Colonizing Space

 I'm a fan of shows and movies that depict the colonization of space: Firefly, The Expanse, 2001 a Space Odyssey, etc.     I'm a true believer: Unless we manage to destroy ourselves first, the Human Race will eventually have extensive colonies in space.

 Space colonies are a lot different than colonies in the new world, India, China, Africa, etc 4 centuries ago, or by various cultures around the Mediterranean and other places 2000 years ago.   For starters, there were already people living in most of these places--they had air to breathe, soil to plant crops in, etc.  This is not true in space.  We will either have to bring these things with us or make them there.  Colonization opened people up to new diseases and other problems in the old days; that will also be true of space: Radiation poisoning, lack of gravity, price of air and water, etc.   My dad, who worked for decades designing satellites, is skeptical that we will ever be able to overcome these, but I think we will.  But it will be hard and it will take much longer than people like Elon Musk imagine.

 The first nasty problem is the difficulty in getting people and goods from Earth's surface into space.  This is very hard, but there's nothing completely intractable about it.  Chemical rockets can do it, but at great expense.  SpaceX, to their credit, have moved the needle considerably.  Several science fiction writers have proposed some sort of fusion rocket, which can be profoundly more efficient.  This will require a breakthrough to achieve, although it's superficially plausible.  Several SF stories, Such as The Expanse and Firefly have followed this route.  Breakthroughs, unlike more straightforward engineering, are difficult to predict, but I understand enough of the physics to be pretty confident that the breakthrough will happen, most likely in the next half century or so.

The next problem is gravity.  It turns out that humans need some gravity to be healthy, although we can tolerate its absence for a while.  Many SciFi stories imply or require some sort of artificial gravity--Star Trek and Firefly are two notable cases, although little detail is given. Gravity Plating, as suggested by Star Trek, will require a pretty big breakthrough--comparable to the Warp Drive of that same milieu.  It's plausible that they are related--In Einsteinian General Relativity, gravity is an artifact of the warping space by large masses.  There may be other ways to warp space, ways which allow faster than light travel or gravity plating, but these are completely outside our present understanding of physics.

 The Expanse does away with artificial gravity: they make it the old fashioned way, by accelerating.  In space ships, they are designed so that thrust is aligned with the axis of the ship, and any acceleration or deceleration gives the occupants a pretty realistic impression of gravity.  In the stories, which are mostly about warfare in space, accelerations well over 1 G are commonplace, but I think the vast majority of ships will remain comfortably 1 G or less the vast majority of the time.  The second way, of course, is to spin things--centrifugal space ships.  Several of the space colonies in the stories are asteroids, which have been spun up to create artificial gravity and hollowed out.   A little engineering shows that this is implausible.  A 1 G force on a several mile long cable exceeds the tensile strength of most rocky-based materials, including iron.  Centrifugal colonies will be largely artificial and their diameter will be only a few miles at most.    They may be very long--more like O'neill cylinders and less like those envisioned by von Braun and Chesley Bonnestal.   They might be made from material harvested from asteroids like Ceres, but they will not simply be those asteroids.

The third difficult, but not intractable problem, is radiation.  All manned space missions so far have been one of two things:  very short or, beneath the van Allen Radiation belts, which protect us from a lot of radiation.  A colony on the moon, Mars, or in a space station or elsewhere, will need considerable radiation shielding.   The simplest way to do this today is using many feet of shielding.  Heavy metals like Lead are the most effective by thickness, but a much thicker layer of dirt or water is much more effective.  I'm think that most space habitations, including those in centrifugal stations, will be protected by ten meters or more of whatever material is most convenient.  Digging deep underground will be the simplest way to provide this.

 Water is relatively common in space, but it will be a limited resource for most colonies.  Air is a little more problematic, but not really.   We can breathe any non-poisonous gas that contains enough Oxygen and CO2.  On earth, Nitrogen is most convenient and likely will be in space too, but we're far from limited.  Oxygen can be made from water and other things by Electrolysis and is a byproduct of photosynthesis.

 We will need plants growing in space to feed ourselves.   Simply dedicating surface area to plants is not particularly efficient: The most solar-efficient plants are well under 1%, where present photovoltaics can easily do 15%.  Put photovoltaics on all possible surfaces and grow plants underground under efficient electric lighting.  The photovoltaics are much more tolerant of radiation than plants are are relatively easy to replace, and to manufacture from materials that we already know are on The Moon and Mars.

Presuming we don't drive ourselves extinct first (and Elon Musk and Donald Trump are presently the leading individuals working towards making us extinct)  I think we will have permanent colonies in space by 2050 or so, and self-sufficient colonies some time after 2100.  The sorts of populations on Mars and Ceres envisioned in The Expanse are unlikely to occur until there is a major breakthrough, such as the Expanse's Epstein Drive, but I'd think that by 2200 there will be tens of thousands of people living, breeding and dying entirely in space.  Not the millions portrayed by the Expanse. 

Why Do Liberals Think Trump Supporters are Stupid?

 

The following is by Florida writer Adam-Troy Castro, 2019

'An anguished question from a Trump supporter: "Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?"

The serious answer: Here’s what we really think about Trump supporters - the rich, the poor, the malignant and the innocently well-meaning, the ones who think and the ones who don't...

That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought "Fine."

That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, "Okay."

That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, "No problem."

That when he made up stories about seeing muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, "Not an issue."

That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn't care, you chirped, "He sure knows me."

That when you heard him illustrate his own character by telling that cute story about the elderly guest bleeding on the floor at his country club, the story about how he turned his back and how it was all an imposition on him, you said, "That's cool!"

That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw.

That when you heard him brag that he doesn't read books, you said, "Well, who has time?"

That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn't commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, "That makes sense."

That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, "Yes!"

That when you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a man's coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, "What a great guy!"

That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, "Thumbs up!"

That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, "That's the way I want my President to be."

That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they're supposed to be regulating and you have said, "What a genius!"

That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, "That's smart!"

That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was the middle of water and you have said, "That makes sense."

That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, "falling in love" with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, "That's statesmanship!"

That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids. has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas - he explains that they’re just “animals” - and you say, “well, ok then.”

That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise.

What you don't get, Trump supporters in 2019, is that succumbing to frustration and thinking of you as stupid may be wrong and unhelpful, but it's also...hear me...charitable.

Because if you're NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are less flattering.

How To End US "Decline"

The Orange Terrorist, in his inauguration speech today, said he will end US decline.  Sorry, Dim Don, you, more than anyone else, represent US decline.  Here are some things that will actually reverse the things your voters have been complaining about

Raise the minimum wage.  Lots of evidence (Kruger and Card, etc), proves that at least for moderate changes, raising the minimum wage helps the economy, and there's essentially no evidence that it hurts, even for substantial raises.

Increase taxes on the rich.  From before the great depression until the 1960s, the top marginal tax rate was above 90% and even after Kennedy's cuts, the top rate was over 70%.   This does not seem to have hurt the US economy at all.  Every single case of a tax cut for the rich supposedly improving the economy can be debunked.  For example, Reagan's 1983 cut caused people (mostly businesses) to change the timing of expenses to optimize for the tax change, but after the dust had settled, the economy returned to the mean it had been on before.   It's also important to realize that the extremely high tax rates were only a marginal rate.  For example, in 1955, a married couple earning over $400K owed 91% of their earnings over $400K to the IRS.  A $400K income in 1955 is equivalent to $4.7M today.  But this is only a marginal rate.  The median family income in 1955 was $4400, and the tax on that was $940.  Our $400K earner is actually only paying about a 70% effective rate.

Laffer and others argue that there is a threshold tax rate beyond which, there is no incentive to invest or expand businesses.  Lots of research has been done on this, and there's no evidence at all of such an effect below about 70% effective tax rate.   It's important to realize that when we had these extremely high tax rates, that all of the people who were paying them were getting huge no-bid contracts from the government.  You don't hear much about Howard Hughes and Henry Kaiser trying to lower tax rates.   You hear a lot about them trying to avoid realizing dividends and gains so they wouldn't get taxed, and making big investments and loans so they could call that an expense.

All income should be taxed at the same rate.  Today, long term capital gains and a few other things are taxed at a much lower rate.  I think the right way to do this is to exempt all income below some level, appropriate for where the person lives, and tax all income above that at the same rate.  The marginal tax rate system was an attempt to do that, but I think it's outlived it's usefulness.    I'm ok with long term gains being adjusted by a CPI correction.  40 years ago, this would have been painful to compute, but nobody does their taxes by hand anymore.  The computer can figure it out.

Effectively ban non-productive profiteering.   The value of the economy is the value of all the goods and services in it.   If it is possible to make money without providing a service, this is a drain on the economy. Examples of this include high-velocity trading, private equity, hedge funds, and several others.  Insurance has become largely a scam, especially health insurance.   Some of these things do provide an actual service, but the drag on the economy far outweighs their Return on Investment.   Countries which have nationalized health care pay less than half what the US does.

I'm pretty sure we could devise a scheme which taxes businesses at a rate inversely proportional to the number of employees.    So a private equity or high speed trading firm employs about 20 people and brings in a $billion a year, they should be taxed at 99%.  If a factory employs 10,000 people and brings in that same $billion, they should be taxed at 10 or 20%.   If a small shop employs 20 people and brings in $250K, it should be taxed at $10% or less.

Tax for-profit churches.  If a church engages in politics, proselytizing or any of a host of other for profit operations, they should lose their tax exempt status.  If a church (or any other organization) sponsors a food bank or other actual charity, they should get an exemption for that, but not for funding the preacher's gold mines in Africa.  A significant fraction of the Orange Terrorists support comes from for-profit churches telling their congregants that opposing him is a threat to our freedom.  The truth is pretty close to the opposite.  Simply taxing them will make a lot of them go away.

Support and encourage unions.  The time that America worked best was the 30 years after WWII.  At that time, about 30% of workers were in a trade union.  Trade unions give workers bargaining power which most workers lack.

Build/Rebuild infrastructure.   This employs a lot of people.  The ROI on infrastructure is extremely high.

Adjust the zoning laws to make sure there's profitable low-income housing and healthy food everywhere.  For example, places like South Lake Union here in Seattle used to be a warren of moderate priced apartments.  The rules need to make sure that the moderate income people who work downtown have a place to live.  Tax the bejezus out of luxury condos, etc., and make it cheap to have low-cost restaurants and other shops.

I'm a fan of transit, but we cannot make people use transit by making the alternative miserable.  Some people cannot ride the bus to work--a repairman, a consultant who works a different place every day, etc.

Separate run-of-the-mill banking from Investment Banking.  Until it was overturned in 1996, the Glass Steagal act gave protections to ordinary banks, called "Savings and Loans", including federally insured deposits.  They also did regular inspections of banks and closed them if they violated certain rules.  This meant that for the period that Glass-Steagall was in effect, S&Ls gave a reliable 5% or so interest and nobody lost everything.  Investment banks wanted the government protection, without the limitations, so they convinced congress to overturn this sensible protection.  11 years later, the economy collapsed. Banking and the building industry are very important.  Nobody was making big profits out of S&Ls unless thy were scammers, but it kept a huge part of the economy healthy.

We need to make it as cheap and healthy as possible to be poor.  Whether this is Universal Basic Income, Housing subsidies, or something else, we can't have poor people starving or homeless.

In the same way, we need to make sure that everyone has a safety net.  Rich people claim that only rich people start businesses.  Historically, this is not true.  The people who start businesses are in a situation where they know that failure doesn't make their family destitute.  Whether that's extended family, government programs or something else is beside the point.  At the present time, this does mean that only rich people can start businesses

Are Electric Trucks Practical?

 I just watched a video where the speaker is arguing that the amount of trucking we have in the US will be impossible to achieve if we electrify it all.  This sounded wrong to me, so here are a few numbers.

 There are about 13M trucks over 10,000 lbs in the US, about 3M of them doing long haul.  The vast majority are doing short haul delivery.  Tesla claims it's semi can do 1.7 miles per KWh.  My model S gets about 2.8 miles per KWh and it weighs less than 5000 lbs, so I suspect that 1.7 is optimistic.    Let's guess a full size long haul truck can actually get 1.5 miles per KWh.  Long haul trucks are limited to about 500 miles a day by driver's hours regulations, which works out to about 333 KWh per day.   So to power all 3M of those trucks would take 1 million megawatt hours or 1 terrawatt hour.

That sounds like a big number and it is.  But here's another big number.   In 2022, the US produced about 434 Terrawatt hours of electricity from wind turbines.  That's about 1.2 TWh per day--about 20% more than would be needed to power all those trucks.  Could we add enough additional wind turbines to achieve this?   Yes, definitely.  Present deployment rates have us doubling every 6 or 7 years.

The other 10 million trucks do not consume nearly that much power.  The vast majority of trucks average much less than 100 miles per day, doing deliveries, moving containers around in seaports, etc. The postal service, Amazon and others have been finding that their fleets of electric vehicles are vastly cheaper to operate than fossil fuel counterparts.   It's certainly well under 1TWh per day.

Metric vs English System

 I think it's important to understand that the metric system is in some ways superior to the english system of measurement, but in most ways equal.  That the US is stuck on the English system is an accident of history.

During the middle ages and earlier, every region had its own set of measurements, all a little distinct, and in most cases, the units didn't relate well to each other.  France and the rest of Europe pretty much stuck with the old ways--there were at least a dozen distinct units call a foot (pied) in France at the time of the revolution, all a little different from each other and none relating particularly to longer or shorter units.  Britain had this same problem, but in the late 1500s, Parliament decided to rationalize this.  They determined, by statute, that a foot was 12 inches, a yard was 3 feet, a chain was 22 yards, a furlong was 10 chains, a mile was 8 furlongs, an acre was 10 square chains, (or a furlong by a chain), and so forth. This happened to be at the start of the great period of British colonization, and as a consequence, these statute measurements found close to universal acceptance in the largely British American colonies.  They made far greater sense than the mess of the rest of the world.

One of the fads at the time of the revolutions was decimalization.  When Hamilton and others were deciding on a currency for their new country, they embraced the new idea, and went with the decimal dollar.  The english system of money at the time was a mix of sensible and less so:  the pound was 240 pence, split into shillings, but also split into other weird things like a guinea.  240 is divisible by 3, which is not true of decimal systems.

During their revolution, the French decided, finally, to rationalize their system and based it on navigation:  there were exactly 10,000,000 meters between the equator and the north pole on the line that ran through the Louvre, in Paris.  The US president at the time, Jefferson, thought this was a good idea and got the french to send a standard meter and kilogram to Washington.  Unfortunately, the ship was lost at sea and they never got there. Rather than cook up their own, possibly different versions, the Americans stuck with feet, inches and pounds, until another set of standards could be sent from France.  Unfortunately, the French government never got its act together to send another.

At the same time, something really amazing was happening--the industrial revolution.  This started in Britain (Scotland) but soon spread to America.  All of a sudden, standardized parts were all the rage, especially things like Nuts and Bolts, because that made it possible to outsource large parts of your manufacturing process, and suddenly manufacturing was a Big Deal.  The US standard, which has come to be called SAE (society of automotive engineers) measured things in fractional inches and threads per inch, but they did something very special: they established a rating system for the strength of these components.     An American engineer was unlikely to specify a metric (or whitworth) bolt because it was harder to be confident of its strength.

I am an american trained as a scientist--I am perfectly comfortable with either system.  Most of the time it really doesn't matter.  1/4-20 is pretty close to 6mm .8 thread.  as long as I know which I'm using, the difference is unimportant.  There are a few cases where it does matter.  3/4 inches is a standard width for a lot of things, such as the width of electrical and masking tape.  Much of the time it doesn't matter.  But when somebody specifies 20mm, as they often do in Europe. it's a bloody pain to find this in America.  3/4" is 19.1 mm.  Close, but no cigar.   I just needed to get some holddowns for my workbench.  American dogholes are 3/4", european dogholes are 20mm. one will not work in the other.

Bands from Berkeley

I randomly caught a few bars of "Feelin' Blue" from their Willie and the Poor Boys album brought me back...I probably hadn't heard this since I lived in Berkeley in the mid '70s, but it took probably less than a second to recognize it.

Credence Clearwater Revival.  Technically, from El Cerrito, a town just north of Berkeley, but they made most of their records at Fantasy Records, on Parker Street, in Berkeley.  I lived on Parker myself during school year 74-5, although over a mile from the studio.

Country Joe and the Fish.  Joe McDonald's family didn't move to Berkeley until he was an adult, but his mother would be mayor while I lived there and the band would be formed there.   I saw them once, Country Joe without the rest of the band a couple of times.  Of course everybody saw them at Woodstock:  "Give me an F.  Give a U..."

Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen.   Their one big hit, Hot Rod Lincoln, was very out of character for them.   I saw them at Winterland, the Oakland Coleseum, several free shows in various parks.  They always put on a great show.

Joy of Cooking.  A short-lived but terrific band, led by two women.  One of them, Terry Garthwaite, sang in a style strongly resembling Mavis Staples and I was a fan of them before I'd ever heard of the Staples Singers.

Greg Kihn Band.  I first saw Greg Kihn, busking, solo, with his guitar in 1973 on the steps of the Student Union building on the Berkeley campus.  He played there several times, until he came back with a full band.  I wasn't really surprised when he had a hit on MTV in the early 80s.  His band was largely from another Berkeley band, the Earth Quake, which was pretty local.  One of their songs was called AC-DC and it enough resembled a different, later band called AC-DC that at first I thought it was the same band.

The Klezmorim were a Klezmer band that got its start playing in Sproul Plaza, where I saw them several times.  They had some success

Green Day and Counting Crows were both from Berkeley, and didn't get their start until after I'd left.

There are of course a bunch of other bay area bands that frequently played Berkeley.  I saw Jerry Garcia at the Keystone, and the Grateful Dead famously played the Greek Theater on campus several times.  I saw Merle Saunders a couple of times on campus.  Tower of Power didn't come to Berkeley much, but their home base was just south in Oakland.  Santana

Reagan Won in a Landslide?

 No, Reagan didn't win the election of 1980 in a landslide, or even close to it.  But he governed as if he had won the mandate conferred by a landslide.  

There were three main candidates in 1980:

Jimmy Carter, incumbent, got 35.5M votes and 49 electors.

Ronald Reagan got 43.9M votes and 489 electors

John Anderson got 5.7M votes and no electors.

Anderson was a moderate republican, a thing which no longer exists.  In hindsight, it's pretty clear that he ran as a spoiler, stealing votes from Carter.  In addition to the third party candidate, Reagan's team sabotaged the hostage negotiations with Iran, getting them to defer the release of the prisoners until shortly before the inauguration.  Reagan took credit for this, even though it was entirely the work of Carter's team.

Before this sabotage occurred, it looked like Carter had a solid path to re-election, being up by as much as 15 points over Reagan.

Carter won only 6 states: Hawaii, Maryland, Rhode Island, DC, and his home state of Georgia and his running mate's home of Minnesota.    But many of the states that Reagan won were flipped by Anderson's cut:

Reagan won Arkansas bu 5,000 votes.  Anderson got 22000.  6 electors.

Reagan won Connecticut by 135000 votes.  Anderson got 172000.  8 electors.

Reagan won Delaware by 5500 votes, Anderson got 16000.   3 electors.

Reagan won Kentucky by 19000 votes.  Anderson got 31000,  9 electors

Reagan won Maine by 17000 votes.  Anderson got 53000.   2 electors.

Reagan won Massachusetts by 4000 votes.  Anderson got 382,000.   14 electors.   (This is where I was living in 1980)

Reagan won New York by 170,000 votes.  Anderson got 468000.   41 electors

Reagan won North Carolina by 40,000 votes.  Anderson got 53000. 13 electors.

Reagan won Tennesee by 4500 votes.  Anderson got 36,000.  10 electors.

Reagan won Vermont by 12000 votes. Anderson got 32000.   3 electors.

Reagan won Wisconsin by 107000 votes.  Anderson got 160,000.  11 electors.

All together, Anderson took at least 120 electors from Carter.   this was not enough to overturn the election: 369 to 169 electors.  Reagan won.  but where the pundit class tells us it was a landslide, it was actually a fairly near thing.

Reagan proceeded to sabotage the income tax, unions, monopoly regulation, infrastructure construction and much more, and we have still not been able to recover to this day, more than 40 years later.