Links for you. Science:
BMJ Paper at Center of COVID Vax Deaths Controversy Gets Expression of Concern
What If We’re Stuck Down Here?
Study challenges popular idea that Easter islanders committed ‘ecocide’ (I wrote about this over a decade ago)
The surprising link between drug trafficking and bird conservation
UK Covid hospitalisations increase following emergence of new variant. The rise is thought to be due to waning immunity and a new group of Covid variants collectively referred to as FLiRT
COVID summer wave grows, especially in West, with new variant LB.1 on the rise
Other:
A National Cartel Fixing Rental Housing Prices: The Scandal Continues to Grow (I wrote about this here)
If even the secretary of transportation won’t take the train, who will?
It’s Not Just AIPAC: How Jamaal Bowman Alienated Voters Who Once Supported Him (important for the left, construed broadly, to read)
Capital Won’t Love You Back, Mr. President. Billionaire chief of staff Jeffrey Zients epitomizes a campaign that has been less than forceful about the rally of capital to Donald Trump’s side. (replacing Klain with Zients has had some bad consequences, as predicted)
Let Tim Cook
Why Conceding To Lies About The Economy Is A Big Mistake. It’s not just about voter sentiment ahead of the election, it’s about what kind of party we want Democrats to be in a post-Trump future.
Understanding the Scale of the Trump Threat: Journalist Radley Balko on the authoritarian nightmare being planned for a second Trump term.
On Juneteenth, Let’s Examine the Link Between MAGA and the Old South
Moody’s: Assessing the Macroeconomic Consequences of Biden vs. Trump
How Recycling Has Become a Largely Empty Gesture
Are Tokyo’s public toilets the new tourist attractions? Here are 13 unique ones worth visiting
Steward Health Care executives are mired in trouble at home. In Malta, it’s much worse.
Is This the End of the Clarence Thomas Court?
Donald Sutherland defied categorization
Trump Endorses Ten Commandments In Schools, Urges Evangelical Christians To Vote
Arizona toddler rescued after getting trapped in a Tesla with a dead battery: The Model Y’s 12-volt battery, which powers things like the doors and windows, died.
How To Comply With Louisiana’s New Ten Commandments Law
The Schools That Are No Longer Teaching Kids to Read Books
Prosecute the U.S. Officials Who Spread Lies About China’s Vaccine
The Crack-Up: A conversation with John Ganz
Russiagate, Revisited. Eight years on from 2016, much of the Russian influence operation is now run out of the Kremlin, from Putin’s presidential administration. The good news: a lot of it is bafflingly bad and some of it is hilariously awful.
Texas Lockstep: The hard right wants all Republicans to fall in line
How Legos went from humble toy to criminal black market item fueled by L.A. heists
Commutes are getting longer as hybrid workers make trade-offs
Scheming A Plan
I’m A Doctor Who Almost Died Because My Own Doctors Refused To Do This 1 Basic Thing
mikethemadbiologist
The “what if we’re stuck down here” piece reads like someone had a list of negatives, read them off one by one and just accepted that they are insurmountable with no further questions. The tl;dr of the below is I don’t agree with that take, in pretty much every single way I could possibly disagree with it.
The vague and ominous list of health problems the author points out are all (as far as we can tell) consequences of extended microgravity. Yes, that’s a challenge, and no, NASA’s Artemis tin can strategy can’t feasibly push past the six-month limit. Does that make long-duration spaceflight impossible? Hardly.
If we hadn’t canceled the CAM we might already know today whether spin gravity is sufficient for the length of a full abort-to-Earth Mars flight and whether you need the full g or if either partial or intermittent works. Lacking that data, the simple answer is to provide full simulated Earth gravity and monitor. This is something we’ll be able to test in LEO first. If hypogravity (like, say, lunar or Martian gravity) is definitely not enough then our options are free-space or accommodation like a centrifuge for exercise, among other things. That said, I’ve spoken to a number of people on the subject including a practicing physician who believe intermittent exposure will be sufficient for long-term health. Are they right? No way to know right now, but by the same argument there’s no proof that any insurmountable problems exist either.
Radiation is a problem, sure. It is particularly a problem for the minimum-energy (~280 day) transfer orbits preferred by NASA, in the minimum-mass aluminum cans they tend to spec. Re-run that exposure math for a high energy transit (~115 days) on a large vehicle with tens of tonnes of supplies to shelter within and those problems evaporate. Surface settlements will be buried or bermed as needed, so the primary source of exposure is the trip out. People on EVA for construction or maintenance will need to track their dose just like any other rad worker, but this is a well-understood process.
Permanent microgravity habitats (‘orbitals’) are definitely not going to look like the retrofuturist art people draw for O’Neill cylinders or whatever the hab du jour happens to be, since windows are stupid and so is pressurizing an entire megastructure just to give people cinematic views of the other side of the hab.
Why are windows stupid? Because radiation doesn’t turn corners. You can use parabolic reflectors to concentrate sunlight, then mirrors to get it around the rad shield, then diffusers or fiber to run it wherever you need. All that natural lighting without having to cook your eyeballs in the ambient solar particle weather or somehow figure out a clear and pressure-tight rad-shield.
Cylinder, sure, but multiple floors fully surrounded by slabs of scavenged regolith. Build them in pairs so you can spin them up against each other with electric motors instead of RCS thrusters. Don’t bother spinning the rad shield, that just puts unnecessary stress on it. These structures are going to be mostly asteroid by mass unless we do something clever on the moon.
At any rate, the moon is the easiest for our current readiness since it’s only a couple of days away and we can just throw money at the problem. Less if it’s an emergency and we’re prepared. Mars is the easiest long-term because it has sunlight, water, nitrogen and carbon all in one place and not completely unreasonable to access. Also plenty of chlorine and iron and all those other essential elements, plus gravity even if it’s not much. Orbitals are hard mode, but if you can solve the towering list of problems down that path then we could feasibly house trillions of humans in our solar system.