Robert Inventor

I think the chances of the SpaceX mission around the Moon going ahead on schedule in 2018 is tiny. But on the remote chance it does happen, I would not fly on that mission, if you paid me a billion dollars. The problem is that they have to rely on hardware that is hardly tested in space at all. They are depending on a spacecraft which will have its first flight in 2018, the Dragon 2. Their current Dragon is only rated for re-entry from LEO (Low Earth Orbit). Only the Dragon 2 has a thick enough aeroshell to handle the much higher speed of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere from the Moon. Also, the Falcon 9 “full thrust” can launch a Dragon 2 to LEO but not around the Moon.

SpaceX doesn’t have the capability yet. In this plan, they are depending on a spacecraft which will have its first flight in 2018, the Dragon 2. That’s because they need to be able to do a re-entry from the Moon, which is much faster than from LEO (Low Earth Orbit). Only the Dragon 2 has a thick enough aeroshell to handle that speed of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.

SpaceX doesn’t have the capability yet. In this plan, they are depending on a spacecraft which will have its first flight in 2018, the Dragon 2. That’s because they need to be able to do a re-entry from the Moon, which is much faster than from LEO (Low Earth Orbit). Only the Dragon 2 has a thick enough aeroshell to handle that speed of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.

Ethan Siegel has just written an article, "The Science Has Spoken: Pluto Will Never Be A Planet Again", so this is a response to it. I'll argue that far from "story over", actually we could make a discovery tomorrow that would turn the whole thing on its head and make their definition untenable.  This will become particularly acute if we ever find a gas giant in the outer reaches of our solar system, too far away to clear its orbit. And we could find such a planet.

Yes it would be an exciting day when the first human steps on the surface of Mars, and a matter of prestige for those concerned. This is something I have read about since a child, and would be as excited as anyone. But it might quickly change to dishonour if it is found that they introduced reproducing Earth micro-organisms to Mars. They might enter the history books as the people who contaminated Mars irreversibly. To dramatize the idea, here are a series of fake newspaper stories in a (hopefully) "alternative future" in which humans accidentally introduce Earth life to Mars, then regret what they did.

I have written this for young children and others scared the world is about to blow up. If you read the news announcements today, you can understand why they seem to say this. Take them literally and that is exactly what they say. Summary: They have just set the "clock" to two and a half minutes, it does not mean that the world is about to blow up into dust in two and a half minutes. It’s like when a friend says “I could eat a horse”. They couldn’t eat a horse. They also don’t want to eat a horse. But they aren’t lying when they say that. They are just using vivid imagery.

As some of you may know, I've become deeply concerned, and indeed appalled by the large numbers of fake doomsday news stories, because I am so often contacted by people who get very scared and sometimes suicidal as a result of reading these stories. Fourteen tabloids and other papers have published this story so far, and none of them mention that it originates from a site known to publish fake news. The story is that the world is going to end because of two snowy days in Salento in Southern Italy, which they say is a prophetic sign of an imminent massive supervolcano eruption. I think it is a particularly striking case of doomsday news based on chinese whispers starting off from a fake story.

Picture this - an astronaut has just found life on Mars. How do you think it happens? I expect most of us will answer "Found a fossil" as in the painting by Pat Rawlings used as the cover for my new kindle book. However, Curiosity is exploring a lake bed that has been dry for three billion years. That's long before there were any easily recognizable fossils on Earth. 

If Humans Touch Mars Will It Be Another Tale Of Human Missteps Like Lascaux?Copyright © Robert Walker (UK). All rights reserved. Cover picture shows First published on December 2016. You can also read this on kindle. For my other kindle booklets, see my author page on Amazon.comThe main sections in this book are

Nibiru easily ranks as the pseudoscience doomsday scenario I get most questions about. Many people, including teenagers, are terrified that we are all about to be killed by a planet called Nibiru which they think is going to hit Earth or do a close flyby in the very near future, for instance many of them have come to believe that it is going to hit us some time before Christmas, or shortly afterwards.

We love to touch things. If you put a sculpture in an art gallery and say "please touch" you can guarantee that both children and adults will touch it. So it's natural that we want to touch other planets. But there are plenty of things we can't touch on Earth, not just sculptures and works of art in art galleries. The Lascaux cave paintings for instance, Photograph of the Lascaux paintings by Prof Saxx.

We've had fake news world ending prophecies for centuries. But now we have exaggerated scientific scenarios to add to the list, so that we can get scared by asteroid impacts, nuclear war, runaway warming and so on. These are mixed with pseudoscience, and hoaxes, to the extent that it's often hard to figure out what is fake doomsday news, what is exaggerated, and what is the sober truth. It's easy to get a feeling of a doomsday helplessness. Yet we are far from helpless. These fake scenarios distract us from many real issues that we can do something about. Some vulnerable people, including teenagers, get so terrified by this fake doomsday news that they become suicidal. I've written many doomsday debunking articles, and have now published a new kindle book Doomsday Debunked.