A Bit More Detail

• John Quiggin at Crooked Timber suggests that the planet Earth, judging by the progress of space travel to date, is going to be the only planet our species will ever inhabit.


• D-Brief notes surprising new evidence that maize was domesticated not in Mesoamerica, but rather in the southwest of the Amazon basin.


• Dangerous Minds notes the penalties proposed by Thomas Jefferson in Virginia for buggery, sodomy, and bestiality.


• Earther considers the extent to which Thanos' homeworld of Titan, whether the Saturnian moon or lookalike world, could ever have been habitable, even with extensive terraforming.


• Hornet Stories notes the interesting light that a study of ideal penis sizes among heterosexual women sheds on studies of sexuality generally.


• JSTOR Daily takes an extended look at how the sharing economy, promoted by people like Lawrence Lessig and businesses like Airbnb, turned out to be dystopian not utopian, and why this was the case.


• Victor Mair at Language Log reports on controversy over bread made by a Taiwanese baker, and at the language used.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the latest proof of the decline of Harper's as a meaningful magazine. (Myself, I lost respect for them when they published an extended AIDS denialist article in 2006.)


• Allan Metcalfe at Lingua Franca celebrates, using the example of lexicographer Kory Stamper's new book, how the blog helped him connect with the stars of linguistics.


• Katherine Franke at the NYR Daily notes pressure from Israel directed against academic critics in the United States.


• Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society Blog notes how the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has picked up InSight hardware on the surface of Mars below.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how NASA is running short of Plutonium-238, the radioactive isotope that it needs to power spacecraft like the Voyagers sent on long-duration missions and/or missions far from the sun.


• Window on Eurasia notes how, based on an excess of deaths over births, the population of Crimea will decline for the foreseeable future.


• Arnold Zwicky takes a look at some examples of the anaphora, a particular kind of rhetorical structure.

• Centauri Dreams notes a paper suggesting that a world without plate tectonics could support Earth-like conditions for up to five billion years.


• D-Brief notes a paper suggesting that, although geoengineering via sulfate could indeed lower global temperatures, reduced light would also hurt agriculture.


• Dead Things notes a suggestion that the Americas might have been populated through two prehistoric migration routes, through the continental interior via Beringia and along the "Kelp Route" down the Pacific North American coast.


• Peter Kaufman, writing at the Everyday Sociology Blog, shares some of the impressive murals and street art of Philadelphia and grounds them in their sociological context.


• L.M. Sacasas at The Frailest Thing suggests that social media, far from being a way to satisfy the need for human connection and attention in a mass society, creates a less functional solution.


• Hornet Stories reports that Turkish Radio and Television vows to remain outside of Eurovision so long as this contest includes queer performers like Conchita Wurst (and other queer themes, too, I don't doubt).


• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on a study suggesting that the oratory of Hitler actually did not swing many votes in the direction of the Nazis in the elections of Germany in 1932.


• Patricia Escarcega at Roads and Kingdoms praises the Mexican breakfast buffet restaurants of Tucson.


• Arnold Zwicky meditates on the Boules roses of the Village gay of Montréal, Swiss Chalet, and poutine.

• Anthrodendum considers the issue of the security, or not, of cloud data storage used by anthropologists.


• Architectuul takes a look at the very complex history of urban planning and architecture in the city of Skopje, linked to issues of disaster and identity.


• Centauri Dreams features an essay by Ioannis Kokkidinis, examining the nature of the lunar settlement of Artemis in Andy Weir's novel of the same. What is it?


• Crux notes the possibility that human organs for transplant might one day soon be grown to order.


• D-Brief notes evidence that extrasolar visitor 'Oumuamua is actually more like a comet than an asteroid.


• Bruce Dorminey makes the sensible argument that plans for colonizing Mars have to wait until we save Earth. (I myself have always thought the sort of environmental engineering necessary for Mars would be developed from techniques used on Earth.)


• The Everyday Sociology Blog took an interesting look at the relationship between hobbies and work.


• Far Outliers looks at how, in the belle époque, different European empires took different attitudes towards the emigration of their subjects depending on their ethnicity. (Russia was happy to be rid of Jews, while Hungary encouraged non-Magyars to leave.)


• The Finger Post shares some photos taken by the author on a trip to the city of Granada, in Nicaragua.


• The Frailest Thing's L.M. Sacasas makes an interesting argument as to the extent to which modern technology creates a new sense of self-consciousness in individuals.


• Inkfish suggests that the bowhead whale has a more impressive repertoire of music--of song, at least--than the fabled humpback.


• Information is Beautiful has a wonderful illustration of the Drake Equation.


• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the American women who tried to prevent the Trail of Tears.


• Language Hat takes a look at the diversity of Slovene dialects, this diversity perhaps reflecting the stability of the Slovene-inhabited territories over centuries.


• Language Log considers the future of the Cantonese language in Hong Kong, faced with pressure from China.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how negatively disruptive a withdrawal of American forces from Germany would be for the United States and its position in the world.


• Lingua Franca, at the Chronicle, notes the usefulness of the term "Latinx".


• The LRB Blog reports on the restoration of a late 19th century Japanese-style garden in Britain.


• The New APPS Blog considers the ways in which Facebook, through the power of big data, can help commodify personal likes.


• Neuroskeptic reports on the use of ayahusasca as an anti-depressant. Can it work?


• Justin Petrone, attending a Nordic scientific conference in Iceland to which Estonia was invited, talks about the frontiers of Nordic identity.


• Personal Reflections' Jim Belshaw writes about what it is to be a literary historian.


• Drew Rowsome praises Dylan Jones' new biographical collection of interviews with the intimates of David Bowie.


• Peter Rukavina shares an old Guardian article from 1993, describing and showing the first webserver on Prince Edward Island.


• Seriously Science notes the potential contagiousness of parrot laughter.


• Understanding Society's Daniel Little t.com/2018/06/shakespeare-on-tyranny.htmltakes a look at the new Stephen Greenblatt book, Shakespeare on Power, about Shakespeare's perspectives on tyranny.


• Window on Eurasia shares speculation as to what might happen if relations between Russia and Kazakhstan broke down.


• Worthwhile Canadian Initiative noticed, before the election, the serious fiscal challenges facing Ontario.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell points out that creating a national ID database in the UK without issuing actual cards would be a nightmare.


• Arnold Zwicky reports on a strand of his Swiss family's history found in a Paris building.

A United Nations body is investigating controversial methods to avert runaway climate change by giving humans the go-ahead to re-engineer the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere.

So-called geoengineering is seen as necessary to achieve the COP21 Paris agreement clinched in December, when 197 countries pledged to keep global temperatures rises below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), according to researchers who produced a report for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.

“Within the Paris agreement there’s an implicit assumption that there will need to be greenhouse gases removed,” said Phil Williamson, a scientist at the U.K.’s University of East Anglia, who worked on the report. “Climate geoengineering is what countries have agreed to do, although they haven’t really realized that they’ve agreed to do it.”

Large-scale geoengineering may include pouring nutrients into oceans to save coral habitats or spraying tiny particles into the Earth’s atmosphere to reflect sun rays back into space. Geoengineering proposals have been shunned because of their unpredictable consequences on global ecosystems.

• Bloomberg notes the upcoming meeting of North Korea's governing party, observes the absence of a groundswell in favour of Brexit in the United Kingdom, and notes NIMBYism can appear in many forms.


• CBC reports on the upcoming summit of North American leaders, notes Mike Duffy's first appearance in the Senate, reports on the likely huge toll of insurance payouts in Fort McMurray, and notes the dependence of many Syrian refugees on food banks in Canada.


• The Independent notes that Brexit might depend on the votes of Wales, which could be swayed either way by the fate of the Port Talbot steel plant.


• The Inter Press Service notes, in a photo essay, how Third World farmers are seeking a technological revolution for their industry.


• National Geographic notes how Atlantic City is coping with rising seas, mainly badly in ways which hurt the poor.


• Open Democracy considers the Argentine government's likely approach to geopolitics in the South Atlantic.


• Universe Today notes the possible discovery of a new particle and looks at how Ceres might, or might not, be terraformed.


• Wired looks at a new documentary on film projectionists and reports on the difficulties of fighting the Alberta wildfire.

The first proposed method of terraforming Venus was made in 1961 by Carl Sagan. In a paper titled “The Planet Venus“, he argued for the use of genetically engineered bacteria to transform the carbon in the atmosphere into organic molecules. However, this was rendered impractical due to the subsequent discovery of sulfuric acid in Venus’ clouds and the effects of solar wind.

In his 1991 study “Terraforming Venus Quickly“, British scientist Paul Birch proposed bombarding Venus’ atmosphere with hydrogen. The resulting reaction would produce graphite and water, the latter of which would fall to the surface and cover roughly 80% of the surface in oceans. Given the amount of hydrogen needed, it would have to harvested directly from one of the gas giant’s or their moon’s ice.

The proposal would also require iron aerosol to be added to the atmosphere, which could be derived from a number of sources (i.e. the Moon, asteroids, Mercury). The remaining atmosphere, estimated to be around 3 bars (three times that of Earth), would mainly be composed of nitrogen, some of which will dissolve into the new oceans, reducing atmospheric pressure further.

Another idea is to bombard Venus with refined magnesium and calcium, which would sequester carbon in the form of calcium and magnesium carbonates. In their 1996 paper, “The stability of climate on Venus“, Mark Bullock and David H. Grinspoon of the University of Colorado at Boulder indicated that Venus’ own deposits of calcium and magnesium oxides could be used for this process. Through mining, these minerals could be exposed to the surface, thus acting as carbon sinks.

However, Bullock and Grinspoon also claim this would have a limited cooling effect – to about 400 K (126.85 °C; 260.33 °F) and would only reduce the atmospheric pressure to an estimated 43 bars. Hence, additional supplies of calcium and magnesium would be needed to achieve the 8×1020 kg of calcium or 5×1020 kg of magnesium required, which would most likely have to be mined from asteroids.

• At Antipope, Charlie Stross starts a discussion about the consequences of satellites getting knocked down. How would a newly satellite-less world cope?


• Centauri Dreams looks at red dwarfs and the challenges of their potentially habitable exoplanets.


• The Dragon's Gaze considers ways to detect the spectral signatures of rocky impacts on young stars.


• The Dragon's Tales considers why nuking Mars in the aim of terraforming will not work.


• Language Hat considers languages with royal and commoner registers.


• Languages of the World starts a consideration of the links between genes and history and language.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the popularity of Planned Parenthood.


• Marginal Revolution thinks the added pollution from the Volkswagen fraud had a trivial negative effect.


• pollotenchegg maps Russian language use in 1926 Ukraine.

• Centauri Dreams reports on a theory suggesting the distant dwarf planet Sedna and its kin were captured from another star in the sun's birth cluster.


• Crooked Timber reports on a Dutch court ruling arguing that the Netherlands is legally obliged to reduce carbon dioxide output.


• The Dragon's Gaze notes that hot Neptune Gliese 436b has a comet-like tail.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that DARPA is working on Martian terraforming bugs.


• Far Outliers looks at Comanche inroads on bison herds in the 19th century.


• Geocurrents maps the recent Turkish elections, looking for patterns.


• Marginal Revolution argues that the campaign against the Confederate flag couldn't work if the two American political parties were competing for rural white votes.


• The Russian Demographics Blog shares an Economist ranking of the top tne economies in 2050, Indonesia ranking notably higher.


• Torontoist notes a local publication of nerd fangirls.


• Window on Eurasia argues that the Russian Orthodox Church's ongoing losses in Ukraine will marginalize it internationally.

[I]t's fairly safe to suggest that the terraforming of Venus would pose a set of problems far greater than what would await us on Mars. But that isn't necessarily a valid reason to terraform Mars first. As already noted, the insights we would glean from a Venus terraforming project could serve us well given our climate change problems here on Earth. It's even fair to say that the simple exercise of thinking about it — the brainstorming of ideas — may help us deal with — and even acknowledge — our current climate crisis.

But Venus poses other advantages as well. It's closer than Mars, making it easier and quicker to travel back and forth. And like the Earth, it resides within the solar system's habitable zone. We also know it can hold an atmosphere (obviously), and it has nearly the same mass and size as Earth. Mars, on the other hand, is considerably smaller, and would pose serious health risks to humans (reduced muscle mass and bone density) on account of its low gravity.