Mission to Mars:  The First Colony

22 Mar 2024 14 Comments

by Dr. John Persico Jr. in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

images

Star Date 2075- 01

Mission Control.  “Countdown, zero plus 22 minutes.  Prepare yourselves for blastoff.”

“I can’t believe we are getting ready to blast off for Mars” said Adam, the Starship Captain

“Yes, after months of preparation, we are finally going to setup the staging for the first Mars colony” said Eve, the Starship Co-Captain.

“Well, I think we are going to be doing a lot more than that” replied Adam

“More, like what” said Eve

“To multiply like rabbits of course” Adam dumbfoundedly replied.  “Why do you think that we were picked for this mission?

“Mr. Musk never said anything about multiplying” said Eve.  “I thought I was picked because I had a Ph.D. in Macro-Cosmic Physics.”

Adam just shook his head.  He was not sure if he should say anything more at this time.  He was certain that all the profiling and psychodynamic training would kick in once they were in orbit.  To be sure, Eve had always seemed a bit distant during their months of training, but Adam assumed she was just shy and nervous.  He would dazzle her once they were in space.

Eve was lost in her own thoughts.  If this jerk thinks that I am planning to “breed” with him, he has another think coming.  As far as I am concerned he can breed with himself.

Mission Control: “Prepare for liftoff!”

Mission Control: “Liftoff was successful, and you are now in transit to Mars.  The journey is estimated to take only 9 months with the new hydro-plasma boosters.  Please take one of your extended dormant pills.  These were created in our bio-tech lab and are calculated by your biomass to help you sleep roughly a week at a time.  Your remaining time can be filled with flight checks and any recreation you can think of.”

Star Date 2075- 08

“Eve are you awake” said Adam, “Yes” replied Eve, “I have been awake for nearly a day now.  I was wondering how much longer you would sleep.”

“Well,”, said Adam, “We need to start reviewing control procedures and vessel checks.  I would recommend one week for procedures and then back to sleep mode for a week.  Can you prepare us something to eat while I go to the head?”

“What do I look like” said Eve, “Chef Boyardee?”  “Or is your arm broke or something?”

“Ok, I did not mean to be offensive.  I guess we could take turns with the meal preparations” replied Adam

“Good guess lover boy” said Eve.

Star Date 2075-90

“Ninety days in transit so far and 180 to go.  I am getting tired of this routine.  What do you say we spice things up a little Eve?”

“What did you have in mind?” said Eve

“How about a little strip poker?” said Adam

“How about you take ten dormant pills and go to sleep for the rest of the journey?” said Eve

“This is not at all what I expected from you” said Adam.  “You are not being very cordial or responsive.  We have an obligation to help colonize Mars and we could have some fun doing it.”

“Your idea of fun is not the same as mine.”

Adam moves forward to put his hand around her in a gesture of friendship

“Keep your hands off of me” said Eve

Star Date 2075-120

“Mission Control from Mars Colony Mission, this is Eve speaking.”  I am having trouble getting Adam to keep his hands to himself.  I have woken up several times and found him groping me.  Do you have any suggestions?”

Mission Control:

“Eve, this is Mission Control.  Suggest you play along and see what happens.  Are you aware that there are condoms if needed packed aboard your supplies?”

Eve aghast “Who were the condoms for?”

Mission Control: “Just one of the supplies we thought might come in handy on a long voyage.”

Eve: “Over and out”

images (1)

Star Date 2075-150

“Adam to Mission Control, emergency, emergency!”

Mission Control: “We have you on communications Adam.  What is the problem?”

Adam: “Eve asked me to check on the outside primary antenna.  I suited up and went out to check things out.  When I tried to get back into the capsule, she would not let me back in.”

Mission Control:  “Eve, we have word from Adam that he is locked outside the capsule.  What is going on?”

Eve, “What is going on is that he took that thing out of his pants and started waving it in my face.  I told him to put it back where it belonged, but he would not listen.  So, I told him that we were having a problem with the main antenna and would he check it.  I am not going to let him back in.”

Mission Control: “Eve, this is no way to start a Martian colony.  Couldn’t you make a sacrifice for the greater good of Earth and the people who love and admire you here?”

Eve:  How come no one ever mentioned that I was supposed to be part of the colonization process?

Mission Control:  Eve, have you ever heard of the chicken and the pig story.  The chicken gave eggs to the farmer and was involved but the pig gave bacon and was committed.  We thought you would be committed to this process and not just involved.”

Eve: “Did you ever see the size of his dick?  It is smaller than a pencil.  If you wanted my commitment couldn’t you get someone with a bigger dick?

Mission Control: “Eve, what would it take to make you a team player?”

Eve: “Well, that all depends.  I will need to sleep on that one a little.”

Mission Control: “Fair enough Eve, but could you let Adam back in while you sleep on it?  After all, No Adam, No Eve, No colony.

p022gxvh

And so, Adam and Eve patched up their differences.  Eve had forty-five children while on Mars and was given by Mission Control, the title “Queen of Mars.”  Adam was relegated to be her consort.  More earthlings were sent on subsequent missions to Mars and Eve ruled that all. Women could have as many husbands as they wanted to.  Men could not have more than one wife.

Eve established a matriarchy on Mars and within two hundred years, the colony had grown into a million people.  Men cooked and cleaned and served women when called.  Word got back to earth that the colony had gone rogue.  Eventually, war broke out between Mars and Earth.

The war went on for over 500 years.  The final outcome affected the entire universe since before the end of the war many other sentient species had been identified.  Most of the identified alien species sided with the Martian women and the planet Earth was defeated.  The Earth soon faded into obscurity and was vaguely remembered only as a footnote in Martian Ancient History.

On Earth, Musk was remembered infamously as the man who wanted to start a Martian Colony.  No one bothers to clean the bird shit off of his statue anymore.

PS:  

I wrote the above story to poke some fun at a subject that is really not very funny to me.  Call me a luddite if you want to, but I think the entire idea of a “Manned” Mars colony is a preposterous waste of time and money.  NASA and Musk will spend billions if not trillions of dollars to put someone on Mars and do you know what?  In Pinal County, in Arizona City, they took out our recycling bins two years ago because they said “The county cannot afford them.”

We can spend trillions of dollars on rockets and so called scientific experiments but we cannot spend one nickel to help with waste and garbage recycling in the county where I live.  The money for both endeavors comes out of my taxes.  My choice is to spend money to save the planet we live on FIRST and then Mars later.  In the meantime, the most I would support for any Martian project would be robot manned space flights.  By the way, they say valuable experiments can only be done by humans and not robots.  Why is that?  What kind of “valuable experiments?”  Robots are developing at a rapid pace.  If we have the will, we can develop robots to handle any physical tasks that human beings can.  It makes more sense to send them to Mars and not live humans.  Following is a passage from a paper by Professor Ross King from Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, who originated the idea of a ‘Robot Scientist’.

“Today, laboratory automation is steadily advancing, and robots can now carry out most of the laboratory tasks that humans can. We are also now seeing the emergence of the ‘Cloud Lab’ concept. The idea is to provide laboratory automation at scale and remotely, with scientists sending their samples to the cloud lab, using a computer interface to design and execute their experiments.”

“And then there are AI Scientists: AI systems integrated with laboratory automations that are capable of carrying out the closed-loop automation of scientific research (aka ‘Robot Scientists’, ‘Self-driving Labs’). These systems automatically originate hypotheses to explain observations, devise experiments to test these hypotheses, physically run these experiments using laboratory robotics, interpret the results, and then repeat the cycle.” — “The future of science is automation”, Professor Ross King, University of Cambridge, Feb 26, 2024

Try, Try and Try Again

18 May 2022 6 Comments

by Dr. John Persico Jr. in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , ,

51981-original

Once upon a time I watched a series of movies called Star Wars.  One of the characters in these movies was an enigmatic Zen spouting creature whose name was Yoda. Yoda was the oldest and wisest Jedi Master. Yoda took Luke Skywalker as an acolyte to teach him the ways of the Jedi.  One of Yoda’s favorite sayings was “There is no try.  There is only do or do not.”  I loved this thought and I used it far too many times with my spouse and friends.  Most of the times, they would just roll their eyes at me or look with some angst while I tried to explain the import of Yoda’s thought.  Whether they got it or not, I will never know.

It was clear to me that when you attempt something, you either do it or you do not do it.  For instance, if I say, “I am going to “Try” to do a cartwheel.”  Either I do the cartwheel, or I do not do the cartwheel.  As Yoda said, “there is no try.”  But lately, I have had to rethink this thought.  Maybe, I was too quick to embrace Yoda’s theory.  Perhaps I am lucky to still have any friends?  People the world over still respond with the phrase “Okay, I will give it a try.”  Am I right or is the world wrong?

I think there may be something missing with Yoda’s theory.  There is a try but try is not succeeding.  Yoda is right but only to a point.  There is only you succeed, or you do not succeed.  You do or you do not.  However, without try there is no succeeding.  Without try, there is no do.  The famous French revolutionary Danton (1792) said, “ Dare, Dare Again, Always Dare.”  What if we had the same attitude about try?

I recently saw the following quote by the great actress Lauren Bacall.  She stated that this was the philosophy of her late husband.  He was the renowned actor Humphrey Bogart.

Humphrey_Bogart_1940_crop“To be good, was more important than to be rich.  To be kind was more important than owning a house or a car.  To respect one’s work and to do it well , to risk something in life, was more important than being a star.  To never sell your soul — to have self-esteem— to be true— was most important of all.”

Great thoughts.  Wonderful ideas.  Ideas well worth living up to.  However, I am quite sure from what I have read of Mr. Bogart that he fell well short of his lofty aspirations.  Cameron Shipp wrote the following in the 1952 Saturday Evening Post about Bogart.

“Humphrey DeForest Bogart, who will be 53 years old come Christmas morning and doesn’t care who knows it, is a whisky-drinking actor who has been hooting at Hollywood and making fun of its pretensions for 22 years. Mr. Bogart’s derision, often acted out with alcoholic capers in night clubs followed by funny quotes in the public prints, is mainly aimed at the popular gospel that under their grease paint, glamorous or menacing, screen players are really fine, home-loving, dish-washing citizens like you and me. In his one bad-man campaign to correct this impression, Bogart has toiled to reestablish the more interesting belief that actors are not necessarily wholesome,”

The more I could tell you about Humphrey, the less you would want him for a role model.  But you would be making a mistake.  This is a common mistake.  All too often made.  We dismiss the message because of the man.  It is said that many kings would kill the messenger because they did not like the message.  But you can kill the message because you do not like the messenger.  In fact, the latter is more often done these days than the former.  And this is where the role of TRY becomes important.  Let me explain.

I have written more than 600 blogs.  In many of my blogs, I offer my advice and wisdom on how to lead a good life.  I counsel patience, compassion, and kindness.  I counsel tolerance, courage, and gratitude.  I counsel learning, discipline, and forgiveness.  I often look back on blogs that I wrote many years ago and wonder “who wrote that?”  I seem far wiser in my letters than I do in my actual life.  I ask myself “why don’t I follow my own advice better?”  It seems to me that over the years, in fact, even over the weeks and days, there is hardly a time when I do not violate my own wisdom and guidance.

PrintTry.  Yes, I try to lead a good life.  I want to live up to my own advice.  I want to be one of the people that I am telling the world we need more of.  I want to live a life consistent with my wisdom.  A life where my behavior mirrors my thoughts and ideas.  But then I fail.  I fall flat on my face.  I try and do not succeed.  I lose my patience.  I am not kind.  I suffer from a lack of gratitude.  I won’t forgive my neighbor.  If it is either do or do not, all too often I DO NOT.  I think like a Yoda, but my actions often lead me to feelings of loneliness, isolation, and despair.

But try, the word disparaged by Yoda comes back into my mind.  Don’t give up.  Tomorrow is a new day.  Stop feeling sorry for yourself.  Try, try, and try again.

download

I think I have a lot in common with Humphrey Bogart.  I have lofty goals and ambitions.  I want to save the world.  I want to eliminate greed, poverty, crime, bigotry, and injustice.  I want to live a life of integrity and be true to myself.  But all too often I fail to live up to Gandhi’s admonition, “to be the change I want to see.”  I can’t even eliminate injustice or selfishness in my own life, never mind the rest of the world.  Then I tell myself, “try again.”  Try again and try again.  Maybe each time I try, I will get a little bit closer to success.

One day maybe, I will be able to tell Yoda that I did not try because I really did it.  Until then I will just keep on trying.