We have, of course, always been in it, even if, like me, we weren’t totally aware of our sexual orientation at the time. If I had been out back then, I almost certainly would not have brought it up in the middle of a pack meeting anyway; personal admissions like that don’t really fit in between a knot tutorial and planning the next hike. (It’s a strange fallacy of the anti-LGBT folks to think that just because someone is openly gay, he will always be talking openly about it.) “Letting in” is not the issue. Rather, what people such as Zach Wahls, Rick Perry, and President Obama, and the BSA itself and the rest are debating is what scouting means in our cultural lexicon—what, at its core, does scouting deem reverential and what should we revere about it?
On this point, it’s helpful to look beyond the right’s attempt to brand scouting as some kind of bastion of conservatism (it needn’t be) and turn to boy scouting’s pledge of allegiance, the Scout Oath. Here are the parts that, in practice, matter: “I will do my best.” “[I will] help other people at all times.” “[I will] keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.” It’s true that I’ve left out the “God” part in my highlights, even though much of the current dustup is swirling around it. That’s because I disagree that Boy Scouts is inextricably religious, even though atheists, like gays, are officially banned from scouting. (The Girl Scouts of the USA does not discriminate against gays or require scouts to promise to serve God.) Religion played a very minor role in the day-to-day life of my troop, really extending only so far as the Presbyterian roof over our meeting space and the performance of an occasional prayer. Perhaps other troops tote bibles along with their handbooks, but mine didn’t, and I suspect most operate in a similar fashion. Regardless of the organizational fine print, it was a pretty secular experience.
If faith is not the most reverential concept in real-world scouting, what is? Based on the oath, the answer is easy: care for others and care of the self. These simple twin ideas are, of course, worthy of the utmost respect, and more to the point, salutary to all young men regardless of their sexual orientation. This much will be clear to anyone who is not trying to use scouting as a pawn in the culture-war chess game. The fact that many troop leaders have already expressed that openly gay scouts and volunteers will not affect those core values reveals just how much of the anxiety is coming from the outside. If scouting means being an ethical agent in the world—being “morally straight,” as the oath ironically puts it—a scout’s sexuality is irrelevant.
Two of the wealthiest Western democracies are now on the verge of having full marriage equality: Britain and France. The vote yesterday in the Commons – 400 – 175 – was echoed in the French National Assembly five days ago – 249 – 97. These were not close votes. Yes, they have divided the British right – with a slim majority of Tory MPs in Britain deciding not to follow David Cameron’s modernizing lead. But those dissenters should not be confused with the Christianist opposition in the GOP. In the UK, gay couples in civil partnerships have almost all the rights of heterosexual married partners, including immigration rights, which John McCain just dismissed as utterly unimportant to him. The Conservative opposition in Britain was nonetheless in favor of consigning gays to a separate but equal category of civil partnerships. The Christianist opposition in America is in favor of denying gay couples any civil recognition or protection of any kind.
The difference is that between a conservative party seeking to govern a country and a religious party seeking an eternal culture war. But when the Supreme Court comes to weigh the issue next month, I think the fast-growing support for equality in America, especially among the young, the growing number of states in the US with marriage equality, and the overwhelming embrace of equality by many countries both physically close – Canada and Mexico – and historically close – Britain and France – will have an effect.
The new study, which was led by Helmut Lammer of the Space Research Institute (IWF) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, suggests that low density super-Earths are clinging to an extended hydrogen-rich atmospheric layer. These planets, therefore, are unlikely to ever become Earth-like.
Lammer and his team reached this conclusion after analyzing the effects of radiation on the upper atmospheres of super-Earths orbiting the stars Kepler-11, Gliese 1214, and 55 Cancri. All these planets are in relatively close orbits with their parent stars, and they're all suspected of containing solid cores surrounded by an atmosphere rich in hydrogen, water, and methane. The astronomers theorize that these primordial gasses were captured from nebulae during planet formation but have not had a chance to escape — nor will they ever.
Their subsequent analysis showed that the short wavelength extreme ultraviolet light coming in from the planets' respective stars are heating up the atmospheres. As a result, the envelopes are bloating up to a massive size — over several times the radius of each planet. Some of these gasses have escaped into space (in a complex process called "hydrodynamic blow-off"), but most of the protoatmosphere remains intact.
"The atmospheric mass loss of the studied super-Earths is one to two orders of magnitude lower compared to that of hot Jupiters," they write," so one can expect that these exoplanets cannot lose their hydrogen envelopes during their remaining lifetimes."
"We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an Earth-like planet. Now we realize another Earth is probably in our own backyard, waiting to be spotted," said Harvard astronomer and lead author Courtney Dressing (CfA).
Dressing presented her findings today in a press conference at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
Red dwarf stars are smaller, cooler, and fainter than our Sun. An average red dwarf is only one-third as large and one-thousandth as bright as the Sun. From Earth, no red dwarf is visible to the naked eye.
Despite their dimness, these stars are good places to look for Earth-like planets. Red dwarfs make up three out of every four stars in our galaxy for a total of at least 75 billion. The signal of a transiting planet is larger since the star itself is smaller, so an Earth-sized world blocks more of the star's disk. And since a planet has to orbit a cool star closer in order to be in the habitable zone, it's more likely to transit from our point of view.
[. . .]
Dressing identified 95 planetary candidates orbiting red dwarf stars. This implied that at least 60 percent of such stars have planets smaller than Neptune. However, most weren't quite the right size or temperature to be considered truly Earth-like. Three planetary candidates were both warm and approximately Earth-sized. Statistically, this means that six percent of all red dwarf stars should have an Earth-like planet.
"We now know the rate of occurrence of habitable planets around the most common stars in our galaxy," said co-author David Charbonneau (CfA). "That rate implies that it will be significantly easier to search for life beyond the solar system than we previously thought."
Our Sun is surrounded by a swarm of red dwarf stars. About 75 percent of the closest stars are red dwarfs. Since 6 percent of those should host habitable planets, the closest Earth-like world is likely to be just 13 light-years away.
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