Lucidity Issue 8 - Science and Space

NLCS Jeju's Official STEM Magazine | Issue 8 2022

L CIDITY SCIENCE AND SPACE A landmark NASA study aims to analyse effect of longterm space travel on human body using the Kelly twins PAGES 32-35

Real Estate

COLONIZING THE GALAXY

Medicine

Off-Earth Hollywood

What should we do with the time we have left?

DEATH BY SPATIUM

41 years after his death, a treatise on Jean-Paul Sartre

NOLAN IN OUTER SPACE

PAGES 12-17

PAGES 36-37

PAGES 47-48

The scientific principles behind Interstellar

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March 2022 Issue 8

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M E N U

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Psychology in Space Aiden Bae

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Getting Closer to Mars Eunice Yoonseo Park

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Let’s Make a Nuke Jayden Junseok Lee

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What We Should Do With the Time We’ve Got Benjamin Soowhan Jun

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A Closer Space in Screen: Space Sweepers Shayla Seokyung Hwang

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Elon Musk: His Life and His Achievements Daniel Shin

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One Small Step, One Giant Swindle?

Emma Chaeeun Chung

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Longitudinal Growth and Change in Bones Clive Wonyeol Choi

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Life Might Be Fun Jayden Junseok Lee

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Why Do I Exist? Jayden Junseok Lee

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Can Earth Be Replaceable? Jay Yaejoon Jung

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The Gemini Star-Sailors Chandler Geumbee Ahn

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Death by Spatium Chandler Geumbee Ahn

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Supernovae Ella Soyoung Hong

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The Undesirable Rendezvous Emma Chaeeun Chung

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Different Colours of Sunsets Hyunseo Kim

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The Link Between the Ocean and Outer Space Liz Jaeeun Chung

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Elon Musk: Advancing Humanity John Seongkyu Park

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Interstellar Remy Woobin Lee

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Thank NASA for These Three Everyday Inventions Sophie Lee

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How to Become a NASA Pilot: the Requirements and the Chances Bella Jian Park

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Space Photography Ashley Ahrim Yoon

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Lavish and Ludicrous: Why Private Space Trips Matter to You Catherine Yeonsoo Kim

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EDITOR-IN-CHIEFS’ S

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Chandler Geumbee Ahn ‘25 North London Collegiate School Jeju On October 26th, 1945, two months after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, author Eric Blair — better known to us by his pen name, George Orwell — published an essay titled What is Science? in the Tribune. He had taken up his pen in response to a letter from one Mr J. Stewart Cook, who had suggested that the sciences ought to be given heavier priority in general education.

Orwell first discussed the meaning of the word ‘science’. To him, science was either (a) the physical disciplines such as physics, biology, chemistry and so on, or (b) a mode of thinking which “obtains verifiable results by reasoning logically from observed fact.” He suggested that although (b) was the full description of science that most people would agree with, (a) was what Mr Cook had been referring to when he called for a focus on scientific education. Orwell however pointed to a concentration on facts and facts only as a surefire way of turning out smart but narrow-minded people. Simply acquiring familiarity with the scientific method — that is, knowing what order in which to use the bunsen burner and the evaporating dish in the formation of copper sulfate crystals and such — did not by default yield a mind that was rational, critical, or capable of independent thought. Orwell believed that scientific education, wherever it was given, ought to focus not only on the mechanics of the disciplines but on the method of thought that characterized those disciplines. “Clearly,” he wrote, “scientific education ought to mean the implanting of a rational, sceptical, experimental habit of mind. It ought to mean acquiring a method — a method that can be used on any problem that one meets — and not simply piling up a lot of facts.”

What Orwell wrote 77 years ago still stands true for us at Lucidity today. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics help the people who study it become scientific thinkers. Lucidity is a STEM magazine, dedicated to bringing to students an accessible and interesting inlet into science, and we hope that reading an issue of Lucidity is an experience both of acquiring scientific knowledge and of gaining an insight into the great scientific minds that brought about those discoveries.

Thank you to all of the people that worked to bring Lucidity’s eighth issue, Science and Space, into print. We hope you enjoy reading our articles as much as we did writing them!

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Remy Woobin Lee ‘25 North London Collegiate School Jeju I am honoured to be having the pleasure of delivering you the 8th Issue of Lucidity magazine, ‘Science and Space’. The previous year of 2021 had been a particularly eventful period for the magazine, as how it had been for many– following up on the transition of the leadership team were an array of changes taking place, including the wonderful addition of Mrs Coughlan to the team and the structural reformation of the crew. Nonetheless, much of what we loved about Lucidity remains unchanged– as the Official STEM Magazine of NLCS Jeju, our commitment to providing a hub of scientific discussions for NLCS Jeju has stood firmly as ever, if not enhanced by the even bolder cross-branching approaches to the interdisciplinary subjects.

Succeeding on from Sean and Minseo’s work, this year we have had the privilege of working with a group of very talented individuals, and I believe their collective efforts have certainly paid off into a success. It was personally inspiring too, to see the numerous day and night from a team of 30 culminating in a 52-page volume magazine, like a beautiful symphony.

Concluding, I would like to express my utmost gratitude to Mrs Prichard and Mrs Coughlan for their amazing guidance, to Mrs Forster and the marketing team for their brilliant feedback, to Minseo and Sean, the previous generation of editors for their legacies, and last but not least, to the Lucidity team, who has managed to put up this colossal achievement.

A happy and prosperous new year to Lucidity Magazine!

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1 The Nauga is a fictional creature whose hide is used to produce Naugahyde, a synthetic substitute for animal leather. Unlike animals, who typically have to suffer for leather products to be made, the Nauga can shed its skin quite painlessly. “Invite a Nauga to your next party,” reads a 1967 advertisement. “Punch him in the nose the minute he comes through the door. Spill a Bloody Mary on him. Get him with a pie in the face. Smear chocolate on his chest. Kick him around. His vinyl hide is Naugahyde vinyl fabric. It’s indestructible.”

2 Tranquility in Space is a sketch of an astronaut floating around space, created by Tim Han in the class of 2025.

The depiction of an astronaut is somewhat poignant and optimistic at the same time as if it is in the pursuit of something, perhaps in self-realisation. Tim was inspired by the silencing dignity and beauty of the night sky and imagined himself floating in space, gliding amid the tranquil power of the dark, starry void.

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PSYCHOLOGY IN SPACE

Writer: Aiden Bae '27 Editor: Chandler Geumbee Ahn '25

Neurologically speaking

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PACE HAS A bunch of definitions. There’s the cosmological definition, obviously, the physical definition, the mathematical definition - and there is also a psychological space. In this article, I will introduce the concept of psychological space.

Psychological space might be different from the obvious space people obviously know. Psychologists first began studying spaces in the 19th century, and are now concerned with the recognition of an object's appearance or the way its interactions are perceived.

For instance, there is visual space, which is an experience of space by an aware observer. Psychologists also studied perceptions of surroundings. Due to psychologists’ attraction to space, lots of studies came out. For example, a new branch of psychology, proxemics (a.k.a. personal space) came out with psychologists’ attention to personal space. Some people also have phobias related to spaces. There are agoraphobia, astrophobia, claustrophobia, and more.

Fig. 1. Person on a bus in Nepal (Boynton, 2018).

As you know, lots of people prefer to have a seat beside the window when they are in a cafe, library, airplane, and so on. It’s because sunlight relaxes our mind, and also affects our hormones and biorhythms positively. On the other hand, people sometimes have scrupulous approaches to stay away from strangers. A bus can be a good example. People hesitate to sit next to strangers, but they also want to sit beside the window.

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Fig. 2. Man drinking tea (Sheldon, 2014).

If we watch children playing, they usually play in the corner of the room, or beside the wall. Also in restaurants, people start to sit beside the wall. The reason for this is mankinds’ primitive instinct for self-protection. Since we have our eyes on our front, we could only observe our front side, so we always had to be alert about the back side of our body.

However, if we are in a corner, we are able to relax at least half of our sight. This reduces our mental fatigue. Furthermore, people instinctively want to rely on something, and walls make us more comfortable.

Ceilings and Cognitivity According to researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, they were able to think of more creative ideas in the Salk research center, than the research center of Harvard or MIT. For example, the one who developed the vaccine for polio virus, was the founder of Salk. They mentioned that higher ceilings gave them abilities to think creatively. So an experiment about it proceeded, and it showed that a person under a 3m ceiling was able to solve creative questions two times better than a person under a 2.4m ceiling. Besides, a person under a 2.4m ceiling was able to solve questions which required concentration. It showed that higher ceiling activates creativity and lower ceiling activates concentration.

Space and territory are inseparable to people’s lives.

It means we should know how to manage and set our spaces to be able to manage our mood, work efficiency, and so on.

Fig. 1. Terry Boyton from Unsplash Fig. 2. Jeff Sheldon from Unsplash

Fig. 1. NASA's MAVEN orbiter (Kremer, 2013).

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LIMATE CHANGE has become a growing concern for many scientists and individuals. As more and more people came to realize that humans and other living things may not be able to continue to live on Earth, they began exploring outside our planet. Perhaps a secondary planet. The most similar planet to Earth in the solar system was Mars. Evidence even suggests that Mars was once full of water, was warmer, and had a thicker atmosphere, which means that it offered a habitable environment for living things. Because of this evidence, many scientists have become even more interested in investigating Mars - though there have also been attempts to find out about Mars purely because it is a neighboring planet. How have we been trying to reach Mars?

Numerous missions to Mars have been launched by humani-

ty from the 1960s. After the first successful flyby of Mars in 1965, four space organizations - NASA, the former Soviet Union space program, European Space Agency and Indian Space Research Org-anization - were able to make it to Mars. From 1960 to 1964, the USSR and the U.S. tried multiple times but failed to get even close to Mars. The first successful spacecraft that finally reached Mars was NASA's Mariner 4. The

spacecraft was launched on November 28, 1964 and it flew by Mars on July 14, 1965 for the first time in history. It sent 21 photos of Mars to Earth. In addition to this, several more attempts were made and NASA launched Mariners 6 and 7 in 1969. Both of these were able to reach the Red Planet once again, sending back a few dozen photographs of Mars.

However, there were mistaken first impressions made by astron-

Fig. 2. Animation of Mariner 4 Spacecraft with Engine Burn (NASA/JPL-Caltech, 2013).

GETTING CLOSER TO MARS Humanity's love affair with the god of war The Red Planet Writer: Eunice Yoonseo Park '26 Editor: Chandler Geumbee Ahn '25

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omers that Mars looked like the moon because coincidentally, it happened to be the cratered part of Mars that all three of the spacecraft flew over.

Direct Contact After the first few successful flybys of Mars, the next target was to reach Mars’s land itself and to orbit Mars. Many failed to reach the land or orbit around Mars, and managed to be on the surface for only a few seconds. The fully successful orbiter and lander was once again launched by NASA in 1975. Two pairs of orbiters and landers, Viking 1 and Viking 2, both managed to reach Mars in 1976 with one orbiting above Mars and the other landing on the surface. The Viking program represents the first extended investigation of Mars since both spacecraft lasted for years sending information back to Earth. Unfortunately, hopes of finding life on Mars - which was one of humanity's main goals for investigating mars - were dashed when it could not be proved that microbes existed in Mars (This still remains disputable). On the other hand, the composition of Mars was revealed to be nearly identical to the meteorites found on Earth, which suggests that it came from Mars.

Close of the 20th Century Fast forward to the 1990s, as it was now possible to reach Mars, NASA’s next goal was to create a spacecraft that would be faster, better, and cheaper. This initiative was called the FBC program. In July 1997, the first mission of the FBC program turned out to be a great success. The NASA Pathfinder lander and Sojourner rover was the first to arrive at Mars and wheel around Mars. The two crafts lasted longer than expected until contact was lost with Pathfinder.

In the 2000s The first spacecraft sent out to Mars in the 21st century was Mars Odyssey by NASA on March 7, 2001. This spacecraft broke the record for the longest serving spacecraft on Mars and returned 35,000 images. NASA’s two rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, were 8 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

Carl Sagan Speaks

Mr. and Mrs. Microbe They sadly aren't likely to be bipeds.

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UCKED AWAY in a lining of humanity's cerebral wallet is a lovingly dappled mugshot of the prototypical Martian: a green-skinned biped, with eyes swallowed completely by the irises, and skinny fingers that spider like those of a malnourished Franz Liszt. One of many critics of this Hollywood-inspired montage was the astronomer Carl Sagan, joint founder of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute and arguably America's most prolific extraterrestrial life advocate.

In 1967, Sagan worked with National Geographic magazine on an article defending the possibility of life on Mars. He commissioned the magazine’s design team to outfit his article with a rendering of his very own idea of a Martian. In letters he wrote to the Geographic staff, Sagan devoted several paragraphs to describing the Mars dweller of his imaginations; “Let’s have him find his way in the daytime by his little red tendrils and at night he will dig a hole,”1 he wrote at one point, by way of explaining the absence of eyes in his maquette. The finished drawing

resembled a fiery red crab with tentacles, carrying dozens of eggs on its back.

Time, however, and with it the calibration of scientific evidence, facilitated a dramatic shift in Sagan’s perception of Martian life forms. In a 1972 interview he gave to Popular Science, Sagan asserted that “there is certainly no compelling evidence for [life on Mars], but there is equally certainly no compelling evidence against it.”2 He noted that a wide variety of terrestrial organisms had been found to be capable of surviving Mars's harsh conditions in laboratory settings. “I’m talking about microorganisms: bacteria — spore forming, or non-spore forming bacteria,”3 Sagan observed. His expectations for the complexity of a possible “Martian” had been drastically reduced; yet he still remained optimistic of the existence of such a species, even if we might make our first contact with them through the glass walls of a test tube as opposed to the explosive affairs that Hollywood has trained us to anticipate.

- Chandler Geumbee Ahn ‘25

1 Natasha Daly, “This Is What a Martian Looks like-According to Carl Sagan,” Magazine (National Geographic, May 3, 2021), https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/explore-space-carl-sagan-mars-martianarchive.

2 Alissa Zhu, Carl Sagan, and Arthur Fisher, “Carl Sagan on What Life on Mars Would Be Like,” Popular Science, April 26, 2021, https://www.popsci. com/article/technology/carl-sagan-what-life-mars-would-be/.

3 Ibid.

sent to the surface of Mars and they found abundant amounts of evidence that water once flowed on Mars. Then, another NASA orbiter was launched and it began orbiting the planet on March 12, 2006. It continues to send high-resolution data of Mars’s features and weather. In 2007, a stationary lander ‘Mars Phoenix’ was sent to Mars by NASA and it discovered water ice beneath the surface. There were some failures

made by the Russian space agency and China after this. NASA’s powerful rover ‘Curiosity’ arrived at Mars’ Gale Crater in 2012 in search of signs of past habitable environments. Successful findings of ‘Curiosity’ include previously water-soaked areas, surface-level methane, and various new organic compounds, and its expedition is still continuing. ‘Perseverance’, which is another rover made by NASA, is currently on a mission

Further Reading

Fig. 3. Artist's rendition of the MAVEN orbiter (Gardner, 2015).

to find samples with signs of life and more. It landed on Mars on February 18th of 2021. ‘Perseverance’ also has a test helicopter called ‘Ingenuity’ in order to test the possibility of flying on Mars.

Also, NASA’s MAVEN - (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) achieved orbit in 2014 and still continues to observe changes in Mars’s atmosphere to understand why it thinned out over time.

Works Cited 1 Esa.int. (2019). Why go to Mars? [online] Available at: https://www. esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/Exploration/Why_go_to_Mars.

2 https://www.facebook.com/ spacecom (2019). A Brief History of Mars Missions. [online] Space.com.

Available at: https://www.space. com/13558-historic-mars-missions. html.

3 Sheetz, M. (2021). Elon Musk wants SpaceX to reach Mars so humanity is not a “single-planet species.” [online] CNBC. Available at: https://www. cnbc.com/2021/04/23/elon-muskaiming-for-mars-so-humanity-is-nota-single-planet-species.html.

4 Kremer, Ken. “Maven and Mom Missions from NASA and India Plan Martian Science Collaboration in Orbit.” Universe Today, December 23, 2015. https://www.universetoday. com/105772/maven-and-mom-missions-from-nasa-and-india-plan-martian-science-collaboration-in-orbit/.

5 Garner, Rob. “Maven Artist Concept.” NASA. NASA, April 7, 2015. https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/maven-artist-concept-011.

The Case for Mars: Richard Wagner and Robert Zubrin (Touchstone, 1996 and 2011). + Originally published in 1996 and revised in 2011, Case discusses the “Mars Direct” plan to make the first human settlement on Mars. Detailing the plan that now serves as the touchstone of the Mars Society, a society devoted to colonizing Mars, Case focuses on in situ material usage to construct the equipment required for a return journey from Mars back to Earth. It also reviews possible Mars colony designs and discusses the possibilities of the colony’s material self-sufficiency as well as a potential terraforming of Mars.

The Christopher Columbus of Mars

The Mars Society Will humans ever be able to reach Mars?

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N AUGUST OF 1998, Mr Brian Barnwell, a 52-year-old real estate appraiser from Santa Barbara, California, took his sons, 14-year-old Brendan and 10-year-old Sean Barnwell, to Boulder, Colorado (Blakeslee, 1998). Mr Barnwell, who had a “nose for historical events”, had previously attended events such as the 1955 opening of Disneyland and the 1969 launch of Apollo 11, which sent humans to the moon (Blakeslee, 1998).

That day, Mr Barnwell and his sons were witnessing yet another historical moment: the inaugural meeting of the Mars Society, a group of people who believed that lack of public enthusiasm, and not scientific limitations, was what stood in the way of humans reaching Mars.

Around 750 people from 40 different countries attended the four-day event. They listened to nearly 200 talks on Mars, got a free badge reading “Mars or Bust”, and received the chance to sign the Society’s 800-word founding declaration. Most attendees, diverse as they were, had one thing in common. They had read the Case for Mars, a book written by aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin, founder

of the Mars Society (Blakeslee, 1998).

The Case for Mars was borne of Mr Zubrin’s frustration with the American aerospace programme, which he said had designed a $450 billion “Death Star” that would get humans nowhere near Mars (Blakeslee, 1998). Mr Zubrin instead put forward the Mars Direct, a plan he stated would enable humans to travel to and from Mars with existing technology. The plan focuses on in situ usage of supplies, where astronauts make rocket fuel out of Martian resources. Like successful Earth explorers, they would pack light and “live off the land” (Blakeslee, 1998).

24 years later, humans have still not managed to colonise Mars. The 24th meeting of the Mars Society was held fully online in October of last year.

Would you consider attending?

- Chandler Geumbee Ahn ‘25

Blakeslee, S., 1998. Society Organizes to Make a Case for Humans on Mars (Published 1998). [online] Nytimes.com. Available at: <https:// www.nytimes.com/1998/08/18/ science/society-organizes-to-makea-case-for-humans-on-mars.html> [Accessed 19 February 2022].

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LET'S MAKE A NUKE An A to Z Guide Do-it-yourself Writer: Jayden Junseok Lee '27 Editor: Chandler Geumbee Ahn '25

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O, YOU’RE HERE to learn how to make a nuke, aren’t you? It’s simple. Here are the ingredients. You want a bit of Uranium, although Plutonium is also a viable option for this task. You also want some explosives, large plates of metal, a set of countless centrifuges, a few billion in dollars, the best lawyer you can find, a very very bad judge, and a country with some shaky/corrupt legal systems - i.e Somalia. If you have Uranium, then chances are you have Uranium-238, which accounts for 99 per cent of Uranium on Earth. If you have this, that's where the centrifuges come in.

Fig. 1. Centrifuge tanks (TOI STAFF, 2019).

Fig. 2. Billet of Uranium (U.S. Department of Energy).

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The -iums You pop the Uranium in, and after a while, you’ll have a handful of small nuclear holocaust pancakes.

If you don’t have Uranium, Plutonium is also perfectly viable for bombs, although in that case, you might not even need the centrifuges. Oh before, I go on, I just want to tell you that by reading this, all of you are now most likely on some sort of list. After that, you shape the Uranium into sort of a cylinder, and you fit it into the barrel of the bomb. Then, you can make a “target” with the remaining Uranium, making a hollow ring that fits over the cylinder nicely.

Then you put some explosives behind the cylinder, which will cause the initial reaction to happen, and also forces the cylinder to hit the ring-shaped thing, which causes the burst of nuclear energy and also the huge explosion, which makes people sort of stop existing altogether. To be honest, we’re just making a nuclear gun at this point. For the convenience of the readers, we’re going to make a fission bomb, which is basically what happens when you bonk a nucleus which releases more things that go on to bonk other things, which releases a lot of energy in the process.

One can give the initial bonk usually by an explosion. If you want to go even further, you can make a fusion bomb, which hits twice as hard. It starts off with fission through the uranium releasing neutrons

and then doubles back by fusing the atoms back in on itself, simply creating a small star on Earth for a moment. Now, pack this makeshift nuclear firearm into a shell that can penetrate many things, including but not limited to metal, dirt, and humans, and congratulations you now have what has ended countless lives and might end countless more. Wonderful.

History, Momentarily In 1945, the bulletin of atomic scientists thought of a doomsday clock, where midnight means a full-scale global catastrophe. Today, the clock stands at 100 seconds to midnight. What’s unsettling is that the clock has been slowly creeping down for the last 10 years, and if we don’t do much about it, it will continue to do that until we’re all dead. Let’s not forget all the close calls we’ve had, such as in 1983, where a single man, Stanislav Petrov, prevented the world from going thermonuclear by just deciding to be a rational human being. And also that one time in 1962 where the Soviet Union almost launched a nuclear torpedo at a United States aircraft carrier. This too was prevented by another man who decided to not be an idiot. Or maybe even in 1961 where 4 megaton nukes were dropped when its cargo plane broke up in midair. A single safety switch stood between 4 nukes, each 250 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb from going off. Or maybe when North Korea shot down a US surveillance plane and Richard Nixon, who was reportedly drunk at the time, ordered some F-4 Phantom Fighter jets to load some nuclear bombs and prepare for a nuclear strike against North Korea. Luckily, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger intervened and we’re all still here. And perhaps, the entire Cold War. Yes, all of those were decades ago, but there’s just one simple concept that is preventing our world from becoming a nuclear wasteland. MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction. It’s very simple. It has to do with the simple fact that in the time it takes for you to launch your missiles or bombs, the enemy will have had enough time to launch their own back at you, the equivalent of giving you the final middle finger before perishing in your nuclear explosion. 9 countries currently have access to nuclear weapons: Russia, The USA, France, China, The UK, Pakistan, India, Israel, and our dictator worshipping counterparts. That’s 9 whole countries that can start World War 3. In total, there are around 15000 nuclear weapons in the world right now, and it only takes a single one of them for the world to become an inhospitable nuclear wasteland. As Einstein is claimed to have said, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones” Vigilance is the key to survival, and currently, nukes are so common in entertainment and media many people seem to lack that vigilance.

Clarion Call Our current lives are fragile, yet people don’t seem to realize that nuclear armageddon could be just around the corner, waiting for an idiot general, president, or dictator to get the house of cards that we

Fig. 3. A plant - just to give you an idea (Federi, 2021).

call society to come crashing down around us. It's 100 seconds to midnight, the threat of nuclear violence has and is still lingering around us, and if we don’t pay attention to what is happening around us every moment, we, and possibly the only instance of life in the universe, might be wiped out. The miracle that we call life, the simple fact that we are most likely the only self-aware things on the planet at all, is on the precarious ledge that hangs off the empty oblivion that is nuclear holocaust. Nobody realizes how precious and neat simply being alive is until it is about to be taken away. We might be a one-off in the universe, and we need to see the fact that every person we interact with, every tree being cut down, every bug, animal, or plant, is a small miracle in itself that only we can experience, and only we can cherish. We might have fun moments, we might have dull ones. We might have bad moments, and also good ones, but whatever experience you are having, it is necessary that we are grateful for the fact that we can have and be aware of these precious moments, because one day and that you are perhaps one of the only things in this universe that is capable of having “Days” at all because one day you will look back upon these memories and think “Thank god I was still alive then to experience that” before your consciousness slips off into the void that is known as death, and who knows what lies after that? Probably nothing, and that’s what we should all be scared of instead of death. The fear that on the last day on our deathbeds, that the larger meaning of things will finally enter our heads, and we will for the first and last time, get an idea of what we should have and could have done with our lives.

Well, good luck not dying, everyone. You’ll need it.

Works Cited 1 TOI STAFF. “Iran Boasts It Will Soon Unveil New Nuclear Centrifuges, Power Plant.” The Times of Israel, December 7, 2019. https://www.timesofisrael.com/iran-boastsit-will-soon-unveil-new-nuclear-centrifuges-power-plant/.

2 U.S. Department of Energy.

3 Patrick Federi from Unsplash.

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"WHAT WE SHOULD DO WITH THE TIME WE'VE GOT" WRITTEN BY BENJAMIN SOOWHAN JUN CLASS OF '27 Mankind's bucket list before something inevitably kills us Extraterrestrial opinion Editor: Chandler Geumbee Ahn '25

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MAGINE AN alien graded 5 on Kardashev’s scale, which basically means that it is developed beyond our imagination.

It has done all its homework, or whatever those super big-brain guys do, and decides to kill some time watching a little civilization that is still in its earliest stages. It consists of a bunch of tiny bugs that go around building slightly less tiny iron structures.

They even tried to throw a couple of their friends into orbit around their planet (which is SO cute). It would have been nice if that was all they ever did, but frankly, that is not the case. Within a century they covered their planet’s suborbital area with little pieces of steel, coming close to trapping themselves within.

Fig. 1. A Level 5 alien on Kardashev's scale.

Although they do make youtube videos about how serious their impact on their planet is, they aren’t doing anything. Adding onto that, they have single-handedly (actually most of their population has 2 hands) driven 680 of its fellow species into extinction and changed their atmosphere to such an extent that the global warming rate neared 0.2°C per decade- which is faster than it may sound.

They call their planet Earth.

We humans as a species have achieved a lot of things. We’ve created quantum computers, found a way to change a living being’s genes, produced (clumsy) artificial brains within a lab, developed psychology, and even gelato (okay if you feel like I shouldn’t be saying this kind of stuff in a science article, you gotta try it - NOW), and more.

But we haven’t really been thinking about how long we would be able to continue ignoring the consequences.

This article is talking about what we as a civilisation should do with our time. And to do that, we need to know how exactly we can colonise the universe. The most common method is called terraforming.

I. Terraforming Humans, like all life forms on Earth, have evolved to suit our environment. We are designed, essential-

Fig. 2. The fate of those who defy gelato.

ly, to acquire, consume, and convert fuel into energy - on Earth. When we started to peek out into outer space, we discovered infinite possibilities, questions and answers. But we cannot live in that world- at least not like we can on our home planet. When we are put in an environment that is sufficiently different from that of Earth, we die of various causespressure, heat, radiation, gravity, dehydration, toxic materials, lack of oxygen- the list goes on virtually infinitely- mostly because there are virtually infinite ways in which something can go wrong in our bodies. But as we start to move up towards a level 1 civilisation and beyond, we find the need to move into a new planet.

The problem is that most planets are very different from Earth- different enough to kill us. There are two solutions to this: a) alter ourselves so that we can survive in that environment, or b) alter the planet so it can keep us alive. Up until now, we’ve been taking the first option, by wearing space suits or staying in rockets. This is because we weren’t trying to live on those planets or moons- just to find out about them and an excuse to say the word ‘celestial body’ (that was only a mildly self-important word- if I were to write the proper ones down they would be around 10cm long on the page).

Now things are a little different. First of all, our population is growing, and second of all, we want to find out more about our universe. It would only be reasonable for our species to start moving onto different planets, just like how people used to go out into the sea to find new places and we make more houses and shelters nowadays as the population grows. At this point, we think our second planet might be Mars.

Mars is, at first glance, a promising candidate. It’s pretty close to Earth, has some water on it, and its day and night cycle is pretty similar to ours. That’s just the first glance. A mere 0.1% of Martian air is oxygen- less than 0.005 percent of Earth’s 21%, and contains 95% carbon dioxide, making it essentially useless for our bodies to get rid of carbon. Besides, the sand contains chlorine, which is toxic, so staying out for long periods would probably kill you especially since Martian sand is very fine. You could fit 540,000 grains side by side on an average 15cm ruler (their name is misleading- a 15cm ruler is actually around 16.3cm). This is bad news for robots as well. Martian dust is so tiny that it can creep into joints, and after some time it would start getting Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 13

static charges. Even if you somehow find a way to survive all this, a giant hurricane that is visible here from Earth is sweeping across the planet, and being caught in it would probably mean trouble. All in all, Mars is not a very pleasant place to be on. However, the hazards mentioned can be avoided in various ways- oxygen tanks or gas masks, dustproof or washable machinery, an interplanetary weather forecast and mobile habitats, et cetera (Shekhtman, 2019).

The biggest problem, the one we’ll have to address seriously, is the temperature. The yearly average temperature on Mars is -63°C, the hottest possible temperature at the equator being less than 20°, and at the lowest around -125°C near the poles. This is because Mars is pretty far away from the sun, so less sunlight reaches it. Mars’s atmosphere is covered with suspended dust- blocking what light makes it to Mars. We would have to change that first. As I said before, Mars has plenty of greenhouse gas (remember the carbon dioxide levels?). But greenhouse gases don’t produce heat- it keeps existing heat from radiating away. One thing we could do is redirect the sun’s rays onto Mars by placing mirrors around the planet- reflecting the light onto Mars. (By mirrors I mean colossal amounts of aluminium foil- making it hard for the scientists because they have to resist the urge to give it a good crumple). After that we move on to the most exciting part- we wait. For decades.

the Martian atmosphere, after which it goes through a process called electrolysis, which means that you take CO2 and put a DC wire next to it and expect something to happen- ‘cause something does happen. After this, we are left with carbon atoms and oxygen- all we need to do now is filter it again, leaving pure oxygen and a rather blackened filter. We’ll just have to make more of these at a larger scale and chuck it on Mars- then we wait again.

Fig. 3-2. Patience!

At some point, there will be enough oxygen floating around to keep a normal human being alive.

Over time, we can plant very tough bacteria on the planet, slowly turning the martian soil (aka mound of dust) into something more lively. We can then plant genetically modified plants that require less sunlight.

Eventually, we would find ourselves on a planet that looks more or less like home. All we have to do now is build a small gelato shop somewhere around the equator where the weather is hottest. I’m sure Curiosity will stop by sometime.

Fig. 3-1. Patience.

The idea is that if we wait long enough at least a small area of Mars will be warmed. We are planning on making that area the polar ice caps (This is important- we need water for drinking, growing food, cooking the food, washing, rocket fuel, oxygen, and much more). Skipping ahead in time- Mars has been sufficiently warmed so that humans can live on it.

Now the greenhouse gases have done their job, they are no longer necessary- they need to be replaced with oxygen so people can breathe without oxygen tanks (masks will still be necessary due to the sand, though). Helpfully, the majority of Martian air is carbon dioxide- which is a carbon atom(carbon) with two(di-) oxygen(-oxide) atoms. All we need to do is kick the carbon atoms out, and we get plenty of oxygen. The recent martian rover perseverance contained a small machine called MOXIE (its other name is a bit shocking- Mars oxygen in-situ resource utilization experiment) that was designed to do just that [Michael Hecht, 2019]. It purifies the CO2 from 14 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

Fig. 4. Curiosity finding gelato on Mars.

This process can be continued, taking different measures for different planets, depending on what parts of the planet are different from Earth.

At some point, we would have conquered all the solar systems, and all the planets in them. (Actually, I take the part about conquering all the planets backWe’re never going to do that. The universe is expanding, and it is expanding pretty fast. So for us to reach certain points in the universe, we would have to travel at speeds faster than light- which we currently believe to be one of the few things proven impossible by science, such as escaping a black hole’s event horizon or waking up on a school day) But if we want

to do that, we need to make sure that we don’t blow ourselves up.

II. Not blowing ourselves up Until recently, we didn’t even consider the idea of taking care of our environment. The most obvious sign is global warming- but aside from that, we have created a dense layer of little leftover pieces from spaceships or satellites around the planet. These pieces are travelling very fast- 7823 metres per second. That’s around 28163 kilometres per hour. So even a tiny screw can act as a bullet, blasting through a spacecraft, which in turn becomes a form of orbital debris. When this happens, the spacecraft doesn’t just get a hole in it- it is partially ‘pulverised’ into pieces less than a centimetre in diameter, which in turn join the hunt.

the magnet will wait until it goes past, at which point the magnet will turn on. The piece of material, which is probably made of iron or steel, would be attracted to the magnet. For a split second it skids to a stop, then starts to hover towards the magnet. For an object to stay in orbit, it needs to travel over a certain speed. When it loses this speed, it falls down onto the planet. This is precisely what happens to the particleit is kicked out of its ellipse-shaped cycle and travels downwards in a spiral- probably to disintegrate once it meets the atmosphere. This can also be done to larger chunks of metal like dead satellites in a similar manner. One day, the magnet will end its life due to repetitive collisions with screws and paint flecks, or just because of the wear and tear all man-made satellites go through. It will move itself to a lower orbit, and once it starts falling it turns its magnet on for the last time, letting the debris slam onto the surface, taking all the junk into the atmosphere, where the whole thing burns away.

Fig. 5. Crash and burn.

This kind of pollution- space pollution it’s calledcan result in a serious problem. With so many bullets flying randomly about, you might reach a point when there are so many bullets that you can’t get past them, essentially meaning you are trapped onin, actually, the planet. So it is an evident fact that we can’t just carry on like this. Besides, it takes a lot of time and energy to terraform a planet, especially if it is not as Earthlike as Mars. We need to take care of those that we did colonise- planets are not a single-use product. How, though?

Again, there are two approaches. A) find a way to clean up the mess, and B) find a way to not make the mess in the first place.

I think we should do both, especially since we already have a lot of stuff floating around already.

There are multiple approaches to option A- giant nets, electromagnets, harpoons, and some sort of giant gumball that is supposed to stick the chunks of metal onto its surface after which it drops out of orbit and evaporates in the atmosphere. All of these are effective- sometimes. As I mentioned before, these pieces of debris- the size of a small screw- can punch their way through 6 tons of iron. So if we aren’t going to make a very strong device, it would probably be a bad idea to come into direct contact. So I would choose monster magnets- er- electromagnets. The good thing about electromagnets is that they shut on and off on command, unlike normal magnets. When a particular piece of debris flies toward the magnet,

Fig. 6. Debris burning as it falls.

The second option is about lowering the chance that a bit of a spaceship would fall off and become part of the debris swarm. The most common and simple idea is to not dump pieces of the spaceship randomly. This process was necessary until now because of a simple problem that is hard to explain. Say you start with something you want to blast into space.

It’s pretty light. But to blast it upwards, you need energy. You get that energy from fuel. The fuel needs a container and an engine. So you get enough fuel to blast your original object into space. But now, you have to carry more weight than the fuel can carry.

You need to carry the fuel itself, the engine, and the container. So you get some more fuel and containers.

You need more energy. More fuel. More weight. So it goes on and on- and the only thing that saves us from deciding that the idea of blasting an object into space was stupid in the first place is the fact that the containers are no longer needed once they’re empty.

So we can drop them and forget about them. Until those containers bonk you on the head on your way back (‘bonk’ might not be the most accurate word to use- it would sound more like ‘splat’). Some modern spaceships have containers that are little rockets themselves and fly back to the base. It’s not perfect yet, and bits and pieces still fall off eventually, but Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 15

Fig. 7. Ah yes, finally. A giant meteor flying at us at twice the speed of sound- let’s blast it into pieces, shall we?

it’s a start. Another idea is to reduce the weight of the rocket itself. This is easier said than done, especially because the rockets were already designed and modified for hundreds of years by hyper-nerds that specialise in making stuff weigh less (which is why they are trying to go to space- there’s no gravity there).

III. The idea of sharing our universe So. All along I’ve been talking about what we should do with this universe. But I haven’t mentioned anything about sharing this vast space. Most scientists believe that aliens are out there somewhere. The logic is that considering the number of planets with water and all the other elements that we think life forms need to survive (wait that’s just water) and the time they’ve been hanging around with weird chemical reactions happening on them, it’s only reasonable that something that at least faintly represents a living thing should have popped up somewhere, sometime, somehow. This chapter will be talking about aliens and what they would mean for the human race. Kardashev, who I mentioned at the start of this article, made a scale that puts extraterrestrial beings on a scale from 0 to 5 (actually he made a scale of 0 to 3, then future scientists who were very imaginative came up with 4 and 5) depending on the amount of energy it has access to.

A level 0 alien would probably be something like bacteria- it barely has any energy aside from its physical energy. It’s nice to know that they are there, but all we’d be able to do with them is put them under a microscope.

A level 1 alien will have complete access to all the energy available on its planet. We are nearing this stage- probably to reach it 100 years later.

Level 2 has access to all the energy of its star. This would be achieved through something like a Dyson 16 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

sphere, which is a structure that surrounds a star, collecting the light and heat energy using mirrors and solar cells (not the vacuum cleaner). Fun factthis kind of civilization will be immune to extinction given that they don’t make any silly mistakes like nuclear wars or mass scale suicide or something. No phenomenon currently known to us will be able to wipe these out. Even if a giant asteroid the size of our moon is flying straight towards their system at twice the speed of sound, they would probably be notified about it ahead of time and would move the entire solar system out of the way if they are feeling particularly forgiving that day, or could just pulverise the whole thing and put an end to the trouble it causes.

Intergalactic dodgeball, if you will.

Level 3- now these are big. They have access to all the energy on every single star and planet in their galaxy. That is a lot. They might have some trouble finding more solar systems as the closest non-colonised star would be several light centuries away.

Level 4- these have all the energy available in their universe. They have enough energy to upload their entire population into a computer system to live an ideal life- and still have plenty left over. Which is cool. Very cool. (But I still think blasting giant asteroids would be more fun.)

Level 5- they are sometimes called level omega.

They control multiverses. They have left the universe of their origin and can visit other universes where the laws of physics and time are different- which would feel very weird. We don’t know what they would do with that much energy, and honestly, at this point, we just consider them more as a myth than a stage of development. These are the ones that got annoyed because we were so irresponsible during the introduction. They must be forgetting that they were once in Level 0.9 as well.

However, we haven’t found any evidence of alien existence, despite endless years of sending radio signals into space and keeping an eye (well, more than an eye) out for a reply. While it is true that just because we don’t have evidence doesn’t mean that something is false- just that it might be false, this is sort of discouraging for some people who were looking forward to doing the finger thing with E.T. Scientists (very sympathetic scientists) have come up with some ideas for why we can’t find aliens in order to comfort these people (and themselves).

Firstly and most obviously, we don’t know anything about aliens. We have no idea whatsoever what to look for. Maybe we’re just doing something wrong.

We might have already encountered an alien species without even noticing.

Another possibility is that the aliens found us before we found them, and they decided to be careful.

Our current approach is to walk up to them immediately and invite them to dinner. Perhaps they’re the ones that are making the right choice.

The aliens could be very very very far away. So far away that our radio signals and their signals, whatever form they are in, can’t reach each other. We must keep in mind that we are still a level 0 species. We can’t reach much further than our solar system.

Last thought- maybe we are alone. In that case, all we can do for now is slowly make our way outwards, making discoveries and transitioning to a level 5-

exploring every nook and cranny of the universe, asking and answering as many questions as we can, until there is nowhere we haven’t thoroughly travelled, and no more questions to ask anymore.

Until then, all we need to do is stick together and keep our planet in one piece. The universe is too beautiful to be left with nobody to explore it.

Works Cited 1 NASA. 2021. Curiosity Rover Serves Scientists a New Mystery: Oxygen. [online] Available at: <https://www. nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/with-mars-methane-mystery-unsolved-curiosity-serves-scientists-a-new-one-oxygen> [Accessed 22 September 2021].

2 NASA. 2021.. [online] Available at: <https://www.nasa. gov/feature/goddard/2019/with-mars-methane-mystery-unsolved-curiosity-serves-scientists-a-new-one-oxygen> [Accessed 22 September 2021].

3 NASA. 2021. Space Debris and Human Spacecraft. [online] Available at: <https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/ station/news/orbital_debris.html> [Accessed 25 September 2021].

4 Creighton, J., 2021. A Brief Explanation of the Kardash-ev Scale: How Far Can Humanity Really Advance?. [online] Futurism. Available at: <https://futurism.com/ the-kardashev-scale-of-civilization-types> [Accessed 25 September 2021].

5 Mars.nasa.gov. 2021. Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE). [online] Available at: <https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/instruments/moxie/> [Accessed 5 October 2021].

Ranking civilizations

What is the Kardashev Scale?

Keeping up with the Kardashevs.

D

evised in 1964 by Soviet astrophysicist Dr Nikolai Kardashev, the Kardashev scale is a method of measuring the technological advancement of a civilization according to the amount of energy it can use. Kardashev created 3 classes, likely to encompass all long-living civilizations, each with an energy disposal level: Type I (10¹⁶W), Type II (10²⁶W), and Type III (10³⁶W) (Creighton, 2014). Other astronomers extended the scale to Type IV (10⁴⁶W) and Type V. The amount of energy a Type V civilization could harness does not yet have a cap, because it would equal that of all available energy in not just our universe, but in all universes and time-lines (Ibid.).

Type I civilizations, according to Kardashev, should be able to control fully the resources of a planet. They would “harness all the energy that is available from a neighboring star, gathering and storing it to meet the energy demands of a growing population” (Ibid.). Being able to harness the full potential of Earth’s energy means that humans would be able to control phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, the weather, and earthquakes.

Civilizations that merit Type II distinctions can “harness the power of their entire star” (Ibid.).

This means that civilizations would gain complete

control over their planetary system. The hypothetical Dyson sphere is one way a Type II civilization might use the energy from its star. The sphere is a habitat built around the star, intended to gather as much energy as it can from the star and store it for future usage. The presence of a structure like the Dyson sphere, hypothesized Dr Freeman Dyson of Princeton University, who in the 1960s proposed the sphere as an example of what an alien Type II species might have achieved, would enable humanity to detect alien species even if they did not wish to communicate, since any civilization commanding such a large flow of energy would have to radiate excess heat energy into the universe in the form of infra-red radiation (Dyson and Carrigan, 2009). A Type II civilization would be able to vaporise asteroids or simply move its planet out of the way of an incoming collision — they could even move another planet in their galaxy into the asteroid’s course, so complete a command of their solar system they would’ve achieved.

- Chandler Geumbee Ahn ‘25

Creighton, J., 2014. The Kardashev Scale. [online] futurism. com. Available at: <https://futurism.com/the-kardashev-scaletype-i-ii-iii-iv-v-civilization> [Accessed 19 February 2022].

Dyson, F. and Carrigan, R., 2009. Dyson sphere. Scholarpedia, 4(5), p.6647.

Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 17

A Closer Space in Screen:

Space Sweepers Netflix's newest extraterrestrial blockbuster offers glimpse into film industry's technological future Hitting the big screens Writer: Shayla Seokyung Hwang '27 Editor: Chandler Geumbee Ahn '25

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EBRUARY 5TH, 2021, Space Sweepers, South Korea’s first space blockbuster, was introduced to us in streaming services due to Covid-19.

Space Sweepers was about a world in which the wealthy could live in paradise up in outer space where minorities and the poor were left behind on Earth. This movie is about 4 characters living in outer space as space sweepers and dealing with a character which is thought of as a dangerous bomb. As a person who has watched the movie - almost when it came up, I was fascinated by the visual effects.

Fig. 1. Captain Jang, Tae Ho, and Up-dong-i on the spaceship (sedaily, 2020).

VFX, short for visual effects, were what made the quality of the movie higher. Numerous comments given by the people who saw the movie praised the unbelievable quality of VFX. If we think about VFX, we may think about a green screen with actors flying around. However, VFX is much more than just green screens as the background. There are diverse techniques by making imagination to real screens utilizing VFX. Most widely known is the green screen or what we may say, chroma key.

VFX, short for visual effects, were what made the 18 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

quality of the movie higher. Numerous comments given by the people who saw the movie praised the unbelievable quality of VFX. If we think about VFX, we may think about a green screen with actors flying around. However, VFX is much more than just green screens as the background. There are diverse techniques by making imagination to real screens utilizing VFX. Most widely known is the green screen or what we may say, chroma key.

Another way of conducting VFX is similar to a relatively old-fashioned technique, rotoscoping - or motion capture. Motion capture, also known as mocap, allows live action of made-up characters to move more realistically. The robot character in Space Sweepers, Up-doing-i, was able to move naturally (well, not naturally I guess because it is supposed to be a robot) because of the mocap technique.

CG, probably a better known word for us instead of CGI, has a difference between VFX. However, there are both types of visual effects that are utilized in movies. CGI, short for computer-generated imagery, is a visual effect that is a style of animation or illustration on computer programs. Meanwhile, VFX focuses more on the act of adding effects to existing imagery or film. In Space Sweepers, they both utilized the effect in order to create a high-quality space movie even though it relatively had a lower budget than other Hollywood space movies. Up-donng-i is a robot character which is made by CGI and VFX. To talk about visual effects in Hollywood, VFX showed up in Hollywood in 1971. Probably one of the most famous movies related to dinosaurs, Jurassic Park, also utilized an immense amount of VFX. The widely known movie created by Pixar, Toy Story, also used VFX to make the dolls come to live.

I was quite impressed - in fact the audience was

Fig. 2. The famous scene before visual effects, using green screens.

impressed by Dexter Studio’s work. Dexter Studio is a proud Korean visual effects company. They were responsible for Space Sweepers’ visual effects. Dexter Studio’s CEO, Chun Ho - Ryu also created another masterpiece Along With the Gods. As technology develops, we are able to be closer to places where we cannot reach.

Works Cited 1 www.graphics.cornell.edu. (n.d.). What is Computer Graphics? | Program of Computer Graphics. [online] Available at: https://www.graphics.cornell.edu/about/ what-computer-graphics.

2 Scratchapixel (n.d.). Where Do I Start? A Very Gentle Introduction to Computer Graphics Programming. [online] Scratchapixel. Available at: https://www.scratchapixel. com/lessons/3d-basic-rendering/get-started [Accessed 28 Sep. 2021].

3 web.pdx.edu. (n.d.). 4 types of animation | cgi. [online]

Available at: http://web.pdx.edu/~squarum/5typesofanimation/cgi.html.

4 www.youtube.com. (n.d.). 할리우드 버금가는 국내 CG기술! “승리호, 기생충, 신과함께” CG전문가가 알려 주는 CG 작업 과정 | #유퀴즈온더블럭 #디글 #알수없는 알고리즘. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=6trt4WdRIoU [Accessed 28 Sep. 2021].

5 www.youtube.com. (n.d.). [ENG] 영화 [승리호] VFX 메이킹 영상 [SPACE SWEEPERS] vfx making film : 송중기, 김태리, 진선규, 유해진 : 2021 NETFLIX : SF. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=KM52IPhWdGU [Accessed 28 Sep. 2021] Johnston, D. (n.d.). “Space Sweepers” review: Netflix’s new sci-fi epic is “Parasite” in space. [online] Inverse. Available at: https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/space-sweepers-review-netflix [Accessed 5 Oct. 2021] 6 콘텐츠뷰. “승리호” CG 입히기 전에는 이랬다. [online] Available at: https://content.v.daum.net/ v/601d538811938e26337f48a8 [Accessed Oct. 2021]

Bet you didn’t know

Why are Green Screens Green?

Of all colours.

C

HROMA key technique is widely utilized by various media nowadays. It can change the background by only setting a green fabric behind the objects. This green fabric that enables editors to insert chroma key is the green screen. So, why are green screens always green? Can’t it be other colors like blue or red? There are 10 million kinds of colors in total, including ultraviolet rays that human eyes aren’t even able to see, so what is it about

green that makes it the chroma key, “green screen” colour? The reason is simple. It is because people aren’t green. To work, the background for chroma key must be a color that isn’t used elsewhere in the scene, and therefore, since green has the least relativity with the skin color of humans, green screens were made as backdrops for chroma key.

- Hanju Park ‘25

Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 19

Elon Musk HIS LIFE, HIS ACHIEVEMENTS

Introducing the billionaire space-racer Notable individuals Writer: Daniel Shin '26 Editor: Remy Woobin Lee '25

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HE MAN who succeeded at launching the first private liquid-fuel rocket to reach Earth orbit after three sets of failure. Once the rocket blew up midair, and the second rocket blew up after it landed. This is the one line summary of Elon Musk’s success. Then a question will come to your mind, “How did he earn that much money to launch a spaceship?” The answer is concise, but first we need to find out about his life.

Career Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa.

His mother was a Canadian model, and his father was an engineer from South Africa. After his family divorced in 1980, Elon mostly lived with his father. Elon has become estranged from his father, whom he describes as a “terrible

human being”. Elon started to develop interest in computers at the age of 10 and this particular interest in computers gave him a reason to drop out of Stanford university after two days.

At the age of 24, he started his own web software company Zip2.

His company was very small. Elon Musk slept on his office couch and showered at the YMCA. His company, Zip2 was a huge success.

Compaq acquired Zip2 for $307 million in cash after 4 years. With the money he got, he started his next company: X.com.

X.com, an online financial service and email payment company co-founded by Elon. This company is PayPal’s predecessor. He was a CEO of X.com once but was ousted by the board due to resulting technological issues and lack of a cohesive business model. The company then concentrated on

PayPal and eventually changed its name to PayPal in 2001.

When PayPal was acquired by Ebay in 2002, Elon received over 100 million dollars.

The beginning of Elon’s space plan starts far back in 2001. He was involved with the Mars society. He once traveled to Moscow to buy rockets but failed. After the failure of buying rockets, he instead decided to start a company that could build affordable rockets, which is SpaceX. SpaceX failed launching 3 spaceships.

However, he didn’t give up and launched Falcon 1 to space. Falcon 1 was the first private liquid-fuel rocket to reach Earth orbit. This was Elon musk’s Career until now. Now let's wrap this up.

Conclusion Elon Musk, who now works to revolutionize transportation both on earth and in space would most likely be the man who leads the future of space.

Works Cited 1 https://www.eyesmag.com/ posts/133014/tesla-elon-muskmoves-to-texas 2 https://www.teslarati.com/spacexstarship-moon-lander-first-nasafunding/ 3 Strauss, Neil (November 15, 2017).

"Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow". Rolling Stone.

Fig. 1. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, PayPal, and X.com, among others.

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“T

HAT'S ONE small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”, Neil Armstrong famously said, - with more than half a million people watching on live television - climbing down the ladder of Apollo 11, and for the first time in history, stepping on the moon’s surface (NASA, 2019). Nowadays, Apollo 11’s moon landing is indeed considered a giant leap, and since the expedition, space science has never seen a more rapid progress. The first ever lunar landing on July 20th, 1969, achieved by 4 astronauts and approximately 400,000 other engineers, scientists, and technicians across the United States (Hollingham, 2019) is unarguably a monumental milestone, or is it?

Conspiracy Theories Some, or rather, many, seem to disagree. Depending on the source, anywhere between six to twenty percent of Americans are known to have answered that they believed the moon landing was a hoax, with an additional five percent responding in a 1999 Gallup poll as ‘undecided’. The numbers have decreased in recent days, nonetheless the theory remains prevalent throughout the internet and our society (Achenbach, 2019). The U.S., desperate to beat the Sovit Union to the moon during the Cold War and thus compelled to create a fake set, was the assertion behind the Apollo 11 conspiracy theory, supported by ‘scientific evidence’which were debunked repeatedly over decades (Jennings, 2019).

Fig. 2. The photo in the midst of controversy.

The most widespread one is the rippling American flag. Skeptics have argued that it is impossible for the flag to flutter on the moon as though wind is present, whilst as in the photo below, the flag appears to be vigorously waving.

ONE SMALL STEP

,

Disambiguation The truth is, the horizontal rod holding the flag in place was accidentally bent several times, and the flag was folded during storage, which created the wrinkles. The photo was captured as though it was in motion, whereas videos show when the flag is let go, it vibrates only briefly but then remains still. "...the video you see where the flag's moving is because the astronaut just placed it there, and the inertia from when they let go kept it moving," says Moon landing conspiracies debunked spaceflight historian RogReviewing the facts er Launius of the SmithWriter: Emma Chaeeun Chung '25 sonian's National Air and Editor: Chandler Geumbee Ahn '25 Space Museum in Washington D.C. (Than, 2009).

Another convincing moon landing myth is the Van Allen Belts, doughnut-shaped zones of highly energetic charged particles trapped in the magnetic field of Earth from solar wind (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2021).

Some have suggested that the astronauts could have not survived the trip due to lethal exposure of radiation from the belts (Institute of Physics, 2021). Interestingly enough, this was NASA’s genuine concern when planning the launch. To minimize radiation doses, they insulated the spacecraft with an aluminium shell and chose a trajectory that allowed the least amount of time in the belts. The inner belt (the more dangerous one, containing energetic protons) was passed through in minutes, and the less dangerous outer belt, containing low-energy Beta particles, was passed in 1½hours. It was later ascertained that the total radiation each astronaut received was equivFig. 1. First Footprint on the Moon. alent as allowed for workers in the nuclear energy

ONE

GIANT SWINDLE?

Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 21

Fig. 3. Van Allen Radiation Belt.

field for an year- not that hazardous (Plait, 2002).

The ‘devoid of stars in the background’ is a paradigmatic argument as well. The explanation for the void is quite simple; the moon’s surface was illuminated with sunlight, so stars were too dim to show up. The astronaut’s highly reflective white space suits, and the camera clicking at 120-150th of a second made it even harder to capture the faint light of the stars (Hamer, 2009). And of course, they simply couldn’t leave out the ‘unbelievably’ clear footprints despite the lack of moisture on the arid surface. Apparently the conspiracists were scientists who happened to be unaware that Moondust is a finely ground powder; almost like volcanic ash under the microscope, able to compress easily into shapes. Unless bombarded by meteorites, compressed Moondust will stay pristine, thanks to no erosion due to airless vacuum (Than, 2009). Lastly, the shadows. In a place where the sun is the only source of light, shadows that extend in different directions seemed like just another factor that verified the landing incoherent, rather than a scientifically-explicable phenomenon. Professor Ojha, discovery director at the National Space Centre explained during a lecture at Royal Museums Greenwich that the shadows were optical illusions that can be made just about anywhere. “If you are trying to reduce onto a two-dimensional plane a three-dimensional situation, you can make lines do all sorts of weird things. Artists have been using this for centuries", he said (Royal Museums Greenwich, n.d.).

To believe in the moon conspiracy is one’s freedom, yet to do so is not only fallacious, but also irreverent towards the multitudes who were involved in the project and vexes those who were committed to it, e.g., Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 astronaut who punched a moon-landing denier in the face in 2019 (Godwin, 2019). Especially in the Information Age, it has become increasingly pivotal for the public to be shrewd rationalists apropos of the unfathomable data mingled with facts and lies- and it’s always up to us, mastering the skill of becoming an open minded critic.

Works Cited 1 Achenbach, J. (2019). 50 years after Apollo, conspiracy theorists are still howling at the “moon hoax.” Washington Post. [online] 24 May. Available at: https://www. washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/50-yearsafter-apollo-conspiracy-theorists-are-still-howling-atthe-moon-hoax/2019/05/23/ca5b4a3a-700e-11e9-9f0622 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

5fc2ee80027a_story.html.

2 Godwin, R. (2019). One giant ... lie? Why so many people still think the moon landings were faked. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/ science/2019/jul/10/one-giant-lie-why-so-many-peoplestill-think-the-moon-landings-were-faked.

3 Hamer, A. (2019). Notification. [online] Discovery.com.

Available at: https://www.discovery.com/science/apollo-50th-anniversary/why-aren-t-there-stars-in-the-moonlanding-photos-.

4 Hollingham, R. (2019). Apollo in 50 numbers: The workers. [online] www.bbc.com. Available at: https:// www.bbc.com/future/article/20190617-apollo-in-50numbers-the-workers.

5 How do we know that we went to the Moon? | Institute of Physics. (n.d.). How do we know that we went to the Moon? [online] Available at: https://www.iop.org/explore-physics/moon/how-do-we-know-we-went-to-themoon#gref.

6 Jennings, R. (2019). Moon landing 50th anniversary: why people like Steph Curry have supported conspiracy theories. [online] Vox. Available at: https://www.vox.com/ the-goods/2019/6/24/18692080/moon-landing-50th-anniversary-steph-curry-conspiracy-theory-hoax.

7 NASA (2019). July 20, 1969: One Giant Leap For Mankind. [online] NASA. Available at: https://www.nasa.gov/ mission_pages/apollo/apollo11.html.

Plait, P.C. (2002). Bad astronomy : misconceptions and misuses revealed, from astrology to the moon landing “hoax.” New York: Wiley.

8 Than, K. (2009). Apollo 11 Hoax Photos: 8 Moon-Landing Myths Busted. [online] Science. Available at: https:// www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/apollo-11hoax-photos--8-moon-landing-myths-busted.

9 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Brittanica (n.d.). Van Allen radiation belt | astrophysics. [online] Encyclopedia Britannica. Available at: https://www.britannica.com/science/Van-Allen-radiation-belt.

10 www.rmg.co.uk. (n.d.). Moon landing conspiracy theories, debunked. [online] Available at: https://www. rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/moon-landing-conspiracy-theories-debunked.

Further Reading Creating Conspiracy Beliefs: How Our Thoughts Are Shaped: Dolores Albarracín, Julia Albarracín, and Man-pui Sally Chan (Cambridge University Press, 2021). + Conspiracy tackles how recent widespread conspiracy theories — the alleged pizza parlor sex-trafficking ring of the U.S. Democrats, the so-called deep state that undermined former POTUS Donald Trump’s presidency — were fueled by: (a) the conservative media and (b) a social climate of anxiety. If debunking and discussing conspiracy theories is your niche, dive into this new book that uses a cross-disciplinary approach to analyze how people’s media consumption patterns play a role in increasing the likelihood of susceptibility to false conspiracy hoaxes. Focusing on conspiracy theories for which no plausible evidence currently exists, Conspiracy is a fascinating foray into why the mind works to see shapes where there aren’t any.

Works Cited Berger, Michele W. “A Novel Theory on How Conspiracy Theories Take Shape.” Anneberg School for Communication University of Pennsylvania, 21 Jan. 2022, https://www.asc. upenn.edu/news-events/news/novel-theory-how-conspiracy-theories-take-shape.

Longitudinal Growth and Change in Bones Understanding skeletal maturity Human biology Writer: Clive Wonyeol Choi '23 Editor: Ms. Kym Prichard

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EFORE SCIENTISTS understood about the formation of bones, many thought bone as sturdy white matter that grows only in a programmed way (Gorvett, 2019), meaning it was possible to predict our bone growth. Yet, as the advent of technology has brought us incremental changes into our lives, scientists found that it has also changed the formation of our bones - perhaps it would be better to put it as an adaptation?

This means that the formation of the bones changed due to the requirement of modern cultures obligating people to be stuck onto their electronic devices all the time(Gorvett, 2019).

Strangely enough, our bones do change according to the environment provided to them, much like a tree root spreading to find water.

Our bones shift into positions that would lessen the bodily pressure pinned on them - whether it is good for our body or not is not their concern.

The layers in between the epiphyseal and the metaphysis known as the physis (growth plate) is responsible for the growth and transformation of the bones.They are located at the end of long bones and are made up of horizontal regions of derived chondrocytes.

The bone’s longitudinal growth is caused by endochondral ossification, in which a cartilaginous scaffold is replaced by the bone.

The growth is catalysed by the production of chondrocytes, also known as chondrocyte proliferation. An unknown trigger

causes the chondrocytes to undergo cell division and synthesize extracellular matrix(ECM) proteins. They then become pre-hypertrophic (increasing in size) and further differentiation leads them to become hypertrophic chondrocytes to secrete large amounts of matrix proteins.

This process is essentially responsible for the increase in size and longitudinal growth of bones (van der Eerden, Karperien and Wit, 2003).

Fig. 1. Schematic of growth plate (Romereim, Sarah & Dudley, Andrew. 2011).

Moreover, the enlargement of bones is affected by the concentration of intracellular calcium along with retinoic acids, and vitamin D. The chondrocytes have a large amount of annexins, which mediate calcium uptake into matrix vesicles, and the vesicles become mineralized and accumulate blood vessels.

Then by undergoing apoptosis (form of programmed cell death) the mineral chondrocytes form the bones.(van der Eerden, Karperien and Wit, 2003) The concentration of calcium, retinoic acids, and vitamin D can affect the process and any lack of the substances may lead to Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 23

deficit growth in bones.

Bone growth is the result of chondrocyte proliferation and the epiphyseal growth plate inside the long bone. These growth can be divided into three major periods - infancy, puberty and after puberty. The first growth is observed during infancy until the age of three, and before puberty the growth is relatively slow. The growth spurt occurs during puberty and after such phases, the growth plate fuses and no longer grows.

layer of connective tissue called cartilage provides protection preventing bones from grinding into each other when moving. At the end of the bones, there is a specific type of cartilage called the articular cartilage which can excrete synovial fluid, filling up the space(Kranz & Gwosdow,, 2021) Yet as we deplete certain joints, specifically the knee and the hip, over the expansion of lifetime, the cartilages become worn out, eventually leading to extreme pain.

-

Fig. 2. Bone Development & Growth (U. S. National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute, 2021).

It is also worthwhile to understand the wearing out of the joints in between the bones. The joint refers to the point where two bones meet. During youth, a

Works Cited 1 Gorvett, Z. (2019, June 14). How modern life is transforming the human skeleton. Retrieved April 14, 2021, from https://222/bbc/com/future/article/20190610-how-modern-life-is-transforming-the-human-skeleton 2 van der Eerden, B., Karperien, M. and Wit, J., 2003.

Systemic and Local Regulation of the Growth Plate. Endocrine Reviews, 24(6), pp.782-801.

3 Romereim, Sarah & Dudley, Andrew. (2011). Cell polarity. Organogenesis. 7. 217-28. 10.4161/org.7.3.18583.

4 SEER Training Modules, Bone Development & Growth.

U. S. National Institutes of Health, National Cancer Institute. Day Month Year (of access) <https://training.seer. cancer.gov/>.

5 https://www.whatayear.org/02_09.html#:~:text=The%20space%20between%20bones%20is,the%20 ends%20of%20your%20bones.

Debunking the growth myth

Is Milk Beneficial for Bone Growth?

Investigating an age-old piece of conventional wisdom.

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HERE IS A plethora of dairy products, ranging from chocolate to cream cheese sandwiches.

All of these milk-based products come from milk, as without milk, these goodies will not be available.

For decades, people have encouraged milk consumption as they stated the myriad health benefits it provides. However, according to Swedish research, while milk is certainly beneficial in some aspects, an excess might be extremely detrimental to one’s health. This study discovered that drinking too much milk – defined as three or more glasses per day – was linked to an increased risk of fractures and hip fractures, as well as death.

Furthermore, it was shown that women who drank three or more glasses of milk per day had a roughly doubled risk of death compared to those who drank less than one glass per day. Men were not as severely impacted as women, but those who had three or more glasses of milk per day still had a higher death rate.

Furthermore, according to a different study, increasing milk and dairy product intake did not always reduce the incidence of osteoporosis and hip fracture when compared to case-control and cross-sectional studies. So, does this imply that 24 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

you should avoid drinking milk? Don’t rule out the jug just yet. According to one research, milk still helps people satisfy their nutritional needs and may even protect them from chronic illnesses. Although milk and dairy are among the most calcium-rich foods available, there are additional components in milk that should be consumed in moderation. “While the Swedish study raises fascinating concerns, there is insufficient data to justify a milk ban,” Dr Cresci argues. Milk has been a staple of human cuisine for centuries, and to rule it out just now would be premature.

- Jiyu An ‘25

Fig. 1. “Today Is World Milk Day: Why Is Milk Considered to Be a Complete Meal?” 2017.

Life Might Be Fun Reasons not to worry about a nuclear apocalypse Pseudo-fictional contribution Writer: Jayden Junseok Lee '27 Editor: Chandler Geumbee Ahn '25

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ET'S PAINT A little scene. You’re in your little result of discovering a 24th century technology in room, being unhealthy as always. The hours the 20th century. You wake up one day to hear the fade away as you try and decide whether your sirens announcing a nuclear strike. There’s panic evmoral compass is broken or just messed up. All this erywhere, although no one can do much about it. while remembering a star died for you to be made.

That doesn’t look very nice does it? Let’s try someThis does sound quite bleak, and thing else. Consciousness and yes, it sort of is. We live in a so- Fig. 1. Footballers in London self awareness is a miracle, as ciety where we have to conquer (Onojeghuo, 2018). well as a gift. Most animals everyone else when we don’t aren’t aware of themselves, even have the time to conquer except for some apes, magpies, ourselves. Each day, a colourless and dolphins. But we have an picture, surviving but not quite even more complex form of self alive, empty but not quite dead. awareness. “Cogito, ergo sum” We’re made to balance on the as Rene Descartes put it. We little line between life and death, are able to distinguish the fact every day leaning towards one that we are the ones doing the or the other. As we grow older, thinking, and therefore we must each day becomes a meaningless exist. This might be something blur, filled with “Should have”s that is completely unique in the and “Could have”s, while not universe, and this opportunidoing much about it, and quite ty must not be wasted. Little frankly, not giving a damn about things like these are the reasons it either. You don’t need to worry why each day doesn’t have to be about living in a dystopia in the a bleak cloud that hangs above future, because you’re already us. Your small mass of flesh in in one. All this while you realise your head can do many things. that you are going to sleep forevIt can turn electric signals into er one day, and then, there will the comforting taste of your fabe nothing for you. We are the vourite food, into the melodies only species that is aware of its of music, into the beautiful canown upcoming demise that will vas of colours inside your head. inevitably happen, like it or not.

You're probably going to live for Rinse and repeat until everyone around 80 years, and you’re not you know including yourself is going to get any of those days dead. So it goes. back once you’ve lived through Or maybe this. Each day is a them. As you grow older, you day spent fretfully while wonmight think about the things dering whether your city will be you could have said, about the suddenly wiped out because of a things you could have done difnuclear explosion. The world leaders have all turned ferently, but that doesn’t really matter now, you’ve on each other, with the nine countries that have had your turn at being alive and there are no second nukes in a standoff that has come awfully close to chances. In a single lifetime, it’s impossible to do nuclear holocaust a few times. The doomsday clock everything that can be done in a universe that’s as has been set to 5 seconds, 4 seconds, now 3. You strange as this, but you can still make the most out of hear the shouts of soldiers as they march outside, your life, so that you can depart from this realm with tearing apart anything that comes too close. Towns less regrets. Become something. Nothing will never and cities are reduced to rubble in a few seconds, be anywhere. Take up a new hobby, start actually bewith the world becoming the inhospitable barren ing productive for once. Don’t listen to anyone who wasteland that it once was, billions of years ago. The tries to convince you that your endeavors are pointIssue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 25

less, that great people in the past had already done it.

There never was and never will be anyone great, only people who never and never will bow to cynicism and critics. Your life isn’t a canvas that will represent humanity. Depending on what you do with your life, it will be a miniscule point, or maybe a large splatter, on the shared canvas, that is history. Each person you see on the streets, each animal, each plant and each bug, is a miracle in itself, which is a fact that we must understand. A greater appreciation for our lives

is a wonderful start to the chain of dominoes that will one day end in tranquility for everyone. All it takes is a little push, from a lot of people. Now run along and be miraculous please.

Works Cited Clem Onojeghuo from Unsplash

Andy Warhol could never

The Primordial Soup Darwin's most controversial proposal.

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HE PRIMORDIAL SOUP is a generic term that describes the aqueous solution of organic compounds that accumulated in primitive water bodies of the early Earth. Billions of years ago on earth, simple organic compounds assembled into more complex coalitions that could grow and reproduce. At that time, the earth was full of volcanic eruptions, which wasn't a suitable environment for living things to survive. Elements and compounds essential to life include hydrogen, methane, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, phosphates, and ammonia. In order to bring these ingredients to react with each other, a liquid solvent is necessary, which is water. All life also needs a source of energy. However, at the time when life began, the UV radiation on Earth’s surface was likely too harsh for life to survive. Therefore, there was an external energy source, which is the hydrothermal vents, that wind across the ocean floor, covered by various conditions and bathed in complete darkness. A hydrothermal vent is a fissure in the Earth’s crust where seawater seeps into magma chambers and is ejected back out at high temperatures, along with a rich slurry of minerals and simple chemical compounds. Energy is particularly concentrated at the steep chemical gradients of hydrothermal vents.

LUCA, shortened from ‘Last Universal Common Ancestor’ can be described as the first ancestor of every living organism. Scientists identified genes that are commonly found in species across all three domains of life that exist today, which are archaea, bacteria, and eukarya. People believe that they must have been inherited from a common ancestor, as these genes are shared across species and domains. This reveals that LUCA lived in a hot, oxygen-free place—like hydrothermal vents.

There are two types of hydrothermal vents: black smokers and white smokers. However, scientists found out that the black smokers are too hot for LUCA to survive. One of the white smokers is located on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge called Lost City, and this place has become the most favored candidate for the cradle of life. The seawater is highly alkaline and lacks carbon dioxide, while it is rich in 26 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

methane and offers more hospitable temperatures.

Black smokers may have contributed the carbon dioxide necessary for life to evolve in the Lost City.

Certainly, both gave it all their components to support the first organisms that radiated into the astonishing diversity of life on Earth today.

- Angela Yumin Lee ‘25

Fig. 1. Although the primordial soup theory has its limitations, the idea of ‘spontaneous life’ is still fascinating to consider. (Time Travel Mart, 2021)

Works Cited Delbert, Caroline. “Darwin Was Right: All Life Probably Comes from Primordial Soup.” Popular Mechanics, 2 Nov. 2021, https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a34649466/primordial-soup-theory-origins-of-life-darwin/.

https://timetravelmart.com/wallaces-primordial-soup/

Why Do I Exist?

Life as it began in the quark-gluon plasma Chronicles of earth Writer: Jayden Junseok Lee '27 Editor: Chandler Geumbee Ahn '25

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T'S A QUESTION I ask myself almost every day. Whenever I fail to make any friends, whenever I feel like someone really stupid, or whenever I’m lying in bed at 5 am contemplating the meaning of life and existence. But let’s take all this quite literally.

Why do we really exist?

If you’re curious about the biological aspect of our existence, then go somewhere else. This is not the place for that.

Ok, but how do we know reality is real and we exist? Well, we might not. Whenever you’re dreaming, can you really tell the difference between reality and the dream? What a great day for an existential crisis. Do you have any proof that you are not in a simulation right now, or vice versa? Let’s think about this. Did you think?

That’s great, you, or at least some part of you, exist. Logically, if you’re thinking something, then you must be a thinking being, one that has to be conscious of itself, which is a proof of the existence of yourself. Whatever you are, you must be something.

Let there be Void We are going to start this off with absolutely nothing. Really.

A complete pure vacuum, a place that cannot be a host for any particles. Well, not any ordinary particles. Due to some sort of quantum mechanics principle, apparently, you can’t really have absolutely nothing, because of some sort of virtual particles that flash in and out of reality, causing photons and all sorts of interesting things to happen. To be honest, I have zero qualifications to be writing about this sort of thing, but I’m going to anyway because

Fig. 2. Bone Development & Growth (U. S. National Institutes of Health,

I can, and also because I have nothing else to write about. Now then, this unstableness of nothing is probably the cause of the big bang, and the creation of the cosmos.

Let’s pause time. Or, at that moment, what will be time. Let’s see, the universe, or what will be the universe, is currently filled with quarks, and some other particles, the stuff that makes up the atoms that we know today. Aha! We have something. In somewhere.

We now have quite a bit of the fundamental building blocks for something, not sure what it exactly is right now. The universe is expanding quite quickly now, and since we have movement, we must have time, and also gravity.

I’m not really sure on how that got there, but I don't think we can do much about it, so let’s not really question it at this point. The universe is getting bigger now, and with that, getting emptier every millisecond because of the expansion of the universe that’s probably still going on now.

Remember those quarks from earlier? Me neither. But the important thing is that now they’re

in groups of 3, with the ones with positive charges being called “protons”, and the ones with no charges being called “neutrons”.

There are also these little things in the air called “electrons”. Not sure how they got here in the first place, but they want to join the quarks, but they can’t right now because the whole thing is too hot for them, so they’ll have to wait for a bit before they can join. It’s been a bit of time, maybe a few minutes, 10 even. The protons and neutrons have now paired up with each other, creating basic elements, or hydrogen in this case.

Some have taken it even further and have now formed helium, the second most basic element (“basic” as in simple, not the state of having a PH larger than 7). It’s been around 380000 years and things have finally cooled down enough for the electrons to join in with them. Hooray, we have now achieved the complex form of gas in space that is ever so slowly getting closer to form what will be the first star in about 100 - 150 million years.

Well, I’ll see you then.

Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 27

The Big Bang Let’s take a look at some of the first stars. We now have more ingredients for the universe, with heavier elements like carbon, iron and copper being made, among other things. These stars burn and usually just implode, but some stars that are big enough burn and explode, creating more stuff.

These weird bits and pieces help make stars that in turn explode to make even crazier space ingredients. There’s one star we’re going to focus on. Of course, I’m talking about SDSS J102915+172927. Of course, I’m not. I mean our star, the sun, or to be specific, Solis, the only star with life that we know of today. Our sun at first was just a mass of rocks, ice, weird dust, and gas, but these eventually joined together to make planets, such as Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, and this ball of burning rocks that we now call the Earth. Look very closely. If you look close enough in the distance just enough, you might be able to see the absolutely massive ball of flaming rocks collide with the Earth. Well, that really did something, all that mess and debris. Wouldn’t it be nice if it managed to join together and make a smaller celestial object that will help humanity in several ways for thousands of years? Well, guess what? The debris managed to join together and make a smaller celestial object that will help humanity in several ways for thousands of years. It’s now called the Moon by the way.

Rocks from outer space are now falling onto Earth. But these aren’t just mere, boring rocks, these are special rocks, with a bit of water in them, which is now causing hot steam. This is causing the temperature to drop quite significantly, meaning the floor is no longer lava. Well guess what happens to the steam now. It’s raining. Let’s travel quite a bit of time into the future. The entire world is now an ocean, and volcanoes are creating land. This is when the first life form will come into existence. A tiny cell living at the bottom of the ocean that gains nutrients from chemicals in the sea left over from when rocks were falling from the sky. It can 28 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

The Tipping Point

When do Theories Become Fact?

The fine line between hypothesis and reality.

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HORT ANSWER: THEORIES never become facts. That’s because: (a) theories exist to explain facts, (b) theories are supported by facts, and (c) theories, unlike facts, are always disprovable. Example: think of a vat of popped corn. You catch some in your hand and discover that all the kernels look slightly different from each other. A fact, like the observation that popcorn kernels come in different shapes, is something that is true (let’s stick with this description of fact for now — the postmodernists who would like to send angry letters to me for daring to opine that objective truth exists can find my name at the end of this article). A suitable number of facts are then collated. Fact 1: popcorn kernels have different shapes. Fact 2: ears of corn have different water content. Fact 3: water expands when heated.

Linking these facts together, then, is produced a hypothesis — we hypothesise that the reason popcorn kernels all have different shapes is because ears of corn all have different volumes of water in them, irregularly spread out in the kernel, nestled next to atoms of corn kernels that are all arranged slightly differently, and that this water, when heated irregularly, pops in different directions according to

also replicate itself because it has instructions on how to do that inside itself. Well, that’s great, but we’re not at the bottom of the ocean now, are we? That’s because of photosynthesis, or to put it in more technical terms, eating sunlight and turning it into energy.

This process releases oxygen and other gases into the atmosphere, making the air we know of today and also turning the sky blue in the process. Then, because of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by volcanoes, the earth might have completely fro-

the position of the water molecules and the differing thickness of the starch that pads the ear of corn’s thick outer layer, causing kernels of popcorn to have idiosyncratic shapes. This hypothesis, at this point the germ of an idea, a tentative raised hand that strings together and tries to explain the set of facts that we’ve gathered, is then subjected to rigorous testing. The hypothesis therefore defines a phenomenon — some scientific occurrence that we can observe, but don’t know the reason behind. After scientists accumulate enough evidence to say with satisfaction that the hypothesis provides a just explanation for the existing set of facts that define a phenomenon, the hypothesis then blossoms into a theory — something that has “predictive power” (Tyson, 2021). And if time turns up a better explanation for the facts, or if new facts are uncovered that don’t suit the theory, then the theory should be discarded in favour of a new one that more successfully explains the phenomenon.

- Chandler Geumbee Ahn ‘25

Tyson, N., 2021. Theory vs. Law: Basics of the Scientific Method. [online] MasterClass.com. Available at: <https:// www.masterclass.com/articles/ theory-vs-law-basics-of-the-scientific-method#4-examples-of-scientific-theories> [Accessed 19 February 2022].

zen over not just once, but twice.

After this came the Cambrian explosion where all sorts of strange looking animals and plants came around, still in the ocean. You see, they really didn’t have much of a reason to go on land, as there wasn’t really anything to eat on land, and anyways, they wouldn’t be able to go on land in the first place because of the radiation from the sun, which will probably stay until some sort of blanket of gas that blocks much of the radiation formed. Well, would you look at that, a blanket of gas that

blocks much of the radiation has formed. Sometimes, it’s just too easy. But still, what’s the point of going on land if there’s no food?

Now, I hear you ask, “what if plants managed to grow on land?”

(No I don’t. But I don’t care.)

Well, that's a great question, because that’s what exactly happened. This gives a great reason for those sea-dwelling creatures to come up to land. But there’s a slight problem. They can’t do it without suffocating or dehydration in a bit of time. Let’s wait for them to be naturally selected into something a bit more convenient.

Maybe a few million years.

Evolution begins Natural selection favoured the fish with stronger fins that could move on land better, which even-

Size XXL extinction It’s been a bit of time (not too long, just around 80 million years), and everything is now huge, like fish, animals, and bugs because of the oxygen or something like that. Don’t worry, because it won’t last, as the permian extinction is happening.

Wonderful, everyone is dead. No just kidding, only like a meager 90 percent died. Some of the surviving lizards are going to become dinosaurs, those large lizard creatures. Actually, we don’t really know if they were warm blooded or cold blooded. Let’s start with the triassic period. This is when the first dinosaurs come into existence. These dinosaurs are smaller than the dinosaurs we would think of today, and they have long legs they inherited from their

Fig. 2. Evolution of fish fins to limbs (Curiosity Generation, 2013)

tually led to legs being formed.

They’ve also adapted their air bladders, which were originally used for buoyancy, as lungs for use on land. But what about their offspring? These amphibians can’t fully keep out of the water because they would have to go back into the water to lay their eggs. Soft eggs just won’t do on land. Obviously, the solution is a hard shell, but this is where another problem arises. Hard shells can’t be fertilised because, well, it’s a shell. (Now I realize we are actually sort of getting into the biological aspect of things. How hypocritical.) So they get a great idea. They fertilise the eggs before laying them, meaning the baby is now in liquid, in the egg, which is on land. This now lets the amphibians transcend to a reptile.

sea-dwelling ancestors. These small dinosaurs thrive because of their speed and they’ll grow larger as time goes on. This is real bad news for mammals, because they can’t really compete with these giants, which means that they have to grow smaller, so that they can survive. Here comes the Jurassic age, where the smaller dinosaurs just evolve to become birds, where the carnivores become more carnivorous and the herbivores become more herbivorous. This is when everything that isn't getting smaller gets larger and when the mammals are so small they’re virtually nonexistent. This one’s the last now, the Cretaceous period, where everythings looks a bit familiar, with famous dinosaurs like the Tyrannosaurus, Pterodactyl, and the Triceratops. To be honest,

those 3 are like 90 percent of the dinosaurs that I know. All this is looking quite bleak for the little mammals in their little caves and logs, but you don’t really have to worry about much of that because a big meteor thing just crashed into Earth (maybe) and now all the dinosaurs are dead except for the birds because they had more stuff they could eat.

Australopithecus This is great for the mammals, because now they can roam free instead of being hunted by dinosaurs. Obviously this means that the mammals can become larger and more diverse, instead of living in little caves, holes, and logs.

There’s one that just learned to climb trees and also grab things - this is pretty useful for them because it allows for greater dexterity, and also lets them swing from trees and away from predators.

Normally, these “monkeys” would just stay on their trees swinging from each one, but as the lack of trees to inhabit start forcing these primates out of their trees, they’ll gradually start walking on their two feet, until they start having an uncanny resemblance to humans.

Walking on two legs, or bipedal movement, lets them use their arms to pick food, throw rocks, bang rocks together, and maybe even use tools. But that’s not really going to help unless they have a great way of scaring and driving off predators. Luckily, these pre-hominids are able to make use of fire, or the *ahem “state of burning that produces flames that send out heat and light, and might produce smoke”. Hold on.

That’s us. Those are humans, with simple languages and clothes and fire. I mean, they still have a long way to go, but in the long run, they are, or what will be, us. And that’s how it started.

Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 29

CAN EARTH BE

REPLACEABLE? Single-use Earth, discard after Anti-terraforming Writer: Jay Yaejoon Jung '27 Editor: Chandler Geumbee Ahn '25

C

AN WE STOP the temperature of Earth skyrocketing every single minute? Can we prevent islands from sinking underwater? Can we turn the air quality back to normal? Ok, let’s face it. Earth is not in its best condition at the moment. Earth has been used too roughly and wasted by ignorant people. Some people started to have doubts tapping them on the back of their heads. “Is there a place to live when Earth is no longer habitable?” This idea was, in fact, both concerning and interesting enough for many scientists to start conducting ‘serious’ research about the alternative of Earth; commonly addressed as Earth 2.0. One of the projects that were and still are very prominent to our beliefs of Earth 2.0 is a project called “Kepler Mission” conducted by NASA. The many planets scrutinized by NASA are surprisingly similar to Earth and have the potential for living organisms to adapt to it as their new habitat.

Fig. 1. Kepler 456b

The main drive of the Kepler Mission is to find a planet with similar aspects to Earth so that people we can prepare to live on that planet after Earth is no longer able to sustain life. There are three main elements of life that are necessary for any faintest life form to habit in a new environment. The first and the most obvious need is sunlight. Sunlight is a very crucial source of energy to all living creatures, warming them and providing them vitamin D. The habitable zone is the perfect place for a planet to embrace living organisms with a balanced amount of sunlight. The next aspect needed is a water supply.

According to Harvard University, water is a ‘Universal Solvent’ and therefore most organisms cannot 30 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

live without the existence of water. Another element is a sustainable food source. The form could be anything; solid, liquid, or gas, but the crucial fact is that it needs to give fuel to the body, making it function.

So, wrapping things up, to find a sustainable planet that behaves similar to Earth, we need to ensure sunlight, water, and food sources exist. A planet that sufficiently fulfills all the criteria could possibly be the next habitat for humanity.

Planet buffet There are a few planets that are highly befitting for cultivating. One of them is Kepler 452b. Based on NASA’s research on different planets, this is so far the smallest habitable planet among the diverse expanse of planets in the Habitable zone. It has a diameter 60% larger than Earth’s diameter, which leads to G2, a stronger form of gravity. Even, considering the substantially larger size compared to Earth, the orbit of this attractive planet is only 385 days, only 5% more than the Earth’s orbit which is 365 days.

This planet is accompanied by a Sun which is just 1.5 billion years older and 20°C higher. It is surprisingly similar to our system.

Another habitable planet recently discovered (Apr 16th, 2020) is Kepler 1649 c. This planet is very much anticipated for further because according to CNN, it is the most similar planet to Earth from the 2681 planets observed during the Kepler Mission.

It is also one of the closest planets (only 300 lightyears away) to Earth. It is also in the Habitable zone and possesses similar, almost identical conditions to the temperature and size of Earth.

Fig. 2. Habitable zone

Are we really moving?

Other alternatives were also mentioned. Kepler 22b is also a very likely and Earth-like planet for humans and animals to live. The planet is 578 lightyears away from Earth near the constellation of a Swan (Cygnus). The planet Kepler 22b has a diameter twice the size of Earth’s diameter, but still, the orbit is similar. It also has a host Sun that is orbiting around, which is only a bit colder than our own Sun at the moment. This at first glance brought up a concern that the planet will be too cold for humans to habit. However, this problem was soon resolved when NASA found out that the planet was closer to the Sun, maintaining almost equal temperature on the surface of Earth. These three planets are so far the closest behaving planets to Earth and have the potential for humans and animals to inhabit its soil.

ble at: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap111207.html Architectmagazine.com(2021).[online] Available at: https://www.architectmagazine.com/technology/going-underground CBS 58. A New potentially habitable exoplanet is similar in size and temperature to Earth. [online] Available at: https://www.cbs58.com/news/new-potentially-habitable-exoplanet-is-similar-in-size-and-temperature-to-earth Krishna, S. (2020). What is the Habitable Zone?[online] The Planetary Society.

Available at: https://www.planetary.org/articles/what-isthe-habitable-zone NASA.(2011).NASA’s Kepler Mission Discovers Bigger, Older Cousin to Earth.[online] Available at: https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-kepler-mission-discovers-bigger-older-cousin-to-earth Sargen, M.(2019).Biological roles of Water: Why is water necessary for life?[online] Science in the News.

Available at: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/uncategorized/2019/biological-roles-of-water-why-is-water-necessary-for-life/ Fig 1: Wikipedia Contributors (2019). Kepler-452b. [online] Wikipedia.

Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler-452b

Fig. 3. Universe, extremely large.

Many planets in space are estimated to be very similar to Earth. However, theories are merely thoughts until they are proven to be true. So, in reality, is it possible to find and reach what we now call Earth 2.0? Is it a dream that would suddenly puff away, throwing us back to reality? Well, the most reasonable answer at the moment is that we do not have a perfect replacement for Earth. No environment in the wide expanse of the cosmic background has promised us insurance just in case the planet has unknown elements that prevent species from living on it. Even if we continue the “Kepler Project” and other research, we need to keep in mind that Earth is a magnificent gift conjured up by the slimmest chances possible. Even the warm sunlight, the piercing winds of the deepest winters, and the natural disasters that tackle us are actually a privilege given as species on Earth to enjoy. Earth is limited. Just because the universe is abundant with stars, it does not mean that Earth is just a mere planet among them. Earth is special, and we as humans have to cherish it.

20 years later…

“Why research alternatives of Earth?”

“We already have one.”

Works Cited apod.nasa.gov. (n.d.). APOD: 2011 December 7 Kepler 22b: An Almost Earth Orbiting an Almost Sun. [online] Availa-

Fig 2: Nevres, M.Ö. (n.d.). Habitable Zone explained by astrophysicist. [online] Our Planet. Available at: https:// ourplnt.com/habitable-zone/ [Accessed 28 Sep. 2021].

Fig 3: Ananthaswamy, A. (n.d.). How Heavy is the Universe? Conflicting Answers Hint at New Physics. [online] Scientific American. Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-heavy-is-the-universe-conflicting-answers-hint-at-new-physics/ [Accessed 28 Sep. 2021].

Further Reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Douglas Adams, Megadodo (1979). + Irreverent, subversive, and dangerously witty, humankind's place as a blip on the grand scale of cosmic existence has never been more humorously articulated than in Douglas Adams's The Guide. As Earth is mowed down to make way for a hyperspace expressway, Arthur Dent, a hapless "ape-descended human", finds himself launched upon a cross-galaxy adventure. Still clad in his dressing gown, Arthur shoots from crisis to crisis while trying to regain control over his life, ultimately settling on the rewarding career of a sandwich maker.

Restaurants! Presidents! The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything! It's all here, folks.

Artemis: Andy Weir, Crown (2017). + Meet Jazz Bashara, Moon inhabitant, professional porter and contraband smuggler. Jazz must stop a criminal syndicate from seizing control of Artemis, the first human settlement on the Moon—and straighten out a few kinks in her personal life in the process.

Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 31

THE GEMINI STAR SAILORS CHANDLER

GEUMBEE

AHN‘25 A LANDMARK TWIN STUDY EXAMINES THE EFFECT

OF EXTENDED SPACE STAY ON HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

32 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

M

ONOZYGOTIC TWINS have long offered scientists a tantalizing model for testing the effect of environment on human development. It was Sir Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, who pioneered the use of identical twins to study the role of genes and environment on human development (Aubert-Mason, 2009) (Burbridge, 2011).

Galton issued several hundred questionnaires to parents of identical twins, asking to what extent the similarities and differences between the siblings had been caused by their experiences (Ibid.). He coined the term “nature vs. nurture”, which came to characterize the conflict of inheritance versus environment in shaping human development and character.

Following Galton, twin studies grew in both number and variety, crossing into subjects ranging from hereditary obesity to the search for the chimerical ‘gay gene’ (Than, 2016). Twins freed researchers from the tyranny of lab mice and allowed them to conduct tests on genetically identical humans — commodities which could not, as peas or elegant nematodes or frogs could, be grown and killed in a lab in monthly croppings. In March of 2015, 140 years after Galton’s questionnaires, brothers Mark and Scott Kelly became participants in a twin study misleadingly dubbed, as though it was the only one, the ‘Twins Study’ (Burakoff, 2019). Only this time, the scale of the Study, at least in terms of sheer stratospheric height, completely eclipsed all others of its kind.

One of the twins was going to be sent into space.

Stellar ambitions NASA had had its sights set on long-term crewed missions for decades. Concepts seemingly lifted from the pages of Valérian — excursions to Mars, a research base on the moon — pockmarked the calendars of Johnson Space Centre’s researchers. In order to translate ambitions into reality, however, NASA first had to contend with a question that evaded the grasp of standard experimentation. What would happen to the human body during an extended stay in space? An exploratory Mars mission could take up to two or three years, while most of NASA’s space expeditions had lasted six months or less. Extended missions beyond Earth orbit could have potentially dangerous effects on astronauts’ bodies. Without finding an answer to the question, the dream of human colonies on Mars, hotels embedded in moon craters, and private homes locked in lower-gravity orbit, would forever remain just that: a dream.

Fig. 2. Mark (left) and Scott (right) Kelly (Edwards and Abadie, 2019).

This was where Mark and Scott Kelly, the first pair of siblings and identical twins to go into space, came in (it is just possible that the honor, if it transcended species, belongs to a pair of unnamed fruit flies launched into space during the Cold War-era space race). Born February 21, 1964, in Orange, New Jersey, the brothers had served side by side as Space Shuttle pilots for 32 years before Mark, an aspiring politician, retired in 2011. NASA now hatched an ambitious plan. Scott would live for a year in the International Space Station (ISS) while Mark remained on Earth as the homebound, control copy of Scott’s genes. After the One-Year Mission, during which both brothers’ biological statistics would be stringently monitored, Scott would be brought back to Earth and differences between the brothers’ bodies would be analysed, allowing researchers to pinpoint the areas that Scott’s space flight had affected and made different from Mark’s. It would be the longest space flight an American astronaut had ever gone on, and one of the most important scientific contributions that any single foray into space had ever made.

It’s a pity that no one at NASA thought to give the Study a more exciting name, since if we could have turned into birds and peered into the Space Centre as preparations unfolded, we would surely have caught a glimpse of a project in the workings that was every bit as thrilling as anything Ian Fleming ever spun.

In order to analyse the outcomes of the One-Year Mission, NASA assembled ten separate research teams that “coordinated and shared their data and analyses as one large, integrated research team” (von Deak and Abadie, 2020). The teams were each given

Fig. 1. Diagram of the research process of the Twins Study (Garrett-Bakelman et al, 2019).

Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 33

parts of the brothers’ bodies — one team tasked with gene expression, another responsible for gut bacteria, and so on (Burakoff, 2019). Findings from the Study would be published as cross-disciplinary studies.

Takeoff On March 27th, 2015, the Russian spacecraft carrying Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko, a Russian cosmonaut who participated in the One-Year Mission but did not take part in the Twins Study, took off for the ISS (Greenfieldboyce, 2015). Kelly and Kornienko spent 340 days in the ISS, during which novel couriers such as a Soyuz spacecraft — courtesy of the ROSCOSMOS — flew samples of Scott’s bodily fluids back to Earth (Burakoff, 2019). Mark, back on Earth, worked to introduce more responsible gun control laws in Texas as well as co-authoring a book1 that he dedicated to his brother.

Three major findings The Twins Study yielded three major findings.

Samples taken before, during, and after Scott’s 340 days in space revealed changes in gene expression, or the process by which the information encoded in a gene is used to direct the assembly of a protein molecule or a functional non-coding RNA, ultimately affecting the phenotype (Candotti, unknown). Gene expression is directed by the epigenome, the prefix epi- meaning above in Greek. An easy way to conceptualize the relationship between the epigenome and the genome, suggests Erika Hayasaki of The Atlantic, is to think of the genome as the instruments of, say, the Vienna Philharmonic, playing the tune of the “‘symphony’ of life” (Hayasaki, 2018). But instruments don’t make music on their own. They need people to play them. The epigenome would be the “musicians that help express (or silence) the performance of our genes” (Ibid.). The process of the epigenome selecting which instruments — which parts of the genome — to give or not give sound to is gene expression. And external factors such as exercise, diet, sleep, trauma, health, stress, age, and disease have all been shown to have significant effects on the epigenome. That an extended stay in space affects

Fig. 3. Diagram of telomere with TTAGGG base repeats (Yourgenome.org, 2021).

34 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

Fig. 4. The Study timeline (Edwards and Abadie, 2019).

gene expression in itself is expected; it’s the specifics of which genes have been muted or brought out as a result that are interesting.

Chris Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell Medicine, led the team that studied the DNA and RNA modifications that would signal epigenetic adaptation. His team found that Scott’s gene expression produced a greater number of variables during the latter stages of the flight. More than six times as many differences in gene expressions cropped up over the latter 6 months compared to the beginning (Burakoff, 2019).

Mason reported his findings to be “somewhat surprising”, as he’d expected the body to stop adapting after an initial adjustment period. Andrew Feinberg, a professor and medical researcher at Johns Hopkins University, headed a team that focused on methyl groups of the DNA and RNA, which are chemical markers that often signal epigenetic change. His team found that Scott and Mark’s DNA underwent similar amounts of epigenetic change — a finding characterized as “not worrisome” by Feinberg. 90% of the modified gene expression returned to baseline after Scott returned to Earth, which Mason believes is a sign that the body can recover from the stresses of long-term space flight.

The second finding is slightly more worrying. A team led by Susan Bailey, professor of radiation and cancer biology at Colorado State University, focused on Scott and Mark’s telomeres, or the “caps” found at both ends of the chromosomes that protect ends from “degradation and illegitimate recombination” (Shammas, 2011). Telomeres become shorter and shorter after each round of DNA replication until eventually they are 1 The book, titled Astrotwins: Project Blastoff, is a fictional story about twin brothers named Scott and Mark who build a space capsule in their grandfather’s backyard and try to send the first child into orbit. Mark co-authored the book with Martha Freeman and published a sequel, Astrotwins—Project Rescue, in 2016.

As of 2022, Mark is two years into his term as a Texas senator, and serves as an independent safety advisor to SpaceX. He has announced his candidacy for re-election in 2022.

too short to work, causing cells to age and stop functioning properly. On Earth, this process takes place over a lifetime, making telomeres function doubly as biological clocks of age. By looking at the telomeres of Scott’s white blood cells, Bailey’s team found that Scott’s telomeres actually lengthened during space flight. “It was exactly the opposite of what we had imagined,” Bailey told the Smithsonian in 2019. “We proposed that, in fact, because of all the really unique stresses and exposures to things like microgravity, space radiation and isolation … [it] really seemed like they would accelerate telomere loss in space.”

Once Scott returned to Earth, the lengths of his telomeres returned to pre-flight levels. In the months following his return, however, a greater number of his telomeres were “lost or critically shortened” (Burakoff, 2019). As telomere length is related to aging, cancer, and cardiovascular diseases, this could be a potential concern.

Despite the press attention surrounding Scott’s telomeres, Bailey’s team is unable to pinpoint exactly when the change occurred during the voyage. The team hoped to analyze the activity of telomerase, an enzyme that extends telomeres but gets switched off in most adult body cells, to see if it was activated while Scott was in flight. The material they needed, however, was lost in the journey — telomerase activity in Scott’s samples was dead upon the Soyuz’s arrival on Earth, possibly due to the heat of the re-entry (Ibid.).

The final major finding is strangely appropriate for the times. Researchers discovered that Scott’s immune system functioned in the same way in space as it did on Earth — a good sign for if humans ever need to be vaccinated in space (von Deak and Abadie, 2020).

As the sample size for NASA’s Twins Study is as small as can be, these findings are in no way complete nor should they be touted as general truths — you can live longer in space! — before further research is conducted. The Twins Study is, however, a landmark investigation into the effect of space stay on the human body. As we diffuse past the gravitational wraps of our planet and plant our flags in increasingly obsolete stretches of the cosmos, the importance of Scott and Mark Kelly’s contributions to our understanding of the human body’s adaptation to extraterrestrial life will only increase.

class. Br J Hist Sci. 2001 Sep;34(122 Pt 3):323-40. doi: 10.1017/s0007087401004332. PMID: 11700679.

Edwards, Monica, and Laurie Abadie. “NASA Twins Study Confirms Preliminary Findings.” Edited by Kelli Mars, NASA, NASA, 31 Jan. 2018, https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ nasa-twins-study-confirms-preliminary-findings.

Garrett-Bakelman, Francine E., et al. “The NASA Twins Study: A Multidimensional Analysis of a Year-Long Human Spaceflight.” Science, vol. 364, no. 6436, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aau8650.

Greenfieldboyce, Nell. “NASA to Study a Twin in Space and His Brother on Earth.” NPR, NPR, 27 Mar. 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/03/27/395536140/nasa-to-study-a-twin-inspace-and-his-brother-on-earth.

Hayasaki, Erika. “Identical Twins Hint at How Environments Change Gene Expression.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 17 May 2018, https://www.theatlantic. com/science/archive/2018/05/twin-epigenetics/560189/.

Howell, Elizabeth. “Scott Kelly: The American Astronaut Who Spent a Year in Space.” Space.com, Space, 4 Sept.

2019, https://www.space.com/32907-scott-kelly-astronaut-biography.html.

New Jersey Monthly. “Astronaut Scott Kelly Is Earthbound Once More.” New Jersey Monthly, 10 Nov. 2017, https:// njmonthly.com/articles/science/astronaut-scott-kelly-earthbound/.

Perez, Jason. “One-Year Mission & Twins Study.” NASA, NASA, 23 Feb. 2016, https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/one-yearmission-and-twins.

Shammas, Masood A. “Telomeres, lifestyle, cancer, and aging.” Current opinion in clinical nutrition and metabolic care vol. 14,1 (2011): 28-34. doi:10.1097/ MCO.0b013e32834121b1 Than, Ker. “A Brief History of Twin Studies.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 4 Mar. 2016, https:// www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/brief-history-twin-studies-180958281/. von Deak, Amanda, and Laurie Abadie. “FAQs – NASA Twins Study.” NASA, NASA, 8 Nov. 2018, https://www. nasa.gov/twins-study/faq.

Yourgenome.org. “What Is a Telomere?” Facts, The Public Engagement Team at the Wellcome Genome Campus, 21 July 2021, https://www.yourgenome.org/facts/what-is-atelomere.

Works Cited Aubert-Marson D. Sir Francis Galton: le fondateur de l’eugénisme [Sir Francis Galton: the father of eugenics].

Med Sci (Paris). 2009 Jun-Jul;25(6-7):641-5. French. doi: 10.1051/medsci/2009256-7641. PMID: 19602363.

Burakoff, Maddie. “NASA’s Study of Astronaut Twins Creates a Portrait of What a Year in Space Does to the Human Body.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 11 Apr. 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ nasas-twins-study-creates-portrait-human-body-afteryear-space-180971945/.

Burbridge D. Francis Galton on twins, heredity and social

Fig. 5. Scott juggles fruits aboard the ISS (New Jersey Monthly, photo courtesy of Penguin Random House, 2017).

Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 35

Death by Spatium This senile act of an atheist The question of a lifetime Writer: Chandler Geumbee Ahn '25

S

TROKES, DIABETES, arthritis of joints, followed by ulcers, uremia, and near blindness of sight— he is losing control of the cauda equina, the bundle of nerves that cup around his bladder and bowels, and his mind begins to unravel. The doctor confesses that he feels he is swindling her, for there is nothing more he can do except to repeat the forlorn prognosis. She bears it. She steals ugly jags of crying in the bathroom. And she can still not accept that it has come to this.

“I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured.”

Jean-Paul says it simply, without expression. The sky is clear and without clouds, limited only by the concave hang of power lines. It seems a paltry confession for a man to make in his twilight years, if not for the fact that he is her lover.

“In short,” he continues, “a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God (Geisler, 2012).”

Three days later, he dies. She refuses to answer the door when the priest arrives to bless the death of the greatest atheist of the century.

Pulmonary edema Such is a long-form reconstruction of the sentiments expressed in the recordings of Simone de Beauvoir, prominent feminist author and longtime partner of the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, circa 1980—

36 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

the year Sartre was known to have made the above concession regarding his lifetime of militant atheism. Sartre, arguably the 20th century’s most prominent advocate of societies ruled not by providence but men’s will, drew Beauvoir’s ire for his later recantation of scepticism and concomitant conversion into the Catholic faith. Sartre’s friends and colleagues reacted with shock to his repudiation of his apostatic philosophies — to the point where Beauvoir denounced it as "this senile act of a turncoat" in the pages of the Nouvel Observatuer (Schott, 1984).

The cause of Sartre’s death was pulmonary edema, wherein the lungs are deprived of oxygen due to the abnormal accumulation of fluid in the external compartments of the lung (Nelson and McMorrow, 2002). One of the most common causes of pulmonary edema is congestive heart failure (CHF), a cardiac dysfunction characterized by the heart’s progressive decline in condition. The heart gradual-

Fig. 1. Pulmonary edema is characterized by the detection of fluid in chest radiographs (MIT CSAIL, 2021).

ly stops circulating blood throughout the body and thus creates a backup of pressure in the small blood vessels of the lungs (American Heart Association, 2017). This causes fluid to leak from the breaks in the vessels, resulting in the retention of fluid in the lungs that leads to a fatal deprivation of oxygen from the body.

Like Sartre’s lungs, these ‘potential spaces’ in the human body that are able to be filled with gas or oxygen are called spatiums, or anatomic spaces—the Latin spatium being the progenitor of the English word ‘space’. Spatiums are like balloons inside the human body that haven’t been inflated. When they are ‘opened’ and filled, the body can suffer conditions such as pneumothorax, edema, and pericardial effusion.

The link between the detection of fluid in the lungs and congestive heart failure allows pulmonary edema to act as one of the most common forewarnings

of impending acute heart failure, wherein the cardiac abortion occurs very suddenly and is considered a medical emergency as opposed to a chronic condition (Connor-Simons, 2020). Making exact determinations on the level of fluid is however a difficult process and requires doctors to rely on subtle X-ray interpretations, oftentimes engendering inconsistent diagnoses.

To better handle the kind of expert nuance required in deciphering the X-rays, a group led by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) developed a machine-learning algorithm that is able to quantify the severity of the edema through chest radiographs, grading on a four-level scale ranging from 0 (healthy) to 3 (very, very

bad). The system was able to assign accurate levels more than half the time, and had a 90% correct diagnosis rate for level 3 cases. The team was optimistic that better edema diagnosis would aid clinicians not only in the treatment of heart attacks but also sepsis and kidney failure, both closely associated with edemas.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s death was caused by the opening of anatomic space, and was mourned by the descent of 50,000 Parisians onto boulevard du Montparnasse on the morning of April 19th, 1980, in weeping accompaniment of Sartre’s funeral cortege. Scientific advancements may very well signify the end of the epoch of deaths by spatium. After four decades, however, the question of whether science will also be able to answer the enigma of providence that Sartre gave his life to remains to be seen.

Works Cited 1. Geisler, Norman L. The Big Book of Christian Apologetics : An a to Z Guide.

Grand Rapids, Mi, Baker Books, 2012.

2. Schott, Webster. “The Last Days of JeanPaul Sartre.” Washington Post, 20 May 1984, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ entertainment/books/1984/05/20/thelast-days-of-jean-paul-sartre/3f75987e69af-43f7-a2ff-a386b7947c6c/. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.

3. Nelson, Angela M., and Mary Ellen McMorrow. “Neurogenic Pulmonary Edema.”

The American Journal of Nursing, vol. 102, no. 102, 2002, p. 44, www.jstor.org/stable/24466400. Accessed 2 Apr. 2021.

4. Conner-Simons, A., 2020. Anticipating heart failure with machine learning. MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Available at: https://news.mit. edu/2020/anticipating-heart-failure-machine-learning-1001 [Accessed May 25, 2021].

5. American Heart Association, 2017. Types of Heart Failure. www.heart.org. Available at: https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/heart-failure/what-is-heart-failure/ types-of-heart-failure.

Further Reading The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing: Edited by Richard Dawkins, Oxford (2008). + A collection of landmark essays in science with introductions by Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene. From mathematicians-turned-geneticists to nobel prize-winning astrophysicists, Book is a foray into the minds of brilliant scientific thinkers and how they perceive the workings of the world that we inhabit.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter: Simone de Beauvoir, Harper Perennial (1958). + Dubbed Simone de Beauvoir's "lost novel of early love", Memoirs is the first and best known of four autobiographical novels that charts Beauvoir's departure from a bourgeois lifestyle in favor of striking out with Sartre into the halls of the Sorbonne.

Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 37

SUPERNOVAE Prepare to be breathtaken Beauties on an astronomical scale Writer: Ella Soyoung Hong '25 Editor: Remy Woobin Lee '25

I

MAGINE SEEING a star explode. BOOM. Looking Type I supernovae are the result of the transfer of at an explosion so big and so colorful. This is mass within a binary system that is made up of a called a supernova, the biggest explosion that white dwarf star and an evolving giant star. A white humanity has ever seen. Supernova is a stellar explodwarf is a small compact star generally about onesion that produces an extremely bright object made tenth the size of the Sun. It is the final stage of life of plasma that declines to invisibility over weeks or for all low-mass stars. Its potential to become a sumonths. This transient astronomical event occurs pernova occurs when the white dwarf orbits around during the last evolutionary stages of a massive star a larger star. The two eventually move close enough or when a white dwarf is triggered into a runaway that the gas and other matter of the large companion nuclear fusion. The original object which is called star transfers to the white dwarf. The mass and gravthe progenitor, either collapses or to a neutron star ity of the white dwarf increase to such a degree that or black hole is completely destroyed. The peak opit becomes unstable and collapses. This collapse retical luminosity of a supernova can be comparable leases tremendous amounts of energy. Some of the to that of an entire galaxy before fading over several star matter blasts outward in a supernova explosion. weeks or months.

The remains of the white dwarf crash inward formSupernovae happen more often than you might ing a black hole. think. One occurs somewhere Works Cited in the universe every second.

Anon, 2021. Supernovae However, the Milky Way only information and facts. Scihas an average of two superence. Available at: https:// novae per century, and trying www.nationalgeographic. to spot one as it happens is com/science/article/superstill very tricky. The last one novae directly observed in our galaxy Anon, Five amazing facts was over 400 years ago and its about supernovae: Space namesake, Johannes Kepler, facts – astronomy, the soconsidered SN 1604 a new lar system & outer space: type of star at the time.

All about space magazine.

Supernovae have generally Space Facts Astronomy the two types: one where the suSolar System Outer Space pernovae are produced when All About Space Magamassive stars die. And the othzine. Available at: https:// er is rarer but is created when www.spaceanswers.com/ Fig. 1. NASA's rendition of Kepler's supernova. they have a very strange binary deep-space/five-amaz(NASA, 2016) star situation. ing-facts-about-supernoAs I have mentioned before, there are two types of vae/ [Accessed September 24, 2021]. supernovae. I would usually start off in numerical orAnon, 2021. What is a supernova? NASA. Availder but since Type II supernovae happen more often able at: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/superthe Type I, I would like to start off with the second nova/en/#:~:text=What%20causes%20a%20 type. Type II of the supernovae is the one which peosupernova%3F,out%20with%20a%20fantasple usually think of when they hear the word, “sutic%20bang!&text=Heat%20generates%20prespernovae”. Type II supernovae happen when huge sure%2C%20and%20the,keeps%20that%20star%20 single stars die in a very dramatic way. As young from%20collapsing. [Accessed September 24, 2021]. stars, they generate energy from the conversion of Anon, What are the different kinds of supernohydrogen to helium. As the star ages, this hydrogen vae? Phys.org. Available at: https://phys.org/ source is depleted. The star’s core contracts under news/2016-03-kinds-supernovae.html#:~:texthe pressure of gravity raising its temperature high t=There%20are%20two%20main%20types,I%20 enough to burn helium as fuel. Once depleted of heand%20the%20Type%20II. [Accessed September lium the star’s core contracts again.

24, 2021]. Image credits - NASA at Unsplash

38 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

“Are we alone?”

A

N ANSWER FROM astronomer Carl Sagan sums up pretty much everything; “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”. So far nothing has been officially proven, despite thousands of annual UFO sightings worldwide (McCarthy, 2020), saucer-shaped comet Oumuamua’s visit across our solar system in 2017 (Letzer, 2020), and Pentagon’s confirmation legitimate of leaked UFO footages from 2004, 2015, and 2019, last April (Aratani, 2021).

People are absolutely obsessed with aliens, and many hold adamant belief that aliens are out somewhere (who knew there was an official ‘UFO Day’ or an ‘Extraterrestrial Abduction Day’?). In fact, the Drake Equation suggests that while the odds of the existence of an advanced alien civilization may be low, according to statistics they may just exist.

This is the renowned equation devised by astrophysicist Frank Drake in 1961 involving the multiplication of several variables, presumed to decide the approximate number of intelligent life forms. The numbers are rough and the more closer to the right hand side, the more obscure; best known values are 10/yr, 0.5, 2, 1, and 0.01, from the left respectively, thus N = L/10 (The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019). Additionally, there’s ‘optimism’ and ‘pessimism’ to be considered when determining how large L is, let alone the other equivocal variables, leading scientists to N values that stretch over a

Fig. 1. The Drake Equation.

massively extensive range from 10 to billions (Liv Boeree, 2018). The equation isn’t a serious guess; its original purpose was to stimulate a conversation at the first SETI meeting. Nowadays it is viewed as an unconventional approach, providing a basic framework for the estimation (Siegel, 2018).

Interest in alien life is greater than ever, and occasionally new findings such as the ‘300 million potentially habitable planets in our galaxy (CNN, 2019)’ puzzles us even further, taking us back to the question, ‘Are we really alone?’, or rather, ‘Where is everybody?’

This exact quote was said by Enrico Fermi in 1950 at a lunchtime conversation with his astrophysics colleagues, infamous for its dumbfounding simplicity, yet which, ironically, left the room in silence. This is the Fermi Paradox; if life is ubiquitous, where are they (Lohnes, 2019)?

Among the countless explanations to the paradox, ‘The Great Filter’ stands out somewhat notably. In this context the ‘filter’ is conceptual, representing a barrier that is tremendously devastating for life to overcome, being able to annihilate a whole civilization. A depressing hypothesis is that the Great Filter is the self destruction of a species by something so conspicuous that everyone discovers it - perhaps nuclear wars, genetic engineering, or homicidal AI. If we have already passed the Great Filter, none of these demoralizing suppositions would be our concern. Maybe the filter was the jump from prokaryote to eukaryote, or perhaps, the start of life itself.

There’s no way for us to know, but one thing is for sure- we are the one, if not, one of the very few exceptions of the universe, and life is immensely rare in defiance of numerous scientific research. Another idea is that there are a number of

Shouting blindly into Outer Space Mathematically speaking Writer: Emma Chaeun Chung '25 Editor: Chandler Geumbee Ahn '25

The Undesirable Rendezvous Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 39

alien species, but none as complex as humans. Conditions in the universe have recently become apt for life, and we happen to be one of the first intelligent civilizations. By the time we got there, the Great Filter wasn’t great anymore (Urban, 2017).

point, aliens are among us, aliens/we live in a Matrioshka Brain- a virtual reality powered by a dyson sphere (Urban, 2017) (Pomeroy, 2017).

If it is just us, it may seem like an awful waste of space. But if there was a choice, I wouldn’t choose to die for a discovery, however intriguing it might be.

Works Cited

Fig. 2. We've passed.

Fig. 3. We're lucky.

The Kardashev Scale, conceived by Soviet astronomer Kardashev in 1964, explicates the concept of the level of a species’s technological advancement. A Type 1 civilization is able to utilize all resources on its planet, Type 2 its star, and Type 3 the entire galaxy. Currently the human race is at 0.7 on the scale, predicted to reach Type 1 in a few centuries. In a nutshell, the previous case reveals that there are rarely civilizations higher than 0.7 on the scale.

Fig. 4. The Kardashev Scale.

The other scenario would, quite literally, signify human extinction. Frankly, an exception is unlikely, thus humans will perish when it meets the Great Filter as did the others. Most organisms have died, and unfortunately, so will we, sooner or later. “I hope that our Mars probes will discover nothing. It would be good news if we find Mars to be completely sterile.

Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit”, says Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom.

He explains that the more complex the life form, the worse the news, as it would further ascertain that the filter is definitely ahead (Bostrom, 2008). In this instance, explanations for the unhappened encounter include: aliens don’t bother contacting the dull-witted species in the rural side of the galaxy, superpredator civilizations exterminate life at a certain 40 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

1 Aratani, L. (2021). Pentagon confirms leaked photos and video of UFOs are legitimate. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/ apr/16/pentagon-ufos-leaked-photos-uap.

2 Bostrom, N. (2008). Where Are They? [online] MIT Technology Review. Available at: https://www.technologyreview.com/2008/04/22/220999/where-are-they/ [Accessed 26 May 2021].

3 CNN, J.Y. (2020). Our galaxy holds at least 300 million potentially habitable planets, NASA finds. [online] CNN. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/05/world/ nasa-300-million-habitable-planets-intl-hnk-scli-scn/index.html.

4 Letzter, R. (2020). Mystery of Interstellar Visitor ‘Oumuamua Gets Trickier. [online] Scientific American.

Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ mystery-of-interstellar-visitor-oumuamua-gets-trickier/.

5 Liv Boeree (2018). Fermi paradox: why haven’t we found aliens yet? [online] Vox. Available at: https://www.vox. com/science-and-health/2018/7/3/17522810/aliens-fermi-paradox-drake-equation.

6 Lohnes, K. (2019). The Fermi Paradox: Where Are All the Aliens? In: Encyclopædia Britannica. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/story/the-fermi-paradoxwhere-are-all-the-aliens.

7 McCarthy, N. (2020). Infographic: Has E.T. Gone Home? [online] Statista Infographics. Available at: https://www. statista.com/chart/8452/ufo-sightings-are-at-recordheights/.

8 Pomeroy, R. (2017). 12 Possible Reasons We Haven’t Found Aliens. [online] Space.com. Available at: https:// www.space.com/37157-possible-reasons-we-haventfound-aliens.html.

9 Siegel, E. (2018). The Drake Equation Is Broken; Here’s How To Fix It. [online] Forbes. Available at: https://www. forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/04/05/the-drakeequation-is-broken-heres-how-to-fix-it/?sh=2af99ce113ca [Accessed 15 May 2021].

10 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (2019). Drake equation | astronomy | Britannica. In: Encyclopædia Britannica. [online] Available at: https://www.britannica. com/science/Drake-equation.

11 Urban, T. (2017). The Fermi Paradox - Wait But Why. [online] Wait But Why. Available at: https://waitbutwhy. com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html.

Further Reading Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space: Carl Sagan, Random House (1994).

The "Pale Blue Dot" is a famous photo of Earth taken by the Voyager probe. The photo depicts Earth as a nearly indiscernible blue speck against the black backdrop of the cosmos. Sagan's Pale Blue Dot outlines poignantly Earth's insignificance in the grand scheme of the universe, and puts into perspective how humans' drama pales in comparison to the grandeur of the universe that we fail to appreciate as much as we should.

DIFFERENT COLOURS OF

SUNSETS The Little Prince didn't know this The atmosphere makes the mood Writer: Hyunseo Kim '25 Editor: Chandler Geumbee Ahn '25

C

OMMONLY REFERRED to by its sobriquet ‘The Red Planet’, Mars is the fourth planet from our sun and is the second smallest planet in the entire solar system. Mars has similar inclination and rotational axes to Earth, and is the most Earthlike planet in our solar system. Both planets, Earth and Mars, have the same amount of dry land surface area. However, as the two are essentially a different planet, there do exist large differences between two of them—one of them being sunsets.

Fig. 1. Movements of light particles.

Pale tint of the orange coloured sky is such a common sight on our home planet Earth. Depending on each planet, however, the colour of the sunset differs.

On Mars, the sun has a blue glow. Unique sunset colours aren’t phenomena unique to Mars. According to NASA, Uranus’ sunset sky transitions from blue to turquoise. One of Saturn's moons, on Titan, as the sun dips beneath the horizon, the colour changes from yellow to orange, then to brown. The colours

of the sunset of each planet are not identical. These lights, shades and hues are a product of the planets’ atmosphere. The atmosphere of Earth is made up of tiny molecules of gases, which are largely oxygen and nitrogen. These are really effective at scattering, or the absorption and re-emission of light particles in different directions. Small molecules and its selective type of scattering is a process called ‘Rayleigh scattering’. This provides us with a blue sky during noon time, but at sunrise or sunset, the result of the sun travelling in farther distance, more of the blue sky scatters away. This action reaches our line of sight, which creates the vibrant shades of red that we see.

According to Ehler’s statement, if any of the planets’ atmosphere is dominated by gas, the longer wavelength colors and the patterns will become more dominant at sunset. According to NASA, the hydrogen, helium and methane gas particles scatter the blue and green wavelengths during the absorption (largely not re-emitting) longer red wavelengths.

As blue light is scattered away relatie to the green wavelengths in this procedure, this creates a blue sky which turns turquoise at sunset.

Everything is about ‘how the sunset is going to be different’, if a planet's atmosphere is controlled by something rather than gases. According to Ehler, the atmospheric gas density is just about 1/80th of what it is here. Also Ehler says that the scattering is dominated by dust particles which are larger.

To summarise all these theories of why the colour of the sunset differs, it is because the dust particles in Mars’ atmosphere scatter away the red light while allowing blue light through. It is the same way as it does on the Earth, except for the red sunset under blue daytime skies. Difference between those two is the composition of dust particles and atmospheric makeup. Most CO2 and iron oxide dust is on Mars, while Earth has nitrogen oxygen and a variety of dust and aerosols.

Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 41

Fig. 2. Contrary to the name 'The Red Planet', Mars' sunsets are tinged a beautiful pale blue. It's a wonder that no Mars movies have concentrated on the beauty of the sunset, as there is something positively poetic about the contrast of blue rays on red rock. How many of us will actually get to see this in real life?

Works Cited https://www.weather.gov/fsd/mars#:~:text=Atmosphere%20and%20Weather%3A%20The%20Martian,composed%20primarily%20of%20carbon%20 dioxide.&text=Temperatures%20on%20Mars%20average%20about,%2C%20to%20%2B70%20degrees%20F. https://mars.nasa.gov/mars-exploration/overlay-hu-

mans/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars https://sola rsystem.nasa.gov/news/925/what-does-asunrise-sunset-look-like-on-mars/ https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_ feature_347.html

A poet’s accusation

Unweaving the Rainbow Does science diminish nature’s beauty?

K

eats despaired at Newton’s discovery of the spectra of visual light. Newton set an unreachable bar for students studying at home during a pandemic when in the 1660s, sent packing to his childhood home because of an outbreak of the plague in the university town of Cambridge, he discovered that white light is a blend of many colours. Keats derided Newton for “unweaving the rainbow”, robbing nature of its beauty by needling at the science behind a phenomenon that was beautiful in part because it was unexplainable. Boey Kim Cheng, a Singaporean poet, later reworded Keats’s accusation: Cheng’s dystopia is a city where “All spaces are gridded, filled with permutations of possibilities,” leaving no nook for the secrets of nature to eddy in.

Does knowing the science behind nature inevitably diminish its beauty? Stars, once “in lone splendour hung aloft the night”, are now dissected in textbooks as mere fistfuls of plasma. Autumn, once with “hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind”, is

42 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

now known to be caused by that force which an apple and Newton conspired to discover, gravity. The rainbow, Keats’s phenomenon of choice to grieve, no longer bows over the pot of a leprechaun but fades when raindrops cease to reflect and refract.

Science reduces the blank spaces in human knowledge, and with it the territory of poets, artists, and writers, whose job it is to fill up those gaps with dragons, jewels, and magic.

Keats died in 1821 in Rome, Italy, from the poet’s disease of consumption, or tuberculosis. Henry David Thoreau, a later American naturalist, praised tuberculosis in his journals, writing, “Decay and disease are often beautiful, like [...] the hectic glow of consumption.” Both Thoreau and Keats, of course, were dead in 1882 when Robert Koch discovered the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. Under a microscope, the bone-white colonies of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, molehilled like malignant mounds of snow, weren’t so beauti- Chandler Geumbee Ahn ‘25 ful anymore.

The Link Between the Ocean and Outer Space Scuba diving into the Cosmos Experience speaks volumes Writer: Liz Jaeeun Chung ’25 Editer: Chandler Geumbee Ahn ’25

T

HE FEELING OF plunging from the cliff into the howling waves is unforgettable. As soon as I dive into the frigid water, the sound of the clashing waves subside and I notice myself surrounded in absolute stillness. After finding the body’s neutral buoyancy, I can finally rest myself in the water.

Facing the surface and looking at the distant shimmering of the sunlight is the most dazzling view. The only thing I can hear is the sound of my breath, inhaling and exhaling from the oxygen tank attached to the back of my vest. These several experiences of scuba diving and achieving a certificate made me realize: the ocean is a lot like outer space.

I guess this may be considered as an ironic statement since the ocean and outer space are the total opposites in some way. Yet, there are actually plentiful reasons as tohow the ocean is related to space. First and foremost, scuba diving is one of the closest experiences we have on Earth that simulates the sensation of floating in space. Most importantly, astronauts are able to experience neutral buoyancy, which is a term to describe something that has an equal tendency to float as it does sink. Not only this, underwater environments provide challenges in terms of temperature, pressure, visibility, and movement. Due to these reasons, NASA has been training astronauts to perform in neutrally buoyant underwater conditions and prepare them for zero-gravity. This underwater training has been taking place since 1966 when Buzz Aldrin prepared the Gemini 12 Mission in a large pool in Maryland. From 2001, The NEEMO, which is the NASA extreme environment operation program, trained astronauts in the ocean on a larger, and more advanced scale. For instance, in June 2019, the NEEMO 23 crew

Fig. 2.

Fig. 1. NEEMO 23 performing a mission in aquatic conditions.

completed spending nine days at the Aquarius Reef Base. Under 62 feet below the ocean surface, the team tested deep space technologies and procedures. Csilla Ari D’Agostino, a member of the NEEMO, mentioned that the data gathered from these missions could help picture the astronauts’ behavior in outer space as well as prepare them for emergency situations.

When we consider the technology that has allowed us to explore both places, the parallels between space and ocean exploration continue. Here is an astonishing case: Jacques Piccard was best known for his record-breaking deep dive in the bathyscaphe Trieste, in 1960. The Trieste was inspired by the first bathyscaphe designed by his father, Auguste Piccard. Auguste Piccard was well known for his record-breaking balloon flight into the stratosphere back in 1931. As a result, he designed a capsule that could withstand decreasing exterior pressure while maintaining cabin pressure. Hence, the technical challenge and mission of exploration were the same in both cases.

Not only in terms of its zero-gravity but the ocean and space are also definitely the two most captivating frontiers of exploration in the 21st century. The ocean and space have always been unidentified areas for human beings. Humans have long wondered about the existence of extraterrestrial life underwater or in outer space, as numerous tales about mermaids and aliens generated from ancient times. Gazing up at the night sky and thinking if anyone is out there, or how we would ever meet them in the confounding depths Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 43

of space and time, has always been an unsolved question for me. Despite these endless fascinations, only 5 percent of the ocean has been explored and charted; along with space, in which only 4 percent of the visible universe has been explored. No one knows what can possibly exist in those infinite remaining areas.

Works Cited NASA. 2021. Ep 146: Neutral Buoyancy. [online] Available at: <https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/HWHAP/neutral-buoyancy> [Accessed 18 September 2021].

The Conversation. 2021. The search for extraterrestrial life

in the water worlds close to home. [online] Available at: <https://theconversation.com/the-search-for-extraterrestrial-life-in-the-water-worlds-close-to-home-73508> [Accessed 20 September 2021].

Digital.ecomagazine.com. 2021. The Fascinating Parallels Of Space And Ocean Exploration. [online] Available at: <http://digital.ecomagazine.com/publication/?i=424642&article_id=2836114&view=articleBrowser&ver=html5> [Accessed 22 September 2021].

Worldwideboat.com. 2021. [online] Available at: <https:// www.worldwideboat.com/news/miscellaneous/ocean-vsspace> [Accessed 23 September 2021].

Ocean Exploration

Down and Out in the Leagues The realm of the Atlanteans, vast and uncharted.

E

XPLORATION IS VITAL in terms of furthering our understanding of the ocean, which would allow us to manage, conserve, and regulate the seas far more effectively than we do nowadays. Although the ocean covers approximately 70% of the Earth’s surface, our understanding of the ocean is still very narrow. Despite continuous and notable discoveries, the deep ocean still holds hundreds of mysteries and benefits. When these mysteries are unearthed, ocean ecosystems can provide new sources for medical therapies and vaccines, food, energy, and more.

Discoveries will also inspire new inventions modelled on deep-sea animals’ adaptations to their harsh environment.

Many films cover ancient living creatures and places in the story. One of these is ‘The Meg’, a film which talks about the discovery of a gigantic monster, the Megalodon, and human’s survival from the danger that the Megalodon poses. These kinds of films are released and favoured by huge audiences because: (a) the wondrous aspects of the ocean intrigue humankind’s imagination and (b) ocean exploration is something unusual in our daily lives. The public will naturally be keen to learn and explore more about the theme, creating a positive conception.

Ocean exploration is also becoming a popular issue as there are wondrous creatures living under the surface of our planet. For instance, a ‘giant squid’ was captured by the OceanX team during their investigation of a shipwreck in the Red Sea. OceanX is an ocean exploration initiative founded

by Ray Dalio, who is keen to understand, enjoy, and protect our oceans. During an investigation in late 2020, large animals just like the giant squid were discovered — all unexpected finds! Researchers and scientists anticipate that there will be more and more marvellous discoveries that will occur during ocean explorations.

Humans are naturally inquisitive as a species,

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and modern explorers are still motivated by curiosity, a desire for information, and a desire for adventure. And if all of these reasons aren’t enough to persuade you to explore the ocean, you should know that it’s also a lot of fun. In addition, ocean exploration may also boost ocean literacy and encourage young people to pursue important vocations in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, thus the best way to explore our natural world and develop it. In a nutshell, we may be all inspired to explore our natural world including the oceans.

- Benjamin Hyunsuk Han ‘26

Works Cited 1 Kooser, A. (n.d.). Giant “mystery creature” filmed by scientists exploring shipwreck in the Red Sea. [online] CNET. Available at: https://www.cnet.com/news/giantmystery-creature-filmed-by-scientists-exploring-redsea-shipwreck/ 2 Ocean & Climate Platform. (2016). The deep sea: a key player to be protected for climate and ecosystems. [online] Available at: https://ocean-climate.org/en/ awareness/the-deep-sea-a-key-player-to-be-protected-for-climate-and-ecosystems/#:~:text=The%20 Deep%20Sea%20plays%20a.

3 US Department of Commerce, N.O. and A.A. (n.d.).

What Is Ocean Exploration and Why Is It Important?: NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research. [online] oceanexplorer.noaa.gov. Available at: https:// oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/backmatter/whatisexploration.html#:~:text=Ocean%20exploration%20is%20 about%20making.

4 oceanexplorer.noaa.gov. (n.d.). NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer: 2022 Expeditions Overview: NOAA Ocean Exploration. [online] Available at: https://oceanexplorer. noaa.gov/okeanos/explorations/2022-overview/welcome.html [Accessed 11 Feb. 2022].

5 Ocean Conservancy. (2021). These Recent Ocean Discoveries Will Blow Your Mind. [online] Available at: https://oceanconservancy.org/blog/2021/03/12/recent-ocean-discoveries/.

Elon Musk: ADVANCING HUMANITY Saviour of the world?

Well, definitely man of the year Writer: John Park '25 Editor: Sophie Seungyeon Shin '23

M

ANY REFER TO Elon Musk as the saviour of the world. Born and raised on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa, Elon Musk is the founder and CEO of SpaceX, Tesla Inc, The Boring Company, Hyperloop, Neuralink and Open AI. From a very young age, Elon had books with him at all times. Using his photographic memory, Elon mastered programming at the young age of 12, then sold his made-up game for $500. Being an extraordinary kid, Elon was often bullied by other children, sometimes getting beaten until he fainted, resulting in plastic surgery. Growing up, Elon often had deep thoughts about sustainability and the future of humanity. He knew one day humanity would go extinct as the Earth would become inhabitable regardless of the current situation. Thus, Elon set his path; advancing humanity.

At the age of 17, Elon moved from his hometown Pretoria South Africa to North America to attend Pencilvenia university, eventually graduating with dual bachelor degrees in economics and physics at the age of 26. Despite earning a bachelor degree in physics and economics, Elon’s interest was in high technology.

Chasing his goal, Elon moved to Silicon Valley, where his job application to Netscape, the only internet company back in 1995, was rejected. So Elon decided to make his own company: Zip 2. Zip 2 was founded in 1995 by Elon, and it functioned as it transferred physical newspapers into digital. Things seemed going well for Elon, but then reality kicked in. Having a huge student debt, Elon had to rent a small office to stay and work. Customers weren’t signing up, his technology not functioning as well as he thought so, things did not go as he planned. But the company

then started to grow, striking deals with more prominent clients, eventually selling the company for 305 million dollars in 1999, taking away $22 million by himself. Overnight, Elon became a multi-millionaire.

Despite buying a million-dollar Mclaren and starring in a CNN TV show with his fortune, Elon had a new goal; transforming the traditional banking industry.

Using $10 million from his $22 million earned from Zip 2, Elon founded a company named X.com, which became the famous Paypal in the future. Elon’s strategy for Paypal was to set a system of exponential growth, such that when a customer sends some money to a friend, the friend is automatically recruited into the system. Within this strategy, Paypal had a growth of earning a million customers in a year. Then came October 2000. Just after a year and a half from when Elon founded Paypal, Elon was fired from the position of CEO of his own company. It turns out while Elon was away for two weeks for an investment raising trip/honeymoon, the company’s management team found him not suitable to run the company, eventually replacing the CEO position of Paypal.

But as a result, things seemed to work well for Elon.

In 2002, Paypal was sold to eBay for $1.5billion, and about $165 million went to Elon. From 2003, along with the great fortune he earned from Paypal, Elon Musk started to explore further his long-term goal: advancing humanity. Elon thought of global warming as a severe issue and found the need to reduce carbon emissions to the environment. This is when Elon found the incredibly popular Tesla motors, the electric car company. He started by joining Tesla motors by funding $6.5 million eight months after Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 45

the company was created, then became the chair of the company by appointment. In 2008, Elon and the team at Tesla relentlessly worked on producing their first car: the Tesla Roadster. However, the year 2008 was extremely hard for Elon, as the global financial crisis kicked in. Led by this, just before Christmas of 2008, Tesla was about two or three days from bankruptcy. In the same year, things got even worse as his first marriage came to an end. Following the divorce with Justine, Elon then proposed to a British actor Tallulah Riley just after dating for only 10 days.

However, in 2013 this relationship also ended in divorce. But in the year 2013, things were looking up as the global financial crisis ended; the Tesla stock increased by 450 per cent between the start and end of 2013.

As things went well for Tesla, Elon’s more ambitious goal became the priority. Along with Tesla motors, Elon had another company running from 2002, the Space X. The company was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk as he realized how expensive it was to purchase space travel rockets in an open market, saying he would be able to reduce the price to three per cent. He thought the fundamental issue of the space industry was that the access for space rockets was limited as the prices were high and going higher, setting his goal for SpaceX to make cheap rockets and sell them to both private purchases as well as the government. Along with his goal of more advanced and convenient space travel, Elon’s ultimate goal with SpaceX was to colonize Mars, which became his most priority. Having deep thoughts about sustainability and the future of humanity from a young age, Elon knew the Earth will become inhabitable regardless of the current situation, which made him decide to make Mars habitable. To do this, Elon aimed to reduce the time and money to travel to Mars. That’s when he thought of reusable rockets, the most suitable way to launch rockets at a cheap price, as all the space rockets in the open markets were all disposable. By creating a reusable rocket, Elon aimed to reduce the price of a rocket to only $50000. However, the method of collecting back the rockets out at space was a conundrum, and people were getting more sceptical about this idea. They started to question the importance of moving to Mars, suddenly calling Elon a delusional lunatic. Things even got worse as his trials ended up as three failures in a row and as various critics and American heroes such as Neil Amstrong went against Elon’s idea of commercial space flight.

But Elon never gave up. Then in 2015, a miracle occurred. After successfully launching a rocket in outer space, for the first time in forever, the projectile of the rocket was safely collected back to earth. Again in 2018, a rocket to Mars was successfully launched.

This was the moment where the impossible became true, and a huge big step to the future of humanity.

Elon Musk now aims to send a person to mars by 2024, and by 2050, to migrate 1 million people to Mars.

“People think that technology automatically improves, it does not automatically improve. It improves when a lot of people work very hard to make it better.” Our civilization was able to send a person to the moon in 1969. Ever since then, the trend of space technology has never improved; it just descended. Elon found this very depressing, thinking that the value of beauty and inspiration is so underrated. He believed that life is not just about solving instant problems, that it is about “thinking about the future and not be sad” to “make reasons to get up in the morning every day.” People called him crazy, but nothing crazy ever comes true if anyone does not start it. And when everyone called him a fraud and crazy, Elon dived into the subject everyone thought was impossible and made it happen. He did it. He advanced humanity.

Works Cited TED-Elon Musk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIwLWfaAg-8 Britannica-Elon Musk https://www.britannica.com/biography/Elon-Musk Britannica-Space X https://www.britannica.com/topic/SpaceX

Further Reading Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future: Ashlee Vance, HarperCollins (2015). + Fatten your bookshelf with Elon Musk: the Quest, a biography that traces the life of the (as of now) second-richest man in the world. Deemed a compelling narrative with many "ancillary pleasures", Vance's book is commentary on a fascinating American icon that bolsters our understanding of how Musk came to amass his entrepreneurial empire of today that makes its presence felt in innumerous corners of society.

“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.”

- Elon Musk

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INTERSTELLAR Indeed a ‘Scientific’ Fiction Makings of a blockbuster Writer: Remy Woobin Lee ’25 Editor: Sophie Seungyeon Shin ’23

Fig. 1. Interstellar’s original movie poster (2014).

Introduction HE FILM Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, is one of few films highly acclaimed by both critics and scientists: the former for its cinematic significance and the latter for its scholastic excellence. This is not surprising. Nolan is well-known — even notorious — for pursuing scholarly perfection in conceptualizing scientific theories and presenting them to an audience on screen.

Many of Nolan’s earliest and most prominent works, such as Inception (2010) and The Prestige (2006) all draw on elements of physics, often with a high degree of accuracy. These films have not only established his position as a superstar of the film industry but have marked the beginning of his obsession with incorporating scientific theories into his work, now established as his own distinctive trademark.

Although Nolan’s cinematic career has not solely been built through such experimental strokes, they have certainly helped the public to take notice of his work. People were fascinated by the complexity and the ingenuity of his Sci-fi films and wanted more.

Nolan’s response to this demand was the release of Interstellar.

T

Interstellar and the science Interstellar depicts the journey of five astronauts sent on a mission in search of a suitable planet for human colonization. The Earth is presented as a barren planet rapidly becoming inhospitable to human life. As a consequence of crop failure, human civilization is degraded, its once-beautiful past long forgotten. In this dying world, Nolan brings to life characters going about their daily lives with no definite assurance of their survival in years to come. One of these is Joseph Cooper, an ex-pilot from NASA, and his family. Cooper is as hopeless as the rest, until he receives a message from an enigmatic source that leads him into a mission in space that could save his family - and humanity.

With a team of four professional astronauts, Cooper travels through space in search of the exoplanets, and in doing so, encounters several astronomical objects, some of which are unknown even to the most stateof-the-art research centres at the time.

The black hole - apart from playing a vital role in the plot - is brilliantly executed, an extremely accurate visual representation of Einstein’s theories. This success is the brainchild of the visual effects team and Kip Thorn, bringing to life Nolan’s superlative scientific accuracy and black holes - which had existed only in theory before the discovery of Messier 87 in 2017. Nolan’s black hole is a strange, ring-like object that glows white, a mesmerizing spectacle. While recent research has disprove some aspects of Interstellar’s black holes, what is striking is how accurate Nolan’s overall vision has proved to be.

Fig. 2. Christopher Nolan filming Interstellar.

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Fig. 3. Actual Blackhole photo(2017) [left] and Interstellar’s Blackhole representation [right]

Conclusion Interstellar is perhaps the most brilliant movie Christopher Nolan has produced in a long career of brilliant productions. With just the right balance of scientific accuracy and heart-warming sentiments, Interstellar is a commercial hit beloved by the scientific community.

Works Cited Ebiri, Bilge. “All 11 Christopher Nolan Movies, Ranked.”

Vulture, Vulture, 17 Sept. 2020, www.vulture.com/article/ christopher-nolan-movies-ranked.html.

Zemler, Emily. “How Real Is the Science in Christopher Nolan’s ‘Tenet’? We Asked an Expert.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 4 Sept. 2020, www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2020-09-04/science-christopher-nolan-tenet-physicist-interview.

“Interstellar.” IMDb, IMDb.com, www.imdb.com/title/ tt0816692/plotsummary.

Wall, Mike. “The Science of ‘Interstellar’: Black Holes, Wormholes and Space Travel.” Space.com, Space, 10 Nov. 2014, www.space.com/27701-interstellar-movie-science-black-holes.html.

“Kip Thorne.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 28 May 2021, www.britannica.com/biography/Kip-Thorne.

Chen, Sophia. “The First Black Hole Picture Has Finallyv

Too Big to Fail

Ageless, Boundless Masses so big that time flows differently.

I

n the momentous November of 1915, Albert Einstein presented to the world the general theory of relativity, a groundbreaking proposition that has come to revolutionise the very frameworks of modern physics. Einstein postulated that everything in space is woven together by the fabric of space-time, or, in other words, by forces of gravitational fields. If such was to hold true, gravity could warp both space and the flow of time.

In putting forward the general theory of relativity, Einstein [inadvertently] theorised the existence of black holes and the likelihood of them causing time dilation. Time dilation, in simple terms, is the slowing down of time, caused by a strong gravitational field pulling against the so-called fabric of space-time. Imagine a circular tub screened with fabric. In the middle of the tub, you place a metal ball. Naturally, the weight would sink downwards, creating a concave slope. When you then put down a marble against the fabric, it would slide along the slope created by the metal ball, and land at the centre. What you have just seen is gravity.

The gravitational field, represented by the slope

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created by the metal ball, or mass, warps spacetime, represented by the fabric, so that the marble, an inferior space object, is drawn by the gravitational field onto the mass. In real life, the metal ball is replaced with an object with a huge gravitational field, such as a black hole. A black hole, rather than a physical hole, is a gargantuan matter squashed into a tiny space (relatively speaking: most black holes are several kilometres wide, although physicists believe that some can be the size of a single atom). Since they carry so much mass, they also possess an extremely strong gravitational field — so strong, in fact, that they are invisible to the naked eye because not even light can escape their gravitational pull. A stronger gravitation field curves space-time more intensely, meaning time flows slowly in the proximity of a black hole.

Such phenomena have been the bedrock to numerous sci-fi films and cartoons featuring black holes and time travelling for decades. Considering the physics behind it all, maybe Hollywood wasn’t too far off, after all.

- Remy Woobin Lee ‘25

H

AVE YOU EVER realized that GPS systems are always working even when we don’t recognize that it is? Also, did you know that something that you wear on your feet every day wasn’t even invented on Earth? The GPS system, athletic shoes, and ear thermometers were all invented in space!

Fig. 1. The space segment of GPS consists of 24 NAVSTAR satellites in six different orbits around the earth.

GPS, a global positioning system, was first invented by the US Department of Defense in 1973 for the purpose of locating satellites. What does GPS have to do with satellites? Inside the GPS, there is an atomic clock that tells the exact time. This time is inserted in codes then transferred by the satellite. A receiver gets (signals) and can know the latitude, longitude, and time of when the signal was sent out. Five years after the first space satellite was launched, scientists decided that they needed a GPS to track where these satellites were located and headed in space.

Now, GPS, also known as the global positioning system, is used in everyday life and not just by scientists launching satellites. The GPS system has been adapted for use in cars, boats, airplanes, and even our cell phones! GPS has developed a lot since it was first invented. It can now even feel earthquakes! It measures the size of an earthquake by calculating the amount of energy and gives us the result. Not only can GPS collect important information by comparing ground positions before and after the shakes and moves, but it can also record motions and even predict how big the eruption will be.

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Fig. 3. NASA Earth Science Disasters Program that assisted citizens and government to recover from natural disasters.

Fig. 5. Coronavirus FAQs: Do Temperature Screenings Help? Can Mosquitoes Spread It?

Another everyday product we use was first invented and used actually for space travel. First developed during the Apollo Program in 1961, “blow rubber molding” was made after melted rubber was formed into a mold, then filled up with shock-absorbing materials full of air. This special soft rubber was put into the astronaut’s shoes to give extra cushion and protection during space travel. It was even put into their space helmets!

These days, because of Covid-19, we all have to measure our body temperature before we enter a specific place. The thermometer is the object that we use at this moment. The thermometer has gotten very popular over the past year and a half because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a very useful tool to measure your body temperature and check if you may have a fever. The more advanced thermometer technology was invented by NASA to measure the heat of stars and planets by instantly recording the infrared radiation emitted from the objects. This new technology made it quick and simple to detect heat during space travel. An easy way to understand how infrared radiation works is when you stand outside on a hot day, the warm energy you feel on your skin is infrared energy. Seeing how easy this was, in 1991, a company called Diatek worked with NASA to insert this technology into an infrared thermometer for everyday use for the public.

Fig. 4. The Journey of Nike shoes.

Later, NASA engineers Frank and Rudy offered to recreate this rubber molding for Nike Corporation. A pad made from interconnected air cells was placed on the bottom of the shoe that provided the forefoot with some cushion. This is how the famous shoe line, “Nike Air” started. This new shoe line was an instant hit for Nike and made them the leading shoe company in the world. Until this day, this special technique is used

by Nike.

Further Reading Mr. Ferris and His Wheel: Kathryn Davis, Illustrated by Gilbert Ford, Harcourt (2014). + Kelvin put his name to the unit, Salk put his name to the vaccine, and George Ferris, a 19th century American engineer, put his name to the world’s most famous wheel. A captivating story of how one ingenious engineer overcame “gravity and seemingly impossible odds” to invent the most iconic amusement park attraction of all time, Mr. Ferris marries a remarkable feat of engineering success to whimsical illustrations of the 1800s Chicago World Fairs. Take Mr. Ferris for a spin (the pun, as always, is intended) and read to impress on your next trip to an amusement park.

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Fig. 6. Welch Allyn Diatek 600 Thermometer - Manufacturer specifications MedWOW Welch Allyn Diatek 600 Thermometer.

So the next time you use your GPS in the car or on your phone, run in your Nike Airs in P.E. class, or quickly and conveniently take your temperature before entering a restaurant, thank the space-travelling NASA engineers. They invented and provided the most convenient objects to assist our daily routine when we did not even know we needed them!

How NASA created mattresses

The Birth of Tempur Spine comfort, space comfort.

D

ID YOU KNOW that memory foam - the material that makes up the mattress in your bed - was in fact created for astronauts?

During the Cold War, NASA craved for ways to get to space more comfortably.

Tempur, a mattress company, uses the identical material used in the seats of astronauts in spaceships. Their mattresses are manufactured out of polyurethane, which led to a huge profit of $4.62 billion dollars according to the latest financial report of the company’s revenue.

This is the primary reason under the birth of memory foam. In 1966, supported by NASA, a soft yet springy substance called “polyurethane” was created. In areas in which heat is applied, polyuWorks Cited 1 Federal Aviation Admihhnistration (2015). Satellite Navigation - GPS - How It Works. [online] Faa.gov. Available at: https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_ offices/ato/service_units/techops/navservices/gnss/gps/ howitworks/ Accessed on 27th of September 2021, 9:17 pm.

2 GPS is going places. (2019). Knowable Magazine | Annual Reviews. [online] Available at: https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/physical-world/2019/gps-going-places?gclid=EAIaIQobChMInouf0fzJ6AIVksVkCh3m-wr_ EAAYASAAEgINOvD_BwE Accessed on 27th of September 2021, 9:16 pm.

3 HowStuffWorks. (2000). How do ear thermometers work? [online] Available at: https://science.howstuffworks. com/innovation/everyday-innovations/question312.htm.

Accessed on 3rd of October 2021, 3:52 pm.

4 Maptoaster.com. (2009). How GPS Works. [online] Available at: https://www.maptoaster.com/maptoaster-topo-nz/articles/how-gps-works/how-gps-works.html. Accessed on 27th of September 2021, 9:15 pm.

5 November 13, S.M. and 2019 (n.d.). 10 Everyday Products Originally Developed By NASA // ONE37pm. [online] www.one37pm.com. Available at: https://www.one37pm. com/grind/money/nasa-everyday-products Accessed on 27th of September 2021, 9:16 pm.

6 Nasa.gov. (2020). NASA - Apollo’s Small Steps Are Giant Leap for Technology. [online] Available at: https://www. nasa.gov/missions/science/f_apollo_11_spinoff.html Accessed on 27th of September 2021, 9:16 pm.

7 Philips. (n.d.). 10 SPACE INVENTIONS THAT ARE CLOSER THAN YOU THINK. [online] Available at: https://www. philips.co.uk/c-w/malegrooming/philips-space/space/10space-innovations-that-are-closer-than-you-think.html.

Accessed on 3rd of October 2021, 3:52 pm.

8 Supercompressor, buy, C. coolest stuff that money can and more. (2015). 6 Things You Didn’t Know Were Invented by

rethane heats up, naturally leading to the air holes inside of it compressing and therefore, pressing down only in those areas. On vice versa, when the heat is removed, the air holes inflate once again, restoring the original form.

After its birth, memory foam was instantly implemented into NASA spaceships in order to secure safe takeoffs and landing. The result was successful; astronauts were finally able to takeoff, land and even orbit around planets comfortably. Soon, memory foams were not only in spaceships but everywhere - including beds. The Space Race had given birth to Tempur.

- Eunsoo Lee ‘26

NASA. [online] HuffPost. Available at: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/6-things-you-didnt-know-w_b_7911828 Accessed on 27th of September 2021, 9:17 pm.

9 UPI. (n.d.). Apollo space program spawned technologies, products still in use. [online] Available at: https:// www.upi.com/Science_News/2019/07/04/Apollospace-program-spawned-technologies-products-still-inuse/8451561000261/. Accessed on 27th of September 2021, 9:15 pm.

10 www.jpl.nasa.gov. (n.d.). NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Blog | Infrared Ear Thermometer. [online] Available at: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/blog/2013/5/infrared-ear-thermometer. Accessed on 3rd of October 2021, 3:52 pm.

11 Howell, E. (2018). Navstar: GPS Satellite Network. [online] Space.com. Available at: https://www.space. com/19794-navstar.html. ‌ 12 kofac.re.kr. (n.d.). Document. [online] Available at: https://www.sciencetimes.co.kr/ news/%EC%9E%90%EC%9C%A8%EC%A3%BC%ED%96%89-%EC%9E%90%EB%8F%99%EC%B0%A8% E C % 9 9 % 8 4 % E C % A 0 % 8 4 %EC%9E%90%EC%9C%A8%EC%A3%BC%ED%96%89%EC%97%90-%EB%8F%84%EC%A0%84%ED%95%98%EB%8B%A4/ [Accessed 19 Oct. 2021] ‌ 13 GPS World. (2019). NASA program aids with disaster relief efforts. [online] Available at: https://www.gpsworld. com/nasa-program-aids-with-disaster-relief-efforts/ [Accessed 19 Oct. 2021].

14 prezi.com. (n.d.). The Journey of Nike shoes. [online] Available at: https://prezi.com/_mz9gtc_plpm/the-journey-of-nike-shoes/ [Accessed 19 Oct. 2021].

1‌ 5 Wamsley, L. (2020). Coronavirus FAQs: Do Temperature Screenings Help? Can Mosquitoes Spread It? NPR. [online] 8 May. Available at: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/05/08/853018233/coronavirus-faqs-do-temperature-screenings-help-can-mosquitoesspread-it [Accessed 19 Oct. 2021].

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Fig. 1. Michael Collins trains in the Command Module simulator at Kennedy Space Center on June 19, 1969. (Image credit: NASA)

How to Become a NASA Pilot: the Requirements and the Chances Try out for yourselves A guidebook for prospective pilots Writer: Bella Jian Park ’27 Editor: Chandler Geumbee Ahn ’25

M

ANY PILOTS go to space every year, every month. Being a pilot and going to space is an honored experiment and it will last in their minds and be reminded every day. However, it’s not easy to endure the dizziness when the aircraft gets out of the atmosphere, also it will not be able to solve the accident that might happen in the aircraft while in space. So, the pilots need to take loads of practise and tests to prove that they are suited to go to space.

Becoming a NASA pilot is not easy. First, you have to have a U.S. passport, and that means to be a U.S citizen. Then you have to be about the age between 26-46 years old because you need to be old enough to overcome the physical problem in the body or the dizziness that you will meet while the spaceship is launching. There is not an accurate type of body that NASA

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prefers, but at least the body should fit into the spacesuit or it will give an uncomfortable feeling about the suit. It will also give a lack of air too. For instance, there was a woman who used to be the first female to go to space but soon cancelled because the body of a woman didn’t fit into the suit even though they made the small size of a man’s suit.

The hardest part to be a NASA pilot is the knowledge they need to know. The pilot has to know technology, especially engineering technology, aviation technology, medical technology and other tech information.

In psychology, except for clinical psychology, physiological psychology, or experimental psychology, they need to know each of the psychologies which are qualifying. In nursing they need to learn to heal themselves, so it is important to learn and be an expert. They need to know social sciences, especially geography, anthropology (scientific study of humanity), and archaeology, among others. Furthermore, in aviation (which is operating of aircraft), they need to know aviation management, or similar fields of aviation.

You need to possess a master’s degree, which is a license which includes two years of work toward a program in a related science, technology, or engineering field. A completed Doctor of Medicine or Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degree which is also recognized.

Completion (or current enrollment) of a nationally recognized test pilot school program is required. You also need a STEM field, including engineering, biological science, physical science, computer science or mathematics, from an accredited institution. Having

at least two years of related professional experience obtained after degree completion or at least 1,000 hours pilot-in-command time on jet aircraft. Being able to pass the NASA long-duration flight astronaut physical is also required too.

walks, applicants must meet the anthropometric requirements for both the spacecraft and the spacesuit.

Applicants brought in for an interview will be evaluated to ensure they meet the anthropometric requirements.

If you are confident or curious about being an astronaut, pilot or do you have any mind being a part of NASA, please try it. Somebody among us might be a pilot someday!

Works Cited

Fig. 2. NASA’s first SpaceX crewed flight for May 27th. (Image credit: NASA)

Some other requirements are that the use of glasses is acceptable. Also surgeries are permitted, but not required for potential applicants. Since all pilots will be expected to fly aboard spacecraft and perform space

Sabrina, Stierwalt. (2021). Do You Have What It Takes to Be an Astronaut?. September 14th, 2021, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-you-havewhat-it-takes-to-be-an-astronaut/# Rachel, Blodgett. (2020). Frequently Asked Questions. September 14th, 2021 https://www.nasa.gov/feature/frequently-asked-questions-0/#:~:text=What%20are%20the%20requirements%20to,command%20time%20in%20jet%20aircraft.

Flint, Wild. (2020). Astronaut requirements. September 14th, 2021. https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/postsecondary/features/F_Astronaut_Requirements.html

Try it out youselves!

NASA Pilot Checklist Your odds of making it as a NASA pilot.

☑ Do you own a US passport? ☑ Do you possess a master’s degree in a STEM field? ☑ Have you completed two years of related professional experience / 1000 hours of pilot-in-command time on a jet aircraft? ☑ Can you pass NASA’s long-duration physical? ☑ Is your height between 62~72 inches? (157~191cm) ☑ Is your blood pressure under 140/90? ☑ Do you have a 20/20 eyesight?

Once you have met the prerequisites, you will be competing against 18,300 candidates over a staggering number of 12 seats - which gives you a less than 1% chance of becoming an astronaut!

Fun facts

- Astronauts’ average IQ tend to range in between 130~140 - The college that has produced the most astronauts is the United States Naval Academy (USNA), where historically over 50 graduates have managed to become an astronaut Good luck on making it!

- Remy Woobin Lee ‘25 Issue 8 2022, nlcslucidity.com 53

SPACE PHOTOGRAPHY A stellar hobby Astrophotography Writer: Ashley Ahrim Yoon '25 Editor: Ms. Shayna Coughlan

O

RDINARY PEOPLE have never been to outer space. However, they know at least what space looks like by looking at photographs.

Mesmerizing scenery of space fascinates and immerses the viewers in the world of outer space, and makes them think like ‘I also want to travel there!’.

Taking photographs of outer space is called astrophotography. Then, how are these astrophotographs taken, and what are the scientific purposes of taking them?

Astrophotography has mainly two ways of taking pictures of outer space — astronauts and the Hubble Space Telescope. First of all, how do astronauts take astrophotos? On the fast-moving International Space Station, astronauts capture the scenery outside as quickly as possible, because the International Space Station is moving so fast that astronauts lack time to set up detailed parts for taking pictures. To get a great shot in time, astronauts always have eight cam-

eras at the ready in the cupola. The cupola is a small module designed for the observation of operations outside the station (NASA, 2019), so amazing images can be captured when needed. The second way to take astrophotos is via the Hubble Space Telescope — a telescope that orbits far above the Earth. The Hubble Space Telescope consists of multiple sets of cameras to take pictures of space. It acts as a digital camera with built-in additional instruments, such as two kinds of visible light cameras, infrared sensors, and heat detectors. (NTS, 2019) These instruments are made to withstand the harsh environment, including the rapid temperature change and radiation of outer space; and also help the Hubble Space Telescope to capture pictures with better quality. For example, the fine guidance sensors allow the Hubble Space Telescope to stay at a still angle while taking pictures. As mentioned earlier, there are two kinds of visible light cameras in the Hubble Space Telescope

"Behind every atom of this world hides an infinite universe."

- Rumi

Fig 1. Photographing in the ISS (Space Center Houston/Blog,2020)

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Fig 2. The ACS camera (NASA/ACS Science Team,2002)

— the ACS (The Advanced Camera for Surveys) and WFC3 (Wild Field Camera 3) cameras. First of all, the ACS consists of three cameras which are wide-field, solar-blind, and high-resolution, but the high-resolution camera which takes pictures inside the galaxy went irreparably offline in 2007. Then, what do the two remaining cameras do? The widefield camera takes images of the universe with a larger area, and the solar-blind camera takes pictures of hot stars and other ultraviolet-emitting bodies when solar radiation hinders it with ultraviolet light.

Next, the WFC3 acts as the main camera of the Hubble Space Telescope. It captures scenes across a range of light spectrums: near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared lights. The imagery of both the ACS and WFC3 cameras combine together to provide images with a higher resolution. However, the WFC3 lately experienced some problems in its hardware due to the harsh environment of outer space, which led to a shutdown. For this reason, astronauts had to repair significant issues of the Hubble Space Telescope by switching to the alternative interface and connecting to the backup (NASA, 2021).

In the 19th century, astrophotography allowed the exposure of celestial events with human eyes. As the technology advanced, astrophotography became an essential scientific data helping astronomers and scientists make scientific discoveries, and view the galaxy in multiple ways. Astrophotography also gives the idea of the relationship between human existence and space — understanding and predicting the future of mankind, and the providence of our universe. For example, the recently released image of the ‘granular surface of the sun’ (Pixobo, year unknown) provided an appreciable insight into the significant impact of the solar surface on the Earth, which means that astrophotography is a medium that facilitates astronomers and scientists to examine a complex and gigantic sized space object.

Fig. 3. The granular surface of the sun.

Nowadays, astrophotography is considered a ‘cool hobby’ which amateurs enjoy. However, astrophotographs, taken by astronauts and the Hubble Space Telescope in extreme environments, is the vital key to visually unlock the mystery of the universe. Before we get amazed by the visuals of astrophotography, reminisce about the scientific value of it.

Works Cited Author unknown. (2019). How Does NASA Take Picture of Space? NTS. [online] 6 June. Available at: <https://nts. com/ntsblog/how-nasa-takes-pictures/> Mia, T. (2014). A Master Class in Space Photography with NASA Astronaut Donald Pettit TIME. [online] 17 July.

Available at: <https://time.com/3810759/donald-pettit-space-photography/> Nermin, G. (year unknown). How Did Space Photography Help Astronomers Pixobo. [online] Date unknown. Available at: <​​https://www.pixobo.com/space-photography/> Author unknown. (2021). NASA Returns Hubble Space Telescope to Science Operations. [online] 20 July. Available at: <https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/ operations-underway-to-restore-payload-computer-on-nasas-hubble-space-telescope>

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LAVISH AND LUDICROUS:

WHY PRIVATE SPACE TRIPS MATTER TO YOU Crazy rich Americans The space race revisited Writer: Catherine Yeonsoo Kim ‘24 Editor: Sophie Shin ‘23

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N JULY 20, 2021, the tech mogul Jeff Bezos soared to space. What dragged more attention than the flight itself was the astounding $5.5 billion cost of the entire trip (Davalos, 2021). Claims suggested that the ‘wasted money’ should have been invested otherwise for the more desperate population, discouraging further space travels of others (Vega, 2021). However, more complex, underlying benefits of space travel might far outweigh the slight preferences over how the money should have been spent.

Fig 1. History Nebraska, 2021

Thanks to early scientists, the advantages of space travel have been evident since the Cold War, which lasted from 1945 to 1991.

From the moment the Space Race took place, science and technology saw unprecedented growth over the decades (Oreskes, 2021). That not only meant that rocket science, or science purely as means to reach outside the atmosphere, would develop but also that knowledge for humanity left on Earth would see growth.

Spinoff technologies from space research have already played a prominent role in the conservation of the environment. GPS navigation has reduced fuel expenditure on sea, land and air by 15 to 21 percent (Autry, 2021). Remotely sensed data from outside the earth also have allowed scientists to gain critical and objective knowledge on the state of the environment such as water cycles, air quality, greenhouse gas emissions, municipal effects of deforestation, ocean pH, and temperature change (United Nations, 2021).

This observation of nature has allowed scientists to both sense the palpable level of damage that had been done and has guided them into ideal directions in deciding actions against the harm.

Fantastical yet future-oriented, there are upcoming advantages sought by space exploration as well. The wealth of knowledge and breakthroughs, such as how to scan Earth terrain using satellite imagery from NASA, is taught in classrooms across the globe, inspiring future generations to gain critical information for the sake of further development. (Hall, 2021) Also, a number of conglomerate CEOs are seeking ways to overcome the climate crisis outside our motherland. For instance, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has been trying to move the entire Earth-based industries to planets away from the Earth (Cameron, 2021). Tesla and SpaceX leader, Elon Musk has been trying to “.... save the Earth from population collapse” via similar means of transferring people and industries to other planets (Mark, 2021).

Fig 2. Nast.C, 2021

As absurd as a $5.5 billion ‘dream-come-true’ trip to the moon sounds, it is perhaps not at all ludicrous to invest any amount of money in a project that may save humanity in all its entirety. Perchance, thinking outside the globe is what we all need at the brink of climate calamities. * Works Cited Autry, G., Devereaux, Giovanni and Palmer, (2021). Space Research Can Save the Planet—Again. [online] Foreign Policy.

Available at: <https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/07/20/space-research-can-save-the-planet-again-climate-change-environment/> [Accessed 4 October 2021].

Cameron, M., (2021). Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Targets Bigger Space Goals. [online] WSJ. Available at: <https://www.wsj. com/articles/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-targets-bigger-space-goals-11626613203?mod=series_space> [Accessed 4 October 2021]. ¶ Page x 56 NLCS Lucidity, Issue 8 2022

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writers Aiden Bae ‘27 Shayla Hwang ‘27 Benjamin Jun ‘27 Jay Jung ‘27 Jayden Lee ‘27 Sophie Lee ‘27 Bella Park ‘27 Victoria Park ‘27 Benjamin Han ‘26 Eunsoo Lee ‘26 Eunice Park ‘26 Jisu Park ‘26 Daniel Shin ‘26 Chandler Ahn ‘25 Jiyu An ‘25 Emma Chung ‘25 Liz Chung ‘25 Ella Hong ‘25 Hyunseo Kim ‘25 Angela Lee ‘25 Remy Lee ‘25 Hanju Park ‘25 John Park ‘25 Ahrim Yoon ‘25 Catherine Kim ‘24 Clive Choi ‘23

Editors Chandler Ahn '25 Remy Lee '25 Catherine Kim '24 Sophie Shin '23

Designers Chandler Ahn '25 Liz Chung '25 Remy Lee '25 Ashley Yoon '25

Staff Members Ms. Kym Prichard Ms. Shayna Coughlan Ms. Naomi Wilson

SCIENCE AND SPACE

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