Our recent focus on habitability addresses a significant problem. In order for astrobiologists to home in on the best targets for current and future telescopes, we need to be able to prioritize them in terms of the likelihood for life. I've often commented on how...
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A Sedna Orbiter via Nuclear Propulsion
When you’re thinking deep space, it’s essential to start planning early, at least at our current state of technology. Sedna, for example, is getting attention as a mission target because while it’s on an 11,000 year orbit around the Sun, its perihelion at 76 AU is...
What It Means to be Human Without Earth: Existential Horror and Hope in Aniara
In the summer of 2018, I took a vacation with my family on an ocean cruise. Being on that cruise ship was very much like being in a small city – minus any vehicles larger than a forklift truck – with just about anything you might want only a stroll away, unless you...
TFINER: Ramping Up Propulsion via Nuclear Decay
Sometimes all it takes to spawn a new idea is a tiny smudge in a telescopic image. What counts, of course, is just what that smudge implies. In the case of the object called ‘Oumuamua, the implication was interstellar, for whatever it was, this smudge was clearly on a...
Expansion of the Universe: An End to the ‘Hubble Tension’?
When one set of data fails to agree with another over the same phenomenon, things can get interesting. It’s in such inconsistencies that interesting new discoveries are sometimes made, and when the inconsistency involves the expansion of the universe, there are plenty...
Megastructures: Adrift in the Temporal Sea
Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of Time… ---Tennyson Temporal coincidence plays havoc with our ideas about other civilizations in the cosmos. If we want to detect them, their society must...
The Statistically Quantitative Information from Null Detections of Living Worlds: Lack of positive detections is not a fruitless search
It's no surprise, human nature being what it is, that our early detections of possible life on other worlds through 'biosignatures' are immediately controversial. We have to separate signs of biology from processes that may operate completely outside of our conception...
Magnetic Collapse: A Spur to Evolution?
The sublime, almost fearful nature of deep time sometimes awes me even more than the kind of distances we routinely discuss in these pages. Yes, the prospect of a 13.8 billion year old cosmos strung with stars and galaxies astonishes. But so too do the constant...
On ‘Sun-like’ Stars
The thought of a planet orbiting a Sun-like star began to obsess me as a boy, when I realized how different all the planets in our Solar System were from each other. Clearly there were no civilizations on any planet but our own, at least around the Sun. But if Alpha...
The Ethics of Spreading Life in the Cosmos
We keep trying to extend our reach into the heavens, but the idea of panspermia is that the heavens are actually responsible for us. Which is to say, that at least the precursor materials that allow life to emerge came from elsewhere, and did not originate on Earth....