Discover Magazine has a great article summarizing the evidence for life on Mars. It’s long because it goes into a lot of detail examines quite a variety of possibilities, but it ties quite nicely in with the questions we are asking about what is life and where it can be found.
The article also mentions a study titled, “The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems” produced by the National Research Council for NASA. It can be found for free online, with an associated podcast that much more accessible to middle schoolers. The report is extremely open to the possibility that extra-terrestrial life exists, and could exist even without water and might even be silicon based.
The Tibetian Plateau. Image from the satellite Landsat 5 via the Eros Image Gallery.
For the geography nerds, but perhaps also for those with an appreciation of the natural beauty of the world. The US Geological Survey has a series of satellite pictures chosen just for their sheer beauty.
The Landsat satellites that take these pictures usually photograph in more than just the human-visible color spectrum. For many geologic and environmental purposes, different infra-red wavelengths are often better for seeing details on the Earth’s surface. The USGS has a nice primer on the Landsat program. Many of the color images posted here were reconstructed from different color bands.
The resulting images can be exceptionally beautiful and somewhat surreal. I like that there is an abstract surface beauty, divorced from the content, meaning and understanding that a closer analysis of the images yields to the eye of the trained observer: delicate swirls of algae might be signs of eutrophication to a biologist; dendritic deltas tell the geologist about sediment load, offshore currents and mass balance.
Phytoplankton bloom around the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea is reminiscent of Van Gogh's Starry Night. Image from Landsat 7.
Amargosa Toad (Bufo nelsoni). Photo from US Fish and Wildlife (M. Burroughs).
NPR had facinating story recently about unlikely groups working together. It’s about a town in Nevada that banded together to save a toad from going extinct. The groups working together include environmentalists and the Saving Toads thru Off-Road Racing, Mining and Ranching in Oasis Valley (aka STORM-OV).
And laughter without philosophy woven into it is but a sneeze at humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom, and if a piece of humor is to last, it must do two things. It must teach and it must preach – not professedly. If it does those two things professedly, all is lost. But if it does them effectively, that piece of humor will last forever – which is 30 years.
– Mark Twain
The term is not loaded with connotations of wisdom and wit, but “adolescent humor” is inescapable in the middle school. The question is, “What to do about it?”
(from Powell's Books)
With the recent furor over Mark Twain’s autobiography, which was embargoed for 100 years, I’m taking my cues from him (see above), especially since I like this philosophical approach to life in general.
I suspect it has much to do with the development of abstract thinking. During adolescence we develop a much greater ability to see and to create subtexts. With humor, the philosophy is behind the scenes, which makes it deep and resonant, but harder to see.
Background context is also important with humor, especially parody and satire: however, just because students can’t reference Plato or Socrates (the philosopher not the footballer), does not mean they don’t have their own cultural markers they can critique. Getting past “adolescent humor” means adding layers.
I am, of course, no expert on humor. This cycle I’m working with the mentor author group and my project is focusing on humorous dialogue. I have no high hopes, but I’m giving it the old college try.
None of this made it any easier last week, when I had to explain editorial cartoons. Our class is trying something new for a newsletter, a newspaper style. I vetoed Garfield-like strips as too simple, and insisted that their cartoons had to make a statement first and aim for humor second. The first student who volunteered for the job gave up after a couple hours of pulling his hair out. I think I’ll try showing them some editorial cartoons if I can find a good website. We’ll see how it goes.
Controversial map purporting to be based on an earlier 1418 map of Chinese exploration of the world. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Most of the exploration we studied this cycle were European expeditions. One group wanted to do something a little different, so I suggested they look in to Chinese explorations of other parts of the world. There was much Chinese commerce across the Indian Ocean, and in a non-Christian twist on the “God” theme for exploration, the Chinese brought Buddhism back from India in the third century AD (we’re studying exploration under the themes of God, Gold and Glory).
Another interesting aspect of research into Chinese exploration is the rather controversial work by Gavin Menzies that suggests that great Chinese fleets explored the Americas and circumnavigated the globe in the 1420’s, a long time before Columbus and Magellan.
There is a lot of evidence that there was no such Chinese expedition, but it’s a fascinating hypothesis and, in a way, very similar to the All About Explorers project: although Menzies’ work is not an intentionally educational hoax. Indeed, it is much more subtle and much more detailed. My favorite line of critique asserts that Menzies’ books, “.. may well prove to be the Piltdown Man of literature.” I don’t know if I’ll have the time to try to unpack that one for my students.
The poignancy and romance of exploration are distilled in Stan Rogers’ ballard “Northwest Passage“.
Ah, for just one time I would take the Northwest Passage,
To find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea;
Tracing one warm line through a land so wild and savage
And make a Northwest Passage to the sea.
–Stan Rogers (1981) from Northwest Passage.
The Bounding Main website has the lyrics, including footnotes about Franklin and the others mentioned in the song, as well as major geographic features like the Davis Strait and the Beaufort Sea.
History and art collide. The music sticks in the brain then seeps down to catch the throat. I think this is a great way to get into (spark the imagination about) Artic exploration.
The next step is, of course, Shackleton and The Endurance.
One of the major motivations space exploration is the search for extra-terrestrial life. The SETI project is the most visible initiative and there are a lot of neat educational resources on their outreach page. And you can participate. seti@home allows you to download a screensaver that actually helps them process data.
Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, which is used (a little) for the SETI project. Image by Jaro Nemcok on Wikipedia.
The NPR program, To the Best of Our Knowledge, has a nice program asking the question, “What is Life?” The last part of the program (at about 45:00 minutes in) is an interview with Paul Davies who is head of the SETI post-detection task group. It starts with question of silicon based life, the theory of which is based on the locations of carbon and silicon in the same column in the periodic table. It also talks about what life might look like once technology really takes off and life starts “evolving by design”.
Finding life as we know it
But SETI searches for signs of intelligent life using radiotelescopes. There are other projects that look for any sign of live. One of the major reasons the Mars rovers and satellites spend a lot of time looking for signs of water on the planet is that life, as we know it, requires water.
Europa: Image from NASA.
It’s also why space agencies are so interest in Europa, the moon of Jupiter that’s covered with ice. Europa also has signs of volcanic activity under the ice, which makes it doubly interesting.
All About Explorers is a wonderful site if you’re interested in talking about the credibility of sources. It looks real, is well organized, well written and could easily pass for credible to the uninitiated. The article on John Cabot starts with:
One might wonder what John Cabot and Christopher Columbus have in common. Both were born in Liverpool, England. Cabot was born in 1405, but his birth certificate was lost at sea and no one knows for sure.
Now, there are more telltale clues that everything is not on the up-and-up, particularly where they mention Cabot’s cartographic exploits on his ”alleged” return to England from growing up in Italy:
In 1484, John Cabot moved back to England with his wife and eleven sons. This was a great career move for John. He developed his own website and became quite famous for his charts and maps depicting a new route to the Far East.
I find sites like these delightful. To think that someone spent the time, energy and intelligence to create this particular little snare, says something wonderful about way the human mind works.
Nicely, the “About This Site” section notes:
All About Explorers was developed by a group of teachers as a means of teaching students about the Internet. … Because we wanted to make a point about finding useless information even in a site which looked at first to be fairly well put together, all of the Explorer biographies here are fictional. While many of the facts are true or based on truth, many inaccuracies, lies, and even downright absurdity are mixed in indiscriminately. As such, it is important that you do not use this site as a source of reference for your own research!
The site also has a set of lessons, handouts and other stuff on its “For Teachers” page.
