Day: October 12, 2020

Categories
Narrative

Of Resilience and Antifragility

When Autumn had talked with Lou Corlin, she’d expected that it would take a while to get the data, if it was even possible. IT had a lot of work on its plate already, and this job was more a matter of curiosity. So it was better to spend the time developing some contacts in the Astronomy department so she could follow up on Sprue’s lead without having to out him as the leak.

Being a proctor down at the testing center did give her one advantage — she already had established contacts with plenty of research scientists up here. Even if they weren’t in the Astronomy department, most of them had working relationships with people there. So much of science these days was heavily interdisciplinary, and Shepardsport was still small enough that it was more like a small town.

She’d just finished talking with a physicist who’d immediately started geeking out on her about his specialty, magnetohydrodynamics. From what she could extract, it had definite applicability to the Sun, and to stars in general, which had gotten his name on a number of astronomy papers as a contributing author. However, most of his knowledge was sufficiently technical that she’d been hard-pressed to make heads or tails of it. Sure, she had the general astronomy classes everyone up here had to take, but it sure didn’t give her the background to really grasp it.

So she’d decided to take a break and stretch her legs. As news director, she was salaried and didn’t have to worry about being on the clock like the hourly employees.

As she stepped out of the station’s front door, she saw Ken Redmond and Steffi Roderick walking down the main Engineering corridor, talking in low voices. Assuming it was something private, she turned the other direction, only to have Steffi call out her name.

“I was going to drop this off with Maia, but since you’re here, I thought I’d give it to you in person.”

It was a USB stick. “Um, thanks. I gather this is some data I’ve asked for.”

“The project you’d approached Lou about, related to Internet connectivity and how it has degraded since the beginning of the pandemic. I had some of our programmers write up a script to systematically ping IP addresses all across the system. I did some preliminary statistical analysis on it, and yes, there are definitely patterns in it. From the looks of it, we’ve lost whole regions. Some of them were to be expected, in countries where the tech base was always fragile, but we’ve had some surprising ones, especially in Western Europe. However, the US is holding together better than would be expected, although from some of the response times, we may be looking at a lot of jerry-rigged connections.”

Ken was nodding in agreement. “Not surprising. The Internet was originally a Defense Department project to create a decentralized communications system that would hold together even if numerous major cities were destroyed in a nuclear attack. Just like the old Timex watches, it takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”

Categories
Document

Farmer on the Moon

In the earliest days of lunar exploration, the astronauts brought all their consumables with them. Food came in the form of dehydrated meals which could be reconstituted by injecting them with water, a byproduct of their spacecraft’s fuel cells. Although these meals were a substantial improvement over the earliest space foods, which the Mercury astronauts squirted into their mouths from packets resembling tubes of toothpaste, they still left much to be desired in terms of palatability. Furthermore, the necessity of lifting every gram of mass out of Earth’s deep gravity well made it less and less practical the longer missions became.

By the time of the Phase B prep mission for the Venus Flyby, it was obvious that there was simply no way to carry a year’s worth of food with the spacecraft. Because the Phase B mission was still in Earth orbit, albeit much higher altitude than the Phase A mission, it would be possible to resupply them via automated spacecraft. However, to do so for the actual Venus Flyby would require the automated spacecraft to be launched into solar orbits that would intercept Aphrodite. While this was feasible, there was the risk that a launch failure would result in the astronauts facing starvation.

As a result, it was decided to have the Phase B astronauts run tests on the possibility of growing at least some of their own food. Much to the scientists’ surprise, it turned out that plants actually handled microgravity better than the astronauts who were raising them. Several species of edibles actually flourished in the Ishtar spacecraft, to the point they ended up supplying a reasonable amount of the astronauts’ diet near the end of the mission.

When the American moonbase was set up, the planners knew from the beginning that long-term occupation would require not only a closed-cycle environmental system, but also in-situ resource utilization, including using lunar materials to grow a substantial amount of the astronauts’ food. Given the constraints on pressurized volume and on astronaut time, even these early lunar farms were designed to maximize the yield per unit volume and relied heavily on automation, including but not limited to automatic drip irrigation.

As processors, chipsets and software improved, the robots involved in agriculture became steadily more capable. However, the complexities of dealing with living things are such that fully autonomous operation was almost never possible, requiring at least some level of teleoperation.

—- O. Jespersen, Agricultural Robotics and the Space Race, Grissom City: St. Selene Digital Press, 2028.