[PHOTO] Times Square and the Statue of Liberty, New York City

It's fair to describe Times Square as an iconic space. It's the model for Toronto's Yonge-Dundas Square, even. It's funny how it was bigger than I remembered it from my 2002 visit.



A pose with an actor playing the Statue of Liberty cost me three dollars.



This is the Statue of Liberty, as seen from Battery Point Park.

[LINK] Two notes on possible environments for extraterrestrial life

I learned, via io9's George Dvorsky, that a new theory explaining the origin of Martian clays (covered by the Los Angeles Times' Amina Khan) might make the independent development of life on Mars in the planet's hypothesized warm youth that much less likely.

A paper published online Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience argues that [Martian] clays might have been formed in hot Martian magma rich in water. If so, that water would have been far too hot to support microbial life.

The argument stands in contrast to two more common theories, said study coauthor Bethany Ehlmann, a planetary geologist at Caltech. One of them is that liquid water flowing across the Martian surface would have interacted with surrounding minerals, forming the clays. In another scenario, underground water warmed by the planet's internal heat could have provided a comfortable living before it got bound up in the mineral structure of clays.

On Earth, clays are remarkably good at trapping organic material. So if organic compounds existed on Mars, clays would be a good place to find them.

If either of the prevailing theories about water is true, the Martian environment could have been hospitable for life, Ehlmann said. Superheated water and magma? Not so much.

"The clays would form as the lava cools from 1,500 degrees Celsius," she said. "That would not be a good habitat."

[. . .]

It's possible that all three models could be right, depending on where you're looking, said Ralph Milliken, a planetary scientist at Brown University who was not involved in the study.

"It's certainly a different take on trying to explain the origin of some clay minerals on Mars," he said. "It does have some merit, and alternative hypotheses need to be considered fully."

But he said the story laid out in the new paper doesn't explain why the Martian surface appears to have tracks cut by flowing liquid. Nor does it account for blueberry-shaped mineral deposits of hematite that scientists believe may have formed when water ran past them.

Elsewhere, Universe Today's Nancy Atkinson noted new calculations for planetary habitability that take into account the habitability of subsurface environments. It should be noted that these environments--solid rock, more or less--are suitable for bacterial life, as on Earth, not for more complex organisms.

We know that a large fraction of the Earth’s biomass is dwelling down below, and recently microbiologists discovered bacterial life, 1.4 kilometers below the sea floor in the North Atlantic, deeper in the Earth’s crust than ever before. This and other drilling projects have brought up evidence of hearty microbes thriving in deep rock sediments. Some derive energy from chemical reactions in rocks and others feed on organic seepage from life on the surface. But most life requires at least some form of water.

“Life ‘as we know it’ requires liquid water,” said Sean McMahon, a PhD student from the University of Aberdeen’s (Scotland) School of Geosciences. “Traditionally, planets have been considered ‘habitable’ if they are in the ‘Goldilocks zone’. They need to be not too close to their sun but also not too far away for liquid water to persist, rather than boiling or freezing, on the surface. However, we now know that many micro-organisms—perhaps half of all living things on Earth—reside deep in the rocky crust of the planet, not on the surface.”

While suns warm planet surfaces, there’ also heat from the planets’ interiors. Crust temperature increases with depth so planets that are too cold for liquid water on the surface may be sufficiently warm underground to support life.

“We have developed a new model to show how ‘Goldilocks zones’ can be calculated for underground water and hence life,” McMahon said. “Our model shows that habitable planets could be much more widespread than previously thought.”

In the past, the Goldilocks zone has really been determined by a circumstellar habitable zone (CHZ), which is a range of distances from a star, and depending on the star’s characteristics, the zone varies. The consensus has been that planets that form from Earth-like materials within a star’s CHZ are able to maintain liquid water on their surfaces.

But McMahon and his professor, John Parnell, also from Aberdeen University who is leading the study now are introducing a new term: subsurface-habitability zone (SSHZ). This denote the range of distances from a star within which planets are habitable at any depth below their surfaces up to a certain maximum, for example, they mentioned a “SSHZ for 2 km depth”, within which planets can support liquid water 2 km or less underground.

[LINK] "Is Triton Hiding an Underground Ocean?"

The answer to the question posed in the title of Jason Major's Universe Today article is almost certainly yes.

Neptune's moon Triton is noteworthy not only as the largest moon of Neptune, captured in a hypothesized near-collision eons ago, but as a prototype for the worlds of the Kuiper Belt, the belt of icy bodies (including dwarf planets) beyond Neptune's orbit that includes the famous dwarf planet binary of Pluto and Charon. A Triton that, heated by tidal friction with Neptune and the decay of heavy elements in its core, has an ammonia-doped water ocean underneath its surface not only adds to the long list of outer Solar System bodies thought to have subsurface oceans like Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's Enceladus, but also has obvious implications for the wider Kuiper Belt.

Briefly visited by Voyager 2 in late August 1989, Triton was found to have a curiously mottled and rather reflective surface nearly half-covered with a bumpy “cantaloupe terrain” and a crust made up of mostly water ice, wrapped around a dense core of metallic rock. But researchers from the University of Maryland are suggesting that between the ice and rock may lie a hidden ocean of water, kept liquid despite estimated temperatures of -97°C (-143°F), making Triton yet another moon that could have a subsurface sea.

How could such a chilly world maintain an ocean of liquid water for any length of time? For one thing, the presence of ammonia inside Triton would help to significantly lower the freezing point of water, making for a very cold — not to mention nasty-tasting — subsurface ocean that refrains from freezing solid.

In addition to this, Triton may have a source of internal heat — if not several. When Triton was first captured by Neptune’s gravity its orbit would have initially been highly elliptical, subjecting the new moon to intense tidal flexing that would have generated quite a bit of heat due to friction (not unlike what happens on Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io.) Although over time Triton’s orbit has become very nearly circular around Neptune due to the energy loss caused by such tidal forces, the heat could have been enough to melt a considerable amount of water ice trapped beneath Triton’s crust.

Another possible source of heat is the decay of radioactive isotopes, an ongoing process which can heat a planet internally for billions of years. Although not alone enough to defrost an entire ocean, combine this radiogenic heating with tidal heating and Triton could very well have enough warmth to harbor a thin, ammonia-rich ocean beneath an insulating “blanket” of frozen crust for a very long time — although eventually it too will cool and freeze solid like the rest of the moon. Whether this has already happened or still has yet to happen remains to be seen, as several unknowns are still part of the equation.

“I think it is extremely likely that a subsurface ammonia-rich ocean exists in Triton,” said Saswata Hier-Majumder at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology, whose team’s paper was recently published in the August edition of the journal Icarus. “[Yet] there are a number of uncertainties in our knowledge of Triton’s interior and past which makes it difficult to predict with absolute certainty.”

[LINK] "9/11/12 in Libya and Egypt"

bradhicks has an excellent background post describing the actual factors triggering attacks on American diplomatic missions in the Middle East.

The stories out of Libya and Egypt broke just as I was going to bed. (I sleep at weird hours in my old age.) When I woke up, and skimmed a half-dozen news sites to see what had changed and started to write something up, only to find out that Richard Engel was going to be on Rachel Maddow's show, so I sat down and shut up and waited politely, because what Richard Engel doesn't know about the current politics of the Middle East, and the players, I could calligraph onto my thumbnail with a Speedball C-3 point. I would, frankly, think more highly of any politician if, anytime something surprising happened in the middle east, when he was asked about it, said, "I don't know, yet, I'm waiting to hear from Richard Engel." It turns out he didn't have a lot more to say than was on the other sites, but Maddow's intro story had the pieces I was missing.

What happened yesterday breaks down into four very distinct stories, and don't trust anybody who tries to lump them together: (1) the military-style assault on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed our ambassador to Libya and burned down the consulate; (2) the completely unrelated mob protest on the US embassy in Cairo that was, almost inexplicably, allowed to enter and vandalize the compound; (3) the covert-ops media provocation that was behind the Cairo riot; and (4) the story of how one American political campaign tried to politicize this before knowing any of the facts and shot their foot off. I'm not going to say anything further about story #4; it's beneath my contempt and will, frankly, no longer matter when people's attention drifts away from in it the next couple of days. But those first three stories have fascinating back story, and/or fascinating recent reporting, that you may want to know while your co-workers and friends are blathering about them.

[. . .]

It doesn't make any sense to talk about what just happened, either in Libya or in Egypt, without catching you up on what's been happening in each of those countries since their previous military dictatorships were toppled, a year and a half ago, in the Arab Spring. Both countries are having the same problem that every post-revolutionary government has in its first couple of years: until the victorious side (and, to some extent, the supporters of the vanquished out-going government, and to even larger extent the vast majority who don't care as long as they have a job and can afford to pay their bills and there's some semblance of policing and sanitation) agree on what constitutes a legitimate post-dictatorship government, there are a lot of heavily armed groups running around, confident that they can overthrow the next government if they don't like it any better, who remain to be convinced that they won't need to.

Read this vital commentary.

[BRIEF NOTE] On a certain Coptic diaspora radicalism

Slate's The Slatest column notes that the identity of the man responsible for the film trailer that triggered the ongoing rioting in the Middle East has been discovered.

[T]he Associated Press has solved the mystery of who was behind the anti-Islam film believed to have sparked this week's violent protests at U.S. missions in Egypt, Libya, and throughout the Middle East.

That man is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a 55-year-old Coptic Christian with a criminal past who lives in California, according to the news wire's digging, which has been backed up by a federal law enforcement official.

In an interview with the AP, Nakoula admitted to providing logistical support for the production of Innocence of Muslims but denied being "Sam Bacile," the name given as the film's maker. But the evidence cobbled together by AP reporters Gillian Flaccus and Stephen Braun suggests otherwise.

The AP was one of a handful of media outlets to publish an interview early Wednesday with a man who claimed to be Bacile. Reporters traced the cellphone number used during that interview to Nakoula's address and, once there, noticed that Nakoula covered up his middle name of "Basseley" with his thumb when displaying his driver's license.

A little more digging on the part of Flaccus and Braun led to the discovery that Nakoula pleaded no contest in 2010 to bank fraud charges, had used numerous aliases in the past, and had a number of connections to the Bacile persona. An unnamed U.S. law enforcement official later confirmed to the AP that they had the right man.

One thread of Hicks' analysis connects the film to the discontent of many Copts, Egypt's indigenous Christian population that is increasingly being driven by persecution into the wider world.

According to the film's press release, the film was produced and financed by an Israeli real estate developer named Sam Bacile. Now that protesters have succeeded in attracting attention, it took reporters less than 24 hours to tie the film to two Egyptians, both Coptic Christians: the film was financed and produced by convicted bank fraudster Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, and promoted by an Egyptian anti-Muslim politician who's claimed religious asylum in the US following Islamist violence against Copts, Morris Sadek. Nobody has reported, yet, on Nakoula's motive, but Sadek's isn't hard to guess: he claims to have lost family when an Islamist mob attacked Copts during the chaos of the Arab Spring.

Because of that, Sadek is seen as sympathetic by some Copts back home; some of them read his web page, his attempt to create a Coptic "government in exile" for Egypt, and presumably gossiped about it. The gossip about the film caught the attention of a couple of medium-obscure Egyptian religious figures who have shows on satellite TV, who utterly misunderstood the word "premier" to mean something like a Hollywood premier, which would usually mean a kick-off to global distribution. Those TV networks are watched by dozens of people in many cities, all of whom showed up at US embassies and consulates to protest. And, frankly, nobody would have noticed or cared; ill-informed religious fanatics showing up by the half-dozens to protest something that only exists in their heads is something that happens every couple of days, maybe every day, somewhere in the world. But because someone, probably al Qaeda in Libya, coincidentally picked that same day for a medium-impressive military raid, this time you heard about it.

I blogged about the Copts last year at Demography Matters, as an example of a group that--subject to significant levels of persecution--is inclined to overestimate its demographic weight to compensate for the fear that it might no longer exist in its homeland. One blogger writing this year suggests that, if anything, the influences encouraging Coptic emigration are growing.

I've read in the past about some Coptic emigres sponsoring anti-Muslim media productions. Nakoula's is likely the most successful one so far, at least insofar as global media attention and foreign deaths are concerned. I fear that the actions of this one man may make things much worse for the co-religionists he claims to care about.