What our civilization needs is a billion-year plan
Artist’s concept of a Kardashev Type 2 civilization (credit: Chris Cold) Lt Col Garretson — one of the USAF’s most farsighted and original thinkers — has been at the forefront of USAF strategy on the long-term future in projects such as Blue Horizons (on KurzweilAI — see video), Energy Horizons, Space Solar Power, the AF Futures Game, the USAF Strategic Environmental Assessment, and the USAF RPA Flight Plan. Now in this exclusive to KurzweilAI, he pushes the boundary of long-term thinking about humanity’s survival out to the edge … and beyond. — Ed. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Air Force or the U.S. government. It isn’t enough just to plan for two or 20, or even the fabled Chinese 100 year periods. We need to be thinking and planning on the order of billions of years.
11 Com b - Visual Exoplanet Catalogue
The planetary system 11 Com hosts at least one planet. Image Click on the image to get a higher resolution image.
ISS HD Earth Viewing Experiment on USTREAM: ***QUICK NOTES ABOUT HDEV VIDEO*** Black Image = International Space Station (ISS) is on the night side of the ...
Black Image = International Space Station (ISS) is on the night side of the Earth. No Audio = Normal. There is no audio by design. Add your own soundtrack. For a display of the real time ISS location plus the HDEV imagery, visit here:
Mars rover Curiosity lands, NASA releases new image and video: ‘The surface mission of Curiosity has now begun’ - Ideas@Innovations
8:23 p.m. - NASA releases short video of Mars rover descent We discovered via io9 this video of the Mars rover Curiosity making its way toward the surface of Mars. The thumbnail images in sequence and taken by the Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) show the rover in the last two-and-a-half minutes of Curiosity’s descent to Mars: 1:13: News briefing ends! The news briefing is over. We’ll have a couple more updates with the photos that were passed down.
Meet the thousands of people ready to die on Mars
Aaron Hamm, an assistant hotel engineer who deals with HVAC, cooling systems, and maintenance, lacks the traditional qualifications to be an astronaut. But that doesn't mean he wants to stay on Earth. "I felt… I was discouraged as a child [from becoming an astronaut] just because of how unbelievably competitive it is,” Hamm told Ars. “I’m a very intelligent person and I’m driven to try and achieve my dreams but, at the same time, I felt like it was an really unrealistic goal to try and pursue. As smart as I am, there's always plenty of people that are smarter.” Hamm, an Ars forum user by the name of Quisquis, has just applied for the private Mars One colony program.
Dyson Spheres: The Ultimate Energy Shell Game
The world’s exponential population growth will soon need to flatten out otherwise within a few hundred years every square foot of the Earth’s surface will be taken up by a human. (Which reminds me of one of my favorite bumper stickers from a space advocacy group in the 1970s that read: “American Needs Space to Grow.”) With this population growth, mankind’s hunger for energy has also increased exponentially. And if this continues, we will soon consume more energy than the Earth receives from the sun. Should they exist, this could be a common problem faced by burgeoning civilizations across the galaxy.
Discover an exoplanet : the transit method
Unveil an extrasolar planet by observing the light intensity emitted by its mother star An extrasolar planet, or exoplanet, is a planet outside the Solar System. Until March 2012, astronomers have made detections of 762 exoplanets (see for a complete and detailed catalog). The vast majority of them has been observed through radial velocity and transit observations but other indirect methods also exist : astrometry, microlensing and timing among them.
Astronomie - MESSENGER arrive aux abords de Mercure - AstroSurf
Envoyé 03-01-2008 19:42 j'ai relevé ces precisions sur le site, où il s'avère que c'est bien pour diminuer la vitesse de la sonde afin qu'elle soit capturée par Mercure...Mais ça ne répond pas tout à fait à la question : pourquoi peut-on envoyer directement une sonde en orbite de Mars et pas de Mercure ? Rôle joué par le Soleil, faible masse de Mercure ?? "5. Why take such a long and complex route to Mercury? Although it is not that difficult to fly a spacecraft by Mercury, the task of placing a spacecraft into orbit around the planet is a significant challenge.
