Space Junk to Resource

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I saw this picture elsewhere and lost it, its cool and a bit worrying, thought of course the scale is so out of kilter it’s almost sublime, but if you figure this only the big stuff and that it’s all in motion all the time and new stuff is going up there, then the worry is not so out-of-place.

The real cloud up there
Junk, very expensive Junk, maybe reusable Junk
All sorts of solutions for removing this stuff has been proposed, from robo tugs to catchers mitts, and evaporating them with lasers.  That last has been under study since the 1990’s and you don’t have to blow them to ‘microns’ you just have to slow them down enough so they did into the outer atmosphere and come crashing to the ground.
 
Basic equeipment and geometry to deorbit debris

A very high tech broom (click through to Wired article)

And in the end I think the laser broom will be used, to deorbit bolts, dropped tools, smashed up debris etc, not worth recovering.

 
But a lot, even most of the material up there probably can be reused.  If we could cheaply catch the small stuff, maybe my using the Laser Broom to guide it into a catch basket, there is plenty of solar power and vacuüm to smelt the metals and create new things. 
 
Using spare material, sunlight, natural vacuüm and microgravity environment it seems reasonable that we could design and build a large-scale Additive Fabrication Machine in orbit that could build space craft parts from scrap.  In the long run we then start getting the materials from asteroids or the moon and off we go into the solar system.
 

NaNoWriMo Day 12 Update

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So I spent most of the day on this and only got 2,628 words written.  Yesterday I spent less time overall and put out a lot more words.  As per typical there is more than one reason, and writers block per se  was not one of them.  Mainly it was because I spent a lot of today doodling on my iPad creating a ‘professional quality’ (per Smash Words Style Guide) cover for Elgin. I love doodling on graphical projects, and especially on the iPad.  I started out trying to do a typical (atypical) swords and sorcery type cover with Elgin the Iffrit and Elgin the Cowboy etc, and this was stupid, I’m not an artist.  Then I started playing around with scenery and graphics do-dads and came up the the pretty cool cover you’ll all be seeing soon. 
While I was doing that I was pondering shifting the ‘publishing’ of the ongoing work the Smashwords, who have kindly made Meatgrinder and their site available to NaNoWriMo works.  Trying to do it on the web page is a bit of a pain since there is something hinky with the import of large blocks of word text into WP, almost undoubtedly me not the site but not something I’m going to bother fighting right now. 
Then of course was the fact that I was mucking around in my mind with the usual….you’re getting too long, too wordy, too discursive.  But then I went back and as of this time I really don’t know that I am.  Oh I can see sections an editor would say cut out, and they’d be right technically, but I have to wonder if the shibboleths of the day of physical type setting, or even physical paper and binding, should come across full force into eBooks, I like books that flesh out the character, that spend some time explaining things, describing things.  As long as they’re not boring.
 
Status from NaNoWriMo
Words Written Today  2,628
Total Words Written  34,332  Current Day  12
Average Per Day   2,861
Words Remaining  15,668  Days Remaining  19
At This Rate You Will Finish On November 17, 2011
Words Per Day To Finish On Time  82

Target Word Count  50,000  Target Average Words Per Day 1,667

 
 

NaNoWriMo Day 11 Status

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From NaNoWriMo Calculator
Words Written Today  6,367
Total Words Written  31,704 Current Day  11

Your Average Per Day  2,882

Words Remaining  18,296  Days Remaining  20
At This Rate You Will Finish On  November 17, 2011

Target Word Count  50,000

Target Average Words Per Day  1,667
Words Per Day To Finish On Time  915

Regression as a good thing!

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This article seems to have very exciting implications. Cellular regression in diseased heart tissue with the help of oncostatin M: Credit: MPI for Heart and Lung Research-press. They have found a channel where heart muscles can be regressed to stem cells (dedifferentiate?) which then can multiply and re-differentiate into healthy heart muscle tissue. This has huge implications not only for heart attack victims but many other diseases and treatments. As Glenn Reynolds would say “Faster Please.”

The Coming ~ Revolution ~ Singularity ~ Multipolar World ~ Collapse of the Social Democratic Model ~ Christmas Season

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The world is always changing, it has always been changing and the arrow of time is always in one direction.  In this post I said that now is a phonograph needle reading out the wobbles in the world created by all our yesterdays. 

There is no going back 7Billion humans now and we will peak at something like twice that possibly in my life-time. And its possible that average life span for many people today could be above a century (and an average life zooming towards that number.) 

I believe we are seeing the limits of organizational efficiencies of scale now.  That one of the reasons the US still works better than it appears to in the media is because we are  1 a republic, not direct democracy, and 2 the state and local gov’t which are still pretty accountable to the people, do a lot of the real heavy lifting.  The focus on our elected King is an aberration, as is the dependence we have developed on ‘congress’ being able to fix things, especially when we put fetters on the members in regards to the big things,  while giving them access to the candy shop in regards to the little crap that the rent seekers care about and are willing to pay to get their way.

We have failed to adequately adjust our assumptions and wants to the world of 2011, we are living as if it were in the late 20th century.  But while many of us live in the illusion of that world there are many living in other enclaves some of the future, some of different pasts.   But with the number of humans with all the knowledge of the world at their finger tips the world has to be on the cusp of change our various ‘tracks’ mixing to create a new locus for the always onward moving phonograph tip of now. 

 What will that world be like?

In thirty years we’ll be able to look back and say, ‘ah’ see, the future was already here in 2011, we could just have looked at ________________and seen the future!   

But filling in that blank is going to take surviving those thirty years.  And maybe that won’t be as easy as surviving the last 30 has been….

NaNoWriMo Day 10

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OK, OK I will post a couple of more chapters in the next day or so.
Anyway
From NaNoWriMo Status
Words Written Today 2,390
Total Words Written  25,337   Current Day 10
Your Average Per Day 2,533

Target Word Count  50,000   Target Average Words Per Day  1,667

Words Remaining 24,663  Days Remaining 21
At This Rate You Will Finish On  November 19, 2011
Words Per Day To Finish On Time  1,175

Complexity and Size…the silent killer of Progressive dreams

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I don’t want to crow that I have pondered these things for some time but I have recently seen a couple of posts on some sites where people are beginning to wonder about the problems of size and complexity and interconnectedness that are at least a chunk of the problems bringing the Euro down and that I also think had.   I think that its still a nascent thought but R. Fernandez had a pretty good post here that tied this together

I think some of this is in response to the Rauche Book Demosclerosis The Silent Killer of American Government, (which is mentioned in the Belmont Club piece) but I think that this is just one part of the overall puzzle.

demosclerosis…. which Jonathan Rauch defines as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt” as a side-effect of the postwar style of politics that emphasizes interest-group activism and redistributive programs.”   In Phillip Longman’s book review of Rauch’s  Demosclerosis: The Silent Killer of American Government. – “Rauch rightly asserts that the “American system of governance today is much less at the mercy of any narrow manipulative few than at any time in the past.” The era of back room bosses who called the shots in service of rich patrons is long gone. But that has hardly brought about a more effective, or even more equitable, government, Rauch observes, because it has been replaced by a coalition representing virtually everyone. “We have met the special interests and they are us,” Rauch writes. “Much as mutual funds have offered ordinary people the access to almost every type of productive investment, so interest groups have offered ordinary people access to almost every kind of redistributive investment.””

NaNoWriMo Status…day 8

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From the NaNoWriMo Site
Words Written Today  1,580
Total Words Written  18,864
Your Average Per Day  2,358
Words Remaining  31,136
Current Day  8  Days Remaining  23
At This Rate You Will Finish On November 21, 2011
Words Per Day To Finish On Time 1,354

Target Word Count  50,000 and Target Average Words Per Day  1,667

 

Space the lost frontier? Losing other things…

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There was a flurry of space interest coinsidering with the shutdown of the Shuttle and the announcement of the Senatorial Launch System, then some good traffic on visiting asteroids etc. Now it seems to have fallen of the face of the earth.  It’s this kind of thing that drives me nuts, we live in such a press release driven world that there tends to be these booms and busts of interest and its all about as artificial as much of the rest of the so-called news.  I know that I can in fact keep up on what’s going on via various web sites and blogs, but I find it disturbing that the there is no concerted effort to keep space front and center in the american people’s attention. 

And no I am not saying NASA should be flogging its programs, but the rest of the space world should be, not only US but the world, there is interesting stuff going on around the world, from the first Chinese docking, to the flyby of the big rock tomorrow etc, etc, that there is never a paucity of things that could be used to keep people’s interest tickled.

I am a bit afraid that the likely coming downturn (recrash…zombie cat bounce…) is going to crush eSpace, maybe not, most are probably fairly well isolated but maybe not if things really go bust.

On another topic…….

Talking about busts I have a feeling that the administration and others may have absolutely no idea the devastation they are looking at if the military downturn turns into a bust due to one force or another.  A huge amount of the US industrial base depends on defense spending for some of its more profitable work.  Maybe (hopefully) not its base, but the stuff that really makes the books sing every once in a while.  I know the vendors who do work for the company I work for, while they may curse us quite frequently, also love us for the ‘quality’ of the work with contract out as well.  Us and dozens of other defense related companies. 

Generally the economic multiplier effect of a defense dollar is over ten, in space or aviation it can be nearly twenty, things like green tech are probably decent but sub ten, automotive is in the same range, but get to more basic stuff and its a few turns at best.  And if you start subtracting a lot of those 10 to 20 X multiplied dollars and either don’t spend them or spend them on more basic products, you are going to see a much more massive downturn than expected.

Hopefully the grownups all realize this and are planning for it…….Oh, yeah, there are no grown ups….there is only us.          Maybe we’re in trouble.