Space 2007

Over the past couple years, there has been a great deal of well-deserved public attention on the science of our planet. People like to talk about the hybrid they plan on driving, because a mild level of environmental awareness is trendy and cute – but never mind that humanity is pretty much fucked regardless of your hip choice to emit slightly less greenhouse gas than the worst of us. Because, hey, if you’re driving a hybrid, you’ve single-handedly saved the world.

For whatever reason, though, environmentalism is pretty much the only form of trendy science right now. I want to shoot the shit on something way less depressing and infinitely more awesome: space exploration.

Oh yeah, space. That thing from the 70’s that our parents thought was cool for a while.

If you’re like me, then you haven’t heard much about space since your Astronomy 101 college class a couple years back. But, if you’re like me, then you’ll also be somewhat shocked to learn that shit has been going down and NASA is still trying its hardest to be awesome despite whatever lame political restrictions have been placed upon it.

In a couple weeks, the Pheonix spacecraft is going to launch. I’ll get the one negative out of the way first, which is that a dreaded phrase is attached which has its origins in career politicians who know jack shit about proper science: “low cost.” In other words, it could be better than it is. But that doesn’t stop the Pheonix from being the most kick-ass robot we’ve sent to do galactic battle with Mars’s polar ice caps. If this bitch survives the arduous trek there, it will be the first real opportunity we’ve had to find life on Mars. Yeah, you read right. It’s going to dig into water ice and there is a chance it might happen upon some tiny bacteria which will utterly rock our perception of the universe forever. Of course, more likely is that it finds (or doesn’t) basic organic compounds instead of life, but even that means there is a much greater chance of finding some fucked-up alien worm if we ratchet up our attentions and funding for next time.

There’s more. In exactly one year, two ridiculously sweet space observatories are being launched from a single rocket. One is the Herschel satellite, by the ESA, which will offer an unprecedented look at the universe’s infrared radiation. It sounds a bit lame because it means we won’t get many pretty pictures like we do from the likes of Hubble, but it is potentially infinitely more important: as the Herschel Science Centre says, “it has the potential of discovering the earliest epoch proto-galaxies, revealing cosmologically evolving AGN/starburst symbiosis, and unravelling the mechanisms governing the formation of stars and planetary systems, such as our own.” Translation: fucking wicked. And they’re letting the scientific community have their way with it.

The other machine being deployed on that rocket is the Planck mission. This guy is way cooler than any Transformer, because Transformers can’t see the Cosmic Background Radiation Field. Wikipedia does a decent job of explaining what this is, but I just want to make an extra-super bold-point note as to how important it is to the future of science. Background radiation is one of the long-predicted consequences of the Big Bang, and in recent history we’ve been able to see that it’s there, and measure it to some extent. But the Planck will see it like never before, and this will reveal a wealth of information as to the history of our universe, our place in it, and quite possibly something else besides (study of the radiation can teach us a great deal about energy and subatomic particle physics, the two greatest mysteries of modern science). My best guess is that the observations from the Planck will be combined with information coming from CERN (another machine way better than a Transformer, but outside the scope of the amount of time I feel like spending writing), and all of a sudden we’ll have the theoretical capability to travel time, or space, or communicate instantaneously over hugemongous distances, or reach out to a parallel universe using gravitons.

That shit is way more hip than driving around town using lead-acid batteries half the time.