Lifeboat Foundation

“The station regularly passes out of range of the Tracking and Relay Data Satellites (TDRS) used to send and receive video, voice and telemetry from the station,” a spokesperson for NASA told ValueWalk.

The only problem with this explanation, of course, is that it’s so much more boring…”

It is, of course, highly unlikely that this was some alien ship. That said, those tracking and relay stations are fixed and known locations. Also, the range and power of the ISS communication systems are well known, non-classified public domain knowledge. I suck at math, but it should only be a matter of taking the exact time and duration of this outage and comparing it to the tracking and relay station stats.

Continue reading “WTF Was That Thing Near the International Space Station?” »

VIDEO: It’s time for something new.

Little green men seem a little unimaginative.

Microscopic spaceships powered by Earth-based lasers are being developed to hunt for extra-terrestrial life in Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to ours.

The £70m Breakthrough Starshot concept involves creating a tiny robotic spacecraft, no larger than a mobile phone chip, which would carry cameras, thrusters, a power supply and navigation and communication equipment.

Physicist Stephen Hawking, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Russian internet billionaire Yuri Milner have all joined the project’s board giving it major backing.

Avi Loeb and Ann Druyan just proposed an unsettling idea as to why we haven’t yet found extraterrestrial life.

“Where is everybody?” So wondered the great physicist Enrico Fermi. The Universe is vast and ancient. Life, he reasoned, has had plenty of time to get started – and get smart. But we see no evidence of life or intelligence beyond Earth.

Forget about generation ships, suspended animation, or the sudden appearance of a worm hole. The most likely way for aliens to visit us — whatever their motive — is by sending robotic probes. Here’s how swarms of self-replicating spacecraft could someday rule the galaxy.

Top image by Alejandro Burdisio via Concept Ships.

Back in late 1940’s the Hungarian mathematician John Von Neumann wondered if it might be possible to design a non-biological system that could replicate itself in a cellular automata environment, what he called a universal constructor. Von Neumann wasn’t thinking about space exploration at the time, but other thinkers like Freeman Dyson, Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, and Robert Freitas later took his idea and applied it to exactly that.

Continue reading “How Self-Replicating Spacecraft Could Take Over the Galaxy” »

Future space missions, including the journey to Mars, edge closer to reality as NASA reveals its top picks from a series of competitions designed to crowdsource innovative concepts.

As the third most abundant element in the universe, oxygen is both abundant and the best element in the periodic table from which to produce energy for metabolism. That’s one reason planetary scientist David Catling argues that E.T. would also breathe oxygen; as noted in this article blast from the past.

What are the odds that visiting space aliens could simply walk off their craft and start breathing our own oxygen-rich atmosphere?

Better than is generally appreciated; even among some astrobiologists.

Continue reading “Why E.T. Would Also Breathe Oxygen” »