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Tai's Take - # 003

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  Tai here. I was reading about what you Earthers call the Kardashev scale. Apologies, sometimes it’s fun to say “you Earthers”. Anyway, this is a cool scale which marks the level of a civilization's progress. It’s based on power, which is the ultimate North Star for any enterprise. Advance depends on energy. Kind of an obvious thing, whether for a household, a nation or a world, but sometimes it helps to say things out loud. Here are the levels of the Kardashev scale: Type I = a civilization that can harness all the energy that reaches its home planet from its parent star. Type II = a civilization capable of harnessing and channeling the entire radiation output of its star. This is the entire star, not just the portion of energy reaching the planet. Type III = a civilization having access to power comparable to the luminosity of the entire galaxy. Heady stuff. Earth gets about 200 quadrillion watts from the sun. That’s not what the sun puts out, just what hits us. Globally we d...
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Happy Hour - # 002

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  May we present, a conversation starter for your next social event: When it comes to going far — like, next-star-over far — we don’t yet have any working solutions. Several have been proposed, including, most recently, a relativistic electron beam which could get a probe to Alpha Centauri in roughly forty years, but everything at the moment is in the concept stage. It’s a fascinating discussion to imagine what technology might take the lead for our first star shot. (At least we think it’s fascinating. You’ll have to break this out at your next poker game and see.) Image Credit: econews Other possible methods rolling around the minds of scientific thinkers: Laser-Powered Light Sails Fusion-Based Rocket Propulsion Nuclear Pulse Propulsion Antimatter-Catalyzed Nuclear Pulse Propulsion That last one just makes you sound smart when you say it. Each of these could get a craft going fast enough to make the journey to Alpha Centauri in a human lifetime. In each case specs for how they m...
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Tai's Take - # 002

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  Tai here. This week I thought I’d give a quick summary of what we’re about. In one sentence: Forty Suns is extending the conversation. In everything we do, with our site, with our blogs, with this newsletter, our books, our channels and shows, our branding, our merch and every other thing we're up to, our central hope is this: That space become a regular topic among the majority. It's important we're having that discussion. This is where we begin. By talking with others about the next frontier. By having that dialog, engaging in debate, initiating discourse with friends. By taking it online; by bringing up space wherever conversations occur. Not often, certainly not always, but some. If enough of us are talking about it, even if only now and again, our future out there becomes that much more certain. That’s my take. Tai Rade ( / tie rah-day / ) is a former Space Marine turned space advocate. Hailing from the nearby Proxima B star system, she's become an active voice f...
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Happy Hour - # 001

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  May we present, a conversation starter for your next social event: In the words of Douglas Adams (of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy fame): “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.” Nearly 50 years ago we humans here on Earth launched what would become our best demonstration of exactly how true that is. In 1977 Voyager 1 set out on its mission to Jupiter and Saturn, before continuing deeper into the solar system and beyond. It’s now out there in interstellar space, covering over 10 miles each second, and after a million more years at that pace (imagine how quickly you could get to the chemist at 10 miles per second), it will be roughly here in our galaxy: 10,000 centuries at 10 miles a second. Of course, even examples like that don’t really help us grasp just how “mind-boggling” big our own galaxy is, let alone the unive...
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Tai's Take - # 001

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  Tai’s Take Tai here. I'm always pitching hard to open the next frontier, yet I realize such a future isn't a guarantee of teacups and rainbows. Possibly worse things will come with the good. Cyberpunk lunar gangs? Could happen. Martian warlords? That too. Space is complex, and will bring with it whole new dangers. There’s beauty to simplicity. I get that. A life on the farm, say. A fantasy setting; castles and princesses and noble quests. More wholesome ways of life. Something akin to an Avatar-like existence, for instance, living in harmony with an energizing ecosystem. There are ways to have such an existence right now, right here on Earth. Yet that existence will live within a world of technology. One can, for example, with effort, get off the grid. Lead a simpler life, if so desired. Still, the foundation of that existence will be civilization. What I'm pushing for is more playing fields, not a way of life. Some of us may not want spaceships and laser guns. Some of us...
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The Old Guard & The New Space Age

  The Old Guard & The New Space Age Contents Sanity Checks The Role Of Oversight Fortifying Our Teams A New Era What Needs To Happen? Estimation Of Effort Our Space Future Civilizing The New Wild West ___ One of our strengths as humans is the ability to evaluate the future and make plans. It’s how we have civilizations, train schedules, tiered prizes for ugly sweater contests, elections … You get the idea. We look ahead. We estimate what will be needed. We prepare. Not always perfectly, of course, sometimes quite horribly, but the fact that an Empire State Building exists in New York City – or that a New York City exists at all – would seem to speak to the notion that, mostly, we’re pretty damn good at figuring out how to do stuff. When it comes to space a storm is brewing. One we may not be planning well enough for. A wave we need to get ahead of. Many are aware of it. Many are pushing for action. It’s time to give it the full focus of our attention it deserves. It’s time to a...
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Moonshot Mindset

  The Moonshot Mindset Contents The Moonshot Mindset Doing It Moving the Needle Responsibility Good Control The Importance of Asking Questions Ethics Greatest Good Trade-Offs > Failure The Turning Point __ We used to live in caves and fear tigers in the bushes. We no longer live in caves and no longer fear tigers in the bushes. Today we live in cities and fear other things. One day we’ll live on entire other worlds and have all-new new fears, but the fact is we’ll be living on other worlds and all our troubles of the present will, in the same way, seem quaint. Progress is part of our existence. The Moonshot Mindset So what are we dealing in? Growth. Big Think. Gains. Pushing the technology envelope. Creating bold futures on all fronts. In short, the “Moonshot Mindset”. You’ve probably heard the term before, coined during the Space Race of the 60s, where it epitomized the thinking behind the literal slew of incredible, impossible, can’t-be-done items on the checklist to get a ...
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