Category Archives: Moon Colonization

(JNS.org) At the first-ever informal United Nations conference addressing anti-Semitism, surprise attendee Saudi Arabia blamed Israeli occupation for the global rise in anti-Semitism.

Colonization and occupation fuels anti-Semitism occupation is an act of anti-Semitism. It threatens human rights and human-kind, said Saudi Arabian ambassador Abdallah al-Mouallimi, who spoke on behalf of the 57-member Organization of Islamic Countries.Al-Mouallimi also condemned all words and acts that lead to hatred, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon struck a different tone, arguing that grievances about Israeli actions must never be used as an excuse to attack Jews.

Amid the Gaza war last summer, anti-Semitic attacks in Europe and elsewhere in the world rose to their highest levels in decades, with protesters in several countries going as far as calling for Jews to be attacked and even gassed. More recently, four Jewish shoppers were killed in an attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris.

Violent anti-Semitism is casting a shadow over Europe, Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Ron Prosor said, calling out other U.N. member countries for their anti-Semitic remarks.This summer, disguised as humanitarian concern, delegates have used this podium to commit anti-Semitism, accusing Israel of behaving like Nazis, he added. It doesnt matter how much youre angered or frustrated by our conflict. There is no excuse for statements like that.

Germanys representative at the conference, Michael Roth, echoed this concern, saying that anti-Semitism is gaining ground in a loud and aggressive manner and that it poses a threat to European society.

U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power, noting that nearly two-thirds of religion-driven hate crimes in the U.S. target Jews, said the world must take action against this monstrous global problem.

When the human rights of Jews are repressed, the rights of other religious and ethnic groups are often not far behind, Power said.

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At U.N. conference, Saudi Arabia blames Israel for rise in anti-Semitism

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live on the moon? What about Mars, or Venus or Mercury? We sure have and that's why we decided to find out what it might be like to live on other worlds in our solar system, from Mercury to Pluto and beyond in a new, weekly 12-part series.

For this series, written by Space.com contributor Joseph Castro, we wanted to know what the physical sensation of living on other worlds would be like: What would the gravity be like on Mercury; How long would your day be on Venus? What's the weather on Titan?

For the sake of our solar system tour, let's take it as a given that humanity has the futuristic tech needed to set up a base on the planets. So join Space.com each week as we skip across the solar system and see what it would feel like to live beyond Earth. Check out our schedule for the tour through the solar system and beyond below:

What Would It Be Like to Live on Mercury? The closest planet to the sun is an inhospitable place, and probably not the first choice for human colonization. But if somehow we had the technology, what would it be like for people to live on Mercury?

10 Strange Facts About Mercury (A Photo Tour) Mercury is a weird place. See just how weird the closest planet to the sun is in our photo tour.

Living on Mercury Would be Hard (Infogaphic) So you've read what it might be like to be a colonist on Mercury. Now see the details in visual form. Space.com's Karl Tate lays out what livingon Mercury might be like for an astronaut.

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What Would It Be Like to Live on Venus?

What Would It Be Like to Live on the Moon?

What Would It Be Like to Live on Mars?

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Living on Other Planets: What Would It Be Like?

That intermingling has continued even with our modern, diminishing space program.

[H]ere is a priest, outfitted in the finery of a centuries-old church, shaking holy water over the engines, invoking God's protection for a journey to near-earth orbit. That these two spheres of human creation co-exist is remarkable. That they interact, space agencies courting the sanction of Russian Orthodox Christianity, is strange.

Orthodox Christian priest blessing the launch of a Soyuz spacecraft in 2012, via NASA.

Religions have also adapted to space travel in broader terms. For example, the

Christianity

In the late 19th century, the Catholic Church actually authorized a French Jesuit priest and scientist named Abb Moigno to make the call on whether or not a "plurality of worlds doctrine" could actually coexist with "Catholic morals and truth." As Weintraub writes, Moigno ultimately decided that the idea of multiple, potentially inhabited planets "did in no way conflict with the doctrines of the Creation, Incarnation, and Redemption as taught by the Catholic Church." So at least in the Catholic Church, no problem with colonies.

Despite Moigno's findings, some modern-day Christians (fundamentalists, specifically) don't just feel vaguely threatened by the promise of space travel. Rather, they believe that the Bible explicitly forbids it. For instance, Ken Ham, a "young Earth creationist" and the founder and president of

But where does the Bible discuss the creation of life on the "lights in the expanse of the heavens"? There is no such description because the lights in the expanse were not designed to accommodate life. God gave care of the earth to man, but the heavens are the Lord's (Psalm 115:16). From a biblical perspective, extraterrestrial life does not seem reasonable.

Fortunately, Ham represents an extreme interpretation. Christianity as a whole has no serious issues with space colonization. And other religious groups are even more forgiving.

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Which Religions Are Prepared to Accept Life in Space?

Moon Colonization

http://www.space.com/21588-how-moon-base-lunar-colony-works-infographic.html

This is a great article on moon colonization. It covers the reasons why a moon base can make sense and it is technically feasible. Surprisingly the moon provides most of the necessities to support life; except of course food. Surprisingly the soil is 42% oxygen.

Aside from materials to make rocket fuel the moon has a high concentration of Helium-3 which is a good source of fuel for nuclear fusion. H-3 is a non-radioactive fuel which could be a great long term reactor fuel source.

The materials mined on the moon would be sent into orbit using a dual rail system which fires the materials off a track a couple of mile long. Instead of rockets, electrical energy is used to accelerate the mass.

Im pointing this out, because this is precisely how my moon base is described in my SIMPOC series. The only major different is, my moon colony named Desert Beach has to be abandoned because 99.9997 % of the people on Earth are wiped out by a suspicious virus and the astronauts on the moon have to use their lifeboats to get home.

Incidentally the first book in the series is FREE.

Ray Jay Perreault

http://rayjayperreault.wordpress.com

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Moon Colonization | Ray Jay Perreault

"Well, irony really does better unelaborated, but if you insist."

Ah, grimdark. It's become shorthand for a subgenre of fantasy fiction that claims to trade on the psychology of those sword-toting heroes, and the dark realism behind all those kingdom politics. But there are arguments over who fits the definition George R.R. Martin? Kameron Hurley? Shakespeare? and whether the nickname's a useful genre marker or just a needle. Some, like Joe Abercrombie, have embraced the term (his Twitter handle is @lordgrimdark). Others see it as a dismissive term for fantasy that's dismantling tropes, a stamp unfairly applied.

In the latter camp is Richard K. Morgan. He's the author of the Land Fit For Heroes series (2008's The Steel Remains, 2011's The Cold Commands, and last year's The Dark Defiles), which casually straddles the lines between quest fantasy, political thriller, and science fiction. However, it straddles no lines about some of its tropes: the Land Fit For Heroes is as grim and as dark as it gets.

In some ways, the structure of the books allows for nothing else. Faded military hero and current outcast Ringil is on a slow slide to the bottom from the very beginning, where a hardboiled missing-persons case leads him to the dwenda, a race of half-unreal magicians determined to remake the world in their image. Archeth is an adviser to the sadistic Emperor, and an alien abandoned by the rest of her race when they traveled to some other star who walks a knife's edge to avoid being killed for either reason. Steppe clanmaster Egar struggles to keep his cultural traditions in the face of colonization that, in some ways, is better than what it replaced. And despite the time Morgan dedicates to his protagonists, they're so knee-deep in plot that they occasionally take on a badass-soldier sameness though he makes clear that those are the only types who live for very long; somebody draws serious blood every few chapters.

There are signs everywhere that Morgan's trying to move beyond traditional epic fantasy. There's no such thing as a kingdom united: Every place holds potential for civil war, veterans from the last war still wander the streets, forgotten, and language barriers crop up regularly. Ringil's a character of color in a world urbane enough that it rarely matters. (Archeth is also of color, but her alien-species origins are unmistakable, with all the slurs that entails.) Both characters are also queer, though Archeth's desires often slip under the radar, and Ringil's the one dodging challenges from those who find his sexuality an offense.

The undertow of the realm's politics proves solid ground for Morgan; power corrupts absolutely and even omnipotence can't stop the unexpected. In particular, the dwenda are only as lovely as they are sadistic (they mount the heads of their condemned alive on tree trunks, the series' most unsettling image). By The Dark Defiles, their quest to raise a fallen savior via magic sword sounds a bit overdone, but the larger world in which Ringil appeals for help to something older, or even just something else suggests an open game board and builds tension across the alternating narratives.

And some of the thematic grit feels like a refreshing sidestep: Wars declared a thousand miles away suddenly darken our heroes' doors; gods appear mostly to unbelievers because they take more secular initiative. (The deliberately-contemporary dialogue will either work for you or it won't. A good litmus test is the petulant god from the epigraph, who later laments: "F******* mortals. You know, it's I'm so sick of this s***. Where's the respect?")

But in this intriguing grimdark world, Morgan seems to want to prove just how bad things really are. It's here the series suffers from an excess of excess. For him, the way to dismantle heroic battles is not to make fighting futile (fighting is, it seems, the most effective way to manage anything), but to make it hyper-bloody, with blow-by-blow battles aplenty; the way to handle sexuality is to deliver sex scenes that are, well, blow-by-blow.

The Steel Remains is perhaps the worst offender, with a sex-slave Macguffin and a veritable parade of throwaway rapes that function more as signposts for degenerate behavior than as anything the narrative addresses with particular care. Morgan's prose becomes more polished with every book (any series is a time capsule of style), but his sexual politics are a streak of continued carelessness. That rescued Macguffin vanishes without a word once her use as a plot point is served, and even with major characters, sexual violence lacks much weight beyond shock value: at one point, Ringil orders a gang rape, framed as just another downward step for him. The cycles-of-violence concept Ringil is a rape victim who uses it to terrorize others in turn is present, but Ringil's unaware of it, and the book quickly dismisses it, undercutting any of its thematic power.

Mixing issues of representation with grimdark is also delicate work, and Morgan often stumbles. Ringil lusts after most men who cross his path (at one point, he's lost in thoughts of a colleague bathing a homophobic standard brought to life without interrogation). And amid Ringil's attempts to reclaim "faggot," Morgan keeps the word a punchline, aimed for the reader to share. Archeth's sexuality reads benignly but recognizably masculine, the Swimsuit Edition of lust. The rest is just so much carnal wallpaper through slavery or in brothels; the only profession available to women seems to be the oldest one.

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For A Taste Of Grimdark, Visit The 'Land Fit For Heroes'

13 hours ago by Fredrick Jenet And Teviet Creighton, The Conversation Is this how space travel will look some day? Sulu, punch it! Credit: Shutterstock

Some climatologists argue it may be too late to reverse climate change, and it's just a matter of time before the Earth becomes uninhabitable if hundreds of years from now. The recent movie Interstellar raised the notion that we may one day have to escape a dying planet. As astrophysicists and avid science fiction fans, we naturally find the prospect of interstellar colonization intriguing and exciting. But is it practical, or even possible? Or is there a better solution?

Science fiction has painted a certain picture of space travel in popular culture. Drawing on stories of exploration from an age of tall ships, with a good helping of anachronisms and fantastical science, space exploration is often depicted in a romantic style: a crew of human travelers in high-tech ships wandering the Galaxy, making discoveries and reporting back home. Perhaps they even find habitable words, some teeming with life (typically humans with different-colored skin), and they trade, colonize, conquer or are conquered. Pretty much, they do as humans have always done since the dawn of their time on Earth.

How close do these ideas resemble what we may be able to achieve in the next few hundred years? The laws of physics and the principles of engineering will go a long way to helping us answer this question.

Nature's speed limit

Nature has given us a speed limit. We call it the speed of light about 186,000 miles per second because we first noticed this phenomenon by studying the properties of light, but it is a hard upper limit on all relative speeds. So, if it takes light one year to get somewhere, we can't possibly get there sooner than one year.

There is also the fact that the universe is big, really big. It takes light about eight minutes to get to our Sun, three years to get to the next-nearest star, 27,000 years to get to the center of our own Galaxy and more than 2,000,000 years to get to the next galaxy. The amazing thing about these distances is that, as far as the universe is concerned, this is all in the neighborhood.

The vast distances between solar systems combined with the speed-of-light limit puts severe constraints on the realities of space travel. Every space-based science fiction writer has to decide early on how to deal with this white elephant standing proudly in the room. Much of the more recent science fiction employs some form of "worm hole" or "warping space": bending the four-dimensional structure of space and time to create shortcuts between two spatial locations in the universe.

Such possibilities have been analyzed with some mathematical rigor, and although the studies are tantalizing, they show that these methods cannot work unless we discover a form of matter that behaves very differently than anything we have ever seen.

Limits of propulsion

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If Earth falls, will interstellar space travel be our salvation?

Reusable, modular space systems could make human Mars missions more affordable and eliminate one long-running objection to them. (credit: J. Strickland)

In a recent op-ed published in the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, titled Why humans shouldnt go to Mars, University of Virginia biology professor Michael Menaker argues that human exploration of Mars doesnt make good sense. We are already exploring Mars with robotic spacecraft, he states, and there are urgent Earth-bound problems to solve.

However, he has not made his case, which is based on several wrong fundamental assumptions. Its possible he may be reacting to the blatant Mars Hype that was recently put out by some people within NASA who support the SLS and Orion programs, since the article does mention the Orion test launch. What the article really represents, however, is the zero sum game attitude by a few within the science community, some of whom depend on government science programs for their employment. I must emphasize that this point is not meant to denigrate the vast majority of scientists, many of whom work on valid and important research and struggle every year to maintain their labs financial survival. I suspect the majority of those who work on robotic spacecraft programs do strongly support the human space program, but those who do not sometimes get more media attention when they speak out, since taking such a position is controversial. Their attitude is that funding for a human Mars mission would take money away from their science. What Menaker forgets is that any human spaceflight program uses funding that could possibly go to the robotic or pure science programs instead, so that opposition to Mars programs is also in effect opposition to all human spaceflight. His comments later in the essay, about urgent Earth-bound problems, confirm that this is his position.

In my view, both robotic and human programs are both important and interdependent. The robotic program gets part of its support from interest in future human exploration, while that future human program will rely heavily on the data from the robotic programs to determine good landing sites and allow safe landings. As a very strong supporter of science in general, and space science and planetology in particular, I find it sad that some people have such a limited vision of how tightly linked science and exploration are. Professor Menaker works at the University of Virginia, whose first president was Thomas Jefferson. As US President, Jefferson sent the Lewis and Clark expedition across two-thirds of a continent and back. That expedition contributed tremendously to understanding the geography and biology of the American West. In like manner, future exploration of Mars by robots and humans will help us understand planets in general, even our own Earth. The exhortation by Menaker to stay home on the Earth would, if followed, greatly impede both our ability to understand the Earth and to protect it.

Menaker agonizes over the stress on crews on such long voyages, but these are nothing new, and in turn will contribute greatly to humanitys future. Previously, several nations, such as Portugal, Spain, and England, have sent crews of sailors on very long voyages of exploration, some lasting for three years, as long as a Mars expedition would last (just getting to Mars takes six to eight months.) The results of these voyages included finding an economical route to the Far East around Africa, proving yet again that the world was round by circumnavigation, and the discovery of Australia and the Hawaiian Islands. Furthermore, expeditions to Mars will be in constant contact with their families on Earth, even though there will be a time delay. The isolation and stress of a Mars mission will be nothing like such maritime crews withstood, in an age before good food and good health could be provided at sea.

Menakers take on the high cost of Mars expeditions and the risk to astronauts is also based on wrong and outdated assumptions. With current and past technology, as represented by the expendable SLS booster and Orion programs, the cost, the risk to crews, and the potential radiation doses would in fact be very high. If Mars missions were mounted using the current NASA plans, the cost would probably be in the hundreds of billions of dollars and radiation doses could exceed current lifetime safety limits. However, it is very unlikely that such huge amounts would ever be approved by Congress, and since just one of the unmanned programs, the James Webb Space Telescope, will cost almost $10 billion all by itself, complaining about only the current human space budget seems misplaced. It is also worth pointing outfor probably the millionth timethat the entire NASA budget is one half of one percent of the federal budget. All of the existing social programs vastly outspend it.

So it is much more likely that Mars expeditions will actually be conducted with reusable boosters and reusable spacecraft designed and built by private companies. Much of the space community is coming to share this view. In addition to reducing the cost, such boosters will allow the use of heavy and effective radiation shielding on the crew habitats, making the radiation issue moot. By the time we are ready for Mars expeditions, sometime after 2025, such boosters and spacecraft will be operating.

With these, a continuing program of Mars exploration will be possible within annual NASA budget limits. The cost of an initial human NASA Mars program would probably be in the tens of billions of dollars, but that is trivial compared to the vast sums spend on the inefficient shuttle program. The more that private companies are involved, the lower the cost will be. If the cost is shared by developing standardized vehicles to also support a lunar base, the overall cost will be lower still. In any case, total costs of a program are misleading, since it is the annual cost that is more important to an exploration program run by a government. Over a 15-year time framefive years for development and ten years for operationsthe cost of a $30-billion program would be roughly comparable to what is now being wasted on the SLS.

A program will also not run out of vehicles quickly if they are all designed for reuse, so the program can be continued at a lower cost. With a robust Mars mission architecture, the issue of whether crew members stay at Mars or come home after one expedition becomes moot. Since the vehicles that would take crew members to Mars are reusable, we would want them back at Earth to use for another expedition. This means at least some of the crew members would return after the first expedition was over. The high amounts of mass that a robust mission can land on the surface would allow other crew members to remain on Mars and augment the next crew to arrive, with food and supplies sufficient for many years. A larger crew would provide more hands to do work such as enlarging the base and its pressurized habitat volume. Thus a flexible policy on who returns and who stays could allow a larger crew to do useful work at a Mars science base with each succeeding mission.

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Why humans should go to Mars and other places in space

With the closing of the year 2014 came the opening of the Visit the Philippines Year (VPY) 2015. Last year, the countrys Department of Tourism headed a campaign called Its More Fun in the Philippines, which aimed to increase the tourism in the country, and this years tourism campaign, Visit the Philippines Year 2015, also aims to continue the advocacy.

Cambolo Rice Terraces in Ifugao Photo by Wikipedia Commons

It was seen in the past year that the tourism in the country has indeed improved, and the Philippines has still more in store for those who plan to visit it this year. Here are the top 15 travel destinations in the Philippines that you shouldnt miss:

Marlboro Hills in Batanes Photo by Roger Alcantara

The waves of modernization seems to have never reached the Batanes group of islands. Instead of malls are the so-called honesty stores, where costumers take and pay for their things honestly without the owner looking after them, and instead of cinema houses is the scenic view of the starry sky and the sea. Batanes is secluded, small, and serene, and everyone here knows each other. Experience life at its most basic form in these little islands.

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El Nido Big Lagoon by Nennnn via Flickr

El Nido is one of the best places in the Philippines for all your seaside activities. If youre skilled enough, you can go island hopping, beaching, swimming, kayaking, cliff-climbing, cave-exploringyou name it. If thats not enough, its Bacuit Bay is also known for being a marine sanctuary, making El Nido your all-around marine paradise.

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Surfing in Siargao By Jun Lao via Flickr Creative Commons

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Top 15 Philippine Travel Destinations for 2015

United Nations UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is alarmed that Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in a downward spiral of actions and counter actions and calls on both sides not to exacerbate existing divisions, a senior UN official said Thursday.

Israel is withholding critical tax revenue and seeking ways to prosecute Palestinian leaders for war crimes in retaliation for Palestinian moves to join the International Criminal Court (ICC).

"We call on Israel to immediately resume the transfer of tax revenues," UN deputy political affairs chief Jens Anders Toyberg-Frandzen told the Security Council. "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is now entering unchartered territory, which, lamentably, seems to have dashed any immediate hope for a return to peace talks."

The council's monthly meeting on the Middle East was the first on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since the failure last month of a Palestinian statehood bid at the United Nations Security Council.

Chief Palestinian delegate Riyad Mansour said his government was undeterred.

"In spite of this setback, we will continue to approach the Security Council," he said without elaborating. The Palestinians will become full ICC members on April 1.

Mansour called the withholding of Palestinian tax revenues a "blatant act of reprisal and theft of Palestinian funds" and condemned Israel's "rabid settlement colonization."

Israel has condemned Palestinian moves, with Ambassador Ron Prosor accusing Palestinians of "running away from negotiations" and obstructing the peace process.

The ICC move paves the way for the court to take jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed in Palestinian lands and investigate the conduct of Israeli and Palestinian leaders. Neither Israel nor the United States is an ICC member.

The United States has suggested some $400 million in aid could now be in jeopardy.

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UN message to Israelis, Palestinians: Stop downward spiral

Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur behind the private spaceflight company SpaceX, says he will unveil his concepts for Mars colonization later this year.

In an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit Monday evening (Jan. 5), Musk told readers that the details of his Mars Colonial Transporter would be unveiled by the end of the year, and that the plan would be different from theDragon capsules and Falcon 9 rocketsSpaceX is flying today.

"The Mars transport system will be a completely new architecture,"Musk wrote in the Reddit AMA. "Am hoping to present that towards the end of this year. Good thing we didn't do it sooner, as we have learned a huge amount from Falcon and Dragon." [SpaceX's Plan for Mars & Reusable Rockets (Video)]

The goal will be to send 100 metric tons (110 tons) of "useful payload," he added. "This obviously requires a very big spaceship and booster system," Musk said.

This year, SpaceX will also reveal plans for spacesuits that will meet both design aesthetics and utility requirements, Musk noted. Although he did not specify where the spacesuits would be used, it is possible that they could form the basis forfuture Mars exploration.

SpaceX is the first private company to deliver cargo to the International Space Station, which it did for the first time in 2012. The company has a $1.6 billion contract to provide 12 delivery missions to the station for NASA. A second company, Orbital Sciences, has a $1.9 billion deal with NASA for eight delivery missions.

Elon Muskfounded SpaceX, where he is both CEO and chief designer, in 2002 with the goal of flying people in space. Last September, NASA picked the company as one of two firms to fly U.S. astronauts to the station beginning in 2017 under a separate contract. (Boeing was the other company selected.)

SpaceX's next flight to the space station, its fifth delivery flight so far, is set to launch at 4:47 a.m. EST (0947 GMT) on Saturday (Jan. 10) from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. During that mission, a Dragon resupply ship will launch toward the station, and SpaceX will also attempt to land the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket on an "autonomous spaceport drone ship" in the Atlantic Ocean. The mission was initially set to launch on Tuesday (Jan. 6), but a last-minute rocket issue delayed the flight.

While Musk discussed space travel possibilities that extend far into the future, he also mentioned some of the systems that the company is currently developing, including thereusable rocket test this week.

In response to a question about the planned Falcon 9 first-stage rocket landing, Musk said the stage would use "mostly gravity" to stay on the robotic ship, with "steel shoes over the landing feet as a precautionary measure."

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Elon Musk talks Mars colonization, Kerbal Space Program