Space News

1. First rocky extrasolar planet discovered!



2. Water discovered on moon!

[click to enlarge]

3. This is only news to me, but I didn't know about the existence of Eris, Makemake, Haumea and Ceres. I especially didn't know that Ceres is suspected of having an ocean of liquid water below its surface and that in 2007 NASA launched the Dawn space probe to explore it in 2015!

See also:
How Many People Are In Space Right Now

Lovecraft / Doré / Ernst Mashup Illustrations

I just wandered across these illustrations for H.P. Lovecraft's literally awesome story At the Mountains of Madness from what I believe was a 1936 issue of Astounding Stories. Besides looking a little like Matt Diffee's New Yorker cartoons, they also reminded me of Gustave Doré's illustrations for Dante's Inferno. If no one does it soon I'm going to add making a collaged together Doré illustrated Lovecraft à la Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonté to my list of neverending art-projects!







Doré's illustrations of Dante and Virgil at the Gates of Hell:

Strange Maps

I am the 10,000,000th person to come across the blog Strange Maps but I don't care. It is the most consistently fantastic thing I've seen online in a long, long time. It has motivated me to drag from the vaults a collection of maps I've been meaning to post on here forever. While researching a conceptual encyclopedia I made for my college senior thesis I found a wonderful old book deep in the library stacks called Unrolling the Map: The Story of Exploration by Leonard Outhwaite (1935) that I think beautifully illustrates the discovery of the world from an unashamedly Eurocentric point of view. For some reason you weren't allowed to check it out so I had to sneak a scanner into the library and covertly gather these images, coughing heavily to hide the noise. I've tried to pair them with maps detailing the same period in world history as close as I could using the book Atlas of World History by John Haywood (1997):

1800 AD — Exploration

1812 AD — Cultures

1550 AD — Exploration

1530 AD — Cultures

1490 AD — Exploration

1492 AD — Cultures

700–1300 AD — Exploration

1279 AD — Cultures

1000 AD — Exploration

1000 AD — Cultures

800 AD — Exploration

800 AD — Cultures

3000 BC — Exploration

2000 BC — Cultures

I like to imagine how mind blowing it would be to live in Europe 2000 years ago and be handed an accurate map of the world and all the people in it, or to be transported from Medieval Europe to the advanced Aztec or Mayan capitols, or Japan, or to Polynesia. It would be akin to being handed a map of the night sky with all the inhabited planets pointed out on it. Kind of like this:

Abysmal Depths Populated by Monsters

I like to think that this is what our first encounter with alien life will look like (although in reality it will probably end up being some single-celled boring-ass thing), the first video beamed back from a Europan ocean probe (as previously reported here). It's actually an "elbowed" Magnapinna squid that presumably snags prey as they brush past its arms at pitch-black ocean depths (full story here).






Thanks Paddy for pointing this video out to me and for letting me rip-off your blog.

Terraforming

This is from a series of space colony ideas NASA commissioned in the 70s. I wish the 70s had lasted forever...

I've been searching for this great article I read about the impracticality of every conceived form of inter-system space travel but can't for the life of me find it. I can only remember a few of the criticized scenarios off-hand. One of the ideas for traveling between planets are these things called generation ships that would be massive ships (possibly created from a hollowed out asteroid) capable of supporting the multiple generations worth of humans needed to survive the passage. Many sci-fi writers have already pointed out that even if the life support systems of these ships didn't break down, within a few (genetically limited) generations it is likely that people would begin to forget where they came from, where they were going and what their purpose was. The cruelest/funniest idea was that should one of these generation ships (or a ship carrying people in induced comas or what have you) finally arrive at its destination it is very likely that humans would have in the meantime invented exponentially faster forms of space travel, passing these older ships in transit to settle these other planets ahead of them so that the original space travelers, instead of stumbling out onto a lifeless planet would be greeted by just another earth outpost station or even city!

So instead of finding this essay I stumbled upon these great renderings of how Mars, Venus and the Moon would look if we terraformed them:


Mars


Venus


The Moon

Life Found on Mars

Simply amazing, this will put all scientific debate to rest. Virgin Galactic announces Mars game hunting packages beginning 2018.

Either We're Alone in the Universe Or Not...

The Voyager Golden Record
Sounds and Images

30 years ago, taking advantage of the favorable alignment of the planets in the late 70s, NASA launched two probes, Voyager 1 and 2, with the goal of studying Jupiter and Saturn. (I'd take time to talk about how amazing the Pale Blue Dot is but I would go on forever.) Once they completed studying Jupiter and Saturn (of which little had previously been known) they continued in different directions and are now on the fringes of our solar system, where the Sun's influence gives way to other galactic bodies. To give you a sense of how far that is, Voyager 2 is now twice as far from the Sun as Pluto and its signals take 14 hours to reach Earth. As of last year, the two spacecraft became the third and fourth human artifacts to escape entirely from the solar system (preceded by Pioneers 10 and 11, which were launched in 1972 and 1973).

Mindful of this mind-boggling fact, the astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake somehow convinced NASA to bolt a gold-plated copper phonograph record to the outer hull of Voyager containing information chosen by a committee chaired by Sagan. This information was etched into gold and is expected to last a billion years, which, as the producer of the record points out in a very Sagan-ian way, is as far in the future as life on earth emerging from the seas was in the past.

If alien cultures or future human civilizations were to intercept the satellite (which is all but impossible, the symbolism of reaching out being the more important aspect here) and were able to figure out how to use the attached record player cartridge they would be greeted by an encoded analog signal that once calibrated would render a series of 115 images (think of a fax machine) followed by greetings in 55 languages, nature sounds, and 90 minutes of music from all over the world as well as printed messages from UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim and this one from President Carter:

"We cast this message into the cosmos ... Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some—perhaps many—may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe ... This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours."

(One of my favorite things about this record is that they mix in whale songs and bird calls as if they're just one more greeting in another language!)

Overlooking the burst of radio and television signals that are now forever radiating outwards from earth, the idea that these images and sounds may conceivably become the only surviving remnants of our existence makes me giddy with delight and a little choked up. Just listen to Blind Willie Johnson play Dark Was the Night and think of it hurtling through a cold empty darkness you can't even begin to imagine. If I ever cried, I would cry now.

Perhaps one of the most accurate things the project revealed about humanity (or at least Americans) was that when the public got wind that the illustration on the disc included drawings of a nude woman and man, newspapers began receiving angry letters accusing NASA of wasting taxpayer money to send "obscenities" into space. On a further bitter note (and to provide one more reason to get rid of record labels forever), Sagan and the Beatles both wanted to include the song Here Comes the Sun but the Beatles label EMI wouldn't allow it. Seriously, what the fuck? On a side note of a side note, in 2002 the British band Blur (also on EMI) composed a song to be beamed back from the surface of Mars by the Beagle 2 (a British landing spacecraft that was part of the European Space Agency's 2003 Mars Express mission) to signal its safe arrival. Sadly the craft was either lost in transit or malfunctioned on the surface and was never heard from.

So here's the game (more of the photos can be found here): As an alien (and assuming that you can process audio and visual signals in the same frequencies as humans-however unlikely), look at some of the images from the record and extrapolate the existence of the human species, and their location, ecosystem, biology, genetics, reproduction, cultures, societies, mathematics etc. from the following selection of images from those record contains. I can't stop laughing! And keep in mind, these will probably become the only surviving documents of the human race:







































In case you didn't notice, one of the first photos of Earth are of Egypt, the Nile and the Red Sea, as if they'd possibly recognize it! (Or would they?)



































































The infection takes hold!


































People become transparent as a parasite develops?























































































Dolphins fly.















A doctor treating a sick human?















A small human riding an enslaved larger human? Answer: Obviously, since it clearly also has four appendages and a face, therefore human.















Humans first attempt at reaching space.















Humans ambulate by becoming transparent and then tumbling forward.














Earthings eventually grew to be larger than their planet and had to leave:















Fish float in the air or (and this is more likely) there is a separate underwater race of humans...














...that can't touch solid ground and try to catch land-based humans using nets...















...Which is why the land-based humans must erect watchtowers along the waterline:

I prefer to imagine that my tax dollars are only going towards the federal government hiring actors to demonstrate licking, eating and drinking:














This is my favorite picture of the group (it reminds me of my friend Jeremy in 2057) and if they can't understand why it's great than I didn't really want to meet them anyway: