Review: Wanted: One Scoundrel by Jenny Schwartz

I stumbled upon this book quite by accident after following a link that took me to the author's website. When I saw she had written a steampunk novella set in Australia, how could I possibly resist buying it? I didn't really need the added incentive of being able to count it towards the Australian Women Writers Challenge. And before you argue, steampunk counts as science fiction because of the technological and scientific sentiment inherent in (the characters) inventing new old tech.

Wanted: One Scoundrel by Jenny Schwartz is set in and around the Swan River colony -- mostly in Perth and Fremantle. The protagonist, Esme, is the daughter of a gold prospector and inventor who struck it rich relatively recently. She is also a suffragette spearheading a political party with the goal of giving women and non-Anglos rights and votes.

The story opens with her realisation that, since her main political opponent has somehow arranged for all political debates to take place at gentlemen's clubs, she needs a male spokesperson to be a figurehead leader. Unfortunately, all her present male supporters are too busy with their own affairs to devote sufficient time to actually leading a political party. So, with the aid of her captain uncle, she set about finding herself a newly arrived scoundrel ("fresh off the boat" -- would that there weren't other connotations to that phrase) whom she intends to pay to be her puppet.

Enter Jed. A conveniently unknown American recently arrived from England with her uncle's (steam-powered) ship. Jed quickly agrees to be the front-runner for her political party and a friendship/attraction blossoms between them (well, it is also a romance story).

Esme's main rival is an old-money easterner (insofar as there is any aristocracy in pre-federation Australia, he seems to be a prime example). Unlikeable to the bone, he doesn't seem to realise that Esme finds his desire to prevent anyone that isn't male, white or rich (or, really, anyone that isn't him or his friends) from voting abhorrent. He started off merely an arrogant prat, but this escalated for the climax in an exciting way, I thought. (No spoilers.)

The steampunk elements are scattered throughout the story. For example there are the steam powered boats that make it to Swan River from England in a matter of weeks, not months, miscellaneous minor steam-powered contraptions and even forays into electricity and magnetism (Tesla gets a very brief mention, too). From a scientific point of view, I found no obvious faults, although I'm a little sceptical of the kangaroo-inspired land vehicle mentioned at one point.

As I implied at the start, the thought of a steampunk story set in Australia made me very keen to read this and I was not disappointed. I hereby encourage more Australian authors to write Australian steampunk. Steam + gold rush allows for a wealth of material to draw from.

Speaking of the gold rush, being an easterner myself, I only really know a bit about Victoria's gold rush, and next to nothing about Western Australia's (arguably, I know more about Western Australia's current mining boom than any of the past). It was nice to read about a slightly different gold rush. I even learnt about the significant Indian population of the time (cf Chinese miners in Victoria).

The writing was ever so slightly clunky in places, mostly when there was an instance of head-hopping (between Esme and Jed) within the same scene. I also found the story got more amusing as it went along -- after a slightly uneventful beginning --  and I really enjoyed the climax and ending. It had my laughing out loud a few times in the second half. I loved Esme, who was strong, progressive (obviously) and kept her head in trying circumstances. Overall, I recommend this to anyone with a passing interest in steampunk or Australian history.

(Oh and if you're wondering, the Christmas element is extremely minor, limited to a single Christmas in July ball, so yeah, ignore that subtitle. Well, unless you like Christmas, in which case, read the book anyway.)

4 / 5 stars.

Relatively Faster

Space shuttle moves pretty slowly and stays close to Earth.
Image credit: ISS Expedition 28 Crew, NASA

Following on from my last blog, in which I talked about travelling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, today I'm going to add acceleration into the mix. But first, a few other funky consequences and transformations that apply when travelling close to the speed of light.

To recap last week's post, when travelling close to the speed of light, time dilates and length contracts. That means time moves more slowly and distance shrinks. The factor which dictates how much is called the Lorentz factor and is denoted by the Greek letter gamma:

Here v is the speed of your rocket or whatever and c = 3 x 10⁸ m/s is the speed of light.

The rate at which time appears to pass (to an outside observer) in a rocket travelling at v is given by the time that passes for the observer multiplied by gamma (which is always greater than or equal to 1). This is also called the proper time for the people inside the rocket. The apparent distance between A and B for a moving observer is given by the distance between A and B as seen by an observer at rest with respect to the two points (so that A and B don't seem to be moving) divided by gamma.

Moving on

Another funky thing that changes with speed is mass -- it increases proportionally with gamma. Well, it's sort of more accurate to say momentum, and it doesn't mean that you'll feel heavier when you're in a fast-moving rocket, but that it will take more energy or force to accelerate you further. Basically, what this boils down to is the faster you're going, the harder it is to go faster.

What about if we have two rockets, travelling in opposite directions at 0.75c (that is, three quarters of the speed of light)? The apparent speed of one rocket as seen from the other must be less than the speed of light (all speeds of massive objects are less than the speed of light in all inertial reference frames). So we need to use another transformation to work it out. Without going into too much mathematical detail, the equation we need is:

See below for slightly complicated explanation of values.

The tricky part is that now we're talking about three frames of reference, not two. There's a frame of reference for each of our moving spaceships, and the third frame which is dictating how quickly the two spaceships are travelling (in their own frame, of course, each spaceship is stationary and we don't have a problem to work out). This third frame we're going to call the rest frame. We want to work out u, which is how fast spaceship A appears to be travelling from spaceship B's point of view. U is the velocity of spaceship A from the rest frame, v is the velocity of spaceship B from the rest frame. For the equation to make sense, one of U or v has to be negative (to account for the opposite directions part) c remains the speed of light (3x10⁸ m/s).

Whew, OK, bit complicated to keep track of things there.


Getting faster

Next up, let's talk about acceleration when travelling at relativistic speeds. So far, we've only considered things moving at a constant speed. Accelerating frames are, by definition, not inertial (since an inertial frame is defined as not accelerating), so we can't quite apply all the same assumptions to them. When you are accelerating, you are moving into a different inertial frame for each instant that your speed is changing. (Of course, when you stop accelerating, you'll stay in your last frame unless you decelerate.)

If you're in an inertial frame and a relativistic spaceship accelerates past, what acceleration does it appear to have? Well, the following formula will tell us and, it's interesting to note, the apparent acceleration changes with the ship's velocity, even though, from on board the ship, the acceleration feels constant.

I was going to include the equation, but upon further consideration, it's not terribly useful or relevant. Moving on to more practical relativistic space travel, I'd like to point you in the direction of this excellent website. The set of rocket equations as explained on that site are as follows:

Equations taken (and re-typeset) from this excellent website.

So these equations assume that the ship is travelling at a constant acceleration, a. The velocity, v, is the speed it reaches, as measured from a "stationary" reference frame -- which for the sake of brevity I'll call Earth* -- after a t-long period of acceleration. The distance over which the acceleration takes place is d and τ (pronounced tau) is the time that passes for the rocket and the people inside it (generally speaking, less time will pass inside the rocket than for people on Earth).

That inverse cosh function (also called arccosh) in the last equation is a bit of an odd one. It's short for inverse hyperbolic cosine. A good scientific calculator should have the appropriate function (you'd probably have to use the shift key to get to it) and failing that, there's always WolframAlpha.com.

There are a few ways to use these equations, depending on the circumstances of your spaceship.

Accelerate constantly until the half way mark, then decelerate until destination

• So, acceleration is good for us. It maintains things like muscle mass and bone density. It's broadly a good idea to maintain Earth acceleration (9.8 m/s² is the acceleration due to gravity).
• If we accelerate the whole way, we'll go splat at our destination. The sensible thing, if we want to accelerate the whole time, is to accelerate constantly to the half way mark, flip the ship and then decelerate the rest of the way. (Flipping the ship is so that the floor doesn't turn into the ceiling. Obviously you'd have to stop the accelerating to do the flipping.)
• So we use the time taken equation (the first one) but put in half the distance (because we're only accelerating 'til the halfway mark), then double the resultant time to include the time taken to decelerate (conveniently, these things are symmetric).

In general, it's easier to deal with light years (rather than meters) and years (rather than seconds) when we're talking about interstellar distances. However, to get a sensible answer out, we need to put acceleration into years and light years as well. Skipping the maths, 1g = 9.8 m/s² = 1.03 ly/yr² so you can use that value for a. You can also just multiply by a factor if you decide you'd like to save fuel by accelerating at only 0.5g or 0.75g. Or save time by going at 1.5g (which humans might be able to adapt to). Also, remember that the speed of light in these units is 1 ly/yr.

To work out the time taken, follow the same procedure as above, but using the time equation (whichever one you're interested in). Again, put in half the distance then double the result.

Accelerate up to a set velocity

Because accelerating for an indefinite period of time might get a bit silly and use up an unrealistic amount of fuel. Also, you'd be smashing into atoms pretty hard and starlight (and the cosmic background radiation if you end up going fast enough) would get blueshifted to higher frequencies. Both of these phenomena would require extra radiation shielding, which adds extra mass and requires extra fuel. So, let's accelerate just up to a set velocity, travel at that velocity for the bulk of the journey and then decelerate again.

• First we need to know the distance required to reach our desired velocity (and potentially also the time). The procedure isn't too different to the first case. We do need to rearrange the velocity equation a little first. Using c = 1 ly/yr we get:

• Throw in our final velocity and the desired acceleration and we get the time taken (from an Earthly reference frame). Throw the time into the distance equation and we get out how far we've come when we stop accelerating. Double this to account for the distance and/or time taken decelerating again, subtract that from the total distance and we're left with the distance spent travelling at a constant velocity.
• You can work out the time that section of travel takes from last time's blog (here).

And there you have it, journey times at relativistic speeds with accelerations. Huzzah!



* Technically not inertial, but it'll do if you ignore the gravity and the motion around the sun. Theoretically we should take the sun as our standard rest frame, so you can pretend I really mean the sun when I say Earth if that makes you feel better. 

Review: Nightsiders by Sue Isle

Nightsiders by Sue Isle is a collection of four short stories set in the same world. It is part of Twelfth Planet Press's Twelve Planets series, twelve collections which are showcasing the work of twelve Australian female authors. I believe it's the only one so far to be entirely science fictional (that said, the only other I've read is Love and Romanpunk by Tansy Rayner Roberts -- an excellent blend of Roman mythology, the past and the future -- and I'm not sure what's planned for the rest of the series).

Nightsiders is set in Western Australia, in and around Perth. I want to say it's post-apocalyptic, but that's not quite true. It seems part local apocalypse, part generalised catastrophic climate change. The Australian climate has changed so that the west coast is no longer particularly habitable, with hints at the start that things are better in the east. The former city of Perth is now generally referred to as Nightside, because the people living there have turned nocturnal, seeking shelter during the heat of the day and going about their business in the marginally cooler nights.

A few words on each of the stories:


The Painted Girl

13 year old girl has been with walking with an older woman (who isn't her mother) as long as she remembers. One day, her life abruptly changes and she learns there's more to it than she'd realised.

The Nation of the Night

Ash, 17 year old a trans boy, goes east for an operation. The story is mostly about the stark differences between the parched west and the drowning east. He quickly learns that life is far from perfect in Melbourne, even if they still have hospitals and infrastructure. In Nightside (aka Perth), everyone helps their neighbours, in Melbourne, the infrastructure is overcrowded and they're trying to keep out as many surplus people as they can manage.

Paper Dragons

Some of the kids in Nightside put on a play based on some old TV scripts they found in an abandoned home. Turns out it's a soap about the trivialities of teenage life as in our time. Nightside's entire population of old folk (who remember life before the bombings and the evacuation) turn out to watch.

The Schoolteacher's Tale

This was my favourite story. Mostly, I think, because it filled in some of the gaps left by the other stories with teenage protagonists who didn't know life before Nightside. The titular schoolteacher is a 70 year old woman who had been mentioned as a key figure in the lives of the characters in the previous two stories. We are exposed to some of her reminiscences of how much the world has changed and, through the story, we learn a bit of where Nightside is headed in the future.

~

It sort of feels strange that I can summarise each of the stories in a few sentences but barely even touch on what the stories are really about. Partly this is avoiding spoilers, and partly because there are some themes and ideas that run through all four stories which are hard to pin down to just one of them.

An idea that runs through all the stories (though features the most in the first one) is that of the Drainers. They are a group of people with a genetic mutation that gives them a tolerance for the harsh sun and helps them go a bit longer between sips of water. They come out during the day when everyone else is sleeping, and hide in caves and drains (hence the name, I suppose) at night. There are stories of them eating people or draining their blood and, because they move about when everyone else is sleeping, they're regarded almost as reverse vampires, a notion which appealed to me.

All the children protagonists have adapted better to life in Nightside than the adults. They have good night vision (and poor day vision) and, of course, they are used to the only life they have ever known. One theme that ran heavily through the first three stories is that of abandonment. In the two middle stories, the children were abandoned by parents who went east during the evacuation. There's a heavy implication that this happened to almost all of the children of Nightside, with some of the remaining adults acting as foster parents to many of them. It sort of felt a bit much. Of course, the children that weren't abandoned when their parents went east wouldn't have still been around. But really, children are pretty much top of the list of things parents take with them when leaving a war zone. Where are the parents that stayed behind with children? Where are the children whose parents were killed rather than left? I appreciate that the theme of abandonment fits in with the greater theme of Nightside being abandoned by its former inhabitants and the rest of the country, but it felt a little bit lopsided by the time I got to the end.

On a happier note, this was a collection full of strong and well drawn female characters. With the exception of Ash (trans) in the second story, all the protagonists were female. There was also a good balance of male and female secondary/background characters, which is always nice to see.

To a small degree, the setting put me in mind of Daughters of Moab by Kim Westwood, but the writing style was very different and thematically the setting and the idea of adaptation to a hostile environment were the only things the two have in common.

Overall, I found Nightsiders an interesting read.

Rating 4 / 5 stars

Rapid slow space travel

Credit: Craig Crawford on APoD

I have posted in the past about mundane space travel such as might be used with the solar system (or another star system if we're talking aliens or whatnot). However, with speeds that slow, it would take an extremely long time to reach another star, even the closest. To have any hope of reaching another star, we need to be able to travel much faster.

Right now, we aren't technologically equipped to do so and that's not what this post is about. What I'm going to talk about is what happens when we (or rabbits or clocks or whatever) travel at high speeds. Because strange and interesting things do happen. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of Einstein's special relativity.

Immutable

We live in a world with three spatial dimensions and one time dimension. All this really means is that we can define a co-ordinate system (for example x-, y- and z-axes) which can define any point in space by listing three numbers (the x, y, z co-ordinates) and which can define any point in time with a single number (although it doesn't look like a single number, that's how we can think of "11:00 am on 21 January 2012"). Any point in spacetime (that is to say, our universe, past and present) can be defined by combining those two co-ordinate systems to give four numbers, unique to each point.

Now, say you're in a long corridor. There are several ways you might try to measure how long it is. You might walk along it and count steps or use a measuring tape. You might jog or walk at a know speed and time how long it takes to get to the other end. If you were particularly eager and the corridor sufficiently long, you could bounce light (or radio waves) off the far end and time how long it takes to complete a round trip.

Of these three options, I'd hazard that most people would use a length-based measurement as per the first option.

Now suppose your room is actually a space ship traveling close to the speed of light with you inside it. (For now we're ignoring how it got up to that speed.) You can still use the same three methods to measure it. Remember, when you're moving at a constant speed, you don't feel the movement. Aside from bumpiness due to uneven roads/train tracks/turbulence, the only sort of movement you can detect without looking out a window are the periods of acceleration and deceleration. So, if you're traveling at a constant velocity in a spaceship with no windows, you would have no way of checking how fast you're going, but other than that, nothing weird would seem to be happening.

On the other hand, if you were outside the spaceship watching it go past, how could you measure how long it was? Being on the outside rules out walking along it with a tape measure (unless it's stationary, but then it's not going past, is it?), but the other two methods more or less work. If you know how fast it's going, you can time how long it takes to go past. If you know how long it is, you can time how long it takes to go past and work out how fast it's going.

Intuitively, we might expect that spaceship length doesn't change and that the speed of the spaceship is the only thing that determines the time taken for it to go past. This isn't strictly true.

The one immutable quantity when we're talking about moving objects in a vacuum (that is, spaceships in space) is not how long they are or, strictly speaking, how fast they're going. It is, in fact, the speed of light. The old mantra of special relativity is:

The speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames.

A definition before I go on: inertial reference frame is a set of co-ordinates which isn't accelerating. If you are in an inertial reference frame, you can define your spacetime position with respect to those co-ordinates.

Also, an important point is that it's not possible for any object with mass to move at the speed of light (or faster). The only reason light gets away with it is because photons, particles of light, are massless.


Goin' fast

Say your fancy long spaceship is constantly going at half the speed of light. Because the speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames, light from a torch you shine inside the spaceship will still travel at the same speed of light as it would anywhere else. Furthermore, just because you're traveling at half the speed of light doesn't mean the light from your torch will appear to travel at one and a half times the speed of light to someone outside your spaceship who can look inside.

Sounds paradoxical, doesn't it?

To make up for the apparent paradox, two things happen. Remember that speed or velocity is basically the amount of distance covered in a stretch of time. To keep the speed of light constant, both distance and time change, depending on how fast you're observing from.

A fast moving object appears to be shorter than it would were both object and observer in the same reference frame (that is, traveling at the same speed in the same direction). This applies to the outside distance for a fast-moving spaceship -- the distance traveled/left to go appears shorter than if the spaceship was stationary with respect to it. This is called length contraction.

Quick side note: this means that all distance is relative and there is no such thing as being truly stationary, just stationary with respect to some other reference frame.

The faster your spaceship goes, the more slowly time passes for you. Well, actually, to you it would seem that between starting your journey and ending it, time passed more quickly planetside than it did for you. (It's all relative, see?) This is called time dilation.

The amount by which time slows down or distance shrinks is dictated by the relative speed of your spaceship. There's a mathematical quantity called the Lorentz factor, represented by the Greek letter gamma, which tells us how much.

Gamma, the squiggle on the left, is the Lorentz factor, v is the speed the spaceship or whatever is traveling, and c is the speed of light, equal to 3 x 10⁸ metres per second.

So if you're traveling at half the speed of light, gamma would be equal to about 1.15, so time would pass 1.15 times more slowly. An hour on the spaceship would take about 69 minutes to pass on Earth. The length of the spaceship, to someone on Earth, would be 1.15 times shorter. One metre would appear to be about 87 cm long.

Some other values of gamma for speeds which are significant fractions of the speed of light are:

• Speed: 0.75c, gamma =1.51
• Speed: 0.867c, gamma = 2
• Speed: 0.9c, gamma = 2.3
• Speed: 0.95c, gamma = 3.2
• Speed: 0.99c, gamma =7.1
• Speed: 0.9999c, gamma =70.7

To work out the time dilation, multiply by gamma, to work out the length contraction, divide by gamma.

This isn't quite all there is to know. For example, objects traveling at relativistic velocities (at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light) also increase in mass by the same factor of gamma and accelerating up to high speeds is also a bit strange. More on that next week.

And in case you're wondering how fast you have to go for these relativistic effects to kick in, or even how we know they're real... well, they exist no matter how fast you're going, it's just that at the sort of speeds we experience on a day to day basis, the time differences are entirely negligible. We have been able to test relativity, however, in a couple of ways. Flying super-precise atomic clocks around on aeroplanes has shown that time passes more slowly for them relative to us. The same has been shown for GPS and possibly other satellites. On a much larger scale, measurements of binary pulsars have also confirmed Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Stay tuned for more next week.

Review: Spare Parts by Sally Rogers-Davidson

You may recall me posting about the Australian Women Writers Challenge at the end of last year. Well I just finished reading my first science fiction book for the challenge, which I will review in this post. Actually, I'm undertaking two challenges, the other not being restricted to only science fiction books (although it is mostly fantasy). One of the books I've read that I've decided to count as not science fiction was a bit borderline. That's Hoodwink by Rhonda Roberts, which is about a time-travelling PI. The time-travelling part is obviously the science fiction element, but since the book doesn't spend much time talking about the mechanics or physics of time travel (it's mentioned briefly and I suspect may become more important in other books), I've counted it towards the other challenge. If you're interested, you can read my 4.5 / 5 star review here.

Spare Parts by Sally Rogers-Davidson


This was actually a fairly difficult book to track down. When I first made my list of possible science fiction books by Australian women, many were out of print. This was one of them. Or so I thought at first, since it was published in 1999 and not readily available in the usual places. I actually found it on Audible in audiobook form (if you become a member, even briefly, it's much cheaper to buy audiobooks from them, FYI). It was read by Suzi Dougherty, who has apparently also read many/most of John Marsden's audiobooks. The Australian accent was appreciated since most audiofiction I come across, with a few British exceptions, is American.

But enough about the format.

Spare Parts is about Kelty, a 19 year old "C-grader" (in a caste system which goes down to D), whose prospects were reduced when she narrowly missed out on a place at university (because C-graders can only get in with scholarships). The book is set about a hundred years in the future in the sprawling suburbia of Melbourne, albeit a Melbourne more filled with high-rises and with even dodgier trains than at present.

When Kelty's best friend is grievously injured in an industrial accident, Kelty decides to sell her body and join the space corps to save her friend. This is a world where the rich discard their old, decrepit (or sometimes merely slightly wrinkled) bodies and have their brains transplanted into the young bodies of people of the lower classes, for a nice fee. The people who've sold their bodies then get to have their brains transplanted into cyborg bodies. The catch? Cyborgs (or cybermorphs as is the politically correct term) aren't allowed to live permanently on Earth.

When I first started reading, I thought this was a dystopian novel and was convinced that Kelty was going to discover that the evil A and B graders were killing the poor for their bodies and organs. It's possible that I've read too many YA dystopias of late. To alleviate any confusion such as what I suffered, I want to make it clear that this is not really a dystopian novel. Sure, it's not all rainbows and sunshine for the poor, criminals wear tracker bracelets which electrocute them if they feel angry (so they don't attack bystanders) but it's not terribly different to our world. The class boundaries are just a little more emphasised so that the rich live in high-rises and ride cable cars around the city and the poor live in dodgy areas and ride the subway. The main thing which distinguishes Spare Parts from books like The Hunger Games and Divergent or even 1984 is that there is no government conspiracy keeping everyone oppressed. The poor are just poor and have to either sell their bodies and join the space corps or be smart enough for a scholarship to university to improve their situation.

Of course, I'm not saying that the characters, rich or otherwise, are necessarily all on the up and up, but if I hadn't automatically assumed dystopia, I think I would have enjoyed the start more, instead of spending it being deeply suspicious of the society. That's more an issue with my expectations than with the book itself, however.

I thought the way the cyborg bodies were explained and treated was well done. The space corps is composed entirely of cyborgs because ordinary human bodies aren't resilient enough to withstand the accelerations and radiation and other dangers of space. Human brains can't just be plonked in a cyborg body and be expected to know how to manipulate it (especially given the extra senses they have, like infrared and UV vision, for example). Rogers-Davidson deals with this by giving each cyborg an AI assistant which interfaces with their systems and helps them acclimate to the world. They can even mitigate or postpone the effects of alcohol. Kelty's snarky AI was one of the really fun parts of the novel. (She's so "state-of-the-art" she can even be sarcastic.)

I also enjoyed the human aspect of the novel. It was nice to see a wide range of female characters and their relationships were equally varied and well drawn particularly between the main character and others (since this was written in first person, that's to be expected). In fact, I think there was only one prominent male character, and he was only really around in the first half of the book, which is rare to see. Another key difference between Spare Parts and many more recent YA books is the lack of a romantic plot line. Which I found endearing. Given all the changes she's going through -- changing bodies, changing socioeconomic circumstances -- Kelty really has much more important things to worry about than boys. It really is nice to read about a teenager who doesn't think important life choices have to include boys.

Rating: 5 / 5 stars

Living in the Future

It being the new year and all, I thought it might be nice to reflect upon what we, as a whole, have achieved that was once science fiction but is now commonplace. Or at least existent. And I'm not going to focus on the big obvious things, because those are boring and, well, we know smartphones and iPads and modern medicine are crazy futuristic devices/advances. That's obvious. But what about the little things? Specifically, what about food?

Foodtastic

I was inspired to write this post when I was eating a fried egg and cheese toasted sandwich that was both gluten and dairy-free. The cheese was made of soy and the bread was specially processed to get rid of the gluten, as well as being made with alternate flours (that is to say, it has gluten-free wheat starch as a key ingredient as well as non-wheat flours). If you're wondering, the cheese stuff does sort of taste of cheese (without the evil taste of doom that I associate with dairy products), particularly if it's mixed with something else, like egg and bread. Other magic pseudo-dairy products I have in my fridge include rice milk, oat milk, soyghurt, oat milk-based ice cream, oat milk fauxghurt, rice milk-based cream, soy-based sour cream, two types of pretend cheese (another flavour of the slices and a solid type one I haven't actually tried yet) and dairy-free margarine.

The more exotic of these are relatively recent inventions. In terms of food (intentionally) not containing gluten*, coeliac disease (and hence the negative impact of gluten on sufferers) was discovered circa World War II (thanks to bread shortages, I believe), margarine has been around for a while, soy and grain milks even longer, although less so in the western world. Another relatively recent development is vegetarian products which resemble miscellaneous meat products. There's not-bacon (it even comes with not-fat bits), slices pretending to be ham, a variety of sausages -- from pseudo hot dog to chorizo to pseudo chicken and gourmet -- faux chicken nuggets, kebablike things and probably something else that's slipped my mind.

All these things already exist.

Science fiction often has us eating vat-grown protein (Bujold's Vorkosigan books), hydroponic vegetables (lots of things) soy moulded into all sorts of unusual and interesting-tasting things (Asimov and others). We already have hydroponic vegetables -- I'm pretty sure that's where my tomatoes come from these days -- and soy disguised as all sorts of things. The main difference is that we're growing these things on Earth, not in space. But we're getting there.

Uncooked quinoa. Nabbed from wiki here.

NASA has looked into (pdf) using quinoa as a space crop because, unlike soy, quinoa is a complete protein. This means that it contains all the essential amino acids we need (just like meat does). As well as being high in protein, it's high in fibre, iron and other useful things. And in terms of off-world farming, crops are much easier to deal with than animals. That pdf I linked at the start of this paragraph is pretty old, and I suspect NASA's research is directed elsewhere for the moment, but there's no reason for this not to be taken further in the future.

Another aspect I want to touch on is additives. There is a certain magic to making something taste like a thing that hasn't even been within a metre of the production line. More importantly, and more relevantly, are preservatives, both the chemical and the food-storage kind. The fact that we can ship things all around the globe without them going off before they reach their destination is also a little bit magic, when you think about what our pre-refrigeration ancestors had to contend with. To say nothing of freeze-drying or long-life (dairy) milk.

And I haven't even begun to talk about mass production farming and all that jazz. Although, despite continuing research/advances in those areas, aspects of that are a little less futuristic-feeling than pretend sausages. Unless we're talking about genetic modification, but that's a whole other can of worms.

So. We might not quite be up to growing crops in space yet, but in terms of what we can do with food, I think we're already living a little bit in the future.

*which isn't actually the substance I have issues with, but that's beside the point.

Weird Worlds: Kepler 22b

It's what all the cool kids are (still) talking about, so why not a post on it? In the glut of Kepler mission transiting planets, a new planet has risen to the fore as the possibly most Earthlike extrasolar planet. Huzzah! (And in a few months yet another new planet will take its place. Just watch).

Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

What we know

Kepler 22 is a star very similar to our sun. It is slightly smaller (0.98 times the radius of the sun) and slightly smaller (0.97 times the mass of the sun). It is 587.1 light years away, so it's not something we're going to be visiting soon.

So far, it only has one known planet, dubbed -- as these things go -- Kepler 22b. This planet is smack bang in the habitable zone ...on the inner edge, so OK, maybe not that smack bang... BUT. The part people are getting exciting about is that it's the smallest planet we've found in the habitable zone thus far.

How small? 2.38 Earth radii. For comparison, Neptune, the next biggest solar planet after Earth, is 3.88 times Earth's radius. That puts Kepler 22b just on the smaller side of halfway between Earth and Neptune. In terms of size.

What we don't know is how massive it is. The way the Kepler satellite detects exoplanets is by looking at stars and measuring how much dimmer they get when (if) a planet passes between the star and us. By knowing how much light the star gives out usually, and how far away it is, it's possible to work out how large the planet is. (And, actually, even if you don't know how far away the star is, you could still work out how big the planet has to be as a fraction of the size of the star.)

We know how long its year is, basically by measuring how often it passes in front of the star. Yeah. It's that simple (particularly since there seems to be just one planet in this system at the moment). So Kepler 22b's year is 290 days long, not drastically different to Earth's. That and its position in the habitable zone have lead people to suppose that maybe it's not so different to Earth.

Based on how far it is from its star etc, the average surface temperature would be about -11º Celsius if it had no atmosphere. However, if it had an atmosphere like Earth's average temperature would be about 22º C. Perhaps a slightly less insulating atmosphere would be in order, however, since Earth's mean surface temperature is actually 14º C. (Because we have to take global lows and highs into account, you see, and average over the whole planet, never mind that 22º is just about room temperature.)

Harping on what we don't know

It's that mass. And the fact that we don't have a planet of that size in our solar system. It's in the transitional zone, as I said, between rocky terrestrial planet and mini gas giant. If it's rocky, it's likely that the gravity will be stronger than Earth's, thanks to it's larger size. In fact, if it's the same density as Earth, the surface gravity will be about 2.4 times Earth. Which isn't long-term viable. At Neptune's density, we get a ball of gas with surface gravity 0.72 times Earth. A ball of ice would result in gravity 4.3 times Earth. The least dense terrestrial planet in our solar system is Mars and at Mars' density, Kepler 22b would have gravity 1.7 Earth's.

So there's quite a spectrum of possibilities there. We really don't know enough to make any definitive judgements at this stage. That doesn't make it less exciting, of course, and it's true that there might be oceans and continents there. Or it could be a small dense ball with a thick gaseous atmosphere inhabited by dragons (perhaps even fire-breathing ones, if there's methane in the atmosphere and breathing fire is a viable way to catch prey). Which would also be cool. Arguably, cooler.