Starship Asterisk*

Scientists discover gene and part of brain that make people gullible Professor Cristoph Morris, who led the research, said that a part of the brain called the inferior supra-credulus was unsually active in people with a tendency to believe horoscopes and papers invoking fancy brain scans. “This cor...

Some comments, wonderboy, after reading your delightful post. I have supported SETI and its goals for a long time and I'd be thrilled if they could detect a proven alien signal. I've also read with interest Stephen Hawking's warning, "Beware the Alien Menace!". His points are reasonable, h...

Also to me, civilization implies social structure and communication. But let me clarify that a technologically advanced race would likely have made significant gains in extending their longevity artificially, just as we have. Of all the gains we've made in technology, communicating and longevity, I ...

In an earlier post, I asked: "Is there a way that a technologically advanced civilization could exist with little or no communication?" This thought has been bugging me until finally I refined it to the question: Is there a relationship between longevity and volubleness? Could the average ...

"I have no problem believing the term could come close to 100%...". Spoken like a true human being! I believe that humans have a built in compulsion to communicate, so I could agree with your higher estimates. Technology and communication seems to go hand in hand (no pun intended) with us ...

Hawking's warning touches on one factor of the famous Drake SETI equation. This factor is a estimate (or guesstimate) of the fraction of "intelligent races that have the means and desire to communicate". Assumming there are alien counterparts to Stephen Hawking, which have made similar pro...

Wrap it up SETI. Hawking has figured out what the aliens have known all along. Keep our big mouth shut. Keep quite until we are omnipotent! Or possibly, Hawking has watched the classic Twilight Zone "How to Serve Your Fellow Man" one too many times. Rod Serling and Stephen Hawking may be o...

Charles Ive's "The Unanswered Question" (mark).

Check the March 25 ESA Phobos Flyby link at http://webservices.esa.int/blog/post/7/1085. At 30% +/- 5% porosity, this moon is a chunk of swiss cheese, figuratively speaking.

ESA's Mars Express continues it's series of Rendezvous with Phobos. Most recent photos posted March 15 from the March 7 flyby can be found at: http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMK17CKP6G_index_0.html Prelimenary analysis of data from the March 4 rendezvous is indicating Phobos is 25 - 35% void space inside...

Seems like the European Space Agency is getting ready to rendezvous with Phobos, again. Follow one or both of the links below: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/SEMFKA6K56G_0.html http://webservices.esa.int/blog/blog/7 The second link has an engineering drawing of the Russian Phobos-Grunt spa...

Years ago in a P-Chem class, any explanation of entropy I came across was a bit stuffy, as I supposed it had to be. I do like the very informal explanation of entropy in the Wired Science article, that (at some level) you could accept a neatly stacked pile of papers on your desk when you left the of...

Mark, awhile back you posted several questions here, one of which was about entropy. If you haven't come across this recent online article in Wired Science, you might be interested in following this link:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/what-is-time/

As the saying goes "the big fish eat the little fish". But more seriously, is it possible that Phobos contains a significant amount of water? Water that could be mined (MTU should know about that) and shipped to a Martian colony. Given: Phobos orbits Mars about twice in one Martian day and...

Thanks Chris. Somehow, I thought it might be a bit more, maybe as much as 10 minutes, going on gut feelings. Probably stemming from the little I know about having to tweak the clocks on the GP satellites almost daily(?). Might I extend my original question by further asking about the effect on Voyag...

Voyager 1 was launched 9/5/1977 and has just passed it's twentieth anniversary as an extra-solar traveler. According to wiki it's exiting our neighborhood at about 17km/sec. It's an easy matter to calculate the age of Voyager I in seconds, minutes, days, months, etc knowing the moment of launch (bir...

"A leading hypothesis for Calypso's smoothness is that much of the moon's surface is actually a relatively loose jumble of rubble -- making Calypso a rubble-pile moon." May I suggest......"making Calypso an astro-riprap moon." In the interest, of course, of not disparging the fin...

Neufer, if your inferring that the name "rubble pile" lacks any pizzazz, I agree. Barney, on the other hand, although a Rubble probably shouldn't be compare to a "pile of rubble". How about asteroid riprap?

True enough. Clarke did write fiction and some good science fiction at that. The technology used in his stories was often scientifically sound and plausible given certain assumptions in scientific advances. I can't think of a good reason why the Rama concept of one-way interstellar travel wouldn't w...

With an imagination running amok after finding my lost copy of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendevous With Rama and fueled by the mystique surrounding the Martian moon, Phobos and flavored by the Russian curiousity in it, I just gotta make this post. What if the monolith in Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey wasn...

My first impression when I viewed this APOD image was that of a circular calculator or decoder of some type. It's a rendering of an actual device with multiple rotating concentric rings. The top narrative is a description of the device and its workings. Got me what it says, tho! I'll get the scissor...