San Clemente UFO Trail: If you are looking for a chance extraterrestrial encounter, journey down to Chile, where the town of San Clemente has just opened its UFO trail. The town is rumored to be a hotbed of alien activity, with hundreds of UFO sightings on record. Although the tour can’t guarantee that your visit will result in a close encounter, you will get to see El Enladrillado, the alleged landing pad for alien spacecraft.

Atomic Tourism: Sadly, the promise of atomic monster men isn’t even hinted at, but atomic tourism will take you to the great sites of the nuclear age. Plan trips to Trinity Site, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, the congressional bunker in the Greenbrier luxury resort, or Three Mile Island.

Star Trek: The Exhibition: If you’re still mourning the loss of Star Trek: The Experience, then perhaps Star Trek: The Exhibition will brighten your day. Formerly Star Trek: The Tour, the exhibition features Trek-themed flight simulators, recreations of the interior sets of the Enterprise, and props and costumes from the various series. After suffering financial issues earlier this year, the tour relaunched in June at the San Diego Air & Space Museum. Unfortunately for those who like to plan in advance, Star Trek: The Schedule hasn’t yet listed the exhibition’s future destinations.

Doctor Who Tours: Star Trek is hardly the only franchise worthy of a vacation destination. Visitors to the Welsh capital of Cardiff can book a Doctor Who package at the Park Plaza, which includes a night’s stay at the hotel, a city map featuring locations from various episodes, admission to the prop-filled Doctor Who Up-Close Exhibition, and a remote-controlled Dalek in the room to keep you in your place. Or you could forego the Dalek and do the tours a la carte.

Space Camp: As Tony Hale’s character in Stranger Than Fiction says, “You’re never too old to go to Space Camp.” And, for the wannabe space tourist on a budget, the adult Space Academy programs in Huntsville, Alabama might be your best bet. Granted you experience weightlessness in a SCUBA tank rather than in orbit, but for a few days you can at least pretend you’re in training to fly the shuttle.

Mauna Kea Observatory: You can watch shuttles take off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida or imagine that you’re James Bond at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, but some of the best stargazing in the world is said to be at Mauna Kea Observatory on Hawai’i Island. Although you can’t look through the research telescopes at the region’s summit, you can explore the cosmos with portable telescopes, provided you’re willing to make the trek up the treacherous access road.

Alpine Astrovillage Lue-Stailas: For a more leisurely approach to staring at the heavens, head to the Swiss Alps and stay at AAV Lue-Stailas. At the astrophotography-center-cum-Alpine-retreat, you can photograph faraway galaxies after a full day of skiing and siteseeing. The Astrovillage, which opens for business in 2009, allows visitors to use its professional imaging equipment to snap photos from its fully motorized viewing domes.

Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame: Exhibits at Seattle’s Science Fiction Museum, have included costumes and artwork from and influenced by works of science fiction, as well as permanent exhibits exploring the building blocks of sci-fi, the concept of the Other, and how the choices we make today affect the future. The museum shares real estate with the Experience Music Project, and plays host to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and an annual Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Film Festival.

Maison d’Ailleurs: Another Swiss entry, this “House of Elsewhere,” describes itself as a “Museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys.” Its recent exhibits have focused on North Pole expeditions, organic architecture, and art inspired by HP Lovecraft.

Space Center Houston: The world is filled with tech museums and, of course, the free-admission National Air and Space Museum, but the Space Center Houston is an official part of NASA. Come for the educational life-in-space exhibits, or just check out the incredibly large collection of Star Wars paraphernalia.

Tomorrowland: Yes, the Tomorrowland has had notorious problems updating its attractions to keep up with changing visions of the future. But at least the Magic Kindom’s version has surrendered to its now retro-futurist roots, even featuring the Carousel of Progress from the 1964 World’s Fair, one of Disney’s oldest attractions. If you want something shiny and newer, you can always hit the Tomorrowlands of Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong.

Tunisia: When deciding where to film scenes set on Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine, George Lucas chose Tunisia because it had a “beautiful countryside, unique architecture and a very high level of technical sophistication.” And the area today is much as it was when Lucas filmed it. Stay in Luke’s home, now the Sidi Driss Hotel in Matmata, trace R2-D2 and C-3PO’s journey through La Grande Dune, wander the streets of Mod Eisley, and stand at the site where Qui-Gon Jinn battled Darth Maul.

Akihabara: Tokyo’s electronics district is the much-touted mecca of the game and anime-obsessed otaku. Visit the Tokyo Anime Center for screenings, demonstrations, and exclusive items for purchase. And to see cosplayers in their full costumed glory, stroll through Chuo-dori on a Sunday afternoon.

CERN: Been drooling over the Large Hadron Collider? You can check out a mock-up at CERN’s Microcosm science center in Geneva and learn about the latest in particle physics. Temporary exhibits are housed in the planet-shaped Globe of Science and Innovation.

Evolution Emanation Cruise: In February 2009, Scientific American is shipping out with educational cruise company Insight Cruises for the Evolution Emanation Cruise. Travel from Fort Lauderdale to the Panama Canal while attending seminars on natural selection, genetics, and the future of life on this planet and elsewhere.

Galacticruise: If you’re an original Battlestar Galactica fan and you have time off next week, consider hopping aboard the Galacticruise. Celebrating thirty years of BSG, the five-day floating convention will host actors from the original show, including series-straddling Richard Hatch.

Vulcan, Alberta: Much like the city of Metropolis, Illinois, Vulcan has capitalized on its association with an alien among us. The self-professed home of Spock, the Canadian town has embraced all things Trek. Visitors are greeted by a captain and crew, and the town’s most prominent feature is a giant model starship mounted near the main entrance. And each summer it hosts Galaxyfest, its very own convention. It may not be Vegas, but Vulcan seems dedicated to keeping its Star Trek experience alive.

Last week, we told you about two galactic clusters colliding, providing visual (and x-ray) evidence of the existence of dark matter. Dark energy is even more elusive, but astronomers who were looking at an entirely different cosmic object may have stumbled across a major clue.

The large blue glow in the image (taken with the Large Binocular Telescope at the Mt. Graham International Observatory to confirm XMM-Newton's discovery) is a galactic cluster with the catchy name 2XMM J083026+524133. It's heavier than any other cluster, and it's farther from Earth than any other as well. In fact, it's twice as far as the next farthest. Here's the mystery — really distant clusters should be very young, because it takes their light so long to reach us. Young clusters shouldn't be big, because it takes time for all those galaxies to pull together. A huge, distant cluster is seemingly impossible. That's where dark energy comes in.

Dark energy, to put it into very simple terms, is a sort of anti-gravity force that actually pushes space apart and speeds the expansion of the universe. If it exists, that is. It is one possible explanation for 2XMM J083026+524133's distance. It might be an old cluster that appears more distant than it should be due to dark energy fueled expansion of space. What is the source of all the dark energy in the universe? Tony Iommi. Image by: ESA.

Cosmic Heavyweight. [Science News]

The image above is a composite, combining data from the Hubble Space Telescope with x-ray imagery from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Hubble captured the blue areas by detecting the gravitational lensing of light shining around the cluster. Dark matter in the cluster is causing the lensing. The pink area is a mass of hot gas, made of ordinary matter, which radiates the x-rays detected by Chandra.

What's amazing about the image is how clearly it shows that the dark matter separated from the ordinary matter when the clusters collided. The gases interacted with each other gravitationally, causing them to slow down and "pile up" in the middle of the clusters. The dark matter evidently did not interact with itself, sliding to the outer edges of the clusters. Astronomers think the mass of all this dark matter is what holds clusters together - without it, the galaxies are moving too fast to stay together. The cluster collision provides a lot of direct evidence that dark matter exists. Image by: NASA/ESA.

You can see the full image in high-resolution here.

Collision of galaxy clusters captured by astronomers. [EurkeAlert!]

The same day NASA released this image, they also renamed the GLAST, which is now the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. It's named after Enrico Fermi - in the realm of high-energy physics, he's kind of a big deal. So what will the FGRS find? Hopefully, a better acronym. It will also spot radio quiet pulsars, supermassive black holes, and blazars, in addition to scanning the sky almost constantly so astronomers can see how gamma sources change over time.

Blazars are, with a doubt, exceptionally awesome. Not only are they incredibly energetic and violent, they're called blazars. You can see one in the gamma image - it's the orange blob down and to left of the center. That brilliant orange and red line in the middle is the center of the Milky Way. The bright spot at the far right end of the Milky Way is the Vela Pulsar. Two more pulsars are visible at the extreme right of the image. It found all that in just 95 hours. Astronomers are eager to see what else it will detect.

As for me, I'm off to create a comic book villain named Blazar. Image by: NASA.

New Space Telescope Reveals Entire Gamma-ray Sky. [Science Daily]

For convenience, we've divided the motherlode of hentai clips (and a couple galleries) into four main sub-pages: space pirates, mechas, mad scientists and aliens.

Sexy Space Pirates!

Mad Science Is Sexy Science!

Aliens Want Your Sex!

The Sex Mechas!

X-ray images:

Radio waves:

[Chandra Observatory]

The VLA is an awesome piece of technology. Instead of building larger and larger dishes to receive distant radio frequency energy signals, astronomers figured out in the 1940s that you could build an array of smaller dishes that act in concert. You can "tune" the array by moving the dishes relative to each other (the VLA dishes, 25 feet across each, move on railroad tracks). But the VLA was built in the 1970s on a backbone of analog technology. The upgraded array, when completed in 2012, will be known as the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA). Personally, I would have gone with Very Very Large Array.

Technically, the array isn't adding new dishes, but it is adding ultra-sensitive digital receivers and replacing the wiring between dishes with fiber optics. Most importantly, they're getting a new correlator. The correlator is the supercomputer that takes the signals from each dish and figures out how they fit together. All the new gear should make the EVLA about ten times as awesome as the original VLA, sensitive enough "in principle, to detect a signal as weak as a cell phone call from Jupiter," according to Scientific American. Image by: NRAO/AUI.

"The New Radio Sky." [Scientific American, Sept. 2008]

1. We have been located in a backwater part of the galactic rim.
To keep Earth inhabitants away from the rest of the universe community, our planet was stuck way out in the boondocks at the rim of a second-rate galaxy. Obviously only a higher alien intelligence could have done this, to prevent humans from leaking out everywhere and finding all the cool shit in the universe.

2. Space debris is a shield to keep us from hearing alien broadcasts.
You've heard that there are thousands of pieces of space junk orbiting Earth, posing a danger to orbiting spacecraft and creating a haze of garbage around the planet. Recently the Chinese government created infinitely more space trash by shooting one of its satellites, scattering its shattered body into orbit. What could be the possible reason for leaving all this junk in orbit, instead of cleaning it up? Obviously, our governments are using the junk as a deflection shield to prevent alien messages and craft from getting through. And this suits the aliens just fine, since they're quarantining us anyway.

3. Space-based weapons prevent aliens from wanting to bond with us.
According to Alfred Webre, a Canadian futurist and author of the recent book Exopolitics:

Star Wars and the militarization of space is part of the information war against the integration with Universe society. Star Wars is an "inside code word" for this war among the military planners. The issue is whether our space technology will be in accord with Universal principles, or controlled by a military empire. The USA will ultimately suffer ignominious defeat by Universe society should it persist as a space military power.

Well, that pretty much covers it.

4. JPL scientists who are in on the quarantine efforts helped perpetuate the myths that were reported in Wired about how we could "never achieve interstellar travel."
Why don't they want us to believe in interstellar travel? Why? These are space scientists, dammit — doesn't it strike you as odd that they are saying we shouldn't go to space?

5. NASA's launch of a suborbital rocket fails.
Today NASA launched a suborbital rocket, but had to shoot it out of the sky due to alleged "launch failure." Really? Could this actually be an effort to discourage suborbital rockets, which might break through the space debris and catch sight of the Universe society? As one blogger points out, NASA already knows about aliens. Thus, they're the perfect organization to make it seem as if there were "problems" on a rocket that was about to run into alien vessels.

6. Large Hadron Collider.
Seriously — need we say more? Any alien civilization worth its salt would know that when we start beaming subatomic particles through that giant, Swiss magnetic loop that the Terrible Events are about to begin. Stay the hell away from Earth when that happens.

7. Project Bluebook closed.
In the 1950s and 60s, the Air Force created Project Bluebook, an investigative project to figure out what all those UFOs were. Despite the fact that people continue to see UFOs every day, the project was shut down in 1969. Why? Was that the year that the government learned about the Quarantine and decided to pull the wool over our eyes?

8. Twelve missions to Mars failed en route to the planet.
Sure we have some satellites orbiting Mars now, and three robots on the surface doing measurements. But they're only in the quarantined areas. Whenever a satellite or spacecraft has tried to go near certain off-limits parts of the planet, they've mysteriously disappeared. Traces of them are never found again, even by the satellites that are supposedly photographing the planet in such minute detail that they can see this hunk of ice.

9. Global warming makes planet more comfortable for everybody.
Little-discussed fact about global warming: It will make all the least-inhabitable regions of the planet into a tropical paradise. Climate change is basically a massive, multinational conspiracy to get everyone so comfy on Earth that they never want to go to ultra-cold Mars or the even colder reaches of deep space. It's good when people believe they actually CHOSE to be quarantined, isn't it?

10. Fly Me to the Moon
This movie about flies stowing away on a moon rocket was actually a government-sponsored plot to make traveling offworld seem so awful that nobody would ever want to do it again.

In the face of such compelling evidence, you cannot deny the TRUTH. Somebody — or something — doesn't want us to leave the planet. We're being . . . quarantined!!!

I love that you can watch the weather moving across the face of the planet. Of course it makes one yearn for a full-color, high-resolution set of pictures, but I'll settle for this. The cam is called the Visual Monitoring Camera, and it's lucky the device even works at all. This is a standard camera, not a scientific instrument, and researchers weren't even sure it would survive the journey through space to reach Mars. But when the Mars Express reached the plent in 2007, the camera came back online and started snapping photos. Let's call them the first tourist snapshots of Mars.

Watch the cam here, and find out more about the ESA Visual Monitoring Camera project here. Thanks, Eric!

1. We are likely to develop new propulsion methods.
True, we have not yet reached as far as the Sun, which is only a mere 8 light-minutes away (okay, that's also 150 million kilometers). There are quite a few good reasons for that, but concern about the necessary propulsion for the journey is a main one. Physics dictates that in the vacuum of space, travelers must create their own forward momentum. Rocket propulsion, as MIT professor Ian A. Waitz (now the Head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics) explained to this young engineering student and future io9 correspondent, is not unlike jellyfish propulsion. In order to go far forward, you'd better have a lot of mass to squelch out your back — and at a high velocity, too, because there aren't any helpful water currents in space. As Lemos correctly tells it, we're not quite ready for that yet:

... Using the best rocket engines Earth currently has to offer, it would take 50,000 years to travel the 4.3 light years to Alpha Centauri, our solar system's nearest neighbor. Even the most theoretically efficient type of propulsion, an imaginary engine powered by antimatter, would still require decades to reach Alpha Centauri, according to Robert Frisbee, group leader in the Advanced Propulsion Technology Group within NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

All right, that is quite a pickle, but a hundred years ago we didn't even know what lift was, and now we have the 110,000-kilogram Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, which will be carrying almost 300 people over 15,200 kilometers on each of its flights when it enters service in 2009. In 1957 the launch of Sputnik amazed everyone, but by the end of 1969 two men had walked on the moon. The limitations of our current propulsion methods won't necessarily block our star exploration forever.

2. Humans could figure out ways to endure long space journeys.
Why do we keep perpetuating this idea that the voyage to a distant star must somehow fit inside the confines of a current human lifetime? That's not strictly necessary. In the past two thousand years, the expected lifespan of an average human has doubled, and with luck and medical advancement, it might not take that long to double again.

Plus, that suspended animation you saw in Alien or 2001: A Space Odyssey will probably be medically possible for humans, and soon. In 2005, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh found a way to revive dogs after the animals had been clinically dead for three hours, and a group at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle successfully induced suspended animation in mice for up to six hours. Hasan Alam, a trauma surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital, led a group that achieved suspended animation in pigs — and the pigs suffered no damage after the process over 90 percent of the time. Alam is now working on clinical trials of suspended animation for humans.

3. Earth is not the only source of fuel.
Lemos presents yet another problem in his article, and this one should sound quite familiar to anyone who gawked at gas prices today:

It would take at least the current energy output of the entire world to send a probe to the nearest star, according to Brice N. Cassenti, an associate professor with the Department of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. That's a generous figure: More likely, Cassenti says, it would be as much as 100 times that.

"We just can't extract the resources from the Earth," Cassenti said during his presentation. "They just don't exist. We would need to mine the outer planets."

Well, as it turns out, the outer planets are a lot closer than the outer stars. Even Neptune is only 0.0004 light-years away from the Earth; a hefty figure when you consider that it's also 4 billion kilometers, but certainly a good deal closer than Alpha Centauri. We still have quite a lot of exploring left to do in our own solar system, and we can probably do that without needing to solve every obstacle of interstellar travel. A new energy resource might just present itself somewhere — and if we don't discover life on any of the planets around the Sun, it's probable nobody will mind if we do a little drilling.

4. We may yet discover a way to achieve faster-than-light travel.
Lemos quotes Frisbee again as saying "any time you try to get something up to the speed of light, Newton is still God." That's probably true — though some Baylor University scientists might beg to differ — but there is quite a lot of knowledge yet to come for human beings, and it could be right here in our solar system. No matter how much information we think we have today, nobody can accurately predict what course space exploration might take after tomorrow's flabbergasting revelation.

So you may not be hitching a ride to Alpha Centauri tomorrow, and your kid might not ever get to do it, either, but let's not jump the gun and rule it out for every human.

According to NASA's Robert Frisbee:

It's always science fiction until someone goes out and does it.

That's the spirit!

Rocket Scientists Say We'll Never Reach the Stars [Wired Magazine]

This is totally what conspiracy theorists are picturing when they say the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland will destroy the fabric of the universe. Sadly, this exhibit has been torn down but its weird science flair lives on.

House-sized art exhibit in Texas [via Gadling] Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!

Here is a touched-up version of the same galaxy so that the tendrils are more obvious. The image you saw on top shows what would be visible to the naked eye, which is pretty damn cool. So what's this galaxy all about? Explains Phil "Bad Astronomer" Plait:

These tendrils have been a problem for astronomers: they’re very narrow (only a couple of hundred light years wide), have masses a million of times that of the Sun, and should fall apart rapidly (they’re blasting out into hot gas which should disrupt them, they’re massive enough to collapse under their own weight to form stars, and tides from the galaxy itself should shred them). Yet they seem at least semi-stable, lasting for hundreds of millions of years. What holds them together?

Turns out it’s that old standby, magnetism. Recently released Hubble images (like the one above) have given astronomers insight into the structure of these tendrils. Hubble’s hi-res view shows details previously unseen in the tendrils, allowing astronomers a better view and the ability to determine the magnetic strengths needed to hold the tendrils together against the forces that would rend them asunder.

In case you weren't already convinced that this was Cthulhu's home galaxy, that freakish and inexplicable persistence of the tentacles in the face of massive force should confirm it.

R'lyeh! R'lyeh! Actually, come to think of it, R'lyeh would make a great name for this galaxy, don't you think?

The Magnetic Tendrils of NGC 1275 [Bad Astronomy]

I wish there weren't those reaction shots of the guy making fun of Buzz, though — yeah, the dude is kind of a nut, but he's a visionary nut who isn't entirely off the mark. I'm still down with the Buzz program, though I'd like to establish a socialist orgy camp on the moon instead of giving it to entrepreneurs.

Buzz Aldrin: Take Us to Space [BoingBoingTV]

The first Proton was launched in 1965. It was originally designed as one huge freaking Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, with a massive range and terrifying nuclear payload. Since the East coast of the U.S. is not currently a smoking radioactive crater, you can be sure it was never actually used this way. Instead, it was put to work hauling satellites into orbit, as well as chunks of the Mir space station. Despite some recent mission failures, Protons are still regularly contracted out by international companies who need to get something heavy into space. In this case, British company Inmarsat hired a Proton to put their 6-ton Inmarsat-4 (I4-F3) telecommunications satellite into orbit. By the time you read this, we'll know if it was deployed successfully.

This photo by Flickr user alexpgp shows a Proton being lifted into launch position at Baikonur.
If you head over to his Baikonur Campaigns page, you can see a huge gallery of cool insider photos taken inside Baikonur as engineers prepare for various launch missions (apparently alexpgp is an engineer with one of the companies that hires Proton rockets). Top image by: BBC News.

Proton rocket in return to flight. [BBC News]

Space construction from science fiction:

Science fiction is full of lavish descriptions of objects being built or assembled in space, from small robots to structures the size of a solar system. And many mega-structures described in science fiction must have been built in space, since they're too big to have been put together inside a gravity well.

Probably the most famous instance of outer space construction comes from Star Trek. There's a huge controversy over whether the USS Enterprise NCC 1701 (without any bloody A, B, C, D, or E) was built in space or not. And the long-simmering debate was boosted into a roaring flame-war by the teaser trailer for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek movie, which appeared to show the starship being constructed on Earth. There's evidence on both sides: supposedly Trek creator Gene Roddenberry stated the Enterprise was built in orbit, but there are also sources that said it was built in San Francisco. But we do know the earlier Enterprise, the NX-01, was built in space, and so were the NCC-1701-D and USS Voyager. Here's a picture of the Utopia Planitia shipyards, from Memory Alpha:There are also tons of other shipyards in space, including the famous "Mon Calamari Shipyards" and several other orbital shipyards in Star Wars. Pictured at the top of this post are the orbital shipyards of Kuat, from the Wookiepedia. And of course, the massive Death Star had to be constructed in space.

Science fiction is full of space elevators and other "megastructures" that must be built, at least partly, in space. Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains Of Paradise and Charles Sheffield's The Web Between The Worlds both involve a kind of "skyhook" or orbital tower, which connects the Earth's equator to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. In the Clarke book, eventually five more "spokes" are built from Earth, to form a structure resembling a ship's wheel.

Other space megastructures, such as ringworlds, discworlds, Dyson Spheres and artificial planets, would be impossible, or near-impossible, to build inside an existing gravity well. In the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, we get to see the massive planet-building area hidden in hyperspace and accessible through an opening in the planet Magrathea:

In Asimov's I, Robot, the robot QT (aka Cutie) deduces that he's superior to the humans, partly because he has no memory of being assembled in space, from parts built on Earth. As far as he knows, he just turned up in space, fully formed.

"Something made you, Cutie," pointed out Powell. "You admit yourself that your memory seems to spring full-grown from the absolute blankness of a week ago. I'm giving you the explanation. Donovan and I put you together from the parts shipped us."

Cutie gazed upon his long, supple fingers in an oddly human attitude of mystification. "It seems to me that there should be a more satisfactory explanation than that. For you to make me seems improbable."

In R. Cordwainer Smith's "Think Blue, Count Two," he specifies that the massive solar sails which people use to sail across the universe were constructed in the vaccuum:

Before the great ships whispered between the stars by means of planoforming, people had to fly from star to star with immense sails - huge films assembled in space on long, rigid, coldproof rigging.

Real-life applications:

So what are the real-life applications of the idea of building in space? We've already proved we can put together a space station in orbit, but we're not likely to be building dozens of those any time soon. It's entirely possible that more robots like Dextre, with complex and multi-jointed arms, will be built in space to handle satellites and space junk. We're definitely not likely to be building space elevators, Dyson Spheres or orbital stations any time soon.

But here are a few other ideas that are being batted around for big space construction projects. Some of them relate to mega-environmentalism. Some people claim we can halt global warming in its tracks by building mega-structures, such as space mirrors, or giant nanofiber "sun shades," in orbit. These would deflect some of the sunlight reaching Earth, and they'd need to be constructed in space.

Also, a mooted solar power satellite, which would collect solar energy from orbit and beam it back to Earth, would almost certainly need to be constructed in orbit. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency wants to have one of these up and running by 2030.

Also, when we get around to building long-range spaceships to explore or colonize outside our solar system, we'll have to build them in space. Some observers argue that these large ships could be constructed using some Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) as raw materials and maybe also as a shell for human habitats.

But a lot sooner than that, big and expensive satellites may be constructed in orbit, to save on launching costs. Last year, some small Japanese "spider robots" successfully crawled out along a net linking three satellites in orbit. They only functioned for a short time, but scientists saw the test as an important proof of concept. In a few years, we could be launching big antennas and solar panels into space in pieces, using small, cheap rockets. And then tiny robots could assemble them in space.

So for the sake of the human race, let's hope J.J. Abrams' Trek movie comes down on the side of the Enterprise having been built in orbit. Our future as a species may depend on getting people used to the idea of large-scale outer space construction.

The concept of Space Fatigue first appeared in Adventure Comics #318, and is best summarized by the Polite Dissent blog's description of the symptoms:

First, impatience.
Second, irritability.
Third, confusion.
Fourth, delusions of grandeur.
And finally, catatonia.

The reality is somewhat less dramatic, but no less dangerous. In 1980, NASA was tasked by the US Congress to investigate the effects space travel had on pilot fatigue, and in 1999, they presented their findings:

Throughout the course of this outstanding research program, it has been evident that pilot fatigue is a significant safety issue in aviation. Rather than simply being a mental state that can be willed away or overcome through motivation or discipline, fatigue is rooted in physiological mechanisms related to sleep, sleep loss, and circadian rhythms. These mechanisms are at work in flight crews no less than others who need to remain vigilant despite long duty days, transmeridien travel, and working at night when the body is programmed for sleep.

The solution? Well, that didn't come until this year, and apparently, it's sticking wires into your brain. Or something:

The brain cap sends weak pulses of near-infrared light into the brain, then analyzes the reflected wavelengths. The results reveals how much oxygen is in the brain’s blood, which is a gauge of it’s activity (is that why I like to do hand stands?). The psychiatrist who is developing the scanner, Gary Strangman, said that he and others are already using the device on Earth-bound patients.

Yes, that's right; the best that modern science can come up with to deal with the problem is a device that allows you to monitor whether you're getting a little abnormal. With the advent of regular commercial space travel looking increasingly likely in our lifetimes and this problem remaining unsolved, now may be a good time to consider living underground, if only to avoid the spaceships that will soon be falling out of the sky on a regular basis due to pilot error brought on by fatigue.

The Fletcher bra works by flooding "cooling panels" with liquid. Then it looks for variations in the breast's skin temperature that could indicate an early malignancy. Fletcher's team claimed it would be "comfortable," but the cumbersome design includes:

a pair of body compliant liquid-perfused cooling panels lying adjacent and held within the inner contour of each cup... a pump connected by flexible tubing to the liquid-perfused cooling panels, a solenoid valve for controlling the flow of cooling liquid between the pump and the refrigerator-heat exchanger and heaters, a refrigerator-heat exchanger for cooling the cooling fluid, a heater for heating the cooling fluid, a cooling fluid reservoir tank, a temperature sensor located in the reservoir tank for sensing the cooling fluid temperature and a temperature readout and controller circuit for controlling the solenoid valve and heater circuit.

Maybe not something you'd wear to a party. Here's a diagram from the patent. (Click to enlarge.)

Fletcher's dream isn't dead. In 2002, researchers at De Montfort University in Leicester, England came up with a bra that uses tiny electrical currents to find tumors, which are denser than regular tissue. But clinical trials in China were supposed to lead to that device becoming available by 2005, which obviously hasn't happened. [FreePatentsOnline

The APA introduced their ideas at their recent convention, drawing from past studies of astronaut psychology and even records of explorers from centuries past.

1. Have an electronic psychologist on board. The APA has already developed a computer program that will let astronauts discuss their psychological issues and assist with conflict resolution. Why a computer? Astronauts don't like to tell human doctors about their issues because they're afraid they might lose flight privileges.

2. Create a home away from home. Astronauts on board the International Space Station are isolated, but they can radio down to Earth easily. Martian explorers will have a hard time even seeing Earth, which could have a profound psychological effect. Psychologists recommend a regular schedule of communications with family and friends back home, even if there's a lengthy delay between "send" and "receive." Anything that connects the astronauts to Earth will combat crippling homesickness.

3. Find out how they dealt with these problems in the past. Tomorrow's explorers will follow in the figurative footsteps of Columbus and Balboa in ships like NASA's Orion, pictured. In many ways, those explorers dealt with a lot of the same problems, such as close quarters, isolation from family and friends and potential problems with other members of the crew. The APA says it plans to study historical records from Earth-bound explorers to find out how they did it. Image by: NASA

To The Moon And Mars: Psychologists Show New Ways To Deal With Health Challenges In Space. [Science Daily]

Imagine riding in that sucker down to Earth at like a zillion miles per hour.

There's something so poignant about this rocket's blistered skin. It's like this machine loved its human companions so much that it came back down to Earth just for them, even though it died in the process.

Soyuz Reentry Pictures [via Dark Roasted Blend]

The theory that life can be carried between planets on rocks ejected by impacts is called lithopanspermia. Some bacteria are able to survive the cold, the dryness and the radiation present in space, especially if they're buried deep inside large asteroids (like Eros, pictured). The shock pressures produced by the impacts that would eject them into space in the first place have always been a stumbling block for lithopanspermists (they love it when you call them that).

A research team made up of German, Russian and U.S. scientists put bacteria thought to have the potential for successful space travel through some rough treatment, using explosives and air guns to slam them around in metal containers. The shock pressures used were similar to the pressures experienced by Martian rocks that were ejected by impacts and eventually reached Earth - we've found about 40 of them so far.

The results: those bacteria are pretty tough. Bacterial endospores and lichens could handle very robust shock pressures, while cyanobacteria were more fragile, but still capable of withstanding impacts strong enough for interplanetary travel. Going from Mars to Earth is a definite possibility. So if the Phoenix Lander finds evidence of past life on Mars, it could mean that all life on Earth is alien. Image by: NASA.

Microbial Rock Inhabitants Survive Hypervelocity Impacts on Mars-Like Host Planets: First Phase of Lithopanspermia Experimentally Tested. [Astrobiology]

And no, I don't know why part of the image is censored. Is it not work-safe? Is there something happening that NASA doesn't want us to know about?

That circle of blue gas at the bottom center may be hiding another young star cluster. This "fantasy-like landscape" is 100 light years wide and features dark dust towers rising above a glowing wall of gases on the surface of the dark molecular cloud that births new stars. Scientists theorize a supernova explosion may have triggered this frenzy of star creation. Happy orbitversary, Hubble! [Hubblesite]

Co-writer and inker Layton (Michelinie scripts the comic, and Bernard Chang pencils) explained the idea behind the comic on his website:

Decades in the future, a 70+ Tony Stark is overseeing his ultimate project of his lauded career—the completion of Earth’s first commercial space elevator, whose inauguration will change the world’s economy and the future of space exploration forever. However, not everyone is looking forward to this project’s launch with the same enthusiasm as the head of Stark Universal. Sinister forces are at work, behind-the-scenes, to insure that Stark’s pinnacle scientific achievement ends in disaster.

Damn, Tony looks good for someone over 70.

Iron Man: The End Preview [BobLayton.com]

There's been plenty of animated scifi before this summer, of course — Fox and Blue Sky put out the bog-awful Robots a few years ago, and Disney/Pixar did The Incredibles. There's been underground-y weird animated scifi like Heavy Metal since the 70s, and plenty of animated science fiction/comics stuff on TV. And while we've been dragging our feet in the U.S., the Japanese have been putting science fiction anime on the big screen for decades.

But this will be remembered as the summer science fiction animation broke out, mostly thanks to Wall-E and Clone Wars. It's not just that both films will probably end up having been box-office successes. They're also so different from each other, in style and storylines, that you won't be able to think of science fiction animation as being restricted to a kind of space-operatic goofiness or superhero pastiche ever again. Whether you love either of those films, they're both a proof of concept for two different ways of approaching big-screen CG-animated science fiction.

(Despite having the cartoony chubby humans, Wall-E is actually more photorealistic than Clone Wars, thanks to the awesome pseudo-cinematography of Roger Deakins, complete with lens flare and textures. Clone Wars, meanwhile, deliberately sets out to avoid being photorealistic and winds up with a weird puppet style of animation that may grow on me. Or not. )

At first, I thought the science fiction animated boom would be self-limiting, because of a string of wretched films in the pipeline, like Space Chimps, Fly, and (I have a feeling) the forthcoming Planet 51. These films sport a cheesy not-quite-Pixar style and paper-thin plots. Unlike Pixar films, which are aimed at kids but speak to adults on a whole different level, the Chimps/Fly movies are barely cogent enough for a really slow child.

But Pixar comes to the rescue once again, with the animated Newt, about the last two blue-footed newts in the world, who hate each other but must interbreed in order to save their species. I'm also quite optimistic about Monsters Vs. Aliens, which is based on a great comic book and has put out some really cool images and a great trailer so far. It has a 50-foot woman and a mad scientist with the head of a cockroach, plus a sort of Mars Attacks sensibility.

I'm sort of intrigued by Igor, mostly thanks to the incredible cast listing, including Eddie Izzard, John Cleese and John Cusack. It also has a cute premise: the hunch-back who wants to a mad scientist instead of an "Igor." The latest poster looks sort of clunky and awful, but the trailer is cute and funny. A brain in a jar tries to hypnotize Igor, and when that doesn't work, it just hits him with a spatula. Pure win!

We're also in for a big-screen anime explosion, with American studios involved. Studio Imagi is working on animated Astro Boy and Gatchaman movies, among others. There's also a Heavy Metal remake/homage in the pipeline.

I feel as though these sorts of kid-friendly animated movies have been dominated by fantasy and funny animals for as long as the CG variety has been around. (There's no science behind talking toys in Toy Story or talking cars in Cars.) But now the pendulum is swinging toward scifi premises, maybe as more creators who grew up on scifi in the 1950s and 1960s take charge.

I have two happy observations about the rise of CG animated scifi kiddie movies:

1) Science fiction is the new fairy tale, and that's an awesomely good thing. Who could watch Wall-E without starting to think of him as a young commoner who gets swept up into a castle by a princess, only to discover his own nobility? Etc. etc. The Igor trailer even includes the "Once upon a time" caption. I could totally see Clone Wars' Ahsoka turning into a fairy tale heroine (although she's probably destined for a bad end.) It would be great if generations of kids grew up thinking of robots and scientists the way earlier Disney watchers thought about princesses and flying elephants.

2) On the flipside, even as these animated scifi movies become fairy-tale-ish, they're also more serious and thoughtful than most "grown-up" science fiction movies. Of the summer's big blockbuster films, how many were as smart and debate-provoking as Wall-E? Off the top of my head, I'd say Iron Man and Dark Knight, and that's it. Okay, so Clone Wars is not going to be smart or thought-provoking, I'm pretty sure. But movies like Newt, Igor and Monsters Vs. Aliens at least have the potential to throw in some clever concepts and make you think about issues like extinction, the class system, and the rights of monsters. So I'm cautiously excited about the new scifi animated boom — and I think it's going to be around for a while.

Tonight

The Middleman's latest episode "The Obsolescent Cryogenic Meltdown" features Kevin Sorbo as a Middleman from the past who's been frozen in time. He's brought back to fight a supervillain, the Candle, but will his obsolete manners force Wendy to kill him?

The Japanese shōnen mecha anime Gurren Lagann, about an underground future society, is on twice on Monday once at 11 and again at 11:30 PM on the Sci Fi Channel.

My favorite X-Files two parter "Duane Barry Part 1" is on Sci Fi at 2 AM. If you like aliens, hostage situations and crazy folk, this is for you.

Futuristic private dick Charlie Jade is back and desperately trying to piece together the clues behind a murder mystery of a lovely young woman, the only problem is, she has no identity (which is impossible in his future), Charlie Jade airs at 3 AM on the Sci Fi Channel

Movies:
Enlist in The Federations alien bug-killing campaign before the evil being take over the universe in Starship Troopers, which is showing at 10 AM and 3 AM on TBS. Murderous soul eating car Christine is on AMC at 5:45 PM. And later, count all of the terrible one-liners in Batman & Robin on TBS at 12:30 AM.

Tuesday

Eureka has a new episode, where Allison starts to get ready for her wedding and all the genius dogs line up for a show of their own. "Best In Faux" is on the Sci Fi Channel at 9 PM.

Movies:

A handsome young man tries to repair the problems of his past with a time machine, but instead he ends up going forward about 800,000 years into the future. The Time Machine will be on TBS at 12:30 AM.

Wednesday

Journey back and discover the roots of our flying saucers. According to UFO Files: UFOs: Then and Now? The Innocent Years, even Medieval times had their share of alien encounters. UFO Files is on the History Channel at 11 PM. Later, explore the secret lives of flexible bendy monsters on the History channel's MonsterQuest: Boneless Horror at 1 AM.

Movies:

Watch the original War Games before they ruin it with that awful remake /sequel, on AMC at 5:30 PM. Crazy scifi movie Mad Love, where murderous hands get transplanted on unsuspecting victims. is on at 8 PM on TMC. Later, Kirk Douglas' 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is on TMC at 2 AM.

Thursday

Movies:

Milla Jovovich dons the world's tiniest bandages as a supreme being that can save the world from biblical alien doom in The Fifth Element on TBS. At 10 AM watch the first ever reality TV Show gone horribly wrong when an entire world is built to house enough cameras to film one man from birth until death (or escape) in The Truman Show, on TBS at 9 PM.

Friday

Stargate Atlantis "The Ghost In the Machine" brings back Doctor Elizabeth Weir, but as a creepy kill-crazy Replicator. Or is she one of the good replicators? Wait, are there good Replicators? Atlantis is on the Sci Fi Channel at 9 PM.

Movies:
Get ready for high kicks and punches — and kitchen splits — with Jean-Claude Van Damme's Timecop at 10:30 PM on AMC.

Saturday

More British scifi beasties and monsters jump out of the rip in time in Primeval on BBC America at 9 PM. This weeks episode has the gang searching through the tunnels of London's underground and uncovering a bunch of gigantic spiders.

Movies:
TNT launches a scifi movie marathon starting at 11 AM with Jackie Chan's terrible movie about fatal formal wear The Tuxedo. Then there is Aeon Flux at 1 PM, Ultraviolet at 3 PM, Blade II at 7 PM, Blade: Trinity at 9 PM, Land of The Dead and 3:10.

Sunday

Venture Brothers will have a new episode for fans on Sunday at 11 PM on Adult Swim.

Movies:

Start your day off right with Space Cowboys where a group of aged astronauts get sent back into space to protect the world from ancient space technology. It airs on TNT at 8:30 AM. Later watch a military plane become self aware and try to blow up the world and fighter pilot Jessica Biel along it in Stealth on TNT at 1 PM.

As a recovering video game addict turned fearless io9 correspondent, I couldn't have been more excited about participating in Dead Space's Community Event at Redwood Shores on Wednesday—after all, I got ninety minutes of exclusive gameplay along with liberal doses of food, info, and funny PR reps acting like they liked me. (Throw in an audiobook of Gillian Anderson reading Barry N. Malzberg's "A Galaxy Called Rome" and you've got my idea of a perfect afternoon.) But I also felt a responsibility—as a recovering video game addict, as a fearless io9 correspondent—to be honest to io9 readers, and just not swallow the long, cool glasses of necromorph-tinted Kool-Aid. I've been burned often enough by IPs both licensed—Enter The Matrix, anyone?—and original—Black & White, anyone else?—to be an acquiescent junketgoer, happy to turn my eyes from the problems on the monitor in front of me to the swag bag beside me.

And so here is the first confounding paradox of Dead Space: although the presentations of the production team utterly convinced me they had created a truly original science fiction survival horror story, at no point did anything in my three thirty minute playtime sessions of Dead Space reinforce that conviction. Dead Space pulls atmosphere and ideas from all four Alien films, Paul Verhoeven's gruesome science-fiction flicks, John Carpenter movies both awesome and awful, and semi-stinkers like Event Horizon and Screamers, but the team seems to think the industrial bays of Dead Space are completely different from those of Aliens or Terminator because the color scheme is brown and gray instead of blue or green.Inspiration also comes from an impressive array of games: Half-Life 1 and 2; the Doom series (man, especially the Doom series); System Shock and Bioshock; the Resident Evil games with an emphasis on RE4, and a dash of Silent Hill, a smattering of Eternal Darkness. Peter Jackson's King Kong removed the HUD before Dead Space did, Psi-Ops gave us fun with telekinesis four years before the stuff seen here, and the Prince of Persia was slowing time long before Isaac refilled his first can of Stasis. (Even Isaac's design, which I love, reminds me of The Destroyer, an old Thor enemy and one-time herald of Galactus.) Perhaps only at Electronic Arts—a company that sports licenses, long-established IPs, and rigorous bureaucratic orthodoxy have made into the eighth largest software company in the world—can Dead Space be called original without a certain amount of Simpsonesque finger-twiddling, eye-darting, and lip-pursing. In fact, my willingness to take the team at their word and consider Dead Space cutting edge worked against my success when I finally played: it took me twenty minutes to realize that those lovely lit x-boxy looking cases scattered everywhere were, of course, breakable crates with helpful stuff inside.

But here's Dead Space's second confounding paradox: none of that matters. I spent maybe thirty seconds arching an eyebrow when a game described as groundbreaking has Isaac sent to go get gadget x to open blocked airlock y (that was on the embargoed level, by the way, so don't tell anyone I told you). The rest of the time? I was alternately clutching the Xbox 360 controller to my chest like it was my beloved Boo Bear warding off the bogeyman, and waving it about like it was a boomstick about to take out some Deadites.Contrary to the worry of some of our io9 commenters, constant focus testing did not turn Dead Space into Halo in zero gravity, but it did keep the game playable, enjoyable and frustrating for the right reason—like, I got too rattled and used up more ammo than I should have—and not the wrong ones—like, I am being chased by monsters but Isaac refuses to haul his ass out of the room at faster than a measured walk. When Isaac has no choice but move in close and try to club a skittering mutant to death with his empty weapon, grunting and panting, the space crates don't matter, the fetch objectives don't matter, the fact your main character has the same first name as the bartender on the Love Boat doesn't matter. Dead Space isn't immersive because there's no HUD or next to no cutscenes: it's immersive because the controls have been tested and massaged so nicely that the difference between what you want to do and what the character onscreen is doing disappears. I know plenty of survival horror fans who believe that the closer to powerless the main character is, the more nightmarish and terrifying the game can be. But Dead Space, like Romero's Living Dead movies, taps into the nightmare that you could survive if you could be on your guard every single second and never, ever make a mistake...but you won't, because you can't.

Some people have argued that video games can't be art because the video game player never surrenders to the creator of a video game the way the a reader or moviegoer or gallery visitor must surrender to the writer or the filmmakers or the artist. And I've seen some people argue that Dead Space won't be satisfying because the game makers sacrificed the potential to be original at the altar of constant focus testing. But a sestina can be satisfying despite the rigorousness of its structure (vetted by troubadors, the focus testers of their day), and anyone reading Lolita or watching Memento has to keep their brains as busy as the fingers of any videogamer. But ultimately the can't-be-arters and won't-be-originalers ignore the active, repetitive experience with which most of us initially experience art—as children, yelling "again!" when the parent reaches the end of our favorite story, and it's a rare child that doesn't at least sometime get its wish. Despite all the thought and effort put into making its meticulously crafted skin feel sensuously new, there's not an original bone in Dead Space's body and thank god for that. It's like playing that movie you've seen a dozen times on cable that sucks you in every time it comes on. Some childish part of me—the gleefully nihilistic child—has been yelling "again!" since it first played Dead Space on Wednesday. I expect it to continue doing so until the game's release on October 27.

Not every person in the video game industry is going to compare the work they do to Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, but lighting designer David Blizard did exactly that at the opening of his presentation at the community event at Electronic Arts Redwood Shores on Wednesday. "Construction of the Sagrada Familia began in 1882 and its current scheduled completion development is 2026," Blizard explained. "Similarly, there’s never a scheduled completion date for how things look in video games, as the tech is always constantly evolving."

According to Blizard, Dead Space uses a deferred lighting mesh, completely different from anything that’s been done in traditional video games: "[Deferred lighting] has had very limited use in the marketplace until now." (There was a brief back-and-forth between Blizard and producer Rich Briggs on this point—Briggs thought Dead Space, when it hits the market, will be the only game to use a deferred lighting system, Blizard believed GTA4 had used dynamic lighting although he didn’t know if it was used throughout, or relegated to special sections.)
"With static lighting, we have set light sources. We may only have four light sources available to us, and we usually can’t set those sources in any way to take advantage of shadows or darkness," Blizard said. "Or we can create the look of light in an environment by 'baking' it into the textures. But a shadow that’s baked into the environment won’t move."

"With dynamic lighting," said Blizard, "we’re not limited to how many lights we can put in the world, we're only limited by rendering speed. We can have point lights, cone lights, directional lights, and the lighting and shadow situations that come with them. But in order to have a game run smoothly at 30 or 60 frames per second, we have to keep the resources of the GPU [graphics processing unit] tightly allocated... Very roughly, each frame of an animated movie requires about six hours of rendering time. By contrast, the processing resources allocated for the lighting for a video game graphics running at 30 frames per second is typically 33 milliseconds."

Explaining the importance of this math, Blizard said that one pass over one frame may only allow 7.5 milliseconds of processing power dedicated to the deferred lighting buffer, 4 milliseconds for the shadow buffer, and two milliseconds of cycle time for the 'post' effects (such as "bloom"—the way bright things might glow under light—and anti-aliasing). To put that in perspective, the GPU calculates the proper application of the shadows and the post effects in approximately two beats of a housefly's wings.

Blizard also broke our brains by boiling the principle of ambient occlusion down to an easily graspable sentence: essentially, objects that are closer together get darker. With that principle in mind, he showed how the dynamic lighting mesh could generate ambient occlusion throughout the Dead Space environment, and how he and the lighting crew could do passes of each stage to check the ambient occlusion was correct for massed objects. For the player, this means Dead Space is not just a game that contrasts just light and darkness, but—appropriately enough for a survival horror game—layers of darkness, so the application of light upon the environment is more convincing to the eye.

Interestingly, Dead Space's dynamic lighting not only aids the player’s enjoyment of the game, it greatly aided the actual creation. In an interview after the presentation, Blizard spoke briefly about the advantages of dynamic lighting on the building of the game. "From a sense of the production pipeline, we knew we couldn’t use static lighting again. Static lighting requires all the models to be done before the lighting can be rigged. If one new object is added, everything has to be rigged all over again and it’s a very time-consuming process. In this model, even if the level is very blocky, we can still begin lighting it. Creating a video game is like setting sail on a ship while you’re still building it and while you still may not be entirely sure where you’re going. In a situation like that, yeah, let’s try to build tools that don’t completely flail about if things aren’t done in a particular order. By keeping as much as we could dynamic, we were just able to crank every day on the lighting—in tandem with the people building art and the people putting new items in the game."
Although one might infer frustration from the presentation's opening comparison of using video game technology to the Sisyphean task of constructing Gaudi's Sagrada Familia, it's actually the opposite for Blizard. Blizard came from movies (he was the lighting supervisor for Minority Report) to games because of the challenges: "Games to me were just a more interesting medium than films in a lot of ways, because there are still many horizons to be crossed in games." While the dynamic lighting system utilized for Dead Space allowed it to cross just such an (event) horizon, the expanding field of technology for both creators and players of video games ensure that Blizard and crew will be again setting sail before too long.