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. 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. 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. 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. 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. I bring all this up as a precursor to tell you about a new, FREE, eBook about Telescopes I have just learned about. The eBook, TELESCOPE 101: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD OF TELESCOPES is authored by Marcus Schenk, and is available here (it’s in pdf format). 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. It appears to be an excellent primer on the subject and I would recommend it for anyone who has an interest in this. And it’s FREE – hard to beat!

Does SETI need to shut up? Speaking of what’s “out there”, I’ve always been interested in the SETI – the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence project (I used to have their search number crunching program on my computer, but during one of my upgrades, lost it). It’s one of the “great questions” and I (probably naively) hope to have an answer to it in my lifetime. Aliens, and whether or not they might be “friendly” to us, are a mainstay of science-fiction. One school of thought says that Aliens WILL be friendly but another school of thought says they may not. And that leads me to ideapod, which is (and I quote) “… a new social-media platform for sharing and connecting ideas“. This question about SETI is being debated on this platform and it’s an interesting discussion, indeed. If you want to participate, head on over to the ideapod community discussion… In a previous post, I discussed StackExchange, another forum for discussions about various topics (including the space elevator). It’s hard to know where the winners and losers will be in social media and online forums. 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. On the other hand, I think it’s important that unpopular ideas not be dismissed as they might, ultimately, be the correct ones. There are many examples of this but a modern day Poster Child for “Unpopular positions that ultimately proved correct” is Alfred Wegener’s idea of plate tectonics. It was an idea that was universally ridiculed when first proposed, but is now accepted as generally correct. Global warming alarmists take note…

Let’s finish today’s post with MUSIC! 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). I have reviewed several and found that almost all of them are just “yucch”, certainly not my cup of tea. We now have another music “entry”, this about a “space escalator” that transports all of our waste into the sun. The album, Shoot It At The Sun is by a group called The Porchistas. 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. It’s a problem we’re going to have to solve HERE, not by shipping our waste anywhere else. Even “small” portions of this are so large, they defy the export solution… Anyway, back to the music. Frankly, I don’t like it, but perhaps you will. 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 album (and on the sidebar of this blog). 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.

More next weekend…

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).