Tag Archives: space

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Keep watching the skies!

The Greenbank radio telescopeI’m late to the party as far as announcing the arrival of the new Google Earth features that let you explore the sky as well as the ground, but I’m not going to let that stop me. Once the excitement of roaming the real stars has faded, however, you can skip on over to Galaxiki – which, as the name suggests, is a wiki-based community that is building a fictional galaxy by describing the star systems within it.[BoingBoing]

I quite like the idea of being able to create my own solar system … for one thing, I’d make sure that I avoided picking a sun that does freaky stuff to its planets with low-frequency waves. We’re all doomed! Possibly. [Image by jesiehart]

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Life on other planets

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Nothing divides space geeks like the question of extraterrestrial life. SETI boffin Seth Shostak is an avowed believer, even though he concedes there’s no compelling evidence to support the assertion so far. George Dvorsky is very interested in the Fermi Paradox, too, but much more willing to pick holes in accepted philosophy.

We’re still looking, of course – but we could do with more telescopes in space to help us locate and image exoplanets, and we’re still not entirely certain of how the universe itself came to be.

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Testing panspermia

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Panspermia is the theory that life on Earth may have arrived in a nascent form from outer space, carried through the void as bacteria in comets or asteroids. It’s controversial, certainly, but persistent too (as well as being a classic science fiction trope). A Scottish scientist has decided to test the theory for plausibility by sending a chunk of rock into orbit and back on an ESA spacecraft, to determine whether microbes can survive not just the cold and vacuum of space, but also the violent physics of atmospheric reentry.

Update! This just in: Centauri Dreams pours water, or rather radiation, on the plausibility of panspermia.