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It is the year 2251. All is well on Earth – food is plentiful, climate ills are cured, and war is nonexistent. Humanity left its home decades ago, with the United Nations of Earth currently on the 20th round of colonization. How would you go about convincing a new round of colonists to brave the hazards of space? More »
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So the age of human space exploration may be over for the US, but a new form of space travel could be invented - and it could be done in bed. Here's a mathematical thought experiment in which a bed sheet could get us to Mars through the power of doubling. More »
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Caenorhabditis elegans is a a less-than-one-millimeter-long nematode that matures and dutifully produces its next generation in space the same way it does on earth. C. elegans' biology shares certain important commonalities with that of humans. Therefore, University of Nottingham researchers are arguing that these roundworms should be used to model the effects of long stays in space on humans. More »
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Space colonization has reached an impasse, for reasons far more fundamental than a lack of money for the Space Shuttle program. There is simply no way humans can travel easily offworld without using massive amounts of rocket fuel to escape the gravity well — and that's both expensive and environmentally unsustainable. So how will we get off this rock? More »
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We've known for a while that there are frozen water deposits just beneath the surface of the Martian poles, but now it seems that there are seasonal streams of liquid water that wind across the red planet's surface. Today, a group of scientists announced their discovery in Science, and told io9 what this liquid water might be like — and whether it changes the prospects for life on Mars. More »
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I can appreciate the cockeyed optimism in this NASA reel, which had us mining the moon to build space settlements. Also, our space colony future will sound like the opening 10 seconds of "Separate Ways" by Journey! More »
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Fifteen years ago, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin published The Case for Mars, and issued a clarion call to his fellow scientists, and the people of Earth. We need to plan our Mars colony, and we need to do it now. More »
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The idea for a 100-year starship has been tossed around recently, and now DARPA the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has put out a Request for Information (RFI) looking for ideas about how a long-term human mission to boldly go out to the stars could possibly happen. More »
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What do Viking colonies teach us about space colonization? The former offers a dire lesson about why the latter may become necessary. Paul Gilster of Centauri Dreams discusses the circumstances that could force humanity to avoid a "planetary Greenland." More »
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A plan to send live microbes to the Red Planet's largest moon risks wrecking our search for extraterrestrial life, argues Barry E. DiGregorio. More »
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The human race could be wiped off the Earth's surface at any moment — so why don't people understand the urgency of colonizing space? In this excerpt from his book Reopening the Space Frontier, Professor John Hickman explains our foot-dragging. More »
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If humans are to colonize space, how will we manage sustainable agriculture? Enter the science of aeroponics. More »
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Could we be colonizing Mars in your lifetime? Three different non-fiction books offered different scenarios — including bombarding Mars with "greenhouse gases" and using it as a kind of quasi-penal colony. John Hickman, author of Reopening the Space Frontier, explains. More »
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It was already nicknamed "Conan the Bacterium" for its ability to withstand radiation. Now it seems Deinococcus radiodurans could, in theory, survive dormant on Mars for over a million years. More »
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Space travel is always expensive - especially having to build satellites on the ground and then drag them up into orbit. Why not use 3D printers to build those satellites in orbit? More »
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Any future astronauts here who are hoping to make the first space baby might want to think again - embryonic stem cells don't act the same way in zero gravity, making successful procreation in space almost impossible. More »
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Space Habitat Adams, created and built by lego guru Hillel Cooperman, is so detailed that you can see the futuristic lives of space colonists through its tiny windows. There are robots, giant computer screens, and even a geoengineering simulation. More »
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It's been a century since we established the first colony on planet Zarmina, in the Gliese system 20 light years from Earth. After scientists discovered its oxygen-rich atmosphere, it wasn't long before settlers came. And then tourists, and hockey teams. More »
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Orbiting a nearby red dwarf star called Gliese 581 are 6 planets. One of them is a rocky ball, bigger than Earth, in the "habitable zone" where water is liquid and temperatures are human-friendly. It's possible we could live there. More »
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Several years ago, astronomers discovered that a distant sun was surrounded by a halo of water vapor. Now they know how it was created. If we can make water in space, we've surmounted one barrier to space colonization. More »
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Though the aliens in 2010 told humanity to stay away from Jupiter's moon Europa, that hasn't stopped aerospace engineer Joseph Shoer from designing a probe that could look beneath the moon's icy surface and peek into the oceans below. More »
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Technology Review has a great article on a new generation of spacesuits - more flexible than previous ones - that will be used on the International Space Station and, later, for trips to Mars. Read the article or watchthis vid! More »
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As the race for U.S. President starts to heat up, Barack Obama has continued to polish his image as the youthful candidate promising a hopeful future. And yet he's also on record saying "[U.S. Space Agency] NASA is no longer associated with inspiration." He's proposing cutting NASA's budget in order to fund early-education programs for kids under 5. It's hard to fault his desire to educate kids, but why sacrifice space programs to do it? If elected, is it possible that Obama, the "hopeful" candidate, will destroy our hopes for space exploration and colonization? More »
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What happened to Polar Lander, the last Mars rover that NASA tried to land in the Martian polar region, where it hopes that the Phoenix rover will touch down on May 25? The mysterious fate of the lander that simply disappeared moments before reaching Mars has been the subject of both scientific and UFO-logy debates. Was it shot down by angry Martians dwelling at the pole? Did it encounter some strange magnetic phenomenon that disabled it? Or did it just malfunction? We may soon find out. More »
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Being a member of the US military in Afghanistan takes it's toll after a few years. So last week, Sergeant First Class William Ruth of the Army's 101st Airborne Division proposed an alternative mission for his soldiers: let them be the first humans to colonize another planet. In his letter (below) to an editor at LiveScience, Ruth says his unit's role as advanced scouts and reconnaissance soldiers makes them ideally suited to the rough, lonely life in the cold, barren wastes that await them on Mars, the Moon, or elsewhere. More »
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NASA scientists have been arguing for years that Martian moons Phobos and Deimos may be the best place to in the solar system for humans to colonize. Some would argue even better than our own Moon. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's HiRISE camera snapped two awesome color shots of what might be humanity's next home during a flyby on March 23rd. Why do NASA geeks think the Martian moons might be the best real estate investment of the 21st century? More »
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