Archives for August 2014

Way back on September 18, 2012, the day before my 51st birthday, I wrote about a speed freak’s wet dream. Back in 1994 a nifty dude named Miguel Alcubierre had figured out that going faster than light, at least from an exterior perspective, was theoretically possible. The tiny, itsy bitsy, problem was that the amount of energy required to make it all work could kill all life in our solar system. That would include us in case you missed a memo or two. So, at the end of the day, it was something fun to think about but showed no practical value.

Then, a nutty guy named Dr. Harold “Sonny” White took a look at the equations and noticed that they could be put in a different order, in a manner that wouldn’t kill us all, and still work. He and a couple of folks got together and even developed a couple of renderings of what such a ship could look like.

NASA added his research into their 100 year plan, designed to realistically create interstellar travel, and went about doing their business in the real world. That plan is looking at what tech needs to be invented, what business models would need to be followed and so on.

And 100 years sounded about right. After all we don’t even have a deep space rocket. We’ve got nothing that could set up a safe building platform.

Well, we didn’t.

As Miriam Kramer notes, now we do.

NASA new mega-rocket, a towering booster designed for deep space missions, will be ready for its first test flight no later than November 2018, space agency officials announced Wednesday (Aug. 27).

It’s possible that the Space Launch System rocket test flight could launch as early as December 2017, but NASA officials have committed to having the rocket ready for flight be the end of 2018 to be safe. That extra wiggle room should let the space agency cope with scheduling and funding issues as they crop up in the future, NASA officials said in a teleconference with reporters.

The SLS will be the largest rocket ever constructed and it is designed to send humans deeper into space than ever before. The huge launcher — which will stand at 400-feet-tall (122 meters) in its final configuration — could deliver NASA astronauts to an asteroid and even Mars sometime in the future. [See images of NASA’s SLS rocket design]

NASA’s giant Space Launch System, or SLS, is derived from proventechnology used for decades in America’s moon program and the space shuttle. See how NASA’s Space Launch System mega-rocket works in this Space.com infographic.
Credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com

View full size image

“Our nation is embarked on an ambitious space exploration program, and we owe it to the American taxpayers to get it right,” NASA associate administrator Robert Lightfoot, said in a statement. “After rigorous review, we’re committing today to a funding level and readiness date that will keep us on track to sending humans to Mars in the 2030s – and we’re going to stand behind that commitment.”

NASA expects that SLS will cost a total of $7 billion from February 2014 through November 2018. For its first test flight, SLS will fly out of low-Earth orbit with an unmanned Orion space capsule.

The SLS team just passed a major design review, which will allow the program to move forward with design plans.

As seen in this artist’s illustration, SLS will represent the most powerful rocket in history. Image released Aug. 27, 2014.
Credit: NASA/MSFC

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The 2018 date is a reflection of modeling done by a review board, which suggested that the new date is likely more attainable, NASA officials said during a news conference today (Aug. 27). The review board looked at the SLS plan and brought up problems that could arise during the building of the rocket system, possibly causing a change in schedule.

“They’re [the review board] telling us that if we don’t do anything, we basically have a 70 percent chance of getting to that date,” William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for the Human Explorations and Operations Mission Directorate, said during the news conference. “Our intent and the team’s intent at Marshall [Space Flight Center] is to go look at those problems and see what we can do to mitigate those problems.”

“There are probably some other problems that aren’t even identified by the Standing Review Board that will come up,” Gerstenmaier added. “Our job as a management team is to look at those problems, figure out ways to work those ahead of time, and proactively work those as they come about.”

It’s possible that the first SLS flight could occur before the 2018 target if the team works to head off any potential issues before they occur, according to Gerstenmaier.

Now, I don’t want to task your memory, but not that long ago we were chatting about Dr. Sonny. As it turns out he isn’t one of those patient kind of dudes. You see, with the mega rocket and some room to move he changed the timeline for touring the galaxy from 100 years to “in our lifetime.”

To make his point he hooked up with a coupe of artist to create images of faster than light ships. Made with stuff we have laying around now.

Jesus Diaz points out that this could be a thing.

As in a real thing.

Dr. Harold “Sonny” White is still working on a warp drive at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. His work is still in the experimental stage but that doesn’t mean he can’t imagine what the real lifeEnterprise ship would look like according to his math.

You’re looking at it right now.

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This is the starship that may take us where no human has gone before. And it has me screaming like a little Klingon girl.

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Concept 3D artist Mark Rademaker told io9 that “he worked with White to create the updated model, which includes a sleek ship nestled at the center of two enormous rings, which create the warp bubble.”

The updated model is the one you can see above, a variation of the original concept which, according to Dr. White, was rendered by Rademaker based on an idea by Matthew Jeffries, the guy who came with “the familiar Star Trek look.” This is the original warp drive spaceship concept:

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Dr. White—whose daily life is working in future propulsion solutions for interplanetary travel in the near future, like ion and plasma thrusters—developed new theoretical work that solved the problems of the Alcubierre Drive concept, a theory that allowed faster-than-light travel based on Einstein’s field equations in general relativity, developed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre.

A spaceship equipped with a warp drive would allow faster-than-light travel by bending the space around it, making distances shorter. At the local level, however, the spaceship wouldn’t be moving faster than light. Therefore, warp drive travel doesn’t violate the first Einstein commandment: Thou shall not travel faster than light.

Here’s more views of the IXS Enterprise during its construction phase, the concept that Dr. White developed with Rademaker:

You can watch the fascinating talk that Dr. White gave at the SpaceVision 2013 conference here:

The spacecraft reminds me a bit to the spaceship in Chris Nolan’s Interstellar, a film that—in theory—will portrait realistic faster-than-light travel. This is partial view of the ship in the movie, which also has a ring of some sort around it.

Not a fantasy, but real science

But Interstellar is just science fiction. Dr. White’s work at the Advanced Propulsion Theme Lead for the NASA Engineering Directorate is science. And while his department only gets peanuts compared to NASA’s budget (not to talk about the Pentagon’s) I find his words comforting:

Perhaps a Star Trek experience within our lifetime is not such a remote possibility.

See, Dr. White and his colleagues aren’t making a movie or coming up with 3D renders for the sake of it. They just don’t just believe a real life warp drive is theoretically possible; they’ve already started the work to create one:

Working at NASA Eagleworks—a skunkworks operation deep at NASA’s Johnson Space Center—Dr. White’s team is trying to find proof of those loopholes. They have “initiated an interferometer test bed that will try to generate and detect a microscopic instance of a little warp bubble” using an instrument called the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer.

It may sound like a small thing now, but the implications of the research huge. In his own words:

Although this is just a tiny instance of the phenomena, it will be existence proof for the idea of perturbing space time-a “Chicago pile” moment, as it were. Recall that December of 1942 saw the first demonstration of a controlled nuclear reaction that generated a whopping half watt. This existence proof was followed by the activation of a ~ four megawatt reactor in November of 1943. Existence proof for the practical application of a scientific idea can be a tipping point for technology development.

The roadmap to the warp drive

According to Dr. White, this is a roadmap that they need to follow to achieve that final objective of rapid interstellar travel. He explains this roadmap in the video above.

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If his work is successful, he says that we would be able to create an engine that will get us to Alpha Centauri “in two weeks as measured by clocks here on Earth.” The time will be the same in the spaceship and on Earth, he claims, and there will not be “tidal forces inside the bubble, no undue issues, and the proper acceleration is zero. When you turn the field on, everybody doesn’t go slamming against the bulkhead, which would be a very short and sad trip.”

Every time I read that paragraph I smile—and these renders just make my smile so wide it looks stupid.

OK, Dr. White, you got our attention. Make it so.

If all of that gets confusing allow me to simplify. There’s this thing called the time dilation effect. In essence if you traveled 100 years around the speed of light you’d age a couple of days and all your friends would be dead.

But, if Sonny’s idea works, and we can call him Sonny now, then you would fold space at point A and unfold it at point B and be many light years from home, but in real time. A day for you on the ship would be just the same as a day here.

That makes interstellar travel possible.

And Sonny says that’s something we can do now.

Aliens explore Earth HD from Fiorella on Vimeo.

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You’ve probably been too busy to start connecting some disturbing dots. That’s okay. I know how important it is to catch up on those back Honey Boo Boo episodes and I, for one, never forget Storage Wars. Even so, between reality TV and celebrity deaths, scientists have managed to find time to take a peek at the world around us. And what they’ve been finding is fucking scary. In case you missed the memo, methane has been erupting all over the Russian north lands. As reported in Real Climate, we’re not talking about a minor leak, we’re talking about gigatonnes per blow hole. What’s causing it is simple enough to deduce. It took scientists about a day to figure it out. The meters of ice that lay under Russian soil has melted. Soil, not strong enough to withstand the pressure of the gases beneath has given way and, wahlah, you have a methane volcano.

In Turkey there’s a lake where there wasn’t one last year. And, as an added bonus, it’s belching poisonous gasses and killing the local ecosystem. But it’s not just there. All over the world lakes and rivers are being negatively impacted. Supreme Master TV listed around 50 lakes and rivers that are dangerously close to drying up completely. Many of them here in the U.S. And while SF Gate tries to put a smiley face on the whole affair, the fact is that more and more craters are opening up in the Arctic Circle and and more and more gases are polluting our air.

And, another bonus, those gases cause heat. Concentrated, as they are, over traditionally cold lands they are loosening the soils and melting the ices. Which means all that stuff is going to start sliding downward soon.

Gravity is still a thing, I don’t care what you believe.

Which means that billions upon billions of tons of water and earth are headed towards a waterway near you. In twenty years or so most coastal areas could move 30 or more miles inland. Which means that Miami, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Seattle, Newfoundland, Japan, anything known as an island in the Pacific (goodbye Hawaii) and so on will no longer be around.

And I’m not talking about sometime in the far future. As I noted above, I’m talking in a couple of decades.

Side effects from this event are still being considered but none of them are good. The lovely islands around Greece will only exist in postcards.

So how are we dealing with all of this?

By gathering the world’s greatest scientists to solve this dilemma?

BWAH HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Of course not.

As syndicated journalist Gene Lyons notes, people are taking to lying and name calling to prevent anything from happening.

Recently a friend posted a video on Facebook that he asserted would demolish the Godless theory of evolution. On it, a fellow sitting in a pickup and wearing a backward baseball cap smugly explained that Darwinian evolution contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a fundamental principle of physics.

This hoary chestnut has long been a favorite of Creationist apologists — appearing to use scientific evidence to support a theological conclusion. Never mind that the fellow’s science was as backward as his baseball cap. The Second Law states almost the opposite of his description. Indeed, if it said what creationists claim, not only evolution, but life itself would be impossible.

But what struck me as equally significant was the implied attitude toward scientists. Because if what the fellow claimed was even halfway right, it could only mean that every physics professor in every university in the world was part of a vast conspiracy of silence against God.

And why would they do that? I suppose for the same reason that climate scientists worldwide all but unanimously warn that increased levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are contributing to a potentially catastrophic warming of the planet.

No less an authority than Sarah Palin once characterized them as employing “doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that capitalizes on the public’s worry and makes them feel that owning an SUV is a ‘sin’ against the planet.”

The ex-governor’s use of religious metaphor is no accident. To millions of Americans calling themselves “conservatives,” at lease for partisan purposes, science is religion, and religion science. Hardly anybody acts on this stuff in real life. People don’t quiz their veterinarian about Darwin.

However, when it comes to climate science, people who wouldn’t dream of diagnosing the family cat feel comfortable hearing the entire worldwide scientific community described as engaged in a gigantic hoax. Supposedly for the sake of one-world government or some similar absurdity.

Clearly, such people simply don’t know what scientific inquiry consists of, how hypotheses are tested, theories arrived at, and consensus achieved — all the things about science that make large-scale conspiracies impossible.

Individual scientists are certainly as prone to temptation as anybody else. However, a single instance of serious fraud — misrepresenting experiments, faking data — is fatal to a career. The higher the profile, the more dramatic the fall.

So what happens when ideologically motivated pundits single out scientists for abuse? We may be about to learn from the lawsuit filed by renowned climatologist Michael Mann against the National Review. Do defamation laws protect even famous scientists from politically motivated smears against their professional integrity and private character?

Is calling an internationally known scientist “intellectually bogus,” a “fraud” and “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science” — as National Review blogger Mark Steyn and various cohorts did — a First Amendment-protected opinion? Or is it libelous, a provably false allegation published with reckless disregard for the truth and the malicious purpose of harming Mann’s reputation?

“(I)nstead of molesting children,” Steyn’s post explained, quoting Rand Simberg, Mann “has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science.” Does it need to be added that the National Review provided no evidence of same? Mann asked for a retraction and apology. Receiving none, he sued.

The director of Penn State’s climatology program — hence the Sandusky reference — Mann drew the ire of climate change deniers as the inventor of the “hockey stick graph.” First published in Nature, it combined so-called “proxy records” — tree ring studies, ice core and corals — of temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the past 1,000 years with contemporary thermometer records.

It showed the climate trending irregularly cooler until the Industrial Revolution, when temperatures trended sharply upward — the blade of the metaphorical hockey stick. Since then, numerous studies based on different data have drawn the same conclusion: Earth’s climate is warming rapidly, with potentially catastrophic consequences.

Mann’s misfortune, however, was getting caught up in the largely phony “Climategate” controversy. Admiring emails referencing “Mike’s trick” of sophisticated statistical analysis were made to appear sinister. Eight investigations by everybody from Penn State’s science faculty to the British parliament have vindicated Mann’s work in every respect.

However, Mann’s not a shy fellow. His book “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars” constitutes not only a lucid explanation of his own work, but a vigorous defense of climate science against industry-funded denialists. In a recent pleading filed in the D.C. Court of Appeals, the National Review argues that this makes him a public figure and fair game for abuse.

In a separate article, editor Rich Lowry alibied that “in common polemical usage, ‘fraudulent’ doesn’t mean honest-to-goodness criminal fraud. It means intellectually bogus and wrong.”

In short, accusing a respected scientist of faking data and comparing him to a child molester was just a colorful way of saying they disagree with his conclusions.

Welcome to Washington, professor.

I’ll make it simple for you. If you deny that global warming is a thing, you’re a moron. As such you have no say in anything.

We did this to ourselves and it’s up to us to fix it. It really is that simple.

Until you wise up, here’s some heat we can all enjoy.

Hot Oven from Simon Bolz on Vimeo.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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For those of you who’ve been following along on the podcasts, you know that I have a yoga pants wearing mole at Warner Brothers. Thanks to her we’ve managed to stay a week or so ahead of the hype machine. We debuted the new Wonder Woman costume on the radio, that’s how cutting edge we are. We knew about Ray Fisher getting cast as Cyborg & Dwayne “THE ROCK” Johnson getting to play Shazam before almost anyone else did too. The thing of it is that this film, and its related entities, seems to be headed down a dark path. We already knew Ben Affleck was going to play an older incarnation of the Bat & that he and Supes would not be pals. Thus the “versus” in the movie’s title. And while I keep hearing rave reviews about the cast, currently shooting in Detroit, very little has been said about the plot. Oh, sure, you could intuit some of what’s coming just by seeing Batman’s body armor (the better to take a punch from Superman with) and the fact that the studio has made no secret that this film is a precursor to a Justice League franchise, but, after that, not so much.

Today that changes.

While we’re not the first to grab this we are near the front of the class. When I asked my friend about plot related items she would clam up tighter than a virgin in the back seat of a Chevy. We may be friends but we’re not good enough friends for her to risk ruining her career.

Fortunately for us, our new pal, Stubby the Rocket at TOR.com has scored some valuable intel and he’s willing to share it with the class.

Have that grain of salt ready? Because it’s time for an unconfirmedBatman v Superman: Dawn of Justice rumor! Badass Digest is purporting to have some intel on the movie’s plot, especially its timeline as compared to the Batman mythos as we usually know it, Man of Steel, and Wonder Woman’s own history.

We already knew that Ben Affleck would play an aging Bruce Wayne. But Badass Digest claims that when Bat v Supes opens, Wayne will have already been Batman for 30-odd years, pushing him into his 50s:

In this version Batman is still an urban legend, a creature of the night, and no one has ever taken his picture. But he’s had plenty of adventures, and the Batcave includes a memorial centered around a tattered Robin costume.

Aww! Still, this is a keen way to solidly distance Batman v Superman from Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, by making this Caped Crusader a more withdrawn figure playing the long game, rather than a bombastic force making headlines by leaving Gotham, training in foreign prisons, drag-racing through Gotham in his souped-up Batmobile (“this isn’t a car”), and getting publicly called out by villains on TV and at football stadiums.

As io9 points out, that would make Superman’s appearance in Man of Steelone of the last, not first, instances of superheroics—which doesn’t seem to quite match up with the astonishment he inspired in that movie. And what of Wonder Woman? Badass Digest says that she also keeps her heroics on the down-low:

By the way, my sources tell me that Wonder Woman has also been in operation for some time before Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice begins, and her activities have been just as secretive as Batman’s. Her activities were badass as well… but in a very different, and unexpected, way.

Does this mean we’ll see more of Diana Prince, and less of Wonder Woman the superhero celebrity and ambassador?

I tend to agree with Stubby. I loved the Christopher Nolan universe but if a vigilante wants to strike fear into the hearts of criminals, ending up on TV all the time isn’t really the way to do it. Unless your staging public executions. Then that might put a damper on them. Of course, the real police tend to make frowny faces at that kind of stuff so that tactic might not be as effective as hoped.

Now, as to these new revelations, I like the whole idea. A creature so cunning that he can avoid all forms of public disclosure while still stopping crime is a fun concept. And the whole “dead Robin” motif is a nice start to any day. Add in Wonder Woman as a sword wielding Amazon who also is more rumor than fact and you suddenly have a lot of room to move.

Yes, there’s the fear that this could all end up being a parody if handled badly but, based on what I know thus far, I don’t see that happening.

In addition, this story line leaves open the possibility of the Justice League being a more underground affair and not some high profile entity with a space station. Certainly the gray palette they’re using for filming would suggest that.

The other item of note is that by using Cyborg right away, and making sure that Robin is well and truly dead, that leaves room for the remaining Teen Titans to join the fray as things go on.

One last thing, we talked on the podcasts about how Warner is using multiple camera crews simultaneously. That seemed like a wild luxury when we first talked about it back in March. Now, with ten movies slated to release by 2020, it seems like they might need more. But it still means they can be shooting up to three films at a time which would give them some serious room for editing and the like. Reshoots would be much easier with the cast and crew having some down time after Batman -v- Superman. They could really tweak these things to perfection.

Given that Warner seems to have allocated around $3 BIL (with a B) to this endeavor, that’s not a bad idea.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
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