Let's Get Off This Rock Already!
Musings on space travel, science fiction, and the radiant future
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 →
The first and only time I ever saw the Grand Canyon was when I was eight years old, traveling through the southwestern United States on a family road trip. I knew roughly what it looked like, of course, but nothing had prepared me for the sheer scale of that thing. It was a sculpted, dizzyingly... Continue Reading →
A think piece for today: If you want to get a rise out of space nerds, bring up Mars colonization1. These days it's the subject of countless op-eds and heated Facebook discussions. The Elon Musks and Robert Zubrins of the world are fierce proponents, viewing the expansion of humanity as a matter of survival; on... Continue Reading →
For today's post, we will turn our attention to Earth---not an unprecedented topic for this blog, despite the overall focus on space. In particular I would like to discuss one of the wackier technological ideas of the Cold War, where the United States researched ways to turn its nuclear arsenal into a tool for economic... Continue Reading →
Wherever you see an alien planet in sci-fi films or television, there's always something weird going on in the sky. How else would you know you're not looking at Earth? So in everything from Avatar to Star Wars we get double stars, panoplies of moons, other planets in the same system---so many disks visible even... Continue Reading →
Space is rather more prosaic than we usually see in fiction. Star Trek postulates a galaxy stuffed to the brim with exciting bumpy-forehead humanoids; we're much more likely to find pond scum. The more nightmarish sci-fi visions are probably off the table, too---a lifeform from a totally different planet would be unable to parasitize a... Continue Reading →
Happy 2021! A new year dawns, as tends to occur every January. Opportunities beckon, fresh challenges present themselves, and, perhaps, hope dares to appear after the nightmare of 2020... it is certainly quite the time to be alive. Anyway, on to the post! One thing that you'll find to be conspicuously absent on this site... Continue Reading →
Somewhere between the current human presence in the space—zilch, save for three people aboard the ISS—and the most ambitious, wide-eyed, optimistic visions for colonization—Musk's million people on Mars, Bezos' trillions throughout the solar system—there's a middle ground where we work on and explore other planets, but inhabit them only in the same sense that we... Continue Reading →
Well, it looks like it's been almost a month since I last posted, but the hectic days of midterms and Thanksgiving break are behind me, now, and I can give this blog the attention it deserves. I'll start things up again with a review of the newest book on my shelf: Andy Weir's Artemis. This tale... Continue Reading →
Post by Nic Quattromani: The Apollo missions, as intrepid as they were, did not venture into wholly uncharted territory. By the time Neil Armstrong famously planted his boots in the lunar soil, a whole fleet of US spacecraft had already explored and mapped out the globe of the Moon in meticulous detail. There were the... Continue Reading →
Let's Get Off This Rock Already! 