moon

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“I find myself growing fatigued, Doctor.”

Hey, everybody.  It’s Tuesday, and here I am writing another blog post.  Huzzah.

I’m rather tired today, which I guess shouldn’t be that surprising, given that I have chronic trouble sleeping.  Still, some days hit me worse than others, for reasons that are probably multifactorial and are certainly difficult to tease apart.  And today, so far, seems to be one of the “I feel more tired than usual by a noticeable margin” days.  You’ve probably all had such days, though you may not have used that specific term for them*.

There is some good news, news that in a way is not world news but is extraterrestrial news, at least temporarily:  the Artemis mission has flown ‘round the far side of the moon, and in so doing has brought humans farther away from Earth even than Apollo 13 did; this is now the farthest humans have ever been.

It’s quite momentous, but the fact of this mission and its (so far) success, raises questions.  I suspect the answers to them are disappointingly trivial, however.  For instance, why was there such a delay in returning to the Moon after the last time in 1972?  The answer to that is at least somewhat clear when one poses the related question:  why did we work so hard to go to the Moon back in the late 60s/early 70s?

Of course, the main reasons were:  primate dominance/hierarchy drives, writ large across the planet.  The Apollo program was, in a barely metaphorical sense, the ultimate dick-measuring contest, and the USA won that one pretty clearly at the time (“Mine reaches all the way to the Moon and back, how ‘bout yours, motherf#cker?”).  The fact that the Soviet Union basically admitted defeat in that region in that round is but one piece among the mountains of evidence confirming that, yes Victoria, humans did indeed land on the Moon.

It wasn’t for purely scientific reasons, though.  In fact, the science at the time took a very distant, rear-facing-storage-area-of-the-station-wagon place compared to the politics that was in the driver’s seat.

Alas, human nature being what it seems to be, perhaps truly amazing innovation and advancement is simply much more likely to occur during conflict (literal and figurative).  Maybe even the Beatles, for instance, were so great at least partly because of the (usually friendly) competitiveness between John and Paul, and also George once he found his considerable mojo.  Ringo was the Samwise Gamgee/Bodhisattva of the group, which seems appropriate for a drummer.

Humans presumably have always had the capacity to make the many scientific discoveries and technological advancements that have occurred in recent centuries.  But they needed to have an impetus before anyone would get anything done.  The two strongest inherent drives are survival and reproduction, and those drives interact and accumulate as humans gather in larger numbers, and they sublimate into national competitiveness‒for wealth and power, for luxury, for prestige, for all that nonsense.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could deliberately control our motivation?  We have crude means of affecting it already‒caffeine and various other stimulants‒but these are blunt yet jagged tools.  In principle, microelectrodes could be implanted into something like the nucleus accumbens or the reticular activating system or more well-chosen, finely tuned areas of the nervous system.  Then one could use a remote control to give oneself motivation when desired (?).  Presumably, other mental states could be manipulated, encouraged, discouraged, etc.  Just watch out that no one else gets their hands on your remote control!

Maybe it would be better to have a helmet with various directed electromagnets to stimulate specific brain regions at will.  This process is already in use in relatively simple form**, but it could be honed and made more precise and more powerful and useful.  It would be nice to be able to have large-scale motivation that didn’t require the tendency toward large-scale destruction.

It may be an inevitable challenge.  Powerful forces can inherently have very good and/or very bad effects depending on circumstances and, of course, depending on what one means by “good” and “bad”.

Not to say that we couldn’t rather easily be doing things better than we are.  We could.  But…it seems we aren’t sufficiently motivated to do so.

*If you did, that would be truly surprising.  It would be so surprising, in fact, that if you told me it was the case, I would more strongly suspect some manner of deception or illusion or delusion or cognitive bias than that it was actually true (this is reminiscent of Hume’s test for the veracity of supposed miracles).

**And is involved in the plot of my book(s) Unanimity, Books 1 and 2.

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Therefore the Moon, the governess of blogs, pale in her anger washes all the air

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the first of May*, the beginning of yet another stupid month.  They just keep coming, on and on and on, so irritatingly relentless that I find myself wishing for the elimination of the Moon and the destabilization of the Earth’s rotation and orbit just to break the tedium.

I know that would inconvenience a great many other people, though, so I’m not going to try to make it happen.  To be fair, it would be much “easier” to alter the Earth’s rotation than to shift the Moon.  A decent-sized asteroid collision at the right angle could alter both the rate of Earth’s rotation and its angle to the ecliptic.

Of course, such an impact would have devastating consequences for almost everything and everyone on the planet’s surface.  So that’s a win-win scenario!

I’m kidding.  But I often fantasize about wiping out all life as we know it, because none of it is truly benign and it’s all futile and will always be marked broadly by fear and pain and other suffering, because all those things are evolutionarily vital (in the literal sense).  I shouldn’t choose that for other people, though, so I probably would never do such a thing even if I could.

Thinking back to earlier, though, I’ve been pondering the question of just how one would move the Moon in its orbit, and I thought about the reflectors up there in the old Apollo landing sites, still used (last I checked, anyway) to measure the distance to the moon with great precision.

There have long been discussions about how to alter the course of an asteroid that looked to be prone to intercept the Earth.  One way might be to vaporize a portion of the asteroid, causing its “outgassing” to act almost as a rocket propellant, and by Newton’s third law (or, equally valid, by the law of conservation of momentum) the asteroid would shift its trajectory in the direction away from the artificial outgassing.

Well, what if one were to train powerful lasers at one site on the surface of the Moon**?   The fact that the moon is tidally locked with Earth means it’s constantly showing the same face to us, so one could keep focusing on the same portion of the surface.  One could study the albedo and absorption characteristics of the surface of the Moon to try to pick the best wavelength for causing “outgassing” of that surface, and that outgassing would propel the moon away.

It would be a slow process, since the Moon is big, and shifting its orbit significantly would require the delivery of quite a bit of energy, but that’s okay.  One could set up a single laser (or pair of them on opposite sides of the Earth, or more if one desired faster effects) perhaps solar powered and using ordinary telescope-style tracking equipment and software, to train the lasers always on the same point on the surface of the moon.

Gradually, the Moon would shift away from Earth (you’d need to keep adjusting your aim a bit), more quickly than it currently is, and eventually:  lunar liberation!

Of course, even given the abysmal state of science on Earth (and particularly in the US right now), people would eventually notice the Moon moving, and they might even notice the “outgassing”.  But a lot could be done before then.

If one wanted to have a much quicker effect, or rather, a more instantaneous effect, one could develop a large depot of antimatter, which we know how to make in particle accelerators.  Storing antimatter is challenging, of course; it must be kept within electromagnetic fields in high vacuum, since it will annihilate if it encounters its matter counterpart.

Still, with enough time and patience and care (and money), one could gradually accumulate a large stockpile of antiprotons and positrons, perhaps stored adjacent to each other so their mutual electrical attraction makes containment slightly easier.  Then, when one had gathered enough, one could launch it toward the moon in a fairly standard rocket‒it wouldn’t need to be manned, and it certainly wouldn’t need to return to Earth.

Release your tons (I would guess) of antimatter onto the surface of the Moon, perhaps at the center of “mass” of its face that points toward Earth, and watch the fireworks!  There would be complete annihilation of matter-antimatter in a release of energy far more extreme than any mere nuclear weapons could produce.  Heck, if you wanted to bypass the whole Moon process, you could just accumulate your antimatter here on Earth over time, maybe near some damage-multiplier like the ice caps or near a super volcano or something, and release the containment when you’re ready.

In a typical nuclear explosion, less than one percent of the mass involved in the reaction is “converted to energy”***.  In an anti-matter reaction, ALL of it would be converted.  Imagine releasing hundreds of times more energy per kilogram than the most powerful nuclear weapons.

Of course, antimatter is absurdly expensive to make, but economies of scale might help that.  It’s not as though one would be expecting a profit‒unless one went the Bond villain route and used one’s anti-matter bomb to hold the Earth for ransom, which is a thought.

That’s enough of that madness for now.

Speaking of madness, today begins “Mental Health Awareness Month”.  I would say that I’m already aware of mental health in a general sense, I just don’t have much personal familiarity with it.  Mental illness, mental dysfunction, mental dysregulation, these are things with which I am more personally acquainted.  I’m only too aware of them.  Physical health falls into a similar position.

All right, well, before I discuss more ideas about how to alter or eliminate all life as we know it‒I’ve many such ideas, I’m afraid‒I should draw to a close for the day.  In case you can’t tell, I’m not right in the head, am I?  So this is a sort of appropriate month for me, especially coming as it does right after Autism Awareness Month.  Batman only knows what will happen next.

TTFN

*Also known as May Day.  I wonder how that came to be used as a distress call, as in, “Mayday, mayday, we are going down!”

**Alternatively, one could, in principle, use a very large array of adjustable mirrors on Earth, and they could be shifted to reflect sunlight and focus the reflections on one spot on the moon, but to get a strong effect would require a worldwide collaboration or at least acceptance of these mirrors.  It’s hard to see that happening.

***I used “scare” quotes because technically it’s all energy to begin with, it’s just changing form.