Category Archives: Transhuman News

NASA just announced that our Sun began a new solar cycle this year its 25th to be exact after reaching a solar minimum in December 2019. Solar weather activity is now expected to increase for the next five years until reaching a maximum in July 2025. With several space missions planned during that time frame for both the Moon and Mars, the Artemis program, in particular, involving astronauts on board, extra preparation and consideration will have to be made to weigh the impact of the increasing radiation events.

Space weather predictions arecritical for supporting Artemis program spacecraft and astronauts, NASAs announcement detailed. Surveying this space environment is the first step to understanding and mitigating astronaut exposure to space radiation.

Solar activity is tracked by agencies around the world by counting the number of sunspots (black spots) that appear on the Sun. Each one is an indicator of some type of high-energy activity such as solar flares or coronal mass ejections, and their appearance means a large amount of Sun material has been ejected into space. This material can cause disruptions on Earth, in orbit, or on anything in the deep space region nearby our star. Satellites in particular have to cope with solar interruptions frequently, although algorithms and engineering tend to mitigate much notice from a consumer standpoint.

While the Artemis mission will certainly have to take on the new challenge of a Sun thats becoming more and more active as time goes on, solar cycles arent something new to NASAs human spaceflight program.

As we emerge from solar minimum and approach Cycle 25s maximum, it is important to remember solar activity never stops; it changes form as the pendulum swings, explained Lika Guhathakurta, solar scientist at the Heliophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in the solar cycle announcement. There is no bad weather, just bad preparation Space weather is what it is our job is to prepare, added Jake Bleacher, chief scientist for NASAs Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at the agencys Headquarters.

When astronauts are orbiting the Earth, our planets magnetic field protects them from being directly hit by the majority of solar ejections; however, once outside that protective bubble and on their way to another deep space or lunar destination, things can be very dangerous. Radiation issues are often discussed when it comes to human space exploration, but scientists dont seem to be short of ideas on how to handle it.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, for example, has proposed passengers en route to Mars using water as shielding. During a solar flare event, all on board would move to a part of the Starship where the liquid was being stored and essentially use it like a basement during bad weather. Given that SpaceX plans to deal with radiation in the longer term via Mars colonization, there may be plenty of other developments coming from the rocket launch (and landing) company in the near future.

Aside from the scientists watching and studying the Suns solar activity, the European Space Agency currently has a space probe in orbit around our star. The spacecraft has been sending back the closest pictures of the Sun weve ever seen, and a few new features have been observed such as campfires. The probes overall mission involves studying and understanding the Suns solar cycles and hopefully make space weather prediction akin to the kind of meteorology we have on Earth.

Just because its a below-average solar cycle, doesnt mean there is no risk of extreme space weather, Doug Biesecker, panel co-chair and solar physicist at NOAAs Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) in Boulder, Colorado, commented. The Suns impact on our daily lives is real and is there. SWPC is staffed 24/7, 365 days a year because the Sun is always capable of giving us something to forecast.

NASA held a live-streamed conference discussing the solar cycle announcement which you can watch below:

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NASA confirms the Suns new solar cycle; Moon and Mars missions will have to adapt - Teslarati

Millions of space nerds reacted with joy Monday to a study showing the atmosphere of Venus contains phosphine, a chemical byproduct of biological life. But none would have been more thrilled or less surprised by the discovery than the late, great Carl Sagan who said this day might come more than 50 years ago.

Now best remembered as the presenter of the most-viewed-ever PBS series Cosmos, the author of the book behind the movie Contact, and the guy who put gold disks of Earth music on NASA's Voyager missions, Sagan actually got his start studying our closest two planets. He became an astronomer after being inspired as a kid by Edgar Rice Burroughs' space fantasies, set on Mars and Venus.

But as Cosmos fans know, Sagan's starry-eyed sci-fi hopes never beat his hard-edged science. He shot down one early "proof" of life on Mars. He predicted the surface of Venus would be insanely hot even before NASA's first Venus probe in 1962, which he worked on, confirmed it. And he was the first scientist to see Venus' hellscape as the result of a runaway greenhouse effect one he knew could point the way to Earth's climate-changed future.

So it was all the more surprising when Sagan co-authored a paper proposing we might still one day find microbial life above our sister planet. "If small amounts of minerals are stirred up to the clouds from the surface, it is by no means difficult to imagine an indigenous biology in the clouds of Venus," he wrote in Nature in 1967 two years before NASA landed on the moon. "While the surface conditions of Venus make the hypothesis of life there implausible, the clouds of Venus are a different story altogether."

As Sagan pointed out, a high carbon-dioxide atmosphere was no obstacle. Up at the 50km (31-mile) layer, at the top of Venus' clouds, conditions are actually hospitable and almost Earth-like. Organisms could thrive in the upper reaches the same way bacteria thrives around superheated, CO2-rich vents at Yellowstone. Add sunlight and water vapor to CO2, he said, and you have the recipe for that building block of life, photosynthesis.

"Sagan's work on Venus was formative, though few today remember his impact," says Darby Dyar, the chair of NASAs Venus Exploration Advisory Group. "His idea was prescient, and still makes sense today: between the hellish surface conditions on present-day Venus and the near-vacuum of outer space must be a temperate region where life could live on."

Just 11 years after Sagan made his prediction, another Venus probe discovered methane in the atmosphere which could be considered a predictor of the presence of organic material. Scientists like Sagan were cautious about the discovery; no one could prove methane meant life beyond a reasonable doubt. (We also found it on Mars in 2018, and have yet to explain that). Still, no one ever gave a reasonable alternative for why the methane might be hanging around on Venus.

Sagan died in 1996, in the midst of a criminally long dry spell for NASA Venus exploration. But his idea lived on. In 2013, we discovered vast amounts of microbes alive in the clouds above Earth. More than 300 varieties, to the surprise of the scientists collecting them microbes are actually less dense at lower altitudes. In 2016, NASA models showed that Venus once had oceans, for at least 2 billion years. That backed up a theory by planetary expert David Grinspoon, who suggests microbial life migrated to the clouds when conditions got too tough for life on the surface a billion years ago.

Call them the original climate refugees.

The science didn't stop, even when we only used Earth-based telescopes to do it. We've found evidence for active volcanos on the surface, which would "stir up minerals" into the atmosphere just like Sagan suggested. In 2018, another study of the Venus atmosphere turned up mysterious "dark patches" that scientists speculated could be evidence of microbial life vast quantities of it. How much? We'd need more study to find out. "I came to that paper out of frustration," co-author Sanjay Limaye told me last year. "We haven't been looking for organisms [on Venus]. Why not?"

Why not indeed. As I wrote earlier this year, Venus was unfairly shunted aside for Mars in NASA's budgetary priorities. Even though Venus is closer and more Earth-like, Mars had a surface we could stand on, which was an easier sell to our 20th century "space colonization" mindset.

But the more we look at Venus, the more we need to rethink what exploration looks like.

Quietly, inside and outside NASA, a "Venus community" grew that wanted to explore its clouds and started begging for scraps of budget. Its most exciting moment until now came in 2015, when NASA unveiled a concept mission called HAVOC a Zeppelin, basically, that you didn't need to fill with helium or hydrogen. Just regular old Earth air would float atop Venus' dense atmosphere. Tear the balloon's fabric, and the high pressure could actually keep the air from escaping for weeks.

As you might expect, the Venus community was abuzz with excitement over the phosphine discovery Monday. Not least because the NASA administrator had just tweeted the magic words: time to prioritize Venus.

There is, of course, caution in spades. Phosphine is also found in the vast, churning gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn. But to explain why it would be present on a rocky planet as small as Venus if it isn't because of life, scientists say, you'd have to propose some geological process we don't yet know about.

"The exciting discovery of phosphine in the Venus atmosphere just reinforces the growing body of evidence that Venus is a likely, perhaps the most likely, other place in our solar system where life might now or in the past have existed," says NASA's Dyar. "Venus holds the keys to our understanding of the evolution of rocky planets as homes for life.

"This finding may be the first of many to come as NASA and other countries renew a Venus exploration program."

Currently the ESA, the Russian space agency and NASA all have Venus probe plans in the works that could arrive this decade; the phosphine announcement could well move launch dates up. If and when the next probes find more evidence of life above the solar system's most mysterious planet, we'll be one step closer to confirming Carl Sagan's legacy as a visionary Venutian genius.

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Life on Venus? Carl Sagan predicted it in 1967. He may be right. - Mashable

As an extra incentive to get humanitys colonization capabilities up to scratch, researchers have revealed that not only are worlds made mostly of diamonds possible, they are in fact quite probable (not to mention profitable).

With private space companies slowly but surely gaining a foothold in low-Earth orbit, amid plans to take humans to the moon and Mars in the next decade, the potential plunder available farther afield looks increasingly promising.

Researchers at Arizona State University have recently published a paper in which they detail the circumstances necessary for these so-called diamond world exoplanets to arise, as well as a proof-of-concept experiment.

"These exoplanets are unlike anything in our Solar System," says geophysicist Harrison Allen-Sutter of Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration.

Their research is based on the idea that not all stars are created equal, and the chemical composition of the planets in a given star system are largely dictated by that of their star.

According to current estimates, between 12 and 17 percent of planetary systems might inhabit the space around carbon-rich stars, a promising precursor for diamond worlds.

Scientists and researchers have already confirmed the existence of carbide planets, made primarily of carbon and a handful of other elements, but they have to encounter the hypothesized silicon carbide (aka 'diamond') planets with just a hint of water to oxidize and convert the carbide to its constituent silicon and carbon.

Allen-Sutter and his team are making the case that, with enough heat, pressure and a dash of water, these silicon carbide worlds could be covered in diamonds. To prove their point, the researchers used a diamond anvil cell, subjecting test materials to extraordinarily high pressures.

They immersed samples of silicon carbide in water and then squeezed the hell out of them at a pressure of around 50 gigapascal, or 500,000 times the Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level. Adding insult to injury, the team then blasted the squeezed samples with lasers to heat them up.

They conducted 18 runs of this experiment and, as predicted, the silicon carbide samples broke down and converted into silica and diamonds. So the theorized diamond worlds are entirely feasible, we just need to find them.

For those tempted to search the cosmos for these diamond worlds, the sweet spot would be planets with a temperature of 2,500 Kelvin (2,226 degrees Celsius, 4040 degrees, Fahrenheit), a high-pressure atmosphere and the presence of water on top of a mostly silicon carbide rock, a somewhat tall order, but worth it to find a diamond in the galactic rough.

The researchers warn budding interplanetary treasure-hunters that these worlds would not be remotely hospitable for miners, as their atmospheres would be toxic to all life as we know it. So interstellar Indiana Joneses would need some pretty beefy machinery to extract the riches from these extraordinary planets.

In the meantime, upcoming missions like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help identify both these diamond worlds as well as a plethora of other interesting planets and potential treasure troves of alien life.

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Diamond worlds unlike anything in our Solar System are entirely possible. We just havent found them yet - RT

Join The Globe and Mail on Wednesday, Sept. 23, at 7:30 p.m. for a livestream conversation between Margaret Atwood and Thomas King. Readers without a Facebook account will be able to view the conversation on the Globes website.

Sept. 23: Margaret Atwood returns to host the Globe's book club with guest Thomas King, the author of Indians on Vacation, The Inconvenient Indian, and Obsidian. Join Atwood and King for a livestream

Everybodys read Tom King. The raccoon that lives under my house has read Tom King.

First of all, let me start off by confessing that Im a huge Tom King fan. By that I dont mean Im a physically imposing fan, but merely a reader who appreciates his talents. As a developing author, I hoped to grow up to be much like him again, not specifically a 6-foot-5 half-Greek, half-Cherokee, American-turned-Canadian photographer and former moustache grower. Instead, I wanted to stand in his shadow or beside it, using the written word and humour to showcase the multifaceted environments of the Indigenous community. In that journey, I still have far to go.

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But first, lets go back to just after Time Immemorial. In 1986, the Contemporary Indigenous Literary renaissance began. By that I mean an explosion of written and published material that sprang forth from our community and took Canada by storm. Before that, there had been the occasional book that would grab the attention of the Canadian literati briefly before they would return to their Margarets. I speak of influential texts such as Halfbreed by Maria Campbell, Prison of Grass by Howard Adams and Bobbie Lee: Indian Rebel by Lee Maracle.

Globe Book Club: Margaret Atwood announces her pick for Sept. 23 online event

Then a play called The Rez Sisters set the theatre community on fire. Written by an unknown playwright Tomson Highway in an unconventional theatre space the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto the play was about seven Anishnawbe women from a reserve on Manitoulin Island who want to travel to Toronto to participate in the worlds largest bingo game. This innocuous storyline won the 1987 Floyd S. Chalmers Canadian Play Award and the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Outstanding New Play, and was shortlisted for the Governor Generals Award the following year. The number of remounts of The Rez Sisters must be approaching triple digits by now.

In my opinion (and we know what thats worth), that simple play opened the doors for many of us who followed in the publishing game. It was a catalyst of sorts. It showed the Canadian public the versatility and talent that existed within our Indigenous communities, and most importantly, that we could tell our stories in a way anyone could enjoy. Within a decade, writers such as Jeanette Armstrong, Basil Johnston, Ruby Slipperjack, Marilyn Dumont, Daniel David Moses et al. were on their way to becoming a substantial presence in the larger Canadian literary world.

This big bang of modern Indigenous storytelling had, and in many ways still does have, an objective. It could be said it was born from the effects of colonization and its prime focus was to record and detail the repercussions of said colonization. In the epigraph to the published version of Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Highway writes: Before the healing can take place, the poison must be exposed.

And exposed it was.

During this renaissance period, most of the plays and novels coming out of the Indigenous community had three general storyline variations. They consisted primarily of a historical narrative, a victim narrative, or stories dealing with the byproducts of what I call post-contact stress disorder. In short, they were gloomy, dark, angry, and dealt with oppression, depression and suppression. As the saying goes, when an oppressed people get their voice back, chances are they will talk about being oppressed. And Native people had a long history of oppression to talk about. So the writing became cathartic on a personal and cultural level.

As a result, I remember talking with several people at different times who would tell me they were reluctant to see any more Native plays or read Native books because they were tired of being depressed. The literature had begun to develop a reputation.

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By this time, Thomas King had relocated to Canada from America and soon began pumping out novels and non-fiction using his own style. What was of particular interest was the unique flavour of his storytelling. It bucked the trend.

Kings first book, Medicine River, was an interesting departure. Published in 1989, it wove together tales of various southern Alberta First Nation people into a cohesive tale of returning home, finding home and accepting those colourful people that make up home. Told from the perspective of Will, an expat returning to Medicine River for a few days to attend his mothers funeral, the reader is transported to a joyous and lovable town bordering on a large Alberta reserve.

What makes this novel so unique for the time is that it didnt dwell on many of the stereotypes usually associated with Indigenous literature. King refused to allow his characters to be victims in the way many previous Native authors had focused on. His characters had flaws, but alcoholism, homelessness, drug addiction and sexual abuse were not de rigueur. Yet, his characters were centred in a very Indigenous context. They were not polemics for the evils of Canadianization. Instead, the book (and those that followed) was a celebration of the humour and frequently quirky aspects of small-town life. And the novel was highly successful CBC turned it into a made-for-TV-movie in 1993.

Inconvenient Indian, Michelle Latimer's documentary adaptation of Thomas King's award-winning book, premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival this month.

Courtesy of TIFF

Over the following years, Kings literary output included the award-winning Green Grass, Running Water, The Truth About Stories, Truth and Bright Water and The Inconvenient Indian (for which I constantly tease him, referring to it as The Incontinent Indian) and a host of other amazing fiction and non-fiction. Of course, this includes perhaps the most popular of his creations, and one of the most beloved of Canadian comedy shows, the radio series The Dead Dog Caf Comedy Hour.

The beauty of Kings writing is that, like all good authors, it seems effortless. Like those words always have and always should be in that specific order on the page, and that was the way the great literary gods planned it.

This was not long after I wandered into the field of Indigenous literature and woke up one morning to discover I was a playwright and later a journalist, filmmaker and novelist. In fact, Tom King and I have an ongoing contest of sorts, around who can write in the most mediums. So far, we are tied. He has never yet had a play produced, and I still have not yet slain the book-of-poetry dragon.

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As any academic will tell you, literature is not static. It grows and evolves, like everything else under creation. Indigenous writing is no different. Perhaps some of that healing has been accomplished. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, curiosity has been developing in our writing community toward the concept of genre fiction. While Indigenous literature may itself be considered a unique genre in itself, many in the last decade or two have let their interests wander further afield to areas not usually hunted by our writers.

Daniel Heath Justice, a noted academic from the University of Alberta, has to be one of the more adventurous of our writers, having published an Indigenous fantasy trilogy back in the mid-2000s, full of elves, magic and swords The Way of Thorn and Thunder, Wyrewood and Dreyd. Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, publisher of Kegedonce Press, compiled and edited a collection of international Indigenous erotica called Without Reservation in 2003.

More recently, theres been an explosion in the popularity of science fiction. Cherie Dimaline took the Canadian youth market by storm when she wrote The Marrow Thieves three years ago. The dystopian tale has Native people being hunted and harvested for their dream-inducing bone marrow. Next came Waubgeshig Rice with his equally popular Moon of the Crusted Snow, another dystopian story about life on a small northern reserve that loses contact with the rest of the world.

I myself have written a collection of science fiction short stories, Take Us to Your Chief and Other Stories, as well as a vampire novel called The Night Wanderer. Im currently working on a horror novel. Indigenous people seem to be colonizing mainstream Canadian publishing.

As usual, my buddy Tom is no different. When hes not pumping out award-winning fiction or non-fiction, he can be found neck deep in one of his favourite past-times: writing detective murder mysteries. DreadfulWater, The Red Power Murders, Obsidian and a few others have established his presence in that genre. And true fans will notice theres a lot of autobiography in Toms writing, shown by the fact that the detective in these novels, the delightfully named Thumps DreadfulWater, is an American Cherokee photographer who discovers hes diabetic. Tom was once a professional photographer and still is.

That biographical tendency also shows up in Tom Kings most recent book, Indians on Vacation (just long-listed for the Giller Prize). Protagonist Bird Mavrias, a Cherokee-Greek writer-photographer expat, meets a woman, Mimi, who will be his wife. They move to Canada and end up in Guelph, Ont. Anybody who knows Tom and his work will notice more than a smidge of familiarity in that character. Less like Toms real life, the two characters, into their golden years, end up tracking down Mimis great-uncle, who disappeared into Europe 100 years ago with a precious medicine bundle belonging to the family.

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Indians on Vacation has his usual wry observations on life, interesting witticisms and spot-on perceptions of white life from the Indigenous perspective, all the while taking you on a curious journey.

I like reading Tom King because he does, succinctly and cleverly, what all good writers should do he educates, illuminates and entertains with every paragraph.

But like I said Im a fan.

Editors note: An earlier version of this article included an incorrect title for Howard Adams novel.

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Globe Book Club: With his wry observations on life, Thomas King educates and entertains - The Globe and Mail