Worlds: The Kepler Planet Candidates from Alex Parker on Vimeo.

Planetary scientist Alex Parker created an animation of 2,299 extrasolar planet candidates orbiting a single star.  NASA’s Kepler mission has detected these transiting planet candidates since 02009.

In reality, these planet candidates aren’t orbiting around a single star, but rather several thousand (some 1,770 sun-like stars). The video above illustrates the candidates by orbital periods, orbital distances and are drawn to scale with accurate radii—they range in size from one-third to 84 times the radius of Earth. Note that the three white rings show the average orbital distances of Mercury, Venus and Earth on the same scale.  Side-by-side, we can compare the different orbital distances from planets in our own solar system to those located elsewhere in the Milky Way, some of which are approximately 2,000 light years away from Earth.

Parker, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, writes:

The Kepler observatory has detected a multitude of planet candidates orbiting distant stars. The current list contains 2,321 planet candidates, though some of these have already been flagged as likely false-positives or contamination from binary stars. This animation does not contain circumbinary planets or planet candidates where only a single transit has been observed, which is why “only” 2,299 are shown.

While 2,299 may seem to be a lot of potential planets, these candidates were found in what is actually a tiny fraction of the sky (Kepler’s field of view covers approximately 1/400 of the sky).  ”In one generation we have gone from extraterrestrial planets being a mainstay of science fiction, to the present, where Kepler has helped turn science fiction into today’s reality,” said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden in a statement back in February 02011. “These discoveries underscore the importance of NASA’s science missions, which consistently increase understanding of our place in the cosmos.”

(via io9)

You may dream of freaky new physics, but sometimes freaky old physics is all you need. (New York Times)

Slava G. Turyshev, an expert on gravity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recently proved that the tried and true theories of Einsteinian physics are as powerful as ever – and he used technology from the 01970s to do it.

In 02004, Turyshev began working on a conundrum that had confused physicists since the early 01980s: Pioneer 10 and 11, two space probes gradually making their way to the outer reaches of the solar system, were slowing down at a higher rate than had been expected. At first, scientists dismissed the observation as the inconsequential effect of propellant left over in the probes’ fuel lines. But when the phenomenon persisted well into the nineties, the lack of a good explanation became a problem. Could it be that Einstein’s theory of General Relativity was off? Were the Pioneer probes perhaps showing us that gravity works differently when you’re measuring distances of a cosmic scale?

Turyshev decided to investigate, but ran into a problem: the last time either of the Pioneers had communicated with Earth was in 2003. Without any new data to rely on, Turyshev undertook what he calls a bit of “space archaeology:”

At the time these two Pioneers were launched [in the early 1970s], data were still being stored on punch cards. But Turyshev and colleagues were able to copy digitized files from the computer of JPL navigators who have helped steer the Pioneer spacecraft since the 1970s. They also found over a dozen of boxes of magnetic tapes stored under a staircase at JPL and received files from the National Space Science Data Center at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and worked with NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., to save some of their boxes of magnetic optical tapes. He collected more than 43 gigabytes of data, which may not seem like a lot now, but is quite a lot of data for the 1970s. He also managed to save a vintage tape machine that was about to be discarded, so he could play the magnetic tapes. (jpl.nasa.gov)

The vintage tape machine allowed Turyshev to read the old data; with help from a software programmer, he was also able to clean up and digitize it all for future safekeeping. And after several years of analysis, Turyshev was able to show that it might not quite be time for a new theory of gravity after all. The observed effect, he argues, has to do with the specific ways in which the Pioneers were built. The heat put out by the probes’ electrical systems radiate out in one particular direction – the direction of travel. This radiation pushes up against the forward momentum of the probes, thereby slowing them down ever so slightly.

“The effect is something like when you’re driving a car and the photons from your headlights are pushing you backward. It is very subtle.” (Centauri Dreams)

These findings not only demonstrate that Einstein wasn’t wrong about gravity; they also prove another aspect of General Relativity: that light (of which heat radiation is a form, as the New York Times explains) can be thought of as a stream of tiny particles (photons), which can carry energy and momentum. This realization will help NASA engineers build more efficient probes in the future.

Turyshev and his colleagues have published their findings in a paper, which can be found here. Though Turyshev is perhaps slightly disappointed not to have discovered a new physics of gravity, his findings do teach us something valuable: that old data is by no means obsolete – and that old theories can still teach us new things.

Scientists at NASA have announced that Voyager 1 is making its way through the very outer edges of our solar system. Sooner than expected, they say, the space probe will leave our tiny corner of the Milky Way behind, and become the first man-made craft to enter the dark reaches of interstellar space.

Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 to explore the dominions of Jupiter and Saturn, and has been at the forefront of space exploration ever since. In the 1980s, it sent us unprecedented close-up images of these two gas giants and their moons, facilitating new discoveries about their history and makeup. From there, Voyager headed deeper into the recesses of the heliosphere. In 1998, it overtook Pioneer 10 to become the most distant man-made object from the Sun, and fourteen years later it finds itself at a distance of 11.1 billion miles from Earth, in a region of the solar system where solar winds slow down considerably – enough to let in certain cosmic ray particles that are usually deflected by these winds. This outer edge is called the heliosheath; a region so far away that the data Voyager 1 sends back to Earth take 16 hours and 38 minutes to reach us.

It’s an increase in the detection of those cosmic ray particles that now tells scientists that Voyager 1 is getting close to the heliopause – the outer boundary of our solar system. They predict it might not be until 02014 that Voyager truly leaves the solar system once and for all. The heliosheath could be hundreds of thousands of miles thick, and Voyager’s exit from the solar system will thus be more of a gradual process of transition, than a demarcated event. The Atlantic Monthly, reporting on this news from NASA, writes:

So perhaps Voyager won’t make its mark with a sudden, defining event that echoes across generations as a sort of before-and-after dividing line across human history, like the line separating the time when a human’s voice had never traveled across a wire to an ear miles away – and when it had – or before a human foot had left its imprint on the moon, and when that print was there. But Stone is okay with that: “Well you know actually Voyager has had a lot of those moments as we flew by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. One after the other, we found something that we hadn’t realized was there to be discovered.

But, the Atlantic admits, “it’s hard not to sit on the edge of your seat to wait for this moment – this months-long moment – to pass.” Gradual as it may be, it is a momentous event nonetheless. Not just because Voyager 1 is carrying us into a new age of space exploration, but also because it is doing so as a 35-year old mission, whose technology NASA has had no way of updating since its launch in the late ‘70s. The fact that NASA’s engineers and scientists were able to design a machine that would be able to communicate with Earth across decades worth of time and space – and that would be able to measure phenomena that had never been measured before – is in and of itself momentous enough to contemplate.

Long Now Board Member Kevin Kelly recently went on a two-month voyage through Asia. But don’t worry – he won’t make you sit through hours of travel pictures. Instead, he’s made a video that condenses his 60-day trip into a mere 90 seconds:

Kelly took 1 second of footage for each day of his trip (2 seconds on some days) and glued them together into this short burst of color, sound, and movement. The video is an accelerated depiction of life, but also shows just how much life can be packed into a single second. A second can contain a wealth of impressions and sensations – it’s enough for a change of perspective, and enough to learn something new about the world.

As such, the video ultimately has the seeming effect of slowing down time. And of reminding us that the speed of time is relative – two months can pass by in the blink of an eye, and a second can last forever.

Radio producer Aengus Anderson began a project earlier this year with the goal of facilitating a conversation about the paradigms we may have to leave behind if we’re to build the future we want. Over the next several months, he’ll be motorcycling all over the United States and discussing the future with thinkers, do-ers, artists and makers. He posts those recordings on The Conversation and invites listeners to give feedback, offer critique, and to suggest questions for future participants:

The Conversation is a new type of media project. It’s not journalism, documentary, or oral history. Instead, it is an asynchronous conversation about the future between a cross-section of American thinkers and you, our participants on the web. Aengus is going to be traveling America from May to October, posting two audio interviews a week and carrying ideas from one interviewee to the next. As Aengus travels, you will be able to join the conversation online, commenting on specific interviews and suggesting themes and questions for Aengus to pursue in upcoming interviews.

He sat down recently with Long Now’s Alexander Rose to talk about long-term thinking, the 10,000 Year Clock, and generational-scale problem solving. Alexander’s interview is the seventh in the series, with many more to come!

Friend and Member of Long Now Davide Bocelli wrote in recently to update us on the story of a lost fresco painted by Leonardo Da Vinci:

This is a story about an incredible error, an act of respect, and a multicentennial game. As I wrote to Alexander Rose, some years ago the mystery of the Lost Da Vinci is still in the news after five centuries and it intends to stay there. This story is also a bridge between California and old Italy, as Maurizio Seracini is a UCSC San Diego graduate and the director of CISA3 at the San Diego’s Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology.

Seracini has been investigating the historical account that says that an original Leonardo Da Vinci, a fresco celebrating the Battle of Anghiari, is hidden by another fresco produced by Giorgio Vasari in the Salone dei Cinquecento (The Renaissance Room) in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio and tried to prove its veracity. For many years Seracini worked on replicating the techniques that Leonardo employed to paint the lost Battle of Anghiari.

As the story goes, it was Niccolò Machiavelli that signed the contract with Leonardo Da Vinci to produce a fresco celebrating the strength of the Florentine Republic. His rival Michelangelo had been commissioned to paint on the opposite wall, but this project was abandoned at the design stage when Michelangelo was called to Rome. The artists were asked to depict two outstanding victories of the Florentines: the Battle of Càscina for Michelangelo and the Battle of Anghiari for Da Vinci.

At that time, Leonardo had already painted the Last Supper at the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan using an experimental technique that made the fresco very unstable. For the Battle of Anghiari, he took an even bigger risk and tried an even more experimental technique – which ended up in a total failure. To put it in Silicon Valley terms, this turned out to be the beta version that you wouldn’t really want to go public.

Leonardo’s experiment used a special recipe that required oil, wax and fires burning for days to dry the painting surface. The paint, unfortunately, melted. Probably, the final result presaged Italian 20th century art, in a mix of Alberto Burri and Mario Schifano. But for the Renaissance standard, it was considered a total failure and it left Leonardo frustrated. He finally gave up in 1504, leaving only an exquisite, unfinished drawing on the wall. Some years later, Giorgio Vasari was asked by the new De’ Medici government to paint over Leonardo’s disaster. The painting thus disappeared and the legend of the Lost Da Vinci became history.

Vasari was asked by Cosimo I De’ Medici to paint a new scene and give a new structure to the whole room, to represent the success of the Medici on the Florentine Republic. Vasari’s respect for the genius of Leonardo was enormous, but still he was ordered to destroy the artwork. Today we know the beauty of the original drawings and sketches thanks to the transmission of copies, including the famous copy of Rubens.

The Head of a Warrior of the Ashmolean Museum of Oxford has a side that has dimensions compatible with the cartoon of La battaglia di Anghiari – it also has traces of the little holes that were made to transfer the figures to the wall. On 12th March 2012 Maurizio Seracini announced that traces of a special pigment were found in a back wall – a recipe that only Leonardo used. “It appears to be a pigment used by [him] and not by other artists.” said Seracini.

The local national authorities are supporting the endeavour to verify the presence of Da Vinci’s work. There is still a long way to go before we can make a visit to see the remains of Leonardo’s imperfect creature and probably one of his most human gestures.

Vasari may have wanted to preserve the traces of Leonardo, protecting it for the centuries to come. Over the surface of his fresco, Vasari wrote a small phrase: “Cerca Trova,” or “He who Seeks, Finds.” The words are in an area of the screen that a viewer can hardly see and not connected with the scene depicted. Maybe it’s a suggestion for people like Maurizio Seracini, as if it were a challenge.

Whatever the politicians may have ordered, Vasari decided that the genius – or the error of the genius – must not be deleted from the surface of universal memory. When you want to preserve something, maybe the best strategy is to hide it.

Thanks to Glen Michael Alessi and Valentina Scambia

Thanks, Davide!

Nature is often resilient, not fragile. There is no wilderness unspoiled by man. Thoreau was a townie. Conservation, by many measures, is failing. If it is to survive, it has to change.

Environment & Energy Publishing recently featured an article on former SALT speaker Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy who argues that conservation work is in need of a new direction and philosophy. The “horror stories” ecologists love to tell about how humanity is singlehandedly (or better said, too-many-handedly) destroying nature are, he claims, not corroborated by research data. They are also a “strategy failure,” because they fail to connect the importance of conservation to the everyday lives and concerns of ordinary citizens.

The old ways aren’t working. Inch by inch, for better or worse, conservation must, he says, enter the Anthropocene Epoch – the Age of Man.

Kareiva argues that we must accept the irreversibility of the Anthropocene. Our impact on the environment can be traced back even further than we always thought – and nature itself has been continually changing since long before we came around. It is neither tenable nor desirable to protect nature from our influence. Rather, Kareiva tells us, conservation efforts must be structured around human life and our influential place in the larger ecosystem.

This means taking steps that ‘traditional’ ecologists might consider blasphemous. Conservation decisions must be based on value judgments – evaluations of value to human life – rather than on the a priori assumption that all human life is naturally destructive to the thriving of ecosystems.

“It’s not about biodiversity,” [Kareiva] said. “It’s about having a forest so you don’t get what happened in Haiti. It’s about having vegetation so water doesn’t get overloaded with nutrients. Having oyster reefs to reduce hurricane storm surges.”

E&E Publishing reports that the Nature Conservancy has indeed begun to shift its focus, with plans for precisely such an oyster reef on the Gulf Coast. In deciding its location, the Conservancy looked for a place that was not just ecologically vulnerable, but socio-economically vulnerable as well: the reef now protects a low-income region that could suffer disproportionately from storm damage.

This approach means having to make some difficult decisions. Our own Stewart Brand calls Kareiva a courageous man.

The Nature Conservancy is no longer in the business of “saving the last great places on Earth.” Its new slogan? “Protecting nature. Preserving life.” It’s a mind-boggling and welcome shift, said Brand, the environmentalist and author.

For Kareiva, it simply makes scientific sense – and it gets the message out to a wider public. For conservation to really work, everyone must be on board: not just Conservancy scientists, but also big corporations, inner-city kids, and the loggers and salmon fishers whose livelihoods depend on natural resources. Only with such a joint effort can we hope to make a sustained effort to preserve nature – so that nature can, in turn, help us preserve our civilization.

Hungry for information, but bored by graphs and pie charts? Then pay a visit to Information is Beautiful, a site dedicated to all things informational – and all things pretty. Its pages showcase models and graphics that reveal what can happen when data presentation is combined with an eye for design and aesthetics.

The site is now hosting the first global award competition for data visualization, and recently announced that Long Now Board member Brian Eno has joined its panel of judges.

Along with his fellow evaluators, Eno will be reviewing submissions for awards in a variety of categories, ranging from “Interactive Visualisations” to “Data Journalism” and “Information Art.” The most prestigious award, however, is reserved – quite simply – for the “Most Beautiful” design.

Submissions are due by May 31st and they’ll announce winners at the end of July.

Check out the website for more (artfully rendered) information about the competition, and a look at the submissions; the general public gets to vote, too!

Long before the era of the Internet, humans already dreamt of creating the perfect search engine.

In 01895 two Belgian lawyers, Paul Otlet and Henri la Fontaine, began building their Universal Bibliographic Repertory: a card catalog similar to that of a library, but vastly larger. It aimed to classify all human knowledge and provide searchable links to books, newspapers, and other media. Otlet envisioned a whole “World City” of knowledge that would link libraries with museums and universities, and make information accessible to people across the globe.

According to a recent NY Times article, Google has decided to pay homage to this pre-digital information network by announcing a partnership with the Mundaneum, the museum that grew out of Otlet and la Fontaine’s project. Located in Mons, Belgium, the museum now houses part of the Repertory’s archive, as well as rotating exhibits about knowledge accessibility and internationalization.

The move is part of Google’s effort to explore the “roots of the internet” and the history of knowledge webs. As we learned from Alex Wright in a 02007 SALT lecture, this history is in fact quite impressive: attempts at information ordering may be as old as the technology of writing itself. Wright showed a video during the talk describing Otlet’s envisioned Universal Bibliographic Repertory, which sounds remarkably similar to some of Google’s own work:

From ancient Sumerian accounting, to Otlet’s City of Knowledge and now Wikipedia and Google, our knowledge webs have undergone quite a bit of evolution. Still, the motivations behind them have changed little with the passing of time. It seems that the desire to order our world into networks of information is a basic part of human nature; perhaps even a fundamental building block of civilization itself.

It brings up the question: what will our search engines look like in 12,012?

Long Now Executive Director and 10,000-year Clock Project Manager Alexander Rose will discuss the ongoing construction of the 10,000-year Clock in western Texas at the Chabot Space & Science Center Friday night, March 16th. He’s appearing at Chabot’s monthly Night School, where,

students of life can explore, imagine, create and mingle in an incredibly inspiring and magical setting. Themes and activities reflect current events, favorite pastimes and playful experiences, each celebrating the unique, resourceful and exciting community of the East Bay.

Get back to school and unleash your inner nerd, spark a new hobby, hobnob with artists and experts, enjoy a show, and relax and contemplate your place in the universe!

The evening includes plenty of futuristic fun & games, music from DC Miggy Pop, several talks, a planetarium show, and more. The hours are 7pm – 11pm & tickets are $12.