Category Archives: Mars Colony

Insect cells, said David Kaplan, the Stern Family Professor of Engineering, check all the NASA boxes. They use fewer specialized resources to grow and are highly adaptable to thrive in the environment of a space station.

In space, whats needed are low-cost, simple ingredients you can carry in high density to produce lots of food over long periods of time, he said. The system were proposing is highly efficient. And nutritionally, insects are just as good, if not better, than animal-derived meats, and yet can be produced at much lower cost.

That efficiency makes growing insect cells a promising way to feed people on Earth in a future dominated by climate change, he added. Modern agriculture is carbon-intense, and food scarcity is projected to increase for a growing global population.

Were looking at Earth the same way we look at the space station, but with more problems and in a larger volume, he said. It's all about scale.

That all-encompassing potential for insect-cell cultivating is encapsulated in the name of the Tufts proposal: Deep Space Entomoculture. Natalie Rubio, EG21, coined the word entomoculture for her Ph.D. thesis (entomo is the Greek root for insects). She is the first graduate student in the Kaplan Lab to focus specifically on the possibility of growing insect cells for food production. She did this by applying tissue engineering techniques to cells from insects. The techniques had previously been developed for mammal cells for regenerative medicine, which promotes the repair or replacement of injured cells, tissues, or organs.

Rubio, whose studies were supported by a fellowship from the nonprofit New Harvest, first heard about the concept of cultured meat as a college student committed to animal welfare. I just instantly fell in love with the idea, she said. I knew that was what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

Insect cells may be a better source of deep space protein than cultivated mammal cells, explained Sophie Letcher, EG25, a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering whos working on the project with continued New Harvest funding. Cells from a cow or a pig need to be heated to the temperatures of the animals in which they would naturally grow, while insect cells can be grown at room temperature. Most mammalian cells grown for cultured meat purposes need to be attached to a dish or substrate, which would typically require gravity, but insect cells can more easily grow suspended in a liquid culture media (made up of amino acids, sugar, salts, and other ingredients). And they've actually already been grown in simulated microgravity, said Letcher. Thats a big point of interest.

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Deep Space Travel: What's on the Menu for Astronauts May Well Come from Cultivated Insect Cells - Tufts Now

NASA is planning a mission to demonstrate the ability to repair and upgrade satellites in Earth orbit. The mission, called OSAM-1 (On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing-1), will send a robotic spacecraft equipped with robotic arms and all the tools and equipment needed to fix, refuel or extend satellites lifespans, even if those satellites were not designed to be serviced on orbit.

The first test flight of OSAM-1 is scheduled for launch no earlier than 2026 and will go to low Earth orbit to rendezvous, grapple and dock with Landsat 7, an Earth observing satellite that has been in orbit since 1999. The mission will conduct a first-of-its-kind refueling demonstration test, then relocate the satellite to a new orbit. While some parts of the mission are autonomous, human tele-operators will conduct much of the procedures and maneuvers remotely from Earth.

NASA says that repairing satellites instead of just letting defunct spacecraft drift in Earth orbit helps decrease space debris to create a more sustainable future for space exploration. In addition, the test flight will assess on orbit robotic assembly and manufacturing, which many see as technology needed for the future, such as doing maintenance during long-duration human missions in our Solar System and constructing and maintaining structures in orbit of the Moon or Mars.

The original idea for a satellite servicing spacecraft is the brainchild of noted NASA engineer Frank Cepollina, who has a history of repairing spacecraft in orbit. He led the teams in charge of planning and choreographing the five servicing missions for the Hubble Space Telescope. He helped design the specialized tools and procedures that astronauts would use to successfully repair and upgrade Hubble, keeping the venerable telescope operating for years longer than projected and allowing better instruments and technology to be installed in each successive mission. He also led teams that developed techniques to repair other satellites during the early days of the Space Shuttle era.

To me, it is astounding that we would just throw satellites away on orbit, Cepollina told me in 2016 when I toured the Robotic Operations Center at what was then called the Satellite Servicing Capabilities Office at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center. It seemed we should find a way to fix these satellites for economic reasons and for the scientific benefits we could derive. I wanted to find a way to fix and upgrade satellites.

Cepollina, now age 85, only recently retired from NASA, but has mentored and trained several generations of engineers, never giving up on his dream of repairing satellites. After several proposals of servicing missions, the concept was officially recognized as a mission and attained line item status in NASAs budget. But there is still much work to be done to be ready for launch by 2026.

When you do something for the first time, theres a lot of new technology and procedures, and you inherently run into roadblocks and setbacks, and we are no different, said Ross Henry, the OSAM-1 Servicing Payload Manager, in an interview with Universe Today. We are dealing with several new systems, like a new lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) system, a unique propellant transfer system and two robotic arms [one is a redundant backup] that can use eleven unique tools and adapters, each with a specific purpose as part of the mission.

The primary goal for OSAM-1s first test flight will be refueling Landsat 7, which is about 705 km (440 miles) above Earth. But since Landsat 7 like many satellites were never meant to serviced or even seen again, the OSAM-1 spacecraft cant just pull up alongside another satellite and hook up the fuel hose.

First, OSAM-1 will need to get close enough for one of the robot arms to grapple Landsat 7, and then perform docking maneuvers, using the original docking clamp or Marman ring on the satellite.

Then, there is a lot of work well have to do to get access to the fueling site, Henry explained. OSAM-1s remote operators will have to cut into the multi-layer insulation thermal blanketing and move it out of the way to expose the fill/drain valves. But when they were closed out before launch, those valves were covered with lock wires, so well have to go in with specialized scissors and cut those. Plus, there are redundant safety caps we will remove.

OSAM-1 will carry 122 kg (270lbs) of fuel, and the plan is to transfer 115 kg (250 lbs) of it to Landsat 7, using the robotic arm and a retractable hose system.

Of course, this is all happening while both spacecraft are traveling at about 26,500 km/h (16,500 mph). OSAM-1 carries six rendezvous and proximity operations cameras for use while approaching Landsat 7. An additional twenty-one cameras are part of a specialized vision sensor system to allow the teleoperators to see the operations from every angle, and floodlights provide lighting for work to continue even during orbital night, which happens about every 50 minutes. Landsat 7s orbital period is 99 minutes.

Goddards Robotic Operations Center includes a specialized testbed with black, curtain-lined walls so that when the lights are shut off, it simulates the darkness of space. This allows for fully immersive training with full scale mock-ups of Landsat 7 and OSAM-1.

Previously, this mission was known as Restore-L and focused solely on refueling and repair. But in February of 2019 a new component to the mission was added, called the Space Infrastructure Dexterous Robot (SPIDER).

This adds the assembly and manufacturing portion of OSAM-1, said Henry. Once we finish with Landsat 7, well release it and then go off and do the assembly and manufacturing portion.

SPIDER includes its own 5-meter (16 ft) long robotic arm, bringing the total number of robotic arms flying on OSAM-1 to three. SPIDER will assemble a functional 3-meter (9-foot) communications antenna, constructed from parts brought along to space, and will demonstrate Ka-band transmission with a ground station.

SPIDER will also manufacture a 32-foot (10-meter) lightweight composite beam to verify the capability to construct large spacecraft structures in orbit.

The development of all the systems, tools and techniques has required input from several areas of technology.

We have a lot of really niche engineers working with us who know this stuff and do it day in and day out, Henry said. Some of our most unique engineers are the robotic folks who know how the arms were built and understand the nuances of the joints and mechanisms such as what poses you can and cant put the arm in, or if an elbow joint fails, they know how you can still move the end effector with the six other actuators. We have a really great workforce that has dived in deep on the technical part of this mission for several years. They are all leaders in their field, I dont think theres another team like them in the country or maybe even the world.

Finding a suitable candidate satellite to be the experimental subject for this demonstration mission took several years of negotiations, Henry said, as the requirements were specific and it had to be a government-owned satellite.

We needed a government agency who was willing to have their satellite be the first to demonstrate this technology, Henry said. Landsat 7 fit the bill for a number of reasons. It is in an orbit that is easily accessible, and it is at the end of its mission lifetime in terms of generating science. Landsat 9 has already launched and is being brought into service, so its successor is already up and functioning.

Landsat 7s nominal science mission ended on April 6, 2022 and its primary science instrument, the Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+) was placed in standby mode. But its twenty-two years in operation provided has provided substantial data on land cover management and assessment, global change studies, and for mapping.

The funded and baseline mission for OSAM 1 is one and done, where once it completes the servicing, refueling and then the assembly and manufacturing portion of the mission, it is scheduled to be deorbited and will burn up in Earths atmosphere.

With that being said, we recognize we are flying a very capable vehicle with fuel available, Henry said, so there are many folks who would like to see us do a follow-up mission while we are in orbit. But as of right now, nothing has been announced or funded.

Henry said he is honored and excited to lead the effort in making Frank Cepollinas dream come true in having a true satellite servicing tow truck in orbit. Cepollina has another dream too, that fleets of these tow truck-like satellites could build structures in space, not only habitats, but large space telescopes with the ability to directly image distant exoplanets, for example.

What we are demonstrating in the assembly and manufacturing portion is laying the groundwork for future advances in the search for extraterrestrial life and hopefully the colonization of the Solar System, Henry said. Decades from now, I think youll be able to trace that back to OSAM-1 being the first US mission to demonstrate these capabilities on orbit.

Lead image caption: Illustration of OSAM-1 (bottom) grappling Landsat 7. Credits: NASA

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NASA is Building a Mission That Will Refuel and Repair Satellites in Orbit - Universe Today

The CW announced today that the CW Network, which has been doing a lot of reconfiguring ahead of a potential sale, has decided to end its long-running series, Riverdale, a show that has become almost eponymous with the network. The President of the CW, Mark Pedowitz, acknowledged that seven years is the right amount.

I am a big believer of giving series that have had a long run an appropriate send-off. We had a long conversation with Roberto [Aguirre-Sacasa] yesterday and he is thrilled with the decision, Pedowitz said. We are going to treat the show in the manner it deserves. Its been an iconic pop culture star and we want to make sure that it goes out the right way.

The current sixth season of the series, which has been waning in the ratings, has introduced the multiverse in a six-episode run centered on Rivervale, followed by another run in which the main characters all have superpowers. In last weeks episode, all the major characters turned into serial killers and murdered the entire population in a theoretical future Riverdale after the seasons big bad, Percival Perkins, levied exorbitant library fines against them.

How does a show that has seemingly tackled every other genre go out on its own terms? Space, showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa said. The final frontier.

Indeed, plans for the final season include setting up a Riverdale colony on Mars, franchising Pops Diner across the universe, and incorporating an alien into the Jughead, Archie, Betty, and Veronica love quadrangle. It seems fitting for a show with out-of-this-world storylines over the last six seasons to literally end in outer space, Aguirre-Sacasa said. Weve paid homage to nearly every other genre since our premiere. Were excited to riff on some of our favorite space movies like Star Wars, 2001, Gravity, Alien and, of course, Moonfall. We cant wait to show you what we have in store.

Fans of Riverdale, however, will have to wait a while to watch Archie and Betty make out in zero gravity. The final season wont debut until midseason, in 2023.

Which Harrison Ford is the Best Harrison Ford? |'Ten Percent,' the British Take on 'Call My Agent' Is So Faithful to The Original That It Offers Nothing New

Dustin is the founder and co-owner of Pajiba. You may email him here, follow him on Twitter, or listen to his weekly TV podcast, Podjiba.

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In Its 7th and Final Season, 'Riverdale' Will Finally End. In Space - Pajiba Entertainment News

But the weight of the needed solar equipment would go up to more than 20 tons for a Mars outpost closer to the poles. Mars is tilted on its axis by about 25 degrees, slightly more than Earth is, and its orbit is less circular, so less sunlight would reach those PV cells during parts of the year. That means nuclear power becomes more viable at the poles. The power generation equipment needed to produce that much nuclear energy would add up to about 9.5 tons of carry-along mass to produce the same 40 kilowatts of energy. That lift is doable for massive next-generation rockets like NASAs Space Launch System and SpaceXs Starship and Super Heavy, which can each carry payloads of at least tens of tons into deep space. (The poles also harbor ice that could provide a water source for the astronauts.)

These same kinds of trade-offs have already arisen with energy technologies used by Mars rovers. Engineers need to find the right balance between transportation weight, storage needs, and an energy system that can handle variations in the availability of sunlight. Significant sunlight reaches the surface only during the Martian day and only when dust and cloud particles dont get in the way, says Guillem Anglada-Escud, an astronomer at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona who was not involved in the study. Hes also a member of the Sustainable Offworld Network, a collaboration of researchers, engineers, and architects studying how future colonies on Mars and other worlds might work.

Anglada-Escud agrees with Abel and Berliners findings. He also believes that, if possible, one shouldnt look at solar and nuclear energy as either/or. Our conclusion is, you want to have both solar and nuclear, he says. Its a matter of resilience. Things can fail in many different ways. The best option is to have redundancy.

Its also important to study solar radiance and how dust and ice affect how much light reaches the planets surface, and where that light can best be collected, says Daniel Vzquez Pombo, an energy engineer at the Technical University of Denmark who wrote a paper last year about a possible hybrid power system for a permanent Mars colony that includes PV arrays and storage. Maintenance for energy systems can be risky for those conducting repairs, another argument for having options.

Do you really want to rely on a single technology? What happens if you have a systematic error or a design flaw? Pombo says. Diversifying is a smart idea. You dont put all your eggs in one basket.

The calculus may also change when its not just a handful of astronauts visiting for a couple months or a year but rather a permanent colony with long-term visitors, Anglada-Escud argues. Solar panels are a relatively simple technology, and solar gets more attractive for the very long term, he says. You may need more mirrors, but it will work. On Mars, finding plutonium to the quality you need for a reactor is not trivial. Solar is there, its safe, and we know how to do it.

In the end, life in Marss rugged conditions will be tougher than anywhere on Earth. And the science and technology issues are only half the story. Settlers will have to navigate complex financial and societal issues as well, Abel says. At least when they get there, though, theyll know how to keep the lights on.

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Mars Colonies Will Need Solar Powerand Nuclear Too - WIRED

As virtual reality increases in quality through development, it will undoubtedly bleed into other industries other than gaming.

Technology is currently emerging through the gaming industry, and while virtual reality games will no doubt be a very big part of culture in the years the come, the technology has wider applications. NASA has recognized the potential in the technology and has partnered with Fortnite creator Epic Games to issue a "challenge" for game developers.

NASA has challenged game developers to create virtual reality assets with Unreal Engine 5 that are based on Mars. Game developers won't be starting completely from scratch as the MarsXR environment already contains a vast "world" that spans hundreds of miles squared, features day/night cycles, realistic martian weather, gravity, spacesuits, vehicles, and other assets. Developers have the option of using the already supplied assets or adding in their own to create their Mars experiences.

"Creators can use Unreal Engine to build realistic simulation scenarios to help prepare NASA for future missions, whether that's to the moon or to Mars. Whether you're a game designer, architect, hobbyist or rocket scientist, anyone can build with UE5, and we can't wait to see the immersive simulations the community comes up with," said Seb Loze, Unreal Engine business director for simulation at Epic Games.

Specifically, the space agency is looking for realistic scenarios in the following five categories: "Set Up Camp," "Scientific Research," "Maintenance," "Exploration," and "Blow Our Minds". As you can probably imagine, there are prizes to be won, twenty in total. Four prizes will be awarded for each category, with a total prize pool of $7,000. Additionally, the winner of each category will be given $6,000. Participants will have 80 days to submit their work.

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So far, the competition has already acquired a massive amount of attention as more than 220 teams of developers, from various locations around the world, such as Kenya, Iran, Ukraine, South Korea, Taiwan, and more.

It will be very interesting if some of the environments and experiences created by the developers will provide useful training grounds for future Mars colonists. Notably, NASA has a large budget and could easily dedicate a small amount of its resources to creating specific VR environments, but letting the public create their own experiences may yield a different kind of value that NASA researchers may not have considered.

Regardless if NASA uses the assets or not, I hope they are playable, as it would be awesome to attempt to survive as a Mars colonist for a select amount of sols.

Enter the contest here.

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NASA looks to the metaverse to prepare astronauts for living on Mars - TweakTown

Meanwhile, the values underlying dynamism above all, the special pedestal given to free thinking and free speech are also more suspect within liberalism today. In their place is a new regulatory spirit around culture as well as economics, a how-much-is-too-much attitude toward the circulation of potentially dangerous ideas, a belief in institutions of scientific and intellectual authority but not necessarily institutions devoted to wide-open inquiry.

Just as a dynamist might, at the extreme of the orientation, prefer a monarchy that protects innovation over a democracy that discourages it, some of todays progressives are making the same move in reverse: If democracy is endangered by technological change and unfettered free speech, then so much the worse for free speech. The important thing is to save democratic self-government, even if you have to temporarily take the liberties out of the American Civil Liberties Union or put away your John Stuart Mill.

Whatever else Musk wants with Twitter and obviously you should assume that he wants to make a lot of money this seems like the ideological trend he hopes to resist or halt: the liberal retreat from dynamism, the progressive turn toward ideological regulation, the pervasive left-wing fear that the First Amendment and free speech are being weaponized by authoritarians and need some kind of check.

So now the question: If this was your ambition setting aside whether you think its admirable or dangerous would buying Twitter make sense?

The affirmative theory holds that because Twitter is both an essential digital town square and a place particularly populated by well-educated liberals, if Musk can make it succeed with a lighter-footprint approach to content moderation, from a dynamist perspective he might hope to accomplish two goals at once. First, he would be simply sustaining an important space in which free debate can happen. Second assuming that he could come up with a light footprint that left-leaning users would accept he would be gently training Twitters liberals back into their Obama-era belief that openness and dynamism are good things, that a marketplace of ideas can work without constant ideological supervision and constraint.

The more skeptical theory, on the other hand, suggests that Musk may be making a mistake somewhat characteristic of the Silicon Valley mentality and overestimating the importance of novel virtual spaces compared with the legacy institutions East Coast, brick and mortar, academic and bureaucratic that still give contemporary liberalism its actual shape and direction. That is to say, what you see on Twitter, the fads and mobs and performativity, may accelerate certain ideological transformations, but social media isnt actually the place where these shifts are taking shape; its just the space in which the change becomes visible and legible to people on the outside.

So, for instance, if important media institutions are more doubtful about free speech than in the past, or if important academic fields are more likely to impose ideological loyalty oaths, or if important foundations and funders are creating a climate of intellectual conformity, a social media town platform is too far downstream of those changes to really help reverse them.

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Opinion | What Does Elon Musk Want? Is Twitter the Way to Get It? - The New York Times

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

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

(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