Reading Time: 4 minutes If humans weren’t the first intelligent species to evolve on this planet, would we know it?
deep time
Posted inSpace
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 […]
Posted inGeneral
The Clock of the Long Now
Reading Time: 4 minutes The Long Now Foundation wants to build a clock that will run for 10,000 years. What do they hope to achieve with it?
Posted inGeneral
Inundations
Reading Time: 3 minutes The webcomic xkcd is one of my daily reads, so I’ve been enjoying this article on Wired about its creator’s most ambitious project yet. Most of xkcd’s comics are one-panel jokes, but starting in March, he unveiled an astonishing comic called “Time” – an animation consisting of over 3,000 separate frames, posted gradually over a […]
Posted inGeneral
Movie Review: Into Eternity
Reading Time: 4 minutes This weekend, my wife and I saw Into Eternity, a gripping documentary by the Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen. It’s well worth a wider audience, so here’s a review of it that I hope will provoke some interest. Every nuclear power plant in the world produces several tons of high-level radioactive waste each year. In total, […]