by Paul Gilster | Nov 8, 2022 | Astrobiology and SETI |
Walking along dark streets this morning, as autumn leaves gusted past under a deepening lunar eclipse, I realized that there was a reason for my recent foray into what I called ‘Stapledon thinking.’ The reason: Landscape by moonlight.
What these early walks remind me of is the beginning of Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 novel Star Maker, in which the narrator takes a similar walk in the darkness, musing on his personal relationships as well as his place in the larger structure of the cosmos (I’m using the word ‘structure’ there deliberately, as we’ll see later). The narrator walks to a hill overlooking houses below, somewhere near the sea.
There is a lighthouse. He sits down on the heather. And now ‘the hawk-flight of imagination,’ in Stapledon’s lovely phrase, takes over. An astral journey begins:
Imagination was now stimulated to a new, strange mode of perception. Looking from star to star, I saw the heaven no longer as a jeweled ceiling and floor, but as depth beyond flashing depth of suns. And though for the most part the great and familiar lights of the sky stood forth as our near neighbors, some brilliant stars were seen to be in fact remote and mighty, while some dim lamps were visible only because they were so near. On every side the middle distance was crowded with swarms and streams of stars. But even these now seemed near; for the Milky Way had receded into an incomparably greater distance. And through gaps in its nearer parts appeared vista beyond vista of luminous mists, and deep perspectives of stellar populations.
Image: William Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950), whose novels on humanity’s future depict a cosmos that dwarfs human understanding and challenges all our philosophy. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
My flight of imagination the other day was hardly as dramatic, but the memory of the opening of Star Maker informed my thinking and led to my musings on the Fermi Question. For Stapledon’s narrator will travel deep into the cosmos in his astral form and, along the way, perceive things that pose deadly challenges to our anthropocentrism. Stapledon corresponded with H.G. Wells and was an influence on writers as disparate as C.S. Lewis, Brian Aldiss, Bertrand Russell and Vernor Vinge. He became a major factor in Arthur C. Clarke’s thinking – ponder Childhood’s End (1953), with its Overlords and transcendent ‘Overmind.’
Even more pointedly, consider Clarke’s Diaspar in The City and the Stars (1956), and the multi-hued seven-star asterism created by a long departed galactic empire in the novel. We’re getting at the roots of ‘Stapledon thinking’ when we talk about things of inconceivable (to us) scale being shaped by intelligences that may or may not be transcendent. Stapledon’s imagination knew few boundaries, a thought underlined by the fact that the idea of a star enclosed so that a civilization could use all of its energy was actually one of the tamer things his Star Maker traveler would encounter. Here is how the idea of such a sphere appears in the novel. The narrator sees the galaxy developing into a single intelligence subsuming its parts:
This whole vast community looked now beyond itself toward its fellow galaxies. Resolved to pursue the adventure of life and of spirit in the cosmical, the widest of all spheres, it was in constant telepathic communication with its fellows; and at the same time, conceiving all kinds of strange practical ambitions, it began to avail itself of the energies of its stars upon a scale hitherto unimagined. Not only was every solar system now surrounded by a gauze of light traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use, so that the whole galaxy was dimmed, but many stars that were not suited to be suns were disintegrated, and rifled of their prodigious stores of sub-atomic energy.
And there you have what we generally call a ‘Dyson sphere.’ Let’s pause here to note that Freeman Dyson told everyone who would listen that he drew his concept originally from Stapledon, which is why I chose ‘Stapledon thinking’ as my focus even while elsewhere referring to ‘Dysonian SETI,’ the latter being the search for artifacts like such spheres around other stars. It would be just – and Greg Matloff does this – to refer to Stapledon/Dyson spheres, just as we might call the Kuiper Belt the Edgeworth/Kuiper Belt, after Irish astronomer Kenneth Edgeworth, who first predicted it in 1943. In the case of Dysonian SETI, the term seems right because it refers to a scientific search for artifacts, whereas Stapledon’s thinking was deeply philosophic in intent.
That philosophical aspect of Stapledon runs through his entire output and in Star Maker embraces a view of the universe that nudges toward the religious but then draws back from comfortable comparisons to suggest a cosmos that is beyond any human understanding, much less communion. From a SETI standpoint, we are confounded. The narrator’s astral journey encompasses universes within universes, pushing into civilizations that have emerged as global minds that are themselves finally aware of the Star Maker, an even more powerful intellect that cares not at all for the universes it has been creating, but simply makes, and evidently abandons, its earlier work. The narrator, indeed, calls the Star Maker an ‘artist.’ A calculating one, who chooses, when one creation doesn’t measure up (ours does not), to move on to another:
Here was no pity, no proffer of salvation, no kindly aid. Or here were all pity and all love, but mastered by a frosty ecstasy. Our broken lives, our loves, our follies, our betrayals, our forlorn and gallant defenses, were one and all calmly anatomized, assessed, and placed. True, they were one and all lived through with complete understanding, with insight and full sympathy, even with passion. But sympathy was not ultimate in the temper of the eternal spirit; contemplation was. Love was not absolute; contemplation was.
Here I’m reminded of Yeats as much as Stapledon:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer…
Star Maker contains many ideas that can conceivably evolve into technologies, even while exploring these deeply metaphysical realms. ‘Stapledon thinking,’ then, couples creativity and conjecture with philosophy, with the suggestion that the exploration of such concepts can be a forerunner of later science. Kepler had conceptions of a structured and mathematically tuned system of planetary orbits that would eventually produce his familiar laws of planetary motion. The ‘Platonic solids’ had nothing to do with it, as it turns out, but the laws he discovered still pertain.
I suggest that such thinking gives us insights into the Fermi Question in that ‘Where are they’ offers no solutions – to this point, anyway – but only a deepening series of probes. This is science fiction’s eternal ‘what if’ pushed about as hard as it can go. Because if there are other civilizations out there, we have no way of knowing how they function, or indeed think, or indeed perceive. We are on the shoals of ignorance.
Olaf Stapledon’s work echoes through science fiction to this day, and perhaps no more tellingly than in the work of Canadian writer and futurist Karl Schroeder. His question: Does our own ignorance about extraterrestrial civilizations imply that if life is indeed common in the universe, it must evolve to a point where its works are indistinguishable from nature? In his essential survey of Fermi ‘solutions’ The Great Silence: Science and Philosophy of Fermi’s Paradox, Milan ?irkovi? spends a good deal of time with Schroeder, recognizing how thoroughly the writer has explored these questions in novels like Permanence (Tor Books, 2002) and Lockstep (Tor, 2014), where outcomes that fit our lack of SETI success flow out of unusual premises.
‘Indistinguishable from nature’ is, of course, Schroeder’s canny nod to Clarke’s ‘indistinguishable from magic,’ and here is what he means (as drawn from The Deepening Paradox, an essay on his website. The italics are mine:
If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don’t produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.
If a civilization produces no waste heat, is it somehow manipulating the laws of thermodynamics? We can push this conjectural realm still further. It was through ?irkovi? that I learned about Stanislaw Lem’s “The New Cosmogony,” which is included in his collection A Perfect Vacuum. Here we find a conjectured universe populated by the first civilizations to emerge into awareness, billions of years ago. Their operations are so embedded in the natural world that we perceive them as essential characteristics of the laws of physics, which they in fact manipulate to their own advantage. They have done this through all stages of the universe’s evolution. The work of these ‘Players,’ as Lem styles them, is utterly beyond our observation, or perhaps better to say, beyond our comprehension – we do observe it as nature itself.
We are indeed latecomers, whether the fantastic notions of Schroeder or Lem have traction or not. The formation of terrestrial-class planets could have begun as much as eight billion years before our own Solar System emerged, making the questions of how intelligence appears and how long civilizations last a pointed issue indeed. ?irkovi? notes about the Fermi Question that “…the very richness of the multidisciplinary and multicultural resources required by individual explanatory hypotheses enables us to claim that it is the most complex multidisciplinary problem in contemporary science.” His taxonomy of Fermi ‘solutions’ explores the entirety of this conceptual space as currently conceived.
Consider, for example, the matter of post-biological evolution, which Larry Klaes brought up in his recent essay. Is such evolution inevitable? If so, it would have an impact on how we do SETI. Here’s ?irkovi?:
Coupled with the ideas of interstellar colonization and astroengineering, postbiological evolution changes the entire game: we need not – and indeed should not – target habitable planets and circumstellar habitable zones in our SETI searches. Instead, we ought to focus on regions with the greatest amounts of resources, including metals and energy, as well as low working temperatures, as the best locales for optimized computation. Surveying warm, wet places would not make much sense.
And we’re clearly going to be finding further ‘solutions’ to the Fermi question as we proceed, for increasing capabilities in our instrumentation will suggest new prospects for discovery. The incontrovertible fact is that about other civilizations we have no data, and I am not one of those who is content to avoid speculation until such data arrive, if this ever happens. ‘Stapledon thinking,’ then, points to an amalgam of musing that is as much at home in hard science as it is in Plato or the films of Alain Resnais. It calls on us to pull out the stops and ask questions that some might find more comfortable to discuss in a pub than a faculty lounge. Or perhaps the pages of a science fiction novel, a field in which Stapledon’s influence will always loom large.
That such matters take us outside the realm of science and into philosophy and metaphysics should not surprise us. But it is equally clear that the science we practice on our species’ place in the universe inevitably raises questions it cannot yet answer. We probe, we analyze, we conceive of possibilities. We assume answers are out there.
We keep looking.
by Paul Gilster | Nov 4, 2022 | Culture and Society |
Larry Klaes is well known in these parts for his extraordinary reviews of classic science fiction films. Today, however, he steps back from cinema to consider how we will expand into space. The crews on our deep space missions will doubtless be a lot different than some of those old black-and-white movies would suggest. Just how will our species adapt to the environments it will soon be exploring? There’s nothing quite so lush as our own blue and green planet, yet the imperative to move ever outward is a driver for our species. Mars is a case in point, but the long-range picture is that we’re looking off-planet and already pondering destinations beyond the Solar System. Re-shaping our expectations will be a part of what drives the scientists and engineers who equip us for the next steps. An earlier version of this essay was published by The Mars Society.
by Larry Klaes
In 1972, singer, pianist, and composer Sir Elton Hercules John (born 1947) released a song titled “Rocket Man”. This piece, which was inspired by a Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) science fiction story of the same name, has an individual who sees his job in outer space not as some grand adventure as one might expect of a typical astronaut, but rather as ordinary and isolating.
Not only does this Rocket Man miss Earth and his wife living there, declaring “it’s lonely out in space,” he also says that “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids/In fact it’s cold as hell/And there’s no one there to raise them/If you did.”
As a life-long space and astronomy enthusiast, when I first became aware of this song, I was highly disappointed with its message. “Rocket Man” was a definite reflection of the counterculture era, where many rejected what they saw as the militant flaws and antiquated traditions of society which held back all but a select privileged few.
The space program fell into that category, being seen as a vehicle of a predominantly white male military-industrial complex. That it was also so publicly prominent in the news and entertainment media only made it an even easier target for criticism, in particular the kind that asked why we were spending money on sending humans to the Moon when there were so many problems on Earth that needed fixing first.
Even as a kid I knew this was an “apples and oranges” situation. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, was funded far less than most other government agencies of that era, a status that remains to the present day. Diverting all its resources to social agendas would have been a temporary band aid at best, not a real solution to modern civilization’s myriad of problems.
Image: A future Mars settlement as envisioned by SpaceX. Is this how humanity will live on other worlds, or will something else be required?
Nevertheless, the general public which had supported the early bold declaration of “sending a man to the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” within ten years had undergone a sea change by the time NASA was actually placing astronauts on our planet’s nearest celestial neighbor at the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s.
I had grown up in that era of the early Space Age when humans were actively circling Earth in preparation for launching representatives of our species to land on the Moon while robotic probes had begun to reveal other worlds such as Venus and Mars. I bought into the future storyline of the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and all those other pro-space entertainment media so prevalent then that humanity would almost automatically spread out and colonize first the Moon and then the other places in our Sol system, before moving on into the wider Milky Way galaxy.
I did not pay much attention to the geopolitical and social forces driving and affecting the space programs then, not just because I wasn’t able to fully comprehend them as a naive kid, but also because I felt they were only temporary issues, ones humanity would conquer as easily and rightly as we were doing with our move into outer space. After all, didn’t Star Trek show a future just a few centuries from now where all of humanity was united, we were flying about the galaxy in fancy starships, and dealing with new alien neighbors as part of a collective called the United Federation of Planets (UFP)?
So, when I heard Elton John warbling a very popular tune that said the starry realm was unpleasant, lonely, and not something good for bringing up children in, I was concerned his words would only add fuel to the fire that was already setting back our “manifest destiny” in the Final Frontier in the beginning of the 1970s.
The Apollo lunar program was already being defunded after the seventeenth mission, which in turn was killing off any plans for manned lunar colonies. The logical promise of sending humans on to the planet Mars after the success of Apollo – as soon as the 1980s it was being declared in certain circles – was also placed on a shelf. No one was saying such missions were being canceled, but it was pretty obvious that no one at NASA was seriously working on such an adventure by then, nor would they be any time soon.
Many in the West thought that America’s superpower rival, the Soviet Union, would pick up the gauntlet we had dropped: Soon there would be cosmonaut bootprints on the Moon and Mars as they went on to become the dominant society throughout the Sol system and beyond.
Since then, a lot has changed. The American manned space program is not only picking up again, with real plans to settle the Moon with a new generation of astronauts in this decade as well as send these explorers on to Mars in the 2030s. There is also a new Space Race of a kind, this time mainly with China. Upon jumping into this race with their first successful satellite launch in 1970, the “People’s Republic” now has a second crewed space station circling Earth while simultaneously conducting automated rover and sample return missions to the Moon and their first wheeled explorer conducting science on the Red Planet.
My attitude and views on our ventures into the Final Frontier have also changed over the decades. I am still quite the space supporter, but I am seeing it now as happening in certain different ways, in particular how we should venture into the void directly with fellow human beings.
When I used to read and hear certain professionals, whom I automatically assumed should have been big supporters of manned space exploration and settlement, publicly state that robots were better for exploring the cosmic void than human beings, I was indignant. They were going against the virtually predestined vision for our species expansion into the Milky Way galaxy and all those other stellar islands out there. Humans had to be an integral part of this future, otherwise our species and society would end up either stagnating or outright destroying itself in the very nest of its birth. No one in their right mind would keep a child in their crib and expect them to develop properly otherwise.
What needs to be understood is that when the Space Age began in the 1950s (or the 1940s if you want to count the first rockets that breached the actual realm, if only briefly), humans were almost always the foremost choice for conducting all kinds of expeditions, be it on Earth’s surface, at sea, or in the skies. Space would have been no different.
Yes, there were many satellites that went up carrying no living organic beings at all, but their mechanisms and computer “brains” were primitive by current standards. For example, Mariner 2, the first probe to successfully explore the planet Venus in late 1962, contained a computer weighing just over eleven pounds that was capable of “a total of 11 real-time commands and a spare… along with a stored set of 3 onboard commands which could be modified,” according to Oran W. Nicks, then Director of Lunar and Planetary Programs for NASA, as he described in his wonderfully written book Far Travelers: The Exploring Machines (NASA SP-480, 1985).
Even the twin Voyager space probes, designed, built, and launched into the outer Sol system on much more complex missions over one decade after Mariner 2, had multiple computers that were still less powerful than a modern day automobile key fob. The onboard computers that helped land astronauts on the Moon with Apollo weighed over 75 pounds and had only 1,600 bits of memory in them, and they were specially designed by experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
On Earth, up until the first personal computers began showing up in large numbers in the 1970s, the majority of “thinking” machines were bulky, heavy, and most often required trained specialists to operate them. So it is easy to see why most people back then assumed the best “computer” to explore outer space was the four pounds of “gray matter” occupying the skull of a functioning and properly educated adult human.
This technology has certainly changed since the first two decades of the Space Age. The average person now routinely works and plays with lightweight computers possessing storage levels and functionalities that would have been pure science fiction to their parents and grandparents. The machines currently exploring the Moon and Mars have autonomous capabilities that allow them to independently run their own missions while also being smart enough to avoid potential hazards in these alien environments.
As one may easily imagine, computing and robotic technologies for space are only going to improve in the coming decades to the point that one may rightly question the purpose of sending humans to distant worlds when much more durable and far less expensive and resource-demanding robots equipped with sophisticated Artificial Intelligence (AI) minds could do the same tasks.
Deadly Rays and Dwellings
Fewer resources and relatively cheaper funding aren’t the only reasons for sending machines over humans to explore other worlds. The cosmic environment beyond Earth is quite hazardous indeed for a species that has spent its entire existence evolving on a planet that is a virtual paradise for our biology compared to every other place in our Sol system (and who knows how far beyond).
Mars has often been considered the world closest in comparison to Earth, yet even the least harsh places on the Red Planet make Antarctica look like a tropical island. Possessing only a very thin atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide and no appreciable ozone layer or magnetic field, Mars is constantly bombarded by high levels of radiation from solar subatomic particles and cosmic rays. Solar ultraviolet rays also reach the Red Planet’s surface unabated. Meteoroids of most sizes are not deterred by the Martian air as they would be on Earth. Orbiting probes have imaged multiple results of recent impacts and the rovers have found substantiated meteorites as they roam their rather narrow swaths of the Martian landscape.
For Martian settlers to survive all these dangers, they would need to either develop structures with heavily reinforced radiation-proof roofs, cover their settlement with local regolith, or bury their dwellings deep underground. In most of these cases, unless humanity develops a type of transparent radiation shielding, the human residents will have to live without a direct view or easy access of their new homeworld.
Can humans stand being in an artificial environment underground on Mars for decades or even their entire lives? Down the road, settlements may be made large and luxurious enough to recreate the nature found on Earth, but the early pioneers will probably not be so fortunate. Will they last long enough psychologically to establish a permanent residence on Mars?
It is easy for those of us who are living now in the relative comfort and safety of Sol 3 to assume that those first settlers on our planetary neighbor can “tough it out” like the pioneers of the olden days did, but those ancestors who sought a new life did so on a world they were already adapted to physiologically. Martian settlers will require a great deal of preparation and mechanical services just to keep the climate of the Red Planet from outright killing them within minutes if they are ever exposed to the raw environment. Running back to Earth in the event of a disaster is not a quick option.
Terrestrial explorers and settlers also did not need to worry about dealing with the effects of a lesser gravity, for the pull of the mass of Mars for anyone on its surface is only 38 percent that experienced by those living on Earth. Not only will this eventually weaken those first settlers and their descendants, but it may create unexpected health issues and affect the way humans gestate in a mother’s womb and how they are born.
Our natural satellite has even less gravity and protection from the celestial threats already mentioned. There too settlers will have to live underground and deal with the same situations as their Martian brethren. The other nearby worlds with solid surfaces such as Venus, Mercury, and the Galilean satellites also have their own unique challenges in addition to all those just described.
Circling Earth in Tin Cans
Human beings have been launching representatives of their species into the Final Frontier for just over six decades now. Yet outside of those handful of brief jaunts to the Moon now fifty-plus years ago, astronauts and cosmonauts have only experienced space directly in their biggest habitat as temporary residents of various space stations in perpetual fall around Earth, where their stays currently last between six months to one year.
Unlike those space explorers going to Mars, those in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) are but a matter of hours away from rescue and safety in the event of an emergency. This also applies to the ability to resupply the residents of a space station. These facts will have a definite impact on our first venturers who will be months to years away from any kind of help from Earth.
Space is Not a Convenient Species Safety Valve
One thing we cannot count on space serving us any time soon is as a method of reducing the overpopulation of humans on Earth, which at this moment is approaching eight billion individuals. The exodus numbers required to start alleviating the environmental pressure in that direction are not going to happen in the foreseeable future, assuming reducing the human population ever even becomes a goal in the first place. Besides, we cannot just “displace” a fraction of our species without serious preparation first and this will only loop us back to the issues I have already addressed, the ones that will decide whether we can permanently settle space or not.
Of course, none of these obstacles may deter those individuals, organizations, and nations who are determined to live off Earth despite the various costs. One may easily envision the super wealthy constructing their own space habitats in what might be considered the ultimate gated community. Others may turn a hollowed out planetoid or comet into a WorldShip, or multigenerational space ark, and head off into the wider galaxy with their chosen acolytes, their fates left entirely in their hands.
Should space become profitable, corporations will most certainly start moving humans and machines out there. Will conditions for such laborers be better than on Earth, or will it be a case of the old phrase ‘the same day, just a different song?’ While more robots and other artificial devices will be required to literally mine the Final Frontier, corporations may still find humans to be overall much cheaper to utilize to collect resources and maintain the various services envisioned in space. This would also include the costs of replacing such laborers when the situation calls for it.
Adapting Ourselves to the Reality
As we are such small creatures compared to the vastness of space and its many wild and dangerous environments, would it perhaps make more sense to change ourselves rather than try to make other worlds more like Earth?
Terraforming Mars, Venus, and even the Moon have been suggested for roughly a century now as a way for humanity to expand to the stars, but would it work? At the least it may take centuries or more to convert an entire planet into one resembling what we have now. One aspect we may not be able to change that could affect such a project is that except for Venus, the other worlds will continue to have less mass than Earth.
Now imagine beings who could live and work directly in outer space, or on any number of moons and planetary bodies without the need for special suits and gear. It will very likely be easier, cheaper, and quicker to adapt humans to other places via bioengineering and cyborg technologies than try to change an entire world to suit our physiological needs. These adaptations would certainly ensure the survival of our species, even if they become quite different from their predecessors, us. This would not be all that unusual considering how different we are from our distant prehistoric ancestors, and rather few are put off by this fact.
As an additional incentive, note how humans already spend billions in unrelenting efforts to make themselves better in all sorts of ways. Such desires have only increased as our technologies for these desired changes continue to improve. Space may become the ultimate reason for human durability and advancement. Perhaps this is all part of the process of our evolution, only we are facilitating the matter faster than nature has done in the past and in the directions we want it to go.
Science fiction most often envisions interstellar vessels having human crews as the primary features and functions of such starships. Even when they include a capable AI, it is the humans running the show. However, just as autonomous machines have long been our first and continuous “ambassadors” to other worlds in our Sol system, so too will we likely see even more advanced versions plying their ways to other star systems in the galaxy.
Artilects will be the “crew” of choice not only due to their multiple levels of durability and longevity, but also because their artificial minds will be able to process and comprehend far more than any human mind could, perhaps functioning even better than a cybernetically enhanced organic human brain. This will be a vital advantage in a galaxy of unknown factors, including when they encounter other minds that may be unlike anything we have ever dealt with before. Then their roles as ambassadors from our realm will be much more than just a clever designation.
We should not be disheartened by the fact that exploring and settling space with our species as it currently is may not be the best way to go in the really long term. Instead, with our new capabilities and knowledge, humanity can supersede what we once thought was the best way to expand into the Universe and do so in a way that will ensure our survival and success.
So, Rocket Man, you may have been ultimately correct regarding the expansion of humanity into space, but for reasons rather different than you could have possibly imagined. This is with no offense intended, as we are all products of our time and place, and you did highlight some important issues regarding permanent space utilization and settlement. The good thing is that we can and will evolve our collective understanding of existence, which in turn will allow us to adapt for the future, wherever it will be.
by Paul Gilster | Nov 1, 2022 | Asteroid and Comet Deflection |
I have further thoughts on ‘Stapledon thinking,’ as discussed in the last post, but my second piece on the topic isn’t ready just yet, and in any case I want to give a quick nod to a topic we looked at a few months back, the discovery and analysis of Near Earth Objects that orbit between the Sun and the orbit of Earth. So far we haven’t found many of these ‘twilight objects,’ but the attempts to find them continue.
As witness current work with an exceptional instrument. The Dark Energy Camera is a wide-field CCD imager, mounted on a 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo (Chile), that was designed for the Dark Energy Survey. The latter mapped hundreds of millions of galaxies to look for insights into the structure of the cosmos. The DES ended in 2019, but DECam continues to produce data that have helped us find fascinating objects like 2015 TG387, a dwarf planet on an extreme orbit that takes it to aphelion at 1000 AU, with a closest solar approach of 65 AU. DECam has also found 12 new moons of Jupiter and a number of ‘stellar streams’ produced when small galaxies interact with the Milky Way. Now we learn that it has flagged three Near Earth Objects on inner system orbits.
These NEOs stand out beyond the fact that they are part of that small population of asteroids found inside the orbits of Earth and Venus. One of them, the 1.5-kilometer-wide 2022 AP7, merits more than a passing glance, as there is a faint chance it could one day intersect with Earth’s orbit. That would be problematic because the size of this asteroid takes it into the category that Scott S. Sheppard (Carnegie Institution for Science) calls ‘planet killers.’ 2022 AP7 is the second asteroid of this size found in the ongoing survey. Another, designated 2021 PH27, is the closest known asteroid to the Sun, and has the largest effects from general relativity in the system.
So should we worry about the 1.5-kilometer 2022 AP7? Only in the sense that we should keep an eye on it. Unfortunately, its designation as a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHA) is going to generate scare stories, so let’s untangle the definition of a PHA.
What we know about 2022 AP7 is that it crosses Earth’s orbit with a perihelion near 0.83 AU and an aphelion near the orbit of Jupiter. Asteroids that cross Earth’s orbit are known as Apollos, and this one is the largest asteroid designated as a PHA that has been found in the last eight years. According to the paper on these observations, the Minimum Orbit Intersection Distance (MOID) with Earth is 0.0475 AU. That’s close enough to declare it a PHA, which basically tells us that this is an object that merits continued observation rather than one posing imminent danger.
The Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which computes asteroid and comet orbits, defines a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid this way:
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs) are currently defined based on parameters that measure the asteroid’s potential to make threatening close approaches to the Earth. Specifically, all asteroids with a minimum orbit intersection distance (MOID) of 0.05 au or less and an absolute magnitude (H) of 22.0 or less are considered PHAs.
So asteroids that fail to approach closer to the Earth than 0.05 au (this works out to about 7,480,000 km) – or are smaller than 140 meters in diameter – do not fit the definition of PHAs. The concern is that over timespans of hundreds of years or more, such an object’s orbit may take it closer still to Earth, making identification of PHAs a necessary part of our planetary defense. Much can happen over extended periods of time to nudge the orbit of an NEO. Consider another PHA, the now well-known and visited Bennu, studied up close by the OSIRIS-REx mission.
The CNEOS monitors PHA orbits and updates them as new data become available. Let me quote NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office about Bennu:
CNEOS predicts that the next time Bennu will pass Earth within the Moon’s orbit will be in 2135. This particularly close approach will change Bennu’s orbit by a small amount, which is uncertain at this time and which may lead to a potential impact on Earth sometime between 2175 and 2199. CNEOS has calculated that the cumulative risk of impact by Bennu during this 24-year period is 0.037 percent or a 1 in 2,700 chance. That means there is a 99.963 percent probability that Bennu will not impact Earth during this quarter-century period.
Note that “1 in 2,700” statement. CNEOS has been clear that this is not an impact probability for a single year, but the cumulative probability of impact over all years between 2175 and 2199. The risk of an impact in 2175, for example, is listed as 1 in 24,000. And the figures adjust as observations accumulate. A close approach to the Moon and Earth will itself tweak Bennu’s orbit by an amount that we can only estimate. Thus new data are constantly sought to tighten the window of uncertainty. One of the many good reasons for the OSIRIS-REx mission was to do just this as we revise the future possibilities for an impact. Remember, we’re looking a century out.
I feel comfortable with this arrangement. We’re doing an excellent job of identifying NEOs, we’re learning about asteroids through observation and sample return missions, and we’re investigating means of altering the trajectories of any objects that one day may threaten us. Which is to say I’m not losing any sleep about NEOs, as long as this level of vigilance and investigation continues, as it surely must in the name of planetary defense.
For more on CNEOS, see its Sentry: Earth Impact Monitoring page, which provides extensive background information.
Image: Artist’s impression of an asteroid that orbits closer to the Sun than Earth’s orbit. Credit: NSF NOIRLab.
The aforementioned Scott Sheppard is lead author of the paper on the three new NEAs. He, notes that the survey has found one other PHA thus far:
“Our twilight survey is scouring the area within the orbits of Earth and Venus for asteroids. So far we have found two large near-Earth asteroids that are about 1 kilometer across, a size that we call planet killers. There are likely only a few NEAs with similar sizes left to find, and these large undiscovered asteroids likely have orbits that keep them interior to the orbits of Earth and Venus most of the time. Only about 25 asteroids with orbits completely within Earth’s orbit have been discovered to date because of the difficulty of observing near the glare of the Sun.”
We looked at asteroids on orbits interior to Earth’s last summer (see The Challenge of ‘Twilight Asteroids’), so I’ll just remind readers that asteroids on orbits entirely within the orbit of Earth are known as Atiras, while those within the orbit of Venus are Vatiras (only one of these is currency known). If there are any asteroids entirely within the orbit of Mercury, they would be known as Vulcanoids, but none have been found yet. I turn to the paper for a note about the frequency of the Atira asteroids:
There are likely several more 1 km sized Atira-type asteroids left to find, which probably have low semimajor axes and high inclinations, like 2021 PH27, making them hard to find for most asteroid surveys. The DECam twilight survey is covering sky geometries and areas that most other surveys do not cover to depths not usually obtained, filling an important niche in the survey for the last few remaining relatively large unknown NEOs.
Noteworthy is the apparent lack of smaller asteroids in the survey:
…the twilight survey has discovered more larger asteroids (≲1 km) than smaller ones even though the survey is sensitive to smaller asteroids. This might suggest the smaller asteroids are dynamically less stable and/or more susceptible to break-up from the extreme thermal and gravitational environment near the Sun, though additional discoveries of asteroids with orbits near the Sun must be made to determine statistically if the smaller asteroids are under-abundant since in general they are also harder to detect.
The paper is Sheppard et al., “A Deep and Wide Twilight Survey for Asteroids Interior to Earth and Venus,” Astronomical Journal Vol. 164, No. 4 (29 September 2022), 168 (abstract). Note as well Shappard’s “In the Glare of the Sun,” Science Vol. 377, Issue 6604 (21 July 2022), 366-367 (abstract).
