Praise the Omnissiah

Recently, the media has noticed the fact that nobody can afford to live on one job. They recommend that you instead turn your spare time into a second, worse job. Experts are coming on, talking about where all the opportunities are in arbitrage, which is a fancy word for "buying shit cheaply and then selling it for more money."

As a result, there's dozens of folks scouring the flea markets and classifieds, looking for car parts to resell to make a little bit of extra cash. That gets in the way of my ambition, which is to obtain a lot of car parts for very little money, never sell them on, and perhaps be buried with them like a pharoah of old.

Recently, I got into a bit of a scrap with a dude who was trying to scavenge the entire interior of a '69 International Travelall when I was in the area. I thought it was beautiful art and was excited to meet a new friend, but it turned out he was merely a capitalist with no love of the beauty that the thirteen-letter shit spreader corporation bestowed upon the world.

Here's the secret about capitalism: it needs fat profits to work. You need to go back to your investors and show some growth every year, or they get mad that you're just making "enough" money and pull the plug. Inevitably, this leads to really bad business decisions usually involving fraud. That's why your local mall imploded; some combination of lies caught up with a series of liars and everyone looked like an asshole. Now it stands empty and unused.

These two things together mean that, in order to support the weight of the entire Canadian economy's expectations of infinite growth, house prices have to keep going up. More profit = more growth = more trying to keep our mind off the inevitable heat death of the universe. And everything worked out great, up until people had to start living in their vans because they could no longer afford to sleep inside the completely unoccupied houses around them. This drove up the price of vans, at which point it became my problem.

Out there in space is another one of those tragedy of the commons deals. Folks park their garbage in low- to medium-orbit, it sails around, sometimes it clonks into other stuff. Scientists are afraid that if too much stuff clonks together, then there will be an impenetrable cloud of rocket-shredding dust surrounding the planet and we'll never be able to leave Earth ever again. Parking. I know a lot about parking, I told myself, so I drove over to NASA to help them out with the whole thing.

"Space Junk Removal" is what it said on the side of my battered 1993 Econoline E250 as I pulled onto the sidewalk outside the JPL and left it running. You really don't want to shut off a van like this, not when it's been on the highway for this long, because the battery is more than a little flat and the chances of the engine ever restarting are just slightly smaller than that of discovering extraterrestrial life. In the back of my van are several 1980s Shop-Vacs, American civilization's sole contribution to humanity. These babies are great: they will suck up a puddle, or a mouse nest, or a bunch of spilled gasoline, or empty a bee hive if you get the little narrow cone attachment for it.

Of course, the modern Shop-Vac sucks ass. It was sold to a foreign investment firm, at which point they started to lose every feature that made it good except for the name. A new one will last you about twenty minutes, which means it's definitely not appropriate to chuck onto the top of a departing heavy-lift rocket, hence the classics pulled from my hoard. This kind of knowledge, and this sort of procurement, is what they pay high-powered government consultants like myself to take care of.

So in undergrad, we learn that everything is just shunting the Big Bang around. I’m not even just talking about the obvious stuff, like sunlight -> grain -> people, but like. Here:

Big Bang -> ancient star -> supernova -> molecular cloud -> our solar system -> water, carbon, sunlight -> Carboniferous-era swamp plants -> methane -> liquid hydrogen, kerosene, liquid oxygen -> humans walk on the moon.

But then later you learn that you can take any process of energy flow and represent it as a bond graph, where each node represents a handful of differential equations:

This is a steam generator, and the bond graph of energy flowing through it. It looks complicated but a one-semester course will teach you how to read it and solve it.

Then you realize that you can stick the bond graphs for a nuclear reactor core on the “heater” input and a turbine generator on the “environment” output and turn it into one bigger graph.

Then you realize you can just keep doing that forever until you get to the Big Bang on one end and this tumblr post on the other.

And if you really really wanted to, you could put all those equations into one gigantic matrix and solve the whole thing. It would be gnarly, but it’s. It’s everything. This is everything.

"Fluid as water, brilliant as silver, heavier than lead, mercury spills through a mine worker's fingers."

National Geographic

October 1972

It has this extraordinarily dense atmosphere that by all accounts shouldn't exist - Venus is close enough to the sun (and therefore hot enough) that the atmosphere should have literally evaporated away, just like Mercury's. We think Earth manages to keep its atmosphere by virtue of our magnetic field, but Venus doesn't even have that going for it. While Venus is probably volcanically active, it definitely doesn't have an internal magnetic dynamo, so whatever form of volcanism it has going on is very different from ours. And, it spins backwards! For some reason!!

But, for as many mysteries as Venus has, the United States really hasn't spent much time investigating it. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, sent no less than 16 probes to Venus between 1961 and 1984 as part of the Venera program - most of them looked like this!

The Soviet Union had a very different approach to space than the United States. NASA missions are typically extremely risk averse, and the spacecraft we launch are generally very expensive one-offs that have only one chance to succeed or fail.

It's lead to some really amazing science, but to put it into perspective, the Mars Opportunity rover only had to survive on Mars for 90 days for the mission to be declared a complete success. That thing lasted 15 years. I love the Opportunity rover as much as any self-respecting NASA engineer, but how much extra time and money did we spend that we didn't technically "need" to for it to last 60x longer than required?

Anyway, all to say, the Soviet Union took a more incremental approach, where failures were far less devastating. The Venera 9 through 14 probes were designed to land on the surface of Venus, and survive long enough to take a picture with two cameras - not an easy task, but a fairly straightforward goal compared to NASA standards. They had…mixed results.

Venera 9 managed to take a picture with one camera, but the other one's lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 10 also managed to take a picture with one camera, but again the other lens cap didn't deploy.

Venera 11 took no pictures - neither lens cap deployed this time.

Venera 12 also took no pictures - because again, neither lens cap deployed.

Lotta problems with lens caps.

For Venera 13 and 14, in addition to the cameras they sent a device to sample the Venusian "soil". Upon landing, the arm was supposed to swing down and analyze the surface it touched - it was a simple mechanism that couldn't be re-deployed or adjusted after the first go.

This time, both lens caps FINALLY ejected perfectly, and we were treated to these marvelous, eerie pictures of the Venus landscape: