Thursday, June 6, 2024

The first blizzards

Curtin's title is unnecessarily clickbaity, so try mine: Nonoceanic water cycle at 4Gya. This merits promotion to the Timeline.

They have water underground reacting with rocks. They say that would be delivered from water on the surface, not from some deeper vent. So I guess they couldn't find any oceanic salts in the vein. That means: freshwater on the surface.

They mention life... several times. But Earth had no life then. Stromatolites are datable a few hundred million years later. I'd have left "life" off the title and maybe mentioned it only once in the main body. Better speculations would go toward other planets at ~550 My of age and, especially, the 70% insolation range.

Also missing on Earth at the time: a magnetic field. Before the 550 My mark, gradual release of water from internal sources should have boiled off. Why not after?

Did a big post-Theia comet or Cereslike deliver this water all at once? or volcanoes? A sudden steamcloud might deluge the whole planet before salts got into the basins. I get the impression that space rocks tend salty already when they get within 1.6 AU. I bring to witness Mars' perchlorates - and for that matter Europa's ocean; given its own heat-sources, radiation, and low-G. The salts don't however make it back into atmo to rain down on the plateaux. Or for that matter to snow down.

Chris Combs can ...

[...insert humiliating ritual here] This morning the SuperHeavy launched the Starship into a successful orbit and landed again (on the water). The Starship followed.

Zim has a rundown, which must be supplemented with Stephen Green. An engine was lost on the SuperHeavy but that didn't hurt; then another one failed on the way down. Also hard stresses affected the Starship itself, especially an orientation-flap. The stresses resulted in more stresses, like a cracked lens. Still: both vessels might have been reusable, if SpaceX wanted to keep that generation of either (which it doesn't).

So far I doubt the FAA can call Miss Happ. Frankly they shouldn't have rung her up for the third test either, but at least some saner heads over there rated it insufficient to block this test.

Starliner had taken off yesterday; this time, trying to get to the ISS. And... it did! - having spouted hydrogen leaks. It barely made it. Thus putting them on parity with (checks) the Raptor and Dragon except that these don't leak. It's like Starliner put humans in a test vehicle. As for the Atlas 5 that put the Starliner up there, that worked as well as the SuperHeavy did; excepting that they don't even try to retrieve the Atlas 5.

Meanwhile Axiom is reporting that on the assumption of a working Starship into orbit, which SpaceX have, yesterday's Artemis III Integrated Test looked good too.

Given all that, I decree that Starliner is now a test shuttle, such that on its return to Earth nothing valuable and nothing human be stored on it. To get the astronauts home I am afraid that NASA will need to get a Dragon up there.

Wednesday, June 5, 2024

Justin/Luke

Over the past few weeks Michael Kok has been confronting some of Brant Pitre's grand(ios)er claims on New Testament authorship. The dispute has entered the Carnival, thence PaleoJudaica. Kok seems to be expounding on his 2022 paper (pdf) which concerns Justin's use of "Luke".

We all agree Justin cited lore which we now find in the Lucan corpus. Kok has been treating Pitre with respect. Kok holds Mark and Matthew to be very early, even a memoir of apostolic times; I agree with that assessment of Mark, by the way. But Kok cannot find where Justin, if aware of the Lucan volumes, was aware of their authorship as by Luke. Marcion was similarly unaware.

If I may interject... said corpus had sources too. Those now claiming that Luke and Matthew used a Quelle, rather than that Luke just used Matthew; might also suspect that Justin used "L" and not Luke. Perhaps Kok follows Goodacre (and Pitre) that Luke used Matthew...? If so, Kok would have a bias against speculations on lost sources. I tend to agree with Pitre on this much as well.

But I question whether Luke's sources be as lost as some think.

Tuesday, June 4, 2024

The failed crusade

I was hoping to catch the Eucharistic Pilgrimage at Steamboat Springs - which festivities be scheduled for after work hours. "T.I.L." that the (Ivanti) VPN doesn't work with our servers from the Steamboat or Kremmling libraries. It will work from Empire and perhaps the whole Summit County; but I didn't want to drive on Wednesday, I wanted to be in Steamboat on Wednesday.

"Luckily" I didn't need the servers for my highest-priority which was administrative haggling. Which was also an exercise in inconclusive frustration.

Let's hope tomorrow is a better day, even though I will be stuck here in 90°-F weather.

Monday, June 3, 2024

Tamid

Davila points to Bavli Tamid. This is a tractate in that Talmud which is classically considered to be off the standard eastern Aramaic.

It seems one Noam Eisenstein has found, with an algorithm, that Tamid actually is typically Talmudic... except where it talks about Alexander. Yes, that Alexander. Alexander cast a long shadow in the Aramaic Orient.

What I can't find in this press release is whether we're dealing with a special dialect for storytelling (like in Callisthenes' Romance), or plain Syriac or Hatrene, or even the hoary Palaestinian dialects used in certain Targums. The paper of DOI 10.3828/jjs.2024.75.1.1 is paywalled.

Sunday, June 2, 2024

Leaving Eros

Let's talk exports from the permamaglev in vacuum and micrograv. On Earth, the fastest train is the Shanghai which has been tested up to 23 m/s. Normally it doesn't go that fast. I assume it could if the Chinese didn't sweat the air-resistance.

That means the calculator again. If I want 9.8 m/s2, and I have 200m radius: the train must run 44.3 m/s. A 1km radius will run 99 m/s!

If some of those numbers look familiar, that's because I used a similar calculation for a momentum capacitor elsewhere. Which leads to ponder if we could so use the maglev as a momentum-capacitor. Escape-velocity of Deimos is 5.556 m/s. Even given my terminal case of sloth where it comes to, say, v_inf I am fairly confident our maglev can eject pods from any rock up to Eros' size, such that Eros won't see them again.

It may even be among Eros' jobs to make those pods. It's not like anyone needs Eros in that orbit. Deimos, yeah, the Martian merchants probably want to keep.

On the other hand: crashes are that much worse at higher speeds and avoiding such requires that much more lead-in time to screech to a halt. As my readers be witness I was considering safety first (well, repairability first). So I think we'll have only as many cars on the track in the wider ring as on the shorter ring, and space them out more.

Saturday, June 1, 2024

Repair-protocol in Eros

As an aside on Thursday's sketch, let's discuss its safety-features. Rubblepiles seem resilient: where a breach opens up, it should only be localised. A breach in a large solid rock - like Deimos, or Eros or Apophis - might not be.

I don't actually think that the rocks be all that solid, even on Eros. I expect colossal boulders with gravel in-between. The spingrav tubes are each, potentially, subject to blockages. Something might shift or even crack a boulder above or below. In natural milligravity, which at the centre is more like microgravity, a crack should be visible before the rocks lazily intrude upon the passages. Or just an accumulation of regolith and gravel.

Higher-risk would be sabotage, or some asteroid-shaking impact like an experiment or docking-manoeuvre gone wrong elsewhere on the rock. More likely is that somebody wants to move the thing. Apophis has a dangerous orbit (for Earth); most asteroids have useless orbits. Maybe someone wants Apophis to be our regular Venus-to-Earth shuttle; maybe someone wants Eros in STL4. That's going to shake things up. Do we evacuate?

The obvious worst-case scenario, if a local one, is decompression. Some cars will have EVA suits; all cars have means to patch leaks (GenX may remember Mission Critical; younger Millennials, The Expanse). Most cars, in event they can't be patched, should light up red warnings commanding to GTFO that car and onto some place safer. EVA suitups simply take too long to do the job from there. A professional in EVA will, in EVA's good time, get over there to patch the leak.

A general bad-case scenario is loss of power to the superconductor. The maglev then shuts down. This means the trains slow down, grinding against the outside floor... which floor is set to become the microgravitic ceiling. We'll want auxiliary power-supply but I'm assuming we'll have that; life-support takes a higher priority to spingrav. I'll hope some softlanding strips line the outside "floor", to reduce damage to chassis. The people in the trains have time to secure their belongings before freefall.

Another bad-case is a boulder-blockage. If unscheduled that's a worse-case: the superconductor must activate backwards. This is to grind the cars to a faster halt. There's less warning. In the worst case where the crash cannot be avoided, affected cars must depressurise too, to avoid internal shockwaves and human implosion (so we learn from "Privateer").

As to cleaning up the mess: I've designed for redundancy, so evacuees in need of gravity should switch to the parallel train or maybe even a nearby rubblepile. That'll be the wounded first, like whoever got himself exploded and/or lost eardrums. I suggest also filling the whole track with nonreactive nontoxic gas as long as trains are not running; this probably means nitrogen with a ratio of carbondioxide. Why? So that human mechanics don't need EVA suits - and also, don't worry about fire. Said mechs will of course need goggles (because zero-G dust) and an oxygen-supply.

When it's all fixed, which includes replacing the brakepads: start it up again, and allow the inhabitants back into their appropriate cabins.