Are we alone? Forty years ago, NASA rocket scientists sought to answer this question by launching the Voyager spacecraft, twin unmanned spaceships that would travel further than any human-made object in history.
Space Exploration
Aug 27, 2017
6
2458
People have long dreamed of re-shaping the Martian climate to make it livable for humans. Carl Sagan was the first outside of the realm of science fiction to propose terraforming. In a 1971 paper, Sagan suggested that vaporizing ...
Space Exploration
Jul 15, 2019
13
2540
When searching for Earth-like worlds around other stars, instead of looking for the "pale blue dot" described by Carl Sagan, new research suggests that a hunt for dry, cold "pale yellow dots" might have a better chance of ...
Astrobiology
Sep 20, 2022
2
522
(Phys.org) —Scientists as eminent as Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan have long believed that humans will one day colonise the universe. But how easy would it be, why would we want to, and why haven't we seen any evidence ...
Astronomy
Aug 26, 2013
213
0
On November 1, 1961, a number of prominent scientists converged on the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, for a three-day conference. A year earlier, this facility had been the site of the ...
Space Exploration
May 17, 2021
1
625
Astronomers have their own version of the single person's dilemma: Do you wait by the phone for a call from that certain someone? Or do you make the call yourself and risk getting shot down?
Space Exploration
Feb 13, 2015
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2626
Life on a faraway planet—if it's out there—might not look anything like life on Earth. But there are only so many chemical ingredients in the universe's pantry, and only so many ways to mix them. A team led by scientists ...
Astrobiology
Sep 19, 2023
1
228
Adrift in a great sea of stars, we must surely not be alone.
Astronomy
Sep 1, 2023
1
102
It's become a kind of legend, like Newton and the apple or George Washington and the cherry tree. One day in 1950, the great physicist Enrico Fermi sat down to lunch with colleagues at the Fuller Lodge at Los Alamos National ...
Astronomy
Apr 8, 2015
16
108
To gaze at the stars is human. To be able to see them in three-dimensional detail is very nearly divine.
Astronomy
Apr 7, 2023
0
603
