Photos of some of the aerospace history I’ve been able to purchase lately thanks to the APR Patreon. If you’d like to help out and get in on this action, please check out the APR Patreon page.
And then there’s this. While I haven’t managed to get hold of the actual item, I have gotten full-color scans of this, in chunks. I am now piecing it together into one gigantic whole.
I’ve never been a fan of Blake’s 7 (only saw a few episodes, decades ago on public TV), but I know a lot of folks are. Well, guess what:
Buy It Now Price: £33,000.00
Years and years ago (late 80’s, early 90’s) I read a short story in Analog where pretty much everybody wore, IIRC, “Rose Colored Glasses.” This wacky, terribly sci-fi concept was a computerized pair of spectacles that slightly altered the world you saw, by making everything better. Stains, cracks in the wall, roadkill, dead lawns would all be digitally painted over, resulting in a prettier, “cleaner” and “better” world. Of course, this leads to collapse; if you can’t see the flaws, you can’t fix the flaws. I’ll have to go digging through the old back issues, I suppose.
So, with that out of the way, some months back Microsoft announced that they are working on a system called “HoloLens,” which, if they can get it to work as advertised, will be an incredibly powerful augmented reality system that can add stuff to your visual world… or perhaps paper over real stuff. It looks like it could be monumentally useful for a vast range of applications. One not shown: you’re out on a blind date. Your date is a bit of a disappointment in the looks department. But with the touch of a non-existent button… now they look amazing! And so do you!
And of course… the hackers and the spammers. How long before someone figures out a way to delete themselves from the system? Say… insert a subroutine that recognizes someone wearing a hoodie with a particular pattern of shapes and colors, and then paints that person out. This would make such a person partially invisible to people wearing the system (they’d be visible until the system recognized the code-pattern).
The system would be fabulously useful for drivers and pilots… a heads-up display that lets you look *through* the walls of your vehicle (I described something similar in my exceedingly short story fragment “Launch“) and automatically alerts you to anything you need to be alerted to. But then the hackers will get involved and pilots will calmly fly their planes into mountains they didn’t see and cars will plow into farmers markets without the drivers having to actually be old people.
The Internet Movie Firearms Database. If there was a movie that had a gun in it, or a hundred guns, this wikipedia-like site describes said gun. Say “goodbye” to many hours of productivity.
It seems that between about 3.2 and 3.5 billion years ago, Earth got whacked at least three times by *big* impactors. Keep in mind that the rock that killed the dinosaurs was on the order of 10 kilometers in diameter; these earlier impactors were on the order of 50 to 100 kilometers in diameter (or up to 1000 times the impact energy). There was life on Earth at the time in the form of primitive single cell organisms, but these impacts would have played hell with them. Estiamtes are that the impact would have driven the planetary air temperature to over 500 Celcius for weeks, and above the boiling point of water for over a year. Sea levels would have dropped by up to 100 meters as the upper levels of the oceans boiled away.
Rocks this old are fairly rare, but examination of some examples show showers of BB-sized “droplets” of molten rock kicked up by the impacts.
A 100-kilometer impactor is *exactly* the sort of thing that mankind would not be able to do diddly-squat about, other than to send a small remnant of terrestrial life to, say, Mars. Certainly wouldn’t want to go to the moon; the moon would almost certainly get pummeled by chunks of Earth blasted into space.
In May of 1967, Barron Hilton – of Hilton Hotels – gave a presentation at the 13th Annual Meeting of the American Astronautical Society where he discusses the possibilities of orbiting and lunar hotels. Even as far back as ’67, Hilton considered such concepts to be perfectly feasible, and essentially inevitable. A shout-out is given to the Hilton depicted on Space Station V in “2001: A Space Odyssey” which would come out about a year later.
This being the 1960’s, of course there would be a “Galaxy Lounge” where guest could enjoy a martini.
Following Hilton was a presentation by Krafft Ehrike (then of North American Aviation) on the subject of “space tourism.” Once again, the concept was treated as wholly valid. He presented a design for a large orbiting tourist destination. While it featured zero-gravity facilities, it wisely was a rotating artificial gravity station, providing for the comfort and convenience of the guests. There would be several “world rooms” with different environments… artificial gravity levels matching the moon and Mars, say.
One assumption was that space launch costs would drop to $10/pound ($71/pound in 2015 dollars). At the time, with the rapid advances in space launch – remember, the first satellite had, at that time, only been launched less than a decade earlier, and now giant Saturn V rockets were preparing to send men to the moon – a price drop to those levels seemed a reasonable assumption. This would be done by having many, many launches of fully reusable vehicles, capable of reliably transporting the guests. The hotel would hold 1100 guests at a time, for 400,000 guest-days per year, and would have an in-orbit weight of 1,000,000 pounds. Profit would be a glittering $5 per guest per day… a total of about $39K/day in 2015 dollars.
I have scanned the Hilton and Ehricke papers and made them available for $4 and up APR Patreon patrons. If interested, please check out the APR Patreon.
A piece of artwork depicting Ehrickes space hotel. At some point Ehricke took to calling this “Astropolis.”
Three years ago, I posted about strange sounds coming from the sky. The phenomenon has not stopped. I suspect part of the reason why is because industrial activity, such as dragging heavy objects around, or sawing through massive things, or drilling and jackhammering through concrete, continues. Another part of the reason why these sounds keep being recorded is because hoaxing is easy, especially audio hoaxes. But regardless of the almost certainly mundane and boring sources of the sounds, they sure do sound creepifyin’.
As grounded in rationality as I like to think myself as being, were I to hear sounds like this out of a clear blue sky I suspect it’d give me the screaming willies.
If you can skip over ISIS news because it’s just too far away and/or just too big, here’s a closer story on a smaller scale that’ll make you question the validity of the notion that all human life is precious:
So many people think the way to deal with a threat is to sit down and talk it out. The reality is that quite often you best bet is to go RRRAAAAAARGH and scare the threat away.
No, supercars haven’t suddenly become ridiculously cheap. Lab-grown meat has, however. A year and a half ago, the first quarter-pounder was made from “test tube meat,” costing well over a quarter million bucks; the same patty would today cost $11. That’s still pretty pricey by burger standards… but imagine $11 burgers on, say, the Moon or Mars. Or endangered-critter-burgers, without endangering the critters. Or the heads of animal rights activist vegans popping when presented with this option, instead of existing upon grass and weeds and whatnot.
Ah, science. Sure, *other* forms of thought promise meat from, say, small carbohydrate wafers, but man do they get snippy when you want to actually test the claim. But science? Pfff. Couple “science” with “profit motive,” and before you know it you’re getting honest-to-Tesla meat being spat out by a machine you keep in your kitchen next to the Bassomatic ’76.