The old SF Solar System had native alien races on just about every body. A prime example is Edmond Hamilton’s “Captain Future” series which featured human races on most moons and all the planets – we were all related by common descent from interstellar travellers from Deneb. By 1960 those hopes were largely dashed by
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Darwin’s Mystery was, amongst the many puzzles that great scientist tackled, was the perceived lack of fossils in rocks older than the Cambrian. Why were those earlier rocks bare of life? Did that indicate a vast span of missing time for life to evolve in? Since then we have found somewhat older animal life, but
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Life began in a flash; Science takes four billion years to catch up: Scientific American Blog. Making the chemical sub-components of RNA is tricky. So tricky that veteran Origins-of-Life researchers like the late Leslie Orgel despaired of cracking the puzzle. It’s a shame he didn’t see this particular leap forward. A different unsuspected property of
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Harry Stubbs aka ‘Hal Clement’ was the Grand Master of alien planet building with such classic creations as Mesklin, Dhrawn and Tenebra. His last creation, prior to his passing in 2003, was Kainui in his novel “Noise”, which I finished reading yesterday. Kainui, as the name implies, was settled by Polynesians and the protagonist is
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Human? What makes us ‘man’? Aside from gender-specific bits, I mean humanity has some distinct features to its nearest relatives, the Chimpanzees and Gorillas. We talk, make and keep things, and we have this curious need to drape artificial fur over ourselves. We make bargains, we trade and we imagine the Unseen. But what about
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Mankind’s first Science-Fiction, tales of visionary quests, let humans tread the pathways of the Immortals, gods and heroes. More recent varieties of SF have often focussed on the not-too-far-off here-and-now, but Big Stories and big themes lure even the hardest of hard SF writers back towards the eschatological and metaphysical. All sorts of “after-lives” have
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Earth will one day be much like Titan. Lakes near the poles, occasional flash-flooding nearer to the equator, but otherwise a planet girt by dunes. Usually the analogy between Earth and Titan goes the other way – Titan is a frozen pre-biotic Earth. And, in many ways, it is. But it’s also drying out as
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How does a water world stay wet when the Sun is too far away? We’ve looked at hydrogen/helium greenhouse effects – too much of a ‘good thing’ means the ocean is of super-critical steam not liquid water. But a planet without a Sun is a perfect candidate for a deep, dense atmosphere to keep its
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I personally hope that one of our many probes to the planets will turn up an anomaly that can’t be explained as a natural formation. The weird thing in Saturn’s rings, the white spot of Venus and rectangular craters on the Moon are pretty odd, but not overly compelling – the scale is too vast
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LPSC 38 2007 Cryovolcanism on Charon. (With thanks to Paul Gilster for asking Cryovolcanism on Charon? over at Centauri Dreams ) Who would’ve expected liquid water out around Neptune and beyond? Not on the surface of any object, of course. That’d be stretching physics just a bit too much. Underground. Deep under an insulating blanket
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