Douglas E. Berry

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.

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.

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

You can't buy a lithium-air battery (yet). You've probably never even heard of one. They were only invented 15 years ago, and for now, they're still just laboratory curiosities.

But with the latest lab breakthrough, the lithium-air battery (also known as the lithium-oxygen battery) is nosing up into the energy density region seen in gasoline. If you're thinking battery-powered car, maybe your sights are too low. How does battery-powered airplane sound?

One of the big hurdles to long range space exploration has been the need to bring everything you need along. That, and never knowing what you might need. We're starting to solve that. You need a tool, or a spare part? Print it.

There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about what a tsunami actually is and the danger presented by one. I've seen a lot of scoffing on local news sites about the predicted 2 to 5-foot surges, commenting that those are smaller than the normal waves seen at Ocean Beach and other popular surfing sites. True enough. Despite the name (tsunami means "harbor wave" in Japanese) we are not talking about a normal beach waves. The waves we like to play in and give surfers their reason to live are an artifact of tides, winds, the shape of the ocean floor and currents. The ocean sloshes around, and when it hits the coast the water humps up a little and forms waves. These can vary from the little breakers I loved as a kid to the beautiful and monstrous waves of the Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii.

A tsunami is created by a seismic event and is a shock wave traveling through the ocean. A big earthquake, like the one Japan just experienced, can send a compressed wall of water surging out in all directions. Changes in depth, what the ocean floor is like, water temperature, and other factors can cause this surge to weaken in areas, change direction, or even fade away. But when the tsunami reaches the coast, things get bad. Tsunamis move in open water at close to 500mph. They slow as the reach coastal waters, but this just allows more of the surge to pile up. A tsunami encountered by a ship in the open ocean may go unnoticed.

People forget that water is heavy. A cubic foot of sea water masses about 64lbs. When that tsunami reaches shore, it contains tens of thousands of cubic feet of water moving at speeds up to 200mph. Even if the actual height of the surge is only two feet, that surge will hit like a battering ram and there are tons and tons of water behind it. Plus the surge is going to pick up anything loose on the sea floor or in its path and turn those things into missiles. You have to think of a tsunami not as a wave, but as a sudden, destructive rise in sea level coupled with an amazing amount of energy directed inland.

The only smart thing to do if you are near a coast and a tsunami alert is given is run like fuck for higher ground. Gaining twenty feet could save your life. Watch some of the videos from the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami.. none of those people saw anything out of the ordinary until the surge was right on them.

It looks like we got off light here on the North American coast. Some damage to harbors and boats, a few morons who needed to be rescued from their own folly. We're still in the danger period, so I'm keeping my eyes open. Japan wasn't so lucky.

Remember people, ours is a big, dangerous planet and the universe has no mercy. Understand the risks!

We're a few days from 2011. I'm communicating with y'all through a global network of computers that even most science-fiction writers failed to predict. I've had several organs removed and am thriving. You me, and the guy down the street are the results of 6,000 years of culture starting with the realization that one could plant seeds and get food on a regular basis. We stride across the globe and are reaching for the stars.

Yet on a tiny island in the Andaman Islands east of India, none of that happened. The people of North Sentinel Island have lived in isolation for an estimated 60,000 years. They are incredibly xenophobic, attacking just about anyone who comes close. Large groups they hide from. Clothing, beyond broad belts and decorations, is unknown. They seem to like the color red. They decorate their shelters with painted pig skulls.

That's all we know about them. Their language, social organization, religion.. everything else is a mystery.

The Andamans used to have several such tribes. Most were assimilated (and destroyed, culturally) by the British, but one, the Jarawa people, fought off all attempts at contact. After 200 years of intermittent contact we understand less an a dozen words of their language, and the authorities in the islands have no clue if the next time the Jarawa come out of their mountain redoubts they'll be coming for handouts or to kill anyone they can find.

Read this fascinating article. Then watch this video. Remember, these are people who have been isolated for ten times longer than humans have had writing. What's amazing is how they make use of found iron and steel. Their tools are wood and bone, but flotsam washes up all the time (additionally, there's at least one shipwreck on the island's reef). You can see in the video that a couple of the people are carrying modern knives. They also hammer small bits of iron to form barbs for arrow and spear tips.

While reading about these amazing relics, I came across a blood-chilling story. The Indian government has place North Sentinel Island off-limits for good reason. Two fishermen decided to poach in the waters. The Sentinelli caught them. The fishermen managed a distress call. When the Indian Army sent a helicopter to rescue the poachers, it was driven off by massed arrow fire from the beach... but not before exposing the shallow graves of the fishermen. The bodies had been savaged.

Why they will kill and mutilate some while allowing others to approach close enough to accept gifts of coconuts (as seen in the video) is just one of the many mysteries.

If you want to see the island for yourself, you can. It takes about a week of flying and boat travel, plus bribing a fisherman to take you out there and bribing the authorities to look the other way. But it's that last part, where you go back into our own past that's the tricky one.

Which we did, back at Fort Benning. Don't ask.