Starship Asterisk*

It seems strange to me that people think water is running out. Where is it going? It's not disappearing into space. Basically the poor countries can't look after their water supplies because the powerful use it as a bargaining chip. Cochabamba Water Wars Obviously we just need to be efficient about ...

I tend to think that the fact that there are creatures such as weasels and toads (and sometimes even human beings) that exhibit intelligence and consciousness and yet adhere to all the laws of nature is evidence that such consciousness is part of the universe and inevitably exists elsewhere.

It's an interesting coincidence that the Moon and the Sun have the same apparent diameter from Earth. Some people don't believe in coincidences. Could it be that some forces of nature made the Moon orbit at a distance where some resonance, gravitational or otherwise, exists with the Sun? Personally...

It's an interesting coincidence that the Moon and the Sun have the same apparent diameter from Earth. Some people don't believe in coincidences.

Could it be that some forces of nature made the Moon orbit at a distance where some resonance, gravitational or otherwise, exists with the Sun?

I thought the diameter was a lot smaller than that

Why did they give this nebula a name so confusingly similar to Cygnus X-1, the famous black hole?

Vesta is the only asteroid you can see with the naked eye, so I assume that means it has an unusually high albedo... Also, when I mix colours either on a computer screen or with paint, brown is a mixture of everything, favouring red and with less blue.Children who play with water colours will find t...

Because I complained, I thought I'd share with you another sort of fossa, only found on Earth. http://www.zooborns.com/zooborns/fossa/ These ones are giant mongooses, as big as a puma, that live in Madagascar and eat lemurs. They might like children as well, if they can get their paws on them. http:...

Obviously this is is fun but I notice that even the CGI Vesta has no colour data.

I believe Vesta is one of the most colourful asteroids with a lot of red hues on its surface. So this is not what it would "be like to fly over the asteroid Vesta"...

Back in the day it used to be bad form to have embedded midi files in a webpage. Nowadays, when embedded video saps the system resources, blows people's data caps and is harder to find amongst a number of tabs in the browser, it is considered acceptable to start them playing automatically, sometimes...

This is the sort of thing I like to imagine for Sci Fi. What would it be like to build a moon base and explore the surface? You could use skis. Would the people on the base be dominated by an oppressive regime exploiting them as cheap mining labour or will we have an enlightened and intelligent soci...

Eros is of course another asteroid that gets pretty close to Earth...

And there's a spelling mistake in the title.

Still asteroids are cool

But when you see there is something bigger than you, you see how petty all your little problems are. All the debts and things that have people running around with high blood pressure hurting each other are nothing really...

Is that a planetary nebula just to the left of the star near the centre, or is that just an artifact of refection in the lens?

Phew mate, you're never going to get any buyers with an odometer reading of 238 million kilometres.

F**# mate, if you want to shift it, my mate might be able to do you a deal, you know, a bit of the old odo windback...

When I played with Lego, I used to make amazing mobile-home-amphibious-spaceship things that could go anywhere.

Underwater, alien planets, you name it, this would be the only vehicle you'd ever need...

it pains me to see so many dead horse beatings I like the flies around the nostrils. That's realistic. Flies are particularly fond of nostrils, particularly ones that aren't breathing. They lay their eggs inside the nostrils and not only does that provide cover from predators but there are lots of ...

I would suggest that a space ship is pretty astronomical...

I have a serious question. When I read about launches of shuttles and rockets, there is always this implication that it is necessary to reach escape velocity as quickly as possible. I would assume, though that this is only necessary after you've run out of fuel. I'm guessing there would be an accele...

I hope they improved the onboard computers in 30 years. The displays almost look like the BSOD...

Always a good one this. Pictures like this make good posters for children to lie in bed looking at the shapes, meditating. I often find with these images that the high res version is too big. All I see is the graininess and blemishes and it would be better shrunk down a bit to where that graininess ...

I'd like to sit in a hotel orbiting Saturn and look at the view

Here's a real live dust devil, a tasmanian one. Not everybody knows that they really exist or even that there is a real place called Tasmania (a state of Australia). They are threatened by a contagious facial tumour disease

Not so easy to get the energy back to where we could use it, either! The problem with something like this as an energy source is that the actual current density is pretty low. So you'd need a massive collector of some kind. It's the same sort of problem as trying to extract energy from terrestrial ...