Carbon is the material of the Future. Graphite, graphene, bucky-balls and nanotubes all have amazing properties. And then there’s diamond – which seems to come in several varieties, albeit rare and/or theoretical. Making enough of any of the allotropes – different carbon forms – is rather tricky, aside from raw graphite, which can be mined.
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Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest book “2312″ is set in that titular year in a Solar System alive with busy humans and thousands of artificial habitats carved from asteroids. Earth is a crowded mess, home to eleven billion humans, but no longer the home of thousands of species, now only preserved, flourishing in fact, in the
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R.J.Spivey writes a provocative essay for the arXiv… From Fermions to the Fermi Paradox: A Fertile Cosmos Fit for Life? …basically Spivey suggests we’re jumping to conclusions too soon about Life in the Cosmos, that the real party is after our current Stelliferous Era, when Life exists in a multitude of planets formed from supernova
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Natural planets capture a minute fraction of the life-giving energy of their stars. Earth’s cross-sectional area facing the Sun is 0.45 billionths of the total area at its orbital distance. What can be done to reduce the wastage? Freeman Dyson originally proposed civilized beings might build an immense spherical cloud of habitats to maximize the
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For his gigadollar earning movie “Avatar” James Cameron wanted as plausible a design as possible for the interstellar vehicle featured, the ISV “Venture Star”. Advised by his good friend Charles Pellegrino, Cameron has given us, in film, a starship design that could really work – or close to. Check-out Winchell Chung’s detailed description and discussion
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What’s eating the stars out of our galaxy’s heart? – 15 September 2010 – New Scientist. The Galactic Centre is home to a massive black-hole, estimated at ~4 million solar masses, meaning it’s event horizon is 12 million kilometres in radius. Not the biggest – there are multi-billion solar mass black-holes in the cores of
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xkcd: Exoplanets Just how many exoplanets are now known? Oodles. Topping 500 this week with 400 more odd promised over the next year from “Kepler” and who knows how many being watched prior to the discoverers going public… Exoplanet Encyclopedia
Found in nature’s freezer, the secret of living to 140 | Mail Online. Certain bacteria and/or their by-products when injected into mice & flies (standard lab-animal models for such studies) extend their healthy life-spans by almost double. Thus the headline about humans heading to 100-140 years of age as normal. Rapid advancements in reprogramming the
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