Sunday Roundup - December 14, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream corporate media.  Today we look at the U.S. Senate's torture report, Ebola, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, John Lennon, the Lima Climate Conference, Mars, and in brief, China's economy, Brazil's torture report, and Hong Kong.

U.S. Senate's Torture Report
The Senate Intelligence Committee released its report on torture carried out by the CIA in the years after the 9/11 attacks.  The report concludes that the CIA repeatedly misled the public, Congress and the White House about the agency’s aggressive questioning of detainees — including waterboarding, confinement in small spaces and shackling in stress positions — after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, minimizing the severity of the interrogations and exaggerating the usefulness of the information produced.  [Politico, Dec. 9]  Just about every media outlet has a summary of the key findings or a list of the "most shocking" revelations:  "The Most Gruesome Moments in the CIA ‘Torture Report’ " [Daily Beast], "10 Craziest Things in the Senate Report on Torture" [Rolling Stone], "America’s Shame: What’s in the Senate Torture Report?" [The New Yorker], etc.  The Guardian had this lead in its December 10 post on world reaction to the report's findings:  The UN has led international condemnation of the CIA’s interrogation and detention programme laid bare by the Senate’s intelligence committee. Its special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights has called for the criminal prosecution of Bush-era officials involved.  

This is not what the United States is supposed to be about.  The report is an indictment of what happens when we allow fear to cloud our reasoning.  It's what happens when we allow a distorted sense of exceptionalism to destroy our democratic ideals and to refuse to grant "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind."  It looks like, for now at least,  there will be no prosecutions for these crimes. Thanks to Congressional interference, the infamous Guantanamo Bay prison remains open nearly six years after President Obama pledged to close it.  Nearly all of the 136 remaining prisoners are being held without charges.   And extrajudicial killings by US drones continue. Torture may have been stopped when Obama came into office but we have a long way to go.  Let's hope that making the report public will be seen as a beginning, a return to our country's true values.  This may require legislation from a soon-to-be-even-more-dysfunctional Congress since a future President would be able to reverse Obama's executive order.
Related
"From Bush to Obama, Eyes Wide Shut: the same memo Bush used to wall himself off from the details of CIA torture is keeping Obama’s drone war alive." [Foreign Policy, Dec. 12]
Sunday Round-Up - May 19, 2013  "Guest Op-Ed"

Ebola
The number of probable, confirmed and suspected deaths from the Ebola virus stood at 6,388 as of December 7.  The World Health Organization has declared the outbreaks in Nigeria and Senegal officially over. The number of reported cases is slightly increasing in Guinea but falling in Liberia, the country reporting the most deaths from the outbreak.  Health officials in Sierra Leone have discovered scores of bodies in a remote diamond-mining area, raising fears that the scale of the Ebola outbreak may have been underreported.  The World Health Organization said they uncovered a "grim scene" in the eastern district of Kono.  A WHO response team had been sent to Kono to investigate a sharp rise in Ebola cases.  [BBC News, Dec. 11]
Related
Time Magazine announced its person of the year award - very rightfully given to the local and international Ebola fighters, the men and women with "the hero's heart" who are fighting the disease at great personal risk.

Occupied Palestinian Territory
With the collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks earlier this year and after the widespread devastation and civilian death toll in Gaza during the Israeli attacks this summer, European states are beginning to seriously debate recognition of a Palestinian State.  As Richard Youngs writes in a post for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Considerable momentum has built up behind the idea that giving formal recognition to a Palestinian state is now the only way forward in attempts to reach some form of peace settlement.  The advantages of recognition would be many.  With formal recognition, the Palestinians could have the possibility of taking legal action against Israeli human rights abuses. Support could be given for the Palestinian Authority to join the International Criminal Court as a means of bringing legal cases against Israeli soldiers. Yet, crucially, debates on recognition will not be sufficient and we should not expect that they can address all current challenges.  One key area for Europe to rethink its current policy is that the EU must start to engage with Hamas. The EU appears to be counting on the Palestinian Authority regaining control of Gaza, but Hamas cannot simply be side-lined without risking major instability – that would set back the Palestinian cause even if formal statehood were recognised. Some form of engagement is necessary if the EU is to help the fragile unity government merge the different institutional structures of Gaza and the West Bank into a single political space.  Youngs warns that the EU must also focus on short-term imperatives to prevent another period of violence.  Recognition cannot become a pretext for European governments pulling back from a stronger engagement on the ground in the Occupied Territories.  

John Lennon
Last Monday marked the anniversary of the death of John Lennon.  Hard to believe it's been 34 years since the life of this peaceful, creative genius was snuffed out by a crazed gunman.  I was a young father then and remember well the huge gathering on the campus of Louisiana State University.  Our sons wandered through the friendly crowd while my wife and I listened to the musical tributes and remembered this great man who meant so much to our generation. "Imagine all the people living life in peace."  We could use some political leaders today that have the insight, consciousness and compassion of John Lennon.  We miss you, John.
Related
Hong Kong protesters to rebuild 'Lennon Wall' [Daily Mail, Dec. 12]

Lima Climate Conference 
Negotiators went into overtime and worked through Friday night trying to work out differences among the 195 countries attending the climate change conference in Lima, Peru, for the past two weeks.  As negotiations continued, National Geographic presented 5 takeaways:
1. The big question of whether the agreement will be binding is still unresolved.
2. Vulnerable countries want to be compensated for damage from global warming.
3. Environmental groups want a 100 percent phaseout of fossil fuels by 2050.
4. Many cities will start measuring their emissions.
5. The UN's Green Climate Fund has raised ten billion dollars.  The US commitment to the fund is 3 billion dollars but Republicans in Congress have attached a rider to the recently passed $1.1 trillion budget that would block the government from spending the money.
One of the key areas of contention is the divide between industrialized and developing nations.  The US and other industrialised countries require all countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions.  That would be a departure from the original UN classification of the 1990s – which absolved China, India and other developing countries which are now major carbon polluters – of cutting their emissions. Developing countries are suspicious that the text being developed in Lima is an attempt to rewrite those old guidelines.  [The Guardian, Dec. 12]  Times change and as countries become major carbon polluters, they need to recognize their obligations to join in the fight against global warming.  The recent bilateral agreement between the United States and China should serve as a model for a way forward.  This is the last major climate conference before the critical Paris conference in December, 2015 and the frustration with the draft text is widespread.  The proposals, still under discussion on Saturday, a day after the talks were scheduled to end, were too weak to keep global warming to the agreed limit of two degrees above preindustrial levels, setting the world on course to a climate disaster...“We are on a path to three or four degrees with this outcome,” said Tasneem Essop, international climate strategist for WWF.  She said the final draft text, a five-page document put forward for approval on Saturday, offered little assurance of cutting emissions fast enough and deeply enough to curb warming. [The Guardian, Dec. 13]

Mars

Depiction of a lake partially filling Mars' Gale Crater
Image Credit:NASA/JPL/ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/MSSS

Was life present on ancient Mars?  NASA’s Curiosity rover has found the strongest signs yet that the surface of Mars, roughly 4 billion years ago, had conditions that would’ve been almost ideal for the genesis of life. NASA says that Curiosity has found evidence to suggest that Gale Crater was once filled with lakes, rivers, and deltas that contained water for tens of millions of years — long enough that some small organisms could have emerged....The next step in the hunt for life on Mars is getting a better grip on the prevalence (or lack thereof) of organic compounds on the surface and in the atmosphere — and then actually digging down into the crust of the Red Planet, to look for actual signs of life, either in the form of fossils or actual living microorganisms.  [Extreme Tech, Dec. 9]
Related

"Could Ancient Mars Have Supported Life? Water Isn't the Only Key" [space.com, Dec. 11]

In Brief/Links

"China's Overhyped Debt Problem" [CEIP, Dec. 3]

"Brazil's President, Herself a Victim, Cries While Addressing Past Regime's Use of Torture" [Slate, Dec. 11]

"Hong Kong Occupy Protests Wind Down as Police Clear Camps" [Slate, Dec. 11]

Other Image Credits
John Lennon Quote is from the InkTank website.
Imagine Peace Tower, Reykjavick, Iceland is from the Imagine Peace website.

Mars Or Bust (Continued)

This is the second of two posts on the colonization of Mars.

We can overcome the technological challenges of getting humans to Mars. We can select the right kinds of people for a colony. But how do we make the venture self-sustaining? The costs of getting a person to Mars are untold times greater than sending an expedition across the Atlantic ocean to set up a  Jamestown colony or settling the American frontier with homesteaders. Obtaining the resources for self-sufficiency will require much development and innovation. Unless we want to limit the colony to billionaires who can pay the cost of their own ticket, government support will be needed. Since no single nation is prepared to prioritize these costs for the foreseeable future, the most likely case would involve an international cooperative effort.

Complementing this international, government-supported effort would be investments from private entrepreneurs willing to invest their capital for some share in the eventual long-term benefits. The emphasis here is on long-term.  Benefits from near-Earth asteroid mining, the first potential source of income, will take decades to become profitable. Likewise, a Martian colony will take decades to become self-sufficient. Among the first, and, according to Buzz Aldrin (Mission to Mars), imperative steps for the latter is in situ resource utilization (ISRU). ISRU projects would include "extraction and long-term storage of oxygen and/or hydrogen from available Martian resources..., hydrated minerals on the surface, and digging into Mars to utilize subsurface ice....[New] ISRU can be tapped, such as methane, perchlorates, and sulfur." The vision is to reduce the need for resupply missions by extracting from the Martian environment "water, oxygen, silicon, metals for life support, rocket fuels, and...construction materials."

The same long-term time frame holds for the technological spinoffs that will inevitably result. Looking back at the earlier space program, we see a slew of these spinoffs. Kidney dialysis machines, CAT scanners, advances in water purification technology, engine and exhaust dampening insulation, MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) technology, vacuum metallizing techniques, cordless power tools and appliances, and surface enhancement coatings are just some of the 1400 documented NASA inventions from the space program - primarily from the Apollo Missions. What innovations might we expect from the Mars project? Perhaps there will be innovations on how to grow crops with minimal fresh water, materials science advancements coming from combatting the high levels of radiation, new techniques for mineral extraction, processes for weather control, or inventions that we cannot even imagine now. [Space.com webpage] 

Another benefit noted in Mission to Mars is that Mars, with a surface area equivalent to the land area of Earth, makes possible a "second home for humankind....Not only is the survival of the human race then assured, but the ability to reach from Mars into the resource-rich bounty of the Martian satellites and the nearby asteroids is also possible."

How long all of this will take is anybody's guess. Eric Anderson, in James Fallows' April Atlantic article, estimated that in 30 to 60 years we would see an "an irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony". In 100 years the colony would "grow from a few thousand to a few million".  Science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson laid out another scenario in his Mars trilogy. Red Mars, written in 1993, had the first human colonists arriving on Mars in 2026. Green Mars had a thriving, terraformed Mars complete with plants in the early 22nd century. Then 100 years after that, in Blue Mars,terraforming had advanced to the point where liquid water - in the form of rivers and seas - could exist on the Martian surface.  Ben Bova also has written on the colonization of the solar system - starting with Mars - in his "Grand Tour" novels (1992-2009).   In Bova's chronology, the international project to colonize Mars gets underway in 2020 - 28 years from the publication of Mars.

Hmm...I'm beginning to see a trend here. Every time someone guesses at a time frame for the start of a Mars project, it's about a generation away -28 years (Bova), 30 years (Anderson, lower estimate), and 33 years (Robinson). It kind of reminds me of my former life as an engineer. As chemical plants would be starting up for the first time or restarting after a maintenance downtime, a critical step would be the startup of the "process compressor". No matter when you walked into the control room and asked when the compressor would be starting up, the answer was always "in about 3 hours". The good news is that the compressor and the plant always did eventually start up. Hopefully the same will happen with Mars.

 

 

 

Mars or Bust

 

Last week (May 6-8), George Washington University hosted the second annual "Humans2Mars" Summit.  Hundreds of scientists, astronauts, engineers and entrepreneurs gathered to discuss what it will take to get us to Mars. Manned space flight into the solar system has been dormant for decades - basically ever since the US beat the Soviets to the moon. Since then, no one seems to have had the energy, the imagination, or the resources to put together a program to get a human being beyond Earth orbit - not even to the moon.

The goal of the H2M conference was to address the major challenges that need to be overcome to send humans to Mars by 2030. Agenda topics included human and robotic precursor missions, science and engineering needed for the program, creating a viable space economy, agriculture and food production, biomedical challenges, international cooperation and other subjects. Among the many agenda topics were robotic and human precursor missions, launch systems, Mars transit challenges, space suit design, biomedical challenges, entry, descent and landing, in situ resource utilization, surface power, science goals, agriculture and food production, international cooperation, and creating a viable space economy. [Picture is from the NASA website. "This computer-generated view depicts part of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight, with an area including Gale Crater beginning to catch morning light."]

Well at least people are beginning to think about it. And it's not just limited to the H2M gang. The April issue of "The Atlantic Monthly" had an interview with Eric Anderson, the co-founder of Space Adventures and the head of two other companies including Planetary Resources, which plans to extract minerals from near-Earth asteroids. James Fallow's article was titled "Life on Mars". Anderson's vision is breath-taking: "In the next generation or two - say the next 30 to 60 years - there will be an irreversible human migration to a permanent space colony." He thinks the location of this permanent colony will be Mars and that it will grow within a hundred years from a few thousand people to a few million. Anderson considers economics to be the only real challenge - that technological and engineering solutions already are available. Mining the asteroids is the path he thinks will make the economics attractive.

Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, one of the featured speakers at H2M, has devised a master plan for missions to Mars – the “Aldrin Mars Cycler” – a spacecraft transportation system with perpetual cycling orbits between Earth and Mars. Aldrin explains the concept in his new book, Mission to Mars. The cycler would require a "substantially large vehicle that would provide radiation shielding and spacious quarters in order to guarantee the safety and comfort of outbound-to-Mars and inbound-to-Earth astronaut crews." The Aldrin Cycler would travel around the sun, making close flybys of Earth and Mars - a trajectory that is continuously repeated every two and a half years with astronauts boarding and disembarking the cycler via a "small but speedy space taxi". Taking advantage of Newton's Laws of Motion, the Cycler could shuttle continuously "without requiring a significant amount of propellant to keep on track." [Photo is of Buzz Aldrin on his moonwalk.  Buzz was the second man on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969.

Mission to Mars gives a comprehensive picture of the "Flexible Path architecture" for going to Mars. Flexible Path architecture combines a lunar strategy with near-Earth-asteroid-mining missions and uses the Martian moon Phobos as a way point to Mars. Aldrin suggests that "going to Mars means permanence on the planet. It cannot be run as a series of one-shot deals as were the moon landings - you know: fly there, plant a flag, take a picture and come home. Rather this will involve astronauts committing to "living out his or her life on the surface of Mars." As he points out: "Living far from Earth in a remote and confined will surely induce physiological and psychological stresses." Hmm, to say the least...it will also take a pioneering spirit beyond anything we have had on Earth during the Age of Exploration from the late fifteenth century on. Indeed the permanent residents of Mars will be homesteaders rather than explorers. In Aldrin's vision, they will employ in situ resource utilization to reduce the costs of resupply.

It's good that we dream these dreams. Without such, we will never move into the greater universe. But there is a practical side too - namely, the benefits Earth can derive from a permanent colony on Mars, which has, after all, a land mass equivalent to that of Earth.

(To be continued...)

 

Links

 

News article on H2M conference from space.com .

 

Humans2Mars Conference website

 

Space Adventures website: "the only company to have sent private citizens to space"

 

 

Anybody Out There?

After more than eight months in space, Curiosity has landed on Mars. As it continues its self-checks, it has been sending back stunning images of Earth's sister planet, such as this one from Mars' Gale Crater.

Besides its studies of Mars' climate and geology, Curiosity will be searching for evidence that Mars could at one time have been suitable for life.  Curiosity will also be gathering information necessary for a potential manned landing.

As of this moment, Earth is the only place in the universe that we know of where life exists. The odds that there is life somewhere out there are very high. Considering the vastness of space, the odds are also very high that intelligent life exists somewhere besides Earth. 

Still, after decades of searching, we have not found any other life,let alone other intelligent life. Physicist Enrico Fermi reportedly commented “...so where are they?” on the absence of any signs of other intelligent life in spite of the probability that such life exists.

I am not sure what would be the more awe-inspiring scenario – that we are totally alone in the vastness of this universe or that our galaxy is teeming with advanced technological civilizations. If we are indeed alone, then, as the only beings capable of looking into space-time and understanding it, we have an awesome responsibility. On the other hand, if Curiosity can provide definitive evidence that life existed at one time on Mars, then at least part of our burden is lifted. If life arose on two planets just in our solar system, then with billions of other solar systems out there, maybe life is not as rare and as fragile as it has seemed until now.

Besides the search for evidence of life or its possibility, the other special objective of the Curiosity mission is to gather information necessary for a manned mission to Mars – currently planned for 2030. Frankly, I am disappointed that we haven't already had a manned landing on Mars. It's been 43 years since man set foot on the Moon. It has been many years since the last manned Moon mission and since then, we have traveled nowhere else. If we spent less on weapons systems and war and more on space systems and exploration, we might have been there by now and the world would have been better off. A manned mission to Mars would be a truly heroic achievement – all the more so, if this could be done by an international team. It would engage the adventurous and scientific energies of mankind and we would be one step closer to making space exploration a reality.

So, here's wishing the best to our robotic envoy. Good luck, Curiosity.

Related

The Drake equation is the classical formula for calculating the probability of the existence of technological civilizations. It was presented in 1961 by astronomer/astrophysicist Frank Drake.

The equation is usually written:

N = R* • fp • ne • fl • fi • fc • L

Where,

N = The number of civilizations in The Milky Way Galaxy whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable. 

R* =The rate of formation of stars suitable for the development of intelligent life.

fp = The fraction of those stars with planetary systems.

ne = The number of planets, per solar system, with an environment suitable for life.

fl = The fraction of suitable planets on which life actually appears.

fi = The fraction of life bearing planets on which intelligent life emerges.

fc = The fraction of civilizations that develop a technology that releases detectable signs of their existence into space.

L = The length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

The factors that one plugs in are conjectural. Basically, you can get any answer you want to believe.

The authors of the Wikipedia entry on the Drake equation used maximum and minimum values that have been proposed in recent years for the factors in the equation. The answer ranged from a low of 8 x 10^-20 - i.e., not only are we alone in our galaxy, we may be alone in the whole universe – to a high of 182 million detectable civilizations! Hmm, that's no help.

In a 2007article in Cosmos Magazine , Tim Dean estimated a more useful range for N, the number of detectable civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy.  He calculated N to be between 0.00127 (As Dean writes: “To put that in perspective, it means that over a 100,000-year period, around 127 detectable civilisations will crop up but they may not overlap.") and 245 detectable civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy. 

Fermi's paradox is based on Fermi's “so where are they?” comment - the apparent contradiction between the high probability that intelligent life exists given the scale of the universe and the absolute lack of any evidence that it does exist elsewhere. The Wikipedia entry is excellent and I'll just summarize its theoretical answers to Fermi's paradox here. The arguments fall into one of two categories – there are few, if any, other technologically advanced civilizations or they do exist but we do not see the evidence.

Few, if any, other civilizations have arisen because...

• No other civilizations have ever arisen
• It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself
• It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others
• Life is periodically destroyed by natural events
• Human beings were created alone.
• There are many, many more young universes than old, Universes with civilizations will almost always have just one, the first to arrive. This argument is based on multi-verse theory.

They do exist but we see no evidence because...

• Communication is impossible due to problems of scale
• Communication is impossible for technical reasons
• They choose not to interact with us
• They are here but unobserved