SILVERLEAF (The Interstellar Age Book 4)

leondumoulin.nl: The Interstellar Age: The Story of the NASA Men and Women Who Flew Voyager Mission (Audible Audio Edition): Jim Bell, Penguin Audio: Books. A great companion for the book is the dvd “The Farthest - Voyager in Space”.
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Learn more about Amazon Prime. Please try your request again later. William Harper, full name: William Thomas Harper, was born on May 20, At ages seven through eight, he was, on the advice of Alvin York, trained in the use of the. He was trained in hand-loading and bullet casting at age twelve by his older brother Weston, and in use of the center-fire rifle and pistol by Colonel Eugene Long of Augusta, GA at Fort Gordon while attending North Augusta High School.

He ran track and outside of school worked in construction. He trained in Anthropology and Archaeology under Dr. Arthur Kelly before taking up the study of History. He achieved his B. While studying and teaching, he practiced strength training and worked as a professional hand-loader for Franklin Gun Shop in Athens, GA for seven years. During this time physical examinations at Ft.

MacPherson ended the possibility of a military career by exposing an abnormal aortic valve and electroencephalographic indications of epilepsy. In , William Harper got his Ph. They have two children Mr. Matthew Jonathan Harper and Ms. In his last six years service he did not miss a single class and made himself always available to tutor undergraduate and graduate students.

During all that time he read and wrote science fiction with zest, but generally found the market closed to anything original he submitted. Presently, he lives in Montgomery, AL with his wife Nadine. He is writing more science fiction and has outlined an historical novel set in the Roman Empire. Another Roman epic is in progress as, perhaps, befits an historian.


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He still exercises regularly, the bad aortic valve having been replaced with the St. Jude Valve, and is considered a master marksman with a completed, photo-illustrated book on the latter subject to submit for publication. One of his latest endeavors has been mastering the methodology of preparing electronic ms. He currently reads hard science fiction on the exploration and colonization of the solar system and hard science to make his future visions real.

The Great Andromeda Galaxy, M31, is one of the most distant objects that can be seen with the unaided eye at 2. The most precious substance in the universe is life, which is somewhat ironic given how abundant life is on Earth. Just a few bacteria cells are enough to form untold colonies. One of the astonishing things about evolution and the process of natural selection is that life winnows and refines chemicals with remarkable efficiency. And this is something life-science medical research companies like EcoBiotics have realized, turning their microscopes to the rainforest and tropical reefs in the search for cancer treatments.

Although alien life would differ vastly from Earth-life at a macroscopic level, shrink down to the level of molecules and there are probably going to be an astonishing number of parallels simply because alien life has to work with the same set of known elements. There are different types of lego brick. Earth would be something to be explored, not only from the novelty factor or out of scientific interest, but because there might be unique applications that are beneficial to them. There are more species on Earth than there are stars in the Milky Way, which is astonishing.

Earth really is an oasis in the middle of a celestial desert. Not only does this mean the surface of the planet is bombarded with solar and cosmic radiation, but the solar wind strips away light elements in the atmosphere, leaving predominantly heavy gases like carbon dioxide. Earth has a massive, global magnetic field. So why am I writing a blog post about the case for life on Mars?

For decades, astronomers looking for life in outer space have spoken of The Goldilocks Zone, the habitable area around a star where life could arise on an Earth-like planet—an orbit where it is not too hot, not too cold. Even at the equator , the temperature is estimated to have been at least -4F, and yet life on Earth survived. Look at how moderate it is compared to the hellish conditions on Venus, or the frozen wastelands of Mars. Life has transformed Earth. Microbes have taken an inhospitable planet with a choking toxic atmosphere and transformed it into the oasis we enjoy today.

Natural Selection has allowed life to exploit finely balanced chemical pathways. Chemicals react a lot. The point is… a life exploits chemistry to sustain itself and b life transforms its environment to support itself. As there are no active volcanoes or flatulent cows on Mars, it does raise the question, where is the methane coming from? And this raises another interesting point. When we look at celestial objects, we see them largely unchanged after billions of years.

The Moon has craters and geological formations that span four billion years. Unless a planet has an active atmosphere and something like plate tectonics, it tends to be astonishingly stable over long periods of time. Do you believe in coincidences? And so that Mars is producing methane and has an atmosphere that is fine tuned to almost precisely the triple-point of water, seems to be a smoking gun for the possibility of active, subsurface microbial life.

Water can exist in three states—as a solid ice , liquid water , gas vapor. The extremes we observe in space mean that often water has no choice. The environment on Venus, for example, is so hot and highly pressurized, water exists only as vapor. On Pluto, the temperatures and pressures are so low that water is locked away as ice. But on Mars, and on a few of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, there are places where liquid water can be found. They all need liquid water as a medium. It is significant that the atmosphere of Mars is finely balanced so that it hovers around the triple point of water, the point where water can exist in all three states simultaneously as ice, water and vapor.

Subsurface water leaking on Mars. And that this has been sustained for hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years? There were points in time where life was almost completely wiped out, like during the snowball Earth phase, but life kept a toehold and fought back. Recently, I was approached by a university student developing a thesis on the inventions featured in sci-fi films and the likelihood of their actualization.

He had some great questions I thought would make for an interesting blog post. Uh, oh… unknown actor in red shirt. Obviously not comprehensive, and not all were written in the past year, but all made a big impression on me. View original post 1, more words.

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Instead, the reverse is true, life arose in spite of hellish conditions. Life transformed this planet into an oasis. Here are some awesome facts about Earth. Cassini just dove toward Enceladus, reaching down to 30km. My guest today is Peter Cawdron, who comes from the land down under.

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission

These books tell the story of teenager Hazel, who in the midst of a zombie apocalypse, searches for Steve, David, and Jane, the only people who ever understood her. Clarke and Michael Crichton, Peter is also a prolific science fiction author in his own right. Dave is controlled by tiny people living inside him who have to work together to coordinate his responses in life. Our bodies are a Rube-Goldberg machine of extraordinary complexity. The fundamental building blocks of life are cells. Just like the tiny aliens inside Dave, cells differentiate, taking the same basic instruction set but applying it in different ways to form heart, lungs, liver, skin, etc.

And we call this complicated mishmash of cells, you. How this occurred from an evolutionary standpoint is remarkable, and a tale told over billions of years. And yet when faced with a scarcity of resources, Dict if I may be informal bands together to create a multicellular organism that resembles a slug.

Individual cells that functioned perfectly well as living organisms on their own switch into a cooperative mode that is a basic model for complex animals such as us. Individual amoebas give up their independence and become role-specific. Some cells form a head, others the body, still others take on the role of an immune system protecting the entire organism. Although amoebas are blind, the newly formed slug will seek out light.

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It is a remarkable transformation to be hold. At some point in the last billion years, cells figured out how to do this on a permanent basis and realized the massive evolutionary advantage of such a cooperative strategy. Branching out from microbial competition, plants and animals were able to exploit ecological niches to survive and pass on their DNA in more and more varied forms.

Our bodies are a hot bed of action. In any given minute, roughly a hundred million cells in your body will die. Cancer is a complex disease that has many forms, but these all share a common cellular problem—cells that continue to replicate without dying off, and these malfunctioning cells form a tumour. Everest in the early s. At the time, it looked impossible.

Now days, with the right training, guidance and planning, any fit individual can stand on top of the world. Okay, I admit it. Books like My Sweet Satan have gone on to succeed on Amazon in spite of their lousy titles. This is very much a tribute work, and I hope it comes across as such. Thanks again for supporting independent science fiction. All too often, we see life on Earth as distinct and separate from outer space, but the reality is, we are in space, not separate from it. As Carl Sagan noted when Voyager turned around and took a snap shot of Earth at a distance of 6 billion kilometers, out beyond Pluto, our world is little more than a pale blue dot, a speck of dust floating on a sunbeam.

What would it take to upset life on Earth? The dinosaurs found that out the hard way, and Matthew explores some other possibilities that are all too plausible. In this article, Matthew discusses the background behind his novel, which is a page-turner and based on hard science. All of the elements of the story—all the forces involved and the paths of the planets afterward—are based on real-world physics at the end of the book, I have instructions on where to watch a video of me running the simulation.

There have been many books and movies illustrating the idea that the Earth is part of the ecosystem of asteroids and comets, planets and even our Sun, and that from time to time, an object may hit the Earth, or the Sun may flare, triggering catastrophic events. It may seem like the interstellar neighborhood is static. This led to a flurry of data crunching, leading scientists to discover that, for instance, four million years ago, a giant star, more than twice the mass of the sun, passed less than a third of a light year from us, and in just over a million years from now, another star will pass at just over a hundredth yes, a hundredth of a light year from our sun, grazing the solar system itself and possibly affecting the orbits of the planets.

Hundreds of objects in the Kuiper Belt, the collection of planetoids past Uranus, are believed to have been captured from passing stars. Some now believe these sorts of events might have been caused by the gravitational effect of a passing star. Asteroids and comets transiting the inner solar system will of course hit the Earth from time to time, but there is an added element of the influence of passing stars that churn these objects into new and dangerous orbits, and even pulling the Earth itself into a slightly different orbit around the Sun.

The point is that there are a lot of things in our universe, happening right around us, that we have no idea about. Despite all of our technology and hundreds of years of peering into the cosmos, we still have no idea what makes up the vast majority of our universe. Author Will Swardstrom talks about his involvement in The Future Chronicles series of anthologies and has a Kindle Paperwhite giveaway with all the Chronicles preloaded. Jump in and join the party! Been radio silence around here for a couple months. Let me back up a bit.

When I started writing, I credited a lot of the reasons why to one man — Hugh Howey. Not success as in worldwide blockbuster multi-millionaire success, but rather just simply getting that book written and published success.

View original post more words. I have awarded this book 5 stars. Hazel is a regular teenager growing up in an irregular world overrun with zombies. She likes music, perfume, freshly baked muffins, and playing her Xbox—everything that no longer exists in the apocalypse. Raised in the safety of a commune, Hazel rarely sees Zee anymore, except on those occasions when the soldiers demonstrate the importance of a headshot to the kids.

To her horror, circumstances beyond her control lead her outside the barbed wire fence and into a zombie-infested town.

pcawdron | THINKING SCI-FI | Page 3

This was such a breath of fresh air from previous zombie apocalypse novels that I have read! There was nothing that stood out about the characters except their age …. The universe is both astonishingly big and surprisingly transparent. We can look into the dark night sky and see light from It seems ET is boozy and has a sweet tooth. Space is a chemical factory. Sagittarius B molecular cloud. When you consider that the Sagittarius B molecular cloud contains enough material to form three million stars like the Sun , each with its own unique planetary system, you realize life may be far more common than we suspect.


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There are literally millions of opportunities for life to form. So if the lego building blocks for life are abundant in space, and if life arises naturally elsewhere in the universe, where is everyone? This is precisely the question that perplexed Fermi.

See a Problem?

It took an absurd amount of time for life to make the jump from single-celled organisms to multicellular plants and animals. What if that was a fluke? When considering the Great Filter, one question that arises is—which side of the filter are we on? Any number of possible doomsday scenarios may yet play out, from nuclear war to the rise of a terminator-like artificial intelligence, or an engineered disease.

Any of these may drive us to extinction.

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We could still be filtered out of the celestial equation. If the Filter turns out to be our own warring, self-destructive nature, we may not make it to the stars. But what if this assumption is wrong? Intelligence is not a default for evolution. Natural selection is the winnowing process by which organisms have adapted to life on Earth.

Too many seeds fall, too many puppies are born, and too many microbes divide for them all to survive in the long term. Coli , as an example, doubles every 20 minutes. By the end of two days, E. What allowed that seed to thrive? Intelligence is not necessarily a survival trait. Take sight as an example. Sight has evolved independently at least 40 different times.