Avi Loeb says, reproduce deez

Abraham Loeb has acquired some notoriety as an interstellar-space expert. Last Tuesday Dr Loeb formally displayed his great balls of an extrasolar metallic meteor. Five of 'em.

I have observed 48 Hour Rule, before this poast. This blog has been burned by bad meteor claims before. I'd rather have waited until Colavito's take but, well, here we are.

Of the 57 millimeter-wide "spherules" (out of 722) which Loeb has examined, 52 might be volcanic, that is from Earth. But five of them have beryllium which tends to be made from other nuclei getting whacked by cosmic rays - the word is "spallated". As to those nuclei left over, a lot of it is uranium and lanthanum. This stuff isn't common on Earth's crust, nor any crust. But the alloy is, apparently, strong enough to survive a 45 km/s pounding through our atmosphere.

Either it came from some lavaworld's crust or else from a starship - says Avi Loeb. Sigh.

Okay - I am not all-on-board with Loeb. But. Loeb did have the gumption to raise $1.5 million to trawl the ocean under 2 km. If his detractors don't like it, they should have got out there earlier... or for that matter they can go now. Also: it wasn't Loeb who said this meteor was likely extraterrestrial, but NASA which clocked this thing at the Borisov-tier speed it came in by - which was 60 km/s against galactic-standard (and not being ecliptic but then, that is also true of comets).

Loeb is selling a book - Interstellar - and since he's obviously-interested, other researchers had better check his work. There are 722-57 spherules left. Have at it, lab-bros.

UPDATE 9/3: Steve Desch doesn't want to believe.

Proof by superior numbers

I wasn't aware that scientody was done by collecting signatures; but here's Ed Driscoll, boomerposter extraordinaire, to talk climate. 1609 scientists! Wow.

This reminds me of nothing so much as an oft-laundered collection of almost a thousand... intelligent-design advocates. Which I can no-longer find on Canada Free Press interestingly...

The problem with collecting many signatures, rather than relaying a superior argument, is that you have thereby conceded the democratic principle. If you are an academic conservative, you are getting outvoted. Which, by your own logic, proves you wrong.

Same goes for vaccines, among epidemiologists and just plain doctors. Similar goes for masks, although here we might just be stymied by passive-aggressives who refuse them. (Disclosure: in both cases, what applies in 2023 isn't what applied in 2020; I intend to follow Cerno in not bothering with either anymore. I am however warning against using similar losing tactics in this argument as well.)

Juno and Eunomia

Let's investigate Juno, the third-discovered and the brightest of the first four. Juno semimajors 2.67 AU, a little closer-in than Pallas especially at perihelion 2 AU. But it is much smaller than the others noted at the time. We saw it as early as we did because, at 0.238 albedo, it's twice as bright as our Moon. It's probably stony. Stony rocks are what we get in the sub-Earth realm, like Atira. 15 Eunomia is slightly larger but darker and further: 2.644 AU semimajor, innermost 2.15 AU. We'll check up on that too.

From 2 AU, Juno and maybe Eunomia could deliver chondrites (not carbonaceous!) to Earth.

I'd expect these two to be more like Pallas than like Vesta. Vesta has several excuses: a differentiated body, formed near Mars, been hit very hard by other rocks. Any of that could burn off its soot and boil its ice. Juno and Eunomia be more difficult to explain. Eunomia in particular is resonant with Mars so like Hygiea and Pallas on the other side. More like Hygiea, Eunomia doesn't have a Ceres to protect it. Eunomia isn't long for where it is - and, conversely, shouldn't have been there long.

I think these formed below 2 AU almost where Mars is at, certainly below Vesta. I think close-passes with Vesta might have pulled them out (and Vesta in), followed by the arrival of Ceres and formation of the Ceres-Pallas duet.

Pallas

On topic of 10 Hygiea's origin, let's ponder other rocks. Vesta's probably always been there; Ceres like Hygiea is an interloper. So: 2 Pallas.

2 Pallas is about Vesta's size but, since we've sent an orbiter around Vesta, we now can constrain that one at least. 2 Pallas is actually slightly smaller and 79% the mass. It shares its orbit with Ceres excepting its monstrous inclination. Pallas like Ceres are 18:7 with Jupiter so chaotic - especially if we add other major planets.

Problem: Pallas (unlike Ceres) looks like it belongs here. It is carbonaceous, "B" subtype (for "blue"). At 2.77 AU we do seem to be in the sooty layer, outside Vesta's stony origins.

I suggest that Ceres, muscling into Pallas's near-turf, forced Pallas into its orbit such that they'll never crash. Pallas may have formed (slightly) inside where it is now, lending momentum to Ceres. Or maybe Pallas formed outside but crashed into something else, dragging down its semimajor. Anyway now they are protecting each other from the secular forces of the other planets.

When resonance isn't our friend

Having peeked at 10 Hygiea I was pondering what makes an orbit chaotic. Turns out: same as what makes Io-Europa-Ganymede stable. It's our buddy the four-body problem - in the asteroids' case, the Sun anchors the system and the two outside bodies are Jupiter and Saturn. Thank the Astronomical Journal for freeing-up Nesvorný-Morbidelli. This was observed at 490 Veritas, which looked to be suffering "secular" drift.

σ = mJλJ + mSλS + mλ + pJϖJ + pSϖS + pϖ

Jupiter and Saturn are not in resonance themselves (anymore); so, the secular angle evolves. For Asteroid 490, thus:

σ = 5JλJ - 2SλS - 2λ - ϖ

Asteroid 490 is 5:2:2. Asteroid 10 is 8:4:3.

MARS 8/30: Saturn isn't alone. 7 Iris and 15 Eunomia look bad. So does Pallas. I'll get to them tonight.

The red hand and the Black Hand

Gavrilo Princip, like John Booth, was part of a political assassination-conspiracy, to oppose imperial interests on behalf of a racial interest. It happens, for the fin-de-siecle Balkans, that a similar conspiracy existed within an interested government. That government was Servia's (sic), and its conspiracy called itself "Unification or Death", led by one Dragutin "Apis" Dimitrijević. History remembers it as The Black Hand.

However it might be that the Black Hand's conspiracy aimed elsewhere than at Austria's government. This is a theme of modern Serbian revisionism; most-prominently John Zametica's Folly and Malice. Mark Cornwall wrote a fairly-detrimental review.

Zametica and Cornwall can read the documents; I cannot. All I can really do is to point to others. In that respect, Cornwall says that Zametica got ahead of his, er, -ski's. (Sorry.) If the book was reframed as a take on what the Black Hand was actually conspiring to do, the book would have worked.

What was the Black Hand doing? Frankly, they were Hezbollah. They were a wicked band of deepstaters who were trying to murder their way into power in Serbia. Zametica's point: not in Bosnia. There'd be time for that eventually; but in the meantime, Apis wasn't sure that killing this particular Austrian noble would end up well for Serbs' interest. We may read one relevant paper here; there exists also Zametica's review of Miller-Melamed's Misfire.

Zametica thought that Young Bosnia's real core was in Croatia.

Where Cornwall parts ways is that when you're running a conspiracy of evil men, some evil men are going to do evil outside your scope. Bosnia offered an opportunity to git money, through arms-trading across the border. One brother Serb to another; to hell with orders.

So maybe the Black Hand wasn't red-handed with Habsburg blood, but it seems either way those hands weren't clean.

Womb transplants are ethical

The Grauniad is living up to its well-earned reputation in being wrong again, this time on womb-transplants.

I repeat: natalism is good, even if Church Fathers themselves dislike it. It may be that a woman cannot conceive due to ovarian problems - or simply running out of eggs, as all women will. If the rest of her plumbing is in good order, I see no problem in passing on said plumbing to someone who cannot conceive due to hysteric / uterine problemata. (Depending upon your medical-language of choice. My Syriac is failing me right now.)

I mean, just don't export these organs to biological men. That's some Ed Gein / Mark Udall creepiness. Don't be Ed Gein.

The chaotic-rotation planet

They're still working on TRAPPIST 1; b and c being known (now) and d being skippable. b,c,d are presumed in 1:1 that is Tidal Lock; hence why they're airless, like Prox-b. Gilster a few days ago flagged two papers on spin-orbit resonance. Perhaps e and f might not be in Tidal Lock.

I must point out the effect of an exomoon - if it be large-enough, like 1+% the planetary mass (I'm unconcerned here with this moon's own habitability). We are reminded that these blighters can stabilise a planet's rotation. b,c,d are too close to each other and too resonant to sport a moon. My hopes are dim for e [REASON 12/1 this system looks like it did at formation, no chaos no Theia]... but I wonder about outermost f.

If a heavy moon be rare, at least for TRAPPIST's tightly-bound planets, then e and maybe f could have chaotic rotation. Sometimes they're locked; sometimes they're Mercurylikes. Sometimes they flip around. This jerking-around of the rotation will keep the star from streaming off the planets' atmosphere.

They might, even so, be nasty places for life to evolve and stay evolved. The higher-optical freqs generally are too low for chlorophyll. So, er. Purple world?

Jovinian was right

The blogger Zwinglius likes to praise mine own saint Jerome. I expect Jerome would think very little of Zwinglius' own blog. Anyway here's one where Jerome is his usual acerbic self - here, against one Jovinian.

In this case Zwinglius, as a liberal Protestant, would likely prefer Jovinian. I know I do.

Jovinian is one of those thinkers whose works and thoughts are preserved only from what their enemies cited of them. The classic(al) example is Celsus, who survives through Origen, Origen being a fairminded "fisker" as these things went. The last-word on Jovinian was from Jerome, whose thought on Perpetual Virginity became dominant and Jovinian thereby "discredited".

It turns out that Jovinian off-and-on has been revived by Protestants, seeking means around Latin Catholic dogmata. As to whether Jovinian deserves this revival, here follow his five-theses per newadvent =

1. That a virgin is no better as such than a wife in the sight of God.
2. Abstinence is no better than a thankful partaking of food.
3. A person baptized with the Spirit as well as with water cannot sin.
4. All sins are equal.
5. There is but one grade of punishment and one of reward in the future state.

I'll start with the third. This looks Muhammadan. Every Jew is baptised at the miqveh. For Jews and for Christians and for Veggie Tales, Jonah then had the Spirit and finally - delivering the Spirit to the sinners of Nineveh - sinned. Score that one for Jerome.

All sins are inequal, of course - but... do we in our own worlds know in our own hearts which of our sins caused the most damage? This can sometimes only be known years in advance. Say someone gets drunk, lies about some girl and then commits an assault against some guy. The violent assault is a crime, for which the man is arrested. But the latter victim shrugs off the bruises and carries on, especially since the Law has justly avenged his injury, so he lives his own life thereafter in peace. The former victim - where does she go to get her reputation back? It follows that although sins might be inequal, in our eyes and in G-d's; G-d alone knows which sins those be. We would be better off treating the one sin on par with the other. Jovinian probably gets this one on points.

The last comment leads against Purgatory... or does it? We might all (except Mary) taste punishment, until we've accepted what G-d requires to earn our reward. Jovinian's own thought might not have matured. Or Jerome might not have been fair to Jovinian.

Moving on to the first, I'll lay out my cards: Jovinian was right, and Jerome was he who was operating from a stance of immaturity. Infertility is evil in of itself, which if voluntary makes it a sin by definition.

Jerome tries to get around this Tatianism by comparing the "holy virgin" (an oxymoron) to gold where the virtuous wife or husband is silver. A house will not be made of pure gold; there is a place for silver, or iron and concrete - even straw (praise Christ Jerome did not include lead). Here all work together. I suppose this goes to Jerome's last couple points, that the Judgement will assign rank.

There are points about which sin turns out to have incidental effects or longlasting effects, which we might debate; but there is no debate - or should be no debate - about whether natalism itself be voluntary. G-d Himself told Noah and his family to be fruitful and to multiply. Jerome had better pray there be no ranks in the next world because his rank could well fall behind Jovinian's. Zwinglius', by my reading, has the worst-of-both-worlds here.

Jabbar al-Malhama

The Quran at the doxology ending sura 59 acclaims God Alone as "al-Jabbâr". Q. 5:22 looks upon the Canaanites as a jabbâr people. The text elsewhere castigates the folk of 'Âd for following every jabbâr Q. 11:59, 26:130. Q. 14:15 and 40:35 (in parallel with sura 59) look back upon jabbârûn before and including Pharaoh. One of Israel accuses Moses of playing the jabbâr Q. 28:19, in 19:14 John is not one, and in 19:32 Jesus denies he is one. The end of sura 50 avers that its qârî is not such a hero(?) over the people.

Meanwhile I see that TheTorah.com is dumping upon us a heap of Emmanuel Tov commentary, including some textual scuffing around Song at the Sea (which I remember as "of the Sea").

In the MT, and presumably in the mouths of Miriam and Moses themselves, YHWH is a man of war (ish malhama). Elsewhere Psalm 24 prefers to hail YHWH a gabur malhama. That reading backwashed into the Samaritan Pentateuch. It is also in the Aramaic Targum and the Syriac, here as emphatic: the gêvra, the ganbura (w-QRBTN' for the song and the psalm both which is, yes, Biblical Aramaic). I find the "גבור המלחמה" also in the apocalyptic War Scroll although the text is a bit corrupt here.

Tov flags Targum's "Samaritan" switch from "man" to "jabbâr" unusual inasmuch as Targum prefers MT; personally I disagree, and consider the Samaritan as inlining midrash into the text itself, as Targum did perhaps-independently. Psalm 24 exists to bind the Psalter's first book (Ps. 3-41), and may be read as an update or even critique to the Song of the Sea.

I have not found Exodus 15 in the Palaestinian-dialect. It went agley from Lewis and Gibson's famous Lectionary. Their supplement reprinted Schulthess, "Christlich-palästinische Fragmente", ZDMG 56, 253-4 (1902) - fragment "IV" for Job; and H. Duensing, Christlich-palästinisch-aramäische Texte (1906) fragment "IX" for Joel, Acts, Romans, and Ephesians along with some Isaiah. Duensing had meanwhile found another MS, of 72 leaves, the writing of which I consider to be Georgian, written from beginning to end on Palestinian texts of the most varied content; which "VII" starts Exodus at 15:7. Christa Kessler (2016) informs us this is the Vatican, sir. (sic) 623 and 627 but, I must report, she also claimed that Exodus 15:1-5 was in the Supplement which it is not. I don't find Exodus 15 in Lewis' Rescript either. As of 2016 Greek "New Finds" "NF_MG 32" claiming 14:24–15:9 was unpublished; M. Black, A Christian Palestinian Horologion was published in 1954 so unavailable to me. Anyway CPA's Torah and Psalter are generally considered a translation from the post-Lucian Septuagint with some Syriac inwash, which may or may not be of use to us.

In Arabic we will be reading much of the [Last] Malhama in apocalyptic: vide Suliman Bashear, "Apocalyptic and Other Materials" ed. JRAS 3.1.2 1991; 173-207. From Hebrew, gabur malhama (especially per 1QM) looks prime to be calqued into Arabic as the Jabbar al-Malhama. If by an Aramaic intermediary, it is not Syriac. This term in full isn't in our Quran, I must note.

The Psalter is possible... but the Quran leads toward a Moses context, as foreshadowed in 'Âd. I cannot rule out the Song of the Sea in an ancient Christian Arabic lectionary.

India is a lunar nation (for a fortnight)

Russia still has a LEO presence but no longer can get to the Moon. India, by contrast, has landed Chandrayaan-3. This is now the lander's mission, called Vikram.

I was holding off on comments-n'-gloats until now because space is haahd, including for India hence why this mission is #3. Now I'll get into what India has accomplished for our world. It's not just an also-ran! (Like the USA when it launched the second satellite into orbit . . .)

The site is 69.367621°S x 32.348126°E. That's the closest to a Lunar pole any Earther's ever landed (- and survived, sorry Pooty). The true polar-circles (more-exactly the shallow cups) are the 80s°S; sunlight is so consistently-horizontal here, especially south where there's a basin, that hydrates survive.

As Zim points out, the lander Vikram hasn't the juice to be a longterm base for rover Pragyan. This is a daylight mission only. The 80s°S should get permadaylight with a high antenna, but not 70°S.

To get there took India some forty days. The trajectory took repeated sweeps of high orbits over Earth. That means they didn't bother with thrust. This opened up a high-ISP manoeuvre. Tsiolkovsky allows to limit the propellant by firing out that exhaust, hotter.

I must, however, worry about shielding. So I recommend this for cargo-runs only and not for humans. I further would prefer that craft start from some midrange orbit, like with fuel-stations.

The Philistine ark

Gary Rendsburg posts about ἅπαξ in Hebrew. The Greek word means "once" and is usually applied to once-spoken words. Like, in the Biblical Noah story, to גֹפֶר-wood.

I never had clue-one about what "gopherwood" meant. I figured you needed a nine-iron for those blighters. Maybe bronze . . .

For Rendsburg, the Torah would do what modern poets and rhetoricians do, whenever we're looking for some wordplay: reach for a thesaurus. In this case, the Genesis 6:14 context (vv. 9-22 is Priestly) demands a ship worthy of the highest seas in time and space. For Canaanites, and Torah is in a Canaanite language, these were assembled from conifers, like pine and (mostly) cedar. But at a pinch Canaan was aware also of cypress and oh lookie גֹפֶר looks a lot like kuprissos whence we Latins get that name.

Torah mostly already had a word for cypress. It was בְּרוֹשׁ. Also I had the impression the Flood story was at base an Iraqi one with a coracle as wouldn't need Mediterranean wood. The Priest, it seems, was Western.

So here, P was using perhaps a loanword. Of interest is that, for Greeks, kuprissos is also a loan: the word is not Indoeuropean, obviously, but more-exactly has that -issos suffix noted of many non-Greek words in the lexicon. Smells like Knossos, or Parnassos, or freakin' Tarhuntassa.

That KPR root will recur in the Classical names for Cyprus (originally Alasiya) and for Copper (originally Khalkos). Copper and cypress will both be found on Cyprus but I do not think exclusively so.

I'm thinking that here, P took a word from the Philistines.

P inherited a legend but, for whatever reason, wanted to relocate it to the west, and to make it bigger, which meant using the finest wood. That finest wood - in P's day - was imported. The closest ports were on the Gaza-Ashkelon coast. The Philistines, in turn, might not have been on the best terms with Egypt and their Lebanese cedar-suppliers. They had, instead, Cyprus: their shipwrights worked with cypress.

10 Hygiea

On looking at 10 Hygieaiaeiea - its orthography is more art than science - I found a couple facts of some interest (to me). One is that, at the 3.14 AU semimajor it is at, it's unstable. Jupiter and Saturn are pulling its orbit to cross Kirkwood's 2:1 gap at 3.279 AU. There's a Lyapunov ("Lhapunov" in Portuguese, I guess) exponent which, flipped, offers a time-value, here thirty millennia (assuming its aphelion hasn't crashed a Hilda or something). After that, even Newton can't tell you.

[SOURCE 8/30: Nesvorný-Morbidelli.]

Which begs the question how 10 H got down here in the first place. It's of a piece with other Ceroids from past Jupiter. More, it shares its orbit with so many other icy sootballs, that Wikipedia thinks it got struck by something. Some of those sootballs will be accidental coörbitals - icy sootballs don't melt at 3.14 AU and some look too large to be divots - but not all. I should add the suspicions that 10-H is orbiting Uranically, on its side and backward.

How long ago was 10-H hit... and where? I find a few models of Jupiter and Saturn being nonresonant as of 2020. Notwithstanding Velikovsky this didn't happen yesterday. The asteroids if truly of 10-H origin would have separated two billion years ago(!). That, I think, constrains when Ceres arrived since Ceres is interior to 10-H. The tacking of Jupiter and Saturn would have ended long before then but, still, two gigayears is a long time.

One-way to Atira

Earlier I dismissed Atíra from most Ecliptic uses, which I followed by tagging it for a Venus supply. Here in this trilogy-making post, we'll consider how to get there in the first place.

The main problem I had was the inclination relative to Earth+Luna: 25.618°. Earth is already the lowest-inclination relative to everyone else but 25.618° is extreme for the major and minor planet[oid]s, also; I have to dig to Pallas' 34.83° before I find anything higher.

But... suppose when Atira hits aphelion 0.983 AU, it is also near-directly above the North Pole. Say: Ellesmere or New George or Greenland or Svalbard. Could bargain down to Baffin or New Zemlya. Later, maybe the Lunar north. That puts the Orion pulse-rocket into play.

Getting back to Earth would be a pain ... for Atira. Orions don't do well with air, nor with ices I daresay (we may allow our Moon again). But Atira exists to give up its mass to a Venus orbit. It is from that orbit, a manageable 3.39°, this crew returns to Earth - should they wish to.

BACKDATE 8/23. Earlier I'd slated something about foodproduction for this Sunny Day but I elected to rewrite this instead.

Weighing dumbbells

Jensen's minimum mass was Bennu, a C type of 73.3e+9 kg. Janhunen had figured 89000 tonnes which is slightly over a thousandth that, 89e+6 kg. Janhunen would have 78e+6 kg of that as asteroidal. Were Jensen and Janhunen competing as North Baltic weightlifters, Jensen is in the heavyweight class (aiming for Atira!) and Janhunen is decidedly welter'. Since Jensen didn't look at Janhunen's scheme, I'll volunteer this blog for it.

The welterweight advantage is, obviously, the choice of material. There are simply that many more small rubblepile asteroids than large ones. So Janhunen is spoilt for choice as to starting-distance. Once there his dumbbell is easier to budge from one orbit to the next. And Earthlings don't worry so much about impacts. They'll let him work with his 89e+6 kg and move his station, like, maybe into the Lunar Gateway. Or into some Terran Trojan trajectory (or Greek - see below). As for spinning the dumbbell, that's easy. It might start with sails with some aid from an Earth-based laser. Heat-radiation could also focus in one direction although here the thrust might be negligible.

Now for the bad news, which Janhunen already suspects. Janhunen made a point to plan his habitat for shielding. He was thinking 2% for water, and boron-10 to soak up what neutrons the water can't. Janhunen can't drink this water. Also Janhunen wasn't planning massive physical exports; he's fine with a robogreenhouse, between the two weights of the dumbbell. And Janhunen must skim his shield for deuterium, tritium, and - over the years - helium-3 (admittedly all valuables as can pay for the investment). So Janhunen's choice of rock will have to be restricted, after all; or else someone gotta ship him the water.

By contrast Jensen's rocks are so yuuge that his colonists can simply burrow in at, what, 50 15-30 meters over the outer shell. And Jensen can probably find, in his hundreds-meters of rock, about as much water as Janhunen got - which Jensen can subsequently drink. Jensen also has ores to transport, and if not ores then anhydrous glass of which Janhunen was unaware. This can open room for more people, even a community of people as won't be inbred.

Jensen's issue is that his big lumbering rocks cannot be moved as well. And they cannot be spun up as quickly. And-and the wires between the big rocky bits will need more tensile strength.

Which is not to say that these schemes are incompatible. Once Janhunen is at the "Greek" L4 halo, he can take over 2010 TK₇ or even the Jensenesque (614689) 2020 XL₅.

Two years ago I'd already said that Janhunen's dumbbell is unsuited for permanent settlement so is, instead, a shuttle; so, here I guess I'm just proving that.

The making of a magnetar

Last year I pondered magnetar creation. Only about 31 were known as of March 2020; that May a 32^nd might have been spotted in the act of creation, a kilonova.

Now Tomer Shenar et al. may see their origins before creation (pdf). HD 45166 used to be a ternary; now, it is known as a binary but one of its stars had been a merger of two helium-rich stars. Thus amalgamated, A is a 43 kilogauss (= 4.3 T) magnet. By contrast Jupiter is low-teen gauss (1 mT); Earth's field isn't even one gauss. HD 45166's stars are far-enough apart that micronovae likely don't happen (on A).

As only two-star-mass, normally HD 45166A would just redgiant like our star will. But... the helium. Instead this paper predicts the electron-capture scenario, type Ib or IIb depending on the amount of hydrogen retained. Thus, although it will redgiant; the concurrent implosion won't go into a white-dwarf, but into a neutron-star. That star will keep its field, and upon implosion will spin even faster. That's a recipe for magnetars.

Apophis could be our Venus taxi

On looking up Ben Noo status, which will be granted to us seven weeks from now, I found that the "Osiris" mission is dropping off a package... and will keep on going. To Apophis.

Six years after Osiris slides into our GEO belt, in 2029 Apophis is supposed to run a similar course. This is close enough that Earth's gravity will budge its orbit, too. Currently it's coming out of a near-Venus orbit; after this rock perturbs it, it will shift from near-Earth to 1.38 AU.

I think 1.38 AU is worthless, a road to literally nowhere. But the present orbit is close to a Venus-Earth shuttle, stone-rama if you will. Why not use that?

If we could budge it to aim at Venus directly, I'd suggest mine own 2L4 - which never crosses Earth-Luna proper. Later we might trim off Janhunen-sized bites to be Hop David's Hohmann cyclers; hitting Venus or just SVL3. Otherwise (depending on delta-V) we might consider the slightly-riskier 3-0-2-9. All these require an onboard propulsion-system to jank its orbit once it scrapes by Venus proper; but Venus has, like, its own propellant in its ion-tail and atmosphere.

Why's no-one talking about this? Even Pekka Janhunen just wanted to mine it. Seems a waste to have Apophis shift to a basic Aten ellipse.

JACKHAMMER 9/3: Apophis has 6.1e10 kg mass. Diameter therefore volume seems ill-constrained as of 2018 (pdf) but seems in the mid-300s-meter range; 70% of Bennu's (10/20: the next risk). If a sphere, that is 2.06e7 cubic-meters and 2961 kg/m³ density. Wikipedia, from a 3200 density, assumes volume 1.9e7. To my mind a broken pile of stony rubble should clock in at the lower 2000s.

I suspect that Wikipedia be more right than wrong. Even if I'm right: Apophis is a hard chunk of silicon with insufficient porosity for a colony. Needs work.

Ryugu's icy origins

I hadn't really got into the origins of Ryugu or Bennu (or ben-Noo as I'm hearing), both originally damp. Dimorphos by contrast is dry, likewise I think Atira. Anyway: here's why Ryugu was damp: it came from the icy part, like Ceres.

We already knew Ryugu was with the C-types (Wiki say "Cg"); Bennu is with related B or F. Now I'm wondering if these belong with D-. UPDATE 8/17 We'll sus out Ben Noo in 24 September, after which it's on to Apophis. UPDATE 12/12 Heated CI.

Wâlidatallâhi in our rosary?

I accept the Dormition ceremony (as counter to Fátimism) but I missed it. So, for my sins, I'll revisit the Marian Rosary.

In Latin, we hail Mary as mater dei. This turns out to be better Latin than I'd expect. Historically, we read theotocus and deipara. Compound words are possible in Romance languages, and I assume in Vulgate Latin and in Church Latin. Mostly Latin prefers to separate the words and even to have the adjectives after the noun. deipara is a Hellenism; it is "S.A.E." (pdf).

mater dei against deipara suggests - in Arabic - a distinction between some "Umm Alahe" and straight-up "Wâlidatallâhi". The mater = umm is tribal, even honorary, as Sunnis claim Aisha for "mother of the muminîn". By contrast the Quran commands Muslims to deny that God begets nor - for our purpose - is begotten.

I found interesting back West that it was Girolamo Savonarola, no less, who insisted on mater dei. I'd have figured him more a Deipara lad. Even he couldn't quite go full Miaphysite.

On Hezeqiah's reform

Concerning whether Hezeqiah had actually reformed what-we-now-call Judaism, Sabine Kleiman is asking the right questions.

For context, the Assyrians under Sennacherib had sandpapered all Israel down to the last holdout Jerusalem. However 2 Kings 18:22 does not have the Assyrians taking credit for removing the Israelite shrines. Instead they mocked Hezeqiah for doing this: claiming that this act and the present siege both suggested that YHWH was on Sennacherib's side and, perhaps, subordinate to Anshar Himself.

Kleiman reasons that Hezeqiah had intended no reform, but simply lost all those temples along with the lands they sat on. Upon Sennacherib's retreat, Hezeqiah had to rebuild, and hadn't got as far as Bethel before passing on his throne. Josiah's faction, recognising Hezeqiah as the saviour of Jerusalem, recast this lag in rebuilding the northern cities as a conscious exercise in refusing to rebuild the temples, any of the temples.

One obvious counter is that Hezeqiah had no writ at Bethel nor points north, which funded their own temples, before Assyria trashed that kingdom. But Kleiman surely knows this as well as Sennacherib knew this. Anyway once Samaria lay in ruins, Bethel might consider prostration to Jerusalem instead.

I'm more concerned with the relayed Ansharite propagandum. It sounds... real, to my ear.

Rather: suppose that Hezeqiah had, indeed, looted several local temples of that wealth (possibly including Bethel). These monies went into the military treasury, in advance of invasion. We know from the Tudors how Henry VIII's squalid landgrab got recast, by his children, as "reformation".

Why do this? Because a beleaguer'd kingdom tends to the monotheletism, as witness Constantinople and, later, Muscovy and - yes - Tudor England. A disunited priesthood might be tempted to go-along-to-get-along syncretism, as not to pose a threat to invaders. Hezeqiah needed his people to pose a threat to invaders.

So much for Illig

Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited sold better than it should have, not least for its flirting with Illig's hypothesis that the Dark Age was fake and gay. Unz has been hosting a "first millennium revisionist" who, likewise, would crush more centuries together.

The 1MR lately self-outed as ... Guyénot. Anyway he's anti-Illig too.

Dendrochronology with the recent marking of carbon-spikes at (especially!) AD 775 make post-Islamic chronologies a done-deal. (Literature being a separate issue.) So Illig was wrong and "Emmet Scott" was an embarrassment.

Where Guyénot has a point is that chronology gets more-and-more difficult the further back you go. We can nail down AD 775 but I've noticed a good deal of fuzziness around AD 635.

I do have to note, however, the direction our findings are heading toward. Illig lost ground to the point Illig lost his war, even in revisionists' eyes. Now Guyénot is fighting on ground a few centuries earlier. I don't think he is keeping that ground. Which is why only Unz will have him. Vox Day awaits, I fear.

John Tolkien, Jr

There's a case for John R. R. Tolkien being canonised as a (Catholic) saint. I am unsure that this will happen. I am leaning toward that it shouldn't.

The most-famous son of Tolkien and his literary heir was Christopher. The man had other sons - the first of which was also-named John. John became a priest. John's ministry is not well-remembered.

The father was aware of scandals in the Church. The father was more personally aware of strange people among the academics he'd known. CS "Jack" Lewis had Issues, himself; although Lewis was more like this guy, I think. Lev Grossman's Magicians hits this theme against Lewis (and Dodgson; perhaps not daring Tolkien).

I accept that not every child is born perfect and that every adult makes his own decisions.

We have to ask if the father, here, made the correct decisions, with this his most-vulnerable offspring. The younger John should not have taken the vows he'd taken, but more-so his senior should not have allowed him.

Cleopatra: overrated

Some skub ensued over a cheatin'-heart who did a "Cleopatra", a horrible history except not even trying with the "Clown Nose" trick. Bret Devereaux took the unusual tack of reviewing, instead, Cleopatra VII's reign. I didn't want in on it - yet. Now I've found this review of a French book from 2021.

I don't know when Helena Gomez poasted her review but let's pretend it was Friday night. Bernard Legras wrote his book years before all this. Sure. That's the ticket . . .

It was Devereaux's thought (and, interestingly, Thomas Harlan's thought) that the whole Cleopatra-Ptolemy "Lagid" dynasty claimed the rights to the Seleucid Empire, which was an ex-Empire by the time Ptolemy XII passed away in Egypt, leaving his own throne to - well, to the strongest. Who turned out to be ... Gaius Julius Caesar.

Keep in mind Rome was still, legally, a Republic. Back West, Rome hadn't annexed (for instance) Mauretania. Over on the Eastern side of the southern Med, Rome's interests would be just-as-well served by a friendly Hellenistic kingdom, like Odenathus' some centuries later. For those Romans, Cleopatra VII was a fine choice for a client: first Gaius and then Marcus Antonius also lusted after further riches of the Orient.

Bernard Legras and, more so, his reviewer Helena Gomez hold that Cleopatra was a wise ruler of Egypt, given the mess the earlier Ptolemies had dumped upon her (and that war with her brother). Cleopatra did well with the public fisc, they claim; it seems not during the Gaius years, but finances were much better during the Marcus years.

Terminal-Hellenistic Egypt was perhaps one of the more-difficult places to rule wrong... as long as your rule wasn't contested by priests, Jews, Greeks and other special-interests. Ruling Egypt wrong had been ongoing since, at least, Ptolemy V defeated a nativist rebellion by bribing the major priests. Cleopatra was able to unite her pharaonate by threatening everyone with Rome or anarchy. Also, Rome ensured that Egypt wasn't getting invaded from Cyrene or Judaea. All this, further, would have kept the Nubians from getting ambitious.

What Devereaux gets, which at least Gomez doesn't, is that Cleopatra having lost her chance at Syria with Gaius' death went on to support Antony's adventure. An Egyptian patriot should, I think, aim to support Egyptian interests, not foreign adventures. (Take heed, Gamal Abdul-Nasser.)

BACKDATE 8/15. Got some catchin'-up...

Io Aircraft smells wrong

For some reason ToughSF is linking to Io Aircraft. I'm not up for linking that site directly, on account the site lacks such basics as a "careers" or "who we are" link. @io_aircraft_inc does have Twitter... and LinkedIn. The company (of two) claims its HQ in Cape Canaveral but you will go up and down the Canaveral Bight in Google Maps in vain.

As for the engineering the kerbals have offered some trenchant observations.

I really don't like to do this but I have no choice but to whois these guys. Its main office looks closer to James Tiberius Kirk, shall we say, further up river.

I'm left wondering where's the punchline. Is "Drew Blair" (I'm hoping this much, at least, is an Orwellism) running a deep satire? I'd earlier hoped that this scheme was sprinkling the easter-eggs, like what Reznor did for Year Zero. But if he's planning a hard SF book like, oh, Abraham-Frank[-Weir] or Suarez, I'm not seeing the Amazon link. And his SF game is as hard as a damp sponge.

The alternative is that the company is serious - that it's a patent-troll operation.

BACKDATE 8/13.

Flying kites for power

ToughSF directs us to MIT/Altaeros on floating turbines... from 2014. I was reminded of this Venereal poast and, why not, let's check in on how we're doing on Earth. It seems Mauretius has installed one.

The hope is to capture windpower. The standard birdblender solution, lacking Antarctic (or Maxwell) katabasis, isn't getting the job done. The alternative is to capture more wind and more reliable wind, also potentially without water (or, for Venus, acid) interference. Google attempted to float such a kite which failed - they did, however, release their patent-rights to others.

Mauretius is able to do this because it's in the middle of the Indian Ocean. The Southern Hemisphere seems a good region to avoid air-traffic, generally. Air-traffic control is a bit more of an issue in, say, the American Midwest.

BACKDATE 8/13. Yeah, writer's block.

The ozone worlds of yesteryear

Nyrath (now I can read the posts) is reminding us of green metallic. To recapitulate: metal-poor stars give off more UV-C (100-280 nm). About the same UV-B (315-400 nm) as the metal-rich stars, but the UV-C swamps it. UV-C upon a high-oxygen planet creates ozone, which not only absorbs that wavelength / frequency by that very creation, but the ozone will go on to block UV-B.

Anyway here's my followup question, which I hadn't considered in April. Say we got a F or (pushing it) A star, as will likely die before its planets spawn sentient life (F0: 2700-My lifespan). Its habitable zone is accordingly further-out, starting at like 1.3 AU (but much wider!). A F will shift to more UV-C baseline on account such're higher-energy. The Fs we see around us will be secondarily-generated so mostly high metallic - and will just get more metallic as they age. That's a problem for UV-C!

Let's also allow for a smaller world with higher-escape velocity. Introduce chlorophyll-bearing plants to the oceans.

Now it's 2.7 billion years from planetary-formation; this planet - yeah, it's orbiting a midrange F - has finally embarked upon what on Earth would be boring-billion. The star is already showing its age. How long before sufficient oxygen is converted to ozone, that life on the surface is untenable?

... As We Know It. Or can animal life evolve as can process ozone instead of oxygen? Oxygen-efficient life is dinosaur life; we mammal synapsids are inefficient!

As ozone-processing reaches an equilibrium (the high atmosphere is still able to block the UV-B) would this inefficient (but smarter?) life be able to live alongside birdbrained animal life as can process plain oxygen?

This life would have to have formed in an earlier generation of F star-systems. So their remains will be destroyed already, by the time palaeontologists start roaming the stars.

Flow boiling and condensation in microgravity

I'm mostly just glad they didn't use a cutesy acronym for this experiment (h/t Reynolds). It's billed as an airconditioning plan for future space-stations and space-craft, on assumption of microgravity. I have to consider its value on account I'd rather use a spinning (and shielded) station, with centrifugal-[pseudo]force standing in for G.

I concede: we might want lower gravity for purposes other than life-support - start with, manufacturing. For -craft, the propellants get heated up to gas before they get expelled and/or become plasma; those don't start with gravity. High-ISP ideas tend to be low-thrust meaning, the vessel isn't being pushed to appreciable accelerations. The article to its credit makes some note of much of this.

Somewhere in between our extremes, do we own a handle on phase-transitions in (say) Lunar gravity, or in both Lunar g's and a strong Coriolis? Asking for a queasy friend in the inner rings of the Elysium habitat.

Mainly Spain's brain drained...

... not to the plain. It drained to Mexico. h/t hbdchick b/c of course.

To this day Andalucía is the dumb part of Spain. María del Carmen Pérez-Artés was pondering how long that's been going on; to which end, she's turned to the census. She noticed a preponderance of thirty- and thirty-five-year-olds among the Spaniards contributing thereto. Rather than assuming something like on The Orville where the Spanish Church was just bumping off kids born in unlucky years (which I might actually suspect of Irish clergy cf. Connell, Irish Peasant Society 1968); maaayyybe the excess were actual thirty-three year olds who were crap at maths.

Pérez-Artés thinks she's found where the smart people went. The New World, as it happens, took in a lot of Andalucianos; some Castilians as well (presumably army-colonels or their sixteenth-century equivalent) but mostly the south coast. Their destination shook out to be Mexico most of all. That was deliberate: Mexico took most of Spain's investment in education. The Spaniards newly-arrived reported their ages - well, firstly as being in their twenties, because that's adventurers for you - but more importantly to nonrounded integer years, like "23" and not "uhh like twen'y or summing señor?".

This may be because Mexico, unlike (say) the Caribbean and Argentina, already came with crops as were native and with native inhabitants who'd spent, what, nine thousand years farming them. Spanish-born farmers had little to contribute to Mexico so didn't go there. Instead Mexico got Spanish engineers, soldiers - and ecclesiasts. Yeah priests and bishops can't marry but deacons can, and so can church-employed laymen. The Caribbean meanwhile got overlords and Argentina got cowboys (and, later, Italians).

So far so reasonable. It is, then, of interest that the Andes didn't get this investment. (The Guarani of Paraguay somewhat excepted.) Was it that the Andes cost more for a Spaniard or even a Panamanian to get there? The Spaniards in the Andes were notably piratical, to the point the Church felt it needed to send missions to the whites over there.

Concrete supercapacitor

Pixy Misa's main thing was the concrete supercapacitor. Not a powercell as such, pace the URL. Ingredients: water, cement, and that "carbon black" as Jews once used to inscribe scrolls.

The Register is making swipes at those eeevil Republicans so I advise bailing out of the article before the end.

I'm thinking this capacitor would be excellent on the Moon (or asteroids) alongside what the Koreans are planning.

The lithium d12

With the h/t to Reynolds: lithium plating. Apparently there's a sort of lithium powercell as isn't an -ion -cell; it's metallic, and this holds more power. I admit surprise that Reynolds got to this before Pixy Misa did; Pixy's been on batteries a lot lately.

You could get the metal onto the electrode by the usual electroplating. And we'd heard earlier that lithium might not be as rare as we'd feared. But.

More energy means, potentially, more boom boom if released off-schedule. And it gets worse. Remember lithium metal in the chem lab? Yeah, apparently it will corrode in a powercell too. So not only do we get a worse boom if something goes wrong but the likelihood of wrong is increased.

Adam Schrader relates that UCLA is now able to plate an electrode fast enough that the corrosion won't hit in time. Then I guess they can gate the metal so it corrodes only when the powercell's current is called-upon. UCLA incidentally report that a pure lithium crystal, now they can see it, is dodecahedrous.

Can we do this for sodium? Also, would lithium-metal cathodes require similar anode upgrades?

The fluid pincer

Electronics are a problem in high ambient heat and pressure (Venus), in acid (Venus' clouds), or in radiation (Jupiter's inner moons, anywhere in near-solar space). Per ToughSF here's a plan for a pincer without electronics.

Actually a 3D printable pincer. That's pointing me toward rocket parts, where quality-control needs are higher. The Raptor 3 keeps getting more extreme, hence the infrastructure.

Visiting an asteroid

Elon Musk is still locking down x-Twitter; luckily, nitter.net seems to be bypassing that lock (back to midJuly). Now I can read Nyrath again a team of six proposes, instead of a manned Mars mission, an asteroid mission. The brief is in Powerpoint form (pdf). Brent W. Barbee is the primary author; the most-famous on the list is probably Rob "Lando" Landis.

The team figures that a NEA mission would take ~150 days = five months and be more-abortable than a Deimos mission, and wouldn't have to land and launch from a whole planet. Also the asteroids are better targets for space industry... like, perhaps, making room-temperature low-pressure (or no-pressure) superconductors. (I refuse to comment further until the weekend. OR EVER 8/14: Eff off, science-twitter.)

They want chemical rockets, LOx and methane, for ISP and thrust. They'd use the Starship to get up there. With a five month stint in space they hope not to care about gravity and shielding.

For my part I wouldn't do it, unless it's to shuttle miners to an asteroid as is itself prepped for human settlement... by spinning and hollowing out an interior. So I'd aim at a C-class as stands to own some ices.

Ben Bova as editor

On pondering how on earth Ben Bova sold books, today I expended a few minutes on who this guy even is. Was, I should say; Covid took him from us late 2020. An ironic triumph of Science over Red Tape; but we are ahead of ourselves.

Bova made his name reviving Astounding as Analog. Bova agreed with Heinlein to disdain the old-era's Weird mix of Science Fiction and Fantasy. In the 1970s Bova stepped away from Analog and did Omni instead, which glossy magazine I'd once remembered as a weird-science Discover with psychics and guff like that, but was apparently more of a fiction publication, as I guess I should have re-remembered when Stephen King complained that Bova wouldn't accept his "Jaunt" shortstory on account the science wasn't hard enough.

There've been occasional attempts to #cancel Bova for the usual reasons. It seems in 1977 Bova had published an issue in which, excepting a serial (by George Martin!), all the stories were written by women. With his feminist-ally credentials safely in hand, or so Bova thought, in 1980 our man publicly complained that women were writing too many "unicorns and dragons" but not SF as intended, good and hard and veiny. There's some truth in - say - McCaffrey and Bradley running fantasy too-thinly veiled as SF. Although even in 1980 you'd think someone might have brought up Tanith Lee, "James Tiptree", and Ursula LeGuin(!). By then Octavia Butler and Cherry(h) were around too and, I think, not unknown. It seems that some in his audience had brought all that up, so maybe Bova was just artlessly trying to shame the newbies away from McCaffrey and Bradley.

All this tells me that Bova was a real force as an editor if not, perhaps, much of a writer. Reminds me a bit of Oppenheimer in fact.

Ben Bova was overrated

Ben Bova was one of the greats in science-fiction... for better or worse. I bought Mars used and failed to get far in it. Lately I got The Precipice used and am having the same trouble with that one.

They come in the same series, Mars first I guess. Let's just say: it's no Mars Crossing or The Martian. And The Precipice is no Expanse.

The conceit is that global warming is happening and, by The Precipice, is boiling. Coastal cities are collapsing and, at the worst possible time, earthquakes are shaking up New Madrid again. Meanwhile William Jennings Bryan has emerged from his grave or something and has, at last, united the Christian faithful with socialists in a "New Morality". Similar is happening in Japan; and in the Near East there's a "Sword of Islam" although brave Ben Bova bravely has the Christians doing most of the terrism.

Humanity's only hope is in nanotechnology, which also might stand to rejuvenate old men (Bova was gettin' up in years by 2001) and even to bring nitrogen-cooled guys out from Nederland back to the land of the living. If only we could do away with the Red Tape! I do hope Charon docked this schmendrick's skiff on the same dock with CS Lewis . . .

Bova does sometimes pull himself back from the moral, er, precipice as he realises that his stance against religionism is also a stance against the average American, who've been suffering rather a lot in his backstory. We might forgive that; we might further indulge aspects of the backstory - warminism aside, there's a lot of tectonics itching the Turtle Island's shell, and American society may indeed not be well suited for the coming Scratchings. But now we must speak of Bova's characters where they are not statistical voting-blocs.

Dan Randolph and Martin Humphries are painted with crayon borrowed from Ayn Rand. Randolph is the good guy and Humphries is the bad guy, but they're both wealthy financiers and they're spying upon one another. And they're equally stymied by the real bad guys who are religious-left types.

I guess tomorrow I'll get to muse upon how this ponderous scribbler got access to crayons for as long as he did.