Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, several times over the years I’ve thought me and Elon Musk should sit down and have a discussion – which would probably, I readily admit, turn into a argument. But we have a lot of things in common, interest wise.

I am often struck by how Elon and Tesla both have the same sense of showmanship, and the same tendency to make utterly batshit claims occasionally.

Elon’s got some great ideas (reusable spacecraft, electric cars, possibly even underground transit) and some reeeeeally bad ones (hyperloop, semiballiastic orbital travel for point to point on earth). But I want today to address a particularly nutty idea he’s come up with – that we’d be able to do a manned Mars mission by 2026. (Claim made here).

This is absolutely true – if we don’t mind that it’s a one way trip, and that we’ll be sending people to die on Mars in a few weeks or months.

However, the tradition in American spaceflight is we don’t consider the crew expendable. Which means a more reasonable timeline is 2046 if we use conventional fuels, or 2036 if we use a NERVA.

Now, I know in general the world is against NERVAs, and I don’t deny that they’re a bit risky – if we did use a NERVA we’d probably have to send up the fuel rods encapsulated in the best tech we could put them in, and assemble them in space. I do feel like various forces have overstated the risk of using nuclear fueled spacecraft, and that’s another whole topic. But, I want to make the case for using a NERVA here.

If we used a NERVA, we would not need combustible fuel, just ‘reaction mass’. THis means any liquid or gas that can be liquified would do! This makes it easy to guarantee a return flight, assuming the spacecraft arrives in one piece on mars, because you can

A: Use the same reactor fuel to run a reactor that compresses Mars’s atmosphere into the reaction mass tanks
B: Use the same reactor fuel to power heat & light onboard the spacecraft and a connected ‘Hab’ a la the Martian
C: It’s very likely a NERVA would not suffer from many of the ‘cold soak’ issues that a conventional rocket engine does, because NERVA designs often involve very few moving parts and by definition the reactor itself is going to get the whole system plenty hot by the time the jet fires

However, given that we’ve shelved NERVA technology, it would still be many years, even if we used a NERVA, before we could talk about going to mars and returning. I don’t know if Musk is outrageously optimistic, or if he’s doing the ‘just one more hill and we’ll be at the top of the mountain’ technique of pushing humanity along.

Anyway, without a NERVA, let’s talk about the challenges, so we understand why 2026 is ludicrous

#1: With a combustible fuel rocket, carrying enough fuel for a two way journey is a non-starter. It makes the fuel load *the square* of the amount you need for a one way journey, because you must carry the fuel to move the fuel.
#2: With a combustible fuel rocket, generally after a burn adequate to reach escape velocity on earth, some maintenance must be done before another burn can occur. Very likely this would have to be done in orbit above mars. Fixing things in space is *tricky* and takes months of simulations and practice to pull off.
#3: With a combustible fuel rocket, a very real concern is ‘cold soak’.

a) Most spacecraft to date have avoided the challenge of trying to ignite something that has been sitting at -200 degrees by using hypergolic fuels – that is to say, fuels that when two dissimilar parts are mixed together, ignition happens automatically. However, hypergolic fuels are much less efficient than oxidized fuels AND they’re incredibly toxic. They are not suitable for a escape velocity rocket anywhere much bigger than the moon.
b) If not using hypergolic fuels, you actually have to figure out starting up the fuel and oxidizer pumps, then igniting the mix coming out of them. Bunch of moving parts to get all working together.

#4: We’ve often spoken of using a combustible fuel rocket and “making the fuel on mars”. If we can find water, we can electrolyze it and make hydrogen and oxygen, then liquify them and make fuel. OK, I agree, all that is true, but there’s a lot less sunlight falling on Mars than on Earth. Doing that with a solar array is going to take a loooong time (and at the same time we’ll also have to make enough power for heat & light for the crew). So we’re probably going to have to send a nuclear reactor to Mars anyway, just to make the fuel, unless we want to try to keep men alive on Mars for a year on our first foray – something that is also likely to end in a dead crew.

I’ve been having tons of fun with OBS and setting up scenes, filters, and the like. Most of the bugs are out. My twitch channel is https://twitch.tv/sheerpanic_. (note the underscore)

Planning a “official” transmission for Feb 15 at 6 PM. In the meantime, I’m doing test transmissions – I will delete the truly horrid ones and leave the rest up until they time out.

So, one thing I should probably be more clear on. While I rant repeatedly about republicans here, for the most part I mean the people actually in power. Granted, I am also sad at the people who put them there, and I do feel as if *real* conservatives have been totally deplatformed. I don’t agree with real conservatives, but I don’t think they’re evil. They just have a different definition of utopia than I do, which is kind of a one man’s heaven is another man’s hell sort of thing. The people who I loathe are the people who have risen to the top of the republican party, and who show a distinct delight in dirty deeds, a willingness to cheat, a complete lack of honor or morals, and that kind of thing. Not the man on the street.

For that matter, for all the denigration of the folks who broke into the capitol on the 6th – if the things they had believed were true, they would have been heroes. The real villians on the 6th where the lying president and the willing-to-cosign-his-BS republican leadership. The people who broke into the capital are mostly guilty of being gullible and easily lied to – something that we all have probably been a time or two.

Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bakker, it’s amazing how much parts of the story remind me of Trump. I guess grifters gonna grift, and the grift has changed very little over the years. I hope that as part of Trump’s sentence, some of his grifted money can be taken and put to some use better than the ones he would think of to put it to. Then again, Trump’s faithful don’t seem to have objected to Steve Bannon being pardoned for stealing their money – I guess they just keep telling themselves it’s all fake news.

So, I have gotten a twitch account at SheerPanic_ (note the underscore at the end). I will be setting up over the next few weeks to do a show in late Feb – I did my first test transmission today, and while there were a few minor warts it went better overall than I had any right to expect. I apparently need to get over yet another type of stage fright.. (it’s so bizarre. I’m over the “stage fright when multitrack deck is running” and I’ve put a pretty good dent in the “stage fright while performing IRL” but apparently video broadcasting is yet another thing.

It’s also never going to be beautiful – I don’t anticipate millions of viewers or anything like that, so I’m not going to build a set or set up special lighting for it. I will arrange to have multiple camera angles, and I will hard-mount them so they don’t get in the way when I’m doing other things in the studio. I’m going to see if I can set up rules in OBS to switch randomly between cameras as well.

It’s kind of impressive, really. At this point the Republicans think cheating on elections is just dandy. Calling for violent overthrow of the government is fine. Trump should get a pass for that and the many felonies he’s demonstratibly committed (the washington post was kind enough to round those all up for us at https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/rap-sheet-trump-crimes/2020/10/16/c6a539da-0e61-11eb-8a35-237ef1eb2ef7_story.html). Of course, I’ve come to expect cheating from the republican party, I’ve come to expect voter disenfranchisement, and apparently in the new normal we can also expect violence from them. (To be fair, they did lots of false-flag violence while pretending to be Antifa during the summer, so this is just stepping up to committing violence in their own name)

I knew they were the party of corruption and lies, but I didn’t realize – and I should have, given how often they talk about how patriotic they are, something that they wouldn’t have to say if it were actually true – that they were the party of destruction of our democratic republic. If they can’t win elections fairly, they’d like to just get out the guns and stop having elections.

Of course, their almost-always-lying “news” sources (Fox, Breitbart, Rush) have whipped them up into a frenzy and made them believe some things which are *clearly not true* (look, if you are dumb enough to think there’s a conspiracy to change the election results that *every single judge* signed off on, including many appointed by the most recent administration – then I can’t help you, you’re dumb enough that you’re likely going to darwin-award yourself sooner or later anyway.)

I think a lot of what’s going on is many of the republican party members are going on, emotionally, what they’d *like* to be true – they want for more humans to be in favor of treating their fellow man awfully than to be in favor of sharing, because it makes their awful behavior more defensible (because everyone’s doing it)

And as far as the leaders, they’ve realized they can cheat and lie their way out of having been complicit in a attempt to overthrow a fair and free election, and they’re in favor of that.

We need to figure out some way to hold their feet to the fire, because it is clear that the party of lies, corruption, and “screw you, I’ve got mine” is going to continue to be as awful as possible for as long as they can, and that apparently includes giving Trump a pass for having deliberately created a violent attack on the capital because he’s such a toddler that he can’t cope with having lost a election.

So, you know those hollywood movies where there’s a alien invasion and humans defeat the aliens and the hero rides off into the sunset?

Yah, not what would really happen. The reality is, we’re the people who don’t have enough agility to make it through a minor pandemic without losing millions. We *politicize wearing masks* (and let’s not even get into the patheticness that is Q).

We are not good at truth, facts, or adaptability. We’re more in love with our economic system than we are in continuing to live (as Greta has reminded us), and let’s not even talk about some of the epic stupidity surrounding politics and religion.

I just heard rumors about a party where 10 people got COVID – that was thrown as a birthday party for a *cat*.

The sad thing is, if we could have just stopped everything for two weeks but real ‘essential operations’, we could have stopped COVID in it’s tracks. But in America, *every* job is a essential operation because if you don’t work you end up with no place to live and no food.

*sigh*

Well, it’s over. Four years of a con man grifting as much as he possibly could, and watching some people unable to comprehend that everything he said was a lie and that he was destroying us.

Now i can go back to having my normal level of loathing for our government, which is still a very long way away from what you might expect to find in a utopia. This will leave me much energy to spend on other, more productive things. I can probably even return to facebook. I look forward to someday in the near future having no idea what the president is up to, and not needing to know.

I do note that not only did the Republicans bring us two of the worst presidents in a hundred years – dubya, who started a war over false pretenses and got a million plus people killed, and Trump, who drove a wedge into the already growing divide between left and right and hammered it repeatedly, lied, stole hundreds of millions of dollars, committed so many impeachable offenses (including ignoring the emoluments clause) that most of us have lost count, and was such a badly-behaved child that he couldn’t even accept losing reelection and lied repeatedly, causing a small insurrection that undoubtedly has done much damage to the thousands of fools who believed his lies and broke into the capital.

Both of them lost the popular vote, but were placed in office anyway. Perhaps we could learn from the mistakes of history and either do away with the electoral college, or make it true proportional representation. It’s already demonstrated that it does not perform it’s desired function of not allowing dictators and demagogues to ascend to the office of the presidency (largely because by the time such a person can get elected, the brainwashed faithful are everywhere)

A lot of this does underline the evil of people like Rush Limbaugh and stations like Fox News – who have been lying repeatedly because it makes money to lie – the more you rile the people up, the more the advertisers will pay you. Rush had better pray there is no such thing as karma.

Anyway, so, we have people living in two different realities. The one I inhabit seems to match observable reality, in which, for example, the COVID virus did *not* go away in the spring. The one in which people continue to support republican politicians requires being willing to ignore those lies. Heinlein had a story that I’ve referenced before, ‘pravda means truth’ in which he talked about how a important aspect of living in the USSR was a willingness to forget the previous “truths” told by the government whenever a new “truth” came along. This is definitely a requirement to live in the modern conservative party, and even more so if you want to for example be a Q or CCP conspiracy nut.

Will they ever figure it out, or will we have republican suicide bombers insisting that the election went for Trump (*common sense* will tell you why it didn’t – he *barely* made it in the first time in a perfect storm, and then he spent years pissing off just about everyone by being his awful self. But, if you believe every lie he told, which some people do, then you believe he’s the best president we’ve ever had and you’re puzzled as to why he was not reelecte)

The one good thing I will say for Trump is that he didn’t start any foreign wars. That still probably makes him a better president than Dubya. However, I think history is a lot more willing to forgive Dubya for being easily duped than Trump for being a asshole who couldn’t even handle losing and threw a trumper tantrum that involved a violent assault on the capital by his followers.

Hopefully it’s over. I don’t expect to love Biden – he’s a moderate in a era when what we badly need is a extremist extreme enough to do as much good for the nation (and heartbreaking to the republicans) as Trump was willing to do bad for the nation. Even Bernie is to the right of me, though. I would be working on redesigning the resource allocation system, I’d be disbanding almost the entire military and outlawing ever having a bigger military than the two other largest nations, I’d be working on universal health care, universal income, mass automation to ensure no one starves, 3D-printing houses for the homeless, and so on. But I could never be elected, because as we said, I’m to the left of Bernie. So Biden’s legalistic tendencies and beholdenness to the powers that be are likely to annoy the heck out of me. But at least he won’t be actively swinging a sledgehammer at everything that’s good about the country (Trump tried to destroy the *post office* in order to win) and there is some hope that Trump will start his ‘Patriot’s party’ and A: they’ll agitate for ranked choice voting, since it benefits them too, B: they’ll occupy the extreme right, letting the Republicans become moderates and the Democrats become left and C: hopefully for a while, they’ll help make sure neither they nor republicans get elected by splitting the vote.

As I said above, I’m looking forward to not *needing* to know what the idiot in the while house is doing. while Trump surrounded himself with criminals because he is, at heart, a con man, Biden is surrounding himself with smart and capable people. They may be way too in love with the awfulness that is the criminal justice system of America, they may be way too in love with the horrors that are capitalism, but at least they are not idiots nor grifters. It’s a step in the right direction.

I also appriciate that unlike Trump, who was always very clear about the fact that he didn’t care what the majority (Democrats) wanted, Biden does express a desire to work for all the people who are here. It is a long standing problem that my utopia and conservatives’ utopia would be two wildly different places.

So, here’s to moving forward, hopefully away from the wildly awful behavior of the right. I still hope we do the right thing and put Trump in jail – it is important that politicians see consequences for behavior like his, or we will see Trump after Trump, eventually from both the left and the right. Trump belongs in jail. Eventually hopefully we can make even the conservatives understand how many different horrible things he did. “Orange man bad”. I think history will decide that Trump cared only about Trump, and did much damage to the world.

I’d like Biden to go a *lot* further than that. I’d like to see plasma cutters tearing down what of the wall there was, Trump charged with environmental crimes for the destruction parts of his wall wrought, and – and I know that Biden who is something of a RINO will never go for this – open borders with only a check for a criminal record – a return to the Ellis Island days. Or else let’s be honest and replace Lady Liberty’s poem with one that says the truth – that we are a awful and stupid people – stupid enough that we don’t realize that each immigrant who comes here brings more wealth, awful enough that we care more about our stupid immigration laws that were deliberately created not to avoid having immigrants, but to disenfranchise them, to enable us to use them as semi-slaves – and awful enough that treating humans horribly is something we embrace.

We are clearly not a Christian nation because the bible says, over and over, to treat immigrants well. And we are obviously not very bright, as a nation, because we’re easily programmed to scapegoat immigrants even though studies have repeatedly shown that they are more law-abiding than natural citizens

Mr Biden, TEAR DOWN THAT WALL! You can also sell chunks of it as souvenirs, like they did in Berlin.

So, I’ve been pondering various things about love. It’s always been intuitively obvious to me that the standard behavior claimed by the Christian God (“You’ll be tortured for all eternity unless you believe $WHATEVER) is the opposite of love, and as I went through the various experiences with various people over the past few decades of my life, it became apparent to me that if you love someone and they don’t want to talk to you, then the only real thing to do is not talk to them, at least within the framework of behaving lovingly towards them. I have done further thought about to what extent love accepts people as they are vs to what extent love wants them to grow, and then the other question is when you want someone to grow because you love them, to what extent are you able to accept that you may not be aware of what the real optimum for them is? I definitely think there’s a problem with parents wanting children to have similar moral and value frameworks even though their moral and value frameworks may be wrong (and there’s a *huge* problem with people not considering that their moral and value frameworks may be wrong even as they are cheering on systems which are more or less guaranteed to fail)

Love is probably the slipperiest thing to define I have ever really considered. The word is heavily overloaded (like God) – meaning it has many different meanings depending on context and both the speaker and the listener.

Interestingly, there was one point where I thought I was addicted to sex, but I discovered that sex without love has no value to me, therefore apparently I am addicted to love. I think someone had a song about that..

I’m not even going to try to actually write the definition of it, at least not yet. I note that in the Bible officially love keeps no record of past wrongs, which means that hell as a punishment for any wrong behavior is apparently biblicly impossible. I always find the frantic jumping of Christian apologists to “But God is a Just God!” both funny and predictable. I think I’ve talked elsewhere about how the history of religions involving dieties is in general a measure of how humans always try to put superhuman intelligences into boxes they can understand and invariably end up using too small of a box. Thusly, I expect way, way better behavior from God than most people, and I sometimes wonder if this is because I myself am more intelligent, at least in some senses, than most people, and thusly can imagine a bigger box.

However, having a big enough box to capture the idea of love remains beyond me, at least thus far. I can sometimes identify which the path of love is, but I’m just beginning to even grasp the shape of it, much less be able to compile what I know into english.

I’ve heard it broken down into eros, philios, and agape, but I find all of the above overlapping and also suspect it breaks down to many more colors of the rainbow than that.