Posts tagged “space exploration”
Pilots ends here. X and Y, the world's first superswitchers, have apparently taken a moon, a few hundred pilots, and enough supplies to terraform a new world, and left our solar system entirely. I'm not saying it was my idea. They're pilots. They can come home whenever they want.
Space got wild fast after orbital launch costs collapsed. After we found Max, a teenage Tibetan monk who'd accidentally killed his entire village with an uncontrolled switch, we nursed him through years of rehab. Then we handed him back to training, and he went straight into orbit on his first try.
I explain how switching technology upended transportation, economics, borders, labour, and eventually space travel, detailing the chaos, accidents, and innovations along the way, from floating ocean hotels to flying saucers, ending with humanity's expansion across the solar system.
A far-future parable about Lucy, one of humanity's last "natural" humans, a park worker who chose death over life extension while helping heal an emptied Earth. Millennia later, her fossilized bones are found and misinterpreted by the planet's next inhabitants. They get everything wrong, except her name.
The discovery of a frozen equatorial sea on Mars changes everything. Combined with solar electrolysis for oxygen and fuel, water means we can actually sustain human life there. A Martian colony has moved from science fiction premise to genuine possibility. I'm ready to go.
Reflecting on the Columbia disaster through newly released transcripts. It was tragic, but we must press on with space exploration.
Last day at IBM Hursley, back to Warwick! Also: possible life on Venus (just microbes, but still), everything we know is wrong, and the Weekly World News has infiltrated Al-Qaeda. Quite a day.
Space elevators could make low earth orbit a four-hour ride and geosynchronous orbit reachable in a week, all at a fraction of current rocket costs. This is genuinely exciting stuff.
Revising all day killed my blogging mojo, but here's what I've got: reasons to ban cloning white people, ice oceans discovered on Mars (hello, terraforming potential!), and my dream of sightseeing through Valles Marineris. Mondays still suck.
