Category: Science
-
The Endemic
Note: I haven't put up any new blog posts for several weeks, and this one is the reason. I've been thinking about this piece for a while, but was reluctant to post it because I didn't want to feed the endless anger. Nevertheless, I think it's important, so here we go. The definition of an…
-
Return to the Event Horizon!
The second half of my interview with John Michael Godier is now available on his excellent Event Horizon YouTube channel. You can listen to it here. Hear me pontificate about star-mining, slow-motion interstellar colonization, nuclear war, and how planetary scientists have fallen in love with giant impacts.
-
Event Horizon Interview on YouTube
I have been a fan of John Michael Godier's "Event Horizon" channel on YouTube for more than a year now, so I was particularly pleased when Mr. Godier and his team decided to interview me about my new book The Godel Operation. The interview itself was great fun. Our conversation rambled widely, discussing the book, artificial…
-
In the Right Ballpark
Last year I wrote a nine-part series of 'blog posts about the Drake Equation, the Fermi Paradox, the Great Filter, and how many civilizations are likely to exist in the Milky Way Galaxy. If you want to re-read it, start here. To give away the ending, after a lot of discussion I would up estimating about…
-
Let’s Build a World
This Saturday, April 17, I'll be teaching "It Used to Take a Week," an online workshop on worldbuilding in science fiction for the Pioneer Valley Writers' Workshop. This is a new step for me — I've never taught a class before. Except that I've done hundreds of convention panels and presentations over the years, and…
-
Steely-Eyed Missile Robot
Congratulations to the Perseverance rover on its successful landing on Mars. Pretty impressive job for a rookie pilot! Let's all wish it a long career of rolling around the Martian landscape. ADDENDUM: Almost as impressive as the landing is the amazing improvement in data return. Forty-five years ago, when I watched the Viking landings on…
-
Dinosaur Fundamentals
Here's an interesting science story: researchers describe fossilized soft tissue of a dinosaur cloaca — the first time this part of any dinosaur has been seen before. You can read about it at ScienceDaily (for the highbrow version), LiveScience (for the popular-science version), or Gizmodo (for the . . . Gizmodo version). The New York…
-
The Lost Manuscripts of Lemuel Gulliver, Part the Second
A couple of weeks ago I posted about the exciting discovery in Oxford's Bodleian Library of unpublished notes and drafts by the 18th Century explorer and naturalist Dr. Lemuel Gulliver. That first post included Gulliver's discussion of how the difference in scale affected the architecture and habits of the Lilliputians. This excerpt is concerned with…
-
Hanson on Fermi
I've posted at great length on the Fermi Paradox — the simple question "Where are they?" in regard to extraterrestrial civilizations. One element of that paradox is simply that the time it would take for an expanding civilization to spread across the Galaxy is relatively short in geological terms. Or so we assume. Now Robin…
-
The Lost Manuscripts of Lemuel Gulliver, Part the First
Historians and students of literature were tremendously excited by the recent announcement by Oxford University that several volumes of unpublished notes by Lemuel Gulliver had been found in the Bodleian Library. Dr. Gulliver was a little-known 18th-century explorer, the first European to visit Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and other lands of the Pacific. His accounts of…
The Cambias Digression 