Written and sung by The Phenomenauts, this is a near-punk anthem to a world class astrophysicist, Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson. Someone had to inherit the mantle from Carl Sagan, and it turned out to be Neil. Thanks to Laughing Squid for the heads up on this one.
A few good photos and videos of cities as seen from space, photographed from the ISS. I particularly like the commentary from NASA Astronaut Don Pettit on the second video, which gives you some pointers on how to recognize specific places from orbit. He also took an awful lot of these images, and even starts off by explaining a bit about how they solved the blurring problem created by trying to take time lapse images while hurtling through the sky. This is also the man who invented the zero G coffee cup; thanks to Openculture for the heads up on this one.
It turns out that NASA’s Mars Explorer Program still has a shot at getting a manned mission to the Red Planet! Which means I was wrong when was afraid we had gone totally third world, abandoning our future in space for a few bucks in local pork barrel projects used to line some politicians pockets. But I wasn’t completely wrong; if you want the future of humanity to include some Americans colonizing our new homes in space (and not just the Chinese and their other western pacific rim culture allies) you need to make your voices heard. From now until July first, go to the Mars Forum, register as a forum member (it’s free), read through the entries, and make your voice heard. There are some great ideas there, some flames, and some irrelevant commentary, like every forum you have ever been to. But this time the stakes may just be the future of the human race for the next half million years; wouldn’t you want your children and grandchildren to have a shot at being part of it?
Yes, the Royal Institute has a great web site with a ton of great resources there, including a lot of video footage of various talks and lectures. They are currently featuring the 1977 Christmas Lecture, which that year was given by Carl Sagan on the topic of the Planets. The quality of the copy on the RI website is much better than the one I could embed here, so you should watch the entire thing from that site.
Much like the last new Total Recall trailer, with some extra footage. My only regret about this version of the Philip K. Dick classic is they are skipping Mars. Probably because we abandoned our space program and they didn’t want to show China colonizing the planet with us left out.
There is no reason to post this except it is amazing to watch. This footage was all taken with a 1080P camera from the ISS, or International Space Station. I so want to go, but for now videos like this will have to do.