K2-18 at home

As study continues for K2-18's planet, and for TOI-270's planet d (the third): models improve for the Neptune-mass planets we got at Sol h and Sol i. I'm halfway afraid to name Sol h.

The story here, which Edward D. Young, Sarah P. Marcum, Aaron Werlen, and Paula N. Wulff tell, is that the Solar System formed with a carbon-monoxide snow line somewhere further out in the Kuiper Belt than we now find Pluto, which is a nitrogen / water iceworld mostly devoid of CO. Also our seventh and eighth planets lack ammonia... like the extrasolars just noted. Compare 59 Virginis b (or B).

This points to a magma ocean making up most of both our "ice" giants. The magma has dissolved high-pressure volatiles. This magma is about half the radius: more for Neptune, less for Uranus. Over that, the atmosphere - mostly hydrogen and helium - extends for the rest. This convects (hydrogen is a decent conductor), to the surface which then radiates infrared which the JWST can spot.

The model may be tentative, because as you know we've only sent flybys to either, but ... so were the "ice giant" models.

Kilotower

In 2021 my cuz Amia Ross and three others proposed "Tall Towers on the Moon". On Earth the standard is the Gulf's Caliphburg. This has to deal with wind, and 9.8 ms^-2 gravity. On the Moon there is no permanent wind although landers kick up some dust; gravity is 1.625.

Ross' crew wanted this for the south polar basin so they could get gigawatts of solar power all month long. I want it at the Lunar base of the spaceline, where I've banned landers. For here, let's talk how one might end up having to work inside a kilotower, if not live in there.

We both must endure radiation, at least up top - including the Bremsstrahlung effect upon metals. Ross isn't living in the high tower so doesn't care, except that she's not using rebar (nor any reïnforcement) and has wired the innards for electric conduction. For my part I want to reïnforce my tower. For that, instead of steel, I'd use Jensen's anhydrous glass. Both are common on the Moon; in fact, any slag used to reduce metals could serve to feed the glasswork. I believe a little copper and silver will deliver much less pain to organics than a titanium shell or even a lot of iron rebar would. And shouldn't mutually spark off one another if an errant ray strikes.

MS Copilot (beyond the flattery) is telling me that I can raise this monster into the low kilometers; Ross reckons higher. But I'd hardly start that way. I'd start with a Burj+ height of 1000 meters. Then build the kilometers-high shell around that, which would involve internal support atop that centre. It would keep growing around that core. Ross estimates that for the concrete - sans rebar - the structure must use 760 mt for 1 km height; 4100 for 2km.

Copilot is warning about supporting the Burj upon that regolith, but I'm scooping regolith away to concoct the anhydrous rebar, maybe some concrete if we get spare water. One hopes eventually to hit the basement rock of the nearside or deep polar basin, either-which should expose lunar-mantle basalt. I don't think this is to buckle much.

Concrete can be manufactured in the south pole at 2 mt per Earth day. It might at first need making down there, because it requires water (and megawatts). So I guess the pole has to shoot it to other Lunar outposts by mass driver. Luckily if it comes in goop form, that's water we hope to preserve, maybe even to start our own 2 mt/day factory. My structure around the spaceline should be easier to extend upward because the ?Kevlar chain can double as a central crane.

What Rosses get inside the structure is a vast, shielded interior which we can water and oxygenate at a nice ~290s K (20ish C) without rusting the rebar. The exterior suffers temp swings over quite the timescale, so we'll need an insulating outer wall. Unless like Amia you're building it in permadaylight.

For whatever plantlife we're growing in the interior, the famous Biosphere had a problem: carbon-exuding life on the inside may carbonate the concrete instead of the ficus. So where we are sharing our space with plants, like hydroponics; we'll have to tile the interior as not to expose the concrete.

Ezekiel in Babylonia

In 2020, a handbook for Ezekiel came out. I haven't, and maybe can't, read all of it. I may not need to - Dalit Rom-Shiloni produced what is certainly one of the best chapters in it, "Ezekiel among the Exiles".

This sets the prophet in the community of Jehoiachin. The prophet may or may not love that king, but he - famously - is clear about what he hates. That would be Jerusalem: whether this be the kingdom of the Babylonians' stooges, or the province now inhabited by subjects ("servitors", Carl Sargent might say).

We also get several Akkadian loans and calques. Like the Babylonian barber the gallâb[u]. At least Dan knew of people who performed this task (Judges 16:19) and one has to assume so did Israel recording Samson's legend at Tel Dan, and then Judah accepting their exiles. Well... Ezekiel didn't want Israel's barber.

I don't see where Ezekiel and other Persian-era prophets like 2 Isaiah react to one another, and Rom-Shiloni doesn't mention any. Of Persian tropes, the critic must note that KBR canal. We concede the rarity of this or any other such trope, compare Daniel. Rom-Shiloni would likely dismiss such as gloss.

Britain's Meiji

Last year on Galveston Liberation Day, Rod Martin explained its merits.

Well: not the merits of this particular day. The ratification of Amendment XIII (always a lucky number for the Union) would have been a better day worth the annual memorial. But we happen to have this day off soooo...

It may be moot for me anyway inasmuch as I am pretty-much not American. My ancestors didn't keep slaves and didn't want 'em. They say my Jewish side might have been 'em, but they were slow to extend that as a principle for the Banu Noah. I might, however, speak to the Institution's retarded sibling Serfdom.

Throughout the Middle Ages, daimyos ruled England. The Magna Carta, whatever John promised us in AD 1215, had been rewritten. Serfdom was officially not the law of the land over the seventeenth century... but then, the Austrians claimed not to have serfs in the early nineteenth, also; and look how that went.

In AD 1688, the English lords called in the Dutch. Kara Dimitruk and Ben Southwood tell how landed lords became landowners, who could better use the land they'd held only in paper before.

Also as with the Dutch, owners of buggy swamp around the Wash reclaimed it for production - because they now legally could. Elsewhere canals were drilled. The England of the 1700s became much, much more powerful than that of the 1600s. (1690s Scotland might have benefitted too until they tried colonising the Darien Gap, like idjits.)

One narrative for the stagnation across Europe is to blame the Church. I'd credit that argument for the chilling days of Inquisition. To me also, however; that doesn't ring as true in the age of Newton, whose England didn't follow the Church. The only case of direct Church influence I see in the whole article is where they slapped down Fernando VI's income tax. Based on the other people who squealed: this tax would have befallen equally land-rentiers, capitalists, and high-wage-earners. Which means the tax by nature would have hurt innovation more than the code's simplification would have helped.

It may be that the English Civil War - which the English won - had reïntroduced the Magna Carta into the commonweal. As Yarvin points out, nobody cited "the rights of Englishmen" before Henry VIII. The Tudors (who were Welsh) had cast about for national myths before all that, touting the Arthur cult. Only after the break from Rome (per Opus 4.8) Henry VIII and Elizabeth touted the Saxons. We still don't really have a national epic, or didn't before Tolkien anyway.

Our first fun mistake

The fossil bed at Mistaken Point, delightful name by the way, is yielding up "Ediacaran" eukaryotic fossils. The region may have been closer to Ediacara at the time, if the "VanDieLand" theory pans out; so, call it Greater Ediacara. Specifically this seabed dates 574Mya, at the start of the "Avalonian" epoch lasting until 560 Mya.

The fossils as fossils have retained zero DNA. What they do retain is where the DNA would have spread: close to the parent(?s), or far. Close "stolons" implies cloning or budding, like fungi or aspen (they say strawberry). Far spreading was done through the water in those days.

Budding eukaryotes don't compete with each other. As long as eukaryotes were stolons, their billion-years remained Boring.

More: interfluid spreading is a prerequisite for mixing before seeding. In short, sex (although here the fluid is just water).

They report that predation did happen but only later in the Ediacaran (or Vendian), running up to the 539 Mya Cambrian onset.

Maxwellport is back

So when I was awaiting a World Cup match, I went through a number of past articles I'd posted here. I wanted 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.

The Spaceline's long L1 station

A few years ago I evaluated the selenosync space elevator - poorly. I ended up rewriting the thing. Since then some people keep revisiting, especially, the "Spaceline". Which ties in with the lunaport at Sinus Medii.

Of the several related papers I've found, this blogpoast explores Penoyre and Sandford appendix C.2.

The notion is that a L1 station between us and Luna will float away unless counterweighted - on our side. A strong, thick cable to L1 must, then, have a strong thick cable toward the other direction - not necessarily the same length but to pull the same weight. As a side-effect of a beam this long being physically anchored to Medii [UPDATE 6/16: or close enough]: I don't think the L1 Lissajous is a thing. At Lunar apogee the L1 "halo" will be a point. At perigee, our loosened cable won't deviate far from that point. Gravity will simply stretch and unwind the cable on the side toward Earth; and if bendy enough also to the Moon. Even if the force is least at perigee, P&S say an attached station is still unlikely to need much force-correction up to a 400 km drift from the straightline.

Take the unit of measurement, such that 1 = radius of our Earth. The Moon's semimajor is around 60, eccentricity-allowing. Our mutual L1 is at 51 (85%ish); GEO is 6.6.

I recommend to attach at L1 a rotating cylinder. Start with a single one: there's no need for a counterspin. And this cylinder isn't high, from its axle to the rim. Instead the L1 plateau is suited for length. Tethered to the spaceline it's not floating away. It's not Hyperion and we certainly can't have Janhunens wrapping themselves around the axle; I'm thinking, that classic O'Neill cylinder. Which we can chain as long as the weight of one be balanced by that of another.

I pondered making this long tube an integral part of the tether itself but then I started thinking of ball-bearings or, failing that, how we'll radiate the heat off; or even how to build it. So we'll just tether it until someone else figures all that out.

As to what this station buys us: it's the cheapest point to launch high-Earth-orbit cargo to stations in TLL4 or L5. As well as TLL2 on the far side of the Moon; and from there, the whole Solar System. Lunar prospectors will want a station to regrow their bone-mass. So: yeah, I'm expecting this to be where the Medii colonists actually live.

Ezekiel's Greek translators

Yesterday we discussed the Leontopolitan targum of Isaiah. Today, we'll address van der Meer's extension of the argument to Ezekiel.

Unlike Greek Isaiah, and more like Syriac Isaiah or indeed Greek Jeremiah: Ezekiel was translated in committee. Present consensus has Ez 1-24, 28-39, and 40-48 by three different editors. Van der Meer handles 28-39; so is unconcerned with the Babylonian canal or that floating chariot. He also isn't touching the Ez 25-27 gap. This blog has raised an additional question about whether someone parasailed into Ez 28-39 to attach our 38-39 in there, somehow; van der Meer's project takes some sides on that, which we'll have to get to.

Van der Meer sees the first and third parts of the main translation-groups as more-faithful (we'll get to that); whatever the Jews might have been doing before them. The middle part - which is where the Greeks couldn't decide on Ez 38-9 - is different, earlier, as well. Van der Meer discusses Ez 28:1-19, an oracle against Tyre. With the assumption that the Ezekiel committee is all on the same page, as it were.

In Hebrew, Ezekiel has your typical Iraqi interest in gemstones. So too his translator into Greek... but in Greek, this guy has spliced in the gems from the Septuagint. That's right: from the Greek Torah, Exod 28:17–20 and 39:10–13 (LXX 36:17–21). The effect is to make of the Tyrian jabbâr - the mlk king - a blasphemer.

Except he's not the king in Greek. He is consistently the "archon". To this, van der Meer notes a Hasmonaean tweak back in Ezekiel 21 vv. 30–32(25–27). In Hebrew, this mocks the man with a crown, which as royal should be a "diadem" in Greek. This well befits the bitterness of the exiles against their last kings who'd... not exactly got to keep that crown. But the translator didn't use this word, instead using "turban" and the stephanos-crown. Those are for priests, not kings. Van der Meer also accepts Lydia Lee that the Greek removes even the satire of Tyrian royal khwarrah. So: a high-priestly figure [has] abused his position and for that reason is discredited. The Greek translator of Ezekiel 28 has associated this abuser with Tyre, van der Meer says; which is best ascribed to a Jew - better, Judaïst - who has observed Antiochus IV from his Tyrian base making a hash of Jerusalem's priesthood.

As noted van der Meer builds his argument from Johan Lust; but from Lust's earlier work, which van der Meer prefers over, say, "King/Prince of Tyre" 2012. Also brought is Maria V. Spottorno [Díaz-Caro]... 1982. This is in van der Meer's fourth section. That whole line of argument is problematic nowadays, at least for the later side of this middle translation-group; now vide Tracy McKenzie. The project in my opinion doesn't even need to discuss the placement or nature of our Ez 38-9. As to why van der Meer insisted on butting in, it may be that the assumption of a team all working together would be strengthened if the whole text was assumed intact at the time of translation.

And if I may inject an unhappy aside, Egyptologists will shudder at this line: the nearly fifty-five years rule of king Ptolemy VII Euergetes II (170–116 BCE). Wiki points here instead to Ptolemy VI Philometor 180-145 BC - and Cleopatra II; overlapping Ptolemy Physcon, 170-164, who will return to rule under this Cleopatra from 145 BC on. As Ptolemy VIII and second Euergetes... not VII. (Some other Ptolemy seems to have been raised posthumously as VII. It gets confusing. Greeks remember Pt. Physcon as "Cacergetes" although maybe Jews and Copts think better of him.)

Incidentally we are not yet at Philometor's last years with Cleo'. Those are the (Physcon-free) years the Egyptian Jews are building their new "Isaiah" - or, at least, Ezekiel's translator(s) presented their case otherwise. Unlike Greek Isaiah: Ezekiel's translator supports the Hasmonaeans, as did the books of Maccabees; van der Meer points mainly to 2 Maccabees. 1 Macc and Daniel perhaps hadn't made it out of Hebrew yet; and of course as a Hasmonaean he has no love for the Aramaic Levite literature including "Enoch".

Ezekiel's translator makes further appeal to some Greek Torah we might still own, which I don't see in (say) the contemporary translation of Isaiah. What I don't know, is to what degree Ezekiel's translator supports the LXX as-such (Egyptian as it was) or some "Lucianic" edition of Judaea.

CONTRAST 6/17: The Temple Scroll dreamt up a Temple which would be built with Divine assistance. Almost all the Ezekiel we know is assumed, excepting maybe that floater chs. 38-39. The 11QT temple would not be the Maccabean Temple, but I don't know if it reacts to that. It may well react to Onias IV's Temple in Egypt because there is absolutely no way it accepts their version of Isaiah.

The Leontopolitan targum of Isaiah

I argued last month, if on slender evidence, that Isaiah, in Greek, was taken from 1QIsa^a itself. For more evidence, Michaël N. van der Meer summarises the Greek Isaiah in the course of "Prophecy and Politics in the Old Greek Version of Ezekiel 28". We'll address Ezekiel later.

The "translator" of Isaiah which Christians have inherited is no translation. It updates the text; for instance changing Aram > Syria, the Philistines > Greeks (Hellenes, not "allophyles"), and Tarshish > Carchedon i.e. Carthage. On the surface such is mere geographic gloss, to aid "the modern audience" as we'd put it. Narratively the effect is to insinuate "Isaiah" (already encompassing chs. 34+, remember) into the role of a predictive prophet. And then there's Is 19:18.

The Isaiah 8:23b-9:6 oracle had concerned the historical Isaiah's king, the young Josiah. In Greek, not so much. Its focus is no longer the king. In fact he's not any king: he is "the herald of the Divine Council". Although sometimes we do get wordplay on MLK - king/angel (see Lydia Lee) - he heralds YHWH, and at no point heralds the elohim. Such title does, however, match an angel like Gabriel or a prophet - or a priest. Van der Meer relays his homeboy Arie van der Kooij, against other scholars, that Isaiah intends some chief priest of the Hellenistic age. Specifically Onias IV; who had to serve out his priesthood in Leontopolis from the early 140s BC.

Onias is, then, the once and future High Priest in Jerusalem; and the suffering servant. It was in Leontopolis and other Ptolemaic cities that Isaiah was interpreted, for that Jewish community. Ptolemy VI Philometor (and Cleopatra II, please don't forget her) kept these priests around in case the Ptolemies (and Cleopatrae) could ever reclaim the Judaea.

Well... they couldn't, and this is one reason Jews today justly dismiss Onias' pretensions for a load of cods. It seems to have gone little better for this sore loser in his own day; Jews elsewhere entertained rival translations of other books. Eventually the Jews as a people would get so disgusted they embarked upon real translations of the Hebrew, here and elsewhere (although not in time to save the MT from, say, the injections into Jeremiah - nor to save Isaiah itself!). One does, however, hope the Aramaic communities kept shtum on this, because they were (famously) floating their own targums.

Other evidence that Isaiah is late is the practically CS Lewis word "terebinth". The Septuagint proper retains the Attic "terminth". Elsewhere the two lower-Egyptian texts mostly share a language, for instance the oddly male parthenos for the female Hebrew alma "damsel" (if the Greeks ever implied a not-yet-a-woman, LXX didn't restrict it to physical virgins). I posit here that the Isaiah translator, living after this Torah, should have had access to such. If so, it looks like our man simply ignored the text. Isaiah's reactionary priestly translator may have preferred the Levite corpus, some of which also survives in Greek; which in early HasMaBean times was downplaying Torah.

We do not eat ze bugs

Manuel Peñero and Pablo Librado set out to show how their European ancestors ate land arthropods. Owen Lewis has got to the core of it: they quit.

At least they quit in "Northern Eurasia". These are the ancestors of us Indo-Europeans on the one side; and the Huns, Manchus, Turks, and Mongols on the other. We can certainly add the Koreans and Japanese to this.

Our ancestors could eat ze bugs - chitin at all - and the Neanders assuredly did. Until 7000 BC, the two authors (through Lewis) say; at that point we lost the ability to process chitin, a enzyme-family called chitinase. So small shellfish were still possible if we just peeled the shell off (I suspect some of these have been aquacultured in prehistory). Note that some coastal populations simply imposed a taboo against the last, although even some of these could be talked into munching a cricket or locust.

I don't know if larvae have chitin (I think little). Either-way some Neolithic populations did attract larvae to eat, infamously the Sardinians (early Levantine farmers) with their cheese.

Anyway as the Neolithic trundled along, I expect that insects attracted some taboos of their own, because people who lived near insects got malaria, and breads and puddings (and beer) were getting less expensive. A family that couldn't eat chitin would naturally have zero reason to live anywhere near ze bugs.

New Punjab

Fifteen years ago seven Hindu-and/or-Sikh monotheists from Punjab got together and designed a space (kilo)station. They called it "Hyperion" in homage to their Greek cultural roots. The basic design is the torus; which they stack, so as to keep it from tumbling chaotically like the Saturnine moon of that name. They had clearly thought deeply on the topic, and the NSS agreed awarding their proposal a grand prize.

The plan was to put this station at TLL4. As to scale: 900m radius (=1.8km dia), staffed by 18000 people.

As to L4 and not L5: interplanetary dust. We call this the Kordylewski Cloud after its 1961 discoverer and, yes, it is more visible in L5. The authors did not know this at the time but a Magyar crew has verified that L5 captures more dust than L4. This is caused by Terra-Luna-particle not being a perfect Lagrangian system, as the Sun also hits the particle; and that Terra-Luna orbit their barycentre with an eccentricity (Brave AI sez: 0.026 to 0.077, higher than Earth's own) and inclination relative to the Sun. For my part I don't rate this dust-delta as so important.

If we must have a megastructure at our own L4 or L5, and I repeat I am very skeptical, a trio of Japanese evaluated the cost: 20MT of material. If they brought it from Earth even with that fancy Starship they'd be looking at ten million million 2025 dollars and over fifteen millennia (Egyptian history is said to be five of these/a third of that). But the Punjabis probably figured as much which is why they wanted to feed their station from Luna... maybe by coilgun. Nitrogen and phosphour might have to be fed from ambient passing asteroids.

I hadn't noticed Hyperion being referenced much since 2011. Janhunen's dumbbell is smaller so cheaper and safer, for TLL4 or L5 (UPDATE 6/10: but not L1). Same holds for Orion Ruzicka's reinforced torus if they keep the mad lad in check. Miklavcic's spinning bag of dirt and since-then Jensen's various schemes were always meant for in-situ mulching of asteroids... somewhere else.

Doctor Moreau

I have recently finished HG Wells' Island of Doctor Moreau which I supplemented with a viewing of Island of Lost Souls. The latter is to-date the best cinematic rendition we've had from the book, and might structurally be better than the book itself - I might get to that.

Wells had - famously - burst out the gate with six books 1895-8, five of them SF including our topic the third. They were, I understand, all big sellers, if not at the time then certainly in their reprints. Wells may have felt guilt over his newfound wealth and fame, as he became a socialist. At least four of the SF books remain classics to this day including (I repeat myself) our topic. The man kept writing - which has proved a problem, because it doesn't look like his later projects (which were many) have fared so well. Although there remain apologists for, say, Kipps.

Moreau - I must report - presents "early work" problems to the modern reader. The book wasn't Wells' first; but he may have felt that he needed to put in as many ideas as he could, so he could force them upon a readership which he feared might abandon him. The movie, at a trim 70ish minutes, slashed out a good deal of Wells' philosophical ramblings, and dared have one of the Lost Souls feel an attraction to the character "Perkins" who is, uh, Prendick in the book. Wells could not dare this in late Victorian England, so postpones such "anthro" after Moreau's (sorry) end as remote-observation.

Wells was writing before genetics, and in anycase was not writing a genetic book. If you are looking for Jurassic Park, you should read Jurassic Park. Moreau at heart may or may not be a "Darwinist", but what he absolutely refuses is eugenics. Moreau believes instead in the medical biology: in Biblical terms, that you can change the leopard's spots, right now. Moreau, Londoner, has made excellent strides in this "endeavour", uplifting several species into humanoid form. He's got into their brains, too. And into their minds: to which end, he's instilled a cult.

Wells would become a(n) eugenicist. Wells, I suspect - darkly - didn't really believe that a man, even a genius of a man, could turn an actual @#$% puma into a catgirl waifu. (Indeed, we learn, here Moreau failed; although he does do fairly well with a dog.) Moreau is, Scott Alexander would say, Wells' steelman. Sake Of Argument.

No. Our text is a parable. Wells was more thinking of British idiots, of American Negroes, and of all the tribes for which London had (somehow) ended up responsible as of 1896. He thought that the British might indeed be able to dress up a Kenyan and make a passable Christian of him. But it would end up a shell of Christianity, and that the Kenyan would revert within months of British neglect. Christianity was a joke to Wells at the time - and in all the time G-d provided to him. If a bear could become like a man it would have to take place over the same millions of years as it took the apes.

Second contact

In AD 1022ish, a tree surrendered its life to build a Scandinavian-themed home in Markland. Map Myths reports a possible Danish attempt to reëstablish contact. With the help of a couple of German pirates and the Portuguese.

As you may imagine this has run up against 1930s German nationalism and general we-wuzzery around Europe about "who discovered the Americas". (The answer is "the Navajo". Because screw you.)

Frankly all this is the wrong question for the last decades of the AD 1400s, on account of a few factors long mooted here on this blog. tl;dr everyone already knew about the "Markland" for at least a century. Few in the 1400s cared about cold worthless islands. The great powers - which did not then include Denmark nor England - cared about bypassing the Ottomans and getting to the Indies. Whatever these privateers were doing well north of all that, didn't figure. No northwest passage, no cities of gold in Labrador, nothing but cod.

I do however find this of interest for several other, if I may say better, reasons. Cod wasn't worthless in this Catholic age. And the fisher fleets were improving. Perhaps the Danes were starting to care about those "islands" again.

It may witness the fifteenth century in Greenland; when the old towns were abandoned. The island might not have been abandoned. These Danes coming toward the end of the century thought some "pirates" might have lingered there. If so: what was their prey? Basque fishermen? the Welsh and Cornish?

Evaluating the large temporary laboratory

ToughSF's actual link, for which we were planning those mammoth toroidal habitats, was to "Tackling a Mars Cycler Design Head-On" (pdf but badly encoded). Let's abstract it out.

These habitats aren't asteroidal mines. For the trio who wrote that paper, they're temporary housing - shuttles. That allows them to be designed smallest, first. The smallest torus they'll allow fits maybe high-fifties of people. There's a lot of room per person, because this is a 180 day mission until the cycler drops them off at Deimos. Once at Deimos they're Mars' problem; their emptied shuttle then cycles back to Earth where it's Earth's problem.

The trajectory this paper assumes is the classic Aldrin, maintained by solar-electric propulsion. They want to build it in LEO where the SEP paper proposed much higher: TLL1. I'd rather the far-side lunar base with assembly at TLL2... but that might be harder now.

This doesn't have to be a T/M cycler. It could be a grand tour of the inner system. It could be Hohmann, with less outgoing delta-V. But to Mars/Deimos that takes longer and then it would have to brake and stay there. It could also be a temporary lab in space but then, why not just use a Janhunen or an asteroid-colony to be worked indefinitely. So, we hohmann it out to Deimos or some isolated nearby rock, which we then dock and exploit.

The lab of 55 dudes isn't a colony. Whether it stay there or cycle back, its crew-and-cargo are not staying at Deimos or Atíra or wherever. This is a mission to say they were there. What they might be able to do is patch together some infrastructure for the next shuttle - which will host hundreds.

The design overall might be better for shifting into other orbits. As noted the outgoing Hohmann is less delta-V than the insertion into Aldrin. If the shuttle can take that, it can certainly take the deceleration to dock Deimos. Can you do that with a Janhunen or a big rolling bag of Bennu? I am pretty sure once you have an orbiting Janhunen, it's not going anywhere else.

How planets (can) lose (half) their crusts

On topic of lavaworlds, last April four people wrote "Coupled orbital and interior structure evolution of lava planets" and, on the 20th, posted it. But the pdf says 22nd. Dude! Whoa.

The claim is they ain't natural. Planets born to that heat should have all their material blasted out on formation. Where planetary systems are known to have stayed in-situ, like the Trappist-1 system, are no lava planets. The lava planets instead are around K2-141, K2-360, TOI-141, TOI-431, TOI-2431, HD 3167 and GJ/Gliese 367 all marked "b". (No 55 Cancri e?)

The thought is that they formed in systems where are much larger planets further out. These, as our planets have done to Mercury, pulled their orbits into eccentricity. As they skirt their stars, they raise tides - on the star and on themselves. Now another equilibrium can assert itself. These shattered worlds (like in Star Control 2) reform themselves this close to their stars, in a circular orbit which outer planets cannot much touch. Then they lock tidally. Inner side melts; outer side re-hardens.

The process happens over billions of years so is not done for, say, TOI-431 which isn't even 3Gy yet.

A hundred tonnes at a time

TransAstra proposes to shift 100 tonnes of rock from near-Earth space to Earth space (or Lunar).

ToughSF prefers this over sending humans over to the rocks. Longterm I agree. What's a Bennu orbit compared to a planetary orbit, or a Lagrangian or even the 13:10:8 Laplacian? People should live on natural ports-of-call.

And some of those rocks are eminently movable. 740 missions by such robots and they could disassemble all Bennu, or at least the parts colonists want; and bring its pieces to, oh, STL4 or to a soft landing on the Lunar equator. In the other direction Casey Handmer can yeet Lunar regolith and maybe even Lunar-assembled critical parts - somehow; and catch them at TLL2.