Category Archives: Technology and Society

Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Not Guilty?

5 Comments

There is evidence that the asteroid that created the Chicxulub crater didn’t wipe out the dinosaurs:

New clues at other sites in Mexico showed that the extinction must have occurred 300,000 years after the Chicxulub impact and that even larger asteroids may not be the purveyors of doom they’re thought to be, according to a paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society by researchers from Princeton, New Jersey, and Lausanne, Switzerland.

“We found that not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact,” said Gerta Keller, a professor of geosciences at Princeton University, in a release distributed by the Geological Society of London. “These are astonishing results.”

Maybe. But even if true, it’s not an excuse to ignore the problem. Being hit by one of these things will mean a bad day, and maybe a bad decade, depending on its size and strike location. Tonguska was only a hundred years ago, and if it were to hit a populated area (e.g., the eastern Seaboard) today, it would be more devastating than a nuclear blast (minus the radiation), potentially killing hundreds of thousands of people. Even if it didn’t wipe out species, you can bet that anything that can create a crater over a hundred miles across wiped out a lot of life. We should still be investing a lot more than we are to become spacefaring, and prevent a repeat.

And what’s frustrating is that we wouldn’t even necessarily have to spend more money. We’d just have to spend NASA’s budget smarter. But that wouldn’t keep the jobs in the right districts.

[Update a few minutes later]

I wonder if this topic will come up at the Planetary Defense Conference. Looks interesting — wish I could attend. A. C. Charania is blogging it.

[Update a few minutes later]

Or maybe we shouldn’t waste all this money on planetary defense, and just get the president to apologize and make peace with the solar system.

Economics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Space, Technology and Society

Solar System Day

10 Comments

Regular readers know that I hate the earth and the environment.

Well, not really, but I’d imagine that some of the more deluded among them believe that. And I am opposed to many so-called environmentalists. But it’s not an anti-environment position so much as an anti-anti-humanity and anti-anti-free market position.

So I do have trouble getting into Earth Day. I find the notion far too blinkered and unimaginative.

Yes, earth is special and, as we learned over forty years ago (shortly before the first Earth Day), looks like a very precious and fragile jewel against the black background of an unimaginably vast, sterile and hostile universe.

But it’s just one planet of uncountably many, and we don’t just live on a planet, we live in a solar system, a galaxy, a universe. In fact, while there’s an implicit recognition of this in the worship of the sun by the renewable energy types, they’re insufficiently open minded about the use of the rest of the system as a source of resources whose harvesting would be much gentler on the planet than mining them here, if it could be done cost effectively.

I’d like to see Earth Day used as a platform to focus a lot more attention on the environmental benefits that space technology has brought us over the past half century, from data gathering on deforestation and pollution, communications that allow less business travel and more telecommuting, to space-based navigation that saves fuel and lives. I’d also like to see consideration of the even greater future potential for saving the planet via space.

I actually do share the goal of the anti-humans of wanting to reduce the environmental burden of humanity on the planet, and I don’t even necessarily object to the goal of reducing the terrestrial population, as long as we can dramatically increase the extraterrestrial human population, because I’m one of those people who think that human minds are the ultimate resource, and that you can’t have too many of them. But the way to achieve that goal is to open up space, not to simply reduce the human population on earth, by whatever means necessary (and many of these folks think that end will justify any means).

Back in the seventies, many of the L-5ers were hippies who recognized the peaceful potential of space colonization to gently depopulate the earth and make it into a giant natural park, with the vast bulk of humanity living and producing off planet the wealth, via industrial-intensive processes, that would make such a thing affordable. I wasn’t a hippy, but I thought then, and still think, that a wonderful ultimate goal.

But the means to achieve it are not more constraints and taxes on current energy use, or population. It is to deploy technologies that can actually achieve the goal — nuclear, molecular manufacturing, fusion (if we can do it), and low-cost space access, which might eventually make space solar power and extraction of other extraterrestrial resources for use on earth economically feasible.

Golda Meir once said that there would be peace in the Middle East when the Arabs started to love their children more than they hated the Jews. Similarly, the planet will be saved when many of the watermelons who claim to care for it start to love it more than they hate humans, freedom, individualism and technology.

[Thursday morning update]

Save the humans:

Last week the Environmental Protection Agency did bravely move forward by finding that things like smokestacks and breathing — or anything related to greenhouse gases — endanger the public health and welfare. And since the EPA can now regulate CO2, it can have a say in nearly everything we do with little regard for silly distractions like economic tradeoffs…

…What’s worse than the EPA grabbing power over CO2? Well, leading Luddite and Congressman Henry Waxman is worse. His proposal sets carbon reduction goals of 20 percent by 2020, 42 percent by 2030 and 83 percent by 2050, and, with cap-and-trade, effectively nationalizes energy production.

This incremental destruction of prosperity is probably going to have to be modified as soon as citizens get a taste of reality. But how could any reasonable or responsible legislator suggest an 83 percent cut in emissions without any practical or wide-scale alternative to replace it, or any plan to pay for it all?

Well, that assumes that Henry Waxman is reasonable or responsible, when the available evidence indicates otherwise.

[Bumped]

Science And Society, Technology and Society

The Achilles Heel Of Aging

15 Comments

Most people aren’t aware of the recent scientific breakthroughs in life extension technology, but here’s a good update:

In 2004 my lab teamed up with Dr. Rafael de Cabo at the National Institutes of Health to see if resveratrol could improve the health and extend the lifespan of mice. When middle-aged mice were fed a low-fat diet, resveratrol delayed diseases of aging but did not extend lifespan. When fed a high-fat diet, mice on resveratrol got chubby but stayed healthy — they were less susceptible to diseases we associate with obesity, like type II diabetes. And with a sufficient- win a Nobel Prize. ly high resveratrol dose, they burned enough fat to stay lean. What’s more, the resveratrol mice on the high-fat diet ran twice as far on a treadmill as their unmedicated counterparts, and their remaining lifespan after treatment began increasing by an average of 25 percent compared with the high-fat controls. Notably, in both the obese and the lean mice on resveratrol, there was the clear physiological signature of calorie restriction.

The trouble is, while resveratrol is found in many foods, it is present only in very low concentrations. Someone wanting to get a resveratrol dose equivalent to what we used in our mice studies would need to consume hundreds of bottles of red wine each day. Resveratrol has served its purpose, proving the possibility of inducing the physiology of dieting and exercise with a small molecule. Now pharmaceutical companies are working on synthetic molecules that are thousands of times as potent as resveratrol: The race to develop a drug that targets sirtuins is on, though the longterm effect of activating sirtuins in humans requires further research. If the mice studies are anything to go by, the side effects of these drugs could include protection from multiple illnesses, including heart disease, osteoporosis, cataracts, and Alzheimer’s.

Bring it on. I’m all in favor of this, which is one of the reasons that I’m not a conservative.

History, Space, Technology and Society

Space Nuclear Waste Disposal

6 Comments

When I wrote that piece about Three-Mile Island the other week, I forgot to mention my own recollections of the event. It was interesting timing, because it happened in the middle of a senior space systems engineering project that I was involved with at the University of Michigan. It was an annual course taught in the Aerospace Engineering department, required for Aerospace majors, which I took as an elective (though it wasn’t my major, I took many courses there, including several graduate ones, tailoring my own astronautical engineering degree, but without the emphasis on aeronautics). The course was taught by Harm Buning (who died only three years ago — I really ought to write about him some time). The project was to figure out how to dispose of nuclear waste in space. This was a couple years before the Shuttle had its first flight, and we still believed the hype about its cost and safety, so it was the assumed launch vehicle, but the question was what to do with the stuff once it was in LEO.

Having been pretty heavily involved with the L-5 Society (I had actually spent a semester the previous year volunteering at the HQ in Tucson, and had met people involved with the MIT mass driver work, including Henry Kolm and Eric Drexler — the people in that now-classic picture are, from right to left, a twenty-four year-old bearded Eric wearing a Maxwell’s equations teeshirt (one of which I also had at the time), Henry, Gerry O’Neill, someone unknown to me, and Kevin Fine — geek and space enthusiast city — I could write a sad book titled “We Were Space Enthusiasts, And Young…), I suggested that we use a linear synchronous motor to propel it out of the solar system. The class adopted the idea, and we came up with a crude systems design (about what you could expect from college seniors for such a complex project). It was in the middle of the project that TMI occurred, making it seem even more relevant.

The university seems to have put many of these older (typed by department secretaries– no word processors back then) reports on line, including this one. I’m sure I have a dead-tree copy somewhere, but it’s nice to see it on the web. It’s been a long time, and I was distracted at the time because my father had his second heart attack in April of that year, and died a few weeks later. Due to time missed, I had to finish up my sections early in the summer to avoid an Incomplete for the course, so I don’t remember how much of it and which parts I wrote, but it was quite a bit of it (at least the orbital mechanics and the dynamics of the payloads in the accelerator, and how much wall play they would have to have). Dave Steigmann wrote a lot of the structures section, I think. The report says that it’s authored by Kevin Blankinship, but he was probably just final editor, because he was officially the team project manager. One of the things that this course taught was not just engineering, but how to work as an engineering team (including managing with the politics and personal interactions). These were…interesting. I won’t say any more than that, to protect the guilty, whoever they all may be. 😉

Anyway, is it feasible? Probably not, but it was a good project for the purpose of learning how to consider all aspects of a space system, and project teamwork.

[Update a while later]

The project name was pretty good acronymery. I don’t recall whether it was mine, someone else’s, or the result of a brainstorming session. But it was Project NEWDUMP (Nuclear Energy Waste Disposal Using Mass-Driver Propulsion).

For anyone who is willing to read the thing, it is probably entertainingly rife with howlers, from the perspective of three decades later. This one on page four jumped off the page at me:

The Space Shuttle has substantially reduced the cost of space transportation since the Apollo project, with possible improvements for further economy.

Note the tense, and not also that this was written about two years before first flight.

Business, Economics, Space, Technology and Society

How Do The Numbers Work?

40 Comments

Sorry, but I just can’t buy this:

PG&E is pledging to buy the power at an agreed-upon rate, comparable to the rate specified in other agreements for renewable-energy purchases, company spokesman Jonathan Marshall said. Neither PG&E nor Solaren would say what that rate was, due to the proprietary nature of the agreement. However, Marshall emphasized that PG&E would make no up-front investment in Solaren’s venture.

“We’ve been very careful not to bear risk in this,” Marshall told msnbc.com.

Smart move.

Solaren’s chief executive officer, Gary Spirnak, said the project would be the first real-world application of space solar power, a technology that has been talked about for decades but never turned into reality.

“While a system of this scale and exact configuration has not been built, the underlying technology is very mature and is based on communications satellite technology,” he said in a Q&A posted by PG&E. A study drawn up for the Pentagon came to a similar conclusion in 2007. However, that study also said the cost of satellite-beamed power would likely be significantly higher than market rates, at least at first.

In contrast, Spirnak said Solaren’s system would be “competitive both in terms of performance and cost with other sources of baseload power generation.”

I just can’t see how. Unless there are going to be many satellites, the system has to be in GEO to provide baseload power to any given region on earth. They talk about putting up a 200 MW system with “four or five” “heavy lift” launches (where this is apparently defined as 25 tons).

Suppose the conversion efficiency of the cells is a generous 30%, the DC-MW conversion is 90%, the transmission efficiency is 90% and the MW-AC conversion efficiency is 90% (generous numbers all, I think). That gives an overall efficiency of 22% from sunlight to the grid. The solar constant in space is 1.4kW/m2, so that means you need 650,000 square meters of panels to deliver 200 MW to the grid. Suppose you can build the cells (including necessary structure to maintain stiffness) for half a kilo per square meter. That means that just for the solar panels alone, you have a payload of 325 metric tons. Generously assuming that their payload of 25 tons is to GEO (if it’s to LEO, it’s probably less than ten tons in GEO), that would require over a dozen launches for the solar panels alone.

That doesn’t include the mass of the conversion electronics, basic satellite housekeeping systems (attitude control, etc.) and the transmitting antenna, which has to be huge to get that much power that distance at a safe power density.

So even ignoring the other issues (e.g. regulatory, safety studies, etc.) that Clark mentions, I think this is completely bogus until I see their numbers. And probably even then.