Getting the word out

[ Photo Credit: Flickr user Tanki (source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelrhys/40428909/) used under license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en ]

Today I canned my first pop science interview for Astronomy.fm (look for it next Monday, July 19!) with the good folks at the York University Observatory. I've never done anything quite like this before, with the possible exception of sitting in and offering a few comments on an interview that my PhD advisor and Phoenix Mission P.I., Peter Smith, had done with NPR (US National Public Radio). With luck, I picked up a trick or two from Peter, the consummate master of the science interview. So, hopefully I acquitted myself well, and didn't embarrass myself too badly.

Even if I did, it's still a useful process. As I've mentioned in this space before, we Scientists have an obligation to share our knowledge, passion and enthusiasm with the public and I hope that I get more opportunities to do just that.

Additionally, it's interesting to get some behind-the-scenes experience, just to see how these interviews are done. For instance, we ended up recording two interviews since we couldn't use the first take as the result of technical difficulties. What was fascinating is that each take of the interview was completely different, despite operating from the same sheet of questions. In the first (which will not air) we talked mainly about Astrobiology as well as the motivations and philosophy of doing space exploration/planetary science. The second version (which will air) was more of a discussion of the technical aspects of exploring the solar system.

It was a fun experience, and I thank the York University Observatory for the chance to participate. In particular, I'd like to thank my host Rob Berthiaume. Rob, a complete natural as a host, knows exactly how to put an interviewee at ease. You end up simply having a conversation - I think we could have continued talking for hours. Hopefully they'll have me back again. If they do, I'd especially love to be able to answer questions from listeners.

The next step

So, I can now officially announce that I have accepted a new job starting at the end of my current 12-month contract with York University. It's an NSERC Fellowship, under the Canadian Astrobiology Training Program and I'll be working at the University of Western Ontario with Dr. Gordon "Oz" Osinski. Oz and I knew each other, briefly, when I was a PhD student at Arizona and he was there working as a postdoc under Jay Melosh (now at Purdue). It's a 2-year fellowship and I'm really looking forward to starting! But before that happens, there is still much work to be done here at York. Hopefully that will include some publications and perhaps even a first conference since I started this blog, 13 months ago.

This fellowship caps off a successful couple of months for me, as I also recently took home a prize from the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS) for my publication "Atmospheric Dynamics at the Phoenix Landing site, as seen by the Surface Stereo Imager."



I've never won anything like this before and it was a happy moment. A long-time friend and colleague on the Phoenix Mission told me that my smile said it all. (The complete list of winners at that banquet can be found here ).
The award I received is named after Roger Daly. It's an interesting coincidence that the biography highlights some of his early work in Newfoundland and Labrador, my home province. But beyond that, his is an interesting story and a testament to the twisting, turning path that led many of his era into careers in Science. I have to wonder whether this kind of a career path would be possible today.

So while the near future looks bright, I also have to begin looking past this upcoming fellowship. And there lie dragons...

_____

As a footnote, a great little website operated by musician John Boswell (www.symphonyofscience.com) has just recently put out a piece on my favourite planet, Mars which samples heavily from Robert Zubrin. While Zubrin has been criticized in the past, he is a tireless advocate for a rapid, near-term crewed mission to Mars. Two of his books, "The Case for Mars" and very especially "Entering Space" were significant influences on me as I first entered this field as an Aerospace Engineer and later as a Planetary Scientist.

Annual State of the Blog

To my great surprise, I've kept this blogging thing up now for just over a year. That means that now is as good a time as any to take stock of the year just past and look forward to the year ahead.

In the past year, I've posted 27 times (this is #28), which is an average of a little better then once every two weeks. So based on the every-other-week frequency I was aiming for at the beginning, I'm pretty much on target. However, things have slowed markedly in the last six months with only half as many posts in 2010 as there were in 2009. As such, I'm going to try and step it up a bit, especially over the summer!

In that time, I've held a pair of jobs, one at Environment Canada, and another at York University. I've also had interviews for postdoctoral positions, research scientist positions and space agency positions. All told, 29 applications were made (I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of my extremely supportive and patient reference letter writers!) of which two remain outstanding and three were successful at least in part. None of these were faculty positions or short-lists for faculty positions, so I must conclude that I need more postdoctoral seasoning at this time.

Content-wise, it's been a bit of a mixed bag for the blog. Initially, I had planned to talk mainly about the trials and tribulations of a young academic trying to find work. Over time, however, things have morphed to include a bit of opinion and commentary on topics of scientific interest. From my initial post, this isn't an entirely unexpected development. Aside from that, I still have not posted topics for potential collaboration and have been reevaluating whether this blog is the right place for that material.

Part of that reason are the low numbers of page views (46 over the year, most of which I'm sure are my own, despite advertising topics on my twitter feed) and comments (only one, in response to this post - thanks Nikhil!). This blog wasn't intended to draw a large audience, and it doesn't particularly bother me that few, if any, people are reading. The initial purposes of being part public diary, part practice ground for me to develop my opinions and ideas and work on my persuasive writing, remain intact. And, of course, if my writing helps even a single other struggling young academic long after I've got a permanent job, it will have been worth it.

Looking forward, you may notice a redesign as of today. I've added a search bar at top on the right, and my twitter feed to the bottom of the sidebar. Additionally, a new background replaces the old flat colour. The mottled spheres floating in a reddish cloud is meant to be evocative. On one hand, the colour recalls the Martian surface and sky with swirling clouds of dust. On the other, the spheres recall planets floating in the ether of space at the same time as they resemble microorganisms. Since my interests will focus more strongly on Astrobiology going forward (More on that in a later post), this feels appropriate. As required by blogger, the image is stock, and can be found, somewhat surprisingly, under the "health and beauty" tab.

In any case, it's been a good first year, and I look forward to another one that's even better!

The Role of Secrecy in Science

For the first time that I can remember, a story about data embargoes for a space mission has made the New York Times. A data embargo is an agreement signed between a space agency and a mission science team which grants the science team exclusive rights to the data for a fixed period of time. The specific case in question involves the Kepler Mission, a NASA-led spacecraft in an earth-trailing orbit (at the L5 Lagrangian point) which is searching for earth-sized extrasolar planets. As first reported in Nature, the science team has identified about 700 potential exoplanet candidates which, under the terms of the agreement the team signed with NASA, must be made public within one year of discovery. But because of bad weather and launch delays for other space telescopes, they have been unable to confirm all those putative detections within that time. As such, they are seeking an extension on their data embargo. In a compromise have been granted the right to hold back their best candidates for one more year.

As space missions are funded by taxpayers, you might wonder why data embargoes exist at all. In fact, a case can be made that their presence can impede scientific progress since it limits new data to a small pool of people for a certain amount of time. If the entire scientific community could be brought in, progress would certainly be faster. Furthermore, many space missions excite the imaginations of the public who ultimately provided the funding that makes them possible. Sharing with these people is an obligation that will only help our future prospects. After all, a vociferously supportive public and scientific community increases the likelihood that more missions will take place in the future.

This desire for openness must be balanced against providing an incentive for the Science Team to participate. Mission planning can consume a great deal of a scientist's time for years before launch. This requirement will delay or supplant work that would lead to publications, the keys to career advancement. Furthermore, once the mission starts producing science, the team who put so much work in ahead of the mission is in the worst possible place to analyze their results. They must spend most of their time running the mission, making scientific decisions, and preparing the cleaned up and polished data for public release. This production of RDRs (Reduced Data Records) from the raw data received from the spacecraft (EDRs, or Experimental Data Records) is a long and tedious task, in and of itself.

If the data were freely available as soon as they were collected and anyone could publish immediately, why would anyone make the effort to join a mission team, knowing what it could cost? Without the carrot of a guaranteed first paper, possibly in a premier journal such as Science or Nature, it would be difficult to attract top talent and the quality of those scientists working on the mission and the decisions they make would be lower. Thus the collected data products would also suffer without embargoes.

A balance is required between the needs of the scientific community, the science team and the public at large. For Mars missions, typically EDRs of images are released within a few days and public release of data to NASA's planetary storehouse, the Planetary Data System (or PDS, as we typically refer to it) for dissemination to the scientific community occurs at the 6-month mark. This 6-month embargo is barely adequate to give the scientists a head start, and often in the course of a mission, you can see a gradual change over the first few months in the make-up of the operations team as the experienced scientists step back to write their papers and younger members of the team step into their roles. Often these younger scientists are graduate students, as I was when I worked on Phoenix.

This brings up the potential conflict that can exist amongst the members of a science team. As there are different levels of participation and different roles within the science team, there is also a method for determining how publishing rights will be meted out within the team. After all, a senior scientist who dedicated five years to a project and who has considerable duties during the science phase would not want someone who was added at the last minute and has more free time to write up a paper in Science or Nature. Thus, the the publications that will result are typically codified in advance of the beginning of the science phase in a document called "The Rules of the Road." This document lists the collaboration level of each science team member and what he or she is permitted to publish. For instance, for Phoenix, the main Science Paper announcing the results was restricted to the senior level of researchers, the Co-Investigators (or Co-I's). In the later JGR special issue, any science team member was permitted to contribute (Disclosure: I helmed a paper in the JGR special issue and contributed to one of the subsidiary Science papers for Phoenix).

The peanalties for the science team members breaking an embargo are serious. While not all missions require formal NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) as Kepler did, team members are well aware that infractions could result in the termination of their participation on the mission and their funding, and even disqualify their participation on future missions. Given the prestige of serving on a mission, this is usually incentive enough.

Embargoes can also affect those on the outside in the scientific community. For instance, publication of results in a peer-reviewed journal can take upwards of a year from submission to publication. Thus every day counts. Often, new discoveries will be announced, somewhat informally, at press conferences and at trade conventions. More then a few outside scientists attempted to publish in peer review the material released at these conferences and conventions for Phoenix while the embargo was still in effect. Mostly, the editors refused to accept these papers - after all, the authors did not collect the data they were reporting, and were not experts on its usage. However, unfortunately, at least one paper did get through and became the first record of one of our instruments to occur in the literature. It seems unlikely that the authors of this paper would be asked to participate in a mission in the future.

The public reaction to full disclosure can also be a source of worry. For instance, when I was on the Huygens Mission working for the Descent Imager/Spectral Radiometer in 2005, an accidental release of the image library resulted in internet bloggers providing the first processed versions, many of which made it onto the pages of newspapers. These bloggers did not have the calibration data from the instrument and thus could not eliminate many of the artifacts and properly balance the colour in the way that we could. Thus an incorrect record was widely disseminated. As you can expect, the P.I. of the instrument who had devoted almost 17 years of his life to getting these 3 hours of data from the surface of Titan, was not impressed.

Many, especially those on the outside, would argue that secrecy is anathema to good science. However, a certain amount is important if we are to keep the quality of mission data at its peak. Those who participate are giving up their time to use their talents to bring back the best data possible and are deserving, at the very least, of our respect. They also deserve the time needed to get it right. I do believe that the current state of affairs with respect to the public is very fair. In terms of the Scientific community, I believe we need to continue to work to make space missions as inclusive as possible. The more talent we have working inside of the embargoes, the better our results will be. At all costs, we need to avoid the impression of space missions as an exclusive club where who you know is more important then the quality of your work.

----

As a note, the JPL planetary photojournal provides thousands of images that have been publically released. These images have been processed by the best and should be your first stop when exploring the solar system or looking for something to include in a presentation.

Planetary Parks System

Almost a year ago, I wrote an entry on the benefits and issues of the current Planetary Protection regime. Clearly there is a necessity to require that the stricture of decontamination procedures be proportional to the biological interest of the destination. You certainly do not want to bring a false positive along with you, or forward contaminate an area to the point of making it unsuitable for future study. However, I was troubled by the trend towards avoiding areas of high interest because of strict decontamination procedures. After all, reducing the amount of decontamination is an attractive descope option for spacecraft on a tight budget as it does not degrade functionality. This is the route that Exo-Mars intends to follow.

But what if there could be a compromise? I spoke with a colleague yesterday who suggested that perhaps what was necessary was a planetary parks system. Under this scheme, some sensitive areas would be set aside for preservation while others could be opened up to study. It's an intriguing idea. You could, for instance, restrict landings to some gullies on Mars, but not all gullies. That way, you could begin to study the gully ecosystem today with cheaper, ready-to-go technologies, while preserving much of the occurrences of this land form for future study or complete preservation.

This is not dissimilar to the way in which returned samples are curated. Current protocols divide any such sample into four pieces, one of which remains untouched, awaiting more sophisticated future analysis. In the context of a park system, similar gradations could be applied. This would lead to a multi-tiered system in which concentric boundaries could mark areas in which landers with successively more stringent decontamination could be placed. This would allow for early and cheap study of these interesting regions, while preserving areas for future study.

In the process we could learn more about the potential for life in these areas. If these early spacecraft show a high astrobiological potential, this increases the chances that an adequately sterilized, expensive and highly sensitive mission will be sent to the parks area. In contrast, today's system of restricting all landings on type-IV special regions, actively discourages missions from visiting these areas.

My colleague also suggested an added benefit of such a policy. Defining the limits and extent of the areas would become a mission objective in and of itself. A good parallel is the scientific bonanza which has resulted from Canada's desire to map the arctic continental shelf for economic and political reasons. As a former engineering student, I see no issue with doing Science in support of a practical goal.

Unfortunately, the parks scheme doesn't solve everything. The liquid water subsurface of Europa, which likely mixes, is not easily subdivided into park-like zones. Thus areas like these should still be off-limits to all but the most sterile spacecraft. However, the parks system strikes a good balance between an open free-for-all, and complete preservation.

The two-body problem

Let's face it, becoming a scientist is an oft-times thankless job. Once you decide to go for it, you'll have a long road ahead of you. You start with a four-year undergraduate degree, and by the time you finally have a PhD, you're often in your late twenties or early thirties. Next comes postdocing, which typically lasts about four years in Planetary Science. Then, if you are very lucky, you might make assistant professor and get tenure by the time you are 40 or 45.

Neglecting the long hours, many PhD programs expect you to have moved from your Undergraduate institution. Likewise, tradition has it that at least one of your two 2-year postdocs should be in a different place. I've been told here that the wider you travel the better. Ideally, you want to have experience in both the US and in Europe, and dabble a bit in Asia if you have the time. Finally, when that professorship comes beckoning, you may not have the luxury of choosing where you work, and may need to move again in order to get that coveted tenure.

But what happens if you meet someone? What if you want to start a family. Well, to put it mildly, you've got a challenge on your hands. Each time the end of a position comes up, you'll have a choice to make: who controls the move? And worse, do you even stay together? This in a nutshell is what is typically called the two-body problem. The resolution of the problem can be a sticky one. But, from what I've seen there are few different solutions which can work.

The simplest resolution is to eliminate from consideration as a wife or husband anyone who does not have a transferable job. Fields like medicine, law, information technology, grade school teaching, and artistic crafts, as examples, are in demand in almost any location where you are likely to find a university. Thus, the academic spouse controls the moves and the spouse with the transferable job follows along. This is the method followed by, perhaps, a little over 50% of couples I know. It works especially well in more traditional families, typically if the academic is male. It also works well when the non-academic spouse is an interested lay-person or enthusiast on the subject that the academic spouse pursues.

But what if your spouse is an academic also? After all, you will typically be working day in and day out with other academics, and there is a certain attraction to shared suffering. In this case, things become a bit more troublesome as academic postings don't come in pairs. Thus you have two ways you can go. First, you can try to negotiate a job offer for a spouse as a part of your academic offer. Almost always, in the rare case where this is possible, the spouse would be offered a position at a lower rank. For instance, one of you would be an Assistant Prof, the other on soft money as a Research Associate. As well, unless your research is "all that and a bag of crisps," you may have to go well down your preference list to find an institution willing to deal. Even if you can make it happen, this can lead to tension as to who is sacrificing for whom by accepting a lesser position. We academics are a competitive breed, after all.

Second, you can do the long-distance relationship, and each of you take your best individual offers. Take it from someone who has been there, that this is not a whole lot of fun. At best, you will need to put off any family aspirations. And at a minimum, you will need to work hard to keep the relationship from falling apart. Sacrifices will need to be made to stay together in terms of time, effort and airfare. Naturally, the closer together you are located the better, and the degree of difficulty goes up exponentially as the number of separating time zones increase. Still, this could be a good solution for those who travel frequently for work. As well, if you prove yourself to be a valuable asset to the hiring department, it might be possible to arrange a spousal hire and a happy ending for all. Even so, this method is clearly a gamble and fails more often then it works out.

So why bother gambling at all? Some chose to end relationships at the time of moving instead. This selection of career over family seems to be especially prevalent amongst more successful academics.

That begs the question: do you have to put your career first in order to be successful? Or can you have both a family life and a professional life? Luckily, more and more institutions are willing to help in trying to balance these two spheres. Flexible work schedules, telecomuting, and spousal job assistance are being offered. Since these institutions tend not to be the top institutions in their field, perhaps they spy that by offering a solution to the two-body problem, they can access a better pool of talent then would be available to them otherwise. I, for one, applaud their efforts, no matter the motivation. After all, a more well rounded and happier set of academics makes for a better learning and collaborative environment.

The Benefits of Health Care

As those of you who read this column regularly know, I'm not one given to posting my initial response to events. I prefer to let things percolate for a bit and try to flesh out all the implications. The recently passed health care legislation in the United States is no different. First of all, I would like to congratulate the US Congress for their work. They have made the health system much more fair, and took a stab at trying to slow the growth of costs, something that will benefit all in the long term. Universal health care is something we have enjoyed in Canada now for many decades. In recent years this has proved to be a boon for private industry; they do not need to spend as much out of pocket providing coverage for their employees located here as for those in the US.

Thus, this provides an excellent place to talk a little bit about the benefits that one might expect working as a postdoc or undertaking a PhD. In Canada, things are pretty simple: with few exceptions postdocs and PhD students are left to fend for themselves. In the US there is more variation. Typically, as university employees (RAs and TAs), PhD students and postdocs are entitled to some basic health care, subject to reasonable co-pays ($5-25 for a doctor's visit, $100+ for emergency rooms, in-network). In many ways this replicates the Canadian health care system, so long as you remain a student in good standing and continue to work a certain minimum number of hours per week. Rare indeed is the postdoc or PhD that covers regular preventative care, such as dental visits, or provides it to spouses and that goes for both countries.

While this all sounds good, make no mistake, as Robert Heinlein once said "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." (TANSTAAFL) If you work in the US, the cost of providing benefits with a position is passed on to you in the form of lower salary then you might earn otherwise. In fact, I have heard of positions that have a "marriage penalty" of sorts in which a pay cut is the price of adding a spouse to a coverage plan. These losses can be significant, totaling thousands of dollars over the course of a year.

Still, the situation is more complicated. For cultural reasons, Postdocs and PhD students in the USA tend to make significantly more then their Canadian counterparts (for instance, US$25k is not an unusual 1/2-time Science RA/TA, whereas the most lucrative NSERC PGS-D pays only C$21k and does not come with a tuition waiver, like the US counterpart; likewise US postdocs typically start around $50k and go up from there, whereas C$40 is much more common here), even factoring in the higher cost of providing benefits. Thus any reductions in cost associated with the new legislation will only widen this gap and make US Positions more attractive.

Astrobiological Disparity: A Commentary on the International Year of Biodiversity

From left to right: Deinoccocus radiodurans, a hardy extremophile capable of life in nuclear reactors, middle, the strange body plan of the now-extinct cambrian animal Opabinia Regalis (As envisioned by Nobu Tamura), an afican wild cat (as photographed by Wikipedia user Sonelle). General Sherman, a sequoiadendron, the tallest tree in the world at 275 feet.

2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, following up 2009, the International Year of Astronomy. This makes it a particularly good time to discuss the field that links these two subjects, Astrobiology. Much of astrobiological work today occurs along two linked themes. The first is assessing habitability and the potential for life elsewhere in the Universe. This is what we are trying to do by following the water on Mars. However, this endeavour cannot proceed without input from the second theme, understanding the origins of life and its early development on the earth.

Unfortunately, both of these themes face a fundamental problem. Even though there is great diversity between extant forms of life on Earth, there is remarkably little disparity, from a cosmic perspective. This difference is a subtle, but important one. While diversity is a measure of the number of different forms in a collection of organisms (usually taken as the number of different species, or non-reproductively mixing groups), disparity is an expression of the degree of differentiation between these forms often in terms of body plans and survival strategies. So a collection of 500 species of shrimp is more diverse, but less disparate then a collection of 100 species made up of plants, fish, crustaceans and plankton. Notably, neither measure takes into account any measures of the success of a particular species in terms of number of organisms, range, species longevity, etc.

Since we only have one example of a planet with life, it is worth asking: how disparate is life on Earth? While there may be as many as 100 million different species present on the planet today (most remaining as yet undiscovered), these can be divided into just three domains of life based upon the form of their constitutive cells. These domains are Bacteria, Archaea, and Eucarya. Yet even these large meta-groups have inter-relationships. Eucarya, the domain of which we and nearly all other macroscopic life are a part, is thought to be the result of a beneficial symbiosis between an Archaean and a Bacterium at some time between 1.7 and 2.7 billion years ago. More fundamentally, all three domains are based on the replicative abilities of a single polymer, DNA and share a common ancestor. Thus in terms of strategies for propagation, the disparity of life on Earth is zero!


The three domains of life with Archea in Green, Eucaryotes in Red and Bacteria in Blue. Note that all three domains share a common ancestor which would be located at the center of the tree. The close relationship between the Archaea and Eucarya is shown as a larger subgroup before linking back to the last universal common ancestor.

Part of the reason for this could be the surprising observation that while diversification increases in time, disparity actually tends to decline. For instance, Stephen J. Gould observes that the number of different body plans (loosely equivalent to the classification level of phyla) in animals present just after the Cambrian Explosion is significantly greater than today. Analogously, it has been hypothesized that several different biopolymers, including RNA, PNA and TNA might have been able to perform functions similar to that which is played by DNA today. All may have been present on the early earth, but DNA, having advantages, outcompeted all of these other forms. The history since has been written by the victorious molecule.

However, this also suggests that even on the earth there may have been greater disparity in the past and that had conditions been different, then the balance could have been tipped in favour of other forms or strategies. As a result, we are left contemplating not just where in the Universe we might find life that has been successful on Earth, but where other kinds of life, as yet unknown, might be possible. There are some theoretical bounds we can put on such a problem; however, I expect that this is an area in which we will be surprised by discovery in the future. As many prognosticators are aware, it is always a dangerous proposition to define the limits of the possible.

Instead, we can proceed by determining what factors will tend to improve the odds of life beyond the earth, based on our limited earthly experience. For instance, liquid water certainly helps the chemistry that we require to function. The presence of certain elements in particular Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorous and Sulphur (collectively referred to as CHNOPS) are also helpful, allowing for systems that can replicate and store energy. Similarly the presence of an energy source to power cellular reactions is critical; both chemosynthesis and photosynthesis, in which energy is gained from chemical disequilibrium or radiation, are practiced on the Earth. This has led to the hypothesis that the powerful oxidants found in the martian soil by the Phoenix Lander could represent a power source for a martian biochemistry.


Above: a soil sample is collected for analysis. On Mars, solar UV causes oxidants to form in the soil, building up to as much as 1 percent by weight of the upper layer. Perchlorate, discovered by the MECA instrument aboard Phoenix represents a potential power source for chemosynthesis, if there is an organism available to metabolize it.

But the most important factor seems to be time. Over time, organisms evolve to move into new habitats that were previously empty. To illustrate this, consider that despite the incredible biodiversity on the Earth, certain niches remain unfilled. Why do the deserts or the summits of mountains not flower with plants and animals? Turn the question around and ask why the continental surface was barren half billion years ago? And why, before that, no animals, plants or larger creatures beyond bacterial colonies filled the seas?

It is worth keeping in mind that all of these biomes, including the terrestrial abodes not filled today, are far more clement locations for the kind of life we know then exists on Mars, Enceladus or Europa. That these are the leading candidates for life elsewhere in our Solar System underscores not only the difficulty of our Astrobiological quest, but also the fragility of life on our planet. It requires that we protect something so rare in all its diverse forms. This is the realization that is at the foundation of the year of Biodiversity.


From left to right: Earth, Mars, Europa and Enceladus (showing water plumes)

As a final thought let us consider what the evolution of intelligence on the Earth has meant for the survival of life on Earth. The fragility of life relates directly to three factors: environmental variation, diversity/disparity and range.

The effects of the first two factors are simple to grasp. The greater the frequency and magnitude of the variation in environmental conditions, the more difficult it is to maintain a stable system. Likewise, the more diversity and disparity there is amongst organisms inhabiting a particular region, the more likely that one or more species will be able to deal with the environmental variations that do occur.

Range, however, is the most crucial. By spreading itself over a large territory, life cannot be extinguished easily by isolated events. This is the advantage of large animals. We cannot tolerate the extremes that bacteria can, but we can deal with inclement conditions by adapting or moving on. Migration is a particularly good example of an adaptation unavailable to simpler life which allows the organism to derive benefits from a much larger range.

Intelligence is by far the best known means of increasing the range of a species. Through our use of tools and clothing, human beings now inhabit the entire planet and can claim a range in pressure, temperature, salinity, pH, you name it - larger than that of any other organism, bacteria included. As such, the Intelligence habitable zone (IHZ) for a solar system housing intelligent life is limited only by the availability of raw materials and energy; aside from politics and economics, there is no reason why humans could not establish a permanent presence on Europa or even further out in the solar system.

As such, we are the first organism produced by our planet with the capability to outlive the death of our Sun, four billion years hence. Thus spaceflight represents the most important adaptation ever produced by life on Earth, and it is an adaptation that we must not lose if we are to preserve life in our corner of the universe.


With the emergence of intelligent life, the habitable zone (HZ) increases in size. This larger Intelligence Habitable Zone (IHZ) shows how through the use of spaceflight and nuclear energy generation, it is possible to spread life to any location with sufficient raw materials, mainly water ice. Discarding waste heat is a difficulty which corresponds to the left edge of the purple trapezoid, but the right edge has no well-defined boundary.

-
For an interesting introduction to some of the central questions posed by Astrobiology, I highly recommend the book Rare Earth (most recently, 2003) by Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. For a more advanced read, try Lunine’s Astrobiology (2005), a tome well-worth close study. Those looking for background on questions surrounding the initial emergence and diversification of animals (more generally “complex metazonans”) are advised to consider Stephen J. Gould’s Wonderful Life (1990). As a note on the images, I have selected NASA or Wikipedia media wherever possible and have made an effort to attribute the base images. If I have missed something, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me and I will fix it! With the exception of the Phoenix and planetary images, assume all image content is covered under: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License.

Why is Global Warming so hard to understand and respond to?

I attended a professional dinner on the weekend where one of the speakers was a University Executive who was formerly an engineering professor working on biofuels. As you might expect, he brought up the concept of global warming in his talk, but the way in which he explained it made it sound like the burning of fossil fuels raised the average global temperature through the heat generated by combustion and not through the increase in GHGs (greenhouse gasses). As a result, in the Q&A he had to fend off a number of comments that nuclear power was terrible from the point of view of global warming due to the enormous quantities of waste heat released.

While the speaker could obviously have expressed himself better, his talk got me wondering about why global warming due to the emission of GHGs is such a difficult concept to communicate to professionals and to the public. There has been no shortage of press on the topic over the last 20+ years. And while a majority of americans now believe that the earth is warming, the message about why isn’t really getting across. A recent poll found that 65% of people did not feel that human activity was to blame or weren’t sure. Worse, when John Keller, a colleague of mine at the University of Arizona, asked a group of undergraduates the best way to combat global warming in a multiple-choice survey, the top answer was by picking up beach trash. This does not bode well for the future.

Obviously, part of the problem is that many environmental causes, from pollution to overfishing to the ozone layer to global warming, have become conflated in the public’s mind. However, this hasn’t stopped concerted action in the past. For instance, the Montreal protocols of the 1980s that sought to curb the emission of CFCs and preserve the ozone layer was passed easily and by any standard has been wildly successful. So what is it that makes global warming different? Here are a few possible reasons which together suggest a “perfect storm” of confusion and inaction of sorts. I’ll cover reasons both why it is complicated to convince people and why it is difficult to spur them to action:

1) Complexity. The concept of a heat-trapping gas producing an effect similar to that inside your car on a hot summer’s day isn’t a difficult one. It’s when you get to projected effects that the mind starts to boggle; stronger hurricanes, less rain in some places, more rain in others, warmer climate in some places, colder in others, to say nothing of the biological effects real and claimed. As such, it’s very difficult to say with precision what the effect will be on a person living in a particular place and to measure that effect. This contrasts with ozone degradation where you can take someone out in the sun in a well-mapped area of depletion and show them that they burn more easily.

2) Size of the effect and Natural Cycles. Catastrophic increase in temperatures from today’s levels could be as little as a few °C. That’s less than the difference between night and day, less than the difference between yesterday and today, and much less than the difference between summer and winter. I’m sure that you could get almost anyone to agree that an increase in temperatures of 30°C would be bad, but getting people to believe that such a small change could be devastating is difficult. Worse, the increase is not monotonic; it’s not as if global warming will add 2°C to the daily high every day. Instead some years will be colder, in fact some decades will be colder than the decade before, even though the trend is towards higher temperatures. Thus, some preferentially use the moniker “climate change” since any change in the climate, heating or cooling, can then be attributed to the effect without confusion.

3) The challenge of thinking Long-term. By and large human beings are not used to thinking long term, especially not in terms of hundreds of years, our brains just aren’t built that way. This means that it is very difficult to avoid processes which are slow to build, even if we suspect that there could be a runaway or tipping-point effect out there. The same is true of hundred-year floods and storms. Eventually, the cultural memory of the event recedes.

4) Global Reach. If you put together a group of friends to clean up trash in the local park, you see immediate benefits in your life and the lives of those around you. However, global warming can only be combatted on a global scale, and we naturally feel less kinship the farther we go from our own community. Furthermore, there is the spectre that actions you take may in fact cause detriment to your own personal quality of life, even though they will benefit the planet overall.

5) Cost. Unlike CFC reduction, which was a relatively small change, economically, reducing the world’s carbon footprint is a monumental task. It will cost trillions to implement and change our daily lives. Potentially, it will change the job market and sap the economies of those countries that make it a priority, versus those who do not. This is true even though we will all rise or fail collectively. Since the cost to change is so high, the standard of proof demanded is thus correspondingly higher than for any other scientific issue.

6) Politics. Not surprisingly, the issue has also become a political one in which parties exploit public sentiment for and against global warming as a wedge issue. In December there was an entire episode of the McLaughlin group dedicated to the topic which discussed only the horse-trading around the issue and nothing of substance. You’re more likely to hear about global warming as a positive for energy security then for environmental reasons in the political sphere these days.

All of this makes global warming a hard nut to crack. I certainly don’t have all the answers. As a scientist I will continue to do my best to educate wherever possible. But things are starting to look a bit better. Attitudes towards wasteful behavior are changing and more technologies are coming online that can get us through. For instance, the world’s largest emitter of GHGs, China, is also the world’s largest investor in photovoltaics. That bodes well.

But I do not wish to encourage those who would try to convince by false claims or facile arguments. In particular, one famous youtube video shows a man making the following argument (“never refuted!”) which I have paraphrased: that because the possible consequences of global warming are so dire, it behoves us to spend mightily to prevent it whether or not we know if or why it will happen, or how bad it will be. How much should we spend? He doesn’t elaborate.

Unfortunately, governments and citizens are in the business of managing finite resources. Thus, money supplied to one cause has to come from somewhere else. Bjorn Lomborg, derided in many circles as “one of the greatest opponents of global warming,” does in fact list it as one of the most serious problems facing the planet today. However, as he says, there are many better ways to spend that capital that could have a larger impact on alleviating human suffering; a few hundred million to provide access to fresh water for everyone, even less to provide vaccinations, just to name a few. That’s the kind of calculated, sober and rational thinking the gravity of this topic deserves.

As a side note, why does a planetary scientist care? Because understanding the climate of the earth, how it works and what it has done in the past, may be the key to unlocking the past history of the climates of the terrestrial planets in general. For Mars this is an important problem. Did the faint young sun permit liquid water, and perhaps life to exist? The sinuous channels, deltas, and chemical/morphological evidence from the MER rovers say yes. But we don't know how long those conditions persisted. As well, we do not know if the large swings we predict in climate today could make it clement again for life on 100,000-year timescales. If so, then our chances for finding life on Mars are much better!

As well, if we wish to live on the surface of Mars one day, we will need to artificially induce global warming there. By knowing exactly what portion of the current trend on the Earth is explained by anthropological activities, we can more effectively warm Mars or determine if it is even possible (One study by Chris MacKay suggests that it would be quite difficult). This concept is known as Terraforming.

Citius, Altius, Fortius

After last night's closing ceremonies, all I can say is wow. What a finish and what a show. Kudos especially to our Canadian athletes who really finished strongly in the last couple of days with a record haul of medals. You had us worried there for a while! All congradulations aside, however, what I'd like to talk about here in this space today are some of the similarities and parallels between an endeavour like the olympic games and space flight.

Some of these are obvious. When you ask a kid what they'd like to be wheb they grow up, chances are that athlete and astronaut would both appear high on the list of most popular aspirations. As well, they both create great spectacle and highlight incredible human stories. No matter which one you are talking about, a veritable army of dedicated people, toiling for years, are necessary to pull the whole thing off.

Also, like the olympics, spaceflight will yield the highest returns if it is not the sole province of a single nation, or even a small few. It needs to be a truly international experience. Greater and greater collaboration across borders is occurring, but the flag on your passport still matters enormously. This is perhaps one of the greatest promises of commercial spaceflight, which may eventually open up this frontier to people from all nations.

So, could there be an echo to Jacques Rogge's traditional line from last night "I call upon the youth of the world to gather in four years..." for our endeavour?

While you ponder that, think about this: on a deeper level, both the Olympics and Spaceflight are expressions of our civic pride and are funded largely through the public purse. As such, both are run at what is essentially a loss. Today VANOC will reveal its balance sheet, and it's not expected to be good. The City of Vancouver has certainly paid a price for the honour of hosting the games. Many residents fought against the bid and boycotted the celebrations that took place. Likewise, the expenditure on NASA sometimes stirs a similar response. Kritoph Klover perhaps put it best in his song "Others Standing by" from the album "To Touch the Stars:"

'Why would you go there?' they say
'There's nothing up there anyways
We could use the money here
Don't you know that life's to dear?'

Neither hosting the winter games nor exploring are cheap endeavours. The obvious monetary returns in terms of new technologies (memory foam, anyone?) and sporting facilities can be hard to quantify exactly, and never cover the cost. So why do we bother with either?

I think it comes down to our nature as human beings. We all aspire to be more then we are. Life is not just the search for a just and comfortable existence. We need to believe in our ability, as a species to grow beyond what we are. To test the limits of what we can do. It's a big part of what made us the creatures we are today, and it is also key to our long term survival. That's worth a few dollars every four years. So, as the olympic motto says: Faster, Higher, Stronger! Or as Klover answers:

'We'll send the best from Earth
To find out what it's worth.'

Hitting the right wall in Vancouver?

I'm sure that many of you, as I did, tuned in Sunday night to watch the Canada-USA hockey game at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. On a weekend when our athletes were expected to take home between five and nine medals, but finished with only one, the loss suffered by our team seemed symptomatic of a dream slipping away. This wasn't supposed to happen. With improving medal counts since 1980, and over $100 million spent on the best training money could buy, this was supposed to be our year. It was to be as much of a coming out party as the Beijing games were to China in 2008. But instead of enjoying a victory celebration, we're in fourth place with a week still to go. Many reasons for the result to date have been suggested. Perhaps the extra pressure put on the athletes by the home crowd is causing an abnormally high choke rate? Perhaps our team is relying on too many veterans.

But when you really get down into the numbers, could a paradoxical conclusion spring up, indicating that Canada's athletes are performing like never before? Stephen J. Gould in his masterpiece "Full House" discusses how the death of .400 hitting in baseball actually indicates an increase in excellence in the sport. Thus, could the results to date indicate that for our athletes, it's the so-called "right wall" of human performance that is keeping us from owning the podium?

To give you some context by what I mean by a "right wall," I need to take you back to high school. We all remember the bell-curve, shown below, which is used to distribute grades from a test with frequency on the y-axis and score on the x-axis.



Scientists call this kind of curve a natural distribution, because it's the distribution of values that arises in many systems in nature. On the graph there are two "walls." A score of 0 is the left wall, since no value lower then 0 can be obtained on the test. Similarly, a score of 100 is the right wall, because, no matter how smart, no one can score higher. The reason that teachers curve grades is that for an ideal test with infinite test takers, the marks of a class will be distributed along this normal curve, as each individual within the class has slightly different abilities and study habits.

In this test, there are no zeros (which indicate the test is too hard) and no hundreds (which indicate the test is too easy) given out and the peak of the curve is well away from either wall. The reason for this is that all students have been taught in the subject matter, and there is a typical amount of material that is remembered with some remembering less and others remembering more.

But what happens in situations close to one of the walls? For instance, if we were to consider the windspeed in Toronto, you could say with confidence that the winds are often light, but rarely zero and rarely stormy. Since the typical, or most likely windspeed is small compared with the storms, the distribution becomes distorted by the presence of the left wall :



Note also in this illustration the presence of what is called, in statistics, the long tail, trailing off to the right, which shows the likelihood of extreme, but infrequent events, such as hurricanes. As the wind speed gets greater, the frequency of that event becomes less and less. For instance, we might have a fairly windy day each week, a few bad storms a year, some remarkable storms every few years, and a devastating event (such as hurricane hazel in 1954) once in a lifetime.

Is there a right wall when it comes to wind? It turns out that there is a limit to how much energy the sun can pump into the winds, and thus there is a maximum wind speed:



This gets really interesting when we consider the problem of watching the winds for a specific period of time. The longer we watch the winds, (a day, a week, a year, a lifetime) the higher the record wind speed we will observe. In fact, over time, the record wind speed that we have observed up to that time will tend to approach or asymptote to the right wall which indicates the maximum value (shown in red):



What makes this concept applicable to athletics is that there is a maximum limit, or "right wall" to human performance as well. No one will run the 100m in a second, or jump over a bar 100 meters high, at least not without significant surgery or bioengineering. But progressively, athletes (who are the extreme values for our human distribution) will approach the limits of their sports. As they do, successive records will become closer and closer to the last record, and the competitive edge of each elite athlete over their peers gets smaller. As mentioned above, Stephen J. Gould invokes this principle in his book "Full House" to describe how the death of .400 hitting in baseball paradoxically implies that today's batters are the best that have ever played the game precisely because the possible edge to be had over their rivals is so small. Thus over time, it becomes more difficult to have a dominating performance.

But how does an athlete approach the right wall? They get there in two ways. First, they are highly trained. Second, most athletes possess an innate skill in their event: they have faster reflexes that allow a faster start, have a body type well suited to the motion of a sport, and so on. While any athlete can improve with training, most of us will never beat Kristina Groves on ice, no matter how hard we work at it. In fact, many of you may remember that in 2008, as much attention was focused on Michael Phelps' physical proportions as on his training regimen. You can't teach that. Finally, as far as the winter Olympics are concerned, the level of sophistication of equipment can make a huge difference, pushing out the right wall (see the discussion of the implications of the introduction of the clap skate in long-track speed skating below).

The first of these factors, better training, can be influenced by national governments and Olympic committees. The second aspect, increased innate ability, can also be improved by making the sport more visible and therefore increasing the pool of people from which the athletes are drawn. This happens because in a bigger pool of people, like when you watch the wind for longer, the existence of extreme cases become more likely.

Unfortunately, this visibility is limited by the size of the country. Thus, with equal training and visibility you would expect all countries to perform roughly in proportion to the size of their populations. Instead what we find is that some countries perform out of proportion. If we look just at the countries that won medals in 2006, they have a combined population of 2.42 billion (1.12 billion neglecting china). Thus, neglecting China, Germany (7.2% pop, 11.5% medals) and Canada (3.0% pop 9.5% medals) over performed significantly, while the USA (26.8% pop, 9.9% medals) and Russia (12.5% pop, 8.7% medals) under performed significantly. Part of the reason for this imbalance is that in a country like the USA, a large portion of the population is found in warmer areas, so the effective size of the pool is not limited by overall population, but instead by population located in cold areas. Similarly, in poorer countries, the pool is also reduced by a lack of well-funded sporting programs (particularly for the Winter Olympics due to a higher dependence on expensive equipment and tracks).

Other small countries succeed by choosing to specialize. The Netherlands is a good example where speed skating is king. The dutch have now won over 100 medals and have an advantage relative to their population as a result (1.4% pop, 3.6% medals).

But what about Canada? Well, an important observation (made by Brian Williams of CTV) is that of the 24 medals won by Canada in Turin, 18 were won by women. Reduce their contribution to that of the men (6 medals each) and we get down to something like the population proportion with 4.7% of the medals. Furthermore, history has shown that, for social reasons, the approach to the right wall for men occurs before the approach for women (see Gould's "Full House" for the example of the marathon). However, in Canada, women in amateur sport are trained as well as the men. Could they therefore have had an advantage over other countries?

To examine this factor, let's take a look at long-track speed skating since it is one of the few events which has a long history at the Olympics and whose form has remained more or less consistent with time (as opposed to alpine events which are staged on a different course each Olympics). Fully half of Canada's medals in 2006 came from this classification (long and short track). Thus it makes some sense to look at the progression of world records in a longer and a shorter length for both genders. Here each is shown relative to the current world record:



The curve shows several relative plateaus (which indicate approaching the right wall) followed by jumps. Many of these correspond to changes in technology which have extended human capability. For instance, the 1997 introduction of the clap skate, which resulted in a 5% improvement in times for both men and women. However, while women were making larger strides until the later 1970s, since then their progress has been similar to the progress made by the men. Thus we can only conclude that, at least in speed skating, immaturity of the sport cannot be to blame.

But looking at the progression of world records does not tell the whole story, as it increases the influence of outliers. One sparkling performance that breaks a world record will bias that metric for years to come. This is the error made by Paul Kedrosky (http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2008/08/is_100m_sprint.html) who argues that the lack of a plateau in the men's 100m dash world record progression indicates the presence of doping or some other chemical edge that moves the right wall further out. Thus it makes more sense to look at the performance of larger samples over time to detect the trends within the elite level of a sport.

A good choice here is the single-distance world championships which were run between 1996 and 2008. For these, I have tabulated the 1000m and 5000m (since the men do not run the 3000m here) and averaged the top ten finishers:



Again the Women and Men hang together, with the introduction of the clap skate being the largest change. The bouncing around of the recent value is an altitude effect which can make up to 2 seconds of difference. It is possible in this figure to appreciate better the plateauing effect hidden within the world record progression. Thus, it seems that the sport is fairly mature.

However, this last measure also makes one important omission, that of the variance between the top ten. If the variance is small, then anyone on any given day can win. If the variance is large, then there is a clear advantage to peaking at the event. Those who do can win many more medals then chance would predict.



What we find here is that for Women, particularly in the longer distances, prior to 2005, is that there was a greater difference between the top ten then for the men. This could have contributed to the ability of a particular Woman to dominate the event in previous Olympics in a way that is more difficult to do today. Surprisingly, this effect is not seen to the same extent in the shorter distances.

Adding to this, is the availability of medals in speed skating, as opposed to other sports. A dominating moguls skier takes home but one medal, a dominating hockey player could generate none, if not surrounded by others of their caliber. But for a dominating speed skater, 5 or more is a definite possibility.

Combine these factors together along with three others. First, the small-number statistics of events in which you get but one chance to perform. Second, the third place cut-off of medaling which hides the true distribution (and can seriously affect the medal count of a country with abundant top 5 finishes but few top 3). Thirdly, the vast increase in the number of medals awarded since 1980, when Canada's total began to increase.

Altogether, this suggests that the 2006 medal count may have been a bit high, while the 2010 medal count a bit low. But both represent a solid performance and a continuing improvement on the average, perhaps even an over-achievement for such a small country. This priciple is further reinforced by below-expected achievement during the first week and the above-expected achievement of the last few days. On the whole, it seems that our athletes are up there at the right wall of human performance, and the world has now, largely, joined them. This is something to be proud of, and to look forward to in future competitions.

*Update: Debra Black of the Toronto Star makes an excellent point that, unlike for men who dominate professional sport, the olympics is the biggest athletic stage for canadian women, and thus may attract more top female athletes. http://olympics.thestar.com/2010/article/771590--why-canadian-women-rock-at-the-olympics

Some Soul Searching

It has been a while since I last posted, so my apologies to any of you out there who might be reading this space on a semi-frequent basis. During these last two months, I've been busy doing a bit of soul searching about what it is that I am looking for with my job search. Those of us who set out on a PhD do so for different reasons, but for many we envision life after grad school as a professor. In fact, a former colleague of mine once confided that students who did not secure a research professorship at a university were a failure and a waste of valuable resources.

However, a quick check of the mathematics shows that it is impossible for every doctoral candidate to become a tenured research professor. If the field is neither declining nor expanding, then each research prof needs to train, on average, a total of one student over the course of their entire career.

Of course, this is an oversimplification. Just as the human replacement rate is in fact higher 2 children per woman, the replacement rate per professor is likely slightly higher then 1 student per career. Some profs, especially those at leading institutions, will have several students who go on to be other profs, while some will have none. However, we have all known a professor or two to be mentoring a group of up to ten or more graduate students at a time which implies a graduation rate of two students per year! It doesn't take a PhD to realize that not all of these students will become professors, no matter how good they are at what they do.

So what then are the alternatives to being a professor that still make use of the degree? In the analysis that follows, I am intentionally neglecting those who go on to work in other fields. For planetary science there are typically three alternate routes.

The first, and perhaps most popular route is to go independent and be a 'research scientist.' These are so-called soft money positions in which you only get paid if you are able to secure competitive grant money. Some of these positions are at Universities, but the high rate of overhead, (i.e. the portion of the money you earn that gets taken off the top by the university) and the extensive application process which may be nearly as stringent as for a professorship have led to the creation of new organizations.

Thus many research scientists find a home in in cooperative groups with many such researchers where the overhead costs are lower. The Planetary Science Institute, Southwest Research Institute and Space Science Institute are examples of these types of organizations. These organizations do cutting edge research and even direct missions, such as SwRI with New Horizons, arriving at Pluto in 2015.

The second option is to teach. Typically, exclusive teaching positions are not available at large research-oriented Universities (though there are exceptions). Also, while research is still encouraged, the time available for this activity is reduced compared to a Professor or Research Scientist. However, for those who enjoy working with and mentoring people, seek a better work-life balance and wish to explore their chosen subject matter outside of their comfort zone in a more relaxed setting, this can be a good option.

Thirdly there are positions in government and industry. While the Obama budget request for the coming year may shake things up a bit, ultimately, space missions are still run by governments and by defense contractors. Thus there are opportunities here to be a government research scientist, or to work on hardware, or to be part of the political process that creates the opportunities for research. Making these positions more attractive is the relative job security, benefits packages and highly attractive salary. On the downside, you may not be able to select your research, and your ability to conduct it will, in many cases, be even more restricted then with teaching.

So those are the options. But many come out of university intent on a professorship and nothing less. Can you blame them? Most have been high achievers all their life. Many have never known failure. As such, many new PhDs work in the relative purgatory of postdoctoral work. Postdoc'ing is neither here nor there as you are no longer a student, but are not yet in a professional post. You are paid better then a student, but in many cases are not doing work much different from one.

Further complicating matters is the fact that you may not be able to choose what research you do for a postdoc, especially in a depressed economy like one that exists now. Today, specialists are the only ones who need apply to positions. The fact that you have studied the atmosphere of Mars is no longer necessarily sufficient for you to get a job studying the atmosphere of Saturn. Thus, it is easy to run the risk of being pigeonholed to the work that you did in your PhD.

Also, you start to become aware that you have a best-before date hanging over your head. To be considered a viable candidate for an entry-level professorship, some postdoctoral seasoning is almost a prerequisite. However, postdoc too much, and employers start to wonder why you have not advanced your career. Generally speaking, in Planetary Science, the best before date is about 4 to 5 years out. Thus, this is a vulnerable time for a young researcher.

These are the lessons I've learned in just over a year of hunting. For now, I'm continuing with the postdoc route, but soon I may have to pick a way and go for it.

Feb 25 Update: more information on non-academic options for PhDs appears here: http://www.universityaffairs.ca/give-us-the-dirt-on-jobs.aspx