Our Sister Planet

What did you learn about Venus - sometimes called our sister planet - when you were in school? Unless you are still in school, chances are that at least some of those ‘facts’ have changed.

Venus has been called Earth’s twin, because it is similar to Earth in size and mass. Venus’ diameter is 7,520.8 miles, only 396.7 miles smaller than Earth’s. Its mass is 81.5 % of Earth’s. But in other ways, they are not very alike at all.

Venus is still the second planet from the Sun, it is still named after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. It orbits the sun in 224.7 Earth days. A Venus day is 243 Earth days, so its day is longer than its year. It also rotates in the opposite direction as Earth, so on Venus, the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. It still does not have any moons.

Venus has the densest atmosphere of the 4 inner planets, which consists of more than 96% carbon dioxide. At Venus’ surface, the atmospheric pressure is 92 times that of Earth, or roughly the pressure found at 3,000 ft underwater on Earth.

Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, with a mean surface temperature of 863°F. Mercury is closer to the sun, but Venus is hotter. It is shrouded by an opaque layer of clouds of sulfuric acid. It may have had water oceans at some point in the past, but they would have vaporized due to a runaway greenhouse effect. That water vapor would have photodissociated, and the resulting free hydrogen swept into interplanetary space by the solar wind because Venus doesn’t have a planetary magnetic field. It is postulated that the surface of Venus is a desertscape interspersed with slab-like rocks and is periodically resurfaced by volcanism.

In my youth, I remember reading books and short stories that postulated that Venus weather included perpetual rain, and that Venus was a water planet. In both cases, humans from Earth had colonized Venus. But given the updated information on Venus’ atmosphere and surface, colonization may have to wait until some type of reclamation can happen. Perhaps remove some (a lot!) of carbon from the atmosphere, and set up some type of artificial field around the planet to keep the solar wind from removing any more of the lighter elements from that atmosphere. If we can lessen the green-house effect, then maybe the volcanism will also settle down a bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus

Poor Science or Poor Writing

The other day, my husband and I watched a movie we’d never heard of. The setting of the story was that Earth had been in winter for the past 300 years, and it would continue for thousands of years. The only humans that still existed lived 10 kilometers under the surface, where they used geothermal energy as their power source. They had created a race of ‘humans’ to do their work for them, including sex workers, but nobody ever indicated what type of work this ‘inferior’ race did, except for the one sex worker.

Hubby had difficulty with Arizona being covered in snow and ice, with daytime temperatures of -60° F. In the latest ice age, the glaciers never reached the sw states. To me, that said the the earth was not just in an ice age, but had entered a ‘snowball earth’ ice age, where the entire globe is frozen.

How did the ice age winter begin? The characters gave 2 theories, but didn’t know which was right. The first theory was that an asteroid had struck the earth, throwing up so much dust and debris into the atmosphere that most of the sunlight couldn’t get to the ground. The second theory was that it was a bomb that threw up all that dust and debris.

Okay, yes, a lot of dust and debris in the atmosphere can reflect enough sunlight to produce some very chilly results. Large volcanos can produce enough dust to chill the entire globe as the dust rides through the atmosphere. BUT, such dust doesn’t stay in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years.

What about the asteroid that ‘killed the dinosaurs’? you may ask. Yes, that threw up a lot of dust and debris. But what killed so much of the flora and fauna was the firestorm produced by the heat released when the asteroid hit. Think of it as a huge explosion, so hot the heat wave raced around the globe, burning almost everything it touched. There may have been a long winter afterwards, but all that dust and stuff did settle out in a fairly short amount of time.

The plot was that a squad of ‘normal’ military-type humans had to go out into the world to track down a renegade ‘inferior’ made human. The squad's DNA was changed to allow them to survive in the far-below-zero temperatures, but that would only last for 48 hours. I had a little trouble accepting that, but... okay, let’s see what they do with it.

The scene that got me was right after they arrived on the surface. It had been stated that ‘all the animals’ were gone. But what they see right after they arrive on the surface was a man fishing. He had chopped a hole in the top of a small rivulet of water racing over the snow/ice, and had actually caught a fish, but seeing that he was going to be interrupted, he put the fish back.

I really couldn’t accept that. If all the animals had died, where did this fish come from? Okay, maybe they were mistaken. But at the temperatures they were talking about, I would expect that little rivulet to be frozen solid, and the fish with it.

It didn’t help that long after the main character had been on the surface for 48 hours, the main character was still chasing the renegade, with his head bare and no gloves. Frostbite was completely ignored.

It was not a good movie. If you are going to change the rules of life (daytime temperatures of -60F), then you (the writer) have to follow those new rules. And it is easy to have characters who don’t know what happened to end the civilization we (the audience) are familiar with. It’s easy for the writer, but it’s not satisfying to the audience.

The Sky is Falling

If you follow me on facebook, you may have noticed that I have shared many articles on climate change and that I have started using the comment, “The Sky is Falling.”

It seemed more appropriate than saying, “The Boy Cried Wolf.” In that story, the boy is lying, only looking to introduce some excitement into his own life, without regard for the consequences.

Chicken Little, on the other hand, was telling the truth, as best he knew it. Something (a raindrop) had come down from the sky and hit him. He had never experienced anything like that before, so the logical conclusion was that something terrible was happening, the sky was falling! Chicken Little ran around the farmyard squawking his terrible news, trying to warn all the other farm critters.

Even that doesn’t exactly fit the problem of climate change. Chicken Little was very young and inexperienced. But it’s scientists who have been trying to warn the world’s population that the climate was changing far quicker than it should. They have lots of experience at studying climate and how it has changed in the past, and they have a pretty darn good idea where it’s headed.

In the past week, I have read several articles concerning the number and severity of heatwaves that have been happening around the world. Not only has the world been having more of them, not only have they broken records for daytime high temperatures, they’ve broken records for the highest low temperatures as well. That means that after a sweltering day, you don’t get much relief during the night, because the heat that has accumulated all day doesn’t dissipate fast enough.

I think Europe has already broken several summer records during a heatwave in June of this year. There’s no guarantee they won’t have another later this summer. Or this fall, or... whenever. A heatwave can happen at any time on the calendar, because it is a comparison between the present and what has been ‘normal’ previously.

The scientists don’t ‘think’ any particular place will start having a heatwave every year. But it could happen. After all, they wanted us to keep the warming of the Earth to 2°C or less. What are they saying now, that it’s officially reached a warming of 1.8°C? But in Europe, the temperatures reached +4 to +8°C over ‘normal’.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t get much done when the temperature gets to 95°F. I sure don’t want it to consistently reach 123°F. Or higher.

Maybe Chicken Little isn’t the best story for me to quote to try to get my point across, but it’s the one I can remember as the summer heat settles in. So I’ll keep squawking my warning and hope somebody is listening, because...

The sky is falling.

What is This World Coming to? 7

And we are back to water. It seems only fitting, since the globe is mostly covered by it.

As I was looking over information on Central America, one of my hard-copy magazines - Popular Science - had an entire issue on water. Including an article on the sudden and sustained lack of water in Colombia in the northern part of South America.

The northern part of South America is also definitely in the tropics, because that area straddles the Equator, and the tropics is generally 30° north to 30° south of the equator. That’s latitude degrees, not temperature degrees.

Colombia is also quite mountainous, but that doesn’t mean their water supply is assured. The article spoke of one city sitting in the heights below a ski resort. Until recently, that resort could exist because of a glacier that sat atop the mountain. That glacier also was the source of the water used by the city.

Guess what. That glacier is gone now. Not just receding, like so many glaciers are, it is GONE.

No more skiing on that mountain, no more water for that city. Now the water officials load up what water is available into tank trucks and deliver it around the area. When the truck pulls up and stops, everybody runs for whatever they have that will hold water; pots, barrels, bottles and jars. They may go home and empty those items into their sinks or bathtub and run back to see if the truck is still there. If it is, they fill their pots, barrels and jars again.

They don’t know how long it will be before the truck arrives to deliver more water, so they have to be stingy with every drop. It is all they have for cooking and possibly a sponge bath. In the meantime, they listen for notices from the government as to when the water in their taps may be turned on for a limited time.

At one point, the author was with a woman who had stayed home from work that afternoon. The water was supposed to be turned on in the pipes for 3 hours, and she wanted to get some laundry done. But the water never came from her pipes that afternoon. No laundry got done.

Did all the women in the city stay home that afternoon, hoping to get some laundry done?

The article ended with a brief mention of another Colombian city on another mountain, also depending on the mountain-top glacier for its water supply. That glacier is visibly shrunken, smaller than anybody has ever seen it before.

Perhaps they’ll figure out another source for water. The article didn’t mention any attempts to look, to figure something out. Everybody - even the water officials - just kept saying, “The rains will come.”

What are we, ostriches? Refusing to acknowledge a problem will not make it magically go away!

This is a depressing subject, and not the type I would usually spend time on trying to spin into an entertaining novel. I suffer from chronic depression and just found an anti-depressant that actually works for me. I don’t know if I’m done researching this subject or not... my constant companion - depression - keeps telling me to stick my head in the sand and think of pretty things. But the story for the novel is beginning to take shape in my head. I think I’ll start thinking out scenes and where they would go, and speak of other things in this blog for a while. If I need to, I can still do more research.

So, next time, the subject will be... Oh, who knows? Whatever I find interesting between now and then.

What is This World Coming to? 5

Okay, I did find something to say on this subject, from a totally unexpected source. I was watching an episode on Nova the other night. Our local channel has 2 episodes on Wednesdays, and we usually watch the first, but not the second, because that’s getting too late for my husband, who is an early bird. That night, I heard that the 2nd episode was on Neanderthals, and human evolution has always been an interest of mine, so I stayed up to watch it.

As a whole, the episode explored a lot of different information about the humans known as Neanderthals, but my interest picked up during their talk about the small colony of Neanderthals who lived in caves currently located at the base of the Rock of Gibraltar.

One question this episode was asking is, “Did Modern Humans have any part in eliminating the Neanderthals?” They didn’t have an answer to that question, in the end. Not a simple one, anyway.

Neanderthals lived in the Middle East, Western Asia and Europe for as much as 700,000 years. During all of that time, the world was in an ice age, but the Neanderthals were built for it, and apparently did not find that a hardship.

About 100,000 years ago (maybe as early as 125,000 years ago), modern humans started to populate these same areas. The cold probably made them wear more clothes than the Neanderthals. And maybe there were instances of violence between the 2 sub-species.

However, the scientists said, it was unlikely the modern humans had traveled all the way around the Mediterranean Sea and got to the Rock of Gibraltar before that particular group of Neanderthals died out. What the scientists discovered in those caves showed that the Neanderthals living there not only hunted and gathered, they ate a variety of sea life as well, from seals to clams. Today, the mouths of those caves are practically at the sea line, but during the brunt of the ice age, the water line would have been about 59 feet (18 meters) lower.

Neanderthals lived in small groups. Scientists estimate their entire population may have been about 100,000, scattered in small groups across a quarter of the world. (How big is the town you live in?) And as they studied this particular group, they realized that it died out during a long and severe drought that hit the area.

My thought? Neanderthals were suited for cold. Not so much for heat. They had a short, stocky build that would help them retain body heat. But when the world heats up, that doesn’t do you much good.

If the world were going through the gradual changes of leaving the ice age, the flora and fauna would no doubt evolve in order to survive. But the current rapid pace of warming that we are in doesn’t leave us time for that. Those who currently live in the tropics might manage by migrating north or south to the temperate zones. Those in the temperate zones might find some comfort in the polar regions, although there’s not a lot of land for them to settle on. Once Antarctica thaws, that land would be available. Would it be fertile? Who knows?

It won’t be a matter of the fit being able to survive. Those who can accept what’s happening and deal with it will have a chance to survive.

And I’m back to looking for potential food for that migrating population.

What is This World Coming to? 4

Okay, we’ve spent quite a bit of time exploring melting ice and (some of) the resulting changes to The Oceans As We Know Them. And last time, we touched on the Arctic jet stream, which brings us to the atmosphere. Let’s go ahead and explore (some of) the changes we can expect there.

I just heard on the news tonight that Hurricane Willa - born in the Eastern Pacific Ocean - will tear across the middle of Mexico (despite the mountains) and then hit the south and south-eastern areas of the US. It’s not expected to be a hurricane by the time it gets to the US, but I don’t remember hearing about any Pacific hurricane/cyclone/typhoon doing that before. And anytime hurricanes get mentioned anymore, there always seems to be a cat 5 hurricane that somebody is watching. Some of them have been so strong a cat 5, there has been talk of defining what would make a cat 6.

The average global temperature has risen 1.4° Fahrenheit (0.8° C) over the past 100 years. Now, that’s not 1.4° F for every single location on the globe. Temperatures at the poles have risen faster than other places. But that is a big change over a short period of time, when you are talking about the life of a planet.

Consider the northern plains of China, home to 400,000,000 people, and the place where much of China’s food is grown. It doesn’t get a lot of rainfall, when compared to southern China, so the fields are irrigated during the growing season. Research from MIT indicates that the temperature in this area of China will cross above 95°F several times between 2070 and 2100. At that temperature and with the added humidity caused by irrigation, even young and healthy humans would reach the point where their bodies could not cool off, and death would result within a few hours. And that’s the young and healthy. Old and frail wouldn’t last that long. Do you suppose they’ll farm at night? How would the plants they try to grow fare in that kind of heat?

Shanghai, on China’s central coast, would cross that 95° F threshold about 5 times, and approach it over 100 times during that same time period.

In the Middle East, many areas, especially coastal cities, are in the same mess. In 2015, Bandar Mahshahr in Iran almost reached that ‘death threshold’ when the temperature hit 114.5° F with 50% humidity. Only 50% humidity! But when the temperature gets high enough, the human body can’t function.

What else can we expect? Some areas, like northeast US, may experience an increase in rainfall, while in the northwest US, rainfall will decrease. Washington has been experiencing range fires the last few years, but I don’t remember hearing about them before that. Maybe I wasn’t listening. But I do know that California has been in a drought for several years, and they’ve had fires rampaging across the countryside.

Not a pretty thought, looking at the future and what climate change will do to us. I have a lot of thoughts to piece together for that book I’m thinking about.

I’ll be looking for information about what food will be able to be grown where in the next 50 years. If I find anything interesting on that front - or some other front I haven’t thought of - I’ll continue this series. Otherwise, I’ll wrap this up next time.

https://www.livescience.com/37057-global-warming-effects.html

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/31/chinas-most-populous-area-could-be-uninhabitable-by-end-of-century

What is This World Coming to? 3

So, what else is the Beaufort Gyre (which, you’ll remember, is north of Alaska) doing to The World As We Know It?

Well, it’s messing up the Arctic jet stream. Being from the midwest US, I’ve heard plenty of winter weather forecasts talking about the Arctic jet stream dipping below the Canadian border and bringing truly frigid blasts to the North American plains. Since I still have friends and family living in that region, I pay attention to the winter weather that happens there. Last year was particularly brutal, with that jet stream going much further south than I remember it doing in the past. It wasn’t just the northern states like the Dakotas, Michigan and maybe Nebraska hunkering down against Arctic-type temperatures, they were reaching into Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana...

How can that possibly mean the climate is warming? Let me remind you that climate and weather are not the same thing. Weather happens on a much smaller scale than climate. As for that Arctic jet stream coming south before returning north, that air gets (relatively) warmed up. Coming so far south, it gets a lot warmer than it normally does, so when it does go north again, it transfers the warmth it gathered to the area it goes; the arctic. More melting.

Earth’s polar ice caps serve a purpose; sunlight is reflected from their white surface, so they act as a ‘cooling’ agent for the entire globe. The more this ice melts and reveals darker-colored water and land, the less cooling is available for the entire planet. Get it? The more snow and ice melts, the more likely more snow and ice will melt. Until there is no more snow and ice to help keep Earth’s temperature moderated.

The really scary part is what happens to the land when all that snow and ice melts. If Greenland’s ice cap melts, the sea level would rise by 20 feet (6.1 m). At its current rate of melt, the Arctic Ocean could be completely ice free by 2040. That’s only 22 years! If all the ice of Antarctica melted, the seas would rise by 200 ft (61 m).

With a sea level rise of only 6 feet (1.8 m), most large cities would be flooded. So, where do you live? I currently live in the center of the Florida peninsula, which would still be here after 6 feet of sea level rise... but loooooong gone by the time all the ice melts. Maybe I should start cleaning out stuff I won’t be needing in my old age, so that it’ll be easier to move north, once that becomes necessary.

By then, New Orleans would be a bay reaching almost as far north as the Missouri boot. The Netherlands would be entirely below sea level, but much of it is now. Hope they have plans for building new, much taller dykes. Australia will be a doughnut, with land surrounding an inland sea. The Amazon rainforest will become the Amazon Sea, and Buenos Aires in Argentina will mean a huge bay. Those are the easy things to notice on the map.

At one time, I found an interactive map showing what parts of the world would be underwater, and the results would change depending on how much you chose to raise the sea level. It didn’t seem too alarming, but I think it only allowed you to raise the sea level by 9 meters.

Alas, I neglected to bookmark that page. When I went looking for it to link to this blog, I found lots and lots of pages with ‘interactive global sea level rise maps’. That means more and more scientists (and others) have been looking at this scenario seriously, and taking the possible sea level rise much higher. Much more ice than that covering Greenland has been and is and will melt, so 9 meters could just be a drop in the bucket.

Water isn’t the only thing that will change. Next time, I’ll examine something else from my research about climate change.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/9/5/1792312/-Warm-ocean-water-has-penetrated-deep-into-the-Arctic-interior-portending-year-round-loss-of-sea-ice

http://www.softschools.com/facts/environmental_science/polar_ice_caps_facts/2894/

What is This World Coming to?

I firmly believe in climate change. In my mind, it is here, and it’s going to get bad.

But I’m not here to debate that with anyone. So, for the purpose of this series of blog entries, let’s say I’m trying to figure out what could happen (climate-wise) in the next 50 years, and how it will effect the people who have to live through it. Well, try to live through it.

The sea level will rise. There has been and still is a lot of water on the Earth that is not located in the seas. It’s not a liquid, it’s solid in the form of snow and ice. Glaciers, sea ice, and so on. This has all been melting at an increasing pace, and probably will continue until snow and ice become rare items.

You can already see the sea level rising, if you look; Miami FL has streets that are underwater during high tides. Miami Beach, located on a barrier island that barely qualifies as dry land, is quietly raising its streets, particularly the ones that run along the edges of the island.

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there was much talk of how badly the shoreline was being eroded. If I remember right, there is an oil refinery or some such that was built on the shore. Now it is pretty much an island, and the road leading to it may or may not be passable during high tides. Those tides even reach 5 or 10 miles inland, making it hard to get in or out of small towns that dot that road. The road, I understand, has been raised in a lot of places, making it even harder to navigate in those small towns.

Parts of Amsterdam in The Netherlands are 18 feet below sea level. Much of The Netherlands consists of land ‘reclaimed’ from the sea and thus below sea level. They did this by building dikes, dams and canals to control where the water could go. This will be an ever increasing chore, as the sea rises.

So I find myself wondering, what happens when the sea rise reaches that critical point, whatever it is? Will The Netherlands continue building their dikes taller, until they loom and cast an ominous shadow over the land they are intended to protect? Is that possible? Does it make more sense to raise the land they are living on? Is that possible?

At what point do people simply give in to nature and move to higher ground? Do those who are displaced get any assistance from their government, or do they have to abandon the home they’ve had for who knows how long, take what they can to some other place, and try to start over again? I suspect the latter, because the former would probably bankrupt any government.

Even if Earth’s population doesn’t grow beyond what it is now, it’s possible the concentration of that population will increase, because there could be less land for us to live on.

Well, with the next entry, we’ll continue with the water theme. Yes, there is more about water to think about.

Martian Shelter 5

I was beginning to think we had run out of ideas, but it turns out I was wrong. So, how about an ‘ice home’? They’ve been used in the Arctic Circle for centuries, haven’t they? But, the ones proposed for Mars are a bit more complicated than igloos. They are, once again, inflatable, but... in the shape of a doughnut. The body of the doughnut would be where people would live and work.

The ‘skin’ of the doughnut would be a double-wall, flexible, of course. The interior wall would hold in the air and provide the space for people to occupy. The space between the 2 flexible skins would be filled with water and allowed to freeze. That outer wall and the ice under it would keep the radiation out, and protect the inner sections from any nasty weather Mars can produce.

Despite recent findings of water of Mars, it is not nearly as omnipresent as it is on Earth, so where does that water come from? No, it won’t be shipped from Earth. What they would ship from Earth is robots with the equipment to find, mine, and transport the water to the shelter area so it could be melted, pumped inside the walls and allowed to re-freeze.

Presumably, this store of water could serve a second purpose; that of being turned into fuel when it was time to leave. To me, this seems counter-productive. It assumes the people will be leaving, abandoning their colony to return to Earth. Even if they were ‘only’ there for a shift of a couple years, wouldn’t more people be expected to arrive to take over, like is done with the space station? On the other hand, keeping options open can be a very good idea.

Of course, with proper timing, those robots could be sent out to mine more water to replace what’s been turned into rocket fuel. You’d just need to make sure the equipment doesn’t get clogged with sand in the meantime.

The biggest drawback I see to this design is that it could take 400 days to fill and freeze the shell. So those robots had better know what they are doing in order to get it ready before humans start arriving.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/a-new-home-on-mars-nasa-langley-s-icy-concept-for-living-on-the-red-planet

Martian Shelter 2

Okay, last time, we looked at the balloon-type house/shelter. It sounded like a lot of work to get it set up, supported, tied down and covered in sand. Not to mention the care that would be needed to see that it didn’t get any holes poked in it. Would it come with a set of ‘instant bandages’ you could use to patch any accidental holes? Personally, I think I’d make that a condition before I agreed to buy, but maybe that’s just me.

Today, we’re going to look at a slightly different possibility, one that apparently does not require shoveling sand around:

2. An above-ground shelter made from multiple layers of plastic film with low density foam between them. The thinking is that the Martian atmosphere is so thin, it would not ‘suck’ heat from the shelter walls. I’m left wondering about the radiation that was considered omni-present and probably deadly in years gone by. And... really? It’s cold, but it’s a thin cold, so that doesn’t count? Right, and 120° in the desert is hot, but it’s dry, so that’s okay.

Can you show me the Heat/AC power consumption on that type of shelter?

We recently visited the Kennedy Space Center, where the display for Atlantis (shuttle) explained that excess heat was disposed of by running tubes of heated liquid into the shuttle bay doors, which were opened to let that heat disperse. There’s a lot less ‘atmosphere’ in space than on Mars, but heat only gets sucked away when you want it to be, and doesn’t get sucked away when you want to keep it? You have to work at it, either way, and I’m just not convinced flimsy plastic and foam is enough insulation.

Also, I have to assume there is some sort of support system for this ‘tent’. Who gets to put that up? And tie the walls down? Once again, it’s going to need air locks, so will those be pre-fabbed and attached to the ‘walls’ before lift-off? But, since there isn’t any mention of burying it in the sand, would there be sections of the plastic film that would be transparent so the new Martians can look outside and see what the weather is like? Of course, the low density foam in those areas would need to be transparent, also, but I’m doubting that foam could avoid distorting the view.

Well, this is a little mind-boggling, isn’t it? You wanted a cottage to raise a family in, maybe with a picket fence, and all we’ve looked at so far indicates your actual choices are either a balloon buried in sand or a tent that may or may not retain any heat when the wind blows. Buck up, we’ve just begun to look at the possibilities. We’ll find something that’s just right for you.

http://www.imagineeringezine.com/e-zine/mars-makeshelter.html

Martian Shelter 1

People are finally giving serious thought to the possibility of living someplace off the Earth. Thought we’d take a look at what those new house designs might look like. Seeing what might be available, once we get to go. We’ll start with Mars, since everybody’s so excited about the possibility of getting there in the next decade or so.

The first shelters will be shipped to Mars from Earth. Maybe they’ll be shipped ahead of time and need to be activated when humans arrive, but probably, the shelter will arrive with them. After all, it worked on the moon, though the shelter in that case was a piece of space ship. It served the purpose for the short time that anybody was there. They even brought part of it back with them. Kind of like living in your car, do you suppose?

So here’s some of the ideas that are floating around for housing on Mars:

1. One suggestion for an early shelter is an inflated balloon-type structure. Think of some kind of thick, air-tight fabric that could be unfolded and laid out in the desired position, hooked up to a supply of air, and blown up. The fabric could be augmented with support structures, and finally, the entire thing could be covered with sand for extra insulation, both from thermal variance and radiation. The average Martian temperature is -80° F, plus the air is mighty thin, so you have to have plenty of insulation. You’d probably have to tie this puppy down before you started inflating it, or risk it floating away in the breeze, but I’m sure the instructions would point that out.

After reading about this proposal, I’m left wondering how the door would be added. It would have to be an air lock, or else opening the door really would mean you’d let all the heat out! I keep thinking an airlock would be made of metal, but perhaps they could fashion them out of plastic or something similar, and they could be added to the ‘balloon’ before it left Earth. Would they only put one door in this balloon, or would they add a back door, too? And who is going to shovel all that sand on top and around? Would they dig a hole in the ground to hold the balloon? Sounds like a lot of hard work, if the ground is frozen or otherwise solid. What’s the circumference of this balloon? Will they have to walk (or drive) all over it to get the sand distributed?

I suppose it has possibilities, but it really sounds an awful lot like a fixer-upper.

Well, phooey. We’ve only looked at one possibility, and I’m out of words. Can’t make these things too long, or so they tell me. We’ll have to continue this search for a new home next week, because there are definitely other possibilities. But don’t get your hopes up; I didn’t see a single split-level ranch on the list.

http://www.imagineeringezine.com/e-zine/mars-makeshelter.html

Weird Planets 8

Good morning. I am your replacement driver and tour guide. Your previous driver, um, has been... has been asked to stay home today.

Hope you had a large breakfast, because we’re going to visit several ‘HD’ systems on this leg, and it could be a long time until supper. Everybody buckled in? If not, get that way, ‘cause we’re headed out.

Okay, on the right side is HD 106906 b. It’s 11 times the size of Jupiter. Yes, it does have a parent star. It’s one of those bright bits of light ahead of us. This planet’s distance from its star is 650 times as Earth’s distance from our sun, so I can’t blame you for asking. Despite being so remote from its star, the average temperature on the surface is 1500° Celsius, which is 2,732° Fahrenheit. That’s pretty toasty warm, in my mind. Scientists say it shouldn’t exist at all, being so large and so far from its parent. Where did it get enough material that far out? But however it came to exist, it’s only 13 Million years old. Just a baby, really, since the universe is over 14 Billion years. So maybe it just hasn’t had a chance to cool off since it came into being?

Now, right over here is Osiris, more formally known as HD 209458 b, which was the first planet to be seen as it crossed in front of its star. It’s also the first planet to have its light directly detected. Its discovery showed that transit observations were possible, which opened up a whole new realm of exoplanet discovery.

The planet ahead of us is HD 189733 b. It’s about the size of Jupiter, and has been studied quite a bit ever since scientists discovered it transiting its star while they studied that star using X-ray frequencies. This is also one of the first planets to have its atmosphere ‘sniffed’ to determine its composition. I don’t remember the full list, but I do remember that the atmosphere contains methane. No, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s cows on that planet. Methane can be produced naturally. It doesn’t have to be a biological byproduct.

Now we come to HD 114762 b, which was discovered in 1989. This is the first discovered planet to be orbiting a sun-like star. However, because its mass is - as seems so popular - 11 times that of Jupiter, and because it only takes 84 days to complete an orbit, it was initially thought to be a brown dwarf. But it’s not. As a comparison, tiny little Mercury takes 88 days to complete an orbit around our sun.

I have to ask you to please be quiet as I approach this one. If it was up to me, we wouldn’t even bother with this one. Too dangerous, if you ask me; you never quite know what to expect from HD 80606 b. It’s orbit is so eccentric-- Oh! Hang on! ... Whew! That was close. I think we’ll be safe now, at least for a few minutes. Besides its highly eccentric orbit, HD 80606 b also displays plenty of storms and atmospheric heating, and you can plainly see how fast it rotates.

Okay, that’s our tour for today. I’ll take you back to base so you can get some supper. I know I’m ready for it. No, I’m sorry, I don’t know who will be your next driver and tour guide. No, I don’t know where you’ll be taken, either. From the looks of it, you still have quite a number of planets to visit. We are all qualified drivers and tour guides, ma’am, otherwise, we wouldn’t have the job.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/643662/The-10-weirdest-planets-to-have-been-discovered-so-far

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/20-intriguing-exoplanets

www.space.com/159-strangest-alien-planets.html

Weird Planets 3

GJ 1214b is another exoplanet that I found on 3 of the 4 lists. Some have nicknamed it ‘Waterworld’ since its discovery in December of 2009. It orbits a red dwarf star some 40-42 light years from us and is a ‘super Earth’, a planet whose mass is between Earth and Neptune. It is triple the size of Earth, but its mass is about 6.5 Earths.

Waterworld - as you might guess - is probably covered in water, reaching depths far deeper than Earth’s oceans. It is assumed to have a solid core, but the lists disagree about that core. One assumed the core would be made of rock, one simply said the core was ‘solid’, and the third stated that with an ocean that deep, the pressure and cold could have formed a core made of different forms of ice.

The depths of this ocean might be frigid, but not the atmosphere, which it definitely has. This planet’s air is described as ‘thick’ and ‘steamy’. It is thought to be home to water in a medley of phases, such as steam, liquid, and plasma. Maybe even ice, down in the core region. Another scientist said that Waterworld’s high temperatures and high pressures could form some exotic materials, such as ‘hot ice’ or ‘superfluid water’.

The possibility of ‘exotic forms of water’ makes me think of an episode from the original series of Star Trek. Small bits of a freakish form of water would ‘infect’ people and make them behave as if they were drunk, even to the point of committing suicide. For most of the episode, Dr McCoy and his team could not figure out what had gotten into the victims... all the tests just considered this stuff water. But in the end, of course, they got it figured out and devised an antidote. There was a very similar episode in ST The Next Generation.

Hmm. I wonder if ‘Waterworld’s ocean consists of salt water, or something more closely resembling fresh water. If the only thing solid is the core - which at the very least might well be covered in ice, if not composed of ice - then where would it get any salt?

And if the ocean is fresh water, what are the chances that it managed to produce any life? Probably not life as we know it, because we need a whole bunch of stuff besides the hydrogen and oxygen found in water. Stuff like iron, carbon and potassium, just to name a few.

Now, let’s all think about this and try to figure out how plain water might manage to create living creatures. And when we’re done with that, let’s tackle the intelligence question.

Bubble Colony

Now that we’ve visited the moon a few times, nobody is talking about setting up a moonbase. Everybody seems to want to move on to colonizing Mars. But you know what? Venus is a lot closer.

Earth’s orbit is 93,000,000 miles from the sun. Mars’ orbit is 141,600,000 miles from the sun. The closest Mars and Earth can get is about 48,600,000 miles, while the furthest away they get is 234,600,000. Venus is 67,000,000 miles from the sun, so the closest Earth gets to it is 26,000,000, and the furthest away Venus gets is 160,000,000. So yes, it’s about half the distance to get to Venus as it is to get to Mars.

Why is nobody clamoring to colonize Venus?

At first glance, Venus does not seem very welcoming. Oh, sure, it has about the same amount of gravity as Earth, but that’s the only thing that might be called ‘welcoming’. Its atmosphere is carbon dioxide and nitrogen, with clouds of sulfuric acid droplets. There may be trace amounts of H₂O and HO in the atmosphere, but don’t expect to go outside without a space suit. The corrosive atmosphere is so dense, no probe that landed on Venus lasted longer than a couple hours. If the acid doesn’t get you, the pressure will. That pressure is the same as being 1.5 miles deep in the ocean. And that’s assuming you don’t land in a volcano, because the surface is highly volcanic.

The atmosphere is the cause of runaway greenhouse effect, and the surface of Venus is about 900°F. Venus rotates backwards, so the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, but it rotates so slowly, a ‘day’ (single rotation) on Venus is 243 Earth days, while it only takes 225 Earth days to complete a circuit around the sun. That would take some getting used to. And despite Venus’ slow rotation, the top lay of clouds whip around it in about 4 Earth days, at speeds of 225 (or more) miles an hour.

Ready to make it your home yet?

There are people considering how it could be done. They don’t see a colony on Venus’ surface, however; they envision an enclosed ‘station’ that floats 30 miles above Venus’ surface, where the pressure is about the same as sea level on Earth. The temperature would be about 160°F, but that would be relatively easy to deal with. And being below that top layer of clouds, it might be pushed around the globe, but not at hurricane speeds.

That doesn’t sound so bad. Maybe they could devise a way to grow plants on the outside walls to change some of the carbon dioxide into oxygen. If enough of that happened, the greenhouse effect could start to calm down, the temperature might lower, and those racing high-level winds would slow down. Who knows, maybe it would be possible to establish a base on Venus’ surface... in a few millennia.

Ready to ship out yet? Or are you waiting for the ship to Europa?

Harvest Feast

Thanksgiving Day in the US is traditionally a day of over-eating. Each family develops their own quirky traditions in what they eat and do on that day, but over-eating is generally common ground.

In the US, legend says early colonists did not bring enough supplies, so half of them (50) died in that first winter. But friendly natives helped the rest survive after that, teaching them to catch eels and grow corn. Before their second winter, they harvested plentiful crops, and hunted wild birds and deer, so they had full larders. And for 3 days, they over-ate in joyous thanksgiving.

Basically, they were celebrating a good harvest. And harvest feasts go back a long, long time, at least as far back as Ancient Egypt, possibly as far back as when man changed from hunter/gatherers to farmers.

It makes sense; after a good harvest of the main crop, food was abundant. There wasn’t as much work to do in the fields, so the workers had more leisure time. In some cases, the coming months would be cold and dreary. Keeping all that food in good condition might not be easy. So it was natural to celebrate in having plenty of food.

Over-eating in the fall could also give them extra fat, which could help protect them from the cold, and give them extra calories to burn, should things get lean before anything became available in the spring.

But what if future colonists landed on a planet with different seasons than Earth? For instance, the winters are so mild, this is when the crops grow. Harvest is held during increasingly hot days, as the climate turns into a blistering summer where Earth plants struggle to survive, and the colonists stay indoors to avoid heat stroke - or worse.

When would they celebrate? I am assuming storage of crops would not be a problem. Would they feast at the end of harvest? Gain a few pounds of fat to lug around through the sauna-like summer? I don’t think fat is a good insulator to keep a person cool.

Or would they wait until the temperature starts to dip, and they will soon need to prepare the fields and plant the crops? To do that, maybe they could use some extra calories to get all that hard work done. Plus, they would have an idea just how much food they could use for a feast.

That assumes the colonists are doing hard, menial labor themselves, not sending machines out to do it. Perhaps they are. Maybe there wasn’t room for farming machines, or the machines are broken.

Would they think things through and have a delayed feast? Would everybody agree to that, or would the question breed dissent, even anger?

Or would they just follow tradition and feast right after the harvest? Would they eventually learn to delay that feast?

I see story possibilities here.

Have a great Thanksgiving. Only our youngest son will be joining us this year, coming over early enough to help with the cooking. We won’t be watching football, so we’ll be debating which sf movie disc to put in the machine. That’s one of our traditions. A quiet Thanksgiving is still Thanksgiving.

Hot Tempers

In 2012, researchers concluded that the hot dry weather produced in some countries by El Nino contributed to unrest and conflict.

I can’t say that I actually stopped to think about it before I read about that research, but I can say that I’m not terribly surprised, if that’s the case. It seems to have been known for a long time that Hot Temperatures produce Hot Tempers. People get uncomfortable and they start to look for someone to take it out on.

So, throw some poverty, political instability and inequality into the pot with the Hot Temperatures, and tempers really start to boil. This is not the Way Things Are Supposed To Be! Maybe people figure things couldn’t possibly get worse than they are, so they might as well try to change things. And pretty soon, things have escalated into some kind of war.

If the climate as a whole is warming up, this doesn’t bode well for the human race. The article I read purported that this strife was more likely to occur in the poorest of nations, and the wealthy countries went relatively unscathed. But how long would that stay true?

For instance, there’s been a lot of talk in the US recently about financial inequality and instability; bigotry and intolerance have reared their ugly heads again. In Nebraska, the daytime temperature can easily top out at 100-110 degrees in August, and everybody virtually runs from air-conditioned work place to air-conditioned car to air-conditioned home.

Now, imagine the temperature heading for 120, and air conditioners that can’t keep up with the demand, or power plants that can’t keep up, producing brown outs. I really don’t think it would take very long for grumblings about the 1% to become angry outcries.

And that means Trouble, my friend. Trouble. With a capital T.