Robert Inventor

Two experts, Carlin, a former analyst for the CIA and the State Department widely regarded as one of the top experts on North Korea in the world, and Hecker, former director of the Los Alamos Laboratory for over a decade, have just released a suggestion for a deal for North Korea with a surprising element - a United Korea civilian space and nuclear program! It was covered by the Associated Press and their release was run in many news outlets including the NY Times. But their release only describes the first steps of their report and doesn't mention this which I think is one of the most interesting parts of their proposal. Other reports expand on that part of their proposal however, e.g.

Mars is extraordinarily cold and dry, like our most arid deserts. Harsh but possibly not totally lifeless. There is a chance of life there, hidden away perhaps in thin layers of brines just a couple of centimeters below the surface, or as spores within the dust. Our astronauts will be covered in microbes from Earth too and our habitats filled with life. What happens when life mixes together from these two biospheres?

This is a debate hosted by the SETI institute between Robert Zubrin, founder and head of the Mars Society, and one of NASA’s former planetary protection officers, John Rummel. They debate the requirements of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 to protect both Earth and other celestial bodies like Mars from any harmful effects from the exchange of living organisms between the planets on our spacecraft.

This is another of those sensationalist doomsday stories in the red top tabloids scaring people. The stories say that we are 100% certain to be hit by an asteroid. Well, yes, for small asteroids, but we are 100% certain to be hit by lightning too, many times a year. Your chance of dying of an asteroid impact is far less than that of dying of a lightning strike, 10,000 times less likely.

ESA have just signed a letter of intent to co-operate with NASA on a Mars sample return mission (see Agencies aim to bring back rocks from Mars). I hope this does not mean a change of focus for ESA, from in situ searches, to a sample return. This expensive NASA program is more of a geological sample return and technology demo than an astrobiology mission. It's not likely to resolve any of the central questions in astrobiology. Yet there is so much involved in ensuring that Earth's environment is protected, both legally and technically, that  it is unlikely that they are ready to return an unsterilized sample to Earth before 2040.

The reason we know so little about the polar regions is not lack of interest. The polar regions are of great interest, for instance the Martian dry ice geysers in Richardson crater, one of the most interesting dynamic processes on Mars and the polar regions also have astrobiological interest too. There are potential habitats there that might even have fresh liquid water within 7 cms of the surface, beneath clear ice - of all the unexpected things to find on Mars with its near vacuum atmosphere!

These channels specialize in uploading evidence of 'Nibiru', a modern myth, a planet that supposedly is about to hit Earth or fly past, always in the near future. This will seem absurd to you if you have a decent scientific background, but these people do not. They missed out on astronomy or science at school and some are very young. Some teenagers as young as 13, the minimum age for Facebook are in a perpetual panic over these videos, and we hear from their parents of even younger children who got terrified by these videos, sometimes as young as 8 years old.

This is another of my posts to help victims of fake doomsdays. For the last three weeks we've had constant PM's and comments on Doomsday Debunked as a result of a viral hoax that pranked probably hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Many of them are young children still at school who came across it on social media, on twitter, Facebook, reddit or YouTube, or as a result of the sensationalist press.

This is going viral on Facebook and scaring thousands of people, many panic attacks, some suicidal. This is another of my Doomsday Debunked posts to help these vulnerable people, many of them young children, still at school, who read about this on their mobile devices. Ever since March 14th I've spent hours every day reassuring very scared and panicking people that the MH 370 flight recorder did not send a voice mail message to a random twitter user warning us of an alien invasion on 18th April. Honestly‽This is a piling heap of stinking horse dung that attracts trolls like flies and beetles from thousands of kilometers away. Like the Titan Arum or Corpse Flower.

Nobody who ran this story even bothered to glance at a sky chart. The false claim is that the sun, moon and Jupiter will all be in Virgo on April 23. So what you might say? Well the end of the world apparently?! But actually none of them will be in that constellation, not only that, no other planet will be passing "in" Virgo on that date either. It’s a good way of locating some of the news sources that have no systems in place to filter out fake doomsdays.  They just went copy / paste / publish

This is an article in New Scientist that’s being shared in social media which says it's a new caclulation of the future of the Universe according to the theory of false vacuum. It’s scaring many people because when you read it as far as it goes, before you have to pay to read, it doesn’t give a timeline, so they think it could happen any moment. Also, because it says “there’s a chance” that it has already collapsed in a distant corner of the cosmos. I'm writing this as part of a series of posts to help people scared of false or exaggerated doomsdays, which often get to the top of Google, Apple News and Facebook trending and are read by many people who have no idea how to take them including children as young as 14 and sometimes much younger.

How do you deal with the trash on the Moon? This is not an exciting or glamorous subject I know, but it is part of the reality of space travel. This is something that's easy to forget about, how much trash astronauts generate every year. We don't notice it so much on the ISS because it is easy for the astronauts to dump it, and it all burns up cleanly in the atmosphere. The Apollo crew didn't spend enough time on the Moon for it to be that noticeable.