Monthly Archives: April 2021

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Last year, Elon Musk caused a stir when he said something provocative, but ultimately correct: theres a good chance the first Mars settlers will die. Now, the SpaceX mastermind, who is dead set on colonizing the Red Planet, is doubling down on that sentiment.

In a recent livestream touting his $100 million XPrize reward to whoever can figure out carbon removal, Musk dispelled the notion that the initial Mars journey will be some escape hatch for rich people.

Musk elaborated:

Of course, wealthy people and explorers arent two mutually exclusive groups. Deep-pocketed daredevils like James Cameron, for example, have made dangerous exploration their business, because having generational wealth often goes hand in hand with funding these kinds of expeditions.

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In his comments, Musk referred to Sir Ernest Shackleton, who led the first attempted trans-Antarctic crossing in 1914. Shackleton was highly decorated and honored during his lifetime, but he definitely wasnt wealthyat least not for long. He came from a working class family and was usually trying to accumulate wealth somehow, whether by making risky business investments or spending all his money on expeditions.

The key to surviving the desperate conditions that await the first Martian settlers isnt having moneyits balancing their response to predictable events (limited water, no atmosphere, radiation) and developing a resiliency against unpredictable events, Jennifer Buz, Ph.D., an areologist at Northern Arizona University, told Pop Mech last year.

Theres a lot you can plan for, Buz said, so you could kind of prolong your life to an extent, but theres always going to be something thats not perfectly accounted for.

Mars settlers will likely need to live in underground caves and carefully monitor and dole out all the necessary resourcescertainly no place for anyones economic status to make a difference. Even the popular first Mars city plans put an emphasis on the per-person cost of buying uniform housing and travel, not of an optional economy of luxury goods once youre there.

That Musk called Mars tough sledding speaks directly to Shackleton and other Antarctic explorers trips across the ice on sleds or sledges. No, Mars wont literally involve sleds, but well have to carry all the resources we need all the way to the Red Planet, and then into the sheltered human settlements, and then out with any waste products.

In fact, our lives on Mars will need to be part of one of the most closed, circular systems ever devisedquite the opposite of the way Earths economies are often stratified and unjust. Musks urge to go to Mars is caused in part by the way previous generations of explorers have colonized and exploited resources around the world.

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Elon Musk: Mars Isn't for Rich PeopleIt's for Explorers Who Will 'Probably Die' - Popular Mechanics

Elon Musks SpaceX just won a $2.9bn Nasa contract to land astronauts on the moon, beating out Jeff Bezos.

The money isnt a big deal for either of them. Musk is worth $179.7bn. Bezos, $197.8bn. Together, thats almost as much as the bottom 40% of Americans combined.

And the moon is only their stepping stone.

Musk says SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2026 and wants to establish a colony by 2050. Its purpose, he says, will be to ensure the survival of our species.

If we make life multi-planetary, there may come a day when some plants and animals die out on Earth but are still alive on Mars, he tweeted.

Bezos is also aiming to build extraterrestrial colonies, but in space rather than on Mars. He envisions very large structures, miles on end that will hold a million people or more each.

Back on our home planet, Musk is building electric cars, which will help the environment. And Bezos is allowing us to shop from home, which might save a bit on gas and thereby also help the environment.

But Musk and Bezos are treating their workers like, well, dirt.

Last spring, after calling government stay-at-home orders fascist and tweeting FREE AMERICA NOW, Musk reopened his Tesla factory in Fremont, California before health officials said it was safe to do so. Almost immediately, 10 workers came down with the virus. As cases mounted, Musk fired workers who took unpaid leave. Seven months later, at least 450 Tesla workers had been infected.

Musks production assistants, as theyre called, earn $19 an hour hardly enough to afford rent and other costs of living in northern California. Musk is virulently anti-union. A few weeks ago, the National Labor Relations Board found that Tesla illegally interrogated workers over suspected efforts to form a union, fired one and disciplined another for union-related activities, threatened workers if they unionized and barred employees from communicating with the media.

Bezos isnt treating his earthling employees much better. His warehouses impose strict production quotas and subject workers to seemingly arbitrary firings, total surveillance and 10-hour workdays with only two half-hour breaks often not enough time to get to a bathroom and back. Bezos boasts that his workers get $15 an hour but that comes to about $31,000 a year for a full-time worker, less than half the US median family income. And no paid sick leave.

Bezos has fired at least two employees who publicly complained about lack of protective equipment during the pandemic. To thwart the recent union drive in Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon required workers to attend anti-union meetings, warned theyd have to pay union dues (untrue Alabama is a right-to-work state), and threatened them with lost pay and benefits.

Musk and Bezos are the richest people in America and their companies are among the countrys fastest growing. They thereby exert huge influence on how other chief executives understand their obligations to employees.

The gap between the compensation of CEOs and average workers is already at a record high. They inhabit different worlds.

If Musk and Bezos achieve their extraterrestrial aims, these worlds could be literally different. Most workers wont be able to escape into outer space. A few billionaires are already lining up.

The super-rich have always found means of escaping the perils of everyday life. During the plagues of the 17th century, European aristocrats decamped to their country estates. During the 2020 pandemic, wealthy Americans headed to the Hamptons, their ranches in Wyoming or their yachts.

The rich have also found ways to protect themselves from the rest of humanity in fortified castles, on hillsides safely above smoke and sewage, in grand mansions far from the madding crowds. Some of todays super rich have created doomsday bunkers in case of nuclear war or social strife.

But as earthly hazards grow not just environmental menaces but also social instability related to growing inequality escape will become more difficult. Bunkers wont suffice. Not even space colonies can be counted on.

Im grateful to Musk for making electric cars and to Bezos for making it easy to order stuff online. But I wish theyd set better examples for protecting and lifting the people who do the work.

Its understandable that the super wealthy might wish to escape the gravitational pull of the rest of us. But theres really no escape. If theyre serious about survival of the species, they need to act more responsibly toward working people here on terra firma.

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In space, no one will hear Bezos and Musks workers call for basic rights - The Guardian

Hollywood has taken many trips to space in the past, exploring the universe's vast expanse, its apathetically ruthless nature towards man, and the isolation and helplessness of the astronauts at its mercy. Sometimes it's through the lens of enigmatic allegory (Stanley Kubrick's magnum opus 2001: Space Odyssey) or breathtaking visuals (Alfonso Cuarn's Gravity), and other times mind-bending scientific theories (Christopher Nolan's Interstellar) or even a little bit of humour (Ridley Scott's The Martian).

Director Joe Penna's expedition to Mars in the 2021 movie Stowaway is neither as ambitious, nor mounted on as grand a scale, as the ones mentioned above. Instead, it unfolds in the rather claustrophobic confines of the Kingfisher, that is en route to a Mars colony. The cast is threadbare, but solid - Anna Kendrick as medical researcher Zoe, Toni Collette as the ship's commander Marina, and Daniel Dae Kim as biologist David. Toni's Marina is confident and steady and Daniel's David stoic yet a softie, but Anna kind of steals the frame as the adorkable space rookie, Zoe.

The crux of the film's story is a moral dilemma involving Kingfisher's titular and accidental stowaway - Michael Adams (Shamier Anderson), whom the crew finds stashed away and injured in a compartment of the craft. As they nurse him back to recovery, they realise that they don't have enough oxygen for four people. It soon becomes clear that one person (and that person being Michael, of course) has to die for the other three to live.

Each of the characters deals with the ethical quandary in their own way - Marina as the no-nonsense leader and David as the scientific pragmatist, both of whom understand that the success of their mission (that involves making Mars fit for human habitation), the fate of humanity, as well as their own lives, ride on eliminating Michael from the equation. On the other hand, Michael is the powerless someone who knows he's in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Zoe the idealist who will keep looking for alternate sources of oxygen rather than let this man die.

Visually, there's not much to fault with the movie and the scenes that unfold in space - especially when we finally leave the Kingfisher at some point in the second half - are well done. It's the pacing that's a letdown, and labeling it a thriller might be an overstatement. The film isn't exactly edge-of-your-seat until its fag end, and meanders quite a bit before making its point. However, among its strengths are its characters, that aren't cookie-cutter and have great chemistry. In fact, they're all endearing in their own way (even Michael, though his part is slightly under-cooked) which is what makes the story's haunting conclusion stay with you.

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Stowaway Review: A suspenseful albeit slow-paced space expedition - Times of India

While the first flight of the Mars helicopter got a lot of attention this week, an experiment on the Perseverance rover quietly accomplished another first, by making oxygen out of the Martian atmosphere.

Embedded within the body of Perseverance is a toaster-sized instrument called MOXIE (Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment). The instrument is a technology demonstrator that produced fivegrams of oxygen from the mostly carbon dioxide Martian air.

Five grams is not a lot of oxygen. It would only keep you alive for about 10minutes, but the success of this test is a huge step towardsending humans to live on the Red Planet, and bringing them home again.

In simplest terms, Mars will kill you. The atmosphere is extremely thin, only one per centthe pressure ofEarth's, and is almost entirely made of carbon dioxide with only 0.16 per centoxygen. Compare that to the 20 per centoxygen in the Earth's much thicker atmosphere. That means explorers from Earth will need to provide their own oxygen by either bringing it from Earth, which is hugely expensive, or making it from resources on Mars.

MOXIE drew in a sample of Martian air, then using a combination of heat and electrochemistry, split the carbon dioxide molecules apart producing oxygen and carbon monoxide. The experiment proved that the process works, so in theory larger units could supply breathable air for Martian colonists.

The advantage of a MOXIE-like system is that it can be set up easily and start producing oxygen right away no matter what the location. But there is another source of oxygen on Mars ice. Like Earth, Mars has ice at the polar caps, and likely has significant amounts of sub-surface ice-rich permafrost

Not only is ice a source of water but you can crack that water into hydrogen and oxygen for both breathing and rocket fuel. Those elements can be extracted from water by electrolysis, or using electricity to break water molecules into their component elements. Ice deposits at the south pole of the moon might also be a sought after resource for lunar colonists.

Having a reliable oxygen supply on Mars is a big deal because the first humans to go there will be in for the long haul. Due to orbital mechanics of Mars and Earth, the two planets orbit the sun at different speeds, with Mars taking the outside track on the elliptical course around the sun so its year is twice as long as ours. A crew must launch towardMars when both planets are close together on the same side of the sun, but by the time they get there seven months later, the Earth will have zoomed ahead on the inside track out of reach. So they will have to wait for their home planet to circle the sun and catch up to Mars again before they can make the return journey. That could take up to a year.

Martian colonists will be homesteaders, like early pioneers, living off the land as much as possible. It will be a risky existence in the cold dry desert environment. Any problems will have to be dealt with on the spot because help is millions of kilometres and many months away.

Perhaps they will occasionally look up at a small blue dot in the pink Martian sky and think about their home planet, the only one we know of where oxygen is plentiful, the only place where a person can step outside, take a deep breath and not have to wear a space suit.

As we celebrate Earth Day this week, let's remember that while the other planets are incredibly interesting, there is literally no place like home. So go outside and breathe some oxygen. It's free on this planet.

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First breathable air produced on another planet - CBC.ca

The vastness of space is both wondrous and horrifying. Its amazing to explore the endless list of what surrounds the planet, but shocking to learn how those surroundings are all-consuming nothing . Walking through zero gravity looks cool, but remarkably less-so when you realize how no gravity means no control. Space is as scary as it is special, which is why its been such a constant setting for science-fiction movies. For every laser gun fired, spaceship going at lightspeed, or alien monster birthed, there have also been movies that tackle isolation, fear, morality and the human condition. Taking the imagination and wonder of outer space and turning it into something intimidating is a bold move for any filmmaker, but its a very thin line to walk across successfully, one that Stowaway, the latest film at Netflix, tries to accomplish.

The set up for the story is rock solid. A private company is sending a three-person team on a two-year mission to start a colony on Mars. Theres team commander Marina (Toni Collette), medical professional Zoe (Anna Kendrick) and botanist David (Daniel Dae Kim) who are all feeling the weight of their mission but excited to take this great leap for mankind. Then a problem literally drops-in; Michael (Shamier Anderson), an engineer for the company who was working on the teams space station before takeoff when he suffered an injury and passed out while still on board. Michael is desperate to get back to Earth while the team is adjusting to having an unexpected fourth member on board. Not only that, but it turns out the ship doesnt have enough oxygen to support the now four-person team all the way to Mars. Now the team has to decide what survives: Michael or their mission.

This is not the first time co-writer/director Joe Penna has told a story of survival in a desolate location, having made the frigid drama Arctic two years ago. With its high-tech implications and likely pricier setup, Stowaway is a more of a challenge for Penna and its one that he frequently rises to. He sets the mood for most scenes with little exposition and good visual storytelling, whether it involves showing the restricted set of the space station or the gravity (no pun intended) of Michaels situation when he first wakes up from his injury. He manages to humanize his small group of characters, all brilliant professionals in their own rights while being both logical and humane to Michael. Hes also good at emphasizing the tense atmosphere of problem-solving in space, especially in the climactic space walk along the station.

Its just a shame that Penna and co-writer Ryan Morrison crafted the story from territory mined by the likes of Apollo 13, Armageddon, Gravity and Ad Astra, which all harnessed drama from the cold depths of space. In fact, Stowaway is basically an inverse of Ridley Scotts 2015 hit The Martian where instead of a man in the dire circumstances of being marooned on Mars, its a team on a mission to Mars stuck with a man making their situation dire. It also doesnt have the energy that The Martian had in seeing botanist Mark Watney progress in his own survival and the NASA team figuring out how to save him. Instead, its a visually flat and progressively dour affair only helped by the commitment of the actors and the lush score from Oscar nominee Volker Bertelmann (Lion, The Old Guard, Ammonite). And while the movie has a solid pace at 116-minutes long, the movie seems to just stop after its rather moving climax without a proper conclusion. Its as if Penna just ran out of time (or money) to film the movies last ten minutes.

None of the shortcomingstime-wise or otherwiseof Stowaway fall on its cast. The four actors here all carry the dramatic weight of the movie effectively and in different ways. Collette bears the burden of being in-charge of a situation she has no control over and makes the audience feel for her having no safe solutions to the problems at hand. Kim is more reserved but seething with anger and frustration that his lifes work is being sacrificed for some unforeseen complication. Even Anderson, being the wild card of this whole story, is never over-emphasized or given some kind of dramatic twist in his character development. He plays being in the wrong place at the wrong time with patience and a perfect reaction to how dire his situation is. The real surprise here though is Kendrick, mostly known for comedies or being the comedic foil in dramas (see her Oscar-nominated performance in Up in the Air), whose character is trying desperately to save Michaels life out of basic human decency and a prior experience. Kendrick isnt showy in her performance, getting the frantic struggle of her character across in focused bursts of stress and heartache. Shes the conscience of the movie and seeing her wither away the worse the situation gets is heartbreaking.

Though slightly flawed and unoriginal, theres still a compelling story in Stowaway that Penna and co. pull off. His prior methods of survival epics are shrunk down with greater intimacy here, making for tense human drama and an engaging ticking-clock element as the team scrambles to save their own lives. In a more positive comparison to The Martian, its also impressive that Penna managed to keep Stowaway engaging without the scope and star-power Scotts blockbuster had. In this new era of introspective and character-driven sci-fi thrillers, its comforting to know that a $100-million budget and lasers arent needed to make something memorable in outer space.

Stowaway is now streaming on Netflix.

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'Stowaway' review: Small cast and big emotion fuel space thriller - The Young Folks

The Week

No one enjoys wearing a face mask, and some medical experts are now saying people especially vaccinated people mostly don't need to wear them for non-intimate outdoor activities. The coronavirus does not spread as easily outdoors though it could jump from human to human if, say, infected Tucker Carlson fans get in your face to scream (politely) about how you are making them uncomfortable by wearing a mask outdoor. And if one of these triggered people also calls the cops or child protective services because your child is wearing a mask, well, that may be on Carlson, too, after his Monday night show on Fox News. Tucker Carlson is now telling his audience to harass people who wear face masks outside. If they see children wearing masks, Tucker says the response should be no different than when you see a kid being abused -- "call the police immediately, contact child protective services" pic.twitter.com/4svVH0JY3s Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) April 27, 2021 The Federalist's Molly Hemingway evidently thought Carlson had a good, and viable, idea. legit deranged to think its possible to politely walk up to a total stranger and tell them your mask is making me uncomfortable pic.twitter.com/4K3zR3Lfxw Christian Vanderbrouk (@UrbanAchievr) April 27, 2021 Carlson's colleague Laura Ingraham hit on masked children, too, suggesting this may be a growing front in the conservative culture wars. pic.twitter.com/kBmCeMGzSM Brendan Karet (@bad_takes) April 27, 2021 The COVID-19 pandemic has not gone away, new variants seem to be hitting younger people, children are not immune, and people under 16 are not yet eligible to be vaccinated. Also, per science, masks work, even outdoors. An average of about 715 Americans are dying every day from COVID-19, a sharp drop from February but not nothing, and very few of them are children, but not zero. Presumably, Carlson is just trying to make a point about snooty mask wearers scowling at mask scofflaws, but it's unlikely 911 operators will see it that way if his viewers take him seriously. More stories from theweek.comThe Oscars finale was a heartless disaster5 brutally funny cartoons about COVID anti-vaxxersRepublicans are expected to gain seats in redrawn 2022 congressional maps, but Democrats could be worse off

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Bruno Mars to return to Las Vegas with July performances at Park MGM - Yahoo News