Space Rocks and tech marvels that really rock! And best sci-future YouTube Channels!

Do you love YouTube channels about science? Wish I had one? Well, maybe if I get that Kiln People self-copier machine! A close second to that would be these great channels! First, an interesting interview for your weekend listening pleasure or edification. Singularity Radio - from Singularity University - I offer perspectives on The Value of History, Criticism and Science Fiction.

Scott Manley is one of my favorite YouTube explainer guys, especially when it comes to spacecraft. If there's some kind of milestone in rocketry, for example, he'll clarify it for you, within a couple of days. (Manley was also designer of the "cycler" spacecraft in the 2021 movie "Stowaway".) But today's posting goes a bit farther in space and especially time, as Manley  talks about how to Move the Earth, citing especially my own postings on the subject. (in particular my video: Lift the Earth! - though he cites the more detailed blog posting.)

Other favorite explainers include Anton Petrov for new science and space discoveries (he often makes an error or two, but generally (not always) small ones)... and Physics Girl ... and for in-depth explorations of galactic stuff like the Fermi Paradox, tune in to Science & Futurism with Isaac Arthur. 

Do you have favorites? Share them with the community in comments.

== Political aside: A rightist Republican is right about moving the Earth! ==

Did the Earth move for you too? When House Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas made an argument about climate change at a subcommittee hearing that appeared to suggest the US Bureau of Land Management might act to shift the Earth’s orbit, in order to fight climate change.

 Most observers are about 80% sure that Gohmert was trying to be clever, asserting thus that no human interventions could avail against a changing climate - one of a dozen rightist arguments that all contradict each other, as heat waves and weather disruptions make it harder for the mad KGB/Fox incantation machine to stop folks from waking up. 

And yet…  well, the coincidence would make one smile... if it weren't possible that idiots like this would leave the planet a cinder.  But onward...

== Rocks And maybe riches out there… ==

Set to launch next year, the agency’s Psyche spacecraft will explore a metal-rich asteroid in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Alas, another example of where the excellent TV series Expanse got things wrong and didn't need to.

“A lonely meteorite that landed in the Sahara Desert in 2020 is older than Earth. The primeval space rock is about 4.6 billion years old, and is the oldest known example of magma from space. Its age and mineral content hint that the rock originated in our early solar system from the crust of a protoplanet.”  Around 75% of these protoplanet remnants seem to have originated from one source — possibly the asteroid 4 Vesta, but this one stands out. "No object with spectral characteristics similar to EC 002 has been identified to date."

Phil Plait (“Bad Astronomy”) reveals how sophisticated are the new programs being created by clever researchers like Jean-Luc Margot, that let radio astronomers sift for “signals” out there… and more important, eliminate the artifacts that originate from our own civilization. Hint, the latter is 100%... so far.

== More fermis… Phos-scarcity? ==

Among the few people who actually know about the shortage crisis of the 2030s - Phosphorus - many first heard about it in my novel Existence, wherein the king of Morocco is the richest man in the world because of it. Now come estimates that Earth may be exceptionally well endowed with the stuff, compared to elsewhere in the galaxy. Does this help to explain the Fermi Paradox / Great Silence?

"Dr. Brin, you brought to our attention the looming phosphorus crisis. It turns out, in regards to alien life and civilizations, that the crisis might be literally universal and Earth has life only because it has a local cache of phosphorus.  What is really depressing is a galactic shortage of phosphorus severely limits the amount of life, human or otherwise, can expand through the galaxy."

Mentioned earlier, Isaac Arthur is always interesting... and cites me pretty often... and he focuses on this problem here.

== Technologic marvels ==

With robotically constructed  foundation, walls, and utility conduits, this 1,407-square-foot Riverhead, New York house cost half as much to build as a normal one.

Incredible scientific advances… including those that gave us covid vaccines… have been propelled by nanopore technology: breaking up samples into tiny constituents that can then be appraised and tallied and then – using computers – that data recombined to model, say, a whole genome! A fantastic technology… that a startup now wants to turn into a gaming console! Yes, taking the amateur science trend (See my past postings about the “age of amateurs”) and combining it with gaming, Huh. Well… it is a game console you’re gonna have to clean and resupply pretty often. But are we on our way to Existenz?  See the Wefunder video.

See Ten Breakthrough Technologies of 2021, such as messenger RNA vaccines and hyper-accurate positioning. 

Fascinating progress in analyzing and modeling the fabulous brass Antikythera Device that (it seems) hand cranked models of the motion of 7 planets. An incredible glimpse of lost technology and science… which (to me) raises the twin issues of “how much else was lost from ancient Chinese, Roman and other civilizations?” and more important “Why were their memories of such skills so fragile?”  I think I know why.

Speaking of spinning disks, spin-memory disks aren’t extinct yet! In order to stay ahead of flash memory for cloud storage use, the solution may be two new techniques called microwave and heat-assisted magnetic recording, or MAMR and HAMR. These use an energy source, either a microwave-generating device called a "spin-torque oscillator" or a laser, or change the platter material's coercivity. This, coupled with a more stable platter material and a smaller write head, lets you pack more data – 20TB or much more - onto each platter.   

And yes, analog disk computation plays a crucial role in letting six refugee/immigrant races do calculations and change their fate, without access to digital computers... all in the Second Uplift Trilogy of Brightness Reef, Infinity's Shore and Heanven's Reach. Now all refreshed, updated with beautiful new covers! 

The newest U.S. Army night vision goggles are wow.

Amazing images of Sicily’s Mt. Etna erupting...

Finally, are you concerned about the mania that is driving many of our neighbors to recite anti-science and anti-fact incantations? There are ways we could restore the role of facts and objective, verifiable reality in politics, society and a recovered notion of grownup negotiation.  See the Fact Act. 

A potpourri of ironies for the weekend

Baseball fans, here's a unique (true?) tale of how - just after World War II - a baseball team consisting of Stratford-on-Avon actors and ex-POWs would dress in Elizabethan blouses and crush teams from nearby US air bases. "A dream team "with Paul Robeson (Othello) on first base, Sam Wanamaker (Iago) on second, Laurence Olivier (Coriolanus) on third and Peter O'Toole (Shylock) at shortstop. Albert Finney (a utility player) used to catch for me while Charles Laughton (King Lear) was the plate umpire. When Laughton said, 'Strike three, you're out!' nobody argued."  How I hope some time traveler secretly recorded their baseline trash talk and banter.  What a cute moment for a short story setting. Read: The Strangest Baseball Team in History.

And while we're on the Bard… Ah, consistency. Here is a hilarious moment of aha! realization… something we always knew, but without ever putting the pieces together. You will slap your forehead and cry "d'oh!"

== Inspirational ==

John Cleese has a very large brain! This speech about "how creativity works" is incisive and brilliant! "Telling people how to be creative is easy. It's only being it that's difficult."

Also watch Richard Turure on TED: My invention that made peace with lions. An inspiring young fellow.

One public servant I very much admire… retired Defense Secretary Robert Gates… talking about another who I deemed (elsewhere) to have been the "Man of the 20th Century," George C Marshall. There are grownups in this world. Amid all the preening and posturing, take solace in that fact.

Okay, name for me another species that can do this sort of stuff.  All right, I can't do any of it either… still…

British humor site The Poke presents The Internet: A Warning from History -- an optimistic vision of the future in which humankind has managed (by 2068) to break free from the shackles of YouTube, Flash plug-in crashes, and even, somehow,  cat videos.

Best rope-jumper in the world!

== And disturbing ==

Great big conspiracy flow chart.  It covers almost 15% of the crazy space!

Fascinating how gender imbalance and the one-child policy are affecting weddings and the "bride price" in China.

== And scientific ==

An auspicious anniversary? On 25 April, 1953, Nature published "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" by J.D.Watson and F.H.C.Crick, setting out the double helix structure of the molecule of heredity. This year is DNA@60.   Now watch the estimable Roger Bingham interview James Watson in an enlightening Science Channel Show. Or read Watson's The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.

As the world’s first building powered by algae, the 15-unit Bio Intelligent Quotient (BIQ) House generates biomass and heat with the assistance of 129 integrated glass bioreactor panels (read: micro-algae harvesters). The algae flourish and multiply in a regular cycle until they can be harvested. They are then separated from the rest of the algae and transferred as a thick pulp to the technical room of the BIQ. The little plants are then fermented in an external biogas plant, so that they can be used again to generate biogas.

A stunt, you say?  I know the folks at Heliae, who have announced the launch of their patent pending micro-algae production platform, using sunlight and waste carbon to produce high-value products from algae.

The "Grasshopper" reusable rocket prototype shattered its own record, reaching a height of 820 feet. That's more than triple its previous record.  Oh, and ain't this the way a rocket ship s'pzed ta be?

== Sci fi items ==

Daniel H. Wilson, the young scientist author of engaging novels such as Amped and Robopocalypse gives a talk at Carnegie-Mellon about robotics in science fiction and how it relates to both real technology and our visions of the future.  Bright and funny.  Also,  he reminds me SO much of myself at that hot new author phase… including the hat!

Star Wars on Trial is available on Kindle, and only 99 cents!

…and miscellaneous…

Seven billion people on one browser page (one mile long). Don't send this to your printer...

View inside a Redbox Kiosk.

And finally, compiled by Cracked.com: Five excellent Sci Fi short films worth watching.

General Insights into the Future

I've continued posting my new series of intellectually stimulating 10 minute monologues on YouTube:

Grand-scale reasons to explore space.

Space Exploration:Planning our next steps in beyond Earth

Space Exploration: - Mining the sky: Are there economic incentives? 

Space Exploration: The Big Picture, excitement? warp drive?

Space Exploration:Ambitious tech- tethers, solar sails, space elevators.

The Transparent Society: Part 1: 

The Transparent Society: Part 2: 

      =====     =====     =====

I’m offline for a little while, so here’s just a dump of some cool/interesting items I’ve collected...

Anybody on Google Buzz?  I am now!

The online comic Schlock Mercenary had this bit about Uplift... funny! (Thanks Robert.)

See a couple of eye-opening brief articles from the Globalist:
Ending Gridlock in the U.S. Senate and
Shanghai's Coming Out Party

See a directory of ways to participate in space exploration. interact + connect with the space community.  Great signs of an age of amateurs!  But it isn’t as recent as some think.  I was an active amateur variable star observer as a teenager, way back in the 1960s!  See:

See what a boy did with a GPS tracking device, a weather balloon, and some duct tape. 

MIT neuroscientists demonstrated that they can influence people's moral judgments by disrupting a specific brain region — the  right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). This sheds light on  how the brain constructs morality.They found that the subjects' ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people's intentions — for example, a failed murder attempt — was impaired when this region was subjected to an electrical burst. 

Wiki Leaks is now under attack by the same people who campaigned against ACORN.  At least ACORN had some sins to atone for, but burying WikiLeaks is all about destroying hopeful trends in general transparency. Visit their site.  Make a donation!

“Dark Flow” of galactic clusters indicates a “direction” in our universe and possibly lots of matter “beyond” it. 

Fascinating article about the quirks and “buts” in evolution theory.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/19/evolution-darwin-natural-selection-genes-wrong

The the blogger at “Asymptosis” seems an especially bright fellow. Worth a look For example in this posting, he comments on research by Jonathan Haidt (that I’ve talked about many times) to the effect that:

Republicans (on an oversimplifying average) care equally about five spheres of morality: avoiding harm, fairness, group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity.

Democrats mostly care about only two: avoiding harm and fairness. 

The blogger adds that, according to Stephen Pinker: Libertarians look much more like liberals than like conservatives on most measures, EXCEPT those that have anything to do with compassion, on which libertarians are lower than liberals AND conservatives....  But here’s where it gets even more interesting (for me at least). A commenter suggests that “libertarianism essentially amounts to is the political expression of autism.”

Yipe!  Of course, this could help explain why a movement whose basic premise is so attractive to American psyches does so badly in elections.  Or the fact that libertarians who extol cut-throat competition tend to have done very badly at it, in real life.  Or their historical amnesia, ignoring who - across 4,000 years - were the real oppressors.  I do quibble with Haidt’s simplistic “2 vs 5” morality check, though.  In fact, many liberals are VERY attentive to “group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity.”  Their loyalty is often to more abstract versions of group, authority and purity... and it is that level of abstraction that I believe constitutes the real difference between them and conservatives.

     =====     =====     =====

Finally, do not let your tea-drinking brother in law avoid acknowledging two facts:

1) that the "socialist" Obamacare bill was first written at the Heritage Foundation as the GOP alternative to Hillarycare, in 1993, therefore the neocon screeching hate-fest is entirely fact-free.

2) that a certain foreign, hostile (but brilliant) royal family owns up to 20% of Fox.  Now how would they be using that influence?

Enough.  I am off line for a while.  Keep up the fight.  NOT for "the left" or even liberalism.  I care little about narrowing my range of choices, which is why I most despise those who have made the Right an impossible  shopping ground for modern solutions. No. Fight for the general Western Enlightenment, for the American Experiment, and a return to sanity among many of our brothers and sisters who've mixed Koolaid with their tea.

Space Exploration, Methane Blurps and Podcast Rants

 A couple of hurried announcement-notes, then a quick-drafted thought on methane blurps and cycles of history:

1) With the help of a techie-camerawoman (for whom I feel considerable fondness), I've begun recording and posting some brief (for me) monologues on YouTube.

Space Exploration Part 1: Planning our next steps in Space  

...followed by...

Space Exploration Part 2 - Mining the sky: Are there economic incentives for exploring space? Can space exploration pay for itself? More space-related postings will go up soon, as well as another on the notion of "cycles" of falling civilization.

2) See a thought provoking snippet from the Globalist: "In the 1980s and 1990s, workers from China, India and the former Soviet bloc contributed 1.47 billion new workers to the global labor pool — effectively doubling the size of the world's now-connected workforce, bringing little capital with them. Even Marx knew that the capital/labor ratio is critical. The more capital each worker has, the higher their productivity and pay. A decline in the global capital/labor ratio shifts the balance of power as more workers compete for working with scarce capital."

This ratio of scarcity explains some of the strong position of capital today and even (perhaps) the present hard push toward revived oligarchy, restoring the normal human governance model, recently displaced by the Enlightenment.  That push may be all the more intense because new capital is forming at a furious rate, especially in Asia. Hence the ratio should correct itself within a couple of decades, especially as population levels off.  The would-be restorers of that ancient pattern may feel they only have a little time.

WELL THIS IS ONE BIG THING I WORRIED ABOUT...

For years I've prophesied that the biggest shoe in the climate mess had yet to drop... the potential (and possibly sudden) release of vast stores of methane that had been sequestered, either in permafrost or in hydrate ices under polar arctic seas.

John Barnes also wrote of this possibility in his fine novel MOTHER OF STORMS (1994). Now come signs it has begun."The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world's oceans," said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF's International Arctic Research Center. "Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap." Earlier periods of rapid climate change have been associated with sudden releases of methane from the seabed.

If this proves to be a true tipping point event, and if dire consequences ensue, it will require re-adjustments on all sides. On the right, it will mean eating crow and admitting they were wrong - something no conservative ever does without prying the words out of him, with a crowbar of facts.  It might also be time to hold the top leaders of the Denialist Cabal accountable in civil court, if their tactics involved deliberate obstruction of informed palliation of harm, as in the Tobacco judgments.

But the left will have to adapt, as well. And one thing they must surrender is their monomania that Global Climate Change can only be dealt with at the demand side -- through conservation, energy efficiency, sustainable development and almost puritanical self-control.  Hey, I am in favor of much of that, as shown by my novel EARTH (1990)  But clearly, liberals may also have to suck it up and accept the need for measures that address global warming directly.  For example via a suite of methods called Geoengineering.

I know some workers in this field.  Many of the schemes are presently impractical -- e.g. giant sunshades to reduce light levels striking the Earth.  Others have potentially dangerous hysteresis effects or are inherently hard to control, like sending plumes of sunlight-scattering aerosols into the upper atmosphere.  Certainly, any prudent attempts at geoengineering should start with things that

1) have no overshoot potential
2) emulate natural processes
3) are easy to stop, cold
4) have side benefits.

Hands down, that means going back to experiments in ocean fertilization.  Earlier attempts, dumping iron dust into the sea, had mixed results and resulted in some worrisome acidification. My favorite alternative would be to create tide-driven bottom-stirrers... as depicted in EARTH -- that simply emulate the natural process by which ocean currents raise nutrients from the ocean floor in some regions, stimulating plankton to draw CO2 out of the air, and also turning sea-deserts into rich fisheries. This possible win-win seems worth a few more-than-tepid experiments.

----------
ENLIST THIS SMART GUY IN THE CAUSE

Finally, I was cued onto a cogent and well-written "big perspective" by Mark Rosenfelder - of the kind that I am wont to spin off, now and then. It can be seen at the zompist site, and though written in 2000, it reads as if written yesterday. Rosenfelder addresses contemporary ironies, like "If liberalism won all its battles, why is it retreating?"

The general topic that he tries to cover is one that I call "What ever happened to the can-do, problem-solving spirit called modernism?"  Way back in 2005, I penned a 20 part series about this, exploring the question from many angles, then waited for some journalist to come and offer to expand it into a book (!)

Among many things I like about this essay -- Rosenfelder distinguishes (as I do) between Liberalism and The Left, two very different movements that are often allies toward particular goals, e.g. civil rights, but that are at-odds over their fundamental models of both human nature and how a better society might unleash human potential. Other topics... (no time to address them all)... he dallies with "two dimensional" political spectra... none of which are as good as my own (naturally ;-) But decide for yourself.

But at least he shares my contempt for the current, absurd (and French) "left-right" axis. His appraisal of the bestiary of American politics is interesting and insightful, though here I diverge in several ways.  For example, I think I have a better explanation for the right's abortion fixation. (The "Jesus Problem.")  His analysis of libertarianism, while hilariously on-target, misses some core points, like the way I challenge libertarians to tell me who was oppressing freedom in any decade, on any continent, across the last 4,000 years. Read Adam Smith, and then tell me how you'll prevent the recurrence of feudalism. All told, a fascinating romp by a fellow who truly qualifies as an open-minded, contrary-ornery wiseguy.

===Misc stuff! ===

Neil de Grasse Tyson on the space elevator.

Brilliant, if true.

What has happened to the Atlantic, though!  Formerly a cesspool of grumbling, anti-future maunderings, it now runs vigorous articles appraising the future, from Nicholas Carr’s dyspeptic but interesting ”Is Google Making Us Stoopid?” to this recent piece by my fellow hard-charging modernist, Jamais Cascio, “Get Smarter.”  Go look. 

Another prediction from EARTH (1992) -- Tidal power is taking off, in Europe. (Now a further prediction.  These “snakes” will also be designed to stir bottom mud and fertilize currents. )

Further articles about my opposition to METi - or “Message to ET.” One ran in the New York Times, another in the New Scientist.

See a wiki about a fun, mind-stretching concept by the renowned singularitarian John Smart.

World’s weirdest animals!  I knew of maybe half of these.  The rest?  Eewww!  Use em as aliens in a scifi pic. 

“A two-year-long interview with Slawek Wojtowicz” the Polish SF scholar.  Mostly for a Polish audience of readers.