Space Is Still The Place
After another year spent spinning around the sun, it’d seem we’re still keen to get out of this place. With 5 billion years of sunlight still up our sleeve, people are already tripping over themselves to pay for space travel. Despite an abundance of crazy events on the earth’s surface, and a bubbling population of homo sapiens, the skies and beyond still mesmerise us in unspeakable ways. At least if you’ve just finished watching the BBC series ‘The Planets’.
While yes, Virgin Galactic has raised 100 million in deposits from people wanting suborbital rides, and 34,000 have registered to fly aboard their rocket planes, the SETI project remains a more modest way to stay involved with space exploration. The Search For Extra Terrestrial Intelligence has used the spare processor time of gazillions of home computers for years now, to share the computing load of analysing potential signals from space. While they haven’t had any significant results yet, it’s a significant technical achievement whose merits are being mirrored in many other online projects. Noteworthy on the same tip – www.worldcommunitygrid.org – who aim to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity.
Have you seen the post in Boing Boing today about regulations? Includes this odd paragraph:
“Legislation signed a year ago by President Bush and designed to help the space industry flourish prohibits the Federal Aviation Administration from issuing safety regulations for passengers and crew for eight years, unless specific design features or operating practices cause a serious or fatal injury.”
WTF?
Full post, including link to the pdf document containing all the regulations can be found at:
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/29/faareleasesspace_t.html
BTW - what’s the story with the body modifications sites? Are they spoofs? I started to look but am so squeamish that I just didn’t have the stomach to click on the ominous sounding links…
Heya, hadn’t seen that, but at a loss to explain why that’d be the case,, weird..
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and yeah – the http://www.humanupgrades.com/ site looks like a faker, but the others don’t seem to be… and why are you squeamish about wanting to peel your fingernails off for replacement? hi5s from lazy sunny-for-once-melbourne…