Well maybe that is an over reaction but I sent them the following Letter to the Editor, and the conservative twirps did not even acknowledge that they received it. Since the new owners took over they have started running op eds by Walter “the madman” Williams from George Mason (alleged) University, that is about as right wing as you can get.

Editor

State Journal Register

One Copley Plaza

Springfield, IL 62701

Emailed – 9/17/07

Dear Editor:

Your Stanford Levin op-ed piece was incredibly deceptive and disingenuous. He says, “Let the Markets decide” about whether we burn ethanol or foreign produced oil as gasoline. Those self same markets are killing us and killing our country. The reason for this is that the markets are wedded to the internal combustion engine that simply BURNS up resources. We have done just about all the burning that we can do in this country.

How nice it would have been, if during his tenure on the ICC from 1984-86, he had advocated a move away from burning coal in power plants and increased efficiency trucks. Instead he continued the passive dependence on coal and gasoline, which has led us to global warming. If he had shown courage 23 years ago and demanded stringent efficiencies in the coal fired power plants that he regulated and a shift to power plants that burn natural gas he may have done some good. If he insisted that those utility companies invest in wind and solar portfolios then Illinois would lead the United States in those power sources but instead we have broken down, and leaking Nuclear power plants.

Yet Dr. Levin wants to trot out the old Ronald Reagan saw one more time and say, “Let the markets decide”. Deregulation has been nothing short of an economic disaster for the middle and lower classes. But, that is nothing compared to the environmental disaster that this country has been exposed to as a result. The North Pole is melting and Dr. Levin wants to make some telling point about which fuel source we should burn, biodiesal or gasoline. BAAAA (wrong answer) The answer is we should not be burning either and the MARKET will never give us that answer. Are we to wait another 23 years, while the captains of industry are driving huge ocean going vessels through their “Northwest Passage” and Russia is drilling on the artic floor before we blow the whistle and end the play?

Sorry Dr. Levin, but as you should have realized in 1984 the markets require hard regulation before they ever respond. The internal combustion engine is obsolete and you could have helped us move away from it. You did not. Join us at www.censys.org or call 629-7031. Community Energy Systems plans on helping Illinois move to a non-Burning future.

Doug Nicodemus

948 e. adams st.

riverton, IL  62561

629-7031

dougnic55@yahoo.com

In “The Relativety of Wrong” he argues in one essay that it’s easy to see that there are DEGREES of being wrong. He uses a very simple example to make his point. There are two historical views of the Earth. One is that it is flat, and one is that it is round. Neither is right. The Earth is a spheroid. Kinda bulgey in the middle and tapered at the top. But which one is less wrong? Obviously, that the Earth is round is, “pretty nearly true”.

Apparently, in the same volume of essays he had pretty much come to the same conclusion about space travel as depicted in much of science fiction, that faster than light travel was as wrong as the flat Earth explanation of the shape of the planet. In other words there are people who say we should not be messing around with manned space travel because it produces no useful results. They argue that we should be using sophisticated and cheap probes to explore the solar system and beyond. That we as a people should be concentrating on making life better on this planet instead.

The science fiction oriented people argue that we must continued with manned exploration. Moving us further out in the colonization of the solar system, while developing ever new and new space craft. In the process many believe we will find away around the “Speed of Light” problem and launch for the stars. Their first goal is to replace the Space Shuttle, set up building operations on the moon and get ready for a try at Mars.

Asimov flatly asserts in an article in 1987 that we must spend 100 years developing a space infrastructure and space travelers who are aclimated to zero G’s on the moon.

Their most ambitious project? A manned mission to Mars with a two-nation crew, a collaboratively built ship, and the goal of planting both the Stars and Stripes and the Hammer and Sickle on the surface of the Red Planet.

Understandably, the idea had imme­diate appeal. Who could argue with an undertaking that would double the talent pool of both nations’ space programs, halve the costs, and, not incidentally, speed the recent thaw between Moscow and Washington?

But hold on. The proposal does have a flaw. It’s possible that the first people on Mars should be neither Americans nor Soviets. Indeed, it’s possible they shouldn’t be people from Earth at all. Rather they should be moon people. Let me explain.

HE GOES ON TO SAY THAT ON THE MOON WE WOULD BUILD AS SOLAR SYSTEM VEHICLE THAT WOULD BE REUSABLE, AND TECHNOLGY AND THE PHYSIQUE FOR LIVING IN SPACE.

What is needed instead is not a one­time sprint to a nearby planet, but a slow, patient expansion away from Earth; a long-term program—perhaps taking a century to complete—that would equip us not just for a single interplanetaryjoyride but for the coordinated explore-‘ tion of the deep solar system.

The first thing a long-term Soviet-American space program would need, of course, would be a base from which to launch its vessels. We have any number of sites on Earth, but our planet is nol truly satisfactory. Escape velocity from Earth is 7 miles per second; that makes lift-off difficult. There are only foui bodies in the solar system—the sun. Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune—with a tighter gravitational grip and a highei escape velocity. Then, too, Earth has an atmosphere and weather. Storms in­hibit launches, and even clear air offers resistance.

What we need is a place that is alto­gether otherworldly, a celestial bodi that,  though sizable,  is  lighter thai Earth, with a lower escape velocity, ll would also be convenient if that bod\ had no atmosphere. As a kindly fate has it, our closest astronomical neighbor ii ideally suited for this. It is the moon which has a diameter of 2,160 miles, at escape velocity of but 1.5 miles pa second, and barely a wisp of atmo sphere.   Less  than a quarter-milliot miles away, it can be reached

with pres ent rockets in just three days. It’s asi we’d spent decades launching our ship from some stormy, rock-strewn pon only to discover that all along there: been a smooth-as-glass harbor just a fev miles down the cosmic coast.

Fine. So let’s dust off the old moot ships, fly our engineers to the Sea t Tranquility, and build ourselves a luw Canaveral.

HE BELIEVES  THAT  THE FOLLOWING PROCESS WOULD LEAVE US PREPARED TO EXPLORE AND COLONIZE THE SOLAR SYSTEM OVER THE NEXT 1000 YEARS. REPEAT OVER 1000 YEARS!

Once we reached the moon, there would be no limit to the ways in which we could use its resources. The moon is a world with a surface area equal to that of North and South America put together. From its raw materials we can get a large variety of metals, concrete, glass, and oxygen. In fact, a moon base that in­cluded mining stations would supply everything we would need for construc­tion except water and the light elements: carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen. These would come from Earth.

Using the moon as our source of raw materials and Earth as a reservoir of talent and technology, the space be­tween Earth and the moon could be filled with any number of support structures —solar energy stations, nuclear energy stations, observatories, and laborato­ries. Even some of Earth’s industrial plants could be put into orbit, to take advantage of the unusual properties of space (vacuum, microgravity, extreme temperatures) that facilitate manufac-

20     DISCOVER • JANUARY • 1988

 turing. What’s more, the waste products the factories put out could be much better disposed of in the vastness of space than in Earth’s fragile and finite biosphere. To service and populate all these facilities, space settlements— each holding thousands of people— could be built, designed to mirror Earth’s environment as closely as possible.

Ideally this extension of the human range should be global, operated not just by the United States and the Soviet Union but by the world at large. In fact, as the moon and the space settlements became more populous, international control could be loosened, and the new worlds could become regional self-gov­erning units of an Earth-Space Union.

It may take five generations or more to flesh out such a system, but only then would we be ready to make the most of the next major step: a trip to Mars.

When that project finally did get un­der way, the best thing for the Earth people to do would be to step back and leave it to the space people to make the journey. Space settlers would be much more accustomed to the idea of space flight, much more accustomed to low and varying gravity, much more accus­tomed to living inside a world rather then on it.

The moon couldbecome o new Canaveral, a spring board to the planets.

They would be much more aware of the need for resource control and tight recycling of such necessities as air and water. When the colonists reached Mars, they would find it rich in the light ele­ments. Using these along with the re­sources available from the moon, the Mars settlers, moon settlers, and space settlers could soon become independent of Earth for raw materials. Such economic independence would help speed the next phase of expansion —out to the asteroid belt where hun­dreds of thousands of small worlds exist, many of which could be carved into settlements or used for further mining operations. And these asteroid settle­ments—once equipped with advanced propulsive mechanisms operating like giant outboard motors—might them­selves be steered into the vast expanses of the outer solar system or beyond the solar system altogether. No one making these long trips would be conscious of. having left home, for they would be taking home along with them. The process of migration and settlement could stretch out over millennia, but what’s the rush? Rather than racing into a symbolic, onetime visit to Mars! We should perhaps contemplate this  slow exploration of the galaxy, by a process very much like the dispersal of  dandelion seeds by a helpful wind.

So he is basically saying that both the stay-at-homers and the go-far-and-fast crowds are both wrong. But in that telling essay that I can not find he believes the far-and-fast crowd are wrong and fraudulant as well. In other words really really wrong. More on that in the last blog on the subject I hope.

Demolisher of myths / Review of ‘The Relativity of Wrong’ By Isaac Asimov

• 08 April 1989
• From New Scientist Print Edition. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.
• JOHN EMSLEY

Asimov also disposes of another popular myth – that one day we will journey to the stars. Here he is tampering with something that might have been better left alone. He quietly knifes the idea in the back, and thereby murders much popular culture on which today’s young people are raised. Space travel is possible between the planets of the Solar System, but that is all. Whatever probe we launch from planet Earth into the cosmos will get nowhere. It will slowly come to rest between here and the next star. A manned spacecraft would suffer the same fate.

Only if we use antimatter as a fuel can we make a return trip to the nearest star, and that form of energy is likely to remain forever beyond our grasp. In any case, the effort would never justify the visit; our intrepid voyagers, or their descendants, would not arrive back before AD 50 000.

Because we can never visit another star, so we can never be visited by aliens from another Solar System. Another chunk of popular science folklore bites the dust. Space travel is a meaningless phrase. Star Wars, Star Trek, and a lot of science fiction suddenly seems merely silly. Asimov you’re a spoilsport!

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg12216594.200.html

The above is not the actual essay where Asimov accuses certain science fiction writers like Roddenberry and George Lucas to only pick on some of the best writers of thousands who have used the device of “suspension of expectations” to peddle their tales involving rapid travel through space. Though the writers vary in their ease of such travel. Many argued that such travel will come with travail, like spice addiction in the Navigators in Dune, or being frozen in Aliens, or even having everyone you know die because it takes so long. BUT still you could DO it. In others all you had to say was, “Make it so” or “Engage” and off you went to distant worlds filled with interesting, sometimes intellegent, sometimes hostile Life Forms

Why is this interesting?

Well one the original essay is in a book where Asimov argues that there are different degrees of being wrong.

Two he is pointing out that the space travel idiom was not just wrong but really really wrong.

Three that myth of space travel has an immense impact on our culture.

BUT, most important for me, it speaks to why the “environmental movement” still struggles to try to save the planet when it is pretty much on the way out of existence right now. Amazingly enough just 10 years earlier Asimov was actually expousing the opposite view. He said then:

Faster than Light 

One other impossibility that equals it  (time travel..note added) as a science fiction essential is “superluminal” (“faster than light”) travel. Without superluminal travel, sci­ence fiction writers are confined to the Solar system. It is only routine superluminality that makes galactic empires, and such things as interstellar warfare, really practical.

There is this difference between time travel and superluminal travel, however. I imagine that most people are willing to think of time travel as essentially fantasy, but to consider superluminal travel as fantasy seems to annoy, and even enrage, a large fraction of the s.f. readership. Why isn’t superluminal travel possible? What is so magic about the speed of light? Surely, if you keep accelerating long enough and hard enough, you are bound to “break the light barrier.”

AND WHAT FOLLOWS IS AN ELIGANT MATHMATICAL PROOF THAT YOU CAN NOT GO FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT. AND HE CONCLUDES THE MATHMATICAL DISCUSSION BY SAYING:

Please note, however, that the mass has been increasing at a faster and faster rate as the speed increases.

The more mass an object has, the less it can be made to accelerate in response to a given force. A force applied to an object moving at 260,000 kilometers per second (and therefore with twice its rest mass) will produce only half the acceleration that that force would have produced if it had been applied to the same object when it was at rest. As an object speeds up under a constant force, its mass increases ever more rapidly and its speed increases ever more slowly. The mass increase predominates, so that momentum and kinetic energy continue to increase more rapidly even though speed increases more slowly.

By the time we reach a speed of 290,000 kilometers per second (97 percent of the speed of light), the mass of the moving body is 3.892 kilograms, almost four times the original mass. At 295,000 kilometers per second (98.3 percent of the speed of light—if that is taken at the slightly incorrect 300,000 kilometers per second figure), 5.52 kilograms; at 299,000 kilometers per second (99.7 percent of the speed of light), 12.22 kilograms; at 299,999 kilometers per second (99.9997 percent of the speed of light) 383.5 kilograms.

At the speed of light itself, if that could be reached, the mass would be infinite—as would be the momentum and the kinetic energy.

A faster speed is impossible because neither mass, momentum, nor ki­netic energy can be more than infinite. Besides, at infinite mass, no force, however great, can produce any acceleration, however small, so the speed cannot increase. —So the speed of light is the limit that cannot be passed.

AND YET HE CONCLUDES THE PIECE BY SAYING:

Ways of evading that limit (tachyons, black holes, hyper-space) have been suggested, but all involve phenomena concerning which we 

can only speculate, and in favor of which there is no observational evidence whatever. Nevertheless, superluminal travel cannot and will not be abandoned in science fiction. Certainly, I will never abandon it.

SORT OF ENDING WITH A TEHEE TEHEE AS HE DID MANY OF HIS ESSAYS.

In 1989, or there abouts, I read an essay in Discover Magazine by Isaac Asimov titled Science Fiction has Created False Expectations. Or something like that. I am embarrassed that I cannot find it but I have tried and (to recreate Dave Barry I swear I am not making this up) I couldn’t find it. If I had the damn essay I could just (copy) BLATT! it up here or (cut) BAMM! a paragraph here and move on like Batman. But I don’t so I am going to have to paraphrase it here – really Asimov was a better writer – and keep looking.

Paraphrase begins{: He said that the older science fiction writers were deeply tied to emerging technology and the laws of physics (Clark, Heinlen, etc.) He argued that many of the modern science fiction writers were using a plot device, “the suspension of expectations”; to promise things in print that science would never be able to produce. His big complaint was space travel over large areas in short time periods with relative ease. (Star Trek, you name it, etc.) He argued that faster than the speed of light wasn’t possible. That just getting to Mars was going to be dangerous, expensive and slow. He concluded that such “science fiction” writing was fraud and had raised expectations so high in what we call the boomer generation that it would damage real space exploration for generations. :} Paraphrase ends

When I first read that, and I will find it, I thought well this is just an old guy fulminating about the younger generation of writers embellishing on themes that he himself had laid down. But the essay stuck with me. When we struggled to build a space station, I revisited the essay in my mind a 2nd time and thought well, in a way he was right but FRAUD? And as the years passed I thought well this is getting “righter”. We are after all still not comfortable settling the Moon and Mars is not even an option. As one chunk of science fiction morphed into cowboy movies like Star Wars and another chuck of science fiction took a bent towards desperate fantasy like Deep Space 9 where wormholes are actually posited as a means of travel I began to get his drift. But it was not until I thought (a 3rd reconsideration) about what his essay meant for the environment that I began to understand his harsh criticism. I mean the charge FRAUD is usually reserved for those who make things while claiming to be telling the truth. Like if you claim you have performed cold fusion in a test tube. That seemed to me way over the top at the time but now I think I understand

.

I always understood why people from the 30’s to the 50’s had a hard time accepting the idea of stewardship for the Earth as mandatory. There were so few of them and they were raised to burn just about everything they could get their hands on. One could just move on to another unpolluted space, there were no real immediate consequences. Towards the end of their lives many of them told me it was up to there children and grandchildren to “solves these problems” through new technology undreamed of in their day. But I never understood why so many people born in the 60’s through the 90’s did not understand that stewardship of the Earth was our Number One Job. I understand that a lot of the green house gasses are odorless and tasteless but when the Rhine caught on fire and Los Angeles’ air turned orange you don’t have to be an “environmentalist” to think that something is wrong.

Why hadn’t people got the idea that this little planet all alone in a solar system on the outer edge of a minor galaxy far from the center of the universe was to be cherished and enriched? It was because the sad truth that Earth is all we got was too threatening to our current economic systems. If this truth was ever realized by the people here now all that manufacturing and assembly of stuff would become irrelevant. But also the idea that we would “be out of here” to other planets fit right in to the tribal expectations that lead to us burning things in the first place.