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 [...]

No matter what the subject, one has to admire a book written by an astronaut and former US senator, illustrated with photos of the author at work on the Moon. When the subject is one as potentially important to the future of our civilization as the energy resources geologist Harrison (“Jack”) Schmitt sees buried in [...]

I’ve enjoyed Spudis’s view of things for several years now; he spoke eloquently during the Aldridge Commission hearings shortly after the “new vision” was announced. I had the chance to meet him in 2002 (as I recall) while he was still in Houston; he took me down to the library and showed me some of [...]