Galaxies on Collision Course (Hubble Space Telescope Ultra Deep Field)
Two days before we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope, Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, epitomizes the state of astronomy and the contributions of Hubble to its recent development for the BBC News.
“Today, we do really have a lot of evidence pointing in the direction of life on Mars. I think it’s actually more scientifically outrageous to think that Mars is and always has been sterile.”
Seed Magazine’s Lee Billings discusses the prospect of finding life on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system with Dirk Schulze-Makuch, co-author of We Are Not Alone: Why We Have Already Found Extraterrestrial Life:
Here’s a brief excerpt on the Viking mission to Mars:
“In some ways the timing was bad for Viking. A lot of progress was made after its life-detection experiments were already on or on their way to Mars: The discovery of all the ecosystems at undersea hydrothermal vents, and the extremophile research of the early 1980s really changed how we think about life and its limitations. The Viking researchers thought life on Mars would be heterotrophic, feeding off abundant organic compounds distributed everywhere all over the Martian surface. That picture was wrong, and studies of extremophiles on Earth have made us think differently about Mars. Some people say Viking tried to do too much, too early, and as a result of its ambiguous results, nothing has happened with Martian life-detection experiments ever since.
“For the Viking results, the devil is in the details. There were three life-detection experiments: the Labeled Release Experiment that yielded a positive result, the Gas Exchange Experiment that gave a negative result, and the Pyrolytic Release Experiment, which was gave ambiguous, inconclusive results. Viking’s Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer (GC-MS), designed to detect organic matter, was made the appeals judge so to speak—and since it did not detect any organic matter, it was concluded at that time that Viking did not detect life.
“However, the results of the GC-MS were always somewhat odd. This is because we know from the Martian meteorites that there are organics on Mars. Also, it’s been shown that the same instrument could not detect organics in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica or from hydrothermal soil, places on Earth where we know that a small but significant population of microbes makes a living. So the question is, why did the GC-MS not detect the organics present on Mars? Was the concentration too low? Were they in a form that was not detectable? Or, were they all oxidized to carbon dioxide before they could be measured as organics?
“We think the latter because an extra amount of carbon dioxide was exactly what the GC-MS detected. This would be nicely explained by a hypothesis I put forward along with my colleague Joop Houtkooper, which posits that Martian organisms could use a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and water as intracellular fluids rather than water alone. When heated during the GC-MS experiment, the hydrogen peroxide would have become unstable and oxidized all the organic compounds, releasing carbon dioxide.
“Such a hydrogen peroxide–water mixture would be a perfect adaptation mechanism for Martian organisms, because it would also convey antifreeze properties—down to – 56°C—and hygroscopicity, which is the ability to attract water molecules directly from the atmosphere, like honey or sugar does. That would be a huge advantage for any life on a very dry desert world such as Mars. And it would also explain the results of the Gas Exchange experiment and the Pyrolytic Release experiment. They were conducted with too much water. If you are adapted to the little water that is present on Mars, too much water will overwhelm you. It’s as if an alien race were to notice that one of us is dying of thirst, and then try to help us by placing us in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We would drown. In a sense this may be what Viking did to Martian microbes. I think it is particularly telling that one of the Pyrolytic Release experiments conducted under dry conditions showed highly significant organic synthesis rates consistent with microbial life, while another one conducted under wetted conditions showed lower synthesis rates than even the sterilized control did.”
Since its inception 29 years ago, the Haysville Community Library’s Annual Read-a-thon has been a celebration of your Freedom to Read.
Come celebrate with us. All we need is you.
Fifty seven years ago, the American Library Association adopted and published the Freedom to Read Statement.
That statement is no less meaningful or powerful today. It’s what we celebrate, tomorrow, with our 29th Annual Haysville Community Library Read-a-thon:
Freedom to Read Statement
The freedom to read is essential to our democracy. It is continuously under attack. Private groups and public authorities in various parts of the country are working to remove or limit access to reading materials, to censor content in schools, to label “controversial” views, to distribute lists of “objectionable” books or authors, and to purge libraries. These actions apparently rise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to counter threats to safety or national security, as well as to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals. We, as individuals devoted to reading and as librarians and publishers responsible for disseminating ideas, wish to assert the public interest in the preservation of the freedom to read.
Most attempts at suppression rest on a denial of the fundamental premise of democracy: that the ordinary individual, by exercising critical judgment, will select the good and reject the bad. We trust Americans to recognize propaganda and misinformation, and to make their own decisions about what they read and believe. We do not believe they are prepared to sacrifice their heritage of a free press in order to be “protected” against what others think may be bad for them. We believe they still favor free enterprise in ideas and expression.
These efforts at suppression are related to a larger pattern of pressures being brought against education, the press, art and images, films, broadcast media, and the Internet. The problem is not only one of actual censorship. The shadow of fear cast by these pressures leads, we suspect, to an even larger voluntary curtailment of expression by those who seek to avoid controversy or unwelcome scrutiny by government officials.
Such pressure toward conformity is perhaps natural to a time of accelerated change. And yet suppression is never more dangerous than in such a time of social tension. Freedom has given the United States the elasticity to endure strain. Freedom keeps open the path of novel and creative solutions, and enables change to come by choice. Every silencing of a heresy, every enforcement of an orthodoxy, diminishes the toughness and resilience of our society and leaves it the less able to deal with controversy and difference.
Now as always in our history, reading is among our greatest freedoms. The freedom to read and write is almost the only means for making generally available ideas or manners of expression that can initially command only a small audience. The written word is the natural medium for the new idea and the untried voice from which come the original contributions to social growth. It is essential to the extended discussion that serious thought requires, and to the accumulation of knowledge and ideas into organized collections.
We believe that free communication is essential to the preservation of a free society and a creative culture. We believe that these pressures toward conformity present the danger of limiting the range and variety of inquiry and expression on which our democracy and our culture depend. We believe that every American community must jealously guard the freedom to publish and to circulate, in order to preserve its own freedom to read. We believe that publishers and librarians have a profound responsibility to give validity to that freedom to read by making it possible for the readers to choose freely from a variety of offerings.
The freedom to read is guaranteed by the Constitution. Those with faith in free people will stand firm on these constitutional guarantees of essential rights and will exercise the responsibilities that accompany these rights.
We therefore affirm these propositions:
1. It is in the public interest for publishers and librarians to make available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority. Creative thought is by definition new, and what is new is different. The bearer of every new thought is a rebel until that idea is refined and tested. Totalitarian systems attempt to maintain themselves in power by the ruthless suppression of any concept that challenges the established orthodoxy. The power of a democratic system to adapt to change is vastly strengthened by the freedom of its citizens to choose widely from among conflicting opinions offered freely to them. To stifle every nonconformist idea at birth would mark the end of the democratic process. Furthermore, only through the constant activity of weighing and selecting can the democratic mind attain the strength demanded by times like these. We need to know not only what we believe but why we believe it.
2. Publishers, librarians, and booksellers do not need to endorse every idea or presentation they make available. It would conflict with the public interest for them to establish their own political, moral, or aesthetic views as a standard for determining what should be published or circulated. Publishers and librarians serve the educational process by helping to make available knowledge and ideas required for the growth of the mind and the increase of learning. They do not foster education by imposing as mentors the patterns of their own thought. The people should have the freedom to read and consider a broader range of ideas than those that may be held by any single librarian or publisher or government or church. It is wrong that what one can read should be confined to what another thinks proper.
3. It is contrary to the public interest for publishers or librarians to bar access to writings on the basis of the personal history or political affiliations of the author. No art or literature can flourish if it is to be measured by the political views or private lives of its creators. No society of free people can flourish that draws up lists of writers to whom it will not listen, whatever they may have to say.
4. There is no place in our society for efforts to coerce the taste of others, to confine adults to the reading matter deemed suitable for adolescents, or to inhibit the efforts of writers to achieve artistic expression. To some, much of modern expression is shocking. But is not much of life itself shocking? We cut off literature at the source if we prevent writers from dealing with the stuff of life. Parents and teachers have a responsibility to prepare the young to meet the diversity of experiences in life to which they will be exposed, as they have a responsibility to help them learn to think critically for themselves. These are affirmative responsibilities, not to be discharged simply by preventing them from reading works for which they are not yet prepared. In these matters values differ, and values cannot be legislated; nor can machinery be devised that will suit the demands of one group without limiting the freedom of others.
5. It is not in the public interest to force a reader to accept the prejudgment of a label characterizing any expression or its author as subversive or dangerous. The ideal of labeling presupposes the existence of individuals or groups with wisdom to determine by authority what is good or bad for others. It presupposes that individuals must be directed in making up their minds about the ideas they examine. But Americans do not need others to do their thinking for them.
6. It is the responsibility of publishers and librarians, as guardians of the people’s freedom to read, to contest encroachments upon that freedom by individuals or groups seeking to impose their own standards or tastes upon the community at large; and by the government whenever it seeks to reduce or deny public access to public information. It is inevitable in the give and take of the democratic process that the political, the moral, or the aesthetic concepts of an individual or group will occasionally collide with those of another individual or group. In a free society individuals are free to determine for themselves what they wish to read, and each group is free to determine what it will recommend to its freely associated members. But no group has the right to take the law into its own hands, and to impose its own concept of politics or morality upon other members of a democratic society. Freedom is no freedom if it is accorded only to the accepted and the inoffensive. Further, democratic societies are more safe, free, and creative when the free flow of public information is not restricted by governmental prerogative or self-censorship.
7. It is the responsibility of publishers and librarians to give full meaning to the freedom to read by providing books that enrich the quality and diversity of thought and expression. By the exercise of this affirmative responsibility, they can demonstrate that the answer to a “bad” book is a good one, the answer to a “bad” idea is a good one. The freedom to read is of little consequence when the reader cannot obtain matter fit for that reader’s purpose. What is needed is not only the absence of restraint, but the positive provision of opportunity for the people to read the best that has been thought and said. Books are the major channel by which the intellectual inheritance is handed down, and the principal means of its testing and growth. The defense of the freedom to read requires of all publishers and librarians the utmost of their faculties, and deserves of all Americans the fullest of their support.
We state these propositions neither lightly nor as easy generalizations. We here stake out a lofty claim for the value of the written word. We do so because we believe that it is possessed of enormous variety and usefulness, worthy of cherishing and keeping free. We realize that the application of these propositions may mean the dissemination of ideas and manners of expression that are repugnant to many persons. We do not state these propositions in the comfortable belief that what people read is unimportant. We believe rather that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.
This coming week, 54 Census workers will be training in three separate classes held each evening on the lower level and in the community room of the Haysville Community Library. Because of confidentiality requirements, these training sessions are not open to the general public.
Beginning on Saturday May 1st, these canvassers will fan out across the city and attempt to finalize the Census here in Haysville with a 100% count.
As we’ve noted in earlier posts, an accurate and complete count in the Census is exceedingly important. Census results determine the apportionment of all 435 Congressional seats among and the states, and are vitally important for the allocation of federal funding in hundreds of programs totaling more than $400 billion in expenditures.
As of April 22nd, the participation rate for Sedgwick County was 73% — not great, but nearly at the 74% participation rate of the 2000 Census. At least three Kansas counties were at 80% or above, and many were approaching the 80% level.
For Kansas as a whole, the 2010 participation rate was at 74%, trailing Wisconsin (80%), Minnesota (78%), Iowa (77%), Indiana (76%) and Nebraska (75%). The national participation rate was 71%.
As for Haysville, our current participation rate is 78% — one percent below the rate in the 2000 Census. We can surely do better.
(For more information, see our earlier posts Haysville Counts and Make It Count.)
