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Carrion Luggage
Carrion Luggage
 
Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem.
This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it.
It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans.
It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier."
I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination.
September 18, 2025 at 9:54am September 18, 2025 at 9:54am
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I've talked about the possibility of Mars colonization before. But I'm pretty sure not based on this Vox article, because it's from just last month.
Elon Musk wants a self-sustaining settlement on Mars as a backup for humanity in case the Earth gets destroyed. Jeff Bezos wants us to move heavy industry and all polluting industries to space to save Earth’s climate, and envisions a trillion humans living in space.
Thus showing once again that you don't have to be smart to accumulate wealth. Just lucky.
Mars, for all its flaws — and there are many, including radiation, dust storms, and unbreathable air — is the only planet in our solar system that’s a candidate for settlement.
I shared an article here recently that proposed Titan. Even so, point stands; Titan is a moon.
The rest of today's link is a transcription of a podcast discussion with Adam Becker, who wrote a book, and so this is actually an ad for that book.
Incidentally, "podcast" is going into my list of anachronyms, along with "filming" for making a video, and "footage" for the resulting video.
Mars is a horrible idea. Mars is a terrible place; it’s awful. There’s nothing to breathe. You’ll die of cancer if you hang out there for too long because it’s covered in radiation. The dirt is poisoned. The gravity’s too low. It gets hit with asteroids more often than Earth does. There’s no biosphere. There’s nothing to eat. There’s nothing to breathe. If you hung out on the surface of Mars without a spacesuit, you would asphyxiate while the saliva boils off your tongue.
Also, it ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact, it's cold as hell. (Okay, no, Elton John was wrong there. Sure, a lot of it is cold as hell. But its surface can occasionally reach around 60F, which is cold to me, but not cold as hell.)
When I was a kid, I thought that the future was in space. I watched a lot of Star Trek because I’m a huge nerd, and a young growing nerd needs to consume healthy amounts of Star Trek in order to grow up to be a big, strong nerd.
Now that's poetry right there.
Mars is awful, and there is nothing that could happen to Earth that would make it a worse place than Mars. You could have an asteroid hit as bad as the one that killed off the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. And the day that that happened, which is the worst day in the history of complex life on Earth, was a nicer day than any day on Mars in the last few billion years.
That's a long way to say "A bad day on Earth is still better than a good day on Mars."
And this part, I also agree with, and I've written some variation of it before:
But science fiction is fiction. It is a set of stories that we tell not to predict the future, but as a setting to explore some questions about being human.
There's quite a bit more at the link. I still think a lot of the issues with Mars are engineering problems, and engineering problems can, eventually, be solved. But it's not going to happen anytime soon.
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention something that's been in the news: a rock found by one of our Mars robots that, possibly but not definitely, has features that could be fossilized former life from way back in the planet's history. (Note that this does not mean, or imply, little green Martians. Just microbes or the equivalent.) To have any greater degree of certainty, it'll need to be brought back to Earth. Possibly by humans.
That doesn't mean we can set up shop there permanently. Yet. |
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