VEL13:10:8 isn't a bus station

For giggles I ran the maths on station VEL13:10:8, on cyclers it might run from Venus, to Earth, and to Mars.

Laplacians didn't bother with cyclers in the Jovian planets, and the same seems to hold here. Venus to this station (approximating nine Venus years to two synods, but I suppose I could try 13-to-1) incurred a nasty offset of 13.49° on return; and there just weren't cyclers from the station to Earth (five orbits to one synod). Permacyclers tend to assume higher-order resonances between planets, like Earth:Mars; even Venus:Earth was a bit of a stretch.

The station kind of is a cycler, being the Venus-Earth Hohmann without the "transfer" part. Everything here is one-way; if someone is stuck here, s/he's there until the next Hohmann window out.

So: how's the cycling from the station to Mars?

I got 7 interior orbits to 4 synods. 2.04° internal offset is twice Earth-Mars-Earth's but arguably not so bad with a shorter orbital circle. Problem here was the angle: the Aldrin alone has insane angles to both planets and is a fryby in order to get to Mars in the first place. Four synods does offer wiggle-room for permacycles but it turned out, not enough.

Neptune's tongue

An old theory from 1972 is that those -ssa suffixes in Greek are non-IndoEuropean; but "preGreek" like Basque is preCastilian. Alternatively they could be from the Luwian adjectival suffix. In the late 2000s, one Robert Beekes revived 1972 in attempts to debooonk the Luwianism. In 2010 Robert Beekes with Lucien van Beek got published an Etymological Dictionary of Greek through Brill, no less. This hypothesis has, via a map, trickled over to the Turtle: in keeping with perturbant planet Neptune, famous thalassa came from *talakya. So: let's read modern reactions to the Beekses.

Stella Merlin has done a dive into the Dictionary and finds several examples of words as can be explained by means other than loans from a single preGreek substrate. Some might be IndoEuropean, like Greek, but variously distorted by other IndoEuropean languages (like Phrygian) or close-enough (Lydian or Luwian).

I don't know that Brill made the right call in publishing so strident an argument as the Beekses'. Merlin seems right.

The poisonous Hettangian

As we work our way back through extinction-cycles, before Chicxulub wasn't P/T - but T/J. P/T gets the press; to solve that mystery, we should get better data on later events (so better-preserved). Tonight let's look at the Triassic's closing bracket.

Triassic's last good epoch is called "Rhaetian". The post T/J epoch is called "Hettangian"; the Jurassic-proper gets going in the next epoch the "Sinemurian".

Bas van de Schootbrugge at Utrecht University is pointing to mercury (Hg) in Hettangian plants (Copenhagen, Aarhus, and Tianjin are also represented; but ScienceDaily pointed me to Utrecht). Northern Germany was then a coastal lagoon. It was full of... ferns, sucking up the carbon-dioxide of which the Hettangian had much. We read that ferns are a colonising plant, like conifers; they take root first in disturbed and mildly toxic soil. I suppose they always were; when vascular plants first took to the land, the soil there wasn't much better than it was under the Proterozoic (yaaayyy lichens).

First up, the T/J Hettangian rocked this planet back to the Proterozoic - again. Even the conifers weren't doing well. Of especial interest to the researchers is that the ferns were mutated. Something was trying to kill them too and it certainly wasn't CO₂. That something was the Mad Hatter.

The paper pins the toxic Hettangian to a ~1.2My span, in which they fit four pulses of quicksilver enrichment with a fifth after that (+1.62My?). The pulses match the 405ky eccentricity-cycle (thereby itself verified for the late Triassic). The paper notes that the isotopes of new mercury taper out such that they waver over counting the expected fifth pulse in the Hettangian (they'd extend the bad times to 2My!). It concludes that these pulses, therefore, are simply pulses of atmospheric intake, not additional spewings of poison.

The initial dose must have injected a megayear's supply of horror into Triassic air. It is certainly volcanic.

So yeah: let's not use mercury in low-orbit plz.

Vera Rubin

Rock hunters have been scouting various dots in old photographs to ascertain where they are and where they're headed. They got quite the haul: 27,500 of the things.

Only a hundred of these are Earth-crossing. Most seem to be Jove-trojans out in SJL4 and '5; or just asteroid-belt floaters. Maybe "Lucy" can look at some of the new small trojans on its flies-by.

More exciting to me are the new KBOs. As their orbits get finetuned, that's more of the extreme-inclination or chaotic iceballs Brown and Batygin (and Nesvorný) can use for pinning down Planet Nine. The planned Vera Rubin Observatory should cover most of that part of the sky; finding at least smaller and dimmer KBOs and maybe even this elusive planet itself.

Ω Centauri

As long as I'm looking at games, let's check Exodus. Its backstory anyway since the game's not playable yet: ... humanity was forced to abandon a dying Earth. Taking to the stars in massive ark ships, we found a habitable galaxy, in Centauri. Here, we are the underdogs, struggling for survival in a cold and hostile galaxy. The prose... needs work.

Timeline plots 2,200 AD (sic) for the exodus from Earth on ark-ships. Nice to see we're still Christian! (But by the term "Exodus" I suppose we'd have to be.) Off we go for 16,000 light years to this "galaxy" in Centaurus (not -i; -i is the genitive). Whuuu? That looks... too close; albeit, yes, far beyond the bulk of Centaurus' nebulae and stars.

Checking up elsewhere, I find Omega Centauri at around the appropriate distance. This is a cluster as perhaps was a galaxy. Our Milky Way ate it, and ejected bits of it - like nearby Kapteyn's Star, which got flung on our direction. Also ejected might be its blackhole but who knows. In 2012 Ian Douglas wrote Singularity about this semidigested exgalaxy.

More: the dating (18,000 AD) looks like we got to this place at lightspeed. Everyone on those ships only experiences a year or decade in all that time. These are not Generation Ships. More to the point is that the dating looks like an affectation, basically. Who's to talk to, back on Earth?

I don't argue that arkships are needed. I assume plenty of space colonies in the Belt and maybe Mars. But space life isn't for every human. If there's a coming disaster on Earth there might not exist the infrastructure to shove them all on Venus cloudcities and Callisto iglooes at once. If governments (maybe including some Belter governments) and corporations (absolutely including spacers) have a plan to get many millions off this system and into The Big Ω, then hey - go for it. Who knows, maybe other colonists have already fanned out to TRAPPIST-1 et al.

At present I've no plan to play any game from these tools, so - that's about all the posting I plan to do on it. The authors should thank me.

Where Z?

Jason Colavito a month ago took some time off his busy schedule chasing aliens and Tucker Carlson around the internet, and posted something more-serious. No, not about James Dean this time; I mean Colonel Percy Fawcett's "city of Z".

I hasten to remind my audience, and maybe Colavito's audience, that the Amazon highlands, abutting the Huari and then Inca imperia, actually... has lost cities. We're finding them all over the place. Upano was reported to us only three months ago. But where's "Z"? Z was supposed to be in the "Thick Bush" province, which is what Brasil says it is. That's downstream and east of Casarabe, let alone Upano.

Colavito argues, at least transmits an argument: (1) that MS 512 "sexed up" a more-sober geographic work and (2) that Fawcett misread MS 512, so lost himself up the jungle. That earlier work referred to Bahia not the Mato Grosso. Bahia, of course, means bay; on the eastern coast.

This is no cidade perdida. It is, rather, a natural formation. Sometimes these things happen; like those hexagonal rocks in the Giant's Causeway, or that Garden of the Gods over in Colorado Springs. The Tupi-speaking locals may well have considered the rocks to be built by some alien race themselves; pictographs (itacoatiara) are painted all over it. For them, Colavito reads inscrição enigmática as an unfortunate interpretation, like so many canali on Mars.

I remain unsure the enigmata of those inscriçãoes, late or early, have themselves been figured. Maybe OldEuropeanCulture blog will have-at-it.

All that said, the movie claimed that Fawcett had found, wherever he got up to, genuine artifacts, beyond the ken of the Fierce People of the forest, and quite different from Tupi-ware. Imports down from Casarabe, would be my thought.

And then we get that hoary shipmate's-tale of those cities of Hy-Brasil. An earlier post pondered the Porcupine Bank; I was also pondering if some Basque or Lisbonite (straying further than the Muslims) found the ruins on (say) Cozumel. Now I must ask, if such a sailor traipsed further south, into that Brasilian Bay, and returned back...?

Free returns

Let's hit up The New World on Mars some more. Chapter 3, on how to get there.

How To Live On Mars proferred two zero-energy transfers (plus the "nukey ride" - maybe NERVA, maybe the molten-salt flying Chernobyl, doesn't matter). The two transfers were: the "stinky cycler", and "riding the freight" that is, Hohmann. New World likewise doesn't care to shave traveltime with extra Starships much less nukes.

New World's "six-month" journey corresponds to the 180-plus days of InSight. That's the (semi)Hohmann; that's the freight train. This will return to Earth's 1 AU orbit, yes. But it does not return to Earth. Earth is going to be elsewhere. Once the freight is distributed, whatever is left (like shielding and spent Starships) is going to end up in some fifteenth of an Earth orbit. This route is, I vaguely recall, the VISIT trajectory.

Aldrin's free-return as actually shows up near Earth is not the six-month halfway Hohmann. Aldrin actually takes less time to (flyby) Mars: 146 days per Hop David so five months. Although, if an Apollo-13 is happening, it's quite a bit longer to get to its own aphelion and then all the way back to perihelion which is Earth(ish). Other "cyclers" are possible, some perhaps worthy of a permanent back-and-forth; Zubrin was possibly thinking of these in 2008.

Right now, Zubrin is confusing six-month halfHohmann, which is one-way freight; with the five-month Aldrin, which I deem best for passengers in case of disaster. Thus retarding his latest book a step behind where he was, in 2008; several steps - a giant leap, if you will - behind Gurrea in 2022. (I'm tempted to importune Zubrin for a free return... of his book. He's wrong on clothing as noted. On immigration too.)

In this spirit of 2008 reminder, recall that the five-month Aldrin as a subset of "cycler" requires more oomph to get started, and needs extra propellant - and shuttle - at the destination to inject those passengers into Martian orbit. Plus: once back at Earth, Earth needs some way to slow all the returned material so to catch it all. Zubrin needs maths on all these.

Alternatively: Zubrin needs infrastructure, like a base on Deimos as can do rescue and cargo-transfer. Frankly he needs this anyway. Asteroid and lunar bases are further upstream of necessary tech, before settling Mars. And once we have asteroid bases what do we still need Mars for? Prison?