Science fiction has brought us so many concepts for colonizing the stars over the last hundred years, everything from interstellar arks loading thousands of colonists (the sea-faring metaphor) to worldships that see generations of crewmembers live and die during their long joiurney. Suspended animation can get people through a trip that takes centuries, while robotic wardens might oversee the safe passage of human genetic material that could be converted into a colony upon arrival. If you want to be on the cutting edge today, though, better look toward what George Dvorsky talks about in Seven ways to control the Galaxy with self-replicating probes. Here's a novel way to colonize a distant star system: Let a von Neumann probe find a promising planet and use the matter it finds there to establish a colony and fill it with settlers. Not the kind of settler that gets out of a suspended animation tank, yawns, stretches, and then walks out onto an alien landscape, but an uploaded...

Ever since I was a kid watching Adventures in Paradise on TV, I've had a yen for islands, the more remote the better. The show had quite a pull on a young imagination, as skipper Gardner McKay sailed the waters of French Polynesia in his schooner, turning up beautiful women and adventure at most every port. The thought of someday threading through the Tuamotus or setting out for Nuku Hiva and the Marquesas made my spirit soar, and to this day my fascination with maps is undiminished. So you can imagine how I studied the image below, and the kind of speculations it triggered. Because when you look at a map, you try to put yourself there in your mind, and perhaps no islands are more challenging to imagine than the ones pictured here. The work of San Diego middle school teacher Peter Minton (and thanks to Frank Taylor for the pointer), they're based on Cassini imagery peering through the murk of Titan's atmosphere at what seems to be an island group in a methane sea. Assuming, of...

The 43rd Carnival of Space is now available on Ethan Siegel's Starts with a Bang site, entertainingly offered in an 'Oscar winner' format that highlights an impressive array of contributions this week. The one I'll send you to first from an outer planets perspective is Bruce Irving's story on Music of the Spheres about robotic operations in extreme environments. Think Antarctica for upcoming tests, and Europa for long-term uses of this promising technology. The helpful video that accompanies the piece features Bill Stone (Stone Aerospace), whose underwater vehicle Endurance is now undergoing tests in Wisconsin.