableau is on the back of a terrible moaning flatfish which seems almost to writhe in your hand. When you look up at the sky the night is descending on the wold. The megaliths take on a sinister new aspect and the very stars seem inimical. it is all too easy to imagine the black holes eating away the center of each galaxy. With dawning fear you realize you need to put this unearthly artifact right back where you found it.
Congratulations to the Japanese Space Agency! On Friday morning (EST) the Japanese space probe Hayabusa2 dropped two adorable little hopping rover bots (“hoppers”? “hop-overs”? “hop-bots”? um, we’ll work on it…) onto the surface of Asteroid Ryugu. The spacecraft arrived at the near-Earth asteroid back in June when the sort-of-octahedral space rock was passing near to our home planet. The twin “MinervaII” probes (“Micro Nano Experimental Robot Vehicle for Asteroid”) are 18 centimeter (7 inch) disks which weigh 1.1 kilograms (2.4 pounds) each. Making use of the asteroid’s exceedingly low gravity, the tiny robots will hop to their location and deliver readings about the composition of the ancient icy rock, which will hopefully provide insight into the formation of the solar system. Additionally, more stirring action is on the way in October when Hayabusa II will deliver a larger lander (named Mascot!) and then a third Minerva lander. This flurry of activity is in preparation to collect asteroid material which will be returned to Earth!
Hopefully….the MinervaII probes are (unsurprisingly) the second in a line of Minerva probes. The first Minerva hopping robot met an inglorious fate during the first Hayabusa mission to the asteroid Itokawa in 2005. That (smaller) Minerva rover was deployed a bit early and hopped ignominiously into the void of space. Sadly I don’t have pictures, but imagine a hockey puck falling into infinite blackness.
I will follow up with more news about this mission as it becomes available, but for now let us celebrate!
Every night, in my dreams, I watch the world die. After a long absence, I have returned to find that the life-giving systems which recycle waste back into useable nutrients have failed. My friends are dead, reduced to grotesque rotting skeletons and mouldering lumps, except for a few last survivors who are barely hanging on to an attenuated half-life of hunger and shallow comatose breaths. I desperately rush to help: I turn on machines to clean away the toxic miasma. I ply the dying victims with food and oxygen… but the microbial ecosystems upon which everything depend are mortally degraded. My last friends are too far gone, and they expire painfully while I watch powerless. What is left is dead world of complete desolation. The precious seed of life has failed and I know that I am the author of this annihilation.
This is all true. I have such dreams all the time and they torment me more than you can know. My art and writing—my entire life quest flows from these nightly horrors. Worst of all, these dreams are based on true experiences from my childhood which color every news article I read. Every opinion I hear about humankind, the world, and the fate of all living things is overshadowed by these prophetic nightmares. However, before you call the men with big white nets, there is a critical twist which I must share with you. In these dreams, everyone is a fish and the world is an aquarium.
Here is what happened. When I was a child, I wanted to be an ichthyologist. I took all of my allowance money and holiday presents and saved to build miniature worlds of wonder like the ones I saw in hobbyist magazines. I read up on each fish species—what they ate and how they lived and what their natural habitat was like. I learned about nematodes and frozen brine shrimp and undergravel filters to help nitrifying bacteria flourish.
Back then I had a tropical South America tank of beautiful fish from the Amazon—little tetras like colored gems, adorable armored catfish with big kindly cartoon eyes, angelfish with fins like a bride’s veil, a knife fish named Ripley who was like a black electrical ghost. I had a tank of Tanganyika cichlids from East Africa (near humankind’s first home). They lurked in volcanic rocks and I could see their huge mouths (for safely rearing their young) frowning from the crevices. At the apex of my involvement with the hobby, I even had a marine tank filled with fluorescent damselfish, shrimp like rainbows, and a clever triggerfish which was busy excavating a private lair into a hunk of red tube coral. It was magical! The miniature worlds I built were incredible. I even had a classical tank of google-eyed goldfish with multicolored pebbles and a porcelain mermaid in the center.
But each of these little glass paradises failed and died. Sometimes they were destroyed slowly by unknown bacterial mishaps which caused the ammonia or nitrogen cycle to shift off-kilter. Sometimes a heater would go out or get flipped to maximum setting and thermal shock would kill my poor pets. The Tanganyika cichlids got stressed out over territory and ate each other whole with their big mouths (just like NY real-estate developers!). Other times the apocalypse was swift: algal blooms or invasive fungi or diseases which I unknowingly brought from the pet store would ravage the tank. Once, the glass of my Amazon-basin aquarium shattered while we were out shopping. My family returned to find the ceilings dripping water. The dying angelfish were lying gasping on the wet pebbles at the bottom of the empty tank. It was horrible. Even the goldfish ultimately died. A weird dropsy caused their gleaming orange bodies to bulge out and pop apart. I love animals and some of the fish had real personality and emotions (in addition to being beautiful) but, despite tremendous heartfelt effort, my stewardship killed them all.
And these experiences haunt me at night. My dreams used to involve a few aquariums which I would try to save…but as I have grown up, the dreams have grown up too. Now sometimes the setting will be a sere coastline which seems uninhabited at first, until I realize the landscape itself is made of giant earth colored fish which are slowly dying. Lately the dreams have moved into the forest where the trees are made of deadwood and the boulders are the hulks of once-living things. As adulthood corrodes away my figurative dreams of success, strength, love, and meaning, my literal nighttime dreams grow bigger and worse. In dreams, I have walked through cities of contagion, plague, and starvation. At night I have sailed a junk across an ink black ocean with nothing in it but slips of charred paper and plastic bags floating like ghosts.
This is why zoos and aquariums (the big public ones) fascinate me. Surely teams of professionals with hundred million dollar endowments can surely keep our animal friends alive! Except…they can’t always. Even with all of the best veterinarians, ecologists, and biologists, working night and day, things still go wrong in weird unexpected ways (by the way, this somewhat pitiless assessment doesn’t mean I stand against zoos: I see them as a combination of ambassador, laboratory, and Noah’s ark). My first job was as an intern at a synthetic ecosystem designed by the world’s foremost designer of synthetic ecosystems…and it was a beautiful study in gradual failure and unexpected interactions. Ecology is complicated and we don’t understand it very well
We are living through one of the great meltdowns which periodically occur throughout Life’s 4.5 billion year history [eds. note: if religious people can capitalize genitive pronouns for God, then Ferrebeekeeper can capitalize a word which we are using to betoken all of the living things from Earth throughout all of time]. It doesn’t take a geologist’s comprehension of the End-Permian mass extinction to imagine ourselves as a toxic black smear in a rock column of the future. I know from reading eschatology that I am not the only person who is tormented by dreams of Armageddon.
At the same time humankind is ballooning in number and appetite, we are also learning at an exponential rate. My experiences with little terrariums and fishtanks does not need to foreshadow the fate of orcas, vinegar scorpions, honeybees, banana trees…and humans. We can use our hard-won knowledge to keep the world’s precious living things alive! We can even carry the sacred seed of life into the heavens. Space would be a better place for us anyway—a place where we can truly spread our wings and grow exponentially towards godhood. It is what we have always wanted…and it is tantalizingly close.
One of my favorite poems has what might be my favorite quotation in English “Learn from your dreams what you lack.” I HAVE learned that…and now I am telling you too. We lack a comprehensive understanding of ecology and the life sciences. We lack the political cohesion and organizational skills to make effective use of what we already know. Those things are not outside of our grasp. Most of the smartest and hardest-working people here spend their lives ripping people off with complicated financial products and elaborate tech products (which are really only online rolodexes or digital catalogs or what-have-you). What a waste! The bankers could throw away their nasty spreadsheets, the doctors could stop filling out pointless insurance forms, the engineers could stop making wireless blenders and cryptocurrency. We could all start building space cities NOW..this very day (although the first generation of those cities are going to have some troubles with the synthetic oceans). The possibilities are endless! Our knowledge and imagination can take us to where we have always dreamed of being. Our failure to be smart, brave, and creative will take us all to one of my dead festering nightmares.
Those fish should not have died in vain. We should not die in vain either. Let’s build a future worth having.
Today’s post features a true oddball in the world of royal headpieces. This strange yet compelling crown is “the diadem of the stars.” It was made in 1863 for Maria Pia of Savoy, wife of King Luís I of Portugal. Although the piece was made in the mid-19th century its minimalist lines and weird geometric pentagons have a distinctly modern appearance.
I love space art (a category which I will reluctantly go ahead and put this crown under), but I am not sure I care for the diadem’s look in comparison with more traditional arch-and-cross type crowns. The white. pink, and yellow diamonds do make me yearn for the stars though (a feeling which I wish more of us would embrace) so maybe the Queen Consort was onto something.
