Author: Alessandra

SMART CATS: INTRODUCING WOLFRAM “WOLFIE” CHETTOH

On By AlessandraIn Cats, Wolfram "Morsy" Chettoh

Wolfie Cheetoh is my favorite – and only – cat. He’s an eleven-year-old male. I love him as a son, even though he often bites and scratches me, barfs on my bed, and claws my sofas to shreds.

In short, a typical cat.

So, why am I blogging about him?

Because I just found out how brilliant he may be. Much more than your average kitty. I just read Calla H. Knopman’s Measure Your Cat’s IQ: Tales from the Devilish Genius to the Feeble-Minded Fuzz Ball. This book is chock full of ideas to estimate your cat’s IQ.

For example, you should notice how he reacts when you feed him. 

Suppose the cat doesn’t eat his food but only stares at it, especially when it’s a vegetarian, biological, green variety. In this case, you’re likely dealing with a “devilish genius.”

More testing is necessary to confirm whether Wolfram “Wolfie” Cheetoh is a real Einstein cat, but he already had a terrific start.

Further assessments of Chetto’s IQ level are available here, here, and here in this blog.

IS THE UNIVERSE AN AWFUL WASTE OF SPACE?

On By AlessandraIn Extrasolar Planets, S.E.T.I.

“The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, it seems like an awful waste of space.” 

This quote is attributed to Carl Sagan from his novel Contact (1985). It is often interpreted as reflecting Sagan’s optimism and belief in the possibility of extraterrestrial life. He strongly advocated for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and believed that the discovery of intelligent life beyond Earth would have profound implications for humanity.

In other words, Sagan suggested that if the Universe is so vast and we are the only intelligent life in it, it would be a shame to waste all that space on just one civilization.

A recent estimate (Conselice C.J. et al. 2016) says the observable Universe contains two trillion – or two million million – galaxies. Of course, this is a huge number, which math buffs can probably better appreciate if I translate it into scientific notation:

two trillion = two million million = one thousand billion = 2 x 1012

Even if we neglect 99.9999% of the Universe and consider only the Milky Way, we are left with a staggering number of about 100 to 400 billion stars.

Of course, these hundreds of billion stars vastly differ in age, mass, and chemical composition.

According to the stellar luminosity function:

A small percentage of stars are massive, young, and very bright (the so-called O, B, and A spectral types, with colors ranging from ultraviolet/white to blue);

A relatively large number of stars are medium-sized (the F and G spectral types, yellow to orange in color). Our “dull” Sun is one of them;

The majority of stars are small, old, low-mass stars (the K, M spectral types, a.k.a. red dwarfs);

Many stars are brown dwarfs (dark, spherical lumps of stellar material that never reached the star stage).

In the last few decades, roughly from the early nineties, it has become known that most, if not all, stars possess planets. Our Sun has eight major ones (excluding the KBOs or Kuiper Belt Objects). The former planet Pluto, now demoted to “dwarf planet,” is one).

Just like stars, planets also show a vast range of types.

I found a helpful classification in Imagined Life: A Speculative Scientific Journey among the Exoplanets in Search of Intelligent Aliens, Ice Creatures, and Supergravity Animals by James S. Trefil and Michael Summers. We can envisage the following kinds of exoplanetary environments as the most promising for alien hunters:

(1) Goldilocks Planets: planets like Earth, located at a distance from their star that allows them to have oceans of liquid water on their surface for extended periods;

(2) Subsurface Ocean Worlds: planets on which oceans of liquid water are bounded below by solid rock and above by ice. Examples in our solar system: the planet Pluto and several moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune);

(3) Rogue Worlds: planets without a parent star. Such planets have been ejected from their solar system of origin and now wander through space. An example is OTS 44, a free-floating planetary-mass object located at 550 light-years, with approximately the mass of Jupiter;

(4) Water Worlds: planets with no dry land at all. That’s what a post-apocalyptic Earth would look like. (See, e.g., Kevin Reynolds’ 1995 movie Waterworld);

(5) Tidally Locked Worlds: planets that always present the same face to their star, much as the Moon does with Earth. Their peculiarity is that one side is perennially hot, while the other is an eternal Antarctica;

(6) Super-Earths: planets whose size falls between Earth and Neptune. Given their mass, the main characteristic of these planets is their intense gravity. Creatures must live in oceans or evolve a strategy to deal with this crushing force. A nice fictionalization of this is Edmond Hamilton‘s Starwolf series (1967-68), where Morgan Chane, the son of a human missionary family, grows up in a heavier-than-Earth world.

If these worlds exist, and there’s a tiny chance some might be inhabited, well… I want to see them. I’ll probably never do it in person (sadly, I’m not an astronaut). However, I can still dream about them, hoping someone will get there someday.

I wish someone to be able to say, just like the replicant Roy Batty in Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie Blade Runner:

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.
Time to die.”

Read more about this topic in this post and this other post.

Great Sci-Fi Novels 1: Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’

On By AlessandraIn Books, Reading, Writing

A compelling SF worldbuilding cannot be done without delivering some backstory at the novel’s beginning. This must be done as early as possible without giving away too much and trying not to bore the readers. 

According to On Writing and Worldbuilding, Volume I, by Timothy Hickson:

“[In] Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone […] J.K. Rowling introduces every major concept and virtually every major character in the story with well-hidden expository writing.”

With all due respect for J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series, I don’t agree that ‘expository writing’ must necessarily be hidden.

I can quote a few great SF classics where a nice chunk of information is in plain view right in the first page’s heading. It may take the form of a journal excerpt, a quotation from an encyclopedia, or even an interview with one of the secondary characters.

Here are a few examples: 

(1) Foundation, Isaac Asimov:

“HARI SELDON— … born in the 11,988th year of the Galactic Era; died 12,069. […] Born to middle-class parents on Helicon, Arcturus sector […].” From the ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA.

And a few lines below, just after the incipit:

“[…] There were nearly twenty-five million inhabited planets on the Galaxy then, and not one but owed allegiance to the Empire whose seat was on Trantor.”

From these few words, the reader can already learn a lot about the tone and setting of the story:

— It’ll be about a Galactic Empire. The plot will unfold in a nation-state encompassing most of the Galaxy’s habitable planets.

In technical jargon, a Galactic Empire is what astronomers call a Kardashev Type III civilization, which is “a civilization in possession of energy on the scale of its galaxy” (M.M. Cirkovic, 2015);

— It’ll be about a long-lasting human civilization. Isaac Asimov’s future human society survived the so-called Great Filter. As explained in the book Exoplanets by Michael Summers and James Trefil:

“[…] there really doesn’t seem to be anything at all special about the way that life developed on Earth, and given the abundance of planets out there, there is no reason that complex life shouldn’t be quite common. On the other hand, from what we know about the process of evolution, we can expect the winners of the evolutionary game on other planets to be no more benevolent than Homo Sapiens. In this case, the [coming] Great Filter is easy to see. Once an aggressive, warlike species discovers science, they are likely to turn their discoveries against one another and, in essence, wipe themselves out. […]”

— It’ll involve interstellar and faster-than-light (FTL) travel. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation is loosely based on Gibbon‘s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In his monumental work, the XVII century English historian stressed Roman roads’ importance in ensuring efficient communications between the central authority and the dozens of provinces of an enormous Empire. The Galactic analog of Roman roads is, of course, hyperspace. Asimov was one of the first SF authors to use this plot device to sidestep the long time required for interstellar journeys.

Find out more about relaying the backstory in a novel in this post and this post.