Space

Space Shuttle Launch

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I was maybe 150 miles away. Unfortunately, my camera won’t do longer than a 30-second exposure without a remote shutter release that I didn’t have. So what you see here is a 30-second arc of the flight, starting at the lower left a few seconds after the Shuttle, which appeared to the eye as a small, glowing red-orange ball, became visible. The bright trail continued, at a shallow angle to the horizon, for about thirty more seconds and then dimmed considerably, perhaps when the boosters burned out. It was probably visible for about 90 seconds in total. I’m sure it’s much more impressive close-up, but it was a bit of a thrill just to see it over the lights of the city.

Space Shuttle Over Miami

The view from downtown Miami.

(Click the photo to display a larger version in a new window.)

Elevator Music to the Stars

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I’m a kinda-sorta advocate of space exploration because I realize that the technology goes far beyond the intended purpose. Figure out a way to send a robot probe to a distant planet and you also have come up with hundreds of new applications that can be used right here on the Big Blue Marble. It is in this that people dedicated to space travel and myself agree.

True blue space enthusiasts lose me when they try to make the case for a permanent human presence in space. It would cost far too much with the technology we have available, and they have never been able to come up with any benefit to justify the effort that makes any sense to me. A lot of them insist that it is something we have to do, though.

One of our fellow Boyz, Steven den Beste of Chizumatic fame, gave me some insight into their motivation.

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Stephenson — Anathem (A Review)

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Stephenson, Neal, Anathem, William Morrow, 2008, 937 pp.

Author Neal Stephenson has forged a substantial body of fiction in the last 15 years by combining elaborate narratives and witty, humourous dialogue with a more serious consideration of scientific and philosophical issues. Having covered nanotechnology, cryptography, and the early stirrings of Newtonian science in his more recent books, Stephenson turns now to cosmology and the nature of human consciousness in Anathem. The biggest of big pictures.

Set thousands of years in the future, Anathem is an adventure story that fits perfectly into the science fiction genre. The conflict between science and culture has led to intermittent but repeated civil conflicts, resolved finally by isolating the scientific and mathematic minds into the equivalent of walled medieval cloisters (maths). Outside the walls society waxes and wanes, prospers and collapses, while inside the walls the life of the mind continues, year after year. Comparisons with the famous 50s science fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz are inevitable.

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Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE, FBIS (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008)

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Not a Chicago Boy exactly, but a towering presence in my inner life for many years. The only thing remotely resembling a writing voice I’ve ever had is a pale imitation of him. Requiescat In Pace.

Updates:

  • added “FRSBIS” (thanks, Jim)
  • from Wired, Video: Arthur C. Clarke’s Last Message to Earth
  • from SomethingAwful forum goon “SirRobin”:

    • Tonight, when the sun has gone down, go outside to a place where you can see the stars. Look up. Watch for a point of light that moves fast enough that its motion is obvious … then take the phone out of your pocket and call someone on the other side of the planet.

  • heh

Terrestrial chemistry is an anomaly in the Solar System

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We take too much for granted when we are looking at terrestrial materials such as rocks and then assume that they are representative for those on other bodies within our solar system in general:

Conditions on Earth scarcely resemble those elsewhere in our own solar system. We live on a wet and tepid exception to the chemical and physical norms of the planets that contain most of the solar sysytems mass. Being made largely of water like the rest of the life on Earth, we think nothing of life’s inorganic substrate being the product of wet chemistry…
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Earthly quartz and feldspars, micas and clays, all contain water and have been re-arranged by it. Likewise, compounds that are decomposed by water and elements that react vigorously with it are largely alien to the surface of the Earth. Not only have we never seen them in the state of nature, but they scarcely figure in our imagined view of the chemistry that gave rise to life…

To plug the gaps in our knowledge and to overcome our (understandable) failure of imagination, we would have to send out a fleet of robotic spacecraft to collect samples from the various rocky bodies in the solar system. A systematic analysis of those samples would offer some important insights in how materials develop and self-organize in and on rocky planets and moons that are solid like the Earth but unlike it are non-aqueous. These results would in turn provide some clues on how emergent and autocatalytic processes can lead from inorganic to organic chemistry and maybe even to life, under conditions that are radically different from those on Earth.