Starship Asterisk*

That's a point. There is a lot of cloud here. How do you control the cloud formations in this software? Even if you choose a date for your image data, these clouds would shift as the satellite takes its images. If these clouds are always in the same place, New Yorkers would be frustrated that they c...

Still I was half expecting some hints of where major cities are. Maybe we aren't scarring the planet up quite as bad as it might seem when we are down in a metropolitan area that takes two hours to drive across. LA, San Diego and Tijuana are quite visible as patches of grey concrete like tooth fill...

This one's centred on Mexico. Mexicans are cool. They get called lazy like me because they don't have any money. Mexican food is nice, always very important, and I dream of playing a guitarrón mexicano. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/af/Guitarron.jpg/220px-Guitarron.jpg On an ...

But they did have a great warp drive.

The largest eagle that ever lived was the Haast's Eagle . Below is an image of one attacking the giant moa, which grew to 7feet tall. They also sometimes ate the Maori who hunted the moa to extinction. In some countries, people live amongst tigers and leopards, but you can build fences to keep them ...

Of course it would then take 100,000 years to travel to the place. Any probes sent to another system would be overtaken in mid-flight by something sent a century later and the glare would also make it very difficult to communicate with such a probe...

<<NASA has funded initial research into the New Worlds Mission project , which proposes to use a pinhole camera with a diameter of 10 m and focus length of 200,000 km to image earth sized planets in other star systems. Interesting. It seems to be both a pinhole and a "starshade". Such a t...

Back to the subject of the moon, if a Māori does this to you, it is called "Whakapohane", and is a traditional insult. You must have done something to offend him.
http://workersparty.org.nz/2011/03/30/b ... akapohane/

I know Uranus is off topic but I'll always be impressed by the achievements of the Voyager project. The bloke who realised that all the gas giants would line up and there was an opportunity to kill so many birds with one stone, if you will, he should be proud of himself. http://upload.wikimedia.org/...

Ah, wolves of the 2-legged variety. Their 'howl' is a 2-tone whistle. But that was before people started to "moon" other people. This conversation's going to a rather dark place. ... like to a moon of Uranus. I give you one now. Haw haw http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/...

Of course there are famous nebulae too. Barnard's loop is very striking, a circular feature that implies a spherical bubble.
The horsehead nebula also makes a great poster for your children

Maybe you mean Mehendri Solon , the Dr Who mad scientist in the story The Brain of Morbius who wanted the Doctor's head for an experiment? http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2550/3831943543_7bc68ef266_o.png In the end, Morbius had to make do with a plastic bubble for a head with funny trumpet eyes, but ...

I'm not sure it matters. The length of time involved is much longer than any species has existed on Earth. The reality is that there will not be any humans (homo sapiens) by then- we will be extinct, or radically changed. What works for us now most likely won't then. So there's no point in finding ...

There's room for much more than fear. Yes. It's about time we moved on from the cold war fear that typified depictions of aliens in 1950s schlock. Even the 1979 Alien movie seems quite modern in many ways with some inspired scenes but the alien itself turns out to be a bit of a one-dimensional slas...

It would be interesting to see what would happen if, for example, we happened to find an ecosystem of creatures swimming under the ice in Callisto. How would newspapers report it? What would the response be? How would callers to talk-back radio react? How would future generations with sophisticated ...

Of course it will be difficult to visit one of these places in a hundred lifetimes, but what say you do and there are natives? They might not like you. They might be scared of these ape-creatures from the skies...

I wonder what George W Bush would have done if they had found aliens and some of his fellow Texans and military personnel had developed itchy trigger fingers...

People raise their shootin' irons against leopards and wolves out of fear. Even other people with darker skin can notice intolerance (or even the odd lynching). The first population of alien animals that we come across will be met with fear, particularly if they are intelligent with a civilisation. ...

I read a short story once, I think it was P. K. Dick, where the people of the world developed a mass depression because all the planets and moons of the Solar System had been explored and there was no extra-terrestrial life. It was as if people have some sort of emotional need to find life. But what...

bother I can't get rid of the entry with the buggy code. Sorry

There are many other fascinating things to be learned from the links. For example, Regulus appears to have a very small close-in companion that may be an underweight white dwarf. Regulus may originally have been the lower mass companion of a larger and hotter main sequence star, which, when it turn...

I read somewhere that there are Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy has been orbiting the Milky Way and leaving a faint trail of stars in its elliptical path. This trail of stars intersects our galaxy close to the Sun and some have speculated that the Solar System could even come from this galaxy. B...

In a more hostile environment, it is less likely to begin. What's "hostile"? I suppose a definition in this context would have to be along the lines of a seriously decreased likelihood of viable chemical building blocks of life interacting within a temperature range that could allow them ...

orin stepanek wrote:With twice as much gravity; would you have to use twice as much yeast to get your cake to rise? What about growth of plants? Half as tall?

Dunno but it would be twice as hard to get out of bed in the morning and the bathroom scales wouldn't be kind.

I would say it's clear that rats are much nicer than people; Their relationships are more genuine. They don't stab each other in the back with a smile to rob each other of a living. Also no rat has ever tortured a man in a cage, let alone their own kind the way people do (only when trapped in artifi...