Category Archives: Moon Colonization

Posted at 6:08 pm February 13, 2014

Tags: Culture, Photography, Visual arts

PAOAY, ILOCOS NORTE The Gameng ti Ilocos Norte exhibit showcases Ilocano culture and heritage through the lenses of local photographers and abel artworks by local artists

Gameng ti Ilocos Norte translates to Treasures of Ilocos Norte and can be found at the newly inaugurated Arte Luna Gallery.

Inline with Ilocos Nortes upcoming founding anniversary, Dr. Joven Cuanang, the exhibits curator, felt it was high time to shine the spotlight on Ilocano artists.

Dr. Cuanang is a dedicated arts patron and owns Pinto Art Museum in Antipolo City.

The exhibit features more than 40 pieces of large-format photos related to the people and placesinIlocos Norte, according to Cuanang. Most are contributed by the members of the The Ilocondia Photographic Society (TIPS).

At the same time, what we will do is to showcase what can be done with the inabel. The aim is for us to be able to relate to our roots, Dr. Cuanang added.

Inabel is a hand-woven textile done on traditional wooden looms by Ilocano artisans using weaving techniques. Noted for its sturdiness and bold designs, inabel is an important part of the cultural heritage of the Ilocos region.

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Gameng exhibit shows Ilocos way of life, inabel art

Imagine pulling on your socks and underwear one morning and realizing that when you take them off at the end of the day, you wont be doing it on Earth.

Of all the thoughts to float through a mans mind on the morning of his first trip into space, its a strange one to have, but Col. Chris Hadfield uses the example to illustrate that when an astronaut climbs aboard a rocket ship to blast off from Earth it happens on a day like any other.

Except, if youre Chris Hadfield, its 1995 and the day that has been the focal point of your life since you were nine years old and watched in awe as Neil Armstrong took his first steps onto the surface of the moon has finally arrived.

And its the day you approach a spaceport and see the shuttle Atlantis in the distance the ship thats going to carry you off the planet to the Russian space station, Mir.

Its also the day that youll climb awkwardly into the vehicle, which is sitting on its tail and allow yourself to be strapped into cramped space above what is essentially a giant bomb.

Then, stuffed into an uncomfortable, oversized suit and wearing a diaper, you wait, because there are still two hours to go until launch.

What do you do? he asks.

Test the diaper, someone yells from the audience.

Good answer, he laughs.

But, in fact, says Hadfield, you nap.

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Chris Hadfield touches down in Langley

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Science fiction is often charged with nave technological optimism and historical amnesia. But for present-day Californians struggling with a wide range of environmental and social problems, science fiction might just provide the perspective we need to successfully pivot from the boom times of the twentieth century to the messy prospect of the century ahead. It won't be the techno-futurist elements of science fictionmiraculously clean energy sources, flying cars, off-planet factoriesthat are going to save us, though. The classic works of science fiction have a different, more fatalistic side that speaks more usefully to our current condition, awash as we are in the environmental and social consequences of the Golden State's postwar boom.

Even as they lived through and contributed to an era of unbridled technological optimism, the giants of postwar science fiction in California brooded not simply over the negative consequences of technologya common anxiety in the Atomic Agebut also over deeper philosophical questions about what it means to be dependent on and even determined by the technologies that made life in postwar California possible.

In the works of three postwar California writers in particularRay Bradbury (1940s and 1950s), Robert Heinlein (1950s and 1960s), and Philip K. Dick (1960s and 1970s)we can watch the rapid development of dams, aqueducts, interstate highways systems, suburban sprawl, and their consequences as they are digested in the speculative cultural form of science fiction. Bradbury dramatizes the personal difficulty of adjusting to the radical novelty of West Coast civilizations carved out of the desert. Heinlein is less haunted by the loss of tradition and more interested in the new political and economic possibilities created by the very artificiality of the postwar environment. And Dickperhaps the most useful guide to our presentgives full expression to the uncanny sense of being lashed to the decrepit infrastructure of the past. It is this complex exposition of how it feels to be a creature of civic infrastructureand not teleporters, psionic readers, and hyperdrivesthat turns out to be the most prescient vision of California science fiction.

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Postwar science fiction is to a surprising degree a phenomenon of the western United States. With a few notable exceptions, the major figures in the development of the genre's Golden Age and New Wave eras (together covering the late 1930s through the 1970s) all had significant biographical connections to the Westand this at a time when the western states accounted for a small fraction of the total US population (around 10 percent in 1930, rising to 17 percent in 1970). A.E. Van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Kim Stanley Robinson are but the most celebrated of the hundreds of significant science fiction writers to live and work in California and the far West during this period.

As the producers of Golden Age sci-fi were lured to the region by the new economic opportunities available to writers in the pulp, television, and film industries of Southern California, they were also drawn into an imaginative relationship with California's physical novelty as a place sprung de novo from the plans of hydraulic engineers, road builders, and tract housing developers. Many of the major themes of science fiction in this periodthe experience of living in an arid Martian colony, the palpable sense of depending in a very direct way on large technological systems, unease with the scope and direction of the military and aeronautics industries, the navigation of new social rules around gender and racecan be read as barely veiled references to everyday life in California. For sci-fi writers, teasing out the implications of an era in which entire new civilizations could be conjured almost from nothing through astonishing feats of engineering and capital was a form of realism. They were writing an eyewitness account of what was the most radical landscape-scale engineering project in the history of the world.

By the 1940s, Ray Bradbury's set of collected stories, The Martian Chronicles, signaled definitively that science fiction had largely moved on from its prewar fixation on interplanetary romance and gee-whiz gizmo stories. While Bradbury drew on an extensive tradition of Mars fiction, the stories have almost nothing in common with Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom novels of the previous generation. They are better understood as explorations of postwar suburbia: John Cheever rocketed to the deep-space exurbsor rather the dusty precincts of southern California. Instead of playing heroic roles in traditional planetary romances through the conquest or liberation of alien civilizations, Bradbury's colonists get entangled in far more mundane passions.

The first violence arises not from a clash of civilizations but from the jealousy of a Martian husband whose lonely wife dreams of being rescued from her constricted domestic sphere by a space-helmeted courtier from Earth in Bradbury's "Ylla." In "The Earth Men," when human beings first arrive on the red planet in small numbers, they are greeted not by a phalanx of alien troops but rather by the Martian psychiatric bureaucracy, whose flummoxed doctors finally decide that the only way to deal with the peculiar, untreatable aliens who show up claiming to be visitors from another planet is to euthanize them. A subsequent wave of colonists succumbs to a fatal form of mass nostalgic delusion that causes them to mistake the precincts of an alien landscape for their own Midwestern American childhood homes in "The Third Expedition."

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The Landscapes Of Suburbia Are The Real Science Fiction

Minecraft Tekkit Gameplay: Part 7 "Jedi #39;s Castle"
Another day, another challenge. This time we are building complex tekkit stuff to help on our quest for moon colonization. Also, We (Jedi21) are building new...

By: Gaming Sanitarium

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Minecraft Tekkit Gameplay: Part 7 "Jedi's Castle" - Video

Jan 27 2014 / 10:13 pm

Review by Edward S. Herman

(Maximilian Forte Slouching Towards Sirte: NATOs War on Libya and AfricaBaraka. Books: Montreal CA 2012, 341 pp.)

Maximilian Fortes book on the Libyan war, Slouching Towards Sirte, is another powerful (and hence marginalized) study of the imperial powers in violent action, and with painful results, but supported by the UN, media, NGOs and a significant body of liberals and leftists who had persuaded themselves that this was a humanitarian enterprise. Forte shows compellingly that it wasnt the least little bit humanitarian, either in the intent of its principals (the United States, France, and Great Britain) or in its results. As in the earlier cases of humanitarian intervention the Libyan program rested intellectually and ideologically on a set of supposedly justifying events and threats that were fabricated, selective, and/or otherwise misleading, but which were quickly institutionalized within the Western propaganda system. (For the deceptive model applied in the war on Yugoslavia, see Herman and Peterson, The Dismantling of Yugoslavia, Monthly Review, October 2007; for the propaganda model applied to Rwanda, see Herman, Rwanda and the New Scramble for Africa, Z Magazine, Jan. 2014)

The key elements in the war-on-Libya model were the alleged acute threat that Gaddafi was about to massacre large numbers of civilians (in early 2011), his supposed use of mercenaries imported from the south (black Africans!) to do his dirty work, and his dictatorial rule. The first provided the core and urgent rationale for Security Council Resolution 1973 [R-1973], passed on March 17, 2011, which authorized member states to take all necessary measuresto protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahirija, including Benghazi , while excluding a foreign occupation force in any form Its fraudulently benign and limited character was shown by this exclusion of an occupation force, as presumably any actions under this resolution would be limited to aircraft and missile operations protecting civilians. Its deep bias is shown by its attributing the threat to civilians solely to Libyan government forces, not to the rebels as well, who turned out to greatly surpass the government forces as civilian killers, and with a racist twist.

As Forte spells out in detail, the imperial powers violated R-1973 from day 1 and clearly never intended to abide by its words. That resolution called for the immediate establishment of a cease-fire and a complete end to violence, and the need to intensify efforts to find a solution to the crisis and to facilitate a dialogue to lead to the political reforms necessary to find a peaceful and sustainable solution. Both Gaddafi and the African Union called for a cease fire and dialogue, but the rebels and imperial powers were not interested, and the bombing to protect civilians began within two days of the war-sanctioning resolution, without the slightest move toward obtaining a cease fire or starting negotiations.

Forte also shows that it was clear from the start that the imperial-power-warriors were using civilian protection as a figleaf cover for their real objectiveregime change and the removal of Gaddafi (with substantial evidence that his death was part of the program and carried out with U.S. participation). The war that followed was one in which the imperial powers worked in close collaboration with the rebel forces, serving as their air arm, but also providing them with arms, training and propaganda support. The imperial powers, and Dubai, also had hundreds of operatives on the ground in Libya, training the rebels and giving them intelligence and other support, hence violating R-1973s prohibition of an occupation force in any form.

Forte shows that the factual base for Gaddafis alleged threat to civilians, his treatment of protesters in mid-February 2011, was more than dubious. The claimed striking at protesters by aerial attacks, and the Viagra-based rape surge, were straightforward disinformation, and the number killed was small24 protesters in the three days, February 15-17, according to Human Rights Watchfewer than the number of alleged black mercenaries executed by the rebels in Derna in mid-February (50), and fewer than the early protester deaths in Tunis or Egypt that elicited no Security Council effort to protect civilians. There were claims of several thousand killed in February 2011, but Forte shows that this also was disinformation supplied by the rebels and their allies, but swallowed by many Western officials, media and other gullibles. That the actual evidence would induce the urgent and massive response by the NATO powers is implausible, and the rush to arms demands a different rationale than protecting civilians in a small North African state. Forte provides it, compellinglyObama and company were seizing the window of opportunity for regime change.

Forte demonstrates throughout his book that from the beginning of the regime-change-war the bombing powers were not confining themselves to protecting civilians, but were very often targeting civilians. He shows that, as in Pakistan, they used double-tapping, with lagged bombings that were sure civilian killers. They were also bombing military vehicles, troops and living quarters that were not attacking or threatening civilians. They also bombed ferociously anywhere their intelligence sources indicated that Gaddafi might be present. Forte also shows that the rebels were merciless in brutalizing and slaughtering people viewed as Gaddafi supporters, and in the substantial parts of the country where Gaddafi was supported, the rebels air-force (i.e., NATO) was regularly called upon to bomb, and it did so, ruthlessly.

Fortes book title, Slouching Towards Sirte, and his front cover which shows devastated civilian apartment buildings in that city, focus attention on the essence of the NATO-rebel war. Sirte was Gaddafis headquarters, and its populace and army remnants resisted the rebel advance for months, so it was eventually bombed into submission with a large number of civilians killed and injured. Forte notes that when NATO finally caught up with Gaddafi and bombed and decimated the small entourage that was with him on the outskirts of Sirte, this was justified by NATO because this group could still threaten civilians! This was a town that had to be destroyed to save itfor the rebels, who Forte shows (citing Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and UN and other observers) executed substantial numbers of captured Gaddafi supporters. This was a major war crimes scene. The civilians in Sirte needed protection, from NATO and the rebels.

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Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa – Book Review

Published on January 24, 2014

I dont like mid-winter melts. Photo by Paul Smith/Special to The Telegram

Published on January 24, 2014

Snowshoes on snowshoes off. Photo by Paul Smith/Special to The Telegram

Published on January 24, 2014

The first thing a setter does is build a good comfortable outhouse. This is mine. Photo by Paul Smith/Special to The Telegram

Is it possible that my descendants might live on Mars? Will they fly fish in summer and snowshoe in winter like I do here on Earth?

They might build cabins in the Martian forest or own sailboats on lovely glacier-fed lakes. Who knows what the future holds?

I think it is inevitable that humans will eventually fly to Mars. Its our nature to explore. There will always be the few amongst us who crave the ultimate adventure. The green grass on the other side of the hill is today, and always has been, irresistible to the spirited adventurous human soul.

It is why Columbus set sail in the Santa Maria, in spite of more reserved folks telling him and his crew that they would sail to their deaths off the edge of the world.

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Facilities first, and fly fishing on Mars

We should not send people to Mars until we create sufficient technology to get them home by Jared Fogel | Jan 23 2014

Mars: The Next Giant Leap for Mankind:http://www.mars-one.com. The Mars One website, which promotes its mission to colonize Mars through phrases like this, is doing everything it can to get the message out, and so far it has worked.

Less than a month ago, the Mars One project, which received more than 200,00 applicants to go on the mission, narrowed down the applicant pool to 1,058 men and women. Over the course of the next two years the program will narrow down the pool until there are six groups of four individuals remaining. From there, the future inter-planet explorers will undergo around eight years of training until the launch of their seven- to eight-month journey in 2024.

But theres a catch. The final 24 astronauts will be given only a one-way ticket to Mars. They will never return home.

This is uncharacteristic of any space missions to date. Historically speaking, whenever astronauts have been sent into space or to the moon, the intent has been for them to return home safely. However, this has not always been the case. Think of the Challenger, Columbia, and other space missions that suffered astronaut fatalities. This difference between the round trip always featured with NASA and the Mars Ones one-way ticket is likely because the Mars project is not funded by NASA or any other country but rather by a Netherlands non-profit organization.

Nevertheless, I dont think it is in anyones power to make the decision to send astronauts to their imminent deaths. I understand that these potential astronauts are signing up and agreeing to take part in this program under their own free will, but the program should not have been created in the first place because of this one-way trip aspect. Additionally, sometimes free will can be misinterpreted. For example, one man from Utah has decided that he would prefer to abandon his wife and four kids for the opportunity to journey to Mars. Thus, the Mars One would not only send people to live on Mars but would also potentially tear up families in the process.

Although there appear to be thousands of perfectly willing volunteers that will offer their lives on Earth for the chance to possibly live and die on Mars, this does not mean it is the right thing to do to send them there. Some may argue otherwise, but I believe an individual human life is more valuable than the knowledge gained from this expedition, especially since we could have the proper technology to bring them home 20 or 30 years down the road.

Even when the United States was first exploring potential moon exploration, the trip did not take place until we had sufficient technology to make a round trip: to the moon and back. Im sure there were plenty of individuals who would have offered their lives for the eternal fame that comes with exploration, but that doesnt mean it was right to offer up their lives for the sake of research and advancement. My point is that there was never any publicity involving one-way trips to the moon, and the trip did not take place until we knew that we could manage a round trip.

I understand that the moon is different than Mars, largely because Mars, after Earth, is the most habitable planet in the solar system thanks to its thin atmosphere and signs of water. Because there are no such conditions on the moon, there was never any mobilization to colonize there, but that doesnt change the fact that we decided that human exploration comes before colonization. Mars also lies much farther a seven- to eight-month journey away from Earth than the moon. Moreover, much like the moon, to our knowledge there are no signs of current life on Mars. Even with all of the potential research possibilities, the distance and lack of life presents a tough case to consider colonization a worthy trip.

Technological feasibility aside, I believe that the ultimate aim of the Mars One project is to stimulate new research on a planet with which we dont yet have much familiarity, and this is a very noble cause. On the other hand, it is not worth sacrificing lives, because no non-profit organization or any other organization should have the ability to offer up lives for the sake of research.

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FOGEL: One giant leap of faith

Every student has stories of their professors unique personalities but one has been to the moon and back, at least metaphorically.

A Penn State alumnus and currently an instructional designer for the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nahks TrEhnl is the artistic astronomer or the astronomic artist, whatever you want to call him.

He has finally found a way to mix his pallet with his two favorite interests, only to arrive back at Penn State, where he first realized his passion for them.

Long ago in time and space

TrEhnl got into space, robots and aliens some 30 years ago like many kids his age.

He grew up during the Voyager probe era with the mindset: Soon we'll get to see even more incredible things no one has ever seen before.

TrEhnl owned many astronomy books at the time, but one in particular had an effect on him that would solidify his interest in astrobiology to this day.

One of these had a particularly profound effect on me, containing a passage something to the effect of . . . and just think what if, on a planet around that star you see in your telescope, there's another creature with its own telescope, looking back at you? TrEhnl said via email. My interests in astrobiology, life elsewhere in the universe, and all that lit up big time, and its just stuck ever since.

When he was young, TrEhnl said he found a relief in Star Trek and the idea of life on other planets as he moved around the country every few years.

His fathers job with the United Way allowed him to travel to Tennessee, Mississippi , Georgia , Iowa and Texas before staying in Pennsylvania for the second half of high school.

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Penn State alumnus turns art into science and vice versa

Add to guns and prosthetic hands something much bigger and heavier forming from the nozzle of a 3D printer buildings printed out of concrete.

Partially funded by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation Countour Crafting is trying to develop 3D printed buildings using concrete. Company founder Behrokh Khoshnevis is a professor and director of Manufacturing Engineering Graduate Program at the University of Southern California.

Concrete printers would be able to build a 2,500-square-foot building within a single day, according to Khoshnevis.

For the military, that means soldiers deploying to a remote location with little or no infrastructure could be operating out of permanent structures pretty soon after a combat engineer unit arrived with printers and material aboard a C-17.

Related: Navy Rail Gun Showing Promise

Essentially, building via printer would work just like any computer assisted manufacturing program. But instead of a robotic tap and die machine turning out parts according to a program, it would be an oversized printer following programmed schematics to lay down, layer by layer, a building, including outside and interior walls, spaces for doors and windows and all electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning conduits, according to Khoshnevis website.

In avideo of a presentation he made last yearKhoshnevis says the machines he is working with now are capable of printing out concrete walls able to bear a compressive stress of 10,000 pounds per square inch. According to the Portland Concrete Association, which represents concrete manufacturers nationwide, conventional concrete has a psi of 7,000 or less.

Anything above that, up to 14,500 psi, is considered high strength.

Building construction is about the only thing that is not automated today, Khoshnevis says. At the same time it kills about 10,000 people a year and injures about 400,000.

Given the history of U.S. military and related missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, Khoshnevis observations on other aspects of conventional construction should also have meaning to the Pentagon.

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Navy reveals next big project

to Colonize-the-Moon!

This website is an effort to translate vast amounts of technical jargon into easily understandable terms. The concept is to express the ideas of space advocates in language that is not difficult to grasp. There are some very exciting things, but often the long winded explanations dampen the excitement. Here the effort is to make the words palatable.

More explanation

The bounds are pretty simple. What can humans do in space? Not traveling to other stars, but what we know can be done in our lifetimes. Taking the time and patience to read a space resource or technical book about Mars, Asteroids, or the Moon is a difficult task. Fiction in this realm does not exist. There is a huge gap between the fiction, and reality.

This website is neither science nor science fiction. It does not fit in either category. The term hard science fiction might apply. However, the genre still implies science rather than engineering or communication.

Science fiction leaves huge gaps in understanding what outer-space is. Science itself relies on very long detailed and exact explanations. Here the highly complicated verbiage is reduced to ideas that dont take so much to explain. The term fiction still applies, but the strategy is to cut out as much fiction as possible.

Possible simple terms for this place:

Engineering Fiction

Hard Science Fiction

Near Earth Space Fiction

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Colonize The Moon