Panspermia seems to be in season at the moment; as well as a Scots professor testing the ability of microbes to survive space and reentry, one of the theory’s long-term proponents, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, has returned to the fray with a paper that uses data from the Deep Impact mission to suggest that cometary bodies may have the ideal conditions for harbouring primitive life.
Monthly Archives: August 2007
Robot rapper quits the music business
Looks like there’s now a little less competition in the robot musician scene – Toyota’s “DJ Robot” (who, despite its name, prefers spitting mad lyrics to grappling with the wheels of steel) has turned its back on the music business for a new career as a receptionist. Give it five years, though, and I’m sure there’ll be a cash-in come-back tour. Musicians can never resist a fast buck.
Bigelow planning human-habitable space station
Emboldened by their recent success with their Genesis modules (and worried about the rising cost of space launches), Bigelow Aerospace are skipping the preliminaries and moving straight on to their Sundancer project – a human-habitable inflatable space station. [Colony Worlds]
Karl Schroeder on colonising Planet Earth
Canadian sf author Karl Schroeder has the sort of day job that anyone with a science fictional mindset would probably love to have – he’s a foresight consultant. Luckily, as internet denizens we can enjoy the fruits of his thinking without having to lash out on consultancy fees. Here’s his latest article for the consistently excellent Worldchanging blog, wherein Schroeder discusses the ecological footprint of humans as a species, and how we should approach our existence on Earth in much the same way as we would build a colony on another planet.
Peter Watts on altruism
If you’ve read his fiction, you’ll probably be aware that Peter Watts doesn’t hold to the romantic notions that pervade around the idea of human altruism. He gets asked about it a lot, apparently, and so Watts decided to explain his reductionist position on human altruism publicly. Warning – unless you have a healthy cynicism about your own species, you’re not going to like what he has to say. Which leads me to believe he’s probably correct.