Covid 19 and 6 Degrees of Separation

Following reports of Covid 19 in the pacific Northwest recently one infers easily that the virus arrived at Seatac airport and generated a cluster in the Seattle are before travelling down to Portland, where a small cluster formed, then travelling east down the Interstate to Umatilla Oregon. One might guess that its next stop on the way could be Salt Lake City.

https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/coronavirus-outbreak-death-toll-us-infections-latest-news-updates-2020-03-03/

The problem in containing the virus seems to be that it takes a couple of weeks for symptoms to appear after infection, and during that time the carrier can give others the disease.  With a few clusters in California already it is not unlikely that the nature of U.S. travel and transcontinental points of contact will deliver the virus to much of the country, although perhaps not with anything like the clustering density of China and Wuhan province where people live more close together in numbers and travel less than the west.

Maybe Mexicans considering crossing the border illegally will want to think about the idea of getting Covid 19 in the U.S.A. and taking it back to their medically challenged country. The Mexican heat is a fair defense yet the lack of good medical treatment may neutralize that a bit.

Soon I would guess a national appearance and clustering chart with appropriate vectors will become commonplace in the mainstream media. Then one will want to stay tuned for a good chunk of one's lifetime-maybe a year or two, listening to talking heads with a broadcast product better than impeachment. Maybe the inauguration ceremony in 2021 will be banned because of the crowd density, and Congress can appear in surgical masks. If that occurs it would be quite a show.

What About Terraforming Venus?

The atmosphere of Venus is mostly made of CO2; about 96%. Nitrogen comprises about 3.5% with traces of other gasses such as sulphur dioxide and water vapor. The Venusian atmosphere is 90 times heavier than Earth's. If N.A.S.A. were to prioritize developing technology to convert the CO2 of Venus into oxygen and perhaps coal it might be a practical way to find solutions for Earth's atmospheric surplus of CO2 and terraform Venus at the same time.

  https://www.space.com/18527-venus-atmosphere.html

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/liquid-metal-catalyst-turns-carbon-dioxide-coal

 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180301094857.htm
converting CO2 into energy

https://newatlas.com/caltech-reactor-convert-co2-oxygen/59869/

 https://www.pnas.org/content/109/39/15606 
single catalyst splits CO2 into CO and O2

Venus is also quite hot. Its greenhouse gas and location a little closer to the sun have made its surface temperature more than 700 degrees fahrenheit. If the temperature can be reduced somewhat is could be possible for botanists to generate some form of exothermal planet that could thrive on Venus and also help convert CO2 into oxygen.

Some people would like to build a floating cloud-town 31 miles above Venus where the temperature would be cooler. Venus is closer to Earth than mars and getting there is easier. Yet converting the CO2 to oxygen and other materials would be a good project for drone and mechanical technology with an oxygenated atmosphere and extremal exothermal engineered plants bringing the entire surface of the world to one more useful for humanity down the road. Venus has more resources than CO2 after all.

If one insisted upon a float on the clouds approach, one might consider covering the planet with floating solar reflecting plates to cool the atmosphere a little. The floats might be used to convert CO2 to oxygen and whatever else-perhaps carbon monoxide and/or coal, and then shape to carbon into gliders to land at some particular place on the planet instead of being scattered all over.

Mars is still a good colony location for people living underground and under glass above. A moon base can serve developments on both worlds and additional planetary locales beyond

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2134206-extreme-plants-thrive-at-72c-in-new-zealands-hot-volcanic-soil/  exothermal plants

American Era of Hermaphrodite Cyborg Units

Since Henry Ford invented mass produced automobiles Americans have developed reliance on the machines for transportation; for everything. In effect they have merged their course of development with machines and become cyborg brains guiding the machine unit to their shared destiny. With male and female being completely equal in machine cyborg power the phenomenon has joined them into equality as hermaphrodite cyborgs reproducing as one.
 
Americans have a certain contempt for human-powered transportation since it is natural and slower. Males have select advantages over females in the work that cyborg-units wish to avoid. When cyborg units arrive at a parking lot the cargo-brain-controller debarks and ventures into a store to shop before scuttling back to join the host vehicle. 

Machines are a powerful component of American life. They dominate and destroy the landscape and ecosphere as cyborg units respect life only for aesthetic qualities and pleasure they can find within it (i.e. fishing, hunting). Cyborg unit-planning has guided the sprawl of sterile cyborg cityscapes in order to reproduce more cyborg units as quickly as possible. Machines should be used carefully, minimally with a view toward reducing ecospheric footprint.

Their was no grand cyborg development plan; it simply reproduced and self-reinforced as the dominant easy economic mode of being. Every citizen is respected only as far as they have been consumed by cyborg culture and compiled vast machine and building structure for-themselves, often with sin in some obvious form as a prerequisite for behavioral adjustment.

https://phys.org/news/2020-02-hunter-gatherer-networks-human-evolution.html

Free enterprise permits the development of any idea for invention. The mass social application of inventions such as cars should not simply find a place in the nation or world without any careful zoning and left to rely on Darwinian trial and error. Just because transportation can design roads to everywhere through any sort of landscape that does not mean they should.

An intelligent human society would recognize the immense value of nature and wilderness to human existence. It is a physical, spiritual and economic life-support foundation for all biological eings on Earth. Indifferent cyborg hermaphroditic reproduction with no concern for the ecosphere may result in the destruction of human life on Earth. 

It would be possible to conserve and restore wild ecosphere with centralized high speed mass transportation and better use of machines for work related purposes. With intelligent though a human ecological economic economic infrastructure renaissance that features as much human powered yet convenient and practical transportation as possible could arise to replace the herm-cyborg unit ethos.

Down with the Sickness; Wall Street and COVID19

Wall Street has been down with the sickness since it learned of the Asian novel coronavirus. Democrats and the left media are blaming President Trump in advance for the mass epidemic that could infect Americans. This is all good stuff; American calm and logic ruling the day as it were.
https://www.forexlive.com/news/!/major-indices-get-hammered-all-down-44-20200227

With a large drop on Wall Street for the first germs that breeze in the prospect of something really serious occurring (ie weaponized plague) to affect the economy isn't wonderful to consider. Well founded sustainable ecological economics could be a little more sturdy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/02/27/stock-market-dow-coronavirus/

On the Global Warming "Hoax" (not)

Global warming is a threat to human existence on Earth. It is one of dozens of threats to human existence on Earth, possibly hundreds. It is also one people should do something about, and could if they weren’t such thoughtless users of technology without regard for environmental consequences.

https://www.fairplanet.org/story/what-are-human-causes-of-climate-change/

The farther north one goes the greater is the increase in annual heating. Alaska for instance is much warmer than it was in former centuries. Human pollutants and exhaust emissions are the primary agents of change. Fossil fuel burning is the main cause of greenhouse gases in the U.S.A. with industry being a close second.

It has been reported that with Arctic permafrost melting there is a potential for release of greenhouse gases trapped in it. There have also been reports that emerging microbes would eat gases such as methane before it reaches the atmosphere. Tundra fires of dry vegetation could release toxic metals trapped in the muskeg that fell from industrial pollution in the atmosphere. Fires could release mass quantities of CO2 etc speeding up the pace of global atmospheric heating.

NASA Flights Detect Millions of Arctic Methane Hotspots

Everything you should know about methane as regulations loosen

The Arctic ice cap is melting away and shrinking to a smaller size with each passing year. It may be gone entirely in summers eventually (maybe in 20 -30 years). The old Arctic ice with many years of life is nearly gone. With an open Arctic Ocean in summer the Arctic ocean absorbs more sunlight and a vicious cycle of warming increases persists.

-image credit Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis

Unfortunately it turned out that human activities produce 40 percent more of the world’s methane than was believed previously. Methane is 28 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. It lasts just a decade so if humans quit adding methane to the atmosphere that would help slow the pace of development.

Humans are producing a far larger share of methane emissions than we thought

I should say that I am more concerned with ocean acidification than greenhouse gassing, yet each are empirical threats. Earths era of photosynthesis and oxygen increase began in the oceans a billion years ago.

The Most Powerful Evidence Climate Scientists Have of Global Warming

People that are comfortable don’t sometimes don’t want to think about global warming or consider it a hoax. They are something like ostriches regarding danger. Many people have 4 to 6% Neanderthal or Denisovan genes. Neanderthals were found to have bred with an extinct hominid that branched off from the human line 2 million years ago. So it isn’t too surprising to me that some people regard global warming as a host though more than 90% of scientists regard it as fact.

Recently a fellow that believes the world is flat launched himself to a homemade rocket and crashed it to death in the desert; he was trying to get high enough to see if the world is really curved. Personally I can see the world’s curvature from a boat on a large body of water, or from a jet looking out a window at 32,000 feet. One could regard a round world as a hoax I would guess, if one didn’t get up high enough for-oneself to see it. Global warming shouldn’t be harder to believe than a nearly round Earth.

There probably were people that didn’t believe that germs exist some decades after scientists discovered them. There is often a time lag between scientific discovery and popular acceptance of a true opinion. Actually there are numerous wrong beliefs pervasively held in societies today. I am surprised how many misinterpret the book of Genesis, including scientists. Christians may misunderstand eschatology and believe that the 1st century tribulation that Jesus said would occur before the generation living was entirely passed was not actually the tribulation. Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E. and the Christians scattered. Some just require a wrong opinion to be true because that is all they know.

Global warming is just one problem. A general failure to upgrade human economic infrastructure from the evolved way of non-sustainable technique need be changed to one based on ecological economic principles and practices. Mass extinction of life on Earth in progress need be stopped and reversed. Habit loss needs to halt. Human dwelling forms and theories need to adapt to so many people occupying and destroying the world ecosphere. The problems are nearly self-evident nearly to those that are not blind.

Ecological economics need be insinuated within the existing infrastructure and with the use of free market tools and directed regulation reform that leads to the natural selection of business practices that are not harmful to the ecosphere.

People misunderstand political philosophy and don’t comprehend Marx of Adam Smith well enough to know that they offered just their best ideas for the age rather than golden tablets for economic rules passed down from on high and valid for all times. People don’t comprehend what Mussolini’s political philosophy of corporatism was or how it works today and why wealth is so concentrated that political adaption to ecological economics is on a worst case track. One must enjoy a cool breeze while one can, and mild northern winters too.

Wonder if Starlink Will Be a Catalyst for Space to Earth Communications

Starlink is moving on with its program to cover all of the Earth with broad-band internet coverage from thousands of satellites that will be orbiting the Earth with a few hundred already in place.

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starlink-job-posting-billion-dollar-market/

I wonder though if the orbiting planetary covering internet satellites will also be useful for other satellites, including small, inexpensive ones with cameras surveying Earth or other directions outward, to communicate with Earth entrepreneurs and companies via the Internet. 

That is will Starlink have some synergy with ad hoc space venture communications transmitting to Starlink as a relay to Earth for very low or nominal cost. Will it be possible for crowd-control internet space ops interacting with satellites and sundry ventures?  Is a Starlink system feasible for Mars or other planets of the solar system?

Sanders or Trump; Name Your Poison

Name your poison; kicking bricks or a flat beer left in the Mohave desert a few weeks. Neither 2020 candidate would be too interesting to spend time with unless a paid journalist. Each are the best their party has to run of course, yet politicians as a genre should be seen and not heard. Constituents need to go about their affairs and not be bothered by the lifestyles of the rich and/or famous i.m.o.

One would like top-level politicians to be intelligent inspirational, brilliantly well-informed progressives regarding ecological economics and space progress who would balance the federal budget, secure the borders and assure that no American need ever be down and out for very long. It would also be good if Gillette would release The Hot One shave cream again, yet neither event is likely to happen within our lifetimes (of this or the next few generations).

One can only hope that politicians do less harm to public affairs and don’t bother private lives. Politicians have some qualities yet overall their faults make the choice of any a Hobson’s choice. Like something from 1984 the Ministry of Truth expects too many to participate in the Daily Hate of reds or blues and sycophants to chortle praise of the chosen.