Monthly Archives: January 2022

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently launched a special challenge for everyone who wants to create innovative ideas about sustainable waste management.

The so-called "Waste to Base" campaign is looking for creative individuals who have interesting ideas to lessen trash, carbon dioxide, and other materials ahead of the upcoming Mars mission.

(Photo : Max Letek from Unsplash)NASA recently launched a special challenge for everyone who wants to create innovative ideas about sustainable waste management.

NASA, together with crowdsourcing site HeroX, announced the start of the "Waste to Base" challenge as part of the sustainability projects of the Red Planet exploration. The space agency is looking for people who have ideas about waste management.

According to the official website ofHeroX, the challenge will tackle all possible ways of converting waste into base materials such as propellants. The organization wrote that they will integrate these methods together so that the upcoming spacecraft launch will only carry the lowest possible mass.

On top of that, HeroX also shared its ideas for waste conversion or management, which fall under four categories namely: Carbon dioxide (CO2) processing, trash, fecal waste, and foam packaging material.

Related Article:NASA's Curiosity Rover Picks up 'Unusual' Carbon on Mars-Is It a Sign of Ancient Life?

According to Space.com, the challenge will welcome every interested participant until March 15. The total price will be $24,000 and some winners would receive $1,000 per head. The announcement of the winner/s will be on April 22.

"The challenge is looking for your ideas for how to convert different waste streams into the propellant, and into useful materials, that can then be made into needed things and cycled through multiple times. While a perfectly efficient cycle is unlikely, ideal solutions will result in little to no waste," the website wrote.

For the eligibility requirements among competitors, you can click this linkfor more details. To sum it up, the aspiring innovator should be 18 years old and above.

Moreover, a person can choose to compete by himself/herself or even join a team with other individuals. As long as their jurisdiction does not fall under the US federal sanctions, they are eligible to join the Mars sustainability mission.

HeroX also added that the novel concepts which will win the competition will be included in the whitepaper. They will be written in the roadmap for "future technology development work," as what NASA's logistics reduction project mentioned in its description.

Currently, NASA has not yet announced the final date for the Mars mission. However, speculations pointed out that the space agency could initiate it in the next decade.

In the meantime, the space agency is focused on bringing astronauts to the moon as part of the Artemis project. These programs will help NASA to shape possible design ideas for future Mars exploration.

Meanwhile, SpaceX Elon Musk lamented the idea of declining fertility rates. According to him, this would hinder his plans to build a Mars colony someday, per Tech Times.

At the same time, NASA is also facing a dilemma regarding the astronaut shortage for the upcoming lunar mission.

Read Also: Radian to Develop Single-Stage-to-Orbit Space Plane | Point-to-Point Travel on Earth Possible?

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NASA 'Waste to Base' Challenge: Sustainable Waste Management Ideas For Mars Mission Now Open | Here's Everything You Need to Know - Tech Times

Hysterical headlines are proliferating over a Twitter exchange between Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, and e-commerce platform Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia musing over possible world population collapse and the desirability of creating synthetic wombs as a solution.

"Rich men suggest synthetic wombs should replace women," warns Insider Paper. Vice grumbles "Cryptocurrency Titans Newly Obsessed With Artificial Wombs." The always reliable Daily Star declares, "Billionaire crypto geeks say they want to replace human mothers with 'synthetic wombs.'"

This ginned up tempest of online moral outrage all began when Musk tweeted he is worried that there may not be enough people wanting to move to his Mars colonies due to a collapsing population here on Earth later in this century. Collapse may be too strong a characterization, but Musk is right that given prevailing global fertility trends world population will most likely peak around the middle of this century and fall back to about the current level by 2100.

Musk's glum observation about the impending shortage of Mars colonists provoked Lavingia to tweet back helpfully suggesting that greater investments in synthetic womb technologywould make having kids much faster, easier, cheaper, and more accessible. Buterin subsequently chimed in with a tweet noting that "synthetic wombs would remove the high burden of pregnancy, significantly reducing the inequality." The convenience of gestating offspring in synthetic wombs would presumably encourage people to have (decant?) more babies, some of whom would grow up to be Mars colonists.

Setting the headline hysterics aside for the moment, how close to perfecting artificial wombs are researchers? Back in 2017, researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia reported keeping premature lamb fetuses alive in plastic bags of amniotic fluid for four weeks. While the researchers' aim is a treatment for saving and bringing to term extremely premature human fetuses, this is nevertheless a step toward developing synthetic wombs for human gestatelings.

In March 2021, a team of Israeli researchers reported their success in growing developmentally normal mouse embryos for up to eleven days inside artificial uteruses. This is remarkable because full mouse gestation is around 20 days. In the future, saidPaul Tesar, a developmental biologist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine,"it is not unreasonable that we might have the capacity to develop a human embryo from fertilization to birth entirely outside the uterus."

Concerning Buterin's suggestion that the advent of artificial wombs could level the economic playing field between women and men - and not minimizing the burdens of pregnancy - the main problem is the subsequent unequal division of the labor with respect to child-rearing.

Let's set aside for the time being the social andethical issues that safely gestating human babies in bottles raise. Instead, let's focus on Musk's concerns about how to populate his Martian cities.

"Ectogenesis (artificial womb technology) could yield many benefits on Earth and provide a safe and sustainable way to populate an off-world human colony," argues Australian bioethicist Evie Kendall in her 2021 article "Ectogenesis for Space Exploration." Rather than use synthetic wombs to prevent population collapse here on Earth use them instead to populate Mars. Rocketing eggs and sperm to Mars has got to be a lot cheaper than transporting full-grown humans.

Kendall further explains, "Gestating foetuses in a protected and controlled environment could help prevent damage caused by radiation exposure, nutritional deficits or the impact of microgravity during pregnancy. This method of reproduction would also reduce the risks and burdens to female settlers and avoid losing members of the early settlement workforce to maternal morbidity and mortality."

Of course, Musk will have deal with the problem that many Martians born via synthetic wombs will inevitably be lured by the lush fleshpots of the mother planet into abandoning the rude rigors of colonial life to immigrate to Earth.

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Elon Musk, Artificial Wombs, and the Impending Shortage of Mars Colonists - Reason

Cognitive dissonance is making news today. One headline says the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the vaccination mandate issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for large businesses. Another headline says one-in-seven ICU beds in this state are occupied by COVID-19 patients, and Inslee is getting the National Guard to help out at the hospitals. A third headline pops up and says most of the COVID-19 patients being hospitalized are those who havent been vaccinated.

Inslee has also been talking about limiting non-emergency procedures at hospitals. I suppose the National Guard is meant to mitigate that. I have to wonder what he means by non-emergency treatment. Would breaking both arms like I did in 2006 constitute a you can wait situation? Maybe in a month well have enough staff to look at that?

In other dueling news, the past seven years are now being called the hottest in recorded history just as Elon Musk is stepping up the talk about colonizing the moon and Mars.

Im really skeptical about the plans to colonize Mars. My feeling is it may be a ruse to distract the competition while Musk goes about doing what he really wants to do, namely take over all the best contracts available from NASA. Mars is so far, and for what? Wheres the payoff? Earth already has potato farms.

At least Musk is considering having humans spend only short periods of time at a moon colony where most of the work could be done by robots. Any humans planted on Mars are necessarily not going back very soon. Theyll have to sit there literally waiting for the planets to realign.

It will be easy to confine most of the crewed missions to a lunar base to robot maintenance and repairs. Land, bring fresh robots, fix the old ones, go home. Oh, maybe there could be rotating crews monitoring the construction of habitats for later visitors. That would provide people with the experience that would help them build habitats on Mars, should that ever happen.

Ive often said Id rather see colonies built in orbiting space stations, but Im warming to the idea that a lunar base could be a good first step. It will be easier, at the beginning, to get materials from the moon, including water. A lunar base could grow fish and plants and supply orbiting stations with water and fertilizer for habitants, in addition to letting them have some of the excess fish.

We think mainly of colonized space as a way of preserving a remnant of humanity. But with global warming continuing apace, we need to start thinking about preserving fish. I dont mean fermenting and salting. I mean as species. If we can ever colonize the moon with people, theres no reason we cant colonize it with fish. And goats. We need goats so we can have cheese. The moon has to have cheese. There is no point living anywhere that doesnt have fish and cheese, potatoes, vodka, grapes, bread, hummus, olives, rice, seaweed, hominy grits, chickens and eggs for omelets. Also many kinds of peppers. We have to take these matters seriously right now while Musk is still planning a moon colony. Since Musk may very well be a space lizard for all we know, the time to let him know that humans need goats is now. I think he will listen, because I know he smokes pot. So he is part human.

Im not so sure about Jeff Bezos. Bezos I like because hes with me on colonizing orbiting space stations. But other than that Im afraid hes like the T-rex in Jurassic Park: His only interest in goats is as an appetizer before a plate of BBQ elephant.

Bezos has his own ruse similar to Musks involving Mars. Bezos has this totally bonkers idea that he can replace all the polluting factories of Earth with factories orbiting Earth. This will never happen, I say with the confidence of a man who knows hell be long dead before he can be proven wrong. Go on, try to prove me wrong youll die before he does it, too. Bezos will also die before he does it.

The point of building factories in orbit isnt to replace Earths polluting factories. Its to build better factories than the ones on Earth. I think Bezos knows that. Hes also probably thinking he can keep the unions out.

Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at drwes@realchangenews.org.

Read more of the Jan. 19-25, 2022 issue.

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Goats are the GOAT be sure to tell Elon - Real Change News

EVERY AGE GETS the mythology it deserves. Our age, it seems, deserves human spaceflight. The our requires qualification, of course: not everyone is enthralled by humans hurtling into the frigid nothingness of the outer void atop a pillar of exploding gases, and then returning to Earth with a splash (or a billowing parachute) but there is no denying that a vast portion of humanity is indeed gripped by this narrative. It has all the drama that European chroniclers used to ascribe to colonizing other continents, but this time no indigenous people get expropriated or slaughtered. Human spaceflight is a capacious container for the aspirations of mortals.

The outlines of the narrative are much the same in the United States or in Russia, in Cuba or in China, in France or in South Africa, but the heroes and the timing vary. The most frequently encountered version called the Space Race is confined to a dozen years over half a century ago. Its heroes are basically the two-and-a-half dozen American astronauts white, male, and overwhelmingly Protestant who participated in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs of the 1960s and early 1970s. Their story occupies the bulk of Colin Burgesss The Greatest Adventure: A History of Human Space Exploration. When Gene Cernan leaves the Moons surface on December 14, 1972, we are two-thirds of the way through this book, and less than 10 percent of the way through the over 550 people who have been in space. Burgess races through to SpaceX with diminished enthusiasm.

What is a Space Race if there is nobody to race with? Compared with most accounts of this period, Burgess devotes significant attention to the Soviet Union. If you think of a space first that is not about setting a human on the Moon, then the Soviets nabbed the laurels: first artificial satellite, first animal in space, first human in space, first woman in space (also the second, after a significant gap), first multi-person orbit, first spacewalk, first person of African ancestry (the Cuban Arnaldo Tamayo Mndez, 1980), first Asian (Vietnamese pilot Phm Tan, 1980), first Indian (Rakesh Sharma, 1984), first multinational crew, and so on. Burgesss account has somewhat surprising emphases. Yuri Gagarin was the first human in orbit, but his trip gets less attention than that of Alan Shepard, whose suborbital flight is marked as a first only because he was the first American (and he didnt go as high or for nearly as long as Gagarin). You can be sure that Russian-language histories of the same events characterize matters rather differently.

Burgess, who hails from Australia, demonstrates that the appeal of the American version of the Space Race is global (although more common in the Anglophone West). He has written over three dozen books on military, airflight, and space history, and he knows how to spin a tale. This is especially true for the early years when the number of astronauts and cosmonauts is more manageable, allowing him to offer full characterizations. The narrative tightens again when space voyagers are killed, as with the Challenger (1986) and Columbia (2003) Shuttle disasters: the book is dedicated to their memory, as well as the fallen crews of Apollo 1, Soyuz 1, and Soyuz 11. The rest of human spaceflight becomes so routine in Burgesss telling that he rushes through other Shuttle missions in staccato bullet points, making it to privatized spaceflight with pages to spare before concluding. If you are looking for a comprehensive history of human spaceflight, this book will come up short. If you want to revisit the drama of the Space Race, Burgesss account is excellent.

As of January 2018, over 550 people have been in orbit, and somewhat more have reached space. That distinction itself is a matter of American parochialism. NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration consider the boundary of space to be 50 miles (roughly 80 kilometers) up, the line set by Hungarian-born physicist Theodore van Krmn. The rest of the world, and also the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), go metric, and pick their arbitrary point as 100 kilometers (or 62 miles). Regardless of which boundary you choose, 60 of those were women (an additional 12 women have joined their number since 2018). That speaks to a radical asymmetry in who gets to leave Earth, which calls for an explanation and discussion. Burgess doesnt offer one.

For Burgess, the only people who matter in the history of human spaceflight are those who actually travel. This is much like telling the history of an iceberg by focusing on the part above water.

A good example is his treatment of the group of American women pilots who underwent the physical tests for astronaut training at the clinic of William Randolph Lovelace in 1959. The cohort that cleared the tests, later dubbed the Mercury 13 in analogy with the seven male astronauts in the Mercury Program of orbital launches were never permitted to begin the next level of training, ostensibly because none of them met the minimum qualification for spaceflight: logging a significant number of hours piloting a jet. The catch, naturally, is that women were not permitted to fly jets and so could never gain such experience. The debate made it to the floor of Congress, where the sexism on display was egregious even though you knew it was coming. Not least reprehensible in the whole affair was the public testimony of John Glenn one of Burgesss primary heroes that women not being astronauts is a fact of our social order. (You also had to have an engineering degree to be an astronaut, a fact held against the women but not Glenn, who never graduated college.) All of this is well narrated in the 2018 Netflix documentary Mercury 13, directed by Heather Walsh and David Sington. You wont learn much about it in The Greatest Adventure, where it is relegated to parentheses on page 99. Because the women never made it to space, they are not part of the history. Their significance lies in the fact that Soviet General Nikolai Kamanin got wind of the project and rushed Valentina Tereshkova into orbit, making her the first woman in space. The rules about which humans count in human spaceflight is not a matter of great moment to Burgess, although when concerns for diversity prompted the Americans letting a few women, fewer Blacks, and one Asian American into NASAs astronaut program over 100 pages later, he praises it. (Sadly, one of each category would die on the Challenger.)

Likewise, once astronauts land back on Earth, they exit the book, except for when the Soviets used cosmonauts such as Gagarin for propaganda value. When the Soviets cheered their space travelers, it was due to the Soviet propaganda machine; when the Americans did so, it stemmed from pride in the nations space flight programme and the men chosen to fly them. You will not learn from this book about the extensive overseas propaganda trips undertaken by the Gemini and Apollo astronauts, all coordinated by the US Information Agency. For that, you will have to turn to Teasel Muir-Harmonys Operation Moonglow (Basic Books, 2020), which Burgess does not cite.

Much of human spaceflight happens on the ground. The actual content of the training is described only sketchily, however. We learn more about the personalities of the Apollo astronauts than about food, air, and waste disposal in their capsules. (The latter is encompassed by the rare mention of a catheter for the short early flights. Solid waste is literally unmentionable.) And what about the hundreds of people on the ground who make each humans flight possible? Are they not also part of the history of human spaceflight?

A key feature of human spaceflight exceptionally well communicated by Burgess is how dangerous it is. Almost every Soviet and American flight during the Space Race, with the important and almost miraculous exception of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, barely avoided disaster. Gagarin almost lost consciousness on reentry. Alexei Leonovs suit puffed up on the first spacewalk and he had to depressurize his suit in open space in order to fit back into his capsule. Gus Grissom almost sank with his Mercury capsule. Scott Carpenter was almost lost when his capsule couldnt be found in the ocean. And of course there was the near catastrophe of Apollo 13, turned into a tale of bravery and ingenuity (rather than recklessness) through the magic of Ron Howard. Upon reading account after account in Burgesss vivid prose, you cannot help but wonder at the shocking peril that governments put these men (and a few women) through.

Burgess does not wonder. That people overcame the obstacles is proof of the arc of destiny bending heavenward. It is unclear how much the cosmonauts and astronauts knew about the dog and primate precursors who tested the life-support mechanisms of the Soviet and American vehicles, respectively. The dogs, strays recruited from the streets of Moscow under the (quite reasonable) presumption that they could withstand pretty much anything and endowed with charming names based on their appearance or character Little Fox, Blackie, Barker (Laika, who traveled on Sputnik 2), etc. fared pretty well. The Greatest Adventure is wonderful on this topic.

The American monkeys fared less well. Using captured German V-2 rockets, Project Blossom used these apes to test human survivability in space. On June 11, 1948, Blossom 3 launched a rhesus macaque named Albert. Not only did the single parachute fail to inflate, writes Burgess, causing the nose cone to slam back into the ground, but it was later revealed that Albert had probably suffocated before lift-off. His successor, Albert II, survived the launch only to perish in another parachute failure. Albert III died when his V-2 exploded within 30 seconds of lift-off. Albert IV was killed when the parachute system failed again. At the end of their V-2s, the Americans switched to Aerobee rockets. Albert V was another victim of parachute failure, despite months of engineering fixes. Albert VI made it up about 45 miles and landed, despite being thumped pretty hard on the desert floor. Rescue took too long to get to him, though, and he died of heat prostration. The Americans stopped naming the macaques Albert. This book is lavishly illustrated with staged photos of smiling astronauts looking directly into the camera before venturing out into space. I could not help comparing these to the photograph of the first Albert being inserted into his capsule.

Which raises a crucial question, one not seriously discussed in this book: why send humans to space at all? It is much harder (and heavier) to engineer their life support, and so much more wrenching when things fail. For Burgess, there is no debate to be had: the intrepid voyagers realized that space exploration is a human imperative and that it would continue despite the losses. It is worth underscoring that no human has been further than Earth orbit since 1972. Most of our advances in knowledge of the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and more have come from uncrewed probes. But, even so, Burgess maintains that shifting exploration entirely to robots shirks our undeniable destiny, and given the spur of human curiosity to seek and explore, such aspirations are both beckoning and achievable.

I expect many readers of this volume will share Burgesss sense of confidence and destiny. How can we not choose human spaceflight, they might think. Consider Elon Musk, one of todays most visible proponents of human spaceflight and human colonization of Mars. In a livestream in 2021, Musk declared: Going to Mars [] is a long journey, you might not come back alive. But its a glorious adventure, and it will be an amazing experience. [] Honestly, a bunch of people probably will die in the beginning. He is right about the risks, but are they worth taking? One might consult the other Elon Musk, whose company Tesla invests huge resources in automatic vehicles to remove the danger to humans caused by everyday traffic accidents. Defensive driving is clearly not the mythology of the moment.

Michael D. Gordin is a professor in Princetons history department. His latest book is On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience.

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Every Age Gets the Mythology It Deserves - lareviewofbooks

Even though the majority of our distinguished readership are FREAKING NEEEEEEERDS, it is very likely many of you havent gotten around to watching The Expanse, which closed six seasons of a near-perfect run last Friday. Instead of recapping season six or reviewing it, Im going to do like Patrick H. Willems, one of my favorite FilmTubers, and tell you why its awesome.

Adapted from the novels by James S.A. Corey (pen name of authors Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), The Expanse is set in one of the most carefully constructed universes in speculative TV, as even the few logical gaps it has can be filled by the fans without needing convoluted theorizing. Its the 24th Century, humanity has expanded and settled throughout the Solar System aided by efficient fusion-propulsion that makes traveling between the Inner Planets and the Outer Rings as fast as shipping is today. Three blocks have developed in the centuries in-between. Earth, now ruled under a global government of the United Nations, overpopulated, with most of the population living on a sort-of UBI, reeling under the effects of Climate Change but still a superpower. Mars, colonized by scientists and soldiers who have become a semi-authoritarian, militarized but wealthy technocracy, pursuing the dream of terraformation. And finally, the Belt, all the planetoids, moons, and large asteroids settled by millions of the castaways of the castaways who have developed their own cultural and national identity and live having their resources exploited by Mars and the Earth, including the two most important in that environment: Water and air. As the series begins, just as political tensions grow between Earth, Mars, and the Belt, humanity makes First Contact with an alien entity, a quantum-blob known as the Protomolecule that could doom or boost humanitys future. Of course, a bunch of corrupt politicians and trillionaires start tinkering with that shit.

The Expanse, like any great speculative fiction, is about our times. It couldnt be any clearer what the intentions of the writers are because its not even a metaphor, its just a projection of our times 300 years into the future: The Earth embodying the United States and other first world countries, Mars as China or other superpowers built around a single purpose (like the USSR back in the day) and the Belt as the underserved and exploited diversity that is the Developing World. Its not a metaphor without nuances that also reflect our times: Earth/The U.N. is unable to provide for most of its inhabitants more than the bare minimum; Mars is fanatical, paranoid and is built on staggering corruption; and the Belt well the Belters are awesome, but having defined so much of their identity in opposition to the Earth and Mars, they risk sabotaging themselves.

Its not an entirely bleak scenario. For one, it seems that gender and race equality has been achieved, mostly, but the exploitation of humans by humans persists in its base forms: Imperialism and class struggle. Then theres the fact that Mars was settled by competent people who actually want to further humanity instead of our timeline, where the ones attempting it will be a bunch of billionaires and their hangers-on, all of whom will die miserably from calcium deficiency.

Wait, thats a good thing.

Also, you can barely see any pets in Mars and the Belt, so that blows.

The Expanse is a choral narrative that gives us a realistic politics-driven plot, naturalist social commentary, brutal (and accurate) space warfare, and an ensemble cast that deserves more things like this in the future (specially Cara Gee, who actually invented the smoky eyeshadow. OK, she didnt but no one has done it better than her playing Carmina Drummer). In fact, the scientific realism is used as a plot-device that defines the relationship of the characters to their world and their actions: Scarcity, the vacuum of space, time-delays, they are more than a gimmick, for once. This is science-fiction that doesnt fall into the clich of technology progresses but humanity remains the same, something which has been false since agriculture, but we have also experienced ourselves after a decade of social media. One of the main theses of The Expanse is that technology changes everything and it also changes nothing if the exploitation logics remain in place.

Because, with its wonderful collection of characters that are flawed, broken, and sometimes downright chaotic neutral, The Expanse is about empathy. Its ultimately is about ethics and mutual responsibility when facing threats that could bring down a civilization. So of course, The Expanse is about Climate Change, but its not even a metaphor: It is the very effects of the former that drove humanitys expansion through the Solar System. By eschewing the metaphor, The Expanse reminds us that most humanitys problems are of our own making, Climate Change among them.

In only six episodes, the final season of The Expanse somehow manages to drive home a coherent thesis about social ethics while making use of all the plotlines they left dangling. Continuing the story from the previous season, we see the crew of the Rocinante, the UN, Mars, and Carmina Drummers band of Belter pirates trying to put an end to Marco Inaros, a Belter leader waging a fanatical and genocidal war on the Inner Planets. Inaros has caused hundreds of millions of deaths on Earth and Mars by hurtling asteroids covered in stealth materials just to make them feel what Belters have felt. He has become perhaps the greatest monster in human history, and yet, as Drummer says, a person like him was inevitable. Inaros, Osama, every tin-pot tyrant in the Global South they are all the logical byproducts of colonialism and making subalterns out of entire human populations, be it continents or planetoids.

This season is a war story, but its also a story about people running into the limits of redemption and forgiveness, about how sometimes the ethical choice and the strategic choice coincide in a decision that will have a cost, political, monetary or in resources. That decision is the only one that will guarantee everyones survival. It is also about how science and technology could actually save us all. But science and technology alone cannot really improve if they do not include the subaltern; otherwise, they can only expand subjugation.

There is a series that cast a shadow over The Expanse, a shadow under which it never managed to become mainstream, but which ironically helped it become a better piece of media: Game of Thrones. Many comparisons were made between both franchises, mostly deeming the latter as the sci-fi counterpart of the former (more to the point, each chapter of the novels is told from the perspective of a single character), but if GoTs quality collapsed spectacularly in the last three seasons, The Expanse either got better or remained just as good as in the first three. Almost as a taunt, the series epilogue is also set around a negotiation table with all the surviving characters. In the following scenes, The Expanse will have James Holden, an Earther who is ostensibly the lead character of the series, actually showing up as an ally to the Belters. Holden could be considered as a white or white-passing man, who has been the pervasive lead in most of Sci-Fis history. His final act underscores the central point The Expanse has been making since chapter one: Humanity will not progress or survive unless the privileged step up (or aside) for the subalterns.

That is the genius of The Expanse; it actually dares to challenge the colonialist foundations on which human exploitation and, ultimately, Climate Change persist. That tackling existential threats (or any other that we are able to understand) is an ethical decision on how much suffering we are willing to allow, how much are we willing to actually recognize dispossessed humans and countries as subjects of rights. The fact that they managed to deliver this idea on freaking Amazon Prime is a commendable achievement by the writers room.

All of that against the worst possible odds. In a very meta way, the fate of The Expanse as a series reflects its own ideas on how to build a worthy universe out of scant resources: It had a big budget, but not in the scale of extravaganzas such as Foundation or even Star Trek: Discovery. It premiered on the SyFy channel, immediately undermining its reach and respectability in the radar of Peak TV. The final season order was shortened to just six episodes. And yet they delivered spectacle through restrained but valuable use of VFX. Nurturing a small but devoted fanbase that managed to give it a better home, and by writing the best ending possible out of six episodes while leaving enough teasers open for follow-ups.

Just like the original Star Trek through syndication, I hope The Expanse grows in popularity through sustained streaming viewership. We the fans dont need it to become as a massive franchise, but maybe a couple of limited series or film anthologies.

And Hollywood needs to start casting more Cara Gee in everything.

'Weird Al' Biopic Staring Dan Radcliffe In The Works from Funny Or Die |The Gutting of the A.V. Club is an Embarrassment to the Industry and a Horrible Sign of its Future

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The Expanse's Final Series Is About Ethics in the Face of Mass Suffering - Pajiba Entertainment News

With the advent of developing space companies and recent conversations surrounding the habitability of Earth, this years Ten Years Hence series uncovers profound reflections not only for the business world, but for the entirety of our current generation. Life Beyond Earth is the theme of the 2022 lectures, offered by the Mendoza College of Business. Christian Davenport, staff writer for the Washington Post, launched the first of the seven scheduled talks by sharing insights regarding the commercialization of space.

Author of, The Space Barons: Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (2018), Davenport related how the quest for the cosmos is intricately tied to the plight of the wealthiest individuals in the world.

The quickest way to go to space is to become a billionaire, Davenport said. And the richest among us are plowing big parts of their fortune into space.

He further explained his reference to the Space Barons in his books title, we have businesses competing in a way that governments used to, Davenport said.

Ten Years Hence course instructor Professor James ORourke notes that enlightened self-interest is the driving force behind this new space race.

The vision of the space barons is similar, but unique in nature. Both Elon Musk and Jeffery Bezos plan to bridge the largest gap dividing Earth from space: costs. While Elon Musk concerns himself with a backup for humanity, with Mars standing as the best candidate for such an option, Bezos philosophy is to preserve Earth and instead move industry to space.

When he founded Amazon, the resources he needed for the business to succeed were there: the credit card, post office and internet, for instance of course, for space, there is no infrastructure yet, Davenport said. Perhaps we are dawning an era of economic dynamism that creates a whole new market, similar to what the internet did to the world when it was first created.

Leading spectators through history, Davenport elucidated how the aura of hope for space travel now burns even brighter. He recalled the desolation of the Challenger space shuttle explosion and traced the quest to build a reusable, cost-efficient rocket, from events like the historic landing of Space Xs Falcon 9 in 2015 to the Starship launch for orbit scheduled this year.

With a multiplicity of companies such as Boeing, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, along with the ranks of astronauts proliferating, an unprecedented era of space exploration appears to be within reach. NASAs plans to construct a new International Space Station and their recent launching of the James Webb Space Telescope are further accomplishments which cannot be overlooked, as they will continue to enlighten the universes great unknown.

Davenport even touched upon an eventual return to the Moon, remarking that the reason we havent been beyond earth orbit for a while now is because of different, conflicting government administrations. NASAs Artemis project, adequately named after the mythological twin sister of Apollo, endeavors to brave through this feat once more. With the knowledge of there being water on the moon, Davenport noted there is even a potential for it to become a gas station to space.

Apart from the lecture, Davenport noted the importance of discussing these subjects in general, emphasizing his goal to explain the issues of our time to people, including how the government is administering tax funded programs, and place that in a broader historical context; to inform the citizenry of this interesting time we hope to introduce in space, and how it might play a bigger role in peoples lives, he said. We must understand the advantages as well as the ethical challenges related to this.

Professor ORourke added that the series itself is designed to encourage students to ponder about major relevant issues of the near future. In ten years, everyone in the room will need to adapt and/or adopt an intervention strategy for the challenges and opportunities that emerge. These are topics you wont encounter in an accounting or marketing course, and you get the chance to meet interesting, important and smart people along the way.

Interesting people will indeed appear throughout this series, featured among them a NASA Astronaut and U.S. Air Force test pilot, a mission manager for Blue Origin, scientist from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and beyond. A full program for this stellar course may be found at the Mendoza College of Business website.

The rest is here:
Twentieth 'Ten Years Hence' series discusses the future of space travel - Observer Online

/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/rJkJNFPcdBkDQKqtkgHSjA/4ab4fea1-e811-4a48-97b2-98db952be827.jpg/r4_0_5924_3345_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg When you hear the word alien, what do you picture?

A six-legged dog? Small dinosaurs? Alien fish? Bacteria? This view doesnt come from science, but science fiction. Movies, TV shows, and novels have created and built up this stereotype, embedding it into our culture. When H.G. Wells wrote War of the Worlds in the late 19th century, Wells created a view of aliens that has stuck with us to this day.

Humans are a very self-centred species we think a lot of ourselves. We think that the world, and by extension other worlds, revolve around us. Therefore, we think that all life on other planets must look, act, and think like us. They would also want we have, and it is up to us to defend ourselves. In War of the Worlds, big-headed creatures with tentacles that operated machines came from Mars to colonise Earth. The book was rooted in science, but also a critique of the world at the time.

Moreover, you may think of a hostile race, that wants to come to Earth to take over. Maybe it is for our resources, maybe it is to colonize, or maybe we do know why, but we should fear and fight them. Most likely, you pictured some human-like figure, maybe with a big head, big eyes, and green or grey skin. Why is this the image we always jump to when we hear aliens.

War of the Worlds is using the idea of beings from other worlds as a way to tell and critique what is happening in the world. We should actually fear ourselves. Wells was strongly against British colonialism and the issues, especially for indigenous peoples around the world, it created. In one passage, Wells even refers to Tasmania, saying that why should Earthlings condemn the Martians when we have done similar things on Earth, using Tasmania as an example.

Even prominent scientists like the late Stephen Hawking have warned we should not contact an alien species as they are likely to be hostile. We worry about aliens, but should we? This view, both physically how aliens look, and how they act, is repeated over and over in science fiction. From Independence Day to Mars Attacks. Even in films like Arrival, the aliens look similar to classic portrayals and, while not meant to be hostile, we automatically assume they are. When aliens seemingly visit us here on Earth, they are hostile creatures out to harm or take over our planet. When we Earthlings travel and explore other worlds and meet aliens there, we are innocent explorers. How come it is not the reverse? It is a matter of projection we are projecting our own worries and fears, not necessarily scientific ones.

Link:
Are there aliens in space and should we be afraid? | The Canberra Times - BollyInside