Farlops Industries

So our telescopes and probes are discovering estimated billions of terrestrial planets in the habitable zones around red dwarfs in our galaxy. Naively I’d think this would be good for the Drake Equation’s estimates of intelligent, technological civilizations in the universe because red dwarfs are more stable and longer lasting than yellow dwarfs like our sun. This would suggest that life on such worlds would have a longer time to develop into high complexity.

But it turns out there are problems, mostly dealing with gravitational forces and tides that manifest that close to a star.

Terrestrial worlds in the habitable zones of red dwarfs are subject to tidal forces which would prevent the emergence of terrestrial planets with mild tilts in their axis of rotation, like Earth. A mild axial tilt, not too large or too small, gives our planet seasons which moderate our planet’s yearly average temperature and keep it close to conditions which favor the existence of water in solid, liquid and gaseous forms. In the worst cases terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of red dwarf become tidally locked so they only present one face to their star while the other side of the planet remains in perpetual darkness. Or in other cases, the tilt becomes so small that the equators of such planets get much hotter while the poles remain in twilight which would keep them colder all year round.

The other problem that tidal forces lead to highly elliptical orbits early in the formation of these planets and runaway greenhouse effects. The tidal forces later circularize the orbits but at that point the greenhouse effect essentially destroys much of the free hydrogen these planets would have. This in turn prevents the formation of water.

Most of these assumptions are based on observational data and computer models based around what we know for planetary formation and geophysics. I suppose it might be possible that there are unknown astrophysical and geophysical forces around red dwarfs that might replenish free hydrogen on these worlds. There might be other factors that emerge that allow environmental stability on planets with very small axial tilts, very large axial tilts or tidal locking but at the moment, this is our models tell us: Life, as we know it, is unlikely around red dwarfs.

So I’m not as well read in biology news as I am in physics news but occasionally I read news in biological research that is just fascinating to me. Extremophile creatures, critters that live in very dry, very hot, very cold or very radioactive environments, fascinate me because they show us the limits of earthly biology. In science, in learning the limits of a thing, you can check the assumptions of your models of that thing. So we can learn a lot about organisms by looking at the very largest examples of that organism and the very smallest examples of it. These will tell us what kind of sacrifices, specializations and optimizing that plant or animal had to do to achieve that size.

For example until 1985, we thought that simple one celled creatures, prokaryotes like bacteria or blue-green algae, couldn’t grow above a certain size due to chemical efficiency limitations in their simple cell structure. But since 1985, we discovered bacteria that grow to nearly a full millimeter in size. These bacteria are large enough to see unaided as they swim and bend in a droplet of water. These creatures show that our old assumptions about size limitations in bacteria were wrong.

But today, I just learned of another creature which is the flip side of that. It’s a species of wasp, a multicellular creature, which is the same size as an amoeba or a paramecium–which are one celled creatures. The fly is barely 200 microns long and the cells that make up it’s body are staggeringly tiny in comparison to other multicellular creatures. This makes it very interesting because we can learn how it manages to make its cells so tiny.

Multicellular creatures usually have more complicated cells in comparison the creatures like bacteria or some species of algae. The cells of complex plants and animals have specialized structures within their cell walls that do specific tasks like metabolize sugar, make proteins or store fat molecules or water. Bacteria, and other prokaryotes, don’t have this kind of specialization.

Anyway, this microscopic wasp evolved along a path where its cells sacrificed some of these special structures, called organelles, in order to get smaller. Its nerve cells have no nuclei like our nerve cells, or the nerve cells of most other multicellular animals do. Stuff like this forces biologists to go back and reconsider some of their assumptions about complex cells and what those cells need to do their job.

This very fascinating to me. That’s why it’s here on my site.

This just in for news of big scary machines of physics–something called, innocently enough, the Extreme Light Infrastructure.

The ELI is a very powerful laser array that will concentrate 200 petawatts of laser power into a very small space-time in hopes of distorting the vacuum on the quantum scale. Let me unpack this a bit to make plain just powerful this is. All the energy from the Sun that falls on the Earth, expressed in units of power, is roughly 89 petawatts, or 89 quadrillion watts. This solar energy is roughly 6000 times the energy produced and consumed by humanity. The ELI expends over the length of a femtosecond and within a space smaller than a pinhead, more than 100,000 times the power of the entire world’s electricity production. How this is possible for us, I shall explain shortly.

So what the hell is this thing for? By concentrating all that energy into such a tiny space, what we hope to do is distort an empty–and I use the word “empty” in a highly qualified way–region of space-time strongly enough to force the emergence of matter and antimatter particles. In this microscopic inferno it’s going to get far hotter than the center of the Sun. It will look as if we generating matter and antimatter from nothing. This might seem incredible but actually it’s all based a very well understood, if counterintuitive, aspect of quantum mechanics.

In quantum mechanics a vacuum is not really empty. Instead it’s something like a sea of boiling particles and antiparticles that constantly emerge from space-time itself only to collide together and annihilate into photos of light. This happens continuously and these virtual particle and antiparticle pairs usually appear and annihilate so quickly and in such a way that they almost never have noticeable effects at the sizes and energies we human experience in daily life. We don’t see matter or energy coming from nothing. But on the quantum scale and at huge energies, the concept of nothing vanishes. Space-time itself is never really a vacuum. It’s never an empty stage in which classical physics plays. The idea of a classical vacuum is an illusion. This what we learn in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

Anyway, there are a variety of ways we can force these virtual particle pairs and photons to appear and have effects that we can measure. The ELI is just one way of doing this. It’s the first time we’ve done this with light alone, even though we’ve known for decades that theory said it was possible.

Now if this all works, this experiment has enormous implications and its data can be applied to a lot of questions and applications:

• Why is there so much matter in universe and so little antimatter?
• What is the composition of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy?
• Are there other dimensions dimension beyond the 4 we know?
• Are some of the predictions of some forms of string theory true?
• Will it give us new and better ways to understand the dynamics of plasmas?
• Will it give us new and better ways to treat some forms of nuclear waste?
• Will it give us new and better methods of radiography and radiotherapy in medicine?
• Will it give us new and better ways to fabricate microelectronics and computer chips.

But to me, one of the big attractions is how gigantic, robust and scary looking this machine is. As I’ve commented before, physics builds some seriously scary looking machines.  And with the usual dumbfoundingly understated hyperbole we come to associate with modern science, it’s just called the Extreme Light Infrastructure–as if it were a small bolt on a hang glider or something.