Power: on Earth, we tend to take it for granted. Most of your household power is generated from the burning of fossil fuels—coal and natural gas account for roughly 61 percent of US power. Another 20 percent is generated in nuclear power plants. These resources are nonrenewable—experts estimate that we may have 50–100 years of fossil fuels and over 200 years of natural uranium left—but Earth also has access to a treasure trove of renewable energy sources. In 2019, water, wind, and sun produced enough energy to power over 60 million average American households. No matter where it comes from, accessible energy is plentiful on Earth. But on other planets and in…
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In the decades following the first spacefaring rockets, solar power and radioisotope thermoelectric generators have been responsible for providing power to probes, spacecraft, rovers, and more. In the process, these technologies have been fine-tuned and perfected to make them sturdier, more efficient, and more compact. While these advancements may not necessarily bring about a glorious future of space imperialism, they may contribute to a brighter, cleaner future here on Earth. Since the 70s, NASA has driven innovation in solar panel technology, including designing self-cleaning panels that can keep off dust and dirt. As greenhouse gases build up in our atmosphere…
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In the summer of 1977, two separate launches occurred off of the NASA launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The spacecraft probes were tasked with traveling to Jupiter and Saturn. The initial plan for the two Voyager probes was a 5-year mission to survey these two distant planets. The initial mission was successful, and the probes were able to travel impossibly farther to Uranus and Neptune for additional flybys. And NASA kept the probes going, farther and farther out until they both eventually reached interstellar space (Voyager 1 in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018). What NASA originally intended to be…
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A couple of weeks ago, Elon Musk’s company SpaceX launched the Starlink app to help people connect with their Starlink satellite. But the app made an interesting claim in its terms of service: any future Mars colonizers will not be subject to the authority of “Earth-based government.” There is a lot to unpack there, from the implications of unchecked capitalistic imperialism to the questionable legality of ignoring established space law (yes, there are already laws in space). But before we consider the governing of space colonies, we have to determine if they are even possible. There are many practical considerations…
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Help me obi Juan whoever you are, you’re my only Ho Unless you’ve been living under a rock, your first introduction to the concept of holograms was probably Leia’s message to Obi-Wan in Star Wars IV: A New Hope (unless your first introduction to holograms was Tupac, in which case. . . I feel old). Although to be clear, Tupac’s Coachella performance in 2012 was not actually a hologram—it was a 2D video projected on a seemingly invisible screen. We don’t actually have the technological capability yet to create real holograms—that is a 3D image projected from a 2D light…
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The last couple of weeks, I’ve been discussing the potentially destructive implications of Hawking radiation, the mechanism by which black holes slowly decay. One of the most pressing implications is the information paradox. A core tenet of quantum physics, the conservation of quantum information, demands that quantum information is not ever destroyed or created. But Hawking radiation seems to defy this rule. Information that enters a black hole becomes irretrievable, but it’s not destroyed. But, when a black hole evaporates into random thermal radiation, what happens to that information? One of the most popular theories involves all the information inside…
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From my last two blog posts on Hawking radiation and the conservation of quantum information, it’s clear that we have a major problem on our hands—the information paradox. We know that black holes decay over unimaginable timescales, seemingly erasing quantum information in the process. But we also know that quantum information has to be conserved. Theoretically, at least, we have to be able to trace particles back through their quantum histories. If black holes were entirely stable, then we could consider this condition met. While the information in a black hole would be inaccessible, it wouldn’t be destroyed. But if…
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Have you ever thought about what happens to all the information you delete from your computer’s hard drive? You might be surprised to discover that deleted files aren’t actually erased. Even when you delete a file from your computer’s trash folder, your computer holds onto the file while erasing the file name and its listing in any directories. The file itself remains on your hard drive, functionally irretrievable (without special software) until it is overwritten when the hard drive needs that data space. At that point, your data is actually irretrievable. That portion of the hard drive’s disk space has…
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In last week’s post on entropy, I blithely referred to black holes as spontaneously increasing in entropy. This may seem counterintuitive (as much as anybody can have “intuition” about black holes). If we view the increase in entropy as a system moving from order to disorder, how would a singularity become more disordered? How could the contents of a black hole spread out in a more disordered manner if they are supposed to take up an infinitely small amount of space? If we use the other definition of entropy, the dispersal of energy, then that would imply that a black…
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Over four nights in April 2017, eight different radio-wave telescopes across the globe fixed their gazes on a single infinitesimally small point—the black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy (M87*). Around 55 million light-years from Earth, M87* and the hot plasma surrounding it create only a minuscule smudge on the night sky. To resolve an image from that distance would require a 13,000-kilometer telescope—roughly the diameter of Earth. Alternatively, the researchers of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Project stitched together an Earth-sized telescope using a set of radio-wave telescopes distributed around the globe. These telescopes were synchronized…
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