Category: Answers With Joe

This Man Just Woke From The Dead. Sort-of.

May 09, 2022

Clive Wearing lives life 7 seconds at a time. That’s because he has both retrograde and anterograde amnesia, which means he has no ability to form new memories and remembers nothing of his life before. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to live like this, but his condition teaches us a lot about how we form memories and how the structure of the brain structures our lives.

In a neurological institution in the UK, lives a man named Clive Wearing. Clive is 83 years old, and actually he’ll be turning 84 two days after this video comes out. Thing is, he doesn’t know this. In fact he probably thinks he’s still in his 40s.
And chances are, less than a minute after he blows out his candles, he will have forgotten it completely. He’ll have no idea it’s his birthday, or even how old he is.
This might sound like the kind of dementia that one might expect from a person of that age, which is sad but inevitable, but Clive Wearing has been like this for over 40 years, and his memory issues go far beyond normal and expected.

In fact, there’s nobody else in the world that’s quite like him.

That’s because Clive has two different forms of amnesia. Chronic anterograde and chronic retrograde amnesia.

  • Anterograde amnesia (meaning he can’t create new memories)
  • Retrograde amnesia (meaning he’s lost many of his memories)
When combined this means Clive is unable form any new memories, and can barely remember anything about his life before he developed amnesia.
So Clive just kinda… exists. He lives his life on an endless loop, 30 seconds at a time, never knowing exactly what just happened or where he’s going.
It’s kind-of impossible to even imagine what this must be like. Our continuity of consciousness is pretty much what defines our experience of life. Clive describes it as feeling like he’s constantly waking up.
In fact, he keeps a journal that is just filled from top to bottom with him proclaiming “I am now awake,” or “I live” with a lot of the earlier entries crossed out because when he sees them, he doesn’t believe that he wrote them, even though they are in his handwriting.
Also, and this kinda heartbreaking, but Clive is married. And every time he sees his wife, he rushes to hug her like he hasn’t seen  her in years.
Deborah Wearing actually wrote a book about their experience called Forever Today: A True Story of Lost Memory and Never-Ending Love,
where she described his experience like this:
Yeah, this is where it gets kinda creepy. He often describes it as having been dead.
He lives in a beam of light with darkness ahead and behind him.
It’s creepy to think about, but Clive’s situation opens up a lot of questions about how memory works in the brain and what it means for our conscious experience.
For example, he’ll claim he doesn’t even know what coffee tastes like, even though he drinks coffee every day. If you ask him where the coffee is, he can’t tell you, but once he’s in the kitchen, he’s perfectly able to make a cup for himself.
Meaning he knows where the coffee is, the cups, the spoons, the sugar, the cream, all that, and he knows how to prepare it… but when he’s sitting in front of the TV, he’ll tell you he has no idea where all that stuff is and doesn’t even know what coffee tastes like.
Today Clive lives under constant care and observation because literally if he were to leave the house, he would have no way of getting back home.
Normal activities like reading a book or watching a movie are out of the question because he would constantly be forgetting the previous scene or the page he just read.
Actually the only entertainment he seems capable of enjoying are sports like cricket or rugby because the action takes place in short segments that are short enough that he can process them.
And this can be very frustrating for Clive because obviously, he wasn’t always like this.
Before the amnesia, he was a kind-of a world-renowned musician, he was a highly respected guy, so in general in conversations he sticks to just a few subjects that he can talk intelligently on.
And he does talk. In fact, chattering on endlessly is kind-of a way for him to remain grounded.
He will sometimes speak about WWll and hiding in air raid shelters as a young boy or talking about the choir at Cambridge.
He also can draw on a slurry of topics that interest him or of which he knows something about. Which makes it so that, if you’re just meeting him, he seems pretty normal.
But in about 15 minutes when you notice he’s said the same thing 3 times in a row… He doesn’t seem so normal.
He also jokes a lot. Kind-of compulsively. It’s actually a condition called Witzelsucht , (vitzul-shoot) which when you have a German condition you know it’s bad news.
Looking at you Munchausen Syndrome.
But no, actually Witzelsucht is known as joking disease, and it’s likely a consequence of his frontal-lobe weakening as he ages.
Clive’s condition is very remarkable and unique to only him. And that begs the question. Just how did this happen?
HERPES! Literally just your basic, run-of-the-mill herpes simplex 1 (HSV-1).
Which is funny… but also horrifying.
Horrifying because a LOT of people have herpes. It’s one of the oldest viruses on the planet, in fact there is a herpes virus for every type of primate there is.
And for most people the worst symptom is cold sores on their lips. If you’re unlucky, you might get sores on your genitals.
But for Clive, somehow the virus crossed the blood brain barrier and attacked his hippocampus. Even unluckier, the doctors couldn’t figure out what the illness was and treated him for the flu.
It was only after he was completely unresponsive that they were able to figure out the actual problem. By that time the damage had been done.
he hippocampus, as you’ve probably already guessed, plays an important part in the memory equation, it kinda transfers memories from short-term to long-term storage.
But of course it’s more complicated than that because as I mentioned earlier, he knows how to make coffee, and where all the coffee stuff is kept, even if he can’t explain it verbally.
So long-term memory is broken up into explicit and implicit memory. You can describe explicit memory as declarative, things that can be consciously described. Implicit memory are non-declarative, things that are more felt and intuitive.
And these can be broken down further, for example there are two types of explicit memories,
  • Episodic (experienced events) Ex: Recalling unique memories of your life
  • Semantic (knowledge and concepts) Ex: Knowing state capitals and dates of things.
On the other side, Implicit memories can be:
  • Procedural (skills and actions) Remembering how to do things like play music or shuffle cards well
  • Emotional conditioning (feelings) Memories which evoke emotion.
And all of this gets confusing with Clive’s condition because some of this he has and some of this he doesn’t.
Like the coffee thing from earlier, that’s Implicit Prodedural memory. He understands that at a subconscious, instinctual level, but if he were to try to recall a specific memory of him doing that in the past… which would be Explicit Episodic memory, he can’t.
You get what I’m saying here?
And sometimes it’s hard to pin down the truth, like he claims to have a vague memory of hiding in bomb shelters during World War 2, which would be Explicit Episodic, but it might just be that he knows the fact that people sheltered from bombs in World War 2, that would be more Explicit Semantic.
But to me the most interesting thing he was able to retain was his ability to play music.
So I mentioned he was a respected musician earlier, well that’s kind-of an understatement.
He was considered like the world’s foremost expert on this late renaissance composer named Orlande de Lassus.
And yes, you’re right, that is a very specific thing to be an expert in, now meet me at camera…
Two… because that’s what makes a person really interesting.
Hey you want to be an interesting person? Or at least convince other people that you’re interesting? It’s really simple. Just become the world’s foremost expert on the most specific, weird, obscure thing you can think of.
Nothing is more interesting to me than to meet someone who has spend a significant amount of their lifetimes obsessing over the tiniest detail of something that I’ve never heard of.
Where you’re just like, “Wow, really?”
Like it makes me wonder what it is about this thing that they’re so passionate about, there must be something there I can’t see.
That is the definition of interest.
Now find your weird thing and nerd the hell out on it.
Sorry, what were we…?
Orlande de Lassus, right, Clive was the world’s expert on his music, he had an encyclopedic knowledge of his work.
He actually ran The London Lassus Ensemble, and led the 1982 London Lassus Festival, which celebrated his 450th birthday.
Right, Clive was a supernerd.
Today, Clive has absolutely no memory of any of it.
But the question is, can he still play music? I did a video a while back about how music hacks the brain, it does hold a strange and deep connection in our minds.
Could his musical ability survive all that memory loss?
Yes, he can still rip up a piano just like he used to.
He can both read music and perform music from memory. And you might think that it would be shocking to sit down at a piano, thinking you don’t know how to play, and then suddenly this virtuoso music comes pouring out of you. But for Clive, he just kinda slips into it. As soon as he starts pressing keys, he’s himself again, lost in the movement, and everything is what it should be.
That sounds nice. But for Clive the real shock is after when his brain resets.
In fact he would kinda convulse and burp and lose control over himself. It’s like his body reacting to being sucked back into the void where he thinks he’s just woken up for the first time ever.
Doctors ascribe his seizure-like shakes to damage in his inferior frontal lobe.
It’s like when his brain sends a signal to activate an emotion, it creates a near epileptic event.
What’s also interesting about his playing music is that he improvises. So it’s not like his brain is acting like an old victrola playing the same thing over and over, Clive’s still in there.
So yeah, once again, music is weirdly intertwined with our identity and sense of self.
It’s really hard to imagine exactly what it’s like to live like Clive.
Part of it sounds hellish. But then again, that hell is forgotten 10 seconds later.
It’s also hard to imagine being in a relationship with someone like that. After years of caring for him full time, Deborah had to finally distance herself from Clive, just visiting him every other week or so.
And she would say that she felt a lot of guilt about that for a while, but… he didn’t. He wasn’t missing her when she was gone, when she wasn’t there, he had no idea she existed.
I should point out that he had no memory of their relationship, but when he saw her, he knew she was his wife. Again, he retained that implicit knowledge but had no episodic memory of it. It’s super interesting.

H.M.

And while I say that Clive has a condition that is totally unique to him, there are other cases of amnesia that are all just as interesting.
Henry Molaison, who came to be known as HM, cracked his skull in an accident when he was a young boy in 1953.
This led to epileptic seizures that continued to get worse and worse throughout his life, eventually becoming debilitating.
Eventually this led him to one of the top neurosurgeons at the time, a guy named W.B. Scoville, and his suggestion was to remove the hippocampus.
The hippocampus and while they’re at it the parahippocampal cortices, entorhinal cortices, piriform cortices, and amygdalae.
It was the world’s first surgery performed with an ice cream scooper.
But it worked. H.M.’s seizures went away, but of course as we just learned with Clive, a hippocampus is a terrible thing to waste.
This is your brain. This is your brain without a hippocampus. Any questions?
So yeah from that point forward H.M. was unable to form new memories. And he struggled to remember anything in the couple of years before he had the surgery.
He was diagnosed as having temporally graded amnesia.
One more weird thing, when H.M. died in 2008, he donated his body to science and researchers sliced up his brain as thinly as possible and scanned it into a 3D virtual environment, which you can see today at thebrainobservatory.org.

Cochrane

Another story is Kent Cochrane, who suffered a severe motorcycle accident that caused brain damage and gave him temporally graded retrograde amnesia.
Cochrane had his semantic memory intact; he could tell you the Capital of Vermont was Montpilliar but couldn’t tell you what he had for dinner the previous day.
Cochrane’s accident happened in 1986 and at that point CT scans were available, so scientists for the first time got to document a damaged brain at that level.
Researchers working with him were able to learn some new things about episodic and semantic memory but also the distinction between implicit and explicit memory, and how people learn new things in amnesia.
In one experiment, neuro researchers presented Cochrane with a list of words. A year later, they showed him the words with letters missing and he was able to fill in the letters while not knowing what the words really were.
In other words the info was getting into his mind through a different process, and found a different retrieval process was different as well.
This challenged the previous opinion that patients with anterograde amnesia are incapable of adding information to their declarative memory. In short, people with amnesia can indeed learn new things.

Bolzan

Then there’s the case of Scott Bolzan which I don’t want to spend too much time on but his case is interesting.
He was a professional football player in the 80s and had his share of concussions because this was way before the helmet to helmet rule.
But his story is he slipped on the bathroom floor and hit his head. And he got the kind of amnesia you always see in the movies, where he forgot his entire life up until the fall, but could make new memories after that.
But what’s weird in his case is he lost the procedural memory and implicit stuff, like he didn’t know what a job was, or the ritual of Halloween, or what a wife is.
Normally amnesia patients retain that procedural memory. So there are some people who think that he’s faking it?
At least Dr. William Barr thinks so, describing his symptoms as “Hollywood amnesia” and suggests he’s doing it to sell a book or get out of some debts.
He would also say, “Not knowing what a TV is, not knowing what a cellphone is, this is all inconsistent with any known form of brain damage.”
But back to Clive, reading about his situation really makes you think about our experience of life, and how the structure of our brain contributes to that.
Because one one level, we’re all going through life exactly like Clive is. Just one moment at a time.
We all have these two memory systems, short term and long-term. And short-term, immediate, real-time system is always running, that’s our present moment, what’s right in front of us. It’s the current block you’re on as you’re walking across town.
But that present moment is informed by our memory of the block we just passed and we know what’s up ahead because we walked there yesterday, those long-term memories provide the context that create this feeling of a continuation of our consciousness.
And when our short-term system resets, it’s supported by this other memory system, so it doesn’t feel like a reset but that system does still reset.
We’re just ridin’ a skateboard on a beam of light through fabric of space and time bud…
If I may end on a sweet note, one thing about this story that gets me is the way he responds when he sees his wife. Every single time, even if she just left the room for 10 minutes, he runs to her and holds on to her like he hasn’t seen her in years, he’s just overcome with emotion.
Which is sweet… but… I mean I get why she had to get away from it after a while.
Like I said before, he doesn’t remember his relationship with her, all he knows is that he loves her with all his heart. Which kinda says something about how deep down the emotion of love is.
I actually think Clive said it best when Deborah asked him, “What does love mean?” And to that Clive responded, “In tennis nothing, in life everything.”
And to that I say, Good show, old chap. (a beat) And happy birthday.
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Autonomous Trucking – Where Exactly Are We? (And Other Questions)

April 25, 2022

With the current shortage of truckers, it makes you wonder what the state of autonomous trucking is right now. At least, it prompted one of my Patreon supporters to ask the question, and many others in today’s lightning round video.

TRANSCRIPT:

So Tesla recently opened GigaTexas, which is apparently the largest factory in the world, they held a huge opening party, many of your favorite YouTubers were invited to it… I was not one of them.
But the plan is to spend this year getting caught up on Model Y orders and spin up the 4680 cells; structural battery and all that and then next year finally get into production on the Cybertruck and Roadster.
And also one other one what was it… Oh yeah. The semi truck. Remember that one?

I seem to recall when they first announced the Semi, I put on my Joestradamus hat and said that I thought it would be their most successful product… I had my reasons.
At the time, and this was a few years back, electric cars were still struggling to gain acceptance in the wider market, the main reason being the higher cost of electric cars.
But I thought that they would be much more popular with trucks and commercial applications in general because the cheaper cost of charging and maintenance would make them more profitable – they would pay for themselves a lot faster.
Plus they showed how you could do these autonomous convoys where you could drive the lead truck and have 2 trucks driverless behind you, basically allowing an independent contractor to haul 3 times more cargo.

Now, there’s still time for me to be right… but the implementation of this has been a lot slower than I expected.
Everybody seems to agree that the trucking industry is on the verge of a major disruption from autonomous technology. The question is when is this actually going to happen, and what effects will it have on our society?

That’s just one of several questions I was asked by Patreon members this month, which I’m about to tackle… Right now.

Fishtail – Discord – April
What lavalier mic do you use? Have you ever studied comedy?

I took a couple of classes from the Barbershop Harmony Society, I’m just wondering if you took classes on comedy.

  • Sennheiser
  • Riff about improv and standup

Cole Parker – Patreon – April
I recently saw there was a shortage of truckers. What’s the status of self driving trucks? Otto had a Coors beer pilot a few years back. What happened to that and what’s the current state of automated trucking?

So I found a couple of articles about the Otto beer run, that was back in 2016, and from what I can tell, it wasn’t a regular route they were running, it was just kind-of a publicity stunt? It looks like they only did it once. It was a 120-mile route from Fort Collins, Colorado to Colorado Springs.
But this is a good question because I mean that was 6 years ago, and I’ve gotta say, I thought if automation was going to take off anywhere, it would be the trucking industry. Specifically long-haul trucking.

Because there’s a monetary incentive for companies to automate this, not just in terms of paying for drivers but from spillage from accidents, insurance costs, plus most of this long-haul driving is done on highways, which is actually the easiest thing to automate, I mean Teslas have been handling that pretty well for years.
So… what’s the deal?

Well the deal with Otto is they were bought by Uber actually just before that run in 2016. And in 2017 it looks like they pivoted away from automation and just created an Uber Trucking app.
In 2018, Co-Founder Lior Ron left Otto and in 2019 the other Co-Founder Anthony Levandowski was indicted on 33 counts of stealing trade secrets from Google, because he had previously worked for Waymo. He was actually pardoned later by Donald Trump.

If you go to the Otto website, they seem to be focused specifically on warehouse automation. Autonomous Mobile Robotics, AMRs.
But as far as the current state of truck automation… yeah, this is probably going to have to be its own video because there’s a bit of a rabbit hole here.
I will say there’s another company that’s getting some press right now called TuSimple that did a similar route at the end of last year, driving a truck with no human intervention from Tuscon to Phoenix.

But they’ve been testing over the last year and a half and have driven 1800 driverless runs over 150,000 miles and they hope to start retrofitting rigs in 2024 for commercial use.
It’s pretty interesting, they talk about wanting to set up a 2-tiered system where driverless long-haul trucks make do the driving on the highways between cities, and then maybe outside of cities, they get handed off to local drivers who cover the last-mile in city traffic and side streets.
But yeah for a lot of reasons like you mentioned I think there’s a lot  that’s going to happen in the autonomous trucking space; it’s super interesting so methinks this might be a stand-alone video.
Daimler and Volvo working on autonomous trucks too back in 2016

John Regel – Discord – April
If you could cameo on any movie / tv show / youtuber / commercial / anything, what would it be?

I still fantasize about being on SNL.

John Regel  – Discord  – April
Oh No! The tachyon amplifier on the time portal machine has overshot it’s return to null and is now giving you a window to yourself 5 years into the future. You have a time-dilated window during which you can ask yourself exactly one question and expect to get one answer. What is the question that you’d ask your 2027 self?

Can I see myself in 5 years? Because if I can, it would probably be something like, “Have you heard of moisturizer? Seriously, pal?” I guess I would ask if the underground Mole People will grant me shelter from the surface-dwelling mutant warlords, or will I need to perform the rite of sacrifice to earn inclusion in their tribe? (a beat) I predict an eventful next few years.

Robin – Discord – April
if the Russians seem to opt so much for poisoning, why do many seem bungled, and some survive and get thrown in jail, then not poisoned.  Is there some weird rule book?(please just call me Robin and roll your eyes — the full name is a little incriminating, lately)

I… Don’t know how to answer this. I think the whole nature of poisoning murders is that they’re supposed to be covert and undetectable. So maybe the “bungles” are all just part of the subterfuge?  Maybe they just suck at it?

Brian Beswick – Discord – April
Are we on the verge of a better boom boom machine?

This is a lot like NERVA – mentioned in my post-Apollo video I could definitely see this as being useful for unmanned probes, doubtful we’d see anything like that on crewed missions in our lifetimes. But I know they’re pretty cagey about launching nuclear material. I’m curious how much uranium would be needed vs. an RTG. Not so much boom boom but ssshhhhhhh

Mark Hoffman – Patreon – April

Let me start off by saying this may just be me…but…does the odor from flatulence seem somewhat exacerbated when expelled underwater? Perhaps something to do with the molecular composition coming to contact and interacting with H2O?

I have never thought about this. But…

So, when you fart in an open room, that gas then diffuses into the air around it, spreading in all directions, assuming there is little air movement – at a rate of about half a centimeter cubed per second.
Methane makes up a big percentage of our farts, and it has a molar mass of 14, which is slightly lighter than nitrogen and oxygen, which makes up most of our atmosphere, so it will float up ever so slightly.
And if this is your own fart, that would need to cross a good 44 centimeters or so before it reaches your nose, dissipating the whole way, and the average fart volume is let’s say 150 milliliters so what you actually wind up smelling is just a tiny amount of the original boof. (Average size of a fart – 17-375 ml)

If you’re underwater however, whether you’re standing in a pool, or sitting in a tub, and you pop a fart, and let’s say that fart does a frontal assault and floats up to the surface, that bubble that pops just inches from your nose? That has not been diluted at all. That is the pure stank.
That is basically like putting your nose just a few inches from your anus and then cutting one. So yeah, I don’t think it’s any kind of chemical reaction, I think it’s just… full concentration.
But I haven’t really thought about this much…

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“Don’t Look Up” Could Actually Happen

April 21, 2022

Don’t Look Up is a satire that imagines what modern society’s reaction would be to an Earth-killing asteroid that generated a lot of acclaim – and backlash – since it came out last year. But what if that did happen? What are our actual plans to deal with a major asteroid strike?

TRANSCRIPT:

Last year, the movie Don’t Look Up premiered on Netflix to huge critical and audience acclaim. And just a few weeks ago, it was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.

Of course now there’s a bit of a backlash against it because I guess it was a little too popular.

But if you’ve been living under a rock or didn’t see the Oscars, the movie is about a team of astronomers who discover an Earth-killing asteroid and the frustrations they have getting the rest of the world to take it seriously.

It’s an obvious satire of climate change and the recent pandemic that basically points a finger at the way we’ve reacted so far to a long-term existential threat and says, what if we acted like that with something much more near-term? How bizarre would that be?

For me anyway, I thought it did that brilliantly in fact some of it was a little too close to home for me, but like I said, there has been a bit of a backlash for being a little too on-the-nose and self-congratulatory, so no, it didn’t win Best Picture at the Oscars. And nothing else interesting happened that night.

But the whole thing got me thinking about asteroid strikes, which are a real threat. And it got me wondering… What exactly is our plan if a Don’t Look Up scenario were to occur?

You might be surprised to hear this but every day, our planet receives visitors from outer space. I’m not talking about Grays or Zeta Reticulans… Although, who knows?

No, I’m talking about meteors, and there’s a lot more of them that hit the Earth than you might think.

In fact, Earth is constantly attracting material from outer space. This is mind-blowing to me, 100 tons of material enters Earth’s atmosphere every day. 100 tons! Most of it burns up in the atmosphere but every day 17 meteors make it to the surface. meteoroid is the more general term, but any object burning in the atmosphere is a meteor

Actually that’s not true. If it reaches the surface, it’s a meteorite.

Yeah, we tend to use the word meteor to describe small rocks in space but technically a small rock like this flying around in space is a meteoroid.

Once it enters the atmosphere and burns up, that streak across the sky, the shooting star, that’s actually a meteor. And then once it hits the ground, it’s a meteorite.

Think of it like other minerals you might find on the ground like calcite, anthracite… meteorite.

And an asteroid is bigger than a meteoroid. It’s more like a planetoid; tiny planet.

But yeah, somewhere on Earth every day 17 of these things fall from the sky. Now, most of the Earth’s surface is water so most of them land in the drink but every once in a while, one hits land. And every once in a long while… They can do some damage.

Meteor Crater, AZ

Last year, 2021, I visited the Meteor Crater near Flagstaff, Arizona. Also known as Barringer Crater, it’s nearly a mile wide and 550 feet deep, and it was created by a meteor impact some 50,000 years ago.

The meteor weighed hundreds of thousands of tons and released something like 9-10 megatons of TNT.

Which is roughly the same energy released by the Tonga volcano in January. The one that did this.

And honestly, it’s pretty mind-blowing to see in person. Especially the part where you start seeing giant out-of-place rocks and boulders strewn all over the place for dozens of miles before you get there.

And this… wasn’t even that noteworthy as impacts go.

Keep in mind this is meteor crater. It was made by a meteor. Asteroids are bigger.

Planet Killers

According to NASA, a meteor the size of a football field hits every 2000 years or so. Asteroids large enough to cause extinctions and end civilizations come along “every few million years.”

Some of these are comets but most of the largest impacts we know about have been from asteroids.

The most famous one, of course, is the one that wiped out the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago and created the Chicxulub crater in Mexico.

Luckily impacts on that scale are extremely rare. In fact, only two craters on Earth rival Chicxulub for size and they’re both around 2 billion years old.

So it’s incredibly unlikely another planet-killing impact will happen in our lifetimes. I mean… If our entire species survives to see the next one, it’ll be pretty impressive.

But an impact doesn’t have to be a planet killer to ruin your day

Chelyabinsk and Tunguska

In 2013, a meteor that fell over Chelyabinsk, Russia injured 1419 people

7200 buildings were damaged over an area of tens of kilometers, not by pieces of the meteor landing on it but from the shock wave when it exploded in mid-air.

In 1908, a much larger explosion devastated an area near the Tunguska River in Siberia. It more-or-less flattened eight-hundred square miles of forest

Uprooted trees formed a ring around the blast’s center, where upright trees were stripped of limbs and bark

Hundreds of reindeer died, but no humans, which was lucky. Not so lucky if you’re a reindeer.

What is a NEO?

NASA defines an NEO as comets or asteroids that pass within 1.3 astronomical units of the Sun.

An astronomical unit, or AU, is the distance between the Earth sand the sun, so just under 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). So basically anything near or inside of our orbit, NASA considers an NEO, and takes particular interest in them.

That’s not just because of the danger. Asteroids and comets are like time capsules from the birth of the solar system. It’s thought that comets were formed in the same process that created the outer gas giants and asteroids are from the process that created the inner rocky planets.

So yeah studying either of them is like opening a window to the solar system 4 billion years ago.

Of course we’d rather go to them than have them come to us. You know, because of the whole…thing.

Near Earth Objects whose trajectories bring them uncomfortably close to Earth are upgraded to Potentially Hazardous Objects, or PHOs. And now I’m hungry for Vietnamese noodles.

Asteroids are by far the most common, so they’re sometimes referred as PHA — Potentially Hazardous Asteroids.

PHOs of all kinds have been tracked by astronomers for years, but efforts got a major boost in 2005, when congress passed a US law directing NASA to identify 90% of NEOs over a certain size. (140 meters)

Asteroid History

And that my friends put NASA in the ‘stroid huntin’ business.

Of course ‘stroid huntin’ goes back a long way. The first first asteroid was discovered in 1801, and was given the name asteroid because it means “starlike”. In a dead language people used to speak.

By the year 1900, 464 asteroids had been discovered. By the year 2000, we had 108,066 in our catalog. It’s almost like our technology progressed in that time.

But to give you an idea of how much our technology has continued to progress, in the last 20 years we’ve discovered nearly 10 times as many asteroids. NASA’s current count is just over 1.1 million. That’s some good ‘stroid huntin’.

They range in size from a diameter of less than 10 meters to the largest asteroid in our solar system, Vesta, which is about 530 kilometers. This is the asteroid the Dawn space probe visited in 2011.

Thankfully Vesta is not an NEO, it’s located in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where most of the solar system asteroids hang out, though they have been known to migrate.

Which brings us back to the danger ‘stroids.

Good News, Everyone!

First of all, the good news is there are currently no known PHOs is expected to hit us in the next hundred years.

The not-so-good news is that there’s still a lot that need to be found. NASA estimates there should be about 25,000 that fit the parameters of the 2005 directive… and so far they’ve found about 10,000.

When you scale that up to asteroid size, NASA estimates there should be about 4700 PHAs. So far we’ve found 2263 of them. As of the time I’m recording this.
(NASA considers an asteroid that passes within half an AU from Earth to be a PHA)

So yeah, we’ve only found about half of the danger bois that should be out there. But the ones we know about tend to be the larger ones, so it’s not likely another Chicxulub will sneak up on us in our lifetimes.

But what if one does? What if that one in a trillion Don’t Look Up scenario comes true? What are our actual plans?

Threat Mitigation

Well, in the US anyway, the plans fall to NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which yes, sounds like the group the Men In Black work for.

By the way, the PDCO is the umbrella office over the Near Earth Object Observations Program that is finding and tracking them in the first place.

So the first thing the PDCO would do is send a probe to study the danger boi because it’s not just the size and trajectory that matters, we also need to know it’s composition.

Because some of these objects are solid iron and others are essentially piles of rubble in space. Hitting one with a missile will have different effects than hitting the other.

In the case of a solid doom rock, there is the option of just nuking it. And my nipples got hard just saying that.

But yeah, NASA has proposed this, not because it would destroy it, but a nuclear blast could deflect it off course, which is all we need to do.

A smaller asteroid might not need to go nuclear and could just hit it with a conventional missile or projectile – the sciency term is “kinetic impactor”.
But these aren’t the best options for the rubble-pile asteroids because an explosion could just cause it to disperse into a cloud of rubble, much of it still directed toward Earth.

It’s like instead of getting hit with a bullet we get hit with buckshot – still not much fun.

So an alternative for rubble-pile doom rocks is landing a rocket on the surface and pushing it off course. This would work for the solid ones as well.

But let’s not kid ourselves, we wanna nuke it if we can.

Now, if the asteroid made of the right material we might be able to deflect it with a laser.

This is known as laser ablation. Basically, the laser would melt part of the asteroid’s surface, and the plumes of gas and ejected material would create enough force to slowly move the asteroid to a safe orbit.

This might could even be done with a large mirror or fresnel lens.

But “slowly” is the operative word, here, this is only an option if the asteroid has the right composition and we find it WAY in advance.

Now, if we get really unlucky and a massive danger boi sneaks up on us, deflection might not be an option. We may have to go straight to disruption.

I mentioned earlier that if we blow up a rubble-pile asteroid it may just create a shower of smaller asteroids. Well it turns out if you hit it hard enough, it might actually work.

I’ll be honest, when I started researching this I really didn’t think that this was a serious option, but there’s a chance that a big enough explosion could turn a dangerous asteroid into space foam.

One recent experiment simulated what would happen if a 1 megaton bomb were detonated near a 100-meter asteroid. They found that it would would disperse 99.9% of the asteroid’s mass.

Instead of a city-killer, they were left with a chunk no bigger than a Chihuahua’s head. Which is the weirdest measurement I’ve ever seen on this channel…

Americans will do anything to not use metric.

But it could work! And by the way, it doesn’t have to just be one bomb, we could send multiple bombs, the first one breaks up the asteroid, the second flings the pieces further off track, repeat as needed.

It’s not like we don’t have thousands of nuclear weapons sitting around.

The question is, could we pull that off in time?

Back in April 2021, NASA conducted an exercise to put existing technologies to the test. They set up a fictional scenario involving an asteroid of unknown size and composition, and gave international experts 6-months lead time.

It… didn’t go well.

They concluded that no existing technology could do the job. No existing rocket could deliver a nuke in time. No existing spacecraft could collide with enough force.

Six months, the experts concluded, is simply not enough time. Opinions differ on how much time would actually be needed but the NASA official who designed the scenario said five years, at least.

(react) Now would be a good time to remember that the chance of this happening is extremely low. But still, we need more information on the PHOs we know about and we need more tools to detect PHOs.

Just like cancer, early detection is key.

NEOS, DART, and HERA

Thankfully some awesome new tools are on the way.

2026 is looking to be a big year for planetary defense for a couple of reasons, the first being the Near-Earth Object Surveyor.
NEOS is a space-based, infrared telescope specifically designed to help NASA finish its mission of cataloging 90% of large NEOs.

It’s kind-of been stuck in development limbo since 2014, but it’s recently cleared a major hurdle, so appears to on its way.

Also 2026 is when NASA expects to get data on the DART mission.

We heard a lot about this when it launched in November of last year, but DART stands for Double Asteroid Redirection Test. And it’s the first time we’ll attempt to redirect an asteroid using a kinetic impactor.
Its target is a 160-meter wide asteroid named Dimorphos that orbits a 780-meter wide asteroid named Didymos. It’s kind-of like a moonlet.

A mini-dangerboi.

The idea is that DART will slam into Dimorphos at a blistering 6.6 km per second, which should move its orbit closer to Didymos.

Currently, it takes 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit, it’s expected after the blast it’ll orbit every 10 minutes. And this will be detectible by Earth-based telescopes.

Now to be clear, neither Didymos nor Dimorphos are a threat to Earth, this is merely a test to provide data on asteroid deflection.

So yeah, it launched last year, it’s set to collide in September of this year, 2022, and we’ll be able to tell if it was successful pretty soon afterwards.

But in 2026, a pair of cubesats developed by ESA will rendezvous with Dimorphos to examine the aftermath and see what went right… or what went wrong.

Either way, it’ll provide insights that will improve our deflection plans. And might help astronomers sleep better at night.

A Near-Miss That Wasn’t

Just a few months ago — January 2022 — a discovery was made that probably caused a few nightmares.

On January 6, an asteroid called 2022 AE1 was spotted on what appeared to be a collision course.

Work to Be Done

Because yeah, a year-and-a-half is not enough time to deflect it with current technology. Now, I want to say that if we really only had a year an a half to save ourselves that it would clarify things and we’d find a way to solve the problem. Recent events have given me reason to doubt that.

Which is why Don’t Look Up resonated so much when it came out. With the current wave of distrust in science we’re seeing, would people be willing to fund an emergency project to stop a threat that we can’t see? One that’s not going to affect us for a couple of years? Tell me what you think down below.

This whole topic is interesting because simultaneously 100 tons of space stuff falls to Earth every day… but the chances of any of it being catastrophic is extremely small.

I guess that’s just the reality of being on a rock flying through a vast galaxy filled with tiny rocks. And a handful of dangerbois.

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What Was The Worst Year In Human History? | Answers With Joe

April 18, 2022

We’re living in trying times, maybe you heard that somewhere? But there have definitely been worse times to be alive. In today’s video, we look back at some of the worst years in human history, including one year that historians seem to agree was the worst of them all.

TRANSCRIPT:

Dear Advertising Industry,
It is April of 2022. The pandemic has been going on for two full years and yet I still continue to hear the terms “unprecedented times,” “trying times,” “new normal” in every commercial block of any television program or pre-roll ad. On behalf of, well, everyone, I am writing to humbly request that you please, for the love of God, stop.

We are all well aware of the clogged toilet this world has become and don’t need to be reminded of it or for our anxieties around said chunk-filled bowl to be weaponized against us in an attempt to take our dwindling reserves of money.
And at the very least, understanding that weaponizing our anxieties is in general the whole point of advertising, it would be preferable that you at least, you know, try to be original? Use a different phrase? Come at it a slightly different way?

Allow me to make some recommendations.
Instead of saying “unprecedented times,” perhaps something along the lines of, “post-decency years”
Instead of “trying times,” try “the excruciation hours.”
Instead of “the new normal” how about “the old abysmal”

These are options I just came up with. Surely if you put all your 20-something junior copywriters in a room with a bottle of whisky and a bag of edibles for a day they could come up with something that would really sing.
So with that, I look forward to hearing what you come up with. Good luck and happy flibbity-floobity.  Ooh, I’m gonna keep that one.
Signed, the world.

The Times We Live In

“These are the times that try men’s souls,” wrote American Revolutionary Thomas Paine.  Over a hundred years later, British statesman Joseph Chamberlain said no time he could remember had brought so many “new objects for anxiety.” Sound familiar?
These days, we’re reminded constantly that things are bad.  We live in troubled times, unprecedented times.  Times of the new normal.
And I’m not here to say we don’t have problems.  We definitely do.  But as Billy Joel said, we didn’t start the fire.
Yes, I just went from quoting Thomas Paine to Billy Joel. Don’t judge my journey.

Believe it or not, there have been worse times to be alive than any in recent memory.  Today, I’d like to take a look at some years considered the Worst Ever by experts.
There is one that seems to be the agreed upon worst, and we’ll get to that later but first let’s start with some contenders.

1347 – The Black Death

Spoiler alert, pandemics are going to be a bit of a theme on this list
The Black Death began in the 14th Century, when a variety of bubonic plague swept through the Near East, North Africa, and Europe
Picture it: it’s Sicily, 1347. A fleet of trade ships docks at the port of Messina. Everybody in town comes running see what’s on the boat because… well they didn’t have internet back then, it was the thing to do.
But as they get to the dock, they find out the ships have a surprise waiting for them. And that surprise is that most of the soldiers were dead.
Of those who were still alive, most of them were sick, their bodies covered in sores, called buboes in Latin, thus the name of the plague.
Now they knew about the importance of quarantining in these situations, but before officials could get the ships quarantined, the plague leapt to the onlookers
Inside of a year, it was all over the continent
By the time it had runs its course, something like 200 million people had died

http://www.bestofsicily.com/mag/art213.htm — most ironic website name ever, based on this page
For scale, 200 million was 30 to 50 percent of the European population at the time
Like, Covid sucks, and we all know someone who has died or at least know someone close to someone who died, but imagine if half the people you know developed strange swellings, started bleeding and vomiting, and then just died within a day.
You’d be pretty freaked out, right?

Well, people in the 1300s were freaked out too. And when people freak out, they tend to gravitate toward their worst impulses. Like finding a group of people to blame.
Throughout the Black Plague, attacks were levied at Jewish towns and neighborhoods, killing thousands of Jewish people, it’s actually known as the Medieval Holocaust.
Funny how a disease that kills Christians and Muslims and Jews equally is somehow the Jews’ faulthttps://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2841&context=facpub
So yeah the Black Death was just about as horrible as you’ve heard. Probably worse. And it reshaped the world in some ways.
But the first outbreak can be traced to that fleet of ships, which is why 1347 is our first contender for Worst Year Ever.

1177 – Bronze Age Collapse

And speaking of ships, our next contender involves a group of people who… probably had ’em. They’re called the Sea Peoples.
The Sea Peoples are one of the biggest mysteries of all time, nobody seems to know where they came from but suddenly in the 13th century BCE, they appeared out of nowhere, attacking Egypt, Palestine, Cyprus, and the Hittites.
And whoever they were, according to archaeologists, they helped trigger the collapse of the Bronze Age in 1177 B. C.
I say “helped” because they were far from the only problem. In fact, they were probably the result of other problems.
Like a lengthy drought in the decade before the Sea People’s invasions, that drove them to raid other countries for resources.
And a famine that had already raged across the empires the Sea Peoples attacked, which made them especially vulnerable.
The tomb of Pharoah Ramses III records a devastating battle with the Sea Peoples. Egypt won, but went into decline soon after.
But the Hittites got it worst of all. Its capital city was destroyed and they basically ceased to exist as a people.
Another Sea Peoples victim was the Canaanite city-state of Megiddo

There are ruins on the Mound of Megiddo from that conflict, though it’s not alone, there were a lot of battles fought over Megiddo over the years, which by the way, is where “Armageddon” comes from.
Are you Armageddon it?
Ultimately it was a perfect storm of disasters and conquest that destroyed multiple economic systems all at once. Civilization was set back hundreds of years and some empires were lost forever.
All this tumult started circa 1177 B. C. which is why it’s a contender for Worst Year Ever.

1816 – The Year Without A Summer

I’ve mentioned the Year Without A Summer in past videos, mostly in just a, “huh, isn’t that an interesting nugget of information” kind of thing.
Turns out it was a pretty traumatic event.
The previous year, 1815, saw possibly the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history at Mount Tambora, in Indonesia
It ejected 180 billion cubic meters of material and may have killed as many as 90,000 locals. But the problems were just getting started
There was so much ash from Tambora, and other, knock-on eruptions, that temperatures around the world plummeted.

The next summer was so cold, people actually froze to death in snowstorms – and I’m not talking about in some distant part of the north; this was continental America.
This snow and frost damaged crops and triggered famines across Europe and China.
This destabilized society and riots broke out in England that became known as the Bread or Blood riots.
In India, colder temperatures flipped nature on her head and caused a drought in their monsoon season and flooded during their usual dry season.
And this affected way more than crops, it actually had the weird effect of causing a local strain of cholera to mutate to adapt to the flipped weather. This mutation was able to bypass human immunity and caused one of the largest cholera pandemics of all time. It eventually killed 2 million people.

All of that is a lot of damage from one volcanic eruption. But that’s how insane the Mount Tambora eruption was.
And that’s why 1816 is a contender for the Worst Year Ever

1914 – Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand

So far on this list, disease and disaster have played the largest role in making years the worst. 1914 is a little different.
What made it terrible was politics. And war. Which is like spicy politics.
The first half of the year was pretty calm, as things go.

The biggest story of the first six months was the accidental sinking of the RMS Empress of Ireland.
Which everyone seems to have forgotten about, but 1012 people died, it’s the 7th deadliest shipwreck in history.
But yeah, that was the good part of 1914.

Because in June of 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated. His wife, Maria, was also killed, by the way, that’s another piece of news that often gets forgotten
He was assassinated by a terrorist – or freedom fighter, depending on who you listen to – with the goal of uniting the citizens of Serbia against the Austro-Hungarian Empire
Austria-Hungary had conquered part of Serbia in previous years so this was something that had be boiling up for a while but this assassination is what sent both countries into war.
Both called on their allies to help out, and within a few months, the world was neck deep in what we now call the First World War.
Over the next four years, from 1914-18, about 20 million people were killed. Up to half of them were civilians
Tens of millions more were displaced and scattered throughout Europe, which helped spread illnesses.

It’s estimated the pre-Columbian population may have been as high as 112 million, so we may be talking about 100 million deaths. It’s just staggering.
One particular wave of influenza became especially virulent and spread around the entire world, infecting half a billion people, and eventually killing 50 million people.
This was of course the Spanish flu, which by the way didn’t begin in Spain, but all the other countries had sort-of censored reporting about it except Spain. So since they were the ones that were talking about it, it kinda got stuck on them.https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html
Now most of the suffering in all this occurred in the years that followed 1914, but it did all start from events that happened in 1914.
Which is why 1914 is definitely a top contender for Worst Year Ever

1492 – American Epidemics

Yeah, we’re going there.
For 400 years, the year 1492 has been celebrated in American culture as the year America was discovered.  (a beat) There is a contingent of people on this continent that see it differently.
We’ve all heard what a monster Christopher Columbus was but the biggest effect his “discovery” had was completely unintentional.
Because while yes, millions of natives were killed in war or enslaved, these are a drop in the bucket compared to the deaths caused by foreign diseases
The indigenous peoples of North and South America had been separated from the rest of the world for tens of thousands of years and had never been exposed to things like smallpox, influenza, or our old friend the bubonic plague.

These and many other diseases killed countless millions of people. Various studies have put the population decline between 50 and 95%.
It’s estimated the pre-Columbian population may have been as high as 112 million, so we may be talking about 100 million deaths. It’s just staggering.
The only disease that we think went the other direction was syphilis, which sucks, but didn’t exactly have the same impact. In fact, Europe’s population increased by 25% in the 100 years following Columbus.
And supporting that growth required resources. Which the “New World” was ripe with. And thus began the violent conquest of North America in earnest, which drove families, tribes, nations, and cultures to the brink of extinction.

So no. They don’t celebrate Columbus Day.
And it’s why I think 1492 should be a contender for Worst Year Ever.
But still there is one year that many scholars say is worse than all of these. A year that’s worse than the years that started the Black Death, the Bronze Age Collapse, an Endless Winter, a Global War, and the near-Genocide of Indigenous Americans
I’ll start with an appeal to authority. The theory I’m about to explain is not mine

The Case for 536

Medieval scholar Michael McCormick put forth the theory that the worst year of all time was 536 AD. And much like 1816, the culprit was a massive volcanic eruption.

Frozen Summer

Actually possibly two volcanoes according to ice samples and tree ring data, it’s thought that there may have been one in El Salador and one in Iceland.
Regardless, clouds blanketed the Sun from Europe to Asia, and global temperatures fell. And they stayed down.
Just as in 1816, there were summer snowstorms, crop failure, and widespread famine, we have actual records of people starving in Ireland and China.
All this hunger weakened the population and caused outbreaks of disease, one of which would go on and become the first true global pandemic.

The Plague of Justinian

This became known as the Plague of Justinian and it did the most damage around the Mediterranean and Middle East, just destroying the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires.
It featured all the plague hits – buboes, vomiting, and swift death, and it wiped out 40-60% of the population.
It became known as the Plague of Justinian because Justinian was a Byzantine emperor at the time and while this was going on, he insisted on having a big old war.
He was trying to reunite the Western and Eastern arms of the Roman Empire, and he was brutal about it. According to the court historian, Justinian demanded plague survivors pay the taxes of their deceased neighbors to pay for his wars.
So, Famine, Plague, War… We’re running out of horsemen here.

Climate Disaster

But it wasn’t just a Mediterranean problem, archaeological evidence shows there were floods in Peru around 540
It’s not known if the volcanic eruption had anything to do with it, but it led to the large scale migration of the ancient Moche civilization, who abandoned their cities and disappeared. 

Economic Collapse

Back in Europe, the economy collapsed for more than 100 years.
They actually know this because silver mining leaves traces in the atmosphere and ice core samples show a huge gap in the century following 536.
Is it Really the Very Worst?
So, to review, 536 was a Year Without a Summer that kicked off a period of starvation, plague, war, climate change, and economic upheaval. In other words, “Trying times”
What was it like to actually live through the worst year ever?
As humans, with a limited life span, we have a hard time seeing the historical context of the times we live in. For the most part, we just keep our heads down and try to make it another day.
But labels like “worst” and “best” depend on historical context. After all, one bad year might spark a century of innovation.

The Personal Touch

But between the plague, famines, and floods, there’s a high probability that one of those would have personally affected you in the period kicked off by 536.
And this is at all levels of society. I mentioned Emperor Justinian’s court historian earlier – he lost a wife, kids, and grandkids to the plague
But he had no idea what was going on in South America. Didn’t even know it existed.

Worst Years Today

Whereas today we know all the problems happening all around the world all the time. On top of the plague and now war.
I don’t know I think there’s an argument to be made that our communication infrastructure could be causing us to feel more anxiety, confusion, and panic than at early times in history.
So in that sense… Maybe we actually are living through some of the Worst Years Ever
But of course that same communication technology is making us more able to find solutions to these problems and innovate and adapt.  Maybe that will be our legacy.
Look, the last few years have been…not great. But when we look back in the decades to follow, when our descendants look back in the coming centuries, with some historical context, maybe it won’t all be bad.
Maybe it’ll be seen as the catalyst for a period of radical advancement that set the world on a whole new course.
What that course turns out to be is up to us.

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There’s A “Bermuda Triangle” In Space

April 11, 2022

There’s an area of space called the South Atlantic Anomaly, or the SAA, where the Earth’s magnetic field is significantly weaker, allowing solar and cosmic radiation dangerously close to the atmosphere. From the beginning of the space age, it has caused issues with satellites and astronauts as they passed through it, with some satellites actually being destroyed because of it.

But… why is it there? What causes it? And should we be concerned about it?

TRANSCRIPT:

Humans have known about the geomagnetic field for at least 2400 years with compasses and navigational equipment. But it was only mapped for the first time in 1701, by Sir Edmond Halley, the comet guy.Humans have known about the geomagnetic field for at least 2400 years with compasses and navigational equipment. But it was only mapped for the first time in 1701, by Sir Edmond Halley, the comet guy.

To make his map, Halley sailed the Atlantic for nearly 2 years and collected observations at 170 locations
Scientists these days make maps using complex instruments on the ground and in space, but they have to be careful about those space based observations
Because there’s one region of the Earth’s magnetic field that’s particularly dangerous to pass over. It’s this one spot where the field is particularly weak and has had consequences for satellites from the beginning of the space age. It’s known as the South Atlantic Anomaly.

A REGION OF FLUX

The oldest detection of the South Atlantic Anomaly — or SAA — I could find is from August 1960
A team of scientists at the Lebedev Institute of Physics, Moscow noted “intense charged particle flux” at 300 kilometers over the southern Atlantic Ocean
The satellite that registered the flux counted 100 times more particle collisions than in regions outside
300 kilometers is much closer to Earth’s surface than most of the inner Van Allen Belt – The altitude of the belt varies, but it typically goes no lower than 600 kmWhy is the SAA an exception?
It’s because for some reason the field strength right here is weaker, bottoming out around 22,000 nanoteslas, which is  about half the typical strength at that latitude
Weaker geomagnetism means high-energy particles can get closer to Earth before they’re deflected by the magnetic field

A weak field means a lower Van Allen Belt, and more energetic particles
Since it was first detected in 1960, the belt has been detected as low as 200 km
You might be wondering if this spot is more dangerous for humans and, yeah, it is. Thankfully few humans need to go there – more on that in a second

SINGLE EVENT UPSETS

What does need to go there are satellites – and this is a problem.
Communication and scientific satellites can be affected in this region, most commonly by Single Event Upsets, or SEUs.
This is when an energetic particle interacts with a satellite’s computer, which can  cause a discharge in computer memory
For us non-computer scientists, that means a small amount of information stored in the computer is lost
To get slightly in the weeds for a second, computers store information as bits — ones and zeroes

These bits are combined to represent documents, videos, and anything else stored on the computer
In a satellite, a bit might be part of instructions for how to relay a TV signal or how to burn fuel to stay at the right height
So you can see why losing part of that information would cause problems, not just in keeping it from operating correctly but just staying in orbit.
But this is a known problem, so some manufacturers add shielding to protect against SEUs, but this can get expensive, and adds weight.

BACKUPS AND OTHER STRATEGIES

So more often than not, satellites that pass over the SAA have to compensate for SEUs in another way
Depending on the satellite’s mission, this might involve checking data against a backup – Sometimes whole backup computers are built into a satellite
Other times, all that’s necessary is a little common sense
Landsat, a type of mapping satellite operated by the US Geological Survey, occasionally show spots of bright white on its photos, sometimes followed immediately by a dark spot.
This means that a particle oversaturated the camera’s detector. The white spot, the dark spot happens when the detector recovers.
But the Landsat operators know this, so they know they can discard the affected part of the image.

By the way, here’s a map of where Landsat SEUs have occurred. That big blob of red and yellow dots is inside the South Atlantic Anomaly.

Another strategy used by satellites is to power down sensitive equipment
All but one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s cameras are regularly powered down for this reason. Hubble actually spends 15% of its time over the SAA
Pictures from the camera that stays on are often affected by particle impacts, but operators expect this, they consider it a small price to pay for extra uptime

R.I.P. HITOMI

In fact, they’re a steal compared to the problems the SAA has caused for other satellites
In 2016, the Japan’s space agency JAXA lost a $270 million x-ray telescope called Hitomi. Probably because of the SAA.
An SEU, or something like it, made the satellite lose orientation. And when it tried to rotate back into position, it went out of control and spun itself to pieces
I should mention here that that’s an extreme case. Not all satellites have to pass through the anomaly and most that do make it out all right. And most cases of SEUs just cause minor problems. It’s not like this is the Bermuda Triangle or something.

Although, I covered the Bermuda Triangle and proved that it’s not any more dangerous than the rest of the ocean. So maybe this is like the Bermuda Triangle.
But this actually is slightly more dangerous. So maybe this is more of a Bermuda Triangle than the actual Bermuda Triangle.
Oh no, I’ve fallen down a logic spiral. Which is the Bermuda Triangle of sanity!
Anyway, satellites are one thing, but what about people passing through the anomaly?

ISS VS SAA

Because they do. Quite often. In fact, the International Space Station passes over it 3 to 4 times a day
ISS orbits between 330 and 435 km, so it does dip into the inner Van Allen Belt

But only a little. And it’s fast, so it’s only over the SAA for 3 to 5 minutes per pass
Still, the space station is exposed to higher levels of radiation during that time
So the hull provides some protection for astronauts and equipment, water stored in racks around the walls provide more
Water is actually a better shield than some types of metal, as it contains more particle-blocking nuclei
Long term studies show that ISS astronauts receive about 0.3 Sievert per year of radiation. That’s 60 times the average dose of a person on Earth; well shy of a fatal dose, but still significant.
Even mild radiation exposure over time can increase the risk of cancer. Standards at NASA allow for increasing that risk by no more than 3% over a career
No ISS astronaut has reached the limit and so far, none have shown evidence of radiation having a dramatic effect on their health

EYE FLASHES

But they have made some interesting observations. And by that I mean, sometimes they see things.
You’ve probably heard of the strange flashes of light some astronauts have seen. These are thought to come from high-energy particles shooting through the eye
They were first observed on Skylab, circa 1974, and were especially common during flyovers of the SAAh

Don Pettit, inventor of the zero-g coffee cup, described his experience with SAA flashes in a 2012 blog entry:“As we pass through this region, eye flashes will increase from one or two every 10 minutes to several per minute.”

I don’t know about you but I’m paranoid enough that that would FREAK ME OUT.
But… Why? Why is this here? What causes this?

MAGNETIC DECLINATION

Before I answer, let’s go back to Edmond Halley for a minute
To make his map of magnetic field lines, the famous stargazer took three different measurements: Latitude, longitude relative to London, and magnetic declination
That last one’s the kicker
Simply put, magnetic declination is the difference between true north and magnetic north
It’s also known as “compass variation” since it tracks the angle between north on a compass and the North Pole
If you thought that angle was zero, don’t feel bad, most people do. But in fact,  Earth’s magnetic axis is about 9.41 degrees from the rotational axis — note that this is the ref that gives 11 percent as an approximation in #1…looks #6 gives updated numbers for 2020, but please check my reading

Interestingly, I talked about this a little bit in my Bermuda Triangle video, too. It’s one of the explanations for it. See, it all comes back around…
By the way, you might see different numbers online, that’s because the magnetic axis shifts. It can actually move up to 55km a year.

So if you imagine the magnetic axis were a simple bar magnet, it wouldn’t lie in the dead center of Earth, it would have to be several hundred kilometers off-center. (a beat) Also magnetic north is technically a magnetic south pole, but I think we’re confused enough.

Point is, there are different theories to explain why there’s this difference in angle. The most accepted one has to do with how the geomagnetic field is generated

THE LUMPY, BUMPY CORE

Earth’s inner core is thought to be a sphere of solid iron. Or at least it used to be, recent models suggest it may be mix of materials in what they call a superionic state.
(over graphic or animation)This solid or semi-solid inner core has a diameter of about 2400 km. Surrounding that is a thick outer core — 2200 km thick. This is thought to be mostly liquid iron and nickel.

And it’s the movement of that liquid that generates most of Earth’s magnetic field. But… it’s not the perfect sphere we usually see it depicted as.
Nope, it’s lumpy. And bumpy.
And because of that, the magnetic field it generates is lumpy and bumpy as well. Meaning different intensities of field strength in different places.
The SAA is one of those places, specifically an area of low strength…possibly due a notable bump.
We have made maps of the core using seismic data that does show two large blobs deep below the SAA. So there you go.

THEIA’S REVENGE?

An interesting theory came out last year in 2021 that these bumps were actually caused by the Theia collision 4.5 billion year ago.
The Theia impact is also thought to be what stirred up the core and gave us a nice strong magnetic field in the first place.
But its thought that pieces of Theia became embedded in the core, causing the lumps that created the Anomaly.
But there are problems with this theory, notably the blobs of Theia appear to be under the Pacific, so why isn’t there a Northern Pacific Anomaly?
It’s still very much up for debate but it’s an interesting thought that we have satellites being slapped out of the sky by what is essentially the ghost of a dead planet. Sleep tight, kids.

DECAY AND REVERSAL

One last thing to mention, I talked about how magnetic north is moving a minute ago, well, over the last century, it’s also been getting weaker
Measurements from 1850 onward indicate it could completely decay in 1300 years

The study of magnetic traces in ancient minerals indicates that over time, the geomagnetic field can reverse. North can become south. Up becomes down. Human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria!”
Yes, the poles flip from time to time, in fact it’s happened 183 times over the past 83 million years
It’s possible the current weakening of the magnetic field means we’re heading for another reversal. You might have heard about this in clickbait headlines. But this is conjecture
Despite the weakening trend, the present field is still relatively strong compared to values it’s had over the past 50,000 years.

SAA MONITORING

But this weakening has led to changes in the South Atlantic Anomaly. In fact, it’s been growing for the last 50 years.
It also appears to be splitting in two, forming eastern and western lobes
But, NASA and other space agencies are keeping a close eye on it, there are whole fleets of satellites monitoring the SAA and the geomagnetic field overall. And while they have been surprised by this, it seems to be more dynamic than they thought, there’s no real cause for alarm.
Despite what you might have read, a sudden geomagnetic flip is unlikely, and losing the field completely is more unlikely still.
The archaeological record shows countless changes and many reversals in the geomagnetic field
Life has always found a way

 

 

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Infamous Disasters: The Tacoma Narrows Bridge

April 04, 2022

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was a modern marvel when it was first built, but soon became one of the most infamous disasters ever filmed. Before the bridge was even finished, construction workers noted how it tended to sway violently in even moderate winds, and despite efforts to make it stop, on November 7, 1940 it plummeted into Puget Sound, taking one victim with it – a dog named Tubby. Footage of the swaying bridge, which came to be known as “Galloping Gertie” has become some of the most bizarre footage ever recorded, showing a bridge made of steel and concrete twisting and flexing like it’s made of rubber. But a lot was learned from Galloping Gertie that went on to make future bridges much safer. So in today’s video, we look at this event, what led to its demise, and what we learned from it.

TRANSCRIPT:

Good morning everyone. Today let’s talk about something really sexy… Infrastructure.

Sorry, I gotta be careful so this video doesn’t get demonetized.

If you’ve been paying attention to the screaming hairdos on TV over the last year, you heard about the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that was signed into law this last November. (2021)

It was contentious because… well, everything is these days, but specifically because it was a huge spending bill, it was budgeted at a trillion dollars. That’s trillion with a T. And an R. And an I. And an L. And a–

But the argument for it is it would create jobs and send billions of dollars to state and local governments to upgrade things like airports, roads, transit systems, water systems, and so on.

With $26.5 billion of it earmarked specifically for bridges. The Department of Transportation actually has a program for this, it’s called the Bridge Replacement, Rehabilitation, Preservation, Protection, and Construction Program. Or, the BRRPPC…P (a beat) Excuse me.

This program is the largest dedicated bridge investment since the interstate highway system was built and will help repair around 15,000 highway bridges.
But… that’s a lot of money, and it’s been a challenge to get some people behind it, so at the beginning of the year President Biden did some traveling around to some places giving speeches to promote it.

One of those places was Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, because there are a lot of bridges in that area that need repair.

So he went there on January 28th to give a speech about the need to update bridges, but he had to cancel… Because a bridge collapsed.

It was a 477-foot bridge called the Fern Hollow Bridge that was built in 1973 and had been listed in “Poor” condition by the National Bridge Registry since 2011.
here were actually 5 cars on the bridge when it went down and 10 people were injured, but thankfully nobody was killed. It really could have been a lot worse, the bridge carries 14,000 cars a day.

And the fact is there are thousands of bridges like it around the country, many of them several decades old and barely hanging on.

But at least they got several decades of good use. Unlike the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Which despite being a modern marvel when it was built, barely lasted 4 months.

It’s become one of the most spectacular bridge disasters of all time. A disaster that taught us a lot of lessons – that would be used to save a lot more bridges.

If you’ve never been to Seattle, you should go. It’s a lovely town and one of the reasons why it’s so lovely is Puget Sound.
Puget Sound is a complex system of channels, embayments, estuaries, and islands where the Pacific Ocean flowed in and just kinda went all crazy in there.

It’s the home of Seattle, but also Tacoma, Everett, and Olympia, all separated by a maze of peninsulas and inlets. So it’s not the easiest place in the world to get around.

People wanting to travel from say, Tacoma to the Kitsap Peninsula, would have to travel far south, west, and then back north to get where they wanted to go.

Sure, ferries help transport people and are often used in the Sound. But they can be slow. And you have to follow their schedules.

Two things we Americans hate the most are a lack of freedom to hit the open road whenever we want and inefficient use of our time.

So, what do we do to guarantee those God-given rights from our Founding Fathers?

In the case of the city of Tacoma, you build a bridge. But before that, you need money, something that would prove to be a problem for the state.

The Washington State legislature created the Washington State Toll Bridge Authority in 1937 and gave $5,000 (about $97,000 today) to commission a study for a bridge over the Narrows.

An engineer named Clard Eldridge was hired and he proposed a suspension bridge design, which was still a fairly new idea, but it had worked well in other places.

They were hoping that tolls would be enough to pay for the bridge but the study showed that no, it wouldn’t be nearly enough. So, they turned to the Federal Public Works Administration (PWA).

This was the program set up by FDR to help create jobs during the Depression.

They asked for $11 million (around $220 million in today’s dollars). And many buttholes puckered.

They needed to get the cost down, so they brought in Leon Moisseiff (Mo-sieff), he was a bridge engineer from New York who was a consultant for the Golden Gate Bridge. And he had some ideas.

Early plans for the bridge included a set of 7.6-meter (25-foot) deep girders to sit under the roadway, which would make it stiff and less moveable.

He suggested using shallower 2.4-meter-deep (8 feet) supports, which meant a slimmer bridge, but also a cheaper bridge.

And like with most things in life, the PWA chose the cheaper design by Moisseiff.

It approved $6 million for the bridge. Bridge tolls would contribute almost $2 million more to help pay for it, for a total cost of $8 million.

Construction began on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in September 1938.

It took 19 months to complete and actually came in under budget at $6.4 million.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge had a main span of 853 meters (2,800 feet), making it the world’s third-longest suspension bridge at the time.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge wasn’t expected to have a lot of vehicular traffic, so it was designed with just two lanes and only 12 meters (39 feet) wide.

This was very narrow considering how long the bridge was. And those 2.4-meter-deep girders made the roadway extremely shallow.

The bridge opened on July 1, 1940.

Around 10,000 people showed up for the dedication and opening ceremony. 

Tolls started at 55 cents and were reduced to 50 cents two months later after the bonds were refinanced.
Officials praised the bridge as an essential economic and military portal to the Olympic Peninsula.

It was called a triumph of man’s ingenuity and perseverance.
“Everyone marveled,” wrote historian Murray Morgan, “at the gossamer grace of a structure so long.”
But the honeymoon period ended quickly as one major problem affected the bridge, a problem that had been happening for a while.

During the final months of construction, the bridge began to move in a wave-like motion.

Workers gave it the nickname “Galloping Gertie” and would often suck on lemons to combat seasickness.
The bridge would buckle and sway during windy conditions.
Strangely, this didn’t stop people from driving across the bridge. Driving across it became like a carnival ride.

They’d wait until the wind was just “right,” and then pull their cars in line to “ride the bridge.”

Even with all the movement, people considered the bridge safe.

A bank even put up a billboard on the Tacoma side saying it was just as safe as the bridge.

Several ideas were proposed to help the bridge move less. These included

  • Add cables to the girders. They were attached to 50-ton concrete blocks on the shore but broke after they were added.
  • Add cable stays. These would connect the main cables to the bridge deck at mid-span. They didn’t stop the bridge from moving less.
  • Add hydraulic buffers between the deck’s floor system and the towers. But this system was damaged when the bridge was sand-blasted before being painted.

The Washington Toll Bridge Authority hired engineering Professor Frederick Burt Farquharson from the University of Washington to create tests of the bridge in a wind tunnel.

The professor and his students built a 1:200-scale model of the bridge and a 1:20-scale model of a section of the deck.
He concluded his first studies on Nov. 2, 1940, offering two solutions to fix the issue.

  • Create holes in the lateral girders and along the deck so air could flow through them and help reduce the lift forces.
  • Add fairings or deflector vanes along the deck to give it a more aerodynamic shape.

The first option was rejected because those changes couldn’t be undone.

The second option was chosen, but it wasn’t done because there wasn’t a bridge anymore.

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapsed on Nov. 7, 1940, at 11 a.m., with cables snapping and concrete crashing into the water below.

Its collapse would eventually earn it the nickname “The Pearl Harbor of Engineering.”
A Tacoma reporter named Leonard Coatsworth was driving across the bridge with his dog, Tubby, on the day the bridge collapsed.

“Just as I drove past the towers, the bridge began to sway violently from side to side,” he recounted. “Before I realized it, the tilt became so violent that I lost control of the car… I jammed on the brakes and got out, only to be thrown onto my face against the curb.”

He could hear the concrete cracking. He tried to get his dog but was thrown against the curb again.

Coatsworth crawled around 457 meters (500 yards) to the towers. His hands were bleeding, bruised, and swollen. His knees were raw.

Professor Farquharson was at the bridge making measurements and ran to try and save the dog. But Tubby bit him and he gave up the effort.

Coatsworth watched from the toll plaza as the bridge broke and his car fell into the Narrows below.

Tubby was the only fatality.
So, why did the bridge collapse? Two reasons: high winds and a design that didn’t plan for them.

At that time, suspension bridges were kind of new. Most bridges were built out of concrete or stone.

Because of that, wind wasn’t much of a factor.

But with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, there were winds of around 70 kilometers per hour on the day it collapsed.

Its center torsionally vibrated at 36 cycles per minute across nine different segments.

That vibration increased, and the motion changed from rising and falling to a two-wave twisting motion.

While the center part remained pretty steady, the other two halves twisted in opposite directions.

Aeroelastic flutter caused the bridge to finally collapse.
Most bridges have trusses that let wind pass through. But with this bridge, the wind was forced to move above and below it.

This caused a flow separation. When this happens and there’s an object present, it can lead to a Kármán vortex street situation.
In the case of this situation, winds would hit the top part of the bridge, pushing it one way, while winds would hit the bottom part, pushing it the other way.
This is what caused the twisting motion and increased vibrations that led to it collapsing.

One way to help make sure this doesn’t happen is to place a gap in the middle of the bridge to allow air to flow around the structure.

Also, having trusses that allow wind to pass through is helpful.
Designers can also install diagonal braces made from steel to help make the structure stiffer when it experiences a high wind load.

The cross braces squeeze together and help prevent the bridge from flopping over.

Today, engineers and designers use model bridges in wind tunnels to test the ability of bridges to withstand high wind loads before beginning construction.

Wind loads affect all sorts of other structures besides bridges.

Skyscrapers, for example. The higher we go, the more wind forces have to be accounted for.

So engineers use computational fluid dynamic analysis and wind tunnel testing to identify pressure loads and design to counteract those forces.
They also have to design for resonance.

Much like a plucked string on a musical instrument, buildings have resonant frequencies that they are inclined to vibrate at.

Wind vortices only have an effect on a building when their frequencies line up with the building frequency.

If these vortices push back and forth at the same rate as the structure’s resonant frequency, they may create huge forces, just like what happened with the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

But design can disrupt the wind flow around a building. Things like rough surfaces or irregular shapes help break up the wind energy into smaller energy fragments.

These fragments create smaller vortices around a structure, which leads to it being more stable.
In the end, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was rebuilt and reopened in 1950. And you can still drive across it today.

This time, the workers nicknamed it “Sturdy Gerdie” because it was galloping no more. By the way, can everything be named by bridge workers from now on?

Suspension bridges were still new at the time but the lessons learned from this collapse have ensured that nothing like this would ever happen again.

So all we have now is this crazy footage of a bridge made of steel and concrete flapping and swaying like it’s made out of rubber. Like I’ve always been fascinated with this newsreel footage, I remember seeing it as a kid and I was just like… How?

And it was only when I researched this that I learned there was a dog in that car. RIP Tubby.

 

 

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(4) NASA’s Original Post-Apollo Plans Were INSANE

March 28, 2022

In 1969, President Nixon created a commission to set the course for NASA’s Post-Apollo years. What they came up with was a bold, ambitious vision of the future. One with multiple space stations, moon bases, regular travel to and from space with airline-like frequency, and people on Mars in the 1980s.

TRANSCRIPT:

Imagine you’re Richard Nixon.
Before all the scandals, you’ve just come into office, it’s January 1969 and NASA has spent the last decade working toward the goal of landing on the moon.
It’s hugely popular and was spearheaded by your predecessor, who made it his mission to carry out the wishes of his predecessor, who became a beloved national hero after he was freaking assassinated.

A guy who, by the way, beat you in your first presidential run because it was the first time debates were televised and he was charming and looked good on camera, and you’re Richard Nixon.
But now you’re president and you get to just walk it across the finish line and take credit. Noice.

Problem is… There’s not really any plan for what to do next. In fact, all the Saturn V boosters that had been contracted had already been made by 1968.
So… what do we do now?
You have to find, somehow, a vision for the next step in American space flight that’s as inspiring and galvanizing as LANDING ON THE MOON. And you’ve gotta get this right or your legacy will be tainted, and the last thing you want, Mister Nixon, is for your legacy to be tainted.

This must have weighed heavily on the actual Richard Nixon because one of the very first things he did in office was to appoint a Space Task Group headed up by his VP Spiro Agnew.
This team of scientists, engineers, and bureaucrats got in a room and put together a bold, ambitious plan for the 70s and 80s that would shape the future of the space program. Almost none of it actually happened.

But what if it had? Today let’s take a look at this plan, what went wrong, and imagine the future that might have been.
When John F. Kennedy announced that the United States was going to the moon, it was pretty much a shock to everyone. I mean we had just launched the first person into space, now we’re going to land on the moon?
In fact, I think we have some footage of their reaction…
I mean… It never stops killing.

But for some people in the early space race, that goal was downright timid.
Werner Von Braun had his sights set on Mars going all the way back to his book Mars Project: A Technical Tale, where he outlined in detail what getting to Mars might look like, and this was back in 1948.
By the way, this book is available online, I’ll put a link down below… It is awesome.
His ideas were pretty out there but you can clearly see the way his vision for Mars influenced the space program AND science fiction.
I mean, look me in the eye and tell me the X-wing wasn’t based on this.

And, um, Starship much?

And in no way was 2001 inspired by this massive spinning space station design from 1956.
Yeah, he was designing a space station to house 55 people 5 years before we even put a human into space. And to this day we’ve never had that many people in space at the same time.
And actually, you know what, let’s just stop the video for a second. Can we just stop and get something out of the way real quick? So this whole video is about visions of space travel that never came true, and there’s two opposite ways of approaching it, one is to laugh at how overly optimistic and naive they were back then – and they were, and you can have a good laugh about it.
The other way to look at it is… Man, space travel has been a huge disappointment.

I mean, for a while there we seemed on track, we went from never putting a person into space to standing on the moon in 8 years. Of course people in 1969 thought some of these ideas were feasible. Oh, and to quote myself from a previous video – pissing contests work.
By contrast, it took 11 years after the Shuttle program ended to find another American ride to space.
It also kinda blows my mind that the entire Apollo program took place over only 6 years. I mean no wonder nobody was paying attention by the time Apollo 17 went up, they were going up all the time. They were like Starlink launches, you couldn’t keep up with them.

The point is, there are two different ways of looking at this. And there are parts of me that agree with both. Was it a failure of foresight on their part or a failure of execution on the people who followed? You can kinda keep that in your mind as we look into this.
But back to Werner von Braun, I bring up some of his early ideas just to point out that, just because we didn’t have a specific plan for what to do after Apollo didn’t mean that people hadn’t been making plans. In fact Nixon’s Space Task Group had a deep well of ideas to pull from.

So let’s look at this thing. So first they go on for __ pages kind-of setting up the parameters for the plan, kind-of creating a framework of purposes and objectives and a bunch of bureaucrat-speak, I’ll link to this down below if you want to read the whole thing, it’s not that long but the meat and potatoes is in Section III, Goals And Objectives.
The first thing they do, after again reiterating the importance of creating a vision for the future, is promote what they call a balanced approach.

So they right away stress the importance of both manned and unmanned space exploration, which is probably important since they’re mostly talking about following up Apollo, which was a manned program, they wanted to make sure that unmanned exploration wasn’t left on the side of the road.
So, I’m just gonna get this out of the way, it’s generally more accepted today to say “crewed” instead of “manned” for obvious reasons but since they used the word “manned” in 1969, that’s what they used in this report so instead of switching back and forth, I’m just going to use the language that they used.
And right now there are two type of people in the comments, the ones who are pissed at me for saying “manned” and the ones who are pissed at me for acknowledging that it’s an issue at all. Because internet.

All right now that they’ve established the need for balance, they talk about the need for an overriding ambitious objective, something as powerful as landing on the moon.
Yep. They wanted to go to Mars.
Actually, they wanted to set as a long-term goal manned planetary exploration, and Mars was the first step in that direction.
They went on to explain that they chose Mars because it is the most Earth-like, is in fairly close proximity to the Earth, and has the highest probability of supporting extraterrestrial life.
They felt that a mission to Mars would be a galvanizing force for the public to get behind, it’s simple and easy to understand and hey, landing on the moon worked, why wouldn’t landing on Mars?

But they also thought it would help as a way to focus the scientific development.
They also detailed some of the advancements that would need to be achieved in order to get there.
All of this is ambitious but the most ambitious thing about this plan was the timeline.
Like, how fast did they think they would be able to land on Mars? Well here’s a hint, Kim Carne’s song Bette Davis Eyes was #1 on the Billboard’s hot 100.
And for Gen Z… 1981, they wanted to go to Mars by 1981. And the hot 100…nevermind.

They wrote: NASA has outlined plans that would include a manned Mars mission in 1981 with the development decision on a Mars Excursion Module in FY 1974,
So they were expecting to have the Mars lander designed and ready for production in just 5 years.
And this was just supposed to be the beginning of our interplanetary travel. I mean if they were expecting to be landing on Mars by 1981, I can’t help but wonder what they would follow that with. Venus? Jupiter’s moons? Titan? I can only imagine what they thought we’d be doing by 2022.

Anyway, now that we have the overarching goal of the program, they outlined a handful of program objectives. I’ll just give a quick rundown here:
First is Application of space technology to the direct benefit of mankind Air and ocean traffic control,  world-wide navigation systems,  environmental monitoring and prediction (weather, pollution),  earth resource survey communications
And they talk about how these capabilities would benefit people all over the world. And yeah… We have those things now. And I would argue the world is a much better place for it. So… that’s one prediction they got right.

Second is Operation of military space systems to enhance national defense
And they just talk under this one about how it’s incumbent on the US to dominate space in order to ensure peace throughout the world. Because obviously.
The third program objective is Exploration of the solar system and beyond.
This is dipping a wee bit into that “balanced” approach with manned and unmanned missions.
They divide this one into three main elements:

Planetary Exploration – Unmanned planetary exploration missions continuing throughout the decade, both for science returns and, in the case of Mars and Venus, as precursors to later manned missions.

See that’s interesting because it hints at a potential manned mission to Venus – probably using upper-atmosphere floating labs.
The program should include progressively more sophisticated missions to the near planets as well as multiple-planet flyby missions to the outer planets taking advantage of the favorable relative positions of the outer planets in the late 1970’s.
If that’s not ringing a bell, this is the Grand Tour of the Solar System they proposed when they saw a rare alignment of the planets; this became the Voyager missions.
Early missions to the asteroid belt and to the vicinity of a comet should be planned.
Again, things we’ve done.

The next element is Astronomy, Physics, the Earth and Life Sciences where they basically advocate for space telescopes, which we’ve done plenty of by now.
And the last element is Lunar Exploration. So no, they didn’t forget about the moon, all this we’re talking about is stuff outside of the obvious fact that we were going to continue going to the moon. Duh.
They proposed expanded mobility on the moon surface and establishment of lunar bases and a lunar space station. Which we’re starting to talk about again.
But it’s the 4th program objective where things start to get really saucy. This one reads Development of new capabilities for operating in space.

So right off the bat they address the biggest achilles heel with the Apollo Program:
Exploration and exploitation of space is costly with our current generation of expendable launch vehicles and spacecraft systems. This is particularly true for the manned flight program.
Yeah, turns out when only this part ever comes back to Earth, it’s not exactly efficient.

So with that in mind, they set three parameters for their plans: Commonality, Reusability, and Economy.
Commonality meaning using a few major systems for a wide variety of missions.
Reusability obviously means being able to use the same systems multiple times.
And economy not necessarily in terms of cost but in the terms of throw-away elements in the missions.
So, their plan to get us to Mars by 1981 while conforming to these principles looked like this.

The logic seems to be that if you are going to expand into the cosmos, you need to have sort-of an infrastructure in place.
And that infrastructure begins with waystations in orbit.
So they proposed the building of a multi-purpose space station module that can support 6-12 occupants and can be combined with other modules to form bigger space bases. Some of which are reaching Von Braun size.

But they didn’t have their eye on just one station, but a whole series of stations.
So in other words, multiple low-earth orbit stations but also a station further out in geosynchronous orbit and one around the moon.
I guess the idea being you can move people and cargo around between these various way points in space, and as the report suggests, out into the solar system.
Because obviously moving between the planets would take years of travel and you’d probably need something the size of a space station.
But yeah, in this vision there would be multiple space stations in LEO and GEO and at least one around the moon facilitating the movement of people and cargo on a regular basis from the ground on Earth to permanent bases on the moon.

But how do you transport this stuff between the stations? Well for that you’d need a kind of a… space transportation system.

For many of you the term Space Transportation System probably sounds familiar. And that’s because that was the official name of the Space Shuttle.
This is why Shuttle launches all had the prefix “STS” in it, that stood for Space Transportation System.
But in the Space Task Force plan, the Shuttle was just one part of a whole system of vehicles designed to “Carry passengers, supplies, rocket fuel, other spacecraft, equipment, or additional rocket stages to and from orbit on a routine aircraft-like basis.”
So when Elon Musk talks about how we need to make space flight as routine as air travel… Well he’s not the first person to say that.
The report described the Shuttle component as:

A reusable chemically fueled shuttle operating between the surface of the Earth and low-earth orbit in an airline-type mode. So this was the part of the system that got stuff off the ground and into orbit. Once in orbit, they proposed a different craft to move things around.
A chemically fueled reusable space tug or vehicle for moving men and equipment to different earth orbits. This same tug could also be used as a transfer vehicle between the lunar-orbit base and the lunar surface.

So this is kind-of like a shuttle that never has to launch off the ground or pass through any atmosphere so it was designed more like a giant can – you can see a similar idea in the Cygnus cargo spacecraft from Northrop Grumman.

There was a third component of this system though which kind-of sounds like a variation on the space tug idea, this one nuclear powered.
A reusable nuclear stage for transporting men, spacecraft and supplies between Earth orbit and lunar orbit and between low Earth orbit and geosynchronous orbit and for other deep space activities.  So this was based on the NERVA engine, which is a really interesting topic that probably deserves its own video, but this was heavily in development at the time and to many was the future of space flight, especially deep space.

NERVA stands for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application, and it was what’s known as a thermal nuclear rocket, basically it used a nuclear reactor core to heat liquid hydrogen, causing it to expand, go flying out the flamey end and push the craft forward.
It had several advantages over chemical rockets, for one thing, hydrogen has a lower molecular mass than the oxygen and CO2 that comes out the butt of chemical rockets, which gives it more kinetic energy per unit of mass.

In other words it gets 3 to 4.5 times higher specific impulse than traditional chemical rockets.
You can think of them kind-of like ion engines, they’re not powerful enough to launch with but once in space, they can burn for way longer, giving more time to accelerate and eventually reach much higher speeds.

So nuclear rockets like the NERVA engine are especially good for long-distance and deep space travel. In theory.
I have to say in theory because it never flew. There were lots of tests done and it was determined to be ready to be put into a vehicle but it was cancelled in 1973. By Nixon.
But with the overriding goal of getting people to Mars, it makes sense that they would prioritize this because it could cut the length of the trip down to 3-4 months. But like I said, it deserves its own video because there were a lot of engineering challenges around it and ultimately it became a funding issue. To this day there haven’t been any nuclear thermal vehicles launched by anybody. Although there are some private companies working on it again.

The rest of the Task Force report focused on international cooperation and budget. And there was definitely a budget.
These were ambitious goals that would require ambitious spending. The task force wanted $6 billion, which was actually more than they were getting under Apollo.(Equals $46 billion today)
The 1969 budget for NASA was just over $4.25 billion, or 2.31% of GDP. But remember, all the vehicle construction was done by that point, it peaked in 1966 at $5.9 billion, or 4.41% of GDP.
So it wasn’t unheard of. When the US was pushing toward Kennedy’s big goal of landing on the moon, they gave NASA somewhat similar amounts of money. Now we had this bold plan for an entire space infrastructure, including moon bases and trips to Mars. Surely that was just as worthy of an investment.

Turns out… no.

Sure Nixon had inherited a space program at the very top of its game, but he also inherited the Vietnam War. And a financial downturn. And he was a fiscal conservative so, no, he was not about to give NASA more money than ever before.
Instead, NASA’s funding went down. By 1975, it was receiving less than 1% of the GDP. (.98%) In 2020 it was .48%.
So various parts of the plan got stripped away and the big bold vision got kinda lost to time.
But that doesn’t mean it’s a total bust. The Space Transportation System became the Space Shuttle, which; while it had its problems, is one of the most successful space vehicles of all time.

We didn’t get a whole bunch of space stations, but the space station idea stuck around and became Space Station Freedom in the 80s, eventually the ISS in the 90s.
They proposed landing on comets and we did that, they proposed sending probes to the asteroid belt, we did that (Dawn), they proposed the grand tour of the solar system. We did that. Twice.
They proposed Moon bases and landing people on Mars… We’re working on it.
What I find interesting about this whole period of the space program is how many things they kinda nailed. Sure their scope was wildly optimistic but the principles they espoused, the core tenants of reusability and whatnot, those are more relevant today than ever before. And we are kinda inching closer to their big vision. It’s frustratingly slow… But maybe we’re getting there.
But what if they had gotten their way? What if in some alternate utopian history we had spent the money on this instead of spending $10 billion a year on Vietnam? What would that look like? Where would we be today?

First of all, if any studio heads are watching, this would be an excellent premise for a movie or series, just saying.
If we landed on Mars in the early 80s and continued that same level of progress, we could have a small city there by now, at least a large base.
And we might have traveled beyond that in the solar system, maybe doing a crewed flyby of Venus, maybe asteroid mining would be more of a thing by now, starting to dip into The Expanse territory here…

We would definitely have a large presence on the moon, maybe a mature moon mining industry in place by now.
Or… it’s also possible that the entire thing backfires and winds up bankrupting the whole country. Although… maybe the opposite is true.
Some studies have estimated that for every $1 spent on the Apollo program $8 was made in terms of innovation, technology and job creation.
In fact, that’s the part of this question that’s really interesting, if we had continued funding the space program at Apollo levels up to today, what would technology look like? And how many new companies and jobs would have been created by that?

There’s also the question of how a program like that inspires people to go into science fields, apparently there was a massive spike in Ph.D’s after we landed on the moon. Who knows how that could have accelerated progress?
My writer Cooper took that $8 for every $1 spent metric and looked at what we would be spending if we had continued funding NASA at Apollo levels and estimated that it could have added more than $94 trillion to the economy.

That’s an interesting thought. Wildly speculative. But an interesting thought. The fact is, we don’t know what could have been. A lot of the advancements needed to make the Space Task Group plan happen couldn’t be solved by just throwing money at it.

There are a plethora of computer advances, materials advances and so on that need to happen before it can all come together in this way. Sometimes these things happen when they’re supposed to.
Maybe even with all the money in the world, we’d still be roughly where we are because this is the natural flow of progress. Many have argued that Apollo was kind-of a fluke and was way, WAY too early to actually be going to the moon.
Hell, I’ve made that argument. And I tend to agree with me.

But what do you think? Could they have pulled this off? Would it make the world a very different place? Talk about it down below.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Next Internet Could Be A Dystopian Nightmare

February 28, 2022

We’ve heard a lot lately about the Metaverse; the next evolution of the internet which we will experience in fully immersive 3D virtual worlds as well as mixed and augmented reality on top of our own world. Facebook has zeroed in on this idea so much they changed their name to Meta to reflect it. So let’s look at the potential for this future, the promises that it holds… And the dystopian nightmare it could become if we get it wrong.

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, and welcome to… this. Whatever this is.
I’m coming to you from a place that doesn’t exist, at least not in reality but it does exist in virtual reality. And of course what you’re seeing is a virtual version of me interacting in this space.
Even though I’m really at home, right where you always see me.

VR technology has been around for a while, obviously, most of you have probably had some experience in a virtual world at some point, there have been VR experiences in theme parks and malls, there were even VR gaming headsets going back to the 90s.

But it never quite caught on. Not in the way its early proponents expected. Sorry, Lawnmower Man.
I really wanted to be Lawnmower Man.
So why now is there all this talk about “the metaverse?” What even is the metaverse, and is it really going to be the next big evolution in the internet?
And maybe the biggest question… Do you have to strap a brick to your face to use it?

META WOES

At the end of October last year during their annual Connect presentation, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was changing its name to Meta. And I, along with the whole of humanity, briefly lost my eyes as they rolled back in my head.
I even came up with this killer meme that I’m fairly proud of, one of the better things I’ve ever come up with.
This whole announcement was coming hot off the heels of a list of scandals longer than the t-shirt aisle of Zuck’s walk-in closet.
Everything from election shenanigans to conducting psychological experiments on unconsenting users to literally enabling religious genocide in Myanmar.

High profile whistleblowers came forward testifying to their pursuit of profits at the expense of society, their buying up of other properties reeks of monopoly, and their apps, especially Instagram, has been linked to depression and even self-harm in young girls.
The name Facebook has become synonymous with data mining and loss of privacy, misinformation, and holy lord the social polarization.

In fact, it seems the only thing everybody in the world does seem to agree on is that Facebook is the worst thing that’s ever happened ever.
They claim their mission is to bring people together, and in that sense anyway, they have been successful.

So hey, name change! That’ll fix it!

That’s how it came across. And how it was covered by people in the media. Including myself. And I stand by my baseless mockery.
But that announcement came at the very end of the presentation, it was their “one more thing.” In fact, he totally stole from Steve Jobs when he announced it.(1:10:30 in presentation below)https://youtu.be/sdqMvEZTxlILike copying his wardrobe wasn’t enough.
No, this came at the end of an almost an hour and a half presentation on the metaverse, where he laid out in stark detail what the metaverse is, what challenges there are to overcome, and how it’s going to transform the world as we know it.
All delivered through totally natural human conversations that sound nothing at all like the sponsored segments on your local news.
I watched the whole thing.

CONNECT 2021

But if you didn’t have time to watch the whole thing, here were some of the highlights…
Zuckerberg talked about Horizon Home, their virtual space that users will own in the metaverse.
By the way, that word ownership will come up again later.
It’s a little virtual home that you can design however you like, keep and organize apps, entertainment, virtual assets and avatars.
And, as it was announced in the video, you can now invite other people over to your virtual home.
You can sit in a virtual home theater with your friends and watch movies or TV shows together in this 3D space.

A lot of it centered around how interacting in virtual spaces like this is more immersive and engaging than the video calls we’ve gotten used to – just a bunch of faces on a flat screen.
Which is why they’re also pushing Horizon Workspaces, which lets people work together in a virtual 3D office.
And if you just find it hard to believe that interacting through digital avatars can be better than a zoom call, he talked about the headset they’re developing called Cambria that will be able to read and mimic facial expressions, and the next generation of avatars that aren’t quite out of uncanny valley, but are much more photorealistic.
And he talked about augmented and mixed realities where virtual objects and art interact with the real world, basically creating a digital layer  on top of our reality, and setting up virtual commerce so developers and creators can make money building out this world.

Basically the point of the presentation was to establish a vision for the metaverse and promote the tools they are building that will push things in that direction.
And, much more importantly, to get out front in the minds of the public as THE company behind the metaverse.
And let’s face it, it worked.
For a lot of people, this was the first time they had ever heard of a metaverse, and it was coming from robot supervillain Mark Zuckerberg, who changed the name of his company around it… This is clearly their baby, no thank you.

Is it not enough you screwed up the world, you’ve gotta create a whole new virtual world and screw that up too?

A lot of people see a company that has plateaued. They’ve reached the saturation point, in fact, their numbers shrank in January for the first time, which caused their stock to plummet on February 3rd. They lost $230 billion in one day.
All of that was after the name change but still, the writing’s on the wall. They’re  not the cool social media anymore, and with Apple’s new privacy features and various new government regulations around the world, they’re grasping at straws.

Add on top of that all these public scandals and the timing is just right to, you know, kinda change the narrative.
All of which is true, and a fair thing to say. But Facebook has been working toward this for a while. They bought Oculus in 2014, so 8 years now, way before the scandals started to hit.

Was Zuckerberg on to something? Have they been quietly laying the groundwork for the biggest thing to ever happen to the internet this whole time?
Or is this just a company nobody likes offering a product nobody wants to solve problems nobody has?

So here’s the thing… Meta is not the Metaverse.

The idea of the metaverse has been around for a while now, and there’s a lot of different people with their own ideas of what it can be and how it will work. And they say in their video that they’re building FOR the metaverse, not that they’re building the metaverse itself.
Zuckerberg just co-opted the name. Like he co-opted his outfit.

SNOWCRASH

The term “Metaverse” was first coined in the Neal Stephenson book Snow Crash in 1992.
In the book, the metaverse took the form of a city street, longer than the circumference of the Earth with virtual real estate branching out from the street, creating whole neighborhoods.

ONLINE WORLDS

And this idea of a virtual, online second world is nothing new either, in fact massively multiplayer online games have been around since 2003 when Second Life went online.
Second Life, Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, all of these allow people to inhabit avatars of their choosing, be social, throw parties, have relationships, and buy and sell virtual goods for actual money.
You could probably go as far as to call each of these “protometaverses” and for sure they feature a lot of the fundamentals that describe the metaverse… But the metaverse takes it further.

Metaverse expert Matthew Ball sums it up by saying:
“The metaverse is a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users with an individual sense of presence, and with continuity of data, such as identity, history, entitlements, objects, communications, and payments.”
He has a nine-part series about the metaverse on his website that I’ll link down below if you want a deeper dive, it’s worth checking out if you really want to get your head around all this.
But to keep things simple here, let’s bullet point some of that quote and take a closer look.

According to Matthew Ball, the necessary features of the metaverse are:
Massively scaled Interoperable Real-time rendered 3D virtual worlds Synchronous Persistent Unlimited number of users Individual sense of presence Continuity of data
Most of these are self-explanatory so let me focus on the ones that aren’t.

Like interoperable, what does that mean, well it means basically that all the parts of the Metaverse have to work together.
For example, you can go run around in Second Life and you can shoot things up in Fortnite, but those are two different platforms run by two different companies, they don’t work together in any way.
In a metaverse situation, you might have doors in your virtual home that if you walk through one door, you’re in the Fortnite world, walk through the other door and you’re in Second Life.
Or the two could work together, or the metaverse world itself would be fully encompassing of both. Assets that are bought in one room can be used in the other one.

In the metaverse, any store, game, or experience online will have to appear by default, there can’t be silos created by different companies.  It’s like imagine if some websites only appeared on Google Chrome, some on Microsoft Edge, some on Firefox?
The metaverse has to have that same interoperability but in a virtual 3D space.

SYNCHRONOUS is another feature worth commenting on
Meta’s Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth describes the metaverse as “a largely synchronous experience,” meaning most of what happens there will be produced and consumed in real-time, by everybody.
Like what I’m doing right now is asynchronous. You’re not hearing me say this right now, you’re hearing me say this days and weeks later. We are not experiencing this at the same time.
Even if I was doing a livestream there would be a 30-second delay. A very annoying 30-second delay.
Multiplayer games and social media are synchronous, so that’s closer to what the metaverse will be, it’s a virtual world that we all experience at the same time.

And finally, CONTINUITY OF DATA.

Sounds boring but it’s actually super important.
When we say “data” what we mean is personal identity. Your identity has to be the same in all of the places.
Like one thing that’s always been different between real life and online life is we often take on different names and pseudonyms in various places online. But imagine if it worked that way in real life, and every time you went into a different store you had to use a different identity. That just totally wouldn’t work, and it wouldn’t work in the metaverse either.

There have to be systems in place that make proving your identity in the metaverse as easy as showing your drivers’ license in the real world – and safeguards to make sure it can’t be stolen.
So yeah, just like the internet isn’t run by one company, the metaverse can’t be either. Despite how much Facebook wants to own it.
And while you don’t HAVE to experience the metaverse in VR, it is kinda the best way to get the potential across.

Just a personal note here, I got this Quest headset toward the beginning of the pandemic as kind-of an experiment, I was wondering if since I was holed up in my house if there was any psychological benefit to VR, like is it immersive enough to actually virtually get me out of the house.
And I don’t think I actually used it enough to tell but I will say what sold me on the potential of VR was a Star Wars game.
There’s a few Star Wars games called Vader Immortal and long story short, there’s a scene where Vader walks up to you and threatens you and guys… I almost crapped myself.
Like I’m old enough to remember when Darth Vader was scary, and then we saw him as a whiny kid in the prequels and then Disney bought it out and now he’s dancing to You Can’t Touch This at Disneyworld.
Anyway, he stopped being scary.

But in this game he walks up to you and he’s like 7 feet tall and this wide and he’s just like towering over you and I was like Oh MY GOD.
VR made Darth Vader scary again for me. So yeah… It’s got some potential.
The question is… will people want to strap a device like this on their faces for hours at a time? I’ll be honest, it’s not the most comfortable thing in the world. But there’s a lot of work going on in this department.

BIG NAMES

At the time of this recording, the biggest names in VR today are Meta, Sony, and HTC.
Sony has new VR headset in the works for the Playstation 5. HTC released its latest offerings, Vive Pro 2 and Vive Focus 3, last year
These are refinements on earlier headsets which obviously move the needle a bit but probably won’t draw VR newbies in on their own.
I mentioned earlier that Meta’s working on a new headset called Cambria that will track facial features better. It also promises to have a better passthrough mode.
Passthrough is when the headset uses the cameras on the front to let you see the room around you, which I have to say is very well done on the Quest 2.
I can step outside the guardian and walk around the room without taking off the headset, and the depth perception is almost perfect. I can grab a drink or move an object like I’m just using my eyes.
And this actually sold me on the idea of augmented reality or mixed reality.

Like, with the Quest, you build a guardian barrier, this is to make sure you don’t walk into any walls or anything, and as you approach the barrier, you see lines appear to let you know that it’s there.
But when you step outside of it, you see this curtain interacting with the real world. Imagine if that was a TV display or digital art or a virtual bookshelf that holds all your favorite books or a virtual jukebox where you could play music.

AR AND MR

These are the promises of AR and MR, to enable a digital layer on top of real life.
This is actually something Apple has heavily invested in over the last few years, embedding AR functionality into their iPhones, including a LIDAR sensor, which helps with facial recognition, but also makes it possible to map out spaces.
And over the last 5 years or so, they’ve quietly bought a handful of companies that are working on AR tech, like VRvana, Polar Rose, and Akonia Holographics.
And you can see some development on synchronous avatar tech with their animojis.

But they still haven’t really come out with any VR or AR gear… yet.
And that might be because, if you want to operate in a mixed or augmented reality space, a VR headset with high-res passthrough might do the job, but it’s doubtful that people will want to spend a majority of their day with this brick attached to their face.

As long as you have to wear a big clunky device on your head, the metaverse will just be a place you step into from time to time. It’s like the internet before smartphones. You could access it… if you were sitting at a computer.
Smartphones allowed us to take the internet with us, to integrate it into our lives, and the apps gave us the ability to never get lost, to find food, information… and Pokemon.
Ah yes, Pokemon Go, the OG of AR.

For the metaverse to become a part of our daily lives, we’ll need something more sleek and streamlined than a VR helmet. For that… we’re gonna need smartglasses.

SMARTGLASSES

Smartglasses have passthrough built-in. Since, you know, they’re see through.
You can use them to transport you to fully immersive virtual worlds or present a virtual digital layer on top of reality.
So far smartglasses have been… less than impressive?

Google Glass came out in 2013 to mixed reviews, some people called it ugly while other people hailed it as remarkably stupid.http://prod-upp-image-read.ft.com/be408ffc-c094-11e1-982d-00144feabdc0
And this is still kind-of what comes to mind when people think of smart glasses, it’s just this dorky thing that only tech bros wore and didn’t really do much except make people stare at you.
It was basically just a tiny little screen that would show you images and information with minimal user interface, they’ve gotten more functional over the years but this is more like a different implementation of a smartphone than VR glasses.

Snapchat released Spectacles in 2016, which was basically glasses with built-in cameras to take images and post on the app.
These didn’t exactly take off with consumers, I don’t remember hearing much excitement around them and honestly, I’d kind-of totally forgotten about them… Until I was researching for this video.
Turns out they’ve made some giant leaps with this product. Last year, they debuted a new version of Spectacles that have AR functionality.

I don’t think they’re actually selling these to the public yet, it’s really for developers, but the glasses work along with the Snapchat app to add AR graphics in real-time.
And Snap is pretty well positioned for this because they pioneered real-time filters and lenses that are, essentially a kind of augmented reality. This just puts them in glasses that you wear.
There’s still a long way to go, the battery life is apparently terrible and it only has a narrow field of view, but it’s pretty major progress.

Last year, Ray-Ban collaborated with Facebook, now Meta, on Ray-Ban stories, which allow you to record videos and live chat with people on Facebook.
They’re still in the “extension of your phone” phase, but it’s a start.
At CES 2022, just a month ago or so, a company named Vuzix announced the Vuzix Shield, promising a real AR experience but this is not really for consumers, these are for professional use cases, and will be priced as such.
But this is the closest that we’ve gotten to real AR smartglasses.

So there’s still a way to go on this.

I feel like I would be remiss if I didn’t mention a couple of other contenders in this field and that’s the Microsoft Hololens and the Magic Leap One.
These aren’t smart glasses as much as AR headsets and both were making some big splashes back around 2018, but Magic Leap unfortunately kinda folded and the Hololens…
Well the biggest purchaser of HoloLens to date has been the US Army.
They issued a second generation in 2019 and there were plans for a HoloLens 3 but those seem to be cancelled….

Or is it…?
The point is, there is progress here. Hell up until just a couple years ago, most quality VR headsets were tethered, you had to be connected to a computer.
It really won’t be long until someone cracks the code and produces a high-quality, easy to use and relatively inexpensive pair of glasses that will make the ultimate vision of the metaverse a reality.
And when this happens I truly think it will be the most transformative tech gadget since the iPhone, something that will fundamentally change how we interact with the world.  And that company is going to bank. Hard.
Imagine it, a pair of glasses that when you put them on shows you a whole level of reality that you couldn’t see before
Computers and TVs might become irrelevant because you can put a screen up anywhere you want in the house.
Imagine navigation showing up as arrows floating in space ahead of you, pointing you in the right direction.
Imagine billboards and ads that interact with you as you walk past them. Walking into stores and buying real life items sitting on a shelf right next to virtual items, which by the way, NFTs kinda make sense in a virtual world like this because if you buy something you want to know that it’s authenticated in some way.

Or… you could teleport from your home as an avatar to a store and buy virtual goods, and purchase real goods to be delivered to your home.
Imagine virtual paramedics that can be on the scene of an emergency instantly as an avatar to assess the situation and walk you through any triage that’s possible before the ambulance arrives.
Imagine going back in time and visiting virtual recreations of ancient Rome or New York when it was still New Amsterdam, or ride on the Titanic.
Imagine a friend calling you and when you accept the call, they just appear, either as an avatar or in 3D, right in front of you.

Like, holograms in the future is just like a trope in science fiction, we’ve always imagined we would have that someday. This is pretty much that. It just requires glasses.
Imagine a world like the one in Free Guy, where once you put on the glasses, the world becomes a first person video game where you can interact with virtual players from all around the world, virtual bullets flying everywhere, virtual cars flying off of virtual bridges while a virtual volcano explodes on the horizon, the only limit to reality will the the limits of our own imagination… Yeah, does anybody really want this?

I mean, could this essentially take all the worst parts of the internet and bring them into living reality?
We’re already so immersed in our online presence that it’s damaging us, mentally.
Like you don’t hear a lot of mental health experts saying we need MORE internet these days.

I mean a lot of these future visions with the holograms everywhere are pretty dystopian.
Think of all the websites where 90% of the screen space is just ads and popups and imagine what it would be like walking through a store with those glasses on.
As you try to walk out of the store a popup comes up saying, “Wait, before you go! Shoes half off!”
The world could be chaos, filled with digital panhandlers crawling over each other for your last shred of attention. This is what reality could be in the future if the tech companies have their way. Which is why many believe that if the metaverse if going to happen, it’s going to have to be a new kind of technology. A whole new kind of internet. Something that goes by the name of Web3.

THE NEW WEB

The Internet as we use it right now is called Web2. Or Web 2.0 but that’s a pretty outdated term, Web2 is dominated by social media and user-generated content.
Web1 was the early days of the internet where people put up pages and other people read those pages. It was mostly text and sometimes called the “read-only internet.”

So Web2 was all about engagement and interactivity. Web3 will be more about ownership; I mentioned that earlier. And this is where blockchain technology comes in.
Blockchain allows the metaverse to be decentralized, not owned by any one entity. And digital assets will need to be singular items that can’t be copied. Or… Non-fungible.
Like I said before, NFTs kinda make sense in a metaverse environment.

The thought is that in Web3, blockchain technology will be used to enhance creator rights, so that posting digital assets will grant you a stake in how the asset is distributed.
And your identity wouldn’t be wrapped up in a Facebook or Google account, you would own a secure, personal identity that you can share however you see fit.
If you want to buy something on credit, you can show your financial records to the creditor, no need for a bank or a credit agency.
Instead of countless logins and passwords, you can visit a website or virtual store and they’ll know it’s you.

A virtual contract signing will become a handshake.
Like the metaverse itself, Web3 is still an amorphous, ever-evolving thing and an entire video could be made on that alone, in fact, I’m going to link to some great videos and podcasts about it down below.
But that’s an example of how there are several different types of technologies that are maturing at the same time that could make the metaverse happen – whatever it turns out to be.
And Facebook – or Meta – is just one of dozens of companies who are trying to get in there first. It’s literally a virtual land grab.
Think about all the companies and even industries that went kaput when the internet came around. Well if the metaverse really is the next internet, if it really is Web3, nobody wants to be caught on their heels when that happens.

So there’s that fear of not being able to adapt fast enough, and then there’s fear of missing out, FOMO.
Add in the greed and speculation that accompanies any gold rush, and it’s easy to see how all this hype got built up around it.
But this really isn’t going to be happening any time soon, these technologies are coming together fast, but there’s still a pretty long way to go. Or, as Zuck himself said…(Play the Connect clip from 1:10:13 and slowly zoom in on his awkward hands. Then cut to Ricky Bobby saying, “I’m not sure what to do with my hands”)https://youtu.be/M8PP3QU7wjIIt’ll be interesting to watch and as a content creator, I definitely have my eye on it, it could really shake up the creator economy, in probably good and bad ways.

But it’s not something I really worry about because I mean… you can always take the glasses off.
And just one more contrarian point before I go… I think it’s possible that this entire conceit, that people want a more immersive, synchronous social experience through the internet… might be flawed.
I think we might actually be moving in the opposite direction.

As our communication technology has evolved, we’ve gone from having to answer the phone when it’s ringing or we’d miss it entirely to someone can leave a message on the answering machine and we call them back when we want, to not calling at all and just sending a text message, which is the most popular form of communication today.
Hell you could say we’ve moved from text messages to just sending emojis and gifs.
We’re reverting back to hieroglyphics!

I mean I don’t know about you but I barely even answer the phone anymore because I’m always in the middle of something and I hardly ever answer the door, even though I have a smart doorbell that allows me to talk to them through my phone, instead I’m hiding behind the couch so I don’t have to deal with the scary Girl Scouts outside. Like a man.
Technology has given us the gift of connection but it’s also given us the gift of control over our own time. And we seem to be valuing that more.
So the idea of being always plugged in to a virtual world… I don’t know. It might not be as popular as the tech bros think.
But what do you think? I know this was kind-of a high-level overview and there’s a lot that isn’t included here that adds a lot of nuance, feel free to chime in with anything I missed down below.

 

 

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