"She Turned Me Into a Newt! ... (I got better)"

I must ask the indulgence of this blog's international readership - nearly half of you - for dealing with something as parochial and terrestrial as the US presidential election.

Newt Gingrich is unique among prominent political figures, 'Murrican or otherwise, in that you could imagine him commenting at Rocketpunk Manifesto. Megalomania is an occupational hazard of politicians, but Newt is the only one I can think of whose delusions of grandeur (grandiosity?) were informed by the Foundation Trilogy, in particular Hari Seldon.

On the other hand, if I were a true-believing 'Murrican conservative, this would give me pause. The Seldon Plan uses both religion and free-market capitalism as mere tools to advance a (cosmopolitan and statist!) ulterior agenda: laying groundwork for the Second Galactic Empire. Those who cherish either religion or capitalism for its own sake should be on notice. (Apparently many already are; Newt is taking a ferocious battering from many quarters of the right.)


In any case, my specific pretext for talking about Newt here is his promise that, if he were elected, the US would have a permanent Moon base by 2020. At some unspecified later date, suggested Newt, the Moon could petition for statehood.

One liberal blogger had trouble deciding whether Newt was channeling his inner geek or just making an old fashioned pander. (He made the speech on Florida's Space Coast, hard-hit by the Shuttle retirement.) These are not mutually exclusive; it could be both!

Discover magazine called the lunar base impossible. In the technical sense it surely is possible - just enormously expensive. Which makes it politically impossible, in the current fiscal climate, especially in the absence of any credible plan to build public support for the plan.


The likelihood that Newt will be called on to make good on this promise is slim to none. The GOP nominee will almost certainly be Generic Republican, AKA Mitt Romney. (And I don't think it is pure wishful thinking on my part to suspect that President Obama will make short work of him in the fall.)

But Newt's lunar follies are not without consequences. The last prominent Republican to make reckless promises about the Moon was George Bush ('the Younger'). The circumstances were different. There is no evidence that Bush was ever a space geek. His proposal to return to the Moon was presumably thrown together by advisors who themselves were not space-minded, but merely looking for a Vision Thing [TM].

The results of this careless promise have been fairly dire. Bush got one speech out of it, then paid it no further visible attention. The public barely noticed, and soon forgot about the whole thing. No heed was given to the program's out-year costs, and the US was locked for several years into a gold-plated architecture that made billions for aerospace firms but ended up getting mostly canceled.

The upshot has been to leave the US with no operational human launch capability, and the fiasco significantly discredit the whole idea of human spaceflight. Newt Gingrich's legacy is to have further discredited it, at least modestly.


In longer historical perspective, yes, an argument can be made that a Democratic president, JFK, also overpromised in a way that set back the long term prospects of human spaceflight. I will argue that the post-Apollo stagnation is exaggerated, simply because Apollo was so spectacular, and also must be seen in the context of post-60s backlash and the great tragedy of Lyndon Johnson.

Also, of course, Apollo actually did go to the Moon, which should count for something in this discussion.

By sheer coincidence (or deep synchronicity), two readers brought to my attention a much more thoughtful space discussion by Gregory Benford. He is a far better writer and thinker than Newt Gingrich, but something about space makes him careless too. Mostly he rags on NASA, and it takes him less than 100 words to get from the fatal Shuttle losses to accusing the agency of being "safety obsessed."

Anyone who isn't "safety obsessed" really has no business going into space - and chances are strong that they'll never get there.

In fact, as I have pointed out before on this blog, we have made crucial strides in human spaceflight, and safety is at the heart of them. The ISS has operated for more than a decade without any mishap that required aborting its mission or emergency rescue from Earth. That is the single most important preparatory benchmark for human interplanetary spaceflight.

I'll also note - again, not for the first time - that NASA's robotic deep space exploration program has been a spectacular success, in spite of some embarrassments (feet ... meters ... oops!) along the way.

Yes, I wish we had scheduled commercial flights to the Moon. But anyone who ever said that space was easy was either delusional or selling snake oil. Or both.




An earlier discussion of political ideology and space travel.


Via Wikipedia, the image shows the SM-62 Snark (really!), a 50s vintage cruise missile.

Meanwhile, Back On Earth ...

Regular readers will know that if the Plausible Midfuture unfolds even remotely as I have speculated here, the vast majority of the human race will still be living on Earth after the next few centuries. Any other outcome requires either a truly staggering increase in the space population or a truly horrific reduction in Earth's population, or both.

Also bear in mind that most humans today 'still' live in the Old World.

So what happens on Earth over the next few hundred years will be overwhelmingly important to most people. Even if the space population turns out to be surprisingly large, what happens there will still be massively shaped by developments on Earth.

This is a topic that I have only sporadically addressed here, which means that it has not yet been beaten half to death. And, happily - just as I was futzing around and getting increasingly antsy about needing to post something here - Winch of Atomic Rockets sent me a link to this MetaFilter page, which in turn led me to a two-part piece on the near to midfuture by Charlie Stross.

(No more links in the body of this post, I promise!)

I come neither to praise Stross nor to bury him. Follow the links or ignore them. Like him I am generally conservative. On the whole I think we are in something of a decelerando, at least compared to the era around 1870-1930, when the Western world went pretty much from post-medieval to proto-contemporary.


I do make, as Stross does, the general presumption that post-industrial civilization is viable enough to last at least through the medium term. Obviously this is not guaranteed to be the case. Post-apocalyptic futures are a whole different matter. On the flip side, post-Singularity futures are also a whole different matter. I am fairly skeptical of either class of outcome, and will ignore them both. (But commenters are not under obligation to do so.)

So we are dealing here with intermediate cases. The future, then, is broadly recognizable to us - even, in many details, rather familiar. Our neighborhood was built some 80 years ago, and mostly still dates to that era. Newer buildings are identifiable by period, coming full circle to the post-modernist retro style.

Within the next century or so most of the old buildings will probably be worn out and replaced, by buildings that probably won't look like the zeerust future. They may get solar roofs sooner than that, barely noticeable from street level.

What things look like at street level may not be the most critical or awesome element of the future, but it is what would give us that all-important first impression. (Compare to the visual appearance of spacecraft.)

In the past month or so an interesting discussion has shown up in some corners of the blogosphere about whether the traditional fashion cycle has broken down, eliminating one of our standard markers of the passage of time. (No links - practice your Google fu!)

The argument is that while the worlds of 1932, 1952, and 1972 had obvious looks that distinguish them from each other as well as from the present, the world of 1992 looked pretty much like it does today, other than the absence of smartphones. Even pop-culture excess has hardly changed - swap in Madonna for Lady Gaga and you're good to go.

My subjective impression is this is broadly true. Hemlines no longer rise and fall consistently; post-post-modernist architecture steals freely from all past epochs as well as from itself; generic no-era cars park freely alongside evocative ones like the Cooper Mini.

Project this into the future, and 2062 and 2112 - even 2212 - might be hard to tell apart, and not that easy even to tell from the present. No monorails, no aircars.

The world of classical antiquity was rather like that (or at least my impression of classical antiquity is like that). Costume, temple design, and the like changed at only a glacial pace. Classical civilization had style, which is timeless, but not fashion.


Having said that, even if we are into a decelerando there will be a great deal of technological progress, if only working out the implications of established technologies. We see a lot of that in the cybertech industry today. We do not have HAL 9000 or anything remotely close, and so far as I can tell, contemporary programming languages are no profound advance over plain vanilla Kernighan & Richie C.

What we do have is enormous raw computing horsepower, and the large-scale computerized mediation of communication between people, of which this blog is a minor example.

The technology that might most exemplify the sort of tech progress that people at midcentury did not expect is the shipping container. It is hard to imagine anything less futuristic - just a big steel box. But it revolutionized cargo transportation, and played a substantial role in the current era of economic globalization.

Because I do not want to keep you my loyal readers waiting even longer than I already have, I will resist the impulse to speculate at length about all the usual things - from medical miracles (or lack of) to the consequences of global climate change.

On the latter, suffice to say that some places will become more or less uninhabitable; some places now subarctic may become gardens; lots of places will become more hot and humid, at times miserably so. Some places will see surprising climate changes, even becoming colder as patterns shift. If world agriculture is severely disrupted, things could get out of hand, but I said I wasn't dealing with post-apocalyptic scenarios, and I won't.

But I will toss in a speculation inspired by recent political issues. An emergent global economic elite could change power politics from horizontal to vertical alignments. Put simply, an elite that socializes and does business together, and not infrequently intermarries, could develop global solidarity. (Or not, per Queen Victoria's grandchildren.) But if they do, the lines of conflict could be within territories and societies rather than between them.

Discuss.




These two container ships entered San Francisco Bay side by side - first time I'd seen that.

A Place to Call Home

Extrasolar 'Earths' are still in the news, for a fairly loose definition of 'Earth'. Thanks to the Kepler mission the news stream of 'Earths' is likely to continue. Upwards of 200 candidates have been identified, most of which will probably not turn out to be false positives.

Surely some of the not-false-positives will orbit within their parent stars' habitable zones, calling for more detailed investigation. We will then search for signs of atmospheric water vapor, and especially oxygen - a substance so unstable and corrosive that its presence in significant quantities probably indicates life, and complex life at that.


Meanwhile, last post's comment thread drifted to a familiar topic in these parts: permanent, large scale human habitation in space. The 'large scale' part, especially, tends to pushes this subject beyond the Plausible Midfuture, which will have its work cut out producing a 'substantial' human population in space.

(Today's persistent space population is six. If it increases by an average 2 percent per year there are a decidedly modest 250 people in space circa 2200; at 3 percent per year some 1500. At 4 percent per year the space population is close to 10,000 people by 2200. Not so shabby, really. But bear in mind that all such compound interest calculations eventually bump up against something.)

Set aside the question of why - other than sheer coolness - we would colonize space at all. Also set aside, for now, those niggly questions about affording it.


An important, under-discussed aspect of space habitats is whether most humans can readily adapt to living in a can - and, if so, how big a can it takes. This issue was first pointed out to me in an email exchange with Matt Picio, a longtime regular at SFConsim-l. It came up again in the last discussion thread.

Putting it a more immediate way, how long can we be comfortable with never going outdoors? And what qualifies psychologically as being outdoors? We already know something about this without having to go into space, as the phrase 'cabin fever' suggests. Experience with nuclear submarines provides a baseline; so does over-winter habitation in Antarctica. But these habitats are on the same order of size as ordinary ships and buildings.

Space habs, intended for long-term occupation, are generally imagined to be at least an order of magnitude larger in sheer size, and an order of magnitude less cramped for their occupants. We do not have any examples on this scale to go by.

In popular imagination there are supposed to be Manhattanites who have no interest in riding the subway to the outer boroughs, let alone visiting the Big Sky Country. (They may or may not exist in any significant numbers.) But Manhattan is not an enclosed can - even its canyon streets are open to the sky. If Manhattan were domed over, would Central Park still feel like a park, or merely an indoor garden?

The question may not be purely a matter of (habitable!) physical space. Parallax depth from our binocular vision becomes 'infinity' at a few hundred meters; other cues (perspective; haze or lack of) can extend this to kilometers. My subjective impression is that mountain cabins on valleys less than a km or two wide feel confined.

Other factors both physiological and psychological could come into play. How rich an ecosystem is required for a healthy variety of smells and sounds?

Does it matter whether we are talking about an O'Neill-esque spacehab or a domed hab on a planetary surface? Does it count as 'going outside' if you have to stay in a vehicle or put on a spacesuit? I have also noticed, during long train rides, that in spite of the spectacular view from the dome car the impulse to step out of the train during station stops becomes very strong.


Presumably these concerns would not arise on a habitable planet, whether naturally so or terraformed. (But can we be completely sure of this?) And they may not matter for gigastructures approaching planetary dimensions, with rich ecosystems to match, and means other than domes or bulkheads to hold in the air.

But the overall point is that long-term human habitability may involve constraints going well beyond those that apply to spaceships that reach their destinations in a few months.

Discuss.




This image of the recent lunar eclipse above the Rocky Mountains comes, as so often, from Astronomy Picture of the Day. And a link to Atomic Rockets, just on general principles.

A Supersized 'Earth'

For your entertainment and edification, a short note on Kepler-22b, the exoplanet that has caused a flurry of 'habitable planet' stories in the mass media.

Is it actually habitable? The short and accurate answer is that we don't know. All we really know directly about Kepler-22b are its orbital period and size. But the first of these - not quite 290 days - yields an average orbital distance (semi-major axis) of 0.849 AU. In the Solar System that would fall close to midway between Venus and Earth.

The G5 parent star, however, is a shade smaller, cooler, and dimmer than Sol. Its estimated luminosity is 0.79 solar, meaning that the planet, at its average distance, receives just about 10 percent more light - and therefore heat - than Earth does. The planet must shed that heat by radiation, and a quick-and-dirty temperature estimate, based on the 4th power law of radiation to temperature, makes it 2.3 percent warmer than Earth - about six or seven degrees C.

In fact, the paper announcing the discovery comes up with an equilibrium temperature of 262 K for Kepler-22b, as compared to 255 K for Earth.

Radiative equilibrium is only a starting point for planetary conditions. How much heat a planet actually absorbs depends on how much light is reflected, or its albedo (0.29 for Earth). And its radiative temperature, in the IR, is measured at the top of any greenhouse layer in the atmosphere. The radiative equilibrium temperature is only a starting point.

But - assuming similar albedo and greenhouse heating to Earth - the surface temperature would also be a few degrees warmer than Earth. Which is easily inside the habitable range.

Pause here to note that most of what makes global warming problematic for our civilization is abrupt change in climate, not a somewhat warmer climate per se. An Earthlike planet with stifling tropics but mild subarctic zones would still be eminently habitable for humans.


Now for the caveats. For one, in spite of the cool illustration above (via Sky & Telescope) we do not know Kepler-22b's orbital eccentricity. Most extrasolar planets, unless so close in that their orbits have been tidally circularized, have notably more eccentric orbits than Earth does; this one could be searing hot at periastron, freezing cold at apoastron.

And we do know Kepler-22's size, 2.38 Earth radii, so it cannot really be very Earthlike at all. The radius corresponds to a volume 13.5 times Earth's. If it is primarily rocky its mass is proportional, with surface gravity well above 2g. On the other hand it could be a 'water giant,' with roughly earth-sized rocky core and a hydrosphere thousands of miles deep. Ocean is far too weak a term.

Earthlike it is not, whatever its composition. But it is hard not to speculate. Suppose that a rocky core has a radius of 1.38 x Earth's (and probably a bit denser), with a hydrosphere above.

Planetary mass is then close to 5 Earth masses. Surface gravity is about 0.9 g, and low-orbit velocity is around 11 km/s - similar to Earth's escape velocity. Getting back off after 'landing' on the hydrosphere would be tough, but not as tough as getting there in the first place, since it is 600 light years away.

So ... speculate!




Bonus science destructiveness news: Thanks to regular commenter 'Thucydides,' five cataclysmic events to think about.

Science Fiction versus Fantasy

Mostly this is not much of a fight. These two subgenres of Romance happily coexist (along with horror) in the same section of the bookstore.

This juxtaposition need not have been inevitable. Horror, at least, could as easily have been shelved along with mysteries. Both have a lot of dark stuff, not to mention shared roots going back to Edgar Allen Poe. In other respects, both SF and fantasy have a good deal in common with historical fiction - all set in worlds different from the everyday present, usually markedly so. But hist-fic seems generally shelved in with general fiction, presumably because its worlds are 'real.'


It is only by coincidence that I bring this up right after the death of Anne McCaffrey, whose Pern setting amounted (IIRC) to a fantasy setting framed within a mostly offstage SF setting.

Exactly how SF and F are to be distinguished from one another is a vexed, long-discussed issue, and now we are going to vex it some more. I have tended to favor the robust if simplistic rule that if it has a spaceship it is SF, if it has a sword it is fantasy, and if it has both it is science fantasy. Which works pretty well as practical guidance, but of course there is more to it than that.

There are theoretical differences - so to speak - between the science-rooted world view (typically) presumed in SF and the magical/mystical/demireligious world view implied by most fantasy. More consequential are the practical differences - science is, well, science, while magic is an art. (Read the posts that follow that one for further discussion.)

Several attempts have been made to 'rationalize' fantasy settings, giving them an SF infrastructure. The ones I have read - notably by Niven and L Sprague de Camp - have tended to clunk. They had no magic, in the literary sense. Explaining magic takes the art out of it, and does what a lecture on nutrition does to a fine meal. The Pern book likely avoided this problem by putting the SF frame on the shelf and reading like traditional fantasy.

Another interesting line of argument contrasts the political undertones of SF and fantasy - the former tending to be broadly liberal, the latter deeply hierarchical and essentially reactionary. I introduce this point in a mealymouthed way because my monkey's google fu is weak. Just a few weeks ago I read an essay or blog post making this point. It was by a pretty well known SF writer, but I can't remember his name, and searching has failed to turn it up. Suggestions by the hive mind would be welcome!

This argument's logic and examples are impeccable, but I can't entirely buy it - and can't entirely put my finger on why I don't quite buy it. It is true that 'traditional' fantasy (as distinct from urban fantasy and the like) is backward-looking, rooted in the social conditions of the agrarian age, while SF looks forward to a post-industrial age.

Is it simply that the Scouring of the Shire is so cool? I've read a revisionist version (which seemed distinct from the one linked - once again reports from the hive mind are welcome), but the Scouring was still cool.

The political interpretation of genre makes for an easy segue to fretting over what has happened to SF/F since their bookstore pairing became the norm, by around 1970. Swords have done better than spaceships, with fantasy becoming considerably the larger of the two genres, as measured by book production and sales.

By further (non-?) coincidence all this happened at just about the same time that space travel became a reality - and turned out to be so difficult and costly as to make the classical SF space future look somewhat ... fantastic. Indeed, much of the modern-era growth in SF itself has been in quasi-fantasy directions, notably including retro-SF that looks as firmly backward as traditional fantasy, if not quite as far.

The flip side may be urban fantasy, bringing fantasy tropes into the post-industrial era.

Yet in spite of the controversies and stereotypes, the two genres do coexist pretty well, to the point where I can more or less take for granted that readers here will be familiar with fantasy tropes. The similarities are, in the end, more consequential than the differences, and more central to the great Romance genre to which they both belong.




Discuss.

The image, besides being entertainingly lurid, illustrates a theme common to SF and fantasy, and provides an excuse to link the page at Atomic Rockets where I found it.

Distance 119+ AU

A discussion of SF and Fantasy is pending here, but in the meanwhile, a little weekend science news.

According to the Voyager website at NASA, Voyager 1 is currently nearly 120 AU from Earth - 119.862 AU, to throw in a few extra decimal places. (Follow the link to see a real-time distance updating.) Its distance from the Sun is just over 119 AU, a more relevant measure - the distance from Earth will actually shrink during by next (northern hemisphere) summer, when Earth swings around to the same side of the Sun as Voyager.

Voyager 2 is a slightly more modest 97 AU from the Sun. Pioneer 10, which lost contact with Earth a few years ago, is at a similar distance.


We grump about human spaceflight a lot around here, but stop to think about the fact that a human-built spacecraft is now nearly 120 AU from the Sun - still in operating condition, still investigating the heavens.

Meanwhile the Mars Science Laboratory mission, including the rover Curiosity, is on its way to Mars. The image above, from Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD), shows its launch.

Not on its way to the inner moon of Mars, sad to say, is Phobos-Grunt, which fell out of contact on entering Earth parking orbit. Mars has a remarkable history of eating space missions. According to Wikipedia, Russian engineers still have some faint hope of establishing contact and perhaps even sending the spacecraft to a near-Earth asteroid. Otherwise, RIP.

In spite of setbacks, the exploration of the Solar System (and its environs) continues.

Whose Space Futures?

This blog has a fairly international readership. If Google Analytics are anything to go by, nearly half of you come from outside the US, and about a quarter from outside the Anglosphere. This probably has much more to do with the virtues of the Internet than any virtue of mine.

Space itself has been an international environment, so far. Which probably has much more to do with its perceived lack of immediate economic or power-political value than with anyone's virtue. Like Antarctica it is interesting enough to establish a presence there, but not enough for the major powers to go to the mat over it.

A frequent topic on this blog has been the colonization of space - how likely it is (or isn't), and under what circumstances it might happen. I am not the only one raising the question. Charlie Stross has brought it up a couple of times, at least.

As he notes, and this is pretty much a no-brainer, the 'Murrican SF conception of the space future is highly colonization-centric. It is firmly and understandably rooted in the experience of the New World (by those populations for whom it was new), and especially the Wild West. Thus Bat Durston and Firefly.

My excessively vague impression is that, elsewhere, the conceptions of the space futures are quite different. The contrast that is most striking in my mind is between Heinlein's rip-roarin' interplanetary future and Clarke's crumpets-and-tea version. (For both writers I am thinking mainly of their earlier work. Later Heinlein annoyed me; later Clarke merely bored me.)

Of the two, Clarke's future now strikes me as far closer to a plausible midfuture than Heinlein's. For one thing - but a very important thing - his Solar System was essentially the one we actually live in, with only one habitable planet, Earth.

Heinlein's Solar System - with its habitable Venus and near-habitable Mars, not to mention native civilizations on both worlds - was wonderful but baroque, largely outdated even by the 1950s. In a lot of ways classic Heinlein reads like steampunk disguised as rocketpunk.

2001: A Space Odyssey is, no surprise, firmly in the Clarkean universe, and resembles the real world space program on 1960s steroids. There is a Moon base, or more than one (the Russians presumably have their own), and commercial space travel, but no hint of incipient Heinleinian colonization.

Having said this much, I have no real sense of how non-US perceptions of a space future have developed over the years, or how much part permanent colonization has played in these images. So I want to toss this out to non-US readers in particular: Does the whole space colonization debate even seem salient, or just a parochial 'Murrican concern?

What is the human engagement with space all about, anyway? And while we are at it, what is the relationship between actual space travel and space as a setting for fiction, Romance or otherwise?

Discuss.



The image, from APOD, seems like one that Clarke would particularly have appreciated: a Perseid meteor entering Earth's atmosphere, as seen from above.