Steve Silberman interviews Lee Billings who provides interesting commentary about the past’s view of the future and what changed from then to now, and some lost optimism. There is also some interesting thoughts on extraterrestrial life and intelligence.

Or how physics, economics, and politics conspired against our celestial dreams.

Be sure to check out his new book Five Billion Years of Solitude.

Indeed. This article, from earlier in the year, has some great details but even more spectacular imagery. Be sure to check it out, even if just for the pictures.

A couple of short documentaries worth checking out. They’re made by filmmaker Matt Checkowski for the University of California. Fantastic work.

Interesting piece by Foreign Policy. It’s an interview with naval analyst Chris Weuve about how wars would be waged in space, it’s implications, physics of movement, and other curious topics.

NASA’s Curiosity rover found evidence for an ancient, flowing stream on Mars at a few sites, including the rock outcrop pictured here, which the science team has named “Hottah” after Hottah Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

Curiosity doing what it was sent to do; great science.

I can waste hours on this site. Better quit now. Enjoy.

A sort of org-chart of all the super hero powers and those who possess them. I always liked the powers of the mind since they could be used so inconspicuously.

This is what I call long-term planning. Dyson spheres, asteroid deflecting, space colonies, oh my.

Article on WIRED asks:

Where were you when Star Trek: The Next Generation first aired? I can tell you exactly what I was doing, and the impact it had on me, as vividly as if it were today.

Me too. I was in our basement / family-room getting my mind blown.

Back in the 80s when I grew up, you didn’t really know when new shows were coming on. I mean, as a kid you had no idea really. We didn’t get the TV Guide or any magazine for that matter. One morning, as I was eating cereal, I saw on the back of the cereal box a promotional ad for TNG describing some of the characters and the ship with a date of when the show would air. I read those little promotional cereal boxes with excitement and anticipation. Without that advanced notice, I probably would have caught it on reruns, if I was lucky, or happen to chance upon it while channel surfing.

NGTS will use wide-field photo metrics to ferret out Neptune-sized and smaller planets around bright stars, partly because it’s easier to measure atmospheric compositions of planets around brighter stars.
MASCARA is even more specific in that it’s targeting even brighter stars.

I’ve had access to this PDF via Icarus Interstellar’s newsletter for a while now and it looks like it’s gone live on their site now. The article and linked PDF goes into great detail on what a 10K person colony vessel might look like and the scale of engineering involved.

Simply astounding. This will take months to pour over. Special thanks to Sean Ragan for making this happen.

I first encountered this amazing infographic hanging on a professor’s office wall when I was visiting law schools back in 1999. I’ve been trying, off and on, to run down my own copy ever since. It’s been one of those back-burner projects that I’ll poke at when it comes to mind, every now and again, but until quite recently all my leads had come up dry. All I really knew about the poster was that it had been created in the 80s by analysts at Rockwell International and that it was called the “Integrated Space Plan.”