Three slide shows for Orycon 2015

These are three slides shows I unwisely promised to present at the Orycon 37 science fiction convention on 2015 November 20 and 21. I allowed 3 months to research, design and practice the Stadyshell presentation, thinking the last would take about a month. I finished the last slide at 4am Nov 20. The talks were well received - I filled the room (at dinnertime!) for the last.

These are wydiwys webslide shows. When you click on the link, you will get the first alignment slide, with instructions. Click or hit space or pagedown for the next slide. home returns you to the first slide, and enter connects you to the hierarchial navigation menu (which I use for 3 day long thousand-slide presentations). These are built from a script stored in the design subdirectory, along with a free copy of the wydiwys perl program - if I was a smarter web designer, I would write a version of wydiwys with captioning and sound.

If you want to know what I planned to say, print out the script (or display it in another window or screen) and read along with the slides. There are extra slides at the end of the presentation, for answering frequent questions. I rehearse from the script, but wing it in front of a friendly crowd. That was necessary at Orycon, where the projector was sometimes delivered 20 minutes into my hour.

Everything here is sorta-kinda creative commons, built partly on images pilfered from the internet. Pilfer from me, please! If I pilfered from you and you don't like it, please let me know and I will change my presentation to showcase your competitor's images.

Server Sky slide show script

Server sky talk, including infrared frontside filtering, and raised GTO orbit 4 month test.

Note that the cubesat deployment depicts the thinsats emerging flat from the end of a 10 x 10 cm cubesat - in actual fact, they emerge edgewise, and are stowed diagonally, so they may be rectangular and perhaps 12 x 14 cm in size. The cubesat may open clamshell to ease deployment sideways. It will also have a cold gas thruster for 30 m/s delta V at apogee; a restartable higher-ISP thruster would be nice, but anything with high energy density (like hydrazine) may be too risky for our launch host.

Launch Loop web slide show script

This is always in demand among science fiction fans - for more information, see http://launchloop.com . Launch loop will only be developed after:

Bye Bye Pluto - a 50 AU Stapledon Dyson Shell made of Kuiper Belt Ice web slide show script

And this was just plain self-indulgent - I don't expect to live long enough :-( to see the first two happen, so I presented an "ultimate artifact" development of Server Sky that none of the audience will live long enough to see. An ice shell surrounding the sun at 50 AU, just beyond the aphelion of Pluto.

Unless we find something as remarkable as the Pluto-Charon system elsewhere in the Kuiper Belt, I think we should keep Pluto, and use it as a processing and launch facility for the Stady Shell. Since it will (artificially) clear its orbit of all other objects, it must be promoted to planet status. If it is not useful for that, we tear it apart. Either way, planet status controversy solved.

Stady = Stapeldon Dyson, Freeman Dyson credits Olaf Stapledon's 1937 space fantasy "Starmaker" for the idea. I am proposing something quite a bit more doable than the usual fanboy "dyson sphere" - I want to depreciate that name and concept.

Near the end of the talk, I suggest spreading out the x-ray flux from a nearby supernova (in the distant future) with Rayleigh scattering from the shell - this is probably too half-baked. Rayleigh scattering attenuates the main beam by scattering the flux in all directions - the x-ray scattering depicted, the whole beam a few microradians to dilute the flux arriving at Earth - won't happen this way, as my particle physicist friends tell me. So what can we do with a few months of accurate supernova prediction?