Extrasolar 'Water World' May Have Been Found

For more details, follow THIS link to the original article on MSNBC's Cosmicblog.

Basically, astronomers have spotted a so-called 'super-earth' in orbit about a G-class star 40 light years away that may have an abundant amount of water.

But don't get too excited about finding exotic alien mermaids on it just yet. The planet wouldn't be a fun place for a human to go traipsing about on without an armored space suit on. Its 2 to 10 times the mass of Earth, meaning it would likely have unpleasantly high gravity as well as potentially crushing atmospheric pressure, depending on its composition. Its also unpleasantly close to its primary, with an estimated surface temperature of 400 degrees F.

But still, because of its estimated density, experts are fairly certain it may hold significant amounts of water, even if it would be in the form of water vapor. Plus, depending on its atmospheric composition, the high atmospheric pressure might be enough to keep surface water liquid even at its estimated temperatures.

Discovery of the presence of water on an extrasolar terrestrial world would be a major find, and a good indication that other worlds like Earth, with abundant liquid water and a thriving biosphere, may actually be out there among the wilds of the Milky Way. Just something to keep an eye on in the coming months as astronomers turn other instruments toward that very distant world and see if they can discover anything more.

The Decade's Best Science Fiction Animation

Animation would seem to be the most natural medium for science fiction. It literally has infinite creative freedom--anything a creator can envision can be drawn and animated on screen.

Unfortunately, at least in North America, the potential of the medium in scifi has been slow in catching on. Fantasy stories and comedies have dominated American animation for decades, while science fiction has usually been a creature of live-action films. This is not to say there hasn't been a lot great live-action scifi, but it would be nice to see Hollywood really cut loose and see what it could do with animated science fiction. But the situation has improved, haltingly, in the last decade. If I'd done this list ten years ago, it would have been all Japanese anime with one exception (The Iron Giant.) I'm glad to say that this list has a number of very strong American entries, and I hope that trend continues.

And it is probably Japanese anime that has shown, and continues to lead the way, in what can be done with animated science fiction. Though the anime industry has become infamous for certain banal cliches (big-eyed schoolgirls, giant robots, tentacles...), it has also produced some truly classic works of science fiction such as Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Cowboy Bebop. Its too bad that people in North America still tend to turn up their nose at these works simply because they're animated, because they stand shoulder to shoulder with the best live-action science fiction Hollywood has ever produced.

Now for the actual list, which includes both movies and TV series. Please keep in mind that these choices are MY OPINION only. I'm sure many people will disagree and will have their own picks, which is the way it should be. lists like this are always very subjective. Also, I haven't been able to watch everything; its certainly possible that there are some works that blow these all away that I just haven't seen.

First up are the honorable mentions. These works are all great in their own right and deserve to be seen, but lack that certain extra je ne sais quoi that could put them in my top 5.

The Incredibles (movie)
Justice League Unlimited (TV series)
Code Geass (TV series)
Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (TV Series)
Last Exile (TV Series)

The main picks:


5. LILO & STITCH (2002): A dysfunctional little girl, still mourning the death of her parents, prays for an angel so she can have a friend. She gets the most unlikely one imaginable: a vicious, violent, super-powered monster from outer space.

There's a school of thought that science fiction has to be serious and profound, like Battlestar Galactica and Lost, to be good. I reject that outright. It not to say serious works can't be high quality, but in fiction, its much harder to make people smile and laugh than to make them frown, and takes just as smart a story. With its stylized design, sharp story, and quirkily-realized players, Lilo & Stitch has smarts in spades. From Lilo with her bizarrely skewed worldview to Stitch's gleeful vileness to the awesomely named Cobra Bubbles, the movie is an inventive, fun and character-driven romp that both sends up and greatly improves upon the science fiction monster movie.


4.THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME(2006): Makoto, a 16-year old student in Japan, discovers on the verge of a fatal accident that she can literally leap backward through time. At first using her newfound ability frivolously, she finds that interfering with past events can have unpredictable and often disastrous consequences. The more she tries to correct them, the more things veer out of her control, until someone dear to her is threatened by the same accident she herself avoided. And when the source of her new power is uncovered, it brings a heart-wrenching revelation.

A much more thoughtful and intelligent take on time travel and romance than the clunky Time Traveler's Wife, this Japanese anime film is fun, intelligent, surreal, and at times profoundly moving. Too often teen-age protagonists are just stand-ins for cynical 40-year-old screenwriters, but Makoto comes across as a real 16-year-old, a tomboy who can be very cocksure one minute and very hesitant and vulnerable the next, especially when she begins to confront her first real romantic feelings. The director Mamoro Hosada very skillfully crafts his tale, allowing the heroine, and the audience with her, to take her time to react and think about developments naturally. I can count the number of truly good time travel movies on the fingers of one hand, and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is one of those.


3. WALL-E (2008): On a future Earth choked lifeless by human garbage and neglect, one last robot spends year after year, century after century, clearing away mountains of trash long after all his fellows shut down. Slowly becoming self-aware, he longs for more from his existence, having only human junk and one lone recording of an old movie musical to guide him. Then, one day, a mysterious probe from space lands nearby...

WALL-E is the very best film created by Hollywood's very best animation studio. It has won scads of awards, even the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation. Its been described as lyrical and enthralling, full of a gosh-wow sense of wonder that is missing too much from modern science fiction. The first half of the film, which goes almost completely without dialog, has been called as close to a true work of art that computer animation has yet come. The robots of the film come across as much more fully-realized characters than the humans that are eventually weaved into the story, and the production's attention to detail is no less than astounding. It is the best animated scifi film of the decade, and one of the best overall science fiction films ever, for that matter. A true classic.


2. PLANETES (2003-2004): By the year 2075, an economic and energy boom created by exploiting Helium-3 on the moon has allowed humankind to expand wildly into space, with many small stations, nine large orbiting colonies, and even a full scale city of a hundred thousand on the Moon. However, all that activity generates an enormous amount of orbital debris that can pose a hazard to all the new orbital real estate. Enter the Debris Section, blue-collar stiffs working out of second-hands spacecraft to clean it all up. This 26-episode Japanese anime TV series follows the lives and happenings of these spaceborn garbage collectors.

I cannot reccommend this series highly enough. I've written about it before as a Hidden Treasure Of Science Fiction. For those who love truly hard science fiction, the series is a treasure trove, showcasing very believable near-future technologies with nary a hyperdrive or giant robot in sight. It should be required viewing for would-be scifi writers just for that aspect alone. But this realism extends also to most of its cast of internationally diverse characters, treating nearly all of them with complexity and maturity. Though the series can at first seem a bit off-putting--its main female character starts off as very annoying--it quickly builds up to a number of astounding, smartly-plotted, and at times deeply affecting stories. Combining gritty realism with aspirations toward humanity's greatest hopes, this series may be the single best work of on-screen science fiction Japan has produced since Cowboy Bebop.


1. FUTURAMA (1999-present): Lowly delivery boy Fry accidentally gets frozen for a thousand years and wakes up in a very oddly skewed Thirty-First Century. Befriending cynical robot Bender and the sexy one-eyed Leela, he finds his true destiny--as a delivery boy.

Futurama is to on-screen science fiction what The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy is to literary science fiction--all at once a mainstream comedy, a tour-de force parody of all things science fiction, and a great work of imagination in its own right. I also predict it will ultimately the most long-enduring and popular work of on-screen science fiction to be produced in the last decade, live action or animated, on small screen or large. It just seems to have that kind of populist resonance, that will ensure it will be a well-remembered classic decades from now.

The first thing that stands out about the series is its wonderfully demented characters: Fry, dimwitted and hypnotized by pop culture; Leela, sexy and heroic but self-conscious about her single gigantic eye; Bender, the joyfully amoral, alcoholic robot; Doctor Zoidberg, a clueless sadsack lobsteroid; and many more. There's more detail and dimension just in many of Futurama's walk-on characters than in many works' main ones. Then there's the universe it inhabits, a vast collection of of visual-puns, gonzo scifi motifs, and skewered sacred cows. An alien race addicted to thousand-year-old Earth TV programs; space bee hives; a planet-sized retirement home; a museum that resurrects celebrities just so they can spend all eternity as heads in a jar. It is a world where literally anything can happen, where the creators' imaginations can be fully unleashed, often to highly humorous effect.

It also helps that the series has consistently had some of the smartest writing on TV. As stated earlier, comedy is harder than drama to write well, and the fact that the show so consistently hits the funny bone is proof of the quality of its scripts. Surprisingly, its not all just laughs either. Very occasionally, it waxes both profound, such as when Bender postulates the nature of God, and heart-felt, such as when Fry learns the fate of his time-lost brother and nephew. Futurama is definitely a show for the ages.

Thoughts On Generation Ship Societies

This entry is an informal response of sorts to a blog written by Charles Stross, which you can find HERE. Not that I think he'll read this, but I thought this might be something people reading the OV blog here might find interesting. I also touched upon this subject in one of the first articles I did for OV, Generations Ships.

In the original article, Stross postulates the difficulty in designing a society that could be stable enough to last through the centuries or millennia of the voyage. I think he was approaching the problem from the wrong angle.

You simply can't build a completely stable human society. Human history has proven that any institution established either mutates profoundly, dies off, or is absorbed by a newer one as the decades and centuries slip by. Human societies cannot be stable for long periods of time, its just not in our nature. Human culture is ultimately dynamic, not static, and that seems to be built right into our base psychology, if not our DNA.

Rather, you have to assume the human society on a generation ship is going to go through numerous upheavals and changes throughout its voyage. Its an inevitability. In fact, I'd even go so far to say that IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT THE ORIGINATING GOVERNMENT OR SOCIETY IS. Its not going to last in recognizable form for more than a small fraction of any truly long-term voyage.

Realistically, the originating society on a gen ship will just be the builder society in microcosm. If the US built one tomorrow, the society would be the current US society in miniature. If China built one, it would be a mini-China, and so on. Its what the people starting the voyage would be most comfortable with, and imposing something radically different would lead to potentially a lot of trouble early on.

In fact, it seems an exercise in hubris by the designers, in assuming the generation ship crew will somehow be too stupid or inflexible to handle their own affairs, to the point that the builders have to impose excessively rigid societal restraints. It is true that a series of poor political decisions could have potentially disastrous effects on the environment or operation of the ship, but the same can be said of just about any government and its environs on Earth as well. Rather, we're just going to have to assume that the crew will adapt and grow to their environment on board in their own way, as our own societies have adapted and grown in unique ways to the world around us.

Instead of trying to impose rigid societal restraints that will just break down anyway, you need to provide the evolving society with one or more safety valves that will allow them to resolve conflicts with minimal threat to the ship as a whole. I think one of the most valuable of these would be living space.

Given the technology level needed to build a gen ship (which I estimate may come online at least 50 years from now, or at Tech Level 13 on the OV scale) how many crew do you really need to maintain it, given future advances in automata and AI? Probably not that many. So you leave most of the habitable space in your gen ship uninhabited; start with a small population, just big enough to ensure healthy genetic diversity, say a few hundred to a thousand. Concentrate them in one small town, and leave the rest of the habitat fallow. Depending on the size and design of the generations ship(Stross quotes an O'Neill-style hollowed asteroid design; it could also have many different levels or separate habitats), that could be from a few to maybe hundreds of square kilometers.

Over the course of the voyage, the crew will expand and 'colonize' the rest of the ship, giving them an added endeavor they can concentrate their energy on. Plus, when schisms and conflicts inevitably arise, the bereaved section of the society can just leave for 'new lands' elsewhere in the ship, giving them a hopefully better alternative to outright conflict.

The amount of fallow space you need to help mitigate potential conflicts would depend on a lot of variables, such as the size and design of the ship, the length of the voyage, and the size of the seed population. If planned out properly, the ship will reach its destination before all the internal space is used up. I do think this approach is the best way for a crew to mitigate the pitfalls of the inevitable ebb and flow of human societies on board a generation ship over the centuries.

More Updates Coming Soon!

I apologize for the lack of updates both here and on the main site. I've been up to my eyeballs in other work and projects, some of which I'll announce on here before too long. But it looks like it will be a few weeks yet before I'll be able to get back into either posting articles on the main site or updating the blog here the way I'd like.

However, the good news is a fan of Orbital Vector has volunteered to recode the main site so it'll handle RSS feeds and such. plus I have over a dozen articles and blog entries already half-written, so when i can fully turn my attention back here I'll have a lot of material to work with.

Be back soon!

Nigeria's Orbital Ambitions

According to
THIS article in the Global Post, Nigeria has ambitious plans for its modest space program, including a manned launch sometime in the coming decade.

To Nigeria's misfortune, when many people in the US and other Western nations think of it, the first thing that comes to mind are their notorious internet scammers and spammers. But I know from my nephew, who is half Nigerian, that the central-african nation has much to be proud of. In recent years, that includes a small but ambitious space program.

The details are in the linked article, so I won't need to repeat them here. But I hope that they succeed in their ambitions in orbit, especially in launching their own astronaut by 2015. Space should be accessible to, and exploitable by, everyone, not just the most powerful countries and global corporations. Africa is a huge, diversified continent with vast natural resources that I think will come into its own as a major global player in the coming century, and its forward-looking countries like Nigeria that will lead the way for its peoples. Best of luck to them.

SciFi TV: Maybe Its Time To Abandon The 1-Hour Format

Recently there has been a dust-up on certain blogs and forums about the state of science fiction on TV, either a) bemoaning its quality or b) bemoaning how shows that are actually interesting, like Firefly or Dollhouse, often don't last long.

I think at least part of the remedy to both these problems can be solved with a relatively simple shift in approach: abandon one-hour shows for half-hour ones.

The idea would be attractive to networks, as half-hour shows would be cheaper to produce and invest in in the long term. They could try out twice as many ideas and approaches than they do currently, enabling them to more easily find the properties that will strike a chord with audiences and make them a profit.

And for fans, the switch would be even better in my opinion, as writers would have to cut a lot of extraneous dramatic junk that I think tends to drag down the worst of the hour-long shows. Scifi stories on TV can get leaner and meaner, focusing much more on important story elements while cutting a lot of the b-story plots used to just fill in time in hour-long episodes.

I haven't come to this conclusion in a vacuum, either. I've recently watched quite a bit of half-hour science fiction shows that easily equal anything the hour dramas have produced. Unfortunately, they weren't made in North America or even Europe. Yes, I'm talking about (gasp!) Anime.

Despite what some purist snobs in the West may think, Anime has indeed produced science fiction on par with the very best the West has produced. All one has to do is watch series like Cowboy Bebop or Planetes or Ghost in the Shell to attest to that.

That's not to say that there isn't a lot of mediocre anime out there; there is, and Sturgeon's Law (which states that the majority of anything is crap) holds true for it as for anything else. But the very best of it does demonstrate definitively that half-hour science fiction can be high-quality, mature, intelligent, and exciting. And there was nothing I saw FX-wise in shows like *Bebop* or *Planetes* that couldn't be done in live-action nowadays. It would just be a matter of finding the right pacing and approach to make such shows work, depending on the concept.

Somehow, though, there seems to be a stigma against half-hour dramas in the US. Half-hour time slots are reserved for comedies, hours for dramas, and that's the way its been for decades now. I'm not sure if that could be changed around enough to give any half-hour scifi TV show a decent chance. But then, if the show is good enough, it would find an audience no matter what.

What I'm basically saying is that if the Japanese can produce quality half-hour science fiction shows, we should be able to as well. And it would help to seriously re-invigorate a TV genre that seems stalled for some time now. Anyway, something to think about.

(Cowboy Bebop copyright Sunrise.)

400+ Exoplanets and counting

According to THIS article, 32 newly confirmed exoplanets have been added to the ever-growing list, thanks to the efforts of astronomers at the European South Observatory. Most significant here is the fairly large percentage of 'super-earths' discovered, planets that are much more massive than Earth, but are not big enough to be gas giants. If these are fairly common, than that means that smaller terrestial planets like the kind we are familiar with must be a standard feature in most star systems.

I would put a cautionary asterix next to the statement in the article by astronomer Alan Boss that, "The universe must indeed be crowded with habitable worlds." While I think most of us would indeed hope that's the case, there's still no real evidence for that. The universe seems to be a very hostile place, and even a plentitude of terrestrial planets does not automatically guarantee a plentitude of life. A lot can still go wrong in the billions of years that are needd for life to evolve, even if it does arise on any world. I'm not saying that life-bearing worlds aren't out there, I'm just saying we need more evidence before we can say that the universe is crowded or not with them