I have been hard at work rebooting my Bens Lab YouTube channel. This has been prompted by a realisation that a niche topic such as astrobiology is not only insanely interesting, it can keep a niche channel alive, away from the blinding glare of the massively monolithic and sucessful general science channels dominating the platform.
Astrobiology is almost too interesting, and there is plenty of scope for all kinds of interesting viewing. It’ll at least be fun making them. There’s also a huge array of related topics, with some room even for a bit of speculation and fun!
To that end I’ve rebadged the channel a little, and here is the first “proper” video from Ben’s Lab presents: astro-biological:
Hi all. This post is essentially the script for a YouTube episode I have coming up on my Ben’s Lab channel. Like the “Holiday on Venus” episode, this one also is meant to depict a TV or radio presenter, outlining a vacation package across the solar system. Zip on past this video if you like, but it provides a bit of continuity for the script.
G’day, lunatics!
“Do you love risking life and limb? Do you think extreme sports is the perfect way to relax? Well then strap yourselves in! Did you love your trip to Venus! Venus is the testing ground for the Apocalypse! Not for the faint hearted!
If you thought Venus was hardcore, and you’re thirsty for more, Time-X has the ultimate vacation package for you! A grand tour of the craziest places in the Solar System! Let’s go!!!!
Mars! Been there, done that, I know, but have you seen a REAL Grand Canyon! Valles Marineris: the longest Canyon in the solar system! Not only the longest, but the deepest!
Those guys in Norway back in the old days… thought they were pretty cool jumping off cliffs, here, swooping down gracefully in their seagull suits! How do you think they’d like to jump into this bad boy! At 2485 miles long, there’s plenty of parking! That’s the distance from San Francisco to Washington. Or, just a bit more than the distance from Sydney to Perth! Holy Frehole! Not only is this canyon long, stretching a quarter of the way around Mars, it’s deep: 7 km deep in places. Hooley Dooley! Cliff jumpers will go insane for this place!
Should we tell them there’s almost no atmosphere on Mars, and they’ll drop like stones?…..Nah!
Still on Mars!
Enjoy a sunrise atop Olympus Mons. Sounds lovely! At an altitude of 21.9 kilometres! That’s pretty tall! How tall is Mount Everest in comparison? Do we even care? Look, look at the little poopoo! Nawwww!!! Olympus Mons is an extremely ancient shield volcano, which has long since become extinct. Climbing its slope, you’d actually be virtually standing in outer space once reaching the peak! What’s not to like about that?
Moving on… ahem!
Next stop, Vesta, a lovely little chunk of prime real estate in the Asteroid belt. Boasting lots of peace and quiet and some really epic views, Vesta has the tallest mountain in the Solar System: Rheasilvia.
A computer generated elevation map of Rheasilvia crater, with its 20km+ peak at its centre. Image: NASA/JPL.
And from above. Red areas correspond to maximum elevation. Image: NASA/JPL.
Plopped right in the middle of a gigantic crater that takes up 90 percent of the diameter of Vesta, this monster was formed by a meaty impact with something really big and mean around 1 billion years ago. Sorry Olympus Mons, Rheasilvia is just a little bit higher than you, at 22 km.
Let’s head further out! Where are we now?
Io, orbiting Jupiter, is the most geologically active object in the solar system! Did someone say geology? That doesn’t sound very extreme, you say. What does that mean for the extreme sports nut? Well, Io has 400activevolcanoes! 400! Ride your mountain bike down one of those- there’s no shortage of them! Just ride really fast! This place is a little bit too extreme! I’m not hanging around for that!
We haven’t forgotten water sports! Europa is the place to go for extreme deep sea diving! Back on earth the deepest point in the ocean is the Marianas Trench in the Pacific Ocean, which gets to 12 km below sea level. You could hide majestic Mount Everest inside it. Poor Everest, a little bit inadequate today!
Europa, smallest of the Galillean moons, is a real contender for the possibility of life. Image: NASA/JPL.
Europa orbits Jupiter, and looks pretty serene, but that pretty icy shell hides an ocean averaging 62 km deep! I’d like to explore that myself! Just be mindful though, extreme sportsters; Europa may have it’s own life. No littering and no feeding the natives!
That’s some pretty serious water! On to our next stop: Neptune and Uranus!
If extreme weather is your thing, then line up! Go hang-gliding in these winds! On Uranus, winds in the upper atmosphere blow along at over 900 kph!
Stop the world, I wanna get off!
But wait, there’s more!
On Neptune, similar winds scream along at a brain splattering 2100 kph! Just think about it. Whiplash from hell, anyone?
If you still can’t get jumping off rocks out of your system, then you will LOVE Miranda, one of the moons of Uranus. What’s so great about Miranda?
Only the TALLEST CLIFFS IN THE ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM!!
Verona Rupes, right of centre, caught in a single grainy image during the Voyager 2 flyby in 1986.
For some colon twisting thrills, these cliffs fit the bill. At 20 km deep, it’ll be a real high jump! Thing is though, we offer this jump to newbies. Why? Because with Miranda’s tiny gravity, it’ll take 12 minutes to fall to the bottom! You’ll hit pretty hard, at about 200 kph, but a tonne of bubble wrap will get around that! We do give a Seniors discount for this jump.
Well those places are nasty, no doubt, But never let it be said that we at Time-X are not discerning purveyors of the ultimate in bowel clenching excitement!
Let’s leave the Solar system altogether! Hurry up! It’s 63 light years away!
What is?
The perfect way to say “I love you” to the raving psychopath in your life!
Exoplanet HD189733B (Catchy name, I know!)
This place eats the others for breakfast. Uranus and Neptune are super windy, but they’re just farting compared to this place. Winds reach speeds of 5400 miles per hour, or 8690 kph!! Oh my gosh! AND it rains glass!! Sideways!! If you’re still keen to visit, put your affairs in order and say goodbye to your loved ones, because that’s what extreme sports are all about!!
Do you wanna live forever?
Places on this trip are going fast! Mind you, we have a slightly high turnover, so you don’t really have to wait too long for a seat. Call now.
If you love bone crushing science and mind splattering knowledge, subscribe to Time-X , I mean Ben’s Lab! Giving you the Universe in PLAIN HUMAN!”
What do you think? Suggestions and comments below! Until then,
Were I offered the chance to study again, I know what I would do. Astrobiology. In the last few years it’s been something I’ve followed. The trouble is, I’m easily interested in almost anything I come across. However, I would study astrobiology in a heartbeat. So, what is astrobiology?
Ever since humanity made its first baby steps beyond our thin layer of atmosohere astrobiology has looked to the stars, emerging as a discipline in its own right. It is the study of life on other worlds. Moreover, it is the study of life itself and asks the question: could life exist anywhere else?
We’ve all seen the movies and heard stories. The idea of life on other worlds has had a vice like grip on the human imagination for a very long time. Every single culture on Earth has some accounts of visitors from the sky and encounters with otherworldly beings.
“Ezekiel’s Vision” by Mattheaus Merian. Image: Wikimedia Commons
From Judeo-Christian mythology and tradition to the various disparate and yet somewhat homogenous mythologies of Australia’s aboriginal people, it seems we’ve had visitors from the sky for quite some time.
Wandjina rock art, from the Kimberley Region of Western Australia. Image: Wikipedia
At least so the stories go. Those stories will persist in one form or another for a long time to come, and the popular imagination is still fired up with tales of otherworldly visitors. Just trawl social media sometime and you’ll see what I mean. A search on YouTube: that paragon of level headedness, for a term such as “Area 51” will yield a miasma of conspiracy theories, alien “sightings” and general silly nonsense. Many of these videos have had millions of views. In my first search one particular video had over 20 million views. It was a “sighting” of an alien strolling across a road in some generic American desert setting.
20 million views? Seriously?
People are eating this stuff up. But what does it have to do with astrobiology? Our desire for interstellar neighbours is always a little, shall we say, elitist? Does all extraterrestrial life need to be flying around in advanced spacecraft and spying on us: the cosmic equivalent of an ant farm?
An early version of the Big Brother house. Image: Factzoo.com
(Are we that fascinating?)
Astrobiology specifically looks for life beyond earth. That life doesn’t need to be a wookie or a Borg drone. Something as simple as a bacterium would rock the worlds of astrobiologists everywhere.
Missions to other worlds in the solar system have had this in mind for decades now. Missions to Mars almost turned the science world on its head when micro traces believed to be produced by single celled organisms were relayed back to space agencies. Big news indeed. Life on another world. Not Yoda, to be sure, but better! The jury is still out on this “evidence” but time will tell!
Possible biogenic structures, found in the Alan Halls meteorite, Antarctica in 1996. Image: NASA
You see, astrobiology is the search for life beyond earth. It is the application of a diverse set of scientific disciplines (which includes but isn’t restricted to) chemistry, geology, biology, planetolgy, ecology and astronomy to look for anything. Any life at all. If human or robotic explorers ventured across the gulf of space and found something as simple as a bacterium it would be a massive deal. From the time of earth’s formation circa 4.6 billion years ago life took around a
Life really was pushing it uphill in the beginning. Image: NASA/JPL
billion years to appear. The story of life isn’t the key point here. On earth life still took a long time to gain traction. It was only around 800 million years ago that anything as complex as a sponge first appeared, and it went through a pounding before all this happened. The Late Heavy Bombardment, a highly toxic and reducing atmosphere; likely similar to that on Titan today, which was replaced by another highly toxic atmosphere: oxygen. This change led to the greatest mass extinction this planet has ever known. An irradiated, toxic lethal planet somehow gave rise to life.
Astrobiology looks at life on this primeval earth and posits the question: if it could make it here, it kind of stands to reason that it could develop somewhere else. Earth now is a benign paradise, possessing a very particular set of attributes that enable life to thrive. Among these; a thick atmosphere and life giving heat from a nearby sun which respectively enable liquid water to exist at the surface and provide the fundamental energy for life to prosper. Earth possesses an active magnetosphere which shields life from cosmic radiation. These are only some of the factors that make earth just right, like the proverbial bowl of porridge. In fact, in honour of that famous metaphor, Earth is said to orbit the Sun in a “Goldilocks Zone” This means that we are just far enough from the sun that the temperature range is just right for liquid water to exist at its surface. Hence the thing with the porridge.
Many other worlds we’ve examined don’t have any or all of these qualities, but that’s no reason to dismiss them.
Life is seemingly turning up everywhere we look these days, and the more we look the more we see that life is extremely tenacious From the clouds above us to hadean environments deep within the earth’s crust to active nuclear reactors life seems to be able to survive anywhere.
That’s what gives astrobiologists hope.
This post is to be the outline of an upcoming episode on my “Ben’s Lab” YouTube channel. For any who are following the channel (thank you!) It will be undergoing renovations. The subject matter will focus more on things near and dear to my heart, and astrobiology is one of those things! If you like astrobiology please leave suggestions for episode ideas in the comments, or share this with others who like it as well.
References and resources:
This list is not comprehensive and is intended to begin those who are interested on beginning their own research;
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
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