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News Briefs 16-08-2010

By Grail-seekeron

The new weird order:

Thanks to Greg, RPJ, Kat & George

Quote of the Day:

The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction—the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality.

Jean Cocteau

Grail-seeker
Related

7 Comments

  1. dirty socks
    I’m not sure about the effect of silver nanoparticles in sewage.

    However, together with the comments there, and the car running on waste water, this is more evidence that we should mine sewage. There is plenty of valuable material in there. We should mine garbage dumps too, not just recycle the big pieces.

    The places to start would probably be some really big, really dirty cities.

    1. The Garbage Mines
      I have often thought that in the future, penal labor would be employed to clear some of the awful and wasteful landfills of our modern world. Let’s face it, who wants to dig through refuse? The contents of the dumps promise to be complex enough to challenge artificial intelligences, leaving robots out for now. So prisoners seem to be a good fit. I like it better than leaving the poor of the third world alone and unprotected with the job as it stands today.

      Perhaps a good start would be comprehensive recycling and waste management procedures to keep the piles from getting any bigger.

  2. Genuine? crop circles
    These crop circles are just how I remember them from when I was a kid back in the 1950s… Except the ones we saw were always in hay fields as this was where we had picnics or played. Not to say though that there were circles in the corn, just that we did not see them.

  3. Must. Have. Gravity. Air. Water. Green.
    A couple of paragraphs from that article about the psychological challenge of living in space:

    Romanenko predicts trouble on a Mars mission. “Five hundred days,” he says with evident horror. …
    […]

    People can’t anticipate how much they’ll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense “periscope liberty”—a chance for crewmembers to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. “A baby!” he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran.

    Nothing tops space as a barren, unnatural environment. Astronauts who had no prior interest in gardening spend hours tending experimental greenhouses. “They are our love,” said cosmonaut Vladislav Volkov of the tiny flax plants with which they shared the chilly confines of Salyut 1, the first Soviet space station. At least in orbit, you can look out the window and see the natural world below. On a Mars mission, once astronauts lose sight of Earth, there’ll be nothing to see outside the window. “You’ll be bathed in permanent sunlight, so you won’t even see any stars,” astronaut Andy Thomas explained to me. “All you’ll see is black.”

    Humans don’t belong in space. Everything about us evolved for life on Earth. Weightlessness is an exhilarating novelty, but floaters soon begin to dream of walking. Earlier Laveikin told us, “Only in space do you understand what incredible happiness it is, just to walk. To walk on Earth.”

    I love Star Trek as much as anybody, and I’d love to warp around from planet to planet in a galaxy-class starship — nicely equiped with artificial gravity, replicators, transporters, a couple of holodecks, and a thousand of my closest friends.

    But, short of building such a starship, the human species isn’t physically or psychologically equipped for space travel.

    1. have to see
      [quote]
      But, short of building such a starship, the human species isn’t physically or psychologically equipped for space travel.
      [/quote]
      I don’t think we can say that with certainty.

      It is harder to do without something if it is within easy reach, but you can’t have it.

      Aside from that, the 500 days are wrong. We have to get there faster, and we basically know how to do that, even today.

      1. Get yourself to Mars
        >> Aside from that, the 500 days are wrong. We have to get there faster, and we basically know how to do that, even today.

        Sure, a couple of people might be able to make it to Mars or an asteroid, take a quick look around, and make it back — possibly in less than 500 days, and possibly without going completely bonkers.

        I still think anyone who makes that trip will never want to do it again.

        1. rockets
          Well, we need the kinds of launchers for a fast Mars trip for many other reasons. Ask EP, for example, his main concerns are well founded.

          So if some people want to go to Mars, we should let them. Just because some of us can’t imaging that it’s any good doesn’t mean everybody should be prevented from going.

          As for myself, I get stomach cramps when using a Windows computer, yes many other people do so for decades with no diagnosed health effects.

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