LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF ATLAS SHRUGGED

 In the opening scenes of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand sets the conflict of values between the heirs of the Taggart Transcontinental railroad. James invested corporation rolling stock and his own money in a copper mining venture in Mexico. He relied on inside information from his friends in Washington and other corporate collaborators. Dagny has been withdrawing the engines and cars. Earlier month, Caltrain sold 19 locomotives and 90 galley cars to the government of Peru for $6 million. The justifications for the sale are almost verbatim from James Taggart. 

“This agreement will help Peru embrace a more sustainable future while also bringing millions of dollars to help us keep Caltrain running,” stated Caltrain Executive Director Michelle Bouchard in a press release. “Our former Caltrain passenger cars and locomotives will enable the start of new commuter rail service in greater Lima, cleaner air for commuters and community members and the access to opportunity that great public transportation provides.”

As part of the state funding for the electrification, the F40 locomotives were supposed to be rendered unusable, per California state law. However, Caltrain was able to obtain a waiver from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District because of the environmental benefits of establishing a new commuter rail service in Peru. The deal was brokered with the Government of Lima, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Department of Commerce." https://railfan.com/caltrain-f40s-gallery-cars-sold-to-peru/

Previously on Necessary Facts

Greg Browne’s Necessary Factual Truths

That Goddam Ayn Rand Book 

The Influence of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism 

Longevity

In 1973, I was reading and writing for The Libertarian Connection and, as it happened, my wife at the time got her hair caught in a printing press. She was OK but the ER doctor recommended that she take a course of multiple vitamins. And that tied in with the Life Extension themes in the LC. (See Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw in Wikipedia.) A few years later and with the new, current, and present wife, everything was natural, organic, locally sourced, and good for both you and the planet. We belonged to food co-ops in every town we moved to and even served on a board. You can live well by choice though living long may not be amenable to human action.

I always like the aphorism attributed wrongly to Thomas Edison: “All I ask of my body is that it carry my brain around.” I quoted that to a colleague and she replied by asking me how long it would do that if I do not exercise. 

Social Security Administration

I have always been a walker, but not much more. Then, I joined the Texas State Guard and ramped up my physical fitness. Being assigned to the National Guard put me above a gym and we were paid to use it. So, that helped. When I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in July of 2022, the oncologist gave me 80 pages of background from Wolters Kluwer. I thought that I had six months to two years to live. (How do you make God laugh?) But I responded well. (Stem Cell Collection.) And here I am. The oncologist said that I could live to be 80 or beyond. So, there was no gain there, just holding the line.

Long before that, maybe 15 years ago, I found an actuarial table that gave me an expiration date of June 18, 2032. Fifteen years ago, that seemed far away. This week, I ran the numbers again. The government is still betting on an early out for me. 

However, Northwest Mutual gave me better odds, assuming I do not take up smoking, drinking, illegal drugs, and driving without a seatbelt—and that I continue to walk at least 30 minutes a day. 

Yesterday, it being cold and rainy, I drove most of the day, patrolling garages but this week, walking became a new kind of bank account. 

I always liked science; I just was never exceptional at the practice; I had to take Physics 1 and Calculus 1 three times each to get A grades in them. To edit for the American Astronomical Society Historical Astronomy Division, I took an online class in astrophysics. It was not required but I thought that it was important to understand the content that I was reading. Most of my practice in astronomy is mere stargazing with 4-inch refractors from city and suburban skies. 

On the other hand, my microscopes never get even that much use, athough I bought a new one after my diagnosis. Biology just never grabbed me. I had microscopes as a kid and enjoyed the views. However, in college, I took physics three times and biology never. 

Today, I have textbooks on microbiology and histology, sadly underused and not marked up and dog-eared. That being as it was, a new year brings new resolutions. From the UT library, I checked out two books on genetics and bought two more from Half Price Books, including “For Dummies.” It is not that I expect to gain any special understanding of aging but rather the value in mental exercise associated with a new body of knowledge.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Biohackers 

Epigenetics 

Epigenetics and Evolution 

Austin Biobash 2013 

 

 

Aging

The doctor said, “You have normal, age-related degeneration.” I said, “I do not believe that it is normal.” She replied, “People like you never do.” 

Widely attributed to Thomas Edison (without good support) is the sentiment: “All I ask of my body is that it carry my brain around.” I repeated that to a friend and she cautioned me: “How long is it going to do that if you don’t exercise?” That was just before I joined the Texas State Guard which put my body in pretty good condition, granted that the standards were lower than for the federal army. Having aged out of the TXSG, I fell out of the daily push-ups and sit-ups, but my current job in parking enforcement at the University of Texas has me walking, and a couple of times a week, I get down on the ground and wrestle 10 kg of iron around a tire to disable a scofflaw. So, despite some serious problems, I am not too concerned about my body. Diet, exercise, and vitamins take care of that.

Over the last four years, I have had four neurological assessments. The doctors agree with each other, but I believe that they are all limited by their education and experience to accept their expectations for normal aging. Exercises for the mind are outside of their knowledge bases. 

First, the mind is not synonymous with the brain or even with the nervous system of brain, spinal cord, and neurons. Back in the 20^th century, I kept on my office wall a quote of my own devising:

At ArmadilloCon 46 I served on a panel to discuss the future of artificial intelligence in science fiction. After my prepared remarks, in the têt-a-têt with the other three panelists, I agreed with Stina Leicht that, historically, we model the human spirit (whatever that is) according to our technology of the moment, from “faculties” to “mechanisms” to “wiring” to a “computer” or “software.”* I said that it is limiting to believe that an electro-encephalogram (EEG) can make the pens of a machine move on a strip of paper but that we cannot communicate directly with another person. (The EEG is more delicate today than it was back in the 1960s but the fact remains.) 

Keeping your spirit in good working order—another model of the moment—can be enhanced with new “book learning.” In 2021, I completed an online class in astrophysics. For other people, crosswords, Sudoku, etc. would also be new exercising.

I know that I am not alone in this.

Robert Leighton for The New Yorker.
25 June 2024.

In the meantime, it takes a few seconds longer to cross the kitchen—a dozen times a day, every day… And I do not always remember why this chicken crossed this road. We say that time is money, but right now, I believe that I have more money than time. One fun fact is that some years ago, I looked up my life expectancy on a life insurance website. My expiration date is 18 June 2032. As I have been treated for multiple myeloma, my oncologist assures me that I could live to be 80 or 82. There are many levels of meaning in “No pain; no gain.” and “No praise; no blame.”

* Stina Leicht mentioned Edgar Allan Poe’s exposé of the mechanical “Turk” in “Maelzel’s Chess Player” (1836). See, also Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer by John C. Lilly (1968).

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

Aging in America: Alternatives to Government Policy

Biohackers 

Disruptive Diagnostics and the Business of Science 

Innovation and Discovery 

 

Digital Literacy and Artificial Intelligence

Ahead of the submission of their doctoral dissertation, a friend asked me to participate in a focus group to discuss digital intelligence and artificial intelligence. I prepared my answers in advance.

Focus Group Questions

The focus group questions are:

Grand tour question:

1. Please introduce yourself to the group and describe your educational background and career in your current position. CRQ

Most of my work has been as a technical writer for information systems serving government agencies and private enterprises. It happens that my degrees are in criminology and social science but I edit for the American Astronomical Society’s Historical Astronomy Division. Back in the 20^th century, for five years, I taught technical writing at my local community college. [Added here: I completed a certificate in introductory use of ChatGPT via LinkedIn Learning as an assignment from my current employer, the University of Texas.]

Questions about Teaching and Education:

2. How do you perceive the role of data intelligence and AI education in preparing students for the future? CRQ

I understand education in data intelligence and artificial intelligence as aspects of good citizenship, along with literacy in mathematics and general science, as well as geography and politics, art and music, etc. 

Gathering data from a wide range of sources and then evaluating each pool against a criterion places a special burden on the active citizen that exceeds the similar moral mandates for good citizenship from previous generations. 

Before the 21^st century, even in urban areas with more than one newspaper, most households chose just one based on political preferences. In that sense, there existed two assumptions: that the news was factual; its interpretation meshed with the values of the household. Given that most students K-12 follow the culture of the home, the descriptions of the world which were accepted by students aligned with that model. However, it is traditional in America that young people question those values when they matriculate to university education. While the specifics might change from nominally “conservative” to ostensibly “liberal” the mode of opinion formation was the same: the student found their facts and the meanings of those facts from established sources. All of that has changed.

Now, students must assume a special burden to first seek out valid (or least validatable) facts and then to give (or find) meaning in those empirical claims. Deeper still, the student must assume responsibility for the choices of original sources and tools of evaluation. In the previous generation, very few people used statistical methods (mean-mode-median; standard deviation; Xi-squared; p-values) to test the data they read about an effectively endless list of current events topics:  inflation, unemployment, imports and exports, medical therapies, endangered species, etc. 

Gathering basic information of events and dates is one task. Evaluating the economic, ecological, and moral contexts of those significant items is far more complicated and impactful. Whatever the worldview of the student among their family of origin, a large flow of unanticipated data and interpretation can have a life-altering impact. 

Everyone has heard about ChatGPT. There are others from Microsoft (GPT-3), Google, (Bard LaMDA), Facebook (RoBERTa), and IBM (Watson), and many more competitors. How do you evaluate an AI? The choice must be made and becomes the responsibility of the student. First, however, the burden lies with the educator.

·       “But with the sheer volume of data being collected, it became necessary to attach a value rating to the data itself, which led to a forensic approach to qualifying data assets by asking where they came from, when were they collected, and why were they collected in the first place.” 

·       “… data intelligence is specifically the collection of disparate pieces of data and using AI to determine what happened in the past and why, whereas data analytics is the use of that information to create actionable predictions of what may happen in the future.” -- 

·       “… data intelligence first emerged as a means of gathering accurate background content for the purpose of more accurate and granular reporting. But with the sheer volume of data being collected, it became necessary to attach a value rating to the data itself, which led to a forensic approach to qualifying data assets by asking where they came from, when were they collected, and why were they collected in the first place. -- Hewlett Packard Enterprise. https://www.hpe.com/us/en/what-is/data-intelligence.html

3. How do you envision the future of digital literacy education in the ever-evolving landscape of AI and technology? SQ1

Educators at all grades and levels in every area are going to adopt AI tools the same as we gave up blackboards and wooden pointers to accept digital projectors and laser pointers—and, of course, computers. The only way to do that is to actively use an array of competing products to discover which are better or not-so-good depending on the needs of class, classroom, goals, and metrics. Microsoft Office and Adobe Suite have become common applications. However, we all learn to use an array of cooperation and team management tools, such as Teams, Slack, Confluence, Jira, Wrike, etc. 

(In 2010, I had a professor whose handwriting was sometimes a challenge to decipher on the overhead. Caught short by the AV department, he had to write on the blackboard and his lettering was clear, distinct, artful. I asked him why he did not use the blackboard all the time. He showed us the dust on his hands and said that he was happy to be free of it.)

At an astronomical conference in 2021, one professor told us, “If they are not programming in Python, you are not teaching them astronomy.” That statement would have been unintelligible 100 years ago. Fifty years ago, it would have been rejected on the assumption that while computers may be useful for number crunching, serious astronomy is always [an] active engagement with a spectroscope or radio telescope. Now, we have so much data that we know only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Professionals seek out and train adept amateurs, even people with no understanding of classical astronomy, who can mine the data. 

Fifty years ago, few police officers had any education beyond high school. Today, 50% have associate’s degrees and 30% have bachelor’s degrees. (Data from 2017. Article from 2010: https://thehill.com/opinion/criminal-justice/504075-college-for-cops-studies-show-it-helps-their-behavior-stress-levels/ ) Those college programs include requirements in geographic information systems or symbolic logic or other classes previously considered far removed from walking a beat or driving a district. The new trends in data literacy and engagement with AI are just as strong and will impact just as many paid employments and lifestyle choices.

We know that you can lie with statistics, lie with numbers. The recent case of Prof. Francesca Gino is telling because it was a student who finally identified the fact that the data presented did not support the assertions in the narrative. These were peer-reviewed journal articles from a scientist who was considered a leader in the field of social science research. It means that everyone is responsible and capable of data literacy. 

Questions about Digital Literacy:

4. How would you define digital literacy in the context of today’s AI-driven world? SQ1

See the quotes from Hewlett Packard Enterprise above (https://www.hpe.com/us/en/what-is/data-intelligence.html).Basic digital literacy is necessary to understand the past. With AI, digital literacy is the means of predicting futures. 

Those are almost always statistical predictions: which are the likely outcomes; which ones are improbable? Digital literacy with AI requires knowing and understanding the tool sets as clearly as we know how to read the traffic signs when driving in a different city. AI does not yet have that common language. 

That said, however, neither is this all as new as tomorrow. Right now, I am working on a short biography of Carl Sagan. I found an interview with NPR’s Talk of the Nation: Science Friday with Ira Flatow. Sagan explained the value in robots for exploring planets by pointing the technology of virtual reality. That was 1994, thirty years ago. The first chatbot was Joseph Weizenbaum’s Eliza program, which he warned against in his collection, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (W. H. Freeman; 1967). So, we have 60 years, a lifetime or two generations, of this incremental development. Considering the evolution of printing, steam power, electrical power, aircraft, automobiles, or computers themselves, it is easy to see that this springtime of roots and shoots is going to become a full autumn harvest—whether we are ready for it or not. 

Digital literacy will require knowing how to “read the signs” of products and processes, and navigate the landscapes of data without getting lost.

5. What are the key digital literacy skills and competencies that you believe are essential for students in the age of AI? SQ1

See the quote above: “If they are not programming in Python, you are not teaching them astronomy.” We all use computers and we do [not] think of navigating through Instagram, Reddit, or Facebook as programming but it is. Those other modes—Python, Java, etc.—are the digital literacy skills of the decision makers. Similarly, millions of people pour out billions of words via social media without knowing how to write a short story, a sonnet, or a limerick. It is an easy claim at that some level here and now, we are all digitally literate even though we do not have the same levels of competency. 

The key skills and competencies for students in the age of AI remain what they have always been:

• Critical thinking 
• A concerned and committed engagement with empirical evidence and logically consistent theory. 
• Questioning 
• Knowing when to accept the limits 

Questions about Ethics and Ethical Considerations:

6. In your opinion, what ethical considerations should educators consider when teaching digital literacy in an AI world? SQ2

Technologies come and go. Ethics can change. Morality is constant. The invention of the cotton gin made slavery profitable and it was unethical to mistreat a slave but neither of those addressed the deeper problem. In order to make the best decisions about how to use AI tools, pupils and students must learn to ask the most important questions of themselves. 

Questions about Student Engagement and Success:

7. How do you assess or measure students’ digital literacy skills, especially as they relate to AI? SQ3

You cannot write a meaningful examination for a subject unless you know the substantive material. With AI it might be possible to write an examination for any subject, accepting the warnings about the two basic limitations of AI: plagiarism [and] hallucination. So, any educator seeking to measure the work of their students must possess a deep understanding of the technology and its engagement.

8. In your experience, what are the main misconceptions or myths about AI that students often have, and how do you address them? SQ3

1. The AI must be right.  
2. Hallucinations are easy to identify. 
3. Copying is permitted. 

1. We learn to trust authorities but we do not learn how to validate them. At some level, you begin pitting authorities against each other with no over-arching standards for judgment. How do you validate an AI. It is easy to find stories on the Internet about AI hallucinations and other failures but it is harder to find anything equivalent to the scientific method for substantiating the reliability of any AI product.  
2. AI hallucinations are claims that are obviously false, false by inspection. An article was never published; a person does not exist; an event did not occur. But those stories are easy to publish when everyone agrees on common facts. Students, in particular, are at an extreme disadvantage because they lack the life experience of academic learning. They have little choice but to believe what they are taught. The alternative is extreme skepticism, which is ultimately fruitless. 
3. One technique for learning how to write for publication is to get a journal notebook. Start with the works you like and copy passages by hand. You will work beyond this to find your own style. (Or so it is claimed.) The fact is that writers begin as readers. Educators properly require that their students read and then rephrase what they have read in their own words but the standards for that are not objective. “President Wilson was adamant that the United States must support the United Kingdom in its war against Germany.” Does changing the word “adamant” to “insistent” prevent a charge of plagiarism? 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

FanFic by ChatGPT (Part 2)

Visualizing Complex Data 

John Kemeny Knew: We Shall Have Computed

ArmadilloCon versus Artificial Intelligence

Knowledge Maps

Gilda Radner: It’s Always Something

Gilda Radner died of ovarian cancer. It is pernicious and aggressive, not curable or even treatable. She spent most of her last 30 months in hospitals, getting or recovering from chemotherapy. There were bright times, a good Christmas, her husband Gene Wilder, a coterie of friends, group support meetings at a Wellness Center for cancer patients, and an experiment with macrobiotic foods that allowed her to feel great for a couple of months. Her narrative is open, honest, frank, and (as much as possible) humorous. 

Most interesting to me was the constancy of cancer and its treatments. In our local support group for multiple myeloma, we all tend to speak of neuropathy as if it were new, special to our cases, and identified with Revlamid, Velcade, or Darzalex. And we all complain about the pain and the effects and side-effects of the painkillers that sometimes do not work at all. And it is personal. However, Gilda Radner’s story is 35 years old. She went through all of those symptoms and all of the others. I have a lot more perspective and context now. 

Although a new, revised 20^th anniversary edition
was released in 2009, I read the first edition.

"...featuring a newly updated resource guide 

for people living with cancer 

and a tribute by Radner’s former colleagues 

at Saturday Night Live."

Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 19, 2009)

Length: 304 pages

ISBN13: 9781439148860

 “Chapter 11. What’s Funny About It” Easy answer: not much. Her caregivers in the hospital did go along with her sense of humor, her need to find humor. With Gene Wilder’s help, they videotaped one session and while she was unconscious, they hung cards of monologue over her head. Nothing in the chapter or the book is laugh-out-loud funny. Even so, Radner’s tragicomic sense of life and her feeling for irony were easy to understand and accept. I found reflection in her story. 

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

How Do You Make God Laugh? 

Stem Cell Collection 

Mortality 

Invictus 

The Little Black Bag: Medical Care as a Faustian Bargain 

Tunguska, Chelyabinsk, Berlin, and New York

(See the previous post.) After my article on the Tunguska Event of 1908 was published, it was removed from This Month in Astronomical History (https://had.aas.org/resources/astro-history) because several members of the Planetary Sciences Division of the AAS sent this letter to the senior editors at the AAS Historical Astronomy Division. 

As senior members of the astronomy community who have spent much of our professional lives studying asteroid impacts and planetary defense, we are concerned by some of the misstatements and omissions in the short article on Tunguska from the AAS Historical Astronomy Division published in the AAS News Digest of 6 June. It fails to represent the currently understood risk from asteroid impacts and the considerable ongoing effort to protect our planet. We request that this article be re-evaluated and either withdrawn or modified to correct these misstatements.

The first half, which is basically a history of the Tunguska event and the early efforts to understand it, does not need much work, although the lengthy discussion of whether this was a strike by an asteroid versus a comet is misplaced; it was a cosmic event by an object in orbit crossing the Earth’s, and further detail hardly matters. There is no established evidence that we know of recovered meteorites associated with Tunguska, and we now know the frequency of impacts of this size. Tunguska was the largest such strike in history of a size expected every couple millennia, which played a critical role in alerting humanity to the real danger from cosmic impacts.

With the comments about the Chelyabinsk impact this story goes off-base. The statement that more than a dozen people were killed by Chelyabinsk we believe is false, and needs to be either documented or removed. The statement that Earth impactors are all on orbits interior to ours is incorrect, it should instead state that impactor orbits must cross the Earth’s orbit, thus are both interior and exterior in different parts of their orbit. Chelyabinsk was not detected by telescopes before impact, it came from close to the dirction [sic] of the sun and could not have been seen in the night sky. The writer seems to have conflated Chelyabinsk with the observations of asteroid 2018 LA, which was observed in the night sky by a survey telescope some hours before impact. In fact, by now 8 small asteroids have been discovered telescopically before impact, a tribute to our ever improving search capabilities.

The size (energy) of the Chelyabinsk impact should be noted, and that we expect something of this size (energy) to hit the Earth about once in a few decades, so it is not unusually large or energetic compared to the observed flux of impactors. It is important to tell readers that the Earth is under constant bombardment by NEOs (Near-Earth Objects, a term chosen to include both asteroids and comets), and that thanks to an international program to detect NEOs we know how often such strikes take place and have a fair chance of predicting the next big one. It is a disservice to imply that astronomers are neglecting this issue or don’t know how to calculate orbits. There is a robust international program studying planetary defense, and the DART experiment" "was notable as the first active defense experiment. The reference to the book “The Asteroid Hunters” is useful, but the other items mentioned at the end of the article are not needed. In particular, any means of diverting an asteroid from a collision course takes time (weeks or months minimum, or even years), so last-minute (or hour) detection cannot prevent an impact.

We are concerned not only by mis-statements of fact in this article, but by basic confusion about the asteroid impact hazard and how astronomers and others are dealing with it. That should be the real lesson of the Tunguska event.

Alan Harris (Former Secretary-Treasurer of DPS, 1995-2001)

David Morrison (Former Secretary-Treasurer of DPS, 1971-1977, and Chair, 1980-1981)

Clark Chapman (Former Chair of DPS, 1982-1983)

We have been further assisted in documenting Tunguska by Mark Boslough, who is not a member of AAS or any Division. We attach an abstract under preparation for an upcoming GSA meeting with him as first author, the other three of us as co-authors, and many additional experts in the field of impact dynamics."

First, I fixed the egregious error. I had accepted the initial news reports from Chelaybinsk at face value and did not go back and check. After the emergency responders worked the scene and victims were sent to hospitals, it was found that no one had been killed. 

I also clarified the language of the celestial mechanics to remove ambiguity. I had written: In addition, they orbit between the Earth and Sun and in the glare of our star are often lost to sight. They also identified the salient fact that the objects are lost to sight: "Chelyabinsk was not detected by telescopes before impact, it came from close to the dirction [sic] of the sun and could not have been seen in the night sky."  

They claimed, "There is no established evidence that we know of recovered meteorites associated with Tunguska..." It is true that no iron or nickel-iron meteorites have been recovered. However, they ignored 100 years of evidentiary reports from the USSR and  Russia.  Every criminologist knows the maxim of Edmond Locard: "Every touch leaves a trace."

It is from this point that the astronomers, as they say, "go off-base." They wrote: "The writer seems to have conflated Chelyabinsk with the observations of asteroid 2018 LA, which was observed in the night sky by a survey telescope some hours before impact." My grammar was quite clear. There was no conflation. I wrote: Asteroid 2018 LA exploded over Botswana (2 June 2018) and was only the second asteroid detected in space prior to impacting over land.¹⁷  And that is the plain truth. 

In an email to my editor, I said that from there, they sound like the government scientists in a science fiction movie. "We have this under control," they say, and then Godzilla comes out of the sea. The astronomers wrote: "In fact, by now 8 small asteroids have been discovered telescopically before impact, a tribute to our ever improving search capabilities." 

I confess that I soft-pedaled the re-write by acknowledging the work of NASA. 

[quote] On 21 January 2024, NASA’s Scout Impact hazard assessment system identified a meter-sized asteroid (later designated 2024 BX1) 95 minutes before it impacted the atmosphere over Germany, possibly leaving debris 60 km away in the Czech Republic.¹⁸ [close] 

I did not point out that the asteroid was first spotted by an amateur who reported it to the International Astronomical Union 27 minutes earlier. From there, NASA picked up the report and tracked the object. NASA did not detect it first. (See: "Asteroid 2024 BX1: From a Light in the Sky to Rocks on the Ground" by Bob King, Sky & Telescope, 26 January 2024 here: https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/asteroid-2024-bx1-from-a-dot-of-light-to-fireball-to-rocks-on-the-ground/.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/preparations-underway-as-planet-killer-
asteroid-the-size-of-cruise-ship-nears-earth-233328582.html

Their complaint of 12 June 2024 could not have predicted the explosion of a meteor over New York City on 16 July 2024.

As for planetary defense, there is no doubt that any mission would require preparation, which is lacking now. 

I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Claudio Bombardelli when he was a visiting researcher here at the University of Texas. I attended a lecture on the DROMO orbit plotting program. In that, he spoke of rescuing Mumbai by diverting a meteorite to strike in Kazakhstan, the lesser of two evils (absent a consultation from that government). What impressed me most was the synthetic (theoretical; mathematical) solution to orbit plotting with minimal data and minimal time. 

I sent my rewrite forward to the editorial committee of the AAS HAD and there was no reply from them or the Planetary Division. 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

I LIKE SATELLITE CONSTELLATIONS

THE AUDACITY OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

PROBLEMS WITH POP SCI FROM SKY & TELESCOPE 

PROBLEMS WITH POP SCI (PART 2)

The Tunguska Event of 1908

[This article was accepted and published by the Historical Astronomy Division of the American Astronomical Society for webpages "This Month in Astronomical History" for June 2024. It was then pulled on the insistence of several members of the Planetary Sciences Division of the AAS. See above for September 19.]

Ten thousand kilometers from the blast site in central Siberia, particulates in the atmosphere rendered the night sky in London bright enough read a newspaper.¹ Seismographs at Irkutsk and Kirensk (1200 km and 500 km distant, respectively) recorded the impact which was assumed to have been a meteorite.² Nearly twenty years passed after that morning on 30 June 1908 before scientists could trek over 3000 km from Moscow to the Tunguska river area of what is today Krasnoyarsk Krai in the Evenk Autonomous Okrug. (See Fig. 1.) Expeditions and field work from 1927 to 1932 gathered remembrances from witnesses; occasional explorations into the 21^st century still have provided little evidence to classify the impacting object as a meteor, asteroid, swarm, comet, or black hole.^{3,4,5,6,7,8,9} Parsimony and the standard of extraordinary evidence to support extraordinary claims have brought most astronomers to assert only that a stony meteoroid about 30 to 50 meters in diameter exploded 10 to 20 kilometers above the ground.^10,11

Leonid Alexyevich Kulik led the first astronomical expedition to the region beginning in February 1927 and arriving in late March. Kulik found the blast site in June. The initial challenge was to identify the exact location. Sending his report to Moscow where it was read to the Russian Academy of Sciences by Academician Vladimir I. Vernadsky, Kulik wrote: “On account of the absence within hundreds of kilometers of any astronomical points and because of the complete unreliability of the maps available for this region, I can only approximately determine the place of the fall as lying in 61°north latitude and in 71° east longitude from Pulkovo.” (Pulkovo Observatory is 30° 19’ 54” east of Greenwich.) An earlier investigation (1924) by Vladimir Obruchev, who extensively explored Siberia, estimated the locale center as 60° 20’ north and 102° 0’ east.³  The fall site is now accepted as 60° 57’ north and 101° 57’ east.¹³

Although latitude and longitude were in some doubt, the site itself was unmistakable. Twenty years after the event, the fallen trees were radii pointing to a depression. The image is iconic. (See Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, etc.) Destruction covers 680 sq. km.³ and damage to the terrain covers 8000 sq. km.¹³ The blast site was obvious by inspection. However, finding the actual fall site, crater, or craters, and the attendant debris has proved less tractable. Over the past century, several expeditions and research projects have unearthed some evidence and more clues to support various theories—but little else.  

In 1988, Andrei E. Zlobin, visited the area, and he wrote: “During the expedition of 1988, in July 24 the author arrived at Pristan camp near the coast of the Khushmo River. He was there from July 24 to July 26. Before returning to Kulik's Zaimka main camp, the author investigated the shoal of the Khushmo River near Pristan with the purpose to find stones which looks [sic] like meteorites.”¹⁴ Zlobin collected 100 samples, three of which were strongly suggestive of being meteor fragments (Fig. 2). 

Approaching the centenary year, motivations were reinforced and another expedition was launched, headed by Luca Gasperini, a marine geologist from the Italian National Research Council. They were rewarded with a “magnetic anomaly” at the bottom of Lake Cheko, which itself has an intriguing conical cross-section.^4,5Yet another exploration and reconsideration apparently dashed those hopes. Lake Cheko is not unique: other depressions in the area also filled with water share its geomorphology and age of 1200 years.¹⁵  Less surprising than the event itself, Gasperini, et al., quickly published a reply.¹⁶ The details of the Tunguska Event remain unsettled and open to continued investigation.

Another such event could be probable within our lifetimes, certainly within the next 200 to 1000 years.⁵ Smaller landfall strikes and near-surface impacts with the atmosphere are more common.

On 15 February 2013, a superbollide meteor in Chelyabinsk, Russia, injured over 1200 people. (Reports were has high as 1500.) The injuries are considered secondary, the result of broken windows and other debris, rather than from the meteor per se. Asteroid 2018 LA was the second asteroid detected in space prior to impacting over land¹⁷exploding over Botswana 2 June 2018. In that case, images had been captured by NASA’s Catalina Sky Survey eight hours earlier, although no determination of the path of asteroid had been computed. On 21 January 2024, NASA’s Scout Impact hazard assessment system identified a meter-sized asteroid (later designated 2024 BX1) 95 minutes before it impacted the atmosphere over Germany, possibly leaving debris 60 km away in the Czech Republic.¹⁸

Astronomer Carrie Nugent published her appeal, The Asteroid Hunters (TED Books Simon & Schuster, 2017) and recorded a TED Talks lecture. First, few researchers are actively scanning the solar systems for “Earth grazers.” Also, of necessity, the objects are small and therefore difficult to detect. Then, there is problem of what to do about any detection. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) of 8 October 2022 was successful¹⁹ but the Planetary Defense Coordination Office was created only in 2016 and this was its first proof of concept mission.²⁰

Rapidly calculating the intersection orbits for such a mission is critical to any last-minute attempt to deflect an asteroid. Among the scientists working on new solutions to celestial mechanics is Claudio Bombardelli of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid who in May and June 2024 was a visiting researcher in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas, Austin. (See Fig. 3). Bombardelli is a member of a team that developed a fast orbit propagator, called DROMO, a generalizable method, which makes use of high speed computers to solve complicated problems in orbital mechanics such as the interception of near-Earth objects.²¹ Their work allows energy-efficient, low-thrust solutions that can be critical to the rapid-deployment scenario of shepherding an asteroid away from contact with Earth.²²

References

1.  Sagan, Carl. (1980). Cosmos: New York: Random House. page 73. 

2.  Bobrovnikoff, N. T. (1927). “A Remarkable Meteorite,” Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 39, 382-384. 

3.  Astapowitsch, I. S., (Lincoln LaPaz and Gerhard Wiens, translators). 1940. “New Data Concerning the fall of the great [Tungusk] Meteorite on June 30, 1908, in Central Siberia,” Popular Astronomy. Vol. 48 p. 433- 1940 

4.  Gasperini, Luca; et al. (2007). “A possible impact crater for the 1908 Tunguska Event,” Terra Nova, 19: 245-251. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-3121.2007.00742.x

5.  Gasperini, Luca; Bonatti, Enrico; and Longo, Giuseppi. (2008). “The Tunguska Mystery—100 Years Later,” Scientific American, June 30, 2008. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-tunguska-mystery-100-years-later/  

6.  Foschini, L; Gasperini, C; et al. (2018). “The atmospheric fragmentation of the 1908 Tunguska Cosmic Body: reconsidering the possibility of a ground impact,” arXiv:1810.07427v2 [astro-ph.EP]

7.   Gladysheva, Olga G. (2020). “Swarm Fragments from the Tunguska Event,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 496. 1144-1148.

8.   Gladysheva, O. G. (2023). “The Structure of the Tunguska Comet,” Earth and Planetary Science, 3(1), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.36956/eps.v3i1.924

9.  Jackson IV, A, A; Ryan, Michael P. 1973. “Was the Tungusk Event due to a Black Hole?” Nature, vol. 245. September 14, 1973.

10.  Chaisson, Eric; and McMillan, Steve. (2008). Astronomy Today, sixth edition. Pearson Addison Wesley.

11.  Murdin, Paul; and Penston, Margaret (eds). 2004. The Firefly Encyclopedia of Astronomy. Richmond Hill, Ontario: Canopus Publishing. 

12.  Kulik, L. 1935. “On the Fall of the Podkamennaya Tunguska Meteorite in 1908,” Meteor Notes, 1935A, 43. Translated by Lincoln La Paz and Gerhardt Wiens, Edited by Frederick C. Leonard and H. H. Nininger. Published originally in the Journal of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1927A.

13.  Astapowitsch, Igor. S. (1938). “On the Fall of the Great Siberian Meteorite, June 30, 1908,” Popular Astronomy, Vol. 46, pg. 310, July 1938. 

14.  Zlobin, Andrei E. (2013). “Discovery of Probably Tunguska Meteorites at the Bottom of Khushmo River’s Shoal,” arXiv:1304.8070 [physics.gen-ph]

15. Rogozin, D. Y.; Krylov, P. S.; et al. (2023). ”Morphology of Lakes of the Central Tunguska Plateau (Siberia, Evenkia): New Information on the Problem of the ‘Tunguska Event 1908’, Doklady Rossijskoj akademii nauk., Number 510, May 2023. https://journals.rcsi.science/2686-7397/article/view/135850reported in “New evidence refutes the hypothesis that Lake Cheko is a result of the Tunguska Event,” Russian Center for Science Information, Federal Research Center, 25 May 2023. https://ksc.krasn.ru/en/news/Ozero_cheko/

16.  Gasperini, Luca; Bellucci, Luca Giorgio; et al. (2023) “Comment on Rogozin, et al., (2023), Morphology of Lakes in the Central Tunguska Plateau (Krasnoyarsk krai, Evenkiya): New Data on the Problem of the Tunguska Event of 1908.,” Seismology, Vol 513, p 1200-1203.  

17.  Jenniskens, Peter, et al. (2021) "The impact and recovery of asteroid 2018 LA," Meteoritics and Planetary Science, 56 (4), 844-893.

18.  https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-system-predicts-impact-of-a-very-small-asteroid-over-germany

19.  https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-confirms-dart-mission-impact-changed-asteroids-motion-in-space/

20.  https://science.nasa.gov/planetary-defense-dart/

21.  Bau, Giulio; Hunh Alexander; Urrutxua, Hodei; Bombardelli, Claudio; Peláez, Jesús. (2011). “DROMO: A New Regularized Orbital Propagator.” International Symposium on Orbit Propagation and Determination, 26–28 September 2011, IMCCE, Lille, France.

22.  Bombardelli, Claudio, et al. (2013). “The ion beam shepherd: A new concept for asteroid deflection,” Acta Astronautica,  Vol. 90, Issue 1.

Fig. 1. Relative distances from Tomsk (pop. 500,000) to Tunguska crater and from Kansas City, Missouri, to the Black Hills of South Dakota, about 12 hours by superhighway or two months by other means. 

Fig. 2. Zlobin’s Figure 2 showing three likely meteorites recovered from the region of the 1908 event. (“Discovery of Probably Tunguska Meteorites at the Bottom of Khushmo River’s Shoal,” arXiv:1304.8070 [physics.gen-ph])

Fig. 3. Claudio Bombardelli explains the DROMO system at the University of Texas (Austin), 9 May 2024.