Reading Time: 4 minutes While I wait for my early morning exercise class, I listen to the chatter of yellow-breasted bichofué, and watch a city worker use a long husk of palm branch to sweep the night’s detritus from the square. On my warmup run, I tuned into a local news podcast, for analysis of the new president’s first […]
Space
Posted inScience
How much should we worry about asteroids?
Reading Time: 2 minutes I was first introduced to astronomy research through the study of Near-Earth Objects (NEOs), when I attended the Yale Summer Program in Astrophysics as a high schooler. I liked to think of it as a kind of astrophysical babysitting project: we kept an eye on our assigned baby asteroid every night, watched its movements, and, […]
Posted inSpace
NASA’s Artemis: It’s time to walk on the Moon again
Reading Time: 3 minutes Fifty years after the end of the Apollo program, humanity is once again heading for the Moon. In July, Congress passed the CHIPS Act, a law to incentivize the manufacture of computer chips in the United States. Tucked into that mega-bill was an official authorization for NASA’s next-generation Moon program, which the agency calls Artemis. […]
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The saved and the damned of Proxima Centauri B
Reading Time: 14 minutes As a child, I delighted in books of the unexplained—ghosts and UFOs, Mary Celestes and Bermuda Triangles, abominable snowmen and cursed mummies. As a grown-up skeptic, many of these inexplicable phenomena have long been explained, or competently assigned diminishing probabilities. Ghosts almost certainly don’t hang around graveyards. Yetis? Nope. The Loch Ness Monster? Get over […]
Posted inSpace
The universe doesn’t look designed for humans
Reading Time: 3 minutes The creation stories in Genesis do a pretty good job of explaining what a universe designed for humans would look like. But the universe isn’t really like that. At all.
Posted inSpace
My humanism comes from the stars
Reading Time: 7 minutes Our views of deep space, such as the new photos from the James Webb Space Telescope, can serve as the basis for a profoundly moral vision.
Posted inSpace
NASA’s Webb Telescope peers deep into the early universe
Reading Time: 2 minutes Nearly seven months after its launch, images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope were publicly released by NASA on Monday and Tuesday. The first image, released by President Biden on Monday, astounded scientists and math-phobes alike. This deep field snapshot of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 provided a glimpse far back in time, revealing faint, […]
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Will the James Webb Space Telescope confirm UFO religions?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Will the James Webb Space Telescope confirm what the UFO religions have been claiming—that extraterrestrial beings, having their own religions on distant shores, have visited Earth with religious messages? Around 50 BCE, the great Latin stylist Lucretius said, “We are bound to acknowledge that in other regions of the universe there are other planets with various […]
Posted inSpace
An astonishing new tool reopens the question of human significance
Reading Time: 5 minutes In a joint effort by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched on December 25, 2021 to a distance a million miles from Earth. It is the most powerful telescope to date and will use infrared resolution to see objects no other device has […]
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For all of humanity’s failings, we’ve never stopped wondering about the stars
Reading Time: 8 minutes It was an atypically dry English spring when a man in Bath scanned the skies with a 7-inch reflecting telescope he’d designed and built by hand, through painstaking refinements to Isaac Newton’s principles of optics. William Herschel was studying stellar parallax, the phenomenon that makes a nearby star look like it has moved in relation […]