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Oh boy. There's no way to answer this without offending the piss out of someone. I'll answer what I know, and give an analysis of the elements that made it interesting to the rest of the media, along with certain timely events that this was linked to, but I'd be remiss if I didn't remark that the conversation is a bit of a mine field.The Events/The Mess What is Being Reported:In August of this year, the ex-boyfriend of indie game developer Zoe Quinn, Eron Gjoni, posted allegations on his blog that she had exchanged sex with Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson to get favorable reviews of her game, Depression Quest.On September 1st, ShortFatOtaku posted, then removed, then reposted a vlog poking fun at Quinn's sexual history and claiming that the woman holding the camera on both videos had talked to Gjoni in a 4chan IRC ("burgers and fries") and that he had disclosed that Quinn's PR agent may have been sleeping with the IGF chairman. The video posted by ShortFatOtaku speculates on a feminist/social justice illuminati that are taking over gaming, and accused Quinn's parent company, Silverstring Media, of being a part of that conspiracy. The video notes that companies and games that tend to win at the IGF are composed of clients, friends and colleagues of Silverstring Media.Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo confirmed that Quinn and Grayson were in a relationship, but noted that Grayson had never reviewed Quinn or her work after the commencement of the relationship. He notes that both her game and a failed show she had appeared on were mentioned on Kotaku before the relationship started.4chan members reacted to this by speculating on various conspiracies involving feminist, social justice and media critics, and noted that Silverstring also has ties to the Digital Games Research Association, an academic institution that studies gaming and gaming phenomena. DiGRA had recently held a retreat for Silverstring members on dismantling hegemonic masculinity.DiGRA itself had done work with DARPA on a project called IMMERSE, prompting 4chan members to believe they had stumbled on to some sort of massive, government conspiracy.The group of gamers, 4chan members and assorted others who believed they had discovered a plot began to try and investigate IGF, DiGRA, Quinn and Silverstring more deeply, launching several operations against IGF sponsors in the form of letter and emailing writing campaigns, joining an ongoing letter writing campaign about the state of gaming.Several youtube vloggers, including Boogie2988 and Jayd3Fox released vlogs and videos around this period served to interest several broad subsections of gamers in this and the previous campaigns against a spate of "gaming is dead" articles. Jayd3Fox linked this to Sarkesian's critiques of gaming, then took her vlog down, claiming to have been threatened by an anonymous woman over her videos critiquing Sarkesian.During this period, Quinn received a variety of threats, was doxxed repeatedly, and suffered wave after wave of harassment and hostility. Her father was called at home and told she was a whore, her head was photoshopped onto porn images, she was threatened with rape, death and serious bodily injury, including breaking her kneecaps if she attended conferences. Her most vocal supporters received the same treatment, causing Phil Fish of Polytron to sell his company and leave gaming after he and his private company information were doxxed repeatedly online.In response to this, Andreas Zechler of Spaces of Play wrote an open letter on September 1st to the gaming community, asking gamers to take a public stand against hateful and harassing speech in gaming. This petition was signed by 2,495 people in the gaming industry. This letter was picked up by a variety of mainstream news outlets, which again linked Sarkesian to Quinn and harassment in gaming.Boogie2988 responded by mounting his own petition, which agreed with Zechler but demanded game developers stop referring to gamers as neckbeards. This petition garnered over 9,000 signatures.At this point, Breitbart noticed and began to publish on gaming and the feminist bullies "tearing it apart." Other critics chimed in, including Dr. Hoff-Sommers.Al Jazeera published a piece on it during this period, causing another round of strife, both within those who felt there to be a feminist conspiracy and in those who felt that it amounted to a conspiracy theory.Those who felt there was a conspiracy responded to the article by publishing a screen cap of what they characterized as financial ties between a Jenn Frank, who wrote an article in The Guardian about the on-going harassment of Quinn and Sarkesian. The screen cap, of the journalist's Patreon Account, lists Zoe Quinn as a friend on that account. The Guardian and Frank both responded that Frank had disclosed the relationship and it was not judged to be a conflict of interest.The virulence of the harassment of Frank caused her to declare that she would stop writing on gaming entirely, a move that did not stop the harassment.By this point, practically everyone has chimed in on the subject, and someone spammed Sarkesian's twitter account with child pornography in response to her comments on the situation.Quin responded on the 6th of September by publishing excerpts from the "burgers and fries" IRC on the date Gjoni had revealed the relationship between her PR person and the IGF, releasing them on twitter and in other places. The excerpts also revealed that various publicity campaigns targeting her were conceived on the IRC, and that the discussion of ethics in gaming journalism was originally conceptualized to provide a plausible smokescreen for harassment. The excerpts also demonstrated that her ex had helped orchestrate the harassment.Members of that IRC disagreed on The Escapist, and released a full dump of the chat logs, to show that the involved group was a minority in the IRC. They did admit that Operation #NotYourShield was conceived on 4chan, but said that it was created by minority gamers frustrated by the way they were portrayed in games. Other users used chat logs to demonstrate that on the /v/ board, attempts to abuse Quinn's character were dismissed.Gjoni released a statement asking everyone to step back and calm down.On the 7th of September, the ShortFatOtaku vlogger posted a video claiming to show proof of conspiracy, fraud and racketeering on the part of Phil Fish, Polytron, IndieFund, IGF and IndieCade--the video claimed that the winning streak enjoyed by the game Fez was a result of that conspiracy, and claimed that the voting software used to vote for favorites had been rigged.The IGF responded by publishing their judging process, and the coder who wrote the voting software spent time on "burgers and fries" answering questions about the software.Shortly after this, ShortFatOtaku made the videos private (the accusations amounted to admitting hacking, responsibility for damage, and what was likely to be false accusations of serious crimes.)However, despite this, the GamerGate tag has begun to gain momentum again on twitter and other social outlets. Ogeeku speculates that this is partially due to The Escapist's embrace of the poor gaming ethics explanation for the previous events.Around September 11th, GamerGate supporters (the feminist conspiracy side of the debate) stated that they had contacted the charity organizations Quinn had stated she donated the proceeds from Depression Quest to--iFred, and the National Suicide Hotline. Representatives from these organizations stated that they did not know her or have an affiliation with her. During the same time, a blogger claimed to have contacted the SF Police Department and have discovered that Sarkesian had never reported any threats.One of the Breitbart-affiliated journalists who originally wrote about the situation took this information and confronted both Quinn and Sarkesian on twitter about it. Ogeeku and several other outlets have noticed that this journalist has increasingly dedicated his career to trying to destroy Sarkesian, and as such may not be a reliable source of information about her.Quinn responded by posting the email receipts for her donations, and posted it on her blog.The officer who was originally stated to have said Sarkesian never filed charges with the SF police department went on to state that it was because she was working with the FBI.The volume, seriousness, public nature, and frequency of the material published about Quinn, as well as the demands made on Kotaku and via other gaming review sites, attracted the attention of main stream media sources, causing stories about the incidents to be carried in The New York Times, Forbes, The Washington Post, Time, The New Yorker, Business Insider, Vice, The Guardian, Slate, BBC News, and a number of smaller venues, including gaming review sites and publications.Because the response to Quinn is very like the response to a series of other women in gaming over the last two calendar years (threats of rape, murder, serious bodily injury, doxxing, posting person schedules and home address, and the attempt to threaten employment or business opportunities), this particular case involving Quinn has been adopted into a discussion about misogyny and sexism in gaming that has been ongoing. Quinn's case, due to the style, type, and frequency of harassment, has been compared to the harassment of Sarkesian and other women in gaming across a variety of media venues.A Precis of the Arguments:There are actually three related arguments, aside from the tactics issues, which I'll address in a bit.The first argument is that gaming is, for the most part, not a medium intended to be terribly serious. While individual games may be serious (for instance, Silent Hill 2), the overall medium is and should remain a diversion, and its most serious responsibility is to entertain.There are several sub-arguments to this argument, including a certain amount of resentment about the increasing turn of gaming journalism to reviewing what amounts to high game art, rather than games that gamers would usually be attracted to. Another sub-argument is that the point of gaming is to be diverted from one's life, or local conditions, and to enjoy exploring a fantasy world, scenario, story or some other unreal environment. This argument notes that the ability to be diverted would be damaged by the introduction of serious critique into a light or relatively harmless art form.As far as I can tell, this represents a combination of nostalgia (the desire to simplify one's life or to be able to have a portion of one's life that is simple, and the belief that the past represents this), the desire to continue to use gaming as a vehicle for escape or entertainment, and a frustration with what is seen as an increasingly distant development process.Early PC gaming (1980s, and I was around to see it, if young), often involved small gaming studios, child studios of large tech developers, hobby programmers, people creating free games, and imports--you could go to a store and pick up a floppy with games like Castle Adventure, Clue, PacMan 3D, BattleChess and other first gen PC games bundled together, or pick up multiple disk sets like King's Quest, or Space Quest. This is also the period in which the first Nintendo hit US shores, and it was possible to rent the machines from video stores and bring them home for 24 hours with titles like Rygar, Dr. Mario, Legend of Zelda, or Kid Icarus.You could subscribe and write to Nintendo Power, and they might publish your letters or gaming tips, and whether right or wrong, many gamers who view gaming as a non-serious venue view that period as one in which they and their interests were better received.The average demographic for gamers is a little bit younger than me (but not much), and grew up with the genesis of gaming technology in the US. It's likely they have strong associations between their childhood and a period that seemed simpler, easier, and potentially happier. Gaming, for people who have these associations, represents a potentially freer, happier and more innocent time, and gamers with these associations are likely to resent intrusion into the happiness they associate with it.The second argument is that gaming is a product of culture, and as a product of culture that disseminates cultural ideas, associations and ideals, can be studied or critiqued on that basis, with attention paid to the dissemination of messages that don't alienate, insult, demean, or mock others. This is not a new argument by any means--it's been applied to various art forms over the years, and is used to provide a basis for discussing any number of cultural events.Gaming, however, has not always been the sort of popular phenomenon it currently is. (Siddown kids, grandma's gonna tell a story.) During the genesis of electronic gaming here in the US using consoles and computers, the audience for gaming was highly likely to be male, white, and/or of a middle class background. The audience for PC gaming was also likely to be in their twenties, since PC were much more rare and expensive during this period, and the OS with its pretty pictures didn't become a thing until the late 80s to 90s--if you had a computer, you needed to know how to operate it from a command line and how to boot an OS from a floppy. Chances are good you also needed to know how to build one, how to operate a soldering iron, and how to fix various maintenance issues. (Kids these days and their mice and their point and click and their quick time events and their repair places everywhere....)I can also distinctly remember going with my father to Radio Shack or various ma and pa electronics stores to pick up parts for something he was working on and begging him for a game. My brother and I were the only children I ever saw in the store, and my father went often (hazards of being an electrical engineer and hobbyist of sorts).It also was not cool to be a nerd until relatively recently, making the older audience for gaming a group of people who felt stigmatized and picked on (and likely were. I took my share of it,* and no doubt many other nerds of the 80s and 90s did, as well.) The lens of cultural criticism aimed at gaming points out race, class and gender elements, and for many nerds accustomed to thinking of themselves as a minority of sorts, comes as a shock and an insult to that group.Some people in this group appear to respond by trying to "save" gaming from what they perceive as being ruined by its own popularity--they reason that the only reason gaming is being subjected to this kind of attention is because it has crossed over into the popular imagination, wherein abides cultural criticism and other influences that will "ruin" the fun of gaming and the connection between gamers and development companies.Some people in this group also appear to be trying to save gaming from the influx of gamers who don't appreciate (aka won't allow things to be more or less the way they were) gaming as a venue. To the extent that new gamers are willing to allow gaming to remain the way it was, they are welcome--it's the people who want to change and complicate things that aren't welcome.I really just can't overstate the influence of nostalgia and escapism in this debate.The last argument is that gaming, like the internet in general, is a true meritocracy--in the sense that the people who thrive best there are those who can best watch their own backs. People who employ this argument are often employing it in service of both the history of gaming and the computer (the original nerds were those who did not need the kind of oversight and hand-holding OS and gaming now provides), and in the service of eliminating what they appear to believe is a set of arguments that make gaming and computers no longer the domain of those with an elite set of skills or certain mentality, but the general public (who will influence gaming and computers to make them less demanding, less intensive, require less intelligence to operate, and less useful, overall.) There is also an undercurrent here of preserving what amounts to a fairly elite clubhouse--again, keeping in mind that older nerds will have spent a considerable amount of time being a minority and have experienced a certain amount of persecution over this.This argument interacts with gaming in a variety of ways, including the general assertion that if someone is genuinely good at gaming (or programming, or what have you), they won't need what is presumed to be a series of arguments about requiring their inclusion. Their abilities will be acknowledged, and they won't need anyone else to help them get acceptance. For gaming, in particular, this argument is sometimes paired with a series of arguments about "natural" or "inborn" skills in certain gender or racial groups, including a few arguments about women and aggression (which I've been finding hilarious since 1984, the first time someone used one on me and I remember it.)The Tactics Issues:I'm classing the discussion about gaming ethics here, for several reasons--first, for those of us who've been around long enough to have subscribed to Nintendo Power, or have read the various computing magazines put out for Apple, Commodore, or Atari owners know that many of the gaming specific early magazines were essentially shills for gaming companies. PC gaming did have the advantage of some independent magazines, but the lines between gaming journalism and gaming companies were often fairly thin or non-existent. Ethics concerns are not new, but they have not been terribly popular as a discussion topic (as far as I can tell, in my years online and reading gaming articles--feel free, if you're reading and have a time line of that, to update me.)If there's an actual discussion to be had here about journalistic ethics and gaming, it's worth having. However, as Ogeeku states (and I agree), the well is so poisoned it's impossible to have the discussion in any reasonable or useful way.To be blunt, if you're going to discuss how to do ethics right, it's probably best to try and take at least the middle road, if not the high road.Second, the pairing of ethics discussions to doxxing, various threats and accusations, the 0-6 record for those accusations and the highly personal nature of the threats undermines the authority of anyone who wants to talk about ethics--it's not ethical to threaten to rape, murder or maim people who disagree with you, and it's impossible to have a discussion about ethics when one or more parties is afraid they're going to be wounded, killed or raped if they attend conferences.Tactically speaking, while they are fighting vociferously, the old guard (the people who would like to keep gaming the way it was), are fighting a losing war--gaming has hit enough popularity to prevent attempts to regroup as an exclusive club. Unless the vast majority of general gaming audiences stop playing tomorrow, gaming is no longer an exclusive club. This has a variety of effects on gaming that are both a part of this debate (in the sense that gaming cannot avoid being exposed to people and groups that disagree with certain ideologies in gaming) and extend beyond this debate, because they create new and different markets for gaming. These markets, in turn, place different pressures on developers and create market subsections, and can attract developers into new markets. This does not mean that gaming cannot retain amusement as a central goal, but it does mean that amusement is going to have to take on a whole lot of definitions for those groups.Also tactically speaking, GamerGate makes it clear that there is a fairly broad swathe of users who tend to characterize groups with opposing ideologies as conspiracies. Social engineering in groups with those tendencies, even ham-handed social engineering, can be remarkably successful even in the face of proof of falsity. The continuance and resurgence of the GamerGate tag, in the face of the continuing string of false accusations, is something of a testament to the persistence of conspiracy narratives and social engineering in some populations. Of course, the GamerGate side of this is not alone in this tendency, but appears to be fueled differently than their opponents.This particular debate in gaming is part of a series of cultural clashes, and that cultural clashes over these issues are unlikely to die any time soon for a variety of reasons, including their continuing absorption into popular thought--simply watching cultural change in the US over the last * cough * thirty odd years (I'm older than that but that's about when I started really noticing) has been like watching a slow riot (you can see the bottle coming, but it takes a while to shatter). While gaming itself is a subsection, and a very small one, in a larger debate, it is not an island in that debate and, like anything happening to a group of people with diverse ideas, is going to be the site of conflict on those issues.Why the term conspiracy theory fits:With conspiracy theories, accuracy is much less important than confirming someone's suspicions and the comfort that comes from confirming those suspicions. In a very essential sense (and I say this, again, as someone who's spent waaaaay too much time in various IRC, conspiracy nut sites, and browsing almost anything I could get to on the internet, including 4chan (hi fellas)), a conspiracy theory is both a way of unifying a group of people and of comforting oneself about the progression of events that someone may feel powerless to prevent.I've flirted with my own, earlier in my internet life--I used to find all sorts of totalitarian state conspiracies sort of attractive in my late teens and early twenties, for a variety of reasons having to do with feeling powerless, encroached upon in my daily life, getting social approval, and being raised by the kinds of Christians who genuinely believed the apocalypse could happen any day now.Just...you know.... replace Satan with gob'ment (I never was good at belief).People on those sites would often present parts of realistic looking documents, or hearsay, or report on troop movements, or other sorts of seemingly provocative minutae, and draw huge conclusions from them which seemed really realistic. I was old enough to really start examining the dynamics of power from more than just my own experiences, though they certainly played a part.**Thinking about myself as "being in the know," and having preparations for when everything went to hell, and thinking of myself as having special knowledge was pretty attractive--it made me, for lack of a better word, part of a special group. The more people made fun of the conspiracy theory, the more attractive it was to me (the sheeeeeeeeple, man, they just don't get it).I got over it once I hit college and started to get a more sophisticated education in social analysis and exposure to history, politics, tactics, and technology. I couldn't verify any of the claims on the site, not even the ones which would have been in the historical record (and I hate being inaccurate, though it happens often enough that I ought to be used to it.)The continuing popularity of the GamerGate tag, despite the thorough debunking of the associated claims, is probably much more about the dynamics of being a part of a group and the kind of support that exists in a much more tangible form in the group than it is accuracy (or gaming ethics.) I think, in this case, it's probably also a function of seeing one's favorite diversion being made serious and no longer just a vehicle for having fun.Conspiracy theories are characterized by their lack of the need for proof, and this certainly qualifies. They're also characterized by in group dynamics that foster a sense of persecution by out group forces, in group enlightenment and a coming sense of disaster or sense of essential falsity on the part of overwhelming forces--in this case, the feminist illuminati.***I'll even go one further and speculate that in this case, the nostalgia is part of an ongoing response to the increasing range and scope of social change as societies and cultures interact closely through the medium of the internet, but that's a bit tenuous for this discussion.GamerGate appeals to people who feel alienated by the changing face of gaming, people who feel criticized when they've been the minority, people who want to keep gaming the way it was, people who are already prone to assuming conspiracies, and people who feel as if they're being disenfranchised by the changes in society being carried out in gaming. It has been timely, in the sense that it is happening during a particularly pessimistic period in game journalism (see all the "gaming is dead" articles) and during a period where there's an active series of cultural debates occurring on the role of gaming in culture.Where it can enlist the disaffected, it will continue. I think, however, that it's overdue for a fizzle out--while it does manage to capture certain disaffected elements of the gaming community (not just those my age, though I talked a lot about your average gamer by demographics), it's been wrong too many times to salvage its reputation unless someone manages to be very, very right with the tag.We'll see.* Much of it from other, male nerds for being female, thanks guys.** At that point, I'd been homeless and had a graduate education in power discrepancies, police officers, random assholes, and being homeless and a teenage girl--the people on the site couldn't out cynic me in that regard.*** And if there is one, I'm hurt that no one has invited me to any meetings. I'd be a fantastic secret master.________________________________Source material:Ogeeku article, which has a ton of links: #GamerGate - All Quiet on the 4chan Front - OgeekuWikipedia has a nice list of articles on this from a variety of sources and I'm lazy tonight: Gamergate controversy

WILD FIRES ARE A HEALTHY AND NATURAL REALITY AND IN DECLINE GLOBALLYOne bad bush fire year in Australia does not climate change make especially when there is so little evidence of unusual warming in our snow ridden world and if there was any warming it is obviously from the natural variability of the post Little Ice Age cooling. Bush fires in Australia and wild fires in California share the challenge of human error in land management. New research puts the spotlight on human error as a major factor in the severity.The historical data of wild fires shows 50 years with little intensity and then the odd year very destructive and how. This data debunks any relevance of the fires to a new trend of climate change. Also the data shows no correlation between temperatures in Australia over the past 50 years and wild fires. In fact the worst fires happened in 1974 one of the coolest years.Further in Australia the winter of 2019 our summer had record snowfall to the delight of the ski resorts.PHOTO Australian snow bus for happy skiing.Here is 67 years of wild fire data suggests a cooling climate not global warming.Well researched science of the Indian Ocean Dipole confirms the rainfall or lack thereof in Australia is the result of natural forces not human cars and trucks.Summary and KeywordsDiscovered at the very end of the 20th century, the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) is a mode of natural climate variability that arises out of coupled ocean–atmosphere interaction in the Indian Ocean. It is associated with some of the largest changes of ocean–atmosphere state over the equatorial Indian Ocean on interannual time scales. IOD variability is prominent during the boreal summer and fall seasons, with its maximum intensity developing at the end of the boreal-fall season. Between the peaks of its negative and positive phases, IOD manifests a markedly zonal see-saw in anomalous sea surface temperature (SST) and rainfall—leading, in its positive phase, to a pronounced cooling of the eastern equatorial Indian Ocean, and a moderate warming of the western and central equatorial Indian Ocean; this is accompanied by deficit rainfall over the eastern Indian Ocean and surplus rainfall over the western Indian Ocean.Indian Ocean Dipole - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate ScienceVijay Jayaraj explains how weather is created around the Indian Ocean in this article Record Heat and Cold Expose Climate Alarmists’ Bias. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.HUMAN ERROR is the well documented evidence for Australia and California wild fires and research shows humans are 90% + to blame for starting wild fires either deliberately or accidentally.Note there are record cold temperatures for this time of year in parts of Australia and no science for the false view that hot dry weather starts wild fires.Australia suffers record cold summerWeather is not the issue as temperatures are record cold in many parts of Australia.25+ LOCATIONS ACROSS SOUTH AUSTRALIA HAVE JUST SUFFERED THEIR COLDEST JANUARY DAYS EVER — MAINSTREAM MEDIA SILENTJANUARY 6, 2020 CAP ALLONParts of South Australia have just shivered through some of their coldest January days on record — with Adelaide missing out on beating its 1970 record by just 0.7C.The temperature at Adelaide’s West Terrace weather station reached just 16.6C on Sunday — about 13C below the average for the time of year, and below the city’s previous lowest January max temp on record, the 17.1C from 1970.However, because of the controversial way the BOM now measures Australia’s maximum temperatures “as the highest reading during the 24 hours to 9am each day,” an observation of 17.8C at Adelaide’s West Terrace site just before 9am on Monday has gone down as the official max for the 24 hour period.So Adelaide may have narrowly –and conveniently– missed out, but more than 25 locations across South Australia have just endured their coldest January days on record, as reported by www.adelaidenow.com.au and quietly logged by the BOM.Just look at the temp departures during the first week of the year:25+ Locations across South Australia have just suffered their Coldest January Days ever - Mainstream Media Silent - ElectroverseOne very hot year of bush fires in Australia cannot possibly be evidence of climate change (distorted meaning human forced change). One year of weather hot or cold is just weather because the climate is chaotic and non-linear incapable of prediction more than a few days out and changes very slowly.Here is a newspaper story this week from Australia documenting this reality. Also I add some analysis for Australia and similar studies for California.Arson, mischief and recklessness: 87 per cent of fires are man-madeOur coverage of the bushfire crisis is free for all readers. Please consider supporting our journalism with a subscription.By Paul ReadNovember 18, 2019 — 12.00amThere are, on average, 62,000 fires in Australia every year. Only a very small number strike far from populated areas and satellite studies tell us that lightning is responsible for only 13 per cent. Not so the current fires threatening to engulf Queensland and NSW. There were no lightning strikes on most of the days when the fires first started in September. Although there have been since, these fires – joining up to create a new form of mega-fire – are almost all man-made.About 40 per cent of fires are deliberately lit ... The Hillville fire that destroyed homes last week.CREDIT:NICK MOIRA 2015 satellite analysis of 113,000 fires from 1997-2009 confirmed what we had known for some time – 40 per cent of fires are deliberately lit, another 47 per cent accidental. This generally matches previous data published a decade earlier that about half of all fires were suspected or deliberate arson, and 37 per cent accidental. Combined, they reach the same conclusion: 87 per cent are man-made.The cycles of the seasons are changing beyond that which can be explained by known forces, both ancient and modern. Every lethal wildfire since 1857 has happened at the height of summer. Until now. The size of these fires has never been seen in Australia's history this side of summer, and certainly not starting as early as September.Seasonal changes, in part due to climate change on top of natural oscillations causing the drought and westerly winds, have some origins in man-made emissions. More directly, however, the source of ignition is human.AdvertisementIt's not lost on police, emergency services and firefighters at the front line that most of these fires were lit deliberately, or accidentally through recklessness, nor that they are unprecedented in their timing and ferocity. Since September, it has been a constant pattern that a few days after the fires roar through we have the first police reports that arson or recklessness was involved.RELATED ARTICLEBUSHFIRESPolice say firebugs will be 'put before a court'Add to shortlistThe mix of people lighting fires always follow the same age and gender profiles: whether accidental or deliberate, half are children, a minority elderly, and the most dangerous are those aged between 30 and 60. Ninety per cent are male.The psychosexual pyromaniac has long been relegated to dusty tomes from 1904 to the1950s. At least among those caught, the profile emerges of an odd, unintelligent person from a chaotic family, marginalised at the fringes of society and deeply involved in many types of crime, not only fire.If I had to guess, I'd say about 10,000 arsonists lurk from the top of Queensland to the southern-most tip of Victoria, but not all are active and some light fires during winter. The most dangerous light fires on the hottest days, generally closer to communities and during other blazes, suggesting more malicious motives. Only a tiny minority will gaze with wonder at the destruction they have wrought, deeply fascinated and empowered. Others get caught up with the excitement of chaos and behave like impulsive idiots.As for children, they are not always malicious. Children and youths follow the age-crime curve where delinquency peaks in their late teens. Fire is just one of many misbehaviours. The great majority grow out of it. Four overlapping subgroups include: accidental fire-play getting out of control; victims of child abuse – including sexual abuse – and neglect; children with autism and developmental disorders; and conduct disorder from a younger age, which can be genuinely dangerous.RELATED ARTICLECRIMEPolice hospitalised after catching accused arsonist in the actWhereas the first three groups can be helped and stopped, the last is more problematic. These children are more likely to continue lighting fires for a lifetime, emerging as psychopaths in adulthood. This tends to match the finding that only 10 per cent of convicted arsonists will go on to light fires again after prison. They are the recidivists, more fascinated by fire, more prone to giving in to dangerous urges when in crisis, more impulsive, less empathic – the hallmarks of a psychopath.Some research suggests only a very small percentage of arsonists are ever caught, which has several implications.One is that we have a biased profile of who they really are. Whereas the children and the dopey get caught, the more cunning would be less represented in our samples. More ominous, many more than 10,000 arsonists might be active.One of the few prospective studies of almost 3000 fire lighters in South Australia alone found as many as 14 per cent of people in a community sample lit fires. This level is much higher than actual convictions would suggest. Further to this, community sampling suggests females represent 20 per cent of those fire lighters, even though convictions of females are only half this figure. If this trend continues into adulthood, it suggests we have a biased view of the typical arsonist to begin with.Those we haven't caught yet are still hiding, but we know enough to recognise them and, one day, maybe stop them.RELATED ARTICLEBUSHFIRESIn the path of disaster: The big causes of bushfires that most of us are missingIn the thick of a deadly crisis, it beggars belief that some people would seek to make it worse. But we should be careful who we demonise. Not all children mean to do harm. Careful handling of them will reduce, not exacerbate, their problems and allow caregivers to refer them before the first match is struck.Emergency services and communities on the front line will shine a light on the very best of humanity; others will disgrace themselves through idiocy or malice. Amid the chaos of confronting fires, the psychopath forever looms – not only the criminals who light fires in the forests and grasslands but perhaps also, figuratively, the people who profit from planetary destruction and ignore the urgent warnings of 23 emergency commissioners to prepare.When the flames abate, we can have a sensible national dialogue about the prevention of wildfires, handling arson, and maybe even climate change.Paul Read is an ecological criminologist and sustainability scientist at Monash UniversityArson, mischief and recklessness: 87 per cent of fires are man-madeNASA GISS Fudges Data, Cooling Turns Into WarmingClimatologist: Blaming Aussie Bushfires On Climate Change Is ‘Alarmist Nonsense’WRITTEN BY ROY W. SPENCER, PH.D. ONJAN 9, 2020 POSTED IN LATEST NEWSSummary Points1) Global wildfire activity has decreased in recent decades, making any localized increase (or decrease) in wildfire activity difficult to attribute to ‘global climate change’.2) Like California, Australia is prone to bushfires every year during the dry season. Ample fuel and dry weather exist for devastating fires each year, even without excessive heat or drought, as illustrated by the record number of hectares burned (over 100 million) during 1974-75 when above-average precipitation and below-average temperatures existed.3) Australian average temperatures in 2019 were well above what global warming theory can explain, illustrating the importance of natural year-to-year variability in weather patterns (e.g. drought and excessively high temperatures).4) Australia precipitation was at a record low in 2019, but climate models predict no long-term trend in Australia precipitation, while the observed trend has been upward, not downward. This again highlights the importance of natural climate variability to fire weather conditions, as opposed to human-induced climate change.5) While reductions in prescribed burning have probably contributed to the irregular increase in the number of years with large bush fires, a five-fold increase in population in the last 100 years has greatly increased potential ignition sources, both accidental and purposeful.Historical BackgroundAustralia has a long history of bush fires, with the Aborigines doing prescribed burns centuries (if not millennia) before European settlement.A good summary of the history of bushfires and their management was written by the CSIRO Division of Forestry twenty-five years ago, entitled Bushfires – An Integral Part of Australia’s Environment.The current claim by many that human-caused climate change has made Australian bushfires worse is difficult to support, for a number of reasons.Bushfires (like wildfires elsewhere in the world) are a natural occurrence wherever there is strong seasonality in precipitation, with vegetation growing during the wet season and then becoming fuel for fire during the dry season.All other factors being equal, wildfires (once ignited) will be made worse by higher temperatures, lower humidity, and stronger winds.But with the exception of dry lightning, the natural sources of fire ignition are pretty limited. High temperatures and low humidity alone do not cause dead vegetation to spontaneously ignite.As the human population increases, the potential ignition sources have increased rapidly. The population of Australia has increased five-fold in the last 100 years (from 5 million to 25 million).Discarded cigarettes and matches, vehicle catalytic converters, sparks from electrical equipment and transmission lines, campfires, prescribed burns going out of control, and arson are some of the more obvious sources of human-caused ignition, and these can all be expected to increase with population.Trends in Bushfire ActivityThe following plot shows the major Australian bushfires over the same period of time (100 years) as the five-fold increase in the population of Australia.The data come from Wikipedia’s Bushfires in Australia.Fig. 1. Yearly fire season (June through May) hectares burned by major bushfires in Australia since the 1919-20 season (2019-20 season total is as of January 7, 2020).As can be seen, by far the largest area burned occurred during 1974-75, at over 100 million hectares (close to 15% of the total area of Australia).Curiously, though, according to Australia Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) data, the 1974-75 bushfires occurred during a year with above-average precipitation and below-average temperature.This is opposite to the narrative that major bushfires are a feature of just excessively hot and dry years.Every dry season in Australia experiences excessive heat and low humidity.Australia’s High-Temperature TrendsThe following plot (in red) shows the yearly average variations in daily high temperatures for Australia, compared to the 40-year average during 1920-1959.Fig. 2. Yearly average high temperatures in Australia as estimated from thermometer data (red) and as simulated by the average of 41 climate models (blue). (Source).Also shown in Fig. 2 (in blue) is the average of 41 CMIP5 climate models daily high temperature for Australia (from the KNMI Climate Explorer website). There are a few important points to be made from this plot.First, if we correlate the yearly temperatures in Fig. 2 with the bushfire land area burned in Fig. 1, there is essentially no correlation (-0.11), primarily because of the huge 1974-75 event.If that year is removed from the data, there is a weak positive correlation (+0.19, barely significant at the 2-sigma level).But having statistics depend so much on single events (in this case, their removal from the dataset) is precisely one of the reasons why we should not use the current (2019-2020) wildfire events as an indicator of long-term climate change.Secondly, while it is well known that the CMIP5 models are producing too much warming in the tropics compared to observations, in Australia just the opposite is happening: the BOM temperatures are showing more rapid warming than the average of the climate models produces.This could be a spurious result of changes in Australian thermometer measurement technology and data processing as has been claimed by Jennifer Marohasy.Or, maybe the discrepancy is from natural climate variability. Who knows?Finally, note the huge amount of year-to-year temperature variability in Fig. 2.Clearly, 2019 was exceptionally warm, but a good part of that warmth was likely due to natural variations in the tropics and subtropics, due to persistent El Nino conditions and associated changes in where precipitation regions versus clear air regions tend to get established in the tropics and subtropics.Australia Precipitation TrendsTo drive home the point that any given year should not be used as evidence of a long-term trend, Australia precipitation provides an excellent example.The following plot is like the temperature plot above (Fig. 2), but for precipitation, as reported by the BOM (data here).Fig. 3. As in Fig. 2, but for annual precipitation totals.We can see that 2019 was definitely a dry year in Australia, right? Possibly a record-setter.But the long-term trend has been upward (not downward), again illustrating the fact that any given year might not have anything to do with the long-term trend, let alone human-induced climate change.And regarding the latter, the blue curve in Fig. 3 shows that the expectation of global warming theory as embodied by the average of 41 climate models is that there should have been no long-term trend in Australia precipitation, despite claims by the media, pseudo-experts, and Hollywood celebrities to the contrary.Keep in mind that wildfire risk can actually increase with more precipitation during the growing season preceding fire season. More precipitation produces more fuel.In fact, there is a positive correlation between the precipitation data in Fig. 3 and bushfire hectares burned (+0.30, significant at the 3-sigma level).Now, I am not claiming that hot, dry conditions do not favor more bushfire activity. They indeed do (during fire season), everything else being the same.But the current 2019-2020 increase in bushfires would be difficult to tie to global warming theory based upon the evidence in the above three plots.Global Wildfire ActivityIf human-caused climate change (or even natural climate change) was causing wildfire activity to increase, it should show up much better in global statistics than in any specific region, like Australia.Of course, any specific region can have an upward (or downward) trend in wildfire activity, simply because of the natural, chaotic variations in weather and climate.But, contrary to popular perception, a global survey of wildfire activity has found that recent decades have actually experienced less fire activity (Doerr & Santin, 2016), not more.This means there are more areas experiencing a decrease in wildfire activity than there are areas experiencing more wildfires.Why isn’t this decrease being attributed to human-caused climate change?Concluding CommentsThere are multiple reasons why people have the impression that wildfires are getting worse and human-caused climate change is to blame. First, the news tends to report only disasters… not a lack of disasters.The desire for more clicks means that headlines are increasingly sensationalized. The media can always find at least one expert to support the desired narrative.Second, the spread of news is now rapid and it penetrates deeply, being spread through social media.Third, an increasing number of environmental advocacy groups seize upon any natural disaster and declare it to be caused by increasing CO2 in the atmosphere.The hyperbolic and counter-factual claims of Extinction Rebellion is one of the best recent examples of this.This is all against a backdrop of government-funded science that receives funding in direct proportion to the threat to life and property that the researcher can claim exists if science answers are not found, and policy is not changed.So, it should come as no surprise that there is political influence on what research gets funding when the outcome of that research directly affects public policy.My personal opinion, based upon the available evidence, is that any long-term increase in wildfire activity in any specific location like Australia (or California) is dominated by the increase in human-caused ignition events, whether they be accidental or purposeful.A related reason is the increasing pressure by the public to reduce prescribed burns, clearing of dead vegetation, and cutting of fire breaks, which the public believes to have short term benefits to beauty and wildlife preservation, but results in long-term consequences that are just the opposite and much worse.Recent news reports claim that dozens of people have been arrested in Australia on arson charges, a phenomenon which we must assume has also increased by at least five-fold (like population) in the last 100 years.Accidental sources of ignition also increase in lockstep with the increasing population and all of the infrastructure that comes along with more people (vehicles, power lines, campfires, discarded matches, and cigarettes, etc.)So, to automatically blame the Australian bushfires on human-caused climate change is mostly alarmist nonsense, with virtually no basis in fact.Read more at Dr. Roy’s BlogClimatologist: Blaming Aussie Bushfires On Climate Change Is 'Alarmist Nonsense'WRITTEN BY THOMAS D. WILLIAMS, PH.D. ONJAN 10, 2020. POSTED IN LATEST NEWSExperts Say California Wildfires Not Caused By Climate ChangeA panel of experts said Wednesday that California’s devastating wildfires were caused primarily by “the way we manage lands and develop our landscape” rather than climate change.Speaking at the annual conference of the National Council for Science and the Environment in Washington D.C., Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at the University of California, Berkeley, said that perhaps 20 to 25 percent of the wildfire damage resulted from climate change, whereas “75 percent is the way we manage lands and develop our landscape.”Stephens noted that in past centuries, wildfires were far more widespread than they are today, and played a vital role in California’s ecosystem by helping to thin forests, Thomas Frank reported for E&E News.In the 18th century, for instance, when California was occupied by indigenous communities, wildfires would burn up some 4.5 million acres a year, said Stephens, whereas from 2013 through 2019, wildfires burned an average of just 935,000 acres annually in California.Even in 2018, the worst year for California fires, blazes consumed just 2 million acres.“When you think about what fire used to do in the state, it was so integral to systems. Fire was almost as important as rain to ecosystems,” Stephens said.Jennifer Montgomery, director of the California Forest Management Task Force, said that climate change did not cause wildfires but “accelerated” them by creating hotter and drier conditions that aggravated naturally occurring blazes.“Climate change is an amplifier for natural systems and natural occurrences,” Montgomery said.The comments by Montgomery and Stephens flew in the face of recent assertions by the head of California’s largest power utility who has blamed the wildfires on climate change.The CEO of PG&E Corp., CEO Bill Johnson, testified at a Senate hearing last month that the wildfires were “a climate-driven experience” caused by extensive drought.California’s “prolonged, record drought; unprecedented tree mortality; heat waves” and offshore Diablo winds created “a significant and an unforeseen increase in wildfires,” Johnson told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.A December report by California regulators, however, said that PG&E and subsidiary Pacific Gas and Electric Co. had “failed to maintain an effective inspection and maintenance program to identify and correct hazardous conditions on its transmission lines.”The utility has acknowledged blame for the massive 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and burned more than 150,000 acres in Northern California.Experts Say California Wildfires Not Caused By Climate ChangeSmoke And Deception Blanket Australia: NASA GISS Fudges Data, Cooling Turns Into WarmingBy P Gosselin on3. January 2020By Kirye and P GosselinWe’ve been hearing much fake news about the Australian bush fires supposedly having been caused by man-made climate change. Yet it has emerged that Australian authorities were warned years ago that poor land management practices were in fact escalating the risk of devastating fires, according to an expert.Forest fuel level highest in 1000 yearsIn 2015, bush fire scientist David Packham warned of a “huge blaze threat” and urged an “increase in fuel reduction burns”.“Forest fuel levels had climbed to their most dangerous level in thousands of years,” wrote Darren Gray here in 2015. Today the public is being misled by climate alarmists and the media on the real causes of the devastating bush fires now taking place.In fact NASA data shows that the area burned by global wildfires dropped by 25% since 2003, according to the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)Misleading temperature trendsUnfortunately, deception is not only taking place in the communication of Australian bush fires, but also authorities (NASA GISS) are grossly misleading the public in terms of temperature trends in Australia.What follows are the curves of six Australian station that go back to the late 19th century. The comparator shows the plots of GISS “unadjusted data compared to the “homogenized” data:Data: NASA GISSBefore the homogenization, the unadjusted data from 4 of the 6 stations showed cooling.But after NASA changed the data, the cooling disappeared and all 6 stations showed warming!Looking at the three stations Yamba. Moruya and Darwin, here we see that NASA dropped the early part of the temperature record (because they showed warm temperatures?). The result of course is a greater warming trend.Look at NASA GISS data plots for Darwin Airport for example. See the huge differences between the versions:So whenever people claim warming is man-made, they are right. But it’s not so much because of the CO2 emitted by man, but rather it is because of the statistical fudging of data at NASA GISS.Smoke And Deception Blanket Australia: NASA GISS Fudges Data, Cooling Turns Into WarmingClimate Activists Suffering From Factophobia… Host Of Studies Show No Drought/Forest Fire TrendClimate Activists Suffering From Factophobia… Host Of Studies Show No Drought/Forest Fire TrendBy P Gosselin on14. January 2018Not climate change: forest fires in the USA controlled by El Nino, arson and land use changesBy Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt(German text translated/edited by P Gosselin)Droughts increase the risk of forest fires; that’s logical. However it is false to reflexively assign every forest fire to climate change. There have always been droughts and forest fires. Anyone wishing to shift the blame over to climate change first has to show that the trend has already deviated from the range of natural variability. For many, that is simply too much work.Thus they prefer to claim something and hope that nobody will bother to fact check the claim. They don’t like climate skeptics because they have the silly habit of carefully examining the facts. They prefer the silent, non-questioning audience who immediately say yes and amen in response to all alarmist claims.And when the facts indeed do contradict their alarmist claims, they get personal. They attack the occupation of the skeptic, or education, or skin color, or, or, or.Nowadays we can find a load of facts in the Internet. Example: forest fires in the USA. The size of the areas ravaged by forest fires is provided by a table from the National Interagency Fire Centers. Strangely the data are not offered in graphical form. You are forced to make your own, which is no problem. Most people however simply are left in the dark. Steven Goddard (Tony Heller) shows such a charts at his Real Science blog.2004 – 2014 burn acreage trend is falling. Chart source: Tony Heller.One cannot always just pull climate change at of his magic hat every time a forest fire appears. The University of Colorado at Boulder recently calculated that 84% of all forest and bush fires in den USA are caused by humans. Read the press release from February 2017:Humans have dramatically increased extent, duration of wildfire seasonHumans have dramatically increased the spatial and seasonal extent of wildfires across the U.S. in recent decades and ignited more than 840,000 blazes in the spring, fall and winter seasons over a 21-year period, according to new University of Colorado Boulder-led research. After analyzing two decades’ worth of U.S. government agency wildfire records spanning 1992-2012, the researchers found that human-ignited wildfires accounted for 84 percent of all wildfires, tripling the length of the average fire season and accounting for nearly half of the total acreage burned. The findings were published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.“There cannot be a fire without a spark,” said Jennifer Balch, Director of CU Boulder’s Earth Lab and an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and lead author of the new study. “Our results highlight the importance of considering where the ignitions that start wildfires come from, instead of focusing only on the fuel that carries fire or the weather that helps it spread. Thanks to people, the wildfire season is almost year-round.” The U.S. has experienced some of its largest wildfires on record over the past decade, especially in the western half of the country. The duration and intensity of future wildfire seasons is a point of national concern given the potentially severe impact on agriculture, ecosystems, recreation and other economic sectors, as well as the high cost of extinguishing blazes. The annual cost of fighting wildfires in the U.S. has exceeded $2 billion in recent years.The CU Boulder researchers used the U.S. Forest Service Fire Program Analysis-Fire Occurrence Database to study records of all wildfires that required a response from a state or federal agency between 1992 and 2012, omitting intentionally set prescribed burns and managed agricultural fires. Human-ignited wildfires accounted for 84 percent of 1.5 million total wildfires studied, with lightning-ignited fires accounting for the rest. In Colorado, 30 percent of wildfires from 1992-2012 were started by people, burning over 1.2 million acres. The fire season length for human-started fires was 50 days longer than the lightning-started fire season (93 days compared to 43 days), a twofold increase. “These findings do not discount the ongoing role of climate change, but instead suggest we should be most concerned about where it overlaps with human impact,” said Balch. “Climate change is making our fields, forests and grasslands drier and hotter for longer periods, creating a greater window of opportunity for human-related ignitions to start wildfires.”While lightning-driven fires tend to be heavily concentrated in the summer months, human-ignited fires were found to be more evenly distributed across all seasons. Overall, humans added an average of 40,000 wildfires during the spring, fall and winter seasons annually—over 35 times the number of lightning-started fires in those seasons. “We saw significant increases in the numbers of large, human-started fires over time, especially in the spring,” said Bethany Bradley, an associate professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst and co-lead author of the research. “I think that’s interesting, and scary, because it suggests that as spring seasons get warmer and earlier due to climate change, human ignitions are putting us at increasing risk of some of the largest, most damaging wildfires.” “Not all fire is bad, but humans are intentionally and unintentionally adding ignitions to the landscape in areas and seasons when natural ignitions are sparse,” said John Abatzoglou, an associate professor of geography at the University of Idaho and a co-author of the paper. “We can’t easily control how dry fuels get, or lightning, but we do have some control over human started ignitions.”The most common day for human-started fire by far, however, was July 4, with 7,762 total wildfires started on that day over the course of the 21-year period. The new findings have wide-ranging implications for fire management policy and suggest that human behavior can have dramatic impact on wildfire totals, for good or for ill. “The hopeful news here is that we could, in theory, reduce human-started wildfires in the medium term,” said Balch. “But at the same time, we also need to focus on living more sustainably with fire by shifting the human contribution to ignitions to more controlled, well-managed burns.” Co-authors of the new research include Emily Fusco of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Adam Mahood and Chelsea Nagy of CU Boulder. The research was funded by the NASA Terrestrial Ecology Program, the Joint Fire Sciences Program and Earth Lab through CU Boulder’s Grand Challenge Initiative.”In July 2017 the Institute for Basic Science explained that the risk of forest fires on the US Southwest was strongly dependent on the temperature differences between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Ultimately the ocean cycles are the real drivers. Press release (via Science Daily):Climate Activists Suffering From Factophobia… Host Of Studies Show No Drought/Forest Fire Trend

Here are two stories if Elon Musk's dreams come true. Enjoy reading.Here is model of our crater described in stories.(1).Journal of Commander LewisLog-1Date-12/12/2050"10...9...8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1... and Liftoff!"Those were the words which had sent us on our jouney to the planet we now call our home. Our mission? To prep the planet to by fit for human life. The planet? Earth's sister Mars. The once barren and dry planet seen only with a telescope or lens of cameras pointed at it was now the stepping stone for human space exploration. We were the pioneers for the human race on this planet. I was lucky to be selected as the mission commander for such an important mission regarding the human race and I will carry out my duty with utmost patience and loyalty. But for now I will sleep in my cryopod waiting to wake up to see Mars as up close as I can see Earth. Over and out.Log-2Date-15/02/2051"Wake up Commander"said the soothing voice of the onboard computer LISA. It felt that I had gone to sleep just yesterday but looking at the date reminds me that I was asleep for a full month. The journey which used to take 300 days to complete was just completed in 30 days all thanks to the latest breakthroughs in space travel and hence more powerful and faster engines. After waking up I did a status check of the ship and called the crew to give them a little pep talk. These men and women were creating history and will be remembered for their work done on the surface. After the distribution of duties, we prepared for atmospheric entry. The landing was smooth and we finally got to go out on the surface. Neil Armstrong said it right"That's one small step for man,one giant leap for mankind."We were like little kids left in a big playpen such was our reaction on seeing Mars like this. "You should see your faces"said Dave,the pilot of our ship,over the headsets in our spacesuits. It certainly was a big moment for us. Starting tommorrow we will initiate the first stage. Over and out.Log-3Date-17/03/2051For a month we worked tirelessly towards our goal and our first true achievement came about today. Our ship was designed in such a way that the individual compartments could be taken apart and used. This solved the problem of shelter and workspace until we built more permanent placeto stay. We had already chosen our place to stay. It was a crater created by an asteroid impact. The depth was of one and half kilometer and the radius was of one kilometer. I had ordered the mining team to start cutting into the crater walls for materials and these tunnels would later serve the purpose of becoming our homes. The agricultural team was tasked with maintaining the plants we brought with us and also examine the soil to check if it is viable for growing the plants and also if not then find a solution. The other teams led by me were working on the cap we planned to cover the crater's mouth with. The cap was made out of gold foil,clay,carbon nanotubes for strength and composite material capable of absorbing radiation and producing eletricity. It's ironic that the gold which has much value on Earth is being used as a shade here on Mars. The twist came when unexpectedly an dust storm arose out of nowhere and the cap was put to the test in the harshest environment on the Martian surface. The covering held and it was a great achievement for us as we were one step closer to home on Mars. I hope to bring more good news on the next log. Over and out.Log-4Date-03/07/2051We have already started living inside the crater. The mining teams used laser cutters to prepare the rock houses along the crater wall and also clearing the floor on which our whole city will reside. The first building made on Mars itself was erected today by the materials gathered and the help of huge 3-D printers. This made the job whole lot easier and already the printer is in overdrive mode to finish this project as fast as possible. Nowadays everyone is hyped and eagerly waiting for the thumbs up from the construction team. To celebrate this achievement the agricultural team treated everyone to Mars grown vegetables,fruits,crops and mushrooms. The had also developed a food printer,Food Printer 1.0! We could input any dish we want and it will prepare it with the avaliable indegredients.Log-5Date-15/12/2051Today is finally the day that we can truly say that the Mars dream has come through. We are done with Dome 1. The first phase is a huge sucesses. Now the only thing to do is do the final checks on all the systems and then give the green signal to the people on Earth that Mars is now avaliable to live. After a small celebration party we gathered around the table housing the communication equipment. Then the moment came that the message was to be transmitted. I was given the honor to send the message. Instead of a long,exaplanation and reports filled message I wrote only one line-'Welcome to Mars.'This is Commander Lewis signing off.Bye.(2).A day of a Martian's lifeGood morning Sara" said the bedside alaram clock while waking me up and showing my schedule for today. It highlighted that I had to go meet Steve today and set a reminder for it. My whole house was synced with the city's OS so even the city was smart to know my schedule and the message must have already reached Steve. He was an Engineer and today he was going to take me out to the surface to Dome 3 for a "Ten-dollar tour" as he said.I got up from the bed and then got dressed in my new jump suit because today there was also going to be theannual supply mission landing. Going outside in the kitchen fresh breakfast was prepared expertly by myvery own Food Printer 3.0! I decided upon the method of transportation I was going to use today amongthe local tram, my car or the monorail. I finally decided on monorail as it was a good way to get aroundand about as well as has health benifits. It is also cost effective as I wouldn't have to spend energypoints because it runs with human power generated by our legs while cycling so i can control the pace asI want. I went outside got into my pod and started cycling away towards my workplace. Since the monorailis above the normal traffic lanes it is also space saver as well as allows you to see the city sights froma height. Overlooking the city was our very own 'Sun'. It was not really a Sun but it provided the necessarylight and heat to keep our Martian city up and running. Since we were living in crater created by a asteroidwe had set up this way of heat and illumination. It was just like the real thing and humans and plants grewunder its light. Also another big structure worthy of notice is the Mile High Tower situated exactly in thecenter of our little haven. You cannot miss it because it is so huge and awesome just like the Eiffel Toweron Earth. I have been there once and rode the elevator to the top: 100th floor! The view is so amazing fromthere and you can see straight to the rock houses cut into the crater walls. Initially these houses were thetunnels left after mining for resources but now the tunnels are reused for train stations, residences andplaying fields for recreational purposes. If I went to the top again then I can see my house as well as mydestination; the train station. On a personal level I want to jump from the tower as a part of the paraglider'sgroup to experience the thrill. This tall tower also serves as the central support for the domeand is the city's control tower. It houses the city OS mainframe and also the administrative offices.While passing over the farms I noted that how even waste can be converted to useful fertilizerfor the plants. They were well maintained as they were the primary source of oxygen for us humans. We were alsoare depended on then for food. Then came the poultry section where the animals were breed and kept. Afterleaving the Earth we realised that how much animals are important to us. They provide important products whichare used either directly or indirectly to create food, clothing or byproducts to be utlized in one way oranother. Also because of more people coming to live, study or explore Mars there have been mass expansion plansgoing on under which two new domes are being developed while the buildings are being constructed by massive 3-Dprinters using the materials avaliable on Mars. As I was called to work I rushed to the train station inthe monorail to catch a train to the adjecent dome where the hanger for rockets and space ships is located.The train runs between the domes to transport people as well as cargo. The train windows are transparent so thepassengers can observe the vehicles on the side roads and also see the big displays on the tunnel walls which showscenes of the surface as well as the scenes of Earth for nostalgia. The side roads allow vehicles to move aboutthe domes and for also the maintenence vehicles to pass through. I reachedjust in time to see that a ship was just being boarded to Earth while another one was coming down to the floor.The landing pad was above us near the top of the dome as to take out all the atmosphere for a landing was too muchof a hassle so there are two dome openings where the first would open letting the ship land without letting theatmosphere escape and then close. The second opening would only open after the first one had been sealed so it istype of an airlock system. Today I was to go to the surface above with my team and since it was summer the surfacetemperature would be around Earth temperature so there would be no need of portable heaters to take with us.After collecting the above ground rock samples and sending them to the lab I went for a drink and thought abouthow we were extracting water from ground and how much of a difference it makes in our life because without it wecould not even live on Mars much less grow on its surface.Bit by bit we were teraforming the Martain surface and atmosphere to be sustainable for human life. At the end of theday I didn't feel like taking the monorail so i called my car which drove itself to me as it is connected to the city OSand then transported me home without making a mistake or any pollution. I went to bed thinking about how I can help theMartian Dream grow and make it come through.Story credit: my friend Dhairya ModhaTechnical ideas credit: both of usImage source: my gallery