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Science

News: We Might Have Neighbors

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Proxima B

The search for life outside our solar system has been brought to our cosmic doorstep with the discovery of an apparently rocky planet orbiting the nearest star to our sun. Thought to be at least 1.3 times the mass of the Earth, the planet lies within the so-called “habitable zone” of the star Proxima Centauri, meaning that liquid water could potentially exist on the newly discovered world. Named Proxima b, the new planet has sparked a flurry of excitement among astrophysicists, with the tantalising possibility that it might be similar in crucial respects to Earth. “There is a reasonable expectation … Read more

Where No Gay Has Gone Before: First Tattooine, now Vulcan

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NASA announced earlier it might have located Luke Skywalker’s home planet Tattooine.  For the past nine years, NASA has embarked on a planet finding mission, SIM PlanetQuest to find Mr. Spock’s home Vulcan.  Astronomers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory are searching for a planet orbiting 40 Eridani, a triple-star system about 16 light-years from Earth.  ‘Vulcan’ is thought to orbit the red-orange K dwarf star Eridani A. K-stars are orangey stars, slightly cooler than our sun.  They are hotter, brighter and bluer than M stars, but cooler, dimmer and redder than O, B, A F and G stars.  Did you get … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Ashes To Ashes

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Death is an old and familiar companion to humanity, older than life and just as well understood. A predator that haunts our every step in a very literal sense. We are so aware of it, in fact, that a great many people actually fear it. That fear has caused, in part, the need to remove the dead from our sight, but paradoxically, given rise to high ritual and ceremony for the occasion. Funerals. An occasion that gives us an illusion of life to say goodbye to with a stunning array of preservative science before we entomb a beloved’s body in … Read more

For Writers: Death in the Future

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death

Every society has its ways of dealing with death. Some enforce long mourning periods in ritual dress. Some cover mirrors. Some hold celebrations of life. And of course there are countless individual variations as well. I once read a great book by a terrible author whose name I won’t share here, where telling the whole truth about a person, both the good and the bad, had become a tradition. It fascinated me – this idea that we do a disservice to people by only saying the good things about them after they have passed. On the practical side, cemeteries take … Read more

Where No Gay Has Gone Before: Men on Mars!

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  For the past fifty years, we’ve been sending spacecraft tour next-door neighbor, Mars.  Starting with Mariner 4 in 1965, which did the first flyby.  The Soviets achieved the first soft landing with the Mars 3 probe in 1971.  Long before those milestones, sci-fi authors have looked to the Red Planet with their own speculative fiction such as Mars being inhabited by aliens (Percival Lowell’s 1895 Mars) and Earthlings on Mars (Ray Bradbury’s 1950 The Martian Chronicles). Now such fiction could become reality in the next twenty years.  Although the minimum distance between Earth and Mars is roughly 35 million … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Sun Synchronous

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My all time favorite trope of fiction is the Grand Quest. Always has been, always will be. Oddly enough, it’s a hard to find the Grand Quest in its true form when it comes to science fiction. Part of the reason for that is, usually, authors come at disasters in science fiction as either a race against time to fix what’s happening, or attempting to find a solution to the new reality in a way that makes life closer to the old reality. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great reading and I have a great time doing so. But there … Read more

For Readers: The Uncanny Valley

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Uncanny Valley

Today’s reader topic comes from QSFer Aidee Ladnier: Why aren’t there more depictions of the uncanny valley? Do we really want AI and robots that we can’t distinguish from humans? OK, there are a couple ideas here, so let me unpack this a little. For those who are unaware, the “uncanny valley” is an idea of robotics professor Masahiro Mori. Basically, people can feel an affinity for robots that are not too human. But there comes a point where a robot approaches humanlike appearance, movement, etc, but is not quite there, that becomes quite disturbing. Wikipedia describes it this way: … Read more

Your Very Own Invisibility Cloak?

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Invisibility

A team of researchers out of Queen Mary University of London believe they have found the first step to a practical cloaking device. Yes, invisibility may be possible in the future. The team, at the moment, is thinking small. They aren’t trying to make people, or battleships at that, disappear. Instead, they’re working on a new material that will make curved surfaces appear flat to electromagnetic waves. “The design is based upon transformation optics, a concept behind the idea of the invisibility cloak,” said Professor Yang Hao from QMUL’s School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, who helped write the … Read more