Quotulatiousness

October 31, 2021

QotD: We’re still trapped in Heinlein’s “Crazy Years”

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In Robert Heinlein’s famed “Future History” he constructed an elaborate timeline of thing to come, to provide a structure for his short stories.

Looking forward from the year 1940, when the timeline was first formed, it was reasonable, even conservative, guesswork to predict the moon landing by the 1980’s, forty years later, since the first powered flight by the Wright Brothers had been forty years earlier. Heinlein’s Luna City founded in 1990 a decade or so later, with colonies on Mars and Venus by 2000. Compare: a submersible ironclad was written up as a science romance by Jules Verne in 1869, based on the steam-powered “diving boat” of Robert Fulton, developed in 1801. In 1954 the first atomic-powered submarines — all three boats were named Nautilus — put to sea. The gap between Verne’s dream and Rickover’s reality was eight decades, about the time separating Heinlein’s writing of “Menace from Earth” and its projected date.

Looking back from the year 2010, however the dates seem remarkably optimistic and compressed. We have not even mounted a manned expedition to Mars as yet, and no return manned trips to the Moon are on the drawing boards.

One prediction that was remarkably prescient, however, was the advent of “The Crazy Years” described as “Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation, and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses in the sixth decade, and the interregnum.”

He optimistically predicts a recovery from the Crazy Years, the opening of a new frontier in space, and a return to nineteenth-century economy. Full maturity of the human race is achieved by a science of social relations “based on the negative basic statements of semantics.” Those of you who are A.E. van Vogt fans will recognize our old friends, general semantics and Null-A logic cropping up here. Van Vogt, like Heinlein, told tales of a future time when the Non-Aristotlean logic or “Null-A” training would give rise to a race of supermen, fully integrated and fully mature human beings, free of barbarism and neuroses.

Here is the chart [full size version here]. Note the REMARKS column to the right.

What Heinlein failed to predict was that the Crazy Years would simply continue up through 2010, with no sign of slackening. Ladies and gentlemen, we live in the Crazy Years.

John C. Wright, “The Crazy Years and their Empty Moral Vocabulary”, John C. Wright, 2019-02-18.

October 27, 2021

Alouette and The Ionospheric Satellites; A Beginners Guide To The Early Canadian Space Program

Filed under: Cancon, History, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Polyus Studios
Published 22 Aug 2109

Don’t forget to like the video and subscribe to my channel!
Support me on Patreon – https://www.patreon.com/polyusstudios

In the early 1960s Canada was among the early pioneers of space technology and research. Scientists and engineers took advantage of then cutting edge technologies like the transistor and solar panels, to produce the Alouette and ISIS series of satellites. It was an immense engineering challenge that represented the high water mark of a tradition of ionospheric research that began back before the establishment of Canada as a nation. The Alouette and ISIS series of satellites produced more than 1200 research papers exploring all aspects of the Earth’s ionosphere, the aurora, and other phenomena. They also demonstrated to the world that Canada was a world leader in peaceful space technology.

0:00 Intro
0:29 Arctic exploration and early magnetic field research
2:40 New technologies promote new questions
5:35 Birth of the Canadian Space Program
9:25 Testing and Launch of Alouette
13:04 ISIS series of satellites
17:12 Legacy and Conclusion

Music:
“Denmark” – Portland Cello Project

Research sources:
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/space…
https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/i…
http://www.friendsofcrc.ca/Projects/I…
https://www.ieee.ca/millennium/alouet…
https://www.ieee.ca/millennium/isis/i…
http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/satellit…
http://friendsofcrc.ca/Projects/ISIS/…
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/space…
http://acuriousguy.blogspot.com/2017/…
https://photostories.ca/explore/photo…
http://www.ieee.dreamhosters.com/digl…
https://www.ieee.ca/millennium/alouet…

#Spacecraft #PolyusStudios #CanadianAerospace

September 25, 2021

Will Mars become the equivalent to Earth that India and the East Indies once were for Europe?

Filed under: Economics, Europe, History, India, Space — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes goes a long way in both time and space away from his normal Industrial Revolution beat to consider what might happen as humans attempt to colonize Mars:

The first true-colour image generated using the OSIRIS orange (red), green and blue colour filters. The image was acquired on 24 February 2007 at 19:28 CET from a distance of about 240 000 km; image resolution is about 5 km/pixel.
Photo taken by the ESA Rosetta spacecraft during a planetary flyby.

The other week I attended an unconference, which had a session on the implications of establishing colonies on other planets. Although this was largely meant to be about the likely impact on Earth’s natural environment — what will be the impact of extracting raw materials from asteroids and other planets? — some of the discussion reminded me of the challenges faced by the long-distance explorers, merchants, and colonists of four hundred years ago. There are quite a few parallels I can see between travelling to Mars, say, in a hundred years’ time, and travelling between continents in the age of sail.

For a start, there’s the seasonality and duration of the voyages. European ships headed for the Indian Ocean had to time their voyages around the monsoon season; trips across the Atlantic were limited to just half the year because of hurricanes. Round-trips took years. Similarly, the departure window for a voyage from Earth to Mars only comes around once every 26 months, and even the most optimistic estimates place eventual journey times at about 4-6 months. Supposing that Mars can be permanently settled, any colony there will likely be extremely dependent on the regular arrival of resupply craft. There’s only so long that any group can survive in a hostile environment on their own.

[…]

The Portuguese had once been the only Europeans to trade directly into the Indian Ocean, but the structure of their trade — essentially a state-run monopoly with some licensed private merchants — was unable to compete with the arrival of the Dutch. The initial Dutch forays into the Indian Ocean in the 1590s had originally been financed by lots of different companies, often associated with particular cities — similar to the proliferation of billionaire-led space exploration companies today. But the Dutch soon recognised that such a high-risk trade would only be able to survive if it came with correspondingly high rewards — rewards that could only be guaranteed by eliminating domestic competitors (and if possible, foreign ones too). They therefore amalgamated all of the smaller concerns into a single company with a state-granted monopoly on all of the nation’s trade with the region. In this, they actually copied the English model, but then outdid them in terms of the organisation and financing of that company […].

Are we likely to see a similar move towards state-granted monopoly corporations when it comes to space colonisation? I suspect it depends on the potential rewards, and on the strength of the competition. There is certainly precedent for incentivising risky and innovative ventures in this way, through the granting of patent monopolies. Patents for inventions in the English tradition originally even had their roots in patents for exploration. I would not be surprised if such policies end up being used again by countries that are late-comers to the space race, perhaps by granting domestic monopolies over the extraction of resources from particular planets or moons. Although direct state funding can help in being first, like they did for Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, state-granted monopolies for private actors may again end up being the ideal catch-up tool for laggards, as they were for the English and the Dutch.

How the monopolies are managed will also matter. The English East India Company, for example, was initially more focused on rewarding its shareholders than it was on investing in the full infrastructure with which to dominate a trade route. The Dutch company, by contrast, from the get-go was part of a more coordinated imperial strategy — one that sought to systematically rob the Portuguese of their factories and forts, to project force with the aid of the state. Indeed, if there’s one big lesson for the geopolitics of space, it’s that far-flung empires can be extremely fragile, with plenty of opportunities for late-arriving interlopers to take them over.

Although it’s difficult to imagine space colonies being able to become self-sufficient any time soon, it seems likely that those controlled by particular companies or countries may occasionally be persuaded — by bribes or by force — to defect. What’s to stop them when they’re hundreds of millions of kilometres away from any punishment or help? Ill-provisioned factors, forts, or colonies happily switched sides to whoever might provision them better. As I mentioned last week, such problems curtailed the ambitions of other would-be colonial powers, like the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia. When the Dutch turned up in the Indian Ocean, many of the Portuguese forts they threatened simply surrendered.

I bow to Anton’s far greater historical knowledge in most things, but state monopolies in the 16th to 19th centuries were very different creatures than their potential modern equivalents, and the much more comprehensive degree of state control of the economy now would probably mean that a state monopoly over extraterrestrial activities would be a worst-possible outcome. The greater the powers in the hands of the state, in almost every case, the worse all state-controlled activities have become. The incentives of civil servants are vastly different than those of individuals or businesses and are farcically incompatible with the risk-taking necessary on a dangerous frontier.

September 16, 2021

QotD: The youthful Utopian

Filed under: Quotations, Space, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

More than half a century ago, I had a friend in junior high school I could never figure out or drum much common sense into. He was quite the dreamer. He loved science fiction. His nickname was “Angus” — derived from the fact that he was rather rotund, and our school was surrounded by farm fields. When we grazed at the same lunch table, he would speculate endlessly about what life on other planets might be like. He was very earnest, and very entertaining.

One day I suggested facetiously that Angus stop speculating and go find out for himself. “Build a spaceship someday and fly to the planet of your choice,” I recommended. To my surprise, he took me seriously.

Some days later, Angus excitedly told me he had it all worked out. He had designed the spaceship and even brought the plans to show me. Then he unfolded a large sheet of brown wrapping paper. There it was — the entire cockpit control panel of the craft that would take Angus to the cosmos. There was a button for everything.

“This is not a plan!” I declared with a laugh. “It’s just a bunch of buttons with labels on them.”

“But it’s all here,” Angus insisted. “I’ve thought of everything — Start, Stop, Land, Take-off, Dodge Asteroids, you name it, everything you need to know.” He even had an all-purpose button to take care of anything unexpected, which he thought was a genius innovation.

What I remember most vividly about this experience was not the fine detail of my friend’s sketch. It was my frustrating inability to convince him he was delusional, that his plan was no plan at all, that as a 14-year-old he wasn’t yet ready for a senior position at NASA. He was what philosopher Eric Hoffer might call a “true believer” — convinced beyond any hope of convincing otherwise that his plan was thorough, perfect, and sure to work.

I lost track of Angus after graduation, but I am quite certain his spaceship never left the ground.

Lawrence W. Reed, “The Dark Side of Paradise: A Brief History of America’s Utopian Experiments in Communal Living”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2021-06-13.

September 2, 2021

Charles Stross predicts that Elon Musk will become a multi-trillionaire

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Charles Stross isn’t exactly a fan of Musk’s, but he outlines why he thinks Musk is on a potentially multi-trillion dollar path:

Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.

So, I’m going to talk about Elon Musk again, everybody’s least favourite eccentric billionaire asshole and poster child for the Thomas Edison effect — get out in front of a bunch of faceless, hard-working engineers and wave that orchestra conductor’s baton, while providing direction. Because I think he may be on course to become a multi-trillionaire — and it has nothing to do with cryptocurrency, NFTs, or colonizing Mars.

This we know: Musk has goals (some of them risible, some of them much more pragmatic), and within the limits of his world-view — I’m pretty sure he grew up reading the same right-wing near-future American SF yarns as me — he’s fairly predictable. Reportedly he sat down some time around 2000 and made a list of the challenges facing humanity within his anticipated lifetime: roll out solar power, get cars off gasoline, colonize Mars, it’s all there. Emperor of Mars is merely his most-publicized, most outrageous end goal. Everything then feeds into achieving the means to get there. But there are lots of sunk costs to pay for: getting to Mars ain’t cheap, and he can’t count on a government paying his bills (well, not every time). So each step needs to cover its costs.

What will pay for Starship, the mammoth actually-getting-ready-to-fly vehicle that was originally called the “Mars Colony Transporter”?

Starship is gargantuan. Fully fuelled on the pad it will weigh 5000 tons. In fully reusable mode it can put 100-150 tons of cargo into orbit — significantly more than a Saturn V or an Energiya, previously the largest launchers ever built. In expendable mode it can lift 250 tons, more than half the mass of the ISS, which was assembled over 20 years from a seemingly endless series of launches of 10-20 ton modules.

Seemingly even crazier, the Starship system is designed for one hour flight turnaround times, comparable to a refueling stop for a long-haul airliner. The mechazilla tower designed to catch descending stages in the last moments of flight and re-stack them on the pad is quite without precedent in the space sector, and yet they’re prototyping the thing. Why would you even do that? Well, it makes no sense if you’re still thinking of this in traditional space launch terms, so let’s stop doing that. Instead it seems to me that SpaceX are trying to achieve something unprecedented with Starship. If it works …

There are no commercial payloads that require a launcher in the 100 ton class, and precious few science missions. Currently the only clear-cut mission is Starship HLS, which NASA are drooling for — a derivative of Starship optimized for transporting cargo and crew to the Moon. (It loses the aerodynamic fins and the heat shield, because it’s not coming back to Earth: it gets other modifications to turn it into a Moon truck with a payload in the 100-200 ton range, which is what you need if you’re serious about running a Moon base on the scale of McMurdo station.)

Musk has trailed using early Starship flights to lift Starlink clusters — upgrading from the 60 satellites a Falcon 9 can deliver to something over 200 in one shot. But that’s a very limited market

As they say, read the whole thing.

July 25, 2021

The Line editors clearly loved crafting their “Dicks in space!” headline

Filed under: Business, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As a fellow space nerd, I welcome the editors of The Line to our number:

You’ve probably noticed by now that your Line editors are space enthusiasts. It’s been an interesting few weeks on that front. Sir Richard Branson flew out of the atmosphere, into free-fall (not zero-G, you scientific illiterates!), on a Virgin Galactic space plane. That said, he didn’t get high enough to cross the Kármán line, which, in the absence of any real international agreement on where the Earth ends and space begins, is as close as we come to a functional definition of the edge of space. (It’s an altitude of 100 km, for those wondering.) Jeff Bezos, of Amazon wealth and fame, did cross that line this week, along with three passengers, including Wally Funk, which was cool, if you’re into that sort of thing. (We are.) Bezos was riding a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket; Blue Origin is a company he founded and funded with his own gigantic wealth.

Look, let’s face facts — your Line editors are into space. We just are. But yeah, we agree that space policy is important enough and complicated enough to warrant debate. Reasonable people can have different views on this stuff. And we also agree that there are important debates to have about the accumulated wealth of billionaires, and the distorting effects that wealth can have on politics and society.

But unlike a bunch of ya’ll, we don’t get confused about a debate over income inequality and a debate over space travel. You can despise Bezos, Amazon and everything he’s done there, and still recognize that what he is doing on the space front is important. Everyone rolling their eyes at Bezos matching space flight capabilities that the Soviets and Americans achieved literally 60 years ago is allowing their desire to rack up some sweet Twitter likes with a snarky dunk blind themselves to the fact that Bezos (and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is way ahead of Blue Origin) aren’t just recreating earlier capabilities, they are massively improving on them.

So yeah, Blue Origin can now do what the Soviets and U.S. could do 60 years ago, but they’re doing it more safely, more efficiently and much, much more sustainably than national space agencies did. Reusability isn’t a frill, it’s a massive game-changer. And as much fun as it is to snort when these private-sector companies recreate an existing capability, do you really think they’re going to stop there?

Branson’s company could be written off as a tourism play for the affluent. Fair enough. Except that making space flight economically viable is the first step to ensuring that capability is both sustainable and more broadly accessible in the long run. Further, Bezos and especially Musk are inventing new and transformative space-flight capabilities. They are materially pushing back against the final frontier in ways that we simply have not before. It won’t matter unless we choose to do anything with these new capabilities, and your guess is as good as ours as to whether or not we will. But we could. That’s huge.

As huge as the gigantic dick-shaped rocket Bezos rode up. Yeah, yeah. We snorted, too. But, like, seriously, folks — making penis jokes about the shape of an object dictated by aerodynamic considerations isn’t quite as witty as you think: the rockets are shaped like penises because they literally have to be in order to work. Having a giggle is fine, but if you actually think you’re making a real point about misogyny and fragile male egos when you get snippy (ahem) about a schlong-shaped rocket, well, we’d love to see what happens when your very emotionally vigorous and feminist vagina-shaped space vehicle hits max Q. So long as we aren’t aboard it or in the landing area for its hurtling debris.

Our main point still stands: don’t let your cynicism and even revulsion at these guys blind you to what they’re doing. Bezos isn’t gonna stop at Yuri Gagarin-vintage accomplishments. Musk sure hasn’t. This’ll matter. It’s time to get serious. They are.

January 9, 2021

QotD: Heinlein’s “Future History”

Filed under: Books, Quotations, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’ve been planning to write about Elon Musk’s Bowie-blasting space car ever since the video footage was transmitted back to Earth in the middle of this week. But I did not even notice until I sat down to the job that I have also been rereading Robert A. Heinlein’s “Future History” short-story cycle. This is not exactly a coincidence: I go back to the Future History every few years. This time I had one of those “Surprise! You’re old!” moments upon realizing that my cheap trade paperback of The Past Through Tomorrow, a collection of the Future History stories, must be 30 years old if it’s a day.

Written between 1939 and 1950 for quickie publication in pulp magazines, the Future History is a series of snapshots of what is now an alternate human future — one that features atomic energy, solar system imperialism, and the first steps to deep space, all within a Spenglerian choreography of social progress and occasional resurgent barbarity. It stands with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as a monument of golden-age science fiction.

In some respects the Future History has not aged any better than one might expect. Like other young nerds who created the science-fiction canon, Heinlein was interested in rocketry before it was thought to have any practical use. And Heinlein was really, really good at acquiring or faking expert knowledge of those topics in which he happened to get interested. The man knew his Tsiolkovsky.

The result, in the key story of the Future History, is an uncannily accurate description of the design and launch of a Saturn V rocket. (Written before 1950, remember.) But because Heinlein happened not to be interested in electronic computers, all the spacefaring in his books is done with the aid of slide rules or Marchant-style mechanical calculators (which, in non-Heinlein history, had to become obsolete before humans could go to Luna at all). Heinlein sends people to colonize the moon, but nobody there has internet, or is conscious of its absence.

Colby Cosh, “Heinlein’s monster? The literary key to Elon Musk’s sales technique”, National Post, 2018-02-12.

December 1, 2020

QotD: Elon Musk as a real life Delos D. Harriman

Filed under: Books, Business, Quotations, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The “key story” [in Robert Heinlein’s “Future History” stories] I just mentioned is called “The Man Who Sold The Moon.” And if you’re one of the people who has been polarized by the promotional legerdemain of Elon Musk — whether you have been antagonized into loathing him, or lured into his explorer-hero cult — you probably need to make a special point of reading that story.

The shock of recognition will, I promise, flip your lid. The story is, inarguably, Musk’s playbook. Its protagonist, the idealistic business tycoon D.D. Harriman, is what Musk sees when he looks in the mirror.

“The Man Who Sold The Moon” is the story of how Harriman makes the first moon landing happen. Engineers and astronauts are present as peripheral characters, but it is a business romance. Harriman is a sophisticated sort of “Mary Sue” — an older chap whose backstory encompasses the youthful interests of the creators of classic pulp science fiction, but who is given a great fortune, built on terrestrial transport and housing, for the purposes of the story.

Our hero has no interest in the money for its own sake: in late life he liquidates to fund a moon rocket, intending to take the first trip himself, because he is convinced the future of humanity depends on extraterrestrial expansion of the human species. (Also, the guy just really loves the moon.)

The actual stuff of the story consists of the financial and promotional chicanery that Harriman uses to leverage his personal investment. Harriman uses sharp dealing with governments, broadcasters, political groups: he plants fake news about diamonds on the moon to blackmail (a disguised version of) the de Beers cartel, and terrorizes companies with the threat of using the moon to advertise for competitors. He is, in short, not afraid to use questionable means to achieve a worthwhile higher end, and does not — Musk haters take note! — recoil from actual fraud.

Heinlein didn’t provide for live broadcasting of his imagined lunar mission, which is almost an afterthought in his Great Man business yarn. TV cameras were, like computers, one of his blind spots. But if he had thought to make Harriman the owner of a fancy-sportscar manufacturing concern, and if he had thought to have Harriman put a car in solar (trans-Martian!) orbit as one of his publicity stunts, that would have been there in “The Man Who Sold The Moon.” Selling the moon is just what Musk is doing. Except the moon is a tad worked-over as a piece of intangible property, so we get Mars instead.

Colby Cosh, “Heinlein’s monster? The literary key to Elon Musk’s sales technique”, National Post, 2018-02-12.

November 28, 2020

Miscellaneous Myths: The Zodiac

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 27 Nov 2020

Thanks to longtime patron Volt for requesting this topic!

We know their names! We know their symbols! We know there’s a truly staggering number of websites dedicated to their stereotypical personality traits! But what do we know about their stories? Let’s discuss!

FUN FACT I GLOSSED OVER IN THE VIDEO: like I said, it’s REALLY hard to determine when these constellations entered Greece. Most people set the date at 300ish, when Eudoxus codified the Greek calendar based on the Babylonian one — but that clashes with the fact that Heracles’s labors predate that by at least three centuries, and they’ve had those zodiacal themes since that lost epic poem was initially written. We know, therefore, that the Babylonian zodiac entered greece between Homer’s time (when he conspicuously didn’t mention them — and neither did Hesiod in his Astronomia) and Peisander’s time (author of the lost Heracleia), basically the interval between 800 and 600 CE. The phoenician traders carrying that info is a reasonable assumption, especially considering how important the stars are to sailors navigating at night. But it is WILD to me how hard this is to research and how nobody seems to have really explored the timeline here!

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June 28, 2020

Why is the British government buying part of OneWeb?

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics, Europe, Space — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As Tim Worstall points out, the British government’s decision to buy 20% of the satellite company OneWeb doesn’t actually make any economic sense:

… OneWeb – in which the UK will own a 20% stake following the investment – currently operates a completely different type of satellite network from that typically used to run such navigation systems.

“The fundamental starting point is, yes, we’ve bought the wrong satellites,” said Dr Bleddyn Bowen, a space policy expert at the University of Leicester. “OneWeb is working on basically the same idea as Elon Musk’s Starlink: a mega-constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit, which are used to connect people on the ground to the internet.

The actual answer is that we don’t need to buy into anyone’s system at all. Just as we shouldn’t have into [EU satellite system] Galileo in the first place.

For, d’ye see, GPS is a public good. The US allows anyone to use the signals. Not that they can really stop people doing so either. Not unless they take the whole system down.

So, there’s the US system, free for all to use. A global public good – this means it doesn’t matter who provides it, it is there. It also means we don’t need our own. Which, in turn, means we don’t and didn’t need the Galileo system, let alone another one after we’ve left that.

As I said, politics not even asking the right question. They’re asking “which new system should we have?” when the correct questions is “why do we need a new system?” and given that the answer to the second is we don’t therefore the first is entirely moot.

Even setting aside the question of what the satellite system will be capable of, as the market is already in the process of developing and deploying the equipment, why does the British government think its investment is necessary?

May 10, 2020

QotD: “Shirtstorm” and other forms of systematic patriarchal oppression of women

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Shirtstorm was more of the same. Rose Eveleth, Vagina Vigilante, might not know much about probes or comets, or have much interest in them. One gets a feeling in her mind aerospace is that icky thing that sweaty, nerdy boys do. So, forced to cover it (or snatching it up as a prize assignment) for her paper, she paid attention to the one important thing in the world: herself. And since she’s female, she projected her prejudices onto all other females, and decided women everywhere would be put off science by a man’s shirt decorated with “space pinups.” A shirt made by a woman. A shirt worn amid a team whose leader was a woman who saw nothing wrong with it. But Vagina Vigilante was on the job! One gets the feeling she didn’t do very well at science, and now she had a REASON. It was the sexism of the field, manifest in a shirt.

Which totally justified making a rocket scientist cry on the day of his greatest triumph. After all, people like him had ruined her life, right?

But it gets worse than that – there was an entire campus filled with supposedly educated (ah!) women terrorized by the statue of a sleep walking man.

And then there’s the ever-elastic definition of “sexual assault” which – I’m not making this up – can now be ratcheted down to “Looked at me in a way that made me feel uncomfortable” or, for that matter “failed to sexually assault me.” Oh, sorry, that last was the definition of racism. Some Palestinian woman looked at rape statistics and found that Israeli women are raped by Palestinian men in much higher numbers than Palestinian women are raped by Israeli men, and immediately concluded this is because Israelis are racist. It beggars the mind.

Another thing that beggars the mind is the progressive image of women as great warriors. You know, in all the movies and half the books (often without supernatural explanation) a 90 lb chick can beat 300 lb men. And women were always great fighters throughout the ages. And, and, and …

And yet, women are peaceful – peaceful, d*mn it. This is why “peaceful planet of women” is a trope on TV tropes. Not just a trope, but a dead horse one.

Attempts to square that circle have included the explanation that women are only violent because patriarchy. There needs be nothing else said because in this context, and with apologies to the ponies, Patriarchy Is Magic. Honorable mention on trying to square the circle must go to Law and Order‘s attempted episode on Gamer Gate where the game the woman designer had written was about Peaceful Amazon Warriors.

Sarah Hoyt, “Give Me My Smelling Salts, Ho! A Blast From The Past From April 2015”, According to Hoyt, 2020-01-22.

April 27, 2020

Entrepreneurs beyond the atmosphere

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Doug Bandow reacts to Donald Trump’s executive order that begins to clear the way for private enterprise in space:

Taken by Apollo 8 crewmember Bill Anders on December 24, 1968, at mission time 075:49:07 (16:40 UTC), while in orbit around the Moon, showing the Earth rising above the lunar horizon.

Despite the current chaos caused by the coronavirus, Washington still must consider the future. Which explains the president’s new executive order that would allow private resource development on the moon and asteroids. It clearly rejects the “common heritage of mankind” rhetoric deployed by the United Nations on behalf of the Law of the Sea Treaty, which four decades ago created a special UN body to seize control of seabed resources.

The Future of Space Exploration

The EO issued earlier this month explained that

    Successful long-term exploration and scientific discovery of the Moon, Mars, and other celestial bodies will require partnership with commercial entities to recover and use resources, including water and certain minerals, in outer space.

The measure began the process of revising an uncertain legal regime which currently discourages private sector development.

The administration pointed to the 1979 Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (known as the Moon treaty) and the 1967 Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of State in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (typically called the Outer Space Treaty). Neither is friendly to entrepreneurs or explorers with a commercial bent.

In response, the president announced that

    Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law. Outer space is a legally and physically unique domain of human activity, and the United States does not view it as a global commons. Accordingly, it shall be the policy of the United States to encourage international support for the public and private recovery and use of resources in outer space, consistent with applicable law.

Space is a Long-Term Prospect

The document’s main directive is for the Secretary of State, in cooperation with other agencies, to “take all appropriate actions to encourage international support for the public and private recovery and use of resources in outer space.” The secretary is to “negotiate joint statements and bilateral and multilateral arrangements with foreign states regarding safe and sustainable operations for the public and private recovery and use of space resources.”

Obviously, the administration’s attention is directed elsewhere at the moment. However, the potential benefits of turning to space are significant. The value of scientific research is obvious and continues to drive government agencies such as NASA. Launch services and space tourism have caught the interest of private operators. Such activities offer fewer legal and practical difficulties than attempting to establish some sort of long-term presence in the great beyond.

More complex development of space is a longer-term prospect. However, that makes it even more imperative to encourage innovation by creating institutions and incentives that encourage responsible development of what truly is the “final frontier.”

April 22, 2020

Can We Build A Space Elevator? | Earth Lab

Filed under: Economics, Science, Space, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

BBC Earth Lab
Published 5 Aug 2013

Getting to space in a rocket is expensive! One of the most popular alternative ideas is the space elevator, but is it really possible?

Here at BBC Earth Lab we answer all your curious questions about science in the world around you. If there’s a question you have that we haven’t yet answered or an experiment you’d like us to try let us know in the comments on any of our videos and it could be answered by one of our Earth Lab experts.

April 13, 2020

Prehistory Summarized: The Early Universe

Filed under: History, Humour, Science, Space — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 23 Sep 2015

Blue hits us with some physics! Hold onto your butts. That butt is made of star stuff, ya know. It’s very special. Be proud of that butt. It was forged in the heart of a supernova.

Anyway, yeah, physics.

Guest starring yours truly! Watch out for my extremely subtle and unobtrusive cameos.

The ninja thing is a reference to earlier videos. I think he shows up in the College video and the one about The Borgias.

February 3, 2020

QotD: The “fine-tuned universe”

Filed under: Quotations, Science, Space — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

What is happening to our country, and our universities? It sometimes seems that everything is coming apart. To understand why, I have found it helpful to think about an idea from cosmology called “the fine-tuned universe.” There are around 20 fundamental constants in physics — things like the speed of light, Newton’s gravitational constant, and the charge of an electron. In the weird world of cosmology, these are constants throughout our universe, but it is thought that some of them could be set to different values in other universes. As physicists have begun to understand our universe, they have noticed that many of these physical constants seem to be set just right to allow matter to condense and life to get started.

For a few of these constants, if they were just one or two percent higher or lower, matter would have never condensed after the big bang. There would have been no stars, no planets, no life. As Stephen Hawking put it, “the remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”

Some have suggested that this fine-tuning might be evidence for the existence of God. This would be a deist conception of God, of the sort that Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and most of the Founding Fathers believed in: a God who set up the universe like a giant clock, with exactly the right springs and gears, and then set it in motion.

Jonathan Haidt, “The Age of Outrage: What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities”, City Journal, 2017-12-17.

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