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Go Clipper
Is this not a beautiful sight? Europa Clipper sits atop a Falcon Heavy awaiting liftoff at launch complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center. Launch is set for 1206 EDT (1606 UTC) October 14. Clipper is the...
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Do You Really Want to Live Forever?
Supposing you wanted to live forever and found yourself in 2024, would you sign up for something like Alcor, a company that offers a cryogenic way to preserve your body until whatever ails it can be...
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A Necessary Break
It’s time to write a post I’ve been dreading to write for several years now. Some of my readers already know that my wife has been ill with Alzheimer’s for eleven years, and I’ve kept her at home and...
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New Explanations for the Enigmatic Wow! Signal
The Wow! signal, a one-off detection at the Ohio State ‘Big Ear’ observatory in 1977, continues to perplex those scientists who refuse to stop investigating it. If the signal were terrestrial in...
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3I/ATLAS: Observing and Modeling an Interstellar Newcomer
Let’s run through what we know about 3I/ATLAS, now accepted as the third interstellar object to be identified moving through the Solar System. It seems obvious not only that our increasingly powerful...
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A Rotating Probe Launcher Alternative to TARS
Shortly before publishing my article on David Kipping’s TARS concept (Torqued Accelerator using Radiation from the Sun), I received an email from Centauri Dreams associate editor Alex Tolley. Alex had...
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The Firefly and the Pulsar
We’ve now had humans in space for 25 continuous years, a feat that made the news last week and one that must have caused a few toasts to be made aboard the International Space Station. This is a marker...
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Cellular Cosmic Isolation: When the Universe Seeds Life but Civilizations...
So many answers to the Fermi question have been offered that we have a veritable bestiary of solutions, each trying to explain why we have yet to encounter extraterrestrials. I like Leo Szilard’s...
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Shelter from the Storm
The approaching storm will almost certainly cause power outages that will make it impossible to post here. If this occurs, you can be sure that I’ll get any incoming messages posted as soon as I can...
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Holography: Shaping a Diffractive Sail
One result of the Breakthrough Starshot effort has been an intense examination of sail stability under a laser beam. The issue is critical, for a small sail under a powerful beam for only a few minutes...
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