All of American law and much of American politics revolves around the term “unconstitutional.” Determining the adherence of laws to the Constitution is basically the only duty of our Supreme Court system, and arguments over how the Constitution should be properly “interpreted” today are pretty fierce.

Surprisingly, when you learn about the Constitution in school, you generally don’t learn about what the world was like when it was written. My teachers, at least, never really made me understand what it meant that factories and railroads hadn’t yet been invented. And I feel that these changes are crucial to understanding the ongoing debates over constitutionality today.

Determining what our Founding Fathers would have wanted us to do is very difficult indeed when one realizes that they had no concept of mass production, factory labor, effective healthcare, or, for that matter, electricity. So I’d like to close my election politics kick with a quick refresher on differences between the modern era and the era of the Framers of our Constitution.

1) There was no such thing as mass production of goods. At the time our Constitution was written, everything was hand-made. A “factory” was a place where a lot of people sat in a room and did hand work. Sewing machines didn’t exist. Neither did cotton gins.

In 1787, even the concept of interchangeable parts was foreign. When Eli Whitney first demonstrated–some fourteen years after the Constitution was written–that it was theoretically possible for unskilled laborers instead of craftsmen to assemble guns from interchangeable parts, his audience was astounded. The audience, including John Adams and then-President Thomas Jefferson, was so astounded by the concept that at first they didn’t believe it was possible.

And rightly so, it turned out: Whitney had rigged his demonstration by covertly marking certain pieces that were meant to go together. This was necessary because technology was not yet good enough in 1801 to make truly interchangeable parts. That should tell you something about how late-18th century technology stacked up to ours today.

Let’s think for a minute about the pre-Whitney world for which the Constitution was created. (And it was certainly created for a world without interchangeable parts, given that none of the Founding Fathers had even conceived of mass production as a possibility.)

Before interchangeable parts allowed unskilled laborers to produce valuable goods, only skilled artisans could produce vital goods like guns, shoes, and furniture. This meant that the “means of production,” to quote Marx, was widely distributed among people. Every village needed a cobbler, a blacksmith, a gunsmith because no single artisan could produce enough to meet the demands of a wide region. Job security was pretty easy; people would always need shoes. Education was pretty easy, too; get an apprenticeship.

With the advent of mass production, the means of production moved from the hands of the village cobbler and gunsmith into the hands of the early tycoons who owned the factories. How was your village cobbler supposed to compete with the prices offered by early sweatshops that used cheap unskilled labor to produce thousands of shoes each day?

Point being, the advent of factories and their effects on employment and income were things the Founding Fathers had never even thought of when they wrote the Constitution. In the Founders’ days, most people supported themselves as farmers or skilled laborers; the idea that factories owned by a wealthy few would become the basis of the entire economy was unconcieved of.

This may be worth bearing in mind when listening to disputes over the Constitutionality of things like labor laws and minimum wage. Thomas Jefferson, for example, was actually a vocal opponent of both the rise of factories and the merchant class; he feared America would be subject to moral decay unless she remained a nation of farmers, and he named banks as one of America’s greatest enemies. Thomas Jefferson was a very wise man.

One wonders what the Constitution may have looked like if he and the other Framers had been able to see a century into the future.

2) We had “inexhaustible” natural resources. Let’s make one thing clear: America is BIG. It’s so big that well into the early 20th century, American presidents were expressing the belief that it natural resources were inexhaustible. And that was the basis both for America’s 18th century economy, and for the American Dream.

The natural riches of the Americas were completely mind-blowing to European explorers. To put things in perspective, most of us know that European powers were perpetually at war with each other. And what were the wars over? Land. Like everybody else before industrialization, Europeans primarily made their wealth their wealth through farming; the wealthy nobles were the land owners. Land = wealth = power.

Europe was so thickly settled that there was no unclaimed land to expand into. When you wanted to expand your territory/wealth/power, you took someone else’s by force.

So imagine the mind-boggling riches beheld by the first European settlers first laying eyes on America and seeing “unsettled” forests stretching as far as the eye could see. Then imagine the mind-bogglingness of traveling hundreds of miles into the American interior, and still seeing trees as far as the eye could see. The vast distances you can drive in America without hitting sea or national borders still freaks Europeans out today. So it’s understandable that for centuries, our natural resources were viewed as inexhaustible.

And that’s where the American Dream came from. In our jubilant rush to become a settled, productive nation, America was literally giving away land for the first century or so of its history. What you once had to fight a war using an expensive army to gain was now available for free to European peasants who once had no better hope in life than to be a serf or a servant for some manner of nobility or landed gentry. No wonder they came in droves. And no wonder America became known as the land of opportunity.

The relationship between land and opportunity didn’t end with industrialization. The production of goods, after all, requires raw materials. Factories need cotton, leather, wool, steel, wood. And a vast, only recently tapped continent had the potential to produce all of those things in great abundance.

Today we know that America’s natural resources are not endless. Now we’re beginning to get into the situation Europe was in 300 years ago; we’ve been settled long enough that we’re getting to the bottom of the barrel of our natural resources, meaning that land and raw materials for the production of goods are no longer cheap and plentiful.

The Framers never saw this coming. I doubt any of them looked at America’s inconceivable wealth of natural resources and thought “we’d better plan for when we use these up someday.” That “someday” would have been so far in the distant future in their minds would have been like us planning for the year 3,000. That, too, is worth bearing in mind in debates over the Constitutionality of certain legislation.

3) There were no airplanes or railroads. Here’s something to consider: the very first boat powered by a steam engine made its debut in America in 1787. The same year the Constitution was written. This was effectively the first form of transportation powered by something other than sails or horses. Ever.

Lest we underestimate the importance of this development to global trade, let’s remember that carrying anything at all across the Atlantic Ocean had taken three months or more up to that point in time. Ship’s carrying raw materials not only had to avoid storms that could easily sink them and spots of “dead air” that could leave them stranded until the crew starved to death, but even when the going was good, a trip from the Americas to anywhere else was at least three months one way.

Now, let’s cut to today. How long does it take to cross the Atlantic Ocean? Depending on what points you’re sailing to and from, it takes 5-12 days.

5-12 days. In 5-12 days, you can have a shipload of goods, people, mail, whatever, from Europe to America. Or, you can get it here from China in 7 days. Beats the hell out of three months, doesn’t it?

Needless to say, this combined with the industrialization of America and the rest of the world has radically altered global trade. Getting all your manufactured goods from China is now not only feasible; it’s actually the cheap way to go. For that matter, exporting all your factory labor to China is also now the cheap way to go.

This is another development the Founding Fathers could never have conceived of. They couldn’t have conceived of factories as we know them today (or, at least they wouldn’t have; I’m sure they could have imagined these things but would not have taken such “wild speculation” seriously).

There weren’t even trains. The first steam-powered locomotive was invented in 1804; more than 50 years later, trains would revolutionize trade within the U.S. to the point where they were a key factor in the demise of the skilled artisan. After all, having all the industrialized ability to mass-produce goods doesn’t do you much good if you can’t reliably ship your products outside a 20-mile radius. It was a happy coincidence that artificially powered transport was invented around the same time as mass production.

And all of this happened after the Constitution was written.

The Constitution was written in a world without mass production or interchangeable parts. It was a world without artificially-powered transportation or automated machines of any kind. It was a world where the means of production were distributed among the many, by necessity; hands were the only means of production, and each person only got one pair.

It was a world where healthcare that could actually save your life did not exist; “healthcare” was largely leeches and Mercury-based cures, surgery without anesthesia or antiseptics. It was a world where most people grew or hunted their own food, or at least lived next to somebody who did.

It was a world where the concept of outsourcing labor or importing goods from China en masse was absolutely ridiculous. It was a world where any contact with another continent involved several months of treacherous voyage across an ocean without the benefit of electricity or steam power.

So let’s keep this in mind when we talk about the Founding Fathers’ intentions for our country. The Constitution would doubtless be much different if the same people had written it today.

Now that we’ve had a nice cross section of where we might expect to find life within and without our solar system, I’m bringing this alien life series to a close with the consideration of a very pressing question: if life may be so common in the cosmos, why haven’t we heard from anyone else?

This question is a good one. If the potential to give rise to intelligent life is common in the cosmos, we should be awash in artificial radio waves from the stars–shouldn’t we? Let’s take a closer look at what would be required for this to be the case.

You may have heard of something called the Drake equation. This equation, developed by Astronomy and Astrophysics professor Frank Drake, purports to offer a way to calculate the number of extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. It looks like this:

N = R* x fp x ne x fl x fi x fc x L.

Like any equation purporting to do such a thing (and most of the theories we’ve discussed so far), it’s rife with unknown variables. Each of the terms that are multiplied to produce N represent a variable related to the formation of stars and planets, the probability of planets supporting life, and the probability of this life becoming a technological civilization that’s detectable from space. Needless to say, almost all of these terms are unknown variables.

Each year we get closer to filling in a few. Astronomers now feel they may be able to make educated guesses about the rate of star formation (R*), for example, and maybe even the fraction of stars that support planets (fp). But the rest are total black boxes. “ne” is the number of potentially habitable planets per star; fl is the percentage of potentially habitable planets where life actually does develop. They only get more esoteric and unknowable (by present technology) from there.

The variable of the most interest to astronomers who are also philosophers is “L.” “L” is the length of time your average civilization releases detectable signals into space. If “L” is small, then the number of detectable civilizations in the Milky Way at any given time is small. If “L” is large and civilizations broadcast signals for millions of years on average, the number of detectable civilizations could be quite large (all other variables allowing).

For Carl Sagan, “L” was worrisome. The radio silence of the cosmos was worrisome. In his eyes, the complete lack of communication from extraterrestrials meant that there weren’t any intelligent civilizations out there who had been broadcasting signals for lengths of time equivalent to their distance from us in light years. To him this meant that technological civilizations may be, by nature, short-lived and self-destructive; each got to broadcast for only a few decades or centuries before destroying itself utterly.

Sagan’s fear was especially poignant during the 1980s, when the Earth stood on the brink of nuclear war. In those days, it was quite easy to imagine that Earth’s technological civilizations may soon render the planet unfit for civilization for millenia to come. So if the radio silence from the stars indicated that “L” may indeed be small–astronomers like Sagan felt that we should listen to the stars’ warning.

Today, the prospect of complete man-made annihilation is far more distant to us than it was to our parents a few decades ago. And, perhaps fittingly, some new possible reasons for the interstellar silence has been proposed.

Some very sensible mathematicians point out the problem of distance. One major obstacle to Earth-based interstellar missions would be the communication time lapse; actual travel time aside, it would take over four years to send a lightspeed signal one way from our nearest stellar neighbor, Proxima Centauri. It would take more than another four years to receive a response from Earth.

Expanding this principle more broadly, most stars in the Milky Way are dozens or hundreds of light years from Earth. And let’s remember that humans have been broadcasting radio signals at a level detectable from space for less than 80 years; any civilizations more than 80 light years from us would have no idea that a technological civilization exists on Earth.

A civilization 60 light years away may have picked up our radio signals 20 years ago and started answering them, but their response would not reach us for another 20 years. Likewise, for us to hear them, any given civilization would have to have broadcast our way in the astronomically extremely narrow temporal window of the last few decades. Not having heard from aliens since the 1970s does not mean that aliens do not exist.

Stephen Hawking recently pointed out another, perhaps even more compelling argument for why radio silence does not mean that the skies are empty.

Think about the history of Earth. When technologically advanced civilizations come into contact with more technologically primitive societies, the technologically primitive societies are virtually always the losers. Sometimes they just have their resources exploited to the point of sinking into permanent poverty and social chaos; other times they are actually wiped out altogether, by accident or design.

This doesn’t give us a lot of incentive to broadcast our presence to the cosmos. In fact, if patterns are similar on other planets (and from a perspective of evolutionary biology, they probably are), no civilization with a high enough IQ to build radio telescopes should want to let every potential advanced intelligence know exactly where they are.

“Oh look, Great Alien Leader, these radio signals lead back to a planet inhabited by a young and defenseless civilization that has not trashed their planet to nearly the extent that we as an older and more industrially developed society have trashed ours. What a marvelous opportunity for the expansion of our species.” (Photo of everyone’s favorite hostile alien race at left by Aaron Thomas.)

Would we put this kind of thinking past a human? Then why should we put it past anyone else?

Stephen Hawking has made headlines more than once by suggesting, in all seriousness, that we take care to avoid broadcasting our presence to space. And given the seemingly head-banging obviousness of this line of thought, what makes us think other civilizations–anybody with a good head on their shoulders, really–hasn’t also thought of it?

So it could be that if there are extraterrestrial civilizations, we won’t find out about them by hearing the noise they broadcast into space. It’s very possible that “L” lasts just a few decades–not because technological societies destroy themselves, but because they take a look at their own histories and wise up, deciding not to broadcast their presence as potential targets for exploitation.

If that’s the case, there might be alien spaceships swinging by Earth every day and hearing our radio clamour, thinking “Poor, silly humans. They must be new at this.”

Recently, there’s been some controversy over claims that the American worker is being “exploited.” Many members of the public have opposed movements like Occupy which appear to have a sense of “entitlement.” The perception is that the protesters want “free money,” or other things they haven’t worked to earn.

“All you need to do to be successful is work,” the opponents say. Or, less gently, “get a job, you lazy bums/dirty hippies/spoiled college kids.” The Facebook group “Occupy a Job” pokes fun at protesters, photoshopping protest slogans off their signs and replacing them with “Please don’t make me work!”

It’s pretty obvious that things aren’t that simple. Unemployment doesn’t fluctuate as a result of people becoming lazy en masse. Unemployment fluctuates because there aren’t enough jobs to go around. Which means, for starters, that those unemployed during a recession are very probably not “lazy bums.”

But there’s more to it than that. A central claim of the Occupy movement has been that the “99%” are being exploited. There is in fact a lot of hard evidence backing this up. Even without looking at growing income inequality, there are a lot of disturbing statistics out there, showing that “job creators” are now demanding more work of fewer employees and for lower wages than any time in the last 50 years.

Let’s start with an odd fact about the current economy: our national GDP has recovered from the recession. It has completely recovered. We’re now producing pre-recession levels of goods, services, and ultimately profit. So why is unemployment still so high?

It’s simple: employers have figured out that during this economic squeeze, they can demand unprecedented levels of productivity from fewer employees from less pay. If an employee gives you trouble for it, there are 100 unemployed folks waiting to replace her. This has led some economists to speculate that high levels of unemployment and comparatively low job security and compensation may be here to stay. If there’s no productivity benefit to treating your workers well, why do it?

This has led some economists to predict a future in which temporary and part-time employment are the norm. If these are the most efficient ways to be productive, perhaps we should get used to the idea of working part-time for multiple organizations, or jumping from contract to contract as permanently temporary workers.

And this isn’t entirely new. The uncoupling of GDP from employment is more recent; the graph above shows the big divide starting around the time of the 2008 economic crash. But the uncoupling of worker productivity from worker compensation began decades ago.

The graph at left sums things up perfectly (please click on it for a better view; the only version I could find had this eye-hurting transparent background feature).

Here we see the average American’s wages (adjusted for inflation) rising barely a few percent since 1979, while our GDP nearly doubles and the wages of the top 1% much more than double.

It’s hard to argue against exploitation here. It’s hard to argue in favor of what we’re always told–that the system we live in is inevitable, that the cost of raising workers’ wages is unfeasible, that “job creators” don’t create jobs because they lack the necessary income. Or, my favorite: that it’s you’re fault if you’re struggling. That it’s your fault if you don’t have a job, or if you’re not paid a living wage, of if you’re in debt. And that, for that reason, you shouldn’t complain.

The Republicans are right about one thing: our current system is unsustainable. But not because of too much government in business. Rather, it may be because of not enough government in business–because we lack the financial and anti-monopoly regulations to actually make markets safe and competitive, because we lack any sort of legal control over the percentage of workers’ productivity that their employers profit.

It’s not that the rich are being taxed more than their fair share; it’s that everyone else isn’t being paid their fair share in the first place. The rise in productivity in recent decades certainly isn’t due solely to the actions of a privileged few: it’s due to their employees, whose wages the privileged few get to determine. If American wage growth reflected work and productivity, then taxing the rich proportionally less or everyone else proportionally more would make sense. But that’s not the way it is. There’s nothing inherently fair–or even slightly fair–in the way our wages are determined. If we wish to have any fairness in the marketplace, our tax system must necessarily act to compensate for unfair wages.

Our system is unsustainable because we continue to ignore, as a society, the thoroughly documented fact that the best way to have success in business in the U.S. is to be born rich. We continue to ignore the fact that the wealthy “job creators,” not market forces, decide the wages of the individual. And I’ll say this in their defense: it’s not their fault. It’s the fault of a culture that has said, for decades if not for centuries, that profit is the measure of success. That playing dirty to achieve profit in business is okay. However much we’d like to think that’s not the prevailing culture in business, anyone who’s ever worked in business will tell you that it is. Successful businessmen have been told by their culture that paying their workers as little as possible is the right thing to do.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing wrong with being rich. There’s nothing wrong with being successful. There is, however, something very wrong with putting the interests of the rich and successful above those of the rest, even as the middle class disappears. There is something wrong with never calling out the top 1%, even as their income grows faster than the GDP while the workers’ remain unchanged. There is something wrong with pretending that lowering taxes on the rich are any way to solve this mess. And there is something especially wrong with pretending that government should defend this money-equals-success, profit-first culture.

In case we’ve all forgotten recent history, let’s review the last 20 years: we were told that if we repealed Glass-Steagall and other financial regulations in the 1990s, it would speed growth. It did. For a while. Then a massive crash happened as a result of–you guessed it–lack of financial regulation.

We were told that cutting taxes on the rich would stimulate job creation and fight the recession of the early 2000s, which now seems like the mildest of economic weather. And it did. For a few years. Then it quite noticeably stopped having any effect as layoffs became the norm and “job creators” continued to take home million-dollar paychecks while laying off employees.

If you can create manufacturing growth by opening up new markets for American products overseas, that might help. If you can put more money in the hands of the middle- and lower-classes who make up the vast majority of consumers for our important industries, that may help these industries recover. But if you put more money in the hands of the rich at the cost of the social programs that support the lower- and middle-classes, that will do the opposite of help. So let’s not do that again.

Thus far, we’ve dealt with the three most probably inhabited alien worlds in our own solar system. Being in our own solar system, they all have some things in common; the same Sun, for example. Now it’s time to move into something Really Different.

As mentioned earlier, our sun outshines about 90% of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Main sequence G-type stars like our own (often referred to by the misnomer “yellow dwarf”) make up about 7 billion of these 100 billion stars. 3 billion are hotter and brighter than our Sun; the other 90 billion are cooler and dimmer. So in the search for life outside our solar system, determining the habitability of the vast majority of cooler, dimmer stars seems a good place to start.

The incredibly convenient picture at right (courtesy of a NASA artist; yes, “NASA artist” is a viable career choice) shows the Kepler-16 planetary system, also dubbed the “Tatooine” system by sci-fi junkies because it hosts the first known planet that actually has two suns. The brighter star is an orange dwarf, or a class K main sequence star. It’s substantially smaller and cooler than our own sun (or that of potentially earthlike Kepler-22b), but still much hotter and brighter than the smaller class M red dwarf seen passing in front of it in the picture.

The planet Kepler-16b, also known as Tatooine, is shown in the picture as a dark spot. It’s about the size of Saturn.

And that should give you some idea of the type of star we’re talking about here. Stars ranging from somewhat cooler than our own Sun to those barely larger than a gas giant–some have debated Jupiter’s possible status as a “brown dwarf,” a ball of gas big enough to produce substantial energy through its magnetic field, but not quite big enough to ignite nuclear fusion. Class M red dwarfs are the next step up from a brown dwarf; they might be so small as to have just twice Jupiter’s diameter.

Interestingly, Kepler 16-b orbits its red dwarf parent star at the outer edge of the habitable zone–this shows that planets can exist both within the habitable zone of a red dwarf, and in a binary star system at the same time. That’s kind of cool. But unfortunately, Kepler 16-b, having the mass of Saturn, is probably a gas giant and probably does sport below-freezing temperatures due to the whole “outer edge of the habitable zone” thing.

Now, onto the matter of the habitability of class K and class M stars in general. How would life on a planet in the habitable zone of such a star differ from our own?

The major difference between these stars and our sun, obviously, is that they’re smaller and cooler. This means that planets have to orbit much closer to be in their liquid water-friendly habitable zone.

Class K orange dwarfs, on average, are about 90% of the sun’s mass and 40% of its luminance. This means that, while the habitable zone would be substantially closer, it would fall somewhere between the orbits of Venus and Mercury around our own star; it wouldn’t be close enough to induce “tidal locking” that can have all sorts of messy side effects.

As a cool consequence, the sun on such a planet would not only appear orange, but it would appear enormous in the sky. The sky itself would likely be aqua to green; the Raleigh scattering that gives us our blue sky would still apply to a planet of sufficient atmosphere, but cooler stars produce exponentially less blue light, so green would be favored as the shortest wavelength present in abundance.

Class M red dwarfs are another matter. These are thought to compose about 75% of all stars in our galaxy (sunlike G-type stars are 7%; medium-cool K-type stars are 15%), so it would be nice if they could host life. But the obstacles are formidable. Red dwarfs are about 40% the size of our sun, but they give off only 4% of its heat and light (star-planet size comparison below by NASA, JPL/Caltech, 84user and Paul Stanifer). That means that to be in the habitable zone, a planet would likely have to orbit so close as to be tidally locked. That gets very sticky.

“Tidal locking” is what our Moon as with our Earth. It’s why we never see the Moon’s dark side; instead of rotating and having a day-night cycle, the same side always points toward us, and the same side always points away. Mercury is very close to having such a situation with our own Sun; it does rotate and have a “day/night cycle,” but the “day” on Mercury is barely shorter than the year. It does not revolve quickly.

A planet in the habitable zone around a red dwarf could have a full-out tidal locking scheme like our Moon, or a partial one like Mercury. Either way, there are some obvious issues. The “day” side is going to become extremely warm, while the “night” side might be in a perpetual deep freeze. Because of this, scientists used to think that planets orbiting red dwarfs would be nigh-uninhabitable. If the atmosphere didn’t freeze or boil off altogether from the extreme hot or cold of one side, only a thin “twilight band” between the day and night zones could support liquid water.

Recent models challenge this idea. Recent studies by Robert Haberle and Manoj Joshi of NASA’s Ames Research Center have shown that a planet possessing just 10% of Earth’s atmosphere may effectively distribute heat to its dark side. The extreme temperature differences between air and water on the day vs. night sides of the planet would create powerful convection currents; a tidally locked planet may actually be the theoretical extreme for the temperature differences that create winds. It would be windy.

It would also probably rain a lot. With the extreme heating of air and water on the planet’s day side, both air and clouds of vaporized water would be exported to the cooler night side very fast. And, as on Earth, hot, wet air cooling fast would result in storms. Big ones. Some models (like the Aurelia project) have a perpetual hurricane happening over oceans at the pinnacle of the heated day-side, while a torrential downpour happens at the pinnacle of the cooled night side.

These red dwarf-orbiting planets do not sound like a very friendly place. They certainly aren’t to human lifestyles or technology. But what about to life in general. Is a hurricane hostile to the evolution of bacterial life? Could life forms that have never known anything different adjust to such conditions quite handily?

As with all questions surrounding the origin of life, the answer to this one isn’t clear. On one hand, lightning strikes may have been a key player in catalyzing early organic chemistry reactions, so a perpetual thunderstorm might actually be a good thing. On the other hand, perpetual (unimaginably, unearthly) high winds and waves might create a chemical stew too turbulent for large structures to form.

The scientists who designed the inhabited   simulation Aurelia proposed that life could develop in the sheltered nooks and crannies of the planet’s land and oceans. Caves and hydrothermal deep sea vents, for example, would receive plenty of warm and potentially biochemically-laden water. They would also be shielded from the brunt of the planet’s violent air and water currents. So could live evolve in one of these settings and spread outward, adapting appropriately as it went along?

We don’t know for sure if life could arise on planets orbiting red dwarfs. And we won’t know until we either find life, or a repletion of lifeless planets around these tiny stars. So we don’t know if life can exist around 75% of the stars in our galaxy.

But the odds for class K orange dwarfs, which are twice as common as our own sun, seem good. Between sunlike Class G main-sequence stars and cooler Class K main-sequence stars, we can estimate that about 22 billion stars in our galaxy have a substantial habitable zone in which life-bearing planets could exist. (Dizzying animation of Tatooine/Kepler 16-b’s orbital pattern by Silver Spoon; the Saturn-sized planet Kepler 16-b is colored purple.)

If we apply what we know from spectrological studies of stars overall, about 15% of all stars seem likely to have planets (the heavy elements that make up planets seem to be missing from their spectra, implying that they may have ended up elsewhere). That makes 3.3 billion potentially habitable stars in the Milky Way that probably have planets.

I think those odds are pretty good, don’t you?

Exciting new update: Astronomers See More Planets Than Stars In the Galaxy!

A couple of months ago, I decided to research every single candidate running for president. There were 23 of them, including Randall “Been Arrested Over 40 Times” Terry, Andy “I Am Delusional” Martin, and Jimmy McMillan of The Rent is Too Damn High Party fame. Most of these candidates, needless to say, never became frontrunners. But I did make one extremely worthwhile discovery: Jon Huntsman is basically the best candidate ever.

We’ve only just begun to hear about Huntsman in the news. The other candidates haven’t even been bothering to attack him, and he’s barely been allowed to speak at the Republican debates. He’s been pouring literally all of his time and energy into New Hampshire. Some analysts are speculating that he may “pull a Santorum” there and shock the nation by finishing first or second. I really hope he does. Because if there’s anybody I have ever thought might fix our economy, it’s this guy.

People say that Mitt Romney is the most qualified candidate because of his governorship of Massachusetts. And they’re dead wrong. Huntsman has also been governor, and he achieved things so spectacular I’d accuse him of lying if I hadn’t checked the sources. Plus, he hasn’t just been governor–he’s been responsible for advancing U.S. trade policy as U.S. Trade Representative, and for the last two years he’s been our ambassador to China.

As U.S. Trade Representative, Huntsman was tapped by George W. Bush to research world trade issues, formulate the best possible U.S. trade policy, and negotiate trade agreements with other nations. During his tenure he negotiated free trade agreements with Asia and Africa. I’m also inclined to think he really learned his stuff, because as Utah governor he literally doubled Utah’s export market abroad. This helped with the spectacular increases in GDP and employment Utah saw under Huntsman.

As Utah governor, his approval ratings sometimes topped 90%. He won re-election to his second term with a staggering 78% of all votes. When he left office to serve as U.S. ambassador to China, his ending approval rating was over 80%. That should give you a flavor for how much people loved him. Can you imagine having a U.S. President or Congress had such high approval?

And why did the people love him? Under Huntsman, Utah saw more jobs created than any other state in the union (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Huntsman’s Utah was also named by Forbes as the third best state to do business in. The Pew Center named Utah under Huntsman as the best-managed state in the nation–I don’t see how it could be otherwise, given the massive growth and reform Utah saw during the Huntsman years.

Under Huntsman, both Utah’s state budget and its GDP grew by over 33%. If that weren’t absurd enough, he managed this while simultaneously doing away with the progressive tax bracket system and instituting a low-rate flat tax. That massive tax cut didn’t hurt social spending at all: in fact, Huntsman spent more on education, environmental protections, and other areas than any previous Utah governor. All without outspending the revenue increases brought on by Utah’s skyrocketing GDP.

This makes him, in my mind, the perfect candidate. Fiscal conservatives give him an A for tax policy but an F for spending. What more could you want? We have someone here who drastically lowered taxes and cut waste while simultaneously improving social programs, including advocating for increased minimum wage and offering every child in the state scholarships to help them attend private school if their families so desired.

And in another weirdly liberal move for a flat-tax governor, Huntsman recently wrote that Wall Street’s Big Banks Are the Real Threat To Our Economy. While correctly claiming to be the only Republican campaign willing to take on Wall Street, he spouted a remarkable outpouring of political-economic sanity, mirroring well-established hard facts about banking regulation and its role in creating–or avoiding–massive recessions.

Let’s take a closer look at this spending thing. Huntsman spent the same percentage of the state’s GDP that his predecessor did. The fiscal conservative criticism that “his spending outpaced both inflation and population growth” completely misses the fact that it kept pace with the state’s GDP and tax revenue, which both skyrocketed despite the institution of an unprecedented low flat tax. And what did he do with the money?

His Parent Choice in Education Act provided scholarships ranging from $500 to $3000 for parents to send their children to the private school of their choice. This program was open to all public school students, and students that were already attending private schools. He also signed laws to circumvent some problematic portions of No Child Left Behind and granted Utah schools greater control over their spending priorities.

Huntsman also signed Utah onto the Western Climate Initiative, the Western American and Canadian states’ version of the Kyoto Protocol, putting Huntsman’s Utah ahead of the entire United States under Bill Clinton in environmental protection. He has consistently advocated carbon-reducing policies and made it clear that, unlike most Republican candidates, he actually trusts science.

Climate change isn’t the only area where Huntsman follows science. On such hot-button issues as abortion and gay marriage, he also seems to offer the kinds of reasonable compromises we no longer expect from politicians.

His stance on abortion has been that elective abortion should be legal in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, but not afterward. This is significant in that it is actually the same stance held by a majority of Americans according to major polling organizations–a view which isn’t represented by either major political party. It’s also medically sound, both in terms of a fetus’ development toward that elusive status of personhood, and in terms of the increased risk of complications for women in late-term abortions.

On gay marriage, he supports equal legal rights, but not calling it “marriage.” While people on both sides of the debate are likely to take issue with that stance, it does effective grant gay couples the legal rights that they need while not officially contradicting the religious stance that marriage is the sole province of child-bearing heterosexual couples.

In other words, he’s sane. He’s the only presidential candidate I’ve seen with such a great record in terms of the offices he’s held and his achievements as governor. He has demonstrated clear understanding of the global trade scene and the ability to drastically increase his state’s export market and subsequently its GDP. He has demonstrated the ability to cut waste and lower taxes while simultaneously increasing spending on education and the environment.

He has shown a clear respect for science and incorporated it into his policies. He has shown a clear dedication to doing what works–not following the delusions of right vs. left ideologues. And having spent the last two years on the  ground in China as ambassador, he’s undoubtedly better-equipped to deal with that growing superpower and its allies than any stateside politician–or, in other words, all the other Republican candidates.

Unfortunately, it’s this very unique sanity that has kept him from the status of frontrunner in the race so far. The Republican establishment doesn’t like him because he’s too moderate. He’s not pro-life enough, he’s not anti-environment enough, he’s not anti-spending enough (although I’m still trying to figure out how that matters at all if he is anti-tax), and he doesn’t use religious rhetoric every five seconds. He even takes dangerously Occupy-like stances with his opposition to Wall Street’s big banks.

I find it very significant that Huntsman was tapped for important international positions by both presidents George W. Bush and Obama. George W. Bush picked him to support U.S. trade interests by researching, developing, and negotiating U.S. world trade policy. Obama picked him to represent the U.S. to the government of China during perhaps the most significant era in U.S.-China relations yet. I cannot think of a better combination of positions held over the last ten years to equip someone to handle U.S. foreign policy.

It should be noted that the one idealistic myth about Huntsman I managed to bust in the course of my research was that of his “proficiency in Mandarin.” Yes, he has started learning Mandarin Chinese for his job as ambassador to China. He’s made progress which is arguably quite impressive given that it’s one of the most difficult languages on the planet and most American politicians don’t even bother. And yes, his vocabulary in the language appears to be pretty servicable.

But according to native Mandarin speakers, his Chinese grammar is so hilariously bad that it’s on par with Engrish gems such as “Welcome to Take Beijing Taxi Now!”

Maybe that just makes him more endearing.

So far, this alien life series has explored Europa and Mars–both planets we find appealing for their potential to host Earth-style life, the type of life we know to exist. But what about life “not as we know it?”

Saturn’s moon Titan is perhaps the most intriguing world in the solar system. Until very recently, its surface has been hidden from us altogether by its thick, cloudy atmosphere. Only with the recent flyby by the Cassini-Huygens probe did we get a glimpse of what Titan’s surface really looks like, and the results of this mission were astonishing.

Visually, Titan bears a very great resemblance to Earth–it has clouds and raindrops, seas and continents and sand dunes and shorelines that look remarkably like those found at home. It is the only place off of Earth known to host large, stable oceans: it is also the first place naturally existing liquid has been photographed off of Earth. If there’s anywhere extraterrestrial that looks like you’d expect it to host life, it’s here. (Titan-Earth comparison courtesy of NASA. Thank government spending for science.)

Given all that, it may come as a shock to hear that Titan’s average surface temperature is -290 degrees Fahrenheit. If it’s any comfort, that’s somewhat warmer than liquid nitrogen; on Titan, nitrogen is a gas, and composes 98.4% the atmosphere. But water is so perpetually frozen that it can be considered a mineral. And there’s another fun difference: Titan’s atmosphere is so thick relative to its low gravity that a human could literally fly by flapping their arms.

So how does frigid Titan do such a good impression of Earth? Its seas are made up of substances that are gases on Earth–hydrocarbons, like methane, ethane, and even a bit of propane. Its land masses are composed of frozen water and ammonia, which also exist in their liquid states below Titan’s crust much as silica and iron exist in liquid form below Earth’s. So there, in Titan’s mantle, there may be potential for Earthlike life. But with so much liquid methane on its surface, it’s hard not to ask if some decidedly un-Earthly life might live in that.

The suggestion of life in liquid methane is still considered pretty outlandish in the scientific community. If nothing else, it may simply be too cold: temperature effects the speed of biochemical processes, after all, and for all we know even hydrocarbon reactions might proceed at a snail’s pace on Titan.

But other astrobiologists aren’t so sure. After all, talking about the fundamental characteristics of life based on Earth life may be like talking about the fundamental characteristics of animals solely from observing a zebra. And Titan’s atmosphere, like that of Mars, has some tantalizing inconsistencies that some scientists claim as possible evidence of life.

Titan’s gas mixture is different from what we would expect. This should not be at all surprising, given how shocked we were by Venus. However, any differences are always tantalizing–for example, Titan has over 1,000 times more carbon dioxide and gaseous methane than predicted. You may recognize these as waste products of Earth-style life.

In addition, some naturally-produced chemicals are missing. There’s not enough free hydrogen or acetylene. This is especially exciting because these molecules may have the necessary properties to serve the roles of oxygen and glucose in a liquid-methane ecosystem. Their conspicuous absence has led some scientists to suggest that they are being consumed by a never-before-observed form of life native to Titan.

To evaluate the question of life on Titan, let’s look at the basic chemical “tools” that make Earth life possible:

1) A solvent. On Earth, this is water. A solvent is simply the background liquid that everything else floats in; and it’s important, because it creates the proper environment for biochemical reactions to occur. Organic chemicals are unlikely to spontaneously react, for example, if you powder them and mix them together on a dry surface. They’re also unlikely to react if you vaporize them and mix the gases together. Liquid is by far the best environment for metabolism.

 (Artists’ rendering of the view from Titan’s surface also courtesy of NASA.)

Earth scientists are in the habit of thinking that water is the absolute best solvent to bring about life. It does have some pretty unique properties. Water is, for example, the only liquid that expands instead of contracting when frozen. This reflects the uniqueness of its hydrogen bonds. These same bonds which form the expanded crystal structure of water ice also make it better than any other known liquid for suspending organic molecules in their highly reactive forms. But on Titan, the liquid isn’t water: it’s methane.

How does liquid methane stack up against water as a medium for life? Some scientists think that it’s a terrible medium, because of its low temperatures (which translate to slower chemical reactions) and its complete lack of water-like hydrogen bonds. Others, however, suggest that this very lack of methane reactivity may encourage organic chemicals to react with each other instead of their liquid medium–possibly speeding the formation of large structures like proteins.

2) Hereditary material. All life must have the ability to reproduce itself. The heart of this is a hereditary material, that is, a material that is used to pass down information from parent to offspring. On Earth, nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) serve this purpose due to their convenient complementary binding abilities–you can make a whole copy of a DNA or RNA double-helix by lining up random nucleotides with either of the strand of the original and seeing what sticks. This is the basis for DNA replication on Earth.

What might serve the role of hereditary material on Titan? We don’t quite know what other chemicals might serve as well as our nucleotide bases. However, we do know that our nucleotide bases could very well be created by the interaction of the Sun’s light with Titan’s atmosphere.

In 2010, astrobiology researcher Sarah Horst showed that all five nucleotide bases used by our DNA and RNA (plus some of the amino acids that make up our proteins) could be produced by applying energy to a gas mixture similar to Titan’s atmosphere. Vitally, this did not require the presence of liquid water. All it required was Titan-style gases, and energy. This has led to speculation both that Earth-type life could exist in Titan’s liquid water mantle, and that un-Earthly life could exist on its surface.

3) An energy storage molecule. On Earth, this role is filled by glucose and other sugars. What you essentially need is a molecule that you can form using the energy of sunlight, heat, or something else, and then break down later to release energy. On Earth, organisms use sugars as their first step in energy storage. What might they use on Titan?

Some have suggested that the carbon-nitrogen compound acetylene might do the trick. Like glucose, it contains high-energy bonds, which is created by methane’s interaction with sunlight. And like glucose, it could potentially be broken down by an organism with the proper enzymes to fuel metabolism. This makes the conspicuous absence of acetylene build-ups on Titan’s surface very interesting; scientists had expected to find billions of years worth of acetylene accumulation sitting around, but so far they haven’t.

4) Biochemical legos. This is my pet name for proteins. That is, after all, what amino acids are; they’re building blocks that come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and chemical properties such that they can be stuck together to make virtually anything a cell may need. The instructions for assembling these legos into useful proteins is contained within the hereditary material of Earth cells. This would likely be the case for non-Earth life as well, unless we stumbled across a situation where hereditary material and structural building-blocks were one in the same. (Very early Earth life may have looked like this, using RNA for both purposes.)

Here, there are two possibilities for Titan. To go the more obvious route, the same Sarah Horst experiment that showed that hereditary material could be produced in Titan’s atmosphere also resulted in the production of Earth-style amino acids.

Earth-style amino acids are surprisingly common in the cosmos: they’re found in many atmospheres, and even, according to some hotly-disputed spectroscopy results, in the gas clouds between stars.

 Scientists are beginning to feel that the basic building blocks of Earth-style life may be virtually everywhere.

But there’s also a known possibility for uniquely Titan structural building blocks. Isaac Asimov, famed science fiction writer and biochemist, suggested that complex hydrocarbon compounds could play the same role there as amino acids on Earth. These hydrocarbons could come in as many shapes and sizes, and arguably be better-suited to interacting with the liquid-methane medium in low temperatures.

5) A membrane. On Earth, we have our lovely phospholipid bilayers. These are highly convenient structures that can form naturally, through inorganic processes. They’re a bit like bubbles, except that in this case it’s a “bubble” of molecules whose nonpolar components want to be shielded from their polar solvent, water. When they form into a sheet and then a closed sphere, they also shield whatever is inside them from the outside, thereby protecting and accelerating the biochemical processes they contain.

In a liquid methane environment, a membrane would look quite different. This is because liquid methane is the exact reverse of liquid water: where liquid water is highly polar, methane is utterly nonpolar. So membrane/solvent polarity may actually be reversed on Titan: cell membranes could be made up of a low-temperature polar liquid, aggregated into a membrane against the polar environment of the methane.

How likely is any of this? The bottom line is that we don’t know. We know next to nothing about the chemical processes taking place on Titan: we know, literally, only what we’ve been able to gather from orbit. Nobody’s ever brought samples back or even taken an on-site chemical measurement at the surface.

It may turn out that Titan, like Venus, is a quite non-living surprise for us. Previously unknown chemical/geological processes could explain the lack of hydrogen and acetylene, and the repletion of methane and carbon dioxide. Or it may turn out that Titan is our first experience with truly alien life, using a biochemistry worlds different from our own. This discovery would utterly transform all we know about life in our Universe.

Never one to stir up controversy, I’ve decided it may be beneficial to post on what is possibly the most controversial issue of our time: the legality of abortion. With our next presidential election approaching, this issue is again serving as a major deciding factor in who Americans will vote for. For some voters, this issue overrides all others in its importance.

Passions run so high on the subject of abortion rights that the truth is literally difficult to find. Conflicting claims abound about everything, from medical and legal facts to public opinion on the subject.

In the interest of accuracy, I’ve looked at both pro-life and pro-choice sources, and tried to compile the best statistics I can regarding American voters’ stances on abortion, the degree of profit motive in the “abortion industry,” and the actual degree of difference that electing a pro-life vs. pro-choice candidate tends to make in U.S. abortion policy. Here are my findings:

1) Most Americans are neither “pro-life” nor “pro-choice.”

Both pro-life and pro-choice activists are quick to claim that they represent the real America. So what do the actual polls of real Americans show?

For one thing, the numbers change over time. They change so much that between 2002-2009 polls showed first that Americans were at a dead-even split; then that pro-life was beating pro-choice by a full 10%; then that pro-choice was again beating pro-life by fully 9%. Does American public opinion really change so much, so fast?

Probably not. The likely reason for this bizarre wild swinging is that the labels “pro-life” and “pro-choice” used in America only represent the far extremes of possible stances on abortion. More detailed polls reveal that most Americans fall somewhere between the two, and so may have trouble deciding which side represents them better.

In more sensible polls that take into account the range of possible positions, 49% of Americans say that abortion should be legal “only under certain circumstances.” That equals the combined numbers of the 27% who say it should always be legal and the 22% who say it should never be legal.

Another poll revealed 62% of Americans believe abortion should be legal in the first trimester, 24% believe it should be legal in the second trimester, and 10% believe it should be legal in the third trimester. This makes good medical sense both from the perspective of the fetus developing toward that elusive status of personhood, and from the perspective of women’s health since later-term abortions have higher rates of complications. It also matches up with the types of abortions that Americans choose: about 87% of U.S. abortions happen within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

In other words, if the majority of Americans’ opinions (and some medical facts) were represented by the law, elective abortion would be legal in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy but not afterwards. This is, in fact, the abortion policy of most European countries. Yet this stance is decried as “barbaric” by both American political parties.

2) Planned Parenthood gets about 13% of its total revenue from abortions.

We don’t even have our party candidates nominated, and Planned Parenthood has already been brought into the presidential race. Opponents claim that Mitt Romney’s past decisions to fund and consult Planned Parenthood on health issues show that he is unquestionably “pro-abortion.” At the same time, other candidates have come under fire for supporting the stoppage of federal funds to Planned Parenthood, a move which some argue puts low-income men and women alike in more danger from sexually transmitted diseases, unplanned pregnancy, and even cancer. So how much of Planned Parenthood is about abortion?

Claims made by politicians about how much of Planned Parenthood’s income comes from abortion range from 3% to over 90%. And no authoritative figure seems to be available. But I’ve been able to find a few seemingly-well-justified estimates:

Planned Parenthood’s claim that abortions make up only 3% of its activities is reasonable. Planned Parenthood does, after all, perform screenings for cancer and sexually transmitted diseases, treatment of sexually transmitted disease, sex education, and pregnancy-preventing contraception. Saying that these services make up 97% of all its activities by number also matches up pretty well with another popular claim…

A Republican politician’s claim that abortions make up 37% of Planned Parenthood’s clinic revenues also adds up. Abortions may be fewer in number, but they’re definitely Planned Parenthood’s priciest product with an average cost of about $450. The rough number of abortions performed annually times this price ads up to about 37%. This means that 63% of Planned Parenthood’s clinic revenues are from preventing unplanned pregnancies, education, or disease testing and treatment, and 37% are from abortion. Take that as you will.

All this means that about 13% of Planned Parenthood’s total revenue likely comes from abortions. Clinic revenues make up only about 36% of its total budget; the rest comes from government funding and private donors, who seek to keep the cost of all of Planned Parenthood’s services down for low-income men and women. If other industries are any example, 13% of revenue is certainly enough to create a profit motive; but it is certainly not the massive 37-90%+ of income alleged by Planned Parenthood opponents.

Interestingly, it turns out that some private donors to Planned Parenthood, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, specify that their donations cannot be used to fund abortions. This may add another layer of complexity to recent Planned Parenthood-related controversies, like one Bible publisher’s decision to stop a breast cancer fundraiser because they found out that the organization they were fundraising with gave funds to Planned Parenthood as one of its anti-cancer partners. I don’t know whether that organization earmarked its funds against abortion, but it’s worth considering that it is possible to donate funds to Planned Parenthood exclusively for use in education and disease screening and prevention.

Also interesting, it turns out that Republican President Richard Nixon was the first president to approve federal funding for Planned Parenthood, saying that low-income women should not be denied access to family planning services. He may have had in mind the still-common concern that children born to large low-income families that can’t support them may be at a severe disadvantage in terms of health, safety, education, and even future career outlook.

So in the course of research, we have discovered that the abortion issue in America is not as simple as either the Democrats or Republicans make it out to be. This leaves plenty of room for ambiguity in how important voters will see the abortion issue to be in this upcoming election. But it is at least good to know the facts; and facts are often disturbingly scarce on the campaign trail.

3) Pro-life candidates will reduce abortions, but probably by less than 10%.

Republicans and Democrats alike claim that pro-life Republican candidates will drastically decrease access to abortion. But is this really true? Has there been meaningful change in abortion under Republican vs. Democratic presidents?

Well, yes and no. Under George W. Bush, abortions dropped from 1.31 million to 1.21 million abortions annually. That’s about a 7% drop. Put another way, one out of 13 women who might have gotten an abortion under Clinton didn’t under Bush. This is definitely a significant drop, but it’s certainly not the seismic shift that pro-life voters hope for when they elect a pro-life presidential candidate.

The drop in American abortions under Bush probably reflects his funding choices (he chose to de-fund many health programs that provided abortions, both at home and abroad), and his partial-birth abortion ban (although partial-birth abortions have only ever made up a tiny percentage of all abortions in the U.S.). He did not directly touch the legality of early term abortions, though he did encourage anti-abortion measures by states, like decreasing the number of abortion clinics, instituting mandatory waiting periods, or toughening parental consent laws for minors.

It should be noted that these statistics do not take into account Bush’s successes or failures on other fronts related to abortion, such as unplanned pregnancy rates or funding for adoption and foster care agencies. I haven’t researched those enough to speak on them. However, I do feel that’s something to keep in mind: if you aim to drastically increase the number of babies born in the U.S. each year, you should also plan to increase funding for welfare, public education, and public healthcare. If the public duty to protect babies starts before birth, it certainly doesn’t end there.

Since Schiaparelli’s 19th century description of “canals” on the Martian surface, Mars has been the most popular planet for speculation about life. Generations of astronomers and science fiction writers alike speculated about an advanced civilization struggling to save itself by constructing these canals as its planet’s water supply dwindled.

Today, we know that Schiaparelli’s “canals” were not the work of an advanced intelligence–in fact they were probably an optical illusion. But we also know that other parts of this tale were uncannily accurate. Mars did once have surface water, and that water did gradually disappear as Mars’ geology cooled and its atmosphere leaked away into space. Today, Mars still has enough water to meet the needs of a flourishing civilization–but what is left is frozen, in the planet’s polar ice caps and underground.

Now, the question–did Mars have liquid water long enough to develop life early in its history? And if it did, has any of that life survived its planet’s dessication? (Photo of sunset on Mars courtesy of NASA. Yes, Mars sunsets really are blue due to Raleigh scattering.)

Mars, like Earth, was once a ball of molten minerals. And like Earth, it went through a hot, geologically active period. Mars lost its geologic heat much faster than Earth due to its much smaller size. But before it did, the red planet passed through a phase during which would have been warm enough to support liquid water, and produced enough geologic gases to have a fairly substantial atmosphere. Life arose on Earth within 1 billion years of the planet’s formation–how long did Mars’ “habitable period” last?

Right now, we don’t know. Mars’ geology shows that the planet did harbor stable surface water for at least 10,000 years–the amount of time necessary to create some of the water-requiring mineral formations found on its surface. Many people think the period was far longer–10,000 years is an eyeblink in geologic time–but we don’t yet know enough about Mars’ geology to say for sure. In time, with a lot of study, we may date the planet’s wet period far more precisely.

We have studied Mars, our near neighbor, in much more depth than distant Europa. So is there any hard evidence of life on Mars?

In the 1990s, a shocking science discovery made global headlines–what looked like fossilized bacteria had been found in a meteorite from Mars. This rock was a chunk of the Martian surface blasted into space by an impact, then picked up by Earthly explorers after it landed in Antarctica. And under the electron microscope, this meteor contained rod-like structures that looked like tiny bacteria.

In the decades since this discovery, debate has raged within the scientific community over the meteorite ALH 84001. Some say it’s actually Earthly bacteria in the meteorite–that it was contaminated in Antarctica or in the lab. Others say it’s not bacteria at all, but rather an inorganic crystal structure that could have formed during the impact or in space. Still others say that it’s conclusive proof that life once existed on Mars. Many theories have been offered, but nobody has been able to prove their claims. (Wonderful photo of the meteorite by Kunalm.)

So in the face of this uncertainty, ALH 84001 has largely dropped out of public consciousness. If the scientific community can’t prove what it is, they may as well not use it. But there is recent evidence just as tantalizing, and just as ambiguous.

Researchers have detected methane in the Martian atmosphere. This is a little odd, because methane should break down quickly in that environment. So it stands to reason that something is replenishing it. Methane can be produced either by active geology–of which Mars has little or none–or by certain types of bacteria. That is, life.

The methane story gets stranger still. It is coming from the ground–that’s to be expected, whether the gas is geological or biological in origin. But it isn’t produced at a constant rate. Rather, the ground produces more methane during Mars’ warm season.

This is, in my opinion, the best evidence that life still exists on Mars. Warm seasons on Earth speed up metabolism and cause life forms to grow and proliferate. And, of course, to produce more waste. The increase in methane production with Mars’ warm seasons does not make a lot of sense if the methane is geologically produced. It is, however, exactly what you would expect to find if the methane were produced by life.

Scientists are hesitant to weigh in on the issue. Alien geologies have surprised us before (Venus, anyone?), so there could very well be some unknown geologic process happening on Mars. But some scientists have come forward to say that the methane gas mixture is not terribly consistent with geological processes–it lacks other trace elements that might be expected in that case. It’s more consistent with the molecular signature of life.

The prospect of finding Martian bacteria is tremendously exciting for biologists. Thus far, it’s been difficult for us to make any statements about the fundamental nature of life because we have a sample size of one–one origin of life from which all known Earth life forms are descended. If Mars had a separate origin of life, studying it could yield knowledge that we could never hope to get from studying Earth life.

It’s also possible that, if there is life on Mars, we may find it to be more than simple bacteria. No one knows how far life may have evolved during Mars’ wet period–we haven’t studied nearly enough of the Martian surface to hunt for fossils. And no one knows what may have survived the gradual dessication.

At this point we can mostly rule out the existence of an intelligent civilization. But whatever life forms existed on Mars’ surface during its wet period would have had millions of years to adapt to a vanishing atmosphere–they could have moved underground for shelter against the increasing cold, dehydration, and radiation. We know that liquid water still sometimes bursts from the Martian underground and leaves rivulets in the sand. Who knows what might exist alongside it?

On this eve of an election year, there’s a topic I’d like to bring to everyone’s attention. We’re going to hear a lot of argument in the coming months about what is the best way to fix the economy. More than that; we’re going to hear arguments about what does or does not need fixing.

One slogan I’ve heard recently in the political circuit is “equality of opportunity; not equality of outcome.” This is a very real attitude in some circles that a) we do have equal opportunity in this country for people of all socioeconomic classes, and b) therefore, if someone is poor or in need, it is their fault and not society’s responsibility.

This slogan will come to more prominence in the coming months. This attitude will be used by those politicians who find it useful for their own interests. The argument will be made that, here in America, we really don’t have a problem of inequality; it’s just that people will always want free stuff, and they’ll never be satisfied.

So how valid are the complaints of inequality, really? Let’s take a look at a few facts.

There are lots of ways to measure equality of opportunity in the United States. You can measure the distribution of financial wealth, or the distribution of household income (two very different things, in fact). You can look at social mobility, which is the percentage of people who die in the same socioeconomic bracket to which they’re born. You can look at the ratio between the highest- and lowest-paid employee in your average company.

To get some idea of how successful (or not) our own system is at creating equal opportunity, it’s especially useful to compare America’s stats to those of other countries.

Let’s start with wealth distribution. “Wealth” in this case, encompasses many forms, including cash in the bank, stock market holdings, and property value. And the statistic is rather staggering; the top 1% of U.S. citizens control about 1/3 of the country’s wealth. The top 5% control over half of it. The “bottom 80%” control barely more than 1/10 of the country’s total wealth. I probably don’t need to tell you that’s a problem.

More disturbing still, the percentage of total wealth controlled by the “bottom 80%” of U.S. citizens has actually been shrinking since the 1970s. In 1983; the 80% controlled nearly 20% of the U.S.’s total economy. We’ve lost 1/3 of the influence we had then. And this loss has been drastically accelerated by the recent economic crash. Since 2007, it’s estimated that about 15% of the influence formerly held by the bottom 80% has transferred into the hands of the top 20%. (Image at right from the Economic Mobility Report.)

This means that that dreaded spectre of wealth redistribution has, in fact, been in the U.S. since the 1980s. But it hasn’t been taking from the rich and giving to the poor; it’s been doing the opposite. We’ve seen a bottom-to-top redistribution of economic influence, consistent and consistently accelerating for the past three decades.

A good part of this is, of course, due to income losses. Everybody has suffered since 2007, but the poor and middle-class have had greater losses than the rich. The average household in the top 20% has lost 16% of their income since 2007; the average household in the bottom 80% has lost 25% of theirs. That’s the equivalent to 1 in 4 members of the bottom 80% losing their entire salary and not recovering it, while 1 in 6 of the economic upper class lost theirs. To put it another way, your chance of losing the equivalent of your job in this economic crash was 50% greater if you were already middle- or lower-income.

Even more sobering than the 80%/20% divide is the divide within the top 20%. The top 1% control nearly half of the wealth within that income bracket. And within the top 1%, the top 0.5% control vastly more wealth than the bottom half of the top 1%. The disparity is so great that the richest 400 people in the U.S. control more wealth than the entire “bottom 50%” of our population.

How do we stack up against other countries in terms of class disparity? Among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (which includes almost all “Western” nations as well as Japan, Mexico, Brazil, India, and China), our wages are fairer than those of…Brazil, China, and Mexico. Everybody else has better income inequality than us. In the U.S., an average company’s top-paid executive earns over 400 times more than its average worker. In most countries, the figure is far less.

Note the graph at right, from the CIA World Factbook 2009. It shows income inequality using the “Gini coefficient.” Note that we’re purple. Note who else is purple; several South American countries, including Venezuela, several African countries, and China. Now, note who’s doing better than us, and by how much.

There are those who still argue that this does not mean unequal opportunity. After all, the history books are rife with stories of successful who built themselves up from a poor upbringing through hard work. America is the land that first made this possible by rejecting the idea of aristocracy and the hard classism of Victorian Europe. So anyone who works hard enough in the U.S. should be able to better their situation, right?

Wrong. While it’s usually possible to find a way to get through school and/or get into a career, it’s drastically easy to do so if you already have money. If you can afford expensive tutoring to help you get into a top tier college; if you don’t have to work to support yourself while in school; if your potential employer sees good grades, a good college, sees you as coming from a background of wealth and success.

In today’s environment, all of these factors are profoundly influential. If top-tier colleges will only take students with top-tier high school grades and college entry test scores, the competition starts quite early on. Lower-income high school teens are already effectively competing with upper-income teens for their future careers. If lucrative employers will only take the top students from colleges and universities, it’s exasperated. It doesn’t take rocket science to figure out that a student whose tuition is fully paid-for is likely to get better grades than one who’s working half-time or more to pay the bills.

So how does America rank in terms of “social mobility,” or the percentage of people born to one economic class who end up in another?

Not great. We do a little better here than on overall income inequality; Britain and Italy have lower social mobility than us. But much of continental Europe and Scandinavia do better than us; some drastically so. In the U.S., for example, someone born to a high-or low-earning family is three times more likely to stay in their parents’ income bracket than someone born to the same earning bracket in Denmark. In Denmark, the children of rich families have a 17% chance of achieving high financial success in their own careers; in America, that figure is 47%. (Graph below from of Guns and Bullets via OWS Charts.)

And all this isn’t just about daily standards of living. It’s not about everybody getting to have an iPhone and a TV. It’s about power: social power, political power, career power, power to decide the course this nation will take in the future. It’s no coincidence that half of Americans’ Congressmen are millionaires; you almost have to be wealthy to run for office successfully.

You have to have disposable income in order to make campaign donations. And the wealthy do; Goldman Sachs donated over $1 million to presidental campaigns in 2008. Those donations allow your candidate of choice to create and distributre propaganda. They allow your candidate to reach into the homes of people who might not be terribly interested in politics and convince them of why they should get their vote. The fact that candidates spend more money are far more likely to win elections is a well-documented fact in the U.S..

It’s also well-documented in other countries. In fact, income inequality figures closely mirror the statistics for “democratic effectiveness,” or how much of a say the average citizen gets in his country’s policies and actions. On this measure, the U.S. ranks 19th among world governments; almost all of Europe and Scandinavia (as well as Uruguay–more power to you, little South American dude) have more democratic elections than us, reflected by stats like voter participation and the influence of foreign governments in elections. We’re dangerously close to being considered a “flawed democracy.”

I’ll leave it up to the reader to decide what this means for our upcoming elections. I don’t know myself what the best way to achieve sustainable job creation. But to me, it says one thing loud and clear: there is a problem with inequality of opportunity in this country. Wealth is being redistributed–from the bottom to the top. There are some seemingly obvious ways to remedy this, like by lowering executive pay from its current outrageous levels and using that money to fund more jobs.

The bottom line is, this is not the best system we could have; other countries have done far better. And no matter what any candidate tells you, the hard statistics say that our situation is getting worse.

For more disturbing facts and figures with relevance to the upcoming elections, visit the website of the Economic Policy Briefing Institute, or the Occupy Wall Street Chart-Sharing Tumblr. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of every single user-made graph presented through this Tumblr, but many of them are from major publications.

Some of you may have heard that Jupiter’s moon, Europa, is a likely to find life in our Solar System. This may sound odd. Europa is, after all, terribly far from the Sun. How could it host liquid water, let alone the photosynthesis that makes up the base of most of Earth’s ecosystems?

At a glance, you’d be right. Europa orbits Jupiter, which is about five times further from the Sun than earth. Its surface temperature can dip unsettlingly close to absolute zero. Plus, it’s pretty tiny–about 100 Europas could fit inside the Earth. The fact that Jupiter’s titanic magnetic field creates enough radiation on Europa’s surface to kill a human in five minutes is just sort of a perk. The cold would get you first.

But if we look closer, Europa has a lot to teach us about where life might arise in the Universe. It turns out that the bitter cold and the deadly force of Jupiter work together in an almost absurdly convenient way to make Europa a possible incubator for life.

Measurements of Europa’s magnetic field reveal that its entire surface is covered by liquid water about 26 miles deep. (Diagram of Europa’s interior, complete with magnetic field lines, courtesy of NASA.) Well, not its surface–its surface is a crust of ice whose exact thickness is not known. But that entire ice crust appears to float atop a 62-mile-deep saltwater ocean. That’s kind of a lot of water. Earth’s deepest ocean trench is only 6.8 miles deep.

How is that possible without sunlight? Europa owes its warmth to Jupiter’s immense gravitational pull. It’s so strong that as she orbits, Jupiter’s gravity stretches and squeezes Europa–creating friction. A lot of friction. Enough friction to keep some of Jupiter’s less watery moons partially molten, and apparently enough to melt water on Europa.

The ridiculously convenient part? Europa’s solid ice covering could provide one of the best shields imagineable from Jupiter’s deadly radiation. Due to its molecular characteristics, water shielding is actually toward the top of the list of ways NASA hopes to protect humans from radiation in space.

Where there’s enough heat to thaw ten Earth oceans’ worth of ice, there’s probably enough heat to support life. On Earth, photosynthesis supports most food chains–not all of them. Earth, in fact, has thriving deep-sea ecosystems which survive off the heat and chemical energy of water heated by Earth’s molten core. Some scientists even believe that life on Earth may have started at these deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

And hydrothermal vents aren’t the only examples of lightless ecosystems we have on Earth. There’s another kind that doesn’t even require intense heat. Cold seeps on Earth survive at near-freezing temperatures off of chemical energy from life forms that died and were buried on the sea floor millions of years ago.

These deep sea communities are very alien, and very cool. (Ha. Ha. That’s half punderful.)

Hydrothermal vent communities on Earth are gorgeous. (Image at right courtesy of NOAA. Science: one thing to love about our government.) Defying expectation for an environment that’s naturally pitch-dark, tube worms, crabs, and other communities are found in brilliant contrasts of red and white. Some of the animals there, like the crabs, look like things we’re used to seeing on the surface and may be the recent descendents of surface creatures. Others are completely alien and unique.

Take the trademark creature of the hydrothermal vent, the tube worm. These look kind of like a cross between a celery stalk and a sea anemone. Long, vegetable-like white body stalks end in brilliant red foliage/plumage that waves in the current but will retract like a snail’s eye if you poke it. The weirdest part: this plumage is red because it’s full of hemoglobin. You know, the oxygen-carrying pigment in human blood. The tube worms are full of something remarkably like human blood.

And in keeping with the bizarre plant-animal hybrid theme, they have blood, but they have no digestive tract. Instead of stomachs, the tube worms have special organs called  trophosomes that are full of symbiotic bacteria. These bacteria turn toxic inorganic molecules like hydrogen sulfide and carbon dioxide from the water that comes out of the vent into organic molecules, which the worm feeds on. This “chemosynthesis” drives entire thriving ecosystems.

Then, there are cold seeps. These are exponentially more bizarre. Cold seeps lack even the familiar trapping of heat that we’re used to associating with life. And they have some positively spooky features–like the supersaturated salt water that creates “lakes,” complete with breaking waves, underwater. These really freaked scientists out the first time they found one (see video at bottom for lulz).

Cold seeps also play host to creatures that appear to be relatives of hydrothermal vent dwellers. There are tubeworms–with some significant anatomical differences to adapt to the cold–and bright organe bacteria that form thick matts along the bottom. There are corals, and even mussels that have symbiotic relationships with methane-eating bacteria much like those of the tubeworms and the hydrogen-sulfide eaters of the hydrothermal vents. But, being completely different species this symbiosis likely evolved at least twice independently. Curious.

One especially interesting feature of cold seep life is the effect the cooler temperatures have on metabolism. They slow it down. While life near hydrothermal vents happens at a fast pace, with organisms swiftly growing, dying, and being replaced–scientists believe that the individual tube worms found at cold seeps may take hundreds of years to grow. That may not be the most exciting thing in the world–tube worms taking hundreds of years to grow. But the thought of whole ecosystems composed of ancient creatures is sort of humbling.

Because we don’t know how life may have originated on Europa–or what forms it may take–we can’t say a huge amount about what life on that planet might look like. But here are some body types that have worked in Earth’s deep seas, in defiance of our photosynthesis-centric worldview.

Update: The recent discovery of unique hydrothermal vent communities on Earth near Antarctica may be relevant to our interests: http://news.yahoo.com/yeti-crabs-ghost-octopus-unique-life-found-1st-220903638.html