‘There were two notable conferences in DC this past week: the second annual Ministerial on International Religious Freedom, hosted by the U.S. State Department, and the National Conservatism Conference, focused on promoting nationalism, and hosted by the new Edmund Burke Foundation.
These two events were partly at odds with each other.’
Solar radiation: We live within the envelope of Earth’s electro-magnetic dynamo, protected from the life-destroying short-wave radiation our star is constantly spewing. Over time (billions of years) this has helped create a relatively stable atmosphere and biosphere; stable enough for the life we know on Earth.
Despite this stability, of course, we know the star-energy we eventually consume as food and water to be scarce as such conditions are coded at the cellular level (and since we’re being depressively realistic, there’s vulcanism, earthquakes, cold, heat, other people, parasites and viruses to contend with). Such facts define us as does the occasional catastrophic event and the eventual catastrophe awaiting each of us. There’s love, friendship, knowledge, music, hope, beauty and a whole world to explore.
Okay, enough of that for now.
Zero or altered gravity: On the surface of Earth, we live x units away from a mass ball at the bottom of a gravity well. In space, we wouldn’t feel this force at all, and on Mars we would feel it about 40%. What if blood vessels contract/expand or slowly atrophy in zero Gs for reasons yet unknown? What if this dims your vision slowly, over time, and impairs cognitive functioning, especially during the reproductive process, pregnancy or early childhood? Wouldn’t you like to know this before it starts happening to you on the six-months-plus journey to Mars?
Once we know about such problems, we can figure out some solutions.
If there is life on Mars (a possibility, still, as of 2019), it’s probably microbial, living on an energy source beneath the surface. Up top, all that solar radiation has created a toxic layer of perchorates, oxidized, rusted dust and rocks, apparently hostile to life as we know it.
Imagine a place colder than Antarctica, drier than the driest desert, with so little atmosphere the atmosphere’s barely there. The EM dynamo and envelope petered out long ago. You look around and see a barren landscape, familiar yet strange; alien.
Imagine, one morning, stepping from a rover on an exploratory mission, feeling a deep nervous tension and excitement. You focus in on the scripted tasks and procedures the next few minutes require.
You know that if your suit becomes compromised, your blood would alternately freeze/boil and you’d die almost instantly. You know some little, unplanned problem can become a big problem. Any sort of help/supply lines would be pretty much impossible, at least six months but at least a year in coming, and probably not coming at all.
Yet, here you are:
—————————
As posted: It looks like Gale Crater has its advantages.
‘Research suggests habitable conditions in the Yellowknife Bay area may have persisted for millions to tens of millions of years. During that time rivers and lakes probably appeared and disappeared. Even when the surface was dry, the subsurface likely was wet, as indicated by mineral veins deposited by underground water into fractures in the rock. The thickness of observed and inferred tiers of rock layers provides the basis for estimating long duration, and the discovery of a mineral energy source for underground microbes favors habitability throughout.’
Why was Mt. Sharp chosen for the Curiosity Rover landing site, and what about those rounded stones that it photographed, indicative of long ago ankle to hip-deep water? If the Martian surface is likely so full of perchlorates and life-hostile, irradiated soil, what are the chances of pockets of microbial life below ground?
The discussion later moves to Venus, Jovian moon Io, and the Chinese lander on the dark side of the moon in the final minutes:
Event Horizon discussion with Emily Lakdawalla.
—
Imagine sub-freezing temperatures and free radicals bombarding the near atmosphere-less Martian surface (oxidized and rusted red, barren), but below the Martian surface lurk big blocks of briny ice; ice with freezing cold, incredibly salty water around them and maybe just enough O2 to support some microbes.
Worth thinking about.
What are you doing with your imagination?
Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported today https://t.co/zLkJwUESiPpic.twitter.com/aAt6hnMxI2
‘Due to the scarcity of O2 in the modern Martian atmosphere, Mars has been assumed to be incapable of producing environments with sufficiently large concentrations of O2 to support aerobic respiration. Here, we present a thermodynamic framework for the solubility of O2 in brines under Martian near-surface conditions. We find that modern Mars can support liquid environments with dissolved O2 values ranging from ~2.5 × 10−6 mol m−3 to 2 mol m−3 across the planet, with particularly high concentrations in polar regions because of lower temperatures at higher latitudes promoting O2 entry into brines’
Why was Mt. Sharp chosen for the Curiosity Rover landing site, and what about those rounded stones that it photographed, indicative of long ago ankle to hip-deep water? If the Martian surface is likely so full of perchlorates and life-hostile, irradiated soil, what are the chances of pockets of microbial life below ground?
The discussion later moves to Venus, Jovian moon Io, and the Chinese lander on the dark side of the moon in the final minutes:
Event Horizon discussion with Emily Lakdawalla.
—
As posted:
Imagine sub-freezing temperatures and free radicals bombarding the near atmosphere-less Martian surface (oxidized and rusted red, barren), but below the Martian surface lurk big blocks of briny ice; ice with freezing cold, incredibly salty water around them and maybe just enough O2 to support some microbes.
Worth thinking about.
What are you doing with your imagination?
Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported today https://t.co/zLkJwUESiPpic.twitter.com/aAt6hnMxI2
‘Due to the scarcity of O2 in the modern Martian atmosphere, Mars has been assumed to be incapable of producing environments with sufficiently large concentrations of O2 to support aerobic respiration. Here, we present a thermodynamic framework for the solubility of O2 in brines under Martian near-surface conditions. We find that modern Mars can support liquid environments with dissolved O2 values ranging from ~2.5 × 10−6 mol m−3 to 2 mol m−3 across the planet, with particularly high concentrations in polar regions because of lower temperatures at higher latitudes promoting O2 entry into brines’
Challenges to many post-Enlightenment radicals, true-believers and narrow ideologues continue apace. Hopefully, colonizing the Arts & Sciences for reasons other than making good art and doing good science will not come so easy.
Who’s got the Truth? Who’s got the better models?
Jordan Peterson & Slavoj Zizek will be debating on April 19th:
So, what is all this Nothing-ness about? ‘My view’, says Scruton, ‘is that what’s underlying all of this is a kind of nihilistic vision that masks itself as a moving toward the enlightened future, but never pauses to describe what that society will be like. It simply loses itself in negatives about the existing things – institutional relations like marriage, for instance – but never asks itself if those existing things are actually part of what human beings are. Always in Zizek there’s an assumption of the right to dismiss them as standing in the way of something else, but that something else turns out to be Nothing.’
—
On that note, keep living a good life and keep learning:
High-fidelity photographic images and satellite loops give you snatches of the bigger picture. Get enough data sets and processing power together to build a basic model of Earth, however, and and you can start mapping months of actual data over the model. Then you can start doing the same for other planets.
Perhaps with the cheaper availability of AI modeling, costs will come down enough to allow localized and predictive weather observations and modeling. Amateur weather geeks can start adding input channels and competitive, real-time knowledge which strengthen and/or challenge the big models in real-time.
Engage your visual cortex along with actual recorded weather data. Choose a particular weather event from your own memory, and align it with this visual representation of the data on the macro-level:
You probably already knew: If you keep scrolling out of Google Maps from your lat/long (https://www.google.com/maps) in satellite view, you will eventually see a similar Earth model. You can then choose other planets from a sidebar if you can’t afford $45K!
I’ve been enjoying Event Horizon lately; good questions and good answers from Astronomers and serious practitioners. Subscribe!:
Imagine sub-freezing temperatures and free radicals bombarding the near atmosphere-less Martian surface (oxidized and rusted red, barren), but below the Martian surface lurk big blocks of briny ice; ice with freezing cold, incredibly salty water around them and maybe just enough O2 to support some microbes.
Worth thinking about.
What are you doing with your imagination?
Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported today https://t.co/zLkJwUESiPpic.twitter.com/aAt6hnMxI2
‘Due to the scarcity of O2 in the modern Martian atmosphere, Mars has been assumed to be incapable of producing environments with sufficiently large concentrations of O2 to support aerobic respiration. Here, we present a thermodynamic framework for the solubility of O2 in brines under Martian near-surface conditions. We find that modern Mars can support liquid environments with dissolved O2 values ranging from ~2.5 × 10−6 mol m−3 to 2 mol m−3 across the planet, with particularly high concentrations in polar regions because of lower temperatures at higher latitudes promoting O2 entry into brines’
—-
Perhaps quite a bit can be explained within modern movements by the following:
"From the sacrilegious treatment of the dead all other impieties stem – and in impious times (such as ours) the disrespect towards ancestors becomes a recurring motif of public life. It is important to bear this in mind when considering the current 'culture wars'" Modern Culture
Freedom is precious, and liberty comes with responsibility. Radical liberation might well involve releasing oneself from an obligation right into the clutches of some less fair, less just and less reasonable obligation.
No one’s going to tell you the new rules emerging from the latest moral ideas sweeping the ‘culture,’ you might only find out after breaking a new rule.
Due process easily becomes ‘do process our way’ and you’re wise to surmise how people are behaving now is probably how they’ll behave into the future.
In a Victimhood Culture, who “deserves” victimhood status will be policed with draconian ruthlessness. https://t.co/fYHvPnwSub
Imagine trying to ban all the Moose Lodges, Elks’ Clubs, Little Leagues, and Girl Scout Troops across the nation in the name of fairness (if these clubs and civil associations can’t be ‘equal’ according to the loudest voices demanding ‘equality’, then nobody’s going to have any clubs).
Of course, many of the same individuals and orgs seeking to influence everyone’s behavior at Harvard are also seeking to do so through the Federal Government.
Some people seem locked in [a] kind of slavish ideological dependency on the institutions they seek to either control or destroy.
‘Members of the Harvard University community are reacting to news yesterday that a faculty committee recommends the Ivy League institution eliminate all exclusive social clubs. The ban would effectively shutter any Harvard-connected off-campus clubs, including all fraternities and sororities, by the year 2022 — despite Harvard’s continued promises of unfettered freedom of association for its students.’
‘The duration of the journey would of course depend on where Earth and Mars are in their orbits; the shortest one-way trip would be around 80 days, according to Musk’s presentation, and the longest would be around 150 days. (Musk stated that he thinks the architecture could be improved to reduce the trip to 60 or even 30 days.)’
Do you click through to videos found on a blog? Probably not, so I’m putting this up for my own benefit as much as anyone else’s. I was fortunate enough to attend a Curiosity Rover landing party at Boeing in south Seattle, which included some speakers from JPL (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) discussing the mission.
There’s so much science going on, and so many new discoveries, it’s hard to keep up. Yet, it’s also easy to overlook some of the data and evidence piling up which allow for an ever-expanding picture of what Mars is like.
Ashwin Vasavada, a JPR Research Scientist gave a presentation open to the public at the one-year mark, which included some very basic and very interesting questions from the audience. Easy to follow:
‘Research suggests habitable conditions in the Yellowknife Bay area may have persisted for millions to tens of millions of years. During that time rivers and lakes probably appeared and disappeared. Even when the surface was dry, the subsurface likely was wet, as indicated by mineral veins deposited by underground water into fractures in the rock. The thickness of observed and inferred tiers of rock layers provides the basis for estimating long duration, and the discovery of a mineral energy source for underground microbes favors habitability throughout.’
‘Research suggests habitable conditions in the Yellowknife Bay area may have persisted for millions to tens of millions of years. During that time rivers and lakes probably appeared and disappeared. Even when the surface was dry, the subsurface likely was wet, as indicated by mineral veins deposited by underground water into fractures in the rock. The thickness of observed and inferred tiers of rock layers provides the basis for estimating long duration, and the discovery of a mineral energy source for underground microbes favors habitability throughout.’
-Curiosity isn’t necessarily looking for life, but it’s looking for the conditions that make life possible here on Earth with its 10 instruments, such as trying to determine the origins of the methane on Mars’s surface by being better able to analyze the kind of carbon (12 or 14) in the atmosphere to find its source. It’s also much better able to look for amino acids (the building blocks of life on Earth) and better able to analyze the rock and crystal samples it picks up. It’s got a cool laser. It’s about the size of a Mini-Cooper.
-Unlike Earth with its dynamic interior and tectonic plates, relatively strong magnetic field, thick and dynamic atmosphere etc., Mars is a bit like a time capsule. With just over 50% the diameter of Earth, about 38% the gravity, and less than 1% the atmosphere we’ll be able to get a much better picture of what happened during the formation of our solar system about 4 1/2 billion years ago as it’s much less disturbed. The trip up the rock face in Gale Crater over the next few years is like a trip back through time. What happened to Mars? Did the Earth and Mars have common experiences?
No methane on Mars, so that rules out the certain kinds of microbial life hoped for. There is water on the surface, in the soil. at about 2%, which is good for colonial prospects. It probably had liquid water in the past, but that is thought to have been billions of years ago. A lot of evidence points to ancient Mars and current Mars being very different.
———————
So, what about a more human problem that interests the libertarian-minded?
——————–
The problem is that over time, human organizations succumb to decay, bad incentives, and get weighed down by their own internal politics, increasing layers of bureaucracy, and regulations. They can end-up no longer boldly and creatively solving the problems they were designed to solve, becoming risk-averse and losing their spirit of innovation and flexibility to free-up the top talent. You can put more and more money in, but get less and less in return. In fact, I’d argue along with many others that we’re in a period of American life where many other bureaucracies and government agencies may have also reached that point. Such is my road-map.
———————
After the terrible Challenger explosion in 1986, Richard Feynman was included on an independent panel to find out what went wrong. He discovered a profound difference between engineers’ and managements’ probability estimates for number of flights without failure. One potential (and very important) reason that a system-ending failure can go unnoticed is the tendency of managers to believe top-down explanations.
It’s vintage Feynman, inconoclastic, penetrating and brilliant:
“for whatever purpose, be it for internal or external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product, to the point of fantasy.”
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.“
Watch Robert Zubrin and other Mars Undergrounders pursue their quest despite NASA at times, but ultimately benefitting from collaboration with NASA engineers’ experience and insight, giving a boost to this deepest of human dreams: the next frontier. A colony on Mars.
We can do this, and it will be both like and unlike anything we’ve ever done before.