Vera Rubin

Rock hunters have been scouting various dots in old photographs to ascertain where they are and where they're headed. They got quite the haul: 27,500 of the things.

Only a hundred of these are Earth-crossing. Most seem to be Jove-trojans out in SJL4 and '5; or just asteroid-belt floaters. Maybe "Lucy" can look at some of the new small trojans on its flies-by.

More exciting to me are the new KBOs. As their orbits get finetuned, that's more of the extreme-inclination or chaotic iceballs Brown and Batygin (and Nesvorný) can use for pinning down Planet Nine. The planned Vera Rubin Observatory should cover most of that part of the sky; finding at least smaller and dimmer KBOs and maybe even this elusive planet itself.

Ω Centauri

As long as I'm looking at games, let's check Exodus. Its backstory anyway since the game's not playable yet: ... humanity was forced to abandon a dying Earth. Taking to the stars in massive ark ships, we found a habitable galaxy, in Centauri. Here, we are the underdogs, struggling for survival in a cold and hostile galaxy. The prose... needs work.

Timeline plots 2,200 AD (sic) for the exodus from Earth on ark-ships. Nice to see we're still Christian! (But by the term "Exodus" I suppose we'd have to be.) Off we go for 16,000 light years to this "galaxy" in Centaurus (not -i; -i is the genitive). Whuuu? That looks... too close; albeit, yes, far beyond the bulk of Centaurus' nebulae and stars.

Checking up elsewhere, I find Omega Centauri at around the appropriate distance. This is a cluster as perhaps was a galaxy. Our Milky Way ate this galactic-scale Theia, and ejected bits of it - like nearby Kapteyn's Star, which got flung on our direction. Also ejected might be its blackhole but who knows. In 2012 Ian Douglas wrote Singularity about this semidigested exgalaxy.

More: the dating (18,000 AD) looks like we got to this region at lightspeed. Everyone on those ships only experiences a year or decade in all that time. These are not Generation Ships. More to the point is that the dating looks like an affectation, basically. Who's to talk to, back on Earth?

I don't argue that arkships are needed. I assume plenty of space colonies in the Belt and maybe Mars. But space life isn't for every human. If there's a coming disaster on Earth there might not exist the infrastructure to shove them all on Venus cloudcities and Callisto iglooes at once. If governments (maybe including some Belter governments) and corporations (absolutely including spacers) have a plan to get many millions off this system and into The Big Ω, then hey - go for it. Who knows, maybe other colonists have already fanned out to TRAPPIST-1 et al.

At present I've no plan to play any game from these tools, so - that's about all the posting I plan to do on it. The authors should thank me.

BLACK HOLE 7/11: 8200+ M_☉, ht Zim and SciMex. Stellar-mass would be 100 M_☉ so - yes, this is Galactic-Class. That 8200 M_☉ minimum in the abstract is actually too timid. It comes from its satellite-stars' velocities; acceleration pegs the lower limit 21,100 + M_☉ more like 39-47,000 M_☉.

Where Z?

Jason Colavito a month ago took some time off his busy schedule chasing aliens and Tucker Carlson around the internet, and posted something more-serious. No, not about James Dean this time; I mean Colonel Percy Fawcett's "city of Z".

I hasten to remind my audience, and maybe Colavito's audience, that the Amazon highlands, abutting the Huari and then Inca imperia, actually... has lost cities. We're finding them all over the place. Upano was reported to us only three months ago. But where's "Z"? Z was supposed to be in the "Thick Bush" province, which is what Brasil says it is. That's downstream and east of Casarabe, let alone Upano.

Colavito argues, at least transmits an argument: (1) that MS 512 "sexed up" a more-sober geographic work and (2) that Fawcett misread MS 512, so lost himself up the jungle. That earlier work referred to Bahia not the Mato Grosso. Bahia, of course, means bay; on the eastern coast.

This is no cidade perdida. It is, rather, a natural formation. Sometimes these things happen... as Colavito keeps having to remind us all. The Tupi-speaking locals may well have considered the rocks to be built by some alien race themselves; pictographs (itacoatiara) are painted all over it. For them, Colavito reads inscrição enigmática as an unfortunate interpretation, like so many canali on Mars.

I remain unsure the enigmata of those inscriçãoes, late or early, have themselves been figured. Maybe OldEuropeanCulture blog will have-at-it.

All that said, the movie claimed that Fawcett had found, wherever he got up to, genuine artifacts, beyond the ken of the Fierce People of the forest, and quite different from Tupi-ware. Imports down from Casarabe, would be my thought.

And then we get that hoary shipmate's-tale of those cities of Hy-Brasil. An earlier post pondered the Porcupine Bank; I was also pondering if some Basque or Lisbonite (straying further than the Muslims) found the ruins on (say) Cozumel. Now I must ask, if such a sailor traipsed further south, into that Brasilian Bay, and returned back...?

Free returns

Let's hit up The New World on Mars some more. Chapter 3, on how to get there.

How To Live On Mars proferred two zero-energy transfers (plus the "nukey ride" - maybe NERVA, maybe the molten-salt flying Chernobyl, doesn't matter). The two transfers were: the "stinky cycler", and "riding the freight" that is, Hohmann. New World likewise doesn't care to shave traveltime with extra Starships much less nukes.

New World's "six-month" journey corresponds to the 180-plus days of InSight. That's the (semi)Hohmann; that's the freight train. This will return to Earth's 1 AU orbit, yes. But it does not return to Earth. Earth is going to be elsewhere. Once the freight is distributed, whatever is left (like shielding and spent Starships) is going to end up in some fifteenth of an Earth orbit. This route is, I vaguely recall, the VISIT trajectory.

Aldrin's free-return as actually shows up near Earth is not the six-month halfway Hohmann. Aldrin actually takes less time to (flyby) Mars: 146 days per Hop David so five months. Although, if an Apollo-13 is happening, it's quite a bit longer to get to its own aphelion and then all the way back to perihelion which is Earth(ish). Other "cyclers" are possible, some perhaps worthy of a permanent back-and-forth; Zubrin was possibly thinking of these in 2008.

Right now, Zubrin is confusing six-month halfHohmann, which is one-way freight; with the five-month Aldrin, which I deem best for passengers in case of disaster. Thus retarding his latest book a step behind where he was, in 2008; several steps - a giant leap, if you will - behind Gurrea in 2022. (I'm tempted to importune Zubrin for a free return... of his book. He's wrong on clothing as noted. On immigration too.)

In this spirit of 2008 reminder, recall that the five-month Aldrin as a subset of "cycler" requires more oomph to get started, and needs extra propellant - and shuttle - at the destination to inject those passengers into Martian orbit. Plus: once back at Earth, Earth needs some way to slow all the returned material so to catch it all. Zubrin needs maths on all these.

Alternatively: Zubrin needs infrastructure, like a base on Deimos as can do rescue and cargo-transfer. Frankly he needs this anyway. Asteroid and lunar bases are further upstream of necessary tech, before settling Mars. And once we have asteroid bases what do we still need Mars for? Prison?

The Martian dresscode

Last week (13-20 April) you could say I got Caught Up On My Reading. I was housebound and didn't have full access to my nonwork computer. Two of these books dealt with exploration: The Wager and The New World on Mars. (We also got Das Schloß and Palestine 1936 in there. And God's Equation.) So. Um. Back to Zubrin. The secondhand store has The Case for Space (2019); New World (2024) heads back to the base-in-exile for Zoob's Society. I skipped that earlier one; for this one, I paid full freight. I still own How To Live On Mars (2008). There's duplication across books; what's changed in sixteen years?

We'll start with - clothing.

Among the more-appalling misses in 2008, Zoob didn't offer a section on textiles, like nylon. He recommended... stealing parachutes. (I'm serious.) That book also didn't mention doing the laundry. The 2024 book gives us both - at last!

Although - I still don't know that Zoob has quite got his head around the concept. He suggests (now) hanging out the dirties to the Martian elements. The radiation (especially daylight), temperature-swings, and poor atmosphere together will break apart lipids, that is grease. It's a antibacterial cleaner, all-natural, no detergent nor even water. This will still leave stains, but in 2008 this author didn't care; just wear rusty reddish camo bro.

I gotta posit here that the chicks won't dig it. Later Chapter 8 concerns social-customs. "Mars needs women," as the chapter (correctly) puts it. No woman is going to put up with stained ruddy clothes; probably clean, technically, but also possibly full of that mildly-toxic dust. And stained. When we're working in the kitchen (I'm not just talking about women, readers; unjerk those knees please), or at the surgeon's or even in the lab, we want clean whites - so we see stains from that, only, not from elsewhere. And going out in social events will assuredly require a dress-code. Expect red at all to be a faux-pas on this planet, like blue jeans or khakis at an Earth tuxedo ball.

Airing out (or vacuuming out) the dirties in the Martian outdoors will be for work clothes only.

Better news, perhaps, is that when clothes are washed, the laundry might be able to use concentrated liquid carbon-dioxide (especially overnight), giving at least that means to save precious water.

Maya dendrochronology

Given that the Miyake event hit at AD 775ish, wouldn't that be visible in datable Maya ruins? And can we get wigglematching on wood in Maya structures? Like this Yucatec canoe.

I ask because it occurs to me that natural events disrupted constructions in Ilopango around AD 400s or 500s; and now we're hearing Teotihuacano earthquakes.

What's the holdup?

The Graecance language

One holdout of Marcion's tongue survives: the Romayka.

Sinope was founded by Ionic Milesians. Alexander brought the Attic variant of Ionian; this "correct" Greek became the koine (not koina). Then came Paul's Church. Finally the Byzantines brought a "correct" update to all the Greeks under its sway, including Miletus and Athens herself. The Spartans kept Doric which by then was so different from Koine, and so isolated, there was no correcting that.

We're learning here that although Sinope perhaps allowed a correction to Attic, and certainly to Church Koine; Byzantine Greek was one step too far. Romayka maintained, they point out, the infinitive construction. By Latin analogy, Romayka is a "Romance" based on Roman-era Greek. (The Spartan survival would fall somewhere between Sardinian and Irish. Think, if the Faliscan community found some valley or island as a refuge against Latin.)