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.

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.

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.