MarsBlog - Part 37

Inventions That Make You Go “Huh?”

I’m not quite sure what to make of this as an invention.

I get what they’re after, I’m just not sure that there is really a need for such a thing, other than to perhaps replace seeing-eye dogs — but only partially, since these things would only navigate and not sense, say, the danger of oncoming traffic at an intersection.

Welcome to the Club

Looks like someone else has discovered the inanity of Bruce Gagnon.

Can I Choose Neither?

Popular Science recently held a design contest for a flag for Mars.

While I’ve never liked the Mars Society’s version (principally because of its fawning association to the vastly-overrated Mars Trilogy), I can’t say that either of the winning PopSci entrants were any better. The top winner looks like Saturn with a Newton’s Cradle hanging from it, and the second-place entrant suggests that the contest’s hypothetical terraforming was performed by Cameroon with help from Queer Eye for the Desert Planet.

None of the flags in the slideshow accompanying the article were particularly attractive or inspiring. But then again, I suppose appreciation for a flag is something which has to grow over time — the U.S. flag, if proposed today, would no doubt be poo-poohed as “too busy”.

The other issue I have with the Mars Society flag as a flag for Mars — and with efforts like those of PopSci — is that it’s wholly premature. After all, we haven’t even been there yet. There’s no telling whether there would end up being one or many flags for Mars once settlement gets underway, and if and when that happens the flag or flags will reflect the history of the effort and the people and entities carrying it out…things we cannot know in advance, any more than the English enthusiasts for colonization in the New World could have, in the mid-1500s, conceived the U.S. or Canadian flags of today.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with such efforts, so long as they are properly regarded as art projects.

Another New Anti-Tech Scare

Oh brother, here we go again: wikipedia entry, at least, there appears to be an actual phenomenon at work here. I’m willing to entertain the idea that bees might be disoriented by cell towers, but how does the theory explain this bit of data presented in the same article:

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive’s inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives. [emphasis added]

If it’s true that wildlife – presumably including bears and other mammals – won’t go near the dead hives, that suggests that something other than cell phone radiation interfering with bee navigation systems is at work. While the Koblenz-Landau study apparently managed to keep bees from returning to their hive by placing a mobile phone “nearby”, how often would such a situation actually occur? And how does the theory explain the occurrence of the same phenomenon (or one with strikingly similar characteristics) occurring prior to the advent of cell phones, possibly even as early as 1896?

As with assertions that one particularly hot summer or destructive hurricane season is “proof” of “man-made global warming” which will soon melt the ice caps, raise the seas, desertify the continents and kill off all life on Earth if we don’t abandon technological civilization, we ought to be careful not to succumb to the hysteria which will certainly be spawned by a single study prompted by a two year spike in a puzzling but recurring phenomenon — a phenomenon which has actually not yet been explained.

And we most certainly shouldn’t be spooked into giving up a useful technology without knowing whether it is harmful — and that’s the real point here. The anti-technology crowd failed to spook people out of using cell phones with the unproven assertions that they cause brain cancer, now they’ll use a single study purportedly suggesting that the signals cause the collapse of bee colonies. And if this doesn’t work, they’ll come up with something else — but if it does work, they’ll put a notch in their belts and move on to banning the next technology they despise.

ADDENDUM: Looks like Instapundit is all over this, including a rare quote from Steven den Beste. Great(er) minds (than mine) think alike!

A Bit Premature?

Someone already has a book out on Constellation.

It should come as no surprise that it’s only 96 pages long. I can’t imagine that there’s all that much information to present just yet.

And Then There’s This…

What super-high-tech suit would be complete without brain implants?

Spinoff Potential

I wonder how hard it would be to adapt some of the technology being developed for this for use with mechanical counter-pressure suits. Particularly the “smart cloth” and “exoskeleton” elements. The former could simplify donning and doffing of the suit while providing increased resistance to punctures. The latter would not only be useful for carrying heavy loads, but also in making the most of low-gravity locomotion — in addition to amplifying the wearer’s strength, a powered suit could conceivably counteract external loads acting on the body, such as from landing after a Superman-like leap. This could even be applied in conventional suits, to aid the wearer in bending the suit’s joints against the resistance from the internal pressure.

Hmm…That Looks Familiar

Haven’t I this somewhere before?

On the bright side, since the thing will be built by a noble communist utopia opposed to the racist, capitalist, imperialist space hegemony of Amerikkka AND it uses evil RTGs that will pollute the pristine surface of the Moon with radiation (snort), it should induce a delicious bout of cognitive whiplash in Bruce and his friends.

ADDENDUM: I no sooner post the text above than I come across Jeff Foust’s review of a book on “space war” by Bruce’s heroine, Helen Caldicott.

What is one to think now of China?s interest in ?prohibiting the deployment of weapons in outer space and the use of force against outer space objects?, in the words of a Chinese diplomat quoted in the book, now that China?not the United States?has destroyed a satellite in space, creating the dangerous orbital debris decried by anti-weaponization advocates? The book, unfortunately, offers no insight on this, since the authors focused entirely on the US as the villain in space weaponization debate. [emphasis added]

Hmm…that, too, seems familiar.

Hayek on Space

While traveling this past week, I was finally able to get into reading Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty, which has been sitting forlorn on my book pile for four years. Immediately, I discovered something of relevance to space tourism — an extended discussion on what are nowadays called “early adopters”, which answers well those who deride space tourism as a frivolous hobby of the rich:

[T]he new things will often become available to the greater part of the people only because for some time they have been the luxuries of the few…A large part of the expenditure of the rich, though not intended for that end, thus serves to defray the cost of the experimentation with the new things that, as a result, can later be made available to the poor…What today may seem extravagance or even waste, because it is enjoyed by the few and even undreamed of by the masses, is payment for the experimentation with a style of living that will eventually be available to many. The range of what will be tried and later developed, the fund of experience that will become available to all, is greatly extended by the unequal distrubution of present benefits; and the rate of advance will be greatly increased if the first steps are taken long before the majority can profit from them. Many of the improvements would indeed never become a possibility for all if they had not long before been available to some. If all had to wait for better things until they could be provided for all, that day would in many instances never come. Even the poorest today owe their relative material well-being to the results of past inequality.

Hard to believe that an economics treatise from 1960 could have such relevance to a topic like space tourism. What I’m more interested in in reading Constitution of Liberty, however, are the implications for space settlement and the extension of Western liberty and its attendant concepts into new realms. And early on, in a discussion on liberty’s value in addressing change, he has this to say:

The undesigned novelties that constantly emerge in the process of adaptation [to changing circumstances] will consist, first, of new arrangements or patterns in which the efforts of different individuals are coordinated and of new constellations in the use of resources, which will be in their nature as temporary as the particular conditions that have evoked them. There will be, second, modifications of tools and institutions adapted to the new circumstances. Some of these will also be merely temporary adaptations to the conditions of the moment, while others will be improvements that increase the versatility of the existing tools and usages and will therefore be retained. These latter will constitute a better adaptation not merely to the particular circumstances of time and place but to some permanent feature of our environment.

In other words, the process of adapting to new conditions brings about new ways and new institutions through a process of evolution, outcomes which (as he elaborates on elsewhere) would be unlikely to result from a process of deliberate, anticipatory planning.

This is why it is hard for me to take seriously conventions or treaties or other efforts which aim to establish detailed international “regimes” by which space resources may be used and ownership claimed. Establishing elaborate regimes in advance of settlement essentially precludes free experimentation with alternatives which may prove superior, and which through competition and selection would tailor themselves to the conditions actually experienced in the field. In practice, even the preordained regimes governing resources, property rights, and other aspects of space settlement would have to evolve eventually, but how much time and effort would be spent unneccessarily in the process before the needed reforms in ill-considered (but lovingly planned-out) institutions were finally brought about? All because a few idealists prefer to engineer a brave new world from scratch to the time-honored practice of extending existing institutions to the new frontier and letting them evolve and adapt as needed. Predictably, Hayek has something to say about that as well:

Those who believe that all useful institutions are deliberate contrivances and who cannot conceive of anything serving a human purpose that has not been consciously designed are almost of necessity enemies of freedom. For them, freedom means chaos.

Should be interesting to see what the remaining 340 pages of tortured but fascinating prose have to say.

Ringing the Bell

Looks like SpaceX finally got something off the ground…or rather, more than just a couple hundred feet off the ground this time: A night of high drama for SpaceX success.

But perhaps Elon didn’t get a good look at the video of the staging before appearing at the press Q&A:

‘Stage separation went very well,’ he added, dismissing what may have been observed on the video. ‘Both the stage separation and the fairing sep went flawlessly. Second stage ignition also went flawlessly.’

Umm…I don’t think I would judge that to be quite a ‘flawless’ staging. If that staging were ‘flawless’, we wouldn’t have bothered to do all the work we did on CEV to assure the SM could extract from the spacecraft adapter without the orbital maneuvering engine striking anything on the way out.

It is of course hard to know without being familiar with the design of SpaceX’s second stage engine, but it sure looks like there was a crack in the bell about halfway down, roughly in the area where the engine struck the interstage during staging. If it was a crack, it’s a lucky thing that it didn’t burn through (to be fair, it didn’t appear to be in any danger of doing so, appearing as a dark squiggle across the red-hot bell…it was the areas closer to the throat with their yellow- to white-hot blotches that appearerd likely to burn through at any moment).

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