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Aliens & Black Holes

Penrose predicted that the object would acquire a negative energy in this unusual area of space. By dropping the object and splitting it in two so that one half falls into the black hole while the other is recovered, the recoil action would measure a loss of negative energy—effectively, the recovered half would gain energy extracted from the black hole’s rotation. The scale of the engineering challenge the process would require is so great, however, that Penrose suggested only a very advanced, perhaps alien, civilisation would be equal to the task.


A 50-year-old theory that began as speculation about how an alien civilization could use a black hole to generate energy has been experimentally verified for the first time in a Glasgow research lab.

Administrator Jim Bridenstine, leadership and a panel of scientists and engineers will preview the upcoming mission at 2 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, June 17. Submit your questions during the briefing using #AskNASA!

Perseverance is a robotic scientist that will search for signs of past microbial life on Mars and characterize the planet’s climate and geology. It will also collect rock and soil samples for future return to Earth and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. The mission is scheduled to launch from Space Launch Complex 41 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 9:15 a.m. EDT July 20. It will land at Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. #CountdownToMars

I think that supporting technologies will be important for closing not just gaps in space, but also gaps in time: a message from Earth takes as long as 22 minutes to reach Mars (hence our email delay in sim), and the reply needs the same time to come back. And that delay is just for the next planet over! Clever tech will be needed to bring us together across space and time.

Learning From Today to Design Tomorrow

Covid-19 is bringing us face-to-face with a host of uncertainties, pressures, and yes, catastrophes. But if we have the patience and courage to learn from this experience, we empower ourselves to build stronger, inclusive, and resilient futures on Earth and elsewhere.

For the first time, a spacecraft has sent back pictures of the sky from so far away that some stars appear to be in different positions than we’d see from Earth.

More than four billion miles from home and speeding toward interstellar space, NASA’s New Horizons has traveled so far that it now has a unique view of the nearest stars. “It’s fair to say that New Horizons is looking at an alien sky, unlike what we see from Earth,” said Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator from Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “And that has allowed us to do something that had never been accomplished before — to see the nearest stars visibly displaced on the sky from the positions we see them on Earth.”

On April 22–23, the spacecraft turned its long-range telescopic camera to a pair of the “closest” stars, Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359, showing just how they appear in different places than we see from Earth. Scientists have long used this “parallax effect” – how a star appears to shift against its background when seen from different locations — to measure distances to stars.

Pleased to have been the guest on this most recent episode of Javier Ideami’s Beyond podcast. We discuss everything from #spaceexploration to #astrobiology!


In this episode, we travel from Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage to the first mission to Mars with Bruce Dorminey. Bruce is a science journalist and author who primarily covers aerospace, astronomy and astrophysics. He is a regular contributor to Astronomy magazine and since 2012, he has written a regular tech column for Forbes magazine. He is also a correspondent for Renewable Energy World. Writer of “Distant Wanderers: The Search for Planets Beyond the Solar System”, he was a 1998 winner in the Royal Aeronautical Society’s Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards (AJOYA) as well as a founding team member of the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Science Communication Focus Group.

EPISODE LINKS:
Bruce web: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucedorminey/#47e297264d03
Distant Wanderers Book: https://www.amazon.es/Distant-Wanderers-Search-Planets-Beyond/dp/1441928723
Renewable Energy World: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/author/bruce-dorminey/#gref
Bruce’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/bdorminey

INFO:
Podcast website: https://volandino.com
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3O74ctu6Hv5zZdHYT9Ox3Z
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/beyond/id1509949724
RSS: https://volandino.com/feed/podcast
Full episodes playlist:

OUTLINE:

Will we ever live on Mars?


Since the dawn of the Space Age, the planet Mars has been the focus of two ambitious projects. One is the search for life forms native to the planet; the other is human colonization.

For decades, Mars colonization advocates have been promising potential settlers that the time for leaving Earth is nearing. In fact, in terms of producing the actual space hardware—the capability to transport large numbers of passengers into space and the engines and life support to ferry them safely to Mars—we’re not much closer to a Mars colony than we were in 1972, when the last Apollo lunar mission returned to Earth, so don’t sell your house on Earth just yet. On the other hand, we’ve had one mind-blowing discovery after another about Mars as a result of unmanned exploration conducted over the last decades by NASA.

The evidence that the planet is home to microscopic lifeforms—something akin to Earth’s bacteria—has been accumulating slowly, but consistently. While few astrobiologists are ready say that, yes, there’s life there, until we have a photo of microorganisms swimming in the microscope field, that moment is really approaching. And we’ll probably get to it long before the first astronaut boots cast their prints into the Martian surface dust.