Month: April 2012

Making life multi-planetary

It is important that we take action now to make life multi-planetary, because this is really the first point in the 4B-year history of Earth that it has been possible. That window of possibility will hopefully be open for a long time, but it may only be open for a short time. That’s why I think urgent action is required on making life multi-planetary.

2012-11-12: This guy has more vision (and execution) than all the web 2.0 kiddies together.

Elon Musk wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80K people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500K a trip. In Musk’s vision, the ambitious Mars settlement program would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey to the Red Planet aboard a huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane.

2013-10-03: My latest toy to mess with tiny Luddite brains

2015-08-17: Long but worthwhile read

I’ve always envied everyone who was alive during the excitement of the moon landing in the late 60s. When I’ve thought about The Story of Humans and Space, the 1960s always seemed like a fluky 10 years of supreme excitement in the middle of an otherwise calm and steady trajectory: But now, I’m seeing the moon landing more as a precursor of something much bigger. Without realizing it, we may be standing on the precipice of one of the great leaps in biological history, and the moon landing may later be seen as the first labor contraction in the birth of an entirely new era for life on Earth. And somehow, we may actually be alive as that new era dawns.

2017-06-15: More details have been published

SpaceX is estimating they will be able to achieve $140K per ton for the trips to Mars. If a person plus their luggage is less than that, taking into account food consumption and life support, the cost of moving to Mars could ultimately drop below $100K. Cost will be brought down 5M % with fully reusable rocket, orbital refueling, propellent production on Mars, CH4 / O2 DEEP-CRYO Methalox fuel.

2018-08-31: Using Starship for habitation

SpaceX plans to live out of the BFS ships initially on Mars and then build out the facilities (habitation, power systems, mining and landing pads). The BFS would land on Mars with 100 tons including the ship.

Have you considered being a vegetarian?

If you’re still eating chicken, you’re not reading the news.
Factory farming is nasty business, I tell you. A sudden rash of reports is beginning to reveal the horrible reality of industrial chicken farming.

“Poultry on factory farms are routinely fed caffeine, active ingredients of Tylenol and Benadryl, banned antibiotics and even arsenic. It’s unbelievable what we found.”

Why caffeine? It turns out that chickens are fed coffee pulp to keep them awake all night so they keep eating and become fatter.

A previous study found that 90% of chickens raised for meat were fed arsenic.

Most chicken farmers don’t even know what they’re feeding the chickens, as the pre-packaged feed ingredients are a trade secret.

Obama’s USDA, meanwhile, is springing into action. The department wants to stop inspecting poultry plants and allow employees of the plant do the inspections. That would enable factory food assembly lines to process 200 chickens per minute, rather than the 140 per minute currently possible.

A pilot program for the plant employee inspections found that they “were missing defective poultry at high rates.”

“The inspectors had observed numerous instances of poultry plant employees allowing birds contaminated with fecal matter or other substances to pass. And even when the employees try to remove diseased birds, they face reprimands.”