One of the things that I believe will precede the fall of Babylon, or our collapse in general, is a crisis of meaning. Specifically, this mean our myths and heroes are hollow or not taken seriously. This is fundamentally a spiritual crisis.

The Jedi Church may be laughable, but a society incapable of even that… that is terrifying. A society without heroes or myths is spiritually dead. It can still move, still function—but only on momentum, like a corpse that hasn’t yet realized it’s dead.

And related to this, is a crisis in telling stories. You can’t have a compelling story without meaning.

It is interesting to note, that of the Eminent Men and Women who appeared to Pres Woodruff, said they laid the foundation of liberty for us. Besides the signers of the Declaration of Independence, the majority were artists and authors. What we might call mythmakers.

 

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3D overlay of exo-planets on our solar system, for scale.

You betcher I’m blame fool whoopin’ and hollerin’

Ascension

Splashdown

Return to tower  (If you only click one link, click this one)

Implications

On the third test, Starship made it all the way. Some problems later on the return but they are basically there.

Happy birthday to @SpaceX! What a day!

HUGE congratulations to the entire team for this incredible day: clean count (glad the shrimpers could get out in the nick of time!), liftoff, hot staging, Super Heavy boost back and coast (and likely a couple engines making mainstage… pic.twitter.com/D3YUPIgKNH

— Gwynne Shotwell (@Gwynne_Shotwell) March 14, 2024

We live in the best of times. All the broken, wicked people, if they will not repent, are there to make our ascent more glorious.

 

Prepare yourselves for victories.

I reckon as how I owes my pard  Elon a apology.  Yessirree, I’m right sorry.  I was out doin’ a mite o’ bird huntin’ and maybe took a shot that I oughtn’t to have took.  It shore is tough being as quick on the draw as I am.    I jest ain’t never poached a rocket before.

 

There was a recent article in Wired Magazine on Brandon Sanderson, which I shall not link. It was a smug largely incompetent hit piece. While I am a Sanderson fan, I am aware of just how Mormie he is, bending over backwards to not offend the Great and Spacious Building. (Though, praise where praise is due, he was remarkably level-headed and peace-making through this whole thing. Something that all of us are going to have to practice, while also standing for the truth.)

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And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. Rev. 9:6

You can not learn what it means to be human, after 20, 40, 80 or even 120 years. You are not fully grown or developed in your 30’s, in your 300’s, or even in your 3000’s.

 

It began when we become immortal. We were promised unending life and perpetual health. We were given machines that provided food, or whatever we could imagine. We rejoiced in our good fortune. Earth was full so we left. We sought a home among the stars.

Our two ships were both a great O’Neill Cylinder, a spacious rotating cylinder with enough room for a thousand NYC, LA, Paris, Rome and Babylon’s packed inside and with room to spare. We lived on the inside of the cylinder and our inverted sky was lit by the metropolises we prided ourselves on.

We joined in bands and tribes of like-minded open-minded people bound only by love. Perpetual youth, perfect bodies, endless time and the hormones to fill it. And fill it we did. The first ship was the more hedonistic. They loved any they pleased. But the second had committed relationships of every kind, Gay, Lesbian, Trans and things presently unimagined.

We slipped the surly bonds of Earth, and of the Sun. We ventured beyond the Milky Way, and Andromeda galaxies and then out of the Local Group. Further we left the Virgo Supercluster of galaxies. And then the larger Laniakea Supercluster. We crossed vast stretches of space, great galaxies and enormous voids. We saw black holes, and super red giants. White dwarfs and blue supergiants.

That is the first thing you learn about navigating the stars. It is rarely where you are at that is the problem. It is where you are headed.

 

Tachyon field collapse means distance is easy. Too easy. A billion light years in a matter of a day. And we spent years in travel. But finding your way back can be tricky, if not impossible. Not that we cared.

The other thing is,

 

We did not understand, that if sex is the most important thing, the greatest good, that that leads to some dark places. If pleasure is what is important, a great many other things are not. A lake that only receives but never sacrifices its own water, quickly becomes a dead sea.

We did not so much underestimate our sins, as we did their consequences. The problem was not so much our sins themselves. It was the direction they set us on.

 

“a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare… Immortal horrors”

Write as a chiasmus, lost in space, lost morally

 

 

I once read that we were eggs. And that we must hatch or go bad. We truly had no conception of what bad meant.

That thar cayus Richard Branson is sashayin’ around full o’ beans on account of how he reached the edge o’ space.

Waaal.  Taint bad for a lil tot, pardner.  Shore, a papoose has gotten to start somewheres, so I give yew my full up congrattylations.

But I reckon when yur a grown feller, taint gonna seem so much.

 

 

Yeehah! Ah reckon ahm as pleazed as punch.

Why, ifn its bin one time its bin a dozen where ah’ve gotten all hetted up fit to bust and had to relieve muh feelins’ by strangling’ a grizzlie with a rattlesnake. Why? For the simple ’nuff reason that many’s the time ah purposed to mosey down to the ginral store and fill up mah wagon with salt, sugar, and nucular power generation and then brought to mind that I had to set to makin’ the dadblame thing muhself.

This may appeal to others besides myself. I wish I could see it. From the Washington Post:

“Okay, you walk — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven — and kneel on eight,” Stiefel tells Sarah Steele, a willowy, dark-eyed 22-year-old. She was recently hired as an apprentice, and Stiefel plucked her from that bottom rank to star in his ballet. Her courage at the outset of rehearsals attracted him. She possesses, he says, “the essence of a strong, brave artist.”

“You have a full eight counts to zip,” he continues. “Then you’ll get lifted. Turn on four, arms on five. Four counts for the gloves. . . . Lift on five; six, you get into the backpack.”

Steele and the dancer-crew members who are helping her dress eye him intently, tallying up the counts in their heads. The first few run-throughs are rocky — Steele’s zipper snags on the waistband of her tights, the gloves don’t cooperate. The helmet strap must be snapped — oh, where is it, where’s that dang other end? — and, meanwhile, the cyber beats in the commissioned music are racing on. Ah, at last, success! Well, the helmet’s a little askew. But Steele stands triumphant, ready for takeoff, fists clenched at her sides in the ready position.

“This is going to work,” Stiefel assures his dancers. “This will be absolutely no problem. We have two weeks to work on it.”

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From an interview with Dave Keuning, Killers guitarist:

In 2008, Rolling Stone said you were saving money to book a trip on Virgin’s first commercial space flight. Is that something you’re still wanting to do?

It’s something I’m still interested in, but Virgin has kept pushing that date back. They said it was going to be 2010, and then ’11, and then ’12, and they still haven’t done it. It’s actually made me a bit nervous about being on the first one. Whenever it happens, I’ll probably let other people do it first for a few years because I don’t want to be the one who blows up.

On Thursday Ken Mattingly, the youngest man among those who ever ventured beyond low Earth orbit, turned 80. A couple others were younger than Admiral Mattingly at the time of their respective launches, but Mattingly’s mission, the next-to-last Apollo mission to the moon, was later than theirs, and he was born last. As Apollo 16’s Command Module Pilot 44 years ago, he is one of seven men to have ever been isolated by a couple thousand miles from any other person, three days orbiting the moon alone.

To repeat, the couple dozen men who have ever seen Earth from a thousand miles away are all 80 years old or older or dead, and they all did so on their way to the moon. Another decade or so left till such feats become legend.

Sometimes I think His Majesty has become a bitter old Sith.

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Fer mah gift, I was durn pleased to unwrap a hootin’, tootin’ sure nuff SpaceX pillar o’ fire. Yeehah!

Dissatisfied with the price and worth of high-speed rail in California, Elon Musk turned some of his SpaceX and Tesla engineers loose on the idea of regional transport between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Their white paper describes a pair of seven-foot diameter steel tubes mounted on concrete pylons along Interstate 5. The tubes are pumped down to 100 Pascals, or, as Musk’s team prefers to call it, 1/6 the atmospheric pressure of Mars. Inside the tubes, 28-passenger vehicles riding on air bearings would run the 350-mile route in 35 minutes, 70% of the time at near-sonic 760 mph.

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