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In this edition of Weekend Walkabout, we take an eclectic journey from telescopes, to SETI to music about how to deal with earth’s garbage…<\/p>\nIn this edition of Weekend Walkabout, we take an eclectic journey from telescopes, to SETI to music about how to deal with earth’s garbage…<\/p>\n
More next weekend…<\/p>\n Hat tips to Harvey Burgess (for the information about the Telescope eBook) and Adrianna Roberts (for letting me know about ideapod and the ongoing SETI discussion).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In this edition of Weekend Walkabout, we take an eclectic journey from telescopes, to SETI to music about how to deal with earth’s garbage… I’m sure that one of the reasons I was susceptible to the idea of a Space Elevator was my early interest in Astronomy.\u00a0 The brief introduction I had to it in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekend-walkabout"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2089"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2191,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2089\/revisions\/2191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"\/media\/Telescopes101Cover.png\")
<\/a>I’m sure that one of the reasons I was susceptible to the idea of a Space Elevator was my early interest in Astronomy.\u00a0 The brief introduction I had to it in High School made me “look up” at night, wondering what was “out there” and how I could get “there” to find out.\u00a0 My father made the stand I used to grind an 8″ reflector mirror for a Newtonian telescope (albeit not a very good one) and I spent many an evening outside learning the constellations and watching the planets move among them.\u00a0 I tried to get my son interested in astronomy with my enthusiasm and giving him a Meade ETX-90 telescope and showing him how to use it, but sadly it just wasn’t for him.\u00a0 The upside to that is that I have that telescope at home and have been gradually accumulating lenses and filters for it and have been starting to explore the field of astrophotography.\u00a0 I bring all this up as a precursor to tell you about a new, FREE, eBook about Telescopes I have just learned about.\u00a0 The eBook, TELESCOPE 101: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF TELESCOPES<\/strong> is authored by Marcus Schenk, and is available here<\/a> (it’s in pdf format).\u00a0 I haven’t read the entire book, but what I have seen so far is a very solid, user-friendly introduction to the various types of telescopes, WHY there are various types, issues that arise in using them for different types of observation and how to solve them, etc.\u00a0 It appears to be an excellent primer on the subject and I would recommend it for anyone who has an interest in this.\u00a0 And it’s FREE – hard to beat!<\/p>\nDoes SETI need to shut up?<\/strong>\u00a0 Speaking of what’s “out there”, I’ve always been interested in the SETI – the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence<\/a> project (I used to have their search number crunching program on my computer, but during one of my upgrades, lost it).\u00a0 It’s one of the “great questions” and I (probably naively) hope to have an answer to it in my lifetime.\u00a0 Aliens, and whether or not they might be “friendly” to us, are a mainstay of science-fiction.\u00a0 One school of thought says that Aliens WILL be friendly but another school of thought says they may not.\u00a0 And that leads me to ideapod<\/strong>, which is (and I quote) “… a new social-media platform for sharing and connecting ideas<\/em>“.\u00a0 This question about SETI is being debated on this platform and it’s an interesting discussion, indeed.\u00a0 If you want to participate, head on over to the ideapod community discussion<\/a>…\u00a0 In a previous post<\/a>, I discussed StackExchange<\/strong>, another forum for discussions about various topics (including the space elevator).\u00a0 It’s hard to know where the winners and losers will be in social media and online forums.\u00a0 On one hand, I think that “expert guidance” is helpful – I see so many naive conversations about the space elevator on various forums that I want to cringe.\u00a0 On the other hand, I think it’s important that unpopular ideas not be dismissed as they might, ultimately, be the correct ones.\u00a0 There are many examples of this but a modern day Poster Child for “Unpopular positions that ultimately proved correct<\/em>” is Alfred Wegener’s idea of plate tectonics<\/a>.\u00a0 It was an idea that was universally ridiculed when first proposed, but is now accepted as generally correct.\u00a0 Global warming alarmists take note…<\/p>\n<\/a>Let’s finish today’s post with MUSIC<\/strong>!\u00a0 There have been several songs and music-videos about the space elevator (or that, at least, have had “space elevator” listed somewhere in their description).\u00a0 I have reviewed several and found that almost all of them are just “yucch”, certainly not my cup of tea.\u00a0 We now have another music “entry”, this about a “space escalator” that transports all of our waste into the sun.\u00a0 The album, Shoot It At The Sun<\/a> is by a group called The Porchistas.\u00a0 Getting rid of the earth’s garbage by shooting it at the sun is an idea which gets periodically revisited by people who don’t realize that our species generates hundreds of millions of tons of garbage each year – far more than even the most optimistic space elevator scenario can envision.\u00a0 It’s a problem we’re going to have to solve HERE, not by shipping our waste anywhere else.\u00a0 Even “small” portions of this are so large, they defy the export solution<\/a>…\u00a0 Anyway, back to the music.\u00a0 Frankly, I don’t like it, but perhaps you will.\u00a0 For my money, the best (by far) song about the space elevator is the one by Glen Phillips which you can find on his Secrets of the New Explorers<\/strong><\/a> album (and on the sidebar of this blog).\u00a0 I consider it the unofficial theme song of the space elevator and it’s going to take something really special to knock it off it’s throne.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n