Dominique Luchart's Blog, page 575

TikTok is returning to normal after experiencing issues on Tuesday, Jay Peters

The TikTok app “should be returning to normal” after it experienced issues on Tuesday, according to the app’s support account on Twitter.

Earlier on Tuesday, I wasn’t able to log in to the app on either the web or my phone. When I tried, I got the following message, which felt like it was downplaying what was going on: “There is a small problem with the server, fixing it now.” Now, though, I am able to log in and use TikTok on iOS and the web as normal.

…Annnnnd we’re back! Your app experience should be returning to normal. Thanks for bearing with us, everyone ?

— TikTokSupport (@TikTokSupport)

July 7, 2021

During the worst of the issues, they appeared to be fairly widespread, with more than 40,000 user reports of problems on DownDetector at one point.

There were also many people on Twitter posting during the downtime using the #tiktokdown hashtag. I gotta say, the memes on this hashtag were pretty good.

Update July 6th, 9:41PM ET : TikTok says the service is returning to normal.

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Conservative social networks keep making the same mistake, Casey Newton

One question I have wondered a lot over the past few years is whether the rise of a large-scale conservative social network — a Fox News of Facebook — is inevitable. Last year, during the rise of Parler, we finally got a good test case.

Here was an app backed by the Mercer family, who previously championed Breitbart News, Donald Trump, and Cambridge Analytica, among other conservative causes. It was promoted relentlessly by top conservative media personalities, including Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Dan Bongino.

And it arrived amid a contentious election in which mainstream platforms’ responsible content moderation — labeling and removing misinformation; promoting reliable information about how to vote — was castigated by many conservatives as outrageous censorship and/or interference with the democratic process.

Then came the January 6th Capitol attack. Parler had been rife with calls for violence leading up to and during the insurrection, and in keeping with the platform’s “free speech” ethos, most had been allowed to stand. Apple responded by removing it from the App Store; Google later followed.

By May, Parler had fired its CEO, shored up its content moderation practices, and returned to app stores. But, as Sara Fischer reported in Axios last week, the thrill appears to be gone. According to data from Sensor Tower, Parler downloads went from 517,000 in December to 11,000 in June. It’s part of an overall decline in the popularity of alt-platforms — and in conservative media generally — since former President Trump left office.

At the height of election fever, Parler indeed had a moment. But the moment seems to have passed.

The withering of Parler has not dissuaded other conservatives from attempting to build something similar. On Thursday, Politico reported that former members of Trump’s team were behind Gettr, an app whose stated mission is “fighting cancel culture, promoting common sense, defending free speech, challenging social media monopolies, and creating a true marketplace of ideas.”

This is more or less what Parler set out to do. (Like Parler, Gettr is also essentially a Twitter clone.) But Gettr, by virtue of not having been used to help coordinate a violent insurrection against the government, started with a clean slate.

The slate remained clean for… a few minutes. It quickly became apparent that despite the involvement of former Trump spokesman Jason Miller, Trump himself had no intentions of actually joining Gettr. Meanwhile, multiple hashtags with racist and anti-Semitic slurs hit the app’s trending section, according to Recode, and multiple reports found a torrent of porn. (Sonic the Hedgehog porn, in particular.)

A growing number of accounts on Jason Miller’s new right-wing “Gettr” site posting “Sonic the Hedgehog furry porn” are being banned from the platform — and now there is a push among leftist users to argue that “furry porn is protected under the first amendment.”

— Zachary Petrizzo (@ZTPetrizzo)

July 6, 2021

Then the Daily Beast reported that the whole thing had been funded by a fugitive Chinese billionaire. Then Gettr’s source code was found out in the open. Then Salon reported that a bug allowed hackers to easily download the personal information of anyone who had created an account on the site.

It’s all going so badly that you almost wonder if the app’s founders intended it this way, my Sidechannel co-host Ryan Broderick writes at Garbage Day:

I’m also beginning to wonder if all these apps are their own grift in a way. Loudly launch a site no one will ever use, claim it’s a free speech sanctuary for Republicans, do the rounds on all the right-wing news outlets, and wait for it to fill up with the worst people on Earth, refuse to moderate it, wait for Apple to ban it from the App Store, and then go back to the right-wing news outlets and screech about liberal cancel culture impacting your ability to share hentai with white nationalist flat earthers or whatever.

When I first read this paragraph I assumed Ryan was exaggerating to make a point. Given the extremely predictable turmoil that emerged from Gettr’s content policies, though, I wonder if there isn’t something to this: a false-flag social network, set up only to watch it burn to the ground.

But let’s say the whole thing isn’t a put-on. What should we take away from the Gettr debacle, and the Parler debacle before that?

Lots of questions about social networks are hard. This one isn’t. If you create a place for people to upload text and images, you have to moderate it — and moderate it aggressively. You have to draw hard lines; you have to move those lines as society evolves and your adversaries adjust; you have to accept difficult trade-offs between users’ well being and their right to express themselves.

Apps like Parler and Gettr offered their conservative users an attractive mirage: a free-speech paradise where they could say the things they couldn’t say elsewhere. It never seemed to occur to anyone that such a move would only select for the worst social media customers on earth, quickly turning the founders’ dreams to ash.

In a sane world, next-generation conservative founders would accept as a given that they would have to police their apps for racism, dangerous misinformation, and other harms. In return, they could use their editorial discretion to promote their favorite culture warriors, rig the trending topics as they wished, and possibly even attract enough advertisers to make the whole thing financially viable.

To be sure, active content moderation is a necessary but not sufficient, condition for running a viable platform. Even if Parler and Gettr had scrubbed themselves entirely of coup talk and Sonic porn, enthusiasm for them may have waned for any number of reasons.

But when you consider why these apps failed as quickly as they did, lax content moderation is surely among the biggest reasons. Most people will only spend so long in a virtual space in which they are surrounded by the worst of humanity. If Parler or Gettr will be remembered at all, it will be because they created networks for conservatives that not even conservatives could stand to be in.

This column was co-published with Platformer , a daily newsletter about Big Tech and democracy.

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Russian hackers reportedly attacked GOP computer systems, Ian Carlos Campbell

Russian state hackers affiliated with the group Cozy Bear were reportedly behind an attack last week on Synnex, a contractor that provides IT services for the Republican National Committee (RNC), Bloomberg writes. The attack may have exposed the organization’s information.

When asked by Bloomberg, a spokesperson for the RNC denied the organization’s systems had been hacked, but confirmed that one of its IT providers Synnex, had been exposed. The RNC provided the following statement in reference to the attack:

Over the weekend, we were informed that Synnex, a third party provider, had been breached. We immediately blocked all access from Synnex accounts to our cloud environment. Our team worked with Microsoft to conduct a review of our systems and after a thorough investigation, no RNC data was accessed. We will continue to work with Microsoft, as well as federal law enforcement officials on this matter.

In a statement released on July 6th, Synnex further confirmed “it is aware of a few instances where outside actors have attempted to gain access, through Synnex, to customer applications within the Microsoft cloud environment.” The company claims it is reviewing the attack alongside Microsoft and a third-party security firm. Manipulating enterprise software that interacts with Microsoft’s cloud rather than going after Azure or Office products directly shares some similarities with the SolarWinds hack in 2020.

And that connection would make sense: members of Cozy Bear working with SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, are largely suspected to be behind the manipulation of the SolarWinds software for illegal ends. The SolarWinds breach potentially exposed information from over a hundred companies and government organizations, and even compromised the tools of cybersecurity companies designed to prevent these kinds of attacks, like FireEye.

There’s also parallels to draw between a breach of the RNC and the hack of the Democratic National Committee and Hilary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016. That breach, and the leak of thousands of emails on WikiLeaks, ultimately led to the indictment of 12 members of GRU, a Russian military intelligence agency with connections to another group of ursine-inspired Russian hackers called Fancy Bear.

The RNC attack arrives among a flurry of ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure and companies in the US. The list is long, but in the last year, Colonial Pipeline, insurance provider CNA, and more recently, IT software provider Kaseya, have all been the victims of ransomware attacks. Bloomberg suggests Cozy Bear’s attack could have used these ransomware hacks as a kind of cover, and even if they didn’t, attacking political targets is an ongoing problem that doesn’t always end in a dramatic leak.

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Enormous Antarctic lake vanishes in 3 days, ,

An enormous, ice-covered lake in Antarctica vanished suddenly, and scientists are worried it could happen again.

In this disappearing act, which researchers say occurred during the 2019 winter on the Amery Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, an estimated 21 billion to 26 billion cubic feet (600 million to 750 million cubic meters) of water — roughly twice the volume of San Diego Bay — drained into the ocean.

The scientists who used satellite observations to capture the shocking vanishing act say the lake drained in roughly three days after the ice shelf beneath it gave way.

Related: 10 signs Earth’s climate is off the rails

“We believe the weight of water accumulated in this deep lake opened a fissure in the ice shelf beneath the lake, a process known as hydrofracture, causing the water to drain away to the ocean below,” Roland Warner, a glaciologist at the University of Tasmania and lead author of a new study describing the event, said in a statement. He added that once the water was released, “the flow into the ocean beneath would have been like the flow over Niagara Falls, so it would have been an impressive sight.”

Hydrofracturing (a natural process using the same physical principles as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, used to extract oil or gas from bedrock) occurs when water — which is denser and, therefore, heavier than ice — rips open gigantic cracks in ice sheets — and then drains into the sea. This leaves behind a gigantic fissure which compromises the structural integrity of the sheet as a whole. As meltwater lakes and streams multiply across the surface of Antarctica, researchers are concerned that growing volumes of surface meltwater could cause more hydrofracturing events, which could cause ice shelves, including the parts which are anchored to the ground, to collapse, thus elevating sea levels above current projections.

“Antarctic surface melting has been projected to double by 2050, raising concerns about the stability of other ice shelves,” the team wrote in their study, which was published June 23 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. “Processes such as hydrofracture and flexure remain understudied, and ice-sheet models do not yet include realistic treatment of these processes.” (Flexure is the flexing of the underside of the ice-shelf by the weight of the meltwater above it, and another potential cause of the break-up of ice-shelves.)

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Warner and colleagues took aerial measurements of the dramatic outpouring of the lake with observations from NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite, which takes readings by bouncing pulses of laser light off a target of interest and measuring the time it takes for the pulses to be reflected. From this time delay, scientists are able to calculate the elevation of a target.

After the deluge, the region surrounding the lake, now free of the water’s weight, rose 118 feet (36 meters) from its original position, and there was an enormous fracture — called an ice doline — that carved out an area of about 4.25 square miles (11 square kilometers) along the lake bed. During the summer of 2020, the lake refilled with water in just a few days, with a peak flow of 35 million cubic feet (1 million cubic meters) per day. Whether this water will create new fractures to vanish into, or is already disappearing through the old fracture and out into the ocean, is unclear, according to the researchers.

“It might accumulate meltwater again or drain to the ocean more frequently,” Warner said. “It does appear that the fracture reopened briefly during the 2020 summer melt season, so it is certainly a system to watch. This event does raise new questions about how common these deep ice-covered lakes are on ice shelves and how they evolve.”

Originally published on Live Science.

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On This Day in Space! July 6, 1938: Discovery of Jupiter’s moon Lysithea, ,

On July 6, 1938, an American astronomer named Seth Barnes Nicholson discovered Jupiter’s moon Lysithea.

Nicholson spotted Lysithea from Mount Wilson Observatory in California, where he had previously discovered three more Jovian moons. This was the tenth moon astronomers had found at Jupiter. As of June 2017, 69 moons have been found orbiting Jupiter.

Lysithea only measures about 11 miles in diameter and is part of Jupiter’s Himalia group, which contains five irregular moons that follow similar orbits and are thought to have a common origin.

It was named after the mythological character Lysithea, daughter of the god Oceanus and one of the many lovers of the almighty Zeus.

Catch up on our entire “On This Day In Space” series on YouTube with this playlist.

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Still not enough space? Don’t forget to check out our Space Image of the Day, and on the weekends our Best Space Photos and Top Space News Stories of the week.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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Wally Funk to break John Glenn’s spaceflight record with Blue Origin flight, ,

Pioneering aviator Wally Funk is set to beat one of John Glenn’s spaceflight records.

In 1961, at just 21 years old, Funk became one of the famous “Mercury 13” — women who made it through the”Women in Space” program led by NASA astronaut physician Dr. Randy Lovelace.

In the program, which wasn’t affiliated with NASA, a group of women participated in rigorous physical and mental testing in parallel with NASA’s (male) Mercury 7 astronauts, who were training for space. Many of the women excelled, with Funk scoring even better than Glenn, one of the Mercury 7, on some of these tests.

Now, Funk — who went on to lobby the federal government to send women to space and spend decades as an aviator, flight instructor and much more — is on target to beat Glenn’s record for the oldest person to reach space with her flight aboard Blue Origin‘s New Shepard suborbital rocket system, which is set to launch July 20 from the company’s facility in the West Texas desert.

Related: Blue Origin to fly female aviator Wally Funk on 1st crewed launch

Funk is 82. In October 1998, at the age of 77, Glenn became the oldest person to reach space when he launched on the STS-95 mission of NASA’s space shuttle Discovery. (In February 1962, he had set another mark, becoming the first American ever to orbit Earth.)

The July 20 mission will be the first crewed spaceflight of New Shepard, which is named for Mercury 7 astronaut Alan Shepard, who also went on to fly with NASA’s Apollo program and land on the moon as part of Apollo 14.

“They told me that I had done better and completed the work faster than any of the guys,” Funk said about her time with the “Mercury 13” in a video released by Blue Origin on Thursday (July 1), when Funk’s involvement in the mission was announced. “I didn’t think that I would ever get to go up.”

More: Jeff Bezos will join passengers on Blue Origin’s 1st crewed flight

Funk and 12 other of the women “graduated” from the “Women in Space” program, completing all of the assigned tests. The test that Funk particularly excelled at, compared to other participants and the Mercury 7 who were in training, was the sensory deprivation tank test.

For this test, the women were put in a dark, enclosed tank, and Funk lasted a remarkable 10 hours and 35 minutes before staff ended the test. Glenn, on the other hand, lasted three hours in his test, which took place in a dark room, according to a 2009 Wired article. Fellow “Mercury 13” member Rhea Hurrle also lasted over 10 hours in the tank.

If the July 20 New Shepard mission goes as planned, Funk will spend approximately four minutes floating in microgravity before the craft takes the passengers back to Earth. The total flight time will be about 11 minutes.

“I’ll love every second of it,” Funk said in the same video. “I can hardly wait.”

Funk will not be the only passenger aboard this crewed suborbital flight, which can fit a total of six passengers. She will be joined by Blue Origin chief and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Bezos’ brother Mark and an additional flyer who was the highest bidder during a three-round auction for the seat.

The auction winner, whose identity has not yet been revealed, paid $28 million for the seat, Blue Origin has said. The money will go to Club for the Future, the company’s science and technology outreach organization.

Blue Origin will not be launching the only crewed suborbital flight this July if everything goes to plan. On Thursday, shortly after Blue Origin announced that Funk will fly on July 20, Virgin Galactic announced that it aims to fly its crewed, suborbital Unity-22 mission as early as July 11. Virgin Galactic’s mission will include four pilots and four mission specialists, including the company’s founder, the billionaire Richard Branson.

Email Chelsea Gohd at cgohd@space.com or follow her on Twitter @chelsea_gohd. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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New exhibit tells ‘stranger than fiction’ tale of aerospace medicine, ,

The idea of an antigravity suit may seem like the stuff of sci-fi, but one such garment that was worn by a NASA astronaut is among the space artifacts now highlighting how aerospace medicine can be “stranger than fiction.”

Opening on Saturday (July 3) at The Museum of Flight in Seattle, “Stranger Than Fiction: The Incredible Science of Aerospace Medicine” brings together dozens of aviation and space artifacts to tell the story of how doctors and researchers have devised the means to keep humans alive and in good health while in the extreme environments of air and space flight.

“They have got my Kentavr, which is a Russian device to prevent fainting after landing,” NASA astronaut Michael Barratt said in an interview with collectSPACE.com, describing his “antigravity suit” — a pair of blue compression shorts that he wore to return from the International Space Station in 2009. “It squeezes the legs and thighs.”

Related: The Human Body in Space: 6 Weird Facts

A member of the team who helped create the exhibition for The Museum of Flight, Barratt’s familiarity with space medicine precedes his own two missions into orbit. A former NASA flight surgeon and medical operations lead for the space station, Barratt lectures extensively about space and extreme medicine and serves as the senior editor for a textbook on the subject.

Even so, Barratt recognizes how the topic can be seen as “stranger than fiction.”

“Well, for me, it’s reality, and it’s strange. I would call it a very strange reality,” he said.

“I teach space medicine to a lot of various audiences, mostly medical. So when I do this, I’m talking about adaptive physiology, G- [gravity-] loads and microgravity to various medical audiences and they have to be six layers deep in detail. And even to them, it is very novel. What we see is way outside their experience base,” Barratt said. “Now [with this exhibit] we are trying to communicate these concepts with the general public. So to them, it will be sort of science fiction.”

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Antigravity suit: NASA astronaut Michael Barratt’s Russian Kentavr shorts, which helped prevent him fainting after landing from the International Space Station in 2009. The space artifact is one of the examples of aerospace medicine on display in “Stranger Than Fiction” at The Museum of Flight in Seattle. (Image credit: The Museum of Flight)

Recognizing what the challenge might be from the start, the museum adopted a motif for the exhibit that matches the expectations for subject matter — vintage comic book art.

“Early on, there was a lot of concern about the exhibit being too technical, too dry and that it would be challenging to make it appealing to the general public,” Geoff Nunn, the museum’s adjunct curator for space history, told collectSPACE. “One of the goals of the exhibit is to present flight surgeons as heroes and we realized that the stories of them exploring the unknown, acting as their own test subjects and coming up with these incredible devices and technological contraptions to make flying safe really read like a classic comic or an action serial.”

“So we put this visual style with these stories because it brought these incredible feats forward and helped make them more accessible to a general audience,” he said.

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The BioSuit, a form-fitting spacesuit designed for use on planetary surfaces, as seen in “Stranger Than Fiction: The Incredible Science of Aerospace Medicine” at The Museum of Flight in Seattle. (Image credit: The Museum of Flight)

“Stranger Than Fiction” spans the history of aviation to modern day spaceflight. In addition to Barratt’s Kentavr, the exhibition’s space artifacts include the medical kit flown on the final flight of space shuttle Endeavour; a Russian “Penguin Suit” sized for NASA astronaut Wendy Lawrence to keep her fit in orbit; and the BioSuit, a skintight spacesuit designed by NASA’s former deputy administrator and MIT professor of astronautics, Dava Newman.

“They also have my Russian biomedical harness that I wore during a Russian spacesuit EVA [extravehicular activity, or spacewalk] and a couple of heritage radiation detectors that we had in our inventory here at NASA from the Apollo era,” Barratt said.

The exhibition, which runs through Feb. 6, 2022, is opening at a time when the number of people who have the opportunity to experience spaceflight is expected to expand dramatically with the rise of commercial spaceflight and the space tourism market. The advancements in aerospace medicine from the past will help keep those passengers safe, while the growth in the number and types of people who fly is anticipated to reveal new challenges, both Nunn and Barratt said.

“As we start looking to fly more spaceflight participants through private companies the community is having to adjust how they look at space flyer safety,” said Nunn.

“Not only is the commercial community growing, but the space medical community that is needed really to support and understand this effort is growing as well, and it is one of the most satisfying things to see,” Barratt said.

Follow collectSPACE.com on Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2021 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.

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Could we really terraform Mars?, ,

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space.

Almost every sci-fi story begins (and sometimes ends) with the terraforming of Mars to turn it into a more hospitable world.

But with its frigid temperatures, remoteness from the sun and general dustiness, changing Mars to be more Earth-like is more challenging than it seems (and it already seems pretty tough).

Incredible technology: How to use ‘shells’ to terraform a planet

The thing is, Mars used to be cool. And by cool, I mean warm. Billions of years ago, Mars had a thick, carbon-rich atmosphere, lakes and oceans of liquid water, and probably even white fluffy clouds. And this was at a time when our sun was smaller and weaker, but occasionally much more violent than it is today — in other words, our solar system is a much more favorable place for life now than it was 3 billion years ago, and yet Mars is red and dead.

Sadly, Mars was doomed from the start. It’s smaller than Earth, which means it cooled off much faster. The core of our planet is still molten, and that spinning blob of iron-rich goo in the center of Earth powers our strong magnetic field. The magnetic field is a literal force field, capable of stopping and deflecting the solar wind, which is a never-ending stream of high-energy particles blasting out of the sun.

When Mars cooled off, its core solidified and its magnetic force field shut off, exposing its atmosphere to the ravages of the solar wind. Over the course of 100 million years or so, the solar wind stripped away the Martian atmosphere. When the air pressure dropped to near-vacuum, the oceans on the surface boiled away and the planet dried up.

It’s so tantalizing: Mars was once Earth-like, and so is there any way to bring it back to its former glory?

Polar opposites

Thankfully (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view), we humans have plenty of experience in warming up planets. Inadvertently, through our centuries of carbon emissions, we’ve raised the surface temperature of Earth through a simple greenhouse mechanism. We pump out a lot of carbon dioxide, which is really good at letting sunlight in and preventing thermal radiation from escaping, so it acts like a giant invisible blanket over Earth.

The increased heat encourages moisture to leave the oceans and play around as a vapor in the atmosphere, which adds its own blanketing layer, adding to the increase in temperature, which evaporates more water, which warms the planet more, and before you know if prime beachfront property is now better suited as an underwater submarine base.

But if it works on Earth, maybe it could work on Mars. We can’t access the OG Martian atmosphere, because it’s completely lost to space, but Mars does have enormous deposits of water ice and frozen carbon dioxide in its polar caps, and some more laced just underneath the surface across the planet.

If we could somehow warm the caps, that might release enough carbon into the atmosphere to kick-start a greenhouse warming trend. All we would need to do is kick back, watch and wait for a few centuries for physics to do its thing and turn Mars into a much less nasty place.

Unfortunately, that simple idea probably isn’t going to work.

Related: What would it be like to live on Mars?

Radical ideas

The first issue is developing the technology to warm the caps. Proposals have ranged from sprinkling dust all across the poles (to make them reflect less light and warm them up) to building a giant space mirror to put some high-beam action on the poles. But any ideas require radical leaps in technology, and a manufacturing presence in space far beyond what we are currently capable of (in the case of the space mirror, we would need to mine about 200,000 tons of aluminum in space, whereas we are currently capable of mining … well, zero tons of aluminum in space).

And then there’s the unfortunate realization that there isn’t nearly enough CO2 locked up in Mars to trigger a decent warming trend. Currently Mars has less than 1% of the air pressure on Earth at sea level. If you could evaporate every molecule of CO2 and H2O on Mars and get it into the atmosphere, the Red Planet would have … 2% of the air pressure on Earth. You would need twice as much atmosphere to prevent the sweat and oils on your skin from boiling, and 10 times that much to not need a pressure suit.

Let’s not even talk about the lack of oxygen.

To counter this lack of easily accessible greenhouse gases, there are some radical proposals. Maybe we could have factories devoted to pumping out chlorofluorocarbons, which are a really nasty greenhouse gas. Or maybe we could shove in some ammonia-rich comets from the outer solar system. Ammonia itself is a great greenhouse blanket, and it eventually dissociates into harmless nitrogen, which makes up the bulk of our own atmosphere.

Assuming we could overcome the technological challenges associated with those proposals, there’s still one major hurdle: the lack of a magnetic field. Unless we protect Mars, every molecule that we pump (or crash) into the atmosphere is vulnerable to getting blasted away by the solar wind. Like trying to build a pyramid from desert sand, it’s not going to be easy.

Creative solutions abound. Maybe we could build a giant electromagnet in space to deflect away the solar wind. Maybe we could girdle Mars with a superconductor, giving it an artificial magnetosphere.

Naturally, we don’t have nearly the sophistication to realize either of those solutions. Could we ever, possibly, terraform Mars and make it more hospitable? Sure, it’s possible — there’s no fundamental law of physics getting in our way.

But don’t hold your breath.

Learn more by listening to the episode “ Could we really terraform Mars? ” on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com . Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter .

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Twitter has lost legal immunity for users’ posts in India, government argues, Jon Porter

Twitter is now legally liable for content posted by its users in India after failing to comply with the country’s new IT rules, the government said in a legal filing. As reported by both Reuters and TechCrunch, India’s IT ministry argues in a filing with New Delhi’s High Court that the social media firm has lost its legal immunity after failing to comply with new requirements imposed in May. These include appointing a chief compliance officer, a grievance officer, and a contact person to respond to requests from law enforcement 24 hours a day.

Reuters reports that the court filing came in response to allegations from a Twitter user that they had been defamed by tweets posted on the platform, and that Twitter has not appointed the new executives required as part of the new regulations.

If the court sides with India’s government, it would mark a major shift in Twitter’s legal obligations in the country, with TechCrunch noting it could open the door for its executives to face criminal charges over objectionable content posted by its users. While social media platforms, including Twitter, often take down content in response to legal challenges, they’re generally not legally liable for the contents of their users’ posts. Although the Indian government has claimed Twitter has lost this legal protection, experts have said that the final decision ultimately rests with India’s courts.

In the US, social media companies are generally not held liable for their users’ posts thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But India’s IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has argued it’s wrong for companies to expect exactly the same protection under Indian law. “The issue is of misuse of social media,” TechCrunch reports the minister said in a press conference last week. “Some of them say we are bound by American laws. You operate in India, make good money, but you will take the position that you’ll be governed by American laws. This is plainly not acceptable.” Prasad denied that the move was aimed at silencing criticism of the country’s government.

A spokesperson from Twitter did not immediately respond to The Verge‘s request for comment, but the company declined to comment to both Reuters and TechCrunch. Twitter has previously said it was making efforts to comply with India’s new Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code, which came into force in May.

Tensions have been rising between Twitter and the Indian government for several months. In May, police in India raided Twitter’s offices as part of an investigation into why the company labeled tweets from government officials as “manipulated media.” Last month, the country’s technology minister warned Twitter of “unintended consequences” if the company did not comply with its new regulations, and gave it “one last notice to immediately comply.”

Other big tech companies have also clashed with Indian authorities over its new regulations. In May, WhatsApp sued the Indian government over the new rules, claiming they are unconstitutional and will “severely undermine the privacy” of its users. WhatsApp’s concerns relate to a requirement that it track the origins of objectionable messages. The service argues that this would effectively force it to “trace” private messages sent on its platform, ultimately breaking the service’s end-to-end encryption.

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Nuclear power is clean and safe. Why aren’t we using more of it? – CNET, Daniel Van Boom

A quick thought experiment. What would the climate debate look like if all humanity had was fossil fuels and renewables — and then today an engineering genius revealed a new invention: nuclear energy. That’s the hypothetical posed to me by Dietmar Detering, a German entrepreneur living in New York.

“I’m sure we’d develop the hell out of it,” he said, before sighing. “We’re looking at a different world right now.”

Detering thinks nuclear energy could be the key to solving the climate crisis. A former member of Germany’s Green Party, Detering now spends his spare time as co-chair of the Nuclear New York advocacy group. He’s part of a wave of environmentalists campaigning for more nuclear energy.

Though the word evokes images of landscapes pulverized by atomic calamity — Hiroshima, Chernobyl, Fukushima — proponents like Detering and his colleague Eric Dawson point out that nuclear power produces huge amounts of electricity while emitting next to no carbon.

This separates it from fossil fuels, which are consistent but dirty, and renewables, which are clean but weather dependent. Contrary to their apocalyptic reputation, nuclear power plants are relatively safe. Coal power is estimated to kill around 350 times as many people per terawatt-hour of energy produced, mostly from air pollution, compared to nuclear power.

“Any energy policy has pros and cons, and we feel, after putting a lot of scrutiny on it, that the pros outweigh the cons of nuclear energy,” said Dawson, a grassroots campaigner at Nuclear New York.

It’s a contentious statement. Many scientists and environmentalists say nuclear power is prohibitively dangerous and expensive, that plants take too long to build. “Better to expand renewable energy or energy saving, that is a better use of money in terms of climate change mitigation,” says Jusen Asuka, director at the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies in Kanagawa, Japan.

But many scientists and experts believe nuclear power is necessary to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050. “Anyone seriously interested in preventing dangerous levels of global warming should be advocating nuclear power,” wrote James Hansen, a former NASA scientist credited with raising awareness of global warming in the late ’80s, in a 2019 column.

This second camp mourns the decline of nuclear power, which has steepened since the 2011 meltdown at Fukushima. The International Energy Agency estimates the developed world is on track to lose 66% of its current nuclear capacity by 2040. In the US, where nuclear power produces nearly 40% of the country’s low-carbon power, 11 reactors have been decommissioned since 2013 — and nine more will soon join them.

The most recent retirement was Indian Point Energy Center, which formerly produced 25% of the electricity used by 10 million New Yorkers. One reactor was shut last year and the second followed on April 30. The result? Higher emissions as the electricity gap is filled by natural gas.

“The whole goal that everybody’s talking about is to increase zero emission electricity, yet they are shutting down the source of the vast majority of zero emission electricity,” said Dawson. “So this drives us insane.”

Nuclear’s PR problem

To be sure, there are risks.

Meltdowns, while rarer than once-in-a-generation, have cataclysmic consequences. And the question of how to best store nuclear waste is contentious: The US invested $9 billion in building a storage site at Yucca Mountain before abandoning the project, though Finland, France and Canada have found potential solutions. (The US also toyed with launching nuclear waste into the sun. Those plans have also been abandoned.)

As a result, nuclear power’s reputation is among its biggest hurdles. In the public imagination, nuclear power presages disaster. But the numbers tell a different story. Estimates of deaths from nuclear incidents range from less than 10,000 to around 1 million. As you can infer, it’s a highly contested number — but in either case dwarfed by the death toll from fossil fuel pollution. Around 8.7 million premature deaths were caused by fossil fuel pollution in 2018 alone, according to a February Harvard study.

Bill Gates, when asked if nuclear energy was a solution to climate change, responded: “If people were rational, yes.”

The PR problem is understandable. Thirteen years before the first American nuclear power plant opened, the same technology was used to devastate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one appreciated the black cloud hanging over atomic power more than President Dwight Eisenhower, who accompanied the rollout of nuclear electricity with a marketing blitz. “This greatest of destructive forces can be developed into a great boon, for the benefit of all mankind,” he promised in his now famous Atoms for Peace speech.

So alluring was the promise of cheap, clean energy that 11 countries had built nuclear reactors by 1970, with hundreds more commissioned for development. The newly created Atomic Energy Commission expected the US alone to be running over 1,000 reactors by 2000. But it was not to be. Forty years later, there are an estimated 440 nuclear reactors running — globally.

There are three key reasons for nuclear’s decline since the ’70s. Environmental groups, fearful of nuclear meltdowns and weapon proliferation, began lobbying governments to stop building new power plants. In the US, the result was rafts of new safety regulations that made building and operating plants two to three times more costly.

Second was Three Mile Island, in which a mechanical failure at a Pennsylvania power plant led to radiation leaking outside of the plant. Though no one was killed, the near-miss caused an immediate pause on nuclear power’s expansion — plus more regulation on existing plants, further driving up costs.

Third, and most crucially: Chernobyl. The catastrophic meltdown realized the anti-nuclear movement’s worst fears: 4,000 people died, according to conservative estimates by the WHO, and over 130,000 were evacuated. (One extreme estimate of the true death toll exceeds 900,000.) The incident illustrates another downside to atomic energy — how lasting damage can be. The nuclear cleanup is expected to take 81 years to fully complete.

Chernobyl put a moratorium on nuclear power. Italy banned it outright a year later, and it would be 26 years before construction of another nuclear reactor was green-lit in the US. By 1987, it seemed the world had decided nuclear power was not the energy of the future.

But that was before climate change took center stage as our greatest existential threat.

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Nuclear energy is often percieved as being deadly, but kills far fewer people than oal, coal and gas power. Collin Buenerkemper/CNETWhen the sun ain’t shining…

The term “environmentalist” is often used as a catch-all, but it can mean different things. It used to refer to people trying to protect wildlife and natural ecosystems. In the 21st century, the term has evolved to encapsulate the need to combat human-made climate change.

The distinction between these two strands of environmentalism is the cause of a rift within the scientific community about nuclear energy.

On one side are purists who believe nuclear power isn’t worth the risk and the exclusive solution to the climate crisis is renewable energy. The opposing side agrees that renewables are crucial, but says society needs a baseload of power to provide electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. Nuclear energy, being far cleaner than oil, gas and coal, is a natural option, especially where hydroelectric capacity is limited.

“It’s true that nuclear power can have localized negative impacts,” said Leon Clarke, research director at the Center for Global Sustainability, “but it isn’t going to melt your glaciers.”

Clarke, who helped author reports for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, isn’t an uncritical supporter of nuclear energy, but says it’s a valuable option to have if we’re serious about reaching carbon neutrality.

“Core to all of this is the degree to which you think we can actually meet climate goals with 100% renewables,” he said. “If you don’t believe we can do it, and you care about the climate, you are forced to think about something like nuclear.”

The achievability of universal 100% renewability is similarly contentious. Cities such as Burlington, Vermont, have been “100% renewable” for years. But these cities often have small populations, occasionally still rely on fossil fuel energy and have significant renewable resources at their immediate disposal. Meanwhile, countries that manage to run off renewables typically do so thanks to extraordinary hydroelectric capabilities.

“Norway, Iceland, New Zealand, countries like these all have a naturally high supply for hydroelectricity, so I’m not promoting nuclear there,” says Dawson, the campaigner from Nuclear New York. “If [renewables] work, and they provide first-world quality of life, great! But most countries are not able to do that.”

Germany stands as the best case study for a large, industrialized country pushing into green energy. Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2011 announced Energiewende, an energy transition that would phase out nuclear and coal while phasing in renewables. Wind and solar power generation are both up over 400% since 2010, and renewables provided 46% of the country’s electricity in 2019.

But progress has halted in recent years. The instability of renewables doesn’t just mean energy is often not produced at night, but also that solar and wind can overwhelm the grid during the day, forcing utilities to pay customers to use their electricity. Lagging grid infrastructure struggles to transport this overabundance of green energy from Germany’s north to its industrial south, meaning many factories still run on coal and gas. The political limit has also been reached in some places, with citizens meeting the construction of new wind turbines with vociferous protests.

The result is that Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions have fallen by around 11.5% since 2010 — slower than the EU average of 13.5%.

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Nuclear energy’s bad PR fairly started with atomic weapons, but a growing number of experts argue it can be used to help fight climate change. Collin Buenerkemper/CNETNuclear is replaced by renewables — and gas

Germany’s stunted progress in lowering carbon emissions isn’t an indictment of renewable energy as much as an illustration of how bedeviling the shift from dirty to clean energy is. Reducing carbon emissions means setting up wind and solar farms, but also improving energy efficiency and tackling transport emissions. Neglect of such areas are part of why Germany’s emissions remain high, but the premature dismissal of nuclear energy is also often argued as a key shortcoming of Energiewende.

Green energy has plugged some of the gap left by a diminishing nuclear sector, but so has coal and gas. The situation is similar in Japan. In pivoting away from nuclear energy after Fukushima, the country plans to build 22 new coal plants in the next five years.

New York, like other parts of the US, is following the same path. When Indian Point Power Center’s second and final reactor closed on April 30 it was the culmination of 20 years of debate: Decommissioning the plant was first proposed in 2002 because of its potentially being the target of a post-9/11 terrorist attack.

Public anxiety over Indian Point is understandable. Though not concentrated enough to be hazardous, water carrying radioactive particles flows from the plant into the Hudson River. More harmful is the cooling system that sucks water in from the Hudson, killing fish and larvae in the process. And, as Gov. Andrew Cuomo has pointed out, the plant is unusually close to an exceptionally dense city, which would make a meltdown particularly catastrophic. That millions of Americans rejoiced when the plant’s closure was announced is no surprise.

But now comes the hard part.

New York, a state with a bigger population than most countries, has committed to getting 70% of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2030. It has invested heavily in wind farms to this end. But with three natural gas plants set up to help provide the power hitherto generated by Indian Point, emissions are likely to go up following the plant’s closure. This is more than a guess: natural gas’s share of energy consumption rose from 36% to 40% after Indian Point’s first reactor was shut last year.

Nuclear critics argue that this rise is temporary, and that expanding wind power will eventually replace Indian Point’s output. Nuclear New York’s Detering rejects this logic.

“People say, ‘Well, we’re replacing nuclear with wind and solar,'” said Detering. “But I think that is looking at this backwards. We want to displace fossil fuels.”

It’s a scenario likely to occur repeatedly in the coming years as plants are deconstructed throughout the country. Already on track to miss its 2030 gas emissions target, California will lose two reactors in 2025 — and a fifth of its carbon-free electricity with them. Nuclear energy provided 93% of Pennsylvania’s carbon-free electricity before one of its five reactors was shut in 2019.

While the developed world grapples with decarbonizing, populous developing nations contend with another issue: Ramping up power by any means necessary. India gets 75% of its electricity from coal power plants and, with around 180 million Indians still without access to grid electricity, has plans for more. China is the world’s biggest investor in nuclear power — 49 reactors are up and running, to be joined by 18 more in the coming years — but the capacity of its planned coal plants exceeds that of the US’ active fleet.

“Who are the biggest advocates for addressing the climate? It’s just what you’d expect: The richer countries,” said Clarke. “Countries that are further down the development scale, they have other concerns. What sells in these countries is not climate mitigation, that’s a long-term issue.”

It’s not just public perception and safety concerns that’s hampering nuclear energy adoption, but the more pedestrian worries of time and money. This is true in the US too: With no carbon pricing, increasingly cheap natural gas is more economical than tightly regulated nuclear.

“Cost is the single most important issue for everything,” says Asuka, of Kanagawa’s Institute for Global Environmental Strategies. Asuka reasons that it’s unhelpful for developing countries or those aspiring to meet 2030 deadlines to start building plants now, since they cost so much and take so long to build. He argues that investment should go into energy conservation and renewable technologies.

“Nuclear power is not so helpful in terms of cost, security and timing,” Asuka says.

A handful of companies building the next generation of nuclear reactors think they can change that.

The next generation

Nuclear power plants are massive investments. Not only do they cost over $10 billion, they often take between eight and 12 years to build. That’s without factoring in delays and budget overruns, which are common. “Stabilizing the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow,” reads the 2019 World Nuclear Industry Status Report.

The US model for nuclear power plant production is particularly inefficient. Each state has its own utility standards and safety regulations, requiring power plants to be tailored to their locale. By contrast, France designed a few types of reactor and mass-produced them around the country — and now gets over 70% of its electricity from nuclear energy. South Korea managed to halve the cost of nuclear energy between 1971 and 2008 using similar methods. Compare that to the US, where costs skyrocketed as high as 1,000% between the ’60s and ’80s.

X-Energy, one of several companies building safer and less expensive “Gen IV” nuclear reactors, hopes to reverse that trend. X-Energy’s pebble-bed designs run on nuclear fuel encased in up to 220,000 billiard-sized graphite balls — which the company says makes a meltdown physically impossible.

Leaks and meltdowns happen when the metal structure in which nuclear fission occurs melts or ruptures. At Chernobyl, for instance, operator error caused a steam explosion that blew a nuclear reactor open, unleashing radioactive gas and debris.

X-Energy encases its nuclear fuel inside a billiard-ball-sized graphite encasing. It claims meltdowns are impossible in its reactors. X-Energy

The graphite encasing nuclear materials used in X-Energy’s reactors can withstand temperatures of up to 3,200 degrees fahrenheit, around 1,000 degrees more than the heat that caused Chernobyl’s meltdown. Even if a reactor was torn apart, all radioactive elements would still be contained within the graphite casing.

“The accident in Chernobyl — with our reactor, it’s impossible,” said Yvotte Brits, a nuclear engineer at X-Energy. “The reactor can never meltdown, no matter what the operator does. They can make the worst mistake but still cannot melt down the reactor.”

That means plants aren’t just safer, they’re significantly cheaper and quicker to build. If meltdowns are impossible, the safety regulations that make power plants in the US so expensive won’t be necessary. Neither will the giant containment structure that typically surrounds a nuclear core, which in turn allows X-Energy to build modular plants in a factory rather than constructing them at a building site.

The first plant is due for completion in 2027, with another following the year after. Brits says the company will eventually be able to complete a reactor in two years’ time.

X-Energy is one of many companies building next-generation power plants that promise to realize Eisenhower’s promise of atomic energy that’s cheap, safe and widespread. Another is the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower, which is developing a reactor that aims to solve the cost and waste problems by running off depleted uranium. Both companies were awarded $80 million by the Department of Energy last October to help fund upcoming reactors.

“I’ve been in the industry almost 40 years, there’s no better time than now,” says Darren Gale, X-Energy’s vice president of commercial operations. “People are coming to the realization that we can’t have it both ways. We can’t demand having the [clean] power and then refuse to let you build nuclear power plants to make that happen.

“Congress, public opinion, everybody is starting to change because they’ve seen the alternative is building more oil and gas.”

Gale’s optimism stems in part from President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan, a huge infrastructure proposal which has provisions to fund advanced nuclear reactors. That’s good news for companies like X-Energy — and for the world if the designs live up to their potential — but does little for existing nuclear infrastructure.

The future, today

“It is, I promise, worse than you think.” Those are the opening words of The Uninhabitable Earth, an influential article-turned-book by David Wallace-Wells that details what a warming planet will likely look like. Low-lying countries like Bangladesh sunk by rising oceans and the onset of mass heat deaths are on the low end of the calamity spectrum. Starvation, plagues and warfare would follow, he writes.

Those are the plausible costs of inactivity — a baseline. No energy source is perfect, so mitigating that outcome by reaching carbon neutrality will require a series of risks, sacrifices and difficult decisions. In the face of this, countries have made weighty pledges to fight climate change but are often light on the particulars of what that entails.

“Countries are making commitments to net zero that are extraordinarily ambitious, but we don’t know exactly how to get there,” said the Center for Global Sustainability’s Clarke. “All options need to be kept on the table. I would absolutely be keeping [nuclear] on the table.”

Both Detering and Dawson from Nuclear New York are aware of nuclear energy’s perils. For different reasons — Dawson is a conservative concerned about air pollution and energy scarcity, Detering a former Green Party member worried about climate change — both have come to regard it a shame that nuclear energy is being neglected. For them it’s not a matter of looking for the perfect energy source, but of comparing alternatives.

“Nuclear energy is not fairydust,” says Detering. “There’s waste and there’s a risk of something going wrong. Comparing it to something that’s real, these are small issues.” For his part, Dawson says he won’t advocate for nuclear power if a better alternative emerges.

“But today, I think this is the most reliable, efficient, scalable, carbon-free technology we have,” he said. “So let’s do something that works today.”

Correction, July 6: Removes erroneous claim that radiation leaks at nuclear power plants have caused deaths.

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