Comments inspired by news items, and miscellaneous thoughts.
Bugs and Marvin in Haredevil Hare
Mars has been the backdrop for movies since Flash Gordon, and now someone is working to collect information on these gems in one place. Visit this nifty site. From Bugs Bunny to Mark Watney, our heroes have looked to Mars. Find some old favorites here that you may not have thought about for ages. Mars intrigues us and invades us!
Oh, I like this idea. Any colony in our solar system will face this: the only safe place is inside your habitat and what will you do there? Especially if you envision technology performing most of the tedious maintenance, people will have a lot of time on their hands. That can be very bad – idle hands are indeed the devil’s workshop.
In my scifi Mars series, my colonists become more and more unwilling to go outside, except for a few malcontents. By the final book, colonists spend their time on vocations that are not Great Art but little hobbies – like what I do myself here on Earth. Good enough for a life?
Last week, artist James Gurney posed a question on his blog. He presented two options and asked which you’d prefer:
Personally, I lean toward the life trapped in a library/art museum option, but still… it’s a tough decision. But then I started thinking more about this. Or perhaps over-thinking it. Why would I be trapped indoors with all this art? Why can’t I go outside? And then the answer occurred to me: Mars.
At some point in the future (perhaps not the near future, but at some point in the future, I’m sure) humanity will establish its first colony on Mars.As that colony grows, the colonists will develop…
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In honor of Americans who died in the pursuit of space exploration and discovery – it’s not all fun and games – thank you.
The World Magnetic Model supports navigation from ships and airlines to your cell phones. It’s gotten out of sync with our planet, thanks to the North Pole’s gentle drift turning into a gallop.
We know the magnetic poles move with respect to the Earth’s surface…
Yet in recent years, scientists noticed something unusual: Magnetic north’s routine plod has shifted into high gear, sending it galloping across the Northern Hemisphere—and no one can entirely explain why… Curiously, its polar opposite, magnetic south, has moved little during this time. NatGeo
The US government has finally issued an updated model, so we can all know where we are again.
Map from 1539 shows the North Pole as an “island of magnets”
The current movement isn’t the oddest thing the North Pole does. Magnetic north and south trade places every 200,000 to 300,000 years, so if the planet were on a schedule (and it’s not) I’d say we’re overdue.
That doesn’t mean doomsday is coming. The flip seems to be more of a polar meander. Migrating wildlife should have time to adjust. We may see a rise in cosmic radiation, but Earth’s magnetic field varies all the time and we’re still here, so that shouldn’t be too big a deal.
The magnetosphere is generated by Earth’s liquid core, and so far, we can’t dig deep enough to impact that. This is one planetary factor beyond human control. We’re just here for the ride.
Greet Anthropocene
Most successful animal
Ends competition
Kate Rauner
Like the Age of Fishes, the Age of Reptiles, the Age of Mammals… we’re in the Age of Humans.
“Various start dates for the Anthropocene have been proposed, ranging from the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution 12,000–15,000 years ago, to as recent as the Trinity test in 1945. As of February 2018, the ratification process continues and thus a date remains to be decided definitively, but the latter date has been more favoured than others.” Wikipedia
I ran across this freebie story: the tale of an eco-warrior.
Free for a limited time
Together with his fellow student activists, Ben traveled to London on Earth Day to take one last stand. To make a final plea for an environmental solution to save the planet. Time is up on combating climate change. Humanity’s choice is about to be made. And most are choosing to leave the fate of the world to a mysterious geoengineering experiment.
Goengineering is a fascinating and terrifying idea. Humanity’s been changing the Earth for eons, and especially since the Industrial Revolution, without any plan. Would we do better if we had a plan? What about the law of unintended consequences? And what if we addressed one aspect of Climate Change, like land surface temperatures, but ignored others, like ocean acidification? There are a lot of apocalyptic dystopian stories to be spun from here, and I don’t want to live in one of them.
Here’s an article Anna Kucirkova suggested to me on geoengineering. I can’t vouch for the story or the article, but this is a topic that deserves discussion. I don’t expect to find a silver bullet. No solution that would fit inside a one-hour TV episode (not even of Star Trek TOS.)
I don’t see anything that allows humanity to go merrily on its way with fossil fuels, land and animal use, and economic inequality as usual. What do you think of our precarious future?
Science Olympiad at Western New Mexico University – middle and high school kids in a science fair competition – teams impound their “builds” this morning- spouse and I are volunteer event supervisors.
