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Waiting Out New Horizons

The outer Solar System has always been something of an obsession for me, to the point where as a kid, I used to haunt the libraries looking for books on planetary science. Absurdly, I had the notion that even though little was known about places like Triton and Pluto,...

Rethinking Alien Encounter

by Larry Klaes Larry Klaes wraps up his two-part essay on our attitudes towards extraterrestrials by looking at how the subject has been treated in the past, and speculating on the scenarios that might bring disaster. Do Earth-shattering depictions of space invasion...

Faces from Earth: A Personal View

by Tibor Pacher My friend Tibor Pacher quotes from Hermann Hesse on the front page of his PI Club site: "To let the possible happen, the impossible must be tried again and again." No one works harder at pushing the boundaries of the possible in terms of public...

IKAROS Sail Deployment in Progress

Update: The IKAROS blog reports "The operation ended today as planned." That must count as good news for the sail, now 7,480,787 kilometers from Earth, but we still need confirmation that the sail's 'secondary' deployment is now complete. Maybe this is it: Japanese...

To Join the ‘Galactic Club’

Is there a 'Galactic Club' of civilizations to which our species might one day deserve admission? If so, the club's members are being mighty quiet about their existence. But David Schwartzman (Howard University) thinks it might be out there. In that case, he finds...

Astrobiology’s Far Future

These are exciting times for planet hunters, with Kepler and CoRoT in the hunt, three ongoing searches for rocky worlds around Centauri A and B, and the continuing WISE mission, which may identify planet-bearing red and brown dwarfs that we haven't spotted yet, not to...

Finding the Real Planet X

One of the things we need to learn about the Alpha Centauri stars is whether Proxima Centauri is gravitationally bound to Centauri A and B. Much hinges on the issue, for if Proxima is merely passing in the night, then whatever disruptive effect it may have upon an...

SETI at the Royal Society

As I'm just finishing up Richard Holmes' The Age of Wonder (Pantheon, 2009), the Royal Society had been on my mind even before the two-day conference on SETI that concluded yesterday made the news. If you haven't read the Holmes book, by all means do so. It's a...