Monthly Archives: May 2021

Mars has long been a target for future human settlement, but the more the space community thinks about it, the more challenging it seems. Stephen Ashworth reviews some of the issues and proposes an interim solution that he hopes will inspire others to act.

A huge amount of interest has been generated in recent months by the flight tests of Starship, SpaceXs super-heavy rocket designed to enable the colonisation of Mars. Meanwhile, the Mars Society has attracted entries from no fewer than 175 teams from around the world for its Mars City State Design Competition, exploring architectural concepts for a Martian city of one million inhabitants. And in February 2021, three new robotic explorers from the USA, China and the United Arab Emirates arrived successfully at Mars.

Momentum is thus building towards astronaut flights to Mars within as little as the next 10 or 20 years, and there is an increasingly real possibility that a permanent settlement will have been established on the red planet before the end of the century.

A self-sufficient human colony on Mars would clearly be of immense value. It would not only serve as backup in the event of any global downturn in the progress of civilisation on Earth, whether through political extremism, economic collapse, war, or environmental disaster. It would also act as proof of concept for the view that humanity has an open-ended future of expansion into the rest of the universe, and by doing so help to ensure the security of life on Earth as well. There are, however, two problems with this rosy vision.

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On Mars as it is on Earth - preparing for settlement - Room: The Space Journal - ROOM Space Journal

NASA has captured the first-ever colour image of neighbouring planet Mars.

Yesterday (April 25), NASAs Mars Ingenuity helicopter, a small, remote-operated drone, took flight for a third time on the Red Planet. Rising to a height of 5 metresbefore speeding off laterally for 50 metres, the miniature chopper was in the air for a total of 80 seconds, during which it successfully captured the first-ever colour photo of Mars.

The photo shows the planets rocky landscape, which is covered in an expanse of red-orange sand dunes. According to NASA, the photo is the first color image of the Martian surface taken by an aerial vehicle while it was aloft.

With this third flight in the history books, the Ingenuity Mars helicopter team is looking ahead to planning its fourth flight in a few days time. On its first flight, Ingenuity spent roughly 40 seconds off the ground, hovering just about three metres, while the second test went hire, closer to five metres, spending approximately one minute in the air.

The biggest difficulty in flying on the Red Planet is the extremely thin atmosphere, which has just one per cent of the density here on Earth, making it hard for the Ingenuity to get off the ground.

Also, the distance from Earth to Mars puts remote control out of question, as it takes radio waves over 16 minutes to cover the distance between the two planets. Instead, Ingenuity takes its commands from the Perseverance rover, the missions main robot.

NASA is taking the Ingenuity helicopter on two more flights before Perseverance goes on its primary mission of searching for life in Mars Jezero crater. If the mission is successful, this will mean that work can begin on building colonies on the planet.

Last week, NASA successfully conducted an experiment to create oxygen on the planets surface. This is a critical first step at converting carbon dioxide to oxygen on Mars, Jim Reuter, an associate administrator for NASAs Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD), said in a statement. MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilisation Experiment) has more work to do, but the results from this technology demonstration are full of promise as we move toward our goal of one day seeing humans on Mars.

This is all good news forElon Musk, whose SpaceX project hopes to have the first people living on Mars by 2030, and an ambitious target of one million people by 2050.

Architecture studio ABIBOO has alsorevealed its plans to create the first self-sustainable city on the Red Planet, which is set to be ready for residents in 2100.The city will be called Nwa, and will be located at Tempe Mensa on one of the Martian cliffs. Its position inside of a rock on the steep cliff will protect its 250,000 residents from radiation and meteorites, while still giving them access to indirect sunlight.

Speaking to Dazed in a previous interview, Mars Society president Robert Zubrin said: The idea was to create not just a base where a lot of science can be supported, but to create a society which will only grow if people want to live there.

Enjoy this clip from the the Ingenuitys third flight below.

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NASA has captured the first-ever colour photo of Mars - Dazed

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to colonize outer space to save humanity, but they couldn't care less about protecting the rights of workers here on earth.

Musk's SpaceX just won a $2.9 billion NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon, beating out Bezos.

The money isn't a big deal for either of them. Musk is worth $179.7 billion. Bezos, $197.8 billion. Together, that's almost as much as the bottom 40 percent of Americans combined.

And the moon is only their stepping-stone.

Musk says SpaceX will land humanson Mars by 2026and wants to establish a colony by 2050. Its purpose, he says, will be to ensure the continued survival of our species.

"If we make life multiplanetary, there may come a day when some plants and animals die out on Earth but are still alive on Mars," hetweeted.

Bezos is also aiming to build extraterrestrial colonies, but in space rather than on Mars. Heenvisions"very large structures, miles on end" that will "hold a million people or more each."

But Musk and Bezos are treating their workers like, well, dirt.

Last spring, after calling government stay-at-home orders "fascist" and tweeting "FREE AMERICA NOW," Musk reopened his Tesla factory in Fremont, California before health officials said it safe to do so. Almost immediately,10Tesla workers came down with the virus. As cases mounted, Musk fired workers who took unpaid leave. Seven months later, at least450Tesla workers had been infected.

Musk's production assistants, as they're called, earn $19 an hour hardly enough to afford rent and other costs of living in northern California. Musk isvirulently anti-union. A few weeks ago, the National Labor Relations Boardfoundthat Tesla illegally interrogated workers over suspected efforts to form a union, fired one and disciplined another for union-related activities, threatened workers if they unionized and barred employees from communicating with the media.

Bezos isn't treating his earthling employees much better. His warehouses impose strict production quotas and subject workers to seemingly arbitrary firings, total surveillance and 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks often not enough time to get to a bathroom and back. Bezos boasts that his workers get $15 an hour, but that comes to about $31,000 a year for a full-time worker, less than half the U.S. median family income. And no paid sick leave.

Bezos has fired at least two employees who publicly complained about lack of protective equipment during the pandemic. To thwart the recent union drive in Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon required workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned they'd have to pay union dues (untrue Alabama is a "right-to-work" state), and threatened them with lost pay and benefits.

Musk and Bezos are the richest people in America and their companies are among the country's fastest growing. They thereby exert huge influence on how other chief executives understand their obligations to employees.

The gap between the compensation of CEOs and average workers is already at a record high. They inhabit different worlds.

If Musk and Bezos achieve their extraterrestrial aims, these worlds could be literally different. Most workers won't be able to escape into outer space. A few billionaires are already lining up.

The super-rich have always found means of escaping the perils of everyday life. During the plagues of the 17thcentury, European aristocrats decamped to their country estates. During the 2020 pandemic, wealthy Americans headed to the Hamptons, their ranches in Wyoming or their yachts.

The rich have also found ways to protect themselves from the rest of humanity in fortified castles, on hillsides safely above smoke and sewage, in grand mansions far from the madding crowds. Some of today's super rich have created doomsday bunkers in case of nuclear war or social strife.

But as earthly hazards grow not just environmental menaces but also social instability related to growing inequality escape will become more difficult. Bunkers won't suffice. Not even space colonies can be counted on.

I'm grateful to Musk for making electric cars and to Bezos for making it easy to order stuff online. But I wish they'd set better examples for protecting and lifting the people who do the work.

It's understandable that the super wealthy might wish to escape the gravitational pull of the rest of us. But there's really no escape. If they're serious about survival of the species, they need to act more responsibly toward working humans here on terra firma.

Excerpt from:

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos: the great escape - Salon

In 2007, actor Robert Downey Jr was doing research for his role in the superhero movie Iron Man. He played reformed arms dealer Tony Stark. To portray this fictional, self-described genius, billionaire, playboy [and] philanthropist, he consulted SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who gave him a tour of his Tesla facility in Los Angeles. According to Musks biographer Ashlee Vance, this Hollywood endorsement was a big ego boost for the attention-hungry tycoon.

Tony Stark dies to save the Earth from the apocalypse in the 2019 blockbuster Avengers: Endgame. In the real world, however, expecting our billionaires to display such self-sacrifice would be woefully naive.

Plutocrats such as Jeff Bezos have resoundingly failed to use their bottomless wealth to help the world respond to the dual shocks of Covid-19 and economic depression. In contrast, the super-rich experienced a bumper year of profits and accumulation.

The worlds billionaires which comprise fewer than 3000 people saw their collective wealth increase by $4trillion, or 54%. Such income inequality has become so glaring that even an ultra-capitalist institution like the International Monetary Fund has now called for a new pandemic wealth tax.

In contrast, the financial and business press has continued to produce fawning coverage of billionaire excess and wealth hoarding. Publications such as Forbes Africa, with headlines like Why $825 million means nothing to me, flaunt extreme wealth in a way that contrasts jarringly with the dysfunction of everyday life. This is especially stark during a pandemic, when the average shopper stands in a physically distanced queue, face mask on, while Musk, the Pretoria-born oligarch, looks smugly into his bright future from a magazine cover featuring the words, The Richest Man on Earth: The Billionaire with Interplanetary Ambitions.

According to this boosterism, plutocrats are the vanguard of human civilisation, offering incredible technological solutions to social problems. At the same time, billionaires such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are also disingenuously framed as modest, relatable technocrats. The meritocracy myth creates the belief that anyone can become super-rich with enough personal dedication and grit.

Yet, as Rob Larson demonstrates in his book Bit Tyrants: The Political Economy of Silicon Valley, platforms such as Microsoft and Amazon were built through the ruthless crushing of smaller commercial rivals, political lobbying and overworked labour forces.

In the 2010s, for example, conditions were so bad at the iPhone complex in Shenzhen, China, that hundreds of workers took their own lives, which lead the company to install suicide proof nets around buildings.

Bezos, meanwhile, has responded to exposure of the dismal working conditions at Amazon warehouses with a public relations campaign in which online bots pose as cheerful members of his workforce.

Big tech is now in control of large sections of the global economy. Platforms such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook have become monopolies that oversee how people conduct business, receive information and communicate.

The most recent historical period in which individual capitalists enjoyed such concentrated wealth and power was the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th century. In the United States, robber barons, tycoons such as Corneilus Vanderbilt and JP Morgan, owned vast industrial monopolies over key infrastructure such as railroads. The robber barons crushed smaller rivals and unleashed private security forces to violently clamp down on striking workers. As JP Morgan once said, I owe the public nothing.

The greed and arrogance of the robber barons ultimately lead to calls for reform. Tycoons such as Andrew Carnegie worked to soften their image by donating money to charity and keeping their excessive lifestyles out of the public eye. But, as Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk write, the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher counter-revolution of the 1980s unleashed the new and greatest gilded age.

Neoliberal policies and deregulation have allowed an unprecedented transfer of wealth upwards. It was also accompanied by a cultural shift towards conspicuous consumption, in which the wealthy are seen as the ultimate sources of value and social progress.

This reverent attitude towards extreme wealth often blurs into quasi-religious devotion, such as when Fortune magazine published a 2016 cover depicting Bezos as an avatar of the Hindu god Lord Vishnu. But deification of the super-rich is also combined with the paradoxical idea that anyone can become a billionaire through sheer willpower. A new self-help book by a South African investor epitomises this. According to The Billionaire Mindset, wealth can be achieved by rejecting self-imposed limitations.

The hollowness of this dream is revealed in the deceit and manipulation that accompanies start-up culture, as chief executives often exaggerate and distort the impact of their technology. An emblematic example is the rise and fall of celebrity con artist Elizabeth Holmes, who raised almost a billion dollars from investors by presenting herself as the Steve Jobs of medical technology. But her company, Theranos, was outright fabricating claims that it possessed a revolutionary new form of blood testing.

This myth of the self-made, start-up billionaire omits both how the likes of Musk were born into affluent backgrounds, and the political and economic contexts that allowed them to gain such concentrated wealth and influence.

Much of the internet and information technology of today has its origins in government-funded military research during the Cold War. From the late 1970s, programmers and technicians in Silicon Valley built on this existing technology and created a revolution in personal computing.

Inspired by the counterculture of the 1960s, computers were seen as more than just machines but as tools for personal emancipation. But the other side of this libertarian utopianism was a fanatical embrace of the unrestrained free market.

In the 1990s, publications such as the widely influential Wired magazine said capitalism was a revolutionary force for change that would blow away existing hierarchies and authorities, leaving a frictionless world of commerce and instant communication.

According to Wired, tech chief executives were the vanguard of this revolution. People like Gates were not only successful businesspeople but also disruptors forcing rapid technological change on society.

But, as Keith White wrote in 1994, this obscured how much of the business of Silicon Valley was exploitation as usual, driven by particularly unscrupulous executives. Breathless tech-speak normalised corporate control of the internet and presented government regulation and social obligations as antiquated forces that stood in the way of progress.

Despite this excessive marketing, companies such as Microsoft were not universally loved. In particular, Gates was seen to embody corporate greed as he used underhanded tactics to ensure a global monopoly over computer operating systems.

In contrast to his current image, pop culture depicted him as a sinister figure. According to the title of Douglas Couplands 1995 novel, his employees were treated as Microserfs. Films like South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999) offered scathing depictions of the worlds then richest man.

Gates faced an even more serious backlash when he was forced to testify at Congressional hearings about Microsoft business practices in 2001. Under scrutiny he came off as arrogant and evasive, more a standard robber baron than a tech visionary. This was echoed in 2018 when Zuckerberg gave a similarly damaging congressional appearance.

The hearing pushed the Microsoft chief executive to adopt a softer public image by starting the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This organisation is often assumed to be doing good work in health and education because of the large sums of money it donates publicly to initiatives. But it and other corporate philanthropy projects are run like venture capitalist firms rather than charitable organisations. The Gates Foundation, for example, explicitly promotes corporate interests and neoliberal economic policy, while also increasing its founders personal influence over global healthcare.

As the pandemic has highlighted, billionaire charity has failed to address the crisis. It has been public institutions and government doctors and nurses who have most effectively responded to Covid-19.

Relying on the largess and generosity of the billionaire class will not solve social ills. Futurists like Musk and Bezos combine personal narcissism, including the belief that they are messianic figures, with base self-interest. Instead of paying their workers decent wages or sponsoring constructive social projects, they are investing their obscene personal fortunes in space travel.

They are not doing this for exploration or to increase our understanding of the cosmos. Rather, Musk and Bezos seem to think that space is a new frontier for them to occupy and exploit. But their grandiose schemes to build space platforms and Mars colonies are often completely detached from reality.

While they claim they are securing a permanent human presence in outer space, they deliberately omit how global warming, ecological collapse and catastrophic social inequality are already making life more difficult for the billions of ordinary people who dont have billions of dollars.

While Gates has now appointed himself an expert on climate change with his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, his dismal solutions include extending corporate control and maintaining the economic status quo.

The future that Gates, Musk and Bezos imagine is determined by power and privilege, where top-down technological solutions are handed down by elites. As Lizzie OShea observes, In the digital age, we are witnessing an ideological revitalisation of the idea that utopia can be achieved by building more extreme versions of technology capitalism.

Rather than expanding democracy or equality, the cultural veneration of the billionaire class is having sinister political ramifications. In recent years, the growth of extreme inequality and global monopolies has led many sociological commentators to warn that society is retreating into neofeudalism, echoing the feudal systems of pre-modern times. The increased fragmentation of state power and economic precarity and unemployment makes it seem possible that we are witnessing the emergence of a new system of peasants and kings, with the rulers being tech billionaires and global financiers.

The future being built is one where billionaires hoard their vast fortunes in luxury fortified enclaves, while climate change and economic suffering make life a bleak struggle for the vast majority.

Real social and political change has never been handed down voluntarily by the wealthy and powerful. Instead it has been won from popular struggle, as ordinary people come together in unions and social movements to agitate for lasting change. Many of these hard-won advances from the right to collective bargaining to laws against monopoly are now being undermined by the super-rich. Instead of being benevolent public figures, they are the overbearing, entitled beneficiaries of a rigged and increasingly dysfunctional system.

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Gods of the market - newframe.com

An international research team led by the Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands) has used 3D printers to turn algae into a living and environmentally friendly material. This new material has multiple potential uses. One of the most promising applications is in the form of artificial leaves.

According to TU Delft, these are materials that mimic real leaves. They use sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and energy, just like leaves do during photosynthesis, the university stated in a press release.

PhD student Kui Yu says that the artificial leaves make it possible to produce renewable energy. Yes is especially beneficial in places where plants dont grow well, such as in future space colonies. We have created a material that produces energy as soon as it is exposed to light. The biodegradable nature of the material itself and the recyclable nature of microalgal cells make it a sustainable living material

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The living cells in the materials can also pick up on signals in the environment and respond to them. This may eventually lead to a new category of photosynthetic and responsive living materials, as Elvin Karana of the Faculty of Industrial Design explains.

Karana: What if our everyday products were alive: could sense, grow, adapt, and eventually die? This unique collaborative project shows that this question is beyond the realm of speculative design. We hope our article will spark new conversations between design and science communities and inspire new directions for an investigation into future photosynthetic living materials.

The full study can be read in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

TU Delft took bacterial cellulose as the basic material in order to make the artificial leaves. This is a non-living organic compound that is produced and secreted by bacteria.

This bacterial cellulose produces a material with a number of unique mechanical properties, such as flexibility, strength and the ability to retain its shape even when twisted, crushed or deformed in some other way.

The research team then used a 3D printer to apply live algae to the bacterial cellulose. When you do this, you could compare the bacterial cellulose to paper in a printer, while the living algae act as the ink, as TU Delft describes it.

The combination of living microalgae and non-living bacterial cellulose creates substances that have the photosynthetic quality of the algae and the robustness of the bacterial cellulose. The material is both strong and durable, while at the same time environmentally friendly, biodegradable, and easy to scale up.

The plant-like nature of the material allows it to feed itself for weeks by means of photosynthesis. Whats more, it can also self-regenerate. A small sample of the material can be grown into something bigger within a short period of time.

What else can you do with microalgae? Read more about it in our archive.

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Using 3D-printed microalgae to make artificial leaves - Innovation Origins