Sword and selfies on the Red Planet

#nomakeup #naturalskin
Source: Twitter.

Don't you just love interplanetary selfies?

Kate Mulgrew NOT, in fact, a believer in geocentrism

So a small controversy erupted over the fact that Kate Mulgrew did a voice-over narration for a movie called The Principle, which promotes the thoroughly disproven idea that everything in the solar system revolves around the Earth. Yes, there are people who still think that. Fortunately, Mulgrew is not one of them. She posted a message on her Facebook fanpage about it on April 8th:

"I understand there has been some controversy about my participation in a documentary called THE PRINCIPLE. Let me assure everyone that I completely agree with the eminent physicist Lawrence Krauss, who was himself misrepresented in the film, and who has written a succinct rebuttal in SLATE. I am not a geocentrist, nor am I in any way a proponent of geocentrism. More importantly, I do not subscribe to anything Robert Sungenis has written regarding science and history and, had I known of his involvement, would most certainly have avoided this documentary. I was a voice for hire, and a misinformed one, at that. I apologize for any confusion that my voice on this trailer may have caused. Kate Mulgrew"

I'm glad she spoke out because Robert Sungenis is a terrible excuse for a human being and I shudder to think that there are people who do associate with him. The guy is a Holocaust denier who actually claims that no one has proven that the Holocaust even happened, so just ignore the death camps, I guess. He also thinks Jews are plotting to "put Satan in control of the world" and that Israel assassinated John F. Kennedy, amongst other things. This guy is so extreme, the Catholic Church made him remove the world "Catholic" from a website he runs.

I still can't believe that people like that still exist.

This picture Neil deGrasse Tyson tweeted is relevant as crap

Especially given recent events involving meteorites and flybys by asteroids.

Via Neil deGrasse Tyson's Twitter.

It's true too. We - not just the U.S. of A., but the entire world - need to pour money into getting off this rock and colonizing space. How about instead of each country having its own space agency, a truly international one could be established and funded/supported by any and all nations that can do it. Once we're a space faring species, nationalities won't matter anyways.

Plus, it would be nice not to have humanity and all life on Earth wiped out by a lucky shot from an asteroid.

Over 1,000 Russians injured by a meteorite!

Damn Bugs!
Via Popular Science.

So today a meteorite popped the atmosphere at around 33,000 miles per hour (or 44 times the speed of sound!) and exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia. The shockwave shattered glass and 950 people were unfortunately injured by the flying glass. On the plus side, only about 112 had to be hospitalized and of those, only two are in serious condition.

I saw a report about this on the local news (which is to say that they were just showing a report from ABC News) and apparently some people in Chelyabinsk thought Russia was being attacked. Good thing the Russian government didn't or else we might be reenacting Fallout 3. :P

Pretty crazy though, especially with an asteroid passing close to the Earth at around the same time. According to scientists, the two events are unrelated.

This blew my goddamn mind

Oh the things you find on the internet!

Jay over on EXONAUTS! posted this after finding it on Universe Today. After scooping what was left of my brain off the floor and putting it back in my head, I thought I'd post it here. It's a stereograph of Melotte 15 in the Heart Nebula created by a Finnish fellow named J-P Metsävainio. He has a website and blog displaying his other awesome works.

Freaking awesome!

NASA planning on capturing an asteroid and turning it into a space station?

I saw this first on Wikipedia's Current Events page, where I usually peruse for news. Say what you will about Wikipedia, but their news aggregation is top notch. Anyway, it was there that I found the most curious of headlines: "NASA scientists are planning to capture a 500 ton near-Earth asteroid, relocate it and turn it into a space station for astronauts on their route to Mars after 2025." Needless to say, I got a bit giddy. I mean, how awesome would it be to capture a freaking asteroid, move it to where we want and turn that sucker into a space station? That would be a major milestone for both NASA, science, and the human race. Not bad for something that might cost all of $2.5 billion. It would also be nice to see NASA get its swagger back and start thinking big again.

My elation was stifled, however, when I saw that one of the news sources cited was the Daily Mail, or as a lot of people call it, the Daily Fail. The Daily Mail is a tabloid at best and at worst, makes Fox News look unbiased. The second source was for the Times of India, which is more reputable, but I decided to look around on Google for more verification and failed. Most of the news websites reporting on NASA's supposed plan were either less reputable than Daily Mail, or just copied and pasted their report.

I did notice that both the Mail and Times of India, along with reddit and Slashdot are linked to a .pdf on Caltech's website about the feasibility of actually capturing an asteroid and turning it into a space station for a future manned mission to Mars, so there's some creditability. I hope this is true, because it would be an incredible step towards becoming a space faring race. Today, capturing one asteroid, tomorrow, asteroid mining, colonies on the Moon, Mars, and beyond!

Meanwhile in space...holy frak, it's a planet!

Looks like Star Trek and science fiction in general were right all along - There is a planet at Alpha Centauri! Astronomers announced it today, though I wish they had come up with a better name than Alpha Centauri Bb. Unfortunately, while the planet has about the same mass as the Earth, it's too close to its Sun to be of any use.

Imagine if it wasn't though, if it was in the right orbit and habitable? The human race would have a reachable goal to set its sights on. True, at four light years, it would take far too long to reach it by conventional means, but it could be the motivation mankind needs to push itself. We could set up a globally-funded science organization to work on building generation ships and the best, fastest propulsion systems possible, while working on making relativity and physics as a whole our bitch, and invent an FTL system.

NASA: Landing car-sized robots on other planets because they can

And amazingly, they did it with a meager annual budget of only $17 billion! No, really, NASA's budget this year was only 17.7 billion dollars. Seriously. Yet, using a small bit of that budget, they managed to put Curiosity on Mars. Imagine what they could do if they had more money? I tell you, if I were president, I'd fight tooth and nail to ensure NASA received a hundred billion dollars a year, or at least as close to it as possible. Of course, were I president, I'd also push for the creation of a cabinet-level Department of Science and Technology that would handle this kind of stuff. Neil DeGrasse Tyson would be the inaugural Secretary.

But no, NASA has to make due with a small budget because while we've put on a man on the Moon, we've lost the drive to do anything else. On September 12, 1962, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Rice Stadium, a line from which has become famous:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

We chose to go to the Moon and we went several times, but when it came to do the other things, we lost our will, our enthusiasm for it. We look at the moon landings and decided "well, that's good enough." Well, it isn't and never was "good enough". We have two choices, not as a country, but as a people: Choice one, we content ourselves with small technological achievements, and stay on Earth and not do a damn thing more. Choice two, we get our act together, return to the Moon, go to Mars, colonize both, and journey to the stars. The first choice ends with oblivion, either from an asteroid, total ecological collapse, or our very sun burning out and destroying us. The second choice sees the human race fulfill its destiny as explorers, as pioneers, and uplifts us from hairless apes from a backwater planet to that of a great species.

Personally, I prefer the latter to the former. How about you?

RIP Sally Ride

Wikipedia.

First American woman in space and a physicist. She was 61. Damn cancer.

xkcd's Exoplanets will make you feel small

xkcd.

Imagine if just some of those planets contained the right conditions for life and some of those had life. While not a believing in the UFO/alien abduction nonsense, I do wholeheartedly believe that there is life in the universe - it's simply too vast for there not to be. If, on the other hand, we are the only living things in this great big mess, then it is the most tragic thing ever and something worth weeping over.

Now, if you really want to feel insignificant, hit the jump.