It was 150 years ago today that papers of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace’s explaining the theory of natural selection - now recognized as the main driver of evolution - were presented to the Linnean Society of London.

This post at The Beagle Project Blog gives an excellent and interesting account of the momentous occasion. Here are they key moments in the story:

Wallace spent much of the late 1840’s and early 1850’s on expeditions in tropical locales, hunting for the mechanism behind the evolutionary change in species. Wallace wrote a paper on the subject in 1855, prompting the eminent geologist Charles Lyell to pay a visit to Darwin, who then spilled the beans on his theory of natural selection that he’d spent the last 20 years mulling over.

Lyell urged Darwin to publish his theory, lest someone else beat him to it. As it happened, in February 1858, Wallace thought of natural selection while stricken by a fever in Indonesia. Wallace even sent an essay to Darwin, who he knew to be interested in the subject, explaining his theory.

Darwin appealed to Lyell and another friend, Jospeh Hooker, who decided to present papers from both Wallace and Darwin to the Linnean Society on July 1, 1858. They were published in the Society’s journal a month later. Fifteen months later Darwin’s semincal “On the Origin of Species” was published.

And such were the beginnings of the most fundamental theory in biology.

Forget Maui, get hitched in space! That’s the message of one Japanese firm that is teaming up with an American private spaceflight group to offer suborbital weddings for just over $2 million a pop.

The Japanese firm First Advantage and the U.S.-based private spaceflight firm Rocketplane Global, Inc., are apparently planning to host weddings in space for about $2.3 million (240 million yen), according to media reports and both firms’ Japanese Web sites.

An illustration advertising space weddings from Japan’s First Advantage and the U.S. firm Rocketplane Global. Credit: First Advantage/Rocketplane Global/http://www.spacewedding.jp.

A translation of First Advantage’s Space Wedding site suggests a four-day training regime that would culminate in a wedding ceremony that would start on the ground and be completed during a one-hour flight into suborbital space about 60 miles (100 km) above Earth, according to the AFP news service.

An artist’s illustration advertising space weddings by Japan’s First Advantage and the U.S. firm Rocketplane Global. Credit: （C）2008 eraliy/Misuzu Onuki/Rocketplane Global, Japan.

Such a ceremony could include a space wedding photo album, marriage certificate, as well as the capability to broadcast the cosmic union live in some way, read First Advantage’s site. Apparently, the couple could take up to three guests – assumedly a priest and two witnesses – along for the near-space nuptials, reported Russia’s RIA Novosti, adding that the first flight could be in 2011.

According to the AFP, First Advantage spokesperson Taro Katsura said his firm expects the main customers for its space weddings to come from China or the Arab gulf region.

This is a good point to note, by the way, that there is a precedent for space weddings. In 2003, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko wed his bride - then Ekaterina Dmitriev - while flying 240 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station. His wife, of course, was on Earth with the rest of the wedding party next to a cardboard cutout of her groom.

Based in Oklahoma City, Okla., Rocketplane Global is developing the XP Spaceplane for private suborbital spaceflights. The four-seat spaceship is slated to be about the size of a fighter jet and designed to carry two jet engines and a rocket engine to reach space.

Initially, the spacecraft is expected to fly missions based out of the Oklahoma Spaceport and give passengers about four minutes of weightlessness during their short trip. Basic space tourism seats, not a full-up space wedding charter, carried ticket prices ranging from the base $200,000 to $250,000 for a premium view up front with the pilot, Rocketplane officials have said.

So that’s the lowdown on Rocketplane Global and Japan’s First Advantage space weddings of the future. If you’re counting down, another space tourism firm – Virgin Galactic – will roll out the WhiteKnightTwo mothership of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceliners on July 28.

The only problem I can think is: once you get married in space, where do you go for a honeymoon?

You know, Space Adventures in Virginia is offering $100 million trips around the moon aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft. So, there’s an idea.

• Video: Rocketplane’s XP Spaceplane
• Future of Flight: Space Tourism, Investment and Technology
• Video: SpaceShipTwo Revealed

More space wedding information: http://spacewedding.jp/ (in Japanese)

More Rocketplane Global, Japan info: http://rocketplane.jp/index.html (in Japanese)

Man and Nature have always been at odds. Long ago, we sought caves to get out of the rain. It was human nature to do so. Now, stupidly, we build houses in locations we know will flood. We know they will. We’re essentially giving the game away, allowing Nature an advantage that assures it will win.

And the worst is yet to come.

In New Orleans, the levees failed years after engineers and hurricane experts told us they would. The disaster was, one could argue, extremely well planned. Officials said, “Nature, our levees are too short and we dare you to send a strong hurricane our way.” And then Nature just did what it naturally does.

This month’s Midwest floods remind us again how precarious it is to live where a river wants to flow. The Christian Science Monitor today explains that unlike the well-studied New Orleans levee system, the patchwork setup in the Midwest was an unwritten recipe for disaster.

“Little information is known about where levees exist, who maintains them, and what their condition is,” the article points out.

But we do know that the Midwest undergoes extensive flooding every few years [just look at the Great Flood of 1993]. This is not news. But it does get easily forgotten. As Gerald Galloway, a professor of engineering at the University of Maryland, put it a few months after Katrina: “The half-life of the memory of a flood is very short.”

To those who live in the flood plain and the lawmakers and planning officials and insurance companies that allow more homes to be built and rebuilt there, none of this week’s events should come as much of a surprise.

“To qualify for the National Flood Insurance Program [in the United States], structures simply need to be behind a levee built to a so-called 100-year standard, meaning there is a 1 percent chance in any given year that a flood will rise above the levee,” the Monitor article explains. This year, for many people, the odds are now at about 100 percent.

Seeing this week’s devastation, would you go for those odds? Would you build a home in the flood plain, with or without insurance? Apparently for many, the answer is yes.

Figuring out why people live in places they know could prove destructive is tricky. “We can’t underestimate the importance of place, weather and beauty to people,” says Paul Slovic, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon who studies risk behavior.

We need to think more like the Dutch, a good chunk of whom live below sea level:

“In the Netherlands, on the other hand, levees for ocean flooding are built to a 10,000-year standard, and inland levees are designed at least to a 250-year standard and usually in excess of 1,250 years,” according to the Monitor.

Not coincidentally, the Dutch are the least concerned of any nation about the rising seas expected from global warming. They’re planning for it.

What’s next? Oh, you don’t want to know.

More than 40 percent of the U.S. population lives in areas protected by levees, according to the Association of State Flood Plain Managers.

New Orleans will get slammed again, eventually. The whole city is sinking, which we’ve known for years, but now scientists say it’s sinking faster than expected. And in California, engineers have long warned of a disaster waiting for aging levees to give way in the vast Sacramento River delta.

“There are more people in the state of California in danger of catastrophic levee failure than in the states of Texas, Louisiana and Florida combined,” said Sandy Rosenthal, Founder of Levees.Org, a group that lobbies for the obvious: Build them taller and better.

If history is any guide, California is poised for an avoidable catastrophe you’ll be reading about one day. Bank on it.

• Natural Disasters: Top 10 U.S. Threats

Or: Toward a Post-Earth-Day World

You know something’s up when Al Sharpton and Pat Robertson agree on something.

With Al and Pat all cozy on a couch, agreeing in a new TV ad (funded by the other Al’s wecansolveit.org) that we need to take better care of this planet, one can imagine a post-Earth Day world in which the day serves not as a plea to make change but a celebration of what was changed, a time in the future when the thinking that embodies Earth Day becomes part of the collective human consciousness, as accepted as the fact that the Earth is round and humans are the product of evolution. Ahem.

The post-Earth Day world is certainly a ways off. But we have to get there. If our grandchildren don’t celebrate its irrelevance, then they will be wallowing in our failures (or as Ted Turner suggested, they’ll be eating each other).

The challenge remains great. While green has become the new black, red is raining on the parade. A really brief history:

Earth Day, started in 1970, was a fringe event for decades. Even in 2005, it was struggling to find relevance. By last year, its popularity boosted by Al Gore and the IPCC pronouncements, Earth Day went mainstream, at least in terms of the public catching up with its calls for action. Corporations were furiously applying a green sheen to their images and online media rolled out new green web sites (to milk the advertising dollars) faster than you can say “do Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton really agree on something?”

Dueling Logos: Everyone is green today …

Yet all fads fade, and frankly a lot of people are tired of hearing about how they’re supposed to change their lives to save the planet at a time when their pocketbooks are being severely pinched and there’s even talk of food shortages in the United States (see yesterday’s blog and today’s NY Times story).

Green thinking risks being supplanted by the red ink of the economy (gas and oil prices hit new highs again today while housing sales and prices declined further) and also by another black: coal. Burning coal is about the worst thing we can do for the environment, because it burns very dirty. Yet with other energy sources getting hard to come by (today, we learn that nuclear power may not be the answer), coal is experiencing a resurgence, especially in China (which has sought help from California on emissions). As a species, we’re clinging to coal like neanderthals to their clubs, and if the global economy doesn’t improve, neither will the thinking.

So an Earth Day message to the future: Here’s hoping you grandkids can retire the day as one having fulfilled its purpose.

[An aside: Most reporters and editors will tell you they hate "birthday card" stories, the puff pieces written in advance to "fill a hole" in the newspaper or, for a web site, garner some traffic — on Mother's Day, Thanksgiving or Earth Day. However, try to find a news site today that hasn't jumped on the bandwagon in a significant way. I like USA Today's no-fanfare approach though, calling this coverage what it is on their catchall page titled "Marking Earth Day." Watch late today as web sites begin to drop green like a hot rock in favor of all the red (and, of course, the election).]

Few things have evolved more rapidly since Charles Darwin’s time than human communication, so it’s fitting that mountains of his scrawlings are now available online.

At http://darwin-online.org.uk, papers that had been available only to scholars are now free for all to peruse. It’s dubbed “the largest publication of Darwin’s papers in history” with thousands of handwritten manuscripts along with other works.

If you want to freshen up on your Darwinism before you paw through the extensive archives, read our story about Darwin’s adventures and tragedy and brush up on how evolution works.

Also: Vote for the Greatest Modern Mind and read about the latest ill-informed and craftily couched attack on evolution by that guy who hocks eye drops.

Thomas Edison gets all the credit for the first sound recording. But Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville beat him to the punch by 17 years.

Thing is, Scott (as he’s commonly called, if called anything at all) didn’t play his back. He created visual recordings of sound waves that he enjoyed looking at.

But some clever scientists have figured out how to play the recordings back. Check it out here, a scratchy rendition of the French folksong “Au Clair de la Lune” recorded on April 9, 1860 on a phonautogram and perhaps sung by his daughter.

NPR has a nice story about it.

A new study of U.S. teens finds many lack knowledge of basic things that some experts say help form the underpinnings of a common culture.

According to an article in USA Today, among 1,200 17-year-olds surveyed:

• 43 percent knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.
• 52 percent could identify the theme of 1984.
• 51 percent knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

Looking at the glass as half-full, as pundits and journalists seldom do, one might say lots of teens know something about their country’s history. Indeed, 88 percent knew the bombing of Pearl Harbor led our country into World War II. One reason so many knew that: It’s taught in school.

So, let me see if I get this: If we teach teens something, they learn it. If we fail to, then we complain that half of them don’t know it. Sure, teens can be lazy (and fail to do chores, and seem simply to not care). But these poll results are as much a reflection on our education system as on teens.

Those flybys of cosmic flotsam this month within our little niche of astro turf — Asteroid 2007 TU24 and Asteroid 2007 WD5 — are a swift kick in the planetary defense pants. That is, there are some lessons learned left in the wake of their passage. Both are newly discovered Near Earth Objects (NEOs).

“The end of January twofer with NEOs flying by both Earth and Mars is wonderful!,” observed former Apollo astronaut, Russell Schweickart, now chairman of the B612 Foundation.

“Once again we’ve had an opportunity, prompted by nature, to think through the questions of what we would know and how we might react, were these objects actually headed for an impact…or even a very close call,” Schweickart told me.

Schweickart pointed out that WD5, in particular, being a small (Tunguska-sized) object, typifies the most frequent NEOs we will have to deal with.

“Deflection will often be out of the question due to the paucity of data we’ll have on them. Therefore, our actions will frequently be limited to providing short-term warning,” Schweickart added.

WD5 has generated some very useful discussions, Schweickart said. That particular space rock blasts by Mars on January 30.

“TU24, regrettably, has been more of a target of opportunity for scare mongers!,” Schweickart noted.

TU24 is on a freight train path, slipping by Earth on January 29. Its closest distance to Earth — roughly 334,000 miles (537,500 kilometers) — will be at 12:33 a.m. Pacific Time (3:33 a.m. Eastern time) in the United States. That’s close enough that the object should be observable that night by amateur astronomers glued to the eyepieces of modest-sized telescopes.

I also asked Donald Yeomans, an asteroid expert and Supervisor of the Solar System Dynamics Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, about WD5’s orbit after it zips by the red planet.

“WD5’s orbit will be perturbed by the Mars close approach,” Yeomans said. “And while the nominal (most likely) orbit is not affected very much by the encounter, it will be difficult to follow thereafter because of the uncertainties introduced by the Mars perturbation,” he told me.

“WD5 is a near-Earth object and so will remain on our short list of objects that we monitor. Assuming we can get the necessary observations, we can track it years into the future,” Yeomans concluded.

For those of you still scratching your science-curious heads about whom to vote for in the presidential primaries, Physics Today has come to the rescue. You might not be a regular reader of the flagship publication of The American Institute of Physics or know that “it’s the most influential and closely followed physics magazine in the world, informing readers about science and its place in the world with authoritative features, full news coverage and analysis, and fresh perspectives on technological advances and ground-breaking research.”

In any case, check out their handy “click on the mugshot” overview on the candidates’ positions on science education, teaching evolution, nuclear weapons, science investment, energy policy and climate change. Someone went to a lot of trouble to assemble all this information.

And if you’re looking for a broader-issue, quicker answer, you might try out the 14-question “Select a Candidate 2008 quiz“ put out by WQAD-TV (Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island, Moline — Illinois, of course). You might be shocked by the candidate that the software assigns as your best match. I was. It wasn’t Kucinich and it wasn’t Giuliani. That’s all I’m saying.

Lot of buzz regarding a recent Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine story about shooting off astronauts to an asteroid - presented as an “alternate vision” for the next president - perhaps altering the trajectory of NASA’s return of footprints on the Moon. An upcoming conference is to thrash out the idea in greater detail, noted the story.

This morning I emailed the NASA folks for any reaction - and got this response authored by the chief of NASA, Mike Griffin, in response to the Aviation Week & Space Technology story.

“I have noted on many occasions that, at present NASA funding levels, our budget is sufficient to support a variety of excellent space programs, but that it cannot support all of them. Balanced choices must be made. But they cannot be continually remade if there is to be progress,” Griffin explained.

“Those who are organizing this conference have long favored choices other than those put forth in the Vision for Space Exploration and subsequently authorized by the Congress. Their rejection of the Moon as an important destination for mankind, their emphasis on the early use of the Lagrange Points in a new space architecture, and their advocacy for early missions to the near-Earth asteroids (NEO) and to Mars are well known and long standing. These views were summarized in a report issued by the International Academy of Astronautics in July 2004. Their opposition to the International Space Station continues unremitting. One struggles to understand how the future international and commercial partnerships they advocate will come to pass if existing treaty-level commitments are not kept,” Griffin said.

“What is not mentioned in the Aviation Week article is that the questions to be raised at this conference have been asked and answered. The organizer’s views, and many others, were amply considered and thoroughly debated in the two years that elapsed between President Bush’s announcement of the Vision for Space Exploration in January 2004, and the strongly bipartisan ratification of the goals of the Vision in the NASA Authorization Act of December, 2005. As goes without saying, NASA will execute the law of the land. Until and unless the Congress provides new and different authorization for NASA, the law of the land specifies that we will complete the International Space Station, retire the Shuttle, design and build a new spaceflight architecture, return to the Moon in a manner supporting a ’sustained presence’, and prepare the way for Mars,” Griffin explained.

“We are doing those things as quickly and efficiently as our appropriated funding allows. System designs for the early elements have been completed, contracts have been let, and consistently solid progress is being made with a minimum of unexpected difficulty. True, the available budget is less than what was once promised, and progress is therefore slower than all of us would prefer. But applying resources in the right direction, irrespective of pace, is always productive, and we are doing that. Ares and Orion as they are presently taking form are the building blocks for any human future beyond low Earth orbit (LEO),” the NASA chief pointed out.

“As I have often stated, human missions to NEOs have no stronger advocate than I, and I hope that a future Congress will add such authorization to future guidance for NASA, without altering other goals. But in other respects, I believe that the 2005 Authorization Act for NASA remains the finest policy framework for U.S. civil space activities that I have seen in forty years. In particular, I believe that to venture into deep space beyond the Moon with what will be our first step beyond LEO in more than fifty years, whether to an asteroid or to Mars, is riskier than it needs to be. Returning to the Moon and consolidating the gains to be made thereby is properly on the path toward NEOs and Mars. We should stay the present course as laid out in the Act,” Griffin said.

“The conference organizers have assigned sole responsibility for our new civil space exploration strategy to President Bush, ignoring the hugely bipartisan — actually non-partisan — support it has received in Congress. In fact, the principal features of the Vision for Space Exploration, and the subsequent 2005 Authorization Act, are directly traceable to the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board [CAIB]. President Bush acted on those recommendations in his proposal to Congress. No such far-reaching proposal should be adopted without debate. That debate was had, in 2003, ‘04, and ‘05, and it was fulsome. From it came a unifying plan for civil space, and the best legislative guidance NASA has ever had,” Griffin stated.

“No plan can fully satisfy all the many constituencies we have in what I wish were a true ’space community’. but as the CAIB noted, it would be far worse to continue the prior multi-decade lack of any strategic plan, to continue dithering and debating and inevitably widening the gap between shuttle retirement and the availability of new systems. The 2005 Authorization Act codifies a great strategic plan for civil space exploration. Now is the time for space advocacy groups to come together in support of it,” Griffin concluded.

Meanwhile, conference organizers of the workshop have notified Aviation Week & Space Technology that the recent story created a misperception - that the workshop to be held at Stanford University had already decided upon a new path for the human and robotic exploration of space, one that might call for pushing the Ctrl-Alt-Delete button on a NASA Moon base.

Not so, explains Scott Hubbard of Stanford University and Louis Friedman of The Planetary Society.

“We wish to make it clear that the purpose of the workshop is to examine critically the Vision for Space Exploration in order to prepare for future space policy considerations in a new Administration and new Congress,” states the letter to the magazine provided to SPACE.com.

“We have deliberately included a wide range of participants with disparate views, including those who would maintain the status quo. We personally do not know what the conclusions of the workshop will be - or even if there will be a definitive consensus,” the clarifying letter notes in part, underscoring the point that the workshop has “no predetermined conclusions.”