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(Picture from here.)
As I sit here and write this on 12/14/2020, the last few electors in the electoral college are voting. The last few states are Hawaii, California and Oregon-- another 66 electoral votes, officially making Biden president-elect.
This is not news. We've known this for a month, right? Yet, people have been screaming themselves blue in the face that the election must have been stolen.
Why?
I've gone over a whole lot of documents in the last month trying to figure out what evidence in this world could possibly allow anyone to hold on to this conclusion. There isn't any.
There's only one word for it: magical thinking.
I'm not going to go into why or how people are subscribing to this particular thread of magical thought. The reason it's magical is that it has no basis in evidence. It's the same thing as "alternative facts"-- facts that are not facts but support a particular conclusion.
The fundamental assumption in science is that the universe is there when we close our eyes. It exists independently of us. Evidence is the mortal enemy of theory. The hypothesis, theory, idea, and philosophy may be beautiful but if they are disputed by facts then, in science, they are junk.
This is not to say people don't ignore facts all the time-- think of that person not wearing his seatbelt. Or insistent he's just fine to drive with a .08% blood alcohol. Or the pilot next to you who utters those horrifying words, "watch this."
We are biased in interesting ways. I read once Michael Shermer noting in an article that none of our primitive ancestors ever died mistaking an empty bush for one with a tiger behind it. While many of our ancestors did die doing the opposite. It skews our reasoning.
Now, human beings are incredibly creative creatures. We are able to create completely out of whole cloth complete civilizations, languages, people, and animals that never breathed a breath. We will die in service of rules inscribed by people who died thousands of years ago.
Our primitive ancestors must have had similar abilities-- that caveman over there, Thog, always thinks a tiger is behind that rock. He never went near it. All of us thought he was a loon until Doug got killed. Now, we never go near the rock unless it's to toss flowers to appease the tiger.
That said, our ancestors were evidence based-- they had to be. Sure, they might venerate Tiger Rock but they didn't venerate every rock-- otherwise they'd starve. If their imagination got too bright on them, the world showed them what was real. The world didn't mind. As long as we weren't imaginative to the point we got eaten by that tiger, we could be as imaginative as we want.
And it served us well. Spears, art, song, dancing-- all sorts of fun things provided we didn't get so absorbed that the Tiger ate us.
Our imagination was a selective advantage for us and nature helped us keep it in check.
But we invented agriculture and civilization-- a mechanism of survival that didn't punish us if we lived to deep in our own heads. Now, imagination-- think culture-- was unchecked by the natural world. It was checked only by our own imagination. Think foxes and hen houses.
As civilization as progressed, the consequences for mistaken imagination for reality have gotten weaker and weaker to the point where they are new pretty much unchecked. While the rewards for it have steadily increased. A man can stand up and tell complete and utter falsehoods and not only suffer no consequence but instead have people cry out his name in messianic fervor.
I haven't spoken all that much about the problems facing us. Things like global warming, income inequality, the concentration of power, the fact there are more guns than people in this country and probably on the order of 60 billion rounds of ammunition. (See here.)
We can't even begin to consider this a problem unless we realize what facts actually are. Being an adult means accepting a fact you don't like. A lot of us woke up in November, 2016 having to accept a fact we didn't like. Bummer.
So for those out there that didn't like the November result and today's electoral college election.
Sorry, man. Bummer.
The print book is available here:
Go get 'em, champs.
(Picture from here.)
I am so tired of being... well, tired. I'm tired of spent hacks trying desperately to hold on to power. Tired of one side being outraged at the other only to find the other side just as outraged. I'm tired of people paying no attention to facts. I'm tired of hearing over and over how we are all doomed in one way or another.
(Pick a doom! Any doom! Global Warming! Economic Collapse! Democracy Destroyed! Famine! War! Disease! Can't win (or lose) unless you pick!)
So: Today I'm just going to talk about interesting and positive things. And because I want to keep away from the current environment as much as possible, I'm going to talk about space. I could have talked about things deep in the isolated Amazon but that goes back into doom again.
Starting with dinosaurs. (It's space. I promise.)
There's been a long discussion as to whether the mammals were destined to take over the dinosaur niches without the Chicxulub Impactor thoroughly making those discussion academic. Some scientists thought that dinosaurs were on the way out anyway. Others thought differently. A new study has come out that suggests that dinosaurs were still going to retain championship status on earth not only if the meteor had not struck, but even if the meteor had been 30 seconds late. See here, here, and here. It's not that the dinosaurs were unlucky. It's that mammals (us) were incredibly lucky.
There's still a lot of mystery in space. The most recent Scientific American's lead article was about all the different kinds of supernovae. Astronomers see a lot of interesting structures that are the result of some past event but it's hard to figure out what. It's like seeing the car wreck and trying to figure out if a squirrel ran in front the driver to cause it. That is, if there are no witnesses left and you don't really have a wrecked car but instead more an interesting pile of rust.
One of these relics is the Blue Ring Nebula. (Picture above.)
The BRN is a ring visible in the far ultraviolet. Why the UV? Why only UV? Why the ring? What happened?
For a long time the BRN was thought to be supernova remnant but ultimately that didn't make sense as there were, really, two rings, one more visible than the other.
Finally, the group studying the BRN has a working theory. The BRN is the product of two stars merging. A few thousand years a sun-sized star orbited with a smaller companion star. As they grew closer, the smaller companion siphoned material from the large one, forming a disk. Eventually, however, the smaller companion was absorbed by the larger one, launching a cloud of debris into space in two cones. One of those cones is aimed at earth-- hence the ring structure. When the debris cone struck the interstellar medium, it caused hydrogen to glow in the far UV.
Very cool. See here.
It took Voyager 1 thirty-five years to leave the solar system and escape into interstellar space. The fact that we have a problem in the interstellar medium is very good. The fact that Voyager wasn't designed to do it and can't, therefore, do a good job is not so good. It's not surprising, then, that there is some effort trying to figure out how to get a probe out there. New Horizons is on its way to the medium (See here.) It's about 47AU out. Voyager 1 left at 94 AU and Voyager 2 at 84 AU. NH has detected the slowing of the solar wind. NH is planned to cross the Termination Shock boundary in the mid-2020s but that's still a long way from actual interstellar space. And it's still not an actual interstellar medium probe-- it was designed to look at Pluto.
So: how do we get a probe into the interstellar medium without waiting forever.
The answer might be a solar powered rocket.
The idea is fairly simple. Take your probe insanely close to the sun. Heat onboard helium to lunatic temperatures. Use it as propellant.
Nothing could be simpler, right?
Well, except for the part where nearly every material known degrades to plasma under these circumstances.
The Parker Solar Probe, though, is approaching that problem for different reasons. At its closest approach, the PSP will be four million miles from the Sun's surface and going a blistering 430,000 mph. (See here.) But the PSP did a lot of gravity assists to get to that point and is intended to have a long elliptical orbit-- much like the Juno orbiter.
The Interstellar Probe needs only a modest a modest 200,000 mph but it has to accelerate to that speed from 30k mph and do it in one swoop. So it has to get much closer-- 1 million miles. Four times closer which means 16 times the radiation and heat. (Pesky inverse square law.) Also, there are solar events that are local to the sun like snapping magnetic fields and local prominences. I don't know how far they extend but at some point not only does the quantity of the environment change, the quality does, too.
But all that is moot without propulsion. Not only does our Interstellar Probe have to use a maneuver to pick up speed on a close orbit about the sun, it has to use an engine to pack a lot of horse power.
Well, there's this huge fusion power plant just ready to help. And Jason Benkoski has built a prototype.
Interstellar medium, prepare to be probed.
I'm going to close with China's lunar probe but before that, check out these links:
Both of these are methodologies to get oxygen on Mars and the Moon.
Finally, the Chang'e-5 probe.
I have been in favor of a return to the Moon for pretty much ever. It's the stepping stone for the rest of the solar system. I know a lot of people want to go Mars Direct but I think that's the direction of failure. It's like Germany deciding that instead of invading Poland, they should start with invading Brazil. The Moon is close. It has good power. It has oxygen (see above.)
The western world has been going about doing various things on the Moon. (I'm looking at you, Lunar Orbiter.) But it seems to me that there's a slipshod shot gun approach. China seems to have a well thought out plan that doesn't change from election to election.
The most recent example of this is Chang'e-5.
The Chang'e-5 is intended to land, take samples, and leave instrumentation behind. The ascender then returns those samples to Earth. It's exciting for a lot of reasons-- not the least of which is that the Chang'e-5 is bringing back samples of ancient Moon rather than the more recent Moon of the Apollo missions.
China made no secret that this mission, and their other missions, are part of a larger effort to first create a lunar research station with human beings and eventually a colony. (See here.)
This is a good thing.
I'm not worried about an dropping rocks on the earth like in Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I'm not even worried about a China Moon. Over time, colonies with long supply lines to the parent country have a tendency towards independence. It would be great to see Hong Kong Luna next to Lunar Boston and Tycho Paris.
What I'd like to see is this challenge interpreted as a means to get a consolidated, well thought out, forward thinking plan created and stuck to.
But in the meantime, I'll settle for China Moon.
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