Assorted content to end your week.
- Sara Mojtehedzadeh reports on the severe uncertainty facing far too many as the CERB is set to wind down with nothing but vaporware to replace it.
- John Paul Tasker reports on the Libs' slow response to the obvious lack of personal protective equipment at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. And Rachel Treisman reports on the recognition by CDC director Robert Redfield that this could easily be the U.S.' worst fall ever for public health.
- Andre Picard discusses the need for clear guidelines to ensure both that children are as safe as possible in returning to school, and that parents aren't confronted with avoidable anxiety about their health. And Alex Bozikovic raises the important question of what we need to do to address ventilation in schools, while Nathaniel Meyersohn writes that stores are also particularly dangerous potential sources of potential outbreaks if they don't make use of available air filtration systems.
- Finally, Robert Asselin writes about the need for Canada to develop some meaningful economic planning of its own in response to the likelihood that a Biden administration will engage in the same. And Carolyn Sissoko highlights the problems with an economic system in which new fiscal capacity is almost entirely absorbed by existing corporate monoliths rather than anybody looking to build anything new.
NASA seems at a crossroads.
ReplyDeleteI think solar sails can slow down using their same propulsion lasers if you refract a laser through a metamaterial: (fig 2): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.02837.pdf
A disaster could be a program running away to space with enough on board to come back strong. If you can slow down solar sails from source, you can use them to send sensors, comms, and defensive lasers from GEO.
Picture a ribbon looped into a circle. Send it like a bike wheel ahead of the laser, yaw it 25 degrees in space. When the laser shines on the outer sail surface, it pushes it forward. But if the laser hits the inner exposed ribbon, it lossily eventually brings the delta v back towards Earth. This could be a design failsafe as well as a strategy to build up a thoughtful space (military) economy. We might send an inert probe to a star rather quickly if we can advance this beyond where the Halifax Navy have advanced this. In the same way our capital cities have vaccine attempts, we could also fund stuff like this that has rational implications (Musk maybe suspects a disease will wipe out Earth and is using his real estate Empire to hazard a Planet B).