A Crooked House

SUBHEAD: Revisiting a 1974 architectural theses project that laid out three Tiny Homes in a 8' wide 4D cube.

By Juan Wilson on 11 December 2019 for Island Breath -
(https://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-crooked-house.html)


Image above: Plan view of 8'x8' of Tiny Home and 8'x8' Tiny Yard. Home features single bed, kitchen counter with sink, work desk, shelving, cabinets, composting toilet with pass-thru panels connecting to other two homes. Click to enlarge.

Note: This is the initial posting of this work on our blog site and it will likely be upgraded and re-edited before it is finalized.

In the 1950's, when I was a teenager, I read short science-fiction story titled 'And He Built a Crooked House'. It is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, first published in Astounding Science Fiction in February 1941. It was reprinted in the anthology Fantasia Mathematica in 1958 and in the Heinlein collection The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag in 1959.

The story is about a mathematically inclined architect named Quintus Teal who has what he thinks is a brilliant idea to save on real estate costs by building a house shaped like the unfolded net of a tesseract. The title is paraphrased from the nursery rhyme "There Was a Crooked Man". See (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22%E2%80%94And_He_Built_a_Crooked_House%E2%80%94%22).

The form of this unfolded 4D cube (or tesseract) took was a four story house of stacked cubes with four additional cubes wrapped around an upper floor. 

At the time I had some interest in architecture and was fascinated by Heinlein's story. More than 20 year, while studying architecture at the Cooper Union in New York City I became interested in the representation of geometric objects through multidimensional space.

In 1973-74, as part of my Fifth Year Theses Project I investigated representing various 4D object concepts like "cube", "tube", "cup", "bottle" in drawing and model formats. One of my studies was a reevaluation of Heinlein's Crooked House architecture.

I decided to design a 4D regular cube that would be 8feet x 8feet x 8feet x 8feet. This hypercube would have there for have 8 8ft x 8ft x 8ft 3D volumes attached to one another as the "faces" of the 4D cube.

The eight 3D cube spaces include:

 - One 8' cube of Earth with a small hyper-dense central rock cor providing One G of gravity to adjacent spaces. The earth cube is living soil providing needed organic materials and minerals to support plants.

-  Three 8' cube Yards with grass and small tree rooted in the Earth cube. There is also a Welcome mat. The volume of the cube filled with breathable air.

 - Three 8' cube Tiny Homes with a door (each facing a Welcome mat in one of the yards). Units also feature a wall with a window (facing an adjacent yard) a ceiling with skylight with access to the roof. There are two adjacent walls in each unit that abut the other two units.These otherwise blank walls each have a 16"x16" pass-through door that allow exchanging items between the other Tiny Home units without going outside. One pass-through door is red and the other green.

- One 8' cube of Sky A space that is above the roofs of the three living units and above the yards. At the center of the sky cube is a small sun-like sphere that provide light and energy for units and yards. At the center of the sphere is a small black hole 16" in diameter that is the only way in and out of this small universe.


Image above: Isometric views of 8'x8' elements, or parts, of 4D Tiny Home project include Home, Yard, Overhead Sky and Underfoot Earth. 

The three Yard and Home cubes are arranged so that the six faces of the 8' Earth Cube supports the bottom of three Yards and three Tiny Homes.

It should be noted that the eight face cube volumes of a 4D hypercube are merely faces... much like the six faces of a empty cardboard box. It is usually what's inside the 3D space of the cardboard box that is the real prize.

Similarly the eight cube faces are merely the surface of the 4D cube. What is inside the 4D cube that is the real content... In this case maybe something to keep the Earth Cube fertile and the Yard Cubes breathable and moist and the Sky cube protective and a source of energy.

When the eight volumes of the tesseract are folded into the four dimensional hypercube the three Tiny Homes are abutted to one another and the three yards are contiguous.


Image above: Isometric views of eight 8'x8'x8' elements of 4 dimensional Tiny Home project arranged into tesseract (4D unfolded cube analogous to a unfolded cardboard box.

The three Yard and Home cubes are arranged so that the six faces of the 8' Earth Cube supports the bottom of three Yards and three Tiny Homes.

It should be noted that the eight face cube volumes of a 4D hypercube are merely faces... much like the six faces of a empty cardboard box. It is usually what's inside the 3D space of the cardboard box that is the real prize.

Similarly the eight cube faces are merely the surface of the 4D cube. What is inside the 4D cube that is the real content... In this case maybe something to keep the Earth Cube fertile and the Yard Cubes breathable and moist and the Sky cube protective and a source of energy.




Image above: Two views, each showing four "sides" of the Hypecrcube's eight volumes when they are folded into the fourth dimension. 

When the eight volumes of the tesseract are folded into the four dimensional hypercube the three Tiny Homes are abutted to one another and the three yards are contiguous. The two views above are analogous to looking at the opposite sides of a 3D dice, where you can only see the number of spots on 3 of the 6 sides of the dice. In the case of a 3D dice there are 8 unique views of 3 sides of the dice. In the case of a 4D cube there are 16 views of any four corner adjacent of the 8 volumes.



Image above:  Pencil drawing from 5th year architectural thesis year at the Cooper Union by Juan Wilson in 1974. Isometric view of unfolded 4D Hypercube showing four of its eight volumes.


Image above: Pencil drawing from 5th year architectural thesis year at the Cooper Union by Juan Wilson in 1974. Isometric view from one side of the Hypercube showing four of its eight volumes. 


Image above: Salvador Dali's 4D crucifixion titled "Corpus Hypercubus" from 1954. In his 1951 essay "Mystical Manifesto",Dali introduced an art theory he called "nuclear mysticism" that combined his interests in Catholicism, mathematics, science, and Catalan culture in an effort to reestablish classical values and techniques, which he extensively utilized in Corpus Hypercubus. From (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion_(Corpus_Hypercubus)).

 

Video above: Animations of rotating four dimensional cubes, tetrahedrons and Spheres by Eugene Khutoryansky. From (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyuRLmCphHc).

 

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Another Year of Magical Thinking

SUBHEAD: If you think Honolulu is expensive, imagine the cost of a bag Doritos in Tesla's Mars colony.

By James Kunstler on 12 February 2018 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/yet-another-year-magical-thinking/)


Image above: A photoshopped image by Elon Musk's Tesla Corporation advertizing it's automobile and promoting its rocket division. Total self-promotional ego trip. From (http://metro.co.uk/2018/02/12/secret-payload-hidden-rocket-launched-tesla-space-7306830/).

A peculiar feature of the human condition is that a society in distress will call forth intellectual witch-doctors to put on a colorful show that distracts the supposedly thinking class from the insoluble quandaries that portend serious trouble ahead.

This feature is on display these days in the person of freelance space pioneer Elon Musk. He intends to establish a human colony on Mars of one million people by 2040.

Musk, who is also developer of the Tesla line of electric cars and businesses that make solar-electric gear and batteries, has tested a series of space vehicles, most recently last week’s celebrated launch of his Falcon Heavy Rocket, said to be the most powerful in the world.

It is just the precursor of the soon-to-come colossus Musk calls the BFR (“Big Fucking Rocket”) that will convey as many as 200 people at a time to their new home on the Red Planet.

NPR reporter Ari Shapiro was rhapsodizing about this “Space-X” project last week on the airwaves, lending it the media stamp-of-approval.

And since NPR is a major news source for the US thinking class especially, you can be sure this meme of colonizing Mars is now embedded in the brains of the Pareto distribution (“the law of the vital few”) who affect to be thought leaders in this land.

There’s an old gag about the space race of yore that goes something like this (trigger warning to the ethnically hyper-sensitive):

The UN convenes a General Assembly session on space travel. The ambassadors of various nations are asked to talk about their space projects. The Russians and the Americans tick off their prior accomplishments and announce plans to explore the planets. Finally, the ambassador from Poland takes his turn at the rostrum. “We intend to land a man on the sun,” he declares. There is a great hubbub in the assembly, cries of “say, what…?” and “wait a minute now….”

The Secretary-General turns to the Polish ambassador and says, “Your scientists must be out of their minds. It’s six thousand degrees up there! How can you possibly land a spacecraft on it?” A hush falls over the assembly. The Polish ambassador looks completely relaxed and serene. “We are going to do it at night!” he announces triumphantly.

NPR’s Shapiro interviewed blogger Tim Urban of the Wait But Why blog for the segment on Musk’s space program. Here’s a sample of their conversation:

URBAN: If humanity is, you know, like a precious photo album you’ve got, the Earth is like a hard drive you have it on. And any sane person would obviously back it up to a second hard drive. That’s kind of the idea here – is all of our eggs are currently on one planet. And if we can build a self-sustaining civilization on Mars, it’s much harder for humanity to go extinct.

SHAPIRO: And a million people is about how many people he thinks it would take for a population to be self-sustaining.

URBAN: Right, self-sustaining meaning if something catastrophic happened on Earth during some world war or something that has to do with, you know, a really bad-case scenario with climate change, maybe some – I don’t know – the species went extinct on Earth but ships stopped coming with supplies and anything else, a million people is enough that Mars’ population would be fine.

Not to put too fine a point on it, I never heard so much fucking nonsense in my life. There’s absolutely nothing that might make Mars a “sustainable” habitat for human beings, or probably any other form of Earthly life. The journey alone would destroy human bodies.

If you think that living in Honolulu is expensive, with most daily needs of the population shipped or flown in, imagine what it would be like sending a cargo of provisions (Doritos? Pepperoni sticks? Mountain Dew? Fabreeze?) to a million “consumers” up on Mars. Or do you suppose the colonists will “print” their food, water, and other necessities?

Elon Musk’s ventures have reportedly vacuumed in around $5 billion in federal subsidies. Mr. Musk is doing a fine job of keeping his benefactors entertained. Americans are still avid for adventures in space, where just about every other movie takes place.

I suppose it’s because they take us away from the awful conundrums of making a go of it here on Earth, a planet that humans were exquisitely evolved for (or designed for, if you will), and which we are in the process of rendering uninhabitable for ourselves and lots of other creatures.

This is our home. Can we talk about the necessary adjustments and arrangements we have to make in order to continue the human project here? Just based on our performance on this blue planet, we are not qualified to infect other parts of the solar system.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Tesla and the Laws of Physics 11/26/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Tesla's test in Puerto Rica 10/29/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Electric cars don't reduce CO2 8/19/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Kauai and Tesla are newlyweds 8/11/17
Ea O Ka Aina: KIUC aims at 100% renewables 6/11/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Musktopia here we come! 4/3/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Solar power one island at a time 11/24/16
Ea O Ka Aina: KIUC on PV - Tesla on PowerWall 5/1/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Annals of pure bullshit - Coco Palms 6/22/14 
Ea O Ka Aina: Coco Palms Travesty 8/10/13   
Ea O Ka Aina: HEI afraid of Solar Power 10/12/12
Island Breath: Annals of False Advertizing - Kauai Lagoons 3/18/08
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The Terror of Deep Time

SUBHEAD: It's vital for humans understand the story in which we play our small but significant part.

By John Michael Greer on 21 September 2017 in Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-09-21/terror-deep-time/)


Image above: The Andromeda galaxy behind a silhouette of mountains. From original article.

Back in the 1950s, sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote cogently about what he called “crackpot realism”—the use of rational, scientific, utilitarian means to pursue irrational, unscientific, or floridly delusional goals. It was a massive feature of American life in Mills’ time, and if anything, it’s become more common since then.

Since it plays a central role in the corner of contemporary culture I want to discuss this week, I want to put a few moments into discussing where crackpot realism comes from, and how it wriggles its way into the apple barrel of modern life and rots the apples from skin to core.

Let’s start with the concept of the division of labor.

One of the great distinctions between a modern industrial society and other modes of human social organization is that in the former, very few activities are taken from beginning to end by the same person.

A woman in a hunter-gatherer community, as she is getting ready for the autumn tuber-digging season, chooses a piece of wood, cuts it, shapes it into a digging stick, carefully hardens the business end in hot coals, and then puts it to work getting tubers out of the ground.

Once she carries the tubers back to camp, what’s more, she’s far more likely than not to take part in cleaning them, roasting them, and sharing them out to the members of the band.

A woman in a modern industrial society who wants to have potatoes for dinner, by contrast, may do no more of the total labor involved in that process than sticking a package in the microwave.

Even if she has potatoes growing in a container garden out back, say, and serves up potatoes she grew, harvested, and cooked herself, odds are she didn’t make the gardening tools, the cookware, or the stove she uses.

That’s division of labor: the social process by which most members of an industrial society specialize in one or another narrow economic niche, and use the money they earn from their work in that niche to buy the products of other economic niches.

Let’s say it up front: there are huge advantages to the division of labor. It’s more efficient in almost every sense, whether you’re measuring efficiency in terms of output per person per hour, skill level per dollar invested in education, or what have you.

What’s more, when it’s combined with a social structure that isn’t too rigidly deterministic, it’s at least possible for people to find their way to occupational specialties for which they’re actually suited, and in which they will be more productive than otherwise.

Yet it bears recalling that every good thing has its downsides, especially when it’s pushed to extremes, and the division of labor is no exception.

Crackpot realism is one of the downsides of the division of labor. It emerges reliably whenever two conditions are in effect.

The first condition is that the task of choosing goals for an activity is assigned to one group of people and the task of finding means to achieve those goals is left to a different group of people.

The second condition is that the first group needs to be enough higher in social status than the second group that members of the first group need pay no attention to the concerns of the second group.

Consider, as an example, the plight of a team of engineers tasked with designing a flying car. People have been trying to do this for more than a century now, and the results are in: it’s a really dumb idea.

It so happens that a great many of the engineering features that make a good car make a bad aircraft, and vice versa; for instance, an auto engine needs to be optimized for torque rather than speed, while an aircraft engine needs to be optimized for speed rather than torque.

Thus every flying car ever built—and there have been plenty of them—performed just as poorly as a car as it did as a plane, and cost so much that for the same price you could buy a good car, a good airplane, and enough fuel to keep both of them running for a good long time.

Engineers know this.

Still, if you’re an engineer and you’ve been hired by some clueless tech-industry godzillionaire who wants a flying car, you probably don’t have the option of telling your employer the truth about his pet project—that is, that no matter how much of his money he plows into the project, he’s going to get a clunker of a vehicle that won’t be any good at either of its two incompatible roles—because he’ll simply fire you and hire someone who will tell him what he wants to hear.

Nor do you have the option of sitting him down and getting him to face what’s behind his own unexamined desires and expectations, so that he might notice that his fixation on having a flying car is an emotionally charged hangover from age eight, when he daydreamed about having one to help him cope with the miserable, bully-ridden public school system in which he was trapped for so many wretched years.

So you devote your working hours to finding the most rational, scientific, and utilitarian means to accomplish a pointless, useless, and self-defeating end. That’s crackpot realism.

You can make a great party game out of identifying crackpot realism—try it sometime—but I’ll leave that to my more enterprising readers.

What I want to talk about right now is one of the most glaring examples of crackpot realism in contemporary industrial society. Yes, we’re going to talk about space travel again.

No question, a fantastic amount of scientific, technological, and engineering brilliance went into the quest to insert a handful of human beings for a little while into the lethal environment of deep space and bring them back alive.

Visit one of the handful of places on the planet where you can get a sense of the sheer scale of a Saturn V rocket, and the raw immensity of the effort that put a small number of human bootprints on the Moon is hard to miss. What’s much easier to miss is the whopping irrationality of the project itself.

(I probably need to insert a parenthetical note here. Every time I blog about the space program, I can count on fielding at least one comment from some troll who insists that the Moon landings never happened.

It so happens that I’ve known quite a few people who worked on the Apollo project; some of them have told me their stories and shown me memorabilia from what was one of the proudest times of their lives; and given a choice between believing them, and believing some troll who uses a pseudonym to hide his identity but can’t hide his ignorance of basic historical and scientific facts, well, let’s just say the troll isn’t going to come in first place. Nor is his comment going to go anywhere but the trash. ‘Nuf said.)

Outer space simply isn’t an environment where human beings can survive for long.

It’s near-perfect vacuum at a temperature a few degrees above absolute zero; it’s full of hard radiation streaming out from the huge unshielded fusion reactor at the center of our solar system; it’s also got chunks of rock, lots of them, whizzing through it at better than rifle-bullet speeds; and the human body is the product of two billion years of evolutionary adaptation to environments that have the gravity, atmospheric pressure, temperature ranges, and other features that are found on the Earth’s surface and, as far as we know, nowhere else in the universe.

A simple thought experiment will show how irrational the dream of human expansion into space really is.

Consider the harshest natural environments on this planet—the stark summits of the Himalayas; the middle of the East Antarctic ice sheet in winter; the bleak Takla Makan desert of central Asia, the place caravans go to die; the bottom of the Marianas Trench, where the water pressure will reduce a human body to paste in seconds.

Nowhere in the solar system, or on any of the exoplanets yet discovered by astronomers, is there a place that’s even as well suited to human life as the places I’ve just named.

Logically speaking, before we try to settle the distant, airless, radiation-blasted deserts of Mars or the Moon, wouldn’t it make sense first to build cities on the Antarctic ice or in the lightless depths of the ocean?

With one exception, in fact, every one of the arguments that has been trotted out to try to justify the settlement of Mars can be applied with even more force to the project of settling Antarctica.

In both cases, you’ve got a great deal of empty real estate amply stocked with mineral wealth, right? Antarctica, though, has a much more comfortable climate than Mars, not to mention abundant supplies of water and a breathable atmosphere, both of which Mars lacks.

Furthermore, it costs a lot less to get your colonists to Antarctica, they won’t face lethal irradiation on the way there, and there’s at least a chance that you can rescue them if things go very wrong.

If in fact it made any kind of sense to settle Mars, the case for settling Antarctica would be far stronger.

So where are the grand plans, lavishly funded by clueless tech-industry godzillionaires, to settle Antarctica? Their absence shows the one hard fact about settling outer space that next to nobody is willing to think about: it simply doesn’t make sense.

The immense financial and emotional investments we’ve made in the notion of settling human beings on other planets or in outer space itself would be Exhibit A in a museum of crackpot realism.

This is where the one exception I mentioned above comes in—the one argument for settling Mars that can’t also be made for settling Antarctica. This is the argument that a Martian colony is an insurance policy for our species.

If something goes really wrong on Earth, the claim goes, and human beings die out here, having a settlement on Mars gives our species a shot at survival.

Inevitably, given the present tenor of popular culture, you can expect to hear this sort of logic backed up by embarrassingly bad arguments. I’m thinking, for example, of a rant by science promoter Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who likes to insist that dinosaurs are extinct today because they didn’t have a space program.

We’ll assume charitably that Tyson spent long nights stargazing in his teen years, and so tended to doze off during his high school biology classes; no doubt that’s why he missed three very obvious facts about dinosaurs.

The first is that they were the dominant life forms on land for well over a hundred million years, which is a good bit longer than our species shows any likelihood of being able to hang on; the second is that the vast majority of dinosaur species went extinct for ordinary reasons—there were only a very modest number of dinosaur species around when the Chicxulub meteorite came screaming down out of space to end the Cretaceous Period; and the third is that dinosaurs aren’t extinct—we call them birds nowadays, and in terms of number of species, rates of speciation, and other standard measures of evolutionary vigor, they’re doing quite a bit better than mammals just now.

Set aside the bad logic and the sloppy paleontology, though, and the argument just named casts a ruthlessly clear light on certain otherwise obscure factors in our contemporary mindset.

The notion that space travel gets its value as a way to avoid human extinction goes back a long ways. I recall a book by Italian journalist Oriana Falacci, compiling her interviews with leading figures in the space program during its glory days; she titled it If The Sun Dies, after the passionate comment along these lines by one of her interviewees.

Behind this, in turn, lies one of the profound and usually unmentioned fears that shapes the modern mind: the terror of deep time.

There’s a profound irony in the fact that the geologists who first began to figure out the true age of the Earth lived in western Europe in the early nineteenth century, when most people believed that the world was only some six thousand years old.

There have been plenty of cultures in recorded history that had a vision of time expansive enough to fit the facts of geological history, but the cultures of western Europe and its diaspora in the Americas and Australasia were not among them.

Wedded to literalist interpretations of the Book of Genesis, and more broadly to a set of beliefs that assigned unique importance to human beings, the people who faced the first dim adumbrations of the vastness of Earth’s long history were utterly unprepared for the shock, and even less ready to have the first unnerving guesses that the Earth might be millions of years old replaced by increasingly precise measurements that gave its age in the billions of years, and that of the universe in the trillions.

The brutal nature of the shock that resulted shouldn’t be underestimated.

A society that had come to think of humanity as creation’s darlings, dwelling in a universe with a human timescale, found itself slammed facefirst into an unwanted encounter with the vast immensities of past and future time. That encounter had a great many awkward moments.

The self-defeating fixation of evangelical Christians on young-Earth creationism can be seen in part as an attempt to back away from the unwelcome vista of deep time; so is the insistence, as common outside Christian churches as within them, that the world really will end sometime very soon and spare us the stress of having to deal with the immensity of the future.

For that matter, I’m not sure how many of my readers know how stunningly unwelcome the concept of extinction was when it was first proposed: if the universe was created for the benefit of human beings, as a great many people seriously argued in those days, how could there have been so many thousands of species that lived and died long ages before the first human being walked the planet?

Worse, the suspicion began to spread that the future waiting for humanity might not be an endless progression toward bigger and better things, as believers in progress insisted, or the end of the world followed by an eternity of bliss for the winning team, as believers in Christianity insisted, but extinction: the same fate as all those vanished species whose bones kept surfacing in geological deposits.

It’s in the nineteenth century that the first stories of human extinction appear on the far end of late Romanticism, just as the same era saw the first tales that imagined the history of modern civilization ending in decline and fall.

People read The Black Cloud and After London for the same rush of fascinated horror that they got from Frankenstein and Dracula, and with the same comfortable disbelief once the last page turned—but the same scientific advances that made the two latter books increasingly less believable made tales of humanity’s twilight increasingly more so.

It became fashionable in many circles to dismiss such ideas as mere misanthropy, and that charge still gets flung at anyone who questions current notions of humanity’s supposed future in space. It’s a curious fact that I tend to field such comments from science fiction writers, more than from anyone else just now.

A few years ago, when I sketched out a fictive history of the next ten billion years that included human extinction millions of years from now, SF writer David Brin took time out of his busy schedule to denounce it as “an infuriating paean to despair.” Last month’s post on the worlds that never were, similarly, fielded a spluttering denunciation by S.M. Stirling.

It was mostly a forgettable rehash of the standard arguments for an interstellar future—arguments, by the way, that could be used equally well to justify continued faith in perpetual motion—but the point I want to raise here is that Stirling’s sole reaction to Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson’s brilliant fictional critique of the interstellar-travel mythos, was to claim dismissively that Robinson must have suffered an attack of misanthropy.

Some of my readers may remember Verruca Salt, the archetypal spoiled brat in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

When her father didn’t give her whatever she happened to want, her typical response was to shriek, “You don’t love me!” I think of that whenever somebody trots out the accusation of misanthropy in response to any realistic treatment of the limits that will shape the human future.

It’s not misanthropy to point out that humanity isn’t going to outlast the sun or leap breezily from star to star; it’s simple realism, just as reminding someone that they will inevitably die is an expression not of hatred but of common sense.

You, dear reader, will die someday. So will I, and so will every other human being.

That fact doesn’t make our lives meaningless; quite the contrary, it’s when we come to grips with the fact of our own mortality that we have our best shot at achieving not only basic maturity, but that condition of reflective attention to meaning that goes by the name of wisdom.

In exactly the same way, recognizing that humanity will not last forever—that the same Earth that existed and flourished long before our species came on the scene will exist and flourish long after our species is gone—might just provide enough of a boost of wisdom to help us back away from at least some of the more obviously pigheaded ways we’re damaging the biosphere of the only planet on which we can actually live.

There’s something else to be found in the acceptance of our collective mortality, though, and I’m considering exploring it in detail over the months ahead.

Grasp the fact that our species is a temporary yet integral part of the whole system we call the biosphere of the Earth, and it becomes a good deal easier to see that we are part of a story that didn’t begin with us, won’t end with us, and doesn’t happen to assign us an overwhelmingly important role.

Traumatic though this may be for the Verruca Saltish end of humanity, with its distinctly overinflated sense of importance, there’s much to be gained by ditching the tantrums, coming to terms with our decidedly modest place in the cosmos, and coming to understand the story in which we play our small but significant part.

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Can we create a durable future?

SUBHEAD: We build buildings now as if they will be abandoned or torn down in a few decades.

By Kurt Cobb on 11 June 2017 for Resoruce Insights -
(http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2017/06/can-we-create-durable-future.html)


Image above: The Roman Colosseum today, almost two millennia  after it was built. From (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-10/the-colosseum/6292532).

It is hard to imagine anyone today building something as durable as the Roman Colosseum. Most of the damage we see to the 2,000 year-old stadium comes from two earthquakes and the persistent looting of its marble, stone and brass infrastructure by humans using them for other building projects.

Were it not for these unfortunate depredations, the Colosseum might be largely intact today.

We pen fantasies about the durability of our culture in science fiction novels, television programs and movies set hundreds and even thousands of years from now. By then we humans will supposedly be moving with magical ease at speeds greater than light, zipping through the known universe aided by voice-command convenience (or maybe even thought-comand convenience).

But our age seems to be populated by buildings and cultural artifacts that are designed for impermanence. It's not that we are technically incapable of making things that are durable when we want to, especially when it feeds our desire to turn science fiction into fact.

NASA's Mars Rovers launched in 2003 were designed for a mission of 90 Martian solar days. The Spirit rover operated until 2010. The Opportunity rover is still operating.

We have even more impressive longevity from the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes sent in 1977 to study the outer planets, that is, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Both spacecraft were designed for 5-year lifetimes and both are still working after almost 40 years.

Voyager 1 has reached interstellar space where it continues to send back data. Voyager 2 will join it in two or three years. NASA expects to continue to receive data for another decade or so from both.

On Earth we would consider such durability to be over-engineering, too costly for our purposes. We build computers to be obsolete in less than 2 years.

We build shopping malls, office parks and other commercial and industrial buildings with the idea that they will be abandoned or torn down in perhaps two or three decades.

I am reminded of a New Yorker cartoon in which a developer looking at a model of his newly commissioned building remarks:

"Great design, but when it comes time, a bitch to implode."

Nothing lasts forever. And, a society that has no dynamism, that does not change with changing circumstances, cannot survive.

But it is we who are creating the change that we have to adapt to. It is we humans who are causing climate change. It is we humans who are causing rapid depletion of soil, water and energy resources. It is we humans who are increasing our environmental footprint in sheer numbers and in consumption per person.

We've initiated a feedback loop that has no end--except catastrophe. What would more durable arrangements look like? If we turn to those arrangements that have withstood the test of time, we have a starting point:

1. Small units of governance. The city of Rome has been continuously inhabited for more than 2,500 years. The Roman Empire, for all its durability, came and went even as the city lived on.
   
   
2.  Small-scale agriculture and craft. Agriculturally based villages with craft industry have thousands of years behind them. This way of living is being crushed by modern industrial farming and its need for ever increasing scale. But the local food movement and the desire of many to know where their food comes from have breathed new life into small-scale farming.
   
   
3. Trade in luxury goods. Some exotic and valuable items have long been traded across large distances because a particular climate is suitable for certain produce, for example, tea or coffee--or the know-how and infrastructure is well-developed, silk from China, for example. What this point implies is that necessities are better produced closer to home to ensure a continuous and adequate supply.
   
   
4. Locations favorable to agriculture and navigation. It should be no surprise that many of the world's most important and long-lived cities are ports. Water has been historically a primary mode of transport. It is also, of course, essential to prosperous agriculture, either from adequate rains or from flowing rivers that can be diverted for irrigation.

All of these will seem obvious to anyone who has thought about the topic, sometimes through the lens of what is called "relocalization." In its simplest form this merely means returning the production of daily necessities closer to where we live.

That seems straightforward enough; but the complex webs of trade and logistics we now have that bring us those necessities will be difficult to abandon.

For those wanting to build more durable arrangements, this implies building them alongside the global system we have now. (It does NOT, however, mean abandoning the knowledge we have gained in the industrial age, but rather using it more wisely to attain our goals.)

Building a relocalized system may seem unduly duplicative and wasteful.

And, it will be until it isn't, that is, until the global system stops serving our needs. In many ways that system already has stopped serving us if you count as one of our needs the desire to build a durable human culture that can thrive far into the future.

The fantasy of a space-faring society has us fixated on an ever evolving technological future that asks us to abandon one set of gadgets for another almost continuously--all premised on the availability of unlimited resources and a climate crisis that somehow won't turn out to be a crisis.

Few people are even contemplating the need to build a durable society because few imagine ever needing one.

We humans like the novelty afforded to us by our rapidly changing society. The world of information and communications technology has brought that novelty to us in addictive oversupply through ever more powerful cellphones and other electronic devices.

What strikes me about this supposed novelty is its overwhelming sameness. It seems like novelty largely because new participants appear. But it is actually monotony itself because the stories we are told are as relentlessly interchangeable as they are shallow.

The durable society is not a dull society. It is rather a deeper society.

We get to spend more time with the very landscape of our lives--the people, the buildings, the everyday objects, and the activities--than the frantic pace of the electronic message now allows us.

The slow food movement is one expression of this desire for deeper engagement.

That deeper engagement is really the foundation of a durable future. It should come as no surprise then that it is difficult to build a durable future in a world that people don't have time to understand...with others they don't really know.

Kurt Cobb is an author, speaker, and columnist focusing on energy and the environment. He has been a regular contributor to the Energy Voices section of The Christian Science Monitor and is author of the peak-oil-themed novel Prelude.  He maintains a blog called Resource Insights and can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.

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Last Man on the Moon

SUBHEAD: Astronaut Eugene Cernan has died at 82. He was the last man to walk on the moon.

By Xeni Jardin on 16 January 2017 for Boing Boing -
(http://boingboing.net/2017/01/16/astronaut-eugene-cernan-last.html)


Image above: Eugene Cernan aboard the Apollo 17 Command Module covered in moon dusted spacesuit on way back to Earth. From original article.

"We leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind."

These were the last words Eugene Cernan said upon leaving the surface of our moon, at the end of Apollo 17.

Cernan (shown below at the beginning of EVA 3) was the last man to walk on the moon. He died Monday, January 16, 2017 surrounded by his family.


Image above: Eugene Cernan, with Earth overhead, during moonwalk during last NASA mission to moon in 1972. From original article.

From the NASA remembrance:

Cernan, a Captain in the U.S. Navy, left his mark on the history of exploration by flying three times in space, twice to the moon. He also holds the distinction of being the second American to walk in space and the last human to leave his footprints on the lunar surface.
He was one of 14 astronauts selected by NASA in October 1963. He piloted the Gemini 9 mission with Commander Thomas P. Stafford on a three-day flight in June 1966. Cernan logged more than two hours outside the orbiting capsule.

In May 1969, he was the lunar module pilot of Apollo 10, the first comprehensive lunar-orbital qualification and verification test of the lunar lander. The mission confirmed the performance, stability, and reliability of the Apollo command, service and lunar modules. The mission included a descent to within eight nautical miles of the moon's surface.
In a 2007 interview for NASA's oral histories, Cernan said, "I keep telling Neil Armstrong that we painted that white line in the sky all the way to the Moon down to 47,000 feet so he wouldn't get lost, and all he had to do was land. Made it sort of easy for him."

Cernan concluded his historic space exploration career as commander of the last human mission to the moon in December 1972. En route to the moon, the crew captured an iconic photo of the home planet, with an entire hemisphere fully illuminated -- a "whole Earth" view showing Africa, the Arabian peninsula and the south polar ice cap. The hugely popular photo was referred to by some as the "Blue Marble," a title in use for an ongoing series of NASA Earth imagery.

Image above: Iconic photo of whole Earth taken by Eugene Cernan during Apollo 17 mission, the last voyage to the moon. From original article.


Video above: NASA film of Eugene Cernan singing "Merry Month of May" while moonwalking. From (https://youtu.be/8V9quPcNWZE).

See also:
  .
The Gobbler: Moonshot Part One 9/21/94
A rocky road to the Cape Canaveral.

The Gobbler: Moonshot Part Two 9/21/94
Up close to a Saturn V Rocket.

The Gobbler : Moonshot Part Three 9/21/94 
NASA's first launch to the Moon.

An Afternoon in early Autumn

SUBHEAD: If the Earth's lifetime was measured as one year, then all human history would be half a minute.

By John Michael Greer on 12 October 2016 for the Archdruid Report -
(http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2016/10/an-afternoon-in-early-autumn.html)


Image above: The artist's concept depicts Kepler-186f , the first validated Earth-size planet to orbit a distant star in the habitable zone. From NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-Caltech (http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/nasas-kepler-discovers-first-earth-size-planet-in-the-habitable-zone-of-another-star).

I think it was the late science writer Stephen Jay Gould who coined the term “deep time” for the vast panorama opened up to human eyes by the last three hundred years or so of discoveries in geology and astronomy. It’s a useful label for an even more useful concept.

In our lives, we deal with time in days, seasons, years, decades at most; decades, centuries and millennia provide the yardsticks by which the life cycles of human societies—that is to say, history, in the usual sense of that word—are traced.

Both these, the time frame of individual lives and the time frame of societies, are anthropocentric, as indeed they should be; lives and societies are human things and require a human measure.

When that old bamboozler Protagoras insisted that “man is the measure of all things,” though, he uttered a subtle truth wrapped in a bald-faced lie.*

The subtle truth is that since we are what we are—that is to say, social primates whow have learned a few interesting tricks—our capacity to understand the cosmos is strictly limited by the perceptions that human nervous systems are capable of processing and the notions that human minds are capable of thinking.

The bald-faced lie is the claim that everything in the cosmos must fit inside the perceptions human beings can process and the notions they can think.

(*No, none of this has to do with gender politics. The Greek language, unlike modern English, had a common gender-nonspecific noun for “human being,” anthropos, which was distinct from andros, “man,” and gyne, “woman.” The word Protagoras used was anthropos.)

It took the birth of modern geology to tear through the veil of human time and reveal the stunningly inhuman scale of time that measures the great cycles of the planet on which we live.

Last week’s post The Myth of the Anthropocene sketched out part of the process by which people in Europe and the European diaspora, once they got around to noticing that the Book of Genesis is about the Rock of Ages rather than the age of rocks, struggled to come to terms with the immensities that geological strata revealed.

To my mind, that was the single most important discovery our civilization has made—a discovery with which we’re still trying to come to terms, with limited success so far, and one that I hope we can somehow manage to hand down to our descendants in the far future.

The thing that makes deep time difficult for many people to cope with is that it makes self-evident nonsense out of any claim that human beings have any uniquely important place in the history of the cosmos. That wouldn’t be a difficulty at all, except that the religious beliefs most commonly held in Europe and the European diaspora make exactly that claim.

That last point deserves some expansion here, not least because a minority among the current crop of “angry atheists” have made a great deal of rhetorical hay by insisting that all religions, across the board, point for point, are identical to whichever specific religion they themselves hate the most—usually, though not always, whatever Christian denomination they rebelled against in their adolescent years.

That insistence is a fertile source of nonsense, and never so much as when it turns to the religious implications of time.

The conflict between science and religion over the age of the Earth is a purely Western phenomenon. Had the great geological discoveries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries taken place in Japan, say, or India, the local religious authorities wouldn’t have turned a hair.

On the one hand, most Asian religious traditions juggle million-year intervals as effortlessly as any modern cosmologist; on the other, Asian religious traditions have by and large avoided the dubious conviction, enshrined in most (though not all) versions of Christianity, that the Earth and everything upon it exists solely as a stage on which the drama of humanity’s fall and redemption plays out over a human-scaled interval of time.

The expansive Hindu cosmos with its vast ever-repeating cycles of time, the Shinto concept of Great Nature as a continuum within which every category of being has its rightful place, and other non-Western worldviews offer plenty of room for modern geology to find a home.

Ironically, though, the ongoing decline of mainstream Christianity as a cultural influence in the Western world hasn’t done much to lessen the difficulty most people in the industrial world feel when faced with the abysses of deep time.

The reason here is simply that the ersatz religion that’s taken the place of Christianity in the Western imagination also tries to impose a rigid ideological scheme not only on the ebb and flow of human history, but on the great cycles of the nonhuman cosmos as well.

Yes, that would be the religion of progress—the faith-based conviction that human history is, or at least ought to be, a straight line extending onward and upward from the caves to the stars.

You might think, dear reader, that a belief system whose followers like to wallow in self-praise for their rejection of the seven-day creation scheme of the Book of Genesis and their embrace of deep time in the past would have a bit of a hard time evading its implications for the future. Let me assure you that this seems to give most of them no trouble at all.

From Ray Kurzweil’s pop-culture mythology of the Singularity—a straightforward rewrite of Christian faith in the Second Coming dolled up in science-fiction drag—straight through to the earnest space-travel advocates who insist that we’ve got to be ready to abandon the solar system when the sun turns into a red giant four billion years from now, a near-total aversion to thinking about the realities deep time ahead of us is astonishingly prevalent among those who think they’ve grasped the vastness of Earth’s history.

I’ve come to think that one of the things that feeds this curious quirk of collective thinking is a bit of trivia to be found in a great many books on geology and the like—the metaphor that turns the Earth’s entire history into a single year, starting on January 1 with the planet’s formation out of clouds of interstellar dust and ending at midnight on December 31, which is always right now.

That metaphor has been rehashed more often than the average sitcom plot. A quick check of the books in the study where I’m writing this essay finds three different versions, one written in the 1960s, one in the 1980s, and one a little more than a decade ago.

The dates of various events dance around the calendar a bit as new discoveries rewrite this or that detail of the planet’s history, to be sure; when I was a dinosaur-crazed seven-year-old, the Earth was only three and a half billion years old and the dinosaurs died out seventy million years ago, while the latest research I know of revises those dates to 4.6 billion years and 65 million years respectively, moving the date of the end-Cretaceous extinction from December 24 to December 26—in either case, a wretched Christmas present for small boys. Such details aside, the basic metaphor remains all but unchanged.

There’s only one problem with it, but it’s a whopper. Ask yourself this: what has gotten left out of that otherwise helpful metaphor? The answer, of course, is the future.

Let’s imagine, by contrast, a metaphor that maps the entire history of life on earth, from the first living thing on this planet to the last, onto a single year.

We don’t know exactly when life will go extinct on this planet, but then we don’t know exactly when it emerged, either; the most recent estimate I know of puts the origin of terrestrial life somewhere a little more than 3.7 billion years ago, and the point at which the sun’s increasing heat will finally sterilize the planet somewhere a little more than 1.2 billion years from now.

Adding in a bit of rounding error, we can set the lifespan of our planetary biosphere at a nice round five billion years.

On that scale, a month of thirty days is 411 million years, a single day is 13.7 million years, an hour is around 571,000 years, a minute is around 9514 years, and a second is 158 years and change.

Our genus, Homo,* evolved maybe two hours ago, and all of recorded human history so far has taken up a little less than 32 seconds.

(*Another gender-nonspecific word for “human being,” this one comes from Latin, and is equally distinct from vir, “man,” and femina, “woman.” English really does need to get its act together.)

That all corresponds closely to the standard metaphor. The difference comes in when you glance at the calendar and find out that the present moment in time falls not on December 31 or any other similarly momentous date, but on an ordinary, undistinguished day—by my back-of-the-envelope calculation, it would be September 26.

I like to imagine our time, along these lines, as an instant during an early autumn afternoon in the great year of Earth’s biosphere. Like many another late September day, it’s becoming uncomfortably hot, and billowing dark clouds stand on the horizon, heralds of an oncoming storm.

We human mayflies, with a lifespan averaging maybe half a second, dart here and there, busy with our momentary occupations; a few of us now and then lift our gaze from our own affairs and try to imagine the cold bare fields of early spring, the sultry air of summer evenings, or the rigors of a late autumn none of us will ever see.

With that in mind, let’s put some other dates onto the calendar. While life began on January 1, multi-cellular life didn’t get started until sometime in the middle of August—for almost two-thirds of the history of life, Earth was a planet of bacteria and blue-green algae, and in terms of total biomass, it arguably still is.

The first primitive plants and invertebrate animals ventured onto the land around August 25; the terrible end-Permian extinction crisis, the worst the planet has yet experienced, hit on September 8; the dinosaurs perished in the small hours of September 22, and the last ice age ended just over a minute ago, having taken place over some twelve and a half minutes.

Now let’s turn and look in the other direction. The last ice age was part of a glacial era that began a little less than two hours ago and can be expected to continue through the morning of the 27th—on our time scale, they happen every two and a half weeks or so, and the intervals between them are warm periods when the Earth is a jungle planet and glaciers don’t exist.

Our current idiotic habit of treating the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer will disrupt that cycle for only a very short time; our ability to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will end in less than a second as readily accessible fossil fuel reserves are exhausted, and it will take rather less than a minute thereafter for natural processes to scrub the excess CO2 from the atmosphere and return the planet’s climate to its normal instability.

Certain other consequences of our brief moment of absurd extravagance will last longer.

On our timescale, the process of radioactive decay will take around half an hour (that is to say, a quarter million years or so) to reduce high-level nuclear waste all the way to harmlessness.

It will take an interval of something like the same order of magnitude before all the dead satellites in high orbits have succumbed to the complex processes that will send them to a fiery fate in Earth’s atmosphere, and quite possibly longer for the constant rain of small meteorites onto the lunar surface to pound the Apollo landers and other space junk there to unrecognizable fragments.

Given a few hours of the biosphere’s great year, though, everything we are and everything we’ve done will be long gone.

Beyond that, the great timekeeper of Earth’s biosphere is the Sun. Stars increase in their output of heat over most of their life cycle, and the Sun is no exception. The single-celled chemosynthetic organisms that crept out of undersea hot springs in February or March of the great year encountered a frozen world, lit by a pale white Sun whose rays gave far less heat than today; the oldest currently known ice age, the Cryogenian glaciation of the late Precambrian period, was apparently cold enough to freeze the oceans solid and wrap most of the planet in ice.

By contrast, toward the middle of November in the distant Neozoic Era, the Sun will be warmer and yellower than it is today, and glacial eras will likely involve little more than the appearance of snow on a few high mountains normally covered in jungle.

Thus the Earth will gradually warm through October and November. Temperatures will cycle up and down with the normal cycles of planetary climate, but each warm period will tend to be a little warmer than the last, and each cold period a little less frigid.

Come December, most of a billion years from now, as the heat climbs past one threshold after another, more and more of the Earth’s water will evaporate and, as dissociated oxygen and hydrogen atoms, boil off into space; the Earth will become a desert world, with life clinging to existence at the poles and in fissures deep underground, until finally the last salt-crusted seas run dry and the last living things die out.

And humanity? The average large vertebrate genus lasts something like ten million years—in our scale, something over seventeen hours. As already noted, our genus has only been around for about two hours so far, so it’s statistically likely that we still have a good long run ahead of us.

I’ve discussed in these essays several times already the hard physical facts that argue that we aren’t going to go to the stars, or even settle other planets in this solar system, but that’s nothing we have to worry about.

Even if we have an improbably long period of human existence ahead of us—say, the fifty million years that bats of the modern type have been around, some three and a half days in our scale, or ten thousand times the length of all recorded human history to date—the Earth will be burgeoning with living things, and perfectly capable of supporting not only intelligent life but rich, complex, unimaginably diverse civilizations, long after we’ve all settled down to our new careers as fossils.

This does not mean, of course, that the Earth will be capable of supporting the kind of civilization we have today. It’s arguably not capable of supporting that kind of civilization now.

Certainly the direct and indirect consequences of trying to maintain the civilization we’ve got, even for the short time we’ve made that attempt so far, are setting off chains of consequences that don’t seem likely to leave much of it standing for long.

That doesn’t mean we’re headed back to the caves, or for that matter, back to the Middle Ages—these being the two bogeymen that believers in progress like to use when they’re trying to insist that we have no alternative but to keep on stumbling blindly ahead on our current trajectory, no matter what.

What it means, instead, is that we’re headed toward something that’s different—genuinely, thoroughly, drastically different. It won’t just be different from what we have now; it’ll also be different from the rigidly straight-line extrapolations and deus ex machina fauxpocalypses that people in industrial society like to use to keep from thinking about the future we’re making for ourselves.

Off beyond the dreary Star Trek fantasy of metastasizing across the galaxy, and the equally hackneyed Mad Max fantasy of pseudomedieval savagery, lies the astonishing diversity of the future before us: a future potentially many orders of magnitude longer than all of recorded history to date, in which human beings will live their lives and understand the world in ways we can’t even imagine today.

It’s tolerably common, when points like the one I’ve tried to make here get raised at all, for people to insist that paying attention to the ultimate fate of the Earth and of our species is a recipe for suicidal depression or the like. With all due respect, that claim seems silly to me.

Each one of us, as we get out of bed in the morning, realizes at some level that the day just beginning will bring us one step closer to old age and death, and yet most of us deal with that reality without too much angst.

In the same way, I’d like to suggest that it’s past time for the inmates of modern industrial civilization to grow up, sprout some gonads—either kind, take your pick—and deal with the simple, necessary, and healthy realization that our species is not going to be around forever.

Just as maturity in the individual arrives when it sinks in that human life is finite, collective maturity may just wait for a similar realization concerning the life of the species.

That kind of maturity would be a valuable asset just now, not least because it might help us grasp some of the extraordinary possibilities that will open up as industrial civilization finishes its one-way trip down the chute marked “decline and fall” and the deindustrial future ahead of us begins to take shape.

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Jupiter's moons and NASA's Juno

SUBHEAD: Humankind can send a spacecraft 600 million miles to explore Jupiter but can't save itself.

By Alan Bates on  10 July 20116 for The Great Change -
(http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2016/07/jupiters-moons-juno.html)


Image above: Illustration of Juno spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter. From (http://spaceflight101.com/juno/juno-mission-trajectory-design/).

NASA’s Jupiter mission, having achieved orbit around the gas giant that is likely to be the earliest planet in our system, provides fodder for many fantasies of science and fiction. 

We are such a great species of animals, you know? Look at what we’ve done. Think of all the new knowledge we will derive from this mission. Think of the gizmos.

The real finds of the mission will probably not come from the giant itself but from its 67 moons, or others that may be discovered before the Juno spacecraft swan dives into Jupiter’s gas clouds on February 20, 2018, on its 37th orbit.

Moons like Europa, with silicate surface and water-ice crust, an atmosphere composed mainly of oxygen, and gravity about one sixth of ours, have offered writers and poets scenic backdrops since Galileo Galilei first glimpsed that moon’s profile on January 6, 1610. 

It is a pretty cold place, about minus 170 C (-274 F) most days. With that low gravity, perhaps it’s a bit easier than on Earth to hop around to try to stay warm.

Suppose, just suppose, that NASA discovers something truly provocative. Suppose on one of those moons there is evidence not only of oxygen-breathing, water-loving life similar to our own, but indisputable evidence of prior advanced civilizations. 

Suppose we were given to understand that they rose and fell by their own hand, either through their own induced runaway climate change or through the unleashed horror of their own unique weapons of mass destruction. How would that knowledge affect us?


Our guess: probably not much.

To be sure, it would be the news story of the year, even the decade. It would sell a lot of ink, make for plenty of new films and performances — all the ways we tell ourselves what is going on, with ourselves at the center. But would it change the political realities of climate change, nuclear weapons or self-destruction by overpopulation? 

Probably not.

Sages would bemoan our human inability to grasp the existential threats felt by the ancient Ioans or Europans, much as they do now. Skeptics would poke holes in the evidence, much as they do now. 

Many conferences would be held in posh hotels in scenic locations. Books would be written, eloquently imploring us to take these lessons to heart. In the end, none of that would matter. 

The news would fade from the headlines, and then from the back pages. Threads would still be found in history books and online discussion groups, but for the most part, we would be back to where we were in almost no time, and none the wiser.

Why?

Because we are humans. The ‘sapiens sapiens’ appellation is a bit of hubris. We are really not that bright as vertebrates or mammals go. We soil our own nest, sacrifice the patrimony of our young to our passing pleasures, are easily attracted to shiny things and addicted to sweets. As planetary citizens we tend to be more like planetary sociopaths. 

We’ll exterminate any other species that we decide we don’t like, or have a hunger for, or don’t even think about, regardless whether it matters in the greater scheme of things. Besides, we don’t really get the greater scheme of things, even though we pretend we do.

The aliens of Europa could pack their whole sordid history onto the NASA transmitters aboard Juno and we would tell each other, oh yeah, that was an episode of Star Trek in 1964.

We are too jaded to be able to listen now.

If someone is right now hard at work crafting some message in a bottle—a dire warning to a race of future alien beings who may some day come to Earth and assay that layer of radioactive plastic in seafloor sediment that traces the ascent of Man — we’d say why bother? 

What makes you think alien explorers would be any more alert than we, who have known the dangers of the atomic Pandora since Einstein and the inevitable result of greenhouse warming since Arhennius?

Either you have the ability to behave appropriately or you don’t.

There is inescapable irony in the admission that our race is able to send a spacecraft 600 million miles to explore a large planet and its moons but is unable to muster the collective will to save itself from itself.


Video above: Video of Juno spacecraft's flight from Earth to intersect the orbit around Jupiter. From (https://youtu.be/sYp5p2oL51g).

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NASA "saucer" test at PMRF

SUBHEAD: Vehicle with giant 'puffer fish' parachute takes flight in $150m experiment over Hawaii.

By AP Staff on 29 June 2014 in The Guardian -
(http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/28/nasa-launch-saucer-vehicle-parachute-hawaii-mars)


Image above: Artists rendering of NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator after takeoff. From (http://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/look-out-mars-nasa-gets-its-flying-saucer-ready-launch-n120741).

[IB Publisher note: Kicking of the season of RIMPAC is a "flying saucer" experiment for landing men on Mars. Maybe before invading another planet we should figure out how to live on the one we're designed for. That certainly won't flow from the kind of activity the US Navy coordinates during RIMPAC.]

A saucer-shaped Nasa vehicle launched by balloon high into Earth's atmosphere splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Saturday, completing a successful test of technology that could be used to land on Mars.

Since the twin Viking spacecraft landed on the red planet in 1976, Nasa has relied on the same parachute design to slow landers and rovers after piercing through the thin Martian atmosphere.

The $150m experimental flight tested a novel vehicle and a giant parachute designed to deliver heavier spacecraft and eventually astronauts.


Despite small problems such as the giant parachute not deploying fully, Nasa deemed the mission a success. "What we just saw was a really good test," said Nasa engineer Dan Coatta with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Viewers around the world with an internet connection followed portions of the mission in real time thanks to cameras on board the vehicle that beamed back low-resolution footage. After taking off at 11.40 am from the Pacific Missile Range Facility on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, the balloon boosted the disc-shaped vehicle over the Pacific. Its rocket motor then ignited, carrying the vehicle to 34 miles (55km) high at supersonic speeds.

 
The environment at that altitude is similar to the thin Martian atmosphere. As the vehicle prepared to drop back the Earth, a tube around it expanded like a Hawaiian puffer fish, creating atmospheric drag to dramatically slow it down from Mach 4, or four times the speed of sound.

Then the parachute unfurled and guided the vehicle to an ocean splashdown about three hours later. At 110 feet (33 meters) in diameter, the parachute is twice as big as the one that carried the one-tonne Curiosity rover through the Martian atmosphere in 2011.


The test was postponed six times because of high winds. Winds need to be calm so that the balloon does not stray into no-fly zones.


Engineers planned to analyze the data and conduct several more flights next year before deciding whether to fly the vehicle and parachute on a future Mars mission.

"We want to test them here where it's cheaper before we send it to Mars to make sure that it's going to work there," project manager Mark Adler of the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory said during a pre-launch news conference in Kauai in early June.

The technology envelope needs to be pushed or else humanity won't be able to fly beyond the International Space Station in low-Earth orbit, said Michael Gazarik, head of space technology at NASA headquarters.

Technology development :is the surest path to Mars", Gazarik said at the briefing.

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China soft lands on Moon

SUBHEAD:  A Chinese planetary rover has successfully landed on the moon. The first soft landing in forty years.

By Elizabeth Barber on 16 December 2013 for Christian Science Monitor -
(http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2013/1216/China-s-Jade-Rabbit-lands-on-the-moon-but-will-it-play-nice-there-video)


Image above: Photo of the lander Jade Rabbit wrapped in gold foil on Moon as taken from rover after coming down ramp. From original article.

China landed its rover, Jade Rabbit, on the moon over the weekend, becoming the third country to make a soft landing on lunar real estate and the first state to visit the lunar surface in almost 40 years. The landing, in highlighting both China’s technological capabilities and its lofty ambitions in the cosmos, now raises questions about what China will do next as it flexes its wings in the final frontier.

Chang’e-3, the lunar lander, and Jade Rabbit, its rover, landed on the moon’s Bay of Rainbows on Saturday, after about 13 days of space travel. State television showed the refrigerator-sized package – shiny and gold, like a wrapped candy – hovering over a blue plume as it beamed itself down. Back on Earth, China’s control room staff were shown applauding as the craft came to a gentle rest on the moon.

“Now as Jade Rabbit has made its touchdown on the moon surface, the whole world again marvels at China's remarkable space capabilities,” said Xinhua, China’s state news agency, in an article following the landing.

It’s been almost four decades since a state has made a soft landing on the moon (in a soft landing, the lander or rover alights intact on the ground). The last state to visit the lunar surface was the Soviet Union, in 1976. The US, the second country to make a soft moon landing, has not done so since 1972.As the Soviet Union was leaving the moon for the last time, China’s space program was just a fledgling one, limited to satellite and missile development.

Its space exploration program was nonexistent: the anxious, repeated attempts of Mao Zedong (who would die just a month later) to match the US and the Soviet Union in achievement and cobble together a crewed space program had disintegrated amidst political unrest. For years to follow, China was much too mired in economic duress to compete with spacefaring powers on the cosmic scale.

It was not until 2004, following China’s successful launch of a manned Earth orbiter, that the state announced its long-term series of lunar missions, all to be titled “Chang’e.” Chang'e, in Chinese myth, was an archer’s wife who swallowed a magic elixir that lifted her to the moon. She took with her a pet rabbit, "Yu Tu,” or Jade Rabbit. There, the pair has stayed, a lunar goddess and her rabbit.

It’s a romantic myth, and its dreamy tropes have burnished Chang’e lunar missions since the launch of the first mission, orbiter Chang’e-1, six years ago: “Flying to the moon is the nation's long cherished dream,” said Xinhua, after the launch of Chang’e-1.

Following Chang’e-3’s landing, China state media reiterated that the mission is a preamble to the state’s even grander, national ambitions, including a manned mission to Earth’s natural satellite and, in the long term, a trip to Mars. In the meantime, Chang’e-3, along with its companion “rabbit,” is charged with exploring a basaltic lava plain on the moon, as well as with setting up the first telescope there.

 

Video above: From (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/10519813/Footage-released-of-China-Jade-Rabbit-moon-landing.html).

“It’s an impressive achievement,” says John M. Logsdon, a professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, of Chang’e-3. “With this mission, China is demonstrating a high level of space technology and operational capability.”

Though China is still decades behind the US and Russia in spacefaring capabilities, the state could “within 10-20 years be one of the top three space powers,” surpassing the European Union, Japan, and India, says Dr. Logsdon.

“It is close to that level now,” he says.

But while there is little doubt that China has developed advanced space technologies, there is some doubt if it will be “a responsible steward of space,” as it exercises its capabilities there, says Michael Krepon, director of South Asia and Space Security programs at The Stimson Center in Washington, D.C.

China, along with Russia and India, which recently launched a probe to Mars, has yet to endorse the European Union’s international code of conduct for the use of space. The code is designed to set standards for managing the congestion in Earth’s skies, in hopes of avoiding scenarios like the one in 2007, in which China, in a booming display of its missile might, shot down its own weather satellite and sent space debris coursing through the cosmos.

The latest version of the EU’s code, now in its third iteration, was released in September.

“We are still waiting to see how China will behave in global commons,” says Dr. Krepon. “Will China cooperate to protect the commons, or will it throw its weight around and act in a way that’s troubling to other stakeholders?”

"Space exploration is a common benefit for all human kind, but space weapons are a very different story," he says.

China and Russia have signed their own bilateral version of a code of conduct, but the document uses language that appears to exempt missile use from the ban on space weapons, says Krepon. The treaty, called the “Treaty on Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space” (PPWT), was signed in 2008.

“Their treaty is not serious. The European Union code of conduct is serious,” he says. “China will need to decide whether it is serious about developing rules of the road in space.”

Under a 2011 law, NASA is banned from using its funds to collaborate with China on bilateral space activities. The US executive branch and state department, though, are not prohibited from engaging with Beijing, nor is NASA prohibited from engaging in multilateral collaboration with the Chinese space program.

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Billions of "Earths" in galaxy

SUBHEAD: Our Milky Way Galaxy may support billions of Earth size planets with liquid surface water.

[IB Publisher's note: Fortunately for them we humans cannot get to another Earth before we learn how to save ourselves from ourselves.]


By Tanya Lewis on 4 November 2013 for Huffington Post-
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/04/earth-like-habitable-planets-kepler-space-video_n_4214758.html)


Image above: An artist's representation of the 'habitable zone,' the range of orbits around a star where liquid water may exist on the surface of a planet. From original article.

Habitable alien planets similar to Earth may not be that rare in the universe, a new study suggests.

About one in five sunlike stars observed by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has an Earth-size planet in the so-called habitable zone, where liquid water — and, potentially life — could exist, according to the new study. If these results apply elsewhere in the galaxy, the nearest such planet could be just 12 light-years away.

"Human beings have been looking at the stars for thousands of years," said study researcher Erik Petigura, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley). "How many of those stars have planets that are in some way like Earth? We're very excited today to start to answer that question," Petigura told SPACE.com. [9 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life]

The findings, detailed today (Nov. 4) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and in a video describing the frequency of Earth-like planets, say nothing about whether these planets actually support life — only that they meet some of the known criteria for habitability.

Petigura also presented the results today in a briefing at the second Kepler Science Conference at NASA Research Park in Moffett Field, Calif, in which the Kepler team also announced the discovery of hundreds of new exoplanets, including many in the habitable zone.

"I think it's by far the most trustable estimate available, but I don't think it's final," said Francois Fressin, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved with the study.
Taking a planet census
Petigura and his colleagues painstakingly developed software to sift through Kepler's mammoth data set. The spacecraft's field of view includes about 150,000 stars, but most of these fluctuate in brightness too much for a planet to be detectable. The team examined 42,000 of the "quietest" stars, finding 603 planet candidates around these stars, 10 of which were Earth-size and lay in the habitable zone.

The team defined Earth-size planets as ones having a radius one to two times that of Earth. Planets were considered to be in the habitable zone if they received about as much light as the Earth does from the sun (within a factor of four). [7 Ways to Discover Alien Planets]

They used the Keck I telescope in Hawaii to take spectra of the stars, in order to pin down the radii of the planets.

But this wasn't the end of the story. Just as taking a census requires some statistical corrections for the people the survey misses, the researchers had to make corrections for planets Kepler missed.


The transit method of finding planets, by definition, only detects planets orbiting in the same plane of view as their host star, which includes just a fraction of the total number of planets. Study researcher Geoff Marcy of UC Berkeley compared planetary orbits to papers fluttering through the air. Very few are going to be edge-on, he said.

Secondly, the analysis misses some planets simply because the tiny amount of starlight they block makes them tricky to detect. To correct for this, the researchers inserted "fake planets" into the data so they could see how many their software would miss.

The analysis was a "Herculean task," Marcy said.

After making these corrections, the researchers had their result: About 22 percent of sunlike stars observed by Kepler have Earth-size, potentially habitable planets.

Chances for life
The researchers were quick to point out that the fact that these planets are Earth-size and lie in the habitable zone does not mean they could support life. The planets might have scorching-hot atmospheres, or no atmospheres at all, they said. Even if the planets have all the basic ingredients for life, scientists don't know the probability that life would ever get started.

The definition of Earth-size planets in this study was pretty broad, Fressin said. For instance, a planet that has a radius twice the size of Earth's might not even be rocky, he said.

Kepler mission scientist Natalie Batalha, an astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center who was not involved with the study, agrees it's a generous definition. Rocky planets with a radius about 1 to 1.5 times the size of Earth's have been found, but the fraction of larger planets that are rocky is probably much lower, Batalha told SPACE.com. Still, it's a fair start, she said.

"Kepler's prime objective was to understand the prevalence of habitable planets in the galaxy," Batalha said at a news conference. "This is the first time a team has offered such a number for stars like the sun."

The researchers had to extrapolate the number of planets with orbits longer than 200 days, because these haven't been detected in the Kepler data. "Ideally, we won't rely on extrapolations," Batalha said. "But as a first cut, this is a valid thing to do."

Last week, Marcy and his colleagues reported the discovery of the alien planet Kepler-78b, a rocky world nearly the same size and density as the Earth. But Kepler-78b hugs its star at a distance far too close and hot to be habitable, with surface temperatures of about 3,680 degrees Fahrenheit (2,027 degrees Celsius).

Kepler went out of commission in May, after the loss of a wheel used for pointing the spacecraft. Nevertheless, scientists will mine Kepler data for decades to look for potentially habitable planets.

"Maybe with future instruments, we could actually image these planets," Petigura said.

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Space near Earth

SUBHEAD: Breathtaking animation of the Moon's rotation and a Space Station view of Earth time lapse.

By David Pescovitz on 17 September 2013 for Boing Boing  -
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG0fTKAqZ5g)


Image above: A Forever full moon. From (http://boingboing.net/2013/09/17/breathtaking-video-of-the-moon.html).

This stunning animation of the Moon's rotation was made from images captured by NASA's Lunar Reconissance Orbiter's Wide Angle Camera (WAC). "A Unique View of the Moon" (Arizona State University)


Video above: An otherwise unavailable view of moon rotating. From (http://youtu.be/sNUNB6CMnE8).

From (http://lroc.sese.asu.edu/news/index.php?/archives/790-A-Unique-View-Of-The-Moon.html)

A huge payoff from the longevity of the LRO mission is the repeat coverage obtained by the LROC Wide Angle Camera (WAC). The WAC has a very wide field-of-view (FOV), 90° in monochrome mode and 60° in multispectral mode, hence its name. On the one hand, the wide FOV enables orbit-to-orbit stereo, which allowed LROC team members at the DLR to create the unprecedented 100 meter scale near-global (0° to 360° longitude and 80°S to 80°N latitude) topographic map of the Moon (the GLD100)!

However, the wide FOV also poses challenges for mosaicking and reconstructing lunar colors because the perspective changes plus- and minus-30° from the center to the edges of each frame. The problem lies in the fact that the perceived reflectance of the Moon changes as the view angle changes.

So for the WAC, the surface appears to be most reflective in the center of the image and less so at the edges, which is quite distracting! This effect results in a pole-to-pole striped image when making a "not-corrected" mosaic.

What to do? Easy - simply take 36 nearly complete global mosaics (110,000 WAC images) and determine an equation that describes how changes in Sun angle and view angle result in reflectance changes. Next step, for each pixel in those 110,000 WAC images compute the Solar angle and the viewpoint angle (using the GLD100 to correct for local slopes), and adjust the measured brightness to common angles everywhere on the Moon.

For this mosaic the LROC Team used the 643 nm band, a Solar angle 10° from vertical (nearly noon), and a viewing angle straight down. Well, perhaps easy is a bit of an exaggeration!

Imagine the number of pixels to consider! To reduce the computational load we use only a subset of the pixels to fit. The most challenging aspect is determining the best photometric model for this huge dataset. Using existing knowledge of lunar reflectance, many iterations, and a variety of classes of mathematical solutions, we ended up using a combination of output from a least-squares fit on a linear model as starting parameters to a minimum search algorithm on a non-linear model. This technique adds robustness to the non-linear model and enables us to more quickly converge on a solution.

Or in other words, there were a lot of calculations over many starts and restarts. So perhaps the process was not that easy in practice, but in the end, it was successful! This type of study is known as photometry, and has a rich history going back to the first half of the 20th century.

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Space Station Time Lapse

By David Peterson on 6 October 2011 for YouTube -
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG0fTKAqZ5g)

Inspired by a version of the opening sequence of this clip called 'What does it feel like to fly over planet Earth?', I tracked down the original time-lapse sequence taken on the International Space Station (ISS) via NASA, found some additional ones there, including the spectacular Aurora Australis sequences, and set it to a soundtrack that almost matches the awe and wonder I feel when I see our home from above.

[IB Publisher's note: The white flashes in the clouds are lightning flashes.]


Video above: From (http://youtu.be/FG0fTKAqZ5g).
 

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