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Easter Island is the most remote place humans have ever colonized, and the fact we got there at all is a miracle. Now it looks like this island was colonized not once, not twice, but three entirely separate times. More »
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Let's face it: Faster than light travel may never be possible, and even near-light speeds may be a pipe dream. But what if we could open a wormhole, to let us jump to another solar system? Or travel in time? More »
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The craggy Martian terrain is daunting for wheeled probes, and Mars' distance from Earth makes refueling rovers impossible. English scientists are exploring the possibility of harnessing radioactive isotopes and Mars' abundant carbon dioxide to launch probes across the Martian landscape. More »
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All current plans to send human explorers to Mars suggest the first mission is 25 years away. But a one-way journey could actually be possible very soon, and it might be just what we need to kick-start human space exploration. More »
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Earlier this month, a NASA researcher mentioned the "Hundred Year Starship," a plan to develop research and technology for one-way human space missions. But since then, all parties have been surprisingly mum on the subject. Why all the secrecy? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5677501&view=rss&microfeed=true Excited by the success of the "big idea" movie Inception, Warner Bros. has given the green light to Expulsion, a spec script from bestselling novelist Gregg Hurwitz. An act of terror destroys the Earth, leaving a handful of human survivors to escape to a planet beyond our solar system. (And how a ruined Earth furnishes the technology and resources to travel all the way outside the solar system is something we'll have to wait and see, I guess.) [Deadline] More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5646306&view=rss&microfeed=true Kim Stanley Robinson's classic Martian colonization novel Red Mars is available for download as a free PDF, and also available for the Amazon Kindle. The bad news is, you'll have to buy the other two books in the Mars trilogy yourself. More »
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As the Asian space race heats up, nations are beginning to ask who owns Earth’s lone satellite. According to a prominent researcher on the subject, lunar property rights should be strictly first come, first served. More »
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Buzz Aldrin has stepped from his pedestal once again to talk about the space program. No longer content to bash science fiction for destroying interest in real space exploration, Aldrin has turned his attention to a crewed mission to Mars, saying that if we do send humans to the Red Planet, we shouldn’t bother bringing them back to Earth. More »
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NASA churned out a lot of concept art in the 1970s while the agency was exploring ways to build colonies in space. NASA concept artists created trippy pieces like the Cynlidrical Colony above, and Torodial and Bernal Sphere colonies as well. We'd like to imagine that you could low-grav the whole thing, and just leap from one side of the colony to the other. Of course, it's not quite clear what would happen if you ran into one of those giant window sections. Hopefully they're made out of some synthetic diamond material to keep accidents from happening. More »
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If only today's announcement from Google and Virgin were true. Supposedly Google and Virgin Inc. are teaming up to create Virgle, a scheme to settle Mars by about 2015, possibly because Mars is the last place Google can keep its server farms the right temperature. In this video, Google founders Sergey and Larry ask you to send in your Youtube videos explaining why you should be one of the first Mars settlers. More »
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It's another installment of Entropist, a scifi culture column by futurist design maven Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDG BLOG. You stumble on a cave in the mountains of Slovenia. Rumor has it this place inspired Dante's descriptions of Hell in his Divine Comedy. Called the Postojna Jama, it's a real cave. Let's say, then, that you join a group of people milling about at the cave's entrance before you all descend into the deep. At a point that clearly isn't the bottom, you're told to turn around. But why stop? you think, looking ahead into the darkness. Is there something down here we shouldn't see? In an utterly cheesy, but nonetheless enjoyable - even impossible to stop reading - novel called The Descent, author Jeff Long presents us with a very similar premise. It involves nuns and the U.S. military and Himalayan mountaineers and a weird parallel branch of the human species, some rogue sub-race that went literally underground so many tens of thousands of years ago - and is only now coming back into the light. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=351460&view=rss&microfeed=true Rockets may be a thing of the past one of these days. Instead, we may use huge electromagnetic "rail guns" to escape from the gravity of a body such as Earth or the Moon. But this concept hasn't appeared much in movies or TV yet. Hence this new short film (which is still in development, hence the unfinished test footage, just posted last night.) More »
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