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Science Fiction & Fantasy   — by Andrew Liptak — There is no better example of how science fiction’s tendency to try and imagine a plausible future is like throwing a dart at a moving target than Larry Niven’s 1964 short story “The Coldest Place.” Up to that point, astronomers widely believed that the planet Mercury was tidally locked to the Sun: its rotation matched that of its orbit and as a result, only one side ever faced the Sun, meaning that its dark side would have been much cooler. Niven took that bit of knowledge and incorporated it into his story—his first—and sent ...

Лесно ще се справяте с ежедневните проблеми, стига да не тръгнете да търсите екзотични способи за решаване на прости задачи.

Skeiðarárjökull Glacier (Photo: US Geological Survey) The Sun follows a solitary path through the Milky Way. This cannot be said of a significant fraction of the stars in the galaxy. Many stars have companions—some distant, others quite close. In the latter case, SF authors crafting a plausible setting may need to take into account the effect of a stellar partner on habitable worlds. For example, the distance between Alpha Centauri A and B varies from 35.6 astronomical units to 11.2 AU. At their closest, A would add about 1 percent to the energy budget of a hypothetical habitable world o...

Artist's conception of a Jupiter-like rogue planet. (NASA/JPL-Caltech) It’s been weeks since you last socialized (in the flesh) with anyone outside your household…or with anyone, if you live alone. Loneliness is tough. But things could be worse: you could be a rogue world, ejected from your home system billions of years ago. You could be a pitiful world formed far from any star. Such worlds are commonplace in our galaxy. They are not quite so common in science fiction. Still, a few of them feature in books that you may have read…   The deep-space object around which the eponymous spac...

Artist's conception of the exoplanet Proxima b, orbiting Proxima Centauri (Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser) Late in 2020—remember 2020? We had so much fun—astronomers reported radio signals from Proxima Centauri, which, as you know, is at present  the closest star to the Sun. This sort of thing cannot be due to aliens (of course)… but just suppose it were. If the signal is from entities native to the Proximan system (which is now known to have at least two worlds, one of which is a terrestrial world in the liquid water zone) then either we got stupendously lucky or technological life is ver...