Tungsten disilicide

SciTechDaily links a heat-to-electricity medium: WSi₂.

As thermodynamics go, once you use the electricity obviously it goes to heat again. And some will get lost en-route and have to be air-conditioned out. You can't win, you can't break even.

... but I daresay, if on an asteroid mine, the radiators form splendid bottlenecks to catch most the heat for reuse. Also mayyybe the WSi₂ could power diodes for a visual diagnostic on those refractory panels (also largely tungsten). We are told that this material has a high melt point itself.

Transit timing variations

Today is a work day... sort of. I'm ducking out to follow up on a use for better spectrometry. And'also to assure my readers I'm not dead.

On Youtube one of the sciencey channels discussed how to sort out the noise in a transit. Sometimes, there's a pattern in the timing of the transits. This may be secular-drift from another body. That other body could be its moon. But usually a transit is seen in the first place because the planet is close to its star... too close for a moon. Alternat(iv)ely the other body may be an outer planet, not detected because it runs oblique relative to that planet and our 'scopes out here.

So here are a few papers to discuss some mathematic models: TrES-2b, from the TESS telescope; and this month Simultaneous Impact Parameter Variation Analysis mainly from the Kepler scope. Lately Daniel Yahalomi and David Kipping's publons on the exoplanet-edge and on the landscape.

Alex Jay Brady's space habitat

It's Turkey Day. Here's Alex Jay Brady's stratified future. Without radiators LOL. That aside I'll review the rest of it.

Brady includes a fusion reactor. It is separated from the rest by distance, reservoirs of water, and the inverse-square law. I deem this SyFy and silly. He seems to be using this to orbit Saturn, low on light and metal. Why's he even at Saturn? If he's there why's he not colonising Titan and using methane waterfalls? Energy could be beamed from there. Leaving aside the titanic dynamo of Saturn himself.

THAT aside, a hangar shares that far end. I don't mind this as much. The ships at that hangar might be carrying some nukes, themselves - fission, mostly, but also fusion-afterburner and z-pinch (so with hot nozzles). The ships' very hulls, further, have been taking on plenty o' curies/ roentgen/ becquerels/ whathaveyou between missions, just from space. And the distance gives the Authorities space to turn inbound freight into tinylittle pieces should they be approaching the wrong velocity-vector. Might be overkill but if that's all I got, I'll defer to Brady.

Socially I dislike the highend / lowend / ultrahighend differentials. I feel like most interplanetary habs will be dug out of rubble. Everyone gets roughly the same under dirt: hollow chambers. We might get fully-fabricated O'Neills later. But would O'Neills ever get a tail of lowend? If someone's a bum, he gets exiled down to Mars. If someone's got a low tolerance for other people, he can work as a Belt miner or maintain a cycler on downtime.

Brady might work best for orbits as don't own much metal. That's my 13-10-8 Laplacian between Earth and Venus - actually Venus generally and all else below our 1 AU. Also Earth's L4 and L5. These get sufficient light none need a fusion reactor. Further out is enough rock and ice that the rubble-pile rules.

Also possible is the long-range colony vessel. Push the thing to biëlliptic = Oberth, aim at Uranus, spin around, decel until orbit-insertion at Ariel I guess. Mine those moons for whatever else will be nice for the journey. After a few years decide who gets to stay at the, er, arse-end of the Solar System; and who gets to go on to Prox.

The ongoing war for disease

Here is a drop in cervical-cancer; and there is a drop in chicken pox. Of course the drop in measles is well known. And in whooping-cough; as can be seen when unVAXXed kids get it.

RFK likes to claim he is not antiVAXX. Tell that to the Samoans, those who survived the measles he helped cause.

The "Great Barrington" guys like to claim they were just antiLOCKDOWN. Jay Bhattacharya can now claim to be vindicated - by popular opinion. Well: I was there. These doctors were not just antiLOCKDOWN. They supported "herd immunity" - letting it rip. (This blog supported masking-with-distancing until THE VAXX came out.)

On topic of THE VAXX, these were several vaxxes. AstroZeneca, yes, seems to have had side-effects. I took Pfizer and didn't suffer any. We could also talk about the vaccine scheduling for childhood; if we were talking to people who were themselves talking in good faith. Autism isn't something I care to discuss given its high hereditability.

Overall I am not yet seeing that Kennedy or Bhattacharya, in their own ways, have a record of arguing in good faith. And from the now-ascendant Right, which Trump has belatedly joined (hey, remember Operation Warp Speed?): I just hear people screeching that the concept of public health is "evil".

In that interest of good-faith, I should make a disclosure / confession. I was prepared to post a Toldjaso after the election, which I'd suspected might be a Blue romp... although I didn't vote Blue myself. I'd thought that the "Kovid Karyn" vote might stick with Biden. It may be that my constituency, which is here the Hanania constituency, didn't move the needle. Because we had other concerns informing our vote. So: the preceding post has been one on the public-health merits, not on whether such convinces voters, because evidently it doesn't.

Meh. Let's hope nothing worse gets loose in the populace.

BACKDATE 11/29

Neolithic immunities and allergens

SciTechDaily has an artilce about DNA in Europe from 5000 BC to now-ish. This is, I think, the ceramic Neolithic. It'll span the rise and fall of Cucuteni, and then the steppe invasion.

They're saying that immune-system genetics got selected-for. And then... un-selected. Gene mix from nonimmune populations.

That is rather telling me that immunity had side-effects. Once the disease was defeated, the genes lingered... as allergens. Allergens, like STC're also saying gives us Alzheimer's.

BACKDATE 11/29

Neptune's power-plant

Although I am left somewhat at a loss for power-supplies past Jupiter, here's one planet which won't have any problem generating power: Neptune. Besides the storms, which Event Horizon immortalised: satellites here also get free energy from its retrograde moon. That would be the Kuiper's greatest export to the Great Eight: Triton.

Triton is a low-gravity, mostly cloudless, low-atmo moon. Because it runs retrograde, its underground is getting squeezed. The heat is pumping volatiles up to its surface where they spew geysers. And where they don't, colonists will suffer little effort in drilling a few KM to get at the reservoirs.

The energy can be pumped to its L2 tower and, thence, beamed to outer space-stations. Which will just be the usual bundled piles of rubble fitting arbitary millions of us.

Hard to believe I hadn't thought of this already.

BACKDATE 11/29 inspired-by.

Tugging Mira

Impulse Space is flaunting Helios / Deneb: 66,720 N thrust. I don't know about ISP; the focus on thrust and its use of methane implies something like the Raptor. Although they are not competing with the Starship. They're going to turn the thing on once in space.

Nuclear is better of course but we frown on that in LEO. So, Impulse are aiming for space-tugging: LEO up to mid-Allen up to GEO and beyond. The press-release calls it "kick stage" and "transfer". Which is fine! We need that too.

It is not just a test; Impulse are to use the engine for real cargo, if small cargo. This is all that fits on a Falcon 9, assumed still the game-in-town in mid 2026. The payload is called "Mira" and it's for our Space Force.

Spiral-in

On topic of SLS, and Mars Sample Return, and the upcoming new space telescope: here is NASA on a roadmap to asteroid-mining. The paper, naïvely perhaps, sees a spiral of costs, which it amusingly illustrates, and hopes to invert it to a spiral of savings, as one advance on the way allows for infrastructure creating opportunities for the next advance.

The paper bears a strong musk of PowerPoint, October 2017. However: now we have a reusable SuperHeavy and, maybe next week, reusable Starship.

The tech-aim here is the "Honey Bee", extraction of water and other volatiles from a NEO, preferably polanoid. Also to capture a large rock, or at least to pull ice-blocks from one; and run the material into Lunar Distant Retrograde Orbit. We don't do the Lunar Gateway in this scenario, but last I heard Elon is likely to kill it anyway.

BACKDATE 11/17

Space jerbs

Now that Elon Musk has bought himself a government on Earth, although some may see some downsides, one upside is the end of the SLS. That's a problem for the dilberts, d-fens's, and code-gibbons hired to work on the boondoggle.

Believe me, I em-/sym-pathise with working a job for a company doing The Wrong Stuff. More than you know.

The incoming administration shifting the pain to Blue States like Colorado is a crude solution but, you know, eff em if they didn't vote for us, as Baker put it to the elder Bush. Same with Equity positions, now exiting Boeing although still infesting NASA.

We do have more space jerbs coming on-line - privatesector. The dilberts have real skills and GenX oldsters in particular tended to MAGA this year. Should USG legislate that the dilberts get affirmative action?

BACKDATE 11/17

Mars is bad for aerobraking

I mean, I'd always assumed that Mars' atmosphere is ridiculously thin for altering trajectories or orbital capture; but it's nice to have the maths.

Aerobraking is mostly an Earthling thing. Gary Johnson notes that ablative tiles - tiles wot falls off - are the best way to do it; but once something is down here on Earth we just, like, slap new tiles on (11/14 an active field of study). I think aerobraking is what Elon's planning for the Starship which, remember, is what does the work in LEO before coming back 1819 November.

Venus is also good for aerobraking and assuredly quiet Titan. But the Martian atmo is too unpredictable.

Anyway this blog has been consistent that we normies don't colonise Mars directly. We colonise asteroids, and (so Nyrath has convinced me) Deimos. From Deimos just dangle a tether bro.

BACKDATE 11/17

Alternatives to solar-power on airless rocks

ToughSF will link (pdf) to Alex Ellery 2021: "Generating and storing power on the moon using in situ resources". ToughSf summarises: solar concentrators paired with vacuum tube-based thermionic converters reaching ~15% efficiency.

These are not solar panels ("photovoltaics"). Panels are for LEO, shipped up from Earth. Ellery is working from a paradigm where we don't ship panels further to the Moon; Loonies go assemble their own power-sources. Once set up on the Moon, Casey Handmer can go beam to them additional power from some high mountain on Earth.

I imagine similar should be good for near-Earth asteroids like Atíra.

BACKDATE 11/17

The nebular magnet on Polana

Today we got more on the Polana CI-chrondrites, here Ryugu. We should be able to replicate the results with Bennu.

Before Polana birthed the rubble of Ryugu - they say - it was under a magnetic field. This was 15 microtesla (μT); Earth to contrast is 50 μT. That would have worked on the iron and nickel in these icy mudballs - and on the gas and ice giants out there.

"Out There" would be from 7 AU on. Closer home, the solar system - then - was pulling more like our 50 μT even up to 200. Jupiter, remember, had a Grand Tack at some point, so - implicitly - formed Out There.

This is evidence Ceres and Hygeia and those other iceballs formed even further Out There.

Statuettes to [?] to script

The origins of writing are here matched to cylinder-seals. In effect: typing preceded writing. At least in Sumer and Akkad.

It all starts with accountancy, those little statuettes all over the Cyclades. These are tokens for trade - including trade in humans (not necessarily slaves; round-trip ferrying might do). The question moves to how they became the two-dimensional representations in pictographs. Most researchers don't deem the pictographs to look like the tokens. The seals are that middle path, the "Seals and signs" paper now argues.

We read backward, as we dig backward. Uruk IV is ~3400 BC. The word "language" doesn't come up until the bibliography, but the authors use Sumerograms for most pictographs. Which they can now decipher with help from the seals. Uruk III / Jemdet Nasr is around the turn of that fourth/third BC millennium; seems more-solidly Sumer. Although, as in the case of netted-vessel representation ZATU190: we cannot necessarily read it as the later pictograph would read it. Here the picto will be GAN / [i]kannu[/i], but ZATU190 holds not just the "stand" but also the netting.

BACKDATE 11/7 like hell I was doing anything on Guy Fawkes' Day. Anyhoo h/t Archaeology org which used to be Saraceni, now might be AI.

Pesach and Matzo

For Americans the upcoming few days will be difficult such that I deem unwise (say) to drink them out. So I am taking this time to revisit the two Darius "pesach" pages. Because the Jews in Darius' fifth year, although noting Pesach, did not relate this to The Unleaven. Darius had a different holiday for that, in Nisan: the new-year holiday.

Pesach was a Psalm 91 thing, a ritual to ward off the divs (as a Persian would name them). 11Q11 will collect quite a bit of these.

Another interesting substitution - before the Ebionites and saint John would think of it - is the replacement of animal sacrifice with this bread. I read here that this was done first in Iran before the Jews, and not necessarily their Christian subsects, thought of it.

I am come to -

h/t to ZR's Carnival: Gathercole presents Jesus as Herald. That is: not as Christ.

Gathercole uses an Armenian translation of a misattributed homily. Which is all manner of problematic but too-often As Good As We Get. I'm not here to dispute Gathercole's support for its antiquity. I am come to dispute its relevance.

See what I did there? I just announced my intention to deliver a message. I didn't even claim to be an angel. You don't have to be an angel to announce the start of a message. You don't even have to be a herald.

Jesus does not have to be an angel sent from Heaven; although admittedly saint Mark - by starting his mission at the Jordan - rather implies this. But still, "I am come" presupposes that Jesus is not himself the King. Or at least has not yet revealed that He is; a skeptic would argue the Messianic Secret has not been revealed to Jesus yet.

Another skeptic may wonder if the ghost of John the Baptiser be lurking behind these accounts. The Infancy Gospel ascribed to Thomas is lately mused to be about John, but redacted to refer to Jesus.

BACKDATE 11/5

Skipover

We're big on airships over here, not least for Venus colonisation, but the tech-tree has been languishing out here on Earth. Casey Handmer's run up a few posts on that tech. Not hearing anything from Brin, I checked in on all that this... month, and up came "Cargo airships are happening" from one Eli Dourado.

Why is this important? Because I'm sick of American ports being as bad as they are, no thanks (as usual) to the Biden Administration and its Transportation Secretary. It was known two decades ago that the west coast longshoremen were literal CPUSA. East coast was hardly better; they were mobbed up. I understand that the west is more efficient, so - hooray Stalinist efficiency. I guess?

Last month it came out that our ports aren't automated. As Reason noted - they should be.

I am unsure why all this is tolerated. I suspect it would "help" that we make stuff within our borders. To that end, bad ports serve as hidden tariffs. Be nice if our IRS got to see those revenues, though; not the hard Left or the @#$%in' Mob.

Dourado sees airships outcompeting aeroplanes for ocean-to-inland cargo. They could well compete with those seaports.

BACKDATE 11/17 and this time I'm actually sorry about it.

Self-healing solar

Solestial has a solar panel as will self-heal at 65° C, on up. That is good for inner-system operations where hooked to a radiator; just turn down the radiator and the panel should just ... get there. Or at least the other operations, when losing heat, can shift to using the panel as a radiator for a bit.

Flexibility will help too.

HATTIP: ToughSf 11/5.