Category: anonradio

What do Leopold and Loeb have to do with space settlement? Perhaps more than I am at all comfortable with. Most of this show has to do with immigration and emigration, and the concept of space settlements as Petri dishes for testing new ideas in human societies. I also take the opportunity to remind everyone that coal kills, and firms investing in fossil–fuel infrastructure are counting on “renewables” to not interfere with their business. But at least I have a new office chair.

• Archive Recording
• 2022 ASFO Masterpost
• A Step Farther Out Masterpost
• Previous Week
• Following Week

Supplementary Shows

• 2022–10–18 The central place of biodynamic research in space activities is explored, with an extract from a 1961 paperback entitled Man Into Space, penned by journalist, novelist, and aviator Martin Caidin. In addition to attempting to explain weightlessness and orbital mechanics in simplified terms for the interested layman, our author gives us extended quotations from John Paul Stapp and Joseph Kittinger, two pioneers in the field, who put their own lives at risk for the sake of science.
• 2022–10–21 I read from another ephemeral journalistic book about space travel, Flight Into Space (1953) by JN Leonard, science editor of Time magazine. There is a vivid description of a rocket launch at White Sands, framed as some kind of sacrificial ritual conducted by witch–doctors or barbaric priests masquerading as scientists and technicians, and a chapter in which Milton Rosen of the Naval Research Laboratory (head of the closest thing America had at the time to a civilian space program, Project Viking, which became Project Vanguard) explains how any attempt to realize proposals of the sort put forward by Wernher von Braun would lead, not only to inevitable failure, but also to the collapse of the US economy, and Soviet victory in the Cold War. Unfortunately, the archive bot glitched, and only recorded parts of it, which you can get here and here. (Ultimately, I re–read it.)

You too can receive propaganda by mail! Whatever else I originally meant to talk about, I got distracted by Green hypocrisy and disingenuousness, in Ireland (where ten people were killed in the accidental explosion of a petrol station), in British Columbia (where the government recently announced ambitious “climate targets”, in conjunction with the Pacific Coast states of the USA, despite its continued pursuit of an immense and economically questionable gas scheme), and elsewhere. Also I mention how my uncompromising committment to whatever–this–is attracted the attention of some very serious law enforcement types. And in the last couple of minutes I start talking about emigration to space settlements, which may be the theme of next week’s show.

• Archive Recording
• 2022 ASFO Masterpost
• A Step Farther Out Masterpost
• Previous Week
• Following Week

Supplementary Show

2022–10–14 Some selections from the 1967 Winter number (“Vol 3 No 25”) of Canute, house magazine of “The Nuclear Power Group Limited”, from Knutsford, England. Tidal Power in Tomorrow’s World by TL Shaw, Lecturer in Civil Engineering, University of Bristol, discusses the possible development of the Severn Estuary for power and transportation. Then Doing the Easy Bit… in which an architect identified only as “EJB” discusses the troubles of his job ; and a description of the Hunterston B power station, for which the contract was placed on Friday, October the 13th of that year ― which is to say, 55 years before the date of reading, almost exactly to the day. Hunterston B, a two reactor–station of the AGR type, went into operation in 1976 and was shut down at the beginning of 2022, after a lifetime generation of 287 terawatt–hours. Although it was the third AGR station to be ordered, it entered commercial operation years before the first (Dungeness B) and some months before the second (Hinkley Point B, also built by TNPG).

Cheers for the Double Asteroid Redirection Test and the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University! Also, I test the Watermelon Hypothesis (“Green on the outside, Red on the inside”) and find it wanting. In particular, personal experience leads me to believe that life in a solar–powered city would be far more socially unequal, and far less pleasant, than in a nuclear–powered one.

• Archive Recording
• 2022 ASFO Masterpost
• A Step Farther Out Masterpost
• Previous Week
• Following Week