Here’s how science fiction novels and movies imagined the year 2020. Science fiction vs reality: what actually happened?
Category Archives: Science Fiction
Astronaut Chris Hadfield reviews 12 popular Space movies [including Gravity and Interstellar]
In the video published on March 24, 2020, by the Vanity Fair magazine below, Canadian retired astronaut and former commander of the International Space Station (ISS), Chris Hadfield reviews space movies, including “Gravity” and “Interstellar”.
“Impossible Engine” – it is impossible
A good rule of thumb: if you see a headline saying something “breaks the laws of physics” (i.e. the “Impossible Engine”) the headline is flat-out wrong.
Super Saturn: J1407b
The exoplanet J1407b is simply “Super Saturn”. If you read Isaac Asimov‘s 1986 novel “Foundation and Earth”, you’ll remember how the main characters of the book (Councilman Golan Trevize, historian Janov Pelorat, and Gaian Bliss) were amazed by Saturn’s rings. They were thinking the gas giant with preeminent rings in old stories was just a …
5 Surprising Facts about Mars
For eons, skywatchers have been fascinated by the pale red dot that not only unpredictably moves backward in the night sky but also shines a compelling blood-red. Its color, indeed, is one of the first features we notice about Mars. It seizes our attention, and its compelling ambiguity has evoked a deep visceral reaction from …
Exoplanet Travel Bureau by NASA [Interactive 3D Images]
Will we ever visit other stars? Maybe, in the distant future, if humans won’t become extinct, our grand grand grand … (insert a hundred or a thousand “grand” here) children can stand on an exoplanet’s surface someday. But, we don’t have to wait. NASA has opened a new web page, an “Exoplanet Travel Bureau”, and we can, …
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Others Will Follow [Short Sci-Fi Film]
A great short science fiction film, “Others Will Follow”, created and directed by Andrew Finch and published on Vimeo, tells the story of a crewed Mars mission. An accident occurs and the spacecraft breaks apart, the last survivor (we don’t see what happens to the rest of the crew, but presumably they have died) manages …
Making Life Multiplanetary [Musk reveals a new plan to colonize Mars]
The billionaire founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk has revealed a new plan to colonize Moon and Mars with giant reusable spaceships. He provided an update on their Mars colonization plan at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC, see notes 1) in Adelaide, Australia this week. Musk plans to send 1 million people to Mars using BFR (see …
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The Planet with Three Suns: KELT-4Ab
Can a planet have three suns? In March 2016, astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics discovered a Jupiter-sized hot planet with three suns: KELT-4Ab. The planet orbits the star KELT-4A, in the star system KELT-4 system that is 680 light-years away from us.
SpaceX Falcon 9 lands on a barge [and the Science Fiction sees the future again!]
April 8, 2016, was a historical day that marks a new milestone in humanity’s space adventure: after delivering CRS-8 cargo on its way to the International Space Station, SpaceX Falcon 9 Flight 23, the third flight of the full thrust version landed vertically on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You over the …
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