Stumble Findings: Permanent Mission to Mars

How would you like to go to Mars? Explore a new frontier, brave the unknown, discover a new world, never see your old home or acquaintances again...

Wait, what?

You heard me correctly. NASA and DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a branch of the Defense Department)  have joined forces to create a plan which will take humans to Mars--and leave them there for good.

Here's an excerpt of the article linked above in case you want to glance through before committing a whole new tab to this topic:

"NASA and DARPA have joined forces to build something called a Hundred-Year Starship, according to the director of NASA’s Ames Research Center. Simon “Pete” Worden said NASA contributed $100,000 to the project and DARPA kicked in $1 million.

“The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” Worden said, according to a Singularity University blog that covered the event. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.” (Worden added that he was fired by President George W. Bush.)

Beyond that, there are no details. But the prospect of a DARPA-NASA spaceship collaboration for Star Trek-esque exploration sounds thrilling — even if by definition, a 100-year ship means leaving Earth and never coming back" - Popular Science

Interesting stuff. I recommend you read the article (and click the links there, as well) if this topic tickles your fancy. Hopefully someday soon we'll live the future the past thought we'd be living by now.

Make it so!

Someday..

Enjoy!

-Feel

Legitimate Thoughts: Space Opera, Afterall

Howdy buckaroos (and buckarettes)! For those of you wishing for a life of swash-buckling adventure on the high seas of space, you're in luck! After years of being told by skeptics that our planet is the habitable exception to a cold and barren rule, scientists from the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) and the Carnegie Institute of Washington have discovered the first potentially inhabitable world outside our solar system. 

Granted, this isn't the first extra-solar planet found, but it is the first to be right smack in the middle of its sun's Goldilocks zone--the crucial orbit no too far or close to the sun where water can exist in its liquid form. And if there’s something you must know about water, it’s that it is necessary for just about everything needed to support life.

You see, we here on earth take water for granted. It's everywhere. It's in our air, our oceans, and on the floors of subway stops and public restrooms everywhere (urine is 80%+ water). So it's understandable that we don't grasp just how stacked the odds were against us having liquid water. Indeed, just a bit closer or farther in our orbit and the Big Blue would either be a frozen wasteland like Siberia or a barren desert like Death Valley, respectively. 

Of course, don't go wanking off to Avatar (again) just yet. Just because it's in the Goldilocks zone doesn't mean it has life, it just means it has the potential for it. All of you budding space cowboys and cowgirls out there can still dream, but it is also highly unlikely that the technology to reach this glorious Earth 2.0 will exist in our lifetime (it is a wopping 20 light-years away).

So much for your career as a bounty hunter..

This will never be you. 

Still, if this planet is in fact habitable then even if we ourselves are unable to warp drive our way over, we can at least settle one debate that has been raging in the media ever since hippies first started digging holes in the ground and going to town: There is a Plan B.

So yes! we can in fact pillage and rape our planet for years to come, because once it’s spent, we’ll have a perfectly good new one to pillage and rape all over again.

Cheers,

Touch

I wish people cared about science more.

Chances are if you ever read this blog you're more likely to know about this than this.

So fuck you.

~The Engineer

Stumble Findings: Colonizing the Universe--With Nuclear Bombs

"Of all the dreams of the golden years of the 20th century, in which flying cars would be be crossing the skies of technologic utopias, one of them actually had serious chances of becoming reality exactly as imagined in cheap sci-fi comics. Shortly after stepping on the Moon, we would be colonizing Mars, visiting Saturn and the satellites of Jupiter, all in gigantic spaceships hundreds of meters long, with thousands of tons and hundreds of astrounauts. Huge permanent colonies would be established in other planets and even Alpha Centauri would be at our reach.

It would all be possible through one project: Orion."

Wow.

Check this shit out.

:D Good, interesting, awesome article.

P.S. paper is not done yet. :'(

-Nero Thanes