How will we keep law and order on Mars? This article digs into various facets of concern, from the physics of hand-to-hand combat in low gravity to the ethical implications of humans living in an environment controlled all the way down to the air they breath. There’s a lot to digest here, but it’s interesting to think about.
The Atlantic Bombarded with words
Geraldine McCaughrean recently won the UK’s Carnegie Medal for children’s literature. Her acceptance speech gives me a bit more confidence in my prose choices for Scratching the Surface.
“Accessible language is, to me, a euphemism for something desperate. Most of its tyrannies are brought to bear on younger books right now. But blink twice and today’s junior school readers will be in secondary school,armed only with a pocketful of single syllable words, and with brains far less receptive to the acquisition of vocabulary than when they were three or seven or nine… We master words by meeting them, not by avoiding them.”
Reaching the next generation
“The idea of the next generation and beyond being able to choose between a life here on Earth or a life of exploration and research in space is a truly exciting one. But does the next generation know it? Probably not.
…more has to be done to reach folks at a younger age, and really convince them that what they are seeing is not only possible but accessible to them in the future.”
Clair de Lune
I found this profoundly moving. Clair de Lune is always one of those prickly hair on the back of the neck songs for me. But this takes it to an entirely new level.
Bravo, NASA Goddard.
“The future is a DIY project”
“Should I honor my half-century on Earth by buying a convertible or by building my own satellite to launch into space?”
We have an obligation
“Colonizing other planets will be a multicentury effort. Nobody alive today will see the end of this project. But, in a way, that’s really cool. It forces us to be farsighted, to take the long view.”
A short article that includes a longer podcast. Both are worth the time.
One Year
I find this video mesmerizing. You are down there somewhere, going about one year of your life. What were you doing from July 2015 to July 2016? The question I keep coming back to is: was it important?
You need a vision
“The moon is certainly achievable, we have been there already, but from what I can see there is no vision there – you need a vision of going somewhere, doing something that is hard, going further than humans have ever been before,” she said.
the Guardian Space war
I don’t intend Generation Mars to be a dystopian saga. That doesn’t suit the target age range and, even if it did, there are too many of those around already. So I don’t see armed interplanetary conflict as part of the series. However, it is interesting to think about the physics of such conflict in space and just how wrong most sci-fi movies get it. And there is a lot to be learned from such thought experiments. The discussion of heat transfer in this video is a good example.
https://www.facebook.com/Nerdist/videos/1909008429409923/?hc_ref=ARSUXPh4WM3PMyLE-5WdBBQkAdlioRmU8UAzKi1S5gfVaPr5RyKQEtl-I3N1o2PAXjo
Space mining
Here’s an interesting paper on the political and economic future of space mining. It begins with a survey of the current state of affairs. This alone is worth reading. There’s a lot going on! It then details a simulation exercise used to explore the ramifications of space mining for the Earth economy. Finally, it analyzes the insights gained from the simulation.
The focus is on mining of near-Earth asteroids with Earth-return of materials, but the issues discussed are certainly relevant to the development of colonies on Mars.
www.sciencedirect.com