A Modest Proposal

blather, Hmm..., news, politics, reshaping the world, wisdom 19 Responses »

Jun 242014

So it seems we have yet another exciting new problem on the southern border: an invasion of illegal alien *children.* And in incredibly large numbers:

U.S. authorities estimate that between 60,000 and 80,000 children without parents will cross the border this year alone.

Since they are illegals, the plan is to deport them. But I have a better idea: the US Janissary Corps.

For those over the age of, say, 13, we send trained professionals through this mass of invading children and search for useful talent then deport the rest. But those 12 and under become wards of the State. They will be taken to special bases in the south and southwest, there to be raised, indoctrinated and trained as a large military force. The indoctrination, which will be pervasive and will last for years, will turn them into rabid devotees of The American Way, and rabid opponents of the cheap warlords and dictators so common in central and south America. Then, after a large enough force of them is adequately trained and of age, we send them back south.

Many of these kids come from Guatemala. The White House and others are claiming that the reason for the flood is because of the violent conditions there. Fine. Well, if 60,000 minors invade the US annually, and we catch maybe 20,000 of them, and are able to utilize half of them… then that’s a force of 10,000 per year. After a half dozen years or so, a force of 60,000 Janissary infantry invading Guatemala would probably be enough to do a hell of a job of conquering the place, followed by an extra 10,000 every year.

Long term, the Janissaries role would be to invade, conquer and overthrow central and south American banana republics. The Janissaries would, in recognition of their service, be given land grants in the conquered lands based on performance and years of service.

The program could of course be expanded. Not all illegal alien children are unaccompanied; some rather large number come here, and are apprehended, with their families. Those under six or so can be separated from the families and raised for the next dozen years in the Janissary Corps, while their families are deported. These particular Janissaries would be tasked specifically with the invasion of their original homelands. Thus they, after the conquest, pacification, re-education and reformation of their homelands, would be able to reunite with their families.

The knowledge that their own children are being raised into a sizable invading and conquering force might itself be enough to convince some of these nations that they need to get their act together. If they figure their problems out and fix them enough so that the flood of refugees dries up.. well, they’ll not be under much of a threat of conquest, will they?

The Janissary Corps would not be regular US military, and would of course be filled with non-US citizens (though they would all be brought up to have a strong appreciation of US culture and ideals). The conquered lands would not be annexed by the US and would pay no tribute to the US; they would simply be given new management. Management devoted to ending the cycle of corruption that has let Latin America squander its promise.

So… objections? Additions? Modifications?

The Detroit Success Story!

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May 312014

Detroit is coming back! Google Street View lets you check out the same places over a span of years, and the progress has been remarkable. You can check out a number of these fantastic images of progress HERE.

Now who could argue that the policies of Detroits fine leadership over the past few decades has been anything other than inspired?

Ain’t Gonna Happen Remake Theater Presents: “The Final Countdown”

aircraft, blather, history, Hmm..., reshaping the world, science fiction, ships 23 Responses »

Feb 042014

A few days back I watched the 1980 movie “The Final Countdown.” If you have somehow failed to see this flick, the premise is this: the nuclear aircraft carrier USS Nimitz is magically transported back in time to December 6, 1941. Most of the movie deals with the crew trying to discover just what has happened, and then deciding whether or not to intervene in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the following day. The end is, bluntly, one of the great letdowns in movie history, but probably the only end they could afford at the time: the captain launches the Nimitz’s aircraft to go swat the Japanese, but the same magic “time storm” suddenly returns and sends them back to 1980. Feh.

“The Final Countdown” is not the only story like this. “Zipang” is a Japanese manga & anime (comic book and TV cartoon) where a modern Japanese destroyer goes back to WWII. The interesting difference between the two different takes on the concept is the different type of decision the characters need to make. For the Americans, fighting on behalf of their homeland makes sense. But for modern Japanese (or, say, modern Germans) sent back to WWII, fighting for their homeland means fighting for a historically evil regime. Of course, some wouldn’t have a moral difficulty, as they might have *preferred* the Imperial system, but I imagine most would be at least conflicted.

For real fun, imagine a modern US Navy ship going back to the middle of the War of Southern Aggression. Most crewmen would probably want to side with the North. How many would want to sign on to the slavers cause, though?

In a few weeks, the unnecessary “Robocop” will be released. “Robocop” was fine the way it was. The remake will, if the last few years are anything to base prognostication on, be nowhere near as good as the original. I would not have remade “Robocop.” But “The Final Countdown?” I can see a way to remake that in a meaningful way.

For starters, it would be *two* movies.

The first movie would largely follow the plot of the first, with necessary updates. Perhaps the USS Ford rather than the Nimitz. The F-14s would be replaced with F-18s. That sort of thing. A more important change: rather than just the carrier, the whole carrier strike group would be sent back. According to Wiki:

A carrier strike group (CSG) is an operational formation of the United States Navy. It is composed of roughly 7,500 personnel, an aircraft carrier, at least one cruiser, a destroyer squadron of at least two destroyers and/or frigates, and a carrier air wing of 65 to 70 aircraft. A carrier strike group also, on occasion, includes submarines, attached logistics ships and a supply ship.

I’d throw in the whole shebang. During the course of the movie, it really wouldn’t make a difference to the plot, as all the interesting stuff was done via aircraft.

At the end of the movie, the captain would, as in the original, send the F-18s and F-35s to go swat the Japanese attack force. Unlike the original, though… no magic time storm. The movie would climax with the Japanese beginning their attack on Pearl Harbor… and then getting set upon by the modern fighters. The Japanese would be allowed to draw first blood, and then they would be shot down. ~~Every single plane would be blown from the sky. They would be allowed to radio messages back to the fleet, but none would be allowed to escape.~~ The fighters would then return to the carrier in triumph.

REVISION: Instead of killing every fighter plane, the US forces specifically allow a half dozen or so to escape. Specifically, the first half dozen or so to turn tail and run… the pilots most likely to be considered “cowards” by the Japanese military. Additionally: these half dozen planes would be targeted by UCAVs… not to be blown out of the sky, but to be played with. They would maneuver around the aircraft in an intentionally taunting fashion, and close enough so that the Japanese pilots – and their navigators/tail gunners/observers can confirm that the American aircraft have neither cockpits nor pilots.

The movie would end with the captain in the combat information center, examining recon data showing the Japanese fleet. The movie would end on some variation on “Well, now what?” as the radio in the background carries a news report from Europe describing the Nazi war effort.

And a year later Part Two would hit the theaters.

Does Earth have an invisible ring system?

awesomeness, blather, Hmm..., reshaping the world, science 5 Responses »

Jan 052014

Few things would be as visually spectacular as a ring system about an Earth-like world. And there may be evidence that Earth has just such a ring system… just one composed of dark matter, not regular matter:

GPS satellites suggest Earth is heavy with dark matter

Much more of the universe is composed of dark matter than regular matter. But since dark matter does not interact with the electromagnetic force, both regular matter and photons go right through it likes it’s not there. However, dark and regular matter *do* interact gravitationally. And it *seems* that the Earth may have picked up a disk of dark matter 191 km thick and 70,000 km in diameter. The data seems very preliminary, and I bet further analysis may well tear the conclusions to shreds, but it’s a neat idea.

Terraforming the Van Allen Belts

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Oct 292013

On the list of the hazards to manned spaceflight – and to photovoltaic arrays and integrated circuits – are the Van Allen radiation belts. These belts, from about 1000 km to 60,000 km above the surface, are the results of the Earths magnetosphere snagging energetic electrons blasted from the sun and protons that are the result of cosmic rays smacking the upper atmosphere. The electrons form a high beta radiation flux, enough to fry unshielded electronic and humans who spend too much time there. This flux is high enough that satellite being shot into higher orbits have a good fraction of the lifetime degradation of their solar arrays done just in the few hours it takes to transit the belts. The belts consume a vast volume of real estate that I’m sure a lot of satellites would love to occupy. But what can be done?

Well… drain ’em, apparently.

Tethers Unlimited, a company co-founded by the late physicist Robert Forward (who I had the chance to meet a few times), studied the use of conductive tethers to sweep out regions of the belts. By charging the tethers to a high voltage, electrons would be kicked away at high speed, enough to leave the belts permanently. I don’t know whether this would work, but it seems feasible, and I can’t see how it would have any real “environmental” effects. The only thing that occurs to me: it seems the electrons would be kicked away in essentially random directions, some up, some down. So… if they launched a couple dozen of these things, they’d be swinging through the sky, blasting electrons every which way. So at twilight, you could look up into the darkening (or lightening) sky and see a miles-long tether, brightly lit by the sun, cruising overhead. And deeper into darkness, after the tethers themselves are in darkness, might you still be able to detect them? Perhaps you wouldn’t see the tethers directly, but the electrons that they kick *down* would smack into the upper atmosphere and create faint aurora. A faint circle of auroral glow? A comet-tail? Dunno…

In any event, these things would not be in permanent operation, but periodic. The electrons that populate the belts are injected into it by solar flares and such; drain the belts, and it may well take a good long time for them to fill back up again.

Thinking BIG

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Oct 222013

After spending a whole lot of time and effort the past couple days banging away on the computer to redraw the Dyna Soar stuff, I needed a break. So, what could be more relaxing than working out how to rebuild the universe?

If you want an idea for a really big place to live, science fiction can help you out. First, ya got yer Earth-like planets. But then you can have rocky planets that have low-density cores… instead of iron, lets say aluminum. This lets you build a terrestrial world with one-G of surface gravity, but perhaps one and a half to maybe twice the diameter. Then you go to supramundane worlds, where you build a “floor” over gas giant worlds like Saturn. Conceptually tricky, requiring tech beyond what we’ve got, but in principle it’ll let you build a 1-G world wit a surface area of perhaps 100 Earths.

Then you start getting into things like Ringworlds (millions of Earth equivalent area). But those aren’t “worlds” in the regular sense, spheres with actual 1-G of surface gravity. But let’s say you were a Kardashev Type III or Type IV civilization, and you wanted to build a planet to impress your neighbors. Let’s say not just big, but so big that it would kinda-sorta punch a hole in the universe. How big would it have to be?

Start off by assuming a surface gravity of 1 G, 9.81 m/sec^2. The equation g=(G*M)/(r^2) defines this… g=surface gravity (m/sec), G is the universal constant of gravitation (6.672E-11), M=mass (kg) and r=radius (meters). You have to adjust the mass and radius to get the “g” you want. But there’s another factor: escape velocity. There is of course a maximum escape velocity, the speed of light. If you have an item so massive that at some radius from it the escape velocity is equal to the speed of light, you have yourself a black hole. That radius is the Schwartzchild radius, and is given by: r = (2*G*M)/(c^2) where c=speed of light, 299,792,458 m/sec.

If you mash these equations together and solve for mass, you can determine how big of a world you need to be so that the surface gravity is 1 G and the escape velocity is the speed of light. And the answer? A sphere with a mass of 3.08E24 kilograms (about 1.55E11 suns) packed within a radius of 4.58E15 meters (about 0.484 light years) is the answer, giving you a “planet” with the surface area of 5.17E17 Earths.

Interestingly, the density of the massive sphere is only 7.66e-6 kilograms/cubic meter, numerous orders of magnitude less than air. How would you build such a thing? Damnfino. I’m just assuming that by the time you get to Type III, you’ll have that noodled out. My guess would be to have an ordered cluster of supermassive black holes orbiting each other, surrounded by a shell of… I dunno, foamed Unobtainium with a fine matrix of Bolognium fibers providing extra strength.

When you build your nearly lightyear-diameter ball containing something like one-tenth of the mass of the entire Milky Way galaxy, you have a black hole you can walk around on. Unless you have some sort of faster than light propulsion, if you land on it, you’ll never be able to get away from it. But even landing on it would be a neat trick… you’d need a starship capable of attaining nearly the speed of light to get close, and would have to rely on impressive aerobraking for terminal descent.

Another issue would be time dilation. Gravitational time dilation does for observers close to massive objects the same as relativistic velocity does for fast-moving observers: time slows down. The basic equation: dilation = square root of (1-Schwatzchild radius/radius). The end result is that right at the Schwartzchild radius, time *stops.* So for the people and critters wandering around on your giant world, the universe will fade away and the last elementary particle will evaporate into a cold fuzz of nothingness in the time it takes to sneeze. Another effect of this would be that all the light that would fall on this “planet” would, from the viewpoint of an observer on the surface, fall within a a fraction of a second. A billion years of starlight would blast the surface inhabitants like a phaser blast.

There would be some interesting philosophical implications. As designed, the escape velocity at the surface is exactly the speed of light. But what would happen if the contractors working on it made the interior mass ten percent heavier, so that the escape velocity on the surface was *faster* than the speed of light? The time dilation math suggests that time wouldn;t just go to zero, it’d go *imaginary,* being the square root of a negative number. Buh?

And of course, this would be a black hole with no singularity. Indeed, if the “planet” was made of some monolithic extremely low density and insanely strong foam, if you tunneled your way all the way to the center, the gravity field would seem to be flat. Assume something even better: the outer shell is the whole mass of the thing, so that there was the better part of a lightyear of empty space inside the thing. What’s the time dilation effect inside *that?* Shrug. My guess would be that if the shell was effectively vanishingly thin, then the time dilation at the surface of the shell would continue all the way in… so you’d have a sphere a lightyear in diameter that would “freeze” time till the structure decays away.

I’ve done my math in Excel. HERE is the spreadsheet if you want to check my numbers.

black hole

SPS receiver art

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Oct 132013

This Boeing artwork depicts the late-1970’s concept for a receiver station on Earth for the energy transmitted from an orbiting solar power satellite. The SPS would convert sunlight into electricity, and then into a tightly collimated beam of microwaves; this would be captured at ground level by a vast receiver. Since microwaves are fairly easily captured, the receiver would appear as not a whole lot more than a vast elliptical field of chickenwire. Sunlight, wind and rain would pass right through it, thus the underside, as the painting depicts, could be conventional farmland.

Most of the time I’ve seen this painting reproduced it has been black and white; this rendering, scanned from Gatland’s “Space Technology,” is the only one I know of in color. Anyone have the full-rez version?

The Wall

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Oct 062013

NPR ran an interesting hour-long piece on the Vietnam veterans memorial wall in D.C. today. If you have an hour and the interest, I recommend giving it a listen (click on the “Stream” button in upper left; keep a hanky or a box of tissues at hand).

American Icons: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

The Wall is in the news again, thanks to Obama’s government shutdown. In order to ‘save money,” the government has ordered the Wall closed to visitors and is spending money to pay police to evict people who walk up to the Wall, which is on open public ground. This is not only stupid, it’s insultingly stupid and a transparently obvious ham-handed political stunt. The claims being made about the National Park Service closing down facilities that normally require little to no actual staff is that without staff on hand, visitors could get injured and need rescue that won’t come, or vandals could sneak in and damage things. Both of these arguments are silly in this case. In the case of the first argument, the Wall is located in an open, public place… not a difficult place for an ambulance to get to. And the second argument, that vandals could cause a ruckus… well, if you’ve ever been to The Wall, you know that the Wall has a security system in place far more effective than a few dozen Park Rangers or random police: the veterans themselves. Anyone who pulls out a hammer or a can of spray paint is going to very quickly find himself the subject of intense… ah, “scrutiny,’ shall we say, from a number of guys like these:

A few anecdotes:

In May of 1996, I was packing up to leave the D.C. area. My first real job after graduating with my Aero E degree was at OSC in Virginia; the job lasted all of a month, because the X-34 I got hired to work on got cancelled the week after I got there. My dad came out to help me pack and move to my next job in Colorado. We went to supper at a restaurant in Arlington and noticed a large number of bikers… bikers with Vietnam veteran regalia. Came to find out that the next day was “Rolling Thunder,” when hundreds of thousands of bikers would roll into D.C. to pay respects at the Wall. The original plan had been to leave that day; we put it off one more day in order to see the procession. We went to the Mall early in the morning, several hours before the bikers were to arrive, and made our way to the Wall. If you’ve ever been there you know that approaching it is unlike approaching pretty much anywhere else on Earth… a level of solemnity not readily found. While my dad looked up his friends on the Wall, among a number of other veterans and family members, a group of tourists approached. These tourists, clearly Asian (Japanese? Vietnamese? Korean? Don’t know, doesn’t matter), were unaffected by the force field of sadness that surrounds the Wall, and were joking and laughing and have a good old time. Anywhere else… nobody would care. At the Wall… that was the wrong reaction. A wave of shock and anger passed among those of us close to the Wall. But the problem came to an *extremely* sudden close. I turned around at the sudden silence and found that this group of a half dozen or so college-age happy tourists were instantly silent and solemn… and surrounded by several times their number of very large, very angry, and very silent Hell’s Angels-looking fellers. There were no raised voices, no threats, no acts of violence, not even the expenditure of a single taxpayer dime, and yet a potential issue at the wall was dealt with quickly and efficiently by those who were there.

A few years later, while living and working in Colorado, a good friend and I were having lunch at a pizza joint in Golden. The TV was on over his shoulder; something on screen caught my attention, and the look of shock on my face caught my friends attention. We instantly shouted for the volume to be turned up. What was going on? In Denver there is a really good military aviation museum, “Wings Over The Rockies.” Sitting outside is a B-52. And what the TV was showing was the cockpit of the B-52 a roaring mass of flames. The volume came up in time for us to hear that some jackass had decided to toss Molotov Cocktails into the cockpit in some form of delusional protest about… something. We were both instantly PO’ed, my friend rather more so since he’d served around B-52s during his time in the Jimmy Carter Peace-Time Fly-In Club (aka: the USAF in the late 1970’s).

But our rage turned very suddenly to laughter. The guy who torched the B-52 was shown sitting in a police squad car… beaten and bloody, apparently lacking a few teeth he’d started the day with. Was this due to Park Rangers or police being Johnnie On The Spot and laying a beatdown? No. His capture and apparent fall down a few flights of stairs was courtesy of a veteran who was simply visiting the museum at the time and who took a dim view of arson.

There are some places where a lack of Park Rangers could reasonably argue towards closing the gates. But the Wall? The WWII memorial? Please. These are examples of places that without government authorities still manage to self regulate. If someone has a heart attack at the Wall, there will be dozens to hundreds in the immediate vicinity who *will* render aid. If someone decides to engage in criminality, there are again dozens to hundreds who will leap in to make him stop, and they will do so much faster than any pre-shutdown collection of Park Rangers.

It might be interesting to know how the Wall is doing in a few decades. For Baby Boomers – the generation that served in Nam – the Wall is powerful. For many Gen Xers – the children of Nam vets, who grew up with the stories or the silence, who saw at first hand what the war did to the vets – the Wall is powerful. But how about following generations? The kids of the Gen Xers will only get occasional war stories from Grampa, or reminiscences about long-lost Grampa from Mom or Dad. The impact of the Wall will, probably, fade. Who gets weepy at Spanish American War monuments? Time fades the impact of such things. But perhaps the power of the Wall will last longer due to its unique nature. As mentioned in the NPR piece, it has changed the way people relate to memorials in the US. Before the Wall, people rarely left mementos. after the Wall, piles of photos and teddy bears and notes and such *are* the memorials.

Shutdown as an excuse to expand government

blather, Crazy, Forward!, Hmm..., I'm from the government, news, Obamazombies, politics, reshaping the world 3 Responses »

Oct 052013

Ever since Imperator Obama shut down the government, officially because there wasn’t enough money to keep all the functions running, the fedguv has been spending a *lot* of effort – and money – to annoy the hell out of people. For example: not only have they shut down Mount Rushmore’s facilities and blocked access to the park, they went out of their way to shut down scenic pulloffs on roads well away from the site to prevent people from getting a good if distant look at the monument:

Mount Rushmore blockage stirs anger in South Dakota

More disturbingly, the fedguv has been shutting down *private* *property* as a way to expand the public annoyance:

National Park Police Close Mt. Vernon, Feel Silly When Told It’s Privately Funded

Federal Shutdown Expands To Privately Run Campgrounds In National Forests

And what’s more: not only are they shutting down private property, they are in some cases telling private property owners to spend their own money to buy the Barrycades needed to block public access.

If this was an *actual* shutdown (considering that the furloughed fedguv workers are going to get back pay, it’s clear the fedguv is not actually serious when it pleads poverty), the areas of the government being shut down would simply… shut down. Instead, we’re seeing governmental over-reach. One need not be a tinfoil hat wearing paranoid to wonder if, if this overreach is successful, this will be used as a stepping stone for even more once things get back to normal. Walmart, after all, is involved in interstate commerce, which is the purview of the fedguv; does this open up Walmart to being shut down at the whim of a imperial President? Hmm.

I’m thinking… sarcasm

AARRRGH, awesomeness, Gah., humor, reshaping the world, youtube 3 Responses »

Sep 242013

Lots of hideous stories out of India recent regarding gang rape. Apart from publicly executing the perpetrators and arming women, I’m unclear what can be done in the near term to fix that problem. But longer term, the dual solutions of weeding out the gene pool and changing the culture should help a lot. To that end, some Indian women put together a video featuring some of the harshest mockery I’ve seen in a while:

[youtube 8hC0Ng_ajpY]

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