Skip to main content

With the excitement generated by the recent announcement of TRAPPIST-1 with the largest group of potentially inhabitable planets, a lot of people would like to learn more about exoplanets. NASA has a great way to do that, with the Eyes on Exoplanets app. Download and install it, and it will generate a scientifically accurate 3D universe populated by more than a thousand planets NASA has discovered orbiting other stars. Just watching the way the stars change as you go from one planet to another is hypnotic. The app has three modules, besides the Exoplanets database/media center it also includes Eyes on the Earth and Eyes on the Solar System, also very fun and educational programs. Since they are all available for free, you might as well get the entire set.

NASA-EyesOnExoplanets
NASA-EyesOnExoplanets

This weeks must see film is obviously Logan, the third and final stand-alone Wolverine film starring Hugh Jackman, and maybe Patrick Stewart. I will definitely be in the theater for that one, but there is an additional option: Before I Fall. That one is a teen groundhog day with one girl trying to get through the day alive, unlike the last multiple times she went through it.

The winner this week has to be Marvel’s Doctor Strange, a real powerhouse of a movie, and one of my favorites for 2016. In Anime, every title listed this time is the complete series, so you won’t be missing anything with any of these. Actually, I Am is about a boy who can’t keep a secret, so he confesses his love to a girl… who tells him a secret about herself: she’s a Vampire. If he leaks this secret to anyone, she will be forced to leave school, but it seems everyone at that school has a secret, and he begins to learn them all. In Amagi Brilliant Park there are scantily clad fairies, giant mice and sniper-trained sheep occupying a run down amusement park that really is a magic kingdom in need of rescuing. The Betrayal Knows My Name is a story of love, reincarnation, and constantly mounting danger, with a twist. There are two titles this week that I thought were already both released, but I can’t find evidence to prove it. Red Data Girl is being released in a S.A.V.E. edition, so you can pick up the entire series for under $20. The classic Scrapped Princess is also coming out on disc as a complete series; I thought it had done that a decade ago, but all the references I can find are for single volumes with 4 episodes each, no collection.

There are some new songs from Fukuoka prefecture art-rock band PolkadotStingray (yes, it really is one word run together), the first one here is ELECTRIC PUBLIC posted last Sunday and rapidly approaching half a million view in just 6 days. That is the opening song of their 1st Mini Album Great Justice, which will be released on April 26th. The next track is the mermaid from their first E.P. release last year, Boneless E. P., and I almost put a pretty interesting Google Android commercial they did for an app that would let you search for photos of yourself. The song on that one is great, but I can’t see posting a commercial.

NASA’s big announcement yesterday makes me hopeful for the future. They found 7 rocky, roughly Earth-sized planets orbiting in (or close enough to with the correct percentage of greenhouse gases in their atmosphere) the Goldilocks Zone, orbiting a single Red Dwarf star. The seven planet’s orbits are spaced very closely together in order to achieve this, but aligned very evenly, and where a star like the Sun has a lifetime of 10 billion years, a Red Dwarf star has a lifetime measured between 1 trillion and 10 trillion years. If I was a Type II civilization, that’s the kind of stellar environment I would want to park my habitable planets in, and looking at TRAPPIST-1 it looks suspiciously like that’s what might be going on there. The range of size and temperature environments each planet is subject to would work particularly well for a multi-species civilization who’s members evolved on different planets.

How will we find out if that is what’s going on here? Without a wildly improbable series of breakthroughs in physics with the associated applied engineering needed to build Warp Drive Starships, or a visit to our solar system by someone who has already done that, we probably won’t find out for sure in our lifetimes. But next year the James Webb Telescope goes into orbit, with a full sensor suite specifically designed to tell us more about everything from the planets of our local solar system, to exoplanets, to distant galaxies. You can believe TRAPPIST-1 has been put high on it’s priority list of the things they want it to examine first. The spectrum’s from each of those planets will tell the tale; if the ones closer in have almost no greenhouse gases, the ones farther out have a lot, and they all show traces of oxygen and organic compounds like Methane, we may have neighbors. Which would pretty much mark this week as the most important one of any of our lives.

If you didn’t recognize the reference to Type II Civilizations, in 1964, Nikolai Kardashev came up with the Kardashev Scale which measured a Civilization by the amount of energy it could utilize, which would in part be a function of its level of technology. On that scale, we are technically a Type 0, although Carl Sagan refined it a bit and considered us a Type 0.7, possibly making it to Type 1 within a hundred years or so, assuming we survive that long. You can learn more about it at David Darling’s Kardashev civilizations or Guillermo A. Lemarchand’s Detectability of Extraterrestrial Technological Activities from way back in 1992 (which explains why the web site looks so primitive). I am also including a video from physicist Michio Kaku that explains it rather well.

The announcement was made today that NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has found 7 rocky planets ranging in size and density from Mars to and a bit beyond Earth. All of them are potentially within liquid water orbital range of their sun, three of them permanently, and depending on the green house gasses composition of the atmospheres the other 4 of them may be. Now that they have located them, every orbital telescope we have is pointed in their direction, gathering data. The star they orbit is nothing like ours, but a tiny rather cool Red Dwarf, which means we have the possibility of habitable planets around many more stars than we used to believe. Of the videos here, the first is a short visual announcement, the second is the full announcement with Q+A broadcast earlier today, and the third is a 360 degree VR rendering to give you a feel for what it would look like from the surface of one of them.