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Good Nutrition, Radioactive Breakfast Cereal

Posted on June 24, 2023 by Brian H. Gill

Breakfast cereal advertisements: left, Quaker Oats (1906); right; Kellogg's Toasted Corn Flakes (1910s). via Miami U. Libraries - Digital Collections, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, used w/o permission. — Breakfast cereal: wholesome, nutritious, and normally not radioactive. Ads from ca. 1900, left; 1906, right.

I’d prefer living in an America where doctors never used kids as lab animals, and “feeble-minded” folks who were already locked up were not feared by the powers that be.

But I live in a very real America.

We had problems in my youth. We still do.

This is not a perfect country, but on the whole I like being an American: and appreciate living in a country where we are allowed to learn about — and from — our past mistakes.

This week I’m talking about the time a giant of the food industry and a prestigious university dosed kids with radioactive breakfast cereal. I am not making that up.

Looking Back at Fernald State School and a “Science Club”

Daderot's photo: Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA; formerly Walter E. Fernald State School; founded as the Massachusetts School for Idiot and Feeble-Minded Youth. The site is near Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. (August 29, 2010) — Fernald State School: known for radioactive oatmeal and once a leader in America’s eugenics movement.

Back in high school, I was in a science club of sorts. A friend of mine and I had organized the Moorhead Model Rocket Association (MMRA), which lasted until we graduated. And that’s another topic.

Since the MMRA was a science club, lowercase, not part of a school’s activities, we didn’t get the perks bestowed on members of the Fernald State School’s Science Club.

Which was arguably just as well, since those perks included parties, tickets to Red Sox games — FSS was near Boston — and radioactive breakfast cereal.

Special treatment for some boys at Fernald State School started in 1949. By 1953, maybe earlier, their group was called the Science Club.

To their credit, folks running the Fernald State School Science Club asked parents and guardians of the kids for their permission. At the time, that was an outstanding example of obtaining informed consent.

Take this form, sent in 1949, for example:

To the Superintendent of the Walter E. Fernald State School:

This is to state that I give my permission for the participation of in the project mentioned in your letter of______

Witnessed by:

______ [signature]______

Date:______ Relationship ______
(Permission form from Parent to the Superintendent of the Walter E. Fernald State School, 2 November 1949 (“This is to state that I give my permission . . .”), as cited by the Task Force on Human Subject Research, in “A Report on the Use of Radioactive Materials,” appendix B, document 19.)

Just one problem. The letter referenced in the form didn’t mention that the “project” involved radioactive breakfast cereal.

Neither did this one, sent in 1953, giving responsible adults an opportunity to deprive their kids of “a special breakfast” and other perks:

“Dear Parent:

“In previous years we have done some examinations in connection with the nutritional department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with the purposes of helping to improve the nutrition of our children and to help them in general more efficiently than before.

“For the checking up of the children, we occasionally need to take some blood samples, which are then analyzed. The blood samples are taken after one test meal which consists of a special breakfast meal containing a certain amount of calcium. We have asked for volunteers to give a sample of blood once a month for three months, and your son has agreed to volunteer because the boys who belong to the Science Club have many additional privileges. They get a quart of milk daily during that time, and are taken to a baseball game, to the beach and to some outside dinners and they enjoy it greatly.

“I hope that you have no objection that your son is voluntarily participating in this study. The first study will start on Monday, June 8th, and if you have not expressed any objections we will assume that your son may participate.

“Sincerely yours,

“Clemens E. Benda, M.D.

“[Fernald] Clinical Director

“Approved:______

“Malcom J. Farrell, M.D.

“[Fernald] Superintendent
(Second letter from Fernald State School to parents/guardians. Dated May 1953. via “ACHRE Report”, Chapter 7: The Studies at the Fernald School (1995))

The “special breakfasts” were Quaker Oatmeal, laced with radioactive tracers.¹ There was a good reason for that, which will take a little explaining.

Science and Cereal

Quaker Oatmeal was made from oats. Quaker’s competitor, Cream of Wheat, was farina-based.

By 1949, both companies were dealing both with competition from sugary breakfast cereals and nutrition-conscious customers.

Back in the 1940s, some research had apparently showed that phytic acid inhibits absorption of iron.

I tried tracking that down, but the closest I found was a 1948 study of phytic acid and calcium; and that’s yet another topic.

Anyway, oats has phytic acid, farina doesn’t, so Quaker’s funded their own research.

And that’s why Quaker Oats, MIT and the Fernald State School fed special kids radioactive breakfast cereal.

More precisely, they ate oatmeal made from oats coated with radioactive iron tracers;² which isn’t quite as dreadful as it sounds.

Zombies and Mutants, Radon and the Minnesota Department of Health

Films like “Creature with the Atom Brain” and “The Damned” show that radioactivity leads to zombies and spooky mutants.

That’s cinema. This week I’m talking about real life, where ambient or background radiation is — well, it’s in the background, pretty much everywhere.

Natural background radiation varies, depending on place: and in some cases, time. Minnesota homes, for example, have about three times as much radon in our air as the American average.

That, along with ‘you should get tested’ advice from the Minnesota Department of Health, has produced a market for radon testing gadgets and services.

Right now, there’s evidence that overly-high radon levels and lung cancer coincide. But I don’t let that bother me. We live in an old farmhouse that’s now in Sauk Centre. Our main concern is keeping heating bills down by plugging leaks.

Some background radiation comes from stuff that we do. Oddly enough, coal-burning power plants give off more radionuclides than nuclear plants.

Getting back to radioactive tracers, the idea of tracking radioactive substances in living plants and animals goes back at least to George de Hevesy’s 1913 experiments.

Joseph Hamilton tracked human digestion with radioactive sodium in 1937.³

In 1949, when the Quaker-Fernald-MIT experiments started, radioactive tracers were still part of a new and exciting field.

We’ve learned quite a bit since then. Including how little we know (for sure) about exactly where radioactivity’s safe limits are.

Good News, Bad News and Flexible Ethics

Results of the Fernald State School, Massachusetts, radioactive breakfast experiments could have been much worse.

For one thing, the subjects survived.

For another, decades later, a Massachusetts state panel said that the Massachusetts state institution hadn’t saddled any of them with long-term health problems.

That’s plausible, since the boys absorbed 170 to 330 millirems of radiation. That’s roughly the equivalent of receiving 30 consecutive chest x-rays. (A millirem is a thousandth of a rem. Rem, roentgen equivalent man, is a unit used for measuring low radiation doses.)

And, as an added bonus, one of the experiments involving radioactive calcium tracers provided data for later osteoporosis research.⁴

That’s the good news.

“A Disappointing Type of Feeling”, “‘This is Their Debt to Society'”

The bad news is that Fernald State School was not a nice place to live. Not for the boys.

Some of them (allegedly) lived with cognitive impairments.

Others were boys who had been discarded for one reason or another.

That bad news was also good news for researchers with flexible ethics.

One of the problems faced by enthusiastic researchers was that the American public was generally squeamish about using no-account boys as lab animals,

But, by following the ‘what they don’t know won’t hurt me’ principle, important people could publish in professional journals and stay safely under the radar.

Usually. I’ll get back to that.

Returning to good news, Fred Boyce — one of the Fernald test subjects — had a pretty good memory:

“…Conditions at the school were often brutal; staff deprived boys of meals, forced them to do manual labor and abused them. Boyce, who lived there after being abandoned by his family, was eager to join the Science Club. He hoped the scientists, in their positions of authority, might see the mistreatment and put an end to it.

“‘We didn’t know anything at the time,’ Boyce said of the experiments. ‘We just thought we were special.’ Learning the truth about the club felt like a deep betrayal….

“…But for Boyce, the pain of abuse lingers. ‘It’s a funny type of animosity. It’s a disappointing type of feeling,’ he said of the researchers who had the opportunity to help, but instead took advantage of students in need.”
(“A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Radioactive Oatmeal Go Down“, Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian Magazine (March 8, 2017) [emphasis mine])

“I won’t tell you now about the severe physical and mental abuse, but I can assure you, it was no Boys’ Town. The idea of getting consent for experiments under these conditions was not only cruel but hypocritical. They bribed us by offering us special privileges, knowing that we had so little that we would do practically anything for attention; and to say, I quote, ‘This is their debt to society,’ end quote, as if we were worth no more than laboratory mice, is unforgivable.”
(ACHRE Report, Chapter 7: The Studies at the Fernald School. footnote 92 (1995))

“Unforgivable” is a rather strong term, but I sympathize with Mr. Boyce.

Folks running the Fernand State School had one sort of authority. The scientists who made use of the institution’s experimental subjects had another. Both decided that using the subjects as if they were “no more than laboratory mice”.

That was a very bad idea. The problem, by the way, wasn’t that someone had authority.

We need folks with authority — legitimate authority — if we want an approximation of a well-ordered and prosperous society. Legitimate authority works for the common good of the group it runs. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1897-1898, 1903)

Wrapping up the Fernand thing, a quick recap of its aliases:⁵

1848 — Operated as the Experimental School for Teaching and Training Idiotic Children at the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind
1850 — Incorporated as the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Youth by the state of Massachusetts
1883 — Renamed Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded
1925 — Renamed Walter E. Fernald State School
1993 — Renamed Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center

Change and Constants

Photo from 'Souvenir Album of American cities: Catholic Churches of Cincinnati and Hamilton County' (1896): Good Samaritan Hospital, operated by Sisters of Charity. — Good Samaritan Hospital, Cincinnati, late 1800s.

Change happens. A “School for Teaching and Training Idiotic Children” became a “State School” and a “Developmental Center” before releasing its final resident in 2014.

I thought I was done with Fernald for this week, but this ties in with the “change” thing:

“…On a Saturday in early January 1942, the Fernald received a communiqué from the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health titled ‘DIRECTIONS FROM DEPARTMENT OF MENTAL HEALTH REGARDING ENEMY ALIENS.’

“The document cited the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s guidelines for carrying out orders from President Roosevelt to identify and detain German, Italian, and Japanese-born Americans as enemy aliens. It then instructed the school’s staff to restrict the movement of eight Italian-born patients and one Italian American staff person mistakenly believed to be a resident. All of them were now considered enemy aliens of the U.S. government.

“The letter is the first ever uncovered that proves people with disabilities who were in the permanent care of the state were specifically targeted as enemy aliens during World War II. It is a perplexing document, demanding the confinement of people whose movements were already restricted.…”
(“‘Enemies’ with Disabilities“, “Eight Italian Americans, the Fernald School, and the government’s watchful eye during World War II.” Alex Green, Roundtable, Lapham’s Quarterly (June 4, 2018)) [emphasis mine]

I don’t see that document as particularly “perplexing”, partly because I’m not exactly “American” — by some standards.

Irish Attitudes

My ancestors spent a long time in northwestern Europe, but I’m not “Anglo”.

There’s a lot of Irish in me, due to a young Irishman who came sniffing around the daughter of a decent American family.

As another of my ancestors said “he doesn’t have family, he’s Irish”.

But the kids got married anyway, and that eventually led to me.

My mother was Norwegian, by the way: five-foot-nothing with curly black hair. Not one of those blonde giants.

Small wonder I’m not overly concerned with “racial purity”. Or eugenics, and that’s almost another topic.

One point I’m trying to make is that different eras have different quirks.

Some of those quirks are just quirky: nothing basically wrong with them, like bell bottom pants or cat videos. Others aren’t quite so harmless. like assuming that someone with the wrong sort of parents is an enemy of the state.

Individuals have quirks, too. And, again, some are harmless.

Others: well, there’s Dr. Roberts Bartholow, a doctor with Cincinnati’s Good Samaritan Hospital. Mary Rafferty, Irish and a servant, came to the hospital in 1874.

Someone diagnosed a lesion on her head as cancer, Dr. Bartholow figured she’d die of cancer, so he stuck wires in her brain, recorded what happened when he zapped her, and published results of his research.

Even though this was 1874 and Ms. Rafferty wasn’t of English ancestry, some doctors said Dr. Bartholow hadn’t acted properly. Even the American Medical Association said so.⁶

Eugenics and Me

Eugenics sounded like a good idea: improving the race, making humanity just ever so much brighter and better.

Basically and briefly, America’s self-described best and brightest thought that eugenics was the best thing since sliced bread: which wasn’t invented until 1912, so you know how progressive the idea was.

Cleansing humanity’s gene pool hit a serious public relations snag after WWII. That’s yet again another topic, for another time.

As eugenics relates to the Fernand State School, folks with “cognitive impairments” were high on the list of folks who needed to be weeded out.

I’m not overly keen on the idea. Partly because I think eugenics is a bad idea. (Catechism, 2268)

And partly because I can’t reasonably support efforts to prevent people like me.

I was born with defective hips, and might have been labeled as cognitively impaired.

I’m not, but I do have a number of neurological glitches. Including but not limited to ADHD and ASD.⁷

I’m not particularly stupid, but odd things can happen when I don’t pay attention.

A case in point: during a recent (by my standards) hospital visit, I was given a brief and routine cognitive test. I’d let my attention wander for at least one question, and as a result the test showed that I’m borderline retarded. Or whatever the current euphemism is.

Happily, this is Sauk Center, I’ve lived here for decades and talk like a professor.

But that experience encourages a certain caution with regards to assertions that some kid who isn’t from a ‘nice family’ is a few bricks short of a full hod.

‘What They Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Me’?

I talked about my defective hips back in March, but they’re involved with a case of the ‘what they don’t know won’t hurt me’ principle and staying under the radar .

Besides, Mr. Boyce’s “…as if we were worth no more than laboratory mice…” remark reminded me of my parents’ experience with an alternatively-ethical doctor.

I was born in 1951. A doctor correctly diagnosed my congenital hip dysplasia. Maybe he figured I was a hopeless case, doomed to a defective life. Or maybe he saw me as a dandy test subject. Either way, he didn’t tell my parents.

“…Instead, he had them bring me in at intervals to see what my hips were doing.

“He made notes about what happens when hip dysplasia isn’t treated. Then he wrote a learned paper on the subject. His paper was published in a medical journal. A copy of the journal wound up in a college library’s collection.

“That’s where my father read the doctor’s learned paper.

“My mother intercepted him before he reached the doctor. She said, ‘no, I will speak with him.’ Which she did. And never shared what they discussed.

“The doctor disappeared a few days later. Maybe it would have been more humane to have let an enraged Irishman conduct the interview….”
(“COVID-19, Cells, Viruses and mRNA Vaccines”, Trust and Prudence, (December 5, 2020))

Again, I don’t know what that doctor was thinking. I can guess, though, at why he apparently didn’t see a problem with (1) letting a crippled baby go untreated and (2) writing about his actions for a medical journal.

This was the early 1950s.

Doctors were among the “elite” — the ‘better sort’ — who might have little contact with the masses, other than that which their profession demanded. He may not have realized that a non-doctor might read one of “his” professional publications.

Mindsets

Today’s America is not an ideal society.

Neither was the America I grew up in.

“…John Lantos, a pediatrician at University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine and expert in medical ethics, says the experiments were indicative of America’s post-war mindset. ‘Technology was good, we were the leaders, we were the good guys, so anything we did could not be bad,’ he says. It wasn’t until the ’70s, after the Tuskegee study, that Congress passed federal regulation requiring a specific kind of oversight.’…”
(“A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Radioactive Oatmeal Go Down“, Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian Magazine (March 8, 2017))

I remember when an increasing number of folks were realizing that the Hollywood blacklist was a bad idea.

I think today’s “cancel culture” is a problem, too. But I also figure we’ll eventually remember that “free to agree with me” isn’t “free”.⁸

Eugenics was and is a bad idea. Even if ‘improving the race’ has given way to slogans like ‘quality lifestyle’ and ‘every child a wanted child’.

It doesn’t feel like good news, but I see reason for hope in today’s frantic headlines.

I remember seeing the same sort of thing back in my youth.

Supporters of The Establishment were watching their world crumble around them, and not taking it at all well.

I think America is going through a similar spasm of clarity. Today’s Establishment has different slogans and somewhat different preferences. But I see the same old unwillingness to let ‘not one of us’ folks speak their minds.

I emphatically am not looking forward to the impending presidential election’s pandemonium, and that’s still another topic.

More, including why I think “medical ethics” isn’t necessarily an oxymoron:

“Edited Twins, Genetic Engineering and Bioethics“
(March 11, 2023)
“Euthanasia for the Mentally Ill: Not a Good Idea?“
(January 18, 2023)
“Couney’s Baby Incubators vs. the Progressive Era“
(February 8, 2021)
“Smoke and Monkeys“
(February 2, 2018)
“Bioethics and a Three-Parent Baby“
(October 7, 2016)

¹ Baseball and a ‘Bedlam’ near Boston:

Wikipedia
- Boston Red Sox
- Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center
“A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Radioactive Oatmeal Go Down“
“When MIT and Quaker Oats paired up to conduct experiments on unsuspecting young boys”
Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian Magazine (March 8, 2017)
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments — Final Report — DOE Openness: Human Radiation Experiments (on DOE Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security, Office of Health and Safety Archived Website)
- ACHRE Report Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments; 1726 M Street, N.W., Suite 600; Washington, D.C. (1995)
  - Chapter 7: The Studies at the Fernald School
  - Chapter 7: Footnotes, 84
“History of the Walter E. Fernald Development Center“
Marie E. Daly, City of Waltham, Massachusetts (written in 2004 or later)

² “Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs”, which I didn’t discuss this week:

Wikipedia
“A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Radioactive Oatmeal Go Down“
“When MIT and Quaker Oats paired up to conduct experiments on unsuspecting young boys”
Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian Magazine (March 8, 2017)
PubMed Central (PMC)
- Phytic acid degradation as a means of improving iron absorption, Richard F Hurrell, International Journal for Vitamin and Nutrition Research (November 2004)
- The effect of bread rich in phytate phosphorus on the metabolism of certain mineral salts with special reference to calcium; A. R. P. Walker, F. W. Fox, J. T. Irving; Biochemical Journal (received September 4, 1947; published 1948) via The Biochemical Society
Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs
The Calvin and Hobbes Wiki, fandom.com

³ Sience, sense and nonsense:

Wikipedia
George de Hevesy
Atomic Heritage Foundation, National Museum of Nuclear Science & History
minnesota radon testing (personalized elements of search string were removed: your results may and probably will vary from mine)
Google search
Radon in Homes
Minnesota Department of Health
Terrestrial Radioactivity and Gamma-ray Exposure in the United States and Canada
Joseph S. Duval, John M. Carson, Peter B. Holman, Arthur G. Darnley; USGS, prepared in cooperation with the Geological Survey of Canada (first posted December 12, 2005; revised October 1, 2009)
“From Radioisotopes to Medical Imaging, History of Nuclear Medicine Written at Berkeley“
Jeffery Kahn, Science Articles Archive, Berkeley Labs (September 9, 1996)

⁴ Science and consequences:

Wikipedia
- Roentgen equivalent man (rem, millirem)
- Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center
“A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Radioactive Oatmeal Go Down“
“When MIT and Quaker Oats paired up to conduct experiments on unsuspecting young boys”
Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian Magazine (March 8, 2017)
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments — Final Report — DOE Openness: Human Radiation Experiments (on DOE Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security, Office of Health and Safety Archived Website)
- ACHRE Report Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments; 1726 M Street, N.W., Suite 600; Washington, D.C. (1995)
  - Chapter 7: The Studies at the Fernald School

⁵ Details:

Wikipedia
- Cognitive impairment
- Walter E. Fernald Developmental Center
Admission and discharge registers, 1851-1995
Massachusetts Archives (April 18, 2017)
“A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Radioactive Oatmeal Go Down“
“When MIT and Quaker Oats paired up to conduct experiments on unsuspecting young boys”
Lorraine Boissoneault, Smithsonian Magazine (March 8, 2017)
“America’s Deep, Dark Secret“
Rebecca Leung, 60 Minutes (April 29, 2004)
Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments — Final Report — DOE Openness: Human Radiation Experiments (on DOE Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security, Office of Health and Safety Archived Website)
- ACHRE Report Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments; 1726 M Street, N.W., Suite 600; Washington, D.C. (1995)
  - Chapter 7: The Studies at the Fernald School
  - Chapter 7: Footnotes, 88, 92
Walter E. Fernald State School
Social Networks and Archival Context (snaccooperative.org)

⁶ It can (and occasionally does) happen here:

Wikipedia
“‘Enemies’ with Disabilities“
“Eight Italian Americans, the Fernald School, and the government’s watchful eye during World War II.”
Alex Green, Roundtable, Lapham’s Quarterly (June 4, 2018)

⁷ Taking eugenics personally:

Wikipedia
What can I say? I’m a bit glitchy
- “A Prescription, Disorders, Conformity and Culture” (May 20, 2023)
  - “Reefer Madness”, “Frankenfish” and Me

⁸ Living in an imperfect world:

Wikipedia
Freedom of expression, my take and history
- “Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus,” Freedom, Censorship and Speculation” (September 10, 2022)
  - But Publishing May Require Permission

Posted in Discursive Detours, Journal, Science News | Tagged America, bioethics, education, eugenics, getting a grip, history, science | Leave a comment

NASA, UAPs, UFOs and a Bart Simpson Balloon

Posted on June 17, 2023 by Brian H. Gill

NRAO (National Radio Astronomy Observatory)'s photo: the Very Large Array, a radio observatory with 27 radio antennas in a Y-shaped configuration on the Plains of San Agustin, 50 miles west of Socorro, New Mexico. (ca. 2008) — NRAO’s Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico.

It’s been two and a half weeks since NASA’s “Public Meeting on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena” aired on YouTube. Or is that streamed on YouTube? Never mind.

The NASA panelists did not announce contact with an extraterrestrial diplomat, or admit that they’ve been holding space aliens captive. So some of the folks who were contributing to the video’s live chat were profoundly disappointed.

The panelists did, however, discuss what Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) means, how they’ll be collecting and analyzing data, and answered some questions.

Ideally, I’d have listened to all four hours of the meeting, pondered its content, and would now be sharing the highlights. That didn’t happen.

But I did catch bits and pieces of the video: mostly during the last hour.

So I’ll be talking about that today, focusing on a former pilot and astronaut’s experience: along with flying saucers, ball lightning and (very briefly) space aliens.

Maybe I’ll listen to the whole video later this month. Or, more likely, next month.

Either way, I’ll almost certainly have more to say about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena studies and the ongoing search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

A UFO that Wasn’t — or — Flying Saucer Down

USAF 388th Range Sqd., Genesis Mission, NASA's photo: Genesis sample return capsule, after crash landing in Utah. (2004) — Somewhere in the Utah desert, a crashed spacecraft: one of ours. (2004)

September 8, 2004, 16:55 UTC.: A saucer-shaped spacecraft entered Earth’s atmosphere over northern Oregon and streaked across the sky toward Utah. Chased by helicopters, it crashed in the Dugway Proving Ground.

One team of specialists rushed the wreckage to a government laboratory, while others removed evidence from the crash site.

So far, this could be part of a movie: something along the lines of “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers”, “Fearful Attack of the Flying Saucers”, “Hangar 18” or “The Andromeda Strain”.

But it’s not.

The Genesis mission’s sample return capsule was literally a flying — or, more accurately, falling — saucer.

But the sample return capsule was not a UFO, an Unidentified Flying Object.

Its return was planned, so when it streaked across the skies of Oregon and Utah it was an identified flying — or, again, falling — object.¹

I gather that “UFO” or “UFOB” started as a term the United States Air Force used as a label for an object that’s airborne and doesn’t look or act like a known aircraft. Or bird.

(Air Force Regulation 200-2, Unidentified Flying Objects Reporting (August 12, 1954 version) via Wikisource)

“…2. Definitions
“a. Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOB) relates to any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object.
“b. Familiar Objects – Include balloons, astronomical bodies, birds, and so forth….”

That was then, this is now. “UFO” still means something in the air that doesn’t look or act like a familiar object.

But I suspect that for a great many folks, “UFO” means “flying saucer”: and reminds them of tabloid headlines they’ve seen in supermarket checkout lines.

Although, now that I think of it, it’s been some time since I saw an “ALIEN ABDUCTION!” headline. Or one about an Elvis sighting, and that’s another topic.

“Flying Saucers” and Explanations: 1947

Or maybe not so much.

Whether news media promoted the 1947 flying disc craze, or passively reported it, the fact is that “flying discs” were in the news that summer.

At some point, I don’t know exactly when, “flying discs” became “flying saucers”. “FLYING SAUCERS” were headline material at least as early as July 6, 1947.

What was behind the flurry of flying saucer sightings during the summer of 1947 depends on who’s talking.

Experts said it was mass hysteria, or some other psychosocial malady.

Some folks said they were from outer space. Others, who worked with aircraft, said the UFOs might be jets or other experimental aircraft. Or maybe meteors.

An anonymous “noted scientist” allegedly said the flying disks were from atomic research. The inevitable powerful preachers and wannabe prophets went into doomsday mode. Folks with more sophisticated styles spoke of matters esoteric and etheric.²

Human Nature, Congress and “Mass Hysteria”

I’m inclined more toward defaulting to ‘natural phenomena’ explanations, and accepting that some observed phenomena don’t have obvious explanations.

Assuming that folks who saw something I didn’t were experiencing “mass hysteria”?

That’s not an appealing notion: partly because I’ve noticed that “mass hysteria” is something that allegedly happens to folks who aren’t high on the socioeconomic scale.

Like the workers in a dressmaking factory who said they’d been bitten by bugs in an infested fabric shipment.

That was in 1962.

An etymologist didn’t find bugs, and most of the workers were women.³ Mass hysteria? Social contagion? Too-tiny bugs? I don’t know.

Quite a bit’s changed in the 76 years since 1947. But from what I see, human nature and the news haven’t.

“UFO Whistleblower, Meet a Conspiracy-Loving Congress“
“Fresh claims from a former US intelligence officer about an ‘intact’ alien craft may get traction on Capitol Hill, where some lawmakers want to believe.”
Matt Laslo, Security, Wired (June 13, 2023)
“Did Night Vision Footage Show ’10ft Alien’ From Las Vegas UFO Crash Report?“
Yevgeny Kuklychev, Newsweek (June 12, 2023)
“We are not alone: The UFO whistleblower speaks“
“Former intelligence officer makes claims of potential extraterrestrial life”
“Whistleblower: U.S. has ‘quite a number’ of ‘non-human’ vehicles”
“David Grusch: ‘We’re definitely not alone'”
Andy Gipson, Miguel Sancho, Zoë Lake, Dana Leavitt, Ross Coulthart; NewsNationn (June 11, 2023)

NASA’s UAP Meeting: Reactions and a Bart Simpson Balloon

NASA photo and text from UAP landing page: 'Members of the Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team gather for a public meeting in May 2023. Back row, left to right: Walter Scott, Warren Randolph, Reggie Brothers, Shelley Wright, Scott Kelly, Anamaria Berea, Mike Gold. Front row, left to right: Nadia Drake, Paula Bontempi, Federica Bianco, David Grinspoon, Karlin Toner, Josh Semeter, Jennifer Bus, David Spergel, Dan Evans.' (May 31, 2023, screenshot taken June 13, 2023

My hat’s off to NASA, for devoting four hours of their NASA Video channel to the UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) Q&A public panel meeting. (May 31, 2023)

Not everyone feels that way. Someone using YouTube’s live chat feature said the meeting was a massive waste of time and money.

I can see the ‘waste of time and money’ viewpoint, since the 16 panelists could have been doing other parts of their jobs for that half-day. And so could the technical crew.

The quality of public participation, reflected in YouTube’s live chat, would be another reason for seeing this sort of meeting as unproductive, at best. Take these cherry-picked comments, for example:

“Public Meeting on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (Official NASA Broadcast)“
NASA Video, YouTube (May 31, 2023)
Top Chat Replay (excerpts copied June 15, 2023, usernames redacted)

“…fake nasa data…
“…END THE TRUTH EMBARGO…
“…NASA IS A JOKE…
“…What a waste of Americans’ tax money, glad am not an American…
“…aliens are real but we still have not got the data and we cannot say because we are being told to keep quiet
“yep. listen to zach folks. there is a few black operations……FACT…
“…Then why was the transiting plane not moving like that ?…
“…they are not Ours . they are trying to Pass the UAP buck and we will not have it…
“…Please watch Mars Attacks! – it is based on real events…
“…I just want to know how these things fly, and who is making them and how…
“…aliens came to free Kurdistan…
“…NASA is full of schizos, they should all get fired ASAP…
“…why do people want it to be an alien ship?…
“…It looked like the three dots were on the lens of the camera that was moving….
“…Can a World Government and a New World Order protect us from the Aliens?…”
[emphasis mine}

I’m pretty sure that some folks participating in the video’s chat weren’t serious, and that some were raising what they saw as valid questions.

I think one of the valid questions was “…why do people want it to be an alien ship?”

I know why I’d like solid evidence that we’ve got neighbors.

But my reasons may not line up with those of folks who insist that nefarious schemes are afoot, preventing us from learning that “aliens are real”.

“May not line up”?

Make that don’t line up, since I don’t “believe in” space aliens who are just simply itching to fix our problems. And I’m not at all convinced that shape-shifting space-alien lizard-men are even now plotting against us. Although it’d make a good story.⁴

Virginia Beach UFO, Identified: a Bart Simpson Balloon

(Four-hour video, playback with Scott Kelly’s remarks starts at about 2:52:00)

Maybe “seeing is believing”, but I think verifying what’s seen is a very good idea.

Mainly because seeing something a second time may yield different results.

Pilot and astronaut Scott Kelly’s “UFO encounter” is a case in point.

“Public Meeting on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (Official NASA Broadcast)“
NASA Video, YouTube (May 31, 2023) (excerpt from remarks by Scott Kelly, astronaut; my transcription)

“…the environment that we fly in … [is] very, very conducive to optical illusions. So I get it, why these pilots would … think it was going very fast. I remember one time I was flying in the warning areas off of Virginia Beach … my RIO thought, the guy in the back of the Tomcat, was convinced we flew by a UFO. So, I didn’t see it, We turned around, we went to go look at it, it turns out it was Bart Simpson, a balloon….”

Our brains are very good at spotting patterns: so good that sometimes we see patterns that aren’t there.

Sometimes, as in Scott Kelly’s experience, observers can get a second look. But sometimes, as with observations of Martian canals, we must wait until we get better data.⁵

Aliens and Alchemy, Attitudes and Assumptions

NASA UAP panel meeting agenda: 'NASA Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Independent Study Team Public Meeting'. (May 31, 2023, screenshot taken June 13, 2023

Again, I think verifying data is a good idea. And I think that eyewitness accounts, are, by their nature, not completely reliable.

That’s not even close to believing either that no eyewitness accounts contain any useful observations, or that any data supporting a particular conclusion must be false.

The UAP public meeting’s Top Chat comments often rang the changes on “aliens are real”. “Aliens are real” is a whacking great assumption, with little to no supporting data. So far.

On the other hand, I gather that some — not all — scientists assume that extraterrestrial spacecraft must not be near Earth. And, therefore, that anyone who presents data which might be evidence of an extraterrestrial spacecraft must be a fool, a fraud, or both.

Given how loud “aliens are real” folks can be, and their newsworthiness, I can see how a scientist might adopt a “my mind is made up, don’t confuse me with facts” attitude.

But I think that lumping serious research in with crackpot enthusiasm isn’t a good idea.

That would make as much sense as dismissing chemistry as “alchemy”. Particularly since alchemy was serious research until non-grifter alchemists rebranded their studies as “chemistry”.⁶ And that’s yet another topic.

I don’t “believe in” or “not believe in” space aliens. I also think that we don’t know everything there is to know about natural phenomena on and near Earth.

So I agree with Nicola Fox. Harassing or stigmatizing folks who study currently-unknown phenomena is a bad idea.

“…Before I begin, I want to echo Dan’s words that it is disheartening to hear of the harassment our panelists have faced online all because they are studying this topic. NASA stands behind our panelists and we do not tolerate abuse. Harassment only leads to further stigmatization of the UAP field, significantly hindering the scientific progress and discouraging others to study this important subject matter. Your harassment also obstructs the public’s right to knowledge. Our panelists are leading experts in the scientific, aeronautics, and data analytics communities. We are very lucky to have them onboard to share their invaluable insights to inform NASA on what possible data could be collected in the future, and how it can be collected, to help us better explain the nature of UAP….”
(Nicola Fox Remarks UAP Independent Study Meeting May 31, (May 31, 2023) from NASA transcript)

“The Language of Scientists is Data”

One more excerpt from NASA’s UAP pages, and I’ll start wrapping this up.

A major takeaway here is that understanding the unknown requires data: what this NASA resource calls “high-quality observations”.

UAP FAQs
Science Mission Directorate, NASA

“1 Will NASA be referring to UAP as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena?
To be consistent with the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), NASA will be calling UAP ‘Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena’ instead of ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’. NASA’s UAP independent study will be largely focused on aerial phenomena.

“2 Why is NASA involved with studying UAP?
Exploring the unknown in space and the atmosphere is at the heart of who we are. The nature of science is to better understand the unknown – but the language of scientists is data. The limited number of high-quality observations of unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP, currently makes it impossible to draw scientific conclusions about the nature of such events. Without access to an extensive set of data, it is nearly impossible to verify or explain any observation, thus the focus of the study is to inform NASA what possible data could be collected in the future to shed light on UAP. NASA is commissioning the UAP Independent Study Team to examine unidentified anomalous phenomena from a scientific perspective – with a focus on how NASA can use data and the tools of science to move our understanding forward….”

A is for Anomalous

Ball lightning entering through a chimney, from Hartwig's 'The Aerial World'. (1886) — “Globe of fire descending into a room.” From Dr. Georg Hartwig’s “The Aerial World”. (1886)

Something I like about the focus of UAP studies is — well, their lack of focus.

Analyzing data from anomalous phenomena won’t be easy. Particularly since I suspect that scientists won’t know what to make of what they’re studying. Not at first, anyway.

But I think it will be worthwhile. Maybe not in terms of developing new consumer products, and I’m wandering off-topic again.

Although predicting what UAP studies will uncover is an exercise in futility, that won’t stop me from speculating.

I remember when ball lightning was (allegedly) something reported by superstitions yokels. Which, in some cases, it probably was. It’s still a phenomena that lacks a thorough scientific explanation, but at least now it is recognized as something that’s real.

And maybe now we’ll collect enough data — “high-quality data” — to work out what makes those luminous ‘it isn’t either lightning or St. Elmo’s fire’ spheres.

I’ve already seen something like that happen.

There was a time when reporting lights shooting up from thunderheads was a good way to get classed as unstable and/or a drug user. Then a scientist with the University of Minnesota recorded sprites with a videocam.

To their credit, the scientific community did not close ranks and declare that videocams were hallucinating; or maybe doing drugs.

I don’t think that would have been likely, actually. Although individual scientists can be as daft as anyone else, as a group they’re quite interested in facts.

So now we’ve got a pretty good notion as to what thunderstorm sprites are: a sort of cold plasma phenomena, a bit like fluorescent lamps. Only naturally occurring.

Seriously Seeking Something Odd

Studying data that doesn’t quite fit into “we already know about this” categories might end the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Then again, it might not.

An argument against our having neighbors in this universe is that we’ve been scanning radio frequencies for artificial signals for decades: and come up with nothing.

Maybe the frequency range of the electromagnetic spectrum we call radio waves is the only way anyone could send messages between stars.

But if it’s not, looking for “anomalous phenomena” — something odd — that we weren’t expecting might start a conversation with folks who aren’t human.

Or, like I said, maybe not.

“…A Mighty Soberin’ Thought”

Walt Kelly's Pogo (June 20, 1959) via WIST, used w/o permission. — Pork Pine, pondering implications of extraterrestrial intelligence. (June 1959)

Those three panels from Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” comic strip make a good point.

Right now, we’ve got reasons for thinking that people who aren’t human might be living on some other planet.

But we don’t have solid evidence that any sort of life exists on other worlds, let alone the sort of living creatures we are.

Whether we are alone in this universe, or share it with others: as Porky Pine said, “ether [sic] way, it’s a mighty soberin’ thought”.

Now, the usual links:

“Trace Signals From an Alien Civilization: Not So FAST?“
(June 25, 2022)
“Space Aliens: Perceptions, Assumptions“
(April 10, 2021)
“Seeking Strange New Worlds, Life and Civilizations“
(January 16, 2021)
“Oxygen, Alien Life“
(February 23, 2018)
“Alien Life: Notions and Research“
(January 5, 2018)

¹ History and movies:

Wikipedia
NASA/JPL
- “Flying Saucer Crash Lands in Utah Desert ” (November 4, 2018)
- End of Mission Wrap Up, GENESIS Search for Origins (last updated November 2009)

² More history and “mass hysteria”:

Wikipedia
- 1947 flying disc craze
- Cold War
- Flight 105 UFO sighting
- Mass psychogenic illness (mass hysteria)
- Psychosocial hypothesis
- Social psychology
- UFO religion
psycholsocial
Dictionary.com

³ More of the same:

Wikipedia
- 1947 flying disc craze
- Mass psychogenic illness (mass hysteria)
- Psychosocial hypothesis

⁴ The silly and the serious:

Wikipedia

⁵ Eyewitnesses, observations and collecting data:

Wikipedia
NASA
- UAP, Science Mission Directorate
  - Files relating to May 31, 2023, meeting
- “Public Meeting on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (Official NASA Broadcast)“
  NASA Video, YouTube (May 31, 2023)
seeing is believing
Idioms by The Free Dictionary

⁶ Science and a scientist:

Wikipedia
- History of chemistry
- Nicola Fox (NASA Science Mission Directorate Associate Administrator)
- Science Mission Directorate

⁷ A very quick look at:

Wikipedia
- Ball lightning
- Cumulonimbus cloud (thunderhead)
- Fluorescent lamp
- Kugelblitz (German/deutsche Sprache)
- Lightning strike
- Sprite (lightning)
- St. Elmo’s fire

Posted in Exoplanets and Aliens, Science News, Series | Tagged extraterrestrial intelligence, extraterrestrial life, history, science, truth | 2 Comments

WASP-18 b and Other Wonderfully Weird WASP Worlds

Posted on June 10, 2023 by Brian H. Gill

K. Miller/IPAC's artist's concept: WASP-18 b, a gas giant exoplanet 10 times more massive than Jupiter, with day side temperatures up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, 2,700 C. (May 31, 2023) — WASP-18 b: a hot Jupiter with an unexpectedly cool twilight zone. An artist’s concept. (2023)

When I started writing this, I’d planned on talking about WASP-18 b, a hot Jupiter: how we’ve found water in its atmosphere, and something odd about the planet’s temperature on the edge of its sunlit side.

Down the Rabbit Hole: Exoplanet Designations and Cosmic Scale

As I said, my plan for this week was talking about what scientists are learning about WASP-18 b.

Then I typed WASP-18 b into Google Search and noticed Google’s occasionally-helpful “People also ask” snippet feature.

People also ask
- How big is WASP 18b?
- How was WASP 18b discovered?
- Why is WASP-17 B odd?
- Does WASP-12b still exist?

The last two, “Why is WASP-17 B odd? and “Does WASP-12b still exist?”, aren’t about WASP-18 b.

So I started looking up WASP, WASP-12, WASP-17, and related topics.¹

My powers of concentration are just fine. Their focus, however, often jumps the tracks, or forgets that there are tracks.

I could complain about Google Search pushing me down a rabbit hole, but I won’t.

Instead, I’ll count them as helpful, since they give me an excuse to talk about weird worlds and exoplanet designations.

Plus, I eventually got around to the “People also ask” list. And, more to the point, a little of what we’re learning about WASP-18 b.

Astronomical Designations: A Discursive Digression

Back in the day, some of the few thousand visible stars had names.

That worked fine, and still does.

Although things get tricky when a discussion involves Thuban, Zǐ Wēi Yòu Yuán yī and Alpha Draconis. All of which are the same star.

Bayer designations, starting in 1603, helped; and that’s another topic.

The good news is that designations for most stars are fairly consistent: thanks partly to the IAU (International Astronomical Union).

And partly to generations of astronomers, frustrated from dealing with star catalogs assembled by many individuals, with little if any concern for cross-catalog consistency.²

Exoplanet designations, although somewhat standardized, are new. So the designation standards don’t quite fit the reality of some exoplanets.

First Known Exoplanets

We didn’t know for sure that there really were exoplanets until 1992.

That’s when two planets orbiting a pulsar were confirmed as being real.

They’ve got assorted designations, but at least there’s only one name for each:

Poltergeist
- PSR B1257+12 c
- PSR B1257+12 B
Phobetor
- PSR B1257+12 d
- PSR B1257+12 C

Some of the pulsar’s planets were first detected in 1988 or maybe 1990. Then the Arecibo Observatory confirmed that the planets were real in 1992.³ Probably.

PSR B1257 et cetera’s muddled designations and jumbled history may be due to their being the first confirmed exoplanets.

We’ve been learning a lot since then.

A Circumbinary Planet’s (allegedly) Impractical and Unworkable Designation

For example, there’s PSR B1620-26 b.

It’s (probably) a gas giant, about two and a half times Jupiter’s mass, orbiting a pulsar and a white dwarf.

The pulsar and white dwarf orbit each other, PSR B1620-26 b orbits both, so it’s a circumbinary planet.

I’m not convinced that the “PSR B1620-26 b” designation is official, although it’s used in both NASA’s Exoplanet Catalog and the planet’s Wikipedia page.

PSR B1620-26 b doesn’t have an official name, but it does have two nicknames: Methuselah and The Genesis Planet.

Those monikers reflect one of the three things making this exoplanet stand out from the five-thousand-plus others we’ve found so far. It’s:

The first circumbinary planet confirmed
The first planet found in a globular cluster
One of the oldest known extrasolar planets

About the PSR B1620-26 system’s age: it’s just outside the core of the M 41 globular cluster, so the PSR B1620-26 stars almost certainly are part of M41’s set.

We figure all stars in a globular cluster form at about the same time. Since M 41 is probably around 12,700,000,000 years old — that’s a lot of zeroes — the PSRB1620-26 system should be, too.

As for how “The Genesis Planet” ended up orbiting a white dwarf and a pulsar? That’s yet another topic, for another time.

The best-known circumbinary planet is probably Tatooine, fictional setting for parts of the Star Wars saga.⁴ And that wraps up this bit about one planet orbiting two stars.

Exoplanet Designations: A Work in Progress

Right now, basically, often, an exoplanet’s designation is [star’s designation] [letter of the alphabet, starting with “b”].

This system’s based on Harvard’s Washington Multiplicity Catalog (HWMC), and has the IAU stamp of approval.

By the way: don’t bother trying to memorize these names. That goes double for the designations. There won’t be a test on this.

Again, with this sort-of-HWMC system, [star’s designation] [a] is the star. Unless it’s upper case A for the star. I’ll get back to that.

And if you think “PSR B1620-26 b”, that circumbinary planet’s designation, doesn’t quite line up with the designation system, you’re not alone.

Back in 2010, some researchers said that the then-current exoplanet designation system didn’t work — at all — for circumbinary planets. I think they have a point, and that’s yet again another topic.

The sort-of-HWMC system isn’t the only one in play. Researchers working with data from TESS, for example, use their own designation system for a catalog of some 1.5 billion (mostly stellar) objects.⁵

My guess is that we’ll never have a standard, one-size-fits-all designation system for each and every star, planet, asteroid and pebble. Different researchers have different needs. There’s also the matter defining “planet” and “asteroid”, and I’m drifting off-topic.

I’m forgetting something. Designations, numbers and letters, being consistent. Right.

Designations and Alphanumeric Alternatives: a Hypothetical Hodgepodge

Let’s say there’s a star, designation Prufrock 918273645; with a planet, Prufrock 918273645 b.

Nice and simple, right?

Based on how I’ve seen different folks interpret exoplanet designations, I very strongly suspect that the planet would be called:

Prufrock 918273645 b
Prufrock 918273645 B
Prufrock 918273645-b
Prufrock 918273645-B
Prufrock 918273645b
Prufrock 918273645B
Prufrock-918273645 b
Prufrock-918273645 B
Prufrock-918273645-b
Prufrock-918273645-B
Prufrock-918273645b
Prufrock-918273645B

There are more possible variations, but you get the idea.

The first one, in bold, follows the IAU convention, with a lower-case “b”.⁶ The other versions might be close enough, at least in context, to avoid confusion.

The good news here is that things like Google Search generally recognize alternatively-accurate designations and yield usable results.

I don’t like discombobulated designations, but maybe that comes from having two librarians as parents.

“People Also Ask”: Strange Worlds and Cosmic Scale

Finally, I’m back to this list:

People also ask
- How big is WASP 18b?
- How was WASP 18b discovered?
- Why is WASP-17 B odd?
- Does WASP-12b still exist?

First of all, WASP stands for Wide Angle Search for Planets: a bunch of academic outfits looking for exoplanets. They’re using the transit method, with two robotic telescopes. I’m not talking about that (them?) today: so if you’re curious, check out footnote seven.⁷

WASP-18 b is about as big as a gas giant can get before being a brown dwarf. It’s roughly 10 times as massive as Jupiter. It’s a gas giant, but more tightly packed than the Solar System’s largest world: with a diameter about 1.1 times Jupiter’s.

WASP-18 b was discovered in 2009.

WASP-17 b has several weird attributes.

It’s first planet we’ve found that orbits backwards. Its sun spins in one direction, WASP-17 b orbits in another. The plane of its orbit is at about a 149° angle to its sun’s equator.

WASP-17 b is also a super-puff planet, which sounds like the name of a breakfast cereal to me; and that’s still another topic. The planet’s between one and a half and two times as wide as Jupiter, with only half the mass of our big gas giant.

WASP-12b is still around, but won’t be for long. it’s being ‘eaten’ by its sun at a rate of about 189 quadrillion tons a year.

Back in 2010, NASA figured the planet had maybe another 10,000,000 years before WASP-12 finished its meal. That’s a short time. On a cosmic scale.

One more thing. WASP-12 b is a hot Jupiter, whipping around its star in about 24 hours. And it’s really hot, around 5,225° Fahrenheit.⁷

WASP-18 b: Discovering Something Odd

R. Hurt/IPAC's illustration: 'The team obtained the thermal emission spectrum of WASP-18 b by measuring the amount of light it emits over NASA's James Webb Space Telescope's NIRISS SOSS 0.85-2.8 um wavelength range, capturing 65% of the total energy emitted by the planet. WASP-18 b is so hot on the day side of this tidally-locked planet (the same side always faces its star, as the Moon to Earth) that water vapor molecules would break apart. The Webb Telescope directly observed water vapor on the planet in even relatively small amounts, indicating the sensitivity of the observatory.' (May 31, 2023) — WASP-18 b’s thermal emission spectrum, from JWST NIRISS SOSS. (May 2023)

WASP-18 is a spectral class F6V star: a bit hotter and more massive than our sun, and quite a bit younger.

One or two — there’s an ongoing debate over that — planets orbit WASP-18.

WASP-18 c‘s year is about 51 hours, 44 minutes long. It’s very roughly an eighth as massive as Jupiter, or about twice as massive as Uranus or Neptune.

Kyle A. Pearson found WASP-18 c by applying Bayesian statistics and machine learning to data from TESS. Maybe that’s why some researchers don’t think WASP-18 c is really there. Or maybe the issue is that not enough other folks have crunched numbers and gotten similar results.

Anyway, WASP-18 b‘s year is about 22 hours, 36 minutes long. It’s about 10 times more massive than Jupiter, only somewhat less massive than the lightest brown dwarfs.

And, like WASP-12 b, WASP-18 b will soon be gone. “Soon” on a cosmic scale. By one estimate, the planet will fall into its star in about a million years.

But unlike WASP-12 b, WASP-18 b isn’t being ‘eaten’ by its star. Tidal effects are slowing it down, bringing it closer and closer to WASP-18.

Besides orbiting a bright star, WASP-18 b is nearby: again. on a cosmic scale. The WASP-18 system is just over 400 light-years out, in the constellation Phoenix.

That, and the Webb space telescope’s instruments, are giving scientist a pretty good look at this hot Jupiter.⁸ And they like what they see. Not that we’ve got images of WASP-18 b. Scientists have been studying light collected by Webb’s mirrors.

“…The discovery: Scientists identified water vapor in the atmosphere of WASP-18 b, and made a temperature map of the planet as it slipped behind, and reappeared from, its star. This event is known as a secondary eclipse. Scientists can read the combined light from star and planet, then refine the measurements from just the star as the planet moves behind it.

“…’It was a great feeling to look at WASP-18 b’s JWST spectrum for the first time and see the subtle but precisely measured signature of water,’ said Louis-Philippe Coulombe, a graduate student at the University of Montreal and lead author of the WASP-18 b paper. ‘Using such measurements, we will be able to detect such molecules for a wide range of planets in the years to come!’

“Researchers looked at WASP-18 b for about six hours with one of Webb’s instruments, the Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS), contributed by the Canadian Space Agency….”
(“Discovery Alert: Webb Maps and Finds Traces of Water in an Ultra-hot Gas Giant’s Atmosphere“; Kristen Walbolt, NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program; News; Exoplanet Exploration, NASA (May 31, 2023))

I’ll mention NIRISS and SOSS, acronyms, from that illustration’s caption, after the next bit.

This WASP World’s Winds: Weirdly Warped?

NASA/JPL-Caltech (R. Hurt/IPAC's infgraphic: 'scientists used the James Webb Space Telescope to observe the exoplanet WASP-18 b and its star before, during and after the planet was eclipsed. By measuring the change in light when the planet travels behind the star, the planet's brightness is revealed. From these measurements, scientists were able to make a temperature map of the planet's day side. Displayed temperature range: 2,800 to 4,800 degrees Fahrenheit.' May 31, 2023) — Exoplanet transits and eclipses: how scientists mapped WASP-18 b’s day side temperatures.

First, getting those acronyms out of the way. NIRISS and SOSS stand for Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph and Single-Object Slitless Spectroscopy.

SOSS is what the NIRISS does when scientists have it getting light from a single object: two objects, actually, in this case. WASP-18 and WASP-18b are so near each other that it’ll likely be some time before we can get images of the star and its planet(s).

The infographic you’ve scrolled past — or, better yet, read — outlines how scientists collect light — infrared light in this case — from the star. They collect three samples: the star being slightly eclipsed by the planet, just the star (while the planet is behind the star) and the planet reflecting some of the star’s light.

Basically. That’s an extreme simplification.

Those samples let scientists subtract the star’s light from the star’s and the planet’s light. And that gives them a sample of light from just the planet, which they run through a spectrograph.

Plus, studying changes in the light reflected by the planet lets scientists work out how the light (infrared, again, in this case) near the center of the side of the planet facing its star compares with light near the planet’s edge.

Since WASP-18 b is a hot Jupiter, a large gas giant, winds in the planet’s deep atmosphere should be distributing heat from the day side to the night side.

That’s not what scientists found.

The odds are very good that WASP-18 b rotates in about the same plane as its orbit and its star’s equator. JWST instruments shouldn’t have picked up all that much temperature difference from the planet’s east and west limbs, as it moved behind its star.

But they did.⁹

Over-the-Top Winds on WASP-18 b?

NASA/ESA illustration: WASP-43 b, a hot Jupiter orbiting its star. 'A team of scientists using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has made the most detailed global map yet of the glow from a turbulent planet outside our solar system, revealing its secrets of air temperatures and water vapor....' (last updated December 15, 2022) — An illustration of WASP-43 b’s orbit, and heat distribution on the hot Jupiter. (2022)

If WASP-18 b’s observed disk had been about the same temperature, east-to-west, on its day side; that would have been useful information.

It would have been another example of how winds carry heat around massive planets like WASP-18 b and WASP-43 b. WASP-43 b is the hot Jupiter in that illustration.

Instead, we have a hot Jupiter that’s not acting the way we’d expected. One of the possible explanations for this minor weirdness is that WASP-18 b’s magnetic field is affecting its winds: so that instead of flowing along east-west lines, they’re moving over the poles.

Late this week, I’d tracked down an illustration and discussion of that idea. But, like I said earlier, I got distracted. So I’ll set that aside for another time.

Another item that’s in my ‘to do’ list is what researchers said about air and ocean currents, temperatures and habitability, on an Earth-like world orbiting a red dwarf star.

Living in Vastness

Torben Hansen' photo: the Andromeda Galaxy, in visible light. (September 1, 2011) — M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. (September 2011)

Once, decades back, my father and I were in a location with a really dark night sky.

He tried to show me what, in my youth, was still called the Great Nebula in Andromeda.

It was almost directly overhead. The sky was clear and dark. I could see each star my father pointed out, but not the vast and subtle brightness of the Andromeda Galaxy.

There’s probably a lesson in that experience, involving metaphors and allusions. Allusions, not illusions, and I’m drifting off-topic.

There’s also a more practical lesson from that and similar experiences. My night vision isn’t and hasn’t been good enough for me to get seriously involved in amateur astronomy.

But that hasn’t kept me from enjoying what others report, and trying to keep up with what we’ve been learning about this vast and ancient universe.

All of which has a serious “wow factor”. And helps me remember just how “wow” God is.

“Indeed, before you the whole universe is like a grain from a balance,
or a drop of morning dew come down upon the earth.
“But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things;
and you overlook sins for the sake of repentance.”
(Wisdom 11:22–23)

Somewhat-related posts:

“TRAPPIST-1 b Measured by Webb: Hot, Airless“
(April 1, 2023)
“Stars, Galaxies, XBONGs and Me“
(January 21, 2023)
“A Doomed World, Spiraling to Destruction“
(January 7, 2023)
“Exoplanets, Air, and the Marshmallow Planet“
(December 10, 2022)
“A Star by Any Other Name, and a Galilean Interlude“
(November 13, 2021)

¹ Fascinating (to me) distractions:

Wikipedia
- Down the rabbit hole
- Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)
- Infrared spectroscopy
- Google Search
- Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP)
- WASP-18b

² Names and designations for stars and exoplanets:

Wikipedia
I talked about it back in 2021
- “A Star by Any Other Name, and a Galilean Interlude” (November 13, 2021)
  - One Star, Many Names: Canicula, Mrgavyadha, BD-16°1591…
    - Old and New Names
    - Designations

³ A pulsar and its planets:

Wikipedia
- PSR B1257+12 (PSR 1257+12, PSR J1300+1240, Lich)
- PSR B1257+12 A (PSR B1257+12 b, Draugr)
- PSR B1257+12 B (PSR B1257+12 c, Poltergeist)
- PSR B1257+12 C (PSR B1257+12 d, Phobetor)

⁴ First confirmed circumbinary planet, and a fictional planet:

Wikipedia
- Circumbinary planet
- Globular_cluster
- Messier 4
- PSR B1620-26 b (unofficial nicknames” “Methuselah”, “the Genesis planet”
- Tatooine
PSR B1620-26 b
Exoplanet Catalog, NASA

⁵ Catalogs, names and designations:

Wikipedia
- Exoplanet catalogues (a very incomplete and mixed list)
- Exoplanet naming convention
“Naming Exoplanets“
International Astronomical Union (IAU)
TESS, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- TESS Input Catalogue (TIC)
“The Washington Multiplicity Catalog“; meeting abstract, id. 3
William I. Hartkopf, Brian D. Mason; A New Classification Scheme for Double Stars, 25th meeting of the IAU, Special Session 3, in Sydney, Australia (July 18, 2003)

⁶ A poem and IAU naming conventions:

Wikipedia
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
“Naming Exoplanets“
International Astronomical Union (IAU)

⁷ Finding strange new worlds:

Wikipedia
- Transit photometry
- WASP-12b
- WASP-17b
- WASP-18b
- Wide Angle Search for Planets (WASP)
Planet WASP-18 b
The Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia
“Hubble Finds a Star Eating a Planet“
Hubble Space Telescope, NASA (May 20, 2010)

⁸ Math, numbers and exoplanets:

Wikipedia
- Bayes’ theorem
- Bayesian inference
- Bayesian probability
- Bayesian statistics
- Billion years (Gyr, or gigayear)
- Brown dwarf
- Emission spectrum
- History of spectroscopy
- James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)
- Stellar classification
- Sun
- Tidal acceleration
  - Tidal deceleration
- Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)
- WASP-18
- WASP-18b
NASA Exoplanet Archive
- WASP-18 Overview
  - WASP-18 b Planetary Parameters (16 solutions)
  - WASP-18 c Planetary Parameters (1 solution)
The Extrasolar Planet Encyclopedia http://exoplanet.eu
- Planet WASP-18 b
- Planet WASP-18 c
Scientific Instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope: Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) (includes description of SOSS)
Webb Space Telescope webbtelescope.org
NIRISS Single Object Slitless Spectroscopy (NIRISS SOSS)
JWST User Documentation, Space Telescope Science Institute
“A broadband thermal emission spectrum of the ultra-hot Jupiter WASP-18b“; Abstract; Louis-Philippe Coulombe, Björn Benneke, Ryan Challener, Anjali A. A. Piette, Lindsey S. Wiser, Megan Mansfield, Ryan J. MacDonald, Hayley Beltz, Adina D. Feinstein, Michael Radica, Arjun B. Savel, Leonardo A. Dos Santos, Jacob L. Bean, Vivien Parmentier, Ian Wong, Emily Rauscher, Thaddeus D. Komacek, Eliza M. -R. Kempton, Xianyu Tan, Mark Hammond, Neil T. Lewis, Michael R. Line, Elspeth K. H. Lee, Hinna Shivkumar, Ian J. M. Crossfield, Matthew C. Nixon, Benjamin V. Rackham, Hannah R. Wakeford, Xi Zhang, Natalie M. Batalha, Zachory K. Berta-Thompson, Quentin Changeat, Jean-Michel Désert, Néstor Espinoza, Jayesh M. Goyal, Joseph Harrington, Heather A. Knutson, Laura Kreidberg, Mercedes López-Morales, Avi Shporer, David K. Sing, Kevin B. Stevenson, Keshav Aggarwal, Eva-Maria Ahrer, Munazza K. Alam, Taylor J. Bell, Jasmina Blecic, Claudio Caceres, Aarynn L. Carter, Sarah L. Casewell, Nicolas Crouzet, Patricio E. Cubillos, Leen Decin, Jonathan J. Fortney, Neale P. Gibson, Kevin Heng, Thomas Henning, Nicolas Iro, Sarah Kendrew, Pierre-Olivier Lagage, Jérémy Leconte, Monika Lendl, Joshua D. Lothringer, Luigi Mancini, Thomas Mikal-Evans, Karan Molaverdikhani, Nikolay K. Nikolov, Kazumasa Ohno, Enric Palle, Caroline Piaulet, Seth Redfield, Pierre-Alexis Roy, Shang-Min Tsai, Olivia Venot, Peter J. Wheatley; astrophysics data system ui.adsabs.harvard.ed; Harvard (January 2023)
“A Search for Multiplanet Systems with TESS Using a Bayesian N-body Retrieval and Machine Learning“, Abstract
Kyle A. Pearson; The Astronomical Journal, Volume 158, Issue 6, article id. 243, 18 pp. (December 2019)

⁹ That’s odd:

Wikipedia
- Emission spectrum
- History of spectroscopy
- James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)
- Spectrograph (from Simple English Wikipedia)
- WASP-18b
“Discovery Alert: Webb Maps and Finds Traces of Water in an Ultra-hot Gas Giant’s Atmosphere“
Kristen Walbolt, NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program; News; Exoplanet Exploration, NASA (May 31, 2023)
Scientific Instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope: Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) (includes description of SOSS)
Webb Space Telescope webbtelescope.org
NIRISS Single Object Slitless Spectroscopy (NIRISS SOSS)
JWST User Documentation, Space Telescope Science Institute

Posted in Discursive Detours, Exoplanets and Aliens, Journal, Science News, Series | Tagged astronomy, exoplanets, planets, science | Leave a comment

ChatGPT, Attorney at Law — or — Trust, but Verify

Posted on June 3, 2023 by Brian H. Gill

Florence Lo/Reuters' ChatGPT screen in perspective, via engaged.com, used w/o permission.

There are times when I almost regret having successfully avoided a conventionally-successful career.

Last weekend was not one of them.

Partly because I saw what happens when an otherwise-smart person forgets to think.

Big-Time Bungle: Bogus References

BBC News article headline, 'ChatGPT: US lawyer admits using AI for case research'. image credit: Reuters. (May 28, 2023) — BBC News headline: ChatGPT and a law firm’s embarrassment, (May 28, 2023)

“ChatGPT: US lawyer admits using AI for case research“
Kathryn Armstrong, BBC News (May 28, 2023)

“…A judge said the court was faced with an ‘unprecedented circumstance’ after a filing was found to reference example legal cases that did not exist.

“The lawyer who used the tool told the court he was ‘unaware that its content could be false’.

“ChatGPT creates original text on request, but comes with warnings it can ‘produce inaccurate information’….”

First, a little background. Then I’ll give my opinion about ChatGBT and artificial intelligence in general, and why I don’t think humanity is doomed. Not any more than usual, at any rate.

A law firm was helping someone sue an airline. They sent a brief to the airline’s lawyers.

The law firm’s trouble started when the airline’s lawyers did what the law firm should have done before sending a brief: look up the cases referenced in the brief.

That was an exercise in futility, since the cases weren’t real.

The airline’s lawyers wrote the judge, explaining their problem. The judge asked the law firm to explain their “bogus quotes and bogus internal citations”.

Back to that BBC News piece.

“…‘Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations,’ Judge Castel wrote in an order demanding the man’s legal team explain itself.

“Over the course of several filings, it emerged that the research had not been prepared by Lawyer P. [redacted], the lawyer for the plaintiff, but by a colleague of his at the same law firm. Lawyer S. [redacted], who has been an attorney for more than 30 years, used ChatGPT to look for similar previous cases.

“In his written statement, Lawyer S. [redacted] clarified that Lawyer P. [redacted] had not been part of the research and had no knowledge of how it had been carried out….”
(Kathryn Armstrong, BBC News (May 28, 2023)) [emphasis mine]

(I’ve put a longer excerpt near the end of this post.¹ I redacted the names, just in case folks who achieved international fame get touchy. Besides, there’s no point in trying to make their situation any worse.)

Trust, Assumptions and ChatGPT

My hat’s off to Lawyer S. [redacted], for his clarification. It’s a fine example of taking responsibility for one’s actions.

His not noticing ChatGPT’s warning that it can “produce inaccurate information” is a fine example, too.

But not the sort that most folks want on their resume.

And the story just keeps getting better. Or worse, depending on one’s viewpoint.

Lawyer S. kept screenshots of what looks like a conversation he had with ChatGPT.

“…’Is v. [redacted] a real case,’ reads one message, referencing V.v.C. [redacted], one of the cases that no other lawyer could find.

“ChatGPT responds that yes, it is — prompting ‘S’ (Lawyer S. [redacted]) to ask: ‘What is your source’.

“After ‘double checking’, ChatGPT responds again that the case is real and can be found on legal reference databases such as LexisNexis and Westlaw.

“It says that the other cases it has provided to Lawyer S. [redacted] are also real….”
(Kathryn Armstrong, BBC News (May 28, 2023))

Double checking references is a good idea. Having ChatGPT do its own double checking, not so much.

Let’s do a thought experiment: assuming that ChatGPT is a person, which I don’t.

ChatGPT was released in November, 2022,² about six months ago. Let’s say that the law firm, or Lawyer S., began using the chatbot immediately.

That’d make ChatGPT the equivalent of an intern, or maybe a law clerk, fresh out of college with no previous work experience.

I’m no lawyer, but trusting a new-on-the-job clerk to do research is one thing.

Assuming that the same newbie clerk should verify references in its own report — that’s something else.

Two Timelines, a Career and Experience

I don’t see either ChatGPT, or artificial intelligence in general, as a looming doom.

On the other hand, learning new skills — or at least using common sense — is at least as important now as it was when I was growing up.

Now let’s look at a possible timeline for the 30-years-plus career of Lawyer S.

Let’s make it 31 years, and say that he pursued his career on schedule. That would mean he graduated from law school and started practicing in 1992.

Earning a law degree takes seven years after high school,³ so he graduated from high school in 1985 and was born in 1967.

This is hypothetical, so Lawyer S. might be a bit older than that. But let’s assume he’s in his mid-50s: and look at what’s been happening since his birth.

During his childhood, artificial intelligence was literally science fiction in films like “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Colossus: The Forbin Project”. Meanwhile, computers were getting smaller, less expensive and a whole lot more capable.

Using 20-20 hindsight, personal computers go back to Edmund Berkeley’s Simon in 1950. But as mass-market consumer electronic devices, personal computers began in 1977 and didn’t take off until the 1980s. I’m oversimplifying, a lot.

Lawyer S. probably heard of personal computers as a high schooler, but my guess is that even then he was focused on less nerdy matters.

Microsoft’s MS-DOS came out around the time Lawyer S. began practicing law,⁴ assuming that my timeline is accurate: which, remember, is an assumption.

Now, let us turn our attention away from this attorney’s successful career — and look at what I’ve been doing.

A Little of This, a Little of That

By the time Lawyer S. was in college, in the mid-1980s, I’d gotten a B.A. in history.

I’d also flunked out halfway through both a masters in library science and a B.S. in computer science. But I had earned a B.S. in English and done time as a secondary school teacher. I’d had a bunch of other jobs, too, including:

Beet chopper
Computer operator
Employment service interviewer
Flower delivery guy
Office clerk/customer service
Radio disk jockey
Sales clerk
Staff writer for an historical society

I’d married a woman with a degree in computer science, started a family with her and began working for a small publishing house here in Sauk Centre.

Fast-forward seven years. Lawyer S. has now become a practicing attorney. I’ve been writing advertising copy and doing graphic design for that publisher.

At some point, my employer’s marketing manager noticed my personal website: so I created and launched one for the company.

I became their ‘computer guy’ and list manager. That’s a fancy way of saying that I answered questions and sorted out SNAFUs. When I wasn’t doing that, I was keeping track of their customers and mailing lists.

I’m not sure that any of my job history, aside from that very brief stretch as a teacher and time as a radio DJ, was “professional” work: since I hadn’t been trained or certified for what I did. Apart from some on-the-job training, which was a really good idea.

But, having seen what can happen when folks enjoy more success and less unemployment, I’m grateful for not getting stuck in a rut.

And I’ve been encouraged to think, even on the job.

Using Our Brains: It’s an Option

WiNG's photo of the Beijing Television Cultural Center fire. (February 9, 2009) via Wikimedia Commons, used w/o permission. — Common sense and safety protocols put on hold: Beijing. (2009)

I can’t reasonably argue that artificial intelligence is completely harmless.

No technology, from lightning rods to video games, is utterly idiot-proof.

Even fire, a technology we’ve been using for maybe a million years, is a problem when someone doesn’t use common sense.⁶ I figure that’ll still be true when the Code of Ur-Nammu, the UN Charter and whatever we try next will seem roughly contemporary.

The problem isn’t technology. It’s us, and I’d better explain that.

We’ve got brains. We’re rational. But we also have free will: so using our brains is an option, not a hardwired response. And our choices have consequences. (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1701-1709, 1730-1738)

Common Sense and Other Alternatives

I talked about ChatGPT, fear and getting a grip back in mid-April.

“ChatGPT and the End of Civilization as We Know It“
(April 15, 2023)

Not much has changed since then, although I’ve been noticing more scary headlines about the existential threat of chatbots, and fewer doomsayers touting economic woes.

I didn’t, and don’t, see chatbots and artificial intelligence as a dire threat.

But folks like that 20-something national guardsman who shared classified military intelligence on social media? And this probably 50-something attorney who put faith (apparently) in the unerring skills of a six-month-old chatbot?⁵

I don’t think either of them are a threat to humanity. Not as individuals. But if enough folks start putting their minds on hold: we could have problems.

A Skunk, a Wood Pile, Dynamite and the Sixties

Making daft mistakes isn’t new.

My wife tells me of the time when some kids noticed a skunk outside the school.

This was back when the local school had wood-burning heaters, and a wood pile stacked against one wall.

Boys, at least, could and did take rifles to school with them so they could do some hunting on the way home. The point is that social norms were different then.

Anyway, the skunk hid in the wood pile. The kids couldn’t spook it out. So one of them went home; returning with dynamite, a fuse and a blasting cap.

Yes, I know. Today that’d be international news. Back then, it was kids using stump-removal tech without permission.

And remember, these were kids. Smart rural kids, but kids nonetheless.

The one with dynamite used a tad more than was absolutely necessary. When the smoke cleared, the skunk was gone: along with the wood pile and much of the school building’s paint on that side.

Nobody was hurt. Startled by the blast, but not hurt. The kids were tasked with cleaning and repainting that side of the school, and life went on.

That was then, this is now.

I do not, by the way, yearn for ‘the good old days’. I remember them, and they weren’t.

Many reforms of the Sixties were long overdue. Some have worked out fairly well. Some, I think, haven’t. And that’s another topic.

Changing Times, Human Nature

This is not the world I grew up in.

I’m okay with that, and in many ways I think “now” is better than “then”. But in other ways: well, at best it’s no worse.

And that leads me to an online chat I had with my oldest daughter last weekend.

We’d been talking about the debacle involving an attorney and ChatGPT.

…
Me:
“Yeah. Amazing. I – good grief.
What bothers me, in a way, is that I’m disgusted – but not all that surprised.”

Oldest daughter:
“Well, you’re over 70, lived through the ’60s, and have been paying attention.”
…

“Disgusted” is a fairly strong word. I don’t use it all that much. When I do, it’s often because someone who should have known better displayed a stellar lack of good sense.

This is where I could launch into a conventional ‘back in my day’ rant about the decline and fall of practically everybody. But I won’t. Again, my memory is too good.

Much as I might enjoy living in a world where folks have always acted rationally, that’s not the world we all live in.

With the passing of decades since my youth, I’ve forgotten names and details: but some high-level national officials became briefly famous after being caught selling state secrets.

At the time, I wasn’t sure what bothered me more: that they were betraying their country’s trust, or that they were selling information at bargain-basement-closeout prices. That may say more about me than the doofuses who got caught, and that’s yet another topic.

The point this time is that human nature hasn’t changed.

We’re still rational, we still have free will, so we can still put our minds on hold.

And that’s still a bad idea.

THE ROBOTS ARE COMING! THE ROBOTS ARE COMING!

So: what can I, personally, do to save humanity from creeping socialism, acid rain, or the current crisis du jour?

Precious little, actually.

I’m just some guy living in central Minnesota, talking about chatbots and making sense.

I can, however, suggest that using our brains is a good idea.

Even if that means reading past the headlines, and maybe even thinking about the appeals to fear that are in play.

Like this gem:

“AI could pose ‘risk of extinction’ akin to nuclear war and pandemics, experts say“
Aimee Picchi, MoneyWatch, CBS News (May 30, 2023)

“Artificial intelligence could pose a ‘risk of extinction’ to humanity on the scale of nuclear war or pandemics, and mitigating that risk should be a ‘global priority,’ according to an open letter signed by AI leaders such as Sam Altman of OpenAI as well as Geoffrey Hinton, known as the ‘godfather’ of AI.

“The one-sentence open letter, issued by the nonprofit Center for AI Safety, is both brief and ominous, without extrapolating how the more than 300 signees foresee AI developing into an existential threat to humanity.

“In an email to CBS MoneyWatch, Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety, wrote that there are ‘numerous pathways to societal-scale risks from AI.’

“‘For example, AIs could be used by malicious actors to design novel bioweapons more lethal than natural pandemics,’ Hendrycks wrote. ‘Alternatively, malicious actors could intentionally release rogue AI that actively attempt to harm humanity. If such an AI was intelligent or capable enough, it may pose significant risk to society as a whole.’…”

Again, no technology is one hundred percent absolutely guaranteed idiot-proof safe.

A breath of good sense in the CBS News piece is “…AIs could be used by malicious actors….” — Hendrycks, at least, apparently realizes that people use technology.

How we use it, and what we use if for, is up to us.

If “malicious actors” use AI, artificial intelligence, with the cunning and wisdom displayed by that attorney: hazmat cleanup might be the biggest problem for the rest of us, after their demise.

Then there was a headline that might have, but didn’t, read “Killer Robot Drone Runs Amok”. The article even, at the very end, included a little background and context.

I put an excerpt in the footnotes.⁷

One more thing. “Trust, but verify” is a rhyming Russian proverb.⁸ And that is yet again another topic, which finally brings me to the seemingly-inevitable links:

“ChatGPT and the End of Civilization as We Know It“
(April 15, 2023)
“Not Feeling ‘Information Overload’ or ‘Loss of Identity’“
(November 6, 2020)
“Materialism, Robots and Attitudes“
(April 15, 2018)
“Robots and Being Catholic“
(January 28, 2018)
“Books and Flying Cars“
(January 26, 2018)

¹ A definition and an excerpt:

brief
Wex, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School

A longer, but still redacted, excerpt from that BBC News piece:

“ChatGPT: US lawyer admits using AI for case research“
Kathryn Armstrong, BBC News (May 28, 2023)

“…A judge said the court was faced with an ‘unprecedented circumstance’ after a filing was found to reference example legal cases that did not exist.

“The lawyer who used the tool told the court he was ‘unaware that its content could be false’.

“ChatGPT creates original text on request, but comes with warnings it can ‘produce inaccurate information’.

“The original case involved a man suing an airline over an alleged personal injury. His legal team submitted a brief that cited several previous court cases in an attempt to prove, using precedent, why the case should move forward.

“But the airline’s lawyers later wrote to the judge to say they could not find several of the cases that were referenced in the brief.

“‘Six of the submitted cases appear to be bogus judicial decisions with bogus quotes and bogus internal citations,’ Judge Castel wrote in an order demanding the man’s legal team explain itself.

“Over the course of several filings, it emerged that the research had not been prepared by Lawyer P. [redacted], the lawyer for the plaintiff, but by a colleague of his at the same law firm. Lawyer S. [redacted], who has been an attorney for more than 30 years, used ChatGPT to look for similar previous cases.

“In his written statement, Lawyer S. [redacted] clarified that Lawyer P. [redacted] had not been part of the research and had no knowledge of how it had been carried out….

“…Screenshots attached to the filing appear to show a conversation between Lawyer S. [redacted]) and ChatGPT.

“‘Is v. [redacted] a real case,’ reads one message, referencing V.v.C. [redacted], one of the cases that no other lawyer could find.

“ChatGPT responds that yes, it is – prompting ‘S’ to ask: ‘What is your source’.

“After ‘double checking’, ChatGPT responds again that the case is real and can be found on legal reference databases such as LexisNexis and Westlaw.

“It says that the other cases it has provided to Lawyer S. [redacted] are also real.

“Both lawyers, who work for the firm L. L. O. [redacted], have been ordered to explain why they should not be disciplined at an 8 June hearing.

“Millions of people have used ChatGPT since it launched in November 2022.

“It can answer questions in natural, human-like language and it can also mimic other writing styles. It uses the internet as it was in 2021 as its database.

“There have been concerns over the potential risks of artificial intelligence (AI), including the potential spread of misinformation and bias….”

² I talked about this in April: “ChatGPT and the End of Civilization as We Know It” > It’s New, it’s Scary and it’s (Not) the End of Creative Writing (April 15, 2023)

Wikipedia
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Artificial neural network (ANN)
- ChatGPT
- Generative pre-trained transformer (GPT)
- Google
- Google Search
- Large language model (LLM)
- OpenAI
- Virtual assistant

³ What it takes to be a lawyer:

Lawyers
Occupational Outlook Handbook, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

⁴ A little history:

Wikipedia

⁵ Headlines:

BBC News
- “AI ‘godfather’ Yoshua Bengio feels ‘lost’ over life’s work“, Zoe Kleinman (May 31, 2023)
- “Artificial intelligence could lead to extinction, experts warn“, Chris Vallance (May 30, 2023)
- “ChatGPT: US lawyer admits using AI for case research“, Kathryn Armstrong (May 28, 2023)
“Jack Teixeira: National Guard airman arrested over leaked Pentagon documents“
Mike Wendling, BBC News (April 14, 2023)
“Samsung employees may have leaked sensitive company data to ChatGP“
Alex Hernandez, TECHAERIS (April 7, 2023)

⁶ “No photos, no video clips, no in-depth reports” — but hard to ignore:

Wikipedia
- Beijing Television Cultural Center
- Beijing Television Cultural Center fire

⁷ “missing ‘important context'”:

“US Air Force denies AI drone attacked operator in test“
Zoe Kleinman (June 2, 2023)

“…I spent several hours this morning speaking to experts in both defence and AI, all of whom were very sceptical about Col Hamilton’s claims, which were being widely reported.

“One defence expert told me Col Hamilton’s original story seemed to be missing ‘important context’, if nothing else.

“There were also suggestions on social media that had such an experiment taken place, it was more likely to have been a pre-planned scenario rather than the AI-enabled drone being powered by machine learning during the task – which basically means it would not have been choosing its own outcomes as it went along, based on what had happened previously.

“Steve Wright, professor of aerospace engineering at the University of the West of England, and an expert in unmanned aerial vehicles, told me jokingly that he had ‘always been a fan of the Terminator films’ when I asked him for his thoughts about the story.

“‘In aircraft control computers there are two things to worry about: “do the right thing” and “don’t do the wrong thing”, so this is a classic example of the second,” he said.

“‘In reality we address this by always including a second computer that has been programmed using old-style techniques, and this can pull the plug as soon as the first one does something strange.'”

⁸ A little more history:

Wikipedia
- Trust, but verify

Posted in Discursive Detours, Journal | Tagged artificial intelligence, free will, getting a grip, history, information technology, robots, technology | 2 Comments

Super-Duper Super Earths and the Search for Life

Posted on May 27, 2023 by Brian H. Gill

Ph03nix1986's image: comparing the size of Kepler-442b and Earth. (January 2015) from Wikimedia Commons via Big Think, used w/o permission. — Size comparison: Kepler-422 b and Earth, artwork by Ph03nix1986. (What’s wrong with this picture?)

This week, I’ll talk about Professor Ethan Siegel’s view that “the myth of the super-habitable super-Earth planet” is “a scientific catastrophe”, other non-catastrophes; and a problem with “super-Earths” as a label.

Along the way I’ll look at science, news, headlines and silliness. And finally, skip lightly over a 13th century academic debate that got out of hand.

This post started more than two weeks ago, when a headline caught my eye.

Now, I’m more likely to click on links to articles about exoplanets and stars, than check on who’s dating who in Hollywood, or what a television sports analyst said about fans.

But words like “catastrophe” get my attention, even though I think they’re overused. Particularly when they’re describing something other than news media’s favorite obsessions.

And that is why the following item caught my eye:

“…A Scientific Catastrophe”?

NASA Ames/W. Stenzel's artistic concept', 'Searching for Habitable Worlds': four exoplanets super-earth mini-neptune. (December 2022) used in Big Think article (May 8, 2023) — Artwork: NASA Ames/W. Stenzel’s “Searching for Habitable Worlds” (December 2022)

“Why ‘super-Earth’ exoplanets are a scientific catastrophe“
Ethan Siegel, Starts With A Bang, via Big Think (May 8, 2023)

“Key Takeaways

“Of the more than 5,000 exoplanets known, the most common class of exoplanet is one that has no representation in our own Solar System: the Super-Earth.

“Between 2 and 10 Earth masses — larger and more massive than Earth but smaller and less massive than Uranus or Neptune — it was the most common exoplanet class found by Kepler.

“Many have speculated that super-Earths may be even more conducive to life, as well as more common, than Earth-like planets. That’s almost certainly untrue; here’s why.

“It’ time to expose a scientific catastrophe: the myth of the super-habitable super-Earth planet….”

I think Dr. Ethan Siegel (theoretical astrophysicist) has a point.

I also recommend his Big Think article. He pulled together a good sampling of what we know about exoplanets in general. With particular focus on those whose heft is between Earth’s and the Solar System’s ice giant worlds.

His text is heavy on facts and nearly devoid of filler or fluff. Just as commendable, he uses many graphics: including E. Pécontal’s animation, illustrating the radial velocity method of spotting exoplanets.

That said, I don’t think speculation about super-Earths is a “scientific catastrophe”.

Granted, I’m thinking of René Heller and John Armstrong’s “Superhabitable Worlds”, Astrobiology (2014).¹

Earth ISN’T the Best of All Possible Worlds???

Ph03nix1986's 2015 artist's concept of a superhabitable world, used on 'Superhabitable planet' Wikipedia page.

“Superhabitable Worlds“
René Heller, John Armstrong; Astrobiology (January 2014) via arXiv

“…4. Conclusions….”

“…Terrestrial planets that are slightly more massive than Earth, that is, up to 2 or 3 M⊕, are preferably superhabitable due to the longer tectonic activity, a carbon-silicate cycle that is active on a longer timescale, enhanced magnetic shielding against cosmic and stellar high-energy radiation….”

“…Eventually, just as the Solar System turned out to be everything but typical for planetary systems, Earth could turn out everything but typical for a habitable or, ultimately, an inhabited world. Our argumentation can be understood as a refutation of the Rare Earth hypothesis. … While we agree that the occurrence of another truly Earth-like planet is trivially impossible, we hold that this argument does not constrain the emergence of other inhabited planets. We argue here in the opposite direction and claim that Earth could turn out to be a marginally habitable world. In our view, a variety of processes exists that can make environmental conditions on a planet or moon more benign to life than is the case on Earth….”
[emphasis mine]

If Siegel’s article identified the “many” folks who thought that maybe super-Earths were “more conducive to life” than our world, I missed it.

He did, however, say why many planets that are between two and 10 times as massive as ours are very likely not suitable for life. I’ll get back to that.

Heller and Armstrong — they wrote that “Superhabitable Worlds” paper — may turn out to be wrong about rocky planets that are more massive as Earth. But their 2014 paper gave reasons for their conclusions.

They also acknowledged that a planet just like Earth, orbiting a star just like ours, could be habitable; and that the odds of finding a world just like that were slim to none.

Heller and Armstrong started by discussing a “menagerie” of hypothetical exoplanets about 1.5 times as massive as Earth, with a radius 1.12 that of Earth’s, orbiting a star similar to Gl58: a red dwarf star in the general direction of Beta Librae.

Then they sketched out possible habitable zones for a rocky moon orbiting a Jupiter-size planet. They showed how the moon would be heated by sunlight from the star, sunlight that had reflected off the planet, and by tidal heating.

Tidal heating is the sort of thing that makes Io the most volcanically active body in the Solar System.² The most active that we know of, at any rate.

Bigger Isn’t (Always) Better: But Neither is Smaller

After that, they describe what they think would make a planet superhabitable.

That part of their paper goes on for five pages, so I’ll skip most of what they said.

One point they made was that bigger isn’t always better when it comes to habitability.

That’s because we’ve been learning that plate tectonics recycles chemicals and minerals living critters need. That process works on Earth, but apparently not for smaller worlds.

“…smaller planets have smaller diameters and thus higher surface-to-volume ratios than their larger cousins. Such bodies tend to lose the energy left over from their formation quickly and end up geologically dead, lacking the volcanoes, earthquakes and tectonic activity which supply the surface with life-sustaining material and the atmosphere with temperature moderators like carbon dioxide. Plate tectonics appear particularly crucial, at least on Earth: not only does the process recycle important chemicals and minerals….”
Planetary habitability, Wikipedia [emphasis mine]

A 2011 study presented at a meeting of the EPSC-DPS by L. Noack and D. Breuer (I put a link under footnote ³) said that plate tectonics works on Earth because our planet’s mantle is at the right temperature and pressure.

The good news is that there’s apparently a range of temperature and pressure that work: not some wildly-improbable exact balance.

The intriguing news is that, if Noack and Breuer are right, Earth is about as small as a planet can be and have enough heat and pressure inside to make plate tectonics go. Go and keep going long enough for life to get started and get interesting, at any rate.

But again, bigger isn’t always better. They figured that a rocky planet’s insides would be too hot for worlds more than five times as massive as ours.³

Science News, Silliness, Headlines and “Catastrophe”

'Nouvelles découvertes dans la Lune....' A lithograph from 'Great Astronomical Discoveries', The New York Sun, translated into French. (1835) Artwork probably by Benjamin Day. Part of the 'Great Moon Hoax of 1835'. 'Lunar animals and other objects Discovered by Sir John Herschel in his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope and copied from sketches in the Edinburgh Journal of Science.' Benjamin Henry Day, Library of Congress, via Wikipedia, used w/o permission. — From The New York Sun’s ersatz science series, translated into French. (1835)

Bear in mind that I’m in my 70s. I remember McCarthyism’s dying gasps, Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb”, and the Cold War.⁴

My notion of a “catastrophe” may be a tad more catastrophic than Professor Siegel’s.

Proxima Chorizo, the Great Moon Hoax and Headlines

I was annoyed when a high-profile scientist told his fans that a slice of chorizo was a Webb telescope image of Proxima Centauri.

But when he sobered up, he explained that he had a perfectly good reason for posting a picture of Proxima Chorizo.

So “annoyed” is about as far as I’ll go with that incident.

I see the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 as edging a bit closer to “catastrophe”.

Particularly since The New York Sun wouldn’t publish a retraction. Not even after folks realized that Sir John Herschel hadn’t discovered bat-people on the Moon.

That’s understandable. Their mini-bison and bipedal beavers sold papers. I can’t help wonder, though, how much their make-believe science series encouraged folks to write off science as flim-flam.

Then there are headlines like these:

“There Is Only One Other Planet In Our Galaxy That Could Be Earth-Like, Say Scientists“
Jamie Carter, Forbes (June 23, 2021)
“Kepler-442b is more habitable than Earth“
K. G. Orphanides, Science, Wired UK (July 10, 2015)

The Forbes article’s headline is accurate, partly.

And, although the scientists weren’t named in the article, there was a link to their paper. Turns out that there were four of them, and they did say Kepler-422 b had enough sunlight to support Earth-type photosynthesis.

But not that it was the only such planet in the whole galaxy, other than Earth.

“Efficiency of the oxygenic photosynthesis on Earth-like planets in the habitable zone“
Giovanni Covone, Riccardo M Ienco, Luca Cacciapuoti, Laura Inno; Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (August 2021)

“…we also find that Kepler-442b receives a PAR photon flux slightly larger than the one necessary to sustain a large biosphere, similar to the Earth biosphere….”

In fairness, Forbes focuses on finance, industry, investing, and marketing. Not science.

The Wired UK article’s author was less imaginative.

Orphanides explained that a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal outlined a new method for assigning the ‘maybe habitable’ label. And that, by that method’s standard, Kepler-442 b might be just a bit more habitable than Earth.⁵

But the headline? Well, headlines are there to grab attention. And that one did its job.

Exoplanets: New Categories for Strange New Worlds

NASA/JPL-Caltech's infographic: pie chart showing percentages of known gas giants, Neptune-like exoplanets, super-Earths and terrestrial planets. (2022) via Big Think, used w/o permission. — NASA/JPL-Caltech’s infographic with pie chart: four types of exoplanets.

If planetary scientists put the super-Earth label on every exoplanet with a mass between two and 10 times Earth’s, then that could be a problem. Because many are not Earth-like.

By 2017, researchers had found many planets that weren’t like anything in the Solar System, and didn’t fit into the old ‘terrestrial, gas giant, ice giant’ categories.

Hot Jupiters, for example, are at least as massive as the Solar System’s gas giants, but whip around their stars in tight orbits.

Ocean worlds are probably covered by profoundly deep oceans and/or have far more ice than Earth. From what I’ve read, the liquid on “ocean worlds” is water. Probably.

That’s assuming that the ‘big ocean’ model is accurate — as it almost certainly is for moons like Enceladus and Europa.

But an ice giant’s ice might be ammonia, methane or water. In this case, “ice” is any volatile chemical with a melting point above around 100 Kelvin. We’ve got two in our Solar System: Uranus and Neptune.

The Solar System’s planets are close enough for astronomical spectroscopy to show us what chemicals are in their atmospheres or on their surfaces. Scientists have used the same techniques for studying a few exoplanets.

But in many cases, the data we have to work with is an exoplanet’s orbital period, mass, and — for transiting planets — diameter.⁶

That information would tell hypothetical astronomers on a planet circling Tau Ceti that the Solar System’s Venus and Earth are almost certainly rocky planets with about the same mass. And that Venus should be warmer than Earth. But it wouldn’t tell them much else.

Sorting Exoplanets by — Radius?

Open Exoplanet Catalogue's graph: 5000 exoplanets known at the start of 2022, sorted by radius. — The ca. 5,000 known exoplanets, sorted by radius. (early 2022) Open Exoplanet Catalogue via E. Siegel.

Even so, just knowing a planet’s mass and diameter tells us quite a bit: particularly when researchers combine data from all known exoplanets.

That graph, used by Professor Siegel in his “Catastrophe” article, sorts 5,000 known (as of the start 0f 2022) exoplanets by radius.

I’m not sure how or where Open Exoplanet Catalogue got the radius of 5,000 exoplanets. When I checked their website, I didn’t find that graph.

We had catalogued about 5,500 exoplanets by early 2022. But as far as I know, we didn’t know the radius of each one.

Fast-forward to May, 2023. As of this month, scientists know of 5,300 and some odd exoplanets, a bit over 4,000 of which are transiting exoplanets.

Transiting exoplanets are worlds that pass between their star and us once every orbit. Observing and measuring these transits tells scientists how wide the worlds are.

I don’t know how Open Exoplanet Catalogue got radii for non-transiting worlds. Maybe it’s derived from their mass. Then again, maybe not.

Anyway, I gather that if Earth was on that graph, it’d be at -1.0 units. Neptune would be at -0.5 and Jupiter would be at 0.0.

And, again looking at that graph, it looks like the number of exoplanets peaks at a little shy of Neptune’s size, with another peak at Jupiter-size and larger. According to that graph.⁷

I spent more time than I maybe should have, trying to tack down where Open Exoplanet Catalogue got their “radius” data. Without success.

Maybe the graph’s “radius” label should have been “mass”.

There was, as of March 2022, a clustering of exoplanet masses around one Jupiter-mass and another around about 0.03 Jupiter-mass.⁷

Mass, Period and Discovery Method of Known Exoplanets (March 2022)

NASA/JPL-Caltech/NASA Exoplanet Archive's scatter plot: known exoplanets' mass, period, and discovery/measurement method. (2022) via Big Think, used w/o permission. — NASA Exoplanet Archive’s scatter plot: mass, period and discovery/measurement method. (2022)

I’d enjoy geeking out over how scientists have been spotting exoplanets, and why they’ve spotted so many big planets with small orbits.

But you’re in luck.

If I’m going to get this thing finished in a reasonable time, my reasonable option is making a list of methods, plus a quick definition.

Astrometry
Precisely measuring the positions and movements of stars
Imaging
Getting a ‘photo’ of a planet, often in infrared
Microlensing
Observing the ‘flash’ when light from a planet gets focused by an intervening star’s gravity field
Orbital brightness variations
Just what it says: observing cyclic changes in a star’s brightness (CHECK THIS)
Radial velocity
Looking for changes in star’s spectrum caused by Doppler shift
Transits
Observing light from a star dimming as a planet moves across its face
Timing variations
Observing and timing transits

Maybe exoplanets really do come in two basic sizes, with two standard orbital periods: either Jupiter-size with a 1,000 day orbit, or between Uranus and Neptune-size with a 10-day orbit.

That’d make the Solar System, with its two gas giants, two ice giants and four terrestrial planets an oddball. And maybe that’s so.

On the other hand, each detection method we’ve got has its own selection bias.

It’s very possible that we’ve found a great many massive planets in either very tight orbits or in fairly big orbit — because that’s what our current methods are good at spotting.⁸

New Worlds Discovered by Kepler, TESS, and Everything Else

NASA/GSFC/SVS/Katrina Jackson's illustration, showing how transit detection of exoplanets and exomoons works. (ca. 2018) — Illustration: how transit detection of exoplanets and exomoons works. (NASA/GSFC/SVS/Katrina Jackson (ca. 2019))

NASA/JPL-Caltech/NASA Exoplanet Archive's bar chart: Cumulative number of exoplanet detections by year and detection method. (1989-2022) via Big Think, used w/o permission. — Cumulative exoplanet discoveries by year and detection method. (1989-2022) For latest count see exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu

Until about 2012, scientists were mostly spotting new exoplanets by measuring the radial velocity of stars. Just to make things more complicated, radial velocity detection is often called Doppler spectroscopy, and that’s another topic.

Oddly enough, I’ve yet to see the flood of exoplanets discovered with the Kepler space telescope tied in with the 2012 ‘end of the world’ thing. Possibly because nerds like me focus more on the science side of the Mayan long count calendar, and less on pop prophecies.

The spike in confirmed exoplanets in 2016 probably came from NASA’s data dump in May of that year. Analysis dump, actually. Then, in July of 2018, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), started sending back data.

Kepler and TESS aren’t the only transit-detecting space observatories. And there’s the CNES/ESA COROT (Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits), and projects like SuperWASP and HATNet on Earth.⁹

That’s not a complete list. The point is that a whole lot of scientists have been gathering and analyzing data, using over a half-dozen methods: mostly transit, lately.

So how come, out of the five-thousand-plus new worlds they’ve spotted, they haven’t found ‘Earth 2.0’ — a planet pretty much like Earth, orbiting a star like ours?

Still Seeking the Legendary Earth 2.0

NASA/Ames/Jessie Dotson and Wendy Stenzel; scatter plot, annotated by E. Siegel: confirmed exoplanets by radius and orbital period, with radius/orbital period of Mercury and Earth for comparison. (2022) via Big Think, used w/o permission. — Confirmed exoplanets by radius and orbital period. (2022) NASA/Ames/J. Dotson and W. Stenzel.
Red and green annotations by E. Siegel.

That scatter plot shows exoplanets know as of 2017, sorted by radius (vertical) and orbital period (horizontal).

The red oval is where we’d find a planet more-or-less like Mercury. Earth-size worlds in an orbit somewhat like ours would be in the green oval.

‘Earth 2.0’, a planet like ours orbiting a star like ours, would be right in the center of the green oval. We hadn’t spotted one like that in 2017, and still haven’t.

But we have found a few planets that are roughly Earth’s size: like Kepler-186f and TOI-700 d. They’re both in their star’s habitable zone. The stars are red dwarfs, though: so neither would be sure-fire ‘Earth 2.0’.

A few exoplanets have been called Earth analogs, and a few of those were temporarily dubbed ‘Earth 2.0’.

Some are too hot for life as we know it. Some are big enough to be called super-Earths.¹⁰ And that, finally, brings me to what bothers Professor E. Siegel about “super-Earths”.

The Problem with “Super-Earths”

NASA/JPL-Caltech/DSS photo/sky chart. Part of the constellation Cassiopeia, with location of HD_219134 circled. (2015) — Part of the constellation Cassiopeia, with HD_219134 circled. NASA/JPL-Caltech/DSS (2015)

The earliest example I’ve found of the term “Super-Earths” is in a 2006 paper.

“…The first such planets were discovered during the past year, judging by their measured masses of less than 10 Earth-masses (M⊕) or Super-Earths. … Their composition can be either completely terrestrial or harbour an extensive ocean (water and ices) above a rocky core….”
(“Radius and Structure models for the First Super-Earth Planet“; Diana Valencia, Dimitar D. Sasselov, Richard J. O’Connell; The Astrophysical Journal (submitted October 4, 2006))

Having “a mass higher than Earth’s, but substantially below those of the Solar System’s ice giants” is a Wikipedia page’s definition for super-Earth. Apparently the label and mass-only description caught on.

But even in 2006 — or 2007, when the paper was published — it wasn’t the best moniker. Scientists knew that a fair number of “super-Earths” could be quite un-Earthlike.

Unlike Professor E. Siegel, I don’t think that’s a “catastrophe”.

Sloppy labeling, yes; but not a catastrophe.

Not unless scientists start forgetting distinctions and labels like ocean world, mini-Neptune, sub-Neptune, super-puff and Chthonian planet.

I’d be astounded if we’re still using all those labels a hundred years from now. We’ve been learning a lot, fast, about exoplanets.

A few decades back, we didn’t know that these worlds existed. A few decades from now, with new data and new analysis, many of today’s models for what’s inside exoplanets may turn out to be very wrong.

Diana Valencia et al.’s 2006 paper used GJ876d, Gliese 876 d, the first known “super-Earth”, as its model. I’d use it as an example, too, but not quite two decades later we still don’t know its radius.

And we won’t, until scientists come up with new observation and analysis methods. We do, however, have a pretty good handle on its mass: between six and a half and seven and a quarter times Earth’s.

So I’ll be looking at what we know about HD 219134 b, a super-Earth orbiting HD 219134, a star that’s a tad over 21 light-years out, in the general direction of Beta Cassiopeiae.¹¹

HD 219134 b: Data, Density and Uncertainty

NASA Exoplanet Catalog's visualization of HD219134's inner planets. (2023) — Visualization of HD 219134’s inner planets, from NASA Exoplanet Catalog.

The star HD 219134 is smaller and cooler than our star, with a K3V spectral class.

Its habitable zone, where a planet like Earth could have liquid water on the surface, is smaller than the Solar System’s.

And HD 219134 b is even closer to its star. It’s far too hot for life as we know it.

Astronomers have taken a close look at HD 219134 b: not directly, but by measuring shifts in its star’s radial velocity, and how much starlight it blocks when it transits HD 219134.

That’s given them HD 219134 b’s mass and radius, with a fair degree of accuracy: which in turn gives its density. Whatever its made of, on average the exoplanet is dense.

Density (grams per cubic centimeter) of:

HD 219134 b
6.36 (± 0.72)
Earth
5.5134
Mercury
5.427
Neptune
1.638

If those numbers are right, HD 219134 b is almost certainly not made of stuff similar to Neptune’s interior. And maybe not quite like Earth’s.

Slightly more recent data says that the exoplanet’s radius is smaller: about 1.5 times Earth’s. Which would make it even denser that Earth.

The last I checked, we haven’t detected an atmosphere around HD 219134 b. But scientists have worked out that it might have one: and if so, it probably isn’t mostly hydrogen.

Given how much data’s available, that’s pretty good work. And gives other scientists starting points for planning new observations of HD 219134’s planetary system.¹²

My guess is that HD 219134 b is a “super-Earth”: both in the sense of having more mass than Earth and less than Uranus or Neptune, and in the sense implied by “super-Earth“, being a planet that’s (probably) rocky.

“Super-Earths”: Not Necessarily Terrestrial

Many exoplanets with the super-Earth label are at least as dense as Earth, so they may be made of stuff like our home.

55 Cancri A e, for example is even denser than HD 219134 b: 6.66 grams per centimeter squared (+0.43 or -0.40).

But others, like Kepler-737b, with a density around three and a third grams per centimeter, are much less dense than Earth.

Since they’re also more massive than Earth, the odds are good that they’re not particularly Earth-like.

What is inside exoplanets — is something I’ll leave for another time.

I think having a label for exoplanets with masses between Earth’s and Uranus’ makes sense.

But “super-Earths” isn’t an ideal label. “Earth” can imply Earth-like. Some of them aren’t particularly Earthlike at all. Looking at their density, they’re probably not even terrestrial, like the Solar System’s inner worlds.¹³

Cosmic Pluralism, Aristotle, God, and Getting a Grip

Detail, Gustave Doré's illustration for 'Inferno', Canto IV - Limbo, Dante is accepted as an equal by the great Greek and Roman poets.' Plate 12 (1857) — Doré’s illustration for “Inferno”, Canto IV: Dante meeting great Greek and Roman poets. (1857)

Aristotle was a very smart man.

Trust me, this relates to super-Earths, exoplanets and the search for extraterrestrial life. Like I said, Aristotle was very smart. But he wasn’t the only smart citizen of an ancient Greek city-state.

Take Anaximander, for example. He lived about two centuries before Aristotle, and said that we lived in a universe with many worlds. But he didn’t have fan base that kept Aristotle’s work front and center while the Roman Empire rose and crumbled.

About a thousand years back now, European scholars picked up where their ancient counterparts left off. They also put Aristotle in an exalted position.

I suspect that it didn’t hurt, either in Aristotle’s day or later, that Aristotle’s cosmology put Earth at the very center of the universe. Or, perhaps more accurately, at the bottom, and that’s yet another topic.

The point is that Earth was important: and the only earthly world. According to Aristotle.

Aristarchus and other ancient philosophers who said maybe we’re not standing on the only world weren’t entirely forgotten.

I figure we’d have realized that Earth wasn’t alone eventually, anyway. Truth has a way asserting itself.

The ‘one world or many’ debate heated up in the late 1200s.

Some European scholars said folks like Aristarchus were on the right track.

Others said there is only one Earth and we’re standing on it. Because Aristotle said so.

I’m oversimplifying developments in Western philosophy over a span of millennia something fearful, by the way.

The ‘because Aristotle said so’ thing got the Bishop of Paris involved. His Condemnation of 1277 said, at least by implication, that God’s God and Aristotle’s not.¹⁴

27A. That the first cause cannot make more than one world.
“Selections from the Condemnation of 1277“, Gyula Klima, Fordham University (November 23, 2006)

Truth Matters

NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt's artist's concept: how rocky, potentially habitable planets might appear. (April 13, 2022) — Habitable planets might look like this. Illustration by R. Hurt. (2022)

Recapping, 27A of the Condemnation of 1277 implied that if we’re standing on the only earthly world, it’s because God (or ‘the first cause’ in Medieval academic-speak) wants it that way.

And that if the universe has many worlds like ours, that’s the way it is: whether Aristotle would have approved or not.

I suspect one reason the Condemnation of 1277 is so controversial these days is the ‘God’s God, Aristotle’s not’ thing.

Flat-out saying — even though Aristotelian cosmology fits nicely into the Mesopotamian cosmic poetry reflected in the Bible — that what’s true is true, even if it means we must readjust our assumptions?

That emphatically does not fit the ‘rigid, arbitrary and unthinking’ view of religion in general and Christianity in particular that’s been popular of late. I’ll grant that rabidly-righteous and frighteningly-faith-filled folks don’t help dispel that image.

A few more points, and I’m done.

I don’t “believe in” extraterrestrial life. I figure we’ll either find life that emerged on other worlds: or we won’t. I’m pretty sure we won’t stop looking.

I certainly wouldn’t mind if we learn that we have neighbors in this universe, and I’m drifting off-topic.

Trying to “not believe in” exoplanets would be silly, at best. Scientists have discovered thousands so far, and the odds are good that evidence of many more is in data that hasn’t been crunched yet.

The bottom line is that truth matters. A lot. That’s not just my opinion. Here’s what Saints, popes and a scientist have said about paying attention and accepting truth:

“Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and always will be: ‘On to God!’“
(“Religion and Natural Science”, Translated and published in “Max Planck: Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers” (1968); via Wikiquote [emphasis mine])

“…if methodical investigation within every branch of learning is carried out in a genuinely scientific manner and in accord with moral norms, it never truly conflicts with faith, for earthly matters and the concerns of faith derive from the same God. … we cannot but deplore certain habits of mind, which are sometimes found too among Christians, which do not sufficiently attend to the rightful independence of science and which, from the arguments and controversies they spark, lead many minds to conclude that faith and science are mutually opposed.…”
(“Gaudium et Spes“, Pope St. Paul VI (December 7, 1965) [emphasis mine])

“…God, the Creator and Ruler of all things, is also the Author of the Scriptures — and that therefore nothing can be proved either by physical science or archaeology which can really contradict the Scriptures. … Even if the difficulty is after all not cleared up and the discrepancy seems to remain, the contest must not be abandoned; truth cannot contradict truth….”
(“Providentissimus Deus“, Pope Leo XIII (November 18, 1893) [emphasis mine])

“Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air…. They all answer you, ‘Here we are, look; we’re beautiful.’…
“…So in this way they arrived at a knowledge of the god who made things, through the things which he made”.
(Sermon 241, St. Augustine of Hippo (ca. 411))

One more thing. God is large and in charge. And I’m okay with that.

“Our God is in heaven and does whatever he wills.”
(Psalms 115:3)

I was going to talk about our search for extraterrestrial life, hypothetical life chemistry, and why I hope we have neighbors. But this post is running long, so I’ll leave that for later.

Now, finally — really finally, this time — the usual links:

“TRAPPIST-1 and the Mysterious Pea Pod Planets“
(April 8, 2023)
“Galaxies, Gravity and a Hot Terrestrial Planet“
(February 25, 2023)
“Two Nearby Habitable(?) Worlds; Elements for Life“
(February 4, 2023)
“Exoplanets, Air, and the Marshmallow Planet“
(December 10, 2022)
“Exoplanets, Iron, Evolution and Strange Geochemistry“
(January 22, 2022)

¹ Superhabitable, uninhabitable, and an opinion:

Wikipedia
“Superhabitable Worlds“
René Heller, John Armstrong; Astrobiology (January 2014) via arXiv
“Professor Ethan Siegel, ‘Hyper Reality’“
Featured Events, Pacific Northwest College (September 2010)

² Strange worlds, hypothetical and otherwise:

Wikipedia
“Superhabitable Worlds“
René Heller, John Armstrong; Astrobiology (January 2014) via arXiv
“Professor Ethan Siegel, ‘Hyper Reality’“
Featured Events, Pacific Northwest College (September 2010)

³ Habitabable may not mean ‘just like Earth’:

Wikipedia
“The role of planetary interior in the long-term evolution of
atmospheric CO2 on Earth-like exoplanets“
M. Oosterloo, D. Höning, I. E. E. Kamp, F. F. S. van der Tak; Astronomy & Astrophysics, ESO (March 18, 2021) via arXiv
“Superhabitable Worlds“
René Heller, John Armstrong; Astrobiology (January 2014) via arXiv
“Plate Tectonics on Earth-Like Planets“
L. Noack, D. Breuer; EPSC-DPS (European Planetary Science Congress-Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society) Joint Meeting 2011, held 2-7 October 2011 in Nantes, France (October 2011)

⁴ Science and history, some of which I lived through:

Wikipedia
“Efficiency of the oxygenic photosynthesis on Earth-like planets in the habitable zone“
Giovanni Covone, Riccardo M Ienco, Luca Cacciapuoti, Laura Inno; Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 505, Issue 3, pages 3329–3335 (August 2021)
A hoax, history, and not missing the ‘good old days’
- “Green Sahara, Environmental and Climate News” (July 30, 2022)
  - Marketing and Menaces
- “Where Have All the People Gone?” (November 23, 2018)
- “‘Oumuamua: Data, Questions” (November 10, 2018)
  - Anaxagoras and the Great Moon Hoax

⁵ Publications and (pop?) science:

Wikipedia
- Forbes
- Kepler-442b
“Efficiency of the oxygenic photosynthesis on Earth-like planets in the habitable zone“
Giovanni Covone, Riccardo M Ienco, Luca Cacciapuoti, Laura Inno; Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 505, Issue 3, pages 3329–3335 (August 2021)
“There Is Only One Other Planet In Our Galaxy That Could Be Earth-Like, Say Scientists“
Jamie Carter, Forbes (June 23, 2021)
“Kepler-442b is more habitable than Earth“
K. G. Orphanides, Science, Wired UK (July 10, 2015)
“Belief, Legend, and the Great Moon Hoax“
Stephanie Hall, Folklife Today, American Folklife Center & Veterans History Project, Library of Congress Blogs (August 26, 2014)

⁶ Diverse and distant worlds:

Wikipedia
- 51 Pegasi b
- Astronomical spectroscopy
- Earth
- Enceladus
- Europa (moon)
- Exoplanet
- Gas giant
- Hot Jupiter
- Ice
  - Non-water
- Ice giant
- Gliese 1214 b
- Neptune
- Ocean world
- Tau Ceti
- Tau Ceti f
- Terrestrial planet
- Uranus
- Venus
- Volatility (chemistry)
Studying light from distant worlds, my view
- “TRAPPIST-1 and the Mysterious Pea Pod Planets” (April 8, 2023)
  - Possible Interiors: 2021
- “TRAPPIST-1 b Measured by Webb: Hot, Airless” (April 1, 2023)
  - Taking TRAPPIST-1 b’s Temperature With Webb’s MIRI

⁷ Lists and statistics:

Wikipedia
- GitHub
- Lists of exoplanets
NASA Exoplanet archive (NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NASA, ipac, NExScI/Caltech))
- Exoplanet and Candidate Statistics
- Exoplanet Plots (graphs and charts)
- Transiting Planet Resources in the Exoplanet Archive
Open Exoplanet Catalogue (“Fork me on GitHub”)

⁸ More lists, and how we study exoplanets:

Wikipedia
Exoplanets in Transit:Transits reveal planets orbiting other stars.
Exoplanet Transit Poster, Professor Newby’s Educational Quanta, Temple University Sites. Temple Univrsity, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
NASA Exoplanet archive (NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NASA, ipac, NExScI/Caltech))
- Exoplanet and Candidate Statistics
- Exoplanet Plots (graphs and charts)
- Transiting Planet Resources in the Exoplanet Archive

⁹ Something silly, and a whole bunch of stuff that’s not:

Wikipedia
- 2012 phenomenon
- CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales/National Centre for Space Studies)
- CoRoT (Convection, Rotation et Transits planétaires/Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits)
- Doppler spectroscopy
- European Space Agency (ESA)
- HATNet Project (Hungarian Automated Telescope Network)
- Kepler space telescope
- Maya civilization
- Mesoamerican Long Count calendar
- Methods of detecting exoplanets
- Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)
- Wide Angle Search for Planets
NASA
- Exoplanet Plots graphs and charts)
- “NASA’s Kepler Mission Announces Largest Collection of Planets Ever Discovered“; Felicia Chou, Michele Johnson; Karen Northon, Editor (May 10, 2016; last updated August 6, 2017)
- Briefing Materials: Artificial Intelligence and NASA Data Used to Discover Eighth Planet Circling Distant Star (2017)

¹⁰ Searching for another place like Earth:

Wikipedia
- Earth analog
- Kepler-42 (Three known planets, each with radius less than Earth’s)
- Kepler-186
- Kepler-186f (first planet with a radius similar to Earth’s discovered in another star’s habitable zone)
- Kepler-452
- Kepler-452b (radius about 1.5 times Earth’s, mass about five times Earth’s
- Super-Earth
- TOI-700
- TOI-700 d (first Earth-sized exoplanet in its star’s habitable zone discovered by TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite))

¹¹ Stars and planets:

Wikipedia
“Radius and Structure models for the First Super-Earth Planet“
Diana Valencia, Dimitar D. Sasselov, Richard J. O’Connell; The Astrophysical Journal (submitted October 4, 2006) via arXiv, Published 2007 via iop.org

¹² Searching for habitable worlds:

Wikipedia
“From the stellar properties of HD 219134 to the internal compositions of its transiting exoplanets“
R. Ligi, C. Dorn, A. Crida, Y. Lebreton, O. Creevey, F. Borsa1, D. Mourard, N. Nardetto, I. Tallon-Bosc, F. Morand, E. Poretti; Astronomy & Astrophysics, ESO (received July 5, 2019; accepted September 20, 2019) via Astronomy & Astrophysics and EDP Sciences
“Secondary Atmospheres on HD 219134 b and c“
Caroline Dorn, Kevin Heng; The Astrophysical Journal (January 23, 2018) via iop.org

¹³ Super-Earths and/or terrestrial planets:

Wikipedia
“Astronomers discover an unusually low-density super-Earth“
Tomasz Nowakowski, Phys.org (May 16, 2023)
“An unusually low-density super-Earth transiting the bright early-type M-dwarf GJ 1018 (TOI-244)“
A. Castro-González, O. D. S. Demangeon, J. Lillo-Box, C. Lovis, B. Lavie, V. Adibekyan, L. Acuña, M. Deleuil6, A. Aguichine, M. R. Zapatero Osorio, H. M. Tabernero, J. Davoult, Y. Alibert, N. Santos, S. G. Sousa, A. Antoniadis-Karnavas, F. Borsa, J. N. Winn, C. Allende Prieto, P. Figueira, J. M. Jenkins, A. Sozzetti, M. Damasso, A. M. Silva, N. Astudillo-Defru1, S. C. C. Barros, X. Bonfils, S. Cristiani, P. Di Marcantonio, J. I. González Hernández, G. Lo Curto, C. J. A. P. Martins, N. J. Nunes, E. Palle, F. Pepe, S. Seager, A. Suárez Mascareño; Astronomy & Astrophysics (received March 31, 2023; acepted May 2, 2023; published May 9, 2023) via arXiv
“Revisited mass-radius relations for exoplanets below 120 M⊕“
J. F. Otegi, F. Bouchy, R. Helled1; Astronomy & Astrophysics (received 8 August 8, 2019; accepted November 10, 2019; published February 2020)
“Mass-Radius Relationships for Exoplanets“
D. C. Swift, J. H. Eggert, D. G. Hicks, S. Hamel, K. Caspersen, E. Schwegler, G. W. Collins, N. Nettelmann, G. J. Ackland; The Astrophysical Journal (December 13, 2011) via Office of Scientific and Technical Information, U.S. Department of Energy

¹⁴ Philosophers and history:

Wikipedia
Condemnation of 1277
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (January 30, 2003; revised November 18, 2018)
“Selections from the Condemnation of 1277“
Gyula Klima, Fordham University (November 23, 2006)

Posted in Exoplanets and Aliens, Series | Tagged astronomy, exoplanets, extraterrestrial life, geology, getting a grip, history, planets, science, truth | Leave a comment

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Brian H. Gill