Category Archives: Mars Colonization

For years scientists have been studying Mars to determine whether humans could colonise the red planet, as Earth is destroyed by its ever-growing population.

But to call Mars inhabitable is a stretch. The planets surface is one huge desert, with a single speck of dust poisonous enough to cause cancer. Wed have to live underground and never see the light of day, just to avoid the planets deadly levels of radiation.

So moving on to the next best option, Earths other neighbouring planet. If you read about Venus on a travel brochure, it would probably say something along the lines of, Beautiful tropic destination with awe-inspiring volcanos and a heart-warming atmosphere.

Except the atmosphere wont just warm your heart, it would completely crush all of your organs. And if 463.85 can pass as tropical, then at least that part is accurate.

Then there are the volcanos which cover the entire surface of the planet and theyre all extremely active. But if you need to wash the volcanic ash off your body, theres plenty of rain to keep you clean but maybe just close your eyes because its highly acidic.

To avoid all of those highly attractive features, were not going to live on the surface on Venus, were just going to build floating cities in the planets atmosphere duh.

Apparently, the Venusian atmosphere has similar conditions to Earth when it comes to gravity and radiation levels. You wouldnt need to wear a spacesuit, just a permanent oxygen mask, and its only a stones throw away, taking just 97 days to arrive.

One of the boffins at NASA, Geoffrey A. Landis reckons colonising Venus isnt actually such a crazy idea. He envisions a floating city full of giant balloons that contain enough oxygen for humans to comfortably breathe.

It sounds like a great setting for a Jules Verne novel, but its extremely unnerving that weve destroyed a perfect planet to the extent where scientists are genuinely considering life in a giant floating condom.

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Forget about Mars, we're going to Venus now - Happy Mag

This January, my corner of the political internet exploded. After all, something staggering had occurred: the green and brown M&M mascots had been remodelled to wear different shoes. Mars, the company that owns M&Ms, announced, Were on a mission to create a world where everyone feels they belong using the power of fun! Join us in being for all funkind.

The fight over the ridiculousness of this PR move broke out. Fox News host Tucker Carson raged about no longer being sexually attracted to the candy icons, generating a slew of reactions making fun of his response. Others called into question the details of the remodel and the way it slut-shamed the women-coded characters. Some others criticized how it didnt attract consumers or get across the message that Mars claims to support.

Among the numerous responses making fun of the remodel including those from Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and countless social media users a repeated theme cropped up: this is a hilarious, meaningless, non-news stunt. Mars seems to have cemented itself as an out-of-touch brand vying for public approval through moral posturing. Just like that, the company got all of our rage, all of our mockery, and all of our attention.

But while we kept our eyes trained on whether the orange M&M should represent anxiety, Mars spent 2021 as the target of a class action lawsuit for profiting off of child slavery in cocoa harvesting. Many large chocolate manufacturers, including Mars, were sued in the past year by Mali citizens who were enslaved as children on cocoa farms funded by the companies. They were kidnapped from their families and taken to Cte dIvoire, where they were surrounded by armed men and forced to work long hours in dangerous conditions.

Such cases have continued even though this issue has been a known problem in the cocoa industry for decades. The companies themselves even claimed that theyd commit to eradicating the worst forms of abuse from their supply lines by 2005 although they arbitrarily extended the deadline afterward.

Last summer, the US Supreme Court dismissed the Mali citizens lawsuit by saying these international crimes did not happen on US soil. This is convenient it sure is costly to go out and check whether the farms youre financing use child slaves, especially if willful ignorance will mean driving down cocoa prices through farms that dont have to pay their workers. It is also easy to participate in human rights offences in other countries when you cannot be legally prosecuted for it. The court confirmed the legitimacy of the child slavery allegations; Mars got away on a technicality, but they still profitted off of child slaves.

This story forces North American readers to face the circumstances to which our economic and legal structures subject colonized countries, getting off scot-free in the process. But smart marketers know that these problems feel far enough removed from our reality that they can be obfuscated.

A seemingly braindead headline about the M&Ms no longer being sexy? Now that gets clicks. Its so ridiculous that its memorable. And a right-winger losing it because hes no longer attracted to a chocolate candy? What a fool! Arent these culture war commentators so silly? Mars fanned the discourse flame, responding to the scandal in a tweet in which the green M&M smugly asks, Did my shoes really break the internet?

Mind you, we should still have conversations about how we exploit womens images for advertisements. However, in this case, this remodel is meant to be the first and last conversation you have about Mars. That way, the name of a company using child slavery is associated with its mascot scandal; the search results are populated with this discourse, burying the lawsuit.

A company remodelling their mascots is, at worst, shallowly attempting to profiteer off of social justice talking points. A company profiting off of child slavery is evil. The remodel debacle requires little effort on the companys part, but letting the child slavery controversy reach the public with no distractions would force Mars to take public action to right its practices. Which option is best for the company and its reputation is an easy choice for PR to make.

Corporate marketers are skilled at attention control, as can be seen from the history of company stunts that have used social issues to manufacture discourse and get press, like Gilettes ad criticizing toxic masculinity and Nikes ad about police brutality. Mars took the tactic to the level of covering up human rights abuses.

Thankfully, as Ive found while writing this article, some people are taking note of these connections and critiquing their capitalist roots. But considering the well of unethical corporate practices, this stunt wont be the last one.

Beware of manufactured outrage and of contributing to the spread of curated advertising narratives. In a world where our attention is invaluable for public action and is therefore a prime target for companies, keep it where it matters. In this case, call out the corporations who are getting away with profiting off the enslavement of children and critique the mass North American consumption of the products of exploitation.

Anna Sokolova is a fourth-year English and environmental chemistry student at Victoria College. They are the Features Editor at The Strand.

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Opinion: How brands manufacture outrage to uphold their image - Varsity

The universe is an Empire of Extremes. If you made a model of the cosmos where Earth wonderful, comfortable Earth is a grain of sand, then all the hostile, impossibly extreme places would be all the beaches on our planet.

Yet its in our myths and collective ambitions to go outward and try to spend as much time as possible in the Great Bummer that is the cosmos.

Bummer? Sounds too pessimistic, right? Thats because NASA has romanticized space travel for so long, and sci-fi has shown us merrily breezing through space a la Star Trek for over a half century now. And theres been no voice, none at all, saying, whoa, wait a minute its COLD out there! And you cant breathe! And except for Venus and Mars it takes years to get from one planet to the next, and millennia to get from one star to the next. Are you nuts? Im staying put!

But maybe Im too much a coward. Being a pilot and owning a plane for decades is the farthest Ive dared to venture off our sweet-hallowed surface. Yet, theyve actually found people who have trained for years in the can-do military credo, men and women who say: Go ahead, shoot me anywhere!

A vacuum? No problem! Air is overrated. Well just fill up this spacecraft here. Four years to get to Jupiters moons? No prob, people routinely kill that much time in the can after being busted for dope. Radiation belts? Okay, well just line this baby with the right material, like insulating a house in Minnesota. And what about the Mission Selection Chief choosing the wrong companion for you? Imagine being locked up in a tiny space with someone who voted for you-know-who?

Okay, lets get serious. We all know what the public wants NASA or private companies like Space-X to do. Send people to Mars. Nobody cares about returning to the Moon despite all the periodic talk about doing that. I think the public mood isbeen there, done that. And a brief landing on some small asteroid, while easier than Mars, wouldnt get many excited.

Everyone wants to vicariously visit Mars, even though the risks (like an unexpected appendicitis or breast cancer and the consequent death of one of the astronauts being a year from an appropriate medical facility) would maybe permanently chill the mood. But sending astronauts to Mars also creates a rarely-discussed negative side of its own, which is: convincing many people theres a potential back-up planet in case we mess this one up too badly.

Happy-face reporting, along the lines of the bunny-hopping images we got from the Apollo guys on the Moon, would make many ignore that the Red Planet has no breathable air. No life companionship or its sensory accompaniments like birdsong or colorful leaves or the smell of pine. Its a barren hostile place far less hospitable than Antarctica, where no one is lining up to colonize even though you can at least breathe there.

The bottom line for this astronomer, who has loved observing the universe all his life, is that we were each fashioned by planet Earth, and our home world dwells within us more deeply than we know. Human space travel is a great adventure, wonderful for explorers to do. But lets never pretend theres another potential home for us. Wed feel like aliens. The toll on our spirits, on our souls, might be devastating. Loneliness and a strange uneasiness might accompany much of our Martian time, with deep psychological problems of unknown etiology. Far fetched? Just picture placing any creature in an environment far removed from its home a condor in a cage, a captured wildcat in a zoo. Watch it weirdly pace back and forth day after day.

When I see the Space-X publicity folks announce their plans, my overarching take-away is that we must be gentler with our planet.

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The Night Sky: Want to go to Mars? - Hudson Valley One

Have you ever thought of taking a vacation to outer space?

For me, I have dreamed of going to outer space and dancing on the moon since I was a little girl. I didnt think how much the trip would damage the Earth. Or how much money will costjust a little girl dreaming of dancing on the moon.

I support studying outer space. It might protect the earth from a catastrophic asteroid one day, and produce a lot of other medical and environmental benefits. But what I dont support is exploiting outer space.

Most humans are driven to explore the unknown and push the boundaries of our scientific and technical limits. Still, I think it went too far with SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other companies.

They are spending billions of dollars and causing tremendous environmental damage to exploit outer space for their interest to gain more billions from colonizing Mars and exploit those who so badly wanted to visit outer space.

SpaceX, Blue origin, and other companies are American space transportation services. They are racing to reduce space transportation costs so people can visit outer space and, in the future, colonize Mars.

Do you know how much the trip to outer space will cost you? According to The New York Times, every passenger will cost $55 million for its seat on a SpaceX rocket.

The billionaire Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Blue Origin, and others, are starting a giant leap for pollution. I believe they can do something about it, but they dont care. They only care about making a legacy and becoming a trillionaire.

We need to think of planet Earth first, not last. We need to protect the next generations future on earth.

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Is space tourism for human exploration or exploitation? - The Clarion

In Mahabharatha, Gandhari stays pregnant for two years and finally delivers a mass of flesh. But luckily, Sage Vyasan arrives at the scene and saves the day.

He divides the flesh into 101 pots filled with ghee, and presto, Gandharis wish to get 100 sons and a daughter is fulfilled.

The technique that Vyasan used to grow the babies outside a womb would have been in great demand if it was available now as countries across the world are facing a shortage of babies.

In countries like Japan, it has already started to have a telling effect, while the worlds most populous nation, China, is slated to have a labour shortage in a couple of decades as the effect of its drastic one-child policy lingers on. India, poised to overtake China as the most populous nation by 2027, has also reported a fall in the fertility rate in 2021.

The rise in education and income level of women has made a sizeable section of them, especially in developed countries, question their traditional child-bearing role. Even in poorer regions, especially in Asia, women rebel against being chained to domestic duties and treated as baby-making machines.

The falling birth rates are fuelling talks about using technology to overcome this hurdle, and research is advancing fast.

In a paper published in Chinas Journal of Biomedical Engineering, researchers in Chinas Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology said they had developed an apparatus that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to grow embryos into foetuses.

The artificial womb, or long-term embryo culture device, is a container where they have mouse embryos growing in a line of cubes filled with nutritious fluids, a report said. The device can pave the way for a technology that could eliminate the need for a woman to carry her baby, it added.

This report came a few days after Silicone Valley superstars set off a Twitter chatter about synthetic wombs to tackle falling fertility rates and gender bias in salaries. Tesla chief Elon Musk started it when he expressed his worries about falling birth rates.

Musk, whose long-term ambitions include colonies on Mars, may have been more troubled by how that could affect his plans.

If there arent enough people for Earth, then there definitely wont be enough for Mars, he said in the tweet.

Soon after Musk (@elonmusk) posed this question to his 72 million Twitter followers, Ethereum cryptocurrency founder Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) tweeted out his suggestion for the looming problem: synthetic wombs that will make child delivery easier and also solve gender pay disparity which is a hot button issue in the Silicon Valley.

Studies have shown that womens earnings decline after a pregnancy break, whereas parenthood does not affect men. As a result, allegations of gender discrimination have swirled around in almost every hi-tech company in Silicon Valley.

Buterin did generate anger among a sizeable section of his 3.2 million Twitter followers, but he also found some measure of support, including from some heavyweights in the tech world.

We should be investing in technology that makes having kids much faster/easier/cheaper/more accessible Synthetic wombs, etc. tweeted Sahil Lavingia, (@shl) founder of @gumrod an e-commerce company who has a quarter-of-a-million followers.

Some notable women from the world of technology also joined on both sides of the argument. Sonal Chokshi (@smc90), one of the brightest with an outstanding track record in Silicon Valley, tweeted this: The current procreation is something humans have been doing for kajillion years and it should be as I-cant-believe-we-once-did-it-that-way as anything else.

Another cyberworld star, Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis), also tweeted out his view, saying the opposition and claims of tinkering with the nature claims were there when scientists were testing artificial insemination methods.Millions of families for whom IVF was the only chance to have a child are glad they did, went his tweet.

It is not that some whiz kid is sitting in a garage right now would have a synthetic womb prototype next year that will let men and women avoid long pregnancy, delivery, pre and post-natal issues; even the tremendous headway made by Chinese scientists may be years away from actual childbirth. But scientists are showing it could be a possibility.

Technologys problem is that its proponents cannot always predict all of the issues it will encounter, as the communication revolution had shown when it became weapons in some hands.

The report of experiments with AI-run artificial womb did raise some troubling questions in China, where surrogacy is banned. Births using a machine would turn hospitals into parents, said one researcher.

If everyone is born this way, fair enough. But if some children are given birth to by parents, and some by the government, there will be a big problem.

The very thought of government producing babies itself is a dystopian nightmare, given the kind of people who run some countries.

The idea of a contraption that could save prematurely born babies sounds good. But if it extends to synthetic wombs that could end up as baby-producing factories, it is time to cry halt.

When technologies that alter fundamental activities are mooted, it needs a well-rounded discussion about its pros and cons instead of just a group of experts in white coats conducting experiments in a lab or a bunch of well-heeled people brainstorming on it.

The falling birth rate is a complex issue that technologies like a synthetic womb may not resolve.

The rise in education and income level of women has made a sizeable section of them question their traditional child-bearing role. In a world where everything is measured in terms of money it generates, the values get skewed about issues like child-rearing and maternity care.

That is the issue to be solved to fix this problem, though it is unlikely to have a smooth passage as it will weaken the structure of many male-dominated societies, which burdens women with all domestic chores.

Technology to help grow babies outside a mothers womb could look like a logical answer to whiz kids in Silicon Valley debating gender disparity in wages. But the far-reaching effects of such a step conjure up some troubling thoughts.

It didnt end well when Vyasan tried it, either. Read the Mahabharata if you dont believe me.

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Synthetic womb on the way; new Vyasans and epics to rock the world - Mathrubhumi English

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Written by Joseph Henry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Every Age Gets the Mythology It Deserves - lareviewofbooks

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

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

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

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

Wait, thats a good thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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