Giant Freakin Robot

If things go as Richard Branson hopes, today will go down as one of the most important days in human history. This afternoon in New Mexico Branson and the state’s governor Susana Martinez opened Spaceport America. This is the first of Virgin Galactic’s planned spaceports from which they’ll launch actual, commercial flights which will take passenger’s outside Earth’s atmosphere.

As reported by Virgin, flying overhead during the dedication ceremony were two of their craft, WhiteKnightTwo and SpaceShipTwo. The first, WhiteKnightTwo will be used to prepare passengers for the rigors of space travel using atmosphere aerobatics. It also functions as sort of a mothership for their spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo. SpaceShipTwo is the actual vehicle meant to take people in to space.

NASA may have put an end to the shuttle program, but they continue to pursue cutting edge technology.  The same people who took us to the moon and made memory foam a reality are now attempting to perfect and implement solar sails that could be used as an alternative energy source for deep space travel.  Solar sails function much like regular sails on boats except that, instead of harnessing the power of wind, they harness sunlight.  As Ray Sanders over at Universe Today explains it, photons from the sun are gathered by the sail and stored until there is enough power to provide thrust to a small spacecraft.

NASA has been experimenting with solar sail technology for a little while now.  NanoSail-D, for example, has been slowly descending from the upper atmosphere via a solar sail and transmitting back data for months.  The latest announced demonstration, however, would involve a solar sail 7 times larger than any flown in space to date.  It will also test attitude control and execute a navigation sequence at mission-capable level, bringing us one step closer to implementation of the technology in actual space flight.

Successful solar sail technology would be a great boon to space travel.  It would allow spacecraft to travel great distances on less fuel, potentially lowering the cost of missions if the sails are reliable and affordable enough.  NASA says solar sails could be employed in a number of other areas, as well.  Small solar sail thrusts could remove orbital debris and solar sails integrated into satellites could allow them to de-orbit at the end of their missions.  Solar sails could also provide enough low thrust to stabilize space stations situated in otherwise unstable locations.

The ever-interesting “Ask a Physist” column over at i09 tackles an issue close to the hearts of many sci-fi fans: faster than light travel.  Scientists involved in the OPERA experiment – connected to CERN – have measured subatomic particles traveling faster than the speed of light. If you want a deep explanation of the actual science involved, you should head over to the column at i09.  If you want to really get down with the math, you should go to Dr Dave Goldberg’s equation-laden explanation over at his blog.  What I can do is give you a quick and dirty rundown.

The OPERA experiment recorded that neutrinos – those electrically neutral subatomic particles you learned about in your high school physics class and then probably forgot existed – can travel about 2 parts in 100,000 faster than the speed of light.  Fairly insignificant, but Goldberg says “it’s only a matter of fine tuning to get any superluminal speed we like” after the light barrier is broken. Pair this with their potential to travel interstellar distances (their weak interactions mean they don’t mess with other things on the way), and the scientific world is a-buzz.  Goldberg is still skeptical as to whether OPERA’s current experiments will be replicated or hold up under heavier scrutiny but says that (if the results do hold) “the simple ability to send signals faster than light would allow us, in a very real way, to affect the past”.  You could send a message to someone, have them receive it before you sent it, then get their response to that message before you sent your original one.  Crazy, right?

Obviously, this isn’t full-on Doctor Who or Star Trek: The Voyage Home time travel, but it does still raise a host of interesting questions and potential paradoxes.  Would you choose to essentially change history, if you could send or receive messages about events before they happened?  What new information could we learn if we could communicate with the past or future?  Does this have something to do with how Hope Plaza communicates with Terra Nova?

Science has found a way to record your dreams. A staple of the sci-fi genre for decades, this fantasy is about to become reality.

It’s happening at UC Berkeley where they’ve developed a system to capture, decode, and reconstruct visual experiences happening inside the human brain. The technology is still in early stages but the scientist there seem pretty confident that they’ll soon be able to use this to capture and record dreams. UC Berkeley neuroscientist Jack Gallant explains it this way: “this is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds”

There’s a lot of talk in their announcement in which they try to justify the scientific leap by saying they could use it to help people who can’t communicate verbally, but I suspect they have much more interesting and lofty goals and they’re just saying that to make the anti-science crowd look bad, should anyone find some reason to come out against what they’re doing. Don’t worry guys, this is awesome.