We just returned from Pasadena, where Caltech - my alma mater - installed me as Distinguished Alumnus. An honor that I sincerely never expected, given the many brilliant minds I knew when I was there. Reflecting on that is humbling - even 'imposter syndroming' - though people kindly urged me to think otherwise.
In today's delayed posting, I'll be mostly taking a pause from politics... though the topic of my previous blog - about the likelihood of blackmail poisoning top levels of the U.S. republic - remains horrifically plausible...
...especially now that prominent members of one party are openly admitting that their party is suborned in this way, by foreign powers.
Only now, let's move on to news from out there!
== Space News! ==
I've already posted elsewhere about the incredible "chopstix" landing-grab of a returning heavy-lift SpaceX booster stage. The concept is now proved, even though a whole lot more incremental steps are needed.
Don't let any polemical jibber-distractions take away from the wonder that was achieved by Gwynne Shotwell and her SpaceX team.
Anyway, as for that distracting blather... well... I recall when there was a similar problem with Frank Zappa -- vast accomplishments that he seemed bent on contiuously spoiling with audience-insulting rants -- until (at last) Zappa listened to the fans shouting he should "Shut up and play your Guitar!"
The ratio of ravings to accomplishments seems similar, this time. And what will be remembered (whether or not that wise example is followed) is the 'guitar.'**
== The next steps in space exploration? ==
On this Future in Review (FiRe) podcast, I'm interviewed by the brilliant Berit Anderson - focusing on the near and mid-future of human spaceflight, especially Artemis and other planned missions to the Moon. (Incidentally, the annual FiRe Conference - one of the most visionary gatherings on the planet - has been postponed due to landslides.)
Also.... Just released: a newly-updated version of Project Solar Sail: 21st Century Edition: A collection of stories and essays exploring the future of lightships and solar sails in propelling interplanetary... and then interstellar... exploration!
This volume (which I edited with Stephen W. Potts) offers classic contributions by Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, Jack Vance, and others... plus new material, including by JPL scientists exploring the latest technologies and vast potential for sails in the future of space exploration.
== A Red/WET Planet? ==
Geophysical/seismic data from the old Mars InSight lander indicates a lot of water – frozen or even liquid – sloshing deep, deep under the surface of Mars. If the water-rich layer now detected deeper below the surface were consistent around the entire globe of Mars, there would be enough water to fill ancient oceans, and then some.
And while we’re there…
NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program - (NIAC) - is pleased to announce the 2024 NIAC Phase III award to the mighty pioneer of applications of spaceflight to future biology, and vice versa, Lynn Rothschild: “Mycotecture Off Planet: En Route to the Moon and Mars.”
In other words, growing space habitats with the help of fungi and mushrooms! A house that protects you from vacuum and radiation... and that you can eat! For a list of all early stage NIAC research, please visit the Funded Studies page.
The Curiosity Mars rover rolled over a rock, accidentally crushing it open to reveal yellow crystals of elemental sulfur! - the first time sulfur has been found in its elemental form on Mars.
A fine article about my friend & colleague (and half of a mighty fencing team) Geoff Landis, epic scifi author and incidentally superstar NASA scientist, proposing ways to explore Venus. See also Land-Sailing: Venus Rover, where Landis introduces younger readers to methods of exploring - and traveling across - the surface of Venus.
Speaking of Venus…. re-analysis of data from the 1990s Magellan probe appears to show that volcanoes there are still active!
== Gettin’ a little galactic wit it ==
Many of you are familiar with Lagrange points – L1 through L5 – where gravity balance between two objects (the smaller orbiting the larger) creates ‘tidepools’ where even-smaller things can gather. Temporarily or (in the case of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroid clusters) permanently. Here Anton Petrov talks about a (slim) possibility that there might be such a point between our sun and the galactic center. It would not be able to collect much, with other stars whipping by over millions of years. But still… I do talk about galactic tidepools in Infinity’s Shore!
Mysterious brightening of a distant galaxy: Did this galaxy suddenly brighten, doubling in infrared frequencies, a 10 fold increase in X-rays)… because its central black hole ate a star?
Getting cosmic. Has the James Webb Space Telescope allowed researchers to resolve the “Hubble Tension” or discrepancy in the rate of expansion of the universe? It may have just been exaggerated… or possible we simply needed a better tool.
== Truly mind-stretching! ==
Incredible. About 20 seconds into this video by Anton Petrov (one of the best ‘casts about new discoveries in space) you’ll see an amazing image from the Webb Space Telescope. A very deep field photo that dives into the faint past, beyond redshift-3, this one image captures eighty(!) supernovae taking place ‘simultaneously’ (as seen from Earth today) in a single, narrow frame. Each in a different galaxy.
There are so many things this tells us.
1. Since any one supernova only remains stand-out visible for a few weeks (maybe a bit longer in infrared, the Webb specialty), this means there ‘are’ absolute gobs of them happening out there…
2. …or there used to be gobs of them, since we are in this case peering way back in time, making it a wee bit less surprising, since early star formation must have led to a great many giant, 1st generation stars, of the kind the burn bright and then blow themselves up with core-collapse supernovas… seeding later generations with heavier elements. Certainly, nothing like this rate is occurring “today”… (our redshift <1 era.) Though Betelgeuse is simmering...
That we are a civilization capable of building such a wonder as the Webb… and perceiving and marveling at such wonders… fills me with joy! And also fear that we might throw it all away, in a fit of anti-modernity angst, Pushed by powerful fools bent on restoring us to feudalism’s darkness.
More impact news...
Recent chemical and isotopic analyses from samples obtained by coring into the Chicxulub, Mexico's crater site in the Yucatan peninsula, indicate that the 66-million year old mass-extinction event was likely caused by the impact of a carbonaceous asteroid, originating from the outer solar system, rather than a comet.
As for the moon... Bombardment and impact vaporization of meteorites hitting the lunar surface appear to replenish and maintain the moon's extremely thin atmosphere.
Watch this simulation of a black hole tearing apart a star.
And...You can help find black holes: a new app, Black Hole Finder - enables citizen scientists to help identify singularities in astronomical images collected by BlackGEM telescopes in Chile.
And yeah. Again. ALL of this is under threat by ingrates with a lunatic grudge against not only scientists, but every fact-using profession. A too-seldom-mentioned aspect of this dire fight for the only civilization that ever brought us all these wonders... and that now stands poised to venture the stars.
If we decide not to blow it.
====
====
** Patrick Farley's Electric Sheep Comix appears to no longer support the beautiful series DON'T LOOK BACK, which featured Guitar spaceships! You could nag him to repost it?
Or else enjoy... and be terrified by... APOCAMON, revealing what fate some of our neighbors believe and fervently salivate for, from from the Book of Revelation. OMG read that one and know what they want and plan for us! People who want this are not nice and they are openly telling you what they want for you.
128 comments:
Well it looks like I'm a wee bit late with this, the Onward has been called:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9Aj7W3g1qo
I'm betting a whole lot of folks around here will recognize it.
Paul SB
I note you're giving credit where credit is due on the Starship flight...
(I'm afraid that the "Take the red pill!" xit caused me to respond with "Hail the Trumpod!" because, while blackmail is the more likely cause for the promotion of krazy, the prior antics of Cambridge Analytica and all those 'caps' also have me glancing sideways at a YA series by John Christopher.)
Farley has shifted to Bluesky, and is currently doing his bit to get out the vote.
He's now working at Facebook which, I suspect, has prompted him to take down some of his more ... risque works. His reworking of 'Spiders' is still up, though, which, as an alternative view of future warfare, is worth adding to TASAT.
I never saw that before! snork.
My daughter visited Italy this past summer, and one of the sights she saw was the Sistine Chapel. There's apparently a huge mural there, also by Michelangelo, depicting a vista of the heavens, earth, purgatory, Hell, etc. He gave the devil the face of the contemporary pope's major-domo, who I gather Michelangelo was not fond of.
The story my daughter heard was that the major-domo complained to the pope to have the artist remove his face from the image. The pope, who must have had a sense of humor, replied that had the artist put that figure in purgatory, he (the pope) might have been able to do something about it, but as the figure was in hell, the pope had no dominion.
On the Monty Python video--I don't remember seeing it as a whole, but the bit about the three Christs and the thin ones balancing out the fat one is definitely familiar.
Dr Brin in the main post:
I recall when there was a similar problem with Frank Zappa -- vast accomplishments that he seemed bent on contiuously spoiling with audience-insulting rants...
I'm too a bit too young to know the details of what his rants were about or who they were directed at. But what you describe sounds a lot like Dave Sim who was largely abandoned by most of comics fandom for his...questionable...views on gender politics. He took out much of his frustration on the readers who still interacted with him--exactly the ones who hadn't abandoned him.
until (at last) Zappa listened to the fans shouting he should "Shut up and play your Guitar!"
Yes, but...
It sounds like the only damage Zappa did was to his own reputation, which could be redeemed by better behavior toward is fans. What if his antics were designed to (for example) support censorship laws which would make future music more difficult if not impossible to produce? It seems to me that that is more analogous to what Musk's "antics" are doing.
The ratio of ravings to accomplishments seems similar, this time. And what will be remembered (whether or not that wise example is followed) is the 'guitar.'
The obvious analogue, which has already been mentioned, is Wernher von Braun. He gave us rocketry and the V2 attacks on London. I'm honestly not sure which he's more remembered for, but it depends a lot on the fact that the Allies won. Had he actually helped Hitler win, how fondly would the conquered think on him?
Musk's ratio of good to bad will depend a lot on whether his attempts to aid Trump succeed or not. If they do, I'd say it won't be a matter of balance. The bad will wipe out the good.
"Cities are built with bricks. The strong make many, the starving make few. The dead make none."
Solar sails and their derivatives (mag sails, laser sails, etc.) are the only way to escape the tyranny of the rocket equation - and thus our only way to expand to the stars. Also it is far more cost effective to pay the capital costs of only one power plant (laser array, Dyson swarm , black hole halo drive, etc.) to power any number of payloads.
Slowing down on arrival would be a problem - especially if traveling at relativistic speeds towards another sun or a black hole (boron drogue chutes, nuclear pulse retro rockets, sending a robot ahead to explore and construct another laser array at the destination, using the halo drive in reverse when arriving at another black hole, etc.).
So perhaps we should think of interstellar travel not in terms of sailing ships but as railroads made out of lasers. You would still need standard rockets to get to the either the Dyson array or a local black hole, but that's no different than driving to the rail road station.
Traveling to a nearby star at 50% c could be a routine as catching the 8:15 into the city.
"So let it written, so let it be done!"
And when we have a network of Dyson array and black hole powered laser railroads crisscrossing the galaxy, we can build subways - faster than light subways.
It's a method that will get you both FTL and time travel.
The idea involves creating wormholes via the Casmir effect and using them as time machines. For a simple explanation of how these would work see this episode of the 1990s science series "Future Fantastic" The part about converting a Casmir induced wormhole into a time machine starts at 19:19:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3yyr7f_epk
(Disclaimer: the fact that this series was hosted by the smoking hot Gillian Anderson of the X-Files has absolutely nothing to do with my enjoyment of this series. Nothing, I swear.)
OK, so let's create the pair of charge plates that create the wormhole via the Casmir effect (as described by Dr. Michao Kaku in the video). Instead of being built on Earth, the first set of plates is placed in orbit around the Sun at 99.99999999999.....% of the speed of light. If this occurs on January 1, 3001 it will essentially always be that date at this end of the wormhole. A time traveler could enter the other end of the wormhole and emerge on New Year's day of the year 3001 - but not earlier since the wormhole did not exist before this date.
Meanwhile, the second set of charged plates with the other end of the wormhole gets carried by a spaceship to another star system at nearly the speed of light so that the crew is subject to time dilation, and they experience a journey of a thousand years as lasting only a few months. Once they enter the alien star system in the year 4001, they set up the other end of the wormhole and explore/colonize the planets of this system. Shortly thereafter, the crew can return via the wormhole back to Earth in the year 3001, later on the the same day they left.
The crew experienced a journey of only a few months. Also, the people back home on Earth watched them leave on January 1st and return via the wormhole a few moments later from a star system a thousand light years away.
Once in place, the wormhole becomes a permanent subway to the stars. Millions of these wormholes would create a subway system across the galaxy like that used by the mysterious monolith aliens in "2001" through which astronaut Bowman traveled to meet his destiny.
Like the roads built by the Roman Empire, this subway system of wormholes could knit together a vast galactic empire/federation with essentially instant interstellar travel.
The downside? The energy requirements for such a system would be equivalent to the energy of an exploding star. Which can be had from a large black hole (preferably a binary black hole pair orbiting each other) spinning at nearly light speed either by dropping matter down into the black hole or using a local equivalent of the halo drive for energy generation.
So FTL and time travel are no longer impossible - they are just engineering problems.
Would the FTL subway described above violate causality as in (SPOILER ALERT) Alistair Reynolds "House of Suns".
Maybe not. All lot has to do with perception.
If the USS Enterprise traveled at warp 10 to Earth, we would se the Enterprise suddenly appear in orbit since it moved faster than its light image. We would then see this light image of a second ghostly Enterprise apparently travelling back ward in time to its origin as its light images finally arrive.
Has causality been violated? We know the backwards traveling enterprise is not real. Any radio message from the Enterprise while traveling would finally arrive but be backwards (like playing a Beatles album backward to hear "Paul is Dead").
We can use a gravity lens to see a distant galaxy which appears as a ring - though we know its not ring shaped.
Nice explanation here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-jIplX6Wjw
@DP,
Notwithstanding Airplane and Ghost Busters, I think The Ten Commandments is in the running for most quotable lines in a movie.
Stop calling me Shirley!
I would also add Casablanca (We'll always have Paris... Here's looking at you kid... Round up the usual subjects...) and Wizard of Oz (Auntie Em its a twister... I'll get you my pretty, and your little dog too!... I have a feeling we aren't in Kansas anymore...) as the most quotable movies.
I think too much is made about the lack of archeological evidence for Moses, Israelite slaves and the Exodus. This probably occurred during or immediately after the Bronze Age Collapse (circa 1177 bc) when a highly sophisticated and interconnected system of kingdoms and empires centered on the Middle East fell apart and were plundered by the Sea Peoples (basically a Mediterranean Bronze Age version of the Vikings). And like the Vikings founding Dublin and Normandy, the Sea Peoples founded the city states of Philistia. .
Cities, literacy, trade, populations - all were wiped out. Except for Egypt, which survive in a much shrunken form. Very few records of anything survived. And if you were a pharaoh fighting for the life of the Egyptian kingdom are you going to memorialize a defeat at the hands of some ragtag rebels. Nope, that would be bad PR - better to pretend it never happened.
My favorite theory is that only the priestly Levites and their households left Egypt, a few thousand at most - they would fill the visitor bleachers of a high school football stadium. They brought with them a now probably outlawed monotheism going back to Akhenaten after a couple centuries of being persecuted as heretics - using the chaos of the Bronze Age collapse to cover their escape.
Once they arrived in Canaan, they hooked up with and converted local desert tribes and began their genocidal ethnic cleansing. Then writing an origin story that justified their conquest and glorified their origins.
Interesting note - the best shape of a solar sail isn't long wings or even a parabolic mirror - it's a disco ball:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2108650-disco-ball-sail-propelled-by-laser-could-fly-to-a-nearby-star/
Disco-ball sail propelled by laser could fly to a nearby star
It turns out that a ball is the perfect shape for inherently keeping the orientation of the sail just right in relation to the laser beam that propels it.
Envision mankind spreading throughout the galaxy on giant thin walled reflective disco balls (with the payload at the center) to the music of the BeeGees.
OK, so the water issue is solved for terraforming Mars - we just need to heat up the planet and all the water melts and becomes oceans.
But if you really want to settle and terraform Mars, you are still going to need Ceres. Because you still need nitrogen.
The Dawn mission showed that Ceres has potentially large deposits of frozen ammonia. So let's start there with some back of the envelope calcs:
55,910,000.000 mi2 Surface area of Mars
196,900,000.000 mi2 Surface area of Earth
0.284 Surface Area Ratio Mars/Earth
...
0.380 g Gravity of Mars
1.000 g Gravity of Earth
2.632 Gravity Ratio Earth/Mars
...
0.747 Required Atmosphere Mass Ratio Mars/Earth for 1 Bar
5.15E+18 kg Mass of Earth's Atmosphere
0.780 Percent Nitrogen
....
4.02E+18 kg Mass of Earth's Nitrogen
3.00E+18 kg Required Mass of Mars Nitrogen
....
14.000 Atomic Weight of Nitrogen
17.000 Molecular Weight of Ammonia
3.64E+18 kg Required Mass of Ammonia
....
0.817 g/cm3 Density of Frozen Ammonia
817.000 kg/m3
8.17E+11 kg/km3
....
4.46E+06 km3 Required Volume of Frozen Ammonia
4.34E+08 km3 Volume of Ceres
0.010 Required Percent of Ceres to be Frozen Ammonia
....
3.64E+18 kg Required Mass of Frozen Ammonia
0.516 km/sec Ceres Escape Velocity
0.029 g Ceres Gravity
....
105.800 kj Energy to send 1 kg into Earth Orbit
3.068 kj Energy to send 1 kg into Ceres Orbit
1.12E+19 kj Energy to send Required Frozen Ammonia to Ceres Orbit
....
5.80E+17 kj Current Human Annual Energy Consumption
19.281 Ratio Ceres Launch Energy to Human Energy
....
So if only 1% of Ceres is frozen ammonia, that is enough to provide Mars its needed ammonia and nitrogen.
But the amount of energy required to launch this ammonia to Mars is 20 time that of human energy use in a single year, or the annual human energy use over 20 years...
Kip Thorne is very modest. He was asked recently why Gargantua from INTERSTELLAR didn't match the recent M87 image. (not sure of the telescope, don't have a link). He just answered, Because they were looking at the objects from different angles.
Oh, of course.
LH I agree re Zappa etc. But you are not the audience for my remarks who matters. There is a fellow who might (slim chance) be edified by my essentially complimentary parallel with Frank Zappa. Even if it spreads to him fifth hand.
DP see how I fill the universe with laser-propelled things in EXISTENCE: http://youtu.be/wzr-DSDMkJM
You might also enjoy a novel called RAILS ACROSS THE GALAXY.
WOW, you and LH are Heston/Brynner fans!
Problem with the wormhole time machine. Everyone from the future wants to come to Opening Day. Everyone. All at once.
Quotable lines. At the theater or somewhere, I stop by the Men’s Room and tell my wife “Where I’m going you can’t follow; what I have to do you can’t be any part of.” Eyerolls commence. Remember Bogart saying it?
"Everyone from the future wants to come to Opening Day. Everyone. All at once."
Did I mention that these wormholes would be huge, like the wormholes in "The Expanse"? Maybe make them expandable.
But here is another problem. 100,00 years from now as the last wormhole is being constructed on the far side of the galaxy, a return ship makes a series of hops from one wormhole to another going backwards intime until it enters the first wormhole at Alpha Centauri and then arrives back on Earth in 3001.
It brings with it 100,000 years of history and scientific advancement. To quote Doc Brown from "Back to the Future" (another quotable movie):
"No! Marty! We've already agreed that having information about the future can be extremely dangerous. Even if your intentions are good, it can backfire drastically!"
If only we could make a time traveling space ship out of a DeLorean.
And your wife can respond with a quote from Last of the Mohicans:
“You stay alive, no matter what occurs! I will find you! No matter how long it takes, no matter how far”
For quotables, the Firefly Series/movie has some gems -
Zoë: Captain will come up with a plan.
Kaylee: That's good. Right?
Zoë: Possibly you're not recalling some of his previous plans.
And always:
"Stand down, or by my pretty floral bonnet, I will end you."
Dr Brin:
WOW, you and LH are Heston/Brynner fans!
The NRA thing kind of cooled me on Charlton Heston as a human being, but for some reason doesn't affect me relative to his movies. Ben Hur, Soylent Green, even Planet of the Apes are just right for him. But The Ten Commandments has to be on my list of "ten films I'd have with me stranded alone in space". Probably even "five films...".
“Where I’m going you can’t follow; what I have to do you can’t be any part of.”
Thanks for loading me up with that image.
Remember Bogart saying it?
No offense, but it sounds better on him.
DP:
If only we could make a time traveling space ship out of a DeLorean.
Didn't you see Avengers: Endgame? Back to the Future is wrong.
From the rat breathing fluid demo in THE ABYSS (1989)
"That is, no bullsh-it, hands-down, the god-damnedest thing I ever saw"
The only improvement would have been Bill Nye exclaiming, SCIENCE!
I know Bill Nye. Bill Nye is a friend of mine. Bill Nye is no Thomas Dolby. "Science!"
Funniest quote in any SF show belong to firefly:
"Yes, this is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we shall call it...this land."
"I think we should call it your grave."
"AH! Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
"Hahahar! Mine is an evil laugh...now die!"
"Oh no, God! Oh, dear God in heaven!"
By Alan Tudnyk currently starring as an alien stranded on earth in "resident alien ".
Near as I can tell, a message from Kirk would arrive and sound like a tape run backwards. I don't see this being the same as sending messages back in time and violating causality.
Maybe somebody smarter than me can confirm.
Now if only we could find a similar wormhole array constructed by a now vanished alien civilization 1,000,000 years ago only a few thousand light years away.
We could enter the wormhole at the other end end go back 1,000,000 years ago. Then travel to earth at near light speed and use intervals of time dilation to go forward in time to any year in human history or earth epoch.
Maybe bring some dinosaurs back .
The use more time dilation to return to our own time.
So time travel is possible it just an engineering problem requiring sufficient amounts of energy. Easy peasy.
Though a Delorean would still be cooler.
Neither was Dolby. It was a scientist named Magnus Pyke who exclaimed "Science!" in "She Blinded Me with Science."
I've heard that he was quite miffed at the success of the song, too, since he was a serious scientist and science advocate, but people only wanted him to scream, "Science!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Pyke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She_Blinded_Me_with_Science#:~:text=The%20song%20features%20exclamations%20from,%2C%20you're%20beautiful!%22
huh!
If Trump does win it means that American democracy is DEAD - and it killed itself
Blaming Musk is like blaming the guy who pissed in a volcano for the next eruption
Did someone start yelling 'Science!'?
Speaking of which, this talk of soggy Mars makes me wonder anew about tectonics. Water is what lubricates Earth's plates, so what's the hold up on Mars? Not enough inner heat?
I'd have to check on the Wiki or something, but I think you're right....Mars is smaller and probably cooled faster...?
Yeah, no conclusive evidence of recent tectonic shifts, but old evidence suggests it used to happen, and there are obvious signs of volcanic activity*, some pretty recent - but no 'rings of fire', more like isolated 'hot spots' such as the one that formed the Hawaiian Island chain on Earth. I'm sure Dr. Brin has better sources than I do.
Unfortunately for my fantasizing mind, the 'underground oceans' mentioned above aren't going to be 'sunless seas' a la Coleridge or Greenwood.
*Olympus Mons being pretty hard to miss
Pappenheimer
AH, here we go - Martian core magnetism shut down billions of years ago. Suggests that the core rotation that powers the dynamo here on Terra isn't there - maybe partial crystallization?
Pappenheimer
P.S. a good chunk of Earth's remnant heat is from radioactive decay* - does Mars have a deficiency of heavier/radioactive metals? Here we go - less than 1/6 than in our soil, according to our (obviously limited) sample size.
* Lord Rutherford's calculations were a bit off because of that; we would have frozen over already if not for fissioning minerals
Heavier elements (inc the fissile ones) in the protoplanetary disc would *tend* to congregate nearer the Sun, so it's no surprise that Mars has less uranium to burn.
The weird thing being that smaller, lighter, cooler world Pluto *does* appear to have some sort of activity (perhaps through serpentine reactions?)
Earth also has a fair size moon providing a tidal massage to loosen things.
Tony,
was thinking the same thing re: element sorting during solar system formation - so Mercury might be uranium - rich? Its iron core is disproportionally large, apparently...of course, there is another reason that Mercury is a tad warmish...
Pappenheimer, who is going to have to leave 'serpentine reactions' to another day, as I am old and need my sleep. Wikipedia science articles are like popcorn - even worse, they link to each other.
P.S. I learned on my recent trip to SC that there is a whole war I never heard of that wracked that region from 1715-1717, caused primarily by growing European pressure on local tribes like the Yamasee, and one reason the Yamasee lost was not numbers - they outnumbered the newcomers pretty heavily - but that hit-run and ambush musketry tactics, while extremely effective in forests and marshes, doesn't work when you have to face a line of muskets on an open field*. Different cultures use the same weapons in different ways. (English traders had been selling a lot of muskets locally, so there was no shortage on the other side.)
*Another reason was another tribe intervening on the English side, looking for advantage over a traditional enemy, the same thing that doomed the Aztecs
Australia also had a few frontier wars that were brushed under the carpet. Start with 'Penuway'.
Pappenheimer
Mars is a lot smaller than earth - if it had the same percentage of uranium then it would still be cooler
The old "Cube/Square Law" strikes again
Final note - the movie with the most memorable quotes on a per-line basis may be "The Princess Bride." On a lot of them, you don't even have to give the full line. See:
"You keep using that word..."
"Hello! My name..."
"He's only mostly..."
"You fool! You've fallen..."
Pappenheimer, who had to play "Musical Gates" in DFW airport in order to be 2 hours late getting home on a packed flight 2 days ago. "Your gate is A13. No, it's C2..."
Even if a solution to FTL travel was even, at this moment, on a chalkboard, there's a lot of work to be done if we're going to survive the journey. How might those technologies alter our lives here? I'm thinking first of Arthur C. Clarke's recycler/kitchens, but there's likely to be more.
Ok - so they'd suicide before they got there then=).
I didn't actually see Princess Bride until much later than most of us. I was disappointed to see that "There's dead, and there's mostly dead," isn't exactly the way that line appears in the film.
Is it just me, or is there a connection between the E. Coli outbreak at McDonalds and the fact that Trump recently handled some of their food?
Well, Larry, that's just another "Play it again, Sam" moment. ;D
Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov make the Thiel and Musk points so much better than I do. Key points start around 22:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biP8ejZyG5o
Even Earth didn't have plate tectonics for a long time. The plates were too thin in the early days to BE plates. More like a foam on top that accreted as low density melts bubbled up to thicken things eventually.
Mars had less time to do it all... and less heat.
"Another reason was another tribe intervening on the English side, looking for advantage over a traditional enemy, the same thing that doomed the Aztecs". That's how 2/3 of colonialism happened. Interventions in local wars or brother spats.
Ok, so my brother just got me to read Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven for the first time. This is a book which takes place in an unspecified future, but was published in 1971. For everyone who insists that global warming wasn't on anyone's radar in the 70s, I relate this passage:
Rain was an old Portland tradition, but the warmth--70 F on the second of March--was modern, a result of air pollution. Urban and industrial effluvia had not been controlled soon enough to reverse the cumulative trends already at work in the mid-twentieth century; it would take several centuries for the CO2 to clear out of the air, if it ever did. New York was going to be one of the larger casualties of the Greenhouse Effect, as the polar ice kept melting and the sea kept rising; indeed all Boswash was imperiled. There were some compensations. San Francisco Bay was already on the rise, and would end up covering all the hundreds of square miles of landfill and garbage dumped into it since 1848. As for Portland, with eighty miles and the Coast Range between it and the sea, it was not threatened by rising water; only by falling water.
And more poetically from the same book: "...the endless warm drizzle of spring—the ice of Antarctica, falling softly on the heads of the children of those responsible for melting it.”
And words to live by: “Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
What a great book!
@Gator,
I'm only on chapter 3, but it did come highly recommended.
Love that bread analogy. Some things are perishable. I think it applies to economics too, which is why I'm not as offended as some others here by a mild level of inflation. I see it as entropy doing it's work on the cash in your mattress, the same way it would on bread stuffed in there.
My first nod would be to JG Ballard's "Deep End" 1961 and Drowned World in 1962. But his causes are seasoned with a bit more of the extraordinary. Another one that comes to mind is In "Behind the Walls of Terra" 1970 where Philip Jose Farmer prominently contrasts the (current) 1970s smog of the Los Angeles basin to an Earth Prime and a character who hasn't been to earth since the 1940s and is shocked by the pollution. I'm sure we could find a lot more.
I went on a school trip to CSIRO's division of atmospheric physics in the mid-seventies. I don't recall greenhouse gases being mentioned (although it would have been a topic of research, *and* scientific debate), but they were certainly looking into ozone depletion. That may have been because it was a more immediate concern back then: it was only about twenty years ago that people started realising the effects that greenhouse gases were having were observable now, not in about a century.
Custer had with him at the Little Big Horn about a half dozen Crow scouts. The Crow and the Sioux had been enemies since the beginning of time and they were perfectly happy to join the white man in killing the hated Sioux.
But as they read the trail signs going down into the Little Big Horn valley they told Custer, "There are to many Sioux, Yellow Hair. Too many Sioux."
Custer didn't listen. He saw it as a golden opportunity to wipe out the Sioux nation in one battle - he thought the 7th Cavalry could defeat anything.
So the Crow scouts spent the evening before the battle signing their death songs, knowing they would not survive the next day.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/us/politics/harris-town-hall-cnn-takeaways.html
Later, when asked about the plight of Palestinians in Gaza, she jumped into a loaded critique of her rival.
“For many people who care about this issue, they also care about bringing down the price of groceries,” she said. “They also care about our democracy and not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”
While very sane and true, I don't think that argument moves many single-issue Gaza voters who have accepted that President Biden is personally responsible for the Israel's war with Gaza and that Kamala Harris inherits that responsibility. They're willing to self-immolate in order to avenge themselves on Democrats.
I don't get why they don't push the only argument that might sway those particular single-issue voters--that Palestinians and Islamic Americans themselves will be much worse under Trump than they would under Harris.
Exxon knew about Global Warming in the 70s
The discussion of LaGrange Points in the galaxy immediately reminded me of a series of books that was popular with sci-fi nerds when I was a little muffin back in the '70s. The Terran Trade Authority series were basically a whole lot of cool sci-fi art, mostly cover art for novels, that some guy collected and strung together into a future history. The book I thought was the best was called "Space Wreck: Ghost Ships and Derelicts in Space." It had a spread that featured a painting of huge numbers of derelict ships together, including a space shuttle. The text explained it as a place where the solar winds dumped the wreckage, which was discovered by pirates and used as a base and source of materials. The whole series was written like encyclopedia articles, so not very impressive as story-telling goes, but as a collection of artwork it's great stuff.
Thomas Dolby was the first rock concert I ever saw, when I was 16. He wrote much better songs than the one he's famous for, though.
Our latest bridge lurker seems to have slunk off, now the Big Billy Goat himself is back from his trip. I'm a little annoyed that I didn't know about it, since Pasadena is a short drive from my home.
Paul SB
Just be glad and don't invoke anything.
SpaceX's rocket innovations are such a huge important achievement that the only way Musk could make himself a net negative for the world is if he singlehandedly swing the 2024 election for Trump. Unfortunately...
My point exactly. What good does all the cool space stuff do if we usher in the Endarkenment.
In that Galloway-Tarlov talk I referenced above, he opines that young men might see a 16-storey cylinder screeching down from the sky, light its engines, float to a perfect chopsticks catch, then say, "we're gonna vote with the guy who can do that". They ignore/dismiss Shotwell.
I think Stross best encapsulates Elon Musk by calling him 'Dilbert Stark'.
I can't say I'm not worrying about 11/5/24 but I also expect to be worried about other dates after that - even if Harris wins outright, I'm expecting titanic legal battles and a USSC majority perfectly willing to show its *ss to get rumpt re-elected. I decided against getting passports because...
Well there's an old song that applies to a different country:
"Twas their turn to die 'neath an Irish sky
than at Suvla or Sud-el-Bar"
May need to get my trans kid out, though.
Pappenheimer
Pappenheimer
With over $2Billion spent on the US Presidential election the $40million that Musk is spending can not be "Blamed" for the result
Bit more than the guy peeing in the volcano - but if the Orange idiot gets elected its the US voters that are to blame
Musk would get some of the blame - but only a tiny amount
It's not so much the money as his dictatorial control over Twitter. Free speech for right-wingers--burying others.
I'm like Richard Gere's character in An Officer and a Gentleman.
"I got nowhere else to go!"
Larry Hart
How is that different from owning a newspaper??
It's Twitter in particular. Not so long ago, that site was THE virtual town square where one could reach essentially anyone who was reachable. More recently, people who are tired of right-wing bullying have been leaving for other venues, but nothing has yet replaced Twitter's reach.
But duncan, your question seems to imply that my beef with Musk is that he's doing something illegal or underhanded--something he shouldn't be "allowed" to do.
No, my beef with Musk is that he's doing everything he can to get Donald Trump elected. At this point, I despise anyone who is doing all he can to get Donald Trump elected. Musk exacerbates it because he has so much money and influence to bring to bear, but that's a matter of degree rather than of kind.
More than his spending is the way he's spending it. His introduction of ads, and the algorithmic 'for you' feed lends itself to the same 'nudge' practices that Cambridge Analytica was playing around with on Facebook in... 2016. Steve Bannon may not outright have given us Brexit and Trump, but it wasn't for lack of trying.
... and it's a legitimate question to ask how long a spoon he's using to sup with this devil.
Larry Hart
I agree 100% that trying to get the Orange Cockwomble elected is a despicable thing to do
HOWEVER - IMHO the good that he has done far far outweighs that
Given that the orange cockwomble has:
- caused hundreds of thousands of deaths by shutting off the Covid response while it raged in port cities because they were Democrat (this turned into a horrific own goal as most of those deaths subsequently occurred in red states).
- through his appointment of SC judges, brought about the overturning of Roe-Wade, which has in turn led to a 7% increase in infant mortality.
- set back climate action in the US by withdrawing from the Paris accord
- caused mass anguish by preemptively cancelling immigrant visas, and separating children from deported parents (aka child trafficking)
- committed a clear act of insurrection by calling on people to storm the Senate (and not for the first time, if you follow up that Covid ref)
- committed numerous other acts of sadness I can't be bothered finding a supporting link for.
Given all that, Elon must have picked up a hell of a lot of Karma from somewhere I can't see to be given a pass for supporting orange cockwomble with more than just his vote (and, no, for all their cleverness, trick rockets do *not* cut it)
I'm splitting hairs now, but I think that if Trump is elected, we risk a 30,000 year interregnum of Endarkenment. And if that happens, all the good that Musk is doing for science and engineering will be nullified. That's regardless of his direct responsibility for the situation.
Stonekettle has no f***s left to give:
https://www.threads.net/@stonekettle
Attention Journalists, The Press, and Social Media: carrying water for fascism WILL NOT SAVE YOU.
Not from Trump, not from history.
This fascist -- and that's the word, SO FUCKING SAY IT -- will come for you. Those goons in the background? They'll come for you. You will not survive it, no matter how far you debase yourself, no matter your alleged "Professional Ethics." Remember history or you're no better than the Völkischer Beobachter and you deserve the same fate as its publishers.
I don't know Musk. Elon is not my friend. Brilliant innovators sometimes become insanely rich and then conflate wealth and brains (eg acquiring Twitter, buying votes, picking winners). He is becoming a Greek tragedy.
I recently saw a blurb on Subramanian Chandrasekhar, someone I did a speech on years ago. His (greatly superior) brilliance somehow led him to be even more kind, generous, and insightful.
One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
'Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
For the record, "Blinded Me with Science" is a song about having sex with a robot.
Just thought I'd throw that out there.
"In other words, growing space habitats with the help of fungi and mushrooms!"
Can they be psychedelic magic mushrooms? It would give a whole new meaning to the term "ultimate trip".
Instead of long term hibernation, we could just send astronauts who are totally stoned - it might have the same effect.
Unless the ship was made of marijuana. Then we would have to triple the amount of snack food needed in storage. And at least half of that would have to be peanut M&Ms and Oreos.
Rude Pundit is also right:
https://www.threads.net/@rudepundit
Congrats to everyone refusing to vote for Harris because of Gaza. You’re not saving a single life, but you are doing exactly what Netanyahu wants you to do.
The Guardian quotes Fiona Hill on Elon Musk's communications with Putin -
“This is a story about oligarch capture of the US,” said Fiona Hill, who was the senior director for European and Russian affairs in the Trump White House. She compared the situation in the US now to the heyday of oligarchs in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
“If people like Musk get Trump re-elected, they’ll expect all kinds of regulatory gifts in their favour,” said Hill, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the chancellor of Durham University and a defence adviser to the UK government.
She added: “He is in a position to command government contracts, potentially with a government position, and there are loads of militaries around the world dependent on his systems, not least Ukraine.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/25/elon-musk-has-been-in-regular-contact-with-putin-for-two-years-say-reports
Fiona is an expert in oligarchic control of government. Her words should carry weight, even with rabid Musk-o-philes like some of this community.
The Washington Post Guild reports that Jeff Bezos personally gave the order to the editorial board to shelf a planned endorsement of Harris for President and instead make no endorsement. Similar to the LA Times non-endorsement ordered by their billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong.
More oligarchs working for Trump and Putin.
Democracy Dies in Darkness, indeed.
And there is no such thing as a good billionaire.
Bah Matthew you are (alas typically) over-wrought and oversimplifying unfair, generalizing from anecdotes. I fight the evil zillionaires harder than you do. And I am open about the faults of those in a gray zone. But Soros? Cuban? Reid Hoffman? I know one billionaire who spent his teen years a Marxist and whose foundation pushed through the ballot measure that gave California the best election laws in the country. Heck, Bill Gates has been pushing hard to use latter-day good deeds to rise out of hell.
Um Beyoncé, Taylor and Oprah all are way past that milestone. Grow up.
As for Delerium Tremens... BTW every living person who bought food from a McDonald's counter has seen how fries are made. You have consumed a bazillion McD fries, but never stood at that order counter.
Look at the face below. A makeup-painted carnival barker who fell in love with Kim Jong Un and Uncle Vlad, calling Putin "a genius" for invading Ukraine and now promises to end all Russia sanctions. Almost all Republicans are now Kremlin boys. And we could power US electricity demand from the spinning in Ronald Reagan's grave.
And THAT is the kind of meme Stonekettle should be spreading, instead of just denunciatory shouts.
Oy!!!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-10-25/-tartarian-empire-conspiracy-theory-enters-us-election-fray
And there is no such thing as a good billionaire.
I think I'll second Matthew on this one.
The problem is the way they use their money - investing it in the stock markets (which increases the pressure on the common worker), in real estates (which increases rent prices), in art (thereby removing humanity's heritage from public access) and so on.
Even if they do good things with their gains, they can only balance their karma out somewhat, and if the fascists take over, they will be on the top of the list of people who will be put to the wall. (At least some of them, the rest will comply).
Also, it begs the question: Why would one have a society that allows billionaires first to grow so strong on its decaying corpse that their good deeds are necessary and applauded as something special? Shouldn't a society provide that from the start?
I mentioned it earlier, but still: There should be a threat level system for rich people, basically the product of their financial power and the danger they are for a free and democratic society.
Larry,
"Just be glad and don't invoke anything."
- I'm fresh out of pentagram chalk, anyway.
Paul SB
If what Dr. Brin has said here a number of times about the difference between high-velocity and low-velocity money is meaningful, than the idea that the only good billionaire is a dead billionaire might hold true. It kind of depends on whether you want to live in a world that grows slowly if at all but is stable and sustainable, or you want to bet on a system that has made technological process but destroyed the civilizations that facilitated that progress with great consistency. The chance that we could launch ourselves into some sort of Star Trek future that way is non-zero, though even approximating those chances is a fool's errand. A more sustainable system (like the one my Spawn #2 came up with) likely would have the same (if not more) potential to reach the stars without risking flatlining the entire planet. it might just go about it at a slower pace.
Paul SB
My thought is that, if we lived in such a world, no one would say "There are no good super-powered mutants," Some use their powers for good and some for evil, just as normal people do.
The difference may be that mutants are born with their powers. It's not something they accumulate on purpose. Maybe the problem with most visible billionaires is the sort of character and mindset that it takes to become a billionaire.
But that would argue in favor of those who were born into wealth and therefore didn't have to use tooth and claw to achieve it. One would think that those people would statistically be more likely to use their wealth and power for good. But empirical evidence doesn't bear that out.
So I guess I'm wrong. Won't be the first time.
Ok, a feel good story. For some of us, anyway:
https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2024/Items/Oct25-6.html
We hear weekly from readers who have Harris-Walz (or other) lawn signs. We also hear sometimes from readers who HAD lawn signs, but the signs were defaced or stolen. We think those readers will, in particular, enjoy the tale of Laura McCaskill.
McCaskill is presumably a Democrat, and is certainly a Kamala Harris supporter. Consistent with her 2024 preference, she had a Harris-Walz sign on her lawn. And it got stolen. And then she got another, which was also stolen. And then a third, which was stolen yet again. That gets pretty tiresome, obviously.
When McCaskill got her fourth sign, she decided she'd had enough. So, she attached an Apple AirTag to it. That's a little bit of a gamble, since an AirTag costs $15-$20, and only a stupid thief would hold on to a stolen sign, as opposed to trashing it somewhere. Fortunately for McCaskill's sense of justice, it was indeed a stupid thief. She managed to track the AirTag to a car parked in front of a house in her hometown of Springfield, MO. The owner of the car turns out to be a Trump fan who lives with his mom. And, consistent with being, well, stupid, he not only had McCaskill's sign, but 58 others, as well.
McCaskill got her sign back, of course, and now she has filed a police report. The same is true of many of her neighbors. The law says that each stolen sign could result in a year's imprisonment and a fine of $2,500. That means the sign thief could end up doing 59 years and paying $147,500. He won't get anywhere near that, but he's not going to get zero punishment, either. And presumably, he'll think twice before filching someone's signage.
Have a good weekend, all!
Der Oger,
Shouldn't a society provide that from the start?
No, though I understand why many feel it should.
The problem is 'a society' rarely has a consensus opinion on what to provide. When we do it is for very specific things... like defense against murders, some diseases, etc. For everything else, we might have a majority opinion with sizable minorities in opposition. That means providing those things from the start comes with an element of coercion because those things either cost money OR the minority actually opposes them existing at all.
Strong consensus opinions tend to work in tiny communities, but fall apart somewhere between 250 and 1000 people except in very narrow cases. The best option we've found for everything else is to let people trade for what they want to try to have and/or move to a place where their neighbors form a consensus bloc making the local taxes NON-coercive.
In non-election news...
Boeing wants out of the space business.
https://www.wsj.com/science/space-astronomy/boeing-explores-sale-of-space-business-fa7fa3a9
Bwa-ha-ha!
@Larry I vaguely recall something similar happened locally at the last election.
Meanwhile, some might consider this an apt portent for the news about suppression of editorial endorsements. I think it's a timely reminder that there are worse things out there.
Also worth pondering why oligarch media owners should take the gloves off now. Suggests to me that they are scared, and pretending to be all-powerful. Washington Post staff, at least, are calling it.
Much stuff. not edited for typoes.
1. Sign thief = a tale about transparency/accountability.
2. Not only is there a sizable minority of zillionaires who have signed the Gates/Buffett pledge, but some truly try to live by it.
Moreover, there are projects that cannot by propelled by investments that aim at a 'return' or ROI. Project that also cannot be justified as taxpayer-beneficial.
Yes, it's a bitch that parasites have arranged for corporate ROI horizons to drop from 15 years to 5 to one... and now the quarterly stock price according to toxic Friedmanism, allowing a gone-corrupt CEO caste to conspire with inheritance brats to vampire-off and destroy great US companies. The latest being Boeing. (ALL compensations for all executives across the last 20 years should be clawed back.)
But even if ROI horizons were still 15 years, there are projects best addressed by the 'whim' of someone who has gathered capital through honest goods & services and now wants to use some of it for, well, either for genuinely generous posterity or else (almost as good) name respect posterity. We'd a known much less about the universe without the big telescopes that were funded in that way, till govt raised its sights in the 60s. Jonas Salk was funded that way, too.
Billionaires who collect art include some SOBs who hoard it away. FAR more often they endow a museum building so their named collection can be admired by all. (Sometimes they borrow back some pieces for a party.) Better they do that than the govt.
Is that ALL zillionaires? Of course not! You hear me often rail about inheritance brats conspiring to re-establish feudalism! And that your 2nd billion $ should be HARDER than the 1st. And that tax rates should reflect the actual utility of each investment, not some stoopid generalization of cap gains. Still, we are unwise to ignore and disparage the kind of billionaire *matthew* would become, if his art became all the rage.
3. This whole discussion is SO shallow. Try reading Adam Smith & Marx & Rand and Friedman... the latter two being horrors who did great harm, but understanding their reasoning (incantations) might help to explain why Marx FAVORED AND APPROVED OF capitalism as a necessary phase for the creation of productive 'capital.' His future-teleology was utterly wedged, of course. Only Smith got it right. But even wrong, he was more subtle than "all billionaires must die!'
A little extra news about media oligarchs: the biggest one of all is experiencing some interesting times.
The Rude Pundit's summer daydream:
https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2024/10/we-need-to-be-done-with-donald-trump.html
...
If you feel like I do, like we're existing in a panic attack wrapped in an fever dream covered in a secret sauce of anxiety, then understand this: the only way it ends is to be done with Donald Trump. We need it to fucking stop, so he needs to lose and then we need to go through whatever avalanche of bullshit Trump is going to subject us to as he flails about in his last gasps of electoral relevance, aided by Elon Musk's billions and supported by the MAGA drones who would lay down their lives for their right to continue to be racist and dunk on the libs and beat up trans kids and tear apart migrant families. We need to go through it and come out the other side and see what's left and build it back to some kind of normal again.
I don't think all of this (gestures at everything) continues as it is once we're done with Trump. There is no one who scratches the celebrity itch and gets the stupidest people to vote. All those wannabe successors are worthless, and even the famous MAGA suck-ups don't have Trump's P.T. Barnum-like ability to corral the rubes and get them to give their money and their freedom to protect him. Unless Trump himself anoints a successor, which he would only do if he won this election. Otherwise, he'll try to insist that he can run again in 2028, and that'll just be sad.
We can be done. Really. This can be over. Think about how that would feel, how we wouldn't have to hear his slurring, sloppy voice or read his idiot brain droppings and pretend that they matter. Think of the feeling of liberation and the sense that maybe there is a future where we make things better. We need this.
It's one fucking guy. For fuck's sake, we should be able to step over his ass and move ahead.
When you get a chance, try and find an old copy of "Morning of the Magicians" by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. I
t covers topics like crypto-history, ufology, occultism in Nazism, alchemy, spiritual philosophy, Charles Forte, Aldebaran, Pleiadeans, Vril, Alister Crowley, Thule Society, Madam Blavatsky, the Ice Moon, Hollow earth, Earth is inside out and surrounded by infinite rock, Jesus was an alien astronaut, Die Glocke and Nazi UFOs, Yeti, etc., and is often referenced by conspiracy-theory enthusiasts.
It's your one stop shopping catalog for all things conspiracy theory.
But this Tartarian conspiracy is a new one for me. What are its origins?
I cancelled my subscription to WaPo yesterday, and wrote them a detailed letter explaining exactly why. There are still quality contributors there (for now) and I will miss reading them when the current subscription expires in January, but to renew, IMO, is to condone Bezos' self-serving cowardice. Dumping Amazon will be harder, but I am resolved to try my best. The downside of never getting a prime subscription is that I can't cancel it and tell them why.
I absolutely do look forward to the day when I can turn on my TV or open an electronic news site and not see that awful man's face or hear his whiny lying voice.
Concerning "Drumph!", we should borrow a line from the Who's We're not going to take it, "Let's forget you, better still".
Larry,
It isn't just one fucking guy. Yeah, he's the charismatic toddler, and no one else has yet been able to herd the toddlers like he has. But if he goes down any other way than El Presidente for Life, he has shaken up the Repugnants so much, there's a fair chance that we will finally actually get the race war Timmy McVeigh failed to inspire. The Repugnants are like a hydra - cut off one head and three more grow in its place. After that sack of shit is gone, you know there are gobs of self-serving party leaders who will pick up his martyr banner and keep stoking the hate and bigotry for their own political and financial advancement. If the Grope died of a heart attack this instant, you know half the country would "know" that he was poisoned, and the lunatics who are a couple deviations from the mean in terms of their hate will take their AR-15s down to any public place they will find lots of minorities to exercise their "freedom." I'm pretty sure we will be seeing that twisted sick-shit's face on flags, bumper stickers, hats, and t-shirts for a long time to come. After all, they think he's the Second Coming.
Paul SB
Between Friedman, Marx, Rand, and Smith, none of them had the perspective of where the world is today, under the Sword of Climate Change. Half of them had never heard the word "sustainable" and the ones who had could not have cared less, they were so focused on building the financial aristocracy. Marx, at least, noted the heavy toll of industrial pollution after a visit to London, but he had no idea how bad it would become. Otherwise he would have railed against Industrialism itself on top of wanting to do away with the oligarchs.
I'm inclined to suggest that we would do well to not worship anyone who had no concept of ecology, at the very least. It's the future we need to look to, because the ways of the past are what brought us here, intentionally or otherwise.
Paul SB
Interesting - Bill Gates says he has donated $50 million to the Harris campaign campaign but is not publicly endorsing her. Warren Buffett says he won't be endorsing or backing anyone. Both of these billionaires have been vocal in the past about rumpt's unsuitability for office, and publicly backed the two previous Democratic candidates. The LA Times and the Washington Post have declined to endorse anyone under strict owner's orders, even against the strong opinions of their staff.
Que pasa? Financial calculation re: tax rates? Trying to appease the beast, should it return to office?
And here's the thing about the billies: I shouldn't have to worry about their
vagaries. They should content themselves with their pocket senators.
Pappenheimer
P.S. It's long been a shibboleth of the proto-MAGA and now MAGA that environmental regulations are 'communist'. Actual communists used to write paeans to huge factories, because of what they are for - distributing goods cheap to people who need them.
P.P.S. Marx might not consider the distribution of Beanie Babies to be a public good.
Rick Wilson coined the phrase "Everything Trump Touches Dies (ETTD)" for one of his books, and I fear it will eventually play out with America itself. After all, Trumps grubby little hands have been all over America. Trump didn't create our divisions, but he gleefully flung political dynamite into them, and they are so wide now I don't see how they are repaired, at least not within my lifetime. There is so much distrust now we can't even come together to respond to emergencies. Hurricane relief should never have become politicized, and the same for pandemic response. Harris winning is the better immediate outcome, but I fear the unravelling has begun.
I've been contemplating these words from Lincoln's 2nd Inaugural address: “Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”
I wonder if America is about to reap a similar bitter harvest from some of our worst foreign policy blunders. During the Vietnam War, the sons of privilege like Donald Trump and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney could exploit any number of loopholes to avoid going to Vietnam, but the sons of the middle class and especially the lower classes had no such escape, and that fed a growing class resentment and distrust in government. Fast forward to the early 21st Century, where many of these people who never served in harm's way have power, and exploit the tragedy of 9/11 to invade Iraq. 2/3 of the nation supports the war, but again the disillusionment sets in when it is revealed that there are no WMDs or ties to Al Qaeda or any evidence that Iraq posed a threat, and the civilian death toll among Iraqis is horrific. Most of the Democrats can't claim moral high ground here, as they rubber stamped the invasion. So even more class resentment and distrust for Trump to exploit. He is a total hypocrite on Iraq, as he is on most issues, but his base doesn't care.
Thx for sample sharing Rude Pundit's autumn daydream: about how luscious it will be for the toxicity of Trump-Putinism to be behind us, allowing return to MERE partisan bickering, laced with some actual, grownup policy negotiation - remember that quaint word? And yes, when that 2-headed T-P monster is a smoldering memory, things will get vastly calmer and less insane. Still - (1) Trump - and especially Putin - will pull out every control rod when they lose, unleashing a McVeigh-wave of violence, and we can only pray for supreme competence from the FBI undercover guys. Likewise at the other end - the KGB-blackmailed Clarence Thomases and Lindsey Grahams, in their multitudes, will panic over the imminent arrival of light.
(2) Lets remember that Newt Gingrich was the last GOP leader who believed at all (despite his rabid-screeching partisanship) in 'negotiation' to get useful things done. A sin for which Rupert Murdoch replaced Newt with Dennis 'friend-to-boys' Hastert, and 'negotiation' became a forbidden crime for any Republican. (Look up Hastert and be so proud! Today's GOP overflows with Hasterts.)
Hence, while the insanity and outright treason may fade with the passing of Putin's puppet - the face-painted, raving, idiocratic carnival barker - the lesson, ever since Hastert, is clear. They won't negotiate like adults. Clinton and Obama each wasted the 2 years they had a Dem Congress, trying to find common ground. Pelosi-Biden knew better, rush-passing the infrastructure, energy etc. bills that gave us the lowest unemployment and greatest US manufacturing boom since WWII.
Expect more good things (and Republican mature inputs are welcome!) if YOU do your job and help give Kamala a Congress. Find the nearest race and help.
Paul, sorry, but you prove my point about no one knowing a damn thing about Marx. Or Smith. Seriously? Almost nothing you just wrote bears any relationship to fact. Again, sorry.
Hmm,
I agree that too few people know much about either of them but their names, but I'm pretty sure that ecology didn't become a thing until the 1870s (given its name by Ernie Haeckel) and I'm quite sure that the Greenhouse Effects was worked out by an Irish chemist named Tyndall in 1949. Pardon me if I apply a few grains of salt here, but neither existed in Smith's time, and Marx might have heard of these things near the end of his life, maybe. Got any quotes to substantiate the claim that either of these two anticipated the global climate crisis?
Paul SB
Actually, Paul, the greenhouse effect was first described by Eunice Foote in the 1860s. The hazards of CO2 in the atmosphere was noted by Svente Arrhenius in the 1890s, and later by Rutherford.
Now, Arrhenius was debunked by a certain Angstrom (Knut, not *the* Anders) who pointed out that water vapour already absorbed all the radiation CO2 was supposed to (it had even caused a runaway greenhouse effect: Earth is 30 degrees warmer than it would be otherwise). It was a fairly well argued counterpoint that was only debunked in the forties when better measuring equipment (and a better understanding of quantum mechanics) showed that CO2 could indeed absorb radiation in the presence of water. In fact it amplified the effect of water as its meagre warming effect allowed more humidity.
There followed vigorous debate in physical chem circles about optical depths etc and the question was only settled in the late seventies. What remained to be determined was how fast a system as big as a planet would react to the additional forcing. The answer is now known to be 'faster than a century'.
Here endeth the spiel.
Most of the Democrats can't claim moral high ground here, as they rubber stamped the invasion.
Far be it from me to say I'm always right, or even mostly-always. But back then, despite the 110% approval for the war, I knew that the politicians who didn't desire it but felt that a nay vote was political suicide would come to regret being on the wrong side of history.
"I knew that the politicians who didn't desire it but felt that a nay vote was political suicide would come to regret being on the wrong side of history."
Paul Wellstone was one of the few shining exceptions; he had the spine to vote no and was willing to campaign aggressively on the rightness of that decision. Such a damn shame he was lost in that plane crash. John Kerry and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were tarnished in my eyes because of that vote, but they were still the better option on the various ballots.
I too was among the 1/3 not buying W's reasons for the Iraq invasion. I found his attempts at a moral reason (Saddam is a MONSTER!) especially galling, as he would never own up to just who had been feeding that monster for so long. I got lots of insults over my opposition on my online forums; but I never got any apologies when it turned out there was no evidence found to back W's reasons, nor did I expect any. Iraq is the foreign policy clusterfuck that will keep reaping bad dividends long after our time. I think it also contributes to the military missing recruitment goals now; it's anecdotal, but I've heard stories of Iraq/Afghanistan vets discouraging younger relatives from enlisting. I can't say that I would blame them.
Going after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan did at least make sense, although we really should have ended it after Seal Team 6 took out bin Laden. Not because I wanted the Taliban back, but rather that I know that the American public at large lacks the political will and the attention span for the sort of long term nation building that was needed. It would have been better (at least for us) to cut bait then (so Obama's error), and I say that very regretfully, as the Taliban are some of the worst human scum on the planet and my heart hurts for the women and girls trapped under their boot heels. But we shouldn't start projects that we are not committed to finish.
Paul you have no idea what Marx 'would have' done. But the London smog of his day would make my Los Angeles of the 1950s look like an alpine meadow. Moreover he believed that ALL depended on capitalists 'completing' the means of production so that advanced proletarians could take over and then make rational decisions.
I'm cool with the spiel. I've never heard of Eunice Foote. Did she get any credit in her time? The 19th Century wasn't a great time to be smart, curious, and interesting, but also in possession of a uterus.
I had a discussion with a chemistry teacher about the role of water vapor in the greenhouse effect. He was convinced that it isn't a serious issue, since the residence time of an H2O molecule is so much shorter than either CO2 or CH4. I'm not as familiar with chemistry as he was, but it seemed irrelevant how long any individual molecule remained in the atmosphere if it was immediately replaced with another. Maybe you can resolve this one. Looking at the oceans-worth of water vapor in the atmosphere of Venus, I figured that at some point heating from CO2 would have increased evaporation to the point that H2O would have tipped the scale over into runaway.
Paul SB
Dr. Brin,
It's weird that you would make this comment, as I said nothing whatsoever about what Marx, or anyone else, would have done were they alive today. That kind of speculation is a fool's errand to begin with. Would Jules Verne have written the same stories if he had been born and raised in the 1960s? Doubtful, since growing up in a different time would have made him into a different person.
My point was simply that we should not rely too much on the words and ideas of people who lived in very different times than our own. Sure, people are people, and some things will translate into any time, but a whole lot of things won't. Neither Marx nor Smith knew anything about climate change, and that is the massive crisis facing the world today.
I didn't grow up in the LA area, but I've met a number of people who did, and heard their stories about having "smog days" off from school. I've also met people who study ice cores, and can point to the exact spot when the Clean Air Act was passed. I'm glad we aren't living in those times anymore. No doubt a Grope Administration would work to undo the Clean Air Act.
Marx's insistence that capitalism would reach a climax before the proles could take over is one of the arguments people have made for a long time as to why Russia never actually became anything at all like the communism he predicted. That's not exactly new. I had a class on the 20th Century when I was a wee undergrad back in the '80s.
Paul SB
On millionaires and billionaires, the compassionate approach would be rehab. Obviously not all rich people act like crack heads. Everyone has their own individual level of susceptibility to wealth addiction, so some rich people are perfectly normal. But the slumlords, the medical insurance execs who put profit over people, pharma execs who randomly jack prices up to unaffordable levels and smirk while the "unwashed masses" live in misery and die prematurely, those ones either get prison or rehab. Unfortunately, people tend to get angry and demand blood, and we end up with guillotines instead.
Paul SB
The stereotype of the rich billionaire is basically the model of humanity that has been used in economic theory for the past two centuries. It's a very crude, inaccurate model that assumes the average person is a selfish, insatiable know-all (hence this unqualified comment!?). Why does it persist? Possibly because many economists like what they see in the mirror.
Has anyone advanced this model further? Maslowe's hierarchy of needs is more concerned with employee motivation, but it would be a good start (eg it clearly assumes people's needs are not insatiable).
Did Eunice receive any credit in her time? Alas, it would seem not (errata from earlier: she published her findings in 1856).
Your chemist friend is missing the point. Water is in a state of dynamic equilibrium between atmospheric vapour and ground liquid. Sure, a particular H2O molecule may not stay in the gaseous state, but (as you've already noted) it will be replaced by another one. By contrast, CO2 and CH4 are in a fully gaseous state, and tend to stay there, although they may dissolve into the ocean (thereby causing oceanic acidification, or souring seas). CH4 is a *very* powerful greenhouse gas, but it does break down fairly rapidly, so estimates of its power vary. Since it's increasing in concentration (ie effectively not breaking down) I tend to rate it at the high end: 70x, making the current level the equivalent of an additional 100 ppm CO2. That would explain a few things.
A good discussion of how water vapour acts to amplify the effect of CO2 (and CH4) can be found on the sceptical science website. (a fair analogy is the gate current on a transistor)
I'm not the expert on Venus, but yes, it receives more radiation, and a runaway effect is the most likely explanation. It may well happen to Earth too, in the not too distant future, but that's a horror for another day. Let's get through the current batch first!
"the compassionate approach would be rehab"
Alas, I'm coming around to the opinion that there's no such thing as 'transferred rehab' (or uplift*). Demonstration/inspiration/empathy yes, scolding/lecturing/re-education no.
No one saves us but ourselves.
No one can and no one may.
We ourselves must walk the path.
- Buddha (iffy translation, as most are)
Or, more familiarly,
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only form of education there is.
- Isaac Asimov
* see https://forum.tasat.org/t/what-follows-mankind/159/16
I hope someone actually shows today's "Doonesbury" comic to President Biden.
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2024/10/27
Scidata,
Yes, the lightbulb has to want to change, as the old joke goes. Very Tao. Laozi would be proud. I still want those sacks off the streets and the hell out of our economy. As Dr. Brin explained before, money is the blood of the economy. Blood has to circulate. Rich people are blood clots in the economy. Billionaires are deep-vein thromboses.
Paul SB
Wasn't the neocon project of building Western-style democracies in the Middle East doomed from the start, because Iraq and especially Afghanistan are deeply tribal societies, and tribalism like that can only really be crushed by extreme authoritarian brutality over many decades, as applied for example by the Soviets in Central Asia or the Chinese today in Xinjiang?
And while modern (say) Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan may be less benighted than Afghanistan, they are still not at all democratic.
Tony,
You would probably get a lot out of reading some behavioral economics. The Friedman model - Neoliberalism - is exactly what the rich and powerful want, which is why economists mostly worship Friedman (anyone who can look at 400% inflation and call it a miracle is a religious fanatic, not a social scientist by any stretch of the imagination). But since Daniel Kahneman, more and more (mostly younger) economists have been turning away from the Old Guard and doing actual research.
Dan Ariely, for instance, has pointed out that studies have shown that the only people who actually behave like economists say all humans do are the economists themselves. Ariely has some very good books, and he's an easy read. Leonard Mlodinov is more challenging but well worth the time.
You might start with Ariely's "Predictably Irrational" and go from there to "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty" and his newest one, "MisbeLIEf."
I have mixed feelings about Mlodinov's book, "The Drunkard's Walk," because the primary message is incredibly important, but it gets lost in all the details of the history of math. If you're not a total math nerd, read the intro, chapter one, and the conclusion, and spare yourself the pain. But "Subliminal," "Emotional," and "Elastic" are all very worthwhile reads.
Being a one-time archaeologist, I could point out that Marshall Sahlins wrote a pretty serious slam of Friedman's H. economicus elephant shit back in the early '70s in "Stone Age Economics," but it's kind of dated.
Paul SB
The best jokes have a grain of truth in them. Hitchens (I think) used to tell the one about the man who bought a hot dog from a street vendor, but when he asked, "hey, where's my change?", the vendor replied, "Change comes from within."
Larry,
I just posted that cartoon to FacePalm. Maybe I'll get some interesting fireworks...
Paul SB
Cute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVxaL8CAO4M
There's a 1st half to this joke: "Hitchens (I think) used to tell the one about the man who bought a hot dog from a street vendor, but when he asked, "hey, where's my change?", the vendor replied, "Change comes from within.""
The 'man" or customer is a guru who tells the hot dog guy: "one with everything."
Friedman assumed that a corrupt CEO caste would not appoint each other onto each others' board and approve every corrupt manipulation to meet their quarterly performance reviews and bleed their companies dry. They did.
Economic theories which presume people are "rational actors" seem to take the term too far, as if we all think out the consequences of every choice to the nth degree and then do some integral calculus to determine which possible action maximizes benefit over time from now to infinity.
People can be "rational" in the sense of deducing what seems best in the service of a particular goal, but that goal is typically more id-oriented than superego-oriented. Veruca Salt's "Daddy, I want it NOW!"
Larry,
The whole point of the rational actor model is to claim that people will always do the right thing unless the government stops them or forces them to do something else. It's a "shut up and let me steal as much as I can" argument.
Paul SB
Last night's On the Media interviewed Jason Stanley - another author I highly recommend - on the subject of Trump and fascism.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/fascism-fear-and-the-science-behind-horror-films
Paul SB
Currently have Geoffrey Parker's 'Global Crisis - War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century' open on my desk. It's grim reading. There's an epilog discussing our century, but I haven't gotten there yet. That and Jared Diamond's 'Collapse' would just undermine my sunny good cheer*.
Pappenheimer
*I brought just two things - gingerbread and sunny good cheer - and I've got a bit of gingerbread left
Jared Diamon'd COLLAPSE suggests eco disaster was a common root for downfalls.
and on that cheery note...
onward
onward
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