Elon Musk and SpaceX's Plan for Mars

Yesterday at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, billionaire and visionary space entrepreneur Elon Musk announced a detailed plan for putting humans on Mars. While it's quite ambitious and entails some unorthodox but surprisingly realistic ideas, the fact that it comes from Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, is significant.

There seems to be every indication that he's going to make it happen. If his past activities are any indicator, this is not pie in the sky dreaming but could become reality. You see, he's said all along that he founded SpaceX with the specific end game of going to Mars in mind. And now, years later, SpaceX is no lightweight start up. And now he has a coherent plan for going to Mars.

What was notable about his talk was that Musk revealed a lot of specifics about the engineering and science of just how his company is going to do this, to the point of delving into the function and testing of a rather impressive carbon fiber fuel tank SpaceX built for the project and even detailed his concerns about going to Mars himself due to the fact that he wants to make sure his company doesn't end up under the control of for-profit investors should he die in an accident. At the very least, Elon and SpaceX has gone "all in" with this one.

Step one of the plan is to build a suitable rocket. This involves an intermediate step. SpaceX's plan to develop a rocket that can take us to Mars has been in the works for some time. Known as the Falcon Heavy, this rocket has been designed from the outset to carry humans and will be fully capable as a super heavy lift launch system that can reach the Moon or Mars. In addition, it can carry significantly larger payloads into low earth orbit than we can with current rockets, to the tune of 54,400 kilograms. The first launch of one of these rockets, which really are a modified version of the Falcon 9 rocket, is expected in early 2017.

That's not long from now, and it ushers in a new age of successive very large rockets including NASA's Space Launch System or SLS, which will surpass even the venerable Saturn V of Apollo fame, but Musk intends to outdo even that. So very soon, at least, we will once again have the capability of sending humans beyond low earth orbit. Congratulations to SpaceX and NASA indeed. But Musk's plan doesn't stop there.

Musk's timetable to go from the first launch of a Falcon Heavy to landing a human on Mars is about ten years. Now, one possible snag with his plan is funding. He envisions a sort of public and private mix of funding sources, but these have not yet been fully secured. There are many ways he can do this, including crowd sourcing and using his own assets and money along with the profits from SpaceX. That might seem a stretch but on the other hand, it's Elon Musk and he's shown a certain ability to get things done.

Using the Falcon Heavy, the plan initially entails sending research spacecraft to Mars based on the Dragon design. Windows to launch to Mars which aligns with earth favorably every 26 months will each see a spacecraft launch starting with the first in 2018, less than two years from now. These missions will collect data needed for landing humans on Mars and moving to the next step. But then it gets crazy.

If SpaceX is successful, which while skeptical I certainly hope they are, this plan is no simple hop over to Mars to take a look around and leave. Musk's plan is far more ambitious. Shockingly so. In Guadalajara, he laid out plans for an all out self-sustaining colony and gave engineering specifics about an even larger rocket and spacecraft to be launched in 2022 that is specifically designed to found a permanent, self-sustaining colony on Mars that could result in millions of people living on that planet terraforming it into a second earth. Elon Musk wants to make us into a multiple planet species, and that's quite an ambitious goal indeed, but also sensible if he can make it happen.

This larger rocket and spacecraft is called the Interplanetary Transport System and it appears that SpaceX has already completed much of the design work. This is an unbelievably titanic launch system designed to carry 100 people and all of their supplies, gear, and separately the fuel needed to get to Mars.

How the system works is relatively straightforward. The manned spacecraft launches atop a reusable stage that carries it into a parking orbit. Then the rocket stage returns to earth to pick up a similar spacecraft adapted for refueling the manned spacecraft. Shortly after being mounted on the same first stage, the fueling spacecraft launches again delivering its payload to the manned spacecraft. It then loads the fuel onboard, returns to earth, and the manned spacecraft disembarks for Mars.

Musk described this spacecraft as fun. It certainly appears spacious, even if carrying a hundred people. But he envisioned that it might have a restaurant, quarters, and all manner of comforts making it seem more like a cruise ship than a spacecraft.

Once it arrives, it will enter the Martian atmosphere using a heat shield, then flip around and fire a landing rocket carrying it safely to the Martian surface. Once landed, the humans will disembark and set up a colony and a fuel depot. This depot would manufacture fuel on Mars to relaunch the spacecraft and return it to earth to be used to pick up more passengers and transport them to Mars, along with anyone with cold feet that wished to return home.

All the while, SpaceX will build more spacecraft and launch systems ultimately allowing for large numbers of people to go to Mars to colonize, build businesses, create a city on Mars and eventually make it self-sustaining. His time table for this is between 40 to 100 years before a self-sustaining colony can be established using a fleet of as many as 1000 of these spacecraft.

He envisions it how the west of the United States was colonized. California, for example, was a sparsely populated frontier until the Union Pacific Railroad was built, and now it's one of the main centers of American culture and population. The existence of the railroad was pivotal in establishing that, and Musk believes that his Martian transport system will serve a similar role. There were people that didn't believe in the construction of the railroad at the time, arguing that very few people lived in California and there was no point. They turned out to be epically wrong. Might that happen with Mars too?

Well, part of that question will be resolved with costs. If it's expensive to go to Mars, then it's not going to happen other than an international government project to send a few astronauts to set foot there, pat ourselves on the back and then leave. But if it's cheap, then that changes the equation.

Musk claims that his system will allow a person to relocate to Mars for less than $100,000 U.S. dollars. That sounds expensive, but it's very cheap compared to going to the International Space Station. In 2001 multimillionaire Dennis Tito went to the ISS and had to pay the Russians 20 million dollars for a week's vacation. In comparison, a hundred grand is so cheap that it could make sense for business people wishing to make money from resources on Mars or selling pizzas there.

In short, SpaceX's plan is to simply provide the transport. They want to be the railroad. Humans will found the colony as they will using Mars's natural resources. These are pretty good, actually, at least for founding the colony. There's no shortage of water on Mars, ice is everywhere that can be melted. Further, the planet's atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, which means oxygen can be extracted from it. There's also some nitrogen there, and soil that almost certainly can be used to grow food. But can you make money from residing on Mars? That remains to be seen.

But the Interplanetary Transport System isn't just limited to Mars. By building a fuel production depot at Mars, essentially a gas station, a manned mission to Jupiter becomes possible. By locating another depot on the moon Europa, then Saturn comes into play. By building a depot at Enceladus, you can go even further. This system is designed to allow humans to physically go literally anywhere in our solar system. That's an amazing idea if you think about it, given that today we can't leave earth orbit with manned missions.

As an aside, Musk mentioned another interesting possibility. To generate money for his endeavour, he explored the possibility of using the ITS for transporting goods on earth. If you were in New York and had a load of tomatoes that you really wanted to get to Paris very quickly, the ITS rocket could certainly do it.

It could theoretically cross the Atlantic in less than 15 minutes. It would be a very expensive batch of tomatoes to deliver, but needless to say that such speeds, if there is a market for them, would prove very useful for the human race and very different from what we have now. And Musk intends to accomplish this within just a few years.

So once a colony on Mars is established, what will it be like? I'll leave that for a future video as Elon Musk's plan develops, but I hope we do it with better planning than we did here on Earth. I'm confidant we will, and maybe some day as the cultures of the two planets diverge we will learn from them as they learned from us.

Proxima Centauri b Update

Proxima Centauri B has recently shot to the top of the list as far as interesting exoplanets go. Not only is it the closest exoplanet to our solar system, it's also about the size of earth and within the habitability zone of its star. This is potentially earthshaking because this planet is so close to us that it's possible, maybe even probable, that some day humans will set foot on it or even colonize it, assuming that it's uninhabited of course.

Unfortunately, at least until the James Webb Space Telescope launches, we don't know much about this world other than what we can infer. We also don't know much about the conditions of life arising in a red dwarf star system. But a recent paper by Laura Kreidberg and Abraham Loeb of Harvard University gives some tantalizing hints of what Proxima B might be like.

The paper's overall purpose is to present the case that the James Webb space telescope will be able to determine if there is liquid water on Proxima B. This is the first step in establishing whether life can exist there. Where there's water, there could be life. But on Proxima b, it's a bit more complicated than that and nothing is guaranteed.

Firstly, they lay out that this planet may have no atmosphere at all. It orbits a star very different from the sun and it orbits it very closely in comparison to earth. More, it's probably tidally locked which means it's like our moon, one side of the planet always faces its star. This creates some unique conditions where one side of the planet is always in night and one side is always in day. That means quite a very unearthlike mix of a permanently scorching hot day side and a frozen solid night side.

With one side always in night, that means that the planet's atmosphere may have frozen out and locked itself up as ice on the dark side. If so, that would mean that life on this world is highly unlikely. But it also makes it a target for terraforming if we ever make it there. Frozen out atmospheres can be melted and restored, which is one of the main things we'd have to do if we were to ever terraform Mars and make it habitable for humans.

But if it does have an atmosphere, the researchers point out that atmospheres tend to redistribute heat. Warm air moves around with wind and weather, so the dark side of Proxima b may just be warm enough to have prevented an atmospheric freeze out. If so, then we're back to an environment that can have liquid water on the surface of the planet.

But there's another problem, Proxima b is so close to its star that it would be subject to stellar erosion of its atmosphere. The solar wind and radiation might literally have blown the planet's atmosphere off into space. That alone may have been enough to deprive this planet of an atmosphere early on before life had a chance to arise, or it may have survived but we just don't know enough yet to say. The good news is that we'll know a lot more in just two years with the launch of the James Webb telescope.

While Proxima b is too close to its star to directly image, it's year is only 11.2 days, the James Webb Space Telescope will be powerful enough to tell us much. We should be able to use the JWST to detect the distinctive infrared emissions that would be produced by the planet and watch how it changes as it orbits Proxima Centauri. From those observations, we should be able to determine if it has an atmosphere and how it's redistributing heat, and by extension if it's warm enough for liquid water there.

But as far as life goes, other factors may also play a role. One of these would be the presence of a moon. Life on earth is thought to have arisen in tidal pools. Tides are caused by the moon. No moon, no tides, and that changes the equations on whether life can arise on a planet. Other factors include the chemical makeup of the atmosphere if it exists, the geology of the planet, weather, magnetic fields, plate tectonics and so on.

But in a best case speculative scenario, Proxima B would be a world that has a ring of habitability rather than a global habitability like earth. If life exists there, it would be centered on the twilight zone of the planet where the light is not so strong as to create a permanently lit desert, but not so weak as to prevent liquid water. This kind of a habitable world is sometimes referred to as an 'eyeball planet'.

But if it did have life, what would it look like? Well, if such a planet had foliage, it would need to adapt to a completely different light profile than earth. As a result, instead of the distinctive green of earth's planet life, leaves on Proxima b would probably be black. Given the environment, animals would probably evolve to rely on seeing infrared rather than visible light. But it may not be possible for that sort of life to exist on that planet and perhaps the best we could hope for would be algae and microbes.

It has been suggested that worlds such as Proxima b, even if it did have liquid water, it would have conditions very different from earth and would present different challenges to life. These include permanent torrential downpours in certain areas of the planet and constant high winds that scour the planet's surface. The presence of an ocean may change that however, and allow for a protected underwater zone where life could flourish. Another factor would be the presence of geothermal vents underneath the frozen side of the planet and the potential for a protected liquid water environment under the ice.

So there you have it, while we may not know much about Proxima b yet, the James Webb Space Telescope will be powerful enough to reveal much more. In just two years, we should have a better understanding of our nearest exoplanet neighbor and determine whether it is to be the first interstellar object humans will visit.

China Unveils Huge Single Dish Radio Telescope

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/26/world/asia/china-telescope-fast-space-seti.html?_r=0

Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-23/elon-musk-to-outline-his-plans-for-mars

Best of luck to him. We need more people in this world that think big like Mr. Musk.

There is no now

Humans very much depend on the present. Everything we do in life is done with the understanding that we're doing it right now, whether we're hugging a friend or recording a YouTube video. We do it in the now and then it becomes the past. But it might surprise you to find out that in science, what we think of as "the present" doesn't actually exist. Only the past and the future do.

When we look into the night sky, we are seeing the past. Often the distant past. If you look at the Andromeda Galaxy which is just barely visible to the naked eye in a dark location, you are seeing it as it was 2.5 million years ago because light travels at a rate of 186,000 miles per second and it takes that long to travel the immense distance between the two galaxies. This is also true for an object in the room with you. When you look at your phone, you are seeing it as it was a tiny fraction of a second ago, not as it is right now. Light, or information, takes time to propagate no matter the distance.

This means that in any direction you look, you are always seeing the past no matter what. You are not seeing the now. In fact, it's physically impossible for you to see the now. But it gets worse. It's also impossible for the now to exist in your brain because it also takes time for impulses to travel along neurons. And, this doesn't happen at the same rate for everyone.

All of our brains are unique. Each human brain varies in the time it takes to process the information it receives from the outside world. This means that your now is different from my now, even if by just a fraction of a second. Perception is a deep rabbit hole indeed because the differences between brains covers more than just processing time.

Diagnosable conditions like color blindness aside, you probably do not see the same colors that I do. How you perceive red is likely different from how I perceive it, but since there's no way to describe the color red then there's no way to know -- at least until brain to brain interfaces become available. Likewise, you don't experience the present at the same time that I do. The difference is miniscule, a matter of milliseconds, but it's there.

Intuitively we think of the present like a sandwich filling. It's wedged between the past and the future, but in reality it's not. It's actually a completely fake construct of our brain. You can see this by thinking about what a moment in time really is. When you think about it, the present has no duration. There is no length of time involved, you're just conscious moving from one moment to the next seamlessly. We have to artificially make a duration for it with a clock. In other words, our perception of the present is just a construct of our brains. It doesn't really exist.

Yet we live our entire lives in this strange juxtaposition of having memory of the past and expectation of the future and are led to believe that we're in the present at all times by our brains.

But what is time? If you think about it keeping track of time is really just keeping track of change. If nothing ever changed, time would seem to have stopped. As a result, there would be no present because there would be no change from which to judge it. If nothing changed in your brains and your neurons simply stopped firing, i.e. stopped changing, the present would cease for you. So would consciousness. Are time and consciousness linked? In some ways, yes. At least our notion of time is.

But does time really exist? Well, in some ways it does, and in some ways it doesn't. Time is thought to be a dimension, one that we always move forward in. We don't actually know why that is, but I'll leave that for a future video. If you're talking about time as we perceive it, then it doesn't appear to exist. But if we're talking time in the sense of physics, it very much exists. And, whatever it is, it's linked to space itself, hence space-time. It can speed up or slow down. It ticks at different rates depending on where you are as far as gravity is concerned and how fast you are moving. If you're just about to fall into a black hole, then time nearly stops -- for someone observing you. For you, it seems to tick normally. That's because everything is relative.

That throws another wrench into the works of perception. That wrench is Einstein's theory of Special Relativity. Einstein realized that because everything is relative, two different observers will perceive events differently depending on where they are. For example, if you were in orbit watching the earth below you might see two train wrecks, one in Sweden and one in Argentina. To you, they appear to happen at exactly the same moment. But if you were at a different angle in orbit, they would appear to happen at slightly different times because of the change in distances the light has to travel.

This is because the observation of events is relative to the distances and motion involved and thusly the question of when they happened is also relative. One person believes the events were simultaneous because she observed them to be, and the other does not because he observed them and saw something different. There is no such thing as an absolute frame of reference.

This whole idea gets even stranger when you dig into philosophy. If the present doesn't exist, and the past is that which already happened, and the future is that which has not yet happened, then where exactly are we? If you've watched my video "Is the universe real? Or is it a computer simulation", you'll know that the universe essentially doesn't exist if you aren't looking at it. If you remove intuitive notions of time and space, that idea gets even more murky. There is no when, and there is no is, there is only consciousness observing changes in space. That constitutes everything we experience from our birth to our death. But let's take it a step further.

There is actually no way to prove that anything exists outside your own mind. The only thing you can prove to yourself is that you exist, everything else could be an illusion. And when you alter perception just slightly, this becomes readily apparent. Mind altering substances alter the brain's perceptions and thusly things that do not exist for you and I, do exist for the person under the influence. Someone on LSD may see a giant blue coyote doling out words of wisdom and completely believe that it's there, whereas the onlooker sees nothing. The person tripping can't prove that the coyote exists, but he certainly thinks it does -- at least until the effects of the drug wear off.

But, that's a two-sided coin. A sober person also can't prove that what they are seeing is real to anyone else. This is because every piece of information you get comes from your senses. Senses can be fooled by fooling the brain, or making it malfunction. This means that to get anywhere in life, you must assume that what you are seeing is real. And likewise, the rest of us have to assume the same thing. This means that existence itself is based fundamentally on an assumption.

So that brings us back to the present. If the present isn't real, and the past is already gone and the future isn't here yet, and perception is different for everyone . . . how does all of this manage to work? I have no idea. As Einstein said, "People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion".^[

Why is Pluto Emitting X-Rays?

Recently a group of astronomers have found a new X-Ray source in the universe. This is nothing unusual, the universe is full of X-Ray emitting stars, galaxies, and the like. But in this case the source is unusually weird. They're coming from the planet Pluto.

Now, Pluto presenting us with something puzzling is nothing new. Ever since the New Horizons probe passed by and explored Pluto last year the planet has tossed one enigma after another at us ranging from the planet being geologically active to the planet having an escaping atmosphere that is partly depositing itself on its main moon.

But these new developments may top even those mysteries. Researchers Carey Lisse and Ralph McNutt and their colleagues using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have found that Pluto, a frozen Kuiper Belt object, is emitting X-Rays. This is unique for the outer solar system, the furthest planet known to be emitting such things is the gas giant Saturn. Everything else is quiet, even the ice giant planets. Very mysterious indeed, but we do have some ideas on how this can be happening.

Planets, even outer minor planets, are bombarded by the solar wind that streams off the sun. What's interesting however is that Pluto lacks a magnetic field and has no apparent way to produce X-Rays on its own. But we do have a clue. Comets produce X-Rays when the gaseous tail they emit interacts with the solar wind. Pluto seems to be doing the same thing somehow, but there are problems.

Pluto is very cold. But it's still exposed to the sun and heat causes gases to evaporate and create an atmosphere, though this atmosphere seems to freeze out depending on where Pluto is in its orbit. As the sun heats those gases with the ionized particles of the solar wind, they react and an X-Ray is emitted. Seems straightforward. But here's the mystery, the X-Ray emissions at Pluto are significantly more powerful than they should be and are at odds with the findings of New Horizons. The spacecraft's measurements indicated that the solar wind is 40 times too low to create the amount of X-Rays that Chandra detected.

That would suggest that Pluto not only has an atmosphere, but also a substantial tail somewhat like a comet. Just such a thing was seemingly detected by New Horizons, but again seems significantly weaker than it should be to produce all those X-Rays, though there are other indications it could be. Another possibility is that interplanetary magnetic fields might be the culprit and are focusing the solar wind around Pluto. Still further, a torus of gas centered on Pluto's orbit might do the trick.

The theories abound and no doubt will multiply, and this is especially interesting since this observation using Chandra was originally met with much opposition from the scientific community and almost didn't happen. Few thought Pluto could emit X-Rays. Why devote telescope time to a wild goose chase? In this case, the goose was easily caught it seems.

But we won't know what's going on here for sure until more powerful and accurate observations can be made of the X-Ray emissions. But chalk yet another one up for Pluto, it's mystified us yet again which it's done repeatedly for the last year. Personally, I suspect it's just taking revenge for having its planet status revoked and downgraded to minor planet.

Exoplanet Odyssey

When I was a young astronomy enthusiast as a teenager in the early 90's, one of the biggest mysteries of the universe at the time was whether or not there were planets outside our solar system orbiting other stars. While everyone thought it was overwhelmingly likely, we had yet to see one. In the intervening years, that has all dramatically changed and just a few days ago NASA made history by announcing the discovery of over 1200 new exoplanets in one shot bringing the total number known to over 4000. More, they now believe that most stars in our universe probably host at least one planet.

Out of all these newly discovered worlds a few dozen of these are known to be earthlike. These are the most interesting ones as far as finding life in the universe is concerned because, well, Earth itself stands as a testament that life can arise on a planet like this. Current estimates place the number of earthlike planets orbiting stable stars in the Milky Way galaxy as high as 40 billion. Of those, about 11 billion are estimated to orbit sun-like stars within their zones of habitability like earth. That's a lot of chances for life to develop within the Milky Way alone, and it gets incomprehensibly higher if you start looking at the multitudes of other galaxies in the universe. Chances are, the Milky Way is teeming with life. But how much of it is intelligent other than us is still a big unknown.

The most interesting earth-like planet we've found so far is Kepler 438b. Located in the constellation Lyra, this planet orbits within the habitable zone of a red dwarf star at a distance of about 475 light years from us. It's nearly the same size as earth, it could have liquid water on its surface, and if it does it very likely looks like earth with clouds and rain and maybe even oceans. It is as close to a twin of earth as we've found so far. Unfortunately, Kepler 438b is very likely uninhabited due to it being subject to periodic  superflare activity from its star that would sterilize the surface of the planet never allowing life to gain a foothold. Even still, it shows us that there are twins of Earth out there.

Another possible twin of earth is a planet 490 light years away known as Kepler 186f. Located in a true solar system with multiple other planets, this planet exists within the habitable zone of its red dwarf star. Red dwarves are frequently cited as being capable of sustaining a living planet due to the extreme longevity of this class of star. We don't know as much about Kepler 186f, only that it occupies roughly the same position in its star system that Mars does in our own. Unlike Mars, which is simply too small to hold onto a dense earth-like atmosphere, Kepler 186f could. Unlike earth, however, it does not seem to be tilted on its axis, so thusly does not have seasons. Unfortunately, we don't really know that much more about this world, but it was earth-like enough to warrant a search by SETI using the Allen Telescope array to see if they picked anything up. Unfortunately, they did not.

But, as it turns out, not just the earthlike planets we're finding are interesting. In fact, some of the wildest exoplanets we've found are interesting specifically because they are so different from earth. As a science fiction writer, I have always enjoyed trying to imagine what strange alien worlds might look like, but I never really knew if what I was thinking was really possible. To my delight, scientists are now finally able to tell us a little bit about these strange exoplanets that exist out in deep space. And some of them are very strange indeed, and often quite different than what the old school science fiction writers I grew up reading had imagined.

One such planet is known as Gliese 436 b. This world is about the size of the planet Neptune, but it's much hotter. Like 570 degrees Fahrenheit hot. But even at that temperature, this planet happens to be covered in water ice. That's right, burning hot 570 degree water ice, kept in solid form by the intense pressure present on this world. And if that wasn't strange enough, the planet is also slowly losing its hydrogen and helium atmosphere, forming a huge comet-like tail that follows it around as it orbits its star.

Then there are worlds that don't like to be seen. A planet in Draco located about 750 light years away known as TrES-2b is so dark that it only reflects about 1 percent of the light that hits it. It's a gas giant that's too hot for clouds, so if you were looking at it, it would look like a giant black ball with weak tinges of red light. The exact reason for why this planet is so dark isn't settled, but it's most likely due to the planet being composed of materials such as potassium that absorb light efficiently.

Another planetary oddity is the so-called "Hell Planet" or Kepler 78b. This planet is only a little larger than earth, but all similarity ends there. It's a world of lava and extreme temperatures. So much so that we have no idea how this planet exists. It's so close to its star that at the time of its formation it would have had to form inside the star, something that surely must be impossible. It isn't clear whether it was a wandering unlucky planet captured into that orbit by the star or where exactly it came from, but its surface temperature is thought to be a whopping 4300 degrees Fahrenheit. While we may not know how "Hell Planet" formed, we do know how it will be destroyed. It will fall into its own sun in about 3 billion years.

My own personal favorite is HD 189773b. This planet is a true delight for a science fiction writer because it has one totally crazy attribute to it: it rains glass on this world.

Unlike many exoplanets, this one is fairly close at just 63 light years away. It's also one of the few worlds that we know the color of it, which is blue like Neptune. It's a hot gas giant, boiling at about 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. This creates some very weird weather. Suspended within the atmosphere are silicate particles. The heat and pressure melts those particles into glass which then rains into the planet's atmosphere. Given that the wind on this world gusts to 4000 miles per hour, HD 189773b is one huge planetary-sized sand blaster.