Engage!

If you show any interest in popular science, Google or another spy you allow to watch over your shoulder while you are browsing will have recommended an article in some pop-sci news aggregator about the new work by a German gentleman Erik W. Lentz about a novel way to break the lightspeed barrier which, while for the time requires energy equivalent to the mass of dozens of Jupiters, does not ask for humongous amounts of something we don't know how to make, namely negative energy (or mass - same thing). As you might remember, this is not the case with Alcubierre drive. 

In the case you are intrigued but havent received any such recommendation, here is one of many similar articles.

But this is not the (mail) topic of this post. I wanted to read the original paper (I might be a lapsed physicist, but I still can find my way around an equation or two if pressed hard enough.) I folloed the link to it in Classical and Quantum Gravity, a journal published by IOP Publishing, one of the smaller robber barrons scientific publishing houses. Naturally, the page offers the abstract and several ways to buy or rent (!) the full article from a number of middlemen. Copyright? Why, IOP Publishing Ltd, naturally!

But not all is lost. Lentz published the article on good old "pre-print" site arXiv.org from where you can download it for free. Now, that is not the "official version", that is, that's the paper's draft before it has passed peer review, such as it is these days. But I will bet you a six-pack of good Belgian abbey beer that no signifficant differences exist between the two versions.

Pre-print sites like arXiv are more or less the only alternative to "pirate" sites such as Sci-Hub if you don't happen to work for a well-heeled university or other similar employer. Science journals are increasingly fragmented by sub-sub-specialities and subscription fees are astronomical. There are so-called "open access" journals, but they charge authors thousands of dollars per paper. In any case, peer reviewers don't get a beer.

Like real scientists ranting about this problem, I don't know the solution. Perhaps this is the best we will get. This reminds me of a scene in a novel by Ken MacLeod (Cosmonaut Keep, I think) where two of the main characters coming from different societies, over beer or something, start the well known phrase, a proverb almost, "Information wants to be..." which they finish in unison, one with "free!" and the other with "paid!". 😠

You might be interested in this video on the topic by one of my favorite YouTubers, Dr Rohin Francis of Medlife Crisis.

LGM or not?

For readers (if any) younger than, say, 50, LGM stands for Little Green Man, an old tongue-in-cheek name for aliens. (Later green transformed to gray, but I digress).

The "provocation" for this post was an article by Ethan Siegel Watch: Harvard Astronomer Mansplains SETI To The Legend Who Inspired Carl Sagan’s Contact. The title says it all, but I will let you judge for yourself how obnoxious the astronomer from the title actually was (spoiler_ pretty much.)

Anyway, the astronomer in question is Avi Loeb who made quite a name for himself recently for claiming not only that 'Oumuamua, an extrasolar object discovered whizzing through our system four years ago, might be, but is of artificial, alien origin..He is about to publish a book on the topic, gives interviews left and right, and does not quite stick to Sagan standard saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. (Let's leave the philosophical and epistemological discussion of the "standard" aside, shall we?)

As for evidence, I recommend this video by prof. David Kipping of Columbia's Cool Worlds Lab, with which I happen to agree (spoiler: the only really unusual property of the interstellar visitor is its very variable luminosity):

But, let's focus on the "extraordinary claim" part of the question. Is claiming "look, aliens!" (or, more in line with the jargon, "look, technosignature!") a legitimate thing to do?

As a great fan of late Iain Banks I was first to see artifacts of The Culture as mysterious things occulting the extremely variable Tabby's Star. I did root for 'Oumuamua to fire up its engines braking aggressively and enter high Earth orbit. I still kind of hope that the signal coming from the direction of Proxima Centauri does contain encoded message.

But, those are hopes and wishes. How high, or how low on our ladder of "possible explanations" should aliens reside?

Before you put them as high as Loeb does, remember "God of the gaps" argument so often used by naive Biblical-literalist creationists. "I don't understand this, therefore God". Replacing "God" with "aliens" does not make the argument any better.

Consider how we discovered pulsars: when Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered an extremely regular extraterrestrial radio-signal in 1967, she and the co-discoverer Antony Hewish named the signal only half-jokingly "LGM-1" and sat on the discovery for quite some time. However, subsequent observations of other similar signals led astronomers to dust off already pretty old hypothesis predicting existence of rapidly rotating neutron stars, and the pulsars entered the everyday lexicon.

Had Burnell (who was knighted for her work, but did not share the Nobel prize for the discovery of pulsars - back to one of the topics of the article I cite at the beginning) and collaborators stayed with LGM "explanation", we would perhaps be a better (or, OTOH, more paranoid) society now, but would be poorer for one whole branch of astronomy.

So, much as I would have preferred that GCU Arbitrary decided that Earth was worthy of contact, aliens are the very extraordinary claim (not in principle, but in every particular occasion) that should only be the fallback when everything else is exhausted.

Tango Delta Nominal!

So, the Perseverance rover and its flying companion, Ingenuity helicopter have arrived to their destination in Jezero crater safely. The ~$3bn mission now starts for real, but the most nerve racking moments are over.

Just a word to people who think that this kind of expenses is a waste of money when "there are so many more pressing problems here on Earth", as they usually say. Of course there are, but the total mission cost can buy two launches (without payload) of SLS (a.k.a Senate Launch System) at best, if it ever gets completed, or one and a half B-2 bombers the manufacturing run of which was cut short after only 21 or 22 examples, instead of 100+ planned, so that another wasteful program could be initiated; it is about 0.6% of the costs of for all practical purposes failed F-35 "Joint Strike Fighter" program, or less than 0.5% of various form of subsidies fossil fuel industry receives every year in the US alone (exact numbers differ depending on what you count).

So, yes, there are pressing needs of humanity everywhere, but there are far better places to take the funds for them from than this magnificent undertaking. 

Jezero

Strange as it can seem to some, Martians don't speak English, and English is not the official language of Mars. So, when International Astronomical Union named the crater bearing traces of an ancient lake after the Bosnian town of Jezero (meaning "lake" in many Slavic languages), it is decent to try and pronounce it in a way somewhat resembling the original. Doing otherwise is parochial.

So, dear Americans, try saying YEZ-ə-roh  ("y" as in "you", more or less, and no traces of "oo" at the end).

For those who are not IPA-challenged, it is  /ˈjɛzəɹo/ - 'y' in 'yes', 'e' in 'dress', 'z' in 'zoom', 'er' in 'letter', 'o' in 'code', approximately. But just switching that first consonant from "jazz" to "yes" will do.

BTW, Neretva delta that used to feed the Martian lake billions of years ago is named after a river also in Bosnia and Herzegovina, flowing briefly through Croatia before emptying into a lush, fertile delta and then Adriatic.

Incidentally, one of the hosts of NASA webcast of the Perseverance (nee Mars 2020) landing is named Marina Jurica. That last name is almost certainly from somewhere in former Yugoslavia (it is pronounced "'Yoo-ri-tsa", to use "English respelling" - stress on the first syllable, short vowels), so she should know the correct pronunciation. The fact she did not use it means that NASA official policy is to pretend that English is the only language in the world, indeed in the Solar system, if not the Universe.

Some would call this "American exceptionalism", Again, I call it parochialism, and not only Americans are guilty of it.

Hot Air

When American energy lobby and their tame scientists and Presidents deny dangers of global warming (or, more PC put, climate change), that's not news. But when a widely respected senior scientist, a botanist David Bellamy joins them (in a letter to New Scientist, a reputable British weekly for amateur science fans), that is something completely different.

George Monbiot of AlterNet did an excellent job of tracing Bellamy's sources. It would be highly entertaining were it not sad.

See IceAgeNow, an amusing site of a charlatan or fraud peddling his book on incoming ice age.

Not all people giving space to climate change skeptics are cuckoos or frauds; see, for example, here.

Actual climatologists debunk most outrageous "sceptics'" claims, comment recent news and generally conduct a lively discussion here.