spacecraft – Page 81 – The Unwanted Blog

So the day before yesterday I posted about some unforgivably stupid rubbish some twit wrote about how space colonization is an evil product of evil male privilege, or some such gibbering nonsense. Well, the editorial I complained about finally hit Fark.com. And even in that wretched hive of leftist scum and villainy, the views expressed by the writer of the anti-space colonization piece were just too much to bear. And the result is a series of astoundingly quotable bits of snark. There’s some stuff here that requires memorization and re-iteration at the appropriate times.

The first thing I noticed was a meme someone had slapped together. A bit of research indicates that it is sort of a bit of fan fiction, a crossover of “Warhammer 40K” and the movie “Avatar.” But had this bit of exposition actually appeared on “Avatar,” it would have turned that bizarre bit of blue-tinged hippie fluff into Pure Awesome:

“Spare us your pity, alien. You gush about your connection with nature, your primal wisdom, but what has it brought you?

“Where are your marvels of engineering? Your voyages of discovery? Your great insight into the nature of the universe? Even at our basest, when we dressed as you do, dwelt as you do, hunted as you do, lived as you do, we did more than merely survive. We built wonders. We made great journeys. We forged epics. You have not.

“You speak so proudly of the plugs dangling from your skulls, little realizing that they are but strings and you puppets. What little you have accomplished you attribute to the wisdom of your goddess, who is nothing but the voices of your dead echoing for all eternity. She moors you to the past, serving as a leash that keeps you as little better than apes, sad parodies of civilization that lack that special spark to become something more.

“We have come to your world in search of resources. Whether your actions drive us back or we take what we want and move on, the outcome is the same. We will depart from your wretched planet, leaving you behind. And in a thousand years, you will not have changed from this contact with another world. You will remain in your trees, hunting your prey, communing with your goddess, until your sun burns out and your world dies.

“And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us…“

As is The Way Of The Internet, this led me HERE, which deserves a good reading. Especially the bit about humanity in Star Trek. Snerk.

And…

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“Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” — Orson Welles, as Harry Lime in The Third Man.

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There’s nothing worse than an empty mind with a deadline

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“They build too low, who build beneath the stars.” – Edward Young 1681-1765

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Pretty much everything humanity has achieved has its origins in mens’ desire to get laid.

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What the sweet jibbering fark did I just read?

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There’s one undeniably good thing about reading a piece of raging idiocy pretending to be important thinking: it can spur the creation, or at least quotation, of something far better.

All the things these anti-testoterone whackos yammer on about have led humanity from the muck and mire to the edges of the ocean of space itself. We have gone from a few million especially bright apes to now over eight *billion* people, a sizable fraction of whom live lives of comfort and health undreamed of in ages past. We are no longer threatened by the wolf or the lion. A scratch is now so rarely a cause of death that when it happens it makes the nightly news. We are not even troubled by the darkness that comes when the sun goes down; we casually flip a switch and go on reading or playing or working or fighting. This is due to not only the desire to conquer and colonize, but to tinker, to puzzle things out, and to turn a profit. Those urges that feminist killjoys and their intellectually lethargic kiss-asses disparage are the ones that have made life *good* for billions of people. Those same urges will, if allowed to express themsevlves, lead mankind outwards, and will turn dead worlds like Mars into living worlds like Earth. We will turn cold sand and rust and a thin envelope of unbreathable carbon dioxide into oceans and forests and meadows and lakes and streams and great herds of beasts. We will turn the sterile asteroids into a billion habitats, each the size of a small nation, each boasting a thriving ecosystem and biosphere. We will turn the Oort cloud into cheesy theme parks and rest stops and gas stations, footsteps on the paths to the farther stars, where we will turn yet more dead worlds into living ones. We will conquer and colonize the universe and bring it to life. In much less than geological timescales, astronomers will be able to look at distant stars and see the reflected spectra indicating water and free oxygen and chlorophyll, the results of terraformed planets and engineered structures on a scale we can not currently easily comprehend.

The drive to colonize, to reach out towards something distant and say “mine,” will turn the universe green with life.

And what will the likes of Marcie Bianco do in the meantime? Complain. What will they build? Nothing. How will they be remembered? They won’t. There will be no place for them on the great monuments to the early colonists in the Alpha Centauri system. No great statues of them will be built in the Magellanic Clouds. Great nebulae will not be sculpted in their likeness. Their existence will be recorded, if at all, merely as footnotes in the great archives of all knowledge. Notes that will go millions of years without being referenced by historians, no more remembered or celebrated than the names of those early humans who decided that standing up to the sabertooth was too much effort.

The patriarchal race to colonize Mars is just another example of male entitlement

NBC News is actually promoting this rubbish.

These men, particularly Musk, are not only heavily invested in who can get their rocket into space first, but in colonizing Mars. The desire to colonize — to have unquestioned, unchallenged and automatic access to something, to any type of body, and to use it at will — is a patriarchal one.

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Rather, the impulse to colonize — to colonize lands, to colonize peoples, and, now that we may soon be technologically capable of doing so, colonizing space — has its origins in gendered power structures. Entitlement to power, control, domination and ownership. The presumed right to use and abuse something and then walk away to conquer and colonize something new.

You know, I’m starting to wonder if perhaps there might be something to the recent line of thinking that the recent spate of school shootings really does have something to do with there being something wrong with the male of the species. But note that this, indeed, does refer to a relatively recent development. And I’m thinking that perhaps the rise of third wave feminism, the man-hating, matronizing, screeching-about-the-patriarchy-at-every-opportunity sort of insanity that has it that colonizing and bringing to life a dead world is not only a bad thing, but that the drive to do so is specifically male and thus any male who wants to make life better – which would be just about every male – is a terrible person… this rise of insanity is filtering down to boys and messing with their heads. You tell a boy that his natural instinct to build, to improve, to make things better, is bad and wrong, what does that leave him?

So, who’s with me: anyone who opposes the conquest of space is an enabler of school shootings. Is that a crazy position to take? Sure is. Is it more crazy than the position taken by the anti-space nuts? Not by a long shot.

The NERVA nuclear rocket, studied throughout the sixties into the early 1970’s, would have been a great way to propel spacecraft. But a nuclear rocket is not the same sort of reactor as is generally designed for use in space to generate electrical power. A NERVA can produce *gigawatts* of thermal energy, energy which is carried away with the high mass flow rate of the hydrogen propellant. Power reactors, on the other hand, are generally designed for several orders of magnitude lower thermal power… a few thermal megawatts, perhaps, to produce a few hundred kilowatts of electricity.

However, the fact remains that a nuclear rocket *is* a nuclear reactor. For most missions it would burn for a few minutes, at most perhaps few hours, out of a mission lasting perhaps years. It is thus a bit of a shame to waste all that potential. So over the decades many studies have been made for using a nuclear rocket as a power generator .

One such study was reported by Aerojet in 1970. The abstract is HERE, the direct PDF download if HERE.

In this study, the NERVA would pump out 1,500 thermal megawatts during the propulsion phase(producing 75,000 pounds of thrust), dropping to 250 to 505 thermal kilowatts during the power generation phase, enough to create 25 kilowatts of electricity. This would be a very low-power, low-temperature use of the reactor, reducing system efficiency… but still, making use of a reactor that was already there, and not noticeably using up the fission fuel in the reactor. The reactor would be run at very lower power levels and hydrogen would flow through a closed loop built into the reactor; the warmed gaseous hydrogen would flow through a turbogenerator to create electricity; the warm hydrogen would then pass through a radiator built on the outer surface of the hydrogen tank itself.

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We’ve trashed the oceans; now we are turning space into a junkyard for billionaires

Experts say rocket emissions affect our climate and cause ozone loss, yet too few people seem to care

Unless you think that that opening line doesn’t really hammer home the point, there’s this:

You might be tempted to dismiss this as an expensive publicity stunt by a billionaire playboy with too much time on his hands. But in reality it’s an important step towards a time when space travel for your average indolent millionaire will become commonplace. It will probably become another way of managing your finances when Mars inevitably becomes the ultimate off-shore tax haven.

Quite what our fetish for space exploration and spending billions on the technology required to feed this does to the environment is a serious matter. There’s a dissonance emerging here. On Earth, we’re organising summits and setting up carbon footprint-reduction targets all over the shop. Yet, up in yonder outer space we’ve established a giant garbage dump replete with huge hulks of rusting metal and, as of last week, a $200k American sports car.

Indeed, the whole issue of rocket emissions needs to be considered if we’re serious about the environment.

This is symptomatic of the modern luddite, repeating the latest version of the tired old “why spend money on space when we still have problems here on Earth” refrain. These monstrous reprobates were wrong fifty years ago when they managed to kill off Apollo and the first good chance for the conquest of space; they’re even more wrong now as they try to kill off what may well be not only the best, but perhaps the *last* opportunity for western civilization to save itself. Kill it off now with environmental laws and regulations and treaties, as the nattering chicken livered assassin of joy who wrote that opinion piece for the execrable “The Guardian” would have, and we’ll never get the chance again in any of our lifetimes. The Chinese might conquer the universe, planting their red flag of communist genocide on every chunk of rock within a hundred AU, but we’ll be stuck here in ever-increasing malaise, besieged by hopelessness and diminishing horizons, dark age Surt worshippers and astrologers and flat Earthers. Gormless chickenshittery in the face of THE ENTIRE DAMNED UNIVERSE should not be tolerated, much less celebrated, even less paid for. The yammering pinhead even finished off his ill-informed and ill-intentioned piece by suggesting that space aliens are mad at us for ” disfiguring their neighbourhood with obsolete metal junk.”

Sadly, the English language is simply far too limiting to get across the level of disdain and dislike I have for people who get paid to try to convince the western world to cut itself off at the knees.