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Misconceptions about science fuel pandemic debates and controversies, says Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Schools should teach science as an evolving process — not

 a series of hard facts, argues astrophysicist

CBC Radio · Posted: Oct 16, 2021 4:00 AM ET | Last Updated: 2 hours ago

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson attends the 23rd annual Webby Awards at Cipriani Wall Street in New York on May 13, 2019. Tyson told The Sunday Magazine host Piya Chattopadhyay that debates and controversies surrounding COVID-19 and other scientific topics often stem from a basic misunderstanding of the scientific method. (Christopher Smith/Invision/Associated Press)

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson says some of the bitter arguments about medicine and science during the COVID-19 pandemic can be blamed on a fundamental misunderstanding of science.

"People were unwittingly witnessing science at its very best.… [They said,] 'You told me not to wear a mask a month ago and now you tell me [to] wear it.… You don't know what you're talking about.' Yes, we do," the American astrophysicist and author told The Sunday Magazine host Piya Chattopadhyay.

"Science is a means of querying nature. And when we have enough experiments and enough observations, only then can we say: This is how nature behaves, whether you like it or not. And that is when science contributes to what is to what is objectively true in the world."

Tyson, who is also the director at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, is doing his part to try to make his corner of the scientific world more accessible with his new book A Brief Welcome to the Universe, co-authored with Michael A. Strauss and J. Richard Gott.

He hopes readers can take those lessons to other scientific topics, including the COVID-19 pandemic, which has seen several controversies flourish about the nature of the virus and the measures developed to fight it.

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Misconceptions about how science works stems in part, he said, from the fact that it's often improperly taught at the earliest levels of education.

"People think science is the answer. 'Oh, give me the answer. You're a scientist. What's the answer?' And then I say things like: 'We actually don't have an answer to that.' And people get upset. They even get angry. 'You're a scientist. You should know,'" he explained.

"What's not taught in school is that science is a way of learning what is and is not true. The scientific method is a way of ensuring that your own bias does not leave you thinking something is true that is not, or that something is not true that is."

Big universe, simple language

A Brief Welcome to the Universe is billed as an approachable "pocket-sized tour" of the cosmos, answering such questions as "How do stars live and die?" and "How did the universe begin?"

It's a condensed version of the 2016 edition of the book, Welcome to the Universe: An Astrophysical Tour.

Welcome to the Universe: A Pocket-Sized Tour is co-authored by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michael A. Strauss and J. Richard Gott. (Princeton University Press)

Tyson and his co-authors argue in the book that astrophysics uses simpler language than other scientific disciplines, which makes it a good starting point to learn about science.

"I don't simplify the origin of the universe and then call it 'The Big Bang' to you. We call it that to each other," said Tyson. The same goes for well-known phenomena like black holes, sunspots and the planet Jupiter's Great Red Spot, he added.

Start with those, and then you can move onto other topics, some with more complex names — such as the Coriolis force, which, among other things, explains how the Earth's rotation subtly affects the way a football travels in the air during a field kick.

"There are simple things in science. And if you're interested, you can then go out and learn the complex things. But I'm not going to lead with the complex things. What good is that? That never solved anything," he said.

Many people likely know Tyson from his appearances on American talk shows, often critiquing or debunking questionable science seen in movies and other pop culture. He's commented on everything from the feasibility of resurrecting dinosaurs, like in Jurassic Park, to the improper night-sky backdrop in the final scenes of Titanic.

Tyson, left, and Seth MacFarlane, executive producer of Cosmos, participate in the Television Critics Association's winter presentations in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 13, 2014. (Kevork Djansezian/Reuters)

He also talks about science on his podcast StarTalk, as well as on a National Geographic TV show of the same name and another show called Cosmos.

Tyson was temporarily removed from both programs in late 2018, after accusations of sexual misconduct from two women, which he denied. Following an investigation, in early 2019, National Geographic and Fox reinstated Tyson on their shows. They did not address the allegations in their statement announcing the decision.

• Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson will return to TV after sexual misconduct probe

About Pluto

Perhaps none of the topics Tyson is known for speaking about has sparked more discussion than Pluto, the former ninth planet.

"Oh, don't get me started," Tyson responded immediately upon mention of the icy celestial body, which was demoted from planet to dwarf planet status in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union.

The term "dwarf planet" is relatively new. It grouped Pluto, which was originally discovered in 1930, with a number of other icy bodies larger than an asteroid but smaller in size and mass to rocky planets closer to the Sun, including the Earth.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft captured this high-resolution, enhanced-colour view of Pluto on July 14, 2015. Once considered the solar system's ninth planet, it was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)

"The word planet really should be discarded," he said. "Because if I say I discovered a planet orbiting a star, you have to ask me 20 more questions to get any understanding of what the hell the thing is."

The word "planet" comes from the Greek planetes, meaning "wanderer." In ancient times, that included Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, but also the moon and the sun. Earth wasn't considered a planet, because it was believed to be the unmoving centre of the known universe.

Over time, the scientific method progressed beyond that: the Earth is a planet that orbits the sun, which is a star. We now know our moon is one of at least 200 moons in the solar system.

• The politics of Pluto: 10 years later, the bitter debate rages on

To Tyson, Pluto's reclassification represents the next step in our evolving understanding of the cosmos, which has necessarily become more complex.

It also illustrates a broadening of our scientific horizons that ancient civilizations might have never contemplated.

That's why when Tyson was asked how to best answer a child's question about things we do not know, such as "how big is the universe," he said the best thing we can say is that we do not know.

"That is one of the greatest answers you can ever give someone — because it leaves them wanting for more. And they might one day be the person who discovers what the answer will be."

---

Written by Jonathan Ore. Produced by Sarah-Joyce Battersby.

 

Dark Matter Alternative Passes Big Test

October 15, 2021• Physics 14, 143

A cosmological model that doesn’t require dark matter has overcome a major hurdle in matching observations from the cosmic microwave background.

WMAP Science Team/NASA

Sky patterns. MOND models—which don’t require dark matter—have not previously been able to reproduce the temperature variations measured in the cosmic microwave background (shown here), a relic from the big bang. But now researchers have created a MO... Show more

Researchers pursuing an unconventional view of cosmology that dispenses with dark matter have developed a model that can match observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the leftover glow of the big bang [1]. This dark-matter-free model is an extension of the so-called MOND (modified Newtonian dynamics) theory, which assumes that the gravitational force on galaxy scales is different from the standard Newtonian force. Previous MOND-based models could not reproduce the CMB. The researchers say that their model can be further tested with observations of galaxy clusters and gravitational waves.

The MOND theory was devised more than 30 years ago as a way to explain galactic rotation data without invoking the existence of the mysterious dark matter [2]. MOND proponents offered an alternative mystery in which the gravitational force changes for accelerations smaller than a threshold of 10−10m/s2${\text{10}}^{-10}{\text{m/s}}^2$. The idea did not spring from any underlying theory, but surprisingly, the same acceleration threshold works for nearly all galaxies—small and large, young and old.

The main reason that dark matter has been favored over MOND is that dark matter is consistent with a much larger range of astrophysical observations. For example, dark matter can explain galaxies’ bending of light from distant sources (gravitational lensing), whereas MOND in its initial form could not. Researchers have devised so-called relativistic MOND models that can fit the lensing observations [3], but until now, none of these revised versions of the theory were able to reproduce CMB data. “If the theory can’t do that, then it’s not worth considering further,” says Constantinos Skordis from the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague.

NASA/CXC/SAO/D. Hartmann/JPL-Caltech

Turnaround is fair play. Galaxies, like M101 shown here, have rotation profiles that can’t be explained by the visible matter. The popular solution is to assume the existence of dark matter, but another solution, called MOND, can account for galaxy d... Show more

Skordis and Czech Academy colleague Tom Złósnik have now created a MOND-inspired model that accounts for the CMB while also being consistent with gravitational lensing observations and gravitational-wave speed measurements. The model follows recent MOND efforts in postulating the existence of two fields that permeate all of space and together act like an extra gravitational force. One of these fields is a scalar field—similar to the Higgs field that is associated with the Higgs boson. The other is a vector field, which has a direction at each point in space, somewhat like a magnetic field.

Skordis and Złósnik set the model’s parameters so that, in the early Universe, the gravity-modifying fields generate a gravitational effect that mimics that of dark matter. Mimicking dark matter in this way ensures that the observed CMB patterns are reproduced. The fields evolve over cosmic time, and eventually the gravitational force follows the original MOND proposal.

Skordis says that the model is similar to other alternative gravity models that have been proposed to explain dark energy (see Viewpoint: Reining in Alternative Gravity). All cosmological models add something (new particles or new fields) to explain observations, he says. He admits that—unlike dark matter models that are often based on fundamental symmetry principles—the new model was not conceived with an underlying theory in mind. However, such a theoretical basis might be uncovered using the new MOND model.

“It really is a huge breakthrough,” says cosmologist Stacy McGaugh from Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. “For years stretching into decades, people have largely ignored MOND because it seemed impossible to do what Skordis and Złósnik have now done.” But David Spergel, a cosmologist from the Flatiron Institute in New York, finds the new model “baroque.” He argues that relativistic MOND models only work by “effectively positing a complex form of dark matter.”

Cosmologist Katherine Freese from the University of Texas congratulates the researchers for their accomplishment. “It is a big deal to construct a relativistic version of MOND that is able to match all existing data, especially fitting CMB data along with the MOND phenomenology in galaxies,” she says. “However, the model has a lot of ingredients,” she says. “I myself would still vote for dark matter as a simpler explanation.”

McGaugh counters that dark matter models cannot explain everything, such as the Universe’s lithium abundance or the discrepancies between different types of measurements of the cosmic expansion rate. The new MOND model might be able to solve these problems, but Skordis says that it will take more time to work out the theoretical details. He says that the model can be checked in other ways, for example, by comparing its predictions with observations of galaxy clusters or by looking for signatures of the gravity-modifying fields in gravitational waves.

Tessa Baker, an expert in alternative gravity models from Queen Mary University of London says that if dark matter detectors continue to come up empty, “then we may see increased interest in this family of modified gravity models.”

–Michael Schirber

Michael Schirber is a Corresponding Editor for Physics based in Lyon, France.

References

1. C. Skordis and T. Złośnik, “New relativistic theory for modified Newtonian dynamics,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 127, 161302 (2021).
2. M. Milgrom, “On the use of galaxy rotation curves to test the modified dynamics,” Astrophys. J. 333, 689 (1988).
3. J. D. Bekenstein, “Relativistic gravitation theory for the modified Newtonian dynamics paradigm,” Phys. Rev. D 70, 083509 (2004).

More Information

• Testing gravity in gas-rich galaxies

  WIMP Alternatives Come Out of the Shadows

  Dark Energy Solution for Hubble Tension

  Lightweight Particles Might Explain Missing Lithium

  Testing Gravity On Solar System Scales

 

Scientists find evidence the early solar system harbored a gap between its inner and outer regions

by Jennifer Chu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

In the early solar system, a "protoplanetary disk" of dust and gas rotated around the sun and eventually coalesced into the planets we know today.

A new analysis of ancient meteorites by scientists at MIT and elsewhere suggests that a mysterious gap existed within this disk around 4.567 billion years ago, near the location where the asteroid belt resides today.

The team's results, appearing today in Science Advances, provide direct evidence for this gap.

"Over the last decade, observations have shown that cavities, gaps, and rings are common in disks around other young stars," says Benjamin Weiss, professor of planetary sciences in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). "These are important but poorly understood signatures of the physical processes by which gas and dust transform into the young sun and planets."

Likewise the cause of such a gap in our own solar system remains a mystery. One possibility is that Jupiter may have been an influence. As the gas giant took shape, its immense gravitational pull could have pushed gas and dust toward the outskirts, leaving behind a gap in the developing disk.

Another explanation may have to do with winds emerging from the surface of the disk. Early planetary systems are governed by strong magnetic fields. When these fields interact with a rotating disk of gas and dust, they can produce winds powerful enough to blow material out, leaving behind a gap in the disk.

Regardless of its origins, a gap in the early solar system likely served as a cosmic boundary, keeping material on either side of it from interacting. This physical separation could have shaped the composition of the solar system's planets. For instance, on the inner side of the gap, gas and dust coalesced as terrestrial planets, including the Earth and Mars, while gas and dust relegated to the farther side of the gap formed in icier regions, as Jupiter and its neighboring gas giants.

"It's pretty hard to cross this gap, and a planet would need a lot of external torque and momentum," says lead author and EAPS graduate student Cauê Borlina. "So, this provides evidence that the formation of our planets was restricted to specific regions in the early solar system."

Weiss and Borlina's co-authors include Eduardo Lima, Nilanjan Chatterjee, and Elias Mansbach of MIT, James Bryson of Oxford University, and Xue-Ning Bai of Tsinghua University.

A split in space

Over the last decade, scientists have observed a curious split in the composition of meteorites that have made their way to Earth. These space rocks originally formed at different times and locations as the solar system was taking shape. Those that have been analyzed exhibit one of two isotope combinations. Rarely have meteorites been found to exhibit both—a conundrum known as the "isotopic dichotomy."

Scientists have proposed that this dichotomy may be the result of a gap in the early solar system's disk, but such a gap has not been directly confirmed.

Weiss' group analyzes meteorites for signs of ancient magnetic fields. As a young planetary system takes shape, it carries with it a magnetic field, the strength and direction of which can change depending on various processes within the evolving disk. As ancient dust gathered into grains known as chondrules, electrons within chondrules aligned with the magnetic field in which they formed.

Chondrules can be smaller than the diameter of a human hair, and are found in meteorites today. Weiss' group specializes in measuring chondrules to identify the ancient magnetic fields in which they originally formed.

In previous work, the group analyzed samples from one of the two isotopic groups of meteorites, known as the noncarbonaceous meteorites. These rocks are thought to have originated in a "reservoir," or region of the early solar system, relatively close to the sun. Weiss' group previously identified the ancient magnetic field in samples from this close-in region.

A meteorite mismatch

In their new study, the researchers wondered whether the magnetic field would be the same in the second isotopic, "carbonaceous" group of meteorites, which, judging from their isotopic composition, are thought to have originated farther out in the solar system.

They analyzed chondrules, each measuring about 100 microns, from two carbonaceous meteorites that were discovered in Antarctica. Using the superconducting quantum interference device, or SQUID, a high-precision microscope in Weiss' lab, the team determined each chondrule's original, ancient magnetic field.

Surprisingly, they found that their field strength was stronger than that of the closer-in noncarbonaceous meteorites they previously measured. As young planetary systems are taking shape, scientists expect that the strength of the magnetic field should decay with distance from the sun.

In contrast, Borlina and his colleagues found the far-out chondrules had a stronger magnetic field, of about 100 microteslas, compared to a field of 50 microteslas in the closer chondrules. For reference, the Earth's magnetic field today is around 50 microteslas.

A planetary system's magnetic field is a measure of its accretion rate, or the amount of gas and dust it can draw into its center over time. Based on the carbonaceous chondrules' magnetic field, the solar system's outer region must have been accreting much more mass than the inner region.

Using models to simulate various scenarios, the team concluded that the most likely explanation for the mismatch in accretion rates is the existence of a gap between the inner and outer regions, which could have reduced the amount of gas and dust flowing toward the sun from the outer regions.

"Gaps are common in protoplanetary systems, and we now show that we had one in our own solar system," Borlina says. "This gives the answer to this weird dichotomy we see in meteorites, and provides evidence that gaps affect the composition of planets."

Meteorites show transport of material in early solar system

More information: Caue Borlina, Paleomagnetic Evidence for a Disk Substructure in the Early Solar System, Science Advances (2021). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abj6928. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj6928

Journal information: Science Advances 

Provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

ALPHA & OMEGA

IN THE BEGINNING… WHAT IF THERE WAS NO BEGINNING OF TIME?


Credit: NASA

Oct 15, 2021

There is something unnerving about hearing a somber voice intone “In the beginning”… but wait. What if the beginning of time is no more real than the sci-fi movies you hear it in?

Could the Big Bang have never really happened? Will there be no end to the universe? Is everything in between, even the passage of time, just an illusion? Physicist Bruno Bento is now proposing that the universe may have had no beginning at all, meaning it did not just blow up out of nothingness, expanding rapidly from a few atoms into an expanse too vast for the human brain to fathom. What we perceive as the past and future may be infinite.

Bento didn’t just wake up one morning and decide that the universe didn’t suddenly explode into being about 14 billion years ago. Turns out that general relativity does not hold up with singularities like black holes and the Big Bang. He and his colleagues recently posted a study on the preprint server arXiv, in which they used causal set theory to propose that space and time may not be what we think they are.

“Sometimes, general relativity gives us infinities that we do not consider to be physical,” he told SYFY WIRE. “This is what we mean when we say it breaks down — we need something else, something new, to describe regions of strong gravity where it does not provide a physical answer.”

Most scientists believe Einstein is right about general relativity, or the idea that our perception of gravity arises from the curve of space and time. Some phenomena insist on bending that theory and could possibly break it in the future. Black holes are dangerous territory for general relativity because there are too many aspects of them we cannot see. Though there is not enough evidence to disprove it (yet), the inability of any instrument to observe gravity inside a black hole, from which light cannot escape, raises controversial questions.

The thing about black holes and other weird gravitational phenomena is that general relativity cannot fathom the extreme size and energies involved. There is a threshold it cannot cross when you are dealing with singularities, or parts of spacetime where everything we think we know about physics suddenly starts to fall apart. Gravity gains almost unfathomable strength at minuscule scales in a singularity. Even if there is something that can explain black hole innards or the hypothetical Big Bang, we have to find out what that is. Enter causal set theory.

“Spacetime is fundamentally discrete in causal set theory,” said Bento. “It is a causal set. This means that there is a minimum possible distance between any two events, both in space and time. We don't know exactly what this minimum scale is, there are currently no experiments that can probe these scales.”

Because you can’t exactly go into a lab and test this out, theoretical physics may be able to offer some closure. Bento believes that how the breakdown of general relativity happens could mean the Planck scale, which declares a minimum limit for the universe, may be able to pick up where it left off. Breakdown could still happen past that limit. However, that scale may be small enough to possibly reveal things beyond the realm of human observation.

What this means for the passage of time is that an element in a causal set is an event, or a specific point in spacetime. Elements is created whenever corresponding events start to happen. “Now” is the emergence of such an event. What is seen as a “causal set” is supposed to grow from the first element onward, adding new elements on top of the set, so the passage of time means that one element after another comes into being. “Past” is all the elements that already emerged. “Future” is those that are still coming up.

“In causal set theory, the passage of time was used as an input when constructing a dynamics for causal sets, or how a causal set (a universe) should behave,” Bento said. “One consequence of this is that the past is finite and the universe has a beginning.“

But wait. How, then, can there be no end and no beginning? That lies in how Bento and his team see possibilities in causal set theory. The set could potentially grow in either way, up or down, and if it can grow in the direction of the past and the future, and if it can do that, it means that there is no end or beginning. What we think of as “time” might just be a way of trying to understand something that would otherwise make our brains explode.

What is really surprising is that Bento thinks the universe would still look exactly the same without a Big Bang. It isn’t that general relativity just vanishes. It can still explain everything that direct observations can be made on, whether by telescope, the naked eye or otherwise. So our solar system and everything observable in it is real. Earth is real. We ourselves are real.

“The problem appears when we cannot see,” he said. “That being said, it's usually accepted that a Big Bang singularity does not exist (nor do black hole singularities). The debate is in what will replace them and how.”

Now try to go to sleep at night thinking about that

The Big Bang and time as we know it might be nothing but illusions (syfy.com)

Katie Mack: Life-altering questions about the end of the universe | TED

Oct 15, 2021

TED
In this fascinating conversation, cosmologist and TED Fellow Katie Mack delves into everything from the Big Bang theory to what we see at the edge of the observable universe to a few ways the cosmos might end. 

Stay tuned to hear Mack recite an original poem on the wonder and marvel of existence. 

This conversation, hosted by deputy director of the TED Fellows program, Lily James Olds.

Opinion

Was Our Universe Created in a Laboratory?

Developing quantum-gravity technologies may elevate us to a “class A” civilization, capable of creating a baby universe

October 15, 2021

Credit: NASA, ESA, HEIC, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

The biggest mystery concerning the history of our universe is what happened before the big bang. Where did our universe come from? Nearly a century ago, Albert Einstein searched for steady-state alternatives to the big bang model because a beginning in time was not philosophically satisfying in his mind.

Now there are a variety of conjectures in the scientific literature for our cosmic origins, including the ideas that our universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation, or that it is cyclic with repeated periods of contraction and expansion, or that it was selected by the anthropic principle out of the string theory landscape of the multiverse—where, as the MIT cosmologist Alan Guth says “everything that can happen will happen ... an infinite number of times,” or that it emerged out of the collapse of matter in the interior of a black hole.

A less explored possibility is that our universe was created in the laboratory of an advanced technological civilization. Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.

This possible origin story unifies the religious notion of a creator with the secular notion of quantum gravity. We do not possess a predictive theory that combines the two pillars of modern physics: quantum mechanics and gravity. But a more advanced civilization might have accomplished this feat and mastered the technology of creating baby universes. If that happened, then not only could it account for the origin of our universe but it would also suggest that a universe like our own—which in this picture hosts an advanced technological civilization that gives birth to a new flat universe—is like a biological system that maintains the longevity of its genetic material through multiple generations.

If so, our universe was not selected for us to exist in it—as suggested by conventional anthropic reasoning—but rather, it was selected such that it would give rise to civilizations which are much more advanced than we are. Those “smarter kids on our cosmic block”— which are capable of developing the technology needed to produce baby universes—are the drivers of the cosmic Darwinian selection process, whereas we cannot enable, as of yet, the rebirth of the cosmic conditions that led to our existence. One way to put it is that our civilization is still cosmologically sterile since we cannot reproduce the world that made us.

With this perspective, the technological level of civilizations should not be gauged by how much power they tap, as suggested by the scale envisioned in 1964 by Nikolai Kardashev. Instead, it should be measured by the ability of a civilization to reproduce the astrophysical conditions that led to its existence.

As of now, we are a low-level technological civilization, graded class C on the cosmic scale, since we are unable to recreate even the habitable conditions on our planet for when the sun will die. Even worse, we may be labeled class D since we are carelessly destroying the natural habitat on Earth through climate change, driven by our technologies. A class B civilization could adjust the conditions in its immediate environment to be independent of its host star. A civilization ranked class A could recreate the cosmic conditions that gave rise to its existence, namely produce a baby universe in a laboratory.

Achieving the distinction of class A civilization is nontrivial by the measures of physics as we know it. The related challenges, such as producing a large enough density of dark energy within a small region, already have been discussed in the scientific literature.

Since a self-replicating universe only needs to possess a single class A civilization, and having many more is much less likely, the most common universe would be the one that just barely makes class A civilizations. Anything better than this minimum requirement is much less likely to occur because it requires additional rare circumstances and does not provide a greater evolutionary benefit for the Darwinian selection process of baby universes.

The possibility that our civilization is not a particularly smart one should not take us by surprise. When I tell students at Harvard University that half of them are below the median of their class, they get upset. The stubborn reality might well be that we are statistically at the center of the bell-shaped probability distribution of our class of intelligent life-forms in the cosmos, even when taking into account our celebrated discovery of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider.

We must allow ourselves to look humbly through new telescopes, as envisioned by the recently announced Galileo Project, and search for smarter kids on our cosmic block. Otherwise, our ego trip may not end well, similarly to the experience of the dinosaurs, which dominated Earth until an object from space tarnished their illusion.

AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is former chair (2011-2020) of the astronomy department at Harvard University, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He also chairs the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies and the advisory board for the Breakthrough Starshot project, and is a member of President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Loeb is the bestselling author of Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

GREEN CAPITALI$M

A Complete Visual Guide to Carbon Markets

VISUAL CAPITALIST
on October 14, 2021
By Sponsored Content
Article/Editing:
Dorothy Neufeld

The following content is sponsored by Carbon Streaming Corporation.


A Complete Visual Guide to Carbon Markets

Carbon markets enable the trading of carbon credits, also referred to as carbon offsets.

One carbon credit is equivalent to one metric ton of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Going further, carbon markets help companies offset their emissions and work towards their climate goals. But how exactly do carbon markets work?

In this infographic from Carbon Streaming Corporation, we look at the fundamentals of carbon markets and why they show significant growth potential.

What Are Carbon Markets?

For many companies, such as Microsoft, Delta, Shell and Gucci, carbon markets play an important role in offsetting their impact on the environment and meeting climate targets.

Companies buy a carbon credit, which funds a GHG reduction project such as reforestation. This allows the company to offset their GHG emissions. There are two main types of carbon markets, based on whether emission reductions are mandatory, or voluntary:

Compliance Markets:
Mandatory systems regulated by government organizations to cap emissions for specific industries.

Voluntary Carbon Markets:
Where carbon credits can be purchased by those that voluntarily want to offset their emissions.

As demand to cut emissions intensifies, voluntary carbon market volume has grown five-fold in less than five years.
Drivers of Carbon Market Demand

What factors are behind this surge in volume?
Paris Agreement: Companies seeking alignment with these goals.
Technological Gaps: Companies are limited by technologies that are available at scale and not cost-prohibitive.
Time Gaps: Companies do not have the means to eliminate all emissions today.
Shareholder Pressure: Companies are facing pressure from shareholders to address their emissions.

For these reasons, carbon markets are a useful tool in decarbonizing the global economy.
Voluntary Markets 101

To start, there are four key participants in voluntary carbon markets:
Project Developers: Teams who design and implement carbon offset projects that generate carbon credits.
Standards Bodies: Organizations that certify and set the criteria for carbon offsets e.g. Verra and the Gold Standard.
Brokers: Intermediaries facilitating carbon credit transactions between buyers and project developers.
End Buyers: Entities such as individuals or corporations looking to offset their carbon emissions through purchasing carbon credits.

Secondly, carbon offset projects fall within one of two main categories.

Avoidance / reduction projects prevent or reduce the release of carbon into the atmosphere. These may include avoided deforestation or projects that preserve biomass.

Removal / sequestration projects, on the other hand, remove carbon from the atmosphere, where projects may focus on reforestation or direct air capture.

In addition, carbon offset projects may offer co-benefits, which provide advantages that go beyond carbon reduction.
What are Co-Benefits?

When a carbon project offers co-benefits, it means that they provide features on top of carbon credits, such as environmental or economic characteristics, that may align with UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Here are some examples of co-benefits a project may offer:
Biodiversity: Protecting local wildlife that would otherwise be endangered through deforestation.
Social: Promoting gender equality through supporting women in management positions and local business development.
Economic: Creating job opportunities in local communities.
Educational: Providing educational awareness of carbon mitigation within local areas, such as primary and secondary schools.

Often, companies are looking to buy carbon credits that make the greatest sustainable impact. Co-benefits can offer additional value that simultaneously address broader climate challenges.

Why Market Values Are Increasing

In 2021, market values in voluntary carbon markets are set to exceed $1 billion.
YearTraded Volume of Carbon Offsets (MtCO₂e)Voluntary Market Transaction Value2017 46 $146M
2018 98 $296M
2019 104 $320M
2020 188 $473M
2021* 239 $748M


*As of Aug. 31, 2021
Source: Ecosystem Marketplace (Sep 2021)

Today, oil majors, banks, and airlines are active players in the market. As corporate climate targets multiply, future demand for carbon credits is projected to jump 15-fold by 2030 according to the Task Force on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets.
What Qualifies as a High-Quality Carbon Offset?

Here are five key criteria for examining the quality of a carbon offset:
Additionality: Projects are unable to exist without revenue derived from carbon credits.
Verification: Monitored, reported, and verified by a credible third-party.
Permanence: Carbon reduction or removal will not be reversed.
Measurability: Calculated according to scientific data through a recognized methodology.
Avoid Leakage: An increase in emissions should not occur elsewhere, or account for any that do occur.

In fact, the road to net-zero requires a 23 gigatonne (GT) annual reduction in CO₂ emissions relative to current levels. High quality offsets can help meet this goal.
Fighting Climate Change

As the urgency to tackle global emissions accelerates, demand for carbon credits is poised to increase substantially—bringing much needed capital to innovative projects.

Not only do carbon credits fund nature-based projects, they also finance technological advancements and new innovations in carbon removal and reduction. For companies looking to reach their climate ambitions, carbon markets will continue to play a more concrete role.

 

Ex-SpaceX Engineers Are Building a Cheap, Portable Nuclear Reactor

Technology designed for future Mars colonies is 'making nuclear power portable' on Earth.

Oct 15, 2021By  Chris Young

                                                           A concept image of Radiant's microreactor.

 

Nuclear power is going portable in the form of relatively lightweight, cost-effective microreactors. A team of former SpaceX engineers is developing the "world's first portable, zero-emissions power source" that can bring power to remote areas and also allows for quick installation of new units in populated areas, a press statement revealed.

Last year, the team secured $1.2 million in funding from angel investors for their startup Radiant to help develop its portable nuclear microreactors, which are aimed at both commercial and military applications.  

Space tech adapted for Earth colonies

We've previously reported on floating nuclear power stations, such as those produced by Danish firm Seaborg Technologies. However, Radiant's in-development technology brings a whole new dimension of portability to the nuclear reactor. 

Their microreactor, which is still in the prototype phase, outputs more than 1MW, which Radiant says is enough to power approximately 1,000 homes for up to eight years. It can be easily transported by air, sea, and road, meaning it will bring affordable energy to communities without easy access to renewable energy, allowing them to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

Radiant founder and CEO Doug Bernauer is a former SpaceX engineer who worked on developing energy sources for a future Mars colony during his time at the private space enterprise. During his research into microreactors for Mars, he saw an opportunity for developing a flexible, affordable power source here on Earth, leading to him founding Radiant with two other SpaceX engineers. In an interview with Power, Bernauer said "a lot of the microreactors being developed are fixed location. Nobody has a [commercial] system yet, so there’s kind of a race to be the first."

Nuclear power hits the road

Radiant announced last year that it had received two provisional patents for its portable nuclear reactor technology. One of these was for a technology that reduces the cost and the time needed to refuel their reactor, while the other improves efficiency in heat transference from the reactor core. The microreactor will use an advanced particle fuel that does not melt down and is capable of withstanding higher temperatures than traditional nuclear fuels. Helium coolant, meanwhile, reduces the corrosion and contamination risks associated with traditional water coolant. Radiant has signed a contract with Battelle Energy Alliance to test its portable microreactor technology at its Idaho National Laboratory (INL).

"In some areas of the world, reliance on diesel fuel is untenable, and solar and wind power are either unavailable or impractical," said Jess Gehin, Ph.D., Chief Scientist, Nuclear Science & Technology Directorate at INL. "Clean, safe nuclear microreactors are emerging as the best alternative for these environments." 

Radiant's microreactor can be used in remote locations, such as arctic villages and isolated military encampments that would otherwise typically rely on fossil fuel-powered generators. Not only is the portable microreactor better for the environment, but it is also more practical as it doesn't rely on constant shipments of fuel. Instead, the clean fuel used for Radiant's microreactors can last more than 4 years. If all goes well with Radiant's test campaign, nuclear power might soon hit the road. In doing so it will help to power countless remote communities, and will further bolster the resurgence of nuclear power in a world that needs clean energy solutions more than ever.

 

Exploring Earth's oceans to reach Europa

by Kate Blackwood, Cornell University

Icefin is a small robotic oceanographer that allows researchers to study ice and water 

around and beneath ice shelves – and develop the technology to explore other oceans

 in our solar system. Credit: Cornell University

Geographically and logistically, Antarctica is about as far away from anywhere as you can get on this planet. Yet in the scope of our solar system, Earth's southernmost continent is right in our own backyard.

Britney Schmidt is in Antarctica through February 2022 with a small team of researchers to explore the confluence of glaciers, floating ice shelves and ocean using a submarine robot called Icefin—the first mission of its kind. But the whole time, she'll also be thinking about worlds beyond Earth.

"My team and I focus on how ice and oceans work across the solar system, including Earth. Particularly, we focus on Europa, the innermost icy moon of Jupiter," Schmidt says.

Europa is the best place beyond Earth to look for life in the solar system, Schmidt says. To prepare for immanent missions to Europa and other ocean worlds, she's leading teams studying polar ice and climate here on Earth.

"We're trying to explore underwater, under ice, the hardest environment you can imagine—the most like Europa," Schmidt said. "If we want to explore Europa with an underwater probe someday, we've got to do it here first."

The members of her Planetary Habitability and Technology lab, which is transitioning with Schmidt from Georgia Tech to Cornell, are working to better understand how oceans work both on Earth and beyond, and to develop tools for further exploration.

Credit: Cornell University

This mission assembles a diverse team of geologists, biologists, physicists, astronomers and chemists on the science side, and engineers from aerospace, mechanical and electrical disciplines, as well as computer science. Scientists and engineers on her team work "in the same loop, in the same room," Schmidt says. "The interdisciplinarity that Cornell seems to embrace and enable is exciting."

Schmidt's arrival at Cornell in July strengthened those cross-disciplinary ties between colleges, specifically in the area of robotics and autonomy, a high-priority research theme across the university. With joint appointments as an associate professor in the Department of Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in the College of Engineering, Schmidt will be a key asset in expanding Cornell's robotics program into the area of planetary exploration.

For example, Schmidt is on the ice-penetrating radar team of NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which will launch in the mid-2020s to explore the outer solar system. Department of Astronomy (A&S) faculty members Jonathan Lunine and Alexander Hayes are also involved in this mission, as is Principal Research Scientist Michael Mellon. Altogether Cornell scientists are on five of Clipper's 10 instruments and will play a major role in mission planning and analysis of data.

For now, Schmidt and four colleagues from her team are working with colleagues from across New Zealand to deepen understanding of ocean worlds and to develop and test new tools. Icefin, their underwater, under-ice robotic oceanographer, will allow the team to access areas beneath the Ross Ice Shelf from previously unexplored angles.

Britney Schmidt, associate professor of astronomy and of earth and atmospheric sciences,

 and her team set up their field site in Antarctica in 2018. They’re currently in Antarctica 

through February 2022. Credit: Cornell University

Icefin—shaped like a torpedo, 13 feet long and 10 inches wide—carries cameras, sonar equipment, speed sensors, water column measuring tools and other devices. The team slips it into open water through a hole drilled in thick ice on the surface.

"We developed this tool to get into environments that have never been observed directly," Schmidt says. "It allows us to make transects under the ice, and measure the ocean directly where it's interacting with the ice."

In the Ross Ice Shelf and Europa Underwater Probe (RISE UP) project, Schmidt and collaborators are using Icefin to learn the limits of life on Earth and to gain an understanding of the evolution of Jupiter's icy moon Europa. Field work for this project is being conducted in McMurdo Station in Antarctica and in the nearby seas, and receives funding from NASA and support from Antarctica New Zealand and the National Science Foundation (NSF). In late 2019, Icefin explored under the Ross Ice Shelf (RIS) near its grounding line—the place where glacier, land and ocean all meet, the most dynamic part of a glacier system.

In austral summer 2019–20, the Antarctic team traveled even farther away from the U.S. base at McMurdo for a similar project: to explore the Thwaites Glacier grounding line using Icefin, for the Thwaites Melt project, funded by NSF and the National Environment Research Council.

The Icefin underwater vehicle has sonar, chemical and biological sensors that help research

ers characterize sub-ice environments.  Credit: Cornell University

The team is now deploying a brand-new sensor onboard Icefin under the sea ice near New Zealand's Scott Base, along with a University of Otago team. This new sensor will make it possible to understand ice shelf melting and sea ice physics in new ways.

From there, the team will fly with Icefin to a new location with New Zealand's Antarctic Science Platform program. There, the robot will explore a subglacial channel that connects lakes and streams underneath the Antarctic Ice sheet with the open ocean underneath the RIS.

"We're going to drop the robot straight into the channel where there's water rushing out from beneath the ice sheet. That's never been done before," Schmidt said. "It allows us to see what's happening with the entire hydrology of Antarctica, in situ. It's exciting, looking at the interactions between the water beneath the ice and the oceanRobotic submarine snaps first-ever images at foundation of notorious Antarctic glacier

Provided by Cornell University