Some thoughts on abortion

One night about fifteen years ago, my girlfriend at the time was freaking out because she was like two days late.  There was a drug store a couple blocks from her apartment, but she didn’t want to go there because her mother’s friend worked there and she didn’t want her parents to think she was pregnant.  So I drove to the drug store across town and bought a pregnancy test.  She took it, and it came up negative.  But since she had read that the tests are more accurate in the mornings, I had to go back and buy a second test.  And the next morning that too was negative.  And she got her period like two days later.

Even after the first test she was still uneasy.  And she said that if she was pregnant she was getting an abortion.  Part of it was because she had some medical issues that could be inherited, and she had struggled with them all her life and she wouldn’t wish them on anyone, let alone a baby.  Also, she was on four or five medicines for these issues, and I think all of them had the side effect of severe birth defects.  So her choices other than abortion were to stay on the medicines, and either miscarry or have a kid with severe health problems, hope that after years of fine tuning her medicines her doctors could quickly switch her to safer meds, or just stop taking these medications that helped her live a semi-normal life.  And even if she managed to get through the pregnancy and had a healthy baby, neither of us were parent material, and we really shouldn’t have been a couple to begin with.

If she had been pregnant and went ahead with the abortion, I would have helped her.  I would have driven her to it, paid for it, and done whatever she needed.  But I was 95% certain that she wasn’t pregnant.  First off, we always used protection, but also because of her medication she had an erratic menstrual cycle.  I wanted to ask how she could be two days late when her cycle was erratic, but I knew better. 

That is the closest I have been to the abortion issue.  But it was a choice I didn’t have to make, so my thoughts on what I would have done are all “in theory.”

If you had asked for my thoughts on abortion twenty-fivish years ago, I probably would have said that I was a militant pro-choicer.  Part of it was the simple idea that women should be able to control what happens with their bodies, but a big part was also that many of those against abortion were religious nuts who I had other issues with.  And if they were against something, well then I was pretty much for it.  The idea I came up with – and which I still agree with – is that the people who should decide if a woman has an abortion are: the woman, the father if possible, her doctor, her parents/guardian if she’s underage, and whoever she wants to talk to about it.  If there isn’t a politician or priest in that group, it’s none of their damn business. 

Now, one night about twenty or so years ago, I was thinking about clones.  Which is perfectly normal for someone interested in/writing science fiction.  Anyway, I wondered at what point in the cloning process could the person who donated the cells stop the procedure.  My idea was that you take some cells from a person, and put them in an artificial womb thing that then grows the clone over days or months or whatever.  And my initial idea was that as soon as the cells are put in the cloning machine, that’s it.  The clone is now another person and the donor can’t stop the process.  Which is great and all, but then I had to ask how that fit in with the old fashioned method of making new people. 

Some people claim that as soon as an egg is fertilized, that’s a new person.  I find that too simplistic an answer for such a complex issue.  The very rough answer that I’ve hammered out, focuses on … separate survivability, I guess you can call it.  As soon as a fetus/baby can survive outside of the mother, that in my view is when they are a new person.  But there isn’t a fixed line when that happens, and medical technology is always advancing.  (Did you really want some schmuck on the internet to just say “Babies are people at X weeks!” and accept that as an answer?)  For my clone idea, there is some machine that takes the cells and makes a new person out of them.  Even if those cells are stolen from someone, barring some machine breakdown, those cells will become a new person.  I don’t see this applying to regular procreation – even if the chance of some cells becoming a new person are the same – because women are people, and not just baby making machines.  If you drop your phone and the screen cracks, you get a new one.  If you drop a baby and there’s a crack, you don’t just get a new one.  We treat humans and machines differently. 

Now, if we had the medical technology that as soon as a woman found out she was pregnant she could go and have the ball of cells removed and put into some artificial womb that would then grow the baby, I would say that should replace abortion and terminating a pregnancy should be reserved for only the most extreme circumstances, like if the life of the mother is at risk.

Of course, if there were now all these babies coming out of artificial wombs, where would they go?  It’s not like we already have plenty of kids waiting to be adopted.  It seems like until that medical technology is fully developed, the best way to reduce abortions would be to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies, through better education and increased use of contraceptives.  And of course, the religious nuts are against that too.

Looking to make a little extra money?

Over the years, I’ve tried a few sites where you answer surveys or whatever and earn some type of token.  Earn enough tokens and you can cash them in for gift cards or even a direct deposit into your bank account.  Several of these sites have gone belly-up, but there are two that I still use.  These are InstaGC and Swagbucks.  To be perfectly clear, those links are my referral links, meaning if you click on them and sign up, I get a bit of a bonus.  But before you sign up, be sure to read all the terms and everything.

How much money you can make depends on how much time you can put into them.  Back when I was unemployed, I probably put an hour or so a day into them.  Now that I have a “real” job, I only spend a few minutes per week on them, and therefore only earn about a $1 a month.  Which is not much, but I look at it as after a year on these sites, I can easily pay for a month of Netflix. 

Random Story – I hit a possum with a shovel and a duck flew at me

 This is just an odd little story from my life.

I live on a farm and we’ve had chickens for as long as I can remember.  A few years ago, our rooster … lost a fight with the rooster in the truck bumper.  (On occasion he would attack his reflection, and one time he attacked so hard he broke his own neck.)  So our hens were on their own.  A few months later, one of our neighbor’s roosters noticed these single ladies and joined them.  I’m not sure what breed he was, but he was half the size of our hens, so I don’t know if he tried anything, but after hanging with them for a few days he followed them into our coop at night.  So we again had a rooster.  We also had some ducks who also spent the nights in our coop. 

Well, one night I was out at 2:00 AM or something – I can’t remember if I was just taking our dog out to pee, or if I was out to look at the stars – but I heard some commotion coming from the coop.  Wondering what was up, I went to see.  I opened the door and saw that a possum had gotten inside.  The little rooster had tried to defend the ladies, but the possum had killed it.  But I guess the possum didn’t think it was enough of a meal, because it was dragging a duck by the neck. 

I stepped outside and grabbed a shovel that was nearby.  I went back in and swung as hard as I could with the intention of beating that possum to death.  But when I hit it, it opened its mouth and the duck – which I thought was dead – was only playing possum and made a break for it.  Unfortunately, the only way out was right where I was standing, so this quacking, flapping, zombie duck came almost right at my face.  And once they saw the way was clear, all the other ducks and hens followed.

Once they were out of the way, and my heart rate slowed to 100 BPM, I went back in, but the possum had gone out the way it had come in.  We used to let the chickens out a small door, but we blocked it off and had just let them go in and out the people door.  But the blocking had come loose and the possum was able to squeeze in.

I looked all around, but I couldn’t see where the possum had gotten to.  I blocked up the door again, took out the brave little rooster, and after ten minutes or so, the chickens went back in the coop.  But the ducks were too spooked; they wouldn’t go back in.  I figured they would probably be okay for one night outside – they were probably too scared to sleep – so I let them be.  But the next night they wouldn’t go in the coop.  Or the night after that.  In fact, it might have been a year or more before they went back into the coop during the day to eat.

Don’t worry too much for the ducks.  They hung around our coop for a few days, but then they wandered over to the neighbor’s.  I guess they felt safer in their chicken coop.

So that’s the story of when I hit a possum with a shovel and duck flew at me.

Some self-checkout thoughts

Several years ago, I moved back home to help my parents out around the house and farm.  And to have time to write.  That’s great and all, but I can’t really use a short story or the afternoon I helped my dad bale hay to pay for my car insurance.  So a couple of years ago I got a crappy part time job to pay the bills.  When I say crappy, I mean that for a while even though I worked thirty-nine hours – often over six days – a week, I was still “part time” and didn’t get benefits.  But for the last year or so I’ve cut back so now I only worked two, or three days a week which means I actually have time to unwind and maybe get something done.

The store I work in is busy.  As in we had three registers and there were times when even with three cashiers ringing people out we still had customers waiting in line.  But a couple of months ago the Corporation, in their “wisdom,” took out one of the registers to put in a self-checkout.  I say “wisdom” because apparently the software of the self-checkout doesn’t work with our old software, and even though they knew the problem existed because it happened in all the stores they put self-checkouts in, they still went ahead and took out a register we used on a daily basis and put in a glorified counter. 

All this means is that for the last couple of months I’ve gotten to hear many people’s thoughts on self-checkout.  To me it seems that younger people are … not excited, but at least cool with the idea, whereas older people are often anti-self-checkout.  They often proudly claim that they will never use one because “it takes away jobs.” I wrote up some of my thoughts on self-checkouts a couple of years ago, but now that I have direct experience with them, I thought I should expand on the issue because things are not black-or-white. 

In a store, there are various jobs that need done.  When stuff is delivered it either needs to go out on a shelf or in the back as overstock, old overstock needs worked to make room for new, sale signs have to be put up and taken down, items need to be returned to their proper locations (you would not believe how often stuff like cans of soup will be left with the bleach), the store needs to be cleaned, oh, and customers need to be checked out.  Let’s call all the worker hours needed to do all of this work each day X.  But the thing is, X is not constant.  A random Monday in May will not be as busy as the last Saturday before Christmas.  Now the Corporation has records of how busy the store has been in years past, so they can have a rough idea of how busy the store will be, but it’s not an exact science.  The number of worker hours the Corporation gives the manager we’ll call Y.  In an ideal world, Y would equal X, but that never happens.  In reality, the Corporation only has two choices, Y>X, or Y<X.  In the Y>X scenario, everything would be put away, the customers would all be helped, and employees would be standing around doing nothing and getting paid for it.  So the Corporation – whose goal is to make money – will opt for the Y<X scenario.

But that means the store won’t be perfect, and customers will have to wait in line.  Yeah.  The Corporation can lose money in one of two ways, they could spend hundreds of dollars each week by having more employees on the floor, or a customer could walk out without buying a $2 thing of deodorant because it wasn’t on the shelf because there wasn’t an employee to put it out.  The Corporation will gladly accept a less than perfect store because the extra money they’d make from a perfect store won’t cover the cost to get to a perfect store.  Basically, the law of diminishing returns. 

Now let’s talk about self-checkout.  I don’t know how many thousands of dollars our self-checkout system cost, but – if the damned thing worked – it may only take a few months for it to pay for itself and it will be cheaper than having an employee standing at a register all day.  And the gap between X and Y will be smaller.  (You can see this as either the paid employee workload X being smaller, or Y being higher, all because the Corporation has some unpaid customer/employees.)

Of course, the Corporation is perfectly fine with current size of the X-Y gap, so it is possible that with a lower X they’ll just lower Y.  And that’s why some people claim self-checkout is costing jobs.  But is the point of a corporation to cut as many corners as they can to make the most profit, or to create some utopic store where all the employees and customers are perfectly content?  It’s not a one to one correlation, but I do wonder how many of the people who won’t use self-checkout to “save jobs” would scream bloody socialism if you asked them if we should raise the minimum wage. 

I do think a tiny element in why some people don’t want to use self-checkout is because they see being a cashier as “beneath” them.  We sell a lot of clothes at our store, and some customers will take the hangers off so all I have to do is scan and bag the clothes.  But some customers will just dump twenty or so shirts on the counter and just step back and watch as I fumble to get the hangers out.  If they’re little old ladies, or they have kids, that’s fine.  But for some I get the feeling that making my job easier is of no concern to them.

So what are my final thoughts on self-checkout?  If you’re buying an entire cartload of stuff, it will probably be faster to go with a human cashier.  In part because we actually know how to scan a lot of stuff quickly.  But if you’re only getting a couple of things, then instead of ringing you out that cashier could be putting that deodorant away.  Also, I don’t know how many times someone with an entire cartload of stuff has come up, and then somebody with a fifty pound bag of dog food gets into line behind them.  Normally, I’d call up whoever I’m working with to ring them out, but sometimes the person I’m working with is on their break, or checking in a vendor, or putting the ice cream delivery away before it melts, or some other more pressing task.  So the dog food person just has to wait several minutes for me to scan the forty-seven cans of cat food or whatever.  But with a, working, self-checkout they could quickly be on their way.  Or there are times when there is a line and I’ll look up and see someone is seven or eight customers back, and five or so minutes later when they get up to the register all they’re getting is a candy bar and drink.  And often the only reason they’re buying something is because they want cashback and we don’t have an ATM.  You know, those things that took away all those bank teller jobs.

Technology is always changing.  In the olden days, a cashier either had to know the price of a can of soup, or the price had to be on a sticker on the can.  Now we just scan it, there’s a beep, and the computer finds the price and adds it all up.  Maybe a decade from now there won’t be human cashiers.  You’ll take your cart up to a spot, and robotic arms will pick up all your items, scan, bag, and return them to your cart.  Or maybe you won’t even go to the store.  You’ll just make a list of what you want, text it to a store, a robot will pick it all out, pack it, and then a self-driving car will drop it off at your house.  Personally, I look forward to the day machines take my crappy job because being a cashier sucks. 

Random Story – What was that name?

This is just an odd little story from my life.

At my college graduation, I was looking around and way up front I saw a woman signing.  It wasn’t like nowadays where there’s someone signing just to the side of the podium.  I think it was just all deaf students or family members were sat in one section.  I thought that was cool, and didn’t think much more of it.

Later, as they were reading through all the names, I glanced over again and saw her signing.  I don’t sign, but it looked like she was spelling out all the names.  And as I was thinking that that must be a pain, one of these names with twenty letters but only three vowels came up.  And I saw the signer stop and glance over her shoulder with a “What the fuck?” look on her face.  Much like Hans at the end of this clip.  (That’s apparently from a Polish movie and the whole thing is some sort of Polish tongue twister.) Anyway, this lady turned back to the people she was signing to and began.  As I said, I don’t sign, but to me it looked like she started strong, but then slowed down and was guessing at letters.  Eventually she just shrugged and made up something.

I have no memory of who spoke at my college graduation, or any advice or wisdom they gave.  But I will always remember some poor lady trying to spell out some long, complex name.

Some ideas for space missions

I am a big supporter of space exploration.  And as a scifi writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to explore the solar system and how they could be worked into stories.  Along the way I’ve come up with some ideas for space missions which I think would be cool or would help in making humanity a spacefaring civilization.  Over a year ago I wrote up Some ideas for small lunar landers, and I guess you could say this is an extension of that, although these are big missions that go everywhere else but the moon.  I’m not an engineer, so these are more back of an envelope ideas, but if you are a space engineer and you’re looking for something to do, maybe one of these will spark something.

Deep space antenna

We have dozens of spacecraft across the solar system, and they all need to communicate with Earth.  Most do so through the Deep Space Network, which is a series of radio telescopes placed across the world.  So far, so good, but as we start sending out more and more probes, there could easily be a bottleneck in communications.  My idea is to put a big ass antenna out in space.  Part of the idea is that if we can make the antenna really big – say 100 meters in diameter – it would make it easier to get the weak signals from extremely distant spacecraft, such as New Horizons. 

Where would you put such an antenna?  I’m thinking maybe twice geostationary orbit, so the antenna would take two days to orbit the Earth.  The reason you’d want to put it out so far, is that in lower Earth orbit a 100 meter antenna would be damaged by debris and the faintest traces of atmosphere would work to deorbit the craft.  Also, it would probably be rather bright.  Geostationary orbit is full of communication satellites, and just outside of geostationary orbit is a graveyard orbit of dead communication satellites, so I’m thinking that at twice geostationary orbit there would be plenty of open space with little interference.

How would you get something that big out there?  I’m thinking you build and launch it in three parts.  The first part would be the main antenna which would be as big as can be origamied into a rocket fairing.  The second part would have the solar panels, all the electronic stuff, and the antennas to talk to the ground.  The final part would be the engine to get it into the proper orbit, and would handle all the station keeping aspects of the mission.  The best part of this idea, is that when the fuel starts running low, you could launch a new station keeping module to replace the old one, so that this antenna would stay functional for decades. 

Could you fold up a 100 meter antenna to fit on a rocket?  Those might already exist, I just don’t have the security clearance to know.  But if you could only fit, say, an 80 meter antenna on a rocket, that’s not bad.  But I had a crazy idea how to turn a measly 80 meter into a 100 meter.  What if on the outside of the second or third module there were preformed panels that a small robotic arm could attach to the folded up antenna to get it up to 100 meters?  A bit complicated, I admit, but is it really that far beyond our capability, especially if we get a really kick ass antenna out of it?  Of course, there’s no reason why we couldn’t build several of these antennas.  Well, other than getting the funding for them. 

Innersystem relays

As the author of The Moon Before Mars: Why returning to the moon makes more sense than rushing off to Mars, you can probably tell that I’m not one of these “We have to go to Mars, now!” people.  I fully support the scientific exploration of Mars – as well as all other solar system bodies – but my vision of human exploration of Mars is more akin to the International Space Station than Las Vegas.  And while I think we are probably twenty years away from humans on Mars, we do have several robots there.  That’s great, but sometimes in their orbits, Earth and Mars will end up on opposite sides of the Sun.  This means we can’t really send or receive signals for about two weeks.  During that time, our rovers just park and probably just take some photos and wait for us to be in contact again.

Just for safety reasons, I don’t think we should allow this for when humans eventually go to Mars.  My solution is to put a couple of relay satellites into orbit, probably between Venus and Earth.  So whenever the Sun blocks our view of Mars, they could just relay the messages and we wouldn’t have to worry if the crew is dead. 

But this only happens for two weeks every two years or so.  Building and launching a satellite just for that seems overkill.  So the main point of these satellites would be to observe the Sun.  And if you have two, three, or four of these spacecraft spread out, you can have a full view of the Sun. 

Multiple asteroid flybys

I see the real future of humanity in the Asteroid Belt.  As I’ve said before, “If we go to Mars, we get a planet.  If we go to the Asteroid Belt, we get the galaxy.” Because we can grind the asteroids up into their component elements, and build spacecraft that we can then send to other star systems.  Before we start colonizing the galaxy, we can use the resources from the Asteroid Belt for … just about anything.  We could mine the materials to build the factories that would build giant solar power stations, which could then be flown to Earth using asteroid manufactured fuel to supply all of our power needs.  For example.

But before we can start mining the asteroids, we need to learn as much about them as we can.  We’ve already flown-by or orbited a dozen or so asteroids, but I’d like to dramatically increase those numbers.  So this mission would be designed to take a looping orbit through the Asteroid Belt that would let it flyby … say at least ten asteroids.  Maybe even more.  But the interesting idea is that instead of just one, there would be three spacecraft.

I know that the Asteroid Belt isn’t like what you see in movies where there are thousands of rocks just rapidly flying around each other.  In reality, if you were standing on an asteroid and you were really, really, really, really lucky, you might see one other asteroid as a dim point of light at the very edge of vision.  I also know that orbital mechanics means flying between objects in space isn’t the same as flying between points on Earth, but I hope this idea could work.  Basically, you have three spacecraft that are mostly identical.  You launch the first one, wait a week or so, then launch the second, and wait maybe two weeks for the third.  The goal, is that the A craft flies by and gets detailed images of half the asteroid.  Then when B flies by, you adjust its path so it can image the other half.  And C fills in any gaps, or takes a closer look at something interesting the first two found.  As things stand now, if we flyby an asteroid and see some strange surface feature, it may be decades, or centuries, before another craft visits it to get a closer look.  With this setup, it may just be a few weeks.

The way you’d do this would be using ion engines, which don’t have much thrust because they go through their fuel so slowly, but since they go through their fuel so slowly you can run them for years.  Spacecraft A would have cameras and a bunch of other instruments as well as a small ion engine for course corrections.  Spacecraft B would have cameras and two-thirds of the instruments of A, to make room for a bigger fuel tank because it will need to make more course corrections than A.  And Spacecraft C would have cameras, the other one-third of instruments, and an even bigger fuel tank because it will need to make even more course corrections. 

A possibility is that if these craft are mostly identical, you could mass produce them and you could have four or five of these tri-spacecraft missions flying, sending back data on dozens and dozens of asteroids.  Or you might find another use for them.

Jovian moon explorer

Jupiter has about eighty satellites, that we know of.  Four of them are big and get almost all the news, while the rest are just small captured asteroids.  We do have a few grainy images of some of them, but the vast majority are just points of light in telescopes.  This mission would aim to flyby as many of them as possible, because every object in the solar system has a story but it is very unlikely there will ever be a mission to … Pandia. 

Jupiter is much farther from the Sun than the asteroids, so you couldn’t just send a set of the asteroid flyby craft to Jupiter.  You’d need to put on larger solar panels, for example.  But it’s possible the Jupiter craft could be a version of the asteroid craft, making the development a bit cheaper.  Saturn also has some eighty known satellites, but right now we don’t have the technology to power a spacecraft at Saturn with solar power, we only recently got that capability at Jupiter.

One thing both the asteroid and Jupiter missions would do is look for new asteroids and moons.  It’s likely there would be months, even years between flybys, and one idea is that the A and B crafts would have telescopes that could be used to search for small, dim objects in their vicinity.  If possible, there could be unplanned distant flybys of these newly discovered objects, which would be fantastic. 

The One Light Day Mission

Voyager 1 is the most distant human object.  Launched in 1977, it is now over 22 billion kilometers from Earth, meaning it takes over twenty hours for its radio signals to come back to us.  Meaning, even after flying for almost forty-four years, it’s not even one light day from us.  This mission is to get that far away from us in, say twenty years.  The way it does this is to launch the craft on one rocket, and then launch two more with booster engines.  The first one to attach, would be as big an ion engine as can fit in a rocket.  The second to attach would just be as big a conventional rocket as can fit.  This booster fires, gets it going as fast as it can in a few minutes, then detaches.  Then the ion engine fires for a decade, or more, slowly ramping up the speed.  Probably throw in a Jupiter flyby to pick up even more.  I know it would be a challenge, but what space mission hasn’t been?

The probe would have dust counters and magnetometers and other such instruments to study the interstellar medium, but it would also have a telescope.  Hopefully, the craft would be put on a course to flyby a known object in the Kuiper Belt, but the telescope would be used to look for objects too small and dim to be seen from Earth.  Also, once it got out to one light day, it would take a picture of the Sun.  In such a picture, would the Earth even be a pale, blue dot?

Random Story – My near alien abduction

This is just an odd little story from my life.

I’ve had a long interest in space, so when I was a kid my parents got me a small telescope.  It had a tripod, but fully extended it was only about three feet tall and somewhat wobbly.  So I built a desk out of some old 2X4s and boards that I could set the telescope on.  And I put this and an old lawn chair in my observatory.  One of the best places to see the southern half of the sky was also a direct line of sight to a nearby road.  I live in the middle of nowhere, so there isn’t much traffic, but still I didn’t want to be blinded by someone driving home late at night.  Not to mention the outside lights our neighbors had.  So my observatory was just some sheets of tin nailed to more 2X4s to act as a light block.

On clear nights, I’d go out and sit in the dark listening to my Walkman letting my eyes adjust to the darkness.  I’d then make observations, trying my hand at drawing star clusters, lunar craters, or marking the positions of the Galilean moons. 

One night, I had been looking through the telescope for some time, and I sat back to stretch.  During this I had closed my eyes, but with my face pointing straight up I opened them, and was almost blinded by this bright flash right in my face.

I’ve always had an overactive imagination, so my knee-jerk reaction was ALIENS!  But after about twenty heartbeats – so maybe two seconds – I realized what had happened and started laughing.  Some random firefly was just flying along, looking for a mate, and decided to light up maybe a foot in front of my just opening, strained, dark adapted eyes. 

That only happened once, but there were several times where I was looking at something through my telescope when suddenly the field would be filled with this overly bright, greenish yellow blob.  Some people love the image of fireflies on an evening.  I think of them as blinding bastards who make me think of aliens.