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My February birthday fund-raising campaign for this website, Behind the Black, is now over. Despite a relatively weak initial three weeks, the last week was spectacular, making this campaign the second best ever.

 

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Delivery from Earth

An evening pause: A short film about the moment the first human was born on Mars, as seen from the perspective of a Navajo family on Earth.

Hat tip Jeff Poplin.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

15 comments

  • Robert Pratt

    Wonderful!

  • ken anthony

    That’s exactly the vision my plan is to make possible but I need to explain it well enough so that people get it and overcome the argument of those already fighting to insure it does not happen.

    Two things need to be understood…
    1) Nobody owns mars which is a great advantage that many would steal away.
    2) Mars has to be owned by a great many diverse people in order to be developed properly.

    The key is to get people that aren’t really interested in colonizing mars to have a financial incentive to invest in colonization. It could be done right now. I just need to find the right lawyer or law firm and get them to understnd the wealth potential.

  • LocalFluff

    ken, Trying to make people understand by explaining, is futile. If one signs up for a course in a subject one is interested in, then a skillful professor has the chance to explain. So don’t waste too much effort on trying to convert people who are not interested to begin with. Our attention is by necessity extremely narrow. We just don’t think so simply because we of course can’t think of that which we don’t think of.

  • wayne

    ken–
    Tend to agree with LocalFluff on this one.

    Develop your own idea’s and solicit input from like minded individuals along the way.

    Tangentially– I was going to suggest you make sure to read “Human Action” by Mises and came across this (at mises dot org)

    “How to Beam Factories to Mars”
    https://mises.org/wire/how-beam-factories-mars

  • wayne

    Mr. Pratt–
    Thanks for making Mr. Z’s podcast available for the November 5th Show.

    ken–
    “Human Action”
    Ludwig von Mises
    https://mises.org/library/human-action-0
    (multiple download formats available for no charge)

    I need to put my turkey in the oven. Not a stuffing-guy myself, but I did manage to cram a whole chicken into the turkey.
    Hoping everyone has a pleasant day today!

  • wayne

    “The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government”
    Richard Epstein 2013
    https://www.cato.org/events/classical-liberal-constitution-uncertain-quest-limited-government
    (-video embedded in page.)

    “Richard Epstein mounts a principled attack on modern Supreme Court jurisprudence and much of the legal scholarship that has grown up around it. The major disarray that infects every area of modern American life, he argues, from deficits and debt to health care, financial services, declining standards of living and more, could not have happened under the original constitutional structure, faithfully interpreted in light of changed circumstances. It arose from a profound progressive break with the classical liberal tradition that guided the drafting and interpretation of the Constitution.”

  • LocalFluff

    I’m having chicken dinner today, as a sympathy with you and your bird holiday (no, not really). I have no clue as to what Thanksgiving is all about, but I think that Trump shouldn’t have shot Drumstick with his handgun in front of all the media during the turkey pardoning ritual. Erdogan will protest.
    Mr. president’s comment:
    “- Well, I’m hungry and that’s that. I pardoned Gulen, he’s also turkey.”

    Is it true that hunters try to hit the turkey’s neck with a rifle?

  • wayne

    LocalFluff–
    I almost hit a turkey (with my car) a few days ago, we have a lot of Turkey walking around. (More than I have ever seen, in my entire life.)
    Come on…. you are far too intelligent, to hunt birds, with a rifle!
    “A Day of Thanksgiving”
    https://youtu.be/ASd0Rm-7Vi4

  • wayne

    President Trump and The First Lady Participate in the Pardoning of the National Thanksgiving Turkey
    https://youtu.be/dOdNfKDe71M
    7:43

  • LocalFluff: Read Lincoln’s original proclamation establishing Thanksgiving in 1863, during the middle of the worst years of the Civil War: That will clarify what the holiday is supposed to be about.

    We all have things to be thankful for. It is healthy and wise to think of these things, and to declare our thanks for them. Today’s holiday is an opportunity to do so.

  • Mars Reviler

    It could be done right now? How about NEVER! The effects of weightlessness on the trip, radiation, plus the 1/3 gravity of Mars would be disastrous. Take Canada, as an example. Most people live within a narrow southern band. Plenty of room to starve and freeze to death though!

  • ken anthony

    Wayne, LocalFluff;

    Will get to that Mises link in a moment, thanks. No, I can’t talk people into anything, but if I show them other people making profit I will not have to. Getting to that point is the problem. I can give money to lawyers forever and never get anywhere. The only two things they are good for is determining legal feasibility and producing contracts. They, like most, are only interested in greed, and even then if they don’t have to work too hard to realize it.

    Mars Reviler;

    …Mars would be disastrous Assertions are not argument. None from your list are the least bit disastrous unless you dumb down the definition to meaninglessness.

    Most people… This is exactly where your non-argument fails. Much more than half the population of the earth live in places that would kill them if humans didn’t do what they ALWAYS do. A perfect example of people unable to see right in front of their noses. Even when it takes such little thought. You do realize the narrow range of environment that will not kill you (probably not, because most don’t.) WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW would kill you at times during the year, if you didn’t do what we all do. You wear clothes and live in houses. These are two forms of terraforming everybody does right here on earth without thinking about it.

    The effects of weightlessness and low G haven’t killed us in fifty years and are rather simple to deal with. The body recovers when the right actions are taken. Radiation is required for life. We can deal with it, especially once on the surface of a planet.

    People don’t die because of the environment. They die because they don’t deal with it. The amazing thing is that more people luck past a Darwin award through no affirmative intent.

  • Mars Reviler

    The body will not recover on Mars, there isn’t enough G’s. And they must return. The time required would kill them. The Apollo crews were exposed to radiation and suffered heart disease more than normal. There is more money in killing untrustworthy oil-land squatters.

  • ken anthony

    Mars Reviler;

    Life is the leading cause of death!

    Radiation is measurable. That makes it almost a non-issue once on the surface of mars. Rovers have directly measured it on the surface of mars and even without any mitigation at all it is only a slightly elevated risk. With mitigation its not an issue at all.

    Mars will give us the first chance to study long term low G effects. Saying we will not recover on mars is pure assertion that flies in the face of known mitigating factors. It’s as ridiculous as saying we’d die before breaking the sound ‘barrier.’

    Quality of life and health issues very with every person. Length of life is not the only metric of a life worth living.

    I have no idea what squatters have to do with anything? I do know for a fact that mars colonization has the potential of being the greatest wealth production this world has ever seen. Done badly, it’s pure cost, but that proves nothing.

  • Edward

    Mars Reviler wrote: “The body will not recover on Mars [from the effects of prolonged exposure to zero G], there isn’t enough G’s.

    Actually, there are no studies to confirm this. We do not even have information on zero-G exposure beyond much past one year of exposure. The only low-G information that we have is a couple of days on the Moon combined with a few days of zero-G. This is too little to draw real conclusions. It would have been nice to have had a rotating space station for us to do various experiments with different G levels, but that is unlikely to happen before we do long-term habitation in low-G places. The gravity experiments will take place along with the exploration.

    Apollo crews were exposed to radiation and suffered heart disease more than normal.

    This is not an expected result of radiation exposure. It is more likely that there is another reason for increased heart disease. Be careful about associating cause and effect. Radiation may not be the cause of this effect.

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