Catching Fog | R.P. Nettelhorst

Judas the Quisling

Posted on March 18, 2013 by R.P. Nettelhorst

In 1940, as the Germans invaded Norway, Vidkun Quisling, head of the Norwegian Fascist Party, announced a coup d’etat against his own Norwegian government. He subsequently collaborated with the Nazis and served as Minister President of Norway under the Nazi occupation from 1942 until the end of World War II in 1945. His name has become a synonym for “traitor” in English and several other European languages.

Now, imagine, that a short story written this year of 2013 surfaces claiming that Quisling is really a good guy, that he was actually working for the Allies, and that he’s been horribly misunderstood and slandered all these years. Would anyone pay any attention? Would anyone accept the rehabilitation of Quisling on the basis of a document written years after Quisling’s death, by someone who never knew Quisling and has no documentation or any other evidence to support a position that is at odds with all the other records of history?

Probably not.

And yet, each year around Easter the news media will trot out texts that have no connection to Jesus other than the fact that his name appears in them. For instance, not long ago the Gnostic Gospel of Judas received a lot of attention from magazines, websites, and newspapers. (And before that, it was The Gospel of Thomas, another Gnostic text.) But in reality, the Gospel of Judas has as much connection to the historical person of Judas as my proposed short story of 2013 has to Quisling–and yet people all over started wondering “maybe there’s something to it.”

Odd. Very odd. Maybe I could actually make a buck with a short story about Quisling, huh? Or maybe about Benedict Arnold?

Of course, the current nutjob President of Iran (along with the majority of the Moslem world) imagines that the Holocaust never happened. There are the willfully stupid who don’t think Al-Qaeda had anything to do with 911. There are people who believe the President of the United States was born in Kenya. There are the morons who don’t think anyone has been to the moon. And some fools believe that vaccines are bad, or that psychiatry is of the devil, or that eating certain fruits and vegitables will cure cancer. Sigh. So perhaps it’s not so surprising that there are pundits and others who think there might be something to the Gnostic literature. Ignorance and folly are widespread. And as Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.”

So what is the Gospel of Judas? It is a Gnostic text written more than a hundred years after Judas’ death; and it is, to put it bluntly, simply made-up, the same way I recently wrote a novel about a nineteenth century patent medicine conman who comes into possession of a time machine. The Gospel of Judas was part of a genre of pseudo-gospels written from the second century onward, in which the authors simply invented the stories in order to perpetuate their aberrant beliefs.

And for those who might suffer romantic delusions about the Gnostics, imagining that they were unjustly labeled heretics by a domineering, patriarchal church bent on eliminating creative alternative interpretations to the narrow orthodoxy, let’s take a look at what the Gnostics actually believed.

They believed that the physical world was created by an angry god whom they identified with the God of the Old Testament. They argued that Jesus had been sent by a different god, who had nothing to do with the created world. Gnostics were polytheists.

Because they believed that the material universe had been created by an evil god, Gnostics strove to avoid all contact with the created world. They believed that matter was intrinsically evil. They abhorred the flesh and wished more than anything to be freed from the bondage of the body. They were generally celibate, and ascetic. They did not even allow the use of wine at communion, insisting only on bread. They also denied the authority of the Old Testament, and most of the Gospels. Their only scriptures were portions of Luke, and only ten out of thirteen letters attributed to Paul that are found in the New Testament. They rejected the rest of the New Testament.

Why did they reject the Old Testament and most of the New Testament? Because the Bible, both Old and New Testament, is filled with stories about the wonders of creation. God keeps saying that creation is good. Genesis 1:31 for instance, states “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” The Song of Songs describes and rejoices in the sensuous love between a man and a woman. In Acts 14, we find Paul preaching to the Greeks in Athens and telling them that the God he worships and has come to tell them about is “the God who made the world and everything in it.” The New Testament argues that the God who was the father of Jesus was the same God who had made the material world. In the Gospel of John, which the Gnostics rejected, Jesus’ first miracle (John 2) happened while he was at a party. They ran out of booze, so Jesus made more.

All the Gnostic sects seem to have condemned marriage. They believed sex was a bad thing. While they acknowledged that Jesus had been born of a woman, they claimed that Jesus had never touched Mary’s body or gotten any nourishment from her womb. Dan Brown’s popular novel, The DaVinci Code, reverses the beliefs of early Christians and the Gnostics. Early Christians would have seen nothing odd or wrong in Jesus being married and having children. After all, a basic Christian doctrine is that Jesus was fully human. What could prove that better than for him to have fathered children? What could have been more ordinary? But for the Gnostics, such a notion would have been shocking and completely vile, an idea to be opposed with every fiber of their beings.

The earliest Christians seem to have foreseen that something like Gnosticism would attempt to substitute itself for Christianity. In Paul’s first letter to Timothy he specifically warned about the false teachings that would arise that would forbid marriage, order people not to eat meat and to abstain from other foods. In opposition to such false notions, Paul asserted that God had created these things to be received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:1-5). Paul believed that “everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected.” The Gnostic author of the Gospel of Judas would have been horrified by what Paul taught.

Gnosticism’s hatred of the created world, of sex, of eating, of essentially anything that is fun, sets it in direct opposition to Jewish and Christian doctrine from the first chapter of Genesis all the way through to the end of the New Testament. Gnosticism also tended to be misogynistic. For instance, the Gospel of Thomas, another Gnostic text dating from about the same time as the Gospel of Judas, concludes with this peculiar exchange, made up by its author, with no connection to anything in the New Testament:

“Simon Peter said to him, ‘Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.’
“Jesus said, ‘I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’”

This odd Gnostic notion regarding the status and value of women contrasts sharply with Paul’s statement (recorded in a letter he wrote to a church in Galatia) that men and women are equal (Galatians 3:28), or with the fact that wealthy women were the source of the finanacial support for Jesus and his disciples as they wandered about ancient Israel (as recorded in the Gospel of Luke 8:1-3).

The Gnostics were not the downtrodden, misunderstood members of a happier, freer, more vibrant version of Christianity, unjustly oppressed and suppressed by “the man.” Instead, they have more in common with our modern perception of Puritanism. H.L. Mencken, in Sententiae: The Citizen and the State, wrote of Puritanism that it is “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

Send to Kindle

Posted in Bible, History, Religion, Theology | Leave a comment

Customer Service

Posted on March 17, 2013 by R.P. Nettelhorst

After I graduated with an undergraduate degree in History, I went to UCLA to pursue my master’s degree in Semitic languages. To pay for all of that, as well as an apartment and food, I worked at the Burbank Airport driving a shuttle bus from a parking lot to the terminals and back, eight hours a day, forty hours a week. I met several famous people and got to chat with them on the way to and from their flights. I also met people who were not so famous.

One afternoon, I took an older gentleman to the airport. He was dressed in a dark gray tweed suit, with a plain gray tie. His hair matched the color of his suit. I struck up a conversation with him and discovered that he was the founder and owner of a major drug store chain. He told me that he was traveling back east to go to a hospital where one of his employees, a cashier, had just been admitted. She had been injured during a holdup at one of his stores and he wanted to be there and find out if there was anything he could do to help.

I suspect that such attention to one’s employees is now rare among CEOs in the corporate world, just as their attention to their customers is likewise not quite as intense. I thought of that man, doubtless long since retired, as I waited at the local pharmacy where I was attempting to pick up my daughter’s prescriptions that help her with her ADHD. The pharmacy I use is not part of the chain that was owned by that gentleman. In fact, that particular chain was bought up by some other corporation several years ago.

Perhaps if that elderly gentleman were in charge of the pharmacy I use, I would not have had the problems I encountered last year. I dropped off two prescriptions for my youngest daughter at 10:30 AM. The employee who took them from me told me they would be ready at 1 PM. I returned about 2 PM expecting—not unreasonably— to pick up the two prescriptions. But, not only could the employee who was supposedly helping me not find record of the prescriptions in his computer, he then spent about ten minutes hunting through the stack of prescriptions turned in during that day before he finally located mine. To this point, his attitude toward me suggested that I was lying to him about having turned in the prescriptions, as if I had nothing better to do than just to wander into a random pharmacy and ask for non-existent prescriptions. This from a man who has seen my face once or twice a month now for the last year getting this exact same set of prescriptions.

Having found that indeed I had turned in the prescriptions this morning he now informed me that “nothing had been done yet,” but he assured me that they could have it ready in “just five minutes” if I would care to wait—pointing to the pharmacist who happened to be in conversation with some other customer –since all she had to do was “count out the pills.” Since I had to pick up my daughters from school at 2:30, I told him that I couldn’t wait, but that I’d be back within an hour or so.

So, I returned again about 3:45 PM. Not only were the prescriptions still not ready—due to the fact that someone had “mistyped” the labels—only one of the two prescriptions I had turned in could be found. Of course, they didn’t know that there were supposed to be two prescriptions until I asked where the other one was as they handed me only the one—and once again, the implication expressed was that somehow I didn’t know what I was talking about. They called my daughter’s pediatrician and learned that indeed I wasn’t just making up a story to annoy them, but that now it would “take a few minutes” for them to get the new copy for the one they had “misplaced.” I told them I had to get my daughter to her soccer practice, so I finally was able to pay for the one prescription they had finally managed to give to me and leave. I noticed that they still had mistyped this one prescription—it had the name of my middle daughter on it, rather than my youngest, for whom the prescription was actually for. However, I was in no mood to point that out to them and then have to wait an additional half hour, especially since I didn’t have that half hour to wait.

Besides being frustrated by the continual disappointment of my not unreasonable expectations of having my prescriptions filled in a timely manner—and of having wasted my time and my rather expensive gasoline in making more than the one trip I had needed to make and knowing that I would still have to make an additional trip the following day to get the prescription that they had lost (and wondering, now, based on their track record, if I would have to make multiple trips on that next day as well)—I was frustrated by the rather blasé attitude displayed by the pharmacy staff, who spent all this time silently bustling about, who never apologized, and looked at me as if I was somehow disturbing their routine and probably behaving unreasonably. They weren’t obviously mean to me: they didn’t yell at me or call me names, but they seemed oblivious to the level of inconvenience they were subjecting me to.

I suspect, that if that gentleman I met many years ago when I drove him to his flight in Burbank was the owner of my pharmacy, those employees would probably never have been hired in the first place. What makes me very sad, however, is that the level of incompetence demonstrated by my pharmacy has become the norm: I see it at the department store, the grocery store, and every time I visit a fast food restaurant. And given that all the businesses I go to treat me with the same level of contempt, I have trouble “taking my business elsewhere.” There’s simply nowhere else to go…

Well…except online to Amazon–where I find service tends to be much better than in most of the local businesses, whether independent or chain. And brick and mortar stores wonder why they’re losing customers. It’s not just about the prices. Customer service matters. I’ll pay extra not to be treated as a problem, potential thief, or idiot. I’ll pay extra to actually find what I’m looking for.

Send to Kindle

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Life As We Don’t Know It

Posted on March 16, 2013 by R.P. Nettelhorst

“The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” So said J.B.S. Haldane in Possible Worlds and Other Papers in 1927. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the astronomer Percival Lowell mesmerized the world with his vision of a Mars crisscrossed with canals, the home of an ancient, advanced race trying to survive on a dying planet. Then, in 1965, the first space probe to send back photographs from Mars, the Mariner 4, showed, not canals, but a world that looked much like the moon, pockmarked by craters, cold, with a thin wisp of an atmosphere. It seemed to demonstrate beyond all doubt that nothing could be living there. Around the same time, the space probes that visitede Venus revealed a world bathed in sulfuric acid clouds with surface temperatures surpassing the boiling point of lead, at over 800 degrees Fahrenheit. The solar system beyond earth seemed clearly dead and lifeless. Only our home world appeared able to support life.

But in the last two decades or so, the outlook for life beyond Earth in our solar system has undergone a radical transformation. Where before, it seemed impossible that life could survive out there, scientists are now beginning to speculate that life—and not just life as we know it, but life as we don’t know it—may be abundant in our solar system.

Mars, rather than being a dead, lifeless analogue of the moon, turned out to be a place that at some time in its distant past had abundant flowing water that formed rivers and streams, lakes and seas. In fact, about one third of its surface was covered with water. Even now, there are vast ice fields at its poles. Scientists wonder if perhaps there might be life clinging to underground pockets of liquid water. On top of that, there were anomalous readings from an experiment on the Viking 1 lander in 1976. Even now, there are burps of methane coming from the planet that either indicate there is continuing volcanic activity—or that something alive is producing the gas, since methane on Earth comes from only those two sources. The Curiosity Rover recently determined that conditions in Mar’s past were indeed comfortable for life as we know it.

Venus seems utterly lifeless on the surface, based on the high surface temperatures and poisonous composition of its atmosphere. But readings of its upper atmosphere show conditions that are not quite so harsh–in fact, conditions are almost comfortable. And oddly enough, the atmosphere contains particles that seems to have the characteristics of living cells. But much more study is needed to be sure.

Europa, one of the largest moons of Jupiter that was originally discovered by Galileo back in 1610, has turned out to be covered with ice. Based on the cracked surface and readings from the Galileo space probe that circled Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, most scientists believe that there is a subsurface ocean of liquid water beneath the ice perhaps as deep as 60 miles. If this is true, then Europa has more liquid water than the Earth does. And where there is liquid water and energy, the chances that life as we know it could exist are much better. Recent measurements indicate that not only could microbial life survive, but the amount of oxygen and energy in the system would allow fish-sized organisms to prosper. Meanwhile, another moon of Jupiter, Ganyamede, like Europa, also has a subsurface ocean. Thus, there are prospects of life there as well.

Further out in the Solar system, Encyladis, a large moon of Saturn, has geysers of water shooting from the surface and spraying out into space. Once again, liquid water under its icy surface indicates a chance that life could survive.

Weirdest of all is Titan, the largest moon around Saturn. It has a thick atmosphere. Temperatures are always 250 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Water is solid and rock-like. But methane is a liquid and Titan has an abundance of that liquid. It flows down rivers and forms lakes and seas. The methane lake Kraken, near the north pole, is larger than the Caspian Sea. The methane on Titan cycles around the planet just the way water cycles on Earth. It evaporates from the surface, condenses into clouds and then rains back down onto the land. The surface of Titan is covered with organic compounds. The photographs of the surface, sent back by the probe Huygens as it descended on parachute, reveal a world that looks more like Earth than any other, with its rolling hills, and jagged coastlines.

In 2005 some scientists speculated on how life could exist on Titan. Such life would depend upon liquid methane and ethane like we depend upon water. It would breathe in hydrogen, breathe out methane, and eat acetylene. If such life existed on Titan, then the scientists predicted that Titan’s atmosphere would be depleted of hydrogen near the surface. The acetylene that the atmosphere produced should also decrease near the surface. Subsequently, recent measurements from the Cassini space probe in orbit around Saturn have indicated that exactly those things are happening there. Does that mean Titan has life, but not life as we know it here on Earth?

At this point, all we have is speculation based on some rather unusual bits of data for the worlds beyond Earth in our solar system. Alternative explanations dependent upon non-biological processes could easily explain all the data. But then again, maybe not. Occam’s razor offers no help yet in discovering what the truth is. We simply don’t have enough information yet to make the judgment. Future space probes will ultimately answer the question of the existence of life elsewhere in our solar system, one way or another.

Send to Kindle

Posted in Science, Space | Leave a comment

Planet Pi

Posted on March 15, 2013 by R.P. Nettelhorst

If you click on the infographic it will give you a much larger version.

Source: JPL

Send to Kindle

Posted in Science, Space | Leave a comment

Moon and Jupiter

Posted on March 14, 2013 by R.P. Nettelhorst

Tonight we attempted to see the comet PanSTARRS again; but we had prayer meeting tonight and by the time we got outside the comet had set. But, I had my telescope with me (a Meade 3 1/2 inch Maksutov–Cassegrain with a field tripod and equatorial mount with motor drive) and so we looked at the crescent moon and Jupiter. Jupiter was beautiful tonight, near Taurus. And all four of the Galilean satellites were visible! This is what we saw:

This is based on a nifty java app that is on the Sky and Telescope website, called Jupiter’s Moons. It can give you a picture of the four Galilean satellites in real time, so you’ll know exactly what you’re looking at through a telescope or good pair of binoculars.

I modified the Sky and Telescope image using the opensource program GIMP, an excellent image manipulation program; it’s very powerful and can do most of what PhotoShop can do, but for free. If you don’t have a high end image manipulation program such as PhotoShop, and you need it, I recommend you get GIMP. It has a bit of a learning curve, but there are plenty of help files and tutorials available on the GIMP website and on YouTube.

Send to Kindle

Posted in Science, Space | Leave a comment

Comets and Other Stuff

Posted on March 13, 2013 by R.P. Nettelhorst

I finally got to see the comet PanSTARRS tonight, together with my wife and Kathy Newman, who took several excellent pictures of it. We watched it from our church; it was dark there and we had a clear view of the horizon. The 28 hour old moon was a very thin crescent like a smile. Directly to the left, about 5 degrees away, was the comet. Once you knew it was there, it was easy enough to see, but it looked spectacular in binoculars. If the sky were darker, it would have been very easy to see, but because the sun had only set about an hour or so before, there was still a lot of light on the horizon–plus we had to look through thicker atmosphere there on the horizon, too. Still, since we are in the High Desert of California, the air was very clear and dry so we had it about as good as anyone could want.

Here is one of the photographs that Kathy Newman took:

©KCNewman Photography

I also got the latest issue of Popular Science Magazine today. What interested me about it most was an article by Konstantin Kakaes entitled Warp Factor: A NASA Scientist Claims to be on the Verge of Faster-than-Light Travel: Is He for Real? And the conclusion is, yes–yes he is. Dr. Harold “Sonny” White founded the Eagleworks facility to work on various cutting edge projects, one of which is his concept of how to make a Warp Drive real. He believes that it is a plausible idea and he is building a tabletop experiment that is designed to create a miniature warp bubble. Kakaes had a tour of the Eagleworks facility at the Johnson Space Center. One of the many interesting things that Kakaes saw while he was there is something that White called a quantum vacuum plasma thruster (QVPT). White couldn’t talk about it much (it’s secret) but it’s one of two initiatives that White is pursuing in addition to the Warp Drive. The quantum vacuum plasma thruster is further along than the Warp Drive. Kakaes writes that a 2011 NASA report that White wrote says that the QVPT uses quantum fluctuations in empty space as a fuel source, so that a spaceship propelled by a QVPT would not require any propellant.

That would certainly save a lot of weight if you didn’t have to haul fuel with you; and you’d never run out, either.

If you had any doubts that you’re living in the future…

Send to Kindle

Posted in Science, Space, Technology | Leave a comment

Speaking in Public

Posted on March 12, 2013 by R.P. Nettelhorst

I saw a bumper sticker once which said something along the lines, “Do not annoy dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.” I tend to look at audiences as being dragons and myself as something crunchy. I think like this even if the audience is only one person that I’ve known for years. I am simply not particularly comfortable initiating contact with anyone. I am mostly convinced that if someone is not currently engaged in a conversation with me, then they probably have no interest in starting one. Being an author I naturally have to spend a lot of time alone and in isolation, and so it strikes no one as peculiar that the only time I ever talk with anyone outside my immediate family is occasionally on Sundays at church. So far this month my cellphone tells me I’ve spent exactly zero minutes talking to anyone on the phone; I’ve sent and received only 12 text messages–all in response to my children needing something. And this is normal for me.

Most people, in my experience, are not saddled with such an odd perspective on human interaction as me. It’s a wonder I function in public at all, actually.

Getting to where I could passably survive public speaking has been an enormous mountain for me to climb. I’m really lousy at interacting with people, very shy, with appallingly bad self-esteem bordering on clinical depression (I’m actually on antidepressants now–for the last year–prescribed by my physician; I still don’t think people want to talk to me, but at least I no longer say mean things to myself constantly. The pills have helped a lot. Really).

Thus, I am absolutely not a naturally effective speaker. But over the years, I’ve been forced by circumstances to compensate for this lack. While I was still in college, someone in the church I was then attending asked me to fill in “for only two weeks” as the children’s Sunday School teacher. I agreed to it only because the person couldn’t find anyone else to fill in and I was the last hope. Then, after the two weeks had passed, my “filling in” continued without break for the next three years. The person I was subbing for never returned to her teaching position.

Then, after those three years, when I was by then in my graduate program at UCLA, someone asked me to “fill in” for the adult Sunday School teacher. I should have known better. Many years passed with me teaching that class. Then I wound up teaching college classes, too, since what else could I do with a degree in ancient Semitic languages such as Hebrew, Ugaritic and Akkadian?

When my wife and I moved to a new community, I somehow got dragged into teaching another adult Sunday School class–they found out I had both an advanced degree in biblically related matters and that I had actually been a college professor teaching Bible and Theology and Hebrew. Not so long after that, I started getting called upon to fill in for the pastor when he was out of town or ill. Then I got volunteered to preach now and again in other churches and even to give seminars. Thankfully the preaching gigs have really only ever been “filling in.” Nothing has ever lasted longer than two weeks.

But I get called upon to preach somewhat regularly.

And thus it is, for the second year in a row, I find myself facing the prospect of preaching the Palm Sunday service. Since I’ve now been doing public speaking for awhile (more than thirty years), I am able to do it without shaking and I almost enjoy it–sort of like you can get to where you almost enjoy visiting your doctor or dentist. God has a sense of humor; he took the last person in the world that anyone would ever expect to do public speaking, and someone who under no circumstances ever wanted to find himself having to speak in public–and turned him into a public speaker.

If you keep doing a good job, it only encourages people to keep coming back to you for more. Bill Cosby suggested that if a husband wanted to avoid having to do the laundry or the dishes, all he needed to do was mess up the task badly enough that the wife would decide to do it herself instead, to insure that the job got done right. My wife never bought into that notion, perhaps because she’d seen Bill Cosby’s routine and so she was prepared. Turning her clothes pink on more than one occasion only encouraged her to go shopping for new clothes: counter productive, it was.

If I purposely blew a speaking engagement and started babbling like an idiot, I might not ever have to speak again. However, public humiliation, despite it’s potential payoff, is simply not worth it in the final analysis. I’ve found it is better to just do the job right and suffer the likelihood of forever getting asked to speak again, rather than having people point and laugh at me for the rest of my life. I don’t need my nightmares to become real.

Send to Kindle

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Asteroids

Posted on March 11, 2013 by R.P. Nettelhorst

The small 150 foot diameter asteroid with the designation 2012 DA14 became newsworthy when it was determined that it would slip by the Earth just beneath our geosynchronous communication satellites on February 15, 2013. But then, coincidentally on the same day, a much smaller asteroid only about 55 feet in diameter coming at the Earth from the opposite direction stole its thunder. It plunged into our atmosphere at 40,000 miles per hour, burned brighter than the sun, and then disintegrated above Chelyabinsk, a Russian city of 1.1 million people near the boundary between Europe and Asia. It detonated at an altitude of about 40,000 feet with the force of 30 Hiroshima atomic bombs, blowing out thousands of windows and collapsing an old zinc factory. At least 1200 people were injured, mostly by flying glass. Had the asteroid hit the ground intact, the destruction would have been much worse.

This was the largest meteor strike since the Tunguska blast in 1908 took out about 770 square miles of forest in a wilderness area of Siberia. The Tunguska blast in 1908 was caused by an asteroid about six times larger than the one that hit Chelyabinsk, though exploding at around the same altitude.

The Chelyabinsk strike has caught the attention of a world that until now had been mostly oblivious to the danger it faced from the detritus of the solar system. If you go outside tonight after dark and stare at the dark sky away from city lights, on average you will witness about three meteors streaking across the sky every hour. Those are much smaller versions of what hit Russia on February 15. Most of the meteors you see will be the size of sand grains; occasionally, you’ll see grape and softball sized rocks which burn bright and are designated fireballs. Objects the size of what hit Russia this month hit our planet on average about once every 100 years; the Tunguska size objects hit on average about once every 1000. Asteroids like DA14, Tunguska, and Chelyabinsk are so small that very few of them have been or even can be tracked with the limited number of telescopes devoted to studying asteroids.

Someone once commented that the reason the dinosaurs died out is because they didn’t have a space program. Although dinosaur-killer-sized asteroids (about 10 kilometers in diameter) are rare—and we are tracking about 90 percent of them—a Tunguska sized strike would make for a very bad day if it happened over a city: think Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

For most of human history we were not even aware of the danger from the skies, just as for most of human history we had no way of predicting the approach of hurricanes or tornados, and just as we had no way of doing anything about earthquakes. But now in California our buildings and overpasses are designed to survive earthquakes up to 8 on the Richter scale. Our satellites track hurricanes and tropical storms, warning those in their paths of the approaching danger, giving them sufficient time to prepare and evacuate.

We now have the technology to find and track all the rocks speeding about the solar system, and we have the ability to nudge them away if we found one on a collision course. We simply must decide: do we want to protect ourselves—or are we satisfied to accept the rare and intermittent danger and just hope for the best?

Interestingly, two companies have been formed in the last few months: Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries. Both companies are planning to track and find asteroids that pass near Earth, search for valuable minerals, move those that are valuable, and mine them. While they are not doing all this for the purpose of saving the world from being hit—that would be an obvious side effect.

Planetary Resources was started by and is being financed by billionaires, such as the founders of Google—a multibillion dollar corporation. They recognize the potential for enormous profit possible from asteroid mining. An asteroid the size of the one that smashed into Chelyabinsk on February 15 contains metals—such as platinum, gold and some other rare earth minerals—worth billions of dollars. An asteroid the size of the one that hit Tunguska in 1908 is valued in the multiple trillions of dollars. It could contain more platinum, for instance, than has been mined in all of human history here on Earth. In fact, platinum exists on Earth only because of all the asteroids that have smashed into our planet in the past over the eons.

So, even though our government (and the governments of other nations) are likely to simply dither and accomplish little in the way of protecting us from the cosmic threat—the potential for profit from these cosmic rocks will spur industry to do the job for us instead. And in the course of them making enormous piles of cash, the government will then happily tax them with very little dithering.

* * *

Two of my friends have just started blogs. One is a photographer and one is a newly minted lawyer who just recently passed her California Bar Exam (on the first try!)

KCNewman Photography – finding beauty in the small things

Williams LLP Law Blog

I’ve also added their links to my Blogroll.

Send to Kindle

Posted in Science, Space | Leave a comment

Daylight Savings Time

Posted on March 10, 2013 by R.P. Nettelhorst

I dislike Daylight Savings Time. A lot. When my middle daughter dislikes something she’ll comment that she wishes it would “die in a hole.” Given that Daylight Savings Time is a rather abstract concept, as well as unliving, my daughter’s curse would be ineffective. Though it does turn everyone into the living dead for a few days afterward, so that we kind of feel like we’re dying in a hole. I would really prefer that we not have to change the clocks twice a year and to lose an hour’s sleep in the Spring. I simply don’t see the value of mucking with everyone’s sleep schedules and inducing nationwide “jet lag” twice a year. I can’t see how that can be good for productivity.

According to Wikipedia’s article on the subject, Benjamin Franklin introduced the concept in 1784 in a letter to the editors of the Journal of Paris. However, the article says that his letter was satirical. I hope so. I rather like Ben Franklin and would prefer to think that he never came up with such a bad idea. Of course, he also stood out in the rain waiting for his kite to be struck by lightening, so he wasn’t exactly a stranger to bad ideas.

Some people claim to like Daylight Savings Time. These are probably the same people who are morning people. There’s something wrong with morning people. I suspect morning people are not actually human. Maybe they’re the ones who came up with Daylight Savings Time. Perhaps they are the vanguard of some alien invasion and intend to attack us when we’re most sleep deprived.

Only most parts of Arizona and Hawaii can save us.

Send to Kindle

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment