Category Archives: Mars Colonization

These have been heady days for would-be space tourists, a self-funding cargo that spacecraft designer Burt Rutan once joked can be reproduced with unskilled labor around the house.

Self-funding is the key term, a synonym for not dependent on NASA.

Mr. Rutan was the brains behind Virgin Galactic founder Richard Bransons space plane, a first in two ways. Mr. Rutans original model in 2004 received the Federal Aviation Administrations first commercial human spaceflight license. And Mr. Branson used a later model this month to beat Jeff Bezos to an imaginary line marking the beginnings of outer space.

Mr. Branson might be said to proceed in the freebooting tradition of the East India Company. The private sector pursues its own aims and government follows. Mr. Bezos and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, without the least disrespect, are government contractors in waiting. The things many of us dream ofMars colonization, exploring the oceans of Europa, sending robot probes to nearby star systemsare public-sector work even if big pieces can be split off for private competition.

All hail Mr. Musk for forcing NASA and its pork-barreling congressional masters to recognize the cost-cutting benefits of private, reusable rocketry. He did so with his own money, impelling NASA for now to alter its business model in a way that may or may not stick.

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Opinion | Why Space Tourism? Because It Operates Outside of NASA - The Wall Street Journal

A scene from Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Source: Netflix screenshot

It has become axiomatic to say that the world is becoming like science fiction. From mobile phones that speak to us (reminding Star Trek fans of tricorders), to genetically modified foods, to the Internet of Things and the promise of self-driving cars, people in industrialised nations live immersed in technology. Daily life can thus at times seem like visions from the pulp science fiction of the 1920s and 1930s either a world perfected by technology, manifested in events such as the 1939 Worlds Fair, with its theme The World of Tomorrow; or a dystopian nightmare, such as Aldous Huxleys Brave New World (1932).

If we think about science fiction (sf) in terms of the genres connections to pressing issues in 21st-century culture, no topic is more urgent than climate change and the ways it promises to transform all aspects of human life, from where we live to how we cultivate our food to what energy sources will fuel our industries.

The issue is so pressing that some have started to use the term cli-fi for climate fiction but this faddish coinage obscures a longer history of sfs engagement with the environment and leaves unexamined the question of why sf has proven such a valuable genre for thinking about environmental futures. Even before the idea of climate change took hold, the genre embraced the geological and evolutionary timescales of 19th-century science and began to think of the planet as something that preceded our species and could conceivably continue without us. Such conceptualisations of the planet as a changeable environment turned the tradition of apocalyptic fiction toward mundane visions of environmental catastrophe instead of divine judgment.

A key early way such ideas circulated was through the changing imaginary about Mars: In the late 19th century, telescopic observations seemed to suggest the planet was covered in canals, which American astronomer Percival Lowell hypothesised were an irrigation technology, an idea taken up in Edgar Rice Burroughss A Princess of Mars (1912), among other fictions. When this idea was disproven by better telescopes, sf often depicted Mars as a once-inhabited planet whose civilisations had died out due to drought, presaging a fate that might also befall Earth.

In Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars trilogy (19931996), about terraforming Mars to create an atmosphere and enable human colonisation, technology is used to make these canals a material reality. The trilogy represents the viewpoints of several different factions over the decades-long process of changing the surface of Mars, including characters who argue in defense of leaving its environment unchanged. This is the best-known science fiction series about engineering planetary environments, most of which express themes about environmental protection and sustainability, but some of which celebrate a fantasy of total human control over the environment and planetary weather.

Early sf offered spectacles of disastrous destruction of cities and their populations but unlike more recent works did not posit anthropogenic causes. Disease rather than climate was more frequently imagined as humanitys end in these works, including Mary Shelleys The Last Man (1826) and M.P. Shiels The Purple Cloud (1901). At times such tales of massive destruction serve as opportunities to remake society without much environmentalism, such as Sydney Fowler Wrights Deluge (1928), in which existing cultures are wiped out by earthquake-induced floods, distilling remaining populations into a hardier strain. This motif begins to take on a more environmentalist orientation in later works such as John Christophers The Death of Grass (1956), about a mutation that kills all cereal crops, a device that draws attention to humanitys dependence on other species, a theme also present in George R. Stewarts Earth Abides (1949), in which current humanity cannot survive, but the planet can.

Such works are interested in how the remnants of humanity might restore civilisation and what form it might take, and thus remain anthropocentric in their focus. They are notable, however, for their emphasis on connections between humans and the natural world, resisting a technophilic tone of much contemporary sf that envisioned extensively mechanised futures. Moreover, they stand out from other contemporary postapocalyptic fiction in positing a premise other than nuclear war for the end of life as we know it and in explicitly linking images of destruction to environmental themes.

With the more experimental sf of the New Wave period and its relationships to contemporary countercultures, an overtly environmentalist sf appears, although here too fictions of apocalyptic collapses are sometimes more metaphorical than literal. This is especially true of J.G. Ballards stylistically compelling disaster novels, The Wind from Nowhere (1961), The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964) and The Crystal World (1966), each of which depicts the world destroyed by what we would now call climate change high winds, flood, drought and a mysterious force that crystallises matter, respectively.

Ballard uses his transformed setting to interrogate the sterility and violence of the world prior to these disasters rather than comment specifically on environmental themes; nonetheless, his vivid depictions of the monstrosities inherent in industrialisation, capitalism and colonialism evoke topics that would usually be addressed in work by activist authors.

At roughly the same time, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring (1962), a trenchant critique of the use of pesticides in agriculture, which opens with A Fable for Tomorrow in which Carson depicts a future where a blight destroys all life in Anytown, USA, an outcome that Carson traces back to disruptions in the ecosystem caused by pesticides.

Carson thus demonstrates the rhetorical power of fictional, futuristic depictions to shape public understandings. In attempts to discredit her scientific credentials and disparage her personal character, Carsons opponents were as vociferous and vile as any Ballardian antagonist. Nonetheless, her work, alongside the Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth (1972) published a decade later, fostered new ways of thinking about ecological futures, premised on sustainability.

Silent Spring energised a contemporary environmental movement, which had significant overlaps with contemporary antiwar and antinuclear activism. The first Earth Day was proposed in 1970, aimed at making air and water pollution a mainstream public concern, and eventually resulting in the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of legislation related to pollution and endangered species.

Earth Day drew on the sf imaginary both in terms of Carsons use of futuristic narrative and in the image of the planet as seen from space as a symbol on a flag designed by John McConnell, which was intended to convey the interconnectedness of all life on the planet. The turn toward imagination as a powerful rhetorical technique in the environmental movement is also apparent in the launch of the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural magazine started in 1968 and published until 1998, which also featured an image of Earth from space on its first cover indeed, this is the whole Earth of its title. An early example of DIY activism, the magazine fostered an imaginative community oriented toward an ideal of living more sustainably, addressed, in this way, to inhabitants of that future.

As with feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, environmental activists turned explicitly to sf and its relationship to the utopian tradition to promote countercultural values. The most famous example is Ernest Callenbachs Ecotopia (1975), written as if it were the notebook of William Weston, a journalist who in 1999 is visiting and reporting on a society in the Pacific Northwest that seceded from America to establish a new polis defined by sustainability, recycling, minimal use of fossil fuels, localised food production and gender equality.

Like the authors of 19th-century utopias, Callenbach demonstrates an imaginative possibility for how one might live otherwise. Moreover, the novel suggests that changed relationships to environmental ideals require transformation of other aspects of social life, such as patriarchy and capitalism, themes that persist in ecological sf today. Similar ideas about the need to address problems of poverty and discrimination alongside pollution and environmental destruction are found in fiction by Kim Stanley Robinson, unquestionably the most important living sf writer addressing environmental themes.

There are then dystopian works of environmental sf such as John Brunners The Sheep Look Up (1972). Taking its title from a line in Miltons Lycidas about hungry sheep failing to be fed by a corrupt church, the novel scathingly critiques the entrenched capitalist system that simultaneously destroys the environment and markets products designed to ameliorate the risks caused by contaminated air, water and food. The plot concerns Nutripon, a manufactured food sent to developing countries as part of an American aid package. A shipment causes hallucinations that result in violent behavior, and some believe this is a deliberate attempt to eliminate people of colour.

Meanwhile, in the United States, money is less and less able to insulate the rich from contaminated food and water. Finally, we learn the Nutripon shipment was contaminated by toxic waste in the factorys water supply, an accident. In a world of irresponsible polluters who value profit above all else, a conspiracy is not required to produce genocide. Brunners work stands out for its global scope and its recognition that the damage done by colonialism continues in and is exacerbated by pollution.

Frank Herberts Dune (1965) is often understood as a prescient novel about climate change, given its desert setting and its invention of several technologies for survival with a minimum of water. It is the first novel is what would become a sprawling franchise. The original novel recounts the political machinations by which young Paul Atreides is displaced from his inheritance as a feudal coloniser of Arrakis, lives among nomadic Indigenous peoples while mastering psionic powers, and eventually reclaims his dynasty while also fulfilling a messianic prophecy.

Alongside Robert Heinleins Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), in which a libertarian, free love-promoting human comes to Earth from Mars, Dune was read widely outside sf circles when it was published. Heinleins strange protagonist, Valentine Michael Smith, preached a hippie-like philosophy best expressed by the novels invented term grok, that is, comprehension so intense as to approximate union with the object of attention, a phrase soon widely used beyond sf. Both novels were embraced by a youthful college audience who saw in them a reflection of their own anti-establishment values.

But the shift from pollution to climate change as the main engine of dystopian futures doesnt firmly take hold until the 21st century. The explicit turn to sf as a tool for environmental activism characterises this second generation of writers, who often write fiction about climate change and are involved in activism.

Wanuri Kahius important short film Pumzi (2009), depicting the regeneration of a future Africa after a period of intense environmental loss, shows the power of new voices taking up these themes. Another prominent example is Paolo Bacigalupi, who addresses the uneven global effects of climate change. His young-adult trilogy Ship Breaker (2010), The Drowned Cities (2012) and Tool of War (2017) is set in a world changed by sea-level rise and projects both growing economic precarity and the rise of authoritarian governments in such circumstances.

Bacigalupis most forceful novel to date is The Water Knife (2015), based on a short story originally published in the environmental magazine High Country News, about near-future water wars as California, Arizona and Nevada all battle to control the dwindling resources of the Colorado Basin. It is mainly an indictment of legal manipulations that keep water rights in the hands of an elite, portraying with sympathy the fraught ethical choices left to the disenfranchised, and it concludes with a glimmer of hope in green technologies distributed by a Chinese government that is mostly in the background of the narrative.

Octavia Butlers Parable series (1993-1998) is a truly prescient work about climate change. One of the few writers of color to achieve prominence in the field during the 20th century, her reputation has only grown in the years since her death in 2006. In this series, she imagines a future California beset by massive displacements fueled by climate change. Although published more than 20 years ago, these books read as plausible futures, perhaps now more than ever. Unlike Bacigalupis despair, Butlers novel is rooted in hope, although she depicts an equally grim future. Like her Xenogenesis series, this work demands of its audience that we confront the difficult task of building communities in the face of loss, displacement and tensions about diversity.

The Parable series imagines a future religion, Earthseed, as the core of this new kind of community. As Shelley Streeby outlines in Imagining the Future of Climate Change (2018), Butlers work has inspired activists, some of whom have formed the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network to cultivate the values Butler espoused, treating her sf as a manual for alternative lifeways what Streeby calls a place to practice the future. Streeby connects this network to other instances of imaginative activism in 21st-century environmental politics, particularly by people of color and Indigenous communities, showing powerful ways that sf is becoming a rhetoric for activist practice.

Butlers vision insists that environmentalism must proceed in tandem with other social justice movements that counter racism and colonialism, a perspective that also informs N.K. Jemisins celebrated Broken Earth trilogy, the most important recent work to address climate change and social injustice as mutually constitutive problems.

Kim Stanley Robinson has written about the environmental damage caused by capitalism throughout his career, generally offering the hope that technology can ameliorate our dire situation. Climate change is most centrally the focus in his near-future Science in the Capital trilogy (2004-2007), about the struggle to mobilise politics and science together to confront the inevitability of climate change. The first novel, Forty Signs of Rain (2004), focuses on structural barriers that bar research and legislation that could address climate change, and it ends with the spectacle of a flooded Washington, DC.

The second novel, Fifty Degrees Below (2005), is set during a mini Ice Age caused by the halting of the Gulf Stream, and it explores possible technical options to ameliorate this changed climate: a lichen engineered to capture more carbon, re-salinating the ocean to restart the Gulf Stream, and various tools and clothing that enable a high-tech Paleolithic lifestyle with a smaller carbon footprint than the lifeways of urbanised modernity. The final novel, Sixty Days and Counting (2007), offers the utopian possibility of an elected US president who will prioritise climate change and who institutes a set of policies that push the U.S. economy into sustainable energy, while acknowledge the global disparities that are the legacy of capitalism. A number of the technological amelioration projects succeed, and we are left on the cusp of a new chapter in history.

Appearing about the time that Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, we can see in retrospect that the trilogy addresses issues of extreme weather, just as we can see now that Katrina was only the first of what has since become the new normal for the climate: heat waves, cold waves and extreme storms. The vast scope of his work speaks to Robinsons careful attention to the complexity of climate change and the institutional barriers that prevent even acknowledging this reality in some circles. His wide cast of characters enables readers to see how politicians, lobbyists, funding agencies, displaced migrants and families in America are all part of the network that informs how climate change is perceived.

The utopianism of Robinsons conclusion seems a bit forced, perhaps, but he is careful to show the number of people and institutions that must come together to enact meaningful social change as he refuses to simply capitulate to the cynical despair that fuels Bacigalupis work. Although perhaps not self-evidently a climate change novel, Robinsons Shaman (2013), set during the last ice age and recounting how early humans adapted to a changing climate, further reinforces his ideas about the value of elements of Paleolithic ways of living with, rather than in opposition to, ones environment.

Science fiction is a genre that has long used its projected other worlds to offer commentary on our material (and contemporary) one, especially to remind us that this world is open to change. There is myriad evidence that authors from outside the genre use sf techniques in precisely this rhetorical way. Consider Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conways polemical The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014), written as if by a Chinese historian in 2393 who is reflecting back to theorise why Western civilisations failed to act, despite clear signs of their looming collapse.

Similarly, popular books such as Alan Weismans The World without Us (2007) and the documentary television series Life after People (2009) encourage us to reflect on how humans have changed our environments as they offer speculative visions of ecosystems continuing without us, erasing the technological signs of human habitation. Or consider Werner Herzogs strange environmental film, The Wild Blue Yonder (2005), which is part documentary, part sf narrative, fused with NASA footage of outer space, deep sea photography and a scripted narrative about an alien species who destroyed their ecosystem and seek to relocate to Earth.

Environmental rhetoric, like speculative design, an approach that encourages thinking about and designing possible futures in a meaningful way, is one of the main places we see sf become a discursive way to grasp the present. Lindsay Thomas, in a compelling article on preparedness discourse, argues that sf provides a counterdiscourse to the kinds of speculative projections found in disaster planning, including government projections about climate change. Whereas documents such as the Department of Defense 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, cited by Thomas, cultivate feelings of neutral detachment and automated response to already anticipated scenarios, sf about climate change enables readers to experience multiple temporalities beyond the individual human life.

Preparedness discourse responds to change, understood as disaster, through strategies of containment. But science fiction offers something much more. It offers us a way of thinking and perceiving, a toolbox of methods for conceptualising, intervening in and living through rapid and widespread change and the possibility to direct it toward an open future that we (re)make.

Sherryl Vint is professor of media and cultural studies and of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of several books, most recently Science Fiction, from which this article is adapted. It was originally published by MIT Press Reader and has been republished here with permission.

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A Century of Science Fiction That Changed How We Think About the Environment - The Wire Science

Human society is on the verge of collapsing in the next two decades unless there is a major shift in global objectives, according to a recent review of a 1970s research.

A stunning new analysis by a director at one of the world's largest accounting companies has concluded that a renowned, decades-old warning from Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) about the likelihood of industrial civilisation collapsing looks to be accurate.

Also read: Warning of 'population collapse' on Earth, Elon Musk calls for colonisation of Mars

According to a news report published in Vice.com, a group of MIT experts got together in 1972 to research the dangers of civilisation collapse.

Due to over exploitation of planetary resources, their system dynamics model published by the Club of Rome detected looming limits to growth' (LtG), implying that industrial society was on the verge of collapsing sometime in the twenty-first century.

A group of MIT scientists stated in that report, which was published in the bestselling book "The Limits to Expansion" (1972), that industrial civilisation would be doomed if businesses and governments continued to pursue continuous economic growth at any cost.

The researchers proposed 12 future scenarios, the majority of which anticipated that natural resources would become scarce to the point that further economic expansion would be impossible and personal welfare would drop.

The contentious MIT study sparked a firestorm of controversy, and it was widely mocked at the time by pundits who distorted its findings and methods.

However, a report written by a senior director at professional services behemoth KPMG, one of the 'Big Four' accounting companies in terms of global sales, has provided astonishing support for the conclusion.

(With inputs from agencies)

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Society will collapse in 21st century: MIT predicted in 1972 - WION

If you want to see some of the toughest, most hardy organisms on the planet, youre going to need a microscope. Microbes bacteria, amoebas, archaea, and so on can live just about anywhere, from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the tallest mountain. Theres trillions of them in your body right now and they can even survive in the cold void of space.

So you can imagine what a surprise it must have been for Noah Fierer and his team of microbial ecologists to find somewhere with no microbial life at all.

Viable microbes have been detected in even the most inhospitable environments and it is widely assumed that all environments on Earth should contain detectable microorganisms, wrote the team in their study published last month in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences. This assumption is likely incorrect.

Given how ubiquitous microbes are across the planet, it was no mean feat to find somewhere they hadnt already colonized. In fact, the researchers had to take themselves all the way to the Shackleton Glacier in Antarctica, where the unique mix of cold, dry, and salty conditions combine to make one of the least hospitable environments on Earth.

Its the combination of multiple very challenging environmental conditions that restricts life more than just one acting by itself, study co-author Nicholas Dragone explained in Science News. Its a very different sort of restriction than, say, just high temperature.

Using a range of tests, the researchers analyzed more than 200 soil samples from the region looking for evidence of microscopic life. And while the vast majority contained enough microbes for the team to detect and classify the various species, a good 20 percent turned up no microbial DNA at all.

We are not suggesting that we have found lifeless or sterile soils, nor have we identified the low temperature threshold for life, cautions the paper. However, our inability to detect microbes or microbial activity in certain soils suggests that these surface soils represent a limit to microbial activity and survival driven by the cold, dry, and salty environmental conditions.

Now, the discovery of, essentially, nothing may not seem like a big deal, but it really is. You see, microbes are one of our best bets in the search for extraterrestrial life, and a lot of astrobiologists have got pretty excited recently about the prospect of a bunch of the microscopic creatures burping on Mars. But if there are places on Earth where no microbes can be found, Fierer and his team say, its probably not going to be easy to find them on Mars.

The combination of conditions found in the surface soils of the Shackleton Glacier are similar to those found on the surface of Mars, the paper explains. Given that Martian soils are much older, experience similar or even harsher conditions, and contain even higher concentrations of the same salts our results suggest that searching for active life in surface soils on Mars is unlikely to return positive results.

On the other hand, maybe we shouldnt lose hope. Finding life on Mars may be a long shot, but finding life on Earth is generally pretty easy which is why some in the scientific community think the results of the study must be a simple false-negative.

Certainly, there were things there, Jeff Bowman of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, who was not involved in the research, told Science News This is Earth.

This is an environment that is massively contaminated with life.

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Scientists Went To The Ends Of The Earth And Found Nothing. Here's Why That's Important. - IFLScience

A host of high-profile websites including UPS and Airbnb went dark yesterday. Screenshot

Good morning and welcome to 10 Things in Tech. If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

Let's get started.

1. A lot of websites went dark yesterday. UPS, FedEx, US Bank, Airbnb, and other major websites saw outages beginning around noon yesterday, but the issue was fixed within an hour. What we know about what happened.

2. Mark Zuckerberg said he wants to turn Facebook into "a metaverse company." The CEO said Facebook will transform from a social media company to the center of the metaverse. That sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, so here's a brief explainer.

3. Reclusive billionaire Larry Page has been hiding out in Fiji for the past year, sources say. The Google cofounder has been off the grid for months - but we found he's been dwelling on islands that have been closed to most travelers during the pandemic. What's Page been doing in Fiji?

4. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk want to colonize space, but both of their ideas have some problems. From thinning bones to toxic plants on Mars, here are the six biggest issues with their plans.

5. NASA's Perseverance Mars rover is going to cut its first sample of Martian rock. Within the next two weeks, the rover will use a laser to collect a rock sample that will help scientists search for signs of ancient life. More on that here.

6. More than half of Silicon Valley workers say they would avoid an employer that banned political discussions. Two surveys asked workers their thoughts on being able to discuss politics at work, and found that most employees want that freedom. Here's what else the surveys found.

7. Wally Funk was the only endearing thing about Jeff Bezos's spaceflight. The passengers on Blue Origin's first human flight - a pair of billionaire brothers and a millionaire investor's teen son - didn't quite reflect Jeff Bezos' message of accessibility. Our science reporter explains how Funk was the flight's saving grace.

Story continues

8. A majority of super-rich family offices own or are interested in crypto. Many investment firms of the rich increasingly see crypto as a hedge against inflation, a survey from Goldman Sachs said. Get the full rundown.

9. Disney+ streaming chief reveals his launch strategy and global expansion hurdles. Plus, he gave us some insight into what he looks for when he's hiring (hint: he's looking for "great athletes''). Read our exclusive interview.

10. A tiny-home startup that built a house for Elon Musk wants to crowdfund $50 million from Tesla fans. Boxabl gained national attention when Musk said that he was living in a tiny unit after selling his several multimillion-dollar homes. Here's how the company wants to use that recognition to emerge as a dominant player in the industry.

Compiled by Jordan Erb. Tips/comments? Email jerb@insider.com or tweet @JordanParkerErb.

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10 things in tech: Larry Page in Fiji - Zuck's metaverse - Web outages - Yahoo News

Welcome to the latest, action-packed episode of Billionaires in Space. In case you missed the most recent action: Sir Richard Branson made it to the edge of space in his Virgin Galactic rocket plane. That put him ahead of fellow filthy rich pioneers Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Bezos hit the skies Tuesday in his Blue Origin New Shepard rocket and space capsule. Musk, it seems, is playing a longer game. No mere space tourism for him. He wants to colonize Mars.

Some argue that such explorations represent the true spirit of adventure and enterprise. After all, Branson and Bezos didnt just fly in their own vessels; they also paid for them. Others, however, are already singing a different tune, one that dates to the days following the original moon landing. If you dont already know it, now is a good time to acquaint yourself with Gil Scott-Herons Whitey on the Moon.

The preeminent spoken word artist of the 1970s and 80s, and a spiritual and stylistic forefather of hip-hop, Scott-Heron was known for his rhyming take-downs of American hypocrisy and inequality. His most famous song, 1971s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, drew a series of lines between commercialism and genuine social change (The revolution will not go better with Coke / The revolution will not fight germs that may cause bad breath / The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.)

Whitey on the Moon arrived one year earlier, in February 1970, less than a year after the moon landing. Scott-Heron wasnt the only one protesting the space race. In his 2003 paper Public opinion polls and perceptions of US human spaceflight, Roger D. Launius writes: Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much on space.

This was also the age of the Kerner Commission, convened to examine the urban uprisings sweeping the country during the 60s; and the Moynihan Report, a study of African American families. But Scott-Heron didnt need such official accounts. He had a front-row seat to the nations racial and economic inequality. While the U.S. was spending some $28 billion (or $288 billion when adjusted for inflation) to reach the moon, poverty was running rampant back on Earth.

Or, as Scott-Heron put it over a pulsing bongo beat: Was all that money I made last year (for Whitey on the moon) / How come there aint no money here (Hm! Whiteys on the moon).

In other parts of the song, Scott-Heron provides close-ups to go with the overview, how a rat done bit my sister Nell and I can't pay no doctor bill. He then connects the macro view of the space race to the personal: Ten years from now I'll be payin' still. Here Scott-Heron conjures imagery right out of Richard Wrights Native Son, with its vision of Chicagos Black Belt, where rodents are tangible messengers of poverty. It should be noted that Scott-Heron was hardly the only Black person protesting Apollo 11. Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King Jr.'s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, called the moon landing an inhuman priority.

The song continues to echo through pop culture. In the 2018 movie First Man, a rather melancholy drama about Neil Armstrong, Fort Worths Leon Bridges appears briefly as Scott-Heron, performing Whitey against the backdrop of an anti-NASA protest. More recently, the since-canceled Black sci-fi drama Lovecraft Country used the song for both an episode title and musical accompaniment and commentary on a mystical brand of white power.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, global warming portends all manner of catastrophe, we can't quite get COVID under control, race relations are plummeting and democracy is under attack. Branson and Bezos know this, even in their spaced-out state. Musk, in his quest to colonize Mars, seems all too ready to spend his money, cut his losses and leave all of these problems behind.

Sure, spaceflight has delivered plenty of benefits to humanity but its hard to reconcile that with vain tourism. To paraphrase Scott-Heron, theres plenty wrong down here. Why so eager to fly away up there?

Vognar is a freelance writer in Houston.

Continued here:
Opinion: Whitey back on the moon? 1970s song is anthem for Americans bemoaning billionaire space race - Houston Chronicle

But billionaires really dont want you to know that

You can hardly blameRichard Branson,Jeff Bezos,Elon Musk, and all their rich buddies for ditching planet Earth to have a hot billionaire summer in space.

After all, even rich people were stuck inside for a year while the COVID-19 pandemic raged its way around the globe. Who among us couldnt use an out-of-this-world vacation?

But it can be difficult not to feel a little saltyover the fact that us regular poor folk can only dream of leaving atmosphere. Meanwhile, Elon Musks out there planning exactly what the buildings will look like on Mars.

Life in glass domes at first. Eventually, terraformed to support life, like Earth.

Elon Musk (@elonmusk)November 18, 2020

Heres how AI can improve your companys customer journeyREAD ARTICLE

Heres the thing though: those billionaires are almost certainly never going to live anywhere but on Earth. Its just too hard. Most of us are unlikely to ever visit space and pretty much none of us, in our lifetimes,will get the opportunity to live there permanently.

Like Musk says, humanity should probably become amulti-planet speciesASAP. The longer we sit around waiting for our planet to get destroyed by an asteroid, an alien species, or our own unchecked destruction, the more likely well end up joining the same club as the dodo and the dinosaurs.

But were going to need to fix the Earth if we hope tolive long enoughas a species to obtain the necessary technology itll take to make life possible in space.

Unfortunately, living in space isnt as simple as replicating life on Earth. The reason people get excited about the possibilities is because weve been inundated with pictures of smiling astronauts having fun floating around.

But compared to Earth, outer space, the Moon, and Mars are allhellishly harsh environments. Theres a laundry list of unresolved science problems restricting even the most basic of human life requirements from being met at any scale beyond a trained space station crew, and that makes colonization a far-away science fiction fantasy.

Each of the above line items are mission-stoppers when it comes to moving members of the general public off Earth.

We dont have the technology to build massive structures in space. And that limits our ability to resolve some of the most difficult problems with living in space.

In the movies, characters walk around on spaceships as if they were taking a stroll on Earth. But space doesnt work that way and artificial gravity remains science fiction.

One way in which we can use currently available technology to solve the gravity issue would be to develop huge cylinders and set them spinning in space. Thanks to centrifugal force, a space station rotating at sufficient velocity could theoretically create artificial gravity.

But were talkingmassivestructures here some scientists believe theyd have to beseveral miles across. And theres currently no feasible method by which we could build such a thing on Earth and get it up into space.

Just feeding, washing, clothing, and supplying oxygen for a handful of astronauts aboard the International Space Station costs millions of dollars per week.

In order to support human life beyond the scope of a spaceship crew, well need infrastructure in space we simply cant build or support with current technlogy.

There are literally no safe spaces in outer space. The moment we leave Earths atmosphere, were completely beholden to our technology. If your ship malfunctions in space, theres no pulling over to fix it.

Furthermore, none of the heavenly bodies near our planet offer the same protections as Earth. Temperatures on the Moon range from 260F to -280F daily. On Mars, the average temperature is -81F. And cosmic background temperature areas of space that arent being heated by nearby stars or other entities is around -455F.

What that means is, if you leave our planet, anywhere close enough for you to travel in your lifetime will be uninhabitable based on temperatures alone.

If you move to Mars or the Moon, youll never be able to stand outside and gaze up at the stars without a special suit to protect you again. And if you live on a giant spaceship or settle on a space station instead, youll spend the rest of your life looking at the cosmos through a window.

The technology it would take to terraform another planet or build giant domes to protect entire populations doesnt exist today.

The science behind making other planets habitable is purely speculative. Elon Musk honestly suggested we should considerdropping a nuclear bomb on Marsto kick start its atmosphere. That should tell you exactly how nuanced our ideas on off-world colonization are.

If we cannot solve Earths current climate crisis, it would be brilliantly stupid to think we can make the atmosphere and surface of Mars habitable for humans.

But with no atmosphere, life outside of Earth would be eternal confinement. The first civilians who try to live in space will be as much prisoners as they are pioneers.

We dont know exactly what effects long term exposure to space radiation will have on people, butwe know theyre going to be bad.

Astronauts operating just outside the Earths orbit require teams with hundreds of support personnel to keep them alive. They cant just rocket up into space and fly around willy-nilly.

Scientists have to monitor radiation constantly so astronauts can avoid bursts and protect themselves.Bursts of radiationcan disrupt communications and electronics and even prove instantly fatal to humans.

Furthermore, even if we manage to figure out how to shield humans during transport, theres nowhere safe for them to go except home. Humans will experience substantially more radiation on Mars and the Moon than they do on Earth, and thats likely to result in a severely decreased lifespan for anybody who lives off-planet.

The human body has evolved over millions of years. Where once we were single-celled organisms developing mutations such as flagella for locomotion, were now upright primates capable of creating nuclear reactors and episodes ofRick & Morty.

One of the quirks that comes with evolving to inhabit a gorgeous, lush planet, is thatwere built for gravity. Floating around in space might look like a lot of fun, but the human cardiovascular system is built to pump blood in a gravity-based environment. Our digestive system uses gravity. Our bones, muscles, tendons, and even our organs have all been designed and trained to function with a very specific amount of force pulling them in the general direction ofdown.

Removing us from the gravity we were designed to live inhas catastrophic effects. Itd be nearly impossible to maintain muscle mass. And theres not much research on what that would mean for our hearts and brains. We simply cannot exist in low gravity for long periods of time without expecting serious health risks including premature death.

Theres currently no solution to this problem. Functional artificial gravity in space or off-planet remains squarely within the realms of science fiction.

At the end of the day, living in space would be exponentially more difficult, boring, dangerous, harsh, and soul-suckingly awful than permanently relocating to Antarctica or establishing a human colony beneath the ocean.

No matter what the billionaires tell you, its going to be easier to fix the planet we live on than to find a new home. Theres only one Earth.

This story was written by Tristan Green for The Next web.

This article was originally published on The Next Web.

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5 reasons why living in space is way harder than solving climate change - Qrius

Jeff Bezos is going into space. Would you? Amol Rajan, of the BBC, asked Sundar Pichai, the C.E.O. of Google, last week. Well, Pichai said, smiling, Im jealous, a bit. I would love to look at Earth from space. Unlike most people, Pichai can probably afford to do so. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, sold a seat on his Blue Origin space companys New Shepard rocket, set to launch this Tuesday, to someone who bid twenty-eight million dollars for it in an online auction and then cancelled, citing scheduling conflicts. The eighteen-year-old son of a Dutch investment-firm executive will be joining Bezos as the first paying customer, instead.

The theatrics surrounding Bezoss tripwhich involves just a few minutes in spacecontribute to the impression that we are not so much in a space age as in an era of billionaire rocketeers. Right before Richard Branson, the Virgin entrepreneur, took off on his own near-space jaunt, on July 11th, Bezoss company tweeted that, among other things, its spaceship has bigger windows. (Bransons are airplane-sized, it said; but hes charging only a quarter of a million dollars per seat.) Elon Musk, the C.E.O. of Tesla and SpaceX, who has his own plans to leave the planet, has tweeted that Bezos is a copycat, using a cat emoji.

Yet it would be a misapprehension to think that, after centuries of humans dreaming about worlds beyond ours, outer space has been reduced to just another stage for rivalries among the super-richa Southampton in the sky. The larger and far more interesting story is that the planet has, somewhat abruptly, embarked on a new and rapidly accelerating space race. The protagonists include private companies and a growing number of nations, among them China, India, and the United Arab Emirates. As General John Raymond, the head of the U.S. Space Force, which Donald Trump designated a separate branch of the militarya decision that President Biden has affirmedsaid at a Council on Foreign Relations event last month, Space is a very dynamic domain right now. Theres a lot happening.

For a start, the most consequential conflict between Bezos and Musk is not about space tourism but about a nearly three-billion-dollar contract that NASA awarded SpaceX, in April, to build a human lunar lander for its Artemis program, which aims, before the decade is out, to resume flying people to the moon for the first time since 1972. Blue Origin, which was part of a consortium that lost out to SpaceX, filed a formal protest with the Government Accountability Office, claiming that the process was unfair; a ruling is expected next month.

NASA also hired SpaceX to shuttle astronauts to and from the International Space Station on the companys reusable Crew Dragon spacecraft line. (The second such mission is currently under way, and this month Boeings Starliner is also set to dock at the station, for the first time.) NASA hasnt had its own means of getting people to the I.S.S. since the Space Shuttle program ended, in 2011. For years, it bought seats on Russian Soyuz rockets, an option that has become geopolitically untenable. Musklikes to play fast and loosesome of his tweets about Teslas stock prices have got him in trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commissionbut hes more reliable than Vladimir Putin.

There may be an even tougher operator on the space scene: Xi Jinping. Last month, Chinawhose presence on the I.S.S. was vetoed by the U.S. a decade agosent the first crew to its own space station, named Tiangong, or Heavenly Palace, which is still under construction. (The I.S.S., meanwhile, is nearing the end of its useful life.) In May, China successfully landed and deployed a rover on Mars. Also this year, it announced that it will send a human crew to Mars in 2033, and set up a base there; coperate with Russia to build a base on the moon (where it already has plans to send astronauts); and launch a spaceship that will reach a distance of a hundred astronomical units (about nine billion miles) away from Earth in time to mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Peoples Republic of China, in 2049.

That last plan recalls some of the suspicions that arise when billionaires and politicians rhapsodize about space travel: that it is all about projecting prestigeand power, and bringing our conflicts and dysfunctions into another arena. Some of the early rhetoric applied to spacecolonization, the final frontier, resource mining, conquesthas a more unsettling ring to it now. What may be worse is the impulse to sell space travel as a way to forget about Earths problems, as if the planet were disposable. One fear is that those who have the resources to help effect action on climate change will instead busy themselves with building their own escape pods. Taking that route would be a betrayal of what it means to be part of the human community. At the same time, the longing to explore and learn is quintessentially human. We can surely embrace space without abandoning one another.

It does seem incomprehensible that, while weve crammed orbital space with satellites, and had uncrewed triumphs such as the Hubble Space Telescope, we are only now matching human exploration milestones laid down two generations ago. Alan Shepard, for whom Blue Origins vessel is named, flew into space in 1961, right behind the Russian Yuri Gagarin. On Tuesday, when Bezos sets off on what is still a risky endeavor, Sothebys will conclude an auction on the theme of Space Exploration. Among the items is an unused spacesuit from the ill-fated N-1/L-3 Soviet lunar program, which was officially abandoned in 1976. Only twelve humans have ever walked on the moon; all were white men, and none of them were born later than 1935. No one has been to Mars. The upcoming American and Chinese lunar expeditions will have crews that look very different from their predecessors and, with any luck, will do much more.

But what have we been waiting foran invitation, perhaps? One of the more intriguing aspects of this summer of space was the release of a preliminary report by the office of the director of National Intelligence on unidentified flying objects, or, as the government now calls them, unidentified aerial phenomena. It turns out that, between 2004 and 2021, government sources reported a hundred and forty-four such sightings, only one of which it could definitively dismiss. But a deeper question than whether we have been visited by U.F.O.s may be why we ourselves havent been U.F.O.slooking down on some of the thousands of planets that astronomers have identified in other solar systems in the past three decades, and bringing them news from Earth.

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The Race to Leave Planet Earth - The New Yorker

Offworld Trading Companyis a real-time strategy business management sim, and its free for the week of July 16-22, 2021, on the Epic Games Store.

With Mars colonized, the biggest corporations on Earth now travel to the red planet to set up business there. Offworld Trading Company puts you at the helm of one of these corporations, with the intent of making a fortune out of Mars natural resources. Designed byCivilization IVLead Designer Soren Johnson, players will have a satisfying challenge of both strategy and tactics in this game.

The game features a single-player campaign mode where you get to decide the fate of the Martian colonization project. Use market forces to bend the will of opposing corporations, and make your corporation the biggest force in the market. Once youre done with the single-player campaign, head toOffworld Trading Companys multiplayer mode and compete against other Martian CEOs. Decide which resources to accentuate, which products to buy and sell, and grow your business into becoming Mars first business empire.

Offworld Trading Company is developed by Mohawk Games and produced by Stardock Entertainment. Mohawk Games also made the recent 4X hit Old World, while Stardock Games published other space-setting classics such asGalactic CivilizationsandSins of a Solar Empire. Youre sure thatOffworld Trading Companyis a great game just based off this resume, in case youve never heard of it before. Dont miss the opportunity to get this game for free, which will be up untilJuly 22, 2021.

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Offworld Trading Company is the EGS free game of the week July 16 - 22 - ClutchPoints

Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars, put Dogecoin on the Moon, and share his obsession with memes on Twitter. Musk, who is the Tesla boss and SpaceX CEO has always been very active on Twitter and has more often than not, changed the trends of the cryptocurrency markets with his tweets. Musks tweets have such a track record of manipulating markets that he has an Internet term named after him: The Musk Effect. Musks tweets, especially about cryptocurrency, also, have sparked curiosity and led to hundreds of people trying to decode what Musk is saying: From his use of popular crypto slang like diamond hands to to the moon to even repurposing Pinkfrogs popular song Baby shark to Baby Doge and even writing a haiku, at one point about space travel.

While Elon Musk stans follow every update of the billionaire on Twitter, Musks tweets do require some decoding. Owing to the vague, and sometimes hard-to-interpret nature of Musks tweets, theyre often analyzed, and sometimes even over-analyzed. A Dogecoin developer commented on this, saying that maybe if he started tweeting out cryptic things, and remained mysterious and outreach, this tweets could be interpreted as mysterious.

I need to start tweeting obtuse and vague things in the hopes that some people will interpret them as coded, meaningful, and mysterious," he wrote on Twitter.

To this, Musk replied with a series of numbers.

While it may not be as obvious to a normal person, a coder or a programmer would have been able to tell very easily what Musk wrote. Musks code is in hex. To convert Hex, you take the byte code (which Musk posted) convert it to decimal, get the character of decimal ASCII code from ASCII table, continue with next hex byte.

Or like Baby Doge(and us) you could use an online converter to see what it meant.

While Musks current tweet is cryptic, he has been very open and upfront about his ideas: of both space and cryptocurrency. While talking about his mission to Mars, Musk has mentioned a time-line to get humans on the red planet. Five and a half years," Musk revealed in February this year. While thats not a hard deadline. Musk listed a number of caveats theres a raft of technological advances that must be made in the intervening years. The strange thing is the deadline may be a little ambitious, as even USAs leading space agency, NASA, had a much more different date, one which is seven years after Musks time. The Perseverance uncrewed rover will arrive later this month to take rock samples and search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet - but the first humans arent due to arrive on a NASA funded rocket until at least 2033.

With Dogecoin, Musk has said this cryptocurrency may be the future. In the interview, he says that There is a good chance that crypto is the future currency of the world. Then the question is which won is it going to be? It could be multiple," he said. He then explains the origins of how Dogecoin was invented as a joke, essentially to make fun of cryptocurrency, and thats the irony, explains Musk. That the currency that began as a joke, becomes the real currency." However, he does add that, Dont invest your life savings into cryptocurrency. Thats unwise."

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Elon Musk Tweeted a 'Cryptic' Message in Hex. Here's What It Says - News18