NONSENSE AND SENSE (in that order)

    As it is sometimes said, “maybe it’s the season.” It does seem, doesn’t it, that in an election year, judging from some statements, the general level of intelligence is not what we had hoped it is. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare” is a gem. Another, from a highly placed figure is “Corporations are people” (yeah, and bankruptcies are abortions). Then there is “Islam is not a  religion.” And for posterity, I’m sure, is the comment plaintively uttered to a reporter by a woman who must have married up beyond her wildest dreams. The reporter was checking out the wealthy occupants of fine automobiles that were lined up for a recent Romney gala fund raiser: “The little people. They just don’t understand.”
   
    Since my particular field is rocketry and anything associated with it, my pet peeve centers on comments that followed published commentaries on NASA’s Curiosity mission, to the effect that all that money ($2.6 billion) ought to have been spent here, on this planet, for more sensible things. It is as if they believe Martians are now happily tearing off check stubs.  Admittedly, it can’t be argued that disparaging comments about space exploration has anything  to do with the election year. They have been around for some time, and never seem to cease.

    Actually, the rover that now sits on Mars is dirt cheap. The raw materials in the 2,000 pound Rover  cost three dollars a pound, give or take a few quarters. The same goes for the  75,000 pounds or so of material in the rockets that got the rover to Mars.  On further thought,  the material is not worth anything, as the value I quoted amounts to what it took to mine, refine and process the materials from which the rover and rockets were built. Labor and businesses benefited.

    Need an example? That $30,000  Mustang you have your eye on costs ten dollars a pound. About three dollars a pound is in material. The rest is labor and benefits paid  to workers by Ford and its parts suppliers, overhead, profit to Ford,  shipping, processing by the dealer, dealer overhead and profit.

    So what happened to the 2.82 billion dollars spent so far on the Curiosity mission? It stayed here, distributed almost entirely in paychecks to the scientists, engineers, technicians and skilled fabricators who designed, built and implemented the Curiosity venture. That money wasn’t squirreled away in the Cayman Islands. It was mostly spent. A substantial chunk went back to the government. The remainder  found its way to builders, the local mechanic, the hair dresser and barber, the local bookstore, and countless other places, maybe even ballet lessons. You get the idea.Those people prospered too, and also sent money back to Washington. And you can bet that some who worked on the project already have underway spinoff ventures that take advantage of some of the technology that was developed in the program. It’s win-win from every aspect, with the bonus of ultimately learning more about our origins through space exploration.

    There are various ways in which the government can stimulate the economy, but for payoff, there is nothing that can match investments in technology. If you doubt this, think about the multi-hundred billion dollar business that has grown from NASA  and Department of Defense early communications satellites.

VOTER FRAUD FRAUD

    When something is statistically acceptable and legislators use their positions to mess with it, something else must be afoot. That seems to be the case with voter fraud legislation. Compellingly suspicious is that the origin of legislation is entirely the work of one political party. Absolutely revealing is the crowing on the part of a senior Republican in Pennsylvania that the passage of voter fraud legislation will win that state for Governor Romney.
    Never mind that studies of voter fraud have all revealed that it is extremely rare. And for good reason. A single vote on the part of an individual can hardly affect an election and the risk is five years in prison and $10,000 fine. How much easier and safer it would be to get a member of the opposition drunk so that person’s vote doesn’t get recorded. Enough studies have been made to put this subject to bed, yet it has become a major, troubling issue in this campaign year. A representative paper by the Brennan Center of Justice can be found on:

www.brennancenterofjustice.org/content/resource/policy-brief-on-the-truth-about-voter-fraud

    The object, of course by the perpetrators (one cannot honestly say legislators) is to cut out of the voting population a segment that can normally be counted on to vote for the opposition. The method is to require all voters to furnish state issued photo i.d. at the voting sites.  Of course a driver’s license will do. So there are troglodytes among us who say “What’s the big deal? Everyone has a driver’s license.” Not so. There are millions who don’t, and requiring those voters to provide a photo i.d. is implicitly illegal in that it costs money to get an i.d. as well as imposing an unnecessary hardship; money for transportation and money for the i.d. That by any definition is a targeted poll tax.

    Many schemes are in play to affect voter outcome. A notorious one, for which voting administrators ought to be prosecuted, is supplying insufficient voting machines in areas that have high opposition voting populations. Discouraging voting by making people wait in lines for hours is patently a form of voter fraud practiced by some in state governments.

    But the most shameful is voter fraud fraud that is practiced by legislators.They know that voter fraud is virtually non-existent. They cannot back their bills with data.  Their intent is transparent. They know the laws will ultimately be declared illegal, but they are doing it anyway, and the Republican governors of those states where bills have been passed, to their eternal disgrace, are signing on.

    Much of the mischief is arguably traceable to Senator Mitch McConnell’s statement on the Senate floor at the onset of this administration that the main goal of the Republicans is to ensure that Barack Obama doesn’t get another term. The record of minority performance in the Senate ensuing months and years, and in the House since Republicans gained the majority shows that he surely meant it, what with kneecapping the president at every turn with  endless filibusters, and outright blocking of needed legislation, such as  the Jobs Bill.  But that was only one facet of the “War against Obama.” Voter fraud, the astonishing birther claims that never go away, the hypnotizing House obsession with women’s rights, are all facets of McConnell’s astonishingly provocative vow, put into practice.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE CHALLENGE FOR HUMANS

   
                    


    Chalk up a big one for  NASA and the  Space Exploration Program. The discovery and confirmation that Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, has a high methane component, even lakes of it, is a strong indicator that methane had a high presence in the formation of the rest of the solar system and  probably was heavily involved in Earth’s evolution.  A theory yet to be proven, but it is plausible that methane occurs not only as a component of biomass as represented by coal and oil, but also as a direct deposit from the original, dense primordial soup that enveloped Earth long before life appeared. It also contained carbon dioxide, water vapor, ammonia, elemental hydrogen and nitrogen in massive quantity and other gasses in smaller amounts. 
        
    As yet, there were no oceans. That came later as temperatures moderated, water vapor condensed, and energy from sunlight and lightning spurred the formation of more complex molecules ....some eventually to become self replicating and characterized by the phenomenon we call life. Thus began an incredible and prodigious global biochemical reaction that converted most of the carbon into biomass, thinned and modified the atmosphere to its present content of mostly 80% nitrogen and 20 percent oxygen, and helped to form the oceans.

    If one takes into account the estimated water in the world, about 2 exp.21 pounds, an easy calculation shows that terrestrial pressure of the early gaseous envelope was in the hundreds of atmospheres. As the earth cooled and a crust formed and cooled, fissures and voids appeared, which would have immediately been filled with “soup.”  Further earth movement sealed it in for the ages. That much of it is still there is evident in volcanic eruptions where carbon dioxide content may be as high as 40 %, accompanied by other gasses. A second clue is appearance of methane in places where its presence can’t be explained by biomass processes, since there is no biomass in the vicinity.  For instance, methane appears dissolved in hot brine in high concentrations. Some efforts are already underway for recovery in places where it is not too difficult to gain access. An added benefit is application of the hot brine to geothermal energy extraction. In the late seventies, remembered for the oil crisis during the Carter administration, there appeared an article in the Oil and Gas Journal describing the discovery of an enormous hot brine deposit miles under Texas and Louisiana that is saturated with methane. The author estimated that there is enough methane in that single deposit to serve the nation’s energy needs for the next 2500 years. Quick conclusion: methane is everywhere, in quantities that would serve Earth’s energy needs for thousands of years. That is, if there were not a down side.     
   
    In an upcoming book, UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller, a confirmed climate change denier for many years, has reversed himself after conducting a detailed study of all the data, assisted by dozens of scientists, funded by a grant from the Koch brothers. He concludes now  that climate change is real, human caused, and there is an urgent need to make corrective changes in the energy generation industry. His immediate recommendation is to convert rapidly from coal to methane to generate  electricity, reducing emissions by about two thirds.  Earth’s natural absorption systems can handle about 50% of current carbon dioxide emissions.  But if a conversion  to methane, along with introduction of other “green” renewables, doesn’t abate the other 50%, climate warming will continue, only at a slower rate.

    Another recently published book by Ozzie Zehmer, also of UC Berkeley, titled “Green Illusions,” does not take issue with the subject of global warming, but dwells instead on the various  methods of generating energy claiming to be renewable, with the object of revealing whether they are beneficial,  have a negative effect, or are simply cosmetic.  It turns out that some, like production of ethanol from corn, are strongly negative (In a recent posting here, titled “Coal Burning Electric Cars,” I also wrote about the dubious benefit of electric cars on which batteries are charged  from coal burning power plants).

    At best, the suggestions made by Richard Muller would buy time, given the rate at which energy consumption is growing globally. The final solutions, restoring Earth’s “breathing” to the situation in which natural absorption processes  maintain an equillibrium, will require innovation on many fronts, including gains in efficiency, conservation, and containing urban sprawl to reduce transportation needs. 

    While nuclear power is looked upon unfavorably by many people, it may be a significant part of the final answer. The United States has more nuclear power plants in operation than any other nation.... around one hundred twenty. They generate nearly 20 % of our electrical energy. France generates 80 % of its electrical energy in nuclear plants; the remainder mostly “green.”
Still, the existing  plants, while technologically formidable achievements, must be considered first generation technology. Most are over forty years old. Some are operating beyond their scheduled lifetimes.The last one to be built in the United States came on-line in the nineties.  Historically, though, there have been no fatalities in the United States. Disasters at Chernobyl and more recently in Japan after the tsunami have been attributed to operator error and aging equipment.  Industry is capable of producing a next generation power plant.... more efficient and safer, by employing advanced designs, using materials not previously available in the original builds, and welding advancements. Operator error can be largely eliminated with a high level of automation, including the quadruple redundancey that is commonly employed in spacecraft design.  Away down the road there is the possibility of continuous fusion power if the technology can be mastered. Perhaps sooner if pulse fusion is discovered to be easier to achieve.   

    So interesting.... discover something useful on a moon a gazillion miles away and realize that the same events that got it there also placed it everywhere you walk, deep underground but nevertheless accessible. Of itself, it might not solve our emerging, serious problem, but it could go a long ways as a stopgap while permanent solutions are found and implemented. This also reaffirms that space exploration is incredibly important. What it can teach us can be quite surprising, and could return every penny ever spent.