Brett Burch: 2019

Sunday, July 21, 2019

The solar system's habitable zone

With the 50th anniversary of the moon landing this weekend, I got to thinking about the scale of the universe and the scale of our solar system... weird, I know, but the mind goes where the mind goes. I then got to thinking about the habitable zone for the sun and how small it really is... and therefore how incredibly unique and opportune life is. Granted there are lots of theories and some of the math varies wildly, but from what I've read in books and found online, what follows is generally thought to be agreed upon today. The definition of the habitable zone has been iterated upon a lot, but I think https://futurism.com/the-new-definition-for-the-goldilocks-zone-2 describes this well.

Lucky us

Consider an American Football field as a model for space, 100 yards from end zone to end zone. Our Sun would be roughly the size of a yoga/exercise ball chair (if you can't picture that think of a large beach ball) on one end zone. The Earth would be roughly the size of a pea located all the way on the other end zone. Let's make this interactive... put the pea in your belly button ("He's got the whole world / In his belly button...") and lay down on the end zone. Assuming an average adult, in this scenario the moon would be about the size of the pupil in your eye, and would be about as far from your belly button as your heart. If you are laying down with your belly button (the Earth pea) on the end zone, feet towards the Sun, your feet would be too close to the sun for life to exist. Roughly the length of your leg is how close we are to the edge of "too hot for liquid water" - I find that incredible.

The Earth's orbit around the sun is elliptical, but it only varies by a couple percent from spherical... at our closest in January we are 91.4 million miles from the Sun and in July we are 94.5 million miles away. If our orbit was spherical and moved in/closer to, say 88-90 million miles, the Earth would have no life on it. Not much wiggle room!

Earth's orbit around the sun, from reference 5

It has also been thought that anywhere out of the back of the end zone (~10 steps further from the sun than your belly button) would be too cold for water and therefore life to exist, but it is now believed that you could be approximately to the 50 yard line of another football field stacked behind the one with the Earth on it before it would be too cold for life to exist. In other words, we're much nearer the inner edge than the outer edge of the habitable zone.

As our sun ages and grows, earth will eventually be closer to it than the habitable zone... but that's apparently about a billion years from now so I'm not going to lose any sleep about that.

Are there any other Goldilocks out there?

Thinking a bit more about the uniqueness of our earth and the vastness of space, the next closest solar system is thought to be Alpha Centauri. In this ridiculous football field analogy, given our nearest neighbor is 300,000 times the distance from the earth to the sun, then 17,000 miles away (90 million feet), we would have another exercise ball chair - slightly larger. That's more than twice the diameter of the actual size Earth. I'm not really sure how else to visualize that.... one way might be to use the circumference of our home planet, actual size... So let's put the our football field around the equator, say in Nairobi, Kenya. If you were to head east, you would need to go across the Indian ocean (wave to Asia on your left), island hop through Indonesia (Australia on your right), cross the enormous Pacific ocean, give yourself a pat on the back for reaching the Americas at the Andes, cross the entire Amazon, and find yourself somewhere around the edge of the Atlantic ocean before reaching our next large beach ball possibly on a sunny day in Ipanema. Then there you would get another football field and a zone about the width of a volleyball or soccer field where liquid water might be able to exist. I honestly can't even fathom that. If there's anybody else out there, they are a looooooooong way away, and they need a lot of luck and a lot of variables to be aligned for them to exist. On that entire journey, by the way, you would essentially pass through complete nothingness. A few asteroids here and there, but on that scale, they'd be invisible tiny little grains of sand that you wouldn't notice at all.

Ok, there's a quick minute that melts my brain about us and our nearest neighbor. 2 stars. There are apparently up to 400,000,000,000 stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone. There are anywhere from 100,000,000,000 - 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies in the Universe. I'll let you ponder that on your own, aside from to say that there are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on the entire earth. Think about our sun as one of those grains of sand one day on your next vacation...

It it unfortunate that people don't (literally can't?) really appreciate how unique our planet - and life on its the ability to exist - is.

References:

Wednesday, January 2, 2019

Farewell Tacoma

Tacoma ("around New Years" 2007 - "around New Years" 2019) lost a short battle with FIP on roughly his 12th birthday. It was quite a journey with him, and I'm quite grateful our paths crossed one April afternoon.

The day before I moved to Boulder in the spring of 2007, with U-Haul loaded and ready to end the Austin chapter of my mid-20s, I handed in my apartment key and drove to my sister's apartment a few miles away. In the grass next to my parking spot was a box with cat supplies, and next to it a kitten in a crate. After a few hours and no one returning to claim him, we took him inside. Hmmm.... to drop him at the Humane Society in the morning or bring him with? He had already been rejected once, but was playful, mild mannered, and litter box trained. It seemed fate had decided we should be companions, so he joined me on my new adventure. His colors reminded me of Mt. Rainier so I named him Tacoma.

#kittenlyfe

Tacoma's personality was far larger than he was right from the start. He loved fresh laundry and cardboard, as most cats do, but was otherwise a fairly bold and atypical cat. He was unafraid of dogs 5x his size. He travelled well, content in a car or plane. He climbed absolutely everything to the point where I joked his middle name would be Viesturs, and played incessantly. I found several of his baby teeth by virtue of impaling my heels on them after they had fallen out... he was a handful, but a joy.

His favorite part of our first home was the post-work daily walks; no matter how I tried, he would escape my front door at least once a day. He chased squirrels, would play with dogs, try to climb trees after birds, and generally explore regardless of weather until as many as 45 minutes had passed. Eventually I stopped trying to keep him indoors and grew to look forward to our daily excursions. Despite requiring effort and extra planning, he quickly became a part of my daily routine and a welcome companion.

#petlyfe

After our first 2 years in Boulder I moved from garden level apartment to a top floor condo, so our walks ended. His favorite activity became sunbathing on the balcony. I've never seen anything take such pleasure in lying in the sun. When inside he was a ridiculous lap cat, constantly wanting to just hang out, it seemed. Once in the middle of dinner he hopped unexpectedly into my lap only to land in a bowl of Thai red curry. I'm pretty sure that was the only proper bath I ever gave him. It took a while for his coat to return to normal, and I'm sure he tasted Thai chilies in his catfood for several days after bathing himself... He would also burrow as I slept so I would wake up with him draped across me - impossibly under the sheets even, and liked to play hide-and-seek more than any cat I've ever seen. Half the time I didn't even know we were playing until a meow indicating, "I'm hiding... come find me" would grow louder and louder until I responded.

Like most cats, I believe, Tacoma was a bit of a nightmare to others. Many joked that only I could handle such a demon. He demanded you give him time to warm up to you, and was not friendly to those not patient with him. He was not kind even to others who cared for and fed him; pet sitters, friends, my family. And yet with me, he was always gentle and warm. I'll never be able to explain it, other than he was grateful for my care at his early age and his appreciation for me as a housemate.

In addition to behaving unusually catlike and fearless as a kitten, he was also unusually large. I'm not a cat expert, but once full grown he was also huge compared to most cats I've known, weighing over 16 lbs but not appearing overweight. Without exposure to the outside other than the balcony, he stayed quite healthy and at that same weight for many years.

Last April during a bout with pancreatitis I fed him via syringe into a tube from nose to stomach for several days and wondered if he survived that whether he'd live another 8 years. He lasted just another 8 months.

#afterlyfe

I can't say that I would consider myself a cat person, but it is shocking what one gets accustomed to. It might be a long while before I'm used to a new morning routine without pet food and litter boxes; a new travel routine that doesn't include a pet sitter or pet logistics of any kind; a shopping routine without put supplies; not being woken by at 3am by the distinct "oh no I'm about to barf" meow or with a leg asleep due to a 15 pound animal draped across it. 12 years with a housemate of any kind will do that to a person.