Maxwellport is back

So when I was awaiting a World Cup match, I went through a number of past articles I'd posted here to consider Jensen's many comments in support of anhydrous glass, especially in vacuum. One such elderpoast was this thing about a tether from the Maxwell Mountains to the clouds of Venus.

And then Google (via blogspot) took the thing back into draft with an ugly red eyeball showing the flagdown. Whaaa?

I'll pipe here the good news: Google allowed it back after a modicum of further change. Maybe a matter of half an hour for them to do it. Which is an annoyance but not a disaster.

As to why the flag, er. All the links were internal except one - to ToughSF, and that one is blogspot too. The internal links went to other science pieces here obviously, none of them subject to review. We did have a link to a post with a title referring to what you do in hot water when you want to modulate the level of tea in it. Some use that term for a rather less wholesome activity. A little "edgy" mayhap. Except that the tea post wasn't flagged, itself.

The one change I made (besides whining about the takedown) was "muh Kevlar" which I just made "Kevlar". So I dunno. Seems arbitrary.

It may be the post got to their attention because it was overly link-heavy. This attracts spiders and robots. I am aware that this 'ere blog attracts those, rather than human readers. Which is kind of sad.

Extra cable for extra power

Over the given sidereal month of any eccentric system, any spaceline releases and pulls its cable. Earth/Luna marks this in the megameters: on the Lunar side of L1, 60-to-61.5. Suppose the L1 station isn't pulling back the cable and releasing it; that's a lot of work and at the cable's sheer scale (and thickness!), I doubt the work is needed. So doubts everyone else who is treating this push-and-pull as a rounding-error ... at L1. They haven't considered the Sinus Medii groundbase. There, they must consider... elasticity.

The gravity forces nonequal tension applying mostly to the L1 plateau; but we're likely saving cost, so that the Lunar side of the cable be thinner. Therefore assume constant elongation throughout. L1-to-Luna elongation needs minimum 2.5%, or we have to add surplus cable. Kevlar-brand aramids give us this minimum, as do Zylon and Dyneema. Most mass will cluster the L1 tension plateau. Also - as noted - overdangling Earth GEO, is our strongest material and there we don't care about elasticity. On our side, is where Toray's T1100G.

Lunaside is the problem. T1100G is only 2.2% (I'm further suspicious about Jensen's anhydrous glass). So the 61.5 Mm apogee (tightest) is extended from 60.17 Mm perigee (loosest). Allowing for redundance (e.g. braiding the cable into rope) will mean more excess on the Lunar side - so the extra cable dump on the Moon is a minimum. By Kepler this slacker-week is shorter than apogee week, but - still.

That means at perigee the loose cable has left 170 km on the moon. At 1 cm² cross-section: 1700 cubic meters if melted into a glob; at 1790 kgm^-3 this is 3043 tonnes. Multiply that if braided.

Coil it, box it, unscroll it - what is the base supposed to do with all this? At the highest apogee, is potential-energy. That's the integral mg(h)dh, but this is a humble blog so we'll assume the 170km is negligible compared to 60+Mm as to treat g as a constant. Highschool lab mgh: 3043 kkg x 1.62 x 170000 ≤ 838,042,200 kilojoules.

I feel like for half this month, which is not quite the month of daylight, the drop of this cable is a steady force - which Loonies can harness. (L1 may or may not be harnessing the central elasticity, for its own part.) Pulling up is energy working on... pulling up, but this too can be harnessed - if we warn L1 we're doing that.

On the leadup to the Lunar perigee when only 60 Mm, when that cable is making its largest pile, is when the trip to/from L1 will be shortest. Maybe not always cheapest because Luna's side of energy depends on the 28-and-a-quarter month we see on Earth.

Under that; I want some structure as can funnel the 1700 m³ to some convenient depository away from useful work. We need to place it somehow/-where so we don't knot it and doesn't get METEORED. The depo would be large and/or deep but - we'll discuss that later. Assume the depo is dustfree anyway. (If we're banning lander-rockets, that should help.)

Traffic with L1 can disconnect at the top, thence to go up and down the internals of our structure (given airlocking); or, roll down to the surface.

Aliens and demons

In case you missed it, or like me chose not to watch it, Stephen Spielberg has some goyslop out. M. Jonathan Pageau reviews Disclosure Day on X and yt. I don't like the term "goyslop" but it's hard to see this any other way.

"Modernity" enjoys about the same cachet in present Christendom as "gnosis" enjoyed in Antiquity. Math is math. "The Science" is he gnosis; although, we concede, real human knowledge can progress - as it becomes engineering. "Vox Day" Beale is right on this much, for which this blog honours him by using his term "scientody" to label advances in, say, chemistry and also in Darwinist evolution and in Earth-Moon spaceflight-and-back because screw Beale.

One recent event in Christendom has stricken the demon-eviction community.

Christians believe in demons, inheriting Jewish reactionary tropes as they/we do. The Catholic Church has instituted a bureaucracy around this. And I'm not here to dismiss it: classical Catholic models of possession may well track mental-illness progression, much as Sigmund Freud (a Jew himself) still finds expression.

Every now and again people have noticed that UFO encounters look a lot like the old demon encounters. Andrew Chesnut has traced this finding back to evangelical Christian Protestants nearly contemporary with the first UFO sightings themselves in the 1950s. One radical postevangelical is Richard Carrier who has written several books pondering if Jesus was actually crucified here; or, on one of those higher celestial spheres - like maybe Mars'. The finding has since found listeners inside the Church like Stephen Rossetti - who does exorcisms. Except that he's going to have to do that somewhere other than under a steeple. People are laughing.

Spielberg seems to be going back to a more Jewish view that the angels are out there in the celestial reaches and that they mean us well. By meaning us well, that means having such elder knowledge as may free the gentilic Nations from their error - of Christianity.

I don't see Spielberg as having any such knowledge himself. He simply wants demons as agree with him.

Before the merger

Argued here is a base text of Isaiah 1-33 to which the rest got appended. We can add here that whenever the MT diverges from this part of 1QIsa^a, 'tis almost-always best in that great Isaiah scroll.

One such locus of MT angst was in Isaiah 19:16-25. This is overall a proEgyptian oracle. Isaiah's generation had some motive to support "Egypt".

But Egypt's "dynasty 25" were Kushites. They enjoyed some loyalty in the middle Nile... but this attenuated among their paler coastal coreligionists. Assyria would eventually raise sub-kings from Saïs to push that dynasty back up the river (getting as far as Thebes IIRC). More to the point, the pericope 19:16-25 predicts Judah communities in a heliopolis. That did not happen - nor is it a desire that Hezeqiah in his Assyrian cage cared to happen.

I further find unlikely the Nubians were making promises to resettle Judah exiles as a "Plan B". Recall that the Assyrians had been resettling Israelites before all that. I won't rule out the Nubians had Plan B on the table (to counterbalance their own restive natives); but the prince Taharqa's Plan A was simply to beat the Assyrians so to keep the Jews on-site as a buffer external. In particular why would Taharqa or his propagandists tout, to Yahwists, the city of Aten-Ra (or maybe Amun to him)?

So these verses 16-25 do not belong in Isaiah 19.

Most scholars as a result see a proEgyptian oracle in the Persian time. It could be when Egypt was promising a refuge from Cyrus of Anshan; or, it could be after his son Cambyses took Egypt and was advertising settlements down there. (Perhaps not in that elephantine island Yeb; I understand the Jews came later up there and anyway was more a Khnum spot.)

The one thing I can say is that this oracle entered the text of "real" Isaiah entirely independently of its attachment to Cyrus' pet second Isaiah. Because: the second Isaiah hated Egypt. Cyrus and his heir were perhaps promising an attack on Egypt; or, at the very least, they didn't like Egypt's capacity for mischief. Cyrus' own propaganda had him as the heir to the Assyrians. Which would also make him the rightful overlord over Saïs and the Delta.

Magellan's chain

Short poast today to consider alternatives to Zylon or T1100G. Pearson's crew, in 2004, did not know T1100G but had caught wind of Magellan's "M5". This was a honeycomb-like 3-D polymer that, honestly, kind of sucked, stress-limited at 5.7 GPa where Zylon was rocking 5.8 Gpa.

Dupont bought Magellan the following year and with M5 has done... squat. Turns out M5 is expensive to make.

The issue here seems to be that the Aramid family (Kevlar), and UHMWPE (Dyneema), somewhat max out below where Toray's T1100G lives. T1100G is a carbon fibre and as such can do better. Not as well as theoretical M5, but maybe they'll get a theoretical T1100G+.

For these science-fiction cables on the spaceline through TLL1 however, I wonder if we can make smaller segments of M5 at one time that are linked in a chain. One issue here would be the friction of the links between each other. Also the mass will increase for the same length. On the other hand I can see this being easier to manufacture and for those robo-climbers to grab onto.

So maybe from L1 down to the Lunar surface?

Artsutanov's elevator

Jerome Pearson, who left us January 2021, proposed a "Lunar Space Elevator"; duplicating work Yuri Artsutanov (m. 2019) had already done ~1960. The Spaceline, if I read this right, is a subset of the LSE. Pearson's scheme is best-known to readers of Arthur Clarke's Fountains of Paradise (1979).

These two physicists upon discovering they'd crossed streams agreed to meet in person, I hear, 2006. They accepted dual authorship: which was a mighty fine thing for Artsutanov to permit, and for Pearson to accept. Would that Russians and Americans got along so well today!

Anyway Pearson got with a few other doodz to sum-up his (part of the) scheme in a 2004 paper (pdf) and a Powerpoint presentation (pdf). It proposes more elevators from the L1 switching-station (which spaceline allows to make the main lunar hab) to the poles - starting with the south, where there's water.

The paper suggests an additional elevator through to TLL2 and... beyond. Nobody much seems to have calculated the length of this far tether toward, next-up, the ultra-high orbits and full STL2. Nor the tether's shape; I assume it bends. It might not need as much mass as the spaceline.

Also here are ribbon-climbers with some friction against the cable(s). They didn't consider a pulley-system. I might prefer pulley(s) over a long continuous cable which, as the 2004 paper notes, is vulnerable to meteors. Near the surface this must include dust kicked off from the low-grav lunar surface by high-energy activities there, which may even involve aluminum-dust rockets.

Pearson - per the paper - gets extra credit for understanding Jacobi's keyhole. Basically once you've paid your electric toll to get Lunar materiel to L1, the delta-V to get it to any other Earth or Lunar orbit - or even L2 - is zero. I mean, L1 wants a little oompf to push it off (hell, you can use spinlaunch here) and then reinsert it into your new orbit; but all that is up to you. L1 will take a hit to get stuff over the humps to L4 or L5 (or indeed STL4/5); such that people over there may just want Lunar rocks yeeted over there directly, or to grab meteor rubble.

One assumption was an elasticity exceeding allowance for eccentricity. To whit: no less than 2.5%. UPDATE 6/16: What to do with 2.2%.

The Christians threw away bad books

Richard Carrier is casting shade at Christians, as he does; this time for not preserving books as weren't theirs.

First of all, nobody should be commanded to do work he doesn't want to do. Okay, amend that: not without payment. If Christianity proved more appealing to the Roman citizenry (since Caracalla, most subjects were citizens) then that is a problem with Christianity's alternatives at the time. Maybe they just weren't that good!

... and maybe their books weren't that good, either. All those "alternative" Christianities that have been dug up here-an'-there really weren't better than what was good enough for Paul and Silas. Among the most-formidable was the religion of Science! or, as they called it, Gnosis. These depended upon geocentric celestial spheres - as Carrier is well aware. He may well also be aware that most of this stuff was done to feed the Astrology grift. How much of that did later generations need? or of alchemy?

Indeed somewhere around there we did, perhaps, need to keep more books on mathematics. I'd say medicine too but as Tannous has reported a lot of that did get translated into Syriac-Aramaic, by... Christians. ctrl-F "Syria" and I come up with one "Syrian" (sic) linguistic reference and that's related to Callimachus. That is: too early for Syriac.

A contrafactual where the old classical culture doesn't get this sharp break is, I suppose, possible. But I've already pointed out the case of Islam, which likewise pruned away Natural History. To replace it with some real mathematics.

Also to be added is that the fate of lost literature was never uncommon before the Printing Press. Xanthos wrote a history of Lydia [UPDATE 6/12: generally here]. The Lydian language was then lost. So much for the Lydian library. Same with the Etruscans'. The Canaanites wrote reams and reams of literature, from Sidon to Carthage. Only Jews cared to keep that language alive; it's not like the pagan Romans were bothering to translate much of that (although it turns out, they did; an agricultural manual survives). Egypt? Nah brah. "Manetho" (that is, Ptolemy of Mendes) did try, for history, but the other works - the proverbs, the novels - got buried. If Carrier isn't blaming pagan Greeks and Romans for neglecting all the above, and why shouldn't they, because they were... Greeks and Romans; why blame the Christians, for not being pagans?

To sum up, Carrier is insinuating a charge against Christianity which is more a charge against the breakdown of law and health in the Mediterranean, which pushed intellectual activity into the Frankish and Syrian hinterlands. Where, I'll posit, they did the best they could. Not despite being Christian but because of it.