Tag Archives: space

Is our solar system the most unique in the universe?

Grappling with assumptions and knowledge bias

Say you are going to visit someone, but for thought-experiment reasons you know absolutely nothing about them, not even their name or gender or anything of the like. What can you confidently say about this person you don’t even know?

Well you can confidently say that they’re human, since I did specify that they were a “person,” and since there’s no evidence aliens exist on Earth. That means they eat food and breath air and all that other stuff. But besides the most vague generalities about human nature, you cannot confidently assert *anything* about them. If I forced you to guess about their qualities, you would only be able to guess the vaguest things that are almost universal among humans, like their physical traits (probably 2 arms and 2 legs) or human universalities (probably love their family, probably like food and traveling).

The only things you can confidently say about this person would be the *common and non-unique traits* that they probably share with all other humans. Because with so little to go on, it would be illogical to assume a set of very unique traits instead.

But then I tell you this person is an American. OK, you can now assume they almost certainly speak English (though it’s not totally certain, and they could always be a baby or a mute anyway). You can assume they know at least some of the cultural touchstones of Americanism (although again, they could be a baby), like they’ve heard the Star Spangled Banner, and they know what Star Wars and Marvel Movies are. They probably know that Hollywood is famous for movies, and that Texas is famous for oil.

But can you confidently say that they are a basketball player? Do you know if they enjoy Handel, Hershel, and Bach? Can you say anything about their politics wahtsoever?

If I then tell you they’re a climatologist, you get even more details. They’re likely on the left-side of the political spectrum. They’re almost certainly well-educated (a pre-requisite for climatology), and they’re far more likely to be an office worker than a manual laborer (although I guess *someone* has to install all those temperature stations).

Now let’s say that this person you’re going to meet is my friend Dave, who’s about 25 years old. Dave is a great basketball player, but he hates watching it because “the modern game is boring.” He likes jazz renditions of famous Baroque music. He plays Minecraft fanatically, although he’s never modded it. And he is a climatologist working at a local university, but he’s also deeply religious and prays before every meal.

The less you knew about Dave, the more generic he seemed. Just a person? There’s 8 billion of those. An American? They’re also common. Even a climatologist doesn’t seem unreasonably unique or special.

But when I gave you more details about his personality, he suddenly seemed fairly out of the ordinary: he’s both sporty and sciency, he’s young but also religious, he plays a popular game sure, but he also likes an incredibly eclectic style of music.

But is Dave *actually* unique? Or does his appearance of uniqueness come from *our knowledge* of him? I’d hazard than many of you can think of people in your lives with an even more unique set of traits, compared to the very few things I’ve told you about Dave. And when I was slowly describing Dave, before you knew how unique he was, you had to fill in the blanks with guesses based on common traits. This is true of anyone we don’t know well. People seem more common as we know less about them, more unique as we know more.

For every person we’ve ever met, we have a very limited set of knowledge about them, and we fill in whatever blanks exist with the “most likely” choices. That’s why even your parents or loved ones can still surprise you, as you may not have known that they did drugs in college, or ran a local newspaper, and you had just filled in those blanks with something else before they told you.

But that means that by definition, we default to assuming everyone around us has “common” and “ordinary” sets of traits. I’d hazard a guess that every person in the world has some set of traits that makes them extremely unique or out of the ordinary, even if these are things that you’d only know if you were close friends with them.

The office worker who reads about 2 books a week: that’s very out of the ordinary. The financial analyst who’s written a dozen murder mysteries: that’s very uncommon. The American who speaks fluent Korean: this is less common in America than having written a book. But if all you knew was “office worker,” “financial analyst,” or “American,” you’d think these people were more normal and less unique than my friend Dave up there, even if they end up being as or more unique than him when you know all their traits.

Extraordinary-ness is realized as we get more and more data about a person, as we find more and more things that are clearly *outliers* to the common trends. Because until we know those things, we naturally fill in the gaps in our knowledge with the “ordinary” placeholders, the “expected” values.

And the reason I’m talking about all that is that I’m almost certain this though process underlies claims about the uniqueness of our own sun and planet.

The Fermi Paradox and the Rare Earth Hypothesis

To shift gears slightly: many people have pondered about why Earth hasn’t been visited by aliens yet. If there are billions of stars in the Universe, and the Universe has existed for billions of years, then there should have been plenty of time for alien species to evolve, become technologically advanced, and start joyriding around the galaxy. As Enrico Fermi said: “where is everyone?”

A potential answer people have caught on is that intelligent life is unbelievably uncommon, and that Earth just happened to have a very very specific set of Astronomical circumstances that made life, and intelligent life, possible. Under this “Rare Earth Hypothesis,” life may evolve around only one in a quadrillion stars, there may only be a *single* life-bearing world in our galaxy: Earth.

Our planet and solar system do seem very rare. In the search for exoplanets, we rarely find ones with lots of gas giants so *far* away from their star, most gas giants appear way closer than ours do. Our sun also isn’t a binary star (like most sun-like stars are), and it has fewer flares and superflares.

But I would contend that, like my friend Dave above, we only notice our solar system’s “uniqueness” because we know so MUCH about our Sun and so LITTLE about exoplanets and their stars. We are *assuming regularity on all the variables we don’t have data for.*

Like, let’s take one of those stars that has a Jupiter-like gas giant orbiting close to the star. Maybe some of those Jupiters have large, rocky moons with complete atmospheres, and maybe these moons can support liquid water, which could support life. That’s probably uncommon, but is it more or less uncommon than our own system having its gas giants so far away?

Our planet has a very large moon, but are there exoplanets with rarer configurations, like an Earth sized planet with 4 or more smaller moons? Or an Earth sized planet with Saturn-like rings?

And our sun has unusually few flares, but is there a planet out there with an unusually strong magnetic field and an unusually thick water atmosphere, one that can easily protect its life-bearing planet from life-killing solar flares?

For this last example, let’s imagine that life has indeed evolved on such a world, intelligent life. They, like us, might think they’re the only life in the universe. They, like us, might think that their planet is unbelievably unique, and that their specific uniquenesses are what allowed their solar system to have life.

Maybe their solar system has a large gas giant orbitting close to the star, and the gas giant’s magnetic field, combine with their own planet’s uniqueness, serves to limit the damage of stellar flars coming to their planet. The gas giant could act like a kind of “shield,” sitting between their own planet and their star, too small to dim the star’s light, but with an incredibly strong magnetic field that blocks the force of any Coronal Mass Ejections (the technical name of large stellar flares).

These people might say “well of course life only evolved on *our* planet, how common is it to have a rocky terrestrial planet outside the orbit of a gas giant? We’ve never seen that in exoplanets. And our gas giant plus or magnetic field are unusually good at protecting us from solar flares. And since essentially all stars have large solar flares, then all planets but our own get blasted to death by Coronal Mass Ejections before intelligent life can evolve.”

But they wouldn’t be right, because we on Earth would still exist. And they’d be assuming every other star out there was “normal,” that there wasn’t a rocky planet *closer to its star* than a gas giant, orbiting an unusually quiet star. And since it would be so hard to get data on *our* star, they’d see our star and assume it was just another “ordinary” lifeless system (we’d have trouble knowing our own star had planets if we didn’t orbit it, it’s difficult to see by the most common measurement techniques)

See, I think Earth only seems *rare* because of how much we know about it. Just like Dave only seems *unique* because of how much I told you about him. If I’d just given you his more common traits (he’s 25, American, plays sports), he wouldn’t seem that unique or special at all.

The jar of marbles thought experiment

Imagine for instance that there’s a jar with 100 marbles in it, each numbered 1 to 100. You pull out number 8 and, aha! This is an exceptionally unique marble! No other marble has this specific number on it, and this marble is 1 in 100, isn’t that unique?

But in this jar, ALL the marbles are unique, they’re ALL 1 in 100. They’re just unique in different ways by having different numbers on them.

Or if you prefer, let’s say the jar of marbles has 999,900 marbles that are unlabeled, and 100 marbles numbered 1 to 100. Again you pull out marble number 8 and, aha, this time it’s even MORE unique! This time it’s a 1 in a MILLION marble! No other marble has this number!

But again, the numbered marbles are ALL 1 in a million, they have different numbers on them, different “things that make them unique,” but they are all still unique.

This marble thought experiment is how I think of the rare Earth hypothesis. Yes our Earth is rare, it’s got a number on it (life), and we think most other stars in the galaxy don’t have life, we assume most of them are unnumbered. But just because we’re 1 of a kind, with our own special number ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FROM ANYONE ELSE’S, doesn’t mean that another marble with another number doesn’t exist somewhere in the Galaxy, even somewhere close by.

We assume that life can only evolve if the marble has the number 8 on it, ie if a planet and solar system have our very unique set of traits (gas giant arrangement, large moon, quiet star, etc). But we don’t have telescopes powerful enough to *see the numbers* on any other marbles out in the galaxy, so we don’t know for sure if they have life or not. We assume that they are normal, that they have all the “common” traits stars have and that they don’t have anything special on them that would make them unique or life-bearing. But we don’t know.

There could be a number 9 marble right next door to us, a planet orbiting a star with its own collection of unique traits completely different from ours, but thinking just as we do that they are the only life-bearing system in the entire galaxy, because our star doesn’t have their star’s unique traits.

And they’d be wrong. And we’d be wrong too. Just something to think about: we should be more humble when trying to argue from “uniqueness.”

Anyway I still want to post part 2 of my fusion power post, so stay tuned for that very soon.

I don’t like Factorio: Space Age

I started, stopped, and started this post several times. I just want to get it out the door so I’m posting it now regardless of that it’s not the greatest. I’ll have more to post on Factorio after this, but my thesis remains: I loved Factorio on it’s own, I don’t like Factorio: Space Age. I don’t think it’s a good expansion pack and I don’t think you should buy it.

Let me ramble about science in the base version of Factorio.

Red science was so simple you could craft it in your inventory. But the long time it took encouraged you to figure out automation to make that unnecessary. Green science was a step up, but it not only tested your automation skills, but also encouraged *and* rewarded you for successfully doing it. To explain: green science needs inserters and belts, which are two things you’ll make a *lot* of in Factorio. If you want to succeed, you’ll need to automate them so might as well do so since they’re also needed for green science. Conversely once you do get over the difficulty hill of automating them, you can split off the inserters and belts you’ll need for your factory, because you probably are building more than what your green science needs. So green science encourages you to automate the things you’ll need to automate anyway, but also rewards you since automating those things is a necessary step in growing the factory.

From there, blue science tests a whole new subject: fluid mechanics. Blue science needs plastics, which needs petroleum gas, which needs oil. If you’ve never dealt with factorio fluids before, blue science demands you learn how. But you’re also rewarded with bots, because blue science unlocks the construction and logistics robots that make the second half of the game so much easier.

Purple science doesn’t feel much different than blue science, but I think the name “production science” is fitting because it’s a real step up in total materials if not complexity. For the most part purple science uses all the same inputs as blue science, but no matter how much I feel I overbuild, I *always* seems to run out of steel for it! Purple science tests your ability to scale, and scale big, because you always need more steel than you think you need.

Finally, yellow science really feels like a final exam. Like purple science you’ll need to have an overwelming volume of inputs, this time copper instead of iron/steel. Blue Circuits and Batteries both require you to have completely mastered the game’s liquid input systems, with multiple steps where chemical plants feed into assemblers and vice versa.

When you finally master yellow, white science is strangely underwelming. It’s mostly “the same but more,” if requires blue circuits and low density structures just like yellow science (plus extra green and red circuits before Space Age came out), but then adds rocket fuel on top of that and a huge space launcher that needs to be built. Not exact a great leap in difficulty, but by then you’re probably just ready for it to end, so it’s in a good place overall.

The thing is, Space Age doesn’t feel like it follows this kind of progression, or any progression. Each planet feels mostly like redoing red and green science. The science pack only demands that you master the basics of automation on this new planet with these new resources. And once you do that, you can leave and never need to return.

It feels… not great. I don’t feel any sense of adventure and progression landing on planet after planet and doing the equivalent of “super simple red/green science, only now with 1 new ingredient no other planet has.”

The space mechanics are like Dyson Sphere Program, in that they aren’t realistic at all and I wish they were. I know making Kerbal Space Program *in* Factorio would have been hard, but at the very least I don’t see why a rocket that runs out of fuel starts slowly sinking back to the planet it launched from, but also doesn’t ever fall into the atmosphere and hit the ground. A rocket that loses fuel just continues to drift on its current trajectory. If you want it to fall back to the planet it launched from, then that trajectory should eventually make it hit the ground. But instead Factorio: Space Age has this worst-of-every-single-world middle ground where things are unituitive *and* unphysical *and* waste your time. My first every space ship didn’t have enough fuel to reach its destination planet, so I had no choice but to wait for it to *sloooooooooooooooowly* drift backwards back to the first planet before I could give it more fuel to try the journey again. I had no way to speed this up, and I had no reason to think it *would even work that way* since that’s not how space travel actually works.

Another thing I dislike, I feel like this game had room for having the planets interact with each other more. The space ships are build off the old system for railroads, but the spaceships aren’t useful as railroads. The game is clear that you should simply be producing your science on each planet and then shipping it all to Nauvis for research. But why does that have to be the *only* option? Why not make it so that we can juggle items and send them all over to each planet? Because the devs decided every challenge in this expansion pack must have *a single specific solution*, rather than letting the player come up with their own solution. That’s bad game design and makes this game less fun.

When I played with rails, yes I would make a starter base for red/green/black science. Then another for blue, another for purple, another for yellow+white. And I’d run a single train line to each of these bases to ship all the science to a single location. But you don’t have to be that lame. You can have train likes running in all directions to ship all raw resources to a centralized location. This can simplify say your green chip production if it all happens in one place and you just siphon those chips to each research that needs them.

Or you can have satellite bases that build intermediate products, say putting all chips in one place and shipping them around. Or a mishmash of both where sometimes you produce everything onsite and only ship the science back and sometimes you’re importing everything just to make science. You can do a lot of things.

You can’t do that in space age because of the seemingly arbitrary restrictions on how much stuff can fit in a rocket. 2,000 green chips can fit in a single rocket, but only 300 blue chips. Blue chips stack a lot more efficiently than that, the only reason for this is the feeling that it would be “too easy” if you could ship blue chips around from Fulgora. But would it be easy, or would it be interesting? They clearly wanted you to engage with space shipping, the entire planet Aquilo punishes you if you don’t, but they didn’t want you to do *enough* space shipping to actually make planet-to-planet production lines like you could with trains in the base game.

And I think that’s a huge missed opportunity, because I’d *love* it if I could be rewarded for interplanetary shipping like this. I’d love to heavily focus Vulcanus on the “low tier” items and Fulgora on the “high tier.” Gleba could specialize in the various oil derivatives with all its bioproducts. Then I could ship whatever I need whereever I need and have an engaging reason to produce a lot of different space ships with different needs.

It feels like the game quite clearly has exactly one way you have to play and doesn’t want you to experiment, rather it wants you to find and accept the “right” way. The most clear version of this is in the asteroids that will hit your space ships. Fighting the biters in the base game gave a huge latitude for experimentation, did you turret creep them? Mass produce grenades and use grenade spam? Drive all around them in a car with autocannons? Go for the defender capsules? There’s a lot of different ways to do things and none of them are wrong. You can use a tank or ignore it completely. You can focus on personal laser defense to kill biters up close, or rush artillery to kill them from afar. Do you even care to try uranium ammo? Or nuclear bombs? Or do you just want to plop down a long line of laser turrets and call it a day? The game lets you play how you want, rewards you for experimenting, and never punishes you for trying something “wrong.”

Space Age punishes you for not playing its way. You need to use turrets in space to protect from asteroids. And you need to build ammo in space to feed the turrets. You can’t use lasers like you could on the ground, because then you’d only need to focus on power, so asteroids have 99% damage reduction against the same lasers that can kill a behemoth biter twice their size. And you can’t ship ammo up to the space ship either, that would be too easy. Instead ammo has been heavily curtailed with how much of it can be shipped to and fro. 25 uranium-coated bullets weigh as much as 1,000 solid iron plates. Check the periodic table and do the math, I assure you it doesn’t add up. Even more crazy is that 25 uranium bullets weigh as much as 50 uranium fuel cells, U-238 really isn’t *that* much heavier than U-235 guys.

And then once you get ammo working, they introduce new asteroids that are 99% resistant to physical damage. All so that you are forced to build rocket turrets instead, which are the new asteroids one weakness. Then finally rocket turrets need to be upgraded to tesla turrets.

There’s no variety here, there’s no experimentation, there’s no reward for trying things your way. You don’t get to try other options like shipping all your ammo up and trying to make it that way. Or focusing on laser turrets instead of gun turrets. Or using walls to ram the asteroids instead of using guns at all. There’s a lot of alternative routes that are just fine to experiment with against biters, but are shot down when you go against asteroids because the devs had a very specific vision in mind for how they wanted space ships to work, and stepping outside of their vision is not allowed.

The game just isn’t fun. The newest planets are hit and miss. Fulgora is nice because it’s a backwards planet, all the most expensive materials are easy to get and all the cheapest materials are harder to get. Vulcanus is my favorite because it actually does something cool: your normal solid products are turned into liquids instead. Gleba is terrible game design and should be deleted entirely. Aquila is unfinished and boring.

And overall even the new planets aren’t fun when I’m just landing, doing 3 things, and then leaving that planet never to return. I don’t feel like these bases are part of “my” base the way I felt when I made an area for purple science and an area for yellow science. I don’t feel like they connect to each other in any way because they don’t.

And I don’t feel like any of the challenges the game presents are worthwhile in their own right, because they’ve all been made with the mindset of “there is only 1 way to properly complete this challenge, find the way the game devs wanted or else.” They’ve specifically put down guard-rails to prevent you from ever having an original thought that wasn’t the solution they themselves wanted, and it just feels lame. Space ship design should be the greatest avenue for player freedom and creativity, but instead everyone’s space ship is *identical* because the devs needed to make the challenges solvable in only 1 precise way. So no one ships ammo to space, no one tries to smash into the asteroids with walls and build up faster than they take damage. No one tries to do anything except the exact solution the devs wanted, and that it such a shame for a game that until now was so focused on player freedom and expression.

Factorio: Space Age is not a good expansion pack. I thought it would rekindle my love for Factorio, but now I never want to play Factorio again. I had been playing for absolute ages, and had recommended the game to friends. But I can’t recommend this expansion pack to anyone I know, it just isn’t what made Factorio so fun to begin with.

The Lunar advantage

This post is gonna be weird and long.

I often have weird thoughts that I wish I could put into a book or story. My thought today is about comparative advantage. Comparative advantage is an economic concept that explains why people and countries can specialize into certain areas of work to become more efficient.

For example, in Iceland the cost of electricity is very low, which is why Iceland has attracted a lot of investment in industries that require lots of electricity, such as aluminum smelting. On the other hand countries like Bangladesh have a low cost of labor, which is why labor intensive activities such as clothing manufacturing invest there. It doesn’t make sense for a company to put an aluminum smelter in places where electricity is expensive, nor does it make sense to put a clothing factory where labor is expensive. Iceland and Bangladesh have their own comparative advantages at this moment in time, and that explains their patterns of industry.

Let’s imagine for a moment that there was a fully autonomous colony on the moon. People lived and worked there without needing to import air, water, or food from Earth. They can trade with Earth, but if Earth were cut off they could still make their own goods, just as if our country were cut off from the world we could still make our own food, drink our own water, breathe our own air. Let’s say they use super-future space technology to extract water and oxygen from moon rocks, and grow crops using moon soil.

If there would be such a moon colony, we would assume there would be trade with Earth. Certainly the cost of moving goods from Earth to the moon and vice versa are enormous. But it was once unbelievably dangerous to cross the oceans, and people still did it because the profits were worth it. We would expect that the moon would have some comparative advantage compared to Earth and vice versa, which would make trade profitable. This comparative advantage is the same reason Iceland sells aluminum products to Bangladesh who in turn sells Iceland clothing.

So with all this in mind, I assert that the moon’s comparative advantage would naturally be in large, heavy goods, but not because of the moon itself but because of the journey.

Let me give another example, suppose there is a factory on Earth making steel and a factory on the Moon making steel. Let’s also say the iron and carbon for the steel can be gotten just as easily on the Moon as on Earth. I assert that the one on the Moon has a comparative advantage because of space travel. Sending goods from the Earth to the Moon means having to spend a lot of energy accelerating out of Earth’s thick atmosphere, then also spending energy to slow yourself down for a moon landing. By contrast it takes much less energy to accelerate off the atmosphere-less surface of the moon, and landing on Earth costs far less energy as you can use the atmosphere itself to brake your fall.

So a moon steel factory can send packages of steel to the Earth at a rather low transport cost compared to vice versa. That gives an advantage to the moon steel factory, as if there are shortages on Earth the moon factory can fill them at a rather low cost, while Earth cannot do the same to fill a need on the moon. The transport costs are not symmetric, and they are in the moon’s favor. I would assert that, all else being equal, investment for steelmaking would flow into the moon and out of the Earth.

Of course the “all else being equal” is the rub. Air, water, and food are hard to come by on the moon. Iron and carbon might be easier but all the mining equipment is already here on Earth. We would have to do a lot of work and build a lot of technology to make a moon-base even possible. But in theory economies of scale and future-technology could make it possible and even economical. And at that point it might enter a virtuous cycle due to these asymmetrical transport costs I mentioned. It will always be cheaper to send goods from the moon to the Earth, than vice versa.

It’s just a random thought I’ve had and I want to put it in a work of fiction. In some sci-fi universe, a moon colony is economically sustained by this comparative advantage compared to Earth. But I’ve never gotten the courage to write this story so until now it’s just been an idle thought in my head.

I wish PBS Spacetime would do more planetary science

For those who don’t know, PBS Spacetime is an awesome youtube series where real-life astrophysicist Matt O’Dowd discusses the most fascinating facts and theories about modern physics. They’ve had videos on everything from String Theory to General Relativity to alien spaceships buzzing our solar system. I’ve loved almost every video and topic they’ve discussed but one glaring omission that I’d love to see more of is planetary science, especially the formation of our solar system.

Our solar system is a weird and wonderful place, and there’s plenty to talk about that they haven’t gotten too. I’m particularly interested in the topic of solar system formation. When I read articles about exoplanets and foreign stars, they often discuss the Hot Jupiters and Super Earths that might be orbiting those. These stories make our solar system, with it’s cold Jupiter and it’s regular-sized Earth seem kind of lame. But how abnormal is our solar system? Are we out of the ordinary, or very ordinary indeed?

One really cool set of hypotheses I’ve read up on are the Nice Model and the Grand Tack. I don’t have near enough astrophysics background to explain these, but together they paint an exciting picture in which, during the early formation of the solar system, Jupiter and Saturn began to drift inward on orbits closer and closer to the sun. Eventually they got to orbits that are much closer to Mars’ orbit than what they have at present, before orbital resonances kicked them back out again into their present orbits. These theories propose to explain a lot of questions about our early solar system: the smallness of Mars relative to the Earth and Venus, how the current gas giants could have formed and reached positions so far away from the sun, and even perhaps explain the Late Heavy Bombardment of the inner solar system. I’ve often been curious if they could also be an explanation for why our sun doesn’t have a Hot Jupiter aka a gas giant orbiting very very close to the Sun. As stated, Jupiter and Saturn migrated inward before eventually turning around and migrating back out again. If they had not stopped, might they have formed a set of Hot Jupiters? Did the Hot Jupiters around other stars migrate inward to their positions, and Jupiter and Saturn once migrated?

It’s a tantalizing topic for me which is why I’d love to see a PBS spacetime episode on it?