Robert Inventor

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You may have heard that the Moon is hopeless for gardening and for growing crops, and that Mars is the "go to" place for a prospective astronaut gardener. But is it? As it turns out, the Moon has some advantages over Mars, especially if you can plant your garden in a habitat or greenhouse on its summits of sunlight at the poles.

When I wrote my kindle and online book Case for Moon First, I was surprised to find that the Moon is resource rich, and often beats Mars in habitability comparisons.  Yet photos of Mars released to the press look so much more Earth-like than the Moon, because of the brightening of the landscape and boosting of blue in the scene (white balancing) done to help geologists read the rocks.

This is a news story that broke recently, on the idea that Elon Musk's plans would violate the Outer Space Treaty. The articles I've read so far focus on property rights and the  provisions in the OST that rule out ownership of territory. But that can be fixed with future legislation, especially since it's not really the land but the habitats that are of most value, and ownership of those is already covered in the OST . So far none of them have mentioned by far the toughest legal and practical obstacle, which is planetary protection of Mars from Earth microbes to preserve its science value for the future of mankind. That can't be fixed by passing new laws. Elon Musk says the mission would be dangerous, with colonists risking death, especially the first ones.

I've just been listening to Elon Musk's much anticipated talk about his vision for colonization of our solar system. Many find this idea inspiring, that by technological means, we can become a multiplanetary species. Here is the talk, in case any of you haven't seen it yet. For a summary of the technical details he revealed in the talk, see this article on Space.com

So now we know what the news is, as expected, Hubble has found new evidence of possible plume activity on Europa. In a series of ten observations, they saw them on three occasions. Here are the images they created.The possible plumes are in the seven o'clock position, not far from the South pole - though the central image here has another possible plume that's close to the equator.Interestingly, they spotted them in the same position as the previous plume detection in 2012:

Jeremy Corbyn has recently been re-elected to leader of the labour party in the UK with an even stronger mandate than before of 62% of the vote, as many of you will know. This opens up the possibility of a future prime minister of the UK who has said that he will never authorize use of nuclear weapons to kill civilians. So is he right to say this? Well yes I’d say he is right. For my whole life ever since I understood what it meant, since the 1960s, I’ve been against the bomb and in favour of unilateral disarmament by the UK. The situation is more complex for the US and if I was in the US I don't know what I'd say.

I've already done a petition to journalists on the issue of dramatized reporting of doomsday stories that make young children and vulnerable adults suicidal. This is another petition on the same topic, this time to Youtube. The  petition is to remove the ads from doomsday videos on the sane grounds that these videos make vulnerable young children and adults scared and suicidal and the ads provide a financial incentive to youtube users to make and reupload them.

This is an intriguing paper which has hit the news, see  Planet Nine Could Doom Our Solar System - If It Exists. If our solar system has a planet in a distant orbit, way beyond Neptune, such as the planet X candidates, it could lead to instability of our solar system far into the future. That's a rather unintuitive result - how could such a distant planet make any difference to our solar system's stability? It's not only intriguing, it might also provide the solution to a major puzzle about white dwarf stars.

Just another short post on Nibiru following on from my recent petition calling for responsible mainstream journalist reporting on "doomsday stories". It's featuring in many mainstream news sites again. Thank goodness one paper, the Independent, has run a straight hoax debunking story on it. "‘Blood moon’ and ‘rogue planet Nibiru’ are on their way to kill us all, conspiracy theorists wrongly claim", kudos to them. Hurrah! It's the first straightforward Nibiru debunking article I've seen in the mainstream newspapers in the last year (since I started writing these articles). I hope this is a start of a new trend.

I've been writing "doomsday debunking" articles here for a while now, and was surprised to find that some people are terrified by these stories, occasionally suicidal, with hundreds of comments by scared people on my posts here. To help raise awareness of this issue, I've made a petition:  "To: Journalists and lawmakers: Let's End Dramatized Reporting of "Doomsday" Stories - The Vulnerable Get Suicidal".

This is just AWFUL - the worst case of irresponsible journalism I have ever seen. Quite a few on a similar vein today, but including an article in the Telegraph, of all places, and when originally published, the article featured an actual "Count down timer" to the moment when according to the video they publicized, we all die a few hours later, on 29th July.

This is another of my articles to help the many people who come to my science blog saying how scared they are of a planet, which they think is hidden behind the sun and is about to fly past or hit Earth in the near future. What I'm going to describe here is beginner level astronomy, but of course many never study astronomy. Most know that the Earth orbits the sun, nowadays, but few stop to think through what this means for the night sky and where planets can appear in it.So let's draw out some of those implications, and then, if you are one of those who worry about this, I hope you'll see for yourself why astronomers say the idea is just plain nutty. Maybe after reading this, you will be kicking yourself that you got so scared of such a nutty idea. I hope so, anyway.