Category: Space
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Photo of an Exoplanet
Initially, it was only possible to infer the presence from exoplanets indirectly from the way they made their star wobble, or when they transited in front of the star, dimming it slightly. Direct imaging has only become feasible recently. As Paul Gilster writes on Centauri Dreams, we now have an…
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The Soviet Space Shuttle
The Soviet Union had its own space shuttle program called Buran. It looked and operated similarly to the U.S. Space Shuttle. One Buran shuttle was completed and reached orbit in 1988, nine years after the first Space Shuttle. Even though that initial test flight was a success, it never flew…
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Life on Mars
In 1996, Bill Clinton announced that we had found signs pointing to life on Mars. A meteorite called Allan Hills 84001, originating from Mars, contained structures that looked like small fossils. It later turned out that they probably weren’t. This week, something similar happened: The Perseverance rover found geological features…
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Spinning Sun-Powered Space Catapult
For years now, I’ve been following what’s happening in the field of interstellar travel. Not closely, but close enough to know what kinds of technology are out there. Paul Gilster’s blog Centauri Dreams is a good resource. Because of the large distances involved, and because of the energy needed to…
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All That Is Earth Has Once Been Sky
Among the hills a meteorite Lies huge; and moss has overgrown, And wind and rain with touches light Made soft, the contours of the stone. Thus easily can Earth digest A cinder of sidereal fire, And make her translunary guest The native of an English shire. Nor is it strange…
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The Moon Landing as Signaling
Signaling, as in virtue signaling, has a bad reputation. This essay by Malmesbury on Telescopic Turnip makes the point that signaling can also involve great things, like the moon landing.
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Biosignature
Paul Gister on Centauri Dreams and Eric Hoel on The Intrinsic Perspective have good posts about the new data strengthening the case for a biosignature on K2-18b. As Hoel writes, Alien life is no longer about waiting for evidence, but debating the surprisingly not-crazy evidence we do have.
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Genetic Drift on Generation Ships
On Centauri Dreams, Alex Tolley writes about the challenges a generation ship would face. He mentions one potential problem that I find particularly interesting, even though I’m not convinced of its seriousness: Genetic drift. Over the quarter millennium voyage, there will be evolution as the organisms adapt to the ship’s…
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Terraforming
Getting to Mars is hard and may take longer than we anticipate. Terraforming it in any meaningful way is going to be even harder and would take centuries. The challenges are outlined here. Proponents of terraforming often focus on changing a planet’s environment to make it friendlier to humans and…
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Moon Diagrams
Bartosz Ciechanowski has created a wonderful page explaining a lot of what there is to know about the moon using animated diagrams. Also look at his past work, including on sound, watches, the internal combustion engine, curves and surfaces and the earth and sun system. Here‘s more on the Apollo…
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Life Without Stars
In a recent blog post, Julian Gough argues not only that planets without stars (“Stanets”) may harbor life, but that most of the life in our universe exists without stars. Two recent observations make this plausible. The first is that many of the moons of the outer solar system have…
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Scaling up the Pioneer Plaques
The Voyager Golden Records and the Pioneer plaques will remain legible for billions of years. Where they travel, they’re protected from the destructive powers of Earth’s elements. This together with their simplicity – diagrams and records etched into metal plates – make it possible that they will be the last…
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Railguns
In Jules Verne’s 1865 science fiction novel From the Earth to the Moon, three men travel to the moon aboard a projectile launched from a huge cannon. In reality, launching crews this way is impossible because of the acceleration required to reach Earth’s escape velocity of 11.2 km/s. Even using…
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Fermi Calculations
Many years ago and on a different continent, I used to work for a management consulting firm with offices in all of the world’s major cities. Part of the job was interviewing candidates for entry level consulting positions, and one of the things I liked to ask them was to…
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Alien Artifacts
As a kid, before I knew better, I liked to read Erich von Däniken. In Chariots of the Gods, he explained that the pyramids were built by aliens and that evidence of extraterrestrial development aid is evident in the artifacts of other ancient civilizations too. More recently, additional outlets such…
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Alien Oceans
2030 is going to be a big year for those curious about life in the solar system. The Europa Clipper spacecraft that just launched is going to arrive in the orbit of Jupiter and begin the exploration of its moon Europa. The following year, a second spacecraft, the Jupiter Icy…
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In Praise of Mystery
In a few days, the Europa Clipper spacecraft is going to launch towards Jupiter. After a journey of six years, it will arrive at Jupiter’s moon Europa, surveying it for signs of habitability. Europa is one of the few places in the solar system with liquid water and the most…
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Where are the Aliens?
Jim Rutt discusses the Fermi Paradox with writer and physicist Stephen Webb (podcast). Webb proposes 75 solutions to the Fermi paradox. You can read my take on one of them here.
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Assumptions for Extraterrestrial Life
Out of Kevin Kelly’s twelve assumptions for extraterrestrial life, I agree with the first nine. However, he gets his tenth, and most important, assumption wrong: 10) The only reason for an advanced civilization to visit another planet is to see if there is another civilization which has invented things it…
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Voyager’s Golden Record
Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is the human-made object most distant from Earth. It carries the Golden Record, a selection of sounds and images representing humanity. Its full contents are archived here. The Golden Record may survive for five billion years, which means it may be there after Earth and…
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Sunspots and Influenza
Fred Hoyle was an accomplished astronomer but also came up with a few controversial theories that didn’t take off, not that there’s anything wrong with that. For example, he proposed that the archeopteryx fossils are forgeries and that flu pandemics are caused by solar winds driving interstellar virus particles towards…
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On Two Planets
On Two Planets by Kurd Lasswitz (or Laßwitz) may be the first science fiction novel to imagine an alien invasion. Published in 1897, it’s about Martians travelling to Earth aboard sophisticated spaceships to study humanity. They have superior technology and a more enlightened culture than Earth, but even so, they…
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Pale Blue Dot: A Very Small Stage
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived…
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Pale Blue Dot: A Restless Few
For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has…
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