It Works

It may seem like the creation of a bored Mac junkie who's seen Minority Report too often, but I see a deeper significance in this intriguing Aurora concept video from Mozilla.

I'm always banging on about how, when we 30/40s were kids, transport was the cutting edge of tech, and seemed likely to remain so. Information Technology was new and exciting, but we just didn't know the half of it. Our young minds would have boggled that we'd seen our last moon landing, but would one day personally command more computing power than currently existed.

So that's how I see things like this today. I like it because it's aspirational and speculative, but in a direction relevant to the present. You can forget your jet pack - we're even retiring our supersonic airliners - but one day you'll have Deep Thought in an earring, and so will I, and we'll do magic with them. Who knows, maybe our information usage can evolve so far that there's just no new, or even uncommon knowledge left on Earth? Then we'll have to turn our gestalt thought-clouds loose on Outer Space once more; exploring vicariously, by remote sensing, as one giant non-hierarchical crew of a notional Argo; Metanauts, if you will.

And instead of a few crackly audio recordings of "The Eagle Has Landed." and "Houston, We've Had A Problem.", will the odysseys of the future be historicized in yottabytes of Twitter archives...?

Fuel Enough, And Time

NASA Confirms Liquid Lake On Saturn Moon

So, there's hydrocarbons in them there planets.

History tells us that the discovery of combustible fuel reserves in a territory, exponentially increases that territory's signature on the U.S. Government's radar. Might this be the shot in the arm that the space programme needs?

Expect imminent speculation about the Saturnian nuclear weapons programme, and new evidence linking Titan with 9/11.

Who'd have thought that Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters would prove so prophetic?

Watch out, Titanians... the Free Men are coming!

Under My Skin

Lots of new images coming in now from Phoenix. As I look at them, something dawns on me.

Any educated layman knows the score with Mars. We know that the atmosphere is thin, that there's no evidence of complex organic molecules, that the ground seems to lack basic nutrients. Moreover, we perceive - logically, at least - that the origin of life on Earth was a random and unlikely event, even in such a complex and fertile environment. The Anthropic Principle tells us - against our instincts but within grasp of our reason - that "surely we cannot be alone?" is a subjective fallacy.

Some observers, with more or less imagination than I, can look at the Phoenix images and say "Hmmm.... rocks." Try as I might , I can't. Something hard-coded in my being lies to me when I look at them. Something visceral and reflexive, that insists, against reason, that there is no such thing as "just rocks". Something that protests that, in a landscape so fundamentally familiar, surely to postulate the absence of all life is the extraordinary claim? And yes, the rationalist in me recoils in self-disgust.

But thankfully, reason allows me to turn this warped perspective back to my advantage, and thus to preserve the sense of wonder: While some see a disappointingly familiar, Earth-like desert, when they were secretly hoping for tangerine trees and marmalade skies - I can see an Earth-like desert, but with no life of any kind. How weirdly, wildly fantastical is that? Put that way, it's hard to imagine anything further outside the realm of Human experience. Pepperland teeming with hallucinoforms may be attractive to the imagination, but Nevada with nary a microbe? Wow; now that's something else!

Beige

The weather couldn't spoil this bank holiday weekend, where beige ruled. Despite an inevitable increase in overall beigeness, Indiana Jones proved a calendar-defying proficiency in excavating the mustard, delighting a whole generation with the affirmation that, our own depreciation notwithstanding, we still have a cool dad. I must confess, under normal circumstances the old Von Daniken tropes piss me off royally - but this is, after all, the franchise where I have already accepted Yahweh and Shiva's vengeful pyrotechnics and - albeit with clenched teeth - the Holy Bastard Grail. So, I confess, the goalposts are wider. Indy may have scuffed the shot a little, but it still ended up in the back of the net.

MARS, lest we forget, is also beige. After the actualization of that foreshadowed "Seven Minutes of Terror" for the intrepid übergeeks of Phoenix, we're getting fuzzy pictures of beige rocks again and it feels bloody marvellous. To put my admiration into transatlantic terms, "You guys rock", in any colour. Hurrah for Space!

The Gentle Touchdown

JPL's pages for the Phoenix mission carry probably the most dramatic video ever made for a nerd infodump. Kudos to those involve for creating a genuine sense of the excitement, enthusiasm, and anxieties of performing multiple impossibilities before breakfast, as these guys do. If we're going to get kids wanting to be aerospace engineers, this is surely how to do it.

"Phoenix will hit the top of the Martian atmosphere at 5.7 kilometers per second (12,750 miles per hour). In the next seven minutes, it will use heat-shield friction, a parachute, then descent rockets to slow to about 2.4 meters per second (5.4 mph) before landing on three legs."

In case that all sounds too simple, it's got to be done with a 10 minute time-lag, due to all that infinitely irritating speed-of-light malarkey.

"By the time we even hear from the lander that EDL (Entry, Descent & Landing) has started, it'll already be over."

Bloody Hell, as they say in space. "7 Minutes of Terror" about covers it. This truly is Extreme Sport for geeks. If they can't get laid after pulling that off, there's no justice.

May 25th is now firmly in my diary. Please put it in yours.

The Clip-Winged Messenger

That there is the far side of the planet Mercury - the one always pointed at the sun, that we don't get to see. Things like this don't make the front pages any more, of course, but in fact this is a pretty rare event these days - a genuine, honest-to-goodness piece of New Frontier. A place seen by human eyes for the first time. Those less disposed to be impressed will point out, understandably, that it's just another load of craters and dust. They have a point, but they're missing THE point. This is sense-of-wonder stuff. It's why kids want to become scientists. This picture should be posted on every school noticeboard in the civilized world, dammit!

I'm reminded of a conversation I once heard at a job club, when a quarry miner was asked what made his work special. After a short pause he said something like "when I chip away a piece of rock, I'm the first human being to ever see what's behind it." It was an image I've never forgotten, and it made me wish that there were more quarry miners in government. Here we are worrying about financial irregularities and the definition of "incompetence", while at the front of the class, weary teacher is desperately trying to grab our attention; "Look, children! Look! It's another planet, for Pete's sake!"

Moonfaker

Well, it's a space first, of sorts. It seems that China has become the first country to successfully photoshop the moon!

One can't help but wish they'd shown a little more imagination, though. You know - made an alien face, or a WWII bomber or something? Instead, they just moved one of the craters around a bit. Hardly in the Capricorn One school of space-fakery, that...

Nonetheless, this revelation is bound to strengthen the notion that the Chinese government is pathologically incapable of releasing any information without distorting it; even if it's just the exact whereabouts of some very, very distant rocks.

Cosmonaught Percent Surcharge

Tourist handed an extra day in space for free | Science | Reuters

Okay, so a day in Space sounds like a fun freebie - but this one's "further purchases required" clause is a bit of a bitch...

Six coupons from "The Mirror", perhaps. Then we could talk.

Actually I'm bluffing. I never wanted to be an astronaut, even when I was a sci-fi kid. It's the single most insanely dangerous field of human endeavour, and I'm scared of crossing the road. Leave it to the experts. Or, failing that, the Americans.