Death By Black Hole & Other Cosmic Quandaries

by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

  IN THIS ERA of cable television, even broadcast signals that might have otherwise escaped the atmosphere are now delivered via wires directly to your home. There may come a time when television is no longer a broadcast medium, leaving our tube-watching aliens to wonder whether our species went extinct.

  For better or for worse, television might not be the only signals from Earth decoded by aliens. Any time we communicate with our astronauts or our space probes, all signals that do not intersect the craft’s receiver are lost in space forever. The efficiency of this communication is greatly improved by modern methods of signal compression. In the digital era, it’s all about bytes per second. If you devised a clever algorithm that compressed your signal by a factor of 10, you could communicate ten times more efficiently, provided the person or machine on the other side of the signal knew how to undo your compressed signal. Modern examples of compression utilities include those that create MP acoustic recordings, JPEG images, and MPEG movies for your computer, enabling you to swiftly transfer files and to reduce the clutter on your hard drive.

  The only radio signal that cannot be compressed is one that contains completely random information, leaving it indistinguishable from radio static. In a related fact, the more you compress a signal, the more random it looks to someone who intercepts it. A perfectly compressed signal will, in fact, be indistinguishable from static to everyone but the person who has the preordained knowledge and resources to decode it. What does it all mean? If a culture is sufficiently advanced and efficient, then their signals (even without the influence of cable transmissions) might just disappear completely from the cosmic highways of gossip.

  Ever since the invention and widespread use of electric bulbs, human culture has also created a bubble in the form of visible light. This, our nighttime signature, has slowly changed from tungsten incandescence to neon from billboards and sodium from the now-widespread use of sodium vapor lamps for streetlights. But apart from the Morse code flashed by shuttered lamps from the decks of ships, we typically do not send visible light through the air to carry signals, so our visual bubble is not interesting. It’s also hopelessly lost in the visible-light glare of our Sun.

  RATHER THAN LET aliens listen to our embarrassing TV shows, why not send them a signal of our own choosing, demonstrating how intelligent and peace loving we are? This was first done in the form of gold-etched plaques affixed to the sides of the four unmanned planetary probes Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2. Each plaque contains pictograms conveying our base of scientific knowledge and our location in the Milky Way galaxy while the Voyager plaques also contain audio information about the kindness of our species. At 50,000 miles per hour—a speed in excess of the solar system’s escape velocity—these spacecraft are traveling through interplanetary space at quite a clip. But they move ridiculously slow compared with the speed of light and won’t get to the nearby stars for another 100,000 years. They represent our “spacecraft” bubble. Don’t wait up for them.

  A better way to communicate is to send a high-intensity radio signal to a busy place in the galaxy, like a star cluster. This was first done in 1976, when the Arecibo telescope was used in reverse, as a transmitter rather than a receiver, to send the first radio-wave signal of our own choosing out to space. That message, at the time of this writing, is now 30 light-years from Earth, headed in the direction of the spectacular globular star cluster known as M13, in the constellation Hercules. The message contains in digital form some of what appeared on the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft. Two problems, however: The globular cluster is so chock full of stars (at least a half-million) and so tightly packed, that planetary orbits tend to be unstable as their gravitational allegiance to their host star is challenged for every pass through the cluster’s center. Furthermore, the cluster has such a meager quantity of heavy elements (out of which planets are made) that planets are probably rare in the first place. These scientific points were not well known or understood at the time the signal was sent.

  In any case, the leading edge of our “on-purpose” radio signals (forming a directed radio cone, instead of a bubble) is 30 light-years away and, if intercepted, may mend the aliens’ image of us based on the radio bubble of our television shows. But this will happen only if the aliens can somehow determine which type of signal comes closer to the truth of who we are, and what our cosmic identity deserves to be.

  SECTION 5

  WHEN THE UNIVERSE TURNS BAD

  ALL THE WAYS THE COSMOS WANTS TO KILL US

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAOS IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM

  Science distinguishes itself from almost all other human endeavors by its capacity to predict future events with precision. Daily newspapers often give you the dates for upcoming phases of the moon or the time of tomorrow’s sunrise. But they do not tend to report “news items of the future” such as next Monday’s closing prices on the New York Stock Exchange or next Tuesday’s plane crash. The general public knows intuitively, if not explicitly, that science makes predictions, but it may surprise people to learn that science can also predict that something is unpredictable. Such is the basis of chaos. And such is the future evolution of the solar system.

  A chaotic solar system would, no doubt, have upset the German astronomer Johannes Kepler, who is generally credited with the first predictive laws of physics, published in 1609 and 1619. Using a formula that he derived empirically from planetary positions on the sky, he could predict the average distance between any planet and the Sun by simply knowing the duration of the planet’s year. In Isaac Newton’s 1687 Principia, his universal law of gravity allows you to mathematically derive all of Kepler’s laws from scratch.

  In spite of the immediate success of his new laws of gravity, Isaac Newton remained concerned that the solar system might one day fall into disarray. With characteristic prescience, Newton noted in Book III of his 1730 edition of Optiks:

  The Planets move one and the same way in Orbs concentric, some inconsiderable Irregularities excepted, which may have arisen from the mutual actions of…Planets upon one another, and which will be apt to increase, till the system wants a Reformation. (p. 402)

  As we will detail in Section 7, Newton implied that God might occasionally be needed to step in and fix things. The celebrated French mathematician and dynamicist Pierre-Simon Laplace had an opposite view of the world. In his 1799–1825 five-volume treatise Traité de mécanique céleste, he was convinced that the universe was stable and fully predictable. Laplace later wrote in Philosophical Essays on Probability (1814):

  [With] all the forces by which nature is animated…nothing [is] uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to [one’s] eyes. (1995, Chap. II, p. 3)

  The solar system does, indeed, look stable if all you have at your disposal is a pencil and paper. But in the age of supercomputers, where billions of computations per second are routine, solar system models can be followed for hundreds of millions of years. What thanks do we get for our deep understanding of the universe?

  Chaos.

  Chaos reveals itself through the application of our well-tested physical laws in computer models of the solar system’s future evolution. But it has also reared its head in other disciplines, such as meteorology and predator-prey ecology, and almost anyplace where you find complex interacting systems.

  To understand chaos as it applies to the solar system, one must first recognize that the difference in location between two objects, commonly known as their distance, is just one of many differences that can be calculated. Two objects can also differ in energy, orbit size, orbit shape, and orbit inclination. One could therefore broaden the concept of distance to include the separation of objects in these other variables as well. For example, two objects that are (at the moment) near each other in space may have very different orbit shapes. Our modified measure of “distance” would tell us that the two objects are widely separated.

  A common test for chaos is to begin with two computer models that are identical in ev
ery way except for a small change somewhere. In one of two solar system models you might allow Earth to recoil slightly in its orbit from being hit by a small meteor. We are now armed to ask a simple question: Over time, what happens to the “distance” between these two nearly identical models? The distance may remain stable, fluctuate, or even diverge. When two models diverge exponentially, they do so because the small differences between them magnify over time, badly confounding your ability to predict the future. In some cases, an object can be ejected from the solar system completely.

  This is the hallmark of chaos.

  For all practical purposes, in the presence of chaos, it is impossible to reliably predict the distant future of the system’s evolution. We owe much of our early understanding of the onset of chaos to Alexander Mikhailovich Lyapunov (1857–1918), who was a Russian mathematician and mechanical engineer. His 1892 PhD thesis “The General Problem of the Stability of Motion” remains a classic to this day. (By the way, Lyapunov died a violent death in the chaos of political unrest that immediately followed the Russian Revolution.)

  Since the time of Newton, people knew that you can calculate the exact paths of two isolated objects in mutual orbit, such as a binary star system, for all of time. No instabilities there. But as you add more objects to the dance card, orbits become more and more complex, and more and more sensitive to their initial conditions. In the solar system we have the Sun, its eight planets, their 70+ satellites, asteroids, and comets. This may sound complicated enough, but the story is not yet complete. Orbits in the solar system are further influenced by the Sun’s loss of 4 million tons of matter every second from the thermonuclear fusion in its core. The matter converts to energy, which subsequently escapes as light from the Sun’s surface. The Sun also loses mass from the continuously ejected stream of charged particles known as the solar wind. And the solar system is further subject to the perturbing gravity from stars that occasionally pass by in their normal orbit around the galactic center.

  To appreciate the task of the solar system dynamicist, consider that the equations of motion allow you to calculate the net force of gravity on an object, at any given instant, from all other known objects in the solar system and beyond. Once you know the force on each object, you nudge them all (on the computer) in the direction they ought to go. But the force on each object in the solar system is now slightly different because everybody has moved. You must therefore recompute all forces and nudge them again. This continues for the duration of the simulation, which in some cases involves trillions of nudges. When you do these calculations, or ones similar to them, the solar system’s behavior is chaotic. Over time intervals of about 5 million years for the inner terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars) and about 20 million years for the outer gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), arbitrarily small “distances” between initial conditions noticeably diverge. By 100 to 200 million years into the model, we have lost all ability to predict planet trajectories.

  Yes, this is bad. Consider the following example: The recoil of Earth from the launch of a single space probe can influence our future in such a way that in about 200 million years, the position of Earth in its orbit around the Sun will be shifted by nearly 60 degrees. For the distant future, surely it’s just benign ignorance if we do not know where Earth will be in its orbit. But tension rises when we realize that asteroids in one family of orbits can chaotically migrate to another family of orbits. If asteroids can migrate, and if Earth can be somewhere in its orbit that we cannot predict, then there is a limit to how far in the future we can reliably calculate the risk of a major asteroid impact and the global extinction that might ensue.

  Should the probes we launch be made of lighter materials? Should we abandon the space program? Should we worry about solar mass loss? Should we be concerned about the thousand tons of meteor dust per day that Earth accumulates as it plows through the debris of interplanetary space? Should we all gather on one side of Earth and leap into space together? None of the above. The long-term effects of these small variations are lost in the chaos that unfolds. In a few cases, ignorance in the face of chaos can work to our advantage.

  A skeptic might worry that the unpredictability of a complex, dynamic system over long time intervals is due to a computational round-off error, or some peculiar feature of the computer chip or computer program. But if this suspicion were true, then two-object systems might eventually show chaos in the computer models. But they don’t. And if you pluck Uranus from the solar system model and repeat the orbit calculations for the gas giant planets, then there is no chaos. Another test comes from computer simulations of Pluto, which has a high eccentricity and an embarrassing tilt to its orbit. Pluto actually exhibits well-behaved chaos, where small “distances” between initial conditions lead to an unpredictable yet limited set of trajectories. Most importantly, however, different investigators using different computers and different computational methods have derived similar time intervals for the onset of chaos in the long-term evolution of the solar system.

  Apart from our selfish desire to avoid extinction, broader reasons exist for studying the long-term behavior of the solar system. With a full evolutionary model, dynamicists can go backward in time to probe the history of the solar system, when the planetary roll call may have been very different from today. For example, some planets that existed at the birth of the solar system (5 billion years ago) could have since been forcibly ejected. Indeed we may have begun with several dozen planets, instead of eight, having lost most of them jack-in-the-box style to interplanetary space.

  In the past four centuries, we have gone from not knowing the motions of the planets to knowing that we cannot know the evolution of the solar system into the unlimited future—a bittersweet victory in our unending quest to understand the universe.

  TWENTY-NINE

  COMING ATTRACTIONS

  One needn’t look far to find scary predictions of a global holocaust by killer asteroids. That’s good, because most of what you might have seen, read, or heard is true.

  The chances that your or my tombstone will read “killed by asteroid” are about the same for “killed in an airplane crash.” About two dozen people have been killed by falling asteroids in the past 400 years, but thousands have died in crashes during the relatively brief history of passenger air travel. So how can this comparative statistic be true? Simple. The impact record shows that by the end of 10 million years, when the sum of all airplane crashes has killed a billion people (assuming a death-by-airplane rate of 100 per year), an asteroid is likely to have hit Earth with enough energy to kill a billion people. What confuses the interpretation is that while airplanes kill people a few at a time, our asteroid might not kill anybody for millions of years. But when it hits, it will take out hundreds of millions of people instantaneously and many more hundreds of millions in the wake of global climatic upheaval.

  The combined asteroid and comet impact rate in the early solar system was frighteningly high. Theories and models of planet formation show that chemically rich gas condenses to form molecules, then particles of dust, then rocks and ice. Thereafter, it’s a shooting gallery. Collisions serve as a means for chemical and gravitational forces to bind smaller objects into larger ones. Those objects that, by chance, accreted slightly more mass than average will have slightly higher gravity and attract other objects even more. As accretion continues, gravity eventually shapes blobs into spheres and planets are born. The most massive planets had sufficient gravity to retain gaseous envelopes. All planets continue to accrete for the rest of their days, although at a significantly lower rate than when formed.

  Still, billions (likely trillions) of comets remain in the extreme outer solar system, up to a thousand times the size of Pluto’s orbit, that are susceptible to gravitational nudges from passing stars and interstellar clouds that set them on their long journey inward toward the Sun. Solar system leftovers also include short-period comets, of which several dozen are known to cross Ea
rth’s orbit, and thousands of asteroids that do the same.

  The term “accretion” is duller than “species-killing, ecosystem-destroying impact.” But from the point of view of solar system history, the terms are the same. We cannot simultaneously be happy we live on a planet; happy that our planet is chemically rich; and happy we are not dinosaurs; yet resent the risk of planetwide catastrophe. Some of the energy from asteroid collisions with Earth gets dumped into our atmosphere through friction and an airburst of shock waves. Sonic booms are shock waves too, but they are typically made by airplanes with speeds anywhere between one and three times the speed of sound. The worst damage they might do is jiggle the dishes in your cabinet. But with speeds upwards of 45,000 miles per hour—nearly seventy times the speed of sound—the shock waves from your average collision between an asteroid and Earth can be devastating.

  If the asteroid or comet is large enough to survive its own shock waves, the rest of its energy gets deposited on Earth’s surface in an explosive event that melts the ground and blows a crater that can measure twenty times the diameter of the original object. If many impactors were to strike with little time between each event, then Earth’s surface would not have enough time to cool between impacts. We infer from the pristine cratering record on the surface of the Moon (our nearest neighbor in space) that Earth experienced an era of heavy bombardment between 4.6 and 4 billion years ago. The oldest fossil evidence for life on Earth dates from about 3.8 billion years ago. Not much before that, Earth’s surface was unrelentingly sterilized, and so the formation of complex molecules, and thus life, was inhibited. In spite of this bad news, all the basic ingredients were being delivered nonetheless.