In Person or Proxy to Mars and Beyond? By Larry Klaes, Guest Writer, Red Planet Bound In 1972, singer, pianist, and composer Sir Elton H. John (born 1947) released a song titled “Rocket Man”. This music piece, which was inspired by a Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) science fiction story of the same name, has an individual who sees his job in outer space not as some grand adventure as one might expect of a typical astronaut, but rather as ordinary and… READ MORE >
Topic Area: Red Planet Bound
From the perspective of a human perched in orbit on the International Space Station, the sun appears to rise and fall every 45 minutes. With continents rolling below in fleeting day and night, astronauts report that the passage of time can feel strangely warped. To those spacefarers hurtling past the whole of civilization, skipping from dawn to dusk and back again, the relentlessness of change and the transience of all things must be palpable. One need not be in… READ MORE >
Imagine that you have been transported 3.5 billion years into the past. Somewhere on a young planet Earth, you find yourself standing by the edge of a warm tidal pool. In it, life has just taken shape for the very first time on this world, and perhaps anywhere. As the result of circumstances that we still do not fully understand, non-living matter has somehow joined together in just the right way to generate a living system. You are witness to… READ MORE >