This week in 1965, NASA launched Ranger 8, part of the series of nine Ranger spacecraft launched in the early 1960s to explore the moon.
The inaugural Space Education and Strategic Applications (SESA) Conference, sponsored by American Military University, will be held at the historic Quaker Meetinghouse, 2111 Florida Ave., NW, Washington, D.C., on Friday, April 17, 2020.
In the first article in this series, I discussed the Drake Equation and its suggestion that intelligent life could exist elsewhere the Milky Way galaxy. In the second article, I examined the Fermi Paradox, which implies that the lack of extraterrestrial contact at this point in the galaxy’s evolution cannot be reconciled with what we should expect to see according to Drake.
Suppose we found a way past the engine and fuel problems of space travel discussed in Part II. Still, a peculiar byproduct of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity presents another quandary.
In an effort to reconcile the claims of Fermi, Drake, and a host of other astronomical theorists throughout human history, mankind has made some of its first planned and scientifically sound efforts at rooting out whether intelligent life does, in fact, exist elsewhere in the Milky Way galaxy.
Interstellar space travel holds untold prospects and opportunities, so there are a great many reasons for pursuing such voyages. The first and perhaps most compelling is survival. Right now, there are significant and as yet unresolved threats to the existence of life on Earth.
In the first part of this article series, I discussed the Drake Equation and its suggestion that the galaxy might be teeming with intelligent life. However, a major contradiction to the fundamental implications of the Drake Equation comes in the form of the Fermi Paradox, a logical quandary first observed by physicist Enrico Fermi in the early twentieth century.
Since the dawn of humankind, we’ve looked up and wondered what lies beyond. In the 1980s science education television series Cosmos, the astronomer Carl Sagan spoke of how prehistoric peoples would look up at the night sky and wonder what those points of light were.