Recent content by egribble

Time is considered to be the steady flow to increased entropy by many. At the start of the big bang this flow may have been almost infinitely fast which is why it makes no sense to say the Universe began 14.5 billion years ago.

Elon is selling a dream to inspire people to get excited about space again. A few weeks ago he had an interview with Robert Zubrin. In it he stated that we will not be colonizing Mars in my lifetime unless we have an exponential increase in innovation. I believe Elon's fantasy does have reality...

Will it have the ability to dock? The Dynetics lander has a low slung configeration in part so rovers can dock. Also a habitat module on the descent Blue Origin may also be able to be configured so a rover can dock. Why suit up and depressurize (risking lunar dust contamination) if docking is...

Personally I think planetary protection is nonsense and the less said about it the better. This is because an unknowing public will become paranoid, in the same way they are about nuclear energy. The media will sensationalize the issue which will completely hinder any real progress being made.

We can sit on earth and not expand out into space. That way we protect the science on lifeless worlds. Probably billions of worlds just like the moon throughout the Universe, but let's just sit at home till we become extinct. Alternatively we can ensure the long term survival of life by...

There is something I cannot get my head around. People say the Universe started as a point of Space and Time around 13.8 billion years ago. They say that early stars formed about 500 million years later. What does not make sense to me is how we can place a time frame on this, time began with the...

Someone asked if it would be possible to terraform the moon (create an atmosphere by setting off a few nukes). My view is a suitable atmosphere could not be created and the resources on the moon would be better mined for rocket fuel etc. I think people are getting a bit carried away with this...

The primary reason for not taking this path is radiation. Solar radiation is a nightmare once you are beyond the Van Allen Belts. Taking people even closer to the sun is dangerous, there is only one realistic direction, outwards away from that nuclear furnace.

My thoughts are that we simply do not know. It is fun to speculate and we must continue to look (seti etc) but we simply cannot even guess as to the likelihood of their being life elsewhere. The problem is that we only have one part of the equation. We know there are 200-400 billion stars in the...

I personally believe Mars is a step too far at present (two and a bit year launch window, 4 month journey, deeper gravity well then moon, radiation concerns etc). However Elon believes he can do it. The moon has surface He3 and concentrated deposits of rare earth metals which may be profitable...

We should not forget the Gerald O'neill space colony concept as well. The view here was that it made less sense settling on a planetary surface than to build space colonies that negated the need to get out of a planetary gravity well. It was suggested resources from the moon and low gravity...

NASA talks about going to Mars and the need for Gateway to achieve that goal. At one time NASA was talking about a deep space transport to depart from the gateway. They have gone very quiet. Has anyone actually seen a recent NASA plan for going to Mars? My thoughts are that they do not actually...

I watched trailer and did not think it was even humorous. Also the film seems to miss the entire point of space force which is to protect space assets and U.S. + allies, not go back to the moon. Re: militrarisation of space, U.S. actually behind as Russia and China been working on anti Sat...

If we look at something a billion light years away we ae looking at that object as it was a billion years ago. My understanding is that we can look back almost to the big bang (about 14 billion years ago). We cannot look back before then as light did not exist before then. This stuff is all very...

It's OK, Science does not yet (and may never) have the answers anyway. Can only come up with hypotheses based on what is observable.