More Space! Space is the Place

Today I'll take a break from posting chapters of Polemical Judo. (Last time I offered one suggestion - out of 100+ under-appreciated maneuvers in the book - just one that might forestall every 'October Surprise,' thwart most of the cheating, and prevent most pre- or post-election violence. Two sentences. Just two.)

Only now let's take a break for science! (Remember when much of our news cycle was about such things?) I just finished participating in the annual Symposium of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts program (NIAC)... and you can watch some of the amazing - just short of science fictional - projects here.

But the following non-NIAC items are straight out of the (scientific) headlines!

Caltech’s robotic Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) - to search of unexpected flares of light in the night sky - on May 21, 2019, detected a visible light flare that appears to be correlated with gravitational wave event S190521g that was recorded at about the same time by the LIGO and VIRGO gravitational wave detectors. Graham reported, “In our study, we conclude that the flare is likely the result of a black hole merger, but we cannot completely rule out other possibilities.” So kewl.

Interesting! The Air Force’s secret space plane the X-37 is hush hush so I was surprised by this article about an experiment to test converting sunlight into microwaves, eventually leading to prototype space power-beaming systems.

Future space travelers may have to conduct lifesaving surgical procedures in the near-zero gravity environment of space. That could be a messy — and potentially dangerous — endeavor.  The prospect of gushing clouds of blood and intestines might partly be solved by lacrosopic surgery techniques. Even better, injectable robots. Meanwhile, one of the coolest new NIAC grants goes to Dr. Lynn Rothschild’s team developing simple, spore-based ways to grow a variety of drugs when and where needed, via astropharmacology.

Alas, in contrast... not all "space news" credible 

“NASA Discovers Huge Potential Caches of Metal On the Moon.” Seriously? A slight change in the parts per millions of some metal OXIDES? Most of it buried deep underground? None of this changes my mind. Except for some water ice at the poles - and maybe some scattered meteoritic iron grains - there is nothing “there” on Luna. None of the supposed exploitable “resources” that some boosters dishonestly yammer about. Nothing compared to the riches at asteroids. One more reason to end this lunatic – literally – administration of science and fact-haters. 

Leave the Moon to the kiddies, desperate for their rites of adulthood, making footprints on that (for now) dusty-useless ball. (Though US companies are welcome to rent out hotel rooms and landers for those tourists! And keep sending robots to check for when... not if... I'll someday be proved wrong.) 

Meanwhile, along with the Japanese and Europeans, we can go for the real riches, doing what no one else can do.

== More space! ==

Might “Planet Nine” be a primordial black hole, orbiting at the fringes of our solar system, occasionally flaring when it sucks in a drifting comets? Or perhaps micro gravity-lensing background star fields? Those betraying encounters might be detected by a new telescope that will give us better all-sky awareness than ever before.

Venus appears to have volcanoes… and remnant ones arrayed in patterns that appear to mimic in some ways Earth’s “Ring of Fire” and hot spot mantle plumes like under Hawaii and Yellowstone.

Two huge planets orbiting a young but sunlike star 300 light years away have been directly imaged. Wonderful.

A piece of Mars that fell to Earth decades ago is heading back to the Red Planet.

Most of the super-energetic sources seen in this spectacular full map (shown above) of the X-Ray Sky - around 77 percent - are supermassive black holes actively accreting material in the cores of galaxies, or active galactic nuclei.  “Within the Milky Way, stars with hot, magnetically active coronae make up 20 percent of the objects. The remaining one percent is made up of an assortment - bright X-ray binaries, supernova remnants, and flares…”

The Dynamic Red All-Sky Monitoring Survey (DREAMS)  to be completed 2021 will be able to map the entire southern sky in infrared in just three days, allowing astronomers to rapidly find and track cosmic events. A major step… alongside the new Synoptic telescope in Chile… toward all-sky awareness.

A group of scientists at Harvard and other universities has received NASA’s first-ever funding to search for alien technosignatures—artificial signs of intelligent life—around other stars. The scientists will look for signs of industrial pollutants in other planets’ atmospheres, as well as light reflected from solar panels—both of which could indicate a civilization technologically similar to our own.  

More galaxies appear to spin counter clockwise (Earth coordinates) than clockwise, leading to a theory that the universe itself was born with angular momentum and a complex set of spins.

Bing Chen points out how Loren Eiseley stated in his last book The Invisible Pyramid, "If man goes down I do not believe he will ever again have the resources or the strength to defend the sunflower forest and simultaneously to follow the beckoning road across the star fields. It is now or never for both and the price is very high".

== Ponderables ==

Might there be a subtle variation of the fine-structure constant with extreme distance in the universe… and even with directionality effects? If this new study is correct, however, it instead presents a universe with a dipole structure, not unlike the North and South poles of a magnet.

Just 1000 light years away, a black hole found only from the tight orbits of two nearby stars. One of them visible to the naked eye! Close! “An invisible object with a mass at least 4 times that of the Sun can only be a black hole,” and  “There must be hundreds of millions of black holes out there, but we know about only very few,” and there are likely many more, some closer still.

An now it is asserted that there may be a LOT of stellar range black holes out there... perhaps enough to account for dark matter?  Perhaps they gather in compact clusters, similar to those that ancient races seek as their final homes in the "embrace of tides" effect, you read about in Infinity's Shore and in Heaven's Reach?

And...

Emily Levesque's The Last Stargazers takes you on a personal journey through the art, science, frustrations and passion of  modern astronomy, especially those ever-evolving mountaintop tools that let us pry secrets out of the sky - those magnificent telescopes.

Finally.... A cute rap song about cosmology! And a nice video in which some whipper snappers make a to-scale model of the solar system out on a California lake bed.

And for you geeks.... Wow. An artillery shell that incorporates a ramjet to triple its guided range.

And yes, if you don't want to face the business end of munitions, this phase of the American Civil War must be won decisively, overwhelmingly and soon, so we can end the violent fevers (both covid and confederate) and get back to being joyful problem solving, with facts and science.

Next... Chapter nine of Polemical Judo...  

America’s place in the world - Part 1:

Pax Americana and the rise of China

Diving into the sun...and ever outward. Expanding our horizons

Taking a pause from Earthly troubles... today we'll look right into the sun! Real-life missions and the big news that we're re-issuing SUNDIVER!  After a several year hiatus, my first novel - a murder mystery with cosmic implications, plunging into the furnace of a star - is available, revised and with a new introduction. See below!

Meanwhile, in other space news... Jason Derleth, head of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts program (NIAC), is interviewed by Fraser Cain on Universe Today. Jason has done a terrific job developing NIAC into NASA's Venture or DARPA center, nurturing early stage concepts, some just this side of sci fi and others that took off skyward. I'm privileged to serve on the advisory External Council. 
     Watch the podcast and consider - do you know anyone who might want to apply for a NIAC grant? We're especially interested in space-related, bold projects in biology!

== Lunar obsessions ==

Many of you know I'm cool to the latest mania for returning U.S. astronauts to the moon's dusty, almost-use less plain. Oh, I am fine with someone keeping that  obsession going. Humanity will go there anyway, as the Chinese, Indians, Russians, billionaires and so on desperate desperately  pursue rites of adulthood we had 50 years ago... their "bar moonzvahs."  I'm also fine with American companies building advanced landers and such to sell! (NASA has put out a call for two different lunar landers, from two different sources.) 

Oh, I'll keep an open mind. Indeed, NIAC is funding concepts in getting that lunar polar water. Even though initial calculations suggest that we can get everything of value - including water - far more efficiently and copiously from asteroids. As Andy Weir makes clear, in his novel Artemis, the Moon is largely of use for tourism.

The absurd “race” to plant US footprints back on the moon’s dusty/useless plain does have positive aspects. I fully support U.S. unmanned exploration missions like VIPER… a lander rover that will do surveys and assays of lunar ice in deep, dark places near the lunar poles.

Still, let me say something nice: I well recall...  Reflecting on the second moon landing -- I remember Apollo 12 so vividly. Earlier, Armstrong & Aldrin almost died, flying almost blind and almost out of fuel. A few months later, the 12 crew glided in so smoothly and easily that they landed within meters of the planned site... less than 80 meters from the Surveyor probe... while joking all the way. The image of both Apollo and Surveyor in the same photo remains one of my top ten exemplars of human competence. 

With less computer power than we now have in some light bulbs. A nerdy, even impudent competence that only ever appeared in democracies, like Periclean Athens and Florence. And a major reason why enemies of our renaissance are waging all-out war on the fact-using professions. And why no despotism will ever make it to the stars.

== More space news! ==

NASA flew gas detecting aircraft across 10,000 square miles of California from 2016 through2018. Landfills accounted for 41% of the methane emissions it identified, manure management 26% and oil and gas operations 26%. If we were a species worthy of the stars... Seriously, is this what aliens are waiting for, before making contact? A sign we can stop fouling our own nest?

Meanwhile, NASA's first large-scale, piloted x-plane (or experimental aircraft) in more than three decades, the experimental X-59 jet, which could make supersonic commercial travel a reality, has been cleared for final assembly.

Studies of Jupiter’s gravity suggest a density distribution that’s a bit too diffuse to have occurred if the early, rocky core was left undisturbed to collect all the later gases in its giant envelope. One possible explanation, a fairly early collision with a super Earth-sized planet that stirred and mixed the core just right. We get to peer into epochs that we always thought invisible forever. Ah, to do with human hearts.

Okay. Even a space posting can't escape politics completely. “Why the economies of Alabama and Mississippi have suddenly gone in opposite directions.” Well, one reason is the boom around tech enclaves like Mobile and especially Huntsville, where a big NASA center has drawn in talent from all over the nation, substantially altering cultural assumptions. 

== And that Solar News ==

Okay, I promised to get all sunny on you, starting with news that the solar sunspot cycle in at a weirdly deep minimum... but then...

...solar tsunami waves blare the harbingers of a transition from one sun cycle to the next.

Interesting results from the Parker Solar Probe as the spacecraft is starting its fourth close orbit around the Sun, edging closer to its scorching target.

Which brings us to...

... we've just re-released the novel that inspired it all… SUNDIVER! Now available as an ebook on Kindle and in paperback -- 

-- with a brand new author's introduction about the personal and scientific journeys leading to my first novel!

You'll come away from this suspenseful, fulfilling and often funny space mystery both entertained and... well... having learned a thing or two. What a deal.

Our dreams of space aren't help by hallucinations

== An actual adult at NASA? ==

Dang. Glimmers of hope. This Trump appointment, though initially unqualified, has proved intelligent, curious and a good listener/questioner. It is way too soon to be optimistic, but NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is starting to sound kind of like a sapient person: 

"The first Gateway is about the moon, but I think the second Gateway, being a deep-space transport, again using commercial and international partners, enables us to get to Mars," Bridenstine said. "What we don't want to do is go to the surface of the moon, prove that we can do it again, and then be done.

"We want to go to stay. And the Gateway, in my view — I've been convinced — enables us to take advantage of commercial and international partners in a more robust way so we are there to stay, it enables us to get to more parts of the moon than ever before, and it enables us to get to Mars," he said. "There is no other architecture that I have been presented with, given the current budgets that we have, that enable all of that."

The Gateway is an overlap between all the goals that are under debate:

China, Russia, India, Europe, billionaires are all desperate for their symbolic rite of passage - (“Look at us, we’re grownups now with moon footprints too!”) - then let them rush to that dusty-useless plain, while we sell them tourist services via the Gateway. ("Welcome to our old Moon. Now you kids be safe down there.”)

Meanwhile, the Gateway can be a lab to study asteroid riches and to learn methods we’ll need, to get to Mars. A win-win.

Let our “commercial and international partners” do all the stuff they can do, and let NASA & the U.S. do things that only America can do. 

Footprint fetishism is for adolescents.

Alas, there's an even worse adolescent fetishism that's eating away at the space-advocacy community. But I'll get to it only after making a small side trip into human psychology.

== Space is not immune to culture – and psychological – war ==

Brain studies show that we make many decisions for unconscious reasons that we then skillfully rationalize. Ain't it funny how often we decide to support a position that just happens to conclude "people just like me are righteous and right and those who oppose me are either stupid or evil"?  

Now add propaganda. I've polled audiences for decades. Nearly everyone nods when asked: "are your neighbors influenced by propaganda?"  But they give sullen headshakes when asked: "were you?"  

All past cultures preached conformity, but not ours. Nearly every movie you ever enjoyed preached Suspicion of Authority (SoA) and the admirability of impudent eccentricity. Look over the previous sentence again and compare it to every Hollywood film. Americans especially suckled those values from an early age, yet they nearly always claim to have invented SoA.  They (and you) resent being told they were taught SoA, in a relentless drumbeat of propaganda.

"I'm the brave rebel against stupid, conventional beliefs held by sheep and pushed by dark elites."   Of course your adversaries think the same thing about you! But that can be safely shrugged aside. 

Taken even farther, this egocentric manifesto manifests as a roar we have all seen from bright fanatics out there: "I'll proclaim the very OPPOSITE to what's blatantly true! That will make me look daring and cool and imply I possess direct insights and information that you sheep cannot see!!!"  

What does all that have to do with our current arguments over where and how to build a mighty, spacefaring civilization?

Space is a screen against which we project many of our hopes and ambitions. Some zillionaires are investing pragmatically in potentially gaining access to quadrillions of dollars worth of asteroidal resources. Others seek colonies on Mars, and I say terrific! A sanely satiable human may ‘need’ his or her first few billion dollars, but beyond that, priorities shift to finding cool things to do with it.

Alas though, there are also insatiable billionaires of the more classic variety, who see space resources as a threat to their sunk-cost, sweetheart investments in Earthly mines and wells. 

Their efforts to stymie serious advance in space capabilities began with elimination of funding for Earth studies at NASA and NOAA, satellites and research that might sear away the Climate Denialist Cult. Now, it’s “Back to the Moon!” which has justified zeroing out NASA efforts to study asteroidal riches.

But let’s circle back to the topic of polemical psychology. Because some in the space zealot community – following the patterns I described above -- have dived into Conspiracy LaLaLand. 

One eminent Mars Proponent has produced a book proclaiming that all forward progress toward technological paradise and space cities is being blocked by a conspiracy by “anti-human” cultists, who want humanity to go extinct, or at least for us to be culled in numbers below a billion, for the sake of the planet.  Oh, for sure, in my novel EARTH I portray 'anti-human' fanatics getting their hands – dangerously – on disproportionate and deadly power.  I’m open-eyed to their existence and mania and to the harm they might do, if given a chance. 

I am also aware that such cultists are presently insignificant, in power and influence, compared to far worse dangers like a looming (and recurring) oligarchic putsch to restore feudalism. 

Still, it struck me how, in raging against this “anti-human” cult, the tech-loving Mars Proponent cites anecdotes but never statistics. Ironically, he thus emulates – and even makes many of the same points as -- the tech-hating Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, in his book The Anti-Tech Revolution. Though preaching diametrically opposite utopias, their logical methodologies and levels of smugly confident paranoia seem similar. Both offer roars against standard, conventional wisdom, held by sheep who happen to be in the modern intelligencia.  

== If you want progress, look at what brought it, till now ==

Let’s recap: Suspicion of Authority (SoA) does provide a luscious way to get that sanctimony-high. SoA means you must aim ire at some elite, but which ones? 

Liberals see dark conspiracies and lies by conniving oligarchs and faceless corporations. Conservatives see conspiracy by snooty academics and faceless government bureaucrats.  It is the same reflex, aimed at different "authorities".  (It happens that all facts right now support the liberal view, and today's conservative view is hallucinatory. But history reveals plenty of times when it was the opposite.)

While it can be effective at generating an excellent, self-righteousness drug high, and it can help to recruit a small, fanatical following, the scream "I can see what all you blind fools can't!" hobbles your effectiveness at pragmatically affecting the majority, or gaining support among the fact-professions, or swaying the allocation of society's investment resources in your desired directions. Demolished effectiveness is reason to suspect that an error has been made. Yet we do the same things, over and over again.

Earlier I compared the teensy-pathetic “anti-human” movement to the vastly more destructive force called feudalism. Feudalist-hierarchic rule by inherited elites was the dominant government -- and failure mode -- for 99% of the last 6000 years. The inherent interests of oligarchs -- to prevent new competitors, to prevent destabilizing innovation, to give unearned advantages to their sons, and to protect the sunk costs of their own investments -- prevented human progress across the ages.

Such men are certainly the greatest force that will keep impudent innovators from accessing the resources of space. And they spend lavishly on propaganda. To veer SoA reflexes against the “elites” who stand between them an total dominance. Like the millions of fact-using professionals who push civilization forward.

Suppose you want to get out there into space. Then concocting strawman enemies -- e.g. denouncing those who want to make human civilization sustainable and efficient -- is astonishingly counterproductive.  Especially given that breakthroughs in efficiency and sustainability will be vastly, vastly more important for living and working in space, than they are down here, on Earth! 

Almost a definition of Sapience would be the ability to notice your own counterproductive cycles... when what you are doing may feel great, but is undermining achievement of your legitimate goals.  We all see examples of this in our enemies, but are often blind at recognizing them in the mirror, where realization would do us the most pragmatic good. 

When it comes to space activism, the driving away of potential allies and negotiating partners is particularly glaring and unnecessary.

It is the end result of all the forces I've described here, from SoA propaganda to "I can see and you can't!" self-flattery... to lickspittle obeisance toward the New Oligarchy Lords.  None of these things makes for lucid discussion of actual tradeoffs.

None of it helps to convince our neighbors to calmly allocate new investments in a risky but promising frontier.