Space

I can foresee a possible clash between those that want to send humans to Mars, and those who want to protect the planet from Earth life. Humans may go there in the near future, as soon as fifteen…

It is hard enough to sterilize the robots we send to Mars to search for life. How can we expect to do the same for humans? It's at least a major challenge. I've argued that to start with we should…

NASA hopes to go full speed ahead with its "Road to Mars" to land humans on the planet, and Elon Musk wants to build a city of a million on Mars by 2100, but it is rare for anyone in the debates to…

This is another in my now rather frequent articles to reassure people who are panicking because of news stories, saying that there is a chance we will all die in a big future cataclysm. No, this is…

This is a talk I gave last summer to a small conference "The Search for Extraterrestrial Life - Europa&Enceladus" in Oxford, summer 2015. It's about the idea that when searching for life in our…

Back in January, Bradley Schaefer published a finding that promised to be a bombshell: KIC 8462852 had been dimming at a rate of nearly 20% per century since 1890 (Schaefer, 2016). The finding was…

Mars is Earth like in some ways, but in other ways it's very different with its global dust storms every two years, its thick sheets of dry ice at its ice caps in winter. Any fresh water is close to…

Yes, a thousand of them indeed. The asteroid belt, and Near Earth Asteroids. I don't mean living on them like the little prince: The Little Prince That's not very practical without an atmosphere.…

Yes, a thousand of them indeed. The asteroid belt, and Near Earth Asteroids. I don't mean living on them like the little prince: The Little Prince That's not very practical without an atmosphere.…

NASA currently has Mars sample return as their priority flagship mission not just for this decade but for the next one as well. They were recommended to do this in the 2012 decadal review. It is good…