A fascinating article on the pros and cons of air-breathing spacecraft vs. rockets for orbital launch at Short Sharp Science:
Trying to build a spaceship by making airplanes fly faster and higher is like trying to build an airplane by making locomotives faster and lighter – with a lot of effort, perhaps you could get something that more or less works, but it really isn’t the right way to proceed. The problems are fundamentally different, and so are the best solutions.
US company Second Sight have developed a bionic eye system that allows a man who has been blind for 30 years to see flashes of light:
He says he can now follow white lines on the road, and even sort socks, using the bionic eye, known as Argus II. It uses a camera and video processor mounted on sunglasses to send captured images wirelessly to a tiny receiver on the outside of the eye.
The Argus II is designed to help sufferers of retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye condition.
[article form the BBC][image from Mazintosh – Fotogranada on flickr]
The news is full of the escalating war between Mexican drug traffickers and that country’s government, and it’s not a pretty picture – especially not for Mexico’s more northerly states and cities.
But what if the problems could spill over? Apparently they already have – there are claims that Canadian gang violence is connected to the Mexican situation, as is often the way with complex illicit supply chains.
John Robb hypothesises that it wouldn’t take much to spark an open-source insurgency in the region – one that could turn the northern states of Mexico and the southern states of the US into a no-go zone for the military forces of either country.
By itself, it’s doubtful that a narco/smuggling open source insurgency could accomplish this goal, although it would make a very good run at it (particularly given the declining budgets of their opponents). However, the prospects for successful achievement of the plausible promise would radically improve if the coming global depression drives
- the creation of new violent groups — new primary loyalties formed from fear, revenge, and necessity — and
- the economic deprivation necessary for a vibrant bazaar of violence — this is a marketplace that forms when, due to a need to purchase food and shelter, there is an endless pool of people willing to kill for a couple hundred bucks.
It’s not really that implausible an idea, and an illustration of the way that nation-state borders are being broken down by modern technology, economics and realpolitik.
When a nation can’t control an insurgency at this sort of scale, what will that do for its credibilty among its more stable neighbours?
… but you probably didn’t even notice it. Earlier this week, we apparently came within a cosmological gnat’s whisker of colliding with an asteroid of similar size to the one that caused the Tunguska astrobleme:
The asteroid, dubbed 2008 DD45, whizzed just 72,000 kilometres above the Earth’s surface. That is less than a fifth of the distance to the Moon and just twice the distance to geosynchronous satellites.
Yikes. It was first reported on Saturday; that’s all the warning we might have had. And had it been a bit bigger, it could have caused a planetary extinction event that would make the climate crisis look like a tea-party. Chalk another one up to human luck, eh?
One of the better known responses to the Fermi Paradox is the Rare Earth hypothesis – the supposition that our planet is rare or unique in its ability to harbour life, and that hence we are unlikely to encounter life-forms elsewhere beyond our own biosphere. [image by Aaron Escobar]
Well, George Dvorsky isn’t having any of it.
I’ve always thought, however, that given cosmologically large numbers that this sort of thinking is symptomatic of our small minds and limited imaginations. It’s easy for us to throw up our hands and sheepishly declare that we’re somehow special. Such a conclusion, however, needs to be qualified against the data involved, and by the mounting evidence in support of the notion that ours appears to be a life-friendly universe.
Dvorsky goes on to attack the assumptions of Rare Earthers methodically.
It’s a myth, for example, that it took life a long time to get going on Earth. In reality it was quite the oppoite. Our planet formed over 4.6 billion years ago and rocks began to appear many millions of years later. Life emerged relatively quickly thereafter some 600 million years after the formation of rocks. It’s almost as if life couldn’t wait to get going once the conditions were right.
This isn’t to say that Dvorsky thinks that we’re being visited by little green men on a regular basis, though; he has a more worrying idea about why we’ve not heard from our neighbours yet.
My feeling is that the Rare Earth hypothesis is a passing scientific fad. There’s simply too much evidence growing against it.
In fact, the only thing going for it is the Fermi Paradox. It’s comforting to think that the Great Silence can be answered by the claim that we’re exceptionally special. Rare Earth steers us away from other, more disturbing solutions –namely the Great Filter hypothesis.
Of course, only evidence of alien civilisation will ever answer Fermi’s famous question; it’s always struck me as a kind of science fictional restatement of the argument for the existence of god. Maybe that’s why it’s such a fascinating subject for debate? A bit of teleology never fails to get people thinking…