Authorship, according to the spirit in which it is pursued, is an infancy, a pastime, a labor, a handicraft, an art, a science, or a virtue.
August Wilhelm Von Schlegel
It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
Neil Armstrong
By March, the worst of the winter would be over. The snow would thaw, the rivers begin to run and the world would wake into itself again.
Not that year.
Neil Gaiman, Odd and the Frost Giants
“Do you ever wonder if—well, if there are people living on the third planet?"
"The third planet is incapable of supporting life," stated the husband patiently. "Our scientists have said there's far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.”
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Well, that settles that. Up and coming, Valentine's Day,
A Quest to Discover America’s First Science-Fiction Writer | The New Yorker "'WILEY & HALSTED, No. 3 Wall street, have just received SYMZONIA, or a voyage to the internal world, by capt. Adam Seaborn. Price $1.' As literary landmarks go, it’s not quite Emerson greeting Whitman at the start of a great career. But this humble advert may herald the first American science-fiction novel. "
Fake Faces | The New York Times "There are now businesses that sell fake people. On the website Generated.Photos, you can buy a “unique, worry-free” fake person for $2.99, or 1,000 people for $1,000. If you just need a couple of fake people — for characters in a video game, or to make your company website appear more diverse — you can get their photos for free on ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com."
A Solar-Powered Rocket Might Be Our Ticket to Interstellar Space | WIRED "Only two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, have left our solar system. But that was a scientific bonus after they completed their main mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Neither spacecraft was equipped with the right instruments to study the boundary between our star’s planetary fiefdom and the rest of the universe."
Disney Won't Pay Star Wars Royalties Says Alan Dean Foster "SFWA president Mary Robinette Kowal also shared her own letter in the press release, saying that the organization chose to go public with the accusations because the situation is unprecedented—not just because it’s impacting a prolific sci-fi writer with decades of experience in the industry who helped form Star Wars’ literary voice, but because SFWA is worried this problem could happen to other writers in the future."
Is space mining the eco-friendly choice? | Astronomy "'...Jeff Bezos breezily suggested that we “don’t want to live in a retrograde world where we have to freeze population growth..... Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial.'"
Debate Erupts Over How ‘Forbidden’ Black Holes Grow | Quanta Magazine "...on May 21, 2019, midsize black holes were unambiguously detected for the first time when the U.S.-based Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and its European counterpart Virgo captured the tremor from a pair of black holes merging in the depths of space."
State of Surveillance | ChinaFile "Whether they are assessing residents’ basic needs or trying to predict future behavior, officials engaged in surveillance are pursuing a single goal: to keep China’s citizens under near-constant watch."
1984.
The Most Famous Paradox in Physics Nears Its End | Quanta Magazine "In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information, which seems impossible by definition. The work appears to resolve a paradox that Stephen Hawking first described five decades ago."
What Comes After the International Space Station? | WIRED "In 50 years, Suffredini hopes, the company will have a large rotating space station complete with parks, schools, and shopping centers to host not just professional astronauts but also their families. He envisions a spinning station that creates artificial gravity in the outer ring with a non-spinning hub in the center used for microgravity research."
Cue the theme ffrom 2001.
Tiny moon shadows may harbor hidden stores of ice | Phys.org "[T]he researchers estimate that the moon could harbor roughly 15,000 square miles of permanent shadows in various shapes and sizes—reservoirs that, according to theory, might also be capable of preserving water via ice."
Who puts the right into "The Right Stuff"? | Astronomy.com "I like The Right Stuff movie, like it a lot. But the thing I like about this new treatment of [the material from the book] is that it goes into much greater depth character-wise. That's something a series allows that a movie does not. You have 3 hours of movie to build these characters. With the series, you can really dive into just who they were."
Disney+
A New Map of All the Particles and Forces |Quanta Magazine "Chris Quigg, a particle physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, has been thinking about how to visualize the Standard Model for decades, hoping that a more powerful visual representation would help familiarize people with the known particles of nature and prompt them to think about how these particles might fit into a larger, more complete theoretical framework."
The genius of stop-motion wizard Ray Harryhausen | The Spectator "Modern Two in Edinburgh reopens this week, and what more fitting subject for a show in a time of global catastrophe than Ray Harryhausen, titan of cinema, creator of beasts, destroyer of cities, king of adventure?"
How Luna 3 first unveiled the Moon’s farside | Astronomy.com "What happened to create these two quite dissimilar lunar faces? Current thinking postulates that a Mars-sized impactor, named Theia, hit Earth in a glancing blow around 4.5 billion years ago .... As its Earth-facing nearside broiled for millions of years under the extreme heat radiated by our infant planet, the farside cooled, and a temperature gradient steadily evolved between the two lunar hemispheres."
Some planets may be better for life than Earth | PhysOrg "Earth is not necessarily the best planet in the universe. Researchers have identified two dozen planets outside our solar system that may have conditions more suitable for life than our own."
Tianwen-1's first 'selfie' in space to celebrate China's National Day | CGTN "Released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA) on Thursday, the selfie shows a bright national flag, with the pattern made of special material and process. The CNSA said the flag measures 39 centimeters in length and 26 centimeters in width, a size slightly smaller than an A3 piece of paper, and weighs 144 grams."
Scientists May Have Found a Material for Building on Mars | WIRED "Fernandez and his colleagues maintain that chitin is likely to be part of any planned artificial ecosystem, because it is so plentiful in nature. It's the primary component of fish scales and fungal cell walls, for example, as well as the exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects. In fact, insects have already been targeted as a key source of protein for a possible Martian base."
‘Trained Immunity’ Offers Hope in Fight Against Coronavirus | Quanta Magazine "Trained immunity is a form of memory exhibited by the innate immune system — a less studied, much older branch of our defenses that evolved more than a half-billion years ago, before vertebrate animals and the adaptive immune system existed."
Charlie Bolden says the quiet part out loud: SLS rocket will go away "The Falcon Heavy is not as capable as the SLS rocket, but its success has clearly demonstrated that private companies can build large, powerful rockets. Moreover, it's not just SpaceX, but also Blue Origin with its New Glenn booster, that seeks to build heavy lift rockets with private money. And although they are rivals, SpaceX's Elon Musk and Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos both agree that rockets need to be capable of reuse to be viable. The SLS will cost about $2 billion to launch and then fall into the ocean."
How Can We Pay for Creativity in the Digital Age? | The New Yorker "People generally don’t become artists for the money. In fact, they are probably drawn to art as a refuge from thinking about money in the first place. What they don’t bargain for is an inquisition calling into question the very reality of their day-to-day work as an artist. The vast majority of American artists are like DeMars, essentially freelancers who generate little in the way of profit."
What does Titan smell like? | Astronomy.com "This leads to an interesting thought experiment: If an airtight spacesuit is not a necessity on Titan, then it might be possible to get a whiff of your surroundings through your oxygen mask. In that case, what would Titan smell like?"
Susanna Clarke’s Fantasy World of Interiors | The New Yorker "'Piranesi' often feels like a book about writing a book, the unending halls a version of the boundless and unruly possibility of a work that has yet to take on the form it must adopt if it is ever going to be accessible to other people. Its narrator lives in a kind of dream that obscures the truth about his past and about his relationship to the Other."
Are aliens hiding in plain sight? | Science | The Guardian "Bartlett, working with astrobiologist Michael Wong of the University of Washington in Seattle, argues that we need to escape the straitjacket of Earth-based thinking about life. They propose introducing a broader category called “lyfe” (pronounced, in an oddly West Country fashion, as “loif”), of which life as we know it is just one variation."
Gravity, Gizmos, and a Grand Theory of Interstellar Travel | WIRED "Woodward’s MEGA drive is different. Instead of propellant, it relies on electricity, which in space would come from solar panels or a nuclear reactor. His insight was to use a stack of piezoelectric crystals and some controversial—but he believes plausible—physics to generate thrust."
Wild theory suggests COVID-19 came to Earth aboard a space rock | Astronomy.com "Panspermia is, broadly speaking, the idea that life arrived on earth from space, and continues to do. The notion goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, but in its modern form it dates back to the 1970s and the work of two astronomers, Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) and Chandra Wickramasinghe."
A nearby supernova could have caused the Devonian mass extinction | Astronomy.com "The radioactive isotopes created by supernova debris interacting with Earth’s atmosphere would have decayed long ago. So if researchers can find evidence of these isotopes in rocks from the Devonian-Carboniferous boundary, it would directly suggest that at least one nearby star exploded around that time."
Margaret Atwood talks about ‘The Testaments,’ ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,’ politics and more "...she recently completed an unusual reading project: rereading both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments, in order to annotate them for an auction. 'I creeped myself out quite a lot,' she said. In terms of the world today, 'they’re just a little bit too accurate.'"