Free Pies!

To mark the last two days of the Republican Convention, my collection of forty short stories with political themes – Political Pies – will be free to download on Kindle today and tomorrow.

The Moon Before Mars

Over the last few years a lot of people have caught Mars fever.  It seems a week doesn’t go by without a report of some new group wanting to send people to Mars, or some big name in the industry talking about why we have to go to Mars, or articles talking about the glorious future humanity will have on Mars.  All of this worries me.  In my opinion, a Mars base is currently not sustainable because there’s no way for it to make money.  A few missions may fly doing extraordinary science, but if it’s then cancelled for cost the whole Mars Project may just be seen as an expensive stunt. 

Fortunately, there are other places in the solar system besides Mars.  While bases on the moon and amongst the asteroids won’t be as inspirational as one on Mars, they will have opportunities for businesses to make goods and services as well as profits, meaning less chance of them being outright cancelled.  This will make life better on Earth and secure a firm foothold in space for humanity.  The essays in “The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars” allow me to describe my ideas on what can be accomplished on the moon and with the asteroids, and why Mars isn’t the destiny of humanity its cheerleaders make it out to be.  I even made a short video talking more about this.

Here is a brief excerpt:

Many of the people gung-ho on Mars see it as a backup for humanity, in case something terrible happens on Earth.  But there are enough metals in the Asteroid Belt to build hundreds of space stations.  The population of a community station may only be ten thousand or so, but they would be scattered all over the solar system, each acting as a backup.

And one thing we can do with a hollowed out asteroid or a constructed vessel that can’t be done with Mars, is to put rockets on one and send it off to another star system.  So basically, the math comes down to, if we go to Mars we get a planet; but if we go to the asteroids, we get the galaxy.  Yes, we’ll do both, but what I realized is that those so focused on Mars, are just thinking too small.

Orphan Black Season 4 Overview

My introductory post

So I rewatched Season Four of Orphan Black.  It was a couple of weeks ago, but stuff kept coming up and I’m only now getting my thoughts down.  But here it goes.

Are Kira’s … feelings related to Rachel’s visions?  I mean, are they things Westmoreland, or someone else, is sending to her and she’s receiving through some funky biological way?  Part of this is related to one thing that has always bugged me in the show, and that is the synthetic sequences in their DNA.  I believe Ethan said that they made cloning possible.  I’m not a biologists, but I don’t think that’s how cloning works.  Which makes me wonder if these synthetic sequences are just something that Westmoreland had Ethan insert for … reasons.  This might explain why Sarah and Helena can have kids.  If there needed to be some shot when the Leda clones were born to activate the synthetic sequences, since Sarah Helena’s mother ran away they missed out on the shot.  Was that the real point of Sarah’s maggotbot?

Speaking of Westmoreland, I’m pretty sure they won’t do the super scifi thing like he’s a time traveler stuck in the past, or an alien or anything like that.  My bet is that he just won the genetic lottery and his genes keep him from aging, or aging very slowly.  Could the synthetic sequences then be his attempt to understand this part of himself?  But without sharing it with lowly clones?  Was his ability something that Kira inherited, allowing for her quick healing when she was hit by the car in Season One?  Could Kira be better at whatever it is than Westmoreland? 

Something smaller.  Should Scott get a girlfriend?  If so, how about MK?  I’m not thinking a whirlwind romance during Season Five, just them connecting over some game.

Something I’ve always wondered is why the clone club doesn’t make a video explaining everything and tell the bad guys that if anything happens to them, the video about cloning, plans to genetically alter humans, etc. would go public.  I’m sure the reason they haven’t done it is they worry what would happen to the naïve clones suddenly learning that they are clones, but at some point that may have to be an option.  The upside to them telling the world is there could be a montage of people learning about clones – such as Angie, Vic, the reverend, Sara, Alison’s mom, Krystal – as well as a bunch of new clones learning they’re clones. 

That might be a way to end the series, but I also wonder if they’ll do a Harry Potter ending of jumping ahead twenty years and seeing Kira with kids, or Scott and MK married, or Cosima and Delphine with some adopted kids.  On one hand, that seems too cheesy, but on the other hand you feel that these characters deserve a happy ending.  I guess if you don’t want it to be too happy, you could have them all coming together for Mrs. S’s funeral. 

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see where it all goes. 

Anyway, here are the links to the previous season’s overviews as well as my reviews for each episode of Season Four.

Season 1 Overview

Season 2 Overview

Season 3 Overview

Season 4

“The Collapse of Nature”  

“Transgressive Border Crossing”  

“The Stigmata of Progress”  

“From Instinct to Rational Control”  

“Human Raw Material”  

“The Scandal of Altruism”  

“The Antisocialism of Sex”  

“The Redesign of Natural Objects”  

“The Mitigation of Competition”  

“From Dancing Mice to Psychopaths”