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Writing a Social Insect Civilization

Communicating with extraterrestrials isn’t going to be easy, as we’ve learned in science fiction, all the way from John Campbell’s Who Goes There? To Ted Chiang’s Story of Your Life (and the movie Arrival). Indeed, just imagining the kinds of civilizations that might...

On ‘Sun-like’ Stars

The thought of a planet orbiting a Sun-like star began to obsess me as a boy, when I realized how different all the planets in our Solar System were from each other. Clearly there were no civilizations on any planet but our own, at least around the Sun. But if Alpha...

The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos

We keep trying to extend our reach into the heavens, but the idea of panspermia is that the heavens are actually responsible for us. Which is to say, that at least the precursor materials that allow life to emerge came from elsewhere, and did not originate on Earth....

Pondering Life in an Alien Ocean

No one ever said Europa Clipper would be able to detect life beneath the ice, but as we look at the first imagery from the spacecraft’s star-tracking cameras, it’s helpful to keep the scope of the mission in mind. We’re after some critical information here, such as...

Deep Space Implications for CubeSats

The Hera mission has been dwarfed in press coverage by the recent SpaceX Starship booster retrieval and the launch of Europa Clipper, both successful and significant. But let’s not ignore Hera. Its game plan is to check on the asteroid Dimorphos, which became the...