If reading the story makes you feel sciencey, Eric explored the science behind using plants for life support on the Science Not Fiction blog. But if reading the story makes you want to kick back and feel mournful, listen to Amanda Palmer’s amazing song “Astronaut.” I’m obsessed.*

*Yes, this entire post was an excuse to post this song.

SPOILER WARNING: This entire post is a giant spoiler for the Battlestar Galactica Season 5 4.5 finale, so I’ve tucked it behind the fold.

Battlestar Galactica ended with a bit of an anti-technology whimper. Humans and Cylons alike tossed their Vipers and their antibiotics into the sun in exchange for a new start. Alongside pre-speech humans, space warriors scattered over Earth, hunting and gathering and farming their way into our own glorious future.

But what was the Earth of 150,000 years ago really like? What was the climate like in Tanzania (where Adama mopes in his cabin) and Britain (where the Chief mopes in exile)? What giant predators might Lee encounter as he explores? And what is mitrochondrial Eve, anyway?

150,000 years ago, the Earth was in the midst of the the Pleistocene Epoch.  The continents were in about the same positions and many of the same plants and animals were doing their thing. But the climate was wildly different. Glaciers rose and retreated and rose and retreated, changing the world’s ecosystems each time. And 150,000 years ago was the maximum of the second-to-last, or penultimate, Pleistocene glaciation. (The final glaciation is the one we think of as the Ice Age, that ended only 10,000 years ago.)

Because of the penultimate glaciation, the African climate was colder and drier than today. North Africa was probably still desert and central Africa a grassland. But the biggest different is in Europe – southern Europe was a chilly steppe and Britain may well have been frozen under the Munsterian glacier. The Chief’s self-imposed exile may be even colder and more exile-y  than he thought, what with starving on top of a giant pile of ice. Maybe he’s really in exile on the Canary Islands?

Africa 150,000 years ago. From Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The Pleistocene is also known for vast herds of giant mega scary mammals. And it seems like most of these would have been around to eat or be eaten by the Galactica survivors. The steppe mammoth and the European jaguar roamed southern Europe, while the Americas were covered in direwolves and giant sloths and 10-foot tall short-nosed bears. African animals, which were least affected by the late Pleistocene extinctions, would have looked relatively similar to today. Which is to say that they were big and hungry and scary.

The last thing that many of the Fleet survivors saw...

What about Hera as the mitochondial Eve, the mother of us all? That is a real biological concept, nicely explained by Peggy over at Biology in Science Fiction:

Unlike the chromosomal DNA which we inherit equally from both parents, our mitochondria are inherited only from our mothers. That means that geneticists can use the sequence of our mitochondrial DNA to follow maternal inheritance². They followed this back for many many generations, until they arrived at the most recent woman who is the ancestor of all presently living humans. She is “Mitochondrial Eve” and she lived roughly 150,000 – 200,000 years ago….

She’s not our most recent common ancestor or even our only common ancestor. She’s not the only woman who was living at the time. She may not be the our common ancestor for chromosome 1 or 7 or 20.

So, 150,000 years ago, Tanzania was pleasant (unless you got eaten or trampled), the Chief was probably not in Britain (unless he was living on a glacier),  Lee should have explored the supercool sloth-ridden Americas (until he got eaten or trampled), and Ed Yong’s theory of Starbuck’s demise is reasonably likely:

Perhaps when Lee turned his head, Kara was quietly eaten and carried away by a leopard.

And in fact, the Galactica survivors may not have survived very long at all. According to mitochondrial genetic evidence, humans almost went extinct 150,000 years ago. The population could have been as small as 2,000 individuals – so not only might the Galactica survivors have killed most of the primitive humans, but they subsequently died off themselves.

Welcome to 150,000 years ago! Please enjoy your nasty, brutish, and short stay here in Pleistocene Earth. Though I would love to ride magnificently about on a giant ground sloth, I’d really rather have modern medical care and the internet.

Diamonds in the Sky is a collection of astronomy-based science fiction stories edited by Mike Brotherton and funded under his National Science Foundation grant AST 05-07781.  The purpose of the anthology is to provide stories with ample and accurate astronomy spanning a range of topics covered in introductory courses…Contributions include both original stories and reprints from some of the top science fiction writers working today.

Best Broader Impacts idea ever! I’m downloading it right now, and will report back on whether they’re actually good stories.

Now how about some ecologically plausible alien worlds? They can be both an ice planet AND a jungle planet! Or how about psychic dolphins (my personal sci-fi bugaboo) that behave just like real dolphins and ravage a space station Aliens style?

Via Boing Boing

The use of plants to recycle air and provide food for long term space trips is one of science fiction’s favorite tropes. It makes so much sense, right?….In the 1990s, NASA’s Advanced Life Support division  conducted a series of experiments at the Johnson Space Center to see if they could make the system work on a much smaller scale.

You might also enjoy his take on getting a head in cryogenics.

A little research reveals that it’s basic economics: Head-only freezing can cost as little as $80,000, far better than the $150,000 whole-body freezing costs, based on the pricing at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a real life cold-storage non-profit.

Well, I want to talk to science fiction writers! And since so many TOG readers are nerdy nerd nerds (and frequently educators of various kinds) I figured you all might want to weigh in, too. Here are my answers to the “Questions for Science Bloggers.”

What is your relationship to science fiction? Do you read it? Watch it? What/who do you like and why?

I love science fiction, though I think probably most of what I read falls more into the fantasy camp. I suppose I’m kind of sterotypically girly in that I care a lot about character development and less about speculative technology, though I do love me some space fights. Though I read all kinds of tripe in my callow youth, I now no longer enjoy books without decent female characters. (Though I don’t mind if they’re sexbots as long as they have a personality and actual humanoid motivations – I thought Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children was tons of fun.)

My favorite scifi author is Ray Bradbury. I’m going to count China Mieville in there too, since he kind of writes about speculative (albeit dystopian) biotechnology. I listen to several scifi podcasts, mainly Escape Pod. My favorite scifi show is Battlestar Galactica, particularly the first and second seasons, with their optimal combination of space fights, daring rescues, and interesting, flawed characters. (Please, gentle readers, DO NOT spoil the fourth season. I watch it on DVD so I haven’t seen it yet!) I still pine for Firefly. I found Heroes tedious and derivative, and could never bear any of the Stargate series.

What do you see as science fiction’s role in promoting science, if any? Can it do more than make people excited about science? Can it harm the cause of science?

Right now, I don’t see scifi as having much to do with real science. Most of the science in science fiction is so bad that it is either neutral (not associated with real science at all) or harmful to science. I stopped watching Farscape over some nonsense about Aeryn Sun being cold-blooded and how that meant she couldn’t get hot. Hadn’t anyone in LA been to the desert and seen all the lizards scuttling around?

Besides, the science portrayed is so far away from what is possible now. For example, somebody who became a computer programmer to be like Hiro Protagonist in Snow Crash would be sadly disappointed.

Have you used science fiction as a starting point to talk about science? Is it easier to talk about people doing it right or getting it wrong?

I really haven’t. This is probably because I’m a marine ecologist and not too much science fiction is about that type of thing. (Except for the horrible abundance of “dolphins with mystical knowledge” books. I would never use these book as examples because a) people do not need to be encouraged to harass poor cetaceans for Mystical Truths; and b) they are BAD books.)

Are there any specific science or science fiction blogs you would recommend to interested readers or writers?

The science blogs I read are listed in my blog roll. I don’t regularly read any scifi blogs, but if I did, I’d read Io9 and Discovery Magazine’s Science Not Fiction. (Full disclosure: Co-blogger and cohabitator Eric blogs for Science Not Fiction, but that’s only 47% of the reason I’m promoting it.)

Clearly, the only way to fight the zombies is to go back to an earlier, purer time, untainted by the smell of rotting undead flesh and the moans of the encroaching hordes. Bring on the alien invaders from Mars! Orson Welles’ 1938 radio play, The War of the Worlds, is available as a free streaming broadcast!

I heard a bit of it last night, and I promise you that 70 years has not made it one little bit less terrifying. Had I been around for the original broadcast, there is a reasonable chance that I would have packed the car full of bread and fled.

Fortunately, the Grovers Mill Martian Landing Site Monument provides needed closure to any traumatized by the Martian invasion. How comforting. Until the zombies get you.

Links via Metafilter, chart via Boing Boing

The Beagle Project

Scientists, teachers and students sailing aboard the 90-foot ship will collaborate with astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) to investigate the biology of plankton blooms, coral reefs and other ocean surface and terrestrial ecosystems as the new Beagle circles the world recreating Darwin’s 1831-36 voyage aboard HMS Beagle, which he called “the most important event” in his life and which led to his later discovery of a mechanism for evolution.

This means that the Beagle will be able to do really high-quality science. Satellite images and photos taken from space can provide a large-scale perspective that’s hard to get from the ground, such as sea surface temperatures across whole ocean basins. But space images can’t provide details of what’s happening on the ground, such how ocean temperature affect plankton species. The Beagle’s partnership with NASA means that they’ll be able to have it all – large scale mapping AND detailed sampling. Darwin would plotz!

To celebrate, astronaut Mike Barrett, who brought about the partnership from the NASA side, is taking a tiny model Beagle with him into space this March. The Beagle will (more-or-less) actually be in orbit.

You too can help to build a new Beagle by donating or buying a fetching t-shirt. Remember, every time you don’t support the Beagle Project, Cthulhu eats a kitty.

Today, I am delighted to report that (some) of the noble tardigrades have survived! Researchers report that:

Back on Earth, tardigrades that had basked in cosmic radiation revived and reproduced at rates comparable to an unexposed control group. Those dosed with solar radiation were less likely to wake — but that even a few survived, wrote Rettberg’s team in findings published today in Current Biology, was remarkable.

Though the TARDIS blog remains defunct, those who want more delicious tardigrade knowledge can check out the peer-reviewed paper in Current Biology.

From there, your choices aren’t so great for an individualistic slime moldling. Depending on what species you are, you are either completely borg-ified or you die. If you’re a plasmodial slime mold, you lose your identity completely. Your cell walls break down and you become just one cell nucleus floating about in a vasty sea of cytoplasm. Millions of wee little slime moldlings have merged to become a giant single cell. That cell, called a plasmodium, continues to crawl happily about while having lots of sex with itself and producing spores that will become new little free-living slime moldlings.

But if you’re a cellular slime mold, you get to keep your cell walls and some of your individuality. You glue yourself to your fellows and become a type of multicellular organism. There’s a downside – you don’t get to enjoy your newfound bros for long, since in cellular slime molds, sex = death. About a third of your buddies dry up and form a stalk, and the rest make spores that are pumped out of the stalk to become new little free-living slime moldlings. At least, until they hear the signal and the Borg rises again…

Slime molds are way, way, way smarter than a slimy crawling pancake ought to be. The plasmodial slime mold Physarum (when in Borg form) can find the shortest way through a maze. Researchers grew a slime mold in a maze, and then put food at the opposite openings of the maze. The slime mold sent half of its body to eat at each end but stayed connected by winding pseudopods throughout the maze. The pseudopods were wound through the shortest possible route, leading scientists to conclude that slime molds are smarter than Harry Potter.

Watch a fetching yellow plasmodial slime mold crawl and spawn in this time-lapse video, courtesy of the ever-awesome Martini-Corona and her dad. So that the wrath of the world’s super-intelligent slime molds does not descend upon you, know that slime molds are NOT fungi. They are protists, in the same kingdom as amoebas and single-celled algae and such. In case this makes you sad, this video has real fungi for you to admire right after the live nude slime mold.