WHY GO TO MARS?

Author’s Note: Trill is a ficticious female acquaintance who makes it possible to write in what for me is a comfortable style.

My Dear Trill,
        

         Odd that while I am thinking about why we should be planning to visit and eventually colonize Mars, you would question me on the same subject. Sooner or later, I should have expected this question from you, and I’m glad you asked, because the lure of adventure beyond our planet, into the solar system and even into interstellar space, prompted, in part, by the success of the Apollo mission, continues. A common cry when the Apollo program ended was: “On to Mars.” But when the estimated cost of such a journey was upwards of a hundred billion dollars, Congressional enthusiasm for the venture cooled. Moreover, the technical challenges far surpassed those that were needed to go to the moon.

         A single problem may prevent any such mission in the near future. One round trip by an astronaut to Mars may cause exposure to cosmic rays equivalent to the total permissible for an entire career. It is a serious problem because brain damage is the main effect, and that could jeopardize the success of a mission where ability to make judgments is a primary requirement. The physics for cosmic ray shielding is simply not known as yet. Earth is fortunate. A strong magnetic field diverts galactic cosmic rays and harmful ones from the sun to the poles.
       Reasons for going to Mars persist. Among them is that humans are born to explore, and examples are cited in Earth’s history ranging from Alexander the Great’s foray to the East with his armies as far as India, the Lewis and Clarke expedition, exploring the west on the North American continent, Livingston in Africa, and lately the Apollo mission to place man on the moon. If one were to look for missions that parallels a journey to Mars for its duration, the sailing of HMS Beagle, from 1831 to 1836 to chart the southern waters under Captain Fitzroy, might be cited. This was the second sailing mission for the ship, on which Charles Darwin was a passenger. The difference was that the ship was able to make stops for supplies and refurbishment. A trip to Mars would have no such luxury. Similarly, the duration of the Lewis and Clark expedition, just over 2 years, in the early 1800’s, the explorers living off the land.

          Other reasons, rather specious, is that in a few million years the sun will expand and engulf Earth and humans must be prepared to move to a planet more distant from the sun. Or that a predictable event will threaten all life on Earth. This could be caused, for example, by collision with a large asteroid, which has occurred in the past. We therefore must move some humans away, to another planet, to preserve the species.This assumes that humans are the only species worth saving, which is arguable. Even Noah saw the value in preserving as many species as the Ark could accommodate.

         Ample water supply is one of the largest consumables for a successful settlement, History of new settlements on Earth tells us that settlers made certain that water was nearby. A future where water is conserved by recycling urine, sweat, wash water, and expelled moisture content from breathing, is bleak indeed, especially if the process follows a likely law of diminishing return. Supplying water by rocket from Earth is possible but a preposterous notion. Scientists are quite certain that subterranean water exists on Mars.

        Supposing a group of would-be colonists were fortunate enough to land in a region close to a under- ground aquifer..... say about thirty feet underground. Initially, a comparable event on Earth would be similar to landing in the middle of the Gobi Desert, where access to a large deposit of local water could change everything.
         For the fun of it, let’s look at the problems associated with getting water from an aquifer to a faucet in a Mars colony structure. To begin, if you drove a pipe down , say thirty feet to the water, you couldn’t pump it with a surface pump as the atmospheric pressure can lift water only 2.4 inches on Mars, versus 33 feet on Earth. With temperatures varying from 70 deg. Fahrenheit to -225 degrees Fahrenheit, freezing avoidance measures would be necessary.

        On Earth, you would call up a well driller, who would promptly appear with his Diesel powered drill rig and a truckload of steel casing for lining the drill hole. On completion of the well hole an electric motor powered pump would be mounted either at the surface, or lowered into the water, depending upon the depth of the well hole. Freezing problems, if any, are easily managed.

        To get water on Mars, significant effort and equipment, designed to function in the Martian envi- ronment, would be required. It is conceivable that well drilling equipment could be transported and erected on Mars. Presumably a drilling rig would be electrically powered, the source of energy being fuel cells or nuclear. Casings to line the drill hole could be of carbon composite to save weight and reduce the need for handling equipment. Transporting steel pipe to Mars borders on the unimaginable. An electric motor driven pump and discharge line would then be lowered down the well casing to submerge the pump in the acquifer.

            Running a pipeline from the well to the settlement has its own set of problems, mainly to prevent freezing. Insulation will not be enough, and burying the pipeline could be ineffective. Possibly something could be learned from the utilities management in far north Earth cities like Vladivostok or Fairbanks, Alaska.

          Could children be born and raised in the Martisn environment? The answer is that nobody knows. Without cosmic ray shielding.... probably not. A second open question is what kind of human would be produced, growing up in a gravity field 38% of Earth’s gravity? Is the human body shaped and sized to a significant degree by the strength of Earth’s gravity? How could you know, other than conducting an unthinkable experiment with newborns aboard the International Space Station?

           I could go on, but it is just as well to conclude with these thoughts: I think you can see that there are no serious driving forces for colonizing Mars or even visiting it. Robots are capable of exploring, providing video coverage, sampling, analyzing and transmission of information at an acceptabe cost. With advancements in artificial intelligence, they will be able to make decisions. That is about the most that would be expected of human explorers, at enormous cost for crew accomodations, crew training, ultra large launch vehicles, Mars surface accomodations and exploration vehicles and return rockets......some of it at high risk to human life. The cost could be prohibitive. The problems are nearly insurmountable. There is little visible payoff that cannot be obtained robotically, and success is doubtful, just as many settlements on Earth have failed and had to be abandoned.
       Just think, Trill. Ten European settlements failed in North America before Jamestown! 

PEOPLE AND BORDERS

Author’s note. Trill is a fictional female acquaintance who makes it possible for me to write in what is for me a comfortable style, on a variety of subjects

My Dear Trill,
    Sooner or later, the issue of legal and illegal immigration and migration was bound to come up, wasn’t it? It is quite an interesting subject, and has implications that people have only begun to imagine.There is no stopping it. You can build the highest, impregnable wall  along a nation’s border and people will tunnel under it. In some regions, like the southern border of Europe. the terrain is such that a wall to keep out immigrants is unthinkable.
    There is more to it, however, than the movement of people to find a better life. That has been going on for thousands of years. Earth is beginning to undergo a big change as scientists forecast a warming trend, caused largely by human activity, that correlates with the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide traps heat from the sun, and the consequences are rising Earth temperatures, melting of the polar ice, and significant rise in ocean levels. The predicted rise is many feet, which will inundate large land areas and affect a hundred-sixty million people in twenty countries. 
     There is a word of Greek origin, Diaspora, which in general means movement of bodies of people from one place to another, for any one of a number of reasons. They may be expelled from a region, or, like the wildebeests in the African grasslands, move to where food is more abundant, or, as in the  modern world, because opportunities exist for a better life, because homelands have become uninhabitable, or simply expelled from a region due to religious or other ideological differences.
    Examples of Diaspora over history are the Spartan exile of the Messenians in the third and fourth centuries BC, expulsion of Jews from Judea, African slave trade, settlement of the Americas and Australia, and  more recently to the present, refugees from Vietnam, movement North from Africa into Europe and from Mexico into the United States and migration of Jews from Europe and Asia to Israel.
    Where will one hundred sixty million people go?  If you have a globe handy, southern movement is not likely in large numbers.. Africa and South America taper off  into a limited area. Australia and New Zealand cannot accommodate a large influx of people. But look north and you see large areas that are virtually uninhabited that will become more inviting as the climate warms. Siberia, Canada. Alaska, and Norway, Sweden and Finland comprise about ten per cent of Earth’s land area.
    But will they be welcomed? Will the migrations be preplanned and agreed to by the participants and proceed in an orderly manner or will there be border wars, starvation, panics, massacres at the  border, that have time and again been demonstrated to be typical of hegemonic human behavior?
    Earth is evermore rapidly transitioning into a new era, for better or worse. Considering the age of Earth, it seems unusual and somewhat unsettling to witness huge changes within your own lifetime. It is fascinating and not a mystery as to the causes. Attempts will be made to reverse, or at least slow the process, but the  day-to-day needs and desires of a burgeoning and largely heedless population may well negate all such corrective  efforts.

THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE

     
       I was no older than twelve then, maybe just eleven, a slender stripling who had years to go to reach anything resembling manhood.
      It was a difficult time, during the Great Depression, though we were lucky to be living on a farm. My mother had died two years before,leaving my father with a family of twelve, including a newborn. A brother and a sister were old enough to work in the table factory, where they were paid a dollar an hour. My oldest brother was working his way through college and a sister was married and living in Boston.
    To add to difficulties, our team of horses had aged, and no longer were fit for work. That became obvious when one, and then the other, lagged when pulling a plow or other implement, leaving the heavy pulling to the other. That led, reluctantly, to a decision to call Benson's Wild Animal Farm a few miles down the road, where, unemotionally, they ended up as lion food. My father had been extremely fond of his team of horses.
    But there was still the Fordson tractor, a treacherous, noisy and odiferous machine that nevertheless, through considerable effort, one June day delivered a field ready for planting corn for the silo.
    My father borrowed a horse from a neighbor to pull the corn planter, a dispenser with plow handles that plowed a shallow furrow, dropped seeds and fertilizer into it and covered them up.
    The horse was a huge, fiery eyed, ugly beast, gaunt and aged, that in other days might have been a war horse. He was clearly not too happy about having been offered up to do work. He had enormous hooves that waved around before taking the next step, hooves that hadn't been trimmed or shod in years, grown broad as a wash basin.
    I  remained  home from school to lead the horse in straight lines, row after row, until the field was done. To say I was terrorized is an understatement.  I had to reach high over my head to grasp the halter. Rather than lead the horse in a straight line, it was  an exercise to avoid falling under threatening hooves, and my father was none too happy about the serpentine trails I was leaving, sometimes overlapping the previous row. The situation did not improve, and in fact got worse. I heard loud curses behind me and took them to be meant for me.
    My father finally gave up. “You can go” he said. I fled to the woods in tears, and stayed there the day long. He finished the job the next day, with my brother driving the Fordson tractor. He attributed my failure to youth, and returned with neither rancor nor apology back  to his normally good nature.

CANES vs WALKING STICKS

A chance encounter today with my one time cardiologist at a local restaurant. He is 89. I am 90. I use a walking stick and he uses a cane. From an engineering standpoint, I believe a walking stick is better than a cane. It gives the body something to hang on to. The arm is in tension. With a cane, the arm is in compression and because it is hinged at the elbow, it can buckle.

REPUBLICAN DEBATE

Two Comments on the Debate:

1. I would like to see Carly Fiorina get the nomination, if only to hear them sing at the Republican Convention:
CarlyFiorina Here I Come!

2.  Trump’s disingenuous quality was revealed in bragging that he made a big deal, but fully within the law, when it is likely that the law was changed by big money to accommodate men like him in making big deals.

SEND MONEY

      Nearly every day a telephone call arrives from the Democratic National Committee, begging for money. Were I foolish enough to contribute in that manner instead of directly to those whom I support, the DNC may or may not  support candidates I favor. Specifically, I would rule out spending any money to support Hillary Clinton.
-    Hillary Clinton comes from a gene pool of corrupt politicians and corrupt financiers who,  at the end of the  20th century, set the stage for near-collapse of the US economy in 2008.
    The critical event occurred in late 1999 when Senator Phil Gramm of Texas  inserted a 254 page amendment into a budget bill that Bill Clinton was about to sign.The amendment gutted  the Glass Steagall Act. This law, enacted in 1933, served the country well by preventing bankers from using their customers’ savings to finance risky investments. Mellow and inattentive in the waning hours of his administration, President Clinton signed the bill.
    Phil Gramm did not write the two hundred fifty-four page amendment by himself. One can be certain that it was crafted by experts, bent on pursuing their own agendas,  confident that in the event of failure, the Federal Government (that is,we the people) would bail them out. They wrote the bill and devised a crafty way to get it approved without debate, or even any knowledge of it by most members of Congress. No one in the Media was smart enough to raise a red flag.
     President Bush was happy with Clinton's  action and confounded the public further by reducing taxes on  the wealthy. Topping that, he led the nation into a trillion dollars added indebtedness by conducting two wars on borrowed money.
    Gutting Glass Steagall  opened up the gates of hell, allowing bankers to free-wheel with their customers’ savings, luring them into all kinds of high risk investments. The collapse came before the decade was out, the highlight of which was the Treasury Secretary informing President Bush that too-big-to-fail banks needed 750 billion dollars to remain solvent.
    The President caved,  the ransom was paid, and the American people were stuck with the bill. The financial firms were back in business. No one was prosecuted. No one went to jail. The principals involved collected their huge salaries, and even took home bonuses that year. But individual investors were left high and dry..
    How much is 750 billion dollars? Enough to build a World Trade Center II every fifteen miles from coast to coast across the United States.
    Word is that Senators Sanders and McCain are teaming to get Glass Steagall reinstated. Opposition will be strong. The President has as yet not taken a position, but  action is absolutely necessary if the nation is to prosper without fear of reversion to the oligarchy that ruled during  the 1920’s before the Great Depression.
    I’ll not ever send a nickel to the DNC, nor the RNC either.

EARTH WARMING

Author’s note. Trill is a fictional female acquaintance who makes it possible for me to write in  what is for me a comfortable style, on virtually any subject.


My Dear Trill,

    How did I know that some day you would be asking me about climate change?.After all, the media is full of  self-styled “experts,” mostly global warming deniers, pontificating on the subject, comfortable inside their skins with things just as they are, and confident that Earth will experience climate changes  every few thousand years and there is nothing we can about it. I am not an expert, Trill,  admittedly, but I do have ability to separate  hard scientific data from mere conjecture and am happy to pass on what I know.
    What I do know is that vast changes have taken place ever since humans have sought ways to ease manual labor, increase production of goods, and travel far and wide. The revolution (often called the Industrial Revolution) began rather recently, around 1775, when in England James Watt made improvements to the Newcomen steam engine that  accelerated its application to all kinds of things, from powering the machines in factories, to trains and ships. Long after that development, another engine that burned gasoline and similar fuels was invented, called the Otto cycle after the inventor,  that underlies the operation  of gasoline engines in the millions of cars, buses and trucks that cruise the highways. The Diesel engine was a further development on the gasoline engine. All of this, in addition to stationary power plants for generation of electricity as well as  a development of air travel, led to enormous consumption of fossil fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas. The burning of these fuels produce huge quantities of carbon dioxide.
    In earlier times, natural processes on Earth like plant growth, which consumes carbon dioxide, and absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, were able to consume the carbon dioxide as fast as it was produced. As consumption increased the carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere grew beyond the ability of natural processes to handle it. Carbon dioxide is a heat trapping gas. It hampers the ability of Earth to radiate into space some of the heat gathered from the sun. Methane has similar properties. Sulphur dioxide, on the other hand, shields Earth from the rays of the sun.
    There are people who downplay the the contribution of humans to global warming, arguing without basis that a single volcano emits a quantity of carbon dioxide equal to the output of all the automobiles in the world. The truth is quite different, All the volcanoes in the world , according to the U.S. Geological Survey, emit a total of .26 giga-tons of carbon dioxide in a year, (That’s .26 followed be twelve zeros). In contrast, the automobiles, ships, trains and aircraft emit a total of 30 giga-tons, a hundred twenty times as much.
    Here’s something for you to ponder. Where does all the carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide emitted by volcanoes come from? One theory is that the gases were present when Earth was nothing but a huge gas ball. Then the rocks started to pour in, forming the hard planet with an atmosphere around it. As Earth cooled, fissures and cracks appeared that got filled with gas from the atmosphere and then got sealed in by further crustal movement.  Volcanic eruptions are largely caused but pressures generated when the gas is heated to high temperatures by Earth’s magma.
    Trill, there is no doubt that climate change is upon us, and some think that we have already passed the tipping point and it is beyond the capacity of humans to reverse it. If true, you will be witness to some enormous changes in your lifetime, with the snow caps, icecaps and glaciers  melting, ocean level rising, regionally some very hot weather, violent storms, and entire civilizations moving to safer ground. Your home, given its location, unfortunately will probably be under water.
    These observations will, I hope, help to guide you and place limits  on how and where you plan to spend your days and years on Earth. It will be quite an exciting time. Not bad for the planet. It will simply be in transition to another form. But very sad for most of its occupants. Sea creatures may be the only survivors and we will begin all over again, when the first ones crawled onto the land.