Category Archives: Mars Colonization

While the space billionaire race takes place near Earth, at around 50 to 62 miles high (80-100 km) between Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson and Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos, Musk has bigger plans: Mars. Towards that goal, he is putting big money and resources into the Starship program, which aims to create a reusable and interplanetary launch vehicle.

To power the 120 meters (394 feet) long spaceship, he has designed the Raptors engines. These engines run on cryogenic liquid methane and liquid oxygen rather than the RP-1 kerosene and liquid oxygen used in SpaceX's prior Merlin and Kestrel rocket engines. A Raptor is able to deliver more than twice the thrust of a Merlin that powers their current Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles.

The Raptor engine's first flight version arrived in McGregor, Texas, in January 2019 and was first flown on the Starhopper test vehicle later that year in July, making it the world's first full-flow staged combustion rocket engine. As of August 2020, Raptor also holds the record for the highest combustion chamber pressure ever produced by a working rocket engine.

Now, to colonize an alien planet, only three such powerful engines that'd be needed for a Starship spacecraft are certainly not enough. For an entire fleet, SpaceX would require hundreds of them to be able to carry an entire population and cargo to Mars.

A Twitter user asked SpaceX founder Elon Musk about the company's plans for a Raptor facility in South Texas on Saturday, July 10th. To that end, Musk announced that a second Raptor plant will"break ground" in Texas, focusing on Raptor 2 engines, while another branch in California will focus on Raptor Vacuum (a variant of Raptor with an extended, regeneratively-cooled nozzle for higher specific impulse in vacuum conditions) and "new, experimental designs."

Another user asked what volume production the billionaire is aiming for. He went on to reply that SpaceX will build "roughly 800 to 1000 per year."These numbers will be enough to create a fleet in 10 years that would construct a self-sustaining city on Mars.

"City itself probably takes roughly 20 years, so hopefully it is built by ~2050.", he added.

It's an ambitious goal that we have yet to see meet the expectations. This is not the first time Musk has said that he aims to put humans on Mars. Musk mentioned a few years ago that the first basecamp on Mars, named Alpha, should be operational by 2030. While that is unlikely to happen, we will have to wait and watch how the stars align for Mr. Musk.

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Elon Musk Hopes to Built a Self-Sustaining City on Mars by 2050 - autoevolution

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

Another week, means yet another few free games to join the Epic Games Store roster! Last week, the team brought on both the 2D puzzler Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead alongside puzzle battler Ironcast, which offered plenty of critical thinking for those who appreciate those sorts of things. In all honesty. its for a very niche crowd, but for those who did try either game, I hope you ended up getting something out of it. This week though, the team is giving two very different experiences for players to get their hands on. Both Obduction and Offworld Trading Company are now free on the Epic Games Store, followed up next week by both Defense Grid: The Awakening and Verdun.

Starting with our first Epic Games Store free title, Obduction sees players minding their own business on an unknown planet when something begins falling from the sky. All of the sudden, youre transported to an unfamiliar place, filled with many different remnants of home, presumably joining you for the ride. With nothing more than that to go on, its up to you to explore this otherworldly planet, discover its secrets, and find your way back home. With high critical acclaim, Obduction is sure to offer something unique for those who love a good sci-fi adventure.

In a same atmosphere, completely different sort of deal, Offworld Trading Company sees players run just that. As humanity has finally dominated the distant red planet of Mars, many trading companies are attempting to make their mark and utilize the planets various resources. Whether exploring the true motives of other companies colonizing mars in a wonderful single-player campaign or battling others for domination of Mars in multiplayer, Offworld Trading Company should bring all you could ask for in an RTS and even more!

Both Obduction and Offworld Trading Company will be free on the Epic Games Store until this time next week, so get in there and grab the titles while you can. If you do, be sure to let us know what you think in the comments below.

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Obduction and Offworld Trading Company are Now Free on the Epic Games Store - The Nerd Stash

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By David M. Greenwald

Does anyone seriously question whether climate change is happening at this point? Maybe I will rephrase that slightly, does anyone, who is serious, question whether climate change is happening at this point?

If you want an illustration of how bad things are likely to getyou dont have to look far. Try the Pacific Northwest. The temperature hit 121 in British Columbia in June.

The Seattle numbers are telling. The temperature hit 104, which was an all-time record. It then hit 108 the next day, obviously an all time record. But the astonishing piece of datain the previous 126 years, Seattle had only hit 100 degrees three times. It reached that mark in three consecutive days in June.

Then there was Quillayute, Washington. A coastal town, it reached 110 degrees. That was 45 degrees above normal for the day and broke the previous hottest temperature by a mind-boggling 11 degrees.

Then there is the article this week on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. CNN reports, Its level today is inches away from a 58-year low, state officials say, and Western drought conditions fueled by the climate crisis have exacerbated conditions.

Worse yetIts only July, and the lake historically doesnt reach its annual low until October.

Scientists are not only worried about the collapse of an ecosystem, but the toxic potential of the exposed lake bed.

This lake could become one of the larger dust emission sources in North America as well, one scientist warned. Right now, the lake bed is protected by a fragile crust, and if that crust is disturbed or erodes over time, then this lake could start to emit a lot more (dust).

California is in the midst of a severe drought and scientists are warning that it could get far worse.

As temperatures climb to the triple digits, the sun will bake out what little moisture there is in the ground, worsening the Wests unprecedented drought. Scientists say heat and drought are inextricably linked in a vicious feedback loop that climate change makes even harder to break: heat exacerbates the drought, which in turn amps up the heat, CNN reports.

As were getting these very extreme heat waves, its just making the drought even worse, even though drought is initially caused by the lack of precipitation, Julie Kalansky, a climate scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, told CNN. But during the dry months of much of the West, these heat waves just continue this drying throughout the summer and into the fall.

In a previous article, they warned: Climate change is playing a key role in these compounding crises: Drought and extreme heat are fueling wildfires; reduced snowpack and the lack of substantial precipitation are exacerbating water demands for millions of people, as well as agriculture, ecosystems and deteriorating infrastructure.

Then theres Siberiathe symbol of the frozen wasteland, now baking in 100-degree days and forest fires.

Reports the NY York Times: They endure the coldest winters outside Antarctica with little complaint. But in recent years, summer temperatures in the Russian Arctic have gone as high as 100 degrees, feeding enormous blazes that thaw what was once permanently frozen ground.

The worse news: Scientists say that the huge fires have been made possible by the extraordinary summer heat in recent years in northern Siberia, which has been warming faster than just about any other part of the world. And the impact may be felt far from Siberia. The fires may potentially accelerate climate change by releasing enormous quantities of greenhouse gases and destroying Russias vast boreal forests, which absorb carbon out of the atmosphere.

Not just fires of course. We saw what happened this week in Germany and Belgium.

The NY York Times warns, No One Is Safe: Extreme Weather Batters the Wealthy World.

They write: Floods swept Germany, fires ravaged the American West and another heat wave loomed, driving home the reality that the worlds richest nations remain unprepared for the intensifying consequences of climate change.

We were unprepared for the pandemic. We have had 40 years to prepare for climate change, but have wasted much of it debating over whether it was going to happen.

The consequence of that shorted-sightedness is only now coming into focus. Remember, its only 2021. Its going to get worse. Those who thought that climate alarmists were overstating the problem may take solace in the fact that those alarmists may actually prove to be wrongthey may have understated the problem.

Some of Europes richest countries lay in disarray this weekend, as raging rivers burst through their banks in Germany and Belgium, submerging towns, slamming parked cars against trees and leaving Europeans shellshocked at the intensity of the destruction, the Times writes.

The extreme weather disasters across Europe and North America have driven home two essential facts of science and history: The world as a whole is neither prepared to slow down climate change, nor live with it, they continue. The weeks events have now ravaged some of the worlds wealthiest nations, whose affluence has been enabled by more than a century of burning coal, oil and gas activities that pumped the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that are warming the world.

I say this as a German: The idea that you could possibly die from weather is completely alien, said Friederike Otto, a physicist at Oxford University who studies the links between extreme weather and climate change. Theres not even a realization that adaptation is something we have to do right now. We have to save peoples lives.

The NY Times editorial board argues: Bidens Made Progress on Climate, Even if Activists Cant See It.

The board notes that, while environmentalists were happy to see Biden replace Trump as President, most are disappointed by the limited progress.

The Times finds he has achieved more than people on the left give him credit for, but still well short of his own hopes.

Unlike his predecessor, Mr. Biden took seriously the scientific consensus that the world needs to keep greenhouse gas emissions from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels in order to avert irreversible planetary damage, they write. Mr. Biden pledged to cut Americas emissions in half by 2030, eliminate fossil fuel emissions from power plants by 2035 and zero out all greenhouse gas emissions by midcentury, which is pretty much what scientists recommend for the entire world.

How we get there is going to be difficult. As the Times notes: That, in turn, would require a vastly different energy landscape massive investments in wind and solar power, a rebuilt electric grid, millions of electric vehicles.

Can we get past this stagnation? If you are not convinced of climate change now, you probably also believe a number of other unsupported notions about the world. For the rest of us, we are running out of time.

David M. Greenwald reporting

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Sunday Commentary: It's Happening, It's Bad Is There Anything We Can Do at This Point? - The Peoples Vanguard of Davis

The hashtag "ElonMuskJustAnnounced" went viral Monday afternoon after the account encouraged users to guess what the billionaire's next big move or announcement would be.

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July12, 20212 min read

Elon Musk was the topic of conversation on Twitter today as a viral new hashtag took over that was started by popular Twitteraccount Insomnia Tags.

The hashtagElonMuskJustAnnouncedwent viral Monday afternoon after the account encouraged users to guess what the billionaires next big move or announcement would be.

Some took the game seriously, predicting that hes building a satellite or that hes the new person in charge of the Mars mission.

Related:Elon Muskexplains Tesla's price increases, removal of lumbar support

But some of the best responses to the hashtag were farfetched, creative and, much like Musk himself, conversation starters.

Here were some of our favorites:

Musk himself has been known to cause a stir on Twitter, drawing harsh criticism after many said that he was responsibile for the whiplash volatility of certain crypto coins (mainly Bitcoin and Dogecoin) based on his tweets.

The billionaire has yet to get in on the game himself, his last tweet being on Sunday where he posted a picture of Raptor engines.

Tesla was up over 128% year-over-year as of late Monday afternoon.

Related:Elon MuskContinues to Back Dogecoin Over Its Competitors

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Twitter Has a Field Day Predicting What Elon Musk Will Announce Next - Entrepreneur

Summer is always a great time to check out a new book! One of my favorite genres to read during the summer is science fiction, in which, more often than not, the plot takes place in space and usually a few centuries into the future.

The genre itself is so dynamic that you can go from reading some fantastical simple heros journeys to thoughtful meditations on technology and humanity, and their relationship with nature.

The original heros journey-style plots from the Amazing Stories pulp fiction magazine inspired the 1950s and 1960s aesthetic of classic drive-in films. These stories are always fun and usually straightforward. Books by Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein also utilize this structure.

At the same time, science fiction has the ability to produce very thoughtful works that present moral ambiguity and question the nature of humanity. Hence there is a science fiction novel for everyone at the Tyrrell County Public Library! The genre is indeed so diverse that you can check out books by both Jules Verne and Cornwainer Smith out of the same section. Since the range of options can be a bit confusing, here are some of my personal favorites that make great summer reads!

One of my favorite authors from the tail end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction is Philip K. Dick. His stories usually have complicated and strange names such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. Despite these elaborate and often strange names, his short stories and novels play with the concept of the artificial, and at what point is the artificial as real as the original or even better?

In his short story The Golden Man, Philip K. Dick constructs a world where mutants (imperfect humans) have become a problem and the government is attempting to sterilize or outright eliminate them. By the end of the story, the protagonists and the reader are left wondering whether this imperfect being is the next stage of human existence.

Dicks most famous work is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which is probably better known by the film adaptations Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049. In the novel, the world is a post-nuclear wasteland where actual living animals are nearly non-existent and, as a result, human beings begin to adopt realistic artificial pets (i.e. the electric sheep in the title) as a cultural and status symbol. From this concept, Dick produces a world where it is near impossible to distinguish the latest versions of androids from human beings, and one is left to question whether the androids are persons.

While many authors like Dick play with the concept of humanity and its relationship with technology, science fiction also serves as a place for environmentalism and exploring humanitys impact on nature.

The first to really tackle this was Frank Herbert with his book Dune and its subsequent sequels. Herbert imagines a distant future where interstellar travel is possible not with machines but with the mind-altering spice mlange only found on the planet of Arrakis. The conflict that unfolds across his story deals with resource dependency, dynastic rivalry, and a planetary environment changed by the greed of man as well as war.

On a more detailed scale, the hard science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson embraces science and environmental advocacy completely. In his Red Mars trilogy, Robinson imagines the terraformation of Mars and asks the question of whether or not it is ethical to change a planet for the needs of humanity before even confirming if there is native life.

A more recent book series, The Expanse, by James S.A. Corey (the pen name for Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) imagines a future where humans have colonized Mars, the Moon, asteroids, and the moons surrounding Saturn and Jupiter. As war and politics ravage space, this society is contrasted with the impact humanity has placed on its solar system and each other.

I love this genre because the medium of science fiction offers the space for science, technology, comedy, tragedy and philosophy to intersect. On the one hand you can read casual stories with heroes, aliens, and rocket ships; yet on the other hand, you can find tales and authors that explore deep questions and push the reader to think about larger concepts.

If you want to try science fiction, go ahead! It is worth it. If it is not your style, that is OK, there are tons of other stories out there to explore! Have a great week, and we hope to see you at the Library!

Jared Jacavone is the librarian at the Tyrrell County Public Library.

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Science fiction: From hero's tales to deep thoughts - The Daily Advance

On June 7, Jeff Bezos announced his plan to go to space on July 20 just fifteen days after finishing up as CEO of Amazon. It was positioned as a bold next step in the billionaire space race that has been escalating for several years, though it didnt take long for its true face to show itself. Soon after Bezos set his date, Virgin Galactic CEO Richard Branson a man known for his marketing stunts decided he would try to beat the richest man in the world into orbit and scheduled his own space flight for July 11.

But as these billionaires had their eyes turned to the stars and the media showered them with the headlines they craved, the evidence that the climate of our planet is rapidly changing in a way that is hostile to life both human and otherwise was escalating.

Near the end of June, Jacobabad, a city of 200,000 people in Pakistan, experienced wet bulb conditions where high humidity and scorching temperatures combine to reach a level where the human body can no longer cool itself down. Meanwhile, half a world away, on the West Coast of North America, a heat dome that was made much worse by climate change sent temperatures soaring so high that the town of Lytton, British Columbia, hit 49.6C, beating Canadas previous temperature record by 4.6C, then burned to the ground when a wildfire tore through the town.

The contrast between those stories is striking. On one hand, billionaires are engaging in a dick-measuring contest to see who can exit the atmosphere first, while on the other, the billions of us who will never make any such journey are increasing dealing with the consequences of capitalisms effects on the climate and the decades its most powerful adherents have spent stifling action to curb them.

At a moment when we should be throwing everything we have into ensuring the planet remains habitable, billionaires are treating us to a spectacle to distract us from their quest for continued capitalist accumulation and the disastrous effects it is already having.

Last May, we were treated to a similar display of billionaire space ambition. As people across the United States were marching in the streets after the murder of George Floyd and the government was doing little to stop COVID-19 from sweeping the country, Elon Musk and President Donald Trump met in Florida to celebrate SpaceXs first time launching astronauts to the International Space Station.

As regular people were fighting for their lives, it felt like the elite were living in a completely separate world and had no qualms about showing it. They didnt have to make it to another planet.

Over the past few years, as the billionaire space race has escalated, the public has become increasingly familiar with its grand visions for our future. SpaceXs Elon Musk wants us to colonize Mars and claims the mission of his space company is to lay the infrastructure to do just that. He wants humanity to be a multiplanetary species, and he claims a Martian colony would be a backup plan in case Earth becomes uninhabitable.

Meanwhile, Bezos doesnt have much time for Mars colonization. Instead, he believes we should build large structures in Earths orbit where the human population can grow to a trillion people without further harming the planets environment. As we live out our lives in ONeill cylinders, as theyre called, well take occasional vacations down to the surface to experience the wonder of the world we once called home.

Neither of these futures are appealing if you look past the billionaires rosy pitch decks. Life on Mars would be horrendous for hundreds of years, at least, and would likely kill many of the people who made the journey, while the technology for massive space colonies doesnt exist and similarly wont be feasible for a long time to come. So, whats the point of promoting these futures in the face of an unprecedented threat to our species here on Earth? Its to get the public on board for a new phase of capitalist accumulation whose benefits will be reaped by those billionaires.

To be clear, that does not even mean anything as grand as asteroid mining. Rather, its form can be seen in the event last May: as Musk and even Trump continued to push the spectacle of Mars for the public, SpaceX was becoming not just a key player in a privatized space industry but also in enabling a military buildup through billions of dollars in government contracts. The grand visions, rocket launches, and spectacles of billionaires leaving the atmosphere are all cover for the real space economy.

While Branson is using the PR stunt for attention, the real competition is between Bezos and Musk and while they do compete with each other, they have significant mutual interest. In 2004, Bezos and Musk met to discuss their respective visions for space, which led Musk to call Bezoss ideas dumb. As a result of that discussion, they occasionally snipe at each other exchanges the media eats up but theyre still working to forward a private space industry from which they both stand to benefit.

The years of competition between SpaceX and Blue Origin over landing platforms, patents, and NASA contracts show what the billionaire space race is really about. The most recent example of this is a $2.9 billion NASA contract awarded to SpaceX to build a moon lander, which Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics challenged. In the aftermath, Congress considered increasing NASAs budget by $10 billion, in part so it could hand a second contract to Blue Origin. But thats hardly the only example of public funding for the ostensibly private space industry.

A report from Space Angels in 2019 estimated that $7.2 billion had been handed out to the commercial space industry since 2000, and it specifically called out SpaceX as a company whose early success depended on NASA contracts. Yet private space companies arent just building relationships with the public space agency.

SpaceX won a $149 million contract from the Pentagon to build missile-tracking satellites, and two more worth $160 million to use its Falcon 9 rockets. It also won an initial contract of $316 million to provide a launch for the Space Force a contract whose value will likely be worth far more in the future and its building the military a rocket that will deliver weapons around the world. On top of all that, SpaceX won $900 million in subsidies from the Federal Communications Commission to provide rural broadband through its overhyped Starlink satellites.

For all the lauding of private space companies and the space billionaires that champion them, they remain heavily reliant on government money. This is the real face of the private space industry: billions of dollars in contracts from NASA, the military, and increasingly for telecommunications that are helping companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin control the infrastructure of space and its all justified to the public under the promise that its in service of grand visions that are nothing more than marketing ploys.

Part of the reason SpaceX has been so successful at winning these contracts is because Musk is not an inventor but a marketer. He knows how to use PR stunts to get people to pay attention, and that helps him win lucrative contracts. He also knows what things not to emphasize, like the potentially controversial military contracts that dont get tweets or flashy announcement videos. Bezoss trip to space is all about embracing spectacle, because he realizes its essential to compete for the attention of the public and the bureaucrats deciding who gets public contracts.

For years, there have been concerns that billionaires space investments are about escaping the climate chaos their class continues to fuel here on Earth. Its the story of Neill Blomkamps Elysium: the rich live on a space colony, and the rest of us suffer on a climate-ravaged Earth while being pushed around by robot police as we perform the labor that makes the abundance of the colony possible. But thats not actually the future were headed toward.

As Sim Kern explains, keeping just a few people alive on the International Space Station takes a staff of thousands and it gets harder the farther away people are from the one world we can truly call home. Mars colonies or massive space stations are not happening anytime soon; they wont be a backup plan, nor an escape hatch. As billionaires chase profit in space and boost their egos in the process, theyre also planning for climate apocalypse down here on Earth but theyre only planning for themselves.

Just as Musk uses misleading narratives about space to fuel public excitement, he does the same with climate solutions. His portfolio of electric cars, suburban solar installations, and other transport projects are promoted to the public, but they are designed to work best if not exclusively for the elite. Billionaires are not leaving the planet, theyre insulating themselves from the general public with bulletproof vehicles, battery-powered gated communities, and possibly even exclusive transport tunnels. They have the resources to maintain multiple homes and to have private jets on standby if they need to flee a natural disaster or public outrage.

We desperately need the public to see through the spectacle of the billionaire space race and recognize that theyre not laying the groundwork for a fantastic future, or even advancing scientific knowledge about the universe. Theyre trying to extend our ailing capitalist system, while diverting resources and attention from the most pressing challenge the overwhelming majority of the planet faces. Instead of letting the billionaires keep playing in space, we need to seize the wealth theyve extracted from us and redeploy it to address the climate crisis before its too late.

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Leave the Billionaires in Space - Jacobin magazine

After watching Laurence Fishburne get stuck in the deep dimensions of hell in the classic 1997 film Event Horizon, I lost any interest in space travel. If I ever have a chance to explore the worlds of the unknown, Ill choose the deep sea. There are so many different species of fish, sharks, and cephalopods that look like theyre from another planet. All the amazingly diverse creatures that exist on this planet are a wonder in and of themselves, and well worth saving.

Despite knowing that our way of life pollutes the planet, causes mass extinctions, and makes parts of the world uninhabitable, the powers that be seem to have their head in the stars instead of on Earth. On June 10, the Senate passed the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, which, if passed into law, will devote $250 billion to fund science, research and development, manufacturing, and innovation.

Now a battle is mounting over how much our billionaire overlords can benefit from these programs. Currently, Elon Musks SpaceX is the sole NASA contractor for a lunar-lander program, which is focused on making it easier for humans to travel to the moon. Thanks to an amendment added by Democratic senator Maria Cantwell of Washington and Republican senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, $10 billion of the new funding could go to Jeff Bezoss company Blue Origin for its work on a similar moon-landing project. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders voted against the amendment, calling it a Bezos bailout, but it passed the Senate, and the legislations fate is now in the hands of the House. As it turns out, Blue Origin is located in the state Cantwell represents, and the Intercept reported that the company spent $625,000 lobbying the Senate ahead of the additional amendment.

The two men often competing to be the richest person in the world are poised to get billions from the government to play space cowboys. As a recent ProPublica report revealed, these same two men have paid little to no income taxes for years. Yet they have obtained U.S. contracts that will further compound their repulsively immense wealth. Musk has already announced plans to try and colonize Mars, saying last year, "If there's something terrible that happens on Earth, either made by humans or natural, we want to have, like, life insurance for life as a whole." Bezos has set his sights on colonizing the moon, telling the media in 2019, Its time to go back to the moon, this time to stay.

The outgoing Amazon CEO is set to fly into space on July 20 on the New Shepard, a crewed rocket ship created by Blue Origin that Bezos hopes will usher in a new era of space tourism for the ber-wealthy, of course. (In a surprising upset for Bezos, British billionaire Richard Branson beat him for the title of first billionaire to travel to space.) Bezos has also talked about building massive, thriving colonies of up to a trillion humans in our solar system, saying that doing so would create an incredible and dynamic civilization home to 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins.

While spinning their ideas of space exploration as a win for humanity, the two billionaires have shown themselves to be anything but humanitarians. Employees at Amazon, which Bezos founded, have accused the company of union busting, maintaining strenuous work environments where workers have said they sometimes had to resort to peeing in bottles, and building warehouses with operations that pollute surrounding communities of color. Musks company, Tesla, has been sued, along with four other tech companies, for allegedly benefiting from the use of children in the cobalt-mining process in the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Cobalt is used for lithium-ion batteries.) In Boca Chica, Texas, where one of Musks SpaceX launching pads is located, scattered debris from exploded rockets has raised concerns about the potential harm to protected wetlands.

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Jeff Bezos Is Going to Space As Climate Change Threatens Life on Earth - Teen Vogue

PUBLISHEDJuly 10, 2021

For the last decade or so, there seem to have been serious efforts by the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the scientific community in other countries to explore Mars and determine whether it can be liveable.

Known popularly as the Red Planet on account of the colour its iron-oxide rich surface, Mars is roughly half the size of the Earth and has been a constant source of curiosity for scientists over the years. This is reflected in the amount of exploration and research that has gone towards the planet to ascertain whether it is possible to establish life there. Projects like the Mars Foundation based in the Netherlands and the Mars Space Mission project based in New York are composed of scientists and aerospace companies exploring how Mars can be liveable in the first half of 21st century.

After Venus, Mars is our closet planetary neighbour. In 2003, Mars was closest to earth with a distance of 56 million kilometres. If Mars and Earth are farthest from the sun, the two planets can be 401 million kilometres apart. Travel time between the two planets in a spacecraft with a speed of 58,000 kilometres per hour that uses the closest approach will take 39 days and with farthest approach with 289 days. On average, travel time between Mars and Earth will be 162 days. With these facts in mind, scientists engaged with NASA and elsewhere are researching the characteristics of Mars that can provide a ray of hope to those dreaming of colonising the Red Planet. It may be a wishful thinking and a utopian concept to send spaceships carrying humans to Mars, but human curiosity and innovation has no boundaries.

Mars can certainly be a source of anxiety for those who realise how in the last 200 hundred years scientific innovation and discoveries made it possible to drastically cut travel time from one continent to another, and enabled people to connect each other from telephone, telex, fax, e-mail and then online sources. But while it may seem an uphill task to develop a planet with a faint possibility of having water and oxygen, our history does lead one to expect scientific miracles.

In a 2014 conference at the NASA Ames Research Centre, Dr Chris McKay, a planetary scientist and founding member of The Mars Society, presented a list of Mars most important resources that early Martian colonists would exploit to make the planet habitable. According to him, under atmospheric CO2 is Mars most easily accessible resource, providing feedstock for manufacturing methane propellant. The chemistry involved in separating it is simple, low power, and has been employed on Earth for more than a century. Referring to H2O from the atmosphere and polar ice he further argued, Mars is a dry planet compared to the Earth, but compared to other celestial bodies like the moon and asteroids, its water budget is quite generous. Mars has a polar cap composed of a mixture of water-ice and CO2 dry ice, and even at non-polar latitudes, water-ice is known to exist a few meters under the surface regolith. This water can be purified and consumed, or electrolyzed to produce O2 and hydrogen, which can be further combined with atmospheric CO2 to produce a range of useful plastics.

Traces of glaciers, lakes and water in some of the regions of Mars and human ability to make use of minimum resources necessary for colonising the Red Planet is perhaps a single most important source of hope for NASA and the worlds scientists. If they are persistent, a day will come when human settlement in Mars be not be a dream but a reality. Instincts of lust for resources and power have remained two major characteristics among human beings that gave an impetus to the colonisation of Americas, Australia, Africa and parts of Asia. Similar instincts motivate human beings from scientifically developed nations to sustain their efforts to transform Mars as the second world for human beings. People may term the vision of some scientists that Mars can be liveable as weird but science has no limit and can strive to transform unthinkable as unthinkable. Life on moon was ruled out because it has neither air nor water, but in the case of Mars the scientific results of exploration done so far tend to make scientists and explorers double-minded about the possibility of life on Mars.

There are technical and various scientific terms, which are used to judge whether there can be life on Mars? According to Robin Wordsworth in his blog (https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/can-mars-be-made-habitable-in-our-lifetime/ February 14, 2020) Its a very poorly kept secret in planetary science that many of us first got inspired to join the field by reading science fiction. For many of us who study Mars, Kim Stanley Robinsons 1990s Mars trilogy, which describes the colonisation and eventual transforming of the Red Planet, was particularly influential. But rereading these books in 2019, I noted that much of what he imagined looks pretty far-fetchedwere still a long way from landing the first human on Mars, and transforming the planet to make it habitable seems like a very distant dream. Reinforcing his arguments about establishing life in Mars he further states that, serious scientific ideas for transforming Mars into an Earth-like planet have been put forward before, but they require vast industrial capabilities and make assumptions about the total amount of accessible carbon dioxide (CO2) on the planet that have been criticised as unrealistic. When we started thinking about this problem a few years ago, therefore, we decided to take a different approach. One thing you learn quickly when you study Marss past climate, as we do in our usual research, is that while it was intermittently habitable in the past, it was never really like Earthit has always been a unique and alien world. So when were thinking about how to make Mars habitable in the future, perhaps we should also be taking inspiration from the Red Planet itself.

Human quest for knowledge, exploration and discovery has no parallel. The West, on account of its edge in science and technology in the last four hundred years wouldnt like to give up hope to make use of the opportunity to colonise Mars provided there are chances of some success. Investment on scientific missions to be sent to Mars will pay off as the West, particularly the United States will be first one to put its flag on the Red Planet and unleash the process of colonising Mars.

In his paper A way to make Mars habitable Robert Woodsworth in Harvard Gazette (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/07/making-mars-habitable/) argues that people have long dreamed of altering the Martian climate to make it liveable for humans. Carl Sagan was the first outside the realm of science fiction to propose terraforming. In a 1971 paper, Sagan suggested that vaporizing the northern polar ice caps would result in yield ~103g cm-2 of atmosphere over the planet, higher global temperatures through the greenhouse effect, and a greatly increased likelihood of liquid water. Based on the results of a pair of NASA-funded researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Northern Arizona University in 2018 found that processing all the sources available on Mars would only increase atmospheric pressure to about seven per cent that of Earth far short of what is needed to make the planet habitable, scientists are now exploring the possibility of colonising not the entire Mars but some of its regions. Quoted by Robert Woodsworth, the researchers suggest that regions of the Martian surface could be made habitable with a material silica aerogel that would mimic Earths atmospheric greenhouse effect. Through modeling and experiments, the researchers show that a two to three-centimetre thick shield of silica aerogel could transmit enough visible light for photosynthesis, block hazardous ultraviolet radiation, and raise temperatures underneath permanently above the melting point of water, all without the need for any internal heat source.

Scientists are going an extra mile to probe how even a small percentage of available ice and CO2 can help start colonization process in Mars. Therefore, they agreed upon selecting some of the parts of mars so as to conduct engineering of environment that can at least lead to life in the red planet. According to Robin Wordsworth, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Department of Earth and Planetary Science this regional approach to making Mars habitable is much more achievable than global atmospheric modification, Unlike the previous ideas to make Mars habitable, this is something that can be developed and tested systematically with materials and technology we already have. Mars is the most habitable planet in our solar system besides Earth, said Laura Kerber, a research scientist at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But it remains a hostile world for many kinds of life. A system for creating small islands of habitability would allow us to transform Mars in a controlled and scalable way. Unlike Earths polar ice caps, which are made of frozen water, the ones on Mars are a combination of water ice and frozen CO2. Like its gaseous form, frozen CO2 allows sunlight to penetrate while trapping heat. In the summer, this solid-state greenhouse effect creates pockets of warming under the ice. We started thinking about this solid-state greenhouse effect and how it could be invoked for creating habitable environments on Mars in the future, Wordsworth said. We started thinking about what kinds of materials could minimize thermal conductivity but still transmit as much light as possible.

According to Chelsea Gohd in her paper, Can we Terraform Mars to Make It Earth-Lie? Not anytime Soon (https://www.space.com/41318-we-cant-terraform-mars.html) while many researchers have devised ways we might use Mars' carbon dioxide to terraform the planet and make it habitable, one new study suggests that the Red Planet simply doesn't have enough carbon dioxide for this to be possible. Could we make Mars Earth-like? Not with existing technologies, one new paper suggests. For many years, Mars has existed as a hopeful "Planet B" a secondary option if Earth can no longer support us as a species. From science-fiction stories to scientific investigations, humans have considered the possibilities of living on Mars for a long time. A main staple of many Mars-colonisation concepts is terraforming a hypothetical process of changing the conditions on a planet to make it habitable for life that exists on Earth, including humans, without a need for life-support systems. Unfortunately, according to a new paper, with existing technologies, terraforming Mars is simply not possible.

Scientists researching on Mars point out that several million years ago Mars was warm and wet and at that there was a large blue fresh water lake. Huge underground aquifers of liquid water exist, according to a group of scientists, who say they have found convincing evidence. The underground lake hasnt been seen directly, but if its real, its a discovery that substantially increases the likelihood that the Red Planet might host life. Researchers detected the possible reservoir with the Mars Express Orbiter, a European spacecraft thats been orbiting Mars since 2003. While scanning the ice cap at Mars south pole, the probes radar instrument, called MARSIS, detected a feature about a mile underneath the surface that was about 12.4 miles wide. The structure has a radar signature that matches that of buried liquid water here on Earth, leading the team to conclude that theres a lake under the glacier. The researchers say theyve ruled out all other possibilities for what theyre seeing.

According to Loren Grush, in her article Scientists detect giant underground aquifer on Mars, raising hope of life on the planet (https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/25/17606966/mars-liquid-water-reservoir-) in 2015, the space agency announced that a bunch of bizarre dark streaks seen on Mars were likely made up of salty water. That was the first big confirmation that water exists as a liquid on Mars, which is remarkable when you consider that the planet has an average temperature of -80 degrees Fahrenheit. Salt in the water lowers its freezing point, allowing it to stay liquid in frigid conditions; scientists believe the salt probably comes from Martian rocks.

Other players for exploring Mars like China and United Arab Emirates (UAE) are also active with a resolve to seek the possibility of starting human life on the red planet. Drive to colonize Mars will further get an impetus because of over population, diminishing food and energy resources and worsening of global environment which will make human living on earth very difficult.

(The writer is Meritorious Professor of International Relations and former Dean Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Karachi. E.Mail: [emailprotected]).

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Tribune T Magazine - The Express Tribune

Another fun week of stargazing is on its way. Though there will be some clouds to fight with by mid and late week both Monday and Tuesday look fantastic for taking in a view of the heavens.

The Planets This Week: Venus remains the highlight of the planets shining brightly in the evening twilight. It passed through the Beehive Cluster over the weekend and remains fairly close to it after sunset this week. It is drawing closer to Mars which can be found just above and to the left. They will be drawing closer to each other over the next week and appear closest next Monday evening. Jupiter and Saturn both appear high in the sky during the late-night and pre-dawn hours. The dimmer planets of Uranus and Neptune, both only visible in telescopes or binoculars, are both up during the pre-dawn hours as well.

Naked Eye Object of the Week-Mars: Mars is slowly sinking in the western sky at twilight so if you want to get out and see it now is the time. It wont be long before it becomes completely obscured by the sun as it moves behind it from our point of view. Named after the Roman god of war, Mars is the 4th planet from the sun and the last of the rocky planets. It has been the topic of many a science fiction novel, most notably War of the Worlds written by H.G. Wells. It has also been the object of many NASA missions. The first came back in 1964 when Mariner 4 became the first probe to photograph Mars up close, and the first successful landing occurred just 12 years later in 1976 when Viking 1 made touchdown. The first rover wouldnt come until 1997 when Sojourner would head out on its mission. Probably the most famous of all the probes and rovers to visit the red planet are Spirit and Curiosity. Both these rovers were launched in January of 2004 and both operated many years beyond their expected lifespan. Opportunity worked for an astonishing 14 years just ceasing operation in 2018.

The planet is very rocky with a thin atmosphere. It has regular dust storms, some of which can be planet-wide, and is the only other planet to contain polar ice caps consisting of frozen water. In its early life, Mars was an active planet like Earth. It had large volcanoes (Olympus Mons is the largest in the solar system) and likely even tectonic plates like the Earth, but it has slowly turned into a dead planet with the planets core no longer producing a magnetic field. It is still seismically active, though, with Marsquakes having been reported by NASAs InSight lander. Mars also once had surface lakes and rivers, and it is theorized that some streaks that appear on the surface even today could come from remaining water leaking to the surface. Regardless, the atmosphere is too thin to allow it to exist for long, though the frozen polar ice caps contain enough water to cover the whole planet in over 30ft of water. These polar ice caps can be seen with a medium-sized telescope when the planet is closest to Earth, but right now a stronger telescope would be required.

Mars nickname is the red planet because it appears red. This is because the soil contains lots of iron oxide, commonly referred to here on Earth as rust. The planet has quite literally rusted which gives it its red color. Rovers that have dug into the soil find a lighter color, though still most decidedly red, just beneath the surface. Mars also has two small moons, both significantly smaller than Earths. They are called Phobos and Deimos and are both irregularly shaped moons, much more akin to a large asteroid than a spherical satellite.

Humans may one day set foot on Mars. SpaceX is determined to land and colonize the planet, but that day likely lies far into the future. For now, we will continue to gaze at it from afar. Just step outside your doorstep during late twilight and take a peek. It can be found very close to Venus this week after sunset.

Telescope Object of the Week The Dumbbell Nebula: Last week we took a look at the Ring Nebula. This weeks highlighted object is an even brighter planetary nebula that can be found right in the core of the Milky Way. Our galaxys main spiral arm visible from Earth currently rises as the sun is going down. This puts it high in the sky by 11 PM and it is home to numerous nebula and star clusters. The Dumbbell Nebula is one such object. Much like the Ring Nebula the Dumbbell was once a large star that eventually collapsed. During the end stages of its life, it flung dust and gas off resulting in a beautiful nebula. Like most bright nebula it was first discovered by Charles Messier and was labeled M27 by him in 1764. Planetary nebulae come in lots of shapes and sizes, and the Dumbbell appears as roughly a sphere but looks nothing like the Ring Nebula. When imaged with a long exposure using a high-powered telescope plentiful knots are visible (as seen below). Why these knots form is still unknown and it is a topic of debate and research among astronomers still today!

Finding the Dumbbell can be a bit tricky because it lies in an area somewhat devoid of bright stars, but hopefully, the star map included below will help. Its located above the fairly unknown constellation Aquila in another obscure constellation Vulpecula.

Head out this week and enjoy the warm summer nights!

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The Sky This Week: A red planet and a dumbbell - Now Habersham