• Everything you know about dinosaurs is wrong: Tour guide sets you straight

    Courtesy of Brian Switek

    Dinosaur enthusiast Brian Switek surveys Utah's landscape during a road trip — and surveys the state of dinosaur lore in "My Beloved Brontosaurus."

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    When it comes to dinosaurs and other prehistoric monsters, even the experts can get things wrong — as dino-fanatic Brian Switek explains in his tour guide to the paleontological frontier.

    The righting of wrongness begins with the title of Switek's book: "My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road With Old Bones, New Science and Our Favorite Dinosaurs." As most 9-year-olds could probably tell you, there's officially no such thing as a Brontosaurus. That name for the quintessential long-tailed, long-necked sauropod went out of fashion when scientists figured out that the Jurassic giant had already been dubbed Apatosaurus.

    Nevertheless, the brontosaur serves as a totem for Switek, a prolific science writer whose work has appeared in Wired, Smithsonian, Slate, Scientific American and now most frequently on National Geographic's Phenomena blog network (as Laelaps). His earlier book, "Written in Stone," laid out the broad sweep of stories told by the fossil record — and in "My Beloved Brontosaurus," he focuses in on the what, where and when of the dinosaurs' heyday in the Mesozoic Era.

    As you page through the book, you'll learn that not all dinosaurs have gone extinct. (Birds are dinosaurs.) You'll find out that the dinosaurs didn't start out as the rulers of the reptiles. (Crocodilians came first.) You'll delve into the back-and-forth debates that have occupied paleontologists for decades. (Was T. rex a hunter or a scavenger? Almost certainly both.) And you'll also get some great tips for future road trips in the American West.

    Listen to an excerpt from the audiobook edition of "My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs" by author Brian Switek, read by the author.

    Misconceptions and marvels
    Switek talked about dinosaurs and tour directions during an interview last week. Here's an edited version of the Q&A that will whet your appetite for "My Beloved Brontosaurus":

    Q: So many myths about dinosaurs are exploded in your book, but is there one big misconception that you want to set people straight about?

    A: There’s one misconception that has a flip side to it, and that’s that dinosaurs are totally extinct. Birds are living dinosaurs. We figured that out about 20 years ago. So whenever we talk about the age of dinosaurs millions of years ago, and how all the dinosaurs are gone, that’s demonstrably not true. At least one lineage is still with us today.

    The flip side of that is that dinosaurs became dominant as soon as they appeared — that the dawn of the dinosaurs sparked an immediate rise to ascendancy. The fact is that dinosaurs started out relatively small. They were relatively marginal. They really weren’t all that important until the extinction at the end of the Triassic period, about 200 million years ago, wiped away all the weird crocodile relatives that were the dominant land animals at the time. So the dinosaurian reign was made possible by, and then winnowed back by, extinction. It’s these wonderful extinction bookends that explain not only their origin, but their ultimate destination, bringing us to the birds that live today.

    Q: Another issue is the appeal of dinosaurs: For some kids, dino-mania is almost a rite of passage. I love the idea that the book jacket for “My Beloved Brontosaurus” is also a fold-out dinosaur poster — what dinosaur fan wouldn’t love that? What is it about dinosaurs that makes them so appealing, particularly to kids?

    A: I think they’re appealing because they demand answers of us. People have been wondering about dinosaurs, pondering what they were and what they were like, even before there was a name for them. I don’t just mean European naturalists. I mean Native Americans, people in ancient Greece and Rome, people in ancient China and India. People in all those cultures found dinosaur bones. They knew that these were the remains of once-living animals, and they created stories of monsters and heroes, myths and legends about creatures from distant times. So we were wondering about the dinosaurs before we even knew what they were.

    That continues now, because there’s nothing quite like the dinosaurs. Yes, birds are living dinosaurs – but there’s so much more. There’s nothing like Apatosaurus, or Triceratops, or Tyrannosaurus rex around right now. When you look at their bones, questions immediately come to mind: What did they look like? What did they sound like? How quickly did they move? What did their environment look like? To me, it’s impossible to hear the dinosaur story without wondering about these questions.

    Answering these questions puts our own existence in context. You can say all this happened 66 million years ago – but wait a second: What was America like back then? How did it all change? That brings up some very powerful truths about extinction, evolution and survival.  It’s these clues from our own distant past and our planet’s distant past that act as milestones by which we can understand our own existence.

    J. Brougham / AMNH file

    Experts say Tyrannosaurus rex may have had a downy layer of feathers, and probably had a coloration that was more varied than the stereotypical green.

    Q: Another way that the book could be read is as a travelogue. It’s almost structured as a series of road trips that you’ve taken to explore all these fantastic fossils. And in fact, that’s what you’re doing along with your book tour. If there’s one dream trip that dinosaur fanatics should take, where would you tell them to go?

    A: This is sort of a plug for my home state of Utah: There’s a byway system called the Dinosaur Diamond that runs through a good part of the state and includes the Dinosaur National Monument, where 150 million-year-old fossils are preserved in place; and the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry, a place where over 46 individual allosaurs and other dinosaurs have been found. You can head up to Salt Lake City, where the Natural History Museum of Utah opened this last year. As you drive along those highways, there are various dinosaur trackways, lots of attractions, lots of dinosaur celebrities. So if anyone’s looking for a weeklong trip in the American West, that’s the best pre-planned tour there is for a dino fan.

    Q: in terms of the frontiers for dinosaur research, there’s been talk about Jack Horner’s "Chickenosaurus" project, and there are always new perspectives on how dinosaurs lived and died. What do you see as the next big thing for dinosaur research?

    A: Researchers are finding ways to draw out clues about how dinosaurs actually lived, through new technologies that can be applied to a variety of animals. So we’re looking at the development of better CT scanning technology. Improved CT technology is helping paleontologists get down to a degree of resolution they’ve never had before — and they’re finding clues about bone structure to a degree that was just not possible before.

    What’s really exciting to me is the study of dinosaur color. It’s a field that’s moving forward by comparing fossil feathers to modern ones. Paleontologists are starting to reconstruct what colors the dinosaurs actually were. They might be able to identify the evolutionary advantages of colors, degrees of coloration, and maybe some aspects of sexual dimorphism. Everything we’re learning about dinosaur biology is filling in the picture of how they lived in a much more meaningful way.

    Q: You mentioned that dinosaurs are appealing to us in part because they tell us how extinction works, and how our own distant past might have unfolded. That suggests that the study of dinosaurs can hold lessons for the 21st century. How can the dinosaur experience best be applied to our own human experience?

    A: Dinosaurs shaped our evolution. People often say that the rise of mammals was made possible by the disappearance of all those non-avian dinosaurs. That's true, but it's not just that. Mammals lived alongside the dinosaurs — things like Stegosaurus and Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus. By keeping our furry little ancestors in the shadows, the dinosaurs set the stage for the later evolution of primates.

    Yes, those dinosaurs disappeared. But beyond that, we know that we’re changing the global climate in drastic ways. We know we’re distributing invasive species around the world. By looking back at the fossil record, and seeing how dinosaurs reacted to drastic changes, we can begin to outline how organisms today and in the future are going to react to the same sorts of changes. Dinosaurs might hold clues about our future. The past isn't just a static monument to what once was. The fossil record also carries lessons about what will be. 

    For much, much more about dinosaur wrongness and rightness, check out the latest 'Virtually Speaking Science' podcast with Switek and University of Maryland paleontologist Tom Holtz. You can download a variety of VSS podcasts from BlogTalkRadio or iTunes.

    More 'Virtually Speaking Science' podcasts:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

    This story was originally published on Wed May 1, 2013 4:50 PM EDT

  • Internet takes education to new level: Will universities make the grade?

    Dozens of elite institutions are now partnering with start-up companies such as Coursera, Udacity and edX, to deliver massive open online courses. NBC's Rehema Ellis reports.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    More and more universities have made a place for the Internet in today's educational offerings, but will universities still have a place in tomorrow's educational environment?

    "We're about to undergo a tectonic transformation in education," Caltech astrophysicist George Djorgovski, a pioneer in scientific applications for virtual worlds, told me on Wednesday. "This is the start of an 'S' curve, and universities will be unrecognizable in a decade or two."

    The rapid rise of next-generation distance education, and what it means for educational institutions, is our theme on "Virtually Speaking Science," an hour-long talk show that goes out to listeners on BlogTalkRadio and to a live audience in the Second Life virtual world. Djorgovski is my guest beginning at 9 p.m. ET Wednesday. If you miss hearing the show live, don't fret: You can always catch up with it as a podcast on BlogTalkRadio or iTunes.

    Djorgovski has had years of experience in virtual worlds, thanks to his role as the director of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics. MICA closed down last year, but Djorgovski is still involved in virtual-reality projects — including the first class that he taught as a massive open online course, or MOOC. "Galaxies and Cosmology" was offered over the Internet via Coursera, one of several MOOC ventures.

    "It took way more work than I thought," Djorgovski recalled.

    More than 28,000 students signed up online, and 2,000 stayed on for the whole course. One of the students was an 80-year-old Caltech alumnus. "I was impressed and surprised by just how dedicated these online students are," Djorgovski said. "This was not a goofball pretty-picture class, this was a serious course with differential equations."

    Djorgovski set up a Facebook page for the course and kept office hours in Second Life. Although most of the students interacted through Coursera's discussion forums, about a dozen of them sent their computerized avatars to visit "Curious George" in his virtual office. "All of those who did were absolutely delighted," Djorgovski said. "They thought this was the greatest thing."

    Second Life / Courtesy of George Djorgovski

    Caltech astrophysicist George Djorgovski, a.k.a. Curious George, holds office hours for his cosmology course in the Second Life virtual world.

    No money changes hands, and no college credits are given for completing the course. Nevertheless, the experience showed Djorgovski that "there is this great need or desire for extended education in some novel sense." For many of the international students, MOOCs provide the only way to get the kind of knowledge that America's universities can offer.

    But MOOCs also raise deep questions for universities. "Now everybody's thinking, how are they going to do this?" Djorgovski said. "You can get 80 percent of higher education online for free, so why would you spend $300,000?"

    Djorgovski said he's less interested in the business aspects, and more interested in the long-term effects on academic institutions. He wonders whether the research and the educational functions of a university will become decoupled, particularly at the undergraduate level. And he wonders whether educators will adapt. The idea of forcing educators and students to be in the same physical location may seem terribly outmoded in the year 2033.

    "We will not be firing 99 percent of the professors, but I think their jobs will change," Djorgovski said. "It may be an even more painful transition than it has been in other fields. If we are lucky, it will be as mild as journalism or the music industry. If we are not lucky, it will be like buggy whips."

    Do you agree? Tune in "Virtually Speaking Science" on Wednesday, join the audience in Second Life, or download the podcast later.

    'Virtually Speaking Science' podcasts:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

    "Virtually Speaking Science" airs on Wednesdays on BlogTalkRadio, with a live audience in the Exploratorium's Second Life auditorium. In addition to Alan Boyle, the hosts include Tom Levenson, director of MIT's graduate program in science writing; and Jennifer Ouellette, science writer and "Cocktail Party Physics" blogger.

  • Beyond NASA: Meet the folks who are planning trips to moon and Mars

    Golden Spike

    An artist's conception from the Golden Spike Company shows a lunar lander in the foreground, and a moonwalking astronaut in the background.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Selling trips to the moon? Sending astronauts to Mars and back? These sound like 1960s-era science fiction adventures, but they're actually in the works for later this decade. Will these privately backed projects get off the ground? That's the billion-dollar question.

    The Golden Spike Company says it's in talks with one corporation and more than one space agency about sending a two-person expedition to the moon in the 2020 time frame, at a cost of $1.4 billion per mission. Meanwhile, the Inspiration Mars Foundation is getting ready to launch a man and a woman, preferably a middle-aged married couple, on a round-trip flyby past Mars in 2018.

    The two ventures are the focus of Wednesday night's installment of "Virtually Speaking Science," a talk show that airs online via BlogTalkRadio with a live audience in the Second Life virtual world. I'm your host, and my guests are Taber MacCallum, Inspiration Mars' chief technology officer; and Doug Griffith, general counsel for Golden Spike.

    The hour-long show starts at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT), but if you miss the live program, never fear: You can always download the podcast from BlogTalkRadio's archive or iTunes.

    Both Golden Spike and Inspiration Mars are getting advice and moral support from NASA, but the financial support is coming from elsewhere. The lunar venture expects to bootstrap its way to profitability by selling its services — and initially through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign aimed at raising $240,000 (one dollar for each mile to the moon) by late April. So far, more than $7,500 has been contributed.

    To Mars and back
    Inspiration Mars is relying on seed money from California millionaire Dennis Tito, who became the first tourist to visit the International Space Station in 2001. Tito said his effort to send a spacecraft zooming past Mars during a favorable planetary alignment in 2018 is purely philanthropic, with the goal of inspiring future generations of Americans.

    MacCallum, who took part in the Biosphere 2 experiment in 1991-1992 and went on to become a co-founder of Paragon Space Development Corp., said he's already noticed the inspirational effect.

    "I keep hearing people say, 'This is the kind of thing America used to do, and maybe now we can do it again.' It's like we touched on a sore spot, and the reaction has been ... almost too positive," MacCallum said.

    He said Tito's aim was merely to get some introductory exposure for the concept, in hopes that all the kinks can be worked out in time to make the 2018 deadline. Tito has committed to supporting the venture for its first two years, but he needs to raise the rest of the money for what's rumored to be a billion-dollar mission.

    The team hasn't yet worked out the procedure for selecting the crew, but MacCallum said more than 100 applications have already been sent in — including some candidates with jaw-dropping credentials. "There are some where you say to yourself, 'Oh, my gosh!'" MacCallum told me. "Hey, listen, it's suddenly cool to be a middle-aged couple."

    To the moon
    Unlike Inspiration Mars, Golden Spike is set up as a business, which will ultimately have to be supported by paying customers. The idea is to provide two-person trips to the moon for roughly the same cost as today's robotic missions to the moon. Golden Spike aims to do that by employing high-tech, low-cost hardware as well as a relatively low-risk mission architecture. The company plans to pre-position a lander in lunar orbit, and only then send the crew and their moon-and-back booster on a subsequent pair of launches.

    "Before it even launches, we know that the lander is working," said Griffith, who is drawing upon years of experience in space and aviation law.

    Griffith said Golden Spike will serve as the outer-space analog of, say, United Airlines, contracting with other companies for flight hardware. The company is working on design studies for launch vehicles, landers and other equipment. It's also talking with potential customers — and trying to convince the skeptics that it's really possible to put people on the moon, almost half a century after NASA did it in 1969.

    "The consensus seems to be that it's doable within the prices we're talking about," Griffith said. "All of the skepticism seems to be about whether there are space agencies or billionaires who are willing to pay the price. That is the big unknown. ... I think we'll know in fairly short order whether the skeptics are right or wrong."

    Griffith said Golden Spike's game plan calls for signing up its first customers for "right of first refusal" deals by the middle of the year, and getting its first flight contract by the end of this year.

    "Our operating premise is not that we keep sliding things back," Griffith told me. "Our operating premise for now is, it's go time."

    Are Golden Spike and Inspiration Mars ready for takeoff, or will we have to wait for NASA to send astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid in the mid-2020s, and to Mars and its moons in the mid-2030s? Listen in to "Virtually Speaking Science" and feel free to weigh in with your own views, either by taking part in the live show or by leaving your comments below.

    'Virtually Speaking Science' podcasts:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

    "Virtually Speaking Science" airs on Wednesdays on BlogTalkRadio, with a live audience in the Exploratorium's Second Life auditorium. In addition to Alan Boyle, the hosts include Tom Levenson, director of MIT's graduate program in science writing; and Jennifer Ouellette, science writer and "Cocktail Party Physics" blogger.

  • How to check the X Files of physics

    CERN file

    The Large Hadron Collider, shown here during its construction phase, is the locale where physicists hope many of their most puzzling cases will be solved. But there are other mysteries to ponder in the cosmos.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    They may not be on a par with alien goo or liver-eating mutants, but there's a whole collection of real-life X Files that physicists are puzzling over. Some cases eventually will be solved, like the hunt for the elusive Higgs boson. Some will fizzle out, like the case of the faster-than-light neutrinos. And some will baffle the boffins for years and years, like the mystery of dark energy.

    Two sharp-eyed truth-squadders discussed how scientists investigate the X Files of physics — and how you can tell when a scientific case is really, truly closed — on "Virtually Speaking Science," an hourlong talk show hosted by yours truly on Wednesday.

    Sean M. Carroll and Matt Strassler aren't FBI agents, although they could probably teach Fox Mulder and Dana Scully of "The X Files" a thing or two about critical thinking. They're theoretical physicists (Sean at Caltech, Matt at Rutgers) as well as accomplished writers and bloggers. Carroll is the author of several books, including "The Particle at the End of the Universe," his account of the Higgs boson search. Strassler performs reality checks on the Higgs quest and other big topics in physics on his blog, "Of Particular Significance."

    What kinds of X Files are we talking about? Here a sampler:

    The proton problem is "one of those classic scientific puzzles where what's actually going on is probably some other type of issue in the experiment, or the interpretation of the experiment, that doesn't have anything to do with the radius of the proton," Strassler told me during our pre-show interview. "There's a small chance that it's something fundamental and really deep, but it's more likely to turn out to be some little detail."

    That sort of thing goes on all the time in science, he said. In fact, some degree of uncertainty surrounds many of the experimental results produced by the scientific process. Professional scientists understand that's "par for the course," Strassler said. "The only thing that's unusual is the level of media attention."

    Rutgers

    Rutgers physicist Matt Strassler

    Sean Carroll via Google+

    Caltech physicist Sean Carroll

    Are there any tricks of the trade that regular folks can use to figure out how to judge a scientific claim's solidity? Actually, there are plenty. But Strassler's top tip is to develop a better understanding of how news outlets work, and how scientific announcements work.

    "We all know how to read advertisements. We know they're selling us something," he said. "But we don't necessarily know how to read an article on the front page of The New York Times or an article in Newsweek. They have a big, exciting topic, but when you look closely, you realize that it's only one person saying this. Or there's been one experiment that shows this. If there's only one, it may be nothing. It may go away."

    Carroll said scientists themselves are getting into the public outreach field — either by blogging, as he does on Preposterous Universe, or by creating videos and other user-friendly materials about their research. "It'd be great if more scientists wanted to become regular contributors, to at least try to explain their most recent work," Carroll said.

    "I can play devil's advocate on that one," Strassler said. "I worry about us generating so much information that no one's able to sift through and get to the meat of what we really know and what we don't." 

    "That's a very interesting topic," Carroll replied. "There's a lot of information out there. In some sense, we could still use more, but it's a matter of finding it. That's the big challenge."

    To find the podcast for Wednesday's show, just follow this link. You can also cruise through the "Virtually Speaking Science" podcast archives at BlogTalkRadio or iTunes, or click on the links below.

    'Virtually Speaking Science' podcasts:

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

    "Virtually Speaking Science" airs on Wednesdays on BlogTalkRadio. In addition to Alan Boyle, the hosts include Tom Levenson, director of MIT's graduate program in science writing; and Jennifer Ouellette, science writer and "Cocktail Party Physics" blogger.

    First published at 7:08 p.m. ET Feb. 6, last updated at 10:30 p.m. ET.

  • 2012's Maya non-apocalypse takes the grand prize for weird science

    Jean-Philippe Arles / Reuters

    Residents dressed as extraterrestrials with green-painted faces walk the streets of Bugarach, France, which was touted as a safe haven from the end of the world on Dec. 21, 2012.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    The hype over last month's supposed Maya doomsday has won honors as the weirdest science story of the past year — and although there wasn't all that much science to the claim that the ancient culture's calendar foretold the end of the world, the whole episode was a classic example of people putting too much faith in way-out calculations.

    "A year before that, we gave one of our prizes to a whole bunch of people who made specific prediction about when the world would end," said Marc Abrahams, who heads up the Ig Nobel Prize program for silly science. The big lesson? "When you make mathematical calculations, you should check your assumptions," Abrahams told me.

    Abrahams and I sifted through the scientific silliness of the past year, including the Maya non-apocalypse, tonight on "Virtually Speaking Science," an hourlong talk show on BlogTalkRadio online and in the Second Life virtual world. If you missed the live webcast, don't worry: You can catch up with the podcast by checking out the archive on BlogTalkRadio and iTunes.

    How did the hubbub surrounding the Maya calendar get started? It began decades ago with the suggestion that the ancient Maya may have seen the end of their 5,125-year-long cycle of creation as the opening for a cosmic Armageddon. Although archaeologists have shot down that hypothesis, the idea persisted — and got mixed up with other end-of-the-world ideas.

    Abrahams suspects that the idea got a push from folks who could profit from a little doomsday buzz: "Some people made money on it — especially people who wrote books about it or made TV shows about it. The prediction certainly did have monetary value for a few people."

    The Internet served a dual role in all this: The bad thing about the Internet is that it's easy for someone to make a way-out claim in some dark corner of the Web — whether we're talking about ancient calendars or alien-looking space blobs. The good thing is that there are lots of knowledgeable sources willing to do a reality check on remarkable claims. That applies not only to doomsday myths, but also to more strictly scientific issues such as the potential for arsenic-based life or the existence of extraterrestrial microbes.

    "When some piece of news gets out there about scientific discoveries, almost always that's the start of some long messy conversation between lots and lots of people," Abrahams observed. "They're almost immediately looking things up and arguing about something they actually saw, rather than something they heard tenth-hand. That's something new for the world. There's a lot of nonsense that gets shot down a lot earlier than it did before."

    Some of the other stories that made the top-10 list for the 2013 Weird Science Awards may sound almost nonsensical — but for the most part, they're way more substantive. That's the key indicator for the kind of scientific silliness that Abrahams is interested in for the Ig Nobels: "achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." Take a look at the list, then tune in "Virtually Speaking Science" for a few laughs — and maybe a few deep thoughts as well:

    2013 Weirdie winners:

    Still more weird science:

    More podcasts from 'Virtually Speaking Science':

    "Virtually Speaking Science" is hosted in Second Life by the Exploratorium. Theoretical physicists Sean Carroll and Matt Strassler will be my guests on Feb. 6 for a show about the frontiers of physics.

     Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Mars hype teaches science lessons

    NBC's Brian Williams reports on the Curiosity mission's latest findings from Mars.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Was this week's news from the Mars Curiosity mission overhyped? Or did it illustrate what happens when the scientific process collides with today's revved-up media maelstrom? "We're doing science at the speed of science ... in a world that's sort of at the pace of Instagrams," the mission's chief scientist, John Grotzinger, told reporters.

    Paul Doherty, the senior staff scientist at San Francisco's Exploratorium, instantly got what Grotzinger was talking about when he referred to the speed of science.

    "I know as a scientist what that means," Doherty said. "That means slow."

    Doherty and I will be discussing this week's reports from the Red Planet at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT / SLT) today on "Virtually Speaking Science," an hourlong talk show that airs on BlogTalkRadio as well as in the Second Life virtual world. You can listen in live, or you can hear the archived version as a podcast via BlogTalkRadio or iTunes.

    Doherty was in the audience on Monday when Grotzinger and his colleagues did the big reveal at the American Geophysical Union's meeting in San Francisco: Curiosity's most capable scientific lab detected the presence of some intriguing chemicals, including a highly reactive substance known as perchlorate and three types of chloromethane. But scientists couldn't yet confirm whether the methane compounds came from Mars, or whether they were cooked up using earthly carbon molecules that were left over inside Curiosity.

    Modesto Tamez

    Paul Doherty is senior staff scientist at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

    That's a far cry from the earthshaking news that folks were hoping for, based on the excited comments that Grotzinger made to NPR just a couple of weeks earlier. At that time, Grotzinger said the data set he was seeing would be "one for the history books," leading some to expect that the science team was on the verge of reporting signs of life on Mars.

    Again, Doherty knows where Grotzinger was coming from. The Curiosity team had just confirmed that its readings were yielding consistent results in multiple tests. "That's what got Grotzinger so excited," Doherty said. That enthusiasm over the fact that the instruments were actually working, and would eventually produce findings worth putting in the history books, was misread as a sign that big news was imminent.

    It will take weeks or months to confirm where the chloromethane compounds were coming from. "Give scientists time, that's the big lesson," Doherty said.

    Grotzinger said they could be the result of earthly contamination, or chemical processes on Mars, or the delivery of organics from outer space by meteorites or other cosmic stuff falling onto the Red Planet. Doherty leans toward the third option.

    "I suspect that there were some organics in the soil, maybe meteoritic in origin," Doherty said. "I'm thinking not biological, not contamination. But what do I know?"

    It turns out that Doherty, who received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT in 1974, does know a thing or two about this subject. He told me he worked on the Mars Viking mission in 1976, "looking for ice crystal halos around the sun, which we never found." But his forte is the ability to explain science to the general public, and he's up for doing a lot of that tonight.

    In addition to the latest from Mars, he's ready to talk about other findings reported at the AGU — the new gravity map of the moon, for example, or today's "Black Marble" images of Earth at night. Here's hoping you'll be able to join us for tonight's "Virtually Speaking Science" session, on BlogTalkRadio or in Second Life.

    More from 'Virtually Speaking Science':

    Virtually Speaking Science" is hosted in Second Life by the Exploratorium. Ig Nobel founder Marc Abrahams will be my guest on Jan. 2 for a lighthearted look back at the weird science of 2012, including the Maya apocalypse ... assuming we all survive.

     Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Climate issue heats up after Sandy

    MSNBC's Thomas Roberts talks to Chris Hayes, host of "Up with Chris Hayes" about the impact of Hurricane Sandy and talk of climate change.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    The climate change issue has been virtually a non-issue during the presidential campaign — but it's primed to take a higher profile after the elections, in part due to Hurricane Sandy's horrific aftermath. At least that's the view of Shawn Lawrence Otto, one of the founders of ScienceDebate.org and author of "Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science of America."

    Otto focused on climate politics during Wednesday night's installment of "Virtually Speaking Science," a talk show airing online and in the Second Life virtual world. You can hear an archived version of the hourlong program, hosted by yours truly, via the BlogTalkRadio archive or iTunes.

    Hurricane Sandy already has re-energized the debate over the global effects of escalating greenhouse-gas emissions.

    On one side, experts point to the fact that this season's warmer seas helped the storm keep up its strength as it moved northward, and that higher sea levels added to the strength of Sandy's storm surge. Such conditions are expected to be more common if current climate trends continue. On the other side, skeptics point out that Sandy's strength was in line with extreme storms of the past. For more on the back-and-forth over Sandy specifically, check out this posting by Columbia Journalism Review's Curtis Brainard and this one by Dot Earth's Andrew Revkin — and be sure to follow the Web links.

    Otto sides with those who believe Hurricane Sandy will bring the climate debate back into the spotlight.

    "I do think that, moving forward, it may be a watershed moment, so to speak," Otto told me on "Virtually Speaking Science." However, he acknowledged that the same claim could have been made for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which didn't end up moving the dial appreciably on attitudes toward climate change.

    Hurricane Sandy may not make voters more amenable to cap-and-trade schemes or a carbon tax, but it's more likely to highlight the flip side of climate policy: how to adapt to potential impacts and encourage climate-conscious innovation. More people are talking about the cost vs. benefit of storm surge barriers for the New York metro area, for example. Insurers may add disincentives for coastal development, in anticipation of higher sea levels or more frequent extreme storms. The federal government may provide more support for energy technologies that cut back on greenhouse-gas emissions.

    That's basically GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's strategy on the climate issue. In his response to ScienceDebate.org's questionnaire, he said he favored "robust government funding" for research into low-emission, high-efficiency industrial technologies. He maintained that this kind of "No Regrets" policy would benefit America "regardless of whether the risks of global warming materialize, and regardless of whether other nations take effective action."

    President Barack Obama, meanwhile, has long championed the development of renewable-energy technologies as a way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, even if such efforts have occasionally gotten him into trouble. An example of that is the controversy over Solyndra, a solar-panel company that went bankrupt after receiving more than a half-billion dollars in government-backed loans.

    Otto speculates that Obama may have a freer hand to pursue climate initiatives if he wins a second term — and that post-Sandy reconstruction may serve as a rallying point for political allies.

    There's some evidence this is already coming to pass: Just today, New York City's independent mayor, Michael Bloomberg, cited the climate challenge and the lessons from the superstorm as reasons for endorsing Obama.

    "The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast – in lost lives, lost homes and lost business – brought the stakes of Tuesday’s presidential election into sharp relief," Bloomberg wrote. "Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be – given this week's devastation – should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action."

    Bloomberg said Obama was taking major steps to reduce carbon emissions, while Romney abandoned "the very cap-and-trade program he once supported."

    The mayor's endorsement probably won't have much impact on the vote in New York, a state that's as solidly in Obama's column as any state could be. But does it hint at a major change in the political climate?

    For more food for thought, watch this archived video from a Capitol Hill debate between Obama surrogate Kevin Knobloch and Republican Mike Castle, who served two terms as Delaware governor and nine terms in Congress. The debate, titled "After Sandy: Climate Change, Science and the Next Four Years," was moderated by Otto and Climate Desk Live's Chris Mooney.

    Update for 8:30 p.m. ET: The Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg sees deep significance in Bloomberg's endorsement, suggesting that it "turned climate change from liability into a potentially winning political issue in this presidential election," and may embolden Republicans who secretly support action on the climate issue to "come out of the closet." Do you agree? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

    More from 'Virtually Speaking Science':

    "Virtually Speaking Science" is hosted in Second Life by the Caltech Virtual Astronomy Group. The Exploratorium's Paul Doherty will be my guest on Dec. 5 for a VSS program looking back at the year's astronomical highlights and looking ahead to 2013.

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • What lies beyond the Higgs boson?

    CERN

    The Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, is one of the main experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. In his forthcoming book on the LHC, "The Particle at the End of the Universe," Caltech physicist Sean Carroll recounts the story of how an underground river had to be frozen to put the 50-foot-high detector into its cavern.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Now that a "Higgs-like particle" has been detected at Europe's Large Hadron Collider, is the hard part of the $10 billion quest for new physics finished? No. Way. The hard part — and, most physicists would say, the fun part — is just beginning. Caltech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll explains why in a new book, and on tonight's episode of our "Virtually Speaking Science" talk show.

    You can tune in the program at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT / SLT) via the BlogTalkRadio website, or you can join the live audience in the Stella Nova Auditorium in the Second Life virtual world. If you miss the show, never fear: Like all our previous hourlong shows, tonight's program is being archived on BlogTalkRadio as well as on iTunes.

    The physics of subatomic particles isn't exactly Carroll's comfort zone. He's more at home with big topics such as cosmic inflation, the accelerating universe, the arrow of time and extra dimensions. But that just means Carroll is able to fit the scientific view of the universe at its smallest scales into the bigger picture, writing in a style that's accessible to folks who wouldn't otherwise know their boson from a fermion in the ground.

    Sean Carroll via Google+

    Sean M. Carroll is a senior research associate in the physics department at the California Institute of Technology.

    Carroll was at Europe's CERN particle physics center when the big reveal was made in July — which means his forthcoming book about the search for the Higgs boson, "The Particle at the End of the Universe," will touch on the human story as well as the history and the science behind the quest. Carroll is also at work on a special for PBS' "Nova" documentary series, due to air early next year.

    If you're looking for a preview of the book and the TV show, as well as a preview of what lies ahead on the frontiers of physics, don't miss tonight's show. If you're looking for some extra background on the Higgs quest, check out "The Higgs Boson Made Simple." And to get ready for the program, give a look to this edited transcript of the Q&A I conducted with Carroll on Tuesday:

    Cosmic Log: What was it that led you to write about the LHC and the Higgs quest? Is this something that you've been working on at your day job?

    Sean Carroll: "No, it's actually not. To be very honest, the book was not my idea. It was the publisher's idea. I'd been following the very exciting search for the Higgs boson. We live-blogged the startup of the LHC, and we certainly followed the tantalizing seminars that were given in December of 2011 when they found a little bit of evidence for it. We were all excited, but the idea of writing a book about it had not occurred to me until my publisher suggested it."

    Q: Well, now that you've gotten into the subject, do you find that it does relate to your day job?

    A: "In the book, I explain a little bit more of the physics behind the Higgs boson than is usually explained. It's funny, because I tried to concentrate mostly on the experiment, and the stories of human beings building the experiment, and their struggles. But my heart is really in gauge theories and spontaneous symmetry breaking and all the fun physics behind that. So I certainly improved my understanding of all those things while struggling to figure out how to explain them the best. It's not actually what I'm working on, in terms of research right now. But who knows? That's something that absolutely can happen."

    Q: Is there something you've found that maybe you didn't previously realize, because you're coming at this from the outside?

    A: "I really hope that I've conveyed a sense of the enormous task that the experimentalists and the engineers set themselves by creating this monstrosity that we call the LHC. One story out of many: When they were digging the hole in the ground to put the CMS experiment into, they found that there was an underground river between the surface and the 300-foot level where they were going to put it. The way they got around that was to freeze the river. They pumped down liquid nitrogen, froze the water, dug out the ice, put down the experiment, sealed in the tunnel and then let the water unfreeze again. Now the river flows over the experiment. How do you anticipate something like that? That's the kind of challenge that the builders faced."

    Q: And you were there for the payoff. What was the mood like when physicists announced that they had found what looks like the Higgs boson? How has the mood changed since then?

    A: "It's a tremendous mixture of emotions, because there have been very few announcements in physics that have been anticipated for quite this long. We knew exactly what it was as soon as we had it.  When we discovered the accelerating universe, for example, people didn't expect it. Therefore, some people are skeptical, and say 'you've got to find more data.' Whereas the Higgs was something that's been expected since 1967, roughly. Getting it is an accomplishment, but you also exhale a little bit, right? You've been holding your breath, because you've been looking for so long, and you think, 'What if it's not there? Will we have to start over again?'

    "Now that we have it, we need to think very carefully about where it takes us. We're hoping that the Higgs boson is not just the end of one era, but the beginning of the next one. We hope to find a whole bunch of new particles beyond the Standard Model." 

    Watch Higgs Boson Revealed on PBS. See more from NOVA.

    Q: Since the subtitle of your book is 'How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World,' can you talk about what that new world will look like, and what it might mean?

    A: "We know that the Standard Model of particle physics fits all the data we have here on Earth. On the other hand, it's not the final answer. It's inelegant in various ways, and it doesn't fit the data that we have from the sky. There's no dark matter in the Standard Model. We need to move beyond the Standard Model if we want to have a full understanding. The Higgs boson is the final piece of the Standard Model puzzle, but it's also a different kind of particle than all the other ones.

    Dutton

    "One of the ways in which it's different is, it's a bit more sociable than the other particles. It tends to want to interact fairly readily with all the other kinds of particles. So, it's very possible that we'll discover what dark matter is indirectly, through the Higgs boson. The Higgs particle can mediate an interaction between ordinary matter and dark matter. By studying the properties of the Higgs boson, we can infer the properties of new particles that we haven't discovered yet. So it's great that we found it, but really, the fun's just begun."

    Q: What are some of the other deep questions that could be answered at the LHC?

    A: "One of the things about 'selling' experimental physics is that people will say, 'OK, you want $9 billion to build this accelerator — what is it going to buy?' We don't know. If we knew, we wouldn't need to build it. Now, at least the LHC has found one thing, and that one particle has generated a great deal of excitement. Thank God we have that. But certainly we're nowhere near satisfied. We're hoping to find something more.

    "The thing we'd like to find more than anything else is supersymmetry. If supersymmetry is there, then in principle, there are double the number of particles that we already know lurking around somewhere. But it's hard. We haven't found it yet. And supersymmetry may not be part of nature, so we have to be open to whatever actually exists out there in the world. We'd like to know what the dark matter is. That's a particle that we know has to be there. It may or may not be detectable at the LHC, but we have a good shot at it.

    "More than anything else, we'd like to be surprised. We'd like to find something we haven't even been looking for."

    Q: Then there are those standard questions: 'What good is all this? What's in it for non-scientists? Will there be a new energy source, or a new gizmo?' How do you deal with those questions?

    A: "I talk about that a lot, in fact. The whole final chapter of the book is devoted to exactly that question. I try to be honest. There might be new gizmos that come out of this, or other technological spin-offs. But that's not why we built the Large Hadron Collider. It's not for the gizmos. It's for the discoveries. It's for figuring out the fundamental laws of nature.

    "The case that scientists need to make is that if we want to continue developing this skill that we've been working on for the last 2,500 years, it's worth knowing how the universe works. It's worth spending billions of dollars over the course of several decades on something that might not give us any gizmos, that might not cure malaria.

    "We're not going to build a better iPhone. We're just going to figure out how reality works. And we should try to make the case that that's worth the money."

    Send questions for Carroll in advance by tweeting with the hashtag #AskVS ... then tune in "Virtually Speaking Science" on BlogTalkRadio or join us in Second Life at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT/SLT) tonight. The show will be archived on BlogTalkRadio as well as iTunes.

    Previous episodes of "Virtually Speaking Science":

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • What's Uwingu? Space funding venture isn't just for space fans

    Uwingu's video previews a venture aimed at engaging the public and raising money for space researchers and educators.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Will you Uwingu? A commercial venture that's been founded to fund space research and education is betting that you will, even if you're not a hard-core space fan.

    But what is Uwingu? The founders are being coy about that, in order to build interest for their Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. As of today, they're almost a third of the way toward their goal of $75,000 in seed money, with 30 days left to go. Just today, Moon Express became the venture's first corporate sponsor, and XCOR Aerospace quickly followed up with the second $1,000 sponsorship.

    One of Uwingu's founders, planetary scientist Alan Stern, talked about Uwingu tonight during "Virtually Speaking Science," a program that's presented on the Web and in the Second Life virtual world. If you didn't hear the show in real time, don't worry: The hourlong program is being archived at BlogTalkRadio's website as well as on iTunes.

    It's hard to think of a space issue that the 54-year-old Stern hasn't been part of during his decades-long career. He's a space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., principal investigator for NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, a one-time astronaut trainee and a champion of suborbital space research. For a time, he served as NASA's associate administrator for space science — and sometime in the next couple of years, he's likely to get to outer space himself, on a rocket plane built by Virgin Galactic or XCOR Aerospace.

    SwRI

    Planetary scientist Alan Stern has been in training for a suborbital research flight.

    Right now, Uwingu is the project Stern is most anxious to talk about. The name comes from the Swahili word for "sky," and the venture's backers hope that Uwingu will eventually make things easier for researchers and educators who focus on what's going on in the sky above. In addition to Stern, the venture's backers include space historian Andrew Chaikin, educator Emily CoBabe-Ammann, citizen-science leader Pamela Gay, science museum curator David Grinspoon, planet hunter Geoff Marcy, and planetary scientists Teresa Segura and Mark Sykes.

    "Uwingu will employ novel software applications to 'game-ify' space, with the profits going toward research and education," Gay said in a news release issued this month. "Our projects will be fun to use, and the proceeds from their use will make a real difference in how space exploration, research and education is funded."

    Stern says a million dollars' worth of software development effort has gone into the venture already, and the $75,000 will help pay the bills for future development. He's not willing to be specific about what the software will do, but he thinks it'll be engaging enough to draw in people who wouldn't otherwise care about space science. The revenue could amount to millions of dollars, with half of that being offered to researchers and educators through a peer-reviewed grant program, he told me.

    Even though Stern is keeping mum, there's a clue to his secret in the trademark database entry for Uwingu: The trademark refers to "a website featuring online technology that enables users to name both features on the surfaces of bodies in the solar system and solar system bodies themselves." If I had to guess, I'd speculate that Stern and his colleagues might be banking on future discoveries on the solar system's rim. Those naming opportunities might be made available to Uwingu's users as part of an online treasure hunt. But that's just a guess — and I'm a notoriously bad guesser.

    During a pre-show interview, Stern delved into the genesis and goals of Uwingo, as well as other topics ranging from suborbital spaceflight to the big Pluto mission. Here's an edited transcript of our Q&A:

    Cosmic Log: How did Uwingu get started?

    Alan Stern: "I had the idea for this several years ago, but I didn’t really execute on it until the beginning of 2010. We got a team together and formed a company, and we started writing software for the first app. Now, you’re probably wondering, 'Why did it take two and a half years?' The first thing we wanted to do was a project that was so massive in scope that we needed to raise a couple of million dollars in venture capital to put together the software product.

    "Ultimately, we decided we didn’t want to give away a lot of ownership, because our central goal was to create the Uwingu Fund for space science and education. We just didn’t want to cede that to someone with a big checkbook who might say, 'Well, I don’t like the idea of giving away 50 percent. I want that 50 percent, and I own the company.' Although we developed a great idea, it just wasn’t feasible to finish it. So we developed the second product, beginning about this time last year. That was much easier, and that’s actually what we’re going to roll out with. We had a bit of a false start, although the work’s not wasted: We intend to take the half-developed initial project and make that our second product. To finish it, we’ll use revenues coming in from the first project."

    Q: I thought Uwingu was going to be basically a Kickstarter venture for space missions. …

    A: "Not at all. Let me tell you what Uwingu’s about: We’re turning the old paradigm upside down. Typically, people create nonprofits, and they say, 'This nonprofit supports a certain cause' — in this case, space research and education. Sign up, be a member, contribute. That’s how the American Heart Association works on heart disease."

    Q: Or the Planetary Society for space exploration...

    A: "Right, I’m a member of the Planetary Society. I’m a huge fan of theirs. Nothing wrong with the Planetary Society. But we don’t want to create a competitor for the Planetary Society, or the National Space Society or the AIAA or anybody else. And if you look at those groups, they have a very narrow 'wheel base.' That’s not unusual. It’s just reflective of the fact that not that many people really care about space enough to join groups and contribute.

    "So we asked ourselves, 'How can we have a large impact?' We know that space researchers and educators currently have only one major funding source: NASA. If you’re a medical researcher, and the National Institutes of Health has its budget cut, you’re not totally out of luck. You can go to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, or the Gates Foundation, or a hundred other places where you can find funding. If you’re a geologist, and USGS gets cut, you would probably go work for a gas company, or a mineral resources company. If you’re in math, or computer science, or in atmospheric science, you’ve got a full range of options.

    "The point is, space funding is not diversified. NASA is pretty much the one-stop shop. Your fate depends not just on how well you do, but also on how well NASA fares. And NASA has been suffering the vicissitudes of a tug of war between Congress and the administration. Every year we hear that 'this is not a good year to have an increase.' The economy is bad, the election is coming up, it’s the wrong topic, there’s something else pressing, we just had 9/11, we’re in a war. It’s always something. We want to create a second way for space scientists and educators — in part to give them a backstop in bad times, when there are budget cuts, but also to create more capacity to get things done.

    "The analogy I like is to think of NASA as a highway. We’re trying to add an extra lane to the highway. When there’s a budget cut — a traffic jam — you have the option of getting in a new lane and moving forward. And when everything’s going fine, the extra lane adds capacity. We’re not just looking to help in bad times, we want to help in good times, too.

    "You might say, 'Look, NASA’s got an $18 billion budget — how much more money can you generate?' Well, we don’t need to generate that kind of money. The actual amount of money going to the researchers in space science is only a couple percent of the NASA budget. It’s a few hundred million dollars — it’s not billions. As you know, people scream when there’s a cut to that budget. If we could generate 10 percent, or 5 percent, of the research money, then we could really have a positive impact.

    "So here’s what we came up with: Instead of putting our tin cup out for a good cause, and getting support from people who are interested in the cause, why don’t we turn the business model upside down? Why don’t we just create products that people want to engage with and buy, and we’ll take everything that’s left after we pay our bills and put into the Uwingu Fund. Because we’re selling products that people who are not space fanatics will purchase, all of a sudden your addressable market becomes the world. Not just the space world, but the world.

    "These particular products — which I’m not going to tell you about — will be of interest to schoolkids and educators, to hobbyists, to all kinds of people from all different walks of life, most of whom won’t say 'space is on the top of my list.' We’re going to see people all over the world engaging with this. The biggest space societies in the world have about 100,000 members. We expect to have millions, and possibly many more, engaging with Uwingu products every year. We think we’ve got a concept that breaks the mold for how you support space activities, but it’s a little indirect.

    "So here’s the way it works: If our IndieGogo crowdsourcing campaign is successful, and we have enough money to launch the company, we’ll debut the website. We’ll have a party. People will come to the website and spend their money. We’ll pay our bills, and we’ll put what’s left in the Uwingu Fund. Our target is to put half the revenue into the fund, and pay our bills from the other half.  The fund starts to build up, so we’ll have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in the fund. Then we’ll do calls for proposals. We will announce to the research and education community that proposals for funding will be due on a certain date. Then we’ll have review panels select the best, and we’ll fund them. And every few months, we’ll do this again, and again, and again.

    "We’ll disburse money as a 'fifth lane' in the highway. From the researchers’ point of view, it looks just like another grant program. We can be their salvation in tough times, and their accelerator in good times."

    Q: It sounds as if this would be some sort of mobile-device app, or Facebook game.

    A: "This is all about suspense, Alan. Look, it’s no worse than Dean Kamen with the Segway. Before the secret was revealed, he wouldn’t tell you what it was, and he wouldn’t tell you what it’s not. If we tell people now, when it’s announced, they’ll say it's old news."

    Q: All right, fair enough. Now, when you’re talking about support for research, it sounds as if you’re not getting a spacecraft going, but that the things you'll be funding are more in line with doing research studies.

    A: "We envision supporting graduate students, and researchers, and educators — not just public outreach types, but also high school teachers, science departments in grammar school, the whole spectrum. We don't imagine being able to fund entire space expeditions, but we might be able to enhance missions. Maybe it's an instrument on a Google Lunar X Prize mission, or on a suborbital space mission. Or we might be able to help somebody build a prototype so they can propose an instrument for a NASA mission. If we’re so successful that we can generate something on the order of a billion dollars a year for the Uwingu Fund, then obviously we’ll get into the mission game. But our goal is to have a grant fund that has millions or tens of millions of dollars each year. We think that's a very high goal. Anything can be proposed, and we’ll pick and choose based on what we can afford and where we can make the biggest impact."

    Q: You’ve been on the other side of the desk, as an associate administrator at NASA. How do you think NASA might feel about Uwingu?

    A: "We've spoken to a few high-level people at NASA about it, and their perspective on doing this is 'absolutely.' We’re not competing with NASA, we’re adding extra capacity. I’ve heard nothing negative. I can tell you that if I was there and somebody came up with this idea, I’d say 'Thank God,' because it means when we have a cost overrun and we have to make a cut in some project, people have somewhere to turn."

    Q: I had a few questions on the other projects you’re working on – for example, the Pluto stamp campaign?

    A: "The campaign is over, and now the ball is in our court to turn in the proposal to the Post Office. I expect that proposal will be turned in before August is complete. Then we don’t expect to hear anything until 2015. We just have to sit and wait."

    Q: And New Horizons? What’s the next step for the Pluto mission?

    A: "The spacecraft is very healthy. The team is extremely busy building both the main-encounter sequence and the backup, the bailout trajectory. We’re also hunting for more moons and looking for Kuiper Belt objects to fly by after Pluto. We are so busy as a team that people are working nights and weekends to be ready for 2015. The spacecraft is in hibernation right now. We’ll be waking it up on Jan. 6 for about a month. While we’re in hibernation, we take cruise science data on the interplanetary medium. We talk to it once a week, on Monday mornings, to make sure everything is fine. And that’s about it."

    Q: How are things going on the preparations for suborbital spaceflights for researchers?

    A: "We’re making plans for the next meeting for researchers in the Boulder area next June. We had 200 people the first time, and we doubled it to over 400 this year. Things are heating up."

    Q: Now that the $2.5 billion Mars Curiosity mission is under way, people are talking about the cost of planetary science missions, and what the prospects are for future Mars missions. What do you think is the right thing to do?

    A: "Well, people are very worried about sequestration and making things worse, but the right thing to do is a combination of more funding and better cost control. We’d get a lot more done with that one-two punch. Realistically, I don’t think there’s any realistic scenario where NASA grows dramatically. But I do think that private space efforts are going to give us a lot of new options. You’re starting to see the focus move from just launch vehicles and capsules to science areas — like suborbital, like what Planetary Resources is doing. I think you’ll see more things like that. I’ve heard of some things that are in the works that are just amazing. And so I’m very optimistic that commercial space is going to give us a much broader space economy.

    "You know, the military isn’t the only purchaser of airplanes. There are also cargo lines and airlines, agricultural uses, even tourists. Hopefully, space efforts in the 21st century will grow in the same way to become a very diverse set of markets — including in the science world."

    You can tune in "Virtually Speaking Science" on BlogTalkRadio or in Second Life at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT/SLT) on Wednesdays. Tonight's show is being archived on BlogTalkRadio as well as iTunes.

    Previous episodes of "Virtually Speaking Science":

    Last updated 10:15 p.m. ET.

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • Is there a virtual Mars in our future?

    NASA / GSFC

    An artist's concept shows how a crew aboard an orbiting station could control robotic operations on Mars, ranging from real-time rover trips to rocket launches bringing shipments to the station.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Imagine a day when virtual reality gets so good that you could take a computer-generated walk on the Martian surface, right here on Earth. Or imagine having a space station in Martian orbit that can control robots down on the Red Planet in real time, just as today's drone pilots control winged robots that are flying half a world away.

    Science fiction? Today, yes. But someday, it could be science fact. At least that's the way Caltech astronomer George Djorgovski and other virtual-world researchers see it.

    "I certainly think that virtual presence will play a significant role in space missions in the future, just because it’s so much easier to send a robot than to keep people alive" in the space environment, he told me. "That is something we can speculate about."

    Djorgovski and I will be speculating about this and other prospects for immersive virtual reality tonight on "Virtually Speaking Science," a talk show that takes place in the Second Life virtual world as well as on the Web via BlogTalkRadio. The hourlong show gets started at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT / SLT). If you miss hearing it live, never fear: The podcast will be archived on BlogTalkRadio's website as well as on iTunes.

    Virtual-reality exploration
    NASA's one-ton Curiosity rover, which is due to be lowered down to Mars' Gale Crater late Sunday night (Pacific time), could bring the vision of virtual-reality exploration one step closer, said Rich Terrile, director of the Center for Evolutionary Computation and Automated Design at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 

    "We can actually create immersive data sets with the Mars exploration rovers," he told me. "We're certainly going to try to do that with a limited number of data sets from Curiosity as well. ... People are on board to take what Curiosity does, and try to create the best we can in terms of immersive data sets, to demonstrate their value and power. And maybe as the mission goes on, we'll have opportunities to create richer and richer data sets."

    Ultimately, those data sets could give scientists — and even the general public — the opportunity to put on VR helmets or 3-D goggles in a specially laid-out room, and walk through what appears to be a realistic Mars landscape. Scientists could conceivably interact with the environment and take measurements as if they were geologists on Mars.

    "It turns out that you gain a tremendous amount with just a very few frames if you’re just interested in the science of understanding Mars," Terrile said. "On the opposite end of that, If you are someone in the public and you want to look at a landscape, then the value of that really increases slowly until you almost have a complete data set. ... Somewhere in the middle, we have to weigh the value."

    Terrile said increasingly sophisticated computer modeling can fill in the gaps in data sets, turning millions of observations from different vantage points into a smooth virtual experience. You still need lots and lots of data. "That’s what we struggle with, particularly in a Mars mission, where our time is limited and the amount of data we can send back to Earth is limited," he said. "But I think we're clearly getting to the point where we can create a lot more of these immersive data sets."

    Telepresence in Martian orbit
    The way Terrile sees it, it's only a matter of time before the power of computing and communications brings a virtual Mars within reach — and brings us closer to the real Mars as well. During a NASA-sponsored meeting on future Mars concepts, held last month, Terrile argued that immersive telepresence could offer a "new paradigm" for Mars exploration. Instead of using data from robots on Mars to create a virtual environment, future explorers could set up VR-ready space stations in Martian orbit to control those robots in real time. That's not possible now, due to the delays involved in sending signals between Earth and Mars.

    "When we run a rover from Earth, if we want it to stop or turn around, it’s 14 minutes from the time we push the brake to the time when the thing actually brakes on Mars," Terrile said. "Now, take the human, and instead of operating the vehicle from Earth, you could be operating the vehicle from Mars orbit. It’d be a lot safer environment for the human [than the Martian surface], and a lot less expensive than having to deliver a human to the surface with all the resources that a human would take, and then getting that human off the surface again."

    Eventually, humans would probably want to have their own feet on Martian ground, but robots could clear the way with less risk. "Wouldn't it be nice to land and have your shelter built and your  power station built and all your resources built?" Terrile asked. "You can do all that with machines from Mars orbit."

    NASA

    A human wearing a virtual-reality helmet and other control devices operates a NASA Robonaut mounted on a wheeled rover chassis during a test at Johnson Space Center. Learn more about Robonaut telepresence.

    Will all this technology be available by the 2030s, when NASA expects to be ready to send astronauts toward Mars and its moons? Terrile doesn't lay out a timeline, but he thinks it could happen surprisingly quickly. 

    "I work a lot outside JPL, in the areas of virtual reality and augmented reality, and the field is just exploding," Terrile said. "In terms of what technologies are available, we gain a factor of two about every 13 months, in terms of Moore's Law and computational resources, and we get that for free. Somebody else is creating that technology for us, and that benefits the human race. I'm hoping to get NASA interested in utilizing thse technologies, because people are going to start seeing them in entertainment. We're going to start seeing them in games. We're going to see them in tourism and museums. So I'm hoping to look for those first opportunities to use them within NASA. I think they’re going to be incredibly powerful."

    Immersive data in the lab
    Long before that VR lab enters Martian orbit, immersive virtual reality could become routine in earthly labs. That's the vision that Djorgovski has been trying to turn into reality through the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, or MICA. We'll be doing tonight's "Virtually Speaking Science" talk in front of a live virtual audience at MICA's small auditorium in Second Life.

    "A lot of our action in Second Life and OpenSim so far has been trying to understand how to effectively visualize the highly complex data sets that scientists generate," Djorgovski said. "And what immersive virtual reality buys us, in addition to what a good graphical program will do on the desktop, is that scientists can interact with themselves, with the data, in virtual space. Their colleagues can 'walk' into their data. And then there is a subjective quality issue that all users of virtual space know: Somehow there is a high-fidelity illusion of reality and presence. That is what we’re trying to harness as a scientific tool."

    Courtesy of George Djorgovski

    Second Life residents Desdemona Enfield and Curious George work on a virtual-reality visualization that classifies stars, galaxies and quasars according to their colors, brightness, distance and morphology.

    Djorgovski specializes in the huge data sets that are associated with all-sky astronomical surveys, looking for clues to the nature of black holes, quasars and other little-understood phenomena. There could be hundreds of parameters to be measured for hundreds of millions of objects. Visualizing that abstract data through immersive virtual reality just might offer the best way for scientists to wrap their heads around huge research challenges.

    Progress has come more slowly than Djorgovski expected, due to several factors.

    "One is that the technology just wasn't ready," he explained. "The technology's getting much better very quickly — driven by movies and games. There's money to be made, and that's why we're getting better and better 3-D representations. Another thing is, I think, just the inertia of adopting new things. That is what holds back most of the academic community. They consider immersive virtual reality to be like a game, for obvious reasons. There is a stigma associated with it. That’s not something serious. Of course you can use that technology merely for games, or you can try to use it for serious science and scholarship, which is what we’ve been trying to do. Gradually, this will be a normal way in which we can interact with cyberspace behind our computer screens, or whatever replaces those."

    Djorgovski is in the process of phasing out MICA now that funding for the experimental program has run out. But he's ramping up a different project known as Virtual Caltech, which could well represent the next small step toward that virtual giant leap. "We're still at the stage of the beginning of the S curve as far as the adoption of technology is concerned. But sooner or later I think this will be a normal thing. Everybody will be interacting with other people or with information through some sort of 3-D interface."

    How much sooner or later? "I really couldn't tell," he said. "I thought that by now we would all be using avatars, and so on, but it's probably going to take a few more years."

    The way Djorgovski sees it, the human body is built to interact with a three-dimensional world. For millennia, we've been missing a dimension when it comes to interacting with information.

    "Right now we're used to dealing with two-dimensional representations of data, knowledge and information, which is just historical heritage," he said. "Paper or writing surfaces were historically how we started representing information. If we had three-dimensional paper, we would have used it. Now the technology is finally enabling us to represent information in three-dimensional spaces. The exact hardware implementation is going to be who knows what, but it's going to be something that will naturally click with human perception."

    Will the vision of immersive virtual reality stand up to a reality check? Join us tonight for "Virtually Speaking Science," and be sure to come with questions for Djorgovski. If you're listening to the show over BlogTalkRadio, you can tweet your questions, using the hashtag #AskVS.

    Tune in "Virtually Speaking Science" on BlogTalkRadio or in Second Life. George Djorgovski and I will be at the StellaNova Small Auditorium, courtesy of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT/SLT) tonight. If you miss the live event, don't worry: It'll be archived by "Virtually Speaking" on BlogTalkRadio as well as iTunes.

    Previous episodes of "Virtually Speaking Science":

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • What a win or loss on Mars will mean

    Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists eagerly await the new, improved Mars rover's touch down to begin the search for life on the red planet. KNBC's Patrick Healy reports.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    Anyone who's looked at the "Seven Minutes of Terror" trailer for next month's Mars landing might have wondered whether the planners behind NASA's $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission really knew what they were doing — and although the planners insist they're confident, they also say they're nervous.

    "There's not a whole lot we can do about it at this point, except just be nervous," said Dave Beaty, chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Directorate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

    You can test the mood for yourself by tuning in our "Virtually Speaking Science" talk show at 9 p.m. ET tonight, via BlogTalkRadio or the Second Life virtual world. Beaty and I will be talking about the buildup to the Aug. 5 landing, and taking your questions through Second Life, Twitter (use the hashtag #askvs) and the phone lines. If you can't make it, don't worry: You'll be able to listen to the hourlong podcast via BlogTalkRadio's archive or iTunes.

    Experts at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory share the challenges of the Curiosity rover's landing plan.

    Falling into place
    All the pieces are falling into place for the Mars Science Laboratory's landing sequence, aimed at putting the subcompact car-sized Curiosity rover down within Gale Crater. On Tuesday, NASA maneuvered its Mars Odyssey orbiter into the correct trajectory to pass over the landing site just in time to pick up telemetry from the probe.

    The MSL spacecraft is currently within 2.2 million miles (3.6 million kilometers) of Mars and closing in fast. The big nail-biter is scheduled for just after 10 p.m. PT on Aug. 5 (1 a.m. ET Aug. 6), when the spacecraft is supposed to blaze through Mars' atmosphere, spring a parachute, pop off its heat shield and let loose a rocket-powered sky crane platform that will hover about 66 feet (20 meters) above the Martian surface and lower Curiosity on cables. Then the cables will cut loose and the sky crane will fly itself out of the way, leaving Curiosity to get down to business.

    JPL

    Dave Beaty is chief scientist for the Mars Exploration Directorate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

    What were they thinking???

    "I've met with the engineers," Beaty told me. "I've seen their presentations, and they can be very convincing. But you have to hold your breath a little bit and trust that they know what they're doing."

    This multibillion-dollar mission depends on everything working right — and there's even more at stake than just the mission. If next month's landing fails, that could spark even more questions about the future of NASA's troubled Mars exploration effort. The failures of Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander in 1999 led to years of rethinking and retrenchment, and the soul-searching would probably go far deeper in this current age of tightened budgets and downscaled ambitions.

    On the other hand, a successful landing would set a sunny tone for what's likely to be years of exploration by the most capable interplanetary robot ever created. During tonight's talk show, Beaty will probably be a lot more willing to talk about that type of scenario, just as he was when I interviewed him on Monday. Check out this edited transcript, and bring your follow-up questions to "Virtually Speaking Science" at 9 p.m. ET.

    Cosmic Log: So, there's less than two weeks before the big Mars landing — what's going on there at JPL?

    Dave Beaty: We're getting very nervous. There's not a whole lot we can do about it at this point, except just be nervous. But this is a significant thing. It's one of these points in history that may change the trajectory of things that happen afterward, whether we end up with a successful landing or an unsuccessful landing.

    Q: What do you see as the outcome for failure, and the outcome for failure? What would that mean to the Mars exploration program?

    A: Well, just having a successful landing, by itself, is of course huge good news. It enables the scientific return from the mission to happen, which will play out over the next Mars year — that's two Earth years, more or less. Once the rover lands, it has to raise its antenna, do some checkouts, get moving, and then drive over to this mountain that has the stratigraphy we're interested in.

    It's sort of like the Grand Canyon way of looking at rock. You get this beautiful exposure of stratigraphy because of the erosion of this mountain. We want to climb up the side of the mountain and check the layering, like John Wesley Powell did just after the Civil War when he went one-arming up and down the Grand Canyon. That was one of the great geological expeditions of all time, as far as I'm concerned.

    The site we want to look at is great. It's a little hard to predict exactly what we're going to see inside those rocks if we end up on the success pathway. We know what we're looking for: What are the rocks? What is the nature of the layering? Are there signals that the layers were "habitable" — i.e., had the potential for a life form to have lived there, had a life form been present. If there's a positive outcome on that, then we would definitely want to send another mission — either back to the same place, to check out whether there's any sign of something actually there; or potentially to another place that has the same kind of layering, but some other kind of characteristic.

    Here on Earth, one of the big issues we face is that the preservation of the signs of life is very uneven. We know that there's life everywhere on Earth, right? And it's been here in sort of the form that we see it when we look out our windows, back to the time of the Cambrian, which is 600 million years ago. But if you look at the sedimentary rocks, they don't all contain fossils, they don't all contain pollen. You've got to look carefully to understand what has happened to the rock since its formation, and whether it would have included the signs of life, and whether those signs would have survived through all the subsequent things that happened to the rock.

    It's not a guarantee that we would go back to exactly the same place, but we would certainly want to go back somewhere if we received this encouragement.

    Q: And the implications of failure?

    A: If it's a bad landing, the question would be, what is the reason why? In my experience, the public and Congress and all the people surrounding us would be accepting of a failure that was just a bad weather day, or if you land sideways on a rock, or some other sort of bad luck that happens because of what Mars has done to us. They tend to be less forgiving of a mistake made by a human being here on Earth. So, those are two very different kinds of scenarios. Just the fact of a bad day doesn't tell you enough to know what the implication might be. 

    Seven minutes of terror is what NASA is calling the waiting period to find out whether the Curiosity rover has survived what could be the trickiest landing ever attempted. NBC's Tom Costello reports.

    Q: A lot of people wonder about how the sky crane is going to work, or whether the heat shield will work properly — the "seven minutes of terror." Is that what you have in mind? Everything that could be done has been done, of course, but if something goes wrong, I suspect people will want to focus on the process for doing something that's never been done before.

    A: Almost everything we do at Mars has never been done before. That's what makes this exciting from the point of view of the engineers. They're here to do the impossible. That sky crane landing has some very powerful advantages, if it works. I've met with the engineers, I've seen their presentations, and they can be very convincing. But you have to hold your breath a little bit and trust that they know what they're doing.

    Q: If everything works nominally, will we see the sky crane become the main method for getting large payloads down to the surface of Mars?

    A: I absolutely think so. For the robotic exploration missions, the bigger question is, do we want the payloads to keep getting bigger? We know for sure that the pathway to eventual human missions has to involve bigger and bigger payloads, because the humans and all their support systems are heavy. This particular landing system will land a payload that's bigger than can be landed with airbags. The airbag would not survive. So it is heading in the direction that we need to follow if we believe in eventual human exploration. Whether the next robotic mission needs to be the same size as MSL — that's an interesting question. We may want to get it smaller, in part to bring the cost down.

    Q: What's your role going to be on the night of the landing?

    A: I just got my assignment. I will be at Beckman Auditorium at Caltech, with an audience of 1,136 people, which is the auditorium's capacity. I'll be standing in front of them with the NASA feed on the screen behind me, and my instructions are to narrate it like a tennis match. You can interject a little bit of commentary, but you don't want to detract from the main show, which is what's on the screen.

    Q: So when will you know if the landing's been successful?

    A: The landing itself is at 10:32 p.m. Pacific time, and we've placed both orbiters [Mars Odyssey and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter] so they will be in position to watch the descent as it comes down. By 10:32 or 10:33, they should have the data to know whether the landing was successful. They may get an ambiguous answer and not know for sure whether it was successful or not successful. That may take a little while longer to sort that out. It's hard to end up with a for-sure crash scenario quickly, because the signals are likely to be less than obvious. But if it's successful, we'll know very quickly.

    Tune in "Virtually Speaking Science" on BlogTalkRadio or in Second Life. Dave Beaty and I will be at the StellaNova Small Auditorium, courtesy of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT/SLT) tonight. If you miss the live event, don't worry: It'll be archived by "Virtually Speaking" on BlogTalkRadio as well as iTunes.

    Previous episodes of "Virtually Speaking Science":

    Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • When the aliens call, who'll answer?

    Gail Shumway / Getty Images

    In a recently conducted poll, 19 percent of the respondents said they thought Washington, D.C., would be the most likely landing zone for a UFO. But if that ever happened, who's the best person to lead the welcoming party? About 65 percent said they'd rather have Barack Obama than Mitt Romney handle the situation.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News


    A new poll suggests that 77 percent of Americans think there's evidence that aliens have already visited Earth. The same poll suggests most Americans think President Barack Obama would do a better job than presumptive GOP challenger Mitt Romney if we had to fight off an alien invasion. And if we have to rely on a superhero to save us, they'd rather go with the Hulk than Batman.

    That somewhat silly survey was conducted to tout a "Chasing UFOs" TV series on the National Geographic Channel, but the results raise a serious question: If an alien civilization does get in touch with us, who's in charge of figuring out what to do?

    "Nobody's in charge," says Seth Shostak, who is senior astronomer at the California-based SETI Institute as well as the chairman of the International Academy of Astronautics' SETI Permanent Study Group. Shostak and I talked about SETI — the search for extraterrestrial intelligence — as well as its serious and silly implications tonight on "Virtually Speaking Science." The hourlong talk show is archived as a podcast on the Web and on iTunes.

    As the poll done for National Geographic suggests, a good number of people suspect the aliens have already arrived, presumably on UFOs or through interdimensional travel. Most scientists scoff at that idea. "Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos?" British physicist Stephen Hawking asked earlier this month. But Shostak thinks it's only a matter of time before extraterrestrial civilizations actually do make themselves known, by sending signals across the light-years. Almost a decade ago, he predicted that we'd detect those signals by the year 2025, and today he told me he's sticking by that prediction.

    During our pre-show interview, Shostak laid out his rationale for the 2025 date and discussed how an alien-contact scenario is likely to go down. Check out this edited transcript of the Q&A.

    Cosmic Log: Do you still feel that 2025 is a good time frame for alien contact? And maybe more importantly, how do we know we're getting closer to the date?

    SETI Institute

    Seth Shostak is senior astronomer at the SETI Institute.

    Shostak: People ask, 'Are you getting close?' And we no more know whether we're getting close than Chris Columbus knew he was getting close to the Americas — we might some palm fronds a day or two out, but other than that, we don't know. In some sense, it'll come as a complete surprise if we get a signal. We know that from false alarms. They never occur when you expect them, because you never expect them.

    But in terms of the prediction, that's based on the following: We're looking for needles in a haystack. If you ask, when are you going to find a needle, you need to know three things: How big is the haystack? How fast are you going through the hay? And how many needles are in there? We know two out of three. The haystack's the galaxy, and we know how fast we're going through it. We don't know the number of needles. So I took estimates of the number from the Drake Equation, and figured that it's two dozen years out. What's happened in the meantime is that the funding crisis has slowed things down a bit.

    Q: Do you think you need to revise the 2025 date?

    A: I think 2025, 2030 is about right, given that we can continue to do the experiment.

    Q: Is it a steady process, or is there an increasing rate of hay examination?

    A: This is all predicated on an increasing rate. That's the march of technology, which is mostly digital electronics. Computers keep getting faster and faster at any given price point, and that's good news for us. We can look at a larger chunk of the radio dial at once. We can go through the stars faster. Or we can look at bigger hunks of sky at once. It's mostly computing power that is responsible for the increasing speed of SETI. We're not sitting around with earphones the way Jodie Foster was.

    Q: Could it be that the patterns of communication by extraterrestrial civilizations take a form completely different from what we assume?

    A: We kind of know what areas SETI is weak in. It's been slow, in the sense that you've got a couple of hundred billion star systems in the galaxy, and if you can look at only a couple a day, that's really slow going. That might take forever. Can we look at more stars in a given time, with adequate sensitivity?

    The second thing is, it may be that you really have to look for a long time at any given star system. Of course, we don't do that. We look at any given star system, at any given frequency, for at most a few minutes. Some other search programs look for one and a half seconds at any given star system. If the aliens are broadcasting in our direction once a week, or once a day, or once an hour, we're not going to see it. We know that's a problem.

    Another issue is that the aliens may not know we're here because they haven't picked up 'I Love Lucy' yet. They don't know Homo sapiens is here, they just know that Earth is a planet with biology. They may not be motivated to target us relentlessly with reality television. They may broadcast now and then, with a little ping just to see if anybody's here. You really need an experiment that can pick up an intermittent, maybe one-off signal that's designed to ping the planet. Everybody knows that. That's a technology issue, but it's an issue that's getting better.

    "Daily Show" writer Kevin Bleyer joins "The Last Word" on MSNBC to talk politics and aliens.

    Q: Has anybody come up with a concept for an all-sky, all-the-time receiver?

    A: Yeah, well, all-sky, all the time, all frequencies — that's what you'd looove to have. On paper, you can design an instrument that can look at the entire sky. All frequencies, that's another problem, but you can certainly cover more frequencies than we do. It's all a question of whether you can afford to build such an instrument. The answer is, no, not now. It takes an enormous amount of computing power to do that. However, one thing you can say about the future is that there will be more computing power. This is not impossible. This is not like building rockets to go at 99 percent of the speed of light. That might work on paper, too, but in practice, that's a long way off. But this is something where you can say, with the computing power of a few decades hence, it becomes a practical thing.

    Q: Assuming that alien signals are detected by 2025, is humanity ready for that?

    A: Well, I don't know how much planning has been done. We've revised some protocols, but those are just the immediate steps you take if you pick up a signal. They deal with practical matters, like checking the signals out and alerting everybody. But I don't know that there's any large-scale effort to prepare humanity, any more than there was any preparation by the Indians in the Caribbean in case a Spanish ship showed up. I don't think that's a problem, to be honest. In poll after poll, the public has said they believe the aliens are out there. They see them on television every night, and at the movies every third weekend. A third of 'em think the aliens are already here, but they don't see a problem with that, either. Nobody's staying home. Everybody's still going to work.

    I think that psychologically, everybody could handle it. It's just going to be a big news item. Whatever it would be, people would find it interesting. But they'd be savvy enough to realize there's no immediate threat. The aliens would be 500 light-years away, and we pick up their signal.  There's no reason to think that people would go just completely non-linear.

    The long-term consequences are less predictable. People would ask, should we broadcast back? Should we send a rocket in that direction? What should we do?

    Q: Who would be in charge if there was an alien signal? Assuming that scientists confirm that there's an anomalous signal pattern, hinting at extraterrestrial intelligence, what's the procedure?

    A: I don't think that there's anybody designated to be in charge. There was a flap a few years ago, involving an official at the U.N., but that was all a red herring. She quickly admitted that she's not in charge. Nobody's in charge.

    Look, the real people who will be in charge will be the media, because they'll be reporting it. In some sense, whoever finds the signal is probably in charge. If it's us, then somebody at the SETI Institute will be called. Or suppose it's the Berkeley group. Well, they're in charge. Or maybe it's a group that comes across the signal by accident. There's no hierarchy. Anyway, you know how the media work — they're not going to follow the rules.

    MSNBC's Ed Schultz, host of "The Ed Show" puts a political spin on a poll from National Geographic that suggests Americans prefer President Barack Obama over Mitt Romney on the alien-invasion issue.

    There's no danger in any of this, except for one thing: That's the idea that you're sitting around, and suddenly there's a signal, and you call a press conference. That's not the way it will happen. We get signals all the time, and someday one of those signals will pass all the tests, and it slowly emerges as a real signal. But it takes something on the order of five days before you're convinced. During all that time, the media knows about this, because there is no secrecy. But there's no press conference yet, because the scientists aren't yet sure themselves. This time lag means there will be all sorts of stories before the official word is out. It isn't because of leakage, it's because anytime anybody finds something interesting, they may mention it. They'll put it on their blog. Who knows what they'll do?

    It'll be very, very messy. And the corollary to this is that you can probably expect a lot of false alarms. There'll be something interesting, and a lot of people will write about it, and three days later it turns out to be nothing.

    Q: Some people worry that our own radio signals are advertising our presence in what could be a rough neighborhood, but I take it that's not a concern of yours.

    A: There are people who get their knickers in a knot about this deliberate broadcast stuff. National Geographic is supposed to be collecting tweets to broadcast as an answer to the "Wow Signal." I personally don't get heartburn about broadcasting. The fact is that NBC is broadcasting all the time, right? You can say, well, that's a weak signal. Sure it is. But if you're really worried about broadcasting into space, don't just shut down the publicity stunts. You better shut down the radars at the Seattle-Tacoma airport, too. They're broadcasting into space all the time.

    Tune in "Virtually Speaking Science" on BlogTalkRadio or in Second Life — and bring lots of questions. Seth Shostak and I were at the StellaNova Small Auditorium, courtesy of the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics, at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT/SLT) tonight. If you missed the live event, don't worry: It's archived by "Virtually Speaking" on BlogTalkRadio as well as iTunes.

    More nuggets from the National Geographic UFO poll: 

    • The "Aliens Among Us" survey polled a random nationwide sample of 1,114 Americans between May 21 and May 29. The poll was conducted by Kelton Research, which used email invitations and online surveys. Quotas were set to ensure reliable and accurate representation of the total U.S. population ages 18 and older. Margin of error is +/- 2.9 percent.
    • More than one-third of those surveyed (36 percent) believe UFOs exist. Eleven percent are confident they've spotted a UFO, and 20 percent know someone who claims to have seen one.
    • Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) said Obama would be better-suited than Romney to handle an alien invasion. Seventy-nine percent believe the government has kept information about UFOs a secret from the public. Nineteen percent think Washington, D.C., is the most likely landing zone for a UFO, while 28 percent think a UFO would touch down in Roswell, N.M.
    • Seventy-seven percent think there are signs that suggest aliens have visited Earth. Most of these people said that the evidence came in the form of photographs (60 percent) and videos (57 percent) of UFOs.
    • If aliens landed, 22 percent said they would try to befriend the visitors. Fifteen percent said they would run away, 13 percent said they would lock their doors, and 2 percent said they would try to inflict bodily harm.
    • Seventy-one percent think that aliens are more likely to exist than are superheroes, vampires and zombies. But if aliens attacked Earth, 21 percent said they would most likely call on the Hulk to deal with the havoc, compared with Batman (12 percent) or Spider-Man (8 percent). Fifty-five percent believe there really are officials like the "Men in Black" who claim to be agents and threaten those who come forward with UFO sightings. 

    Previous episodes of "Virtually Speaking Science":

    Seth Shostak has a talk show, too! Hear it at "Big Picture Science."

    Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

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