Micro sci-blog #1

I took this picture in a park, that surrounds a lake called the Rabindra Sarovar, in my hometown of Kolkata in India. Calling this photo, an image of a beautiful sunset, would be such an injustice and so boring. I would, rather, call this a perfect instance of how a combination of Rayleigh scattering and Mie scattering creates a captivating painting in the canvas of the sky. All of us have read/studied about this in our science lessons in school but we never really appreciate the beauty of it – how mere interactions between light and particles give rise to some of the most beautiful natural sights for our eyes to feast on.

P.S. Hi readers! This is my first micro-blog! In this category of posts, I would keep scientific explanations to almost nil and would rather urge you to experience/feel the elegance of science. If you’d wish to know more about the topic mentioned in the micro-blog, you could always do a simple Google search on it.

The Big Five (?)

Life is full of surprises. At one moment, you are there laughing, drinking and making merry and then, the very next moment, you could die due to circumstances not totally in your control. At one moment, a particular species could be the most dominant life form on earth, thriving and the very next “moment” (in the geological time scale a “moment” could be of the order of thousands of years), that entire species could be wiped off the face of Earth. And when almost 50 to more than 90 percent of all species, living at a particular time on Earth, disappear completely within a relatively short period of time, such a phase is termed as “Mass Extinction”. A mass extinction is basically an apocalypse playing out in the real world – a catastrophic event of unimaginable scale that brings life to the edge of oblivion. During the last 500 million years (m.y.) or so, Earth and life on Earth have witnessed and withstood 5 such apocalyptic events that deserve the tag of “mass extinction.” Even though these phases brought doom to the living beings alive at the time, they also made way for newer, more adaptive life forms to succeed, setting the ball of evolution rolling. In fact, we owe our existence to one such extinction period commonly referred to as the K-Pg extinction event, that occurred almost 66 million years ago (more on this later on in the blog). Scientists have been able to narrow down to a number of culprits, different combinations of which are responsible for annihilating life at different phases of Earth’s history. These are flood basalt eruptions, impact events, glaciation, sea level fluctuations, methane release, global anoxia, global climate change (extreme warming and cooling), plate tectonics, gamma rays and disease which acted as reset buttons in the history of life on earth. These factors will come into play in varied proportions as we trace Earth’s history starting from approximately 540 m.y. ago. So buckle up for a ride!

PSLV – the Workhorse of ISRO

The news of ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) launching its 100^th satellite on January 12^th, 2018 had been all over media channels and newspapers. This successful mission has been called “a New Year gift to the country” by A.S. Kiran Kumar, ISRO’s then presiding chairman. Known as the PSLV-C40/Cartosat-2 Series Satellite Mission, it has successfully put 31 satellites into their required orbits in one single launch. These 31 satellites include the main Cartosat-2 Series satellite for earth observation, one Microsatellite and one Nanosatellite from India as well as 3 Microsatellites and 25 Nanosatellites from 6 countries, namely, Canada, Finland, France, Republic of Korea, UK and USA. This mission had a lot at stake not only because it was the first mission of this year but also because the last mission by ISRO, PSLV-C39, had failed due to a faulty heat shield. The unsuccessful launch of IRNSS-1H by ISRO last year, was however the only failure after a string of 38 successful launches over a duration of 20 years. As of now, PSLV’s report card shows 42 attempted launches out of which 39 had successfuly reached their target orbits with only two failures and one partial failure. That amounts to a 93% success rate or 95% if the partial failure is also considered a success. This is an impressive record to boast of since PSLV or the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle had been designed completely in India and has single-handedly made ISRO a force to reckon with, in the field of space technology and exploration. For good reasons, it is aptly called the ‘Workhorse of ISRO’.

The Holy Grail to Humanity’s Energy Crisis

For a little over two and a half centuries, we have been heavily dependent on fossil fuels as the primary source of energy production. The benefits of using fossil fuels, spurred by the Industrial Revolution from mid-1700’s, have shaped rapidly what today’s modern human civilization looks like. However, it is only very recently that we have realized that the honeymoon period of fossil fuel utilization needs to come to an end and the sooner that happens, the better for our planet. Fossil fuels, which include coal, oil and natural gas, have played an undeniable role in human progress and development but have also dealt a serious blow to the ecosystem we live in. Man-made global warming, a direct consequence of burning excessive fossil fuels, is now hands-down the single most disruptive threat that mankind is facing. There are definitely several alternative energy resources which are clean, like solar, wind, tidal energy but the total energy output from all these resources cannot even come close to the ever-growing energy demands at present and even more so, in future. Nuclear fission, a process which involves splitting a heavy nucleus into two lighter nuclei, is one of the major alternatives that could potentially replace fossil fuels. Although it does have the tag of a “clean” energy, mainly because production of greenhouse gases are minimal, it is not exactly clean. That is evident from the dead zone surrounding the concrete carcass of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, to the recent quake-ruptured Fukushima power plant in Japan. These unfortunate incidents could be brushed aside as accidents but even a well maintained nuclear power plant produces on an average 20 metric tons of used nuclear fuel annually. This nuclear waste would take thousands of years to decay to safe radioactive levels and is lethal to any nearby life-forms including humans within that period. If all of fossil fuels is to be replaced by nucelar fission power plants, then safe disposal of such huge amounts of deadly radioactive waste would be a nightmare. A better solution to this energy crisis lies up above our heads in the sky, the Sun, that could show us the light, literally and figuratively.

Honey, I shrunk all that data!

In just one generation, storage devices have come and gone and been made obsolete, only to be replaced by newer and better devices offering greater storage capacity, density and higher reading speeds. The first hard disk drive, IBM Model 350 Disk File, which accompanied IBM’s RAMAC 305 computer system in 1956, offered a meagre 5 MB as storage while being of the size of a refrigerator. Fast forward to 2017 and an external hard disk drive, of the size of your palm, with a minimum capacity of 1 TB is a necessity for any personal computer owner. So there has been almost a million fold increase in terms of storage compared to the RAMAC disk drive and a drastic reduction in size, owing to rapid advances in solid state technology. However, humanity is still losing out on a lot of information especially in the digital format for several reasons. Data is growing at an unprecedented rate aided by combined factors of social media explosion, accessibility to smart devices and with the recent advent of IoT (Internet of Things), there will be just not enough data centres to store all of humanity’s data. In fact, more data has been created in the past two years than in the entire previous history of the human race. Estimates predict that by 2020, the total amount of data in our digital universe will grow from 4.4 zettabytes at present to 44 zettabytes or 44 trillion gigabytes! In order to visualise this figure, 44 trillion gigabytes, imagine a tower of 128-gigabyte iPad Airs stretching from Earth to the moon and then imagine 6 such towers – that’s roughly equivalent to the amount of data humans will accumulate in next 3 years. We could definitely fill up our vast oceans with submerged data centres. Notwithstanding that such a step would undoubtedly wreak havoc in the rich underwater ecosystem, it will still not solve the problem it wanted to solve and will only delay the inevitable. Despite phenomenal advances in technology, present day data storage solution simply cannot keep up with ever increasing rate of data growth. The answer to this crisis, it seems, lies within all of us and every living creature on this planet – in a tiny but indispensable molecule that has a 3.7-billion-year history of storing information – information without which life would not exist.

How will the Earth die?

It is extremely difficult to predict how an individual will die but it is fairly well agreed upon how our Earth will eventually meet its demise. If everything else goes well, our home planet shall die a natural death and  be cremated. Yes, you read that right! Earth will literally undergo a galactic cremation and the furnace will be none other than our very own Sun which today is responsible for Life and almost everything on Earth. Seems ironic, isn’t it? But that’s the truth. Put simply, Earth will be engulfed whole by the Sun. So, how does the very Sun that is the source of all energy, directly or indirectly, on Earth, and vital for any kind of lifeforms to survive, become its nemesis? How does the Sun become the  Grim Reaper for Earth?