Hank Green of SciShow is all about Mars, and Elon Musk, the Paypal multi-millionaire who founded SpaceX, has some plans for colonizing the Red Planet that have got Hank very excited.
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Meanwhile, NASA is throwing cold water on growing speculation about a possible discovery of life — or signs of life — on Mars.
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Vice travels to Paris to interview premier astrophotographer, Thierry Legault, about tracking spy satellites in the sky. It’s a story of mutual surveillance, adept tracking and ultimately one man’s quest to do “things that nobody has done before.”
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Brian Switek, science writer for Smithsonian.com, once lambasted the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series as “some of the most noxious sludge in television’s bottomless chum bucket.” He was reacting to an episode that audaciously suggested that aliens had exterminated the dinosaurs to make way for the human species. That was a particularly spurious theory but this series, recently renewed for a fifth season, has been widely criticized for advancing all manner of pseudoscience and pseudohistory.
Perhaps the best take-down yet is this three-hour documentary, Ancient Aliens Debunked, by Chris White with an assist from Mike Heiser. While it’s long, it covers a lot of ground, including Puma Punku, The Pyramids, Baalbek, Incan sites and Easter Island. White and Heiser also get into ancient artifacts: Pacal’s rocket, the Nazca lines, the Tolima “fighter jets,” the Egyptian “light bulb,” UFOs in ancient art and the crystal skulls. Text issue they explore include Ezekiel’s wheel, ancient nuclear warfare, Vimana’s, the Anunnaki, and the Nephilim. If you’re curious at all about these arcane matters, give it a watch. H/T Ameristroika
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Out of billions of galaxies and billions of stars, how do we find Earth-like habitable worlds? What is essential to support life as we know it? Ariel Anbar provides a checklist for finding life on other planets. Anbar is a biogeochemist in the School of Earth & Space Exploration at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz.
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Aerospace Engineer Rand Simberg talks about the future of space flight under the next president. Find out why President Obama has had one of the best space policies of the past 40 years. Plus, what can we expect under a Romney administration? Will commercial space flight save space? Find out on this episode of PJTV’s InstaVision with Glenn Reynolds.
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In a short, bittersweet edition of Afterburner, Bill Whittle bids farewell to the Endeavor and looks back at the Space Shuttle program in a rear-view mirror. How did the United States go from being a world leader in space exploration to playing a diminished role in space, shrinking faster than Pluto? H/T PJTV
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NASA has announced plans to build a Mars base — a space station beyond the dark side of the Moon that would serve as a way station for future astronauts traveling to Mars. H/T SourceFed
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What once seemed like a science fiction fantasy — warp drive — might not be so remote or out of the realm of possibility. NASA scientists have uncovered wrinkles in physics and mathematics suggesting warp drive can be achieved, conceivably within our lifetimes. H/T SourceFed
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Although the concept of warp drive has appeared in many sci-fi works, from Dr. Who to Starship Troopers, it’s most closely linked to the Star Trek franchise. Here’s a montage that shows the changing animation used to depict warp drive in the Star Trek movies.
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A DAY OF BACON
The scientific marriage of two perfect commodities — bacon and rocketry. Two disciplines at the pinnacle of human achievement, finally united.
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Microscopic tardigrades, or “water bears,” are the only animals that can withstand the extreme temperatures and conditions found in the vacuum of outer space. This raises the question: Did they evolve on Earth or migrate here from elsewhere in the universe? H/T Vice
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Hank Green, the host of the SciShow, calls tardigrades “the toughest animal on the planet,” and explains why NASA and the European Space Agency have fallen in love with these extremophiles.
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