pale blue dot
If human beings are ever to colonize other planets – which might become necessary for the survival of the species, given how far we have degraded this one – they will almost certainly have to use generation ships: spaceships that will support not just those who set out on them, but also their descendants. The …
Continue reading “Would it be immoral to send out a generation starship?”
Imagine being confined to a metal cell with a couple of other people and few amenities for months or even years. Maybe after that, you’ll be moved to a new compound, but you still have no privacy and extremely limited communication with your family and anyone else in the outside world. You feel both crowded …
Continue reading “How to optimize your headspace on a mission to Mars”
One fact about our time is becoming increasingly well-known. No matter how far you travel, no matter in which direction you point, there is nowhere on Earth that remains free from the traces of human activity. The chemical and biological signatures of our species are everywhere. Transported around the globe by fierce atmospheric winds, relentless …
Continue reading “Forget the Anthropocene: we’ve entered the synthetic age”
What would happen if you stuck your body inside a particle accelerator? The scenario seems like the start of a bad Marvel comic, but it happens to shed light on our intuitions about radiation, the vulnerability of the human body, and the very nature of matter. Particle accelerators allow physicists to study subatomic particles by …
Continue reading “Why we can stop worrying and love the particle accelerator”
Many people believe that chemicals, particularly the man-made ones, are highly dangerous. After all, more than 80,000 chemicals have been synthesised for commercial use in the United States, and many have been released into the environment without proper safety testing. Should we be afraid of the synthetic chemicals that permeate our world?
The blockbuster movie Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018) involves more than just dinosaurs wreaking havoc. Humans are sent in to rescue some prehistoric critters on the volcanic island of Isla Nublar, and chaos soon begins. The volcano erupts, and everyone runs away as a roiling cloud called a pyroclastic flow approaches. At one point the …
Continue reading “What kills you when a volcano erupts? [It’s not what you think]”
I am one of the few African-American aerospace engineers who helped design the Apollo spaceships that took men to the Moon. My great-grandfather was a slave in Claiborne, Alabama, who used primitive tools to work the land. My father was born in Alabama before the Wright brothers made mankind’s first flight. He lived to see …
Continue reading “Space exploration is still the brightest hope-bringer we have”
Many of us think that rapid environmental change is a quintessentially modern crisis. Today, temperatures are soaring, topsoil is washing away, phosphorous is being diluted, forests are retreating, pesticides are sterilising farmland, fertilisers are choking waterways, and biodiversity is plummeting under the onslaught of overpopulated, industrialised societies. Some of these changes are indeed truly new. …
Continue reading “Did European Colonisation precipitate the Little Ice Age?”
For most of human history, the distant ‘celestial sphere’ was regarded as perfect and unchanging. Stars remained in place, planets moved predictably, and the few rogue comets were viewed as atmospheric phenomena. This began to change with the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe’s observation of the supernova of 1572 – apparently, a new star – and …
Continue reading “What high-speed astronomy can tell us about the galactic zoo”
On 11 January 1672, the Fellows of the British Royal Society were treated to a demonstration of Isaac Newton’s reflecting telescope, which formed images with mirrors rather than with the lenses that had been used since the time of Galileo. Afterward, the fellows hailed Newton as the inventor of this marvelous new instrument, an attribution …
Continue reading “How many great minds does it take to invent a telescope?”
