Category Archives: Technology and Society

Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Asteroid Impact Craters

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Some great pictures from space, which is the best place from which to see them.

But we still don’t seem to be taking the problem seriously:

NASA is charged with seeking out nearly all the asteroids that threaten Earth but doesn’t have the money to do the job, a federal report says.

That’s because even though Congress assigned the space agency this mission four years ago, it never gave NASA money to build the necessary telescopes, the new National Academy of Sciences report says.

Because space isn’t important. Even when it is.

Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Geoengineering

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Could “cloud ships” solve the problem (assuming that there is a problem) with “global warming”?

I do find this both amusing and frustrating, though:

The Copenhagen Consensus Centre, which advises governments on how to spend aid money, examined the various plans and found the cloud ships to be the most cost-effective.

They would cost $9 billion (£5.3 billion) to test and launch within 25 years, compared to the $250 billion that the world’s leading nations are considering spending each year to cut CO2 emissions, and the $395 trillion it would cost to launch mirrors into space.

That’s an absolutely insane (and economically and technologically ignorant) number for the latter. The only way to get it is to assume that a) the mirrors are very massive, b) they are made entirely out of terrestrial materials and c) that launch costs would not be reduced in any way by launching that much mass. I’m not saying that “space mirrors” are the most cost effective solution, but I’d like to see their basis of estimate, because that number is nuts.

Political Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Restoring NIAC?

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One of the stupidest and most criminal results of Constellation’s crowding out the rest of the NASA budget was the dismantling of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts two years ago. It was only costing a few million dollars a year, and that trivial amount of money, which was providing tremendous bang for the NASA buck, was taken to be poured down the multi-billion-dollar Ares rat hole. Now, apparently, there’s talk of resurrecting it. That would be a small, but vital step in getting the agency back on the right track, if the new administrator follows the advice.

Popular Culture, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Feeling Old

14 Comments

The morning anchor (a twenty-something, by the looks and behavior) on Fox 29 in Palm Beach was reporting on a Star Wars story, and pronounced C3PO “See Three Poh.” She was ribbed by her co-anchor, and defended herself by saying, “I’ve never seen the movie.”

I was too old to be influenced by Star Wars (in my early twenties when it came out) — 2001, a real SF movie, was my cultural touchstone, but this is the first time I’ve run into an adult that is too young.

Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

More Danger Than We Thought?

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…from asteroids:

To properly explain the crater distribution, Ito and Malhotra say some other factor must have been involved. One possibility is that we simply haven’t seen all the craters yet: the ongoing lunar mapping missions may help on that score.

Another idea is that the Earth’s tidal forces tear Earth-crossing asteroids apart, creating a higher number of impacts than might otherwise be expected.

But the most exciting and potentially worrying possibility is that there exists a previously unseen population of near Earth asteroids that orbit the Sun at approximately the same distance as the Earth. These have gone unnoticed because they are smaller or darker than other asteroids, say Ito and Malhotra.

“More complete observational surveys of the near-Earth asteroids can test our prediction,” they say.

And let’s not waste too much time about it. By some reckonings, asteroid impacts represent the greatest threat to humankind that we are able to calculate.

Even more to the point, it’s not only the greatest one we can calculate, it’s probably the greatest one that we can actually mitigate (short of colonizing the galaxy).

Philosophy, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

I’m One, And Didn’t Know It

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John Bossard coins a useful concept: Exvironmentalism:

…whereas Environmentalism is focused on conservation and improvement of the environment of the Earth, Exvironmentalism seeks to turn the focus outwards, so that the ideas of conservation, and improvements of terrestrial environments are part of much broader and more inclusive notions regarding life not just on Earth, but also of life in our solar system, and out into the Cosmos.

I think that there is another important distinction between Exvironmentalism and Environmentalism. I believe that Exvironmentalism should see human beings as part of the solution, as opposed to being part of the problem. Humans can and must play an important role in enabling the growth of living creatures, plant, animal, and other, in the otherwise sterile exvironments of the cosmos. As such, human life has intrinsic value and worth, like all living and sentient creatures, and therefore is also worthy of respect and should be valued.

Just the opposite of the misanthropic Deep Eeks. I like the logo, too.

Business, Economics, History, Political Commentary, Space, Space History, Technology and Society

A Space Program For The Rest Of Us

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I know, you’ve all given up, and just assumed that the piece in The New Atlantis was just another drug-addled Simberg fantasy of grandeur. That when I kept saying it would be Real Soon Now, that it was just vaporware. Well, Now has finally arrived.

As I wrote in an early draft, if extraterrestrial aliens had contacted the White House after the last lunar landing in 1972, and told the president that humans wouldn’t be allowed to move into space beyond earth orbit, and to pass the message on to his successors, but that the public was not to know this, it’s hard to imagine how policy actions would have been much different. Let’s Hope that this can finally Change with the new administration. That (unlike most of the rest of the agenda) would be Hope and Change that I could believe in.

[Late Friday update]

I want to thank everyone for the kudos, but I can’t accept it (did you know that kudos is not plural?) without acknowledging that this was a collaboration. Adam Keiper, the first and only (to date) editor of The New Atlantis, encouraged me to write this piece and, more importantly, played a key role in making it what it was. While we lost some things in editing (that I’ll rectify in a later Director’s Cut, and perhaps expand into a book), he focused it and almost certainly helped make it more influential in getting more to read it now, when we are at such a critical cusp of policy decisions.

But beyond that, he really helped write it. I was tired when I finished, and had a weak ending. The final paragraph, one of the best in it, if not the best (and it may be), is his.

And I’m grateful for the opportunity that he provided to get this message out, not just with The Path Not Taken five years ago (was it really that long?) but this and other pieces. The links in it are his, which indicates to me that he’s been following this topic closely. The most amazing thing is that this collaboration is a result of a snarky criticism by me of his own space-policy punditry, over half a decade ago. Rather than taking umbrage, he opened his mind to new possibilities, and the result is this (so far at least) collaborative magnum opus.

[Bumped]