"The crust is towards the thinner less dense end of the pre-mission expectations" -Mark Panning

So here's a major thing. A truly big deal. Mars is the feature of actual government conspiracy. Basically, people expect things of Mars, planetary science is not even remotely corroborating those expectations, and NASA literally will look straight into the camera and say "fossil" twenty times and "Hesperian" not even once during the Perseverance press release. Presumably they do this to keep the hype up, meaning they think plebeians would lose interest in Mars if they knew the truth. 

To find real facts about Mars, you really need these LPI videos. They are not at all vague. The "warm-wet Hesperian" they sometimes speculate about is still a huge frozen asteroid, no rain, no surface liquid. But people like Elon Musk and Robert Zubrin seem to have committed to a faith, and the church has many followers. 

In this video alone you can get a glimpse of real Mars. This video is about seismology, not specifically Mars or InSight, but the details are there.  

• Thick Lithosphere
• Mantle on the cool end of pre-mission expectations
• The core is light, not dense. Sulfur in the core
• Cerebus Fossae Graben
• Normal fault, extensional settings

The truth is Mars isn't made out of Earth. It's made out of Mars and that is far less dense, and far colder than people find intuitive. However, because Mars is so different compared to Earth, the geology is also vastly different, and fascinating.  

Probably the most intriguing thing about real-Mars is how large-scale its features are. One vast feature is the Amazonian horst-graben rifting, especially Valles Marineris. Mars earthquakes are largely the result of thermal contraction as the core freezes. Its heavy features, the Hesperian shield volcanoes and Noachian south, seem to remain anchored, while the northern lowlands seem to be experiencing large scale extensional rifting. That's incredible for a lot of reasons, but one thing to note is that if the core shrinking was the only thing driving Mars topography, there would be a lot more thrust-faults, not rifting, like on Mercury. The low density (hence poor ore) of Mars' thick lithosphere seems to be playing a mysterious role. 

Maybe one of the bravest things I did in Sweet was to touch on Mars being unsuitable to long term habitation, something poorly informed writers and fanatics eschew. At the point where people could truly exploit Mars, they could also dismantle it, and that is far far into deep time.  

 

 My last cat died on the 16th (or earlier) of negligence while I was away. I've been depressed about it ever since. 

No more recharge. 

 

 Not sure what I want to do with this one other than keep it for future reference. Scott Guzewich lectures mostly for climate change, it's a good reference vid so I want to put a pin in it. 

 The TLDR is that if you are an amateur looking to learn facts about planetary science, this book is currently mandatory. However, the bitter before the sweet, this is also the first time in my life I thought I could edit a book for certain. Although impeccably proofread, Bloomsbury Sigma should be ashamed that they contributed so little to such an important book. 

The books editorial issues subside around 'chapter 6, Peering In'. That's when Dr. Starkey starts dropping the bigger knowledge bombs instead of mostly prerequisites. She makes it fun, but avoids conjecturing. She puts out numerous up-to-date puzzle pieces, but avoids speculating that say maybe Maat Mons may one day grow so massive it sinks into Venus, causing a new resurfacing event. That she leaves for her readers.

It wont be long after Sweet is published before people will notice how relevant this book is to it. 

 So here's a thought exercise. One cannot predict the future well, but for those who are inclined to try, there are the ones taking faithful fliers, and the ones trying to get the answer right. Still, what is a safe bet? 

Anything that improves the quality of life, and can't be messed up by the government, (stupid supreme court,) is on the table, and anything that is happening now and has room for improvement is a fair bet. 

In Sweet, when dividing broad traits to four spacefaring nations, I'm not remotely trying to be predictive. Venusians are too much genetic engineers, Pacificans are too much androids, Mediterraneans are too much Cyborgs. They probably wouldn't be divided so starkly in reality, but it makes the story flow. Jovians are too much in tune with their wetsuits. 

This is existing and emerging tech. Here is a sciencedaily article and here is raman spectroscopy, a breakthrough discovery that's going to take it to the next level. If you want to start a business, get in on this racket. 

In Sweet I avoid sticking my neck out too much. Some for fun, but I mostly am only using real world tech, for example the above. Stuff that exists but hasn't been made ubiquitous yet. 

By doing it that way, I am laying out before the reader, options. Tech isn't an obstacle to overcome. How do you get to there, from where and when you are now?

 One day I was playing Skyrim, and I started writing down things as I hiked along. 

Part 1 Tamriel Overview.

Part 2/9 The White River.

Part 3/9 The Throat. 

Part 4/9 Eastmarch. 

Part 5/9 The Jerall Mountains.

Part 6/9 The Rift. 

Part 7/9 Solstheim.

Part 8/9 Winterhold.

Part 9/9 The Pale.

Sometime soon I hope to turn this into another book. Soon being maybe a few years. I don't actually have a spot in my life where I can sit down and resume playing Skyrim, and I would have to be playing it to complete the book from where I left off. 

You can tell that I never intended to make a book of it when I wrote it. I put it up on reddit in a very raw form. The thing I regret the most about that is not the grammar and paragraph structure, it's that I expected the only people to be interested in it would be modders and the occasional nerd. But it got attention from (gasp) real geologists and geology students. That lead to some fun conversations, and gave me a clue that maybe I should follow through on this project. 

Oddly, this is not entirely unrelated to Sweet. When I first played Skyrim, the very first play-through, I was shocked at how loyal and concerned I was toward Lydia. It was not lost on me how simple she was, but I tangibly was looking at myself in 3rd person studying why I cared about this Lydia thing so much. Much of my inner thoughts from that experience colored what I think androids can be, and how to get to there from here. That stuff shows up in Sweet, including several Skyrim homages.

 This recent article is so on point for robot-apocalypse tropes I have to link it. 

Sweet Sol System does not have any kind of robot-apocalypse, or any other apocalypse, in it, but rather the opposite. In Sweet androids are symbiotic with the "Pacifican" libertarian nation, and other androids are self-aware colonies for blue-collar "Jovians." However the implications of how they got to that point are central to the plot. 

A reoccurring but only implicit theme in Sweet is "how do we get from here to there?" A common problem with SCIENCE-fiction is that people will conjecture about a distant possibility and not go through all the prerequisites it would take to get to that possibility. Yeah, sure, you can terraform Mars, but before you get to that point you would already have better options than the terraformed Mars result. That's part of why hard-sci-fi is usually set near the present and anything that is "long ago & far away" is filed under space opera.

The premise in Sweet is that modders, coders who make add-ons for video-games, found a way to allow anyone to mod casually, and a nation emerged from that event. So androids went to a libertarian non-utopian ideal instead of a authoritarian dystopia.      

 Enter the Lyman-Alpha glow. 

Basically this is telling us that tholins can be generated by cold.

On Pluto's Binary-Partner Charon (I will die on the hill that Charon is no moon,) there are far more tholins than on Pluto itself. Why? Something amazing is on the table. Apparently it may be possible to make methane cold enough that its hydrogen's emit a photon.

Let that sink in for a second. An energy source, albeit a minute one, appears far from any star.    

http://www.sci-news.com/physics/lyman-alpha-transition-antihydrogen-06338.html

"Well, welcome to the Kuiper belt, things move a lot slower." - C. Adeene Denton

First of all, turn on closed captioning and enjoy all the mistranslations every time she says "Sputnik Planitia." Seriously. Make a drinking game out of it. 

What's in here is the secret to Pluto's smooth surface. Literally Pluto's heart, with or without the double entendre. Pluto could and possibly should have been deeply cratered and cracked. But it isn't, and that blew minds everywhere when revealed. Was it radioactive decay powering Pluto's resurfacing? A force from the interior? Was it nitrogen glaciation as Pluto very slowly orbits the sun? Those were the initial hypothesis and doubtless they are variables, but all that combined is still not enough. Pluto has a good Cryovolcano suspect, and tall pyramidal ice mountains. The force involved had to be more than tiny amounts of radioactivity pushing up and nitrogen erosion (let's take a moment and appreciate how awesome the very idea of nitrogen-ice eroding water-ice alpine-style is,) molding things down. 

Enter this C. Adeene Denton. Cool name. I've never seen her speak before but she's got a working giant-impactor hypothesis complete with heat and impact models. Thus she is ruling out the impacts that would have destroyed Pluto, and finding one that explains Pluto's surface with just the proper range of impact heat. In other words it's a special kind of lecture. Something that can infer new hard rules. It's not a tour of Pluto, it's an extrapolation.    

 r/sciencememes share.

"The Largest, Fastest, Spinning Body in the Entire Solar Sysem."-Jessica Noviello

This LPI describes a model that explains Haumea traveling in a group with other KBO's, this phenomenon is not known anywhere else. Haumea has at least two moons, a ring system, and a cluster of lesser KBO's traveling alongside it. There's gotta be a reason for that right?

That's what our speaker has been studying. She makes basically her whole argument in the first half of the video, the second half is applications, which is fun for even those who are fairly new to planetary science.

• At 4:30 she describes how a KBO's volume is measured. More interesting that one might think.
• At 9:30 she presents some hypothesis for the evolution of the Haumeans.
• At 26:50 you see how she used probability to find something that could work based on available evidence.
• Key takeaways at 33:30

This speaker produces some wonderful detailed slides. I want terribly to see more from her, the knowledge density in her lectures is just what I want to see more of. She basically was puking out stuff she knows over the second half of the lecture. If anyone wanting to learn more about KBO's (among other things) studied this lecture alone, it would take many rewatches to get it all.

We are learning that large KBO's are distinct from comets by more than just orbit, and that is the beginning of something.

 One in 500 men carry extra sex chromosome

From ScienceDaily.com. The article is finding a correlation between an increase in certain cardio and pulmonary illness such as throwing a clot, or COPD, and an extra sex chromosome. Curious because there is no clue towards cause, and it does not matter if it's an extra X or y. Therefore this will be the trail-head of an ongoing research path.  

But this gives me an opportunity to mention something in "Sweet," Sevens.

In "Sweet," Sevens are a type of Venusian male that can fly. They are XXy and the book goes on at length why, crossing through genetics 101 but stopping short of genetics 315. 

I set them up like that reasoning that a genetic-engineering society would work themselves towards one gender. The idea being genetic-engineers would want to make themselves easier to engineer, and want to have maximum freedom. But "Sweet" is held at a time when that kind of stuff must be further down the line. I pushed the believably with Venusians enough as was, actually having to resort to "creative-freedom" once or twice. 

Sevens though, I'm very proud of. They address a lot of complaints I've had over the years. The existence of XXy as effectively a 3rd gender seems a fact politicians are unaware. I loved the lymphatic system when I studied A&P and wanted to use it, and I can't stand how Angels and Succubi are never anatomically feasible. Sevens let me put all these torments to rest. 

   

 

For the record, I spend more time on r/aww the like than r/science or r/space

 "The Lunar Regolith strongly scatters seismic energy." -Renee C. Weber.

 

All the space agencies know it, and almost none of the general public accepts it. Luna, (I hate calling it "The Moon" if you lived on Ganymede you would not call "The Moon", "The Moon." It deserves it's own name,) is a great, even better than Earth, example of what all the other rocky bodies are like. The agencies sneak missions to our moon as often as they are able, and this video is both a summary of some recent ones, and a report of proposed missions.    

• The slide at 14:50 describes the gravity map, and those always are informative because they show intuitive topography. Did you even know there was a Lunar Mission named "Grail"? If you did you are a better nerd than I, but lunar missions tend to get poor press...
• There are a few slides talking about the use of retroreflectors, which are cool and underused. In "Sweet" I may have overused the term LIDAR when I could invoke retroreflectors.
•  The slide at 21:30 is one of the most important thing for a nerd outside the ivory walls to know "Stagnant lid conduction is assumed to be the norm for smaller bodies, as is global contraction." Understanding this applies to most worlds in the solar system, including Mars, and it is not at all in line with fantasy-Mars.
• I don't have a great reason to call attention to the slide at 24:20, I just love the InSight mission. 
• Lots of engineering at the tail 3rd. 

It's important to know that when you are talking about the surface of Luna, and probably Mercury, and very very probably Mars-noachian-crust, you are talking about breccia. Breccia means that Seismic waves wont travel through well, "The lunar regolith scatters seismic energy." 

That's very sci-fi when you think about it. It tells you what you are building on, sensing, picking up, digging, standing next to. Many can-&-cannot-do's. It's an immersion breaker when someone who knows this reads from some author who does not. Right now, many do not, but I suspect that will change sometime in the next decade. 

-Caue Borlina  

 

This is a very normal and very solid planetary science lecture. Good stuff. But it's not for the layman per-se. It's still very very important to keep up with this kind of video. This one in particular gives us clues on what we can conjecture about asteroids and the interiors of small rocky worlds like Luna, Mars, IO, & Mercury. If you don't keep up with the context of these kinds of videos, it's hard to have an idea about what planetary scientists are really spending their time on.  

Model-makers are all the rage in planetary right now, and that's here to stay, not just a trend. What they do is very mathy and statistical. The reports they give tend to be quite dry and frankly dull. This lecture  qualifies as model-maker material, but it's not as dull as most. 

Universities are focusing on producing more model-makers from young students. This has a lot of good & bad effects. We need them, in bulk, to get more quantification studies. Theories like Jupiter grand-tack, dark mater formations. Big picture stuff, that takes a lot of labor to produce. At the same time it's harder to make their work popular and publicly accessible, at least until it's done, which takes a long while and often leaves only one simple proven fact to dwell on. And lastly, the math-wall is just making the ivory-walls thicker. Combined with the pay-wall, that is most detrimental for public education. Also, math by its nature is rife with casual plagiarism, so people working on mathy projects tend to guard their work, and create no buzz. They certainly don't publish boldly.      

• At 19:50, there is an interesting method. Probably the highlight along with the conclusions at 46:20. Poorly sorted magnetized bits cannot be used to show direction, but they can be used to show intensity and cumulatively can be used to show abundance, and direction can ultimately be inferred. That and methodology is pretty much the whole video. 
  

Let me know if you would like to see more LPI's that are highly statistical. I tend to prefer lectures that have lots of pretty slides, but I watch nearly all of them. Either way I won't run out anytime soon. 

 

 I want to share something I think is neat. 

See this? 

The geological map of Ganymede. The image I used as a critical guide to make Jovian Society in Sweet Sol System. 

Now check this out. 

This is from the current JUNO mission, June 8 2021. Neat picture huh? 

See that big white crater with the awesome bright star shaped ejecta? It's name is Tros. In "Sweet" Tros is a self-aware city burrowed into that crater basin. But that's not the super cool thing I'm writing about. 

Tros is located inside a sulcus. A sulcus in context of Ganymede is very likely a rift, with horst-graben tilt-block geomorphology. The sulcus Tros is impacted in is named Phrygia Sulcus. There's a lot of implications buried in that information alone, and planetary scientists are loath to read too much into them. But I'm free to ass-pull some creative freedom so here it goes. 

When water freezes it expands 11%. So it's implicit that the sulci popped open as Ganymede froze solid to some depth or another. The sulci of Ganymede occupy more than 11% of the surface area, so it sure as hell didn't happen on one go. But that's what gives planetary scientists pause. They cannot prove that the sulci rifted in accordance with that 11% rule. So they have to explore more. Some sulci are doubtless much older than others. And the temptation of invoking cryovolcanism mechanics is ever-present. Could be all that and more. More probes are needed. But that's not the super cool thing I'm writing about either.

Look up (not north, this image wasn't aligned so up is north,) from Tros, through Phrygia sulcus, to the "continent", only slightly darker in the black and white image. Ganymede's continents are different from Earths, don't read too much into the use of the word continent. But that dark pointy continent is named Perrine Regio. Perrine Regio is split by another sulcus. Both sides of that sulcus are Perrine Regio, and the sulci name is Sicyon Sulcus. The Regio continents are way older than the sulci, darker and higher. But that's also not the super cool thing I'm writing about. 

Look closer. Compare the two images. You should be able to see by comparing that there is another sulcus splitting Perrine Regio. It's name is Nineveh Sulcus. In Ninevah are craters. You can find their names on the map. You see Bau crater in Nineveh, and Enki Catena in Sicyon Sulcus. Enki Catena isn't a normal crater, it's a machine-gun impact. Something got busted up by mighty Jupiter and the bits shotgunned into moving Ganymede. But that's not the super cool thing I'm writing about. 

The cool thing I am writing about, you may have noticed by now. Not all the craters on the geological map are named, but one at the crossing between Ninevah and Phrygia is missing from the new image, and it's a big one. How cool is that? 

It looks like it has pale ejecta to the north and south of it. I can't see any newer small craters in the basin or on the ejecta, but there may be one down and to the right. Can it be this huge impact happened between the JUNO and Galileo missions? And everybody missed it? Unlikely, I must doubt. But I've gone looking and can't find an explanation. Could be the older images used to make the geological map were incomplete in the first place. Could be something else. Dunno. But that's a big neat crater and the idea that something that big could have hit Ganymede in the age of observation, and no one noticed, that has fun implications.  

Oh, and in my own self-interest I must mention. In Sweet Sol System, Sicyon Sulcus between Enki Catena and Sati Crater is where "Zarathustra" the self-aware Jovian city where the plot of the Jovian story mostly takes place, is located. 

 Timestamp 35:18 "I copied this wholesale from Wikipedia, and I trust it because I wrote it." -Michael Shepard 

  

M-class means metal asteroids and there are very few of them. Seven or more depending on your source list. Many asteroids are ambiguous and hotly debated as to what should have it's own classification or go into one group or another.

I'm sure you know about Psyche. The $10 Quintilian floating iron-nickel ball. This video will touch on all there is to know about it and it's peers. Psyche, and also the second largest M-class asteroid by volume Kalliope, are as yet unexplored. All but Lutetia are un-imaged so far. Kleopatra appears to be one of the more relevant, and 758 Mancunia is most peculiar. 

• At 11:42 A slide for models.
• He goes into some stats at 15:30 You can skip to 52:00 to get the TLDR of this part but he's got some really cool slides that can be applied to many purposes. The slide at 17:30 really demonstrates the difference between having a probe or not. The slide at 18:50 implies that collisionally evolved M-class asteroids are likely debris off of the bigger planetesimal cores.
• The entree slide comes at 22:30. I want to let it speak for itself. But 758 Mancunia steals the show. Now that rock is an obsession generating mystery box to worry over. Also, let's take a moment and admit that both Anti-gone and Ant-tig-on-ee are both awesome sounding asteroid pronunciations.
• Much of the next few slides have a lot to do with radar physics. The key for those is that radar reflects best off smooth stuff, so smooth=white, rough=black. It's especially important with M-class asteroids because metals reflect radar particularly well. 
• Maybe the juiciest part is the stuff at 37:00 where he, like all others who make a good LPI video, suddenly realizes that even though he's delivering the good stuff, for some mysterious goddamned reason there's a time limit, and he starts skipping the the dessert of his lecture. That being the close-ups of Psyche. Then Lutetia (The only M-class seen by a probe so far) at 43:50. Then Kleopatra who is the upstager of the show. 

I wanted some more Kaliope, and find it conspicuous that there was so little. Kaliope is less dense, though bigger by volume, than many of the others, and that's a big deal in planetary science. There's lots of things that can cause it, and it applies to a lot more worlds than only Kaliope. Think Mars, Charon, Miranda, and Callisto. So it would have been fun to see some insight from something with funky density but still expected to have metallic content. I wonder at times if Kaliope has Vestoids mixed up in it. Something that can relatively date the two, or provide a timeline of their dismantling.  

 

There will come a time when people who do not live on Earth can truly compete with people who do. This is a story within that moment.

Sweet Sol System is an immersive world-building adventure. A deep landscape for the reader to hike upon. Set soon enough that one can just imagine how they got there from where you are... Albeit in hindsight. 

• Meet the innocently-spoiled Alexander Porco and his follower Charity Google. The libertarian world they live in may seem idyllic, but satiated does not mean satisfied. The reader may see clues to get from here to there, but then where will you be? 
• Witness the precision of Isaac, the immaculate cyborg and his detachment. And what is a cyborg? The question's been asked before, and freshly we go again. But this is not an Asimovian Isaac.
• Enter Juliette. See how alien genetic-engineers can make themselves given a pittance of centuries. See now how humanism, identity, and raw motherhood are taken to a new level when all life is an intellectuals plaything. 
• Follow Adela Jaff. A refugee filled with ambition and blessed with luck. She will go where no Terran has gone before, come over hell, or deep frozen water.
• Make friends with Tyson and Rosalie Clifford. Buddies for life. Married forever. Blobfish people, most comfortable living deep under the ice of Jupiter's moons.  

The many protagonists suffer new stresses and new joys. Relatable yet alien situations arise from living in worlds, such as Venus and Ganymede, that have rules quite different from Earth. Meanwhile implicitly, the protagonists are dismantling dated Voyager era tropes that are no longer consistent with real world science.

"Sweet" passes through topics like neuro-atypical minds in war-clones. Sexuality in a world consumed with genetic engineering. Pressures at great depths in the crust of ice-worlds and the effects those have on biology. Then a lighter topic. Immortality; what it never was, and may one day be. It’s an implicit exploration of modern probes, InSight, JUNO, MAVEN, Cassini, New Horizons and more, because it revolves around the worlds that modern planetary science is exploring now.

Do you know about Phosphine, Glycine, and "unusual UV absorption" on Venus? Are you dying for 2028 & the VERITAS mission? If I write "October 2024," do you already have the Europa clipper launch circled? Do you know what a blobfish is?

If yes than this book is certainly for you. If not so much, then all you need to ask yourself is, "am I the kind of person who wants to make the world a better place?" This book is written with hope to inspire some plausibilities for each reader.