“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert.” –J. Robert Oppenheimer
This is a very open-ended post. The goal is to get YOUR thoughts, opinions, and theories.
Without getting too deep, I can tell you that we are seeing a LOT of COVID in my world. It seems to be everywhere. But some apparent attempts to get masks going again are fizzling out fast, thank goodness.
So I’m curious what others are seeing. But beyond that, we’ve had almost 5 years of COVID in this world – maybe more.
Time for reassessment – particularly prior to the election.
Time for some fresh ground reports.
What think you about COVID?
Tell us what you’re seeing and thinking, please!!!
What is it that feeds our battle, yet starves our victory?
Speaker Johnson: A Reminder.
And MTG is there to help make it stick.
January 6 tapes. A good start…but then nothing.
Were you just hoping we’d be distracted by the first set and not notice?
Are you THAT kind of “Republican”?
Are you Kevin McCarthy lite?
What are you waiting for?
I have a personal interest in this issue.
And if you aren’t…what the hell is wrong with you?
Lawyer Appeasement Section
OK now for the fine print.
This is the WQTH Daily Thread. You know the drill. There’s no Poltical correctness, but civility is a requirement. There are Important Guidelines, here, with an addendum on 20191110.
We have a new board – called The U Tree – where people can take each other to the woodshed without fear of censorship or moderation.
And remember Wheatie’s Rules:
1. No food fights 2. No running with scissors. 3. If you bring snacks, bring enough for everyone. 4. Zeroth rule of gun safety: Don’t let the government get your guns. 5. Rule one of gun safety: The gun is always loaded. 5a. If you actually want the gun to be loaded, like because you’re checking out a bump in the night, then it’s empty. 6. Rule two of gun safety: Never point the gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy. 7. Rule three: Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire. 8. Rule the fourth: Be sure of your target and what is behind it.
Lots going on…gold surged on Thursday, and I was expecting a beat-down on Friday. Instead, it rose almost 20 more dollars. The FRNSI went up quite a bit, nearly four points! Silver did even better on a percentage basis. Note that an ounce of gold is worth 83.724 ounces of silver…but last week it was worth 89.094 ounces. That means that, in comparison to gold, silver became more valuable.
*The SteveInCO Federal Reserve Note Suckage Index (FRNSI) is a measure of how much the dollar has inflated. It’s the ratio of the current price of gold, to the number of dollars an ounce of fine gold made up when the dollar was defined as 25.8 grains of 0.900 gold. That worked out to an ounce being $20.67+71/387 of a cent. (Note gold wasn’t worth this much back then, thus much gold was $20.67 71/387ths. It’s a subtle distinction. One ounce of gold wasn’t worth $20.67 back then, it was $20.67.) Once this ratio is computed, 1 is subtracted from it so that the number is zero when the dollar is at its proper value, indicating zero suckage.
Piling On
One claim that Flat Earthers (“flerfers”) make is that there aren’t any time lapse videos of the sun doing a full circle around the viewer in Antarctica; that there’s always some sort of eight our gap in the videos.
This is a LIE. Don’t fall for it. Here is FIVE SOLID DAYS worth of timelapse with no hiccups and no breaks, taken in early March just before south polar sunset.
By the way there’s an absolute plethora of videos about the Amundsen Scott station, tours of the main building, tours of the buried areas, tours of the Ice Cube Neutrino Observatory (the largest science experiment by volume), and so on. And plenty of ways to get there as a tourist…provided you have $60K (or more). That’s roughly 24 ounces of gold right now.
Also we have a few cases of flerfers trying to run an experiment and finding they don’t get the results they expected…and not coming to the obvious conclusion.
There are three instances here: One where people stood on opposite sides of a body of water, put lights at 17 feet above water level, then tried to establish a line of site through temporary barriers with holes in them at 17 feet above water level. On a flat earth, there’s be no problem; on a curved earth, however. the barriers in the middle would cut the beam off. And that’s what happened; the light had to be raised a number of feet to be visible through the hole. Second, a gyroscope was seen to precess 15 degrees per hour…as it would if the earth were rotating over a period of 24 hours. On a flat, non-rotating Earth, it shouldn’t precess at all. Third, a striped flag was seen to disappear from the bottom to the top as it sailed off, again, as predicted by Globe Earth but not by Flat Earth.
This all forced the Flat Earth charlatans to do a lot of tap dancing, and one body language expert thinks at least one of the Big Flerfer “names” knows he’s a lying sack of shit. (Well, they didn’t say the “sack of shit” part.)
Mars
A while back I wrote something about why Mars sucks. Meaning, why it had such a thin atmosphere and virtually no surface water. This is interesting because by every indication (everything from visible stream beds on the surface, to minerals that only form in water, to sedimentary rocks which form in fairly stationary bodies of water like lakes and oceans), Mars used to have liquid running water on its surface, which in turn implies it once had a much thicker atmosphere. (There is still a fair amount of water on Mars, in the form of permafrost below the ground. This will be useful should we start human exploration.)
And it turns out that there are two key things going on here: one, Mars has weak surface gravity making it easier for the atmosphere (including water vapor) to escape and two, Mars has no magnetic field, allowing the solar wind to help that process by stripping away the atmosphere. Both in turn are consequences of the fact that it’s considerably smaller than Earth. (There’s no magnetic field because the interior of the planet has cooled off, because it is smaller than Earth, which hasn’t cooled off internally yet, and still has molten iron inside.)
This in turn has a bearing on the question of life. We’re mostly convinced nothing lives on Mars (though there’s a significant minority of scientists who make plausible arguments that there could be). But the tougher question is whether Mars ever had life, back when conditions were much better. That’s largely dependent on how long the conditions were good, how rapidly life actually develops…and whether it’s a rare event even given the right conditions. All of these are very much open questions at the moment; the frontiers of human knowledge.
Time to revisit Mars.
Orbit
First, where is it? Its orbit averages 1.52 AUs in radius…which is to say it’s 52 percent further away from the Sun than is Earth. But that is an average; it varies from 1.38 at one end of the elliptical orbit, to 1.67 AUs at the other. This is a large variance and Mars therefore has a much greater orbital eccentricity than most planets, at 0.0934. (0 is perfectly circular, 0.9 and above are very “cigar” shaped with the Sun close to one end of the cigar. No planet comes close to that though some comets do.) Since Earth is at 1 AU and orbits in 1 sidereal year, it completes one orbit in 1.88 (Earth) years or 686.90 Earth days.
As seen from Earth, Mars moves from west to east against the background stars, usually. It can appear to travel in the opposite direction at times, when we “lap” it in our orbit around the Sun. Here’s an animation from 2020, showing the actual relative positions of Mars and Earth, and an inset showing how Mars appears to move across our sky. (Note how, even though Mars’s orbit appears to be circular, it’s not centered on the Sun; that’s because in fact it is very slightly elliptical.)
If you watched that and paid attention to the trace of Mars across the sky as seen from Earth, you might wonder why it’s not just a straight line. That’s because the two planets don’t orbit in exactly the same plane. The Earth’s orbital plane is the zodiac line, Mars is at a slightly different tilt so even though it roughly follows the zodiac, it doesn’t stay precisely on it.
Surface Conditions
So Mars is significantly further away from the Sun and one would expect it to be colder…and it is, with an average surface temperature of -69C or -60C depending on how you take that average. (This is Antarctic winter type temperatures.) Yes, you will see that it sometimes gets up to +35C, but that’s rare; it’s just as liable to get down to -110C.
What else would you experience on the surface other than it being cucking fold there? Surface gravity is 0.3794 of Earth…almost exactly 3/8ths. (A 98 pound weakling is a 37 pound weakling there.) Air pressure depends on elevation, like it does here on Earth. Our scientists picked an arbitrary “sea level” that is about average for Mars (there is of course no sea), and at that level atmospheric pressure is 0.00628 our sea level pressure…not even one percent! We couldn’t live in that, even if it were pure oxygen, which it is not; it’s 96% CO2. There is a fraction of a percent oxygen but when you multiply that by how thin the air is, it might as well not be there. There is actually more argon than oxygen.
This is not to say there isn’t wind on Mars, and even dust storms, sometimes those storms can cover huge parts of the surface; at least one even covering the entire planet just as our first Mars orbiter arrived in 1971. These tend to happen when Mars is nearest to the Sun, and they help keep it warmer than it otherwise would be.
Another aspect of Martian weather is that the surface radiation is extreme, because there is nothing to block the solar wind and also nothing to block ultraviolet light. Solar flares and the like would cook you just as much as they would on the Moon.
Does Mars have seasons? Yes, cold, and colder. But seriously, yes. The axis is tipped a bit more than 25 degrees, and that causes seasons just as it does on Earth.
The Martian day is 24h 39m 36s long on average. That’s noontime to noontime; to avoid confusion with the Earth day, we call the Martian day a “sol.” Of course since it is orbiting the Sun just like we are, it has to rotate slightly more than one time on its axis to do this, it has to rotate another half degree or so to account for the Sun not being in the same direction against the stars as it was the day before. The true “God’s Eye View” rotation of Mars (i.e., relative to the stars) is 24h 37m 22.7s. Visitors to Mars would have an extra 39.6 minutes to kill every day. And this matters a great deal to some people even now, because Mars surface rovers only function in the daylight (because they run off solar panels, besides, it’s hard to see in the dark anyway). So the scientists and mission controllers here must follow the Martian day night cycle. Imagine a job where every day you have to wake up and go to bed 40 minutes later every day; you’d be out of sync with your family pretty quickly, and it would take about 36 days before things got back in sync.
Size
Mars has a radius of 3396 km, or about 53% of Earth’s. Which means a Mars globe and an Earth globe to scale should have the Earth globe looking about twice the width as the Mars globe.
Mars’s surface area is 144 million square kilometers, 28.4 percent of Earth’s. BUT…Earth is mostly covered by water, so Earth’s land area is 149 million square kilometers. Virtually the same. So there’s a lot of real estate there, however, as of now it’s about as valuable as that land just west of Miami or San Francisco.
Here is a map, with elevation coded by color.
Note the northern hemisphere would largely be ocean, if there were an ocean, with the south almost all highlands. But there is a big basin, the deepest/lowest spot on the planet, in the south at 60 degrees longitude–this is the Hellas basin, and likely an old impact basin. Another smaller basin is at about 320 west. But the true highlands area straddling the equator at 240 degrees is the “Tharsis bulge.” There are three white peaks in a line running southwest to northeast, then west of that, an isolated white peak. That peak is Olympus Mons, the largest volcano known to man. It’s so large you could be on its slope and have no idea you were on a volcano, just that the land has a gentle slope to it.
This thing is BIG. Here it is compared to France.
The other tourist attraction on Mars is Valles Marineris, a canyon 4000 km long, 200 km wide, and up to 7 km deep. It would stretch most of the way across the United States. It cuts through the left hand side of the red area on the map. There are other smaller canyons thought to have been cut by running water, but Valles Marineris is actually thought by some to be a rift zone from plate tectonics, one that failed as the mantle cooled too much for such things. (Photographed in infrared which apparently has better contrast.)
Moons
Mars has two moons, insignificant little things that weren’t discovered until August 12 and 18, 1877, by Asaph Hall. They are too small to have forced themselves into spherical shapes. The inner, larger moon is Phobos (named after the Greek deity of panic and fear) roughly 22 km across (it’s hard to average it when it’s basically shaped like a potato), with Deimos (named after the Greek deity of dread and terror) being 12 km across (same caveat).
The names make sense, because Mars was after all the god of war. (In Greek mythology this god was known as Ares, and a lot of scientific terms to do with Mars actually derive from this root, e.g., “areography” analogous to “geography”)
Phobos has an average orbital radius of 9,377 km, while Deimos has one of 23,460 km. Phobos orbits Mars in a mere 7.66 hours while Deimos orbits in 30.35 hours.
Note that Phobos orbits Mars faster than Mars rotates. These are both in the same direction (counterclockwise as seen from over Mars’s north pole), so Phobos’s actual west to east motion overwhelms its apparent daily east-to-west trip across the sky as Mars rotates. So, it actually rises in the west and sets in the east!
There is some thought that Phobos could be used as a transit point for people traveling to and from Mars; imagine how convenient it would be to set up a space station there. There’s plenty of room for such a thing there.
Exploration of Mars
Mars is undoubtedly the best explored planet other than, of course, Earth. The first successful flyby of another planet was by Mariner 4 in 1965. The first successful orbiter for another planet was Mariner 9 in 1971…at which time Mars was suffering a planet wide dust storm. Fortunately it cleared while the spacecraft was still alive, and we finally discovered the great volcanoes and Valles Marineris. (All prior flybys had just happened to fly by when the wrong side of Mars was presented.) The Soviets tried multiple times but had my luck, having few successes. They were the first to attempt a landing…and failed, repeatedly. They finally succeeded with a flyby about the same time we put Mariner 9 in orbit. (They had better luck with Venus, which is harder. Go figure.)
Finally in July and September 1976 the two Viking landers successfully touched down on Mars. Here is the first photograph taken from the surface of Mars. (With one caveat. The Russians successfully landed on Mars in 1971…but the spacecraft went belly up less than two minutes later, having transmitted part of a picture. I can only imagine the profanity they must have used.)
And a panorama, which I remember being printed on the front page of the newspaper (with messed-up colors that made the sky look blue):
One of their missions was to search for life–presumably microbial life–by running various tests on soil samples. Although most think the tests returned negative results on the whole, there was enough activity in some of the tests that some to this day hold out hope that there was, in fact, life there.
Since then, of course, we’ve had a plethora of orbiters and rovers, but as yet no sample-return mission. China has gotten into the act.
But where to from here? Elon Musk has famously pushed for actual permanent human habitation on Mars, with an aggressive timeline. The idea would be to send one of his Starships to Mars, after refueling in Earth orbit, then on Mars making fuel from the CO2 in the atmosphere and subsurface ice, which would be used to make methane and oxygen. Not the best fuel in the world, but far better than lugging it all the way from Earth (which would require MUCH bigger rockets to launch the mission in the first place). This is similar to the Mars Direct concept put forth in the 1990s by Robert Zubrin, which involves sending a return vehicle first, waiting for the next launch window and sending a habitat with crew and another return vehicle, then again every launch window. Habitats would accumulate on the surface, and fuel would be manufactured for both the return vehicles and for rovers. By spacing the habitats and return vehicles several hundred miles apart, a network of them is eventually set up, and they can even back up for each other in emergencies since they would be in rover range of each other. (And if a previously sent return vehicle fails, there’s one that came with the crew during this launch window.)
Mars is in some ways an ideal target. There are resources there that could be used by human visitors; carbon from the atmosphere, water from subsurface ice. We could breathe there, indefinitely, with help from machinery. We could likely grow food there too. Everything we can create there is less stuff we have to schlep there in the first place. In many ways, it’s a better bet than the Moon, even if it is scores of times further away.
There was an epic set of novels by Kim Stanley Robinson describing the future on Mars, with the first bases, terraforming, and settlement, they are “Red Mars,” “Green Mars” (as some plant life takes hold), and “Blue Mars” as Mars gets an ocean. In fact there’s even a Martian tricolor flag inspired by these classic books, with red, green and blue.
How feasible is that? Can Mars ever be that earthlike?
Maybe more than you might think! It turns out that a big magnet (I can’t seem to locate how powerful it would have to be, but it’s something we could put there) placed at the L1 point between Mars and the Sun might actually be enough so that Mars would find itself in the “tail” of the magnetic field, now protected from the solar wind.
The people putting forth this idea claim we might see significant thickening of the Martian atmosphere in years, not decades or centuries. The atmosphere would be mostly carbon dioxide…and that is a greenhouse gas. It might get warm enough even to melt the subsurface water, eventually.
We might not be able to breathe the air, but if the pressure is high enough, we can ditch “space suits” and just wear an oxygen mask over our faces, and maybe a parka if we need to keep warm.
I definitely see our future involving Mars in a big way…provided of course we have a future. I can’t imagine us ever making it if current trends continue…unless Musk is able to pull a rabbit out of his hat, quickly. Because 40 or maybe only 20 years from now we might not have a civilization capable of it any more.
