Diary of a Network Geek

I’ve got nothing this week, so I’m offering a world.

My wife and I have been sick the past week or so, which has left me with not a lot of mental bandwidth for my regular posts and writing.  Also, my attention span is short, but at least I find that I’m more easily amused.  One thing that amused me probably a little too much this week was Oskar Stålberg’s Polygonal Planet project.  It comes in two forms; downloadable, which you…
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Another game this week.

This one takes a bit more time than the last one.  500 years, actually.

Okay, not five-hundred actual years, but five-hundred game years.  The game is called Super Planet Crash, but the goal is to not crash planets.  The idea is simple, design a solar system that will last at least 500 laps around the Sun.  You add in planets of various sizes and densities and let them go.  The more planets and more complicated your solar system,…
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One of the many problems I’ve always had with the majority of science-fiction is space.

No, not outer space, but, rather, the space they use on spaceships and the like.  Something like the [amazon_link id=”1451621299″ target=”_blank” ]U.S.S. Enterprise[/amazon_link] is fantastic and fun, but, frankly wholly unrealistic in their use of available space on a star ship.  Those high ceilings and vast gardens are wonderful, but, really, they add so much mass to a deep space vessel  that I have to wonder if they’re really a good use of materials, not to mention the fuel to move it all and maintain it.
Even [amazon_link id=”B0036EH3UC” target=”_blank” ]Battlestar Galactica[/amazon_link] seems to have incredibly high ceilings for a military vessel.  I mean, compare it to, say, an aircraft carrier, or, perhaps more reasonably, a submarine.  Granted, modern submarines have vastly more space available to them than their predecessors from World War II, but, still, space is at a premium.

In our only actual space installation, the International Space Station, space is certainly at a premium.  Granted, it’s not something that we still seem to be spending a lot of money on to improve or expand or even replace or duplicate, but it is the only real off-planet installation we currently have.  As such, it’s all we have to use as a guide for how future space craft or space stations might use their space.  So, if you’re a science-fiction writer, a future or hopeful science-fiction writer, or even just a fan, you owe it to yourself to check out this tour of the ISS.  Trust me on this, it will be an “eye opener” for many people seeing it for the first time.

Also?  I think it’s incredibly cool that people are living in space, even in cramped quarters, even for relatively short periods of time.
We live in the future.

This is not new.

Setting aside for a moment the fact that there is nothing new under the sun, there are some ideas that have been around for a long time that are just now seeing the light of day. The idea I’m thinking about today is regenerative life-support systems for long-term space exploration. The idea is simple, really. You just create a tiny, self-sustaining ecosystem on a spacecraft and send it on its way toward Mars or Jupiter or wherever you’re interested in going. The astronauts tend the garden which provides them with both fresh produce and breathable air. Of course, actually implementing this system is much more challenging than it seems on the surface. Discover takes a little closer look at the problem in a recent article on their blog.

You can read a short-story about this, or at least with this as a theme, in the New Yorker on-line called Lostronaut. It’s good and it inspired the Discover blog posting. Also, it’s science-fiction published in the New Yorker, so it’s worth reading.