Website of Science Fiction Author Thomas L. James
Netflix’s Mars series “Away”, starring Hilary Swank, debuts next month. Check out the official trailer. It appears to focus on the relationship of a mother leaving behind her daughter for a 3-year mission.
What caught my eye was the Earth-Moon-Mars bracelet Swank’s character gives her daughter prior to departure. Not nearly as cool as Amber’s pendant in In the Shadow of Ares, but still an interesting parallel between the two stories.
Redlands: Crime and Consequence on the Martian Frontier is available for purchase on Amazon.
But why stop at one? Consider gifting copies to your housebound friends. They’ll thank you!
NAWA Technologies has announced that it will begin mass-producing carbon nanotube based ultracapacitors. Compared to lithium batteries, ultracapacitors are capable of near-instantaneous charging and discharging.
It was these characteristics that led us to select this technology, in our novel In The Shadow of Ares, to power various devices on a future Mars, ranging from mobile agents to the autonomous “diggers” (mining robots). More specifically, it was the near-instantaneous discharge of huge quantities of energy that made them particularly appealing.
Although the 2019 versions of ultracapacitors have shortcomings (low energy density and high leakage rates compared to lithium units), it is rewarding to see the technology we described a decade ago reach mass production.
So what say we buy one, bring it to full charge, and see what happens when we damage the charge regulator?
Someone is now marketing something we proposed in In the Shadow of Ares: robotic solar panel cleaners. I received information on these via an email brochure from Sentro Technologies USA (unfortunately information on theses robots is not available on their website). These devices are certainly something my employer, a significant developer and owner of renewable technologies, would consider for our larger solar arrays. Here are two images from the brochure:
The first runs on a rail, much like we envisioned when we had Amber engaged in her chores, cleaning dust off solar panels because the robot wasn’t functioning. I find the second autonomous, mobile unit more interesting. The engineering challenge would be to get it to move from array to array, especially where those arrays have tracking systems and vary in tilt and orientation relative to one another.
Alan Bean, Apollo 12 Lunar Module Pilot and 4th man to walk on the Moon, died today.
The topic of directed panspermia found its way into a recent issue of The Economist: Colonizing the Galaxy is Hard. Why Not Send Bacteria Instead?
The concept, apparently being discussed by “a number of scientists”, involves jump starting evolution on exoplanets by seeding them with terrestrial bacteria. With human interstellar travel likely centuries away, the proposal is to send tiny probes–containing microscopic passengers–in the near term. These could be propelled using solar sails and Earth based lasers, along the lines of what is proposed for use in NASA’s Starlight (also known as “DEEP-IN”) program.
The article presents valid objections to this idea, including the worry of contaminating worlds were life might have arisen independently.
However I see a more practical reason for opposing such efforts. Directed panspermia of this nature is being discussed because it is all we have the potential to do near term. But technological advances over the next two centuries are likely to expand our capabilities greatly, including the ability to send larger, more capable exploratory craft and perhaps even human crews. Sending smaller craft now, at best, provides a head start of a couple of centuries on an evolutionary process that is likely to take hundreds of millions or even billions of years to produce anything significant, assuming conditions are ideal. That hardly seems worth the effort or risk.
When it comes to seeding life in distant solar systems, the sensible thing to do is to wait until we can do it responsibly. Just because we can do it in the next few years, doesn’t mean we should.
Houston-based startup Orion Span is taking reservations for 12-day on orbit stays at their planned “luxury” hotel, Aurora Station. The $9.5 million cost includes astronaut training and launch, with the station scheduled for launch in 2021 and the first guests hosted in 2022.
2022 seems more than a bit optimistic to me given that neither Space X or Boeing expect to launch crewed missions until late 2018 at the earliest.
Still, I’d love to be proven wrong. And for those of us that don’t have $9.5 million or even $80k lying around, it seems to me that a good way to stoke up interest and funding would be to raffle off a trip for two.
I’m quite used to encountering conspiracy kooks nearly everywhere on the Internet–and occasionally in public places–but never this close to home. Apparently my neighborhood harbors not only a 9-11 Twoofer, but one willing to drop some change at the local printer and go door-to-door hanging these brochures.
And it’s not just your run of the mill “it was an inside job!” claim. It’s heavy on Dr. Judy Wood, a “former assistant professor of mechanical engineering”. She asks “where did the towers go?”, claiming that the debris piles were too small to account for the mass of the towers and that “directed free energy technology” must be behind the “missing” mass. That’s one I hadn’t heard before, and even more evidence-free than most other ridiculous claims out there.
I’m not going to get into it a critique of her “theories” here, and I’m not going to provide a link as you can find it yourself if you are so inclined. But as a civil engineer I see no need for non-existent weapon systems, thermite charges, or any other nonsense to explain how the towers collapsed. My limited perusal of her website revealed nothing but unsupported speculation, evidence taken out of context, and any number of other logical fallacies including special pleading. Oops, I said I wasn’t going to get into a critique. Old habits…
It’s interesting to note that on her website she claims “Sadly, this case had no support from the ‘Truth movement’…”, meaning, it appears, that her claims are too ridiculous for other Twoofers to accept. I had a hard time believing that until I came across efforts by the frauds at “Architects and Engineers for 9-11 Truth” to debunk her. Splitter!
Anyway, while it makes for a compelling study in psychology, the question I find more interesting is: what would it take to pull off a hoax like this and actually fool the experts? I’m quite certain that with millions of eyewitnesses, and the fact that it took place right here on Earth in one of our most densely populated cities, that it would be phenomenally difficult to fake (and by “fake” I mean to fool ACTUAL experts, not crackpots on YouTube). Like the fact that it would be MORE difficult to have faked the Apollo landings, than to actually have gone to the Moon in 1969.
Or should I say Happy Belated Birthday? Atlas Shrugged was published 60 years ago yesterday. Here John Stossel summarizes the history of this provocative novel and the controversy it whips up to this day.
Apparently the folks at JPL have been playing with the Mars Odyssey Orbiter’s THEMIS camera, pointing it toward Phobos.