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...
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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...
A Deepening Look at the Digital Sky
Sometimes as I click through imagery from spacecraft and observatories, I think about what the world was like before we had an Internet to deliver this kind of information. Consider the early surveys of the heavens, exemplified by William Herschel sweeping the sky in...
The Perseid Project: Crowd-sourcing the Meteor Stream
An individual meteorite can tell us much about the composition of ancient Solar System material, but today I want to mention a project that is taking the aggregate view. Chris Crawford has set up the Perseid Laptop Meteor Observation Project as a way to use...
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...
Avatar: Film-making and Human Destiny
by Larry Klaes Judging by the abundant reaction to Larry Klaes' recent article on James Cameron's Avatar -- and by the continuing commentary in society at large -- Larry seems to be vindicated when he says the film has become a focal point of discussion for many in...