Essays 2015

Essays By Ian Beardsley 2015

1

God, Mind, And Science…………..2 The ET Dialogue… 5 Consciousness And AI……8 The Impasse……….14

2

God, Mind, And Science We say as we travel from point A to point B, we have been in motion. The ancient Greek paradox of Zeno’s arrow, may actually hold. He says for the arrow to get to point B, it must travel first a distance C, and before it can travel a distance C , it must travel a distance D. Since I can always find a distance I must travel first before I travel the next, it means I can never reach point B, and therefore motion is an illusion. The mathematician resolves the problem by saying each successive distance I must travel before reaching B is less than the one that comes before it, and therefore converges on B, and I have therefore been in motion. This is not, in my opinion a solution to the problem, but simply another point of view, that motion is possible. It says space is real, and can be traversed. But I say that is not necessarily true and that motion does not necessarily happen. I say this because I claim that it is equally possible that motion is an illusion, a construct of the mind, a mathematical abstraction. To say motion is possible, is to say there is such a thing as distance. But, what is distance? It is a construct of the mind, a definition for something we cannot ascribe any reality. I say this because distance is described in terms of velocity.

It is velocity times time. But velocity is defined in terms of distance. It is distance per time. But what is time but something described in terms of our original distance, it is distance per velocity. All three concepts are defined in terms of one another. Thus distance is a definition, and our way of interpreting the motion of an arrow is to say that distance is real, but we have shown it to be nothing but a definition tied up in a circular argument. I might be able to say that that if I throw a rock up in the air, and that under gravity it will return to earth in so many seconds because of the force I put behind it, but I will have no more validated the concept of distance and motion than the mathematician did when he said Zeno’s arrow went from point A to B because the limit of a diminishing series has a value. This is because the force with which I threw the rock in the air, and the distance I claim it traveled because of it, is described in terms of acceleration.

Acceleration is the change in velocity with time, and velocity is distance per time, and we have already shown that velocity, distance, and time are defined in terms of one another, and therefore definitions are constructs of the mind that we attribute to reality. However, force is not just acceleration, but mass times acceleration. So, if there is any reality we can attribute to mass, perhaps we would have something, but we don’t. Because mass cannot be shown to be any more real than anything else. In chemistry they tell us matter is that which has mass and occupies volume. But what is volume but space, and space but that specified by three distances at right angles to one another? Could we make mass to be any more real in terms of the physicist’s definition? The physicist says matter is inertia, that which resists motion; the more of it, the more it resists motion. More precisely it is Force divided by acceleration. We have already said acceleration is the change in velocity with time, velocity the change in distance with time, and that time, distance, and velocity being described in terms of one another cannot be known to be real. What we have really said is that mass, length and time are at the basis of everything and are described in terms

3

of one another, and therefore cannot be used to say that Zeno’s arrow travels from point A to B, because distance is a construct of the mind, and therefore motion is nothing more than an interpretation of what reality might be. To see this clearly, watts - or using any concept in physics - is energy per time. But energy is force times distance, force is mass times acceleration, acceleration is change in velocity with time, but finally velocity is distance per time, and velocity, distance, and time, are defined in terms of one another, so, say nothing.

Ultimately we see all of physical reality, whether one is talking about motion, force, energy, or whatever, can be reduced to different expressions of mass, length, and time, all which are described in terms of one another. Not that when an arrow is in motion, we are wrong to say it is traversing a distance because of motion, because it could be that we are right. I am saying that we just cannot know if we are right, and that the mathematicians sequence perhaps never converges, and Zeno was perhaps right, that his arrow never really moves, it is our mind that says it does. The cosmologists have said that time and space were created in the explosion that gave birthday to the universe. Well if nothing is not empty space, what is empty space?

This brings us to the next treatise. What is the reality we say we observe? One could argue that it is what we see. Not necessarily, I say. When we say we are seeing something and that what we see is as it is seen, it really may not be that way, because ultimately the eye is a machine, and we have said that machine is founded upon physics, the very physics we have already argued are based on three things described in terms of one another, mass, length and time. So, is it so silly to say, when Osho Rajneesh says to know God is not a matter for religion or science, but for psychology. it is intelligent? When he says knowing oneself, through self-realization, which comes from losing all attachments, materialistic or in the realm of desire, (attachments to sex and food) is the way to do it? When he says that this is done through mediation? We see it makes sense when he says who can God be, but the devil, because the world is awful, full of cruelty, and he never even asked to be born into it. This works with the concept that psychology is the way to truth, because, applying psychology, we could say we say god is the devil because humans are the devil, and humans made God in their own image. He is a projection of ourselves onto our fears of the unknown. Thus Osho Rajneesh has said of himself Osho never Born, Osho never died, is the state he has achieved, because it makes sense.

I think mathematics and science are formal systems. Bertrand Russell was trying to make them perfect systems that produced inarguable results until Godel came along and showed that all formal systems have at least one unprovable statement. Russell had to abandon his undertaking. This much was known to the Ancient Greeks 2000 years before their time when Archimedes said that at some point you have to stop demonstrating or you will demonstrate endlessly. Look at geometry, the theorems are proved in terms of axioms, but the axioms are not proved, they are self-evident. Perhaps the only way out of the conundrum is to consider what Gandi said, "The Truth Is Self Evident". In terms

Â

4 Â

of geometry, that would be the axiom if two triangles are the same as a third, then they are the same as one another. How can you not accept that regardless of whether or not it is proved? Well, maybe Einstein could have said it was not always so, that it would depend on whether or not space is flat. But science has never claimed to be the truth. Consider what Bronowski said, science is the best truth for the moment, its truth is always changing with more incoming data. Is not that the advantage of science, religion is static, science is not, so the world is always 6,000 years old because the bible says so, regardless of what the most recent discoveries say in the geologic record. Indeed the geologic record said in the eighties that dinosaurs were cold blooded, or hairless, but further discoveries in science circa 2000 show perhaps they were warm blooded and had hair. It is this self-correcting aspect of science, to use the term of Sagan,that landed us on the moon. Just as science and mathematics are formal systems, so is religion. Religion says God exists and if you live according to him, you can go to heaven. But just like geometry is incomplete, has at least one unprovable statement, so does religion, which is god exists because I have faith. So science and mathematics will argue in circles forever with religion, because no one can ever state the truth in an absolute way by Godel's incompleteness theorem. His theorem was such a landmark achievement, that Bertrand Russel put a halt to his life's project, to make a perfect formal system.

Â

5 Â

The ET Dialogue Person 1: That dinosaurs went extinct due to asteroid hitting earth always has fascinated me in terms of exobiology. It might suggest that intelligent life elsewhere in the universe might predominately be reptilian if intelligent mammals are a fluke of an asteroid impact.

Person 2: Probably can't assume it would be reptilian,..merely because they evolved here first. No telling how evolution unfolds in alien worlds. Little cabbages might be highly intelligent.

Person 1: True, but there is a theory that life unfolds through the same process everywhere as a product of a universal process that starts even before a planet forms. The idea is that life is built out of amino acids that don't originate on the planets after they form but in the material from which they later form that ultimately comes from the stars. That it is part of the stellar process. We don't know it is so, but it was part of a theory put forward by astronomer Fred Hoyle called panspermia, which has recently been strengthened with recent discoveries.

It is all really in the name, Panspermia, pan meaning across the universe, spermia meaning same seed.

Â

6 Â

Person 2: You are conflating two or three different theories or ideas. We are all star dust... that's fact. But how things evolve on other worlds can be quite different. Even differences in gravity would shape things along other lines.

Pansperma says nothing about how life evolves. It merely points to the building blocks of life being ubiquitous across the universe.

Person 1: Years ago you were the one who told me because the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe, life could be similar to us throughout the universe. Gravity, chemical composition are factors that influence evolution, but it may be evolution does not happen without the right factors, like temperature, H2O in liquid state, reasonable gravity, and so forth. We don't know that, but it is an idea worth entertaining. Sure different enough that maybe they are orange and taller, but have five-fold symmetry like us, like two arms, two legs, a head, and so forth,..

January 26 2015, New Scientist writes: "To test the reproducibility of evolution at the genetic level, an international team took advantage of a natural experiment. Three different groups of terrestrial mammals have at some point in their evolution re-colonised the ocean, giving rise to what we now know as whales, walruses and manatees. Comparing the genetic changes in the three lineages, the researchers reasoned, should reveal whether evolution followed similar or very different paths in each case.

"They sequenced the genomes of walrus, manatee and two whales – killer whales and bottlenose dolphins. The comparisons showed that many genes changed independently in each lineage, suggesting that randomness did indeed play an important role in their evolution.

"But for 15 genes, natural selection led to exactly the same genetic changes occurring in all three lineages. This suggests that for some of the challenges of life in the sea, evolution repeatedly arrived at the same solution – that is, replaying the tape does indeed give much the same result again and again."

7

Don’t You Think ET’s Are Here Now If what the physicist Stephen Hawkings says, that our experiments with the Hadron Collider, however unlikely, could cause space and time to collapse, wouldn't that mean if advanced ETs exist, that they are here now concerned about what we are doing with the Universe they live in.

H.G. Wells turns out to have been very accurate in predicting the trajectory of humanity when in his work The Time Machine, he suggested the future would be represented by two separate kinds of humans that he depicted as what he called the Eloi and The Morlocks, both of them not such a good thing. Of course we don't all fit into one of those two categories yet, and yes humans are not that far gone yet, but it does seem to be beginning to form like that. He did of course abandon his earlier work for something much more grim saying he realized humans actually suffered from a Universal Inadequacy, and that that, included himself. He was really saying it was genetic, that we were one of evolution's failed experiments and had not the capability of pulling ourselves out of our entanglements.

8

Consciousness And AI

By

Ian Beardsley 2015

9

I first took an introduction to computer science at Harvard, called CS50. The compiler provided is the CS50 appliance. It runs on linux, so whether you use a PC or a Mac, you have to upload the free VirtualBox that allows you to use software that runs on linux. This course begins with learning to write code in C. The MIT course teaches you to write code in Python. The compiler, which is called Enthought Canopy Express, can be downloaded for free and is available for PC, Mac, or linux.

10

If you make a computer language and it has six primitives (elements) it can compute anything. It was Alan Turing who showed this. If you write a program in a computer language that has six primitives, you can write a program that does the same thing in any other language that has six primitives.

A computer language that has six primitives is said to be turning complete. I your language does not have six primitives, it is a fixed program computer and can only do a finite number of things. If the computer language has at least six primitves, it is a stored program computer, for which you can write an algorithm for anything.

Let us look at the language C. It has six primitives that allow us to do anything.

Perhaps they are: if, then, else, for, printf(), and scanf(). Could this say at the basis of human consciousness there are six primitives? That, the human mind has the potential to compute anything? Is evolution just not the development of a more and more sophisticated set of primitives, but the development the primitives and added elements made from the basic primitives?

Ian Beardsley February 21, 2015

11

Wikipedia writes:

“To show that something is Turing complete, it is enough to show that it can be used to simulate some Turing complete system. For example, an imperative language is Turing complete if it has conditional branching (e.g., "if" and "goto" statements, or a "branch if zero" instruction. See OISC) and the ability to change an arbitrary amount of memory locations (e.g., the ability to maintain an arbitrary number of variables). Since this is almost always the case, most (if not all) imperative languages are Turing complete if the limitations of finite memory are ignored.”

12

Let’s see if Turing was right; that you can write the same program in another language if both have six primitives. Here is what my first program in python looks like name.py name=raw_input('Enter your name: '); print('Are you ' +name+ '?'); answer=raw_input('Answer: '); print('Thank you'); Running it does this: Enter your name: Ian Beardsley Are you Ian Beardsley? I thinks so.

Thank you.

Here is the same program in C (name.c) #include <stdio.h> int main (void) { char first[15], last[15], answer[15]; printf ("Enter your last name: "); scanf("%s", last); printf ("Enter your first name: "); scanf("%s", first); printf("Are you %s, %s?\n", last, first); scanf("%s", answer); printf("Thank you, %s\n", answer); } Running it: jharvard@appliance (~/Dropbox/descubrir): ./name Enter your last name: Beardsley Enter your first name: Ian Are you Beardsley, Ian? yes Thank you, yes jharvard@appliance (~/Dropbox/descubrir):

13

14

The Impasse By Ian Beardsley 2015

15

James Lovelock for some time had said his Gaia Hypothesis said that there was no stopping of catastrophic climate change, and that it would be upon us soon, and that there was no point in being green, recycling, and so forth that these ideas had become nothing more than for profit industries and as such were counter-productive in the struggle to stop global warming, because they did nothing more than make people think by going green they were solving the problem which kept them from doing the real big things that needed to be done to solve a problem which was much bigger than they really knew. He said the only habitable places would be the northern latitudes, while the middle latitudes would become desert. That the most we could be hope for was to live life as best we could for what short time would be left for us.

However, he has come out after that to say he made a mistake in his calculations and that he was alarmist, not intentionally, but explained that that is the nature of science, you admit when you were wrong.

He is now working on a third book where he explains how he was wrong and the though the earth is having colder winters and warmer summers, the net result is that the net average temperature is remaining about the same; that the earth is managing to keep its temperature in a safe, reasonable range.

Of course he did say that global warming will happen, because we are putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by industry and burning fossil fuels, but that it just won’t happen as soon as he earlier thought it would.

I recently took a course in global warming science at MIT, and it seems pretty clear to me that the earth has to be warming. The earth receives about 1,370 watts of radiation from the sun per square meter. About 30% of that is reflected back into space. What is left is intercepted be the earth’s disc and distributed over its entire surface area. This warms the earth to a particular temperature.

Once it reaches that temperature, more radiation has already distributed itself over the planet’s surface. Light (radiation) is constantly coming in. Therefore, for the temperature of the earth to not increase, it must constantly be losing as much radiation (energy) as it receives. When the earth is in such a state, where the average temperature of the earth over a year averaged over all the planet remains constant, it is said the earth is in equilibrium. There are many ways in which the earth can lose radiation to be in equilibrium, but one of the major ways is for it to be absorbed into the vaporization of ocean water. It takes energy to vaporize water, energy that would otherwise go into heating the Earth. When ocean water is vaporized (goes from liquid to gas) this is the formation of clouds.

When the clouds condense into water droplets (precipitate) this represents further loss of energy that would have otherwise warmed the earth. Through such mechanisms the earth has been able to remain in equilibrium for some time, that is, again, to lose as much radiation as it receives, so that its average annual temperature when averaged over all geographic locations, has been able to stay steady at about 15 degrees centigrade.

16

However, since the advent of the industrial era, we have burned more fossil fuels, putting more CO2 into the atmosphere, and CO2 is a greenhouse gas. A green house gas is a gas that retains heat and warms the planet. Greenhouse gases are necessary, in that they keep the earth from getting too cold. Without an atmosphere with its green house gases, the earth would be about 18 degrees centigrade below freezing. But, too much greenhouse gases, and the earth becomes too warm. Remember, the earth needs to be in equilibrium, which means it needs to lose as much radiation as it receives. Current measurements show that the earth receives about one watt per square meter more than it loses.

A watt is a joule per second, where a joule is an amount of energy. A square meter is about the size of a patch of land, a square, about one yard on each side.

How much heat is that, that is heating each square meter of the earth? Well consider a 100 watt light bulb. A lot of it its energy drawn from your lamp outlet goes towards making light to light, say, your bedroom, but some of it goes towards making the bulb hot. I would estimate this excess energy we have falling upon the earth that is not being lost would be around the heat caused placing a 100 watt light bulb in the center of every square meter of the planet. It does not sound like much, but think; we are adding more and more CO2 to the earth every day, so that value is increasing, and the increasing effects are affecting the planet in more ways than one. One of the effects is what is called a feedback loop; this is where a warming planet melts more snow in the northern and southern latitudes, decreasing the ability of those latitudes to reflect sunlight back into space. This in turn makes the earth get warmer, so even more snow is melted than before, causing still less light to be reflected back into space, causing still more warming, causing more melting of snow than before,â&#x20AC;Ś and so on; it is a runaway effect, that is why is called negative feedback.

How does the atmosphere and its greenhouse gases keep the earth warm? As we said the earth receives radiation from the sun. This radiation warms the surface of the planet. However, the radiation that reaches the surface of the earth is bounced up to the lower layer of the atmosphere, the stratosphere, and the stratosphere sends it back down to the surface. However by that time the same amount of sunlight has come from the sun to the surface of the earth. So as you can see, the light coming in from the sun plus the light emitted back to the surface of the earth by the atmosphere doubles the amount of radiation warming the surface of the planet. The more greenhouse gases we have, the warmer the planet. Just how have human activities increased CO2 levels on earth? In 1958 CO2 levels were 315 parts per million of the atmosphere. It rose to above 400 parts per million in 2013, and this change was brought about by the industrial era.

And here is the point: Lovelock has said that though the summers are warmer, the winters are colder, so that the earth has managed to keep a steady temperature. But in the MIT class I took, it was stated that measurements show

Â

17 Â

the earth is not in radiative equilibrium, that it receives about one watt per square meter more than it loses and therefore has to be warming.

Â

18 Â

We have a real situation on our hands. I cannot help but think global warming will not happen at all because there are other cycles in earth climate that can override global warming due to other more potent forces. I speak of the precession of the equinoxes and slight changes in the earth orbit that about every 20,000 years cause an ice age that lasts about 100,000 years. However, these cycles don’t occur with any precise regularity; the numerous factors that determine the climate are far too complex to determine with any exacting precision what will happen. There is one thing we can all agree on, whether we are James Lovelock, or MIT, and that is burning fossil fuels puts heat retaining gases in the atmosphere, and that does cause the planet to warm. When I say situation, I mean we have a situation in that everyone is bickering over whether or not burning greenhouse gases does this when meanwhile the situation escalates, for example, in passing a bill to build the Keystone XL Pipeline, which as Senator Bernie Sanders put perfectly is taking us in a direction towards using fossil fuels when we should be going away from that route and towards clean, renewable energy, like, solar.

The human situation can best be explained by what H.G. Wells wrote in his book Mind At The End Of Its Tether, around 1950.

“The Writer finds very considerable reason for believing that, within a period to be estimated by weeks and months, rather than by aeons, there has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life,…has been going on since its beginning.

“If his thinking has been sound, then this world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything we call life is close at hand, and cannot be evaded.

“The writer is convinced there is no way out or round or through the impasse. It is the end.

“The present writer has experimented with a number of words and phrases,..

“The Antagonist is the term the present writer will employ to express the unknown implacable which has endured life for so long and has now turned against it so implacable to wipe it out.

“It is possible that hard imaginative thinking has not increased so as to keep pace with the expansion and complication of human societies and organizations. That is the darkest shadow on the hopes of mankind.”

For the more mathematically inclined, I present some of the topics covered here with some simple Algebra.

19

Climate Science 01 As climate science is a new science, there are many models for the climate and I learned my climate science at MIT in a free online edX course. One can generate a basic model for climate with nothing more than high school algebra using nothing more than the temperature of the sun, the distance of the earth from the sun, and the earth’s albedo, the percent of light it reflects back into space.

The luminosity of the sun is:

L0 = 3.9 "10 26 J /s The separation between the earth and the sun is:

!

1.5 "1011 m

The solar luminosity at the earth is reduced by the inverse square law, so the solar constant is:

!

S0 =

3.9 "10 26 = 1,370Watts/meter 2 4 # (1.5 "1011 ) 2

That is the effective energy hitting the earth per second per square meter. This radiation is equal to the temperature, Te , to the fourth power by the steffanbolzmann constant, sigma (" ) . Te can be called the effective temperature, the temperature entering the earth.

!

!

S0 intercepts the earth disc, "r 2 , and distributes itself over the entire earth ! ! surface, 4 "r 2 , while 30% is reflected back into space due to the earth’s albedo, a, which is equal to 0.3, so !

!

S "Te!= 0 (1# a) 4 $r 2 (1# a)S0 4 $r 2

!

4

But, just as the same amount of radiation that enters the system, leaves it, to have radiative equilibrium, the atmosphere radiates back to the surface so that 4 4 the radiation from the atmosphere, "Ta plus the radiation entering the earth, "Te 4 is the radiation at the surface of the earth, "Ts . However,

"Ta 4 = "Te 4

!

! !

!

20

and we have:

"Ts4 = "Ta 4 + "Te 4 = 2"Te 4 1

Ts = 2 4 Te S0 (1# a) 4 " = 5.67 $10#8 S0 = 1,370 a = 0.3 1,370 (0.7) = 239.75 4 239.75 4 Te = = 4.228 $10 9 5.67 $10#8 Te = 255Kelvin

"Te 4 =

So, for the temperature at the surface of the Earth:

!

1 4

Ts = 2 Te = 1.189(255) = 303Kelvin

Let’s convert that to degrees centigrade: !

Degrees Centigrade = 303 - 273 = 30 degrees centigrade And, let’s convert that to Fahrenheit: Degrees Fahrenheit = 30(9/5)+32=86 Degrees Fahrenheit In reality this is warmer than the average annual temperature at the surface of the earth, but, in this model, we only considered radiative heat transfer and not convective heat transfer. In other words, there is cooling due to vaporization of water (the formation of clouds) and due to the condensation of water vapor into rain droplets (precipitation or the formation of rain).

21

Summary The incoming radiation from the sun is about 1370 watts per square meter as determined by the energy per second emitted by the sun reduced by the inverse square law at earth orbit. We calculate the total absorbed energy intercepted by the Earth's disc (pi)r^2, its distribution over its surface area 4(pi)r^2 and take into account that about 30% of that is reflected back into space, so the effective radiation hitting the Earth's surface is about 70% of the incoming radiation reduced by four. Radiative energy is equal to temperature to the fourth power by the Stefan-boltzmann constant. However, the effective incoming radiation is also trapped by greenhouse gases and emitted down towards the surface of the earth (as well as emitted up towards space from this lower atmosphere called the troposphere), the most powerful greenhouse gas being CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) and most abundant and important is water vapour. This doubles the radiation warming the surface of the planet. The atmosphere is predominately Nitrogen gas (N2) and Oxygen gas (O2), about 95 percent. These gases, however, are not greenhouse gases. The greenhouse gas CO2, though only exists in trace amounts, and water vapour, bring the temperature of the Earth up from minus 18 degrees centigrade (18 below freezing) to an observed average of plus 15 degrees centigrade (15 degrees above freezing). Without these crucial greenhouse gases, the Earth would be frozen. They have this enormous effect on warming the planet even with CO2 existing only at 400 parts per million. It occurs naturally and makes life on Earth possible. However, too much of it and the Earth can be too warm, and we are now seeing amounts beyond the natural levels through anthropogenic sources, that are making the Earth warmer than is favorable for the conditions best for life to be maximally sustainable. We see this increase in CO2 beginning with the industrial era. The sectors most responsible for the increase are power, industry, and transportation. Looking at records of CO2 amounts we see that it was 315 parts per million in 1958 and rose to 390 parts per million in 2010. It rose above 400 in 2013. Other greenhouse gases are methane (CH4) and Nitrous Oxide (N2O). Agricultural activities dominate emissions for nitrous oxide and methane. A healthy earth is one that is in radiative equilibrium, that is, it loses as much radiation as it receives. Currently we are slightly out of radiative balance, the Earth absorbs about one watt per square meter more than it loses. That means its temperature is not steady, but increasing.

Â

22 Â

Here are a couple programs I wrote in the language C that model not just climate for the earth but for planets around other stars.

Discover 04 (Goldilocks.c) #include <stdio.h> #include <math.h> int main (void) { printf("This program finds the habitable zone of a star,...\n"); printf("And the surface temperature of the planet in the habitable zone\n"); float LC, r, L, HZ, AU, a, root, number, N, answer, C, F; printf("What is the luminosity of the star in Joules per second? \n"); scanf("%f", &L); AU=L/3.9E26; HZ=sqrt(L/3.9E26); printf("The luminosity of the star in solar luminosities is: %f\n", AU); printf("The habitable zone of the star is in AU: %f\n", HZ); r = HZ*1.5E11; LC=L/(4*3.141*r*r); printf("luminosity constant of star in watts per square meter: %f\n", LC); printf("What is the albedo of the planet? (between 0 and 1): "); scanf("%f", &a); N = (1-a)*LC/(4*(5.67E-8)); root = sqrt(N); number = sqrt(root); answer = 1.189*number; printf("The surface temperature of the planet is: %f K\n", answer); C = answer - 273; F = (C*1.8) + 32; printf("That is %f C, or %f F \n", C, F); }

Â

23 Â

Discover 08 #include <stdio.h> #include <math.h> int main(void) { float s, a, l, b, r, AU, N, root, number, answer, C, F; printf("This program calculates the temperature of a planet,...\n"); printf("Given the luminosity of the star and the albedo of the planet,..\n"); printf("What is brightness of the star in solar luminosities? "); scanf("%f", &s); printf("What is the albedo of the planet (0-1)? "); scanf("%f", &a); printf("What is the distance of the planet from the star in AU? "); scanf("%f", &AU); r=1.5E11*AU; l=3.9E26*s; b=l/(4*3.141*r*r); N=(1-a)*(b)/(4*(5.67E-8)); root=sqrt(N); number=sqrt(root); answer=1.189*(number); printf("The surface temperature of the planet is: %f K\n", answer); C=answer-273; F=(C*1.8)+32; printf("That is %f C, or %f F", C, F); printf("\n"); }

Â

24 Â

Here is a sample running of those programs: jharvard@appliance (~): cd dropbox/descubrir bash: cd: dropbox/descubrir: No such file or directory jharvard@appliance (~): cd Dropbox/descubrir jharvard@appliance (~/Dropbox/descubrir): ./discover04 This program finds the habitable zone of a star,...

And the surface temperature of the planet in the habitable zone What is the luminosity of the star in Joules per second?

9E26 The luminosity of the star in solar luminosities is: 2.307692 The habitable zone of the star is in AU: 1.519109 luminosity constant of star in watts per square meter: 1379.603149 What is the albedo of the planet? (between 0 and 1): 0.618 The surface temperature of the planet is: 261.051056 K That is -11.948944 C, or 10.491900 F jharvard@appliance (~/Dropbox/descubrir): ./discover08 This program calculates the temperature of a planet,...

Given the luminosity of the star and the albedo of the planet,..

What is brightness of the star in solar luminosities? 2.3 What is the albedo of the planet (0-1)? 0.618 What is the distance of the planet from the star in AU? 1.5 The surface temperature of the planet is: 262.489410 K That is -10.510590 C, or 13.080938 F

Â

25 Â

Ian Beardsley February 18, 2015

26