There are so many reasons why we ought to refuse and reject the propaganda-against-confidence, out there. A better-than-expected economy? Dropping crime rates? A working vaccine against malaria and looming extinction for both the Guinea worm and polio? Uneven but steady, incremental steps toward justice... and even progress toward saving the planet!
Please look at these! https://www.abundance360.com/ and https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews2023/
But above all, incredible science! So today let's deal with the science that's actually above it all. In space!
== Let's live up to Ingenuity ==
The little Mars helicopter that could. It's mission is now officially over, due to damaged blades. This may not be the very last hurrah. But still... hurrah little guy.
Meanwhile Japan's SLIM lunar lander bots - a mostly successful ensemble! Though one little pike on top coulda prevented the showoff headstand.... Some of the design concepts emerged from studies funded by NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC).
== Looking out there ==
The Webb Telescope took spectra as a sub-Neptune planet passed in front of its star, letting Webb detect the presence of methane and carbon dioxide in the exoplanet atmosphere, which supported the theory that K2-18 b could indeed be a Hycean (highly oceanic) world… plus evidence of the rare molecule dimethyl sulfide, which might be a strong indicator for the presence of life. On Earth, dimethyl sulfide is created solely as a byproduct of life, most commonly by marine bacteria and phytoplankton.
An infant star! A new image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured what Earth's sun may have looked like when it was only a few tens of thousands of years old. Enhanced images of this newborns are gorgeous!
Also from Webb: carbon, an essential component of life on Earth, is also present within Europa, Jupiter's ice-covered moon that's believed to hold huge oceans of liquid salt water beneath its icy surface.
The riches pouring from the Webb are amazing: a cornucopia! For example, Tellurium, an element rarer than platinum on Earth, was just found in the aftermath of a violent cosmic kilonova 1 billion light-years away, thanks to Webb.
See the James Webb Space Telescopes's views of galaxy M51. And again wow. YOU are a member of a civilization that does this sort of thing. Yet you dare to wallow in gloom and killed confidence? Look at this! You helped pay for the wonder, the competence, the wisdom. Do more.
LIGO my ego! Humanity’s new gravity wave detectors, led by LIGO, are so spectacularly precise that they could parse the tiny difference of arrival time between the g-waves emitted by a neutron star collision 130 million light years away and the subsequent (by just a 2.7 second delay!) arrival of gamma rays then visible light from the same event. Truly wonderful stuff. And humbling that I cannot operate at that plane!
== Space travel & colonization ==
Just getting big rockets to push more stuff out of the Earth’s grip will not be enough for Mars colonization. Other absolutely necessary ingredients will include ISRU facilities robotically utilizing local water to make fuel and air and drinkables, with full tanks before any human departs Earth-Luna space. Also vastly better recycling. And solutions to zero-g and radiation health dangers. And – above all – nuclear interplanetary rockets for shorter transit times.
Speaking of which… this Fission Fragment Rocket Design is one of our projects at NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC).
The one – and only one – verified-likely “lunar resource’ – other than the hot air of Artemis-booster blowhards – is a few somewhat-verified deposits of water-ice in some permanently shaded polar crater areas. Alas, even that attractive bonanza seems to be downgraded. “Deposits of nearly pure ice tens to hundreds of meters thick are no longer expected” according to new research in Physics World. “The outlook for would-be lunar water prospectors isn’t entirely negative, though. “We now have more accurate maps for where the largest concentrations of ice can be expected on the Moon.”
There might also (maybe) be debris fields of collectable iron bits from past meteorites. And if someone develops a very efficient solar smelter, maybe a couple other metals. Someday. But if you want water out there in space… and just about anything else… lift your gaze!
NASA and Japan and the EU should explore the riches of asteroids and leave that dusty plain of poison lunar dust – to the kiddies, tourists and Apollo-wannabes.
Okay… time to cue the insipid Helium Three cult! Over to you guys.
== Look up! But with judgement & skepticism? ==
This BigThink photo-essay by Ethan Siegel does a terrific job illustrating the 'distance ladder' method for measuring the 'Hubble Constant' rate of expansion of the universe, now double checked by the Webb Telescope. This method's metric differs from one got from the microwave background, a conundrum! one you'll understand much better from this excellent piece of sci-journalism.
Failure to find a giant ‘planet X' way out there, perturbing into the inner solar system, has led to models suggesting a smaller one, orbiting closer in. This world, frozen and dark, would be no greater than 3 times the mass of Earth, and orbiting at high inclination no farther than 500 astronomical units from the Sun. Which happens also to be the boundary of the Sun’s gravity-lens zone described in Existence. Hence such a world might (maybe) become an incredible base for making a myriad super telescopes.
Speaking of the outer system… the New Horizons Science Team hopes to use the spacecraft to precisely measure the darkness of space itself. Since it's so dark where New Horizons is – billions of miles beyond the sunlit dust of the inner solar system.
A new study reports ‘conclusive evidence’ for the breakdown of standard gravity in the low acceleration limit from analysis of the orbital motions of long-period, widely separated, binary stars. If verified, this might – maybe – confirm a conjecture of the late physicist Jacob Bekenstein.
A new paper explores a concept closely related to my novel Existence. “Capture of Interstellar Objects in Near Earth Orbit.” Are many near Earth Objects (e.g. close passing asteroids) actually interstellar arrivals (Like ‘Oumuamua) that Jupiter captured into the solar system? I show such a trajectory-event happening (with a little assist from the object itself!) in that epic tale!
== Black Hole ‘Eaters’ inside the sun? Or the Earth? ==
My friend and colleague John Cramer was working on the latest of his wonderful “Alternate View” columns for ANALOG, this time regarding a new paper out there… “Is there a black hole in the center of the Sun?”
Here’s an excerpt from that article’s abstract: “There is probably not a black hole in the center of the sun. Despite this detail, our goal in this work to convince the reader that this question is interesting and that work studying stars with central black holes is well motivated. If primordial black holes exist then they may exist in sufficiently large numbers to explain the dark matter in the universe. While primordial black holes may form at almost any mass, the asteroid-mass window between 10−16−10−10 M⊙ remains a viable dark matter candidate and these black holes could be captured by stars upon formation. Such a star, partially powered by accretion luminosity from a microscopic black hole in its core, has been called a `Hawking star.'”
Phew! John wrote for my opinion, given that my novel Earth is pertinent. Here’s some of my response:
John, your Analog columns are a principal reason to stay subscribed! And this is a fascinating topic! And yes, in Earth the very diverse and eclectic plot is centrally propelled by one protagonist having accidentally dropped his lab-made singularity into the planet. Nearly all physicists are sure it will dissipate... he's not so sure and leads a secret effort to build gravity resonators to 'ping' the planetary interior… and he does find it... and realizes it IS dissipating... but there's another one down there. A more deadly variety of singularity that's been growing since 1908.
Moreover, his ping triggers something unexpected. His surface resonator and the mystery singularity serve as 'mirrors' that excite stimulated, coherent radiation from the energy-rich core and mantle in between. In other words… a gravity laser! Or gazer. The potential range of beneficial uses - like spaceflight or saving the world from getting eaten from within - fall aside as it is used by various groups as a weapon. Till someone notices that all these beams are also doing very strange things to the Earth's mantle... So sure, Earth is relevant to the topic. (It also came in 2nd for a Hugo.)
As for one inside the sun - an intriguing idea that demands compatibility with fundamental observations.
Amid billions of observed stars, we are witnessing no effects of runaway eating of dense stellar interiors, which ought to cause a rather peculiar kind of supernova in its final stages. (This is also an answer to the question of whether super-high-energy cosmic rays - vastly more powerful than any produced by the LHC - could make dangerous black holes.) Hence, if a solar core primordial BH does not do runaway eating, not even when an elderly star shrinks to a super-dense white dwarf or neutron star, then what prevents that?And if growth doesn't happen, they why won't it shrink?
Of course, using asteroid size BH to explain Dark Matter is a version of the MACHO theory. If there's that many of them, it certainly could help explain the Fermi Paradox! Making interstellar travel pretty damn hard because of the Minefield Problem. The problem with this is that they oughta interact with Jupiter pretty often. And wouldn't some get captured into solar orbit? They'd have to all be below a certain mass not to be noticed.
Okay, you can see why I saved that part of my conversation with John Cramer to share with you last.
Keep looking up... and continue fighting those who would sabotage your can-do spirit and confidence!
222 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 222 of 222Der Oger:
The franchise certainly lacks realism in that regard,
Geography in 1940s comics can be quite bizarre. Even as late as the early 60s, there were scenes like the one in The Hulk where the commander of a missile base in the American southwest hears of an alien invasion of Washington DC, and quickly leads a tank brigade to the capital. Or when Spider-Man is tricked into making a movie by the Green Goblin, and they take a helicopter jaunt from Hollywood to film over in the New Mexico desert (two states away).
A fan favorite, though is a 1940s comic in which the Human Torch and his sidekick Toro fly (under their own power) to the planet Jupiter to fight aliens.
* * *
Der Oger quoting me:
'Course, "There are parts of Alaska I'd advise you not to try to invade."
This is a tangent, but I'm curious whether the movie Casablanca is well known in modern-day Germany, and if so, how it is received.
Larry Hart: how it [CASABLANCA] is received
I've wondered this myself. Also specific actors such as Conrad Veidt, Kurt Jergens, and many more.
LH I favor annexing Canada to get a bunch more blue states. Fix ourselves, then let em slip away… taking Scarolina and West Texas with em.
Can-Am union is a sometimes popular idea here too. But it would immediately drag the US 20% to the left, and permanently extinguish the confederacy, which is probably why it hasn't happened before. It would also fluster several overseas oligarchies.
Paleo-conservatives could succeed in returning us to virtuous standards, via rigorous application of capital punishment.
Islamists can do the same thing; or simply chop off hands.
Communists can promote proletarian morality in a similar manner.
All in pursuit of a more WHOLESOME existence.
scidata:
permanently extinguish the confederacy, which is probably why it hasn't happened before
During the Reagan years, American conservatives used to complain that Canada was too friendly toward Moscow. These days, American conservatives would seem to consider that a good thing.
Watergate was a definite erosion of the Social Contract. Once trust has fled, it takes a long time to return.
A very long time.
First paragraph,
there’s a name for it: teamwork.
H Beam Piper imagined his "Aryan Trans-Pacific Timeline", where the Indo-European chariot hordes turned east instead of west, somehow crossed the Bering Strait and colonized North America. Unfortunately for the story line, it turns out these guys actually expanded in all directions, but the bands that turned east didn't get that far, leaving only an extinct language line (Tocharian) and some genetic markers - blue eyes on the eastern steppe, for instance.
Pappenheimer
@John Viril - I want to chat with you offline. My dad was born in 1908 and was a doctor in the Philippines from about 1938 till 1941. He was recruited by one of the Ossorio family to work as a doctor at the North Negros Sugar Company Hospital (later known as St. Joseph Hospital) in Occidental Negros. He had the good luck to leave in mid-1941.
He took home movies, about 2 hours worth. Before he died I transferred them to VHS tape and had him make a narration track. I also took a 36 minute video of him talking about some of his adventures in the Far East. I recently contacted the MacArthur Museum and I am going to donate the original films to them.
I thought I posted a comment here earlier today but it seems to have vanished. I have been inactive for the past few weeks because...I was recruited to join the IRS as an Appeals Officer. Starting February 12 I will start work up in the Detroit office. Since I live in Columbus, that is going to be one very long commute. Hopefully they will let me telecommute.
One nice thing about my new job is that I never have to be involved in politics again. I won't comment on politics and I won't contribute to campaigns. If people want to make fools of themselves by opining about matters they don't really know about that is on them.
Hi Alfred,
Of course human decency is not something that can be defined, since it varies from culture to culture. As a proxy you could talk about the violation of law, but there is a whole lot of indecent behavior that is not illegal anywhere. I like to set up Hippocrates as a solid floor that no one should sink below. Above that floor, every culture will have its own norms and rules.
“I love that stuff because I can test those things I've been enculturated to believe…”
That’s about the most anthropological thing I have seen anyone here write. In anthropology we understand that our own thinking, priorities, etc. are very much channeled by the culture we were raised in, and this creates huge blinders. It’s hard to miss this stuff when you devote your life to trying to comprehend very different people. It’s also a big part of why I have a hard time taking seriously the theses people write about human behavior who have never considered the possibility that they might be wrong because they’re thinking the same way as everyone in their tribe. Many years ago I saw a psychology book advertised by an anthropology press, which should seem kind of odd. The authors were a bunch of Japanese psychologists who were finding that years of professional practice pretty well blew away so many of the things that their Western education taught as human universals.
Another example I could bring up would be Steven Pinker’s book “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” which was discussed for a while right here. Pinker’s historical data looked pretty sound, but his comprehension of prehistory was junk. He was trying to claim that the ancestors of modern humans were universally far more violent than today’s hominids. The problem with that claim is that it isn’t well supported. So to CY his A, he claimed that there was some huge conspiracy among anthropologists to portray primitive people as angelic. Now if he had ever taken an anthropology class, he would know that right off the bat from Anth 101 students are given at least two cultures to ponder, one who was once called “the harmless people” by Marjorie Shostak, and one called “the fierce people” by Napoleon Chagnon. If this conspiracy existed outside of Pinker’s mind, why would they teach everyone who walks through their doors both sides? You would think that a person who claims to be that smart would be able to figure this out. But then there’s the cultural blinders, the centuries of our religions teaching us that we are all evil by nature, so of course without institutions to control them they must have been horribly violent.
I don’t know of any other science that teaches its students to be constantly aware of our own cultural blinders. I could be wrong, but judging by the works of psychologists and economists, I’m not seeing it at all. Why is it that we keep hearing the words “competition” and “cooperation” thrown together, when there are other types of relationships between humans that are neither? I mentioned a couple of them a few weeks back: the three types of symbiotic relationships, Mutualism, Commensalism, and Parasitism. If you think for a moment, you can find equivalent relationships between humans. Same with niche specialization, a way that nature prevents species from constantly competing with each other. So why is it always competition vs. cooperation? That’s how it was presented all through the Cold War. One team told fairy tales about peaceful cooperation and harmony when there’s no government, money, or private property. The other team told fairy tales about the glories of manly struggle and how competition is human nature, hierarchy and productivity are the rightful goals of all human society. Note that they are both fairy tales. As usual, real life is far more complicated.
Alfred con.t,
When society glorifies competition, it might encourage on person to strive to be come the best pitcher or free-thrower, world-famous chess master, life-saving doctor, original artist, or even a scientist universally praised for insight. But when you praise competition in the business community, you are handing a scarf to the Boston Strangler. Corporate culture values success above all, as measured by the bottom line. Honesty, responsibility, the needs of society are optional, and are often seen as hindrances to getting what you want. That’s why business is so attractive to psychotics. Three times as many psychotics are corporate executives than the general population.
But there is another really big reason to lay off the competition-is-life rhetoric. One very popular way for people to compete has always been through conspicuous consumption. That’s the force behind every Mercedes and BMW, or Italian sports car. But that type of competition doesn’t only happen among the rich. You see this all the time in “manly” types who buy unnecessarily big trucks and drive them like jackasses, or young urban males with their muscle cars. All these things are huge gas-guzzlers, and take a whole lot of resources to manufacture and maintain. That all burns fuel. The more people compete over who’s got the manliest pickup truck or can do the fastest doughnuts, the more pollution is made. That’s why I mentioned Venus recently. Earth probably will never be as hot as Venus, but without a whole lot of people getting off the conspicuous consumption treadmill, it could get hot enough to flat-line everything. More heat = more evaporation. More evaporation = more heat trapped in the atmosphere. How hot does a greenhouse have to get to become a runaway greenhouse? Let’s hope we don’t learn that one the hard way.
Paul SB
Paul SB,
That’s about the most anthropological thing I have seen anyone here write.
Heh. Well… it is of practical use at work. I don't live in a homogeneous culture. Never have really. Even as a Boy Scout in VERY white parts of the country there were always Them and Us. That leads to problems at work if you need to hire Them. How do we get along? Well… we test our assumptions.
Here in my part of California, I can live in a relatively white neighborhood, but I get no say in whether I work in a heterogeneous team. It's essentially impossible to find a job where I don't have to make some effort to test my assumptions. (Maybe if I lived in Simi Valley I could.) There are way too many valuable people to have on my team for me to be lazy about this, so I do it AND teach it to others on the team. For example, there are about a sixteen men and women on my software dev/ops team. I MIGHT be able to work with untested assumptions with two of them. Maybe. We are quite a hodgepodge.
Much of my career success (said with inflated ego and all that) depends on my skill at getting inside the head of others on my team. I've made a lifetime study of it. So much so I glitch on untested generalizations.
———
I'm aware of the controversy around Pinker, but I think his general argument still holds up. What he says about narratives supported by anthropologists of the past can be viewed as an outsider looking in, but there is some truth to it if one focuses on the story tellers who caught on with the public's view of others. Not that long ago we used to call them all savages. There was a brief time when a different narrative was pushed suggesting they were all more idyllic than us. Of course, none of that was true. We had weakly defined stereotypes and disagreed on the usefulness of them. Meanwhile, real people continued to be real people.
I'm still inclined to give Pinker credit for getting us to consider the possibility that ALL our ancestors were more violent than we are. His argument didn't rely on the notion that those people over there have always been savages. He specifically pointed out that they all were and offered evidence we could swat at in our debates. Whether he is right in the details won't matter a couple of generations from now because we will have advanced the arguments.
———
I accept that seeing things through the lenses of competition and cooperation is a culture specific approach. And Yes. The sides involved in the Cold War told a lot of just-so stories. Fantasies really. I won a school essay contest during the bicentennial because I could parrot our fantasy so well the teachers loved it. A year later, though, I left Scouting because the hypocrisy finally got through to me. We DO love our self-justification stories. 8)
But when you praise competition in the business community, you are handing a scarf to the Boston Strangler.
For some… but you are also creating the web of dependencies that enables market specializations that make us all wealthier. For each strangler you are employing tens of thousands in work that rewards innovations.
It's one of those trolley problems. Which way will you throw the switch?
Take your time and ponder the opportunities lost against each of those stranglers.
Take your time and ask how much you are willing to lose to prevent stranglers.
"...very much channeled by the culture we were raised in, and this creates huge blinders..."
DeCamp wrote that the anthropologists he met were more likely to ignore the cultural mores they were supposed to follow than other scientists. I guess this is the 'cultural relativism' that moralists like to howl about, but seems logical here - "Wait, why do we do things this way when these other folks are fine doing it another way?"
With regards to "What is good behaviour*" I fall back on Terry Pratchett - evil means treating other people as things. A direct Weatherwax quote, I believe. Good means NOT doing that.
Papppenheimer
*leaving the Brit spelling as is in honor of my misspent childhood with Enid Blyton and Cpt. W E Johns novels - and if you want to talk about underlying racist outlooks, hoo boy.
Paul SB,
Regarding competition and conspicuous consumption…
Well… We've only been doing that since humans became human. One thing I learned from anthropologists was that one of the earliest things traded by humans who were not kin was what we'd call makeup. Cosmetics. We'd only do that if it made sense in terms of sexual selection back home within our kin groups. Of course, this kind of trade wasn't going to melt the planet, but I mention it because removing one option for people wanting to express sexual signals will just result in them picking some other way to do it. Humans DEFINITELY compete with each other over mating options.
I encourage you not to worry too much about urban males with muscle cars and rural males with truck nuts. Ponder what fraction of the private car/truck fleet they represent and what will happen to the price of those vehicles when the larger fraction of the fleet converts to EV's.
Work out the numbers. The truth is the 20-something males doing all that aren't a huge fraction of our CO2 emissions. We can afford to focus on converting everything else and then let market prices deal with them. For example, do you own a car with a manual transmission? Most of us don't anymore. Try ordering one and it will likely cost more except for particular models. Try ordering one with a manual choke and you'll run into people who have no idea what those are.
Features fade when everyone else moves on. That WILL happen to the muscle cars and truck nuts too because they are sexual signals. It won't be long before gas guzzling ICE's will be seen as quaint… and that is NOT the signal a 20-something male wants to send.
———
As for runaway greenhouse, the Earth isn't in much danger of melting so bad that everything dies. The danger is to us and our civilization. Earth will manage fine* if alligators can find livable habitats at the poles… but our civilization will die before that happens.
The Earth is not in danger.
We are in the sense that our way of life is.
*There is a line of argument where we could do so much damage so quickly that the methanogens in the ocean win out for a while. That would make the extinction event underway right now look like a blip. I'm currently doubtful we will do that, but those stories make wonderful self-preventing prophecy fodder, so I hope people keep telling them.
Got to agree with Alfred re: GG. Large industrial/agricultural processes are causing more climate change that individual lifestyles choices - though those aren't helping. We aren't going to turn into Venus, but we could well destroy the climatic stability that allows for global civilization - meaning a dramatic reduction in human numbers. That in itself is a horror worth fighting against.
Pappenheimer
If you Googoo "percentage of cars that are gas guzzlers," you find a lot of articles that are pointing out the increasing sales of SUV and monster trucks, a percentage that has increased much faster than EVs. This may turn around eventually, bit how long is eventually going to be?
Pappenheimer,
It's true that large industrial/agricultural processes are huge, but manufacturing cars is a huge part of that.
Alfred,
Can you think of any way of taking the Boston Strangler out of the equation entirely? Do we really need rapacious monsters to head our industries? When did rapaciousness become competence? Would whole industries collapse if they were led by people actually who care about their own species? Given how little CEOs actually affect the successes and failures of businesses, I think we can do better, a whole lot better.
Paul SB
“Watergate was a definite erosion of the Social Contract.”
SO many conservatives admitted Nixon was a monster… but then spent every year for 50 seeking the ‘revenge’ of finding similar travesties among liberals. It drives them nuts that the rates of indicted Repubs remains close to 100x larger.
Pappenheimer: GUNPOWER GOD. Lord Kalvan!
GMT fascinated to have you and JV report on any overlaps!
And yay the Pelosi bill to revive the sabotaged IRS! Killing that revivalis one of the GOP’s ONLY three priorities. Good luck and do good work.
PSB: “That’s about the most anthropological thing I have seen anyone here write.”
What about VIVID TOMORROWS: Science Fiction and Hollywood – http://www.davidbrin.com/vividtomorrows.html
!!!
But tell me WHO is preaching open/fair Smithian competition, these days? YOU are the one shouting at a strawman today, not locum. Liberals detest the word competition and conservatives detest “regulated” competition. Regulations – laid down by cooperative political negotiation - to keep it open, creative and fair.
NO ONE IS STANDING UP OPENLY for the one thing that gave us accountability and creativity. Please, name someone. Anyone. Other than Adam Smith. And maybe me. Alfred, sure. Certainly almost no libertarians ever mention the c-word, competition, anymore and the new feudal lords want to end it.
Those on the left howling at Pinker utterly ignore the hypocrisy of crying “We need progress!” while reflexively claiming “There’s been NO progress!” Well, if there’s been none, what kind of deluded fools think it’s possible?
It is those who admit ‘We’ve come a huge way and there’s tons of good news! And that should give us confidence to complete the job! And if we don’t build on that progress and finish it, our children die.” … THOSE are the ones who give us a fighting chance.
The rest are sanctimony junkies, not reformers.
onward
onward
onward
UNCLEAR = between 10−16−10−10 M⊙ remains
Q: what does that numerical sequence refer to?
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