When you think about it, the Earth has had a rough time of it. You’d never guess by looking, but over its 4.5 billion year history it’s been hit a zillion times by asteroids, from dust motes up to something Mars-sized that whacked us and ended up forming the Moon.

You’d expect the planet to be scarred, pockmarked, from all this. But the Earth is restless, and shifty. Even though there probably isn’t a square meter of the planet that hasn’t been hit, over millions of years erosion has taken its toll, wiping out all but a few of the craters.

Some are obvious enough, like Barringer Crater in Arizona. I’ve been there, and it’s amazing. But the one that wiped out the dinosaurs is 100 or more kilometers across, and most of it’s underwater. It takes some pretty sophisticated technology to even know it’s there.

So what’s a crater aficionado to do? Why, go to the Impact Field Studies Group homepage, of course. This group is like Audubon for extinction-level events; they travel around doing field studies at impact sites. The site has pictures (the panorama above is from their page; click it for a better image and a bunch more), descriptions, and this is way cool, an Excel spreadsheet listing 540+ suspected impact sites across the planet. Want a nightmare? Sort them by crater diameter. Yikes.

I’m not sure how the conversation started, actually. But over dinner, Mrs. Bad Astronomer, the Little Astronomer, and I started talking about the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Now, LA is only 9, so some of the concepts are unclear to her. But she’s also a smart kid (with smart parents, I’ll add) so we were able to talk about things pretty well.

As it happens, she’s supposed to read for half an hour tonight for homework. But she can’t find her book, so Mrs. BA comes up with a solution: read the Constitution! So we fire up the PC, browse to the Bill Of Rights, and let her start to read.

She read each Amendment, and we explained them to her in turn. Why it’s important to have free speech, and the right to assemble. Why the government can’t put troops in your house against your will. Why you can bear arms. Why the government needs to go to extraordinary lengths to snoop around inside your house, your car, your body. And why we have the right not to incriminate ourselves.

And then it occurs to me: it’s September 11. Of all days to spontaneously talk about this! She’s old enough, I think. So we explain it to her. How people can do such terrible things, why they hate us so. And I told her: there are many reasons they hate us, but one of them is because of the Constitution. It says that the government and religion should not get entangled. It gives women the right to vote (and implicitly, to wear what they want, marry whom they choose, and to walk in front of or beside a man, instead of behind him). Because we are free to worship or not worship, to believe or not to believe as we see fit.

For that, they flew planes into buildings.

Of course, I’m oversimplifying. But Little Astronomer is 9. She’ll grow up, and she’ll learn about the subtleties of 9/11. The religious brainwashing, the various failures of the US Government to prevent what happened, the subsequent paranoia that in many ways, too many ways, still grips this country.

But she’ll grow up, and she’ll learn. She has the right to do both, and it’s for those rights– for her — that I swear she’ll get the chance.

How have I missed this for so long?

Emily Lakdawalla is the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society, and is a pretty good writer. She has a blog, where she writes about things, well, planetary. She’s currently blogging about the Division of Planetary Science meeting in Cambridge, England, and reporting on all sorts of fascinating results. Titan, Mars, asteroids, Saturn’s moons, Pluto… scientists are studying cool stuff. Check it out.

Note: This was originally posted on my website, as part of my regular Brains on Vacation segment on the “Are We Alone” radio show. My blog gets a lot more traffic, so I decided to go the easy way out tonight and post it here. You can get the audio part of the interview (later, James Randi comes on!) here.

You can dress creationism up, but you can’t take it anywhere.

At least, not to Utah. In a surprising but extremely wise move, the Utah Board of Education has decided that the so-called "Intelligent Design" idea — that life is too complex to have occurred naturally, and is the product of a designer, aka God– is not scientific, and should not be taught in Utah public schools. This, despite heavy pressure from one of their state senators, Chris Buttars (R-West Jordan), who has been railing against evolution for quite some time now.

The Utah BoE is exactly right for not allowing this to be taught in school, and for the right reason. It ain’t science. It’s not even a theory, it’s just an idea, and it’s based on bad thinking. IDers claim that evolution cannot possibly produce such complex biological mechanisms such as the eye, or the flagellum of a bacterium. But, oops! These claims are demonstrably wrong! In fact, it’s not hard at all to show that evolution could have — indeed, did — produce very complex structures, like the eye or (in some cases, but evidently not all) the brain.

A scientific theory makes predictions and can be supported by evidence. This right away means ID isn’t science– the evidence isn’t there. All they really do is attack science, saying that, since science doesn’t know everything, God must have made whatever we don’t understand. Well, of course science doesn’t know everything… yet. But that’s a pretty thin premise to base your ideas on! As we learn more, we understand more, and as we understand more the claims of creationists and IDers get more and more narrow, wedging themselves into increasingly narrow gaps of knowledge. Eventually, the gaps are closed. Then what do they have?

Well, nothing, which is what they started out with. And the Utah BoE saw that, and called them on it. If that could happen in Utah, an incredibly religious and conservative state, it can certainly happen in other states too. Maybe this is a sign that a lot of peoples’ brains are finally coming home from vacation.

I am very pleased to announce that there has been a major upgrade to the Bad Astronomy site: I have merged my Bad Astronomy Bulletin Board with the Universe Today board.

The new board is (at least temporarily) called The Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum, or just BAUT for short. Fraser Cain, the admin of UT, and I both think this is the next logical step for both our boards. His focused on space and astronomy, and mine was astronomy and space, if you catch the difference. We have a lot of overlap, and where we don’t overlap we can strengthen each other’s abilities. By merging, we increase our reach, and get two communities together who should really know each other.

The board went live on Saturday night/Sunday morning, with Fraser and I working hard to get it set up. Everything appears to be going well, with everyone posting merrily away. We’re talking about astronomy, space travel, extraterrestrial life, how to observe, what a moonbase would be like… literally everything from the ground up.

So come on over! It’s a good crowd. You’ll like it there.

Thursday night, Venus and Jupiter made their closest approach in the western sky after sunset. It’s been interesting watching them
getting closer every night!

Below are the images from every night this week, starting on Sunday August 28.

August 28, 2005	August 29, 2005
August 30, 2005	August 31, 2005
September 1, 2005

When that last image was taken, Venus and Jupiter were about 1.25 degrees apart– less than 3 times the size of the Moon. I could easily cover them both with my thumb. I could also see a difference in color– Venus was a brilliant white, but Jupiter looked duller, a little more yellow. In the image, you can see the famous San Francisco fog trying to ruin the shot.

Oh, and an added bonus! When I was out on Wednesday night, the International Space Station (ISS) passed almost directly overhead. I hastily aimed my camera and managed to squeeze in a single shot.

It was a 30 second exposure, and ISS entered into the frame from the upper right. The exposure ended before it left the frame. It wasn’t fully dark yet, so the sky is a bit blue. The bright star near the top is Gienah, also called Epsilon Cygni. The star below ISS is Zeta Cygni.

It’s been quite a week of observing! And next week, on September 6, the new Moon will be in the picture as well. I’ll get another image of that if the fog doesn’t come back by then!