Monthly Archives: August 2022

From August 20, 2022 through March 25, 2023, the fire planet Mars will waver for an unusually long period in the air sign Gemini. Mars usually spends about two months in each sign, but, thanks to a retrograde going down October 30, 2022January 12, 2023, were in for an extended journey: one which will likely tap us into the wide variety of our talents, and leave us ambivalent about how to use them. Heres how Mars in Gemini, and the Mars retrograde, will affect you and the world around you.

Your sun sign may be the protagonist of the chart, but, as evinced by Dorothy of Oz, its rarely the hero who drives the plot. Enter Mars to claim the villain edit and set things in motion. If your sun is your identity, then Mars is the raw ego, driving you to evolve, excel, and attack your ambitions. Named for the god of battle and conquest, Mars seeks victory, and thrives in relational conflict and sexual catharsis. Mars rules Aries and Scorpio; its position in your chart, therefore, reveals where your individuality, and your power, are declared. This isnt always so selfish; sometimes, a warrior is needed to defend the ones they love, or fight for something that matters. Mars leads the charge. Of all the planets, Mars most interfaces with your physical body, as a vessel of creation and destruction.

As Mars moves through the zodiac, it comes into clashes and alliances with other planets, often setting off conflicts with authority (Saturn) or providing motivation for abstract dreams (Neptune). Naturally, it gallops through signs like Aries and Capricorn, inspiring action and leadership; and struggles to find footing in hyper-relational signs like Libra and Pisces. What happens when the prize fighter enters Geminis domain?

When the planet of decisive action enters the sign of duality, it feels like every path is suddenly split, like your Link has gone from the linear action of Majoras Mask to the wide open world of Breath of the Wild. Gemini is a mutable air sign, without identity or set purpose, a channel meant to capture and transmit the culture around it. When Mars enters Gemini, it can explore a vast range of talents, options, and possibilities. But with that choice comes indecision, ambiguity, and paralysis; like scrolling for a streaming movie, never deciding on one, and losing interest along the way.

Gemini rules our direct experience: the people, stimuli, and social noise around us. This is not a sign known for perspective or wisdom. When the ego planet enters such a myopic domain, ones ideas, however specious, become beliefs, and suddenly worth fighting for. With the United States November midterm elections going down during this transit, count on a surge of ignorant political leaders and social media martyrs to take a stand for their points of view, regardless of any basis in reality.

The voting booth, where we are meant to exercise personal choice, will further become a battleground, and, even in states without rabid gerrymandering and racist voter suppression, a general doubt over the point of ones vote will set in. With so much over-stimulation and doom messaging, this latest era of post-economic meltdown malaise will make everyone wonder what they want to do next, if their choices matter in the big picture, and why they should even bother.

As with any Gemini transit, this one has two faces. On one front, youre in for a further lurch, a sense of confusion regarding your destiny. The radio dial to your calling has snapped; youre now hearing a blur of frequencies, and cant find your channel. But with that big-picture uncertainty comes the freedom of experimentation, play, and possibility. In Gemini, Mars has access to more talents than ever. Now is the time to study, train, and take in new inspiration. Cultivate what media youre exposed to and who your masters and teachers are. Counter the twins limited point of view by expanding your range of exposure. Gemini adapts through communication; take this time to play with songwriting, essays, or, most vitally, direct dialogue with others. Seek out collaborators, book club nemeses, and anyone else who can inspire friction through contact. Gemini needs something to react to, as well as someone to channel. On the spiritual front, this is an ideal time to get in contact with your guides, ancestors, and higher powers, and to clear your vessel to best receive them.

You are not supposed to know where you or your country are ultimately headed. This is your time out of the world when you can expand your skills, even if you dont know how theyll be put to use. Throughout this transit, Jupiter will continue working through Aries, inspiring the next generation of artists and heroes to create. With Mars in Gemini, you have time to come into your powers, even if youre blind along the way. Train hard now; well need you on the other side.

From October 30, 2022 through January 12, 2023, Mars will station retrograde, furthering Geminis inborn ambivalence. Along with the aforementioned election chaos in November, count on all manner of dropped initiatives, pulled projects, and sudden, severe changes of plan, a la the recent shelving of Batgirl. This will not be a time of consistent or dependable leadership; dont count on anyone to show you a way forward out of this mess.

On a personal level, be wary of any big plans, grand identity signifiers, or declarations of purpose. Any lightning strikes of clarity or direction should be given a few days to integrate; you may find yourself losing steam, or doubling back on yourself, no matter how sure you were just a few days ago. Mars retrogrades are not times for output, but for observation, review, and downloading. Connect with your influences and mull over the path youd like to take. If David Lynch and Jane Campion can go years between making movies, you can take half a year to think about your life. As the Queen Mary instructs, on The Crown: To do nothing is the hardest job of all. It will take every ounce of energy you have. Take your time. Dont rush to Cloud City just because you think you should. It might be a trap. Complete your training. Youre not ready to face your destiny just yet.

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2022's Mars In Gemini Brings Confusion and Possibility - NYLON

NASA's Perseverance rover has captured a mysterious, stringlike material on the surface of Mars. Turns out it was likely just trash discarded there by the rover itself.

In a blog post last week by the space agency, scientists said that when the rover originally landed on Mars in February 2021, hardware known as Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) was discarded onto the planet's surface.

Now, NASA is seeing that debris from imagery in the Hogwallow Flats region of the Red Planet. Scientists suspect the tangled object, and most of the other material pictured, is likely pieces of shredded Dacron netting from the Perseverance.

"So far, we've seen shiny pieces of thermal blanket material, Dacron netting material that is also used in thermal blankets," NASA Imaging Scientist Justin Maki wrote. "It should be noted that discarded debris are common in space missions."

Dacron is classified as polyester fiber known for its durability, consistency and quality, the blog explains.

"This particular piece of netting appears to have undergone significant unraveling/shredding, suggesting that it was subjected to strong forces," Maki wrote. "Perseverance team members are reviewing images of the debris, checking to see if the material may pose as a potential contamination source for the sample tubes from this area."

The blog notes that engineers have also considered the possibility that EDL debris might be a source of entanglement risk to the rover, but have concluded that such a risk is low.

"As Perseverance continues to collect samples for eventual return to Earth, the Perseverance imaging teams will continue to review images of the terrain for possible sources of EDL debris," Maki wrote.

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Trash or treasure: NASA's Perseverance rover finds tangled object on Mars - CBS News

NASA Mars Perseverance rover lets you hear what your voice would sound like on the Red Planet.

Have you ever wondered, how your voice may sound in space or other planets? NASA has developed a program that can let you hear how your voice will appear on Mars. The data collected by NASA's Perseverance rover is able to replicate how people sound on Mars. The space agency even has an online tool that allows humans to simulate how they'd sound on the red planet from their homes. All you have to do is just go to the Sounds of Mars section on NASA's website, navigate to the You on Mars tab, then click and hold the button to record your voice. Once done, download the audio file and hear how your voice sounds on Mars.

If you were standing on Mars, you'd hear a quieter, more muffled version of what you'd hear on Earth, and you'd wait slightly longer to hear it, wrote NASA. The US space agency has even shared some sounds that they have recorded on Earth, like whistles, bells or bird songs. But they are almost inaudible on Mars. However, humans might still sound pretty much like themselves. If you were standing on Mars, you'd hear a quieter, more muffled version of what you'd hear on Earth, says NASA.

How does sound work on earth?

According to NASA, what we hear is because of the vibration of our eardrums that comes from waves of pressure traveling to our ears from the source of the sound. Do note that sound waves need a medium to travel through, like air as well as liquids and solids. However, Mars has an unusual atmosphere with very different temperature, density, and chemistry as compared to Earth. These differences affect the sound in three ways - Sounds take longer than usual to get to our ear, second is it's relatively lower than earth and the third difference is attenuation -- a weakening of the signal at certain frequencies.

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NASA lets you hear how your voice will sound on Mars! Know how - HT Tech

Living on Mars is a game for squillionaires and the agencies of superpower governments, for Elon Musk and Nasa, not the average citizen. The reason is obvious and simple: it is mind-bendingly expensive and complex to get people and equipment to a planet 140 million miles from Earth. The artists Ella Good and Nicki Kent are, however, undeterred. On a Bristol wharf, next to the M Shed museum of the citys history, they have installed what they call a peoples version of living on Mars, a prototype Martian house built to a budget of 50,000, with an additional 20,000 spent on workshops, plus support in kind from a number of construction companies. Their expenditure is about enough, at a guess, to pay for the toothbrushes on a typical real-life space programme.

Their two-level structure looks like a shiny gold bug a woodlouse? a tardigrade? perched on a shipping container. It stands small but conspicuous among the masts and rigging of heritage shipping, and the culture and retail buildings and preserved cranes of a former industrial zone. It represents one unit, designed for two astronauts, of an imaginary community that could be built on the planet, where 50 people might stay for months and more. The idea is to provide a lens on life on Earth, by exploring how to survive in a place of scarcity and danger.

There is an element of realism. The artists asked Hugh Broughton, an architect best known for designing Antarctic research stations, to design the structure, on the basis that he has worked in the most Mars-like places, in terms of environmental hostility, on Earth. Working with Owen Pearce, an architect formerly employed in his office, who has now set up a practice called Pearce+, Broughton has come up with techniques that, although untested, have some practical plausibility.

The bug is a lightweight structure of gold-coated foil, to be shipped from Earth, which would be filled on site with the Martian rubble known as regolith. Habitable space below it would be made by exploiting the lava tubes that are believed to lie beneath the planets surface, and by re-using components of the spacecraft that would carry humans to their new home. By these means resources would be used as efficiently as possible. Residents would be protected by the mass of material above them from the cosmic rays that are among the worst hazards on Mars.

Good and Kent developed their ideas by visiting the Mars Desert Research Station in the Utah desert, which simulates missions to the planet, and by consulting a spacecraft systems engineer and an Earth and planetary scientist at the University of Bristol. Ultimately, their interest is less technical than human. What do you need to live well, they want to ask, in conditions of isolation? What would you have for breakfast? How would you cope with the fact that it takes up to 20 minutes for a message sent from Mars to reach Earth, and the same again for the reply to come back again? Or that you have to fix something yourself if it breaks, using whatever is available?

So they ran education workshops and will hold more inside their Martian house. Ultimately, say Good and Kent, they want to offer a hopeful vision. They want to show what is possible where high levels of resourcefulness are required, and how even in extreme circumstances it might be possible to think beyond mere survival. Whatever discoveries may arise are likely to be more relevant to an environmentally challenged Earth than the red planet, especially as participants in the workshops are unlikely ever to get to the latter.

The interior of the structure provides the backdrop for this work. As Broughtons Antarctic projects are also concerned with wellbeing and mental health in challenging circumstances, he and Pearce can bring this expertise to bear on the Mars/Bristol endeavour. It comes with features designed to cheer up or at least distract its dwellers, and to put them in touch with nature: a window on to the dusty landscape (or, in this instance, office buildings and a cathedral tower); a double-layered roof light that contains some of the units water supply in its thickness, such that it would freeze and unfreeze with the local weather conditions. (Mostly the former, given that the average temperature is minus 60C, the maximum 20C.) Hydroponically grown plants, helpful for survival and sanity, surround the putative astronauts.

At the same time you get a sense of the extremely limited dimensions available to space travellers. On the lower level, inside the shipping container, you see how tight are the sleeping quarters of such places. There was a concept in 1920s German architecture called existenzminimum, which described the least amount of space in which people could decently live; interplanetary travel takes this idea to a new level of tininess.

Theres part of me that would like this project to be a bit less speculative, that it would show more precisely what might be built on Mars if humans ever got to live there. The Nasa-backed Hi-Seas project in Hawaii has been pursuing this subject with substantial resources and expertise for a decade, as did the European, Russian and Chinese Mars500, from 2007 to 2011. A well-funded exploration of their findings would be quite something.

But, given that much is still unknown about the subject, theres value in the glimpse on offer in Bristol. It also illustrates to an extreme degree a famous saying of William Morris. Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful, said the Victorian designer and sage. This would be true on Mars, with knobs on.

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Building a Martian House review will this be your tiny gold-foil room on Mars? - The Guardian

Welcome to the140th edition of 6 Storm TeamStarwatch. This is a blog that will be updated weekly that lists events happening in the sky.

Late tonight (technically August 19th) is the Last Quarter Moon (Sky & Telescope). The Last Quarter Moon looks like a half Moon. Mars will be close by, slightly below the Moon (Sky & Telescope). Above the Moon to the left is the star cluster the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters (Sky & Telescope).

About 1 hour after sunset tonight Saturn will be visible in the sky (Sky & Telescope). You will want to look Southeast to see this planet (Sky & Telescope). The image below shows what to look for.

Now is a great time to check out the Milky Way since the Moon is not visible in the evening sky (Sky & Telescope).

The following sites were used in the creation of this blog:

This Week's Sky at a Glance, August 12 – 20

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6 Storm Team Starwatch: Saturn and Mars visible this week - WATE 6 On Your Side

In todays highly-connected and instantaneous world, we have access to a massive amount of information at our fingertips.

Historically, however, this hasnt always been the case.

Time travel back just 20 years ago to 2002, and youd notice the vast majority of people were still waiting on the daily paper or the evening news to help fill the information void.

In fact, for most of 2002, Google was trailing in search engine market share behind Yahoo! and MSN. Meanwhile, early social media incarnations (MySpace, Friendster, etc.) were just starting to come online, and all of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the iPhone did not yet exist.

Every so often, the dominant form of communication is upended by new technological developments and changing societal preferences.

These transitions seem to be happening faster over time, aligning with the accelerated progress of technology.

Each new wave of media comes with its own pros and cons.

For example, Connected Media was a huge step forward in that it enabled everyone to be a part of the conversation. On the other hand, algorithms and the sheer amount of content to sift through has created a lot of downsides as well. To name just a few problems with media today: filter bubbles, sensationalism, clickbait, and so on.

Before we dive into what we think is the next wave of media, lets first break down the common attributes and problems with prior waves.

Before the first wave of media, amplifying a message took devotion and a lifetime.

Add in the fact that even by the year 1500, only 4% of global citizens lived in cities, and you can see how hard it would be to communicate effectively with the masses during this era.

Or, to paint a more vivid picture of what proto-media was like: information could only travel as fast as the speed of a horse.

In this first wave, new technological advancements enabled widescale communication for the first time in history.

Newspapers, books, magazines, radios, televisions, movies, and early websites all fit within this framework, enabling the owners of these assets to broadcast their message at scale.

With large amounts of infrastructure required to print books or broadcast television news programs, it took capital or connections to gain access. For this reason, large corporations and governments were usually the gatekeepers, and ordinary citizens had limited influence.

Importantly, these mediums only allowed one-way communicationmeaning that they could broadcast a message, but the general public was restricted in how they could respond (i.e. a letter to the editor, or a phone call to a radio station).

Innovations like Web 2.0 and social media changed the game.

Starting in the mid-2000s, barriers to entry began to drop, and it eventually became free and easy for anyone to broadcast their opinion online. As the internet exploded with content, sorting through it became the number one problem to solve.

For better or worse, algorithms began to feed people what they loved, so they could consume even more. The ripple effect of this was that everyone competing for eyeballs suddenly found themselves optimizing content to try and win the algorithm game to get virality.

Viral content is often engaging and interesting, but it comes with tradeoffs. Content can be made artificially engaging by sensationalizing, using clickbait, or playing loose with the facts. It can be ultra-targeted to resonate emotionally within one particular filter bubble. It can be designed to enrage a certain group, and mobilize them towards actioneven if it is extreme.

Despite the many benefits of Connected Media, we are seeing more polarization than ever before in society. Groups of people cant relate to each other or discuss issues, because they cant even agree on basic facts.

Perhaps most frustrating of all? Many people dont know they are deep within their own bubble in which they are only fed information they agree with. They are unaware that other legitimate points of view exist. Everything is black and white, and grey thinking is rarer and rarer.

Between 2015 and 2025, the amount of data captured, created, and replicated globally will increase by 1,600%.

For the first time ever, a significant quantity of data is becoming open source and available to anyone. There have been massive advancements in how to store and verify data, and even the ownership of information can now be tracked on the blockchain. Both media and the population are becoming more data literate, and they are also becoming aware of the societal drawbacks stemming from Connected Media.

As this new wave emerges, its worth examining some of its attributes and connecting concepts in more detail:

The Data Media ecosystem is just beginning to emerge, but here are some early pioneers we like:

Growth in data journalism and the emergence of these pioneers helps give you a sense of the beginnings of Data Media, but we believe they are only scratching the surface of what is possible.

In a sense, its easier to define what Data Media isnt.

Data Media is not partisan pundits arguing over each other on a newscast, and its not fake news, misinformation, or clickbait that is engineered to drive easy clicks. Data media is not an echo chamber that only reinforces existing biases. Because data is also less subjective, its less likely to be censored in the way we see today.

Data is not perfect, but it can help change the conversations we are having as a society to be more constructive and inclusive. We hope you agree!

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Every Mission to Mars in One Visualization - Visual Capitalist

Elon Musk on Saturday reaffirmed his unwavering focus on colonizing Mars and making human life multi-planetary.

I hope there is a self-sustaining city on Mars in 20 years, the Tesla CEO said in a tweet.

His statement came as a response to a tweet by Tesla Owners Silicon Valley, which posted a picture that showed both SpaceXs beginnings and its current status. The picture was captioned with the words, 2002: How it started vs 2022. The tweet also askedMusk how it was going.

As early as last month, Musk said humanity will reach Mars in our lifetime. Just as the Moon brought us together in 1969, Mars would do it in the future, he added.

Read Benzinga's story onSpaceX' 36th launch of 2022

Also, in mid-July, the billionaire spoke about creating a self-sustaining civilization on the Red Planet, which would mean being self-sufficient in terms of supplies and not relying on the Earth for them.

"20 to 30 years from first human landing if launch rate growth is exponential," the Tesla CEO said at the time.

The timeline is assuming about 100,000 people are transported per flight and about 2 million people are needed, he added.

Last week, Musk shared a picture of a spacecraft on a red surface and captioned it, This will be Mars one day.

Photo courtesy Steve Jurvetson on Flickr

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Elon Musk's Mars Obsession Intensifies: A 'Self-Sustaining City' On The Red Planet In 20 Years - Benzinga