Recently in Technique Category

By signing a name on a check, a forger signs his death warrant. The sentence of a man convicted of mail fraud never ends; part of his penalty is to forever wonder if the footsteps behind him signal abuse, degradation, and perhaps death. A woman struggling with a legacy of sexual abuse and drug addiction is punished with further sexual abuse.

More complete stories are here, including this obversation, which is in accord with something I've thought for quite a while:

I saw all this stuff about Abu Ghraib. People were outraged that this was happening overseas, but this is also happening in our nation's capital. It's happening to people who need drug treatment. It's happening to 19-year-old girls who have low selfesteem. It's happening to people who are arrested for the first time after being completely strung out. This is happening in our country.

This strikes me as being an intolerable state of affairs.

I'm certainly not ready to read it untranslated yet, but Lucretius' The Nature of Things strikes me as a work that is more important now than when it was written, more than two millennia ago.

Inspired by the philosopher Epicurus (I am fairly certain I am not an Epicurean -- quietism doesn't strike me as being an honorable or practical response to life), Lucretius set about applying the atomic theory -- the notion that we, our buildings, the glass I'm drinking from as I write -- are made of tiny invisible particles.

Democritus of course originated the theory. Matter persists, but objects undergo change. A shield rusts, an amphora cracks and the pieces crumble -- thus, these things must be made of smaller things that retain their integrity, even as the larger object (our bodies among them) disintegrate. Epicurus, who came up with the notion that these atoms swarm in clouds -- combining and splitting apart from one another -- was more interested in ethics than physics. Lucretius, the poet, was interested more in the physics -- and their implications -- than in ethics.

Lucretius gets a lot right -- the notion that even the most effete chardonnay sipping poets among us descend from brutish, uncouth, hairy ancestors; that plants preceded animals; that the constant variation and recombination of atoms explains the diversity of life (we of course recognize this as happening, not on the atomic level, but rather the molecular); that there may once have been massive animals roaming the earth. He also gets a lot wrong -- for example, he rejects the notion that land animals coud share an aquatic ancestor.

But so what?

The other book I'm reading -- Ernst Mayr's What Evolution Is -- puts poor Lucretius to shame when it comes to reciting evidence. Mayr is right about a lot more than Lucretius -- but they're part of the same conversation. Lucretius, like Democritus and Epicurus, is postulating based upon the empirical evidence of his senses and his reason. In a 2,000-year-old poem.

Now read, for example, this, or this, or even this, and ask whether there are any facts Mayr has that might persuade them to reconsider...

When I wrote this rather poorly named post about Deep Space 1, the first craft (well, perhaps I should say the first human built craft) to use ion propulsion, I neglected to mention something that caught my eye. Deep Space 1, "the little spacecraft that could," was built as part of NASA's New Millennium Program, the purpose of which is described here:

Although the objective of the NMP technology validation missions is to enable future science missions, the NMP missions themselves are not science-driven. They are technology-driven, with the principal requirements coming from the needs of the advanced technologies that form the "payload." The missions are high risk because, by their nature, they incorporate unproven technologies that, in general, will not have functionally equivalent back-ups. (Indeed, if an advanced technology does not pose a high risk, flight validation by NMP is not required.)

I thought the distinction was worth noting -- I used to make the same one when writing about the rapid advance of medieval European technology while its science remained rather primitive. It seems to me there is something of a contrast between the two, and it's interesting to see someone else, in a decidedly different context, making the same distinction.

A commentator at the always excellent Cronaca points to this story on paraffin rockets, which might represent a great advance over our current technology. While we'll need rockets to lift craft into orbit for some time, I think if we're going to Mars, ultimately, we'll need to improve on an engine we've already made using superior technology. I refer to the Deep Space 1 project, launched on October 24, 1998 (its mission ended December 7, 2001). The probe was fueled by an ion propulsion system, the advantages of which are obvious -- it's a far more efficient and potentially faster engine than a conventional rocket:

The ultimate speed of a spacecraft using ion thrust depends upon how much propellant it carries; indeed, the same principle applies to chemical propulsion systems, although they are much less efficient. The ion propulsion system on Deep Space 1 carries about 81.5 kilograms of xenon propellant, and it takes about 20 months of thrusting to use it all. It increases the speed of the spacecraft by about 4.5 kilometers per second, or about 10,000 miles per hour. If we had the same amount of chemical propellant, it would provide only one tenth as much velocity increment. If DS1 carried a larger solar array, it certainly would have a slightly higher acceleration, and if it carried more Xe propellant it could reach a much higher final velocity by simply thrusting longer. But DS1 is testing ion propulsion solely to find out if it works as well as predicted. Future missions that use it likely will carry more propellant to achieve still higher speeds.

And here we learn that an ion engine is ten times as efficient as a conventional rocket engine.

I don't think rockets will be able to send a craft to Mars and back, but ion propulsion might be capable of the feat. The important thing, in my mind, is to set the goal -- then get out of the way of the engineers who will do the rest...

I've liked Gregg Easterbrook's writings for some time, and I've been enjoying his new, unnamed blog on The New Republic site. So I was not particularly surprised when I read this paragraph, at the end of an entry on the Biosphere:

It seems certain that as the space shuttle debate continues, some prominent person will advocate the bold new adventure of a trip to Mars. When someone advocates that, this blog will demolish the idea in detail. Here's a quick preview. Last week the Wall Street Journal ran a letter to the editor blithely asserting that colonization of Mars could be accomplished "easily and cheaply." The Russian rocket manufacturer Energia recently estimated that the hardware for a stripped-down manned mission to Mars would weigh a minimum of 600 tons in low-earth orbit. At current space shuttle prices, it costs $15 billion to place 600 tons in low-earth orbit. That's just the initial launch cost for a stripped-down high-risk flight with a couple of people--spaceship and supplies are extra.

Not surprised, but disappointed nonetheless. First, I think one is always on the losing side of the ledger when betting against human ingenuity, although it's a bet many otherwise perfectly sensible people make. In 1899 (that's not a typo -- 1899), the head of the U.S. Patent Office, one Charles Duell, confidently asserted that,

Everything that can be invented has been invented.

In 1920, no less then the New York Times editorialized that Robert Goddard, the American father of rocketry, knew less about physics than the average high school student. There are, of course, many other examples of this kind of certainty.

I think it's largely a question of will and priorities. We went from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo to the moon to the Shuttle in a span of two decades, and all those craft were designed in the age before laptop computers.

Which brings me to the reasons to do it: going to Mars is essentially a technological problem, and anything that advances our technical capabilities is an unqualified benefit. The sheer difficulty of the endeavor would require -- just as it did in the Apollo program -- the development of materials and techniques that at present are in their infancy or as yet unimagined. No to mention, of course, the jobs that should an effort would create.

I also found this commentary, on developing a vision for NASA, worth reading.

Addendum: In fairness to Easterbrook, there's nothing he says that's quite like Duell's statement or the idiocy of the Times' attack on Goddard. But his assumptions seem to flow from the notion that the only way to get to Mars is with a rocket, and that the only way to get it into space is with the space shuttle. I'd argue for a replacement for the Shuttle, and a parallel effort to develop a craft that can go from earth's orbit to Mars.