Category: Space and flight

Posts about flying in atmospheres, or outside of them

Proud Prophet and how nuclear wars end

The National War College is located inside the National Defense University, which is located just across the river from the Pentagon. Each day, to play the [1983 Proud Prophet war] game, the secretary of defense would pick up a red phone and call the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss various ideas in the different nuclear war scenarios put forth by [Thomas] Schelling. Schemes included everything from tactical nuclear strikes in a so-called limited nuclear war, to massive decapitation-event scenarios. There were exercises with NATO and without NATO nuclear forces getting involved. There were scenarios where the U.S. launched nuclear war preemptively, beginning with everyone at the Pentagon in a state of focused calm. There were exercises where nuclear war was launched in crisis mode. In full-on panic mode. With and without China entering the conflict. With and without the UK involved.

Paul Bracken, a professor of political science at Yale, was one of the civilian individuals invited to participate in playing the classified nuclear war game. The results were horrifying, Bracken says. Over the course of two weeks, in every simulated scenario—and despite whatever particularly triggering event started the war game—nuclear war always ended the same way. With the same outcome. There is no way to win a nuclear war once it starts. There is no such thing as de-escalation.

According to Proud Prophet, regardless of how nuclear war begins, it ends with complete Armageddon-like destruction. With the U.S., Russia, and Europe totally destroyed. With the entire Northern Hemisphere uninhabitable from fallout. With the death of, at minimum, a half billion people in the war’s opening salvo alone. Followed by the starvation and death of almost everyone who initially survived.

Jacobson, Annie. Nuclear War: A Scenario. Penguin, 2024. p. 174

America is demolishing its brain

From NASA to the National Science Foundation to the Centres for Disease Control to the educational system, the United States under the Trump administration is deconstructing its own ability to think and to comprehend the complex global situation. A whole fleet of spacecraft — each unique in human history — risks being scrapped because the country is ruled by an anti-science ideology. They are coming with particular venom for spacecraft intended to help us understand the Earth’s climate and how we are disrupting it. Across every domain of human life which science and medicine have improved, we are in the process of being pulled backwards by those who reject learning from the truth the universe reveals to us, in preference to ‘truths’ from religious texts which were assembled with little factual understanding in order to reassert and justify the prejudices of their creators.

The anti-science agenda will have a baleful influence on the young and America’s position in the world. In any country, you are liable to see nerds embracing the NASA logo and pictures of iconic spacecraft — a form of cultural cachet which serves America well in being perceived as a global leader. Now, when an American rover has intriguing signs of possible fossil life on Mars, there is little prospect that the follow-on sample return mission will be funded. Perhaps the near-term prospect of a Chinese human presence on the moon will bend the curve of political thought back toward funding space, though perhaps things will have further decayed by then.

The young are being doled out a double-dose of pain. As Christian nationalism and far-right ideology erode the value of the educational system (transitioning toward a Chinese-style system of memorizing the government’s official lies and doctrine rather than seeking truth through skeptical inquiry), young people become less able to cope in a future where a high degree of technical and scientific knowledge is necessary to comprehend and thrive in the world. Meanwhile, ideologues are ravaging the medical system and, of course, there is a tremendous intergenerational conflict brewing between the still-young and the soon-to-be-retired (if retirement continues to be a thing for any significant fraction of the population). Whereas we recently hoped for ever-improving health outcomes for everyone as technology advances, now there is a spectre of near-eradicated diseases re-emerging, in alliance with the antibiotic-resistant bacteria which we have so foolishly cultivated.

What’s happening is madness — another of the spasmodic reactionary responses to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution which have been echoing for centuries. Unfortunately, it is taking place against the backdrop in which humanity is collectively choosing between learning to function as a planetary species and experiencing the catastrophe of civilizational collapse. Nuclear weapons have never posed a greater danger, and it exists alongside new risks from AI and biotechnology, and in a setting where the climate change which we have already locked in will continue to strain every societal system.

Perhaps I have watched too much Aaron Sorkin, but when I was watching the live coverage of the January 6th U.S. Capital take-over, I expected that once security forces had restored order politicians from both sides would condemn the political violence and wake up to the dangerousness of the far-right populist movement. When they instead jumped right back to partisan mudslinging, I concluded that the forces pulling the United States apart are stronger than those holding it together. There is a kind of implicit assumption about the science and tech world, that it will continue independently and separately regardless of the silliness that politicians are getting up to. This misses several things, including how America’s scientific strength is very much a government-created and government-funded phenomenon, going back to the second world war and beyond. It also misses the pan-societal ambition of the anti-science forces; they don’t want a science-free nook to sit in and read the bible, but rather to impose a theocratic society on everyone. That is the prospect now facing us, and the evidence so far is that the forces in favour of truth, intelligence, and tolerance are not triumphing.

Canada and the ‘Golden Dome’

Canada’s connection to US ballistic missile defence efforts goes back a long way and is interwoven with our shared history of continental air defence.

Now, Trump is proposing a ‘Golden Dome’ to supposedly make America safer from foreign threats, and Canada is part of the discussions.

Recently, the American Physical Society released a detailed free report: “Strategic Ballistic Missile Defense: Challenges to Defending the U.S.”

The basic weaknesses of the whole concept are simple to understand: it takes drastically more expense and hardware to (possibly) stop one missile than it does for a challenger to build one more missile. As a result, the technology is inherently likely to fuel arms races, as foreign challengers fear their deterrents will lose credibility.

Related:

See also my 2005 report: “Common Threats, Joint Responses: The Report of the 2005 North American Security Cooperation Assessment Student Tour“

Worms or moles

It is not hyperbole to make the statement [that] if humans ever reside on the Moon, they will have to live like ants, earthworms or moles. The same is true for all round celestial bodies without a significant atmosphere or magnetic field—Mars included. —Dr. James Logan, Former NASA Chief of Flight Medicine and Chief of Medical Operations at Johnson Space Center.

Weinersmith, Kelly and Zach. A City on Mars: Can we Settle Space, Should we Settle Space, and have we Really Thought this Through? Penguin Random House, 2023. p. 192 ([that] in Weinersmith and Weinersmith)

Mars as a refuge for humanity?

Consider the 2015 Newsweek article: “Star Wars’ Class Wars: Is Mars the Escape Hatch for the 1 Percent?” which claims “the red planet will likely only be for the rich, leaving the poor to suffer as earth’s environment collapses and conflict breaks out.” The only way you could believe this would be if you had no idea how thoroughly, incredibly, impossibly horrible Mars is. The average surface temperature is about -60°C. There’s no breathable air, but there are planetwide dust storms and a layer of toxic dust on the ground. Leaving a 2°C warmer Earth for Mars would be like leaving a messy room so you can live in a toxic waste dump.

The truth is that settling other worlds, in the sense of creating self-sustaining societies somewhere away from Earth, is not only quite unlikely anytime soon, it won’t deliver on the benefits touted by advocates. No vast riches, no new independent nations, no second home for humanity, not even a safety bunker for ultra elites.

…

Mars is nowhere near being a Plan B home for humanity anytime soon. Consider a worst-case climate scenario. The oceans have swollen ten meters higher, drowning New York City and Boston. Low-lying countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have been swallowed up whole. Heat waves make parts of the Southern Hemisphere uninhabitable as the planet is ravaged by floods, droughts, wildfires, and massive tropical cyclones. More than half of the world’s species die, coral reefs become bleached skeletons, freshwater sources from snowpack melt away or are fouled by rising seas, tropical diseases make their way into formerly temperate climates. Crops fail, people starve, and violence breaks out as over a billion climate refugees beat against the closed gates of the comparatively livable North.

That planet? Eden compared to Mars or the Moon. That Earth still has a breathable atmosphere, a magnetosphere to protect against radiation, and quite possibly still has McDonald’s breakfast. It’s not a world we would like to inhabit, but it is the one world in the solar system where you can run around naked for ten minutes and still be alive at the end.

Weinersmith, Kelly and Zach. A City on Mars: Can we Settle Space, Should we Settle Space, and have we Really Thought this Through? Penguin Random House, 2023. p. 2, 137-8

Related:

The nuclear razor’s edge

I listened to the audiobook of Annie Jacobson’s Nuclear War. Having followed the subject and read a lot about it over the years, it nonetheless had a lot of new information inside of a compellingly presented, plausible, and chlling story.

Our whole world can end in a couple of hours; live life accordingly.

A broad-ranging talk with James Burke

As part of promoting a new Connections series on Curiosity Stream launching on Nov. 9, I got the chance to interview historian of science and technology, science communicator, and series host James Burke:

The more interview-intensive part begins at 3:10.

Satellite to satellite espionage and warfare

One inescapable but confounding element of trying to understand politics, international relations, and history up to the present day is that we don’t have access to what governments are doing in secret. We will need to re-write the history of these times decades from now, if circumstances and freedom of information laws permit historians to learn about the skullduggery of this era.

One potentially important example is happening now in space. Satellites have become crucial to everything from time synchronization for high precision activities to navigation and communication. They also can’t really be hidden. Perhaps there are satellites with optical stealth that are hardly or never visible, but even top secret spy satellites of the conventional design can have their orbits determined by civilians with stopwatches and binoculars.

That is why we know that Russia, among others, has been experimenting with satellites that approach others and can potentially disrupt or destroy them, or monitor their activity. An article on China’s program includes the intriguing phrasing: “non-cooperative robotic rendezvous” between spacecraft. Russia’s Cosmos 2542 is known to have approached USA 245: an American spy satellite believed to be one of the largest things in space.

One can only speculate on how such capabilities are influencing world politics and the unfolding of events.