Membership in Second Life, the giant online game/community/virtual world that you’ve heard about but never used, is free. I didn’t know that until recently. When I learned that fact, an idea hit me:

Second Life is a free source of material for at least one post, and probably a series.

It is, after all, the place where all the scariest, most unpleasant motherfuckers on the internet come together to be totally uninhibited. A place where a man can say, “In my real life, I’m an accountant, but here I can by my true self: a panda with huge tits and both sets of genitals,” and be accepted and embraced by a whole huge-titted hermaphro-panda community. A place, in short, where I could find something to write about, whether or not those stereotypes turned out to be true.

My vision for this project was simple: I’d go undercover, knowing absolutely nothing about the game or its world. Once there, I’d investigate all the things you’ve heard about Second Life in the media. Would the other players be at least half-normal? Would they would look down on me for being a noob who didn’t own any in-game property? And (of course) is the game really a depraved 24/7 furry scat party like all the news reports say it is, or is it mostly just people walking around and chatting? This, I told myself, would be some funny shit.

I downloaded the necessary files from the Second Life website, I installed them, I set up my account, and I started playing.

And then I stopped playing, because it is fucking unplayable. My computer is old, and my internet connection isn’t as fast as it could be, but goddammit, it ran World of Warcraft just fine! This game, though, suffered from a fucking ridiculous level of slowness. Remember that first generation of 3D games, on the original Playstation and the Nintendo 64? How objects just appeared when you got close enough? How mountain ranges would just pop up out of nowhere?

Yeah. It’s like that, but with better graphics and about 1/10th of the speed. Oh, and sometimes you’ll see objects that aren’t supposed to be there at all! You’ll be standing around, and a cluster of weird-looking polygons will appear in the middle of the screen, and stay there until you adjust your camera.

I assumed this had to be a problem with my hardware — either the old computer, or the mediocre connection. To an extent, I was right. But then I watched a couple video tutorials put out by Linden Labs (the makers of Second Life, who I probably should’ve mentioned earlier), and the videos’ narrator wasn’t having much more luck. He clearly had a better system than I did, but the framerate was still choppy, and his avatar spent much of its time standing around, waiting for the scenery to load. The game even crashed on him while he was recording one of the tutorials, and he didn’t even bother cutting it out of the video. He knows how to edit — he’s making video tutorials, after all — and he decided to leave this in.

And that was the end of my undercover investigation of Second Life. Everything I learned, I got from articles and tutorials that are already freely available to anyone who wants to read them, whether or not they’ve played the game. I am able to bring absolutely nothing new to the table regarding this topic. I had some interesting points about the in-game economy, but it’s nothing you can’t find on your own. No, all I could come up with is some angry criticism of the game’s slowness.

Seriously, how fucking patient do you have to be to addicted to this game? At least with drugs, you have the instant gratification of getting high.

Attention apocalypse crackpots and physics geeks! We (finally) have news on the revised timetable for the world’s (potentially) greatest atom-smasher, the Large Hadron Collider. Get ready, because it’s going to start up in September 2009. Exactly one year later than it was supposed to.

You may recall, loyal reader, that last fall, when we were stressed out by the horrors of the McCain/Palin ticket, certain paranoids were also stressed out by (silly) rumors that the LHC might create a black hole that could swallow Switzerland. Varius mentioned the controversy early on, prompting me to attempt to calm things down again. Then, just when we were getting used to the idea, an unfortunate leak of helium superfluid knocked the entire system out of commission for the duration of the winter, if not longer.

It seems that we’re now on the way to being back in business, with some useful new fail-safes thrown in. According to a report filed yesterday by New Scientist,

“CERN is now installing an early-warning system to detect nano-ohm rises in resistance in the superconducting wires that power the LHC’s bending magnets. It is also fitting all magnets with additional pressure relief valves to reduce collateral damage in case of a similar incident. Half of the valves will be in place this year.”

And that’s good news, because, as has been stated elsewhere, the least little malfunction causes the whole fucking thing to shut down. So take heart, LHC fans! All that cool stuff that was supposed to happen with gravitons and rolled-up dimensions and Higgs boson particles can all still happen. Just push all your hopes and dreams back a year. We’ll see you in September.

Remember last week when I talked about the inherent conflicts involved in President Obama’s idea to merge NASA with the Pentagon? Well, we haven’t heard anything new on that subject since the Inauguration, but it seems he has been thinking along related lines. Reuters reported on Sunday that the Obama administration is working on a global ban on all space-related weapons. The ban idea is mentioned on the “Defense” page of the administration’s official agenda, and it goes like this:

“The Obama-Biden Administration will restore American leadership on space issues, seeking a worldwide ban on weapons that interfere with military and commercial satellites. They will thoroughly assess possible threats to U.S. space assets and the best options, military and diplomatic, for countering them, establishing contingency plans to ensure that U.S. forces can maintain or duplicate access to information from space assets and accelerating programs to harden U.S. satellites against attack.”

Since both the U.S. and China have demonstrated that it’s possible to shoot a satellite down from Earth’s surface, the “defending satellites” part of the ban is both understandable and topical. But, through the wonders of science fiction, it’s easy for us to predict that one day — possibly not far off — there will be other categories of space-based weaponry. Lasers could be fitted onto satellites, high-power sunlight magnification devices could be launched into orbit, and, eventually, photonic energy guns could be fitted onto space shuttles. I’m not saying that anyone is currently working on these things, I’m just saying that they will be someday, and once one country has it, everyone’s going to want their own.

And this is where the genius of a preemptive space weapons ban really comes into focus. Usually when someone attempts to ban a weapon globally, several armies already have stockpiles of the stuff. Nuclear, chemical, germ, etc.; sure, we have rules about them, and they don’t tend to get used all that often, but the fact remains, we have the fucking things on our planet, and it’s scary and dangerous.

But! To the best of my knowledge, nobody actually has any real space-based weapons yet. Banning the damn things now, before some country begins the sort of tests that put everyone into a Cold War-style panic, could be the best way to prevent Solar War I. This is exactly the sort of forward-thinking that I’ve been wanting from a politician all along, and my guess is that, wonderfully, we finally have a president who knows his science fiction. So, cheers to Obama, and cheers to sci-fi, for, for once, warning us about a threat before it happens.

I don’t know where he or his team finds the time, but somewhere in-between building a new cabinet, puzzling over the economy, closing Gitmo, writing a speech, inspiring millions, and picking a fucking dog, Barack Obama has begun to make plans for the revitalization of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. With, one might say, some decidedly complicated results. On the table are a fleet of old rockets about to be thrown onto the scrap heap, a completed International Space Station, conflicting designs for the next phase of American spacecraft, tensions with Russia, a possible collaboration with the Pentagon, and most exciting of all, the prospect of competition with the Chinese space program. And I say “exciting” because international competition is the only thing that ever made NASA worth a damn.

Yeah, we’ve got some groovy robots running around on Mars now. But if you leave out Spirit, Opportunity, and Phoenix, it becomes evident that NASA has really sucked ass ever since the U.S.S.R. collapsed. Some of this is due to a lack of funding, and some of this is due to a general lack of enthusiasm on the part of the public and the last few presidents. (Come on, you didn’t really think Bush was serious about Mars, did you?) And the culmination of this lengthy bout of apathy is a dangerous 4-year gap when the Space Shuttle program will officially end in the middle of 2010. The final missions for Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavour will all focus on getting the International Space Station finished, after which the ships will presumably meet their final resting places in a museum. NASA’s replacement system, the Orion spacecraft and the Ares launcher, are currently scheduled for their maiden voyage in September of 2014. In the meantime, it’s generally assumed that we’ll be entrusting the safety of our astronauts to the Russian space program. So don’t expect anyone to raise too much of a fuss if Putin and Medvedev decide to invade Georgia again.

As an alternative, it has been suggested that NASA use the Atlas V and Delta IV rockets which the U.S. military already uses to deploy its spy satellites into orbit, at least until the Ares design is complete. The idea of NASA using parallel military technology appears to have sparked an idea in the mind of our apparently very pragmatic new president. Or maybe it was in ‘07 when China demonstrated their ability to shoot down an orbiting satellite from the ground that did it. Either way, what we find is that Barack Obama is considering merging NASA with the Department of Defense.

Now let’s stop and think about that for a moment, because putting the Pentagon in charge of our space program has a lot of implications, both worrying and encouraging. NASA in its classic incarnation has been purely scientific in nature. It’s also been chronically under-funded. The Defense Department, meanwhile, is the nerve center of the Military Industrial Complex, which is notoriously well-funded. The military also gets advanced technology years, sometimes decades, before civilians do. So we’re talking about giving our space program more money and more state-of-the-art equipment than ever before. This would, in theory, increase our chances of visiting, exploring, maybe even colonizing outer space significantly faster. But it also means putting all the space power in the hands of the military, which increases our chances of conquering outer space significantly faster. Granted, I wasn’t expecting those fossilized worms to put up much of a fight.

Wow, you know, I just realized what a bastard I’m being. Obama doesn’t even start being the first black President of the United States until tomorrow, and I’m already nominating him to be the first Human Galactic Emperor. Ah, well. Have a good Inauguration Day tomorrow, Mr. New President. We can start terraforming Mars next week.

Much has been said recently, both by the scientific community and by science fanboys like Varius and myself, about the exciting prospect of resurrecting extinct animals, such as Woolly Mammoths, with advanced (and yet-to-be-developed) cloning techniques. In a nutshell, the process involves extracting DNA from preserved remains and injecting them into the eggs of existing species. Warming up to the subject, New Scientist has published a new article entitled, “Ten Extinct Beasts That Could Walk the Earth Again,” basically a top ten list of species resurrection.

The article ranks each species on 1-to-5 scales of DNA preservation (i.e., how many good samples we have to mine genetic material from) and suitable surrogates (i.e., are there any available host animals to inject the DNA into once we’ve found it). So, for example, the Tasmanian Tiger, also known as the Thylacine, ranks a 4-out-of-5 for DNA preservation. This is because the last Thylacine died in a zoo in 1936, and they kept the body. Unfortunately, the Thylacine ranks a measly 1-out-of-5 on the surrogate scale, because it’s a marsupial, which gives it fewer relative options, and the closest living cousin is the Tasmanian Devil. Interestingly enough, though no one appears to have cloned a marsupial thus far, this may turn out to be an advantage:

“Pregnancy in marsupials typically lasts just weeks, and a simple placenta forms only briefly, meaning there might be less risk of incompatibility between an embryo and a surrogate mother of another species.”

Conversely, the Woolly Rhinoceros scores a 4-out-of-5 on preservation and a 5-out-of-5 on surrogates. The preservation is partly because of specimens preserved in permafrost, and partly because it’s apparently easier to get good DNA out of all those horns and hair. The surrogate rating is because the Woolly Rhino has some conveniently-similar relatives. Unfortunately,

“Although the woolly rhino has close living relatives that might make suitable surrogates, all contemporary rhino species are themselves on the brink of extinction. As long as this remains the case, resurrecting a woolly rhino is unlikely to be a top priority.”

Well, shit.

Surprisingly, though the Dodo is mentioned, it ranks a pathetic 1-out-of-5 on the preservation scale. Now, I knew there were preserved Dodo remains lying around in museums, but I was shocked to learn that scientists are already cutting into those specimens!

“In 2002, geneticists at the University of Oxford got permission to cut into the world’s best-preserved dodo specimen, a foot bone - complete with skin and feathers - held under lock and key… This yielded minute fragments of dodo mitochondrial DNA but nothing more.”

Apparently, though DNA is present in almost every cell in living creatures, this isn’t the case for the dead. Or maybe they just sucked at specimen preservation in the seventeenth century. Also, no one has yet managed to clone a bird, which may or may not prove to be a problem.

Oddly enough, a major hurdle raised in the article is one of scale. Several of the animals on the list are essentially gigantic versions of existing creatures, just like in the Giant Land section of Super Mario Bros. 3, and this bigness has drastically reduced their surrogate ranking. Varius summarized the problem well when I showed him the article earlier this week:

“Giant sloths, giant armadillos, giant beavers, and giant elks would all be cool by virtue of their sheer bigness, but their size means there’s a lack of viable womb-space; in a few cases, the fetus would be larger than the parent. Short of finding a way to grow these creatures in jars or something, I can’t think of a good solution. I mean, what’s the point of cloning a giant armadillo if you have to make it small?”

Happily, this problem may soon be solved by researchers more interested in human babies. A lot of research money is being pumped into the field of Ectogenesis, and specifically the invention of a functioning artificial womb. Making babies for women who can’t do it the old-fashioned way is big business, and building a machine that could safely house an embryo or a pre-term fetus is sure to rake in the cash. It’s also a gigantic slap in the face to all lonely orphans everywhere. But the upshot is that once we get a mechanical uterus for human babies, it should be easy to build a bigger one to grow a Glyptodon in.

New Scientist closes the article with a reference to The Frozen Ark, a consortium of institutions, museums, and charities working to “collect, preserve and store DNA and viable cells from animals in danger of extinction.” The idea behind this project is to get the DNA from endangered species now, before we have to cut into museum exhibits that have been stuffed with sawdust. It’s an excellent idea, and one which could probably benefit from increased funding. I think we’d all love to see us some resurrected giant armadillos, but in the short term, we probably ought to work on keeping the gorillas around. And you know how we increase the gorilla population in the 21st century, right? Yeah, baby. We clone ‘em.

As regular readers of this site may have noticed, Varius and I spent a large chunk of last year watching the news cycle like a pair of overcaffeinated neurotic hawks. In all that time, the single factor that hid in the background of almost every major topic was energy. Presidential candidates expounded on their policies for weaning Americans off of foreign-bought oil. Environmentalists sparred with oil, gas, and coal companies over the best ways to reduce carbon emissions from the usage of fossil fuels. Agriculture analysts worried about food shortages stemming from the increase in biofuel production. Technology buffs championed the gradual efficiency improvements in solar cells. Automakers were attacked for failing to make hybrid cars fast enough. Economists linked high gas prices to high everything else prices. In short, virtually every single fucking news story you heard last year related, in some way, to energy.

So will somebody please explain to me why, in all that time, I never heard anybody say anything about the Fusion Reactor they’ve been building in California for the last eleven years? And why, when the project is happening right here in the United States, I finally needed the British to tell me about it?

Last week, while researching articles on starving koalas and Barack Obama’s muscles, I found myself clicking through the online version of the U.K. newspaper The Daily Telegraph. When I saw an article entitled, “Scientists plan to ignite tiny man-made star,” I immediately assumed that the project was going to be conducted at some prestigious European institution like CERN. But no! It’s actually happening at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California. What’s more, the NIF is on the grounds of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the U.S. keeps its nuclear weapons. This was all starting to sound rather ominous.

Luckily though, the “tiny man-made star” isn’t a new weapon. It’s a real live fusion reactor! As in, a power plant that mimics the processes that occur inside the Sun! Holy fuck!

No, I seriously mean it when I say “holy fuck,” because a fusion reactor is big league stuff; potentially far superior to today’s nuclear power plants. Your standard Twentieth Century nuclear power plant utilizes nuclear fission, which involves the breakdown of radioactive isotopes into smaller radioactive isotopes. A fissile chain reaction can produce enormous amounts of energy when harnessed; unfortunately, it also produces hazardous radioactive waste.

In contrast, nuclear fusion, as the name suggests, involves the fusion of two atoms into one. Specifically it’s “the process by which multiple like-charged atomic nuclei join together to form a heavier nucleus,” and in the case of the NIF’s reactor, hydrogen atoms are fused into helium atoms. Which is precisely what happens inside of a star. The process requires an enormous amount of energy, but when successful, the net energy gain is exponential. During a tour of the facility last November, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger explained the numbers thusly:

“The impact will unleash a burst of fusion energy up to 500 billion watts of power and, just to show you what this is, generating the power of the United States and multiply that by a thousand. So that’s what we are talking about, the energy this will create.”

Best of all, fusion reactions are carbon-free and don’t produce radioactive byproducts (theoretically, anyway). And if the fusion process succeeds in creating the predicted, “source of almost limitless energy,” it could put a welcome end to a lot of the arguments I mentioned in the first paragraph of this article.

The NIF is still in the process of calibrating the many lenses and mirrors that will align the 192 high-energy lasers needed to force the fusion reaction. Though the final pieces are now being put into place, the painstaking detail required in these calibrations could push the first test shot back to 2010. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that 2010 isn’t particularly far away anymore. And while I’m annoyed that it’s taken so long for me to find out about this, I have to acknowledge the wisdom of Beak editor Varius when he told me recently,

“The fact that I’m learning about it now, instead of 11 years ago when they started work on it, is even cooler, since it means I don’t have to sit around waiting for them to build the goddamn thing.”

So with the enormous potential of fusion energy, why hasn’t this project received more attention in the national media? I can only speculate, but my guess is that, unlike the coal plants, the NIF is spending their money on actual research, rather than on lobbyists.