#but the UNIT era is so grounded to earth and to the now (and they cant go forgetting the date when they're a military organisation that has

[moreaugriffins]

Me: it's late in the night and im really tired. i should sleep

-as soon as my head hits the pillow-

My brain: Wasn't there a calendar in the background in The Green Death? If so, what does the calendar show? Would it add to the Unit Dating Controversy? we must go check now!

#rambles #classic doctor who #unit dating controversy #my presentation on this topic has plagued my mind all holiday #it wont stop #i can't get a moment's rest #i also know that sarah says at some point that she's from the 80s #but apparently at some point she uses a unit pass that states its from the 70s #well i heard that anyway #but i can't find it so who knows #honestly - i was ready a week or so ago to chalk the whole controversy up to the brig being shit at maths and dates #(because it's funny - especially as he has a degree in maths and becomes a maths teacher) #but then like.. how do you explain characters giving various contradicting dates? #is everyone connected to the doctor bad at dates? #because being round a time traveller who can mix up time periods would eventually rub off on others? #but the UNIT era is so grounded to earth and to the now (and they cant go forgetting the date when they're a military organisation that has #to be at conferences and investigate things etc etc) #why am i trying to think logically about this? #i can't do that - for my own sanity #aaaaaaa

[tvmigraine]

FORGOTTEN LIVES: Robert Banks Stewart

Before we begin! Remember to get a copy of the Forgotten Lives Omnibus at this link! You've got until the end of August to get a copy before preorders end, so make sure to grab a copy!

It was in 1970 that we first saw John Pertwee take center stage as the Doctor, now trapped on Earth and cooperating with UNIT as he continued to fight against aliens from another world. It was this era that saw iconic locations such as Peladon and iconic villains such as the Master make their footprint on the franchise. Conversely, Philip Purser-Hallard brings us a Doctor cut from the same cloth, showing us another landlocked Doctor as he tangles with a new nemesis.

Robert Banks Stewart (1931-2016) has a small but notable footprint on Doctor Who, having written Terror of the Zygons and The Seeds of Doom. He also wrote for other popular shows such as The Avengers (not the Marvel one) and Adam Adamant Lives!

There is little I want to discuss about Banks Stewart himself - instead, I want to focus on Purser-Hallard and the era he's formed for this Doctor. You'll notice when reading the book that certain Doctors reflect later eras or formats of the show to give themselves unique ground, which is no different here. Purser-Hallard places this Doctor in the middle of the Second World War, working with the British Government. Purser-Hallard lists the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies as one of the inspirations behind this Doctor and you can feel that in the writing, as the Doctor investigates a unique case in House of Images involving Laurel and Hardy, with much more lying beneath the surface than first appears.

In my previous post, I argued that this Doctor still hadn't reached proper sci-fi however I now feel that's wrong. While he does encounter some sci-fi elements, it's more apt to say his character closely ties itself with the supernatural. There is no better evidence to this than the nemesis that this Doctor faces - where he will someday know the Master, here we meet the Magus. The influence of the Master can be seen quite clearly, with the Magus possessing mesmerizing abilities that come into conflict with the Doctor's more practical skills. I personally found it a surprise to see the Doctor presented with a proper rival so early on, but understanding the intention of the Magus to act in a Moriarty-role made the inclusion much more logical.

Paul Hanley's design of the Banks Stewart TARDIS also took a clear alchemist inspiration, with a more rustic feeling that feels very Di-Vinci in design. Although they make very small appearances in the era, this Doctor also appears to have an owl companion.

Now is a good time to cover one important story - Retrogenesis. Unlike many other authors, Purser-Hallard did not write a full short story for the second book and focused his efforts elsewhere. Retrogenesis is a story that covers an alien race called the Kelda, along with their encounters across all eight Morbius Doctors. As the editor for Forgotten Lives (and who we have to thank for these fantastic books), Purser-Hallard has more intimate knowledge that allows him to cover each era. The story of the Kelda is told in snippets, only two pages in length, but I'd argue it best encapsulates what Forgotten Lives is - a snapshot into their lives, left for you to continue.

For more insight into the creative process of every author that worked on Forgotten Lives, you can go to @forgottenlivesobverse and find interviews from everyone involved across the books. If you're looking for insight on how the outfits were designed, you can go to Paul Hanley's Patreon and find what went into designing each Doctor.

Look forward to these four stories as the Doctor works through the Second World War, facing off against demon dogs and comedy legends:

HOUSE OF IMAGES by Philip Purser-Hallard:

THE HOUNDS OF WAR by Kenton Hall:

RETROGENESIS (Part Two) by Philip Purser-Hallard:

THE ROSEWELL INCIDENT by Matthew Kresal:

Tomorrow we'll be covering the Christopher Baker Doctor, where we'll follow a Doctor travelling with his children, taking a cut from the TV Comics. I'll also give more personal opinions on a story from the second book, so look forward to it!

#forgotten lives obverse #forgotten lives #obverse books #doctor who #the brain of morbius #robert banks stewart

[xtruss]

Alcatraz Island still draws tourists for its history as a federal penitentiary. But it also has a rich past as little-known military base, erected to guard against foreign invasion. Image Credit: Mbprojekt Maciej Bledowski, iStock

Ground-Penetrating Radar Reveals Military Structures Buried Beneath Alcatraz Penitentiary

Using non-invasive techniques, archaeologists have confirmed the presence of a coastal fortification beneath what was once the prison’s recreation yard.

— By Katherine J. Wu, Published March 4, 2019 | August 02, 2023

Alcatraz might be best known as a popular tourist destination, the site of the former high-security prison that once held Al Capone. But a team of archaeologists has now unveiled new evidence of this San Francisco Bay island’s often overlooked military history.

In the study, published last Thursday in the journal Near Surface Geophysics, researchers used non-invasive technologies to pull back the curtain on a stunningly well-preserved 19th century coastal fortification that lies beneath the ruins of this infamous federal penitentiary. The work confirms that while prison construction in the early 1900s destroyed much of the former military installation, several structures were buried more or less intact, enshrining a critical sliver of Alcatraz’s colorful past.

“This really changes the picture of things,” says study author Timothy de Smet, an archaeologist at Binghamton University. “These remains are so well preserved, and so close to the surface. They weren’t erased from the island—they’re right beneath your feet.”

Study author Timothy de Smet used non-invasive techniques to create a subsurface map of remains of Alcatraz Island's former military fortification. Image Credit: Timothy de Smet, Binghampton University

Prior to the mid-1800s, Alcatraz Island was a barren strip of land capable of supporting little more than a raucous population of seabirds. But in the wake of the California Gold Rush, the United States government looked to the rocky outcrop as a potential military base to protect the newly bustling city from foreign invasion. Over the next several decades, a stone- and brick-based fortification was erected, then rebuilt as earthen structures better equipped to handle erosion. But Alcatraz struggled to keep pace with the rapid changes in artillery during and after the Civil War era, and by the late 1800s, the island’s defenses were essentially obsolete. Military pursuits on Alcatraz were abandoned shortly thereafter.

When the island’s prison was erected around the turn of the 20th century, little physical evidence of its former architecture remained—or so many thought. The new study, led by de Smet, says otherwise. To look beneath the surface, the researchers deployed ground-penetrating radar, which pulses electromagnetic waves into the earth, returning signals that can visualize remains without excavation. The strategy uncovered a labyrinth of subterranean structures, including an earthwork traverse, a kind of defensive trench, running beneath the penitentiary’s former recreation yard.

“Below the Surface, Alcatraz is Still Full of Mysteries”

“This really reinforces what several historians and archaeologists had long suspected,” says study author and Alcatraz historian John Martini. “Up until this point, we had nothing to go on except for a few visible trace remains and maps—and a lot of suspicion.”

In a way, Martini says, the findings reflect just how limited real estate was on Alcatraz, which clocks in at less than 50 acres. “On a small island, there’s only so many places you can build,” he says. “And it’s unlikely they went to the trouble of demolishing all this stuff.”

A 15-inch Rodman cannon and its gun crew, 1869. These were the largest guns mounted on Alcatraz. Image Credit: National Park Service, Golden Gate National Recreation Area

Because they’re both sensitive and non-destructive, techniques like ground-penetrating radar are crucial for these kinds of investigations, and can complement historical records that survived the era, says Jolene Babyak, an Alcatraz historian who was not involved in the study.

With these results in hand, de Smet and his colleagues plan to continue archaeological investigations under Alcatraz. Going forward, only time will tell what this rock will reveal, Martini says. “Below the surface, Alcatraz is still full of mysteries,” he says. “There’s still a whole lot to be learned.”

Soldiers posing in the island’s ordnance yard. A brick Citadel capped the summit of Alcatraz. 1869. Image Credit: National Park Service, Golden Gate National Recreation Area

#NOVA | PBS #Ground-Penetrating Radar #Military Structures #Alcatraz Penitentiary #Non-invasive Techniques #Archaeologists #Coastal Fortification #Tourist Destination #High-Security Prison #Al Capone #San Francisco Bay #Military History #Near Surface Geophysics #Timothy de Smet #Binghamton University #California Gold Rush #Civil War Era

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

NASA prepares for historic asteroid sample delivery on Sept. 24 NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is cruising back to Earth with a sample it collected from the rocky surface of asteroid Bennu. When its sample capsule parachutes down into the Utah desert on Sept. 24, OSIRIS-REx will become the United States’ first-ever mission to return an asteroid sample to Earth. After seven years in space, including a nail-biting touchdown on Bennu to gather dust and rocks, this intrepid mission is about to face one of its biggest challenges yet: deliver the asteroid sample to Earth while protecting it from heat, vibrations, and earthly contaminants. “Once the sample capsule touches down, our team will be racing against the clock to recover it and get it to the safety of a temporary clean room,” said Mike Moreau, deputy project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. So, over the next six months, the OSIRIS-REx team will practice and refine the procedures required to recover the sample in Utah and transport it to a new lab built for the material at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. There, scientists will unpack the sample, distribute up to a quarter of it to the OSIRIS-REx science team around the world for analysis, and curate the rest for other scientists to study, now and in future generations. Flight dynamics engineers from NASA Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are reviewing the trajectory that will bring the spacecraft close to Earth. At Lockheed Martin in Denver, team members are keeping tabs on the spacecraft and preparing a group to recover the sample capsule. This summer, crews in Colorado and Utah will practice all of the steps to recover the capsule safely, while protecting it from contamination. At Johnson Space Center, the curation team is rehearsing their procedure to unpack and process the sample inside glove boxes. Meanwhile, members of the sample science team are preparing the investigations they will perform with the sample material once received. “The OSIRIS-REx team has already performed amazing feats characterizing and sampling asteroid Bennu,” said Dante Lauretta, OSIRIS-REx principal investigator from the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These accomplishments are the direct result of the extensive training and rehearsals that we performed every step of the way. We are bringing that level of discipline and dedication to this final phase of the flight operations.” Asteroids are the ancient materials left over from the original era of planet formation and may contain molecular precursors to life. Scientists have learned a great deal from studying asteroid fragments that have naturally reached the ground as meteorites. But to understand whether asteroids played a role in delivering these compounds to Earth’s surface over 4 billion years ago, scientists need a pristine sample from space, free from terrestrial contaminants. In addition, the most fragile rocks observed on Bennu probably would not have survived passage through Earth’s atmosphere as meteorites. “There are two things pervasive on Earth: water and biology,” said Dr. Jason Dworkin, OSIRIS-REx project scientist at NASA Goddard. “Both can severely alter meteorites when they land on the ground and muddle the story told by the sample’s chemistry and mineralogy. A pristine sample could provide insights into the development of solar system.” On Sept. 24, as the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft flies by Earth, it will release its sample return capsule, thereby ending its primary mission. The capsule, which is estimated to hold about a cup of Bennu’s material – 8.8 ounces +/- 3.6 ounces (250 grams +/- 101 grams) to be precise – will land within a 37-mile by 9-mile ellipse (59 km by 15 km) within Department of Defense property that is part of the Utah Test and Training Range and Dugway Proving Grounds. OSIRIS-REx team members from NASA Goddard, KinetX, Lockheed Martin, and NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, are using computer models to test navigation plans in various weather, solar activity, and space debris scenarios to ensure that when the capsule enters Earth’s atmosphere at 10:41 a.m. ET (8:41 a.m. MT), it will touch down inside the targeted area 13 minutes later. Recovery crews are responsible for securing the sample return capsule’s landing site and helicoptering it to a portable clean room located at the range. Additionally, crews will collect soil and air samples all around the landing capsule. These samples will help identify if any minute contaminants contacted the asteroid sample. Once the capsule is inside the building with the portable clean room, members of the team will remove the heat shield, back shell, and other components to prepare the sample canister for transport to Houston. The return to Earth of samples from asteroid Bennu will be the culmination of a more than 12-year effort by NASA and its mission partners but marks the beginning of a new phase of discovery as scientists from around the world will turn their attention to the analysis of this unique and precious material dating from the early formation of our solar system. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center provides overall mission management, systems engineering, and the safety and mission assurance for OSIRIS-REx. Dante Lauretta of the University of Arizona, Tucson, is the principal investigator. The university leads the science team and the mission's science observation planning and data processing. Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado, built the spacecraft and provides flight operations. Goddard and KinetX Aerospace are responsible for navigating the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. Curation for OSIRIS-REx, including processing the sample when it arrives on Earth, will take place at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. International partnerships on this mission include the OSIRIS-REx Laser Altimeter instrument from the Canadian Space Agency and asteroid sample science collaboration with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Hayabusa2 mission. OSIRIS-REx is the third mission in NASA's New Frontiers Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency's Science Mission Directorate Washington. IMAGE....Members of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx curation team work with a glove box at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The curation team will be among the first to see and handle the sample OSIRIS-REx is returning from asteroid Bennu. They are also responsible for storing and distributing the sample to science team members around the world. Most of the sample will be stored for future generations. Credits: NASA Johnson/Bill Stafford

#space #science #Astronomy #physics #news #nasa #osiris rex #bennu

[xasha777]

In the opulent conference room of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, amidst the global elite gathered to discuss the fate of a world on the brink of ecological collapse, she sat—a striking figure draped in the traditional garb of her ancestors, yet with a look in her eyes that betrayed a wisdom far beyond her years.

Her name was Aara, a delegate from the Southern Federation, and she was about to change the course of history.

The leaders had been debating for hours, stuck in an endless cycle of profit versus preservation. They couldn't see that their time to choose was running out—that is, until Aara stood up, her voice cutting through the cacophony like a clarion call.

"We are looking for solutions in the past, while the answers lie ahead," she proclaimed. "Our attempts at solving the climate crisis with old-world thinking are futile. We must advance, evolve, and embrace what comes next."

The room hushed, skeptical eyes fixating on her. Then, with a gesture to the holographic projector at her side, she unveiled her vision.

The walls of the room flickered to life with images of a metropolis that defied reality—skyscrapers twisted into helixes, greenery intertwining with architecture, and vehicles that hovered noiselessly above the ground. It was a vision straight out of a science fiction fantasy, yet it was grounded in the bleeding-edge technologies her Federation had been developing in secret.

"We have been working on Project Helix," she revealed, "a synergy of advanced AI, biotech, and nanotechnology that can regenerate our world from the atomic level up. But we can't do it alone. It requires a global effort."

Skepticism quickly turned into intrigue as the AI systems demonstrated their capacity for not just sustaining, but enhancing the biosphere. Nanobots that could clean oceans in weeks, genetically engineered plants that could grow in the harshest environments, energy systems that harnessed the very motion of the planet.

As she spoke, her presence seemed to transcend the here and now, as if she was the herald of a new era of human existence. Her attire, while traditional, was adorned with intricate patterns of conductive thread, subtly interfacing with the room's network, a perfect blend of heritage and futurism.

"Join us at the dawn of a new age," Aara implored. "Let the Southern Federation lead us into a future where technology doesn't strip away our humanity, but instead, celebrates it. The International Institute for Strategic Studies can be the crucible for this transformation."

The world leaders, once divided, began to come together, united by the promise of a world reborn. Aara's vision, part prophecy, part science, promised a salvation woven not out of the desperation of a dying planet, but from the hope of a species willing to embrace the stars as their ancestors once embraced the earth.

And so, in a room that had seen countless debates leading nowhere, a new alliance was forged, not just for strategic interests, but for the survival of all life on Earth. Aara's image, once a lone figure against the backdrop of tradition, became the emblem of a civilization ready to leap into the science fiction dreams of its forebears, crafting a reality more fantastic than fiction itself.

[ethanreedbooks]

Unveiling the Universe: Exploring the World of Green Lantern with Ron Marz and Jeremy Adams

Hey, comic book enthusiasts! Today, we're diving deep into the world of Green Lantern, catching up with the masterminds behind the scenes, Ron Marz and Jeremy Adams. With the recent release of Green Lantern #8, there's a lot to unpack, from the return of Kyle Rayner to the ever-complicated life of Hal Jordan. So, let's jump right in!

First up, we chat with Jeremy Adams about his experience working on Green Lantern so far. Eight issues in, and Jeremy is thrilled to be steering the ship alongside luminaries like Ron Marz. He's not just delivering the main story but also ensuring that the backup tales, penned by Ron himself, seamlessly tie into the overarching narrative. With each issue packed full of content, Jeremy wants readers to feel like they're getting their money's worth—and we couldn't agree more!

Now, let's turn to Ron Marz, who's no stranger to the world of Green Lantern. While he's worked with artist Dale Eaglesham before, their collaboration on this series feels fresh and unexpected. Ron dives into the cosmic action with Kyle Rayner, offering readers a glimpse into the character's vulnerable side. Through his story, Ron aims to tug at the heartstrings of readers while delivering those classic '90s-style thrills. And judging by the response, he's nailed it!

Jeremy, on the other hand, has been teaming up with artist Amancay Nahuelpan, whose detailed artwork brings each panel to life. Together, they're crafting stories that explore the depths of Hal Jordan's psyche while keeping readers on the edge of their seats. Plus, with Kyle Rayner making his triumphant return, fans of the '90s era have plenty to be excited about!

Speaking of Kyle Rayner, Ron shares his insights into the character's journey and the emotional weight behind his story. With a flashback opening that sets the tone for the entire tale, Ron taps into Kyle's past to uncover his inner struggles. It's a delicate balance of action and emotion, and Ron handles it with finesse, leaving readers wanting more.

But let's not forget about Hal Jordan, who finds himself grounded on Earth, unable to leave the atmosphere. Jeremy explores Hal's internal conflict as he grapples with his identity and responsibilities. With the looming threat of the United Planets, Hal's world is about to get a whole lot more complicated. And as Jeremy hints, there are big things on the horizon for our favorite Green Lantern!

Of course, no discussion of Green Lantern would be complete without mentioning the villains. Sinestro's presence looms large over the series, serving as a constant reminder of Hal's past. Ron and Jeremy delve into the complex relationship between Hal and Sinestro, highlighting the thin line between hero and villain. It's a battle of ideologies, with high stakes and even higher tension.

Looking ahead, Jeremy teases some exciting developments in the world of Green Lantern. With mysteries unraveling and cosmic events on the horizon, readers can expect plenty of twists and turns in the issues to come. And with characters like Jo Mullein stepping into the spotlight, the Green Lantern mythos is only getting richer and more diverse.

In the end, Ron and Jeremy remind us why Green Lantern is such a beloved franchise. With its rich history, diverse cast of characters, and endless storytelling possibilities, Green Lantern continues to captivate readers young and old. So, whether you're a longtime fan or a newcomer to the series, there's never been a better time to jump on board and explore the universe of Green Lantern!

And that's a wrap on our deep dive into Green Lantern #8! Thanks for joining us, and until next time, keep reading and keep exploring!

#green lantern #dc comic #hal jordan #kyle rayner #green lanter corps #science fiction

[truebluewhocanoe]

A Meeting of Minds Extended Author's Notes

Spoilers for my fic A Meeting of Minds! Please go read that first.

This fic was an interesting one, since it’s for a corner of Who I haven’t quite touched before: fan Doctors. A Meeting of Minds is based on a pitch for an animated Doctor Who series, drafted up by I.N.J. Culbard during the Wilderness Years but never presented to the BBC. You can read his pitch and the story behind it here; it’s only a couple paragraphs and the rest of these notes will be me talking about how I adapted said ideas, so please do read it.

Okay, now that you’ve read the Culbard pitch, let’s talk about it.

Character fusions are interesting. It’s not made clear in the pitch whether the resultant fusion of the Doctor and Master has one unified personality or both the Doctor and Master’s personalities hanging around, but the comparison to the Fourth Doctor and the Watcher fusing to make the Fifth Doctor makes me think it’s the former. Let’s be honest: he probably meant the latter, but multiple personalities is a sensitive subject I don’t feel qualified to write on and the trope of the Evil Alternate Personality needs to stay dead for a few goddamn centuries at least, so that option was off the table from the start.

So, the Doctor and the Master regenerate together into one body, with one resultant mind. How would that happen? The presence of the Fourth Doctor’s scarf and Harry Sullivan’s jacket implies it happens during, well, the Fourth Doctor’s era. Of course, we know that the Fourth Doctor never met the non-crispy Thirteenth Master on screen due to Roger Delgado’s unfortunate passing, but this is fanfic so I say it can happen. Harry’s jacket doesn’t necessarily imply Harry’s presence- maybe he left it in the TARDIS wardrobe- but I like Harry Sullivan a lot and Four/Sarah/Harry is one of my favorite TARDIS teams so I decided to set it roughly around Terror of the Zygons. Terror, of course, marks the end of the UNIT era (depending how you classify it), and a tipping point in the Doctor’s overarching characterization: he’s sick of running around doing the Brigadier’s bidding… so he takes off, and that’s that.

Harry’s stint as a companion seems very short-lived, with each of his stories leading directly into the next and thus apparently cutting him off from any other adventures with Sarah and the Doctor during the UNIT era, but Scratchman ignores this continuity and thus so can I. 

The rest really wrote itself. The Doctor, in his fourth incarnation and traveling with Harry and Sarah Jane, merges with the Master in a freak regeneration accident. How? Because the Master was trying to steal the Doctor’s remaining lives. I didn’t give an explicit reason, just implied that for whatever reason the Master feels the need to get more regenerations, now. Why is the resulting person wearing Harry’s jacket? Because Harry died, of course.

Sorry Harry, I love you, but this was the most interesting way this could go. Harry’s death cuts off the Fourth Doctor’s arc before it can even get off the ground- literally- by giving the Doctor a slap-in-the-face reminder of why he runs around protecting the Earth: because he cares about the people on it.

Just one problem: is this person the Doctor? Or the Master? Or neither?

Of course, the original pitch was for Doctor Who: The Animated Adventures, not The Master: The Animated Adventures. I left it somewhat open-ended for our poor nameless Time Lord who’s not quite sure who he is, but of course he’s the Doctor. At least, mostly. He has the Master’s memories, too, and had the rather ruthless impulse to loot the corpse of a friend- even if I’d say that’s not outside the realm of possible actions for the Doctor.

But ultimately, the probably-Doctor chooses to run towards the Doctor’s TARDIS, not the Master’s. Harry’s death hits him hard. He doesn’t want to show his new face to Sarah Jane and the Brigadier, because he cares about how they think of him, and fears that they’d be revolted by his fusing with the Master. (And perhaps because he doesn’t know if he’s safe to be around, not with how close to the surface his ruthlessness is.)

But why is it the Doctor who had far more influence over the merge than the Master? Well, because he was the one supplying the regeneration energy. The Doctor and the Master got glued together, but the Doctor was also the glue. So if anything, the Doctor absorbed the Master.

…Yeah, okay, can we talk about how that’s kind of horrifying? Character merges always carry a sort of existential horror. There were two people, now there’s one, that implies some kind of death, right?

Yeah. I don’t think it’s just Harry’s death that will have a lasting effect on this Doctor, but also the fact that he essentially killed the Master by accident as well. Sure, he has the Master’s memories and some of his personality, but there’s no one left in the universe running around calling themselves the Master. They are effectively dead.

I don’t plan on writing a follow-up to this, but I can at least imagine the future of this Doctor. The Culbard pitch mentioned a story with Sea Devils in 1960s Brighton; I think this Doctor sticks around Earth, at least spatially, but hopping up and down its timeline as a self-appointed protector, maybe with just the slightest undertones of implied ‘ownership’ as a lingering mindset from the Master. I think it would take him a few adventures to gain the confidence that he’s the Doctor, not the Master, and that it would be safe for him to take a companion. Maybe he reunites with Sarah Jane, or maybe he needs a new friend for a fresh start. That’ll be for y’all to imagine.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

-The shift from past to present tense was originally at the moment where the new incarnation decides to run. I changed it to be at the POV switch to the new incarnation, since that made a lot more sense, and in doing so thought that removing contractions from the prose would fit as a quirk of this serious-faced new incarnation. He doesn’t get any spoken lines, but the implication is that he doesn’t use contractions when speaking.

-I planned to include a line saying that the new incarnation referring to himself with the ‘he’ pronouns was only out of habit, but I don’t think the Doctor or Master thinks about themselves in English, so that pronoun in the prose is due to the the fact that the TARDIS is translating their thoughts for us, the viewers/readers. I felt that they/them would’ve left it ambiguous whether the new incarnation was one personality or two, which is something I did want to definitively settle, so I stuck with “he.”

-This was my first time writing Delgado's Master, hopefully I didn't make him overly hammy. If I did: my bad.

Thanks for reading all through my rambles, I hope you enjoyed this weird little fic!

#doctor who #doctor who fanfiction #wilderness years #fourth doctor #thirteenth master #delgado!master #harry sullivan #true blue who fic

[rawwkfingers]

The Ambassadors of Death

I've heard of course about the wonky timeline that the Classic era brings up, that we're just not sure when the UNIT stories are meant to take place, but I always assumed that was more of a nerdy fan thing but no, they make it very clear in this serial that the story doesn't take place in "modern" times considering they'd already been to Mars several times.

This was the first serial where I really had no idea what the alien menace was going to be, and they kept that mystery for so long! It's been awhile since I felt completely in the dark about Doctor Who and I loved it and I loved the final reveal that they were actually good guys. The "twist" that it was the general made no sense for me because they'd already established that he was in on it very early on in the serial, so I'm not sure why it was treated like a big reveal

Its so interesting how different the sonic screwdriver is in Classic Who vs New Who. There were many times in this serial I thought "why doesn't the Doctor just use the screwdriver" before remembering that initially, they didn't want it to be the magic wand that it is today. I understand both sides of the argument tbh. In the serial format of Classic, it makes sense for it to be a more grounded device, whereas in the more modern style of television that New Who takes, having the screwdriver be a catch-all device is something of a necessity

The editing so far in Pertwee's era has been, weird. A lot of direct cuts with little transition between scenes, literally the Doctor would make a comment and then an immediate cut to a different scene, and the cliffhangers are all extremely sudden. It's not something I ever notice unless it's done badly so I'm not quite sure what exactly is being done differently now compared to this but it's a jarring change, though not necessarily a bad one

You can definitely see the James Bond influence this serial. The political intrigue, the car chase scenes, the way the mystery takes several episodes to develop. I didn't think I was going to enjoy that aspect of the Pertwee era tbh but I'm actually really loving it. Though because of it, and the stuck-on-earth plot, Pertwee's Doctor feels a very different character from any other Doctor (even if he shares a fashion sense with 12.) He's much more concerned with things from a UNIT perspective

I don't like his response to Liz being threatened though. At first I thought his cool demeanor was him staying calm to unsettle the bad guys but he never seems to get too upset about it, which is such a marked difference from how other regenerations react, both 1-2 and 9-12

#rawwk on #classic who watch #the ambassadors of death #i did a different style in writing up my thoughts this time around #instead of writing them all at the end i wrote paragraphs as i watched it #i dont think i like how it turned out tbh

[spacenutspod]

The ground shakes. Paintings tilt. Walls crack. Rubble may fall. On Earth, we understand how and where these events happen due to the discovery of plate tectonics – the continental crust’s creation, movement, and destruction. However, when astronauts placed seismometers on the lunar surface during NASA’s Apollo mission era, those instruments recorded quakes on the Moon. In the 1970s, the Viking landers also recorded quakes on the surface of Mars. Since neither of these worlds has plate tectonics, scientists set about collecting more data to understand the phenomena, which led to the recent NASA InSight lander. Now, a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters explains how the largest recorded seismic event on Mars provided evidence for a different sort of tectonic origin — the release of stress within the Martian crust. On Wednesday, May 4, 2022, InSight recorded a record-breaking magnitude 4.7 marsquake with an epicenter about 2,200 kilometers away from the lander. The resulting tremors shook the planet for the next six hours. The event was large, but scientists had no reason to believe the cause was anything different from the usual meteoroid impact. After all, InSight had recorded no fewer than eight impact-related quakes, the two largest of which resulted in separate craters about 150 meters in diameter. This new event – cataloged as S1222a – generated a quake energetic enough for the resulting crater to be on the order of 300 meters in diameter with a potential blast zone nearly 200 kilometers wide. This spectrogram shows the largest quake ever detected on another planet. Estimated at magnitude 5, this quake was discovered by NASA’s InSight lander on May 4, 2022, the 1,222nd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ETH Zurich All three events had several similarities, including long-period surface waves. There were, however, differences in the wave data types collected. Lead author Benjamin Fernando from the University of Oxford still suspected an impact as the cause of S1222a. He gathered up a team to find the crater, requesting help from a number of organizations, including the European Space Agency, the Chinese National Space Agency, the Indian Space Research Organisation, and the United Arab Emirates Space Agency, all of whom have or had missions in orbit around the red planet. These orbiters have been collecting a wide range of images, covering the entire visible spectrum as well as some near-infrared (Mars Odyssey) and ultraviolet (Emirates Mars Mission and MAVEN) bands. InSight’s seismometer, SEIS, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure. Credit: NASA/JPL The team ended up taking several months to search the nearly 144 million square kilometers of Martian surface using low- and medium-resolution images from all of their respective orbiters. No new craters in the correct size were discovered. Nor did they find any signatures of potential new craters such as a dust cloud from the impact or a dark patch representing the expected blast zone. Without the mechanics of plate tectonics, the team concluded that the 4.7 temblor had to have been caused by the “release of enormous tectonic forces within Mars’ interior”. As Fernando explains, “We still think that Mars doesn’t have any active plate tectonics today, so this event was likely caused by the release of stress within Mars’ crust. These stresses are the result of billions of years of evolution; including the cooling and shrinking of different parts of the planet at different rates.” While the imagery ruled out an impact cause for this marsquake, further analysis of the wave data is necessary to understand fully the nature of Mars’ tectonic mechanics, and that analysis is ongoing. Unfortunately, NASA’s InSight reached the end of its mission in December 2022, so now the data collection focus will be on upcoming lunar missions from another assortment of international organizations. We look forward to more collaborations in the quest for understanding our solar system. Original Source: University of Oxford press release The post “The Big One”: The Most Powerful Marsquake Ever Detected appeared first on Universe Today.

#space #astronomy #news #science

[thxnews]

Biden's Vision: American Diplomacy in Transformation

  FROM THE DESK OF Secretary Antony J. Blinken, U.S. DEPARTMENT of STATE.

Introduction: This week, I delivered a speech at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) on the Biden Administration’s view of the power and purpose of American diplomacy at this historic inflection point – the end of the post-Cold War era and the early days of fierce competition to define what comes next.   We find ourselves at another hinge moment in history – grappling with the fundamental question of strategy: “How do we get from where we are to where we want to be, without being struck by disaster along the way?” What I want to do is set out the Biden administration’s answer to that profound and vital question. So let’s start with where we are. The end of the Cold War brought with it the promise of an inexorable march toward greater peace and stability, international cooperation, economic interdependence, political liberalization, human rights. And indeed, the post-Cold War era ushered in remarkable progress. More than a billion people lifted from poverty. Historic lows in conflicts between states. Deadly diseases diminished – even eradicated. However, decades of relative geopolitical stability have given way to an intensifying competition with authoritarian powers, revisionist powers. Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine is the most immediate, the most acute threat to the international order enshrined in the UN charter and its core principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence for nations, and universal indivisible human rights for individuals. Meanwhile, the People’s Republic of China poses the most significant long-term challenge because it not only aspires to reshape the international order, it increasingly has the economic, the diplomatic, the military, the technological power to do just that. Forging international cooperation has gotten more complex. Not only because of rising geopolitical tensions, but also because of the mammoth scale of global problems like the climate crisis, food insecurity, mass migration and displacement. So we find ourselves at what President Biden calls an inflection point. One era is ending, a new one is beginning, and the decisions that we make now will shape the future for decades to come. The United States is leading in this pivotal period from a position of strength. Strength grounded in both our humility and our confidence. Humility because we face challenges that no one country can address alone. Because we know we will have to earn the trust of a number of countries and citizens for whom the old order failed to deliver on many of its promises. Because we recognize that leadership starts with listening, and understanding shared problems from the perspective of others, so that we can find common ground. And because we face profound challenges at home, which we must overcome if we are going to lead abroad. But confidence – confidence – because we’ve proven time and again that when America comes together, we can do anything. Because no nation on Earth has a greater capacity to mobilize others in common cause. Because our ongoing endeavor to form a more perfect union allows us to fix our flaws and renew our democracy from within. And because our vision for the future – a world that is open, free, prosperous, and secure – that vision is not America’s alone, but the enduring aspiration of people in every nation on every continent. Now, our competitors have a fundamentally different vision. They see a world defined by a single imperative: regime preservation and enrichment. A world where authoritarians are free to control, coerce, and crush their people, their neighbors, and anyone else standing in the way of this all-consuming goal. The contrast between these two visions could not be clearer. And the stakes of the competition we face could not be higher – for the world, and for the American people. At the core of our strategy is re-engaging, revitalizing, reimagining our greatest strategic asset: America’s alliances and partnerships. We’re working with purpose and urgency to deepen, broaden, and align our friends in new ways so that we can meet the three defining tests of this emerging era: a fierce and lasting strategic competition; global challenges that pose existential threats to lives and livelihoods everywhere; and the urgent need to rebalance our technological future and our economic future, so our interdependence is a source of strength – not vulnerability. We’re doing this through what I like to call diplomatic variable geometry. We start with the problem that we need to solve and we work back from there – assembling the group of partners that’s the right size and the right shape to address it. We’re intentional about determining the combination that’s truly fit for purpose. So, we’re determined to work with any country – including those with whom we disagree on important issues – so long as they want to deliver for their citizens, contribute to solving shared challenges, and uphold the international norms that we built together. This involves more than just partnering with national governments – but also local governments, civil society, the private sector, academia, and citizens, especially young leaders. This is the heart of our strategy to get from where we are to where we need to be. And we’re pursuing it in four principal ways. First, we’re renewing and deepening our alliances and partnerships, and forging new ones. Today, the NATO Alliance is bigger, stronger, more united than ever. We’re transforming the G7 into the steering committee for the world’s most advanced democracies. And we’ve raised the level of ambition in our relationship with the European Union. Second, we’re weaving together our alliances and partnerships in innovative and mutually reinforcing ways – across issues and across continents. Just consider for a minute all of the ways that we’ve rallied different combinations of allies and partners to support Ukraine in the face of Russia’s full-scale aggression. Some once saw threats to the international order as confined to one region or another. Not anymore. Russia’s invasion has made clear an attack on the international order anywhere will hurt people everywhere. We’ve seized on this recognition to bring our transatlantic and Indo‑Pacific allies closer together in defending our shared security, prosperity, and freedom. Third, we’re building new coalitions to tackle the toughest shared challenges of our time. We’re working with our G7 partners to deliver $600 billion in new infrastructure investment by 2027 through the Partnership of Global Infrastructure and Investment, or PGI. And we’re focusing our government support on areas where reducing risks will unlock hundreds of billions more in private sector investment. And we’re leading by the power of our own example. The United States is the largest donor to the UN World Food Programme – we provide about 50 percent of its annual budget. Russia and China?  Less than 1 percent each. Since 2021, the United States has also provided more than $17.5 billion to address food insecurity and its root causes. The more countries can feed their own people, the more prosperous and more stable partners they’ll be; the less they can be victimized by countries willing to cut off food and fertilizer; the less support they will need from international donors; the more abundant the global food supply will be, lowering prices in markets everywhere, including in the United States. The more we bring together allies and partners to make real progress on critical issues like infrastructure, like food security, like AI, like synthetic drugs, like conflicts new and old, the more we demonstrate the strength of our offer. At this critical inflection point, we’re showing countries who we are. So are our competitors. Finally, we’re bringing our old and new coalitions together to strengthen the international institutions that are vital to tackling global challenges. When we strengthen international institutions – and when they deliver on their core promises to ensure security, to expand opportunity, to protect rights – we build a broader coalition of citizens and countries who see the international order as something that improves their lives in real ways and deserves to be upheld and defended. When our fellow Americans ask what we are getting in return for our investments abroad, we can point to tangible benefits for American families and communities, even as we spend less than one percent of our federal budget on diplomacy and global development. Those benefits include more markets for American workers and businesses; more affordable goods for American consumers; more reliable food and energy supplies for American households, leading to lower prices at the pump and the dinner table; more robust health systems that can arrest and roll back deadly disease before it spreads to the United States; more allies and partners who are more effective in deterring aggression and addressing, with us, global challenges. I’m convinced that, decades from now, when the history of this period is written it will show that the way we acted – decisively, strategically, with humility and confidence to reimagine the power and purpose of U.S. diplomacy – we secured America’s future, we delivered for our people, we laid the foundation for a more free, a more open, a more prosperous era – for the American people and for people around the world. I appreciate those who have taken the time to write to me in the past several months. To share your thoughts, please write to me and my team at [email protected]. Sincerely,

Secretary Antony J. Blinken Sources: THX News & US Department of State. Read the full article

#Americandiplomacy #Bidenadministrationstrategy #Foodsecurity #Geopoliticalstability #Globalchallenges #Infrastructureinvestment #Internationalalliances #People’sRepublicofChina #Russia-Ukraineconflict #Strengtheninginternationalinstitutions

[drwilfredwaterson]

Update/Supplemental: 8/5/2023 5/10 888 Jesus Christ Post. Almost exactly on the three day anniversary after the 8/5/2023 5/10 888 Jesus Christ post… Posted All 10/10 Posts at Approximately 22:04 UTC on 8/5/2023. Part 2/3.

Making Of - You Belong With Me (On The Set With Taylor Swift)

Published: February 19, 2023 (50th day) Duration: 16:21 (981 seconds) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoeIoLL-sJI SoeIoLL-sJI eiijllooss 5+9+9+600+20+20+50+50+90+90=943. 943+981=1924. 1924+50=1974.

Strong's Concordance #1974 hillul: a rejoicing, praise, merry, a celebration of thanksgiving for harvest. Original Word: הִלּוּל

Every night, a network of NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com.

On August 09, 2023, the network reported 50 fireballs. (28 sporadics, 20 Perseids, 1 Northern Delta Aquariid, 1 Southern Iota Aquariid)

Strong's Concordance #50 Abishua: "My Father is rescue/freedom," from 'ab and showa'; Father of plenty (i.e. Prosperous); two Israelites Original Word: אֲבִישׁוּעַ

"…And there's something to be proud of about moving on and realizing that real love shines golden like starlight, and doesn't fade or spontaneously combust. Maybe I’ll write a whole album about that kind of love if I ever find it." - Taylor Swift (2012 Red album liner notes)

Tonight I Can Write (The Happiest Lines Remix) - Pablo Neruda ft. Taylor Swift Pablo Neruda: Love is so short, forgetting is so long. Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.

Taylor Swift: I said remember this feeling I passed the pictures around Of all the years that we stood there on the sidelines Wishing for right now We are the kings and the queens You traded your baseball cap for a crown When they gave us our trophies And we held them up for our town And the cynics were outraged Screaming, "This is absurd" 'Cause for a moment, a band of thieves In ripped up jeans got to rule the world

Long live the walls we crashed through How the kingdom lights shined just for me and you I was screaming, "Long live all the magic we made" And bring on all the pretenders, I'm not afraid Long live all the mountains we moved I had the time of my life fighting dragons with you I was screaming, "Long live the look on your face" And bring on all the pretenders One day we will be remembered

Hold on to spinning around Confetti falls to the ground May these memories break our fall Will you take a moment? Promise me this That you'll stand by me forever But if, God forbid, fate should step in And force us into a goodbye If you have children someday When they point to the pictures Please tell them my name Tell them how the crowds went wild Tell them how I hope they shine

Taylor Swift - Eras Tour - SoFi 8/8/2023:

“What do I say to you after that?” Swift said in response to the applause, as captured in videos from the night. “That was so deeply abnormal and beautiful. I don’t know what to do or say.”

“I think it’s safe to say that I, like all people, will experience a certain amount of emotional downward spirals throughout the course of the rest of my life and in those moments, you can rest assured I’m gonna think about what you just did,” she continued, getting slightly emotional. “And I’m gonna feel better. So thank you. That was insane. It was crazy.”

“I’m going to spend several decades trying to figure out words for how that just made me feel,” Swift added after the night five standing “O.” “I’m trying to get it together. I’ve completely lost control over my brain, and that’s your fault. I’m just gonna float through the rest of the show, so thanks for that.”

Taylor Swift - Sweet Tea and God’s Graces (from her 2004/2005 demo CD) Tire swings, summer dreams, honeysuckle on the breeze Wilson County creek Laying in the green grass, I was watching clouds pass Baby, you were watching me Cold barns, truck beds, everything you said Slowly educating me I never had a lesson so sweet

You can get high on a first kiss You can get by with sweet tea and God's graces You can love like a sinner and lose like a winner Nothing's shatterproof You can crash and burn and come back someone new And that's what I learned from you

Autumn rain, window pane, looking how the leaves change Just like the two of us Still got your laugh, your ghost, your jacket Guess I loved you way too much But I'm a little smarter, my heart's a little harder But it's still soft enough to cry Cause I remember those times I remember

Saw you just the other day All that I could think to say was "Hey, how have you been?" You caught me with that old smile Said, "It's really been a while And I still think about back when" We used to get high on the first kiss We could get by with sweet tea and Jesus And you can love like a sinner and lose like a winner Nothing's shatterproof You can crash and burn and now I'm someone new And that's what I learned from you

June 10, 2016 was the 162nd day. Strong's Concordance #162 ahah: Oh! -- ah, alas! Original Word: אֲהָהּ

Strong's Concordance #2524 cham: husband's or wife's father, father-in-law, hot. Original Word: חָם

Ladson, South Carolina 4.7 km (2.9 mi) SSE Population: 13790

Goose Creek, South Carolina 10.7 km (6.6 mi) ESE Population: 40633

Miles Teller/"Goose" - Great Balls of Fire (From “Top Gun: Maverick”) With a Foundation of/Beginning with 1944 and Valentine's Day…

Published: June 16, 2022 (167th day) Duration: 2:14 (134 seconds) 2/14: Valentine's Day https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVcMsjyKlaM pVcMsjyKlaM acjklmmpsvy 1+3+600+10+20+30+30+60+90+700+400=1944. 1944+134=2078. 2078+167=2245.

1944+Valentine's Day=Love… Strong's Concordance #2245 chabab: to hide (as in the bosom), i.e. To cherish (with affection) -- to love, hobbyist. Original Word: חָבַב

John 8:31 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. John 8:32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

John 11:9 Jesus replied, “There are twelve hours of daylight every day. During the day people can walk safely. They can see because they have the light of this world.

John 13:34 So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. John 13:35 Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.”

"The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone." - George Eliot

"I keep waiting for the roof to cave in. I was raised to follow the Golden Rule, you know, treat people the way you wish to be treated. That's kind of the way I live my life. Maybe someone up there likes me for that." - Matt LeBlanc

"My favorite six words in recovery are: trust God, clean house, and help others." - Matthew Perry

"Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such." - Henry Miller

#august #hope #taylor swift #the eras tour #ts eras tour #swifties #you belong with me #friends #video games #gaming #cheat codes #matt leblanc #matthew perry #george elliott #henry miller #miles teller #Youtube

[hieranarchy]

Rating Cannes Grand Prix Winners

Whoosh. Another Cannes Ad Festival has come and gone, and here I am, empty-handed yet full of opinions on who actually deserves their Lion. Rawr. Here we go.

Brand Experience & Activation /

Fifa 23 X Ted Lasso, for EA Sports and Apple, by Apple, Cupertino, and EA Sports, Redwood

Maybe I'm not into football, maybe i'm not familiar with the show Ted Lasso. It's a collaboration that makes sense, but importing existing real-life characters and objects into the meta verse? Done to death and hardly ground-breaking. Next.

Creative B2B /

EART4, for B3 Stock Exchange and United Nations Global Impact, by AlmapBBDO, São Paulo

Listing Earth as a stock. Interesting. But im still confused--do people actually buy and sell the shares like it's a real stock? Because Eart4 certainly does not look bullish to me.

Creative Business Transformation /

ADLaM – An Alphabet To Preserve A Culture, for Microsoft, by McCann New York

It's nice that big corp have to occasionally do something meaningful to keep up their brand image. Suss out a semi-dire issue in third world communities and offer to solve it with basic technology. A low-hanging fruit and fail-proof award-clinching method. No complaints, I guess.

Creative Commerce /

The Subconscious Order, for HungerStation, by Wunderman Thompson, Riyadh

Um I have many issues with this idea. Firstly 'subconscious choice' could just as easily be 'marketing manipulation'. Who knows when they show you that you're craving a McMuffin at midnight that it's not because Macdonalds paid them a few extra grand to be featured? Secondly does my eye lingering at some eye-catching image of a blue-coloured ice cream necessarily mean I want blueberry gelato for dessert? I'm not sure if this kind of measurement is accurate. The insight of choice overload is true though, just not a fan of this solution.

Creative Data /

The Artois Probability, for Stella Artois, by GUT, Buenos Aires

I usually love ideas that dive into arts/history/pop culture. But all these efforts just to prove that Artois was the beer of choice in Victorian times and has a legacy dating back to the B.C. era or sth...is kinda lame. Also verifying the Artois brand through the illustrations of a can? ...I can't.

*I know it's been a slew of disappointment so far, but stay with me, there are some worthy ideas below.*

Creative Effectiveness /

Shah Rukh Kahn-My-Ad, for Cadbury Celebrations, by Ogilvy Mumbai

The first positively creative one so far. Now this is how you leverage data and tech effectively: by making one superstar ad and replicating it by the hundreds to promote small and local businesses. The doors to deep fake AI are officially thrown wide open. Yay and also, yikes👀

Creative Strategy /

Plug-Inn, for Renault, by Publicis Conseil, Paris

Whoever thought of this, you sold yourself short by selling this idea to Renault as a campaign. It's basically a peer-to-peer AirBnB business model. Should've pitched this as your own personal side hustle start-up.

Never Done Evolving Featuring Serena, for Nike, by AKQA, Portland, and AKQA Melbourne

Paying homage the glorious (23-time Grand Slam winner) career of tennis legend Serena Williams is very on brand for Nike. It's like a very cool passion project of a sports enthusiast. Unfortunately, I am no sports enthusiast.

Direct /

Runner 321, for Adidas, by FCB Toronto

I love that 321 refers to Trisomy 21 (Down syndrome) and also sounds like 3,2,1, ready set go. An elegant idea to kickstart a new tradition.

Entertainment For Gaming /

Clash From The Past, for Clash of Clans, by Wieden + Kennedy, Portland.

No, just no. Again, huge waste of effort that amounts to basically nothing. Sorry Clash of Clans fans, but we really need technology and man-hours to be used more productively.

-OK 10 VIDEO LIMIT I'LL CONT IN THE NEXT POST-

#mypost #canneslions #cannes festival 2023 #advertising #grand prix #advertisers #creatives #creatives on tumblr

[coastalincidental]

Long Jetty, the Playground Rocket & the Space Age: Inspiring Future Coastie-Nauts

Coastal Incidental by Art.

31 March 2023

Credit: Coastal Incidental

After many decades’ stationary on the launch pad, the iconic red, blue and yellow playground rocket of Long Jetty on Darkingjung country finally had its T-minus 3, 2, 1, LIFT OFF.

While not exactly heading for the blanket of stars we are familiar with on the coast, the rocket more humbly made its way along The Entrance Road, where it will be taken for what Central Coast Council (CCC) calls a ‘planned refreshment’.

Not so much a nip and tuck, more a paint job and bringing the rocket up to twenty-first century safety standards.

You can vote on the future look and design of the rocket until 5 April. The revamped rocket will return in June.

Before talking about design options and how to vote, let's take 'one giant leap' back and chat about how Long Jetty's rocket arose from the 1960s quest to land on the Moon – and how the rocket's return is an opportunity to inspire the next generation on the coast to reach for the stars.

Credit: Central Coast Council

Playground rockets – symbolic of the first space age

When Apollo 11 astronaut, Neil Armstrong, disembarked from the lunar module to take 'one small step' onto the Moon's surface in 1969, children were also disembarking from rocket ships onto the grass, dirt and even concrete of playgrounds worldwide.

Rocket ships – like the one in Long Jetty – were increasingly constructed in playgrounds from the US to the then USSR, symbolic of the space race between these countries to reach the Moon and capture the imagination of the next gen.

The first playground rocket was built in Blackheath in the early 1960s after John Yeaman, a town engineer from the area, visited the US and was inspired to recreate the iconic playground equipment, with the help of metal manufacturer, Dick West.

Space archaeologist, Associate Professor Alice Gorman (also known as Dr Space Junk), has been researching the significance of and maintains a database of these unique playground structures. Nearly 40 rocket ships were constructed here.

Credit: Rotary Club of Blackheath

This period also saw the start of futuristic, space-inspired buildings and signage, known as Googie architecture. In the US, roadside diners in a hyper-modern style – think of the steel, neon and glass architecture from the cartoon, The Jetsons – sprung up to capture the attention (and dollars) of a new market: the car traveller.

Closer to home, the UFO-like The Shine Dome (or the 'Martian Embassy' as it is also known) was built in Canberra on Ngunnawal country. Home to the Australian Academy of Science, the design by architect, Roy Grounds, speaks to a technologically modern future.

Indeed, on Wiradjuri country, the Parkes radio telescope – now known as Murriyang, a name chosen by Wiradjuri Elders representing ‘Skyworld’ – was integral to televising the grainy footage of the Moon landing to over half a billion people worldwide.

Credit: Unknown. Original newspaper clipping from a scrapbook belonging to this blog's author.

Against this backdrop, countries from around the world were meeting at the United Nations to decide on the legal rules for the exploration and use of outer space. Lofty ideals on the exploration and use of outer space for the benefit of all, and to be used only for peaceful purposes infuse these laws.

Yet, the focus on outer space was subject to important critiques, considering the ongoing inequality and discrimination on Earth. The historical context of the Moon landing era cannot be overlooked. Civil rights movements during this era were pushing for the intersecting aims of racial equality, land rights for Indigenous peoples, gender equality and socioeconomic justice. Some of these sentiments in relation to the Moon landing were powerfully captured at the time by spoken poet Gil Scott-Heron.

The return of the rocket ship: an opportunity to inspire?

Along with the rocket refresh, CCC is looking to install an information board to ‘highlight the rocket’s life throughout the years’.

Let’s use this information board to not only talk about the local history of the rocket and how its symbolic of the first space age and the quest to reach the Moon, but importantly the return of the rocket ship can inspire the imaginations of the next generation.

A new space age is now underway. NASA is again working in cooperation with countries and companies across the world to return to the Moon and onto Mars. This 'Space 2.0' needs not only tech-minded people with science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) skills, but poets, artists and philosophers to ask the big questions.

What does a future in outer space look like? How do we imagine and make real an outer space for all? How do we envision new ways of being and avoid exporting terrestrial inequalities?

The Earth rising behind the Moon, captured in 2022.

Credit: NASA

If you are asking: ‘Why care about outer space?’ One reason is that space technology helps us here on Earth. Satellites provide us with everything from images to help with weather monitoring and bushfire management to allowing us to speak instantly with loved ones next door or overseas.

So many technologies that we take for granted today had their origins in what scientists and engineers invented for outer space – from solar cell technology to freeze-dry food techniques to emergency thermal space blankets.

Let’s vote: the future design of the rocket

Fast forward five decades and very few of these playground rockets remain.

A council attempt to remove a rocket from a Hawthorn playground in Naarm, Victoria led to a petition garnering thousands of signatures. The rocket was saved and brought up to meet safety standards, and a series of jumpable boulders representing planets from the solar system were added. The rocket was re-opened in late 2022.

Hawthorn revamp (left), Enmore Park upgrade (right)

Credit: The Glenferrie Times

Fortunately, CCC is keeping the local icon and asking for resident views on the future design by April 5. The options:

(1) Keep it classic with only the necessary safety repairs; or

(2) Upsize the rocket with an extra slide and make changes to enable the top portion of the equipment to re-open.

Get voting here.

While partial to retaining the ‘classic look’ (option 1), this blog encourages CCC to look at other refreshed rockets such as the one in Hawthorn or Enmore Park to inform any revamped design for option 2, if not already done so.

Let’s hope the return of the rocket can inspire and fuel space enthusiasts – and potentially even a future local astronaut (or ‘coastie-naut’) towards a real life T-minus 3, 2, 1 LIFT OFF.

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Established in 2015, Coastal Incidental is an arts project to engage locals and tourists alike on the NSW Central Coast on Darkinjung country with the area’s changing built environment. Initially a photography project, the project has grown to include walking tours, talks, exhibitions and zines, with involvement in local community events such as the Long Jetty Street Fest, Blank Canvas pop-ups and the Neighbourhoods art trails.

To say hello: [email protected]

With special thanks to Linda Coy for encouraging this blog post.

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Copyright © 2023 Coastal Incidental.

[coreymichaelsmithson]

Message From An Injured Bird

Anastasia is a barrier island near St. Augustine, in the northeastern "First Coast" of Florida. Shaped roughly like a lobster claw, it stretches fourteen miles from inlet to inlet, yet it runs only about two miles across at its broadest point. For the majority of its length, less than a mile separates the Atlantic Ocean from the Matanzas River. Vulnerable, serene, imbued with a quiet magic, Anastasia is an important stopping point for several species of migrating birds, a haven for deer and geckos, and a prime nesting ground for sea turtles. It has also been my home for the past four years.

When viewed from above and facing north, the right pincer of the lobster claw is occupied entirely by Anastasia Island State Park, roughly 1,600 acres of pristine dunes, mangrove hammock, and marshland. A broad tidal estuary known as The Salt Run divides the two upper parts of the island ... the developed part to the west, and the wild, sandy, raw part to the east. Because of this topography, the outermost shore of the island stands at a significant remove from buildings, trees, utility poles, or most other vertical elements. Thus, a beachcomber walking on the outer shore is treated to one of the most awe-inspiring vistas on the entire Eastern Seaboard. One would be hard-pressed to find a bigger dome of uninterrupted sky anywhere ... a view hemmed only by low dunes on one side, and the curvature of the Earth on the other. There are very few hints of civilization, save for planes or helicopters flying overhead, a faint glow from the historic downtown, the occasional buoy or washed-up bit of flotsam, and our majestic lighthouse, which towers over the dunes and casts its roving beam across the entirety of the landscape.

For much of the past four years, I've been walking this glorious beach nearly every day, usually at sunset. Now that my time in St. Augustine is drawing to a close, my hours here have come into an especially sharp focus. My daily walk on the beach has become a ritual of vital importance.

Most of the sand here is fairly coarse, made up of quartz, pulverized shell, grit from broken coral, and flakes of silica. The heavier material is a rusty tan color, with finer grey grains drifting into piles and plateaus. Flat stretches of white get interspersed with a tarry black, creating dazzling marble patterns. Every acre of exposed beach contains the remains of trillions of life forms: clams, oysters, snails, crabs, lobsters, urchins. It's full of fascinating finds ... every so often, things like shark teeth, 16th Century Spanish relics, and rare coins from shipwrecks will pop up.

Below all this painterly variety lies a foundation of coquina, a natural concrete composed of compressed shells. This material, so resilient that cannonballs will sink into walls made of it, was the island's chief commodity during the era of Spanish colonization. St. Augustine’s famous Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort in the United States, was built using coquina, along with several of the town's earliest buildings.

The dunes themselves are held together with sea oats, a type of tall reed with strong roots, as well as a number of flowering vines, sea grapes, and bush daisies. Hidden among the rises and falls of this terrain thrives an entire ecosystem: gopher tortoises, brown water snakes, marsh rabbits, ghost crabs, armadillos, and the critically endangered Anastasia Island beach mouse. Dolphins leap between the whitecaps, sharks and pompano slice through the shallows. Right whales blow in the distance. Several species of bird can be found here, in large numbers: the least tern, the royal tern, the great egret, laughing gulls, turkey vultures, cardinals, pileated woodpeckers, ruddy turnstones, willets, ospreys, roseate spoonbills, wood storks, black skimmers, loons, and pelicans.

The pelicans are my favorite. They can be seen alone, or moving in “squadrons” of up to a dozen birds. Their hunting technique is impressive … they climb high into the air, circle around a few times as they observe their prey, and then go into a steep dive, plunging into the water with astonishing force. The resulting splashes of white can be seen from quite a distance, and can easily be mistaken for whale spouts.

When they're not actively searching for food, though, the pelicans engage in a remarkable display of agility ... they coast in long processions, single file, floating only a few inches above the water. It's amazing to see them knifing alongside the breakers or following the flat expanses further out. This very low and daring flight pattern utilizes an aerodynamic principle known as "compression gliding", in which a cushion of air forms between the slightly cupped wings and the relatively smooth surface below. It's a highly efficient form of movement, as it conserves energy that will be needed later for gaining altitude. Yet I've come to suspect that this particular behavior is not merely a matter of economy.

I believe that this is the pelican's art.

Or, more accurately, that this is the nearest equivalent to how we humans use art, as an outward expression of one's inner experience. For many people, good art is a demonstration of virtuosity. Great art, in my view, is the consolidation of one's entire being into a meaningful gesture. It is a succinct depiction of the relationship between self and environment, between impulse and action, between transmission and reception. The pelicans' flight above the water has an unerring certainty, and it carries within it a charge of sublimity, perhaps even joy. Their formations are possessed of a grace unequaled by any of our crafts. It is as if the birds, individually and collectively, are expressing their mastery, their pride, the essence of their being.

Anastasia Island teems with life ... but like all environments under scrutiny, it will also sometimes present sobering reminders of death.

Last year, on one of my many beach walks, I came across a mortally injured cormorant. Its wing had been badly mauled, probably by a boat propeller, and it was struggling to hold the ruined limb aloft as it limped around on the surf.

My guts churned to see the creature in such a sorry state. Clearly it was in terrible pain, but I had no idea of how to help. I tried to approach the bird several times, but it always retreated. No matter how often I paused, how softly I spoke or slowly I moved in, it continued to panic and flee from my advances.

Using my phone, I searched on the internet for somebody to call. Surely there had to be a department for this kind of emergency. There had to be an official out there who could help alleviate this poor animal's suffering. But the late hour was working against us ... it was already early evening on the weekend, when most offices were closed. I called nearly a dozen numbers, and every single one went straight to voicemail. Finally, I was able to contact an after-hours emergency veterinarian willing to treat injured shorebirds. He advised me to carefully capture the bird, bring it in, and they would see if it could possibly be rehabilitated. But therein was the problem ... how could I possibly do this? I had carried nothing with me, no bags or blankets or ropes or nets or any viable means with which I could safely transport this animal. Worst of all, I was easily three miles away from my car. Even if I were successful in somehow seizing and subduing this justifiably snappy cormorant, I certainly couldn't carry it in my arms for such a distance, especially giving the fragile state of its wing. My best hope would to hike back to my car, rush home, and re-equip myself for a challenging rescue.

"I'll be back," I said. "I promise." I already knew that this was folly, but I was determined to try.

The sun continued to sink as I started my return journey. Eager to distract myself from the agony I had just witnessed, I turned my attention outwards, to the Atlantic. The lights of shrimping boats blinked on, illuminating swarms of gulls. I looked to the waves themselves, mesmerized as their crests got tinted by the sunset and the hazy hues of the horizon: lilac, cream, a dusty rose. Streaks of saffron climbed the inner surfaces, while silver flattened the backs. A lacework of froth skimmed the troughs.

About an hour later, I made it back to my car. A sheet of clouds had moved overhead. I sped home, where I grabbed a laundry basket, several blankets, some bottled water, and a flashlight. I immediately returned to the beach, which had by now been plunged into total darkness, with neither moon nor stars to relieve the black.

At low tide, the long slope that descended from the berm would be much easier to walk upon, the sand having already been compacted by the pounding surf. But at high tide, treading along the narrow and steep expanse that remained above the swash became a challenging slog, especially in the dark. I felt both determined and ridiculous as I carried the padded laundry basket across the darkened beach. Normally, there would be enough ambient light to see at least the water's edge and perhaps some details of the terrain. On a clear night you could read a newspaper by the starlight alone ... but this low and thick cloud cover obscured everything, and so I had to rely entirely on my little flashlight. I swept the beam back and forth, making a continuous scan between the berm and the breakers.

The first mile passed. Then the second. Then the third.

I could not find the bird.

I knew that I had already covered the same distance as before, and had then gone a little further. Even without much in the way of visible landmarks, I was familiar enough with that expanse of Anastasia to know exactly how far I had walked. The northernmost end of the island was only another quarter mile away. But I found no hint of the cormorant. It had either gone back into the sea, and to its eventual death, or it had dragged itself further into the dunes and out of sight. Either way, it had traveled beyond my reach.

After searching for another hour or so, I surrendered. The shorebird would meet its fate, and there was nothing I could do to change it. I walked back in a state of deep despair and increasing exhaustion. By the time I finally arrived at my car, I had already walked across twelve miles of loose sand in the space of a single evening, and my calves were on fire. I leaned against my steering wheel and cried for a long time. "I'm sorry," I said, over and over again. "I'm so sorry."

The memory of that bird haunted me for months afterwards. I rationalized my grief away ... reassuring myself that I had done what little I could to aid a creature in distress. But the fact that I failed, or that the bird refused to cooperate and stay put long enough to be rescued, felt like some kind of terrible injustice. I wanted to ask for forgiveness, for some kind of acknowledgement that I had at tried my best, that my effort to set things right was a sincere, if unsuccessful, gesture of goodwill. Still I found myself wracked with guilt and sorrow. The sight of its ravaged wing re-emerged in my mind again and again.

Recently, though, I had the opportunity to reconsider my encounter with the shorebird, and the divine message occulted within.

Over the course of the last year, I have been working with psilocybin, cautiously and deliberately reintroducing this natural psychedelic into my mental health program. I've been taking very moderate "threshold" doses, often in the company of a trusted friend, and we've been enjoying our journeys together in a safe and appropriate setting: my favorite stretch of beach. The spiritual yield of these sessions has been incalculable. I should note here that I do not see any conflict between this work, which is a work of engagement and expansion, and the ongoing maintenance of my sobriety, which is a work of restraint and resolve. If anything, my recent experiences with psilocybin have made me even more grateful for the clarity of mind I've gained after ten years of avoiding alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and other recreational drugs.

I've come to understand during these recent mushroom trips that the shore is an interface between worlds, a liminal space between the known human experience and the (metaphorically) unfathomable mysteries of the ocean. As such the beach offers up a treasury of valuable insights. The seemingly boundless expanse of ocean invites us to imagine time on a much vaster scale. The meeting of land and water lends itself to consideration of important but often intangible concepts ... like the ephemerality of all things, the hypothetical "authorship" of nature, and the importance of an individual observer's relative vantage point in the cosmos. The beachgoer, be they a saucer-eyed psychonaut or a zaftig Bathsheba in sunblock, comes to the sea to feel a sense of connection with the infinite. Whether we realize it or not, we are obeying some primal summons to meet our source. The sea draws us back because looking upon it reveals our place in the grand scheme of things.

On my most recent quest, I spent a fair bit of time examining my feelings on death, purpose, and the fleeting nature of all human achievement. I became fixated on the idea of "the record". Theosophists, quack mediums, and spiritual charlatans of the 19th Century spoke often of "The Akashic Record" ("Akashic" being a misappropriation of the Sanskrit word for æther), and there's been a heap of New Age hooey piled atop the topic ever since. Nonetheless, it's a tantalizing idea to consider. There are correlating concepts in Buddhism, Jainism, and the Aboriginal Australians' non-linear experience of The Dreamtime, which shares the notion of an accessible ancestral memory.

This calls into question whether or not the universe itself has a memory. Will all of the things that ever existed within it, on our planet and the countless other worlds moving through space, be remembered or reflected upon? Did the universe invent life in order to gain some kind of awareness of itself, like a grand thought experiment or the material manifestation of a dream? Did matter (and by extension, sentience) blink into existence merely because the universe needed a mirror? Is there really a universal story that we are all contributing to, and who will be interpreting it? Are we merely an accident of physics, an inadvertent poem of carbon, or are we players on a grand stage?

Many creators are deeply interested in documenting their experiences for posterity. The impulse to make records in the form of artworks stems from the same imperatives as reproduction, storytelling, and the mythological anthropomorphizing of nature into humanlike deities. The ancient Egyptians and Mayans carved their histories in stone, while modern day artists use pixels and photographs and paintings. But all of these documents, be they monuments or temples or the Mona Lisa ... all are like sandcastles, subject to the inevitability of wind and tide. All things will eventually be returned to their constituent parts, disintegrated and reintegrated into new structures, new species, new stories. All gods will live and die, cresting like waves and withdrawing again into the roiling sea of thought. All human endeavor ... all religions and empires and arts and language ... will eventually be washed away. We are dunes, we are whitecaps, we are flecks of foam. The "divine" may be an action, not a being.

While watching a seagull peck at a helpless crab, I thought again of the injured cormorant, and its likely demise. I thought of how unfair this fate seemed, how cruel, and how even my pathetic attempt at rescue was in vain. "Why?" I asked, looking towards the spot where I had first encountered the bird. "Why did that have to happen?"

Just then a thought struck me, a truth so simple and direct and unvarnished that it could not have been a product of my own (admittedly Baroque) imagination. The answer had been sitting in plain sight all of this time, so obvious as to escape detection until this very moment, when I had stepped out of my narrow little ego for an instant and took a gander at the larger picture.

Every life and death is a testament.

Every life, no matter how brief, how small or tenuous or insignificant it may seem, offers some degree of feedback to the macrocosmic observer. Like an organ sending pain or pleasure to the body that envelopes it, each utterance, movement, breath, each wish or word or howl, each unfurling frond, each opening petal, each death rattle, each moment in the endless eternal dance of existence ... each relays a message to the higher consciousness. The baby that cries with its first gasp of air, the injured bird that squawks in pain and fear ... both are speaking directly to the cosmos, saying, "I am here. This is my message to you. Listen."

I speak now of the macrocosm, the collective being that envelopes us and binds our molecules and sets into motion the whirls and eddies of evolution. Call this entity what you will ... "God", "Shiva", "a higher power", "the almighty", "the man behind the green curtain", "the universe" ... the macrocosmic sentience receives these messages and responds. In the same way that we acknowledge the pain from stepping barefoot on a broken seashell, or we delight in the tender caution of a first kiss, our cosmos reacts to the signals we send. It responds with amplifications, adjustments, corrections, balances, rewards, punishments, obstacles, keys, barriers, gifts. It is listening, all the time.

No life is meaningless. Not the blade of grass, nor the beetle that gnaws on it. There is no mineral without a soul, nor is there any villain without merit. Each living thing contributes its understanding of the world, its actions and growth and death being a form of testimony, an accounting of its time on the planet. Consider the songs of whales, and what they might tell us about time and creation ... perhaps they push their poems through the water in the form of sonic shapes, sharing ancient hymns of love and valor. Perhaps they venerate gods that dwarf our cosmologies. Think of the subtle prompts of slime molds, the whispers of an aspen grove, the quiver of a bee, a murmuration of swallows. Even the tardigrade has its tale to tell.

On one of my latest walks, I came across a dead pelican. The two halves of its open beak were jabbed sideways into the sand, its open eye stared sightlessly into the sky, and the breeze animated its feathers in an unsettling parody of flight. It had died so recently as to look intact, almost alive.

As the sun dipped behind the dunes, I stood for a long time above the corpse, gazing upon it with a mixture of admiration and pity. I hoped that this animal did not suffer, in the way that the doomed cormorant had. I hope that it enjoyed many hours of smooth flight above the waves, taken many satisfying plunges into the sea, that it had found its mate, that it had known moments of grace. I hoped that its final moments were peaceful. I wondered then if its experiences and feelings and thoughts had been recorded somewhere. Was the perfection of its flight seen and appreciated? Did its life transmit some meaningful message? Was that message ever received, and by whom?

All of my works are an attempt to transmit discoveries. The hum of the sublime may be apprehended, or ignored. But the birds need no brushes or keys or chisels to deliver their testaments. Their arts are flawless.

Nothing is lost. Everything is seen and heard. All is as it should be. The sand is full of stories, and the roving dunes will reveal the fate of all stories. The footprints you have left are already disappearing. The injured bird has spoken. The dead are still speaking. The gods in the waves are listening.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Curiosity rover discovers water-rich fracture halos in Gale Crater A research team using new methods to analyze data from NASA's Curiosity rover and its neutron spectrometer Dynamic Albedo of Neutrons, or DAN, on Mars was able to independently verify that fracture halos contained water-rich opal, potentially serving as an important resource for human exploration. The study finds that the vast subsurface fracture networks would have provided water-rich and radiation-shielded conditions that were potentially more habitable than those on the surface. In 2012, NASA sent the Curiosity rover to Mars to explore Gale Crater, a large impact basin with a massive, layered mountain in the middle. As Curiosity has traversed along the Mars surface, researchers have discovered light-toned rocks surrounding fractures that criss-cross certain parts of the Martian landscape, sometimes extending out far into the horizon of rover imagery. Recent work finds that these widespread halo networks served as one of the last, if not the last, water-rich environments in a modern era of Gale Crater. This water-rich environment in the subsurface would have also provided more habitable conditions when conditions on the surface were likely much more harsh. As part of a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, led by former Arizona State University NewSpace Postdoctoral Fellow Travis Gabriel, now a research physicist for the U.S. government, archival data from several instruments were examined and showed considerable anomalies near light-toned rocks earlier in the traverse. By happenstance, Curiosity rover drove right over one of these fracture halos many years ago, long before Gabriel and ASU graduate student and co-author Sean Czarnecki joined the rover team. Looking at the old images, they saw a huge expanse of fracture halos extending far into the distance. By applying new methods for analyzing instrument data, the research team found something curious. These halos not only looked like halos found much later in the mission, in completely different rock units, but were similar in their composition: a whole lot of silica and water. "Our new analysis of archival data showed striking similarity between all of the fracture halos we've observed much later in the mission," Gabriel said. "Seeing that these fracture networks were so widespread and likely chock-full of opal was incredible." Gabriel and his team of researchers studied the composition of light-colored rocks surrounding the fractures on the ground, or fracture halos, in Gale Crater. Previous studies Gabriel was involved in used the rover's laser-induced breakdown spectrometer, Chemistry and Camera, or ChemCam, to show that these halos may be composed of opal, a material that has important implications for the history of Gale Crater. Opal itself contains a large amount of water, which produced a strong signal in another instrument on the rover: the DAN spectrometer. Observing drill cores taken at the Buckskin and Greenhorn drill sites many years into the mission, scientists confirmed that these light-toned rocks were very unique compared to anything the team had seen before. "These light-toned rocks were lighting up in our neutron detector, producing anomalously high thermal neutron count rates," Gabriel said. In addition to looking back through archival data, Gabriel and his team went searching for opportunities to study these light-toned rocks again. Once they arrived at the Lubango drill site, a bright-toned fracture halo, Gabriel led a dedicated measurement campaign using the neutron spectrometer, confirming the opal-rich composition of fracture halos. The discovery of opal is noteworthy as it can form in scenarios where silica is in solution with water, a similar process to dissolving sugar or salt in water. If there is too much salt, or conditions change, it begins to settle at the bottom. On Earth, silica falls out of solution in places like lake and ocean bottoms and can form in hot springs and geysers, somewhat similar to the environments at Yellowstone National Park. Water-rich environments in the subsurface of Mars could have provided a safe haven from the harsh conditions on Mars' surface, which is rather inhospitable compared to Earth. In Gale Crater, temperatures can go below minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the winter night time, reaching only up to roughly 30 degrees Fahrenheit in the warmest of afternoons. Gale crater also experiences far more radiation than the surface of Earth due to our much thicker atmosphere. Every day spent in Gale crater would expose you to a cosmic-source radiation dose that roughly equates to a daily pelvis X-ray. Since scientists expect that this opal in Gale Crater was formed in a modern Mars era, these subsurface networks of fractures could have been far more habitable than the harsh modern-day conditions at the surface. "Given the widespread fracture networks discovered in Gale Crater, it's reasonable to expect that these potentially habitable subsurface conditions extended to many other regions of Gale Crater as well, and perhaps in other regions of Mars," Gabriel said. "These environments would have formed long after the ancient lakes in Gale Crater dried up." The significance of finding opal on Mars will have advantages for future astronauts, and exploration efforts could take advantage of these widespread water resources. Opal itself is made up of predominantly two components: silica and water, with minor amounts of impurities such as iron. Since opal is not a mineral, the water is not bound as tightly within a crystal structure. This means that if you grind it down and apply heat, the opal releases its water. In a previous study, Gabriel and other Curiosity rover scientists demonstrated this exact process. Although Gabriel and his team aren't able to perform an exhaustive assessment of the water content in all halos, the dedicated neutron experiments they performed over two of these halos demonstrate that a single-meter halo could house roughly one to 1.5 gallons of water in the top foot of the surface. New Martian water resource: Opal? What does this research finding mean for future Mars exploration? The poles of Mars house a large amount of water ice among other volatiles like carbon dioxide. In the present day, the equator of Mars by comparison is water poor, showing no sign of widespread water ice resources in the near surface. The study suggests that water-rich opal may be lining many landscapes across regions of Mars where scientists otherwise don't expect water. Surprisingly, the opal in Gale Crater retains water despite the dry conditions of the modern-day atmosphere. Combined with growing evidence from satellite data that shows the presence of opal elsewhere on Mars, these resilient materials may be a great resource for future exploration activities elsewhere on Mars—that is, if opal elsewhere on Mars also retains water to the same degree as the opal in Gale Crater. Opal forms in water-rich environments; however, it was found in fractures that formed much later in geologic time compared to the majority of rocks in Gale Crater. Much of Gale Crater's rocks were formed in an ancient lake environment. This demonstrates that the water that formed the halos was around in the subsurface much later and that it was much more widespread than researchers thought. Once opal forms, it tends to mature into a more crystalline form when exposed to water and fluctuating conditions. The fact that this opal was so well preserved suggests that once it was formed, there wasn't much interaction with water thereafter. In these ways, discoveries from the Curiosity rover help us understand the where, when and what about water on Mars. "It's amazing to see Curiosity's neutron detector, the rover's only subsurface probe, which was originally only expected to survive for a few years into the mission, still providing fantastic results like these that reveal the nature of water and hydrated materials buried just below the Martian surface," said Craig Hardgrove, co-author of the work, associate professor at ASU's School of Earth and Space Exploration and scientist on Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover's DAN team. What's next? Gabriel and the team continue to investigate the role of water in the formation and alteration of Martian rocks as the Curiosity rover heads up the central mound of Gale Crater, but no such luck has been made in discovering new halos at recent elevations. As a member of NASA's latest rover team, Mars 2020 Perseverance rover, Gabriel is eager to explore silica-rich features in a new location on Mars to understand the nature of water-rich environments elsewhere on the red planet. IMAGE....Light-toned fracture halos as seen crosscutting the bedrock extend into the subsurface. These fracture networks would have served as safe havens from harsh surface conditions in a modern period on Mars. Credit: Malin Space Science Systems/NASA/JPL-Caltech

#space #science #Astronomy #physics #news #nasa #mars curiosity rover

[americatransformed]

Yesterday I visited an obscure Star Trek tourist spot; the future birthplace of Captain Kirk in Riverside, Iowa. 😄 According to canon, This Star Fleet legend is born in a utopian era of Earth, where our world is united, living at peace and prosperity, in a federation of planets where exploration and advancement is our highest calling. And Iowa is no longer best known for exporting corn, 🌽 but warp capable starships. 🚀

Can we expedite this future please? Do we really want to wait for 2228, until our species has mastered interstellar travel? Do we want to endure a near generation dark age on Earth, before we can rebuild civilization after the Third World War? This is the timeline of Star Trek, and we seem to be flirting with its fulfillment, where World War 3 erupts in 2026.

Every day in the news, I’m reading about tensions flaring between the world’s superpowers, whether it’s between the US and Russia over a proxy war in Ukraine, or between the US and China concerning a coming invasion of Taiwan. On top of this, US politicians have been talking about an invasion of Iran for years, while planning for war with North Korea. Does our over 700 billion defense budget, (more than double the budgets of our geopolitical rivals combined) and the thousands of our military bases sprawling across the planet, have anything to do with Russia and China teaming up in war games preparing to fight US? https://bit.ly/3TJLZXc

We may currently be dominated by the fear filled sides of the superpowers, planning for the end of civilization in a nuclear war, but there is another Russia, China and America. It is made of millions of citizens who believe we should explore, not wage world war. I have friends in both rivals through the global mind, (internet) who agree with me. The best side of US and the rest of the world, believes the power of possibility can defeat nightmares. This is what I try to express in my recent Star Trek video, where I talk about why I love this science fiction show so much! https://youtu.be/HJLDdQkpza0

Imagine living on an Earth where we can achieve the most beautiful dream of building a utopian future similar to Star Trek, with our world united in a type one planetary civilization! Imagine every nation’s flag merging into the Earth; the common ground we all stand on together, where World Spirit inspires us more than nationalism! Imagine a world where we escape the horror story of billions dead in a Third World War! Imagine a future where starship captains are being born in Iowa right now today, and not having to wait 200 years until we rebuild a shattered, war torn civilization.

There could be something in our solar system this moment that is mind-blowing, and if we go out there to find it, it could transform our perspective of the entire cosmos. What if we found life under the ice of Pluto, Europa or Titan! Or alien artifacts in Valles Marineris canyon on Mars!

In the past, explorers visited the Amazon rainforest and found incredible plants and animals never seen before, that brought breakthroughs in medicine and science. It’s possible there is something even more transformative, waiting for us to find up there, 🪐 if we would just stop wasting resources fighting each other, and seize the reigns of a future where we all win together. ✌🏽👁🌍👁 Imagine how much better off we could all be if we weren’t trapped in a negative frequency, making the whole world feed the wrong wolf! 🐺💥🌍🔥

It’s likely exploration of our solar system could transform life forever and make this existence on earth so much more worthwhile, that no-one would ever want to wage war again, because the future looks so promising and beautiful, with the excitement so palpable, that humankind would unite in a stirring global worldwide revolution into a United States of Earth. This is what we could have at our fingertips if we could only gain the slightest amount of vision and see the potential, waiting for US to discover. If we truly deserve to pass the great filter in this universe, we will collectively wake up to see this! https://earthpledge.net

#startrek