The dust rocket: Martian edition

Our moon has aluminium oxides and is energy-rich for half the month. It also doesn't have a lot of gravity. Therefore an outbound craft, rather than burn expensive hydrogen, might have a crew spend time separating aluminium from oxygen, then burn that dust. So: a similar suggestion for Mars.

Mars can get oxygen too... but what it can get for cheaper, is carbon dioxide. Now: CO₂ is pretty inert, as gas goes. Goroshin, Lee, and Higgins back in 1999 suggested that CO₂ if liquid could burn magnesium.

Back in 1999 these three weren't confident in finding water on Mars - meaning, equatorial latitudes, best for getting back to Earth (which, further, could refuel and tether at Phobos / Deimos). We might be better-off now. Honestly I remember some confidence of finding Martian-tropic ice even in 1999.

I'll bring in that whatever you can react with carbon-dioxide, you can react so much better with carbon-monoxide. Mars' economy, if we trust Robert Zubrin, will use much CO. Instead of Mg + CO₂ why not Mg + CO for more exhaust-velocity? I can think of soot as a clog-opportunity, but if so then the authors should have noted that - I think.

The Volkswanderung into Britannia-Inferior

HBDChick points to Gretzinger et al. including Stephan Schiffels. Summaries at Science and at Schiffels' own Twitter.

Here the Venerable Bede is affirmed as flagging post-Roman pre-Viking Britain as taking on a lot of migrants. These migrants would include female migrants. So far, no argument from me. Until we get further west, out to "Wessex" and to the Welsh Marches and to literal Cumbria; there I might take a stand, as perhaps my ancestors did.

We're not quite there yet as defining what a "Jute" was. Bede and the Anglosaxon Chronicle(s) said they're the tribes who settled Kent. But... the Chronicles depended upon Bede, or at least upon the sources he had, which also trended eighth-century. The genes in the southeast point more to Franks and, indeed, there's a Merovingian influence in Norfolk-Suffolk late-sixth-century aristocracy. Raedwald was of the Angles. Kent and the East-Saxons slipped back into paganism in his time, thus seceding from the Franks.

In that respect I'd not yet call out Frankish genes as being "Norman". Especially when you consider (A) Normans were actually Viking-descended and (B) Bill the Bastard had called in many many Bretons, who - by their name - could boast Devonese and Cornish ancestry, by conquest claiming their homecoming. The "Franks" in Dark Age southeast Britain, if by that we mean Gaulish and/or inland-Germanic, look to be centuries earlier than 1066. Or a century later: Angevin/Plantagenet-era, when the kings and nobles became more French, in culture and in marriage.

Hatepe

In light of this nonsense, why not.

Over the past couple decades I've understood the latter Lake Taupō eruption called "Hatepe" to be AD 180. (Like Iceland, this isn't a one-and-done.) I just looked back in on Hatepe today and now they're like, no; AD 230ish. And its date now sports an error-bar.

For New Zealand this isn't just prehistoric, it's prehuman. Only moa saw this thing (briefly). The nearest human society was Polynesian yes, but way north in Tonga whose inhabitants were not yet Maori. Also this precedes the eastbound migrations lately fictionalised in Moana. Prevailing winds would keep the Australians from knowing anything about this (as a landbound quake - no tsunami).

The AD 180 date - I find - wasn't dendrochronologic. That date (perhaps always suspiciously round) came from Herodian and Fan Ye; neither of them Tongan, nor anywhere subequatorial. So maybe some other event caused the climate they noted. Rather: claimed.

The late 220s-230s would overlap Severus Alexander, I think. Could we assume some other climate disruptions then?

CONFIRMED 10/9/23: Antarctica.

Enrichment

A couple weeks ago World Nuclear News relayed press-information from Silex down-under.

I bring this up because recently we've learnt how long Australia is on Net Zero. Solar will be part of it (especially if beamed from orbit); but meanwhile, why not nuclear too.

"Enrichment" has a long history in isotope-processing; at first, with a uranium centrifuge. It's not literally enriching the isotopes they got. It's about separation of isotopes, so they can skim valuable U-235 from the U-238 baseline.

Note: the same process should be good for, say, Boron, to get the lower-neutron isotopes of that. You want this to soak up stray neutrons from your reaction.

Haldeman as seer

On this fine Sunday in time for the Texans / Broncos game, I drove up to Breck and here finished Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. I wish I'd read it in 1998.

I mean of course I should have read it long before that, but 1998 was when I read Starship Troopers. There's no excuse for reading one and not the other. Both authors Served; both books know the score. Although I'll rate Haldeman's score higher as dealing with the civilian side, where Heinlein flat doesn't hold civilians as worthy of an opinion.

I get the impression from Haldeman that he doesn't respect civilians either, given how he depicts civilian society. We're criminals and/or decadents. Haldeman's edge is that he argues the point where Heinlein just says "whatever; just pay your taxes, pleb".

As for the Future as seen from the middle 1970s:

Haldeman called it that we'd be finding dwarf-planets pretty soon. He also called it that the next one would be named "Charon". And that an interstellar military would prefer a further Kuiper body than Pluto, which journey cannot use Neptune for grav-assist - a nonPlutino can.

Unfortunately JH didn't call that Pluto would get that dwarf-planet, as in fact a near-twinned moon. So his "Charon" is out at, what, 80 AU and has a Mercury-like size and gravity. Honestly I think that even in the 1970s Haldeman should have guessed that ice-rich dwarf planets should be Tritonlikes with low density. But, back then, everyone was still banging on about Pluto's effects upon Neptune. Some thought Pluto was an aberration (we see echoes in Mass Effect's mass-driver); Haldeman represents the side which assumed that Pluto would be followed up by bigger Plutones out in the Kuiper. This can be fixed by positing a Marslike even further than 80 AU, or else setting the whole scene on Eris allowing for low-grav.

Haldeman also called that the world's dominant governments would be subsidising homosexuality as population-control, and that we'd be Malthusian - by 2025ish. Here he was optimistic; we've been there for some time now. Haldeman doesn't express an opinion that we should be Malthusian given our energy capabilities - overtly. Haldeman's book implies that much of this is a racket, excused by the Forever War (a theme he borrows from "Orwell" Blair). We don't have Taurians for our excuse but we do have other bogeymen.

A good day

I want to check in on some personal comments. Some positivity, perhaps. Because in the southwest-Louisville / Superior region, we needed some of that this year.

I was readying for a day-out in Superior (and Broomfield) when, around 8:20 AM, I looked in the mirror and saw Jack Torrance staring back from it. So: haircut time. Superior actually had a salon open, so I started out early. This done I got a nice breakfast next door, and then headed out to the bookstore. I got Joe Haldeman's The Forever War (and Daryaee's Sasania), so walked (back) to the park.

I was early by three hours for the chili fest, but they let me read this book in the nearby soccer field. So I did that. Then I queued up to pay my $40 for four hours of beer and chili (and to pay another $5 for a shirt).

I can't exactly say I had too much beer - anyway I wasn't driving - but I definitely had more chili than I needed. Nice conversations. No rain! (Until I was walking home, but - well - it was hot, so I didn't mind it.)

The second monkey

JGS has adopted a spider-monkey, chuen to the Quiche. The Internet warns that these are Not Pets but maybe that's just for urbanites and Martha's Vineyard residents. They were tolerated among all the Maya, and indeed kept as pets as in Apocalypto. Much like macaques along North Africa, except more so. There exist other monkeys in the region however (and not just us bumbling tourists).

In Chiapas lives also the howler-monkey, no domesticate for anybody. This is called batz among the Quiche / K'iche' today (I assume mantled palliata; black pigra is more peninsular). In their bible the Popol Vuh, Hun Chuen and Hun Batz were the older brothers of the Hero-Twins; those twins finally usurped their brothers' tyranny and drove them into the treetops. The Quiche have reasoned that chuen laughs; batz grieves. But one must always keep in mind that the Popol Vuh is a postapocalyptic foreign text which, like our Bible (and Apocalypto) often reacts against the Choltal culture which, as we all know, ended up in failure.

As for the Choltal, some modern research points more to the capuchin as the brother to chuen. The capuchin was either indigenous to the region at the time or else imported from further south. With the collapse of the Maya oeconomy the capuchin became more scarce this far north and was no longer remembered among the Quiche.