Wednesday 16th of February 2005

Kyoto protocol: today

I’m watching euronews on the tube box and I was remembered that the Kyoto protocol comes in force today, as of roughtly 5 hours. Interestingly, of the 141 countries that have ratified the treaty and will have to lower their green gas emissions, the United States of America, the country with the largests emissions of planet Earth, is not one. In Bush’s words:

The world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases is China. Yet, China was entirely exempted from the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol. This is a challenge that requires a 100 percent effort; ours, and the rest of the world’s. America’s unwillingness to embrace a flawed treaty should not be read by our friends and allies as any abdication of responsibility. To the contrary, my administration is committed to a leadership role on the issue of climate change. Our approach must be consistent with the long-term goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

Even more interestingly, China emits 2,893 million metric tons of CO₂ per year (2.3 tons per capita) compared to 5,410 million from the USA (20.1 tons per capita), and 3,171 million from the EU (8.5 tons per capita). And while they are exempted initially, they will have to start meeting the goals entering the next decade. The USA now has the economic up-hand againts contries that did ratify the treaty and now have to find other ways to get electricity other than a cheap but very dirty coal plant.

And not to bash on the USA alone, Australia did not ratify the treaty either. Hum.

Saturday 15th of January 2005

I feel a great disturbance in the force..

As if millions of teenage girls cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. At least now millions of users might actually have something to write about when the servers are back up. “Today I went outside. My pupils have never been tinier”.

Ok, heh :p sorry for the generalization, couldn’t stop myself. Let’s go back to regular stuff. First, here’s some pictures of fish that have been driven up to the shore by the tsunamis, seems mostly they are those that live in the bottom of the ocean, where sun light does not reach them. I see what looks like some Angler fish in there.. mwahaha! -”Rape” is the Angler fish’s name in Spanish.

Shiny things. The Japanese have a great way of finding excellent and thoughtful names for their toys. Take an exclamation, add the word “Super”, and append the product function; you then get the Oh! Super Toaster! -a 1.1 million ¥ toaster (~$10000) that not only can slice whole loaves of bread but also can toasts them with an infrared beam. Intelli-toast, step aside.

On to more important things, a salute goes to the Huygens Probe, which touched down yesterday on the surface of Titan and the people at ESA have been busy churning out pictures. Here’s some of the first, and even more that were released today. I’m happy.

I’ve got nothing else, so I’ll just leave you with the furminator while I go do something productive.

Tuesday 4th of January 2005

Biospheres, et al

Writing about the EcoSphere and the SpaceShipTwo, et cetera the other day threw me off in a tangent. I believe the next pressing challenge in manned space exploration is human life support. How do you sustain Humans on both long space voyages and permanent colonies far away from Earth? -the former could have solutions such as achieving a state of lethargy or just getting to the place in question fast enough that sustenance for long periods of time is no longer a problem. But the latter I believe has only one concrete solution (as I don’t think constantly sending supply ships is a good solution) -recreating Earth’s biosphere.

Only small amounts of matter enter the Earth’s system in the form of meteorites and possibly water ice. Then there’s only a few hydrogen and maybe other molecules (and today, spacecraft) that may reach escape velocity and leave Earth forever. Aside from that, Earth is a system that is closed to matter, but quite open to energy -mostly from the Sun. It gives the necessary fuel for Earth’s many systems and processes in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere (lovely photosynthesis) and even lithosphere. Eventually, most of this energy degrades to heat, which is emitted back into space as thermal radiation. Some of the Sun’s energy may be tied up for geologic intervals as chemical bond energy in such fossils as coal, oil and natural gas.

Being able to recreate Earth’s biosphere would give us the wonderful benefits of waste recycling, possibly by using green plants (i.e. algae or higher plants) to remove carbon dioxide to produce oxygen and even food for our long journeys, just as on lovely Earth. Transpired water vapor could be condensed and reused, and wastes from the crew would at least be partially recycled to the plants, the ecosystem’s primary producers.

There have been many attempts to construct small, closed ecosystems with light always being the key. For example, Clare Folsome sealed small aquatic ecosystems consisting of algae, brine shrimp, and other organisms (Basically the EcoSphere previously mentioned) in glass flasks. Although the flasks were prepared in the 1950s, some of them still retain fuctioning mini-communities.

Biosphere 2, at a cost of over 150 million dollars and covering 1.2 hectares of desert in Oracle, Arizona, stands in flagrant contrast to those relatively simple systems; including different types of “biomes”: ocean, freshwater and saltwater marshes, tropical rain forest, savanna, desert, intensive agriculture, and human habitat -in an attempt to mimic those of Earth. It didn’t work -oxygen and carbon dioxide levels fell, social problems arised, disaster ensued. Nowadays you can go visit it, piss around it and stuff.

As an interesting side-thingy; some economist used the cost per resident of the Biosphere 2 to calculate the monetary value of Earth’s biosphere.

Given that it does at least as good a job at sustaining humans as Biosphere 2, it should be worth at least as much per resident. This leads to a rather large, but finite, price of Earth itself.

So, Earth is worth at least ($240 M / 8 people) X 6.5 Billion people on Earth = 195 million billions of dollars.

Going back, I think such an attempt to mimic every single process on the Earth biosphere is flawed for our space explorations purposes. You only need to do the minumun necessary to make it work, no more, no less -just like politicians do; and it most assuredly works, because they keep on defecating on our faces and we keep on re-electing them.

Such were the ideals of the Bios-x projects of the Soviet Union. Bios-1, which, in 1965, reached 80%-85% closure with one Human in a 12 cubic meters area. Some suggested that traditional food plants, such as vegetables and wheat, be introduced into the system. To this end, in 1968 the Bios-1 sealed chamber was attached to a 2.5 x 2.0 x 1.7 meter chamber for higher plants and renamed it to Bios-2.

In 1972, Bios-3 was built in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia at a cost of approximately 1 million rubles (then, roughly equivalent to 1 million dollars), not counting the labor. It consisted of 315 cubic meters of space, sutiable for up to three Humans. They mainly used chlorella algae with artificial xenon lights to achieve a balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Water and nutrients were stored in advance and were recycled.

Bios-3 was used to conduct 10 manned closure experiments with one to three man crews. The longest experiment with a three man crew lasted 180 days (in 1972-1973). The total time of closure -that is, the time that one or more crew members have been sealed in one of the three facilities-exceeds one year.

I think small systems such as Bios-x are more productive for space exploration. It’s easier to stick them into a ship and it’s easier to build one on the surface of a planet (imagine giving a piggyback ride to 3000 species all the way to Mars, as Biosphere 2 proposed). Even so, Bios-3 only managed to achieve 90% closure -meaning, it will eventually fail, unlike mother Earth.

And we think we’re grand.

Monday 3rd of January 2005

Cassini, SpaceShipTwo and the great vacuum

The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft passed within 72,000 kilometers Iapetus; one of Saturn’s moons on December 31st 2004, taking some great images of it’s quite intriguing features along the way.

Another thing worth mentioning, the Cassini-Huygens mission is a joint NASA/ESA/ASI project, which makes me feel all warm and tingly inside.

On to SpaceShipTwo, some details about this new ship have trickled down on to the internet. Apparently the new ship, under the Virgin Galactic umbrella, will have five to eight passenger seats and boast “the same diameter crew cabin as a Gulfstream V business jet“, which happens to be around 1.9m by 2.2m. Can’t possibly go to space without proper leg room, can we?

Burt Rutan’s proposed SpaceShipTwo will also fly higher than SpaceShipOne, as much as “135-140 km” which will allow for an additional 90 seconds of microgravity compared to SpaceShipOne. They also want to add a roller coaster-type bar that you push forward and out of the way to float and around.

It seems they also understand that the idea of “fun” is different from person to person -while someone might want to just look out the window (for which they are adding appropiate handles to help you do so), others might want to partake in different types of business:

Does that mean that some guy and his girl might want to take the whole ship? OK!

That just sealed the deal for me, even if it lacks an in-flight open bar (a martini at zero g, anyone?). I definetly want in. Now, if they just accepted peanuts as payment.. ugh.

Sunday 2nd of January 2005

EcoSphere

You could say there’s no real use for this; and you would probably be right, but damn, I’d love to have one on my desk.

The Original EcoSphere® is the world’s first totally enclosed ecosystem - a complete, self-contained and self-sustaining miniature world encased in glass.

They have both sphere and pod shapes of them, and each have inside algae, shrimp and bacteria. Sunlight is the key. Algae use the light to create oxygen and food for the shrimp, these, after breathing and eating, leave organic waste and carbon dioxide behind; the organic waste get’s eaten by the bacteria for food, cleaning the sphere in the process and they also leave behind some carbon dioxide which in turn get’s used by the algae to produce more oxygen and food, ad infinitum.

You just have to take care of how much light you’re allowing to shine into your sphere in order to control the algae growth, which, if too much or too little, can tip the balance off and make the shrimp perish. The average life of a sphere is two to three years, with the larger units lasting longer.

This reminds me of how much i want an aquarium.

Wednesday 29th of December 2004

Poking Darwin just a bit

Yesterday, while talking to Kathy about some $problem she had, she said something along the lines of “there’s three guys here and none know how to fix $problem“; I then said “and those are going to pass on their genes.. don’t let them touch you!“. Anyway, that got me thinking.

It seems like we’re reaching the point where the enviroment is no longer having as much of say on what get’s selected and what doesn’t regarding our genetic makeup. A thousand years ago my blindness would probably cost me my life; yet today, I can just buy some glasses, contact lenses or get a laser surgery. There, I just cheated evolution.

I’d dare say we been quite successful at blatantly ignoring enviromental pressures on the “selection of the fittest” to the point of even imposing our very own. If my eyesight would have cost me my life, I wouldn’t get to sexor some lovely woman with the intents of procreating; yet I intend to do just that, at some point very, very much far away along the line. And when I do so, I will cheat evolution once again and pass on my crappy eye genes.

I guess other forms of selection are still in place, such as sexual selection (eeeww he’s ugly) or social selection (but he’s so boring!), and while the former does directly have to do with the physique of the person in question, hence their physical fitness, the latter does not. You could argue he’s boring because he’s less intelligent, and thus, less fit in another aspect; but it could just be she’s into Hello Kitty while he likes the Thundercats.

Another point is, if we have the ability to alter our deficiencies trought the wonders of medicine (laser surgery, et cetera) isn’t that, then, an expression of being the fittest? -then again, I need a doctor to perform the surgery on me, and he needs someone to make the laser for him, and yet someone else to make the gloves he uses, and so on; at that point it’s not survival of the fittest individual anymore, we’ve made into survival of the fittest species as a whole.

Also, is it really going to be me or the average person in the society we partake on, going to make an indent on evolution? -I don’t have birth rate figures at hand, but I do know that Italy has a higher mortality than natality rate. Yet way more impoverished countries have soaring natality rates, with families having eight and more children.

Maybe in the not so near future “normal” will stop existing and everyone will have something wrong with them; but we, the mighty ones, have changed the process of “survival of the fittest”, so, I’m sorry Darwin, but who cares? -bring on the viagra!