The Strange Case of Arkady Babchenko

They say truth is stranger than fiction, and I must say, I cannot conceive of any reasonable fiction writer coming up with a plot that included these rather bizarre events.

The first reports I heard were on the radio, where it was announced that the Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, who had been a strong critic of Vladimir Putin and who had fled to Ukraine a year previously, had been shot in the back on a Kiev street, and had died on the way to hospital. There were strong protests from Ukraine and a number of other countries at the Russians for using murder as an act of revenge. The Kremlin denied any involvement. Of course, they would, wouldn’t they? My first thought was, since Ukraine is a bit anarchic, maybe we had better wait for more information. The next morning’s paper gave more details, and it looked bad. The story now changed to this murder had been pulled off outside their apartment, and his wife had phoned for the ambulance.

But the morning radio news had an even more bizarre twist. The Ukrainian police had given a press conference, and in the middle of it, in walked Arkady Babchenko. Yes, Putin was definitely innocent of his murder. It turned out the whole episode had been staged, which left open the question, why? The official statement was Arkady had had threats, and this was staged to “flush out the perpetrators” who were alleged to be Russian Intelligence. Even Arkady’s wife did not know this stunt had been pulled. My thought at the time was, he may not be dead yet, but when he gets home . . . But wait – his wife phoned for the ambulance?? A little short on self-consistency here. Well, there is worse to come.

Let’s think about this for a moment. You have been instructed to murder Arkady, then you hear on the news that he has been murdered? What do you do? Get flushed out? Or sit back and say to yourself, “Well, that was easy,” and have a glass or two of whatever beverage take your fancy? Even the highly suspicious agent (and note, this is Ukraine) might like to check out that there is indeed a funeral and see how sad the mourners are, but whatever, they are not going to jump up and down and be “flushed out.”

It seems these thoughts finally struck the Ukrainian authorities so the story changed. Now a hit-man had been hired and instead of doing it, he went to the police, and the Ukrainian intelligence services staged it so it looked as if it had been done, so the man who hired him would have to identify himself when he paid for the hit. The next question is, if so, why not wait a bit and let him identify himself. However, no need, because a day later, we knew who he was. The hit-man was an ultra-right wing priest who was known to be violently anti-Russian, and who liked to dress in military attire and take part in “exercises”. The man who hired him was Boris L. Herman, and he was alleged to have a list of some thirty others Moscow allegedly wanted eliminated. He is supposedly in custody for two months. Herman then claimed he hired the priest to kill Babchenko at the request of Ukrainian counterintelligence. Ukrainian counterintelligence denied this. Herman is reported as claiming that he hired the priest, on the basis that the priest would go straight to the SBU, Ukraine’s security service.

The SBU has conceded that he priest told them about this and they collaborated, but denied the matter had anything to do with Ukraine’s counterintelligence operations. That is like saying, “We did it, but it wasn’t us.” It then turns out that Herman is

the only private enterprise arms manufacturer in Ukraine, and was similarly right wing. Is this some sort of oligarch shakedown? They get his company and he lives if he cooperates? Whatever, who can believe anything out of Ukraine these days.

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Colonizing Mars

Recently, Elon Musk threw a Tesla car at Mars and somewhat carelessly, missed. How can you miss a planet? The answer is, not unsurprisingly, quite easily. Mars might be a planet, and planets might seem large, but they are staggeringly small compared with the solar system. But whatever else this achieved, it did draw attention back to thoughts of humans on Mars, and as an exercise, it is not simple to bring the two together. Stephen Hawking was keen on establishing a colony there, mainly as some sort of reserve for humanity in case we did something stupid with out own planet. Would we do that? Unfortunately, the answer is depressingly quite possibly.

So what is required to get to Mars? First, not missing. NASA has shown that it can do this, so in principle this problem is solved. The second requirement is to arrive at the surface at essentially zero vertical velocity, and NASA has not been quite so successful at that, nevertheless, we can assume that landing will be with a piloted shuttle, so this should be able to be done. So far, so good? Well, not quite, because when you get there you have to have enough “stuff” to ensure you can survive. If it is a scientific exploration, the people will be away for over two years, so at a minimum, they will need groceries for two years, unless they grow their own food. They will need their own oxygen and water unless they can recycle it. They will need some means of getting around or there is no point in going, and they will need some sort of habitat. If they are settlers they will need a lot more because they are not coming back.

The obvious first thing to for settlers to do is to have somewhere to live. We can assume that the ship that brought them will provide a temporary place, although if the ship is to be recycled back to earth and they came down in a shuttle, this is a priority. At the same time they must build facilities to grow their own food and make oxygen. This raises the question, how many people could actually grow food and guarantee to do it well enough not to starve in a totally different environment to here? I am not sure you can train for that, but even if you can, there will still need to be a lot of food taken as well as oxygen. However, let’s assume these settlers are really competent and they are raring to get on with it.

The first requirement would be enough area to do it, so they would need a giant glass house (or houses). That means glass, and metal to hold it, but there is worse. You have to pressurize it, because the Martian atmospheric pressure on average is only about ½% of Earth’s. That means you need a strong pump, but because of the aggressive nature of dust in the atmosphere much of the time, you need some form of filter. The air is about 95.3% carbon dioxide, about 2.7% nitrogen and 1.6% argon. If you want to recover the oxygen to breathe, you want to boost the nitrogen so that what is produced is breathable as air, and that requires a major gas separator. The best way is probably to seriously overpressurise it, so the carbon dioxide comes out as a liquid, and keep the rest. However, there is another problem: you need water, so that equipment will probably have to be made even more complicated so the water in the atmosphere can be recovered. The next problem is that if the glasshouse is to be pressurized, it has to be leak-proof. All the joints have to be sealed with something that will not decay under UV radiation, and worse than that, a deep footer is needed around the glasshouse. That means digging a deep trench, pouring concrete, and sealing the walls. Finally, the whole regolith inside the glasshouse has to be treated to decompose its strong oxidizing nature (but this does produce a small amount of oxygen) otherwise the soil will sterilize anything you plant, then you have to add some actual soil. Many of these operations would be best done mechanically, but they each need their own machine.

You may notice that all of these things costs weight, and that is not what is wanted on a space ship. So the question is, how much can be brought there? There is a second requirement. Every time you use a machine, you need fuel. That has to be electric, which means either batteries, which so far would require huge numbers to keep going all day, or fuel cells, but if fuel cells are selected, what will be the fuel? Note that two fuels are required; one to “burn” and the other to burn it in, as there is no oxygen in the atmosphere worth having. Either way, a serious energy producer is required because not only do you have to power things, but you have to keep your glasshouse warm. The night-time temperatures can drop below minus 100 degrees Centigrade. The most obvious source is nuclear, either fission or fusion, but that requires shielding and even more weight.

The above is just some of the issues. I wrote a novel (Red Gold) that involved Martian settlement. The weight of the two ships was twenty million tonne each, and each had a thermonuclear propulsion system that detached and could be used as power plants and mineral separation units later. The idea was that construction materials would be made there, but even if that is done, a huge amount of stuff has to be taken. Think of the cost of lifting forty million tonne of stuff from Earth into orbit alone. Why two ships? Because everything should be done in duplicate, in case something goes wrong. Why that much stuff? Because you want this not to be some horrible exercise in survival.

At this stage I shall insert a small commercial. Red Gold is a story of such colonization, and of fraud, and it includes a lot more about what it might take to colonize Mars. It is available on Kindle Countdown discounts from 13 – 19 April. (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009U0458Y)

Exit Mugabe

I confess to having an interest in “important” people. What is it that makes them get to where they do? I have explored this in a number of my novels, and I have met and talked with a number of important people here, not that New Zealand is very important on the world stage, nevertheless I think I have seen enough to know that I don’t really know the answer. In Mugabe’s case, though, I think there were two major causes that brought him to the top. The first was self-belief and determination, and the second was stubbornness. Once he made up his mind on something, nothing would turn him away. And yet he has finally decided to quit.

He probably had little choice. The army did not want to have to shoot him, but eventually it must have occurred to him that the senior army officers could not back down and live. That is the sort of reality that someone like Mugabe would understand. The fact there were mass demonstrations may have finally got through to him, and now it must be galling that the crowds are cheering his departure. Still, he would know the usual exit for dictators is quite brutal, and there would be a time when the soft options would disappear.

Mugabe’s main positive claim to fame is that he led the Shona resistance to the white government the British colonial administration left as the government in Zimbabwe, or Southern Rhodesia as it was then called. For that he would get much gratitude from the Shona people, which would make him the obvious choice to become Prime Minister of the new government. It seems that at first he was reasonably enlightened, and expanded healthcare and education. Later, he would become President, but by then the signs were deteriorating.

This started when many of those of European descent fled, essentially for economic reasons. By itself, this was no great deal, however the skills they took with them was. It was the highly educated or those with money who could find a life most easily elsewhere. The economy started to contract, but Mugabe was not one to be put off his vision, and this is an unfortunate aspect with many dictators. They think their dream is the only one, and the reality of achieving anything is irrelevant. Means will be found, and they tend to shut their eyes at the consequences.

Worse was to come, because Mugabe now feared all those who had fought for revolution, and worse, there were scores to settle with the Ndebele. The Shona people hate the Ndebele for things that happened in the early 19th century, so then was the chance for revenge. To bolster his position, Mugabe ordered the training of the Fifth Brigade by North Korea, and set them loose on the Ndebele. Estimates are that there were 20,000 killed for no good reason.

Mugabe nominally was a Marxist, but he also realized that he should leave the economy working. Zimbabwe is naturally a rich country, and it was the breadbasket of Africa, and is also rich in minerals. The problem was, whites owned all the resources, so Mugabe set about confiscating them. The land seizures were declared illegal by the Zimbabwe courts, but Mugabe continued with them, declaring the courts irrelevant. Land was for Zimbabweans. It was all very well to put ill educated Shona as farm owners, but they did not know how to farm. Food became in short supply. Inflation soared to 7600%. Apparently, they even issued a banknote for 100 trillion dollars. But no matter how bad things got, Mugabe would not step down and let someone else try.

One of the bad aspects of revolution is that the people who carry out revolution are often not the best for what follows, and the history of revolutions is not a happy one. Not only that, but the leaders seldom if ever encouraged successors. South America was interesting because Jose de San Martin abandoned politics altogether after the successful liberation of the south, while Simon Bolivar did try to manage a major coalition of countries in South America and eventually gave up, leading to somewhat chaotic outcomes. The first Russian revolution was led by “nice” people who really had little idea what was required next, and we all know what Lenin and Stalin did to Russians.

One of the very few successful revolutions was carried out in America. What resulted after the British were ejected was a rather enlightened set of leaders who founded a truly great nation. And it is here that we see a great difference. This may sound awful, but in my opinion the best thing George Washington did as President was to step down after eight years. The reason I say it was the best is that while no doubt he did a number of other good things while President, they were relevant only at the time. His standing down and respecting the constitution, and I rather suspect he would have had the other option, has cemented that forever: no President would ever dare to suggest he was more important to the United States than George Washington, the man who effectively was responsible for it formation.

And here is Mugabe’s great failure: he could not put the country before his own personal wants. This was a tragedy. So what follows? Will Zimbabwe emerge into a bright new era? I am far from convinced prospects look good. The man replacing Mugabe is Emerson Mnangagwa, who was Mugabe’s “enforcer”, and was in charge of carrying out the killing of the 20,000 Ndebele. Not the most promising of starts. Worse, why the coup then? It appears that Mugabe fired Mnangagwa, and Mnangagwa had the generals behind him. You form your own conclusion.

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The Face of Mars

In 1976, the Viking 1 mission began taking photographs of the surface of Mars, in part to find landing sites for future missions, and also to get a better idea of what Mars was like, to determine the ages of various parts of Mars (done by counting craters, which assumes that once the great bombardment was over, the impacts were more or less regular over time if we think in terms of geological timing.) On the Cydonia Mensae, an image came back that, when refined, looks surprisingly like a face carved into a large rock. Two points are worth mentioning. The first is, if it were such a head, the angle of the light only allows you to see the right side of the head; the rest is in deep shadow. The second is all we received of this object was 64 pixels. The “face” is clearly a butte standing up from the surface (and there are lot of these in the region) and it is about 2.5 km long, about 1.5 km wide, and something like up to 800 m above the average flat ground at its highest point. As you might imagine, with only 64 pixels, the detail is not great, but there is a crater where the right eye should be, a rise that makes the nose, and some sort of “crack” or depression that hints at a mouth, but most of the “mouth” would be in the shade, and hence would be invisible. The image was also liberally splattered with black spots; these were “failed pixels” i.e. a transmission problem. What you see below is that primary image.

So, what was it? The most obvious answer was a rock that accidentally looked like a face. To the objection, what is the probability that you could end up with that, the answer is, not as bad as you might think. There are a lot of mesas and rock formations on Mars, so sooner or later one of them might look like something else. There are a number of hills etc on Earth where you can see a head, or a frog, or something if you want to. If you think about it, an oval mesa is not that improbable, and there are a lot of them. There are a very large number of impact craters on Mars, so the chances of one being roughly where an eye would be is quite high (because there is quite a bit of flexibility here) and there are really only two features – the eye and the “mouth”. The rise for the nose only requires the centre to be the highest part, and that is not improbable. As it happens, when you see the whole thing, the left side of the head has sort of collapsed, and it is a fracture offshoot from that collapse that gives the mouth.

However, the image caught the imagination of many, and some got a little carried away. Richard Hoagland wrote a book The Monuments of Mars: A City on the Edge of Forever. If nothing else, this was a really good selling book, at one stage apparently selling up ot 2000 copies a month. Yep, the likes of me are at least envious of the sales. So, what did this say? Basically, Hoagland saw several “pyramids” near the Face, and a jumble of rocks that he interpreted as a walled city. Mars had an ancient civilisation! Left unsaid was why, if there were such “Martians” did they waste effort building pyramids and carving this Face while their planet was dying? For me, another question is why does something this fanciful become a best seller, while the truth languishes?

So what caused this? I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. It is reasonably obviously caused by erosion, but what the eroding agent was remains unknown. If you believe Mars once had an ocean, the Cydonian region is roughly where one of the proposed shorelines was. It could also be caused by glaciation, or even wind erosion, aided by moisture in the rock. The freezing/thawing of water generates very powerful forces. What we need is a geologist to visit the site to answer the question, although there would be far more important things to do on Mars than worry about that rock.

Suppose it was carved by a civilization? I included that possiblity in my novel Red Gold. In this, one character tried pulling the leg of another by announcing that it was “obviously carved” by aliens with the purpose of encouraging humans to go into space. “It is worth it,” the aliens would be saying. So why is it so rough? Because the aliens were plagued by accountants, who decided that the effort to do it properly was not worth the benefit; if humans cannot take the hint from the roughly hewn rock, so be it.

It also figures in another of my novels: A Face on Cydonia. Again, it is intended as a joke in the book, but on whom? Why did I do that? Well, I started writing when I heard that Global Surveyor was going to settle this issue, so I thought I should try to have something ready for an agent. However, Global Surveyor, which took very narrow strip images, and could have taken two years to cover this area, took only a few weeks. Out of luck again! Fortunately, the story was never really about the rock, but rather the effect it had on people.

A quick commercial: if anyone is interested, the ebook is at 99 cents on Amazon (or 99p) for the first week of September. The book is the first of a trilogy, but more about people being taken to levels higher than their abilities, and also about what causes some to descend to evil. It also has just a toiuch of science; while you can ignore this and just consider it a powerful explosive, it has the first mention of a chemical tetranitrotetrahedrane. That would be a really powerful explosive, if it could be made, but the more interesting point is why is that there?

Where to settle on Mars?

A few weeks ago I wrote an introductory post on Martian settlement issues (https://wordpress.com/post/ianmillerblog.wordpress.com/716 ). I am now going to ask, where should such a settlement be? Obviously, this is a matter of opinion, but there are some facts to consider. The first is seasons. The northern hemisphere spring and summer is about 75 Martian days longer than the autumn and winter (and opposite for the southern hemisphere. This is a consequence of the elliptical orbit, but it also means that the longer seasons mean the planet is further from the sun (which is why it is going slower) and because of the axial tilt that generates the seasons as well as the elliptical orbit, most likely places can get up to 40% less sunlight in winter than in summer. Add to that that by being so much further from the sun, Mars never gets more than about half the Earth’s solar energy. So the southern hemisphere has a shorter but warmer pair of seasons, and a longer colder other pair. Temperatures in summer can get up to 20 degrees C in the day and in winter, fall to minus 120 degrees C during the night. No plant can survive that, so besides providing air, heat is also required.

There is a reasonably easy way to get around the heat problem. Assuming you have a nearby power plant, and as I shall show in other posts, if a settlement is to be viable, it will have a heavy demand for high quality energy, then there will inevitably be waste heat. Space mirrors can also supplement the heat and light. Heating the planet is not on (you would need mirrors of area greater than the Martian cross-sectional area) but heating a settlement is plausible.

The location could be decided on the basis of nearness to raw materials, but that leaves open the question of which ones? The obvious one is metal ores, but here we do not know where they are, of even if they are. Again this can be left for another post.

The next question is air. Air pressure depends on altitude, and much of the exploration so far has been around the zero of altitude, where we get pressures of around 6 -8 millibar, depending on the season. In the southern hemisphere summer, the pole shrinks and vaporizes a lot of carbon dioxide, thus increasing atmospheric pressure. In my novel Red Gold I put the initial settlement at the bottom of Hellas Planitia. That is in the southern hemisphere, and is a giant impact crater, the bottom of which is about nine kilometres deep. That gives more atmospheric pressure, but at the cost of a cold winter. The important point of Hellas Planitia is that at the bottom of the impact crater the pressure, is high enough to be the only place on Mars for liquid water to exist, particularly in summer. The reason this was important, at least in my novel, is that unless you find water, you will probably have to pump it from the atmosphere and condense it. Also, while you are pumping up domes, you will want to get the dust out of the air. The dust is extremely fine. That means very fine filters, which easily clog; electrostatic dust precipitators, which may be too slow for many uses; or a form of water filtration. In Red Gold, I opted for a water-ring type pump. Of course here you need a certain amount of water to get started, and that will not be a small amount. The water will still evaporate fairly quickly, hence the need to have plenty of water, but the evaporite will go into the dome, so it is recoverable or usable. It could also be frozen out before going in; whatever else is in short supply on Mars, cold is not one of them, although with the low atmospheric pressure, the heat capacity of air is fairly low.

So strictly speaking, based on heat and air, both have to be heavily supplemented, it does not matter where you go. However, I think there is another good reason for selecting Hellas Planitia as the site. It is generally considered that water, or at least a fluid, flowed on Mars. The lower parts of Hellas have signs that there was water there once, and to the east two great channels, the Dao and the Harmarkis, seemingly emptied themselves into the Hellas basin. Water will flow downhill, so a lot of it would have resided in depressions, and either evaporated, or solidified, or both. So, there is a good chance that there is water there, or anything that got dissolved in the water. The higher air pressure will also help reduce sublimation by a little bit, so perhaps there will be more there than most places.

The next issue is, you wish to grow food and have plants make oxygen. Obviously you will need some fairly sophisticated equipment to get the oxygen from the plants to wherever you are going to live, assuming you don’t live with the plants, but the plants have to grow first. For that you need soil, water and fertilizer. The soil is the first problem. It is highly oxidised, and chlorides have been oxidised to perchlorates. That is fine for making a little oxygen, but it has to be treated or it will kill plants. Apparently it is something as good as bleaching powder. Again, you will have to take the treatment chemicals with you; forget something critical or do not bring enough, and you will be dead. Mars is not a forgiving place.

That leaves fertilizer. Most rock has some potassium and phosphate in it, and if these have been washed out, their residues will be where the water ended, so that should be no problem if you go to the right place. Nitrogen is slightly different. The atmosphere has very little nitrogen. On Earth, plants get their nitrogen from nitrates washed down in rain, from decayed biomass, and from farmers applying it. None of that works there immediately. Legumes can “fix” nitrogen from the air, but there isn’t much there to fix and partial pressure is important. You can, of course, pump it up and get rid of carbon dioxide. A lot of these issues were in the background of my ebook novel Red Gold, ad there, I proposed that Mars originally had somewhat more nitrogen, but it ended up underground. The reason is for another post, but the reason I had then ended up as being the start of my theory regarding planetary formation. However, the possibility of what was leached out or condensed out being at the bottom of the crater is why I think Hellas Planitia is as good a place as any to start a settlement.

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N24ATF7