Monday, November 28, 2011
Earths population reached 7 billion this month. As WN pointed out two
years ago (WN 19 Jun 09) that's double what it
was in 1968, the year Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich warned of desperate shortages in "The
Population Bomb." Julian Simon, a libertarian economist at the University
of Maryland, challenged Ehrlich to a public wager on a list of commodity
prices. Ehrlich lost on every point, but the real loser was the
environment: anthropogenic climate change, vast floating garbage patches in
ocean gyres, starvation in parts of the world, the Hubbert peak in oil
production, perpetual warfare etc. But there was also good news in
1968; "the Pill," a combined-hormone oral contraceptive, was approved by
the FDA. The Pill is arguably the most important technological invention
in history, and last week the Obama administration made it clear that
health insurance plans are required to cover birth-control expenses without
co-pays. The policy follows the recommendation of the Institute of
Medicine, but prompted protests from Catholic bishops who will have fewer
souls to save. An editorial in the New York Times called the policy
a proud achievement of the administration.
You may have noticed that Martian landscapes photographed by Rovers are
pretty drab compared to Earth landscapes taken by Ansell Adams. The
problem is not the cameras or the lighting. Rocks, even red ones, simply
do not Yellowstone Park make. The Mars lobby insists we should be touring
the red planet with humans rather than soulless machines. But even if we
could find astronauts with the artistic instincts of Ansell Adams, the Mars
quest is for life to which we are not related. Astronauts would be
compelled to spend perhaps nine months waiting for the appropriate
conjunction of Earth and Mars. Unless a way could be found to suspend
their diurnal rhythms during those months, the risk of contaminating Mars
with Earth life seems unacceptably high. The difficulty of mounting a
human mission to Mars is probably sufficient to keep us from doing
something foolish. Meanwhile, the evolution of our Rovers with every
generation is a wonder to behold. Humans, by contrast, have not noticeably
improved in 200,000 years. A huge advance in Rover technology in Curiosity
is the use of RTG technology to provide power.
Previous Mars rovers have all relied on batteries or solar panels for
energy. Alas, they have problems in dust storms, and Mars is a dusty
planet. For all of our deep space missions, however, we have relied on
radioisotope thermoelectric generators, RTGs. It is the most reliable and
longest duration electric power generation system ever devised, but we're
running out of plutonium 238. We'll talk more about it in the next issue.
The only thing faster is the speed at which the media goes to print with
unverified accounts that seem to violate natural law.
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