Interest has recently accelerated in human visits to our celestial neighbor, as is evidenced in this book with its wide collection of essays on the subject, in the new NASA program and announced plans from almost all the other major spacefaring nations, but also in the coincidental simultaneous release of another book with the same [...]

Neutron stars, the remnants of medium-size stars after a supernova explosion, are expected to be in a state analogous to superconductivity. Larger stars were thought to collapse into “black holes”, but Chapline and Laughlin’s theory, based on some calculations with Emil Mottola, Pawel Mazur and others, is that they would instead develop this quantum critical [...]

Ray Kurzweil: “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”, 2005 Ray Kurzweil is an optimist. Actually, it’s a lot more than that. Ray Kurzweil is extravagantly, exponentially, optimistic about progress over the next century or two. And he has some good reasons for optimism, extrapolating from the growth in information technologies of the past [...]