Watch videos about ‘Space’
When Will Time End?
It now seems that our entire universe is living on borrowed time. How long it can survive depends on whether Stephen Hawking’s theory checks out. Special thanks to Ivan Bridgewater for use of footage.
Time is flying by on this busy, crowded planet… as life changes and evolves from second to second.
And yet the arc of human lifespan is getting longer: 65 years is the global average … way up from just 20 in the Stone Age.
Modern science, however, provides a humbling perspective. Our lives… indeed the life span of the human species… is just a blip compared to the age of the universe, at 13.7 billion years and counting.
It now seems that our entire universe is living on borrowed time…
And that even it may be just a blip within the grand sweep of deep time.
Scholars debate whether time is a property of the universe… or a human invention.
What’s certain is that we use the ticking of all kinds of clocks… from the decay of radioactive elements to the oscillation of light beams… to chart and measure a changing universe… to understand how it works and what drives it.
Our own major reference for the passage of time is the 24-hour day… the time it takes the Earth to rotate once. Well, it’s actually 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.1 seconds… approximately… if you’re judging by the stars, not the sun.
Earth acquired its spin during its birth, from the bombardment of rocks and dust that formed it.
But it’s gradually losing that rotation to drag from the moon’s gravity.
That’s why, in the time of the dinosaurs, a year was 370 days… and why we have to add a leap second to our clocks about every 18 months.
In a few hundred million years, we’ll gain a whole hour.
The day-night cycle is so reliable that it has come to regulate our internal chemistry.
The fading rays of the sun, picked up by the retinas in our eyes, set our so-called “circadian rhythms” in motion.
Powering the Planet
To consider the space solar power concept requires an understanding of science, technology, engineering, math, energy, policy, environmental factors, and more. Space solar power is an engineering project on a scale that rivals the greatest in history. Students need to be informed and able to participate in the conversation.
Read the rest of this entry »
Parallel universe

Everything you’re about to read here seems impossible and insane, beyond science fiction. Yet it’s all true.
Scientists now believe there may really be a parallel universe – in fact, there may be an infinite number of parallel universes, and we just happen to live in one of them. These other universes contain space, time and strange forms of exotic matter. Some of them may even contain you, in a slightly different form. Astonishingly, scientists believe that these parallel universes exist less than one millimeter away from us. In fact, our gravity is just a weak signal leaking out of another universe into ours.
The same but different
For years parallel universes were a staple of the Twilight Zone. Science fiction writers loved to speculate on the possible other universes which might exist. In one, they said, Elvis Presley might still be alive or in another the British Empire might still be going strong. Serious scientists dismissed all this speculation as absurd. But now it seems the speculation wasn’t absurd enough. Parallel universes really do exist and they are much stranger than even the science fiction writers dared to imagine.
Read the rest of this entry »
Einstein’s Messengers

Ripples in the fabric of space-time from monumental collisions between black holes, and how scientists are trying to measure them with lasers and mirrors. From LIGO and the National Science Foundation.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Search For Earth-Like Planets

The search for Earth-like planets is reaching a fever-pitch. Does the evidence so far help shed light on the ancient question: Is the galaxy filled with life, or is Earth just a beautiful, lonely aberration? If things don’t work out on this planet Or if our itch to explore becomes unbearable at some point in the future Astronomers have recently found out what kind of galactic real estate might be available to us. Well have to develop advanced transport to land there, 20 light years away. The question right now: is it worth the trip?





