Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
An Author's Adventures in Space Travel, Science Fiction, and Worlds Beyond
Avi Loeb believes aliens are real, and they've visited our Solar System. But this man is no fringe conspiracy theorist, dressed in ratty flannels and a tinfoil hat, broadcasting rants from a pirate radio station in the wilderness—he's a Harvard University professor, who has done world-renowned research on cosmology and astrophysics. This is a serious... Continue Reading →
The good news is, nature has provided us with a planet startlingly similar to our own, orbiting almost within reach just 4.3 light-years from Earth. The bad news? It might not be a very good neighborhood. Despite being the best-studied exoplanet out there, scientists can scarcely make heads or tails of what it's really like,... Continue Reading →
Robert Zubrin is a persistent man. An engineer, author, and above all, space advocate, he's lobbied for a human voyage to Mars for about three and a half decades now, even as the US government has dilly-dallied its way through various questionable exercises in pork-barrel spending. It's 2025 and human boots haven't even returned to... Continue Reading →
We all have our bad days at work. Sometimes you have to deal with an abrasive, domineering boss. Sometimes you're tasked with meeting impossibly high quotas, despite unclear instructions and faulty equipment. And sometimes, all those things are going on at once, and you happen to be working in the control room of Chernobyl Reactor... Continue Reading →
Very early on, my family instilled in me a love of coffee table books: hefty, hardcover volumes, large enough to double as paperweights or even footstools1, bedecked with photographs and artwork from front to back. Instead of reading straight through, you could open one to whatever page you fancied. They covered all sorts of topics,... Continue Reading →
The absolute smallest angular distance resolvable by the human eye is 28 arc-seconds1. That's about 0.008 degrees, or the apparent size of a quarter at 132 meters, and for those of us not blessed with impeccable vision, that value will be a lot worse. Thankfully modern technology far surpasses the limits of human eyesight, seeing... Continue Reading →
For today's entry we're welcoming back my friend Eamon Minges---who, as an engineer, brings a welcome dose of technical rigor to this website. You can find his other pieces here, here, here, and here. I wanted to start off by saying a quick thank you to my good friend Nic Quattromani, the originator of this... Continue Reading →
Below is a list of the known stars1 and stellar systems within a ten-light-year radius of the Sun. See if you can notice anything strange about them: Alpha Centauri (A and B, plus Proxima Centauri). Barnard's Star. Wolf 359. Lalande 21185. Sirius (A and B). Luyten 726-8 (A and B). Ross 154. There are familiar,... Continue Reading →
It's been the better part of a year since I posted my early experiments with Midjourney. Today, in what may be one of my shorter, sillier pieces, I'll fill you in on my antics during the intervening time. It's stunning how far generative AI has advanced just while I've been using it; if I were... Continue Reading →
Historians will remember 2022 as the year AI took the internet by storm. Algorithmic text and image generators---the likes of ChatGPT, MidJourney, and Jasper---exploded in popularity, spawning new internet trends, provoking fierce opposition from flesh-and-blood artists, and threatening the security of creative jobs (like mine). As 2023 dawns, it seems there is no stopping the... Continue Reading →
