"Bob there's a goddamn rock headed our way."-Seth Shostak

This LPI is seven years old, or still current if I may paraphrase, and a rarity regardless. There is no slideshow and no slides to call attention to. Also the subject matter is quite light by LPI lecture standards.

Seth Shostak is of the SETI institute, and therefore much more of a theorist than experimentalist. This is good, when your subject is aliens. Astrobiology has yet to acquire a sample. 

As one would expect from a guy who doesn't bring slides, he does bring jokes, and they aren't terrible. He speaks about films with many citations, but hardly limits himself to any category more specific than 'all science-fiction.' 

At about 22:30 he starts talking about a time when he offered to proofread Star Trek scripts for Gene Roddenberry. He was rejected. And at around 29:00 I'm pretty sure he suggests circumstances where he would consider sexual assault. But by and large there aren't many timestamps to call attention to. He's mostly just amusing a crowd with light banter. The show goes into Q&A at 52:00.

 

This is a left-wing Trump history with a slant looking towards declining love, birthrates, and relationships. Make no mistake, this is a liberal eco-box book. This will convert no conservatives, and no scholarly moderates either. 

Our author writes passionately, biased, and with a talented pen. A firehose pumping words forming sentences that often would make no sense out of context. It works, making the book a fast read. There is a whole lot of attributing to malice what is certainly the product of stupidity going on in here. The citations are perhaps too weak and the conclusions too untested to call this a particularly good non-fiction, but if you are already mad as hell at the NAZI-ness of American conservatives, this will make you madder.

"55 new minerals"-Chi Ma

Chi Ma's name shows up on a lot of papers but it's hard to find video of him speaking, so this LPI is that much more interesting for me. This LPI involves a lot of electron microscopy, which is why his name come up a lot, he has the keys to some of the best electron microscopes. But the big takeaway is, there's going to be a lot of fascinating images in this talk.

• Benitoite at 5:50 with barioperovskite inclusions. 
• At 10:50 he presents a table of the new minerals discovered from one ancient meteor. He calls modest attention to the high amount of Titanium in the new minerals. Keep in mind, Ti is formed by supernovae, is lightweight and super reactive. The reason it is so strong and flexible is because it's so reactive that once it bonds to itself it never wants to let go, but it bonds to anything just as readily. So the Ti in the protoplanetary disk would have reacted early and often to make any odd mineral. In other-words Ti is fully expected in making primordial minerals that don't normally recur since. If you find a weird mineral with Ti in it when normally there would be none, it's very old.
• At 33:05 a tiny meteor from Mars yields nine new minerals. As popular as Mars news is, this got no press.

I kinda wanted to make a bullet point for every new mineral and every pretty thin-slice, but they came multiple per slide and he was going through them so fast that was impractical. Suffice to say he categorically listed many of the new minerals as the bulk of the lecture. Rock hounds and mineralogists should get chained nerd-gasms. 

"All of our known meteorites fall into clusters when you analyze their cap-17 oxygen [and other isotope ratios]"-Megan Newcombe 

Skip ahead to 15:00. That block is all production jazz that should have been edited out. (And for some reason the closed captioning wasn't set up either.)

Isotopic deduction is kind of an abstract thought. It is in fact very objective, but it's hard to picture. It's a bit unintuitive. It's easy to underestimate, because when you see what can really be done with it, it's almost like magic. Isotopic deduction is to planetary science what spectroscopy is to astronomy. A fount of hard facts. That's what this LPI is about.  

• 18:30 the matrix of Chondrites is volatile rich. This is the kind of fact one could easily just try to pocket without thinking through. The cement holding most asteroids together has volatiles in it. Any place that can get hit with an asteroid can therefore receive diverse volatiles.
• From 20:20 for two slides she physically separates asteroids into two groups, literally physically separated in the proto-cloud by proto-Jupiter or maybe by proto Earth and Venus, though the latter case implies both formed further out.
• Slide at 21:10, what she's doing with her graph is showing you that water and heavy water (Deuterium or "D" is a heavy hydrogen that when mixed in H₂O is heavy water.) are constant in ranges of the solar system, therefore she can just use that ratio to prove that Earth got it's water from a certain range out from the Sun. Turns out the range is about where our orbit is now erring on further out. The case that Earth and Venus were further out seems to be building.
• The catch, at about 32:00, is that there is a second match, enstatite meteorites match the same isotopic profile, but could have worked closer to current orbits. 
• To figure out which happened she looks at a mineral that is semi-metamorphosed and tries to find the point of metamorphosis where water couldn't have stayed on Earth.
• 49:40 "So we coat it in gold."

Much of the remaining is exhaustive methodology and results. Normally I would call attention to those results, but she manages to get very specific about multiple topics. How big a planetesimal can hope to hold onto water? What could they be made of? Turns out she can deduce hard answers, and eliminate old guesses. 

 

There should be a book like this about every celestial body in the solar system. A book crammed with facts like a textbook, but serving them for delight instead of a textbooks obstructionist ways. 

I cannot think of anything to nit-pick. This is a superb example of what non-fiction should be.

"Boy, did we learn a lot from 21, almost 21 and a half kilograms of rocks and soils."-James W. Head, III

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyXAHHM1Pp4

Artemis is rolling out to the pad again about now, and will have Nov 12-17 to pick a clean launch. Never forget that aborted launches count as test results, each one makes the new rocket system stronger. 

This LPI is a 50 year anniversary of Apollo spoken by an Apollo OG geologist; a good teaser for Artemis. Our speaker had Artemis in mind when he prepared this lecture. 

• 16:15 "We wanted to go to rough areas because geology scales directly with surface roughness." Maybe I should have used this quote in the header. It also relates well with Artemis. 
• 17:20 I've never heard of anyone dunking on a fool with this feat. The second Apollo mission,12, aimed for a previous probe and took pictures with it. Eat that conspiracy jerks.
• 20:50 sample 14321, has an inclusion that may be ejecta from Hadean Earth. Possibly molten Earth. 
• 27:25 The story of the seat belt basalt. These kinds of Amy Shira Teitel stories are fun.
• 33:10 Apollo 17's Jack Schmitt did an LPI already set up.
• 35:15 Another thing I never knew. Proposed drivable rover.
• At 39:10 he transfers into specifically Artemis preview. When he points to a geological map and says "it's all here" what he's implying is that Artemis missions will categorically explore each color-zone on the map. 
• About 53:00, he's straight up telling us Artemis behind the scenes stressors.

by Gil Scott-Heron

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)

I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)

The man jus' upped my rent las' night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)

I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I was already payin' 'im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wasn't enough

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)

Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

Don't forget to vote.

 Mandatory Mars: Ordered list of top-ten lectures to learn about Mars.

The following lectures are directly or indirectly focused on Mars. The first few are more fundamental and the last few are more conclusive. Altogether one can get a very good idea for what we have learned about Mars over the last decade. 

They aren't ranked in order of "best", but in an order that should deliver a satisfying learning experience.

1.                                                           
2. 
   
3. 
   
4. 
   
5. 
   
6. 
   
7. 
   
8. 
   
9.                                      
   
   
   
10.