Reader Mail
In the wake of the X Prize Cup, one reader wrote in to ask why anyone would pay $200,000 for a quick space trip on a rocket plane. "I assume it means much quicker travel time coast to coast, but your story never mentioned anything about why this is the next step in aviation evolution," said Cutter Garcia of Los Angeles.
Point-to-point travel is definitely on the minds of spaceship developers - but before they get to that point, all they can offer are up-and-down sightseeing trips. At least at first, rocketeers will be banking on a luxury market ... the kind of people who are willing to pay $95,000 to go on a North Pole expedition, or buy a cell phone for $20,000. So who better to design the interior of the spaceship than Frank Nuovo, the man behind that $20,000 cell phone?
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NASA |
Some astronomers would be delighted if a super-bright supernova blast like the one reported this week were to occur in our own galaxy. One says it could be "the best star-show in the history of modern civilization." But if the blast was pointed right at us from close quarters? Well, that would be bad.
How so? And how bad? For the answers to those questions, you can turn to some cool Web sites, a few good books ... and a couple of bad movies.
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As physicist Stephen Hawking tours America in advance of his April 26 date with weightlessness, he’s clearly hyped up about the trip, says Zero Gravity Corp. founder Peter Diamandis, who saw the great man up close and personal at the California Institute of Technology last week. "He is so excited about the flight,” Diamandis told me. “It was wonderful to see him smile."
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There are plenty of ways to become a virtual traveler in outer space. Second Life may be the simulation flavor of the week, and NASA may be carving out its own space there, but there’s a long history of virtual worlds that give you the feel of the final frontier.
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Sometimes all you have to do is point to a couple of items, then stand back and wait for the messages to roll in. I'm hoping that will be the case with these items.
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We're running
this Associated Press story about the worries that NASA officials and members of Congress have about the "spaceflight gap" - the period between 2010 and 2015 when the space shuttle fleet is retired and the next-generation Orion spaceship is not yet ready for launch. The worry is that NASA might have to rely on (gasp!) the private sector or other countries to provide space services. To be sure, the United States should have its own spacefaring capability, but I'm betting that some people might say the best thing for NASA to do is to
leave the spaceship-building business to the private sector. Others might say that the government has to take the leading role in such a risky business. What do you say?
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I was struck by this
comment from John in Kansas: "I want to thank you for the occasional postings of amateur astronomy tools - if you could do more of that, I might be more prepared for next year, when I take my kids out to rural Kansas for the first time to look at the moon, planets and stars. So if an astronomy expert has some sound advice on the best (affordable ... which is subjective, I know) available tools and gadgets for seeing craters on the moon, keep 'em coming!" Now if that's not an invitation for feedback, I don't know what is. Do you have any suggestions for John? Leave them below - and if I think of anything, I'll do the same.
EIROforum / CERN |
A hardhat worker is dwarfed by the inner workings of the Large Hadron
Collider's ATLAS detector. The collider is due to begin operation in 2007.
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Even though it’s been judged Science’s “Breakthrough of the Year,” it’s a safe bet that people won’t be buzzing about the Poincare Conjecture in 2007. Instead, the coming year is bracketed by two paradigm shifts in science, having to do with politics and particle physics.
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The mystery over former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko's death by radiation poisoning is getting curiouser and curiouser, with Russian prosecutors pointing the finger at the managers of a now-bankrupt business empire. It's yet another bizarre twist in a tale that has already entangled the Russian government. But even though the murder investigation is getting murkier, it's no mystery that the murder weapon, radioactive polonium-210, could be produced in virtually any chemistry lab.
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Science-fiction tales often fast-forward the pace of evolution to create the big-brained humans of the future - or, for that matter, the big-brained chimps of "The Planet of the Apes." Research published this week in the journal PLoS Biology, however, argues that the more complex your brain gets, the harder it is to evolve further. The subject could have implications for speculation into the future of intelligence.
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Cornell Univ. |
Ten years ago today, I was muddling through this new thing called online news at MSNBC - while just a few miles away, at a Seattle cancer center, one of science's most eloquent spokesmen was dying. At the time, astronomer Carl Sagan's death was another blip on the news screen. But since then, his influence has, if anything, grown for me and for others - as evidenced by the outpouring of reminiscences on this 10th anniversary.
Many commentators have touched upon Sagan's legacy for scientific skeptics - for example, the idea that in this "demon-haunted world," extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, whether those claims relate to the existence of extraterrestrials or the existence of God. Not so many have addressed his legacy for believers. And that's what I'd like to touch on here.
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As a metaphor for the process of seeking out the truth, the idea of "separating the wheat from the chaff" goes back at least as far as the Gospel of Matthew. Over the past couple of days, readers have stirred up their share of wheat and chaff in response to my report on the apocryphal tales surrounding the biblical accounts of Jesus' life.
Most of those tales - highlighted in the National Geographic documentary "Secret Lives of Jesus" - are definitely chaff, created in the first four centuries of the Christian era. As scriptural scholar Ben Witherington told me, they're the ancient equivalent of Harlequin romances, or you might compare them to the popular "Left Behind" series of novels: that is, riffs on Christian scripture that flesh out the basics with plenty of fiction.
So are such also-ran gospels a fit subject for religious study - or scientific study, for that matter? Read on for a sampling of opinions from believers and skeptics:
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