Tags: exploration

Space Elevator

Scroll up to the Kármán line.

Why Not Mars (Idle Words)

I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.

Maciej lays out the case against a crewed mission to Mars.

Like George Lucas preparing to release another awful prequel, NASA is hoping that cool spaceships and nostalgia will be enough to keep everyone from noticing that their story makes no sense. But you can’t lie your way to Mars, no matter how sincerely you believe in what you’re doing.

And don’t skip the footnotes:

Fourth graders writing to Santa make a stronger case for an X-Box than NASA has been able to put together for a Mars landing.

An Ocean of Books

What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.

This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.

British & Exotic Mineralogy

A really lovely unmonetisable enthusiasm:

All 2,242 illustrations from James Sowerby’s compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond, drawn 1802–1817 and arranged by color.

You can dive in and explore or read more about the project and how it was made.

It reminds me of Paul’s project, Bradshaw’s Guide: the both take a beloved artifact of the past and bring it online with care, love, and respect.

Life Under The Ice

Here’s the latest wonderful project from Ariel—explore microscopic specimens from Antarctica:

The collected Antarctic microbes were found living within glaciers, under the sea ice, next to frozen lakes, and in subglacial ponds.

Beautiful!

Bound in Shallows: Space Exploration and Institutional Drift

If a human civilization beyond Earth ever comes into being, this will be unprecedented in any historical context we might care to invoke—unprecedented in recorded history, unprecedented in human history, unprecedented in terrestrial history, and so on. There have been many human civilizations, but all of these civilizations have arisen and developed on the surface of Earth, so that a civilization that arises or develops away from the surface of Earth would be unprecedented and in this sense absolutely novel even if the institutional structure of a spacefaring civilization were the same as the institutional structure of every civilization that has existed on Earth. For this civilizational novelty, some human novelty is a prerequisite, and this human novelty will be expressed in the mythology that motivates and sustains a spacefaring civilization.

A deep dive into deep time:

Record-keeping technologies introduce an asymmetry into history. First language, then written language, then printed books, and so and so forth. Should human history extend as far into the deep future as it now extends into the deep past, the documentary evidence of past beliefs will be a daunting archive, but in an archive so vast there would be a superfluity of resources to trace the development of human mythologies in a way that we cannot now trace them in our past. We are today creating that archive by inventing the technologies that allow us to preserve an ever-greater proportion of our activities in a way that can be transmitted to our posterity.

The Voyage of Captain DaCosta – A Digital Narrative

What a beautiful and fascinating website!

This is a layered interactive narrative that traces the life of Captain Antonio DaCosta, a Black Portuguese sailor who visited Japan in 1597. From his early life as a slave in Lisbon to his voyage to Japan, this site weaves together his personal diary and drawings, along with artwork and historical notes from 1500-1700, the Age of Exploration.

Font Map · An AI Experiment by IDEO

Fontlandia is yours to explore.

By leveraging AI and convolutional neural networks to draw higher-vision pattern recognition, we have created a tool that helps designers understand and see relationships across more than 750 web fonts.

Rockets of India – Medium

The fascinating history of India’s space program is the jumping-off point for a comparison of differing cultural attitudes to space exploration in Anab’s transcript of her Webstock talk, published on Ev’s blog.

From astronauts to afronauts, from cosmonauts to vyomanauts, how can deep space exploration inspire us to create more democratic future visions?

Will we ever walk again on the surface of the moon?

A brief history of lunar sci-fi.

No matter how much we want the science fiction dream to come true – and personally I would love it – the reality is that a lunar colony is very unlikely to ever be financially viable. It would be no surprise if we saw more expeditions to the moon, but all those wonderful visions of the high frontier recreated in space are more likely to apply to destinations with a better long-term future, like Mars, rather than the moon.

When Neil Armstrong and Edmund Hillary Took a Trip to the North Pole | Atlas Obscura

Hillary, legendary for being the first to scale Mount Everest with teammate Tenzing Norgay, was on board, and Armstrong was, too, saying he was curious to see what the North Pole looked like from ground level, as he’d only seen it from the moon. Astronaut problems.

Project Kronos on Vimeo

A beautiful bit of design fiction.

Wanderers - a short film by Erik Wernquist on Vimeo

A vision of humanity’s exploration of our solar system.

Springboard – Coming soon from Clearleft

The latest Clearleft product will be like having an intensive set of discovery, collaboration, and exploration workshops in a box. Perfect for startups and other small businesses short on time or budget.

It starts in Spring but you can register your interest now.

Web Typography for the Lonely

A collection of experiments in typography using canvas, SVG, JavaScript and whatever else it takes.

Explorations in Typography / Mastering the Art of Fine Typesetting

What a great way to sell a book with “explorations” in the title—play around with the font size, leading, alignment (and browser window size).

Spacehack

This looks wonderful: "a directory of ways to participate in space exploration." I'll be keeping my eye on the Elevator:2010 project.

Interview @MarsPhoenix - Universe

An interview with Veronica McGregor, the human being behind the wonderful MarsPhoenix Twitter account.

How to... Solve the meaning of life | Mail Online

The inimitable Dr. Brian Cox gives us a peek into the state of play with the Large Hadron Collider. "Because of its size and ambition, the LHC could inspire an entire generation to rediscover the value of exploration in the way Apollo inspired me …