I'm about to suggest something that you may find difficult to believe, but it needs to be addressed in any discussion of species extinction.
There are many people who look favorably on the idea of making large numbers of species extinct, regardless of the economic consequences of that extinction. If they can make some money off of the matter, well and fine, but they take pleasure in species extinction even if there is no economic benefit, and even if there is probably some long term economic harm.
I know that seems crazy, but it is the only explanation for some behavior.
Now, why do they feel this way? I think it has to do with the way that politics interacts with personal psychology. It lets them feel "tough-minded" and assures them that they are not weak.
Consider those people you know who are anti-environmentalist, who probably label themselves as "conservative." Do they ever refer to "bleeding heart liberals?" Do they use phrases like "soft on crime?" (Previously, there was "soft on communism" but that sounds a tad archaic now). Are they themselves "tough on crime?" Do they ever speak approvingly of "tough love" as a way to deal with problem kids? (In my observation, "tough love" is always about the "tough," never about the "love").
In certain political circles, any real show of compassion or sympathy is a sign of weakness. They derided Clinton because he "feels your pain." Clinton was weak. They know that the proper way to show sympathy for the victims of crime is to use the death penalty more freely. The way to show compassion for the inhabitants of poor nations is to cheer when they cut down rain forests.
Under such a mind set, power is the only thing that matters, and anything that interferes with your own exercise of power is anathema. They want to drill for oil in the ANWR not in spite of the fact that it is pristine, but precisely because it is pristine--and as such is an afront to their complete dominion over the entire world.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Thursday, August 30, 2007
An Oysters Tale
The first time I traveled with Dale Enzenbacher, the sculptor, he managed to break the interior rear-view window in my little 1978 Honda Civic before we’d even left the driveway. He did this damage with his hip.
We traveled to a Westercon, in the Seattle-Tacoma area. I think it was probably 1979. We arrived and began to carry sculptures from the car (mostly tied up in the luggage rack) to set up in the dealers’ room. But people kept stopping us to buy things, and Dale kept stuffing the money into any available pocket. When we finally made it up to our hotel room, Dale started just shedding money. By the time he’d finished, I counted over eight hundred dollars, purchasing power equivalent to over two grand today.
In 1981 we went to the Worldcon in Denver, Denvention. We had a secret mission, to present Guest of Honor C. L. Moore with a guerrilla Gandalf, Fantasy Grand Master Award. I once wrote up the tale of the Last Gandalf on Genie, and at some point I’ll probably post it here as well, but I have another, minor Dale story to tell.
We were in the elevator, riding down to get still more of Dale’s sculptures from the car, when Dale noticed the ad for the hotel’s restaurant on the elevator wall. The special for that evening was Rocky Mountain Oysters. “That sounds good,” Dale said.
“Um,” I said cleverly. “You do know what Rocky Mountain Oysters are, right?”
“Some kind of freshwater clam?”
“Uh, no,” I said. “I mean I might have this wrong, but I believe that Rocky Mountain Oysters are the fried testicle of mountain goat, or whatever domesticated substitute they have.”
Dale frowned. “Goat balls?” he said darkly. “They wouldn’t give you goat balls, would they?”
I shrugged. “Maybe I have it wrong,” I said.
The elevator door opened and we headed across the hotel lobby. The restaurant was just opening for lunch. Dale looked at the maitre d’ standing at the doorway.
“Wait a second,” he told me. “I’ve got to check on something.”
He went over and spoke to the maitre d’ for a moment then headed back across the lobby, visibly excited. So excited, in fact, that he couldn’t wait until he got all the way across.
So, from halfway across the hotel lobby, he announced, in a clear, penetrating voice, “Hey, Jim, you were right! They are goat balls!”
We traveled to a Westercon, in the Seattle-Tacoma area. I think it was probably 1979. We arrived and began to carry sculptures from the car (mostly tied up in the luggage rack) to set up in the dealers’ room. But people kept stopping us to buy things, and Dale kept stuffing the money into any available pocket. When we finally made it up to our hotel room, Dale started just shedding money. By the time he’d finished, I counted over eight hundred dollars, purchasing power equivalent to over two grand today.
In 1981 we went to the Worldcon in Denver, Denvention. We had a secret mission, to present Guest of Honor C. L. Moore with a guerrilla Gandalf, Fantasy Grand Master Award. I once wrote up the tale of the Last Gandalf on Genie, and at some point I’ll probably post it here as well, but I have another, minor Dale story to tell.
We were in the elevator, riding down to get still more of Dale’s sculptures from the car, when Dale noticed the ad for the hotel’s restaurant on the elevator wall. The special for that evening was Rocky Mountain Oysters. “That sounds good,” Dale said.
“Um,” I said cleverly. “You do know what Rocky Mountain Oysters are, right?”
“Some kind of freshwater clam?”
“Uh, no,” I said. “I mean I might have this wrong, but I believe that Rocky Mountain Oysters are the fried testicle of mountain goat, or whatever domesticated substitute they have.”
Dale frowned. “Goat balls?” he said darkly. “They wouldn’t give you goat balls, would they?”
I shrugged. “Maybe I have it wrong,” I said.
The elevator door opened and we headed across the hotel lobby. The restaurant was just opening for lunch. Dale looked at the maitre d’ standing at the doorway.
“Wait a second,” he told me. “I’ve got to check on something.”
He went over and spoke to the maitre d’ for a moment then headed back across the lobby, visibly excited. So excited, in fact, that he couldn’t wait until he got all the way across.
So, from halfway across the hotel lobby, he announced, in a clear, penetrating voice, “Hey, Jim, you were right! They are goat balls!”
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Phony Tough and Crazy Brave
Many years ago, I read a column by Stewart Alsop, in which appeared the classic phrase “The Phony Tough and the Crazy Brave.” I’ve googled and found that most people remember the phrase being from Full Metal Jacket, but Alsop’s column was about Watergate.
Most of the Watergate conspirators were Phony Tough, given to pronouncements like “I would walk over my grandmother if necessary to assure the President's reelection.” They liked to curse (expletive deleted), and strut around, and tell each other how manly they were.
Alsop had seen their like in the military, where such behavior is fairly common. Much rarer were the “Crazy Brave,” the men who really would walk over their grandmothers, punch out their enemies, hold their hands over flames, or do whatever else the phony toughs would brag about – and more. Such men flourish during wartime, because war is the dissolution of the rules of civilized behavior, and is the natural habitat of the lawless and the sociopathic. So the idea of war appeals to the phony tough, but the actuality of war gratifies the crazy brave.
Alsop wrote about the hoodoo that the crazy brave have over the phony tough, because the latter have few defenses against the man who dares them to follow through on their braggadocio. When G. Gordon Liddy proposes to break into DNC headquarters, how can John Mitchell say no, without being seen as weak? When Oliver North decides to sell arms illegally to Iran in order to fund his crazy brave brethren in Nicaragua, what is John Poindexter other than a rubber stamp?
As a friend of mine says, the Militia Movement is primarily about going out in the woods on weekends, getting barking drunk, and telling the other guys how manly you are. The crazy brave Tim McVeigh must have come as quite a shock. Now they're talking tough about policing the border, because illegal immigrants are easy prey. I'd say it would be interesting to see what happens if one of the Minutemen encounters actual drug smugglers sometime, but that's just me projecting my own violent fantasies on someone else, which is only one step away from the phony toughness trap. So I think I'll just say, "Drink up, guys! And stay off the highways."
Phony toughness is the essence of a certain kind of bully and we live in a time of national bullydom. I can’t pinpoint the crazy braves who could crystallize the disaster. Ted Nugent is a draft-dodging gas bag, for example, good at killing small animals and blasting away at trees, but you've got to wonder how he'd fare in a real firefight. My guess: badly.
But I do so hope my country comes to its senses before the right seductive sociopath appears, ready, willing, and able to lead his countrymen straight over the cliff. All for toughness, you understand. It’s always important to be tough.
Most of the Watergate conspirators were Phony Tough, given to pronouncements like “I would walk over my grandmother if necessary to assure the President's reelection.” They liked to curse (expletive deleted), and strut around, and tell each other how manly they were.
Alsop had seen their like in the military, where such behavior is fairly common. Much rarer were the “Crazy Brave,” the men who really would walk over their grandmothers, punch out their enemies, hold their hands over flames, or do whatever else the phony toughs would brag about – and more. Such men flourish during wartime, because war is the dissolution of the rules of civilized behavior, and is the natural habitat of the lawless and the sociopathic. So the idea of war appeals to the phony tough, but the actuality of war gratifies the crazy brave.
Alsop wrote about the hoodoo that the crazy brave have over the phony tough, because the latter have few defenses against the man who dares them to follow through on their braggadocio. When G. Gordon Liddy proposes to break into DNC headquarters, how can John Mitchell say no, without being seen as weak? When Oliver North decides to sell arms illegally to Iran in order to fund his crazy brave brethren in Nicaragua, what is John Poindexter other than a rubber stamp?
As a friend of mine says, the Militia Movement is primarily about going out in the woods on weekends, getting barking drunk, and telling the other guys how manly you are. The crazy brave Tim McVeigh must have come as quite a shock. Now they're talking tough about policing the border, because illegal immigrants are easy prey. I'd say it would be interesting to see what happens if one of the Minutemen encounters actual drug smugglers sometime, but that's just me projecting my own violent fantasies on someone else, which is only one step away from the phony toughness trap. So I think I'll just say, "Drink up, guys! And stay off the highways."
Phony toughness is the essence of a certain kind of bully and we live in a time of national bullydom. I can’t pinpoint the crazy braves who could crystallize the disaster. Ted Nugent is a draft-dodging gas bag, for example, good at killing small animals and blasting away at trees, but you've got to wonder how he'd fare in a real firefight. My guess: badly.
But I do so hope my country comes to its senses before the right seductive sociopath appears, ready, willing, and able to lead his countrymen straight over the cliff. All for toughness, you understand. It’s always important to be tough.
What is the Frequency, Kenneth?
There are mathematical proofs, there are empirical tests, and there are good narratives. When push comes to shove, the good story gets more believers.
Last year, at an SF convention, I attended a panel titled, The “Future in Oil,” which was about oil painting, and had three artists on it. One of them wound up talking about the difference between CDs and vinyl records (because a subject like oil painting tends to get a lot of artistic musing). The cherished narrative is that vinyl is better than digital. I did try to set the record straight, but there were true believers in the audience, as well as one tech guy who thought he knew what it was all about (he did not). I don’t try to win unwinnable arguments very often these days, though I do kvetch about it afterwards, hence this essay.
In my own personal history, one of the most fascinating courses I ever took was a graduate level thing “Voice and Image Processing.” It’s been interesting watching the technology of voice, sound, and video over the past thirty years catch up to the things we learned in that course. Add to that the fact that I’ve also had a number of friends and acquaintances who were sound and music nuts, and I will claim some expertise on the subject. Whatever else may be said, I am not uninformed, nor am I lacking for opinions.
So why do so many people think that vinyl LPs are better than CD? We’ll leave aside whatever buried agendas are being worked out (rebellion against the digital age, simple nostalgia, etc.). In fact, I’ll stipulate that many people have had experiences that are consistent with the hypothesis that vinyl is better than digital. Why?
I know of three answers to that question, one kinda obvious and unsurprising, one that gets seriously arcane, and one that’s just counter-intuitive.
Let’s first take the one that’s unsurprising. In the production process for making an LP or CD, there is a thing called the “Master” tape, which is mixed, balanced, and frequency adjusted for the medium. Not surprisingly, CDs and LPs have different frequency responses. In fact, the old LPs had a lot of special things done to the frequency response to compensate the need to put all the sound in those little, inherently noisy, grooves. Then, on playback the “phono” jack on the pre-amplifier had a frequency response curve built into it to undo all those special tweaks. The net result was an RIAA standard “compensation curve” built into the master, to achieve closer to a flat frequency response for the final product.
When CDs first came out, and the record companies realized that they could make tons of money selling baby boomers their favorite music yet again (first on LP, then cassette, then CDs, and some poor guys had the Beatles on 8-track, too). In a few cases, they didn’t bother re-mastering the tapes, and the things sounded just horrible, especially in the high frequencies, which were artificially “bright.” In other cases, they did “digitally re-master” the tapes, but the guys who did it weren’t as good as the guys who had originally done it. So CDs got a reputation as being “harsh.”
Then there was the fact that early CD players weren’t up to properly implement the theory of sound sampling.
To understand what went wrong there, let’s start with the Nyquist Sampling Theorem. Short version: you can perfectly reconstruct any wave form like a sound signal, provided you sample it at a rate that is at least twice the frequency of the highest frequency in the signal. In the above noted course, we actually went through the proof of the NST, and while I can no more reproduce it than you can reproduce an aria by sampling it at ten samples per second, I did once know it well enough to have the sort of belief in it that qualifies as “faith” for my kind.
So CDs use a standard that samples at 44,000 samples per second, which, theoretically can perfectly reproduce sound up to 22 kHz, but actually is set up to go to 20 kHz, because you need to put in a high frequency cut-off.
See, if you try to reproduce sound at something less than the Nyquist rate, you get a phenomenon known as “aliasing,” where the lower frequencies also have an “alias” signal that is frequency shifted up to higher frequencies. This isn’t the same as a harmonic, because the frequency shift is related to the sampling rate, not to the original signal. I’ve heard aliased sound, and it’s one of the most unpleasant things I’ve ever heard, but I can’t think of any analogies for it. It just sounds alien and wrong.
So above 22 kHz in the analog signal that is reconstructed from a CD, you get this horrible noise. You can try to filter it out of the analog signal, but filters are imperfect, so some faint residual alias remains. Worse, real circuits have some slight non-linear responses, non-linear in the mathematical sense, not in the sense of a “linear frequency response.” What a mathematically non-linear effect can do it to take a high frequency signal and leak some of it to a lower frequency. Thus, the aliased signal above 22 kHz could result in some faint distortion down where even hearing-damaged Boomers could hear it.
Again, more for the CD reputation of “harshness.”
The aliasing problem was eventually solved by digital filtering. What later generation CD players do is to use “oversampling.” Basically, the original 44,000 samples per second is converted through interpolation to many more samples (12X oversampling is common). Then, use a digital filter to make damn sure that there aren’t any aliased frequencies in the thing, so when you finally do the digital-to-analog conversion, you only need a pretty good high-frequency cutoff filter. This winds up being both effective and cheap. Win/win.
Finally we come to the strange one. I think I saw it in Science a couple of years ago. I’m not even sure if it spoke to the issue with CDs vs LPs, but the implications were obvious, even if the result was counter-intuitive. Simply put, our perception of sound is such that we hear things more clearly if there is a little bit of low level noise in the mix. I think the speculation was that the noise allows us to “calibrate” our perceptions on the fly. Whatever the reason, it flies in the face of everything in sound reproduction in the past century. Noise is supposed to be your enemy, not your friend.
But the implication is that the slight surface noise that you get on even the best turntable with an LP actually assists your sound perception. Go figure.
In any case, I’ve made CDs of vinyl LPs; not all LPs have been re-issued, and besides, I don’t like buying the same thing twice. I’ve listened to the resultant CDs, and I don’t believe that anyone can tell the difference between the CD and the source LP. Furthermore, there have been many, many, controlled A/B tests of whether or not anyone can tell the difference, and it’s a simple fact that whatever differences there may be, they are imperceptible to human beings.
And if that’s not enough, Frank Zappa looked into the matter and he agreed; CDs can perfectly reproduce vinyl, if you want them to.
None of this will convince anyone who is sure that LPs, vinyl, and analog are better than CDs and bitstreams. Vinyl is “organic” (which is perfectly true in the chemical sense), while CDs and digital are harsh and artificial. And that’s a simple narrative, as opposed to what I’ve just described, which is convoluted (little math joke there) and knurdish.
I’m fine with that; I’d rather be right than win an argument.
Last year, at an SF convention, I attended a panel titled, The “Future in Oil,” which was about oil painting, and had three artists on it. One of them wound up talking about the difference between CDs and vinyl records (because a subject like oil painting tends to get a lot of artistic musing). The cherished narrative is that vinyl is better than digital. I did try to set the record straight, but there were true believers in the audience, as well as one tech guy who thought he knew what it was all about (he did not). I don’t try to win unwinnable arguments very often these days, though I do kvetch about it afterwards, hence this essay.
In my own personal history, one of the most fascinating courses I ever took was a graduate level thing “Voice and Image Processing.” It’s been interesting watching the technology of voice, sound, and video over the past thirty years catch up to the things we learned in that course. Add to that the fact that I’ve also had a number of friends and acquaintances who were sound and music nuts, and I will claim some expertise on the subject. Whatever else may be said, I am not uninformed, nor am I lacking for opinions.
So why do so many people think that vinyl LPs are better than CD? We’ll leave aside whatever buried agendas are being worked out (rebellion against the digital age, simple nostalgia, etc.). In fact, I’ll stipulate that many people have had experiences that are consistent with the hypothesis that vinyl is better than digital. Why?
I know of three answers to that question, one kinda obvious and unsurprising, one that gets seriously arcane, and one that’s just counter-intuitive.
Let’s first take the one that’s unsurprising. In the production process for making an LP or CD, there is a thing called the “Master” tape, which is mixed, balanced, and frequency adjusted for the medium. Not surprisingly, CDs and LPs have different frequency responses. In fact, the old LPs had a lot of special things done to the frequency response to compensate the need to put all the sound in those little, inherently noisy, grooves. Then, on playback the “phono” jack on the pre-amplifier had a frequency response curve built into it to undo all those special tweaks. The net result was an RIAA standard “compensation curve” built into the master, to achieve closer to a flat frequency response for the final product.
When CDs first came out, and the record companies realized that they could make tons of money selling baby boomers their favorite music yet again (first on LP, then cassette, then CDs, and some poor guys had the Beatles on 8-track, too). In a few cases, they didn’t bother re-mastering the tapes, and the things sounded just horrible, especially in the high frequencies, which were artificially “bright.” In other cases, they did “digitally re-master” the tapes, but the guys who did it weren’t as good as the guys who had originally done it. So CDs got a reputation as being “harsh.”
Then there was the fact that early CD players weren’t up to properly implement the theory of sound sampling.
To understand what went wrong there, let’s start with the Nyquist Sampling Theorem. Short version: you can perfectly reconstruct any wave form like a sound signal, provided you sample it at a rate that is at least twice the frequency of the highest frequency in the signal. In the above noted course, we actually went through the proof of the NST, and while I can no more reproduce it than you can reproduce an aria by sampling it at ten samples per second, I did once know it well enough to have the sort of belief in it that qualifies as “faith” for my kind.
So CDs use a standard that samples at 44,000 samples per second, which, theoretically can perfectly reproduce sound up to 22 kHz, but actually is set up to go to 20 kHz, because you need to put in a high frequency cut-off.
See, if you try to reproduce sound at something less than the Nyquist rate, you get a phenomenon known as “aliasing,” where the lower frequencies also have an “alias” signal that is frequency shifted up to higher frequencies. This isn’t the same as a harmonic, because the frequency shift is related to the sampling rate, not to the original signal. I’ve heard aliased sound, and it’s one of the most unpleasant things I’ve ever heard, but I can’t think of any analogies for it. It just sounds alien and wrong.
So above 22 kHz in the analog signal that is reconstructed from a CD, you get this horrible noise. You can try to filter it out of the analog signal, but filters are imperfect, so some faint residual alias remains. Worse, real circuits have some slight non-linear responses, non-linear in the mathematical sense, not in the sense of a “linear frequency response.” What a mathematically non-linear effect can do it to take a high frequency signal and leak some of it to a lower frequency. Thus, the aliased signal above 22 kHz could result in some faint distortion down where even hearing-damaged Boomers could hear it.
Again, more for the CD reputation of “harshness.”
The aliasing problem was eventually solved by digital filtering. What later generation CD players do is to use “oversampling.” Basically, the original 44,000 samples per second is converted through interpolation to many more samples (12X oversampling is common). Then, use a digital filter to make damn sure that there aren’t any aliased frequencies in the thing, so when you finally do the digital-to-analog conversion, you only need a pretty good high-frequency cutoff filter. This winds up being both effective and cheap. Win/win.
Finally we come to the strange one. I think I saw it in Science a couple of years ago. I’m not even sure if it spoke to the issue with CDs vs LPs, but the implications were obvious, even if the result was counter-intuitive. Simply put, our perception of sound is such that we hear things more clearly if there is a little bit of low level noise in the mix. I think the speculation was that the noise allows us to “calibrate” our perceptions on the fly. Whatever the reason, it flies in the face of everything in sound reproduction in the past century. Noise is supposed to be your enemy, not your friend.
But the implication is that the slight surface noise that you get on even the best turntable with an LP actually assists your sound perception. Go figure.
In any case, I’ve made CDs of vinyl LPs; not all LPs have been re-issued, and besides, I don’t like buying the same thing twice. I’ve listened to the resultant CDs, and I don’t believe that anyone can tell the difference between the CD and the source LP. Furthermore, there have been many, many, controlled A/B tests of whether or not anyone can tell the difference, and it’s a simple fact that whatever differences there may be, they are imperceptible to human beings.
And if that’s not enough, Frank Zappa looked into the matter and he agreed; CDs can perfectly reproduce vinyl, if you want them to.
None of this will convince anyone who is sure that LPs, vinyl, and analog are better than CDs and bitstreams. Vinyl is “organic” (which is perfectly true in the chemical sense), while CDs and digital are harsh and artificial. And that’s a simple narrative, as opposed to what I’ve just described, which is convoluted (little math joke there) and knurdish.
I’m fine with that; I’d rather be right than win an argument.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Metropolis
[Cross-posted from WAAGNFNP]
I know a lot of amateur scholars, including myself (ask me about New York City circa 1911 sometime). Many of them concentrate a fair amount of their scholarly impulses on science fiction, and that includes my friend Douglas. He’s taken advantage of the fact that U.C. Berkeley has a collection of the papers of A.E. van Vogt, for example. He also tells me of a movie review of Metropolis written by H. G. Wells.
I know a lot of amateur scholars, including myself (ask me about New York City circa 1911 sometime). Many of them concentrate a fair amount of their scholarly impulses on science fiction, and that includes my friend Douglas. He’s taken advantage of the fact that U.C. Berkeley has a collection of the papers of A.E. van Vogt, for example. He also tells me of a movie review of Metropolis written by H. G. Wells.
Wells was highly critical of the movie, on science fiction and futurist terms. Specifically, Wells noted that the economics of Metropolis was simply non-functional. In the city, there is a small, wealthy class that owns everything, while there is a much larger class (literally an underclass, because they live in the city’s depths) of workers who produce all the goods. Nonsense, says Wells. This makes no sense. The number of workers, plus modern manufacturing, would produce vastly more goods than the small wealthy class can consume. Who buys the rest of it?
There are a couple of points worth noting here. One is that the society in Metropolis is very similar to Wells’ own book When the Sleeper Wakes, written 25 years before Metropolis. The second is that Wells belonged to the Bloomsbury Group, a collection of artists, writers, and other intellectuals, that included John Maynard Keynes. I suspect that Keynes once made the same economic critique to Wells, about Sleeper. Wells then passed it on.
It’s a relevant point, and quite true. Yet the image of the elite in the clouds while the toilers work in darkness nevertheless is the one that sticks in the mind. It’s way too easy to make the leap to Freudian symbolism here, even down to the parsing the phrases “bowels of the city” or “out of sight, out of mind.”
Can one even find a dystopian future story that doesn’t contain the extremes in wealth and power trope? Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut comes to mind, since it, at least on the surface, was about forcing everyone to the same level. But scratch the surface and there’s the Handicapper General wielding power over everyone. Maybe that Twilight Zone where everyone has plastic surgery to look the same manages it.
For that matter, the highly unequal version of society isn’t confined to obviously dystopian works. Often it seems like the standard view of what’s to come, as if no one can really come up with a credible alternative.
If science fiction is a reflection of everyone’s hopes and fears about the future (and that’s surely one feature of our genre), what does it say that everyone has in the back of their mind a view of an undemocratic, faux feudal society, with the masses falling prey to a few predatory rulers? And if this vision of the future is the default, it certainly makes sense for people to engage in class warfare as a sort of full contact musical chairs, with the expectation that the winners and their progeny will have the rest of time to enjoy the spoils of the Social Darwinian State.
Friday, August 17, 2007
Swimming Pool Air
In “The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff, Sturgeon mentions in passing a plethora of alien civilizations and lifeforms, including “fluorine fellowships.” Alliteration aside, the likelihood of a lifeform being based on fluorine in any significant way is very slim; the likelihood of an environment having free fluorine in it is so close to zero that I’m saying it’s impossible. Fluorine will burn water, so the most you could get would be hydrogen fluoride, and that will etch glass, so your putative fluorine world would need to be free of silica. Good luck on that one.
Chlorine, on the other hand, seems more likely. It’s actually a bit less electronegative than oxygen, so it isn’t obviously less likely to exist in a free state. But an atmosphere of chlorine has a serious problem: sunlight.
Chlorine photolyzes all the way down to yellow light, the chlorine molecule splitting into two chlorine atoms. And chlorine atoms are really promiscuous, especially to hydrogen. While they won’t strip hydrogen from water, they will do it for any hydrocarbon, including methane, as well as molecular hydrogen. So you’re really talking about an atmosphere of hydrogen chloride, i.e. intensely acidic.
We use chlorination as a disinfecting process for drinking water and swimming pools, with the latter getting a lot more chlorine than the former. Anyone who has ever had to maintain an outdoor pool can tell you that a sunny day can chew up your chlorine mighty fast. There’s a trick you can use to get rid of the chlorine taste in over-chlorinated water, which consists of just putting the water in a glass jar and leaving it in the sun for an hour. Then you can make your coffee or tea from it without the chlorine taste.
Part of the chlorine in swimming pools goes to hydrochloric acid, which will acidify your pool. We used to use sodium hypochlorite at the old YMCA pool where I was a lifeguard, and the sodium took up some of the acidity. Nevertheless, we sometimes had to add some sodium carbonate to the mix.
Chlorine doesn’t just kill bacteria though; it chews them up and grinds them down into small molecules, including ammonia and organic amines. Then you get chloramines which are even more toxic than chlorine itself. A substantial part of the “swimming pool smell” that most people think of as chlorine is actually from chloramines. For us former life guards, a little whiff of chloramines (or even Clorox) triggers memories.
A “chlorine producing photosynthetic algae” like the one mentioned in “Tranquility” and in Steve Gillette’s World Building articles (and book), probably wouldn’t affect a planetary atmosphere very much, at least at first. But it would begin killing sea life pretty quickly, in a kind of “green tide.” Depending on how it sequestered the alkali elements (I had in mind carbonate in a silica diatom shell), it would also raise the pH if the upper water layers. That would disrupt the carbonate-bicarbonate balance of the sea surface, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere while also depleting surface CO2 as the biologically sequestered carbonate precipitated down the water column. Oceanic primary productivity would plummet, while atmospheric CO2 would skyrocket; a combination of global climate change and a die-off of oceanic life that I figured as apocalyptic.
But of course no one would ever do so foolish a thing as to tamper with the global environment just out of curiosity, or while trying to make a buck, so I'm sure we're safe from this particular danger.
Chlorine, on the other hand, seems more likely. It’s actually a bit less electronegative than oxygen, so it isn’t obviously less likely to exist in a free state. But an atmosphere of chlorine has a serious problem: sunlight.
Chlorine photolyzes all the way down to yellow light, the chlorine molecule splitting into two chlorine atoms. And chlorine atoms are really promiscuous, especially to hydrogen. While they won’t strip hydrogen from water, they will do it for any hydrocarbon, including methane, as well as molecular hydrogen. So you’re really talking about an atmosphere of hydrogen chloride, i.e. intensely acidic.
We use chlorination as a disinfecting process for drinking water and swimming pools, with the latter getting a lot more chlorine than the former. Anyone who has ever had to maintain an outdoor pool can tell you that a sunny day can chew up your chlorine mighty fast. There’s a trick you can use to get rid of the chlorine taste in over-chlorinated water, which consists of just putting the water in a glass jar and leaving it in the sun for an hour. Then you can make your coffee or tea from it without the chlorine taste.
Part of the chlorine in swimming pools goes to hydrochloric acid, which will acidify your pool. We used to use sodium hypochlorite at the old YMCA pool where I was a lifeguard, and the sodium took up some of the acidity. Nevertheless, we sometimes had to add some sodium carbonate to the mix.
Chlorine doesn’t just kill bacteria though; it chews them up and grinds them down into small molecules, including ammonia and organic amines. Then you get chloramines which are even more toxic than chlorine itself. A substantial part of the “swimming pool smell” that most people think of as chlorine is actually from chloramines. For us former life guards, a little whiff of chloramines (or even Clorox) triggers memories.
A “chlorine producing photosynthetic algae” like the one mentioned in “Tranquility” and in Steve Gillette’s World Building articles (and book), probably wouldn’t affect a planetary atmosphere very much, at least at first. But it would begin killing sea life pretty quickly, in a kind of “green tide.” Depending on how it sequestered the alkali elements (I had in mind carbonate in a silica diatom shell), it would also raise the pH if the upper water layers. That would disrupt the carbonate-bicarbonate balance of the sea surface, releasing CO2 into the atmosphere while also depleting surface CO2 as the biologically sequestered carbonate precipitated down the water column. Oceanic primary productivity would plummet, while atmospheric CO2 would skyrocket; a combination of global climate change and a die-off of oceanic life that I figured as apocalyptic.
But of course no one would ever do so foolish a thing as to tamper with the global environment just out of curiosity, or while trying to make a buck, so I'm sure we're safe from this particular danger.
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