The first Mars generation

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, astronomy, astronomers, biographies, mars, social phenomena

In 1877, Mars and Earth had a "great opposition". The two planets were close together, just about 56 million km (35 million miles). The orbit of Mars is somewhat elliptical, so at "less favorable" oppositions, dates when Mars is directly outward from the Sun and high in our night sky at midnight, the distance can be as great as 102 million km (63 million miles). Astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli took advantage of the great opposition to observe Mars nightly, for weeks. In addition to blotches and pale areas, he saw a few seemingly linear features, which he called canali, the Italian word meaning "channels".

The word canali does not refer to artificial waterways; other meanings are "troughs" and "gullies". Unfortunately for the next generation or two of the American and European public, when Schiaparelli's  work was translated into English, the translator chose to use the word "canals".

About seventeen years later, Percival Lowell, nearing the age of forty, having observed Mars in telescopes located in Boston and elsewhere, built his observatory near Flagstaff, on "Mars Hill". With the 24-inch diameter telescope he installed there, he watched Mars obsessively during every period of opposition. The drier, steadier air in Flagstaff enabled him to see the planet more clearly. Over time, he discerned numerous linear features, writing of them as "canals". He inferred that they were produced by intelligent Martians.

Lowell's articles, books, lectures, drawings and later photographs of Mars stirred a kind of Mars Mania for a generation, as described by David Baron in The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.

Percival Lowell was rich, driven, obsessive, and probably bipolar. He had earlier had a varied career, including being a kind of envoy for Korea and Japan. Once the observatory was completed, and he had released his book Mars, the planet and his theories about the Martians and their engineering abilities dominated his life and enthralled the public.

His public lectures and writings kept Mars Mania going for the rest of his life, in spite of opposition from roughly half of the scientific establishment. One particularly telling blow came from an experiment conducted by Walter Maunder, which became known as the "Small Boy Theory". Maunder began with maps of Mars produced by Schiaparelli and Lowell. He removed all the canals and replaced them by scattered dots or bits of riverine shapes. For each of several tests, such a doctored map was hung high on the wall at one end of a large classroom, and schoolboys were seated throughout the room. They were asked to copy the map as well as they could, without moving from their seats. Those closest to the front made the best facsimiles, of course. The farther back a boy sat, the more likely he was to add straight lines where dots and fragments seemed to run together in his vision.

Lowell never wavered from his view of a canal-riddled Mars. This image from page 62 shows one of his maps showing the "canals" and "oases" (dots) he drew. Just below it is an image I captured from Google Mars, taking in the approximately same view of the planet. The straight edges of some dark areas are artifacts of different camera views stitched together.

The scattered dots in the lower image are craters. I remember in 1965 when the Mariner 4 spacecraft sent us images of Mars that resembled a moonscape: loads of craters, and no canals. This was just a century after the Flagstaff Observatory was established.

Have you looked at clouds to see "cloud animals" and other fantasies? Various amorphous shapes can look like faces. There is a blotch in the abstract pattern in my shower that looks a little like a panther's head, only when I have my glasses off. This is called pareidolia. A roughly lined-up string of spots can look like a straight line when seen from a certain distance.

But what further affected Lowell as he aged was a bad case of confirmation bias. It's something we are all prone to: when we like an idea, we remember facts that support our view and discount those that don't.

At one point, Lowell spent some time looking at Venus. He produced the map in the upper part of this pair (from page 76). He was told that the "map" seemed to just reflect the blood vessels in his retina; he apparently agreed, and retracted the map. 

I've viewed Venus a number of times with various size telescopes. To a normal human eye, it is featureless, a blank white disk. However, if Lowell had lived a century later, and had a cataract operation, he might have seen features on the surface that are visible in ultraviolet light, particularly if he used a dark blue filter such as Cobalt glass. The lower image simulates such a view; I just "blued up" an ultraviolet photo of Venus. The natural lenses in our eyes are yellow, to filter out deep blue and UV light, which are hard to focus and tend to blur the vision. Cataract operation patients can see more UV than the rest of us.

Well, that would only be true before 1980. Since then, the plastic lenses that are inserted to replace the natural lens also filter out UV light. Oh, well, my hopes of getting my cataracts out and gaining UV vision are dashed!

Percival Lowell married at age 53. Eight years later, somewhat a fallen hero but still well remembered by the public that had been enthralled by his lectures, he passed away at age 61. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 Lowell was still sufficiently famous that the planet was given the symbol ♇ using Lowell's initials.

I have just skimmed over Lowell's life. I sympathize with his "neurasthenia", which was probably depression in the "low" phase of bipolar syndrome. I've been there. David Baron did an amazing amount of research to put this book together. The apparatus—source notes, bibliography, list of illustrations, and index—take up a quarter of the volume, almost 80 pages. Many other people who surrounded Lowell and the Mars phenomenon, including Nikola Tesla, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Camille Flammarion, play their parts in this narrative. The fabric of these lives is a fascinating tapestry of the American and European societies of the thirty years surrounding the year 1900, when so much happened.

Why did I title this piece "The first Mars generation?" A new Mars generation has arisen, enthralled by the vision of Elon Musk, who wants to establish a colony on Mars with a million inhabitants. He hopes the first humans to reach mars will do so in the early or mid 2030's. Maybe it will work...

A multiplanet enthusiast

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, emigration, planets, mars

From time to time I use a very small prompt with an art generation program. The prompt for this image was "Planets everywhere." The site I used was Leonardo AI with the Lightning engine and its Dynamic style. The engine clearly doesn't understand either physics or astronomy. Actually, the way these programs work, the engine cannot be said to "understand" at all. But I like the surreal look of the image.

I produced this image about a year ago. It came to mind when I saw the cover art for Out of This World and Into the Next: A Physicist's Guide to Space Exploration by Adriana Marais. The author is based in South Africa, and she was one of the Mars One candidates for their plans to send people on a one-way trip. Mars One went out of business in 2019, but the banner has been taken up by Elon Musk and SpaceX.

The book is rather big; it's intended to be comprehensive, a sort of "History of humanity starting from the Big Bang." In keeping with the author's Germanic heritage, the Table of Contents is a thorough outline. Denying the trace of Teutonic detail-mindedness found in my own heritage, I'll touch a few items of interest and leave the rest to the interested reader.

The subjects of Part I, "Where do we come from?", remind me of a Bible verse. The three subjects (elaborated in 13 subchapters) are "The Universe", "Our biosphere", and "Are we alone?" Zechariah 12:1 tells that God "stretched out the heavens, laid the foundations of the earth, and formed the spirit of man within him." Each set of 4-5 items goes from broad to narrow. The tip of the arrow at the end of this Part introduces the Kardashev Scale. This is worth a bit of discussion.

Nikolai Kardashev proposed a three-point scale to describe the energy made available to a technological civilization:

1. A Type 1 civilization, labeled Planetary, has attained control of all the energy available on a single planet, including all the incident sunlight.
2. A Type 2 civilization, labeled Stellar, captures and uses all the energy output of one star, presumably its home star.
3. A Type 3 civilization, labeled Galactic, controls all the energy of its home galaxy.

Many, myself included, add Type 0, to represent the beginning of technology as evidenced by the first mastery of fire. This level was apparently achieved before Homo sapiens arrived on the scene, as much as two million years ago. How far have humans come towards becoming a full Type 1 civilization? Relevant facts:

• Worldwide energy use is about 625 exajoules per year (note: 80% is fossil fuel use). That's 174 billion megawatt-hours (MWh, = 1,000 kWh) per year.
• Solar energy influx is 1.53 million billion MWh per year. The ratio of these two numbers is about 1:8,800. In other words, our global energy use is 0.0114% of the energy available in sunlight.
• Internal heat flow of the earth, half radiogenic and half primordial, is 410 billion MWh per year. Thus total geothermal energy is about 2.4 times the global energy budget.

Thus we are about 1/90th of a percent along the way to being a Kardashev Type 1 civilization. Dr. Marais points out that photosynthesis converts just under 2% of sunlight into sugar, putting the biosphere's Kardashev level about ninety times farther along, compared with vaunted human technology.

Years ago I first examined the "carbon debt" indicated by the oxygen in the atmosphere and the oxidized iron in Earth's crust. Going back to the origin of oxygen-emitting photosynthesis (which came along half a billion to a billion years after other varieties of photosynthesis such that found in sulfur-digesting bacteria), we first find about a billion years of accumulation of "red beds" and other iron oxide deposits. Once the iron was all oxidized, oxygen began to accumulate in the atmosphere, as carbon-containing detritus was buried in the crust and later subducted beneath it by plate tectonics. I concluded that if we could find all the oil, natural gas, coal and tar in the crust, and also the graphite and diamond in the upper mantle, and burn it, that might use up most of the oxygen in the atmosphere. By contrast, 200+ years of fossil fuel consumption have "used up" about 0.01% of it. 

A little thought is sufficient to realize that there are limits to the energy available from fossil fuels, and not just because the oxygen will run out (to be replaced by carbon dioxide). Rather, we must consider the medical fact that humans (and who knows how many other animals) begin to feel distressed when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeds 1,000 ppm. So, we don't want to go anywhere near that! From the vantage point of 430 ppm today, up from 280 ppm prior to the Industrial Revolution, 1,000 ppm seems far, far off. It isn't. Global energy use is still increasing, fast. Think about that.

A final point. I have seen it proclaimed that human civilization today is approaching a Kardashev level of 1; estimates range up to 0.7. Hmph! We are far below that. Just focusing on Kardashev levels zero and 1, we can consider a logarithmic scale, so that a scale value of 0.7 would represent energy use of about half of total solar input, or 765 quadrillion kWh per year. That's about 4,400 times as much energy as we are presently using! We need a different scale for energy consumption less than 0.1 of the solar value (the logarithm of 0.1 is -1, and starting from 1 for "1 solar output", the result is a Kardashev level of 0). For the moment, I'll set this aside.

As for levels 2 and 3, I have a couple of thoughts. A spherical construction that encloses the entire Sun at a suitable distance (probably between Earth and Mars) could capture all of the Sun's energy. Such a construction is called a Dyson Sphere, after the physicist who popularized the concept. We would need to take apart at least all of Jupiter and possibly Saturn also to accomplish it. Communication is a bit of a problem; the travel time of light or radio across the sphere would take about twenty minutes, one-way. Communication in a Galactic civilization is another thing entirely; getting a signal across the Milky Way Galaxy would require about 100,000 years. Talking across dwarf galaxies such as the Magellanic Clouds would be quicker; only a few thousand years!

In Part II, "Who are we?", the focus at the culmination of the 15 chapters is Terraforming. The next-to-last topic is "The Anthropocene," a designation that some have proposed for a geologic age that began 250-300 years ago with the Industrial Revolution, and so far has resulted in the extinction of many species (though it is so far probably less than one percent). Can we indeed terraform Mars? Let us contrast this with our current activities, which could be considered "the anti-terraforming of Earth" (my coinage).

It is worthwhile to ask, does our experience of human nature give us any grounds for optimism that we can properly terraform another planet? It is wise at this point to jump to the conclusion in Part III (Where are we going?), its last section, "Transforming our world." That is the crux of the matter. Can we terraform Earth? This is a question asked by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: Which will cost less, establishing one (or a few) million people in a new colony on Mars, or restoring the environment on Earth so that future global catastrophes will not wipe us off the planet? Clearly, he is in favor of the latter course, and I agree.

I hope Dr. Marais gets her chance to go to Mars. She wants it so much she can taste it. Her evocative essay "Off-World" almost gives us the taste for it. It is markedly utopian. She needs to add to her scientific perspective the lens of history. No utopian society has ever succeeded. The advice of a pioneer of space inhabitation, "Go with friends!", tells you only part of what you need to know. Because friends change. Those who once ran together grow apart. The current divorce rate of about 50% does not bode well for the ability of mere humans to establish the kind of society she describes.

I like the dream. I wish I could conclude it won't turn into a nightmare.

Preparing to write this, I ran the prompt "Planets everywhere" in OpenArt's DynaVision engine, with AI Enhancement turned on. This was the result. The physics is a little better, but this is still surreal. If you were to see this density of planets in the sky, it would be best to go far away. The chaotic gravitational regime would soon prove catastrophic. Still, it's a fun image.

===============

A couple of minor errata:

• On p. 188 Yuri Gagarin is said to have "experience[d] the weightlessness of being beyond Earth's gravitational field." Not even close. He was well within it, but orbiting such that the centripetal force and the gravitational force exactly canceled. He experienced microgravity. If he'd been paying attention, he might have noticed very slight tidal forces tending to reorient him if he tried to float free inside his capsule.
• On p. 195 we read that the wavelengths of visible light are "similar to the size of atoms". The wavelength range of visible light is 400 nm to 700 nm, or roughly half a micrometer. The diameter of a typical atom is 2-3 tenths of a nanometer, or some 2,000 times smaller. The author is making the point that light bounces off material stuff. Actually, X-rays of the sort used in medicine do have wavelengths similar to the size of atoms, and they pass right through most materials. So the physics is wrong anyway.