Wow! Signal Pub 2 - let's talk.

It will be next Friday night, and I hope to see lots of people there. I know it's not the best time for people in Europe, but we'll do some a few hours earlier in the day so people in Europe can join in without staying up to the wee hours.

Last Friday, we did a technical rehearsal, which went well. Feel free to watch it on YouTube if you want. It's almost a Pub 1.5.

Why Interstellar Spaceflight is Hard

This was initially published in audio form as Burst 7 of the Wow! Signal. As part of the ongoing effort to tie this blog into that podcast and vice versa, we here present a slightly edited text version of the same.

This is a tutorial post, and is largely meant to bring some of our readers up to speed, since we are going to be talking about interstellar space flight more over the next months. If you have ever wondered by we can’t just get on a big rocket and fly to the stars, this is for you. If you already know why we can’t do that, then I think you might want to skip this one. 

Questions about Asteroid Mining

What follows is based closely upon the Wow! Signal Podcast's Burst 8.

Lately, it’s been my sense that it’s time to spin up the asteroid mining conversation in earnest. Our most recent Unseen Podcast episode (#33) covered asteroid mining, and space policy expert James Muncy joined us for the first part of the show. We received a comment on the blog post for this episode by “Khani”, and here it is verbatim:

Question - (case 1) I travel to an asteroid of 100 meters in size. I start extracting materials from the "equatorial" zone. Is the material mine? (case 2) is the asteroid mine? (case 3) I move the asteroid, and now someone else lands on the other side and starts harvesting it. Is that "illegal" ? How much does the asteroid to be moved to be claimable? One meter?

Respectable test cases, I think, but we can go further.

Audio version of Bracewell Probes part 1 and 2.

I didn't just translate my Bracewell Probe posts to audio for the Wow! Signal Podcast, but I also improved and expanded upon them.  Also with cool music.

http://www.wowsignalpodcast.com/2013/03/episode-5-superior-galactic-communities.html

A couple of key interviews

Just a short note please check out a couple of key interviews relevant to this blog: Geoffrey Landis and David Grinspoon. 

Also, if you are interested in SETI (of course you are), please read this.