Isegoria

Colonizing Venus may be oddly feasible, because its dense atmosphere lends itself to floating cities. Colonizing Mars presents a very different challenge, as Matter Beam explains:

Atmospheric pressure is 1% of that on Earth. It is mostly unbreathable carbon dioxide, and does a poor job of spreading the warmth from half the sunlight we are accustomed to. Temperatures ranges from -135 degrees Celsius to an infrequent 35 degrees Celsius, averaging -55 degrees Celsius to Earth’s 14 degrees. Dust storms sometimes fill the sky, but their main effect seems to be eroding the ancient geological features over a surface area equal to Earth’s landmass.

The planet is also long dead. Most of the core is no longer molten, meaning that it does not spin to generate a magnetic field. Being 15% of Earth’s size, it cooled down to its present state much quicker.

Despite its downsides, Mars is pretty hospitable compared to other planets in the Solar System. It is cold, but no unmanageably so. It has a lot of solid, traversable ground. The polar caps contain billions of tons of water ice covered by a layer of solid carbon dioxide. The soil can be used for agriculture after some preparation.

Martian gravity is 37.6% of that on Earth. It is doubtful whether this is enough to stave off the muscle atrophy and bone loss caused by prolonged living in low or micro-gravity.

The low atmospheric pressure means that most architecture and equipment on Mars will have to be hermetically sealed and pressurized. This imposes structural constraints and a dangerous failure mode if the colony’s walls are pierced. Obtaining breathable gasses might requires energy and time: oxygen can be removed from carbon dioxide by energy-hungry chemical reactions, of through the photosynthesis of plants. Nitrogen is present at a 1.0% concentration in the thin Martian air, so it can eventually be extracted for small colonies to use as fertilizer and breathing mix. Larger colonies would need to find it in the soil, either as NO3 or NO.

The atmosphere actually helps with the cold, as it is so thin that lacks the ability to conduct heat away from the colony. It acts as an insulator. This makes dealing with Mars’s low temperatures easier than on Earth, where a thick atmosphere steals heat away from buildings in Antarctica or Northern Canada much more quickly.

Mars’s greatest assets, Matter Beam explains, may be its two moons: Phobos and Deimos.

Let’s start with Phobos.

The closest description would be a floating pile of rubble, loosely held together by a layer of compacted dust. It is composed mainly of carbonaceous chondrite rock riddled with ices and crevasses that might take up to a third of its volume. What is it good for? Living and lifting.

Phobos has a surface gravity of about 0.0004g. Riding a bicycle on the Mars-facing side is enough to fall off the moon and start orbiting Mars instead. It also means that it is very easy to dig into Phobos and excavate large volumes. These volumes can be filled with orbital habitats. These will have access to large quantities of volatiles and minerals, and the surrounding rock will provide sufficient radiation protection.

At 6000km, Phobos is also close enough to start considering orbital elevators. A cable can be dropped from the moon to an altitude of about 10km. In the simplest version, it passes over the surface at 2662 km/h. A mass-driver launched spacecraft or even a supersonic aircraft can catch up to the cable. The Martian end of the cable experiences nearly no drag, so it doesn’t heat up. Structural requirements are so low that it can be built from existing materials such as Zylon. It only needs to be about 12 times heavier than the payloads it expects to receive.

Once the aircraft or pod is attached, it simply climbs up to Phobos with no propellant required. This is a ‘free’ 4.1km/s of deltaV.

A more advanced version has an equally long cable extending out from Phobos. The two cables rotate in opposite directions to the moon’s orbit, allowing the lower end to nearly cancel its velocity, while the higher end travels at twice the orbital velocity.

The advanced version allows Phobos to ‘pick up’ payloads from the surface, then fling it outwards on the opposite end. At 4km/s, it can impart enough velocity to fling a payload all the way to Earth. In reverse, it can capture a spaceship entering the Martian system, and deposit it gently onto the surface at the other end.

A cable system vastly cheapens travel to and from Mars’s surface, Mars’s moons and extramartian destinations. Mars might end up being an even easier destination than Venus with its aerocapture or Mercury with its beamed solar power. Thanks to low surface gravity and thin atmosphere, the cables can be made from conventional materials and do not require much protection.

Deimos is a more extreme version of Phobos.

It is even smaller and higher than Phobos, but nearly identical in every other way. With a cable system, it can capture interplanetary spacecraft and lower them to Mars’s surface or Phobos’s orbit even more cheaply in terms of deltaV saved, energy required and structural mass involved.

So, by properly exploiting its moons instead of relying only on the surface, Mars becomes a very inviting destination for spacecraft. While it lacks the energy to produce or refine products cheaply, it can compensate by providing rocket fuel and sending off the products to other destinations at greatly reduced deltaV cost.

I was not expecting that.

In 18th-century Europe, Linnaeus — I suppose I should call him Carl Linnaeus, using both names — had achieved meteoric success, but he had a problem:

The man who made order from nature’s chaos did not have a good management system for his own work. His methods for sorting and storing information about the natural world couldn’t keep up with the flood of it he was producing.

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He had started out collecting plants in the woods of his native southern Sweden. But as his profile grew, so did his research and writing, and the number of students under his wing. Achieving scientific renown of their own, Linnaeus’s students sent him specimens from their travels in Europe, Russia, the Middle East, West Africa, and China. According to Charmantier and Müller-Wille, most botanists of the era employed a team to manage their affairs that would keep track of correspondence and categorize specimens. But not Linnaeus, “who preferred to work alone.” Starting in the 1750s, he complained in letters to friends of feeling overworked and overwhelmed. Burnout, it turns out, isn’t a modern condition.

Linnaeus’s predicament wasn’t new, either. In her book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age, the historian Ann Blair explains that since the Renaissance, “the discovery of new worlds, the recovery of ancient texts, and the proliferation of printed books” unleashed an avalanche of information. The rise of far-flung networks of correspondents only added to this circulation of knowledge. Summarizing, sorting, and searching new material wasn’t easy, especially given the available tools and technologies. Printed books needed buyers. And while notebooks kept information in one place, finding a detail buried inside one was another story. Finishing an academic dissertation wasn’t just a test of erudition or persistence; dealing with the material itself — recording, searching, retrieving it — was a logistical nightmare.

Many scholars, like the 17th-century chemist Robert Boyle, preferred to work on loose sheets of paper that could be collated, rearranged, and reshuffled, says Blair. But others came up with novel solutions. Thomas Harrison, a 17th-century English inventor, devised the “ark of studies,” a small cabinet that allowed scholars to excerpt books and file their notes in a specific order. Readers would attach pieces of paper to metal hooks labeled by subject heading. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the German polymath and coinventor of calculus (with Isaac Newton), relied on Harrison’s cumbersome contraption in at least some of his research.

Linnaeus experimented with a few filing systems. In 1752, while cataloging Queen Ludovica Ulrica’s collection of butterflies with his disciple Daniel Solander, he prepared small, uniform sheets of paper for the first time. “That cataloging experience was possibly where the idea for using slips came from,” Charmantier explained to me. Solander took this method with him to England, where he cataloged the Sloane Collection of the British Museum and then Joseph Banks’s collections, using similar slips, Charmantier said. This became the cataloging system of a national collection.

Linnaeus may have drawn inspiration from playing cards. Until the mid-19th century, the backs of playing cards were left blank by manufacturers, offering “a practical writing surface,” where scholars scribbled notes, says Blair. Playing cards “were frequently used as lottery tickets, marriage and death announcements, notepads, or business cards,” explains Markus Krajewski, the author of Paper Machines: About Cards and Catalogs. In 1791, France’s revolutionary government issued the world’s first national cataloging code, calling for playing cards to be used for bibliographical records. And according to Charmantier and Müller-Wille, playing cards were found under the floorboards of the Uppsala home Linnaeus shared with his wife Sara Lisa.

In 1780, two years after Linnaeus’s death, Vienna’s Court Library introduced a card catalog, the first of its kind. Describing all the books on the library’s shelves in one ordered system, it relied on a simple, flexible tool: paper slips. Around the same time that the library catalog appeared, says Krajewski, Europeans adopted banknotes as a universal medium of exchange. He believes this wasn’t a historical coincidence. Banknotes, like bibliographical slips of paper and the books they referred to, were material, representational, and mobile. Perhaps Linnaeus took the same mental leap from “free-floating banknotes” to “little paper slips” (or vice versa). Sweden’s great botanist was also a participant in an emerging capitalist economy.

Modern humans may be missing old friends:

With good reason. Hookworms are a leading cause of disease in the developing world with around 750 million people suffering from infection, which can cause anaemia, growth retardation and malnutrition in heavily infested populations. Hookworms can even be lethal, with hookworm related death standing at an estimated 60,000 people per year (Crompton 2002, de Silva 2003).

In first world nations, cleanliness, sanitation and clothing measures have eradicated hookworm infections by breaking their life cycle. (Brooker 2004, Crompton 2000)

This may seem like a good thing at a casual glance. The economic impact of hookworms is huge for some countries. For example, productivity losses due to hookworm infections in South Asia have been estimated at a value of approximately 5 billion dollars annually. (Crompton 2002) At first glance, exterminating these parasites seems wholly sensible.

There is a caveat however, to throwing nature out of balance by Man’s crude intervention. By vastly overpopulating areas in developing countries, we have created the perfect conditions for huge hookworm burdens. Then, by removing hookworms completely, we induce conditions unnaturally sterile. Our bodies, finely tuned through eons of evolution to respond to the challenge of parasite infection, react erratically.

Westernised nations have witnessed a dramatic rise in the incidence of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases, a rise that is concurrent with hookworm eradication. Researchers soon realised that many autoimmune diseases are largely absent in Third World populations. This discovery gave rise to the Hygiene Hypothesis.

The Hygiene Hypothesis theorises that the absence of various micro-organisms in Western society causes dysfunction in immunoregulation (Stiemsma 2015, Versini 2015). We see this manifest itself in diseases such as MS, Crohns disease, Asthma, and Rheumatoid Arthritis. This theory can be traced back to the 1870s when it was noted that aristocrats and city dwellers were more likely to get hay fever than farmers.

This idea was further developed into the ‘Old Friends Hypothesis’.

Whilst it would be rash to state that the sole cause for the increase in autoimmune diseases seen in our society is due to helminth eradication, it is certain that the underlying cause in genetically susceptible individuals is environmental. One of these environmental factors is the removal of Helminths, or ‘old friends’ (Rook 2012).

In Rooks’ words:

“The Old Friends hypothesis suggests that one reason for the increasing incidence of chronic inflammatory disorders in developed countries since the mid-nineteenth century is the depletion from the urban environment of organisms that accompanied mammalian evolution and had to be tolerated. In parts of the world where there was a heavy load of organisms causing immunoregulation (such as helminths), there has been selection for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) or other gene variants that partially compensate for the immunoregulation. As soon as immunoregulation inducing organisms (Old Friends) are withdrawn by the modern lifestyle, the genetic variants lead to excessive inflammation, and become risk factors for chronic inflammatory disorders”

In effect, organisms like helminths have been present in the human environment since the evolution of our species. Our immune systems have been titrated to their presence. Further, genes have evolved to help to manage the burden of these organisms, genes which predispose individuals to autoimmune disease once the helminths have been removed.

The fellow writing about old friends suffered from terrible psoriasis and decided to try Necator Americanus therapy:

A few short weeks and a lot of reading later, I sat at home, looking, with serious trepidation, at a small vial filled with clear liquid.

Inside it, were 25 stage L3 NA Larvae, purchased online with laboratory assurance that they were as sterile as a multicellular organism that comes from faeces can be.

Now I am not by nature someone who puts off what needs to be done. But I won’t lie when I say it took a few minutes of serious contemplation before I pipetted the innocent looking fluid onto the supplied dressing, and pressed it onto the skin of my inner arm.

Would this work? Did the larvae survive transit? Would they find their way onto my skin?

I needn’t have worried, less than two minutes after application, it felt like dozens of hot needles were boring into my skin. This was very real, and now there was no going back. They were inside me.

I didn’t sleep that night such was the itching on my arm, and I got a low grade fever the next day that lasted 48 hours.

Exactly 5 days post inoculation, I awoke in the middle of the night thinking someone was choking me. My throat was burning and closing up fast, causing my breath to rasp in my chest. As I sat in the bathroom gasping for breath, I knew exactly what was happening. They had made it to my throat and were about to finish their migration down into my intestines.

10 days after inoculation, I awoke once again in the early hours of the morning to terrible stomach ache. My regular regimen of intermittent fasting was out, the only remedy for this was a large breakfast, which for reasons unbeknownst to me helped ease the symptoms. My skin, likely because I had stopped the Methotrexate, worsened.

Bereft that I might have to drag my arse back to the Dermatologist and actually ask her for worming tablets, I toughed it out.

It worked.