The Science of Why 2: Answers to Questions About the Universe, the Unknown, and Ourselves PDF
Preview The Science of Why 2: Answers to Questions About the Universe, the Unknown, and Ourselves
Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook. Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. Contents Part 1: The Great Beyond 1. Are we alone in the universe or are aliens out there? 2. Could we bring back the dinosaurs? 3. Why is the sky blue? 4. Could we ever build a space elevator? 5. What would happen if the moon disappeared? 6. Why is the night sky dark? 7. What’s dangerous about the Bermuda Triangle? 8. What are near-death experiences? HISTORY MYSTERY: How did the rainbow come to have seven colors? Part 2: The Body 1. Why do I get hiccups and how can I make mine stop? 2. Why can’t I tickle myself? 3. What is a hangover and how is one cured? 4. What is the Law of Urination? 5. Why can’t I remember anything that happened before I was two years old? 6. Can we ever walk in a perfectly straight line? 7. Why do we have five digits on each hand and foot? 8. Why do my knuckles make that cracking noise? HISTORY MYSTERY: Is it true that right now we are breathing the same air that Julius Caesar breathed? Part 3: Animals 1. How do electric eels shock their prey? 2. How can a mongoose survive a cobra’s bite? 3. What’s the difference between falling toast and falling cats? 4. How do octopuses camouflage themselves? 5. Can an elephant jump? 6. Can worms digest each other’s memories? 7. Could humans ever hibernate? HISTORY MYSTERY: Was Atlantis a real city? Part 4: Weird Science & Machines 1. How do stones skip? 2. Are we living in a computer simulation? 3. How does one pick the most private urinal in a public bathroom? 4. Could we ever build a perpetual motion machine? 5. How much do people pee in pools? 6. What’s inside a black hole? 7. Will machines ever have feelings? 8. What’s lurking in your bathroom? 9. What is the Turing test? HISTORY MYSTERY: What is the Antikythera mechanism? Acknowledgments About the Author To the 2017 version of the Brady Bunch—even if they don’t read it Part 1 The Great Beyond Are we alone in the universe or are aliens out there? YOU CAN’T EVEN START TO answer this question unless you believe that life— intelligent life at that—could have begun on planets other than Earth. You don’t have to believe that: it’s still quite possible that we are unique in the universe— that no matter how many billions of galaxies exist, containing billions of stars that have untold billions of planets orbiting them, we’re the only ones. But the attitude that we’re the center of everything has been eroding since the 1500s and has reduced us from being the one and only to being one of eight planets orbiting a humdrum star in one of an incalculable number of galaxies. It’s challenging to figure out whether we’re alone in the universe when we don’t yet have evidence of life anywhere else. But there’s a way of approaching it, mostly thanks to astronomer Frank Drake, who, in 1961, invented something called the Drake equation. The Drake Equation is a series of unknown quantities that give a sense of what we have to know before we can be confident that there are other intelligent civilizations out there. It’s written like this: Translated into English, the equation says that N is the number of technologically advanced civilizations out there right now that we might be able to discover. Exciting stuff! N means extraterrestrials. N means aliens! But N is dependent on everything to the right of the equals sign. As each term is taken into account, N shrinks. That means the chances of us finding another species in the universe, then, is based on: R = the total number of stars • f = the fraction of those stars with planets • n = x P e the number of planets that are the right distance from their star to allow the existence of life • f = those planets that actually do support life • f = those where l i intelligent life managed to evolve • f = the ones that acquired advanced c communications technology • and the last number, L = the number of technological civilizations that actually survive long enough for us to detect them. When Drake came up with his equation, many of the numbers in it could only be guessed at. But since then we’ve managed to get a little more exact. Science Fiction! We are most familiar with life-forms evolving on land or in water. But are there other possibilities? Two famous astronomers, Fred Hoyle and Carl Sagan, imagined weird and wild gaseous life-forms. In Hoyle’s late-1950s science fiction novel The Black Cloud, a giant cloud of dust and gas invades our solar system and blocks out the sun, threatening all life on earth. The cloud, more intelligent than us, lived off the energy of radiation from stars—what we call sunlight. Earth was saved when the cloud decided to move on. Carl Sagan, in a paper for NASA, put forth the idea of three kinds of giant balloon-like organisms existing in the atmosphere of Jupiter: floaters, sinkers and predators. Floaters would be kilometers in size and would survive by gathering sunlight or processing the chemicals in the atmosphere. Sinkers, like the ocean’s plankton, would slowly fall through the atmosphere but could absorb other things as they fell (such as floaters), the way raindrops grow as they fall. And hunters, of course, would target other organisms to absorb. Planets orbit stars, so, to start, we need to know how many stars there are in the universe. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, has at least 100 billion stars, and that could be roughly the same number in any galaxy. There are somewhere between 10 billion and 10 trillion galaxies, so if you multiply those numbers (using the larger estimate of galaxies), you get an incomprehensible 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Lots of stars. Did You Know . . . There are different estimates, but there could be as many as 60 billion habitable planets in the Milky Way galaxy.
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