Hello friends, and welcome new subscribers!

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I’m back! I took a break over the summer from publishing this newsletter, and after that I had a wonderful vacation in Japan for three weeks. But here we are in November, so I decided it was time to get back to business. There’s a lot to talk about!

Space News

The JWST space telescope has been busy. In August, it discovered the most distant star ever. Nicknamed “Earendel”, it’s over 13 billion light years away, and the light we’re seeing comes from only 900 million years after the universe formed in the Big Bang. We can only see it because of gravitational lensing, an effect predicted by Einstein that magnifies images behind giant galaxies, similar to how a magnifying glass can “smear” out images into arcs.

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Closer to home, JWST recently peered into the very core of our galaxy. At the very center is a gigantic black hole, the mass of hundreds of millions of suns. Surrounding the black hole are dozens of orbiting stars, and clumps of hot gas and dust. JWST can only take pictures of the core because it sees infrared light, which can pass through these opaque clouds.

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Meanwhile, the Earth-based ALMA radio telescope array took some amazing images of planetary nebulas, which are giant disks of hydrogen gas surrounding a very young star. Eventually these will cool off and the disk will coalesce into planets. I remember, many years ago, a student of mine asking me how we knew that our own Solar System was formed in this way. Back then it was just a theory, but now we can look through powerful telescopes and actually see other solar systems in the process of creation.

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And last Saturday, SpaceX launched its Starship rocket. Starship is the most powerful reusable rocket ever, and it’s larger than the Saturn V that sent astronauts to the Moon. It has a ridiculous 33 main engines on the first stage, and is capable of delivering payloads to Mars. The launch went perfectly, but the first stage blew apart when trying to land again, and the second stage lost contact just before it reached orbit. This triggered its auto-destruct system, blowing it to pieces somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. So it was both a success and a failure. Well, nobody said rocket science was easy!

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Sci-fi News

I haven’t been watching or reading much science fiction lately. After the end of this season of Strange New Worlds, there isn’t much else that I have my eye on right now.

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I’m currently reading a book that just came out called A City On Mars. It’s a critical look at the state of technology and the social implications of settling humans in outer space. While the authors admit to being pessimistic about the future of space habitation, I’m finding the book to be a refreshing reality check on where we are on our journey to the stars. Spoilers: living in space is a lot harder than most people think, and harder than many people want to admit. Mars, for example, is far away, has barely any atmosphere (and what little it has is unbreathable) and is bathed in deadly radiation. It’s not realistic to think of it as a “backup Earth” quite yet. A better comparison might be Antarctica — somewhere that scientists might visit and even stay for a short while, before returning to the safety of Earth.

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But that doesn’t mean that humans will never find homes out in space. After all, we already have an orbiting space station, the ISS, that has been permanently occupied for 23 years now. It’s a start, at least. Cities on Mars might be farther off than we hope, but I think they will still happen eventually. In the mean time, the book also explores the social problems that might exist if such cities existed. How would human rights work, if a corporation literally controls your access to oxygen? These are important questions that need to be resolved before we even think about creating long-term settlements in space.

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My sci-fi novel Silicon Minds of Mars features not one but three giant domed cities, but it's set far enough in the future that many of these problems have been solved. Of course that doesn't stop humanity from inventing new problems! I'm currently about 70% of the way through writing the sequel, Silicon Dreams of Mars, so I'll be talking more about that as it nears a release date.

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Personal news

I recently got back from a three-week vacation in Japan with my wife, brother-in-law, and two friends. It was the first time I’d ever been in Asia, and I found it to be a life-changing experience. Japan is an amazing place. It’s like living in the future and in the past at the same time. I’m still working on a blog post recounting my adventures there, so stay tuned for that!

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I’m pretty busy these days at work trying to ship a major upgrade to our custom documentation portal application. I wrote this version of the application from scratch, and I had to learn how to program in Python using the Django web framework, learn how to serve the application with Gunicorn and Nginx, learn how to package the whole thing with Docker and learn how to deploy it on the GCP platform. If none of those words made sense to you, consider yourself lucky. But all joking aside, I’ve had a great time learning all these things, even though my job isn’t actually being a web developer. It expanded my mind and my horizons. I got a little taste of what it might be like to be a developer or a systems engineer as a full-time job. It’s not easy!

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Well, that’s all for now. Look forward to a special holiday edition of the newsletter next month!

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Cheers,

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Jeremy

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