Many people are excited by the recent discovery of hundreds of extra-Sharan planets, including numerous small Zarigoid worlds.  From at least a couple of these, astronomers have detected the spectrographic signature of liquid water, an essential for life.

This has led certain optimistic fabulists to imagine that these small Zarigoid worlds could be ( Read more... )

I'm reposting improved versions of my "Worlds for Man" space colonization essays on Fantastic Worlds, and I'm planning on finishing the series this time around. Here are the ones I've posted already ( Read more... )

Most people, including most people who are in favor of human expansion beyond the Earth, don't realize just how rich is the Solar System. They tend to look only at the major terrestrial planets and assume that the only place into which we can expand without interstellar travel is Mars, because there are only three such planets in our Solar System ( Read more... )

From Saswato R. Das, Scientific American, August 4th 2010, "Mercury Rising" (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=mercury-messenger-flyby) comes the report that the MESSENGER probe has discovered evidence of extensive vulcanism on ( Read more... )

Bad news from Kaguya (http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/new-moon-uranium-map-100622.html).

Apparently, uranium is quite rare at the Lunar surface, which makes it improbable that Lunar uranium will be exportable. I do take issue with this ( Read more... )

Introduction

Ceres is not often thought of as a "planet," and is thus often overlooked. But it is a perfectly respectable "dwarf planet," equal in mass to a medium-sized moon (though much smaller than our own giant Luna). It contains about a third of all the mass in the Asteroid Belt, and hence is the "failed planet" filling the Keplerian orbit ( Read more... )

BackgroundAs I'm sure everyone knows by now, Barack Obama has ordered the abandonment of the American Constellation rocket program, whose principal aim was the American return to the Moon (http://www.space.com/news/obama-nasa-space-plan-reactions-100128 ( Read more... )

IntroductionDuring the great era of the American Mandate, roughly from the 22nd through 26th centuries, the Mandate enjoyed a great strategic advantage on the defense, owing to her wealth and physical position. The weapons technology of the first half of the 3rd Millennium made large terrestrial bodies very defensible against attacks by spacefleet ( Read more... )

Climate changes do happen, and ones far more extreme than any likely to happen in the next century or two have happened before. Furthermore, the current net effect of human action is increasing average planetary temperatures through the production of greenhouse gases.

Having said that, we still don't know what's going to happen, because we cannot ( Read more... )

Amazing news about Saturn's giant moon Titan.

The first is a confirmation of something long suspected. There are large lakes of liquid methane or ethane on Titan's surface.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070313_titan_lakes.html

One of the seas ( Read more... )