Monthly Archives: May 2022

Alex Kuzoian and Jessica Orwig of Business Insider have prepared a video titled Heres why Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. In the video below, we see some reasons why we should colonize Mars someday.

A summary of the video:

Increasing CO2 levels will not only make Mars warmer but will also thicken the atmosphere. A thicker atmosphere can block the highly dangerous UV light. So, the microorganisms can survive. Ideally, we would send Cyanobacteria first (see notes 2), they will produce the O2 and O3 (ozone) for the atmosphere. And when these oxygen-producing bacteria die, their biological matter will enrich the Martian soil.

But, how we could release the CO2 at the poles into the atmosphere?

One crazy suggestion from Elon Musk: We can nuke the poles. Another option: we can put giant mirrors into the orbit of Mars which will focus the sunlight, so we can melt down the CO2 at the poles. Even then, it will take hundreds, even thousands of years to make Mars a habitable place.

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Why we should colonize Mars (and other planets and the satellites too)

A Chinese rover hasfound evidencethat there was liquid water on Mars far more recently than we thought a discovery that could affect plans to one day colonize the Red Planet.

Liquid water on Mars:Based on past research, scientists believed there was liquid water on Mars up until about 3 billion years ago the point at which the planets dry Amazonian epoch began and the geological era before it (the Hesperian epoch) ended.

Hydrated minerals and ground ice can be used as the important water resource on Mars.

Understanding the history of liquid water on Mars can help us predict how much water remains on the Red Planet, in the form of ice or hydrated minerals. We might then be able to use that existingwater on Marsto support crewed missions.

One of the most important resources for human explorers is water, leadstudyauthor Yang Liu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)told CNN. Hydrated minerals, which contain structural water, and ground ice can be used as the important water resource on Mars.

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Whats new?Afterlanding on Marsin May 2021, Chinas Zhurong rover began collecting data on soil samples. When researchers from CAS and the University of Copenhagen analyzed some of that data, they found evidence of water in samples that were just 700 million years old.

This suggests that the area being explored by the Zhurong rover Mars Utopia Planitia, a plain in a huge impact crater was home to a substantial amount of liquid water at a time when we thought Mars surface was already dried up.

One of the major things well have to find out is how extensive these young water-bearing minerals are.

Looking ahead:The data used for this study was collected during Zhurongs first 92 Martian days (sols) of exploration. The rover has now spent 350 sols on Mars, traveling more than a mile across its surface.

The whole time its been collecting data that could further inform our understanding of liquid water on Mars.

One of the major things well have to find out and that I look forward to seeing from the Zhurong rover is how extensive these young water-bearing minerals are, Eva Scheller, a planetary scientist at CalTech, who wasnt involved in the study,told Space. Are they common or uncommon in these young rocks?

This article was originally published on our sister site, Freethink.

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Chinese rover makes surprise discovery about liquid water on Mars - Big Think

Global pandemics, drowned cities, armed fascists on the streets, collapsing infrastructure. As income inequality reaches historic new heights, some media promote the colonisation of Mars by a narcissist oligarch from Pretoria as a viable solution to environmental collapse. The social reality of 2022 feels chaotic and increasingly unstable, which begs the chilling question: What comes next?

Could it be a mental health epidemic, leading to a spate of mass suicides, while right-wing extremists attempt to ferment a new American civil war, as in Noah Hawleys Anthem?

Or is it the nightmarish process of capitalism failing to stop the climate crisis it has unleashed on humanity, as in Alistair Mackays It Doesnt Have To Be This Way? A setting where the inhabitants of a near-future Cape Town watch as todays world burns from uncontrollable fires, drowns with rising sea levels and starves as food systems wither under extreme weather and uncontrollable temperatures?

Anthem is the sixth book by an American author who is best known for his innovative writing on television shows such as crime drama Fargo and the surreal Legion, while It Doesnt Have To Be This Way is South African Mackays debut novel.

Despite their geographical differences, both authors use fictional narratives to explore a sobering political argument. They conclude that not only is the dominant capitalist order the cause of the spiralling crisis but it is also incapable of surviving the coming environmental and social dislocations of the 21st century.

By focusing on how characters attempt to survive and retain a sense of human dignity against a hopeless future, the authors contribute to a literary tradition of using the future to critically consider the direction of contemporary society. Throughout the last century, science-fiction has warned of the consequences of power and domination, such as the nightmarish spectre of nuclear war, environmental depletion and the struggle to retain individuality in a mechanised world.

What is especially disturbing is how much of the fearful reality of today seems to have sprung off the pages of the darkest imaginings of prior generations. Octavia Butlers Parable Of the Sower (1993) and Parable Of the Talents (1998) focus on Lauren Olamina, a young Black woman in a 2020s America that has been wrecked by environmental disaster, greed and runaway inequality. The second book features the emergence of a far-right president who, as with Donald Trumps campaign in 2016, uses the slogan Make America Great Again. His fanatical followers terrorise women (such as with public witch burnings) and minorities, but the books also show how dispossessed people fight back against rising neo-fascism.

The reason that Butlers work seems to have an uncanny resonance with our present reality is that, as a writer sensitive to questions of power and resistance, she was able to read the direction that the politics of her time were leading. The 1990s were a time of rampant neoliberalism, and the belief that humans had entered the end of history and the age of free markets and wealth accumulation.

In contrast, Butler saw that this was producing greed and cruelty. Her fiction honestly depicted how unrestrained capitalism was not leading to more freedom and stability, but to organised sadism, reality-show politicians and immigrant children being detained in cages.

But rather than viewing apocalyptic works of fiction as dreadful warning, todays Right often welcome social collapse in the belief that it will purge the world of their enemies and allow them to live as rulers of the wasteland. The rise of internet self-publishing has unleashed a flood of survivalist fiction, which focuses on how to stockpile fuel, food and most importantly weapons against such monstrous foes as child-eating leftists.

Even more on the fringe is the truly despicable novel Iron Gates, which openly fantasises about being a death camp commander after a nuclear war. The book is used for recruiting by a neo-Nazi doomsday cult called Atomwaffen Division, whose members in the United States and Europe have been implicated in murders and attempts to attack nucleur power plants. Shockingly, despite the clear dangers posed by this group, court documents in 2021 revealed that the FBI had been paying the fascist publisher of Iron Gates to be an informant on other extremists.

In Anthem, a group of teenagers escapes from an anxiety clinic, after a rash of mass suicides by people terrified of the climate crisis, and travel through a US full of mass shooters dressed as clowns, religious fanatics and Jeffrey Epstein-style predators.

Hawley clearly intends the book as a state of the nation statement on post-Trump politics, but his ambition is let down by thin characterisation and dialogue that often feels more like an opinion column than compelling speech. Throughout the novel, he interrupts the plot to insert commentary where he writes of his fear that fiction is incapable of capturing reality, which has the grating impact of killing the narrative momentum he has built.

Rather than creating a plausible immersion in the world of tomorrow, Anthem too often feels like a disjointed, hectoring, 400-page lecture. While his passion and anger at the state of the world is laudable, it fails as a novel, which is especially disappointing when compared to the powerful tragicomedy of his work on Fargo.

Mackay, in direct contrast, successfully blends storytelling with his wider political concerns. His book focuses on the intertwined lives of three characters Malcolm, Viwe and Luthando and explores themes of class, race and sexuality against the backdrop of a rapidly worsening environment.

By retaining a sharp focus on individuals, he injects a compelling psychological realism, which gives the work a terrifying plausibility as the protagonists watch todays world of consumer capitalism and binge-watching being decimated by economic and environmental failure, leading to a brutal, depleted future of sinister cults, desperate attempts to escape with virtual reality technology and generalised misery.

The result is a deeply disturbing work. Reading it against the backdrop of the floods in KwaZulu-Natal and endless, purgatorial power cuts, I often had to put my copy down, because its bleakness seemed too close for comfort.

But then again, the point of such work is to force us to look reality in the face and realise how precarious our society really is and how the greed, moral depravity and myopia of political and corporate elites is what causes it. This is not the collective fault of all humanity, or some kind of divine punishment, but the direct result of an ecocidal system that values the constant pursuit of profit over life.

The fact that both novels feel less like speculation and more like social realism is a warning. This is not the world we want, but it is the world we live in.

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The apocalypse after the apocalypse - newframe.com

The lights of downtown Anchorage reflect in the waters of Knik Arm as seen from Point Woronzof in Anchorage, AK on Tuesday, March 22, 2016. The Chugach Mountains rise above the city after sunset.

With all thats wrong in the world today, its therapeutic to focus on the positive and count our blessings. This could be especially true for those of us in advanced years, who remember what life was like when glaciers were closer and Alaska was not yet a state.

In 1946, when I was one year old, my family moved to Alaska from Pennsylvania. We arrived in Seward in late March via DC-3 aircraft.

Forsaking the amenities and relative comfort of a city like Pittsburgh to build a life in a frontier town like Seward was an abrupt change for my parents and 12-year-old sister. At that time Alaskas entire population was about 100,000, and Sewards was less than 2,000.

My father was drawn to Alaska because of its wildness and mystique. But he had more pragmatic reasons. His employment in the defense industry ended at the close of World War II, and he learned that there was plenty of work on Sewards docks as a longshoreman.

In the mid-1940s, Seward was Alaskas principal port. Almost everything for the territory came through the small towns docks by steamship, and my dad had all the work he could handle.

I think my parents were grateful that Seward already had public services comparable to Anchorage and even Seattle, such as electricity, telephone, plumbing, water, sewer and even garbage collection.

We had dial telephones, and our service was on a party line. Calls to homes were identified by the number of rings. I think ours was three. Although no one would admit it, it wasnt unusual for folks to listen in on others conversations. Town secrets didnt seem to last very long.

In 1948, my mom opened a music studio and was one of the towns first private piano teachers.

Television didnt exist, so radio was our main source of evening entertainment. Newsreels at the movie theater also linked us to the outside world. There was one local radio station, a library, hospital, post office, jail, civic center/gym, one school, two grocery stores, a barber, a bowling alley (opened in 1948), a few restaurants and shops, a meat market, two clothing stores, a local newspaper, dusty gravel streets, and my mother often complained that there were more bars than churches.

Food shipments to Seward were sometimes delayed at sea, so we had to be careful about items that spoil, such as eggs. At our chosen grocery store, Seward Trading Co., I recall there being only a couple of brands of bread on the shelf. Food was also delivered to homes, and my mother listed that item simply: bread. Milk came from a local dairy with a location appropriately named Dairy Hill.

We used fuel oil for cooking and heating our home. My mom didnt have a clothes dryer, so wash was hung out on a line when it wasnt raining.

Absent TV, computers and video games, as kids we spent most of our time outdoors summer and winter. In summer we crafted spears, bows and arrows and slingshots from alder bushes; built forts, climbed trees; made up games; and when we were a bit older, climbed Mount Marathon. In winter we went sledding, ice skating and had epic snowball fights that included construction of elaborate snow forts.

Back then, Seward had a curfew for anyone under 18 years old. When we were about nine, a friend and I summoned courage and sneaked out of our houses on the night of the summer solstice. We boldly roamed around the sleeping town for several hours and managed to get back into our homes without detection. Most residents didnt lock their doors in those days.

I guess what struck me on our night out, when it didnt get dark, was how days dont really have beginnings or endings that we create those divisions.

The first and most important transportation artery originating in Seward was the Alaska Railroad, completed in 1923. As everyone knows, it was vital to Alaskas development, including the establishment of Anchorage.

Construction of the Seward Highway seemed to drag on forever. Seward folks fortunate enough to own cars could travel over a rough and rocky road to Moose Pass, Hope and finally Cooper Landing. By 1948, they could drive all the way to Kenai a section of road later named the Sterling Highway. But the Seward Highway to Anchorage wasnt opened until 1951.

On my first road trip to Anchorage in the 1950s, I stared in awe at two skyscrapers, the McKinley Building, later named the McKay Building, and the L Street Apartments, today called Inlet Tower Hotel and Suites. Having left Pittsburgh at age one, Id never seen structures so large.

Today, as I easily access information on my computer, peruse amusing Facebook posts, stream a vast assortment of videos on my flat-screen TV; become distressed after misplacing my iPhone; wander brightly-lit supermarket aisles that display countless varieties of bread and breakfast cereal; heat my coffee in a microwave oven; ride a bicycle with a battery; tune the radio past a score of FM stations, I think about that simpler time so many years ago and count my blessings those of yesteryear, and those of today.

I cant recollect my parents complaining about our life in Seward. They had persevered through the Great Depression of the 1930s. For them, Alaska was probably a refuge and promise of a new beginning. In later years, my sister and I would be eternally grateful that they brought us to what was then a rather unknown, far-flung place. I think my two children, both living in Alaska today, feel the same.

It would be great to be around when humans colonize Mars; to see the day when most diseases are eliminated; when we begin to show more kindness to the environment and each other. But I believe I have lived during a good period of time, and in an ideal place.

On a fundamental level, however, I dont think there is a best time or place to live. I learned that from my parents. You try to make the most of wherever you are, whenever you are. It seems obvious, but I think we sometimes forget that simple axiom. For the better part of five years in furtherance of my career, I lived in pancake-flat Houston, Texas. Hot. Humid. Crowded. I discovered bicycling and made it work.

Undeniably, its extremely hard to look past COVID-19, the Ukraine war, inflation, homelessness, urban violence, racism, political divisiveness and other troubling issues to hold up ones head and make the best of things. But I believe as human beings, were built to do just that. We prove it every day in myriad ways.

For many of us, its easy to block out current woes by looking backward. But as poet Emily Dickinson wrote, forever is composed of nows. Were fortunate to live in a special place where our nows can be quite extraordinary.

Frank E. Baker is a freelance writer who lives in Eagle River.

The views expressed here are the writers and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.

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OPINION: The 'good old days' are what we make them - Anchorage Daily News