BREAKING: Massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake triggers tsunami warning for Pacific coasts
Quake off the coast of Kamchatka:
Quake off the coast of Kamchatka:
Some recent panoramas, stitched together from cameraphone photos:
The “Belt of Venus” looking southeast towards Brigham City at sunset.
A late afternoon summer storm. The rain didn’t quite make it to the surface; it evaporated en route.
Sunset
Sunset
Sunset
UPDATE: books have sold.
I’m selling some books. The usual approach is ebay, but I figured I’d start here with y’all. This first group I will try to sell separately *if* nobody wants the lot of them. If you buy the whole lot, it’ll be cheaper than individually. The individual prices are based on what they seem to be going for online.
If you want the whole lot, I’m selling it for $100 (sum of the individual books, $133), plus postage. If you’re in the US, it’ll be media mail, so it shouldn’t cost too much. If you want the lot, let me know via email or comment; first come, first served.
For right now, trying to sell these books as a lot. If nobody wants the whole lot within a day or so, I’ll make them available individually.
“The High Frontier” by O’Neill, larger paperback, 1982. $15
“Colonies in space,” by Heppenheimer, larger paperback, $3.50
“The Future of Flight” by Myrabo, paperback, 1985. $3.50
“Colonizing other Worlds” by Macvey, hardbound, 1984. $7
“The Exploration of Space,” by Clarke. Hardbound, dust jacket is torn, otherwise good, 1951. $3
“The high Frontier,” by O’Neill, trade paperback, 1978, $3.50
“Colonies in space,” Heppenheimer, trade paperback, 1977. $3.50
“Space Trek,” by Glenn, paperback, 1978. $5
“Moving Into Space,” paperback, 1978. $4
“The Third industrial Revolution, by Stine, paperback, 1975. $5
“Space Shuttle,” by Kaplan, hardback, 1978. $4
“Dark Sun” by Rhodes, 1996, paperback, $4
“Fallout Prediction,” US Army FM3-22, 1973. $12
“The Constructive Uses of Nuclear Explosives” by Teller, 1968. Hardcover, no dust jacket. $60
Here’s a propaganda cartoon from 1956, put out to benefit the American petroleum industry. I’m at a loss as to who this was meant to be shown to… school kids, perhaps? In any event, it uses reasonably good (for the time) animation to extol the virtues not only of petroleum, but of the competitive capitalist economic model. In other words… pretty much exactly what you would not expect to see today.
It’s interesting to see what American society put out to promote itself when the US was in undeniable ascendancy, compared to the self-flagellating barf that tends to get promoted now that the US is seemingly in self-imposed decline.
Oldman is one of those actors who pops up all over the place, often under heavy makeup, and never seems like the same character – or even the same physical body – twice. He played Commissioner Gordon, Dracula, Zorg, Sid Vicious, Dr. Smith, Beethoven… everyone.
And now, he’s taking a turn as Churchill:
In cobbling together my “Zaneverse” world, I’ve pondered a number of technologies that I figure should be available five centuries from now. A lot of them are pretty standard sci-fi tropes, as one would expect. Several forms of artificial gravity, AI, warp drive, hyperdrive… the usual stuff.
In a world with all this stuff, you have to wonder why everyone hasn’t just uploaded into the Matrix, abandoning the physical world. I’ve come up with an explanation for why that hasn’t happened, thus allowing for space opera. Still, I’ve utilized portions of this technology for limited applications:
1: Extreme long-range colonization. Even with hyperdrive, the galaxy is a big place and there are a limited number of ships. If a colony world is a year away and you have 10,000 people who want to go, and your ship can comfortably support fifteen people for a two-year round trip, and throw in some sizable possibility that the ship could be lost of destroyed en route, what to do? In this world, one of the solutions that is often used is to copy the colonists. They get into something akin to a futuristic CAT scanner. It does a complete scan of their bodies, genetically, epigenetically and structurally, and saves the scan as digital data. The brain is scanned with means only describable as techno-magic; the personality, memories and basic operating system is copied and stored digitally. The colonist is then put into suspended animation somewhere secure… a cavern deep under the lunar surface, say. The stored data for that colonist and his 10,000 fellows is put on a portable hard drive, transported to the distant location, a new body for the colonist is printed off and the “brain” uploaded into it. If the colonist is successfully recreated at the far end, an FTL message is sent back to the storage facility, and the original is instantly evaporated. The colonist then goes on with life.
2: Long-range limited term contract jobs. Let’s say that the person isn’t a colonist, but instead someone whose career is setting up colonies, then coming home. Perhaps they are responsible for the construction of terraformation atmosphere processing plants for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. OK, so the same process of copying, transport and recreation of the person is followed. However, the original is kept under suspended animation. At the end of the contract term, the copies mind is scanned and stored and shipped home. As soon as the hip departs for home, the copy is evaporated. When the ship returns home, the copy is uploaded into the original, basically just adding memories. The original wakes up; from his point of view, he went to sleep on Luna, woke up on the distant colony world, worked for six months, then woke up back on Luna.
There would be a few advantages to a system like this. First is the ease of transport; just an inert computer storage system, rather than a whole lot of people who either need tending or suspended animation systems jam-packing the ship. Second: if the ship explodes or gets lost, the original can be awoken. Third, security: if someone tries to tamper with or kidnap the computer system, it can simply self destruct, destroying the data. The original is safe at home.
Note that in this system, there is only one copy of the person walking around at a time. If the copy at the far end is to be made permanent, the original is destroyed. This is due to social and legal strictures against having multiple copies of an individual… it’s easy to see how that could quickly become seriously problematic. There is an authority in the Zaneverse that’s very zealous about this, and very good at keeping control over this.
So.
I was discussing this system with a friend, and she expressed… well, dismay. There is an obvious philosophical issue with this system, the same problem that has plagued the “transporter” from Star Trek: is the copy *you?* The argument was… who would volunteer for a colonization mission like this if, from one point of view, you are simply committing suicide so that someone a whole lot like you, but not really you, gets to colonize a distant world? The counter-argument: in Star Trek, the vast majority of folks don’t seem to have an issue with transporters. For every McCoy or Barclay, there are several starships full of folks who merrily beam up and down. So long as the “colonist-copy” technology is decades or even centuries old, reliable and the tales of the copies being noticeably different from the originals, I would expect that people would generally accept it.
So my question: assume the colonist-copy system exists, and to all appearances works as advertised. There is, however, zero scientific evidence regarding whether or not your “soul,” if such a thing exists, is copied or transmitted. If you, dear blog reader, wanted to colonize some distant world and was offered the opportunity, but the *only* way was this way… would you do it?
Every month, patrons of the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon campaign are rewarded with a bundle of documents and diagrams, items of interest and importance to aerospace history. If you sign up, you get the monthly rewards going forwards; the “back issues” catalog lets patrons aid the APR cause by picking up items from before they signed on. The catalog, available to all patrons at the APR Patreon, has been updated to include everything from the beginning of the project back in 2014 on up to February, 2017.
Below are the items from 2016 (and the first two months of 2017):
If you are interested in any of these and in helping to fund the mission of Aerospace Projects Review, drop by the APR Patreon page and sign up. For only a few bucks a month you can help fund the procurement, scanning and dissemination of interesting aerospace documentation that might otherwise vanish from the public.
Looks like a Minuteman and its slightly paranoid escorts.
To me, “faith” is neither good nor bad, though it *tends* towards the latter. Especially “unexamined faith,” or faith based not on facts but feels. “Faith in science” I am generally good with, because science is a process that has repeatedly proven itself to be a reliable way to understand, utilize and, most importantly, predict the real world. “Faith in Supernatural Entity X” is something I’m less understanding of because history has shown that that’s a *terrible* way to get a handle on the future. And if some such faith or other actually works as a dandy way to predict the afterlife… well, the data on that is wholly lacking.
With that, a dandy way to examines ones faith is to ask “what sort of thing could conceivably occur that would convince me that my faith is wrong?” For people who believe there are no gods, it’s of course quite conceivable that if there *was* a god, that god could do something that would prove that gods existence. Of course, “god” is a pretty vague descriptor, covering anything from “superpowered human-like critter from ancient myth or old Star Trek,” on up to “creator of the universe.” Some people claim that there is no such demonstration that could prove the existence of an all-powerful universe-creating god, because anything that such a god might choose to do could conceivably be done by sufficiently advanced, yet non-god, aliens who just want to screw with us. However, I can think of two demonstrations that would be hard to argue away. And appropriately, both come from science fiction. The first was described in Carl Sagan’s “Contact:” buried deep within constants like pi are undeniable messages. Pi can’t, so far as I’m aware, be tinkered with; if there’s a message in it, it could only have been put there by an intelligent agent that created the universal constants. This is close enough to “a god” for engineering purposes, though it of course does not nail down the specifics of that god finely enough to decide if I should avoid shellfish and mixing cotton and polyester.
The second example was somewhat similar. As eventually described in the underrated “Stargate: Universe” series, fifty million years ago an incredibly advanced alien race discovered that there was an intelligent message embedded within the cosmic background radiation. The message was fragmentary, so in order to collect the whole thing they needed to send out an automated starship to the far end of the universe, apparently collecting data all along the way. A message in the CBR, especially if detected across billions of lightyears, would also be a good sign of an intelligent universe-creator.
If either of these notions were borne out, it would be difficult for an honest atheist or agnostic to claim that there was no universe-creator. Of course, the further nature of that creator, including whether of not it gave a rats ass about critters like us, would remain unknown, unless that message was *really* detailed.
But on the opposite end of the scale: assuming you have some religious belief or other, what sort of event would, if it were to occur, cause you to go, “whelp, guess I was wrong.” If you were a Muslim and the Ka’aba was successfully nuked into vapor, would that do it? If you’re a Catholic and R’lyeh rose from the depths, Cthulhu took over the world and Deep Ones swarmed up out of the sea and turned the Vatican into a spawning ground… would that do it? If you’re an evangelical and Satan shows up, tangles with the second coming of Jesus and the angels and wins, takes over the world and turns out to be not such a bad feller, would that do it? If you’re a Mormon and letters were dug out of the LDS Church archive that are verified as having been written by Joseph Smith back in the day, where he tells a pen pal that he was creating a new religion as a way to make money and nail some hot chicks, would that do it? If you’re Jewish and all of a sudden the old Egyptian gods show up en masse, take a look around and say “we were only gone 4,500 years, and look what you’ve done to the place” and promptly re-order the world to their liking, would that do it?
History has provided billions of examples of people who have lost their faith for reasons *far* less spectacular than the rise of ancient alien chaos gods or the discovery of messages in universal constants. Generally those de-faithing incidents arise from unplanned-for exterior yet deeply personal events… the loss of a loved one, a trusted priest or religious hierarchy turning out to be scumbags, discovery that a long-held belief about some historical or scientific fact is just plain dead wrong, that sort of thing. These are hard to plan for. But I think it’s always worthwhile to put one’s own faith to the question. The scientific method involves you coming up with an explanation you like…. and then YOU go about trying to prove it wrong. You design a series of experiments with the goal of finding the flaws. But to do that, you need to have some idea of what would prove your scientific hypothesis wrong.
So: what would prove your religious hypothesis wrong?
A 1972 Teledyne Ryan report on modifying their supersonic BQM-34E Firebee II target drone into RPV’s for testing new aerodynamics, wings and area-rule add-ons and the like. Numerous diagrams are included.
Here’s the link to the NTRS abstract.
Here’s the direct link to the PDF.
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