Probably Not Cow Farts

So, I just wrote a story for Cosmos Magazine in Australia about the first discovery of methane gas on a planet in another solar system. Turns out the discovery also confirmed water vapour in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, the star is so close to its sun that it bakes at a blazing hot 1000K, making life as we know it impossible.

One of the things I find most fascinating about the discovery besides the “WHOA! COOL!” factor is that the technique being used by the Hubble Space Telescope to detect the methane wasn’t thought possible when the Hubble originally blasted off into space. That offers a lot of potential for future telescopes like the Spitzer, Kepler, or James Webb. As Sarah Seager, an exoplanet astronomer at MIT commented in the press teleconference, “Spitzer or Webb will definitely suprass expections, and they could absolutely suprirse us [with what they are capable of].”

There is one drawback to the new space telescopes being built though. “[The new space telescopes are] being built to see the faintest objects in universe,” said Seager. “If earths are everywhere, for instance if there were an earth orbiting Alpha Centauri B, that star is so incredibly bright we couldn’t observe it. It’s too bright for the James Webb space telescope.”

Maybe we need a telescope that doesn’t have such great optics to look for Earths in our own backyard.

What, No Mention of Time Travel?!

Well, it’s that time of year when all the science journalists, engineers, and scientists swarm to the world’s largest science conference in the world: the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This year it’s in Boston, MA, home of MIT, Harvard, and the Boston Red Sox.

In one of the sessions at the AAAS, a panel of engineering experts described what kind of cool gadgetry and inventions we can look forward to in the next 100 years. Think cheap solar panels, energy from fusion, virtual reality that’s better than real life, and medicine that can cure any disease.

I write about the report and the session in an online feature article for Cosmos Magazine in Australia.

I think the report is good, but it is also fairly conservative. None of the goals sound like they are beyond present day technology or know-how (maybe just present day economics). I was really hoping for interstellar time traveling androids.