Everything You Know About Space is Wrong E-Book

Matt Brown

• Herausgeber: Batsford
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 207

Beschreibung

Indulge your curiosity with this humorous and fascinating book that demystifies the surprising myths about space. In the latest book from the Everything You Know is Wrong series, Matt Brown brings you a compendium of amazing facts about our planet, the universe, and everything in between! Thanks to popular sci-fi films and TV shows, there have been many misconceptions about the cosmos – from travelling through worm-holes to blowing up asteroids. In Everything You Know About Space is Wrong, you'll find a plethora of myths, legends and misquotes that have shaped the way you view the universe today. Think that the vacuum of space would make your blood boil and your head explode? It won't, and there have been people who have survived without wearing a suit in space. Think that astronauts float in space because there is zero-gravity? They're actually constantly falling towards the Earth. Think that the colour of space is black? It's actually predominantly green. Chock-full of facts about the cosmos, how it works (and how it doesn't!), this illuminating book will guide you through the mine of misinformation to answer such questions as whether we will meet aliens in our lifetime (SETI predicts we'll find evidence of ET by 2040!), what happens in the centre of the black hole, and why Mercury is not the hottest planet in the solar system. Discovering untruths about popular science, Everthing You Know About Space is Wrong provides a hugely entertaining insight into our universe.

Leseprobe

EverythingYou KnowAbout Spaceis Wrong

EverythingYou KnowAbout Spaceis Wrong

Matt Brown

Contents

Introduction

Space exploration

Putting stuff up into space is a waste of money

Rocket science is hard

Sputnik was the first man-made object in space

Laika the dog was the first animal in space

Astronauts have escaped Earth’s gravity

Yuri Gagarin was the first human to orbit the Earth and land his craft safely

Spaceships need heat shields or they’ll burn up from friction on re-entry

The space shuttle was the world’s first reusable spacecraft

The astronauts on the Space Shuttle Challenger were the first humans to die in space

Astronauts need special pens to write in zero gravity

Your body would explode in the vacuum of space

The Earth in space

The Earth’s day lasts 24 hours

Copernicus was first to claim that the Earth moves round the Sun

The Great Wall of China is the only man-made object visible from the Moon

It’s a long way up into space

Rockets are the only way to send objects into space

You can reach space by balloon

Fly me to the Moon

The Moon is geologically inactive

The Moon always looks the same, so it can’t be turning

Apollo 11 was the first spacecraft to land on the Moon

The first words spoken on the Moon were ‘That’s one small step for a man …’

Other lunar firsts

All the Moon rocks on Earth came from the Apollo missions

Overwhelming evidence shows that the Moon landings were faked

Other Moon conspiracies

No human has travelled further than the Moon

Out into the Solar System

Saturn is the only ringed planet

Mercury is the hottest planet

Earth is the only place in the Solar System with oceans

You can tell a comet’s direction from its tail

The Solar System ends at Pluto

The Sun is at the centre of the Solar System

The Sun is a big ball of fire

Light from the Sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth

Everything in the Solar System gets its name from mythology

Across the Universe

The Pole Star is the brightest in the sky

The constellations were all named by the ancients

Astronomers spend their time looking through telescopes

To study the stars you need expensive kit – astronomy is only for professionals

Space is black

Space is silent

Space is as empty and cold as it gets

We know what most of the Universe looks like

Space oddities

Mozart wrote ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’

Other musical mishaps

Mars contains a network of canals

Humans first attempted to contact aliens in the 1960s

Space blooper reel

Are you pronouncing it wrong?

Other myths and misnomers

Let’s start a new wave of false facts

Index

Acknowledgments

About the author

Introduction

Newsflash: the Moon is sometimes visible in the daytime.

To you, this might not be a revelation, yet it is surprising how many people are oblivious. The Moon, it turns out, is visible in the daytime as often as the night.

In researching this book, I chatted to many friends and contacts about the mysteries and misconceptions of space. I expected to hear about Apollo Moon hoaxes and the meaninglessness of the term ‘zero gravity’. I knew I’d get a list of sci-fi movies with impossibly audible space explosions. I didn’t expect to hear tales of middle-aged friends who never realized the Moon can be seen during daylight hours. I mean, how can you go 40 years and not notice?

The rising and setting of the Sun defines the beginning and end of daytime, but there is no parallel with the Moon and the night-time. Our spoilsport satellite has its own timetable, independent of whether the Sun is shining in any particular location on Earth.

If so many of us are blind to this simple truth, where else do we stumble when it comes to the cosmos?

There are no adequate words to describe space: big, vast, immense … nothing comes close. Our most powerful telescopes have barely revealed a fraction. Even our fictional heroes can’t master it. You might think that the starship Enterprise from Star Trek is able to go anywhere in the Universe with its lightspeed-dodging warp engines, but it’s largely confined to a small section of our own galaxy. If the entire observable universe were shrunk down to the size of the Earth, then Captains Kirk and Picard are, generously speaking, playing about in a region the size of your left nostril. Meanwhile, our descriptions of space are off-kilter with reality. We can say that space is cold, dark, silent, empty – and yet none of those is quite true. The only thing we can say is that our assumptions about space are almost always wrong.

The stars themselves are charlatans. We see them not as they are, but as they were. The galaxy Andromeda is the most far-flung object visible to the naked eye. The light from its stars has taken more than two million years to reach Earth. You see Andromeda as it appeared long before our species existed. When we look into the night sky and say ‘There is Orion; there is Vega,’ we should really say ‘There was Orion; there was Vega.’ Even our closest star, the Sun, shines in a perpetual past. Its rays take a little over eight minutes to reach Earth.

Even space exploration is fraught with inaccuracies. Sputnik was not the first human artefact in space, and nor was a dog called Laika the first animal to get there. Astronauts do not experience zero gravity. The first sentient being to travel to the Moon was not an Apollo astronaut, but a tortoise. You can’t send a hamburger into space with a helium balloon.

This book seeks out old myths and new misconceptions and boldly goes where no nitpicker has gone before. We will discover commonplace ‘facts’ that turn out to be wrong. We’ll find out why rocket science isn’t exactly rocket science. And we’ll examine the space conspiracy theories that propagate a different flavour of falsehood.

As with previous volumes in this series, the idea is not to belittle or ridicule. Rather, I want to use misconceptions as a springboard for higher things. We learn from our mistakes. By pointing out what is wrong, we are more likely to remember what is right. And I hope we shall have a lot of fun along the way.

Let the nitpicking begin!

Space exploration

Why rocket science isn’t exactly rocket science, and other astronautical adventures.

Putting stuff up into space is a waste of money

What did space exploration ever do for us? What’s the point of spending all that money (and it is a lot of money) lofting people and objects off the planet? Shouldn’t we be sorting out our problems here on Earth before we start looking beyond it? These questions are often, and rightly, raised whenever space is in the news. But those expensive rockets are not shot into the skies for the fun of it. Many launches carry payloads that directly enrich our lives.

My apartment overlooks a local park. I can’t see many stars in the night sky, thanks to the urban glow of London. What I can see, out there in the dark, is a constellation of faint lights moving across the grass. A group of teenagers is prowling through the park in search of the digital monsters of Pokémon Go! They stop. Lambent oblongs are raised. A battle is joined. It’s a scenario played out in parks and streets around the world, and it’s all possible because of GPS*, the Global Positioning Satellite service.

GPS relies on a constellation of at least 24 satellites, which together allow a user to find their position anywhere on Earth. When the system was built during the 1970s and 1980s, it was intended as a navigational tool, first for the military and then for civilians. It has succeeded beyond measure. Satellite navigation is well on the way to replacing the traditional map.

Uses for GPS now extend way beyond navigation. Since the development of smartphones and third-party apps, the technology has percolated into many aspects of life. I doubt whether those who developed GPS could possibly have conceived that it would, one day, be used to hunt imaginary monsters in a moonlit park.

If catching Pokémon isn’t your thing, then you might instead have used GPS to seek a partner. Shakespeare portrayed Romeo and Juliet as star-crossed lovers. These days, people are finding cross-matched lovers thanks to artificial stars. Dating apps provide a summary of potential sweethearts, whom you might have passed on the street, or sat next to on the train – all reliant on GPS data. Some find this creepy, but one senses it is the beginning of something much bigger.

That is just to dip our toes in the water. We can swim out a little deeper, thanks to GPS-tagged sharks. The OCEARCH project has tagged dozens of great whites in this way. The feedback not only forewarns lifeguards about an incoming shark, but also allows scientists to learn much more about the behaviour of these creatures. Other applications include ‘geocache’ treasure hunts, the tracking of stolen goods and even performance art.

GPS is just one example of how space technology affects, and arguably improves, our everyday lives. Satellite TV is another, and accurate weather forecasting a third. Our orbital henchdroids have myriad other uses, such as helping farmers plan their crop rotations, prospecting for minerals, monitoring environmental changes, discovering the ruins of ancient cities, and spying on the enemy.

If a solar storm suddenly fried all the satellites orbiting our planet, chaos would ensue. Civilization might even collapse. Think of all the cargo ships, delivery trucks, emergency services, pilots and Pokémon Go players who rely on GPS. Many banking and payment services run data through satellites. There would be riots if the satellite dishes of the world were no longer able to receive the latest episode of Game of Thrones, or the Superbowl final.

Our modern world just wouldn’t be possible without satellites. And satellites wouldn’t have been possible without the billions of dollars and rubles spent on developing space programmes.

Spending money on satellite development, launch and operation has clearly helped to make the modern world. But what about space exploration? Can the costs of launching exploratory probes or humans into space be justified? The case can be argued persuasively either way, but I’m firmly in the ‘Hell, yes’ camp. Here’s why.

The romance of it all: I really shouldn’t start with this one. It is irrational. It is frivolous. It is subjective. Far better to begin with economic arguments, or the threat from asteroids, or the benefits to medical research. Most articles do just that, then finish off with appeals to our sense of wonder and curiosity. But no. That doesn’t seem right. If we’re being honest with ourselves, most space advocates want to explore simply because it is exciting to do so. And what is wrong with that?

When Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, the astronauts’ experience was shared with an estimated 600 million people back on Earth watching on TV. For the first time in history, one-sixth of our species united to witness the same event. The audience would have been still higher had TV sets been as widespread as they are today. These people did not tune in because they were interested in the composition of lunar soil, or to scope out investment opportunities. They did so because space exploration is thrilling.

The sense of wonder extends to our robotic probes. When NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on Mars in 2012, a lot of people took notice; 3.2 million viewers watched the livestream over the Internet – a huge number in 2012, and a larger audience than most cable news channels. Over a thousand braved the rain in New York’s Times Square to witness the event on a giant screen. The pictures were hardly eye-catching: all they got was footage of an anxious control room, as no imagery from the probe was immediately available. And all this for the fourth US rover to land on Mars – not an unprecedented event – and yet we were gripped.

There is something deep in the human psyche that urges us to tinker, to ask questions and to explore. It is our sense of curiosity that led us to harness powers beyond our own muscles: first firewood and yoked animals; later the sunlight and the energy locked up in the atom. Now we create and explore computer-generated worlds to satisfy that itch. Pushing out into space is not a ‘nice to have’ or an ‘optional extra’. It is an adventure that will forever call. We are driven to do it. As long as the human brain is what it is, there will be many who dream of the stars, and some will eventually get there.

When people say ‘What’s the point of exploring space?’ they’re asking a superfluous question. We might as well ask ‘What’s the point of art?’ or ‘What’s the point of having a baby?’. These are all questions that you could attempt to justify with facts and figures, but the honest answer is more human: because we want to.

Survival: And so we come on to the more rational justifications for space exploration. The first is one of survival. Sooner or later, Earth is going to be troubled by something big, and planet-wide. That might be an environmental disaster, an asteroid impact or a nuclear war. The only way to guard against such an ‘eggs in one basket’ scenario is to establish a human presence in places other than the Earth. The future of our species may rely on stable colonies on the Moon, Mars or elsewhere.

Let’s be honest, though. These will not come anytime soon. The most balmy, idyllic location on Mars is still far less hospitable than the wastes of Antarctica or the middle of the Sahara Desert. The first humans on the Red Planet will find a harsh realm with no oxygen and little atmospheric pressure. With no vegetation or liquid water, the scenery will soon become tedious and dispiriting. Establishing a successful colony may require us to alter the environment of Mars to suit human needs better (terraforming), or alter ourselves to suit the environment better (genetic engineering), or both. It may take many decades or centuries before an off-Earth colony is entirely self-sufficient, but we have to start somewhere. As space pioneer Elon Musk once described Mars, ‘It’s a fixer-upper of a planet, but we could make it work.’

In the shorter term, learning to live and work in space is crucial if we are to have any protection from major, extinction-event asteroid impacts. The dinosaurs lost out there and the same fate could easily befall us. A colossal strike may yet be millions of years in the future, or it might come in the next few decades. We just don’t know.

In the extreme long term, the Earth will be swallowed by the Sun. One day, our star will begin a new phase in which it swells to many times its current size. Our planet will grow steadily warmer, then bake to a crisp. Earth will then be swallowed entirely. We’re talking five billion years in the future, which I appreciate is quite a relaxed deadline, but it will happen. Our species – or whatever we’ve evolved into – will have to be more than competent with interstellar travel by this point, or face extinction. It pays to get your homework done early.

Science and innovation: By building craft that can leave the confines of Earth, and by learning to live in a weightless environment, humans have solved all kinds of problems we wouldn’t ever have encountered had we stayed on terra firma. A heap of new challenges has led to a tidy pile of inventions originally developed for astronauts and space probes that have since found purpose closer to home. NASA even has its own Technology Transfer Program, to help spin out its best research and development into the wider world. Space spin-offs include the foil blankets given to marathon runners, numerous types of health monitor, advances in robotics and miniaturized computing, improved artificial limbs and much more besides. NASA alone claims to have developed around 2,000 products from its research programmes. Contrary to popular belief, these do not include Teflon and Velcro, which were invented by others.

Meanwhile, the weightless environment is also useful for scientific and medical study. Much of this research looks ahead, to prepare the way for long-duration space missions to Mars or beyond. Some addresses more Earthly needs. Osteoporosis is one example. This common condition, most prevalent in elderly women, weakens bones and leads to fractures. As it happens, bone loss is also one of the side effects of life in microgravity. An astronaut on a long-duration mission will lose 1–2 per cent of their bone mass per month. The crew of the International Space Station (ISS) is therefore well placed to investigate early signs of bone loss, and ways to prevent it. About half the pressurized space on the ISS is given over to scientific research, in areas as diverse as crystal growth, muscle atrophy and the detection of antimatter.

Inspiration: No photographs can compare in importance with the images of Earth taken by the Apollo astronauts. They mark a fundamental stage in our development as a species. Trillions of creatures have lived their lives on the Earth; until the middle of the 20th century, not one had seen its home from the outside. Those shots of the delicate blue marble, hanging in the boundless black of space, still captivate after decades of familiarity. We went to the Moon, but we discovered the Earth.

Space exploration makes us think. What a precious, lonely rock we inhabit. Why is it here? Why are we here? How can we keep it safe? The Apollo images influenced poets, musicians and philosophers. Space exploration is a muse like no other. It drives creativity – from Avatar to Ziggy Stardust. How many scientific careers were launched alongside Apollo 11?

Profit: One of the main objections to space exploration is the amount of public money pumped into the cause. Yet study after study has shown that spending on space is a tremendous boost for the economy. For every dollar the US government gives to NASA, the treasury gets back something like $10 in new revenue and from licensing spin-off products. It pays for itself and then some. What’s more, spending on NASA represents only about 0.5 per cent of the federal budget (1 per cent if military space spending is included). It’s barely visible on the pie charts. China, the country with the next largest spend, only invests 0.36 per cent of its national budget in space.

The private sector, too, can make a tidy buck from space, and not just by fulfilling government contracts. Many satellites are launched privately, with little or no burden on taxpayers. Several companies are now focused on sending humans into space – a role traditionally played by the state. After all, the adrenaline rush of launch, the weightless conditions in orbit, the chance to see the curve of the Earth and the bragging rights of saying you’re an astronaut, are all very appealing. There is a strong demand, which could translate into profits for any company who can sort out the ‘supply’ side of the equation.

There are already precedents. Seven paying astronauts have travelled to the ISS aboard Russian Soyuz rockets, beginning with Dennis Tito in 2001. These out-of-this-world holiday packages were arranged by Space Adventures, a private company. Ticket prices were undisclosed, though a figure of $20 million has been reported.

A second wave of private space travel is now opening up its throttles. Companies such as SpaceX, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are developing their own craft that will take paying customers beyond the atmosphere. All hope to make money out of these endeavours, partly for profit’s sake and partly to help fund even more ambitious adventures to the Moon and beyond. At the time of writing, none has yet fielded a crewed vehicle, nor registered a comfortable profit. Nevertheless, momentum is building. This paragraph is likely to fall out of date quicker than any other section of the book.

Prospecting: Another opportunity for the private sector is space mining. Our celestial neighbours contain plenty of raw materials that are not readily available on Earth. Helium-3, for example, is present in far higher concentration on the Moon than on the Earth. This non-radioactive isotope could be used in fusion reactions to provide safer nuclear energy. Mining and transporting the element would not be a trivial task – technologically or economically – but the rewards make it an attractive target for space companies. Such efforts could be done robotically, but some kind of human presence would help with logistics. Similarly, rare elements used in the electronics industry may one day be mined on the Moon or asteroids when Earth’s diminishing bounty is exhausted.

Peace: The final and least-remembered mission of the Apollo era took place in July 1975, three years after the last Moon landing. In terms of technological leaps, it was trivial. Two spacecraft rendezvoused in low Earth orbit*. Politically, it was a monumental mission. The US Apollo capsule docked with a Soyuz spacecraft from the Soviet Union. After two decades of fierce rivalry, the Americans and Soviets were finally collaborating in orbit. It was the beginning of the end of the Space Race.

Space exploration, it hardly needs saying, is expensive. It makes lots of sense to team up, to pool resources. The Apollo–Soyuz test project was followed, albeit 20 years later, by a series of US space-shuttle dockings at the Russian Mir space station. This paved the way for the biggest feat of cosmic cooperation yet: the aforementioned International Space Station. The ISS brings together not only the old Space Race foes, but also 11 members of the European Space Agency, Canada and Japan. Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts still work up there together, despite a renewal of tensions between their two countries back on Earth. Indeed, since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, all US astronauts have relied on Russian rockets** to launch into space. International cooperation in orbit is unlikely to bring about world peace, but it does provide a model for us to look up to, in more ways than one.

To finish with an apposite quote from Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell, ‘From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a *!#!."’

* FOOTNOTE The Global Positioning System is the best known of several competing satellite clusters. GPS is owned by the US Government and operated by the United States Air Force and can be selectively turned off at their whim. It’s a little bit scary that so many people worldwide rely upon its information. Alternatives include the Russian GLONASS (Global Navigation Satellite System) and Europe’s Galileo satellites.

* FOOTNOTE This did, in fact, require some clever engineering. A special docking module, costing $100 million, was needed to allow the otherwise incompatible Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft to join together. One design requirement was that neither party should be seen to be the receptive partner in this mating – which just shows how touchy, some would say childish, Cold War diplomacy could be.

** In a curious quirk, the Russians don’t launch their crewed missions from Russia. The famous Baikonur Cosmodrome – which waved off Yuri Gagarin and all cosmonauts since – is actually in Kazakhstan, formerly part of the Soviet Union but now an independent country. At the time of writing, and for the best part of a decade, China is the only nation capable of putting humans into space from its own territory.

Rocket science is hard

‘How do rockets operate in space?’ My father is fond of asking this. ‘I mean, there’s nothing for the flames to push off.’

I think he imagines that rockets fly by pushing down on the air, like a swimmer kicking off the wall of the pool, hence his bafflement over how a rocket can keep going even when there’s nothing to push off from.

It’s an easy and common mistake to make. Very few of us encounter rocket engines in everyday life. We can be forgiven for misunderstanding how they work. ‘It’s not rocket science,’ we say, when faced with a task that is straightforward compared to the daunting prospect of understanding how a rocket works.

But really, rockets aren’t all that complicated. The technology goes back as far as the 13th century, when the Chinese developed gunpowder rockets. The physics underlying a rocket’s flight path have been well understood since Isaac Newton laid down the laws of motion in 1686. Children learn these rules at school, and some even remember them.