Apollo at 50. Plus updates from space

I was 18 years old, had just survived my frosh year at Caltech, envious of those I heard were heading to a rock concert back east while I worked the unner hauling a radio astronomer's tapes on and off an IBM360-75... and I recall watching Walter Cronkite interview Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, with all of them in tears of joy. And seeing Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov hold forth on other networks, as a nation and world came to realize that Earth is not enough. The rest of the universe is palpable and real; you can step on it! And a literature that looks forward just might have some relevance.

Apollo 12 would be the stunning display of utter competence and Apollo 8 had just given us one of two great artworks of the 20th Century, changing human hearts without needing a word of persuasion. But it was Neil and Buzz and Mike and the tens of thousands who got them there, and tens of millions who paid for it, and a billion or so watching - thrilled - who got a boost to our inner confidence, at a time when we would need it most.

Draw from it now! That competence and confidence matters. Don't let enemies undermine -- or worse, hijack -- that pride in a scientific, pragmatic, progress-oriented and change-willing civilization. Those of our neighbors who are helping to wage war on facts... remind them that those inconvenient truths help us to revise and to learn and to become greater than we were.

(Reporting from Comicon!)

== Space News! ==

Organoids in space: Will human cells differentiate and proliferate and organize themselves properly - if development takes place in micro-gravity? Finding out is the aim of a human-brains-in-a-dish experiment created by UCSD researchers and about to be shipped up to the Space Station. I am tangentially part of the team led by Alysson R. Muotri, PhD, in cooperation with UCSD's Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination.

After a brief embargo, I can now link you to the announcement of new phase III grants by NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts program. (I was in DC last month as a member of NIAC’s External Council.) Phase One offers small seed grants to explore an idea that’s just this side of science fiction, and sometimes beyond that line. Phase Two allows the best-demonstrated Phase One concepts to develop more tech/sci readiness across 2 years. Phase Three is brand new.  Substantial funding to demonstrate real feasibility for a space mission. The first two P3 grants can now be viewed here. Both involve the quest to access lunar and asteroidal resources.

At that meeting in DC, we discussed NIAC’s difficulty in attracting brilliantly conceptual proposals from underrepresented groups or categories. Some of the finest ideas have been in areas like biology, life support or habitation… and a number of these came from just Lynn Rothschild and her students!, so we know there are great innovators in those fields. We just need to get the word out, better. Your suggestions for groups or conferences, startups or companies that might have a stunning notion potentially applicable to spaceflight would be welcome, below. (Under-represtnted groups welcome.) Better yet, share with those folks links to the NIAC information pages!

And if NIAC’s brash innovativeness is way too-sane for you, then try this gonzo-paranoid techno tall tale about high ISP rocketry by my colleague Charles Stross. It's like if NIAC got really, really mad and turned from mild-mannered Bruce Banner into the Hulk. 

Oh, and here are some images from my June talk to a packed auditorium at Goddard NASA Spaceflight Center. There I offered a trio of slides that portray distinctly why  readily accessible riches are available on asteroids, but only one kind of any likely near-term value exists on the moon: lunar polar ice. (And even water will likely be better accessed from certain kinds of asteroids.)

Metals, in particular, are unlikely to be a “lunar resource.” Want to know where to find them out there? See how NASA has given go-ahead to the Psyche Mission! “While most asteroids are rocky or icy bodies, scientists think Psyche is composed mostly of iron and nickel, similar to Earth's core. They wonder whether Psyche could be the nickel-iron heart, or exposed core, of an early planet maybe as large as Mars that lost its rocky outer layers through violent collisions billions of years ago.” And a lot more than nickel-iron.

== News from the Solar System ==

Partly inspired by earlier NIAC grants, NASA will fly a billion-dollar quadcopter to Titan, Saturn’s methane-rich moon. Acetylene-butane co-crystals might form rings around Titan's lakes as liquid hydrocarbons evaporate and the minerals drop out—in the same way that salts can form crusts on the shores of Earth's lakes and seas. Huh, I had envisioned the Titanian shore-dwellers mad of wax. Shows what I know.

The Deep Space Atomic Clock experiment will test miniaturization of super accurate time keeping in space, so future missions (mars & beyond) can self-navigate. 

Cool. NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft has been orbit-spiraling close to asteroid Bennu. See images  from just 690 meters away. The spacecraft is designed to reach out to Bennu, snag a sample of surface material and bring it back to Earth in 2023. The recent impressive Japanese sampler mission to another asteroid shows who we should be partnering with, to do things out there that none of the Apollo-wannabe lunar dust-tourists can dream of. Possibly accessing the riches that would enable greatness while paying for a restored Earth.

Speaking of which. Even stony asteroids are moist – testimony from samples returned by Japan’s first (of two) Hayabusa probes, supporting the notion that other kinds – like carbonaceous C-type or extinct comets – will likely be very rich in the stuff of life (and of rocket fuel).

While asteroids offer the greatest (vast) trove of available wealth to a nascent interplanetary civilization, there are rocks along the path. Both Planetary Resources (PI) and Deep Space Industries have scaled back their immediate ambitions to access metals like Platinum, and PI’s assets have been acquired by one of the founders of Etherium. (A thought provoker, that news.)

Meanwhile, Joel Sercel’s TransAstra Corp. Keeps winning grants to pursue the nearer term profitable resource, water, on both asteroids and the lunar poles.  He has competition there! The Chinese have declared lunar polar ice to be their goal, as has George Sowers of the Colorado School of Mines and even – officially, at least – The current U.S. administration.

== Politics of space ==

SpaceX has successfully deployed sixty production versions of the Starlink Satellite. They are targeting 360 through the next six months, aiming at a lot of revenue for service to North America, Europe and Asia, by reducing latency in financial trading communication.

That obscure but lucrative revenue source is crucial since it will flow almost immediately once the constellations prove reliable. In fact, it could be why folks still lend Elon money for Tesla, because (yet again) one of his businesses will be able to pay off debt for another at a critical moment. It also would give Starlink time to build its more general internet access business.

Two factors though. First, Bernie Sanders has raised the prospect of a potential transaction tax on financial trades. In fact, it is a very important reform that could save all of us from genuine dangers from the worst kinds of AI. But fortunately for Elon, it won’t happen for at least two years. By then, Starlink will have other sources of revenue.

The other factor is China. The arrival of these new low-orbit internet constellations will mean citizens of the Central Kingdom may have another chance at a free infosphere. Daunted by this prospect, at times the PRC has threatened to “shoot down” such constellations.  An impractical threat and a sign of desperation. So, will they seek to make a deal with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and others?  Or will they try to get control over that situation by going over their heads, through their friends in American high places?

Meanwhile the current head of Roscosmos – the Russian Space Agency – has laid down a vision for moon landings by 2030, by creating a launch system more powerful than NASA’s in-development SLS. This article, while conveying his slides, is justifiably skeptical. More likely would be a Russia-China partnership. Perhaps and/or India. I hope not snaring in ESA, Japan, or the U.S., who have better things to do, elsewhere. Best case? Commercial tourist junkets leave them in a cloud of mood dust.

NASA is giving the public an opportunity to send their names — stenciled on chips — to the Red Planet with NASA's Mars 2020 rover. And sure, I recommend you sign on! I give odds of a bazillion to one against anything bizarre happening as a result (as in my short story “Mars Opposition,” published in Insistence of Vision.

Science Marvels: A Goldilocks Planet? Mass extinctions. Prognostication!

Sitting in at the symposium of NASA's Innovative & Advanced Concepts program (I am on the NIAC advisory council) we all gathered round for the announcement confirming recent rumors of a "goldilocks zone" planet orbiting the nearest visible star to our own -- Proxima Centauri. 

The planet orbits every 11.2 days. It’s at least 1.3 times as massive as our planet, and based on its likely size, astronomers think it is rocky. Its home star is only .15 percent as bright as the sun. "The system is 25 trillion miles away, more than 270,000 times farther than the sun."  The Proxima team used the radial velocity method, analyzing the star's light for wobbles caused by orbiting planets… a different approach than the "transit eclipse" approach used by the Kepler spacecraft to detect thousands of new worlds. They used the HARPS spectrograph, mounted on a 3.6-meter telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile. 

Note this planet orbiting so close to its dim sun will probably be tidal-locked like our moon is toward the Earth. Also, like most small K or M types stars, Proxima emits a lot of flares and X-rays, meaning even if there's liquid water on this world. Hence any life would need to shelter along a Twilight Zone.

Can we learn more? Well, if we are lucky with the Proxima system's orbital plane -- there’s only a 1.5 percent chance the Proxima Centauri system’s geometry is arranged in such a way that we could see it transit in front of its sun. But if so, we might be able to look at its atmosphere. Even if there's no transit, some of the endeavors being funded by NIAC might enable us to see this new world much better, so stay tuned!

Oh, other news in the oh wow department: a galaxy with the same mass as the Milky Way but with only 1 percent of our galaxy's star power. Apparently, at first impressions, about 99.99 percent of this other galaxy is made up of dark matter.

== Looking to the future... and past ==

My friend and fellow futurist Glen Hiemstra - founder of futurist.com -  was interviewed by Popular Mechanics on the pitfalls and rewards of trying to peer ahead into tomorrow’s Undiscovered Country. 

Speaking of which, this seems an Indiegogo crowd-funding project worth a look. One of the best-looking endeavors to develop processes for tissue culture meat. In this case the ambition means “growing real meat, non GMO, no antibiotics, in machines at supermarkets all over the world.” To be clear, this once-science-fictional idea - if implemented in ways that deliver a tasty, healthful product with far great efficiency and vastly lower karma than current herds and slaughterhouses - could reduce human impact on the environment decisively, in the nick of time.  (With no help from those helping wage a War on Science.)

Turning the other direction. For 35 years I have been tracking the topic of past extinctions on Earth, as paleontologists parse the sedimentary fossil layers ever more finely, dissecting periods when our planet's diversity of life gradually rose and then suddenly plummeted.  We know the most famous extinction event, the demise of the dinosaurs, was caused (all or mostly) by a huge asteroid that struck the Yucatan Peninsula, 65 million years ago. Evidence is growing that extinction events  - many or most of them - seem to follow a cyclical rhythm of every 26 to 30 million years, with varying severity, and I have discussed this cycle - with fascinating theories - elsewhere.

But not all such events fit into any cyclical pattern. Some were one-off… as would be the "anthropocene" extinction that we're causing ourselves, right now, through the powerful impact of human civilization. Time will tell, perhaps soon, whether this will be a mild one (if we wise up and act like grownups) or a severe event.

Now comes evidence of another one that shows just how scary the universe can be. Scientists have found remnants of a supernova - anomalous traces of Iron 60- encased in the fossilized chains of “magnetofossils,” extracted from two Pacific Ocean sediment cores. The supernova that expelled the iron-60 is believed to have occurred at least 325 light-years away from Earth, starting around 2.6 million – 2.8 million years ago, bombarding the Earth for nearly 800,000 years. This corresponds with an extinction event which occurred in that timeframe, affecting mollusks such as marine snails and bivalves. There was also a global cooling at the same time.  

These things come in all sizes. For example, anomalous amounts of carbon 14 are found in certain tree rings around the globe, suggesting that 10,000 or so years ago there might have been a massive solar flare -- far smaller than any supernova, but near and sharp enough to affect isotopic ratios in the atmosphere. Such a flare - today - would be vastly worse than the "Carrington Event" that fried telegraph lines in 1859, or the slightly lesser one in the 1920s.  We are fools if we don't do minimal preparations to safeguard civilization. (A theme I just preached in DC for the upteenth time.)

== Innovative ideas ==

Solar City is taking the step I’ve longed for — they are going to roll out a roofing integrated product. “It's not a thing on the roof. It is the roof, which is a quite difficult engineering challenge and not something that is available anywhere else," Elon Musk said.

China announced plans to create a human occupied station 3000 meters below the surface of the ocean, to develop methods for exploiting undersea resources.

Wow. What an age we live in. Paraplegics regain some feeling & movement after using brain-machine interfaces.

Though there’s a need to tease out certain selection effects, if appears that eating more protein from plant sources was associated with a lower risk of death, while eating more protein from animals was associated with a higher risk of death. Synergistically, the same shift in behavior can help the planet, too.  Still… I wonder if fish protein rates differently.  Other studies seem to say so.

Experiments at the South Pole have apparently ruled out a fourth type of “sterile” neutrino.  

Dassi, a UK bike manufacturer, claims a bicycle frame frame that weighs 750g, although it says that this could be more than halved to just 350g at some point in the future, incorporating super strong graphene layers amid the carbon composites. Look forward to bikes you can lift with a finger, or cars that weigh hundreds of pounds vs. thousands.

An Oslo-based startup called Iris AI (www.iris.ai) is building an AI science assistant. Iris is built with combination of neural and statistical models to help researchers and corporate innovators identify knowledge for their R&D project, PhD or innovation process across research disciplines. How it works: Drop in a research paper abstract and Iris builds you a visual results map letting you browse the most relevant open-access research on the topic of your interest.  Someone try it and report back here!

== Science and the world ==

Fascinating and fun… “We finally know who forged Piltdown Man, one of science’s most notorious hoaxes.”  Oh BTW… want some musical fun from a great classic? Mike Oldfield's spectacular album Tubular Bells has a 'Caveman' part known as 'The Piltdown Man.' It is way cool.

A lovely essay by a physicist who offered to consult for amateurs (sometimes – if unfairly – called ‘crackpots) and steering them toward either refining their ideas or seeing the flaws. It’s a fun piece. Scientists should learn from it and we all should have to spend 50 hours doing this, in our apprenticeship.  But what really stands out is the core lesson: that scientists have no objection to amateurs in principle.  We  all know about Humason and many other gifted amateurs who won names in the annals of science.  Most working scientists haven’t the time and many lack the patience… but in a burgeoning Age of Amateurs, making this kind of connections may be increasingly important.  

And finally...

"The human footprint continues to expand, with three quarters of earth's land surface now experiencing measurable pressures from buildings, roads, crops, pastures and other human structures and activities, according to a new report. Those pressures are building most intensely in the few remaining wild areas of high biodiversity, it notes. But the report also finds an encouraging trend: in recent years, growth in the footprint has lagged far behind population and economic growth. From 1993 to 2009, population grew 23 percent, and the global economy by 153 percent–but human influence on land went up only 9 percent. The mismatch suggests that increasing urbanization and more sustainable use of resources may be buying time ." -- from Kevin Krajick, in Physics.org

We need to remember what's at stake. Anyone participating in the War on Science, or swallowing any of the propaganda put out by media that hate the knowledge professions, is actively hurting your grand-children and our world.  There is no compromise here.  Any political party that has collaborated with the War on Science needs to be torched. To the ground.

From near to far, amazing things are everywhere...

What a year! So far, we've had a landing on a comet, great results from Mars, many more exoplanets zeroing in on "goldilocks" zones... and now, across the next few months, NASA spacecraft close in on the two most wondrous and fabled dwarf planets...

First up -- Ceres: NASA's Dawn spacecraft - after probing the giant asteroid Vesta - is getting super close to its planned orbit of the dwarf planet Ceres -- due to arrive March 6. The "white dot" mystery grows. But I am especially interested in whether our probe finds evidence of a liquid sea under the thick, icy crust.  If so, it will prove the "roofed water worlds" don't need the tug of a nearby planet, in order to heat and melt subsurface water.  It will change our notions of the abundance of liquid water in the universe.

And...the New Horizon spacecraft is closing in on Pluto. Nine years after its launch, New Horizons will achieve closest approach on July 14, 2015, collecting data on the surface and atmosphere of the dwarf planet, its large moon Charon and four smaller moons, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx.  

 Want your name and message to go onto the New Horizons probe? Uploaded into memory after it finishes its main mission and heads out of the Solar System?  See (and join!) the New Horizons Message Initiative, headed by my friend the great space artist Jon Lomberg and his wife Sharona.

Want more wonders? Could there be life in the seas of Saturn's moons? Cornell researchers have modeled methane-based lifeforms that could live in the liquid methane seas of Titan.  Many have I got a great story on the back burner!

Meanwhile, we're still receiving wonderful views of Comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko from the Rosetta orbiter, and these should get even better, during coming weeks. A dream come true for this comet guy!

(Alas, they hope that the little Philae lander, which should have been nuclear, not solar powered) will get enough power in a few months, as 67/P streaks sunward. But that's the same point when the rising push of escaping-subliming gas from below will likely shove the little guy out into space.)

== Visualizing Andromeda ==

For stunning new imagery of our neighboring galaxy, see the high-definition Gigapixels of Andromeda, assembled by Cory Poole. 

If there are a trillion stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, that means there are 100 stars for every Human Being! Manifest destiny!  Let's go get em!  

Ooops, that just went out over the web... so the natives know we're coming...

... in peace!  Yeah, that's the ticket.  We come in peace. ;-)

Seriously, read Phil Plait’s lyrical essay about how fortunate we are to witness such splendor. He writes of "the awe of the raw Universe laid out right in front of me."  Now revealed.  By our own hands.

== Peering downward...and outward == 

Four newly launched Earth-observing satellites are now collecting data on global atmospheric conditions, carbon dioxide levels and aerosols, allowing us to better understand our own planet. 

A Kepler-discovered solar system with rocky planets is 11.2 billion years old and was born near the dawn of the galaxy. An amazing discovery with profound impact on our "Drake Equation" calculations of when both worlds and life might have first emerged. At a distance of 117 light-years from Earth, Kepler-444 is two and a half times older than our solar system, which is 4.5 billion years old. "Which could provide scope for the existence of ancient life in the galaxy."

A proposed space telescope, the Aragoscope, could potentially image at a far higher resolution than Hubble. See an interesting write-up on one of the exciting projects we’ve been seed-funding at NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concept (NIAC) program, designed to turn science fiction into reality through pioneering technology development. This one is a spectacular space telescope that might also be very cheap to build… and closely related to one I described in Existence.

In fact, see my earlier posting about a wide range of skyward wonders that are astronomically-good...

== And more! ==

Astronomers have discovered the largest and most luminous black hole ever seen — an ancient monster with a mass about 12 billion times that of the sun — that dates back to when the universe was less than 1 billion years old. This monster quasar shines (or shone 429 trillion times brighter than the sun.

After decades... a historical curiosity comes to light: Neil Armstrong’s Widow Finds His Moon Purse Stashed in a Closet. 

Closest known flyby: An international group of astronomers has determined that 70,000 years ago a dim star is likely to have passed within our solar systems Oort Cloud — 52,000 astronomical units (AU) or 0.8 light years from the Earth. That is five times closer than Proxima Centauri.

To answer your next question: “98% of the simulations showed Scholz’s star passing through the Oort cloud, only one brought the star within the inner Oort cloud which would have triggered “comet showers”.  Still, one is tempted to look for impact fluxes having gone up, 60-70,000 years ago.

An interesting thought that came up, at the AAAS discussions.  That a top-ranked motion picture like Avatar can now cost about the same as an astronomical mission to discover thousands of real-life planets, like Kepler. Not suggesting a zero-sum tradeoff.  

We need both.  Now if only one could help the other….

== Mister Spock -- the final farewell ==

Yes, it was good to have Leonard Nimoy among us.  I won't say Rest in Peace, because frankly, although I am a scientific dubious agnostic, I do hope he is not "resting," but off on his next cool adventure.  Maybe even where no one has been, before.

=

Addenda:  My wife had a crush on Spock, as a child. Phew, that was tough competition!

Oh, what a tricky guy -- getting all the world's nerds to hold up a rabbinical hand sign.... probably well into the future.

  

Comets galore! And much more...

"Ridiculously difficult" -- describes the challenge of landing a probe on the surface of the comet, as summarized in this simulation: How to Land on a Comet. 

On November 12, the European Space Agency's Rosetta Spacecraft will drop the Philae Lander onto Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko -- in the first ever soft landing of a craft on a comet. The landing site, named Agilkia, is located on the head of the comet. Philae will drill into the surface to analyze the comet's composition -- see this timeline of science experiments to be undertaken by the lander. Meanwhile, Rosetta will continue to monitor changes on the comet through 2015.

The event will be covered live on NASA and the Science Channel. Am I excited? * 

== Space News ==

No roundup about space would be complete without first mentioning the tragic and disastrous crash of the Virgin Galactic Spaceship Two... whose problem we hope will soon be solved and resolved, so that Richard Branson and Burt Rutan will achieve their aim -- offering the uber-rich thrills that in-turn subsidize the development of space. (As portrayed in a recent novel.) 

... and the explosion of the Orbital Sciences Antares rocket. Such coincidences in timing aren't uncommon.  Hey, space is hard! Still, the sci fi nut inside asks: are we under attack by UFOs? (Yeah, silvery guys... I'm lookin' at you.) 

Seriously, our sympathy to both teams, with best wishes for recovery and future success.

And we move on to ...

Is suspended animation possible? Can we 3D print whole structures on the moon? How about swimming the ocean of Europa?

Our leader at NASA NIAC - Jay Falker - explains the mission, to explore highly speculative ideas with small, seed grants. Watch this short video about NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group. I am proud to be on the council of external advisers. 

YOU should be proud to be a member of a civilization that does stuff like this.

Indeed, cheer up by reading a fascinating article about the British Skylon Program, which promises air-breathing engine technology that could make genuine space planes possible.  We appear to be entering the "barnstorming era" of space at last, when private risk-taking becomes possible and opens up many worlds of possibility. As the earlier (cheaper and easier) barnstorming era opened flight in the 1920s.

== More space! ==

Art often interfaces with science, but not quite like this. As reported by Adam Rogers (my former ArchiTECHS co-star) in WIRED -- The Warped Astrophysics of Interstellar -- it seems that the special effects team for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming (and much-awaited) film Interstellar consulted with another friend of mine — Caltech’s brilliant Kip Thorne, who supplied equations that Nolan’s team crunched and crunched… in order to show us what (according to Thorne) a Black Hole “will actually look like.”

This isn’t the first time that art rendered a best-image for science!*

But this is just plain terrific. If you are like me, you are bouncing against walls with eagerness to see Interstellar! Both as fans... and for what just the right piece of art may do to shatter the stunning cowardice toward new ideas that dominates today’s studio-Hollywood.

== More Comet News == 

Last month Comet Siding Spring grazed right past Mars, endangering our many satellite probes there... clever maneuvers enabled all of them to survive.  More exciting, the comet, which passed within about 87,000 miles of Mars on October 19. NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) mission, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and the ESA's Mars Express spacecraft all detected a change in the level of ions in Mars's ionosphere. The comet close approach apparently set up epic meteor showers -- bombarding Mars with thousands of fireballs an hour!

Eau de comet? The Rosetta Probe sniffs Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko -- and detects odors resembling "rotten eggs and horse pee" -- also known as hydrogen sulfide, ammonia and formaldehyde.

And comets beyond comets! Thousands of them observed flickering in and out near the new solar system of Beta Pictoris.

Bizarre Pyramid on Comet 67P? "It looks almost as if loose dust covering the surface of the comet has settled in the boulder's cracks. But, of course, it is much too early to be sure," comments researcher Holger Sierks."Yes, well, comet dust layers were predicted 30 years ago, in fact. *

==Space Updates==

NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and Elon Musk's SpaceX to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station, ending U.S. dependence on the Russian Soyuz for transportation of humans. It's about time! It also makes clear the advantages of competition, which Elon's company has restored.

The Sentinel program - developing satellites that can warn in advance of medium/small asteroids on collision course - reveals in vivid detail what the U.S. Defense Department had heretofore (for unfathomable reasons) deemed secret — that from 2000 to 2013 there were twenty-six “nuke-level” incidents, when meteors of asteroidal scale exploded in the atmosphere, delivering from one to six-hundred kilotons of energy. 

A “city killer” strikes Earth once per century, though the greatest danger is if one of these events ever took place in a touchy region, possibly sending itchy trigger fingers racing for buttons.

Watch the video visualization … then consider participating.

Want another worry? Earth's magnetic north pole has been speeding up in its movement and this year passed its closest to true north. Interesting... and sci fi worrisome.

How cool is this? “Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have located at least one and possibly three Kuiper Belt objects that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft can reach after its flyby Pluto next year.”

Meanwhile, I am helping my friend Jon Lomberg (creator of Hawaii's famous "Galaxy Garden" and co-creator of Carl Sagan's Voyager Record) in his effort to get a similar trove of human wisdom and art stored aboard the New Horizons probe after it finishes doing science, screaming past Pluto next year. 

Sign the petition for the New Horizons Message Initiative -- to send a crowd-sourced message to the spacecraft's memory.

== And yet more inspiring science! ==

Scientific American asks: “Conspiracy theorists may wonder, why does NASA’s next major telescope director need top secret clearance?” Interesting indeed. “The Webb telescope is being planned as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, and will peer at some of the farthest reaches of space and time. The $8.8-billion observatory is due to launch in 2018.” Past Space Telescope directors did not need clearance. But in fact, I believe that this event has little to do with the Webb Telescope. 

Remember that NASA just took delivery of two Hubble class Keyhole space telescopes, no longer needed by the National Reconnaissance Office or NRO. I guess they want to be sure that, in converting those scopes for scientific work, sensitive tech does not leak . On the other hand, what if the Webb is being used as a civilian cover operation for next generation spook craft, just as the Hubble had been? Maybe an even bigger reason.

Gamma Ray Bursters as cullers of life? These bursters may wipe out those systems that orbit near Galactic Center. “Only at the outskirts of the Milky Way, at more than 10 kpc from the  center, this probability drops below 50%. 

When considering the Universe as a whole, the safest environments for life (similar to the one on Earth) are the lowest density regions in the outskirts of large galaxies and life can exist in only ~ 10% of galaxies." Interesting hypothesis. On the role of GRBs on life extinction in the Universe, by Tsvi Piran, Raul Jimenez.

Tiny diamond nano threads could someday support a space elevator?  See my earlier ruminations about how a space elevator beanstalk on the far side of the moon might (across 100 million years) save our planet!

Ten horrifying technologies that should never exist, by George Dvorsky, citing weaponized nanotechnology, brain hacking devices, weaponized pathogens...and more terrors.

Will “torpor” let us put astronauts into suspension (as in 2001: A Space Odyssey), saving resources for deep space missions? As I mentioned earlier, this work is funded by us at NIAC... actually, one of the less plausible grants, in the next decade or two.  But good press!

Heh cute visualization to put things in perspective; How close is our closest neighbor, our moon "It’s tempting to think it’s much closer to Earth than it really is. The Moon has an average distance from Earth of 384,399 kilometers (or 238,854 miles if you prefer)....It turns out it’s far enough to fit every other planet in the solar system with room to spare, " notes astronomer Christian Ready. 

Here's one rule of thumb.  The distance from Earth to moon is ten times Earth's circumference.  So wind a measuring tape ten times round the equator.  That should do it.   In fact... now that I put it that way, I am starting to suspect....

But never mind. Onward and let's foster a bold, ambitious, responsible but brave civilization! 

====

*PS... am I excited about all this comet news?  Excuse the pump heck-yeah. But way back then, for a while, I was a top comet-ologists. My doctoral dissertation created the present model of dust layers on an icy-rocky core. See it portrayed in Heart of the Comet.  So heck yeah indeed!  I am plenty jazzed.