Starship Asterisk*

Comments are cheap. Read the cited paper. It's not very long or technical: "The collision of an asteroid as small as ~200 m with the Earth could cause widespread damage and loss of life1. One way to deflect a threatening asteroid is to dock a spacecraft to the surface and push on it directly2. ...

eltodesukane, chris,
Good links, just have time to scan the Falconer paper. It brings to mind the Banach-Tarski sphere, which is astonishing mathematics but not for the real world: the fractal-sized venetian binds would run up against the physics of diffraction.

I think there was a (tongue-in-cheek) Martin Gardner puzzle that challenge you to design a sundial so that the changing position of the sun casts a corresponding digital time shadow/projection--continuously, all the time!

Speaking of dust, why the use of soil to refer to lunar regolith?

This brings to mind of Clarke's A Fall of Moondust, with the steep grade and the rover so close to the edge...

Those statues serve as a stark reminder of what's in store for civilizations that refuse to admit that the frontier mentality of unlimited resources isn't a smart idea. The statues were moved and installed using wood from forests that used to cover the island. I wonder what those guys were thinking...

Well, on the subject of geology...the Shoshon river mentioned in the image gives geologists shoshonite, a high potassium basaltic rock that reveals lots about subduction zone processes!

Also...it might be that if you look at the image at full resolution, you'd notice that it has been altered with a painterly filter effect (that comes with PhotoShop, e.g.). So the edge effect you see maybe an artifact of being 'artistic'. I disagree with this assessment. The texture is noise from t...

I'm confused about something. Why is it we only see a transit every hundred years or so? With Venus' orbital rate and Earth's orbital rate, I would think we would see a transit about every 8 months. Are our orbital planes different or what? Every planet orbits on a different plane. Earth's and Venu...

There's something about this image that is not easy for me to explain. In Adobe's Camera Raw, there is a slider for adjusting the clarity of an image. What it does is locally increase contrast around edges. The results can be strikingly good but they can also result in this dark halo around bright ...

I see your points. So to not duplicate what a camera does (no integration) but just to see the world with increase eye sensitive, I could think of images from light-amplification scopes? Or do those scopes not response logarithmically and thereby not give an equivalent (super eyes) experience? Righ...

I see your points. So to not duplicate what a camera does (no integration) but just to see the world with increase eye sensitive, I could think of images from light-amplification scopes? Or do those scopes not response logarithmically and thereby not give an equivalent (super eyes) experience?

I always find such artist-imagined event a little bogus. They almost always never depict correct surface brightness of extended objects: closer objects do not necessary imply brighter objects (except for point sources). Unless the artists are saying that in 5 Gyr our descendents have 1000 x more se...

SDO's Venus transit page includes a bogus transit simulator by sunaeon showing Venus taking crazy paths (depending on your locale) across the sun's disk!
I am reminded of Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision.
http://venustransit.gsfc.nasa.gov/

I always find such artist-imagined event a little bogus. They almost always never depict correct surface brightness of extended objects: closer objects do not necessary imply brighter objects (except for point sources). Unless the artists are saying that in 5 Gyr our descendents have 1000 x more sen...