Currently viewing the tag: "Space"
Today starts the 520-day Mars mission simulation by the Russian State Scientific Center. This only makes me thing of two things. The first is the above image, which is one of many concept pictures for a potential Mars base. I wanted to be on Mars soooooo bad when I was 12.
The other [...]
Discovery News has two interesting articles. First, insect AI:
But a small organism doesn’t have so many cells to control and can fit some very elaborate mental circuitry in a pinhead-sized brain.
Several hundred neurons give the ability to count. A few thousand create sentient, and perhaps even sapient, thought. If that’s really the [...]
The government has decided to stop doing something that it does badly.
That’s a rare occurrence, so pause to savor it.
That is how Katherine Mangu-Ward opens her piece on Obama’s revision of the NASA budget. Delicious. The piece itself is more focused on the confused logic of government’s role in “job creation,” but [...]
The Obama administration recently released its NASA budget with the expected, but still surprising intention to end the Constellation program and increase funding for developing commercial space flight. I must admit, I am very excited about the prospects here. The Ansari X prize managed to get over 100 million dollars in development in five [...]
A few scientists are trying to pin down where the best places for life might be elsewhere in the universe:
“When people talk about ‘habitable zones,’ they mean where there’s liquid water on the surface. But there’s liquid water elsewhere in the solar system; it’s buried under thick sheets of ice on moons,” Francis [...]
Why don’t we have as much funding for underwater exploration as we do space exploration?
That question has haunted me since I was a little kid who wanted to be a marine biologist. The ocean is unbelievable: two-thirds of the planet, millions of species undiscovered, some 95% simply unexplored. It’s so big that after making [...]
“While NASA frets over a looming hiatus in its ability to launch people into space, a commercial company is poised to unveil the first spaceship for private passenger travel.” - Irene Klotz, Discovery News
About
Pop Bioethics, written by Kyle Munkittrick, is an effort to study the ethics of the continuing evolution of the human species via the lens of pop culture and be somewhat entertaining in the process.
Kyle's writing can also be found at Discover's The Crux, Slate's Future Tense, and at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. For questions or comments: comments [at] popbioethics [dot] com
All opinions, ideas, and words either explicit or implicit found within this website are my own and represent no other person, organization, or group.Categories
