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Science Posts
Our Closest Call - July 29, 2012
Science Fiction Posts
Existence (a novel) - Oct. 3, 2012
Existence by David Brin is an epic, near-future novel that speculates about what contact would look like in the "cosmos that we see" - that is, the relativistic universe limited by the speed of light. No warp drives, no wormholes - just old fashioned slower than light travel. As in most near-future sci-fi works, there is plenty of artificial intelligence, bionic modifications, advanced medical techniques, virtual reality, nanotechnology, class strife, factions trying to stop the advance of technology, and, of course, enhanced global electronic networking...
New Si-Fi: Osiris by E.J. Swift - Mar. 24, 2013
I'm going out on a limb here but I'll predict that the world will not end on December 21, 2012. The Mayan calendar does end on that date but that is about all that does...But through the long history of our planet, there have been at least five extinction events, i.e., periods during which the majority of species are made extinct. Over the past 500 million years, these have occurred an average of once every 100 million years...Bad as these events were, they were not mankind's closest call. That honor goes to the Lake Toba Volcano eruption about 73,000 years ago...
Anybody Out There? - Aug. 9, 2012
After more than eight months in space, Curiosity has landed on Mars. As it continues its self-checks, it has been sending back stunning images of Earth's sister planet...Besides its studies of Mars' climate and geology, Curiosity will be searching for evidence that Mars could at one time have been suitable for life....
Meteors, Asteroids, Lightning Strikes - Feb. 15, 2013
Over the past few days we've witnessed two celestial events involving near earth objects and one very interesting lightning strike....
The God Particle - Mar. 18, 2013
Osiris by E. J. Swift presents a post-ecological-disaster Earth. The action takes place in the eponymous city of Osiris, near Patagonia, where the inhabitants believe that they are the last remnants of mankind...As she describes the book on her website, the novel is “set in a far future ocean metropolis, a failed utopia whose inhabitants believe they live on the last city on earth.”
2312 (a novel by Kim Stanley Robinson) - Apr. 1, 2013
If E. J. Swift's remnants of future humanity are imprisoned and isolated on a floating city on a flooded Earth, Kim Stanley Robinson's denizens from 300 years in the future are roaming the solar system and transforming every planet, moon, and asteroid into habitats suitable for the human race...
When the Blue Shift Comes: End of Time Sci-Fi - Apr. 9, 2013
If humanity has spread throughout the solar system by 2312, it has spread throughout the stars and galaxies of the universe When the Blue Shift Comes, a two-novella work by Robert Silverberg and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro. Robert Silverberg has been writing science-fiction for more than 50 years. Zinos-Amaro is a newcomer to the field. In this addition to the Stellar Guild series, Silverberg teams with Alvaro Zinos-Amaro to produce a fantastical look at the very far future.
Comets, Asteroids, and Interstellar Wormholes Nov 19, 2014
Over the past week, you may have heard increasingly confident statements reported in the popular press that the elusive Higgs boson - the so-called "God particle" - had been found....The discovery of the Higgs boson was made at CERN's Large Hadron Collider near Geneva....
The End of Space-Time (from When the Blue Shift Comes post of Apr. 9, 2013)
Theories of the ultimate fate of our universe seem to be divided into three general categories: the Big Freeze (aka "heat death"), the Big Crunch (the universe collapses in upon itself when its current expansion reverses), and a Never-Ending Multiverse....
Mars or Bust and Mars or Bust (continued) - May, 2013
Last week (May 6-8), George Washington University hosted the second annual "Humans2Mars" Summit. Hundreds of scientists, astronauts, engineers and entrepreneurs gathered to discuss what it will take to get us to Mars....We can overcome the technological challenges of getting humans to Mars. We can select the right kinds of people for a colony. But how do we make the venture self-sustaining? The costs of getting a person to Mars are untold times greater than sending an expedition across the Atlantic ocean to set up a Jamestown colony or settling the American frontier with homesteaders. Obtaining the resources for self-sufficiency will require much development and innovation...
(Buzz Aldrin's Mission to Mars is also discussed in these posts.)
Sunday September 15 Round-Up: Voyager 1 Has Left the Building (Sep. 2013)
This is an historic moment. Mankind, or at least one of man's creations, has officially reached interstellar space....
Self-Driving Cars and Downloaded Minds (part 1) - Oct 29,2013
The October issue of Popular Science, which was devoted to automobiles of the future, has an 8-page article on self-driving cars. Google is in the lead in this area. The company is currently beta-testing a self-driving car based on Google Chauffeur software and light detection and ranging technology ("lidar")...
Self-Driving Cars and Downloaded Minds (part 2) - Oct. 31, 2013
"I think the brain is like a program in the mind, which is like a computer, so it's theoretically possible to copy the brain on to a computer and so provide a form of life after death." Not a believer in the conventional concept of an afterlife, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was speaking during an appearance at the Cambridge Film Festival in late September....
Kepler's Planet Bonanza - Feb. 27, 2014
The past couple of weeks have seen a number of space-related events including a probe landing on a comet and the opening of a blockbuster sci-fi film....Interstellar's plot and subplots, its visual effects, and its reliance on cutting edge science make this nearly-three-hour epic one of the best and most scientifically realistic sci-fi movies ever made....Wormholes, black holes, relativistic time dilation, and a fifth dimension all play a role in the film.
NASA scientists announced a huge new cache of verified planets in the distant reaches of space...
Sunday Roundup Aug 31, 2014 (Traces of One of the First Stars)
The Big History Project Sep 3, 2014
A few weeks ago, I had the good fortune to stumble across a 2011 TED talk on Big History. Professor David Christian's "The History of Our World in 18 Minutes" is an introduction to the Big History way of looking at the universe. It's more like Big Science but who's to quibble with what the proponents of this interesting theory want to call it...
Sunday Roundup Sep 7, 2014 (Yellowstone's Sleeping Giant)
The Sixth Extinction Sep 10, 2014
In the 525 million years or so since creatures with backbones first appeared on our planet, there have been five mass extinctions....Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction takes a look at the evidence that we may be in the midst of a sixth mass extinction - what may come to be known as the Anthropocene extinction....
Sunday Roundup Oct 19, 2014 (The Brightest Pulsar)
Sunday Roundup Dec 14, 2014 (Mars)
Was life present on ancient Mars? NASA’s Curiosity rover has found the strongest signs yet...
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