A Colony on Mars

I just saw an article on Wired stating that billionaire Elon Musk wants to build a colony on Mars with 80,000 colonists.  Interesting in the recent developments in rocket technology which would bring down costs of launching people into space.  A mention of risk aversion in the aerospace industry makes it clear that the attitude to space flight needs to change from current timid approach to more pioneering attitude.  This is space flight!  There are risks involved.  Paradoxically, as more risk is taken at the beginning, it will iron out kinks and lessen risk in the long run, a la the airplane industry. 

Today Space Jump, Can Space Marines be Far Behind?

Earlier yesterday, Felix Baumgartner became the first skydiver to jump from space. He also broke the sound barrier while he was at it. This is good news for future Space Marine hopefuls.

Space Opera for Real

In recent news, singer Sarah Brightman will be visiting the International Space Station.  I would expect they would take the chance to test effects of zero gravity on singing.     

Godspeed, LTJG Armstrong, Godspeed!

The recent passing of Neil Armstrong has ended an era in the annals of our space-faring race.  He will always be remembered throughout history as the first human to set foot on another celestial body.  Thanks to him for all of his contributions.  Godspeed and God bless!

When aliens attack

The other day I caught a National Geographic channel program entitled "When Aliens Attack".  Basically it speculates what strategies humanity would utilize to fend off an invasion of Earth. 
Basic premise is that the aliens would be nomadic and would want to harvest the Earth for resources such as fuel and water.  But I was thinking that if aliens would travel across the galaxy to extract resources I would think they would be sending advance scout probes first to find out which planets have the resources they want.  They could also scout beforehand our vulnerabilities.  I just read a novel One Second After which is an account of what would happen after a high altitude nuclear EMP happens.  SCARY stuff!  As our society is so dependent on electrical and electronic machines, it would have devastating effects.  In the novel, it would basically mean a 80 to 90% die-off in the developed economies.  So coming back to alien invasion, if they had figured out that is our vulnerability, I would also think they would have a year or two to wait for the after effects of such an attack.  I would also suppose a space faring race would easily have nuclear weapons technology at their disposal.  That is of course if their intention is to take our resources and not subjugate or enslave humanity (or use humanity as food).  The latter would require another strategy altogether.

Toilet Challenge as ISRU

In the news lately, Bill Gates has issued forth a challenge (actually a year or two ago but for some reason in the news) to create the next paradigm in hygiene technology.   The challenge reminds me of the NASA efforts in what is called In Situ Resource Utilization or ISRU.   The basic idea is that when going to other planets, you can't take all the stuff you need, but you would need to make whatever you need right there on the planet.  Thus even on other planets such technology as Toilet 2.0 would certainly be required (what no sewers!?).   

Matrix Alternate Ending?

I just recently read about one of the directors (Larry Wachowski) of the Matrix trilogy just underwent a sex-change operation.  This post isn't about that, I really don't care what he now she does with his now her life.

It just jogged my memory about an alternate ending for the trilogy that I had thought up awhile back.  The original seemed to leave a lot of open questions.  One ending that would have been a mind-frack (to put it more politely) is that Neo finds out at the end that the so-called 'real-world' in which the freed humans inhabit is just another layer of the Matrix, a firewall program if you will whose purpose is to give humans the illusion of choice and free-will.  A step further would have revealed that the real, real world in which the Matrix is set is a generational seeder ship traveling through space seeding worlds with human and earth flora/fauna ostensibly to create backup homeworlds. Such a theme would reveal ultimately that it is not machines that enslave humans but man enslaves man, a story as old as history. But another layer to of nuance  to such an overarching theme would be 'man enslaves man for his own good' i.e. presumably to save human civilization from destruction on Earth by sending out a giant seeder ship to seed the stars. This opens up all sorts of ethical and philosophical questions.  Such a theme would also add a layer to the Messianic/Hero's journey (Neo as the One who would save humanity from slavery) and the 'what is reality?' and 'what is free-will?' philosophical strains. Using the messianic theme as an example, it could be seen through the light of the story of Noah's ark.  The ark is a vessel built to save a remnant of humanity from destruction (from the flood).  As such, the generation ship can also be seen as an ark, it also is sort of a messiah to save humanity from destruction adding to the layers of a messianic theme.  But there is also a tension set up between free-will and slavery vs. salvation and destruction vs. reality and deception.  Basically, this part of humanity would be de facto prisoners on this seeder ship while at the same time ensuring salvation of human civilization.  In my alternate ending, Neo and the audience would find out the truth which would provide the much needed mind-frack harkening back to the first Matrix when one finds out he is in a vat.  But meanwhile the ending would proceed with the Architect agreeing with the Oracle that humans would be given a choice to leave the Matrix.  Of course, this is a false choice since the 'real-world' as the residents of Zion nor the machines know that it is just a firewall program designed to keep everyone in. 

Network Disruption Strategy

The other week I was watching the movie Independence Day which was on I would suppose because it was Fourth of July.  I was thinking about the strategy that the aliens used in order to take over the Earth.  From the alien perspective, they would not know all the details of human civilization and details of complex inter-dependencies in human society, but I'm sure they would at least be aware of network effects and know that large concentrations of human society i.e cities would appear to be "mega-nodes" as far as human-to-human connections are concerned.  Thus, not knowing any of the details of human civilization, it could be surmised that the simplest strategy would be to "degrade" their target's network as fast as possible by destroying the mega-nodes first.  Thus in the movie, they destroyed the 30 or so largest cities in the world at the same time and then systematically destroyed the smaller cities.  It would pretty much be a 'decapitation strike' against the humans which would severely degrade Earth's ability to fight back effectively.  Of course, in the movie, the humans fight back and win as Hollywood generally likes a happy ending, at least for mass-appeal faire.  In a more reality-based circumstance, the situation would be more dire and less hopeful.
With the decimation of society comes the loss of many of the expert 'nodes' and logistic chains to maintain it, thus any destruction of the population and infrastructure would set the human civilization back a few centuries, i.e back to ~ 1800 when most workers were agricultural and the industrial revolution was just starting to get underway.  Since (hopefully) there would still be remnants and pockets of technical expertise left, I believe the society would bounce back faster than the original building out of the 1800s but more like rebuilding of Europe and Japan after world war 2 except not as fast as that since the loss would be be much greater than even those conflicts produced.

Technological Progress vs. Interstellar Colonies, part 1

Assuming (a big assumption) continuous and uninterrupted exponential technological progress on Earth, it would seem to set up some interesting implications for interstellar colonies and each's respective technological progression.  The farther away the colony in light-years, the farther away from the human technological "center of mass" the colony would lie.  It would take many generations for such a colony to "catch up" if ever since the population of a colony would necessarily not be very large at first.  In theory, the number of technical people would certainly be disproportionate to the ratio of workers on Earth, but still the technological progress would be slower at first which could make all the difference.  As an example, if humans would establish a colony X around 30 light-years away, the colony would have to 'wait' for the signal from Earth of all the technological developments from Earth.  Let's just assume there would be a powerful laser signal that would be sending news and information from Earth to colony X and vice versa at the light-speed.  Thus Earth would always be 30 years ahead on the technological growth curve, of course assuming no interruptions like an end-of-days asteroid strike.  And such a growth is exponential, thus in real terms, the differences would be more stark over time.  Think of the differences of tech development in the year 1940, 1970, and 2000.  The amount of progress between 1970 and 2000 was much more than between 1940 and 1970. 
In the next post, I will further explore the implications of this progress differential across interstellar distances.

Prometheus Unbound

I got to see the movie Prometheus the other day.  I thought it was pretty good. I won't go into the plot too much which you can read about at here here.

     

One theme that was subtle but could still be picked up is the cycle of life in which the young replace their parents in the scheme of things, necessitating that the parents exit stage left.  A sub-plot is the revelation that Weyland, the founder of Weyland Industries (who is trying to extend his life with the help of the Engineers) is in fact Vickers father.  In a dialog between the two, Vickers states that "every king has his reign but that all reigns come to an end."  In short, she wants him to accept that his time as 'king' has come to an end and way should be made for the new king or queen for that matter.

    

Thus we come to the grand scheme of things, a reason suggested thematically (but subtlety) of why the Engineers wanted to send bio-weapons to Earth was to destroy the human race before it would become a threat (i.e. out with the old in with the new).  From the carbon dating, the Engineers at their outpost were killed around 2000 years prior suggesting they would have destroyed Earth 2 millennia if they hadn’t had a “bad day”.  So from a sub-luminal relativistic frame-of-mind, if the Engineers had visited Earth to check up on us about the year 60BC, they would have found the Roman Republic having taken over most of the Mediterranean area.   The Library of Alexandria which was the largest collection of learning still hadn’t been destroyed in a fire.  China in the East was unified and expanding in territory in the Han dynasty.  They could have well concluded that Earthlings would become a threat to their civilization in short-order (relativistically speaking).  Assuming they couldn’t communicate or travel super-luminally, they may have thought a seemingly ‘inferior’ civilization could be on their doorstep within a millineum commencing orbital bombardment given technology exponential improvement.  Notwithstanding the Dark Ages, best to nip these little whipper-snappers in the bud while they are still Earth-bound.  If for instance, these travelers lived in a star-system 100 light-years away, a 2-way trip would take at least 200-years if they are traveling at the speed of light.  So let's say on average they could get up to half the speed of light, then the 2-way trip would take 400 years.  But since they can send a signal at light-speed, the scout party would have sent a signal back so maybe it would take 300 years (100-years for the back signal and 200-years for an expeditionary ship to come with the bio-weapons back to Earth) to get a weapon on-line to wipe out Earth.  Thus such advanced planning would not seem to be so outlandish from the Engineers perspective.  

So coming back to the cycle-of-life thing, the archeologist on-board theorized that the Engineers made the humans or seeded them on Earth many thousands of years in the distant past as it is revealed that the Engineers and humans have the same DNA.  Thus the Engineers may have feared some sort of Oedipal impulse for their Earthling children to kill them and take their place as the 'kings' in their respective small part of the universe.