Stan Ulam figured it out in 1947. He realized that it was hard enough keeping a chemical rocket from melting and trying to contain a reaction one million times more powerful was simply not worth the trouble. At tremendous expense and risk a Nuclear Thermal Rocket would be only a little over twice as efficient as a chemical rocket. Ulam did not just think outside the box… he threw the box away and conceived the idea of a propulsion system an order of magnitude more efficient and one that would become even more efficient the larger the scale used.
Nuclear Pulse Propulsion (bombs) has long been the only propulsion system capable of enabling Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (BELO). It is the only option for the foreseeable future. Nothing else will work. Nuclear Thermal Rockets are a dead end and always have been.
It just turned midnight here and it is now the first day of October. The coronavirus vaccines are on the way and a few people are starting to predict the end of Trump… or a civil war. I am starting to pay a little more attention to the future and to my calling to write as a futurist. I have been off work for over a week due to a change in schedule but am going back tomorrow night. Started reading Chris Hedges “When Atheism Becomes Religion.”
This support of right wing extremism is not going to end well…but it better end or something very bad is going to happen.
It is so obvious and yet no one will say it: The President of the United States is courting the Neo-Nazi movement. Proud boys celebrate.
The debate was so bad nobody wants to watch it
Rachel hit the nail on the head. I just don’t want to watch it. And I have been clicking off news that shows segments of it. Trump is essentially just showcasing the bully he is because in his experience it is what works. It is all just a joke to him because anything or anyone that does not serve him is a joke. And that arrogance attracts his base.
“Defend the system or he will crush it.”
In Trumps mind the proud boys are his army
Stand back and stand by can only mean exactly what it sounds like: shut up right now and when I say the election was rigged and I did not lose then fight for me.
The most spoiled rotten bunch of creeps in history
When I started this blog I held to some strong positions concerning space travel and the future of humankind. One of those positions was an extremely skeptical view of fusion reactors. I have repeatedly stated over the years the only two places fusion was going to be useful was in a sun or a bomb.
Interestingly, I held the opposite view concerning a technique for freezing human beings without damage. The central idea has always been that star travel will take centuries and only freezing people will enable such missions without constructing “world ships.” It follows that if freezing a human being without damage becomes practical this will have a profound effect on the human race, will change literally everything, and be the most important event in history.
A working revivable freezing process will very quickly make possible a war on death with millions and possibly, eventually, billions at the end of their lifespan being frozen. As soon as this “Great Rescue” begins, the “Great Race” to reverse aging will also begin, with the resources of our entire civilization involved.
Now there appears to be the real possibility of fusion reactors, due to high temperature superconductors, but no progress on freezing people.
A long time ago early humans, or rather, hominids, discovered by smacking rocks together they could make a very useful tool we now call the hand axe (not with a handle as we understand an axe, but a sharp rock held in the hand). We began the journey to our present society with these amazing tools that allowed us to butcher large animal carcasses and crack bones. This was great but we were still getting eaten by predators. We learned to make fire and at the same time to sharpen and harden the wooden tips of spears. This was much better but these sticks and stones were not as good as they could be. At some point we began to lash a stone point onto the spear and this, along with our ability to cook food with fire, suddenly made us the ultimate predators and the rulers of our African environment. All that was left was to remove the skins of animals, shape them into protection for our feet, wrap them around us to protect us from exposure to cold, and humans were on their way to wherever we wanted to go. Where to go? Where there was either more food or nobody else trying to kill us, or both.
From wiki: “Around 200,000 BP Middle Paleolithic Stone tool manufacturing spawned a tool-making technique known as the prepared-core technique, that was more elaborate than previous Acheulean techniques.[20][21] Wallace and Shea split the core artifacts into two different types: formal cores and expedient cores. Formal cores are designed to extract the maximum amount from the raw material while expedient cores are more based on function need.[22] This method increased efficiency by permitting the creation of more controlled and consistent flakes.[21] This method allowed Middle Paleolithic humans correspondingly to create stone-tipped spears, which were the earliest composite tools, by hafting sharp, pointy stone flakes onto wooden shafts. [23“
As humans spread across the planet, they had already developed socials behaviors tens of thousands of years old. And we still carry those nascent urges to organize and function together in certain patterns in our genes.
“There are many theories on the evolution of behavioral modernity. These generally fall into two camps: gradualist and cognitive approaches. The Later Upper Paleolithic Model theorizes that modern human behavior arose through cognitive, genetic changes abruptly around 40,000–50,000 years ago.[7] Other models focus on how modern human behavior may have arisen through gradual steps, with the archaeological signatures of such behavior appearing only through demographic or subsistence-based changes.”
“Hunter-gatherers tend to have an egalitarian social ethos.[18] Nearly all African hunter-gatherers are egalitarian, with women roughly as influential and powerful as men.[21] For example, the San people or “Bushmen” of southern Africa have social customs that strongly discourage hoarding and displays of authority, and encourage economic equality via sharing of food and material goods.[22]Karl Marx defined this socio-economic system as primitive communism.[23]“
The egalitarianism typical of human hunters and gatherers is never total, but is striking[according to whom?] when viewed in an evolutionary context. One of humanity’s two closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are anything but egalitarian, forming themselves into hierarchies that are often dominated by an alpha male. So great is the contrast with human hunter-gatherers that it is widely argued by palaeoanthropologists that resistance to being dominated was a key factor driving the evolutionary emergence of human consciousness, language, kinship and social organization.[24][25][26]
In other words, humans became egalitarian because they were unhappy about being bullied by alpha males.
“Anthropologists maintain that hunter-gatherers do not have permanent leaders; instead, the person taking the initiative at any one time depends on the task being performed.[27][28][29] In addition to social and economic equality in hunter-gatherer societies, there is often, though not always, sexual parity as well.[27] Hunter-gatherers are often grouped together based on kinship and band (or tribe) membership.[30] Postmarital residence among hunter-gatherers tends to be matrilocal, at least initially.[31] Young mothers can enjoy childcare support from their own mothers, who continue living nearby in the same camp.[32] The systems of kinship and descent among human hunter-gatherers were relatively flexible, although there is evidence that early human kinship in general tended to be matrilineal.[33]“
One common arrangement is the sexual division of labour, with women doing most of the gathering, while men concentrate on big game hunting. In all hunter-gatherer societies, women appreciate the meat brought back to camp by men. An illustrative account is Megan Biesele’s study of the southern African Ju/’hoan, ‘Women Like Meat’.[34] Recent archaeological research suggests that the sexual division of labor was the fundamental organisational innovation that gave Homo sapiens the edge over the Neanderthals, allowing our ancestors to migrate from Africa and spread across the globe.[35]
A 1986 study found most hunter-gatherers have a symbolically structured sexual division of labour.[36] However, it is true that in a small minority of cases, women hunt the same kind of quarry as men, sometimes doing so alongside men. Among the Ju’/hoansi people of Namibia, women help men track down quarry.[37] Women in the Australian Martu also primarily hunt small animals to feed their children and maintain relations with other women.[38]
At the 1966 “Man the Hunter” conference, anthropologists Richard Borshay Lee and Irven DeVore suggested that egalitarianism was one of several central characteristics of nomadic hunting and gathering societies because mobility requires minimization of material possessions throughout a population. Therefore, no surplus of resources can be accumulated by any single member. Other characteristics Lee and DeVore proposed were flux in territorial boundaries as well as in demographic composition.
At the same conference, Marshall Sahlins presented a paper entitled, “Notes on the Original Affluent Society“, in which he challenged the popular view of hunter-gatherers lives as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, as Thomas Hobbes had put it in 1651. According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well. Their “affluence” came from the idea that they were satisfied with very little in the material sense.[39] Later, in 1996, Ross Sackett performed two distinct meta-analyses to empirically test Sahlin’s view. The first of these studies looked at 102 time-allocation studies, and the second one analyzed 207 energy-expenditure studies. Sackett found that adults in foraging and horticultural societies work, on average, about 6.5 hours a day, whereas people in agricultural and industrial societies work on average 8.8 hours a day.[40]
Researchers Gurven and Kaplan have estimated that around 57% of hunter-gatherers reach the age of 15. Of those that reach 15 years of age, 64% continue to live to or past the age of 45. This places the life expectancy between 21 and 37 years.[41] They further estimate that 70% of deaths are due to diseases of some kind, 20% of deaths come from violence or accidents and 10% are due to degenerative diseases.
Mutual exchange and sharing of resources (i.e., meat gained from hunting) are important in the economic systems of hunter-gatherer societies.[30] Therefore, these societies can be described as based on a “gift economy.”
A 2010 paper argued that while hunter-gatherers may have lower levels of inequality than modern, industrialised societies, that does not mean inequality does not exist. The researchers estimated that the average Gini coefficient amongst hunter-gatherers was 0.25, equivalent to the country of Denmark in 2007. In addition, wealth transmission across generations was also a feature of hunter-gatherers, meaning that “wealthy” hunter-gatherers, within the context of their communities, were more likely to have children as wealthy as them than poorer members of their community and indeed hunter-gatherer societies demonstrate an understanding of social stratification. Thus while the researchers agreed that hunter-gatherers were more egalitarian than modern societies, prior characterisations of them living in a state of egalitarian primitive communism were inaccurate and misleading.[42]
Hunter-gatherer societies manifest significant variability, depending on climate zone/life zone, available technology, and societal structure. Archaeologists examine hunter-gatherer tool kits to measure variability across different groups. Collard et al. (2005) found temperature to be the only statistically significant factor to impact hunter-gatherer tool kits.[43] Using temperature as a proxy for risk, Collard et al.’s results suggest that environments with extreme temperatures pose a threat to hunter-gatherer systems significant enough to warrant increased variability of tools. These results support Torrence’s (1989) theory that risk of failure is indeed the most important factor in determining the structure of hunter-gatherer toolkits.[44]
One way to divide hunter-gatherer groups is by their return systems. James Woodburn uses the categories “immediate return” hunter-gatherers for egalitarian and “delayed return” for nonegalitarian. Immediate return foragers consume their food within a day or two after they procure it. Delayed return foragers store the surplus food (Kelly,[45] 31).
The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is not necessarily a one way process. It has been argued that hunting and gathering represents an adaptive strategy, which may still be exploited, if necessary, when environmental change causes extreme food stress for agriculturalists.[47] In fact, it is sometimes difficult to draw a clear line between agricultural and hunter-gatherer societies, especially since the widespread adoption of agriculture and resulting cultural diffusion that has occurred in the last 10,000 years.[48] This anthropological view has remained unchanged since the 1960s.
Nowadays, some scholars speak about the existence within cultural evolution of the so-called mixed-economies or dual economies which imply a combination of food procurement (gathering and hunting) and food production or when foragers have trade relations with farmers.[49]
Many hunter-gatherers consciously manipulate the landscape through cutting or burning undesirable plants while encouraging desirable ones, some even going to the extent of slash-and-burn to create habitat for game animals. These activities are on an entirely different scale to those associated with agriculture, but they are nevertheless domestication on some level. Some agriculturalists also regularly hunt and gather (e.g., farming during the frost-free season and hunting during the winter
So…how did we go from people only concerned about Calories to the prosperity gospel and Donald Trump?
I have an interesting metaphor when considering the present political situation: Just as Sam Harris states our sense of self is actually something we manufacture, so to is our sense of country and all the bad that goes along with whatever good we derive from our nationalist identity. It may be the key to any real American Exceptionalism is the separation of church and state- and we have seen this divide compromised in recent decades. Trump pandering to the evangelicals and vice versa is a toxic relationship that is now seen for what it is with the nomination of a Christian fundamentalist replacement for RGB. There is little doubt Trump is hoping a conservative-packed Supreme Court will allow him to stay in office if he declares “the election was rigged.”
We have allowed the rich to convince us that money is all that matters despite the painfully obvious example of 1929 and the New Deal. That money is the god of this world is also a queer violation of the separation of church and state. White grievance and white nationalism has allowed this fool reality TV show host to become the most powerful man on Earth and now we just might allow him to destroy our democracy. Americans have been tricked into accepting individualism as the only good and anything collective as satanic communism. A queer reversal of equal rights and the rule of law as we finally lose the rights we have historically denied others and allow the king of red America to suspend any rule he wants. It is Orwellian that democracy is certainly a collective project while authoritarianism is definitely individual- and we have been brainwashed into thinking the opposite. What was left of democracy after the Reagan Revolution is almost gone. We landed on the Moon and now we cannot even run an election.
Is this the fall of the American Empire and the beginning of a new dark age?
Details were revealed today (27 September) concerning the tax audit on Trump that has been delayed 4 years. Trump may owe over 100 million dollars to the IRS. Not really surprising as he has gone bankrupt 6 times. “A stunning record of failure.” He owes 421 million dollars in personal loans. The President of the United States is in debt and likely will owe penalties totaling around a half a billion dollar dollars. The only business he has that makes a profit is his Florida Golf Club where foreign visitors and U.S. government employees now pay rates five times what they were previous to his election. Without his reality TV show earnings (ironically a “fake news” CNN executive, Jeff Zucker, is most responsible for this) Trump would have been out of money long before he ran for office. Trump says it is fake news.
In other words, Donald Trump the successful businessman was always the actual fake news. He is most accurately described as a failed rich boy and reality TV con man. This is particularly gut-wrenching to me because in one of the last conversations I had with my father he said he supported Trump- because he was a successful businessman. Now we all know it was simply lies promoting a chronic liar. Yet his cult still believes in him.
“Why is Trump so good to some countries and not to others?”
9 million dollars from a trade deal with the Philippines (where Duterte allows extrajudicial killings we do not criticize). At least a million from a licensing deal in Turkey (likely connected to our abandonment of the Kurds who had fought for our interests for decades- leading to the resignation of James Mattis). And…Russia, where an oligarch loses millions on the Miss Universe pageant, essentially paying money to Trump. In his first two years as president, Trump received $73m from foreign operations, including $3m from the Philippines, $2.3m from India and $1m from Turkey. In 2017 he paid $145,400 in taxes in India and $156,824 in the Philippines – but just $750 in the US.
How did Hillary lose to Donald Trump? How did the corporate democrats manage to lose to one of the biggest losers in America? Cenk seems to blame Jeff Zucker as one of the key factors and Maureen Dowd reported another media executive characterizing him as, “-a case study in the most destructive media executive ever to exist… You’d have to tell me who else has taken a once-great network (NBC) and literally destroyed it.”
From wiki: “During the 2016 presidential election campaign, a large focus was placed upon on-air debates between partisan pundits surrounding issues relating to the candidates (including, in particular, Republican candidate Donald Trump). In an interview with The New York Times, Zucker stated that aspects of its election coverage were influenced by sports channels (with the Times citing, specifically, debates between pundits reminiscent of shows such as ESPN‘s First Take, and large outdoor “pre-game” shows for the presidential debates), explaining that “the idea that politics is sport is undeniable, and we understood that and approached it that way.”[37] In 2016, CNN reached a monthly average of 105 million unique visitors to its web and mobile properties.”
I think there is this illusion that celebrities and politicians are somehow not out for a dollar like the unwashed masses and above scrambling for some easy money here and there. And so it seems we have all these individual players trying to cash in on making politics a “sport” so as to gain some personal profit and by chance we end up with the worst possible situation and possible end of democracy in America.
“Manufactured garbage” that Trump is trying to steal the election? He is trying of course. Orwellian that so many million people will believe this opposite-of-the-truth con blathered by someone whose only trick is to talk fast with confidence and a female racist.
Truth is absolutely stranger than fiction.
Not as many of them ready to sacrifice themselves as they think.
Atlas Shrugged, instead of Mien Kampf, might be surprising, as Ayn Rand was a Jew, but the influence of the ideas in this science fiction novel on these extremists is obvious. Neoliberalism is the religion of Ayn Rand and along with racism the only ideology the white nationalists are interested in.
Exactly what violence these ultra-conservative groups are willing to perpetrate in the event the election is disputed is anyone’s guess. Based on this Portland rally it does not appear they are dedicated enough to go to prison or be killed for their cause. I hope not but I never forget the Oklahoma City Bombing and so they will always scare me.
I grew up with World War Two veterans in my family and as a boy I learned that Nazis are not to be imitated, glorified, complimented, admired, or spoken in anything but the most derogatory terms. Really. My uncle was at the Battle of the Bulge. No love for Nazis. Zero.
For several years I endlessly argued with Muskrats about cosmic radiation, among other things, on the forums found on popular space blogs and news sites. Until, one by one, I was eventually banned from all of them. My message was as unchanging as the amount of radiation and decrease in bone mass experienced by astronauts, so when I used other names I was instantly recognized and banned again.
I was allowed to continue posting on Dr. Paul Spudis’ blog but he died of cancer in 2018 and now I have only my own blog on which to comment on these issues. The political situation has kept me occupied for many months and after we throw that maniac out of the white house I hope to again concentrate on space travel and life extension as the main subjects of this blog. That said, the radiation on the Moon is one of those things the NewSpace fanatics discount as unimportant when it is actually the single most important issue in Human Space Flight (HSF).
Of the three named scientists in my own view concerning HSF, which I call “The Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum” (PDSC), only Eugene Parker, age 93, is left, Freeman Dyson having passed away at the beginning of this year and, as noted, Paul Spudis also passed in 2018. Parker wrote the classic laymen’s guide to space radiation for Scientific American in 2006. titled “Shielding Space Travelers.” NewSpace adherents reject this article and react in righteous indignation whenever it is cited. They also have no use for Nuclear Pulse Propulsion, despite the concept having been validated by Freeman Dyson in project Orion and endorsed by several famous figures such as Wernher von Braun, Arthur C. Clarke, and Carl Sagan. In fact, they have nothing good to say about anything not found on the SpaceX website. At this point I am hoping Bridenstine gets picked up by the Biden administration and the SLS program is expanded.
NewSpace is the worst thing that has ever happened to space exploration.
I wanted to go back to writing about space and life extension but it seems the closer the election the harder it becomes to control my anxiety and I am driven to keep posting on it. I think I am trying to subconsciously process what is happening and so I cannot let it go. And if anyone were to look at my posts over the last couple weeks they would see I am indeed starting to form a larger picture. The main feature of this “big picture” comes from one of the first principles I was taught in boot camp when I joined the Army as a young man 2 score ago: know your enemy.
The enemy is that fifth prince of hell- greed– and the world-wide Neoliberal ideology now promoting that absolute greed. It has translated itself into social media algorithms which manipulate people so as to sell them consumer products. This has turned into a Frankenstein radicalizing millions of people. Add to this “the death of truth” which is the main tactic of Trumpism and the makings of the possible imminent catastrophe become crystal clear.
Well done Emma and Ana; the algorithms steer people towards their biases and emotional gratification. This is psychological manipulation on a vast scale. People are gradually conditioned to believe what they want to believe instead of the truth. Combined with white grievance this explains the big mystery the rest of us cannot seem to wrap our heads around: why forever-trumpers are so brainwashed. My coworkers have displayed to me how this works- on every break they are watching the hodgestwins and other propaganda. Week after week, month after month, for the last couple years. I will not own a smart phone.
“Tell Donald Trump to go to hell”
My comment: It is evident he is a narcissist and his ego will not accept not being re-elected so he is completely obsessed with staying in office and will do anything to make that happen. I am scared. Most of us who have not been brainwashed by social media algorithms on smartphones and have been trained to think critically (I was an autopilot troubleshooter most of my working years) are scared.
Charlie Baker, republican governor of Massachusetts
Not just the history books; in the years immediately after this election people are likely going to prison and those who supported them are going to be rightfully defamed in perpetuity. The forever-trumpers may finally realize what suckers they have been and could even become Trumps worst enemies. Possible but not likely.
Despite the 7 demon princes of hell working so hard for Trump.
From “Demopedia Wiki: The Lanterne of Light’s classification of demons-
In 1409-1410 The Lanterne of Light (an anonymous English Lollard tract often attributed to Wycliffe) provided a classification system based on the Seven Deadly Sins, establishing that each one of the mentioned demons tempted people by means of one of those sins. This list was later used in the works of John Taylor, the Water Poet. (Terms in brackets are those found in the text)
1. Lucifer: Pride “I am the chosen one”
2. Beelzebub (Belzebub): gluttony (glotouns) Trump weighs 244 pounds. At 6 feet, three inches tall that puts him over the threshold for obesity set by the U.S. National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute
3. Satan (Sathanas): Wrath (wraþþe) ABC News has identified at least 54 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault. In many cases of assault or threat, charges are never filed, perpetrators are never identified or the incident is never even reported to authorities.
4. Leviathan (Leviathan): Envy (envous) “I will be a better warrior than anybody.” (better than John McCain, despite Vietnam deferments and bone spurs)
5. Mammon: Greed (Auarouse)
6. Belphegor: sloth (slow) Executive time- and more golf than any president in history
7. Asmodeus: Lust (leccherouse) Individual Number 1 (Trump as co-conspirator in the Cohen felonies of paying off a playboy model and a porn star with campaign funds)
Ice on the Moon 