During Crimean War, hospitals of the day weren't so much centers of healing or recovery as they were the places where injured combatants went to die slightly more slowly. Turkey's Scutari hospital was one such notorious example. Converted by the British Empire from army barracks, Scutari lacked every imaginable amenity, from basic sanitation to sufficient ventilation, this "hospital" served as a potent incubator for myriad infectious diseases — that is until Florence Nightingale and her team of volunteer nurses arrived in 1854.
Maladies of Empire by Jim Downs explores how many aspects of modern medicine are borne on the backs of humanity's most abhorrent impulses, though in the excerpt below, Downs illustrates how one woman's unyielding tenacity and fastidious record keeping helped launch the field of preventative medicine.
While in Scutari, Nightingale developed a system of record keeping that tracked a variety of factors at the Barrack Hospital and the nearby General Hospital. She took notes on everything from cleanliness to the quantity of supplies to diet to the placement of latrines and graveyards.
She also carefully examined the physical space. She took careful note of the size of the wards, the condition of the roof, and the quality, size, and placement of the windows. In her book on the health of the British army, like Thomas Trotter and others who wrote about the importance of fresh air, she pointed to the problem of improper ventilation, and she devoted an entire section to “bad ventilation.” She quoted the report of the sanitary commission, which remarked on the “defective state of the ventilation” in the Barrack Hospital. There were only “a few small openings here and there,” so that there was no way for the “hot and foul” air to escape. As an adherent of the miasma theory, she believed that diseases were spread through the air and advocated for ventilation to release the “foul air” from hospitals.
In addition to inadequate ventilation, Nightingale pointed to poor drainage and badly designed sewers and plumbing. In her testimony to the royal commission, Nightingale reported on the filthy conditions she found in the Barrack Hospital when she arrived. “The state of the privies... for several months, more than an inch deep in filth, is too horrible to describe.” She observed six dead dogs under one of the windows, and a dead horse lay in the aqueduct for weeks. The drinking water was dirty; once she saw used hospital uniforms in the water tank. Rats and insects abounded, and “the walls and ceilings were saturated with organic matter.”
In the conclusion to her report on the health of the British Army, she explained, “We have much more information on the sanitary history of the Crimean campaign than we have upon any other, but because it is a complete exam (history does not afford its equal) of an army, after failing to the lowest ebb of disease and disaster from neglects committed, rising again to the highest state of health and efficiency from remedies applied.
"It is the whole experiment on a colossal scale.” She pointed out that during the first seven months of the Crimean campaign, mortality exceeded that of the plague of 1665 as well as that of recent cholera epidemics. But during the last six months of the war, after sanitary reforms had been made, “we had... a mortality among our sick little more than that among our healthy Guards at home.”
Using mortality data that she had collected during the war, along with domestic mortality statistics, Nightingale showed that between 1839 and 1853, mortality among soldiers was much higher than among civilian men: “of 10,000 soldiers [at the age of 20], 7,077 live to the age of 39, out of whom 135 die in the next year of age; whereas out of 10,000 civilians at the age of 20, 8,253 attain the age of 39, and of those 106 die in the year of age following.” Nearly all mortality among soldiers was the result of disease; “actual losses in battle form a very small part of the calamities of a long war.” Nightingale classified the causes of death as “zymotic diseases” (which in the nineteenth century referred to infectious diseases such as fevers, measles, and cholera), “chest and tubercular diseases,” and “all other diseases (including violent deaths).” Nightingale was critical of the army’s classification system for diseases. At the bottom of a chart, she notes, “Bronchitis and influenza have no place in the Army nomenclature. The chronic catarrh of the Army Returns is believed to be really phthisis, in the great majority of cases; acute catarrh comprehends both epidemic catarrh, or influenza and bronchitis.”
Nightingale presented statistics using charts, tables, and diagrams, which were just beginning to appear in research reports, to make it easier for readers to visualize the comparison she was making. She developed a new kind of graphic, called a “rose chart,” also known as a coxcomb chart or polar area diagram, to present mortality data from the Crimean War. Each chart, which is laid out like a pie, shows data from one year, with the slices representing months. Each slice is divided into colored segments whose area is proportional to the number of deaths.
One segment is for deaths from wounds, a second for “preventable or mitigable zymotic diseases,” and a third for all other causes. A quick glance at the charts of deaths from April 1854 to March 1855 and April 1855 to March 1856 is enough to show that many more deaths were caused by disease than by combat, and that overall mortality decreased in the second year.
To further make visible the dangers of unsanitary hospitals, Nightingale gathered mortality data for matrons, nuns, and nurses working in fifteen London hospitals who died of the “zymotic diseases” of fever and cholera. She presented tables, which she notes William Farr compiled for her, showing that the mortality rate of the nursing staff was much higher than that of the female population in London; in addition, women working in hospitals were more likely to die of zymotic diseases than were other women. She used these figures to argue for the “very great importance” of hygiene in hospitals. “The loss of a well-trained nurse by preventible [sic] disease,” she wrote, “is a greater loss than is that of a good soldier from the same cause. Money cannot replace either, but a good nurse is more difficult to find than a good soldier.”
In her book Notes on Hospitals, she retold the story of the British prisoners of war who died in a crowded jail cell in India in 1756: “Shut up 150 people in a Black hole of Calcutta, and in twenty-four hours an infection is produced so intense that it will, in that time, have destroyed nearly the whole of the inmates.” Nightingale’s reference to the case is evidence for its status as the prototypical illustration of the need for ventilation. And the fact that it took place in India shows how British medical authorities used information from around the empire.
As a result of her work with large numbers of patients in the Crimean War, Nightingale framed her analysis like an epidemiologist, in terms of populations. She focused on how disease spread within a group. She devoted her energies not to changing bedpans or dressing wounds but to studying the structure of hospitals, analyzing statistics, and figuring out how to increase ventilation.
The war provided her the opportunity to compare mortality rates in varied settings: crowded hospitals, shabby tents, and wooden huts. It also underscored to her the importance of preventive measures, which constitutes one of the major tenets of modern epidemiology. By publishing her observations, her insights, and guidelines for hospitals to follow, she hoped to provide a set of rules and guidelines for physicians to follow to prevent the spread of disease. While efforts to ensure proper hygiene as a way to guard against illness can be traced to Mesopotamian civilization and Sanskrit writings from 2000 BCE, Nightingale’s warnings, in particular, and sanitary reform, more generally, sparked a critical turning point in the middle of the nineteenth century that gave rise to preventive medicine. This transformed military medicine from an enterprise that largely focused on treatment and surgery to one that began to engage epidemiological questions and issues.
Early-aught headliner Radiohead has teamed with Epic Games, makers of Gears of War and Fortnite, to compose "an upside-down digital/analogue universe created from Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood’s original artwork and audio design by Nigel Godrich. It commemorates the coming of age of Radiohead’s records, Kid A and Amnesiac," per an Epic Games rep.
The project, developed by namethemachine and Arbitrarily Good Productions, will be available on multiple platforms including PS5, PC and Mac this November. The news follows earlier reports of upcoming reissues for Kid A and Amnesiac this fall (and as soon as late this month) along with Kid Amnesiae, an LP of b-sides, which you can listen to one of below.
I’m a dozen miles outside of Santa Fe, heading West on the 502 towards Los Alamos in a borrowed 2022 Polestar 2 that won’t quit begging my right foot to gain a few pounds. Damned if I can’t stop staring at the horizon. In a futile effort to overtake me, stacks of clouds race across an azure backdrop spanning the Earth’s curvature.
“It’s just so big,” my mind protests after 18 months of indoor pandemic living.
My right foot, ever loyal, finds the floor. Away we go, the overhead world a fading memory as the horizon rushes forward to meet us.
Paul Barshon/Beadyeye
With the Polestar 1’s production run ending in December and both the 3 and Precept without firm release dates, the Polestar 2 I’m driving is the current crown jewel of the company’s burgeoning model lineup. The Polestar 2 Launch Edition arrived last year with every bell and whistle the company could manage to pack into its frame. For the 2022 model year, Polestar is taking a different tack by splitting the vehicle’s bevy of features into optional packages fitted onto a surprisingly well-appointed — and inexpensive — base mode.
The FWD version starts at $45,900 (as low as $34,900 after California incentives) and is outfitted with a single-speed AC synchronous permanent magnet motor using a 10.51:1 gear ratio. That motor delivers 231 HP, 243 ft-lb of torque, and a lengthy 265-mile range — 35 miles more than last year’s model, putting the 2022 FWD Polestar 2 on par with the VW ID.4, Hyundai Kona EV, and the Chevy Bolt (assuming the latter isn’t currently on fire). It offers a 100 MPH top speed with a 0-60 of 7 seconds.
The AWD version starts at $49,900 (down from last year’s $61,200 starting price) and utilizes a pair of permanent magnet motors (one on each axle) running 8.57:1 gear ratios. At that ratio, the performance-focused AWD Polestar 2 will have a higher top speed of 127 MPH, albeit at the cost of a nominally reduced 249-mile driving range. As such, the AWD puts out 408 HP between the two motors, 487 ft-lb of torque, and a 4.45-second 0-60.
Both variants will offer a $4,000 Plus Pack, which includes a full-length glass roof, "premium" interior including a 600W Harman Kardon stereo, powered seats, cabin illumination and the addition of a heat pump that uses waste energy from the drivetrain to heat the cabin interior and battery pack on cold days (while also improving range by up to 10 percent under certain climate conditions).
Paul Barshon/Beadyeye
The 2022 base models will come outfitted with a new, vegan “embossed textile upholstery” while the Weave-Tech covering found in last year’s Launch Edition is now included in the Plus Package. If you’re hankering for real leather, that is available but comes at a premium price point. If you want the metallic Magnesium, Midnight, Snow, Moon, or Thunder paint options, they’ll set you back an extra $1,200.
The $3,200 Pilot Pack incorporates Advanced Driver Assist features like adaptive cruise control, blind spot warnings and a 360-degree camera. Only the AWD version, however, will have access to the $5,000 Performance pack which adds 20-inch alloys, Brembo brakes, sport tires, and upgraded suspension components. You’ll be able to spot Polestars with the performance pack by their bright yellow cosmetic accents on the brake calipers, seatbelts and valve caps. There is also a “blacked-out” option that eliminates all the chrome and colored exterior accents if you opt for the “Void” color scheme.
Regardless of the packages included, both Polestar variants run off the same 400V electrical architecture and 78 kWh (75kWh usable) capacity battery pack. The company has squeezed a few additional kW of charging capacity, 155 kW up from last year’s 150 using just software updates, for the 2022 models dropping the amount of time needed to refill from 10 percent charge to 80 percent to just 33 minutes. On a standard Level 2 AC charger (like what you'd have installed in your home), you’re still looking at around 8 hours to fully repower the vehicle.
Paul Barshon/Beadyeye
Compared to last year’s model, the 2022 Polestar’s interior appears largely unchanged. An 11-inch central infotainment display running Android Automotive still dominates the vehicle’s minimalist dashboard. Rather than tethering or mirroring content from your mobile device, drivers will be able to log into the vehicle’s OS directly, granting them access to their Google accounts, contacts and the Google Play Store as well as natively running Google Maps, Spotify, YouTube Music and others.
Installing new apps is a cinch, a nearly identical process to doing so on your smartphone. Each new Polestar comes with 3 years of included access to Google Service Connectivity and LTE capability from AT&T. The company anticipates that a steady stream of OTA updates will help keep the Polestar 2’s features and performance continually up to date. Polestar also plans to extend its latest OTA service to the 2021 model year so Launch Edition vehicles will enjoy the latest and greatest in software updates.
Paul Barshon/Beadyeye
At 5,312 feet above sea level, Albuquerque, New Mexico is the highest of America’s state capitals, though it is outclassed by Santa Fe, an hour to the west and 7,199 feet high, where I spent last Tuesday putting both Polestar iterations through their relative paces. At more than a mile above sea level, the air is so thin that conventional internal combustion engines (ICEs) can lose as much as 30 percent of their power output (roughly a hundred HP). Thank goodness battery electric vehicles (BEVs) like the Polestar have no need for triflings like oxygen. No matter how high it climbed, every last one of the FWD Polestar’s 231 horses remained available — still chomping at the bit, if you will.
Snapping awake from an unplanned anaphylactic nap, I find myself charging through the rolling hills of New Mexico State Road 4 while it winds its way through the Valles Caldera National Preserve. Of course, because it’s being pulled along by its leading axle, the FWD Polestar 2 does tend to swing wider through turns (as front drive vehicles are wont to do) compared to its AWD cousin, which led to a couple of hair-raising encounters with oncoming vehicles who were themselves shading the narrow two-lane’s centerline.
“If you are thinking of flying a drone to take video of the car near Los Alamos National Lab,” Polestar PR warned us before we took off for the initial test drive. “Don’t. The government has been known to shoot them down.”
So instead, here’s a picture of the W80 that was awaiting us at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History at the end of the drive’s initial leg. Coffee, snacks and selectable-yield thermonuclear warhead displays, oh my.
National Museum of Nuclear Science and History
The choice between the FWD and AWD versions of the 2022 Polestar 2 is not an easy one. For nearly all intents and purposes, the two are functionally identical both inside and out. The question you’ll have to answer for yourself is whether you want a fast, sporty and stylish ride with 265 miles of range or whether you want to trade in 16 of those miles for an extra 177 HP of head-snapping acceleration.
It’s mid-afternoon and I’m hill-climbing the absurdly tall, 10,000-foot high mountain that leads Ski Santa Fe. It started raining about 20 minutes ago, the temperature is dropping, and that gentle pitter-patter of formerly refreshing precipitation is now doing its best to become a Class 3 Kill Storm. When I raced along Skyline Blvd in 2019, the skies were clear and my right foot was a rotund demon with 408 Launch Edition horses at its beck and call.
Today, the skies were crying and the roads were revolting, but had just as much power at my disposal with the AWD Polestar 2’s accelerator pedal underfoot. It’s raining, it’s hailing, it’s snowing, minor landslides are depositing forearm-sized stones into the roadway. The Polestar barely seemed to notice the hazards — easily forging through spontaneous road rivers, slush piles, and newly laid rock beds — while charging up the tightly winding hillside. One flick of my right foot and away we go, ever onward, ever upward, and ever faster, just as soon as the Chevy Tahoe ahead of me decides to pull off into its campsite and stop crawling along at 15 goddamn miles an hour.
In 2019, Google parent, Alphabet Inc, terminated the employment of two software engineers, Laurence Berland and Rebecca Rivers, in a move that sparked company-wide protests and accusations of retaliation for the pair's efforts to organize their workplace. On Wednesday the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) announced that it had approved a proposed settlement between the company and Berland.
While neither Berland's legal council nor Alphabet could be reached for comment, Bloomberg notes that this agreement does not impact the NLRB's continuing investigation into Alphabet's alleged firing of other employees who protested the company's coordination with US Customs and Border Patrol, which is currently being argued in a San Francisco courtroom.
Per previous testimony in Berland's case, Alphabet argued that the firings were due directed at those “who abused their privileged access to internal systems, such as our security tools or colleagues’ calendars.” Berland, in his defense, countered that "I told them that I accessed the calendars because I was concerned that our rights were being violated."
Art may imitate life but it rarely does so with realistic fidelity. As Naomi Pequette, Space Science Programs Specialist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, argues in her essay "The Sounds of Contact" as part of The Science if Sci-Fi Cinema: Essays on the Art and Principles of Ten Films, being "based on a true story" doesn't exactly mean we're getting the whole story.
How would you react if you found out we aren’t alone in the universe? Imagine the moment you discover a radio signal from another civilization had traveled billions of miles through interstellar space, had been detected by some of the most powerful radio telescopes in the world, and decoded by scientists. Would it matter if it was first detected by scientists from your home country? Would the content of the signal matter? Would you want the chance to be able to meet the alien civilization that sent the signal? These are all questions that the movie Contact explores.
The opening sequence of Contact sets the scientific basis for the rest of the film. As the camera travels away from Earth, the audience hears a cacophony of sounds. These sounds, which are radio and television signals traveling out into space, get older and older as we zoom past planets and asteroids. Eventually there is silence as the audience is taken into deep space and past beautiful sights like the Eagle Nebula. While the premise of the sequence has its basis in science, the scale is completely wrong.
Humanity has been transmitting television and radio signals into deep space for over a hundred years. These signals leave Earth and travel at the speed of light. This means that in one year, a signal will travel one light year into space. This has created what scientists call the “radio bubble,” an ever-expanding sphere with Earth at the center, that spans over 200 light years and announces humanity’s presence to the cosmos. These signals have gone well beyond our solar system and out to the nearest stars. However, our own solar system is small in comparison to this vast bubble since it spans just a few light hours across. That means, when Contact was released in 1997, our solar system would have still been listening to the greatest hits of 1997, like the number one Billboard song “I’ll Be Missing You” by Puff Daddy and Faith Evans, not broadcasts of the Kennedy assassination like we hear at Jupiter during the opening sequence. The closest star, Proxima Centauri, is only four light years away, which means any aliens on the planets orbiting Proxima Centauri would be singing along with Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” The television signal featuring Hitler at the 1936 Olympic games would have been traveling through space for 61 years, meaning any planet within 30 light years from Earth could have received the signal and sent it back to Earth. This includes more than 20 planets discovered as of 2019 and the all-important star of the film, Vega.
The story in Contact closely parallels the story of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI). One of SETI’s first projects, Project Phoenix, used radio telescopes to search for narrow-band radio signals, or signals that are at only one spot on the radio dial. These are considered the “signature” of an “intelligent” radio transmission. Much like Dr. Arroway’s research, Project Phoenix heavily relied on existing radio telescopes, such as Arecibo. Despite this, Project Phoenix was still the world’s most sensitive and comprehensive search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Unfortunately, this dependence on existing equipment meant that there were multiple projects competing for observing time. Still, SETI was able to obtain two three-week observing sessions on Arecibo, the world’s largest radio telescope, each year between 1998 and 2005. Instead of broadly scanning the sky, Project Phoenix targeted Sun-like stars within 200 light years since they were believed to be the most likely stars to have a planet capable of supporting life, and thus possibly intelligent life. Nearly two billion channels were examined for each target star.
SETI faced funding woes much like Dr. Arroway. Less than a year after founding the program, NASA withdrew funds from SETI due to pressures. While there were, and still are, questions about whether we could find evidence of extraterrestrial life, most informed parties agreed that SETI was pursuing worthwhile and valid science. However, fervor to decrease the federal deficit and a lack of support from other scientists and aerospace contractors made it an easy program to cut. Since then, SETI has been dependent on foundations and private donors for funding.
We see this reflected in Contact in Dr. David Drumlin who often questions the value and chance of the success of Dr. Arroway’s search. Dr. Drumlin is the science equivalent of a mustache-twirling villain. He will tell politicians whatever they want to hear, is narrow minded with the power to make or break scientist’s careers with funding, and is the stereotypical patronizing “mansplainer” that makes him reprehensible to the audience, or at least to an audience of scientists. He represents the politicians and other scientists who often mocked SETI. “What’s wrong with science being practical, or even profitable?” he muses. There is no immediate return on a search for extraterrestrials and that is often the factor that determines what projects receive funding. This was especially true for national funding of science in the 1990s. During Dr. Drumlin’s visit we hear other scientists at Arecibo scrambling to justify their own research in hopes that they can keep their funding. Dr. Drumlin ultimately pulls the plug on Dr. Arroway’s funding from the National Science Foundation, forcing her to seek funding from private sources. Her research became dependent on funding from a private donor, S.R. Haden, much like SETI’s research.
SETI served as the inspiration for key scientists as well. Dr. Arroway was based on Dr. Jill Tarter, the former director of SETI and the person responsible for the fact that SETI even exists. Like Dr. Arroway, she was inspired and encouraged by her father to pursue engineering and science before he died when she was twelve. She had to elbow her way through school at a time when women didn’t pursue STEM careers and was often not respected by peers because searching for extraterrestrial intelligence was, and still can be, considered fringe. However, like Dr. Arroway, Dr. Tarter persisted and left behind an incredible legacy. Dr. Kent Clarke was based on Dr. Kent Cullers, a project manager for SETI. Dr. Cullers was the first blind student to earn a Ph.D. in physics in the United States and is believed to be the first astronomer who was blind from birth. He developed and implemented complex computer algorithms to sift through mountains of radio signals and search for one that might be from another civilization.
One key difference between Dr. Arroway and Dr. Clarke’s search in Contact and SETI is the telescopes they used. While both Dr. Arroway and SETI utilized Arecibo, SETI never used the Very Large Array in their search. Not only would this have been a significant drop in sensitivity (Arecibo has four-times the collecting area, so it would be more likely to be able to detect a faint signal), it would have created a logistical problem. Since the Very Large Array is made up of 27 radio dishes, this would have required 27 specially designed receivers (one for each telescope) which would have been impossible with SETI’s limited budget.
And forget trying to listen to all those radio signals. While Dr. Arroway sitting in the desert listening for a signal is one of the most iconic visuals of the film (and one visitors of the Very Large Array love to recreate) astronomers don’t listen to signals at all. During Project Phoenix, using only one radio dish, there were 28 million radio channels being monitored simultaneously. Headphones could only listen to one of these channels at a time so the chances of listening to the right channel when the signal arrives is “astronomically” small. Unfortunately, the life of a radio astronomer is not nearly as romantic. It involves a lot of sitting in a control room (with no Wi-Fi or cell phones since that could produce a signal radio telescopes could pick up) waiting for a computer (using complex programs, like those developed by SETI’s Dr. Cullers) to send an alert that there is an interesting signal. However, astronomers are required to make critical decisions about signals that look intriguing.
Much like radio signals we have broadcasted into space in hopes of contacting an alien civilization, scientists speculate that any signal we receive from an intelligent civilization would be distinct from other naturally occurring radio sources. This could be done with the content of the message, like the “Arecibo Message” sent in the 1970s which contained the numbers one through ten and information about our DNA. Certainly, prime numbers or information on how to build an advanced machine would qualify the signal in Contact and make it distinct. In reality, however, it could take years to decode the deeper signals so there needs to be something else to make scientists look twice at a signal.
The aliens in Contact do this by transmitting the signal at a very special frequency that wouldn’t occur naturally. This frequency, 4.4623 GHz is described as “hydrogen times pi (π).” The hydrogen line, which is a common observation in radio astronomy, is the frequency at which hydrogen atoms, the most abundant substance in space, emit radio waves (1420.40575 MHz). While there aren’t a lot of loose hydrogen atoms in space (about one per cubic centimeter of interstellar space) space is vast. So, the collection of all those individual atoms makes for a powerful signal that can be easily detected by small radio telescopes. By multiplying this frequency, that would be well known by scientists, by a mathematical constant, not only are they creating a signal that could not be naturally occurring (since pi is an irrational number), bit would also give the civilization on the receiving end clues to the scientific knowledge of the aliens that sent it. While this frequency isn’t inside the range of frequencies that was observed by SETI’s Project Phoenix, it is within Very Large Array’s observing range of 1–50 GHz.
Another clue that the signal in Contact was not likely to be one that was not from a typical astronomical source is its strength. The signal measured in at 100 Jansky (Jy). A Jansky is a unit used by radio astronomers to describe the “brightness” or strength of a signal. Celestial radio sources are much fainter than terrestrial and are just a few Jy in strength. So, this is a relatively strong signal. The Sun, the brightest celestial radio source is 106–108 Jy in most frequencies, depending on solar activity. Terrestrial radio broadcasts, such as those we listen to on FM radio can be a million to a trillion times brighter than the Sun. So, while strong by astronomical standards, this is still a very faint signal by terrestrial standards and would require a radio telescope to detect.
So, what would happen if a signal is detected? In Contact, we see mixed reactions—excitement, wonder, fear, a sense of loss of control. The closest we have gotten as a society was on October 30, 1938, when CBS Radio systems broadcasted a story that Martians were attacking Earth, starting with a small town in New Jersey. While reports are mixed on whether there was nationwide panic or people simply enjoyed the broadcast of “The War of the Worlds,” many scientists have used this reaction to frame their recommendations for “first contact” protocols. Today’s society is used to getting constant updates via Twitter and other social media, so the post-detection protocols, which were first written in 1989, were revised in 2010, and are currently undergoing another revision.
As in Contact, the first step would be to verify the signal. Since 1997, scientists have become even more connected globally which fosters collaboration and allows for this sort of testing. In an ideal situation, only after the signal had been verified would the world be alerted to the discovery via a press conference. However, in this increasingly connected world with more “news leaks” this is unlikely to happen. The 2010 International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) post-detection protocol, which is only 2 pages long, now includes informing the public earlier in the process than the original version. If the public were to find out before the signal was fully verified, scientists would manage the public’s expectations by using the Rio Scale, a scale which indicates how likely the signal is to be from an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization.
Could a discovery of this possibly be contained by one government like the United States attempts to do in Contact? If the signal is discovered by SETI, which is not funded or controlled by a U.S. governmental agency, it is unlikely. Step three in the IAA post-detection protocol is “[a]fter concluding that the discovery appears to be credible evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and after informing other parties [researchers or organizations involved in the detection] to this declaration, the discoverer should inform observers throughout the world through the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union, and should inform the Secretary General of the United Nations in accordance with Article XI of the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Bodies.” Yes, astronomers send out “telegrams.” However, today they are digital and are used for all major astronomical discoveries that need further observation. This is widely used for the discovery of new supernovae which are some of the brightest phenomena in the universe but fade very quickly and need quick reactions from observatories around the world to maximize observation time. This step in the IAA protocol also includes notifying eight other international organizations. Step five requires the release of all data necessary to confirm detection to be released to the international scientific community. Unfortunately, there have been no confirmed signals yet and there are Dr. Drumlins in the world who would work closely with politicians so, despite the international community’s best effort, we won’t know until it happens.
So how would we react as a society? Michael Varnum of Arizona State University investigated just this. In his study, published in the Frontiers of Psychology in 2018, he found that we might react better than science fiction might lead us to believe. Varnum and his team ran several relevant new stories through a language-analysis program and asked it to determine whether the language used in those articles reflected positive or negative emotions. These news articles included stories about the 1967 discovery of pulsars whose regular, repeating signal was first labeled “LGM” for little green men, stories about the “Wow!” signal from 1977 which is the most likely candidate for an extraterrestrial signal but has never been verified, the 1996 “discovery” of fossilized microbes in a Martian meteorite, and more recently articles about the discovery of earth-like exoplanets and the strange behavior of Tabby’s star, which was thought by some to be acting like an “alien megastructure.” These articles generally turned out to include language reflecting more positive attitudes. The second phase of his study was to conduct surveys of approximately 500 people on their anticipated reaction if we discovered (and verified the existence of) microbial life along with asking another 500 people to read, and write down their reactions to, articles about the 1996 “discovery” of microbial life (now known to be incorrect) as well as an article about the creation of synthetic life here on Earth. In both cases, participants used more positive than negative language. However, this study has been criticized for its focus on microbial life. After all, as SETI scientist Seth Shostak points out, microbes are one thing and little grey aliens with an advanced technological society are another. The reality will be much more complicated than people reading a single article and writing down their reactions. People will be influenced by not only how the story is presented, but also by reactions on social media and their friends. This study also didn’t investigate the effect religion will have on people’s reactions, a central theme in Contact.
If a signal from an intelligent alien civilization is ever detected, it will be a world-changing, paradigm-shifting event. So what are the chances there is life out there that could send such a signal? “There are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If just one out of a million of those had planets, and just one in a million of those had life, and just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.” Dr. Arroway’s numbers aren’t quite correct and are pessimistic even by the lowest estimates by astronomers. However, even with those numbers, it’s clear that if there wasn’t intelligent life out in the universe, it would be an awful waste of space.
Once you get offworld, count water among your most valuable resources: drink it, wash in it, use it to power your spacecraft. This humble molecule is critical to space exploration and exoplanetary colonization which is why, ahead of an international effort to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon (aka the Artemis Program), NASA scientists plan to land the world’s first autonomous lunar rover there in search of dihydrogen-monoxide deposits worth their weight in gold.
“Every mission, no matter what type, whether roving or not, will be standing on the shoulders of what was learned by other missions before,” Dan Andrews, VIPER project manager, told Engadget. “Otherwise you're just throwing away really good learning.”
However, we don’t necessarily have a great understanding of how those frozen molecules are actually distributed or how to best extract them from the lunar soil — and that’s where the upcoming Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mission comes in.
This golf cart-sized machine will be delivered to the Moon’s South Pole in late 2023 and spend its scheduled 100-day mission scouring the area for four “ice stability regions” — surface regions where we might find ice just laying about, shallow regions where the ice is covered by 50 centimeters of regolith, deep regions where the ice is buried up to 100 centimeters, and dry regions where there is no ice present below 100 centimeters. Andrews notes that “those regions exist all over the place in both the North and the South Pole. There's thousands of them.”
As the VIPER trundles about, it will employ its Neutron Spectrometer System (NSS) to indirectly survey the soil around itself in search of water at depths up to three feet (.9m) by looking for the energy losses in cosmic rays (mostly in the form of neutrons) that occur when they strike hydrogen molecules. And where there’s hydrogen, there could well be water.
NASA
Once the NSS finds a suitable concentration, the VIPER will deploy its meter-long TRIDENT (The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrains) to drill down and pull up soil samples for examination by the onboard Near-Infrared Volatiles Spectrometer System (NIRVSS pronounced “nervous”), which can identify the hydrogen’s form, whether that’s free hydrogen atoms or slightly more complex hydroxyls. And even before the rover sets a wheel off its orbital delivery vehicle, the Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations (MSolo) will be sampling gases kicked up during landing in search of stray hydrogen atoms.
When the LCROSS mission slammed a probe into the moon’s surface, it measured and analyzed the resulting ejecta for water ice using variations of nine commercially available instruments that could be traced back to “everything from NASCAR car instrumentation to manufacturing.” The VIPER mission is taking a similar tack. While not directly a part of the mission itself, other units of the instruments that will land aboard VIPER will also be delivered to the Moon in both 2021 and 2022 as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program for use in various experiments. This will serve as a sort of shake-down cruise for the instruments, allowing the VIPER team to see how the gear they’re sending will operate under real-world conditions. “If the instruments work beautifully, well great,” Andrews said. “If the instruments have a peculiar behavior that was unexpected, we can plan that in. And if they outright fail... we at least have the chance to try to diagnose why it did go wrong.”
While it won’t be the first wheeled vehicle to roll across the Moon, it will be the first autonomous vehicle to do so with a mission far more important than ferrying astronauts around. But the Moon is a harsh and unforgiving mistress, presenting an entirely unique set of challenges not faced by the larger rovers currently crawling over Mars. For one thing, Mars has an (albeit thin) atmosphere, the Moon has none, “which means it gets really, really hot, and it gets really, really cold,” Andrews said. “There's no moderating atmosphere so that becomes a really strong design point for the rover.”
What’s more, at the South Pole where the VIPER will be prowling the sun will rarely get more than 10 degrees above the horizon, which causes “unbelievably long shadows,” he continued. “And since there's no atmosphere, the lighting conditions are such that it looks to be very, very bright and right next to it can be unbelievably dark and black,” which can create havoc for visual navigation systems.
And then there’s the regolith — the moon’s razor-sharp, electrostatically-charged, insidiously-invasive soil. Created from eons of micrometeorite impacts, the stuff has built into berms and hills, lined craters and valleys across the lunar surface. Regolith can pile high and deep enough to bury the likes of a VIPER. So to ensure that the rover remains mobile, Andrew’s team taught it to “swim.”
NASA
Under typical conditions, the VIPER’s wheels roll conventionally at the ends of a rocker-bogie suspension system at speeds approaching a blistering half-mile-per-hour (that’s 20cm/s). Since the rover is powered exclusively through solar energy with a 450W battery, rather than a handy radioactive core, “we need to be able to move in any direction at any time, independent of how [VIPER is] pointed,” Andrews explained. “That means we need to be able to crab walk. So, each of our four wheels has the ability to independently be steered.”
And when the rover finds itself mired in regolith, it can turn these wheels sideways acting as scoops to drag itself forward. What’s more, the suspension setup enables the rover to lift each wheel independently, like a foot. Combining the vertical movements with dragging action somehow resulted in the Shaq-esque shimmy.
“We know we're going in and out of craters — and in fact we want to, because some of the areas where the water that can be found are going to be in very dark permanently shadowed craters — and because no robot or human has been down there, we don't exactly know what it's going to be like,” Andrews said. “So we needed to improve the capabilities of the rover to handle a lot of the unknown.”
The VIPER will not be driving blind, mind you. NASA is already hard at work producing a lunar road map to help guide the rover on its journey. The 3D, meter-scale maps were created using NASA’s open source Stereo Pipeline software tool alongside its Pleiades supercomputer to assemble satellite images captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter using a technique known as photoclinometry. With them, the VIPER will be less likely to fall into craters or tip head over wheels trying to climb a too-steep incline.
Unlike its Mars-based cousins, VIPER won’t have to rely nearly as heavily on automation thanks to its drastically shorter signal lag time — 6-10 seconds compared to the 15-20 minutes needed to talk to Mars. That’s still too long a delay to take control of the VIPER directly from Earth, but it will allow Mission Control to plot a series of incremental 15-foot-long navigational waypoints. “Once we pick the landing site... which will be in October,” Andrews said. “We're going to pick the optimal traverse plan for the rover to get as much science as we can out of it.”
After VIPER completes its mission, NASA researchers should have a much broader and more detailed view of where water deposits are located in the region. But what will happen to VIPER itself once its duties are done?
While the decision on that subject is still being debated by the VIPER team, Andrews points to two possible outcomes. We could drive the rover into the deepest, darkest crater it can find, consequences be damned, to see just what the heck is down there (maybe ghosts!). The other option would be to park it on the highest and best-lit mound of regolith we can find and hope that the rover can be revived after the region sinks into 6 to 9 months of complete darkness.
“NASA would then have to decide if it is worth them keeping the team going for that amount of time,” Andrews conceded, “so when the South Pole comes back into the sun, to try to somehow bring Viper back to life... Is it worth it to NASA, is it worth the money, to do that? Those are the trades that the agency is going to have to make.”
Hyundai has bet big on EVs and that gamble is paying off with the Korean automaker pacing ahead of many larger companies in the industry in the race towards electrification. The company continued that trend Tuesday when its luxury brand, Genesis, announced that every new model made after 2025 will be an electric vehicle. The company expects to have eight EV models available for sale in 2030 and sell around 400,000 of them annually.
These models won't necessarily be straight plug-ins as the company is pursuing a "dual-fuel" strategy, developing both battery electric vehicles powered by lithium-ion cells and those powered by hydrogen fuel cell technology. The GV60 will be Genesis' first true EV when it hits the streets later this year. Built on the same E-GMP platform as the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6, the GV60 is rumored to have between 226 and 436 HP, depending on model type, and offer both 2WD and AWD options, though Genesis has not officially released specs yet.
Virgin Galactic announced on Wednesday that its upcoming "Unity 23" mission will include the first commercial research payload in the company's launch history — that payload being three paying passengers from the Italian Air Force.
The IAF members have teamed with the National Research Council to study the effects on the human body of transitioning from full 1G gravity to the microgravity felt in orbit. The launch will also carry additional instruments designed to study the impact microgravity has on various chemical and physical properties of the surrounding environment, according to a Wednesday press release from the company.
“The Italian Air Force has always placed great importance on the understanding of space and aerospace," Lieutenant General Alberto Rosso, Chief of Staff of the Italian Air Force, said in a prepared statement. "Aerospace is the natural operational extension of our institutional duty. Strength in this domain is an asset for the country and is critical to its protection and safety, which is why the Air Force places great emphasis on further deepening its knowledge. With this mission, the Italian Air Force aims to start exploring potential implementations for this kind of vehicle - both civilian and military - and to further opportunities for technological, scientific and industrial growth.”
Unity 23, when it launches during its window between late September and early October, will be the first Virgin Galactic flight since company founder, Richard Branson and crew completed their history-making flight in July.
AI and Machine Learning systems have proven a boon to scientific research in a variety of academic fields in recent years. They’ve assisted scientists in identifying genomic markers ripe for cutting-edge treatments, accelerating the discovery of potent new drugs and therapeutics, and even publishing their own research. Throughout this period, however, AI/ML systems have often been relegated to simply processing large data sets and performing brute force computations, not leading the research themselves.
“The distinct characteristic of this challenge is to field the system into an open-ended domain to explore significant discoveries rather than rediscovering what we already know or trying to mimic speculated human thought processes,” Kitano wrote in June. “The vision is to reformulate scientific discovery itself and to create an alternative form of scientific discovery.”
“The value lies in the development of machines that can make discoveries continuously and autonomously,” he added, “AI Scientist will generate-and-verify as many hypotheses as possible, expecting some of them may lead to major discoveries by themselves or be a basis of major discoveries. A capability to generate hypotheses exhaustively and efficiently verify them is the core of the system.”
Today’s AIs are themselves the result of decades of scientific research and experimentation, starting back in 1950 when Alan Turing published his seminal treatsie, Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Over the years, these systems have grown from laboratory curios to vital data processing and analytical tools — but Kitano wants to take them a step further, effectively creating “a constellation of software and hardware modules dynamically interacting to accomplish tasks,” what he calls an “AI Scientist.”
“Initially, it will be a set of useful tools that automate a part of the research process in both experiments and data analysis,” he told Engadget. “For example, laboratory automation at the level of a closed-loop system rather than isolated automation is one of the first steps. A great example of this is Robot Scientist Adam-Eve developed by Prof. Ross King that automatically generates hypotheses on budding yeast genetics, plan experiments to support or refute, and execute experiments.”
“Gradually, the level of autonomy may increase to generate a broader range of hypotheses and verification,” he continued. “Nevertheless, it will continue to be a tool or a companion for human scientists at least within the foreseeable future.”
By having an AI Scientist handle the heavy intellectual lifting involved in generating hypotheses to explore, their human counterparts would have more free time to focus on research strategies and decide which hypotheses to actually look into, Kitano explained.
As always, avoiding the Black Box Effect and implicit bias (both in the software’s design and the data sets it is trained on) will be of paramount importance to establishing and maintaining trust in the system — the residents of Dr. Moreau’s island wouldn’t have been any less miserable had he been a mad AI instead of a mad geneticist.
“For scientific discoveries to be accepted in the scientific community, they must be accompanied with convincing evidence and reasoning behind them,” Kitano said. “AI Scientists will have components that can explain the mechanisms behind their discoveries. AI Scientists that do not have such explanation capabilities will be less preferred than ones [that do].”
Some of history's greatest scientific discoveries — from radiation and the microwave to Teflon and the pacemaker — have all come from experimental screwups. But when hyper-intelligent AIs start devising their own inscrutable spoken language, researchers rush to pull the plug. So what happens if and when an AI Scientist makes a discovery or devises an experiment that humans cannot immediately understand, even with an explanation?
“When AI Scientists get sophisticated enough to handle complex phenomena, there are chances to discover things that are not immediately understood by human scientists,” Kitano admitted. “Theoretically, there is a possibility that someone can run highly autonomous AI Scientists without restrictions and [not caring] if their discovery is understandable. However, this may come with a large price tag and one has to justify it. When such an AI Scientist is recognized to make important scientific discoveries already, I am certain there will be guidelines for operation to ensure safety and to prevent misuse.”
The advent of an AI Scientist able to work alongside human researchers could also lead to some sticky questions as to who should be credited with the discoveries made — is it the AI that generated the hypothesis and ran the experiment, the human that oversaw the effort, or the academic institution/corporate entity that owns the operation? Kitano points to a recent decision by an Australian court that recognized the DABUS “artificial neural system” as an inventor for patent applications as one example.
Conversely, Kitano notes the case of Satoshi Nakamoto and his inventions of blockchain and bitcoin. “There is a case where a decisive contribution was simply published as a blogpost and taken seriously,” he argues, “yet no one ever met him and his identity (at the time of writing) is a complete mystery.”
“If a developer of an AI Scientist was determined to create a virtual persona of a scientist with an ORCID iD, for demonstration of technological achievement, product promotion, or for another motivation,” he continued, “iit would be almost impossible to distinguish between the AI and human scientist.” But if a truly groundbreaking medical advancement comes from this challenge — say, a cure for cancer or nanobot surgeons — does it really matter if it was a human or a machine running the experiment?
