From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Thu May 22 2003 - 14:53:07 PDT
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From: daviddarling123
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2003 5:39 PM
To: DarlingsSpace_at_yahoogroups.com
Subject: [DarlingsSpace] David Darling's Newsletter #12
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DAVID DARLING'S NEWSLETTER
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Issue #12
May 22, 2003
e-mail: darling_at_uslink.net
website: www.daviddarling.info
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1. Meanderings
2. Exoarchaeology 101
3. Bookends
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1. Meanderings
One thing I couldn't be is someone who builds experiments to send to
other worlds. It's the suspense and uncertainty that would get to
me. Consider the European Space Agency probe Mars Express, due to
blast off from Baikonur Cosmodrome on June 2 for arrival in Martian
orbit on December 26. It carries the miniature lander Beagle 2
www.angelfire.com/on2/daviddarling/Beagle2.htm
which is scheduled to make planetfall in the New Year and sniff the
Martian air and subsurface soil for traces of anything biological.
How well would you be sleeping right now if you were one of the
researchers involved in that project? First your delicate apparatus,
which took years to design, build, and test, has to shake, rattle,
and roll its way into orbit on top of a chemical bomb. (There's no
backup mission.) Then you have to hope that the engine burn goes
well to get Mars Express on its way to the Red Planet. And that
nothing goes wrong along the way. And that Mars orbit insertion goes
to plan. And that the parachute deploys, and that the hit, bounce,
and roll airbag technology gets your instruments onto the surface in
one piece and the right way up. If you're still in business at this
stage, you're just at the start of worrying if your instruments will
turn on and do what they're supposed to. No, I don't think I could
stand the strain. On the other hand, if Beagle 2 does arrive safely
on Isidis Planitia and carries out its tests without a hitch, it
just might pull off the achievement of the millennium -- detecting
the first signs of life beyond Earth. No other planetary mission on
the short-range radar carries a specific biological package: Beagle
is our best hope of an immediate breakthrough.
------------------------------------------
2 Exoarchaeology 101
Just as exobiology is the study of life beyond Earth, so
exoarchaeology is the study of the traces, relics, and artifacts of
past extraterrestrial intelligence or cultures. (There's a subtle
distinction between "astro-", as in astrobiology, and "exo-", as in
exobiology, in that "exo-" means outside and therefore includes
everything except the Earth, whereas "astro-" means related to the
stars, and thus implies everything including the Earth. By this
reckoning, astrobiology is the universal science of life, inclusive
of terrestrial biology, whereas exobiology is the science of
strictly alien life). OK, so exoarchaeology is the science of
ancient extraterrestrial artifacs. *What* extraterrestrial artifacts
you may well ask? Well, the absence-to-date of confirmed
extraterrestrial life hasn't stopped exobiology from getting a
toehold in mainstream science on the basis that we may well soon
make that vital breakthrough. So, it's perhaps not too early to get
cracking on a science of exoarchaeology on the grounds that, sooner
of later, we're going to come across some signs of past exo-
cultures. Let's at least start to put the methodology in place,
imagine what kind of alien artifacts might turn up, and consider
some of the places of special interest for off-world digs.
You may think this is starting to sound a bit Erich-von-Danikenish.
Von Daniken, in case you've been in stasis for the past three
decades or so, sold vast quantities of his "Chariots of the Gods"
and its sequels and brought to wide public attention the hypothesis
of "ancient astronauts" -- the idea that advanced aliens visited the
Earth thousands of years ago and influenced our own ancient
cultures. Perfectly plausible, of course. Unfortunately, von Daniken
relies more on tabloid journalism and unspecified sources than on
anything remotely resembling true scholarship. What's more, I don't
think many people realize that he borrowed most of his ideas from
genuine archaeologists and ethnologists who had raised the
possibility of extraterrestrial relics on Earth in the 1940s
and '50s. Prominent among these was the French archaeologist Henri
Lhote who, in his book "The Search for the Tassili Frescoes",
published just after World War II, pointed to some curious frescoes
from Tassili-n-ajjer in the central Sahara, dating back several
millennia B.C. His reproductions of what he called "Jabbaren", the
great Martian god, and other strange figures, are striking and
superficially mystifying, but have since been adequately accounted
for, more mundanely, in terms of ordinary humans wearing ceremonial
costumes and masks. Anyone looking for a good, sound introduction to
early theories (and rebuttals) of exoarchaeology should check out
chapter 33 of Sagan and Shklovskii's 1966 classic "Intelligent Life
in the Universe." You might also like to browse a few of my own on-
line encyclopedia articles. Go to my main page
(www.daviddarling.info), scroll down to the A-Z, and then find the
entries on "paleocontact hypothesis," "Agrest, Matest," "Agrest,
Mates," "Sirius, mystery of red color," and the various links from
these.
Exoarchaeology has roots stretching back before the mid-twentieth
century. Percival Lowell's canals
www.angelfire.com/on2/daviddarling/Marscanals.htm
had they been real, could easily have been the relic of a dead or
dying Martian civilization. Earlier, Franz Gruithuisen
www.angelfire.com/on2/daviddarling/Gruithuisen.htm
thought he'd seen signs of a civilization on the Moon (not to
mention Venus). And, in fiction, George Griffith and others were
charting out the possibilities for finding monuments of long-ago
alien races on the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere:
www.angelfire.com/on2/daviddarling/Griffith.htm
Some people enjoy scouring NASA images of Mars, taken by Mars Global
Surveyor and the 2001 Odyssey probe, in the hope of spotting signs
of things that look artificial -- pyramids, the infamous "face,"
even entire cities. It's good to be on the lookout for such things,
and who knows? But it's also a very dodgy pastime if you're not a
planetary geologist, fraught with Lowellian possibilities of
glimpsing patterns at the edge of resolution and generally
convincing yourself that shapes and collections of objects that look
somewhat regular in layout may be artificial when, in fact, they
have a perfectly innocent, natural explanation. The key in
exoarchaeology, as in all science, is to start out with the
simplest, least spectacular explanations. Avoid speculating about
anything more esoteric until you've totally excluded the mundane. As
Sherlock Holme's said in The Blanched Soldier: "When you have
eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however
improbable, must be the truth." The most important word here
is "when"!
Of course, there are whole websites devoted to arguing the case for
long-lost civilizations on the deserts of Mars, complete with
heavily re-processed photos that owe more to the imagination of
contemporary humans than to the ingenuity of extraterrestrial
architects and engineers. Yet there is also some serious and well-
considered work being done in the field of what has been called SETA
(Search for Extraterrestrial Artifacts). Mark Carlotto's expert
analyses of the Cydonia site
http://www.newfrontiersinscience.com/martianenigmas/
are worth reading, even if (as in my own case) you don't necessarily
agree with his conclusions. Similarly, the Ukrainian radio
astronomer Alexey Arkhipov has made some important contributions to
exoarchaeology in the context of the Moon, for example:
http://it.utsi.edu/~spsr/articles/iau_symp.html
Anyone who ventures into this subject risks being tarred with the
same brush as that small army of amateur armchair enthusiasts who
see an alien hand at work in every anomalous planetary feature or
trick of the light. But the fact is that exoarchaeology is not an
outlandish possibility. On the contrary, recent developments in
astrobiology have increased the chances that we've been visited in
the past or that other traces of alien intelligence may be waiting
to be found elsewhere in the Solar System. Over the next couple of
decades, there are plans by NASA and the European Space Agency to
launch a series of increasingly powerful instruments whose aim will
be to detect and then probe Earthlike extrasolar planets.
Ultimately, if things work out, we should be able to surmise the
presence of life on worlds going around other stars and even get
some idea of its stage of evolution. If advanced technological races
are out there, the Earth may have been identified as a bearer of
advanced (i.e. multicellular) life millions of years ago. What would
be more logical than that those watchers among the stars should then
dispatch probes or even survey parties to reconnoiter the Solar
System and monitor the progress of life on the third (and maybe
fourth) planet? Watch this space!
---------------------------------
3. Bookends
You can get a sneak preview of my next book, "The Universal Book of
Astronomy," including the cover art, at this John Wiley catalog page:
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471265691.html
Publication date is October 2003. This is the companion to "The
Complete Book of Spaceflight" which came out at the end of last
year. Fall 2004 will see the publication of the third in my A-Z
series, on recreational math. I'm just starting research for another
Wiley book -- on Teleportation. So, if you have any bright ideas
about quantum entanglement or other issues to do with beaming
objects around, please get in touch!
Until next time,
Best wishes,
David Darling
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