Galaxy - Progressive

Robotic missions are much cheaper and may provide more scientific information, but they don't catch the public imagination in the same way, and they don't spread the human race into space, which I'm arguing should be our long-term strategy. If the human race is to continue for another million years, we will have to boldly go where no one has gone before." Stephen Hawking, Cambridge University

Will unmanned robotic missions be able to detect weird microscopic life-forms they are not programmed to recognize that might be lurking below the surface of Saturn's Titan, or beneath the murky seas of Jupiter's jumbo moon, Europa?

The Interplanetary Transport Network (ITN)^[1] is a collection of gravitationally determined pathways through the solar system that require very little energy for an object to follow. The ITN makes particular use of Lagrange points as locations where trajectories through space can be redirected using little or no energy. These points have the peculiar property of allowing objects to orbit around them, despite the absence of any material object therein.

Image - This stylized depiction of the ITN is designed to show its (often convoluted) path through the solar system. The green ribbon represents one path from among the many that are mathematically possible along the surface of the darker green bounding tube. Locations where the ribbon changes direction abruptly represent trajectory changes at Lagrange points, while constricted areas represent locations where objects linger in temporary orbit around a point before continuing on

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network

John Carmack is the founder, president, and lead engineer of space flight company Armadillo Aerospace. He was also the co-founder of id Software, creator of classic computer games like Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake.

In the interest of disclosure, Carmack notes that about 25 percent of the funding for Armadillo Aerospace has come through NASA.

There has been some wailing about how the newly proposed changes in NASA’s direction are “throwing away our future in space” by canceling the internal development of new launch vehicles. In reality, we won’t actually be losing anything. And focusing on commercial sourcing of space transportation may be the most beneficial thing NASA has ever done.

For years now, whenever a reporter asked me what I thought about returning to the moon with the country’s existing Constellation technology, I said something along the lines of “It’s like watching a slow motion train wreck. It isn’t going to end well.”

I have an excellent working relationship with the parts of NASA that my company deals with, but honestly, I thought the program was going to drag on for another half decade and piss away several more tens of billions of dollars before being re-scoped due to failure to deliver.

Cutting the internal NASA launch vehicle development now, as President Obama has proposed, is a Good Thing. We weren’t going to wind up with Ares V rockets delivering Altair landers to a moon base. It just wasn’t going to happen. Schedules would slip, requests for additional funding would be denied, and milestones would continue to be pushed years into the future until they were finally just canceled. After a hundred billion dollars was pumped through NASA, we would be left with, at best, a capsule launched on the world’s most expensive expendable rocket. Slow motion train wreck.

Physicists explore the possibility of life in universes with laws different from our own

(PhysOrg.com) -- Whether life exists elsewhere in our universe is a longstanding mystery. But for some scientists, there?s another interesting question: could there be life in a universe significantly different from our own?

 

A definitive answer is impossible, since we have no way of directly studying other universes. But cosmologists speculate that a multitude of other universes exist, each with its own laws of physics. Recently physicists at MIT have shown that in theory, alternate universes could be quite congenial to life, even if their physical laws are very different from our own.

In work recently featured in a cover story in Scientific American, MIT physics professor Robert Jaffe, former MIT postdoc, Alejandro Jenkins, and recent MIT graduate Itamar Kimchi showed that universes quite different from ours still have elements similar to carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and could therefore evolve life forms quite similar to us. Even when the masses of the elementary particles are dramatically altered, life may find a way.

“You could change them by significant amounts without eliminating the possibility of organic chemistry in the universe,” says Jenkins.

Pocket universes

Modern cosmology theory holds that our universe may be just one in a vast collection of universes known as the multiverse. MIT physicist Alan Guth has suggested that new universes (known as “pocket universes”) are constantly being created, but they cannot be seen from our universe.

In this view, “nature gets a lot of tries — the universe is an experiment that’s repeated over and over again, each time with slightly different physical laws, or even vastly different physical laws,” says Jaffe.