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A rare and winning combination: a serious person who seldom takes himself seriously. He keeps his ego a little off to the side, muffled, away from the business at hand. It never disappears. It grows dormant, like some cases of tuberculosis. Jules Renard is such a man and writer, an aphorist and wit with the soul of a peasant. Often, he thinks like a farmer – practical, focused, unsentimental – while writing like a satirist. Here is Renard in his Journal, bargaining with fate on October 17, 1899: “Of all that we write, posterity will retain a page, at best. I would prefer to choose the page myself.”  Renard writing as a commonsensical critic, September 6, 1902: “A great poet need only employ the traditional forms. We can leave it to lesser poets to worry themselves with making reckless gestures.”   More writerly common sense, November 27, 1895: “Keep their interest! Keep their interest! Art is no excuse for boring people.”   A lesson for “cancel culture, August 1896: “We always confound the man and the artist, merely because chance has brought them together in the same body. La Fontaine wrote immoral letters to his womenfolk, which does not prevent us from admiring him. It is quite simple: Verlaine had the genius of a god, and the soul of a pig. Those who were close to him must have suffered. It was their own fault! – they made the mistake of being there.”   Renard sounding like the premise of a story by Maupassant, September 29, 1897: “Some men give the impression of having married solely to prevent their wives from marrying other men.”   On why some of us become writers, May 9, 1898: “Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.”   Renard was born on this date, February 22, in 1864 and died of arteriosclerosis in 1910 at age forty-six. With Montaigne and Proust, he is the French writer I most rely on.   [All quoted passages are from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]

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This post is the second in a series. Read part one here. p {line-height:1.6em; } p.caption { margin-top:0px;padding-top:0px;margin-bottom:20px;text-align:center;} a.fnote {text-decoration:none;color:red} img {margin-bottom:0px;} “From a mathematics and trajectory standpoint and with a certain kind of technology, there’s not too many different ways to go to Mars. It’s been pretty well figured out. You can adjust the decimal places here and there, but basically if you're talking about chemical rockets, there's a certain way you're going to go to Mars.” - John Aaron[1] Unlike the Moon, which hangs in the sky like a lonely grandparent waiting for someone to visit, Mars leads a rich orbital life of its own and is not always around to entertain the itinerant astronaut. There is just one brief window every 26 months when travel between our two planets is feasible, and this constraint of orbital mechanics is so fundamental that we’ve known since Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic what a mission to Mars must look like.[2] Using chemical rockets, there are just two classes of mission to choose from: (The durations I give here can vary, but are representative). Long Stay: Spend six months flying to Mars, stay for 17 months, spend six months flying back (~1000 days total). This is sometimes called a conjunction class mission. This profile trades a simple out-and-back trajectory for a long stay time at Mars. Short Stay: Spend six months flying to Mars, stay for 30-90 days, spend 400 days flying back (~650 days total). This is also called an opposition class mission. This profile trades a short Martian stay time for a long and frankly terrifying trip home through the inner solar system. Before comparing the merits of each, it’s worth stressing what they have in common—both are long, more than double the absolute record for space flight (438 days), five times longer than anyone has remained in space without resupply (128 days), and about ten times humanity’s accumulated time beyond low Earth orbit (82 days).[3] It is this inconvenient length, more than any technical obstacle, that has kept us from going to Mars since rockets capable of making the trip first became available in the 1960's. [4] And because this length is set by the relative motions of the planets, it’s resistant to attack by technology. You can build rockets that go faster, but unless you make Mars go faster, you’ll mostly end up trading transit time for longer stay times. Getting a round trip below the 500 day mark requires fundamental breakthroughs in either propulsion or refueling. [5] Delta-v requirements for short stay missions of varying length (left) and a long-stay mission (orange line right) for comparison. Note the sharp jump at around 500 days. source. That’s the bad news. The good news is that these constraints are so strong that we can say a lot about going to Mars without committing to any particular spacecraft or mission design. Just like animals that live in the sea are likely to have good hearing and a streamlined body shape, there are things that have to hold true for any Mars-bound spacecraft, just from the nature of the problem. I. No escape, no rescue A trip to Mars will be commital in a way that has no precedent in human space flight. The moon landings were designed so that any moment the crew could hit the red button and return expeditiously to Earth; engineers spent the brief windows of time when an abort was infeasible chain smoking and chewing on their slide rules. [6] But within a few days of launch, a Mars-bound crew will have committed to spending years in space with no hope of resupply or rescue. If something goes wrong, the only alternative to completing the mission will be to divert into a long, looping orbit that gets the spacecraft home about two years after departure.[7] And if they get stuck on Mars, astronauts will find themselves in a similar position to the early Antarctic explorers, able to communicate home by radio, but forced by unalterable cycles of nature to wait months or years for a rescue ship. Delta-v in km/sec required to return to Earth in 50, 70, and 90 days from various points in a long-stay Mars mission. Values above 10 km/sec are not realistic at our current technology level. source The effect of this no-abort condition is to make Mars mission design acutely risk-averse. You can think of flying to Mars like one of those art films where the director has to shoot the movie in a single take. Even if no scene is especially challenging, the requirement that everything go right sequentially, with no way to pause or reshoot, means that even small risks become unacceptable in the aggregate. To get a feel for this effect, consider a toy model where we fly to Mars on a 30 month mission. Every month there is a 3% chance that a critical system on our spacecraft will fail, and once that happens, the spacecraft enters a degraded state, with a 5% chance every month that a subsequent failure kills the crew. In this model, the probability that the crew gets home safely works out to 68%. But if we add an abort option that can get them home in six months, that probability jumps to 85%. And with a three month abort trajectory, the odds of safe return go up to 92%. These odds are notional, but they demonstrate how big an effect the absence of abort options can have on safety.[8] This necessary risk aversion introduces a tension into any Mars program. What’s the point of spending a trillion dollars to send a crew if they’re going to cower inside their spacecraft? And yet since going outside is one of the most dangerous things you can do on Mars, early missions have to minimize it. The first visitors to Mars will have to land in the safest possible location and do almost nothing. Risk is closely tied with the next issue, reliability. II. Reliability The closest thing humanity has built to a Mars-bound spacecraft is the International Space Station. But ‘reliable’ is not the first word that leaps to the lips of ISS engineers when they talk about their creation—not even the first printable word. Despite twenty years of effort, equipment on the station breaks constantly, and depends on a stream of replacement parts flown up from Earth.[9] A defective heat exchanger packaged for return to Earth from ISS in 2023 Going to Mars will require order of magnitude reliability improvements over the status quo. Systems on the spacecraft will need to work without breaking, or at least break in ways the crew can fix. If there’s an emergency, like a chemical leak or a fire, the crew must be able to live for years in whatever’s left of the ship. And the kind of glitches that made for funny stories in low Earth orbit (like a urine icicle blocking the Space Shuttle toilet) will be enough to kill a Mars-bound crew. Complicating matters is that traditional reliability engineering practices don’t work in life support, where everything is interconnected, often through the bodies of the crew. Life support engineering is much more like keeping a marine aquarium than it is like building a rocket. It’s not easy to untangle cause from effect, the entire system evolves over time, and there’s a lot of “spooky action at a distance” between subsystems that were supposed to be unrelated.[10] Indeed, failures in life support have a tendency to wander the spacecraft until they find the most irreplaceable thing to break. Nor is it possible to brute-force things by filling the spacecraft with spare parts. The same systemic interactions that damage one component can eat through any number of replacements. The bedrock axiom of reliability engineering—that complex designs can be partitioned into isolated subsystems with independent failure rates—does not hold for regenerative life support. The need for long and expensive test flights to validate life support introduces another kind of risk aversion, this time in the design phase. With prototypes needing to be flown for years in space, there will be pressure to freeze the life support design at whatever point it becomes barely adequate, and no amount of later innovation will make it onto the spacecraft. This is a similar dynamic to one that afflicted the Space Shuttle, a groundbreaking initial design so expensive to modify that it froze the underlying technology at the prototype phase for thirty years. In that period we learned nothing about making better space planes, but burned through decades and billions of dollars patching up the first working prototype. Such timorousness goes against the grain of a development strategy that proven spectacularly successful in recent years for SpaceX, an approach you could call “fly often and try everything”. With hardware to spare, SpaceX is not afraid to make wholesale changes between tests of its Starship rocket, relying on rapid iterations to advance the state of the art at an exhilarating pace. But this Yosemite Sam approach to testing won’t work for Mars. It only takes a few hours for engineers to collect the data they need after a Starship launch, while test runs of Mars-bound systems will last for years. The inevitable outcome is a development program that looks an awful lot like NASA, with long periods of fussing and analysis punctuated by infrequent, hideously expensive test flights. III. Autonomy Autonomy is a concept alien to NASA, which has been micromanaging astronauts from the ground since the first Mercury astronaut had to beg controllers for permission to pee (the request went all the way up the reporting chain to Wernher Von Braun). To this day, missions follow a test pilot paradigm where the crew works from detailed checklists prepared for them months or years in advance. On the space station, this takes the form of a graphical schedule creeping past a red vertical line on a laptop screen, with astronauts expected to keep pace with the moving colored boxes. Most routine work on the space station (like pumping water or managing waste heat) is relegated to specialized teams on the ground and is not even visible to the crew. Alan Shepard aboard Freedom 7, explaining that he really has to go pretty bad. But as a Mars-bound spacecraft gets further from Earth, the round-trip communications delay with ground control will build to a maximum of 43 minutes, culminating in a week or more of communications blackout when the Sun is directly between the two planets. This physical constraint means that the crew has to have full control over every system on the spacecraft, without help from the ground. Autonomy sounds like a good thing! Who wants government bean-counters deciding how astronauts spend their space time? But the ground-driven paradigm has its advantages, most notably in limiting workload. The ISS is run by a staff of hundreds who together send some 50,000 commands per day to the station. The seven astronauts on board are only called in as a last resort, and even so the demands on their time are so great that the station has struggled to perform its scientific mission.[11] One benefit of NASA’s backseat driving has always been that in an emergency, the crew has access to unlimited real-time expert help on Earth. The starkest illustration of this came on Apollo 13, when an oxygen tank in the service module ruptured 56 hours into the flight. It took the crew and mission controllers nearly an hour to get their bearings, at which point there was only a short window of time left to power down the spacecraft in a way that would preserve their ability to return to Earth. A transcript of that first hour shows how difficult it was for crew and ground to figure out what was happening, and prioritize their response. It casts no aspersions on the crew of Apollo 13 to say they could not have survived a Mars-like communications delay. And while this mission is the most famous example of ground controllers backstopping an Apollo crew, there were at least five more occasions in the Apollo program when timely help from the ground averted serious trouble: Apollo 12 was hit twice by lightning after launch, scrambling the electrical system and lighting up the command module with warning lights. Flight controller John Aaron recognized the baffling error pattern and passed into NASA legend by telling the crew to flip an obscure switch that restored sanity to their displays. On Apollo 14, the descent radar on the lunar module failed to lock on properly, returning spurious range data. Without a timely call from ground control (who told the pilot to reset a breaker), the problem would likely have led to an aborted landing. On Apollo 15, the crew struggled to contain a water leak that threatened to become serious. After fifteen minutes, engineers on the ground were able to trace the problem to a pre-launch incident with a chlorination valve and relay up a procedure that solved the problem. Also on Apollo 15, a sliver of loose metal floating in a switch caused an intermittent abort signal to be sent to the lunar module engine. Suppressing the signal so the lunar module could descend safely required reprogramming the onboard computer in a procedure guaranteed to raise the hairs on the head of every modern software developer. On Apollo 16, a pair of servo motors on the service module failed in lunar orbit. Mission rules called for an abort, but after some interactive debugging with the command module pilot, ground controllers found a workaround they judged safe enough to continue with the landing. While these incidents stand out, Apollo transcripts reveal numberless other examples of crew and ground working closely to get on top of problems. The loss of this real-time help is a real risk magnifier for astronauts going to Mars. IV. Analysis Another way in which the ISS depends on Earth is for laboratory analysis of air and water samples, which are collected on a regular schedule and sent down with each returning capsule. The tests that can be performed on the station itself are rudimentary, alerting crew to the presence of microbes or contaminants, but without the detailed information necessary to trace a root cause. For Mars, this analytic capability will have to move into the spacecraft. In essence, this means building a kind of Space Theranos, an automated black box that can perform biochemical assays in space without requiring repair or calibration. Such an instrument doesn’t exist anywhere, but a Mars mission requires two flavors of it—one that works in zero G, and another for Martian gravity.[12] This black box belongs to a category of hardware that pops up a lot in Mars plans: technologies that would be multibillion dollar industries if they existed on Earth, but are assumed to be easy enough to invent when the time comes to put them on a Mars-bound spacecraft. [13] Some Mars boosters even cite these technologies as examples of the benefits going to Mars will bring to humanity. But this gets things exactly backwards—problems that are hard on Earth don’t get easier by firing them into space, and the fact that nonexistent technologies are on the critical path to Mars is not an argument for going there. V. Automation The requirement that the crew be able to handle the ship when some members are incapacitated and there is no communication with Earth means that an ISS-size workload has to be automated to the point where it can be run by two or three astronauts. Astronaut Alexander Gerst (right) interacting with CIMON, NASA's $6 million AI chatbot Automation means software, and lots of it. To automate the systems on a Mars-bound spacecraft will be a monumental task, like trying to extend the autopilot on an airliner to make it run the airport concession stands, baggage claim, and airline pension plan. The likely outcome is an ISS-like hotchpotch of software tested to different levels of rigor, running across hundreds of processors. But this hardware will be exposed to a far harsher radiation environment than systems on the ISS, making software design and integration a particular challenge. A special case of the automation problem comes up on long-stay missions, when the orbiting spacecraft has to keep itself free of mold, fungus, and space raccoons for the year and a half that the crew are on the Martian surface. Anyone who owns a vacation home knows that this problem—called “quiescence” in the Mars literature—is already hard to solve on Earth. Unless carefully managed, the interplay between automation, complexity and reliability can enter a pathological spiral. Adding software to a system makes it more complex. To stay reliable, complex systems have to degrade gracefully, so that the whole continues to function even if an individual component fails. But these degraded modes, as well as unexpected interactions between them, introduce their own complexity, which then has to be managed with software, and so on. The upshot is that automation introduces its own, separate reason for running full-length mock missions before actually going to Mars. There will be too many bugs in a system this complex to leave them all for the first Mars-bound crew to discover. Implications The extreme requirements for autonomy, reliability, and automation I’ve outlined are old news to designers of deep-space probes. The solar system is full of hardware beeping serenely away decades after launch, most spectacularly the forty-six-year-old Voyager spacecraft. But no one has ever tried attaching a box of large primates to a deep space probe with the goal of keeping them alive, happy, and not tweeting about how NASA sent them into the vast empty spaces to die. A Mars-bound spacecraft will be the most complicated human artifact ever built, about a hundred times bigger than any previous space probe, and inside it will be a tightly-coupled system of software, hardware, bacteria, fungi, astronauts, and (for half the mission) whatever stuff the crew tracks with them back onto the spacecraft. Designing such a machine means taking something at the ragged edge of human ability (building interplanetary probes) and combining it with something that we can’t even do yet on Earth (keep a group of six or eight humans alive for years with regenerative life support).[14] My argument is not that it is impossible to do this, but that it is impossible to do it quickly. Preparing for Mars will be an iterative, open-ended undertaking in which every round of testing eats up years of time and most of our space budget, like Artemis and the ISS before it. The first decade of a Mars program will be indistinguishable from the last forty years of space flight—a series of repetitive, long-duration missions to orbit. The only thing NASA will need to change is the program name. Nor is this a problem that can be delegated to billionaire hobbyists. Life support is going to be a grind no matter whose logo is on the rocket. The sky could be thick with Starships and we’d still be stuck doing all-up trials of hardware and software on these multi-year missions to nowhere. The only way to explore Mars in our lifetime is to ditch the requirement that people accompany the machinery. Choosing a profile But since we’re determined to go to Mars, and have two profiles to choose from, which one is better? Everyone agrees that only the long-stay profile makes sense for exploration. There’s no point in spending 95% of the trip in transit just to get a rushed couple of weeks at the destination. But on early missions, where the goal is just to get the crew home alive, the choice is tricky. Long Stay The virtue of the long stay profile is simplicity. You fly your rocket to Mars, wait 17 months for the planets to align, and then fly the same trajectory home. Each leg of this transfer journey lasts about as long as an ISS deployment, and it’s possible to tweak the transfer time by burning more fuel (although the crew then has to stay longer on Mars to compensate). At every point in the mission, the ship remains between 1 AU and 1.5 AU from the Sun. This simplifies thermal and solar panel design and greatly reduces the risk to the crew from solar storms. But the problem of what to do with all that time on Mars is vexing. 500 days is a long time for a first stay anywhere, even someplace with nightlife and an atmosphere. And as we’ll see, an orbital mission is probably out of the question. The requirement that the crew go live on Mars on their first visit adds enormously to the level of risk. Short Stay The appeal of the short stay profile is right in the name. Instead of staying on Mars so long they have to file taxes, the first arrivals can plant the flag, grab whatever rock is nearest the ladder, and get the hell out of there. Or they can choose to skip the landing and make the first trip strictly orbital, following a tradition in aerospace engineering of attempting the impossible sequentially instead of all at once. But the problem with the short stay profile is that trip home. The return trajectory cuts well inside the orbit of Venus, complicating the design of the spacecraft and adding spectacular ways for the crew to die during the weeks near perihelion. For most of that journey, the ship is on the wrong side of the Sun, hampering communications with Earth while leaving the crew with no warning of solar storms. And that crew has to spend two consecutive years in deep space, maximizing their exposure to radiation and microgravity, the biggest known risks to astronaut health. The short stay profile also requires more propellant, in some years a prohibitive amount. If your strategy for mitigating risk on Mars is to launch crews during every synodic period, so that there are always potential rescuers en route to Mars, then this is a problem.  A diagram comparing the delta-v requirements for short stay and long stay missions across future launch dates. Since propellant requirements go up exponentially with delta v, a mission in 2041 requires five times as much propellant as one in 2033. source“ Orbit or Land? Once you’ve picked a profile, the other decision to make is whether to land the spacecraft. Obviously you have to land a crew at some point; if you don’t, the other space programs will make fun of you, and there will be hurtful zingers at your Congressional hearing. But since surviving a trip to Mars requires tackling a sequence of unrelated problems (arrival, entry, landing, surface operations, ascent, rendezvous), there is a case for cutting the problem in half by making the first mission orbital. This was the approach taken by the Apollo program, which looped the first crew around the Moon before a working lunar lander existed. Not having to carry a lander on the first mission means more room for spare parts and consumables, which improves the margin of safety for the crew. It also buys time for engineers to work on the hard problems of entry, landing, quiescence, and ascent without holding back the entire program. But there are powerful arguments against an orbital mission. Since so much of the risk in going to Mars is a simple function of time, why roll the dice more than necessary? And given the expense and physical toll on crew, how do you justify not attempting a landing? Imagine driving to Disneyland, turning the car around in the parking lot, and announcing to your family that you’re now ready for the real trip next year. There will be angry kicking from the backseat, and mutiny. NASA has waffled for years over which option to choose. In the 2009 design reference architecture, they favored sending a crew of four on the long stay trajectory. Their more recent plans envision a shoestring mission on a short-stay profile with four crew members, two of whom attempt a landing. Elon Musk, for his part, has proposed solving the problem in stages, sending volunteers to settle Mars first, then figuring out how to get them home later.[15] What makes the choice genuinely hard is that we lack answers to two key questions: 1. How does the human body respond to partial gravity? Decades in space have given us a good idea of what prolonged periods in free-fall do to astronauts, and how they recover after returning to Earth. But we have no idea what happens in partial gravity, either on the Moon (0.16 g) or on Mars (0.38 g). In particular, we don’t know whether Martian gravity is strong enough to arrest or slow the degenerative processes that we observe in free fall.[16] The answer to this question will drive a key decision: whether or not to spin the spacecraft. As we’ll see, spinning a spacecraft to create artificial gravity is an enormous hassle, but whether it’s avoidable depends on the unstudied effects of long stays in partial gravity.[17] 2. What is the risk to the crew from the heavy-ion component of galactic cosmic radiation? Radiation in space comes in many varieties, most of which are well-understood from experience with their analogues on Earth. Low-dose heavy-ion radiation, however, is different. It doesn’t exist outside of particle accelerators on Earth and is hard to study in low orbit, where both the magnetosphere and the bulk of our planet shield astronauts from most of the flux they’d experience in free space. Heavy ion radiation has biological effects that are not captured by the standard model of radiation damage to tissue. In particular, there is a class of phenomena called non-targeted effects (NTEs) that are known to damage cells far from the radiation track. This is a weird effect, like if found yourself hospitalized because your neighbor got hit by a car. It’s believed that NTEs disrupt epigenetic signaling mechanisms in cells, but the phenomenon is poorly understood. Uncertainty about the effects of low-dose heavy ion radiation widens our best guess at radiation risk by at least a factor of two.[18] At the low end of the range, these effects are just a curiosity, and Mars missions can be planned using traditional models of radiation exposure. At the high end of the range, long-duration orbital missions may not be survivable, and astronauts on the Martian surface will either have to live in a cave or cover their shelter with meters of soil. Prediction of tumor prevalence after 1 year of galactic cosmic radiation exposure. The solid line at bottom shows the standard radiation model (TE). The dotted lines show the influence of non-targeted effects (NTE) under different assumptions. Note the nearly threefold uncertainty in predicted tumor prevalence in the unshielded case. source This uncertainty about biological effects makes radiation the greatest uncharacterized known risk facing a Mars-bound crew, and it affects every aspect of mission design. It’s helpful to combine the three main risk factors in going to Mars into one big chart:  table.risk { font-size:1.1em; margin:0px; margin-top:20px; width:550px; border-spacing:0px; } caption { font-size:1.2em; margin-bottom:10px; color:#777; } th { text-align:center; padding-bottom:10px; } td { text-align:left; padding:14px; margin:0px; } td.risk {border:1px solid #777;} td.unknown { background:#888; color:white; } td.low { background:#afa; } td.mid { background:#ff9; } td.high { background:#fc9; } td.vhigh { background:#f99; } Technical Risk OrbitLand Short Stay Spacecraft trajectory complicates spacecraft design, communications are a challenge. Requires working lander and ascent stage, less margin than orbital mission. Long Stay Lowest complexity, large mass budget for spares and consumables. Highest complexity, all-up mission must work on the first try. Radiation Risk OrbitLand Short Stay 600 days in deep space, return trip requires close solar approach (0.7 AU). Risk from solar particle events may require flying near solar minimum, incurring higher GCR dose. Long Stay Risk of death or incapacitation from heavy ion component of GCR may exceed 50% Lowest radiation exposure, but adequately shielding the habitat on Mars increases complexity and contamination risk Deconditioning Risk OrbitLand Short Stay 1.5 times beyond human endurance record; crew at risk for bone fractures and eye damage. Long Stay 2.5 times beyond human endurance record. Physiological effects of partial gravity unknown. The gray areas in these grids represent knowledge gaps that have to be filled before we decide how to go to Mars. How long this preliminary medical research would take is anyone’s guess, but it has to be some multiple of the total mission time. Studying partial gravity in particular is tricky—you can do it on the Moon (42% of martian gravity) and hope the results extend to Mars, or you can build rotating structures in space and do more precise tests there. Studying radiation effects means flying animals outside the magnetosphere for a few years and then watching them for tumors, which (unless the radiation news is really bad) is also going to take some time. In software engineering we have a useful concept called “yak shaving”. To get started on a project you must first prepare your tools, which often involves reconfiguring your programming environment, which may mean updating software, which requires finding a long-disused password, and pretty soon you find yourself under the office chair with a hex wrench. (The TV show Malcolm in the Middle has a beautiful illustration of yak shaving in the context of home repair.) The same phenomenon afflicts us in trying to go to Mars. It would be one thing if, given enough rockets and money, explorers could climb on a spaceship and go. But there is always this chain of necessary prerequisites. We paint Destination: Mars! on the side of our spaceship and then find ourselves in low Earth orbit a decade later, centrifuging mice. It’s dispiriting. It’s tempting to say “you can just build things” and dismiss all this research and testing as timid and unnecessary. But this would mean ignoring the biggest risk factor for Mars, which I’ll include here for the sake of completeness. Unknown Risks OrbitLand Short Stay Unknown Unknown Long Stay Unknown Unknown A trip to Mars is so difficult that we don’t have the luxury of ignoring known risks—we need all the room we can spare in our risk budget for the things we don’t know to worry about yet. My goal in all this is not to kill a cherished dream, but to try to push people to a more realistic view of what it means to commit to a Mars landing, and in particular to think about going to Mars in terms of opportunity costs. In recent years, there’s been a remarkable division in space exploration. On one side of the divide are missions like Curiosity, James Webb, Gaia, or Euclid that are making new discoveries by the day. These projects have clearly defined goals and a formidable record of discovery. On the other side, there is the International Space Station and the now twenty-year old effort to return Americans to the moon. These projects have no purpose other than perpetuating a human presence in space, and they eat through half the country’s space budget with nothing to show for it. Forget even Mars—we are further from landing on the Moon today than we were in 1965. In going to Mars, we have a choice about which side of this ledger to be on. We can go aggressively explore the planet with robots, benefiting from an ongoing revolution in automation and software to launch ever more capable missions to the places most likely to harbor life. Or we can stay on the treadmill we’ve been on for forty years, slowly building up the capacity to land human beings on the safest possible piece of Martian real estate, where they will leave behind a plaque and a flag. But we can’t do both. Next time: Eyes and Bones Footnotes [1] Quote taken from a 2000 oral history with Aaron. [2] For an early example, see the 1928 Scientific American article, “Can we go to Mars?”, While understandably hand-wavy about the means of propulsion, it describes a conjunction-class orbital mission not substantially different from NASA’s 2009 Design Reference Architecture. [3] Valerii Polyakov set the 437 day record on a space flight that landed in 1995. The International Space Station went without resupply from Nov 25, 2002 to April 2, 2003. Nine Apollo missions went beyond low Earth orbit, the longest of these (Apollo 17) was gone 12.4 days. [4] The Saturn V was capable of launching about 20 tons on a Mars flyby trajectory. NASA undertook preliminary planning for such a mission (requiring four Saturn V launches) in 1967. [5] In 1987 a team chaired by Sally Ride proposed a ‘split/sprint’ mission architecture that is probably the best way to get to Mars. In this architecture, slow-moving tankers pre-position cryogenic propellant depots in Mars orbit, and then in the next synodic period a human mission (the “sprint” part of the mission) lands briefly on Mars, refuels from the orbiting depots, and get home within 400 days. Such a mission requires about 15 heavy launches and two nonexistent technologies: long-term storage of liquid hydrogen in space, and the ability to pump liquid hydrogen between spacecraft in space. (Interestingly, both of these technologies are part of Blue Origin's plan to build a moon lander). The other way to get to Mars fast is with nuclear thermal rockets. A nuclear thermal rocket is just a nuclear reactor that shoots hot hydrogen out one end. Nuclear thermal rocket designs are about twice as efficient as chemical rockets, making it feasible to fly missions with higher delta V requirements. [6] For a comprehensive discussion of Apollo abort modes, see 1972 Apollo Experience Report - Abort Planning. [7] You can read about possible Mars abort modes in Earth to mars Abort Analysis for Human Mars Missions. What kind of a failure scenario would even benefit from a two-year abort option is an interesting philosophical question. [8] I wrote a little python script if you want to play with these scenarios yourself. [9] Life support equipment on ISS is packaged into components called ‘Orbital Replacement Units’. In some cases, this means that an assembly weighing hundreds of kilograms has to be flown up because a tiny sensor within it failed. Here's a partial list of ORUs replaced in calendar year 2023 (source): Heat exchanger in Node 3 Common cabin air assembly water separator Node 3 water separator Common cabin air assembly water separator liquid check valve 21 charcoal filters stationwide HEPA filters in Node 3 Blower in carbon dioxide removal assembly (twice, first replacement failed) Sample Distribution Assembly in Node 3 Mass Spectrometer assembly Multifiltration bed Pump in oxygen generation assembly [10] An early urine reprocessor on the space station failed after it got clogged up by calcium crystals from the astronauts' dissolving bones, an effect of weightlessness that wasn't properly accounted for in the design. [11] The 50,000 command figure is from The ISS: Operating an Outpost in the New Frontier, a detailed primer on space station operations. ISS utilization has gone up in recent years, but still remains below 80 hours/week—two full-time equivalents. The seven-member crew spends most of their waking time on mandatory exercise, housekeeping, and station repair. [12] Existing instruments in space are usually set up to identify chemicals on a target list of 10-20 substances, a much easier task than identifying arbitrary compounds. For the state of the art on the latter, see Progress on the Organic and Inorganic Modules of the Spacecraft Water Impurity Monitor, a Next Generation Complete Water Analysis System for Crewed Vehicles (ICES-2023-110). [13] Other examples of magic Mars technology include leakless seals for spacesuits, waterless washing machines, biofilm-proof coatings, nutritionally complete meals that can be stored for years at room temperature, and autonomous solar-powered factories for turning CO2 into hundreds of tons of methane. [14] The endurance record for closed-system life support belongs to Biosphere 2, which kept a crew alive for 17 months before oxygen fell to dangerous levels because of unanticipated interactions with building materials. [15] Plans involving Starship and Mars depend on being able to produce hundreds of tons of propellant on the Martian surface so the rockets can launch again. In the absence of any details from Musk or SpaceX, the closest thing we have to a detailed plan is this analysis in Nature. [16] For all we know, the set of problems collectively called "deconditioning" could get worse in partial gravity. This goes against our intuitions, but there have been bigger surprises in space. [17] Another decision that hinges on the effects of partial gravity is whether or not to include heavy exercise equipment on the Mars surface habitat, where space and mass are at a premium.

Introduction part of a longer series of drafts about the novel experience of being a parent, to someone currently best defined as ‘a young child’. I once wrote a lot about my experiences of things, then took a break, and drafted this blog post on a few pages of yellow legal pad, by hand, brought/edited/extended for the internet here. Write It Now and such. This will end up maybe being a series of recommendations and anti-recommendations Please skim, or make judicious use of the anchor links to skip around. I am happy to watch movies/shows with my kid. Because of that, and that I follow their interests, generally, I’ve watched a few movies/shows lately that I wouldn’t normally watch. This blog post started as a single page of handwritten notes about the movie Frozen. Why did you draft a blog post by hand, in this particular format? Often-enough I watch a movie with eden, if it’s a painful-to-me movie, a way I process my feelings/disappointment/anger is by creating something out of it. I also don’t begrudge Eden her taste for the interestingness of things. I get why Frozen is so appealing to kids, that is precisely why, or part of why, I am so frustrated by it. Some of the reasons it’s appealing is perfectly valid, of course. Interesting music, interesting visuals, crunchy-enough story line. Eden has normal-for-young-person taste, and I think sophisticated taste. I love to watch movies with Eden. We’ve watched and enjoyed the movies of Studio Ghibli, over and over. There’s also been a whole bunch of days where the temperature has been extremely cold, like a weekend of a high of four degrees farenheight. On most of the days we’ve gone out side at least a little, but my gosh we’ve been inside a lot lately. I’ll probably find more to say about it at some point. For instance, we’ve seen Ponyo (2009) many times 1, and enjoyed it’s beautiful depictions of all sorts of sea life, dignifying view of the ocean, people who are young, people who are old, the world, the ocean, water, hills, trees, sky, weather, food, independence, and more. We’ve seen many more Ghibli films than just Ponyo, but Ponyo is a good example of a movie that perfectly attracts the interest of a child, and is not demeaning to an adult, and is full of beautiful themes, beautiful depictions of the world, and interesting and exciting movement of the plot through the movie. You might be able to watch it on Amazon Prime right now: Ponyo with English dubs on Amazon Prime Studio Ghibli films are so dignifying and beautiful that to watch them is, to me, like taking a vitamin or going on a walk. It’s so dignifying in so many ways, I’m pleased for anyone to soak in any aspects of those movies. More recently, Eden has begun to get socialized into American media, because (unfortunately) we happen to live in America, and kids references to Paw Patrol and movies like Frozen and Disney and a number of other bits of media intended of kids are ubiquitous. There’s of course a giant commercial industry around making tons and derivative media around Frozen, Paw Patrol, etc. 🤮 Those shows unfairly weaponize kids’ interests and attention spans into something that honestly feels like grooming, and it’s despicable, and anyone involved ought to feel shame for their role in the creation of the piece of media. Truly. I think I’d never watched the movie Frozen until watching it with Eden, and my jaw hit the floor many times. When someone else saw just a few minutes of the movie with us, they also routinely expressed shock at what was in the movie. Strong words Josh, can you back that up? Oh yes. Keep up. I’ve got a media review of Paw Patrol coming up appended to the bottom of this post. Regarding Frozen, I wrote this blog post via paper, as I watched the movie with Eden. She likes to ‘process’ media, usually some of the interestingness she experiences is around knowing what’s coming next, so she gets a lot of enjoyment from re-watching movies. Without further adeui, here’s the notes, with light editing, as I captured them across multiple re-watches of Frozen. I’ll sometimes quote dialogue or a song, and add my reactions to it. I don’t think Eden is unfit to make her own assessments of anything, by the way. She often has astute observations. When we watch a movie, if it’s the first time we’ve seen it or especially later times, I sometimes (SOMETIMES! NOT OFTEN) ask a question like: - what do you think of that person’s tone? can you tell they have anger? can you hear that tension? are they being kind? do you think they are happy? sad? what do you think they are feeling? did that seem safe? what do you think of that music? notes upon watching Frozen Oof, re-reading the notes as I transcribe them here is a trip. Skim, treat the formatting loosely. I don’t dislike only patriarchal themes, I also believe that political authority is a myth, and dislike mononormativity, and moto-normativity. I don’t like jokes in a kids movie that are callbacks to american car culture. Anna, at the beginning, showing that her entire existence revolves around getting chosen by a person to become that persons… property? 🎶 Maybe I’ll be noticed, maybe I’ll find romance? 🎶 Both the children in this show, elsa and anna, experienced a few gnarly things in sequence. emotional abuse and neglect at the hands of their parents, then the parents died, and the kids were raised by… no one? for a few years? Then Anna and Elsa just reunite in advance of a coronation ball? Is a nation really choosing a traumatized child to become their symbolic head? The beauty norms, so painful. sexualizes children, explicitely, as the movie starts with the depiction of these two female protagonists as children, maybe 5, and ends with them supposedly ‘adult’, where someone at disney finds it appropriate to see these people as sexualizable objects. Many parts of the the look is the same, and there is little distinction between how a five year old is being depicted, and an adult. And certainly something appreciable about that distinction might be lost to the viewer of this piece, who is often-enough a child. the ‘big, innocent doe eyes’ gives helpless, shows matching the idealized male gaze of femininity. The skinny arms, impossible waists, over-exaggerated breasts, the belt that profiles hips, butt, and pubic region. Please read Fearing The Black Body. It’s all gross, and has been said by a thousand other people. Frozen normalizes emotional neglect and abuse. The dad (before his death) repeats over and over “suppress your emotions, conceal yourself, don’t show things” to Elsa, and then _coercively destroys her and anna’s memories to hide their own past from themselves”. Identical to how supremacists ‘cleanse’ the history of their victims, to hide from the victims the extent of their own abuse. In literally every single interaction between Elsa and Anna, for much of the movie, Elsa ends a conversation with violence. Anna keeps saying “She wont’ hurt me, we’re family”, normalizing the idea that not only is it acceptable to overlook clear harms and mistreatment from someone because they are family, that it’s in fact good to end up dying as a result of their misdeeds. later, Elsa attempts to murder Anna via proxy by creating a vicious snow monster that, among other things, throws Anna off of a cliff. As soon as the snow monster lept into frame, the first time we saw it, Eden’s whole body stiffened up and she said “i don’t like that”, and we skipped the scene. In all the watchings and re-watchings of this movie, we’ve skipped that scene every time. The “we are family” admonishment is particularly painful to see, because much of the harm that people experience is at the hands of their family members. Parents abusing children, spouses abusing spouses, neglect all around. 2 Jesus, I’m three entries into this, and I’m so angry at supremacists, evangelicals, the family system in which I and others was raised, and the long, long legacy of chattel slavery + the ethnic cleansing of the natives/nations, all by european americans. Frozen normalizes centering the lives of aristocracy, for no reason. It’s dedignifying to children and young adults. This entire movie could be about two people who are, in fact, not members of the nobility or aristocracy. I tell eden “belief in kings and queens and this ‘ruler’ stuff is a mental affliction experienced by some people who live in this country right now”. It’s extremely annoying when Anna bullies others because she is assuming a magical authority by right of ‘royalty’. […] The ‘simple’ townsfolk are depicted as experiencing a naive giddy joy about the castle ‘opening its gates’ and a party. I am not interested in watching the self-aggrandizing fantasies of the ruling class. 🤢 The townsfolk: “It’s corination day!” or “The castle gates are open!!!” Studio Ghibli, every single one of it’s movies, are infinitely more dignifying, and comprehendable to children. I feel ANGRY that the seemingly nice person Anna meets after her first song (who also commits an act of traffic violence, running her over with his horse) actually is a con man who goes on to almost kill Anna at the end of the movie!!!!! OUT OF SPITE! I get to explain to my three year old what ‘willfull betrayal’ is, and why this person who seemed good is in fact now being ‘bad’. […] More family BS: Frozen pushes a message: Family would never hurt you, family is more important than everything, thus accept mistreatment’ Frozen reinforces a colonizers mindset: No one indicates awareness of the subject class, or a displaced/enslaved people. (Compare this to Studio Ghibli’s Princess Mononoke) Anna displays helplessness, self-abandonment, needs saving because of something inherent in her femininity, not because her key support structures hurt her and abandoned her when she was a young child, including her parents, which is what actually happened. Cristof is written to be obsessed with who posseses her. “You got engaged???” or “She’s engaged!” as the only distinctive things he can note about her. Her status vis-a-vis another male. It’s painful to behold the dehumanization. In Frozen, nearly every interaction between two people who presumably have penises is an interaction mediated by dominance. It is inherent to being a man, to try to dominate someone else, and if you don’t dominate them, you’re getting dominated. Yes, this is a movie intended for children. But it’s also being watched by their parents. Every message this movie purports to send about the experience of being human makes the world a worse place. […] Anna, upon meeting a new and novel, sentient, non-threatning being pretends to surprise to justify kicking off its head, anna and cristof written to be disgusted by Olaf’s injured state, saying things like “eeeewwwww its head” or “eeeewwwwww it’s body”. When Anna puts Olaf’s head back on Olaf’s body, it first goes on wrong, then she flips it over, and Olaf thanks her. Talk about supremacist fantasy. That’s what a supremacist would love - devestate an indigenous people, then, when slightly repairing the harm caused by that supremacist, they want to be earnestly thanked by the victim. supremacists expect to be thanked by their victims for the abuse they meted out. 3 Frozen plays ethnic tropes regularly, as supporters of colonialsm. Non-state people as backwards, un-understandable, fractal variations of the ‘magical negro’ trope. […] Cristof is depicted as being seen by the trolls as an obviously superior being. #supremacy The whol movie is obsessed with romance take away romance between the protagonist and ‘love interests’ and there is hardly a plot move remaining. Obviously fails the bechdel test. The entire movie is settler colonialist propaganda. erasing the existance of anyone/thing existing before they showed up. Frozen II is vastly worse. Normalizes women as property, belonging exclusively to someone else, never to themselves. Troll song about Cristof is :vomit:, ‘shipping’ him and anna, without anyone’s consent. When he says “BUT SHE IS SOMEONE ELSES PROPERTY, THATS WHY SHE CANNOT BE MY PROPERTY” the trolls say “Eh, that claim of property is weak, you can totally own her.”. Agriculturalist, state-supporting. ‘true love’ :vomit: side-note, as I’m writing this blog post a while after writing the original paper notes. got bored of the movie quickly. We would rewatch it, skipping more and more of the movie, and now when we put on Frozen we may only watch the two main songs. the opening song sung by Anna, and _Let It Go, of course._ Frozen makes white people look like royalty, or makes royalty look like white people. Frozen depicts impalement as a joke. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUUUUUUUUCK. Someone wrote a scene with Olaf getting impaled, indirectly, by Elsa, and it’s supposed to be read as a joke, not a reference to a horrific act of violence. I talk with eden through these movies. Sometimes extensively. She’ll initiate conversation or I will. She appreciates my help skipping the scenes she doesn’t like (vicious wolves, violent snow creatures attacking others, soldiers fighting and trying to kill each other with blades and arrows) We discuss themes of adults controlling kids, neglecting kids, coercion, support of the state, the myth of ‘true love’. Settler colonialists suppress the sexuality they ‘allow’ themselves to express, and obviously suppress/exploit the sexuality of the ‘other’, and then do strenuous mental gymnastics to justify the whole thing. Please see The Origins of Pro-Slavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Antebellum Virginia The troll song about Cristof says “He’s a bit of a fixer upper”. This normalizes ‘weaponized incompetence’ and enmeshment and self-abandonment. I wonder which of the creators of Frozen are being horrific partners to their partners, and expecting the other partner to just keep accepting bad behavior. Cristof says ‘but shes engaged to someone else’, normalizing marriage, monogamy, ‘possessive’ love’, ‘true love’ Frozen has incredible violence, casual malevolence, and betrayal. Anna is so unwise, high conflict, needlessly provocative. (Throws a snowball at the snow creature created by Elsa, after being violently thrown out of Elsa’s ice palace, and the snow creature throws her off a cliff! instead, what if she read the room, said ‘ew, i hate how my sister is treating me, i am out of here’ and ran away/escaped) … I will write something dedicated about Suzume, the movie, soon. It’s the perfect drop-in replacement for Frozen. Just watch Suzeme, never watch frozen. I watched parts of it with Eden, while she was in her Frozen era, and wept with it’s beauty. I’d love to do a bunch of screenshots, or snippets of scenes, to help illustrate a point. There’s obviously things challenging to convey about a musical through the written word, especially if you’ve not seen the movie(s) in question, or recently. My notes contain ‘call outs’ to parallel/comparing/contrasting themes between Frozen that really shows the intellectual/emotional un-self-conscious poverty of the people involved with Frozen. The city-scape differences of Frozen and Paw Patrol and the cities/towns/landscapes of Ghibli. You, and I, would be right to anger about the built environment in the world today, and it’s parallels in the landscapes of Frozen. Enough people in the USA have forgotten there ever was a good streetcar network in every town, so they forgot the kinds of trips and adventures and places enabled by those infrastructures. Multiple acts of traffic violence, and car propaganda. Phrases like “Oh noooo, I just paid it off” (a sled, upon witnessing it’s explosive, fire-ball-containing destruction after falling off a cliff after being CHASED BY WOLVES!), comments about treating it in a certain stereotypical way that mimics propaganda about cars, the fact that a sled explodes after falling off a cliff after being chased by wolves, all because this random helpless white woman threw political weight and threats of violence at someone, demanding that they head into the dangerous, cold night, causing catastrophe after catastrophe, because she felt obligated to other people’s obedience. The movie ends with Anna buying Cristof’s forgiveness by buying him a car. It’s a sled, in the movie, but obviously in the minds of the writers, it’s a car. […] “you should wait out here”, she’s so pushy to Olaf and Cristof and Sven, who have supported her well through difficult times, as she heads into the demonstrably dangerous territory of interacting with her sister. Abandon your friends who show support of you, to receive more hurt from a family member? elsa is dangerous, over and over, to anna. So dangerous. To rely on family binds makes all this worse. the sexualization of children. Cristof says something, she makes a breathy “I like it fast!”, seeming to make a nod to aggressive sex? Again, this is horrifying. Big breasts, the eyes, eyebrows, lips. Cristof, looking at elsa’s ice palace, he is an ice professional, says “its so beautiful I could cry” and Anna says, derisively, “Go ahead… i won’t judge”. Which directly gives judgement for the sentiment, how did this make it into the script. That was basically the single most dignifying, humane line in the entire movie, and the female lead brushed it off, encouraged emotional suppression, and issued more demands. Stuiod Ghibli films/Suzume is full of reasonable moments of people displaying nice rapt attention to mundane, beautiful nature, of course to WITNESS AN ICE PALACE WOULD MOVE ONE TO TEARS and Disney literally attacks someone who displayed an emotional response to beauty. I wish the entire concept had been cut, OR she had given a non-abusive response to his exclamation. Elsa’s power was plainly mishandled by her caretakers. She obviously has tons of creative potential, it’s a powerful tool, she just was shamed and attacked and tortured from a young age to think she had no power. She could have done useful things for her community, or made things of beauty, and ease, like parks, sculptures, slides, maybe some sort of perpetual motion machine to unburden the townspeople of some labor. If one can fabricate heavy things effortlessly anywhere in space, the potential is unbelievable and it’s dedignifying to kids and adults to act like demanding that she hide her power is at all a reasonable response. She also didn’t need to be doing work or a slave of capitalism bc she has a rare/valuable skill-set. What if she cared for children, because they found her entertaining? Put on free, funny outdoor shows using animated characters for the entertainment of all? to believe that erasing someone’s memories of their own power is reasonable enough to model in a movie is disrespectful to children. I’d like to add that Eden has me skip large parts of Frozen, because it’s scary. We no longer skip the part with the wolves, but did early on. Elsa creates a sentient snow monster that tries, plausibly, to kill the other party. The whole movie could be her doing cool stuff for the entire town, as an inventor/creator/artist/advocate/engineer. Eden has me skip the snow monstor part. Also there’s a part where soldiers attack Elsa in her tower, we skip that part. Wild to make a kids movie and inject war into it. the entire troll meme is offensive, based on a bunch of supremacist stereotypes about non-domesticated people groups. Olof, about cristof: “He is crazy”, jokes about taking off clothes, then being written to push agricultural marriage norms. to anna: “why are you holding back from such a man” (!!!???!!!) More on Frozen, from a subsequent re-watch i’ve got a few pages of notes from multiple re-watches of Frozen Are Producer/writers trying to hide their own misdeeds? Are we seeing deep into their subconcious? The normalization of emotional mistreatment makes me concerned for the personal lives of all who were involved with crafting this movie. 🎼 people do bad things when scared or tired or stressed… but throw a little love their way… [and you can maybe influence them to not harm you, themselves, or others JFC!!!] I’ll link to that song. here it is, ‘fixer upper This is the normalization of abuse. It could have been: “People get stressed and tired and scared, but if they use that to justify violence or intimidation of you, you can call them at least in your own mind on the bullshit” I skip all the overt violence for Eden, as she requests me to do, and its still so violent. prison-based motifs, arrows, implied impalement death, violent and intimate at the same time. In one scene anna is lying her entire body down on the person who she just met and later betrays her, and this moment of uncomfortable closeness she experiences becomes a joke and justification for later pushy behavior. “true love” meme makes me hurt each time it’s mentioned. so de-dignifying. To eden, I ask “Did that surprise you?” often enough. She will say yes or no, and sometimes why, often enough. I firmly believe she enjoys being able to anticipate what is coming in a story line, and how reasonable of a thing to enjoy, eh? In a world one has inhabited for only a few years, one can anticipate/predict what is happening next, in certain situations? How interesting. [^questions-for-kids] [^questions-for-kids]: I have a draft of ‘words I do and do not use with eden’. ‘was that surprising’ and ‘did you anticipate that happening before it happened?’ are rich, rich phrases. I do not use words that convey an expectation for things like obedience, compliance, obligation, authority. I don’t say ‘good job’ or ‘good work’, I say ‘that looked interesting’, or ‘that looked tricky’, or ‘i could see you thinking about that’ or ‘that was so smooth’ or ‘was that interesting to you?’ or ‘what did you like about that?’ or ‘I appreciate how you did {thing}’. It’s a very rich and active experience, to watch movies with her. It’s not turning a show on and tuning out of the experience. We often-enough have it going in the background, too, as other things happen, the normal movements of life. I don’t put a special magical power around “watching TV”, and I help her have a good, curated, enjoyable experience of the media. My own childhood was filled with this strange magical gatekeeping around screens, plus shame, plus never actually being interested in the stuff I found interesting. Once she’s digested a movie, it quickly becomes vastly less interesting to her, and if there is anything else interesting going on, she’ll attend to it. Sometimes she creates the more interesting thing (painting, playing, climbing on things) sometimes I create it (she’s happy to participate in anything like cooking, loves it when friends visit, loves to accompany me to a climbing gym or a park or a playground, she enjoys throwing and catching games, etc.) I take children seriously. Sometimes people witness it, and are obviously stunned by the kinds of cool interactions they witness. I’ll ask Eden very specific, detailed questions, they obviously think she’s incapable of hearing it or giving a thoughtful response, or of offering her own spontaneous thoughts, and they’re shocked sometimes. It’s always entertaining. I can hear her a little more clearly than someone who’s unfamiliar with her mannerisms and cadence and specific words for things, but when she tells me something, when I relay it with a small dose of translation, they’ll sometimes show with surprise how clear and reasonable they find the statement. During a movie (like Frozen) I’ll sometimes say something like ‘hmm, I don’t like how that person is speaking to that person. seems mean.’ or something like that. She also will clock, sometimes, when one person is speaking meanly to another. I really, really approve of her being sensitive in these ways. I don’t want her to think she needs to endure someone speaking meanly to her, or if she cannot escape the situation (common, when an adult is speaking meanly to one or many children) she at least will clock it as the adult’s misbehavior, rather than something brought on by her fundamental wrongness, for instance. A few thoughts about a delightful, wonderful, beautiful movie called Suzume THIS movie is the one that I’m thrilled for Eden to have in her mind. It’s not a little kids movie, so while we’ve seen most of it, together, we had to skip lots of it and some parts of it are (understandbly) not interesting to her, so it’s not in the rotation with the same level of ‘play it again’ as some other movies currently are._ It wouldn’t surprise me if someday this movie gets seen many, many times around here. Here’s the synopsis: 17-year-old Suzume’s journey begins in a quiet town in Kyushu when she encounters a young man who tells her, “I’m looking for a door.” What Suzume finds is a single weathered door standing upright in the midst of ruins as though it was shielded from whatever catastrophe struck. Seemingly drawn by its power, Suzume reaches for the knob…. Doors begin to open one after another all across Japan, unleashing destruction upon any who are near. Suzume must close these portals to prevent further disaster. The stars. The sunset. The morning sky. Within that realm, it was as though all time had melted together in the sky–guided by these mysterious doors, Suzume’s journey to close doors is about to begin. Suzume, made in 2023. here’s a trailer I’ve now seen it a few times, and found it deeply moving. I remember weeping through the end of it the first time, and again the second time. I’ve only seen portions of it with Eden since then and have not been moved to tears subsequently, but I doubt that I’ve shed all the tears I’ll ever shed watching it. In Suzume, a young female protagonist travels around japan in an attempt to achieve certain goals (just like elsa/anna) and has normal interactions with the people she encounters along the way. There are so many parallels between suzume and frozen, and in every single point of comparison, suzume shows itself to be able to be serious, dignified, and frozen shows lack of seriousness. more Suzume notes OK, these are all written out on yellow legal pad, I’m gonna draft the suzume stuff here, it might get its own post later, I wrote all these notes over the last…. at least a few weeks, I really want to get it written and done […] I’m so pleased to watch this movie compared to Frozen. so much healthier interpersonal stuff. Mom/daughter, aunt/niece, friend/friend, adult/kid, kid/kid interactions. No one gets insanely betrayed by someone who is first presented as kind and safe. (Talking about Frozen.) Features the real devestation of the loss of a parent. Also says ‘the world is made safer by feeling fully what you are feeling’, instead of frozen’s ‘let it go, the past is in the past’, ‘suppress your emotions’ motif. here’s a trailer, and here’s the delightful theme song. I’ve listened to this so many times. features a strong (like, actually strong) female lead, as a non-sexualized child. her childness is far more often a factor than her feminine-ness. (unlike frozen) it’s a coming of age trip, with strong built tension. there are even scenes comparable to ‘violence’ and ‘aggression’ but are not the absolute idiotic, fabricated drivel that is frozen. There’s intense expressions of power, force, resistance. Helps if you’ve seen/are able to appreciate Studio Ghibli films. creators love and understand cities. In one scene, a downstairs shop owner helps provide access for Suzume to Souta’s apartment. Jane jacobs, talks about this phenomina directly. this is what american-style ethnic cleansing stole from us. American-style ethnic cleansing literally wants/wanted to eliminate the ‘upstairs residence downstairs shop’ pattern, from all cities. American movies usually depict the americanized urban spatial form of suburbs/single family housing mixed with ‘downtown’ city cores and massive, car-choked streets connecting everything. There’s certainly not people walking around on streets. This is all handled correctly in Suzume Eden is sometimes activated with fear. Scrambles into my lap, shamelessly, and keeps watching. I check in if scared, or she wants to skip this part, she says ‘no’ fully credibly, so we continue. (sometimes she says yes, of course, and I skip the scene). She crawls back out of my lap when the scene ends, back and forth, this goes away as she gets familiar with a movie. I find it charming, cute, and useful for her to experience (without being shamed) fear, the safety that comes from responding to it, experiencing an adult as attentive and helpful, and then the ebbing away of that fear. I have a single memory of a scary scene I saw as a kid, it shook me and my dreams for weeks and months, and as I was watching this movie with my dad, I don’t think it crossed his mind that anything had happened. I was young, it was an Indiana Jones movie, a skeleton erupted from a wall with an arrow embedded in an eye socket. I still remember the scene. 🤮 I don’t like the english dubs a lot, vs. original audio + subtitles, this is the first time I’ve seen it with the english dubs, of course it’s far more accessible to Eden when it’s in English, though she watched a lot of the movie in the japanese, when the original audio is all I had. beautiful, beautiful depictions of indoors and outdoors places. I think Eden ‘processes’ a movie across re-watches, and easily departs the movie or skips it, once it’s no longer interesting or novel to her, in a reasonable way. I value these kinds of times, even though other people criticize it. I’m not a ‘quality time’ person, though I do care about it. I simply also happen to prize the mundane time, too. I protect us from unwanted pressure, trips, rushing, restraining, limiting. I want to see her practice feeling seen as fundamentally good and trustworthy, and her instincts for what she wants as being taken as reasonable things. She will confidently and enjoyably watch something, then, when done, herself close the laptop and move on to the next thing. Sometimes we have real grieving that happens over what happens when we cannot watch something right now, and again, I take that grief (and the opportunity to witness it and hold emotional space for her in it) seriously. She enjoys naming when some part is coming. it’s a form of readying herself for scary parts, sometimes. I see it through a lense of helping her build inner resources to deal with the tricks that adults will sometimes play in moves to get a certain response from you, with or without your permission. (jump scares, certain bits of dialogue). Complaints about other hard-to-avoid-here/now shows I don’t begrudge Eden for anything that she finds interesting. She knows I’m down for everything that’s interesting to her, and will help maximize her enjoyment of it. (Skipping the scary parts, if any, starting/re-starting the desired bits of media) I’ll pus Paw Patrol eden happens to really like paw patrol. Again, understandable, from a toddler’s point of view. I feel nothing but contempt and derision for every adult involved in the production of this show. It’s canadian, paid for by the canadian state, and ruthlessly reinforces authority, authoritarianism, political control, single family housing, and a very machanistic/industrialized view of nature. Extremely car-centric, celebrates all things involving engines, and vastly supportive of police, policing. (slave patrollers, slave patrolling) [deep breath] I’ve written a little/lot about zoning, and how I perceive zoning to be precicely enough how america did/does things that round to ethnic cleansing. I wrote the above upon discovering a certain document that is what got enshrined/encoded in Ambler vs. Euclid, in 2926. Virtually every zoning ordinance that exists in America is rooted in some way in that document, in a way that seems clear to me from a few different frames.4 So, it’s not exclusively american, but it’s some distillation of something representing the ideas of european-american-passing decendents of immigrants, and their idealized sense of social control, or whatever. It’s unfair how disney/ppl like this grab the attention in an unfair, gross way, then fills the story with colonialism, authoritarianism, pro-deputized slave patrol propaganda!. Eden likes it, and knows that I really don’t like it, so often we’ll reach great compromises. She’ll simply choose a different show she wants to watch. (E, to me: “put on {other show}. I choose it for you, because it doesn’t have police or cars”. me: “wow, gladly, i appreciate your thoughtfulness about what is easy or not so easy for me to watch.”) And paw patrol still sometimes is played. No sweat either way. specific complaints the ‘patrol’ obviously references police, policing, the concept of ‘going on patrol’, and always a ‘patrol’ is virtually synonymous with a supremacist occupying force controlling with violence and intimidation the ‘native’ peoples. In america, many police interactions are the slave-patrolling action of policing jaywalking. In killed by a traffic engineer, the author mentioned that at one point in time, something like 40,000 people were arrested for ‘jaywalking’ in chicago????? my jaw dropped. I still hope I am wrong. phew, I checked myself, I am wrong. It was Detroit, not chicago, and it was 20,000 people, not 40,000. Here’s a link to all my highlights for this book. Thanks to goodreads, amazon, kindle versions, and the delusion of ‘american police’, we have the proper quote from the book: In the same 1958 report, AAA says that “it is time that we become concerned with pedestrian violations and unwise walking practices” and then highlights all the progress on this issue in cities like Detroit, which arrested 19,765 pedestrians for crossing against the signal but only 8,662 drivers for violating the pedestrian’s right-of-way. The report noted that San Francisco arrested 165 pedestrians for crossing between intersections as compared to 7,304 drivers arrested for violating the pedestrian’s right-of-way. But don’t let the numbers fool you; San Francisco also arrested 32,968 pedestrians for public intoxication. Thus, i leave it as an exercise to the reader to infer my opinions for what is sometimes called ‘police’, in the greater united states. Here’s my thoughts on ‘jaywalking’ Therefore, because in the USA, where this show is being consumed (even though it’s created by a canadian group, and because of the internet, and colonialism, undoubtedly this show is being requested/demanded beyond the united states, so i bet people in countries victimized by american armies get to watch their kids want to watch this show), the origins of ‘police departments’ was to deputize the existing slave patrols. The very concept of deputization is sorta religeous (“here, random person, have a stamped piece of metal. Affix to your shirt, you now have magical powers”), and simply conceeds so much that doesn’t justify that concession. (“the state”, “authority”, “retributive justice”, AND THE LIVED EXPERIENCE of people on both sides of that police power, like the story told in Killers of the Flower Moon) not only ought one to appreciate police as slave patrolling, but that this role of slave patroller/deputized slave patroller filled a desperately needed position in society. what was that position, that role? maintaining the suppression of ‘slave rebellions’, also known as ‘people of the global majority taking minimum steps to slightly reduce the daily oppression of themselves and their loved ones’. So, ‘slave patrol’ energy is strong in American policing. not only are police slave patrollers. not only were they needed/wanted by american society. other energies got rolled into American policing, too. Slave patrolling dealt with only one of the two primary fears of european americans. Displacing native populations was also critical to the formation/survival of that group of european-american white-passing immigrants! Killers of the Flower Moon, mentioned above, is a good-enough sample of the experience of the people who lived in the greater united states before the immigrants arrived with political authority. For someone else’s experience of the same people group, I invite a read of I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction. here’s my kindle highlights One of the roles a slave patrol would fill is simply reminding people that violence could happen at any time, and no tactic (rebellion, passive resistance, fawning) could make any individual safe from harassment. This is why I don’t like to see or hear police (or sirens in general). Every time, it’s a proclamation, piercing the air and walls and consciousnesses of everyone around, that the local ‘slave patrol’ is on the move, willing to mete some coercion, if it feels right. I have a related contempt for fire departments, by the way. Their sirens are ear-splittingly loud, actually damaging to hear from any proximity, disruptive, pierce the city for hundreds and hundreds of meters in all directions from their vehicle, they drive in dangerous and entitled ways, and RAM their way through a city with their vehicles, and like children hold to strange tropes about their own profession, and continue to resist efforts at narrower, safer streets, because some part of the system acts afraid it might not be able to fit their giant vehicles into a small space. God forbid they demonstrate skilled driving or drive around with the kinds of vehicles used _in any other place. So, this show, “Paw Patrol”, constantly venerating the institutions of slave patrollers and people who do not actually contribute good things to society. I say defund fire departments, fund ambulance riders & libraries/librarians. The vast majority of trips fire departments make in their huge ladder trucks are adequately served by an ambulance, and are inspired by american highway supremacy, so like three orders of magnitude of improvement would be trivially gleaned. Not only does paw patrol hold on a giant, childish pedestal the vaunted role of ‘first responder’, it paints a unbelievable depiction of how the world works. Because kids like animals, and kids shows that depicted (for example) the police brutalizing and assaulting an ethnic group might not do so well. So instead, the police, in Paw Patrol, are involved in things like “rescuing a narwhale that got its horn stuck” or “helping guide a sleepy/hibernating bear back to its den”. Paw Patrol features a bumbling mayor and some other sinister wanna-be mayor who plays a trope throughout the show that sparks conflict, when the show needs conflict. Eden is generally unable to appreciate that adults would pour their entire lives into hurting others and controlling them, so some of the tropes in the show goes over her head, or lands with confusion. She has no idea what a mayor is, or why someone with that title would behave in the ways depicted in this show. Another page of notes more nnotes as taken by hand, across various episodes, and days statist, arrogant, high-modernist drivel. “police are helpful”. the world and nature desperately need A WHITE MAN TO TELL EVERYONE WHAT TO DO!!!!! It’s an honor to be given a command and to do it joyfully, and if you do it well enough, a white man might tell you ‘good job’ and scratch you behind the ear as your payment. Ryder passes out TREATS when they do what he says. This show doesn’t even understand real dog training, or indicates that the adults see children as no more sophisticated as dogs, and equally responsive to treats/threats. (Operant conditioning. 😬). (If one gives treats as rewards, one will also give threats as anti-rewards. This is Not Good). Isn’t it funny how ‘treat’ and ‘threat’ are so similar in spelling? Vastly supportive of the 15 tenants/characteristics of european american supremacy culture each pup has a magic backpack that has a machine, claw, gun, shovel, whatever, that because it’s a machine, solves a problem. high modernist, every problem just needs a technology applied to it. Force and mass and movement are magical, no basis in reality. Ryder, a domineering white male, in nearly every line of dialogue, is issuing a command. he is never given orders or direction, even by the pups, never shares/models sharing power or control (remember, that’s one of the 15 characteristics of supremacy culture). Basically fills the authoritative role of ‘god’, or ‘the state’, or ‘benevolent patriarch’. Exercises complete, unquestioning control of the city. constant reinforcement of the concept of role confomity. every aspect of every person’s existance, except for the role they play, is expunged from existance. The role of the patriarch is ironclad. Gives instructions, endlessly, in fake cheerfulness voice. the entire mayor motif i think goes over eden’s head right now, because she is not yet traumatized/inculcated into political authority, where the mayor/political authority motif makes sense to her in the way it ‘makes sense’ to me. childlike love of military vehicles portrayed throughout, by the shows creators. Vehicles modeled on v22 osprey, some ocean lander/transport thing, tanks. TANKS!!!! eden and I talk a lot throughout the show, often enough. Talk about things happening in the show. about the first of TWO MOVIES about Paw Patrol: The Movie which is AAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH_ Movie opens with act of traffic violence, same as Frozen. It normalizes people doing things (white-passing men giving orders) to solve nature’s problems with technology. normalizes: ‘bad things’ come from obviously bad people working to nefarous purposes. tons of offensive sterotypes. people/animals need saving by emergency services constantly. they have a hero’s lair, like a marvel movie universe. It’s despicable, I am loath to see it. Iron-man esq suits for all pups, glorifying the power and authority of the state and Authority. Their HQ vehicle launching thing is so fucked. Every pup isn’t just a specialized pup, but gets a specialized vehicle, that they rev the engine on and drive dangerously. A pup says ‘I could get used to this’ about a car before launching the police car through the downtown city, totally devoid of awareness or concern for the people in the roads. that launched police car launches into a traffic jam, and then gets help from a ‘local’, native guide, codes as black, who leads them thru shortcuts. wow wow wow. An iraqi-style MRAV type vehicle gets featured/driven around! By the police! water cannon bombs a territory for their own benefit. (“bombing people is good!”). Normalizes a sense that cops risk themselves to help others. (see Warren v DC, 1981, to see how they really feel about that). Bombs a different agent of the state with water to put out flames. See? Shooting people is good! white sky daddy receives scared police force member. Literal domestic abuse. (performative violence when the mayor is angry at the pups). bluey Australian, funded by the australian government, has lots of similar vibes to a different state-funded show I’ve seen lately. (Paw Patrol). Ruthlessly normalizes suburban, single-family-home, nuclear family concept. monogomous marriage. Fumbling, emotionally disconnected dad, mom ‘momming’ the entire family, including dad. I dislike Bluey less than paw patrol, and plenty of moments in the show are fine/appreciable, but for me the whole thing is hamstrung by the context, the expectation of another terrible thing being normalized. season 3, episode 38 “cubby”. I’m trying to articulate why I don’t actually like bluey, even though so many people say it’s touching. I say it normalizes patriarchy, belief in authority, abuse. dad: “The TV is too small, it’s only 50 inches wide” OMFG, he’s ‘watching the game’ and dissociating from the family. agriculturalism, settled/domestication, marriage = the state, patriarchy = entitlement/obligation. ‘i’ll play this role, you MUST play this other role’ they’re building a play/space/fort out of blankets, a cubby. Dad shows exasperation, annoyance with them. dad plays obvious trope of bumbling, clueless male-figure the fort they built is SO COOL!!!! he didn’t say this once. how did he dissociate from their whole life/project? Bluey episode, 43, ‘dragon’ dad diminishes mom and her skills at drawing BECAUSE SHE’S BETTER THAN HIM AT DRAWING!!! he could have said “mom’s so good at drawing, I love to see the things she draws.” Jesus **. it’s literally abuse to hack away at someone’s skills, it undermines them/their confidence/independence. this is horrifying to see. that does it, my notes. might get this published finally! another episode the mom/kids get pulled over by cops, treated as a friend. the cop is wrong about the law and instead of doing something realistic, like shooting the family or at least a dog, the cop says to the mom “you’re right, I shoulda known that”. They say “thanks officer”, joyeously, and ride off in the car. Zero evidence of ppl of the global majority. The normalization of european-american/nobility/suburbanization-of-everything. Cars take us from our house to everywhere else, all activity is at grocery stories, restaurants, arcades, bowling alleys, back yards. In conclusion Mmm, this thing has been months in the making, perhaps that is clear. Based on when I first started editing this file, it was five months ago that I first started copying down notes, but I think that was after more than one page of notes had been created. I really like all things by Studio Ghibli, the movie Suzume, all episodes of Sagwa (available for free on Youtube here). For Studio Ghibli, start with Ponyo, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle. I hadn’t seen or heard of these movies until very recently in my life, I’m so pleased to have encountered them, and the other films made by Studio Ghibli. You’re probably not gonna feel the same about Grave of the Fireflies as you do Totoro. Be careful, and be warned. I dislike Paw Patrol, Bluey, Frozen, in particular, and all Disney in general. Luca is less-bad than most. Finding Nemo is atrotious. Settler colonial culture is hurtful to exist inside of, and more hurtful if it exists inside oneself unrecognized. These disliked shows push a message of normalization of the supremacy culture inside of which the shows were made. Recommended Reading Killers of the Flower Moon my highlights I Saw Death Coming my highlights fearing the black body how to hide an empire spare the child my gosh there’s more but that’ll do for now. Footnotes some of the movies I’ve purchased online or found on youtube, like Sagwa the chinese siamese cat, here’s the 20 episode youtube playlist line with Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture, I generally look for shows first on the pirate bay https://thepiratebay.org/, to download the raw files in a piecemeal way called torrenting. Obviously now there’s conversation about the legality of it, but I’ve always been vastly more impressed by the simple mechanics of torrenting. The piecemeal receiving/sending files, peer-to-peer, instead of server/client. How refreshing. Then save it somewhere easy to find, and use VLC to play it on a laptop, my perfectly functional but mostly retired, genuinely aged apple laptop. Would be harder to do all this quite as easily on a smart TV, for instance. It feels wasteful to stream a full-length movie many times, and on many normal internet connections in the world today, it still is. ↩ my own father, who proudly celebrates the notion of adults assaulting children, in his own words, continues to think that the concept of family makes it not just appropriate, but necessary for adults to assault and sexually assault their own children. I am still working on finished this collection of ideas around ‘spanking’. TL;DR spanking is the ritualized hitting and sexual humiliation of children, served up with a big dose of emotional abuse when the victim is coerced into believing not soley that they are causing their own victimization, but that the assault is an act of love between the adult and the child. I tell Eden regularly that anyone who hits children does not love that child/children and in fact might not be capable of love. I tell her that adults hit children only if the adult wants to hit the child, and they sometimes tell the strangest stories to explain that away, in a way that would certainly not be acceptible in other dynamics. An adult who hurts a child and doesn’t recoil in horror at what happened and take extensive efforts to prevent it from happening again needs a different imagination. I’ve another blog post about how the concept of ‘punishment’ or ‘discipline’ and even ‘obedience’ are in themselves abusive. Stay tuned. ↩ Don Thompson, when I pressed him about his abuse of me as a child, eventually exited the conversation with “I did what I did, you are welcome.”. LITERALLY. Those were his words, he was trying SO HARD to make me play the role he wanted me to play - adulating child. He emotinoally kicked my head off, over and over, but because he thinks it was an expression of love, his self-concept needs me to say “thanks, don, I think you were a great parent.” ↩ In the world of software, one encounters fancy identification labels called ‘guids’ or Globally Unique ID. It might look like 19e38c497fa028936823325fb6a57f25142f25152f5b086882c0fa38ab885538d364ffd8941cde001033b4d99d4fc5f35ea66d08d060fb6dd959b3d36f518e04 or in more likelihood, it’ll look like 9542e1b6-a78b-4b11-8a01-16d1a8adf642. If you google the first of those ‘magic strings’ you’ll find a really specific blog post by Patio11 titled ‘dropping hashes: an idiom used to demonstrate provenance of documents’. If you google the second one, you’ll find nothing. Also common in software are ‘magic strings’. Some strange little string that keeps showing up in different places. Maybe it’s the logs, maybe the codebase. Maybe it’s ‘35ft’ or 5000sq or 16 dwelling units per acre but when you see it first show up in one place, then another, they might be linked. The person who invented zoning desperately wanted to live in a supremacist enclave and wanted to keep people of the global majority in ghettos, and was pretty damned successful. ↩