There are chemical signs of life on earth in the oldest sedimentary rocks we have. That early life may have been simple anaerobic microbes, primitive archaea, RNA world, or something we have no knowledge of at all. This was an alien looking world! As seen above, the moon was much larger and closer in those days (Yeah, that’s the moon, not the sun), in fact the days themselves whirled by in about half the time it takes now! The earth was probably hotter, with a thicker atmosphere painted yellow and orange with prodigious amounts of greenhouse gases and volcanic emissions.

But around 2.5 billion years ago a newcomer evolved that could use light to turn water and carbon dioxide into simple sugars. Over time these bacteria gave rise to blue-green algae which would transform the world and change the color of the sky by creating a deadly poison: oxygen. New evidence suggests the ancestors of the poison loving bugs may have been around a lot longer than once thought:

The ‘Great Oxidation Event’ (GOE), nearly 2.3 billion years ago, marks the point when oxygen started to make an impact on the atmosphere, stimulating the evolution of air-breathing organisms. But new research from MIT suggests that oxygen may actually have been around hundreds of millions of years earlier, in ‘oxygen oases’ in the oceans. And the team says there’s good evidence that tiny aerobic organisms may have evolved to survive on extremely low levels of the gas in these spots.

Of course we tend to think pretty highly of oxygen, without it we die! But oxygen is corrosive stuff, organisms that couldn’t handle it probably perished or clung or in low oxygen environments. Oxygen may have done more than change life, it probably change the color or the oceans and the sky. It may have also caused a huge drop in greenhouse gases leading to a series of global glaciations called Snowball earth, but that’s a post for another day.

Looks like the rebels in Libya may be closing in on the capital city, Tripoli in the next few weeks:

The key factor is the bloody battle for Zawiya — an strategically important city just west of Tripoli, engulfed in urban warfare on Tuesday. Rebels have made advances in the south and the east. But if those fighters eventually gain control of Zawiya, that will be a major stride in putting a stranglehold on the Gadhafi-controlled seat of power. “We will be very careful entering Tripoli, which we hope to do by the end of this month,” said Col. Ahmed Banni, military spokesman for the opposition National Transitional Council.

There’s nothing funny about war, one of my colleagues at Daily Kos has family in Libya and his cousin-in-law was killed fighting for the rebels a few months ago. But watching the same apologists who used up gallons of ink and scads of electrons defending Bush’s trillion dollar Iraq blunder now up in arms because the commander in chief is now a democrat has been rather hilarious.

The rebels are going to win of course, everyone knows that, just like they won in Egypt and just like they will win in Syria. It’s just a matter of time. Qadaffi is among the worst terrorists in the world, he’s old, and no one likes him; except possibly the Teaparty Republicans who would love to see what was once referred to as the world’s greatest terrorist come out on top.

Mars rover Opportunity is said to be near the end of its life. But it’s been a hell of a pay off on a probe that was designed to last a few months at most!

Opportunity is still providing great images and data for scientists back on earth like the gorgeous picture above taken from the rim of a 14 mile crater called Endeavour located near the equator in a place called Meridiani Planum. Opportunity is looking for signs of ancient water or water ice buried beneath the dry dusty surface. The current thinking among astrobiologists is, if microbes ever thrived on Mars, they would probably have been in an ancient ocean or lake.

And earth bound biologists are working on strains of bacteria that might one day survive on the Martian surface, giving rise to a sort of microbiological farming industry:

In its quest to colonize space, NASA has awarded a $750,000, three-year grant to researchers at South Dakota State University, the School of Mines and Technology and Oglala Lakota College to make fuel, oxygen and clean water for colonists. Those researchers already are genetically manipulating cyanobacteria – commonly known as blue-green algae – so that it produces and secretes the renewable carbon molecules necessary for gasoline, jet fuel and diesel.

Shut up and eat your algae you ungrateful brat! Why back in my day we had to eat … Kidding aside — hey it’s the Zingularity — Mars is a worthy goal for human exploration. It’s by far the nearest planet where humans can actually survive on the surface. The problem is Mars will probably never grab the public’s imagination like the moon did. The moon may be way smaller than Mars, but it’s also much closer. It’s been hanging up there, big and beautiful, since our ancestors stumbled out of a Pliocene forest on two shaky legs. Poems and songs have been written about it, lovers have gazed into each other’s eyes under its ghostly glow and fallen in love. Mars is a spark of light most people can’t find in the night sky without help. The moon is just way more ubiquitous for most people. That may not be a scientific analysis, but it is human nature.

Billionaire Warren Buffet, the sage of Omaha, had an eye opening op-ed today in in the Sunday New York Times:

While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks. … If you make money with money, as some of my super-rich friends do, your percentage may be a bit lower than mine. But if you earn money from a job, your percentage will surely exceed mine — most likely by a lot.

Buffet notes he paid less than 18% in taxes, as compared with the middle class employees in his home office who paid around 35%.

Something reeks in this nation, and the source of the stench comes straight from hard-right ideologues like the ones making up Texas Governor Rick Perry’s base. And Perry had an odd take on the growing third-world income distribution in the US. He’s complaining about the tiny 2.5% sliver in the pie chart; you middle class working stiffs aren’t paying enough:

We’re dismayed at the injustice that nearly half of all Americans don’t even pay any income tax. And you know the liberals out there are saying that we need to pay more. We are indignant about leaders who do not listen and spend money faster than they can print it.

Of course Perry fails to mention that those ‘freeloaders’ earn a tiny fraction of the income, or that they’re soaked by sales and consumption taxes of the type Perry and his ilk would love to hike, or that they pay more payroll taxes than Warren Buffet. The chart shows networth, i.e., wealth, of which that bottom half has very little of. About the only tangible asset they have is the Social Security and Medicare they’ve built, the same assets assholes like Perry think are unconstitutional. Code for an implicit promose to rip off the last cent these folks have and feed it to the wealthy elite who fund his perverse campaign and cheer his sick ideology.

But then that’s Rick Perry’s platform. Cut taxes for Paris Hilton and stick it to the rest of us. The same as it ever was. In the history of mankind, nothing has been easier and more cowardly than sticking up for the wealthy and privileged, and that’s Gov Perry in a nutshell. If he had lived in ancient Egypt he would have been chasing Moses and trying to mow down the Exodus, in Roman times he would have been standing next to Caesar watching early Christians being fed to lions. Today he works for the Koch brothers. What a classic scumbag.

Interesting article on the state of Rick Perry’s faith by Kathleen Townsend at the Atlantic. The Money quote:

Maybe he believes, like some socially conservative evangelicals, that these passages refer only to personal charity, not government programs. But I don’t see any place in the Bible that says we shouldn’t use all the tools we have at hand to help the poor, the sick, and the hungry. The same conservative Christians claim that the Bible teaches them that the government should outlaw gay marriage and stem cell research. But why should the government carry out some Biblical injunctions and not others?

No doubt plenty of convoluted apologetics exist which happen to coincidentally line up exactly with the interests of Perry and his zillionaire buddies. Funny how that always seems to be the case. One might almost call it miraculous.

I wonder if the Christians in the US understand that when the religious right champions torture or exploitation of the middle class, or any of dozens of ugly right-wing political positions they embrace, and makes up transparent excuses for why a loving God really wants us to crush a suspect’s testicles in a vice or doesn’t want We the People to intercede if homeless families are starving in the streets, it’s revolting to most of the rest of us on every level.

Every time I see that stuff I feel lucky to not be a Christian. For years I considered every single one of them either a hopeless dope, or a sleazy conman fleecing the dopes, precisely because of the antics of the religious right and the tele-evangelical phenomena. I’ve since met many great progressive people of faith who have helped dissuade me of that, but the stereotype still lingers and, as long as religious opportunists like Rick Perry thrive, it probably always will.

Most aliens in science-fiction movies are disappointing. Even the aliens in a program I saw last night speculating on an invasion were unimaginative. They went with the usual humanoid with a skin condition and large eyes deal. Real aliens would surely be very different from anything we can imagine. Here’s one example of just how different they could be, drawn up by my talented artistic friend Karen Wehrsten a few years ago.

Qax were dreamed up by hard sci-fi writer Stephen Baxter, and they are weird! Qax biology is based around chemical hyper-cycles embedded in convection cells. A Qax is millions of such cells arranged on the sea surface in a branching pattern covering several miles. Each cell is as wide as a coffee can lid, languidly bubbling like chocolate with nested eddies down to the microscopic level; they’re highly organized, living storms.

Shown right, on a young, simmering ocean world, under an oversized blue-white star, the tendrils of one Qax reach out to the limb of another in the distance. The bluish sunlight is filtered and scattered to a pinkish orange by a dense blanket of CO2 spiked generously with hydrocarbon and sulfur compounds. Undersea volcanoes light up the horizon and belch more toxic gas into the air.

In Baxter’s Xeelee series, the Qax at one time enslaved mankind. Humans eventually threw them off thanks to the efforts of mostly one guy, but the Qax never forgot us. They spent the next 5 million years learning to live in other turbulent systems, gas giants, stars, even the quantum turbulence of empty space. All the time they had one species goal, revenge.

That last part definitely sounds human. Hopefully, in the next few weeks, I’ll have another alien taken from another writer’s dreams that is even more alien, in some respects, than the Qax!

That scene on the movie Office Space was brilliant. The only way it could have been better wuold be if it were a computer, especiaily some of the ones I’ve owned. Ever wondere why computers suck so much, why they’re so confusing, which is a nice way to say they’re so aggravating they could drive one to violent felonies against innocent silicon wafers? Finally, after I’ve spent the last year in retail tech support, the secret can be revealed.

The number one reason computers suck is because of thieves. Crooks who steal everything they can get their virtual mitts on, often operating freely in countries where corrupt or indifferent law enforcement agencies happily look the other way.  These assholes cause all sorts of problems for PC users. A common one is the antiviral software dilemma, too strong or too weak — the digital equavilent of autoimmune conditions vs compromised immunity seen in Lupus vs HIV or cancer patients, where confusing packages of security software must be bought and maintained which either slow every damn thing down when it’s not outright shutting them off, or let malacious programs through slowing or shutting every damn thing down.

The second reason computers suck is because We the Users buy them based on cost but use them based on need. It’s kind of like a farmer buying a vehicle based purely on cost and then hooking it up to a plow. That Kia Soul will pull a combine alright, better than a person doing it with sheer muscle power anyway. But it’s going to get expensive real quick, because it won’t do it well and it won’t last long doing it. 

That being said, the PC and software industry could, imo, do a better job. Just one example: the hung web page. We have dual memory cores and graphics cards and blazing fast Internet speeds. And yet windows developers are unable to put out a browser and operating system that will reliably and quickly shut down a webpage that hangs up. You know the drill, the page you’ve been visiting all day and/or all year suddenly won’t finish loading. There’s no indication of when to give up, you just have to guess. Finally, in frustration, you click on the X to shut the sucker down, and then nothing happens or, worse, an annoying message that ‘the page is no responding’ appears. At which point you start task manager, and half the time task manager also informs you the program is not responding to being shut down. In extreme cases the power has to be cut and the device rebooted, all because one web page wouldn’t load.

One would think that ending a connection would be a fairly simple operation. When that X is clicked, that page should close, ideally without resorting to a special program plastering up an annoying messages that the page is not responding on programs when it was specifically opened to end an unresponsive page. And yet this must be more difficult than it sounds because, despite 20 years of web innovation to the tune of trillions of dollars and enough graduate degrees to paper over a small state, it has so far eluded the nerdiacs.

Computers are, hands down, the most confusing, unreliable, over hyped items most people have to deal with in life. And that’s the kicker, that’s why people get so pissed off at computers and software: we have to deal with them. One can no more function in 21st America without a PC than they can without being able to read and write. And what’s even more aggravating is, far from getting a handle on it, meaning operating systems and applications that don’t routinely seize up or crash, that same technology is instead being extended to everything from television sets to cell phones. A few more years of this and I won’t be able to brew coffee without downloading F-secure and Defender and fighting off whatever slips through. Maybe we should just hope future household appliances rely on Apple and not PC based code.

OK, all this whining is just a way for me to vent. What’s a blog for after all? Truth be told, my ASUS came down with fake security virus. And that’s what really sparked this post, or the first part about thieves anyway. /Rant

Update 8 AM CDT: Wow , lots of responses. OK, in rough order, I use every web browser, FF, Chrome, I/E when I have to, etc. My firewall at work is whatever they say, at home it’s the standard Windows Vista or the ASUS XP thing. I’ve opened and closed ports as needed, changed proxy settings, one of my machines is currently in perm safe mode w/networking because i just got tired of it being so slow. Incidentally, found a rootkit virus or at least a piece of an old one when reading the msinfo in that one, got rid of that and it wasn’t easy.

Thing is though, I know this stuff “OK,” or at least I have very good resources to go to for advice when I run into something I can’t resolve on my own. Most people don’t have a lot of experience reading an msinfo or a handy dandy tech assistant guide that parses it down, few people can do a trace route without specific intrusctions and fewer still know how to read it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been dragged over to a friend’s house on a weekend morning to try and fix their damn PC. For free of course.

In response to the point about Windows or Macs, these devices I have and wrote about will probably be the last Windows machine I ever own. My next PC will be a Mac. That’s not to say Macs are immune to problems, we get some Mac tickets at work. But I’ve been around both kinds now, inside and outside, that I think a Mac is worth a shot even though it’s going to cost twice as much.

 

Suborbital flight will open up access to space for us regular folks, we children of Apollo (Or in the former USSR, children of Soyuz) who’ve gazed skyward with a heaping helping of awe tinged with a touch of envy for half a century and counting. In 50 years of exploration only about 500 human beings have been lucky enough to go into space. Most of them are government or civilian pilots, a few scientists, engineers, and medical doctors, and a handful of privately funded astronauts lumped – unfairly as we’ll see in future posts — into the category of space tourists. In the next decade or two more than ten times that many will get to go. Among them will be the first rock and roll star, the first paraplegic (Who may find the freedom afforded by weightlessness to be so enjoyable they may not want to come back!), and the first head of state. They’ll be followed, sooner or later, by the first teenager, the first President, even the first infant.

Adventure is reason enough! But there’s science to do up there too. Our atmosphere is actually thousands of miles thick, but it’s not a continuous, gradually thinning blanket of cooler and cooler air as one might think. It’s a thing of layers, like an onion, each marked by abrupt changes in temperature and other properties. The part we’re most familiar with, the part containing every forest, coastline, and hanging valley, is the Troposphere. It starts at the surface, what scientists call the planetary boundary layer, and extends all the way past the thin wispy cirrus clouds that fly above the tallest thunderstorms. Only the highest flying birds and the peaks of the world’s greatest mountains soar into the next layer, the Stratosphere. The stratosphere is a layer of stable air that acts like a lid on weather systems embedded in the troposphere, limiting the vertical development of thunderstorms and blizzards. This is the realm the protective ozone that shields the planet’s surface from harsh ultraviolet light like a global sunscreen.

The highest flying rocket planes like the legendary X-15 and the proposed Lynx, shown right, penetrate the layer after that, the Mesosphere, where the air is many times thinner than on Mars. It is the coldest part of our fragile atmosphere, around 135 degrees below zero on average, the stage where grand electrical discharges called sprites and jets are conducted, and shooting stars end their brief dazzling lives. Beyond that are the Thermosphere and Exosphere, both so rarefied and distant that we’ve adopted another, simpler word to describe their properties: space.

Notice there’s no hard altitudes associated with the descriptions above. That’s because the earth’s atmosphere expands and contracts with heat and cold. The altitude of each layer changes constantly, as a function of temperature, season, and geography, by a 100 percent or more in some cases. Over the equator, the troposphere extends upward for 12 miles, but above the poles it is only 5 miles thick.

Suborbital spacecraft can take direct readings and collect samples that provide the precise mixture of gases and pressure, including the amounts of industrial pollutants like greenhouse gases or ozone destroying chlorofluorocarbons. Scientists collect a lot of similar data from satellites flying much higher and aircraft flying much lower, but samples from the intermediate alititudes are hard to come by. Just as data collected by hurricane hunter aircraft provide specific and at times critical details about storm intensity and storm surge unavailable to weather satellites, data and samples taken from the upper atmosphere give meteorologists and climate scientists a far better, more detailed understanding of what’s going on in real time. The Mesosphere in particular remains one of the least understood layers of the atmosphere, too high for most aircraft to penetrate and too low for a spacecraft to maintain orbit.

Spacecraft engineering is another area that can benefit from suborbital flight. Here on earth we take gravity, engineers are no exception. That office water cooler depends on gravity to feed water through the valve and into a cup. Fuel tanks in every car and on most airplanes rely to some degree on gravity to help prime the pumps and deliver fuel to the engine. But a tank full of water or fuel in microgravity behaves differently. Unless the tanks, valves and pumps are specially designed to operate in zero G, water or other substances like fuel might glob up, slosh around inside the tank, without making reliable contact with inlets. Pumps in particular have a well known tendency to choke and sputter when they’re forced to try and move both liquid and air. And in space, where replacement and repair are hundreds of vertical miles and millions of dollars away, something as simple as a failed pump can mean a lot more than mere inconvenience, it can mean the difference between life and death.

Likewise, experiments designed to operate in zero G benefit from live tests. Research on materials and processes in microgravity have already resulted in breakthroughs in drug production, silicon wafer fabrication, and molecular biology. There may come a time when automated orbiting mini-factories grow flawless microchips of such quality, or produce pharmaceutical isomers of such purity, that our current earthbound efforts are crude by comparison. Just like pumps and valves, testing these experimental packages before spending millions of dollars to send them to space might save a ton of money for manufacturers.

One fascinating spin-off from commercial suborbital flight could change passenger travel in the same way airlines revolutionized transatlantic travel. Suborbital airlines — or perhaps space lines would be more accurate. Today a flight from New York City to Tokyo takes about 14 hours. And that’s for a non stop flight. A suborbital hop between the two cities might take less than an hour. A passenger could travel from Chicago to London for a lunch meeting and be back in time for dinner with the family.

The cost for a quick trip into space, high enough to earn astronuat wings, usually defined as 100 km (65 miles) above sea level, is expected to run between $100,000 to $200,000. Prohibitive to be sure, but near the range of the middle class. And the cost will drop as more tickets are sold. Wanna take a ride? Space Adventures, Virgin Galactic, and XCOR would all love to talk to you.  

 

I remember it like it was yesterday: speeding through the empty north Texas prairie en route to a holiday rendezvous, Dec 25th, 1968 at 2 AM. I was lying above and behind the back seat, my seven-year old body easily stretched out on the old fashioned rear console, staring up through the slanted glass of a Ford sedan at a crystal clear nightscape. The winter stars were poured thick that night, spilling across the sky like powdered sugar. In a moment of pure synchronicity the radio replayed a newly arrived, static filled season’s greeting carried a quarter million miles on the gossamer wings of invisible light:

We are now approaching lunar sunrise and, for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you. … In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth …

My wonder aroused, the rest of the family dozing, I listened intently to mankind’s first message from another world, and asked my father about those brilliant stars burning cold in the night. He began to explain to me quietly, patiently, using analogies of distance a child could grasp. Something clawed up from the subconscious, an extraordinary stew of agoraphobia and wonder gripped me. And I fell into the sky.

In a jolt of acceleration it was as though I were flung out of the car and thrown head over heels off into the endless heavens, a mote of consciousness lost in immensity. It was terrifying, turning to exhilarating; then it was glorious. Who knows what cocktail of neurotransmitters was unleashed in my virgin brain that night. But one dose was all it took. I was mainlining cosmic eternity, and like a latent alcoholic feeling that first warm rush of bourbon, after my transcendental ride ended all I could think was I want some more.

The Apollo 8 reading of Genesis from the moon was the most watched and listened to broadcast in the world up to that time. People of every age and background were profoundly moved that night by the same transmission. It would later win an Emmy, the highest award given by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Millions more the world over were affected in the same way in the years before and in the years after by the drama of human spaceflight. In the late 1950s, legions of excited onlookers flocked to dark pastures and barren desert to catch a fleeting glimpse of Sputnik and other early satellites racing among the stars. Russian school children still learn songs praising Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space. Millions of Americans proudly watched John Glenn lift off in a tiny capsule called Friendship 7 and listened in as he circled the world. Millions of ordinary people joined me in spirit in 1968 when Apollo 8 sent us a cosmic season’s greetings from the back side of the moon.

It is said that during Apollo 11, a billion people listened to radios or watched TV to share in the culmination of one of mankind’s greatest dreams. For a brief moment, the political turmoil and bitter debate dividing Americans from one another and the chilling prospect of cold war melted away, leaving us united not just as a nation, but as a world and a species. Even the failures generated intense interest: the world watched, holding its breath, as NASA battled to bring a severely wounded Apollo 13 and crew back to earth safely.

The effect on those of old enough to remember the triumphs of Apollo were profound. To this day many in my generation think of ourselves as space-race kids. The Children of Apollo. There are a lot of us. The interest in natural science spurred in children by the space-race is matched only by their fascination for dinosaurs. Our celestial inheritance included the belief that with hard work and brainpower, we could do anything. It wasn’t a cliché for us, repeated by teachers and parents hoping to see their children excel. It was innate, imprinted for life.

As impressive as all that is, many following the space program as youngsters in the 60s and 70s confidently assumed vacations on rotating space stations by the year 2000, a base on the moon, and great ships plying the interplanetary space lanes between earth and Mars. Wonder junkies and space race kids even have a cynical catch phrase for our disillusionment: dude, where’s my flying car? And yet so far, only a few hundred of earth’s billions have gone to space. Only 24 lucky people have ventured beyond low earth orbit and no one has crossed that boundary or visited the moon since 1972.

That’s all about to change in the decades ahead. There is a new wind blowing, part technological, part ideology. It is driven by Silicon Valley pioneers who have amassed great fortunes, fueled in part by the innovative spin offs of NASA come full circle, and the great wonder inspired by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong’s one small step. These men and women are not content to wait on short-sight politicians fighting over the bones of NASA. They are not just obsessed with building the rockets and spacecraft that will guide us through our next small step. Readers of this blog will soon meet some of the visionaries determined to actually make that leap.

The effort to expand into the solar system until it becomes economically and culturally irreversible is known simply as Newspace.

A fitting obscure video for an old school Central Texas politician, Project Terror was the intro for an old horror movie program run out of San Antonio in the early 1970s. It was camp, black and white mostly, rubber masked monsters and terrible special effects. That clip takes me back four decades, and for some bizarre reason reminds me of Texas Governor and soon to be Presidential candidate Rick Perry:

Conservatives who make up the core of the GOP primary base view Romney skeptically on cultural issues, and he hasn’t been able to establish himself as the heavy favorite for the nomination even though he’s spent months promoting his background as a businessman and claiming that he alone has the know-how to create jobs to pull the country out of a period of high unemployment, rampant foreclosures and tumultuous financial markets.

This is good news for two reasons. One, Perry is no slouch, don’t under estimate him, he could win. But Romney has a better chance of picking off Obama in the general. Two, Perry will be an endless source of hilarity. This is a guy who worked for Al Gore at one time, flipped to conservative when the political winds changed, and recently expressed his profound, patriotic love for America by threatening to secede and start a second Civil War. It will be a hoot!