Crowlspace

An article which seems to be the basis for the Discover piece’s discussion of the Rainbow Body…

The Rainbow Body

…with some extra anecdotes. Father Tiso mentions his own vision of Christ, which is fascinating, plus some bilocation stories of Christian Saints. Post-mortem visions of Saints is pretty big in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Both believe that Saints share in the Beatific Vision – basically God’s eye-view of Creation – thus they can hear our prayers and know what’s happening here on Earth.

Crass Physicist Question: Just how do they do so much in a timely way?

Answer: There’s another dimension of Time.

Seriously, there’s a very notable Physicist who has been in the news about his “Two Time” theory, which seeks to complete various physical symmetries by adding another time dimension – call it “Orthogonal Time”. To hear all our prayer requests at once – and how many are asking a Saint to talk to God at the same time? – all a Saint needs to do is “move” a bit into Orthogonal Time.

If you have Eternity to play with, what’s a bit more Time?

A lot of Christians, especially Sectarians, think all deceased persons are really dead until they’re physically Resurrected by JC – but what did JC say about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? That to God they were Alive! There’s a lot of sophistry brought to bare on this verse by Sectarians, but really they’re twisting JC’s words to deny the “literal meaning”. Other Protestants aren’t too sure what the post-life is really like – usually vague descriptions of Heaven or the New Jerusalem fill the void.

And me? More later…

A quick posting, plus some commentary later (I promise)…

Mirror World …Titan – a frozen Earth?

Soul Search …DIY uploading into your Rainbow Body.

Science and Islam in Conflict …when everything is Allah’s Will how can science claim consistency?

Circles of Life …how eccentric can an Earth get?

Hot Times on Titan …come 6 billion AD Titan will defrost to a toasty -73 C.

A link from the Soul Search piece is just an archive card at Australia’s ABC radio…

Father Francis Tiso …reconciling Christ and Buddha.

…which really interests me. I read about the Rainbow Body in John Robinson’s 1970 book on Christology (The Human Face of God) as a possible example of how Christ’s body was transformed. I’m sure fundamentalists might not like the idea of Buddhists resurrecting, but as Robinson (and many others) have pointed out Jesus was too big an event to be limited to just Christians. He made it possible for all people to resurrect into the New Life by defeating Death for all of us.

Early Buddhism agreed with Christianity that we’re all in thrall to the Power of Death – what Christians call ‘Satan’ and Buddha called ‘Mara’ – and outlined the way of approaching a true understanding of the escape route. I think the ‘Clear Light’ that Tibetan Buddhism aims for, and looks to for answers, is the same Light that the Gospel of John talks about which shines on all of us – and we reject it because of the consciousness of our sin that it causes. As The Epistle of James tells us, God shines his light on all with no partiality, but we’re led astray by our own desires. In the Tibetan Bardo Thodol the Light can only be entered by those prepared for it, freed from earthbound desires.

But what is freedom from desire all about? The Greeks called it Apatheia – freedom from passions – and it was considered it an attribute of the gods. I think it’s kind of hard to put into words, but it doesn’t mean we “feel nothing”. Instead we rule our feelings and aren’t ruled by them – and we rule them by recognising their causes, their progression and their dissipation. Mindfulness. In Christian terms, the Fruit of the Spirit – Love. More on that later.

The International Space Development Conference 2007 was held over the weekend of May 25-28 and was chock-full of ideas. One especially caught my attention because its developer, Paul Roseman, is a Sci-Fi fan like me who dreamt of working in space, and actually has a plan to bring that future about. Paul has graciously allowed me to reproduce his paper here on Crowlspace, and I would like to discuss it in some detail.

Here’s the abstract, to tease you into reading the whole speech,…

It may be possible, now, to build a 5 gigawatt space solar power system for about 10 years revenues at $0.10 per kilowatt hour. This can be done by utilizing an as yet unused materials stream available in low earth orbit (LEO). This method is required to lower the costs of this project due to the massive amount of material to be launched into orbit. The materials stream is used to create both the structure/frame of the solar collecting and microwave transmitter beaming satellite in geosynchronous orbit (GEO), and the shell of the habit/remanufacturing facility in LEO.

That materials stream is spent boosters. For many launches with strap on boosters, like the Space Shuttle or the Ariane V, these main boosters can be launched into LEO at some or little payload weight penalty. For the Shuttle, next to none; for the Ariane V, about half of the payload. In LEO, these boosters can be melted down and remanufactured into structural parts for the solar cells and microwave transmitter elements, manufactured on earth.

These boosters can also be captured and used to create the shell of the variable gravity, closed ecology, remanufacturing facility in LEO. Earth standard manufacturing hardware will be launched to space in containers which will be stuffed inside the booster shells. These booster shells will be connected and rotated with ion engines to induce an artificial martian gravity at the ends, with variable gravity down the spine. The solar power panels will be manufactured inside the structure and assembled on its frame, then connected to unmanned transport and taken to GEO, where they will be joined with the satellite to increase the power sent to earth. The closed ecology of the remanufacturing facility will save significant money by lessening resupply at $5,000 per pound.

The revenues of the project are $40 billion, determined by 10 years of 5 gigawatts of power delivered at $0.10 per kilowatt hour for 8000 hours per year. The costs are primarily determined by the standard launch costs of $5,000 per pound to LEO. They are estimated at $35 billion. Of that, current solar cell costs for 5 gigawatts are $5 billion for the cells and $22.5 billion to launch them to LEO. Ion engines and fuel are used to get the finished modular pieces of the solar power satellite to GEO, so that the costs are also quite reduced.

Optimistic? Of course, but nothing is ever done without taking a risk.

First point of my discussion is the question: How much can launch costs be improved in the short term?

Paul cuts costs by haulling the finished components of the SPS to GEO with solar-powered ion-drives – plus he uses the upper stages of the boosters for structural materials. He bases his cost estimates on the current rates of placing payloads to LEO – between $10,000-$5,000/lb ($22,000-$11,000/kg) – but there is a cheaper option that may be available soon. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is offering haulage to LEO via its Falcon 9 Heavy for a $90 million launch fee. Maximum payload is estimated to be ~ 27,500 kg, thus the per kg cost is $3,300/kg. Musk promises a “modest” discount for long term contracts, so let’s call it $3,000/kg.

Roseman cuts mass-to-orbit cost by using the lower stages of the launchers. On the SpaceX site there’s a technical description of the launcher available and I’m working on just how much a Falcon 9 could push into orbit. So watch this space…

Fomalhaut (Whale Mouth, in Arabic) was a favourite location for many of Philip K. Dick’s stories – either as a place for aliens to have come from, or for people to eke out a lonesome existence. Now it probably has a planet, as well as a ring of dust…

Planet Warps a Ring

…though whether it’s home to aliens is another question. Perhaps it is just a relay point, as the star and its system seem to be very young.

This is cool… in a kind of grim way. Dante’s “Inferno” is a journey through the Circles of Hell – well worth a read for anyone wanting to know how people thought in the 14 th Century. Dante puts more than a few Popes in Hell for abuse of their office, which was a pretty gutsy thing to do especially when one of them was still alive.

Dante’s Inferno

The entry way into Hell has a chilling “Sign”:

Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here

Once again Spectrolab is busting records. Physorg reports a new multi-junction cell that converts light to electricity at 40.7% efficiency. The theoretical limit for the design is 58% so they’re getting closer, and are optimistic of 45-50% in the near term. What would a 50% efficient cell mean?

Take Geoffrey Landis’s SPS design which uses L’Garde inflatables for structure and concentrators. It massed 800 tons of concentrators/PVs/heat sinks and 500 tons of structure for 3 GW in-space power and 1-2 GW delivered to the ground, depending on antenna technology. Thus a 300 MW in-space power source for a Mag-Beam pushing 10 ton payloads to Mars would mass 130 tons with his assumed 35% efficient PVs, but would mass just 91 tons with 50% efficient cells. A whole Mag-Beam system massing about 130 tons could be launched by a single near-term HLLV.

Launch a few more and you’d very quickly have 1 GW SPS launched massing just 910 tons. At $3,000/kg (think SpaceX) that’d launch for just $2.73 Billion. If you sell power for $50 /MW.hr then a 1 GW SPS brings in about $400 Million a year so it would repay the launching bill pretty quickly – if it takes 10 years to pay for and lasts 30 years, then we’re talking serious money.

The International Space Development Conference had an interesting abstract available online, but the site is currently being redone. In sum the author suggested using current commercial throwaway launchers, but lifting a bit less than their maximum payloads to put both the upper stage and the payload into orbit. Then both payload and booster could be use for constructing an SPS – he estimated abou 4,000-5,000 tons for a 5 GW SPS and a total cost of $22.5 Billion. Power would be sold at $100/MWhr.

About 12,900 years ago an asteroid or comet – the distinction is a bit blurry – fragmented above North America and effectively fire-bombed the entire Eastern side of the continent, wiping out the large mammals and the Clovis people with both the direct blast, the fire-storm and the Younger Dryas cold spell which refroze the Northern Hemisphere just as it was leaving the last Ice Age’s glacial advance. This is the latest claim advanced by a team of geoscientists at a recent geophysics meeting. The various news outlets have reported on the meeting, probably leaving a few of their fellow scientists a bit envious of the publicity – sufficient motivation to do some research of their own… that’s science!

Here’s the BBC story… Ice Age Blast

The BBC also has some good background pieces…

Megafuna Extinction …dozens of large mammals went extinct roughly at the same time as the blast took place. Some might’ve died soon after, some lingered through the Younger Dryas freeze.

Solutreans in America …the Solutrean people were Stone Age Europeans who lived towards the end of the last big Ice Age (glacial advance.) Their technology, and possible genetic traces, have links with the Clovis culture that was destroyed by the comet/asteroid blast.

Clovis First? … background on the debate over who settled the Americas first. The picture has been blurred by a lot of finds earlier than Clovis remains.

Science News has a more scholarly news report… Ice Age Ended Smashingly? … but they archive quickly, so the link might drop dead.

And, of course, MSNBC… Comet Chilled and Killed Ice Age Beasts …which gives a nice summary.

Also the American Geophysical Union has abstracts from the meeting available online – just do a search under “Younger Dryas” and most of the abstracts will be about the putative impact event.

Andrew Collins is an independent researcher with an astounding grasp of the Late Pleistocene and Neolithic (see his “From the Ashes of Angels”), and some intriguing theories and evidence for Plato’s teasingly half-true story of “Atlantis”. Collins believes that the story derives from tales brought back by the Phoenicians, who had made contact with the natives of the present day islands of the Americas. The natives had retained memories of a terminal Ice Age catastrophe which had preceded the flooding of their primeval lands – just as the new research has revealed.

Here’s Andrew’s discussion of the new findings… Comet Firestorm

And, of course, my erstwhile friend and guru of the Interstellar, Paul Gilster, reports on the Impact at his blog, Centauri Dreams …which also has a few thoughts from yours truly.

As a Space Enthusiast who grew up reading pop-sci books for kids with an optimistic take on the world I grew up thinking that by the year 2000 there would a lot of space activity in LEO, GEO and even the Moon. A Mars mission might’ve returned, or be not far from launching.

In reality I was born in the year 1970 – the year of Apollo XIII and the near cancellation of the US manned space-program. Nixon almost killed off everything after Skylab, but he bought into the Shuttle spin at the last minute, committing the USA to a space vehicle program that had no mission. It’s a little known fact that a large 12-person Space Station was due for launch in c.1975, to be tended by the Shuttle, to be followed by a 50-person Space Base by 1980, which would be expanded to 100-persons by 1990. When the Station program was cancelled it effectively removed the main justification for the Shuttle, but by then the bureaucratic machine was in “Program Mode” and inexorably moving forward.

Now, some 37 years after that decision, we have a Future that no one expected.

as it is the business of the future to surprise us, it seems unwise to rule out such scenarios – Paul Gilster