Lava tubes

When it comes to it, and with respect to Robert Zubrin, much Martian (and Lunar) settlement will be in lavatubes. Some talk about these has been going on for years now, although this blog hasn't noted instances yet. So here is the latest: Francesco Sauro, Matteo Massironi, Riccardo Pozzobon, Jo De Waele, and two other Italians not interviewed. doi 10.1016/j.earscirev.2020.103288.

Life here will be night life - VERY cold, at these pressures. However with internal pressurisation, the low external pressure would insulate the bases.

If the entries to the lavatubes are punched in by meteors, as seems the case on the Moon, the colonists've also got some ores to process. If they're lucky: purely metallic and precious ores.

Venus is volcanic and will have lavatubes as well. Not all the volcanoes are active. Here, insulation is more for keeping the outside air from coming in. Solid cylindrical rock should protect from implosion as from explosion. But I am more reluctant to recommend colonies down there; I don't think these volcanoes rise far enough above the supercritical surface. Getting simple electronics to the mountains of Maxwell is taxing our thoughts.

Battery aeroplane!

Somehow I missed this story from 30 May: battery-powered Cessna.

This tells us what we'll need to include on our flight over Venus along with the battery - mostly coolant. This in lieu of fuel; I dunno if we get to keep the heated coolant. Keeping in mind that my superVenerean aerofoil is only to keep freight aloft, where this 'plane here intends to go somewhere.

The Earthers didn't consider solar-panels, to mitigate the power-drain. Also, their aerofoil was secondarily modified to stuff the battery in the passenger cabin; once it's designed around the battery, it will certainly be more efficient.

But here's our proof-of-concept.

SUPERSONIC 11/18: Casey Handmer.

The Huari's coastal rivals

For Covey, 50 the Cuzco vales had taken on some Huari colonies; he implies the Huari sites were foreign here. These Cuzcian towns survived the Huari collapse to the Fourth Age - they did NOT retreat to the hills. The same might be said for Chanca, 150 km west (p. 54). But a pre-Inca palace in Cuzco was a "thirtieth" the size of contemporary still-Third-Age palace at Chan Chan of the Chimú culture.

Huari was expansionist and imperial in a way Tiahuanaco wasn't. I don't know where's evidence of Huari attacking Tiahuanaco. It may be that Huari saw Chanca and Cuzco both as difficult-enough. If the Huari hold was light, and trade with Tiahuanaco unhindered, this may explain why Cuzco memory didn't recall a difference. One wonders if Chanca might have remembered more about the Huari in particular.

Huari at 600-1100 AD overlaps Moche (up to 700) and Chimú (Chan Chan founded 900). I am unsure why the 700s and 800s AD are absent from Wikipedia for the coast. Did the Huari annex postMoche coastal sites, inspiring and encouraging Chimú to rally around Chan Chan ...? Sicán, also, was post-Moche coastal. Records are better here (at least for Wiki). It too doesn't really take off until 900 AD.

To me, this looks like the Huari started off with some hegemony over disunited coastal polities, profiting from the collapse of Moche culture. But the postMoche sites rallied, asserting their independence. The Huari never did exert force over Tiahuanaco. The coastal sites were very rich sites; Tiahuanaco didn't matter so much, but losing the coast hurt. The Huari for whatever reason couldn't reorganise from - say - Quito, as Huayna Capac did. So it collapsed.

As to why Tiahuanaco also fell at this time, I know less. Maybe the lack of trade from the north. Over the Fourth Age, I do see that Tiahuanaco's old region of hegemony is succeeded by Aymara chiefdoms. It may well be that the Inca royal family started as one of these. Chanca, westward, strikes me as purely Quechua.

UPDATE 5/23/21: Huari's decline AD 900-1100 overlaps the Amazon's.

City of the Gods

The Valley of Mexico, Otomí and Nahua alike, had no memory of "Teohuacan" / "Teotihuacan". (The Maya knew it as "Place of Reeds" ... when they cared, which as of 1300 AD they didn't.) "Teo/huacan" just means "place of gods". Similarly the Akkadians didn't know what "Babillu" meant so folk-etymologied it as KA-DINGIR-RA, Godsgate (Bâb Ilân). So: to South America, when the Quechua / Aymara lords of Cuzco happened upon Lake Titicaca.

Titicaca had a ruin of its own, southern edge, on the yonder side from Cuzco. "Three-week journey" according to Covey, 41; and the journey crosses what Coloradans call a "Fourteener" to get there. The Incas called that southern site "Tiahuanaco".

Most South Americans thought they'd come from the tropical north, a myth that has the virtue of being true. The Incas proclaimed a contrary myth: the god Viracocha himself came out of this lake Titicaca, whence at Tiahuanaco He made new stone men. As Covey, 45 points out, Tiahuanaco had a rich sculptural tradition, leaving behind copious broken statues and stone heads. Apparently these golems spread underground because Viracocha then went up and down the Andes calling men out of caves. The Inca, thereby, didn't come from Tiahuanaco itself; they were called out of a cave by the Tiahuanacan Creator.

Complicating matters, the Pachacuti Inca (note the name: pachacuti means something like "cosmic reconstruction") built Viracocha shrines up and down the route from Cuzco to Tiahuanaco. Covey, 43 notes as Inca: Maucallata and Huanacuari. So it has historically been difficult, both for Europeans and indeed for the later Inca, to know which was pre-Inca and which Inca. The Inca also didn't quite have the same linear concept of time that IndoEuropeans (or Mesoamericans) got. Although at least some of these "modern" Andean shrines were in view of truly ancient ruins, like "Pukara" which just means "hillfort" (p. 45). And, of course, like Tiahuanaco itself. The Incas rebuilt a lot of this stuff too (p. 44).

(To the reader: feel free to take a drink when you read since time immemorial. Pukara and Tiahuanaco do in fact precede Richard I Plantagenet.)

The Andean memory got better when it came to life before the Inca. Pro-Inca Andeans of the north remembered it as the Fourth Age, the age of Pukara. The men of the Third Age had fled to the hills, living in fear. (So far, so Archaic Greek.) The Inca had brought the Fifth Age of peace and plenty (for late fourteenth-century Cuzcians).

We now know that "Third-Age" Tiahuanaco was the centre of a south-facing civilisation. Cuzco herself had been settled by a contemporary neighbour, from the north: the Huari. (These borders have rather reasserted themselves in the Bolivian / Peruvian border.) The Inca didn't know the difference. When they chanced upon a Huari gravesite in Urcos, that was their proof Viracocha had visited there too.

Covey doesn't say (since now we're getting out of Covey's scope) but Andean civilisation even by the Huari / Tiahuanacan era had already grown to share ideographical tropes - much like how Mesoamerica came to share, say, a feathered-serpent god and a calendar. Or like how Quechua and Aymara share linguistic aspects, or how most Mesoamerican languages join in a Sprachbund.

Covey does say (p. 49) that the fragmentation and warfare plaguing the Fourth Age highlands didn't reach the coasts. The coasts still enjoyed Third Age lifestyles. Which, when the Inca united the highlands, left the lowlands militarily vulnerable...

Neolithic familial change

Razib Khan did one of his open-threads yesterday. One of its links was to Harald Ringbauer, John Novembre, and Matthias Steinrücken: a look at inbreeding in various populations. The term there is Runs of Homozygosity. (Calling HBDChick!)

The article is an overview and a recommendation for future research. The claim here is that wherever there is first-order incest, it's in an elite burial. We have ourselves a Sun King, like the Pharaohs and Incas - or the old Irish. This phenomenon is rare. Turns out sister bumping was just as dangerous for an Irish prince in 5000 BC as it was for the Habsburgs in 1500. The softer inbreeding was more common: here, we're dealing with a gene-pool limited likely by sheer population. UPDATE 9/10 - like the Incas' subjects.

Or by caste and clan. Pakistan is notably bad here (long RoH).

Western Eurasia turns out to shorten its RoH over time. The authors figure this was a revolution in agriculture rather than in social mores: beforehand, some people would like to outbreed, but in the old days they couldn't, and now they can. Same for the Andes. Excepting their respective sun-kings.

INTERJECT 8/5: The reverse is also true. Some culturally-inbred populations were limited by the number of cousins. Europe is the exception which Razib cites. Mandarin China another exception.

One notably sharp change is Iberian: Early Neolithic 5400-5000 BC was inbred, then suddenly Middle/Late Neolithic 4800-2600 BC outbred. The authors link this to Cardial (not Corded!) Ware 5500 BC. These farmers radiated out from a small population. And I guess the population stayed small for several generations. In the early 4000 BC - the authors point out - the farmers started mixing with the foragers, as well. I'd suggest: a move to animal-husbandry among the old foragers. Now they had something to offer to the new cities; further, like the pygmies among the Bantu, the now-herdsmen adopted the city language. Intermarriage was no longer the problem it used to be, so it happened.

Supersonic flight, take three

The Concorde failed, at Mach 2. Its sonic-boom distracted the people living around the aeroports, so - from circa 1970 on - it was allowed to hit that speed only over the ocean - limiting its range. The real problem was cost. Yeah you saved some flight-hours on the crew. But the crew wasn't that large given that the passenger-manifest was smaller. The issue here was fuel.

Rolls-Royce and Mr "Virgin" Branson have a plan for a Mach 3. It fires higher into atmo at 18 km; the boom, at that height, isn't so loud on the ground. As we've learnt from the ramjets the higher up you are, the faster you go - in fact, the faster you must go, to get the airflow-pressure.

This third-version fast 'plane carries even fewer passengers than the Concorde but, they think, it's less fuel per passenger than in that - might as well call it, the Mark Two (after the Tu-144, also doomed; let us not speak of the Boeing 2707).

They'd sell it to the private-jet set I guess. I can see governments wanting in on this. Maybe not the largest governments: Air Force One is pretty much a flying West Wing, so don't mind the longer flight times.

GLWT 8/12: Branson in trouble. That's telling me that the announcement came out to shore up the stock-price. That is: it's early. I don't doubt the science but I do doubt Virgin Galactic's ability to deliver. Rolls Royce may need to buy out the stake. The question is - when.

MOAR POWAH 5/17/21: We got thrust! - although impulse is still unobtainium.

Khusro, restorer of the faith

Touraj Daryaee, possibly our best researcher in Late Sasanian Iran, explains Khusro's propaganda. The first Khusro, not the doofus who claimed his name and threw Persia into the dumper.

Khusro came to the scene with a disunited Iran. One Mazdak had spread about an attempt at unifying the dên religion, further bringing in some Manichaean elements I think. Reform was in the air; in AD 540 everyone else was doin' it. Mazdak's proposals failed to impress the Magi in the outlying shrines.

So Khusro told his people a story. Before his own (Sasanid) dynasty - Khusro claimed - the old dên had been broken. The Greeks had occupied Perse(polis) and stolen its library; they drove other refugees to the Indus. The Arsacids had done nothing to help. Artaxerxes / Arda[x]shir of Sasan had brought the texts back. But recently Mazdak has scattered the remnants again.

The texts which tell this tale are now in the dên-kard books, specifically volumes III and IV. The tale is anachronistic as stated: Ardashir never got as far as the India. Also Ardashir was unaware of several Avestan tropes (e.g the Kayanid kings - not historical), or at least unaware that they mattered to his state. But Khusro got that far, and knew that much. And his vision of the religion - which we now call Zoroastrianism - was able to argue its case against the (now-Christian) Greeks on a Greek level; further explaining how it got here.

Of interest (to me) is who is not in these Denkard books: Yazdegird I, around 400 AD. It was then that the shahanshah starts referring to such Avesta tropes as are not generally Iranian - like the Kayanids. To the extent Khusro had a predecessor in "restoring" the Iranian faith, it was Yazdegird.

At a guess, the now-legendary figure of Ardashir offered propaganda points to Khusro that the real Yazdegird couldn't. Ardashir was earlier, in fact the founder of the dynasty. As Ardashir united the state, he could be made to unite the state's religion - in Khusro's image. (Him and Tansar, whom Daryaee calls "Tôsar". I understand the Letter of Tansar is authentic, being the real ideologic underpin of Ardashir's state.) Also as earlier he could "witness" to more antiquity for the Zoroastrian texts and dogmas. In Persia, anyway; the Avesta is of course an Iranian text much older than the Sasanian state, but it's not Persian.