The Stars Our Destination II

The Times ran a front page story about “the most Earth-like worlds yet known in the outer cosmos, a pair of planets that appear capable of supporting life and that orbit a star 1200 light-years from here, in the northern constellation Lyra” (“Two Promising Places to Live, 1200 Light-Years From Earth,” NYT, 4/18/13). Naturally, perennially “space" conscious New Yorkers, with little experience of trying to locate space in outer space, will wonder if there is rent stabilization (before they even consider how stable the orbits of the bodies question are)? According to the Times both planets circle a star called Kepler 62  named "after NASA's Kepler 62 spacecraft, which discovered them” and are both “in the ‘Goldilocks’ zone of lukewarm temperatures suitable for liquid water, the crucial ingredient for Life as We Know It.” The prospect of affordable space and the citation of Goldilocks make the whole extraterrestrial discovery seem like a rather far flung fairy tale. Indeed getting back to life on earth, hardened Manhattanites would find it more improbable to come across an inexpensive rental than they would to achieve the near speed of light velocities necessary for a rocket ship to get there. But who knows what the future for space travel will hold. No one really understands what space is either in terms of the dark matter that holds things together, nor the dark energy the force which constantly causes things to expand. In studying the Higgs Boson, a basic component of matter, in the Large Hadron Collider scientists are only beginning to understand what happened in the milliseconds following the explosion which created life as we know it today. Did something come out of nothing? Or is there another explanation that still eludes us? When we begin to understand the highways and byways of space in the context of a unified theory which takes into context both the microcosm and macrocosm, will we discover the wormholes that we read about in sci fi and that will allow travellers to make quantum leaps through space/time?

Breaking News

Photo: European Space Agency, Planck Collaboration

A front page picture in The Times with the title “The Cosmos Back in the Day," showed the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite’s “heat map of the universe as it appeared 370,000 years after the big bang.” The article that appeared on page l0 “Universe as an Infant: Fatter Than Expected And Kind of Lumpy” (NYT, 3/21/13) went on to describe a picture of what the universe looked like 13.8 billion, the new estimated age of the universe according to science reporter Dennis Overbye’s piece, minus 370,000 or 13,799,630,000 years ago. Not exactly breaking news. In the field of cosmology where the battle between, as Overbye described it, “dark energy that seems to be pushing space apart and the almost-as-mysterious dark matter that is pulling galaxies together” is, of course, a big story. Overbye quoted Marc Kamionkowski, “an astrophysicist at John Hopkins University,” as saying that Planck was “cosmology’s human genome project.” Still, it’s nice to see a picture of way back when as you scan over column right to “President Urges Israelis to Push Effort for Peace" or center "Once Few, Women Hold More Power in Senate” and column left, ”Bronx Inspector, Secretly Taped, Suggests Race is a Factor in Stops.” The map of the universe described in the article “is in stunning agreement,” according to Overbye, “with the general view of the universe that has emerged over the past 20 years” and it roughly corresponds to the period in which on-line journalism began to seriously challenge newsprint. Twenty years ago on-line reporting was where the universe was 13,799,630,000 years ago. Now despite all the dark matter, the dark energy, aided and abetted by the advent of social networks like Twitter and Facebook, has caused the universe of journalism to expand, for good or bad, beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

His Dark Materials

The Times ran a piece about the search for dark matter (NYT, 12/18/09), the mysterious element that scientists believe may constitute the building blocks of the universe. Producing temperatures of one hundredth of a degree Kelvin—near absolute zero—at the bottom of an abandoned copper mine in Minnesota, a team of scientists that identifies itself as the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search have come tantalizingly close to identifying the residues of the kinds of energy they are looking for. Of course, readers of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Milton’s Paradise Lost, upon which Pullman’s enormously popular trilogy is based, will be heartened by research that reveals the scientific underpinnings for what previously seemed to be mere poetic conjecture.

  

These revelations come not through looking into a telescope, but in effect from creating an environment devoid of cosmic radiation, which can obfuscate the detections of this dark Miltonian world. And what is both compelling and disturbing about the findings is the fact that the universe is expanding.  According to the Times piece, dark matter could constitute the missing piece of a puzzle that includes 4% atoms and 70% dark energy, which, the Times explained, has nothing to do with dark matter, which itself would account for the rest. What the future holds is not the prospect of overcrowding, but of tremendous isolation. If our search for life forms—another recent Times story described the discovery of a sultry, water-covered planet orbiting a distant star—is frustrated by the enormous distances involved in intergalactic travel, it will only get worse in eons to come.  But one thing is for sure: we are unlikely to be plagued by turf wars. By the time one settler is ready to homestead on  a far-off rancher’s lands, the rancher will be long dead.