Category: Uncategorized

400 days to Titan

Adam Crowl has been examining the Spacex Interstellar Transport System and analyzing the possible missions to Saturn’s Titan and Jupiter’s moons. Flying to Titan will be easier than flying to the large Moons of Jupiter. The thick atmosphere as thick as Titan’s is a boon to space-travelers trying to shed excess speed. Plus Titan is held in its orbit by a lighter planet – Jupiter masses 318x Earth, while Saturn masses 95x. The minimum delta-vee for a parabolic solar orbit is 8.75 km/s from LEO. Working out gravity losses from finite time boosts in LEO isn’t easy, but at a guess it’ll be 0.1 km/s. That leaves about 0.4 km/s in the tank. We’ll need that aerobrake at Titan to land.

Harbor Ring

I realized that there was a disconnect between the idea of a cars-only crossing and the reality evolving in the region. Bikes are taking off all over the city. We now have waterfront development all along the harbor with parks and bike paths. It’s a whole rebirth, the “new New York.” And the powers that be have repeatedly rejected bike access on the bridge. We started thinking about how we could recast the idea of a shared-use path on the bridge. I’m an urban and regional planner by training, but I’ve been in the family hardware business, and so I thought, “We have to take a marketing approach to repackage Verrazano access.” It’s the missing link in the Harbor Ring. We became the Harbor Ring Committee.

Private exoplanet hunting

Unlike the Kepler Space Telescope—which monitored 100k stars and looked for slight dimming to determine when planets passed in front of their parent stars—Project Blue will use high-contrast imaging. Technical studies have shown that, with an advanced coronagraph to block light from the stars and data processing techniques, such a telescope could reject light from the 2 stars at a rate of 10B to 1. This is sufficient to allow direct imaging of a planet with observations made over the course of several years. Put another way, such an observation system is akin to detecting a firefly next to a lighthouse 16km away.

The proposed telescope should be able to resolve a world that is 0.5 to 1.5 times of the size of Earth and orbiting within the host star’s “habitable zone,” where water theoretically could exist on the surface. Based on Kepler’s data, with 2 Sun-like stars to search around, the odds of at least 1 terrestrial planet in the habitable zone is 80%.

RIP Great Barrier Reef

The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in 2016 after a long illness. It was 25 ma old.

For most of its life, the reef was the world’s largest living structure, and the only one visible from space. It was 2200km long, with 2900 individual reefs and 1050 islands. In total area, it was larger than the United Kingdom, and it contained more biodiversity than all of Europe combined. It harbored 1625 species of fish, 3000 species of mollusk, 450 species of coral, 220 species of birds, and 30 species of whales and dolphins. Among its many other achievements, the reef was home to one of the world’s largest populations of dugong and the largest breeding ground of green turtles.

2022-08-21: Various coral startups are tackling this problem. I haven’t been able to find a number in centimeters / year for this claim to make it comparable.

Unlike traditional projects, Coral Vita grows their corals on land, and they do this for a few key reasons. Land-based coral farming basically allows us to grow more diverse and resilient corals more affordably and at scale. So corals have a natural ability to adapt to changing conditions, but things are deteriorating in the ocean so quickly— largely due to climate change— that they can’t keep up. So what we’re doing is acclimating the corals. By raising and lowering the temperature of the water, the corals undergo stress. We basically take them to the gym. And in turn harden, which boosts their ability to survive the planet’s warming oceans. Corals also have an ability to make babies, it’s known as coral spawning. So when it comes time for coral spawning, we can then put those already more resilient corals together so that their babies are also gonna be more resilient. This process is called ‘assisted evolution.’ They can also dramatically speed up a coral’s growth rate. The method we rely on to accelerate coral growth rates is known as ‘microfragmenting,’ which is an open-source method that basically allows us to grow corals 50x faster.

2022-10-07: Another huge claim on coral growth. Has anyone combined these techniques?

In nature, coral grows 0.5cm per year through the accretion of minerals dissolved in seawater, which form a thick layer of substrate. But on electrically charged reefs, the electric current takes on some of the heavy lifting needed to deposit essential calcium carbonate on the reef. The coating could thicken at a rate of 5cm per year — 10x faster than coral grows naturally — for as long as a current was flowing through it.

2023-04-07: There’s also Stony coral tissue loss disease to deal with

A bacterial probiotic treatment effectively stopped or slowed SCTLD in 66% of tested infected coral fragments. It also prevented the infection from spreading in all transmission experiments.