Food on Mars

Settlers on Mars will have needs, but the most obvious ones are breathing and eating, and both of these are likely to involve plants. Anyone thinking of going to Mars should think about these, and if you look at science fiction the answers vary. Most simply assume everything is taken care of, which is fair enough for a story. Then there is the occasional story with slightly more detail. Andy Weir’s “The Martian” is simple. He grows potatoes. Living on such a diet would be a little spartan, but his hero had no option, being essentially a Robinson Crusoe without a Man Friday. The oxygen seemed to be a given. The potatoes were grown in what seemed to be a pressurised plastic tent and to get water, he catalytically decomposed hydrazine to make hydrogen and then he burnt that. A plastic tent would not work. The UV radiation would first make the tent opaque so the necessary light would not get in very well, then the plastic would degrade. As for making water, burning hydrazine as it was is sufficient, but better still, would they not put their base where there was ice?

I also have a novel (“Red Gold”) where a settlement tries to get started. Its premise is there is a main settlement with fusion reactors and hence have the energy to make anything, but the main hero is “off on his own” and has to make do with less, but can bring things from the main settlement. He builds giant “glass houses” made with layers of zinc-rich glass that shield the inside from UV radiation. Stellar plasma ejections are diverted by a superconducting magnet at the L1 position between Mars and the sun (proposed years before NASA suggested it) and the hero lives in a cave. That would work well for everything except cosmic radiation, but is that going to be that bad? Initially everyone lives on hydroponically grown microalgae, but the domes permit ordinary crops. The plants grow in treated soil, but as another option a roof is put over a minor crater and water provided (with solar heating from space) in which macroalgae grow and marine microalgae, as well as fish and other species, like prawns. The atmosphere is nitrogen, separated from the Martian atmosphere, and some carbon dioxide, and the plants make oxygen. (There would have to be some oxygen to get started, but plants on Earth grew without oxygen initially.)

Since then there have been other quite dramatic proposals from more official sources that assume a lot of automation to begin with. One of the proposals involves constructing huge greenhouses by covering a crater or valley. (Hey, I suggested that!) but the roof is flat and made of plastic, the plastic being made from polyethylene 2,5-furandicarboxylate, a polyester made from carbohydrates grown by the plants. This is used as a bonding agent to make a concrete from Martian rock. (In my novel, I explained why a cement is very necessary, but there are limited uses.) The big greenhouse model has some limitations. In this, the roof is flat, and in essentially two layers, and in between are vertical stacks of algae growing in water. The extra value here is that water filters out the effect of cosmic rays, although you need several meters of it. Now we have a problem. The idea is that underneath this there is a huge habitat, and for every cubic meter of water, we have one tonne mass, and on Mars, about 0.4 tonne of force on the lower flat deck. If this bottom deck is the opaque concrete, then something bound by plastic adhesion will slip. (Our concrete on bridges is only inorganic, and the binding is chemical, not physical, and further there is steel reinforcing.) Below this there would need to be many weight-bearing pillars. And there would need to be light generation between the decks (to get the algae to grow) and down below. Nuclear power would make this easy. Food can be grown as algae in between decks, or in the ground down below.

As I see it, construction of this would take quite an effort and a huge amount of materials. The concept is the plants could be grown to make the cement to make the habitat, but hold on, where are the initial plants going to grow, and who/what does all the chemical processing? The plan is to have that in place from robots before anyone gets there but I think that is greatly overambitious. In “Red Gold” I had the glass made from regolith processed with the fusion energy. The advantage of glass over this new suggestion is weight; even on Mars with its lower gravity millions of tonnes remains a serious weight. The first people there will have to live somewhat more simply.

Another plan that I have seen involves finding a frozen lake in a crater, and excavating an “under-ice” habitat. No shortage of water, or screening from cosmic rays, but a problem as I see it is said ice will melt from the heat, erode the bottom of the sheet, and eventually it will collapse. Undesirable, that is.

All of these “official” options use artificial lighting. Assuming a nuclear reactor, that is not a problem in itself, although it would be for the settlement under the ice because heat control would be a problem. However, there is more to getting light than generating energy. What gives off the light, and what happens when its lifetime expires? Do you have to have a huge number of spares? Can they be made on Mars?

There is also the problem with heat. In my novel I solved this with mirrors in space focussing more sunlight on selected spots, and of course this provides light to help plants grow, but if you are going to heat from fission power a whole lot more electrical equipment is needed. Many more things to go wrong, and when it could take two years to get a replacement delivered, complicated is what you do not want. It is not going to be that easy.

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Book Discounts and Video

From November 8 – 15, two ebooks will be 99c or 99p. These are:

Scaevola’s Triumph

The bizarre prophecy has worked, and Scaevola finds himself on an alien planet that is technically so advanced they consider him a primitive, yet it is losing a war. According to Pallas Athene, only he can save this civilization from extermination, and his use of strategy is needed to win this war. But what can he do, when at first he cannot even open the door to his apartment?  Book III of a series. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O0GS7LO

The Manganese Dilemma

Charles Burrowes, master hacker, is thrown into a ‘black op’ with the curvaceous Svetlana for company to validate new super stealth technology she has brought to the West. Can Burrowes provide what the CIA needs before Russian counterintelligence or a local criminal conspiracy blow the whole operation out of the water? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B077865V3L

Finally, for those who what to know what I look like: https://youtu.be/2z7lBTQ_nWY

A link to Red Gold:  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009U0458Y

Problems of Sustaining Settlements on Mars: Somewhere to Live.

People who write science fiction find colonizing Mars to be a fruitful source of plot material. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote three books on the topic, ending up by terraforming Mars. I have also written one (“Red Gold”) that included some of the problems. We even have one scheme currently being touted in which people are signing up for non-return trips. So, what are the problems? If we think about settlers making a one-way trip to New Zealand, as my ancestors did, they would find a rough start to life because much of the land was covered in forest, although there were plains. But forests meant timber for houses, some fuel, and even for sale. Leaving aside the stumps, the soil was ripe for planting crops, and you could run sheep or cows. It would have been a hard life, but there would be no reasons to fear instant death.

Mars is different. It has its resources, but they are in an inconvenient form. Take air. Mars has an atmosphere, but not a very dense one. The air pressure is about two orders of magnitude less that on Earth. That means you will have to live in some sort of dome or cave, and pump up the atmosphere to get adequate pressure, which requires you to build something that is airtight. The atmosphere is also full of carbon dioxide, and has essentially no oxygen. The answer to that is simple: build giant glass houses, pump up the atmosphere, and grow plants. That gives you food and oxygen, although you will need some fairly massive glass houses to get enough oxygen. So, how do you go about that? You will need pumps to pump up the air pressure, some form of filters to get the dust out of the inputs, and equipment to erect and seal the glass houses. That will need equipment brought from Earth. Fortunately you can make a lot of glass houses with one set of equipment. However, there are three more things required: glass, metal framing, and some form of footer, to seal in the pressure and stop it leaking back out. Initially that too will have to come from Earth, but sooner or later you have to start making this sort of thing on Mars, as otherwise the expense will be horrendous.

Glass is made by fusing pure silica with sodium carbonate and calcium oxide, and often other materials are added, such as alumina, magnesium oxide, and or borate. It is important to have some additives because it is necessary to filter out the UV radiation from the sun, so silica itself would not suffice. It is also necessary to find a glass that operates best at the lower temperatures, and that can be done, but how do you get the pure ingredients? Most of these elements are common on Mars, but locked up in basaltic rock or dust. The problem here is, Mars has had very little geochemical processing. On Earth, over the first billion years of ocean, a lot of basalt got weathered by the carbonic acid so a lot of magnesium ended up in the sea, and a lot of iron formed ferrous ions in aqueous dispersion. The earliest seas would have been green. Once life learned how to make oxygen, that oxidized the ferrous to ferric, and as ferric hydroxide is very insoluble, masses of iron precipitated out, eventually to dehydrate and make the haematite deposits that supply our steel industry. Life also started using the calcium, and when the life died and sunk to the bottom, deposits of limestone formed. As far as we know, that sort of thing did not happen on Mars. So, while sand is common on Mars, it is contaminated with iron. Would that make a suitable glass? Lava from volcanoes is not usually considered to be prime material for making glass.

So, how do you process the Martian rock? If you are going to try acid leaching, where do you get the acid, and what do you do with the residual solution? And where do you do all this?

While worrying about that, there is the question of the footer. How do you make that? In my novel Red Gold I assumed that they had developed a cement from Martian sources. That is, in my opinion, plausible. It may not be quite like our cement, which is made from limestone and clays heated to about 1700 degrees C. However, some volcanic eruptions produce material which, when heated and mixed with burnt lime make excellent cements. The main Roman cement was essentially burnt lime mixed with some heat-treated output of Vesuvius. Note once again we need lime. This, in turn, could be a problem.

My solution in Red Gold to the elements problem was simply to smash sand into its atoms and separate the elements by electromagnetism, similar to how a mass spectrometer works. The energy input for such a scheme would be very high, but the argument there was they had developed nuclear fusion, so energy was not a problem, nor for that matter, was temperature. No molecules can survive much more than about ten thousand degrees C, and nuclear fusion has a minimum temperature of about eighty million degrees C. Fine, in a novel. Doing that in practice might be a bit more difficult. However, if you don’t do something like that, how do you get the calcium oxide to make your cement, or your glass? And without a glass house, how can you eat and breathe? Put you off going to Mars? If it hasn’t, I assure you once you have your dome your problems are only beginning. More posts on this some time later.

A prediction in my SciFi novel “Red Gold”

Time to brag a bit! I know, bragging is BAD, but here I cannot help myself. Around science fiction, there are always these comments about things that SF predicted. You know, like the “flip-open” communicator in Star Trek that looks suspiciously like some mobile phones. Well, I am going to claim a partial success. There are two tricks with such predictions. The first is to find a need, which, of course, drives all successful inventions. The second is that nobody recalls the failures, so, predict away! However, in my case, unlike most others, the prediction is not what it is, but how it would work, and that is a lot harder. The reason I put science into my novels is not to predict or show off, but rather to try and show those interested some of the principles under which science works.

One problem in my novel Red Gold was, how would settlers on Mars power their transport? Since there is no air, any combustion motor would require carrying your own oxygen, so the obvious answer is, electricity. There are now two problems: how to get power, and how to get enough total energy. Electricity could come from either rechargeable batteries or fuel cells, and both use the same basic chemistry, although some chemistry for one is not suited to the other. For example, most fuel cells now run on hydrogen and air, and a rechargeable battery that generated gas on recharging would soon blow up. Similarly, a sodium – sulphur system that works in batteries might provide a challenge as to how to feed a fuel cell.

Basically, a fuel cell (or a battery) works by burning something in a controlled fashion such that instead of generating heat, the energy comes off as electric current. I decided that a fuel cell would be better than a rechargeable battery because the battery can only store so much charge, whereas a fuel cell can go indefinitely if you recharge the fuel and remove the waste. Further, I rejected the use of hydrogen and oxygen because both would have to be in gas bottles, and as we know from the use of compressed natural gas, compressed gas takes up too much volume for a given range. That suggested the use of metal. The metal I opted for was aluminium, which is desirable because each atom gives up three electrons, and it is a solid that is easily available. At first sight, this may seem strange because to get power the reaction must be fast. Thus iron rusts, but that is so slow and fuel cell might make snails win a race with the vehicle, yet iron rusts faster than aluminium corrodes.

Aluminium has been postulated for fuel cells for about 30 years, but no real progress has been made. There are two problems with it. First, the aluminium cation with three positive charges strongly attaches itself to solvent, which means it moves very slowly, which in turn means any possible fuel cell will have a very poor power output. The second is that aluminium reacts strongly with oxygen and forms an oxide coating on its surface that effectively protects it from all sorts of reagents, which is why aluminium corrodes so slowly. Aluminium was the metal of choice to contain white fuming nitric acid for the German rocket fighter in WW 2. (White fuming nitric acid was mixed with aniline, and the spontaneous combustion gave an impressive power output. Since the fuel tanks were just behind the pilot, he was effectively flying a bomb if something went wrong.)

To get around this, I opted for chlorine as the oxidizing agent, and there were three reasons for this. The first was that chlorine and chlorides totally disrupt that oxide layer, and hydrochloric acid reacts furiously with aluminium. The second was that chlorine would be a liquid at Martian temperatures, and hence apart from its corrosive nature, which can be got around with ceramics, it would be easy to handle. The fact that it is toxic is beside the point because everyone has to wear their own breathing system on Mars because it has no significant atmosphere. The third is that the reason aluminium is usually a problem is because when it burns, it forms a small cation with three positive charges on it, and these charges polarize the solvent and large amounts of solvent stick to each cation, they then do not move very quickly, and hence the power output is very low. However, if aluminium is burned in chlorine in a fuel cell, chloride anions bond to aluminium chloride to give (AlCl4)-, an anion with one negative charge, even though the three electrons have been given up. Of course, this was a bit detailed for a novel, so I just left it with the fuel cells, and left it to those with a bit of chemical knowledge to work out why I put it there. So, why the brag?

Last week, in Nature (vol 520, p 325 – 328) Lin et al. have developed an aluminium-chloride battery that has quite dramatic properties: charge/discharges over a minute with 3 kW/kg are claimed. If it works in a battery, it should work just as easily in a fuel cell. One of the key aspects is that the reaction is that (AlCl4)- reacts with Al to make (Al2Cl7)-, which makes the whole process so fast. Another important point is that the product of burning the aluminium, namely AlCl3, actually helps further reaction and does not impede the reaction, although of course, from a volume point of view it would have to gradually removed. There is a long way to go yet, and I doubt there would ever be such a fuel cell on Earth because chlorine is a rather dangerous gas, but it should work on Mars. Not, of course, that I shall live long enough to see. Nevertheless, the fact that I could predict some chemistry that would work when up to thirty years of work by others had not is very satisfying to a chemist.

If anyone is interested in Red Gold, it will be on a Kindle count-down special from May 1 for six days.

Theory and planets: what is right?

In general, I reserve this blog to support my science fiction writing, but since I try to put some real science in my writing, I thought just once I would venture into the slightly more scientific. As mentioned in previous posts, I have a completely different view of how planets, so the question is, why? Surely everyone else cannot be wrong? The answer to that depends on whether everyone goes back to first principles and satisfies themselves, and how many lazily accept what is put in front of them. That does not mean that it is wrong, however. Just because people are lazy merely makes them irrelevant. After all, what is wrong with the standard theory?

My answer to that is, in the standard theory, computations start with a uniform distribution of planetesimals formed in the disk of gas from which the star forms. From then on, gravity requires the planetesimals to collide, and it is assumed that from these collisions, planets form. I believe there are two things wrong with that picture. The first is, there is no known mechanism to get to planetesimals. The second is that while gravity may be the mechanism by which planets complete their growth, it is not the mechanism by which it starts. The reader may immediately protest and say that even if we have no idea how planetesimals form, something had to start small and accrete, otherwise there would be no planets. That is true, but just because something had to start small does not mean there is a uniform distribution throughout the accretion disk.

My theory is that it is chemistry that causes everything to start, and different chemistries occur at different temperatures. This leads to the different planets having different properties and somewhat different compositions.

The questions then are: am I right? does it matter? To the first, if I am wrong it should be possible to falsify it. So far, nobody has, so my theory is still alive. Whether it matters depends on whether you believe in science or fairy stories. If you believe that any story will do as long as you like it, well, that is certainly not science, at least in the sense that I signed up to in my youth.

So, if I am correct, what is the probability of finding suitable planets for life? Accretion disks last between 1 to even as much as 30 My. The longer the disk lasts, the longer planets pick up material, which means the bigger they are. For me, an important observation was the detection of a planet of about six times Jupiter’s mass that was about three times further from its star (with the name LkCa 15) than Jupiter. The star is approximately 2 My old. Now, the further from the star, the less dense the material, and this star is slightly smaller than our sun. The original computations required about 15 My or more to get Jupiter around our star, so they cannot be quite correct, although that is irrelevant to this question. No matter what the mechanism of accretion, Jupiter had to start accreting faster than this planet because the density of starting material must be seriously greater, which means that we can only get our solar system if the disk was cleared out very much sooner than 2 My. People ask, is there anything special regarding our solar system? I believe this very rapid cleanout of the disk will eliminate the great bulk of the planetary systems. Does it matter if they get bigger? Unfortunately, yes, because the bigger the planets get, the bigger the gravitational interactions between them, so the more likely they are to interact. If they do, orbits become chaotic, and planets can be eliminated from the system as other orbits become highly elliptical.

If anyone is interested in this theory, Planetary Formation and Biogenesis (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007T0QE6I )

will be available for 99 cents  as a special promo on Amazon.com (and 99p on Amazon.co.uk) on Friday 13, and it will gradually increase in price over the next few days. Similarly priced on Friday 13 is my novel Red Gold, (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009U0458Y  ) which is about fraud during the settlement of Mars, and as noted in my previous post, is one of the very few examples of a novel in which a genuine theory got started.

Discounted and new ebooks

Talk about getting something wrong. I had heard that there was a really good reason to discount my ebooks on Black Friday, and Amazon offers a means of discounting. Accordingly, I decided to get ready, I had plenty of time, after all (and Americans, please, contain your mirth here) I was going to set everything up for Friday December 13. Two things went wrong. The first was, oops – for Americans it appears Black Friday is something else. The second one was that I decided to discount my “Mars books”, but it turned out that I may have trouble with “A Face on Cydonia” because the KDP select period expires this week. Watch this space next week, but sooner or later it will be discounted.

Nevertheless, there will be discounts on the scientific ebook on my theory of planetary formation:

Planetary Formation and Biogenesis (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007T0QE6I )

will be available for 99 cents  as a special promo on Amazon.com (and 99p on Amazon.co.uk – these are the lowest prices permitted on each case) on December Friday 13, and the prices increase daily for about 5 days until they reach normal price.

Also on the promo is my novel Red Gold, (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009U0458Y  ) which is about fraud during the settlement of Mars.  This ebook was written in the early 1990s, and to expose the fraud, a surprising discovery was required. The surprise was the discovery of what remained of the Martian atmosphere, which provided the nitrogen fertilizer necessary to make the settlement viable. The very first version that led me to the theory in the first book is outlined in the appendix, so this is one of the very few examples of how a theory got started. How important this is depends on whether the theory is correct, and I would love to know the answer to that one. A review, to help you decide: http://www.ebookanoid.com/?p=9819

Finally, and not on promo (because it has to be there for more days than it has) I have just published my latest ebook, Athene’s Prophecy ( http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GYL4HGW ). Below, I have copied out the first paragraph, which I think gives some idea of what the book is about:

Pallas Athene was in disgrace, but she felt that it was worth every gram of it for she had immortalized herself, starting over three thousand years before she was born. Yes, she knew that her career as a serious classical historian was over, and being consigned to this miserable cell was not exactly a career highlight, but on the bright side the cell did not have a means of evacuation. If it had, and if there were even a remote possibility that such an evacuation could have been reported as accidental, she was quite certain she would have been consigned to the depths of space. Instead, all they could do was to put her in a shuttle and return her to Earth tomorrow. They would also make certain that she would never be given permission to use the temporal viewer again.

Terraforming Mars

In the 1990s, there was much speculation about terraforming planets, particularly Mars. The idea was that the planet could be converted into something like Earth. To make Mars roughly like Earth, the temperature has to be raised by about ninety Centigrade degrees, atmospheric pressure has to be raised by something approaching a hundred times present pressure, and a lot of water must be found. That presumably comes from buried ice, so besides uncovering it, an enormous amount of heat is required to melt it. The reason Mars is colder is that the sun delivers half the power to Mars than Earth, due to Mars being further away. The gas pressure depends on two things. The first is there has to be enough material, and the second is we have to get it into the gas phase. The most obvious gas is carbon dioxide, because as dry ice, it could be in the solid state, but would be amenable to heating. The problem is, if carbon dioxide is present with a lot of water, it will be absorbed by the water, particularly cold water, and slowly turned into material like dolomite. Nitrogen is the major gas in our atmosphere, but that would be a gas on Mars, and there is very little in the Martian atmosphere.

Why did anyone ever think Terraforming was possible? One reason may be that about 3.6 Gy ago (a gigayear is a thousand million years) it was thought that there were huge rivers on Mars. The Viking images found a huge number of massive river valleys, and so it was thought there had to be sufficient temperatures to melt the water. Subsequent information has suggested that these rivers did not persist over a prolonged wet period, but rather there were intermittent periods where significant flows occurred.  Such rivers probably never flowed for more than a million years or so, and while a million years might seem to be an extremely long period to us, it is trivial in the life of the solar system. Nevertheless the rivers meandered for that period, which is at least suggestive that they were relatively stable for that time, so what went wrong?

When I wrote Red Gold, I needed the major protagonist to make an unexpected discovery to expose a fraud, and it was then that I had an idea. The average temperature on Mars now is -80 degrees C, and while we could imagine some sort of greenhouse effect warming the early Mars, the sun only emitted about two-thirds the energy it does now, so temperature would have been a more severe problem. To me, it was inconceivable that the temperature could get sufficiently above the melting point of ice to give significant flows, but there is one way to make water liquid at -80 degrees C, and that is to have ammonia present. If the volcanoes gave off ammonia as well as water, that would give some greenhouse gas, and the carbon would be present as methane, this being what is called a reducing atmosphere. Sunlight tends to act with water to oxidize things, giving off hydrogen that escapes to space. This has happened extensively on Mars, indeed at many sites where chloride has been deposited on the surface, it has been converted to perchlorate. So methane would oxidize to carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide would react with ammonia to make first, ammonium carbonate, then, given heat or time, urea. So my “unexpected discovery” was the fertilizer that would make the settlement of Mars possible. I had something that I thought would make my plot plausible.

Funnily enough, this thought took on a life of its own; the more I thought about it, the more I liked it, because it helps to explain, amongst other things, how life began. (The reduced form of nitrogen is a set of compound called nitrides. Water on nitrides, plus heat, makes ammonia, and also cyanide, which is effectively carbon nitride.) Standard theory, of course, assumes that nitrogen was always emitted as the nitrogen gas we have in our atmosphere. Of course you might think that all the scientists are right and I am wrong. Amongst others, Carl Sagan calculated that if ammonia was emitted into the atmosphere, it would be removed by sunlight in a matter of a decade or so, and he had to be right, surely? Well, no. Anyone can be wrong. (Of course you may say some, such as me, are more likely to be wrong than others!) However, in this case I maintain that Sagan was wrong because he overlooked something: ammonia dissolves in water at a very fast rate, and in water it will be protected to some extent. To justify that, we have found rocks on Earth that are 3.2 billion years old and that have samples of seawater enclosed, and these drops of seawater have very high levels of ammonia. These levels are sufficiently high that about 10% of Earth’s nitrogen must have been dissolved in the sea as ammonia at the time, and that is after the Earth had been around for about 500 million years after the water flowed on Mars.

If anyone is interested in why I think this occurred, Red Gold has an appendix where my first explanation is given in simple language. For those who want something a bit more detailed, together with a review of several hundred scientific papers, you could try my ebook, Planetary Formation and Biogenesis.

The “Face” of Mars

I start my new SciFi ebook, A Face on Cydonia, as follows:

On the Cydonian region of Mars there are two faces staring into space. Both are two and a half kilometers long, a kilometer wide and about four hundred meters high, and since both are in exactly the same place, no observer can see more than one of them. Most see a battered butte with craters roughly in the right place such that, with considerable imagination, the image of a badly torn face can perhaps be seen. Some, however, see a refinement of the enhancement produced from the original low resolution Viking photographs, a truly alien monument, a deep message to humanity . . .

I refer, of course, to the “Face”, which has gained a certain degree of notoriety as people speculated as to what might have created what we see.  Guesses run from Martians, aliens, to natural erosion. Most people would be skeptical and point out that, “You can see faces anywhere, such as clouds,” and dismiss anything other than nature as nonsense. While this face is somewhat different from cloud faces, it has one interesting thing in common: much of the face is hidden in the original image, simply because the angle of the sun shades half of it. One purpose in my novels is to try to show that reality should follow the rules of logic. So, what would logic say? The first question a scientist asks is, are the data suitable to resolve anything? If they were collected for some other purpose, they may not be. The initial data were collected by the Viking orbiter, which had the task of creating the first map of Mars. The map, perforce, had to deal with the major features, so for various reasons it settled on resolution that would give the desired map. Below, see one of the images of the Cydonia Mensae, in which the Face was first seen. Note that the angle of the sunlight shades quite a bit of the Face.

 

We can expand and enhance the particular region (small black dots are lost pixels and are not real):

 

The initial argument against erosion/adventitious craters was initially, the probability of sufficient coincidences is too low. That argument is false, because what was overlooked was that with so few pixels devoted to the face, coupled with the shading, you do not need much in the way of accidental coincidence. That does not prove it is natural, but rather suggests you need better data before reaching a conclusion.

As I noted in Red Gold, we can immediately eliminate Martians, because the face looks like ours  (if it looks like a face) rather than like a possible Martian’s, and leaving aside the inhospitality of Mars, even had there been such Martians, they would have no idea what our face would look like. There are further reasons: there is no reason why a Martian would carve a face only we could see, and Mars could never have evolved indigenous technological life forms without leaving some evidence of the process. Aliens are slightly more difficult to eliminate by logic. As one of the characters in Red Gold said as a joke, space-traveling aliens who visited Earth, say two million years ago, could have worked out what our faces would look like when we evolved sufficiently to develop the technology to see such a butte on Mars, and they could have carved something. It could then be a message to us, meaning, “Come to space; it is possible and it is worth it.” That still leaves the issue of why would they bother to do that.

All of this speculation almost certainly annoyed NASA considerably. Beside the Face, some thought they saw pyramids. That is not hard to understand, except again the specific lighting in the first picture greatly enhances the possibility, since only a pointed top and an edge is required. Accordingly, when Global Surveyor was sent to Mars, NASA promised to use its better resolution to settle for once and for all what this rock was. Meanwhile, I had thought that all the activity might make it worth while to write  a SCiFi novel about the rock. Of course you cannot simply write about a rock, so I had to construct a story around it. This was slower than I thought, and Global Surveyor settled this issue, one of its images being reproduced below:

 

The end of speculation about aliens! Well, not necessarily in fiction! (Actually, not necessarily in reality, as can be seen if you check the web!) I started my novel A Face on Cydonia with a television program that showed the image of the butte, intending to show how silly people were to think there could have been aliens, when the image morphed into the Viking-type image and winked. Eventually, this lead to an expedition, in which the members all have problems with each of the other members, and the book focuses on these problems. To add to the mix, there are at least three attempts from an external agent to murder at least one of them. Then, to keep the story going, each of the participants finds exactly what they did not want to find, and I set up a situation for more story by having each of them look forward to a future where they will have to carry out what they do not wish to do.

For those interested, in next post I shall give a link to A Face on Cydonia.

 

 

Chemicals from durene (1)

The next few posts will involve issues in my life that have been helpful in providing some background to my novels, particularly involving industrial startups, small business, and government. The posts might also convince some why governments should stay out of specific commercial enterprises. These incidents occurred at the same time as I was trying to find a place to publish Gemina. As I mentioned in the previous post, I had lobbied to persuade the New Zealand government to sell durene from the Motunui synthetic fuels plant. To develop the offshore Maui gas field, the government had entered into a “take or pay” agreement with the company that would construct and operate the platform, so, having paid for it, the government owned the gas. A simple thing would have been for the government to sell the gas to the company operating Motunui, but the simple approach seems to elude certain politicians. They decided they would retain ownership of the hydrocarbon stream, and pay a toll to get it converted. Reason: they saw oil as always increasing in price, and I suppose there was also the strategic element.

The reason why this project made sense was because durene had to be removed from the synthetic petrol, therefore the cost of making it was close to that of petrol, which made it an order of magnitude cheaper than durene from other sources. Durene could be converted by a known process to pyromellitic dianhydride, which could be used to make the very high quality polyimide plastics, and it was then being made at about 500 t/a. The competitive advantage was cost, and with the price of oil falling, nobody was going to construct a similar plant to Motunui.

One fruit from my lobbying was the approach of a small company. This company had no experience at chemicals or fuels, but it claimed to know how to raise money, and how the political system worked. As the only game in town, I supported them, at first without much hope, but strangely enough, they exceeded all expectations. I put together, in my spare time, a technical proposal, and the company began looking for joint venture partners. The first effort was with an American multinational, and it was embarrassing, as two of the “official presenters” merely demonstrated they knew nothing about chemicals. Neither did the third, but he had the sense not to pretend. After a somewhat blunt discussion, those two exited from further presentations, and I ended up attending presentations and was responsible for the technical issues. I was on somewhat uncertain grounds here, being employed by a government scientific department. My defence was that I was following the organization’s mission statement. What was impressive about this defence was that it appeared I was one of the very few that even knew such a statement existed, let alone had read it! Anyway, things started progressing at last. I had apparently made sufficient nuisance of myself that there was sufficient groundswell that at last the politicians could not ignore it.

Two events happened. The first was that the small company entered into an agreement with the state-owned entity, Petrocorp, and now there was a player that made sense. (Petrocorp owned a methanol plant and an ammonia-urea plant, each run by gas, and hence had a reasonable amount of brownfield development on which to add a further chemical plant.) The second was that the government announced a bidding process for the development of durene, the process to be run and judged by the Department of Energy. Now, suddenly, the officials asked me to join in the judging process. I refused, explaining that my role was to ensure that at least one sensible proposal was on the table. Then, Petrocorp sent one of their senior executives, an executive from the small company, and me to the headquarters of Fluor Corporation, in southern Los Angeles. (This gave me one scary moment; the driving was left to the small company man because he was a native of Los Angeles and had been in New Zealand for a few years. At one point he made a left turn and to my horror we were on the left side of a divided multilane street. Apart from that minor piece of forgetfulness, though, I appreciated his driving, because he knew where he was going.)

I was fairly pleased with myself for a while, because here I was discussing a venture with engineers who knew how to build chemical plant, and they were validating most of what I had said. They agreed with me that a certain amount of development work was needed, but they were convinced this was doable. Then a spanner in the works. On the last day, with about an hour left, the Petrocorp executive produced a critical blow: Petrocorp would not be part of the bid. Why not? What I was told was that at the Petrocorp Board meeting, the Secretary of Energy, who was also a Petrocorp Board member, had said there was no need to reach a decision at that meeting, and everything could be delayed until the next. With no need to do something, they did nothing. The problem was, the next Board meeting would be after submissions closed, and that Secretary knew that, or should have, after all, his Department was running the process. Whether I was told the truth is another matter, but that borders on the irrelevant. The small company no longer had a joint venture partner, and it was not big enough to be credible. Forked? Whatever, the small company put in its submission, stating that if it won, the win would be dependent on its finding a suitable partner. More will follow!

The first steps towards self-publishing

In my last post, the bloghop post, I gave a brief answer to the question, how did I start writing “Red Gold”? Some of what happened that was left out might also be of some interest, because it introduced me to self-publishing, even back then. As I wrote previously, my first book, “Gemina” was written as a response to a bet, and after I sent it off, I got, I think, four rejections. I gave up on that, but the writing bug must have stuck because next summer I tried another. This, I decided, would be more literary, with as much as anything, the objective of which was to record experiences of a young student during the early 1960s. That too ended up in the trunk, and I gave up, as my career, aka day job, took over. About fifteen years later, I reopened the scripts. The first one, I felt, was genuine trash at the start, but half-way through I was reasonably pleased with it. The book was written in four parts, so I totally rewrote Part 1, made some significant changes to Part 2, I left Part 3 totally untouched, and Part 4 was rewritten only to accommodate necessary changes made earlier. Now what? I sent it off to one publisher and got the standard rejection. However, about this time I was reaching a crisis in my life.

I had been employed as a scientist at the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in New Zealand, and in response to the first oil crisis, I was involved with energy-related matters. This climaxed when I was asked to a meeting to decide the government’s response to a proposal to build a synthetic fuels plant. As part of the background, New Zealand had found a massive field of natural gas offshore and by previous contracts, the government had a “take or pay” agreement to consume the gas. There were two major proposals for synthetic fuel on the table: a German group offered to build a Fischer-Tropsch plant for something like $800 million, plus site development, while Mobil Corporation offered to build their methanol to petrol process for $290 million, plus site development. (The reason for “plus site development” was that nobody knew where the plant was to be constructed.) A meeting was called, at which I was by far the most junior, and I advocated the German plant, because it was cheaper. I was asked what I meant, and I said the Mobil proposal would cost at a minimum, $1100 million plus site development. I was ridiculed, after all, how would I know better than Mobil Corporation, and never asked to come back. I became persona non gratia with the officials who recommended the plant, and who promptly received very significant roles in it. Motunui was built, using the Mobil process, and I gather it cost something around $1300 million. You might ask, how did that happen? The answer was deploringly simple: Mobil corporation gave a perfectly good quote, but it was for a process to convert methanol to petrol; you still had to build the plant to convert gas to methanol. My estimate was based on adding the cost of the methanol plants to the Mobil quote.

There was one further point about the Mobil process: the petrol it made had a component in it called durene, which, unlike other petrol components, is a solid, so it could crystallize out from petrol on a cold day and block a carburetor. On the other hand, since it crystallized out, it could be separated, and if it were, it would be a raw material for a class of chemicals called dianhydrides, from which you can make fire-resistant plastics. Since the official role for DSIR was to assist and promote industrial development in New Zealand, I set out to promote the use of durene, which in principle could be made in this plant ten times cheaper than anywhere else. Such efforts started with proper channels, and got immediate rebuff from the same certain officials who had been promoting the Mobil process. Why? Who knows. It could have been rank incompetence, or it could have been to protect their positions. However, I took what opportunities that were available, and one turned up in the form of an invitation to go on a nationwide TV program to discuss the flammability of plastics. I had mentioned to the producer that it as possible to make flame-resistant plastics, so I was invited to make some and bring them along. I did, and found myself on the set facing one of the leading interviewers in the country, and a small gas torch. At the end, I was asked to prove what I had made was flame resistant, so the gas torch was lit, I placed this slab of home-made foam in the palm of my hand, fired it up, and hoped this would work. It did; the plastic became yellow hot, but apart from minor ablation, remained more or less the same. I held it there for thirty seconds, until the interviewer decided that this had some similarity to drying paint and cut the flame.

As the plastic cooled down, he remarked something like, “Yes, but it still gives off obnoxious gas doesn’t it?”

We had already discussed the poisonous fumes given off by burning polyurethane, so I knew where this was going. So I held my nose over it and gave a huge sniff, and held my face and said something like, “Nothing too bad.”

The interviewer gave a wry smile. He knew I had acted, but he also knew there was nothing to be gained by his calling me.

The relevance of all this is, of course, I was starting to build up something of a public image. I had to get that novel out! I decided to self-publish, because there was no time to lose, or so I thought.