Category Archives: Space

things outside the earth’s realm

Space Case

Posted on by
92
Beyond infinity? (from Publicdomainpictures)

As a consequence of my dismissing human space futures as fantasy, I was contacted by an academic astrophysicist counterpart pushing back on my position—which is perfectly reasonable. But the nature of the conversation offered too many revealing insights for me to set it aside. I share the dialog here as a case study representing two extrema on the space question, quickly exposing foundational disconnects of staggering proportions in terms of how the universe works and what we might expect of the future.

The identity of my interlocutor is not revealed, here. Suffice it to say that they are an astrophysicist in a research/professorial position having an impressive list of publications to their name as well as a few books—often touching on the topic of space futures. In other words, the opinions you are about to see are from a serious professional engaged in the subject at hand—more so than I am, in fact.

Not every sentence from the thread is reproduced below (cut about 10% of material less germane to the issue), but whole sections are left intact with no editing or modified emphasis. For each of the four rounds in the exchange, I include the original verbiage, then elaborate a few points before moving to the next round. Each starts with Not Me (NM) followed by the response from me (TM).

A recurrent emerging phenomenon is one of apparent symmetry, in a number of facets. For example, a top-level assessment is that each appears to think the other’s position is bonkers, and I’m ineligible to judge.

Continue reading →

Views: 3187

Space as a Window

Posted on by
57
A reflected window on space camp (Wikimedia Commons).

I grew up as a space enthusiast before I grew up. Part of the maturation process involved work on a Space Shuttle project, two decades of uninterrupted funding from NASA, reviewing many dozens of NASA proposals for space/rocket investigations, and serving as Principal Investigator for a mission concept study centered at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to put a laser transponder on Phobos. Oh, and the most significant chunk of my astrophysics career relied upon the reflectors placed on the lunar regolith by astronaut hands.

No single moment stands out as a crossing of the Rubicon in terms of my migration away from fantasy. But by October 2011 my faith had eroded sufficiently to put out a blog post titled Why Not Space—motivated by responses to the “growth can’t last on a finite planet” drive that initiated this blog. “We’ll just expand into space,” some countered. Note: always beware the word “just,” especially when attached to feats of unprecedented difficulty.

I reprised the theme in Chapter 4 of my textbook (out in 2021), and again a few weeks back. In the last five years, my journey has produced significantly new perspectives (for me) which only serve to make the space delusion more strikingly fascinating and revealing. At this point, it’s hard to identify a phenomenon that so completely captures the religion of the day and its unhinged basis.

Continue reading →

Views: 2969

When Space Becomes Silly

Posted on by
Transport transfer in 1925: we’ve all done this by now, right? (Wikimedia Commons)

Recent posts have compared belief in a space future to belief in Flat Earth, and also compared living in space to hijinks like keeping a crewed airplane flying for over two months straight. Indeed, a number of insights might be gained by comparing the quest for flight to the space ambitions that followed.

Long before fuel-powered flight was demonstrated in 1903, human-powered flight had been a perennial dream of early inventors. It wasn’t until decades later that the much harder task of human-powered flight became possible—aided by modern lightweight materials. Yes, it can be done, but only if you’re a world-class athlete and content to travel at running speed a meter or two off the surface (remaining in ground-effect). Likewise, supersonic commercial flight is possible but not practical enough to remain an option. And it is possible to keep two people up in an airplane for 65 days.

Just because something can be demonstrated as a stunt does not mean it is destined to become normal practice. In particular—as I pointed out in an earlier post—occupation of a space station shares a lot in common with sustaining people in continuous airplane flight, which was once quite the enterprise. But after 1959, people stopped even trying. The exercise had crossed the line from meaningful to a silly waste of effort.

In the first half of the 20th Century, few (in techno-industrial cultures) would question the merits of attempting to keep people airborne as long as possible. It was exciting—proof of man’s greatness and progress into the novel. Given some degree of technological development since that time, we could presumably beat the 65 day record by a large margin, perhaps even demonstrating indefinite airborne capability—if sufficiently driven and provided adequate funds. But the proposal would likely—and fittingly— elicit shrugs and questions as to what the point would be. From my perspective, similar responses should accompany proposals for living in space. The question, then, is: when will we collectively become comparably dismissive of proposals for humans in space?

Continue reading →

Views: 2476

Biosphere Theatrics

Posted on by
Photograph by John de Dios (Wikimedia Commons)

I recently watched a documentary from 2020 called Spaceship Earth about the Biosphere 2 project in Oracle, Arizona. I had picked up bits and pieces about Biosphere 2 over the years, but found the film to be effective in expanding my sense of the endeavor.

Biosphere 2 was an effort motivated by obvious ecological peril together with the crazed space-age notion that we’d be living on other solar system bodies in a few generations. So, we’d better get our butts in gear and learn how to create our own sealed ecosystems. To clear up a point of confusion, Biosphere 2 was not the second attempt at an artificial environment, but was so-named to honor Earth as the original biosphere.

Here, I offer a few reflections spurred by the documentary.

Continue reading →

Views: 2524

2025: A Space Absurdity

Posted on by
Space is sillier. Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum (from this site).

I recently connected faith in space colonization to Flat Earth belief, even though these might seem to be on opposite ends of the spectrum—as Flat-Earthers contend that NASA is a hoax and that artificial satellites are not real (wait: because they’re artificial?). What connects these groups is a belief in something that’s not actually real: based more on imagination than fact, and working backwards from what they wish to be true. I’m not saying the groups are equivalent by any stretch, but that they do share something in common, at core.

Anyway, this observation sparked a few conversations that prompted me to resurrect old arguments (see Why Not Space and chapter 4 of my textbook), but also add some new ones. Here, I share some of these new perspectives and related calculations.

Continue reading →

Views: 3158

MM #2: Cosmology

Posted on by

This is the second in the Metastatic Modernity video series of about 17 installments (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous episode afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode provides a cosmological perspective on our insignificance.

As will be the custom for the series, I provide a stand-alone companion piece in written form (not a transcript) so that the key ideas may be absorbed by a different channel. I record unscripted videos in one take—usually keeping the first attempt—which has the advantage of being fresh and natural, but I inevitably leave out all the “right” things I would say if given more time. Writing allows more careful reflection and optimization of how I say things. I’m not as collected in real-time.

The write-up that follows is arranged according to “chapters” in the video, navigable via links in the YouTube description field.

Continue reading →

Views: 2354

How Far Are Stars?

Posted on by

Photo by Michael J. Bennett

This week’s post is a bit of a distraction from the usual business, based on a question I wondered about. Rather than ask Google, I dug in like a nerd to get a more complete picture.

One of my frequent spiels is about the vastness of space, in the context that we can dismiss fantasies about humans traveling to the stars. I do throw in an old-school calculation at the end to reinforce this point, but until then we’ll entertain ourselves with a sense for the scale of the sky we see with our eyes.

When we consider a scale model in which the sun is reduced to the size of a sand grain (about 1 millimeter), the closest neighbor star is about 30 km away. One light year at this scale is about 7 km. But how typical is this yawning gulf in our region of the galaxy? And how far away are the stars we lay eyes on in the night sky, typically?

Before getting to those questions, just how many stars can we see, naked-eye? It depends on the darkness of your sky. According to the Hipparcos catalog, rounding apparent visual magnitudes to the nearest integer, there are two −1 magnitude stars: Sirius and Canopus. Eight more join at magnitude zero; 12 at first magnitude; 71 at second; 192 at third; 622 at fourth; 1909 at fifth; and 5976 at sixth—at which point our eyes run out of steam. A suburban sky might allow fourth magnitude, or roughly 1,000 stars (not all at once, since only half are up at a time). At fifth magnitude, we get about 3,000 (all-sky). At the limit, we tally about 9,000 stars. About half this number would be above the horizon at any given time.

Incidentally, going to space hardly does a thing to improve visibility: the atmosphere is pretty impressively transparent at visible wavelengths (only “eating” about a tenth of a magnitude). I was excited to see the night sky from Mauna Kea on my first observing trip there as a graduate student. Being above 40% of the Earth’s atmosphere, it’s the closest I had been to space. The thing is, low oxygen levels impair visual sensitivity, so when I first went outside it really sucked: I could barely see a thing (eventually dark-adapted, but way slower than at lower elevations). Space is even worse on the oxygen front.

Continue reading →

Views: 9409

Life Found on Mars

Posted on by

ESA & MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

No, life has not yet been found on Mars, but imagine waking up to that headline. How would you react? The headline’s font would be huge on print newspapers—maybe one word per page, occupying the first four pages. Some bold papers might even put one letter per page and go so far as to have blank pages for the spaces. The point is, it would be big news.

So I ask again, what would this stir for you?

For me, the swirl would be thick with competing thoughts and feelings, tripping over themselves to get out. First would be the raft of questions stemming from pure curiosity. Is it DNA-based? Is it a separate start, or do we share some ancient microbial ancestor—possibly shuttled from one body to the other following a meteoric impact? What lessons can we learn about how life forms? Can we get the discovered lifeforms to call us Mama or Dada? Will they make good pets?

One can imagine the discovery team, whether at NASA or elsewhere, ecstatic with joy. The entire exploration establishment around the planet would likely be giddy. SETI folks would probably be unable to chew for a while, wearing fixed grins.

I would share many of these same reactions, for the pure joy of discovery and the novel opportunity to re-examine what it means to be a part of life on Earth. But then it dawns on me just how devastating the news might actually be for the human race.

Continue reading →

Views: 7954

Survey the People

Posted on by

The futuristic survey (covered in last post) has attracted about 1300 respondents, 900 from DtM, 300 from the Energy Bulletin (now Resilience.org), and a smattering from other places.

I will ultimately be sharing the results, but the habitual readers of the aforementioned sites are perhaps not representative of the population at large.

Thus I would like your help in pushing this out to a broader population.  See if you can get your friends and family members to take the survey, and perhaps even pass the link on to their friends, etc.  I’ve never done this sort of thing before, so do not know what to expect.  But let’s give it a try, yeah?

Here’s the link you want to pass on in whatever form (paste into e-mail, Twitter, link on FaceBook, whatever works): https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2ZC6RD9

Thanks for your help—should be very interesting.

Views: 1273

Futuristic Physicists?

Posted on by

www.dvdtoponline.com

One day, sitting around with a group of undergraduate physics students, I listened as one made the bold statement: “If it can be imagined, it can be done.” The others nodded in agreement. It sounded like wisdom. It took me all of two seconds to violate this dictum as I imagined myself jumping straight up to the Moon. I may have asked if the student really thought what he said was true, but resisted the impulse to turn it into an impromptu teaching moment. Instead, I wondered how pervasive this attitude was among physics students and faculty. So I put together a survey and in this post report what I found. The overriding theme: experts say don’t count on a Star Trek future. Ever.

Continue reading →

Views: 8351