Skinny Dipping in the Adirondacks

When I was a young boy we used to go hiking in the Adirondacks. My father would sling an ax over his shoulder and my mother and her three boys would set out on an adventure in the mountains.

We would come across leantoos. This is basically a wooden shack with a roof and one side open to the elements. It was shelter provided by the park service. We’d set up camp and spend the night.

Leantoo in the Adirondack Mountains, New York State.
Typical leantoo in the Adirondack Mountains.

I was the youngest of three boys and although these were really cool adventures, my brothers were 8 and 10 years older than me, so I used to complain a lot about all the walking.

Some of the places we visited had water falls and pools of deep, cold and fresh water. Because nobody thought to bring bathing suits, they went skinny dipping.

Now, don’t try. They’re watching from the sky.

Specialized spy satellites that can photograph things as small as a fist are flying above us. I can even see the junk in my backyard by searching Google Earth, and word is the governments have even better satellites flying at over 17,000 mph about 200 miles above.

Weird Things Happening

Some weird stuff is going on. Dark stuff.

We can look out and calculate that galaxies are spinning too fast and should fly apart but they don’t. So we think there’s too much gravity.

And so we came up with the notion there’s some invisible undetectable stuff called dark matter making up more than 96% of the universe.

Also weird is this lensing effect astronomers see, caused, they suppose, by said dark matter.

Yet we haven’t seen it directly nor detected it even though it should be all around us.

As I said. Pretty weird stuff going on. Leaves plenty of mystery in science.

Build a Vehicle that could park in your garage but fly into orbit?

This would be so cool. Everyone would want one, even if they couldn’t afford it. But is the concept possible?

Well, the short answer is no. It’s not possible.

To understand that “no” requires a little bit of understanding in orbitology.

You see height is not the only problem when you want to stay up in space. If you want to stay up there for sometime you’ll need to be in orbit. To get in orbit you’ve got to go really, really fast – like around 17,000 mph fast.

That’s because an orbit simply put is when an object is going so fast in one direction that as it falls it misses the planet. You’ve got to be going a lot faster than a speeding bullet.

So if you had a vehicle in your garage that could not only fly like a plane, but could continue to fly above the atmosphere and get going 17,000 mph, then you\d be bad ass.

But you can’t and you won’t, because to do all that takes a lot of fuel. That’s why we have these big ol’ rockets boosting satellites and astronauts into space. Those big ol’ rockets are filled with fuel. Once the fuel is expended then the big ol’ rocket isn’t needed anymore and it’s detached to fall back to Earth.

So sadly, the idea of having a small shuttle that you park in your garage and fly into space is just not going to happen. Ever. Sorry!

Will Trump be Re-elected in 2020?

No president of the United States can serve in office for more than 10 years. That means a sitting president can be re-elected for a second term

Polls show that Donald Trump’s approval rating has gone down to around 35%. The polls indicate voters don’t like him. So that should tell us he won’t serve a second term.

But my head still hurts just how badly the predictions of 2016 went south. Hillary Clinton was regarded as the candidate to win the election by an impressive margin. The New York Times gave her a very wide chance of success, even though as the night progressed it became obvious the two candidates switched sides and Trump won by a wide margin of electoral votes.

Since then I’ve become a critic of polls. They obviously don’t work.

Would you want to die on Mars (just not on impact)?

Woah. What an interesting question with far reaching repercussions!

Built into this simple question are numerous assumptions!

For example, would I want to go to Mars, and the answer to that is no.

Would I want to die on Mars? No. I don’t want to die at all, but when I do it will be on Terra.

Would I travel to Mars? No. I think we should go back to the Moon and colonize that before we even think of going to Mars.

Will we ever colonize Mars? I don’t think so. I think people will walk on Mars and do experiments, but I do not think Mars will ever be populated by humans.

What are we missing logistically to be able to colonize on Mars?

Great question: “What are we missing logistically to be able to colonize on Mars?|

  • A breathable atmosphere.
  • Nitrogen in the soil to grow stuff (there is none)
  • Temperature range (presently it goes below a hundred degrees below zero).
  • Lack of an organized magnetic field to protect people from the sun.
  • A thin atmosphere equivalent to living way above mount everest on Earth.
  • It’s a long, long far far away. The moon is better.

Why do you think we should even consider colonizing Mars? We can’t even colonize our own planet successfully what to speak of Mars!

Why might there be no life in other planets that are located in the Goldilocks Zone?

If you ascribe to various religions, then because God created life on Earth, not elsewhere.

Aside from the religious connotation, we haven’t found evidence of even a fossilized microbe from another planet to date. In fact, there is no proof life exists anywhere else other than Earth.

Now for those of us who prefer science, it’s likely life does exist somewhere else. We just can’t prove it yet. If we could prove it, then it would challenge the theory of creationism.

Can we “Bleed” Venus’s atmosphere as a way to terraform it?

Venus is Earth’s sister planet. It has almost the same size and gravity as Earth.

As you know, the Venus atmosphere is extremely harsh. So bleeding into space would be one way to make the planet more friendly to people.

The one big thing about Venus is that it’s atmosphere is way thicker than Earth’s. There’s no known technology that could somehow siphon all the air from Venus and send it adrift in space anymore than we could siphon all our CO2 on Earth into space.