One tends to roll one’s eyes when the topic turns to Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the French encyclopedist and pre-revolutionary intellectual luminary.

Buffon sounds regrettably similar to Buffoon, especially considering that The Comte is best-known for some memorable blunders. For example, Georges-Louis came out on the losing side of a tussle with Thomas Jefferson regarding the general valor of the New World fauna. From the wikipedia article:

At one point, Buffon propounded a theory that nature in the New World was inferior to that of Eurasia. He argued that the Americas were lacking in large and powerful creatures, and that even the people were less virile than their European counterparts. He ascribed this inferiority to the marsh odors and dense forests of the American continent. These remarks so incensed Thomas Jefferson that he dispatched twenty soldiers to the New Hampshire woods to find a bull moose for Buffon as proof of the “stature and majesty of American quadrupeds”

Buffon also speculated, in 1778, that the solar system’s planets were the result of a collision between a comet and the Sun, a hypothesis that is completely incorrect. Even in the 1750s, perturbation analyses (such as those carried out by Alexis Claude Clairaut in connection with the successful predictions of the return ephemeris for Halley’s Comet) had made it clearly evident that cometary masses are far smaller than planetary masses.

Buffon, however, was definitively not a buffoon. He came remarkably close to having a full command of all the scientific disciplines, and some of his efforts still sparkle. He calculated that the chance of the Sun rising tomorrow is \(1-(1/2)^x\), where \(x\) is the number of consecutive days that it has risen to date. In his treatment of probability theory, he also stated that one chance in 10,000 is the lowest practical probability — an enormously useful bon mot, on par, say, with Andy Warhol’s remark that “when you think about it, Department Stores are kind of like Museums.”

Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, which aimed to exhaustively cover all of the natural sciences, ran to 44 quarto volumes, eight of which were written and which appeared after he died, and all of which were out of date the moment they were printed. Even in the 1700s, scientific knowledge was accumulating so rapidly that it was impossible to keep up.

It has been recently hammered home to me that the same situation also now holds true for extrasolar planets. Jack Lissauer and I just finished a review article on exoplanets for the forthcoming second edition of Elsevier’s Treatise on Geophysics. A pre-print is up on today’s arXiv listing. In writing the article, it was painfully clear just how large the literature is, and how fast it is growing…

I’ve been putting the finishing touches on a review article covering extrasolar planets that will be posted to arXiv in a few days. The list of to-do’s involves updating the figures, including the one shown just below, which charts \(M\sin i\)‘s of the RV-sourced planets in dark gray and simple radius-derived mass estimates of the transit-sourced planets in red. The steady Moore’s Law-like progression toward ever-lower masses has definitively reached Earth-mass (not to be confused with Earth-like) planets. The process took up only two decades, and was among the more impressive scientific advances of the recent past.

Here’s an elaboration of the above figure that doesn’t make it into the article, but is interesting nonetheless. On the y-axis is \(K/rms\), which is reasonably well correlated with the signal strength of Doppler velocity discoveries. One can certainly detect planets with confidence at low \(K/rms\), but it requires a large number of independent Doppler velocity measurements. The color corresponds to “astrobiological interest” — surely naive, and probably misplaced, but nonetheless quantifiable by my planet valuation formula.

Credit: NASA/JPL

It feels increasingly awkward and embarrassing to read LaTeXed, peer-reviewed articles that quantify and delineate the habitable zone — the special region surrounding a star that is invariably (and rather fittingly) linked to a particular fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm.

Evolutionary psychologists have speculated that the concept of the afterlife might be inextricably entwined to the evolution of the mind’s ability to reason about the minds of others. A rational world view, however, frustrates ingrained atavistic yearnings and a belief in the supernatural. Habitable planets provide a respectable stopgap to assuage the discomfort of these incompatible poles. Could it be a mere coincidence that the ancient Greek and classical depictions of Elýsion pedíon, the Elysian Fields, are part and parcel the very image of the habitable zone?

Credit: NASA/SETI/JPL

And they live untouched by sorrow in the islands of the blessed along the shore of deep-swirling Ocean, happy heroes for whom the grain-giving earth bears honey-sweet fruit flourishing thrice a year, far from the deathless gods…

— Hesiod, Works and Days (170)

The submerged summit of the Detroit Seamount ranks among the planet’s gloomiest spots. East of Kamchatka, a mile beneath the waves at 51 51′ N, 167 45′ E, it is second-to-last in the long line of Emperors. Inch by inch, it creeps toward destruction in the Aleutian Trench.

Detroit’s glory days were the late Cretaceous. Back then, it was an active Hawaiian volcano.

Live it fast, you’re gonna get there soon. Kauai is five million years old, but underground, the lights have gone out. Over half of the original height and the original land area have disappeared. Rivers gush sediment into the sea. Waimea Canyon juxtaposes verdure and an erosive wasteland. Four wheel drive claws and rends the red dirt.

Beyond Kauai, the next islands in the chain are Nihoa,

Necker,

and the La Perouse Pinnacle,

whose resemblance to a sinking ship is not just metaphoric.

Before humans arrived, the Hawaiian islands had strange flightless birds. Indeed, each island in the chain developed its own odd avian inhabitants, sculpted by natural selection, and then driven conveyor-like to extinction. Not once, in forty, fifty, sixty tries, did the birds respond by evolving intelligence and doing something about their situation. Probably, there was never enough time.

Or perhaps, that’s something that rarely, if ever, happens.