Curiosity Rover Animation:

Nuclear Mars Rover:

11 Amazing Things NASA’s Huge Mars Rover Can Do: http://www.space.com/13689-nasa-amazing-mars-rover-curiosity-science.html

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Stephen Hawking

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The end of the Space Age – Inner space is useful. Outer space is history http://www.economist.com/node/18897425

An Elegy for the Age of Space http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2011/08/elegy-for-age-of-space.html

Why Not Space? http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/ Cf. http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/10/18/2258237/space-is-not-the-place-says-professor

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Planets with Stabilizing Moons May Be Common: “The Earth’s comparatively massive moon, formed via a giant impact on the proto-Earth, has played an important role in the development of life on our planet, both in the history and strength of the ocean tides and in stabilizing the chaotic spin of our planet. Here we show that massive moons orbiting terrestrial planets are not rare. A large set of simulations by Morishima et al. (Morishima, R., Stadel, J., Moore, B. [2010]. Icarus. 207, 517–535 [cf. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.0579 ]), where Earth-like planets in the habitable zone form, provides the raw simulation data for our study. We use limits on the collision parameters that may guarantee the formation of a circumplanetary disk after a protoplanet collision that could form a satellite and study the collision history and the long term evolution of the satellites qualitatively. In addition, we estimate and quantify the uncertainties in each step of our study. We find that giant impacts with the required energy and orbital parameters for producing a binary planetary system do occur with more than 1 in 12 terrestrial planets hosting a massive moon, with a low-end estimate of 1 in 45 and a high-end estimate of 1 in 4.” http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.4616

Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/planetary-anthropic-selection

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A Fusion Thruster for Space Travel – Clean, highly energetic reaction delivers a lot of drive from a drop of fuel “[...] improvements in short-pulse laser systems could make this form of thruster more than 40 times as efficient as even the best of today’s ionic propulsion systems that push spacecraft around. The specific power of the proton-triggered boron fuel would be so great that a mere mole of it (11 grams) would yield roughly 300 megawatts of power. [...]” http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/a-fusion-thruster-for-space-travel/0

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“Imagine life on an Earth-like moon, one so close to its gas giant host that its landscape is bathed in a dusklike planetary glow. Such places are not only possible but also probable, according to a new study, which finds that as many as 5% of gas giant planets orbiting their stars at Earth-like distances may harbor habitable “exomoons.”

For the past decade or so, planet hunters have been scanning the skies, hoping to detect an Earth-like planet in a habitable orbit around its sunlike star. NASA’s Kepler observatory, currently orbiting Earth, is expected to detect dozens of such planets as they make their way across the face of their parent stars. But so far, most of the discoveries have been giant planets in Earth-like orbits, which are much easier to spot but too hot and gaseous to harbor life. The new study provides them with the possibility of life-supporting satellites.

Simon Porter, a predoctoral fellow at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and colleagues created computer models of 12,000 hypothetical planets about the size of Earth that had been gravitationally captured by gas giants like Jupiter. The simulated gas giants orbited their stars at just the right distance for life to be possible on these planets-turned-moons.

All of the simulated satellites started out on very elliptical orbits around their gas giants, the team will report in an upcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Over hundreds of thousands of years, half of them crashed into their planets or were spat out of orbit. But the other half evolved steady orbits, allowing them to develop stable climates over billions of years. Such climates are thought to be necessary for the evolution of complex life. [...]” http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/06/does-life-exist-on-distant-moons.html

Cf. http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/06/22/2318206/New-Find-Boosts-Prospects-For-Life-On-Distant-Moons

http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/are-we-unlikely-to-ever-leave-the-solar-system

http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/planetary-anthropic-selection

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Are we unlikely to ever leave the solar system? http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html Cf. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2639456

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Project Icarus: Flying closer to another star http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/

http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/icarus_project.php

http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.3833

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/05/09/1929201/Project-Icarus-an-Interstellar-Mission-Timeline

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52 Years and $750M Prove Einstein Was Right “[...] the Gravity Probe results would live forever in textbooks as the most direct measurements [....]

Empty space in the vicinity of Earth is indeed turning, Dr. Everitt reported at the news conference and in a paper prepared for the journal Physical Review Letters, at the leisurely rate of 37 one-thousandths of a second of arc — the equivalent of a human hair seen from 10 miles away — every year. With an uncertainty of 19 percent, that measurement was in agreement with Einstein’s predictions of 39 milliarcseconds.

Likewise, the “sag” should alter the space-time geometry around Earth, warping it from the Euclidean ideal and cutting an inch out of the Gravity Probe’s orbit around it, so that the circumference is slightly less than the Euclidean ideal of pi times the orbit’s diameter, a fact confirmed by the Stanford gyroscopes to an accuracy of 0.3 percent. [...]” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/science/space/05gravity.html?_r=1

http://einstein.stanford.edu/highlights/status1.html

Update: http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/05/05/0253241/NASA-Gravity-Probe-Confirms-Two-Einstein-Predictions

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Et Intelligence

Original: https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/ufo/et_intelligence.pdf

Key to the messages: https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/ufo/key_to_et_messages.pdf

Html: http://agoragraphie.canalblog.com/archives/2008/10/27/11130768.html

History & wording:

It is curious, to say the least, that this document was cleared for release on October 21, 2004. Why was that? Because the NSA did not release it into public information until April 21, 2011. Though cleared for release, the NSA had been stonewalling it along with hundreds of other NSA documents about contact with UFOs and extraterrestrials until they lost the lawsuit brought by Peter Gersten, a lawyer from Arizona. When they well and truly lost, the judge’s order had to be carried out, and the documents had to be released. [...]

Dr. Campaigne’s presentation to the NSA on decoding the extraterrestrial messages was not a hypothetical exercise. I contacted someone who is formerly associated with the NSA and still has TS clearance, and asked him to view the document. I asked him to give me his take on it. There was no question about its authenticity since it was published in the NSA Journal, and was released by the NSA on their web site. What I wanted to know was whether this document had any particular impact or importance (other than its startling revelations) for someone familiar with the inner workings of the NSA. It did.

My contact told me that he was blown away by the wording of the document. He said that NSA communications are filled with words like “possibly” , “allegedly”, and “thought to be”.

He said, “This document has none of the normal NSA disclaimer words in it. They just come out and say ‘we received messages from outer space’ and this is the way to decode those messages.”

I asked, “What does that mean to you?”

His reply was instant.

“Disclosure, pure and simple. They aren’t making any fanfare about it, but there it is. They have just made open disclosure.” http://www.ufodigest.com/article/official-et-disclosure-nsa-document-admits-et-contact-kevin-w-smith

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https://vault.fbi.gov/hottel_guy/Guy%20Hottel%20Part%201%20of%201/view?searchterm=Guy%20Hottel

Cf. https://vault.fbi.gov/unexplained-phenomenon

Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_incident

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It is widely recognized that regions of Earth that have stable temperatures (e.g., tropical rainforests) have high levels of biodiversity (see review by Wilson, 2001). The hypothesis that this link is direct and causal is reinforced by the observation that the deep ocean seafloor also has high biodiversity (Sanders, 1968), even though the conditions are, stability excepted, poor and biological productivity therefore low. Further evidence of a link between rapid climate change and loss of species richness has been gleaned from studies of Earth’s glacial-interglacial cycles. The most recent ice ages have resulted in reduced biodiversity within the temperate zones where the greatest changes in climate occurred (see review by Hewitt, 2004). There are, therefore, two independent lines of evidence that support the proposition that biodiversity is, in general, lower when climate change is significant. [...]” http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/ast.2010.0475

Cf. http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/the-great-filter-are-we-almost-past-it

Update: http://theunitedpersons.org/blog/planets-with-stabilizing-moons-may-be-common

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Cosmonaut Crashed Into Earth ‘Crying In Rage’: “The problem was Gagarin. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed.

The question was: Who would tell Brezhnev? Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. With less than a month to go before the launch, Komarov realized postponement was not an option. He met with Russayev, the now-demoted KGB agent, and said, “I’m not going to make it back from this flight.”

Russayev asked, Why not refuse? According to the authors, Komarov answered: “If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead.” That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn’t do that to his friend. “That’s Yura,” the book quotes him saying, “and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.” Komarov then burst into tears. [...]” http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/03/18/134597833/cosmonaut-crashed-into-earth-crying-in-rage

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A measure for the multiverse: “[...] Everything we need to know about the multiverse might be right here in our own universe.” http://www.sott.net/articles/show/204004-A-measure-for-the-multiverse

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Alonzo Fyfe

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