Tungsten disilicide

SciTechDaily links a heat-to-electricity medium: WSi₂.

As thermodynamics go, once you use the electricity obviously it goes to heat again. And some will get lost en-route and have to be air-conditioned out. You can't win, you can't break even.

... but I daresay, if on an asteroid mine, the radiators form splendid bottlenecks to catch most the heat for reuse. Also mayyybe the WSi₂ could power diodes for a visual diagnostic on those refractory panels (also largely tungsten). We are told that this material has a high melt point itself.

Transit timing variations

Today is a work day... sort of. I'm ducking out to follow up on a use for better spectrometry. And'also to assure my readers I'm not dead.

On Youtube one of the sciencey channels discussed how to sort out the noise in a transit. Sometimes, there's a pattern in the timing of the transits. This may be secular-drift from another body. That other body could be its moon. But usually a transit is seen in the first place because the planet is close to its star... too close for a moon. Alternat(iv)ely the other body may be an outer planet, not detected because it runs oblique relative to that planet and our 'scopes out here.

So here are a few papers to discuss some mathematic models: TrES-2b, from the TESS telescope; and this month Simultaneous Impact Parameter Variation Analysis mainly from the Kepler scope. Lately Daniel Yahalomi and David Kipping's publons on the exoplanet-edge and on the landscape.

Alex Jay Brady's space habitat

It's Turkey Day. Here's Alex Jay Brady's stratified future. Without radiators LOL. That aside I'll review the rest of it.

Brady includes a fusion reactor. It is separated from the rest by distance, reservoirs of water, and the inverse-square law. I deem this SyFy and silly. He seems to be using this to orbit Saturn, low on light and metal. Why's he even at Saturn? If he's there why's he not colonising Titan and using methane waterfalls? Energy could be beamed from there. Leaving aside the titanic dynamo of Saturn himself.

THAT aside, a hangar shares that far end. I don't mind this as much. The ships at that hangar might be carrying some nukes, themselves - fission, mostly, but also fusion-afterburner and z-pinch (so with hot nozzles). The ships' very hulls, further, have been taking on plenty o' curies/ roentgen/ becquerels/ whathaveyou between missions, just from space. And the distance gives the Authorities space to turn inbound freight into tinylittle pieces should they be approaching the wrong velocity-vector. Might be overkill but if that's all I got, I'll defer to Brady.

Socially I dislike the highend / lowend / ultrahighend differentials. I feel like most interplanetary habs will be dug out of rubble. Everyone gets roughly the same under dirt: hollow chambers. We might get fully-fabricated O'Neills later. But would O'Neills ever get a tail of lowend? If someone's a bum, he gets exiled down to Mars. If someone's got a low tolerance for other people, he can work as a Belt miner or maintain a cycler on downtime.

Brady might work best for orbits as don't own much metal. That's my 13-10-8 Laplacian between Earth and Venus - actually Venus generally and all else below our 1 AU. Also Earth's L4 and L5. These get sufficient light none need a fusion reactor. Further out is enough rock and ice that the rubble-pile rules.

Also possible is the long-range colony vessel. Push the thing to biëlliptic = Oberth, aim at Uranus, spin around, decel until orbit-insertion at Ariel I guess. Mine those moons for whatever else will be nice for the journey. After a few years decide who gets to stay at the, er, arse-end of the Solar System; and who gets to go on to Prox.

The ongoing war for disease

Here is a drop in cervical-cancer; and there is a drop in chicken pox. Of course the drop in measles is well known. And in whooping-cough; as can be seen when unVAXXed kids get it.

RFK likes to claim he is not antiVAXX. Tell that to the Samoans, those who survived the measles he helped cause.

The "Great Barrington" guys like to claim they were just antiLOCKDOWN. Jay Bhattacharya can now claim to be vindicated - by popular opinion. Well: I was there. These doctors were not just antiLOCKDOWN. They supported "herd immunity" - letting it rip. (This blog supported masking-with-distancing until THE VAXX came out.)

On topic of THE VAXX, these were several vaxxes. AstroZeneca, yes, seems to have had side-effects. I took Pfizer and didn't suffer any. We could also talk about the vaccine scheduling for childhood; if we were talking to people who were themselves talking in good faith. Autism isn't something I care to discuss given its high hereditability.

Overall I am not yet seeing that Kennedy or Bhattacharya, in their own ways, have a record of arguing in good faith. And from the now-ascendant Right, which Trump has belatedly joined (hey, remember Operation Warp Speed?): I just hear people screeching that the concept of public health is "evil".

In that interest of good-faith, I should make a disclosure / confession. I was prepared to post a Toldjaso after the election, which I'd suspected might be a Blue romp... although I didn't vote Blue myself. I'd thought that the "Kovid Karyn" vote might stick with Biden. It may be that my constituency, which is here the Hanania constituency, didn't move the needle. Because we had other concerns informing our vote. So: the preceding post has been one on the public-health merits, not on whether such convinces voters, because evidently it doesn't.

Meh. Let's hope nothing worse gets loose in the populace.

BACKDATE 11/29

Neolithic immunities and allergens

SciTechDaily has an artilce about DNA in Europe from 5000 BC to now-ish. This is, I think, the ceramic Neolithic. It'll span the rise and fall of Cucuteni, and then the steppe invasion.

They're saying that immune-system genetics got selected-for. And then... un-selected. Gene mix from nonimmune populations.

That is rather telling me that immunity had side-effects. Once the disease was defeated, the genes lingered... as allergens. Allergens, like STC're also saying gives us Alzheimer's.

BACKDATE 11/29

Neptune's power-plant

Although I am left somewhat at a loss for power-supplies past Jupiter, here's one planet which won't have any problem generating power: Neptune. Besides the storms, which Event Horizon immortalised: satellites here also get free energy from its retrograde moon. That would be the Kuiper's greatest export to the Great Eight: Triton.

Triton is a low-gravity, mostly cloudless, low-atmo moon. Because it runs retrograde, its underground is getting squeezed. The heat is pumping volatiles up to its surface where they spew geysers. And where they don't, colonists will suffer little effort in drilling a few KM to get at the reservoirs.

The energy can be pumped to its L2 tower and, thence, beamed to outer space-stations. Which will just be the usual bundled piles of rubble fitting arbitary millions of us.

Hard to believe I hadn't thought of this already.

BACKDATE 11/29 inspired-by.

Tugging Mira

Mueller's Impulse Space is flaunting Helios / Deneb: 66,720 N thrust. I don't know about ISP; the focus on thrust and its use of methane implies something like the Raptor. Although they are not competing with the Starship. They're going to turn the thing on once in space.

Nuclear is better of course but we frown on that in LEO. So, Impulse are aiming for space-tugging: LEO up to mid-Allen up to GEO and beyond. So they backed off their initial grandiose plans. The press-release calls it "kick stage" and "transfer". Which is fine! We need that too.

It is not just a test; Impulse are to use the engine for real cargo, if small cargo. This is all that fits on a Falcon 9, assumed still the game-in-town in mid 2026. The payload is called "Mira" and it's for our Space Force.

WAITING 9/16/26: They're still getting paid and the Mira is still working. Helios, we dunno.