Cameron Smith is no stranger to these pages, having examined the role of evolution in human expansion into space (see Biological Evolution in Interstellar Human Migration), cultural changes on interstellar journeys (Human Universals and Cultural Evolution on...
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Pluto: Unusual Interactions with the Solar Wind
David McComas (Princeton University) calls what his team of researchers have learned about the solar wind at Pluto 'astonishing,' adding "This is a type of interaction we've never seen before anywhere in our Solar System." The reference is to data from the Solar Wind...
Beneath a Methane Sea
Back when Cassini was approaching Saturn and we all anticipated the arrival of the Huygens payload on the surface, speculation grew that rather than finding a solid surface, Huygens might 'splash down' in a hydrocarbon sea. I can remember art to that effect in various...
Breakthrough Starshot: Mission to Alpha Centauri
Here on Centauri Dreams we often discuss interstellar flight in a long-term context. Will humans ever travel to another star? I've stated my view that if this happens, it will probably take several hundred years before we develop the necessary energy resources to make...
Agriculture on Other Worlds
Because Centauri Dreams focuses on the outer system and beyond, I haven't had much to say about Mars, knowing how many good sites there are that cover developments there. But today's post is timely not only because of recent depictions of Mars in film but also because...
Tracking the Chelyabinsk Impactor
Yesterday's post on the distribution of asteroid populations inevitably had me thinking about the Chelyabinsk event on February 15, 2013, and about the concurrent flyby of the asteroid (367943) Duende, which took place on the same day. A scant sixteen hours after the...
Planet Nine: “An Uneasy Exhilaration”
In the past few years, several readers have talked to me about changes to the comment format on Centauri Dreams. In particular, some way of setting up comment 'threads' seemed to make sense, and there are various plugins to make this happen. Thanks to all for their...
Can Social Insects Have a Civilization?
I first encountered Michael Chorost in his fine book World Wide Mind (Free Press, 2011), which looks at the relationship between biology and the machine tools that can enhance it. Mike's thinking on SETI has already produced rich discussion in these pages (see, for...
ALMA: Interesting Objects in the Outer System
Two papers have appeared on the arXiv server suggesting hitherto undiscovered objects in the outer Solar System (thanks to Centauri Dreams reader Stevo Darkly for the pointer). Both papers use data harvested by the Atacama Large millimeter/submillimeter array (ALMA),...
The Best Pluto Imagery Yet
I finally have a landscape to attach to Larry Niven's classic "Wait It Out," a tale of shipwreck on Pluto. The New Horizons imagery is giving us resolutions of 77-85 meters per pixel, so that we can, as this JHU/APL news release reminds us, see features less than half...