Category Archives: Transhuman News

Humans have been asking themselves about the viability of settling on Mars for years. Currently, the logistics of such an undertaking make the idea completely impractical and unrealistic. However, what if we get to Mars? How would one go about setting up a successful colony?

In Terraformers players are faced with the daunting prospect of settling on Mars, and building a safe, self-sustainable colony on the Red Planet that can grow into humanitys second home.

Players find themselves on the Red Planet, building humanitys first-ever colony away from Earth. The first colony must focus on providing inhabitants with what they need to survive and serving as a staging ground for the development of more colonies.

Players can send explorers across Mars to look for mineral-rich areas, and suitable volcanic tubes and craters to build new colonies in. The rare metals and minerals of Mars can be mined to be used in the development of highly advanced new technologies.

Different leaders have different perks and abilities. Image by 'Terraformers.'

Players can use terraforming techniques such as activating volcanoes, crashing asteroids, or space mirrors to shape the planet to meet their needs and help to build a hospitable second home for humanity.

Resource management, and the development of transit systems between cities, as well as all the relevant infrastructure to support human life on Mars, are all in the players hands.

Players have the option to spread flora and fauna, plant forests, spread bacteria, and introduce adaptive animal species to the planet to build up its biodiversity.

According to the developers of Terraformers, they are building this game to inspire interplanetary colonization and think of realistic methods of doing so.

Terraformers is developed by Asteroid Lab, and is coming to Steam on the 21st of April, 2021.

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Terraformers Colony Builder Attempts the Impossible Task of Creating a Realistic Colony on Mars - Gamers Decide

I hope you dont mind, Im going to be scarfing down this chicken wrap at the same time we talk, Cole Sprouse politely informs me as he sits in the kitchen wearing a fuzzy, baby blue sweater. The wrap in question is already halfway to his mouth.

Sprouse is used to multitasking.

He and his twin brother, Dylan, began their professional acting careers when they were infants and worked steadily throughout their childhoods, sharing prominent roles on Grace Under Fire and in the Adam Sandler film Big Daddy. Cole went on to play Rosss son on Friends before reteaming with Dylan in the Disney Channel sitcom The Suite Life of Zack and Cody (Cole played the brainy Cody). The tween hit led to a spinoff series, TV movie and mega kid stardom for the twins. By age 18, theyd effectively burned out.

But after graduating from New York University with a degree in archaeology, Cole Sprouse fulfilled a promise hed made to his manager to give one more round of TV auditions a go before quitting the industry for good. He booked the role of the brooding outcast Jughead Jones on the CW drama Riverdale and was sucked in again.

I started acting when I was so young that I hadnt actually attempted, as an adult, to think about if I really enjoyed performance, Sprouse said in a recent video call from Vancouver, British Columbia, where hes currently filming the seventh season of Riverdale. He continued, When I returned, I reminded myself that I do very much love the art of acting. But I still have a very complicated relationship to celebrity culture.

Hes learned to guard his private life. Rare public comments about his relationships past (namely, with his Riverdale co-star Lili Reinhart) and present (the model Ari Fournier) are scrutinized by fans and widely recounted by entertainment outlets. He started a secondary Instagram account devoted solely to sharing the photos he takes of strangers while theyre trying to sneakily snap photos of him. It was an attempt to go, Hey, I actually have agency in the situation, too, he explained. It helped me a lot.

His latest role is the lead in the HBO Max rom-com Moonshot not to be confused with the unrelated 2022 releases Moon Knight and Moonfall. In the near future, where robots run coffee shops and Mars is being colonized, Sprouse plays Walt, a hapless college student who hitches a ride on a Mars-bound rocket alongside Sophie (Lana Condor) in an attempt to reach another girl on Mars he thinks could be the One.

Intermittently puffing on a vape pen after finishing the chicken wrap, Sprouse spoke about billionaires, the effects of childhood fame and turning 30.

These are edited excerpts from our conversation.

Moonshot is a futuristic take on a conventional romantic comedy. Are you a romcom fan?

I have my favorites, and theyre all over the map. Im a huge Forgetting Sarah Marshall fan, for example. And though theres a heavy romantic element throughout it, most people would just call that a comedy and yet, by all genre boundaries, it is a rom-com.

I think for so long romantic comedies were put down as chick flicks, something lowbrow that only a female audience would care about. Male-centric entries like Forgetting Sarah Marshall made some people rethink that notion.

The general trend with the arts always starts with a large female fan base really falling in love with something. In a lot of cases, we see the female audience braving the territory first, and then everyone follows. Ultimately, with Moonshot, we set out to make a movie that didnt really take itself super seriously, that we had a lot of lighthearted fun on, and we were able to weave an old married couple dynamic into Lana and Is relationship.

The film also throws some solid punches at the billionaire space race: Zach Braffs Elon Musk-esque character admits he could have used his fortune to solve world hunger dozens of times over, but went to Mars instead. How do you feel about the current space cowboy endeavors of people like Musk and Jeff Bezos?

Oh, I think its tremendously masturbatory. Its a ridiculous thing. When I was studying archaeology, we used to have this conversation about the resurrection of the mammoth. The conversation would always devolve into two camps: the camp that really wanted to see the mammoth walk the earth again. And the camp that was going, Hey, we have active species that are currently going extinct. If we put the resources you are talking about putting into the already extinct mammoth and shift that focus to the present, we could do way more good. I feel like this conversation about space cowboys is very similar. Im in the camp where I go, lets focus on the present. We have an active space that we are living in that is currently decaying. We need to shift focus and resources to here.

So, no chance youre booking a commercial ticket on a rocket any time soon.

No, Im already such a paranoid freak when it comes to flying. I couldnt imagine what my control-freak nature would do when we started taking off. I would be a nervous wreck.

People like to talk about former child stars in this dichotomy of either they spiral out of control or, somehow, come out OK. Do you think its possible for anyone to actually come through that experience unscathed?

My brother and I used to get quite a bit of, Oh, you made it out! Oh, youre unscathed! No. The young women on the channel we were on [Disney Channel] were so heavily sexualized from such an earlier age than my brother and I that theres absolutely no way that we could compare our experiences. And every single person going through that trauma has a unique experience. When we talk about child stars going nuts, what were not actually talking about is how fame is a trauma. So Im violently defensive against people who mock some of the young women who were on the channel when I was younger because I dont feel like it adequately comprehends the humanity of that experience and what it takes to recover. And, to be quite honest, as I have now gone through a second big round of this fame game as an adult, Ive noticed the same psychological effects that fame yields upon a group of young adults as I did when I was a child. I just think people have an easier time hiding it when theyre older.

After it was announced that Riverdale had been renewed for a seventh season, a lot of memes popped up imagining your reaction when you heard the news. The general internet consensus seemed to be that you were completely distraught to have to do another season. Is that accurate?

[Laughs] Its not completely accurate. One, because Ive just assumed were going to see the finality of our [seven-season] contracts. Two, I think the internet assumes because of how insane our show is that were probably doing a bit worse than we actually are. Its easy to forget that people love the show. And I do think its going to be much more appreciated in 10 years than it is right now. It would be pretty pompous of me to say that another season of financial stability is not something that would be appealing. Though Im not going to lie. The memes do make me laugh.

Youve built a side career as a professional photographer, mainly in fashion. What is it about that medium that made you want to pursue it?

When I was in school, I was traveling a lot for archaeology, so I always had my camera and I was taking almost anthropological-type photos of the people I was meeting, the culture I was surrounded by. And then, just by being in New York City, I got wrapped up in fashion work and built a portfolio. That was my main source of revenue until Riverdale Season 2.

Youre turning 30 in August. Does this decade feel like the start of a new chapter?

Definitely. I feel like my ducks are in a row better than theyve ever been. Were also seeing the conclusion of a program Ive spent the majority of my 20s on, so there is this world of possibilities that lies before me at the end of this production that I find incredibly appealing and intoxicating. And, I hate to break it to everybody, but Im not the only 30 year old playing a teen on television.

You made it to college in Moonshot. Youre starting to age up.

Just stringing them along, slowly but surely. In an ideal world, when Riverdale finishes, I would love to be doing one to two movies a year and photography the rest of the time. And the logical intersection of those two worlds will eventually be directing.

Were living in a time of extreme nostalgia for the 90s and 2000s. Is there any chance youd go full circle and do a Suite Life reboot?

I dont think Ill ever return to that. Not that I have a problem with other people doing the reboots thing. Im just a big believer that if something is beautiful in the past, you should let it stay beautiful. To bring it into the future feels a bit like reheating a really good, fresh meal in the microwave. It would be hard to be in my 30s and go [in a deep growl], Zack and Cody are back, man!

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Cole Sprouse on Finding a Healthy Balance in Hollywood - The New York Times

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Twenty-one years ago, on April 7, 2001, America launched a spacecraft into the cosmos.

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Its mission was to go out and seek new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no spacecraft had gone before.

No wait, my bad, that was the USS Enterprise I was thinking of, which isnt scheduled to be launched until 2245.

The mission of the spacecraft that was launched in 2001 the Mars Odyssey was far less dramatic, but nonetheless significant: to investigate the Red Planets environment, to provide key information on its surface and to map the chemical and mineralogical makeup of Mars as a step to detecting evidence of past or present water and volcanic activity (NASA).

But deep, deep down, we all know the real reason why the Yanks launched the Mars Odyssey 21 years ago to scope out potential new real estate on the solar systems fourth planet.

Colonizing Mars has been a dream of sorts for humanity for centuries, almost a fetish if I may be so bold to say. It has inspired countless books and movies, including The Martian, Arthur C. Clarkes The Sands of Mars, Mission to Mars, Total Recall (that film where Arnold Schwarzenegger travels to Mars and unsurprisingly kills pretty much everyone there), even the sensational so-bad-that-its-actually-good 1965 classic, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, where ol Saint Nick is abducted by a buncha ungrateful, Yuletide-averse Mars dwellers.

Were so obsessed with Mars that weve even named one of our most delicious chocolate bars after the planet good luck trying finding a Neptune bar, a Uranus bar or a Mercury bar in your local corner store, we dont care much about those planets (we named a car after Saturn and after a relatively unsuccessful run, production was finally halted in 2009).

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Noted contemporary deep thinkers Elon Musk and Donald Trump have openly mused about sending humans to the Red Planet and I feel that it would be a truly tremendous day for humanity if we could somehow trick them both into boarding a spaceship (along with the equally cerebral, murderous, unhinged space cadet Vlad Putin), lock the door behind them then send them on an impromptu scouting mission to Mars, which is nearly 500 million kilometres away. Its not likely to happen, admittedly, but a simple man like me can dream his dreams, cant he?

In any event, Mars is an attractive place to colonize because: a) it is, relatively speaking, not so far away from us (a one-way trip to Mars takes about six to seven months, apparently, which is do-able provided that no one on board the spaceship forgets their wallet at home and has to turn the spaceship around); b) it contains things like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, water ice and permafrost, stuff that is pretty essential to maintaining life; c) its got a great view of Earth, in real estate parlance; and d) it is big and red and named after the Roman god of war, which is pretty hunky-dory if I do say so myself.

While leaving all our problems behind here on Earth probably seems like a wise idea for the continuation of our species what with climate change, wars, overpopulation, pandemics and our ceaseless degradation of the environment high tailing it to Mars might not be the easy win we think it would be, for a myriad of reasons.

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For one thing, shipping off humans to Mars is going to cost us, in the words of the aforementioned Trump, a huuuuge amount of money.

Colonizing Mars would cost us not millions, not billions, not even trillions of dollars wed probably start talking about quadrillions, thats how expensive its going to get. The fuel costs alone to ship people to the Red Planet would be outrageous (gas was $1.75/litre this week for instance, which means filling up for a single Mars trip would cost us hundreds of millions of dollars. Counterpoint: wed probably earn a lot of Air Miles points).

Also, were starting with nothing on Mars, so wed have to create from scratch the infrastructure of our future domed cities with their moving sidewalks, robot charging stations and automated Starbucks outlets. Wouldnt it be better to invest that money into cleaning up the Earth and making it more inhabitable? Of course it would be, but human nature is stupid and were drawn to this Mars thing like moths to a flame.

Secondly, Mars isnt Earth, so wed probably have to worry about a whole host of other life-threatening occurrences whilst inhabiting the planet, things like starving to death (Mars might not have the most fertile of soil, but apparently dandelions can grow there; unfortunately, after a few years of an all-dandelion diet you probably wouldnt want to keep on living), dying from lethal doses of radiation, running out of oxygen, getting swept up in one of Mars frequently occurring dust storms or freezing to death.

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Not to mention the real possibility that robots will begin outsmarting humans and attempt to terminate us (just like in 2001: A Space Odyssey) after we inhabit Mars because theyll quickly realize that were as dumb and gullible as a bucket of bolts.

Finally, if we look at our past behaviour, why in the world would we want to export all the awfulness weve created here on Earth to a new planet? I can guarantee you that if humanity travels to Mars and somehow we discover some sacred form of life, well immediately bulldoze it and build a strip mall on top of it.

Humans will inevitably start polluting Mars, doing things like leaving our candy wrappers on the ground and not recycling, and in a few hundred years well have to find a new planet to colonize because we absolutely wrecked another celestial body (hello Kepler 442-b!).

So for all the above reasons, at least until we collectively get our stuff together as a species, I truly believe we should forget about moving to Mars and focus on some good old self-loving for Earth.

If humanitys space cadets want to wreck a place, send them to the Moon its just a hunk of rock and metal (filled with green cheese and old golf balls from past human visits) that has almost no atmosphere and little gravity, so let them have their fun up there. Leave Mars for the Martians, I say, and save them the headache of having to clean up after us humans.

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Moving to Mars might be a bad idea - Sarnia and Lambton County This Week

Mars is often seen as Earths sister planet, and scientists have long dreamed of one day establishing a colony there.

But even having a chat on the Red Planet would be tricky, and listening to music would be well-nigh impossible, as new data from NASAs Perseverance rover demonstrates.

In a study published this week in the scientific journal Nature, scientists said they had worked out that the speed of sound is slower and less consistent on Mars, while even quite loud sounds wouldnt carry half as far.

On Earth, sound typically travels at 767 miles per hour. But in the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars, high-pitched sounds would only move at about 559mph while baser tones would wader along at a sedate 537mph.

"On Earth, the sounds from an orchestra reach you at the same speed, whether they are low or high, explained Sylvestre Maurice, the studys lead author, but imagine on Mars, if you are a little far from the stage, there will be a big delay.

The sound wouldnt carry as far either, so youd need to sit much closer to the stage. While in the Earths atmosphere a sound might easily carry for a couple of hundred feet the same sound on Mars would suffer a significant drop in volume after just 13ft.

High-pitched sounds such as childrens voices and birdsong, would be particularly affected.

As NASA explains: "Because the Mars atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide (Earths atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and oxygen), higher-frequency noises will likely be more attenuated than bass pitches, meaning we probably wont hear them as well as lower-pitched sounds.

Recordings from Perseverances two microphones one mounted high on the rovers mast and the other built into its mobile camera demonstrate the eerie quietness of Earths chilly neighbour.

NASA has put together a series of recordings and posted them online to give a sense of just how much the Martian atmosphere would change the way we hear familiar sounds.

It is stunning all the science we can get with an instrument as simple as a microphone on Mars, says Baptiste Chide, a postdoctoral researcher in planetary science at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a contributor to the SuperCam microphone.

Recording audible sounds on Mars is a unique experience, he adds. With the microphones onboard Perseverance, we will add a fifth sense to Mars exploration. It will open a new area of science investigation for both the atmosphere and the surface.

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Scientists measure speed of sound on Mars with NASAs Perseverance Rover - Daily Star

Bobbie Draper, for my money the coolest character in The Expanse.

I am about to start gushing about The Expanse, telling you all the reasons you absolutely should watch it. But before I do that, here's a laundry list of things that are decidedly not good about The Expanse.

Whenever I go full hog trying to convince someone to watch The Expanse, I like to get this list out of the way. I want people to know from the outset: This TV show is not perfect. In fact, depending on what you value in your television, you could even call The Expanse "bad."

I do not think The Expanse is bad.

On the contrary, I think The Expanse is very good. Often it's good in spite of its flaws. Sometimes it's enhanced by those flaws.

Set hundreds of years in the future when humans are spread out across the solar system, The Expanse is based on a series of hard sci-fi novels written by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck under the pen name James S.A. Corey. It is dense with peerless universe building. It's a show about the very real perils of space travel and colonization, but also a surprisingly nuanced show that deals in interplanetary politics and class warfare.

In one corner we have Earth and all its citizens. In the other, Mars. The humans who have colonized Mars are a military-focused, tough group of people prone to resolving conflict with force. Those still on Earth are the preening, politically savvy elite.

The wild cards are the Belters, residents of outer planets and asteroid belts who have developed their own Creole-esque language and, alongside that, a culture completely separate from the humans on Earth and Mars. Sick of being trampled upon by the "Earthers," the Belters are threatening revolution, but lack the power or resources to truly strike back at their oppressors.

Everything that occurs in The Expanse stems from the tensions between these three discrete groups.

The tight knit crew of the Rocinante.

The magic of The Expanse is how effortlessly the show flits between genres. It's hard sci-fi at all times, but in its first couple of seasons, The Expanse plays out like a murder mystery. Later, it's a show about alien technology and the arms race associated with that. Then it becomes a show about exploring strange new planets. Ultimately, The Expanse is a show about all these things, but places its uniquely crafted universe at its core, giving it a through line lesser sci-fi shows don't have.

The show's aesthetic plays a similar trick. Not everyone enjoys its metallic, video-game-esque color scheme, but I like video games, so I'm a fan. The Expanse feels like how I think a Mass Effect show could feel, if that ever comes to fruition and is somehow decent. The Expanse is cool, clinical and smart -- and sometimes the wooden performances amplify that in ways that should be bad, but often feels good? In a universe that lacks warmth, dialed back, minimalist performances make sense.

Yeah, I'm confused too. But it works.

It's a very not good hat.

Ultimately, The Expanse is a show that will never disappoint you. Much like Dark -- for my money the best show on Netflix-- The Expanse is now fully complete and, unlike most sci-fi shows, defied the odds and finished well. Some of its six seasons are better than others, but The Expanse is incredibly consistent. You'll be shocked by how much ground it covers and how seamlessly it moves from one civilization-altering crisis to the next.

It's funny, but almost everyone I know who watches The Expanse, including myself, loves to complain about it. They'll complain about the clunky dialogue and the strange performances, but there's nothing else like it. It's a show that's stubbornly carried by its strengths, to levels of quality it has no right attaining. You owe it to yourself to watch, if only to create your own list of things in The Expanse that annoy you.

Just make sure that list includes Thomas Jane's hat. Unforgivable.

Explore movies, games, superheroes and more with CNET Culture. Delivered Tuesdays and Fridays.

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Why You Need to Watch This Sci-Fi Masterpiece on Prime Video - CNET

Did humanity come together to take the steps needed to protect the planet or are ye now building spaceships to join the Elon Musk-founded colony on Mars?

While humans are specialists in dragging their feet, the Covid-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine showed that, as a species, we can move heaven and earth to accomplish something when we really want to.

I hope none of ye have to experience sunset on Mars.

And I also hope Limerick still have a stranglehold on Liam MacCarthy.

Today the worlds carbon dioxide concentration is 418ppm and rising yearly despite all we know about the impacts of CO2 on global warmingand of climate on our survival.

We have destroyed vast ecosystems and devastated animal populations despite all we know about nature and the life support system it affords us.

We have the science and technologies to fix this but are mired in our own ignorance, greed and cowardice.

The kind of world you inhabit depends on how we change our mindsets and habits now.

I hope we do right by you.

Dear future friends of 2122.

I must be dead at least 50 years now, so Im running low on news.

Its March 2022, and our family is in the throes of battling Covid-19. We are isolating in our home. Its boring.

Vaccines saved millions of lives worldwide.

I hope your generation never experiences anything like this.

Pandemic aside, its a scary time in the world right now.

A Russian autocratic regime is, as I write, bombarding the sovereign democratic country of Ukraine.

The threat of climate change looms large over humanity, and I hope we passed on a better world to you.

Maybe you could answer some questions for me.

Did I ever write that screenplay? Did I have a second baby? Did I ever buy a cottage by the sea?

Did Mayo ever again win the All-Ireland?

In my time capsule I would put in my hopes for a female Taoiseach and outline the biggest challenges facing the country at the moment housing, a possible recession and recovery out of a global pandemic, to give future generations an idea as to what life is like today.

On a pessimistic note, I feel like the country will probably still be dealing with similar challenges, as housing is an issue now that was also a problem a century ago.

Ill also write about the joy of meeting people in real life and not through online introductions. Dating apps and making friends through Instagram seems to be all the rage nowadays but I love nothing more than just bumping into somebody in a pub and making a friend.

If you are able to read this 100 years from now, it hopefully means we have done something substantial to curb the effects of the impending climate catastrophe and the water and food shortages that will inevitably follow from it.

If, as I fear you might be, you are reading this in some kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape, I can only apologise. In that case, I hope the paper this is printed on can serve some actual use as part of an improvised meal or kindling for a fire. At the very least, maybe you can make a hat.

Hello, is anyone out there? Im hoping a human is reading this and not some alien species that has since colonised Earth after we did our best over the past century to destroy the planet through pollution, climate change, war, greed and hatred.

Sorry if I sound pessimistic but even as a child growing up in the Atomic Age,I played in my neighbours backyard bomb shelter and I really hope the threat of nuclear annihilation thathas been in the background for my entire life never came to pass.

I also hope that people realised that saving the planet was more important than showing off in their SUVs or doing other stupid things to keep up with the Joneses at the expense of humanity. If you are a human reading this, then well done. If not, we only have (had) ourselves to blame.

More here:
'Did we avert climate disaster? And did Mayo ever win the All-Ireland?' - Independent.ie

As seen in part one, Join or Die (1706-1774) (debuts April 4 at 8 p.m. on GBH 2, YouTube TV, PBS.org, and GBH.org), Franklin was born in Boston and absconded from there as a youth to escape the bondage of his brother, to whom he was indentured as a printer. He arrived penniless in Philadelphia; and like a forerunner of todays social media moguls found a fortune there in a burgeoning new industry print, including the printing of currency, foreshadowing his appearance on the $100 bill. It made him a famous, wealthy, and wise man.

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In his spare time, Franklin pursued scientific research into electricity (Burns clarifies some myths about the kite and lightning experiment) and invented the Franklin stove, the lightning rod, the uncanny musical instrument the glass armonica, and other invaluable devices. His scientific endeavors, one historian ventures, might well have earned him a Nobel Prize, had there been one at the time.

But it was in some ways a tainted fortune. The advertisements in his newspaper The Pennsylvania Gazette included notices for the sale of enslaved people and postings of rewards for runaway slaves (the narration points out the irony of Franklin profiting on such trade, given that he was once a runaway indentured person himself). And Franklin owned slaves. This contradiction between his image as a champion of freedom and the reality of a businessman who profited from those who were deprived of freedom shadows the documentary and comes to a head in part two, An American (1775-1790) (April 5 at 8 p.m. on GBH 2, YouTube TV, PBS.org, and GBH.org).

There are other conflicts explored as well. As a representative of the colonies in London in the lead-up to the Revolution, he was torn between his loyalty to Britain, where he enjoyed star status and relationships with such Enlightenment giants as Adam Smith and David Hume, and his growing awareness that the Colonies had outgrown the empire and needed to unite into a nation of their own. He ultimately came down on the side of independence, which brought this conflict close to home. It opened a rift with his son, William, the colonial governor of New Jersey and who during the war led a militant band of Tories. The two never reconciled.

Though Burns has not progressed stylistically beyond the trademark documentary conventions that first brought him success, he has grown more subtle and insightful in his analysis of what America means and what it means to be an American. His film about Franklin celebrates his subject but is no hagiography. Instead it probes into such timely issues as the nature of patriotism, freedom, family, and personal responsibility.

Go to http://www.pbs.org/kenburns/benjamin-franklin.

Watch this space

The recent documentary Last Exit: Space by Rudolph Herzog expresses skepticism about the privatization of space exploration. One expert opines that life on a corporate moon or Mars colony would be like living in an Amazon redemption center, poorly paid toil under conditions regulated by an exploitative, profiteering, and all-powerful company. There, according to the voice-over narration by the filmmakers father, Werner Herzog, one would hunker down in radiation-proof bunkers enjoying drinks of recycled urine.

In Return to Space, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin who won an Oscar for best documentary feature for Free Solo (2018) take a more positive attitude. A look at the development of multibillionaire Elon Musks SpaceX program and his project to be the first private company to put people into space and ultimately expand humanity beyond Earth, the film doesnt dwell on the speculated conditions of such habitations. Instead it looks at what it took to achieve the first crewed rocket launched from US soil since the end of the space shuttle, in 2011. Earth is the cradle of humanity, says Musk, explaining his motives. But you cannot stay in the cradle forever.

Vasarhelyi and Chin flash back to the first failed attempts by SpaceX, beginning in 2006, to get its Falcon rocket off the ground. The repeated images of exploding vehicles are spectacular and oddly satisfying. After the third failure the company almost folded, but Musk and SpaceX persevered. The next attempt succeeded. By 2020 they were ready to launch two NASA astronauts into orbit for an eventual link-up with the International Space Station.

The film focuses on this mission, spending time with the astronauts and their families (one is married to another astronaut with several NASA missions to her credit) and profiling the engineers and other experts who labor to make it possible. Musk himself comes off as stalwart, determined to help elevate humanity to this next evolutionary stage while perhaps padding his estimated $267 billion fortune. At one point the filmmakers question the motives of Musk and fellow space-minded capitalist titans like Amazons Jeff Bezos, presenting a montage that concludes Perhaps space travel today is all about money and egos. Maybe it always was; and like the Western frontier before it, the final frontier might become just one more pristine wilderness to be exploited and despoiled.

Return to Space can be streamed on Netflix beginning April 7. Go to http://www.netflix.com.

Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.

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Ken Burns on Benjamin Franklin; space is the place - The Boston Globe

If Space Settlements Explained How to Live in Space, Space Forces Explains the Why

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As the world spins deeper into the third year of a global pandemic with no sign of abating, a newspacerace is forming over our heads. Entry is open to all, and the tickets are literal. The Architect's Newspaper's Jonathan Hilburg explores how the world's richest men are charting new paths for the human species, andhow the public are reacting tothe future of private space tourism.

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Just pay Richard Bransons Virgin Galactic $250,000 and you, like the more than 600 customers the company has already lined up, can touch the edge of space. If you wanted to up the ante and paid $28 million to Jeff Bezoss Blue Origin, you could have dined with and sat next to the Amazon founder himself when the first manned flight of the companys New Shepard rocket launched on July 20, 2021. And if youre so wealthy you just want to show off, you can pay $55 million for a ticket to the International Space Station courtesy of Elon Musks SpaceX, whose Falcon 9 rocket successfully deployed the first private trip to orbit in September.

To these would-be space cowboys, NASA had its chance and failed; only great men can drag the planet up and onward. The only problem is the public isnt biting. As Vox pointed out, a majority of Americans polled by Pew Research are disillusioned with private space tourism and would rather see the extravagant amounts of money being thrown around by billionaires used to solve terrestrial problems. The sentiment isnt new: Public support for the Apollo missions was divided throughout the 1960s, when rampant income and racial inequality presented much more pressing targets for federal funding.

For their part, Bezos, Branson, and Musk see themselves as charting new paths for the human species, though they differ on the details. They are the self-appointed helmsmen pointing the rest of us into an impossibly bright future where profit charts only go up and to the right. Why resist?

Smug as they are, todays billionaires are only picking up where mystics, rocket scientists, and socialists left off. As Fred Scharmen documents in Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space, many have sought salvation among the stars. The book catalogs these 19th, 20th, and 21st-century visionaries, drawing a line from Nikolai Fedorov, the 19th-century Russian originator of the Cosmism movement, to Bezos, a proponent of interplanetary expansion to save humanity. Not directly, of course. By touching on the development of contrasting views of how practical spaceflight was developed across seven distinct time periods, Scharmen lays the threads of how we got here out in perfect clarityhistory, like music, layers sample, remixes, and references. He returns to the well first visited in his 2019 book Space Settlements, but rather than discuss the logistical challenges of building habitats in space and inventing a ground plane with no frame of reference, the topic at hand is the dueling visions of the future we now seem locked into.

Fedorov believed that if death was the ultimate evil to avoid, the highest good would be to solve it, with the end goal of resurrecting everyone who had ever died; the only way to sustain this exponential growth was unending expansion by whatever means necessary. Failure to do so would (Should space-faring humans encounter another sentient species, it would be better to stamp them out at the first available opportunity.) Federov died in 1903, but his ideas resonated with utopian revolutionaries such as Alexander Bogdanov, whose 1908 novelRed Stardepicts a socialistMarswhere the inhabitants are freed from societal divisions by a lack of plate tectonics and labor is not compelled but willingly offered. But after exhausting the resources of their home planet, and an unsuccessful expedition to Venus, the Martians eye Earth as a potential substitute. All that stands in the way of their cosmic destiny is human society, which, being less evolved and mired in strife, can be eliminated without a second thoughtto do any less would doom them.

The solar system can easily support a trillion humans, Bezos has repeatedly touted as the end goal of Blue Origin. If we had a trillion humans, we would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited, for all practical purposes, resources and solar power.

By his own admission, Bezos modeled his dreams on the work of Princeton physicist Gerard ONeill, whose 1975 NASA Summer Study program conceived of enormous toroidal or spherical spacecraft capable of sustaining life. These spinning megastructures, analyzed in great detail in Space Settlements, were to feature rolling pastures, lakes, and picturesque hill towns; a slice of Alpine Austria churning through the vacuum of space and all of the colonial-era imagery that comes with it. Blue Origin even developed its own version of the ONeill cylinder, one populated with pastiches of Earthbound landmarks. His counterpart, Musk, wants to colonize Mars as a hedge to what he sees as an inevitable catastrophe, whether it be an asteroid or plague, without considerations of staving off these ills in the first place.

ButSpace Forcesdoes offer avatars of hope. The xenophilic books of novelist Ursula Le Guin, whoseHainish Cyclesees multiple humanities spread across the galaxy who explore solely for the enjoyment of new experiences, are placed alongside dealers of doom. Wernher von Braun, the Nazi who headed up the American space program after the latter defeated the former, is a curious mixture of the two.

Von Braun looms large in Scharmens study for his relentless advocacy of manned spaceflight and Martian colonization and is the closest thing to a main character the book has. The aerospace engineer oversaw the creation of the V-2 ballistic missile as a terror weapon at Hitlers direct order; the rockets were assembled by prisoners in the underground Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where 20,000 would ultimately die as slaves to fuel Germanys war economy. Resettled in America with a team as part of Operation Paperclip, von Braun quickly took to his adoptive homeland, publishing educational leaflets and science fiction stories that teased a near-future where middle-class Americans would live and work among the stars. He even worked with Walt Disney (himself a Leni Riefenstahl fan and tacit supporter of Nazi policies) on a series of films popularizing human space flight.

It was von Brauns ability to code switch, to say the right things to the right people at the right time, that kept him in the public spotlight for so long. On the one hand, he was spaces most effective salesman, relentless in his love for the subject. On the other, he lobbied the U.S. government to build an orbital overwatch station capable of deploying a nuclear payload anywhere in the world, putting mutually assured destruction overhead. Peace through security was always a core tenet of von Brauns ambitions, and his extended placement in Space Forces underlines a very real dichotomy at the heart of every epoch. Do we want to expand skyward for the sake of exploration, or as an expansion of empire? Even if the rockets carrying mankind toward Mars have peaceful intentions, can we ignore that they were built for bloodshed and by literal slave labor?

In the books introduction, Scharmen argues that we should understand moving off-world as colonization even if no one is being displaced. After all, somewhere in the chain of resource extraction, manufacturing, assemblage, and testing, someone is being immiserated (or as early science fiction writers admitted, enslaved). For Elon Musk or Jeff Bezoss utopias in the sky to be realized, people must be exploited. If Musk has his way, the first waves of travelers may be pressed into service as Martian guinea pigs to ensure the safety of the rich. And therein lies the rub, that funneling people into the furnace of progress is the only way forward, because its how weve always done things. Someone will always need to mine the asteroids and maintain the autonomous robots.

Space Forces is often not prescriptive, but at the books end, Scharmen reflects on the creation of the titular Space Force by former president Trump in 2019. He correctly surmises that sending the U.S. Armed Services into orbit will only induce greater militarization back on Earth, potentially ending in the extinction of the species. If the promise of space exploration is one of wholly new ways of seeing, designing, and interacting with the universe, why does it look like it always has back on Earth? Why are we carrying forward the same modes of thinking that so easily excuse human sacrifice? Why must a utopia for some be a dystopia for everyone else? Space Forces pulls back the sheen of space to reveal the dangers lurking within.

This article was originally published in The Architect's Newspaper.

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If Space Settlements Explained How to Live in Space, Space Forces Explains the Why - ArchDaily