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Over the long march of biological and now technological evolution, we have finally reached a survival gate — we have enough computational power to model the trajectory all Near-Earth Objects (NEO's) that could threaten life on Earth. This was not possible in the year 2000, or any time over the prior millennia. We have made a million-fold improvement in computation in just the past 20 years. So, we can see the future and predict decades in advance of an impact event and then give the NEO a nudge such that it misses Earth entirely.
It’s not like the movies, where you have an asteroid on final approach and try to blow it up somehow (that just turns a rifle into a shotgun blast); instead, you launch a rocket to rear-end it and change its velocity ever so slightly. Integrated over years, that small delta-v makes all the difference. In short, asteroid defense does not end with a bang, but merely a nudge. That is, if you know what you are doing!
The non-profit B612 (with co-fiounding astronauts Ed Lu and Rusty Schweickart) did a webinar and demo of their ADAM simulation tool for calculating asteroid orbit propagation. They gave me permission to share the unpublished work of their Asteroid Institute tech team. Here's an unlisted video showing the sim seen here.
Rusty Schweickart, the first Lunar Module Pilot summarizes: “We live in a remarkable time in history. We can change the trajectory of the solar system, ever so slightly, and protect life on Earth"
Mapping the Final Frontier with ADAM (Asteroid Decision Analysis + Mapping):
The ADAM project runs on the Google Compute Engine to provide a cloud platform for large-scale orbital dynamics. Small errors in the initial velocity vector measurements can expand over decades to very different outcomes, especially when gravitational slingshots around the planets occur. So, they run thousands of Monte-Carlo simulations over an array of starting conditions, creating a distribution of points, as seen in the images here, some hitting Earth (red) or a near miss (green). The distribution of endpoints gives a probability of deep impact. As a heuristic patch to some insane computational complexity, we can calculate a probability for the long term, which narrows like a hurricane forecast cone to a certainly as time advances.
To reach an accuracy of a few kilometers over many decades, it’s not just the complexity of an n-body problem. They had to model effects such as the curvature of space-time due to General Relativity, the non-sphericity of the Sun, the gravitational asymmetry of the planets, moons and larger asteroids, as well as the non-isotropic thermal re-radiation from rotation of the asteroid.
So so the good news: we can do this today, and with each passing year of Moore's Law, we can look further into the future, moving from decades to a 100 years. The further you can see, and the more precisely, the easier the nudge becomes.
For input to the model you just need a series of at least three sample points (but more is better). And we are about to get a whole lot better at that. Starting in 2022, LSST will observe ~600,000 asteroids every night, and discover new asteroids at 10X today’s rate. This will accentuate the computation-bounded problem of using this torrent of data.
There is something poetic about the computational defense of humanity. And something that rhymes with history. The Space Race of the 60s was won computationally, not by brute force heavy-lift, which would have favored the Soviets.
Survival is computational. Intelligence allows us to see the future.
Oil on canvas
11" x 14"
June 2015
None of This Was Real is a series of oil paintings that portrays fictional scenes of objects randomly generated by a computer program. These objects are a product of code written by the artist and rendered using a global illumination ray tracing engine. They are effectively subjects for still life. But there was never any life – any reality – in the subjects. Everything was virtual and simulated.
The software for creating the reference images was written in Processing (processing.org), with the additional help of toxiclibs (toxiclibs.org) for geometry creation and Sunflow (sunflow.sourceforge.net) for the global illumination rendering engine.
While my wife was making a hospital visit, I took a few minutes at the community park.
There she was, on the stage of the amphitheater. It must've been a brutal concert! There was Barbie, torn asunder on the stage. Apologies for the grusome sight!
Viewing the forms of objects as they change over time.
the animated version can be seen here www.vimeo.com/434401
Ok thats the story! I went to my surrounding area, because the weather was good to take some pictures. I found this nice place all over Graz which provided a great view with these nice sunbeams spotting down.
So I was searching for an object to put it in front, because I learned "you always need to have an object". :)
Now, there wasn't anything interesting even close.. so I abused my car. Actually it wasn't well prepared, no cleaning since months and even still this ugly box on the roof from my latest holidays.
Anyway I am quite pleased with the result, It gives the impression of being in holidays, even because the ugly box is on top. ;)
Maker: Charles Negre (1820-1880)
Born: France
Active: France
Medium: photogravure
Size: 8 3/4 in x 12 1/4 in
Location: France
Object No. 2018.421g
Shelf: F-8
Publication:
Provenance:
Other Collections:
Notes: From a modern portfolio produced in 1984 containing ten photogravures printed by Pierre Brochet and based on Negre's 1854 portfolio ‘Le Midi de la France’, in an edition of 45 copies published by the French Ministry of Culture, under the direction of Joseph Nègre and Alain Paviot.
Charles Nègre, (born May 9, 1820, Grasse, France—died January 16, 1880, Grasse), French painter and photographer best known for his photographs of Paris street scenes and architectural monuments, notably the Notre-Dame and Chartres cathedrals. In 1851 Nègre became one of the founding members of the Société Héliographique, the first photographic society, whose members included photographers, scientists, and intellectuals. His early photographs taken outside the studio were street scenes that attempted to capture movement among street vendors, musicians, chimney sweeps, and the like. He invented a system of multiple lenses that would allow him to capture motion, which he succeeded in doing in photographs such as Market Scene at the Port de L’Hotel de Ville, Paris (1851) and Chimney Sweeps Walking (1851). When Nègre was not chosen by the government in 1851 to go on a Mission Héliographique—a survey of the country’s architecture to help determine preservation and restoration needs—he embarked on his own photographic expedition to the south of France, where in 1852 he documented the Midi region. He compiled his many calotypes from that trip into a book, Le Midi de la France: sites et monuments historiques photographié (1854–55).
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