Blogs / Bad Astronomy

In a couple of hours I’m stepping on a plane for a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am visit to Texas to give a talk at TCCD. So in the meantime enjoy this…

This is why we shouldn’t allow creationism to be taught as "an alternative" to evolution in the schools.

My future as a web comic artist is somewhat uncertain.

Saturday night was the global celebration of Yuri’s Night, the evening set aside to commemorate the time that separates all of history in twain: the time before humans went into space, and the time after.

Yuri Gagarin, on April 12, 1961, became the first human to travel into space.

40 years later, Loretta Whitesides (who was just attending the Conference on World Affairs here in Boulder), George T. Whitesides, and Trish Garner created Yuri’s Night. It’s been celebrated ever since. Festivities take place around the world, and it’s quite a party.

Until Saturday I’ve never attended one; in general a lot of conferences are held in April and I always wound up missing the event. But this time I was invited to attend the Yuri’s Night in Boulder, sponsored by The Secure World Foundation, which

…envisions a global space commons that is free from threat and available for the benefit of all humanity. The Foundation is dedicated to supporting steps that strengthen global security and lead to an international law-based system with reliable enforcement. These steps include confidence building and the development of cooperative norms, regulations, and rules of conduct.

Sounds good to me.

The first part of the event was a VIP party (heh, me at a VIP party… at least Paris wasn’t there) and it was rolling by the time I showed up. I had never been to the Trilogy bar in downtown Boulder, but I quickly made myself at home. One cool thing (among many) about Boulder is that it is home to a lot of space-based industry, and so I knew several people there, including Leonard David from space.com, asteroid expert Clark Chapman, and Carolyn Porco from the Cassini mission. I had many good conversations (including some that will eventually be blog posts) as well as excellent coconut shrimp. Yum!

But then it was time for the commemorative toast to Yuri. Special shotglasses with vodka were handed out, and a fine speech was made to honor Yuri. Then I drank the vodka, and even now days later my throat still burns a bit (what, they couldn’t have used chilled Stoli?). After that the party moved to the back, but I had to go home. I had things to do and blog posts to write, but I still had to stop and chat with the guy wearing the goofy Sputnik helmet.

I also chatted with a woman named Cassie, a graduate student at CU, who wants to make a career somehow out of merging her passion for engineering and journalism (hmmm, sounds familiar). She was young, enthusiastic, smart, and wants very much to encourage and support our efforts to explore space. Before I left, I looked once more around the bar, and saw a crowd filled with people like Cassie trying to make sure that Yuri Gagarin’s first step doesn’t falter, but is instead the prelude to millions more.

I think, with folks like this, we have a very interesting future ahead of us.

Brian May, guitarist for Queen, one of the greatest rock bands of all time, has been formally installed as a Chancellor of Liverpool John Moores University.

May is a guitarist, sure, but he’s also a real-live astrophysicist, getting his degree recently after a slight delay due to a career move involving music. But he is now an actual Chancellor, and was awarded "an honorary fellowship for his contribution to astronomy and services to the public understanding of science…"

Very cool. His degree was in studying the radial motion of dust in the zodiacal light, and I can’t say more because I couldn’t find his paper on any online server. Anyone have a link? I did find a couple of book reviews of Bang! — The Complete History of the Universe which he cowrote with my friend and blogger Chris Lintott. Maybe I’ll pick up a copy whilst (!) I’m in the UK later this week.

Anyway, congratulations to Dr. May! But it’s interesting to wonder how many Brits have left behind a life of music for astrophysics…

Tip o’ the mortarboard to BABLoggee Chris Nicoll.

Fraser at Universe Today had a good thought — he (like any space enthusiast) gets asked about the value of space exploration all the time. So why not post an answer, and ask others to send in answers as well?

So he sent an email to a few folks asking them to answer this question: "Why should we be spending money exploring space when there are so many problems here on Earth that we need to solve first?"

He’s been posting the responses, and they’ve been really good. Here’s mine… but you should go over to UT and check out what the others have said. Lots of ammo there for the next time a luddite wants to cut NASA’s budget!

First, the question of why spend money there when we have problems here is a false dichotomy. We have enough money to work on problems here and in space! We just don’t seem to choose to, which is maddening. $12 million an hour is spent in Iraq; the US government chose to do that instead of fix many problems that could have been solved with that money. NASA is less than 1% of the US budget, so it’s best to pick your fights wisely here.

Second, space exploration is necessary. We learn so much from it! Early attempts discovered the van Allen radiation belts (with America’s first satellite!). Later satellites found the ozone hole, letting us know we were damaging our ecosystem. Weather prediction via satellites is another obvious example, as well as global communication, TV, GPS, and much more.

If you want to narrow it down to exploring other planets and the Universe around us, again we can give the practical answer that the more we learn about our space environment, the more we learn about the Earth itself. Examining the Sun led us to understand that its magnetic field connects with ours, sometimes with disastrous results… yet we can fortify ourselves against the danger, should we so choose. Space exploration may yet save us from an asteroid impact, too. Spreading our seed to other worlds may eventually save the human race.

But I’m with Fraser. These are all good reasons, and there are many, many more. But it is the very nature of humans to explore! We could do nothing in our daily lives but look no farther than the ends of our noses. We could labor away in a gray, listless, dull world.

Or we can look up, look out to the skies, see what wonders are there, marvel at exploding stars, majestic galaxies, ringed worlds, and perhaps planets like our own. That gives us beauty and joy in our world, and adds a depth and dimension that we might otherwise miss.

Space exploration is cheap. Not exploring is always very, very expensive.