Exoplanets, waterworlds and asteroids

After three postings about politics and winning this phase of the Civil War... how about some space stuff?  Proof that we are members of a dynamic, bold, competent scientific civilization.

A planetary system similar to our own: Epsilon Eridani, at 10.5 light years, is one of the nearest solitary stars roughly similar to our sun, and hence was inspected by Frank Drake, in the 1960s, for possible SETI signals. Now, as well reported on the SETI Institute’s site, new infrared observations reveal a system very similar to ours, with a Jovian planet riding herd just outside a silicate-dominated asteroid ring and an outermost ring much like our Kuiper Belt… but with a third debris field also orbiting where we would have Uranus.  

It appears that most habitable planets may be waterworlds: On Gizmodo, George Dvorsky reports on a new study published in The Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggests that most habitable planets are wet. “Like, extremely wet. Using computer models, astronomer Fergus Simpson from the Institute of Cosmos Science at the University of Barcelona found that habitable exoplanets, at least simulated ones, tend to be overrun by water, in most cases accounting for 90 percent or more of the total surface area,” unlike Earth’s relatively dry 70%.  Here’s the original paper’s abstract.

In fact, the authors’ inferences are a bit weak. Still, I have been saying that Earth is likely to be dry, for a water world, for 30 years.  Going back to this classic paper in the 1983 Quarterly Journal of  Royal Astronomical Society.

  

Or in this way fun youtube riff you’ll enjoy, I promise!

In fact, this is the safest and best "soft landing" to the Fermi Paradox.That the universe is filled with life-rich water worlds, but our Earth, skating the inner edge of the Sun's CHZ or Goldilocks Zone, has unusually more land surface. Hence hands-and-fire races like us are the rare thing.  When we build starships, we'll find lots of other folks out there... with flippers and such. Interesting to talk to, but not competitors.  

Of course there's another aspect to us skating the inner edge of the Sun's CHZ or Goldilocks Zone.  It explains why Earth has to shed heat so efficiently and even a little bit of greenhouse gas excess can be lethal.  But then, members of the Denialist Cult don't read my blog. And you science lovers don't need to be convinced.

== Again, the case for asteroids ==

A question asker over on Quora someone asked: “Is space mining sci-fi or a legitimate concept?”

In fact, some of the smartest people on the planet have studied the material properties of meteorites, which are bits of asteroids or comets that have fallen to Earth. Back in the 1980s, John Lewis's book Mining the Sky (or his more recent Asteroid Mining 101) made clear that simple estimates of the various types of asteroids and their relative abundance reveal what’s out there…

…and what’s out there is a bonanza. Just one 1-km asteroid of the right type — if melted and cast using solar concentrators — would produce:

• the entire Earth’s iron/steel/nickel production for a year.
• Earth’s gold and silver production for 100 years.
• Earth’s platinum group production for 1000 years. And that’s one such asteroid, and there are millions

Do we yet know how to “melt and cast using solar concentrators” in space? Only in computer models. But a different kind of asteroid is rich in water, so we’d harvest that resource much sooner, just by throwing a baggie around one and siphoning the evaporated volatiles.

Is all this guaranteed? Of course not. Do the payoffs seem to warrant some capital investment? Um, duh?

Oh, about “bringing asteroids to Earth”… the answer is you don’t do that! You bring them to lunar orbit and process them there. Which means that a lunar orbit station would be valuable in all sorts of ways. Including the profitable selling of services to all the wannabe nations — China, Russia, India, Europe and billionaires — who want to plant their own footprints on that sterile and (for now) utterly useless surface.

(If you meet a “back to the moon!” zealot inside the US, it will always be a republican, whose other mantra is “screw science!”)

== METI Redux ==

Over on Quora someone asked: “Stephen Hawking believes we should not attempt to contact alien civilizations. What’s his thinking? And do you agree?”

I have been cataloguing answers to the “Fermi Paradox” - the question of why we see no blatant signs of other sapient species - since 1983, before it was even called the “Fermi Paradox”! In all that time, I have found that the brightest people — e.g. Hawking — tend to leap to declare “Aha! I know the reason!” 

It seems an immature habit, given this is a topic that has no known subject matter! ;-)

Seriously, the best we can do is catalogue and maybe rank-order these notions by plausibility. In my novel Existence, for example, I go through more than a dozen hypothetical reasons why interstellar AI probes might sit in the Asteroid Belt, tune in to our Internet, yet refrain from making themselves known.

Among the 100 or so “Fermi” explanations, a few seem plausible (e.g. we may have anomalous-fluke intelligence), some are optimistic (e.g. Earth happens to be “dry” compared to most Water Worlds, and hence, most other bright races have fins, not hands.) And a fair number are pessimistic or dangerous, (I go through more than a few of those, in Existence.)

The dangerous ones aren’t totally compelling - though they worry folks like Nicholas Bostrom and Lord Martin Rees. And Hawking. But they seem plausible enough to put a burden of proof on those silly radio astronomers who eagerly seek to beam “yoohoo!” messages into space. I am among the SETI scholars who object to this foolishness called METI or Messaging to ExtraTerrestrial Intelligences.

This is not a place to go into detail, but you can find a very biting rundown of why so many of us object to this stunt on my website.

== The Politics of SETI ==

Stranger danger: Extraterrestrial first contact as a political problem, by John Hickman and Koby Boatwright offers an interesting essay on political decisions whether to respond to a SETI detection and the difficulties of communications with aliens.

Just released: Aliens: The World's Leading Scientists on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life, edited by Jim Al-Khalili, with contributions from Martin Rees, Paul Davies and others.

And consider this: Nuclear explosions and submarine comms distort space weather near the earth: Very-low-frequency (VLF) signals are emitted by ground stations "at huge powers" so they can reach submarines deep below the ocean's surface. Now comes a (still controversial) finding that these VLF signals can affect the Van Allen radiation belts above the Earth.  Satellites report that the inner boundary of the inner VAB has shifted over time. Measurements from the 1960s, when VLF transmissions were more limited, suggest that the inner edge of the Van Allen belts was closer to Earth then than it is today, according to NASA. It's possible that the inner boundary of the Van Allen belts is an "impenetrable barrier" and that, if humans did not send out VLF signals, the boundary would stretch closer to our planet.  

Gawrsh. There’s a sci fi premise that writes itself.  

 == Cartoons re SETI & METI! == 

Fom: SMBC Comics: 


We debated whether to send signals to earth...

Why we might worry...

How come we never hear from aliens?

From: XKCD Comics:

If planets are common, where is everyone?

The first ants to achieve sentience...

Brewster Rockit on METI and REGRETI

Space: big plans and misplaced schemes!

I'm preparing to head east for a meeting of NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts group (NIAC)... and a couple of other DC area events: one for the White House (OSTP), one for the Caltech Alumni Assn, and an AIAA panel on future military aircraft... followed by an appearance at the Ideacity idea festival in Toronto. 

Busy trip. Busy topics. Busy times for a civilization that deserves far-seeing citizens and leaders.

== Thinking big about space ==

If you are anywhere near the Washington DC - Baltimore area July 1-3, consider attending the Escape Velocity convention - a micro futuristic world's fair focusing on Science Fiction and STEAM education, sponsored by the new DC area Museum of Science Fiction.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX announced an ambitious new plan to land an unmanned spacecraft on Mars as soon as 2018 with NASA providing technical support -- "an extraordinary collaboration between the public and private sectors in an effort to eventually get humans to the Red Planet."

As no doubt all of you know, in another success for Elon: SpaceX launched a communications satellite into orbit and for the fourth time they were able to recover the rocket, again on a drone ship at sea. This was another really tough geosynchronous launch like the previous one and hence may not be re-usable except for spares. But that just makes it double impressive! And... onboard cameras covered the rocket's descent.

Amazon and Blue Origins CEO Jeff Bezos wants to build giant factories in space... to save the Earth, proclaiming a vision of "millions of people living and working in space."

After an initial failure, NASA  inflated the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, an essential tech for human-crewed spaceflight. And we are on our way to 2016 being as terrific a year for our outward progress as fantastic as 2015 was.

Canadian firm Thoth Technology Inc. has been granted both U.S. and U.K. patents for an inflatable tower designed to take astronauts up into the stratosphere, so they can then be propelled into space. A freestanding structure complete with an electrical elevator up to a 20km (12.5 miles) high launch platform.  In other words in all ways precisely the design that I described in my novel Sundiver (1980). Anyone remember the Vanilla Needle? One difference.  Mine was big enough that balloons could use buoyancy in the high pressure space to lift cargoes most of the way.

Yuri Milner, the Russian philanthropist and Internet entrepreneur, announced a plan on Tuesday to send a fleet of robots no bigger than iPhones to Alpha Centauri. “Once in orbit, the probes would unfold thin sails and then, propelled by powerful laser beams from Earth,” say reports The $10 billion project aims to accelerate the mini-probes to a fifth of the speed of light… perhaps a bit of an ambitious goal for Earth-based lasers just a decade or two from now.  See also “Instead of starships, try StarChips.”

A more extensive exploration of Milner’s many Breakthrough Institute projects, in collaboration with Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg and former NASA Ames head Pete Worden -- including a vast expansion of SETI, can be found in The Atlantic, and a detailed technical description of the plans will appear on the project’s website.

A final note on this, for now.  Those of you who have purchased Insistence of Vision know that one story - “The Avalon Probes” – offers up an ironic commentary on exactly this approach. And of course… it’s an early version of exactly the scenario that I mapped out – more seriously detailed - in Existence. With one exception.  I proposed that before going interstellar we aim for an earlier, intermediate goal of the solar gravitational lens focal zone, just 550 astronomical units out.  Seriously, the Breakthrough Institute could probably use one more advisory board member….

== Forcing a return to the (useless) moon, instead of getting rich out there ==

Space politicized? The current U.S. House of Representatives, already the laziest and most dogmatically useless national legislative body in American history, has now altered NASA’s budget, forcing the space agency to return to a Bush Era priority: “no funds are included in this bill for NASA to continue planning efforts to conduct either robotic or crewed missions to an asteroid. Instead, NASA is encouraged to develop plans to return to the Moon.”

To be clear, there should be nothing political about these priorities. I serve on neutral commissions to evaluate missions based on their likely scientific and other outcomes. Nearly all scientists agree that there is little or nothing to be gained from any near term manned return to the sterile lunar surface, which offers humanity nothing of any near future value. Though the region called 'cis-lunar space' - the orbit just above the moon - is seen as extremely valuable.

In contrast, both scientific and commercial interest in asteroids is intense, with several nations and companies like Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries eagerly investing in what could be the 21st Century’s giga-Gold Rush.

The Obama Administration’s and NASA’s goal for manned flight - ramping up operations in lunar orbit, learning to both study asteroidal resources and work on extended missions - is exactly right and supported by the best expert advice.  

Expertise that the current House leadership banished from Congress when they disbanded their own Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) for the crime of presenting them with fact-based analyses. Instead, leaders like Dennis Hastert, Thomas DeLay, John Boehner and Paul Ryan chose to rely on majority members’ gut instincts.

Those guts have made this matter - which should be nonpartisan and scientific - part of culture war, with one party praising Return To The Moon for no other reason, certainly not science or potential profit. Their sole rationalization? “The Europeans and Chinese are talking about moon trips!”

Yeah, so? Let the Chinese and Europeans and billionaire tourists have that sterile ball. We have lifted our gaze to more interesting and likely far more rewarding vistas. Vistas that only the United States can take on, instead of being copycats.  (Hint for U.S. voters: let's get rid of those twits?)

There's more. When the Obama Administration canceled the Bush boondoggle Constellation Programs, it seemed that money might be spent on actual missions to explore the cosmos.  Instead, Congress in 2010 imposed a restoration of core elements of Constellation, called the Space Launch System (SLS), resurrecting many Space Shuttle components for a system without any mission on the near or intermediate horizons.  And now the GOP-run House and Senate have since imposed increases in the SLS budget, mostly at the expense of science missions.  All of this against a backdrop of success in the Obama endeavor to spin off and commercialize orbital launch services to private companies, which are developing capabilities at a vastly quicker rate.  (Example: most of the expensive SLS systems will be rendered redundant by - for example - the SpaceX Falcon Heavy and Dragon capsule.)

“Unfortunately, once the rocket is built, the expenses don't end. Ground crews must be kept ready, supply lines kept open, and contractors taken care of. These fixed costs can be enormous. For the space shuttle, those costs amounted to about $2.5 billion annually—whether the vehicle flew or not…”  So much for the  party that opposes government boondoggles.  Of course part of it is pure pork: Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), wants SLS because it is managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. And MSFC has been Instrumental for 30 years in systematically preventing humans from getting into space.  

See my earlier posting: Does the moon beckon us back?

Asteroids seem a more promising target in the near future....
            

Our next target in space?

Lots of reaction to my earlier article on the Nautilus site, asserting -- (proving!) -- that 2015 was by far our best year, ever, in humanity's forward exploration of the cosmos. Now let's follow up with a look at where our ambitions should take us next.

(Further down... see a weird-wonderful type of Time Travel via gravitational lens!)

== Should we go back to the moon? ==

NASA has determined that its long term destination for astronauts will be the surface of Mars, with asteroid retrieval and appraisal in lunar orbit as the intermediate step. Lunar orbit is perfect in many ways. Others have different ideas, though.

With their new video, The Moon Awakens, the European Space Agency declares its goal to send humans to Luna over the next decade.  This article says “ESA has become increasingly bold with its lunar preferences." Both China and Russia are also aiming to explore the moon. And several private endeavors hope to turn it into the most expensive and high-status of all aristocratic tourist destinations.

Really? Fine. It’s closer and in many ways easier. Those who want the moon are welcome to it. I do not object to others repeating or improving on the Apollo missions. Indeed, if romantic billionaires want to boldly go or take small steps of their own, then hurrah for them, subsidizing that realm for the rest of us.

But I am far less impelled by romanticism than by pragmatic considerations. Indeed, very few scientists or space-resource folks feel even slightly tempted by the moon, in the near term. 

1- The lunar surface lies at the bottom of a steep gravity well, fairly expensive to descend and depart through.  

2- None of the samples brought home by astronauts, nor minerological satellite data from orbit, are indicative of fractionation-separation of elements into what anyone on Earth would call "ores" or concentrations of useful materials, except apparent ice deposits at the poles that were predicted long ago by Jim Arnold, my doctoral committee chair at UCSD. 

Indeed, one would be hard pressed to offer up even a theoretical way that substantially useful ores might exist there. According to current models, the moon was made from chunks of the Earth's crust torn away by a giant collision... after Earth had already experienced separation of heavy metals sinking to the core. Hence any metals on the moon's surface would have been delivered later, by meteoritic impacts. And yes, there may be iron rich impact debris fields. Perhaps you could get some by dragging magnets... just as one might mine a little ice at the poles...

3- But that is harder than going to the source... meteoroids themselves! See this video from Planetary Resources on the economic advantages of mining asteroidal resources. (And now Luxembourg declares their intent to help mine asteroids, teaming up with Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries.)

4-  Suppose you do find a lunar debris field rich in meteorite bits and drag them together.  You then use solar concentrators to melt and separate and shape them, right?  Only on the moon you have 2 weeks of darkness each month.  Meanwhile asteroidal solar smelters work around the clock.

5- Back to the one "ore" we know-of --those polar ice deposits. Those could be nice. But so far, they appear to be too small and too valuable to just grab and use-up, willy nilly, sucking Luna dry, in order to fuel activities elsewhere. To my mind, they belong to future generations of moon colonists -- loonies, not wasted as rocket fuel. 

6- Please. Do not bring up Helium 3. Not till you show me a fusion reactor that will use the stuff. (Though it was a way-cool gimmick in Iron Sky.) Oh, sure.  Let's land a few rovers to check lunar soils for embedded solar He3.  It's called science.

7.  This should not be true. But it seems your political-partisan leanings somewhat predict whether you are an asteroid zealot or a loonie... sorry lunati... oh, never mind that.

8. The moon is not a way station to Mars. It is not a way station to anywhere.  Lunar orbit is.

I could go on, but why? I don't mind some rich fellows funding return to the moon. But scarce tax dollars should go to basics, empowering the tool sets that entrepreneurs might then use, to give us a true space industrial basis. NASA's plan to use cis lunar orbit as a marshalling yard is brilliant. We could do asteroidal tests there, and also service those fools... I mean bold folks... who spend their own money to go down to the lunar surface and prove me wrong!  

Invent cheap Helium 3 fusion power and show me how you'll moon harvest it, for example.  That movie trope is a real reach, for at least the time being.

But go ahead.  Few things would make me happier.

== Further out in the cosmos ==

What an era!  Only a decade ago, cosmological gravitational lenses were considered freaky marvels… wherein a giant galactic cluster at an intermediate distance bends and focuses light from objects vastly farther away, allowing us to glimpse some of the very oldest epochs in the universe. (Though some of us have speculated about them for a long time, and they figure prominently in my novel EXISTENCE.)

NASA/ESA

Now? These lenses are tools that astronomers catalogue and use, with as much familiarity and skill as their own telescopes! Moreover, there is an incredible quirk: the nearer cluster often forms multiple images of deep background objects, far beyond, arraying different versions of the same distant galaxy in an extended arc. Or in an arrangement called an ‘Einstein Cross.’ 

And since these images have slightly different transit times to our planet, we get to witness events across multiple viewing times. For example, when a supernova was spotted in one of these lensed and magnified scenes, scientists crafted models to calculate when the same explosion would appear in other focal images of the same galaxy. And lo, the stellar explosion – in a galaxy ten billion light years away – popped up as predicted! “The supernova has been nicknamed Refsdal in honor of the Norwegian astronomer Sjur Refsdal, who, in 1964, first proposed using time-delayed images from a lensed supernova to study the expansion of the Universe.”

Seriously, did you grasp how cool that is? The implications are stunning. Among them: astronomers were able to zoom in on the distant star before it exploded, knowing that it would, in advance. A kind of time travel? 

Wrap your head around it. You are a member of a species and civilization that's doing cool stuff like this! You paid pennies for it, in taxes. So tell the "mad as hell" anger merchants to get bent.

Oh, and the universe is apparently older than 6000 years. Yes it is.

== Much closer to home… ==

... astronomers have discovered the closest potentially habitable planet found outside our solar system so far, orbiting a star just 14 light years away. The planet, more than four times the mass of the Earth, is one of three that the team detected around a red dwarf star called Wolf 1061.  

Aw heck, I just alluded so I might as well... one hot topic has been the interface (if any) between science and religion. I've been writing a whole book on it(!) and contributed a chapter to Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection of Space Travel and Religion (edited by Paul Levinson & Michael Waltemathe), which explores what may be the best motive for human exploration of space: the desire of every human being, essentially spiritual, to understand more about our place in the universe, how our lives on Earth are inextricably part of that bigger picture. 

Even most atheists will admit to that hunger... and we got our richest meal in 2015... the "best year in space, ever."

Now to even better years.  Make 2016 the one when we all - especially Americans - decide to make it very clear that we love science!

Challenges for Future Generations: space, brain preservation and more!

Continuing in a space and science vein, let's reprise the topic from last time... only this time with another of my rambunctious-uppity videos.

Are we ready, once again, to be a bold, dynamic people, ambitious and confident, ready to take on new challenges and new horizons? See Our Reborn Future in Space, my look at the ambitious proposal by Planetary Resources to mine asteroids for "trillions" in purported mineral wealth. How are these billionaires planning to obtain metals and fuel by mining nearby asteroids? Has the future finally arrived?

Is it B.S. or not B.S.? In Part 2: Science or Fiction? I discuss the obstacles, technical and economic, facing Planetary Resources.

And while we're on the subject... see a brief  but philosophical view of how crucial the next few human generations may be. Part of a series produced by the European Commission’s Horizons 2020 project. 

== Is your brain worth the bother? ==

The Brain Preservation Foundation is an interesting enterprise co-developed by John Smart (Acceleration Studies Foundation) that's offering a prize for researchers who manage to preserve animal brains in ways that would be suitable for humans and that keep intact the web of physical connections - or the connectome - that some believe to contain all of the information in both memory and thoughts. Brain preservation aims at locking in these connections against post-mortem decay.

Yes, you've heard of Alcor which will contract to rush in the moment you are declared dead and perfuse your brain (or whole body) with chemicals so it can be cooled in liquid nitrogen. The contracts are expensive ($200,000 for whole body cryonics) and the promised event would be very gaudy. Still, it seemed the only option, for those whose aim (some might say fetish) was to have their physical organic brain itself someday brought back to life.  

I appraise the tradeoffs in an article: Do we really want immortality?

Believers in the connectome don't expect or need the organic brain to be revived, so long as all the synapses and their weightings can be preserved and later nano-traced in perfect detail. They hope memories, even personality, might be emulated - some say "revived" - in a computer setting. 

 Now... I have some deep reservations about this "connectome" business, suspecting that there may be a lot more at work, possibly deep within the associated cells or in highly non-linear and ephemeral standing waves. Moreover, the semantic distinction between emulation and revival is one that we could argue about for decades... and will.

But let's run with this. Here's the innovative idea.  If the connectome is everything, then preserve that.  No need to revive the organo-colloidal brain, so plasticize it!  Lock it in lucite.  Store it at room temperature, on your kids' mantle or book shelf. No garish emergency room procedures or draining/perfusions around grieving relatives and no ongoing refrigeration fees. Heck, why not be decorative, till the nano-dissectors and hifalutin computers are ready...

Well, as I said, I have doubts at many levels.  Still, it has advantages over the gaudy, rather chilling image of cryo skull-dipping. To become a knick-knack. A conversational tchotchke on my descendants' shelf... and at much lower price, with a lot less drama or dependence on fickle contracts?  Well, it grows more... hm... the word isn't "tempting."  But let me put it to you.

What level would the price need to reach before you shrugged and said: sure, sign me up?

==More on the flexible Human Mind==

Using brain-imaging technology for the first time with people experiencing mathematics anxiety, University of Chicago scientists have gained new insights into how some students are able to overcome their fears and succeed in math.   Teaching students to control their emotions prior to doing math may be the best way to overcome the math difficulties that often go along with math anxiety.   READ THIS.

Much discussed  at the "Transhumanism" talks at TedX DelMar where I spoke about space in our neo-human future... brain-computer interfaces, which are starting to mature.... or IMmature!  See for example Brainball!  a special table uses magnets to move a ball AWAY from you the more RELAXED you are. (You wear a brain wave monitor.) I love the image of the two competitors, each looking more unconscious or dead than the other!

And... a Real ‘Beautiful Mind’: College Dropout Became Mathematical Genius After Mugging.

== Astronomical News ==

British scientists have produced a colossal picture of our Milky Way Galaxy that reveals the detail of a billion stars, BBC News reports. "When it was first produced, I played with it for hours; it's just stunning,"

The Pioneer Anomaly has been resolved, thanks in part to efforts of the Planetary Society to help a small team find, then translate, and finally analyze more than 30 years worth of data, recorded on archaic media.  Sorry, it wasn’t “strange physics.”  But some very good science sleuthing was required.

Astronomers are reporting the first "Earth-sized" planets orbiting within the habitable zones of their stars.  They report stellar parameters for late-K and M-type planet-candidate host stars announced by the Kepler Mission. Three of the planet-candidates are terrestrial sized with orbital semimajor axes that lie within the habitable zones of their host stars.  Note with this kind of star, there is the chance of getting tidal locked, with one face always toward the sun.

It's  difficult to knock a star out of the galaxy.  To give a star the two-million-plus mile-per-hour kick it  involves tangling with the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's core. Astronomers have found 16 "hypervelocity" stars traveling fast enough to eventually escape galaxy's gravitational grasp. Now, Vanderbilt astronomers report in a recent issue of the Astronomical Journal that they have identified a group of more than 675 stars on the outskirts of the Milky Way that they argue are hyper-velocity stars that have been ejected from the galactic core.

Wind At Sea Is Strangely Van Goghish, says NASA. New instruments have taken a leap. One of the most beautiful and surprising things I have ever seen!  For the first time we can see how similar our atmosphere behaves to that of Jupiter.  Stunning, beautiful and thought-provoking!


Pop-Art? Artistic geological maps of solar system bodies.

==On the Technological Front==

One of the most instantly recognizable features of glass is the way it reflects light. But a new way of creating surface textures on glass, developed by researchers at MIT, virtually eliminates reflections, producing glass that is almost unrecognizable because of its absence of glare — and whose surface causes water droplets to bounce right off, like tiny rubber balls.

Touché proposes a novel Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing technique that can not only detect a touch event, but also recognize complex configurations of the human hands and body. Tap your arm or hand for gesture commands without a lens or electrodes, and so on.

== And some lighter stuff ==

See a hilarious xkcd about picking a college major:  Why 'Undecided' may be the best choice.

A lovely fantasy Voyager cartoon.

Another beautiful mash-up of classical music and space imagery.  Inspiring... and a bit cautionary....
Know that reader who loves to mix both romance and adventure with unusual personalities... and a little science? Have them give a look at the newest novel by Lou Aronica (author of BLUE) and Julian Iragorri:  Differential Equations. I see another book with that same title on my shelf, nearby (among my mathematics textbooks!).  Lou’s writing is much less dry... and there’s more romance!

And finally....  faux vintage travel posters for the solar system.

Is our time in outer space finally at-hand?

Last week it was asteroid mining, as Peter Diamandis and his partners showed us their bold new venture, Planetary Resources, aiming eventually to start harvesting trillions of dollars worth of materials that would then no longer have to be ripped out of Mother Earth.

This glimpse of a vigorously bold and can-do future provoked The Daily Show's Jon Stewart to comment, "Do you know how rarely the news in 2012 looks and sounds how you thought news would look and sound like in 2012?"  to fervent approval from his audience. Having worked in this area 30 years ago, I was thrilled to see this forward-looking initiative finally get rolling in my lifetime.  Oh, but also... to see it completed...

Now, for something else that's speculative/inspiring: another bit of space news announced only a few days later.

According to the The Daily Yomiuri (via Gizmodo), construction company Obayashi Corp has announced it will construct a space elevator capable of shuttling passengers 36,000 kilometers above the Earth by 2050.

Obayashi plans to manufacture cables for the elevator from carbon nanontubes, which are twenty times stronger than steel. Those will extend toward a counterweight placed 96,000 kilometers above earth's surface (approximately one-fourth of the distance to the moon.) Passengers will be able to reach the elevator's terminal station at geostationary height (GEO), 36,000 kilometers above Earth's surface, traveling in cars at 200 kilometers per hour, powered by solar energy.

Cool enough for you?  Could it happen in real life?

== An uplifting idea ==

Although there had been scribbled concepts for "towers to space" going back to Tsiolkovsky in the 1890s, it wasn't until 1959 that Russian scientist, Yuri N. Artsutanov  published the counter-weighted space elevator concept known today, with a midway station conveniently located at GEO, and everything held suspended by tension, rather than compression.  Subsequently, amid all the excitement over rockets, most in the west remained ignorant of the concept...

... till it burst upon us in the 1980s, with the simultaneous publication of great space-elevator novels by Charles Sheffield (The Web Between the Worlds) and Arthur C. Clarke (The Fountains of Paradise). Since then, it has been portrayed in many other tales, like Red Mars and Foundation's Triumph.

In fact, in Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson vividly showed that the ideal site for a space elevator system is not Earth, where you need materials right near the edge of what's possible with the carbon bond, with a safety multiplier in single digits... but Mars, where such a device is much simpler to build, due to lighter gravity.  Almost a no-brainer.

That is, till someone sabotages it! At which point (snap!) the part that's beyond geostationary orbit goes hurtling away while the lower third proceeds to impact the surface at hypersonic speeds, laying a visible equator mark, as if for a manufactured toy globe!

Ah, sci fi.  It does warn us to exercise extra care, and get it right.  And watch out for crazies.

== So.... BS?  or not-BS? ==

In fact, this is not the first time we've heard such an announcement and I give it less cred than the initiative from Planetary Resources, by some distance.  Still, the coincidence in timing... plus a number of fascinating technologies that I saw while attending (as an advisor) the recent NASA Innovative and Advanced Concepts workshop ... lead me to wonder.  Is our time of disappointment in space coming to an end?

Consider how different things used to seem.  Until the launch of Voyager 2, every advance in the speed that human beings could travel fit neatly on a logarithmic curve that increased very slowly for centuries, through foot and steed to sailing and then steamship.  Then overland train, automobile, airplane... an acceleration that breached escape velocity from the solar system! Projecting this curve beyond Voyager, it seemed the stars might be in our grasp within a lifetime.

Only then, the seeming irresistible force of a mathematically modeled curve met the immovable object of something called reality. The much-feared "S-curve" that crushes the fantasies of the naive... those whose simple-eager projections fuel doomed asset bubbles!

After Voyager, nothing man-made ever moved that fast again... that is, till the New Horizons mission to Pluto, just a few years ago.

Shall we forgive some dreamers for growing grouchy, during the long wasteland of the Space Shuttle era?

(Indeed, I once started writing a story with a stark premise to explain such an unlikely shift from hopeful progress to stagnation. In it, some nasty aliens negotiate a pact with President Elect Ronald Reagan - similar to the one he worked out with the Iranian Ayatollahs.  The aliens would stop supporting the USSR, propping up that incompetent, thuggish state, allowing it to crumble...

...and in return, America would divert all "space" efforts, veering away from accomplishment and toward wheel-spinning.  Spending lots of money but getting nothing done at all.  The timing works, by the way. Certainly George W. Bush's nonsensical notion of wasting our time by going back to the sterile moon fit that lurid but snarky scenario.)

== A Resumption? ==

So is that it?  Were those early dreams just fantasies? Were the Apollo landings flukes? Or evidence that an earlier generation was better, or more daring, than us?

Well now, here's the thing about sudden tech spurts and long, frustrating plateaus. You may be deluded by the spurts, but you can also get too accustomed to plateaus! In fact, as models of reality they are just as unrealistic.

What's more accurate is to realize that Apollo was way, way premature. Given the technology of the 1960s -- your phone has more computational power than all of NASA had, back then -- it's amazing they didn't blow themselves up every time. It was a perfect example of human determination and ingenuity overcoming all obstacles of technology or common sense.

I have long called Apollo an example of the same phenomenon as Las Vegas -- proof that there is nothing human beings cannot achieve with enough fervid concentration of money, water... and desire.
Ironically, during the long dry period, background technology and abilities have been maturing, till now....

Why did the Planetary Resources consortium of billionaires suddenly announce plans to move ahead in steady steps toward fulfilling the dream of reaping lavish rewards from asteroid mining?  Because space optics and microelectronics and communications and computers and ion drive engines have all matured to a point where dozens of their planned "Arkyd" spacecraft might be built and deployed for mere tens of millions of dollars.  Crowd-sourcing some of the computation to distributed networks of millions of home computers will both reduce costs and get countless citizens involved. (I hope each participant will get a stock share!)

== Can it really happen? ==

So are the the folks at Obayashi Corp just blowing smoke?  Well... almost certainly at some level. Still, that doesn't matter, so long as we are generally moving forward, with confidence and an eager, can-do spirit.

Could it be that Clarke and Sheffield and Artsutanov had a prescient dream that might come true o n my 100th birthday, perhaps soon enough for me to take a comfy orbital elevator car ride, gentle enough for brittle centenarian bones?  You gotta hope and believe that a confluence of technologies may arrive, as part of a "good singularity" wave.

Is humanity ready?  I mean mentally?  Well, not judging from the level of puerile responses in the comments section, under the Gizmodo report...

My optimistic solution to that obstacle?  Brain boosts. Smart pills.  For everybody. (oh, please!)  If we can get those, without major side effects, then maybe... just maybe... those stars.

It's an amazing time. A time for us to resume being amazing. In fact, if you heed the wise advice of Zaphod Beeblebrox, you'll be getting ready to be amazingly amazing.

See more of my speculations about Space: Where are we headed?