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A new “oldest fossil”

awesomeness, Hmm..., news, paleo, science 5 Responses »

Mar 012017

And if this is confirmed, both the age and the fact that it’s a fossil, it’s really, really, REALLY old:

Earliest evidence of life on Earth ‘found’

These “fossils” aren’t of recognizable critters, but hematite filaments, which are the traces of life. The age is somewhere between 3.77 billion and 4.28 billion years.. If it’s on the older end, it’s really rather astonishing; the theorized collision of the early Earth with the hypothetical planet Theia, resulting in the creation of the Moon, is believed to have occurred about 4.5 billion years ago. This collision would have turned the entire surface of the planet into liquid hot magma, so it seems life *could* have arisen less than a quarter billion years after the Earth was a molten ball of fire.

And so, the Democrat war on the Moon begins…

AARRRGH, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., Meh., nukes, politics, rockets, science, science fiction, spacecraft, THIS is why Trump won, weapons, ಠ_ಠ 13 Responses »

Mar 012017

If you’ve been wondering how the party of fear-mongering and authoritarianism was going to respond to the idea of private American companies going to space and the moon, I believe we have us an early test balloon:

Congressional candidate: Moon-colonizing companies could destroy cities by dropping rocks

One “Brianna Wu” scientifically embarrasses herself, but likely improves her standing with the Luddites, by claiming that “Rocks dropped from there have power of 100s of nuclear bombs.”

Now, on one hand this is true. If you fling a big enough rock from the surface of the moon, it could hit the Earth with kinetic energy similar to the total energy of a nuke. But there’s the thing: in order to do that, you need to *impart* damn near a nukes worth of kinetic energy in the first place. Simply chucking a rock from the lunar surface at lunar escape velocity (about 2.4 km/sec) will not put that rock on a trajectory to the Earths surface, but rather just in a very wide orbit , basically the same orbit the moon has. You’d need to cancel out the orbital velocity, another kilometer or so per second. From there the rock would “fall” to Earth, picking up speed and smacking down with no more than Earth escape velocity, or no more than 11.2 km/sec. So, by accelerating a rock to about 3.5 km/sec, you get it to hit the Earth at about 11 km/sec.

Sounds great for a weapons system. At 11 km/sec, the kinetic energy of one kilogram of rock (or anything) is 60.5 megajoules. One single kiloton of yield is defined as 4.184 terajoules. So to get a kiloton of bang out of a lunar rock, you’d need to launch (4.184 terajoules/60.5 megajoules) 69,157 kilos of rock. Lobbing a seventy-metric ton rock to 3.5 kilometers per second is a non-trivial act. Plus, you have to assure that the rock not only hits the target via accurate guidance, but survives passage through the atmosphere.

But Wu didn’t just say that a rock would have the power of a nuke, but “hundreds” of them. So… let’s say 100 times Fat Man, or 1.5 megatons. That would require the launch not of 70 metric tones, but 105,000 metric tons. The USS Nimitz displaces about 100,000 metric tons. So according to Ms. Wu, the threat posed by the likes of Elon Musk is that he will toss aircraft carriers off the surface of the moon.

Ms. Wu then went on to claim that any criticism of her rather unrealistic fearmongering was due to sexism, and to then decry the militarization of space. Because apparently a few tourists going around the moon will be able to grab chunks of moonrock the size of a carrier battle group and hurl it at Earth.

Silly as her fears are, I won;t be the least bit surprised if they gain traction, and this is used as the basis of an attempt to shut down private spaceflight in the US… or at least to nationalize it “for the children.”

Thanks to blog reader SE Jones for heads-up on this miserable little story.

As always, feel free to check my math.

Asking For Trouble

blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, THIS is why Trump won, wisdom, ಠ_ಠ 6 Responses »

Mar 012017

Some ideas are so dumb that not only are they not going to work, not only are they going to make the problem they claim to want to fix *worse,*they are so dumb that a good case can be made that the idea was actually planted by the opposition. Here is a *fantastic* example:

It’s Time for White People to Pay for Privilege: The Equality Tax

The short form: every white person should pay thousands of extra dollars per year, money to be just handed over to a “person of some color other than white.” Because reasons. But even better, white men pay more than white women; straight whites more than gay whites.

Obviously this is a bad idea on many levels. It’s unConstitutional, for starters. Second, taking money from a low-income working white laborer to pay his black boss is ethically indefensible. Third: how long does the author think it’ll be before a bunch of white folk realize that if there are no more “people of politically correct color,” then they won’t be fined just for the color of their skin in order to pay them? This whole proposal is little better than an invitation for race war.

Now, here’s the thing. The opinion piece here *seems* to be written by a Social Justice Warrior. But given the inevitable result not only of the implementation of this proposal, but of the mere *existence* of the proposal… how do we know that this wasn’t written by some smarter knucklehead at Stormfront? There’s even a hint that that’s what actually happened. At one pint in the piece, the writer notes:

According to TaxFoundation.org, white Americans pay 83% of the federal income tax.

And then a little later:

According to InfoPlease.com, whites account for 63.7% of the population (a population of 308.7 billion based on the 2010 census).

Hmmm. Note the discrepancy… whites are 63.7% of the population but pay 83% of the taxes? Nobody who really wanted to seriously suggest that whites need to pay more would openly note that whites *already* pay more.

In the comments section of a post a day or two ago, I noted that in the science fiction I write I posit that the 21st century becomes not a happy fuzzy period of coming together, but yet another century of bloodshed. The more interesting stuff of course if the likes of Pakistan and India nuking the bejesus out of each other… but of no less importance will be the result of decades of political and racial divisiveness causing societies like the US to tear themselves to bits. Interestingly, we’re just about at the one century anniversary of the creation of the word “Balkanize,” which perfectly describes the end result of these sort of proposals:

Word Origin and History for Balkanize

1920, first used in reference to the Baltic states, on the model of what had happened in the Balkans; said to have been coined by English editor James Louis Garvin (1868-1947), but A.J. Toynbee (1922) credited it to “German Socialists” describing the results of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Either way, the reference is to the political situation in the Balkans c.1878-1913, when the European section of the Ottoman Empire split up into small, warring nations. Balkanized and Balkanization both also are from 1920.

Do you want more Alt Right? Because this is how you get more Alt Right.

Not entirely sure this is a good deal

history 4 Responses »

Feb 272017

An advertisement from a twenty-year-old NASA Tech Brief. It’s selling a single CD-ROM of data… programs, abstracts of reports, patent abstracts. All for the low, low price of $195. Seems kinda steep. Of course, today this could all be downloaded off Ye Olde InterWeb. Heck, I’d be pretty cheesed off about being charged nearly two hundred bucks just for some abstracts.

Panoramas: Night Time

art, photography, Utah No Responses »

Feb 272017

Moar:

Panoramas: Daylight

photography, Utah No Responses »

Feb 272017

Here’s some foteygrafs.

And the Moon Race is on…

awesomeness, news, projects, rockets, spacecraft 35 Responses »

Feb 272017

Hmmm…

SpaceX to Send Privately Crewed Dragon Spacecraft Beyond the Moon Next Year

We are excited to announce that SpaceX has been approached to fly two private citizens on a trip around the moon late next year. They have already paid a significant deposit to do a moon mission. Like the Apollo astronauts before them, these individuals will travel into space carrying the hopes and dreams of all humankind, driven by the universal human spirit of exploration. We expect to conduct health and fitness tests, as well as begin initial training later this year. Other flight teams have also expressed strong interest and we expect more to follow. Additional information will be released about the flight teams, contingent upon their approval and confirmation of the health and fitness test results.

If the Space Race comes back, and it turns out to be an ongoing race between Public and Private *American* programs…. why, that would make me… Hmmm. What’s the word I’m thinking of? It’s a word I don’t use often because I don;t have much use for it. Something like… hoppy? Harppy? Hooppy? Something like that.

However, let’s just say that I’m just a weee tad bit skeptical that SpaceX can go from “we’ve never launched a human nor a Falcon 9 Heavy” to “We used a Falcon 9 Heavy to send humans around the moon” in less that two years. But if they can… hmmm. Happers? Something…

Questions for Catholics

blather, Hmm..., My Fiction, religion, science fiction 47 Responses »

Feb 262017

Of course, anyone can chime in.

Here’s the ponderable: it is later in the 21st century. For a few decades, the Catholic population of Europe has been declining, while the overall population has grown substantially. However, the long trend of Europeans becoming less and less religious has reversed; Europeans are now very religious. It’s just not a religion friendly to Catholicism.

So for some years not only have the Catholic churches grown more and more empty, Catholics and the church are coming under increasing attacks, legal and physical. Most Catholic churches around Europe are in fact empty… and mostly empty burned out shells or converted to the replacement religion. So now Catholicism in Europe has contracted to within the walls of the Vatican. And it is clear that very soon it will be physically assaulted and destroyed.

That said, North and South America, Australia and the Pacific island areas remain more or less as they are now, demographically, just more so. There are somewhere in the area of a billion Catholics with a lot of money and resources. It is physically possible to send a flotilla of cargo ships to Italy and load up all the Vaticans stuff and transfer it all elsewhere.

So, the first question: under the immanent threat of destruction, does the Catholic Church pull up stakes and move elsewhere, or does it stay put and put its faith in divine intervention?

Second question: assuming it moves… where to? There are a lot of Catholics in the US and Canada, but a distinct minority of the overall populations. Plus, the idea of setting up a sovereign theocratic nation within US borders is probably not a politically floatable boat. On the other hand… from Mexico on south those lands are *loaded* with Catholics, the vast majority of whom would probably be thrilled to have their home town turned into Vatican 2.

And this being later in the 21st century, the possibility exists of the Catholics setting up Space Vatican, in orbit, on the Moon, Mars, asteroids, wherever. However, getting there would be fabulously expensive, difficult and risky.

My own suspicion is that Mexico and Brazil would be in the lead. But then Argentina seems to have the best climate, and the Caribbean has it’s charms. Cuba, perhaps.

So… any thoughts?

Political Rocket Theater

history, Hmm..., news, rockets, spacecraft 40 Responses »

Feb 262017

Recently it was announced that the Trump administration has asked NASA to study the possibility of putting crew on the first SLS launch in 2019. If this comes to pass, it will entail sending an Orion capsule around the moon (and back, one would hope), the first time humans have left low Earth orbit in… well, a long-ass time.

What would be the scientific benefit compared the baseline plan of sending the capsule unmanned? Well… not a whole lot, especially given that the mission would be rather rushed. But the political benefits *could* be substantial. Assuming it’s a successful flight, it could be seen and sold as the return of America to having an actual space program (as opposed to the “hey, let’s go in circles a few times in an flying United Nations”). Two American astronauts will go back to the moon; not to land, of course, just to get within spitting distance of it. But almost certainly they will get there before any other nation could pull that off. One can of course argue that the US won the race to the moon in 1969, and anybody going there after all these years is a poor second… but in reality, the US has *long* since lost the direct experience and tribal knowledge that got Apollo tot he moon. Most of the people responsible for making Apollo work are dead or very, very retired. The US going back to the moon would be more like the US going for the first time, just again.

There are two obvious potential downsides to this:

Disaster. This could come in the obvious form of the crew being killed at any point during the mission. This could also come in the form of the changes in the mission causing so much trouble and delay and cost overruns that the entire launch gets scrapped. Remember, this flight, if it happens, will happen after the 2018 mid-terms. This flight will be Trumps’ baby, and, who knows, he could well be impeached by then.
How do you follow it up? It’s all well and good to fling some guys past the moon, but this could be done with a substantially smaller and cheaper system than SLS. A pair of Falcon 9 Heavies could certainly do it. The one thing that SLS brings to the party is massive lift capability, which in this case means the ability to send an actual lunar launder. But unless I missed a staff meeting… we have no lunar landers. We don’t even seem to have a real program to develop one.

SLS is meant to launch not only lunar missions but manned missions to Mars. Great! But there are no funded programs to develop actual Mars ships. Lots of people have lots of ideas for what SLS could launch. Some of the ideas are actually pretty good, such as very fast deep space probes, giant space telescopes, components for real space stations, etc. But none of them seem to have the most important feature any such idea needs to have: funding.

The first SLS flight, Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1) is already being assembled. So turning it into a manned flight would entail substantial modificationg to stuff already constructed… never an optimal solution. The second SLS flight, EM-2 scheduled for 2021, is intended to be manned and will have more advanced systems than will be available for EM-1. So it can be readily argued that making EM-1 manned is simply unwise. But the 2021 EM-2 flight would be after the inauguration of whoever wins the Presidential election of 2020. And does Trump – or anybody – really want President Warren to be in charge when NASA next tries to send men to the moon?

So here’s the calculation. NASA does this at Trumps behest, and it crashes and burns: this way leads to DOOOOOOM. NASA does this and succeeds: NASA is golden and Trumps scores points. Launch in 2019 and cement manned deep-space flight into NASAs schedule, or wait until 2021 when there’s a good chance that NASA will be controlled by an Administration that thinks that giant government spending programs are just awesome, so long as they don’t actually *build* anything.

Hmmm.

I suspect this is political theater…

Hmm..., news, politics, religion 5 Responses »

Feb 242017

… but if so, it’s pretty good.

France’s Le Pen cancels meet with Lebanon grand mufti over headscarf

French Presidential candidate Marine Le Pen supposedly had a meeting set up with the Grand Poobah of the Sunni Lebanese, when said glorious leader supposedly demanded that she wear a headscarf, which she refused. Of course there are conflicting accounts… one side said the headscarf was a demand from the get-go, the other that it came after the meeting was set up. In either case, Le Pen’s refusal to put on a scrap of cloth that would actually be occasionally *illegal* back in France will probably hold her in good stead in the forthcoming election.

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