Depression Wednesday

Found this quote from Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan advisor and a Treasury official under Bush. Here's where I found it.

Here's the quote.

Basically we’re still stuck in the situation we were three years ago and we haven’t made any progress at all except that our problems are much worse because of political reasons, because we now have a crazy party in charge of one of the Houses of our Congress and they won’t allow anything to happen because it’s in their vested interest to make things worse,” Bartlett explained in his typically exasperated way. “Plus they have a theory that is completely nuts…. I’m very depressed. I’d love to see some program like this [paper] enacted. I see zero chance of it happening. The most we can hope for is that a complete crazy person like Newt Gingrich gets the Republican nomination, the Republicans lose so badly that they lose control of the House and don’t get control of the Senate and then maybe in a year we can finally talk about doing something rational such as what is discussed in this paper.

What might be over there

(Picture from here.)

The news last week, among other things, is Kepler-22b, a planet about 2.4 times the radius of Earth orbiting a G-type star, Kepler-22.

Kepler-22 is about 600 light years from her. Kepler-22b appears to be orbiting in the habitable zone: the orbit around the start that gets enough sunshine to neither turn water to steam nor to freeze it utterly. It is/may/possibly be/we wish it were liquid water.

Why? Because liquid water is one of the prerequisites for our kind of life. Not that life that isn't ours isn't possible on some of the other planets found by Kepler. Just that with only a sample number of 1 we don't have much to compare it to.

We don't know the mass of the planet simply because of the way Kepler finds things. It looks for a blink in the star it's looking at to determine that something passed in front of it. Hence, we have an idea of Kepler-22b's size but not what fills it.

There's a good article over at Life Unbounded that discusses what it might be. It might be pure rock, pure ice, pure iron or a mix-- like our lovely home. If it is like our planet, things are going to be much heaver. Volume, and hence mass, is a cube function not a linear one. An increase of radius of 2.4 doesn't make the mass 2.4 times earth. If Kepler-22b were only made of rock and ice, it's gravitational pull would be about 5 times earth. A mix of ice and rock gets you 10 times earth. If it were like earth the pull would be better than 40G! But for arithmetic convenience, let's postulate it is of the composition that there are only 10Gs on the surface. Your average couch potato American Super Bowl watching male will weigh 2000 pounds, not 200-- more than a Holstein or a small rhinoceros.

Let's wax speculative for a moment. Let's say mammalian life evolved on Kepler-22b. That would mean a relatively modest size animal, such as a human, would have to have skeletal and musculature systems beefed up to be comparable to cattle. It's certainly possible-- cattle do quite well. But what would that mean?

Think about land vertebrates. They would have to either evolve these load bearing structures early or they'd never get on land. Let's start with salamanders, an early land vertebrate. If you look at a salamander the arms come into the body structure at nearly right angles. Earth's really huge salamanders would have required significant musculature around the shoulders to lift themselves off the ground. Or they could have just dragged themselves around.

Now, take that ancient 200 pound salamander and make it 2000 pounds. It's not moving, dragging or otherwise. I have a strong suspicion that land based animals would have significant difficulty. Flight might well be evolutionary impossible. I suspect verticality would be problematic-- humans would be on all fours and not have much chance to develop hands.

But that line of speculation only suggests that the evolution de novo of such structures on land would be difficult. Not impossible-- living systems manage many things. Just our kind of mammalian life being so suited to the conditions that birthed would have difficulty evolving the same sort of adaptations under such heavier gravity.

But let's go to the ocean.

Two things immediately leap to mind for ocean based life on Kepler-22b. For one thing, the gravity problem drops away. Archimedes pointed out that buoyancy is a function of how much water something displaces. If you displace 1 gallon of earth water you get a buoyancy of 8 pounds. If you displace 1 gallon of Kepler-22b water you get a buoyancy of 40 pounds. Of course, there's 5 times more pressure on that empty gallon jug so it would need to be stronger. But water is incompressible. That's why fish can go up and down the water column easily.

We can presume that we have aquatic life if there is any life at all.

Pressure changes would be much more rapid. On earth, we get about 33 feet/atmosphere. That means if you go down 99 feet you are under 4 atmospheres of pressure: 1 from the surface + 3 for the depth. On Kepler-22b that would be much more rapid: 1 atmosphere every 3.3 feet. However, that's an earth atmosphere. About 14.7 psi/atmosphere. I would expect surface atmospheric pressure on Kepler-22b would be significantly greater. I don't know how much.

Regardless, the pressure gradient in the ocean would be significant. This would completely change the ecology and physiology of marine life. We know there are some pretty strange animals living down about 5000 feet. On earth, that's about 152 atmospheres. Light does not penetrate down that far so animals have two big issues to face: no photosynthesis and pressure issues.

On Kepler-22b we get the same pressure at 500 feet. Much, much closer to the surface. Many animals on earth manage quite nicely migrating from the surface down to that depth and return, though whether they'd be able to withstand the pressure gradient on Kepler-22b is open to question.

Kelp can grow as deep as 200 m-- around 180 feet. This relationship between depth and growth is purely defined by how much light is received by the organism and is independent of pressure. We can imagine that our Kepler-22b kelp beds are surviving under 56 earth atmospheres of pressure rather than a little over 5.5.

So, Kepler-22b's attempt at vertebrate life would give us some surprises. Ocean life, maybe not so much.

We can forget marine mammals, icthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, seals and sea otters. All of those animals started on land and made the return. If a land animal actually evolved and returned to the sea, it would carry with it the characteristics that made it successful on the land. Kepler-22b's dolphins aren't going to look like ours if they happened at all. There would be too much differing heritage.

But advanced organisms can evolve in the sea. We have cuttlefish, tuna and octopuses, all of which are very bright. If/when we get to Kepler-22b we might find cultures based around them.

My money's on the cuttlefish.

Cat vs. Laser Pointer

R. K. Milholland of Something Positive said it best. Picture from here.

Consideration of Works Past: The Green Rain

Usually, I talk about science every two weeks. But the turkey tryptophan is still coursing through my veins and I can't face it. So I'll wax literary for a bit.

Over the past few years I've been re-reading works that I found interesting and provocative back when I was a mere babe. (You can read previous ruminations here, here, here and here.)

The Green Rain was published by Paul Tabori back in 1961. It's a short book-- barely 70,000 words, if that. It's premise is simple: there's a mistake with a chemical missile and something goes wrong. The chemical seeds the clouds. It rains and the result is that everyone caught in the rain turns green. General hilarity ensues.

Well, only if you count political destruction, death and riot as hilarity. Perhaps I have a skewed sense of humor.

There were a lot of odd books written in the sixties and seventies, many of them better known. The Muller-Fokker Effect by John Sladek, for example. Adam M-1 by William C Anderson. Rally Round the Flag, Boys! by Max Shulman. Most of these works were fairly light even though they might be handling fairly dark material.

The Green Rain reads like a bitter, eloquent Ron Goulart at the height of his powers. It opens with a quote from one of the characters, a bitter old professor named Pelargus, who says "Something goes wrong. It always does." Then, it wanders over to a satyric biochemist who has created "chlorophylogen", a chemical precursor to chlorophyll. It has the property of generating plant like behavior upon contact with light. NASA (the ISS in the book) decides to send a rocket to the moon to make it earth like. It fails in launch and returns to earth, seeding the rain with chlorophylogen. Something happens to the chemical in the return. It's no longer simple chlorophylogen, it turns human beings green.

You can't change the color of people's skin without dealing with race. Tabori does. You can't change skin color without political repercussions. Tabori gleefully traces the downfall of the cold war. You can't change skin color without religious overtones and you can't have a religion without con artists-- at least not in southern California. Tabori wanders over there, too.

It's a romp. Or, at least it is in the beginning.

Things go dark about half way through. It's not like Shulman or Anderson. There's no easy, happy ending. The bitter Pelargus may have the last laugh after all.

This is what fascinated me when I first read it long ago and it fascinates me still. Though the science is dated and the political world is different, there's a lot that still rings true in this book. There's a scene where a young actress discovers herself pure green and comes out screaming and then faints. When she wakes up her first words are "I'm going to sue for a million bucks!"

And we're off and running.

What's curious about this book, and some of the others mentioned, is how thoroughly vanished they are in popular culture. Certainly you can find them. All of the above books are mentioned in wikipedia and you can get used copies at Amazon. The internet never forgets anything.

The impact at the time of Sulman and Anderson was considerable. Tabori, less so, but he was well known. Almost none of these names are mentioned now.

It's what I call the Bret Harte phenomenon. If you've taken an American lit course, you've ran across the name. He was a contemporary of Mark Twain. However, now we remember Mark Twain and Harte is barely remembered. Now, I'm not saying Harte was as good a writer as Twain-- he was not. But he was worth reading and popular for a time. You can make a similar statement about William Saroyan or my own favorite author, John Dos Passos. Both brilliant writers and rarely read these days out of literature courses.

The Green Rain is a lovely little science fiction book that will make you think. Don't take my word for it. Go over to Amazon here and buy it. Read it.

We'll bring these guys back eventually.

Happy Thanksgiving

I'll be too busy preparing to, doing and recovering from stuffing my face for the next couple of days to put anything up.

But never fear. The Oatmeal is here.

Notes from FactCheck.org

Lies in the South Carolina Debate

Huntsman SuperPAC lies

Many Lies from Crossroads GPS and one from the League of Conservation Voters

Repeated lies from Pat Boone

Lies from Rick Perry and Mitt Romney

Lies about the deficit

UC Davis Spraying

I have nothing to say about this that hasn't been said. It's an outrage. I am reminded of setting dogs on protesters in the south in the 1960s.

However, if you want a real analysis of it go to James Fallows articles, here, here and here.