To the Moon, With Tardigrades and Knowledge

By: | August 16, 2019

This post (published in May 2018) seemed worth resurfacing after the astonishing recent news that the Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library had flown to our celestial neighbor with Earth life aboard. For the record, I love the Lunar Library concept (cf., below). But I think the tardigrades were a bad idea.

After several thousand years spent looking up and contemplating the nature of the cosmos, as well as what’s for dinner, we humans have amassed a lot of knowledge. We know the precise age of the Earth and the universe. We know how life sends copies of itself into the future. We know, with amazing accuracy, how strange mistakes in those copies lead to endless forms of life. We know who won the 1998 World Series and how to calculate area and the best way to make a beef bourginon. This is a lot of information to have in one brain, so humans also invented a way to offload some of that information and store it someplace else, through writing.

The loss of collective knowledge, either through deliberate acts of destruction or via accidents, remains one of the most potent sources of psychic pain — at least on a humanistic level. So there was something so touching about the press release I got from Astrobotic Technologies this week.

Sometime in 2020, Astrobotic will launch its small lander off the Earth, send it to the moon, and set it down, marking a leap forward for commercial space travel. Along with cargo for some private companies, some governments, a few universities, and some rich institutions and individual people, it will be carrying a library.

They are calling it the Lunar Library, but for now it’ll just be a digital copy of Wikipedia (which edit date, I don’t know) and a beautiful object called the Rosetta Project. The latter is a project of the wondrous Long Now Foundation, and it is a CD-sized solid nickel disc inscribed with data on 1,500 human languages. You can only read its pages using a microscope.

The Lunar Library consists of tens of millions of pages of text and images, which are stored in a decidedly retro fashion, essentially a 21st-century style … nanofiche, if you will. Each page is laser-etched onto thin sheets of nickel at 300,000 dots per inch, using a patented nano-lithograph, according to the small concern that is building it, the Arch Foundation (pronounced Ark). All a library patron would need to read it is a 1000x optical microscope.

Astrobotic was at one point a leading contender for the Google Lunar X Prize, which would have awarded up to $30 million in prize money for a private robotic jaunt to our satellite. That didn’t happen, but Astrobotic is still planning its mission, because why not, and because there’s money to be made.

The Arch Foundation apparently flew a mission called Solar Library earlier this year, which used a new memory architecture called a 5D memory, so the foundation wants to add one of these for the moon, too. The company also wants to use DNA storage, encoding information in the four-letter code that serves as the backbone for all of life as we know it. But for now, the Library is just the nickel pages.

Nickel is impervious to cosmic radiation and can withstand wild temperature fluctuations from the lunar day to night, so an etched physical disc will last far longer than any computer or current memory chip. They will last longer than the Pyramids. In fact, it may last much longer than our planet, according to the foundation.

This is all cool and good, but the press release still didn’t tell me why.

The Peregrine — that’s the lander’s name — won’t need to reference this lunar library. It will have all the information it needs stored within its brain, because this is a thing we can do with robots. No human settlers (I don’t want to say colonists) will need it, either, at least for a long time, and maybe forever. By the time we send humans back to the moon on the regular, Apple Watches will have more memory than today’s supercomputers, and we will just bring our knowledge with us.

It could last for billions of years, according to the Arch Foundation: “the ultimate in cold storage for human civilization,” said Nova Spivack, co­founder and chairman. The foundation’s mission is “to preserve and disseminate humanity’s most important knowledge across time and space.” So this library will exist on the moon just because it can.

I think it’s important to note that this knowledge is our most important knowledge as of now, in 2018. This is not a reflection of all we have known and understood, nor what we will come to know and understand in the future. But there is something eternal about this library, all the same. It is a reflection of our most fundamental desire, the deepest ache in all our hearts that ties us to everyone who has ever lived. It is a way for us to send versions of ourselves into the future. It’s a path to immortality. Taking a collectively edited compendium of knowledge and sending it off the planet forever is probably the most human thing there is.

Image credit: E Schokraie, PLoS One, via Wikimedia Commons; bottom, Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

I Had a Hamster. I’m Pretty Sure He Killed Himself.

By: | August 15, 2019

Golden Hamster

This was my first guest post for LWON, in 2015. I’m reposting it because there’s yet another update: A few days ago, my mother revealed that, CONTRARY TO ALL HER PREVIOUS CLAIMS, it was the cat.

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This week, while working on a little story for Science about hamster emotions, I decided to do some hard-hitting journalism, so I called my mother.

“Mom, I want to know what happened to Hamlet,” I said over the phone, interrupting her dinner party in California.

A pause. “Really?”

Hamlet was my childhood hamster. He looked a lot like the tawny fluffball pictured above. I named him Hamlet because, well, I was a pretty melodramatic kid.

The official story was that Hamlet disappeared. I remember my clever mother speculating that he had escaped into the black widow-infested crawlspace under our house by slipping through a vent. After learning the truth about what really happened to one of our dogs, however — a story for another time — I harbored suspicions.

Hamlet had always seemed pretty depressed. He didn’t appear to enjoy his colorful cage, complete with a tunnel, wheel, and ramp. He was sullen and ornery — a biter. He was a pretty lousy pet.

My mother confirmed my childhood impressions. The only thing he did with any enthusiasm was gnaw at his plastic cage in an attempt to escape, she said. Eventually, he did. “One morning, I came in to wake you girls up and he was not where he belonged,” she said. “Then I found his body.”

Hamlet hadn’t been obviously mangled or chomped on by our two cats, she said (SEE UPDATE.) “Maybe it was old age,” she said. “Or a broken heart.” (Reading this in light of what I know now, I am struck once again by my family’s emotional flair.)

“Do you think that Hamlet committed suicide?” I (unwittingly) said. Continue reading →

Sounds of Summer

By: | August 14, 2019

This post originally ran Sept. 1, 2014.

After my voice lesson Sunday afternoon, I heard bells. Eight bells, ringing on and on. My voice lessons are in the bowels of Washington National Cathedral – a real live Gothic cathedral, hand-carved over the last 107 years by bearded Englishmen, or at least the group included one bearded Englishman who lives in my neighborhood. The cathedral’s tallest tower holds 10 bells known as peal bells, because they’re for playing peals like this one.

Peal bells are used for mathematical playing, not melodic; as the website of the North American Guild of Change Ringers explains, a peal goes through the bells by number, switching the order each time, so a four-bell “method” – apparently the little bits of music are called “methods” – might start like this, where each number is a bell:

Continue reading →

Strikeout

By: | August 13, 2019
Scottobear_-_051231_sun_(by-sa)

Late summer makes me think of thunderstorms, baseball and Steve. This post first appeared in 2014.

Last weekend there was an unseasonable lightning storm on the coast. Not here (thank goodness, for our dog’s sake), but farther south. More than 1,400 strikes touched down across the region, with 13 people reporting injuries in Los Angeles County alone. A golfer was hit on Catalina Island, 22 miles from Los Angeles. One young man died after being struck in the water in Venice Beach.

Some people thought the boom of thunder was an earthquake. You see, people don’t usually think of lightning at the beach in the summer around here.

Inland, sure: a study looking at lightning flashes in Southern California found the mountains and the high deserts draw extensive summertime lightning, particularly in the afternoon and early evening, at the peak of the day’s heat. Over coastal waters lightning is more common in the winter, before dawn, coming in with a cold winter storm.

Continue reading →

This week

By: | August 12, 2019

This week (and to be honest, part of last), what with August being August, we’re running the posts we’ve liked best. Maybe we have criteria by which we choose, possibly not. We hope you like them.

Love City

By: | August 12, 2019

For every story that makes it to print, there are scads that die in the reporting trenches. This is one of those stories. It originally ran in October 2013.

In 2001, I moved to Bolivia to become a Peace Corps volunteer and fell deeply in love with the country. In 2010, I returned. I wanted to visit friends and family, but, like any intrepid freelancer, I also hoped to do some reporting. Although Bolivia has been landlocked since it lost its coastline to Chile more than 130 years ago, the country still maintains a navy. This is their motto: “The sea belongs to us by right, recovering it is a duty.” I find this sentiment simultaneously ridiculous and sort of commendable. So why not do a story on Bolivia’s navy, I thought. (Well, lots of reasons. But I didn’t let details deter me.)

The first order of business was making contact. I found a Web page for the navy, but it seemed to be broken. And all other attempts to arrange an interview ahead of time failed. So I developed a two-part backup plan. 1. Fly to Bolivia. 2. Call the navy. And that’s exactly what I did. With help from the hostel desk clerk, I called naval headquarters. “Come on over,” said the man on the phone. So I hopped in a cab and went.

Continue reading →

Gesundheit

By: | August 8, 2019

shutterstock_194185637.jpg (1000×667)These thoughts on sneezing first ran back in October 2015, and I loved the responses. Feel free to share more examples of achoo styles from friends and family!

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When we were kids, my brother was the sneezer of all sneezers. There was never just one, or even two or three. It was always 17. No lie. Each sneeze began with this strange little sucking in of air, a pause, and then from his bent body and contorted face flew ah-YESH-ah!

Seventeen times. He was very consistent. (He says he’s now down to seven.)

By sneeze number two, tissues were required—and employed, if time permitted, in between explosions.

My husband, meanwhile, sneezes so loudly and with such force that I can’t help but shriek. I beg for a warning but never get one. Even the second and third ones rattle me. They cause our old Jindo dog to drop belly-flat to the floor in fear. John is a big guy, with big lungs, who doesn’t hold back. So he sneezes larger than most.

Sneezes are like fingerprints—we each have our own. But the physiology of a sneeze is the same for all of us. The trigger is usually dust or some other irritant trapped in the mucous lining of the upper respiratory tract. Cranial nerve endings fire off a message to the brainstem telling the lungs to take a deep breath. Your eyes and vocal cords close, then air explodes forth from the mouth and nose at upwards of 90 miles per hour.

There’s no way to look cool while sneezing.

Scientists call sneezing sternutation. Some of us sternutate (no, I’m not sure you can use it as a verb) when we look at the sun—called photic sneezing (I do that). A sneeze may build as we tweeze a hair from the eyebrow or nose (been there). Others achoo during an orgasm, apparently (so far, nope). Those responses—and others—are a bit of a mystery, but faulty wiring in the brain is likely to blame.

Do sneezes match personalities? A lot of loud (may I say obnoxious?) people are, after all, giant sneezers, and we all have that friend who really holds back, letting squeak out just a tiny, high-pitched choo at the very end. My mother did that, at least for sneeze number one. Any follow-up sneezes had force, and the same phonetic as (though less drama than) my brother’s: ah-YESH-ah. They were much like her, a seemingly polite and gentle woman who might without warning start a whipped-cream fight at the dinner table or make a joke about “taking the bull by the balls.” In a church.

From a very unscientific poll (thanks, Facebook) I learned that allergy sneezes tend to be harder to control than other types, many people sneeze in twos, and sneezing politely into the arm is far from universal. (Australians and Indians, according to friends, aren’t germ-phobic like we Americans; they share sneeze product widely. Sometimes right in your face.) A pregnant friend has decided that letting it all out is better for the fetus than holding back. Who knows if that’s true.

My friends seem to like sneezing. Here’s how some of them do it:

Often its loud-knock-the-china-off-the-wall sneezes…and out of the blue. Scares the bejeezus out of the mister.

Mouth sneeze, not through the nose. One sneeze, rarely multiples. All out. [A useful tidbit: Ear doctor taught me to suppress post-surgical sneezing (so as to avoid jostling delicate ossicular chain reconstruction) by snorting forcefully out through my nose, alternating with panting hard out through my mouth. Works pretty well.]

Face in elbow and let ‘er fly. Sleeve stops the splash damage and muffles the sound.

Definitely through the mouth. No hand gyrations or exciting body movements. Volume is excessive.

Once sneezed very delicately and got such an amazed and positive response that I now actually out of habit sneeze that way. It is about the only time I ever get called, “cute”.

My sneeze? Like my mom, I might go minimal at first but then I transition to a fuller more satisfying outburst. Why hold back? There’s obviously something in there that wants out. If needed, though, I can sneeze almost imperceptibly, with no product whatsoever. I’m pretty proud of that.

Meanwhile, the appropriate response to a sneeze depends on where in the world that sneeze happens. According to a fine list on Wikipedia, in most countries, a witness offers up God’s blessings or wishes you good health or long life. (We were a “bless you” family, although the German “gesundheit” was also acceptable.) Mongolians ask God to forgive the sneezer, and the Igbo apologize to or for the person. In China and Japan, it is customary just to ignore the whole thing.

But my favorite reply wonderfully states the obvious. If you speak the Australian language Ritharrngu, you might say after someone’s wet blast, “klas bin gurruwan.” It means: “You have released nose water.”

They don’t say “You have released nose water in my face.”

I guess that would be rude.

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Possible future polls: Tissue or Kleenex? Whose dad still carries a handkerchief—and has he ever found a pocket booger? Does your sneeze match your love life? Stay tuned.

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Photo: Shutterstock