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 We request that this article be re-evaluated and either withdrawn or modified to correct these misstatements.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. 

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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. 

Science Fiction Recent Reads

I could not do better than this myself, which is why I do not write fiction. If real science were not difficult enough imaginative science is more challenging because you cannot just look up the answers. Science fiction has rules and one of them is that you cannot violate known science without an explanation (however thin it might be). Most often that invention or discovery is the basis for the story. Sometimes, it can be slid in behind the story, just another element in a wonderful new future or very different planet. The hyperspace that modern writers must now belabor, Cordwainer Smith only tagged “the up and out” – and that’s where the dragons were. That was acceptable in 1955 and 1963. Now, we demand more than wonderment. 

The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 4

Edited by Allan Kaster

An unabridged collection spotlighting the best hard science fiction stories 

and novellas published in 2019 by current and emerging masters of the genre.

Infinivox

Post Office Box 418

Barker, Texas 77413

https://www.infinivoxsf.com/

Cynicism and pessimism can be antidotes to chronic optimism but in our time, the expectation of success is the cure we need and are not getting from science fiction. Most of the stories in this anthology center on severe climate change or some other disaster not well defined. Nuclear war or bionic plague would be explanations, but a cause would suggest reasonable responses and in “At the Fall” by Alec-Nevala-Lee nothing like that is offered. The reader can cheer for the plucky robot, but ultimately, we never learn the reason for the complete demise of our civilization. 

 

Global warming sets the backdrop for the effects of corporate-controlled genetically-modified crops in “Winter Wheat” by Gord Sellar. I never got to the end of the story to find out if the off-camera hero, the father of the narrator, actually developed a strain of wheat to compete with the GMO. 

 

This is Not the Way Home by Greg Egan opens the anthology and sets the context for undefined disasters on Earth that our viewpoint characters must overcome. In this story, Earth stops responding to the Luna colony. Some of the members take off in a rocket home. (We never learn what happens to them.) In that event, the viewpoint character’s husband is killed (meaninglessly). Then, she cleverly builds a plan to bring her new baby and herself back to Earth. The ending is not quite clear. I think they made it. Regardless, the reader never finds out what happened on Earth to cause the story.

 

We create experiments at colonization by locking people in biodomes. (Prisons should also be highly informative here.) And it is no surprise based on experiences at sea (and under the sea) that extended periods of close quartering requires some insightful management. So, it is predictable that in ”Sacrificial Iron” by Tom Kosmatka the two people launched into deep space to carry a cargo of genomes to a new world learn to hate each other. Death was anti-climactic. But the mechanism of FTL was interesting. 

The ship drive worked on a simple principle. You can’t travel faster than the speed of light, but the speed of light can change. No longer 299,792,458 m/s, but something else, governed by the field-state of the space-time through which light propagates. The engines didn’t change the shape of space, only shifted its internal calculus. … Since the Big Bang, particles have precipitated out of the vacuum as the Universe inflated, bleeding out excess field density into the real while the speed of light slowed over billions of years—if only slightly. But what if you could reverse it? Sublimate matter into the system, increase the field-state of the local vacuum. Invert the trendline. Spacetime would have to shed the extra energy back somewhere. It sheds it back into the speed of light.

 

Science fiction has always depended on intellectual sleight of hand. But I also have read that the Universe does not “expand” as particles at the “edge of space” stream out into nothing. Nothing is not a different kind of something. Nothing is nothing. Rather, the Universe expands between particles, the spacetime that separates processes that we call “particles” is what expands. So, Tom Kosmatka offered an interesting interpretation from modern physics.

 

The idea in “Ring Wave” by Tom Jolly is that when Earth is struck by an asteroid some people can survive in pods placed at the circumference of the strike zone because those capsules will be ejected into space. Jolly imagines a cut-throat struggle before and especially after the strike. And that conflict includes guns. I do not know if Tom Jolly ever fired a gun here on Earth, but if you imagine firing one in space, you have to visualize the conservation of energy, of momentum, of angular momentum. You will spin about your center of mass impelled by the moment-arm of the reaction. In addition to centering the gun on your center of mass (rather than extending your arm as you would here on Earth), you have to be cognizant of how you are pointing the gun. The velocity vector in reaction must balance the shot you just fired. And in this story, there’s a lot of firing and no reactioning. 

 

As compelling as was the premise of a story of mating between spiders, Sarina Dorie’s “A Mate Not a Meal” left me insensitive about halfway through. 

 

On the Shores of Ligeia by Carolyn Ives Gilman offered a lot. I might not have followed the author’s logic. The story is about the exploration of Titan by a virtual experience through enhanced vision from remote mapping. The time lag must be about 80 to 160 minutes and the author writes for that most of the time, but I am just not clear on that. Not all of the action suggests evidence that time lag. Also, at the end, without any explanation of the evolution of international politics the deus ex machina is a global crowdsource of school children who were empowered by China’s freely given project in VR and ER. 

 

I was rewarded and pleasantly surprised by an unpleasant idea about colonizing outer space and other planets: What do you do with the dead? In “The Menace from Far Side” by Ian McDonald, life on the Moon requires recycling. Why would it not? But I never heard of it in that way before. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Mycroftxxx  says that despite recycling, Luna must run out of water. This mainly because they are exporting grain to Earth, but the deeper logic cannot be ignored, hence the happiness at the realworld discovery of water on the Moon. (NASA here: https://science.nasa.gov/moon/moon-water-and-ices/ ) But as for the dead, no one speaks of them. In McDonald’s story, the revelation is scary, the stuff that youngsters tell each other. But it is something to consider. And I have to confess to not actually reading the story. I started it, then skimmed it and found this, but the writing style alienated me. The story has a glossary at the end; for myself, if you need a glossary at the end of the story, each entry admits to a failure of narrative. 

 

I mentioned Greg Egan’s Slipway in the post before this one. Other stories in the anthology are:

• Cyclopterus by Peter Watts
• The Ocean Between the Leaves by Ray Nayler
• Cloud-Born by Gregory Feeley
• The Little Shepherdess by Gwyneth Jones
• By the Warm of Their Calculus by Tobias S. Buckell
• Soft Edges by Elizabeth Bear

 

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Fantastic Voyages: Teaching Science with Science Fiction 

Monsters from the Id 

Forbidden Planet 

All Volitional Beings Deserve Rights 

Recent Reads – Science Fiction: Questionable and Trash

At least it makes you think—but not too much.  

 

For the second time in my life, I threw out a book because it was not good enough to pass along. Commune 2000 AD by Mack Reynolds was disappointing on many levels, but not too many because it did not have many. I bought the book last year at ArmadilloCon 45. It was clearly a period piece from 1975. As it happened, I later received The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy by Ursula K. Le Guin, as a door prize in return for my judging half a dozen flash fiction entries from the convention’s Writers’ Workshop.  Le Guin complained often about capitalism and the lack of socialist science fiction. So, I googled for “socialist science fiction” and along with Edward Bellamy, Jack London, and others, I found Mack Reynolds. 

In his autobiographical sketch appended to Commune 2000 A. D., Mack Reynolds (1917-1983) tells of being raised in the culture of socialism. He dropped out of high school to volunteer for the Socialist Workers Party. Indeed, at one point in Commune 2000 A.D., Reynolds uses the

word “chauvinism” in a gender context. It is only in passing because the bulk of the book is about the hero having sex with an array of “mopsies.” Not one character with agency is a woman. Tasked by the equivalent of the CIA and FBI (for whom his academic post-doctoral advisor is fronting) to investigate independent countercultural “communes” neither the hero nor Reynolds writes much sociology while visiting only three or four within a day’s drive of New York City. And they are all pretty much alike. The key to their very existence and a basic fact of this future is that the guaranteed annual income created stiff competition for any job that offered surcease from leisure. Intriguing as that is, we spend more time in bed with blondes, natural and bleached, ten or 15 years our junior. And the best part is that the hero rants against the CIA, FBI, and Academe to their faces in a small room and then walks away, The End. I was disappointed that he was not shot dead by lasers in the doorway.

My incentive to read Ursula K. LeGuin came from the movie version of The Jane Austen Book Club. The male in the group, a young tech entrepreneur, eventually introduces his match-up to science fiction and Le Guin is one of his favorites. Already knowing The Lathe of Heaven, I enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Much of  The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy by Ursula K. Le Guin was beyond my ken because she was writing for voracious readers and some of these essays came from acceptance speeches for awards at conventions. I found much of the content here open to question and counter-argument. 

 

Le Guin was not the feminist she claimed to be. She could not be because at some level, we are all products of our environments. In this collection of essays written between 1967 and 1977, LeGuin rarely uses the indefinite “she/her” versus “he/him” to stand for any human being. She was born in 1929. A writer on her own as a child and youth and into her adult years, publication success came at age 40. Early habits form deeply. So, she defaults to a “a person … he.”   

Similarly, her rants against the Establishment are stuck in the 1960s. “From a social point of view most SF has been incredibly regressive an unimaginative. All those Galactic Empires taken straight from the British Empire of 1880. All those planets—with 80 trillion miles between them!—conceived of as warring nation-states, or as colonies to be exploited, or to be nudged by the benevolent Imperium of Earth toward self-development—the White Man’s Burden all over again. The Rotary Club on Alpha Centauri, that’s the size of it.” (“American SF and the Other”)

Le Guin’s imperium in The Left Hand of Darkness is not much different, only vaguer, less well-defined. Limited by the distances between the stars, it has no choice but to balance benign neglect with heartfelt helpfulness. 

 

She advocates mildly for socialism (“American SF and the Other”): “Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten.” However, that denies Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. In Jack London’s The Iron Heel fascism is in the past; the story is told from the socialist present of the future. Le Guin might not have known about Octavia Butler, but could not have missed Mack Reynolds, neither of whom appears in this anthology. 

 

I suggest that the reason that SF generally does not present a successful socialist society is that it seems less plausible than FTL and time travel. That being as it may, I did find these resources for those who steer to portside. 

• Science fiction and Socialism from Solidarity website https://solidarity-us.org/p2137/
• “50 Sci Fi and Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read” https://portside.org/2017-11-18/50-sci-fi-fantasy-works-every-socialist-should-read
• Socialism and Science Fiction from Workers Liberty https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2020-04-05/socialism-and-science-fiction (or read online at https://workersliberty.org/node/35385).
• Le Guin is recognized for her socialism in “How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism” by Nick Hubble at Jacobin dot com. https://jacobin.com/2020/12/utopian-science-fiction-socialism-history and https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2020-04-05/socialism-and-science-fiction
• See also, the Comments following Socialist Futurism: Sci-Fi for Reds and Greens at https://solidarity-us.org/p2137/Comments

 

As for Le Guin’s essays on writing, remove the dross and what’s left is gold. Le Guin’s best critiques center on the lack of style in language among writers who mechanically produce fantasy (“sword and sorcery”) and she contrasts poor efforts against J. R. R. Tolkien E. R. Eddison, and Kenneth Morris. (Tolkien I know; the others I do not.) Her complaint is not just against the fake medieval grammar which is often erroneous, but that the conversations could have taken place in Poughkeepsie rather than Elfland. I believe that the word  that she was looking for was “gravitas.” The best stories are important to the reader because they are important to the writer and language delivers that inherent sense of value. 

Those books transcended their authors. Le Guin says in “The Book is What is Real” that as a child she was often unaware and uninterested in the author even as she re-read her favorite books. Reading a book is an interaction. “As you read it word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note in the creation, the coming-t0-be, the existence of the music. And as you read, and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.” 

 

In “Do-It-Yourself Cosmology” Le Guin places science fiction within the realm of fantasy. It is a cogent suggestion from someone who wrote both successfully. We perhaps too easily set the genres apart as we separate Westerns from Historical Romance. I long ago lost the citation, but I read a critical essay by a science fiction author who said that science fiction is the appropriate literature for our modern culture whereas so-called mainstream fiction is really historical fiction set in the present. Le Guin says that fantasy is subjective and inward while science fiction is what comes from giving fantasy “the power and intractability of the object.”

 

Overall, I like the language in the stories from mathematician Greg Egan. I found his “Slipway” in The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 4 edited by Allan Kaster. I then requested The Best of Greg Egan from my local library and of those, the ones I remember are “Dark Integers,” “Bit Players,” and “Axiomatic.”

 

I had to read “Slipway” twice to understand the narrative. I liked it because it opened with an amateur astronomer terminally ill with cancer. From there, the story went to professionals trying to understand a phenomenon that seems to be swallowing space and the Earth, which it does: we apparently pass through it  or it around us – and we are transported 65,000 light years farther toward the edge of the Galaxy. However, for this story and the others, one criticism summed up my lack of enthusiasm for someone who writes like I do (and why I do not write fiction).

 

RocketStackRank by Greg Hullender and Eric Wong http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2019/06/The-Slipway-Greg-Egan.html had this to say about the downside.

Con: It’s a pretty low-stakes story. The only thing that’s really lost here is the view of the night sky and humanity’s ability to get to the nearest stars. The protagonist has nothing at stake at all, other than the prospect of a better job in a different country.” 

 

And she apparently had the job before the story started but only had not yet been offered it. So, this was truly low stakes for the heroine. That said, though, It did not bother me that no one died or became a better person. It was just a technical story about something that happened. All of his works are like that. “Bit Players” is one of three in a series from the viewpoint of artificial characters in a gaming universe. They are non-playing characters (NPCs gamers call them). They are trying to figure out who they are and what their world is, but they are warned by other characters that if they show too much awareness, they will be deleted. Their situation was depressing and I lost interest in the outcome. As far as I can tell, Egan is in the mainstream of the dystopian present. It was cute when it was cyberpunk in the 1980s and 90s. Now, it is just tiresome.

 

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NGC 6207 in Hercules

Andromeda is easy enough. I logged M81/M82 using the NASA OWN remote telescope (9 July 2021). The Austin club's dark sky site is south of the city, so at star parties the Messier objects in Ursa Major are problematic with a smaller refractor. From my backyard, I have never had any success with the Virgo Cluster or the Leo Triplet. So, I made a list of 10 Spiral Galaxies to pursue and last night I found NGC 6207 in Hercules. (These comments appeared first in the Cloudy Nights forum for Deep Sky and the Observation Log Continued). 

Last night and this morning, I found NGC 6207 in Hercules. 

Nominally in a “suburb” the sky here is too white. Last night, I used a binocular (10x42) to search for the Milky Way, but no joy. I have a hospital one mile to my north with a gas station between us. I think that NGC 6207 was successful because it is near the zenith.

I was viewing with the Astro-Tech 115 mm triplet. With focal length F=805mm its theoretic limits are Magnitude 12.8, Resolution 1.01 arc-sec; Magnification 230X. I was unable to see Messier 101 magnitude 7.9 low in the north but found NGC 6207 magnitude 11.6 near the zenith, and the magnifications were 57X and 115X. Sky conditions are more important than aperture and magnification. Anyway, I was happy to have seen something new and very far away (30 million LY). 

Hubble Space Telescope images of NGC 6207 from 
Wikimedia Commons. 
My view was more like a globular cluster: 
a small white circular array of very close dots.
The spiral was not evident at all.

 

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Jim Simons and the Quants

Being centered on mathematicians, this book was not exciting, but it was interesting. James Harris “Jim” Simons (1938-2024) earned his doctorate at Berkeley, and worked for the NSA and the Institute for Defense Analysis, before teaching at Harvard and MIT. (Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons). And that is in this story, of course. The focus, however, is on Renaissance Technologies and their hedge funds (Medallion and others), the most successful trading firm in history. Simons’s background in language recognition—pattern recognition; pattern prediction—allowed him the insight to expect that correlations must exist across markets, even if causal factors ultimately remain hidden. Therefore, it should be possible to profit from trading on trends that are unexpected and unperceived by everyone else. He was right.

The Man Who Solved the Market:
How Jim Simons Launched
the Quant Revolution 
by Gregory Zuckerman
(Penguin RandomHouse, 2019)

The method was easy to explain: mine the data. Look at all the numbers from all the markets and seek out trends and patterns and correlations. Some turned out to be causative. Regression to the mean predicts that after some market has a remarkably bad day, prices will rebound. The prediction applies to hugely profitable days: the market reverts toward its previous level. That much is easy to understand. The rest never gets explained. 

 

For one thing, no one associated with Renaissance Technologies was willing to talk to Gregory Zuckerman because they were bound by deep long-term non-disclosure agreements. Aside from that, the powerhouse of the company was driven by its staff of Ph.D. mathematicians. It would have to be understood at their level before it could be explained to the rest of us. 

 

What can be understood is that on average, employees who invested with the firm earned about $50 million each. “Since 1988, Renaissance's flagship Medallion hedge fund has generated average annual returns of 66 percent, racking up trading profits of more than $100 billion…” (Introduction). With that money came power, of course. Robert Mercer put his ideology to work when he found Steve Bannon for the Donald Trump presidential campaign in 2016. However, Jim Simons was a Democrat. And he was not alone in that. Many of the academics in the firm were liberals and they contributed to political campaigns, naturally, and also to special foundations (some of their own creation) supporting education, medical research, and other social initiatives.

 

Jim Simons’s methodology was a long time coming. Computers were rare and costly. Ten years later, they acquired the first desktop computers, which were woefully underppowered by today's standards. Although he launched the firm specifically to mine data so that profits could be harvested from trends, Renaissance Technologies also employed traditional traders. The two teams often collided, with Jim Simons himself significantly abandoning the algorithms for what would be too easily called “gut instinct.” Sometimes, we just know.  Also, with that mountain of cash, and with their frequent intra-day trades, they did not need to be often right. At the peak, in Jim Simons’s last decade, with the models and algorithms and supercomputers all generating money, Renaissance Technologies was right only 51% of the time.

 

One aspect of the story which I believe explains as much of their success as their mathematical models, is that Renaissance Technologies adhered to the ideal academic organizational culture. Workspaces were open. Visiting around the office was common. Sharing ideas was habitual. Discussion and disagreement were encouraged. (Pages 199-203). (See also "Team of Teams" on this blog.) It was not always easy and some people never forgave others for their complete lack of social grace. Neither time nor money heals all wounds.

But we all enjoy the profits. Zuckerman presents this as a zero-sum game. For Renaissance Technologies to have profited, many other brokerages, whose clients were stereotypically “dentists” (and other middle class professionals), had to lose. It is true that every trading position requires two people with opposite expectations. Ultimately, conservation of energy (charge; spin) means that everything must be accounted for with nothing magically lost or gained. And yet here we are: 10 billion people, 50% of us in cities of over 1 million; flying around 10 kilometers above the ground or cruising on the ground at 100 kph. We could not have hunted and gathered enough to make this possible. If not for Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies, we would each of us be poorer by unperceived small fractions that did not become the comforts we enjoy.

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Some Limitations of ChatGPT

University of Texas president Jay Hartzell declared this to be "The Year of AI." So, the assignment for my "Mental Spa Day" at work was to be introduced to ChatGPT. The first task was to compare Google with ChatGPT.  "Choose a topic to search in both Google and ChatGPT: How did the results differ? What were you looking for and which one gave you the information that you needed?" 

The two tools are different, of course, though Google does now claim to be supported by an AI Assistant. 

I asked if Gerard Kuiper ever met Beatrice Tinsely, if Otto Struve ever met Gerard Kuiper, and if Otto Struve ever met Beatrice Tinsley. ChatGPT delivered approximately the same reply in all three cases. In that, it completely missed the fact that Struve and Kuiper worked together at the University of Chicago before Kuiper took over the McDonald Observatory from Struve.

I then asked ChatGPT: Tell me about the pay warrants of the Texian Navy, a subject for which I did independent research. My work was presented as an article in The Numismatist and as a lecture at an ANA Convention (virtual via Zoom) 4 August 2020. That talk is available on YouTube here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWGzivjlOUI

ChatGPT's answer was at once cursory and inventive. Contrary to its claims, the warrants did not specify the period of service or the vessel on which the sailor served. The warrants were issued solely on the authority of Commodore Edwin Ward Moore. They were repudiated by Pres. Sam Houston. ChatGPT's offering is echoic of a college student writing to fill space when they cannot answer the question.

ChatGPT replied:

[quote] The pay warrants of the Texian Navy were a form of financial compensation issued to sailors and officers serving in the navy of the Republic of Texas during the 19th century. The Texian Navy, also known as the Texas Navy, played a crucial role in the fight for Texan independence from Mexico and in protecting the fledgling republic's coastline.

As with any military or naval force, it was essential to ensure that sailors and officers were compensated for their service. The pay warrants served as a form of promissory note, guaranteeing payment for their work and dedication to the cause of Texan independence.

The pay warrants were typically issued by the government of the Republic of Texas, often by the Navy Department or other relevant authorities responsible for managing naval affairs. These warrants were written documents specifying the amount of money owed to the individual sailor or officer, as well as any relevant details such as the period of service and the vessel on which they served.

In many cases, pay warrants could be redeemed for cash or used to purchase goods and services, depending on the policies and resources available to the Republic of Texas at the time. However, it's worth noting that the financial situation of the Republic of Texas was often precarious, and there were instances where pay warrants could not be immediately honored due to budgetary constraints or other factors.

Despite these challenges, the Texian Navy played a crucial role in safeguarding Texan interests and maintaining maritime security during a tumultuous period in the region's history. The issuance of pay warrants was a tangible acknowledgment of the sacrifices made by sailors and officers who served in the navy, ensuring that they received the compensation they were owed for their service to the Republic of Texas. [close]

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