…or How moving fast and breaking things…breaks more than just things
(Crossposted with Inverse Square)
So…it turns out that among his many other sins, Elon Musk, with a boost from the now-unmentionable fact of climate changes, is turning low earth orbit into an overgrazed commons…to the impoverishment of us all. That’s the message of this study, published last week in Nature Sustainability. That work explores the effects of injecting anthropogenic (AKA us) greenhouse gases on the thermosphere—the bit of the upper atmosphere that extends all the way into Low Earth Orbit (LEO, up to 2000 kilometers above the planet).
The TL:DR is that climate change heats the earth’s surface, but cools and shrinks the higher-up regions of the atmosphere. That in turn means satellites in low earth orbit experience less atmospheric drag. Which leads to the following problem: without such drag bits of space junk don’t get slowed down…which means their orbits don’t decay (as fast) and they don’t burn up. As the corresponding author of this work, MIT graduate student William Parker put it in an interview with the MIT news office, “The sky is quite literally falling — just at a rate that’s on the scale of decades…And we can see this by how the drag on our satellites is changing.”
More dead satellites and orbital debris boosts the risk of collisions that knock out still-useful spacecraft. Such wrecks generate more debris, which makes crashes yet more likely, until it becomes too dangerous to try to park a satellite in some patches of space. And when that happens, a global commons will have been tragically exhausted.
Bit of backstory here: the idea of a common is an old one. In practice, it probably dates back to the beginnings of anything resembling hominid society, and as an explicit term in property law (in England, at least) it extends back to the feudal manorial system.
The basic concept is simple, and kind of evident in the name. A common is (in its first incarnation) some bit of land on which the people who live on or around could do something—the ability to use the property for one or more purposes, usually up to some defined limit. For example, someone could hold the right to graze five sheep, or gather some amount of wood, or some similar privilege.
Note the idea of limits—constraints on an individual’s use of a common resource. Our commoner (!) could put five sheep out to nibble…not six or seven or any number they chose. And if it turned out that the already granted rights of pasturage were too much in a bad year, existing rights could be reduced. All of which is to say that on a lasting, well run common property, its use was tightly regulated. If that weren’t so…well that’s where the tragedy comes in. If any member of commons can run as many ewes as they want on a field of grass then the endgame comes fast: the meadow gets munched down to the roots and its carrying capacity drops. Fewer animals can graze and everyone grows poorer.
Historically, lots of commons have avoided this outcome. They have been actively managed and the commoners involved in any given set of rights have policed potentially cheats with great assiduity.
But, beginning perhaps in the 19th century, certainly by the 20th, new kinds of commons have emerged that have proved much more difficult to police. Think the oceans and overfishing, or of the use of air, land, and water as depositories for pollution, or (my current focus) a way of thinking that sees the effectiveness of antibiotics as a kind of commons that can be destroyed by uses that promote antibiotic resistance. And, of course, there is the most common commons of them all: the earth’s atmosphere, in which the tragedy of billions of individual decisions (and national and multi-national corporate choices) is producing profound physical and chemical changes on a planetary scale.
Back to the cooling thermosphere and the rise of space junk. In the study authors’ analysis, less drag leading to longer decay times for debris will reduce the carrying capacity of some or all of the LEO region. As they write, “the worst-case scenario capacity carries many fewer satellites across broad swaths of LEO by the year 2100.”
2100 is a bit of ways out. But the problem is already here. Why? Because of Musk and a handful of other overgrazers of this space-commons. Here’s what’s happening, again, as told to the MIT news office:
Their predictions forecast out to the year 2100, but the team says that certain shells in the atmosphere today are already crowding up with satellites, particularly from recent “megaconstellations” such as SpaceX’s Starlink, which comprises fleets of thousands of small internet satellites.
“The megaconstellation is a new trend, and we’re showing that because of climate change, we’re going to have a reduced capacity in orbit,” [MIT associate professor Richard] Linares says. “And in local regions, we’re close to approaching this capacity value today.”
In other words: as Musk and his minions are attacking the US federal gov’t efforts to combat climate change, he’s running his space-grab as fast as he can, to the point where we may lose access to the territory currently used by everything from earth sensing satellites, the Hubble Space Telescope, both the International Space Station and China’s Tiangong sation, not to mention a wealth of communications satellite (including Starlink, of course).
The response is obvious, previewed in the history of the commons. Resources that belong to/are valuable to society (or societies) as a whole need to be closely regulated. We have to make sure that the asshole in the third cottage down doesn’t ruin it for everyone by grabbing the temporary advantage of running some extra livestock on the pasture. In other words: we have to tell Musk and his ilk that a common resource like low earth orbit—is not one in which they can do whatever they want.
Of course, the idea of regulating global commons is exactly the antithesis to the Silicon Valley “move fast and break things” credo, the one Musk embodies, of course. But as that techno-capitalist view takes hold it’s important to recognize how unsustainably extractive it is in many domains—and how much can be broken.
I have little hope of anything moving to protect LEO as a resource under the current regime, nor any of the other crucial modern commons. But here’s the thing: nature, the material world we inhabit, gets its vote too. It doesn’t care if MAGAts think climate change is a hoax (or rather, that elite MAGAts are happy to suggest it’s a hoax to squeeze the next dollar out of a declining resource). Elementary physics tells us that if we go on as we are now, the troposphere will shrink and satellites will crash. That’s reality. I hope that we can minimize the cost of our education at the hands of this most explicit of teachers. But pay we will.
And in the meantime…open thread.
Image: Thomas Sidney Cooper, Shepherd with Sheep, 1868
Betty Cracker
I like the commons framework.
Musk isn’t the only villainous pig in this tragic tale, but I feel like if he can be brought down a peg or 335 billion, the rest of us might have a fighting chance.
Martin
The problem Starlink presents is it marks an international land grab for LEO that more or less guarantees a Kessler syndrome situation. And that happens in the lowest orbits, which you need to pass to get to higher orbits, endangering all spacecraft.
But so long as profits get made before that happens, it’s all good I guess.
Gloria DryGarden
In a functioning efficient government, it would make sense for the EPA to have a space division, that regulates the companies that go leaving their debris up there.
My vision is that companies like space x, and other satellite and space flight agencies, would be required to spend money on equipment that orbits and collects the floating bits of unusable, disabled, or non functioning materials. They can pay to clean it up.
yes, I know, the EPA wasn’t known for efficient operations, and efficiency is now in the thesaurus under synonyms for bullshit, nonsense, empty words, and double speak.
But still. In case we get functioning government back. Or for the countries that do have such.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Executive Summary:
Billionaire techbros will be the death of all of us. That death will manifest itself in myriad forms.
Perhaps most techbros to be honest.
Melancholy Jaques
@Martin:
And when things go south, guess who will be expected to fix it quickly & at no cost to the satellite owners.
Martin
@Melancholy Jaques: Well there’s good news on that front – we have no way of fixing it.
Checkmate libtard!
WTFGhost
Musk has learned one of the lessons of the 21st century commons – if you’re already crowding out the commons, do it faster, so no one else can break in.
I also must wonder: is Star Wars based on our current consumption model? Star Wars has miraculous tech, but it seems like the vast majority of people are barely eking out a living, the exact opposite of what we’d expect with near limitless energy and technology. And we live in a “republic,” they live in a republic. Was Lucas a grim dystopian, or are the Muscovites using Star Wars as, like, a playbook?
LeftCoastYankee
I hate that I’m getting old and have become the stereotype of the old man complaining about the world going to hell in a hand-basket.
I hate even more that it’s actually true.
Gloria DryGarden
@Martin: somewhere I read that there was some space materials reclamation and trash pick-up, going on, or in development. It would sure be a good thing, if that’s happening.
It’s been awhile, I’ll try to search for it.
Gloria DryGarden
@LeftCoastYankee: in the complacent countries, and the denial oriented communities, there’s always decorating your hand basket.
Or, for a privileged few, living far away from the places where the consequences hit first.
Martin
@WTFGhost: Star Wars is not subtly a metaphor for a future where the Nazis are not defeated. So it is antidemocratic dystopian. The trade council is presumably capitalistic but it’s not really stated. Vader is the usual suspects seeking immortality. The Death Star is technology without moral guardrails. The prequels map a bit more closely the American Civil War.
This is why I’m souring on dystopian sci-fi because as The Boys discovered, you can’t write dystopian subtext without part of your audience sympathizing with the bad guys. You have to state it as text, and even then some of your audience won’t get it. (See also: ‘when did Rage Against the Machine go woke’)
I think there’s a good argument that if we want to influence culture, we need to embrace the Star Trek approach of representing the future we wish to build, not the one we wish to avoid.
dm
Another effect comes when those satellite orbits finally do decay — they leave a trail of aerosolized metals as they plunge through the atmosphere, which in turn destroys the ozone layer.
Martin
@Gloria DryGarden: There are experiments with it. It’s is extraordinary expensive, and it’s viable as a preventative effort, but not a remediatory one. Once you lose the ability to predict and maneuver around debris, then your cleanup craft are destined to be destroyed just adding to the problem.
Scamp Dog
@WTFGhost: No, I don’t think Lucas did any elaborate world-building. He wanted to make a fun adventure movie, with good guys and bad guys, and I think he nailed it, at least in the first film. Or first to be released, to be exact. I was in high school when Star Wars came out, and I thought it was a great movie. When I saw the twentieth anniversary version, I decided it was as actually a fun adventure flick, and still loved it, even if some of the sequels were bad.
So no, I don’t think Lucas had anything too profound to say about society, political power or anything like that.
EthylEster
This week’s Quirks and Quarks episode deals with this matter in some detail. Q&Q is a Canadian science podcast with the best radio interviewer I have ever encountered.
Martin
@dm: That’s probably not a serious problem. We’ve demonstrated we can recover the ozone layer with sufficient global cooperation, and the problem of degrading space debris is if nothing else a problem of fixed size. So we might backslide on that front, but it’s not a sustained problem. Eventually you run out of debris. This presumes you gain enough policy control over space access that you don’t constantly create new problems, and if this remains a geopolitical arms race, well, that won’t happen.
chris green
There’s also a risk of a satellite debris chain reaction that could render some orbits unusable as the number of satellites increases:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
Gloria DryGarden
Googled “space debris clean up” got many articles of interest. Here’s one
How much does it cost to remove space debris?
also:
How many dead satellites are orbiting the Earth?
A Ghost to Most
They have no concept of “common good”. They only acknowledge “tribal good”. Everyone else can FOAD.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Jogged my memory
Joseph Campbell ‘s contribution to Star Wars
Interview with Bill Moyers
Jay
@EthylEster:
Available on the CBC radio website, known in the US and amongst the Con’s here as Government Funded Woke DEI Propaganda, even Laugh Out Loud.
cbc.ca/radio
Baud
One of the difficulties we have is we don’t have a good counter framework. They propose to do something, and we say they’re taking too much. But it’s ad hoc. I think we’re reluctant to say something a corporation wants strikes the right balance, either because of insecurity or because of lack of consensus.
ETA: There may be no good solution to this problem.
Gloria DryGarden
Space debris Wikipedia article is quite thorough
Everything you wanted to know, and more.
The initial google search did list companies doing clean up, or researching it. Lots of interesting reading!
Baud
People are running their own private DOGE
Martin
@Gloria DryGarden: This is why it’s a prevention solution, not a remediation one. When a Chinese satellite broke up in orbit, it created about 700 pieces of debris, each in a whole new usually eccentric orbit so they cross across multiple orbital shells.
5,000 satellites and 27,000 pieces of debris quickly turns into 3 million pieces of debris in a chain reaction (Kessler) scenario, and the $50B cost to prevent that scenario turns into a $100T problem to solve, and the craft you designed for the former can’t survive the latter, and you likely need much more maneuverable, better shielded, and overall much more expensive vehicles which drive the cost up even more.
Old Man Shadow
Oh, at this point, I honestly expect the parasites to kill the host. World civilization as we know it collapses. Another world war between areas to hot to survive in and areas that don’t want to share their nation-state’s lands. Famines, diseases, weather disasters, the collapse of satellites, extinctions, the oceans turning increasingly toxic, ten thousand years of darkness, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying.
Just that I think it won’t work until we deal with the billionaires sucking the life out of everything and getting fat off of human suffering.
Old Man Shadow
@Baud: We could try lining up the billionaires in front of a firing squad.
I don’t know if it would work, but I’m willing to try it.
RevRick
The threat posed by satellite debris is minuscule compared to that posed by climate change. We are one significant change in wind patterns delivering moisture caused by ocean heating from really screwing up food production in the global breadbaskets. In this, the wealthy imagining that they can immunize themselves from the effects are complete fools. Money means nothing if the complex network of food production and distribution breaks down. And if they think they can create their own feudal fiefs, well, they’re one bullet away from being disabused of that belief. The poor and minorities may be the first and hardest hit victims, but Seneca’s cliff doesn’t have an exemption for the rich and powerful. Rome shrank in population from one million people at its peak to 10,000 in the Early Middle Ages.
Salty Sam
👍👍👍
ETA: not gonna apologize for emoji usage.
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
THIS. Absolutely THIS.
And it’s not just US, it is everyone, and especially those that think they own the planet. The uber wealthy for example. Not all of them are horrible, but a number very much ARE. And their wealth makes it far easier for them to not give a damn about anyone but THEM. As stated here before, I worked in professional sports, 30 yrs as a hobby and 10 yrs full time. I’ve run into a few of whatever is the next two or three steps down the economic ladder, mostly not nearly as bad as this one, but about 50% of them can be almost as selfish as he is. That almost is doing a lot of work. This dipshit came from a country where people that look like him and have anywhere near this much money are often the worst of the worst. OK that can apply to any country. And to make matters worse he actually does own a company that is at least attempting to make the concept of automobiles reasonable, at least for the foreseeable future. We do need a line of them that doesn’t cost the level his do, because even if he was a better human (please don’t hold your breath waiting for him to improve – you’ll be very long gone before that has even a very small % of possibility of that) we need to figure out how to have a reasonable world, one that, you know, lasts longer than another 50-100 years.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Martin:
The Star Trek world went thru two cataclysmic periods, WWIII and the Eugenics Wars, that vastly reduced the population on a planet now bursting at the seams with homo sapiens and all the resulting disaster that’s resulting from that.
As has been shown with previous, massive reductions in population, things* can get better over time.
So, once we get thru a couple of those, we’re golden!
*things defined as stuff having a better impact on a wide swath of the population, not simply the rich/powerful.
Salty Sam
I was a college sophomore when it came out, and I thought it was a refreshing change from the usual sci-fi “space operas”. I had an older buddy who sneered,”It’s a fucking western set in outer space! They might as well have cast John Wayne as Obi -Wan!”
Upon reflection, I could not argue against that…
Salty Sam
Hmm, I think I see the problem…
Gloria DryGarden
Returning from space right now CNN
parachutes just deployed..
Baud
@Gloria DryGarden:
Good.
dm
@RevRick: This could be part of the attraction of “51st state” talk about Canada — likely still a breadbasket as climate change progresses — and the attraction of Greenland, when the Arctic becomes a blue ocean and the shortest route between Asia and Europe.
@Martin: getting rid of chlorofluorocarbons was the result of preventative steps. Part of the problem with satellite is that the vaporized metal debris persists in the upper atmosphere for quite some time.
Elizabelle
What Elon and The Felon and DOGE and the oligarchs are teaching us is the value and importance of a government working FOR its people, as a counterweight to big business with no guardrails.
American voters seem to be a rather incurious bunch, and don’t know much history, so they have to learn why FDR was such a sea change — desperately needed at the time, and the agencies and government he built have been needed ever since. Also that the Nazis were actually the bad guys, as stylish as they were.
We are getting a tutorial in self-dealing and destruction of The Commons.
Ruckus
@Martin:
I do agree.
BUT.
And it is a big, firm, round but.
I think we need to do both. Because I think we otherwise might too easily fail. Humans have a common issue and that is survival. And unfortunately that is most often based upon THEIR SURVIVAL. Humanity is based upon the concept of survival. And history shows us that while there are humans that can easily look beyond their own survival, there seem to be far, far more that don’t care about anyone’s survival if they can’t be farther up the ladder. At one time in history that may have worked far more often – because there weren’t so many of us. We had an opportunity when we didn’t have the numbers – which gave us more space to be selfish. But in today’s world I don’t see that working well at all. We have to take others into consideration. Over 100-150 years ago we didn’t have to give near as many others much thought at all. Most people rarely had much possibility of doing as much damage as one person can do today.
dm
I’ve heard that Lucas was partly inspired by the Vietnam War, with the US in the role of the Empire.
Professor Bigfoot
@LeftCoastYankee: Cosign.
Elizabelle
@Gloria DryGarden: And you know what I especially love:
breaking news banner at Bezos WaPost:
Jackals, keep an eye on how their splashdown is reported. What body of water??
Jay
@dm:
That would be a “nope”. Roughly 75% of Canada and Greenland is 2″ of “soil” over top of igneous granite all the way down to the earths core. Another 5% to 10% is a thin layer of peat and mosses overtop of permafrost, then once again, granite. There is a reason why 90% of Canadians live in that narrow belt within 100 km of the US border and why Greenlanders eat seals, fish and seabirds.
Climate change is also making Canada less habitable and it is only going to get worse.
Baud
The world isn’t real.
Raoul Paste
Well, I’m not very happy to read the MM post above. Apparently there is a new EO declaring that the alleged fentanyl labs in Canada are a weapon of mass destruction,
Are we really going to do this again?
Jay
@Ruckus:
The history of human success and colonization is littered with the bones of “rugged individualists”.
Martin
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: The backstory of Star Trek isn’t really relevant because it’s not shown. But depopulation, particularly a rapid one, would be economically devastating because its shifts all economic systems from growth, which is how all economic systems are designed to work, to conservation, which none are. Everything changes. You can’t have consumerism. You can’t have inflation. Lending becomes unviable over the long term. And those changes take generations.
RevRick
@dm: The problem with Canada is that there isn’t a chance of two growing seasons like we have in the Southern Plains. And Greenland’s melting glaciers will create a huge challenge for many coastal cities and related industrial infrastructure.
Elizabelle
Have enjoyed your comments about the underpinning of the Star Wars story: Nazis, US civil war, Viet Nam, nothing at all?
Have not read sci fi as much as the rest of you, and totally up for some recommendations on sci fi that got the culture right. (Not so much for the whizz bang technology, being a Luddite.)
zhena goglia mentioned yesterday morning that Soviet/Russian authors used sci fi as a vehicle for criticizing their government (since they could not do so through the channels we take for granted).
This is the year I really have to read Octavia Butler. Have heard good stuff about Terry Pratchett (of course) and …. who else?
I like Connie Willis a lot. Have started on her time travel novels. Learned here she also has a blog to resist Trump and other GOP idiocy …
Martin
@dm: CFCs stay in the upper atmosphere from half a century to two centuries. And yet reducing their use by a sufficiently large amount allowed the ozone layer to begin to recover.
Like I said, it’s a problem of fixed size, and likely not that big of a problem, certainly as opposed to the feedback cycles that other parts of climate change represent where even if you turned off human contribution entirely, they might continue to get worse.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Martin:
My point is that everybody who thinks mankind is headed toward some kind of optimistic Star Trek vision of our planet forgets in that fictional world, we managed to damn near kill ourselves twice but emerged well.
Instead of not emerging and instead living in a Mad Max hellscape of one kind or another.
Or if one believes in the multiverse theory, it could be both…or neither.
Tim C.
Just an anecdote, not data.
I have a friend who has worked as an archetect for the last 25 years. He specializes in things like giant warehouses and other big corporate structures. He’s fairly certain his firm will fold this summer as since Early February, there has been not only no new buisness, but pretty much everyone is buckling down and not wanting to spend money until things settle down.
So yeah, this is gonna be wild, in a bad way.
Mike E
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: competing futures on display between Star Trek, The Expanse and notably Silo, the latter going deeper into the future (where people somehow survive that dystopian hellscape despite it all).
Elizabelle
@Tim C.: I believe it. Architects are a canary in the coal mine, for sure.
Tim C.
@Baud: Not a drag queen.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Mike E:
The Expanse series is on my near-term reading list. Who’s the Silo author?
Jay
@Raoul Paste:
As a sane person, I would assume* that this is just political posturing.
*That word again,
But, you are a country of morons, ruled by morons, barreling in an out of control car towards Dictatorship, and the brain trust is being hollowed out rapidly.
The Mexican Cartels regularly rip the Mexican Army and the Mexican Police a new asshole. What happens when they team up?
Canada has 360,000 regular forces, over 600,000 “Militia”, (like your National Guard and rapidly growing), and based on WWI and WWII volunteer numbers, that would quickly add up to over 3,000,000 irregulars. We also have 127,000,000 guns.
We also have allies, you don’t anymore.
Against that, you have 2,000,000 Regulars and National Guard, scattered all over the globe.
France has moved an AWACS and some Rafels to Greenland, and Canada is replacing the NORAD EWL with a Canadian only, Australian partnered more modern EWL. North and South.
Mike E
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Hugh Howey
raven
MAGA Mike Collins was a no show at an Athens Town Hall so they went ahead without him and it’s really good.
Martin
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: and my point is that people will not work toward a better future if that better future cannot be sold as feasible. What left is a competition (rather than collaboration) for limited resources which turns us against each other.
Jay
@raven:
Is there a Dem standing in for his no show?
Ruckus
@LeftCoastYankee:
Seems like there are more than a few of us…….
Elizabelle
And now, reporting from the bravest of the brave at the FTF Vichy Times:
The astronauts capsule splashed down off the coast of Florida. Also Florida’s Gulf Coast.
And: they helpfully provided a map with an arrow of touchdown site.
They did not label the body of water.
An earlier update:
In other words. Elmo also launched more eventual space junk.
Gloria DryGarden
@Elizabelle: Live splashdown and recovery
Sunni just got off the capsule. This particular feed called it the gulf of A…I chose this live because it wasn’t fox.
So riveting to watch the reentry, parachutes, recovery, and egress.
next, med checks, helicopter to land, flight to Houston. About 739 pm est, a news brief coming up on the return.
Ruckus
@Baud:
I have a question.
Is the problem the cars or the guy that owns the company that builds them?
And no, I am not saying that the cars are perfect or even good.
But.
Are the cars causing any issues or is it totally the pompous, arrogant company owner?
Geminid
@raven: This made me wonder what happened to that idiot Rep. Doug Collins from Hall County. It looks like Doug Collins is the new Veterans Administration. Secretary. He a lightweight, which is probably why he got the job.
Jay
@Ruckus:
It wasn’t done for the insurance money,…….
Martin
@Ruckus: Some of each. There’s a lot of people (myself included) that think that Tesla’s autonomous driving software should not be in public use because it’s too flawed.
Jay
@Gloria DryGarden:
CBC reported that it touched down in the Gulf of Karen.
Ksmiami
@Salty Sam: George Lucas has been quoted as saying Star Wars was a western in space actually
Jay
@Martin:
People are not protesting Tesla “Stores”, vandalizing Tesla’s, because they are crappy cars or have dangerous self driving features, or will incinerate their owners, etc.
Gloria DryGarden
@Jay: is that why it’s called the Shield? Because it’s mostly rock, with very thin topsoil?
BTW, I feel so heartened that Canada has such military preparedness, in case crazy man goes forward with his insane ill begotten threats. I’m sorry for all the efforts being required.
Gloria DryGarden
@Jay: seriously?
that’s pretty amusing..
Jay
@Gloria DryGarden:
Yes, the Canadian Shield.
@Gloria DryGarden:
Not seriously, but apt.
Gloria DryGarden
@Jay: apt, yes. But they actually said it on one of your news sources?
we deserve every bit of mockery, at this point.
Martin
@Jay: No, but some of my sympathy toward the protesters does stem from not minding if fewer of the vehicles most likely to try and hit me on my bike aren’t being bought.
I’m not a huge fan of Tesla dealerships being targeted because SpaceX is the wholly owned Musk company and really should be the bigger target, but you attack what surface area is presented.
I would argue that Cybertrucks generally being embraced as MAGA asshole machines has divided public opinion in a way that Tesla otherwise wouldn’t have done. Well before the election my city’s police department bought one as a DARE vehicle and it’s been enormously polarizing in the city with a lot of what the city is trying to do being constantly hijacked by that decision. That was well before DOGE. So it’s not just protests against the administrations actions either.
Tipping points are a thing.
Martin
@Gloria DryGarden: I’m curious what the US military’s commitment to such a campaign is going to be. I can’t imagine it will be met with the same zeal as fighting the Nazis, to say the least.
Gloria DryGarden
@Elizabelle: calling it the Florida gulf coast is a pretty good solution.
It’s been G of Mexico all my life, 67 years, and I really can’t adjust, it only confuses me.
I still have to review my maps of former Yugoslavia, I was there in 1979, I’m pretty good at maps, but I’m mixed up between Serbia and Bosnia Herzegovina.
Gloria DryGarden
@Martin: I’m imagining a certain level of wanting to desert.
It would be very hard to convince, brainwash, USian soldiers into seeing Canadians, or Greenlanders for that matter, as enemies.
I just can’t imagine. And, it would really mess up recruitment.
youre so right, not at all like gearing up to fight nazis.
Gloria DryGarden
@Martin: suddenly flashed on cow tipping,
a thing in Texas, I hear. Deadly.
Jay
@Gloria DryGarden:
We have been on guard “for thee” since 1776.
Martin
@Gloria DryGarden: I find it helpful to remember that the Gulf of Mexico, like Mexico itself, was named after the people who lived there – the Mexica or Aztecs. This was long before ol Ponce showed up to name the peninsula.
Jay
@Martin:
Here Tesla drivers are not the worst of the worst, that would be full size pickup drivers and SUV’s.
Matt McIrvin
@Elizabelle: Stanisław Lem would often do the implicit critique of Polish Communism through satirical parable (in a couple of novels he was even disguising it by writing about Americans, but they could also be aliens or robots). His work can be extremely dry; I recommend starting with the more comical stuff, “Cyberiad” and “The Star Diaries”.
One of his earliest novels, “Hospital of the Transfiguration”, is a mainstream novel about doctors at a psychiatric hospital when the Nazis invade and decide to exterminate the inmates. I think this was to some degree based on his own experience.
Matt McIrvin
@Gloria DryGarden: In this case you *shouldn’t* adjust– it’s a loyalty test.
Sister Golden Bear
@Ruckus: As a Tesla owner, my opinion is there’s no fucking way it’s full service driving should be street legal, it’s simply not good enough.
Albeit there’s an inherent issue with any “automatic driving” system that still requires the driver to take control in emergencies—the two are at inherent cross purposes. I.e. there’s just no way a driver will be as fully attentive, and we’ve seen similar concerns j aviation that using auto-pilot is degrading pilot skills.
But the cars are being burned vandalized because of Musk himself.
At the risk of #NotAllTeslaOwners, those of us who bought them several years ago were mostly eco-conscious liberals, who may not have been Elon fan bois but there also weren’t many alternatives, and Musk merely seemed like Phony Stark rather than a Nazi. And not all of us are in a position to sell ours.
That said, Wankpanzer owners definitely knew exactly who Elon was when they bought it. So my sympathy for them is zilch.
Jay
@Sister Golden Bear:
As a Swasticar owner, you can prevent
forest fireswith a bumper sticker or two,or, if you have money, a good bodyshop can hide the fact it’s a Tesla with some body mods.
So here for offgrid and whole house, Tesla battery packs became a cheap option for battery storage, as idiots early on tended to trash the cars, but the batteries were okay. None of the junkyards were set up for proper disposal of the battery packs, so they are a cheap source of large amp hour battery arrays,
until recently. Now nobody want’s to buy them.
WaterGirl
@LeftCoastYankee: Had to give that one a wry chuckle.
WaterGirl
@raven: Excellent! I hadn’t heard about that. Did the R plan the town hall, and then not show. Or did the people organize a town hall, and he refused to show?
TF79
@Tim C.: I have a family member who works at the tail end of the supply chain (raw material production) and it’s a similar story – new orders have completely evaporated.
Great thread topic btw, the tragedy of the commons in space (and the difficulty of addressing it due to shitty incentives) is indeed just the latest resource to face that challenge. Very climate-like problem given the potential for tipping points, irreversible damage, and challenges of international cooperation.
Ruckus
@Martin:
Easy to win a bet on the no it shouldn’t, specifically because you are correct. When in human history has any person or group of people ever created a list of every single flaw of humans or anything they’ve ever done. Sure, if the list starts with the most common/stupid errors it’s going to cover a lot of the possible issues, but being as humans are going to be making the list and the solutions, then hell no they won’t catch every possible issue/solution.
VeniceRiley
@Martin: Octavia Butler. She did it. No one listens to black women though.
Gloria DryGarden
@Jay: um, watching out for us to be jerks to you? Or you mind our borders, helping watch over us? Your preposition didn’t make it clear.
Seems I didn’t get much history of Canadian -US relations, sorry for my ignorance.
Gloria DryGarden
@Martin: and Mexico/ the mexicas lands, extended into what we refer to as Texas, didn’t it?
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: With Star Trek they’d do the “dystopia of the week” approach where the good guys encountered a messed-up society and sometimes agonized over the morality of trying to fix it (but in the original series, that’d usually go right out the window once the ship was in danger– time to start the fistfight!)
Gloria DryGarden
@VeniceRiley: usually like your comments. I take exception to over generalizations such as everyone, and no one.
perhaps, “few, have listened to___”
past tense, and non absolute. Just saying. YMMV
Elizabelle
@Matt McIrvin: Thank you.
Jay
@Gloria DryGarden:
During the Revolutionary War, the 13 Colonies tried to invade Canada. Did not go well.
1812, ditto.
1867-1880 ditto.
1920, ditto.
Elizabelle
@VeniceRiley: Octavia Butler. Amazing woman and writer. Too soon gone. Her grave (and cemetery) was spared by the Easton fire in Altadena.
Cemetery actually served as a fire break for houses south of them. That was helpful.
Jay
@Gloria DryGarden:
Tex-ass, New Mexico, (hint in the name), California, Colorado, Arizona,…………
Matt McIrvin
@Elizabelle: Speaking of comic/ satirical SF, I was thinking about Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series recently and in hindsight, it seems like it was Adams working through how to stay sane in the Thatcher era, when greedy people with monstrous political ideas were ascendant and seemed to have all the power, and the best you could do was try to survive and eke out whatever fun you could. His characters have almost no agency, or when they do, it’s a sham (one character is literally the President of the Galaxy, but he’s a powerless figurehead intended to serve as a distraction).
Elizabelle
@Matt McIrvin: We should do some posts/discussions on these ideas.
I missed all of this stuff on first go round!
Jay
@Matt McIrvin:
Well, Thatcher speeches were Vogon poetry.
catclub
@Sister Golden Bear: I am guessing you have liberal bumpers stickers.
catclub
@Matt McIrvin:
It is amazing how many new turns of phrase he gave us that have taken over – at least my attempts at amusing expression.
The real tragedy is he died so young. The next tragedy is his book “Last Chance to See.”
Actually, reverse those.
catclub
@Matt McIrvin:
Red Dwarf was probably made for the same reasons.
Betty
Thanks for this Tom. How many ways and in how many places can Elon cause damage and destruction?
Matt McIrvin
@catclub: The first radio series actually slightly predates Thatcher as PM, but I’m pretty sure the writing was on the wall.
YY_Sima Qian
The problem of the governance of LEO commons is not restricted to SpaceX, or the US techno-kleptocrats. There is OneWeb & Project Kuiper in the US. The PRC has just embarked on a 10K+ satellite mega-constellation Guowang (or “National Network”), & another mega-constellation is planned. The EU & India have their own ambitions, as ultrafast internet based on satellites is one of the main concepts for 6G communications. The LEO is getting mighty crowded.
The governance of the global commons has be crumbling in the era of Great Power Competitions, & the decline has accelerated as any semblance of world order fell apart in the past few years, w/ global & regional powers prioritize “natsec” & “winning” whatever technological race against each other, acting selfishly & viewing the collaboration necessary to preserve the commons w/ suspicion. In fact, they have all but view the commons as new arenas for them to compete in, full convinced that their competitors do not care about preservation of the commons, & any such sensibility puts oneself at a severe disadvantage. We have seen such behavior from the key underwriters of the past world order (the US & the EU), we have seen it from one of the main beneficiaries of the past world order (the PRC), we are have seen it from the agent of chaos (Russia), & we have seen it from other regional powers hoping to rise (India). We are seeing this wrt the Antarctic Treaty, the Svalbard Treaty, the exploration & exploitation of the Arctic Ocean, & exploitation of the ocean floor in international waters. Of course we are seeing it in space.
Now, the US, the PRC & Russia (though the latter is constrained by capability) are all openly planning for warfare in space. All the debris from all of the destroyed satellites in LEO will render space flight unviable for centuries. The US & the PRC might still try to employ techniques w/ less collateral damage, such as laser dazzling, microwave beams, & physical capture. Russia will have no compunction about ruining space for everyone by wantonly employing kinetic kills.
Bill Arnold
@Elizabelle:
Checked just now. Of the major outlets, just New York Post, Fox Business, Fox News called it Gulf of America.
Most used Gulf of Mexico, or off the coast of Florida.
NaijaGal
@Elizabelle: Start with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. She predicted some of what we’re experiencing now, including a presidential candidate who used the slogan “Make America Great Again.” It definitely influenced the last story in my linked short story collection.
Ruckus
@Sister Golden Bear:
I believe we are on the same page.
I also believe that electric cars are going to make a major comeback, from decades and decades ago. A lot of the first cars were electric, I’d imagine that because a lot of the country had electricity and not much gasoline fuel. What it takes to create gasoline from crude oil is a fair bit of cost. I used to work across a small street from a gasoline distribution center – they filled up semi tanker trucks to fill up station tanks. We possibly/likely wouldn’t have lived if that distribution facility had caught fire or especially exploded. Which once, when the drivers were on strike and non union drivers were hired because the process to create gasoline from crude oil is a bit of a not insignificant effort and the profit from selling that gasoline is itself not an insignificant amount, especially in places like SoCal, and one of the regular drivers during said strike released a trailer lock pin so when the truck stared down the driveway and applied the brakes, the trailer stopped and the truck went about a foot farther, almost dropping a FULL gasoline tank trailer down to the ground before the driver got stopped. Had he not stopped it might have gone BOOM, which would not have been, for anyone within a one block – minimum radius, in any way positive. I was less than 20 feet away. I’ve had closer calls but that one was/would have been likely the worst.
My point is that an electric car seems to be, to me, in the overall concept of cars outside of drag or street racing a better concept. And I’ve worked full time for a decade in motor vehicle racing so I have a rather lot of exposure to issues when something goes seriously wrong in a gas powered vehicle.
randy khan
Space debris is a known issue that is a big topic in the regulatory universe in the U.S. Rhe FCC seems to be in charge of it for U.S. satellites, although it’s not really part of what it does, and so I have some familiarity with it. (I literally was talking with people on the Hill about it – at a much more abstracted level – on Friday.)
There is one important factor here that ought to be mentioned, which is that the U.S. is one of the few countries that tries to do anything about minimizing space debris. (You can’t file any application for satellite authorization at the FCC without a space debris analysis, for instance, and some of the FCC’s satellite rules are built around minimizing the chance of generating debris.) There’s some reason to believe that China and Russia go beyond not caring and actively want there to be more debris to cause problems for, well, the U.S.
It’s also worth mentioning that there are people thinking about how to clean up space debris or eliminate it in the first place. There are a bunch of companies focused on it one way or another – mostly collecting it and deorbiting it, or getting decommissioned satellites out of the way (either pushing them way up or, again, deorbiting them). It’s not clear to me that there’s a business in that unless the government pays for it or makes satellite operators pay for it, but I guess I shouldn’t worry about that until someone shows that there’s a practical solution.
YY_Sima Qian
@randy khan: Russia definitely does not care. Arguably the PRC didn’t care in the late 00s & early 10s. However, by now it has nearly as many satellites up there (not including Starlink) as the US, & it has clear ambitions to replicate Starlink, that by now its interests may be more aligned w/the US’ (or at least a sane US).
Gloria DryGarden
@Martin: late now, but this might well apply to how we speak about and write about the future we desire:
Chris T.
The modern update is “Move fast and kill people.”
Chris T.
@Gloria DryGarden: I now call it The Gulf of A… Country That Borders It.
Chris T.
@Ruckus:
I’m not sure about the former, but the latter was true. Gasoline was a waste product of the production of kerosene. (Meanwhile, Rudolph Diesel’s engine ran off bean oil, peanuts and soybeans.)
Being a waste product, however, made it ridiculously cheap. It was something people had to pay to dispose of! Imagine being able to sell a waste product! So there was a big push to make it work.