At last! Someone as pessimistic about Mars colonization as I am

Mars is for robots, not people. I’ve thought that for a long time, and as someone who reads a fair bit of science fiction, I can say that there are many books I have hurled across the room for proposing that we can save humanity by building colonies on Mars…which, admittedly, is the second most hospitable planet in the solar system. Unfortunately, there’s a huge distance between #1 and #2.

I’ve compared colonizing Mars to colonizing Antarctica, to set the bar really low. Except for a few scientific research stations and a few obsolete whaling stations, no one has built long-term, productive homes in Antarctica. It’s just too hostile. But still, it does have air and plentiful water, unlike Mars.

Here’s a better comparison, though: why haven’t we colonized the upper reaches of the Himalayas?. There, air and water are scarce, but not as scarce as on Mars, and it’s only a difficult hike, or a risky helicopter ride, from human population centers. It’s all right there! We can shuttle to and from the place in days, pessimistically, and not months, and it doesn’t require multi-million dollar spaceships to get to it!

The summit of Mount Everest is around 8,800 meters above sea level, squarely within those balmy Earth latitudes that get nice long sunlit days all year round. Compared to anyplace on Mars, it is the very womb of God. No plant life grows there. No animals live there.

Even with steady year-round subtropical sunlight, even with conditions infinitely more nurturing than those found anywhere on Mars, the summit of Mount Everest cannot support complex life. It’s too cold; the air is too thin; there is no liquid water for plants and animals to drink. Standing on the top of Mount Everest, a person can literally look at places where plants and animals happily grow and live and reproduce, yet no species has established a permanent self-sustaining population on the upper slopes of Everest. Even microbes avoid it.

Life on earth writ large, the grand network of life, is a greater and more dynamic terraforming engine than any person could ever conceive. It has been operating ceaselessly for several billions of years. It has not yet terraformed the South Pole or the summit of Mount Everest. On what type of timeframe were you imagining that the shoebox of lichen you send to Mars was going to transform Frozen Airless Radioactive Desert Hell into a place where people could grow wheat?

I could be wrong. The author of that essay could be wrong. I think Elon Musk ought to build a mansion on top of Mount Everest as proof of concept, along with a weed farm and an artificial womb. I think he should move there permanently, just to prove it can be done, and sit there happily stoned and make mountaintop babies.

Except…I think Elon Musk is almost as pessimistic as I am. He has to know he’s not going to be establishing a Mars colony in his lifetime, but he also knows it’s a successful grift to pretend he’s going to.

We got our soundbite

It slaps.

I don’t really care what the intent of the creator was, it shows what a buffoon this guy is.

Who needs fly paper?

We don’t have air conditioning, which means we don’t have the house buttoned down tight in the summer, which means the occasional fly wanders in and heads to the kitchen, always the kitchen. But they don’t last long, because we’ve got a tangle of cobwebs under our cupboards, which are occupied by fierce fly-killers. This is a Pholcus phalangioides caught in the act of ‘explaining’ to a housefly that we don’t care for their kind comin’ round these parts.

I didn’t notice the teeny tiny gnat snared in the web by the spider’s hind leg when I took the picture.

Can we cancel this weird creep now?

Dave Rubin is one of the dumbest online pundits on the planet, and he’s also one of those people caught with his hands in the Russian cookie jar. Rubin weighed in on Taylor Swift’s endorsement, and it’s one of the sleaziest, most repulsive takes you’ll see.

“Let’s talk a little bit about how this fits into the pop culture part of this, because the pop culture is a huge driver of the cultural narrative,” said Rubin. “Poor Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris on Instagram after the debate on ABC, proudly calls herself ‘a childless cat lady.’ Elon Musk, who they hate, saw that and he wrote this: ‘Fine Taylor … you win … I will give you a child and guard your cats with my life.’ So he’s mocking and exposing the ridiculousness, right?”

“It’s like Taylor Swift, you are a young, pretty girl,” said Rubin. “Do you know what the gang members from Venezuela do to young, pretty girls? It ain’t pretty. So what do we have to do? We just have to keep finding each other to whatever extent we can, we have to keep waking people up, it is the only chance we have in these remaining 60 days.”

Seriously, dude? “Vote for Trump or you’ll be raped by a Venezualan gang”? Combining racism, classism, and threats of sexual assault is an ugly mix, you know. That’s just how desperate the Trumpers are getting.

Game over, man

Taylor Swift has endorsed Kamala Harris/Tim Walz.

Lest you think the Republicans will be steamrollered, have no fear: Donald Trump quickly countered.

When asked Wednesday morning about Swift endorsing the Democratic nominee, Trump tried to shake it off, telling Fox News he prefers Swift’s close friend Brittany Mahomes over the singer.
“I actually like Mrs. Mahomes much better if you want to know the truth,” Trump said. “She’s a big Trump fan. I was not a Taylor Swift fan.”

Who?

I looked her up on Wikipedia.

Brittany Lynne Mahomes (née Matthews; born August 31, 1995) is an American sports team co-owner and former soccer player who played as a forward for Icelandic club UMF Afturelding. She is a founding co-owner of the Kansas City Current, a team in the American professional top-division National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL).

She is married to Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

OK, I’m still saying, “Who?”

It’s a good thing that the election won’t be decided by celebrity endorsements, but I do think Harris might have an edge here.

This is rather horrible.

He’s just confirming that the Trump cult is weird and creepy.

I watched the debate

I did. I sat through the whole thing, and I did not enjoy it.

Harris said nothing radical. No surprising policy changes; she wants to stay the course with Israel, demanding a cease fire and release of the hostages, but what I wanted to hear was that she would leverage the sale of arms to pressure Israel into ending the genocide — nope, she couldn’t say that. She did promise other positive changes, though with a $6K tax credit for new families and $50K for new business startups. Otherwise, she hammered on Trump a bit, as expected. “In this debate tonight, you’re going to hear from the same old tired playbook, a bunch of lies, grievances and name-calling,” she predicted. She was exactly right.

Trump glowered through the whole thing. He looked resentful at being there, and yeah, he kept returning to immigration. He really hates a lot of people, and wants to deport millions of people, all those dangerous criminals pouring over the border, released from prisons and insane asylums. He repeated that nonsense about immigrants hunting down your beloved pets and killing them and eating them.

Asked about abortion, he claimed that everyone, including women, Democrats, and professors, loved the fact that he killed Roe v. Wade. No, they do not. Asked if he would veto a bill that proposed a nationwide abortion ban, he dodged the question. Asked about January 6th, he said “I didn’t do it.” He’s a liar and a coward.

Here’s a 20 minute summary of the whole thing.

The highlight for me, though, was when he was asked about what he planned to replace Obamacare with, he admitted he didn’t have any specific plans, he had concepts of plans.

He’s a hate-filled sack of shit. He’s got nothing but jingo and contempt for anyone who doesn’t look like him.

Maybe that will be enough to get him elected, unfortunately.

Lies, lies, and more lies

It’s just that easy!

What to expect from the debate tonight: as we get closer and closer to the election, the lies get more and more extreme.

Former President Donald Trump repeated his false claim that children are undergoing transition-related surgeries during their school day, exacerbating existing fears among conservatives that educators are pushing children to become transgender and aiding transitions without parental awareness.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house, and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school, and your son comes back with a brutal operation. Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?” Trump said at a campaign rally in Wisconsin, a vital swing state, on Saturday.

What the hell is wrong with Trump and his audience? And he repeats it again!

When asked by the group’s co-founder how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

There is no evidence that a student has ever undergone gender-affirming surgery at a school in the United States nor is there evidence that a U.S. school has sent a student to receive such a procedure elsewhere.

My transgender friends are constantly complaining about how many hoops they have to jump through, how many years it takes to get approval, and how many states won’t even allow you to buy the drugs for maintenance. I’ll have to inform them that all you had to do was say that you used a different pronoun in middle school, and zip, you’re sent to the school nurse, who has a fully equipped surgery, and the sex change is done in a day.

Yeah, right.

And the MAGA idiots will believe it, and are ready for the next lie.

Which happens to be that Haitian immigrants are flooding the country and stealing your pets to eat raw in their apartments in the slums. Sure, fully believable. Everyone knows that housecat is the national dish of Haiti.

Examples of life in my neighborhood

My front yard is a bit of a scary place — it’s been taken over by cranky stinging insects. Here’s a wasp that has a nest in my front door.

Scarier still, though, is this small cavern that has been excavated in my lawn, and is full of buzzing frantically busy creatures that I could not photograph well, because they were moving so fast to complain about my existence. It might be a swarm of Karens.

I’ve mentioned that I have an endoscopic camera. Anyone want to double-dog-dare me to probe deeply into that mysterious tunnel full of alien life-forms? I’ll do it. I’m not a-skeered.

If you’re in the neighborhood…

On Thursday, 12 September, at 2:30, I’m joining forces with another class to drag our freshman students outside, before the snow starts falling next month, to confront the reality of life on campus. I’m bringing some handlenses, my macro camera, and an endoscopic camera for poking into holes, and we’ll take a look at life in the desert of the campus lawns and shrubbery (there is some, but it’s mostly springtails, ants, and spiders). We’ll also talk about how “spider” is misleading, because there are at least 30 different species of spiders living here, alongside the human monoculture.

I’m encouraging the students to sign up for iNaturalist and to use Seek to begin their careers as natural historians. It’ll be fun! Especially since otherwise I’d be lecturing them on meiosis. You’re welcome to join in if you’re in the neighborhood of Morris, Minnesota — this is going to be casual and geared to the first year college student.