by Adam Crowl In the market for a mammoth starship? Recently released work by Friedwardt Winterberg, discussed here by Adam Crowl, points to fast interplanetary travel and implies possibilities in the interstellar realm that are innovative and ingenious. Adam notes in an e-mail that Winterberg’s drive has certain similarities to MagOrion, a system that in its earliest iteration combined a magnetic sail with small yield nuclear fission devices. Dana Andrews and Robert Zubrin first published that concept in 1997 and it has been evolving in the years since, but Winterberg’s work takes the idea into the realm of what may … Continue reading A Workable Fusion Starship?

by Administrator Paul Titze, who somehow finds time to write the excellent Captain InterStellar blog when not preoccupied with his maritime duties in Sydney, passed along a 2009 paper on warp drives yesterday that I want to be sure to consider before the year is over. Warp drives as in Miguel Alcubierre’s notion of a method of reaching speeds that are faster than light. The Star Trek echo in the choice of names was playful and intentional on Alcubierre’s part, and the physicist kicked off a cottage industry in exotic spacetimes and their geometries when he used it in a … Continue reading The Problem with Warp Drive

by Administrator Suppose a civilization somewhere in the cosmos is approaching Kardashev type III status. In other words, it is already capable of using all the power resources of its star (4*1026 W for a star like the Sun) and is on the way to exploiting the power of its galaxy (4*1037 W). Imagine it expanding out of its galactic niche, turning stars in its stellar neighborhood into a series of Dyson spheres. If we were to observe such activity in a distant galaxy, we would presumably detect a growing void in visible light from the area of the galaxy … Continue reading Toward an Interstellar Archaeology

By Brad Weismann The Power of Belief DENVER (soon perhaps World UFO HQ) — Is the government hiding its knowledge of and interaction with alien beings? Could they be on Earth right now, all around us . . . within us . . . up our . . . noses? It depends on who you believe, and more importantly, what you believe. I’ve written on UFO enthusiasts previously, and recent activity shows that there is no slackening of interest in the subject. On Jan. 26, theoretical physicist Paul Davies addressed London’s Royal Society on the subject of extraterrestrial life on … Continue reading UFO legislation, ‘inner aliens,’ and true belief

A cat with an uncanny ability to detect when nursing home patients are about to die has proven itself in around 50 cases by curling up with them in their final hours, according to a new book. By Tom Leonard in New York Telegraph UK The tortoiseshell and white cat spends its days pacing from room to room, rarely spending any time with patients except those with just hours to live Photo: AP Dr David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University, said that five years of records showed Oscar rarely erring, sometimes proving medical staff at the … Continue reading Cat predicts 50 deaths in RI nursing home