Author Archives: Kevin O'Connor

The Possibility of Time Travel

Posted on November 12, 2016 | Leave a comment

Time travel has always been a fascination of humanity. The idea of peering into our future or exploring the past is a captivating one. As a consequence, time travel plays a large role in science fiction and many of the genres famous films are centered around time travel: Back to the Future, Planet of the Apes (1968), Minority Report, 12 Monkeys, Looper, and The Terminator. Even Charles Dickens featured time travel in his novella, A Christmas Carol (1843) .

Is time travel possible today? Yes! At least that’s what the people at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation would have you believe. Alcor sells the idea of time travel by means of cryonics, a process in which a person is frozen after death to preserve their body so that, in the far future, advanced technology can revive them. Cryonics have been a subject of scientific skepticism, due in large to the unproven technology which has yet to reanimate anybody. In fact, here in British Columbia is it illegal to sell your body for preservation by cryonics.

Max More presentation.

Max More. Credit to null0 on flickr (2006)

Despite this, preservation by cryonics has been around since the 1960s  and is commercially available today. Cryonics markets immortality and makes people like Max More, the President of Alcor, $200,000 per person on top of subscription fees.

 

 

Cryonics was addressed on an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

YouTube Preview Image
ae

Albert Einstein. Credit to ebravolosada on flickr

Time travel is possible in another way, using Einstein’s theories of relativity.
Special relativity states that time passes more slowly for objects moving at a greater velocity relative to the observer. Einstein’s theories are not strictly theoretical; his ideas of time dilation have been experimentally proven. Humans have already achieved time travel like this. For example, after spending 342 days in the international space station, astronaut Scott Kelly has aged about 8.6 milliseconds less than his twin brother. This is because the ISS orbits around the Earth at approximately 7658 m/s relative to the surface.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity sates that time slows down in strong gravitational fields. The possibilities of this type of time travel are expressed well in the movie Interstellar when astronauts explore a planet with an orbit close to a supermassive black hole.

YouTube Preview Image

The methods of time travel that I have described focused on traveling to the future. This is because traveling to the past seems less plausible and more difficult to accomplish. According to the theory of relativity, an object would need to move faster than light to move backwards in time, a feat that would require an infinite amount of energy. In addition, Stephen Hawking suggested that the absence of visitors from the future gives evidence against the existence of backward time travel.

-Kevin O’Connor (Nov. 12, 2016)

 

Reference

Interstellar Science: ‘That’s Relativity’. The Huffington Post. 2015. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-bennett/interstellar-science-that_b_6130228.html (accessed Nov. 12, 2016)

Leave a comment

Posted in uncategorized

Tagged , , ,

What Colour Is Pluto?

Posted on October 22, 2016 | 3 comments

On July 14, 2015, after nearly 10 years and three billion miles traveled though our solar system, NASA’s New Horizons space probe made history when it performed the first flyby of Pluto and captured the most detailed pictures of the dwarf planet to date.

Since then, New Horizons has been transmitting data back to Earth, providing planetary scientists with incredible discoveries. Among these discoveries is Pluto’s colour.

Pluto

New Horizons’ view of Pluto, courtesy of NASA (link)

Seen clearly above, Pluto is reddish brown. This is remarkable considering that when picturing Pluto, we often imagine an icy-blue, rock world.

This marks Pluto as the second red planet in our solar system, next to Mars. However, unlike Mars, Pluto’s colour is not the result of iron oxide. Instead, Pluto is red due to the formation of complex organic molecules called tholins.

Tholins are composed of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, and while they do not form naturally here on Earth, they have been found on many icy bodies in the outer Solar System, including Neptune’s moon Triton, and Saturn’s moon Titan.

The formation of tholins is believed to be the product of ultraviolet light driving a reaction between methane (CH4) and nitrogen gas (N2) in the planet’s thin atmosphere. The resulting tholins then fall to Pluto’s surface, giving it a reddish appearance.

caption

The Hörst Laboratory has synthesised tholins. Credit to Chao He, Xinting Yu, Sydney Riemer, and Sarah Hörst of Johns Hopkins University.

The structure of tholins is undefined. The term was coined by Dr. Sagan and Dr. Khare in their 1979 paper when a new term was required to describe the varying organic products created by subjecting gases abundant on Titan to ultraviolet light [3]. In their paper, they define tholin to be “complex organic solids formed by the interaction of energy”. [3].

To give a more ralatable explanation, planetary Scientist Dr Sarah Hörst – who has made studying tholins part of her research – compares the word ‘tholin’ to ‘salad’ as both are nonspecific and describe “a mixture of a number of different compounds and spans a fairly broad range of materials” [4].

As for the New Horizons space craft, it will continue to push further into the Kuiper Belt where its next scheduled destination is 2014 MU69 in January, 2019.

– Kevin O’Connor

References

  1. NASA’s Three-Billion-Mile Journey to Pluto Reaches Historic Encounter. https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasas-three-billion-mile-journey-to-pluto-reaches-historic-encounter (access October 22, 2016).
  2. Pluto: The ‘Other’ Red Planet. http://www.nasa.gov/nh/pluto-the-other-red-planet (access October 22, 2016).
  3. Sagan, C.; Khare, B. Tholins: organic chemistry of interstellar grains and gas. Nature, 1979, 277
  4. What in the world(s) are tholins? http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blogs/2015/0722-what-in-the-worlds-are-tholins.html (access October 22, 2016).

3 Comments

Posted in chemistry in the news

Tagged , ,

Helium: A Shortage?

Posted on October 1, 2016 | Leave a comment

At an atomic number of two, helium is known most commonly for floating party balloons and producing hilariously high pitched voices, but the noble gas is not often thought of as a non-renewable resource.

Balloons

Party balloons are possibly the most well known use of helium. Credit to HilkeFromm (link)

Aside from parade balloons, helium gas is used in a variety of practical ways from weather balloons to leak detection. Being inert and non-toxic, helium is also used to pressurize scuba diving and rocket fuel tanks and has applications in welding.

However, the most significant property of helium is its cooling ability. With a boiling point of 4.2K, liquid helium is one of the coldest liquids known to science. Employing a pump, one can further cool liquid helium by reducing pressure and upon reaching 2.17 K, helium becomes a superfluid, allowing for very high thermal conductivity and zero viscosity.

YouTube Preview Image

This property makes helium essential in the creation of superconducting magnets, such as those found in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, and the in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners.

CERN's Large Hadron Collider. Credit to: Thomas Cizauskas, flickr, October 11, 2014 (link)

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Credit to: Thomas Cizauskas, flickr, October 11, 2014 (link)

On Earth, helium is produced underground by the radioactive decay of heavy metals. This process is known as alpha decay and emits a helium nucleus (two neutrons and two protons), which gains two electrons and forms Helium-4. Next to hydrogen, helium is second most abundant element in the universe, but unfortunately it’s quite rare on Earth.

Credit to: Wikimedia Commons, Nov. 3, 2005

The Bohr model of a Helium Atom. Credit to: Wikimedia Commons, Nov. 3, 2005 (link)

This is because helium’s low mass allows it to escape Earth’s atmosphere and into outer space. Because of this, helium is only found trapped underground and is often mined together with deposits of natural gas. With no way of producing more, our access to the precious gas is finite and until recently scientists believed the world would run out with the next 25 to 30 years. The worlds largest supply of helium is in Amarillo, Texas with the Federal Helium Reserve which was stockpiling helium from 1925 until 1996 when the decision was made to sell it. While the scarcity of the gas has many worried, this flooding of the market resulted in helium’s rarity being poorly reflected in its price.

Fortunately, a new, massive deposit of helium was recently discovered in the Tanzanian East African Rift Valley. While this new reservoir brings relief to science and industry, it will only prolong the worlds helium shortage. Helium remains a limited resource, and should be conserved and recycled when possible, or we might find ourselves running out again.

– Kevin O’Connor (revised Oct. 13, 2016)

References:

What is the most abundant element? http://antoine.frostburg.edu/chem/senese/101/periodic/faq/what-element-is-most-abundant.shtml (accessed October 1, 2016)

Cryogenics: Low temperatures, high performance. CERN. https://home.cern/about/engineering/cryogenics-low-temperatures-high-performance (accessed October 1, 2016)

Helium. Royal Society of Chemistry. http://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/element/2/helium (accessed October 1, 2016)

Magill, B. As Shortage Worsens, We Visit the Federal Helium Reserve. http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a8289/as-shortage-worsens-we-visit-the-federal-helium-reserve-14720528/ (accessed October 1, 2016)

Harvey, C. The world is running dangerously low on helium. This discovery reinflates our supply. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/06/28/the-world-is-running-dangerously-low-on-helium-this-discovery-reinflates-our-supply/?utm_term=.62a6d2408852 (accessed October 1, 2016)

What Happens If We Run Out Of Helium? Dominguez, Trace. Dnews, YouTube.com. 19 July 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCorxPmmLa8 (accessed October 1, 2016)

Leave a comment

Posted in chemistry in the news

Tagged , ,