This group comprises millions of individuals who are deeply interested in our space programme
The name “Enterprise” is tied in with the system on which the Nation’s economic structure is built.
Use of the name would provide a substantial human interest appeal to the rollout ceremonies scheduled for this month in California, where the aeronautical industry is of vital importance.
It is really too bad that the shuttle looked nothing at all like the Enterprise (Constitution class).
And an odd coincidence that the original name chosen by NASA was…
According to Thorne, who served as a consultant on the science of Interstellar, quantum mechanics could hypothetically explain a way to time travel via wormhole. So far, it’s a thought experiment that leads to the conclusion that you’d lose information along the way—not very practical.
First off, I’m incredibly annoyed at the way WordPress has screwed up the “quotation” function. It seems they are more focused on encouraging bloggers to use AI to write.
Uh. I don’t need AI. I blog. The end. WTH is the point of using AI to write my thoughts? It’s already being trained to USE my blog in the first place! Idiots.
OK. Second, the Popular Mechanics article I’m linking to is entitled “Interstellar travel is possible if we break into a higher dimension, scientists say.”
Only, that is NOT what scientists say. It’s still a thought experiment!
Researchers at Cornell have come up with a novel way to control a walking robot: with a mushroom.
Cornell explained in a press release that these four-legged “biohybrid” robots were built by researchers who literally grew mycelia, the belowground connective threads that allow fungal communities to communicate, into the robot itself.
Psyche! There are no “mycelial network” in space, and the drive would only work if we could somehow find a fifth spatial dimension (this was discussed a few years ago).
Too bad the spore drive is “laughably ridiculous,” said one scientist, and if all Star Trek ships had one, over half its episodes wouldn’t have happened.
I finally managed to get 1st edition copies of the famed Star Trek Readers, published in the late ’60s and early ’70s. My mother had copies when I was a kid, and they were among the first fictional stories I ever read.
The content varies slightly from the broadcast episodes, which apparently drew the ire of fans at the time. In defense of the British writer James Blish, he had not seen the episodes at the time of writing and was relying entirely on the scripts. As he himself wrote as an “Afterword” that appears (naturally) in the middle of the Reader II book, adapting script to prose is just as hard as adapting prose to scripts. Some scenes were skipped and dialogue boiled down to help the flow of the narrative, and fans were often upset to discover their favorite lines didn’t appear in the books.
The confusing part is the arrangement of each Reader into “books.” For example, Reader I (which has no label “I,” actually) consists of “Star Trek 2” (called “Book I”), “Star Trek 3” (Book II), and “Star Trek 8” (Book III). That reflects the original paperback publications by Bantam, but just makes things difficult. As a kid, I had no idea which episodes came before which. Not that it mattered! This was the first show I saw “in living color” — in the “TV room” of my grandparents’ house (we had a small black and white TV at home in the mid to late ’70s, so I never saw “The Incredible Hulk” (Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno) in color.)
All told, 59 of the original 79 ST: TOS episodes were adapted by Blish. Of the twenty not appearing in the Readers, “Mudd’s Women” and “What Are Little Girls Made of?” are odd exclusions. “Shore Leave” (the most childish of the first season episodes) is also not there. But there are still plenty to satisfy.
Two episodes were renamed by Blish for some reason; “The Man Trap” — the first episode broadcast but the third episode made — was renamed “The Unreal McCoy” (which gives away the plot), and “Charlie X” was renamed “Charlie’s Law.” The original pilot, “The Cage,” appears under the name “The Menagerie” as it was later broadcast (in two parts as part of the court martial of Spock, in which Star Trek characters watch Star Trek, but the novelized version omits the court martial framework — the “Afterword” comments that this script was covered in handwritten rewrites, making it difficult to work with.)
Most satisfying of all is the snarky dedication of Reader II — “To Harlan Ellison who was right all the time.”
Taters the cat chases a laser pointer in a video sent to Earth from Psyche
Aiming the laser at the spacecraft so the transceiver knows where to point back is the most difficult part, Wright said. And because Earth and the spacecraft are both moving, the lasers must point to where the destination will be in a few minutes. “The beam’s so narrow, it can’t just point to Earth. It needs to know exactly where on Earth,” Wright said. “Trying to hit a dime from a mile away while you’re moving at 17,000 miles an hour — that’s the challenge.”
So NASA has been working on this idea for a while now. The invisible laser beam that carried this video file came from the Psyche probe, on its way to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Psyche is 19 million miles away right now. The laser beam took 108 seconds to reach Earth.
Mars and Earth are on average 140 million miles apart and can be up to 250 million miles apart depending on the timing of their respective orbits.
I don’t think lasers are the answer here. A good start, maybe, but you can do the math. Having to wait between 10 to 20 minutes, or more, for a one-way transmission (double that for an exchange of messages) would not be ideal for a human settlement in an emergency.
Star Trek style instant interstellar communication is still just scifi. Unless there’s still something out there we haven’t found yet, even quantum communication will take time…
But at least NASA has finally realized that non-science people like cat videos.
[Context: my mother had just passed away, and I was remembering that both my parents’ choice in reading materials influenced my own fictional likes and dislikes.]
I guess both Mom and Dad liked Trek from its inception [in 1966]. I remembering watching the original series (in syndicated reruns of course) in the late ’70s/ We saw it in the “TV room” in my grandparents’ house….They had a color Zenith; we only had a tiny black and white on a bookcase. I remember being fascinated by the bright reds and blues (this was the point…color TV was new in the late ’60s and the sets and costumes deliberately used bright primary colors)…
Mom had all three “Star Trek Readers” I through III, by James Blish….Later I would borrow more complicated science fiction / fantasy stories from my Dad — Frank Herbert’s Dune and Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land stood out. And of course, Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, which were televised when we lived in Berne [a small village in New York west of Albany]. Once I discovered [The Chronicles of] Narnia and The Hobbit in 3rd grade, it was all over. I was a nerd for life.
And now look at the influence on pop culture. Movies, books, music, clothes, shoes, bags…the Internet and modern media. Smartphones. Tablets. Skype. Wireless devices. Bluetooth. GPS.
Nerd-dom has conquered the world. And my mom got there first. Way to go, Mom.
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