Ice on the Moon

Several space terms and concepts are abused by NewSpace supporters and used as deceptive P.R. devices. A recent comment from Australia needs to be addressed;

“-(also as far as I aware there’s nothing wrong with calling a Bernal Sphere a space station).”

That’s no space station, it’s a moon. An artificial moon.

Let us start with defining what space itself is. Space, as differentiated from Earth Orbit, should be demarcated at Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) 22,236 miles up. NewSpace has pushed much of their business plan for years with propaganda identifying LEO, a couple hundred miles up, as some kind of new frontier. LEO is actually a dead end for Human Space Flight and should not even be classified as such. Comparing LEO to deep space is like comparing a duck pond to the North Atlantic.

Continuing on to spacecraft vs spaceships, what I call the Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum is I believe the best guide for understanding the difference between the two. And with the preliminaries out of the way we can now address the subject of space stations. The first problem is that 40 years of LEO space stations have been a tremendous waste of time and resources and proof of why we should abandon LEO as a complete dead end in terms of Human Space Flight. For many years the space station vacation tourist fantasy was NewSpace dogma and has always been a joke to true space enthusiasts. If one goes by certain criteria, the Space Station and the Lunar Cycler are the interesting comparison, since a Shielded Lunar Cycler would be the intermediate step to a true spaceship.

The ISS and those before it are what should be more accurately called “Orbital Platforms” or “OP’s” since they cannot really support long duration missions anywhere except LEO as they lack a cosmic ray shield. A “Space Platform” might have a cosmic ray shield but not artificial gravity and does not have much utility so I doubt they will emerge. A true Space Station would have both a cosmic ray shield and artificial gravity. Shielding and artificial gravity almost certainly equate to lunar water and tether systems as other methods are not very practical. A capable enough propulsion system would make a true Space Station into a Lunar Cycler and a nuclear propulsion system would make it a Spaceship. Such basic practical realities and distinctions need to be understood. A Habitat, as visualized by the space colonization movement of the late 1970’s, is large enough for people to raise families and actually live in indefinitely. The Habitat is thus orders of magnitude larger so tether systems would be replaced by the torus, sphere, or other configurations. In this context calling a Bernal Sphere a Space Station is wrong.

If you look into this NASA study on habitat design you find some mention of material strengths and how strength is a determining factor of size due to artificial gravity stresses. What type of alloy and pattern of construction would be ideal remains to be seen. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/martelaro2/docs/nasa-sp-413.pdf

In my view the benchmark, after looking at the various concepts, is an artificial moon, a hollow sphere, several miles in diameter, spinning to provide 1G on the inner surface at the equator (a Bernal Sphere). One question of interest is how many miles in diameter? The trick is to provide cosmic ray shielding as well as structural strength, as well as making the structure able to be gradually repaired and likely entirely rebuilt over time so that it will last several centuries or, essentially, as long as structure is being remade over time. These three requirements; 1G, cosmic ray shielding, and gradual regeneration, are the factors to focus on when converting a Habitat design into a Starship design.

A Bernal Sphere converted into a Starship would be accelerated to some percentage of the speed of light out of the solar system by an immense solar powered beam propulsion system. Upon reaching another star several centuries later it would likely use pulse propulsion nuclear devices (bombs) to slow down. Due to the acceleration and deceleration, the more severe interstellar radiation environment, and degradation of structural materials over time, these Habitat/Starships would need to be built to a much higher standard than Bernal Spheres used only as habitats. The smart species would build them to the higher standard from the start.

The missing piece of the puzzle in regards to Star Travel is freezing people. A population reproducing over generations on a “world ship” does not appear desirable and I place it in the category of space elevators as being a lost cause. Suspended animation is, however, not a losing proposition at all since it is a straightforward  problem preventing damage to cells from ice formation. We can likely freeze people without damage and revive them so we should start building the infrastructure now to allow missions to other stars to be launched within a century.

Of course being able to freeze people, as I have written about on this blog, is the ultimate game-changer and would be the most significant event in the history of humankind. Besides having no option except to find a cure for aging, suspended animation also means Star Travel because humans will not stop having children. While it has been calculated the resources are available in the asteroid belt to support space colonies in this solar system with a total population in the tens of billions, interstellar migration is of course the better path to plan on from the beginning.

I posted a comment on YouTube today and Donald Brent asked me to explain why I believe Musk has set space exploration back a decade. I have explained this a couple dozen times on popular space blog forums in previous years, before I was banned from all of them. The story starts in 2008 with the Chandrayaan 1 lunar mission.

https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/mini-sar-nears-completion-of-its-first-mapping-cycle-152597012/.

By 2010 data was released that strongly indicated ice on the Moon. This was a pretty big deal and should have pointed the space agency straight back at that prize we never should have taken our eyes off of. Unfortunately, a campaign contribution by a certain entrepreneur made his hobby rocket the priority and talk about the Moon was verboten. The President gave his infamous “we’ve been there” speech and that was it for almost a decade. Slowly, year after year, the evidence for ice and other factors such as radiation made it clear we were not going to Mars anytime soon and the Moon was the best destination. It has also become clear that nearly a half a century of LEO space stations have been a tremendous waste of time and resources.

The ISS had been scheduled to be decommissioned in 2016 but because it was the NewSpace cash cow and essentially the piggy bank for SpaceX, it is still going in circles up there, going nowhere, at 4 billion dollars a year. The best course would have been to decommission the space station to nowhere a couple years early and build Sidemount as a lunar Heavy Lift Vehicle. It broke my heart when they killed it. On the wings of maybe, downing birds of prey. The worst wrong turn NASA ever made was buying into the scam that is NewSpace. The first flight of Sidemount would have been in 2013 and 6 a year means roughly 36 heavy lift missions would have been flown by now. If those missions had been dedicated to a lunar return we might be getting ready to land people and move into a Moon base about now. Of course that probably would have depended on abandoning LEO- which is the only place the SpaceX Falcon could go. See how that works?

Not content with having his own satellite launch company handed to him by the taxpayer, Musk has never done a thing to dissuade or denounce his rabid fan club posting, literally, libraries of death-to-SLS propaganda over the years. He promised a cheap astronaut ride to the ISS years ago and we have yet to see it. His next boondoggle is the space-junk-horror-movie that is Starlink. 12,000 refrigerator size smallsats and now a possible 30,000 more. NewSpace has been pushing their scam for over a decade now and the effect has been to program those who were teenagers a decade ago to be true believers today. Tens of thousands of people who are interested in space, perhaps several hundred thousand, are followers of Musk and believe his whole Mars-as-a-second-home-for-humankind con.

In the 1970’s the true prophet of space colonization, Gerard K. O’Neill, early on eliminated Mars and other natural bodies as possible colony sites because of the requirement for Earth gravity. Humans thrive in 1G and nothing indicates lower gravity does anything but harm. A million years of evolution is not going to be undone because Mars happens to be a convenient P.R. theme. Mars is too far away, without enough solar energy, and with too much gravity to make landing easy and not enough to keep humans healthy. Mars, like Low Earth Orbit, is a complete dead end. The future is the Bernal Sphere built with lunar resources and space solar energy powering Earth as the economic engine financing space colonization. No other plan has even a small chance of succeeding. Humankind will never create off-world colonies courtesy of billionaire hobbyists. Only state-funded public works projects on the scale of Hoover Dam or the Panama Canal will create the infrastructure required to start up factories on the Moon and begin to build the necessary industrial base.

 

 

 

The penultimate disruption to a nation is the threat of destruction, one such specific threat being invasion by a genocidal enemy. The modern example of this is the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia in 1941. Russians had already suffered from revolution and then civil war, famine, and purges under Stalin that killed millions in the 20’s and 30’s. They now faced an adversary intent on simply making them disappear and taking over their land as lebensraum. The Russian people fought back with the entire population of over 150 million, with few exceptions, exerting themselves to the limits of human endurance, year after year. Imagine such a struggle now, at the end of 2019 or 2020. Instead of a few hundred million involved, imagine billions, the majority of the human race. How would it start? The more important question to ask, after the identity of the adversary is revealed, is why we would want to stop it.

Therein lies the “ultimate” conspiracy theory. But first, more about threats; my interest in space travel began with helping my wife with a class on situational ethics some years ago. I recommended the cold war for a paper and while doing some research for her I happened upon “Project Orion, the true story of the atomic spaceship” in the public library. And I was hooked. Space Travel led to Star Travel and that led to suspended animation which led to deeper questions and nothing has been the same for me since. The most fascinating part of all this is what strange beings we are. Instead of focusing on the possible future we can effect within the laws of physics, we seem to most often defect to magical thinking. It occurs to me often that by way of being distracted by fantastical constructs we may well go extinct. Nuclear warfare led me to other existential threats such as another dinosaur killer impacting Earth or a new volcanic epic or an engineered pathogen. And this led me to Gerard K. O’Neill and his plan to colonize space and incidentally stop global warming. Looking for why nothing seems to be going the way it should I discovered neo-liberalism. Now I know.

On to the conspiracy-

In the 1997 movie Abre los ojos, and the 2001 remake Vanilla Sky, a television commercial featuring a dog revived from suspended animation may be a futurological prophecy soon fulfilled. If tomorrow in some lab, a dog or some other animal is (by some electromagnetic or sonic technique preventing ice formation) reanimated after being frozen- then the most significant event in the entire history of the human race will have occurred. Not only the most significant but the most absolutely disruptive and paradigm changing event of all. Nothing else would even come close. A few minutes of considering what it would mean to be able to freeze a human being for decades and then revive them without damage gives my claim credibility. The revealing of such a freezing technique would, in a matter of hours, cause a chain reaction species-wide as first those with loved ones near death and in the following days everyone would realize that death, the eternal enemy, could now be warred upon and eventual victory clearly seen as our destiny. There is nothing magical about freezing something delicate in a way that does not cause damage. It is simply a problem humankind must focus on and advance technology to solve.

It is a three-step process. Affecting the condition of microstructures and connections during changes in temperature is the first problem to be solved. The second problem is to store millions and possibly several billion frozen human beings. This would be the battle to save those dying and would enlist the population of planet Earth working to the limits of their endurance- like Russia in World War II. The more difficult problems of rewriting DNA and gene therapies to reverse aging are the final step. Like Cortez burning his ships, after we started freezing people there would be no alternative except to succeed.

Now comes that question of why.  Why is such a freezing technique considered impossible or impractical, and not a subject of any significant funded research? How can simply lowering the temperature of tissue without damage by ice crystals be such a completely ignored and scorned subject of study? The properties of water are about physics and research on low temperature liquid states holds the key. Is there some latent psychological mechanism working against the idea of funding this path? It would seem so. To answer these questions conspiracy theorists will jump on mind control and alien forces at work, while more mundane fundamentalists and narrow-minded beings will predictably preach moral objections and heap ridicule. After exploring the issue of life extension one becomes convinced some secret is just below the surface. Something similar to Terror Management (a psychological theory). Or maybe a super-intelligence IS telepathically influencing us to ignore this subject of extending our lifespan. Probably not. Probably we are just afraid.

And then there is the possibility such a freezing technique already exists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“God has granted to me to make friends with two of the people here: one is Orlov, and the other and principal one is Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov. He is a librarian at the Rumyantsev Library… He has devised a plan for a common task for humanity, the aim of which is the bodily resurrection of all humans. First, it is not as crazy as it sounds (don’t worry, I do not and never have shared his views, but I have understood them enough to feel capable of defending them against any other beliefs of a similar material nature). Secondly, and most importantly, because of these beliefs he leads the purest Christian life… He is sixty, a pauper, gives away all he has, is always cheerful and meek.’ L.N. Tolstoy writing to V.I. Alexeev, 1881”

As my coworkers seem to drift farther and farther right I am going in the opposite direction. This brings to mind the psychology of Jordan Petersen and how we need the opposite view if we are to ever understand our own. Though I am certainly perplexed by Trump supporters it is possible to just accept their behavior has a mechanism driving it and if I cannot understand it I can at least start with that. The best way I have found so far to make some sense of the present situation is to frame it as a kind of bizarre social Darwinism. As a few discerning progressives have stated recently, it is not about left and right, it is about up and down. Those at the top and those at the bottom and the deceptions sustaining this extreme inequality.

Deception in nature is of course ubiquitous in the form of camouflage. When humans evolved consciousness they went supernatural in the way they exercise self-deception concerning their own mortality. This is the basis of the psychological theory of Terror Management. Troubleshooting a fault by looking at all the parts of the system is my only gift and when applying that talent to this up and down problem I see deception as the salient factor. This goes back to my favorite verse in the bible and the question asked by Pilate, “What is truth?” All the parts point to a thanatological distraction acting as a kind of mass hysteria throughout history. We must substitute stories because the realities are too much to bear. The endless stories are how we escape distress.

The reality that generates all these constructs we believe to be so important is the unacceptable mystery of existence. Why is this world so terrible and yet so wonderful? Our simple default is to believe it is either completely terrible or completely wonderful but either of those worldviews alone wreck our psyche and is catastrophic to survival. To reconcile both as existing together is beyond our ability so we are driven to make stuff up. This is not simple and quickly becomes infinitely complex. When we have to make stuff up we automatically assume everything and everyone is either made up or is making stuff up also- so life becomes this game not about what is true and real but what you want to believe. My troubleshooting leads me to choose that fault as the big problem; the correct process is to imagine the best possible reality and then try to make it real, to turn a lie into truth – not make up the best possible reality and then just believe the lie without making it real. We must not choose the story we like. The mistake is choosing a story, which is fundamentally different than making a story real. The devil is in the details.

The most difficult path is to accept the world is both terrible and wonderful and not as alternative stories to choose from. We can only “accept” for short periods when we are at our strongest and most resilient. Between the two poles of terrible and wonderful is the great unknowable. For short periods we are transfixed by a world either terrible or wonderful but most of the time it is that queer mix we do not know how to deal with. So we resort to making up stuff and fooling ourselves into thinking we know something. And that is where the trouble starts. In terms of the obscene wealth amassed by a very few individuals and the self-induced delusions we use to make sense of that, what we are doing is choosing to believe one lie or another. Those choices lean left or right and our unique personalities push us one way or the other. The immutable law we rebel against here is that simple problems get solved but the hard problems will remain no matter how hard we try to make them simple. That hard problem is not left and right, it is up and down.

For any who are reading this expecting a blog entry about space exploration, this issue of left and right and up and down relates directly to the first space age and the future of our species. The perfect example to illustrate the left/right-up/down dichotomy is the race to the Moon. Ostensibly a cold war battle between socialism and capitalism, it showcased the shortcomings of both political systems. The west won by resorting to a soviet command economy program and then, because of the lack of profit that went along with that style of project, ended the first space age just after it began.  We have yet to see humans travel beyond Earth orbit again and the present push is underfunded and shot through and through with neoliberal agendas almost guaranteeing failure. There is no short term profit to be made Beyond Earth Orbit and since we typically die after 70 or 80 years nobody cares about the long term. Individually there is no future to care about. Yet we collectively refuse to invest any significant resources into indefinitely extending the human lifespan. This seemingly bizarre little detail, never addressed with any degree of seriousness, may ironically doom our species to extinction.

This is akin to a race to the bottom where we collectively sacrifice our species so as to live our momentary individual lives just a little better off than others. Nothing is going to make us individually sacrifice until there is a future to sacrifice for. The terminal illness that is aging translates into a society where the individual seeks to gain as much power and wealth as possible in the moment. Part of this insatiable appetite is to invest in safeguarding extant wealth by any means possible and, naturally, influencing and deceiving others is the best way to accomplish that. While the patriarchy is often blamed for much of this it must be understood women enjoy wealth just as much as men. Part of the left and right deception has to do with stories about the battle of the sexes. In reality it is women who are the more existentially important beings- as I have often told my daughter. Males are largely expendable and act that way, at least for the first quarter century of life. It would be wise to send only women and no men to colonize space.

In closing, Federov’s Common Task is not camouflage for any left or right storylines. The Task always at hand is a call for all to go up, and if that requires dragging those very few at the top back down, then so be it. In the end, it is essentially about the 91 percent tax rate on the top 1 percent of the 1950’s that made America great. That story was made real, but the neoliberal fantasy happening now is simply camouflage for predation and greed.  Propaganda.

 

I envy this YouTube personality with half a million viewers…I really do. So I will try not to let any bitter resentment show too much in my own humble blog offering concerning his space-themed videos. I will try but since nobody visits my blog I might have to just vent a little. Sorry Joe. Of course, I could actually TRY and promote my blog but that takes time and I barely find enough of that to write. A poor excuse. But that is my story and I am sticking to it.

Joe promotes Musk and SpaceX which I do not like at all. He also seems to think space solar power is a dead end which makes me want to not like Joe at all. But I can’t help enjoying most of his videos. It is not a perfect world and I must take the good with the bad. His offering this morning had some of what I considered not so accurate information and neglected three key concepts- and I just had to write a blog entry about it.

1. The idea that Artificial Gravity makes you sick.                                                                       This is not really a factual statement. What I recall from my studies is past NASA research indicated a system requiring more than 4 revolutions per minute of centripetal artificial gravity might not be practical due to difficulties adapting to it. My spin calculator website says those 4 revolutions per minute require a radius of 183.37 feet and a speed of 52.37 miles per hour to generate one disorienting and nauseating gravity. In view of this information the best place to start might be 1 revolution per minute since most of us are familiar with the second hand on an analog clock. This would require a radius of 2933.92 feet. Let’s just call it 3000 feet because 1G equaling a 6 thousand foot tether revolving once per minute is easy to remember. The great strength of materials like spectra allow for very long tether systems and the length to get the rotation down to once every two minutes would be 2.22 miles. The trick is to find the rotation rate that will allow people to live comfortably for years at a time. The key concepts being the tether or, later on, the Bernal Sphere. The miles-in-diameter hollow spinning artificial moon where humans can thrive in one Earth gravity.
2. The idea that Artificial Gravity is the main problem.                                                        The “problem” with space travel is three-fold and the first and most difficult one to solve is not gravity, or, to give it a descriptive term, debilitation. Between dosing and debilitation the problem of radiation dosing is far more serious. The third part of the problem, as Joe talks about, is time. Dosing and debilitation are not a big deal if it only lasts a short period. Unfortunately, a spaceship we have the technology to build right now, using atomic bombs for propulsion and reaching speeds of over 100,000 miles per hour, still takes several years to accomplish two-way missions to the outer planets like Jupiter and Saturn. A small capsule holding a few astronauts requires around 400 tons of cosmic ray water shielding to duplicate a near-sea-level radiation environment. The practical living space for a multi-year mission would likely triple that mass to well over a thousand tons. The big dumb metal plate or folded-up Solem Spinnaker that is the hard or soft “engine” of a pulse-propelled spaceship need not rotate but a kiloton+ cosmic ray shield would spin as the equal mass with a pair of masses spinning at the ends of a tether system. The key concept being the Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum which I detail elsewhere on this site.
3.  The question mark about Artificial Gravity is nonsensical.                                                 It is not a question of whether we can do it- it is a question of how we WILL do it since we simply must have it. To infer it is not “achievable” is to infer Human Space Flight is a dead end. There is certainly enough of that defeatist tunnel vision garbage going around and we don’t need any more it. No thank you Joe. I was extremely disappointed when I watched the YouTube video about space solar power since that is almost in the same category as Artificial Gravity as a must-have. Any scenario without space solar power where humans expand into space is highly unlikely.  Gerard K. O’Neill, the true prophet of space colonization, believed space solar is the key to the future of the human race (and also cited it as the cure for climate change) and I have to agree. O’Neill is why I am so opposed to the NewSpace scam the Musk Mob endlessly hypes. O’Neill envisioned a kind of green new deal with space solar power enabling the construction of artificial worlds while Musk promotes…a neoliberal alternate reality where all the John Galt and Howard Roark types will settle on Mars. The key concept being O’Neillian space colonization of the 70’s instead of the present NewSpace scam being hyped by Ayn-Rand-in-Space-libertarian nutjobs. Don’t be one of them Joe.

 

 

 

 

 

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/we-have-no-reason-to-believe-5g-is-safe/

Along with the small-satellite-constellation-space-junk-horror-movie this is proof we are doomed as a species. We seem to be contaminating our environment while we destroy it with climate change. It is perhaps a dead pool among aliens which will do us in first, a dinosaur killer, a volcanic epic, a pandemic, or a nuclear-winter-pandemic-cannibal-apocalypse brought on by a combination of events.

I happened to tune into the fat drug addict on AM radio today and did not immediately recognize his voice. It has changed in a quarter century of Orwellian ranting but the message is the same lies-are-truth garbage that has been brainwashing the weak-minded all these years. He babbled about death and how the liberals were causing the suicide rate to go up by telling the youth the planet is going to be uninhabitable and that was why escaping to Mars with Elon is so popular. His point being it is normal for our brains to fool us into believing we will not die and socialists are an abomination destroying that clever deception. Incredible.

Boeing is now being revealed as responsible for the deaths of 346 people in two crashes, one in 2018 and one in 2019, associated with 737 Max design flaws. This after no passenger jets crashed in 2017- the safest year in commercial aviation history. Ironically, the niece of Ralph Nader died in one crash, the person famous for revolutionizing consumer safety with his book, “Unsafe at Any Speed.” The connection with being a doomed species is clear; the greedy malicious children in the group are leading us to our deaths. Where are the adults? All busy attending the church of neoliberalism.

Nearly 30 years ago I learned an important lesson about the law of unintended consequences due to my experience maintaining the HH-60J rescue helicopter. In the airframe school we were taught some history about the aircraft and it has some similarities with the 737 Max tragedies. The Army selected the H-60 to replace the Huey back in the day and one of the design requirements had been that with a minimum of disassembly it must fit in the back of a C-130 transport plane. The reason being helicopters are maintenance intensive and only fly so many hours until they need serious inspections- and it takes them many of those hours to get anywhere far away on the planet because they are so slow. The problem was due to other performance requirements some complicated design tricks were needed to make the H-60 small enough to fit. One trick was the “stabilator” wing on the tail which was driven by a computer to compensate for a shorter fuselage length. Unfortunately the cable run to the actuator in the tail was not adequately shielded which made the run a kind of antennae and flying through certain kinds of radar beams would generate a signal in the cable that drove the stabilator actuator down. The helicopter, if going above a certain speed, would violently dive and there was nothing the pilot could do about it quickly. Since helicopters would encounter these beams when making approaches at low altitude to an LZ several dove into the ground killing everyone on board. They finally figured it out and fixed it.

The sad fact is the helicopter only barely and with difficulty fit into the C-130 and this turned out to be a seldom used feature. The point being that when we seek to gain extraordinary advantage or profit there is a reason it is extraordinary. If greed overrides caution then failure is most often the result. This lesson applies to the existence of humankind and not just airplanes and economic markets.

Having landed on the Moon a half century ago we should have fleets of spaceships traveling the solar system by now. You would think. The reality is the public does not understand what would define a true spaceship. Though I have always disliked similes concerning space, especially those like JFK’s calling space an ocean, it has some utility.

1. A spaceship, like a ship on the ocean, must be capable of crossing an ocean. The space analogy of a small ocean, like the Mediterranean, might be from the Earth to Mars. The Pacific analogy might be Pluto. The analogy to oceanic storms would be radiation and the equivalent to running aground would be meteorite damage.
2. The basic requirement to travel interplanetary space, that is, Human Spaceflight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (HSF-BELO), is to weather space storms. If radiation is the equivalent of an ocean storm it is interesting that taking a microcosm of an ocean into space as a kiloton+ cosmic radiation shield seems to be the prerequisite.
3.  The next requirement for HSF-BELO is speed. It relates directly to the first problem because though 400 tons are needed to shield a small capsule, humans have psychological limits concerning living space and mission time which equates to thousands of tons of water. And pushing those kilotons requires nuclear energy. There is only one practical nuclear propulsion system: Bombs.
4.  Along with dosing there is long term microgravity debilitation which will require tether generated artificial gravity. Micrometeorite shielding will require more mass and a warning and deflection system for larger particles. The unavoidable mass penalty for multi-year HSF-BELO missions is going to be ten thousand tons plus.
5.  A “true spaceship”, versus a spacecraft, would likely mass well over ten thousand tons minimum, carrying a couple thousand nuclear bombs, at least a thousand tons of water for cosmic ray shielding, using either a metal disc or a parachute of some kind as an engine. Water would be acquired from, and assembly and testing would be done on, or in the vicinity of, the Moon.
6.  On multi-year missions the true spaceship would spend most of the time split in half with equal or spaced masses spinning at the end of a several thousand foot tether system. The larger the disc (or “spinnaker” in a Medusa type) the more efficient, faster, and longer ranged, likely operating between Ceres and Neptune.
7.  Relocating the superpower nuclear arsenals into deep space to ratchet down the cold war launch-on-warning situation is perhaps the only enabler for HSF-BEO. Fleets of such “space boomers” would also protect Earth from impact threats and allow for guest scientists on voyages of exploration to the gas and ice giants.

“BTW, all, just for context, it appears that 2019 OK is by far the largest asteroid [to] pass this close to Earth in the last century!” reads one subsequent email from Planetary Defense Officer Lindley Johnson. NASA experts determined that a combination of factors ultimately caused the agency to miss it, including the position of the moon, bad weather and the slow-moving nature of the asteroid. (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/nasa-internal-emails-asteroid-ok-2019_n_5d8402bbe4b0957256b3f555)

Wiki: “The object’s size is estimated at 57 to 130 metres (187 to 426 ft) across-”

“If 2019 OK had been around 100 m (330 ft) in diameter an Earth impact could have released as much power as the 50 megatons generated by Tsar Bomba.[11] If 2019 OK had been around the middle of the size estimates it could have released the equivalent explosive energy of about 10 megatons of TNT similar to the 1908 Tunguska event that flattened 2,000 km2 (770 square miles) of forest land.[9] If 2019 OK had been on the smaller size it still could have released over 30 times the energy of the atomic blast by Little Boy at Hiroshima.[12]”

 

These city killer near misses happen all the time. It is the extraordinary one that is the problem. One of those big asteroids or comets is going to get us. Could be tomorrow and it could be even bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs. Really. It would be just a spike in that probability curve everyone mistakes as safety. In hindsight we would remark it was out of the ordinary but considering the timescale not really extraordinary. Except no one would be left to make the comment.

The human race would be gone…forever.

Any alien race observing us would not be surprised.

We were just not intelligent enough to survive.

I made some references to being a Queen fan in a previous post and mentioned the song “39.” On my birthday a few days ago I averaged the lifespans of my Mother and Father and figured out what year I would die if that average held true- and it was, coincidentally, 2039. Less than 20 years to go.

The most likely method of star travel is going to be the “slow boat” that takes several centuries to reach a fairly close star by travelling at well under ten percent of the speed of light. The crew would almost certainly be frozen and even though massively shielded from radiation would likely still have to be re-animated periodically. The reason for the wake-ups for several months each time would be so their bodies could repair damage done by unavoidable energetic particles. The slow boat would be accelerated by beam propulsion out of the solar system and use H-bombs to slow down upon reaching a destination. This would require an immense space solar power infrastructure and is not  likely to happen in the next 20 years.

A recent article about a new therapy that can reverse aging was interesting, except it is only good for 2 years. That bumps me up to 2041…maybe. Humans are great at imagining the best possible scenarios and making them reality. That is, they lie to themselves and then try and turn that lie into truth. I prophesy around 2040 freezing people without damage and thus allowing them to be revived decades later will be perfected- and I will be fading fast and among the first to go into cold storage.

Since nobody will allow their loved ones to simply die when there is hope for them to be cured of their condition or aging reversed- the terminally ill and the elderly will all be frozen. With 56 million people a year going into storage facilities those solutions will simply have to be found. So…at some point in the future I consider it quite possible I will be awakened from a frozen state and start aging backwards. I am familiar with the work of Hugo DeGaris and considering his worldview I might also expect to be gradually “enhanced” in that future new age. How the existence of Artilects (super intelligent artificial intellects) will affect humankind is unknown. We cannot even guess. I can, however, speculate that in some sense it will be as if I died because I will not be the same person I am now. So be it.

Perhaps humans will form binary personalities and then even larger composite minds. This joining of minds is not my idea and has been around since E.E. Doc Smith wrote his space operas in the 1930’s. When my wife is washing dishes I often rest my chin on her shoulder. I will then ask her, “would you let them transplant my head onto your body  to save my life? Then we would always be together. Wouldn’t that be great?” She does not think it would be so great. And that is my-hoped-for-imagined-future. Kind of.

A proposal to create an artificial black hole propelled starship using a parabolic reflector to reflect Hawking radiation was discussed in 2009 by Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland. This is the most likely “fast boat.” There is a possibility many slow boats will head out and then be intercepted a century or so later by these fast boats. It has always been a mystery to me why the entertainment industry cannot take these most likely scenarios and build stories around them instead of the garbage that passes for science fiction. It is depressing because it seems we are a basically stupid species which means my imagined best future is a throw of the dice…at best.

It is not just our bad science fiction not providing any expectations of success, it is actual threats to our species we simply ignore. Despite continuing evidence of the rock that ended the dinosaurs, we are not worried. Despite continuing evidence of past volcanic epics that caused mass extinctions, we are not worried. Despite continuing advances in genetic engineering that could create a doomsday plague, we are not worried. From heaven above, from hell below, and from test tubes in modest labs around the world, we turn away and ignore these most serious threats.

The problem, of course, is we are already on death row in this great open air prison called Earth. Why should we waste our time worrying? As long as every story ends with execution we are not likely to focus on the rest of the human race ceasing to exist- and will continue to watch bad science fiction.

 

My (now slightly edited) comment on https://phys.org/news/2019-09-europe-teaming-asteroid-deflection.html

“Nothing will work better than a nuclear device. Yet there are several entities who are pushing their “gravity tug” or other concepts and they have hijacked this train.”

However, the train has not left the station yet.

A human crewed Nuclear Pulse Propelled spaceship capable of interplanetary missions would necessarily carry a couple thousand “pulse units” (bombs). Those devices would be just as effective deflecting a rock as pushing a spaceship.

The Parker-Dyson-Spudis Continuum states only a kiloton range water shield can make Human Space Flight Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit practical (Parker). Only a Nuclear Pulse Propulsion system can push such a shield around the solar system (Dyson). The Moon is the only place to acquire the water for shielding (Spudis), assemble, test, and launch nuclear missions.

The NASA Space Launch System is the only human-rated Super Heavy Lift Vehicle with an escape tower that makes launching fissile pits direct to the Moon an acceptable risk. SLS launch cadence needs to expand to 6 per year.”

The proposed “Space Force” is not about space at all, it is about Earth orbit and mostly about Low Earth Orbit. This NewSpace marketing technique of calling LEO space has always been a trick, a ruse, and it needs to end. Exploring LEO is not space exploration.

The best demarcation between space and Earth orbit is the distance where an object at the equator in a circular orbit will remain stationary over the surface. This is Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) at 22,236 miles up. Just as the ability to see out to the horizon originally determined where international waters begin, the minimal energy required to leave GEO makes this distance the ideal “edge of space.”

By this measure cislunar space, between the Earth and the Moon, would be comparable to “coastal waters” and GEO and the cislunar sea would properly be the domain of the space version of the Coast Guard. Call it the “Space Guard.” This could include a fleet of Lunar Cyclers flying around the Earth-Moon and providing a superhighway in space. The space counterpart to the Air Force would be the “Space Force” and would fly Beyond Earth and Lunar Orbit (BELO). If a space counterpart to the Navy is required there are always the ocean moons of the gas and ice giants and their subsurface seas to drive submarines around in.

A Space Force could serve the very useful purpose of removing nuclear weapons from Earth, a fantastic and impossible dream for many. The over a trillion dollars that is going to be spent in the coming decade on the U.S. nuclear deterrent makes relocating that arsenal to deep space not so fantastic or impossible. For over half a century the superpowers have been on hair-trigger alert and poised to launch on warning. There have been close calls. By placing the nuclear arsenals in deep space months away from Earth on human-crewed spaceships, we no longer face those few minutes to decide whether or not to destroy civilization. The other superpowers will follow America.

There are arguments against space-based-deterrence of course, but the pros, in my view, far outweigh the cons. One of those pros is a dinosaur killing rock will not be ending civilization while fleets of spaceships are on patrol ready to deflect any impact threat with nuclear devices.