Douglas E. Berry

The Rant light is ON!

2021-07-22T19:17:02Z

I need all of you to shut the fuck up about Jeff Bezos and Blue Origins. Also, STFU about Space X, Virgin Galactic, and every other private attempt to make space travel easier.

Because if you hate that these guys have reached the edge of space in privately built craft, you need to get some pitchforks and torches and march down to the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum and burn the Wright Flyer, and the Spirit of St. Lous, because both of those were also used for stunts.

Does anyone here remember the filksong Bloody Bastards? We used to celebrate the idea of private space travel.

So here's to Conesgstosa,
Pegasus and Liberty
And all the rest who've joined them in the race!

Oh, we're proud of NASA's heroes
But we'd rather raise our glass
To the hard-nosed bloody bastards who will get us into space

Jeff Bezos is a hard-nosed bloody bastard, and I'm sorry, but Salvage One was a fantasy of the highest order. Do you want orbital hotels? Asteroid mining? Large-scale orbital manufacturing? Governments ain't going to do it! It's going to be Space X or Virgin Galactic who will contract to build a Hilton in low Earth orbit.

"But Doug, there are some many problems on Earth!" Damn right, and we could bankrupt every billionaire on Earth and not make a dent in those problems. Do you think money is going to solve the political nightmare that if Africa? A nightmare that prevents effective infrastructure growth to help end hunger? How many billions to end religious tensions in the Mideast? How much are you willing to spend?

This brings me to my next point: It's their money! And I would rather have them spending it on building things over hiding billions in an offshore bank in the Caribbean. Yes, they need to pay more taxes, that's a different rant. But there's an important concept here called the velocity of money.

Back when I drove for Lord&Sons, my job was delivering construction materials, mostly fasteners and connectors plus things, like Unistruct and allthread to various subcontractors. Here's how the velocity of money works.

You're rich and decide to build a beachside resort. You're going to have a hotel, some cottages, a couple of pools, and a dock. You probably get banks to finance most of this. You hire a general contractor and an architectural firm.

Right here at the start, your money is moving. It's paying people. It's paying for detailed models and the print shop for blueprints. You're also paying lawyers, who create more velocity of money. Then the building starts, and an army of subcontractors are brought in. Steelworkers, concrete people, electricians, plumbers, IT contractors, power generation experts. They only increase the velocity of the money being spent.

Because each of those contractors is hiring workers and buying materials. That's where I come in. There were sites that I delivered to every day for two or three years. Which increased my income, so Kirsten and I had more money, and I could buy a truck from Ford, which increased the velocity of the money. . .

See the point? Things like Space X and Virgin Galactic create money velocity. That Blue Origin bird cost money and involved that same pyramids of engineers, designers, subcontractors, and workers, all the way down to whatever taco trucks showed up for the launch. Creating and making moves the economy!

Yes, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are tone-deaf assholes. Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi sympathizer. The Wright Brothers were racists. But they are getting us closer to space being accessible, and getting us off this rock! To them, I raise my glass!

Finally, to everyone who made a dick-joke about Blue Origin; congrats, Dr. Freud, you really went to the basement on that one.

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A modern-day Eratosthenes, that's me!

2020-02-04T01:29:40Z

It was 31°F when I got to work this morning, while helps to explain the 1,146 steps I took between 0730 and 0745. Move or die! But I was able to get scientific confirmation that spring is coming! I did this by noting the angle of the sun during my shift.

There are two very tall pine trees on the grounds of Scott Lane School that stand about due South East of my post at Scott and Cabrillo. For much of the late fall and winter, those pines have been blocking the rising sun. As any sun on a cold morning can help, I stared at these trees with dark thoughts of chainsaws and wild attack beavers in my mind. For a week or so, the sun was rising almost directly between the trees, as seen from my point, creating a narrow sliver of early light I could bask in by standing in just the right spot on the sidewalk. I'm sure that shaft of light hitting my hi-vis safety vest dazzled a few drivers, but I didn't care. As I'm not allowed to cut down one of the trees near me for a bonfire, I'll take my heat any wat I can get it.

I never even got to the point where I explained the importance of dancing naked around the fire. No burning trees! So intolerant. I'd have kept the safety vest on!

But anyway, this morning was the first really clear morning we've had in a few weeks, and I was pleased to see that the sun is now rising a bit to the north of these trees, and letting me get sunlight right on my corner. Bang, there you go: observational proof of the Earth's Axial tilt taken over a period of many weeks by yours truly.

For my next trick, I'll discover a means of accurately measuring longitude while at sea.

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I need some physics help

2019-10-17T20:46:56Z

OK, another question for my NaNo project. This one gets very geeky, so hold on.

The main weapons in my universe for ship-to-ship combat are grasers - gamma spectrum lasers focused by artificial gravity - that transfer a lot of energy to the enemy ship in the form of heat, which causes explosions, melting, and all sorts of chaos.

The main sublight drives are fusion torches, which I imagine would create a wake of hot gasses.

My question is, would shooting a graser through that fusion exhaust cone degrade it in any way? Especially close to the drive bells where things are the most chaotic?

I'm trying to determine if in the final third of the book the enemy can do a straight on stern chase, or if they'd need to spread out to get around the engine wake to fire effectively.

Thanks in advance.

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I am outtahere!

2019-07-31T20:06:26Z

Or at least my name is escaping this lousy planet.

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186,000 miles per second. It's not a good idea, it's the LAW!

2019-04-20T21:40:53Z

On the 6th of October, 1995, the world learned that we were not alone. No, the aliens hadn't shown up, but the first confirmed planet orbiting another star was found. 51 Pegasi b, orbiting a star roughly 50 light years away, changed how we saw the universe.

Because astronomers had been saying for centuries that there was no reason for other stars not to have their own family of planets. But until we found evidence, it was still just a hypothesis. But once we found that first planet, the flood gates opened. Observatories began confirming dozens, then hundreds of "exoplanets" orbiting other stars. Orbital observatories like TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) are finding more every day. To date, we've confirmed nearly 4,000 planets orbiting other suns.

But there are a few problems for the science-fiction fan dreaming of colonies on strange new worlds. Of these 4,000 worlds, only a tiny fraction might be habitable. Many are super-Earth, much larger and more massive, which would indicate much higher gravity than Earth's 1g. Imagine living on a world where the force of gravity is three times stronger. You weight three times as much, and falls would be bone-shattering. You'd also be breathing air that was thick as soup assuming there was any free oxygen there to begin with. Other worlds have similar issues. So close to their stars that their year lasts less than a week and the sunward face would be molten, or so far out that they are ice-encased balls of dead rock. Not very inviting.

Add in that getting anywhere is a daunting prospect. Our closest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, is 4.244 light years away. That's 2.49489x10^13 miles. Unless we turn everything we know about physics on its head and find a way to cheat lightspeed, getting anywhere is going to be a slog. There is an "effective" speed limit of about 40% of the speed of light with the technology we have now. Any faster, and you start to have real problems with both relativistic effects (your ship gets more massive as it approaches the speed of light) and the random bits of dust and hydrogen you hit start having the impact energy of atomic bombs.

That makes the trip to Proxima Centauri b take about 17 years (ship time, the trip feels a little quicker for those on board due to relativity) which means that that ship needs to be able to support both crew and colonists for a long time. These are known in science-fiction as generation ships, Huge vessels built to carry thousands and support them with a functioning ecosystem. These ships have to be built to last because as the name implies, generations will live and die before the ship reaches its destination. For example, the closest candidate for a twin to Earth is Kepler-186f, which is 500 light years away. With our .4c speed limit, getting there is going to take 2,271 years, ship time. For reference, 2,271 years ago, Ptolemy II Philadelphus was king of Ptolemaic Egypt.

Which raises the question, after untold generations in space, living in an enclosed world, would the settlers choose to leave the home of their families for untold generations to settle a new world? What kinds of cultures would evolve on these ships? Given centuries, it's quite possible that any given generation ship could experience the same cycle of rising and falling, with new religions, new languages, even the possibility that over time the population forgets they are on a ship at all and see the ship as their entire universe.

Even on shorter hauls, even if we figure out how to beat the problems of relativity, the journies are going to take a long time. Tau Ceti, long a favorite of science fiction writers because the star is a close twin to our sun, lies a mere 11.9 light years away. If our transport can boost at 1G acceleration (adding roughly 10m^2 velocity every second) and can make it to .99c, the onboard trip will take a bit over five years for those on the ship. But here's where things get fun. Relativity means that those 5.14 years on the ship happened while 13.7 years passed outside the ship. If you take the same ship from Earth to Kepler-186f, it gets much worse. You have 12 years onboard to practice saying "Hello, my name is" in Keplerian, but 501 years have passed in the non-relativistic universe, and the language has changed beyond recognition.

In this case, I think you would develop a caste of spacers who live their entire lives on their ships and pass through the centuries as ghosts, visiting colonized worlds for trade and passing information. British author Alastair Reynolds has written an entire series, called Revelation Space, around this idea.

Science fiction loves to break the rules. Faster than light travel, magic energy sources that can provide endless power with no input, and fantastic but plausible technologies. Larry Niven also played with the concept with his Léshy Circuit stories, where vast slower than light starships used magnetic scoops to feed their fusion drives with interstellar hydrogen. Sometimes, the story is more interesting with you don't break physics. I should try that.

All travel times were generated at the Relativistic Star Ship Calculator http://convertalot.com/relativistic_star_ship_calculator.html

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Strange, but fun, dream

2015-02-11T22:13:39Z

Had this one last night.

I was the President of the United States, and was speaking at the opening ceremonies of a Baltimore Worldcon. I was using the occasion to announce my administration's goal of landing not just a couple of test pilots, but a full scientific outpost on Mars. It was a good speech too. I invoked SF's history of predictions, the constant theme of discovery, and used Clarke's "The Haunted Spacesuit" for a laugh line. ("spoiler alert, it was a kitten.")

I finished by referencing JFK's speech at Rice in 1961, stating that going to Mars was going to be hard, it would take dedication, sweat and blood, but that is how we built this nation. We will go to Mars, to the asteroids, to the outer system, and someday, our descendants will go to the stars, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

Standing ovation. The Republicans hated me.

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God Speed, Voyager 1

2012-06-16T23:40:08Z

With absolutely no attempt at hyperbole at all, it is fair to say that this is one of - if not the - biggest achievement of the human race.
For, as we speak, an object conceived in the human mind, and built by our tools, and launched from our planet, is sailing out of the further depths of our solar system - and will be the first object made by man to sail out into interstellar space.
The Voyager 1, built by Nasa and launched in 1977 has spent the last 35 years steadily increasing its distance from Earth, and is now now 17,970,000,000km - or 11,100,000,000miles - away, travelling at 10km a second.
Indications over the last week implies that Voyager 1 is now leaving the heliosphere - the last vestige of this solar system.

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