Most frightening and/or depressing story: The U.S. legalized political corruption problem is getting worse, not better. This was one of Project Censored’s most censored stories of 2022.
Most hopeful story: Space-based solar. This just might be the killer energy app, the last energy tech we need to come up with for awhile. Imagine what we could do with abundant, cheap, clean energy – reverse global warming, purify/desalinate as much water as we need, grow lots of food under lights in cities, power homes/businesses/factories with little or no pollution, get around in low-pollution cars/buses/trains, electrolyze as much hydrogen from water as we need for fuel cells to power aircraft and even spacecraft. Solve all these problems and we would eventually come up against other limits, of course, but this would be an enormous step forward. And space-based solar seems like much less of a fantasy than nuclear fusion or even widespread scaling up of new-generation fission designs.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The Liver King, obviously. What is it about the Liver King I just can’t get enough of. Is it the abs? The huge pectoral muscles?
This New Yorker article compares the isolation that might be felt in future space travel to long ocean voyages in the past.
“Future space expeditions will resemble sea voyages much more than test flights, which have served as the models for all previous space missions,” Stuster wrote in a book, “Bold Endeavors,” which was published in 1996 and quickly became a classic in the space program. A California anthropologist, Stuster had helped design U.S. space stations by studying crew productivity in cases of prolonged isolation and confinement: Antarctic research stations, submarines, the Skylab station. The study of stress in space had never been a big priority at NASA—or of much interest to the stoic astronauts, who worried that psychologists would uncover some hairline crack that might exclude them from future missions. (Russia, by contrast, became the early leader in the field, after being forced to abort several missions because of crew problems.) But in the nineteen-nineties, with planning for the International Space Station nearly complete, NASA scientists turned their attention to journeys deeper into space, and they found questions that had no answers. “That kind of challenging mission was way out of our comfortable low-earth-orbit neighborhood,” Lauren Leveton, the lead scientist of NASA’s Behavioral Health and Performance program, said. Astronauts would be a hundred million miles from home, no longer in close contact with mission control. Staring into the night for eight monotonous months, how would they keep their focus? How would they avoid rancor or debilitating melancholy?
Stuster began studying voyages of discovery—starting with the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, whose deployment, he observed, anticipated the NASA-favored principle of “triple redundancy.” Crews united by a special “spirit of the expedition” excelled. He praised the Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen’s three-year journey into the Arctic, launched in 1893, for its planning, its crew selection, and its morale. One icebound Christmas, after a feast of reindeer meat and cranberry jam, Nansen wrote in his journal that people back home were probably worried. “I am afraid their compassion would cool if they could look upon us, hear the merriment that goes on, and see all our comforts and good cheer.” Stuster found that careful attention to habitat design and crew compatibility could avoid psychological and interpersonal problems. He called for windows in spacecraft, noting studies of submarine crewmen who developed temporarily crossed eyes on long missions. (The problem was uncovered when they had an unusual number of automobile accidents on their first days back in port.) He wrote about remote-duty Antarctic posts suffering a kind of insomnia called “polar big eye,” which could be addressed by artificially imposing a diurnal cycle of light and darkness.
And of course, there is also this classic contribution to the literature: