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Ed Webb

New Mexico's Sad Bet on Space Exploration - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...554243

space dystopia utopias utopia future US USA desert

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • New Mexico spaceport is only the latest entry in a triumphant time line of military and aerospace innovation in this southwestern state. Our video narrator speeds through Spanish colonialism and westward expansion to highlight the Manhattan Project’s work in Los Alamos, to the north, and Operation Paperclip, a secret program that recruited German scientists to the United States after World War II. Among them was Wernher von Braun, who brought his V-2 rockets to the state.White Sands Missile Range, a 3,200-square-mile military-testing site in South Central New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin, hosted much of this work. It’s home to the Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, and von Braun’s rocket testing site, too. Spaceport America is positioned adjacent to the Army property, in a tightly protected airspace. That makes rocket-ship testing a lot easier.
  • “It feels exciting, it’s like the future is now,”
  • For now, the spaceport is a futurist tourist attraction, not an operational harbor to the cosmos. The tour buses depart from a former T or C community center twice a day every Saturday. They pass thrift stores, RV parks, and bland but durable-looking structures, defiant underdogs against the mountains. We pass the Elephant Butte Dam, a stunning example of early-20th-century Bureau of Reclamation engineering that made it possible for agriculture to thrive in southern New Mexico; even so, a fellow spaceport tourist notes that the water levels seem far lower than what he recalls from childhood
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  • The complex and its buildings vaguely recall a Southwest landmark frequently mistaken for the city of the future: Arcosanti, the architect Paolo Soleri’s 1970 “urban laboratory” nestled in the mountains north of Phoenix. It’s oddly fitting: Soleri imagined a sustainable desert utopia, as well as speculative space “arcologies”—self-sustaining architectural ecologies, delicately rendered as hypothetical asteroid-belt cities or prototype ships
  • The only spacecraft we see on the tour is a model of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, glimpsed from a distance in an otherwise empty hangar. Even the spacecraft isn’t real.
  • the name Spaceport America suggests theatrics. There are several commercial spaceports throughout the United States, some of which sport more activity and tenants. Most of Virgin Galactic’s testing has happened at the Mojave Air and Space Port; Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport recently signed on the SpaceX competitor Vector as a customer.Others, like Oklahoma’s Air and Space Port, seem to be even more like ghost towns than this one. But New Mexico’s gambit suggests we are at the spaceport of the nation. It doesn’t feel like the frontier of private space travel so much as a movie set.
  • Many promises for technologies of future urbanism start as desert prototypes
  • New Mexico examples tend to include slightly more dystopian rehearsals: Much of the state’s existing science and defense industries emerged from bringing Manhattan Project scientists to what, at the time, was the middle of nowhere to test nuclear weapons—essentially, to practice ending the world.
  • most of my fellow tourists take the premise of ubiquitous space travel to colonies on Mars as a fait accompli. I’m not sure why people in a desert would fantasize about going somewhere even harder to inhabit
  • Humanity dreams of going to space for many of the same reasons some people went to the desert: because it is there, because they hope to get rich extracting natural resources they find there, and because they suspect mysterious, new terrains can’t be any worse than the irredeemable wreckage of the landscape they’re leaving behind
  • believing in the inevitability of Mars colonies is maybe no less idealistic than believing in the Southwest itself
  • The romance and promise of the American West was built, in part, on federal land grants to private corporations that promised to bring boomtowns to places previously otherwise deemed uninhabitable wastelands. Cities rose and fell with the rerouting of railroads
  • To manifest destiny’s proponents, to doubt the inevitability of technological and social progress via the railroad was tantamount to doubting the will of God. Today, questioning the value of (mostly) privately funded space development likewise feels like doubting human progress
  • I wonder if the future always feels like rehearsal until it arrives, or if it is always rehearsal, only seeming like it has arrived when the run-through loses its novelty. Maybe all of the impatient skeptics will be proven wrong this year, and the future will finally arrive at Spaceport America. Here in the desert, a better future always seems to be right around the corner
Ed Webb

Saudi Crown Prince Asks: What if a City, But It's a 105-Mile Line - 0 views

earther.gizmodo.com/at-if-a-city-but-it-1846046352

KSA Saudi MBS cities environment future sustainability dystopia opinion

shared by Ed Webb on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Vicious Saudi autocrat Mohamed bin Salman has a new vision for Neom, his plan for a massive, $500 billion, AI-powered, nominally legally independent city-state of the future on the border with Egypt and Jordan. When we last left the crown prince, he had reportedly commissioned 2,300-pages’ worth of proposals from Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Co. and Oliver Wyman boasting of possible amenities like holographic schoolteachers, cloud seeding to create rain, flying taxis, glow-in-the-dark beaches, a giant NASA-built artificial moon, and lots of robots: maids, cage fighters, and dinosaurs.
  • Now Salman has a bold new idea: One of the cities in Neom is a line. A line roughly 105-miles (170-kilometers) long and a five-minute walk wide, to be exact. No, really, it’s a line. The proposed city is a line that stretches across all of Saudi Arabia. That’s the plan.
  • “With zero cars, zero streets, and zero carbon emissions, you can fulfill all your daily requirements within a five minute walk,” the crown prince continued. “And you can travel from end to end within 20 minutes.”AdvertisementThe end-to-end in 20 minutes boast likely refers to some form of mass transit that doesn’t yet exist. That works out to a transit system running at about 317 mph (510 kph). That would be much faster than Japan’s famous Shinkansen train network, which is capped at 200 mph (321 kph). Some Japanese rail companies have tested maglev trains that have gone up to 373 mph (600 kph), though it’s nowhere near ready for primetime.
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  • According to Bloomberg, Saudi officials project the Line will cost around $100-$200 billion of the $500 billion planned to be spent on Neom and will have a population of 1 million with 380,000 jobs by the year 2030. It will have one of the biggest airports in the world for some reason, which seems like a strange addition to a supposedly climate-friendly city.
  • The site also makes numerous hand wavy and vaguely menacing claims, including that “all businesses and communities” will have “over 90%” of their data processed by AI and robots:
  • Don’t pay attention to Saudi war crimes in Yemen, the prince’s brutal crackdowns on dissent, the hit squad that tortured journalist Jamal Khashoggi to death, and the other habitual human rights abuses that allow the Saudi monarchy to remain in power. Also, ignore that obstacles facing Neom include budgetary constraints, the forced eviction of tens of thousands of existing residents such as the Huwaitat tribe, coronavirus and oil shock, investor flight over human rights concerns, and the lingering questions of whether the whole project is a distraction from pressing domestic issues and/or a mirage conjured up by consulting firms pandering to the crown prince’s ego and hungry for lucrative fees. Nevermind you that there are numerous ways we could ensure the cities people already live in are prepared for climate change rather than blowing billions of dollars on a vanity project.
Ed Webb

Critic's Notebook - In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...26masdar.html

cities environment UAE future

shared by Ed Webb on 26 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • What Masdar really represents, in fact, is the crystallization of another global phenomenon: the growing division of the world into refined, high-end enclaves and vast formless ghettos where issues like sustainability have little immediate relevance. That’s obviously not how Mr. Foster sees it. He said the city was intended to house a cross-section of society, from students to service workers. “It is not about social exclusion,” he added. And yet Masdar seems like the fulfillment of that idea. Ever since the notion that thoughtful planning could improve the lot of humankind died out, sometime in the 1970s, both the megarich and the educated middle classes have increasingly found solace by walling themselves off inside a variety of mini-utopias. This has involved not only the proliferation of suburban gated communities, but also the transformation of city centers in places like Paris and New York into playgrounds for tourists and the rich. Masdar is the culmination of this trend: a self-sufficient society, lifted on a pedestal and outside the reach of most of the world’s citizens.
Ed Webb

Smartphones are making us stupid - and may be a 'gateway drug' | The Lighthouse - 0 views

lighthouse.mq.edu.au/...upid-and-may-be-a-gateway-drug

technology Neuroscience

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Sep 19 - Cached
  • rather than making us smarter, mobile devices reduce our cognitive ability in measurable ways
  • “There’s lots of evidence showing that the information you learn on a digital device, doesn’t get retained very well and isn’t transferred across to the real world,”
  • “You’re also quickly conditioned to attend to lots of attention-grabbing signals, beeps and buzzes, so you jump from one task to the other and you don’t concentrate.”
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  • Not only do smartphones affect our memory and our concentration, research shows they are addictive – to the point where they could be a ‘gateway drug’ making users more vulnerable to other addictions.
  • Smartphones are also linked to reduced social interaction, inadequate sleep, poor real-world navigation, and depression.
  • “The more time that kids spend on digital devices, the less empathetic they are, and the less they are able to process and recognise facial expressions, so their ability to actually communicate with each other is decreased.”
  • “Casino-funded research is designed to keep people gambling, and app software developers use exactly the same techniques. They have lots of buzzes and icons so you attend to them, they have things that move and flash so you notice them and keep your attention on the device.”
  • Around 90 per cent of US university students are thought to experience ‘phantom vibrations', so the researcher took a group to a desert location with no cell reception – and found that even after four days, around half of the students still thought their pocket was buzzing with Facebook or text notifications.
  • “Collaboration is a buzzword with software companies who are targeting schools to get kids to use these collaboration tools on their iPads – but collaboration decreases when you're using these devices,”
  • “All addiction is based on the same craving for a dopamine response, whether it's drug, gambling, alcohol or phone addiction,” he says. “As the dopamine response drops off, you need to increase the amount you need to get the same result, you want a little bit more next time. Neurologically, they all look the same.“We know – there are lots of studies on this – that once we form an addiction to something, we become more vulnerable to other addictions. That’s why there’s concerns around heavy users of more benign, easily-accessed drugs like alcohol and marijuana as there’s some correlation with usage of more physically addictive drugs like heroin, and neurological responses are the same.”
  • parents can also fall victim to screens which distract from their child’s activities or conversations, and most adults will experience this with friends and family members too.
  • “We also know that if you learn something on an iPad you are less likely to be able to transfer that to another device or to the real world,”
  • a series of studies have tested this with children who learn to construct a project with ‘digital’ blocks and then try the project with real blocks. “They can’t do it - they start from zero again,”
  • “Our brains can’t actually multitask, we have to switch our attention from one thing to another, and each time you switch, there's a cost to your attentional resources. After a few hours of this, we become very stressed.” That also causes us to forget things
  • A study from Norway recently tested how well kids remembered what they learned on screens. One group of students received information on a screen and were asked to memorise it; the second group received the same information on paper. Both groups were tested on their recall.Unsurprisingly, the children who received the paper version remembered more of the material. But the children with the electronic version were also found to be more stressed,
  • The famous ‘London taxi driver experiments’ found that memorising large maps caused the hippocampus to expand in size. Williams says that the reverse is going to happen if we don’t use our brain and memory to navigate. “Our brains are just like our muscles. We ‘use it or lose it’ – in other words, if we use navigation devices for directions rather than our brains, we will lose that ability.”
  • numerous studies also link smartphone use with sleeplessness and anxiety. “Some other interesting research has shown that the more friends you have on social media, the less friends you are likely to have in real life, the less actual contacts you have and the greater likelihood you have of depression,”
  • 12-month-old children whose carers regularly use smartphones have poorer facial expression perception
  • turning off software alarms and notifications, putting strict time limits around screen use, keeping screens out of bedrooms, minimising social media and replacing screens with paper books, paper maps and other non-screen activities can all help minimise harm from digital devices including smartphones
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