Monthly Archives: May 2022

Last fall, the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson was asked to predict what the world will look like in 2050. He was speaking at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, and the atmosphere at the summit billed as the last, best hope to save the planet was bleak.

But Robinson, whose novel, The Ministry for the Future, lays out a path for humanity that narrowly averts a biosphere collapse, sounded a note of cautious optimism. Overcome with emotion at times, he raised the possibility of a near future marked by human accomplishment and solidarity.

It should not be a solitary day dream of a writer sitting in his garden, imagining there could be a better world, Robinson told the crowd.

Its a hard time to be a utopian writer, or any sort of utopian. Disaster-filled dystopian stories abound in movies, television and fiction; news headlines verge on apocalyptic. Other masters of utopian speculative fiction giants like Ursula K. Le Guin and Iain M. Banks are gone, and few are filling the void. At the same time, utopian stories have never felt so necessary.

You could probably name the most important utopian novels on the fingers of your hand, Robinson said in an interview. But they get remembered, and they shape peoples conception of whats possible that could be good in the future.

At 70, Robinson who is widely acclaimed as one of the most influential speculative fiction writers of his generation stands as perhaps the last of the great utopians. It can be lonely work, he said. But lately, his writing has been having an impact in the real world, as biologists and climate scientists, tech entrepreneurs and CEOs of green technology start-ups have looked to his fiction as a possible road map for avoiding the worst outcomes of climate change.

At the United Nations climate summit last fall, Robinson was treated as a quasi-celebrity. He met with diplomats, ecologists and business leaders, and made the case for implementing some of the ambitious ideas in his fiction geoengineering to stop glaciers from melting, replacing planes with solar-powered airships, reordering the economy with carbon quantitative easing, with a new cryptocurrency that could fund decarbonization.

These are deeply researched, plausible futures hes writing about, said Nigel Topping, the United Kingdoms high-level climate action champion, who invited Robinson to the summit.

Robinsons ability to marshal dense scientific and technical detail, economic and political theory and wonkish policy proposals into his fiction has made him a prominent public thinker outside of the sci-fi sphere.

There arent a lot of writers who have tried to take a literary approach to technical questions, and a technical approach to literary questions, the novelist Richard Powers said.

In some ways, Robinsons path as a science fiction writer has followed a strange trajectory. He made his name writing about humanitys far-flung future, with visionary works about the colonization of Mars (The Mars Trilogy), interstellar, intergenerational voyages into deep space (Aurora), and humanitys expansion into the far reaches of the solar system (2312). But recently, hes been circling closer to earth, and to the current crisis of catastrophic warming.

Futuristic stories about space exploration feel irrelevant to him now, Robinson said. Hes grown skeptical that humanitys future lies in the stars, and dismissive of tech billionaires ambitions to explore space, even as he acknowledged, Im partially responsible for that fantasy.

In his more recent novels works like New York 2140, an oddly uplifting climate change novel that takes place after New York City is partly submerged by rising tides, and Red Moon, set in a lunar city in 2047 he has traveled back in time, toward the present. Two years ago, he published The Ministry for the Future, which opens in 2025 and unfolds over the next few decades, as the world reels from floods, heat waves, and mounting ecological disasters, and an international ministry is created to save the planet.

I decided that it was time to go directly at the topic of climate change, Robinson said. The real story is the one facing us in the next 30 years. Its the most interesting story, but also the stakes are highest.

Robinsons latest book, The High Sierra: A Love Story, is unlike any of his previous ones: Its Robinsons first major work of nonfiction, and the most personal thing hes ever published.

Over the books 560 pages, Robinson weaves together a geological, ecological and cultural history of Californias High Sierra mountains, with his own story of falling in love with the region as a young man in the 1970s and returning over the decades. Interspersed with dense chapters about granite composition, plate tectonics, glacier formation and the ranges flora and fauna he describes marmots, the large, goofy-looking rodents that thrive there, as great people Robinson recounts his adventures in the back country and reveals how they shaped him and his work.

He includes snippets of poetry that he wrote while backpacking, describes experimenting with psychedelics in his 20s and recalls his relationships with his literary heroes sci-fi writers like Le Guin and Joanna Russ, but also the Zen Buddhist poet Gary Snyder, who praised Robinson for bringing a whole new language to his Sierra book.

The book also offers a glimpse of how Robinsons time in the wilderness instilled a reverence for the natural world that saturates his science fiction. Robinson often rooted his descriptions of Martian landscapes in his observations of the Sierras ethereal peaks, valleys and basins, sometimes repurposing notes from his hiking journals directly into his novels. When writing about space exploration, he drew on the sometimes otherworldly feeling that being in the mountains gave him the exhilaration, isolation and sense of his own insignificance in a geological time frame.

His turn toward nonfiction and autobiography nearly 40 years into his career has surprised many longtime readers and even Robinson himself. Hes always thought of himself as boring, a white-bread suburban househusband.

My sense of being a novelist was, get out of the way, he said. Its not about me, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Robinson spoke to me on several occasions from his home in West Davis, California, where he lives in an ecologically sustainable planned community called The Villages with his wife, Lisa Nowell, a chemist. Most days, he writes at a small table in their front yard, with a tarp to keep him dry when it rains and a fan to cool him when its hot, though lately, he said, he hasnt been writing as much as hed like. He recently returned from northern India, where he spoke at a climate conference hosted by the Dalai Lama. Later this month, hes scheduled to travel to Davos, Switzerland, where he will give a lecture about how to combat climate change at a conference hosted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Being an in-demand, and somewhat reluctant, public intellectual has left Robinson struggling to find time to start a new novel. But hes also been reassured by the enthusiastic response to his climate fiction, and has started to map out ideas for new work that builds on the story he told in The Ministry for the Future, he said.

Robinson discovered his love of science fiction at the University of California, San Diego, where he majored in literature and received his Ph.D. in English. The literary critic Fredric Jameson, who was a professor there, urged him to read Philip K. Dick and Robinson was hooked.

In the 1980s, he published his first sci-fi series, a formally innovative trilogy that traced three different futures for Orange County, California, where he grew up. Each book followed a classic futuristic sci-fi formula one post-apocalyptic, in the aftermath of a nuclear attack; one dystopian, set amid the ruins of unchecked suburban sprawl and environmental degradation, and one utopian, as the region evolved into an ecological paradise. The trilogy, Three Californias, was nominated for major science fiction awards. Robinson was praised in The New York Times for having virtually invented a new kind of science fiction.

Since then, Robinson has experimented liberally with sci-fi tropes, writing everything from an alternate history of China to an epic about deep space exploration to a speculative historical novel set in the Ice Age. But hes become best known for his deeply researched utopian stories, which use science fiction as a framework to explore alternate social, economic and political systems.

Writing utopian fiction is hard, Robinson said: Its not easy to write a gripping story about the mechanisms that drive social progress.

Novels are really about what happens when things go wrong, Robinson said. If you propose plans for how things go right, it sounds like civics, it sounds like blueprints. A utopias architectural blueprints are, let me show you how the sewage system works so you dont get cholera. Well, that doesnt sound exciting.

But things can go horribly wrong on the road to utopia, as they do in The Ministry for the Future, which opens as a devastating heat wave in India kills millions of people.

As a utopia, its a very low bar, Robinson said. I mean, if we avoid the mass extinction event, we avoid everything dying, great, thats utopia, given where we are now.

When Robinson is asked to forecast the future, as he often is, he usually hedges. He has argued that we live in a big science fiction novel we are all writing together but hes not sure if its going to be a utopian or dystopian one.

Nobody makes a successful prediction of the future, he said. Except for maybe by accident.

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A Sci-Fi Writer Returns to Earth: The Real Story is the One Facing Us. - The New York Times

Week ten million of Epic Games Stores free game giveaways is now upon us. Okay, maybe it hasnt been quite that long just yet. This week,Terraforming Mars, a strategy game thats literally about terraforming the planet Mars, is free. All you have to do is head on over to the games EGS page and claim it, which will let you start installing right away. If youre itching to do some terraforming, at least. Were a little used to pairs of games, but this is the only title you can grab this week. Next week will be a bit more flavorful, however.

Terraforming Mars is based on the board game of the same name and was developed and published by Asmodee digital back in October of 2018, which was somehow over three years ago. What is time? The game puts players in control of their own corporation, which allows them to play project cards, build their own cities, and make their own interstellar colonization choices. Youll also be increasing the planets oxygen levels, making oceans, and increasing the temperature, all to make Mars habitable to members of our undeniably parasitic species. You dont, however, get to see humanity junk up Mars like we junked up Earth.

Things are heating up a bit with next weeks games, which are already visible on EGS. Back by popular demand is modern classicPrey, which was also free over the holidays.Prey is Arkanes immersive sim where you play as a person on a space station struggling to survive using tricky powers and hacking. Alongside it is the top-down action-exploration game, Jotun: Valhalla Edition, a 2D game where you fight giants while admiring some lovely art. Our EGS accounts will keep growing as most of these games sit eternally unplayed, but hoarding digital goods is good for the blood. Or something.

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Terraforming Mars is now free on Epic Games Store, with Prey next - PC Invasion

(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)

(THE CONVERSATION) Satellites help run the internet and television and are central to the Global Positioning System. They enable modern weather forecasting, help scientists track environmental degradation and play a huge role in modern military technology.

Nations that dont have their own satellites providing these services rely on other countries. For those that want to develop their own satellite infrastructure, options are running out as space fills up.

I am a research fellow at Arizona State University, studying the wider benefits of space and ways to make it more accessible to developing countries.

Inequity is already playing out in access to satellites. In the not-so-distant future, the ability to extract resources from the Moon and asteroids could become a major point of difference between the space haves and have-nots. As policies emerge, there is the risk that these inequities become permanent.

Where to park a satellite

Thanks to the rapid commercialization, miniaturization and plummeting costs of satellite technology in recent years, more countries are able to reap the benefits of space.

CubeSats are small, cheap, customizable satellites that are simple enough to be built by high school students. Companies such as SpaceX can launch one of these satellites into orbit for relatively cheap from $1,300 per pound. However, there are only so many places to park a satellite in orbit around Earth, and these are quickly filling up.

The best parking is in geostationary orbit, around 22,250 miles (35,800 kilometers) above the equator. A satellite in geostationary orbit rotates at the same rate as Earth, remaining directly above a single location on Earths surface which can be very useful for telecommunications, broadcasting and weather satellites.

There are only 1,800 geostationary orbital slots, and as of February 2022, 541 of them were occupied by active satellites. Countries and private companies have already claimed most of the unoccupied slots that offer access to major markets, and the satellites to fill them are currently being assembled or awaiting launch. If, for example, a new spacefaring nation wants to put a weather satellite over a specific spot in the Atlantic Ocean that is already claimed, they would either have to choose a less optimal location for the satellite or buy services from the country occupying the spot they wanted.

Orbital slots are allocated by an agency of the United Nations called the International Telecommunication Union. Slots are free, but they go to countries on a first-come, first-served basis. When a satellite reaches the end of its 15- to 20-year lifespan, a country can simply replace it and renew its hold on the slot. This effectively allows countries to keep these positions indefinitely. Countries that already have the technology to utilize geostationary orbit have a major advantage over those that do not.

While geostationary orbital slots are the most useful and limited, there are many other orbits around Earth. These, too, are filling up adding to the growing problem of space debris.

Low Earth orbit is around 1,000 miles (1,600 km) above the surface. Satellites in low Earth orbit are moving fast in a highly congested environment. While this may be a good place for Earth imaging satellites, it is not ideal for single communication satellites like those used to broadcast television, radio and the internet.

Low Earth orbit can be used for communications if multiple satellites work together to form a constellation. Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are working on projects to put thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit over the next few years to provide internet across the globe. The first generation of SpaceXs Starlink consists of 1,926 satellites, and the second generation will add another 30,000 to orbit.

At the current rate, the major space players are rapidly occupying geostationary and low Earth orbits, potentially monopolizing access to important satellite capabilities and adding to space junk.

Access to resources in space

Orbital slots are an area where inequity exists today. The future of space could be a gold rush for resources and not everyone will benefit.

Asteroids hold astounding amounts of valuable minerals and metals. Later this year, NASA is launching a probe to explore an asteroid named 16 Psyche, which scientists estimate contains over US$10 quintillion worth of iron. Tapping huge resource deposits like this and transporting them to Earth could provide massive boosts to the economies of spacefaring nations while disrupting the economies of countries that currently depend on exporting minerals and metals.

Another highly valuable resource in space is helium-3, a rare version of helium that scientists think could be used in nuclear fusion reactions without producing radioactive waste. While there are considerable technological obstacles to overcome before helium-3 is a feasible energy source, if it works, there are enough deposits on the Moon and elsewhere in the solar system to satisfy Earths energy requirements for several centuries. If powerful spacefaring countries develop the technology to use and mine helium-3 and choose not to share the benefits with other nations it could result in lasting inequities.

Existing international space laws are not well suited to handle the complicated web of private companies and nations competing for resources in space. Countries are organizing into groups or space blocs that are uniting on goals and rules for future space missions. Two notable space blocs are planning missions to set up bases and potential mining operations on the Moon: the Artemis Accords, led by the U.S., as well as joint Chinese and Russian plans.

Right now, the major players in space are establishing the norms for exploiting resources. There is a risk that instead of focusing on what is best for everyone on Earth, competition will drive these decisions, damaging the space environment and causing conflict. History shows that it is hard to challenge international norms once they are established.

Moving forward

Access to space is critical for the functioning of a modern nation. Space access will only become more important as humanity rapidly advances toward a future of space hotels and colonies on Mars.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the founding document of space law, says that space should be used for the benefit and in the interests of all countries. The policies taking shape today will dictate whether this is the case in the future.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/wealthy-nations-are-carving-up-space-and-its-riches-and-leaving-other-countries-behind-182820.

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Wealthy nations are carving up space and its riches and leaving other countries behind - Alton Telegraph

ONCE upon a time, Nasa believed we would one day end up living in giant inflatable space doughnuts.

The U.S. space agency designed a wheel-shaped habitat almost five decades ago that would house up to 140,000 residents.

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In the early 1970s, Nasa was at a crossroads having shut the Apollo programme down and landed astronauts on the Moon.

Scientists were on the hunt for the next space exploration milestone, with some targeting Mars and others exploring space colonies.

In 1975, Nasa explored possible designs for a space city in the Summer Study, conducted at Stanford University.

Possibly the most bonkers scheme proposed was the Stanford Torus, a ring-shaped station that would sit between Earth and the Moon.

According to Nasa's designs, the Torus would be one mile in diameter and rotate once per minute to provide artificial gravity.

Between 10,000 and 140,000 people would live on the colony, mining the Moon and nearby asteroids for resources.

They would live on the inside of the outer ring, farming animals and livestock in fields like those back on Earth.

Energy would be collected from the Sun using huge solar panels, while gigantic mirrors would reflect dangerous radiation.

The Stanford Torus was one of three space colony designs proposed in Nasa's Summer Study.

Artist impressions of the concept were developed byNasa's Ames Research Center and illustrated by Don Davis and Rick Guidice.

Then-NASA Administrator James Fletcher said that the paper posed big questions for humankind.

He said that the purpose of the study was "to assess the human and economic implications as well as technical feasibility."

Fletcher added that "the participants in this effort have provided us with a vision that will engage our imagination and stretch our minds."

The three stations are icons of speculative design, but Nasa never got close to building them.

The enormous cost, transport of materials, potential radiation poisoning of residents, and more proved insurmountable challenges.

The idea was not even new. In 1952, pioneering Nasa engineer Wernher von Braun presented similar concepts for space stations.

Eventually, however, Nasa did build its space habitat the far-less-luxurious International Space Station.

The lab orbits 250 miles above Earth and is home to up to six astronauts at a time from space agencies across the globe.

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Inside Nasas vision of the future from 47 YEARS ago with humans living in bizarre space tube... - The Sun

Scientists are preparing to send a message to space to contact aliens but are doubtful of humanitys ability to survive long enough to receive a response.

A team of boffins working on the Beacon in the Galaxy (BITG) project will send information about our world and cultures to extraterrestrials who may be out there listening.

They plan to send the message to a cluster of stars in the Milky Way, which is between 6,500 and 19,500 light-years away.

The team hopes aliens who receive the new message will send a reply back to Earth and finally answer the question of whether humans are alone in the universe.

Jonathan Jiang, co-author of the study and a principal scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, explained that the state of the world could see humans destroyed before a response is ever received.

Speaking to Fox13 he said: "The tendency that humans try to destroy ourselves is the greatest danger.

"Currently, theres lots of problems with humanity, and Stephen Hawking worried about whether or not we can survive another thousand years.

Jiang explained that NASAs Pioneer missions in the 1970s about space exploration were also designed to make contact with potential alien civilisations.

The spacecraft used for these missions had a graphic message bolted to the mainframe on a six-by-nine-inch gold anodized plaque.

Other attempts at contacting alien life forms have been made using telescopes.

In 1974, a signal was sent to space from the Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico aimed at a cluster of stars 25,000 light-years away.

Later in 1999 and 2003, the Evpatoria Transmission Messages were sent to space and included an invitation for other life forms to respond.

The next message could contain coded examples of great works of art, and images of nature and architecture on Earth.

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It may also have a map of our solar system, show where the Earth is located, and share information about our system of numbers.

A reply would take tens of thousands of years to reach Earth because of the massive distances between galaxies.

There could also be conflict over getting everyone to agree on the wording of the message sent out.

But the team at the BITG project is hopeful that future generations will be inspired by their work and put their differences aside in the search for alien life.

The brains behind the BITG project wrote in their study: Humanity has, we contend, a compelling story to share and the desire to know of others and now has the means to do so.

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Scientists prepare message to beam into space but say humanity won't survive to hear it - Daily Star