Tag: answers with joe

The Full Plan For Artemis Part II: Back To The Moon

With the upcoming launch of Artemis I, NASA is officially on the way back to the moon for the first time in 50 years. Recently I posted the first of 3 videos designed to cover the entire Artemis program. The last video focused on the uncrewed missions, today we’re looking at the human missions, the ones that will finally put boots on the moon again.

TRANSCRIPT:

So last month I kicked off this series on the Artemis program by talking about the robotic and uncrewed missions that will do some research and set the stage for the next generation of humans to walk on the moon.

Today, we’re going to talk about those humans.

All right, so we’ve sent the robots, we’ve conducted the tests, we’ve stockpiled supplies and instruments through the CLPS program, now it’s time to send living, breathing, pooping humans back to the surface.

By the way, if you haven’t seen my previous video on those robotic missions, I’ll put a link on screen or down in the description – I encourage you to check that out because… well… that’s how I make money.

Honesty.

But those robotic missions are interesting and it also establishes why we’re going back and the water resources that are going to make going back and staying back possible.

So if we’re going to return humans to the moon, we’ve got to talk about how they’re going to get there, and for Artemis, that’s the Orion capsule.

ORION

A lot of attention has been paid over the last several years to the next generation of crewed vehicles designed to send astronauts to the ISS. This is a job NASA handed off to private companies as part of their Commercial Crew program.

So we’ve heard a lot about the SpaceX Crew Dragon, the Boeing Starliner, and the Sierra Space Dream Chaser… Only one of which has actually flown people to the ISS.

But at the same time, NASA has been developing the Orion capsule, designed to handle the rigors of deep space outside of low Earth orbit and the magnetic shield.

And that’s really what sets this one apart from the others, it is specifically designed for deep space travel.

The obvious comparison that you want to jump to with Orion is to compare it to the Apollo command module, but they’re different in some significant ways.

First and most obvious, Orion is bigger, built to carry 4 passengers as opposed to 3 for Apollo.
Orion crew capsule dimensions
16.5 ft wide
316 ft^3
Capacity six astronauts but likely
Apollo
13 ft wide
219 ft^3
Capacity three

But just as obvious, the technology in Orion is like a million times what Apollo was.

You always hear that you have way more computer power in your phone than the Apollo module had, well Orion has the power of… 2 phones. Progress.

I’m kidding, I’m sure it has far more than that but the point is the navigation, guidance, and communications systems are top of the line tech and far beyond what Apollo had.

It also has a brand new toilet on board. Because enter joke here.

There’s also a bunch of storage behind the seats and in the event of a solar storm, there is extra shielding back there so they can take shelter.

It’s being built by Lockheed Martin, so just like Boeing has the Starliner, Lockheed has Orion. And it’s designed to support the crew for up to 21 days without docking.
And it comes with this massive launch abort system that covers the entire capsule and jettisons away after it leaves the atmosphere, with four larger motors in cast they need to abort closer to the pad.

Assuming they’ll still be allowed to abort in Florida.

European Service Module

Attached to Orion is the European Service Module, which you could compare that to the service module on Apollo except this is obviously being built by the European Space Agency.

This thing is loaded with engines, 33 engines total including the main engine which will push it out to lunar orbit, auxiliary thrusters, and reaction control thrusters.

All of which will make this a very stable, precise vehicle. Which is what you want from something that will be docking a lot.

This will carry the power and propulsion systems and “consumables” like air and water for the crew.

One other thing it will have that the Apollo service module didn’t is solar panels.

The ESM will have four solar array wings that NASA says will generate enough power to run two 3-bedroom houses.

Together, this is the system that will ferry astronauts back and forth from low Earth orbit to Lunar orbit.
If you recall in my video on the Space Task Group plans for NASA post-Apollo, you might recall they advocated for something like this, basically a ferry that can move people and cargo back and forth between space stations and lunar bases.

Except theirs was based on the nuclear NERVA engine, which is featured in For All Mankind.

NARRATOR:
How to make a Space Launch System. Start with a Space Transportation System.
Remove the Orbiter. Detatch the engines and apply them to the bottom of the external fuel tank. Throw in one more engine just for good measure.
Then, top the fuel tank with a second Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage (ICPS), and stack the Orion Capsule and European Service Module, or any moon-bound payload on top of that.
And presto!
Congratulations. You’ve made a SLUSS!

Easy peasy!
Except actually difficult pifficult.

SLS looks like a cross between a Saturn V and the Space Shuttle, which seems like it would simplify everything, because we’ve done all that before, but this is many ways an entirely new rocket, which is why it’s been in development since 2011. It’s been 11 years and it’s just now ready to go up.

And there have been delays this year too. It was supposed to launch in June but back in April they rolled it out on the launchpad for a wet dress rehearsal and found a faulty helium valve that needed to be replaced.

And look, it would be very easy to start getting ranty right now about the entirety of the SLS program, it definitely has its issues and there’s plenty of content out there for that. I will skip that here, just check out the comments if you really want to go down that road. Because it’s already started.

But in an attempt to be more positive, I’ll just say that’s what testing is for. That’s the point of wet dress rehearsals, to find the issues and take care of them. And that’s what they’re doing.

To be fair this is not a small rocket, in fact, it is currently the biggest, most powerful rocket in the world.
It tops out at 322 feet tall on the landing pad, which is just a little bit taller than the Statue of Liberty. Slightly shorter than a Saturn V, but at 8.8 million pounds of thrust, it’s 15% more powerful. And it’ll carry five tons more cargo than the Space Shuttle. Not too shabby.
These are powered by those four Shuttle proven RS-25 engines and those two magnificent solid rocket boosters that I just can’t wait to see back in action.

ARTEMIS 1

Luckily you and I both won’t have to wait too long to see it because as of this recording, Artemis 1 is scheduled to launch on August 29th. T-0 is set for 8:33am from Pad 39-B at Kennedy Space Center, with extra opportunities on Sept. 2nd and 5th.

Artemis 1, also called Exploration Mission 1 or EM-1 will be an uncrewed test of the SLS, Orion and… well, everything. The plan is to go into Earth’s orbit, then fire a translunar injection burn out toward the moon. Once at the moon, it will do a little loop-de-loop that will actually go further out into space than any human-rated vehicle has ever gone (280,000 miles) before coming back to Earth.

Once back in Earth’s orbit, the Orion capsule will separate from the service module and re-enter the atmosphere, splashing down in the ocean.

Altogether the Artemis I Mission will last about 3 weeks and will test all the new propulsion, guidance and communications systems.

Along the way, Orion will drop off 13 cube sats that will run a variety of deep space experiments including one where they test the effect of deep space radiation on yeast and scanning the moon’s surface for water ice and other resources.

But maybe one of the most important tests for Artemis I is just seeing if we can do this again. This is the first time a human-rated craft has visited the moon in 50 years. 49 years and 9 months, specifically.

Artemis is a massive program involving 3,200 suppliers and contractors from every state in the country, including Aerojet Rocketdyne, Boeing, Jacobs, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman – because that’s how these things get funded. And yes, there’s plenty of debate around whether this model still makes any sense.

ARTEMIS II

Artemis II is basically the Apollo 8 moment of the Artemis program. It’ll do basically the same thing as Artemis 1 without the moon loop de loop but with four astronauts on board.

And just like Apollo 8, they will have the experience of coming around the moon and seeing the Earth in its entirety in the distance. They’ll be the first human beings to see that in 50 years.

And maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll livestream that moment so we can all experience it with them, which is something we’ve never been able to do before.

I feel like I’m saying that a lot but I think a lot of people kinda blow off Artemis because we’ve already been to the moon before, but there are a LOT of firsts taking place in this program. And I think that’s worth mentioning.

Artemis II is scheduled to launch in 2024 from a slightly evolved SLS rocket that will be able to lift 45 metric tons, so it’ll be bigger and badder than before.

It’ll be a 10 day mission during which the crew will test out all the systems including system performance, crew interfaces, guidance and navigation systems, and that fancy new toilet I talked about.

They will also do something different from Apollo missions in that they will rely on the Deep Space Network to communicate as opposed to the Earth satellite networks, so they will be testing that as well.
The DSN consists of three facilities spaced equidistant from each other – approximately 120 degrees apart in longitude – around the world. And this is how NASA keeps track of solar system probes, Mars rovers, the Voyagers, that kind of thing.

But I think this it’s interesting that they’ll be using this network designed for deep space missions for a human flight. I think this is the first time they’ve ever done that, which is really cool.

You could imagine someday school children on Mars will be learning about the first time humans communicated over the Deep Space Network that they use every day.

And the names of those astronauts will be… We don’t know yet. They haven’t been picked, but there have been 18 astronauts chosen for the Artemis team. It’s a diverse group of equal parts men and women, reflecting the agency’s goal of putting the first woman and person of color on the moon.

So assuming Artemis II goes off without a hitch, now it’s time to land. There’s just one thing to do first.

I talked in the last video about the Lunar Gateway, and it’s funky rectilinear halo orbit, well the first couple of modules are scheduled to go up in November of 2024 on a Falcon Heavy, so maybe right after Artemis II.

Another module called I-HAB will be added later (2026), more on that in a minute.

Because once that’s ready to go, it’s time to put some boots on the regolith. Of course… you need something to get you to that regolith… So… I guess we need to talk about the Human Landing System.

HUMAN LANDING SYSTEM

It’s a very simple nomenclature, this Artemis program. The Space Launch System launches people into space. The Human Landing System… lands humans.

So again… this could be and has been its own video a million times over, feel free to browse around, there are a million hot takes out there, but the short version is… it’s a lunar version of the SpaceX Starship.
NASA opened up the Human Landing System to private industry, and it came down to three proposals, SpaceX with the Starship variant, a company called Dynetics, and Blue Origin’s National Team, which included Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper.

And in April of 2021, to pretty much everybody’ shock, NASA chose SpaceX. And then Blue Origin sued NASA and it got ugly and stupid.

But I say shock because… I mean look at this thing.

But maybe not a shock because it’s the only option that was fully reusable. All the others left a landing stage behind when they ascend like the Apollo lander, and you can only do that so many times before the landing stages start to pile up.

We haven’t seen any official renderings of the interior but we do know that the crew space will be WAY up at the top.
Yeah the plan seems to be that they’re going to engineer a crane like this to get crew and cargo down to the ground, which sounds insane to me, especially considering how abrasive lunar dust is. I have honest concerns about the longevity of this solution.

You know another reason NASA may have chosen this is because SpaceX has already shown they can do human rated flight with the Crew Dragon. In fact, this kinda looks like a hybrid of the Starship and Crew Dragon.

They’ve also shown that they can land rockets pretty well. So yeah, maybe not so shocking.

Now it should be mentioned, the choice NASA made was which company they were going to contract to build this thing, so they are helping to fund the Starship Lander. The other two companies can still revise their plans and then lobby NASA to use their lander, which they seem to be doing.

But yeah, it’s a huge lander, and it looks especially insane next to the Gateway. I mean… Why even have it?
But this version of Starship is not designed to ever come back to Earth so there’s no heat shielding on it, it is a deep space vessel.

And we don’t know exactly when they’ll have it done but it’d better be by 2025 because that, at long last, is when we land on the moon again, on Artemis III.

ARTEMIS III

So if Artemis II is this generation’s Apollo 8, Artemis III would be Apollo 11. The math checks out.

So we’re doing in 3 steps what Apollo took 11 steps to do. That’s progress.
Artemis III will take off on the SLS with a crew of four, and after a few orbits will head out to the moon where the Gateway and Lander will be waiting for them. They’ll dock Orion with the Gateway and do a few orbits before 2 of the astronauts move over into the Lunar Lander, and then on the next swing by the moon, they drop down to the surface and land.

These two astronauts will spend about a week on the moon, performing experiments and testing out all the systems while looking for water ice in nearby craters. All the while the other two will be doing the same from orbit in the Gateway.

So like the command module pilot from Apollo except they get to have a buddy.

Anyway, after the mission objectives are complete, the lander will launch back up to dock with Gateway, the crew will transfer cargo and themselves back into Orion, and then head back to Earth for a splashdown.

Along the way, I’m sure that we are going to see some great live events from the Moon which is wild to think about.

The first moon landing was shown in grainy detail on a black and white CRTV to streaming 4k on Twitch.

So Artemis III will be a technology demonstration and celebration of American ingenuity. A very big deal will be made for this.

But just like Apollo 11 wasn’t the end of the Apollo program, Artemis III is just the beginning for Artemis.

ARTEMIS IV

Next up will be Artemis IV, which actually won’t land on the moon, it will be a crewed mission to deliver the I-HAB module to the Gateway and spend some time on that, testing out human habitation in deep space.

It will also go up on a bigger, beefier SLS Block 1B that will replace the ICPS second stage with a larger Exploration Upper Stage.

The mission objectives are still being solidified but this is currently scheduled for launch in 2027, followed by Artemis V in 2028.

ARTEMIS V

Artemis V will go back to the surface of the moon, and it’ll be a similar flight profile as Artemis III, with two astronauts going down to the surface and two stay up in the Gateway.

They are bringing with them another module for the Gateway called the ESPIRIT module and the advanced Canadarm.

They’ll also be bringing a new unpressurized moon rover to cover more ground on the moon and will likely spend more time than Artemis III.

AND THEN…

So that brings us to 2028 – assuming things stick to plan – and we will have landed on the moon twice with a total of 4 astronauts. And this… is all that’s been funded.  Things get kinda murky after this.

If you go to the Wikipedia page, there are proposed missions going up through Artemis X roughly in 2032, but right now NASA has only been funded through Artemis V. So what does that mean for the future of the Artemis Program?

The answer depends on a lot of things, not least of which what the economic and political landscape looks like in 8 years, both of which are super stable these days.

Also as many are already saying in the comments, if SpaceX really nails the Starship platform, I think you can say goodbye to the SLS, it’s just a no-brainer.

Though I’ve said it once and I’ll keep saying it, I think it’ll be a very long time before Starship is human rated, especially for landing.

Also who knows, the private space industry is changing super fast, maybe another company steps up and provides a different more affordable solution

A lot of the future of Artemis also relies on whether or not they’re successful at finding water ice in those craters. After all that’s kind-of the whole point is to find resources that can sustain a long-term base on the moon and exploration beyond.

And I have to say as I was researching this, I was kinda surprised how much the “beyond” part gets hyped in NASA’s Artemis discussions. They really do see it as the first step to Mars.
I mean, I found this page where they kinda explain the Artemis logo and what all the elements mean and they reference the words “Mars” and “Beyond” almost as much as they do the moon. Even that red swoosh that completes the letter A is colored red – for Mars.

NASA has totally framed Artemis as the just the first step toward human exploration of the solar system. And I’m not gonna lie… I like it.

I feel like so much press has been given to Elon and his Mars ambitions, we don’t hear as much about the fact that NASA’s got very similar ambitions, just through a moon infrastructure.

There are still some hurdles, one worth mentioning is the next generation moon suits.

I’ll point you to a video from Real Engineering that breaks it down really well but the original Apollo suits really didn’t hold up very well against the lunar regolith. And the longest any of them were on the moon was 22 hours on Apollo 17.

With no water or wind to break it down, lunar dust is basically a bunch of microscopic shards of glass. And these new suits need to hold up to that for years at a time.

Not to mention provide more freedom of movement and longer time for moonwalks that will be needed for the construction and maintenance of a moon base.

And yeah, there have been some major stumbles on the new suits, some are concerned it’s going to throw the schedule way out of whack.

So I do expect delays, there will be some bumps in the road. But I have a reason to believe NASA will pull it off.

Two words. Pissing. Contest.

China’s space program has been making huge progress with their Tiangong space station and Chang’e lunar program.

So far they’ve launched 7 successful missions to the moon, including orbiters, landers, and rovers and have shown interest in landing humans there and establishing a habitable base on the South Pole.

In fact, in 2021, they announced a partnership with Russia to build a moon base they’re calling the International Lunar Research Station.

So yeah… they see an opportunity to position themselves as the true superpower in the world. To say that sure the US was able to do great things 50 years ago but now we’ve got the advantage. And the moon is the ultimate high ground.

And I don’t see the US just letting that happen. That’s the kind of thing that makes dollars flow toward NASA.

So my bet is, even though Artemis is only funded through the Artemis 5 mission, we’ll see more funding in the future as that rivalry heats up. It’s starting to look like Artemis could be fueled by the same forces that fueled Apollo.

And if that is the case, what happens next? What is this “beyond” NASA keeps referring to with Artemis? That’s the subject of the next video in this series.

When New England Had A Vampire Problem

Vampires have been a part of folklore for hundreds of years, but in parts of New England in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were a very real. Let’s talk about the New England Vampire Panic.

TRANSCRIPT:

This is Salem Massachusetts, which famously got caught up in a witch craze in 1692 that led to the executions of 19 people. It was a society gone mad, overcome by fear and superstition. And it’s not the last time this happened.This is Salem Massachusetts, which famously got caught up in a witch craze in 1692 that led to the executions of 19 people. It was a society gone mad, overcome by fear and superstition. And it’s not the last time this happened.
In fact, 200 years later in 1892, you get the story of Mercy Brown.

Mercy Brown was the unassuming daughter of George Brown, a Rhode Island farmer whose life had just been through a series of tragedies.
Tuberculosis had been ravaging the area, they called it “consumption” at the time and in this outbreak George lost his wife Mary, his daughter, Mary Olive Brown, and in the same year Mercy Brown herself died of the illness.
And even as he was burying Mercy, his son Edwin became sick.
But if Mercy’s life had been unassuming, her death would be nothing of the sort.
Because two months later, a mob of people from the town of Exeter dug up Mercy’s body, pulled out her heart and set it on fire.
Mercy unfortunately got caught up in a Salem Witch style mass hysteria event that took place in New England in the late 1800s. Only they didn’t think Mercy was a witch… They thought she was a vampire.

Just to put that time period into perspective, this was the 1890s, the Gilded Age, we had lightbulbs and telephones, transatlantic steamships… Mercedes had its first car on the road at this point.
We even had the germ theory of medicine, though it was still in its early days and hadn’t been universally adopted. In a lot of areas the old folk remedies and superstitions held sway.
And rural New England was one of those places.

By the way, Mercy Brown was not an isolated event, another story involves Rachel Harris of Manchester, Vermont.
This was about 100 years earlier in 1790, but Rachel died from tuberculosis. Her husband then married her stepsister, Hulda, who also started to show signs of TB.
And yeah, the local townspeople thought that it was Rachel’s fault. That she was escaping her grave at night and enacting revenge on her stepsister.
So they exhumed Rachel’s corpse in February 1793. They removed her heart, liver, and lungs and burned them on a blacksmith’s forge.

This was a big event by the way, 500 people showed up to take part in this. In fairness, there probably wasn’t a whole lot else to do in 1793 Vermont.
Regardless, despite their valiant efforts, it didn’t stop Hulda from dying in September of that year. 
So, this was a real thing, people were really convinced that vampires existed and preyed on the living.
But these aren’t exactly the vampires we think of today. Today we’ve seen vampires imagined in just about every way possible, from Count Dracula, to Edward Cullen from Twilight, and Grandpa Munster from The Munsters.

But all vampires in fiction have a few core characteristics in common:

  • They drink human blood
  • They can turn their victims into vampires
  • They prey on their victims at night because the sun kills them
  • They have hypnotic powers
  • And they can’t see their images in mirrors and have no shadows.

Of course a lot of what we now think of as a vampire was first popularized by Bram Stoker when he wrote Dracula in 1897.

He was the first person to take all these folk stories about vampires and codify them in a way.
It’s thought that he named the character Dracula after Vlad III, who ruled an area of modern day Romania called Wallachia from 1456-1462.
His father was Vlad the second, who went by Vlad Dracul, meaning Vlad the Dragon. So Vlad the third was called Dracula.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_Impaler

He was also called Vlad the Impaler, because he got a kick out of impaling his enemies on wooden stakes.
And it was also said he enjoyed dining among his dying victims and would dip his bread in their blood. Which is horrifying… And really unsanitary.
Another historical figure that may have inspired Bram Stoker is a Hungarian countess named Elizabeth Báthory.

If you’ve never heard of Elizabeth Báthory, it’s probably because she KILLED EVERYONE WHO MET HER.
It’s rumored that she tortured and murdered more than 600 young women during the 16th and 17th centuries. And she would even bathe in the victim’s blood.
It should be noted that these accusations may have been politically motivated and completely untrue, but they tied into beliefs that people already had about monsters drinking the blood of others.

These stories go back to the middle ages as plagues began to spread throughout Europe. People didn’t know what was going on, and often turned to folk takes and the supernatural to explain it.
For example, some of the victims of the plague had mouth lesions that bled, and some thought that their mouths were bloody because they were drinking other people’s blood.

The point is there are a few diseases that historians think were related to vampire stories.
The first one isRabies
In 1998, neurologist Juan Gomez-Alonso published a paper in Neurology that argued the symptoms of rabies might explain vampire myths. https://n.neurology.org/content/51/3/856
Rabies lyssavirus causes rabies in animals. It’s transmitted through direct contact with saliva or brain/nervous tissue from an infected animal.
Rabies infects the central nervous system. Once it reaches the brain, it can cause things like agitation, anxiety, confusion, and hallucinations before killing the victim.

Yeah, have you ever really looked into rabies? Rabies SUCKS.
People with rabies… go rabid. They bite and scratch and claw at people like a wild animal.
Seeing a person do that might put some ideas in your head.
The article also mentions that people who die from rabies often die from suffocation or cardiorespiratory arrest.
This can make the blood less likely to coagulate and slow the decomposition, which to some people might look like the dead person is more undead than dead.
He also pointed out correlations in rabies outbreaks and the birth of vampire tales in the 1720s in Eastern Europe.

In fact, one physician in 1733 got closer than he thought when he described vampirism as, “a contagious illness more or less of the same nature as that which comes from the bite of a rabid dog.”

But another contender is Porphyria
So, rabies may explain the biting and scratching parts of vampire lore, but other characteristics could be explained by a blood condition called porphyria.
For people with porphyria, their bodies don’t make heme, which is an essential part of hemoglobin, that’s what carries oxygen in our blood.
There are two, broad types of porphyria:- Acute porphyrias which affect the nervous system- Cutaneous porphyrias that affect the skin

The most common type of acute porphyria is acute intermittent porphyria, which causes sudden and painful attacks.
These attacks may include seizures, breathing problems, and red or brown urine. (which one might expect one’s urine to look like if one were drinking a lot of blood)
And these attacks are often set off by triggers, including stress, medications, and sunlight.

Similarly the skin porphyria is set off by sunlight and can cause blisters or excessive hair growth
Porphyria cutanea tarda (PET) is the most common form of cutaneous porphyrias. It is characterized by extreme sensitivity to sunlight.
If exposed to sunlight, people with PET might experience skin blisters, excessive hair growth, and red or brown urine.

So… They’re burned by sunlight, so they only come out at night, and they have red pee. Like they’ve guzzled so much blood, their urine is red.
And actually one of the treatments for porphyria was to drink animal blood.
People have even speculated that repeated porphyria attacks may cause facial disfigurement and gums to recede, leading to the teeth having a “fanged” look.
Oh, and believe it or not, garlic has a high sulfur content, and thus can make it a potential trigger for a porphyria attack.
So there’s a lot of interesting connections there, and I definitely could see people mistaking that disease for vampirism, but I don’t think that’s where it all came from.
Porphyria is a very rare disease so it’s unlikely that all the vampire myths came from the very few people walking around with that. However, seeing someone like that back in the day may have reinforced any belief they had.

But the disease that’s most associated with vampires is Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis is especially associated with the New England vampire beliefs in the 18th and 19th centuries.
A bacteria called Mycobacterium tuberculosis causes TB, which destroys lung tissue and can be fatal if not treated properly.
People who experience untreated TB lose weight, become weak, have fevers, and can cough up blood.
It basically makes a person look like blood is being slowly drained out of their bodies, like they wake up every morning a little bit paler than the day before. Like something it taking it from them in the middle of the night.
TB can also spread from person to person through the air, but most people back then didn’t know how that worked.

So, it’s no wonder they may have thought a supernatural creature was sucking the life out of those dying from TB. And usually that creature was someone who had recently died.
By the way, while we’re at it, there are other supernatural myths that may have a disease to thank.

Werewolves

Werewolves may have also been inspired by rabies for all the reasons I listed before, there’s also a a condition called lycanthropy that makes people hallucinate that they are a four-legged animal.
There is also hypertrichosis, which in some types causes hair to grow all over a person’s body, giving them a little Teen Wolf flavor.

Witches

Witches are sometimes associated with ergot poisoning, which is a wheat fungus that can cause manic episodes and hallucinations.
But in the case of the vampire craze in 18th and 19th century New England… It was TB.
A disease that so appears to consume the body that they actually called it Consumption. It’s easy to see why one might suspect it’s something else consuming the body. Maybe someone who had just died. Someone like Mercy Brown.

As tuberculosis ravaged nearby Exeter, the townspeople began to suspect things, maybe out of desperation. They started looking around for patterns.
And while everybody had suffered in this outbreak, maybe none more so than George Brown, who had lost is wife, his two daughters, and now his only son was sick as well.
I can only imagine that when some of the townspeople came to visit, shovels in hand, insisting on digging up his family, George was just too exhausted to object.
They dug up his wife Mary and older daughter Mary-Olive, but they had deteriorated to the point it wasn’t possibly them. But Mercy, who had only been in the ground for 2 months in the winter… looked remarkably fresh. In fact, her hair and nails seem to have grown a little and blood still pooled in her body.

So they did the thing the folk tales say to do… they took out her heart, burned it and mixed the ashes into a potion for Edwin to drink. This would hopefully cure him of the vampire curse.
It didn’t. He died a few months later.
The Mercy Brown story did make some headlines and in fact, clippings of these articles were found in Bram Stoker’s files after he died, so he did know about it and may have even been inspired by https://newengland.com/today/living/new-england-history/vampire-mercy-brown-rhode-island/
The vampire panics started to die down in the 20th century when medical knowledge improved and tuberculosis became treatable with antibiotics. In fact Mercy Brown was one of the very last “confirmed” vampires in America.

The vampire panics started to die down in the 20th century when medical knowledge improved and tuberculosis became treatable with antibiotics. In fact Mercy Brown was one of the very last “confirmed” vampires in America.  

Today, her gravesite is a tourist attraction. Visitors to her grave may see gifts left behind, like jewelry and flowers.
Or in one case, a note that just said, “You go, girl.”

Is Monkeypox A Real Problem Or Just Clickbait?

The headlines have been breathlessly warning of a new outbreak of the Monkeypox virus, and the WHO just declared it an international emergency. Are we really on the verge of yet another pandemic? Is monkeypox something you should be worried about? Or is it just clickbait? Let’s take a look.

TRANSCRIPT:

A pox upon ye.

That’s right everyone, COVID-19 is so last season, the new hotness on the plague scene is Monkeypox.
So do you want to be on-trend with the latest and greatest disease outbreak in town, then stick around because we’ve got the ins and outs on Really? Another pandemic? Really?

Here We Go Again

Well, we had a good run. There were a few weeks there where it looked like Covid was finally starting to wane, or at least become manageable. Things started feeling kinda normal again. (a beat) I remember normal.
But no… We can’t have that can we?

Not only are there new variants, Covid cases are on the rise again, but now we got a whole new pandemic. Or do we?
Yeah, Monkeypox has been all over the news lately but is it really a concern, or is this just a new thing the news shows are using to get you to stick around for the next commercial break?
Cynicism aside, Monkeypox does exist. And it’s been popping up all over the place so let’s take a look and see if we can get to the bottom of this.

Outbreak 2022

As of this recording, there are around 15,300 cases of monkeypox around the world. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot after what we’ve just been through with Covid but there’s a few things to keep in mind here.

First of all, that number is rising quickly. To give you an idea of how quickly, when my writer, Ryan, researched this video, his script said 5300 cases. So it’s 3 times higher now than it was when he submitted this script a couple weeks ago.
And it’s probably up quite a bit by the time you see this. I’ll put a link below that you can click to see where things are right now.

The other thing that’s notable is this map. Here you can see the most cases are in the US and Europe but you see these blue dots down here in Africa? That’s where Monkeypox has historically been seen. All this orange… That’s never really been seen before.

In fact, out of the 71 countries with monkeypox cases right now, 65 of them are seeing cases for the first time ever. So… yeah, this is a thing.
As for what’s happening in the US, again, at the time of recording this, New York has the most cases at 581, followed by California at 365, and then Illinois, Florida, basically the urban centers of the US.
The total number in the US is 2,323, but keep in mind that’s up from 19 cases at the beginning of June.
And yeah, I think it’s safe to say that we’re all a little shellshocked from Covid-19, because we all remember when we were all like, “oh, it’s just a few cases in Washington” and then suddenly there were thousands and then… well. Yeah. Here we are.

Monkeypox in Africa

Now I mentioned earlier those countries in Africa where monkeypox is normally found, the Democratic Republic of Congo has by far the most cases, with 1356 reported between January 1st and May 22, 2022.  Monkeypox had killed more than 70 people in Africa this year. According to the sources we found.

Why Monkeypox?

Now the fact that it’s been historically seen in Africa and it’s called monkeypox, you probably put 2 and 2 together and assume it got its name because there are monkeys in Africa and it jumped from monkeys to humans there. You would be wrong.
It actually came from Denmark.
It was first seen in monkeys kept at Denmark’s Statens Serum Institute, in 1958. It was first seen in humans 12 years later.https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2022-DON388

Monkeypox is a type of orthopoxvirus, this is the same genus that includes cowpox, camelpox, and skunkpox. Didn’t know skunkpox was a thing did you?
It doesn’t include chickenpox, though, that’s a different type of virus but it does include – yikes – smallpox.

And the symptoms are similar to that of smallpox, including fever, exhaustion, headaches and swollen lymphnodes, and a rash of bumps that look like blisters or pimples.
Thankfully, what they don’t share is mortality rate. Before it was eradicated, smallpox had a mortality rate of 30%.  Monkeypox has a 1–10% mortality rate.

The Variants

Why “1-10%”? Because, just like coronavirus, there are a couple of variants. The variant from Central Africa is severe, the one from West Africa less so.
And it’s the milder variant that’s making its way around the world right now, so it’s unlikely monkeypox will become a deadly pandemic like COVID-19.
Unless, of course, it mutates.

Monkeypox, or MPV uses DNA to encode its genes. And that’s good because DNA is more stable and less prone to mutation than RNA viruses like say influenza and COVID-19.
But MPV has mutated in the past. And not for the better. That deadly version I talked about earlier was a mutation of the milder version.
And the more a virus spreads, the more chances it has to mutate. In fact a recent study suggests the exported variant has experienced “accelerated evolution”.

They studied samples collected in 2022 and compared them to samples from 2018 and 2019 and found about fifty DNA changes
hat’s at least six times the mutations researchers expected to find.  These mutations don’t appear to have made monkeypox deadlier.  But they may have made it more transmissible, in an unexpected way.

Past Outbreaks

In 2003, we saw monkeypox for the first time in the US and it was traced to pet prairie dogs. Because apparently that’s a thing.
Pet prairie dogs that were housed near pet exotic African rodents. Which gave it to the prairie dogs, which bit their owners and gave it to their owners. Just… so many bad decisions there.

You know, I used to think exotic pets were really cool, I liked the idea of having a pet that nobody else had, thought that made me interesting… I’m not sure I’m a fan anymore.
It seems like a lot of these pandemics and outbreaks are zoonotic viruses that jump from animals to people, often exotic animals of some kind.
It just seems like a vector that triggers a lot of other vectors, if that makes any sense.
So I get it, prairie dogs are cute but no… Just… no…

In fact, one of the fears about monkeypox being a zoonotic virus is that this can become a cycle of zoonotic transmission. We got it from prairie dogs, maybe it could jump to our cats and then bounce back to us, each time mutating it a little more. 
One interesting thing about this current outbreak is that back when it was only in Africa, cases were more common in rural areas, amongst hunters. But in this outbreak, you see it mostly in urban areas.
And that’s because though it’s not a sexually transmitted disease, it has mostly been spread through knocking the boots.

Is Monkeypox an STD?

This is actually where things do get a little prickly because it has been prevalent in gay communities, which of course some people have used to smear LGBT people.
Which outside of being gross and horrible is also dangerous because people generally don’t get tested or treated for stigmatized diseases, which only serves to spread it further.
Needs to be said again, just because it’s being spread by sexual contact does not make it a sexually transmitted disease.

And being called a “gay disease” brings up parallels to the early days of the AIDS crisis in the 80s.
Stigmatizing and moralizing it  led to it not being taken seriously and let it take a foothold that it otherwise might not have.

Official Status

And there are signs that that might be happening again. On June 25th, the WHO declined to declare monkeypox a Public Health Emergency of International Concern.
Setting aside the fact that P-H-E-I-C, pronounced FAKE, is the worst acronym ever, the decision is controversial.
There are concerns that lack of a PHEIC will discourage less-affected countries from fighting monkeypox now, instead of later.  Some may hoard vaccines.  Or they may simply wait so long, their outbreaks become critical, and they won’t have resources to help their neighbors.

Now, Monkeypox is not HIV. Not even close. But the best way to keep it that way is to prevent it from spreading and mutating.

Vaccines

One of the best ways to do that is with a vaccine. And we have one, a company called Bavarian Nordic makes it, and it’s approved for Monkeypox, but only like a million doses have ever been made.
Apparently people have tested using smallpox vaccinations, since they’re similar types of virus and they’ve been effective, but can be dangerous for people with compromised immune systems.

Fearmongering

So, is monkeypox the next Covid? Not likely, not in its current state. But that doesn’t mean it’s harmless.
Maybe the bigger question is, is this our future?  Are we doomed to bounce from one pandemic to another?  Will we ever be able to shake somebody’s hand without a creepy-crawly feeling again?

Pandemic History

The fact is, we evolved as isolated tribes of people who are now attempting to be a global species. And while there’s a lot of good that comes from our cultures mixing together, the downside is that yeah, our bugs get around.
In the past, this could lead to entire civilizations being wiped out – as we saw happen to the indigenous Americans.

Now all our cultures are colliding all the time. And if the grand story of humans is that we started as fragmented and isolated tribes that eventually became a global species, we’re in those awkward pre-teen years. The years when we haven’t fully stirred but we did just get thrown in the pot.
We’ve mixed enough to share our bugs but not enough to become immune to them.
Throw on top of that the encroaching of our habitats into nature, and the potential for a zoonotic virus to spillover goes through the roof as well.

Maybe we eventually get immune to all of them. Maybe new ones never stop coming and we’ll always be fighting something off. That’s probably a lot more likely.
The real story of the world is one of countless cells, all vying for supremacy. We’re just the only clumps of cells that became aware enough to know what’s going on.
Maybe that’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it always will be. Just whack-a-mole forever. Luckily most of them, like Monkeypox, are survivable. So maybe we should consider ourselves lucky.

So is Monkeypox something to be concerned about? Or is it just an overhyped clickbait? It’s a little bit of both.
Of course media companies are going to hype this to its clickiest level to get as many eyeballs as possible. Of course this is going to become pandemic porn.
And of course we’re all way more on edge about outbreaks of disease after what we’ve all been through. Or, the opposite, maybe crisis fatigue takes over and we just stop paying attention to it.
The best thing you can do right now is just be aware of the outbreak and take basic precautions. Monkeypox is only transmissible through close skin-to-skin contact. So you don’t have to worry about breathing it in. That’s good.

The CDC recommends avoiding close skin-to-skin contact with anybody that might have a rash that looks like blisters or bumps, don’t eat after or use utensils from someone who has monkeypox or looks like they might, don’t handle clothes or bedding used by anybody with monkeypox, and to wash your hands often with soap and sanitizer if you’ve come into contact with anybody with monkeypox.

And if you do have monkeypox, obviously they want you to isolate yourself until “all lesions have resolved, the scabs have fallen off, and a fresh layer of intact skin has formed.”
So if you’re scabby, stay inside. And if you meet someone who’s scabby, maybe knock somebody else’s boots.
Basically when it all comes down to it, some awareness and basic prevention is all that’s required here, but we can’t freak out over every outbreak that happens because well… we’re going to be seeing more of these.

 

The Somerton Man FINALLY Has A Name

This is a re-upload of my previous Somerton Man video with new information that has just broken in the case. Professor Derek Abbott announced that he and Colleen Fitzpatrick (I mistakenly call her “Fitzgerald” an embarrassing number of times in this video) have found the identity of the Somerton Man, an unidentified man found dead on an Australian beach in 1948.

TRANSCRIPT:

On Tuesday of this week, July 26th, headlines around the world declared that the Somerton Man, the unidentified man found dead on an Australian beach in 1948, had finally been identified through DNA evidence.

And my inbox exploded; I literally got more links sent my way than I could count. And thank you to everyone who reached out and asked me to revisit this.

So here’s the deal – I was thinking of reuploading that video anyway because guess what… It got demonetized.

Yeah, YouTube’s been pretty bad about that lately.

Apparently one image we used of the body on the beach was a bridge too far for YouTube, the irony is that it wasn’t even a real photo, it was a photoshopped recreation, but anyway, I was thinking about taking that photo out and reuploading it, and now there’s new information, and a reason to do a new video.

So this video is an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, I’m going to include the original video in its entirety – with the exception of that one image – and then add the new information to the end of it.

So if you’ve already seen my Somerton Man video and just want to hear the new stuff, feel free to jump ahead, it won’t hurt my feelings, I’ll put time stamps so you can find it on the timeline here, or you can go to here… Just skip over to here… I don’t know as I’m recording this where here  is so…

But if you have the time I would encourage you to watch the original because I’ve always been proud of this video, it’s a real roller-coaster of a story, and I do think it provides some interesting context to the new info at the end.

So, without further ado, let’s roll that title sequence again and pick up where we left off.
Which brings us to the next darn thing.

All right, so as I said at the beginning, on Tuesday the 26th, Derek Abbott announced that they have an identity for the Somerton Man, and the name is… drum roll please…  Actually, we’re talking about a dead man, a drum roll doesn’t feel right – turn it off.  His name was Carl Webb.

Actually his name was Carl but he went by Charles, thus affirming that he’s Australian.

He was born in 1905 outside of Melbourne, actually, the youngest of 6 kids, and not much is known about his early life but he grew up to be an electrical engineer and instrument maker, and would have been 43 when he died, assuming he was the Somerton Man.

He married a woman named Dorothy Robinson, who went by “Doff” Webb – because Australia – and she filed for divorce from him in 1947, claiming he had disappeared. And in fact there are no public records of him after this point, including no death certificate.

The next record they could find of Dorothy was in 1951, showing that she lived in Bute, South Australia, which is about 144km from Adelaide.

So it’s possible that he was in Adelaide trying to track her down. But that is just speculation.

There is one other thing that ties him to the Somerton Man case, as I mentioned the name T. Keane that was found on some of the Somerton Man’s clothes, apparently Carl Webb had a brother in law named Thomas Keane, and those clothes could have just been hand me downs.

But, before we go too far, you’re probably wondering how they landed on Carl Webb, well Professor Abbott was working with an American forensic genealogist named Colleen Fitzpatrick of the group Identifinders International – her name pops up a lot on these cases because she’s like a badass at this.

And they used the DNA that Abbott had extracted from the hair follicles from the plaster cast, specifically focusing on the halogroup H1a1a1a.

Yeah, it’s important to note, they did exhume the body, but as far as I could tell from the articles I’ve read, this has nothing to do with any tests that might have been done on the body, this is only from the hair follicles, so I’m going to assume further tests on the body will be needed to verify all this.

ANYWAY, they ran these DNA results against a genealogical database and found a living descendant that would have been Webb’s first cousin three times removed on his mother’s side.

From there they constructed a family tree that started with 4000 names, and were able to painstakingly trace it back and triangulate it to Webb, a man who disappeared right around that same time.

And though Fitzgerald and Abbott claim that they’re 99.999% sure Webb is their guy, this has yet to be corroborated by the South Australian police, and like I just said, this needs to match up with the tests being conducted on the body.

And by the way in case you’re wondering, so far they’ve been unable to find any photos of Carl Webb to verify his identity.

But like any good mystery, this kinda just raises a lot more questions.

Like what happened when he disappeared in 1947? Where was he for those 18 months between the divorce and his death? Why and how did he die? If he was from just one state over in Australia, why did nobody come forth to identify him when his picture was being shared all over the place for nearly 75 years? Why was Jo Thompson’s number in his book? What was that code all about?

This is where we enter speculation time.

As for the code, they claim to have evidence that Carl bet on horse races regularly, so they may have just been him keeping track of horses.

As for why he disappeared, you know, they found stencils in his bag and one theory was that he may have worked on a merchant ship because they often used those to label crates – maybe he had been out to sea during that time, maybe that explains why he had some items from America that weren’t available in Australia.

Perhaps he and “Doff” had had a falling out so he took a job like that to get some space, and then when he came back he found out she had divorced him and moved and he went to Adelaide to track her down.

As for Jo Thomson… Maybe Dorothy knew Jo, maybe they’d met in their past and she turned to Jo for help after her divorce, maybe moved in with her briefly. And in the course of tracking her down, he found Jo’s number and wrote it down in his book.

By the way, I didn’t mention this in the previous episode, a lot of people focus on how coincidental it is that there are multiple copies of this obscure book of ancient Persian poetry in this case, it was actually fairly popular back then, it had experienced a bit of a resurgence of interest in literary circles so it wasn’t that random.

To go deeper into speculation territory, and this is just the storyteller in me taking over… I can’t help but wonder if his relationship with Dorothy was toxic… Maybe even abusive. Maybe she took the first opportunity to divorce him and then moved away trying to escape him and turned to Jo for help.

Jo claimed to not know who the person was, but her reaction to his death mask suggested otherwise. Now that could have just been her being uncomfortable looking at a dead man’s face, but she did later tell her daughter she knew him but couldn’t say anything. Maybe she was protecting her friend.

And if he was someone unstable enough to pose a danger to her, then maybe he was also a danger to himself. And took himself out.

Like I said… more questions than answers.

Abbott and Fitzgerald haven’t found any living relatives that ever knew Carl Webb, and after all this time it’s unlikely they will but with 5 siblings, I find it hard to believe that there’s no photo of him out there somewhere. That’s what I want to see, I want to see a photo.

Maybe with this new exposure, someone in that lineage has an old photo album laying around that will come forward. That would be cool.

But what this new evidence does seem to prove is that Robin Thomson and his daughter Rachel Egan are definitely not descended from the Somerton Man. Which Abbott says is actually a relief to finally know the answer for her.

And I will say, you know, Derek Abbott had a theory that he had been working on for decades, and when the evidence pointed in a different direction, to his credit, he didn’t try to change the evidence to fit the theory, he changed his theory to fit the evidence. That’s admirable.

But the South Australian police have not made a statement on this yet – it’s only been a couple of days but as far as I know they’re still doing tests on the body, it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with. And like I said, there could still be some photo evidence out there that would help tie this up with a bow.

So, it’s not 100% over. There’s still many questions to answer and a lot of investigations taking place. It’ll be interesting to see what darn thing happens next.

And when it does, I’m sure I’ll get a million emails about it.

All right, thanks for watching – again – we’ll see if YouTube buries this one as well, but I’ll put links in the description to some articles so you can go check it out for yourself. And I’ll see you next time. Love you guys, take care.

 

Millions Could Starve Because Of The Ukraine War | Answers With Joe

The war in Ukraine is terrible for a lot of reasons, but maybe the biggest is the disruption the war is causing on food production around the world. Ukraine has often been called “The Breadbasket of Europe” because of its fertile soil that produces massive amounts of wheat, corn, and other grains. In this video, we take a look at why Ukraine’s geology makes them the breadbasket they are, and how the current war will impact the millions of people who rely on that food.

TRANSCRIPT:

This is the Ukrainian Flag. You’ve seen it in a lot of places lately. A very simple design, a blue field over a yellow field, the colors taken from the coat of arms of the city of Lviv. (le-view)

But it used to be quite different. It used to look like this…

Okay, maybe it’s not all that different, but this was the original national flag adopted by Ukraine in 1848 when they wanted independence from Austro-Hungarian rule. But in 1918, they flipped it to its current orientation. And they did it for one specific reason. Because they wanted it to emulate the blue sky over a field of yellow wheat.

This is how important wheat is to the economy of Ukraine, it’s literally emblazoned into their national symbol.

Ukraine has often been called the Breadbasket of Europe, and for good reason, they’re one of the largest agricultural producers in the world, exporting food to dozens of countries.

So the sight of Russian tanks driving through these wheat fields is more than just darkly symbolic. It’s potentially crippling a food producer that hundreds of millions of people rely on.

All of which begs several questions. Like, why is Ukraine such a huge food producer in the first place? Is this increasing the price of food and leading to food shortages? And how will this affect geopolitics around the world?

You know, the geopolitical thing shouldn’t have been the final question there, that’s not really what matters, what matters is are people going to starve because of this?

Priorities people.

So let’s start with a short primer on the war and where things are right now, obviously this is a fluid situation so it’s possible things have changed by the time this comes out.

Also, there’s mountains of videos on YouTube following this story so I’m just going to hit the highlights.

Let’s start in 2014.

That’s when Russian troops invaded and took control of Ukraine’s Crimea region.

Russian President Vladimir Putin used the pretense that he was protecting the rights of Russian citizens and speakers in Crimea and southeast Ukraine.

Two months later, pro-Russian separatists in the Donetsk (don-etsk)and Luhansk (loo-hansk) regions in eastern Ukraine held a referendum to declare independence from Ukraine.

This led to armed conflict between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian military, that eventually fizzled into an ongoing stalemate. That is, until February of this year.
That’s when the fighting escalated between separatists and Ukrainian forces in Donetsk and Luhansk.

Putin used that as an excuse to invade, claiming that genocide was taking place in the Dombas region, and Russian forces began building up along Ukraine’s border.

And the Russians finally launched their assault on Ukrainian territory on February 24.
This was followed by a series of sanctions from Western nations against Russia, with Russian oil and gas being restricted from European nations like Germany, and new European nations like Sweden and Finland showing interest in joining NATO.

It has not exactly been the rout that Putin was expecting and has turned into a long, protracted conflict.
More than 6.9 million people have fled the country, according to the UN refugee agency’s data portal.

The country’s estimated population before the war was 44 million, making it the seventh-largest country in Europe.

In terms of size, it’s the second-largest country in Europe at 603,550 square kilometers (233,031 square miles).

For comparison, it’s slightly smaller than Texas, half the size of South Africa, and two-and-a-half times the size of the United Kingdom.

And with all that land, as I was saying before, they export more than one-quarter of the world’s wheat.

Wheat, by the way, is the world’s second most-produced grain after corn, which they are also major exporters of.

Corn, also spring barley, potatoes, sugar beets, fruits, and sunflowers.

Ukraine is actually the world’s largest producer of sunflower oil, which goes into a lot of foods. Like, SO many foods.

Okay, so… why? Why is Ukraine such a prolific producer of produce? How did they become this basket of bread?

Well part of it is just the sheer size. I mentioned how big Ukraine is earlier, but they make good use of it – 71% of the land in Ukraine is used for agriculture.
Ukraine farmers grow wheat throughout the country, but central and south-central are the main production zones.

The other part is the climate. Ukraine’s climate is similar to Kansas in the US, but it’s a little drier and cooler during the summer and wetter during the winter.

So it’s like Kansas on steroids. Carry on my wayward son. Carry on.

But there is one more secret weapon in Ukraine’s agricultural arsenal… Chernozem. (a beat) What the hell is Chernozem?

Chernozem is basically a type of soil that is packed with insane amounts of nutrients.

It’s a Russian word that means “black earth” or “black soil.” Because it’s black.

And it’s black because it’s rich with humus (hue-mis). Not hummus (pic of hummus)… Humus (pic of humus)
Humus consists of complex molecules and organic acids that formed after plant parts decomposed and were digested by organisms in the soil.

Humic acids are great at retaining water and nutrients, like calcium, phosphorus, and zinc. And can help bridge dry seasons.

Soils that aren’t humus-rich lose nutrients when rain or irrigation water sinks them down deep below a plant’s roots. Humus keeps it in the topsoil.
There are several theories about how this soil was formed.

Swedish mineralogist Johan Wallerius introduced the first theory in 1761, saying that plant decomposition was responsible for chernozems.

Russian scientist Mikhail Vasil-yevich expanded on this theory in 1763 by adding that animal decomposition also helps form the black soil.

German botanist Peter Pallas offered another theory in the late 18th century in which he believed the soil was formed by reed marshes.

In the 19th century, British geologist Roderick Murchison suggested that Jurassic marine shales formed the soil.

Russian geologist Vasily Dokuchaev (duck-oo-cha-ev) published a book that same century that stated he believed various factors like a region’s climate, its topography, and its vegetation formed chernozems.
However it was formed, chernozem accounts for 1.8 percent of Earth’s total continental land area, and it’s focused in two large concentrations called the Chernozem Belts.
One belt is located in the Eurasian Steppe and includes several countries like Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine.

The other belt is in North America. It encompasses the Great Plains, stretching from Kansas to Manitoba, Canada.

Combined they add up to 2,299,998 square kilometers (888,034 square miles) of land, but Ukraine is just lousy with chernozem, it makes up 68 percent of the country’s soil.

So yeah, combine that with the favorable weather conditions and now you know why Ukraine is so rich in agricultural exports.

It’s a valuable resource. And it’s made them a target for a long time. Which brings us back to the current conflict.

In May, Ukraine reported a decrease in grain exports, while wheat prices reached record highs.

According to Ukraine’s agriculture ministry, its exports were down 64 percent that month compared to the same timeframe last year.

The U.N. estimates that about 20 million tons of harvested grain are stuck in Ukrainian ports due to Russian blockades.

Executive Director for the U.N. World Food Programme David Beasley didn’t parse words when he tweeted in May:

“Failure to open the ports in Ukraine will be a declaration of war on global food security, resulting in famine, destabilization of nations, as well as mass migration by necessity. It is absolutely essential that we allow these ports to open because this is not just about Ukraine; this is about the poorest of the poor around the world who are on the brink of starvation.”

To make it all worse, Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of shipping stolen grain from Crimea to destinations like Turkey.

And Ukraine Grain Association Chief Mykola Gorbachov has said that if exports are unable to resume from the country’s ports, the July harvest will be severely impacted.

He said Ukraine’s grain exports could be limited to 20 million tons next year, down from 44.7 million last year.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a warning in June during a Time 100 Gala, saying:

“We cannot export our wheat, corn, vegetable oil and other products that have played a stabilizing role in the global market. This means that, unfortunately, dozens of countries may face a physical shortage of food. Millions of people may starve if Russia’s blockade of the Black Sea continues.”

The U.N. World Food Programme issued a report in June stating that this could cause a population of 323 million to fall into famine.

It’s worth mentioning that they rely on Ukrainian food to help with relief efforts in famine stricken areas.
But anyway, back to modern day, one last thing to cover is the geopolitical consequences of all this…

Because one country’s loss is another country’s gain. And which country is out to exploit th– I mean stands to benefit from this?
That’s right, Bob. China.

China has actually been really good about storing food reserves for a long time. Currently they have enough to feed the whole country for a year and a half, even if the rest of the world stopped producing food.

So they could fill the gap with their reserves, in exchange for various resources and clout with the countries they help.

But China may actually have its own wheat problems right now.

Strict Covid lockdowns and floods have disrupted its winter wheat harvest. So they may need to use these reserves.

Now, China can buy as much wheat as it needs, but this could increase wheat prices, making it unaffordable for poorer countries.
But if China’s not in a position to take advantage of it, India just might.

They’ve had a series of bumper harvests which led to a surplus of wheat, which they have offered to fill the demand if necessary.

So maybe there’s a safety net of some kind, but prices are likely to go up.

We are kinda going through a perfect storm of problems right now. Like I said, China’s still feeling the effects of the pandemic, combine that with a major conflict in an agricultural center, and we don’t even need to go into the nuclear sabre rattling Putin’s been doing (laugh manically) Wouldn’t a nuclear war be perfect right now!

The point is… will people starve? And that’s an actual possibility. It looks like the gap will be made up by other countries eventually, the systems will adjust. But adjustments are not always easy.

I feel like the same could be said about society in many ways right now. We are adjusting as we transition from one technological era to another. This isn’t going to be easy.

All we can really do is just hold on. And take care of each other.

The Full Plan For Artemis Part 1: The Robotic Missions

Artemis is NASA’s plan to return to the moon, and this time to stay. That’s something you probably already know. But there’s a lot more to it than picking a lander. This video is the first of 3 videos to explore the full plan for Artemis, starting with the uncrewed and robotic missions that will set the stage for a sustainable, long-term base on the south pole of the moon.

TRANSCRIPT:

In 1609, the first image of the moon was drawn based on observations through a telescope. It showed the major craters and mare, with the termination line passing through them. That man, of course… was not Galileo.

It was actually a British guy named Thomas Harriot. He beat Galileo by 6 months.
Fast forward though 353 years of dreaming about going to the moon and all it took was one cold war, $24 billion dollars and hoocha hoocha hoocha – moonwalk.

650 million enraptured people watched in awe as human beings walked on the moon for the first time, and only 3 and a half years later the public was so disinterested, the entire program was cancelled.

But let’s talk some more about how TikTok is ruining our attention spans.

I mean, it is… But also people are just kinda shite.

In fairness, we were also dealing with proxy wars, runaway inflation and over-the-top gas prices at the time. Can’t imagine what that would be like.

So we didn’t stay. But that’s all right, we got what we came for, we took the W and went home. Besides, we didn’t even know if we could stay, not without any water on the moon.

And we really didn’t know how to reclaim water, grow food, or a million other little things one would need for long-term space travel.

So NASA focused on that, first with Skylab, then the Shuttle, and the ISS. And our moon ambitions kinda waned.

Get it? Like a waning moon?

But on July 31st, 1999, almost exactly 30 years after Apollo 11, something interesting happened.

NASA’s Lunar Orbiter called Prospector reached the end of its mission, and the plan was to go out with a literal bang.

They wanted to crash it in to the lunar surface, both to prevent a buildup of space debris but also, they were hoping the crash would create a plume that could be analyzed to determine what was under the surface.

That plume turned out to be smaller than they were hoping, but they did detect hydrogen. Which got NASA thinking…

And they decided to go bigger.

NASA had a companion mission for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission and that was LCROSS (The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite ).

They decided to do the same thing with LCROSS only this time they would crash the entire upper stage Centaur rocket into the surface and fly LCROSS through the plume.

And this time it worked. LCROSS’ spectrometers picked up water ice.

Just like that, the idea of returning to the Moon got a lot more interesting. Water ice meant lunar colonies, it meant fuel could be made from the water. And by this time we’d learned a lot more about long-term space habitation.

It was time to go back.
Okay so we found some water, but the question is how much?

Well, the estimates start at 108,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools to 240,000 Olympic swimming pools.
How big is an Olympic sized swimming pool? It’s this big.

And how much is 108,000? It’s a lot. Like… It’s a lot.

Fine, if you need something easier to visualize, it’s about the same as Lake Winnibigoshish in Minnesota.
And we could find more, missions like the LRO and LROC are still actively mapping the moon in greater and greater detail.
Of course it’s not just water, we’ve also found helium-3, which would be huge if we ever crack fusion as well as iron and thorium… I’ve done a whole video on moon mining, you can go check it out.

We are, of course, not the only country interested in getting a monopoly on those sweet sweet moon resources. Several private companies are investing in it but also China.

So if the only reason Apollo happened was because we were in a competition with another superpower, well… As OK Go once said…

All of which brings us to Artemis, which is super close to popping off, maybe in the next few months.

Actually as I record this, SLS is on the launch pad so it may have happened by the time this comes out.

So I decided to really do a deep dive into the Artemis program with a 3-part series. This is the first in the series, which will focus on uncrewed and robotic missions, Part 2 will focus on the scheduled crew missions, and Part 3 will explore the future of the program and where we go from there.

So strap yourselves in because it’s about to get lunar up in here.

he first thing we need to do before we put boots on the regolith is to find that sweet, sweet moon juice. I should just call it water, this is ridiculous.

Prime-1

So the first planned robotic mission is called Prime-1. No relation to Amazon.

Prime-1 is going to probe the lunar surface with its drill and will be able to accomplish depths of three feet!

Considering that Bruce Willis isn’t helping that is an impressive feat.

For perspective, the Mars rovers are some of the most advanced robots ever created and they can only drill a couple of inches.

Prime’s drill will hunt primarily for water ice, for all the reasons we’ve already talked about.

By the way, four astronauts on the moon require 12 gallons of water. Not to mention propellant use and growing food. So it’s important.

Prime-1 should be landing in December of this year. 2022.

VIPER

Following Prime-1 is VIPER, which stands for Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover.

Just so you know, there’s going to be some major acronym game in this video.

VIPER will also be seeking water ice, but this one will be exploring sunless craters.

Just in case you don’t know what that means, there are craters around the poles where the angle the sunlight hits it means that there are spots at the bottom of the crater where the sunlight never hits, and it’s thought that there could be water ice down there. Like, a lot of it.

Think about what a cool job that is. Someone’s going to be piloting a remote control robot through a crater that hasn’t seen sunlight for billions of years.

And because it’s going to be shielded from the sun, it can’t power itself with solar panels, so it will only have 100 days of power.

VIPER will have a top speed of 0.45 mph, so not a speed demon, but that’s not what we’re there for. Ultimately VIPER will cover 12 miles and in that time hopefully find some great spots for astronauts to explore.

Another interesting fact, working in the shadows means VIPER will be the first rover sporting headlights.

VIPER should be landing in November of 2023 via Astrobiotics Griffin Lander carried by SpaceX Falcon Heavy.

Gateway

But perhaps the biggest uncrewed mission won’t even land on the moon, it’s going into lunar orbit. A very weird lunar orbit.

What I’m talking about is the Lunar Operation Platform-Gateway, which sometimes goes by LOP-G, though these days it usually just goes by Gateway.

This is a space station, fifth space station ever built and the first space station in orbit around the moon.

Think of it as part space station, part laboratory, part fuel depot, part spacecraft launcher… It’s basically a swiss army knife in the sky, but for science.

So while I call it an uncrewed mission, I’m talking about the launch to the moon, later on it will definitely house a crew that will remain in orbit. And there will be a few launches because much like the ISS, Gateway will be put together in segments.

The first two modules to go up will be the power & propulsion element and the habitation and logistics outpost or the PPE & HALO.

Right now both modules are scheduled to launch on a Falcon Heavy in November 2024 and reach lunar orbit in 9-10 months.
And this orbit is wild.
It’s called a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit, or NRHO, and it’s a wildly elliptical polar orbit that swings as close as 3,000km from the surface all the way out to 70,000 miles. It’s an orbit that takes an entire week to complete.

This ensures that the station never goes behind the moon and lose radio contact with Earth but it’s also more efficient because it takes advantage of lagrange points.

In 2025 the first crew should arrive on Artemis III and new modules will be added – the Orion command module that got the crew there, and the European Service Module, made by ESA.

Following that is the I-HAB module and the ESPIRIT module. The I-HAB will extend the LOP-G’s communication capabilities and will feature a science airlock which can be used to release things like cube sats.

The ESPIRIT module will do many things. It will provide refueling, additional comms equipment, more habitation space, and an airlock.

In 2027 the Gateway will receive the CanadaArm3 made in, obviously… Croatia.

I hate that I have to do this… It’s actually Canada. That was a joke.

JAXA will also assist by providing habitation components and logistics resupply.

Russia was supposed to be helping down the line but uh… Let’s just say that’s iffy now.

Altogether the Gateway will provide 125 cubic meters of space or 4,400 cubic feet.

The idea of the Gateway is to serve as a way station, a hub of sorts between the lunar system and the Earth system, and it’s a pretty old idea.

I did a video a while back on the original plans that NASA had to follow the Apollo missions, and it did involve multiple stations in low and high Earth orbit and in lunar orbit. And it does kinda make sense.

But it’s not without its detractors. An ex-NASA director George Abby said, “…we should go directly there (moon) not build a space station around it.”

For many, it’s just an unnecessary extra step that only adds to the cost and complicates things as opposed to a moon direct approach.

And just as I was about to record this, an article was posted on Ars Technica that really throws a lot of cold water on the Gateway.

It talks about a recent NASA report that shows some delays on the Gateway, which is to be expected, but it reports that quote, “NASA’s revised schedules, will require most or all of the capability of the SLS rocket during that time frame, and they could preclude the agency from developing a greater focus on lunar surface activities.”

In other words, the Gateway is kinda taking up all the oxygen in the Artemis mission and could eventually be deemed unsustainable and scrapped.

But for now anyway it is still part of the plan. A very big part of the plan.

When Astronauts do finally return to the Moon it will be anything but a barren wasteland. They will have supplies sent before their landing so they can be fully equipped from the start.

NASA will make it rain supplies by partnering with private companies through their CLPS program, which stands for Commercial Lunar Payload Services.

They’re basically just creating a platform for commercial partners to fulfill orders for the cargo they need. They call this PRISM, the Payloads and Research Investigations on the Surface of the Moon.

Seriously with the acronyms in this program. It almost makes the whole thing worth it.

So basically NASA puts a call out for whatever type of cargo they need for the crew on PRISM, and their commercial partners can vie for the job and line up with a launch provider. It’s kinda like Match.com but for aeronautics!

If you don’t want a metaphor then according to NASA, PRISM is a solicitation for new PI-led investigations through individual suits of instruments that are either destination agnostic or uniquely adopted for certain lunar geologic terrains. Featuring a catalog of instrument and technology demonstrations that are available from the science community.

Or…match.com for space projects.

The PRISM program is expected to fulfill contracts till 2028 and will help supply astronauts after they land and before they arrive.

Some notable supply drops that are coming go as follows:

  • A solar cell demonstration platform that will enable long-term solar solutions for the Moon Missions to come. This will be in the first batch.
  • Stereo cameras to better study how engine plumes affect lunar dust, which is a major concern, so very important.
  • Ranger, an autonomous rover the size of a briefcase that will travel the moon and create a highly detailed 3D map.
  • Then there’s PlanetVac, from Honeybee Robotics, this will land and then take a sample which will then take off into space to be collected.
  • Coming a little bit later will be the LUNAR VERTEX, which will investigate the mysterious lunar swirl at Reiner Gamma which has been drawing speculation since the Renaissance.
  • And last but not least is the Farside Seismic Suite, which will place two seismometers on the far side of the moon.

Is is not, as the name suggests, going to drop off cartoons featuring overweight cows.

Other payloads to the Moon will be various supply drops for the crew once they get there, like any faraway operation, its success hinges on the ability to keep them supplied with necessities, and the PRISM program will facilitate that.

Forget Heat Pumps – This House Cools Itself With NO Electricity!

Heat pumps are all the rage these days, and for good reason, but it turns out that ancient Persians had ways of making and storing ice, long before refrigeration existed. Today, engineers are taking from that ancient knowledge to design homes that cool without the need for electricity. And it could be the future of building design.

TRANSCRIPT:

It didn’t look like this when we moved in. It had insulation, but just a few inches of it, so being in Texas and my office where I usually shoot my videos is on the 2nd floor, it would get unbearable real quick.

So a while back we got the attic re-done with new insulation and a radiant barrier on the roof. And it helped… some. We still eventually had to replace our HVAC system to something that could pump out a lot more …heat like this unit is doing right now. That’s a lot of heat.

So even with all that attic work and – oh, I also replaced all my windows with new energy efficient bad boys, and the new, more efficient HVAC system, it still takes a lot of electricity just to keep this house comfortable.

That’s kind-of amazing when you think about it. People have been living in houses and dwellings for thousands of years, and electricity is only 100 years old. How did they make all this happen? And what could we learn from it?

So I recently traveled to Ireland, home of green fields, cloudy skies, pasty skin, and very, very old buildings.

From neolithic tombs called Dolmen, like this one named Poulnabrone that dates back over 6,000 years, to tower houses that would display the wealth and opulence of Celtic chieftains, everywhere you look are reminders that as long as there have been humans, we have been building dwellings.

And it’s only in the last 100 or so years that we have used electricity to heat and cool these buildings.

So there’s only two options, one, that humans were miserably uncomfortable for thousands of years up until very, very recently in our history, or they found ways to build their homes so they could be comfortable without electricity.

I don’t think the first one is true, yes, we have a lot more comforts now than we used to, but I think the human desire for comfort probably existed before electricity.

So how did they do it? How did they build for comfort without using any electrical or mechanical means? And in a day and age when temperatures are higher than ever, and our grids are stressed to the breaking point, what can we learn from that?

I spent the intro to this video primarily talking about keeping heat out of my house, that’s because it’s summer in Texas right now but keeping the cold out is just as important, as we found out last February.

That was when we had that epic cold snap that pushed the Texas power grid past the breaking point, which led to blackouts that lasted for days for some people, and at least 246 people died.
By the way, the worst power outage in U.S. history was the Northeast Blackout in 1965. It prompted new, federal regulations to ensure that the nation’s power grid would be reliable.

ERCOT stands for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Not to be confused with EPCOT, a totally different type of beast.

ERCOT was formed in 1970, and it manages the Texas power grid beyond the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s jurisdiction.

Not all of Texas is under ERCOT’s management. There are some parts that belong to the national grid. But for the most part, if you live in Texas, you live with ERCOT’s grid.

And as we enter the second summer after that incident, we’re still dealing with the threat of rolling blackouts, shutdowns, and failures. Why? Because the equipment is old.

And there’s a bunch of politics and money exchanging hands that’s too much to get into for this one video.

But Texas isn’t alone when it comes to concerns about the power grid, that’s because the use of electricity across the country is on the rise.

The more we turn away from fossil fuels and toward electricity, the more power grids will be pushed to the limit.

One thing a lot of people are talking about right now is a heat pump, which moves heat from a cool space to a warm space.

The pump makes the cool space cooler and the warm space warmer. Basically, it transfers heat instead of generating it.

The Netherlands government is on board, banning fossil fuel heating by 2026 and mandating the use of hybrid heat pumps.

The government said this could lead to a savings average of 60 percent on natural gas consumption.
No, they weren’t miserable. They were clever. And they devised some really simple ways to live comfortably. And these are pretty cool.

Let’s start with wind catchers.

The city of Yazd in central Iran has the most wind catchers in the world.

The city also includes other heat-beating structures, like an underground refrigeration structure called yakhchāl and an underground irrigation system called qanats.

Wind catchers are often rectangular but can be circular, octagonal, square, or other shapes.
Here’s how they work: Two, main forces drive air through and down into the housing structure. These are the incoming wind and the change in air’s buoyancy, depending on the temperature.

The wind catcher catches the air, funnels it down to the dwelling below, and deposits any debris or sand at the tower’s foot.

Air then flows throughout the structure’s interior, sometimes over subterranean water pools for further cooling.

Warmed air eventually rises and leaves the structure through another tower or opening, aided by pressure in the structure.
According to researchers, using wind to cool structures goes back all the way to Egypt about 3,300 years ago.

There, the structures had thick walls, few windows that faced the Sun, and openings to let the wind in and out.
In desert regions of North America, Native Americans would either live in caves or build homes with thick adobe walls against the sides of mountains to help stay cool.
On the flip side, the Inuit people used to construct igloos to stay warm in the Arctic regions.

Igloos stay warm because their snow walls are good insulators that help keep in body heat and heat generated by oil lamps that the Inuit use for cooking and socializing.

Traditional igloos were made out of snow since solid ice doesn’t retain heat as well as compressed snow.

The Inuit would also keep on their fur-lined clothes while inside the igloo during the day and would sleep at night wrapped in heavy furs to stay warm.

So, for thousands of years, people figured out how to stay cool and warm without the need for electricity.

I know, I know, electricity is great and all, but what if you could slash your home’s use of it by up to 90 percent and still remain comfortable?

That’s the idea behind passive housing.

Now, while the word housing is in the phrase, this concept can apply to a variety of structures like apartment blocks, industrial facilities, retail stores, schools, etc.

In fact, passive housing is great for larger structures because they have more efficient geometries.

As the structure gets bigger, the ratio of its surface area to its volume decreases. And this increases its efficiency.

There are two different and independent passive house certifications and standards. The German-based Passivehaus Institut administers one, and the U.S.-based Passive House Institute US administers the other.

Despite the similar names, they are not affiliated with one another.

Each group offers basic certifications, net-zero options, and a retrofit certification.

Both also have standards that are grounded in building science and physics, require practitioners to use a common suite of design principles to achieve targets, and focus on three performance metrics.
Those metrics are building airtightness, thermal energy demand, and total energy demand.
The main difference between the two standards comes down to performance targets based on the climate of a project’s site.
For example, PHI has the same cooling and heating load/demand criteria for all climates around the world, except for a dehumidification demand that is dependent on climate.
But PHIUS has “climate-specific” targets that are tailored to their locales.

There are five fundamental design principles behind passive housing, including:

  • Airtight construction
  • Continuous insulation
  • Filtered fresh air with heat recovery
  • High-performance doors and windows
  • Thermal bridge-free design

These principles are joined by other principles:

  • Building orientation
  • Daylighting and solar gain
  • Efficient water heating and distribution
  • Moisture management
  • Shading
  • Passive housing offers several benefits.

Saving electricity isn’t the only benefit to all this, a lot of it is about filtered airflow.

They do this through balanced ventilation systems, which don’t just keep the house cool, it also prevents mold and mildew from arising.

Passive housing structures are also quiet, have no dust, keep bugs outside, eliminate moisture and odors, are durable, and are more affordable in the long run.
Here in Dallas, the first passive house went on the market in 2018.

It was a 300-square-meter (3,230 square feet) home with two levels.

It also had a water harvesting system and 4.8 kilometers (three miles) of buried tubes in its yard that acted as an irrigation soaker system with no roll-off.

The house was pre-wired for solar panels, and it made use of smart technology to control household functions.

While there are plenty of advantages to passive housing, there are some disadvantages, too.

For one, the upfront cost can be 10 to 30 percent higher than traditional construction. Ideally, you’d be able to make that up with all the savings in electrical bills over a few years.

Passive house construction can also be challenging in places with hot summers or cold winters.

In fact, it may be necessary to have backup cooling and heating systems. Builders may also need lots of insulation to stay below the limit of 15 kWh a year.

Window areas may be limited because of the required energy performance standards. Also, those windows used must have a Low-E coating and triple glazing.
Another thing to consider is if a passive house will retain its value. Local property values and politics need to be thought about.

Some locations are more open to houses built to help protect the environment, while other locations may be indifferent or show contempt for these types of houses.

To recap, passive housing includes the following elements:

  • Proper insulation
  • No air leakages
  • No thermal bridges
  • Proper windows
  • Proper shading and orientation
  • Uses heat recovery ventilation

Biomimicry is another way we can design structures that are naturally cool or warm. Take Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, for example.

Designed by architect Mick Pearce, the country’s largest office and shopping complex has no conventional air-conditioning or heating.

But it stays a consistent temperature year-round. That’s because its design was inspired by termite mounds.
Termite mounds have tiny holes in them that allow air to be pulled through freely. It basically operates like a lung that inhales and exhales throughout the day as the temperatures rise and fall.

The Eastgate Centre is similar. Outside air is drawn in via low-powered fans and is cooled or warmed by the building’s mass, depending on the temperature of either the concrete or the air.

Its air is then vented through the building’s floors and offices before leaving through chimneys at the top.
Pearce included jagged stone on the building’s facade that is meant to emulate cactus prickles.

Since pointy surfaces have a greater surface area than flat ones, they absorb less heat. They also bleed off heat more easily, helping keep Eastgate Center cooler.
Because of all this, the building stays between 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahreinheit) during the day and 14 degrees Celsius (57 degrees Fahreinheit) at night.

And it does so using less than 35 percent of the energy of similar buildings in the country.

It literally doesn’t have an air conditioning system. And because of that, the building’s owners have saved at least $3.5 million and the tenants’ rents are 20 percent lower than other buildings in the area.
Another building taking its cue from nature to help stay naturally cool or warm is the “Gherkin” in London.

This was designed by Norman Foster based on sea anemones and sponges.
The building’s cylindrical shape allows wind to flow quickly around it and drive wind through the structure’s center to help keep it cool.

Then you have the Spring Mountains Visitor Gateway in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest Headquarters in Nevada.

The structure uses several biomimetic elements in its design, like highly efficient radiant heating tubes that move cool and warm liquid to different areas in the building.

This is similar to the ears of a Black-tailed Jackrabbit.

Jackrabbits use their huge ears to pump blood through to help cool them off, this works on the same principle.
So, I get into this because I think it’s really cool, you know, using nature to find simple solutions.

But it’s also really important. According to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, we might be running into some problems pretty soon.

They released their Summer Reliability Assessment for 2022 in May, and it warned of a high risk of failure throughout the midwest, while Texas and the western US is at an “elevate risk”

According to NERC director John Moura, “It’s a sobering report, “It’s clear the risks are spreading … and the pace of our grid transformation is a bit out of sync with the underlying realities and the physics of the system.”

It’s a warning we should pay some attention to. Because the problem’s only going to get worse.

Humans lived for thousands of years without electricity by being clever. Let’s face it, we’ve gotten lazy over the last 100 years.

But we seem to be finding our way back to clever. Heat pumps are all the rage now, and they’re pretty clever.

It’ll be interesting to see how far our cleverness can take us.

 

 

 

 

Aim High: The Long, Strange History Of Drugs In The Military

In the 1960s, the US military tested a psychedelic called BZ on its own troops, to study how they could use it as a weapon. The results were shocking, but drugs have been used in the military for as long as humans have been fighting each other. Today we take a look at this taboo subject.

TRANSCIPT:

U.S. Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman once said “war is hell.” He and a lot of people but somehow it stuck to him.
Yeah, human bodies being ripped to shreds all around you while every moment feels like the last you’ll ever have, I think that term applies.
Sometimes a human being needs a little extra help to perform in these conditions. And for centuries, armies have used stimulants to provide that help.
They helped in a lot of ways, from enhancing troop performance and keeping soldiers awake to even helping soldiers bond with each other, which led to better group cohesion and morale.
The short of it is that soldiers have been fighting while high for much of world history.
Alcohol is probably the oldest and most popular motivator for soldiers. For example, British soldiers would turn to rum, while Russians would drink vodka.
Ancient Greeks and Romans preferred wine. The Germans? That’s right, beer.
And for Americans, it’s been whiskey since the Civil War.
But just like for most of us, alcohol is pretty basic when it comes to really getting lit, for that you need to get more herbal.
For example, when the British tried to conquer the Zulu tribes in 1879, they got more they bargained for, in fact, their enemy seemed almost immune to rifle fire.
It turns out the Zulu warriors had been given various herbs by their shaman, herbs like intelezi, which is a traditional plant that basically makes you fearless.
They also gave them dagga, which is a South African variety of cannabis that has a stimulating effect.
And there was also the “bushman poison bulb,” whose effects caused hallucinations.
You know you hear that and you might think, “why would they do that, wouldn’t that make the soldiers crazy?” Well, you’re sending them into a crazy situation. Maybe that’s an advantage.
In Eurasia, mushrooms were often used by soldiers in Siberian tribes.
For example, the main psychoactive component of a toadstool mushroom is muscimol, which can enhance combat performance.
Soviet soldiers were reportedly intoxicated on mushrooms and fought fearlessly at the Battle of Székesfehérvár (SEE-kesh fer-HER-var in Hungary in 1945.
During World War One, French and German pilots and Canadian soldiers were known to use cocaine.
London pharmacists even sold medical kits that contained cocaine and heroin.
They were advertised as “useful presents for friends at the front.” Women would buy and send them to the soldiers.
I feel like it’s important to point out that they gave cocaine and heroin to kids back then too, so…
Next up was World War II and this was was all about the amphetamines.
The Nazis especially conducted systematic military doping with an early version of crystal meth called Pervitin.
The drug would increase alertness, energize the body, reduce fatigue, and boost confidence.
Troops were issued around 35 million pills during the peak of the Blitzkrieg in spring 1940.
Some soldiers even took up to four pills a day. It’s believed that from 1939 to 1945 the German military took about 200 million meth pills.
Seriously, the Nazis were meth-heads.
So how do you beat an army of meth heads? With your own meth heads.
Yeah the Allies gave meth to their troops, too in the form of Benzedrine pills.
72 million Benzedrine amphetamine tablets were issued to British troops during the second world war.
The U.S. gave Benzedrine tablets to bomber crews in 1942 before offering them to infantrymen the next year.
All in all, the Pentagon issued anywhere from 250 million to 500 million Benzedrine tablets to Allied troops.
Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a new class of drugs that began to interest the U.S. military: psychedelics.
One of these was lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.
The story is that a chemist named Albert Hofmann was working for Sandoz Pharmaceutical, trying to create a blood stimulant.
And one of the drugs he synthesized 1938 just happened to be LSD, but he didn’t know that it had any hallucinogenic effects until 1943, when he… accidentally consumed some.
That’s an upsetting way to find out that you need to CLEAN YOUR LAB.
So psychiatrists started experimenting with LSD starting around 1950, and between 1950 and 1965, had administered it to more than 40,000 patients and wrote more than 1000 scientific papers on the subject.
But it was the 1960s when the drug became popular with the general public, hence the psychedelic 60s. It was promoted by alternative thought leaders at the time like Timothy Leary with his “turn on, tune in, drop out” mantra.
But perhaps nobody wanted to tune in more than the US Military and the CIA.
Project MK-Ultra was a CIA program that started in the 1950s and through the 1960s where the CIA experimented with LSD and other substances on volunteers and unsuspecting subjects.
Dozens of medical facilities, pharmaceutical companies, and universities were involved.
The thinking was that LSD could be used as a psychological weapon during the Cold War, but ultimately they decided it was too unpredictable for use in the field.
By the way, this marked a bit of a shift in the use of drugs in the military. Like all the previous examples I mentioned were about enhancing the performance of their own troops, this was more about using drugs as a weapon against the enemy.
And to my knowledge anyway, this was different, drugs hadn’t been used this way before, unless you count chemical weapons like mustard gas and sarin and whatnot.
With psychedelics, the army saw an opportunity to confuse and disable an enemy or to engage in psychological warfare with the populace by doping them against their knowledge.
And it didn’t stop with LSD, one of the most interesting and lesser known drugs they tested was 3-quinuclidinyl (quin-u-clid-inil) benzilate, also known as Agent BZ.
If you wanna get deep in the science lingo, it’s an anticholinergic drug, which means it blocks the action of acetylcholine, which is a type of neural transmitter that sends messages between neurons.
It gives the neurons a bad connection basically.
Much like LSD, this was also discovered by accident by a pharmaceutical company called Hoffmann-La Roche – different Hofmann than the LSD guy by the way – they were trying to create an antispasmodic for GI conditions.
But in 1951, they discovered that one of their formulas… kinda messed people up. And in comes the military.
The U.S. Army began experimenting with BZ and its effects at the Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland in the 1950s. 
They were run by U.S. Army researcher John Ketchum. He was a colonel who had spent much of his career researching how drugs like LSD and PCP could be turned into chemical weapons.
Ketchum was fascinated by BZ and the bizarre effects, saying:
“Subjects sometimes display something approaching wit, not in the form of word-play, but as a kind of sarcasm or unexpected frankness,” he wrote in a report.
(act out) That sounds like a review of my channel.
(maybe a comment animation of someone typing “something approaching wit”)
The effects would last for several days, and during the drug’s peak, subjects were completely cut off in their own minds, jumping from one fragmented reality to the next.
They’d even see visions, like tiny baseball players on a tabletop diamond, animals, and objects that materialized and vanished.
And they reportedly barely remembered the experience after the drug wore off.
His most notable BZ tests took place in May of 1962, and this was quite a production.
They literally built a fake communications outpost and locked four volunteer soldiers in the building for 72 hours.
They were provided with food and water, medicine, and a chemical toilet. And were given combat simulations to see how they would perform as a communications team under the influence of BZ.
All the while they had four cameras set up around the room with Ketchum and several technicians observing through monitors on the outside.
So, there were four of these guys, like I mentioned, and three of them remained anonymous in Ketchum’s report, one of them was identified as Pfc. Ronald Zadrozny. The others are only identified as H, C, and L.
L was the leader of the group – maybe that’s why he went by L – and he was the control subject, he didn’t have any of the BZ.
H and C got low doses of it and Zadrozny got the largest dose.
One example of a test they were put through was Ketchum triggered an alarm that indicated a chemical attack, which caused the men to rush to put on their gas masks.
The guys with the lower doses did okay but Zadrozny was in a state of delirium and had to be helped with it.
During Zadrozny’s drug-induced weekend, he saluted imaginary officers, thought a drape that partitioned the toilet was a group of men, and would stay up late pacing, mumbling, and trying to escape the room.
He began to improve at one point and sat in front of the switchboard, ready to receive communication, but didn’t understand that he had to put the telephone to his ear to hear anything.
When one of the other soldiers tried to explain it to him, he said he couldn’t because “It wasn’t working with electrodes.”
The soldiers were subjected to 200 phony tactical messages and warnings of chemical attacks. In the end, the experiment showed that BZ could be used to render troops ineffective.
But it wasn’t the end of the tests.
That same year, reservist Walter Payne was told to inhale a cloud of BZ in a wind tunnel. He was unresponsive three hours later.
He was examined and showed “signs of decerebrated rigidity with hyperextension of the back, neck and limbs, accompanied by irregular twitching movement of limbs.”
In other words, there were signs of major head trauma and brain damage.
Payne was quickly given an antidote and he recovered from it pretty fast. They did an EEG test on him almost a month later and it showed that he was back to normal.
Dodged a bullet on that one. I’m sure they won’t do that again…
In 1963, they did it again with another volunteer named Jason Butler, Jr. This time they had him breathe in the BZ in a wind tunnel… and he immediately went into critical condition.
His head shook spastically, and his body temperature peaked at 39.8 degrees Celcius (103.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
He was given an antidote and sponged with ice water to cool him down. Doctors released him after six days, saying he looked normal. And vowing that they would never, ever, ever do–
Another test a year later tried to see if they could incapacitate a group of soldiers with a cloud of BZ in the field. This was called Project DORK for some reason.
(is there a movie clip we could put here?)
This one is kinda hilarious because they had trouble getting the cloud to stick around long enough for the soldiers to breathe it in, it just dispersed in the wind too quickly.
So they tried doing it at a specific time before dawn when the air and ground temperature differences were just right, to prevent it from drifting away, and that didn’t work.
So they resorted to having eight soldiers running in place on the back of a moving vehicle that moved along with the cloud so they could breathe as much of it in as possible. And it still didn’t work.
So yeah, seeing as how they didn’t think they would get an enemy to agree to drive along with a cloud of poison gas while their soldiers breathed in as much of it as possible, they had to abandon the idea.
The BZ tests officially ended in the early 70s but there were rumors that the military tested them on US soldiers in Vietnam. The ending of the movie Jacob’s Ladder refers to this but in the movie BZ turned the soldiers into violent, aggressive animals, which is not at all what the experiments reported. So that’s probably just some Hollywood fantasy.
Unfortunately for many of the volunteers in these experiments, the effects changed their lives forever.
The Army published a study in 1980 that showed 16 percent of volunteers who took LSD suffered psychological symptoms like depression, flashbacks, and suicidal ideation later in their lives.
Another study showed many subjects had been hospitalized for nervous-system disorders.
And tragically in 1995, Ronald Zadrozny killed his third wife and then himself. Although his ex-wife claimed that he never appeared bothered by the BZ experiments.
Since that happened more than 30 years before his death, it’s probably fair to assume that the drug had nothing to do with it.  Or maybe it did. We’ll never know.
Believe it or not, military experiments involving psychedelic drugs are continuing to this day… but for a very different reason.
Psychedelics have been shown to be useful in therapeutic settings, and they’re now being studied to help soldiers and veterans to treat anxiety, depression, and substance abuse.
In 2020, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency better known as DARPA funded a $27 million project to create new medications for this purpose.
DARPA’s announcement didn’t specifically mention psychedelics, but it referred to “certain Schedule 1 controlled drugs that engage serotonin receptors” and that have “significant side effects, including hallucination.”
Psychedelic drugs appear to create a state of plasticity in the brain that makes it easier for people to rewire neuronal circuits and learn new behaviors.
For soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, these drugs along with therapy may help them increase their well-being.
There are currently more than 200 clinical trials registered on clinicaltrials.gov to test the effects of MDMA and psilocybin on conditions like PTSD and depression. 
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is closely following the research. But some soldiers need immediate help.
Army Ranger Jesse Gould’s disability claim for PTSD took two years to be processed by the VA. But the department’s recommended treatment wasn’t working for him.
Then he discovered psychedelics and chose to drink an ayahuasca brew. According to Gould, it saved his life. Maybe with this new research, many others could be saved as well.
So we seem to have entered a third era of drugs in the military. The first being performance enhancing agents for the battlefield, the second being weapons to use against the enemy. Now we’re studying how to improve the lives of those who sacrifice so much in service to their country.
And that’s a goal that I myself can get behind.

FINALLY! A Graphene Battery That Could Change Everything

We’ve been hearing about the potential of graphene for decades, and yet very few of the big promises have come to pass. But a new aluminum graphene battery design is coming out this year that could charge a phone in less than a minute, and it may be the future of energy storage.

TRANSCRIPT:

This is a paperclip. The average paperclip weighs about a gram. And it’s made out of steel, which is electrically conductive. So you don’t want to stick one in a light plug.This is a paperclip. The average paperclip weighs about a gram. And it’s made out of steel, which is electrically conductive. So you don’t want to stick one in a light plug.
Materials are electrically conductive because electrons move freely across its surface. The more surface area, the more electrons it can hold.
A paperclip obviously doesn’t have a lot of surface area, if you pounded it as flat as possible, you can imagine getting maybe a square foot of surface area? Maybe?
Then there’s graphene. You’ve probably heard graphene described as a wonder material that’s going to change the world, well here’s one of the reasons why. It’s literally only one atom thick.
So if you folded up one gram of graphene, it would have the same surface area… of not one… not two… But TEN tennis courts.
That’s a lot of electrons. And a lot of potential.

Mo Li-ion, Mo Problems

Saying the words “lithium-ion” before “battery” is practically redundant these days. I mean, let’s face it, lithium ion won, these are the batteries that run our cell phones, tablets, computers, even our cars. We are officially a world run by lithium ion.
You might say they have the li-ion’s share of the market. (shit-eating grin)
But Lithium-ion batteries aren’t perfect. I mean, they’re Goodenough (Picture of John B Goodenough; smirk)… But they have their downsides
Are all my puns giving you a… charge? I’ll stop.

Safety Concerns

One problem we continue to have with lithium ion is safety.
These batteries run hot. And yes, if not properly configured, they can burst into flame. You might remember in 2016, 2.5 million smart phones were recalled after some of them burst into flames in peoples’ pockets and bags.
Don’t get me wrong, they’ve gotten safer over the years, but it comes with a cost.
EV batteries for example have extensive cooling systems woven into them to keep their temperatures at optimal levels.
This not only complicates the design and makes it more expensive, the cooling systems take up space that could be used storing energy, which lowers the pack density.
And don’t get me going on how much it complicates recycling these batteries, (get more frantic) they’ve gotta break it all apart and there’s all this gel that has to be separated from the recyclable metals which is super important because — Yep, you did it, you got me going now…

Ethics and Recycling

Battery recycling is super important because the materials in the batteries are not easy to come by.
For example I did a whole video on the cobalt problem in lithium ion batteries, how a lot of it comes from artisanal mines in the Congo that exploit child labor in really dangerous conditions.
A lot of work has been done to source cobalt more ethically, and battery makers are cutting down on the use of cobalt but it’s still an issue.

The point being, these batteries do have a finite life cycle and we need to be able to recycle them, but for all the reasons I just pointed out, it’s still far more expensive to recycle lithium ion batteries than just build new ones.
In fact when I looked, I could only find that 10% of lithium-ion batteries get recycled. To be fair this was from an article in 2016 so hopefully it’s gotten better since then?

Daily Hassles

And all of these issues are on top of the fact that… well… They have a lot of room for improvement.
Look, let’s be fair, the reason they won out is because they were leaps and bounds above the options we had before, but still, 2 hours to charge your phone? What is this, the stone age?
It’s not the stone age, it’s the phone age! Yeah, I know…

The Promise of Graphene

So researchers around the world are working on the next big thing in energy storage, there’s like half a million new battery chemistries being worked on, I’ve covered most of them already.
But the battery I want to talk about today is different because it does its magic using graphene, (get worked up) and let me tell you something, when I hear about a new technology that uses graphene…  I… don’t know how to feel about it.
Because we’ve been hearing about how graphene is going to change the world for SOOO LOOOOONG, it’s really starting to feel like a football we just can’t kick.

Like the potential of graphene is off the charts, it could potentially revolutionize everything from construction materials, semiconductors, clothing, even make a space elevator possible.
So much potential and yet…

Graphene is like that gifted kid that was always told they had so much potential but just… never learned how to apply themselves or didn’t believe in themselves enough to execute on that potential so they just kinda flounder around on the internet, eventually becoming a mid-tier content creator in his forties…

But hey, producing graphene is hard. Which is what makes this battery interesting, the company who designed it is a graphene manufacturer.
So not only are they some of the biggest experts in the world on graphene, they make it in-house so they don’t have to pay retail for it, making the batteries cheaper to make.
Now, before I get into the battery itself, let’s back up a second and talk about why graphene has these wonder properties to it in the first place – it’s kind-of important to the rest of it.
Graphene is basically carbon, which makes up about 12% of your body. So you’re familiar with it.
But unlike the carbon in your body, in graphene, carbon atoms are arranged in a honeycomb pattern literally one atom thick, and this is where it gets its crazy properties.
The bonds in this pattern give graphene more than four times the tensile strength of steel while being extremely flexible and light.
It also makes it an excellent conductor of electricity and heat. Good things to have in a battery, but even better things to have in a supercapacitor.

Supercapacitor Basics

So, capacitors are devices that store energy, similar to batteries, except instead of storing the energy in chemical reactions, they store it on the surface of electrodes.
This means they can be charged extremely quickly, because they don’t have to rely on chemical reactions to store the energy.
The downside is energy density. As in, they don’t have much of it.
The energy density of a typical capacitor is about one-third of a Watt-hour per kilogram
For comparison, a one kilogram lithium-ion battery can store hundreds of Watt-hours

The Graphene-Aluminum Hybrid

So the trick to getting a capacitor to increase its energy density is to increase the surface area of the electrodes, and for that, you need an extremely thin and flexible material that is electrically conductive and manages heat really well that you can fold up into a tiny space.
Hence, graphene.
Here’s how bonkers graphene is. One gram of graphene has a surface area of 2629 square meters. That’s roughly the same as 10 tennis courts.
I’ve been talking about capacitors here, supercapacitors are obviously capacitors that have been turned up to eleven. And then there’s ultracapacitors, which are turned up to… (confused) more than eleven.
But even a massively upsized supercapacitor can’t compete with the energy density of an advanced chemical batteryWhich is why researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia have developed a graphene-based, supercapacitor/battery hybrid.

The battery part uses aluminum, so it’s generally referred to as a graphene-aluminum battery– earlier research that gives problems with graphene that maybe UQ has solved NOTE: this is where my comprehension ran out, so I contacted GMG to ask if they can clarify the benefit
Now, I would love to go into the details of the design and how it works but a lot of it is proprietary and what I did find went way over my head but I can say that it involves embedding aluminum ions into perforations in the graphene mesh.
This creates a graphene-aluminum layer that acts as the cathode, with an anode of just plain aluminum foil.
The battery as a whole has an energy density of 150-160 Watt hours per kilogram, and it can still charge extremely fast.

Cell vs Pack Density

Sounds great, but Tesla’s new 4680 battery cell is closer to 265 Wh/kg. So there’s definitely still a gap there. BUT… it might not be as big of a gap as you’d think.
Because that’s cell density. You also have to think about pack density.
Like I was saying before, lithium ion batteries have to have massive cooling systems built in to their battery packs to keep it from overheating. This battery wouldn’t have that issue.
So all that extra space could be taken up by energy-storing batteries. It might not put it even with a Tesla pack, but it does close the gap a bit.
So the University of Queensland developed the battery, but I mentioned before that a graphene manufacturer was producing it, that company is called the Graphene Manufacturing Group, or GMG.

They’ve built a prototype that can reportedly charge 60 times faster than lithium-ion.
So while their battery pack might not take an EV quite as far, charging would be a lot closer to the experience of filling up at the gas pump, which could open up EVs to more people who don’t have access to home chargers today.
Of course I’m spending all this time talking about EVs, it would be just as world changing for everything else we use; our phones, our watches, our computers… You could plug in your laptop while you take a leak and it’ll be fully charged by the time you’re done.
Also keep in mind everything I’m talking about here applies to their prototype battery. It’s still the very early days of this technology.
In a presentation back in March to The Graphene Council, Founder and CEO Craig Nicol said the energy density of the battery has a theoretical upper limit of 1050 Wh/kg, and that their team is currently testing 300,000 variations on the battery’s design in pursuit of better performance.

Prototypes and Further Advantages

I can only imagine that AI is involved in that in some way, but those tests are happening at a pilot plant the company opened in December 2021.
And here’s where it does get kinda exciting – they are actually producing batteries at this plant. Right now.
They’ve started manufacturing coin batteries, which are being shipped to customers for testing and feedback, and they plan to begin manufacturing pouch pack batteries by the end of June 2022.
Pouch pack batteries are housed in a polymer bag instead of a solid case, but these are the kind of batteries that you see in phones and tablets and other small electronics.

Although, there are some EVs that run on pouch pack batteries, including the Chevy Bolt.
Not for nothing but late last year, Chevy issued a $1.8 billion recall of the bolt over issues that their batteries were catching on fire. This wouldn’t have that problem.
And as if all that wasn’t enough to give you a tech nerd stiffy, there’s also the fact that the batteries are fully recyclable and made from abundant, easy to source materials. So what’s the catch?

Isn’t Graphene Expensive?

As Rocky Balboa once said, life ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. Of course there’s a catch. And the catch in this case is the price of graphene.
Right now graphene costs about $1000 per kilogram, that’s for the highest quality graphene that you need for these batteries.
Lithium is selling for about $80 per kilogram. Of course that’s just one component of the lithium-ion battery but still.https://www.lme.com/en/metals/ev/about-lithium
That’s been the major drawback of all graphene technologies this whole time, it has to be synthesized. You can’t just dig graphene out of the ground, the only way to make is feasible is to reduce the cost of making it.

GMG for example has patented a process for making graphene out of methane, but they’re being kinda cagey about exactly how much it saves them in production costs.
But if you’re going to compare the price of graphene with that of lithium ion, it’s only fair to keep in mind that once upon a time, lithium ion was prohibitively expensive.
The price of lithium ion battery storage has plummeted over the last couple of decades, and now it’s flirting with $100 per kilowatt-hour.
It’s more than possible that graphene could follow the same trajectory once a sustainable, inexpensive process is perfected. And there’s a lot of projects working on that.

Graphene From Trash

One that’s worth talking about is a team from Rice University in collaboration with Ford, who are working on recycling plastic into graphene.
Kill two birds with one stone? Yes please.
Professor James Tour and the team were able to turn plastic into graphene car parts, and they were able to recycle old graphene into new
The question, of course is if the graphene is high enough quality for these type of batteries.
We wanted to get the answer to that so my writer, Ryan emailed Professor Tour and asked if their flash joule heating method is of high quality. And he was kind enough to respond and said, “Flash graphene is one of the purest graphene forms you can get.”
But while he agreed that their method could make graphene prices drop, he was careful to say only as much as the market will bear.
And it’s going to be a while before the supply catches up to the demand, so you won’t be flossing with graphene thread anytime soon.

Some Hurdles Remain

There is also one more problem with GMG’s graphene battery, and that’s voltage.
Their coin cell that hits the market this year delivers 1.7 Volts, and most small electronics require at least 3 volts.
Now that doesn’t mean they can’t be used, you can combine cells to get what you need, this is true of other types of batteries too.(AAA, AA, C, and D cells are 1.5V)
But there are some devices that only take a single cell; computer chips, watches, some toys, and GMG wants to power these without the manufacturers having to change the design.
They’re confident one of the 300,000 variations they’re working on will do the job, they just need the time to find which one.
Of course battery technology is evolving and advancing so fast, it’s possible some other breakthrough could make all of this irrelevant.
I feel like that could be said about pretty much anything these days though.

Promise Fulfilled?

But hey, let’s focus on the good news, there is an actual graphene-based battery hitting the market this year.
I feel like I didn’t mention that GMG does have partnerships with some big-name companies, including the tool manufacturer Bosch and mining company Rio Tinto.
So let’s hope something actually comes of this because I mean, an ethically sourced, fully recyclable, fast charging battery would be a game changer.

And it’ll be nice to finally see this supermaterial we’ve been hearing about for decades in action.
I mean, I’m still holding out for that space elevator.  But you’ve got to start somewhere.
But I don’t know, what do you think? Is this worth getting excited about? Or are we just gonna get the football yanked away from us once again? Sound off in the comments and let me know.

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