Minding The Planet is Nova Spivack’s weblog on emerging technologies and trends. It focuses ways in which the Web is becoming more present, personalized and precise.
Nova Spivack is a technology futurist, entrepreneur, and angel investor, and a leading voice on search, collective intelligence and the Semantic Web. More...
The New York Times has published a wonderful and fascinating set of mini-essays by leading scientists about their beliefs in the unknkown and unexplained — from consciousness, to God, to life on other worlds, and the existence of true love. There are some terrific thoughts in it — one of thoses rare articles that breaks [...]
Frank Drake, the originator of the present-day radio-telescope-driven search for extraterrestrial intelligence — has written an editorial suggesting that his famous Drake Equation may need an update. In short, he believes his equation should be changed because there may be a lot more intelligent life out there than has been previously suggested.
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It’s official, the US Air Force has looked seriously at teleportation. This recently released Air Force report details the history of teleportation science, the present state-of-the-art, as well as several new directions for research and an extensive bibliography. Fascinating reading!
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Deep beneath the South Pole ice-cap is a strange fresh water lake — Lake Vostok. Lake Vostok is the subject of intense speculation, debate and strange conspiracy rumors. Because it hasn’t been exposed to our atmosphere since at least the last ice-age, it may contain ancient microorganisms that do not exist anywhere else on our [...]
A Chinese satellite rudely crash-landed in a villager’s house. The villagers were unhurt but the house was demolished in the freak accident. The homeowner was quoted as speculating that perhaps this indicated they would have good luck in the coming year…yeah, like maybe a new house will fall from the sky too?
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In August of 2003, I posted an article that suggested the SETI folks ought to look at our own DNA to see if there happens to be a hidden message from aliens in there waiting to be discovered. Putting a message in human DNA, particularly in the junk DNA regions, is guaranteed (a) not [...]
Traces of ammonia have been detected in Mars’ atmosphere. This is a probable sign of life. Read more here
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Has anyone ever done a computer analysis of all known stars seen from Earth, to detect if there are any groups of stars that are identical (or linearly transformed) in different parts of the sky? For example, have they looked for identical sets, mirror image sets of stars, flipped image sets, slightly drifted but nearly [...]
Here is a fantastic article on the futuristic physics of Dr. Nikolai A. Kozyrev, the Tesla of Russia. Kozyrev’s theories are only now beginning to be understood. He made fundamental proposals related to zero-point energy (the energy of the quantum vacuum) as well as gravity and “anti-gravity” propulsion, as well as hidden reasons for various [...]
Here’s an interesting article on another theory that suggests our universe is just an experiment in someone’s lab.
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The Mexican Air Force has released information about a recent UFO encounter. It is unclear as to why this information was released to the public but it appears to be the real thing. The story was confirmed by the Mexican military, and was reported by Reuters and CNN among other reputable sources and was [...]
This is a very good article on the physics of scale-free networks such as the Web.
Lately I have been getting increasingly interested in graph theory and also in knot theory. There is a similarity between networks and knots and it should be possible to do a mapping such that the theorems and algorithms of knot [...]
Methane has been detected on Mars, which may indicate the presence of bacteria.
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NASA prepares to test its Hyper-X jet — a plane that can fly up to 7 times the speed of sound. Future passenger jets based on the technology could go from New York to London in less than 2 hours.
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It turns out that we’ve already sent life to Mars, and it may be still living there, according to a researcher who has studied the decontamination methods used by NASA. Only our early Viking landers were fully heat sterilized. Subsequent missions have most likely been contaminated with bacteria from Earth. This, in my opinion, is [...]
Good news for American Express customers — you can now use those extra points from your Membership Awards Program to fly to SPACE!!!!!. Full sub-orbital flight only costs a mere 20,000,000 points! That’s NOTHING — all you have to do is purchase a single skyscraper, or an F-18 fighter jet, or 2,000,000 movie tickets, and [...]
This informative article discusses the growing evidence for liquid water on Mars. It seems that the Mars Rover team is doing everything it can to avoid making any claims until they are 100% certain. Because if there is water that means there could be life too.
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Josh Kirschenbaum submitted this interesting link to some cool images from NASA of water balloons bursting in microgravity. Your tax dollars at work!
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I am having an interesting conversation with Howard Bloom, author, memeticist, historian, scientist, and social theorist. We have been discussing network models of the universe and the underlying “metapatterns” that seem to unfold at every level of scale. Below is my reply to his recent note, followed by his note which is extremely well written [...]
Hello all, I have been thinking about the general problems of social networks on the Internet. It occurs to me that these issues are closely related to digital physics. For more on digital physics see the work of Ed Fredkin, Stephen Wolfram, Norman Margolus, Tomasso Toffoli, and other pioneers of the field of cellular automata. [...]
An article claims that Bush’s Moon initiative may be motivated by the lunar presence of Helium-3, a better source of fuel for nuclear reactors that just happens to be abundant on the Moon but virtually absent on Earth. The article proposes that whomever has space supremacy controls the near-earth Helium-3 supply and therefore has [...]
Paul Davies has put forth an interesting proposal for a one-way trip to Mar as the most cost-effective way to establish a permanent human presence on Mars. It’s a smart and novel idea.
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I just read an interesting article about new images from the surface of Venus … yes, Venus, not Mars! The Soviets sent a number of probes to Venus, several of which actually managed to land on the surface and send back photos. Recently Don Mitchell (who has perhaps one of the coolest homepages ever — [...]
A group of climatologists met recently in England to discuss how to save the Earth from global warming. Rather than actually doing something to stop the emission of greenhouse gasses — they proposed a giant space shield and a bunch of other insane ideas.
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I admit it. I’m a total sucker for things like this. If the Bush Administration commits to sending a manned mission to Mars, or even just putting a permanent base on the Moon, it would definitely be a point in their favor in my mind. I really think space exploration is one of the most [...]
Here’s a wildly unexpected proposal that just popped into my brain: Humanity should intentionally contaminate Mars with Earth lifeforms — as soon as possible! The benefits vastly outweigh any concerns to the contrary. Indeed, it may be the smartest thing our species ever does.
The first obvious benefit is that it will get Earth life off [...]
NASA wisely buried this amazing full hi-res version of their now-famous color Mars image on their site because they are getting too many downloads to handle the load. But here it is — the full sized 8 megabyte color Mars image in all its glorious detail. It’s absolutely incredible!!! Like being there. Totally mind blowing. [...]
Does the universe loop back on itself? Is the universe laid out like a computer game? Read this article citing new evidence and experiments into the shape of space and time.
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