Monthly Archives: October 2012

Red Bull Advertising

Update: Nice stunt but the jerk jumping out of this 50 year old nearly useless technology turns
out to be obscenely uneducated when it comes to the value of exploring Mars. (Speaks volumes
about the level of intelligence needed to make space commonplace. Everyone’s an astronaut
nowadays.)
“That awkward moment when you realize a soda has a better space program than NASA.”

NYTimes on Cultural Stagnation – Why the Americas Aren’t Speaking Italian…

“In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.
The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn’t long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. Eventually, the colleganza was banned. The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally. By 1500, Venice’s population was smaller than it had been in 1330.”

(…also why we need to replace our income tax with an accumulated wealth/net worth tax:

Mars Panorama Composite by Stuart Atkinson

“Finally, a spaceprobe takes a picture that shows Mars as it has
burned in my mind all these years,” said Stuart Atkinson via Twitter,
who created this mosaic from four separate raw color images taken
by the rover. The images were taken on Sept. 26, 2012 by the right
MastCam on Curiosity, then uploaded yesterday. They provide a
glimpse at the depth and distances the rover’s cameras can see,
with hills and the rim of Gale Crater off in the distance. (The rover is
looking towards the northeast.)

International Day of the Girl

Important reasons for Mars settlement stem from the cultural change millions of people living on another planet will catalyze here on Earth – simply by the fact of their thriving as a robust vibrant civilization on Mars. Settlements will need to educate every person to their fullest potential. Anticipation of such a society through depictions in film, concept art, mission plans, business proposals, fiction writing, etc., reenforces progressive cultural change now, here on Earth.

"Settling Mars" | A Preview of the Upcoming Documentary

(we really need to STOP USING THE TERM “COLONIZE” – please!)

Also, it is important to note that without several decades of rudimentary, relatively easy terraforming, early settlements will not look like the image above. Surface solar and cosmic radiation will force early settlements underground (either buried beneath several meters of soil or tunneled into mountainsides).  Space activists favoring other destinations than Mars often deride such artists concepts as “fantasy”…the most realistic depictions of early settlements show only airlocks and telerobots on the surface, with cross-sections of extensive subsurface environments.